Hey Transgenders, Don't Frighten the Horses

Yesterday, June 29, 2021, the US Supreme Court voted not to review a transgender bathroom case in which a transgender high-school student (girl turned boy) had sued and won in federal court to be allowed to use the boys' bathroom. MSNBC :

Grimm’s right to use a boys bathroom was upheld in rulings by lower federal courts, which had ruled that he was protected by a federal law that bars school programs from discriminating against students on the basis of their sex.

No kidding!

But I would suggest to my liberal friends that this development runs afoul of two principles that, in my opinion, trump the holy writ of non-discrimination.

The first is the Mrs. Patrick Campbell principle. It is is said to be in answer to a young actress that complained to Mrs. Pat about two male actors being a bit too friendly with each other. Said Mrs. Pat:

Does it really matter what these affectionate people do — so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!

I would say that the whole point of current LGBT politics and activism is precisely to frighten the horses in the street: and not in the sense of frightening them into stampeding, but to frighten them into shutting up or else they will lose their jobs. Which suggests one of my main maxims:

There is no such thing as justice. Only injustice.

In other words, when you have climbed into the ruling class power seat and you start to have the power to reverse decades, or centuries, or eons of injustice, I tell you that the people on the receiving end of your "justice" will experience it as "injustice."

The other important point is that gender specific bathrooms are not there in order to discriminate against transgenders. They are there to protect women from male harassment. Why in the world should we worry about that, you may ask? Because of Freud's famous remark (which I had thought was made by Oscar Wilde)

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

I say, Siggie, that you are asking the wrong question, you silly boy. It is not what women want, it is what women expect. And what women expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

So, you LGBTs and liberals and wokies and judges and nice liberal ladies and all the ships at sea. With this bathroom thingy you are heading right into Trouble, with a capital T, right here in River City. Because biological women really don't like biological men in the women's bathroom. I mean that women really don't like men in the girls' bathroom!

You will notice that the LGBT activists chose a biological woman acting as a man in order to demand the right of transgenders to use the bathroom of their choice. Of course they did. Because when you want access to the other guys' bathroom you certainly don't want to go to the court system on behalf of a biological male wanting to use the girls bathroom. Whatever the civil-rights laws may say about discrimination, you wouldn't want to be persuading judges to permit biological males in the women's bathroom. Not yet. Not this week.

On this subject I am a true Leninist: The worse the better.

The fun thing about this is that, back in the day, liberals were bellowing from the rooftops about "legislating morality" and protecting women from the male gaze, and liberating women. Today, everything that liberals do amounts to legislating their morality and forcing it upon the rest of the world.

And also parading a battalion of fake victims before the world.

And this issue also attaches to my concept on women in the public square. The public square, according to German sociologist Georg Simmel, was created by men for men. So women coming into the public square a century ago could be expected to transform it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

What women in the public square do not like -- do not like -- is the idea of men coming into the women's bathroom. Because "women expect to be protected."

Just sayin'.

The End of Over/Under Politics

Back in the day, we didn't have over/under politics. Back in 12th century England, politics was all about squabbling nobles. In Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir there isn't a word about the middle class or the oppressed peoples. Politics is all about King Henry II of England and his Angevin Empire -- which included England and a good half of France. When he wasn't putting down rebellions among his feudatories he was playing political games with the King of France and quarreling with his sons.

And if he got really annoyed with one of his feudal retainers he would lay siege to his castle and destroy it and probably set fire to the town around it.

I guess if you were a poor person you just hung on and hoped that your lord would prosper -- and not tax you too heavily to finance his wars.

But then there was the Black Death and in its aftermath wages went up and the lower orders became a bit uppity what with Wat Tyler's Rebellion in 1381 against the poll tax needed to finance the Hundred Years War.

And then came the nationalization of the armed forces and the development of agricultural "improvement" and the surplus peasants were sent packing.

Thus the first Vagabonds and Beggars Act of 1497. And the first Poor Law in 1536, although the first big poor law was in 1597. Clearly, in this world, the poor have emerged into political consciousness: as a problem, rather than an opportunity.

So how do we get from the taken-for-granted hierarchy of the Middle Ages to the over-under political philosophy that is clearly in full bloom with rich kids Marx and Engels by 1850?

Well, more research is needed. But, to start with, in the 18th century, we have Rousseau. In The Discourse on Inequality he argues that mankind in the "state of nature" is driven by pity and self-preservation. Says SparkNotes:

Man in the state of nature has few needs, no idea of good and evil, and little contact with other humans. Nevertheless, he is happy.

But he has "perfectibility." And this drives him to respond to his environment, and live in groups, and develop reason and society. But this is not good, because

As men start to live in groups, pity and self-preservation are replaced by amour propre, which drives men to compare themselves to others, and to need to dominate others in order to be happy.

This leads to a dangerous instability between rich and poor, leading to war, that is solved by a trick where the rich entice the poor into a political society that merely "fixes the relations of dominance." And, of course, private property is the cornerstone of this dominance.

In The Social Contract "agreed upon by all citizens for their mutual preservation" Rousseau defines the "sovereign" as "the collective grouping of all citizens" that "expresses the general will that aims for the common good." It is in conflict with the actual "government to exercise executive power." And the "sovereign" and "government" are typically in conflict.

Then we have Babeuf, in the French Revolution. His "newspaper Le tribun du peuple (The Tribune of the People) was best known for its advocacy for the poor and calling for a popular revolt against the Directory, the government of France. He was a leading advocate for democracy and the abolition of private property."

But both Rousseau and Babeuf were commoners -- Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker; Babeuf the son of an officer who was working as a domestic servant at the beginning of the Revolution. 

Next we get Saint Simon, born an aristocrat, and another socialist theorist. But he recommended the rule of an "industrial class... [that] included all people engaged in productive work that contributed to society such as businesspeople, managers, scientists and bankers, along with manual labourers, amongst others."

Honestly, I don't see how all this muddle gets to Marx and the brilliant idea that rich educated kids like him will lead the helpless workers to glorious revolution and heaven on Earth.

But, clearly, the logic of politics as war by other means leads Marx to invent a struggle of the poor helpless workers against the monstrous and evil capitalists and bourgeoisie, not because the capitalists and bourgeoisie are necessarily evil but because the logic of his over/under political system requires an enemy.

In fact, of course, the two centuries since the French Revolution and the century and a half since The Communist Manifesto have seen a Great Enrichment, an increase of 30 times in real per capita income in the western world. And we have had scientific experiments on whole populations that have conclusively demonstrated that the market economy delivers prosperity to ordinary people and poor people, and that the ideas of Marx lead to slavery and death camps and famine.

So I say that the current spasm of over/under politics, in the antiracism of Allyism, with allies advocating for "oppressed peoples" against "white oppressors" is more nonsense driven by the logic of over/under politics that requires the middling sort of people to be the enemy. That's because the logic of politics requires an enemy, and the logic of over/under politics requires that the enemy be the middle. Who else could it be?

I say there is a reason why over/under politics switched from Marx's over/under politics of class to the current over/under politics of race. The reason is that by, say 1970, the numbers weren't working, because the Great Enrichment had lifted too many helpless workers into the responsible middle class. So a new concept was required, of racial oppression and white guilt. "Anti Whiteness," if you will.

But what do we do about it?

I don't think that the answer is a conscious whiteness race movement. And my reason arises out of my reductive Three Peoples theory. In the Three Peoples theory it is easy to understand the logic of the left's over/under politics. The "over" class of rulers is the educated elite, the Cathedral of Curtis Yarvin's notion, and it wants to be important, wants to rule. But the ordinary responsible Commoners of the middle class don't want too much government rule, thank you very much, so the obvious thing for the overclass to do is to champion the "under" class, the Subordinate Clients, and hopefully get to direct traffic. This situation is obviously a class situation.

And I don't think that the middle middle people experience themselves as "white." That's because the logic of being middle class and doing middle-class things is that you work to serve the consumer and you associate with people that you can trust because they exhibit a record of trustworthy behavior; you obey the law, you go to work, and you follow the rules, and you don't really think about it. Notice how this middling trust culture differs from the overclass where you trust people with the right ideas and credentials and from the underclass where you associate with people of your race, or class, or language, or kindred.

And that is why I think that the future for the middle middle is a class identification of being middle class commoners rather than white people.

So I believe that the Great Rebellion of Commoners will not be defined by race but by class.

Yes, but whatabout the non-white members of the middle class? Won't they identify with their ethnic and religious origins rather than with whiteness?

No, I don't think they will, and the reason is war. In my view all groups and tribes and nations are defined by the war in which various disparate elements are drawn together and forged into a political (or military) army. This experience creates a new cultural community, a new identity, a new "band of brothers." If the "army" wins its war then it defines a new community, a new identity. In our time, the "band of brothers" creates a new nation. If it loses, of course, it disappears into the mists of time.

So my prophecy is that the facts of the situation today in which the ordinary middle class finds itself attacked by the Cathedral is radicalizing the middle class, and the experience of defending the middle-class identity, and the instinctive political strategy of the politicians representing the middle-class identity, is creating a new political identity and a new unity. And the disparate people that are coming together into this new identity will increasingly experience themselves as united into a nation of commoners rather than the previous identity they may have experienced.

I give you President Trump. Our lefty friends insisted that he was a racist sexist homophobe, because Charlottesville. But I'd say that President Trump has and does define himself as a leader of Americans, ordinary, patriotic, middle-class Americans. In other words, he defines himself exactly as you would expect a leader of ordinary middle-class American commoners rebelling against the rule of the educated overclass.

And I think the current instinctive panic of our Democratic friends, where they are trying to ram through their entire woke agenda in six months, demonstrates that, even if our Democratic friends don't consciously understand the rise of the Commoners, they just feel that something is rotten in the state of Denmark and the foundations of their world are shaking. So there is no time to be lost.

And they are right to be concerned. Because I prophesy that the Age of Domination of Over/Under Politics is coming to an end.

My Three Theses: Racism Does Not Pay

I understand race and slavery through My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

I discussed Thesis One, on slavery, here. Now let us discuss Thesis Two, that racism Does Not Pay.

Really there should be no need to go beyond the fact of Jim Crow laws in the South of the United States after the end of Reconstruction -- i.e., the military occupation of the South -- after the Civil War.

Why did the South need Jim Crow? Because otherwise people would not discriminate against blacks. At least, not enough.

Yes. Political folk have a real problem with businessmen and employers and corporations. They really don't want to discriminate. It's costly to have racially segregated railroad trains. It is crazy not to hire marginalized minority workers at a lower wage than privileged majority workers -- if it is more profitable. It is annoying to have to send blacks to the back of the bus. It means unhappy customers.

And clearly, the racism in employment since the Civil Rights era, half hidden by a score of euphemisms such as Affirmative Action, Diversity and Inclusion, Equity, and so on, costs money. Because all the HR and race-counting and Human Rights Commission busy work that a modern corporation is obliged to perform is a pure cost. Oh boy, what it would save not to have all those busybody women in HR collecting race and gender data so that the government can use it against the corporation!

But let us not just blame the racists for screwing the economy. Basically all wage and hour laws are put there to stop eevil corporate chieftains from using employees to get the maximum profit out of them, just like Marx said. 

Only, of course, nobody knows what makes the most money. Is it treating the employee as a widget? Is it treating an employee like a human? Is it reducing everyone to contractors with no benefits and no tenure? Encouraging and subsidizing employees that improve their skills? Firing everyone over thirty? Providing extensive benefits from pensions to health insurance? Paying premium wages? Paying low wages supplemented by profit-sharing in the good years?

Basically, I believe, the culture of capitalism is that you are the slave of the consumer. Whatever the consumer wants, and whatever price the consumer is willing to pay, that is final. And then there is trust. The point of trust is not that it is a good thing, although it is. The value of trust is that it reduces costs. That is why diamond merchants are often Hasidic Jews: they have a closed community and trust and reputation is everything, so they can exchange valuable diamonds and have faith that none of their fellow merchants will cheat them.

There is a Science to explain this. It is called the iterative Prisoner's Dilemma. It does not pay to cheat unless you will never see the other party to a transaction again.

This capitulation to the market is hard, very hard, for humans to do because we are all social animals and instinctively look for protection from our kindred and from the people that we know. Capitalism is an utter revolution in social relations that says that you trust those people that are trustworthy. It says that your life and prosperity depends on you serving your fellows, doing things that they are willing to pay for. And the customer is always right.

Racism is the old way, the way of the hunter-gatherer band, the way of the village, the clan, the ethnic ghetto in the big city. And it Does Not Pay.

Next up: We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

My Three Theses: Slavery Does Not Pay

I had a brainwave a week ago, about slavery and race, and I announced my brainwave in a piece at The American Thinker. I call it My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

Oooh look. I already mapped the idea out in "Stop Moralizing about Race, Slavery, Empire" back in January 2020.

What on earth is this idea of Three Theses all about?

Obviously it issues from the first principle of my life, that all my ideas must cut across the grain of liberal ideas, creating confusion. Hopefully, strategic confusion in liberal-land.

But we are bigger than that. We really want to know. Why should we, in the current epoch, have decided to abolish one of the most ubiquitous human institutions, probably dating back to the beginning of agriculture.

Yes, what do the scientists say? Nils Petter Lagerlöf of York University:

The institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development and less often among hunter-gatherers and advanced agrarian societies.

Oh oh. There's a clue. We just emerged from the agricultural age. So maybe there is something about agriculture...

We know all about the Romans and their slaves. They had Triumphs, parades in downtown Rome, to exhibit the slaves and plunder from their successful military -- shall we call them colonial imperialist? -- campaigns.

Don't forget the Vikings, bless their Scandinavian hearts. Sarah Pruitt:

Historical accounts make it clear that when they raided coastal towns from the British Isles to the Iberian Peninsula, the Vikings took thousands of men, women and children captive, and held or sold them as slaves—or thralls, as they were called in Old Norse. According to one estimate, slaves might have comprised as much as 10 percent of the population of Viking-era Scandinavia.

Dublin, Ireland, was the principal slave market in Northwest Europe.

Then there were peasants that actually requested to become slaves. You can read about that in The Year 1000 by Danny Danziger and Robert Lacey.

People also surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress...  [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands...  It was a basic transaction--heads for food.

Oh, and let's not forget the women slaves from Circassia that were sold at Kaffa in the Crimea and distributed to harems all over the Middle East. As I understand the Venetian and the Genoese merchants were very much into that business.

But, writes Max Weber in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, slavery is problematical. Yes, the slave-owner enjoys "a more complete power of disposal over the worker than is the case with employment for wages.:" But there are costs (p.276):

1. Capital to invest in slaves is usually more expensive than "employment of free labor," including the "capital risk" of slave ownership.
2. Fluctuations in the price of slaves, and problems with recruitment of slaves.
3. If slaves can marry, then cost of women and children is borne by the slave-owner.
4. Difficulty in using slaves to operate "tools and apparatus" because of need for "high level of responsibility and... the operator's self-interest."
5. Impossibility of selection, hiring and firing.

Thus, writes Weber, slavery only works where slaves are cheap, with a well-supplied slave market, and put to work in slave plantations or "very simple industrial processes."

Of course, it would be remiss not to mention the greatest slave experiments in all history, the slave state of the Soviet Union, 1917-89, and the slave state of Maoist China, 1949-79. And why did Maoist China take the capitalist road under Deng Xiaoping in 1979? Because slave socialism Did Not Pay. And why did the Soviet Union start "perestroika" under Mikhail Gorbachev and collapse in 1989. I wonder why the noble Commies, devoted students of Marx and Engels, decided to end their experiment in slavery? I will tell you, it is because communism -- i.e., slavery -- Does Not Pay.

This is not to completely marginalize the noble activism of people like William Wilberforce, son of a wealthy British merchant in the Baltic trade, or the importance of the abolitionist movement that helped end the slave trade and thus make slaves a lot less cheap.

And it is not to hide the guilt of Venetian merchants that invented slave plantations on Cyprus to grow sugar cane. Or the Brits that made money growing slave sugar in the West Indies, or the Virginians that grew slave tobacco, or the Southerners that grew cotton with slave labor.

But if slavery Does Not Pay, then maybe we didn't need to have a civil war over it.

Yes, imagine what would have happened if the abolitionist activists and their mostly peaceful protests had cooled their jets? Suppose US had not decided to turn the question of slavery over to a civil war? Suppose our fearless leaders had just ended slavery by buying off the slave owners with 10 cents on the dollar for their slave investments as they did in Brazil and elsewhere. The Brits paid out £20 million in compensation to slave owners in the Slave Compensation Act of 1833 when Brit GDP was about £500 million. That's about 4 percent of GDP. So, in today's money that would cost the Brit taxpayer about £80 billion., Here in the US 4 percent of GDP is about $800 billion. I think that, in today's terms, with $2 trillion infrastructure programs it would be chump change. I bet it would have been cheaper than the Civil War.

Of course, in our day we have reintroduced the voluntary slavery of the Year 1000 where people can "surrender themselves into bondage." We call it "welfare."

Next up: We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.

So You Want a Revolution

On his Gray Mirror Substack, Curtis Yarvin is proposing that the only way forward is the singularity of a democratically elected president who, for the time being, acts as an absolute monarch.

And the Z-man is talking about the fantasy of a two-party political system.

In reality, America is a one party system. It has been since Gettysburg. The differences between the two parties are miniscule. This is why public policy never changes when the party in charge changes. The mild reforms of the Reagan years were followed by a consensus that remains in place to this day. There is some tinkering around the edges to keep up appearances, but otherwise the results of each election have no impact on public policy or the priorities of government.

But why? Why didn't Ronald Reagan cut spending? Why didn't the Supreme Court vote down the unconstitutional Obamacare, and why didn't the Republican Congress of 2017-18 repeal Obamacare?

The answer, of course, is Chantrill's Law, that you cannot repeal a government program. Why? Because every program is some grant of loot and plunder to somebody's political supporters.

Reform Social Security? Even though you might lay out how it will benefit everyone, present beneficiaries are going to suspect that there's a catch, and whatabout their checks.

Reform education? There are millions of folks working in the current system and any change threatens their paychecks. And they have unions breathing down the necks of the politicians.

And so on. This means there is no prospect of "change" until everything is so screwed up that people are ready to give up their share of the loot in return for the promise of a strong leader to lead them to safety.

The story of Hitler demonstrates this. In the years from 1871-1914 Germans were eager to become the equal -- or better -- of the nations of Europe, full of plans to expand the boundaries and create an empire. The disaster of 1918 was a bolt from the blue, utterly unthinkable. And then it got worse, with hyperinflation as the German government failed to balance its books. Then, of course, came the crash of 1929 and things got worse again. What do you expect the Germans, or any people, to do when disaster strikes like that? What any people does in this situation is: it elects a strong leader. It forgets all the privileges and carve-outs and benefits, because they are all Gone with the Wind already. They just want to be saved from disaster.

Will that disaster happen here? Really, my guess is that it won't. Again, Germany's experience is telling. The US has not lost a world war, and been utterly humiliated by the victors. We still have the world's default currency, and that won't change for a decade or two. The Democrats' vote-bank is likely to suffer in the years ahead as Hispanics seem to be moving into the middle class and voting like it.

But in the long run, I'd say, the current system, whether the dysfunctional Uniparty of the Zman's analysis or the dysfunctional oligarchy of Yarvin's analysis, cannot say No. It cannot say to the beneficiaries of the government's 36 percent share of GDP, sorry, but you are going to have to take a cut. It dare not. And so the system will collapse, and people will demand a strong leader.

In the short term we could well see a replay of the 1970s where the ineffectual "stagflation" of the Carter years led to the election of the "amiable dunce" Ronald Reagan. One thing about Ronald Reagan: he may not have reduced spending but he stopped it increasing. I suspect that the spending plans of the Biden administration, that are simply distribution of loot and plunder to lefty interest groups, will inspire a reaction similar to the Reagan revolution.

In the long run, I think we humans have an existential challenge. The story of all previous human government has been dividing and/or conquering and divvying up the loot among the supporters. I suggest that this age-old human culture has reached an end. In the old days "to the victor the spoils" actually worked for the victor -- even though it meant death and destruction to the loser.

But I think that in the industrial and post-industrial era, the victor of a military struggle or a political struggle hurts himself if he resorts to loot and plunder. That's because the real source of wealth today is not gold or oil or broad rich acres but the "intangible capital" inside peoples' heads. The victors get richer by putting the losers back to profitable work rather than plundering them of everything they own.

But I expect it will take a thousand years for humans to change society to reflect this truth.

The "Four Americas" and My Three Peoples

As usual, during the night, I awoke to realize something. Thanks, unconscious, you're a real pal!

I thought to myself: how does the Four Americas of The Atlantic's George Packer and his "How America Fractured into Four Parts" match up with my reductive Three Peoples theory? 

I first noticed, yesterday, that Packer's view of America was a "View from the Window of the Ruling Class Club," another world, separate from the corridors of power trod by our rulers. But now it's time to Be Like Ike, and make the problem bigger.

Let's lay out the Four Americas, as described by George Packer:

Free America. That's the old Buckley conservatism, the anti-Communists, and the libertarians.

Smart America. That's the high-cognitive-skill folks with advanced degrees that work as salaried employees in tech, the professions, journalism and the arts.

Real America. These folk believe that the real heart of America is the "common people that work with their hands," a "country of white people."

Just America. Young "people coming of age in the disillusioned 2000s were handed powerful ideas about social justice to explain their world... They converged and recombined in American university classrooms, where two generations of students were taught to think as critical theorists."

Before I bring the hammer down, let's just rehearse my Three Peoples.

People of the Creative Self "These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary."

People of the Responsible Self "Call them commoners, citizens, middling sorts, 'deplorables,' these are people... that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law."

People of the Subordinate Self "Call them slaves, serfs, workers, clients, marginalized, these are people that do not experience 'agency.'" They are somebody's subordinate.

Let us re-describe the Four Americas in their relationship to the ruling class and the ruling class's political formula of fighting systemic racism. And let's figure out how they fit in my reductive Three Peoples system.

Free America. These are the defeated foes of the ruling class that once hoped at least to sit at the table with the educated ruling class. Don't worry about they, they're done. They are, to me, People of the Creative Self.

Smart America. These are people that have thrived under the bureaucratic rule of the educated ruling class. They are good at education and taking exams and converting their skills into salaried positions approved by the rulers. They eagerly display BLM signs in front of their houses and deplatform people that peddle in "disinformation." They are, of course, People of the Creative Self.

Real America. These are people that don't have the intellectual chops, the cognitive skills to make it in Smart America. They are commoners that do the ordinary work of society: technicians rather than techies. Racist-sexist-homophobes, every one. The are, obviously, People of the Responsible Self, often in danger of falling into the world of the Subordinate Self.

Just America. These are people that have been screwed by the political and educational system set up by their liberal educated-class parents. They are almost all white, but don't talk about that. They are would-be People of the Creative Self only they'll never make it. So they think of themselves as helpless victims, "fake" People of the Subordinate Self.

Golly Geewillikins. Godfrey Daniels. Mother of Pearl.

First, this Fractured America is mostly an tableau of upper-class America, the People of the Creative Self. In other words it is the actual ruling class viewing the next class down as representing the whole of America. Almost everyone in the Four Americas -- except the dastardly "deplorables" -- is a member or would-be member of the creative class.

Second, there is no real mention for the underclass, the Clients of Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers, the People of the Subordinate Self in my Three Peoples, except as a back-handed insults about "vodka in plastic cups" and "missing teeth from crystal meth." They sorta exist in Real America, in the lower section of Real America, in the 21st century collapse that "happened in the shadow of historic failures" like the Iraq war and the Great Recession. They get a fake entry as the wokey social-justice activists -- the "trained Marxists" of BLM -- but they don't really exist in George Packer's world. 

Third, you can see why Big Tech is down for the ruling class's program of beating up white deplorables. They are the fortunate sons of our educated ruling class, that happen to have the intellectual chops to thrive in the world that the educated class created over the last century. Why rock the boat?

Fourth, you can understand the lefty wokies and their rage. It's fiendish really. These young people, that have fake degrees in activism, that don't have the chops for the high-status salaried professions, are being drafted into the educated-class's activist army that is beating up ordinary Commoners because they are all systemic "white oppressors."

Here's what I think. 

The one vital need in every ruling class is to have a real understanding of the people that they rule. Otherwise that ruling class is not long for this world. If the rest of the ruling class thinks like George Packer, then they got a problem.

But really, it's not surprising that George Packer is dealing in fantasy and only thinking about people on the next step lower in the political and cultural hierarchy. For one thing, it is only those people that count, that are likely to mount a cultural or political challenge to our ruling class. Yep, no mention of the rising Hispanics, who are starting to vote Republican. No mention of the "oppressed peoples" of the underclass, the folks that have really taken it on the chin from the ruling class's race politics of the last half-century and the inflexible top-down culture of the administrative state. No mention of Asians, who are beginning to feel the whip of race-conscious government.

Could the omission of ordinary middle-class Hispanics and Asians from the Four Americas be a mistake? Or would it just complicate the agenda of the ruling class in the Biden years, so better not think about it?

Let's just say that if the clueless clots of Just America that "literally know nothing" -- in the words of Ben Rhodes -- ever got a clue, they might not continue as the useful idiots of the ruling class.

Might not, of course. I don't have much confidence in that. But you never know.

The View from the Window of the Ruling Class Club

Over at The Atlantic they know that something is wrong. Goldwater, Reagan, Bush, Trump. Really, darling, how can anyone stand it? 

So George Pasker has written about "How America Fractured into Four Parts:" Free America, Smart America, Real America, Just America.

Over at Free America we have the coalition of traditionalists, anti-Communists, and libertarians. Although traditionalism and anti-Communism have died out, libertarianism is still strong: people still read Ayn Rand. By the way, did you know that Barry Goldwater was a segregationist?

Then there is Smart America, the folks in the knowledge economy,

salaried professionals in information technology, computer engineering, scientific research, design, management consulting, the upper civil service, financial analysis, law, journalism, the arts, higher education. 

They are smart and know how to play the credentials game, for themselves and their children.

Then there is Real America, whose members believe in the "idea that the authentic heart of democracy beats hardest in common people who work with their hands." Sarah Palin is the archetype, and Trump is the modern pied-piper. From time to time, Real America has been interracial, but that always dissolves because "white supremacy."

Real America has always needed to feel that both a shiftless underclass and a parasitic elite depend on its labor. In this way, it renders the Black working class invisible.

By the way, here is Packer's view of Trump.

Throughout his adult life, Trump has been hostile to Black people, contemptuous of women, vicious about immigrants from poor countries, and cruel toward the weak. 

Really? I had no idea.  

Finally there is Just America. It sees through the lies of Free America and Smart America. It sees "the country is less a project of self-government to be improved than a site of continuous wrong to be battled."

It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today—the betrayal of equality that has always been the country’s great moral shame, the heart of its social problems.

So, it stands to reason that the ruling class should back the truth-seekers of Just America and teach the rest of America a lesson. On with The Project!

What is clear to me is the "tell." There is no discussion of the ruling class as actors in this play. They are the Brit colonialists up at Shimla drinking their gin-and-tonics at the club, and worrying that "the natives are restless." The only time that "Progressives" are mentioned is when Packer states that

Progressives, shocked by the readiness of half the country to support this hateful man [Trump], seized on racism as the single cause and set out to disprove every alternative.

Oh really! I had no idea! That our ruling class used "racism" as a club to beat back the monstrous challenge to their divine right to rule.

But this was too simplistic, says Packer. "Racism is such an irreducible evil" that it allowed Progressives to ignore the "grievances of their compatriots down in the lowlands" etc.

See what is going on here? A little ideological leak from Mt. Olympus, giving us peasants a brief look at what our rulers are really thinking. Hey, what's a ruler to do when the peasants start grumbling?

Now I interpret Packer's Four Americas as four reactions to a century of Progressive rule by the educated ruling class.

I'd say that Free America is a principled objection to the top-down administrative state with its programs-for-all and its regulatory ethos, both from a traditional humans-as-social-animals perspective and from a markets perspective.

I'd say that Smart America is people doing what they are told: get an education, get a credential, and take your place in the ordered hierarchy that the rulers have designed for you. It works pretty well for the cognitive elite.

I'd say that Real America is people that have fallen out of the system, the grand plan of the Olympian progressive gods, and they look to an older America for inspiration.

I'd say that Just America is people that know that something is wrong, but being creatures of the system, have no ideological tools to critique the society that progressives have created and grown except the lefty rubbish that they have been carefully taught. They want more of the same, the sweeties, because that's all they know.

This is the point at which I like to bring up my chart of government spending since 1900.

I just suggest to all the world that when you look at government spending growing from 7 percent of GDP to the present 35ish percent (leaving out the various peaks responding to wars and crises) on all kinds of top-down programs you are bound to say to yourself: Hmm, I'll bet that at least half of that growth is a bad idea that doesn't make America a juster or more prosperous society, but just Makes Things Worse.

It doesn't take genius or conspiracy theory to come to this notion. Anyone that has lived in the world knows that there are lots of good ideas abroad in the world, but not so many good ideas that actually work.

God only knows what it is going to take to fix America, especially when we see the ruling class spinning such fanciful tales to itself.

Murray Facing Reality, Yes You Liberals

The point of Charles Murray's Facing Reality is quite simple. Whatever you fervently believe with every cell in your activist brain, liberals, human groups are different.

(The bigger meaning of Facing Reality)

That means that if you use government or secular religion to force group outcomes to be "representative" of society as a whole you are going to have to use force. A lot of force.

And even when you use force, it will probably not make much difference.

Charles Murray has spent his life showing liberals how their fervent beliefs are in fact virtue-signalling fantasies -- from way back before "virtue-signalling" became a thing. Let's recapitulate.

In Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, 323 pages, published in 1984, Murray wrote that the Great Society was a wrong turn and failed, and that liberals should know it because they instrumented all the wonderful new programs so they could boast about their successes, so the numbers are all there for anyone that cares. But the liberals didn't want to write about the failures. So they didn't.

In The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, 845 pages, published in 1994 and co-written with Richard Herrnstein, Murray argued that the future would belong to those with more "cognitive ability." I.e., black Americans would not do well in the job market of the future. Liberals said that Murray was a racist.

In Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, 407 pages, published in 2012, Murray wrote that, considering only white Americans, the cognitively able were doing fine with great careers and merger marriages (of cognitive able men to cognitively able women), the middle 50 percent were doing so-so, and at the bottom the cognitively disabled men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much.

Now in Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America, 151 pages, published in 2021, Murray says told-ya so liberals. Groups that test with lower IQ have worse outcomes in life and work and crime. Period, full stop, science.

For me Facing Reality crystallized two notions that hadn't previously crystallized in my brain.

First, I have known for a while that humans do not give up their fervent beliefs when presented with "science" that demonstrates their ideas are wrong. Not at all. Instead humans go for one more Big Push, a Reign of Terror, a Great Purge, a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Only when their brilliant ideas lie around them in graveyards from here to the horizon do people give up on their glorious vision of a better world. So this is it. This is our Great Purge. That is the meaning of "systemic racism" and Wokism and pushing Critical Race Theory into the nation's schools. Liberals instinctively know their ideas have failed. So the response is to destroy their political opponents. Humans always do things like that when things start going wrong. 

Second, "woke" corporations are a natural and physical response by corporations to the double-bind the Civil Rights era puts on them. The original Civil Rights Act in Title VII provided for affirmative action and the idea that the only way to show an absence of bias was by showing that a corporation's workforce "looked like America" from janitor to CEO. Thus, if a traditionally marginalized group is "underrepresented" at any level in a corporation then the corporation is just sitting there, like a rabbit before a coyote, easy prey for any lefty activist group hungry for a nice tasty lunch today. But, because of the distribution of cognitive ability in different groups it is physically impossible to achieve this. So all a corporation can do is salute and contribute to BLM and close the accounts of Republican candidates at their bank.

So, if gubmint programs can't achieve what they promise to do, because reality, what is the point of them? The point is that every government program is a war on some horrid monster, and the noble supporters can expect loot and plunder from here to eternity.

Thus, all politics is about ginning up a war on some frightful enemy and then sharing the loot out among the supporters. There are four ways to do this.

You can declare some small neighboring country an enemy and invade and conquer them, as Bismarck did to Denmark (!) in 1862. This is the best strategy, because it unites the whole country against an insignificant foe that can't really fight back.

You can declare that Japs and Nazis are the enemy and have a world war over it. This is obviously a high risk strategy: what if you lose? But still, you get to unite the whole country to fight the monsters: keep your fingers crossed.

You can declare some large minority to be an enemy and fight a culture war against them, as the left is doing right now against "white supremacists." The danger is that you might ignite a real civil war, as happened in the US culture war of the 1850s. But nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

You can declare a small minority to be the cause of all our problems, and unite the rest of the country against them, as Hitler did with the Jews. Not much fun for the small minority. Hey, I wonder if the current liberal use of blacks as a helpless victim small minority might not rebound in a "backlash."

See, I think that the real need for liberals to "face reality" is that there is a good chance that their present way of dividing the nation -- as all politics does -- might work against them. What if whites and Latinos and Asians all decide that low IQ blacks are a problem in the workforce, and a menace on the streets? You can say that the group differences between blacks and the rest mean that blacks are helpless victims. Or you can decide that since blacks commit about 50 percent of all murders that blacks are an existential problem. 

Suppose we experience the US politics of the last 50 years as a continuous effort of liberals to insist that blacks are "helpless victims" and to cancel anyone that disagrees, because raciss.

In the end life, the universe, and everything is a throw of the dice. That's what modern "science" says.

Murray Facing Reality: the Outcome

OK. So the two truths in Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America are that Americans of different races, as groups, have different cognitive ability and they have different crime rates. But what does it all mean?

(Back to Murray Facing Reality: The Setup)

What it means is that liberal governance, based upon the idea that the only just society is a society in which everything in all walks of life should be racially balanced, is going to make things worse.

Let us leave aside the trivial meaning, when it comes to crime. The job of the police is to crack the heads of lower-class thugs whether they are 19th century Irish, 20th century Italians, or 21st century blacks. If you don't police the young thugs then you will get vigilantes and gangs stepping in to keep the peace. And we don't want that, right, liberals?

No, the bigger problem is that the policy of race norming in the workplace cannot work: forcing every corporation, at every level, to display the right proportion of races. In fact, it will make everyone angry, from whites and Asians diversified out of jobs for which they are best qualified to blacks boosted up into jobs beyond their cognitive comfort zone.

Let's look at the problem both at the average and at the extreme.

At the average you have the average black at at IQ of 91 and an average white at an IQ of 103. Now, as Murray says, studies show that IQ is a good predictor of performance. This means that if you hire an average black for a position he/she will perform worse than an average white.

Do you see the problem here? It is that the average white around the office will think that the average black is a fool and a dunce, because the average black in the office with an IQ of 91 will be performing a lot worse than the average white in the office with an IQ of 103.

Let's suppose that science tells us that for a particular job a corporation needs an employee with an IQ of 103 and it hires on that basis. OK, right away it means that the pool of blacks will be smaller than the pool of whites. If our employer is completely race blind and hires only on the basis of IQ that means that blacks will be "underrepresented" throughout the corporation at jobs that require an IQ level of 103.

I don't think that the bean-counters at race-enforcement central are going to like that.

Now let's talk about the extreme. Let's talk about a job that needs an IQ of about 135, such as "a full professorship at an elite university" or "a senior position in the IT industry." What is the talent pool of 25-29 year-olds in the whole United States, by race, for that job?

[You are talking] about 2,800 Africans and 9,500 Latins compared to 50,700 Asians and 160,100 Europeans.

In other words there are 57 whites nationwide that could do the job for every one black. So, if you were conducting a totally colorblind job search then you would hire a black once in every 50 job searches.

Imagine what the race-counters at race-enforcement central would say about that! 

Of course, in fact one third of the hirees would be Asian, because the average Asian has an IQ of 108 to the average white's IQ of 103 even though Asians are only about 6 percent of the population. So Asians would be way overrepresented in the top-dog jobs. Right now, as we all know, the race-counters at Ivy League colleges discriminate against Asians because otherwise they would be the majority of students!

Ok, now let's forget about the race-counters at race central. Let's think instead about ordinary people. Suppose we proceed on our current diversity and inclusion course and preferentially hire blacks for elite positions. What would that mean to the people boosted up into positions for which they do not have the cognitive chops?

Well, we know what it means at elite colleges, which search out blacks to study at their universities. Studies show that blacks -- and kids in general -- fail when they study at a university where the rest of the student body has much higher cognitive ability than they do. I think the gold standard on this finding is Mismatch by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. They showed that black students -- er, students in general -- do much better when they go to a college with a student body that matches their test results than when they go to an elite college where the other students have significantly higher test results.

If we project this finding from the university to the workplace, then we are looking at blacks who are much more likely to fail at their jobs than their white counterparts -- because they have a significantly lower cognitive ability than the job requires.

And one thing more. If corporations hire unqualified people for their top jobs then the performance of these folks playing out of their league is going to lower the performance of the corporation as a whole and that is going to affect the lower-level employees -- not to mention the customers.

We are actually seeing this work out in real time at shops like The New York Times where "midwit" journalists such as Nikole Hannah-Jones -- of the "1619 Project" -- and Mara Gay -- troubled by American flags on Memorial Day weekend -- make fools of themselves by parroting the elite conventional wisdom without having the chops to perform on the elite stage.

And that is to say nothing of the ordinary middle-class whites that get shouldered out of the ordinary middle-class jobs for which they are qualified in order to satisfy the moral preenings of the educated ruling class.

There's another problem with race-conscious hiring, particularly in government: "aggressive affirmative action" at the city level means less competent police, prosecutors, health-care workers and K-12 public school teachers. It's the science.

The presence of incompetent or marginally competent people in those jobs is only occasionally important to members of America's upper middle class... The burden... is borne overwhelmingly by America's poorest and most vulnerable populations.

You may say that the poorest and most vulnerable populations can do something about that by voting the rascals out. You may say that our liberal friends are devoted above all else to government services that help the poorest and most vulnerable. I couldn't possibly comment. 

Let us give Charles Murray the last word.

The problem, he says, is that "affirmative action" morphed from "initiatives... to seek out qualified Blacks who were being overlooked" into "government-sponsored preferential treatment in determining who gets the educations and the jobs."

The solution, he says, is to "Eliminate all forms of government-sponsored treatment by race."

And the place to start is "to restore the American creed as the ideal shared by a consensus of the electorate." 

The Democrats need to treat racial preference policies "as pragmatic measures to deal with residual racism... and disassociate himself from the rhetoric of systemic racism."

The Republicans "must stop posturing as the guardians of true Americanism and instead say... that the people who love this country have always been on both sides of the political spectrum and still are today."

I said I'd give Charles Murray the last word. And I will, for today. But not tomorrow.

Murray Facing Reality: The Setup

I had an aha moment in the first chapters of Charles Murray's short polemic Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America. Nothing remarkable really. As he says in the introduction:

American White, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive ability.

That was what The Bell Curve was all about back in the 1990s.

American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime.

Sorry liberals. Those are Facts, backed up by Science. And you are the Party of Science, remember?

His book made me realize what "systemic racism" and wokism is all about.

It is about the fact that to our liberal friends it cannot be true that the whole liberal project is a steaming pile of ordure. 

America's problems cannot be because ruling-class liberals have been wrong and wrong again and that their vision to make America into a just and equal society will never work. No, it's all the fault of those racist sexist homophobic evil white supremacists and right-wing extremists.They are what holds us back. It must be, because liberals are the good guys.

The point is that, over fifty years since the civil rights acts, it is intolerable to our liberal friends that there are still large group differences in America, particularly between white and black. Their faith was and is that civil rights law would eliminate group differences, and inaugurate a new era of equality. Somebody, somewhere, somehow has sabotaged the holy quest, and they must be stopped.

The whole point of Murray's book is to tell liberals: No. Your vision was always fatally flawed, and the last 50 years has proved it. Humans are different, liberals, and the differences mean different outcomes, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Because we have not talked openly about group differences, we have kidded ourselves that the differences are temporary and can be made to go away. The next big push... No Child Left Behind in 2001 or a campaign to root out systemic racism in 2021 will change things.

Remember "Big Push?" That's what the Brits called their failed offensives on the western front in World War I. 

So Murray says no to the next Big Push. "[M]ean differences between groups are a reality and will be with us indefinitely." But against that is the saving faith, not just for liberals but for conservatives who say:

"The differences must be temporary. If they aren't... but they must be."

Sorry Charlie. There are real differences between the races in America. And there always will be. And that means different outcomes. You know what happened with the Big Pushes of World War I? They killed off the flower of youthful Britain. And France and Germany too.

OK. Let's get down to race. Just a social construction, after all.

America is multiracial America. Murray dissects it in three different ways: overall, Big City America, and America Outside the Big Cities.

Murray	Colloq.	Total US	Big-City	Rest of US
Total Population		325m	127m	198m
European	White	60%	45%	71%
Latin	Hispanic	18%	25%	14%
African	Black	13%	17%	10%
Asian	Asian	6%	9%	3%

You can see that America is still majority white, overall and in the rest of America. But whites are a minority in Big City America.

Now Murray gets down to brass tacks. Specifically:

1. When Africans, Asians, Europeans and Latins take cognitive ability tests, their "mean" results are different.
2. Race differences between Africans and Europeans in cognitive ability have not changed since the 1980s.
3. The tests predict future outcomes.

Do you see the point here? It is that you cannot expect populations with different cognitive abilities to have similar performance.

And you can see why our liberal friends are foaming at the CRT mouth. If we have been spending hundreds of billions every year on "helping" the marginalized and the oppressed it cannot be -- it cannot be -- that in the case of Africans (blacks) the whole effort is a big fat zero. There must be "malevolence" preventing it, because, per Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return:

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

There must be a fault. And since it can't be the educated, evolved liberal elite, and it can't be the helpless victims of the marginalized. Well, you get the point.

The test scores between Africans and Europeans are about one standard deviation, between Latins and Europeans is about 0.7 of a standard deviation. And Asians test about 0.25 of a standard deviation better than Europeans.

That mans that Asians are going to outperform Europeans are going to outperform Latins are going to outperform Africans. Period.

The point is that if you, the ruling class, want to make the proportions of workers in jobs and professions "look like America" you are going to have to go beyond affirmative action and diversity. You are going to have to blacken the entire white America as systemic racists and send them to the back of the line.

And here are the latest IQ numbers:

	IQ
European	103
African	91
Latin	94
Asian	108

If you construct bell curves of the IQ distribution of each of the four race categories there is plenty of overlap. So there are plenty of bright Africans, and plenty of dumb Europeans. But...

Since the most prestigious, powerful and highest paying jobs are so concentrated among people on the right-hand side of the [bell curve], a variety of important social and economic consequences... are inevitable.

In other words, there is no way in hell that it is possible for average people to succeed at the demanding jobs leading great institutions, creating new businesses, and ruling the nation. And that is what our liberal friends cannot allow themselves to think, let alone to admit.

And it gets worse. But that is for next time.

Is Forgiveness in Politics Ever Possible?

At American Greatness today Clifford Angell Bates, Jr. proposes in "Grievance and Forgiveness or Civil Strife" that the only way to end the current race war is for blacks to forgive whites for the crime of slavery and Jim Crow.

Really? Forgiveness? How often does that happen in the world of politics and love and war?

Then at Spiked! Frank Furedi deplores that "The culture war is real and it's getting worse" even while the left proposes that the whole idea of a culture war is a fantasy. But it makes sense that the left insists "there's nothing to see here; move right along."

Not being open about the existential nature of their crusade is integral to today’s cultural warriors against Enlightenment values. They prefer to convince the public that the culture war is a myth rather than admit that they are engaged in an ‘all or nothing’ struggle against some of society’s most important values and achievements.

This, a day after I commented on Gregory Clark at the end of his The Son Also Rises that maybe we still need some kind of gubmint effort to do something about inequality -- even though there has been precious little success on the 200-year gubmint war on unequality.

So, I am inspired to do my double Ike-Einstein act, and make the problem bigger, while making it as simple as possible but no simpler.

We must understand that men are only united when they are fighting an existential battle against annihilation. The rest of the time they are bickering among themselves. And the folks that are ginning up divisions and grievances and rage are generally classified by the cognoscenti as "politicians."

(Women are always bickering among themselves, only they won't admit it.)

Why is this? It is simple, really. The job of human males -- and it is their only job -- is to defend the homeland, the food-growing territory of the band from marauders. Alternatively, they can be pre-emptive and raid the neighboring band and kill the men and enslave the women and loot the village before the neighboring village does it to them.

You can see that in our own time, when food-growing land isn't a big deal -- as the twelve grain ships usually anchored off West Vancouver, BC waiting their turn to load up at the grain terminals mutely attest -- there is a problem. What are the men to do?

Well, they can fake it. OMG those bloody Nazis, Commies, Ay-rabs, whatever, if their taste is for foreign wars.

Or, OMG those bloody racists, bitter-clingers, deplorables, white supremacists, if their taste is for civil wars.

Finally, for the really cunning that just want to unite the people on the cheap without a foreign war or a civil war, there is the small minority as the enemy, OMG those Jews. Or overseas Chinese. Or Copts.

And because every man is really a pirate inside, the wise leader of his people will offer loot and plunder to his supporters.

You will notice that every election -- every election  -- comes down to the perfidious behavior of the "Other" and the rightful reward of loot and plunder to the voters of the winning side. That is why, for instance, Donald Trump offered tax cuts and tariffs to the voters of 2016 and today Joe Biden is offering trillions in loot and plunder which is partly "infrastructure" but mostly straight out grants to every liberal interest group imaginable.

But, of course, politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion and so it is usual for political movements and parties and ruling classes to dress up their naked war-plus-loot-and-plunder politics as a religious and moral war on evil to make sure that the evil get their just desserts and have to pay just reparations forever. Then, of course, there is no question about getting second thoughts about plundering the chaps next door. They are evil! They had it coming!

That is what the culture war is all about. It is a war against the middle America of responsible Americans, because the ruling class of the educated and evolved needs an enemy for their over-under politics of race and gender. And notice that nobody is proposing that we all just get together and work it out and forgive our enemies. The solution to the plague of white supremacy is for whites to confess their sins and take the knee.

But when will it ever end?

The lesson, I think, comes from the Treaty of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648. The idea was that the various peoples should take their religion from the religion of their ruler; otherwise shut up or move to the German state with your religion. But this idea was not reached in rational and logical debate by enlightened and evolved philosophers. It was reached in the exhaustion and horror of a frightful war fought mainly over the German lands in which, it is said, 30 percent of the German people lost their lives.

The equivalent for the United States would be that the Civil War of 1861-65 resulted in 10 million dead instead of the advertised 700,000, or a civil war in our time that resulted in 100 million dead.

I would imagine that a civil war here that caused 100 million dead might cause the various culture warriors to cool their jets for a couple of years. But don't worry: they'd be back.

So yeah. Don't expect any forgiveness from blacks in the current row over Black Lives Matter and reparations. And don't expect any relief from the culture war. That's not how the world works.

The bigger question is whether we can figure out a way to domesticate our politics in the same way that we domesticated our men from piracy and dueling into organized sports.

There's gotta be a way. I just don't have a clue how to do it.

OK, Inequality is Bad. But Can We Do Anything About It?

After 286 pages in The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility showing that despite the determination of western elites to eliminate inequality it is alive and well, from Sweden to the US to China and especially India, Gregory Clark, professor at a gubmint university, ends his book with a the usual blather in the passive voice suggest more gubmint programs to end inequality.

Even though he admits that the competition among elite parents for places at elite schools probably doesn't make much difference.

Even though he admits that gubmint interventions like Head Start don't make much difference.

Even though he proposes that assortative mating has limited benefits to elites.

Says he:

A better, more humane, less competitive, social world than ours may exist, but it is not that obvious how we will attain it in a world where people have such strong aspirations for the social success of their children.

Would it?

Let's do a Great Reset on the inequality front.

Let's say that, most likely gubmint programs won't really do much about inequality. Want to know why?

It is encoded in my understanding of politics and government, that politics is war, Us against Them, because "They" are an existential threat, and government is force.

You think you are going to solve inequality by war and force? By taxing people and then having bureaucrats handing out loot and plunder to the supporters of the elite?

Obviously, in the last 200 years, the Age of the Educated, the elite has strongly believed in its power to change the world. Its power strategy, becoming more and more naked over the years, is an over-under strategy, of justifying political power because it helps the underdog. And the Educated Class gets to distribute the loot to its supporters -- er, worthy underdogs.

Does it? Gregory Clark shows, it seems to me, that the Rule of the Educated seems to have made very little difference to the lower classes. On the other hand, we know from the Great Enrichment that the operations of capitalism, which nobody really understood 200 years ago, has increased per capita income by 30 times in real terms. What did the Educated Class have to do with that? Nothing.

Suppose we approach the question of inequality by another way. Suppose we say, for a start, that the social problem of inequality -- specifically the problem of the lowest class that tends to be vagabonds, or "Travellers" or homeless -- should be solved by social methods, by people working together to help other people, and not by Educated Class educrats ginning up yet another gubmint program that ends up being nothing more than a program of taxation collecting loot that is handed out to regime supporters. And all imagined by gubmint professors at gubmint universities using gubmint research grants to propose another gubmint program. What could go wrong?

My effort in this department is Road to the Middle Class, first put on the internet in April 2004. My idea was that, to wive and thrive in the modern world, the underclass needed to acquire cultural skills: religion, law, mutual aid, and education. Religion and law are of course the necessary cultural framework to make the commercial city work. Education is needed because you need literacy and numeracy to do useful work in the city. Mutual aid is the welfare state society of the 19th century when "everyone" belonged to the Masons or the Elks or the Oddfellows and dozens of others. These mutual-aid societies provided, first, death benefits. Then they looked after widows. Then they had "lodge doctors," young doctors just out of medical school who would help birth your child for a song.

But let us look at other means of helping the lowest class.

Voluntary Slavery. Yes, did you know that back in The Year 1000 you could go to your feudal lord, place your head between his hands and become his slave -- and get food and lodging? But you already know about this. It's called "Welfare."

Servant. If you read 19th century novels or watch 20th and 21st century TV series about the good old days, you will notice that everyone either had servants or was a servant. That ended after World War II and the beginning of the full-on welfare state. One thing about servants: they weren't allowed to marry, and they weren't allowed to have "followers." Do you think we could serve the poor better by giving them jobs as servants?

Apprenticeships. In Shakespeare's time you went to work at age 8 unless you went to a grammar school like young Bill. Later "everyone" went to work at 12 or 13 as a servant or an apprentice. Thing about apprenticeships was that the employer was supposed to supply practical education to the apprentice. You think that might suit the average teenager and the lower-class teenager better than the gubmint teacher thingy? Notice that we could have Big Woke & Co. pay for all this. Actually, right now, at Walmart stores there is a back room where employees can take on-line courses and up their skills. And get more money. Then there is Walmart's $1 a day college program. Maybe this would be better than more taxes.

Thing is: hierarchy, or inequality, is universal. That was the point about Jordan Peterson's lobster thingy. Even lobsters have hierarchy, and the reason is because it reduces violence on the lobster front.

The question is: what kind of hierarchy is beneficial and what kind of hierarchy is harmful.

My guess is that most kinds of gubmint wars on inequality in fact have the opposite effect, and entrench and create new, harmful hierarchies. That is, after all, the lesson of socialism, that equality leads to a brutal hierarchy and millions of deaths.

So let's think about how we can create and adapt hierarchies that are beneficial and actually helpful to the less fortunate.

Yes, Whatabout Gay-Lesbian vs. Full-on LGBT?

Here's an interesting take. Gay writer Bruce Bawer in "The Great Consonant Shift" wants to know how come, all of a sudden around 2000, the gay-lesbian rights movement transformed into LGBT? See, according to Bawer, gay-lesbians and transgenders are about as different as different can be.

Being gay or lesbian or bisexual is about which sex one is attracted to. To be transgender is to claim that you’re a member of the opposite sex[.]

You see, to Bower it is perfectly natural and physical to have gay marriage, but to have trans rights and the right to transition is completely different.

Probably not. The whole game of modern politics is "rights." That how the educated ruling class justifies its power. It conducts its "over-under" politics by championing the "rights" of some marginalized group against the insufferable heedlessness or active opposition of the booboisie.

I say that some marginalized groups championed by the ruling class are genuinely marginalized; others are "fake," members of the ruling class playing oppression theater and acting the part of a marginalized group. I say that workers of the industrial revolution and the blacks of the Jim Crow era were genuine victims. Feminist women, gays, lesbians, transgenders, post-civil-rights blacks, etc., are fake victims.

Your mileage may vary.

Actually, my question is really: "why gay marriage?" That's because I believe that the purpose of marriage is the protection of women. Men are naturally sexual predators and need to be curbed, and marriage is one of the ways that human society puts the curb on men. But gays and lesbians? What's the point beyond, of course, the question of gubmint benefits.

Oh yeah, I get it. Humans are social animals, and the point of gay rights and gay marriage and the pejorative "homophobe" is to raise the social status of gays and lesbians. Because all the world's a stage for social status games.

Back in the day, before the narrative was changed to tell us that gays and lesbians had been discriminated against and marginalized since the dawn of time, you get Eveyln Waugh's 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited which represents homosexual love as a kind of Oxbridge-upper-class exoticism: a stage that our hero goes through at Oxford with a troubled scion of the decaying aristocracy.

But Bawer inspired me to check up on the history of human marriage practices, starting of course with our pals the gorillas and the chimpanzees.

Chimpanzee marriage. Chimpanzees are territorial, and the males defend the food growing territory and form a male hierarchy: the higher up the hierarchy the more sexual opportunities with the females. See Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn.

Gorilla marriage. Gorillas seem to live in bands officiated by a single silverback, and the females seem to attach to a silverback for safety reasons. Gorillas are not territorial like chimpanzees; they just move through the countryside in search of food but do not establish territory. They do not compete for food-growing territory.

Human hunter-gatherers. Scientists say that there is some polygyny -- multiple wives -- but mostly hunter-gatherers live by arranged marriage using "brideprice" or "brideservice," where brideprice is payment by the groom's family to the bride's family and brideservice is "labor performed by a prospective groom or newly-wed husband for the family of the bride."

Agricultural humans. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in the agricultural age men had as many wives as they could afford -- until the Catholic Church started asking high-status males the reason why. So high status men had lots of wives. But for low-status men it is clear to me that you were only allowed to get married if you could afford it. That was the whole point of doweries. A guy would only marry a girl if the bride's family coughed up enough of the ready money so he could keep the new family alive. Note that slaves didn't get married except in the Americas where more slaves meant more field labor. And note that domestic servants in all 19th century novels and 20th century TV serials about the good old days were, and remained, unmarried.

Industrial humans. The whole point of the industrial era is that it is the era of the Great Enrichment. The economy was no longer static, founded upon the food from food-growing land. Anyone could get married and hope for the best. Exit arranged marriage and enter romantic marriage, because the chances are that any young man and young woman could make it, because economic growth.

See, my line is that in the post-industrial era we have sexual freedom because we can afford it. Not because we are advanced and evolved and special. We can afford to have gays getting it on with multiple partners because AIDS vaccine. We can afford to have lesbians living together because we don't need a male around the house to do the plowing. We can afford to have childless couples because we don't need child labor on the farm any more.

And we can afford to have the scions of the educated elite running around getting into "activism" and gay rights and transgender rights and "1619 Projects" not just because of Adam Smith's old maxim about "a great deal of ruin in a nation" but because we can afford to have a lot of people running around doing stupid things. At least, we think we can.

Of course, I believe that modern politics is a domestication of the old warrior ethic. Just like chimpanzees, territorial human males had to defend their territory from other groups. The defenders were heroes and were rewarded with high status. But now we have brave road warriors competing for market share; we have brave startup entrepreneurs risking everything on a business idea; we have brave "activists" challenging the bigots and the oppressors and demanding their "rights." And we have a new feudalism as many people choose the low-risk neo-serfdom of work at a corporation.

The interesting question is what happens next. I think that modern "rights" politics and its domesticated "activist" warriors has gone about as far as it can go. I think that "liberation" especially in sexual matters is probably going to reverse itself, because I think that women instinctively hate the sexual free-for-all: they expect to be protected. I think that the big-government welfare state with its domesticated form of loot and plunder has gone about as far as it can go.

But I doubt if we will see the end of the "rights" activists in our lifetime. They are having too much fun. So the question really is:  what comes after "trans"?

I suspect that in another twenty years we will be reading articles by transgender activists that are mortally offended by whatever it is that comes next on the gender front.

Understand Your Liberal Friends and Be There For Them As Their World Collapses Around Them

We merry band of racist-sexist-homophobes, we happy few, have observed the "unfriending" thingy ever since the Dawn of Trump back in 2016.

Liberals get a social-media post or an email from an acquaintance about some political issue and they can't take it. So they "unfriend" the friend.

This happened to me back in early 2017 when a friend I had been going with to coffee for years said he was going away for a couple of weeks. So to speak. And now I am seeing it happening to others. Their liberal friends are angry, and they lash out.

I wonder why.

Well, I was reading a piece on "Lying to Liberals" by Auguste Meyrat at American Mind and he 'splained it all to me. Our liberal friends believe what they are carefully taught. All humans do.

When it comes to the legacy media, well-known technocrats, or leftist politicians, they will default to an assumption of truthfulness. Reporters can repeatedly report lies... Collecting the evidence and doing the work of finding and accepting the truth is much harder than simply trusting them, so people ignore the red flags and contradictions.

But, of course, eventually the truth starts knocking on the window, and it becomes more and more difficult to deal with the glitch in the Matrix.

What do you do when the world is not behaving the way you were "carefully taught?" You get angry. You lash out at the friends that don't go with the narrative. Then you "unfriend" them rather than face up to the fact that your understanding of the world, the "narrative" you go with, has crashed and burned.

I like to think that I have never done this, because, I tell myself, I am actually interested in the ravings of lefty lunatics. I am interested in understanding the narrative they subscribe to and figuring out at what point they have to give up and admit they were wrong. And I am interested in analyzing the lies they believe and trying to figure out the best place for a flanking attack. At least that is what I say to myself. No doubt I am just as bad as everyone else and I cling to crazy conspiracy theories about crazy lefties just as lefties cling to crazy conspiracy theories about right-wing white-supremacist patriarchs.

But I am here to urge my racist-sexist-homophobic friends to be understanding with your lefty friends. This is only the beginning of a long journey through hell for our lefty friends. 

It is telling, I think, that our lefty friends are already so paranoid a mere five months into the glorious Biden-Harris administration. Obviously they must feel, at some unconscious level, that all is not copacetic in liberal-land. OK, sure, they blame eevil racist Trump conspiracy theorists for everything that is going wrong: of course they do. But still, they feeel that something is wrong; something does not compute.

But think how much worse things are going to get for them. Already we are seeing the first uptick in inflation. Guess where that is going to go? We are seeing the push-back on CRT by concerned parents at local school districts. Is that merely the first ripple of a tidal wave? We are seeing surprising elections of Republicans in Hispanic voting districts. We are seeing sweetie New York Times journalist Mara Gray traumatized by Trump car parades and US flags on Long G-island over the Memorial Day weekend.

Think what it will be like for them if the schools and CRT thing blows up into a political hurricane? Think what it will mean for them if Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) switches parties and switches control of the United Senate. Think what it will be like for them if the 2022 mid-terms turn into a Democratic bloodbath. Think what it will be like for them if Trump gets his own social media platform going. Think what it will mean if moderate Democrats panic and break ranks and run for the hills in the months ahead.

See, what I say is: don't "unfriend" your liberal friends in the months and years ahead. Be there for them. They are going to need you as their whole world-view crashes in ruins about them, and they don't know what to do about it.

Politics Equals Us vs. Them Equals Hate

In my eternal quest to understand the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" I come back again and again to politics. Here are all my maxims that mention politics:

Politics is the art of division.

Politics is all, and only, about rallying the men to fight against the foe — external and internal enemies — in the present emergency.

Politics is the royal road to injustice.

Politics is the exercise of collective power against human opposition. (Curtis Yarvin)

There is no politics without an enemy. (Curtis Yarvin)

The only thing that politics knows is hate and loot and plunder.

The more politics, the more injustice.

When a political movement achieves its objectives it doesn’t go home.

When a political movement achieves its objectives it doesn’t have to play nice any more.

When a political movement achieves its objectives it is time to crush its enemies.

Nietzsche: “the priests” teach us to hate ourselves. Me: the politicians teach us to hate others.

Politics is the division between “us” and “them;” Religion is the division between “good” and “evil.” Totalitarianism is the division between “us good people” and “them evil people.”

Politics is about trying to get things you shouldn’t want.

The first rule of politics is: never tell people the truth.

Politics and government are all about force; law is all about private property; religion is all about morality.

Politics is downstream from culture (Breitbart) is downstream from religion (Wright) is downstream from the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything” (Chantrill).

I think it is time to add a couple new ones

Politics equals "Us" vs. "Them."

Politics equals Hate.

See, the guy that got me going on this is my own special Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss. I had a phone conversation with him a while back, and before he got to his signature line "I have a meeting in five minutes" he allowed as how he was all opposed to "hate." And he spoke the word "hate" with particular affect to show how he hated "hate." Hatey hate hate.

But really, Dan old chap, if you are in the politics business, you are in the "hate" business. Why? Because the whole point of running for election is that there is a crisis! If we don't act now, our city will wither away. Because greedy landlords. Because lack of needle exchanges. Because lack of affordable housing. Because potholes in the street. Because lack of public transportation. Because lack of social workers to help people in crisis. And why do we have all these crises? Because there are evil people out there preventing helpless victims from getting the help they need.

Politics is all about "Us" the good people and "Them" the bad people. See, if things weren't that bad then we wouldn't need politicians to "fight" for us.

The same goes for "activists" that are all about fighting for justice. If you are fighting for justice there must be injustice out there. What kind of person perpetrates injustice? An evil person. So activists hate evil unjust people: probably white supremacist patriarchs, I expect. They usually are. The point is that once you have declared a moral quest, as activists do, then you have divided the world into "Us" and "Them" and you have determined to fight the Evil One.

Notice the cunning of religion on the Evil One front. Religion tends to say that it is not you that is evil, but Satan that has tempted or corrupted you. So, all an evil person needs to do is repent and all is well.

Notice the un-cunning of Allyism. Allyism says that the world is composed of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." Do you see how the only thing for the Allies to do is to defeat the "white oppressors" utterly. The "white oppressors" are the enemy, not Satan.

See, I think that politics is problematical, on its face. Because once you make something a political issue then you have reduced it to "Us" and "Them" and the only thing to do is to hate the "Them" and fight to defeat them.

And then, when the fight is over, it is time to reward the loyal soldiers and supporters with loot and plunder taken from the evil defeated "Them."

In my reductive Three Peoples theory I say that the world is not "Us" vs. "Them." I say that the world is peopled by different people, who look on the world in different ways, and expect different things from it. So, immediately the "Us" and "Them" of politics is problematical. The question becomes how to understand and organize the world so that different people can live in it and work and wive and thrive in it -- and just get along.

That is why I say that the Age of Politics is over, because the need for "Us" to fight against "Them" is over.

Tell that to your lefty friend.

How Meaning of Life, Religion, Culture and Politics Connect

We all know the basic truth of humans as social animals. It is the notion of Downstream-ism, that

Politics is downstream from culture, is downstream from religion, is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

But why? I was writing about downstream-ism yesterday in "What if Wokism is Implied in the Civil Rights Laws," but after I finished it came to me, in a vision, how the four things -- politics, culture, religion, and the meaning of life -- are connected. So here goes.

The meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is the vision of eternity. Of course, it is way short of the real meaning of life, the universe, and everything. I maintain that the more we know the more we know we don't know. Think of the simplicity of the universe of The Iliad that was just humans and the gods on Mt. Olympus. Or the geocentric model of the universe. Or explaining everything with spirits in the trees, or God creating the universe in six days and then deciding everything. Now we believe that the "observable" universe is huge, about 100 billion light years across. But really, we still don't have a clue.

The point is that at every stage in the story of human existence we seem to need a story of what the universe is and how it got there and what it all means to us. I wonder why?

Religion is the vision of eternity reduced to a system. That's what Moses did when he came down from Mt. Sinai. He reduced the divine vision he had experienced to the Ten Commandments. The vision of Jesus Christ was reduced by St. Peter and St. Paul to the systematic religion we call Christianity. The vision of Marx was reduced to the religious system we call Marxism. The vision of the Frankfurt School was reduced into the religious system we call Wokism, and woke priests are teaching it in the schools as Critical Race Theory.

Religion is inevitable. Most people live their daily lives; they have no time for visions in the wilderness or Nietzschean Thus Spake Zarathustras. So they experience the vision reduced into the processed food of church services on Sunday or mostly peaceful protests downtown.

Culture is the religious system turned into a true story. It is all about people living their lives according to the vision of eternity as promulgated into systematic religion. It is responding to our human need to see the world in human rather than systematic terms, and it is responding to the human need to experience and remember everything in a story, a narrative, and to see what happens to people if they go with the system. But what happens if they rebel against the vision turned into a system. Nothing good, needless to say. Obviously the story that Homer told in The Iliad is different from the story that John Bunyan told in Pilgrim's Progress is different that the story told by women novelists in the 19th century is different from the story told by James Joyce in Ulysses is different from the story told in the 20th century in 1950s TV sitcoms or by Eve Ensler in The Vagina Monologues.

Domestic politics is the religious system's true story reduced to enforcement by a ruling class. Enforcement is only experienced by those on the receiving end. To the rulers, politics is just good people doing God's work. It only makes sense that, when the rubber hits the road, something must be done about people that don't get with the program of the ruling class's vision of eternity, their well-thought-out religious system, and their morally improving tales. And of course, the foot-soldiers that get with the ruling-class's program need to be rewarded with loot and plunder.

International politics -- war -- is the defense of the religious system's true story against foreigners. That'll teach 'em!

Now you can understand America under the rule of the woke. The vision of eternity is the idea of perfect equality here on Earth, the lion lying down with the lamb: all races, all genders, all workers, all activists, all billionaires. The religion is the commandments on the yard signs: Black Lives Matter, Love is Love, Kindness is Everything. The culture is the multiracial advertisements, the superhero heroines, the wise black grandfathers, the husbands as idiots, the businessmen as villains. The politics is the allies protecting the oppressed peoples from the white oppressors and mandating the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools.

Got it?