Elon Musk Schools the Karens

Well, well, well. After Gov. Karen Newsom (D-CA) told Elon Musk not to open his Tesla electric car factory in Fremont, CA, and after Alameda Country Interim Health Officer Karen Pan disallowed his plan to reopen, Elon Musk upped the challenge.

Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2020

And went ahead and reopened his car plant. Hey, why not! He is saving the planet with his electric cars!

But I think that we should understand the bigger picture here. Musk is using the method of the great American philosopher, Jackie Gleason. He is saying "To the moon, Karen!"

Or maybe, in the case of Elon Musk, we are talking about "To Mars, Karen!"

The thing to understand, I think, is the fundamental difference in the way that men and women handle conflict and danger.

Women say: "Shelter in place." Men say: "March toward the sound of the guns."

Women run conflict in a static to and fro of each one takes a turn, as in:

Woman #1: [Yells at neighbor]

Woman #2: shares with her friends: "I can't believe she said that," then retaliates.

Etc., move by move. 

Men are different. Men run conflict as a war of movement, where you are always trying to stay one move ahead of the enemy.

This is confirmed by chaps like Sun Tzu, and lately by John Boyd's OODA loop.  The whole idea of Observe, Orient, Decide, Act is to understand the process that an actor in a conflict goes through, and to train yourself in the process so it is second nature. Then, the idea is that when you are in a conflict you "get inside the opponent's OODA loop" by responding to events and acting faster that he can react and act. It´s a guy thing.

It is not a Karen thing. Because Karen is a girl.

But there is a bigger issue here. And it points up the difference between the educated Gentry and the Commoners.

The educated Gentry is the most highly educated part of the population, meaning that its members are more likely to have excelled at formal education in schools and universities. There is a tendency in such social structures to develop One True Way on everything: "settled science" as we know it. Also there is a tendency for such institutions to come under the influence of the ruling class and to convert them from education institutions into ruling-class seminaries.

The Democrats, as the party of the educated Gentry, are big-time into formal structures and settled science promulgated from on high, and you peasants better follow along.

The Republicans, as the party of Commoners, are much more into informal education, learning by doing: a million consumers and producers responding to the price signals of the market and learning as they go and correcting mistakes on the way.

The Helpless Victims, of course, just sit there waiting for someone to tell them what to do. But as I say in my Little Darlings concept, the problem with being a Little Darling is that you are completely at the mercy of the ruling class, who may or may not really care about people like you.

The current Wu Flu epidemic is showing us the problems in the One True Way approach of the educated Gentry. Their epidemic models don't work; their assumptions about social distancing don't work. Their from the top edicts, such as Gov. Karen Cuomo's order forcing nursing homes to accept Wu Flu patients from hospital or else, don't often work.

Of course they don't. That's because all human activity on this Earth is a cluster-f*ck.

Meanwhile ten thousand producers are adapting their operations to make masks and social distancing markers and restaurants are switching from eat-in to takeout.

The interesting point is that the top-down model beloved by the educated Gentry class with its hunger for "ambition, honor, and vanity" is anti-social. I mean that it is a command from on high, a pure hierarchy. It does not allow for flexibility and feedback and interaction.

The market, on the other hand is a truly social thing, with humans interacting and responding to each other in no particular hierarchy and doing things that benefit other people just because that is the way you get on.

Did I mention my Four Laws? That

Socialism doesn't work because it can't compute prices. 

Administration doesn't work because it doesn't have the bandwidth. 

Regulation doesn't work because "regulatory capture." 

Government programs don't work because you can never reform them.

If you want the economy to produce masks and gloves, let the price system go to work. If you want to restart the economy then let the business owners go to work. If you want to come up with a vaccine, then stop the FDA and let the drug companies go to work. If you want everyone to get back to work then don't pass a Karen Pelosi (D-CA) $3 trillion lefty make-work bill that will make things worse.

Know what? None of this is rocket science. It really isn't.

But there is a cultural problem. If you are in the educated Gentry, your self-image depends on your superior wisdom to order the lesser breeds without the law around. You cannot believe that the Commoners should be allowed to live without proper supervision from their betters.

But #WeBelieve that "kindness is everything." Just like it says on the yard-sign out in front.

How Do You Counter the Gentry's "Anthems"?

At WattsUpWithThat today they are chuckling about Michael Moore's latest documentary. It suggests that renewable resources aren't quite and pure and spotless as we have heard tell.

They are amused by Michael Mann, the Hockey Stick guy, who tweets, complaining that only in the Trump era could anyone suggest that right-wing plutocrats were secretly funding the effort end our dependence on fossil fuels.

It's funny, really, that a guy who is 20 feet deep in the trough, should be complaining about plutocrats. Except that, as far as I know the plutocrats are supporting the green agenda openly. Plutocrats are quite happy to cash in on renewable subsidies, particularly wind turbines. What do you think Tom Steyer, plutocrats, is up to? And what do you think Elon Musk is doing with his Tesla electric cars? Trying to save the planet? Hell no. He is troughing.

But there's a bigger issue here. There always is.

Backstage, Al Gore is coordinating with Joe Biden on the Green New Deal and we learn how Joe was right there with the program. Yes. The fact is that the educated Gentry is pretty well on board with the extreme climate agenda. And you can see why. It creates lots of jobs for the educated Gentry, whether in scientific research, in bureaucratic regulation, or in lapping up subsidies for Green Energy work. And good little girls like AOC believe.

And anyone that complains is a "climate denier." As in "holocaust denier." By the way, did you know that the area around Auschwitz-Birkenau was notable because it was the center of German attempts to synthesize oil products like gasoline from coal mined at the nearby coal-mines. Also synthetic rubber.

My point is that it is almost impossible to push back against the ruling-class narrative. And, of course, the time and energy you spend could have been more profitably spent on something else. Curtis Yarvin goes on for 8,000 words about this in his "Clear Pill: Part Two." The rulers compose and play their "anthems" that please the Gentry, on the one hand, and on the other they punch out their political formulas.

And by the time they have finished they have hogged all the bandwidth.

It makes you long for the good old days of the 18th century when the thinkers and intellectuals were busy crossing up the ruling-class narrative. So that, in the French Revolution, the rulers were on the ideological defensive.

Look, I get it. Government is always looking for another excuse to wield government power. And there are always plenty of people willing to hire on in exchange for loot and plunder.

Yeah, I know. How did the French Revolution start? It started because the French government was running out of money, and it called the Estates General in order to get the estates to buy in on giving the state More Money. Big mistake, because the Estates General took the bit in its teeth.

See, I really don't want the American people to suffer through a revolutionary era in which everything is turned upside down. And for what? So we can get a Napoleon and the Duchess of Devonshire's Ball in Brussels on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo?

OK, so I am doing my bit, thinking up all kinds of ways in which to discredit the present ruling class and its educated Gentry supporters. And I suppose that's the right thing to do, right now, when the rulers can still count on the support of their Clients high and low that are getting their uninterrupted loot and plunder as promised.

But I wish that it didn't have to be this way, that we could reform the system and discredit the grifters without turning the whole place upside down.

Mrs. Poyser and the Plague of Karens

The general opinion, experts say, about Mrs. Poyser, the tenant farmer's wife in George Eliot's Adam Bede, is that she is a "comic character."

To which I say: you experts are missing the point. George Eliot gives Mrs. Poyser a comic turn because otherwise she would appear so serious as to make her a deeply unpleasant character. And all the characters in George Eliot's novels have some redeeming quality. Because George Eliot was that kind of woman. Henry James:

Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her… Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.

Everybody loved George Eliot, despite themselves.

Now for a bit of throat-clearing. We are told by our betters that the society of old was a white patriarchal society where women were oppressed and kept in their place. Maybe so. But, on the evidence of George Eliot, it was also profoundly matriarchal. If the men were patriarching out in the field, the women were matriarching back in the home. And how.

Mrs. Poyser in Adam Bede is the mother of three children -- two rambunctious boys and baby Totty. She is also mothering two orphaned nieces, Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel. She is running a dairy, renowned for its cream cheese, and keeps a remarkably clean kitchen, that visitors never forget to praise.

Mrs. Poyser's big problem is the unmarried girls in the household, dairymaids and whatnot. Because these single girls think of nothing but "finery," all except the sainted Dinah. These days we refer to "finery" as the "baubles, bangles, and beads" of the song made memorable by Peggy Lee.

One interesting thing in Adam Bede is that the married women all rate highly the provision of a "bit o' victual" to their husbands as the major thing they do. I take that to be George Eliot's hint that getting food on the table in 1799 during the Napoleonic Wars was not a trivial matter.

In brief, far from the world being a patriarchy, for the Commoners it was a serious matter where everyone's contribution, men and women, mattered. I dare say it was a matter of life and death rather than a choice between Whole Foods and Trader Joes.

The other thing that seemed to be a matter of life and death was the reputation of the family in the community. Any misdeed by any member of the family shamed and humiliated not just the sinner but the whole family. So when Hetty Sorrel kills her out-of-wedlock baby the Poyser family immediately decides to pick up and leave the land they have farmed since whenever and move to another place where their shame is unknown.

Mrs. Poyser seemed to think that the only way the unmarried girls could be got to do their work around the house and in the dairy was through detailed supervision, featuring constant nagging and complaining. Who are we to say that she was wrong?

It is clear that women today still think that constant supervision and nagging and complaining is the way to get the world to work, and we have come to call this attitude "Karen" that we understand as "an entitled, obnoxious, middle-aged white woman." Some opinion-makers have suggested that many women in public office exhibit this characteristic, especially during the current plague.

Who am I to disagree? But I would advise all women in public life to think seriously about this issue. It may be possible to run a household on this basis, and maybe its strategic value is to encourage all unmarried girls to get out of the household as soon as possible and start making his "bit o' victual" for a darling husband.

But in the larger world, detailed supervision does not work. That is the meaning of the market economy. You offers your price, for your labor or your product, and the miracle of the price system works the whole thing out without any Karens -- or Stalins -- having to order anyone about.

And, by the way, it is also the judgement of the German General Staff, which determined during and after World War I that detailed supervision of lower ranks did not work in the "lethal battlefield" of rifled guns and artillery. Responsibility had to be pushed down the chain of command as far as possible.

In my view, Karenism is a disease of the whole liberal woke-aholic world. It is the idea that educated, evolved Gentry were born to supervise and nag the ordinary Commoners of the world. Because of their bigotry and superstitions.

This, as they say, is worse than a crime, it's a blunder. It may be possible, it may be desirable, to run a household as Mrs. Poyser ran the Hall Farm. But anything beyond the scope of the family -- and maybe the neighborhood -- does not respond to Karenism. And, for sure, bossy supervision should not be enacted into law, as in regulating whether people can have drive-in church services or whether the sale of seeds at Walmart is an essential service or not.

Oh, I get it. In the present plague, politicians are desperate to seem decisive and leader-like. And bureaucrats are desperately trying to come up with stuff to make it look like their flaccid and inefficient operation is "fit for purpose."

But guess what! We humans are social animals. We are at our best and most social during an emergency. This is exactly the time when we should relax the rigid web of supervision and Karenism and encourage all our good citizens to "have a go" and figure out something that might help their fellow humans.

I am afraid that some of our fellow citizens are going to have to find this out the hard way.

A Reminder that Politicians Only Know Politics

If you are like me you are mad as hell at Our Nance and Chuck the Schmuck and you are not going to take it any more.

But think of things from their point of view, particular from what they know.

What they know is campaigns, fundraising, and dealing with left-wing activist groups. And as I say, "politics is division." Also, "politics is civil war by other means."

They say that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is the world's foremost expert at getting to a microphone first. And Nancy Pelosi must have some finely-honed skills related to getting to be Speaker of the House of Representatives and recruiting nice moderate Democratic candidates for moderate suburban Congressional Districts and jiggering around with fundraising and liberal activist groups.

But think about it. All they have come up with in the Four Years of Trump is witch-hunts and investigations. Really! That is all that you chaps could come up with!

When the Republican Senate was coming up with a $2 trillion stimulus bill Our Nance was back in California. Then she came back and demanded a bill that included lots of money and carve-outs for the activism community, making a priority out of diversity. Of course she did. That's all she knows.

And Chuck the Schmuck? He's busy blaming President Trump for everything. Of course he is. That's all he knows.

Meanwhile, today, President Trump is announcing the first "checks in the mail" in the government's small business rescue plan. 'Cos that's all he knows.

Some people are despondent because they see the China virus panic as another opportunity for the left to ratchet up government power. And put the country even further under centralized administrative control.

On the other hand others are despondent because they fear that the noble supra-national experiments like global trade and the EU are going to get a hammer blow from which they will never recover.

My approach is that the Great Reaction of the left over the last two centuries has been reaching its sell-by date for some time. Something, some day, is going to push it into the dustbin of history. Will this be it? Probably not. But it might create some cracks in the monolith.

I look at politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and see people playing the old game, because that is what they know. I see the progressive left playing its political correctness game because that is what they have been carefully taught and that is what they know. And of course we have all the Good Little Girls in HR doing what they have been carefully taught and that is what they know. The reason that the tech lords at Google have been siding with the Democrats and silencing the "far-right" on social media is because that is what they have been carefully taught and what they know.

And the Oregon Court of Appeals upholds the conviction of a "far-right" journalist Mike Strickland who brandished a gun at "far-left" mostly peaceful protesters that were attacking him. Because that's all those appeals court judges know.

We humans go on doing what we know until our world collapses in front of us, according to scientists.

So we "far-right" racist-sexist-homophobes should be careful what we wish for. It's all very well to hope for "change," as our lefty friends say. But when "change" happens it also means that anything can happen.

And, when you think of all the things that could happen you have to know that most of them would be worse than the current situation.

So, the politicians, especially the late 70-something politicians, only know what they know. And so they do what they know.

Will they go on doing what they know until they pass on? Or will they be pushed?

I suppose it is up to us voters.

What I think, and nobody cares what I think, is that the current ruling Gentry class is not good for us Commoners, because they are setting rules for us that don't apply to them, because they are special.

I don't know that a ruling class that rules in the interest of Commoners would necessarily be good for America, or even good for Commoners. But as H.L. Mencken said, we Commoners would then at least be getting what we voted for, "good and hard."

What Path Should We Follow?

I am working on a long think piece that is trying to solve the mystery of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Of course, I am making the whole thing revolve around my reductive Three Peoples theory and the notion of three layers in general.

And, it seems to me, the whole thing comes down to "which path should we follow?" And naturally, it should be different for each of the Three Peoples. And, I propose, for each of them there is a good path and a bad path.

For the People of the Subordinate Self -- and for Curtis Yarvin's Clients -- the path is obvious; it is Follow your Leader. But, of course, you should understand that your Leader, whether the tribal leader, the Olympian gods, or President-for-life Xi, doesn't really care about people like you. He is using you as a path to power. You are, as I say, a Little Darling, like the mistress of a rich guy, who is liable to age out and get dropped. And it is one thing to follow your traditional tribal leader and another thing to follow some chap like Adolf Hitler with some cockeyed notion of world domination. But how do you tell? Good question.

For the People of the Responsible Self -- and for Curtis Yarvin's Commoners -- the path is: Follow the Rules. At the prosaic level this is the "obey the law, go to work, follow the rules" that I first heard from FoxNews Sean Hannity. At the higher end it is the notion of God's Divine Law, and the Paradise that await believers that follow the Divine Law. But, obviously, there is a limit to this. Do you damn to personal hell someone that doesn't follow your rules? Do you belong to a church with very rigid rules and roles? Following the Rules is the center of the market economy, where everyone follows the rules and is trustworthy, and where we make our living by working for others, whether as an employee or as an entrepreneur that makes his money by making products and services demanded by the market.

So far so good. But now we come to the People of the Creative Self -- and Curtis Yarvin's Gentry. Whatabout them? Well, I know what I want to say. The path of the creative is the path of the Sacrificial Hero. Then there is the other guy, who Jordan B. Peterson calls the "eternal adversary." Let us expand on Peterson's notion of the Hostile Brothers.

One of these "hostile brothers" or "eternal sons of God" is the mythological hero. He faces the unknown with the presumption of its benevolence -- with the (unprovable) attitude that confrontation with the unkown will bring renewal and redemption. He enter[s], voluntarily, into creative "union with the Great Mother," builds or regenerates society, and brings peace to a warring world.

The other "son of God" is the eternal adversary. This "spirit on unbridled rationality," horrified by his limited apprehension of the conditions of existence, shrinks from contact with everything he does not understand. This shrinking... makes him rigid and authoritarian... His weakness, in combination with his neurotic suffering, engenders resentment and hatred for existence itself.

Peterson calls these Hostile Brothers "archetypes of response to the unknown." I consider the mythological hero as the Sacrifical Hero, and the eternal adversary as the Egoist Hero. And it occurs to me that the path of the Sacrificial Hero is the Path into the Unknown. The true hero has the courage and the humility to follow the path of the Unknown, and accept the fear of the Unknown as a fact of life. The eternal adversary wants to make the Unknown known before he is willing to take th path into the future. And this is why the past two centuries is littered with ideological narratives that pretend to resolve the question of the Unknown: Comte's Positivism, Marx's Communism, the Frankfurt School's postmodernism, the Wokerati's political correctness.

I would say that the story of the last century is the story of the Gentry failing to face up to the frightful truth of the creative life, that it is a journey into the Unknown -- where there be dragons. The Gentry wants its creative life on the cheap, paid for by the Commoners. Or it wants to practice its creative notions on the Commoners, because Gentry is special and Commoners are deplorable. You can see these conceits in everything the left does, from socialism to politics to art. It is all a denial of the truth of the creative life, that it is a terrifying journey into the Unknown.

You can see that Nietzsche had a glimmering of this truth; that is why he proposes his Übermensch who is brave, creative, able to handle "a fair amount of accidents and nonsense," who is bigger than the descent from decadence to nihilism and the terror of the eternal recurrence in the hope of a future of ascending strength and achievement. But I think that there is probably too much of the Egoist Hero in Nietzsche's Übermensch to qualify him as a true Sacrifical Hero that walks, overcoming his fear, into the Unknown.

So that's all settled.

If you are one of the People of the Subordinate Self you follow the path in the footsteps of your Leader.

If you are one of the People of the Responsible Self you follow the Rules.

If you are one of the People of the Creative Self you follow the path into the Unknown.

The Clear Pill - Table of Contents

An Analysis of Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer Theory

1. Curtis Yarvin's Clear Pill: The Uses of the "Political Formula"
It could produce a "third story" to upend the Gentry

2. Curtis Yarvin's Clear Pill: How to Keep the Woke Gentry Onside
Take away the power; then the Gentry will behave

3. Applying Yarvin's Gentry Commoners Clients to Charles Murray's "Coming Apart"
And other three class theories of society

4. My Three Peoples vs. Yarvin's Three Layers
My Creatives, Responsibles, Subordinates vs. his Gentry, Commoners, and Clients

5. "Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry
But not necessarily for Commoners and Clients

6. Could Chile's Collapse Happen Here?
It could, except we Commoners have Donald Trump in our lane

7. It's Past Time for Merely Defending the Market System. Etc.
Why not go on the attack

8. Why Is Everyone Going Crazy?
Because the progressive project is splitting at the seams

9. What Path Should We Follow?
It depends on what kind of person you are

10. A Reminder that Politicians Only Know Politics
Pelosi and Schumer don't know any better

11. Mrs. Poyser and the Plague of Karens
Nagging and complaining work in the home but not in the public square

12. How Do You Counter the Gentry's "Anthems"
Short of a revolution?

13. Elon Musk Schools the Karens
It's a gender -- and a class -- thing

Why is Everyone Going Crazy?

Back in 2016 it was the Republican Party that got blindsided by a outside candidate, Donald Trump.

All the wise heads agreed that it just didn't make sense that everyone should be going crazy. Except it did make sense. Trump appeared and put himself at the head of a disorganized rabble of ordinary Americans, people that were neither educated swells or subordinate serfs: call them Responsibles, Commoners, Yeomen, whatever.

The point is that in the last 50 years the ruling class and the educated Gentry -- or Creative Class or clerisy -- has been implementing a cultural and political agenda that makes the ordinary American the scapegoat, because racist, sexist, homophobe. And Trump came along and made himself the leader of those selected to be scapegoats.

Today, in 2020, the Democratic Party is falling apart as Bernie Sanders, unreconstructed Sixties Commie, is the leading candidate for president. What is going on?

I mean, come on chaps! This is crazy! Nobody really believes that socialism works do they?

Sorry, but they do. And I would say that it is a consequence of the educated Gentry playing with gasoline for almost a century.

What the Democratic Party and the educated Gentry have been selling since, say FDR and the New Deal, is Oh No! We are not crazy lefty socialists, but boy, how you poor victims have been screwed by the system! And how about some free stuff if you vote for us!

The problem is, of course, that to win elections you have to promise free stuff, and the free stuff you handed out at the last election doesn't count.

As I say in my reductive Three Peoples theory and as Curtis Yarvin says in his three-layer theory, the current political setup is that the educated Gentry gets to occupy the commanding heights of the culture and education and the bureaucracy by organizing the Clients -- or victims or serfs -- against the ordinary middle who are racist sexist homophobes.

Plus, because the educated Gentry is also a kind of priesthood, a clerisy, it promulgates from a thousand cultural pulpits its religion of woke virtue. Due to the internal logic of such sermonizing you get to a point where ordinary Commoners that don't intone the correct responses to the Creed get named and shamed and shunned: canceled.

Now it is my belief that the current religion and culture of the educated Gentry is is fact a peculiarly nostaglic longing for the good old days, the prehistoric days: a Great Reaction. To use a Jungian notion, the educated Gentry is rediscovering the hidden harmonies and resonances of the old archetypes.

One of the points of the Jung doctrine was to say: don't you imagine that you are a modern that is all about logic and reason. Those ancient prehistoric archetypes are still at work in your unconscious mind, and don't you forget it.

Thus when I say that socialism is a return to slavery, I am saying that there is a peculiar satisfaction, if you are a notable in the Gentry, to ordering the plebs around.

When I say that the welfare state is a return to feudalism, I am saying that there is a peculiar satisfaction, if you are a functionary in the Deep State, to sashaying around like the local lord in caring for your flock of peasants.

When I say that activism is a replay of medieval knight-errantry, I mean that there is a peculiar frisson from pretending you are a brave revolutionary waving the flag of revolution on the barricades.

My belief is that the Left and its culture and its instantiation in the United States in the Democratic Party is a reactionary movement that is really cool for the educated Gentry, spending other peoples' money on themselves. But it is not good for the Commoners and Yeomanry.

And it is not good for the serfs, the Clients, the subordinates. Why? Because it does not help them master the Code of the City, that you leave the comforts of your ethnic tribe in the city ghetto and bravely, one step at a time, learn how to master life in the city as a contributor and cooperator in the market economy. The Gentry says to the victims, oh, don't worry about silly little things like getting a skill or learning how to be a good employee, or how to use the finance system. Just vote for us and we will take care of you.

Only the day comes, as it did for the white working class, when the Gentry reneges on its promise to its "Little Darlings" and leaves them by the side of the road. Sorry about that.

But that is not all.

The day also comes when the whole progressive project starts to split at the seams. You see that with Our Nance and Chuck the Schmuck. This week they are issuing crazy pronouncements blaming President Trump for his Coronavirus response. You mean, instead of going to the White House and saying: "Mr. President. How can we help!"

In other words, they don't have a clue what they are doing and where they are going. They are just reacting to the latest news and blaming it all on Trump.

Let us give the educated Gentry its due. Back in the day it made some kind of sense to imagine that the destiny of educated children of wealthy businessmen ought to be to help the workers in the city, who would otherwise die of "immiseration" among those Satanic mills.

Actually, they turned out to be wrong about that. The Industrial Revolution saved the peasants from starvation and gave them jobs in the cities and then the workers could climb up from being mere "hands" to a modest respectability as, in the 19th century, the Irish in America rose in half a century from "shanty Irish" to "lace-curtain Irish."

But whatabout the blacks? We need to give them their rights and end the shame and injustice of slavery and Jim Crow.

OK. Done that. Yes, but whatabout institutional racism, and disparity and exclusion? And toxic masculinity! And homophobia!

Oh yeah. I see. You chaps want a job. You want to maintain meaning in your Gentry lives. You are looking around you and want get your name up in lights again.

Well, now the whole project is in ruins. Actually, in this situation, Bernie Sanders makes sense. As developmental psychologists like Clare Graves and Don Beck and Ken Wilber say: when your life seems to be failing then you reset back to a lower developmental level. So if the woke-and-identity politics seems to be failing let's go back to the class politics of our fathers!

Of course, I know exactly what should happen next, because I am all-wise and all knowledgeable.

First, the educated Gentry should actually think about how to help the serfs, clients, and subordinates. My advice is to help them to get out of the victim culture and become Commoners and Yeomen and middle class.

Then, the educated Gentry should think about how to help the Commoners, Yeomen and deplorables. My advice is to help them imagine that they could step out of the set routines of middle-class life and become just a little bit creative. But nobody should pretend that the creative life is just a walk in the park.

Then, the educated Gentry should think about themselves. What does it actually mean to be woke and evolved and creative? My advice is that the real creative life is the life of the Sacrificial Hero, that descends into the underworld of the unconscious to confront the truth about himself, and if he survives that journey he may return to the world to live on the border between Chaos and Order and try to explore that terrifying land -- and hope that his experience will be a boon to his fellow humans. And to recognize that there will be no hosannas and statues and adoring crowds. In other words, better leave ambition and vanity and honor at the door.

But back to the excitement of today.

Conrad Black says that the Dems need to commit (temporary) suicide.

An ineluctable process of national political renovation is proceeding apace... the Democratic Party will... slouch off to Milwaukee to consummate temporary suicide, enabling a sensible resurrection worthy of that historically great party.

And if their wise heads plump on my suggestions above, then future generations will sing hosannas to their vision and their wisdom.

It's Past Time for Merely Defending the Market System. Etc.

I'm reading Why Liberalism Works by economist Deirdre McCloskey that celebrates her three "Bourgeois Era" books. In those books she establishes the remarkable Great Enrichment of the last 200 years and attributes it to the bourgeois ethos of the seven virtues and also the "have a go" ethos of ordinary people starting in 1800.

Basic to this notion is that "capital" is not something that accumulates, but is created when something new and useful is invented and produced and sold out of a clear blue sky. I suppose the fundamental case for that is the creation of John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his Standard Oil. Rockefeller created a company that reduced the price of illuminating oil from about 80 cents per gallon to 10 cents per gallon. Not surprisingly this astonishing achievement shot the stock of Rockefeller's Standard Oil into the stratosphere. Why? Because the present value of Standard Oil discovering and producing and selling oil was enormous. And that was before they discovered oil in Texas in 1901.

I mean: what is the value to the average housewife of the oil that she bought for those cute oil lamps later featured in western movies? That were much safer and useful than the wax candles that really only rich people could afford? (Check out various recent TV series of the candle era in which typically the producers have decided to show the indoor lighting just by candle. Rich-people parties have veritable galaxies of brutally expensive candles. Almost everyone lights themselves to their bedrooms with a single candle.)

Apply the same logic to all the other astonishing things of the past two centuries: trains, steamships, cars, electricity, safe childbirth, computers, internet. This is not accumulation but explosion.

However, I am not sure that I buy the Bourgeois Virtues argument and the celebration of bourgeois culture. I am more inclined to go with the verdict of George Eliot in Adam Bede where she celebrates ordinary rural carpenters and farm girls getting the ethos of Methodist Christianity and the sense of directing their own livesunder the inspiration of God and his divine laws.

In other words, Adam Bede and Dinah Morris were graduating out of the subordinate peasant mentality to think and act as Commoners.

And there is the peculiar marriage of elite science and commoner mechanics marrying science to technique and turning ideas into useful products.

I am more inclined to attribute the Great Enrichment to the ordinary people "having a go" and the elites and governing classes not seeing what was going on until it was too late to stop it.

Think of the Trump election in 2016. The elites thought Trump was a rube and a blowhard. They just had no idea that he could and would connect with the ordinary American Commoner and win their votes and now their trust. If they had known... they would have made sure that Trump got nobbled before he got out of the starting gate. Indeed they did nobble him with the Steele Dossier, but just didn't press home their spying operation, probably because they thought to themselves that "this clown will never get elected."

I guess my point is that it is past time for defending the market system and its recipe for baking the cake of a world without poverty. If you don't get that, lefties and gentry, after all these years, you are a fool and a knave.

When the elite and the left make that elite guidance is needed to keep capitalism just and moderate I think that they are not quite lying but certainly covering their eyes to the reality of the market economy. Certainly any fair-minded judge has a right to feel that the eye-coverers have a vested interest in their blindness.

It is past time to be understanding. I think we should be on the attack, as in this from my Maxims page:

Crimes of the Left: Driving working class off the road to the middle class; misdirecting women in the public square; making war on middle class culture and values; taxing business and ordinary people and enslaving them to ruling-class crusades to save the world.

See, I think that the argument of Marx and subsequent lefties to teach the working class that "we wos robbed" is one of the great crimes of the ages. All in the interest of political power. And then teaching women to have "careers" rather than run the culture from their traditional base in the home, the famiy, and the neighborhood. Now we have the gentry class saying that we need less prosperity! Because Saving the Planet.

Here's a piece about how the Democrat judges are using blatant devices to stall and stymie anything that Trump proposes with tricks like "nationwide injunctions." I don't think that we should give them the benefit of the doubt, and allow that the poor dears just don't understand. If the Obama judges don't understand the monstrous injustice of their actions -- and I dare say they don't -- then they really don't understand law and don't understand that the whole point of law is to be a brake on ruling-class power.

It is far more likely that the Obama are deliberately blind to the injustice of their actions, because they don't want to know, because they have been carefully taught, because to seriously think about their political agenda, to seriously allow that others -- their political opponents -- might have a valid point of view, is not to be endured.

In other words it makes more sense to believe that our liberal friends of all kinds are merely Educated Gentry responding to ruling class anthems that appeal to their taste for ambition, their need for honor, and their consuming vanity. And that the don't have the education, the understanding, and the judgement to think any other way.

When you look at our liberal friends, let's face it, it's all about them. That's what Trump Derangement Syndrome is all about, the utter demolition of the decades old liberal comfort zone.

I mean, anyone with half a brain should have at least considered that 2016 was a change election, after two terms of Obama and certainly after 8 years of very slow growth out of the 2008 Recession, and given the rather limited political skills of Democratic Candidate Hillary Clinton.

The very fact of the post-election hysteria was a dead giveway that the average Educated Gentry voter had been led by their leaders and the liberal media into a political La La Land. Because what grown-ups do after a failure is suck it in and determine to do better.

No, the only thing that will teach our Educated Gentry that they have a problem is nothing less than the school of hard knocks, of a 55-45 loss in 2020, a sold Republican Congress in both houses, several high profile criminal prosecutions of Obama administraion officials involved in the spying on the Trump campaign and the half-hearted coup attempt since the 2016 election.

Our Democratic friends have to be treated to the famous line that the coach delivers to his football team after a stinging loss: "Let's get back to basics. This is a football."

And nothing would communicate that something is completely out of joint than for a significant chunk of black and Hispanic voters to start voting like Commoners rather than Victims.

It's past time for merely defending the market system. It is past time for merely defending the American way of life. It's past time for assuming that the Educated Gentry will ever give the Commoners a fair shake. It's past time for cringing before the accusation of racism, sexist, homophobia.

It's time to go on the attack. For the simple reason that all sectors of American society have a right to be heard and to have their needs factored into the political auction.

It is not true that the market system is unjust. It is not true that Commoners are bigots and white supremacists. It is not true that women and gays and blacks and Hispanics and Muslims are helpless victims and need special privileges to get justice in America. And it is not true that Educated Gentry have a right to order the rest of America around.

Until that is conceded, things are going to continue to get pretty hot around here.

Could Chile's Collapse Happen Here?

Here's the thing. "Chile's Collapse Foretells America's If Dems Win." What in the world is wrong with Chile? I thought that since the days of th eevil Gen. Pinochet that Chile had set up a pretty decent free-market economy that was the envy of the rest of South America. But no. Things are not copacetic in Chile these days. Writes Axel Kaiser in the Wall Street Journal about Chile's very own Elizabeth Warren,

The economic pain started with the antimarket reforms of the previous government under Socialist President Michelle Bachelet, from 2014-18. Ms. Bachelet increased corporate taxes by 30%; signed a law banning the replacement of workers on strike, thereby dramatically increasing the costs of labor; increased public spending at three times the economic growth rate; and unleashed armies of regulatory bureaucrats on the private sector.

Of course, I dare say thaat the reduction in copper prices plays a role in this.

Now I am reading Deirdre McCloskey's breezy Why Liberalism Works and you would think, from her, that all good-thinking people know that liberalism, the 18th century Enlightenment one, not the 20th century US version, is the way to go.

But actually they don't. As we know. Because our Educated Gentry are all in favor of race politics, big government politics, gender politics, and canceling anyone that doesn't agree with their secular religion.All over the world.

Now maybe somewhere in Why Liberalism Works I dare say that McCloskey has some winning argument to persuade the Wokies to give it up. But I doubt it. If I had any doubt my mind was made up by the simple notions of Curtis Yarvin in "The Clear Pill."

Yarvin writes that the present ruling class plays beautiful "anthems" -- no doubt on a magnificnt pipe organ -- to the Educated Gentry that appeals to its "ambition, honor, and vanity."

Yarvin's three layer theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients fits moderately well with my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we moderns live in a status hierarchy of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates. When you are a creative the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is all tied up in your ability to do creative, original work.

So the problem with the notion that we should all relax and enjoy it because, Why Liberalism Works, is that there is no "ambition, honor, and vanity" for the Creative Educated Gentry in a minimum government society. Yes, yes. Everyone will be prosperous and happy. But what about the workers, er, gentry? What ambition is satisfied for the gentry? What honor will crown the gentry with fig leaves? What will appeal to their vanity (not that the gentry are vain, oh no)?

Let's take a smart ambitious woman like Elizabeth Warren. Here is a woman that has played the Gentry game to the hilt. She has converted herself from her Commoner origins into a rootin' tootin' Gentry mandarin. She got into Harvard Law as a professor by faking Native American heritage. As a graduate of Rutgers Law School she would never have got into Harvard without the Native American scam.

As a smart ambitious woman she knows instinctively that she is never going to have a top-fight political career humming the anthem of Why Liberalism Works to the Gentry. Or telling the Clients that the trouble with big government is that sooner or later you run out of Other Peoples' Money. No. She's running with her pedal to the metal of Big Government Über Alles.

Or take my Four Laws.

"Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices." Oh yeah? Whatabout the homeless? The children stuck in cages at the border? Let's worry about prices and profits next week.

"The administrative state cannot work because it doesn't have the bandwidth to direct the whole economy." Oh yeah? But whatabout the folks that don't have health insurance? Are we just going to sit here while people die?

"The regulatory state cannot work because of the law of 'regulatory capture.'" Oh yeah? So you are going to let monopolies make obscene profits for ever and ever?

"Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them." Oh yeah? So you are going to put little children back to work in the mines because the education system isn't perfect?

Now I think the problem is even bigger than that.

First is the notion I picked up from the best-seller The Millionaire Next Door. Suppose you are the wife of a businessman that made a nice little fortune with a string of dry-cleaning stores? Whatabout your children? So you send them out into the marketplace at age 18 and tell 'em to work it out? No you don't, because in the world of business many are called but few are chosen and you don't want your kids suffering through the agony of failed businesses and bankruptcy. No, what you do is send your kids to university and get them into nice regulated professions like medicine and law, or you buy them a nice pair of striped-pants for a career in the State Department, where you have to go through years and years of fees and 80-hour weeks before you get licensed to print money.

And then there is the basic fact of politics. First, the political leader is the tribal chief that protects you from pirates and plunderers. Second, the political leader recruits his warriors with the offer of loot and plunder. Got a solution to that age old fact of life?

So when are we going to rise above these wee problems? Next week? Next year? Next century?

Well, I offer hope. Three hundred years ago, people in the west were just beginning to worry about slavery. Then Christian evangelicals like William Wilberforce taught us to be ashamed and we abolished slavery. Then lefties created the biggest slave states in history, the sweeties. But the slave states have kinda dialed down the slavery thing because slavery does not pay, Mr. Gorbachev.

Three hundred years ago, according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash, the lower orders were indeed regarded by all respectable gentry people as rubbish. And if white people weren't slaves, there were plenty of them that were indentured servants. But now they are Commoners. Although the gentry still sneers at them as racist sexist homophobes and deplorables. And along comes Donald Trump to champion the Commoners.

But the problem is that a world with less government and less Studies degrees and less moral lecturing about toxic masculinity and white supremacy is also a world in which the Educated Gentry has less scope for its "ambition, honor, and vanity."

You think that the proud Educated Gentry is going to put up with a world that crimps their style? In fact, as I argue in my Great Reaction series, the Educated Gentry seems determined to take us back to the past, with socialism as a return to slavery, the welfare state as a return to feudalism, identity politics as a return to tribalism, and all the rest of it.

Me neither.

So could the Dems screw the place up like Chile? Of course they could. And they'd blame "greedy bankers" and white supremacists all the way to the guillotine.

That's why I think that a rude crude rootin' tweetin' bigot like Donald Trump who is focusing his program on the needs of the Commoners is a much better prospect than any of the big-government anti-deplorable Democrats.

"Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry

In her magnificent "Bourgeois Era" books Deirdre McCloskey celebrates the achievements of the western bourgeoisie, and I have written about it. As La Wik says, the bourgeoisie, contrary to its self-advertisement as "prudence only" actually practiced all the Seven Virtues. And its appetite for innovation provoked the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, from $3 per person per day to $100 per person per day. In today's dollars.

In her new book, Why Liberalism Works: How true liberal values produce a freer, more equal, prosperous world for all, McCloskey advertises an inclusive libertarianism, and proposes to reclaim the word "liberal" from the progressives.

McCloskey argues for "the continuing desirability of a liberalism conceived in the eighteenth century" and how it has created good things like "economic success" the "arts and sciences" plus "its kindness, toleration, its inclusiveness, its cosmopolitanism, and especially its massive liberation of... people from violent hierarchies ancient and modern." Then there are the critics.

Progressives and conservatives and populists retort that liberalism and its rhetoric also explain numerous alleged evils, such as the reduction of everything to money and markets or the loss of community and God of the calamity of immigration by non-whites and non-Christians. But they are mistaken.

Twenty years ago and more I might have agreed with her. But then I read F.S.C. Northrop, who wrote:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

"Inadequate?" Everything I believed? But what does that mean? At the time I was perfectly happy with the world view of the British Enlightenment. And yet. For one thing didn't German thought lead directly to Nazism?

So I gradually embarked on the study of the Germans. For instance, Kant. He famously developed his philosophy from problems in Hume, especially Hume's showing that there is no warrant for our faith in cause and effect. And so Kant proposed that, contrary to the Newtonian era's confidence in matter and mechanics, we do not know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances, and we construct a world view from information coming in through our senses. Then there were the German Romantics that argued that we know directly that there is more to life than facts and reason. That's what all those Romantic paintings of a young German looking out into a prospect of magnificent nature were about.

Then there was Hegel (that McCloskey dismisses as an inspiration for authoritarianism and national-socialism). Does anyone understand Hegel? I certainly don't. But I rather like his Master and Slave analysis, which suggests that the Master is not exactly master, and the Slave not exactly helpless. And his notion of dialectic proposes that we humans proceed by lurching from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, rinse and repeat.

Then there was German physics that drove the relativity-quantum mechanics revolution. What was that all about?

And Freud-Jung and the mostly German developmental psychologists that invented modern psychology that, amongst other things, reminds us that our fabled rational minds sit on top of an undiscovered country of the unconscious. And it may be that our conscious mind is just a fake image projected like a movie from the unconscious to make us feel good.

Now, I reckon that out of all this came my reductive Three Peoples theory that owes a lot to the developmentalists. And then there is Curtis Yarvin's three-layer picture of modern society as Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

So tell me "Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry. And "Why Liberalism Works" for the Commoners. And "Why Liberalism Works" for the Clients.

See, I believe with McCloskey that liberalism and the discoveries about how markets work for all of us and have driven the Great Enrichment are true -- as far as anything can be true, given that as far back as Nietzsche we have to understand that our understanding of the world are remarkably constrained by, say, the need of every living thing to stay alive when danger strikes.

The fundamental world view of my People of the Subordinate Self and Yarvin's Clients is that to survive in this world you have to have a patron, a powerful man that can protect you from a cruel world. How does McCloskey's liberalism speak to them?

The fundamental world view of my People of the Responsible Self and Yarvin's Commoners is to accept that it is your job to get on in the world, to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, but that in return you expect some sort of protection from the rulers. How does McCloskey speak to them?

The fundamental world view of my People of the Creative Self and Yarvin's Gentry is that life is a creative project and a fine thing it is: it is their creative innovation that gave us the Great Enrichment. But the Gentry also seem to believe that the scope for their creativity should be almost limitless and that the plebs should not have the right to oppose their brilliant ideas. Yes, of course, McCloskey is a creative and naturally thinks that creatives should rule the world with "kindness... toleration... inclusiveness... cosmopolitanism" and so forth. But whatabout the people that experience the "kindness" etc. as mere patronizing bossiness?

I call my Three Peoples theory "reductive" partly out of irony, because of course all human knowledge is reductive. Nietzsche: "a priori 'truths' are for me -- provisional assumptions" Or this:

Within the mechanistic view of the world (which is logic and its application to space and time), that concept is reduced to the formulas of mathematics -- with which as one must emphasize again and again, nothing is ever comprehended, but rather designated and distorted. Will to Power §554.

The mistake of the original 18th century liberals was to assume that everyone would identify with the creative bourgeois ethos. And that ethos is certainly my culture and feels comfortable to me.

But humans are not like that. We humans are social animals that find safety and survival in groupish behavior and instincts. Most humans down the ages, I think, experienced themselves as subordinates in the hierarchy; they submitted to power to enjoy the benefits and safety of being in a community.

And, of course, one of the basic facts of life was that land was life. You, or your group, had to possess food-yielding land, or else. So you had to belong to a group.

Now I think that modern socialism as a prescription for groupishness is a disaster. But clearly there are a lot of people that think it delivers community and safety.

I notice that everyone these days is shocked, shocked by slavery. I ask, instead, why has slavery become, in the last centuries, a scandal? What changed?

I even think I get the Death of God. It is because modern Gentry believe that they are the creators. No God needed.

So I think that the modern problem is how to deal with the fact that people have different ideas of community, of work, of wealth, of rules, of morality. And the place to start, to be able to look at the world from different perspectives, I believe, is with a reductive Three Peoples or three layers theory.

How to make a better world that subordinate Clients will appreciate?

How to make a better world that reponsible Commoners will appreciate?

How to make a better world that creative Gentry will appreciate?

It's a problem!

My Three Peoples vs. Yarvin's Three Layers

It was pretty exciting to read part one of Curtis Yarvin's "Clear Pill" a month ago. He has a three peoples theory just like I do. Here is how he describes it.

As Orwell wrote, all societies have three human layers. We may call ours gentry, commoners, and clients. The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

He inspired me to catalogue all the three layer systems that I knew about, thus:

Author	Top	Middle	Bottom	Relig/Culture/ Political
George Orwell	Inner Party	Outer Party	Proles	Political
Karl Marx	Bourgeoisie	Communists	Proletarians	Political
Auguste Comte	Positive	Metaphysical	Theological	Cultural
New Left	Racists, etc.	Activists	Victims	Political
Woke Left	White oppressors	Allies	Members of oppressed groups	Political
Charles Murray	Belmont	Everybody Else	Fishtown	Cultural
Curtis Yarvin	Gentry	Commoners	Clients	Political
J.R.R. Tolkien	Elves	Hobbits	Dwarves	Cultural
Joel Kotkin	Clerisy	Yeomanry	Serfs	Political
Z-Man, Z-man	Cloud People	Dirt People	[lower classes]	Political
Dennis Price	Cloud People	Dirt People	[dependents]	Political
David Goodhart	Anywheres	Somewheres	[Inbetweeners]	Political
John Derbyshire	Ice People	??	Sun People	Political
Vikings	Earls	Peasants	Thralls (slaves)	Political
Hammurabi	Superiors/ Propertied	Commoners/ freed men	Slaves	Political
Christopher Chantrill	Creatives	Responsibles	Subordinates	Cultural
Christopher Chantrill	Ruling Class	Middle Class	Little Darlings	Political
Christopher Chantrill	Hero (sacrificial or ego)	One God	Many Gods	Religious

When Yarvin gets into part two of the "Clear Pill," he sets forth what I think is the key to understanding our liberal friends in the educated liberal gentry. Yarvin says that the ruling class obtains the support of the gentry class by playing "thymotic anthems" to the gentry, where "thymos is somewhere between ambition, honor, and vanity."

Update 2/3/20: See also Yarvin's latest on pistos (loyalty) and thymos (ambition) in a later piece.

And it's not just anthems, but cold hard cash delivered to supporters. You are ambitious? Easiest way forward is to help the ruling class with one of its projects. You want honor? Well so do we all, but the short way to get it is to help the ruling class. You are vain? Of course not. But if you were it sure would help if you joined the ruling class and made out that you were helping fundamentally transforming America from its shameful past of racist sexist homophobia and bending the arc of history towards justice.

My maxim that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice" is supposed to poke a hole in the above conceit. Because the point is that everything any ruling class does is force. Of course it is, because otherwise it would happen on its own. And so everything a ruling class does amounts to injustice. And so all the gentry in the ruling class's officer corps are conceited creeps promoting injustice.

I've been having a lot of fun with Yarvin's three layers in the past couple of weeks, and the only problem is that I'm not happy with "clients." I converted "clients" into "victims" in a piece for The American Thinker over the weekend, but that was really about "fake victims" or gentry people -- such as feminists and gays -- defining themselves as victims in order to beat up on the commoners. But identifying the "clients" as "victims" doesn't quite do it because, after all, most of the lower class are not victims; they are just dependent. So I think the best word for the lower class is "subordinates."

So I'd define Yarvin's three layers as: gentry, commoners, and subordinates.

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious, and interested in power; the commoners are suburbanites, moderately skilled and competent; the subordinates are dependent and tribal, candidates for victimhood.

 But how does Yarvin's layers intersect with my Three Peoples theory? When I think about it, I reckon that my three sectors do not exactly match his but rather overlap.

I think that my People of the Creative Self is the top end of Yarvin's gentry layer, who I expect, see themselves as more responsible than creative. There are, for a start, a lot more people that think of themselves as "creative" than are really creative, in the sense of Nietzsche's "free spirits" or Bronze Age Pervert's "pirates." If we think of the educated liberal Subaru-driving gentry, we would expect most of them to experience themselves as responsible citizens, concerned about justice issues, rather than as creative free spirits.

I think that my People of the Responsible Self overlaps the low end of Yarvin's gentry layer and the top half of his commoner layer. We see that in the Trump phenomenon. In my view, the enthusiastic "white working class" are clearly commoners, but barely responsibles. Trump supporters clearly see President Trump as protecting people like them. On the other hand, Trump has clearly driven away educated gentry women from the Republican Party, for he clearly offends their sense of honor and vanity.

I think that my People of the Subordinate Self tracks pretty well what Yarvin calls clients. The point about subordinates, clients, proles, victims, whatever, is that they expect to be protected at a closer level than the nation state. Since they are not really literate, they conduct their lives at the person-to-person level. They really need to have personal contact with some leader or patron to whom they owe fealty. The bureaucratic welfare state is not the ideal way to socialize such people.

One way of understanding the Three Peoples, or three layers, is through belonging. Creatives and gentry clearly feel they belong to something higher and better than nation states. Their world is clearly supranational, although not quite global. Responsibles and definitely commoners are nationalists, they identify with and belong to the nation state. The reason for Trump and Boris and the other national populists is that they have exploited a hole in the world view of the oh-so-sophisticated suprnationalists in the gentry.

The thing about the subordinates and clients and proles is that they cannot relate to being nation-state citizens. They need a loyalty closer to home. However, I would say that they are suspended part way between sub-national tribalism and nationalism. For the left found out long ago that their working-class supporters identified themselves as German workers, and British workers, and never identified with "workers of the world unite."

Notice how clients, victims, and my Little Darlings track. In all cases we are talking about how the ruling class or their gentry supporters enlist the subordinates into their political battalions -- in return for free stuff -- where the subordinates in their ranks-and-files are to be the shock troops of the ruling class's power project. And the whole point is to use the clients and victims to keep the commoners from getting any ideas above their station.

Applying Yarvin's Gentry, Commoners, Clients to Charles Murray's "Coming Apart"

Writes Curtis Yarvin in "The Clear Pill:" all societies have three layers. So it turns out that almost everybody from George Orwell to me has a Three Peoples theory. Let's make a table of the correspondences.

Author	Top	Middle	Bottom
George Orwell	Inner Party	Outer Party	Proles
Karl Marx	Bourgeoisie	Communists	Proletarians
Auguste Comte	Positive	Metaphysical	Theological
New Left	Activists	Racists, etc.	Victims
Charles Murray	Belmont	??	Fishtown
Curtis Yarvin	Gentry	Commoners	Clients
J.R.R. Tolkien	Elves	Hobbits	Dwarves
Joel Kotkin	Clerisy	Yeomanry	Serfs
Z-Man, Z-man	Cloud People	Dirt People	[lower classes]
Dennis Price	Cloud People	Dirt People	[dependents]
David Goodhart	Anywheres	Somewheres	[Inbetweeners]
John Derbyshire	Ice People	??	Sun People
Vikings	Earls	Peasants	Thralls (slaves)
Christopher Chantrill	Creatives	Responsibles	Subordinates
Christopher Chantrill	Ruling Class	Middle Class	Little Darlings

Some people only have two layers in their system, and they are wrong!

But let us think a little about Charles Murray and his binary of Belmont, a suburb of Boston where Mitt Romney used to live, and Fishtown, the working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia along the Delaware River.

In his Wall Street Journal précis of his Coming Apart he notes how the Belmont folks are doing fine, with great careers and merger marriages; the middle not so good, and then the Fishtown folks where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Note that the libertarian Murray doesn't really give the middle a name. But we now know who they are. They are the Trump people, left out of the equation.

Interesting, isn't it, that Charles Murray was just presenting what he regarded as a problem, that the top and the bottom of white America were drifting apart, and while things were great for the top they weren't so great for the bottom. And then Donald Trump solved the problem, by assembling a new middle that is sorta left out of the Belmont-Fishtown binary, and is now gonna fight to Make America Great Again. What a concept!

And now Boris Johnson has done the same thing in Britland.

Hey! Wasn't the left supposed to be all about advocating for the downtrodden? What happened there, lefties?

Actually, when you think about it, Donny and Boris have solved the political problem for the next 30 years. Are they geniuses or just cunning rascals that saw their opportunity and they took it? Never mind.

Truth is, we have needed this for a long time, because the Big Game of the 20th Century was the game of the Inner Party bribing the Proles with the money they taxed on the Outer Party. That worked a charm when the Outer Party wasn't too large. But now that we have progressed to Yarvin's world where the old Inner Party has expanded into a gentry class polluting the Proles, now their multicultural clients, with the idea that the Outer Party, now commoners, are the enemy. Well, one fine day some damn politician was going to figure out that there are a lot of votes in those deplorable commoners, and that he could rally the commoners against the gentry.

See, in Orwell's 1984 the Inner Party was less that 2 percent of the population and the Proles were about 85 percent. So the Outer Party was about 13 percent of population. But now, according to Charles Murray, the gentry in Belmont is about 20 percent of the population, and the Fishtown population is about 35 percent. So there's a much bigger middle. And then there are class traitors like me that believe that the Belmont guys are cruel and unjust and so vote with the Outer Party become commoners.

So now you got a rough balance of power.

And wot I say is: surely some of the Little Darlings of the ruling class are about ready to flip the bird at their gentry officers, desert the woke colors and become commoners.

And it serves the gentry right!

Curtis Yarvin's Clear Pill: How To Keep the Woke Gentry Onside

What is going on with the whole progressive project? That is what Curtis Yarvin is doing in Part 2 of "The Clear Pill."

But what exactly is he saying in his 7,800 words of exegesis?

Simply, at the end, he says that he is explaining how "progressivism is a way for the ruling class to feel important by supporting the government." And don't they just, the gentry class support the government? Oh yeah.

Yarvin's purpose is to look under the hood of today's governance, and figure out how it is done, how you get all the gentry class, who might theoretically have a whole range of goals, singing from the same hymnal.

How do you get them to take their eye off the truth, and buy into an "aesthetic tilt" that sneaks in the agenda of the ruling class, and gets them all singing the same tune of power?

Obviously, he writes, you do it with anthems, "thymotic anthems," where thymos comes from the Greek with a meaning "somewhere between ambition, honor, and vanity." In other words, the job of the ruling class is to compose anthems for the gentry class that appeal to the natural ambition, honor, and vanity of gentry-type people. But... The gentry class is too educated to live a live in the shadow of such base motives. Right? Right!

The other way to rule is with political formulas, "pistoic formulas," where pistos comes from the Greek with a meaning somewhere "between loyalty, fidelity, and servility." The formula demonstrates an emotional bond of loyalty: "I pay my taxes because the money supports good works." Usually, that money supports me, of course, so what's not to like?

And of course, when we observe a loyalty bond out there that does not involve us, we see corruption. Obviously, the climate science of scientists funded by Exxon is tainted, because the Exxon-funded scientists are naturally going to study things that do not hurt Exxon's interest. Obviously.

But whatabout climate scientists funded by NOAA? Huh? They will be saying that they do climate science because it helps save the planet, a political formula that proves their loyalty to the federal government and the climate establishment.

Thus:

Here we see just how blissful the union of thymos and pistos can be. Ambition and loyalty may contrast; they do not conflict; the contrary—they fit together like burger and bun. Most anthems serve power; most formulas imply status. 

An anthem is a way to feel important. A formula is a way to support the government. Therefore, a formulaic anthem is a way to feel important by supporting the government.

Both anthems and formulas are ways to tilt reality and make people feel good about supporting the tilted power reality of the ruling class, especially our beloved gentry class of progressive liberals.

And so we wise and learned deplorables outside the Capitol of Panem can understand how the pompous idiots cavorting in the Capitol are just completely hoodwinked by the anthems and formulas of the ruling class into being proud and loyal foot-soldiers in the ruling class's power project.

What does untilted reality look like, the kind that we, that have taken the Clear Pill, experience?

Unaffected thought will be found wherever no valid thought is anthem or formula. The institution of mathematics can be politicized. The math itself cannot.

The key is that no power is involved. Once power enters in we get titled reality and we start to get anthems and formulas to make us feel good about bowing to power and going with its power project.

Of course, no power project lasts forever. There is a long period cycle that seems to rule western civ. and refreshes the fountain of power.

• The intellectual command economy rules. Public opinion is directed by a dogmatic bureaucracy, rife with pervasive error, systematically incapable of changing its mind.

• An unofficial free market for truth evolves. This market cannot be poisoned by power, because it has no power. It develops a higher-quality product than the official narrative.

• A new epistemic elite arises. The old intellectual bureaucracy, smart enough to sense its own inferiority, hands power to the new truth market. A new golden age begins.

• Dogmatic bureaucracy returns. Slowly and inevitably poisoned by power, the once-vibrant civil society slowly ossifies into a dogmatic bureaucracy, evolving more and more pretty lies until pervasive error is again the norm. 

Oh well.

This has been a monstrously shortened and truncated explanation of Yarvin's notion, which I barely understand. If you want to ponder the deep richness of what he is saying, go read the original, "A Theory of Pervasive Error." Chances are you will end up just as confused as I am.

Curtis Yarvin's Clear Pill: The Uses of the "Political Formula"

Back in the day, smart Jewish kid and software guy Curtis Yarvin made something of a name for himself in a years-long blog odyssey as Mencius Moldbug.

What was Moldbug all about? Just trying to upend the conventional political wisdom. Nothing much.

Who is Yarvin? Let La Wik (as he called it in his Moldbug years) tell the story.

[Yarvin] is an American far-right political theorist, blogger, and computer scientist. He is known, along with fellow "neo-reactionary" thinker Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-right.

Yeah! "Far-right!" Scary!

Yarvin proved his importance by getting canceled at a 2015 StrangeLoop software conference. In 2016, his invitation to the conference "resulted in the withdrawal of five speakers, two subconferences, and several sponsors." Note the use of the passive tense.

But now he is appearing on American Mind in a five part series called "The Clear Pill." I'm going to blog about it because that's the best way for me to understand what Yarvin is trying to say.

Yarvin starts by saying that the two turn-of-the-20th-century Italian political scientists Mosca and Pareto, "taught that all states are ruled by elites who subdue their subjects with illusions."

Mosca called these illusions “political formulas.” A political formula is any narrative element which makes [the subjects] prefer actions that objectively stabilize the regime. 

But you are above all that, right? You can see through all the formulas and know the real reality.

Actually not. We all live in a fake reality dome, and we don't know what reality is. All we can do is subject all political formulas to this analysis:

Here is one way to check out any idea you don’t want to believe: assume it’s true, then build a new reality around that axiom. Once you fail, you get to say: I can’t see how this could be true.

That's the Clear Pill. If you can't find a problem with a political formula, then OK. Go with it, for the time being.

But the ideal is to be neutral, to live outside all the narratives, In the perfect case:

You will not be of any use or any harm to any particular cause. You will feel neither political anger, nor political fear. You will neither cause trouble, nor get in trouble. This vacation from politics need not last the rest of your life. But it can.

Now, Yarvin says, our present regime is not like the Hitler/Stalin/Mao regime, "with one person or a small team unilaterally directing the entire state."

Let's call the Hitler-type regime a "one-story state. Everyone has to believe one narrative—one official history of the present." Or else.

But we live in a two-story state. It's really cunning.

When people hear one story, they tend to ask: is this true? When they hear two stories, they tend to ask: which one of these is true? Isn’t this a neat trick? Maybe our whole world is built on it. Any point on which both poles concur is shared story: “uncontroversial, bipartisan consensus.”

Now maybe both stories are rubbish. Maybe the shared story in the middle is rubbish too. But because there is agreement on some things we humans are inclined to believe the shared story as true. "Stagecraft,"says Yarvin. And the benefit is that a two-story state can maintain itself with a lot less repression than the one-story state.

So how does power operate in our two-story state? According to Yarvin it has a "civic core" and a "political core." Nominally the political core is in charge, as in the voters electing the government. But actually the civic core in in control because it runs the story-making machine.

Public opinion does not direct the civic core; the civic core guides public opinion.

And the civic core is "the permanent civil service" plus "the press, academia, philanthropy, and so on."

If you weren't sure about that before you are now, what with the civic core, from the "deep state" to the MSM to lefty academia doing a 24-7 effort to bounce the peoples' choice, Donald Trump, from office.

And the civic core seems to manage to coordinate itself and its story without any actual Mr. Big in charge. How do they do it?

How does the political core work? Yarvin proposes a three people world, as I do. He calls the three classes: gentry, commoners, and clients.

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

Usually the gentry rules using the clients as its clients. "The natural conflict pits commoners against gentry plus clients." This is what I say, that the People of the Creative Self (gentry) combine with the People of the Subordinate Self (clients) against the People of the Responsible Self (commoners).

In a society like ours, the commoners are the majority, so it takes a fair bit of talent  -- and "Jedi mind tricks." -- to keep the commoners divided so the gentry can rule.  The trick is to keep the gentry united.

Everything can probably stay copacetic for the ruling gentry unless an outside "third story" comes along.

The most dangerous outside stories (a) are completely true, (b) aim at rogue gentry, and (c) exalt commoners and/or disparage clients. Any such narrative might be the political formula of the next regime. 

Now you see what President Trump is doing in his political rallies: he is "exalting commoners." Obviously chaps like me and Yarvin are interested in outside stories that would do exactly that. Because? Maybe because the gentry seems to be dissing us, people that actually read a book and write about it. And we don't like being dissed any more than black gangbangers in the 'hood.