Double Revolution - Table of Contents

The Double Revolution: in Physics and the Economy

1. Communism Week: The Real Revolution of the Modern Age
   Two revolutions, in physics and the economy
   
   
2. The Counterrevolutions of the Modern Age
   Communism-socialism and environmentalism for a start
   
   
3. The Two Heads of the Forces of Lefty Reaction
   "Activism" and neo-feudalism, for a start
   
   
4. The Two Heads of Reaction: How Do We Deal With Them
   Against neo-tribalism of identity politics the nation state; against neo-feudalism the corporation
   
   
5. The Great Reaction Also Includes Neo-Sacrifice
   Neo-sacrifice is what totalitarianism is all about

The Great Reaction Also Includes Neo-sacrifice

I've been quietly minding my business developing my ideas of the modern Double Revolution, in physics and in the market economy, and the Great Reaction, in the left's return to the old world, pre-revolution, in reaction to the unbearable force of the Double Revolution.

But this morning I happened on a piece by David Gornoski, who reports on his YouTube interview with Jordan B. Peterson. Gornoski raises the issue of sacrifice, specifically the Christian abolition of sacrifice, the culmination of a process that begins in the Old Testament with the substitution of a ram in the place of Isaac in a sacrifice that Abraham makes to God.

In other words, it used to be that humans would sacrifice their most precious possession, the son or the livestock, in order to propitiate the gods. But now God sacrifices his own Son, so we don't have to.

The concept of innocent sacrifice is developed by René Girard in his concept of the scapegoat. The idea is that human communities avoid the descent into the chaos of the war of all against all by picking out an innocent scapegoat, and in sacrificing that innocent scapegoat they end the war of all against all by collectively turning their rage against the scapegoat.

It is this that Christianity attempts to end, but only tentatively, as we can see in the eruptions of witch-hunts down the ages. It is this that the left has returned to in its scapegoating first of the bourgeoisie in which the rage of of working class is to be resolved, and in the demonization of racists, sexists, and homophobes to resolve the rage of the traditionally marginalized.

Of course I have been writing about this for years, as in "The Left Returns to Sacrifice" back in 2004. I said:

The lefty twentieth century exhibited a return not just to real sacrifice but human sacrifice, the kind that went out when God told Abraham to sacrifice that ram instead of his first-born son.  Wherever left-wing regimes held sway, whether in a socialism-in-one-country version or in a national-socialist-German-worker version, millions of humans were sacrificed to atone for the sins of the world in the most gruesome manner imaginable.

Then, in March of 2016 I wrote that "The White Working Class is the Designated Scapegoat of the Ruling Elites." Yeah, and that was way before Hillary Clinton had spoken about "deplorables." Here is what I said:

Let us turn to René Girard and his Violence and the Sacred. On his theory humans have learned to end escalating violence between factions by sacrificing a victim, a scapegoat. All of the hate and the rage of a divided community is diverted from hating each other and onto the newly selected victim. Somehow, at the civil rights revolution of the Sixties, the white working class got selected as sacrificial victim. Thus the necessity of Archie Bunker, racist, sexist, and bigot, that Norman Lear wanted to teach us all to hate.

Actually, now I think of it, the scapegoating by the left is a tactic to avoid internal violence between factions on the left and directing all their rage on an external scapegoat: the white working class, the patriarchy, racists, sexists, homophobes.

Here's a Google Ngram chart to make the point.

Notice that all these lefty insults took off after the civil rights revolution? Hey kids! Surely 75 percent of the problem of racism and sexism would have been solved by the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. And yet there was a mere ripple of "racism" before 1965, and almost nothing about "sexism" and the "patriarchy."

How could this be? Well, I don't know. But it all makes sense if you think of the left as a Great Reaction, and a reactionary return to scapegoating and witch-hunts in a movement of neo-sacrifice.

So, as of right now, we can say that the left represents a Great Reaction characterized by the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, and the neo-sacrifice of totalitarianism.

Because that is what the sacrifice of the scapegoat is all about, it is the clarification of all social and tribal rivalries into the fascist dictum of "all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." To make that work, to totalize everything into the state, you have to unite the mob against a sacrificial scapegoat.

Notice how Donald Trump is completely against the Great Reaction. Is he a feminist? No. He is for women, he is for men, he is for everyone. Is he a racist? No, he is for the American nation state, to make America Great Again. And he is removing the stake from the heart of the white working class.

It is obvious, in retrospect, to realize that the astonishing Double Revolution of our era, in physics and in the Great Enrichment, should have provoked a Great Reaction in the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, and the neo-sacrifice of totalitarianism.

The point is that the exchange economy removes the need for bloodthirsty tribalism, because the means of existence no longer depend of the food-growing land that must be protected against all odds, because the need for a great lord to shelter us from the Vikings no longer applies, because the society that interacts through the exchange economy no longer needs to vent its rage on designated scapegoats.

But it takes a while for everyone to learn the new ways and get with the program.

And that is why I propose my Perfect Plan for the ruling class. First, it should gently teach the workers and peasants how to wive and thrive in the market economy and learn its ways. Second, it should treat the ordinary middle class with compassion and understanding rather than contempt and marginalization.

The Two Reactions: How Do We Deal With Them?

In recent weeks I have been developing the idea of the Two Reactions against the modern world, and that is the way to understand the Left. It is the most natural thing in the world that the staggering social and economic changes of the last 200 years has provoked a movement of reaction against the modern phenomenon of wage labor and market capitalism. What I call the Double Revolution is utterly strange and disruptive to the old ways of the world.

So the left has raised the banner of identity politics, a neo-tribalism that reenacts the culture of the tribe that is mobilized forever against the danger of the neighboring tribe that wants "our" land. Naturally, there is in every one of us still the spirit of the hunter-gatherers and their existential need for tribal unity.

And the left has raised the banner of the patron/client relation, symbolized for us by powerful lord and its grateful retainers, a neo-feudalism that reenacts the culture of the agricultural age in which farmers needed military protection from raiders and pirates that might descend on them and steal their grain stores, for every agricultural village must store grain for the next year from the harvest until the next crop is harvested and is therefore always vulnerable to plunderers.

Our lefty friends imagine that their fight against "fascism" is proof enough of their virtue, yet they seem to be utterly blind and deaf to the truth that their identity politics, their encouragement for people to identify themselves by race or gender rather than by citizenship, is pure racism and sexism, the very thing they rail against.

Our lefty friends imagine that their welfare state is the acme of compassion and justice, yet are blind and deaf to the creaking inefficiency and injustice of a system that pays billions out to well-to-do retired folks like me while taxing young and less well-to-do working people to pay for our benefits. Of course they do: they are the guys that get to occupy the commanding heights of the welfare state in comfortable sinecures and pensions that issue from their hard-gained credentials and connections.

There is a spirit in conservatism that longs to roll up tribalism into a global community that gets beyond race or gender or class identity, but I do not think it is practical to expect humans to do that. We humans are tribal; the question is how to channel our tribalism into beneficial channels that don't set us against each other within our current political boundaries.

There is a spirit in conservatism that longs to roll up the welfare state and replace it with a non-governmental system of private charity and mutual-aid societies in which people are responsible for their own social insurance. But I do not think that it is practical to assume that everyone can do that. There is clearly a big part of each human that wants to snuggle up to a powerful lord and have him take care of making us safe.

So my mind proceeds to wonder how we can accommodate our instinctive tribalism but without the bloodthirsty naming and shaming that sometimes escalates into witch hunts and Reigns of Terror. And I wonder how we can accommodate people that do not want to try the rigors of the marketplace but want to live a life of safety.

And I come to this from my recent reading of Jungian psychology that emphasizes the continuing role of the unconscious and its vast underworld of instinctive "archetypes" or scripts for living. Obviously we cannot consign the unconscious to the dust bin of history. It is a vital part of us; indeed recent science says that the brain seems to make decisions about 1.5 seconds before the decision appears in our conscious mind. So what is that all about? Does it mean that our glorious consciousness and rationalism is all a mirage and a delusion?

But then it occurred to me that we have already accommodated the tribal and the feudal impulses in our modern world. After all, we are humans, we are not as dumb as we seem.

In the stead of tribalism we have invented the nation state. Instead of the actual ties of the blood kindred we have the fantasy of a nation united by its language, its culture, its glorious history, and the memory of the Fallen, those who died to Make Us Safe. How cool is that? There are a lot of people that sneer at the nation state. They should cool their jets; it is nothing less that amazing that we could have transformed the culture of the actual tribe into a myth of the imaginary tribe made up out of whole cloth by clever thinkers and propagandists. And that is the problem of the globalists; they have not thought through how to create a transnational demos to which ordinary people can pledge allegiance. Their transnational experiments cannot succeed unless they create a demos for their transnational creations. I like to joke that we humans will not create a global political community until we have to fight a war against the Martians or the Trisolarians from Alpha Centauri.

What we need to work on is how to keep tribalism inside the guardrails. The problem right now is that our global elite has discouraged a nation-level identity politics on the grounds that we must never allow fascism to rear its ugly head. But its strategy to retain its power has encouraged and normalize sub-national identity politics with appeals to labor unions, Black Lives Matter, the Latino La Raza, women's liberation groups, and environmental groups. Hey, groups like that are natural and physical, but should not have special privileges, as unions did for a century. And when the ruling class encourages sub-national identity politics it is playing with fire.

In the stead of feudalism we have invented the corporation. Instead of the subordination to the local lord we have subordination to the corporate hierarchy, with its pretty safe employment prospects, its chance for advancement, and its basket of benefits and pensions. If you don't like the uncertainty of employment at will, you can get yourself into a nice safe corporation with an HR department and a code of conduct. In my view, it is not really safer to work for a corporation than to accept the rigors of employment at will, but it sure feels like it.

What we need to work on is how to keep the neo-feudal baronies from plundering the rest of society. It is clear that the industrial corporations of the 1950s in concert with industrial labor unions were allowed to raise prices and wages above the market level, and this was unjust. But then, in another proof of God's existence, the proud privileged steel and auto industries got soft and entitled, and got sucker-punched by emerging German and Japanese corporations in the 1970s. Then they ran out of money to pay their defined-benefit pensions. We could have avoided that if we had kept the corporations and labor unions honest and written beneficial legislation to prevent labor unions from forming a combination against trade and prevent corporations from getting carve-outs from politicians and regulators. Today we have the scandal of government employees earning way above the levels in the private sector and getting defined-benefit pensions that threaten to bankrupt states like California and Illinois. The truth is that people may run from the market and its prices, but they can't hide, not forever. Eventually everyone of us must surrender to the will of the market and its prices, and it is the job of a good ruling class to teach the people the truth of the emergent phenomenon we call the price system.

Is this possible? Can we contain the tribal and the feudal impulse within safe channels, with wise recognition of their profound humanness, and cunning strategies to keep them from plundering us all?

We should all hope so.

The Two Heads of the Forces of Lefty Reaction

A while back I introduced the idea of the Double Revolution of the modern era. In my view this is a revolution in physics, from the mechanical model of the Newtonian era to the uncertainty model of the quantum era, and a revolution in economics from the mechanical supervisory model of the feudal era to the emergent price-driven economy of the post-industrial revolution.

And I said that, inevitably, there arose a reactionary movement opposing the Double Revolution, what we call the left. I called out the communist-socialist reaction as the example of this.

But this morning I was re-reading Jonathan Haidt on the current political divisions, his "Age of Outrage" in which he worries about the outrage culture on campus, and I clarified my thinking.

The reaction against the economic part of the Double Revolution comes in two flavors. The first is what I call "activism," a faith in politics as a form of salvation. This reactionary movement is best seen as neo-tribalism, as it uses the unconscious drives of the tribe against the threat of the Other to motivate and to inspire. The second is the hierarchical practice of the administrative state, the rule by educated expert and administrative bureaucracy which has precipitated into the modern welfare state. I consider this part of the reactionary movement to be a neo-feudalism.

There is nothing scandalous, nothing monstrous about this movement of reaction. It is what you would expect to happen in response to the utterly transformative Double Revolution in its economic manifestation. This is confirmed by the developmental psychologists and their epigones like the New Age philosopher Ken Wilber. When people are frightened and disoriented by trials and setbacks while living the higher levels of consciousness they turn to the tried and true of the old, lower, levels of consciousness.  That is why Hitler was able to appeal to the German people, the most advanced country in the world but frightened by the post-World War I convulsions and failures, with a program of blood and soil.

Yes, of course the reactionary movement of "activism" appeals to tribalism. We are, as Jonathan Haidt writes, profoundly tribal.

We are exquisitely designed and adapted by evolution for life in small societies with intense, animistic religion and violent intergroup conflict over territory. We love tribal living so much that we invented sports, fraternities, street gangs, fan clubs, and tattoos. Tribalism is in our hearts and minds.

Anyone that wants to bring humans together in any enterprise or project is going to appeal to their tribalism, for good or ill. The problem with tribalism is that it is designed to raise consciousness for the inevitable conflict with the neighboring tribe, for death or glory, and this is very seldom required in the modern economy and society where the fundamental requirement is for people to submit to the notion that they are obtaining their livelihood by serving others, not fighting others. The fight, if there is one, is between different businesses to see which one will win in the fight to serve the consumer.

The problem is that over the last 150 years the left has marched through the institutions and taught every Good Little Boy and Good Little Girl that "activism" is the highest way of life, so even though almost every Good Little Boy and Good Little Girl is really not cut out to be a Social Justice Warrior, everyone of them has a yearning to "get into activism."

I wrote a week or so ago in "Militarism vs. Activism: Ruling Class Culture Then and Now" that I thought that "activism" was just as harmful a culture as the "militarism" culture that led the leaders of 1914 into World War I. Too many people now are instinctive "activists" and don't really understand the awful consequences, just as too many people in 1914 were instinctive "militarists" and really did not understand the consequences.

Somehow, some way, some day we are going to have to lance the boil of modern "activism."

The other reactionary movement is the neo-feudalism of the welfare state and the administrative state. It is telling that in The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels prophesied that capitalism would rehearse the subjection of peasant to lord with the subjection of proletarian to bourgeois capitalist. Only that is not what happened, because subordinate peasants and serfs were not particularly useful to the capitalists. They found that they needed responsible, resourceful employees not dumb-as-dirt peasants and slaves.

I am trying to think of a single word to describe the neo-feudalism movement, but it hasn't come yet. Serfism, subordinism, administratism, expertism, manorialism, patronism? I can't figure it out yet, but I will.

While the "activism" culture organizes humans into a permanent war of all against all, just like the old "militarism" of the dynastic monarchs and the tribalism of the hunter-gatherers, the neo-feudalism puts people into a permanent subjection to an administrative system that has significant powers over their lives but is usually unable to adjust to changing conditions. In other words, it promises security and safety but in fact cannot deliver them, because security and safety can only be delivered by reacting to dangers and threats, and the bureaucratic welfare state cannot do that, not until it is too late.

It is remarkable, but the model for how things ought to be in society are present daily in the life of the human body. Some of the larger, cruder things are directed by the brain and the central nervous system, but the moment-to-moment, day-to-day life of the body is conducted cell by cell in exquisite instinctive individual responses by each individual cell to the overall needs of the body according to chemical codes and operations that we barely understand.

That is what the modern economy and society asks of us: to respond to the prompts of prices of goods and the needs of other people that we can serve, each of us individually and without the clunking fist of some political or economic overlord telling us what to do and when, or the rage of tribalism inspiring us to fight to the last man against the hated Other.

The Counter Revolutions of the Modern Age

Every revolution inspires its counter-revolution. The great revolution of our age is the Double Revolution in physics and in economy. The counter-revolution is the great movement of the left.

I first developed my notion of the Double Revolution in my "Communism Week: The Real Revolution of the Modern Age." My idea is that through two revolutions of ideas we moderns have radically changed our fundamental understandings of reality, and both revolutions have unmoored us from old certainties more than any previous revolutions because their descriptions of reality cannot be made in terms of everyday experience, of the things that we see and hear and touch with our five senses.

This fact is most obvious in the case of the physics revolution. During the 19th century there was a continuing battle over two conflicting theories of the nature of light: the corpuscular theory and the wave theory. Was light a stream of particles, or an emanation of waves? Particles and waves are both everyday experiences for humans. We understand that light bounces off a mirror like a billiard ball off a cushion and we understand the waves in the ocean, by direct experience. But which was it?

The answer developed during the relativity and quantum mechanics revolution was: neither. Or both. The fact is that, whatever is going on at the level of the atom, it is nothing like what we experience in our everyday experience of everyday life. We have mathematical theories to predict behavior and we have a sub-atomic "zoo" of metaphors and stories to talk about what is going on. An example of the mystery of the sub atomic world is the two slit experiment. If you shine white light through a slit it shines as a white slit when it hits a screen. If you shine a light through two close slits you get a wave pattern. But if you shine single quanta of light, one by one through one of two slits you still get a wave pattern. What does it mean? It means that we cannot experience the basic elements of reality as direct correspondences of human-scale phenomena.

But the same thing is true with the economics revolution, the conversion of economic life from face-to-face relations to the abstract coordination of the price system. This fact is illustrated by the story of market value. The classical economists first differentiated between use value, the value of a useful object like food, and exchange value, the value of e.g., "useless" but precious metals like gold. But in fact a price is a price, it reflects the accumulation of individual acts of buying and selling of perhaps millions of consumers and producers. An individual human can grasp the notion of use value: obviously useful things have value; and we can understand the notion of exchange value: grain prices go up and down with the weather. But the truth is that a price is a price; the only thing that is concrete is actual market transactions and their prices.

It is not surprising that this radical and overwhelming Double Revolution has spawned counter-revolutions. The most obvious one is the Communist-socialist counter-revolution. While advertising itself as the acme of progress it is in fact a nostalgic attempt to return to the good old days.

In its communist version the counter-revolution idealizes the supposed unity and equality of the village community. In its welfare-state version it re-enacts the lord-and-serf relation of feudalism. Both reactions advertise that Communism or welfare-state subjection is safer than the uncertainty of life under the market. But both of these assertions are a lie. In the village community, you better get with the program of the male village elders or the community of women or you are out of luck. In the feudal subjection you are only safe while you are useful to your lord, either producing revenue for him with your farming, or fighting and dying for him in his quarrels with the neighboring lords. If you live in a communist state, then your welfare depends on the decisions of men whose talent is for politics rather than production, and the record is that politicians are lousy at creating prosperity. If you live as a subordinate worker or beneficiary in the welfare state then your prosperity hangs on the continued power of your patron. If you work for the government you depend on your program continuing; if you work for a corporation you depend on the corporation continuing to expand and prosper.

Really, the only thing to do is to expose yourself to the market and obey its signals. As a worker you will be forced to update and improve your skills as the labor market changes. As a business you will be forced to respond to the changes in the market for your product. That way you won't wake up one day and find out that your secure job or secure government benefit isn't secure after all, because you never had a chance to go to sleep on the job.

The truth is that politicians do not care about you; they only care about your vote. Corporate CEOs don't care about you; they only care about the bottom line. The only person that cares about you is you.

Another reactionary counter-revolution is the environmental movement, which yearns really for a world before the Newtonian mechanical age and a return to a rural idyll before the invention of heat engines and power-assisted everything. Of course, life was always great for well-born scions, then as now. Well, it is great until the tumbrels start to roll.

The question is, how long are these counter-revolutions going to continue, and what will be the net effect of them a century from now?

Communism Week: The Real Revolution of the Modern Age

Our age has been a great age of unimaginable novelty and "progress." But it has also been a great age of nostalgia and reaction, the eternal yearning for a lost Garden of Eden. It has seen cultural movements longing for the lost community of the village in socialism, and other movements returning to the old community bonds of blood and land in fascism. Meanwhile most of the rest of us have found refuge in the materialist, mechanical model of the world that rose to majesty in the last millennium and seemed to predict the movement of the heavens: the science of Galileo and Newton.

But even the mechanical world of substance and absolute space and time has fallen by the wayside, and this has precipitated a revolution in thought and deed beyond imagining. For we have now learned that the micro world of the "atom" and the macro world of the "universe" cannot be understood in terms of the familiar world of day-to-day life and the mechanical world of Newton, of ballistics and action and reaction.

Up until yesterday you could understand the flight of a cannon ball or the operation of a heat engine or the forces in a building structure from notions very near to daily life. Even the motions of the planets could be understood in these terms. But in the modern science of quantum mechanics, that undergirds everything from smartphones to laser lighting to electricity, the old concepts of daily life no longer apply. Energy is neither particle nor wave, yet its operations must be understood as a bit of both. The nearer you get to an elementary state the less you can consider things as anything other than a state function of probabilities. This would be intolerable but for the fact that quantum mechanics and its probabilities and uncertainties works, and not only works, but works miracles.

The impossible wonders of the quantum world are happily handled for us by intermediaries, the scientists, technologists, and businessmen that know how to unlock its wonders. They have provided us with interfaces, the light switch and the touch screen, that enable us to use these wondrous gadgets by actions common in daily life: the flip of the switch, the dab of the finger. And so we use the unfathomable world of the quantum state in daily life, even though the quantum world is indescribable and the kid transmitting her latest trivial act to her friends on Instagram knows nothing of its mysteries.

But there is another world that is just as unfathomable and indescribable. It is the world of the modern  economy, and the market economy is just as mysterious and indescribable as the world of the quantum. And yet the modern economy has poured riches unimaginable upon us, in the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years that, in the United States has increased personal income from $4 per person per day to $140 per person per day, all in "real" dollars. You could look it up.

We are all terrified by the implacable power of the market that has given us so much, and so we have deputized political leaders and their henchmen to pummel the market into submission, or at least something less frightening. Needless to say, they have done it very badly, and no wonder. Politics is division and distrust, yet the modern economy requires us all to engage in its global trust network, trusting anyone that can be trusted. Government is force, yet the modern economy requires us to be sensitive to the slightest economic breeze and trim our sails to its vagaries. System and hierarchy are domination, yet the market yields up its power to anyone that can innovate and serve the consumer.

We must accept the obvious. The tools and the culture of politics do not work in the modern market age. The more force, the more division, the more system, the more you get North Korea, or the Soviet Union, or Castro's Cuba, or the wreck of Venezuela. The modern economy and modern society must work on the foundation of what we might call the "market state function," expressed in its prices, and the willing surrender of everyone to its signals. But how do we neutralize the terror of the market, the helplessness we all feel as individual humans before the searing power of the market, and steer people away from the natural instinct to create a personal refuge from the terrors of the market.

Maybe the way to make the market work for all of us right in front of our eyes, in the smartphone and its applications. The cumbersome world of the taxicab is transformed when you create an application, per Uber and Lyft, that connect buyer and seller, resolve the higgling of the market into a simple offer of a price, and regulate all market participants through the operation of the 5-star rating system that enforces the market's culture of trust. The innovation of AirBnB allows individual householders to enter into the hospitality market with the same market reach as any global hotel chain.

Each of these applications includes three crucial features: First is the universal reach, instantly, to anyone with a smartphone and the app. Second is the payment method, integrated into the app, so that payment, and the whole complicated problem of billing and accounts receivable is not an issue. Third is the rating system that leans very hard on everyone to be trustworthy.

I suspect that, where the smartphone "app" is concerned, you ain't seen nothing yet. Its power lies in the way that it reduces the frightening complexity and terror of the marketplace to operations of daily life that anyone can understand and easily accept, the flip of the switch, and the dab of the finger, the shaking of hands.

The role of politics and government is to protect us from existential perils, and one of the existential perils is the terror of the all-powerful marketplace. Unfortunately, as vast human experiments have proved, from plantation slavery to collective agriculture to nationalized industry, politics cannot protect us from the existential peril of the marketplace; it only makes things worse. The most obvious example of this truth is the real live political and economic experiment of the last 65 years in Korea. From a land devastated by civil war we have today a socialist North Korea with a per-capita GDP of about $600 per year, and capitalist South Korea with a per-capita GDP of $27,500 per year. Case closed.

But we can implement interfaces with the marketplace to make it less terrifying. Indeed, we already have. So it only remains for each of us to lead, follow, or get out of the way of this beneficial enrichment, and abandon the false gods of politics as the way to bend the arc of history towards justice.

Because we can tame the terrors of the marketplace, not by the crush of the clunking fist or the divisive tricks of the politician, but by softening the terrors of unfathomable marketplace into the familiar actions of daily life that are programmed into us by human life down the ages.

That is the story of our time: the Double Revolution, in science and society, that is transforming our lives.

The challenge of our time is this: to humanize the terror of the universe and the market into the familiar acts and operations of daily life. And yield up astonishing cooperation and prosperity for every human that believes and practices its protocols.

But how do we do this? I'm glad you asked.

Next up: My Perfect Plan to solve all our problems.