Reviewing and Extending Downstreamism

 Andrew Breitbart famously said that "politics is downstream from culture." But did you know that SciFi author  John C. Wright has said that "In the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion."

But is there something beyond religion? I like to misquote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and talk about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

In other words, if you really believe in the importance of downstreamism, then you will agree that

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

And if you don't agree with that obvious truth, there is no hope for you!

Now, I have been reading a book that reviews the whole of philosophy, religion, science, and spirituality in the last 200 years written by a Brit J.J. Clarke, The Self-creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview. It is telling us all about the post-materialist, post-mechanical worldview that issues from what I call the "German Turn" that begins with Kant. Clarke is talking about a worldview that he calls "emergentism,"

a radical strain of thinking which is advancing in fields such as evolution, complexity, chaos, and self-organising systems[.]

In other words, the way the world works is that some nobody -- it could be a nobody plant -- tries something new, and, wonder of wonders, it works. And that successful change changes the world. Not because it was forced on the world, but because it worked, and people copied the new idea. Because it worked.

So the way the world works is creativity, people creating new things, animals creating new things, plants creating new things, from the bottom up, not from the top down.

So, things just evolve.

But Clarke is an academic, so when he gets to religion and spirituality, he thinks that God is dead so let's reinvent spirituality as a creative enterprise. The old religious culture was based on an eternalist presumption, it

locates the source of values and meaning in an eternal reality beyond nature, beyond the world as we experience it through our sense.

The new worldview is what Clarke calls a naturalist presumption, it is

a way of thinking about the world in general which focuses its outlook, its values, its meaning on the natural world of which we humans are an integral part.

This includes both what we experience in the physical and living world and also the "world of inner sense," the mental world, and also culture and history.

But what Clarke tells us is that the old "eternalist presumption" is done, finished, because we educated advanced humans know that the old world of God and Sin and the promise of eternal life in Heaven has been replaced by the new world of emergentism and the naturalist presumption.

That is where I part ways with the noble professor.

Because not everyone lives in the world of the creative educated philosophy professor for whom God has died. And clearly, for Clarke, there is no reason to respect or make a cultural space for the old people that still live with the worldview of the eternalist perspective.

I say that for the ordinary middle class person the old eternalist presumption still works pretty well. You believe in God; you believe that if you live your life by the rules then you will go to Heaven. So, you live a life of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

But for the educated elite this old worldview is a superstition and verges on bigotry.

Actually, I believe, further, that for the lower class, a still earlier worldview applies. For the lower class there is no happy land of Heaven if you do the right thing. In the lower class, power is everything, and what you need to do is get with a powerful person, and shelter in his powerful shadow. The old Nordic and pagan and Greek and Roman gods seem to apply. The newer Christian God of sweetness and light seems to be a fantasy to the lower class person.

Now I say, starting at 3:00 am today, that for all levels of society, the following applies, using the downstream hierarchy.

Politics answers the question: who is my enemy?

Culture answer the question: who are we the people?

Religion answers the question: who is God?

The meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" answers the question: What's it all about, Alfie? 

Who is my enemy? For the serf it's the cruel master; for the Commoner it's the tribe or nation next door; for the educated creative it's the dumb white middle-class racist-sexist-homophobes whose religion is pure bigotry.

Who are we the people? For the serf it is the people enslaved and oppressed like me; for the Commoner it is the nation; for the educated creative it is the global community of educated and evolved people.

Who is God? For the serf God is the cruel master; for the Commoner it is the God who made Heaven and Earth and declared that it was good; for the educated creative the god is the creative thinker, artist, activist.

What's it all about? For the serf it is just to stay alive; for the Commoner it is to live a virtuous life and get to Heaven; for the educated creative it is to create something that changes the world.

To be continued.

It's Not Just a Political Malaise

Yes, everyone knows that politics in the US is broken. And the other guys are to blame.

But I believe in Downstreamism, from the famous Breitbart dictum that politics is downstream from culture.

I believe more than that. I believe that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

I go further than that. I agree with Kant that we cannot know "things-in-themselves," but only appearances. We spend our lives trying to figure out what the "things-in-themselves" are. Today the question is: are they atoms, aub-atomic particles, waves, probabilities, multiverses?

The fact is that all our fabuloso math and science and philosophy and religion don't tell us. So we make it up.

Thus every theory about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" -- the "things-in-themselves" -- is really a hot mess. It gets some things right and a bunch of other things wrong.

And every institutionalization of some theory of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is also a hot mess. As in churches, sects, political parties, ruling classes, corporations, families, marriages.

The eternal problem is this: when something is going wrong, how do you fix it?

When your marriage is going wrong, when your kid is going wrong, when your career is going wrong, when your business is going wrong, what do you do about it?

And when you get to governments, political parties, religions, the problem is even bigger because big-time institutions are designed to resist change. In fact, change to governments, political parties and religions usually involves war and the associated butcher's bill.

I would say that the current political crisis in the US -- and elsewhere in the western world -- is about the fact that the political ideology of the last 200  years has reached its sell-by date. I would say that problem is that there is a profound disconnect with the faith of the educated ruling class, that its knowledge and wisdom and power are the right combination to rule modern human society, and the reality that all government is a war against some enemy and the distribution of spoils among the supporters. And that war and spoils is always a net negative.

I would say that the current social crisis in the United States -- that involves among other things the white working class "dying of despair" and heightened deaths by drug overdose -- is a consequence of the culture of our ruling class. Charles Murray in his Coming Apart shows how, for white America, things are pretty good for the intellectual elite, but not so good for the middle middle. And at the bottom the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Ron Unz has a sprawling article about all this at his web site, starting with the fact that the death rate for US whites age 45-54 has gone up in the last 20 years while the death rate for US Hispanics aged 45-54 has gone down. Maybe the sharply increased death rate from "poisonings" has something to do with this.

The fact is that our educated ruling class has imposed its religion and culture on the rest of America and it is Making Things Worse. I think that the welfare state is a reason for this; the size of government and government regulation as well; the culture of women's liberation -- women entering careers and politics and sexual license just like men -- that assumes that women want to live in the public square is a wrong turn; the attack on middle-class religion is a brutal Reign of Terror.

And I believe that the ruling class's religious quest to transform the energy economy and the fight "systemic racism" are galloping disasters that will rapidly Make Things Worse.

I also believe that the educated ruling class believes in a false religion, that educated people are called by history to bend the arc of history towards justice, and everybody else should do what they are told. Problem is, I believe, that when you use government to bend the arc of history towards justice what you get is injustice. Always and everywhere, don't you think Stalin and Mao?

Yes, but what do we do about it?

Well, it starts with a new understanding of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for our educated gentry, the present ruling class.

The idea is quite simple. The educated gentry must stop thinking of themselves as cultural and political metropolitans called to rule and correct the world for its sins. Instead they must think of themselves as humble sacrificial heroes, that sacrifice their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on the border between Order and Chaos. Do you see the difference? It means that the magnificent Names that strut across the political and cultural stage will be thought of as second-rate poseurs. The true heroes will be people that struggle all their lives trying the make the world around them a bit better, knowing that most of the time their efforts may well be mistaken, probably won't make any difference, and nobody will ever know about them.

We can't have mega governments creating a loot and plunder operation out of 30 to 40 percent of the economy. We can't have lifer unionized women teachers teaching our children. We can't have health care cramped into government-directed corporate-driven systems like the present. We can't have government welfare administrators doling out loot to the poor and smashing the family to smithereens.

But it starts with the devaluing of politics down to a dull roar. Because there is no politics without an enemy; and there is no peace unless politics and its war on enemies is downgraded into a low-status activity that no well-born person would dream of descending to. And that no well-born person would truckle to any politician.

Somehow, we have to turn politics into a form of sports. But I don't know how to do it, because I'm not a genius.

Is Forgiveness in Politics Ever Possible?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But when will it ever end?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Meaning of Life, Religion, Culture and Politics Connect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Got it?

Implementing a National Liberation from Lefty Colonialism

Over at American Greatness Stephen Balch comes up with a good idea. He says that we the people are presently suffering under a colonialist regime, and we need a national liberation project.

To be sure, the colonial analogy is far from perfect. Western colonies often gained from being colonized; for us, it’s a dead loss. But there are enough similarities to help us understand the strategies our elites are following, how they could be better resisted, and why, as with most colonialists of the past, they’re likely to fail.

If we are to neutralize our colonialist ruling class we need not just "mass activism" but also "mass education and inspirational ceremony," Balch writes. Yes. Ceremony.

We should also organize mass observances of traditional and newly created holidays, commemorating events like the Yorktown surrender and D–Day, or solemnly memorializing the victims of totalitarianism... so let’s consider the creation of a counter-calendar to our elite’s parade of apologetic commemorations, filled with holidays reinforcing national consciousness and pride.

Brilliant idea. Actually, when you are talking ceremony, you are talking religion, the celebration of the sacred. And we need to re-sacralize our national myth, to make holy again the sacred history of the American Founding. I say, for instance, that we should counter the lie of the 1619 Project with my "1584 Project." In case you didn't know, 1584 was the year that the first shipload of White Trash arrived in North America.

Yes, let's celebrate the "waste population" of Europe that was cast upon these shores by the hoity-toity ruling classes of Old Europe. Instead of sneering at white trash and rednecks.

This is all part of the downstream notion: politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

When we are not celebrating America in religious ceremonies, like President Trump at Mount Rushmore, I think we should push back on all the lefty pejoratives.

Racism? There's nothing more racist in today's America than Black Lives Matter. Period.

Sexism? There's nothing more sexist in America than the old tired movement of feminism. Which has done what, exactly, for women lately?

Violence? There's nothing more violent in America today than a lefty Antifa "mostly peaceful protest."

Homophobia? What could be more oppressive than the brutal cancel culture promoted by Big Gay? Imagine what would happen to you if you got up at a Critical Race Theory session at work and said: "you know, I think we should teach children that, while gay is all very well, you will probably live a better life if you act hetero, and marry and have children.

Slavery? Apart from the fact that the biggest slave states in all history were founded in the 20th century in Russia and in China there are other questions to consider. What do you call a regime that forces its people to go about wearing masks? What do you call a regime that taxes over a third of its peoples' income? What do you call a ruling class that metaphorically flogs any impertinence from the plebs with cancel culture? What do you call a regime that drafts the whole nation into a Green New Deal to "save the planet?"

Hate? I'll tell you what. Every politician, at every level of government, is in the hate business. That's because, stripped of all its fol-der-ol, politics is about two things: foreign war and civil war. In the foreign war the politicians teach the people to hate the horrible Frogs, or Krauts, or Nazis, or Commies. In civil war the politicians teach the people to hate the N-word, the white trash, the white oppressors, the white supremacists, the robber barons, malefactors of great wealth, the conspiracy theorists, the armed insurrectionists. Etcetera.

Colonization? There is nothing more colonizing that the rulers and the swells telling ordinary American commoners that they are subhuman white oppressors or deplorables or bitter clingers or white racists. There is nothing more colonizing that the top-down administrative state. There is nothing more colonizing than forcing workers and students to attend diversity training or critical race theory sessions. Colonization of the Curriculum? Yeah. Starting with the uber-colonizing 1619 Project.

We all of us need to be ready with the comeback. Racist? I'll tell you what's racist: BLM. Hate? If you are in politics, you are in the hate business. White Oppressor? Yeah, and I could be fired tomorrow for saying the wrong word -- in private. There's always the Mary McCarthy line. Everything the left says is a lie: including "and" and "the."

Yup. First we celebrate America in every way possible. Second, we push back whenever the left uses a pejorative. Onwards and Upwards

Zuck and @jack Have No Power, Because...

So now Curtis Yarvin has exploded another test nuclear device. "Big tech has no power at all," says he.

What does he mean? He means that, for Zuckerberg and the rest of the tech lords, the easy way out is to defer to the "press" and cancel anyone the press wants canceled. 

Zuck doesn’t want to do any of this. Nor do his users particularly want it. Rather, he is doing it because he is under pressure from the press. Duh.

Perfectly true. Only, I would add, the Breitbart Downstream Principle applies:

The press is downstream from activism is downstream from the Cathedral is downstream from the political formula.

For "activism" you can substitute "wokies" if you prefer.

The maxim above is merely a restatement of the Breibart Extended Downstream Principle I have inscribed among my Maxims:

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

For those of you that aren't yet in the know, the Cathedral is the combination of all the people who are good and right and that have the right values.

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

To clarify things further, Yarvin argues that: 

There are three forms of regime: monarchy (rule of one), oligarchy (rule of a minority), and democracy (rule of a majority). The System is an oligarchy.

There are four forms of oligarchy: hereditary oligarchy (rule of nobles), military oligarchy (rule of soldiers), commercial oligarchy (rule of the wealthy), and clerical oligarchy (rule of thinkers). The System is a clerical oligarchy.

The Political Formula is the ruling class's moral and legal basis for its power. I described the political formula of our ruling class today at American Thinker.

The U.S. formula used to be that government existed to protect “the little guy.” The formula was celebrated in anthems like It’s a Wonderful Life, with the little guy homeowners of Bailey Park protected by St. George Bailey from the rapacious dragon Mr. Potter.

In our day government exists to fight systemic racism, and it is celebrated in anthems like the woke “oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors” narrative. If it weren’t for the “allies,” little kiddies are carefully taught from K thru Activism School, the world would collapse into a “literally Hitler” oppression of the oppressed peoples by the white oppressors. Sign here to become an “ally.”

Am I right, or am I right?

And what is poor old Zuck going to do standing up against the priests of the Cathedral and against the sacred principles decreed in the regime's political formula? He's gonna stand up against all that is good and true and anti-racist? He ain't, and neither is @jack at Twitter. 

So what do we do about it? Well, the answer is right there in my Downstream maxim. We gotta come up with a new "meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Which, of course, I have done in my "Vision of the Good Life."

So, what are we waiting for?

Towards a Critique of Meaning

One of my little conceits is to parrot Douglas Adams' line in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Only, I got it wrong.

I just looked it up in my five-books-in-one Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, and that is not how it is presented. Chapter 24, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"O Deep Thought computer," he said, "the task we have designed for you to perform is this. We want you to tell us..." he paused, "The Answer!" 
"The Answer?" said Deep Thought. "The Answer to what?"
"Life!"urged Fook.
"The Universe!" said Lunkwill.
"Everything!" they said in chorus.
Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.
"Tricky," he said finally.
"But can you do it?"
Again, a significant pause."
"Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it."
"There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement.
"A simple answer?"added Lunkwill.
"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But," he added, "I'll have to think about it."

Now, at La Wik, they phrase this as the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." And the Answer, of course, is 42.

So I got it wrong. And so did La Wik. But I am going to have to change my quote. I think that I will henceforth refer to "the meaning of  'Life, the Universe, and Everything.'" Just to make it fair.

The thing about the meaning of Life is that everyone wants a short-cut. And why? Because you need to have some idea about the meaning of Life before you get up in the morning. It is much harder to live life in the knowledge of ignorance, that you don't have a clue what is going on, than living life when everything has been decided on the meaning front by your local priest or your local activist.

The fact is that the meaning of Life is unfathomable. Indeed, the more we know about "the Universe, and Everything" the more we wonder. How is it possible? How did it come to be? How big is it? Is there Life elsewhere? What is Life? What is the Universe?What is Everything? And what does it all mean?

Also, the question of the meaning of Life only occurs for a being that has a conscious mind. If you are a dog or a lion or a mosquito, you just live the life you are programmed to live, as we now think, by your DNA. You don't think about it; you don't worry about it: you just wake up in the morning and go about your business.

So our primitive forbears didn't think about the meaning of Life. They just went about it. And as they began to acquire the glimmerings of a conscious mind, they initially attributed all the angst of life to evil spirits. Notice that, at this stage, the human does not yet feel responsible for his life. Therefore, he does not really need to know the meaning of Life. The gods have decided all that. All the primitive human has to do is get on with it. And suffer, if the gods will it.

It is only with the gods of the Axial Age that humans get to be responsible for their own lives. Even then, God has decided pretty well everything you need to know about the meaning of Life. God just says: now you are responsible for organizing your Life according to the meaning of Life that I have vouchsafed to the Prophets.

Indeed, I would say that down to the Protestant Reformation, all the Average Joe had to do was listen to the priests, and do what he was told.

But with the Reformation a new concept arises. With the advent of printing, your bourgeois citizen wanted to read his own Bible. But that meant that the bourgeois citizen was taking on the new responsibility of trying to figure out what it all means in the Bible.

And now, with Nietzsche's Death of God, we are on our own. It's up to you to figure out the meaning of Life on your own.

Only, of course, most people don't do that. If they can't believe in God anymore then they pick up the secular gods of their school teachers. Or the meaning of Life revealed to them by a political leader, or a religious guru.

I would say that the urgency of knowing the meaning of Life has increased radically in the last century. It is not an accident that with Freud and Jung we see the beginning of a new age in which we have highly trained specialists to help us with our angst. And it is not just a question of taking the word of a priest or a guru to solve your existential problems. With "analysis" it is the patient, the analysand, that is supposed to do the heavy lifting, not the expert psychologist.

The less that society has already determined the meaning of Life, the more the responsibility falls on the individual. And the heavier the weight on the shoulders of the individual.

Even so, nearly everyone picks up a pre-packaged Meaning of Life kit at the store, or the church, or the meeting, or the activist group. Because, really, the alternative, to stand in the full horror of not knowing what you are here for, and what you should do next, is a terror that few of us have the resources to deal with.

But I think with my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we should at least begin to recognize that different people need different meanings of life.

In my reductive system, we can say that your average Subordinate should not worry about such things, but just do what his lord orders him to do. The average Responsible has the overall divine plan all set out for him, but he has to fill in the details, and that is not easy.

Obviously we can see that the Creatives, that are supposed to be figuring it out for themselves, are in completely over their heads. That is why, for the last 200 years, they have been grabbing whatever half-baked canned cults and religions are on offer, like passengers on the Titanic grabbing for life-belts.

Maybe that's as it should be. I just wish that the cults and religions that the Creatives have been grabbing for were, as the Brits say, "fit for purpose." That is what my Great Reaction theme is all about. It is about Creatives grabbing for something to steady their lives: only time and time again, they lurch back to the primitive, to belief systems that are more primitive than the Axial Age religions that they can no longer believe in. Because they are not yet ready to face the Universe without he comfort of a ready-made belief system.

That is the real challenge and the real problem. How do you face the world if you accept that you do not know the meaning of Life and never will, and accept that it is a cop-out to just buy a ready-to-wear suit right off the rack?

How About a Critique of Critique?

We all know that everyone who is anyone has created a "critical theory." The current rage for "critical race theory" is just the latest effort from the global sophomores.

Now, in the official introduction to its Critical Theory page, La Wik writes that critical theory is

an approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures.

Very commendable. In case you weren't aware, 

critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. 

And we can't leave La Wik's article without this gem:

Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

"Challenge power structure." "Liberate human beings." Couldn't agree more, Max old chap. Because I'm sure if you were alive today you'd agree with me that today's "power structure" is a lefty power structure, and its objective is to enslave the minds and the bodies of so-called "deplorables." For their own good, of course.

Now "critique" starts with Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason where he argues that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances.

Then along came Marx with his "critique of political economy," that is to say the economics of the classical economists. He was only just in time, because his critique was exploded in 1870 when the marginal revolution in economics completely set aside the opposition of exchange value and use value that the classical economists used and that Marx critiqued. You could look it up.

Our modern critical theory is a post-WWI phenomenon, based upon the post-Marx reality that needed a non-economic basis for its critique.

And in my opinion it is just as wrong. Here's why. It was crazily wrong for Marx to propose that capitalism was an essentially oppressive system. Why? Because in the first place the market economy rewards people for serving the consumers. Because in the second place, capitalism is associated with an unprecedented rise in income, over 30 times in 200 years. Thirdly, because the capitalists then and the ordinary middle class today are not that interested in power.

So, to develop a critical theory based on the theoretical foundation that the one thing needful is to attack and destroy "power structures" misses the point. Under the market system, power structures come and go.

We see this with the fairy tale of "systemic racism." We made systemic racism illegal half a century ago with the civil rights acts. We made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or sex. And ever since we have had lefty activists, funded by lefty billionaires, running around looking under every rock to find discrimination and root it out.

Oh, there's discrimination still, of course. People are wary around young black males. And when young black males mostly peacefully protest a lot of people head for the suburbs.

Actually, city people have been wary around young uneducated unemployed males since whenever. Because young unassimilated males are dangerous and violent. What do you think Dickens' Oliver Twist was about?

So you can see that for me, there is a desperate need for someone to come along and liberate lefty minds "from the circumstances that enslave them."

Now, when I awoke from a dream during the night the book's chapters presented themselves to me thus:

A Critique of Meaning 

A Critique of Religion 

A Critique of Creativity

A Critique of Morality 

A Critique of Revolution 

A Critique of Activism 

A Critique of Politics 

A Critique of Force 

A Critique of Responsibility 

A Critique of Slavery

I think that will do for a start. Of course, you can see what I am about. I am trying to find a framework in which to fit my overwrought ideas, from my reductive Three Peoples theory, to "downstreamism" -- that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- to my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, to my critique of Activism Culture, to my various critique of the Left's Conceits, Crimes, and Errors, to the problem of the Little Darlings.

And it all starts with the eternal question: why do humans seem to need, nay demand, a sense of "meaning?"

Presidential Debates as Oral Exams in Regime Orthodoxy

I don't usually watch presidential debates; instead I rely on sites like PJMedia or Breitbart that run blow-by-blow accounts of the debates. And then I read up on the post-debate spin.

But I did watch the October 22 debate between President Trump and former Vice President Biden.

Now when I listen to Republican politicians I am always conscious of the Overton Window of what you are allowed to say today in America.

So it was cringingly obvious to me that President Trump did not answer the question made to him by NBC reporterette Kristen Welker on Climate Change. Trump talked about how he loved the environment. He said nothing about how the whole Looming Disaster on Climate Unless We Act Now is a globalist ruling-class lie. Because he is not allowed to say that.

What I would like is for the president to say, look, climate change is a total fraud, a fake panic ginned up by the swamp to order us around and make big bucks for its supporters. And especially to create lots of Jobs for educated Gentry.

Ditto on the question about Race and "the talk." The president completely avoided the question, instead talking about how he has done all kinds of wonderful things for blacks.

What I would like is for the president to say, hey, whatabout "the talk" white parents need to give to white kids, like "The Talk: Non-black Version" that got John Derbyshire fired from National Review? But he is not allowed to say that.

Lots of people have been complaining that the moderators of the debates are all pro-Biden. And they are right.

But the reason is not that the moderators are biased and/or Democrats and/or swamp creatures, although they are: hey, reporterettes gotta eat too!

The reason is that presidential debates are Oral Exams in Ruling Class Orthodoxy. Let us review the issues and discover the Ruling Class Orthodoxy that you are not allowed to challenge.

COVID: OMG, if we can just save one life!

Climate Change: OMG, we're all going to die unless we act now and get rid of polluting fossil fuels!

Race: OMG, the white supremacists -- or white oppressors, or systemic racists!

Health-care: OMG, we've got to insure pre-existing conditions!

Education: OMG, we gotta have free college!

On each of these issues, which you will note I have framed as an emotional response that you would expect from a young woman, the way that all good Democrats with #WeBelieve signs out front believe is the only moral, moderate, evolved thing to do.

So, when the Democrat in a presidential debate answers a question about one of these issues, he starts with the orthodox moral position that all good people believe and then continues by talking about billions of dollars in loot and plunder for this sub-issue and regulations for that sub-issue. Don't forget the regulations aspect: regulations are Jobs for Gentry.

Whereas the Republican has to do a dance, to avoid contradicting the Orthodox Position directly, but still dog-whistling to his supporters that he is on their side. This is something that President Trump has shown himself to be expert at. He has to be expert at this Ali Shuffle because the default Republican position -- and indeed the reality -- on these issues is not acceptable in polite society.

Here's where I stand on the Big Issues:

COVID: Hey kids, it's an epidemic; let's get through it, protecting old people and the vulnerable, but get on with life.

Climate Change: Hey kids, ever met a snake-oil salesman? Guess what: the Earth is not about to fry; it is in the middle of an interglacial, a brief warm period in the middle of the current Ice Age. That means: cold weather ahead!

Race: Hey kids! Guess what: it is illegal in these United States to commit racial and/or sexual discrimination. Who knew?

Health care: Hey kids! If you try to skate by and don't pay for health insurance, it could cost you.

Education: Hey kids! Ever thought that compulsory education amounts to confinement in government child custodial facilities?

Feeling a bit embarrassed while reading the above? Did you check behind you to see if someone was watching? I understand. You have a job and a wife and kids to protect.

The point is: you are not allowed to say such things. And it could cost you.

We all know what this is about. It starts with the Breitbart Dictum: politics is downstream from culture. As modified by the John C. Wright Proviso: politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion. A modified by the Christopher Chantrill Maxim: politics is downtream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

First, you gotta get out ahead on the meaning-of-life question. Everything else is just a mopping up operation.

Is the Trump Phenomenon a New "Awakening?"

One of the ways to understand social change is through the notion of the "Great Awakening." The North American colonies such a religious awakening in the years before the American Revolution.

You might say it is a confirmation of Andrew Breitbart's notion that politics -- the revolution -- is downstream from culture, as modified by John C. Wright that culture is downstream from religion. So,

Politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion.

In other words, a political revolution is the product of a cultural revolution and cultural revolutions are products of religious "awakenings." Another way of looking at this is to say that a Great Awakening is a time when a mob of people suddenly revise their understanding of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." And so the world changes.

So, the Zman was descanting about Awakenings and wondering if we were in the middle of such an event, that the combination of waking up to the left's race grift, the mass media keeping its creatures in power, the Hunter Biden story, are going to wake people up.

But that made me think of the Trump phenomenon. Even my fairly Democratic Greek friend admits that the Trump enthusiasts are not "white oppressors" but people that have been left behind by the current rulers.

And I have to think that there is something organic, something Jungian and archetypal, in the phenomenon of the Trump rally, the Trump Boat Parade, the Trump Car Parade. I don't mean to say something specific, that it shows Trump will win the election; I am just saying that, if you are a human, programmed like every living thing to "notice" things that don't compute, then you are bound to suspect that something deep and archetypal, something of the unconscious, is going on, as people seem to be coming together in something below the obviously rational consciousness.

Of course, for me, with my mind trained by my reductive Three Peoples theory, it all connects. Obviously, to me, this is a Great Awakening of the Commoners, the People of the Responsible Self, starting to rise up, instinctively, against an unjust ruling class of educated Gentry. But, just as obviously, I could be completely wrong. I could be connecting dots in one way when, in reality, the dots are connecting in another way that will make me look like a complete idiot.

What will it all lead to, continues the Zman? Will it lead to civil war? Insurrection? Revolution? He plumps for "Insurrection, then Revolution." Civil war, to him, is a fight between two sides of the ruling class.

Revolutions, on the other hand, are when a new elite overthrows the old elite, because the old system offers no way for the new elite to join the elite.

So we aren't there because the ruling class is in fact pretty united, at least on the surface. So that means insurrection.

When people begin to sense that the invisible bargain between the people and the ruler is breaking down, that the ruler is not holding up his end of the bargain, that is the beginning of an insurrection.  

For instance, if the state won't let the cops do their job then people will start to police the streets themselves. If the schools don't do the jobs, they start to pull their kids from school.

Actually, he says, there is an insurrection going on in the elite, as liberal cities refuse to keep law and order, and federal judges don't follow the rules, Judge Sullivan. But that is an insurrection within the ruling class!

This is the soil of revolution. On the one hand, you have the people seeing a breakdown of that invisible bargain between themselves and their rulers. Basic things like road maintenance, policing and public order are not being done. On the other hand, you have members of the elite who no longer accept the authority of the system in which they function, causing that system to further breakdown. American is a machine that is breaking down and no one wants to repair it. 

For me, it's all rather odd. You would think that the elite would be smart enough to fob off the Commoners and the Deplorables with some penny-ante action to make the bitter-clingers think that the elite "cares about people like me." But they haven't.

Indeed, with the Ally-ist notion of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" they are proposing that the people you see at Trump rallies are "white oppressors."

Sorry, wokies. For me it does not compute. I'd say that Jeffrey Toobin, he of Zoom fame, is a "white oppressor" cunningly disguised as an "ally," up until the day before yesterday. That would make sense.

Of course, I would say that nothing illuminates a possible Commoner Great Awakening better than my Commoner Manifesto, that begins

A spectre is haunting the liberal elite -- the spectre of the Commoners. All the powers of the liberal establishment have entered into a secular alliance to exorcise this spectre...

Ooh. See that word ally-ance? And I continue:

It is high time that Commoners should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of “systemic racism” with a manifesto of the Commoners themselves.

And more of the same. But it's going to get worse before it gets better. 

The Different Kinds of Hero

Last night I had another of my 3:00 am Aha! moments. I realized that the Sacrificial Hero is the hero that inaugurates a new religion. But whatabout people inaugurating a new culture? Or a new politics? Whatabout them?

Let's get back to fundamentals.

Politics is downstream from culture. Said Andrew Breitbart.

Culture is downstream from religion. Says John C. Wright.

Religion is downstream from the question "what is the meaning of 'life, the universe, and everything?'" Says Christopher Chantrill.

And I say, in my "Vision of the Good Life," which is supposed to replace the left's reactionary vision, that the new answer to the question of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything," is the Sacrificial Hero. Like Moses, bringing his tablets of a new religion down from the mountain, but never getting to the Promised Land. Like Jesus Christ, dying for the idea that you don't need blood sacrifice to atone for your sins.

But whatabout the guy that creates a new culture out of the new religion providing a new answer to the question of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything?"

That was the point of my Aha! moment. Because I thought to myself: probably the chap that develops a new culture is not a Sacrificial Hero. But what is he? Is he a Hero? Is he a Philosopher? An Artist? A Writer?

See, the point is that the cultural innovator is not really, as Jungian analysis proposes for the heavy lifting, a Hero teetering on the border between Order and Chaos. Because the heavy lifting has already been done. By the time the cultural innovator comes along the area of Chaos is no longer complete Chaos. The outlines have been mapped out.

So let's do the decent thing and say about the cultural innovator: I don't know.

Same thing for the political innovator that creates a new politics. This chap is not really tilling virgin ground that has never felt the blade of the plow. He is taking a culture and working out the implications of the culture when it comes to politics.

And that means we have to do the decent thing and say about the political innovator: I don't know.

But already my mind is seething with ideas. What do you call chaps like Calvin and Luther? What do you call Montesquieu, the chap that invented the political framework that our Founders hammered into the good old US and A? What do you call Kant? My pal Nietzsche? Whatabout the Rousseaus and Marxes and Marcuses? Whatabout Saul Alinsky, of Rules for Radicals? Whatabout Martin Luther King, Jr.?

And what you you call the actual high-profile politicians, the Lincolns, Bismarcks, Roosevelts, Reagans, Obamas?

What indeed do you call President Trump, the most unlikely of political innovators?

I don't know. Because I just don't want to jump to conclusions. Not just yet.

But I will be back!

Gorsuch Decision Means Back to the Drawing Board

With Justice Gorsuch legislating gay rights into the Civil Rights Act of 1965, another fantasy of conservatism bites the dust.

We are never going to win the culture war with conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Why?

Because the judicial branch is the aristocratic branch; it reflects the culture of the educated Gentry. And always will. Actually, that was the intention of the Founders.

Right now, the educated Gentry thinks that LGBT rights is a Good Thing that all Goodwhites agree on.

Let us be clear about what this means. It means that if you want to change the laws of the country you have to do more than win elections.

Because, as Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream from culture. Don't expect to win political battles unless you occupy the high ground of the culture.

But that is not enough for, as John C. Wright writes, culture is downstream from religion. 

Don't doubt me on this. And if you did, you might change your mind and get to see why Wright is right on this, in a moment when the devotees of the religion of Wokeness dominate the culture with their religious devotions and flagellations "mostly peaceful protesting" for Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police.

So is it all over? Do we all just take a knee, the baptismal rite of Wokeianity? Not at all.

Because there is something upstream from religion. And that is the classic line from Douglas Adams, that he repeats again and again in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It is the eternal human search for the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

Let it be said that we are no closer to succeeding in this search than the first humans that developed the conceit of self-consciousness. And we never will. The closer we get, as we increase our knowledge and wealth and power and wokeness, the further the answer recedes into the depths of the universe.

For instance, just this week the "Physicists Union" -- that demands, if you remember, "rigorously defined areas of doubt and uncertainty" -- announced that the Hubble Constant isn't quite as constant as we thought, and this "bolster[s the current] challenge to the basic model of the universe."

Whatever it is that the universe is. If, indeed it is something rather than nothing.

So, what we need to do is to come up with a meaning of life, the universe and everything that will condense into a new religion for the educated Gentry that will change the culture that will change the politics and that will make it unthinkable for the aristocrats on the Supreme Court to continue with the current faith in finding new "rights" to enshrine in law and new "victims" to be inducted into the sacred hall of victims.

Should be a snap, right?

I mean, it shouldn't be that hard to find some sort of meaning of life that is higher and better than Wokeness, the religion of Activism that there are billions of helpless victims out there wallowing in helplessness unless straggly-haired Chés and Good Little Girls in face masks all get together and hand-letter signs and mostly peacefully protest and demand that we bend the arc of history towards justice for the helpless victims?

I mean, surely smarter minds that you and I should have figured this all out by now, and forged a new and better meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." Right?

Of course they have. And I have made it my life's work to sniff out these noble heroes. And now I have published my findings, "A Vision of the Good Life Better than the Left's," that begins here.

I warn you, it is an extremely sophisticated analysis that is way beyond the ken of the average Ché or Good Little Girl in a good little face mask.

Now I have come up with the Ideal of this new meaning of "life, the universe and everything." It is the Sacrificial Hero who dies upon the border between Order and Chaos.

This Hero is not the Warrior Hero of old, the Prince Harry or the Harry Percy of Shakespeare. He is not the Revolutionary Hero of leftist revolutionary fantasy literature. He is not the Activist Hero of the current Activism Culture.

But what is he, then?

I will tell you. He is rather like Jordan B. Peterson, author of Maps of Meaning and 12 Rules for Life. 

Why would I pick him, when tough guy Vox Day makes fun of him in Jordanetics: A Journey into the Mind of Humanity's Greatest Thinker? Two reasons:

1. Peterson came out against Canada's C-16 law that basically legislated the LGBT agenda. If you watch his testimony before the Canadian Senate you can see that he is basically offering himself up as a sacrifice.
2. His latest blog post, taking aim at the entire current culture in the university, "Missives of Appalling Idiocy and Envy Embarrassing to Behold," in which an eminent Canadian chemistry prof has been thrown to the woke mob.

When you do this you are offering yourself up to Pontius Pilate as a sacrifice to the search for the meaning of life. It means you are willing to sacrifice reputation, career, respectability, honor, everything.

But actually, of course, you are transcending the woke mob and its Cancel Culture, because in offering yourself as a sacrifice you are in fact daring the wokies to make you into a martyr. And that is something that they don't want.

But who really has the courage to stand up to the mob? Not me. But maybe you are. Anyway, Jordan B. Peterson is, in my opinion, an example of what it takes to be a Sacrificial Hero. Needless to say, his Maps of Meaning goes into great depth about the Sacrificial Hero and the whole question of the Hostile Brothers. 

I investigate Maps of Meaning here.

So, All we need to do is make the philosophy of the Sacrificial Hero a conventional wisdom among the educated Gentry. Then the whole religion and culture and politics of Wokeranity will vanish in a puff of smoke.

And we can start to deal with the next problem.

What is the Meaning of Life?

In his review of Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds, Spencer A Klavan complains that Murray doesn’t really come up with a solution to the problem of the current gender, race, and identity madness. Murray does not offer an alternative, “a vision of the good life more compelling than the fanatical march toward a virtuous future that the Left offers.” 

Exactly. It is not enough to critique the Left. Or to offer political alternatives. “Politics is downstream from culture,” said the late Andrew Breitbart. And culture is downstream from religion, adds John C. Wright. And religion, I would suggest, inspired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is downstream of the eternal question that every human yearns to answer: the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

Everything -- religion, culture, politics -- is downstream of the question: what is the meaning of life? Indeed, you could say that life is an endless attempt to answer that question.

In the following pages I will attempt to construct "a vision of life more compelling than" the left's vision. It will be a vision suitable for use by anyone in the modern "educated class," and it will be based on what I call the German Turn, that is the revolution in philosophy, in science, and in the sciences of the mind, that begin with the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century.

The modern problem, I believe, is that moderns no longer experience life and the universe as either a complete mystery known only to the gods, or a program handed down by God to humans in a divine creation and a program of divine law. Instead the modern imagines himself the creator of his own life. He is a discoverer, an explorer, and expects to develop an individual, and creative, approach to the age old question of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." Far too many moderns also believe that their wondrous creative vision entitles them to force the rest of humanity onto their Procrustean bed -- in their own best interest, of course.

But I believe that we moderns underestimate the enormity of this project. That is, after all, why our ancestors assigned this honor to God: who are we to think that we could ever have the answer to the mystery of life, let alone forcing the answer on our fellow humans? It is not just a question of stepping out and writing a book, or leading a revolution, or doing a bit of activism, or inventing a new theory, or bending the arc of history towards justice. It is a personal existential journey, full of peril, and most likely to end in disaster, or at least in failure. So I believe that the creative explorer, the man who will show his fellow humans a new meaning of life, cannot be a proud egotist but instead a humble investigator that well knows and deeply accepts the odds against him, "that durst defy th'Omnipotent to arms."

There is a name for this kind of man: the Sacrificial Hero.

But now let us examine how it is that I think that the Germans, notorious aggressors and monsters of the 20th century, have a lot to teach us.

Next: The German Turn
The Germans invented everything

Or back to Contents

Downstream-ism in Brief

 Andrew Breitbart famously said that "politics is downstream from culture."

John C. Wright extended the idea in "Last Crusade: Fighting the Wrong Battle," He said that:

In the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion.

But I think that is not far enough. I say that:

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

Now, what the meaning of life is downstream from I have yet to determine. But here is a clue from Carl Jung:

It is only the things we don't understand that have any meaning.

What does that mean?

Politics is about who is the enemy.

Culture is about who are we.

Religion is about who is God.

The meaning of life, the universe, and everything is about everything else.

Downstream-ism Table of Contents

Three Layers, Three Peoples, Three Religions

I just had a brain wave. It happened, of course, during the night.

I realized that Curtis Yarvin's three-layer theory is related to my reductive Three Peoples theory, in this way.

Yarvin's theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients is a political theory. It divides the world into three classes, and it is an external theory. It looks at how the world categorizes people.  You look at someone and you say, oh yeah: educated Gentry. Or, if you are Hillary Clinton, you look at Commoners and call them a "basket of deplorables." Or, if you are an activist, you look at subordinate victims and see them as potential Clients of your activism. Yum.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is a cultural theory. It divides the world into three experiences, three ways of living, as a Subordinate, as a Responsible, or as a Creative. It is an internal theory, how people look at themselves, how they experience themselves. So you feel yourself as helpless, thrown about in the world and needing a strong leader? Or do you think of yourself as responsible, living off the script of God and His Divine Law? Or do you think of yourself as a creative person, able to understand and navigate the world without the help of a divine script?

And, of course, let us not forget Andrew Breitbart's dictum that politics is downstream from culture.

But, as John C. Wright says, culture is downstream from religion. So whatabout religion?

Perfectly simple. You look up my Three Peoples Religion label. And my Three Peoples Religion says that the Three Peoples each have a different god. Of course they do.

The People of the Subordinate Self have a vengeful power god, that helps and hinders people as the mood takes him. These gods are like the Olympian gods that run things in The Iliad. Humans are the pawns in their Olympian political wranglings.

The People of the Responsible Self have a God that has created the world and set forth His divine laws and left humans to get on with it. Humans are, of course, responsible for their acts and will be judged at the Last Trump.

The People of the Creative Self have themselves as their god. For them the nature and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not a mystery known only to God, but a Gordian Knot that creative man himself is unraveling. Notice the fundamental advance over the Responsible Self: now the Creative person imagines himself possessing the means to extend his understanding of the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Do you see the breathtaking scope of this three-times-three theory? It lets you look out upon the world and understand that the Brave New World hath such different people in it, and this is normal. You look say, at a helpless victim, beloved of our leaders and betters, and you say, well, someone like that is going to want to nestle under a strong leader, and they are likely to feel helpless and subordinate, and they are likely to feel that the world is a nasty, vengeful place. You can do this because you have three ways of looking at everyone, from a political point of view, a cultural point of view, and a religious point of view.

But, most important of all, you are equipped to understand and judge the world's Big Problem, the Gentry, the People of the Creative Self, the believers in themselves as gods.

And you begin to see, in a glass, darkly, why the Creative chaps have been making such a dog's breakfast of the last century or so: boosting socialism, which is nothing but a return to slavery; the welfare state, which is nothing but a return to feudalism; and activism, which is nothing but a return to the noble conceit of the Middle Ages, the cult of knight-errantry.

I mean, when you are getting everything wrong, maybe you have a problem!

Downstream-ism -- Contents

Politics is downstream of culture is downstream of religion is downstream of...

0. Downstream-ism in Brief

1. Politics is Downstream from Culture is Downstream from Religion
From Breitbart to Wright to Chantrill

2. Reality Hits the 19th Century White Ethnics

And so they are becoming Republicans

3. A Conservative Supreme Court is Not the Answer to Our Prayer

Because the elite culture is still pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage

4. Ruminations on "Politics is Downstream from Culture"

And the search for a new religion for creatives

5. Pelosi's Far Left Bill: The Bigger Problem

You are legislating morality, lefties!

6. Three Layers, Three Peoples, Three Religions

Three Layers is a political theory; Three Peoples a cultural theory...

7. What is the Meaning of Life?

For creative people, of course.

8. Gorsuch Decision Means Back to the Drawing Board

Don't expect a conservative Supreme Court to go against elite culture and morality

9. The Different Kinds of Hero

What kinds of people start new religions, new cultures, new politics? I don't know

10. Is the Trump Phenomenon a New "Awakening?"

What does a Great Awakening of the Commoners lead to?

11. Presidential Debates as Oral Exams in Regime Orthodoxy

Thou shalt not venture outside the Overton window

Pelosi's Far-Left Bill: The Bigger Problem

Yesterday I proposed that Nancy Pelosi's horrible fund-all-the-lefty-wish-list never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste bill was maybe just her way of showing the lefty activist community that their agenda just wasn't going to fly. Not this week. Try again later, wokies.

Today I am reading a lot of commentary outraged at the rank partisanship of the Dems, and how horrible it is, etc. Yes. Of course it is. Partisanship is what politicians and activists do every day.

But let us understand the bigger picture.

The Dems really believe in legislating their progressive morality. They really believe that we need laws to enforce diversity in the work place, and that these laws can make America a better place.

Do you see the difference between a law that makes racial and sexual discrimination illegal and a law that penalizes failure to achieve government-set racial percentages in the workplace?

Do you see the difficulty of making judgements based on percentages of different races and sexes in a particular corporation or workplace? For instance, did you know that well-born white women have really entered the life sciences in battalion strength but not so much in computers and engineering? So, how does the government judge the situation at, say, a microbiology department at a university and a Silicon Valley startup? Who gets harassed and fined? At what point?

Well, we know. They set up a bureaucracy with quasi-legal authority to judge and harass corporations that don't meet their moral standards. As the bureaucracy feels appropriate.

My point is that once you get away from a pretty black-and-white situation -- as in not hiring a guy because he is black where there are incriminatory statements on record -- you have a problem. How do you deal with the vague and uncertain question of whether a particular racial and sexual breakdown can be reliably dealt with by government prosecutors and the courts? Or government administrators?

Government is the agent for protection from existential peril. Morality -- churches, activist groups, women´s gossip networks -- is the means of doing social control over things that are not questions of life and death. And, per our beloved Founders, it is best to separate the organs of force from the organs of morality.

And the fact is that the progressive movement instinctively understands this. That is why it represents each of its agenda items as a matter of life and death.

But most moral issues are not a matter of life and death, and they should not be encoded into law.

Many of the commentators outraged by the Dems' shenagigans are demanding that we teach them a lesson at the ballot box. And certainly they need that.

But I return to the basic Breitbart notion that politics is downstream from culture. And the John C. Wright's  expansion that culture is downstream from religion.

Then there is a further argument that religion is downstream from social animals. In other words, the whole point of religion in the broad sense is that social cooperation with moral rules is a lot less bloody and expensive than deciding everything with a fight. Jordan B. Peterson makes the point in his 12 Rules that even lobsters have a social hierarchy, so that lobster males don't fight over every little thing. But the Good Little Girls interviewing him on TV had no clue what he was talking about.

So, how soon do you think that our liberal friends will get this? Take, for instance Kristen Doerer, Managing Editor of Right Wing Watch, whose job in life is to search out "far-right" offences to progressive morality and name and shame the perpetrators. What would it take for her to see the error of her ways?

Well, we know the answer. It is contained in books like When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al. Every religion, every ideological movement, is a prophetic movement, predicting some kind of perfect world in the future. And when its prophecy fails it doesn't give up, not right away. Indeed failure initially encourages a deepening of prophetic enthusiasm. But after a while the adherents start to fall away.

Now I think it is reasonable to say that the basic left-wing prophecies have failed. And the intensified enthusiasm of today's wokerati is, in a way, a marker of that.

What we need to do is show our lefty friends, again and again, that their prophecies have failed. That's the basic thing, that wherever leftism has been tried it has failed. Oh, we'll never persuade the leaders. But the followers...

Two other things.

First, to establish the notion that almost all the progressive agenda is about status and honor for the educated Gentry, as proposed by Curtis Yarvin in his "Clear Pill." It is not about saving the victims; it is about power and glory for the activistes. We need to establish every day that the moral preening of progressives is just that. Moral conceit.

Second, to attract victims from the rank-and-file of Gentry Clients and invite them to come on over and join the Commoner class. Like I say with my Little Darlings concept, the fact is that the helpless victims beloved by the progressives are beloved only while they are useful to the progressive power project. When they are no longer useful they are dropped like an overage mistress. The idea is simple. We Commoners care about people like you. The educated Gentry doesn't care about people like you.

Here's a way we can start. We can classify every progressive activist group as a church. And we can critique every lefty initiative as an effort to "legislate morality."

Actually, I think our lefty friends would be much happier if they formed a church and said woke confession to each other every Sunday. But they are too dumb to realize that is what they need.

And for tomorrow and next month, it sure wouldn't hurt for President Trump to be experienced by the average American as "doing the right thing." And it will really help if he restarts the economy real soon.

Ruminations on "Politics is Downstream from Culture"

We all know the Breitbart dictum, that politics is downstream from culture. That is to say, before you "win" in politics you need to win the culture. Then I read sci-fi writer John C. Wright, and he extended the maxim: "politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion."

How true. And that is the problem for conservatives right now, that not only do our liberal friends have control of the culture, through literature, education, the arts, journalism, but also through the dominatory hegemony of their secular lefty religion of political correctness.

For instance, I was to several Shakespeare plays over the last year, from Seattle, to Ashland, Oregon, to Stratford-on-Avon, UK, and every one of the plays had modern LGBT gender-bending. So this means that, over the whole English-speaking arts world, the culture of the educated elite and its promotion of LGBT culture is hegemonic. Personally, for me, this is unfortunate, because I believe that LGBT culture is dull and superficial. But you better not dissent from the idea that having general gender chaos in Shakespeare with women playing male roles and lesbians and transgenders showing up all over, because homophobia.

Now, I believe that the reason that today's elite culture is so superficial issues from the superficiality of its religion. The elite religion is that the current elite creative culture is the only thing in town: everything else is bigotry and superstition. The purpose of today's elite culture is that we elites get to practice our elite creative culture and your job is to like it. And the more it humiliates you racist sexist homophobe proles, the better.

I would say that the most bigoted and superstitious religion in history is the current superficial religion of creativity of our educated elite. But what would I know?

I believe that an authentic creative culture would issue from an authentic creative religion. And that religion would echo the Jungian notion that the creative process exists on the borders of order and chaos and that usually the creative experience ends in disaster for the would-be creator and also for those associated with him. Thus a true religion of creativity would be drenched in the humility of that knowledge, that the true creative hero is a tragic hero, a sacrificial hero.

Now we travel into new territory.

It seems to me that the function of religion is to translate and transform our unconscious instincts into the conscious culture of a religion. Obviously -- or, at least, obvious to me -- the nature of that transformation will reflect the reality on the ground and the needs of the particular human community that the religion serves. The religion of a hunter-gatherer band will be different from the religion of an agricultural people will be different from the religion of a city people will be different from the religion of a creative educated elite. And this is right and proper.

Now I think -- from five minutes ago -- that the religion of a people tends to be specific and conscious, and its purpose is to set the parameters for the unconscious culture of that people.

Huh?

Well, I think that the purpose of religion is to reformulate and redirect the unconscious instincts of a human group to set its members up to inhabit a new world of unconscious instinct -- that we call culture -- adapted by some prophetic visioniary to suit the new world of the group and to train its members how to act in their everyday lives, by consciously putting on the new suit of the religion and thereafter unconsciously wearing that new suit in day-to-day life.

On this notion, politics would be the conscious expression of the culture in connection with the specific communal problems of the society, and specifically those questions that require the use of force, of which the major items are the defense of the community from enemies foreign and domestic.

The point is that normally the day-to-day culture of the people will resolve all problems, because people instinctively and unconsciously follow the unwritten rules of the culture. But those that do not respond to gentle persuastion need specific encouragement -- perhaps throught the use of force -- and problems that seem to be beyond the ability of the unconscious culture rise to consciousness in the rhetoric of politics to be dispatched by communal decision and executed by government force.

It seems to me that the actual operation of government is, again, a return to unconscious process. The fact is that government goes on in its dilatory way, in its various programs of government force, from the collection of taxes to the policing of criminals to the education of children, in another unconscious culture, where people are not really thinking about what is going down. People do not think about being forced to pay taxes or send their children to government school, but they pay their taxes and send their children to school. They obey the law without really thinking about it.

Only when the application of government force is experienced on the receiving end as injustice does it then rise to consciousness and into politics.

Now you can see why the Breitbart dictum about politics being downstream from culture is important. Because culture is an unconscious thing. It is what it is, and it does what it does. And one of the thing it does is set the agenda for politics by setting the unconscious agenda of what "everyone" accepts as day-to-day reality. So, if you don't like the way that politics frames the problems of society you now realize that to do that you have to change the culture.

But then, you understand, after John C. Wright, that to change the culture you need to change the religion.

And that is not a small thing.

As I say, the problem with the world at this time is that its educated elite has developed a false and malicious religion. Its religion of creativity is a religion of self-worship that basically says that everything that educated creative people do is good and anyone that disagrees with them is a racist sexist homophobe that should be named, shamed, ostracized, canceled, fired from their job. And think themselves lucky that they haven't been sent to the guillotine.

Now I think that we have all the knowledge we need to solve this problem. We have the psychology of Jung which explains how our conscious culture is necessarily entangled with our personal unconscious and with all the collective unconscious and its archetypes down the ages. We have Nietzsche telling us that creativity is a hard and lonely path, as his Zarathustra explained. We have the developmental psychologists from Piaget to Wilber that demonstrate how different people have different levels of consciousness and how only people inhabiting the higher levels can understand people at lower levels, and that people at lower levels think that people not at their level are either dumb idiots or crazy loons.

What we need is our creative class to understand that only a few people are ready for a religion of creativity. Most of the rest of us don't want to live creatively and wouldn't know how to anyway. So a True Religion of Creativity would start with the knowledge that the creative life is not for everyone.

And most important of all, the True Religion of Creativity would start with the advice of actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Do you know what the advice was? There are variations, but it starts with advice to a young actress being bothered by the affections of older actors.

It doesn't make any difference what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses."

Interesting isn't it, that our liberal friends seem to have the opposite idea, that the whole point of a creative life is precisely to stampede the horses in the street and then shoot them for being too skittish.

Marianne Williamson: Getting Only Half the Point

At American Greatness Matthew Boose takes a look at the unexpectedly popular Marianne Williamson who, he proposes is bringing something to politics other than mere wonkery.

Like Trump, Williamson is an outsider who understands that politics is about bigger things than what can be reduced to policy bromides. 

Well yes. But Mariane Williamson is a preacher -- if a new-age preacher -- and I thought that we were supposed to have a separation between church and state.

Williamson is outraging the liberals, apparently, because she is saying that you can't cure depression with drugs, and that is "anti-science." Well maybe she has a point. Maybe we have a problem, Houston.

To admit that America is broken spiritually invites reflection on the cultural revolution of the past half-century. Has America really progressed, or have things gotten worse?

Why are there so many mass shootings these days? Why are young Americans killing themselves at record high rates? Why are they having children at record low rates? Why are diagnoses of depression and anxiety so high, despite a marked jump in antidepressant use? Why is life expectancy in the wealthiest nation on earth going down, rather than up? 

Yes but. Politics is downstream of culture is downstream of religion. The job of politicians is to divide the voters at election time -- on my maxim that politics is division -- and the job of policy wonks is to figure out how to divvy up the loot one more time -- on my maxim that government is an armed minority that taxes the people to reward its supporters.

The whole question of what is the good life, what is the right way of life, what is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything comes upstream of politics. It is the subject matter of religion.

And, according to the Bill of Rights, the United States shall have no establishment of religion.

However, even a semi-moron can see that religion is always bumping into politics and politics is always bumping into religion. That is because when the nation's legislators make laws they are necessarily informed by their various religions. They have a vision of the Good Life and Justice and they are bound and determined to get there.

In our age, with the decline in authority of Axial Age religions, new religions are popping up all over. They may be Socialism, the idea of building a Heaven on Earth with government power. They may be Nietzsche's Übermensch off in the mountains doing his Zarathustra thing. They may be Jungians getting in touch with their personal or collective unconscious. Or they may be new-age gurus like Marianne Williamson.

And wouldn't you know. All these religions seem to take a remarkable interest in politics.

But our Founding Fathers knew that this was a problem. The problem was identified for our age by our liberal friends who found it intolerable when fundamentalist Christians were "legislating morality." Or when McCarthyites were flushing Communists out of the State Department and the public schools.

But now the shoe is on the other foot and liberals and lefties all over are legislating their morality and getting conservatives bounced from their jobs at Google and Mozilla. Notice that the liberals that are beside themselves with McCarthyism have no problem with the defenestration of folks that don't worship in their church.

To talk about our political problem in terms of Trump and Williamson going a bit deeper than the usual idiot wonks is to miss the problem.

The problem is that, with government so busy with 1,001 programs -- all of which come down to some sort of idea of Good and Evil which all originate in some sort of religion or quasi-religion -- there will inevitably be a lot of religious conflict arising out of some peoples' religion getting to set the government agenda and other peoples' religion getting marginalized as "bigoted" or "superstitious".

If government were smaller then people could exercise their religions and project their values in the public square without having to fight to get government on their side.

For in the real world people only "get" the notions that are taken for granted in their cultural bubble. Their beliefs and their understanding of the meaning of life, the universe and everything go without saying. But other peoples' faith and beliefs are experienced as a threat.

You can see the problem. If people get the power of government on their side then they will use it to neutralize the "threat" from other peoples' beliefs.

And since, on my reductive Three Peoples theory, there are at least three kinds of people on this Earth that means that there are three world views competing for that government dollar and the opportunity to legislate their morality.

The less government there is the more that each of the Three Peoples can live according to their values and not keep bumping into people that think they are a threat.