Murray Facing Reality: The Setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now Murray gets down to brass tacks. Specifically:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here are the latest IQ numbers:

	IQ
European	103
African	91
Latin	94
Asian	108

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

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

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

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

"Progressive Fatalism?" How to Miss the Point

The culture war, writes Samuel Kronin at Quillette, is characterized by "a deepening progressive fatalism about race in America." That's where BLM and the current cultural hysteria comes from.

I Don't Think So. But here's what progressives think.

Before 2008, many believed the country was simply too racist to elect a black president. And then, just like that, it happened and Americans forgot what it felt like before it happened. For progressives, the optimism that came with a two-term black presidency in a white majority country with a recent history of overt racism was thwarted by the realization that racism hasn’t gone away and black disadvantage abides.

Hey, I know. Maybe the problem is that the left's whole religion on race is a false religion, that for decades liberals have gone to church on the notion that America is irredeemably racist and that only liberals have the moral chops to redeem America.

And then when we elect a black president and the "black disadvantage" -- liberalspeak for black dysfunction -- doesn't go away, why, as the primitive mind has it, according to Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return,

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

America's blacks cannot be dysfunctional fools, ruined by half a century of liberal post-civil-rights-era politics. Oh no. Systemic white racist-sexist-homophobes must be to blame. Let's recast Eliade's notion.

The liberal... cannot conceive of flat-out black dysfunction issuing from unjust liberal policy. It arises from the systemic immoral malevolence of gap-tooth white bitter-clinger deplorable white oppressors in their insurrectionary far-right terrorist cells. There has to be a right-wing fault at the bottom of it -- at the bottom of everything -- otherwise maybe the whole liberal project is a wrong turn, a moral horror, and an unjust monstrosity.

Liberals have to believe that "racism hasn’t gone away," because if it has the world doesn't need liberals any more.

Earth to liberals: ordinary American Commoners all wish that liberal race politics would just go away so they could get on with working and wiving and thriving without looking over their shoulder to make sure that some liberal isn't about to cancel them for a wrong word 20 years ago. And without ever thinking about race again.

The current left-wing ideological terror is not just "the sharp cultural turn toward identity issues in the 2010s." It's been there all along. Here's what Paul Kengor wrote in The American Spectator about liberals circa 1990

I recently happened upon a folder of my columns for my college newspaper in the late 1980s. I was the editorial page editor for our daily newspaper (published Monday through Thursday), The Pitt News. My goodbye column in May 1990 lamented the liberals who reflexively called conservatives names like “Nazi,” “fascist,” “racist,” “homophobe,” “hater.” Yes, way back then. This was when the political correctness movement really launched. We were already referring to liberals as the Thought Police.

I mean. When you are calling the opposition names, using pedal-to-the-metal pejoratives like "RACIST," we are not talking "progressive fatalism." We are talking people that think that the "other" has no place in polite society, and that the "other" needs to be purged from the public square.

Did I mention that pejorative comes from the Latin pejorare meaning "to make things worse?"

We are talking about the human need for a moral narrative, the need for a meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." And that every moral universe needs a Satan, an Old Scratch, a scapegoat upon which to blame all the evils of the world.

And if your need for a moral narrative comes from a need to justify your status as a ruling class, then, in the modern era, that requires you to pose as the educated enlightened lightbringers, the allies of the oppressed peoples fighting the white oppressors for justice.

So, if you have passed your civil rights acts, if you have elected your First Black President, if you have midwifed a second rate race narrative called the "1619 Project," if you have railroaded a poor dumb cop to jail for not preserving the life of a drugged out black habitual criminal resisting arrest, why, the last thing you are ever going to do is declare victory and give up the game to a new, improved ruling class.

You tell me: when has any religion declared that Satan or the Evil One has been decisively defeated, so now we can wind up the old religion and hang out in cafés drinking lattes until the next religion comes along?

Like old soldiers: religion never dies. It only fades away as the believers, one by one, fail to turn up at regular Sunday services.

If you want to call that "fatalism," be my guest.

Moths Attracted to the Flame of Power

In American Greatness Edward Ring is spinning a tale of conspiracy, of the globalist billionaires willing the hell of Critical Race Theory upon us, with "The Origin and True Agenda of 'Anti-Racist' Politics."

Well, first of all, I don't think that really "anyone" is leading the Woke religion. Ring notes that the left's funding is coming from lefty billionaires and corporations.

It is coming from global corporations and leftist billionaires. The intent is to destroy the sense of shared identity that defines America. By doing this they will eliminate unified opposition to their agenda, which is to remake America into a mere economic unit where the vast majority of residents are of limited means and dependent on government entitlements, the middle class is wiped out, and the upper class exists to serve an elite oligarchy.

Well, I don't think the lefty billionaires and global corporations are that smart. I don't think they have a power plan of that depth and sophistication.

For instance, the corporations. They are just playing the angles. They know that their pots of gold are an eternal temptation to all governments and politicians, for politics has forever been a game of loot and plunder. So they are pal-ing up with the activists in the hope that they will be eaten last.

Then the lefty billionaires. I don't think of the @jacks and the Zucks as dark malevolent forces. They are just picking up the Zeitgest and going along for the ride. That's what humans do. There are only a couple of prophets in any era that redefine the meaning of life for everyone. Everyone else goes along to get along.

Now I believe that the religion -- Wokism if you like -- is a foolish and false religion. But it answers the call of Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

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

Doesn't that describe our lefty friends to a "T"? There cannot just be different groups with different genetic and cultural inheritances optimized for life in different parts of the world. There must be a fault, the fault of racism.

And really, we are not just talking about primitive religion. All religion is trying to deal with the problem of suffering, and all religion tends towards the notion that someone is at fault. In religion this fault is assigned to evil spirits or to Satan. In Communism the fault is assigned to the bourgeoisie. In New Deal politics the fault is assigned to the "big corporations." In politics, of course, the fault is assigned to the out group, the hated enemy. So, of course, the practitioners of "anti-racism" have as a hated enemy the "white oppressor."

As I say in my maxims: "politics is division."

Then there is the other thing, issuing out of my maxim: "the only warrant for government power is existential peril."

If you are a ruling class courtier or a billionaire, you can probably find your "meaning of life" by battling some existential peril, because battling an existential peril requires more power to government and the ruling class. The current peril du jour is climate change. It really is  magnificent. It is something you can't really measure, except through ruling-class-financed computer models. And it requires immense new powers for the ruling class and for their bribed apologists in the corporations. And unless we act now...

But I think that the salient question of our age is that the old instincts of defending the patch of land from marauders -- or alternatively attacking the neighbors and looting them -- doesn't work any more.

And that is due to a simple reason. In the old days the best patch of land for growing food equaled wealth and life. Everyone had an interest in stealing the best patch of land from its current owner. If you succeeded, you were rich and he was poor: Yay! If you failed, well, better luck next time.

But that is not how things work any more. The best thing now is for everyone to stay on their patch of land and make stuff and trade it. If you loot some guy's property you don't really make yourself richer; instead you have removed his contribution to the common wealth and made everyone poorer.

But, we are still programmed the other way, that loot and plunder benefits me if I loot my neighbor before he loots me. And we are still programmed to believe that if anything bad happens it has to be the result of malevolence.

Hey liberals, I think the next outbreak of malevolence will be the ordinary middle-class folks devastated by the Year of Lockdown. Old folks like me are looking at the booming stock market; gentry liberals are enjoying issuing rules and regulations. The poor are enjoying being able to stop paying rent.

But when it is all over, the people in the middle, that took in in the solar plexus, will be looking for someone to blame, and I don't think that the MSM and social media will succeed in pinning the whole thing on Trump and on "white oppressors."

Just sayin'.

But Tear Gas and But Hate

I had my jolly little phone chat with Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss yesterday, and here are my takeaways.

When it comes to policing, Year Zero for Strauss is the occasion of the mostly peaceful protests in Seattle in 1999 against the WTO. You can see what the ruling-class conventional wisdom is, from La Wik's "1999 Seattle WTO protests" with a picture of Seattle Police doing a spot of pepper spraying.

That's interesting to me, because Dan Strauss, born in April 1986 according to La Wik, would have been 13 at the time of the riots. Was he on the street back then? Or his social-worker parents? Why exactly would a 13-year-old be exercised by the WTO protests? Was he pepper-sprayed? Or one of his parents?

So Dan Strauss is interested in reducing the Seattle Police Department use of violence and tear gas and pepper spray. At least, that is what I understood from his comments.

Later on I introduced the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" moral narrative -- Allyism -- and proposed that it was problematic to describe the world with a moral narrative before you have described the world with a descriptive narrative. 

I advanced my reductive Three Peoples theory as an example of a descriptive theory, that tries to understand the world before judging it. Mind you, the idea of a descriptive narrative rather than a moral narrative is incredibly modern and progressive. If we are dealing with ancient religion, the whole of creation is subject to the wrath of the gods, and, as Mircea Eliade argues in his Myth of the Eternal Return:

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

See, I'm so sophisticated that I hesitate to blame my neighbor's malevolence for all the sins of the world.

And the narratives that arose later in the Axial Age are all moral narratives, too.

I went on to mention to Dan the virtue-signaling yard-signs so common in the gentry liberal neighborhoods of North Seattle that Dan represents: the Black Lives Matter, the #WeBelieve, the Hate has no Home Here signs.

In response Dan Strauss muttered about Hate. At least that is what I understood him to say.

Unfortunately I did not get in my Hegel zinger, that Hegel says that the thing is the same as its opposite, as in the north pole and the south pole of a magnet: the same, only opposite. On this notion, when you are exercised about racism as an noble anti-racist you are really putting yourself on the racist's level: obsessed with race. And if you are fighting Hate, you are probably a hater, because after all, you hate the Haters. Right?

The joke, to me, is that our liberal friends have become precisely the people they have criticized all these years. They used to rail against McCarthyite witch-hunts -- although back in the day Hollywood actually took fairly good care of the Commies in their midst. Now they get people fired for their political beliefs. They used to rail against censorship: now they applaud it. They used to sneer at enthusiastic Christianity and its obsession with sinners. Now they are obsessed with sinful racist-sexist-homophobe Haters.

Like they say: be careful who you choose as your enemies, because you will become them. 

Well, well, well. It's Nietzsche who said that:

Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that's who you become most like.

Or Marcus Aurelius arguing the opposite:

The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.

Or Sun Tzu:

To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy. 

Golly Geewillikins. Who knew?

But it does raise the question of how we deal with our liberal friends. Really, we don't want to wipe them and their hatey-hate Hate from the face of the Earth. We know that if we were to wipe out all liberals they would just be reborn as something just as foolish and knavish. Correction: as something more foolish and knavish.

Hey liberals! Ever thought that if you utterly cancel all the bitter clingers and deplorables they will return as something far worse?

And, of course, it is my conceit that I understand liberals and the left, that they are reactionaries lurching back to the past, that their activism culture is a kind of neo-Quixotic movement, pretending to be revolutionaries way after the end of the Age of Revolution.

And it is my belief that liberals, devoted to the idea of the creative life, of making a difference in the world, have totally misunderstood how the creative life works. It is not a triumphant bending of the arc of history, but a harrowing journey into the unconscious that, if successful, may well end in the death of the Sacrificial Hero rather than the applause of a grateful world. As I rehearse in my Good Life concept.

But hey, if the gentry liberals of North Seattle want a councilman concerned about police brutality and Hate, why, they got exactly what they want in Dan Strauss. Bless their hearts.

Dennis Prager Itemizes My Great Reaction

Dennis Prager recently put out a piece "The Four Horsemen of America's Apocalypse." That is:

1. Victimhood: "People who think of themselves as victims feel that, having been victimized, they are no longer bound by normal moral conventions -- especially the moral conventions of their alleged or real oppressors.
2. Demonization: "demonizing a group as inherently evil."
3. A Cause to Believe In: "The need for meaning is the greatest human need after the need for food. Leftism, with all its offshoots -- feminism, environmentalism, Black Lives Matter, antifa -- has filled that vacuum."
4. Lies: "Lies are the root of evil."

Of course, I interpret this through the lens of my Great Reaction idea. That the left is a lurch back to the primitive.

Thus, of course the left deals in victimhood. As I keep quoting, from Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

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

Right. So the troubles of the poor are all the fault of the corporations, or the whites, or something. For Hitler, the poor suffering Germans were the victims of the Jews. "There is always a fault at the bottom of it."

Thus, of course the left deals in demonization. This goes back to the notion of the scapegoat that was given a recent push by René Girard. The point of the scapegoat is to unite the community and put all of its divisions and arguments on a single person or group and then banish them from the community.

Thus, of course the left comes up with a succession of causes, socialism, feminism, climate change: a cause to believe in. We all are tormented by the need to know the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." That is what religion -- and science -- are all about. They are an effort to try and figure out what the heck is going on in this town, this world, this solar system, this galaxy, this universe.

Notice how the boundary of the Will to Know keeps expanding. Used to be that people were really concerned about the spirits in the local trees. Then they started worrying about the moon and the sun and the stars that revolved across the sky. Then they started worrying about the Sun as the center of the solar system. Then the Sun as just a medium star in the galaxy. Then galaxies in a universe of galaxies.

I predict that one day we will be worrying about a universe, or multiverse, or something, bigger than our current Big Bang created universe.

Thus, of course the left deals in lies. Because the lie is the shortcut to the truth. In truth, the truth is unknowable, or at least unfathomable. And all religions, philosophies, cultures, narratives are a shortcut to the truth. All of them, therefore, are lies. The only response is the classic line of Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken," that all knowledge, all ideas, all everything is incomplete, less than the truth. And that the beginning of wisdom is to understand that, deep in your bowels.

Now I maintain that the modern age is an astonishing miracle, that has repressed -- in the sense of Schopenhauer and Freud -- the basic primitive instincts that Dennis Prager listed. The point is that we can't have our larger society, our market economy, our multicultural cities, unless people repress their basic human instincts, to think that "someone is to blame," to want to punish the scapegoat, to believe, to jump to a cheap explanation that justifies your action.

But, you would expect, our ascent from the dusty plain to the current heights would not be without incident and setback. And, as new-age philosopher Ken Wilber has written, when things go wrong we regress to our old ways and consciousness. Of course we do. If our new ideas seem to falter we go back to what is old and familiar.

And that is why we have the left. Because there is a constant nagging feeling that in all our progress and modernity we have lost something, something that we imagine we used to have in the old community. Thus the left's nostalgia for the solidarity of olden days. Only, of course, life then was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

And you tell me why the left, that imagines itself a movement of rebellion against the injustices and repressions and intolerance of the modern age, is so devoted to political power and fault and vengeance.

It could be because they are idiots.

Three Religions for Three Peoples

Every human needs a way to cope with the experience of suffering, in other words a religion.

Now, I will tell you a mystery. Each of the three layers of people that we have described, with their three layers of culture, has a different religion. Of course they do. Each lives in a different world, and and each different world is experienced a different meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." The Subordinates or Clients tend to have a pre-Axial Age religion, with vengeful gods. The Responsibles or Commoners believe in a God that made the world, enacted his divine law and directed them to get on with it. There is a tendency among these folk to get beyond vengeance, as George Eliot taught her venerable Commoner Adam Bede to do with the help of that veritable saint, Dinah Morris.

Two Kinds of Hero’s Journeys

But what about the religion of the Creatives, the educated Gentry? That, of course, is the question before us.

The Creative class, the Gentry, the Somebodies, just know that they must have some vitally important role to play upon the stage of society. God, or rather Gaia, has decreed it. But what? This is where the brilliance of rich-kid Karl Marx, son of the leading lawyer in Trier, comes in. If you are a rich kid looking around for something meaningful to do why not gussie up a quick-and-dirty meaning of life, the universe and everything that explains the world as a sub-lunar battle between Us and Them: the capitalists vs. the workers, and then organize the workers and lead them to justice against the mean-spirited bourgeoisie? Or the minorities against the racists? Or the women against the patriarchy? Or the gays against the haters? Was Marx a genius, or what?

And what does it mean to make your religion about other peoples' suffering? Did Marx not feel suffering himself? Or was he sublimating his own sufferings onto others?

I find myself asking a question: Is this a rising to peaks beyond the “heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx,” or is it a lurch back to the primitive, to re-imagine that all suffering arises from a social or economic fault or from a “hater?” And that vengeance is the answer?

For in the primitive world-view Mircea Eliade teaches us that there “is always a fault at the bottom of it.” Really, if Marx hadn’t come up with this cunning plan, what else could the scions of the Gentry do with their primitive hate, poor things?

These Creatives sound to me like der Übermensch on stilts. But how can that be? Was not Nietzsche “the Nazis’ favorite intellectual?” How come our lefty friends are singing his song?

They are singing his song because the Nietzschean hero is an egoistic hero. That’s what our modern artists and writers and activistes and revolutionaries are all about: Ego Heroism. You solve the problems of the world in your creative manifesto or work of art or activist agenda and then demand the right to implement it, as activiste, or revolutionary, or expert, or Minister of the Department of Silly Walks, because the arc of history. And never mind the butcher's bill.

But whatabout yourself? Shouldn't the activiste heal himself before he heals the world? But that raises an agonizing problem: if the Egoistic Hero is not the answer, then what is?

The answer is as old as the hills and as new as yesterday: the Sacrificial Hero. We all know something about him because we all know about the iconic Sacrificial Hero, Jesus Christ, who died on the Roman cross, not to mention Moses who died before the Israelites reached the Promised Land. But the Sacrificial Hero is an archetype that shows up everywhere, and has been an especial interest of the followers of Carl Jung, including Joseph Campbell and recently Jordan B. Peterson. The whole idea of the Jungian archetype is that each archetype is encoded in our DNA, in our unconscious minds -- and has been, for aeons.

Earth to lefties: your activist, your Gramscian marcher through the institutions, your politician is not the Hero that will save the world. He is the monster, the dragon in the underworld, that sacrifices others to his fantastic dream of personal immortality.

The Hero’s Journey has been criticized: by academics that regard it as too general or too vague, by feminists that regard it as too masculine and privileged. But against them is George Lucas’s Star Wars phenomenon that was openly based on the Hero myth and struck a mystic chord that is still echoing. So the Hero myth clearly resonates with young men; Jungians might say that Star Wars activates certain archetypes in the male collective unconscious.

Perhaps the best place to start is to check off what the Hero is not. He is not the fanciful knight of the medieval romance, pace Wagner, the feudal princely raider dressed up as the servant of Christ. He is not the lefty activiste living the fantasy of revolution. He is not the leader of the nation, feted by battalions of flatterers or serviced by a 2,000 woman “Pleasure Squad.” He is not the ethnic leader warring against hate with an agenda of hate. He is not the peacocking journalist truckling to the powerful while imagining himself speaking truth to power.

And here is something else he, or she, is not, that I blogged about recently. He is not the expert that decides that a teenager is “psychosomatic” and should be taken away from her parents and confined in a hospital’s psychiatric unit. Nor is she the Harvard academic who believes that she ought to decide how other peoples’ children should be educated. This sort of thing is a plunge back into the past. This is what the Olympian gods were up to in The Iliad, deciding who would win and lose in each battle on the plains of Troy -- as the mood took them -- because they were gods. Surely, Mao, we are better than that.

The Hero is instead the mediator between Order and Chaos, and will probably die, a Sacrificial Hero, on that fateful border. But that is where the creative life must be lived, for life cannot long thrive in the arid safety and often the cruel hierarchy of Order and the experts. And life is unendurable as unmitigated Chaos.

So the Hero, privileged and masculine and Sacrificial, must descend from the safety of privilege and learn to navigate the dark realms of Chaos in a generalized and vaguely constructed archetypical journey into the underworld of the unconscious. For here be dragons.

But, what does the Hero's Journey mean, exactly?

Next: The Hero's Journey in Each of Us
Modern educated people are called on a creative life journey

Or back to Contents

The Question of Suffering

If Nietzsche ended his life by going mad, maybe he made a mistake in the development of his Übermensch philosophy. Maybe his mistake was to imagine that his revaluation of values for “we free spirits” could just vault nonchalantly over all the suffering and misery of the world. For, as Mircea Eliade records in The Myth of the Eternal Return, humans are eternally obsessed with the suffering of life, and that there must be a reason for all the misery.

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

There has to be a fault. And it has to be avenged.

Primitive man, according to Eliade, solves the problem of existence and its suffering by denying history, and lives life as an annual repeating cycle, with each New Year representing a new Creation following a brief descent into Chaos. Only with the Axial Age religions does mankind dare to enter history, with the priests and prophets promising an end to suffering at the End of Time. Nietzsche sneers at “the priests,” that they teach us to hate ourselves. But perhaps the opposite is true, that the priests have cunningly taught us to hope that the natural self-hate that issues from our universal suffering will be dissolved in the moment of Redemption.

And, of course, the Left’s secular religion learned from Marx is just another priestly attempt to resolve human suffering with the hope of Redemption. The Left offers the balm of social justice once the arc of history has been heroically bent by progressive political activists towards justice. Or is the left a lurch back to the primitive, insisting that all suffering arises from a social or economic fault or a “hater” and there has to be a fault? And boy, are we activists going to teach you haters a lesson!

So what do we do about it? After the Death of God how do we acknowledge the problem of suffering and yet invent a meaning to our lives that can give us the hope we yearn for? Humans did it in primitive times, and then later with the God of the Axial Age. We tried socialism, but a scientific experiment conducted in the 20th century by eminent social scientists Lenin, Stalin, and Mao proved that socialism created more suffering than it redeemed.

Can we invent a meaning for those for whom God is Dead but who hesitate to blame kulaks or billionaires or even white supremacists for human suffering? And if we succeed, we lordly thinkers, perhaps we can then take a step further -- and I warn you this is really radical. Suppose our lordly philosophy creates not just a narrative for us lordly ones, but actually thinks just a little about the rest of the world, and concedes to lesser breeds without the law their right to a meaning that makes sense for them: for primitives, yea, for ordinary deplorables -- foul racist-sexist-homophobes though we be -- and even for the “free spirit” bad boys, the Übermenschen of Nietzsche’s fevered dreams?

And, as a bonus, wouldn’t it be fun if we could conjure up a vision of the good life “more compelling than the fanatical march toward a virtuous future that the Left offers” that would appeal even to lefties? It would be nice for our fellow humans, considering how often that lefty dreams have ended in the abattoir.

Three Kinds of People

Nothing could be simpler. But first we have to take a leap of faith. There is always a leap of faith.

Let us suppose there are three kinds of people in the world. First, there are the primitives, that live in an eternal present, buffeted around by angry neighbors and wrathful gods. Second, there are the responsibles, living in history and seeking the dignity that attaches to people taking responsibility for their own suffering in the hope of eventual redemption. Third, there are Nietzsche types, that imagine themselves the creators of their own lives: Übermenschen, a cut above the rest.

Is this too simple? Yes of course it is: the world is infinitely complex and all our knowledge but a crude effort to keep dodging disaster. But it is still pretty sophisticated, for most people cannot understand anything except their own perspective: solipsism. Even so, many of us have managed climb out of solipsism to construct a two-kinds-of-people world of semi-solipsism: Us and Them: the good people and the evil people, where the evil people are barely human and are to blame for all our suffering.

Still, a lot of people have gone the extra mile beyond the binary of Us and Them. The Vikings had their earls, peasants, and “thralls” or slaves. Romans? Patricians, Plebeians, and Slaves. Why the number three? Because with anything more complicated you will lose your audience. I discuss this further here.

And then there is Curtis Yarvin, who proposes in his “Clear Pill” that modern society comes in three layers: Gentry, Commoners, and Clients -- after George Orwell’s Inner Party, Outer Party, and Plebs -- where

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

I have my own three-layer theory that I call my reductive Three Peoples theory. I introduced it here. It is pretty close to Yarvin’s theory. I have: the People of the Subordinate Self, that “attach themselves to a powerful patron in return for scraps from the lordly table;” the People of the Responsible Self that “must individually shoulder the responsibility of finding their place in the city scramble and holding onto it.” And then there are the People of the Creative Self, the special people:

Our modern son of the middle class wants to live a creative life, as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary. His sister wants to work in global health for a non-profit.

Yes, we creative people really are insufferable. Yarvin agrees; he describes his Gentry, as not so much creative as creatures of the ruling class, animated by “ambition, honor, and vanity.” I would say that most people that think of themselves as creative are fake-creatives. Really they are just intelligent ticket-punchers with an inflated idea of themselves: experts, scientists, and policy analysts. But they are Somebodies!

Here is a curious difference between Yarvin’s three-layer theory and my Three Peoples theory. It occurred to me, as most things do, in the middle of the night. Yarvin’s theory is an external theory, the description of actors on a stage: playing their roles as Gentry, Commoners, or Clients. My Three Peoples theory is an inner theory, about how people experience the world. Do you feel Subordinate, Responsible, or Creative today?

But what does it all mean? I will tell you.

The center of gravity of the modern world is the Responsible, the Commoner, the Anybody. These are people that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules. They have surrendered to the will of the market -- some people call this modern slavery -- which is to say that they live more or less willingly in the social cooperative system of the market where you work to produce, not for yourself, as a peasant farmer might, but for others in exchange for money. Responsibles learn to trust people that demonstrate trustworthiness, and a reputation for trustworthiness is the beginning of dignity.

If you are a Subordinate or Client, a Nobody, you have not yet learned how to wive and thrive in the modern world. You live in a tribe, or an ethnic enclave in a city, and trust only other tribe members. You “got your rights” and you expect someone else to tell you what to do and you imagine yourself as their loyal and beloved retainer. But in fact you are the Little Darling of your lord and his power project, and the day will come when he will no longer need you. Hello, white working class.

If you are a Creative or Gentry you are a problem, because even though you are Somebody chances are that you are neither very creative or very gentlemanly. The real creatives, the people that have transformed our modern world, have usually started out as Commoner Anybodies: Rockefeller the store clerk; Carnegie the telegraph messenger; Einstein the patent clerk; Jobs the castoff of educated parents raised by a coastguard mechanic. Good breeding and selective colleges don’t change the world.

But, obviously, these three kinds of people will experience suffering in different ways, and will need a different understanding of the meaning of "life, the universe and everything" in order to understand their suffering and hope for a better life, despite the sorrows of the world: in other words, each of the three kinds of people needs a different religion.

Next: Three Religions for Three Peoples
Your religion depends on your understanding of suffering

Or back to Contents

The Three Realities of the Three Peoples

I live under the notion that my reductive Three Peoples theory explains everything. 

OK, of course I don't believe that. Humans come in an infinite diversity of types. But I do think that it is helpful to divide people in these United States into three lumps, for the purpose of religious, cultural, and political analysis. Anything more complicated and you lose their attention.

In recent weeks, under the influence of Mircea Eliade in his book The Myth of Eternal Return, I have shined a new light on my theory, especially because of this pull quote:

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

When you think about it, we all have a tendency to do this, and the reason is pretty obvious. Our brains and our five senses are in the business of noticing things out there in the world that might affect us, beneficially or otherwise. This means that we are inclined not to think of everything that happens in the world as completely random. Survival in this world means tying events together into something meaningful when appropriate.

It doesn't take too much to imagine that a tiger or a wolf that is stalking you is malevolent. Hey, the darn animal is treating you like dinner. And the worst thing in the world for you right now would be to end up as someone's dinner.

So I propose that the basic reality of the People of the Subordinate Self is that the world is out to get them. Malevolent. And you will note that our lefty friends are pretty strong on suggesting to the various People of the Subordinate Self that they wish to recruit into their political army that there are malevolent racist-sexist-homophobes in our society that are out to get them. The ongoing riots over the death of forgery suspect George Floyd is an example of this lefty approach to politics. Who really cares about a 40ish night-club bouncer that has a heart condition and, it seems, a drinking and/or drug problem? Why would the eevil white supremacists care a whit about him?

But, obviously, the malevolence gambit works. People of the Subordinate Self vote, overwhelmingly, for lefty parties that sell the malevolence schtick. So I propose that, for the People of the Subordinate Self, an assumption of malevolence, of evil powers ganging up on you, is front and central in their world view. And this aligns with my view that People of the Subordinate Self live in a world prior to the advent of the Axial Age religions.

Now we come to the People of the Responsible Self, and I propose that People of the Responsible Self believe that the world runs on rules. That, of course, is the logic of having a God that created the world and then created His divine law. In this reality it is up to humans to take the world that God has created and be fruitful and multiply. Only, watch it. You don't want to break God's laws; that way lies disaster.

Now, I am not saying that Responsibles are perfect beings that soldier on irregardless without suspicion that their neighbor might be up to no good. Of course not. There is a lot of subordination in all of us. Humans are hierarchical, and that means that we are all subordinate to someone, and very often we hate it -- and them.

Obviously this kind of clockwork world that operates according to rules takes us right up to the beginning of the modern era but no further. Because the whole point of the modern era, starting with Hume, is that we cannot prove cause and effect. Correlation is not causation. We can't reduce the world to a set of rules.

After a couple hundred years of philosophizing about the problem that Hume set forth the geniuses came up with quantum mechanics and the "state function" to explain how the world works.

At the fundamental level -- or at least at the current understanding of the fundamental level -- subatomic "particles" are not really particles, but a fuzz of possibilities that only condense into something definite when an event occurs. And even then:-- when a single quantum of light goes through a double slit it forms an interference pattern when it hits a receptor.

What this means is that, at the fundamental level, God plays dice. You never know what is going to happen: it might rain or it might shine.

Now, I propose that the People of the Creative Self understand this. They have to, because when an artist creates something new he knows that the creation does not come out of a deliberate process of 2+2=4, but in a contingent process, an inspiration. 

In my own life I tend to say that my ideas come to me from my unconscious. When I encounter a problem, in ideas or in my usgovernmentspending.com website, I do not grind away at the problem; I get up and walk away. And then I find that the solution to a problem comes to me, irrationally, in the middle of the night. Or, as with Puccini, you could say that your music comes directly to you from God.

Now this applies to creative people whether they are writers, artists, business start-ups, whatever. There is always an aspect of chance, or good luck, or an unanticipated inspiration. or just being in the right place at the right time.

Let us call this the "creative state function." All the pieces that might come together in a creative act are fuzzing around in a state of probabilities. And if they come together into a wonderful creation it is the result of unknown probabilities. We have various ways of describing the flash of creation, the condensation of probabilities.

The most obvious example is the creation of every human life at the moment of conception where a single egg is beset by a crowd of sperm. Which one will break through the walls of the egg to start a new life? It's all a matter of probability, a "state function."

Of course, People of the Creative Self also believe in malevolence, and Rules. There is a lot of the Subordinate and the Responsible in each of them. But each creative lives in the hope of being the Chosen One, the result of a condensation of probabilities into a miraculous creation never before seen on this Earth. 

Personally I prefer the idea of life as a "creative state function," so I must be a People of the Creative Self. But I also respect the need for rules, and regretfully, I realize there is a lot of malevolence in the world, particularly where lefties are concerned.

So there is reason for hope, and also reason to despair. As it ever was.

Good Life in Brief

The ascendancy of today's lefty wokism presents us with a profound challenge. This challenge, as Spencer A Klavan demands, is to come up with “a vision of the good life more compelling than the fanatical march toward a virtuous future that the Left offers.” We must generate a new answer to the eternal question that every human yearns to answer: the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything," and which the left has got so thoroughly wrong.

But this new answer will not be an Absolute Truth, the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for all time. It will not be Forty-two: the representatives of the union of philosophers have ever demanded "rigorously defined areas of doubt and uncertainty." It will just be a pretty good answer, for now.

What should it be? The Olympian gods that determined the outcome of the Trojan war? A revival of Christian culture? Enlightenment reason and logic? Romantic individualism emphasizing inspiration and creativity? Obviously not the religion of lefty politics.

I have come to believe that this new vision must be based on the German Turn, the revolution in philosophy, in science, in politics, and in the sciences of the mind, that began with the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. It is the language of the modern world, and in particular, the language of the left: if you do not understand the German Turn you cannot understand the Wrong Turn of the left.

What does that mean? It means abandoning the idea that we can know reality, because logic and reason and because the other guys are governed by their feelings. On the contrary, said Kant, we cannot know "things-in-themselves" and anyway, as Freud said, 90 percent of our mind is "unconscious," or feelings by another name.

We humans have come a long way. We used to experience life and the universe as a complete mystery known only to the gods. Then we got wise and decided that our understanding of the world had been handed down by God to humans in a divine creation and a program of divine law. Today the modern imagines himself as the creator. He is a discoverer, an explorer, a creator. 

Thus we no longer believe that the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is the story of the gods on Mount Olympus. Nor do we advanced thinkers believe that the world was created in six days and that the suffering of life ends with a Redemption and the End of Time.

Nor can we advanced thinkers accept the leftist narrative that suffering is the fault of white oppressors, and will end when the arc of history finally bends towards justice as demanded in mostly peaceful protests by leftist activists.

The new meaning of "life, the universe, and everything," I will propose, is a personal existential journey, full of peril and most likely to end in disaster, or at least in failure. The creative explorer cannot be a proud activist but instead a humble traveler, a Sacrificial Hero.

The German Turn tries to understand this, lurching through Kant and Hegel and Goethe and Schopenhauer and Marx and Wagner and Nietzsche and Freud and Jung and Heidegger and Marcuse and Habermas and their Anglo-Saxon adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson, as I have investigated at length.

I say that the German Turn starts with Kant saying we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances, sense impressions that we then conjure up into a theory of reality. It continues, with the Romantics, that there is something that comes before logic and reason. It means, with Wagner, that there is a lot more in those ancient myths than mere superstition and something more in medieval romances than rescuing damsels in distress. 

It means, with Nietzsche, that any time a God is Dead the former believers cannot avoid a nihilist eternal recurrence ending in a revaluation of all values. It means, with Freud, that 90 percent of our mind is the unconscious mind. It means, with Jung, that we should work to better understand our unconscious and the archetypes with which it seems to be programmed to interpret and interact with the world. 

It means, with Horkheimer and Adorno, that “Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them” and with Habermas that humans do not live in a mechanical world but in a Lebenswelt, a “life-world,” Heidegger's being-there in a face-to-face culture of shared experience in the world.

But why are we so inspired to understand the world in a new way? Because the old ways do not have meaning for us any more. 

For a start, we cannot believe in the primitive experience, where humans are eternally obsessed with the suffering of life, and that there must be a reason for all the misery. To primitives, according to Mircea Eliade, human misery arises out of a fault, in ourselves or in our neighbor.

Primitive man, according to Eliade, solves the problem of existence and its suffering by denying history, living life in an annual repeating cycle, with each New Year representing a new Creation following a brief descent into Chaos. We still celebrate the new hope of every New Year, just like the ancients.

With the Axial Age religions mankind dares to enter history, but is taught to believe that suffering ends with a Redemption at the End of Time, the hope that the natural self-hate that issues from our universal suffering will be dissolved in the moment of Redemption.

The Left’s secular religion prophesied by Marx imagines it is replacing the Christian experience of personal Sin and guilt, and yet has proved to be just another priestly attempt to resolve human suffering with the hope of Redemption -- here on Earth rather than in Heaven. And it seems to include a lurch back to the primitive, insisting that all suffering arises from a social or economic fault or a “hate,” and that there has to be a fault. It doesn't seem to have worked out very well.

So now it is time to grow up and understand that suffering is forever, and imagine a new experience and analysis of suffering, one that does not deny history or insist on fault, or resolve it in the Sin and Redemption binary, but rather accepts its inevitability: dealing with suffering rather than blaming the Other or magically resolving it at the End of Time.

But how do we get to this new understanding of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything?" The best place to start is by telling the story of one modern creative that got it all wrong.

He was a modern religious prophet, rich-kid son of the leading lawyer in Trier. He created an ingenious meaning of "life, the universe and everything" that explained the world as a sub-lunar battle between Us and Them: the capitalists vs. the workers. But then there were special people like him, Communists, who would volunteer to organize the workers and lead them to justice against the mean-spirited bourgeoisie. Subsequent rich kids have proposed to organize the minorities against the racists. Or the women against the patriarchy. Or the gays against the haters. Was Marx a genius, or what?

I call this meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" Ego Heroism.

That’s what our modern artists and writers and activistes and revolutionaries and Ego Heroes are all about. You heroically solve the sufferings of the world in your creative manifesto or work of art or activist agenda and then demand, in a mostly peaceful protest, the right to implement it, as activiste, or revolutionary, or expert, or Minister of the Department of Silly Walks and end human suffering for evermore. And never mind the butcher's bill.

But shouldn't the activiste heal himself before he heals the world? Maybe the Egoistic Hero is not the answer. If not, then what?

The answer is as old as the hills and as new as yesterday: the Sacrificial Hero. We all know something about him because we all know about the iconic Sacrificial Hero, Jesus Christ, who died on the Roman cross, not to mention Moses who died before the Israelites reached the Promised Land. The Sacrificial Hero is an archetype that shows up everywhen and everywhere, and has been an especial interest of the followers of Carl Jung, including Joseph Campbell and recently Jordan B. Peterson.

But what is the Sacrificial Hero for our own time?

Perhaps the best place to start is to check off what the Hero is not. He is not the fanciful knight of the medieval romance. He is not the lefty activiste acting out a fantasy of revolution. He is not the leader of the nation, feted by battalions of flatterers or serviced by a 2,000 woman “Pleasure Squad.” He is not the peacocking journalist truckling to the powerful while imagining himself speaking truth to power. Nor is he the expert or the academic.

Our Hero is instead the mediator between Order and Chaos, and will probably die, a Sacrificial Hero, on that fateful border. But that is where the creative life must be lived, for life cannot long thrive in the arid safety and often cruel hierarchy of Order and the experts. And life is unendurable as unmitigated Chaos.

Notice how the idea of Sacrifice has changed over the years. Prior to Abraham, you sacrificed your son to the gods. Then, Abraham discovered, it was OK to sacrifice a lamb instead of Isaac. Later, God sacrificed his own son, Jesus Christ, to teach us to sacrifice ourselves rather than sons and lambs.

So the Hero, privileged and masculine and Sacrificial, must descend from the safety of privilege and offer himself to suffering, as he learns to navigate the dark realms of Chaos in a generalized and vaguely constructed archetypal journey into the underworld of the unconscious. For here be dragons. Another version of this is Nietzsche's journey through decadence, nihilism, and the terror of eternal recurrence to the revaluation of all values -- but that ended, in his case, in madness.

And the Hero's journey ends on the border of Order and Chaos where, if he is fortunate, our hero may expand the realm of Order just a little and thereby benefit the rest of humanity. Or maybe not.

Our hero does not experience suffering as someone else's fault; that is the primitive world-view. He does not experience suffering as something to be escaped through Divine Redemption; that is the Axial Age world-view. Nor does he experience suffering as the wages of inequality, or racism, or bigotry: that is the lefty world-view. For the Sacrificial Hero suffering is life, and life is suffering, and there is no escape from it.

To repeat: the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for the Creative person, for someone who aspires to the highest and the best, is the journey of the Sacrificial Hero, a terrifying journey into the underworld of the unconscious, and not the Ego Hero, the simplistic self-worship of the "ally" bravely advocating for the "oppressed peoples" suffering under the domination and exploitation of the "white oppressors." 

Wow! This is cool. But what about the Old Ones, the folk still living by the light of the Old Ways? What about the primitives, who experience suffering as somebody else's fault? What about responsibles, that accept the challenge of dealing with their own fault and suffering, but live in hope of eventual Redemption? And what about our lefty friends that live to be Redeemers, allies that will defeat the dragon of oppression?

The answer is simple. The Old Ones get to live their Old Way, and we, the Wise Ones, understand them, their reality, and the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" that they have developed to make sense of the world. And if we understand them, then surely we will be able to live in the world with them, to share a "life-world" with them and, as Habermas says, communicate with them and develop moral agreement. One thing we will not do is cancel them.

The new world that is to come begins with the discovery of a new meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" by a Sacrificial Hero that suffers on the border between Order and Chaos. But that is just the beginning. Then it is up to the prophets to prophesy new religions. Then it is up to the writers and artists and thinkers to imagine new cultures. Then it is time for politicians to teach a new generation of people how he cares about people like them, and for Anybodies to create the next technological revolution.

And what these creative prophets will preach and creative writers will write and sauntering politicians will enticingly offer will also include a respectful and insightful understanding of the needs of people not like them: ordinary Responsibles, for whom meaning involves accepting the challenge from a God that created the world and laid down the rules for a good life that they try to follow; and the needs of Subordinates, who will always look to a beneficent Oz to make things right.

Years ago I thought that it would take generations to work all this out. But then I thought that if a guy like me, that had read a few books, could see the blurry outline of the problem and the glimmerings of an answer then probably brighter lights had already solved the problems. Only their lights were still emerging from under a bushel. So now I have a faith that the truth is out there, the prophets are already born, the writers are already writing, and the politicians are already rehearsing their sound bites. 

If I can imagine a blurred “vision of the good life” through a glass darkly, surely the geniuses have already seen the new peaks rising vividly before them, face to face.

Next step: "What is the Meaning of Life?"

Human Sense and Sensibility Never Change

A couple of days ago I just couldn't take it any more, so I whipped out my copy of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and reread it.

Every time I reread Jane Austen I seem to penetrate to a new depth.

For instance, it seems to me that all the characters, for all that they are Regency era swells, are no different that humans today.

All the women in Sense and Sensibility are prone to "hysterics" except our heroine Elinor.

OK. We are not allowed to use that word today. Sexism, dontcha know. But today almost all women jump at the chance to have a Satisfying Emotional Experience. So what's the difference? Both emotional experiences are predicated on the presumption that someone will show up and pat the little dear and tell her how helpless and innocent she is.

So, in those days we had "hysterical" females. Today we have females that get totally bent out of shape by a "microagression."

The exception, our heroine Elinor Dashwood, has all the emotional responses that all the other women are having. Only she keeps it bottled up, because someone has to keep on carrying on.

Eventually, her sister Marianne realizes what a heavy load Elinor has been carrying, and begs her forgiveness. But only in the novel, not in real life.

The men, except for the peerless Colonel Brandon, are moral cretins. They flop around engaging the affections of all the unattached young women, without a thought for what they are doing. And only in retrospect do they realize what bounders they are. Or, like John Dashwood, they are analyzing the world purely in monetary terms, of pounds a year in income, and assuming that everyone else sees the world that way.

Of course the women, whoever they are, spend the whole novel judging the other women and their behavior. So nothing has changed there.

But here is a puzzler. It raises the question of just how satirical Austen was. For instance, in Volume III, Chapter VIII, Elinor ruminates on the dastardly Willoughby, and judges his "extravagance and vanity," his every "faulty propensity," as though she were God.

I suppose the genius of Jane Austen is that we can never really be sure when the character is speaking, when Austen is speaking, or indeed when Austen's Muse is speaking.

Maybe if I took the time to read Austen's letters with her sister Cassandra in Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others I might find out.

In any age, of course, people are busily judging others with complete confidence in their authority to do so. Ben Stein reports on a 78-year-old liberal lady castigating him for a comment on China.

“I don’t want to hear that,” she said angrily. “It’s not the ‘Chinese virus’ like Trump says. It’s just a virus and to call it the Chinese virus defames all of the wonderful people of Chinese descent in our country. It’s racist and I don’t want to hear it.”

Sweetie Pie Ben "didn’t want to argue about it for even a moment." But I rehearsed in my mind the sort of comeback appropriate for the occasion. Maybe this:

I don't know about that, but have you ever thought that pejorative rhetoric like that is what is going to get us more Trumps?

I am doing a long think piece right now that is anchored in this thought from Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

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

Humans are obsessed with the question of suffering, and I would argue that it is not just "primitives" that are obsessed with it. Axial Age religions are obsessed with Sin and Redemption, where Sin is the consequence of trying to avoid suffering, and post Death of God secular ideologies are likewise all in unison that the sufferings of the marginalized and oppressed are all the fault of someone, a someone that is probably white and probably male and certainly privileged.

But what if our obsession with suffering is just a human conceit? That suffering is nobody's fault, least of all racist-sexist-homophobes and Satans and Old Scratches. That life, the universe, and everything is uncertain, with a quantum theory roll of the dice every moment.

Surely it cannot be so. Because what would all the moral arbiters and bullies do then, poor things?

Mircea Eliade -- Contents

Mircea Eliade and the Primitive

1. Understanding Initiation from the Ancients
   
   
2. We Have Nationalism Because Humans are Tribal
   
   
3. Suffering, Religion, History, and the Three Peoples
   
   
4. Human Sense and Sensibility Never Change
   
   
5. The Three Realities of the Three Peoples
   
   
6. The Question of Suffering
   
   
7. Three Religions for Three Peoples
   
   
8. Dennis Prager Itemizes My Great Reaction
   
   
9. But Tear Gas and But Hate
   
   
10. Moths Attracted to the Flame of Power
    
    
11. "Progressive Fatalism?" How to Miss the Point
    
    
12. Murray Facing Reality: The Setup

Suffering, Religion, History, and the Three Peoples

According to Nietzsche, the Eternal Recurrence is the end point of decadence, the decline from growth and optimism. When you start to fall away from the faith of the fathers, then you get to nihilism, where you don't believe in anything. Then you get to the Eternal Recurrence, where your life is a meaningless repeat, day after day: Groundhog Day.

But in The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History Mircea Eliade tells a different story. For him, the Eternal Return is a way, invented by our ancestors, of dealing with the unbearable suffering of life by escaping from history, and it is characteristic of all primitive peoples, pre Axial Age.

[S]uffering proceeds from the magical action of an enemy, from the breaking a taboo, from entering a baneful zone, from the anger of a god -- and when all other hypotheses have proven insufficient -- from the will or the wroth of the Supreme Being. (p.97) The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

But, in addition, primitive man escapes from history, the whole miserable story of endless suffering, with the Eternal Return, the annual renewal of the world in New Year celebrations, which erase the past and starts the world anew with a celebration that both marks a return to the chaos before the Creation and celebrates a new creation in the New Year.

You can see that this attitude survives into the modern era in the belief systems of the People of the Subordinate Self or Yarvin's Clients. Our lower classes attribute their sufferings to the malevolence of employers and billionaires. Or Jews, according to taste. And our periodic elections provide a chance for a new beginning, a Time for a Change, or Hope and Change, endlessly recycling without end.

Notice how this approach conflicts with Nietzsche. According to him, the Eternal Recurrence is the end point of decadence and failure and meaninglessness: really dumb. According to Eliade, the Eternal Return is an attempt to erase the eternal sufferings of life and begin anew: pretty clever.

Now, according to Eliade, when we get to the Axial Age religions, the priests are now trying to deal with history instead of hiding from it. Well, almost.

[History] can be tolerated because it is known that, one day or another, it will cease. History is thus abolished, not through consciousness of living in an eternal present... nor by means of a periodically repeated ritual... [as with primitives;] it is abolished in the future.

But the point is that, at some point, all the sufferings, i.e., history, will end. Yay!

Now, in Eliade's account, the question of "sin" arises when, e.g., with the Children of Israel, the prophets start selling the idea that the misfortunes of the Israelites are a consequence of them losing their faith in God.

Through their terrifying visions the prophets but confirmed and amplified Yahweh's ineluctible chastisement upon His people who had not kept the faith.

Do you see what is going on here? All of a sudden "the priests" are demanding that people take responsibility for their actions. You fall off the wagon, pal, and disaster will ensue. In other words, the Israelites are now supposed to be People of the Responsible Self, responsible for their lives before God and not mere helpless thralls that go crawling to the sorcerer or sacrificing the firstborn to the Supreme Being when things go wrong.

Note that Nietzsche excoriates "the priests" for teaching us to hate ourselves. But on Eliade's version, the priests are merely asking us to take responsibility for our lives, that our suffering is not the result of "the magical action of an enemy" but our own faults and sins. Got it, Fritzi?

OK. Whatabout our pals the People of the Creative Self? Where do they get off in this battle of the intellectual giants. Perfectly simple.

Nietzsche is telling us that we need to be free spirits, strong, growing, fearless. Willing to take the rough with the smooth, indeed actually seeking out challenge and difficulty. He is saying that we should stop whining about suffering, and trying to hide from history. Be a Man. That is what Nietzsche is saying.

Now it may be that the Nietzschean ideal is not just Übermensch, over-man, but beyond-man, that it challenges us to be something that is really beyond the capabilities of humans. That we cannot forget our sufferings and our fears, and need the comforts of the Eternal Return of the primitives or the Eternal Rest of eternity after history has ended.

And you may say that the collapse of Nietzsche into madness in 1890 proves this. Nietzsche, despite all his bold writing, could not really deal with the ideal he had conjured up. He set up his ideal of the man that lives without the comforts of home and the promise of paradise, but in the end couldn't live up to his ideal.

And you may say that our own overlords, the People of the Creative Self and Yarvin's Gentry, are jolly good at thinking up rules and standards for us Normals to live up to. But when it comes to themselves, the law doesn't apply to them. Any backtalk from the deplorables is rejected as racist-sexist-homophobic hate.

All true. But I think that it just shows that the Creative Turn is a lot more difficult and challenging than we first thought, back in the day when we special people decided that God is Dead.

We Have Nationalism Because Humans are Tribal

Today Jonah Goldberg does a piece where he can inveigh both against the left's idea of nationalism and the Trump idea of populist nationalism. Jonah dislikes "nationalism and populism of the Left and the Right, regardless of the brand names they hide behind."

Jonah takes off against liberal Elizabeth Bruenig, who argues against nationalism thusly:

America simply isn’t a nation-state; it was neither conceived to nor can it foster the “organic” nationalism Trumpish conservatives now seem fixated on. Nations are made up of people who claim to share certain unchosen characteristics: language, ethnicity, historic religion, mystical destiny. In America, not only is it the factual case that we do not share such things, but it’s rather the point of our existence as a country — or was, once. Liberal democracies prize freedom and self-determination, so it follows that Americans are made by beliefs and choices, not by blood and tongue. American nationalism can shatter lives and breed violence, but it won’t ever amount to the creation of an American nation. Such a thing does not exist. 

But nationalism has been central to liberalism, according to Jonah, from the original Progressives and their "moral equivalent of war" to the nationalism of the New Deal to President Obama gushing over "Seal Team Six as a model for domestic life."

If we have to have some form of nationalism, Jonah would prefer the "benign nationalism" offered by Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru.

I would argue, of course, that all these folks are wet behind the ears. Here's how.

Humans are tribal social animals. The reason for this is simple. In the hunter-gatherer era, that only began to end when agriculture was invented in China and/or the Middle East some 5,000 years ago, humans were organized in small tribes that defended their patch of land from all the world. So the humans had the attitude of Seal Team Six, defending the tribe's land to the death. We may say that tribalism is deeply encoded in our DNA.

OK, so then came the agricultural era, gradually displacing hunter-gatherer tribes over the last 5,000 years. There is less need for tribalism, except in the fierce marcher lords that defended the frontiers of agricultural empire. Everyone else could just be a nice subordinate peasant. In Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays we see the last hurrah of England's marcher lords as Harry Percy, marcher lord on the border between England and Scotland, and Worcester, marcher lord on the border between England and Wales, made war against the King of England. The larger political unit of England may make a lot of sense, but your marcher lord still had a lot of tribal leader left in him, and he made a lot of trouble.

The nation state is a solution to the marcher lord problem. In England the nation state began with Henrty VIII disarming the nobles and creating a national army. So now marcher lords were no longer leaders of potential rebel armies; the king was the only guy with an army. Instead the nobles began to "improve" their lands and make more money so they could afford to cut a dash in the court of the capital city.

But if you are not going to have tribes any more, but instead a nation, how do you inspire tribal humans to feel like they belong to the nation state instead of their ancient local loyalties?

The answer is that you create a national myth. This is an ancient practice. In the olden times, described by Mircea Eliade in books like Rites and Symbols of Initiation, you had a tribal history compressed into a sacred story of the founding of the tribe, by founders that were really gods. And the sacred story was taught to the youngsters at puberty in rites of initiation.

In Britain they have a national myth about Britain being an indivisible nation going all the way back to William the Conqueror in 1066. In France they believe in Charlemagne as the founder. In Germany they believe in Karl der Große, which is German for Charlemagne. The Germans also had the cult of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which creates a history of the Germans as the true heirs of both the Roman Empire and Christianity, which is something of a joke since the Germans were never part of the Roman Empire. All these nationalisms are really remarkably ingenious efforts to create a tribal myth, a cult of the nation, using the concepts and tropes used back in tribal times when humans really were organized into real tribes where everyone was related by blood. In all these myths, the notion is developed that we are all descended from the same stock going back into the mists of time. Even though we aren't.

Now let us invoke the shade of Enoch Powell, the notorious British politician that first raised the spectre of immigration in his "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968. He was basically saying that immigration would dissolve the notion of Britain as a nation state with its special sacred history, and that could lead to civil war. Although Powell was branded as a racist and a bigot, he was in fact a classical scholar that rose from private to brigadier in World War II working in military intelligence, and then became a Conservative member of Parliament.

Powell also said that the European Union could never work because there was no such thing as a European demos or people that thought of themselves as Europeans.

Actually Powell was not quite right on that. In Europe, the educated elite does think of itself as European. But the average German, or Frenchman, or Brit, does not. The broad mass of the average middle class still identifies with the nation, not the continent. And that is a problem for the European project; it is the reason why Brexit and Marine Le Pen and the AfD exist.

The bottom line is this. Every government, when it wants to embark on some national project, will find that it has to appeal to some sort of collective identity, some sort of notion of the tribe writ large. That is why Jonah Goldberg got to write a critique of our Progressive rulers in Liberal Fascism as semi-fascists wrapping themselves in the American flag when they wanted to unite the nation in World War I and the New Deal and then World War II.

But the leaders do that not because they are fascist villains, but because they have to find a way to unite the people when they want to get them to consent to some great collective project. Thus  the lefty and anti-war Barack Obama discovers the virtues of Seal Team Six, the special forces warriors that winkled out Osama bin Laden.

Now, the ruling class in the US, like the ruling class in Europe, has felt itself in the last few decades rising above the surly bonds of nation into the ethereal heights of globalism. And most educated people go along with this. Thus my liberal neighborhood is plastered with #WeBelieve and Hate has No Home Here yardsigns. That takes care of the educated elite. For the lower orders, the ruling class practices identity politics, which I call neo-tribalism. In other words, the ruling class must use some way of uniting its supporters into a collective identity. If it doesn't want to invoke the notion of the nation, then it has to use something else, and that something else has turned out  to be racist and sexist and gender-non-conforming identity politics, with all opponents branded as racists, sexists, and homophobes. Go figure!

The problem with the ruling class's globalism combined with race and gender identity politics is that it leaves out the ordinary broad middle class, people that are neither educated nor immigrant nor race-identifying. You can see that this could create a bit of a problem if, say, the ruling class wanted to lead the nation to war against some existential threat. What gods to you invoke? What ancestors? What national unity?

Into this hole have stepped Donald Trump and the neo-nationalists in Europe, to the consternation of the globalist educated ruling class and the identity politicians representing racial or gender subcultures. Who are these gate-crashers? Are they fascists, or ethno-nationalists, or populists, or white nationalists, or what?

The answer is: none of these. They are politicians, opportunists. They are trying to create a new approach to the virtual community of the nation. We humans do not live in small enough communities where we can be unified by appeals to actual tribal and kindred loyalties, so we have to be mobilized and unified by a fancy of belonging, to the national flag, to the idea of the nation as family, to the idea of the American people. Really, to anything that stirs the chords of memory, the instincts of the tribe, in modern people.

Donald Trump in his State of the Union Speech on January 30 was trying to birth a new form of unity, the unity of all the ordinary Americans overcoming their private challenges: the guy with a small manufacturing firm hiring and training a black welder, the kid planting flags on the graves of veterans, the families devastated by criminal immigrant gangs, the couple adopting the child of a drug addict. Do you see the genius of this? The fact is that the great majority of Americans are not educated liberals with their #WeBelieve signs advocating climate change and gay marriage. They are not tribal immigrants that have not yet assimilated into the city culture of the exchange economy. They are ordinary people that just want to wive and thrive, get a good job, find a house they can afford and raise a family. And they want to believe that their way of life is good and worthy. President Trump is trying to create a sense of community in these ordinary people, that they are the real "America" and that Trump is trying to "Make America Great Again" for people like them.

I think that the argument over nationalism, from the proposition nation to benign nationalism, to ethnic nationalism, to the awkward elite combination of globalism and identity politics misses the point.

The point is how to unite modern citified people working in the exchange economy into some fancy of a collective identity that makes them feel they belong, as hunter-gatherers once belonged to their little tribe. Our liberal friends don't like Trump's approach for obvious reasons. If the Trump approach  succeeds it puts their globalist/identity politics model on the scrap heap of history.

The question is: do our liberal friends have a better idea? Watching our Democratic friends sitting on their hands as President Trump made a pedal-to-the-metal appeal to ordinary middle-class Americans, honoring their modest, but sincere, achievements, I would say that they are out of ideas, out of gas, and out of joint.

And then there is Jonah Goldberg, who is comfortably against the nationalism of both left and right, although open to some kind of benign nationalism. OK, Jonah, where is your cunning plan to find a better, nobler way to create some sort of cultural myth that people can believe in and unite around? 'Cos yer cain't beat something with nothing.

Understanding Initiation from the Ancients

I was down in the Bay Area last week and got out alive with my skin and a book from Copperfield's in Petaluma. The book was Mircea Eliade's Rites and Symbols of Initiation.

Very good, but the whole book revolved, for me, around the Introduction, where Eliade asserts the basic difference between us and the ancients. Why is it, he asks, that we do not practice "initiation" into adulthood, whereas all the ancients did? The answer:

Modern man's originality... lies precisely in his determination to regard himself as a purely historical being, in his wish to live in a basically desacralized cosmos.

You could say that we moderns orient ourselves by reading history, by gradually building up a knowledge of the world, by the gradual accumulation of innovation and discovery over the decades and the centuries. But ancient man had no history, no libraries of knowledge and sacred books. And yet ancient man needed to know the meaning of life, the universe and everything just as we do.

So ancient man devised the initiation, a process whereby the youth was indoctrinated in all the tribe's knowledge of the world. Ancient peoples do not have a history, but a "sacred history" in which all events are projected back into a primordial time of gods and heroes. Let us put this out in long form:

[T]raditional societies tend to project every new acquisition [of knowledge or history] into the primordial Time, to telescope all events in the same atemporal horizon of the mythical beginnings.

Thus the point of initiation of boys into manhood:

It is to this traditional knowledge that the novices gain access. They receive protracted instruction from their teachers, witness secret ceremonies, undergo a series of ordeals. And it is primarily these ordeals that constitute the religious experience of initiation -- the encounter with the sacred. 

You can see that for a traditional, preliterate society the transmission of the Knowledge to the new generation is a vital task, intimately connected with the survival of the tribe. Indeed, the smaller the tribal unit the more critical is the transmission of knowledge, because if any one young man or woman fails to get the message it may mean the end of the tribe. In our larger societies, this urgency is not so immediate. A significant fraction of a generation can twirl away into folly without bringing the survival of society into question. These fools will just fail to wive and thrive, and drain away into the sand. Or perhaps, occasionally, some one or two of them will discover something transformational, and the new knowledge will be incorporated into the sum of society's understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

Of course, the idea that we have abandoned intiation is crazy. We still have initiation, only we call it "school" "university" and "education." That is how we teach the young the Knowledge, the right ways of thought and action, all the right things approved by our ruling class. So nothing has changed. And as for "ordeal," we now have mandatory classes for the young in diversity and inclusion and white privilege.

Naturally, I want to use this information in my quest to understand and demolish the reactionary culture of the left, where I identify identity politics as neo-tribalism and the welfare state as neo-feudalism. It seems to me that the culture of activism, against which I rail with frequency, is a process of initiation, similar to the ancient practice, that teaches the young the left-wing knowledge, and all the correct faith and action in connection with the ancients like Marx and Engels, particularly the faith in the sacred practice, the "ordeal" of "peaceful protest."

Yes, because public protest is not something that people naturally do. The good old "riot" much feared by our bourgeois ancestors was, or tended to be, an instinctive outbreak of madness in response to hard times. But our lefty friends have institutionalized the riot into the sacred observance of the peaceful protest with its very well developed chants, responses, liturgies and processions.

We are, after all, not so very different from our ancestors. Evolution and genetic changes are measured over millennia, according to scientists, and the agricultural age is no more than several thousands of years old, whereas our modern era is no more than hundreds of years old.

And that is why I maintain that our modern lefty reaction is as natural as the birds and the bees. Of course the modern era, with its call to abandon tribe and subordination, has inspired a vast movement of rejection. We are still tribal, feudal, and need to be initiated into the Knowledge in order to take our places as adults.

But for us radicals and revolutionaries that want to introduce our fellow humans, ever so gently, to the new ways and ideas, the lefty reactionaries are a heavy burden to bear.