Yes, But the Republicans Have Nothing

Now that our Democratic friends are staring utter failure in the face, the latest "messaging" is that Republicans don't believe in anything, e.g., WaPo's Jennifer Rubin: "Republicans are embarrassed to tell us what they are for."

Well yes. And part of that is that chapettes like Jennifer Rubin and the whole of the rest of the educated class sneers at the modest goal of ordinary American Commoners to live an ordinary life of going to work, obeying the laws, following the rules, having children and living in a nice house in the suburbs.

People on the right get in on the sneering act too. David Cole at Taki's is always up for a sneer at the utter ineffectiveness of Repubicans.

And frankly, I get it. What in the world is the point of arguing whether John Locke was a Christian or not when our lefty friends are telling us to worship their LGBT gods or else?

And what does the Republican Party have to offer to counter the wall-to-wall spending something-for-everyone spending spree and saving the world from climate change?

Because everyone deserves free stuff and everyone wants to save the world from burning up.

Well. I'd say that the free-stuff and save-the-world is on the way to self-destruction.

Free stuff? I discussed that yesterday in respect of Charles Murray's work. His books show pretty conclusively that the big-government model of the Great Society programs Makes Things Worse for the very people they are intended to help. And the current education and credentials system modified by racist DEI is making life really cool for the educated class, but Making Things Worse of average people and much worse for lower class people.

And I think that ordinary people are going to be reacting big time against the green agenda that means the end of personal transportation and cheap energy.

But then what?

Thank you Senator, I'm glad you asked that.

I used to wonder about what the next regime would be like.

Wait, using the "downstream" notion of Andrew Breitbart, I'd have to say that I know what the next politics will look like, what the next culture will look like, what the next religion will look like, what the next meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" will look like.

And I am here to say that I didn't invent any of it. It's all out there; all you have to do is look for it.

First of all, you must understand that there are three kinds of people. I didn't invent that; tons of thinkers have come up with the idea of Three Layers of humanity. Curtis Yarvin's idea is that the top layer is Educated Gentry; the middle layer is ordinary middle-class Commoners; and the bottom layer is Clients -- or serfs or underlings.

The Clients need a boss to tell them what to do; the Commoners need a set of rules to tell them what to do; the Gentry need the chance to invent new rules, be creative.

The next regime needs to help the Clients learn how to live by a set of rules rather than today's order from the boss. It needs to help the Commoners get a bit creative; and it needs to teach the Gentry that ordinary people are not their playthings: their creative projects should be about improving themselves, not improving others.

Second, we need to internalize what has happened in philosophy, and knowledge generally in the last 200 years. I call it the German Turn and it left the lefty dream of Heaven on Earth and the Road to Justice in the dust 50 years ago.

Roughly speaking, the human world of the future will not be a system, a political cultural machine. It will be an emergent lifeworld, a community in the world with other humans with whom we communicate and negotiate and develop moral agreement in an ongoing person-to-person process, per Jürgen Habermas.

Notice how, at present, the way the world works is that the Educated Gentry imposes its moral system on the rest of us rather than engaging and negotiating morals and values with others as respected people that just think differently than they do.

What sort of person would the people in the new Educated Gentry of the human lifeworld be? I've sketched it out in my series "A Good Life Better Than the Left."

I have to say that none of these ideas are mine. They are all ideas and concepts that are out there in the world that I have encountered in my reading. And I don't suggest that anything is the last word. Indeed, the whole point of the notion is that it is emerging, developing, through the interactions of people, and not a fixed eternal system imposed from above or from outside.

Then, of course, it doesn't matter if Republicans Have Nothing. Things will just develop, on their own.

Poor Bloody Germans -- and US

Everybody knows that the Germans are guilty forever for electing and then knuckling under to Hitler and his totalitarian fascist regime.

How could Heidegger collaborate with the Nazis? La Wik: "There is controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazism." And how could you read Nietzsche, the "Nazis' favorite intellectual?" How could ordinary people go along with Hitler and put on those swastikas, and serve in his Wehrmacht?

But I have begun to think, now that our ruling class and government are getting more, er, authoritarian, that maybe it is time to give the Germans some slack.

After all, who among us really has the courage to risk job, bank account, and freedom from the bottomless malevolence of the Deep State? Or stand up in class and take your college instructor to task for his lefty lies? Or dare ever again to protest in front of the US Capitol while Nancy Pelosi is the boss of the Capitol Police?

I'd say you have to be almost crazy to have the courage to stand without flinching against the power of the state. Especially when the state feels threatened, as right now.

Let's rehearse how the Germans got to Literally Hitler.

First, they lost the Great War, mainly thanks to US President Wilson, a former college president, who sent the dough-boys into France to show the world who was boss.

Second, their brilliant Reichsbankpresident Havenstein blew up the currency with money printer go brrrrrrrr.

Third, President Wilson & Co. imposed a humiliating peace on the Germans at the Treaty of Versailles, including reparations and breaking off East Prussia from the rest of Germany.

Fourth, Germany got really screwed by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the failure of the US Federal Reserve to perform its job as "lender of last resort."

So, by 1933, Germans were looking for a "strong leader" to get them out of a mess. Generally, the logic of being a strong leader is that you identify some enemy and lead the nation to defeat it. Hitler chose the Jews.

Imagine what is in store for Americans in the next few years.

First, President Biden has lost a war in Afghanistan and has humiliated the United States.

Second, our brilliant Federal Reserve is printing money go brrrrrr.

Third, the Europeans are probably going to humiliate President Biden and the US. Hey, maybe the Germans will tell us to get out troops out of Germany while they go dance with the Russians.

Fourth, there's likely to be riots in the streets when Biden lifts the moratoriums on rent, mortgage, and student debt.

One of the things about the German experience in the 1920s was that the middle class got royally screwed by the hyperinflation and then royally screwed by the Great Depression.

One thing about the American experience in the 2020s is that the middle class is getting royally screwed by inflation, by lockdowns, by systemic racism, by CRT in schools, by outrageous college costs. Oh, and energy costs.

So, by 2024, Americans will be looking for a "strong leader" to get us out of a mess. Generally the logic of being a strong leader is that you identify some enemy and lead the nation to defeat it. I wonder who our Literally Hitler will choose as the enemy. Probably not the Jews. Probably not the Blacks. That's been tried before. Hey, I know! How about the Wokey Deep State!

Yep. It looks like 2024 will be a replay of 2016. Only the players will know their lines a lot better than in 2016.

I wonder who will be blamed forever after as Literally Nazis.

"Wittgenstein's Vienna:" When a Ruling Class is Losing It

Do we care about Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, which is all about putting philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's life and work in the context of the fin de siècle Vienna in which he grew up?

Well, I do, for several reasons. First, I am interested in the decline and fall of a ruling class, and what it looks like. Second, I am interested in better understanding the context of Wittgenstein's philosophy and thought. Third, I am interested in the cultural clash between the feudal-era Hapsburgs, the 19th century Viennese bourgeoisie, and the creative class chappies from Karl Kraus the journalist, Adolf Loos the architect, Arnold Schönberg the composer and, of course, Ludwig Wittgenstein the rich-kid philosopher and dropout. Fourth, I want to believe that our current ruling class is as clueless and myopic as the ruling clique in Hapsburg Vienna.

Decline and Fall of a Ruling Class: The Habsburgs were perhaps the most successful ruling class in history. Habsburg Castle was built in 1020, and Habsburgs were heads of the Holy Roman Empire from 1440 to 1740 and produced kings of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, Spain, Portugal and Galicia-Lodomeria. At the end of the 19th century the emperor Franz Joseph I ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire from Vienna. You can imagine that all the lefty rich kids chattering in the cafés of Vienna absolutely hated this tottering remnant of feudalism into the modern era.

The Habsburgs ruled on the basis of Hausmacht which translates as house-power, and I interpret as governing to preserve and protect the power of the House of Habsburg. That is to say, everything that Franz Joseph did was an act to keep the Habsburg thing going. And so it did, until the defeat in 1918. Hey, it worked, keeping the ancient family in power until World War I swept the old order away.

Philosophical Context: Philosophically, I am a Kantian: I believe that we humans cannot know "things-in-themselves," only "appearances." Put crudely, I think that we cannot know the real reality, whatever it is -- if it is. Between things-in-themselves and appearances are all the theories and assumptions and science and philosophy that flesh is heir to and that we have such a grand old time arguing about.

Now Wittgenstein grew up in the era when all the science that we now take for granted was being proposed and argued about. For instance, Heinrich Hertz  was developing a "model" theory of science and Ludwig Boltzmann was developing the idea of statistical mechanics that is now the core of quantum mechanics.

Then there was Ernst Mach who proposed to reduce "all knowledge to sensation;" so "the world is that sum total of what appears to the senses." 

Hertz in his Principles of Mechanics proposed a "model" theory of science, that tests of "a representation of mechanical phenomena are logical consistency, correspondence with empirical data, and simplicity or elegance of presentation." Wittgenstein used Principles in his university studies.

Boltzmann's statistical mechanics is too complicated to discuss here, except to note that Max Planck picked up on it.

In this way, one could eliminate finally all subjective references, to "sensations of warmth" and the like, which lingered on in Machian accounts of heat theory and replace them with rigorous mathematical descriptions.

Needless to say, Wittgenstein was a Hertzian and a Boltzmannian, not a Machian.

Cultural Clash: Let us propose the following clashing cultures: the feudal Habsburg monarchy, the various nationalities in the Habsburg empire, the rising bourgeoisie, the rising industrial workers, the Jews, the rising intelligentsia. The Habsburgs were trying to manage all this to stay in power; the nationalities were each agitating to advance their separate national interest; the bourgeoisie was creating wealth and prosperity in the new industrial era, and building ornate houses to reflect their satisfaction; the new working class was having problems because of a severe housing shortage in Vienna; the Jews were shooting into the stratosphere after centuries in the ghetto; the creative intelligentsia was fit to be tied by the insult of Habsburg power, the mindlessness of the rich bourgeoisie that thought that just copying the fashionable taste was the way to organize life, and the need to create the world anew.

Wittgenstein's family history is canonical. His father, Karl, rebelled against his father, wanting to get a technical education, which his father considered beneath his status as a "gentleman." So Karl want off to America, and went to technical school on his return.

Over the next twenty years the financial world of Vienna witnessed the meteoric rise of Karl Wittgenstein to the heights of business success. He had an extraordinary capacity for utilizing his technical knowledge to transform failing factories into booming and productive enterprises.

But this immensely creative man -- he took his violin everywhere and just about everyone in the family was a talented musician -- would not allow his children to go their own way, Elder brother Hans wanted to be a musician; dad said no, and eventually Hans committed suicide. "His second son, Rudi, committed suicide in similar circumstances[.]"

Karl Wittgenstein had all his kids educated at home by tutors. But this meant that Ludwig could not go to a Gymnasium, because he didn't know Greek. So he went to Realschule and then engineering school (like Einstein) where he read, learned, and inwardly digested The Principles of Mechanics of Heinrich Hertz.

And of course, there was the intellectual culture of chaps like Kraus, Loos, and Schönberg.

There was Karl Kraus, the polemicist and satirist, who, the authors assert, held that the "tender fantasy [of womankind]... forms the unconscious origin... of all inspiration and creativity." And what he hated was the hypocrisy of the bourgeois culture that harassed prostitutes and homosexuals.

There was Adolf Loos, the father of modernist architecture, who hated decoration and the bourgeois "craze for totally meaningless articles of decoration" in their houses, "all purely for show."

There was Arnold Schönberg, the composer that gave us "the twelve-tone row" and whose music represents "attacks on the pseudo-sophistication of bourgeois aestheticism." See, Schönberg, like the critic of Wagner, Eduard Hanslick, "considered the question, how a composition sounds, as having no importance."

So the "beautiful" in music is, for Schönberg, a by-product of the composer's integrity, a function of his search for truth[.]

Notice the compulsion to épater la bourgeoisie. And note how the young sprouts of Vienna represent an emerging creative class desperate to break out of their embarrassing bourgeois origins and streak across the sky as creative gods of creation.

Myopia of Our Ruling Class: Steve Sailer has a piece on "The Future of Floydism" where he ponders what on earth our ruling class thinks it is doing with the "the worship of the holy martyr George Floyd and his racial brethren." Hey, writes, Sailer, gun murders are up by 34.4% in the year After Floyd. And we don't know what proportion of the murderers were blacks. Not yet.

Unsurprisingly, nobody in The Establishment is stepping forward to forthrightly apologize and admit that, yeah, the bad people (like, say, me) were right: America’s biggest criminal justice problem is not police brutality, it’s black brutality.

But is it all a conspiracy to screw us all over, a Macchiavellian plot by the Ruling Class? Sailer thinks not.

As reassuring as it is to imagine that when disasters befall America they must be the work of an all-knowing conspiratorial deep state out to get you, it seems more likely that there is no Inner Party. Nobody knows how things really work because, like the courtiers in The Emperor’s New Clothes, anybody who expresses doubts about Floydism is, as Hans Christian Andersen said, “unfit for his office.” 

Maybe that's a good thing; maybe our ruling class doesn't have enough of a culture of Hausmacht to guide it in maintaining its power. Maybe its determination to get rid of Trump at all costs was not such a good idea. Maybe making liberal urbanist urban dwellers less safe will not end well for the rulers.

Of course, I would rather not have our ruling class exit stage left like the Habsburgs after losing a World War. That might not be too much fun. 

I have in mind that one day soon some Trump or DeSantis will get up and, like Cromwell tell our ruling class: 

Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!

And, like the Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls they are, our ruling class will do just that. 

The Left: Just What Is Their Problem?

I've been reading a number of books that deal with the lefty mindset, not exactly in an organized project to dissect the lefty world view, but just because.

For instance, in Ellen Meiksins Wood and her The Origin of Capitalism she is trying to advance the notion that things were pretty good before agrarian capitalism came along and marketized the agricultural sector. OK, so in the modern era people live under a "market imperative" instead of what I would call a feudal imperative. Instead of having to keep a weather eye on the local lord and his use and abuse of power we moderns have to think about our skills and how they are priced in the market. The Horror.

With Marx and The German Ideology we get another directed analysis of the move from feudal to market society. Marx's intent is to unearth the secret of how the bourgeoisie with their money and their capital and their circulation got to turn the world upside down and put the working class into wage slavery. The Horror.

Now I am reading Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin. The premise is that Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is not really about the philosophy of language but is an ethical commentary on the decline and fall of the Hapsburg empire. What the heck does that mean? Well, Vienna in the pre-WWI decades produced a gaggle of commentators who wanted a moral revolution away from the bourgeois ethos of late-19th century. 

There was Karl Kraus, the polemicist and satirist, who, the authors assert, held that the "tender fantasy [of womankind]... forms the unconscious origin... of all inspiration and creativity." And what he hated was the hypocrisy of the bourgeois culture that harassed prostitutes and homosexuals.

There was Adolf Loos, the father of modernist architecture, who hated decoration and the bourgeois "craze for totally meaningless articles of decoration" in their houses, "all purely for show."

There was Arnold Schönberg, the composer that gave us "the twelve-tone row" and whose music represents "attacks on the pseudo-sophistication of bourgeois aestheticism." See, Schönberg, like the critic of Wagner, Eduard Hanslick, "considered the question, how a composition sounds, as having no importance."

So the "beautiful" in music is, for Schönberg, a by-product of the composer's integrity, a function of his search for truth[.]

Just what is their problem?

And just what is the problem, in our own day, of the academicians and Wokeys and activists whose whole world view is about The Horror! The Horror! of ordinary middle-class people and their "systemic racism?"

Here's a piece on "The Paranoid Style in Progressive Politics" by Lee Siegel echoing the famous book of Richard Hofstadter's essays on The Paranoid Style in American Politics. You know: Red Scares and McCarthyism. It was the status anxiety of small-town America wot did it, according to Hofstadter. Maybe, just a teeny bit. But maybe the opposite is true, in spades.

Today status anxiety and paranoia are entrenched on the liberal side. It is the status anxiety of young editors, reporters, and producers, working in a collapsing profession, that is behind the generational combat that has driven the media to the far Left.

So maybe the feverish anti-bourgeois culture of the educated rich kids of the late 19th century is reflected in the feverish anti-deplorable culture of the educated not-so-rich kids of the early 21st century. It is good old fin-de-siècle all over again.

In The Soul of the World the recently departed Roger Scruton cuts through all this. What does it mean, he asks, to be a human in human society?

I exist as a subject, that is, as a self-conscious being with immediate knowledge of an inner realm, which defines my point of view of the world... [But then there are] others, with whom I share language... And language presupposes a shared world, a Lebenswelt, in which others are represented as subjects like myself.

The beginning of wisdom, in his understanding, is to step outside of your own self-obsession and think about other people from their own point of view. The amazing result is that you may find yourself able to share that world with others.

Do you see how the lefty world presupposes that the world cannot be shared? Not with those capitalists, not with those stupid Viennese bourgeois and their over-decorated houses, not with bloody Wagner and his reduction of music to pure emotion, not with those deplorable racist-sexist-homopbobes?

Just what is their problem? 

The Evil Spirits Will Always Be With Us

Even though David Hume disentangled factual truth and moral truth, says Zman, people still conflate them. And then a day later he notes how important simple belief is to humans.

Mysterious forces like privilege and institutional racism drive the public debate. These are not things that can be seen or even described. They just exist. Lives are being changed and public policy is being written on the assumption that these things exist. 

You mean the #WeBelieve signs?

I think it is important to understand that we humans are everything we ever were. We are the interactions at the molecular level, at the DNA level, at the distributed body level where cells are built and destroyed, nutrients are transported across the body, babies grow into adults, adults reproduce, and then grow old and die. We are an unknown complication of instincts, of semi-conscious emotions, of unconscious drives, of rational thought and of creative innovations.

Zman tells us about the importance of writing things down.

People who think the natural phenomena of the world are controlled by spirits are going to live different lives than people who work from a fixed set of religious doctrines. The spirit gods are fickle and unpredictable, while the book of rules is less so. The unpredictability of the holy book is due to the people holding it, not the book itself. It creates a standard of truth that everyone can understand and, more important, uphold collectively.

But, I would say, a wise book religion keeps a continuity with the spirit gods. That is why Catholicism had saints and miracles. And that is why the Reformation and Puritanism, with their iconoclasm and focus on the book to the exclusion of everything else, are a problem. Because here we are, 500 years later, and nice liberal ladies say: We Believe in Black Lives Matter and Love is Love -- not because of a book, but because.

I say that leftism is a Great Reaction, a lurch back to the primitive, where socialism is slavery, and the welfare state is feudalism, and reparations is revenge. In part, I think this is a reaction against too much book religion and book ideology.

But I claim to understand why this is so. People cannot live by bourgeois rationalism and a dichotomy between factual truth and moral truth alone. In fact, tons of people just don't get the religion of the book and fixed rational rules. Because the only thing they know is the fickle world of the evil spirit that doesn't like them.

Our glorious elite, that lives on its faith in creativity -- not just in making better scientific theories but that humans can "fundamentally transform" society -- likes to regard the simple bourgeois culture of responsibility as backward and shameful. It regards the middle class that lives by the truth of people following the rules, getting a job, and obeying the laws as cramped and oppressive. Whatabout the people that can't get a job? Because disability or racism? Whatabout them, deplorables?

That is why my theory of the Good Life recognizes all three levels of human experience, and is the wisest and the deepest and the truest thing out there. It recognizes that there are millions of people that still live in a world beset by evil spirits. And by the way, what do you call Hitler/Stalin/Mao? If those guys weren't animated by Evil Spirits my name isn't Chris Chantrill.

My theory of the Good Life believes that the great broad middle class lives by rules and responsibility. But that the middle class often can't understand the folks that believe the world is driven by the Evil Corporations, or whatever evil spirits best fit their sufferings and setbacks.

My theory of the Good Life believes that educated people live in the faith of creativity, that we have the power to discover new knowledge and that the highest and best life is to discover something new, whether a scientific theory, a new technology, a new social program, a way to transform the world towards heaven on earth.

What is missing in this world is perfect people that recognize that there are people in the world that don't think like them, people that believe that other people have a right to live in their own way, and a right not to be bullied and harassed and canceled into the right ways -- which mysteriously happen to be just what the perfect people believe.

I say that the German Turn that begins with Kant's dictum that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances, is the way out of the box, because it says that we humans cannot know the minds of the evil spirits, cannot know for sure that our science really describes the world as it is, cannot know for sure that our creative achievements are real rather than imaginary.

In other words, all of us, whether a certified genius, an ordinary schmuck, or a delta-minus moron, are stumbling in the dark. We live our lives in the faith that what we believe, what we are doing, what we dream of doing, is the right thing.

But what if we are wrong?

I would say that to ask that question is the beginning of wisdom. And never mind about the answer.

Against Kimball: Science Advances by Breaking the Rules

Everybody says that they are in favor of logic and reason: St. Thomas Aquinas; the rational Enlightenment; conservatives. Even radical lefties say that modern capitalism and liberalism is all a lie because the truth is that capitalism and liberalism are all about oppression.

Now comes Roger Kimball with a piece in American Greatness on "Science!" He starts with statement that the two great scientific fraudsters, "the egregious Michael “hockey stick” Mann and St. Anthony “mask theater” Fauci, have recently received gratifying comeuppances." About which we can all agree. But then he starts attacking all my favorite guys:

[Paul] Feyerabend maintained that science is no more cognitively privileged than (for example) astrology, voodoo, or necromancy. The “only one principle that can be defended,” he wrote in Against Method, “. . . is anything goes.”

[Thomas Kuhn.] According to Kuhn, [in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,] scientific truth is “paradigm relative.” For example, what was considered true under the Ptolemaic view of the solar system differs from what we, having read Copernicus, believe. 

[Karl] Popper’s 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery made the curious argument that the distinguishing mark of a scientific theory was not (as everyone used to think) that it was verifiable by empirical evidence. On the contrary, Popper argued that a theory was scientific to the extent that it was “falsifiable.” 

Well, I think all three are right and Roger Kimball is wrong.

Feyerabend: The point here is that the record of the last century or so is that a new theory always busts up the assumptions of the reigning methodology. Maybe just a little, maybe a whole lot. Newton was based on absolute space and time; Einstein said that space and time are relative.

Kuhn: His argument is that the reigning princes of science will always defend the old ways. Only when the old generation dies off can a new "paradigm" get a foothold.  Of course this applies to everything. The current 80-year-old princes of the Democratic Party are about to retire and the Dems will only then complete their paradigm shift to lefty wokism.

Popper: The point of "falsification" is that if your theory explains everything it isn't useful. Climate change is an example. Everything that happens, from extreme weather to hurricane frequency, is said to demand that we stop using fossil fuels. Genuine science makes predictions upon which the theory stands or falls. The famous example of the 1919 confirmations of General Relativity is an example, including the "Perihelion precession of Mercury" -- which could not happen according to Newtonian theory -- and the "Deflection of light by the Sun" of a star that was close to the Sun during a solar eclipse. If these experiments "falsified" Einstein's equations instead of confirming them, it would have been "back to the drawing board."

The point that these three scientists are making is that every scientific theory is a stitch-up, good enough for government work. But once you start trying to apply it to more and more situations, then you are likely to find that, at some point, it doesn't work. The most obvious case is Newton's mechanics. It works at Earth scale. But when you get out into the universe, then it doesn't predict close enough.

And when scientists have to explain their anomalous results with things like "dark matter" and "dark energy" that is a "tell" that "Houston we have a problem." Nothing shameful about that: happens all the time. Here is an article that proposes that the "dark matter" explanation arose because scientists used Newtonian gravitation instead of relativity to model the behavior of galaxies. (Waat? Really?)

Now, my belief is that to understand what is going on here you need to understand the German Turn in philosophy and knowledge -- and Feyerabend and Popper were both born Austrians. Kuhn? He was Jewish American with a German name.

I have a lot to say about the German Turn, but it starts with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, a Prussian. He wrote that we cannot know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances. When we humans experience light hitting our eyes we process and interpret that light in our brains, and out of that processing we create an image of the world we are seeing.

For instance, I am sitting at a table. Hey, what more do I need to say? Well, if I wanted to construct a table, then I need to know more about the construction of tables, about materials, about tools, and so on. And if I were to use metals in my construction I would have to learn about the mining and smelting of metals. Behind what George Lakoff calls a "basic level" object hides an infinity of possibilities.

My argument is that Kant's theory of things-in-themselves and appearances set off the German Turn that leads directly, do not pass go, to relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are ridiculous at a "basic level."

So, whatever you believe, I suggest that you take the notions of Feyerabend and Kuhn and Popper, and ponder them in your heart.

Now, we conservatives and nationalists tend to ridicule the left and its "critical theory." Writes Andy Ngo in Unmasked, "Have you heard it argued that there is no such thing as objective reality and truth?" But the critique of objective reality and truth doesn't just come from Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School. Kant's masterwork was titled "A Critique of Pure Reason."

My point is that if we want to own the future and banish lefty rubbish from the face of the Earth "we" need to understand "critical theory" from Kant to Kuhn and then go beyond it. That's Sun Tzu: To beat your enemy you must first understand him.

And this begins with admitting that there is no such thing as "objective reality." All realities are constructed, in our minds.

The Day After: "Groundhog Day"

A couple of years ago I determined to observe our sacred national festival of Groundhog Day by watching -- what else? -- Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day about a pompous twerp of a TV weatherman caught in a Nietzschean "eternal recurrence," reliving February 2 at Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and suffering the local yokels pulling the groundhog out of his den and announcing to the world that Phil the groundhog -- seer of seers, prognosticator of prognosticators -- has forecast another six weeks of winter. Again and again.

Nietzsche's line is that, when God dies, what you get is decadence, nihilism, and the eternal recurrence, over and over, until a new God is born.

In the case of Phil Connors the weatherman played by Bill Murray, he tries out all the sins of the world -- in particular manipulating women to get them into bed -- before he surrenders and just tries to do the right thing by little old ladies with a flat tire, performing the Heimlich maneuver on a local yokel choking on his breakfast, making his music teacher proud, being a nice guy, and finally winning the love of producer Rita Hanson played by Andie MacDowell.

This year, I particularly noted that the neurologist played in a cameo role by Harold Ramis is practically blind. Hmm. I wonder what he meant by that!

Also, I liked the moment where Rita is skeptical that Phil the weatherman knows the business of every local yokel in town. Phil replies, with a kind of existential resignation of a man that has perhaps relived February 2 three thousand times -- given that it takes ten years to become an accomplished musician -- that he knows all about everyone in Punxsutawney. And there is a kind of divine wisdom peeking through in that. We ought to know more about the lives and the needs of our neighbors, not because of prurient or curtain-twitching interest, but because of human concern.

Of course, one major theme in Groundhog Day is the same as America's Big Problem today, the cult among the elite -- even including TV weathermen -- that they are above the ordinary local yokels, the kind of people that dress up in top hats on Groundhog Day, or the fading beauty that makes it to Groundhog Day every year, or the bumbling armored car workers dropping coins on the ground. (Those armored car workers have nothing in common with health bureaucracy professionals making a mess of COVID vaccine distribution.) And, of course, there is the quintessential all-American "sure-as-heckfire" insurance agent, Ned Ryerson.

But ordinary people have a right to live their ordinary lives, and until our best and brightest acquire the wisdom to understand that -- and inwardly digest it -- then they, and America, are going to be living Groundhog Day for ever and ever, until they finally get that teeny-weeny bit of wisdom and release us all from our present Eternal Recurrence.

Meanwhile, like Phil Connors in the early part of the movie, the members of our ruling class, both the ruling clique and the broader educated elite, are in denial.

German History in Three Chapters

Thanks to Curtis Yarvin I got to watch a US propaganda film from 1945, warning of the danger of US right-wing politics using the Evil Germans as an example. 

There are three chapters of "German History" in the film:

Chapter 1: Führer #1, Blood and Iron (picture of Bismarck)

Chapter 2: Führer #2, Deutschland Über Alles (picture of Wilhelm II)

Chapter 3: Führer #3, Today Germany... Tomorrow the World (picture of Adolf Hitler)

Then, after pictures of mass graves, a swastika getting blown up, and the wreck of Hitler's Alpine retreat, we switch to the US of 1945 and "The ghosts of Berchtesgarten still walk. Right here in America..." and pictures of American politicians and activists that we are supposed to hate. Only I don't know who they are picturing. Presumably one of them is Charles Lindbergh. And another is Huey Long. And presumably Father Coughlin. But I can't be sure.

Bless their hearts.

When you know a bit of history it is interesting to see what the propagandists miss out. For instance, the whole point of Bismark's three wars, on Denmark, Austria, and France, was to force the various German states to unite. Bismark's genius was to understand that the only way to do this was with three nice little wars.

And why bother to unite Germany? Well, perhaps because of what had happened to the German lands before the film's Year Zero of 1870.

We could discuss the occupation of the German lands by France in the Napoleonic Wars. Friedrich Meinecke's book is called "The Age of German Liberation: 1795-1815." A lot of what we call German nationalism was born in that age when the Germans got together to decide how to stop the French from walking all over them every century or so.

Because in 1618-1648 was the Thirty Years War in which Sweden, France, and the Spanish/Austrian Hapsburgs pretty well devastated Germany. Thanks fellahs!

So if I were to write a History of Germany in three chapters, I would say

Chapter 1: Never Again. Leading intellectual lights in German lands during the Napoleonic Wars devise educational reforms to educate Germans to stand up against the French. The University of Berlin is the first research university. It leads eventually to Bismarck, who cunningly unites Germany in three short sharp wars.

Chapter 2: Age of the Idiots. After the fall of Bismarck Germany is ruled by the lightweight Wilhelm II, who makes enemies of France, Britain and Russia, while Germans invent the automobile, make a revolution in physics, and a revolution in ammonia fertilizer with the Haber process. After getting caught in a two-front war Germany -- Idiot! -- was humiliated and dismembered by the Treaty of Versailles, and that made young Adolf Hitler mad. So when the stumbling bumbling US Federal Reserve failed to act as lender of last resort in the 1929 crash Hitler rose to power, and then got Germany into another two-front war. Idiot!

Chapter 3: European Hegemony. Dismembered and humiliated again after World War II, Germany got smart and entered into a partnership with France to dominate Europe with the nominally supra-national European Union. So today Germany dominates Europe but does it through intermediaries. Sorry about the butcher's bill in the Age of the Idiots.

That's the thing about history. The more you know, the more you can stitch together a narrative to do anything you want. You can make the Germans the monsters of all time, or you can make them the helpless victims that finally got their act together. 

Your choice.

Let's Kritik Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

Let's start with La Wik, which says that critical race theory is based on the following notions:

• Firstly, that white supremacy exists and exhibits power maintained over time, and, in particular, that the law plays a role in this process.
• Secondly, that transforming the relationship between law and racial power, as well as achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly, are possible.

By "white supremacy" is meant the academic use meaning, per Frances Lee Ansley:

By "white supremacy" I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.

Notice that in both definitions, the writer comes close to, but does not quite say "it's a conspiracy!" They do not quite say that White Men got together and decided to Take over the World!

(Although, parenthetically, our lefty friends do have a plan to take over the world).

The point is: could there be an innocent explanation of white supremacy, that explains it as a consequence of White Man being in the right place at the right time with the right ideas and the right technology? In the same way, say, that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a man of undoubted skills and smarts, just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right ideas at an opportune technological moment so that, even though Einstein said that "God does not play dice," our pal Zuck won the lottery and here he is, master of all he surveys.

Because that is how I understand "white supremacy." Here is a likely story:

Back in the day, about 1500, Europeans had developed the technology for ocean-going sailing ships. One thing led to another and pretty soon a chap like Vasco de Gama was sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and landing in India. As La Wik says:

Traveling the ocean route allowed the Portuguese to avoid sailing across the highly disputed Mediterranean and traversing the dangerous Arabian Peninsula.

I have a more "overdetermined" narrative.

Back in the day the Europeans were being monstrously oppressed by Arab supremacy and the outrageous and exploitative prices of spices. See, when spices came from India -- and a lot of the spices were grown in the Western Ghats as I have seen with my own two eyes -- they got to Europe by an overland route that went through the desert of western India and through Arabia. And every stop on the way meant a nice little excise tax for the local yokels. Wow! Talk about oppression! Talk about racial power! And whatabout the law! What law in the world could justify all those oppressive princes and potentates making the poor helpless White Man of Europe pay through the nose for spices!

Well, in the event, the Portuguese started trading for spices on the west coast of India, and then the Brits got in on the act. The bloody Brits! Who invited them?

And pretty soon the spice trade through the western desert of India and points westward to the Mediterranean collapsed -- as I have seen with my own two eyes and heard with my own two ears from the guide at the once-powerful desert city of Jaisalmer in western India.

Well, when you set up a trading port on the coast of India, guess what happens? You may not be interested in the various princes and potentates nearby but they are interested in you. And so the Ports and the Brits got involved in local politics, and pretty soon young Robert Clive, East India Company "factor," learned a thing or two about soldiering. One thing led to another and in 1757 Clive won the Battle of Plassey against the Nawab of Bengal. With 1,100 Europeans and 2,100 sepoy troops, and with nine field-pieces, Clive beat the Nawab's army of 18,000 horse, 50,000-foot and 53 pieces of heavy ordnance, served by French artillerymen.

Hello "white supremacy!"

Now, I've read The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon and perhaps the most significant moment of the whole 1,200 pages is in 1825 when some Brit opined that "these people don't really like us," old chap.

Do you understand the importance of this comment, dear lefty friends and all the ships at sea?

The importance is that, prior to 1825, no ruler in the world gave a damn about whether the people he ruled "liked" him. Nobody gave a damn about white supremacy, Muslim Supremacy, Brahmin Supremacy, Western African Tribal Supremacy or any other kind of supremacy. The rule was simple: the strong ruler set the rules, and if he decided to kill every man in town and rape every woman, well, that's how the cookie crumbled. Until 1825.

Notice that this attitude has not exactly disappeared from the face of the Earth. Joe Stalin: do you think he cared whether the Russian people "liked" him? Mao Zedong: do you think he cared whether the Chinese people "liked" him?

Or whatabout our modern Wokies: do you think that a single Wokie gives a damn about what the average white deplorable thinks about him? Exactly. The average Wokie thinks only about bending the arc of history towards justice and crushing systemic racism and white supremacy until the rubble bounces. "Liking" has nothing to do with the case.

No. The interesting thing about "white supremacy" is that White Man is not that interested in white supremacy. Of course, he likes his own people best, and his own religion of logic and reason and market supremacy best. And he wants to water and weed his 401k until it blooms nicely for his retirement. But, all in all, he is remarkable in that, by and large, he is pretty well copacetic with letting other peoples' sleeping dogs lie.

Unlike our lefty friends.

Now let's talk about "intersectionality." La Wik:

Intersectionality is a theoretical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Examples of these aspects are gender, caste, sex, race, class, sexuality, religion, disability, physical appearance, and height.

Couldn't agree more, old chap. You certainly wouldn't want to be a young short white guy from Appalachia at a swank eastern selective college that said the wrong thing about trans people of color within earshot of some Good Little Girl that had been indoctrinated in critical race theory and intersectionality since first going to her snobby pre-school in Manhattan. 

And I certainly wouldn't want to be a Dalit working at Brahmin-dominated Google being harassed all the time by snobby Brahmins feeling for my non-existent "sacred thread!" Oh boy!

To say nothing of being a Google employee being fired and humiliated across the rapidly warming planet for innocently writing an essay in response to a solicitation for feedback to say that "while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination."

Now I say that all this hysterical babbling about postmodernism and critical race theory and intersectionality is due to the fact that our lefty friends do not understand the import of Kant and the whole "German Turn."

Poor dears.

Oh, so you want to mend your ways and actually join the human race instead of doing a Koba or a Mao and just eliminating the deplorables?

Well, reduced to an "overdetermined" simplicity, the German Turn says that because we cannot know things-in-themselves it means that all our knowledge -- from our division of life into genera and species to our fabrication of LED Christmas light strings -- is really only "the story so far," be sure to tune into next week's exciting episode. It means that it behoves everyone to cool their jets instead of winding up the turbines preparatory to launching a crusade against the unbelievers. Because next week we will discover something that changes everything.

And anyone that declares that those haters over there are the oppressors and we here are the noble allies and friends of the oppressed peoples might very well be wrong. After all, we can't know things-in-themselves, and for sure what is going to change next week is today's dominant cultural and political narrative.

To suit the agenda of the ruling class of the moment.

Yes, lefties. Did you ever notice that all speech in any society has to stay pretty close to ruling-class orthodoxy? So, if you chaps are allowed -- nay encouraged -- to mouth off about critical race theory and intersectionality and marginalize the notorious White Man it must mean that the ruling class believes that such activity supports the regime and its power.

Hmm. I wonder why.

Now Penguins are Getting Triggered

Sooner or later it had to happen. Penguins down at the South Pole would want into the fun and games of micro-aggressions and taking offence.

And now it has happened, reported by the lefty wizards at Vice.com. The special snowflake LGBT+ staffers at Penguin Random House are all in a twitter because Penguin is going to publish the sequel to the #1 best-seller 12 Rules. The new book is titled Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.

(That title is interesting, because in my reductive Three Peoples theory, the middle people are the Responsibles, the people of Order, and the Creatives are the chaps trying to live beyond Order.)

They are all in a twitter because Peterson, who opposed the Canadian C-16 law on preferred pronouns, has become the preferred target of hate for Good Little Girls that Literally Know Nothing. Here is one foolish young thing quoted at Vice.

“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” a junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community and who attended the town hall told VICE World News. 

It is bootless to get into their whiny girly complaints, except to note that women have a Culture of Complaint.

But obviously Penguin has missed an opportunity to Send a Message to its employees. Something like this:

Hey snowflakes! Get a clue! The whole point of non-fiction publishing is to get new ideas out there. Guess what! New ideas are almost always deeply unsettling to the defenders of conventional wisdom and the status-quo: evidently chaps and chapettes like you.

If you feel that you are not up to the challenge of living and working in the public square where uncomfortable ideas are bruited about by thinkers and writers that may not be quite out of the top drawer I invite you to hand in your resignation. You are not a good fit at Penguin.

Not only that, but any student of The Ruling Class by Gaetano Mosca would know that a sensible ruling class always allows room for upstarts from the lower classes. They bring much needed vigor into the ruling class and help it avoid decaying into a sterile aristocracy that is closed to new blood. A sensible ruling class also keeps the vapid twitterings of upper-class girls on its staff well in check.

I checked over to my pal Vox Day who is a severe critic of Peterson. Of course he is crowing, and offering a copy of his Jordanetics to the snowflakes.

My problem with Vox Day is that when he says something like this that Immanuel Kant was "wrong, completely wrong, and utterly wrong... And the Jungians are not merely wrong, they are mad" he is telling us that he does not understand the German Turn that more or less invented the modern world.

And all Kant said was that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances. What is so wrong with that?

Jordan Peterson is saying that if we understand Kant and then go through the whole German Turn to Jung then, well then the Jungian archetypes give us a cloudy window into the goings-on inside our unconscious mind. Then if we want to understand hierarchy as a way to reduce violence we should take a look at lobsters, which have been doing hierarchy for 350 million years. Then 12 Steps and Beyond Order: 12 More Steps to Life. Then the idea of the Sacrificial Hero who gives his life on the border between Order and Chaos so that others may live.

We are at an interesting moment in the history of the world. We have a ruling class that just stole an election so it could install a vapid ageing idiot as president. We have chaps like Vox Day still flapping around in the age when reason and logic were going to save the world. We have lefties and their silly snowflake adepts running around trying to stop free speech. We have a clueless health bureaucracy flapping around with terminal incompetence.

And then we have you and me and that fellow behind the tree that hope that we will survive the current madness until a time that the world gets a clue again.

This "Fact Checking" Thing and @jack's Beard

Can we now admit that the "fact-checking" era is over?

Because, let's face it, "fact-checking" was always a liberal grift to avoid publishing conservative attacks on liberals.

No need to go into the weeds on this. It was OK to publish thinly sourced attacks on President Trump, accusations that had political-hit-job written all over them. And to spend tax-payers' money following up every possible false trail armed with Special Prosecutorial powers trying to trap the guy in some shenanigans, no matter how trivial.

But when it comes to Joe Biden and a lifetime of pay-for-play corruption, help! Where are the smelling salts?

Hey, liberals, did you know that being one-person-removed from the actual transaction means you can say "I never took any money from any of those people." Quite right, Joe. It's called "deniability" in the trade of influence politics, of which I am sure you are the Grand Master.

But the fact-check culture means that @jack can reach into his beard and declaim that Twitter is not going to publish "hacked" material. Because principles. I always wondered why @jack sported a beard. Now that he has revised and extended it during the COVID years, I get it.

You could say, of course, that the "fact-check" culture was a political joke by our liberal friends, as in "hey, why don't we tweak the right's noses by using their devotion to facts and logic and reason by subjecting the right to fact-checking?"

Whereas every good lefty knows that everything in this world, from race on down, is a social construction.

As a matter of fact, of course, everyone who has stumbled into Kant knows that. Because if, with Kant, we believe that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only sense impressions, it follows that everything we know about things is a social construction, starting with what George Lakoff calls "basic-level" concepts like cat.

Why do you think little Susie knows that a cat is a cat? Because Mommy told her.

The joke is that -- as with everything the left touches -- our lefty friends have taken a stunning discovery and turned it into a political weapon.

Because, sure, race is a social construction, but humans categorize everything, including different kinds of humans. It is helpful to know that people looking different is significant, and that it might serve to differentiate enemy from friend. For instance, in the current era of mostly peaceful protests, it might be helpful for the average pedestrian to categorize males on the street by their hair: maybe you should watch out for the guy with a man bun, but not the guy with a crew-cut that looks like he just started basic training at Parris Island.

Sure, let's all agree that physical characteristics, as defined by social construction, are not dispositive because, after Kant, we cannot know things-in-themselves. But you never know, it could help.

Facts are what we come up with after applying our received notions about the meaning of life, the universe and everything, usually after a very cursory glance.

(I hesitated before putting in "meaning of life" because even I am something of a facts-and-logic guy. But then I realized that first comes the belief in a meaning of life, then comes everything else, including facts, logic, science, and the universe and everything.)

For instance, I would be inclined to believe any accusation of corruption against a Clinton or a Biden, because my experience, solidified by years of consuming conservative media, leads me to believe that Clintons and Bidens are up to no good. The notion that Clintons and Bidens are up to no good is a social construction.

But the point about a social construction is: does it help navigate the uncertain world of a million sense impressions? Meaning, is it helpful to develop a social construction that Clintons and Bidens are up to no good?

Many of our citizens organize their political lives these days around a social construction that may be summarized as Orange Man Bad. Hey! They have a perfect right to do so, right, @jack?

Hey @jack! Stop mumbling in your beard!

But, the question is, would it be a good idea to use the social construction of Orange Man Bad as a strategy for, e.g., investing your 401K? Hmm.

And would it be a good idea to interpret everything in political life in These United States through the lens of the social construction of Orange Man Bad?

For instance, suppose you were a political pollster and you believed in the social construction of Orange Man Bad. Do you think that your social construction would help or hinder your polling to find out who or what was going to win the presidential election of 2020?

In a way, there is something comical about the notion of "fact-checking." You mean to say, you wise one @jack, that ordinary people are not able to sift fact from fiction and must be protected from the lies of political actors?

For there is a real danger in the "fact checking" culture. If your guys are out busily labeling things true or mostly true, false or mostly false, there is a danger. The danger is what scientists agree is "confirmation bias." There are no facts out there, scientists agree. There are only interpretations.

But you educated liberals already knew that. Right @jack?

Science, Climate Change, Politics, Prophecy and Reason

California Governor and nephew of Nancy Pelosi Gavin Newsom just issued an executive order to ban the sale of fossil-fueled powered cars in California in 2035.

Because the science of climate change demands it.

Over at UnHerd.com they have an article suggesting that only by harnessing the power of Nationalism will the world be able to tackle climate change.

Because the disconnected politicking of left and right can't do the job. We need to act as if we were fighting the Nazis or the Commies.

Or take the wonderful City of Seattle Council that has overridden the veto of Mayor Jenny Durkan and made "a down payment" on defunding the police with a reduction of 100 officers in the upcoming fiscal year.

Because, as Marx wrote, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. Just because Revolution, Baby, failed in the Sixties doesn't mean it won't succeed today!

What is going on? Why are these politicians doing all this stupid stuff?

Fear not. I have the answers right here.

First of all we must recognize the nasty bind in which today's politicians find themselves. Politics is all, and only, about rallying the men to fight against the foe -- external and internal enemies -- in the present emergency.

Or as I say it in my Maxims: "The only warrant for government power is an existential peril."

But, that was for the old days, the tribal days, when the men of the tribe had to be ready to foil the neighboring tribe's dawn raid. What do you do when the threat of invasion and conquest has diminished to a nothing?

You make it up. That is what climate change is all about. That is what systemic racism is about. Because if there weren't any climate change or systemic racism to worry about we wouldn't need our brave political leaders leading us into battle against the evil giants.

Yes, but what about the science?

OK. Here is where I am going to lose you. Science is nothing more than Prophecy. Oh, it is very good prophecy, much better than divination and the entrails of a goat. But science is still prophecy, meaning it makes predictions about how stuff in the world moves and shakes and changes from moment to moment and day to day and eon to eon.

But isn't science all about logic and reason? Yes indeed. But did you know that humans invented logic and reason to manage their social relationships, and especially their lies? Sorry, I forgot to save the link. But here is another look, "Why Do Humans Reason?" by Hugo Mercier that argues that humans reason in order to argue and persuade: 

Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade... Skilled arguers... are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.

Actually, it was not that long ago that the philosophers descanted upon logic and reason in their coffee houses completely separate from the mechanics across town that made the clocks and the carts and the cathedrals. And ne'er the twain would meet. Until they needed really accurate clocks for global navigation and the mind-guys got together with the clock-maker guys and the European adventurers conquered the world.

The only point of science is to help predict the future, which may be anything from predicting the flight of a cannonball to predicting whether a bridge will fall down. But if you are an engineer you will know that engineers always build in a "factor of safety" when designing a building or an airplane.

Now, this notion of science as prophecy is built into what I call the German Turn in modern knowledge. It begins with Kant saying that we can't know things-in-themselves but only appearances. He was responding to the canceled Hume's dictum that there is no such thing in human knowledge as cause and effect, but only correlation. Just because a building fell down right after a raven flew across the face of the moon doesn't mean that the raven caused the building to fall down.

The German Turn reaches its peak with Jung saying that, for all our conscious knowledge, we are still mostly programmed by unknown "archetypes" in our unconscious, the primordial instincts that kept us as a human species alive for millions of years, and other living species for hundred of millions of years.

What does a living thing need, most of all? It needs to have some glimpse of what happens next, so that it can react in time to make a kill of a mega-fauna or dodge the spear or the bullet. And then whatabout next week? Whatabout next year?

That is what Prophecy is all about. Generally, once a prophetic tradition gets a hold of human minds it becomes an orthodoxy, enforced by the powerful and their priests. Notice that a prophetic tradition does not necessarily have to have a track record, just that influential people support it and enforce its doctrine.

This even extends to science. That's what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was all about. A new scientific theory doesn't just come along and everybody agrees with it. The new theory -- or "paradigm" -- is not just a harmless idea; it proposes to humiliate the supporters of the old theory. It threatens jobs and reputations in academia. So it really doesn't succeed until the old generation dies off. Best of all, the new theory should make a prophetic prediction: like the prediction of General Relativity that light is bent as is comes close to a very massive object like our Sun.

You can see why climate change and the COVID-19 epidemic are like catnip to politicians. The politician really has nothing to do unless there is an existential peril requiring bold action. The world is coming to an end and we will all die! Unless we act now! There is a new plague and we will all die! Unless we all act now. And this is not just the politician acting up. He is activating Jungian "archetypes" deep in our unconcious.

Do not underestimate how vital and powerful these archetypes are. Writing in 1936 Jung said in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:

There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to. If thirty years ago anyone had dared to predict that our psychological development was tending towards a revival of the medieval persecutions of the Jews, that Europe would again tremble before the Roman fasces and the tramp of legions, that people would once more give the Roman salute, as two thousand years ago, and that instead of the Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure onwards millions of warriors ready for death -- why, that man would have been hooted at as a mystical fool. (p.48)

So it is not surprising that politicians lurch towards any existential peril as a warrant for political power; that well-born young men and women throng the streets in mostly peaceful protest, that scientists go with the program and advocate for the hot thing that gets the grants, and that nice liberal ladies throng to the meetings of the latest prophet. 

The thing is to jump off the prophetic train before it transports us to disaster. But how?

Suppose "Politics is Division" is a Good Thing

At American Greatness Curtis Ellis is observing that the Davos set, the corporate globalists, are shedding their camoflage.

The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions,” the oligarchs of the World Economic Forum helpfully advise. “Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.” (Emphasis added.)

Or the Zman is saying that, "maybe it is simply the end of Left and Right. The Left won." But I say that when the Left has vanquished all its foes, then what?

And Willis Eschenbach is wallowing in Scott Adams' Win Bigly: Persuasion in a world where facts don't matter, in which Scott talks about the idea that mass delusions are not infrequent, but normal. As in, you would expect the world's scientists to all buy into the climate change delusion since their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor depend on it being true. Scott says this a bit differently:

[S]cientists who oppose the climate change consensus have a high degree of career and reputation risk[.]

So why bother, pal? Just go with the flow.

Let's go back to Scott Adams and his 3-D world view:

This worldview says humans are irrational 90 percent of the time. The only exceptions are when decisions have no emotional content. 

This is actually what the science of the German Turn says. Our conscious -- and supposedly rational -- mind is only 10 percent of the whole. The rest is the unconscious mind, and who knows what it is thinking? We know, at least, that it is operating instinctively and emotionally.

If you are not going to have mass delusions going on all the time and leading us over the cliff, then you have to have a counter mass delusion to even things out.

As in, two party politics, where the mass delusionists of each side can hurl their vitriol at each other.

As in, a world open to all religions, so that the moralists of every description can damn the other guys to hell and back again without the benefit of canceling their opponents in the public square and lighting up a nice cozy auto-da-fé.

As in, a free economy where there is not just one monopoly corporation in bed with the political elite, but different corporations each with a different strategy for market domination.

But boy, do we all hate it when the other side dares to question our mass delusion!

As in, the Davos globalists hating on Trump for questioning their august authority and right to direct traffic from the Magic Mountain.

As in, the deep state in the US that has run the US for decades with a nod-nod-wink-wink consensus throughout the corridors of power. Until Trump came along and upset their apple cart.

It's curious, isn't it, that everyone is insulted by the idea that there are people over there that don't agree with Our Saving Truth.

Here's something to think about. If the educated Gentry managed to completely vanquish the bitter-clinger Deplorables, what would they do then, poor things?

Because I would say that the only reason that the Davos special people are united is that they have the awful populist nationalists to kick around. I think that if the nationalists ever succumbed, then the globalist elite would divide into factions and start to fight each other.

And if the critical race theory postmodernists ever succeeded in purging the last racist-sexist-homophobe from America then they would split into two and start beating up on each other.

And so, really, the health of the state, or of the culture, or of science, is when everyone is beating up on the other guy -- verbally, of course.

Those Davos Pooh Bahs are fools if they think that the right thing is for them to step up and tell the rest of us what to do.

Those deep-state anonymous sources are crazy to think that they should not be roughly sorted out every decade or so.

Those critical race theorists would be out of luck if they ever won and condemned the hated racist-sexist-homophobes to the University of Outer Slobbovia.

I realize what I am saying. I am saying that the chaos agent Donald Trump is probably the best thing that has happened to the US since sliced bread.

OK. So the worst that can be said about that is that it is a mass delusion of the Deplorables driving around aimlessly in their Trump Car Parades.

And that my maxim that "politics is division" points to the good thing about politics. That a true mano-a-mano politics -- Marquess of Queensbury rules, old chap -- is the best thing going.

All the World's a Social Construct

The arts and the sciences have been on the outs with each other for a while, if not for ever. Certainly long before C.P. Snow spoke about the "Two Cultures."

I suppose the big reason for this is that scientists think of themselves as objective investigators dealing with facts and reason, while artists and writers think of themselves dealing in intuition and metaphor.

I suppose we might say that science thinks of itself as Apollonian, and the arts thinks of itself as Dionysian.

And in the middle are the postmodernists that say, correctly, that race is a social construct. No doubt, but the fact is that all of science is a social construct, in the sense that science is a basket of theories that we use to explain how the world works.

And even though race is a social construct it is still an attempt to understand why different people are different and different peoples are different.

All of human science is an attempt to understand the world.

But so is a work of art. A work of art is nothing unless it explains how the world works.

Now you may say that science shows us how the world works with logic and reason, and the arts show us how the world works by triggering the unconscious and its emotions, its instincts, and its archetypes.

However, what with pyschology and all, we now have the beginnings of a science of the emotions, and Jungian pyschology is trying to provide the beginnings of a scientific explanation of the unconscious.

Now the postmodernists propose that science as a social construction is a scandal, a cunning power trick of the ruling class.

I would agree, up to a point. Our present ruling class uses its "Jobs for Gentry" program to keep science as a kept woman of the ruling class, and a particular kept woman of the ruling class is the whole postmodern community. Scientists know that grant money comes only to scientists that provide the right answers to the ruling class, particularly on climate change, race, and gender. There is no objective knowledge. It is all social construction and "narrative."

I wonder why the current ruling class encourages and promotes postmodernists. What's going on here? Because the postmodernist helpfully beat up on the middle-class Commoners? I wonder.

The best social-construct narrative I know is that of lefty linguist George Lakoff. He is famous for describing conservatives as inspired by a "strict father" model for the state, while liberals are moved by a "nurturant parent" model. I guess that in 2020 we would update his theory to say that Commoners are inspired by a Trump Boat Parade model of society while lefties are inspired by an AntiFa mostly peaceful protest model of society.

But Lakoff proposes a social construct of language that for me is dispositive. He proposes that humans start to understand the world using "basic-level categorization." By the age of three, children are able to understand a world of "socks and shoe, dog and cow." And table and chair, house and bike.

Get it? "Dog" is a social construct.

In fact, as the child soon learns, the world is a lot more complicated than that. There are, for instance, different kinds of dogs. And then dogs are a kind of animal. So right off the bat the kid learns about three levels of categorization:

Superordinate	Animal	Furniture
Basic-level	Dog	Chair
Subordinate	Retriever	Rocker

Now, the point is that there is no limit to the number of levels. Beyond Animals? Living things. And beyond that? 

That is why the ancients decided that the world is sitting on a turtle. But what is the turtle sitting on? Fuggetaboutit. It's turtles all the way down. We have a similar problem. The Earth is set in a Solar System, and the Solar System is set in the arm of a galaxy, and galaxies are scattered in space. And beyond? Is there Something? Nothing? A multiverse of Universes? We Don't Know.

Scientists have determined that we humans block out nearly all the information that is pouring into our five senses. We only pay attention to the stuff that our brain -- or whatever -- determines is significant. So, you might say, the basic-level objects are the most significant objects in our world: parents, siblings, dogs, food, angry neighbors.

But once we master the world of basic-level objects we start to explore the rest of the world.

Things we understand are in the world of Order. Things we do not understand are in the world of Chaos. But how do we get to understand the world of Chaos? That is what science and the arts and religion and culture are for. They are different ways of trying to get a grip on the Unknown world of Chaos.

There are, of course, different ways of understanding the world of Order. And that is what the successive revolutions in science and religion and the arts are all about.

Our postmodern friends of the last century think that the white supremacist bourgeois way of understanding the world of Order is a false narrative. And it is true, the white bourgeois world-view overdetermines the idea that we are logical and rational, and that the middle-class bourgeois way in the highest and best way to live, to organize society, and to establish the inevitable hierarchy. The fact is that the bourgeois culture is a social construct imagined and built by good solid bourgeois thinkers and what they thought not surprisingly seemed to be good to the good solid bourgeoisie.

Hey, how about this?

Lefty activist: Race doesn't exist; it is a social construct.

Trump Car Parade Attendee: So white supremacy doesn't exist; it is a social construct.

Exactly. Our postmodern friends have erected their own social construct, for instance, that the whole of western civilization is a white male patriarchal social construction designed to oppress and marginalize every one else.

Only I would interpret the postmodern world view as a social construct imagined by educated Gentry that proposes to oppress and marginalize the white-male bourgeoisie under the hegemony of postmodern thinkers and activists.

See, I think that my social construct sails into the stratosphere far above the put-putting ideologies of the postmodernists. And it does it because it comprehends the whole of the German Turn from Kant to Hegel to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Jung and beyond with Wittgenstein and Habermas, whereas our postmodern friends get tangled up in the bushes with Marx and Freud. Silly geese.

See, I think that if you have grasped the German Turn you understand that everything is a social construct, a step-by-step analysis from the First Social Construct of the "basic-level" notion onwards and upwards and that each step always partakes of both the Apollonian consciousness and the Dionysian unconsciousness. And each step is complicated by false starts and errors. 

So it is rubbish to think of science as Apollonian and the arts as Dionysian. Or to get all hung up on social constructs. Unless you access both and understand that everything is a social construct you will be stuck on a rock. Or in the bushes, like a silly goose.

German Turn -- Script

Hello, I'm Chris Chantrill. Let's talk about what I call The German Turn.

Ok, you ask, why? Because I think that the way to understand the modern world is through the arc of German thinking, from Kant to Jung.

Some of these Germans were good Germans, some of them were bad. And one or two were just naughty.

Most Anglo-Saxons are proud to believe logic and reason -- and sneer at people led by their feelings. 

But the Germans, prompted by the British David Hume, realized that this was not so. We are all governed by our feelings, including the unconscious feelings that we don't even feel.

With Immanuel Kant, the Germans believed that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances, appearances that get processed by our brains into a picture of reality.

I maintain that Kant leads directly, do not pass Go, to the modern physics of relativity and quantum mechanics -- developed mainly by Germans and a Dane or two.

I believe that Kant leads directly to German psychology, with Schopenhauer, Freud, and Jung and the theory of the unconscious. 

Guess what? It was Schopenhauer that invented "repression," not Freud.

Then there is Richard Wagner. His operas were all about characters in medieval romances, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and a rehash of the Nordic myths in The Ring of the Nibelung. You could say he was digging into the past in order to understand the future. Wagner was a bit of an anti-Semite.

But then there were the bad Germans. I mean guys like rich kid Karl Marx that created an economics of worker "immiseration" on classical economics the day before it was superceded by the marginal revolution of 1870. But enough of them.

Let's talk about Nietzsche: he is my naughty German. Lefties dismiss him as "the Nazis' favorite intellectual." Maybe so, but Nietzsche argued that for guys like him the old God had Died, and this meant a brutal process of decadence -- the dying off of the old order -- followed by nihilism, then the terror of the eternal recurrence -- think Bill Murray and Groundhog Day -- and finally the birth of a new god with the revaluation of all values. 

Nietzsche's man of the future was his egoistic Übermensch, but I think that the new man will be a Sacrificial Hero rather than a Warrior Hero.

Why is that? Because the Good German that came after Nietzsche was Carl Jung. OK, so he was Swiss. And Jung, following Wagner, reckoned that if we wanted to understand human nature it would help to look at the ancient myths in a new light: not as superstitions but as universal human experiences. 

Jung talked about archetypes and the collective unconscious. And one ancient archetype is the Sacrificial Hero, as in Jesus Christ.

After Jung? The Frankfurt School, in particular Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. They took the Marxian narrative of bourgeois vs. proletarian and made it bigger: mankind vs. the world. "Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men."

Finally, there is Jürgen Habermas. He was a leftist, but he climbed out of the Marxian hell-hole.

For him, humans are not merely rational actors dominating the world with instrumental reason. They also live in a community in the world -- he called it the life-world. Humans live with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement.

Oh, and don't forget the German Wernher von Braun. He helped America win the race to the moon.

What does it mean that humans live in a life-world animated by a shared experience of archetypes ancient and modern and the mystery of the collective unconscious?

That's what my reductive Three Peoples theory is all about, up next.

I'm Chris Chantrill, and thanks for watching.

Reign of Terror Means the Revolution is Failing

One of the conventional wisdoms on the right these days is that the Conservative Establishment failed us. It failed to fight against the left. And now look where we are, with the left canceling everyone in sight, and Big Business keeping its powder dry by mouthing conventional platitudes about Black Lives Matter.

So argues Julie Kelly at American Greatness.

The argument of the Conservative Establishment, on the other hand, is that Trump's crazy chaos politics radicalized the left. But for Trump, we would all be getting along.

I think that both arguments are wrong. I believe that what we are experiencing is the classic case of a religious movement dealing with the impossible situation, that its faith is not moving mountains.

Do you realize the impossible place our lefty friends are in? The whole arc of leftism is that, with a new politics, we could create a heaven on earth, free of hunger, free of poverty, free of discrimination, free of oppression, free of racism, sexism, homophobia and all the other -phobias in the dictionary.

They said that their labor laws would revolutionize the workplace. Oh yeah, how are the workers doing these days? Dying of despair? How come?

They said that their Civil Rights laws would transform race relations and lift African Americans up from centuries of slavery and Jim Crow oppression and segregation. Oh yeah, how are the blacks doing these days? Still getting killed by police for resisting arrest? How come?

They said that feminism would liberate women from the patriarchy of the ages. Oh yeah? Then how come women reported themselves happier in the 1950s than today?

When the revolution fails to deliver the promised Paradise, the revolutionaries do not just give up and go home. They redouble their efforts. And redouble them again.

Eventually we get the Reign of Terror, Great Purge, Cultural Revolution, Great Awokening.

And then comes Reaction.

That's the model proposed by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. And I like it.

But why Reaction? Why don't the wokies keep on keeping on naming and shaming and canceling from now until forever, or until the last Deplorable Statue has been erased from history and the last "far-right" activist has been fired from his job and divorced by his wife?

Because, Crane Brinton writes, humans cannot live forever in the frenzy of white hot religion. Eventually we relapse back to normal life.

The classic Reaction is the end of the French Reign of Terror in July of 1794, the so-called Thermidorean Reaction when Robespierre was removed from office. And it led to the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Of course, Bonaparte then led France through the disaster of the Napoleonic Wars from which France has never really recovered. Some people think that is a good thing.

But I think that, because the United States is a proof of God's existence, that we in America will get through the Reign of Wokeness without the bloodbath of the Reign of Terror.

And that is because the voters of the United States elected Donald Trump in 2016.

Yes, of course Conservatism Inc. is really resentful about Donald Trump. Hey, he's managed to do what they failed to do for 60 years, ever since William F. Buckley Jr. decided to stand athwart history, yelling Stop. Wouldn't you be angry?

Yes, of course the left is fit to be tied by Donald Trump. According to their arc of history, Donald Trump ought to be impossible. Yet here he is. 

And One Million people have signed up for his June 20th rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although the top Tulsa city health expert wants Trump to cancel the rally, because health.

Do you see why that would be? Why a million people might have signed up for Trump's rally in a stadium that holds 19,000? 

It's because the vast majority of people just want to live their "humdrum lives" -- immortalized by Lina Lamont. They don't want to bend the arc of history towards justice, or stand athwart history, or amaze their college classmates with a brilliant career, or get into activism, or even go to Mars with our tech billionaires. They just want to live and work and get married and have a family and live to enjoy their grandchildren.

And let it be said that this simple agenda has never been easy, down the ages, on account of the Four Horsemen representing pestilence, war, famine, and death.

In a way, it is appropriate that President Trump has been assailed non-stop by a series of harassments from the ruling class, starting with surveillance from the intelligence community, then an effort to take out his advisor LTG Flynn, then the Special Prosecutor investigation, then the impeachment effort, then the hyped-up WuFlu epidemic, and lately the faked-up riots over the death of a black career criminal in police custody.

Really, what president in our history could have stood up to all this abuse the way Trump has done?

Now I believe, following my research into Jungian psychology and his concept of "archetypes," that the proper role for the man who wishes to change history is the role of the Sacrificial Hero, one who probably perishes on the border between Order and Chaos trying to understand and stand for new ideas and knowledge despite the baying of the mob.

Donald Trump is, of course, an improbable candidate for Sacrificial Hero of the Year, since he is a proud and boastful egomaniac, thrice married, and I know not what.

And yet he has stood against the rage of the mob for nigh on four years, standing for Making America Great Again and promising to Drain the Swamp of the Deep State.

Will he succeed or will he go down to ignominious defeat at the hands of the wokey mob and the devious wranglings of the Deep State?

Nobody can tell, but I believe that he has changed history to this extent. He has redefined the Republican Party as the party of the ordinary American Commoner. As opposed to the Democratic Party that is clearly the party of the educated Gentry and its Clients.

In my view the only question is now how the left in its current Great Awokening will go down the tubes. Will it be at the hands of Donald Trump, as the Sixties went down the tubes with the two elections of Richard Nixon, or will it be at the hands of a future Reactionary that seizes the reins of power at the next Thermidorean moment?

You tell me.

The German Turn

The great question in every human life is the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything” -- for me. But this meaning has changed over the years and millennia, particularly in our own time. Many of us can’t accept the religion of our ancestors, and the religion of the Prophet Marx that they force-feed kids at our government schools and universities inspired the worst slave states in history. There seems to be a “glitch” in the Matrix. And yet still we yearn for meaning, for, as Roy Rappaport has written, “No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion,” the attempt to find meaning in life.

I experienced my “glitch” in the Matrix decades ago when reading F.S.C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West. In Chapter V: German Idealism, he begins:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature, which defined the foundations of traditional modern French and Anglo-American democratic culture, has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

What did that mean, I wondered, a young man educated in the Newtonian mechanics of pre-relativity physics and perfectly content with the mechanical world view of the British empiricists? What was their problem? Well, I now understand, it means the German Turn: 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. They were all dealing with the fact that, for them, the “Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature” didn’t do the job of explaining the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything,” and they set out to do something about it.

OK, so what does that mean? For me, it means that after you have read all those Germans the problem of the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything” looks a lot different than the logic and reason and mechanical world of the Anglo-Saxons. And downstream from that, so is any religion, and culture, and politics that you might want to conjure up to solve that little problem of meaning.

And you appreciate, or at least I do, why there seems to be a bit of a cock-up these days on the religion, culture, and politics fronts, especially wherever lefties are involved.

And there is this: Downstream of religion, downstream of culture, there is the fact that nobody, but nobody, has yet come up with a politics that goes one better than the politics invented by our Founders 240 years ago. How come? But there have been a ton of people -- from Marx to Marcuse -- who have taken ideas from the German Turn and made a complete dog’s breakfast out of them: murderous religions, poisonous cultures, and dysfunctional politics.

What does that mean? That the German Turn was a wrong turn, or that Marx and Marcuse were wrong’uns? My faith is that the Marxes and the Marcuses were fools rather than wrong’uns, and made a very simple, and very foolish mistake: that the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in the new world could be found in politics and political power, pretending you were some kind of an Earthly god. But for me, the German Turn is not about power, but everything else.

Indeed, I would say that the one thing to take from the German Turn is that politics and power are not the answer.

But what are the positive takeaways from the German Turn? It starts, at least, that with Kant we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only sense impressions conjured up into a theory of reality. It means, 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, the Peck’s Bad Boy of philosophers, that any time a God is Dead the former believers cannot avoid a revaluation of all values, even though the journey leads through decadence and nihilism and will probably tip them into madness. It means, with Freud, that 90 percent of our mind is the unconscious mind, and that probably it is the unconscious mind that is directing our lives with its repressed mania and not the magisterial logical Ego of the conscious mind. It means, with Jung, that we’d better understand our unconscious and the archetypes with which it is programmed to interpret and interact with the world before we boldly head out to bend the arc of history towards justice. 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 “lifeworld,” Heidegger's being-there in a face-to-face culture of shared experience in the world.

All cool stuff, but does it matter? Well, here’s my take: you be the judge.

I’ve come to think, over the years, that Kant’s dictum about not knowing things-in-themselves is the most astonishing idea in human history. He was trying to synthesize the antithesis -- before Hegel! -- between Cartesian rationalism and Humean empiricism. 

In my view, Kant's dictum that we do not know things-in-themselves but only appearances gave physicists permission to break out of the certainty that we live in a world of matter and absolute space and time. It gave them permission to dare to suggest that space and time are relative. And his ideas also led to the mad, mad world of quantum mechanics where matter is no longer matter. Another thing: with the Uncertainty Principle we have a foundational reason to believe in Free Will, or at least unexpected accidents, again. I’d say that Kant matters.

But what does it all mean? The truth is that we still don’t have a clue: that is the point of saying that we cannot know things-in-themselves -- or, if you like, the man behind the curtain -- so we are reduced, we will always be reduced, to making it up as we always have, filling in the blanks with a Narrative. And that, I presume, is the meaning of Douglas Adams’ little joke about the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything.” Nietzsche is on to it in The Will to Power §853 with a characteristic insult:

Metaphysics, morality, religion, science -- in this book these things merit consideration only as various forms of lies: with their help we can have faith in life.

Nietzsche’s lie, his “faith in life,” his Narrative, is the free spirit, the Übermensch, with increasing vigor, will-to-power, exploding forth to overcome decadence, nihilism, and the Groundhog Day of eternal recurrence. Maybe that is a bridge too far; maybe humans can never become Übermenschen, since Nietzsche collapsed into insanity at age 46.

Maybe Nietzsche is giving us a clue, that he could not bear the weight of suffering in his life, and so retreated behind the cloud of insanity. For suffering seems to be front and center in human religion, ancient, modern and postmodern, in our human attempts to understand the meaning of life.

Next: The Question of Suffering
The question of meaning revolves around the differing analyses of suffering

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