Girard, Scapegoat, Whitewash and Politics

For some time I have been reading around the notion of René Girard and the Scapegoat. The idea is that when a human society is hopelessly divided and involved in blame and revenge, it tends to resolve the problems by uniting against a single person, usually marginalized or diseased, and blaming that scapegoat for everything. Then, after the scapegoat is ritually killed, the community is "healed," ending the divisions and recriminations and blame and endless revenge. Until next time.

That is Girard's argument in Violence and the Sacred. In another book, The Scapegoat, he proposes another notion, that in our human religions and myths we get embarrassed about the crimes of our ancestors and our gods, and start to whitewash them. Because, after all, our ancestors and our gods could not have been that bad.

Girard uses a mistranslation of the death of Remus -- of Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome -- as an example.

Romulus and Remus are contesting the kingship of Rome. Girard quotes a translation of Livy:

An argument ensues, which comes to blows; anger degenerates into a murderous struggle. It is, then, in the scuffle, that Remus falls dead.

Only, Girard writes, the Latin translated as "in the scuffle" is "in turba" which means "in the crowd" and "the word turba has an almost technical meaning; a crowd that is confused, perturbed, and disturbing" and Livy often uses the word "turba" to describe "collective murders." 

Do you see what he is describing here? Nothing to see here, only a "scuffle:" not a collective murder by the mob.

In a related topic, see reports on the current move by Wikipedia to delete its "Mass killings under communist regimes" page.

On the other hand, we note that our lefty friends spend a lot of their time hyping the crimes of imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, to represent the recent past as a violent and oppressive horror show in which the whole of society, except for activist lefties, is guilty.

I suppose that none of this is remarkable. If you are spinning the narrative of continuing the current regime you propose that it is all for the best, although maybe "mistakes were made." But hey, we don't want to be too hard on our ancestors. If you are trying to change the regime, then you want to present the regime's doings as a horrible crime.

I would say, in addition, that the scapegoat mechanism of re-uniting the society around the victimization of a single individual has been replaced with the victimization of a small minority group. Thus Girard writes about blaming the Jews for the plague in medieval Europe. Thus, in a divided and demoralized Germany after World War I Hitler and his propagandists united the Germans against The Jews.

In another context Girard discusses the murder of the Scandinavian god Baldr through the machinations of the trickster god Loki. He proposes that Baldr was probably a victim of the scapegoat mechanism but that the story of his collective murder by the whole community was covered up in later versions of the myth: the evil trickster did it.

If you try too hard to prove something you prove nothing. This is the case of the myth of Baldr: guilty people make too many excuses. They fail to realize that a simple excuse is more effective than many excellent ones. If you want to deceive your audience you had better not let them see what you are trying to do.

This story puts me in mind of our lefty friends. Don't you think that they try too hard to blame everything on guilty racist-sexist-homophobes. And imperialists and colonialists? I wonder why. 

Obviously, the scapegoat mechanism is connected with Nazi Carl Schmitt's notion of politics being the friend / enemy distinction, made "real simple" by Curtis Yarvin in the maxim: "there is no politics without an enemy." Politics, then is the uniting of the community against a common enemy. Just as in the distant past a community without an organized politics would combine against a scapegoat.

Scapegoating the Unvaccinated

The wolves are after Dennis Prager. He made a comparison between the scapegoating of gays around the time of the AIDS epidemic with the current scapegoating of the unvaccinated at the present moment. His unforgivable crime is that he noted that the ruling class came out and protected gays from being the pariahs to blame for it all. But today, of course, the ruling class is all-in on blaming the unvaxxed. Said he:

During the AIDS crisis, can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users, who were the vast majority of the people with AIDS, had they been pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are? But it would have been inconceivable.

Only, of course, IT WAS gays that were to blame. It was their unprotected anal sex that was the prime vector of AIDS.

But hey, gays are the Little Darlings of the ruling class, so don't you dare blame them, bigot.

But the scapegoat is as old as humanity. René Girard is the chap that has done most to point this out in his Violence and the Sacred. And I have been writing about this since 2008. My first scapegoating article was about blaming bankers for the Crash of 2008.

But this week I have been reading Girard's The Scapegoat. Which is more of the same, but more focused. And what I am getting is that, when a human community experiences a disaster that it can't explain then it unites and turns on some convenient scapegoat. He uses the example of the Black Death, in which about one third of humans in Europe died.

We now think we know what the Black Death was all about. It was a disease that originated in the port of Kaffa in the Crimea and was transmitted by rats. But people back then didn't know that. So they blamed the Jews for poisoning the water.

You can see that when any disaster occurs the cause is, at least initially, uncertain. So it is natural and physical to, e.g., blame gays for AIDS. But fortunately there was St. Fauci at hand who said that "AIDS may be transmittable through casual household contact." Blessed be his name.

We have a similar situation with COVID. We have a vaccine that is turning out to be rather less effective than originally promised by the ruling class. We really don't know why. Looks like "Houston we have a problem." So what is the obvious thing for politicians to do? Find a scapegoat.

Now, the art of scapegoating is to find some small minority, such as Jews or gays, without good contacts in the ruling class, and blame it all on them. You accuse them of being ignorant or malevolent, and whip up the mob to deal with them. And now we have Twitter mobs that can be mobilized in a moment.

Girard points out that "mob" and "mobilize" come from the same Latin "mobile."

I'd say that the unvaxxed are a good, but not ideal, scapegoat to blame for the continuance of the COVID epidemic. In fact, blaming the unvaxxed may turn out to be a strategic error, for a variety of reasons, from the fact that the unvaxxed are not a helpless marginalized minority to the uncertainty about the ultimate effectiveness of COVID immunity from vaccination versus immunity from actually contracting the disease and surviving.

I get why the Biden administration went all-in on vaccination and mandating vaccination through OSHA. And a political leader needs to appear to be leading us -- for the men -- and protecting us -- for the women.

Reality is that politicians can't really do that much to help us on anything. But we don't want to hear that, especially when people are dying: "if we can just save one life!"

Of course, scapegoating the unvaxxed is just one of the scapegoating operations that our liberal friends in the ruling class are conducting right now. The most obvious one is blaming the problems of blacks on "white supremacists" and "white oppressors." Otherwise, how could it be that blacks lag in almost all the good things and lead in all the bad things like murder? It could not be -- it could not be -- that the problems of blacks all lead back to liberal programs like welfare and Affirmative Action / Diversity / Equity.

Actually, that's a good point. It cannot be, it can never be that the ruling class is to blame, because we rulers are the good guys, the educated evolved people who care. It must be some racist / deplorable / bitter clinger that's to blame.

Of course, the opposite is true.

I say that almost always, every ruling class in history Makes Things Worse. And do you know why? It is because government is force, and "Justice is the Absence of Force." (I just thought of that in the middle of last night). So you can't really do anything useful with government except defend the borders from the invaders. Everything else that government does Makes Things Worse. Even when there's a hurricane the Cajun Navy is out well before the gubmint folks. 

Derek Chauvin, Human Sacrifice

That's the title of Ann Coulter's latest. Hey, human sacrifice is as old as the hills. And its provenance is explained by René Girard's concept of the scapegoat, that societies come together after a division by sacrificing a scapegoat to the gods.

But Paul Craig Roberts simply calls the Chauvin trial a show trial.

[The prosecutor] is not going to let facts get in the way of Chauvin’s conviction. Neither does the judge want the vilification that a fair trial would bring. The jurors all understand that if they let Officer Chauvin off they will be outcasts and suffer violence to themselves and their property. The entire community knows that unless Chauvin is convicted, their city will again be looted and burned. Indeed, the many cities that experienced the George Floyd protests feel the same way.

Yeah! What better way to bring us all together, Girard-style, than by sacrificing a policeman to the Gods of the Woke?

For Roberts it's the end of the justice system.

In former times when America had a justice system and a responsible media, media was careful not to convict a suspect or defendant prior to the jury doing so. To be convicted by the media was reason for dismissing the charges on the grounds that there was no prospect of an objective jury. But in America today, it is conviction that is the focus, not innocence or guilt.

Because the whole point of a justice system is to cool the jets of the mob.

So why is our ruling class so happy to dump the justice system and encourage the mob, their own special Sturmabteiling of BLM/Antifa? Of course the day came in 1934, the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler didn't need his SA any more. Or maybe wanted to make sure there was not going to be any trouble from his once-useful street thugs. Hey who needs street thugs when you have the Army and the police?

You would think that our ruling class would be perfectly happy to have the police to enforce their power. Why are they proposing to Defund the Police? We know, of course that the armed forces are not a problem for the regime. The recent deployment of the National Guard in Washington DC to protect Our Nance proves that.

Well, we know the answer to that. Regimes institute Reigns of Terror and witch-hunts when they think that the natives are too restless, when the regime has failed to create the promised Heaven on Earth. Trouble is that the reigns of terror and cultural revolutions and icon-busting often gets a bit out of hand, and starts to destroy the ruling class itself.

We can see that there are literally millions of people that are perfectly delighted to start beating up their fellow citizens for heresy, toppling statues, and declaring the classic music notation is colonialist.

Now, I read a while ago that witch hunts are great fun when they are stringing up crotchety old women from out of town that are living alone. But when the witch hunt starts to engulf high-status respectable women, that's when the ruler call a halt.

I wonder what will cause our present rulers to cool the jets of the Cancel Culture and BLM/Antifa. Not for a while.

For instance, in my view the Biden economic policy is going to cause serious hardship to the average person in the US, and maybe even to nice liberal ladies living in nice gentrified suburbs. So the Bidens may want to amp up the Cancel Culture in response to reports that the natives are restless.

I dunno. I just have a nasty feeling that things are not going to be too much fun in America over the next few years.

I fear that Derek Chauvin is only the first of many sacrificial scapegoats.

Just Who Are Those Horrible Systemic Racist White Supremacists?

As we watch all the mostly peaceful protesters protesting against systemic racism and proposing to defund the police, we have to wonder. 

Just who are the monsters, the patriarchs, the white supremacists, the systemic systemists, the racists, of which we've heard tell?

Are they privileged corporate CEOs? No. Everyone from Amazon to Walmart has clearly declared their support for Black Lives Matter, and some have actually paid good money to back up their words.

Are they privileged college professors? Heavens No! College professors are all down for the movement, and are willing to DIE on the cross of Diversity, Inclusions, and Equality: for Blacks, and maybe for the odd Hispanic and certainly for all the non-cis-gendered in their many LGBT flavors.

Are they writers and intellectuals? Certainly not! The whole point of the Harper's Wet-Noodle Manifesto was for the intellectuals to declare themselves firmly on the side of the GoodWhites and absolutely opposed to President Trump's assault on democracy.

Are they Hollywood types? No indeed. In fact Hollywood is so determined to get woke that it looks like you ain't gonna work in this town again if you are a middle-aged white guy.

Are they root'n toot'n feminists demanding that that the marginalized women down the ages have the right to own their own bodies? I can't believe you said that. Feminists demand that marginalized women have the right to choose just like well-born academic women.

Are they nice liberal ladies preening themselves behind a forest of social-moralizing yard-signs of the #WeBelieve and #BlackLivesMatter variety? Absolutely not. Nice liberal ladies always take care to model the proper moral attitude.

Are they the activist college kidz that we see marchin' and protest'n in mostly peaceful protests across this great land and that are absolutely not spreading WuFlu with their protests? Of course not. You must be crazy to think that the kidz, perfectly programmed by two decades of regime propaganda, would have a white supremacist bone in their bodies.

So obviously there is something really weird going on. Some Deep Thinking is required.

Let's get a little more intellectual and apply this question to my reductive Three Peoples theory or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer "Clear Pill" notion.

Are we talking about the educated Gentry or my People of the Creative Self as the cause of all this Police Brutality and white supremacy? No indeed. The Gentry is all down for the movement, committed to Justice for the historically marginalized.

Are we talking about the Clients, the Victims, or my People of the Subordinate Self. Certainly not! They are the very people that have been enslaved and enserfed and dominated and marginalized since the Dawn of Time and very likely earlier and for whom all good people demand Justice and an end to Police Brutality!

Then, we must be talking about the Commoners, the People of the Responsible Self, that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules.

Really? Now I don't claim to know everything, just almost everything. And I cannot see how the average Commoner can be the guy that's to blame for all the problems of the world.

You know why? Because he doesn't have any power. He doesn't have any privilege. He can be fired in a moment for an ill-considered comment. Nobody pays no nevermind to his opinions and his beliefs. And as for his clothes and his baseball caps! Darling!

Let us create an image of this guy. He is the guy that you see in a Trump rally that forms the backdrop of Trump's performance.

Does he have more privilege than a CEO?

Does he have more privilege than a college professor?

Does he have more privilege than a famous writer?

Does he have more privilege than a Hollywood producer, or even a Grip, whatever that is?

Does he have more privilege than a feminist?

Does he have more privilege than a nice liberal lady?

Does he have more privilege than a mostly peaceful protesting college kid?

The question answers itself.

Now this notion, this scapegoat for all the sins of the world, goes back to the original Marxian narrative, in which noble educated youth and helpless proletarians would unite to scupper the bourgeoisie that was hell-bent on immiserating the working class due to the inevitable workings of classical economics and the neo-feudal instincts of the capitalists.

Of course, the Marxian narrative was just an update of the scapegoat of primitive humanity as outlined by Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred.

It had a point, back in the day, when the bourgeoisie and even the petite bourgeoisie, whatever that is, were a minority compared to the masses of workers. Yeah! They were an exploitative minority that was exploiting the workers. Down with the capitalists!

But today, I'd say, this narrative has passed its sell-by date. Because, for one thing, the middle class Commoners are probably a majority of the adult population. I'd say that a politics that blames a majority of the population for all the sins of the world is probably heading for a bruising.

I mean. Suppose a politician came along and told the middle class Commoners that they were the greatest people in the greatest nation in the world and that the Stuck-ups in the Swamp and the criminals in the streets were the guys that were really to blame for all the sins of the world.

Now I don't know where such a politician might come from or what he would look like. No Idea!

But you can see that there is an opportunity there for some courageous and adventurous soul that is not afraid to incur the wrath of all the Great and the Good.

Look, this scapegoat thing is as old as the hills. We humans have been doing the Scapegoat Waltz since whenever. But to compose a new tune to the Scapegoat Waltz and push it to the top of the hit parade. Well, that takes talent. And also a lightning strike.

What do you think?

Dennis Prager Itemizes My Great Reaction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It could be because they are idiots.

Understanding the Power of "Fascism"

What exactly is fascism? It has been such a bugaboo for so long that a guy wants to know. Why should we be so terrified of it? Why should all good people want to cut it down the moment it appears? Why do the young lefty thugs of AntiFa choose anti-fascism as their escutcheon?

I read a piece about fascism at Quillette and I'm still not sure. Obviously, fascism as a monster was created by Stalin in the 1930s. Why, exactly? Because fascism was a rival to Communism? Because Stalin needed an enemy for his Bolsheviks and for other lefties to hate? No doubt, as Paul Gottfried has written, fascism is a

slur “hurled at anyone who holds what are now unpopular opinions.”

And, I suppose, anyone that wants to occupy the commanding heights of culture or politics tends to need a convenient lightning bolt to hurl at the despicables and the deplorables.

And, I suppose, after the glorious victory of 1945 both the ruling class of the US coalition and the Soviet Union found it convenient to have something "that must never happen again." Still, what exactly was it that we were supposed to fear?

Even in the 1940s, at a time when genuinely fascist dictatorships threatened to extinguish freedom over much of the world’s surface, George Orwell noted that misuse of the term had rendered it “entirely meaningless.” Decades later, American journalist Tom Wolfe would note the “morbid tendency” of his colleagues to apply the word to everything from Christian revivalist movements to hippies.

Maybe the meaning is just as Tom Wolfe described it in "The Land of the Rococo Marxists."

Anti-fascism, he wrote, “became a universal ray gun, good for zapping anybody, anywhere, from up here… on the intellectuals’ Everest of Indignation.”

Really, then, it is no different than the universal kill-shot, the accusation of racism. The whole point of calling someone a racist-sexist-homophobe is to shut them up, because there is no defense against it.

So the accusation of "fascism" or "Nazism" is just a ranging shot, because if you say a word in its favor then you are obviously in favor of killing Jews.

I suppose that is why I have developed my usual "across the grain" aphorism, where I say that

Trump is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.

For you can also say that "fascism is the idiocy that people grab for when the usual idiots have screwed up."

But really, I think that fascism is much more cunning than socialism or communism. Because fascism and Nazism exploit the obvious power of nationalism, the identification that ordinary Commoners have with the nation state. It is a powerful combination of the ancient and the modern.

The power of socialism as an idea is its lurch to the primitive. We all have programmed within us the yearning for the community of the kindred, where people are as one and are perfect social animals. And we all have the other primitive instincts, that if something goes wrong there is a fault at the bottom of it, either our own fault of the malevolence of another. And the solution is vengeance or the scapegoat of Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred.

But we humans have learned over the last 500 years to identify with the community of the nation. So when things go wrong we look to the leader of the nation to lead us back to safety. The lesson of World War I was that the workers of Germany, supporters of the Social Democratic Party, identified first as Germans before they identified as the class of proletarians.

And the lesson of World War II is that when Stalin wanted to rally the Russian people he did it by appealing to them as Russians and not as Communists. Hey, guess what: Stalin (and Bukharin) came up with the notion of "socialism in a single country" in 1924! According to La Wik.

So, when the rubber hits the road, even socialists need to rally the workers to the nation. Because that is what works.

Really "fascism" is just a pejorative that people with cultural power use to shut other people up. 

So, the only question is: how do we respond? And I would say that we should understand that all lefty 

heroes are really fascists, national socialists at heart.

So the way to respond is to say, if you are a man, "Whatabout Obama? Here was a progressive trying to bend the arc of history towards social justice in one country. Fascism, in all but name."

For "Obama" you can substitute any Democratic leader that seems appropriate, from FDR to Speaker Karen Pelosi (D-CA).

If you are a women, you say, "I can't believe you said that." And then you text your friend to complain.

Obamagate: Putting the Racist Bugbear to Rest

What do we do about the Obamagate scandal? It is becoming clear that the Obama administration orchestrated surveillance of the Trump campaign, maybe directed from the very top, i.e., from President Obama himself.

There are all kinds of flags indicating this, including the fact that President Obama seems to have had a personal animus against LTG Michael Flynn. Because Flynn was a danger to shipping in the "intelligence community," because he wanted to reform the Defense Intelligence Agency. Apparently Obama personally recommended to Trump more than once that he not bring Flynn into the Trump administration.

But what to do? Because you and I know that we are only days away from the accusation that the people accusing President Obama of orchestrating the whole Trump Russia Collusion caper are racists.

Anyone accusing President Obama of anything is accused of being a racist.

It's getting to the point that I am going to refuse to vote for any African American ever. Because you are not allowed to criticize African Americans. Because racism.

Oh wait. No problem voting for black Republicans! Because there is no special privilege for them.

Now we have the tragic killing of a black "jogger" in Brunswick, Georgia, with the media going full Trayvon Martin. Again.

Did you notice that the Trayvon Martin incident occurred in February 2012, a presidential election year. And did you know that the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, occurred in August 2014 at election time?

Hmm. Do you think perhaps that Democrats need to get their African American supporters wound up into a frenzy of fear every election year, in order to get them out to vote?

Look, I get it. The African America community is a vital part of the Democratic coalition, and the most pro-Democrat, with 90 percent voting Democrat. Any falloff in black voting means curtains for Democratic politicians.

I also know that the way you keep small minorities unified is by the external enemy and the cult of innocence. That's how the Jews do it. I do not say this out of animus; it just occurred to me one day. If you are a small minority you are always at risk from the larger community if it needs a scapegoat. So you have to maintain your unity at all costs. And the way you do it is with a culture of innocence.

And scapegoating, from René Girard and others, is just the way that a human community restores unity after a divisive rupture. Nothing personal, you understand!

Indeed, Hitler's use of anti-semitism to unite the Germans is merely a textbook case of how to unite a people divided and demoralized after defeat in war.

But the flip side of the scapegoat game is the culture of innocence, the idea that "we" are the helpless innocents harassed and harried by all kinds of vicious enemies. It is just as natural and physical as the culture of scapegoating.

That is the point of stuff like Jung's collective unconscious and archetypes. It is to call attention to the fact that there is a whole lot going on in the human unconscious that is not necessarily apparent at the conscious level.

Of course there is. "Consciousness" is clearly a recent development in humans. Yet, clearly, mammals of all kinds, including our simian friends, are social animals that do things that promote pro-social behavior. And we are just jumped-up apes. How do they do it? With behaviors progammed into their brains. Archetypes.

Obviously politicians and leaders of all kinds need to activate various unconscious archetypes in their followers and constituents. Of course they do. For one thing, it is very difficult to get a consensus in human affairs by logical and rational discussion. In fact, I would say it is almost impossible. Instead, the politician and the leader, whether corporate or military, finds that the only way to lead is by activating unconscious drives like loyalty, courage, innocence, hate. Again, nothing personal; that's just the way things are.

But obviously when the activation of archetypes develops to the point that, e.g., the racial killing of a black in election year gets boosted up into the stratosphere, then we have a problem. Did you know that that there were about 500 black-on-white killings a year in 2015 and about 230 white-on-black killings? These represent about 12 percent of the 6,000 homicides for which "police had information about the race of both victim and killer."

Now I don't know what that means. Because to have an opinion on such a matter would be racist.

But I would say, to both liberal journalists and the black community, that maybe it is time to turn off the race argument. Because I'd say that we are getting close to the point where you chaps will do yourself an injury when you play the race card.

But I don't expect that you will stop it. Not until it hits you in the face.

Meanwhile, it looks like Obamagate is the worst political scandal in US history. And why? Because Obama and his underlings reckoned that Obama got a pass not just because he was a Democrat but because race. So they could afford to do illegal things without penalty.

But don't accuse President Obama. That would be racist.

Dying of Despair: What Should We Do About Cultural Decline?

Our elite betters have being doing a little worrying lately about the decline of the white working class. Whether it is Charles Murray in Coming Apart: the State of White America 1960-2010, or J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, or now Deaths of Despair by Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

According to Steve Sailer, Case and Deaton compare the "declining lifespans of working-class white Americans since the turn of the century" -- featuring suicides and drug usage -- with the much more optimistic culture among African Americans.

What's the difference? Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that poor and working-class whites are universally devalued as racists and deplorables while blacks are "a triumphant race, celebrated all over the world for their soul."

In fact, cases of groups and tribes and nations "giving up" are not at all uncommon. Whatabout native Americans? Whatabout Russian men in the aftermath of the Soviet Union? And whatabout Germans that were universally convicted of war and race and anti-Semitic crimes after World War II?

My point is that groups and nations are giving up all the time. Just don't let it happen to me and mine!

But I also have a theory about this. I call it Little Darlings, and get seriously into it with "The Cruel Fate of the Ruling Class's "Little Darlings." My argument is simple. If the ruling class is saying how wonderful you are, and is shoveling free stuff at you, and bidding for your votes, be wary. They are not doing it because they like you, or because they care about people like you. They are using you as foot-soldiers in their power project.

And the day will come when they don't have a use for you.

I like to use the example for Napoleon's march on Moscow in 1812. He marched the flower of France to Moscow and spent the summer there. But when it was time to retreat then it was every man for himself and many starved and died. Napoleon himself, of course, returned to France in a carriage protected by an armed guard.

When you've been praised and flattered and patted on the knee for years, it is a shock to the system when suddenly Sugar Daddy don't have that twinkle in his eye no more.

That is what has happened to the white working class, and for understandable reasons. In the 1960s our liberal friends stopped obsessing over the exploitation of the working class. They moved on to the exploitation of blacks and women. So the ruling class narrative changed.

From the 1960s onward, it became increasingly unfashionable to criticize blacks, but trendy to criticize whites. Not surprisingly, blacks reacted to this new dispensation with increasing exuberance, while whites became more depressed and withdrawn. As black egos expanded after their civil rights victories, they increasingly shot each other in knuckleheaded beefs. Meanwhile, as White Privilege became a preoccupation of the press, whites increasingly shot themselves, or drank themselves to death, or overdosed on synthetic or natural opioids.

In other words, people really do care what you say about them.

Of course, people are now worrying about the white working class. What do "we" do about their "deaths of despair?"

Well, my advice would be the same as the advice of Frederick Douglass.

Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall!

And this is true of all groups that well-intentioned elitists decide to help. But then there are the ill-intentioned elitists, that are spewing pejoratives at the groups they wish to marginalize, calling them racists, white supremacists, and Nazis.

The evil of all this talking-up and talking-down, I think, is well illustrated by the situation of the Jews. Jews have tended to be a small minority within a larger community, and this has exposed them to the risk of being a convenient scapegoat for the larger community. The whole purpose of the scapegoat phenomenon, according to Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred, is to get a divided community to unite. But the only way you can do that is to battle against a common enemy.

How do the Jews do it, and keep their morale up through Pogroms and Holocausts? They do it by creating and maintaining a culture of innocence. Jews can never be wrong, because anti-semitism and centuries of oppression. Sure, it works, but it also keeps Jews as outsiders, eternally vulnerable to a society that needs a scapegoat, as the Russian Czar needed in 1905 and as Hitler needed after World War I. See, I don't think that developing a culture of innocence is a good idea, any more than I think that scapegoating a small minority is a good idea.

And that is why I urge blacks and women to return to the cry of Frederick Douglass. "Do nothing with us!" Why? Because while it is great to be the Little Darling of the ruling class, there will come a day when you need to stand on your own two feet and when you will not have the ruling-class cheering section and the ruling-class pom-pom girls on your side. And what will the robin do then, poor thing?

Well, unless you have developed the requisite intestinal fortitude in advance you will perhaps lose heart, and become like the culturally marginalized all down the ages. Except the Jews.

Anyway, someone has been "doing something" about the white working class. His name is Donald Trump. He is telling the white working class -- and all Americans together -- to cheer up because he is going to make America Great Again.

So I say, take heart! And then fortify yourself with a stiff course in intestinal fortitude so that when the Trump Era ends you have the courage and the strength to push back against ruling-class Mean Girls.

Rene Girard -- Contents

Rene Girard and the Scapegoat

1. Dead Cat Bounce?
   
   
2. ObamaCare on Life Support
   
   
3. We Need a Good Scapegoat
   
   
4. Obama's Scapegoat of the Week
   
   
5. The Wages of Hubris
   
   
6. A Grand Strategy for the War Against Islamism
   
   
7. Why I Say "Politics is Division"
   
   
8. The Bright Side of Obama's "Strategic Patience"
   
   
9. I Want a "Live-and-let-Live" President
   
   
10. The Real Challenge for 2017
    
    
11. The Left's Catalog of Errors
    
    
12. The Great Reaction Also Includes Neo-sacrifice
    
    
13. Great Reaction: The Story So Far
    
    
14. Great Reaction: Slavery and Scapegoating
    
    
15. Lefties: Getting the Hero's Journey Upside Down
    
    
16. Reich: Three Consciousnesses is Not Enough
    
    
17. Dying of Despair: What Should We Do About Cultural Decline?
    
    
18. Obamagate: Putting the Racist Bugbear to Rest
    
    
19. Understanding the Power of "Fascism"
    
    
20. Dennis Prager Itemizes My Great Reaction
    
    
21. Just Who Are Those Horrible Systemic Racist White Supremacists?
    
    
22. Derek Chauvin, Human Sacrifice
    

Reich: Three Consciousnesses is Not Enough

Well, so now Charles A. Reich, who enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame in 1970 with his Sixties manifesto The Greening of America recently passed on. Roger Kimball has a long piece about him at American Greatness.

What caught my attention was Reich's notion of the Three Consciousnesses, as follows, from La Wik:

Consciousness I applies to the typical values and opinions of rural farmers and small businesspeople which dominated society in 19th century America. 

Consciousness II represents a viewpoint of "an organizational society", featuring meritocracy and improvement through various large institutions, the ethos of the New Deal, World War II and the 1950s Silent Generation. 

Consciousness III represents the worldview of the 1960s counterculture, focusing on personal freedom, egalitarianism, and recreational drugs.

OK. So Consciousness I is the bourgeois ethos; Consciousness II is the educated ruling class ethos of socialism and the administrative state; Consciousness III is the ethos of creative artists and activists and stuff, the vision that our liberal friends have of themselves.

Do you see what is missing? Call it "Consciousness 0," except that I don't think there is a zero in Roman numerals. It's the consciousness of the People of the Subordinate Self, people who nestle up to a powerful leader -- in Consciousness II -- and surrender themselves as foot-soldiers in his power project.

But really, I find Reich's notion interesting, because of what it tells us about our liberal friends. It tells us that a gay professor like Reich knows that the welfare state is not the last word in human evolution. Who knew?

However, you will notice that our liberal friends have not proposed any reform of the liberal administrative welfare state they have built. So even though all evolved people have moved on to the creative project of Consciousness III they still need the structures of Consciousness II. And you can see why. Our liberal friends obtain their political power and the resources for their creative projects by staffing the bureaucratic slots of Consciousness II, keeping the peasants -- of Consciousness 0 that does not even exist in the world of the Three Consciousness slots! -- enslaved to entitlement programs and whacking deplorable racist sexist homophobes from their fire-bases in corporate HR. They must keep the sub-human rubes under control even as they explore the cosmos of intersectionality and creativity from their safe spaces.

Also, Reich leaves out what we might call Consciousness IV, which is the label I would put on the German notions from Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung, the understanding that consciousness is only a pimple stuck on the vast unknown of the unconsciousness, and that "personal freedom, egalitarianism, and recreational drugs" are a wet and adolescent first attempt at the Hero's Journey into the unconscious in which terrible monsters are experienced, and from which the creative person does not necessarily return. And only when the Hero has passed his trials in the underworld does he return as the Sacrificial Hero that has acquired the wisdom that empowers him to guide those left behind on the terrible border between Order and Chaos upon which he is called to sacrifice himself, to die so that others may live.

You can see that Reich's hot mess is nothing compared to the glorious vision afforded for the adepts of my Three Peoples notion. Let us express it in a way close to his own Three Consciousnesses notion.

Subordinate Consciousness applies to the dawning self-consciousness expressed in a felt lack of agency in the slave, the serf, the worker, the employee in a big bureaucracy. Their reality is the subordination to the will of the overlord who makes all the decisions and who we would say shamelessly exploits and sacrifices the subordinate in the pursuit of his power project.

Responsible Consciousness represents the viewpoint of people that experience themselves as responsible, usually to God, for the actions of their lives. The idea is to conform one's life not to the power of an earthly lord who eventually betrays those that follow him, but to a heavenly lord who a dispenses a perfect heavenly justice. These people are self-conscious as responsible agents before God.

Creative Consciousness represents the viewpoint of people that have come to believe tht it is not enough just to live a responsible life, but that humans are called to create, to be, in the words of Nietzsche, a free spirit. But, the creative realizes, the creative life is not a walk in the park with an occasional blast from a mind-altering drug, but a terrifying journey into the unexplored land of the unconscious, and the frightful temptations and monsters therein. Nor does the journey end with prizes and encomiums and "good jobs" and all, but with the sacrifice of which the Passion of Christ is the model. In fact, the sign that the hero is a false hero is that his life is a power project of self-worship rather than the equivocal fate of the Sacrificial Hero or the Scapegoat. Read all about it in Rene Girard and Violence and the Sacred.

You can see the Big Problem with our liberal friends. Their project always ends up as self-worship, demanding that the world genuflect before their wonderfulness.

Sorry, dear liberals. The meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not like that at all.

Lefties: Getting the Hero's Journey Upside Down

I believe, following the logic of my reductive Three Peoples theory, that the tripartite nature of our modern society requires that the elites realize that each of the Three Peoples really does live in a different world, and that the essence of wise governance is to respect that different People will want and need -- and deserve -- the right the live their lives according to their lights.

Of course if you believe, as I do, that the fundamental nature of the creative person is that they must follow the Hero's Journey, first into the underworld of the unconscious and then into the sacrificial role of exploring the boundary between Order and Chaos, between the known and the unknown, then you will understand this. The Hero is the sacrificial Christ-like figure, reprising the role of the Son, like Marduk, Horus, and Co.

The antithesis of the Sacrificial Hero is what John Ralston Saul in Voltaire's Bastards calls the Egoistic Hero. You can see what is going on here. The man that works on the border between Order and Chaos, discovering new knowledge and power, is a very dangerous person. So it is bad enough if he is a modest sort of chap. But if he has delusions of grandeur, then it is Katy bar the door.

And, if you didn't get the point, the 20th century has produced magnificent specimens of the genus Egoistic Hero, from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to Mao and beyond.

Our problem today is that the more influential members of our ruling class, as People of the Creative Self, have institutionalized the Egoistic Hero as the best and most wonderful thing in the world, unless he is a businessman or a right-wing politician.

Creatives of all kinds: artists, writers, intellectuals, activists, politicians, gurus; these are celebrated as the highest and best of all humans and deserving prizes, accolades, pensions, and human material on which to experiment. Every youngster from an educated home dreams of a life of creativity; that is what he has been carefully taught.

But I think the opposite is true. I think that young people should be discouraged from a life of creativity. The truth is that most people should just do the right thing and live lives of wiving and thriving. The whole creativity thing just encourages people to shortchange their life on the wiving and thriving front, and this is a great social danger, because Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

You can see the result of the celebration of the creative life. People are encouraged to think contributing to the economy, finding a life partner, and having children is not all that great shakes. They are encouraged to dream up some creative sexual identity for themselves that is a lot funner than the dull routine of selecting a life partner and being true to her through thick and thin. They are encouraged to spend their twenties "finding themselves" in some yeasty urban safe space rather than getting a job.

The truth is that the creative Hero's Journey is, in great part, an anti-social path, which will probably end in failure and misery. Because many are called but few are chosen. He who descends into the underworld of the unconsciousness will probably disappear forever, mourned only by his mother. Only he who can get through the descent into the underworld and learn its lessons can hope to return to the social world and bestow on his fellows the benison of the wisdom he learned in the darkness of the underworld.

In other words: you really don't want to try out for the Hero's Journey. You have no idea what you are signing up for.

The truth, I think is contained in the notion expressed in my latest American Thinker piece:

The Jungians, guys like Jordan Peterson, say that the crux of all religion is the hero, the Christ-like figure, that sacrifices himself exploring the border between Order and Chaos, between the known and the unknown, so that the rest of us get to the Promised Land.

But our lefty creative friends think that they get to go to the Promised Land, and the deplorables get to be sacrificed.

No, no. True religion is not like that, lefties. Trouble is that, so long as you chaps live like Alice in your Wonderland, so long will millions suffer and die for your conceit and your folly. Because that is what happens when an egoistic activist organizes millions of victims and then fails to deliver, as Lenin and Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Castro and Chávez and Maduro failed to deliver.

Oh and don't forget Barack Obama. He went down to South Chicago for a year to organize the laid-off steelworkers. Only he discovered it was too hard. So he went to graduate school instead.

If you want to be an activist and save the victims; an artist to discover a whole new vision; a writer to describe a whole new world, you should understand that this is hard, much harder than you can possibly imagine.

And at the end of it you must submit to the Sacrifice and become a scapegoat. Because that is the fate of he that toils at the border between Order and Chaos, between the Known and the Unknown.

Notice how that updates the notion of the scapegoat in Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred. In Girard's notion the community chooses a scapegoat as a sacrifice to heal its divisions. In the Jungian Peterson vision the scapegoat offers himself to be sacrificed.

Until you understand that, you understand nothing.

Great Reaction: Slavery and Scapegoating

I argue that our lefty friends are reactionaries; faced with the shocking changes of the industrial revolution, they want to return to the good old days. So we have the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-piracy of high taxation. And so on.

But let us simplify things. What the left is doing is returning us to the slavery of the agricultural age, and the mob justice of the tribal village.

Let us look at the fact of the great socialist governments, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Castro's Cuba. We are talking about slavery. And this is reactionary, because the great characteristic of the agricultural age is its slavery. Oh yeah. Sometimes it was merely feudalism. But the basic fact of the agricultural age was that the farmers needed the protection of their warrior aristocracies to keep pirates and Vikings out of town. And the warrior aristocrats took advantage of them. Big time. Right through the agricultural age the farmers were actual or nominal slaves.

In a way, I think the end of the agricultural age coincided with a kind of apotheosis of slavery in the sugar plantation. Slaves cultivated sugar cane, a fast-growing plant that uses C4 photosynthesis, and the masters fed them maize, also a fast-growing C4 plant. Very efficient!

But the market economy doesn't work with slavery. Not because we are highly advanced and ethical and moral. But because slaves just aren't as profitable as free labor, because you can make more money with workers that use their noggins, rather than just follow the orders of the slave-driver. In the same way, after World War I, the German General Staff decided that soldiers as cannon fodder didn't work; they needed resourceful, responsible soldiers that would know to do the right thing when isolated on the modern lethal battlefield.

But isn't it amazing that our lefty reactionary friends want to return to the top-down, orders-from-the-top culture of the agricultural age! In a word, slavery.

The good thing is that the slavery experiments in the Soviet Union and Maoist China turned out to be staggering failures: not just a failure to match the economic growth of the capitalist countries, but veritable death cultures that starved and enslaved tens of millions of people, and not the peoples of conquered countries, looted and put to the sword by neo-Conans, "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!" No, the people that suffered under Communism were the people that Communism was supposed to help, the workers! Imagine!

In my view, the resort to slavery is programmed into the left, because politics is war by other means, government is force, and therefore the combination leads to slavery, because the whole point of politics and government is to draft everyone into the political army of the ruling class and forced to live their lives in service to the power agenda of the ruling class. So the politics of the left inevitably drafts the whole nation into the political army of the rulers. And what are draftees but slaves by any other name?

The other thing that goes with the left like ham and eggs is the moral panic. Call it the witch hunt, the reign of terror, the purge, the scapegoat mechanism of René Girard, or whatever you like. We are seeing a classic instance of this all-to-human characteristic in the campaign of vicious slander against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

What has emerged in the moral panic over the nomination of Kavanaush is the purpose of all our legal traditions. The whole point of the law is to provide a replacement for the age-old method of dealing with intra-community conflict. The old way was for the community to gang up on a scapegoat and to invest that scapegoat with all its worries and hatreds and accusations and then kill to purge the conflict and the hatred. Maybe that worked in a small face-to-face community. But the whole point of law has been to provide a more peaceable alternative to the scapegoat culture.

Isn't it interesting that our liberal friends have completely demolished the cultural process of legal procedure in their conviction of Brett Kavanaugh by mass denunciation! And boy, do we now find ourselves reminded of what an amazing cultural miracle is our inherited culture of legal process.

I mean, what a concept! Instead of just fingering a suspect and slitting his throat, actually or metaphorically, we force the accusers to get their story straight, to submit to rules of evidence, to cross-examination of witnesses, to "beyond reasonable doubt" verdicts in the criminal law, and "preponderance of the evidence" verdicts in civil law. How blessed we are to live in this age where we benefit from these immensely civilized notions! We get to appreciate them all the more when our lefty friends gin up a periodic moral panic and demand to dispense with the law's delay.

My point is that when you decide that the price discovery system is not good enough for you, look out, because the next stop is slavery.

And when you decide that "due process" is not good enough for you, look out, because the next stop is a baying mob demanding the blood of a scapegoat, the gallows of the French Revolution and the Communist governments of the 20th century.

And that is why I call all lefties reactionaries, and their movement the Great Reaction. They want to return us to the slavery of the agricultural age and the scapegoating of the tribal village.

Great Reaction: The Story So Far

For me, the great social movements that have dominated the headlines and dug the mass graves of the last century and a half -- Communism, the welfare state, environmentalism, identity politics -- amount to a Great Reaction against the most astonishing event in world history, the Double Revolution, that in physics that has given us relativity and quantum mechanics, and in everyday life has given us the market economy.

When the world is suddenly utterly changed it is natural for people to look back to the past. New-age philosopher Ken Wilber describes it as people stepping back to "what worked" when it seems that things are all going to hell around them. So of course, with the unparalleled changes of the last two centuries there are many people that yearn for an older simpler time.

This nostaglia was evoked by Archie Bunker in the title song of All in the Family, "Those Were the Days" of the time when "Girls were girls and men were men." And the whole point of All in the Family was to sneer at the white working class that was all of a sudden finding itself left behind by history. Or at least by the ruling class.

Or, in a less innocent manner, it was natural for the Germans to revert to blood and soil after the disaster of World War I. And that is what Hitler offered them: a pure Aryan race, and a Drang nach Osten for land to the east of Germany. Absolute insanity for the nation that had invented the automobile and the new physics and left behind the old faith of slave-farmer Gerald O'Hara that "land was the only thing that lasts."

Every effort in the Great Reaction is to re-invent some social or religious or economic facet of the good old days, so my way of illustrating this is to "neo" everything about it.

Most obviously, there is the neo-feudalism of the welfare state. In the good old days of feudalism, the peasants were held in thrall, as semi-slaves, to the warrior class. The peasants tilled the fields and grew the food, and surrendered a good part of their labor to their lord in return for his protection against pirates and other lords that might come and relieve the peasants of their food and land. Same thing now: the ruling class makes all kinds of promises to the workers and offers all kinds of benefits, and people feel secure in their work and in their lives. But this is an illusion, a confidence trick. As the feudal peasants found out when the lords threw them over, and as  the white working class has found when the ruling class went global about half a century ago.

Then there is the neo-tribalism of identity politics, that unscrupulous politicians and ideologues use to divide modern voters into race and religious and gender tribes. In the modern era we have tried to use the nation state to create a new kind of membership, to get people to feel membership in something bigger than their kindred and their tribe. But the truth is that our natural human instinct is for the clan of about 120 people, and any politician worth his salt knows how to activate those ancient instincts.

How about the neo-piracy or neo-plunder of modern taxation? Back in the old days under slavery the lords would appropriate as much of the slaves' or serfs' production as possible. Then in the 19th century the expropriation of taxation came as low as 10 percent of GDP. Now it is back up to 35-40 percent in the advanced countries. But what is this expropriation but a return to the old days when the way to get rich was to steal resources from the neighboring tribe? We are better than that, because for us wealth comes from the ideas and labor of humans and the knowledge in between their ears.

Then there is the need to propitiate the gods, in neo-sacrifice. In the good old days humans would sacrifice animals -- or even the first-born son as Abraham nearly did with Isaac -- to propitiate the anger of the gods. René Girard proposed the notion of the scapegoat, an individual sacrificed to carry all the blame for social discord, as a way to restore social harmony in a social group divided by conflict. Our modern politicians are masters at this. Recessions and financial crashes are never the result of reckless government policy but always the fault of greedy bankers and speculators. Or The Jews. The disasters of socialist regimes are always due to "saboteurs and wreckers." Also, of course, we have the environmental movement that wants us to "live simply so that others may simply live" which assumes that there is a fixed amount of resources and that my sacrifice is needed to put food in the mouth of somebody else.

Don't forget the rise of neo-guilt. Nietzsche blames Christianity and "the priests" for the widespread incidence of guilt. He represents this as a cunning trick to get us to turn our healthy tribal hate and cruelty back on ourselves. I like to propose a more innocent notion, that turning warrior rage back on ourselves in Original Sin tames us for the market economy in the city where Viking berserkers are really not helpful to a prosperous economy. Back in the day our modern evangelizers were, like Nietzsche, anti-guilt and anti-Christian. But now all the best people are trying to make white people guilty about their "white privilege" and men guilty about their "toxic masculinity." I think we need a new history of guilt so that we can really understand the social origin and significance of guilt.

One of the most obvious manifestations of the Great Reaction is the emergence of the neo-tyranny of totalitarianism. It's remarkable that, despite the universal horror of tyranny, of man's inhumanity to man, we have seen the most tyrannous political regimes in history in living memory: Stalinism, Hitlerism, and Maoism, and various lesser lights. And here in the United States we have the neo-tyranny of the politically correct to stamp out "hate speech" using the power of the state.

Now my judgement is that these neo-isms reflect basic human instincts that cannot really be abolished. The fact is that many people prefer to live in subordination, and thus we will always need institutions in which they can diminish the risks and rewards of life. But I'd say that it is best for such people to go work for a corporation rather than saddle us with the weight of the welfare state. We humans are tribal down to our toes, but we are also smart enough to imagine new, less exclusive, ways of belonging. We humans need ways to resolve conflict, but we can surely find new ways to do that without blood sacrifice and guilt-tripping whole communities.

And surely there is a higher, better way to provide for common needs than by taxing -- that is, taking by force -- from every worker over a third of his wage.

The Great Reaction is a challenge to us all to imagine something for this age, after the Double Revolution of modern physics and the modern economy, something higher and better than a cowardly return to Old Ways of olden times.

The Great Reaction Also Includes Neo-sacrifice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Left's Catalog of Errors

Let us set forth, as a public service, the catalog of errors that our lefty friends have compiled over the years. But let us not just dismiss with a snarl but understand the ground of their errors and give their follies the benefit of the doubt.

Wage Labor is Alienation. No it isn't. Wage labor is a boon to the worker because he assigns a lot of the risk of producing and selling away to his employer. Source of error: Marx believed in the classical economists theory of value, with competing "use value" and "exchange value." He proposed that the natural task of labor was producing for "use" rather than producing for sale. But the marginal revolution of 1870 solved the value problem by realizing that all prices are determined "at the margin." Benefit of the doubt: Wage labor was dehumanizing, especially at the start of the industrial revolution before inventors had figured out how to automate all dehumanizing work.

Capitalism will "Immiserate" the Workers. No it won't. The capitalism of the last two hundred years has been a Great Enrichment with successive innovations building prosperity from $1-3 per capita per day to $100 per capita per day in real dollars. There has been nothing like it, ever. Source of error: Marx understood that market competition tends to squeeze profit out of any undertaking as new market entrants compete for the consumer's business. So, if nothing changes, competition is likely to squeeze all costs, human and material, to the bone. But Marx forgot one thing. It is true that in each individual industry increasing competition squeezes profit away from the producers and "immiserates" them. But actual history is that every decade or so, a new revolution of innovation produces new opportunities for profit, and most of the immiserated workers get jobs in the new industry. Benefit of the doubt: At the time that Marx was writing nobody could have foreseen the oil revolution, the internal combustion engine, the electrical revolution, the physics revolution, the electronics revolution, the computer revolution, the internet revolution.

Socialism will end the exploitation of man by man. No, it didn't. Socialism has been a disaster wherever it has been tried, whether as a simple rural commune or as an administrative socialist state. Source of the error: In its rural commune version socialism fails because "to each according to his needs" discourages people from working. That is why all rural communes like New Harmony, Indiana, fail. In socialism's administrative version the political bosses decide what work is to be done. But political bosses don't know what work needs to be done. In fact, we now know, socialism can't work because it cannot compute prices, and administrative bureaucrats cannot outperform the price signalling of the market, and regulation cannot work because it ends up captured by the regulated. In reality, of course, capitalism is the closest we are ever going to get to socialism, because capitalism, through the price system, encourages everyone to altruistically find work that is useful to other people; it demands that they do socially useful things with their lives. Benefit of the doubt: The world is a cruel place, and mankind has ever dreamed of a perfect land of peace and justice.

Government can Deliver Social Services. No it can't. OK, it can for a while. But over time government fails to adjust its service delivery program to new conditions and needs. Source of the error: Government is an armed minority that occupies territory and taxes the inhabitants so it can reward its supporters. Thus all new government programs and "reforms" end up merely rewarding the government supporters and only incidentally providing social services. It becomes almost impossible to reform an existing government program because the clients of the program object vociferously if anyone proposes to reduce their benefits. This is why education is failing to teach, Social Security will go broke, Health care is brutally expensive, government welfare doesn't raise the poor out of poverty. All this reduces to the truism that it is almost impossible for a government to reduce spending. Instead, government resorts to subterfuges, including hyperinflation, as in Germany and Austria after World War I, Zimbabwe in the 2000s, Venezuela in the 2010s. The root of all these disasters is a government that dared not reduce its spending to balance against its reduced revenue. Benefit of the doubt: Humans ask for things from their leaders that they shouldn't ask for, and politicians try to deliver. Until they can't.

It's all the Fault of Racists, Sexist, Homophobes. Yeah. The problem with all oppression theories under capitalism is the question: why don't the evil capitalists hire the oppressed and marginalized and underpaid and exploit the hell out of their marginalized status? Why don't businesses flood into the inner city and hire blacks? Why don't they prefer the underpaid women that apparently work for 80 cents on the dollar? Or, under the current diversity regime where the capitalist all advertise their eagerness to diversity their workforces, why aren't the traditionally marginalized zooming up to the top of the charts? In fact, as the Jim Crow era in the South showed, you need to pass and enforce racist laws in order to force business to hew the racist line. Source of the error: People don't appreciate the depth of the social revolution we call the industrial revolution. It requires people to abandon their pre-industrial culture of the kindred, the tribe, and the village, where you only trust your kin, your race, or your fellow villagers. The modern world demands that everyone enter into the trust culture of capitalism where you trust and work with anyone that can be trusted, and submit yourself to the judgement of the market rather than the judgement of your in-group. This is hard, very hard, and it creates a demand for political activists that conjure up scapegoats. See René Girard. In modern democracy we scapegoat the "in" party and hope to end our troubles by throwing the rascals out and voting for "change." Benefit of the doubt: It is very easy to see the mote in another's eye, but very hard to see the beam in one's own eye.

To be continued.

The Real Challenge for 2017

Linked today on RealClearPolitics.com is Russ Smith, once "Mugger," on Scott Walker and the Republican candidates for president. He writes that

not a single candidate has articulated a coherent strategy to resuscitate the United States once Barack Obama’s tenure mercifully ends.

Then he notes that Scott Walker is pretty light on foreign policy.

I think that's baloney. I think that it's pretty clear what is needed to "resuscitate" America in 2017. The big question is how.

By that I mean that it's pretty obvious that we need honest money, budget cuts, an honest Obamacare that puts the subsidies into the federal budget and leaves the rest of the health insurance market alone. It's pretty obvious that we need a generational cleansing of the income tax code and a start on entitlement reform. It's pretty obvious that we need to reformulate our strategy vis-a-vis Islamic radicalism that stops short of occupying the Middle East. We need to draw a line on immigration somewhere between the people that want to send all the illegal immigrants home and the open-borders folks that want to register as many new Democratic voters as soon as possible.

The problem is that we conservatives don't want to do this the liberals did it, by ramming everything from Obamacare to gay marriage down our throats either by partisan cramdowns or by Salem-style witch-hunts. We want to reform America with bipartisan bills that represent a rough consensus of the American people. We want to observe the Moynihan rule, that you want to pass important reforms by 70-30 votes in the US Senate. Otherwise we have done nothing except stir the pot and create opponents to our programs.

Do we want to reverse all the Obama executive orders on January 20, 2017? Should we cram down a reform of the independent regulatory agencies so that the FCC Obamanet decision can never be repeated? Should we reverse Obamacare with a partisan vote without bothering to get a single Democratic vote? I don't think so. Because then we have licensed Democrats to do the same to us in eight years.

One of the reasons I don't want to shove conservative victories in liberal faces is the grim message of René Girard's notion of mimetic rivalry. His theory may not explain everything, but it does illuminate pretty well the tit-for-tat folly of excessive partisanship. Full-on partisanship doesn't achieve lasting reforms and social consensus. It just inflames passions and raises the stakes, as the presidency of Barack Obama has done.

The problem is, of course, that Gramscian strategies of a march through the institutions, the Alinsky tactics of constant street action and deliberate humiliation of the opposition, the grievance ideology of the left-wing academy, all these left-wing notions are innocent of the idea that we humans are social animals not soldier ants. They completely miss the point that the point of politics is to damp down differences before they escalate to civil war. It is one thing to rail against the Man when you are outsiders battling the system. It is another thing to continue such "outsider" tactics when you own the culture and the elite institutions as liberals do.

But how can we communicate to liberals the danger in their tactics? How can we implement a program of conservative reform by co-opting liberal fence-sitters instead of ignoring them?

Chances are that in 2017 Republicans will have a Republican president and decent majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since the 1920s. But it's not enough to have the power. The challenge is to persuade your adversaries, not just roll over them.

And that is the real challenge of 2017.

I Want a "Live-and-let-Live" President

A little while ago I wrote a piece for the American Thinker titled "I Want a President That Loves America." Then came Rudi Giuliani and his right-to-the-point jab at President Obama about the president's love of America.

Of course Obama doesn't love America. No liberal loves America; they know better than that. They are, to coin a phrase, on a high horse about America. They think that nation states like America ought to be replaced by multinational entities -- like the EU and the UN. They deplore "nationalism," knowing that deploring "patriotism" would get them into trouble.

But loving America is so yesterday. Now I want something more. I want a president that believes in a "live-and-let-live" America. Let me tell you what I mean (H/T Vox Day).

A while ago back down the Yellow Brick Road, according to the London Guardian, a couple of techies, Hank and Alex, were sitting at a tech conference and swapping dongle jokes when the young woman in front of them got up and took a photo of them. Pretty soon the photo was on Twitter:

Not cool. Jokes about forking repo's in a sexual way and "big" dongles. Right behind me #pycon pic.twitter.com/Hv1bkeOsYP
— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

They found a tweet from a woman, called Adria Richards, with a photo of them: “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles. Right behind me #pycon”.

One thing led to another and pretty soon Hank had been fired from his job. But that's not the end of the story.

That night, Hank made his only public statement. He posted a short message on the discussion board Hacker News: “Hi, I’m the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I’d like to say I’m sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. [But] as a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have three kids and I really liked that job. She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.”

That's not the end of the story either. A bunch of guys on Hacker News decided to take Adria Richards out, and they did. Pretty soon they had got her fired. Did you know that Adria Richards is a black Jewish female?

Hey fellahs and social justice warriors! How about an America where we live and let live? How about we tell someone to their face that we are offended by their locker-room talk instead of taking our taking offense to the entire world?

Of course, we all know that this is impossible for the Left. The whole point of the Left, starting in the French Revolution, is the taking of offense, turning the personal into the political, transforming the normal frictions of life in the modern world into political issues, and getting the government involved.

We know that liberals really hate it when they are on the receiving end of the political. Liberals hated Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority. They hate government getting into the bedroom. They were practically paranoid that the openly religious George W. Bush was setting up a "theocracy." And liberals froth at the mouth when denouncing the injustice of "legislating morality."

Liberals want to be free of the demands of conventional morality. So why don't they reciprocate, and allow conservatives and others the freedom to dissent from their "social justice" morality? (I know: they wouldn't understand.)

The whole point of the modern constitutional state is to put a space between law and morality, to permit freedom of religion, meaning a diversity in ways of worshipping God or in liberal-speak addressing the ultimate questions and meanings. The whole point of the Left since the French Revolution is to collapse the separation of powers into a single political power that some people have called "totalitarian."

We see this, incidentally, in President Obama's "phone and pen" governance where he pushes the administrative power of the presidency to the utmost, as in the executive order on immigration, as in his administration's pushing of the Federal Communications Commission to implement "net neutrality" by administrative fiat rather than by congressional legislation.

We see it in all the works of modern government. It can't just let parents educate their own children according to their lights; it has to corral children into government child-custodial facilities. It can't just let people make their own arrangements for health care; it has to bully them into buying a government-approved health plan. It can't just leave people to save money for retirement; it has to bully them into a government retirement plan.

The thing is that when you decide that it's OK to bully parents over education, or bully nerds exchanging sophomoric dongle jokes, or implement a culture of "taking offense" or define society as composed of the oppressors, the oppressed, and the champions of the oppressed, you'd better think a couple of moves ahead and figure out how people on the other side will respond to your actions.

The history of warfare is full of new tactics that completely confused and demoralized the opposition -- until the opposition figured out how to counter and defeat them.

The idea of live and let live is that it's better not to start offensive operations; you never know where they may end up. The best thing to do is to  solve your problem right here and right now. Most people are pretty decent and don't want to offend or hurt other people. Government ought to concentrate on the people that don't respond to a quiet word and to be hit on the head with a two-by-four before they will pay attention.

Hmm. I guess we might as well haul in René Girard and his idea of mimetic rivalry. The natural thing to do is for humans to escalate rivalries and conflict higher and higher. Until the whole thing gets out of hand and finally solved when the whole community turns upon a scapegoat and expels the scapegoat from the community.

In my view President Obama, with his Alinksy community organizer tactics, his Obamacare cramdown, with his executive orders à outrance, with his encouragement of "Our Loud, Proud Left," with his Obamanet "net neutrality" is stoking a mimetic rivalry between right and left that can only end in tragedy. In my view the whole point of the separation of powers, of the separation of church and state, of the civil society between the individual and the state, of the live and let live idea, is to neutralize mimetic rivalry and its escalation of conflict into open violence.

But I have a faith that the American people will stop this escalation by electing a bland live-and-let-live president in 2016 that will find a way to send the left's Offense Brigades back to their barracks where they can harmlessly squabble with each other without damaging the body politic.

The Bright Side of Obama's "Strategic Patience"

Everyone is worrying that the 2010s is the 1930s all over again. They want to get up and deal with the Islamic menace before it gets any worse. And maybe they are right.

President Obama, of course, advocates "strategic patience," which means what, exactly?

Should "the West" follow a forward strategy, and whack the Islamic State right now? Or should we stand back from the Middle East and let the chips fall where they may?

I'm a conservative, so I've tended to support the forward strategy, memorably enunciated by Ronald Reagan at the time of the Cold War: "Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose."

But the funny thing about Ronald Reagan is that he won the Cold War with hardly firing a shot. He talked a good game, he cranked up the Defense budget, he got the spies helping the Lech Walesas behind the enemy line, he got the US economy out of its stagflationary Keynesian slump, he whacked the dime-store Commies in Grenada. And the rest is history.

One of the things that liberals harped on about during the Cold War was US support of right-wing dictators. It forced US apologists like Jeane Kirkpatrick to insist that there was a difference between right-wing authoritarian dictators and left-wing totalitarian dictators. And maybe she was right, in the bipolar days of the Cold War.

The reason to support authoritarians is usually "stability." We support right-wing dictators because they are a lot better than lefty totalitarians. But what about the Middle East? Should we support, e.g., Saudi Arabia, because they are a bulwark against radical Iran?

The problem with "stability" according to the Black Swan guy, Nassir Nicholas Taleb, is it tends to freeze things in place. What happens in the spring when the ice breaks up? You get a world war.

Now the West has basically kept the Middle East in a fast-frozen mode for the last century, ever since the Ottoman Empire broke up at the end of World War I. And the reason, of course, is Oil. The Middle East, ever since Winston Churchill switched the British Royal Navy from coal to oil, has been the source of the world's cheapest oil. So the West has wanted to dominate the region to make sure that the oil keeps coming.

That's why we were meddling in Iran in the early 1950s. That's why we've supported the Saudi family dynasty since whenever. That's why we cared about the thug Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile the Middle East has been seething under the western knout. One day it will explode. And then what?

President Obama recommends "strategic patience." We conservatives assume that this is merely a cover for the left-wing argument that the West is to blame for everything, because of its racist colonialism and imperialism. For Obama, we assume, the West has it coming, and has no moral right to interfere in the Middle East.

But suppose President Obama is right for the wrong reasons. Suppose that the best strategy is the good old Cold War strategy of "containment." Let the Middle East become a cauldron of hate and blood, but establish a clear perimeter, starting at Israel, at the Bosphorus, at the border between Pakistan and India. We will contain the fire at the borders: thus far and no further.

This is a good time to switch strategies, from the Bush forward strategy to the Obama strategic patience, because of the fracking revolution. Instead of the left's prophecy of "peak oil" it looks like there is an ocean of hydrocarbon out there from natural gas to oil.  That means that we don't care as much about Mideast oil as we used to do.

Right now, it looks like there is plenty of fracked hydrocarbon at $50-60 per barrel, and it puts the "stability" regimes and the radical regimes of the Middle East in a quandary. They can use the oil weapon, but in doing so and raising the price they will just make it easier for Big Oil and little oil to do more fracking. But if they cut production they get less money and they need the money. All the big oil-producing nations, from the Saudis to the Iranians to the Venezuelans "need" the oil price up at $100 per barrel or more.

Various critics of Islam argue that it is ill adapted to the modern age. It retains a pre-trading mentality, a philosophy of global conquest in jihad that doesn't work any more than the nostalgic global totalitarianism of communism and socialism can work. Since it was impossible to convince the true-believers of the left that socialism could not work until communism crashed and burned in 1990-91, there is no reason to believe that the Islamists will abandon their jihad for world domination before its catastrophic collapse.

It's at this point that I like to invoke the Chinese Christian from David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing. Here is what he said.

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. 

OK. So what is it about Christianity? I suggest, following Rene Girard, that Christianity, more than any other transcendental or secular religion, has articulated a philosophy of human comity. It directs every human to serve before they collect. It tells people to love their enemies. It tells that that in service is perfect freedom. This goes against the basic human instinct to strike first before the other guy gets his chance. It goes against the ancient instinct of the border war, the escalating feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. And of  course it goes against the modern totalitarianism of basic conflict of interest between the races, between the sexes, between the classes, between religions.

The modern totalitarianisms are cunning. They understand how to get people riled up. First, in the 19th century they got the working class all riled up against the bourgeoisie. Then, with "cultural Marxism" they got all kinds of other groups riled up: the blacks in Ferguson, the women in college, the gays in their urban ghettos.

From a tactical political point of view, these totalitarianisms are brilliant. But there is a problem. These political tactics wall up groups into resentful ghettos. They prevent people from surrendering to the market and making the profoundly social and altruistic decision to find something in this world that contributes to other peoples' welfare, and then doing it.

That is what the Islamists are doing to Muslims worldwide. They are telling Muslims that the way to the future is to conquer the world, not to serve it.  Maybe they are right, but if they are the whole history of the past 500 years has been a terrible mistake.

The only way to demonstrate who is making the mistake is to step back from the Middle East and let the chips fall where they may, except in Israel. Sorry, jihadis, no messing with Israel. And in the rest of the world, we enforce our Judeo-Christian doctrine of service. Muslims that want to thrive in the West are welcome. But they must show by their actions that they accept the fundamental principle of the modern economy. They must seek to serve before they demand to collect.

On my theory of the world, the history of the last two centuries has been the story of various foolish attempts to rebel against the new world order of markets, exchange, and service to others. On this view, radical Islam is merely the latest and hopefully the last such rebellion.