Yes, But the Republicans Have Nothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Should We Teach the Ruling Class to Do?

My line on ruling classes is that human nature programs the leaders of society to be warriors, fighting the existential foe to save the tribe from extinction.

And I say, following Nazi Carl Schmitt, that politics is about friend vs. enemy. In other words if you are in politics your game is identifying and making war on an enemy. Otherwise you have nothing to do.

That's how I understand the ruling class's current obsession with climate change and systemic racism. Climate change empowers the world's ruling class to lead to lead the whole world against the existential threat of runaway warming. Because fossil fuels. Think about it. It's really a natural, because it avoids the little problem that any problem less than global warming would mean that the enemy is some nation state: Russia or China or some such.

And systemic racism allows the educated ruling class to make war on bigots and racist-sexist-homophobes. What could be funner?

My judgement is that both climate change and systemic racism are less about fighting real enemies and more about finding something for the ruling class to fight against. Because the ruling class is political and politics needs an enemy, per Nazi Carl Schmitt.

Now, I would say that to have the ruling class fighting climate change and systemic racism is an improvement. After all, our ruling class in the last century has been in the business of world wars, starting with college president Woodrow Wilson sorting out Europe in 1917-19. And rich-kid FDR sorting out the world in 1941-45. And various warrior presidents sorting out the Commies in 1948-89.Two generations of young men were sent to war; fortunately most came back. I have come to believe that it was all ruling class conceit and baloney, but that's just me. And if our ruling class is currently all worked up about systemic racists, maybe cancel culture is better than a full-on Reign of Terror or Great Purge or Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

But can't we think of something better for our rulers to do? Some way for them to be heroic warriors without actually having a fighting war that wrecks the economy, or a fake war like climate change that wrecks the economy.

Hey I know! How about a war on bureaucracy! A war on useless schools that fail to teach the children of "oppressed peoples" how to wive and thrive in the modern world! A war on racial quotas and DEI? But, of course, there is one little problem. These wars do not establish the ruling class as the political heroes beloved by their grateful peoples.

But just as we have progressed from leaders as actual military fighters -- as in the days of Henry V -- to politicians that leave the fighting to generals that leave the fighting to actual lieutenants and corporals, and now to the fight against climate change that has no real fighting at all, I don't see why we can't make national heroes out of guys that clean up the mess in the bureaucracy. You know, like Donald Trump promised to clean up the Deep State.

And I don't see why we can't make heroes out of the men and women that stand up to the lefty cancel culture "activists," rather than making heroes out of "activists" that are tilting at the windmills of racism-sexism-homophobia in a world where you are a complete fool ever to even roll your eyes at one of the "oppressed peoples" of whom we'eve heard tell.

This is all to say that my idea of the most heroic and noble thing in the world is not to be a warrior hero, real or fake, but a sacrificial hero, someone who sacrifices his life on the border between Order and Chaos so that the rest of us may live. I call it "A Vision of the Good Life Better Than the Left."

Hey! Sounds like a great idea. The only question is what is the Next Step.

And I have No Idea what to do next.

Atheism: The Religion of Not Believing in God

In a routine expedition to HalfPrice Books I picked up John Gray's Seven Types of Atheism. His basic line is that modern atheism is just Christianity without the God. Thus, he begins,

Contemporary atheism is a flight from a godless world. Life without any power that can secure order or some kind of ultimate justice is a frightening and for many an intolerable prospect. In the absence of such a power, human events could be finally chaotic, and no story could be told that satisfied the need for meaning.

So "atheists have looked for surrogates of the God they have cast aside." Instead of "belief in divine providence" they believe in the "progress of humanity." Thus most modern atheisms are really a re-imagining of the Christian narrative with different names on the beliefs. 

But first Gray wants to instruct us about the uniqueness of Christianity.

The notion that religions are creeds -- lists of propositions or doctrines that everyone must accept or reject -- emerged only with Christianity.

In most religions -- and that was originally true of Judaism -- what mattered was not belief but "observance," the observance of sacred rituals. Many religions have creator-gods, but the "divine mind" is not experienced universally as good, nor as intimately engaged with the world, nor that humans have a "soul" or a "self," nor a death involving a judgement by a Supreme Being.

So when Marxists and their brethren want to force march us towards a better world, they are just repurposing Christianity, but without God and with Marx instead of Christ.

The New Atheism of the 19th Century. Chaps like Comte believed that "magic, metaphysics and theology belong in the infancy of the species." But now we adults "accept science as the only authority in knowledge and ethics." But science, to Gray, is just a tool for the human animal to deal with the world. Suppose religion really is an "illusion." Who is to say that the creation of illusions not is an important part of survival? And there is the embarrassing fact that atheism tends to ally itself with pseudo-science. Comte thought that bumps on the head were significant; Dawkins believes in "memes."

Secular Humanism. In Christianity, humanity is a "species in need of redemption" with an apocalyptic myth that Jesus would return and found the kingdom of God. But the Reformation replaced the apocalypse with a "conviction that evil could be slowly diminished in history." Thus, with God removed, we get to the idea of modern meliorism, of gradual improvement. Then there was Gnosticism that believed that "salvation was achieved by acquiring a special kind of knowledge."

The modern myth of progress came into being as a fusion of Christian faith with Gnostic thinking. 

But, of course, science has nothing to say about improvement in history.

Faith in Science. Following Darwin's theory of evolution, a lot of thinkers harnessed evolution to "theories of innate racial inequality" and eugenics to improve the race. "Herbert Spencer used evolutionary ideas to vindicate untrammeled capitalism... Beatrice Webb... suggested that Stalin's Russia embodied the next stage of social evolution." Francis Fukuyama "had no doubt that an evolutionary process was at work, leading to the advance of "democratic capitalism" throughout most of the world."

Modern Political Religions. Gnosticism "is the belief that humans can be delivered from a dark world by the saving light of knowledge." Plato and Socrates may have believed that goodness and truth were one, but not that they could be realized in history. But Christianity plus Gnosticism combined to form the "explosive force" of political religions in the modern west.

[Forget] the idea that secular and religious movements are opposites... Jacobinism and Bolshevism were secularizing forces; but both were channels for the millennarian myths of apocalyptic Christianity... [W]hen the Nazis tried to create a "science of man" based in physiology, they continued an Enlightenment project. Liberalism emerged in the seventeenth century as the application of a universal morality inherited from monotheism.

We do not live in a secular age, for "secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion."

God-haters. Think Marquis de Sade, Dostoevsky, and William Empson. Says Gray about de Sade:

Hating the Christian God, he also hated Nature, cursing it even as he obeyed what he believed were its laws... For Sade's libertines... nothing but a world-destroying act could sate their passions... the satisfaction that comes from doing evil.

For writer Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky is "the greatest artist in human misery." He "was chronically unhappy and spread unhappiness around him.

And said William Empson of the Christian God: "the God of Tertullian, Augustine and Aquinas, is the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man."

Atheism Without Progress. This is the kind of atheist that John Gray prefers. He starts with George Santayana, born in Madrid in 1863 who became a Harvard professor and then quit in 1912 when he received a small legacy. He ended his life in a nunnery. For Santayana, religion is natural to humans. He wrote:

Why should we be angry with dreams, with myth, with allegory, with madness? We must not kill the mind, as some rationalists do, in trying to cure it... Values presuppose living beings having a direction of development... so that good and evil may exist in reference to them.

Says Gray: "Without valuing organisms there are no values."

Next, Gray considers Joseph Conrad, who spent years working in sailing ships in the late 19th century. He was an atheist and rejected the idea of progress. Says Gray:

The seaman's struggle with the ocean is a cipher for the human situation in a godless universe.... None of the visions of improvement conjured by modern thinkers could stand up against his "deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world."

The Atheism of Silence. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer just stepped away from monotheism without regret. But his life was a contradiction.

Himself extremely wilful, Schopenhauer was convinced that all human troubles came from the will... Anyone who grasped this truth would turn away from life and mortify their appetites, he believed.

But did he follow that advice? Not a bit of it. With financial independence he did exactly as he pleased, "playing the flute and attending the opera." He never married, but "pursued erotic pleasure." He "denounced the world as illusion" but lived a life of "disciplined intellectual labour... was careful with money." He believed that human life is "purposeless striving" and "the world was in need of redemption." So what!

John Gray concludes his disquisition on atheism with the following thought.

Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means... But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.

How Meaning of Life, Religion, Culture and Politics Connect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Got it?

What if Wokism is Implied in the Civil Rights Laws?

Over the weekend, thanks to John Derbyshire, I got to read Richard Hanania's "Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law." I'll have my American Thinker piece up soon.

Let's say the piece cured me of my faith that the Civil Rights laws were a Good Thing, even if the quotas and diversity and wokism are a Bad Thing.

But politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." So now what?

Thank you, senator, I'm glad you asked me that. Let's start at the upstream source.

My "Vision of the Good Life Better Than the Left" is all about the question of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" in a world that, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory, has at least three different kinds of people in it. That means that society's ruling class needs to accept that creative people have needs and wants different from responsible people different from subordinate people. I develop an idea of how a society with three different sorts of people could work in An American Manifesto.

I say that creative people -- and I have the conceit to imagine that I am one such -- should accept the path of the Sacrificial Hero, in which life is a journey to the underworld of the unconscious followed by a creative attempt at the border between Order and Chaos, which will probably fail. This means, e.g., that if you want to get creative about sex as a transgender, you should understand that the whole thing is likely to end up as a total disaster for you and yours. That is the meaning of creativity: you will probably fail. But creative people need to understand that most people do not want this kind of life and do not understand why anyone would.

I say that responsible people should have the right to live boring responsible lives within the guardrails, living according to a fixed agenda set forth in one of the Axial Age religions or later modifications, such as the Code of the Bourgeois as developed in my Road to the Middle Class. But responsible people should understand that subordinates, the new migrants to the city, are scared and properly live in ethnic enclaves run by virtual ganglords until they learn the Code of the Bourgeois. But do not expect responsible people to understand creative people.

I say that subordinate people since time began have looked to a family patriarch or tribal chief or urban ethnic leader to provide a safe haven from a brutal world. But, in our modern world this is a mean and cramped life, for subordinate people since time began have been cruelly used as political cannon fodder by their leaders. If subordinate people want to live in their ethnic ghettos, so be it. But if they yearn for something higher and better, we noble creatives and responsibles should extend a hand and help them learn the Code of the Bourgeois as per my Road to the Middle Class. But do not expect subordinate people to understand responsible people or creative people.

Then there is the question of the religions that come downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." We already have religions for responsibles and subordinates. The problem is the religion of the creatives, that right now is the false religion of Wokism. I say that the problem with the creatives' religion is that it has as its human ideal the Ego Hero rather than the Sacrificial Hero. The Ego Hero is the revolutionary that kills millions on his millennial quest, the activist that leads a community of subordinates to social hell, the nice liberal lady with virtue-signalling yardsigns in front of her house. Obviously our wokey friends will not change their religion until their current one fails them utterly: we can hope.

Then there is the question of the culture of the future. Well, obviously it would not be the current culture that only allows cultural expression by the creatives that endorse the current religious cult of wokism and cancels everything else. In other words, the culture of the future would feature cultural expression and experience not just for wokey college graduates that celebrate revolution, activism, peaceful protest, anti-racism, and gender bending. It would also have cultural space for ordinary responsible people that want to celebrate marriage, family, children within the context of a religion issuing from the Axial Age. It would also have cultural space for subordinate people and their cultural preferences -- I am ignorant enough not to know what that might be.

Now we get to politics. Politics is the art of uniting "us," the people, against "them," the enemy. It is pure tribalism, and, I say, all tribalism is "fake tribalism. Why? Because once humans get beyond the community of the kindred we invent a fake kindred, that might be a clan or a tribe or a class or a race or an order of nobles. Our wokey lords and masters have a politics of race, in which they are "allies" fighting for the "oppressed peoples" against the "white oppressors." My politics would be a politics of class, in which "we" ordinary Americans unite against "them," the wokey upper class of educated snobs and cancel cultists, while looking after the lower class of subordinates with a modest program of paternalistic support and understanding. It is totally fake, but every politics is fake.

Funny, isn't it? This politics has already been invented. That is what Trumpism is all about. It is nationalist, in the semse of America First -- or ordinary Americans first. It issues mean tweets to various ruling-class swells and functionaries and toadies and Democratic operatives with bylines, and it is avuncular towards the traditionally marginalized, with a below-the-radar offer to join the great American mainstream, any time you are ready, friend.

Roger Scruton on Life, the Universe, and Everything

Back in 2014 the recently departed Roger Scruton published The Soul of the World. The book is about God and the two basic facts of life: "the nature of reality" and "how we should live." The point is that you may know everything about the nature of reality but the knowledge tells you nothing about how you should live.

Our current atheist educated class teaches us that science tells us how we should live. But the Islamists have another approach, that "originates in a need for sacrifice and obedience." They

believe that they are called to sacrifice themselves on Allah's behalf, and that their lives will acquire a meaning when thrown away for Allah's sake.(p.1)

And not just Islamists.

The desire for sacrifice is rooted deep in all of us, and it is called upon not only by religious but also by secular communities, especially in times of emergency and war.

Scruton calls this "cognitive dualism," that the world can be understood in two ways, "the way of science, and the way of interpersonal understanding." The natural world and the "lifeworld," or Lebenswelt for us intellectual snobs.

But then Scruton divides the lifeworld into two. There is the Order of the Covenant, of which the best known is the covenant between God and the Jews,

a binding agreement, in which God commands obedience only by putting himself under obligations toward those whom he commands.(p.78)

But then there is the Order of Creation, "another world beyond our daily negotiations." This is

another order, where being and nothingness, creation and destruction, wrestle together with no fixed result.(p.177)

This, says Scruton, is the world of sacrifice, of giving and forgiveness. In the Order of the Covenant, nobody has a right to forgiveness, only "to honor his obligations and receive his rights." But in the Order of Creation,

Forgiveness comes, when it comes, as a gift... It is a moment of mutual recognition, when who people lay down their resentment in an exchange of gifts.(p.182)

(Is this why women have such a culture of "gifting?")

Now comes the heavy stuff.

The experience of the sacred is the revelation, in the midst of everyday things, of another order, in which creation and destruction are the ruling principles. the great junctures of life are precisely those in which this order shines through, so that deals lose their meaning and vows come in their place.(p.183)

And so to the junctures, each in turn:

New life is a gift from the place where things are created and destroyed for no merely human reason. Birth is therefore marked by rituals of acceptance and gratitude...

Sexual love is the moment in which two people make a gift of themselves, and also prepare themselves for the sacrifices required by family and the love of children.

Death is the moment when the gift of life is surrendered and the funeral is the recognition in retrospect of the gift[.](p.183)

Community and its web of deals, its Order of the Covenant, cannot long endure without people making the gift of the sacrifice of themselves, in renouncing resentment and vengeance, and even making the ultimate gift, the sacrifice of life. Thus the need for rituals that extol the sanctity of sacrifice.

And in the end, God, the eternal question: "why?"

It is thrust upon us in those moments in extremis when the Order of Creation irrupts around us. It is then that we cry out to God -- who will tell us why we suffer, why we live, and why we die... In the faithful frame of mind we are aware that being is not simply a fact but also a gift, and aware that gifts have reasons. And the response of faith is to recognize that we too must give.(p.191)

And so, Scruton argues, we create a "space at the edge of reason, where faith can take root and grow."

Faith looks beyond nature, asking itself what is required of me by way of thanks for this gift.. It is open to God, and actively involved in the process of making room for him.(p.192)

And what does that mean, you ask?

It's a good question. I'll think about it. 

The Evil Spirits Will Always Be With Us

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

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

You mean the #WeBelieve signs?

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

Zman tells us about the importance of writing things down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what if we are wrong?

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

Peterson's "Beyond Order"

I only realized that Jordan B. Peterson's follow-up to 12 Rules was to be published March 2 on the day before publication date. So I ordered my copy of Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life right away. For some reason the book is not yet banned on Amazon.

Hey, you good little girls at Penguin: how come I didn't know about the publication date? Are you still too triggered that, well, everybody knows that Peterson is a... well... something Eeeuww? 

But now I am half way through Beyond Order, and I'll tell you what surprises me. There's a lot of Nietzsche and Jung in it. And Dostoevsky. And then he tells the Mesopotamian myth of Tiamat and Apsu and Marduk. And when he is done with that it is on to the Egyptian Osiris, Isis, and Horus. And how Harry Potter fits exactly into the myth story arc. 

I would have thought all that would be a bridge too far for a best-selling self-help author. Anyway, the book is #8 on Amazon right now on March 8, 2021.

If the theme of 12 Rules was to get started in life, to get out of that proverbial parents' basement, the theme of Beyond Order is really more for mid-life adults that are afraid to take the next step out of a dead-end career. Or don't know what to do about the wokey co-workers at corporate HR. And Peterson recommends a blend of creativity, courage, and responsibility, and stick-to-it-iveness.

Of course, if you read Helen Lewis's review of Beyond Order in The Atlantic you won't be any the wiser about who Peterson is and what he is trying to do. Lewis is a Brit feminist lefty, that went to a private Catholic high school and then Oxford, darling, and you can understand that she would have No Clue about what Peterson is about, and what his ideas mean to his readers. To give you a hint, here is Lewis on Maps of Meaning, Peterson's 1990s book.

Maps of Meaning, published in 1999, built on the work of academics like Joseph Campbell, the literature and religion scholar who argued that all mythic narratives are variations of a single archetypal quest. (Campbell’s “monomyth” inspired the arc of Star Wars.) On this “hero’s journey,” a young man sets out from his humdrum life, confronts monsters, resists temptation, stares into the abyss, and claims a great victory. Returning home with what Campbell calls “the power to bestow boons on his fellow men,” the hero can also claim the freedom to live at peace with himself.

Know what I think? I think that Lewis hasn't read Maps of Meaning. But, of course, it is trite to call Peterson's work a rehash of Campbell, just as it is right out of the lefty catechism to refer, as Lewis did in her famous GQ interview with Peterson, to Nietzsche as the "Nazis' favorite intellectual." Earth to Lewis: Nietzsche was a pro-European and an anti-nationalist.

The message in Beyond Order is that if you are stuck in a rut, it isn't going to do any good to hide from your problems. And it isn't going to do any good to burst out into the stratosphere, and it isn't going to do any good to pick up on one of the modern isms. Lewis:

Peterson writes an entire chapter against ideologies—feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, basically anything ending in ism—declaring that life is too complex to be described by such intellectual frameworks. Funny story: There’s an academic movement devoted to skepticism of grand historical narratives. It’s called … postmodernism. 

Ahem. Do not all the most advanced minds agree, Helen Lewis, that postmodernism is the grand narrative that all other grand narratives are, to use a Brit word, bollocks, and apologies for power. But postmodernism is pure as the driven snow.

Odd, isn't it, that postmodernism is a favorite with lefties for whom political power is not just the best thing but the only thing.

Here's an interesting moment from Beyond Order. Peterson talks about the 160 city speaking tour for 12 Rules. He mentions the need to keep the audience's attention, and how he learned to focus on one or two people in the audience.

What you want to see from the person you are facing is silence. What you want to hear from the crowd is dead silence. You want to hear nothing.

Because when people stop paying attention they shift their weight; they whisper to their neighbor; they think about tomorrow.

I became increasingly aware that the mention of one topic in particular brought every audience... to a dead-quiet halt: responsibility[.]

Well I never. Odd, isn't it that the one thing that our lefty friends are against is the notion of individual responsibility. Responsibility for lefties is all about the responsibility of the patriarchy or white supremacy for the misery of the oppressed peoples.

But responsibility for lefties is never about each individual, be xhe never so humble, seizing the nettle of life, overcoming adversity and fear, and just getting on with it.

Given how the ordinary People of the Responsible Self respond to Peterson's work, I would say that folks like Helen Lewis should spend a little more time trying to figure out why, and a little less time back-handing Jordan Peterson.

For me, the reason for Peterson's success is obvious. Peterson is laying out the road to creativity from rote responsibility. And it is a road that a lot of people in the world are ready to hear.

But Tear Gas and But Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or Marcus Aurelius arguing the opposite:

The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.

Or Sun Tzu:

To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy. 

Golly Geewillikins. Who knew?

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

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

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

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

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

Good Luck, Joe. You'll Need It

So you, Mr President and your Democratic friends have got rid of the awful Trump. So what comes next?

I'd say that the most important thing for your administration to do is to avoid the mistakes of the early Obama administration. There were two big ones.

First, there was the decision to make the "stimulus" all about loot and plunder for Democratic Party constituencies like public-school teachers instead of restarting the wheels of commerce after a generational financial crisis.

Second, there was the push for Obamacare, all about making health care a totally centralized administrative system, instead of restarting the wheels of commerce after a generational financial crisis.

Incidentally the financial crisis was caused by the bursting of a housing bubble caused by gubmint subsidy of home mortgages that encouraged Americans to buy houses on low down payments and 30-year fixed mortgages. This housing subsidy is the big reason why housing prices, to this day, are sky-high and very difficult for ordinary young middle-class Americans trying to buy a house for the first time.

I noticed that President Trump, in his farewell address, catalogued all the wonderful things he had done for ordinary Americans. But you, President Biden, have emphasized, after restarting the economy, climate change and systemic racism. And the stimulus bill you have proposed so far sounds just like another loot and plunder operation for the Democratic Party supporters.

Frankly, I believe that climate change and systemic racism are both catnip for the educated Gentry, and provide nothing for the vast majority of Americans.

I don't have much to say about climate change, although I think it is an instance of the Left's Conceit that it knows what is good for the rest of us. 

The decarbonizing plan is an utter folly that will visit enormous hardship on ordinary Americans. Cheap energy is, and will continue to be, the basis of a healthy economy that extends prosperity to all walks of life. I maintain, according to the notion of Daniel Botkin in Discordant Harmonies, that there is only a climate problem if the climate changes too fast for plant and animal species to migrate with the climate. An example of dangerous climate change is cold weather on the farms of folks in the far North and the harvest fails and they all die -- as in Scotland in the 1690s at the depths of the Little Ice Age.

It's telling that the Scottish famine in 1690 was a tragedy while the Irish potato famine 150 years later was a scandal. The difference is that by 1840 we Westerners had the means to get food to a famine area. Today we have probably an order of magnitude more "means" to adapt to climate change.

Then there is systemic racism. One fine day, a brave politician is going to call an end to what I call the School of Hate. But I doubt if it will be you, Mr. President.

I get the liberal obsession with race. The civil rights movement was, for liberals, an ecstatic moment, a supernova of surpassing brightness that lighted up the moral universe. But once you have made discrimination by race illegal then, as my grandfather would have said, it's all over bar shouting. By placing the chains of race guilt upon ordinary white Americans for the last half century you have committed a moral crime that, to me, is morally equivalent to the Jim Crow laws that you fought to eliminate. But this moral crime is, to me, just one of the Left's Crimes.

It seems that our problems are insoluble. But, as Ike said, if you have a problem you can't solve, make it bigger.

I think that our Big Problem is that our educated ruling class operates according to a political formula that violates what I call the Four Laws of modern governance. I wonder if you have heard about them, Mr. President. I would recommend putting them on your desk, as President Truman had "The Buck Stops Here" on his desk. Here they are:

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). 

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). 

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

Really, everything that our educated ruling class has attempted since the turn of the 20th century attempts to violate these laws. But breaking these laws is catnip for the ruling clique and the larger ruling class, because they all provide for the satisfactions of ruling class members: ambition, honor, and vanity. 

Now I think that the present violations of the Four Laws have gone "about as furr as it can go." Any more ordure piled on top of the mountain of legislation and regulation of the past century is going to seriously break the United States. But your party, Mr. President, wants to double down with Medicare for All, which violates all four laws, and your Green New Deal which will probably be mostly a regulatory scam and only violate the last three laws.

But that is just nuts and bolts.

To make the problem even bigger, I think it stems from the insularity of our ruling elite, that cannot imagine the notion of people not like the educated elite, and that these other people would choose to live a different life than the educated, and worship different gods. If you read about my Three Peoples notion, Mr. President, you will see how understanding the people of today as belonging to different worlds -- the world of the Creative, the Responsible, and the Subordinate -- immediately raises the question of how to make it possible for these very different kinds of people to live in the same society. Notably, the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" doctrine of Allyism lacks such a world view. It only sees the world in the black and white of allies fighting for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

Now I think that Allyism basically reduces to this: that the woke elite gets to buy the votes of the oppressed peoples with loot and plunder seized from the white oppressors. In other words it is a Viking world view masquerading as noble benevolence. It is the Big Problem with the left's Activism Culture. That is perhaps why my basic critique of your side, Mr. President, is called the Great Reaction, a lurch to the primitive:

Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice; totalitarianism is a return to the scapegoat; social justice is good old loot and plunder.

My prediction, Mr. President, is that by the third year of your presidency we will be seeing serious economic problems, and that your supporters will be looking around desperately for a reason, some fault of the big corporations or the lack of a proper minimum wage or the rampaging evil of systemic racism. And you will find yourself called upon to take drastic economic and political action that will only make things worse. For that is the way of the world, that the rulers and their supporters are the last to know there is a problem.

My diagnosis of our national problem is that it issues from a wrong turn by our educated elite. You and your supporters, Mr. President, interpret your culture of creativity in terms of creating a new society. Run by people like you.

But I say that the correct agenda of a culture of creativity is creating a new Me, and leaving society alone. You create a new Me in the Hero's journey into the unconscious, and if you survive the journey, you will come back much sadder and wiser. Only then will you be qualified to help other people. And you will probably die on the border between Order and Chaos as a Sacrificial Hero. I have written about this, Mr. President, in my writing on "A Vision of the Good Life Better Than the Left."

The presidency of Donald Trump was a wake-up call to our present ruling class, that they are "not fit for purpose" as the Brits say. Unfortunately, it is clear that our ruling class has not gotten the message. Indeed, the only message it has had in the last four years was to deep six President Trump.

You will notice, Mr. President, that in the urge of your supporters to deep-six Donald Trump there is nothing that exhibits any concern for the American people, apart from the educated gentry of the ruling class and its clients the "oppressed peoples." This means that the American people are condemned to suffer in the next few years from the blindness and the myopia of your supporters.

It will not be a happy time.

Taleb on the Sacrificial Hero. But Whatabout Women?

I just finished up Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Actually, it's a bit of a hot mess. The key concept, he says, is "ergodicity." What does that mean when it's at home?

Ergodicity: In our context here, ergodicity holds when a collection of players have the same statistical properties (especially expectation) as a single player over time... Absence of ergodicity makes the risk properties not directly transferable from observed probability to the payoff of a strategy subject to ruin...

But he does say something very significant that complements my Good Life philosophy, in which the highest, best person is the Sacrificial Hero, who dies that others may live. He writes that 

Courage is when you sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of the survival of a layer higher than yours.

He has a six-layer hierarchy as follows:

Ecosystem
Humanity
Self-defined extended tribe
Tribe
Family, friends, and pets
You

Now that fits right into my notion of courage being honor among men. The courage to fight a duel, I would say, is not a sacrifice for the survival of the group. Or, as I say, the Ego Heroism of Nietzsche's Übermensch is not the highest form of courage.

But, I thought, all this is guy stuff. Whatabout women, you sexist? As we know from James Bowman's Honor: A History, honor among women is the reputation for chastity: broadly, the reputation for being a good little girl. So how would women fit into Taleb's notion of courage as sacrifice for the bigger community?

I was pondering this in the middle of last night, as I am wont to do. And the answer from my unconscious came pretty quickly. The answer is: Forgiveness. 

If women don't forgive, then the community of women is all bollixed up with destructive Mean Girl competition and the seminal "I can't believe she said that." Because women play-acting at chastity are the first to name, shame, and shun other women as whores. And as we know, women can hold a grudge for a lifetime.

Indeed, I remember distinctly a acquaintance reciting how, whenever he did something wrong, his wife would rehearse The Catalog of all the things he had done wrong since he and his wife first met 40 years ago -- for which she had still, it appears, not forgiven him.

This notion came upon me pretty strongly while watching the Polish movie version of Quo Vadis: a Narrative of the Time of Nero. In the DVD version it is a six-part series. 

Quo Vadis is all about Nero sending the Christians to the lions after Rome burned. The book was originally written by a Pole, Henryk Sienkiewicz, so you can see why the post-communist Poles would be eager to do a movie version.

But the big scenes occur when someone does something really bad and St. Peter forgives them in the name of God. This concept of forgiveness absolutely knocks everyone for a loop in good old pagan Rome. They never heard anything like it in their lives.

But that's the highest thing for you, ladies. Forgiveness. But whatabout a recipe for living?

Taleb has a three-point program for a guy to live as if he had Skin in the Game:

1. Never engage in virtue-signaling
2. Never engage in rent-seeking
3. You must start a business

Obviously, this is a guy thing. But whatabout for women? As a starter, I would say

1. Never engage in virtue-signaling
2. Never say "I can't even!"
3. You must learn to forgive

Whaddya think of that, sports fans?

The Mostly Peaceful Hellscape

Yesterday in a mostly peaceful effort, law enforcement officers caught up with accused AntiFa killer Michael Reinoehl. 

In the report of Reinoehl's mostly peaceful death I noticed a number of tweets from mostly peaceful AntiFa related Twitter accounts that seemed to be advocating violence.

Hey @Jack! How come those violent mostly far-left accounts are still mostly unlocked?

OK. We can all trust @Jack to deal with the mostly hateful haters. But, we have to ask, what is wrong with the generation that seems to be represented in the mostly peaceful protests of the past few months?

One only has to review the sickening recordings of the recent “peaceful protesters” around our nation-- Atlanta, Saint Louis, Seattle... and Portland to confirm the “peaceful” perps were almost exclusively young adults born between 1990 and 2002—people who have been brainwashed into progressivism by their education and lack of ambition or work for a living.

Thank you, Senator, I am glad you asked me that. The whole thing is explained by my reductive Three Peoples theory, that people in the modern world can be reductively classified into Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.

In this reductive theory the great story of the modern era is the astonishing pilgrimage of Subordinates -- once starving peasants -- from feudal subordination to a noble lord to the alternative, the subordination to the rule of the market. And for those that made the journey the consequence has been a increase in real per-capita income over the past 200 years of 3,000 percent. See my Great Enrichment page.

But whatabout the people that have been born into the middle class, for whom a life of Responsibility is a given?

For these life is inexpressibly hard. Oh, not in the physical sense, of scrambling to make a living. But in the emotional sense of what we today call living a creative life, as a person of the Creative Self.

This is because nearly everyone that yearns to live a creative life ain't up to the challenge.

If that weren't enough, the rise of the Left two hundred years ago has meant that many young people are being fed a fake narrative on how to be a creative and live a creative life.

I call this fake narrative the Activism Culture. It is as fake as the medieval romance culture of King Arthur and his Knights enjoyed by the courtiers of the early absolute monarchs. And the Activism Culture is the moral framework of what I call the Great Reaction of the left, its lurch back to the primitive.

The notion behind the Activism Culture is that the way to live a creative life and "make a difference" is with revolutionary politics, by peaceful protest, marching against the injustices of the day. But I am here to say that the Age of Revolution is over. The logic of the Age of Revolution was the rising bourgeoisie wanting to replace the hierarchical culture of the agricultural feudal age with the transactional culture of the market economy and business.

Once that was achieved then the logic of revolution was over. Do you know why? Because when it came to the rise of the working class, the bourgeoisie was perfectly happy to accommodate the workers. And when it became time to accommodate women and minorities, the bourgeoisie was perfectly happy -- if a little slow -- to accommodate them too.

So the Age of Revolution is over. But I also think that the Age of Politics is over.

This is because I think that politics cannot go much beyond the crude domain of force. If you are talking about defending the border, then you need politics and government to do the job. If you have criminals harassing ordinary citizens then you need police to crack the heads of robbers and gangsters.

And you need laws to punish people that defraud and exploit others in normal commercial transactions.

But pretty soon you get to the point where you are legislating morality, and that's where things get sticky. Whatabout the annoying tree in the neighbor's yard that is threatening to grow into a monster that might one day fall upon your house in a storm?

In the regulatory state we have assigned a ton of moral questions to the supervision of the state, and I wonder if it is time to wonder if there isn't a better way to do it.

So I say that the Age of Politics is over. We need another way of negotiating between neighbors than the resort to regulation and lawyering. And we haven't really even begun to think about this.

And I believe that young people that have been carefully taught the culture of Revolution and the culture of Politics have been sold a bill of goods and that is why they are going crazy in the streets.

But if young people of a creative bent or a desire to Do Good in the world are not to do it with Revolution and with Politics, what are they to do?

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

They need to reject the Egoist Hero's Journey of fighting for justice and embrace the Sacrificial Hero's Journey. This journey is the journey down into the underworld of the unconscious that emerges from Jungian psychology and was popularized by Joseph Campbell. It is as new as social media and as old as the Jungian archetypes that try to make sense of the ancient human world before writing and maybe even before language.

I have tried to make sense of this in my series on the Good Life.

My point is simple. If you want to be creative, if you want to create a new world, then you are embarking on a journey of unimaginable difficulty and trial. It will take you up to the border of madness and possibly over it. At the very least it will involve a journey into the underworld of the unconscious that will expose all the monsters in your Self that you are hiding, not from the world but from yourself.

But most of us don't want that. We want something easier. Like the left's Temptation of Activism.

Become an Activist! Change the World!

You mean like lefty icons Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro?

Wanna become an Activist? The simple answer is: Don't. You can do much more good in the world by simply working, marrying, raising a family, and hanging on for the grandchildren.

As My Girl George Eliot writes at the end of Middlemarch of her heroine Dorothea Brooke:

that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs

instead of blazing across the firmament like a comet. 

What I Believe

I'm going to lunch with some regular guys today, organized by a man that emailed me a couple of weeks back to thank me for my American Thinker articles. So maybe we will talk politics, not to mention "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

So I thought: what do I believe? What is "the meaning of life?" I think that my basic belief is that "we don't know." But everyone feels the need for a purpose, a meaning in life, so we make it up.

Correction: we don't make it up; we pick up someone else's belief system, a religion or ideology, and believe in it. Here is how a Portland stay-at-home mom experienced the woke belief system:

I started noticing [in 2016], throughout the neighborhood, a massive movement. Resistance to everything without an understanding of the issues themselves, the underlying data, what was really happening, it just felt so surface oriented, emotionally driven, and a repeat of media talking points. Yard signs popped up everywhere and are still on proud display. 

I believe that different people have different beliefs, and that this is natural and physical, and comes out of the modern understanding of the human psyche through things like developmental psychology. On this view, you would expect a hunter-gatherer to have a different world view than a college professor. You would also expect a construction worker with a mega pickup truck to have different ideas on transportation and grocery shopping than a college professor driving a Prius and shopping at Whole Foods.

I try to understand this "diversity" through my reductive Three Peoples theory. I use the word "reductive" because of course I know that things are not so simple that you can put all humans into three boxes. But, you have to start somewhere, and dividing humans into three parts is better than the more usual two-part "Us" and "Them."

Thus, I believe that we humans in the modern world come like this. There are, first of all, Subordinate people. These are people that experience themselves as victims, tossed around by indomitable powers. So the answer is to find a powerful lord or political patron and stick to him like glue. Then there are Responsible people. These are the middling sort of people that have a basic competence and skill set that enables them to make it in the market economy of the city. They think it is their responsibility to follow the rules, go to work, and follow the law. Finally, there are Creative people. For these people it is not enough to go out in the world and live a responsible life. As rich-kid Karl Marx wrote,

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Now I think it is important for Creative people to understand that it's all very well to talk about "changing" the world. But what if you are wrong and your plan for change is a disaster? You got insurance for that, pal?

I also think it is important for Responsible people to realize that it is all very well for them to say "get a job" to the Subordinate people of the world. But there is a whole cultural transformation between the life of the subsistence peasant in the feudal countryside and the knowledge worker in the city. I discuss this in my book The Road to the Middle Class.

I also think that it is important for Subordinate people to realize that their feudal lords or elected politicians or woke "allies" don't really care about people like them. Subordinates are what I call the "Little Darlings" of the rulers, at best, and their cannon fodder, at worst. When the day comes that the Subordinates are no longer useful for the lordly political project, they will be cast aside like an aged mistress. Case in point, the white working class, that progressives once loved, and now dismiss as white supremacist bigots and fascists.

Like everyone, I do have plans for how other people should live. For Subordinates, that I experience as people learning how to make it in the modern city, I propose The Road to the Middle Class, a program to learn the ways and the culture of the city, that I define as learning the code of Axial Age religion, education in modern skills, mutual aid rather than government welfare programs, and learning to live under law rather than under a lord. In other words, I recommend growing from Subordination to Responsibility.

For Responsibles, I recommend growing from Responsibility into Creativity, to experience life as not merely living according to God's law and living within set parameters, but learning to create a little, as in creating your own business, trying out some idea of betterment, of doing things better.

For Creatives, I have a plan. See, I think that the wokies -- ever since Marx -- have made a fatal error. They think that the future will be made by Creative people like them "fighting for change." This kind of person I call the Egoist Hero and they think of as the Revolutionary Hero. It is the modern equivalent of the tribal leader leading his people to victory on the border against the dangerous tribe next door. So I have developed my own idea of "The Good Life" which comprehends the wokey approach but reaches higher. 

For Creatives, I propose, the highest goal should be to become a Sacrificial Hero. This notion comes out of Jungian psychology and his idea of "archetypes." As developed by Jungian adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson, the Sacrificial Hero means a person that conducts the Hero's Journey into the underworld of the unconscious, and if he survives this dive into the depths he may return to help his fellow humans, by illuminating the border between Order and Chaos, between the known and the unknown. And he probably sacrifices his life in the process.

The key thing to understand, I think, is that politics is not the way to the future. Politics, in my understanding, is the defense of our tribal patch of land from others that would conquer, plunder, and enslave us.

Only, in my understanding, conquest, plunder and enslavement are so yesterday. No, not immoral, so much as belonging to another age. For the point is that in our world, conquest, plunder, and slavery Do Not Pay.

Why? Because in modern developed countries 80 percent of wealth is "intangible capital" between the ears of intelligent creative responsible people. If you conquer, and plunder, and enslave, you have gained nothing. Because the wealth of the world is intangible.

If only our lefty friends would wake up one day and realize this.

What Does the Modern Sacrificial Hero Look Like?

In this series on "The Good Life" I have been trying to answer the question raised by Spencer Klavan in a review of Douglas Murray's The Madness of Crowds. We need “a vision of the good life more compelling than the fanatical march toward a virtuous future that the Left offers.”

Of course, I pointed out that the vision of the good life depends on who you are. If you are a Subordinate it has always meant being a loyal servitor to your lord. If you are a Commoner, it means living up to God's divine law, as you follow the rules, go to work, and obey the terrestrial law.

But, I said, if you are a Creative, a member of the educated Gentry, it means being a Hero. And I proposed that there are two versions: the left's version in which the Hero is an egoistic political revolutionary; and my version, derived from the German Turn and Jungian psychology, in which the Hero is a Sacrificial Hero, like the Sacrificial Hero Jesus Christ.

Fine, but what does that mean to a modern man? Well, I just ran into an example: Sick Heart River written by John Buchan just before his death in 1940. Buchan is famous for his Richard Hannay spy thrillers, The 39 Steps and Greenmantle. 

In real life Buchan, born in 1875, was a scholarship boy who won a First at Oxford, that promoted him in 1901 to private secretary to the High Commissioner for Southern Africa. In World War I he wrote government propaganda and was elected to the British Parliament in 1927. In 1935 he was made a baron and appointed Governor-General of Canada. In 1937 he went on a 7,000 mile tour of Canada's arctic North, and that forms the background to Sick Heart River, the story of a successful lawyer and politician, Sir Edward Leithen, dealing with a death warrant from his doctor that he had a year to live: tuberculosis.

Yes, what do you do when you have been told you have just one year to live? In Leithen's case the question is answered for his as he gets asked to look for a friend of a friend who had disappeared. This young man, Francis Galliard, was a successful finance man and husband to a devoted wife, Felicity. Leithen agrees to go find him.

Naturally, Galliard, a French Canadian from a decayed landowning family, has gone up North, into the vast wilderness that fascinated John Buchan. Teamed up with a half-Scot half "Indian" guide, Leithen goes after him and finds out that Galliard -- with his guide, the brother of Leithen's guide -- is on a trek to find a mysterious valley, Sick Heart River.

Leithen and his guide catch up with Galliard, who has been abandoned by his guide and is within days of death. Having saved Galliard's life, Leithen goes on alone with an Indian guide from the Hare tribe (even though he physically weakened by his TB) and finds Galliard's guide in the valley of Sick Heart River. Only, it's almost impossible to get out of Sick Heart River, for the valley is surrounded by steep cliffs. Except that Leithen is a mountaineer and can rope himself and his guide and Galliard's guide out of the valley of Sick Heart, thereby saving their lives.

But with the exertion of getting out of Sick Heart valley, Leithen collapses, and is nursed by the guides back to health in a log cabin they have built against the Canadian arctic winter. So the Indians and half-Indians have saved Leithen's life.

On their way back to civilization they learn that the Hare tribe is dying. The snowshoe rabbit, source of food from the trapper Hares, has succumbed to a periodic collapse in numbers, and the Hare men have given up. So when they get to the Hare village the men are dying, the children are dying, the sled dogs are dying, and the women are about to give up.

But Leithen decides to rally the Hares; he sends his guides out to hunt for caribou and moose to feed the Hare villages; he builds a huge fire in the village, and rallies the Hare people back to life.

But he kills himself with his exertions, and dies from his TB, despite the pleas from his guides to save himself.

But the Hares live; Francis Galliard lives and is reunited with his loving Felicity, and Leithen dies a noble death as the Sacrificial Hero.

An undercurrent in the book is that everyone is falling into the valley of the Sick Heart because their religion isn't delivering for them. Leithen is a successful barrister and politician, but not really supported by his nominal faith. The French Canadian Galliard has fallen away from his Catholic faith, and the Hares in their village are unable to face the vicissitudes of life, either from their traditional beliefs or from their local Catholic priest. So what is the answer to the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in the world of 1940 with Christianity falling away, the tribal religions useless, and the world plunging into war?

I would say, 80 years later, that we still don't have a clue.

Except that we do; we have a glimmering about the Hero's Journey into the depths of the unconscious, even into the underworld of Sick Heart River from which there is no return, and the miraculous ascent back from the depths with a wisdom obtained by facing the demons of the underworld.

And thus armed we can illuminate the darkness at the border between Order and Chaos, and bring our fellow humans back from despair and into the Light.

But we will probably die in the attempt.

What is the Good Life Better than the Left -- for Women?

I've established to my own satisfaction that the meaning of "life, the universe and everything" for educated male Gentry or People of the Creative Self is symbolized by the notion of the Sacrificial Hero that comes through the Nietzschean/Jungian tradition, and through adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson.

But whatabout women?

Truth is, women are not into heroes. You can see that in the whole "safety culture" that powers the "cancel culture." If you make me feel unsafe, well, your words are hurtful and you should be canceled. We have seen this in the resignation of Bari Weiss at The New York Times.

This safety thing, to me, is a girl thing. Being safe, intellectually and emotionally, is not something that occurs to a guy. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That's the guy approach to wordplay.

And this takes us back to Georg Simmel's prediction a century ago, that with women coming into the public square, they would transform it to suit "a more feminine sensibility." I have been thinking about this for a few years and have come to the conclusion that women don't relate to the public square; they aren't comfortable at all with a frank and fair exchange of views; they don't believe in "debates." That's because women that have a disagreement don't have it out woman to woman. They complain to their friends about the woman they have a problem with, and the whole thing gets massaged by the neighborhood community of women and spat out, eventually in some collective decision of naming and shaming and shunning.

The proof of this is the "safety culture" that is emerging in universities and in the prestige media as women take over. Most of your university students these days are women; most of your university administrators these days are women. And it certainly seems that most of your young journalists are women. That is why you see the rise of the "safety culture." Women expect to be "safe;" they insist on being safe. Being a hero doesn't make sense. Not to a woman.

(Yes I know. There are exceptions. I know a few of them, personally).

So what is "best in life" for a woman?

The answer, I believe, issues out of the basic concept of honor among women. As James Bowman writes in Honor: A History, 

[In] spite of the discrediting that honor has undergone, the basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of popular culture what has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut. (p.5)

I think the woman's notion of honor comes out in the #WeBelieve yard-sign which usually closes with "Kindness is Everything."

Then, of course, we turn to My Girl George Eliot, Mary-Ann Evans that was. In Adam Bede, the heroine Dinah Morris is the kindest and most thoughtful person in the world. She is always thinking about other people and how she can help them. Her antagonist, Hetty Sorrel, is the most selfish person in the world who thinks of nothing but her beauty, her self-adornment and herself. You can see the question of chastity in women blazing across the sky: goodness, thoughtfulness, kindness.

In Middlemarch we have a rainbow of young women exemplars, from Dorothea Brooke, who really wants to do good in the world, to Rosamond Vincy, who is completely selfish and cannot see out of her needs and her truth of her eternal innocence, to Mary Garth, the Mary-Ann Evans name-alike, who is not to be dislodged from her determination that Fred Vincy has to deserve her before she will accept him as her affianced husband. Dorothea is the kindest, noblest, most thoughtful young woman in the world, and yet, as her uncle Mr. Brooke might say, she has a tendency to "go too far." Rosamond is a peerless beauty, yet frozen in place, determined never to do anything wrong, yet unable to see the wrongness of her mindless selfishness and sense of entitlement. Mary Garth is the balance between the two: kind but firm; thoughtful but not yielding; good, but no pushover.

So, after the alpha and omega of womanhood in Adam Bede George Eliot in Middlemarch gives us a spectrum of women and the opportunity to reflect on the question of woman's honor in more depth and breadth.

Now let us think about how this works out in the context of the modern educated woman in the educated Gentry or the People of the Creative Self.

Clearly, for such women, the need is for something original, something that steps out of the Commoner context of being good and kind and thoughtful by following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. We are trying here to think outside the box of goodness, thoughtfulness, and kindness, all the while avoiding falling into the trap of becoming a Lady Bountiful.

So, obviously, our Dorothea/Dinah/Mary would not be doing conventional things such as nice liberal women do, just aping the current liberal line and doing good, being kind and thoughtful and Lady Bountiful around the usual liberal victims.

In other words, the role of the creative good/kind/thoughtful woman is hard, as the role of the male Sacrificial Hero is hard.

OK. We have solved the whole problem and the future of womankind is set for the next millennium.

But what shall we call this paragon of femininity, the name, the feminine ideal corresponding to the male Sacrificial Hero.

Frankly, I don't have a clue. So I will just lay the question aside and leave it to my Jungian unconscious to rummage around in its archetypes to come up with the right answer.

The Different Kinds of Hero

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

Let's get back to fundamentals.

Politics is downstream from culture. Said Andrew Breitbart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I will be back!

Gorsuch Decision Means Back to the Drawing Board

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should be a snap, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what is he, then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I investigate Maps of Meaning here.

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

And we can start to deal with the next problem.