Enough of Enemies; Enough of Loot and Plunder!

The fact is that one of the instinctive roles of male humans is to defend the territory. Because the territory has food on it. Defending the territory and its food is a matter of life and death.

But, since the Industrial Revolution food is something humans buy with money. Therefore, access to or control of food-bearing territory is not a matter of life and death.

If we apply Nazi Carl Schmitt's dictum that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy, we can see that it used to make complete sense. Friend is someone that shares the food-bearing territory and fights to defend it; enemy is someone threatening to take away our food-bearing territory.

So when, e.g., Frederick the Great of Brandenburg invaded Silesia in 1740 it was not about defending Brandenburg's food-growing territory but it was about increasing the area of food-growing territory over which Fred could rule and tax. It worked out well for Our Fred, and he was a decent flute player that liked to play music of an evening. Of course, it could be that he sent the wrong message to the future rulers of Germany.

Then came the Industrial Revolution.

Then came Stalin. He starved the peasants of the Ukraine so he could buy industrial equipment from the West. Way to go, Joe.

Then came Adolf Hitler. He believed that Germany needed Lebensraum to grow food for its people. In the East. But Germany was an industrial nation that could buy its food as long as it wasn't in a world war.

Not a good idea, Adolf.

Now, of course, ever since World War II, our global elite has decided that nations and national leaders are literally Hitler, and it is their sacred duty to stop Literally Hitlers anywhere they rear their mustachioed heads.

But, our global leaders are still acting like male humans defending their territory. All across the world leaders during the late COVID emergency have been acting like male humans defending territory, issuing orders to the troops -- er, ordinary citizens -- to keep in line, to wear their uniform masks, get their vaccinations. Or else go to the brig. Just like the GIs in World War II.

And after the War on COVID our leaders are proposing to bravely lead us to Build Back Better with a whole raft of programs to dish benefits out to the people. And mobilize for the Next World War, the Green New Deal that will decarbonize the world before it's too late.

Needless to say, those that get on board with the new World War Green will be handsomely rewarded. Others will pay for their armed insurrection.

The thing that keeps bothering me is that, whether we are talking about hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon rain forest or the cult followers of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, proprietor, we are talking about the same thing.

First there is the enemy to be defeated before it's too late. And then there are the glorious perks to all the faithful friends and followers.

In other words, whenever politics is involved it is always about the enemy, and then always about rewarding the followers. Just like in the Amazon rain forest. Just like with feudal lords and their retainers. Just like the Soviet leaders and their nomenklatura. Just like western leaders and their loyal deep state.

But, you only need to mobilize against the enemy when your life depends on the continued possession of food-growing territory. If you are growing food to sell, if you are making stuff to sell, if you are doing anything in the modern economy, you don't need to defend your food-growing territory. What is more, it doesn't make any sense to invade a country and plunder its resources and sell its inhabitants into slavery. They will benefit you much more doing what they are already doing and selling it to you. That's because 80 percent of wealth in the modern economy is "intangible capital" which is a fancy way of saying the knowledge and skills of humans.

Do you understand what I am saying? I am saying that the modern state with its compulsions, its endless partisan squabbling, its gigantic loot and plunder operation -- that in the developed world means something from one third to one half of gross domestic product -- is an echo from the past, the past of primitive humans that lived and died on food-growing territory that they defended with their lives. That's why I call it the Great Reaction.

Loot and plunder? The last major loot and plunder operation that I know of was the looting and plundering of eastern Germany by the Soviet Union after World War II. How did that work out, Joe Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev?

See my point? If you are in the enemy plus loot and plunder game you ain't doing yourself a favor. Although of course, you do get to drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentation of their women. If that's how you get your jollies.

The next Big Thing for humans is to get beyond the primitive culture of enemies and loot and plunder for the friends.

But I don't know how we get there.

Alternatives to Politics and the Enemy

 If politics is the friend/enemy distinction, that "there is no politics without an enemy," then the interesting question is: "whatabout the alternatives."

And obviously the alternatives to the war against the enemy is something a bit less bloody. Such us religion and the good / evil distinction, and law and the legal / illegal distinction. And economic exchange and the trusting / cheating distinction.

But then an email acquaintance proposed the following:

Politicians need an enemy.
Corollary:  The enemy must be more feared than government.

That's a good point. Because clearly government likes to swing its weight around. I'd say it is pretty clear that since the January 6 riot our ruling class has -- deliberately or instinctively -- come down like a ton of bricks on the "armed insurrectionists" and also anyone in the Republican political sphere that might feel like lending them a hand, right Speaker Pelosi? Because, what with the resources of the government you can sure make life unbearable for any government critic or Outer Party partisan. As in bankrupting them.

Actually, there must be a further corollary to "politicians need an enemy." Clearly, practical politicians in the ruling class's Inner Party would really like it if members of the Outer Party had a healthy fear of the Inner Party.

And that is obviously what Our Nance and the Cancel Culture are all about. They are not interested in persuasion any more. Just intimidation.

Which tells us that they have given up on persuading us of the glory of their arc of history bending towards justice. Just shut up and fall into line, peasants.

But my point is that, really, we humans should attempt to spend as much time as possible outside the political world and its friend  enemy distinction. Because treating other people as the enemy implies physical conflict and ultimately the possibility of killing.

And the point about conflict and killing is that it is very expensive. Particularly for men. That is why, I have read, primitive tribes do not go in for pitched battles and the risk that the entire male warrior group could be killed off. When the males are all eliminated it means the end of the tribe, and the women are absorbed into the neighboring tribe.

You know, just like German women after World War II becoming GI war brides.

Primitive tribes prefer a nice surgical dawn raid to a pitched battle. More civilized, old chap.

And so also religion, which deals with malefactors by naming, shaming and shunning, rather than by conflict and killing. More civilized, old chap.

And law, which short-circuits the revenge and reparations culture with a legal trial, rules of evidence, and a final disposition of an argument over land, inheritance, wimmin, and a deal gone sour. More civilied, old chap.

And the market economy, which, as indicated by the Science™ of trust and the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, rewards acts of trust and penalizes acts of deceit. Notice that the market economy is gentler than the religious game of naming, shaming and shunning, and the expensive law game of trials and lawyer bills.

Amazing, innit, that the most civilized version of the friend-enemy distinction should be the one thing anathametized by our lefty friends. I wonder why? Is it because, at heart, they are primitives, or at least reactionaries, as in my Great Reaction.

Hey, you gotta say, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat are most keenly experienced in the political sphere, where all is won and lost in the decisive battle. So I understanding my lefty friends having a certain hankering, a certain nostalgia, for the good old days.

But I say that the destiny of mankind is to civilize conflict and disagreement. Because that is the whole point of social animals.

If you want excitement, then build a spaceship and go to Mars. Hey, Elon Musk may have a job for you.

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.

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.

Maybe I Have Been Too Tough on the Lefty "Great Reaction"

As I get deeper and deeper into the psychologist Carl Jung I understand more and more the curious condition of humans. 

On the one hand we are proud rationalists, building cathedrals of logic and reason to explain the meaning of life, the universe, and everything and how we are rational agents as we plan our every move and our ideal society. On the other hand we are just a hop, skip, and a jump from our primitive ancestors who, as Jung writes, did not think they had "agency." For instance in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 153: 

Primitive mentality differs from the civilized chiefly in that the conscious mind is far less developed in scope and intensity. Functions such as things, willing, etc are not yet differentiated; they are pre-conscious, and in the case of thinking, for instance, this shows itself in the circumstance that the primitive does not think consciously, but that thoughts appear. The primitive cannot assert that he thinks; it is rather that "something thinks in him."... Moreover, he is incapable of any conscious effort of will; he must put himself beforehand into the "mood of willing,"or let himself be put... His consciousness is menaced by an almighty unconscious: hence his fear of magical influences that may cross his path at any moment; and for this reason, too, he is surrounded by unknown forces and must adjust himself to them as best he can. 

Jung goes on to say that our rational consciousness puts an intolerable burden on us, because in every way our conscious mind is rebelling against our unconscious instincts. "This means, on the one hand, the possibility of human freedom, but on the other it is a source of endless transgressions against our instincts."

And that, Jung suggests, can lead to hideous catastrophes. "For ages man has dreamed of flying, and all we have got for it is saturation bombing!" Of course, that was before the invention of the jumbo jet.

So when I sneer at our left friends with my Great Reaction motif, that

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.

Maybe I am doing them an injustice. For, following Jung, if lefties are committed to "fundamental transformation" and implementing an absolute standard of justice, this would create in their minds and souls a hideous sense of conflict, for a totally rational society is the complete opposite of the instinctive culture of the primitive, the pre-agricultural human. And actually, lefties have a huge nostalgia for the assumed simplicities of the pre-civilized life, for the good old community of the Russian Mir. And both Rousseau in his Second Discourse and Shaw in Fabian Essays make a Garden of Eden moment out of the invention of private property, the first man that fenced in his plot or patch of land and called it his. 

Yet socialism, with its dream of equality, has implemented the most severe hierarchical societies in world history. While under capitalism, there is a constant turnover of the economic winners: the average company that gets into the Dow Jones Industrial Index lasts 20 years in the index.

So, we may say that whenever we encounter a movement of nostalgia for the good old days, or for a simpler, less corrupted time, we are seeing a person or a movement breaking under the strain of life under the logic and reason of consciousness, over-replacing the old ways of pre-conscious instinct. And that applies too, I suppose to mental illness: a collapse, a fall from the heady heights of consciousness, rationality, and agency into pre-consciousness.

Notice the irony of the notion of the Fall of Man, in which religion takes the position that the emergence into self-consciousness is actually a Fall into Sin. And so it is, because while in the old days, good and evil were the acts of good and evil spirits, in the new order, everything that goes wrong is the fault of the rational agent himself

So, of course, the medieval courtiers, tamed and disciplined into the courts of the absolute monarchs, were nostalgic for the good old days when knights were bold and were cantering about the country on their trusty steeds instead of moldering away in the dog-eat-dog world of a royal court.

Of course conservatives hanker after the good old days when the rules were clear and enforced: an age of clarity that shines like a beacon upon our chaotic times when all values are getting revalued.

But what is interesting, to me, is the realization among the best and the wisest among us -- in other words you and me -- that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything means a constant uncertainty and randomness. We cannot know what the weather will be tomorrow; we cannot know if our brilliant start-up will in fact succeed; we cannot know if China will be the next to rule the world or collapse in Commie stupidity. Our lives are not ruled by logic and reason, but by hope and luck and relentlessness.

Then there is the line of Giacomo Puccini:

The music of this opera (Madame Butterfly) was dictated to me by God. I was merely instrumental in getting it on paper and communicating it to the public.

Yes indeed. Where does a Puccini or a Mozart -- or the young piano sensation Alma Deutscher -- come from?

So, let's not be beastly to the lefties. We should expect them to break under the strain of trying to believe ten impossible things before breakfast, and that they would lurch back to the primitive in instinctive recoil.

Still, it would be nice if they were not so beastly to us: calling us every nasty name under the sun, from racist to sexist to homophobe. I wonder what they mean by that?

The End of the Commoner Rebellion

We don't know yet exactly how our Democratic friends are going to cook up the votes in the states remaining to be called in the 2020 Presidential Election as of this moment: in NV, WI, MI, PA, NC, GA. 

But I don't think it matters.

The fact is that President Trump didn't expand the map beyond his victory in 2016. To establish the Revolt of the Deplorables as a thing he needed to increase his 300 odd Electoral College votes to 350 or 400.

And if he has in fact increased his support among blacks and Hispanics, then he has lost support among white educated Gentry.

One of the notions of Gaetano Mosca in The Ruling Class is that the Commoners don't get a vote. Political change only occurs when the ruling class divides and the change faction wins.

My hope was that a Trump reelection would redefine politics in the US and that the educated Gentry would decide to compose its differences with the Commoners. But that did not happen. If you are an educated Gentry this morning you are saying to yourself and your educated Gentry friends: pedal to the metal, on Critical Race Theory, and on saving the planet from climate change. We've got those racist-sexist-homophobe bigots just where we want them.

In other words, the global educated Gentry is going to go Full Speed Ahead on its Great Reset agenda, "building back better" under the benevolent supervision of the educated and the evolved and the creative people. That means, of course, also, Full Speed Ahead on climate change and eliminating fossil fuels.

And all the Good Little Girls of intersectional politics are going to be cooking up new "1619 Projects" and other reasons to oppress the Basket of Deplorables. Because they had it coming. Let us rehearse Hillary Clinton's Basket of Deplorables speech one more time:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.

Notice the end of the quote, that the "irredeemable... are not America." Do you see what that does? It empowers the speech police to go out throughout the land to identify and cancel anyone guilty of being "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic  – you name it."

Hey, there is never a shortage of people ready to teach the other guys a lesson. And now that the Commoner Rebellion has failed, they will be out there working their tails off on social media, in the movies, in the schools, K thru retired professor.

Oh yes. In the end the Reign of Woke Terror will sputter out, perhaps in a Thermidorean Reaction, or perhaps just in exhaustion, or perhaps after defeat in civil war. But as of now I can promise you it has its bit within its teeth.

I feel that the Woke Religion is a Great Reaction, a lurch back to the primitive. We don't need religions with that kind of discipline, and the Woke Inquisitors are going to do nothing but harm. Tell that to the woke enthusiasts, and see what you get.

Nothing new, of course. There are always people hanging around panting to dive into a moral war against the Evil One. Usually the moral warriors are the Evil Ones they are supposed to be fighting. My belief is that in the modern era we really don't need such strong religion. But what do I know. There is always a moral component to humans as social animals, and always will be.

Then there is the Green New Deal, the plan to save the planet from runaway global warming from the burning of carbon-based fuels. If you are a ruling class you slobber at a supposed existential peril like runaway global warming. Because it licenses you to mobilize every corner of society in a gigantic war to save humanity. Think of the power, the glory! There are always people lusting after power and glory and there always will be.

Now my belief is that a totalitarian moral hierarchy that the current Woke Religion calls for, and the totalitarian economic/political hierarchy that the current climate panic calls for can only end in disaster. And that is because of my Four Laws.

Socialism cannot work, because it cannot compute prices.

Administrative government cannot work because it doesn't have the bandwidth to supervise everything. 

Regulatory administration cannot work because of "regulatory capture" by the businesses being regulated

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them except by expanding them. 

In other words top-down anything, except in an actual war, doesn't work because it isn't social, and humans are social animals. When we set up a hierarchical top-down structure we are setting something in concrete, assuming there is One Correct Way, and the one thing we can be certain about in human life is that tomorrow the world will change and we will have to change our plans.

One fine day, we humans will emerge from the Dark Age into which our globalist educated Gentry is leading us. I just hope that my descendants are among the happy ones that survive till that day.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Slavery

Everybody knows that the only thing you need to know about slavery is the Middle Passage and Negro Slavery and plantations and white racism.

I'm sure that's what you were carefully taught, to hate and to fear, in school.

I had my first warning that it ain't necessarily so years ago when I read The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

See, back in the feudal era you could ask your feudal lord to make you a slave. Sure, the most notorious source of slaves was war: "conquest slavery." And you could be made a slave for a criminal offence; of course you could, because prisons are expensive. 

But voluntary slavery? Here's how Lacey and Danziger put it.

People surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress, when they simply could not provide for their families any more... [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands. No legal document was involved, and the new bondsman would be handed a bill-hook or ox-goad in token of his fresh start in servitude. It was a basic transaction -- heads for food.

Of course, this is not particularly scandalous to me, because my reductive Three Peoples theory understands that a lot of people are Subordinates, or people that believe they need a protector. Just like in 1000:

In the year 1000 people could not imagine themselves without a protector. You had a lord in heaven and you needed a lord on earth. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb expands on the topic in his Skin in the Game. It is covered in Chapter 3: How to Legally Own Another Person.

First, Taleb talks about the roaming monks of early Christianity, that were banned and enslaved into monasteries by the edit of St. Benedict. What was going on? The problem is that the vagrant monks were free, and

Complete freedom is the last thing you want if you have an organized religion to run.

But that is not all. Whatabout the corporation and the company man?

Total freedom for your employees is also a very bad thing if you have a firm to run[.]

Why? Well suppose you have a small airline and the pilots are contracted. Suppose that tomorrow you have a fully booked flight to Munich for the Oktoberfest, and at 5pm your pilot calls you to cancel, because he got a better deal that day from a Saudi sheik. You can see that it would be better to have salaried employees, even if they spend a lot of time sitting around, rather than risk a contract pilot saying, sorry Bob, I got a better offer today. As Taleb says:

People you find in employment love the regularity of the payroll, with that special envelop on their desk at the last day of the month, and without which they would act as a baby deprived of mother's milk.

And so we developed the culture of the "company man" who was guaranteed employment until retirement and then retired with a pension.

The system worked when large corporations survived a long time and were perceived to be longer lasting that nation-states.

But now, Taleb says, in the tech age, the important thing for security is to be "employable," to have skills that employers want.

Here's another curious form of slavery. To employ someone, say in a foreign country, at a salary and benefits way over the market rate back home. "The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status." 

Or suppose you are a high-ranking civil servant. You are terrified of losing your reputation and your sinecure, and so behave exactly as required -- say by the deep state -- in order to keep your status and your perquisites.

Yes, you say, but these examples are not really slavery. Maybe not, but they do illustrate that the dominant narrative -- that back in the old days people were brutally enslaved, but now, in the glorious light of enlightenment those days are gone forever and everyone is free, except for the remaining "oppressed peoples" that we "allies" are determined to liberate -- is a little too simplistic.

And I say, with my Great Reaction notion, that the left, despite its glorious devotion to ending all oppression and domination, is in fact reintroducing subjection: thus I argue that socialism is a return to slavery and the welfare state is a return to feudalism.

In fact, all social animals are hierarchical, not egalitarian. True equality, true freedom don't exist in the real world. Every living thing lives in a hierarchical world and obtains protection from its subordination to the hierarchy and its place in the power hierarchy.

Some people want a lot of protection: at some point the level of protection and subordination approaches what we like to call slavery. Other people want very little protection; they are what we might call "free spirits" after Nietzsche. It ain't black and white, but all shades of gray.

But, of course, we Hegel scholars have always known that. Because, having taken the short cut and read Alexandre Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, we know that the Master and Slave relationship is not as simple as we might like to think. For instance, the Slave knows a lot more about the Master than vice-versa. And knowledge, as they say, is power.

One fine day, I predict, our lefty friends will completely change their minds about slavery. Because their political power will depend upon it. But don't ask me when.

Meanwhile keep your nose in the air, knowing that you know a lot more about slavery than your virtue-signaling Black Lives Matter liberal neighbor.

Lefty Ally-ism, and What Real Allies Look Like

It is a couple of months since I read the definitive word on our current Woke witch hunt and first commented on it. It was from Matt Taibbi's piece on "white fragility." The "antiracism" movement, he wrote, is based on the following three-layer theory of society.

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

Of course, I jumped on it, because of my interest in three-layer theories, which are the typical way that humans understand each other -- that is when they have the sophistication to graduate from a simple Us and Them theory. I lay out the theories in a table here.

I call this meaning-of-life theory "ally-ism." Because, of course, the point of "antiracism" is not being against racism but being an activist force for good, being the ally of "oppressed peoples."

Notice that, like the original Marxism, this ally-ism is not a theory of society but a theory of conflict. In Marx's concept, humans are engaged in an eternal Us vs. Them conflict, feudal lords vs. serfs, and now capitalists vs. proletarians. But there is hope! The Communists, the vanguard of the proletariat, will ally itself with the proles and smash the capitalist domination and hegemony. And then the problem of good vs. evil would be solved for all time.

In the new concept, we have the "white oppressors" dominating and oppressing the "oppressed peoples." But along come the "allies" who heroically insert themselves into this dominatory hellhole and join the battle of the oppressed against the oppressors as the allies of the "oppressed peoples."

Do you see the absurdity of this analysis? That it reduces human society to a war of all against all. Really? So how does the concept of humans as social animals come in?

And by the way, whatabout the notion, that I have advanced with respect to slavery, that some people actually voluntarily place themselves into slavery? Bad boy Nassim Nicholas Taleb updates the notion in Skin in the Game. He suggests that monasticism is a form of slavery. It was invented by St. Benedict to deal with the problem of itinerant monks that were totally out of the Catholic Church's control. Says he (p.96)

Complete freedom is the last thing you want if you have an organized religion to run. Total freedom for your employees is also a very, very bad thing if you have a firm to run[.]

So, Taleb argues, in this supposed post-slavery age, there are all kinds of dependence going on, especially in the corporate world. By offering security of employment -- and dependence -- an employer buys loyalty. The high-water mark of this was the old lifetime employment deal offered by big corporations in the post-WWII era. That worked when the life of big corporations was sixty years or so. But not in the current era where "firms stay in the top league by size (the so-called S&P 500) for only about between ten and fifteen years."

That's why my maxim about the Great Reaction says that the welfare state is a return to feudalism. It works because a lot of people prefer the life of subordination to the life of responsibility.

In other words, a big chunk of your "oppressed peoples" may be subordinate by choice.

That's why I think that a good three-layer theory is descriptive before it is prescriptive. Who are these "oppressed peoples" these "white oppressors" when they are at home? And who are the glorious white-knight "allies?"

Well, my reductive Three Peoples theory does just that. It describes the Creative people, that want to create something new; the Responsible people that just want to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, and the Subordinates, that look to someone else to tell them what to do.

Let us try to mesh my theory with the Ally-ism theory. I'd say that the "oppressed peoples" align with my Subordinates. But what if, for many "oppressed peoples," their Subordination is a choice. Nobody, for instance, is forcing you to take welfare. In fact, you demand your welfare and your unemployment check and your Medicaid as a right. Really? You mean that your average "oppressed" person has enforceable "rights?" Oh, I forgot: they would have nothing without the heroic assistance of the "allies."

Whatabout the "white oppressors?" Are these graduates of prestige universities and prestige media or NGO jobs? Certainly not? Are they Tech Lords? Certainly not! Tech Lords are for the people. Are they Trump supporters, the kind that often get suspended and censored on social media and can be found enthusiastically cheering at Trump rallies? I think you have a funny notion of oppressor if the average "white oppressor" can be fired for expressing the wrong opinion, James Damore.

And whatabout "allies?" Are these graduates of prestige universities with prestige media or NGO jobs? You betcha! Are they Tech Lords? You betcha! Are they nice liberal ladies in swank gentrified inner suburbs with #WeBelieve yard signs out front? You betcha.

Hmm. I am getting a sneaking suspicion that the Mary McCarthy Rule applies here. You remember Mary McCarthy. She said of Lilian Hellman:

Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."

I'd have to agree with Mary, since the day I saw Lilian Hellman's play "The Watch on the Rhine" at the Berkeley Rep. 

Against this putrid philosophy I offer an notion of real Ally-ship. It is based on my Three Peoples theory and recognizes that different people need and want different things. 

I'd say that Subordinates -- or "oppressed peoples" -- need a decent support from society but should be encouraged to lift themselves out of dependency. That's what I think a real ally would do.

I'd say that Responsibles -- or "white oppressors" -- need to be allowed to just be ordinary people and go about their business without being hassled by credentialed "allies" and accused of being monsters when they are not. But Responsibles also need to be encouraged to rise above mere responsibility and try something new. That's what I think a real ally would do.

I'd say that Creatives -- or "allies" -- need to be encouraged in the courage of creativity, but not if it means running about being white knights and beating up on "white oppressors." True creativity means being willing to sacrifice yourself rather than sacrifice others, to be a sacrificial hero rather than an ego hero, and Creatives need to be told that in no uncertain terms. That's what I think a real ally would do.

Now let us look at the bigger picture. In our era, the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, the wages of cooperation have been immense. Take just one statistic: there are 3.8 billion smartphone users in the world today. In a world of 7 billion humans.

Just sayin'. How oppressed can you be if you have a smartphone? For one thing, it means that if you are one of the Factory Girls in southern China you can text with your friends about the best -- and the worst -- employers.

Now I think that the emergence of the Great Reaction, of well-born allies that went to selective colleges proposing to right the wrongs of the world with politics, is a sign that the Age of Politics, the age of using force to make people get along, is coming to an end. It is clueless scions getting the wrong end of the stick. It is a sign that the rule of the educated Gentry is coming to an end. Because we Commoners can get on perfectly well without the supervision of our Betters. Why? Because with smartphones and credit scores and cashless transfers there is a gigantic "nudge" encouraging each of us to be faithful and trustworthy in every life transaction.

In other words if there is a crisis in the modern era it is the crisis of people that are not trustworthy: people that crash their credit scores, that can't keep a job, that get pitched out of the circle of trust because they demonstrate untrustworthiness. The Fools.

Back in the day, the untrustworthy could disappear. A Brit could take a ship to the Americas. A New England Puritan could disappear and head Out West. People could give themselves a fresh start. But today, I'd say, the penalties for untrustworthiness are huge.

Hey, Wokies! How about a program for you guys to go out in the world and teach the "oppressed peoples" how to earn the badge of "trustworthiness?"

But meanwhile, we "white oppressors" will do our thing with the "oppressed peoples" and give them jobs and reward them for trustworthiness. And in the fullness of time they may become rabid Trump voters too. 

That's that I call real allies.

My "1584 Project"

Remember when the peerless New York Times journalist put up her "1619 Project" and the editors announced it thus?

The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. [emphasis added]

Yes, of course, that bold bit has since been memory-holed. Because reasons, chiefly because a lot of historians weighed in and said this narrative is, as they say in Critical-Theory-Land, "overdetermined." And, I understand, the chief writer in the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has taken her Twitter feed private, because reasons.

I get all this. It's because we humans all want to recite "the story so far," the comforting story about how "we" -- whoever "we" happens to be -- are the culmination of the history of the world so far. Educated blacks like HNJ want a narrative special to them. And our liberal friends are deeply in love with the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" narrative which is all about how liberals are the saviors of the world because they are the allies of the oppressed peoples and plucked them from out of the clutches of the eevil white oppressors.

The purpose of the 1619 Project is, of course, to throw offal on the "founding narrative," that the American people are the best people in the world, the United States is the best country in the world, and our founders are the best politicians in the world.

Which is really cool if you are a liberal, but not so much fun if you are, say, a gap-toothed white redneck. Where do you fit in to all this virtue-signaling?

Enter my "1584 Project." It is critical theory on steroids, because it is a critique of the "1619 Project" as a prime example of the domination and hegemony of the educated class. You see, it may very well be that August 20, 1619 marked the arrival of the first slave ship in North America. But back in 1584 the first ships from England arrived off the coast of North America to found the Roanoke Colony.

What was the Roanoke Colony? According to La Wik, It was the brain-child of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was awarded a charter by Queen Elizabeth I to "discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous Lands, Countries, and territories ... to have, hold, occupy, and enjoy." He sent an expedition out in 1584 which made landfall at "Port Ferdinando" by Roanoke Island. Raleigh's people spent the next couple of years trying to establish a colony, but gave up, probably abandoning a few colonists to their fate.

But what was this colonization all about? If you read Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, it is all about the problem of "waste population" in England in the 16th century.

I know, let's tell a story.

Back in 1000, let us say, the Brits lived in a pure feudal system where they lived as serfs in a medieval manor. They could, if they chose, become slaves of their lord, and get their three squares a day directly from the loving lord rather than scratching for it as agriculturalists farming the open field system.

But in the 12th century, according to La Wik, "some fields in England tilled under the open field system were enclosed into individually owned fields." Then came the Black Death and that really got the break-up of the feudal system going.

Many farms were bought by yeomen who enclosed their property and improved their use of the land. More secure control of the land allowed the owners to make innovations that improved their yields.

The nobles also liked the enclosure concept. Their idea was to enclose land so they could graze sheep. This became a political issue by 1500, so that in his Utopia Thomas More could speak of how when gentlemen "that carry about with them... a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving men" die, their heirs "thrust [them] out of doors."

And what do they do, these landowners?

[They] leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all into pastures... and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made into a sheep-house.

The money, says More, is in the growing "of the finest and the dearest wool" and that is what the "noblemen and gentlemen" were doing. Not coincidentally, the first vagabond act was passed in 1495.

To add insult to injury, monarchs in the 16th century started disarming their nobles and creating national armies. This created another reason for nobles to kick their "idle and loitering serving men" out of doors.

By 1584, Richard Hakluyt in his "Discourse Concerning Western Planting" proposed not just the advantage of merchants and artisans improving the waste lands of the Americas, but the benefit of exporting the human detritus from the improvement and enclosure movement. Isenberg:

[T]he bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless... Idle and unused they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land and be better... put to use.

Then the convicts. Here is what Hakluyt planned for them in America.

Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar, and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export.

Anyway, after the Roanoke Colony failed the Brits tried again with Jamestown, founded in 1607. It struggled as badly as Roanoke, but then in 1609 John Rolfe introduced a strain of tobacco from Bermuda, and "tobacco quickly became the new gold --  the ticket to wealth."

But for that the planters needed labor, and so they pleaded for "more indentured servants and laborers, who, like slaves were sold to the highest bidder." Actually, the normal game was that men that did not pay for their own passage to the Americas paid instead with a term of indentured labor. And contracts of indenture bound servants to their masters and even their heirs. If an indentured servant died, his wife and children were expected to work out the term of indenture.

So the waste population of England was not that different from the conquest slaves of West Africa.

Of course, some of the indentured servants escaped, and learned to live off the grid as squatters and crackers.

They lived off the grid... disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down... anywhere and everywhere.

As early as the 1750s they were called the "scum of nature" and "vermin"; they had no means of support except theft and license.

Thus the whole pejorative vocabulary of White Trash, from Nancy Isenberg:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [n-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

Don't you think it is time for a new movement among the elite, to champion the White Trash against their oppressors? Oh wait. In that case the moral narrative would be about "oppressed white trash, gentry oppressors, and don't cares."

Did you know about the "maroons?" They were communities of escaped African slaves all up and down the eastern coast of the Americas. They usually lived just far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't be bothered to bother them.

So really, the maroons were the same as the white trash, the squatters and crackers, that lived far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't bother them. Both white trash indentured servants and negro slaves were useful to the ruling class to work in their money-making plantations, if they could keep them from escaping.

In my narrative of The Story So Far, I reckon that, at some point, the benefit of slave labor began to burn out. Eventually the powers that be started to realize that free labor was much more profitable than slave labor. And so indentured servitude and slavery became a scandal to the great and the good.

However, I maintain that the pendulum has swung back somewhat to feudalism, for in my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, I call socialism a return to slavery and the welfare state a return to feudalism. In the welfare state the workers give a lot of their wages back to the government in return for benefits. And what is that, in effect, but a kind of quasi-serfdom?

There seem to be only two ways of recalling the past. Either it was a golden age or it was a shameful barbarism. Or both.

But I think a better way is to be understanding about the past. It was what it was. We should be hesitant to praise it unduly, and we should be disinclined to sneer at it.

For who knows how our own age will be judged by those that come after us.

"We Get to Play-act on Your Dime"

I was exchanging emails with a friend about Colorado's Governor Jared Polis, who is putting a vegan on the state board that regulates livestock.

Polis is gay, and he and his "husband" have two children, who go to private school.

Up until now, I have proposed that one of the main aspects of the left's Great Reaction, its lurch back to the primitive, is the Activism Culture, that I say amounts to "play-acting revolution."

But now I am inclined to think that the whole culture of the left, from LGBT to climate change, is all about play-acting.

The idea is that the children of the educated Gentry get to play-act, with sex, with culture, with the environment. On our dime. And if any particular play results in negative results -- even disaster -- well too bad.

Notice how this goes against the notion advanced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his Skin in the Game. He says:

What should I do? I want to help mankind. His suggestion:

1) Never engage in virtue-signaling;
2) Never engage in rent-seeking;
3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.

In other words, don't do anything unless you have Skin in the Game, so that if your idea to help mankind turns out to be a dud -- and most such ideas are -- then you are the one that suffers the losses, not the rest of mankind.

See what I mean? Everything our liberal friends do is at other peoples' expense. If they are professors advocating for the Green New Deal, then it's all gravy for them. Government grants for now, and maybe Green Czar jobs down the line. But if the whole thing wrecks the economy? Hey. don't blame me; I only work here.

Oh no! A pandemic! Shut the economy down, because even one life lost is too much! But whatabout the millions of young people and semi-skilled that get furloughed and fired, while gubmint employees skate for a year and the bureaucrats that set the rules are entirely unaccountable for their mistakes? (And everyone makes mistakes).

If it is the Great Society, to give money to unmarried mothers, and results in 70 percent of children in the black community being born outside marriage? Hey, what's your problem, racist?

If it is gay marriage, suggesting to suggestible youngsters that it is kinda cool to experiment with your gender, well whatabout the kids? An American philosopher once told me that all children want a mother and a father: their mother and their father. I wonder what the social-science research says about children raised by gays and/or lesbians? Or is that even allowed?

If it is "affordable housing" and brilliant academic economists propose low-down-payment loans and liar loans, and the whole thing ends up in a generational financial panic where millions lose their jobs and millions more their life savings, where are the ones responsible? The academics with the brilliant ideas? The activists that sold the idea as a matter of justice? The politicians that bought votes with promises of home-ownership?

If it is electric cars, then electric car manufacturers get subsidies, electric car buyers get subsidies, Elon Musk makes a fortune, and German car manufacturers promise to stop making diesel-powered cars. What happens if renewable energy wind-turbines and solar cells can't deliver the power? Who takes the losses? The greenie activists? The rent-seeking billionaires? The ordinary consumers suffering power outages? The politicians that told us we had 12 years to save the planet?

There are literally dozens, if not hundreds of "issues" for which professors want research money, activists want to virtue-signal, special interests want to rent-seek, and politicians want to buy votes. But none of them have Skin in the Game. None of them will go bankrupt and lose everything they have if their brilliant idea turns out to be a dud. They are, in effect, play-acting on the public dime, kids playing on the jungle gym at the local park.

And what happens if all these grand plans all come crashing to Earth at the same time?

Hey kid. Grow up and stop with the play-acting. Learn what it means to have Skin in the Game and get a life!

Hey Liberals and Lefties: The Age of Politics is Over

OK. Nothing new. The whole point of my Great Reaction and my Activism Culture notions is that politics is not the answer. And these two pieces, "Suppose We are Approaching the End of the Age of Politics" and "Two Centuries of the Great Reaction," say it all.

The Age of Politics is Over.

But why?

Let's reduce the whole thing to a Three Stages concept. 

Back in the day, we humans lived in the Age of War. That's when "land was the only thing that lasts," according to the fictional Gerald O'Hara. You had to have strong leaders to defend your food-growing land and protect you from pirates and plunderers. Call it the feudal system, if you like. Although when the real thing, like Genghis Khan, happened the usual kingly king wasn't up to snuff and everyone got killed or enslaved.

Then came the Age of Politics. The perfect instantiation of this age was the American Revolution. I am reading a history of the run-up to 1776 -- Desperate Sons by Les Standiford -- all about Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty in the decade between the Stamp Act and the battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775. What comes out at me is that the Yanks were objecting to the top-down "we know what is good for you" stupidity of the Brits. The Brits were forever writing laws that screwed up the economy of their North American colonies, because reasons. But the colonials were middle-class Commoners and working-class mechanics, not serfs on the farm. They wanted, they expected, to govern themselves, being the men on the ground that knew what needed to be done and accepted the responsibility to do so.

But once the post-feudal political order is established, with a separation of powers in government and a Greater Separation of Powers between economy, politics, and religion, then the need for political organization and the fisticuffs of revolution is over. You just need someone to man the front desk and make sure people sign the register.

A characteristic of the Age of Politics was the nostalgia for the good old days when knights were bold: the Tournament and the Medieval Romance. Both were favorites of nobles that had become courtiers in the early years of the absolute monarchs but longed to relive the glory years of rough tough warriors.

Now we have the Age of Trust. Do you realize how much you can trust that everything will work? We assume that we can work anywhere in the world. We assume that corporations produce good products at good prices. We assume we can jump onto an airplane and go anywhere in the world at a moment's notice, and when we get there our credit card and debit card establish our trustworthiness anywhere in the world. A teenaged girl can drive across three states to go visit the family of her prospective roommate in college, and think nothing of it.

Who needs politics when we have trust?

But now we have two nostalgic movements. First, we have the Activism Culture that is trying to relive the glory days of revolution, when revolutionaries were out in the streets, Les Mis style, outdaring the dangers of the time. This, I propose, is like the medieval romance, spinning stories about the good old days. Second, we have sports, which is a second iteration of the retreat from the Age of War. Instead of the clash of arms in the Tournament we have sports, where men can relive the glorious days when courage and perseverance were the only thing that mattered.

The point is that in the Age of Politics you don't need war anymore. Because you have politics to resolve disputes. In the Age of Trust you don't need politics anymore because all the trustworthy people are identified by their carte de confiance -- I made that up: It means trust card -- so you can live happily ever after just dealing with trustworthy people and steering clear of the rest.

OK. So you and I are convinced: politics is so vieux jeu. Now, how do we persuade our wokey Gentry friends, whose homes are presently festooned with #BlackLivesMatter and #WeBelieve signs, and for whom political virtue-signaling is the meaning of life? 

I propose we leave the solution of that problem for next week.

Message to Lefties: The Age of Politics is Over

So, yesterday the Seattle City Council decided to Defund the Police. Next year. When you think about it, this is exactly how politics works. 

Some interest group gussies up a bunch of rage, and the politicians realize they have to Do Something about it. But they know, in their heart of hearts, that it's all baloney. So what do they do? They pass a bill to make it look like they are doing something but push the big stuff off till next year when, maybe, the patient's fever will have subsided.

Anyway, the black woman Seattle chief of police Carmen Best resigned. Or rather, retired.

Doesn't that make the whole Seattle City Council into racist sexists? You tell me.

But I think there is a bigger issue here. And I think it is this:

The Age of Politics is Over. 

You think? I think that the Age of Politics ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts 55 years ago.

I went to the website of my Seattle Councilman Dan Strauss and he says this.

My priority as a Councilmember will be to create bold solutions at the scale of the problems we are seeking to address. I will fight to ensure Seattle is a healthy city, one connected by transit, that supports our small businesses, that has accessible and affordable childcare, and has safe, affordable places to call home.

Know what, Dan? The Age of Bold Solutions is over. What we need is an absence of bold solutions, a long withdrawing roar of undoing the Bold Solutions of yesteryear. For the only Bold Solution worth thinking about relates to my maxim that "Government programs cannot work because you cannot reform them." Which is to say: don't even think of a bold solution.

Of course, you can reform government programs, but only when they are broken -- completely broken, as in government can't borrow money any more. 

But we are better than that. 

This is why I say that the left -- liberals, progressives, choose your poison -- is a Great Reaction, a lurch back to the primitive, where socialism is a return to slavery, the welfare state a return to feudalism, and the activism culture a replay of the medieval romance, when knights were bold and damsels were in distress.

See, the whole point about humans is that we are social animals. That means that we do a bunch of things in order to reduce violence and conflict. One of those things, highlighted by Jordan B. Peterson in his lobster thingy, is hierarchy. Male lobsters don't fight over every little thing; instead they have a hierarchy. So unless a male lobster just can't take it any more, he accepts his place in the hierarchy. Lobster Lives Matter.

Now, one of the Big Problems down the ages is that humans have lived by the food available to them on the land. They have attempted to secure this food supply be defending a territory. Men have specialized in territory defense. Because land, and the food grown there, was life.

But now things are different, as I keep saying. It doesn't matter where food is grown. You can buy it. You can buy it thousands of miles away and have 100,000 ton grain ships move it all over the world from where the food is grown to where it is wanted. It doesn't matter where any product is produced; it can be loaded into a container on a container ship and dispatched across the world.

The only real wealth in the world is "intangible capital," the knowledge and knowhow in human minds. And this knowledge and knowhow can create incredible fortunes: the Microsoft fortune, founded by a guy that bought an operating system for personal computers and sold it by the item to IBM; the Apple fortune, starting with the iPod music machine and culminating in the iPhone that has transformed the world.

Notice what is missing from these tales of fabulous wealth? Force. Government. Politics. Bold Solutions.

Now, all is not completely copacetic, not yet. It is true that we no longer need to live as the underlings or the thralls of a Strong Leader that will protect us from all the dangers of the world. Instead we now are subservient to the market, what other people are willing to pay for our services and our products. It is, many people think, a worse slavery than the old household slavery or plantation slavery. For there is no hiding from the market in some rural paradise. We must all mark to the market every day. We must all keep updating our skills and improving our products. If we don't then we will find that the market no longer rewards us very much for our trouble.

And we need police to bash the heads of knuckleheads that haven't yet got with the program. That still like to loot.

But is the new market order unjust? Does a social animal deserve to thrive even if it is unwilling to serve its fellows with services and products that those others want to buy? That, of course, is the Great Question that all of us are confronted with every day. By what right can and should we demand to be supported by others when we cannot provide for ourselves?

There's a yard-sign on my morning walk that declares "Equality Hurts No one" and it features the clenched fist of Black Lives Matter. Well. So equality doesn't hurt anyone but if you don't provide it we have a clenched fist ready to enforce the notion. Thanks, pal. 

I would say that the only way to have equality is to enforce it. And you'd have to do it every day because tomorrow some entrepreneur will have a remarkable idea that is worth millions -- or maybe trillions. And that would be the end of equality until you enforce it. So equality needs a clenched fist.

In fact, though, social animals have found that equality is impossible. The only thing that works is a benevolent form of hierarchy, just like the lobsters. In our society the chap that ascends the hierarchy is often an entrepreneur with a good idea that turns out to be worth trillions. Then there is the politician that ascends the hierarchy by promising Bold Solutions.

And there is the fact that young men are programmed, coded to be defenders of the border. That is what all the LARPing AntiFa warriors are doing. They are doing what comes naturally.

Only, in our day, we don't need no stinkin' border warriors. We have road warriors, professional sports stars, the chance to found a new business and take it public in an IPO, instead.

And a glorious thing it is, to be, not a pirate king, but a software billionaire.

But you tell Councilman Dan Strauss. Or Councilwoman Brahmin-from-Puna Kshama Sawant about that.

Because I don't think they would understand. They still live in the primitive world of the Age of Politics and don't understand that the world has moved on.

Think of them as primitive savages, or primitive progressives. What does a primitive progessive understand about the market and the idea of trusting anyone that acts trustworthy?

Great Reaction -- Script

Hello, I'm Chris Chantrill, and I want to talk about the Great Reaction of our age, my way of understanding the Left as a gigantic lurch back to the primitive world of our ancestors.

The old world, before capitalism, was feudal, a system of domination and subordination, from the king and his direct vassals down to the meanest serf on a lord's estate.

Then came the 19th century with ordinary people running all over the world without permission, inventing new things and selling them. 

All over the world. And it worked! Trade and cooperation could work on the basis of trust between nobodies, with the legal system as a backstop to take care of cheaters.

Nobodies? Doing things without permission? Inconceivable! Something had to be done!

It was in the middle of the 19th century that rich kids invented socialism. What a concept! To reestablish the old regime of top-down control. Rich kids would save the workers from a fate worse than death by beating up on the employers and capitalists. After World War I another generation of rich kids extended the notion to include other marginalized groups as approved victims that would be saved by rich-kid activism.

I call this movement the Great Reaction, a nostalgic lurch to the imagined Garden of Eden of a vanished past, a reassertion, if you like, of primitive archetypes that still dwell in the human collective unconscious.

I say that:

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

Social justice is good old loot and plunder

I say that the Ally Narrative of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" is a lie, including "and" and "the."

And I say that there is no greater task for humans than meeting and answering the challenge of the Great Reaction, the deeply instinctive turn, away from the disruptive change of the modern era and its Great Enrichment and back to the primitive.

Next time let's talk about the ideas that birthed the Great Reaction. In my view it's all part of the German Turn, the revolution in ideas created by a succession of German, Good and Bad.

I'm Chris Chantrill and thanks for watching.

The Conflict of Interest of the Educated Gentry

One of my notions, coming out of my reductive Three Peoples theory, is that life for the People of the Creative Self is not easy.

Of course, I do not mean that their physical life is hard, but that the agenda of each person that desires to be creative is daunting.

We can show that by comparison with the others of the Three Peoples. If you are a Subordinate then all you have to do is suck up to your lord, and if things go wrong it is his fault. If you are a Responsible then all you have to do is follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. In both cases you go along to get along, presuming that is the way to survive and prosper.

But the essence of the life of the Creative person is to create something new. This is hard, very hard. We know, from the experience of artists and of people that start new businesses, that almost all creative endeavors fail.

What do humans do when facing failure? We tend to cheat. So if you are a Subordinate you probably steal from your lord or your employer. If you are a Responsible you don't always follow the rules or work as hard as you might.

Whatabout the Creatives? In this case, you might fake up some routine project as creative. Or you force your creativity on the rest of mankind.

In the fake department I like to use the example of LGBT. Everyone is interested in sex. So almost anyone can think up some lame way to be creative about sex. But the real program of sex is to bond with a person of the opposite sex and create children and a family and a home and stick to it through thick and thin. Anything else is really just faking it, taking the easy way out.

So a lot of what we call "creative" is not really creative at all, but people playing at being creative.

But then there is the other way, to force your creative project on the rest of mankind. Here's trivial example, how the educated class has mucked around with the regulation of automobiles: first it was gas mileage, then it was crash protection, then it was ethanol, then it was ASS, automated engine start/stop. But ethanol makes engines run hotter, which uses up old cars faster. 

Then you could be a health-science professional and order people around with creative ideas about how to fight epidemics.

Or you could be an environmental scientist and order people around with creative ideas about how to save the planet.

My point is that the regulation of cars and fuels, and the regulation of health care -- and the whole environmental game -- is all about the educated class having a creative project to work on. And it has to be backed by force, otherwise failed ideas would never get implemented or, if implemented, soon discarded. And then the educated gentry in question wouldn't feel creative.

To me, the whole project of the left suffers from this problem, going back at least to Marx. Hey, the fathers have been screwing things up since forever. So now we educated youth have a new idea, to end centuries of oppression and domination. And we demand the right to impose this idea on the rest of you, by force.

Put that way, it looks absurd. But it never occurs to the young sprouts full of rage.

Hey Uncle Joe! How yer doin', pal?

Now, it is my contention that most of the glorious moral and political advances of history are not glorious and moral at all, but just an adjustment responding to the fact that the old way just does not pay.

For instance, the change from sacrificing the first-born to sacrificing a goat. From sacrificing domestic animals to sacrificing the Son of God so the rest of us don't have to. Not moral; just practical.

Changing from the rule of the fathers and the conflict of the tribes to the state with its monopoly of violence, encoded in our time with police forces. Not a moral advance, just practical common sense.

Switching from slave labor and from serfdom to free labor. Not moral, but practical because free labor is more profitable to all concerned.

Emancipation of women. Not moral but practical because women aren't needed to birth lots of kids and spend their lives preparing and preserving food. They could do other things.

The next thing, I think, is the reduction of the administrative state and the rule of the educated gentry that makes them creative and important. Not because the administrative state is immoral and the educated gentry have a conflict of interest but because, first, the administrative state does not pay. And the educated gentry could be doing more productive things than ordering us all around in a pandemic. and sending their children to mostly peacefully protest about issues that were decided half a century ago.

But, but! What would the educated gentry do then, poor things?

Exactly, they would have to face up to the real challenge of all creative endeavor, that they are probably not creative enough, and not courageous and not persevering enough to get much beyond having a creative idea or two that they fail to develop and bring to fruition.

And then there is my bigger theory, that we are in the twilight of the political era, die Politischedämmerung, because, with our market economy and its trust culture, we really don't need much policing and administrating, except for the few people that haven't yet got with the program. And for them we need a few of Dickens' Inspector Buckets to tap their noses and straighten out the thugs and malingerers.

But whenever humans enter a new era we seem to have to go through a period of transition where some reactionary movement falls in love with the past and pushes the pedal to the metal trying to revive the old days. Like our lefty friends and their Great Reaction.

Like right now.

Remember, the "Activists" Aren't Revolutionaries

Now that Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP is winding down, according to Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, in a "phased" way, we can now say what it was not.

It was not revolution. What is was, instead, was regime supporters getting to let off a bit of steam after the glorious emotional experience of the George Floyd riots.

And it was, as all left-wing activity is, a reactionary moment, a nostalgic recreation of the good old days of organic, pre-city, community.

In a way, you can say it was a scientific experiment. Let's see what happens if you set out as a new Adam, as "he drives his spade into, and sets up his stockade around, the most fertile patch of land he can find?" That's Bernard Shaw, writing the first pages of Fabian Essays in Socialism.

Well, thanks to intrepid reporter Andy Ngô, we know that it means going through a couple thousand years of history in ten days. First of all, establish the borders. Then the men start to fight over who will be boss. Then you have to figure out the laws. Then you have to keep the peace. Then you identify that people that dress like you are the good guys and you start to hate the people beyond the border.

I suppose that one of the things that drives the Great Reaction, the movement of the left to recreate the primitive community, is the annoying realization that all the cool stuff has already been done. No Fair!

So you decide to do a redo, to re-enact the scenes from the past. Setting up a new community. Enforcing the peace. Competing to see who will be leader. Hating the monsters on the other side of the border.

What you are not, are revolutionaries. You are regime-sponsored "activists" doing what you have been carefully taught: You cannot be a revolutionary when the local mayor pats you patronizingly on the head and talks about a "summer of love." When activism is taught in government schools to children. When degrees are awarded in government universities in grievance studies. When the media reports on "mostly peaceful protest" in a burning city.

What you are doing, you activists, is doing the dirty work for the ruling class, frightening the Commoners, canceling the stepmother of an accused policeman. Roughing up conservative websites for their comment section.

If your protests were real revolution then the functionaries of the Inner Party -- the Nancy Pelosis, the Chuck Schumers, the tame journalists that parrot their sound bites -- would be coming down like a ton of bricks on the protesters, invoking the End of Days, the brutal behavior, the pile of skulls, the racism-sexism-homophobia of the terrorists, the wild violence of the protesters, er, riotous mob.

When you walk around my neighborhood full of nice white liberal ladies and see Black Lives Matter yard-signs and protest signs you are not seeing revolution. Nice liberal ladies do not do revolution; they instinctively seek out the approved line on everything and chant the responses with the rest of the faithful.

Here's a lovely tweet out today about the Beckys supporting revolution (Or are they Karens?):

Woke White Women continue to take over these protests. https://t.co/ZvlVLPuzkT

— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) June 23, 2020

As Instapundit puts it: "White Women's Self-Esteem Matters." And Woke White Women don't do revolution, baby. They do and say what they have been carefully taught. By Mommy, by Daddy, by teachers, by professors, by other Woke Women. Women Don't Do Revolution.

And this reminds me to make the obvious point.

The reason we have cities and states and police and the market culture is because it is staggeringly beneficial to humans that get with the program. That's what the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is about.

When you stop fighting over affronts to your sacred honor, and stop the vengeance culture and trust anyone that acts trustworthy to you, then a thousand flowers bloom. Not to mention a million IRAs.

But there is a problem. A part of the human instinct is the instinct to protect your little patch of land from looters and plunderers, to only trust your kind of people, and to be ready to drop like a ton of bricks on anyone that "disses" you and yours. A part of the human instinct loves to dump on the neighbors, whether in the women's gossip network of "I can't believe she did that" or in the man's honor culture of "you wanna back that one up, pal?"

What we need is a way to sublimate the women's gossip network into something that isn't mean-spirited naming and shaming and shunning, and a way to sublimate the men's insult culture into something that doesn't end in a fist-fight or worse.

And I don't know how we do that. Not when the ruling class prefers to keep the Commoners frightened and demoralized.