The Small Minority Gig and the Ruling Class

In his NY Post piece on "To beat woke tyrants the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are," Instapundit Glenn Reynolds invokes the Chapter 2 in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Skin in the Game: "The Most Intolerant Wins." He starts by noting that almost all prepared drinks have a "U" symbol on them that establishes the drink as Kosher. Even though full kosher eaters are less than one percent of the US population. Taleb writes that

It suffices for an intransigent minority -- a certain type of intransigent minority -- with significant skin in the game (or, better, soul in the game) to reach a minutely small level, say 3 or 4 percent of the total population, for the entire population to submit to their preferences.

Not quite. It requires an intransigent minority supported by the ruling class to force the entire population to submit to them. If the ruling class doesn't care about them, or actively wants to use the small minority as a punching bag, well, keep your heads down fellahs. 

Because unless the ruling class encourages a narrative, and publicizes it, and teaches it in the media and the schools, it didn't happen. Case in point, The American Spectator's Dov Fischer, who is a Jewish lawyer and an orthodox rabbi. Says he in "Let's Play Holocaust:"

I grew up in the 1950s and much of the 1960s relatively unaware of the Holocaust.

See, the Holocaust didn't become much of a thing until the Seventies. And before World War II our national savior FDR wasn't in too much of a hurry to let the Jews of Germany into the United States.

You can see that this is the key to our ruling class's brilliantly successful campaign of championing small minorities against the rest of America to maintain its domination and hegemony. First it was blacks, because slavery and Jim Crow. Then it was women, because the patriarchy. Then it was gays, because of centuries of homosexual persecution. Then transsexuals -- sorry, transgenders -- because.

If it weren't for the ruling class championing these chappies, they would all keep a low profile and make sure to keep below the radar.

As you probably know, because of your eevil habit of consuming far-right media, a trickster has turned this game on its head by championing the idea of "Super Straights" as a helpless minority that demand their rights not to date transgenders.

But naturally, our ruling class has swung into action to censor this dangerous and "far-right" and transphobic movement.

See what I mean? If you are a small minority, be you ever so intransigent, and the ruling class don't like you, better head for the hills.

Because while the ruling class can use small minorities to solidify its power -- as our ruling class does today -- it can also turn on a dime and crush small minorities as the very agent of the Devil. That's what Literally Hitler did.

I maintain that all minorities maintain themselves using a Culture of Innocence. We, whoever "we" are, are innocent. Everything that goes wrong with us is the fault of the big guys, so we'd better all stick together. That is the point of the Culture of Innocence. It is the means for our community to stick together united against the world.

But the Culture of Innocence is almost always a lie. I had a serious confrontation with the lie of America's innocence lately, reading Flyboys by James Bradley, about the naval fliers in World War II. The Japs were inhuman killers, right? Well, the US treated Filipinos in the Spanish-American War rather similar to the way that the Japanese treated the Chinese in the 1930s. And the first thing the US did in WWII was the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, which outraged the Japanese as an attack on civilians. Then, towards the end of the war was the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, culminating in the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And never mind about carpet-bombing German cities. Hey, but we were the Good Guys, remember?

Yes, and so it is with our Woke Ruling Class today. All the Wokies are doing is fighting the "white oppressors," as the noble "allies" of the "oppressed peoples."

Akshully, this game of innocence occurs wherever politics is found. If you want to get the people off their behinds to fight a war for you, whether hot or cold or woke, you need to scare the people out of their wits with talk of a frightful danger, real or imagined. They, the enemy, are the worst thing since Frankenstein invented fossil fuel, and we, the helpless innocents, are the most oppressed and ill-treated since the invention of the patriarchy.

But, of course, one fine day, the world changes, and today's ruling class becomes yesterday's ruling class, and a new company of innocents takes the stage.

The only question is the size of the butcher's bill.

We Can't Go Away and Hide in our Little Platoons

We humans naturally prefer our own kind, for "man is by nature a tribal creature," writes Robert Stacy McCain, approving of Burke's "little platoons."

How, then, has this principle of group loyalty become so wickedly warped, and turned into a weapon destructive of all social order, by the contemporary practice of progressive identity politics? Why is tribalism in America now asserting itself in such toxic and ferocious ways?

Actually, I would say that all group loyalty has been "wickedly warped" since, well, since humans started to live in communities bigger than "Dunbar's number" of about 150 people. La Wik:

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

I am relying on the anthropological writings of C.R. Hallpike. In his How We Got Here he argues that hunter-gatherers were pretty relaxed about tribe. They were pretty individualistic, except about sharing food. And they would change from one "band" to another without much fuss.

According to Hallpike, humans didn't start getting really tribal until they started living in village of 2,500+ people.

I take Hallpike's ideas and propose that all modern tribes are "fake tribes," gussied up to unite people against a real or perceived threat. Read La Wik on "Clans" and tell me what you think about clans, bands, and tribes.

So I say that all modern tribalism is "fake tribalism," whether tribalism of religion, of class, of nation, of race, of tribe or clan or band, of occupation, of level of education. All fake. All tribes, all identities, all groups are artificial, using the natural groupishness of humans for a political purpose.

Here is an example of what I mean. America's "Blacks" -- once "black" and then "African American" -- are descended from a whole bunch of tribes in western Africa. Each individual Black got enslaved by some tribal incident of conquest slavery and then sold to a white European slave trader. Yet now, we are told by our betters, all Blacks belong to one race -- except that race is a social construction. Anyway, if you disagree with any American liberal on race you are a "racist." Barack Obama, son of a white mother and a well-born East African, is America's First Black President.

Obviously the invention of "fake tribalism" is the most important thing since sliced bread. Or before sliced bread.

But when McCain proposes that we check out of the crazy world of "victims" and "oppressors" and "get through the week, pay our bills... by clinging to those 'little platoons,'" and when Jackie Gingrich Cushman says our problems must be "conquered in a bipartisan way," I say fuggetaboutit.

All politics is "fake tribalism." All religion is "fake tribalism." All culture is "fake tribalism." There is no checking out of the game and going back to your "little platoon." If you want to be a "man in the arena" then you are a player in the "fake tribalism" game.

There is only one way forward: to create a "fake tribalism" that is better and nobler and more popular than the left's "fake tribalism" of race, of gender, of identity politics, of "allyism." And let it be said right here that Donald Trump's MAGA movement, based on the idea of America as a nation and the American people as one American people, was the first shot fired in developing this new -- better, nobler, popular -- "fake tribalism," No wonder our liberal friends want to kill it in its cradle.

The question is: on what principle do we raise our banner? Our liberal friends have based everything on the concept of victimhood. Whether it was the industrial workers of the nineteenth century or the unemployed of the 1930s, or blacks suffering under Jim Crow, or women from an eternity of patriarchy, or gays suffering from ages of homophobia -- did you know that Edward II of England was gay? -- or oppressed peoples in general suffering under white oppressors but for the heroic "allies:" it's all about the victims.

And about the "fake victims." I buy slaves as victims; I buy blacks under Jim Crow as victims. But post 1965 Civil Rights Act? Well-born educated feminists as innocent victims? Well-born gays as innocent victims? Ahem.

There is, I think, an eternal temptation to don the mantle of "innocence." I say that it is almost universal that small minorities use a "culture of innocence" to maintain tribal unity. But that is not for us; innocence is for the Garden of Eden, not for life in this vale of tears.

I don't think the victims narrative works for us. And the reason is quite simple. We middle-class Americans are Commoners, what I call, in my reductive Three Peoples theory: People of the Responsible Self. Responsible people cannot be victims.

I think it is pretty obvious what works. We need to base our politics on the "fake tribe" of nation, and the "fake tribe" of the middle-class Commoner, responsibly getting a job, getting married, raising a family, and providing for our own.

And we must stop apologizing. A good start would be Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Every Republican and every American Commoner should be saying: "hey Dems: come and talk to us when you have dealt with the poisonous racists and sexists and anti-semites in your own party. Period."

President Trump fired the first shot heard across America. It is up to us and to a new generation of politicians and culture warriors to continue the fight.

And that means having the zingers ready when the liberals come with their pejoratives. Such as this on the accusation of systemic racism.

So, pal, what is it about the Civil Rights Acts you don't understand? It is illegal in the United States to discriminate on the basis of race. So, if you see discrimination, report it to the police. Don't complain to me. I ain't the system. You are.

And so on. I was talking to a nice liberal lady the other day and she talked about race as a social construction. So what is 23andme.com all about, I asked? Profits, she said. Oh yeah, I said, of course. Silly me.

What is about America as the best country in the history of the world, and the American people as the best people in the history of the world that our liberal friends don't get?

The Intersection of Innocence, Victims, Chastity, and Complaint

Yesterday I had a brainwave while categorizing a bunch of blog posts into my Culture of Innocence category.

I said to myself: but aren't helpless victims and innocent virgins and Little Darlings and women resisting the public square with their "safetyism" all the same?

They are all humans in the pre-responsibility culture. They are Adam and Eve before that nasty serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted the innocent Eve into tasting the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

So let's rehearse all this:

Three Peoples: The People of the Subordinate Self are people that attach themselves to a lord -- a feudal lord or a political boss -- and they are saying, thanks very much but responsibility is not for me. Of course, the Subordinate has no problem complaining if his loving lord goofs up and fails to protect him.

Little Darlings: If you are a Little Darling of the ruling class, given loot and plunder in return for your vote, you are like the rich man's mistress. One fine day, when your prettiness is not quite what it was, your Sugar Daddy will dump you for a newer model. In politics this is the fate of the white working class. I say that it will also be the fate of the feminists as the ruling class favors transgenders over whiny women. And blacks too as the ruling class pivots to illegal immigrants.

Women in the Public Square: I maintain that women don't want to be responsible people in the public square. That is what #MeToo and "safetyism" is about. Women expect to be protected, and rightly so. But that means that women are never going to accept the proposition of the public square, that you take the good with the bad, the ups with the downs. The very difference between the male Culture of Courage and the female Culture of Chastity that issues from the different conceptions of honor experienced by each sex mandates this. Women are not into courage. Their job is to stay alive and keep the kids alive. That does not include dying in a Forlorn Hope after King Henry V bellows "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more."

Culture of Innocence: I maintain that it is the natural and physical imperative for small minorities to develop a culture of innocence. Small minorities always feel embattled and vulnerable. They never know when they will need to join together as one to defend themselves from the cold cruel world outside. To maintain the necessary unity the small minority has to develop a culture of innocence, that all the world is against us and the only way we can survive is if we all hang together. And when did we do anything to deserve this? Obviously in our own time this Culture of Innocence is most obvious in Jews and Blacks. But I believe that all ethnic immigrants to the United States have gone through this stage. We will probably see it grab hold of the white commoners in the next few years as the implacable acts of the educated elite make life more precarious for them.

 Notice that this Culture of Innocence is mandatory for anyone fighting a war. The leader must unite the country to fight the war if he is to have a hope of winning and he always does this by representing the enemy as a guilty monster and we the people as innocents. If the leader fails to unite his people in this declaration of innocence then he will fail to mobilize the necessary will to win. In fact, if you are the anti-war party you will always try to insist that, hey, we aren't so great. Whatabout such and such... Our liberal friends did a bang-up job on this front during the Vietnam War and also in the the Iraq War after a decent interval to mourn the dead of the 9/11 attacks.

I say that the beginning of wisdom is to get beyond the Culture of Innocence. And that is the meaning of the Garden of Eden story. Once Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge she was no longer an innocent, and Adam and Eve had to leave the pre-conscious Paradise and "eat the herb of the field" and "eat bread." Sounds like the Dawn of Agriculture.

Then there is the human guilt from putting Christ on the Cross. Admitting guilt and getting beyond the Culture of Innocence is the beginning of responsibility, admitting that you are not perfect, and that, here and there, you may have done things of which you are ashamed, and for which you are sorry.

Notice that our liberal friends have a peculiar version of this with their BLM signs and their #WeBelieve yardsigns and their "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative. They are saying "we are the good guys" because we help oppressed peoples and the other guys are the haters. There is not a whisper of doubt, that we think that, on the margin, we are doing the right thing, but you never know. No. We activists are the good guys, and don't you forget it.

To live successfully in the city you have to get rid of all this innocence. You have to accept personal responsibility for your life and surrender to the will of the market. If something goes wrong you pick yourself up and get back in the game. There is a big upside to this: you get to be a happy camper. You ditch the Culture of Complaint for the Culture of Courage and Responsibility. Even if it's not always your fault.

Race, Identity, and Innocence

According to Shelby Steele, a black intellectual whose father was a black truck driver and whose mother was a white social worker, the whole racism thing is about innocence.

That's what Samuel Kronen writes in "The Prescience of Shelby Steele."

It all started after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

In Steele’s view, the explanation of black underachievement has its origins in the moral fall from grace of the 1960s when racism was first stigmatized out of polite society. For the first time, a critical mass of whites became conscious of their historic privilege and complicity in racism in ways that transformed the larger culture, while a critical mass of blacks came to identify with their historic victimization. 

You gotta admit, it's pretty weird. Instead of feeling good that we put the past of legal discrimination behind us, in a remarkable First in human history, we feel guilty about our past.

Oh wait a minute. Of course we do. Guilt is especially a girl thing, arising out of the woman's experience of honor-as-chastity. And since no woman is really as chaste as she wishes she were...

Ever since, both whites and blacks have developed unconscious patterns to guard their sense of racial innocence. A significant strand of white American culture projects a sense of guilt about the plight of blacks to dissociate themselves from the stigma of racism, and a significant strand of black American culture compels an angry militant pose to win concessions from white society and dissociate from the stigma of inferiority.

Ahem. Not quite, Sammy. Let's put it slightly differently. 

The end-all-and-be-all of white liberal culture is to maintain their white liberal innocence and heroism on the race question and damn the rest of the whites to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains who durst defy th'Omnipotent [educated Gentry] to arms. The beginning and the end of liberal self-image his their heroic stand on racial justice.

That is what all those Black Lives Matter signs are doing all over my upscale liberal neighborhood.  It's not just about innocence. It's about being Saved. Yes. We glorious wokie liberals are Saved, because we have been to racial confession and have been absolved of our sins. Aren't we special!

Now, in my book a culture of innocence is a political thing. If you are organized for political combat you need to develop a culture of innocence to give you permission to do all the dirty deeds that come naturally in any human conflict, and especially in political conflict.

For instance, after World War I the Germans developed a culture of innocence around the Dolchstoßlegende, the stab-in-the-back myth, that the German Army had not lost the war but had been betrayed by the civilians back home, Jews and republicans, and the like.

I maintain that any small minority will develop this culture of innocence to give itself the courage to fight in the political arena.

You will notice that in the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative beloved by our wokey friends, the "allies" are obviously a small minority of enlightened and educated people innocent of the racial guilt of the "white oppressors" and blessed with the evolved wisdom to save the "oppressed peoples" from the systemic white racism of the "white oppressors." So they are the saved, the lucky ones.

And so blacks need their culture of innocence, as Kronen writes, to deal with "the stigma of inferiority."

But whatabout our liberal friends. Whatabout their culture of innocence?

Hmm. It must be because they do not experience themselves as conquering heroes, but as an embattled minority, the few, the proud, the Marines -- of noble progressivism.

So they have to maintain an culture of innocence, to purge the guilt of the nasty stuff they do to the rest of the white community.

Why Does the Left Insist that Race is a Social Construction?

I just got through Ron Unz's review of "White Racialism in America, Then and Now." A large part of his article related to the fact that you are not allowed to say or write that race is real and has an impact on IQ.

I wonder why?

Is it because the left's power depends on the notion that everything especially intelligence, is culture driven, and therefore malleable by education and therefore by a wise and educated and evolved elite?

I had a discussion with a liberal friend about this. She said that race was a social construction, and I said so why does 23andme.com purport to be able to tell your ethnic origin by testing your genes? 

In other words, if we said that humans are what they are, mostly defined by their genes, and then by their peers, and then by their parents, could there be an intellectual foundation for the current religious doctrine of All Power to the Educated Gentry? Or should we just give up on the progressive project and let people be who they are.

By the way, some researchers have done research that says that a population's IQ goes up as they become more prosperous, or, I imagine, integrated into the modern market economy.

But you have to wonder. What does it mean when an idea is so scandalous that you are not allowed to hold it and publish it? Obviously, I would say, it says more about the cancelers than the canceled.

What I wonder is: how much does it really matter if blacks have a lower IQ than the average white American? For instance, I have read recently that East Asian Americans have a higher average IQ than Jews. And, as we know, American Jews have a higher average IQ than white Americans. But does it matter?

Suppose it does matter. Does it matter enough that any discussion of IQ by race is forbidden and anyone that publishes an argument that IQs really do vary by race should be canceled? Does it matter enough to cancel the heretics?

I get the notion that there is a political dimension to this, that educated Gentry power to some extent depends on the right of the Gentry to order us all around, and this is helped by assuming that race is a social construction.

But why does this practical consideration get elevated into Holy Writ? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

OK, I get the need to rile up blacks at election time, because without blacks voting 90% Democrat, Democrats lose power.

I get the need to insist that the argument for equality -- and the need for educated Gentry power -- depends on all humans being alike and all differences in outcome the result of oppression and exploitation.

I get that for small minorities like Jews and blacks, there is a need for unity, and a corresponding need to divide the majority.

Wait: I would say that for the leaders of small minorities there is a need to flog the members of the minority community into unity and the way to do this is to create a culture of danger, of possible attack by the majority culture. Therefore the leaders of the minority should be strive to maintain a culture of unity; therefore it doesn't hurt to try and divide the majority.

But I wonder why, say, Jews are still organized in a culture of unity and innocence after a century in the US. And why blacks have a culture of unity 50 years after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

All this, to me, is matter of fact and by the way.

I still don't really understand why the issue of race and IQ has to be radioactive. I suspect that I am missing something, but I don't know what it is.

Jews, Anti-Semitism, and the "Other"

One of the astonishing things about the Jews is how they have managed to maintain a religious/tribal identity from whenever.

And, remember, for most of this period, Jews have maintained this separate identity as tiny minorities within larger, hostsile political units.

How did they do it? Because, if you look at the broad sweep of history, all the eternal nations and tribes and empires and religions are not eternal at all. They are born, they grow, they squabble, they divide, they combine, they die. 

But the Jews have kept their identity going against all odds, let us say, ever since the Romans made Palestine a part of the Roman Empire.

How do you do that, when you are a tiny minority in a much larger political unit?

I think the answer is that you create a culture of perpetual innocence.

Of course, all nations and cultures do this. And I supposes it relates to the notion of "fault" in the primitive mind. If something goes wrong, there must be a fault. And the fault must be the other guy.

But if we, whoever we are, are perpetually innocent then whatever happens can't be our fault. Therefore we should soldier on, and never falter.

Of course, the Jews, who, we can say, came out rather on the wrong side of the nation-state movement of the last millennium, have now created the most nationish nation state in the world with the nation of Israel.

But when your define yourself with such determination, you define yourself as the "Other" to the rest of the world.

And when things go wrong, people usually blame the "Other." Because there must be a fault, and it can't be that "we" are at fault.

Having a bit of a problem with the Black Death? Blame the Jews. Or, as a convenient backup, the witches.

Having a bit of a problem in Germany after the disaster of World War I? Blame the Jews.

You see this with the current WuFlu. There are all kinds of conspiracy theories flying around, from the Chinese did it deliberately in their Wuhan lab in Wuhan to the US did it and seeded the offending viruses in the unsuspecting Chinese lab in said Wuhan. And then all the blame games, from Trump doing too little or too much, too early or too late, to the Dem governors deliberately wrecking their state economies in order to get Trump defeated in November.

And don't get me started on all the mostly peaceful protests over the death of the black innocent George Floyd.

One of my tentative notions is that the innocence culture of almost all left-wing groups issues from the fact that intellectual Jews have been their leaders, from the workers and communism and socialism to blacks to the current wokey AntiFa and Black Lives Matter.

See, I have a problem with innocence culture. I think that in the modern era with the market economy and the city culture people have to get beyond a reactive innocence culture and grow up a little. Because nobody is innocent; nobody is perfect. We all have to rub along and put up with people that, given our druthers, we would rather not.

Hmm. Maybe I need another leg in my Great Reaction concept, something along the line of "identity politics is a re-assertion of innocence."

Notice that one of the things in Christianity is its notion of Sin, that we are all sinners, and that we all have to work for salvation. Nobody is an innocent. The Jews have a similar concept, the Book of Life, in which God records who's the good guy and who's the bad guy.

The point is that all politics depends on "Us" and "Them." And all politicians establish their tribe by demonizing the "Other."

Obviously, if we humans are to ascend from the dusty plain of political conflict to the ethereal heights that soar above such petty squabbles, we all have to shed the armor of innocence.

And I don't know how that works. Well, I do, but I don't know how to get there.

The Emperor's New Clothes and Race

One fine day, some kid is going to say it: Mommy! How come the emperor doesn't have any clothes on?

With respect to our ruling class and race.

Well, I am here to tell that kid, wherever he is, why it is that we have this remarkable culture where you are not allowed to say that

1. There has never been a society in history that cared about some ex-slave minority. Not till ours.
2. Without the race, race, race orthodoxy our ruling class and its bribed apologists would have nothing to say and nothing to do.

See, the religion of permanent white guilt and permanent black innocence doesn't do anything for anyone, except the white educated Gentry.

It doesn't do anything for the ordinary middle-class Commoner. He must still go forth and work and strive and wive and thrive, just as he does every other day.

It doesn't do anything for non-white victims, the Clients of the ruling class. They will continue going down the tubes as all Little Darlings of the ruling class do.

But, boy oh boy, it certainly gives our betters a chance to moralize and have a wonderful emotional experience. Did I mention that I was thinking of putting a yard sign out in front of my house with the following motto: "My Social Moralizing Yard Sign?"

See, the problem with a modern capitalist free market economy and free society is that it really doesn't require a magnificent ruling class, the heroic helmsman lashed to the wheel steering us all to safety through the storm.

Yeah, remember when they called Mao ZeDong the "Great Helmsman?" That's the fantasy of every lefty AntiFa basement-dweller. To be the great helmsman saving society from a fate worse than death. It could be the fate worse than death of racism, or climate change. Doesn't really matter.

That's why a common-or-garden novel virus epidemic has to be turned into a national crisis with politicians directing traffic while experts grind the data through their computer models and examine the entrails.

That's why the cruel inattention of a policeman arresting a drugged-up criminal has to be gussied up into a national crisis with weeping women and angry bomb-throwers, featuring that First Sacrament of the modern age, the "peaceful protest." And already several people, including policemen, have been sacrificed upon the Altar of Peaceful Protest.

Well, I have already ventilated for years about the left's fake Activism Culture, how it represents a replay of the medieval romance of robber barons -- the original robber barons -- as chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche. Hey, the barons liked to be serenaded by minstrels when dining and drinking and partying in their medieval castles. And they rather liked the idea of themselves as peerless knights riding their palfreys to the assistance of damsels in distress. Who wouldn't?

Likewise our modern scions of the ruling class like to think of themselves a revolutionaries activist-ing to the assistance of diverse helpless victims. It gives them a reason to get up in the morning.

Also, activism is much easier than real creative work. See, activism is not measuring by its results, but by its effect. Does it get on TV? Are the helpless victims mobilized to peaceful protest? The results are another matter, way downstream, and nobody really checks it out. But real creative work is hard, and will probably end in failure, whether in business, in the arts, or in politics.

You see that even in Les Mis where the dumb young well-born activist, Marius, wounded on the barricades of Paris, gets rescued by the reformed convict, Jean Valjean. And why does he do it? Because Valjean's adopted daughter, Cosette, is in love with the guy. Go figure.

Hey, you kids! Don't you realize that the emperor, our Gentry ruling class, is naked? Don't you realize that everything they have taught you, in school and college, is rubbish? That Activism is a crock? That racism is a crock? That peaceful protest is a lie? That government is a weight around our necks?

Then why don't you do something about it?

It starts with naively asking Mommy why the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

Obamagate: Putting the Racist Bugbear to Rest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culture of Innocence -- Contents

Small Minorities and the Culture of Innocence

1. Crossing a Line
   
   
2. Changing the Societal Security Code
   
   
3. Can You Blame Women for Pushing Back Against Hookups?
   
   
4. A Short History of Safe Spaces
   
   
5. Marxists in the Garden of Eden
   
   
6. Bathrooms and Gramsci and Thermidor
   
   
7. A Test of My Culture of Complaint Theory
   
   
8. Yes, Secularists Do Too Have Religion
   
   
9. Understanding Tlaib: The Culture of Innocence
   It's needed for a truly oppressed minority. But the Muslims in Detroit?


10. Innocence and the Three Peoples
    Only the Subordinates are real innocents


11. Conspiracy Theory and Cancel Culture
    The things you are not allowed to say


12. Dying of Despair: What Should We Do About Cultural Decline?
    It helps to have a culture of innocence to stop it


13. Obamagate: Putting the Racist Bugbear to Rest
    When all criticism is racist, you get to think that the rules don't apply to you


14. The Emperor's New Clothes and Race
    
    
15. Jews, Anti-Semitism, and the "Other"
    
    
16. Why Does the Left Insist that Race is a Social Construction?
    
    
17. Race, Identity and Innocence
    Blacks and Liberals are small minorities, so
    
    
18. The Intersection of Innocence, Victims, Chastity, and Complaint
    
    
19. We Can't Go Away and Hide in our Little Platoons
    

Conspiracy Theory and Cancel Culture

One of the things that is clear in the effort to get President Trump is that partisans believe the propaganda that their side is putting out. Did President Trump collude with the Russians in 2016? Or did President Obama direct the intelligence community to spy on the Trump campaign? Did the Obama administration put pressure on Ukraine to dismiss a prosecutor that was looking at natural gas company Burisma? Or did President Trump get Ukraine to look into corruption as a quid quo pro for getting military aid? Depends whose side you are on.

But right now at least both sides get to put out their propaganda without being canceled.

Then there are the things you are not allowed to say. Michelle Malkin is having a bit of a problem because her visits to college campi to discuss immigration keep getting canceled. And Conservatism Inc. is going after her and 21-year-old far right YouTuber Nick Fuentes.

Now that gay marriage is a thing you are not allowed to fund Christian organizations like the Salvation Army. Because homophobia.

Anyone that doubts the narrative of the Holocaust and 6 million Jews murdered in the camps gets their book shredded and their academic career ruined. And in 1940 a ton of Americans got canceled for opposing FDR's move towards war.

Interested in a canceled and pulped book? Ron Unz at unz.com has put a raft of canceled books online on his HTML Books feature. Also 88 books by G.A. Henty: and to think I only read three of them!

Here's my info on Jews and Nazis, obtained from Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk. Wittgenstein the gay philosopher, author of Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations was Jewish from a very wealthy family in Vienna. He was in England in the 1930s, but his sisters were still in Vienna as the Nazis took over Europe. In 1938 they got fake Yugoslav passports and visas to go to Switzerland but were prosecuted by the Nazis. But, "All four were cleared of the charges brought against them." Then, it turned out that the Wittgenstein family had a lot of foreign currency. After lengthy negotiations -- that included Wittgenstein -- the sisters transferred a ton of Wittgenstein wealth from Switzerland to the Nazi Reichbank, and "Hermione and Helene were able to survive the war relatively untroubled." (p.400) So what's that all about?

We all know about the Overton Window, "range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time," the things that politicians are allowed to propose versus the crazy stuff that everyone agrees is beyong the Pale.

I suppose this suppression of radical ideas is a basic part of humans as social animals. For social cooperation to work everyone has to be on the same page, or nearly so.

But what makes Jewish groups so determined to cancel Holocaust Denial? Or gays so quick to cancel Christians? Or the climate community so quick to brand skeptics as "climate deniers?" Or Sen. McCarthy to winkle Commies out of the State Department? Or priests to winkle out heretics?

One thing I read recently, regarding Jews, is that when you are a small group, as Jews have tended to be, your survival depends on culture of innocence backed up by eternal watchfulness. Put it this way, for Jews to have survived as a tribe and a religion for the 2,000 years of Christianity is beyond remarkable. There must be something about Jewish culture and practice that maintains the Jewish identity through thick and thin.

Obviously, there must be something in humans as social animals that makes it beneficial to name and shame and cancel people that cause trouble. And it makes sense that people with crazy ideas could cause the demolition of the community in which they live.

But I just think it is sick and wrong for me to be named and shamed and canceled.

Innocence and the Three Peoples

Earlier this week I discussed the Culture of Innocence that is defining for the Left. The clients of the Left are always helpless innocent victims being unjustly oppressed by the capitalists, or the patriarchy, or the white supremacists, or the fascists.

Mark Bauerlein in "Deliver Us from Innocence" observes that the nation state partakes of this culture.

Niebuhr saw it at work in foreign policy: “Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem, are insufferable in their ­human contacts.”

But Bauerlein goes on, real innocence only applies prior to The Fall.

Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were sinless, ­cognitively ­innocent and morally innocent. But after the Fall, with moral innocence shattered, this other innocence turns into a mode of obtuseness. It is ­sin-blind and self-unaware. It will not and cannot see itself addressed when Jesus looks upon sinners and says with authority, “go and sin no more.”

Or, to put it bluntly, once you have acquired self-consciousness which includes, I think, the ability to sort-of see yourself as others see you, the continued protestation of innocence is an exercise in bad faith. Innocence went out the window once Eve bit into the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

But. Whatabout the innocence of nations? Whatabout the innocence of the Jews? I think the answer is simple. When you are fearful, when you are living in a dangerous place, then you must regress to a previous place. Because when you are fighting for your life you do not have the luxury or the leisure to start thinking "on the one hand this, on the other hand that." So you regress to a place of fake innocence to help you face the dangers of the times.

Now we apply this to my reductive Three Peoples theory.

It seems to me that, to a considerable extent, the People of the Subordinate Self are not yet self-conscious; they are, in fact, innocents. They experience themselves as helpless victims of the gods, of their lord. They are fatalistic, and do not imagine that they have the agency to do anything about their situation. The left has played on this in a masterful way by offering to take the place of the gods or the lord and lead the subordinates to safety.

The Jews were the guys that put all this together, and why not. They just extended their own situation as an endangered minority and applied it to any non-majority group. Because, I think, the same rules apply. If you are Strangers in a Strange Land then you must stick together, for safety.

The People of the Responsible Self are not helpless innocent victims. We believe in personal responsibility. In a way, of course, this is a mirage, because the truth is that individuals are, to a great extent, the helpless victims of circumstance. You could be caught in a storm at sea; you could be caught in the middle of a bloody revolution or a Great Depression or a war through no fault of your own. But you are still thinking: how do I get out of this situation? You do not lie back and think of England. And even if the worst comes to the worst, you think to yourself, well, I fought the good fight. You do not think how come the government didn't protect me.

The People of the Creative Self, of course, cannot be helpless victims, nor even responsibles. Because the whole point of human creativity is that now, we humans are creating the world, not just living as the subordinates of the gods, or as responsibles living in the world that God created and according to the Law that God set forth. But things are not so simple, as Ariel Levy relates in "The Rules Do Not Apply."

[38-year-old] Levy was married to a woman and five months pregnant, having been impregnated with a friend's sperm, when she lost her baby, delivering it alone in a hotel room in Mongolia, where she was on a reporting trip.

Yes. You can kick over all your middle-class morality and its suffocating rules. You can marry a woman; you can decide to have a baby in your late 30s. You can go on your reporting trip anyway.

But evidently someone forgot to tell you that the creative life is hard, and will likely end in failure. You might have learned that by reading Nietzsche, but of course you have been carefully taught that Nietzsche was a Nazi. Or maybe you would have got a clue from Joseph Schumpeter that wrote about "creative destruction." Or you might have learned that 9 out of 10 business startups end in failure.

Our great global problem is that, like Toad of Toad Hall, the globalist educated ruling class wants to play all the roles from helpless victim to rulemaker for the deplorables, to courageous creative artist and activist. And if things go wrong, it's the patriarchy's fault.

But creativity is hard. That is what all the myths about going into the underworld (of the unconscious) and finding out if you are really up to the mark are all about. And that is why, if you survive your Hero's Journey, it will probably end in a sacrificial death on the border between Order and Chaos.

Our glorious creative class is, right now, on its own collective journey into the underworld of the unconscious. It is a journey of frightful peril and most will not return to the light of day with all their marbles.

If you discover that you are not up to the journey, that you don't have the necessary hardness for the creative life, well then better slide back to a life of Responsibility where The Rules Do Apply and protect you from doing stupid stuff. Or you can become a helpless innocent victim and wait for someone else to tell you what to do to solve your problems.

But don't complain about the patriarchy or white supremacy or America being a racist slaveholding country since 1619. Either suck it in, follow the rules, or fall in line.

What I am saying is that you can't pick and choose. You wanna be a fancy-schmancy creative? Then no fair acting like a victim. No fair saying "but they didn't tell me."

And no fair playing the activist game, pretending to be taking it to the Man when really you are just a regime thug doing the dirty work for the rulers.

Understanding Tlaib: The Culture of Innocence

There's an ad that runs constantly at my gym LA Fitness. It has the girl gym employees protesting against stinky gym bags, complete with protest signs and rhyming couplets.

There is something about women picking up on a political meme. It shows that the political issue in question has passed from the phase of a genuine movement against injustice to a fashion statement.

Want to see confirmation of this? Try this piece on "luxury beliefs," where the upper class has moved on from defining itself in terms of luxury goods -- that you can't afford -- to luxury beliefs that you can't afford. Example: "monogamy is kind of outdated," according to a young woman Yale graduate who is from "an affluent family and works at a well-known technology company."

Yes, she personally intends to have a monogamous marriage — but quickly added that marriage shouldn’t have to be for everyone.

So, the rich and famous can talk about letting it all hang out. But the only thing is that, according to science in Coming Apart by Charles Murray, the rich don't actually do that. Instead they have fabulous careers and merger marriages while the bottom 35 percent don't work much and don't marry much.

Here's another example. Squad member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) declining to go to Israel to see her grandmother if she couldn't do "activism."

I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in--fighting against racism, oppression [and] injustice.

Now, Rep. Tlaib, as I understand, represents a district that includes the Muslim part of Detroit, Michigan. Are the Muslims fighting there against racism and oppression and injustice? I doubt it. I've been to the Muslim area of Detroit, and eaten in a Middle Eastern restaurant there. It looked to me as though the Muslim "community" in Detroit was doin' fine. The black community, not so much.

Are the Muslims in Detroit being denied the vote? No, I don't think so; certainly not if a Muslim woman from Palestine gets to be their representative. Are the Muslims in Detroit unable to get jobs? I doubt it, considering the apparent prosperity of the Muslim quarter around Hamtramck. Injustice? Hardly, considering how much horsepower our ruling class puts into fighting Islamophobia.

I mean. When the ruling class is putting a thumb on the scales of justice in your favor, I don't believe you can cry "injustice" with any credibility.

I am trying to follow the demand that the opera composer Verdi places on his librettist, Piave, in the TV series The Life of Verdi to avoid extra, useless words. In fact, how about distilling the whole thing down to "one word!" says Verdi. "Oh yeah," says Piave, rolling his eyes.

So what I am trying to do is distill the whole fake "culture of activism" down to one word, or at least a Nietzschean aphorism. "Luxury Beliefs" is certainly a starter. Then there is the notion of "The Conceit of Innocence."

Here's what I mean by the Conceit of Innocence.

Marx proposes that the workers were helpless innocents. Very good. The workers certainly had it tough in the 1830s, although perhaps not as tough as their ancestors struggling in the breakup of the feudal system. But the activists leading them were usually not workers. They were, like Marx, scions of the middle class, that were doin' fine. So they chose to lead the workers to paradise; it gave their lives meaning.

You can certainly say that Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington were the real deal, former slaves. Of course, they were guys that wanted to be not-slaves, to be independent, responsible free men working for a living. Then there was W.E.B. Du Bois. He was a middle-class black from way back. La Wik:

[His mother] Mary Silvina Burghardt's family was part of the very small free black population of Great Barrington and had long owned land in the state.

Du Bois was a lefty academic. He believed that the black population should be led by its "talented tenth."

The feminist movement has always been a movement of the well-to-do, and it remains so today.

Let's return to the "luxury beliefs" above. Marx, Du Bois, and feminists like Simone de Beauvoir were all upper-middle-class intellectuals. They made their bones spinning likely stories about racism, oppression and injustice. Their writing gave their lives meaning.

Now let's talk about a real movement for justice: the Indian National Movement. The story of the Brits in India and the movement for an Indian Nation is almost a stage play about the modern era.

The Brits in India starts with the Brits establishing trading ports at Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. They wanted to trade in Indian textiles and spices, but they had a problem: the Indian feudal lord next door. The Brits wanted a nice stable law-governed place where they could do business. But, from the Muslim Mughals to the local Hindu prince, the status quo was a feudal lord and his court. And below that were lesser landowners and the peasantry. For the Brits this was inconvenient and also dangerous, because the feudal lords operated on a loot and plunder system which might extend, with the Marathis, to actual raids into neighboring feudatories. Bad for bidness.

As the Brits extended the sway of their European nation-state market-economy law-governed society it more-or-less forced the princes and a slowly emerging middle class to adapt to it. By the middle of the 19th century you could say that an actual "Indian public opinion" had begun to operate, because of communications, newspapers, and the India-wide regime of peace enforced by the British Raj.

Here's an example of what I mean. Starting in 1770, any time there was a failure of the monsoon resulting in a famine, the disaster became a political scandal for the Brits. The Brits responded by creating government programs of relief and of moving grain to the famine areas which got easier once the railway age got established. Here's my take. Before the Brits came India would have been so fragmented and communications would be so poor that nobody would know about a famine outside the affected area. Anyway, absent modern transportation there was nothing a ruler could do about it anyway. So no news. No scandal. Just an act of God.

The more the 19th century advanced the more that the notion of Britain being a foreign Paramount Power exercising hegemony over South Asia became a scandal: not just to the rising class of educated Indians, but to the Brits themselves. We moderns just experience foreign rule over a subject population as sick and wrong: racist, oppressive, and unjust, in the words of Rep. Tlaib. We cringe at the very thought of it.

So you can see that in India the notion of an Indian National Movement to create an India for the Indians is really an artefact of western European moral and political culture. Before the Brits got there it was unthinkable in the strict sense: nobody would have thought it. And when the Indians did in fact create an Indian national state, they created two of them: one Hindu and one Muslim. That, I propose is according to the logic of human life, that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion.

Notice that the Palestinian Question, beloved by Rep. Tlaib, is not quite as simple as the Indian Question. In the good old days of the Ottoman Empire, nominally Muslim, all kinds of different religious communities existed side-by-side. As soon as the Ottoman Empire collapsed these religious differences took on a new salience, in which, obviously, the Jewish desire for their own nation state was a big factor. The Jews, being highly intellectual and westernized, were already prepared, without instruction from the Brits, to form their own nation state. The rest of the Middle East, not so much.

In fact, I would suggest that in the Middle East the national idea has not yet really triumphed over the previous culture of religion-and-tribe.

I guess here's my point about Rep. Tlaib and "racism, oppression and injustice." Such notions are western notions that only apply when the idea of nation of laws and the idea that there should be no discrimination by race have captured the culture.

And, I would argue, these notions are, to a great extent, not salient in a fully-developed western nation, where such questions have already been resolved. They are an obsession of upper-class scions looking for "luxury beliefs" to give their lives meaning and enable them to lord it over the lesser breeds without the law such as deplorables.

When you are an upper-class scion wanting to give meaning to your life through activism and fighting "racism, oppression, and injustice" you start, I think, with a Presumption of Helpless Victimized Innocence for your chosen victims. And you go from there.

Actually, I suspect that the Culture of Innocence is a necessary part of the culture of a minority community in a larger society. You have to have sharp elbows to survive, and you have to justify the sharp actions that it takes to survive in a cruel, heartless world. You can't allow yourselves to think about all the deals and compromises and betrayals that it took to survive. That's because you must be mobilized and prepared, at any moment, to fight for your life. So you develop a Culture of Innocence.

Obviously, this situation is the situation of Jews down the ages. The question is: can the Jews in, say, the US relax, and just take their place in our modern multicultural post-industrial society? Or should Jews remain mobilized, because at any moment, the left -- that was invented by Jews -- could turn on Jews in the service of black racists and resentful Muslims? Or maybe, pace New York Times, the threat could come from the right and its resentful deplorables?

You tell me.

UPDATE: See also "Deliver Us from Innocence" by Mark Bauerlein. From a reader.

Yes, Secularists Do Too Have Religion

Over at the Australian Claire Lehman's Quillette they are having a set to about whether secularism is a religion. John Staddon says they sorta do.

My argument is simple: religions have three characteristics: spiritual, mythical/historical, and moral. Secular humanism lacks the first two and is often quite critical of these aspects of religion.

See, I think that the secularists do too have the spiritual and the mythical/historical.

Oh sure, the secularists don't have a "god" but they certainly have sacred objects. Principally, the sacred object is the Victim. The point about the sacred is that it is beyond criticism, and analysis, at least not by you, chum. Now, you tell me that, for the Communists, the "worker" was not a sacred object. Or that the suffering woman is not a sacred object for the feminists, or the African slave for the blacks. Etc. In addition, the prophets of secularism have attained almost to the status of saints, as a first step towards identification with the immortal. Think Lenin's tomb. Or Mary Wollstonecraft. Or Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is not stretching things too far to suggest that the secularists worship The Victim.

And as for "mythical/historical!" The whole point of the secular left is to construct likely Three Stage stories about the Victims. Back in the day humans were innocent and equal. They lived, you might say, in a veritable Garden of Eden. But then came the Fall. Once innocent humans fell upon each other, stripped of their innocence, and became divided into Exploiters and Victims. Or Patriarchs and sex objects. Or Lords and Serfs. Or Masters and Slaves. Or Capitalists and Proletarians. But now, with the blessings of activism and the holy sacrament of peaceful protest there is dawning a new age that will save us from oppression and exploitation and we will enter into a new Eden of Heaven on Earth.

I am not making this up.

Of course, I come to this from an appreciation of chaps like Jung and Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson. They are saying that myth is universal, and just because we moderns say we have "grown" beyond religion doesn't mean that we aren't lying to ourselves. Jung, of course, was consciously trying to found a new religion, and for that got criticized by chaps like Richard Noll in The Jung Cult.

I believe that it is essential to establish that modern secular beliefs are religion in everything but name. There is a very good practical reason for this, that if modern secularism is a religion then the dicta of the Bill of Rights apply, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." If secular cults are religions then they should not be privileged as science and should not have the power to deplatform people that disagree with their expressions of faith and their orthodoxies.

We can expect that our lefty friends will insist, to the last faggot on the auto-da-fé, that their systems and their ethics and their programs are not religious, no sir, not nohow.

Because under the current regime lefties hold a huge tactical advantage. Their ideas and proposals are noble "issues" and "settled science" rather than the crazed doctrines of a whacky religious cult.

A Test of My Culture of Complaint Theory

It is my belief that men have a Culture of Insult, that derives from the sense that honor in men is about the reputation for courage under fire. So a male insult is asking another man whether he really has the courage to stand and fight.

But women have a Culture of Complaint, that derives from the sense that honor in women is the reputation for chastity. (Chastity goes beyond mere sex to the general reputation for never having put a foot wrong.) So a female complaint is about another woman whose chastity is in question or about a man that threatened her chastity.

The central pillar of the Culture of Complaint is "sharing," where a woman shares her experience of some violation of her chastity. That is what all the talk about #BelieveAllWomen is about. A woman, any woman, must be allowed to "tell her story." And told she is a good little girl. And given a knowing and understanding look. And cheered up by an occasional "I can't believe he/she said/did that."

It is frequently said that men need to understand that when a woman "tells her story" she does not necessarily want anything done about it. She just wants to share, to reestablish, I suppose, her innocence and her chastity.

Is this the case with the liberal activist Christine Blasey Ford? Is all she wanted just the chance to "tell her story?" Who knows?

But also, what about all the enraged feminists? Are they satisfied and fulfilled now that the rape victim has had a chance to "tell her story?" Will their righteous rage now dissipate in the next few weeks now that Ford has "told her story" and the Republicans let a female rape prosecutor gently interrogate her instead of a bunch of judgmental white males?

According to my theory the fact that Ford was allowed to tell her story and was treated non-judgmentally by the Senate committee should in fact give the feminists what they wanted, and it should in fact result in reduced turnout for Democrats in November.

We shall see.

But think of the bigger picture. Is it not completely obvious now that the Victorians were right and that women want and expect a big strong patriarch to protect them and care for them and send unsuitable suitors away and listen indulgently when they "share" some outrageous indignity and attack on their innocence and purity.

So away with the sexual revolution, away with co-ed dorms, away with hook-up culture, away with abortion on demand, away with the horrid danger of the corporate workplace, away with unchaperoned teenagers, away with sexting. And hey, how about away with leggings that encourage foolish young women to shake their booties at undeserving men.

Right girls?

But I still maintain that the bigger question is: what about lower-class women. Everything about the current controversy and everything about the feminist agenda is really all about well-born women and the height of their pedestals. Earth to feminists: well-born women have always been treated with care and respect. Obviously, because they are protected by powerful men.

What about the checker at the supermarket? What about lower-class women tangled in the welfare culture? What about working-class mothers? What about married Christian women with children?

What Republicans and conservatives should understand is that there is nothing in all the current blatheroo that speaks to anyone except well-born women that went to exclusive private schools and went on to get sociology and psychology degrees and ended up as therapists.

What about real women in the real world? There's a huge opportunity out there for some Trump-type character.

Because lower-class women are just as neglected by the ruling class as the famous white working class of which we've heard tell.

Bathrooms and Gramsci and Thermidor

I got in a lot of trouble with the commenters at American Thinker last week when I wrote that Trump is Thermidor, meaning that he represents the inevitable reaction after the virtual reign of terror by the SJWs during the Obama administration.

I think that the commenters' main problem was the reluctance to equate Trump with dictator.

Now here's a piece in the American Spectator about the transgender bathroom debacle and Antonio Gramsci's march through the institutions. What is going on here? Ralph Benko answers:

The left is advancing a cultural revolution of radical egalitarianism, creating a new cultural hegemony of which the Great Bathroom War of 2016 is but the most recent element.

Conservatives don't have a clue about how to counter this, Benko writes. Instead of arguing about the danger of rape in the bathroom, we should argue from the innocence of modesty.

Well, yes. But I think that Benko is missing the point and that my argument, from Crane Brinton and his Anatomy of Revolution is the right one. The point is that a march through the institutions culminating in a real or a virtual reign of terror and virtue is something that ordinary people hate. They don't want to be bullied and reeducated and have their lives turned upside down and made to mouth words they don't believe in. And sooner or later they react against the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, the Red Guards, the SJWs. They may not react with violence, but the fact is that, as Brinton writes, a reign of terror and virtue puts society into an impossible stress that cannot go on forever.

My analysis of the Obama years follows those that point to the collapse of the Democratic Party everywhere outside the White House. Congress? Republican. States? Majority of Republican Governors and Republican legislatures. Rebellion by the GOP primary voters. I read today that there are a lot of GOP primary voters that didn't vote in the general in 2012.

In other words, ordinary Americans are rebelling against the Gramscian march through the institutions and the totalitarian SJW virtual reign of terror in which you will be made to care about the left's agenda or you will pay the price. But they are not talking about it, because you are not allowed to talk in SJW America.

The problem with a reign of terror is that you don't end up back at the status quo ante. That was the problem with Napoleon. The Directory and Napoleon ended the reign of terror and Made France Great Again. But Napoleon also lost the Second Hundred Years War against the Brits and France has never been the terror of Europe since.

So I don't think that the Gramscians will go on marching through the institutions forever. For one thing, lefties tend to hollow out and destroy the institutions that they invade. That's because humans are social animals first, not political animals, and institutions have a social purpose before they have a political purpose.

But I do think, following Ralph Benko, that a Return to Modesty is part of the solution. Oh yeah, there's a book by that name, by Wendy Shalit. Here she gets to make her point in The New York Times!

Every woman I know is defined by her love and her modesty. Oh yes, women can be pretty immodest when they are looking for a mate. But otherwise they define themselves by their loves, their modesty, and their privacy. That is why it was not evil oil companies, but women, that led the migration to the suburbs. Women do not like to raise their children in the city, not unless they are total rich bitches that can afford nannies and car service and so on. Ordinary woman want to retire to a quiet place to bear and raise their children. And then they want to plant a garden. What an idea!

Honestly, I don't have a clue how this is going to work out, but I do think that women are going to redefine culture and politics to provide more privacy and more safety in a way that lets women live out their lives in a more feminine rather than feminist way. To me, the whole "rape culture" flap is related to this. Women don't like a sexual free-for-all, and no wonder, because it licenses boys to use them and abuse them. But the left has no real answer to the brutalities of the sexual revolution, because we are all supposed to be liberated from our bigoted bourgeois patriarchal culture. No more fathers demanding to know "what are your intentions!" So the lefty future has to replace the culture of modesty with a politics of legalisms in Affirmative Consent. Which is madness.

But there is no way back. Whatever happens now, it will be stumbling over the tangle of 20th century themes, from marriage, to abortion, to careers, to work/life balance, to the LGBT diversion, to the excruciating regulation of everything by big government. And above all it will have to deal with the Jacobin narrowness of the politics-is-everything left.

In other words, it ain't gonna be pretty.

Marxists in the Garden of Eden

Over the years I have learned to consider the Garden of Eden story as an allegory about the agricultural revolution. The serpent speaks to Eve and humans get sent out from the bliss of hunter-gathering into the hard work of plowing and sowing and reaping.

So let's think about the Marxist account of capitalism as a garden of Eden story about the Industrial Revolution. Imagine happy peasants living in collectives enjoying their traditional grazing rights on the Commons. Now imagine rich landowners enclosing the Commons and sending happy peasants into the hell of the proletarian city.

In The Origin of Capitalism author Ellen Meiksins Wood tells a grand story about how this happened and how the innocence of the pre-industrial world and its political and military compulsion was converted into the hell of economic compulsion under capitalism.

But Wood wants to propose an innovation. She wants us to know that capitalism started not with the Industrial Revolution and the growth of the factory but 100 years or more earlier when the rich landowners of England started converting their estates from feudal domains into profit-making enterprises. This "agrarian capitalism" was inspired by a culture of improvement that celebrates improving the land under your care in a productive manner and that, she says, goes back to John Locke and his linking of rights in property to the labor involved in improving it.

But there's a sinister aspect to this improving culture because it says that only he who improves the land has the right to own it. Thus the Native Americans in the North American continent that did not improve their land do not deserve it and the industrious white man that does improve it has a right to own it instead. Thus did John Locke and Co. justified  their conquest of the world. This all ties together capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism as one single grand exploitation project. Yay!

Thus does a Marxist enlarge upon the Marxian version of original sin and damn the modern west for everything. But we have to ask what happens next. After all, in the biblical version of original sin mankind somehow manages to carry on and by the time of Christ imagine a way to atone for sin. But what kind of atonement would the Marxists allow for capitalism? Well we know the answer to that. The only possible atonement is of course socialism and nothing else will do.

Let us concede the Marxist indictment but not the atonement. Because now we know two to three centuries later that capitalism yielded an increase in per capita income of something like 30 times the per capita income of the pre-capitalist era and that on a population of 7 billion humans on the planet. And we also know that socialism has yielded misery and poverty and conflict and military and political compulsion of extraordinary ferocity wherever it has been tried.

Yes, capitalism has put everyone on the earth under economic compulsion. But there's another way to describe this economic compulsion. It is that we all live under the principle of serving others before we serve ourselves. What could be more socialistic than that?

If it weren't for Marxists perhaps we'd have to invent them. Otherwise we could not know the worst that could possibly be imagined about the extraordinary world in which we live.

A Short History of Safe Spaces

All of us bitter clingers are pretty pissed off by the liberal safe-spacers, the young college students that need a place to go and cry when they hear anything that offends their delicate sensibilities.

But let us not pretend that this is anything new under the sun. This safe space culture started way, way before liberal cultural Marxists and their bribed apologists, the community organizers, cast their dark shadow across the land.

It all started with the Garden of Eden. Yeah, what would you call the place where Adam and Eve gamboled together in perfect innocence other than the First Safe Space? Then the Serpent showed up and that was the end of the First Safe Space.

One day, agriculture showed up and it looked like ordinary people could shelter in the benevolent safe space of the king. Only, of course, the kings tended to take advantage of the farmers and peasants under their protection, and needed them as spear fodder in their endless wars. So life wasn't quite as safe as the farmers hoped when they came in from the steppe.

Fast forward to the feudal era, and well-born sons and daughters of the nobility liked to shelter in the safe spaces of monasteries to get away from the knightly challenges of the Dark Ages. The monastic safe spaces might have gone on forever if merchants across Europe hadn't wrecked the monastic economic model with their global commerce. The safe-spacing peasants also found themselves hurled onto the labor market in consequence of the agricultural revolution that needed a lot fewer "useless retainers."

It took a while but finally the sons of the bourgeoisie came up with a new safe space. They would provide "social protection" for the factory workers traumatized by the industrial revolution. All the workers had to do was vote for lefties and all their problems would be taken care of by community organizers and educated experts. This new safe-space model worked like a charm for a while until the factory system was replaced by automated manufacturing and the white working class collapsed into drink and drugs.

Now we have a new safe-space movement. It provides protection for college students traumatized by hate speech and bigotry. It provides racism-free zones for African Americans. And it provides Muslims with safe spaces purged of Islamophobia.

I wonder if the new safe spaces will prove any better than the old ones.

Can You Blame Women for Pushing Back Against Hookups?

All good conservatives are opposed to the college campaign against "rape culture." Inspired by a "Dear Colleague" letter from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, the nation's college campi have now become a due-process-free zone as college administrators harass college men for failing to observe the new liberal rules of "yes means yes" where sexual relations are concerned.

But then I read this click-bait article in Vanity Fair, "Tinder and the Dawn of the 'Dating Apocalypse" by Justin Bishop, about young millennial professionals hooking up in New York City using Tinder and similar social media tools.

It is, as they say, a meat market out there, and the girls don't like it.

Now it is my experience with women that when they don't like something they "share" with their friends and then they get angry about it, and then they find manipulative ways of getting back at the source of the anger.

Call me sexist if you like.

It is clear from Justin Bishop's article that Tinder and the other hookup apps play directly into the male lust for the hunt. And it seems that girls have to play along, because. Well, because women always play along.

But then the girls go back to their apartments and their dorms and their sororities, whatever, and they talk and text with their friends. Or they run into an activist from the Womens Studies department.

And this gives the angry young girl, whether a "Jackie", a Mattress Girl, or just a nobody Jane Doe, a way to do something about the nameless anger she is feeling on account of being treated like a piece of meat.

And really, who can blame her? All young women carry within them the very fount of human life, the most precious thing that humans possess. And yet these days young women are treated like sexual prey, courtesy of smartphones and smartphone apps, and are led to believe that unless they submit to this oppression they won't ever get a man. Or be popular. Or something.

Now a sensible person would say that maybe the recreational sex meme of the sexual revolution is a big part of the problem. Sex is serious, dead serious, and the rituals and culture around sex lies at the very center of any human culture. You mess with sex and you mess with the very center of human existence.

A sensible person would say that if you throw off all the rules around sex that the ensuing chaos will demand new rules. And it is telling that the new rules now being enforced on campus essentially say that a young woman cannot be considered a responsible actor where sex is concerned. She must be protected by older and wiser people and shielded from the consequences of imprudence or a desire to be nice. Which is exactly what the old rules under the evil old patriarchy said.

So maybe every human society ends up with some sort of culture of female innocence and modesty. Because in every human society young unmated women and women with children really do need protection from male predation.

Ya think?

Changing the Societal Security Code

I'm listening to the mindless blow-by-blow CNN Paris feed at my daughter's house in California, and I'm thinking how clueless the liberal conventional-wisdom journalists are as they interact with their contacts in the security bureaucracy.

But yesterday I read the piece by Richard Fernandez titled "Security Code." Riffing off the female Charlie Hebdo staffer that punched in the security code to let the terrorists into the building he writes:

Do you think our elites won’t punch the door buttons to let the killers in to shoot us? They already have. They already have.

Soon enough, he writes, things will have to change. Our ruling class is clinging desperately to its religion, the religion of "multiculturalism, social deconstruction and redistribution". It is in too deep to "doubt the faith now." It must maintain "the innocence of Islamism as an article of faith", it must. Because the alternative is unthinkable.

So nothing can happen in the west until we "tear our politics apart" with our ruling class ripped from its comfortable kneelers in front of the altar of political correctness. In other words the cognitive dissonance for our ruling class has to get unbearable for them before we can deal with the Muslim menace.

Yesterday I wrote about the two lefty responses to the industrial revolution, the revolutionary response that organized the working class to defeat the bourgeoisie and the "little darling" response that mommied the working class with legislation and benefits. Our modern ruling class, it seems to me, is a coalition of both traditions. The "little darlings" of the liberals, who today are blacks, Hispanics, educated women and gays, are encouraged by the "activism" culture to think that they are bravely protesting and marching against the Man, when really they are little darlings of the liberals sucking at the teat of Mother government and indulged by their doting parents.

But the challenge of the industrial revolution is to take the hicks from the sticks and turn them into nice disciplined middle class citizens. No problem with the girls; you can take them straight from the farm and put them to work in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts or the iPhone sweatshops of China. But the boys are a different story. Usually they terrify the bourgeoisie for a generation and socialize themselves into menacing criminal gangs, like the Irish, the Italians, and the blacks in the US.

Really, when you think about it, leftist politics couldn't be better designed to delay and prolong the socialization into the responsible middle class of the young immigrants to the city. Up to now, that hasn't been a devastating problem because the immigrants assimilated into the middle class in spite of leftist politics.

But now we have the great global Muslim migration to the city and this time it may be that the leftist "little darling" politics of cultural Marxism is going to succeed in preventing assimilation of a good percentage of the Muslim immigrants.

Do you see what I am getting to? I am saying that up to now the internal contradictions of leftist politics were not enough to prevent the socialization of the immigrants into the middle class. But now it may be that the assimilation of the Muslim immigrants to the city will be halted and even reversed unless we neutralize leftist politics and violently suppress the pre-modern culture of Islam in western cities.

As Richard Fernandez suggests, we can't solve the problem of the rebellion against the culture of the city by the latest cohort of immigrants -- who happen to be Muslim -- unless we neutralize the poison of leftist politics that runs in the veins of our center-left ruling class.

So our ruling class has a choice. It can counter the Muslim threat before it gets replaced by an angry electorate. Or it can wait until after it gets replaced.

Either way, We the People are going to have to change the security code pretty soon.