The Day After: "Groundhog Day"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Path Should We Follow?

I am working on a long think piece that is trying to solve the mystery of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Of course, I am making the whole thing revolve around my reductive Three Peoples theory and the notion of three layers in general.

And, it seems to me, the whole thing comes down to "which path should we follow?" And naturally, it should be different for each of the Three Peoples. And, I propose, for each of them there is a good path and a bad path.

For the People of the Subordinate Self -- and for Curtis Yarvin's Clients -- the path is obvious; it is Follow your Leader. But, of course, you should understand that your Leader, whether the tribal leader, the Olympian gods, or President-for-life Xi, doesn't really care about people like you. He is using you as a path to power. You are, as I say, a Little Darling, like the mistress of a rich guy, who is liable to age out and get dropped. And it is one thing to follow your traditional tribal leader and another thing to follow some chap like Adolf Hitler with some cockeyed notion of world domination. But how do you tell? Good question.

For the People of the Responsible Self -- and for Curtis Yarvin's Commoners -- the path is: Follow the Rules. At the prosaic level this is the "obey the law, go to work, follow the rules" that I first heard from FoxNews Sean Hannity. At the higher end it is the notion of God's Divine Law, and the Paradise that await believers that follow the Divine Law. But, obviously, there is a limit to this. Do you damn to personal hell someone that doesn't follow your rules? Do you belong to a church with very rigid rules and roles? Following the Rules is the center of the market economy, where everyone follows the rules and is trustworthy, and where we make our living by working for others, whether as an employee or as an entrepreneur that makes his money by making products and services demanded by the market.

So far so good. But now we come to the People of the Creative Self -- and Curtis Yarvin's Gentry. Whatabout them? Well, I know what I want to say. The path of the creative is the path of the Sacrificial Hero. Then there is the other guy, who Jordan B. Peterson calls the "eternal adversary." Let us expand on Peterson's notion of the Hostile Brothers.

One of these "hostile brothers" or "eternal sons of God" is the mythological hero. He faces the unknown with the presumption of its benevolence -- with the (unprovable) attitude that confrontation with the unkown will bring renewal and redemption. He enter[s], voluntarily, into creative "union with the Great Mother," builds or regenerates society, and brings peace to a warring world.

The other "son of God" is the eternal adversary. This "spirit on unbridled rationality," horrified by his limited apprehension of the conditions of existence, shrinks from contact with everything he does not understand. This shrinking... makes him rigid and authoritarian... His weakness, in combination with his neurotic suffering, engenders resentment and hatred for existence itself.

Peterson calls these Hostile Brothers "archetypes of response to the unknown." I consider the mythological hero as the Sacrifical Hero, and the eternal adversary as the Egoist Hero. And it occurs to me that the path of the Sacrificial Hero is the Path into the Unknown. The true hero has the courage and the humility to follow the path of the Unknown, and accept the fear of the Unknown as a fact of life. The eternal adversary wants to make the Unknown known before he is willing to take th path into the future. And this is why the past two centuries is littered with ideological narratives that pretend to resolve the question of the Unknown: Comte's Positivism, Marx's Communism, the Frankfurt School's postmodernism, the Wokerati's political correctness.

I would say that the story of the last century is the story of the Gentry failing to face up to the frightful truth of the creative life, that it is a journey into the Unknown -- where there be dragons. The Gentry wants its creative life on the cheap, paid for by the Commoners. Or it wants to practice its creative notions on the Commoners, because Gentry is special and Commoners are deplorable. You can see these conceits in everything the left does, from socialism to politics to art. It is all a denial of the truth of the creative life, that it is a terrifying journey into the Unknown.

You can see that Nietzsche had a glimmering of this truth; that is why he proposes his Übermensch who is brave, creative, able to handle "a fair amount of accidents and nonsense," who is bigger than the descent from decadence to nihilism and the terror of the eternal recurrence in the hope of a future of ascending strength and achievement. But I think that there is probably too much of the Egoist Hero in Nietzsche's Übermensch to qualify him as a true Sacrifical Hero that walks, overcoming his fear, into the Unknown.

So that's all settled.

If you are one of the People of the Subordinate Self you follow the path in the footsteps of your Leader.

If you are one of the People of the Responsible Self you follow the Rules.

If you are one of the People of the Creative Self you follow the path into the Unknown.

Nietzsche - Table of Contents

Reactions to Nietzsche

1. Jordan B. Peterson's "Maps of Meaning." It's a Start
Can we emerge from our need for safety to the challenge of the Sacrificial Hero?

2. The Problem with Politics
It never knows when to stop

3. Peterson and Jung and Nietzsche, Oh My!
Can the three peoples make sense of modern psychology?

4. My Critique of the Left. Again
A history of activism since 1848

5. On Darwin and Escape Hatches and the Will to Power
You need to figure out what to do when things go wrong

6. The Two Paths: For Rich Kids after the Death of God
Either the nostalgia of "activism" or the real path of self-discovery

7. Tribalism: The Empty Middle
Between Progressive Activists and Devoted Conservatives

8. Not Left vs. Right, but Skeptic vs. Fanatic
The whole point of limited government is to put the leash on the fanatics

9. Nietzsche Railed Against "The Priests", but Now "The Priests" are Wealthy Liberals
And we need to rail about wealthy liberal "priests"

10. The Problem of Creative People and Power
Too many people want to get the creative rush from political power.

11. Now the Lawyers Want to Do Diversity and Inclusion
Are you lawyers racists and sexists, or what

12. Free Spirit vs. Fettered Spirit
Updating Nietzsche's notion for the 21st century

13. Nietzsche on the Criminal Law
Disgrace for he that can feel shame, punishment for the rest

14. Bronze Age Mindset Gets the Michael Anton Treatment
BAP wants to be a pirate. Is that good or bad?

15. Let's Check Out the Woman Question
Maybe women will end up returning to wiving and thriving

16. My Journey from Common Sense to Common Sense
Yes, my common sense understands why lefties are going crazy

17. Suppose Lefty Activists are Just Faking It, Like Actors
Activism is a form of acting. Like the ancient Greeks

18. Nietzsche in 900 Words, If You Can Take It
Morality, decadence, nihilims, eternal recurrence, übermensch

19. Being Thankful Towards the End of Life
Since everything is "accidents and nonsense" stop complaining!

20. Nietzsche on Knowledge and Reality
There are no facts, only interpretations

21. The Question of Whether the Deep State is Clever or Stupid
They just assume that conventional wisdom and things-as-they-are explain the world

22. "Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry
But not necessarily for Commoners and Clients

23. Roger Scruton, RIP
A remarkable man, gentle, learned, courageous

24. The Intersection of "Groundhog Day" and Nietzsche
Decadence, nihilism, eternal recurrence. It's all there

25. The German Turn: How Germans Invented the Modern World
Everything from relativity to modern pyschology

26. Suffering, Religion, History and the Three Peoples
The different ways in which different people experience suffering

27. What Path Should We Follow?
It depends on what kind of person you are

Suffering, Religion, History, and the Three Peoples

According to Nietzsche, the Eternal Recurrence is the end point of decadence, the decline from growth and optimism. When you start to fall away from the faith of the fathers, then you get to nihilism, where you don't believe in anything. Then you get to the Eternal Recurrence, where your life is a meaningless repeat, day after day: Groundhog Day.

But in The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History Mircea Eliade tells a different story. For him, the Eternal Return is a way, invented by our ancestors, of dealing with the unbearable suffering of life by escaping from history, and it is characteristic of all primitive peoples, pre Axial Age.

[S]uffering proceeds from the magical action of an enemy, from the breaking a taboo, from entering a baneful zone, from the anger of a god -- and when all other hypotheses have proven insufficient -- from the will or the wroth of the Supreme Being. (p.97) 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[.]

But, in addition, primitive man escapes from history, the whole miserable story of endless suffering, with the Eternal Return, the annual renewal of the world in New Year celebrations, which erase the past and starts the world anew with a celebration that both marks a return to the chaos before the Creation and celebrates a new creation in the New Year.

You can see that this attitude survives into the modern era in the belief systems of the People of the Subordinate Self or Yarvin's Clients. Our lower classes attribute their sufferings to the malevolence of employers and billionaires. Or Jews, according to taste. And our periodic elections provide a chance for a new beginning, a Time for a Change, or Hope and Change, endlessly recycling without end.

Notice how this approach conflicts with Nietzsche. According to him, the Eternal Recurrence is the end point of decadence and failure and meaninglessness: really dumb. According to Eliade, the Eternal Return is an attempt to erase the eternal sufferings of life and begin anew: pretty clever.

Now, according to Eliade, when we get to the Axial Age religions, the priests are now trying to deal with history instead of hiding from it. Well, almost.

[History] can be tolerated because it is known that, one day or another, it will cease. History is thus abolished, not through consciousness of living in an eternal present... nor by means of a periodically repeated ritual... [as with primitives;] it is abolished in the future.

But the point is that, at some point, all the sufferings, i.e., history, will end. Yay!

Now, in Eliade's account, the question of "sin" arises when, e.g., with the Children of Israel, the prophets start selling the idea that the misfortunes of the Israelites are a consequence of them losing their faith in God.

Through their terrifying visions the prophets but confirmed and amplified Yahweh's ineluctible chastisement upon His people who had not kept the faith.

Do you see what is going on here? All of a sudden "the priests" are demanding that people take responsibility for their actions. You fall off the wagon, pal, and disaster will ensue. In other words, the Israelites are now supposed to be People of the Responsible Self, responsible for their lives before God and not mere helpless thralls that go crawling to the sorcerer or sacrificing the firstborn to the Supreme Being when things go wrong.

Note that Nietzsche excoriates "the priests" for teaching us to hate ourselves. But on Eliade's version, the priests are merely asking us to take responsibility for our lives, that our suffering is not the result of "the magical action of an enemy" but our own faults and sins. Got it, Fritzi?

OK. Whatabout our pals the People of the Creative Self? Where do they get off in this battle of the intellectual giants. Perfectly simple.

Nietzsche is telling us that we need to be free spirits, strong, growing, fearless. Willing to take the rough with the smooth, indeed actually seeking out challenge and difficulty. He is saying that we should stop whining about suffering, and trying to hide from history. Be a Man. That is what Nietzsche is saying.

Now it may be that the Nietzschean ideal is not just Übermensch, over-man, but beyond-man, that it challenges us to be something that is really beyond the capabilities of humans. That we cannot forget our sufferings and our fears, and need the comforts of the Eternal Return of the primitives or the Eternal Rest of eternity after history has ended.

And you may say that the collapse of Nietzsche into madness in 1890 proves this. Nietzsche, despite all his bold writing, could not really deal with the ideal he had conjured up. He set up his ideal of the man that lives without the comforts of home and the promise of paradise, but in the end couldn't live up to his ideal.

And you may say that our own overlords, the People of the Creative Self and Yarvin's Gentry, are jolly good at thinking up rules and standards for us Normals to live up to. But when it comes to themselves, the law doesn't apply to them. Any backtalk from the deplorables is rejected as racist-sexist-homophobic hate.

All true. But I think that it just shows that the Creative Turn is a lot more difficult and challenging than we first thought, back in the day when we special people decided that God is Dead.

The German Turn: How Germans Invented the Modern World

If you want to understand the modern world, a good place to start is with Kant, woken up from a dogmatic slumber by the philosophy of David Hume.

What it meant was the end of the Age of Reason, the conceit that humans had banished ignorance and superstition with the triumph of human logic and reason.

It started with Kant and ran for over a century. Whether you consider it ended when Hitler flung the brain of Germany across the Atlantic to the US of A, or perhaps later with Marcuse and Habermas, I call it the German Turn.

Back in the day it was called "the German pestilence that would ruin almost two millennia of facts about the Bible."

My relationship with the German Turn began when I read this, from F.S.C. Northrop of Yale. It's in The Meeting of East and West, Chapter V, German Idealism:

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

If you have never heard of F.S.C. Northrop, here is a clue from British philosophy popularizer Bryan Magee, who wrote "F.S.C. Northrop... remains one of the only two people I have ever met with what tempts me to call... a genius for teaching."

Never have I known anyone so excited by ideas; and he was able to pass on not only the ideas but also the excitement. He would walk into the room already talking, and from then on perfectly formed sentences would come geysering out of his head as if he were a gusher blowing its top... [W]e were stimulated as I have never known any other teacher stimulate his students. Bright young graduate students would emerge from his seminars thrilled by the prospects they had just glimpsed and impatient to pursue them... and they would rush straight to the library, lusting to get at the books.

But what does this mean?

It means, to begin with Kant, that we don't experience the world directly as commonplace objects like mothers, tables, chairs, dogs, horses, and food, as we imagine. We cannot know "things-in-themselves" but only the sense impressions from our five senses, most notably vision, that have been processed into a vision of the world by our brain and its "categories."

What, you might ask? What craziness is this, when we can't even accept the reality of the every-day world around us? Well, I would now say, after 20-odd years reading and thinking and writing about this, it is the beginning of wisdom.

Here is what I wrote, for American Thinker, nearly 15 years ago in "Conservatives and the Creative Impulse." Let us start with the phenomenon of Freud and the notion of the unconscious underneath our conscious mind.

Freud's psychology may seem to conservative Americans as a sudden, irrational outburst from Teutonic Europe.  But his psychology develops naturally out of Kant's conscious ego, Fichte's impulsive ego, Hegel's stage theory of consciousness, and Schopenhauer's theory of repression.  The key link in this chain is Johann Gottlieb Fichte, because he isolates the key factor in human knowledge: humans.

How does knowledge come into the world?  Descartes thought that knowledge came from a scientist making logical inferences from known indubitable facts to a necessary theory.  But Fichte showed that facts are dead, and dead men tell no tales.  It is the free imaginative act of the scientist that breathes life into facts to create a new theory.  And that act comes from impulse: "All our thought is founded on our impulses," he wrote.  It was surely Fichte that gave the great generation from Einstein to Heisenberg permission to think the unthinkable and shock the world with modern physics.

Of course Fichte’s discovery applied not just to scientists. Artists and writers were delighted to think the unthinkable—and do it too. A century later, Freud taught the young artist to regard his dreams as a holy font of impulse welling up from the unconscious id and to fear that repressing it would lead to neurosis. 

I am in the middle of reading Freud's On Dreams, and I must say I find it indigestible, partly because I find Freud too mechanical and Newtonian. I prefer the chap that came after Freud, C.G. Jung, who connected the unconscious with all the myths of mankind, as an expression, a welling up, of the human unconscious. Oh yeah. Whatabout Richard Wagner, who created a four-opera cycle about German pre-Christian mythology, The Ring of the Nibelungs, right in the middle of the German Turn.

But notice that Freud did not just appear out of nowhere, and did not invent his idea of the unconscious out of whole cloth. He is the heir to the German thinkers that came before him. Jung says that C.G. Carus invented the unconscious, and Eduard von Hartmann reinterpreted Schopenhauer's Will and Idea into unconscious and conscious thought.

Actually, you could say that the whole German Turn is the development of understanding about the unconscious. When Kant says that we don't know things-in-themselves, but only sense impressions, he is telling us that, unbeknown to us, our unconscious mind is creating an image of the world out of our sense impressions, a theory about the actual things-in-themselves or whatever it is out there.

Jordan B. Peterson comments on this. He says that we -- and the animals -- walk around in the world on the unconscious's autopilot until the moment that something unexpected happens. Then we freeze until we figure out what is going on. In other words, our unconscious theory of the world has broken and we need to mend it with a spot of conscious thought before we proceed.

So the point of the German Turn is to say that the magnificent skyscrapers of logic and temples of reason are built on hidden foundations that we ignore at our risk. These foundations are the hidden depths of the unconscious. Indeed, it may be that 90 percent of our brain action goes on in the unconscious. And, some naughty boys have suggested, maybe the conscious mind is just a movie -- think The Matrix -- that our unconscious mind runs in our brain to make us feel good about ourselves.

One of the consequences of the German Turn is the modern culture of creativity. To repeat Fichte: "All our thought is founded on our impulses." This, of course, is what artists and writers experience. Their stories and theories do not come from pure logic and reason; they come from somewhere deep in the unconscious, or, as opera composer Puccini said of Madama Butterfly, "the music of this opera was dictated to me by God."

Notice how the notion of creativity replaces the old notion of a fixed mechanical universe, and before that of a world run according to the whim of the gods. In the old days, we understood that we were the mere playthings of the gods, and subject to the power plays amongst them. How to get in their good favor? Sacrifice. Then, with the Axial Age religions, we might discover the workings of God's or Nature's universe and we spoke of God's Law. But now we are in the business of creating the future, not merely understanding God's plan and executing it. And our lefty friends are busy creating the future and heaven on earth with their critical theory and activism and peaceful protest.

I have tried to give expression to all this with my reductive Three Peoples theory. My People of the Subordinate Self are people that believe that powerful forces run the world, and that they need to find protection under a powerful lord. My People of the Responsible Self are people that believe in God's Creation and his rational Divine Law, and the point of life is to use reason and logic to find out and live God's plan. My People of the Creative Self are people that believe that they are creating the world through creative process. They are the people inspired by the German Turn.

However, there is a problem. You may have noticed it. There is a tendency for humans only to respect and understand their own kind. Thus People of the Subordinate Self have a tendency to believe that the  rest of the world is out to get them; The People of the Responsible Self have a tendency to think that the Subordinates are lazy bums and that the Creatives are whacky immoralists. The People of the Creative Self tend to believe that Responsibles are racist-sexist-homophobes and that the Subordinates are helpless victims of the bigoted Responsibles.

But I think that my wonderful Three Peoples theory, as a stage theory of consciousness -- see Hegel above -- understands and respects humans at all levels of consciousness as it also understands why people at different levels mistrust and dislike "the other."

I have recently come into contact with Curtis Yarvin's "Clear Pill" and his three-layer model of society, of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. Says he:

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

So great minds think alike.

Now, I believe that Kant's dictum that we don't know things-in-themselves leads directly to the revolution in physics, of curved space in relativity, of indeterminacy and the state function in quantum mechanics.

I believe that Fichte's "impulse" theory of thought leads directly to our notion of creativity and the Freud and Jung theories of the unconscious.

I believe that Jung's theory of the individual and the collective unconscious and the archetypes allows us to connect with and understand our pre-rational ancestors and their mythologies.

And I believe that Nietzsche's theory of the will to power is what powers the modern notion of creativity and perhaps even Schumpeter's notion of economic "creative destruction." For instance, I was just reading Nietzsche this morning and he talked in Will to Power §784 about freedom and power.

One desires freedom so long as one does not possess power. Once one does possess it, one desires to overpower; if one cannot do that (if one is still too weak to do so), one desires "justice," i.e., equal power.

And this echoes Horkheimer and Adorno of the Frankfurt School in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to dominate it and other men.

In other words, the German Turn leads to all things, both good and evil. And "creativity," rather than being the innocent craving of starving artists and writers for inspiration, is really a program of power. For, even back in mythology, it was understood that the god of creativity was also the god of destruction. As in Schumpeter's "creative destruction."

In a way, the German Turn is another expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Before Kant we were innocents in the Garden of Reason and Logic. But now we realize our nakedness, and are ashamed. We have learned frightful powers, and yet, as ever, there is no return to the Garden of Eden. Once you have tasted the apple of the Tree of Knowledge there is no going back.

So we go forward, terrified of our powers, and yet inspired to discover more, still the social animals of Africa that added a new dimension to social cooperation with language, still the creatures that developed logic and reason out of the need to keep our story straight in social interactions, and now conscious of our amazing and frightening creative powers.

That we have the power to make the world anew. And also to destroy it all in less time than it takes to say it.

Thanks to the German Turn it is the best of times; it is the worst of times: the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness.

As it ever was, and is, and shall be.

The Intersection of "Groundhog Day" with Nietzsche and Religion

A while back I purchased a copy of Groundhog Day at HalfPrice Books intending to watch it religiously every February 2. I credit Jonah Goldberg with putting me onto Groundhog Day and I see that he gets a lot of credit at La Wik.

Oh, and by the way, don't miss the Jeep Groundhog Day commercial from yesterday's Super Bowl.

And then there is the real Groudhog Day life of screenwriter Danny Rubin.

But when I watched the movie last night, February 2, 2020, which, from its numbers 02/02/2020 should be the groundhoggiest Groundhog Day for millennia to come, I realized that the whole thing echoes Nietzsche's notion of Eternal Recurrence. And, of course, when I Googled "groundhog day nietzsche" I found that thousands had already tumbled to this. Even La Wik gets into the action.

OK, so I only read Nietzsche over the last year or two. So I have an excuse.

But let us be clear what Nietzsche was on about, before the "Nietzsche was the Nazis' favorite intellectual" chorus starts up. I notice that most of the quotes on the Internet come from The Gay Science but I take my text from The Will to Power.

It is all about the sequence of morality, decadence, nihilism, eternal recurrence, will to power. You can get my long form in "Nietzsche in 900 Words -- If You Can Take It."

First, there is morality, as in a stable religious tradition. It "protect[s] life against despair and the leap into nothing." But when God is Dead, then you get decadence. Nothing to be ashamed of, it's part of the rhythm of life, growth and increase are followed by "waste, decay, elimination." Obviously, when people lose the faith that protected them against despair then they start to lose their bounce and joi de vivre. So we get to nihilism:

Nihilism is a symptom that the underprivileged have no comfort left; that they destroy in order to be destroyed; that without morality they no longer have any reason to "resign themselves"[.]

And so when you have descended into nihilism, you are reduced to "existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: 'the eternal recurrence'."

And that, pretty clearly, is what is happening to Bill Murray's character Phil Connors in Groundhog Day. But is that all there is? Not at all. The next step is the Will to Power. In other words, to break out of the descent into decadence and nihilism and the eternal round of Groundhog Day, the same-old same-old day after day you have to break out. And you don't have to be a Homeric hero.

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not demand extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account: those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and therefore not so afraid of misfortunes -- human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride. (§55)

In Groundhog Day we can see that the key is for Phil Connors to stop being a cunning rascal, figuring out how to flatter the babes to get them into bed, using knowledge about people to manipulate them, but just going ahead to serve others -- even if they don't thank him -- and also becoming the man that the girl of his dreams would like him to be.

The interesting thing is that, in the Special Features of the DVD, in "The Weight of Time," the director Harold Ramis, who is part lapsed Jew and part Buddhist, related that he got calls from just about every religion thanking him for being one of them:

The first inkling I got of what is was going to mean to me was [that] someone called and said the Buddhists love this movie. And I meet a yogi that said this is the yoga movie; this totally expresses our philosophy. Then I started getting letters from Jesuits, from fundamentalist Christians, all saying the same thing... you must be one of us because this movie perfectly expresses our philosophy of life.

 So. There's something that Nietzsche gets and just about every religious believer gets that gets expressed in an ordinary -- OK, not so ordinary -- Hollywood movie about a jerk of a weatherman and how he got to be unjerked.

Maybe there is hope for us and for America and for the world after all.

Roger Scruton RIP

The most important thing to know about British conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton who died January 12, 2020, aged 75, of cancer is the way that he met his Sophie, the future Lady Scruton. He was riding his gelding Sam in the Beaufort hunt and happened to be standing next to Sophie, riding her mare Petra. Says he in his autobiographical Gentle Regrets,

Usually [Sam] puts his ears back if a horse gets too close to him, anxious to preserve the distance that will preserve safety; on this occasion, however, he stood quietly beside Petra, and then followed her as the hunt moved off. The next Saturday he caught sight of her across a field of 200 horses, seized the bit and cantered across to where she stood, fulfilling simultaneously his desire and mine.

But here's the thing. Not only was Scruton's horse named Sam, but also his family dog when he was a boy and his son. His son. You tell me! Perhaps there is a connection, that Scruton loved his dog, his horse, and his son, so why shouldn't they have the same name?

And another thing. It turns out that his surname Scruton is made up. His great-grandmother, born Lowe, had a son surnamed Lowe, that she decided should be surnamed Scruton. So perhaps his grandfather was conceived on the Scruton estate while his great-grandmother was in service there.

Of course, all this has nothing to do with Trollope's Sir Roger Scatcherd, railway engineer, drunkard, and father of the illegitimate and practically-perfect-in-every-way Mary, in Doctor Thorne. Nor would Trollope, a famous hunter of foxes, ever have dared to introduce a ridiculous plot device like a horse selecting his owner's wife for him.

Roger Scruton was an immensely learned philosopher and writer, son of a left-wing teacher father and a respectable middle-class mother. Born in 1944 he became a conservative in the 1968 student riots in Paris, and throughout his adult life was on the receiving end of the tender mercies of the left. The latest incident was a 2019 New Statesman interview conducted by a young lefty -- who no doubt literally knows nothing -- that monstrously edited and misrepresented his remarks. And got him sacked from the Tory government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission for a season.

Scruton seems to have been a gentle soul, according to many that knew him, and also a courageous one, who went into Eastern Europe in the 1980s to meet with the dissidents that became the government leaders in the 1990s.

Scruton visited Prague [in 1979] to give a secret lecture with the dissident Czech philosopher Julius Tomin. 

When he accompanied Tomin back to his apartment, he found waiting for them at the door a secret policeman who refused to let Scruton in, and then pushed him down the stairs. He was eventually arrested and thrown out of the country. 

“I realised that this was a situation that was completely outside anything in my experience,” he remembered. “And at the same time this was a place which was dear to my heart. The intellectual life was genuinely dangerous. They were being put in jail by a Left-wing police force.”

But actually, Scruton was "put in jail" multiple times throughout his adult life by the left-wing police force of the academy and the culture. It is just that the left-wing police in Prague were a little more direct than our left-wing police in the university and in the culture.

What is wrong with these people? Don't answer that.

Scruton has written about many things, principally in the areas of aesthetics and philosophy. So I thought I would check his notions of my current enthusiasm, Nietzsche. He notes, in A Short History of Modern Philosophy, that Nietzsche, in common with Aristotle, "found the aim of life in 'flourishing':  excellence resides in the qualities that contribute to that aim." Thus,

In each case pride, self-confidence, cheerfulness of outlook, and a desire always to dominate and never to be beholden were regarded as essential attributes of the self-fulfilled man.

The drawback is, of course, the accusation that this is why Nietzsche is "the Nazis' favorite intellectual." But whatabout Marxism, with Marx "the Commies' favorite intellectual?" As Scruton writes in Modern Philosophy: an Introduction and Survey:

If you happen to believe that you are, deep down, an Übermensch, whose powers, energies and talents are frustrated by the little people who tie you with their Lilliputian web of obligations, you will gladly endorse Nietzsche's vision[.]

Or if you believe that you are an activist, fighting for justice for all the oppressed peoples of the world, you will gladly endorse Marx's vision that appoints you as the vanguard of the proletariat.

The massive excuse prepared by Marx for the crimes of the international socialists, was prepared by Nietzsche for their nationalist opponents.

And this makes me think that Hegel's Master and Slave dialectic and Nietzsche's Master and Slave morality are missing the middle.

Both Marx and Nietzsche are trying to find a Master morality for my People of the Creative Self, today's Educated Gentry. Nietzsche is sneering at the Slave morality of weak people, who just want to combine against the strong.

But I think Nietzsche is missing the middle, what we might call Commoner Morality. In other words, when he complains about "the priests" teaching us to hate ourselves, he is complaining about the self-reflection that the Axial Age religions promote for commoners. It is a middle way between the self-justification of the "creative" and the collective protective morality of the slave. It is the thought that, in the give and take of commoner life, well, maybe the problem is me.

So that would fit my reductive Three Peoples theory and Yarvin's Gentry, Commoner, Client layers.

Creative/Gentry morality: Creativity involves creative destruction, perhaps of me, perhaps of lesser folk. Too bad.

Responsible/Commoner morality: Life is an interaction and we need to think about how our actions impact other people so we don't have to come to blows.

Subordinate/Client morality: Life is a bitch and we the people have to combine against the powerful to protect ourselves.

Sir Roger Scruton was a remarkable man, gentle, learned, courageous. We shall not see his like for many a year. 

"Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry

In her magnificent "Bourgeois Era" books Deirdre McCloskey celebrates the achievements of the western bourgeoisie, and I have written about it. As La Wik says, the bourgeoisie, contrary to its self-advertisement as "prudence only" actually practiced all the Seven Virtues. And its appetite for innovation provoked the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, from $3 per person per day to $100 per person per day. In today's dollars.

In her new book, Why Liberalism Works: How true liberal values produce a freer, more equal, prosperous world for all, McCloskey advertises an inclusive libertarianism, and proposes to reclaim the word "liberal" from the progressives.

McCloskey argues for "the continuing desirability of a liberalism conceived in the eighteenth century" and how it has created good things like "economic success" the "arts and sciences" plus "its kindness, toleration, its inclusiveness, its cosmopolitanism, and especially its massive liberation of... people from violent hierarchies ancient and modern." Then there are the critics.

Progressives and conservatives and populists retort that liberalism and its rhetoric also explain numerous alleged evils, such as the reduction of everything to money and markets or the loss of community and God of the calamity of immigration by non-whites and non-Christians. But they are mistaken.

Twenty years ago and more I might have agreed with her. But then I read F.S.C. Northrop, who wrote:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

"Inadequate?" Everything I believed? But what does that mean? At the time I was perfectly happy with the world view of the British Enlightenment. And yet. For one thing didn't German thought lead directly to Nazism?

So I gradually embarked on the study of the Germans. For instance, Kant. He famously developed his philosophy from problems in Hume, especially Hume's showing that there is no warrant for our faith in cause and effect. And so Kant proposed that, contrary to the Newtonian era's confidence in matter and mechanics, we do not know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances, and we construct a world view from information coming in through our senses. Then there were the German Romantics that argued that we know directly that there is more to life than facts and reason. That's what all those Romantic paintings of a young German looking out into a prospect of magnificent nature were about.

Then there was Hegel (that McCloskey dismisses as an inspiration for authoritarianism and national-socialism). Does anyone understand Hegel? I certainly don't. But I rather like his Master and Slave analysis, which suggests that the Master is not exactly master, and the Slave not exactly helpless. And his notion of dialectic proposes that we humans proceed by lurching from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, rinse and repeat.

Then there was German physics that drove the relativity-quantum mechanics revolution. What was that all about?

And Freud-Jung and the mostly German developmental psychologists that invented modern psychology that, amongst other things, reminds us that our fabled rational minds sit on top of an undiscovered country of the unconscious. And it may be that our conscious mind is just a fake image projected like a movie from the unconscious to make us feel good.

Now, I reckon that out of all this came my reductive Three Peoples theory that owes a lot to the developmentalists. And then there is Curtis Yarvin's three-layer picture of modern society as Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

So tell me "Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry. And "Why Liberalism Works" for the Commoners. And "Why Liberalism Works" for the Clients.

See, I believe with McCloskey that liberalism and the discoveries about how markets work for all of us and have driven the Great Enrichment are true -- as far as anything can be true, given that as far back as Nietzsche we have to understand that our understanding of the world are remarkably constrained by, say, the need of every living thing to stay alive when danger strikes.

The fundamental world view of my People of the Subordinate Self and Yarvin's Clients is that to survive in this world you have to have a patron, a powerful man that can protect you from a cruel world. How does McCloskey's liberalism speak to them?

The fundamental world view of my People of the Responsible Self and Yarvin's Commoners is to accept that it is your job to get on in the world, to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, but that in return you expect some sort of protection from the rulers. How does McCloskey speak to them?

The fundamental world view of my People of the Creative Self and Yarvin's Gentry is that life is a creative project and a fine thing it is: it is their creative innovation that gave us the Great Enrichment. But the Gentry also seem to believe that the scope for their creativity should be almost limitless and that the plebs should not have the right to oppose their brilliant ideas. Yes, of course, McCloskey is a creative and naturally thinks that creatives should rule the world with "kindness... toleration... inclusiveness... cosmopolitanism" and so forth. But whatabout the people that experience the "kindness" etc. as mere patronizing bossiness?

I call my Three Peoples theory "reductive" partly out of irony, because of course all human knowledge is reductive. Nietzsche: "a priori 'truths' are for me -- provisional assumptions" Or this:

Within the mechanistic view of the world (which is logic and its application to space and time), that concept is reduced to the formulas of mathematics -- with which as one must emphasize again and again, nothing is ever comprehended, but rather designated and distorted. Will to Power §554.

The mistake of the original 18th century liberals was to assume that everyone would identify with the creative bourgeois ethos. And that ethos is certainly my culture and feels comfortable to me.

But humans are not like that. We humans are social animals that find safety and survival in groupish behavior and instincts. Most humans down the ages, I think, experienced themselves as subordinates in the hierarchy; they submitted to power to enjoy the benefits and safety of being in a community.

And, of course, one of the basic facts of life was that land was life. You, or your group, had to possess food-yielding land, or else. So you had to belong to a group.

Now I think that modern socialism as a prescription for groupishness is a disaster. But clearly there are a lot of people that think it delivers community and safety.

I notice that everyone these days is shocked, shocked by slavery. I ask, instead, why has slavery become, in the last centuries, a scandal? What changed?

I even think I get the Death of God. It is because modern Gentry believe that they are the creators. No God needed.

So I think that the modern problem is how to deal with the fact that people have different ideas of community, of work, of wealth, of rules, of morality. And the place to start, to be able to look at the world from different perspectives, I believe, is with a reductive Three Peoples or three layers theory.

How to make a better world that subordinate Clients will appreciate?

How to make a better world that reponsible Commoners will appreciate?

How to make a better world that creative Gentry will appreciate?

It's a problem!

The Question of Whether The Deep State is Clever or Stupid

There is a natural instinct in all of us, I propose, that assumes that people in authority know what they are doing. More or less.

Thus, we tend to think that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must have a card up her sleeve when she omits to send the impeachment of President Trump over to the Senate. But suppose she doesn't? Suppose she is just playing the next card in her hand because she doesn't know what else to do? Maybe she knows that a) to send the impeachment to the Senate as is would end up as a disaster for Democrats, so that b) playing manipulative games at least puts off the inevitable.

My 70-year-old yoga teacher usually manages to blurt out some New York Times conventional wisdom about Trump at the beginning of the class. This week it was that Trump would easily win in 2020 on the economy: if only he wasn't so crazy.

Earth to liberal bubble: it was Trump's attack on the liberal Gentry that made him president! Millions of Commoners that had given up suddenly discovered a politician that seemed to "care about people like them." Whoa! Who'da thunk it?

Or the Deep State intelligence community chappies that let themselves be suckered into spying on a presidential campaign. Are we to think they are cunning Svengalis? Or just easily duped Barnacles and Stiltstockings hoping for preferment from the next admininstration?

Or the geniuses that gave us the Great Recession. Science says that the credit system needs two things: properly collateralized loans, and borrowers that can service their loans. So how come our governing geniuses gave us 100% mortgages and liar loans? Are they dumb or somep'n?

Whatabout the brilliant Democratic Socialists that want to bring everything under the aegis of the admininstrative state after a century of proving that it doesn't work? And 100 million dead slaves under Communism? Are they evil or just stupid?

The truth is that they are just humans and, as usual Nietzsche explains the whole procedure -- The Will to Power §517. Our lords and masters are just average Joes walking in the world assuming that the conventional wisdom and things-as-they-are explain the world.

The fictitious world of a subject, substance, "reason,"etc., is needed--: there is in us a power to order, simplify, falsify, artificially distinguish. "Truth" is the will to be master over the multiplicity of sensations:-- to classify phenomena into definite categories. In this we start from a belief in the "in-itself" of things (we take phenomena as real).

Of course, it's been a long road for me to accept the Nietzschean view. That, as animals in the world, we have to discriminate among all the welter of information coming in through our five senses that deluges us every moment, and filter out the things that might kill us! So we -- so much higher than the ordinary animals! -- conjure up narratives about the world to try and understand it: gods arranging battles from Mt. Olympus; spirits in trees; reason and logic; matter; energy; Four Elements; atoms and molecules; quarks; dark matter and energy.

And I wonder what comes next!

Truly, human understanding has gone through an astonishing transformation since, well let's say since Descartes and "I think, therefore I am."

The truth is that all of our knowledge is conditional and a likely story. Good until it fails to explain the world. And we have to edit out 97.2 percent of the possibilities in order to stay sane. So everybody lives in their comfortable bubbles paying attention only to the edited information that tells them comfortable things that confirm their world view.

But, of course, what is comfortable to you in your bubble may be a perfect hell for me in my bubble.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

And I suspect that James Delingpole is right with his analysis that "The 2010s were the Twilight of the Elites." Would that be Führungsschichterdämmerung, James? Or something shorter?

Happy New Year!

Nietzsche on Knowledge and Reality

For some time I have been reading people that tell me to forget the conceit of logic and reason. Everything in the world is "affect," or feelings.

Except that when I have a "feeling" it is the rising to consciousness of an event that took place in my pre-frontal cortex up to seven seconds ago. And the fact that I have a feeling is because, after the chaos of sense impressions bombarding my body, something unusual has tripped an alarm that has brought this something to my consciousness.  What is going on here?

What is going on is that the Freuds and Jungs -- and latterly Jordan Petersons -- peddling this stuff all go back to Nietzsche.

In The Will to Power: Book Three: Principles of a New Evaluation Nietzsche blows everything apart.

For instance, "everything of which we become conscious is a terminal phenomenon, an end", in other words the opposite of our common belief in understanding the world through "thinking, feeling, willing!"

Or this: "'inner experience' enters our consciousness only after it has found a language the individual understands". Thus, "'to understand' means merely: to be able to express something new in the language of something old and familiar."

Or this:

There exists neither "spirit," nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use. There is no question of "subject and object," but a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness; above all, regularity of its perceptions (so that it can accumulate experience)--

Knowledge works as a tool of power. Hence it is plain that it increases with every increase of power-- 

In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it.

See what he is up to? That everything that we "think" and "feel" and "know" about the world is an epiphenomenon that wells up out of our body and its six senses and its sensors and its ganglia of nerves and brain cells and who-knows-what as part of its project of staying alive. And we really do not have a clue what is going on!

Whatabout the "ego" and the "subject" and "facts?"

There are only facts -- I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations... 

[Even the] "subject" is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.

"It is our needs that interpret the world." And we better hope that our interpretation is correct. This time.

Here's a concept that I find useful:

Everything that enters consciousness as "unity" is already tremendously complex: we always have only  a semblance of unity.

What is going on here? I think that it reflects our modern knowledge -- call it the paradox of our modern knowledge -- that things are a lot more complicated and a lot weirder than we ever imagined, and that we ever could imagine.

One of the things that helps deal with this unsettling thought is this piece from Nature in 2008: "Your brain makes up its mind up to ten seconds before you realize it, according to researchers."

Because if that is true, that stuff is going on in what we call the "unconscious" that the "ego" knows nothing about, then what other stuff is going on that we know nothing about?

Here is Nietzsche on "words:"

We set up a word at the point at which our ignorance begins, at which we can see no further, e.g., the word "I," the world "do," the word "suffer":-- these are perhaps the horizon of our knowledge, but not "truths."

I guess Lewis Carroll knew all about this when he had Humpty Dumpty opine on "words."

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

But Lewis Carroll -- real name Charles Dodgson, academic and mathematician -- was not a student of Nietzsche; he wrote Through the Looking Glass in 1872, and Nietzsche was writing his late stuff in the 1880s. But the question is: were Charles Dodgson and Friedrich Nietzsche swimming in the same intellectual pond?

Because, when Humpty Dumpty talks about "which is to be master" is he not talking the same language as Nietzsche's Will to Power?

Which Is Worse: Trump's Insults or The Racist Canard?

We all know that all educated suburban women are disgusted with -- cannot believe! -- the crudities of President Trump, the Twitter Insult Dog.

But I have a question for you educated suburban women. What do you think about the lefties in our land that think nothing of calling anyone with an opinion they don't like of being a "racist?"

Which is worse? A presidential insult? Or the admission that when you are a billionaire, women will let you pet them in the crotch?

Or being accused of being a "racist" the Summum Bonum of the Pejorative Culture?

Now, I would think that there is no contest. A few insults on Twitter, about Slow Joe Biden or Pencil Head Schiff, are just joshing among the guys, the kind of thing that is normal and natural on, say, the locker room and the golf course.

But I realize that among women such insults are experienced in a conversation at the coffee shops as "I can't believe he said that." An abomination!

Whatabout the accusation of "racism?" Isn't that much, much worse? Particularly if it means that your husband loses his tech industry job because some woke HR woman had it in for him?

OK, ladies, I'm waiting for your answer.

I was thinking about this, as one does when you have had an idea for a blog and haven't yet written it.

And then I thought, OMG. Yes, even I say OMG from time to time.

Because I realized that the question of honor among men, and honor among women, as developed by James Bowman in Honor: A History applies here. And how!

Bowman's simple dictum is that honor among men is the reputation for courage; among women honor is the reputation for chastity. Or, to quote Bowman directly:

[T]he basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of the popular culture that has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut.

Now, Bowman develops the idea that the institutionalization of society leads to a situation where the honor culture of bravery among men gets diluted by the presence of women and the substituting of police and courts for the revenge culture of the tribesman or the gang member.

In fact, following Nietzsche, we could say that Christianity and "the priests" have switched entirely the bravery culture among men for the good vs. evil culture among women. And what, says Nietzsche, would happen if good finally triumphed over evil, so there was no evil in the world, but only good? What then?

So here is what I think. I think that, indeed, it has been necessary and appropriate to diminish the honor-as-bravery culture among men and dilute it with the chastity culture among women, so that men become good little boys in the peaceful market economy.

But whatabout women? And here I return to the prophecy of Georg Simmel from a century ago, who understood that things were going to change, what with women emerging out of the home.

Obviously, Simmel wrote, the public sphere, the world outside the home, in the short term would still be defined by men for men, but in the long term women would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility." 

But do you know, I am coming to think that the opposite is true, and that women in the public aquare will have to adapt to a more masculine sensibility. In other words, following Nietzsche, they will have to acquire something of the culture of the Übermensch, the "free spirit:"

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede, but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense… human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride. 

I don't think you can thrive in the public square unless you are a person "sure of their power" and someone that can not just endure but "love a fair degree of accidents and nonsense."

Now, it seems to me that the women's culture of chastity demands absolute purity. You are not allowed to make mistakes; you are not allowed to push against the community of women that define what "good" is in your community. In this sort of culture it makes perfect sense to name, shame, and shun people who are not perfectly chaste in all their actions. That's all very well in the private women-only culture of the tribe, where men live in a different world of war and hunting.

But the modern public square cannot be a perfect moment of chastity maintained to eternity. It is a roiling mess of accidents and nonsense, and that's just on a normal day. Why is this? Because the public square is the old world of tribal warfare and defending the border that has been civilized into the market economy and democratic politics.

So I say to educated suburban women: if you don't like the male honor culture of Trump, and insist of enforcing the name and shame and shun culture of "she's a racist-sexist-homophobe" then you had better retreat from the public square and live in a male-provided safe space.

And one thing is for sure. You are not a liberated woman.

Being Thankful Towards the End of Life

I remember my grandfather -- my mother's father -- at the age of 72. That is, I remember him being 72, and an old man. And that he died in 1965 aged about 85 after colon surgery.

Those were the days when you didn't tell people they had cancer.

But this year, 2019, I turned 73. So that makes me an old man! Anyway, I thought this was a good year to make absolutely sure that each of my daughters had heard from me about what I thought about them. I told them both that I thought they were amazing and that it was hard for me to understand how such women could have come from a guy like me.

It was time to tell them that because, I thought, you never know. I could die tomorrow and I wouldn't want that to happen without having told my daughters how much I honored them.

So I got that one under my belt. Or off my chest.

Of course, we all think this is the worst of times. Because political division, etc. But that is rubbish.

Hey! If Dickens could start his novel about the French Revolution with the maxim: "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times," then our world today in America cannot be anything but the best of times.

Let's do the full quote from A Tale of Two Cities, just to make it fair.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

What Dickens is saying, I suppose, is that we humans tend to imagine that we, at this moment, are the center of the universe: amazing and special and unique -- and also going to hell in a handbasket.

Which we obviously are not. However, each of us is at the center of our personal world and cannot help but experience our life and our world from that position.

The question is: what do we do about it? And, given that I have been reading Nietzsche over the last year, we should give him his chance to tell us what to do (The Will to Power §55)

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede, but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account; those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and therefore not so afraid of misfortunes --  human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride.

I rather like the notion of loving "a fair amount of accidents and nonsense." Because, you know what? We are all too inclined to want everything serious and tied down and no suprises, thank you.

But the truth about life is that it is full of "accidents and nonsense" and we ought all to accept that.

And be thankful, and stop complaining!

Nietzsche in 900 Words -- If You Can Take It

There I was at the gym, reading my Nietzsche on a cardio machine that made it difficult to read because I couldn't use my regular cardio machine because I cannot stand listening to nearby women talking loudly to each other on the cardio machines.

And all of a sudden, Fritzi explained the whole procedure, in a couple of pages in The Will to Power. Of course, The Will to Power was not published in Nietzsche's lifetime; it is a collection of notes in his usual aphoristic style, so who knows what he really meant. But still. He explained his pitch:  on morality, decadence, nihilism, Eternal Recurrence, and Will to Power just like that. Slam, bam, thank you ma'am. It is all presented at the end of Book One: European Nihilism starting at Section 40.

For instance, I had not really got the point of his Eternal Recurrence thingy until now.

Let's start with Morality (Section 55):

It was morality that protected life against the despair and the leap into nothing, among men and classes who were violated and oppressed by men; for it is the experience of being powerless against men, not against nature, that generates the most desperate embitterment against existence.

But what happens when people start to lose their faith in morality?

Decadence (Section 40):

The concept of decadence.-- Waste, decay, elimination need not be condemned; they are necessary consequences of life, of the growth of life. The phenomenon of decadence is necessary as any increase and advance of life; one is in no position to abolish it.

In other words, when the old order -- particularly the old morality -- is collapsing, maybe because God is Dead, we get a period of decadence. Nothing to be ashamed of: Just life.

Which brings us to nihilism. Nietzsche does not champion nihilism. He just regards it as natural and physical when some religious belief or morality has collapsed. (Section 55)

Nihilism is a symptom that the underprivileged have no comfort left; that they destroy in order to be destroyed; that without morality they no longer have any reason to "resign themselves"[.]

And so we get to the Eternal Recurrence. In the collapse of morality into decadence and nihilism it seems

as if everything were in vain... [So] "Are not all 'values' lures that draw out the comedy without bringing it closer to a solution? 

Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: "the eternal recurrence."

In other words, it is the nihilist, demoralized by the collapse of morality and the increase of decadence and decay, who collapses into nihilism and a philosophy of eternal despair.

Thus to the Will to Power (Section 55):

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not demand extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account: those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and therefore not so afraid of misfortunes -- human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride.

How would such a human being even think of the eternal recurrence? 

Easy for you to say, Fritzi. Be not afraid of misfortunes.

The Will to Power is obviously a difficult concept for us post-Nazi humans. Because we think of the Will to Power as the Nuremberg rallies and SS stormtroopers and concentration camps. Of course, the worstest Will to Power of all was Lenin and Stalin and Mao who created societies of what the Jewish intellectual Georg Lukács approvingly called "totality." Yep, societies which were defined solely by political and military and ideological power. And which were, dialectically, incredibly weak.

Well, the truth is that Nietzsche's Übermensch is indeed a disturbing and unsafe chappie, for he is not afraid to burst all bounds. Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert is all about that. And one of Pervert's ideas is that the real man is a pirate, unafraid to sail around the world in tiny wooden sailing ships looking for trouble.

Crusaders like Cortes and Pizzarro, Fernando de Soto, Drake and Raleigh, Magellan and Balboa equal in daring, intelligence, magnitude of spirit, resourcefulness and achievement any of the great men of the Greeks and the Romans.

As the hero says in Pirates of Penzance:

It is a glorious thing
To be a pirate king.

In my reductive Three Peoples theory I say that the modern thing is to be a creative person, one of the People of the Creative Self. But, as Pervert says, "I don't promote for you the life of the scientist, or artist, or writer, because in our age these degenerate into hobbies and ways to pass the time, and there's no value in this." The true creative life is indeed the work of God, to create the world anew. But that means that the creative life is the life of a man, to be a creator, fighter, destroyer, a life indeed with no happy ending, as is required in all religions up to and including socialism.

I think that the quintessential Bronze Age man, or Übermensch, is Elon Musk: crazy, fearless, piratical, willing to take the government's money to make stupid electric cars on the one hand, and make rockets to go to Mars on the other. 

Suppose Lefty Activists are Just Faking It, Like Actors

The whole thing about the left is the notion that they are brave revolutionaries, taking it to The Man. Only, of course, in the present age, lefty activists are not revolutionaries, but just the stooges of the ruling class taking to the streets under the beneficent eye of their seniors.

Activism is a form of acting. As in plays and movies. I feel much better after writing that.

This came to me through a happy coincidence this morning. First I was reading an oped by Victor Davis Hanson noting how, in the old days, Americans could build a transcontinental railroad in six years. Now, the State of California can't even do a high-speed railroad from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Yes, yes, I know. Why would anyone with half a brain build a high-speed passenger railroad from SF to LA when you can take a plane from any one of four or five airports in the Bay Area to any one of four or five airports in Southern California? I dare say that a 737 cruising at Mach 0.8 at 30,000 feet uses less energy than a train doing 150 mph at sea level.

We look back at a heroic age like the ancent Mycenaean Greeks -- I was at Mycenae a couple weeks ago -- and

We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.

 Wouldn't you know, I went off to the gym and found myself reading Section 356, "How things will become ever more "artistic" in Europe" in The Gay Science by Nietzsche, and he is talking about the same thing.

In the old days, men used to identify themselves with their role in life, their "so-called occupation," and "men believed with rigid confidence, even with piety, in their predestination for precisely this occupation... this way of earning a living." They refused to admit the "element of accident, role, and caprice."

But then, Nietzsche says, there are opposite ages with a certain "cocky faith."

The individual becomes convinced that he can do just about everything and can manage almost any role... and all nature ceases and becomes art. 

This, he says, is what the Greeks achieved, starting with the Periclean age, and thus, step by step, "They really became actors."

[W]e modern men are even now pretty far along on the same road; and when a human being begins to discover how he is playing a role and how he can become an actor, he becomes an actor.

But when you reduce life to play-acting you end up enacting life on a stage -- as if it were real life. This is the way to understand our lefty activists, from AntiFa to Extinction Rebellion. AntiFa is acting out the idea of a street mob. But it is all just a show. Extinction Rebellion is going through the motions of a revolution to force the powers-that-be to get serious about climate change. But really, it is all theater.

And this is the way to understand the whole theater of the left's activism, in particular what Victor Davis Hanson is complaining about, that we can't get anything done in America because the activists block everything with their rebellion theater.

That's what Macbeth proposed as his political plans turn to dust:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more:

If you are merely an actor, your actions mean nothing; they are merely a shadow of real life. And I suppose that is the fate of all that inherit the past, as the later monarchs in a dynasty, as politicians in a functioning democracy. You are play-acting, enacting political theater to keep the plebs from seeing the man behind the curtain.

Our lefty activists that play the game of revolution do not really want revolution. They just want to play-act at it, pretending that they are fearless revolutionaries risking everything for peace and justice. Not really. They are just play-acting at revolution, under the kindly eye of the ruling class, and jolly good fun it is.

But this fake revolution doesn't really play to the ordinary middle class that doesn't experience itself as acting a role, but just obeying the law, going to work, following the rules in order to support a family and raise some children. The deplorables don't really get the game the activists are playing.

And neither do the activists. They have been taught by their teachers that they are changing the world with their activism. But they have been lied to. Whatever you get taught in a government school or a government university it is not how to overthrow the existing order.

Government schools and government universities are not in the business of overthrowing the government. Surely that ought to be obvious.

But as for me, I feel liberated after reading Hanson and Fritzi this morning. And writing about it.

But am I an actor, merely playing a role like the lefty activists? Good question.

My Journey from Common Sense to Common Sense

One of the complaints of conservatives is the death of common sense. Logic and reason and common sense are what we assume inspired the Founders when they rebelled against the Brits to form this more perfect union.

And, we complain, the lefties have declared "War on Common Sense." Thus, Robert Curry in American Greatness:

Political correctness is quite simply a war on common sense. It is a war by the elites on the common people and on the shared understanding of basic realities of life that has made it possible for us to rule ourselves under the Constitution. Once this common-sense understanding of reality has been vanquished, it is “mission accomplished” for the Americans who reject America.

I would have agreed 100% with this 20 years ago. But then I read F.S.C. Northrop in The Meeting of East and West.

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been showed by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

And, of course, our Constitution and political culture in the United States was based on the truth, the common sense, of Descartes, Locke, and Hume. So began for me an intellectual journey in which I made my way through Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and now finally Nietzsche and Jung.

I still think our lefty and politically correct friends are wrong, as Curry does, but not because they are opposed to common sense and logic and reason. I think they are wrong because I believe that the German Turn does not invalidate the British empirical philosophers, but puts a new layer on knowledge on top of it, in the same way that relativity does not replace Newtonian mechanics completely, but only when dealing with astronomical distances and speeds close to the speed of light.

See, the "common sense" of the politically correct is that there is not one correct view of life but that diffferent cultures experience a different view of the world. It's all relative and uncertain.

And indeed modern science argues that all living things must choose, from the overwhelming amount of data pouring in through the senses, which data is important to them.

Prior to the Germans we Anglo empiricists thought there was mind, and matter, and common sense to put it all together. But actually Hume, the skeptic, noted that we cannot, for instance, justify the notion of cause and effect. Just because some event comes after another does not mean the first event caused the second. It is our faith -- in science, in Newtonisn mechanics, in common sense -- that connects the two.

Then Kant came along and questioned everything. Never mind cause and effect, he said. Really we cannot know things-as-they-are. All we know is what comes in throught the senses as sense impressions, and the theories we spin in our mind to make sense of it all. It is my belief that this radical notion, that really we are making it all up, leads directly to Einstein's relativity, do not pass Go. Because Einstein tells us that space and time are not absolute, as openly assumed in Newton's mechanics, but relative.

Do you see the amazing thing here? By casting loose from the notion of absolute space and time and matter vs. idea and believing that we know reality we humans made the most radical step forward ever in understanding how the Universe works.

Another thing that got moving in the German world was modern psychology. By the time we get to Freud and Jung we are saying that our conscious mind is just a tiny thing riding on the top of a fathomless unconscious. That really we are not conscious rational actors, but mostly the slave of our unconscious instincts. I recently read that scientists have discovered through brain scans that our mind makes its decision to act about 1.5 seconds before we experience the decision in our conscious mind.

Now, I believe in "common sense." It's just that my common sense is built upon all the work of Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Freud and Jung. I walk around the world realizing that my eyes are seeing far more stuff than I am aware of. It's just that my mind ignores 97 percent of the visual information and only concentrates on what it thinks is important. That could be a problem if I am stopped at a stop sign and my visual processing system fails to notice a car coming up in the corner of my eye. Indeed the whole modern concept of "situational awareness" understands that the processing of information in our brain is a tricky thing. And they say that at 79 your situational awareness starts to make such a serious decline that over-79s get involved in lots of "failure to yield" accidents at stop signs. Roll on driverless cars!

Now, I think that my journey, from the common sense of the British empiricists to the common sense of the post-Jungians is a glorious and liberating thing. Because it means to me that I can understand all the people in the world that have a different view of common sense than I do. And I have the conceit that I know where they go wrong. So I can forgive them, the poor little dears.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is supposed to show how it is perfectly natural and physical that people are different. The People of the Subordinate Self are workers and peasants; they think the world is run by vengeful gods and lords and political bosses. They do not yet know science. The People of the Responsible Self are citizens, that live and work in the city. They believe in a God that created the world and then told humans to get on with it, and he'll judge our performance on Judgement Day. Thus is pays Reponsibles to develop science and laws and stuff to make sense of the world and act responsibly in it. The People of the Creative Self are people that realize that humans are like gods, they can create the world anew, and change the Law, and even dream of a world of perfect justice.

But, if the People of the Responsible Self treat the People of the Subordinate Self like slaves and use them up as slave workers in satanic mills and slave plantations and factories with child labor then they are monsters. That is what Marx was talking about. Actually, the People of the Responsible Self were not that interested in driving slaves; that's why they abolished slavery just about at the moment that lefties first appeared over the horizon. They were OK with giving the workers rights and giving them the vote. So everything is now copacetic on the border between the Responsibles and the Subordinates.

However, if the People of the Creative Self treat the People of the Responsible Self as racist sexist homophobes, and declare them to be deplorables, and create politcal regimes to deliberately oppress and dis-empower Responsibles then they are monsters. And that is exactly what Stalin and Mao did, and plenty of Creatives to this day have failed to utterly deplore and condemn this great crime of history.

Yes, lefties, the People of the Responsible Self may be a bit slow, and bigoted and superstitious, compared to the woke, the educated, the evolved folks like you. But they still have a right to live according to their lights. Just as you chaps insisted, back in the day, that the workers had a right to live according to their lights and demand their rights even if it was mighty inconvenient to the bourgeoisie.

The point of any knowledge or world view is: does it help me understand the world? I say that my "common sense" helps me understand why lefties are going bat-shit crazy right now.

The lefty world view says that lefties are involved in a sacred project to "bend the arc of history towards justice." Obviously anyone that tries to stop this process is a monster and should be named and shamed and ostracized and fired from their job and deplatformed from social media. And yet, Donald Trump and his deporables!

Do you see how it makes complete sense that liberals would be beside themselves right now? Call it a Failure of Prophecy. By now, all the old racist sexist homophobes were supposed to be a thing of the past. And yet here we are, with a president elected by the votes of white working class deplorables in the old industrial states that liberals once loved and revered.

How could this have happened! What is going wrong! Obviously, the only thing to do is to redouble our efforts to bend the arc of history towards justice and suppress all the hate speech and toxic masculinity and extremism and fake news from whacko sites on the internet. This sort of reaction is normal. It is explained by Leon Festinger et al. in When Prophecy Fails and also by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution as the Reign of Terror that revolutionaries enact when their revolution fails to transform society in ein Augenblick.

See how my world view enables me to understand the Trump Derangement Syndrome of our liberal and lefty friends? My world view must be a good one, that's what I have to say.

And there is this. The world seems to be one religious outburst after another, when some religious group prophesies the end of the world unless we act now. As in socialism and as in climate change. But the overwhelming majority of people, most of the time, just want to get on with life, wiving and thriving and raising a family and pursuing happiness. When these two cultural forces clash then you are going to see some fireworks.

And by the way, that is why our Founders decreed a separation of church and state. So that religious fanatics could not seize the reins of state. Hey, I just came up with this maxim:

Politics is the division between "us" and "them;" Religion is the division between "good" and "evil." Totalitarianism is the division between "us good people" and "them evil people."

And the problem with our liberal and lefty friends is that they are mixing their politics of big government with their religion of bending the arc of history towards justice. History tells us that nothing good comes of uniting religion and government.

Let us end with a word from Nietzsche, who suggests in The Gay Science §292, to preachers of morals that they deprive the best things of honor and worth by praising them all the time.

Deny these good things, withdraw the mob's acclaim from them as well as their easy currency; make them once again concealed secrets of solitary souls; say that morality is something forbidden.

That way, writes Nietzsche, you might win over the only people that matter, the heroic.

Well, that's a thought. Maybe our liberal and lefty friends are making the case for tolerance and good fellowship by demanding absolute conformity to woke morality and lock-step conformity. 

Let's Check Out the Woman Question

I suppose the most important thing to know is that when people are arguing about the number of angels that fit on the head of a pin, you know that the age is coming to an end, and will be replaced by an age in which the number of angels on a pinhead is irrelevant.

And so, in Quillette they are looking at the absolute madness ongoing between transgender activists and radical feminists. Since it is left against left, you can imagine that the question is: Who can outshame the other girls? Or guys, depending on your identification.

Well, I just want to cue Nietzsche in on this, from The Gay Science, Book Three:

Whom do you call bad? -- Those who always want to put to shame. 

What do you consider most humane? -- To spare someone shame.

Just saying. Hey, lefties, how ya doin' today! Is there anything on your agenda that does not involve naming and shaming someone?

Here's an interesting take. In the American Spectator Ann Hendershott observes that the decline in marriage seems, according to schientists, to involve the fact that women like to marry up.

[M]en who found women to marry them have an average income that is about 58 percent higher than the actual unmarried men who are currently available to unmarried women. The researchers conclude that the decline in marriage is due to the “putative shortage of economically attractive partners for unmarried women to marry.”

In other words, if a woman can't find a good provider -- compared to her own economic status and education -- she'd rather not marry at all, darling, and that means not to have children at all.

But back to the vital important of non-binary gender identity. Let's not lose sight of the important things!

I know! Let's take a look at the Zman.

The thing about the war of the sexes is that it is really a war on normal women. When you examine the arguments from the Left and from feminists, not a lot of it is aimed at changing male behavior that is beneficial to women. Mostly it is aimed at eliminating the protections a healthy society has for its women. The resulting social breakdown creates more unhappy women, who can then be recruited into the coven of feminism.

Zman raises an interesting question, for which I do not have the answer. Are women in fact helpless victims, condemned eternally to repeat the conventional wisdom of their Mean Girl betters and spiral into bitterness without the agency to save themselves?

Because if the result of the war of the sexes is that women get unhappy and turn into cat ladies, then it makes sense that women have not, in the past, been recruited into the happy band of philosophers, politicians, and warriors.

Let us turn again to Nietzsche in Part Four of The Gay Science,  where he longs for an heroic age for ideas "which will restore honor to courage above all" and

human beings who know how to be lonely, silent, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome; humans beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished[.]

Well, you can see why lefties want to brush Nietzsche aside as "the favorite intellectual of the Nazis."

I am reading a history of the tech world, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara. This foolish woman stops the action every couple of pages to recite lefty pieties on race and gender. I call that racism and sexism, straight up.

Here's a piece where normal women are fighting back aainst the gender activists. They are protesting against trans-boys using the girls' restroom, against trans-boys competing in girls' athletics. Or the Scottish teenager that was thrown out of class for insisting there are two genders. So maybe women do have a clue.

I suspect that the fuss about "microaggression" and "safe spaces" is a visceral reaction by women -- normal women -- against the "virile, warlike" nature of the public square. For the only human activity that really matters is the bearing and raising of children. And that requires women, or men pretending to be women, retreating from the public square to bear, and suckle, and raise, and nurture those children. They leave it to others to act all virile and warlike and lonely, silent, resolute, and cheerful and all that other Nietzschean stuff. If the women in our human society forget all that, in some periodic religious cult, then, like the Shakers, we are not long for this world.

It is odd, is it not, how many millenarian religious cults react against the simple agenda of wiving and thriving. What is going on, I wonder? Why would people rebel against the most obvious and necessary activities of every living thing, to make more of them. Maybe it is just Hegelian, in that the thing is the same as its opposite.

I wonder whether it will be normal women that insist on the return to normal wiving and thriving or whether it will be "virile, warlike" men that do it for them. Perhaps it will be a combination, for in Spirit and Flesh James M. Ault observed that while men hold all the offices in a fundamentalist church, the women run the church through their husbands.