You Noticed: Our Rulers are Going Stark Staring Mad

You might ask: why don't the wokerati just leave us alone? Why do they have to be in our faces about our racism-sexism-homophobia? Why get in the faces of the police? Why allow the homeless to trash the place? Why release violent suspects onto the street? Victor Davis Hanson goes on and on about the ridiculous behavior of our ruling class.

Is there really a legal system any more, at least as we once knew it, in our major cities—New York, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles? Violent crime has soared. Murders are up 30-50 percent in many of those places... 

In 2020, whether an arsonist, looter, or rioter was arrested, indicted, and jailed depended on the ideology of the perpetrator and the political context of the crime. Old ideas like “broken windows” preventative enforcement went down the memory hole. Did Rudolph Giuliani’s crime-reduction miracle in New York City ever really exist? Is it legal for a district attorney simply to announce that he will no longer enforce the legal code?

A clue comes from Curtis Yarvin's latest, "Socialism and capitalism are both fake."

We can say: “socialism,” in the 20th century, is an aristocratic movement which intends to promote the interests of the working class.

Of course, the followers of the movement, people motivated by fashion -- I suppose the folks with their virtue-signaling yard-signs -- don't really count. It's the real aristocrats that count.

Yet for those betters, the true aristocrats, the motivation of the ideology is at least as much ambition as empathy.  

Socialism has never really been a working-class movement to help the workers. It was always been an aristocratic movement, an intellectual cult and, as very often happens, a clerical nobility.

But things aren't really going too well for the clerical nobility. There is still sin in the world: blacks are still doing badly in school, and still the leaders in violent crime. And the white working class are now the leaders in dying of despair.

How could this happen, with all the good sort of people trying to make things better. Strictly speaking, we could all agree, if things are going wrong then dollars to donuts, it is probably the fault of the ruling class, the clerical nobility.

But, of course, nobles never blame themselves when things go wrong. It is always the "other." That's the beauty of the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative. We allies are putting the pedal to the metal to help the oppressed peoples. If something is going wrong, it must be the fault of the white oppressors. QED.

It could not be, could not be, that the programs and policies -- even the very idea that government can make a society better -- are wrong, and instead of making things better are making things worse.

As I have written many times, from When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al, a religious group does not just give up when its prophecy fails, when the promised socialist heaven on Earth does not appear. It redoubles its efforts, for a while.

Now I say that the whole idea of a just society is a pipe-dream. The best we can hope for is a society where injustice is kept down to a dull roar. I say that the whole idea of the top-down administrative state is a conceit of the ruling class, and bound to increase injustice. I say that the whole idea of government education is a disaster, because it ends up being an indoctrination in ruling-class ideology, whereas I think education should be a "diverse" environment where parents can try out their kooky ideas on their children -- which, I suspect, would turn out to be a lot less kooky that the ideas of the ruling class. I say that the whole edifice of entitlements is a disaster because it sequesters the savings of the people as handouts that can never be reduced.

And I say that the Age of Politics is over. We've got to find new ways to indulge in our masculine lust for loot and plunder, and our feminine lust for virtue-signaling. These lusts are All Too Human, and will not go away. The question is how to divert them into social beneficial channels, like converting warriors into sports heroes. Yes. How do we convert virtue signaling into socially beneficial channels?

Meanwhile we are condemned to live in a world where our ruling class is going stark staring mad.

Still, they haven't started a world war recently.

Postmodernism! We Hardly Knew You!

We all know that postmodernism is the movement that... Yes, what exactly does it say?

I would say that postmodernism argues that every narrative about Life, the Universe, and Everything is ultimately a narrative of power, the way a ruling class, every ruling class, creates a story that proves conclusively that it has a divine -- or historical -- right to rule.

In part this movement was part of the German Turn, a movement away from the rationalism of the Enlightenment and from the notion that you could establish a just society on Earth from rational principles. A philosophy of reason was just as much an apology for rule as the divine right of kings.

In part, of course, the postmodernists saw themselves as heroic resisters against bourgeois supremacy, pushing against the notion that the philosophy and faith of middle-class property and business owners was the highest and best form of life.

So in the little book I picked up on Nietzsche and Postmodernism by Dave Robinson, we are to understand that 

Postmodernists like Jacques Derrida celebrate difference, diversity and the marginal, those things that flourish in a pluralist and tolerant democracy.

Derrida is against "logocentricity," the idea that languages rule.

The conviction that language can create stable and "total" certainties is dangerous as well as misguided. Language can only be made to do this by excluding alternative readings by excluding what is considered to be "other." 

Quite right, Jacques, mon vieux.

In practice this has usually meant the establishment of hegemonies that marginalize all those whose values and beliefs don't conform to some limited and contingent world view. 

Well, we are certainly a couple of marbles short of the celebration of difference from establishing norms where your average white working-class deplorable is concerned right now. Shall I go on?

Ethical and political doctrines are always founded on some essentialist myth about human nature. But language cannot establish essentialist "truths", so ethical values and political doctrines are nearly always the constructs of authoritarian institutions imposed on the rest of us.

Exactly, Jacques. So that helps us understand the current notion from gubmint "bioethicists" that access to the COVID vaccine should be prioritized according to race. It's just the current ruling class of educated Gentry imposing its world view on the rest of us, because systemic racism.

Or Jean-Francois Lyotard, who decided after 1968 that "Marxism had inbuilt authoritarian tendencies" and that "the latent passions of human beings will always make it impossible for them to be marshalled under some theoretical doctrine."

Guess what postmodernist Lyotard wants instead.

Lyotard himself recommends a society that is tolerant, pragmatic and pluralist, libertarian and anarchist, one which again celebrates difference and avoids monolithic certainties. 

Good luck with that when you chat with our wokey friends, Jean-Francois.

Jean Baudrillard thinks we are all living in "a fragmented world of alienated individuals with no sense of self or history" but "just consumers of media in a world of signs without signifiers." Well, not if our "trained Marxists" at Black Lives Matter have anything to do with it.

Robinson's Nietzsche and Postmodernism was published in 1999, at the last moment before we could begin to speak of "woke leftism" as a movement of neo-Marxism devoted to imposing a single ruling-class world view on the rest of us, because systemic racism.

The funny thing is that all the critiques of the postmodernists, which were sorta true back the bad old days of the patriarchy, now apply in spades. And the reason is that while the old ruling class was indeed a hegemony that dominated society as any ruling class does, it did not do so with a deliberate strategy of liquidating certain groups and classes, and enforcing its class supremacy, but in reaction to actual rebellions and opposition.

The new ruling class -- from its "trained Marxist" at Black Lives Matter to its educated Gentry with a divine right to salaried tenured pensioned positions of power of the rest of us -- has a direct faith in domination and hegemony, that derives from its essentialist doctrine of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

The "allies" movement has a transparent argument for power that blithely ignores the findings of the postmodernists. It denies "difference" and imposes the "monolithic certainty" of systemic racism. It shows, I suppose, that people will believe anything so long as it is to their personal advantage.

In American Greatness, Edward Ring proposes an end to the bitterness and rancor of the last four years by "reaching out" to the good people on the other side and trying to find a common ground upon which to move forward together.

But I think he misunderstands the situation. Right now our educated Gentry friends are in the grips of a religious prophecy, a prophecy that decrees that the world is on a trajectory to climate disaster, unless we act now, and decrees that America is on the way to a racist hell of white supremacy, unless we act now.

They don't just argue this. They believe it as a saving truth.

The point about prophecies is that you can't argue rationally about them. You can only move forward when the prophecy has collapsed in ruin, as argued in When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger et al.

And right now our globalist friends are determined that we must end fossil fuels, because end of the world. What can you say to them? That Derrida says that they have got it all wrong?

What can you say to our Wokie friends that are determined that systemic racism is tearing us apart? Because anything you tell them just confirms their conviction that you are a racist and that racism is systemic, just as they believe.

Humans do not respond to argument. They respond to ruin.

The Problem of the Left's Woke Religion

It is a fundamental part of my faith that every human has a religion -- especially the people that insist they don't.

In the writings of Nietzsche he maintains that now that God is Dead we are going through decadence and then nihilism in a process that will end in the Revaluation of All Values.

But surely he is wrong. The decline of Christianity as the faith of the educated class immediately prompted replacement religions, most obviously Marxism and Communism. In fact what is interesting about the Left is how it has picked up the essential content of the Axial Age religions. 

First, there is Original Sin, the idea that there is an essential flaw in human nature that humans must work to repair. Obviously, the new Original Sin is racism. Or, in the words of a journalist supporter of Britain's lefty Jeremy Corbyn:

“We can build a world free of injustice, oppression, exploitation, bigotry, racism and violence”

Yep. There's a lot of Original Sin crashing around these days.

Second, there is Heaven on Earth. The cunning of Christianity is that is does not promise Paradise except after death. But the modern religions promise Heaven on Earth, just like the quote above: "a world free of injustice, oppression," etc.

But I think that the old Sin of inequality and oppression is clearly in the process of being replaced by Climate Change, which also includes both Original Sin and Eternal Redemption.

In Climate Change the Original Sin is the "carbon pollution" of the Earth with the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is peculiarly similar to the original notion of Original Sin with Adam and Eve becoming conscious of their nakedness, their sexuality. For sexuality is central to living things, just as carbon is central to all life on the Earth.

In Climate Change the attainment of Eternal Redemption is obtained, just as under Christianity, by enormous acts of penitence and denial, to retreat from lives of consumption and luxury and instead live a Buddha-life of contemplation under a Bodhi tree.

So nothing has changed.

What Climate Change provides, of course, apart from the penitence of the Commoners, is a magnificent scope for heroic deeds for the activist class. Just as in a world war, the rulers get to direct traffic and conjure forth prodigious efforts and march enormous armies across the world.

OK. So far so good.

Now I think our educated Gentry believe in a false religion. I just don't believe that any true religion can possibly be constructed to encourage a ruling class to admire itself in the mirror for its eternal fight against oppression and climate change. There is a word for that: self-conceit.

But what will it take to explode the conceit and the self-delusion of our ruling class and its educated Gentry supporters?

I have two analyses I use to help me on this. The first is Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. He says that the frenzy of heretic-hunting peculiar to Inquisitions and Reigns of Terror and Great Purges tends to collapse after a season because humans cannot live at that level of frenzy for too long -- any more than people can live in a perpetual sexual orgasm. At some point the frenzy collapses and normal life resumes.

So, we can say, eventually the present cancel culture will burn itself out. The only question is the size of the butcher's bill.

The other analysis is from When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger et al. This is an examination of a small cult in the US that flourished shortly after World War II with people that believed that they were going to be visited by UFOs on a certain day and carried away to Paradise by the aliens in their UFOs. So what happens when the prophecy fails? Initially, the believers amp up the intensity of their belief. But then, eventually, the members of the cult start to fall away and the cult breaks up.

Yes. And then there is Jim Jones in Jonestown, where the leader gets the whole cult to commit suicide.

The problem that I see is that it is not clear to me that we can ever get past the modern Original Sin of racism. Lefties will be descanting on "injustice, oppression, exploitation, bigotry, racism and violence" till the end of time.

Maybe the answer on this front is for Blacks to start voting Republican. Could it happen? Who knows?

And whatabout Climate Change? What would it take to discredit the prophecy of runaway climate change? Would it take a collapse of electrical generation when it is all wind and solar and a day dawns when there is no wind and precious little sun? Or will it take a sharp drop in global temperature in association with the current solar minimum?

Or will Woke Hegemony collapse in the face of the current surge of "populist nationalism" which, I would judge, is a revolt of the Commoners against their educated Gentry rulers?

Or perhaps, like the Roman emperor Constantine who switched Rome from paganism to Christianity, the day will come when the educated ruling class decides to lead the Commoners rather than oppose them. I wonder what that would look like.

The problem, of course, is encapsulated in Ben Franklin's maxim, that "Experience keeps a dear school but they will learn in no other." Our rulers will not change until they have experienced a very nasty knock on the head. Unfortunately the knock on the head will not be confined to the conceited educated Gentry but will also affect the lives of ordinary Commoners. And, I dare say, women and minorities, the "oppressed peoples," will be hardest hit.

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

Science, Climate Change, Politics, Prophecy and Reason

California Governor and nephew of Nancy Pelosi Gavin Newsom just issued an executive order to ban the sale of fossil-fueled powered cars in California in 2035.

Because the science of climate change demands it.

Over at UnHerd.com they have an article suggesting that only by harnessing the power of Nationalism will the world be able to tackle climate change.

Because the disconnected politicking of left and right can't do the job. We need to act as if we were fighting the Nazis or the Commies.

Or take the wonderful City of Seattle Council that has overridden the veto of Mayor Jenny Durkan and made "a down payment" on defunding the police with a reduction of 100 officers in the upcoming fiscal year.

Because, as Marx wrote, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. Just because Revolution, Baby, failed in the Sixties doesn't mean it won't succeed today!

What is going on? Why are these politicians doing all this stupid stuff?

Fear not. I have the answers right here.

First of all we must recognize the nasty bind in which today's politicians find themselves. Politics is all, and only, about rallying the men to fight against the foe -- external and internal enemies -- in the present emergency.

Or as I say it in my Maxims: "The only warrant for government power is an existential peril."

But, that was for the old days, the tribal days, when the men of the tribe had to be ready to foil the neighboring tribe's dawn raid. What do you do when the threat of invasion and conquest has diminished to a nothing?

You make it up. That is what climate change is all about. That is what systemic racism is about. Because if there weren't any climate change or systemic racism to worry about we wouldn't need our brave political leaders leading us into battle against the evil giants.

Yes, but what about the science?

OK. Here is where I am going to lose you. Science is nothing more than Prophecy. Oh, it is very good prophecy, much better than divination and the entrails of a goat. But science is still prophecy, meaning it makes predictions about how stuff in the world moves and shakes and changes from moment to moment and day to day and eon to eon.

But isn't science all about logic and reason? Yes indeed. But did you know that humans invented logic and reason to manage their social relationships, and especially their lies? Sorry, I forgot to save the link. But here is another look, "Why Do Humans Reason?" by Hugo Mercier that argues that humans reason in order to argue and persuade: 

Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade... Skilled arguers... are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.

Actually, it was not that long ago that the philosophers descanted upon logic and reason in their coffee houses completely separate from the mechanics across town that made the clocks and the carts and the cathedrals. And ne'er the twain would meet. Until they needed really accurate clocks for global navigation and the mind-guys got together with the clock-maker guys and the European adventurers conquered the world.

The only point of science is to help predict the future, which may be anything from predicting the flight of a cannonball to predicting whether a bridge will fall down. But if you are an engineer you will know that engineers always build in a "factor of safety" when designing a building or an airplane.

Now, this notion of science as prophecy is built into what I call the German Turn in modern knowledge. It begins with Kant saying that we can't know things-in-themselves but only appearances. He was responding to the canceled Hume's dictum that there is no such thing in human knowledge as cause and effect, but only correlation. Just because a building fell down right after a raven flew across the face of the moon doesn't mean that the raven caused the building to fall down.

The German Turn reaches its peak with Jung saying that, for all our conscious knowledge, we are still mostly programmed by unknown "archetypes" in our unconscious, the primordial instincts that kept us as a human species alive for millions of years, and other living species for hundred of millions of years.

What does a living thing need, most of all? It needs to have some glimpse of what happens next, so that it can react in time to make a kill of a mega-fauna or dodge the spear or the bullet. And then whatabout next week? Whatabout next year?

That is what Prophecy is all about. Generally, once a prophetic tradition gets a hold of human minds it becomes an orthodoxy, enforced by the powerful and their priests. Notice that a prophetic tradition does not necessarily have to have a track record, just that influential people support it and enforce its doctrine.

This even extends to science. That's what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was all about. A new scientific theory doesn't just come along and everybody agrees with it. The new theory -- or "paradigm" -- is not just a harmless idea; it proposes to humiliate the supporters of the old theory. It threatens jobs and reputations in academia. So it really doesn't succeed until the old generation dies off. Best of all, the new theory should make a prophetic prediction: like the prediction of General Relativity that light is bent as is comes close to a very massive object like our Sun.

You can see why climate change and the COVID-19 epidemic are like catnip to politicians. The politician really has nothing to do unless there is an existential peril requiring bold action. The world is coming to an end and we will all die! Unless we act now! There is a new plague and we will all die! Unless we all act now. And this is not just the politician acting up. He is activating Jungian "archetypes" deep in our unconcious.

Do not underestimate how vital and powerful these archetypes are. Writing in 1936 Jung said in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:

There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to. If thirty years ago anyone had dared to predict that our psychological development was tending towards a revival of the medieval persecutions of the Jews, that Europe would again tremble before the Roman fasces and the tramp of legions, that people would once more give the Roman salute, as two thousand years ago, and that instead of the Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure onwards millions of warriors ready for death -- why, that man would have been hooted at as a mystical fool. (p.48)

So it is not surprising that politicians lurch towards any existential peril as a warrant for political power; that well-born young men and women throng the streets in mostly peaceful protest, that scientists go with the program and advocate for the hot thing that gets the grants, and that nice liberal ladies throng to the meetings of the latest prophet. 

The thing is to jump off the prophetic train before it transports us to disaster. But how?

Suppose the Wildfires in California Are Not Due To Climate Change

Up here in Seattle we have smoky haze this morning, resulting from the California wildfires. According to the science, the wildfires are a consequence of global warming. Says former President Obama.

The fires across the West Coast are just the latest examples of the very real ways our changing climate is changing our communities. Protecting our planet is on the ballot. Vote like your life depends on it—because it does. pic.twitter.com/gKGegXWxQu

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 10, 2020

Yes. And here is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

“Mother Earth is angry,” the San Francisco Democrat said during an appearance Thursday on MSNBC. “She’s telling us -- whether she’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is … that the climate crisis is real and has an impact.”

Notice how the Catholic Pelosi uses religious language -- actually pre-Christian religious language -- to make her point.

Of course, climate deniers like this nobody say that the California wildfires are due to the environmentalists. 

I live here. Have a seat and learn something, sir. In the state of California the environmentalist lobby sets policy. Controlled burns? Bad for air. Logging to reduce forest density? Bad for the owls. Focus on replacing ancient transmission lines? Nah, we're building wind farms.

So who are you going to believe? The former President of the United States backed by the scientists or a nobody?

And, if you are a climate denier, that still doesn't believe, no matter what a former President of the United States says, what do you do about it? Particularly when all the best scientists agree with the former President of the United States.

I guess there are two available strategies.

The first strategy is to appeal to peoples' selfish interests. If you are campaigning in Pennsylvania, which has benefited enormously from the fracking revolution, you say that the Green New Deal will cost Pennsylvania jobs.

This is, after all, the strategy of the anti-capitalists for the last 150 years. Doesn't matter that the economics says that capitalism is great, that real per-capita income is up by 30 times in 200 years. When a factory closes down or a CEO makes a fortune, a Robert Reich will show up to blame "robber barons." And it works.

But pro-Green New Deal Joe Biden goes to Pennsylvania and declares that he won't ban fracking. Yep, and I gotta bridge to sell you.

The second strategy is to capitalize on failures of prophecy. Science is science: it is merely a technique for trying to understand how the world works. It has achieved amazing results, particularly in the last 500 years, particularly in the last century. But whenever science makes predictions about the future, it is still prophecy, just as in the old days. That is because science is not the final word on how the universe works; it is just the latest human attempt to figure out what is going on. Thus Kant: we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances. 

Only, modern science is a lot better at predictions than the old methods of divination and examination of intestines. Still, weather forecasting, despite the biggest computers in the business, is still a pretty chancy affair. So is hurricane prediction. So is stock-market prediction. So is climate modeling.

Ultimately a failure of prophecy is what will kill off the climate change religion. But not yet. For the climate-change enthusiasts have cunningly arranged that just about everything is a confirmation of climate change.

And it doesn't matter that Karl Popper declared that science isn't science unless it opens itself to "falsification." He meant that if everything is interpreted as confirmation of your theory you do not have science, you have prophecy.

The way real science works is the confirmation of general relativity in 1919 by Sir Arthur Eddington. Einstein's relativity predicted that light passing close to a heavy body like the sun would be slightly bent. Because space is curved by gravitation. And it was.

So, using the bones and the entrails of general relativity math, Einstein prophesied that light from a star would be bent as it grazed the surface of our Sun. And he was right.

The best way to understand prophecy is the helpful book When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al. It's about a UFO cult in the late 1940s predicting that a UFO would come and rescue them before the Earth was destroyed. It didn't, and the Earth was not destroyed. Oops.

But a cult doesn't collapse the day after the predicted end-of-the-world. It takes a while. So even if the global temperatures stop increasing -- say, due to a new grand solar minimum -- it won't change minds, not right away. But a while after the failure of prophecy, the cult starts to break up, to make room for the next great prophetic cult.

Meanwhile, you can blame electrical blackouts on climate crazies. You can blame soaring electrical rates on climate activists. You can resist restrictions on automobile use. You can let billion-dollar light-rail projects wither on the vine. And you can vote against politicians that want to raise your taxes and kill your job.

What you cannot expect to do is discredit the ruling-class narrative. Not yet.

Riots and Mayhem: Be of Good Cheer

As Crane Brinton writes in Anatomy of Revolution, the normal cycle of a revolution is that the moderates get ejected by the extremists -- because revolution fails to realize the hopes of the extremists -- and then the extremists get ejected by the Thermidorean Reaction. That's because humans can't live forever in the white heat of religious frenzy.

As Festinger et al write in When Prophecy Fails, the failure of the prophecy (in this case abduction of the faithful by UFO aliens) does not end the religious cult that has formed around a religious prophecy. The cultists go for broke when the prophecy fails, looking for ways in which they failed to interpret the prophecy properly. Only later does the prophetic cult disintegrate as members start to fall away.

As Nietzsche writes, particularly in The Will to Power, when a god dies, as in his God is Dead notion, what follows is a period of decadence -- of cultural dying -- followed by nihilism, meaning that people experience life as meaningless, followed by the eternal recurrence, where life seems to be a constant recycling of meaninglessness, as in the movie Groundhog Day. But then a new age dawns with the revaluation of values, where a new god arises to comfort the believers.

As new age philosopher Ken Wilber relates, using his multi-level theory of consciousness, when things fall apart people regress from their current level of consciousness to the next lower level of consciousness. E.g., fascism, where people regress, when things aren't working, from a citizen consciousness appropriate for the city to a tribal consciousness appropriate for a people under siege.

And right now I am reading the classic Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga. It's about the thuggish lords and princes in love with tales of knightly derring do as soldiers for Christ saving damsels in distress. And elaborate court ritual. And the semi-polytheistic cults of the saints. Things weren't working, and people -- that is to say the ruling class -- really didn't have a clue.

Well, imagine you are a good educated Gentry liberal living in a good Gentry liberal city like Minneapolis or Seattle. How is it possible for racist sexist white policemen to be kneeing the necks of helpless victim minorities? It must be a malevolent influence. Maybe white supremacists!

Or, you might ask, how come a 48-year-old career criminal with fentanyl and methamphetamine in his blood gets to cash a fake $20 bill in today's America? What's wrong with us? (Yeah, I know, who's this "us" Kemosabe?)

Or, you might ask, how come that "peaceful protests" attended by earnest young Gentry liberal students become the occasion for organized gangs of looters driving SUVs up to high-end stores selling name-brand luxury goods?

Would you believe me when I say that all this mayhem represents the "failure of prophecy" of the Gentry liberal cult that believes in the saving of society by educated experts and/or activists that will assuredly bend the arc of history towards justice?

That the idea of beneficial legislation handing out loot, first to the working class, then to blacks and minorities -- and even gentry women and gays! -- does not solve any problems? Because the problem of the working class in the 19th century and the former slaves in the 20th century was that they had not yet learned the code of the city, how to become responsible citizens with marketable skills and a reputation for trustworthiness.

That the idea of the administrative and regulatory state, staffed by educated experts in the latest settled science, is a non-starter because life is much more complicated and conditional than is possible for administrative experts to direct from government offices.

That the idea of educated Gentry imposing their woke religious beliefs on the bigoted deplorables and firing them from their jobs for Badthink is a non-starter because, as the Founders declared in their wisdom, there should be no state establishment of religion. Yes, and in our modern era, dear Gentry liberals, that includes so-called "secular religions" like social justice. Do you know why the Founders put the thingy about no establishment of religion into the constitution, liberals? It's because they were still smarting from the religious wars of the 17th century, and figured that the government should confine itself to basic questions of life and death and mayhem in the streets and not arcane questions of morality.

So I am saying that we are in a Reign of Terror and Virtue, rather like the French Revolution, because the arc of history isn't bending fast enough for our liberal masters.

I am saying that liberals are experiencing a "failure of prophecy" right now and are reaching desperately to make the prophecy come true before it crashes to the ground in failure.

I am saying that we are about to experience the moment when the liberal god dies and a period of decadence and nihilism takes over as the former believers blunder around looking for a new god.

I am saying that liberals are going backwards, in a Great Reaction, trying to find meaning in the jumble of archetypes in the basement, now that their exalted higher consciousness seems to be failing them.

I am saying that the liberal Activism Culture is a dead end, because we do not need revolution, or a stage version, because the problem is liberals themselves, not some imagined patriarchy or white supremacy.

I am saying that liberals are leading their helpless victims up a blind canyon and the victims will crash into the canyon wall as other Little Darlings of the liberals have already done.

And the best thing that can happen in America is for liberals to become demoralized by their manifest failures and take their hands off the controls of the ship of state!

And then we can all get back to work and working together and building trust in reciprocal trusting relationships.

Deep Sixing the Socialist Idiots

Today Dinesh D'Souza has an excerpt from his book The United States of Socialism. He asks why the economic failures of socialism haven't made socialism a dead letter all over the world. Why do the AOCs and Co. still believe?

They are on a grand quest, and they refuse to look back. The[y] insist that they are the champions of a moral ideal. The only way to refute them is to refute their moral ideal, to expose their dream as a nightmare, to capsize their utopia. 

But, he writes, there is a problem. How to persuade people that Socialism is a fantasy? The problem is that, for humans,

a fantasy continues to hold its appeal even when it is exposed as a fantasy. So we have to expose the socialist utopia not as an illusion but rather as a racket.  

This approach would have the advantage, of course, of tying into Eric Hoffer's notion that

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

So, with socialism we would say that it starts with St. Simon, Fourier, and Marx as an incandescent dream. It becomes with social democracy and the welfare state a business of votes for benefits. And it became with Communism and now Wokism, the dull thuggery of: "nice little job you got here, real shame if it got canceled for Wrong Think, James Damore."

Of course, my Great Reaction notion is designed to be an all-fronts attack on leftism. And my Four Laws notion is designed to show that a government-run economy cannot work.

And my study of Prophecy indicated that prophetic failure does not extinguish the prophetic cult, not right away. But, hey, you'd think that after all the prophetic failures of socialism it would be about time for Good Little Girls like AOC to reject socialism. But they don't.

Well, we know why. Because the education system teaches Good Little Girls that socialism is good. Nobody is teaching the Good Little Girls that socialism is a lurch back to the primitive, that it is always cruel and unjust and always will be, that is always leads to poverty and famine, and that it imagines a world that can never be, not in this world and not in the next world.

This is actually not surprising, because with a government-dominated education system of course the system is going to shill for the ruling class and teach little children the wonders of a government-dominated society.

I guess the attack on socialism needs to operate on several levels. Let' s call it Routing the Left.

1. We need a meaning of life, a religion that appeals to educated Gentry more than the current over-under ideology that makes the educated Gentry into a convocation of saints trying to bend the arc of history towards justice. My idea, in A Vision of the Good Life, that we should teach the educated Gentry to be Sacrificial Heroes rather the Egoist Heroes, is one such effort.
2. We need a new common-sense, set of aphorisms that marginalizes the socialist fantasy. My Four Laws is one such, saying that socialism cannot work, because this and that and the other.
3. We need an ideological offensive that cuts across the grain of socialism putting everything about the left in a bad light. That, I believe is the role of my Great Reaction notion.

Hey, this is not rocket science. We need to engage people at all levels: at the prophetic vision level, saying here is a vision of the good life better than socialism; at the logic and reason level, saying that socialism cannot work, because reasons; and at the gut level, saying that anyone that believes in socialism is an delta-minus moron.

Humans are Ruled by Public Opinion, Not Science

Everybody says they are on the side of science. But the other guys are led by superstition.

Then there are the guys that say they believe in logic and reason, while the other guys are ruled by their feelings.

But I think it is pretty clear, from the experience of the last two months of Wu Flu, that humans are ruled by the notions that are in the wind, particularly the notions that are being ventilated in their particular ideological bubble.

For instance, what I would call the standard line of the epidemiologists, that in any epidemic, you eventually need to get to "herd immunity" was all very well in the abstract, but when politicians got the word -- from flawed epidemiological models -- that millions might die unless we "do something" they opted, from President Trump on down, to do something, from canceling flights from China and Europe to closing bars and restaurants and schools and "non-essential" businesses.

And beaches!

How much science was involved in all that? Not much, I would say. (OK the science of telephoto lenses was involved in the beach closings). Why so little science? Because humans are not driven by science and logic and reason but by memes, maxims and aphorisms floating around social media and amplified by news media and politicians.

And this is not scandalous. It is because humans live and act in the here and now, and cannot spend half their lives researching the evidence and the science. They conduct their lives using notions they got from their parents, from their peers, from school, from media, from politicians. And most of the time -- almost all of the time -- it works pretty well.

This is most obvious if we think of the higher animals that don't have the conceit of a "conscious mind" or science and reason. How do they live? Yes, how do they live without our triumphant reason and science? Well, they do OK. They go about their business as we do, and if something unexpected happens they stop what they are doing and deal with the unexpected. Exactly as we do.

And when you think about it, this animal behavior is exactly what we do. We putter about in our routines as unconcernedly as seagulls, and then stop dead in our tracks if something unexpected happens. Do we then apply science and reason? Not really. If anything we call up our friends, or we turn on the news, or we take a look at social media. And then we act, or don't act. So, how much reason and science went into that? Not much? Exactly what you'd expect from social animals; we take our clues from our fellow social creatures.

Now in the United States in the present time we also take our cues from our political tribe. Liberals and experts are clearly going big time for an administrative solution with rigid rules and instructions from on high and nobody moves without permission. Conservatives and small-business people are clearly more in favor of people making their own decisions about what is appropriate.

And hanging over all is the basic instinct that government is there to protect us.

But there is another thing that comes out clearly to me, that a lot of what we call "science" is really thinly veiled prophecy and divination. Would you be insulted if I suggested that modern science is really the heir to religious prophecy and fortune-telling. La Wik:

Divination can be seen as a systematic method with which to organize what appear to be disjointed, random facets of existence such that they provide insight into a problem at hand.

Am I right, or am I right? The point about science is that it is a very systematic method "with which to organize... facets of existence." But it is also true that it is much easier to predict the trajectory of a moon rocket than the behavior of a modern consumer. Or to predict the future, or the stock market, or elections. Or an epidemic.

Should we be discouraged that opinion rules and not science? Not at all. Opinion is really processed science, knowledge boiled down to maxims and rules of thumb. The better they are, the more people  will adopt them. But there is still, and will always be, a "marketplace of ideas," where people pick and choose what rule of thumb should work for them.

In the best of all possible worlds, the good ideas will win out in the end, and the bad ideas will fall by the wayside. And so they do, in the end.

But in the meanwhile, people are really attached to the ideas that they have adopted, and it often takes a real blow to the solar plexus, metaphorically speaking, before people will abandon a particular rule of thumb that isn't working out so well.

As we see every day.

Prophecy -- Contents

Analysis of Prophecy

1. Democrats Ride the Tiger of Progressive Rage
   
   
2. When Prophecy Fails: The Muellerites
   
   
3. Prophecy, Prophecy: All is Prophecy
   
   
4. Usually the Pessimists Are Right
   
   
5. Our Ruling Class's Unjust Sense of Entitlement
   
   
6. My Journey from Common Sense to Common Sense
   
   
7. Lenin's Philosophy of Force
   
   
8. Conservatism: What Comes Next
   
   
9. Will Medicare For All and Green New Deal Sell?
   
   
10. Waging Permanent Ideological War
    
    
11. The Millennial Cult Problem
    
    
12. Are Democrats Getting Desperate?
    
    
13. Pelosi's Far-Left Bill: The Bigger Problem
    
    
14. Humans are Ruled by Public Opinion, Not Science
    
    
15. Deep Sixing the Socialist Idiots
    
    
16. Riots and Mayhem: Be of Good Cheer
    
    
17. Suppose the Wildfires in California Are Not Due To Climate Change
    
    
18. Science, Climate Change, Politics, Prophecy and Reason
    
    
19. The Problem of the Left's Woke Religion
    
    
20. Postmodernism! We Hardly Knew You!
    
    
21. You Noticed: Our Rulers are Going Stark Staring Mad
    

Pelosi's Far-Left Bill: The Bigger Problem

Yesterday I proposed that Nancy Pelosi's horrible fund-all-the-lefty-wish-list never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste bill was maybe just her way of showing the lefty activist community that their agenda just wasn't going to fly. Not this week. Try again later, wokies.

Today I am reading a lot of commentary outraged at the rank partisanship of the Dems, and how horrible it is, etc. Yes. Of course it is. Partisanship is what politicians and activists do every day.

But let us understand the bigger picture.

The Dems really believe in legislating their progressive morality. They really believe that we need laws to enforce diversity in the work place, and that these laws can make America a better place.

Do you see the difference between a law that makes racial and sexual discrimination illegal and a law that penalizes failure to achieve government-set racial percentages in the workplace?

Do you see the difficulty of making judgements based on percentages of different races and sexes in a particular corporation or workplace? For instance, did you know that well-born white women have really entered the life sciences in battalion strength but not so much in computers and engineering? So, how does the government judge the situation at, say, a microbiology department at a university and a Silicon Valley startup? Who gets harassed and fined? At what point?

Well, we know. They set up a bureaucracy with quasi-legal authority to judge and harass corporations that don't meet their moral standards. As the bureaucracy feels appropriate.

My point is that once you get away from a pretty black-and-white situation -- as in not hiring a guy because he is black where there are incriminatory statements on record -- you have a problem. How do you deal with the vague and uncertain question of whether a particular racial and sexual breakdown can be reliably dealt with by government prosecutors and the courts? Or government administrators?

Government is the agent for protection from existential peril. Morality -- churches, activist groups, women´s gossip networks -- is the means of doing social control over things that are not questions of life and death. And, per our beloved Founders, it is best to separate the organs of force from the organs of morality.

And the fact is that the progressive movement instinctively understands this. That is why it represents each of its agenda items as a matter of life and death.

But most moral issues are not a matter of life and death, and they should not be encoded into law.

Many of the commentators outraged by the Dems' shenagigans are demanding that we teach them a lesson at the ballot box. And certainly they need that.

But I return to the basic Breitbart notion that politics is downstream from culture. And the John C. Wright's  expansion that culture is downstream from religion.

Then there is a further argument that religion is downstream from social animals. In other words, the whole point of religion in the broad sense is that social cooperation with moral rules is a lot less bloody and expensive than deciding everything with a fight. Jordan B. Peterson makes the point in his 12 Rules that even lobsters have a social hierarchy, so that lobster males don't fight over every little thing. But the Good Little Girls interviewing him on TV had no clue what he was talking about.

So, how soon do you think that our liberal friends will get this? Take, for instance Kristen Doerer, Managing Editor of Right Wing Watch, whose job in life is to search out "far-right" offences to progressive morality and name and shame the perpetrators. What would it take for her to see the error of her ways?

Well, we know the answer. It is contained in books like When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al. Every religion, every ideological movement, is a prophetic movement, predicting some kind of perfect world in the future. And when its prophecy fails it doesn't give up, not right away. Indeed failure initially encourages a deepening of prophetic enthusiasm. But after a while the adherents start to fall away.

Now I think it is reasonable to say that the basic left-wing prophecies have failed. And the intensified enthusiasm of today's wokerati is, in a way, a marker of that.

What we need to do is show our lefty friends, again and again, that their prophecies have failed. That's the basic thing, that wherever leftism has been tried it has failed. Oh, we'll never persuade the leaders. But the followers...

Two other things.

First, to establish the notion that almost all the progressive agenda is about status and honor for the educated Gentry, as proposed by Curtis Yarvin in his "Clear Pill." It is not about saving the victims; it is about power and glory for the activistes. We need to establish every day that the moral preening of progressives is just that. Moral conceit.

Second, to attract victims from the rank-and-file of Gentry Clients and invite them to come on over and join the Commoner class. Like I say with my Little Darlings concept, the fact is that the helpless victims beloved by the progressives are beloved only while they are useful to the progressive power project. When they are no longer useful they are dropped like an overage mistress. The idea is simple. We Commoners care about people like you. The educated Gentry doesn't care about people like you.

Here's a way we can start. We can classify every progressive activist group as a church. And we can critique every lefty initiative as an effort to "legislate morality."

Actually, I think our lefty friends would be much happier if they formed a church and said woke confession to each other every Sunday. But they are too dumb to realize that is what they need.

And for tomorrow and next month, it sure wouldn't hurt for President Trump to be experienced by the average American as "doing the right thing." And it will really help if he restarts the economy real soon.

Are Democrats Getting Desperate?

One of the basic tent-pegs holding up my world view is the notion developed by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. The idea is that there comes a time in every revolution where the revolutionaries get desperate. Despite the glorious prophecy, the New Age has not dawned.

Why? It's got to be the reactionaries, the kulaks, the saboteurs and wreckers. In our day, of course, it's the racist-sexist-homophobes. Did you know that it is xenophobic to refer to the Chinese Flu instead of the WHO approved COVID-19?

What to do? The answer is always the same: pedal to the metal. Push the movement's agenda to the utmost. Stop compromising with the other side. Push them out of the way.

In the French Revolution it was the Reign of Terror and Virtue. In the Bolshevik Revolution it was Death to the Kulaks. In Maoist China it was the Great Leap Forward followed by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Now I believe that in the United States we are seeing the failure of the progressive agenda. I think we are seeing that the big government adminisrative state doesn't work. I think we are seeing that the Sexual Revolution doesn't work. I think we are seeing that the regulatory state doesn't work. I think we are seeing that "I am woman, hear me roar" doesn't work.

That is why the left is accusing everyone of being a racist-sexist-homophobe.

And so our wokerati friends are overreaching. In California they are trying to kill the "gig" economy -- meaning especially Uber and Lyft -- with the so-called AB5 act -- and are demolishing the arts, including writers and musicians. In Oregon they are so determined to save the climate that they are steamrollering a cap-and-trade policy past a desperate GOP opposition and the Democratic governor is now implementing the policy by executive action. Here in Washington State the Democrats are pushing a cap-and-trade bill. What is cap and trade?

a system for controlling carbon emissions and other forms of atmospheric pollution by which an upper limit is set on the amount a given business or other organization may produce but which allows further capacity to be bought from other organizations that have not used their full allowance

See? Another "system," beloved of bureaucrats and ideologists.

Because there is no time to be lost! The climate deniers, funded by eevil oil and gas interests, are going to kill us. Unless we act now.

And the Democrats in Washington have been running a three-year campaign to hinder and humiliate President Trump in every way possible. Including a special prosecutor investigation and an impeachment effort. Now, according to reports, House Democrats are trying to put abortion policy into emergency legislation to help deal with the Hunan Virus Epidemic.

Yeah, you might say. What is wrong with these people? What happened to bipartisan compromise and both sides working together?

What is wrong is that the world promised by the prophets is not working out for them. All the things their prophets told their supporters are turning out false. And so they are getting desperate; they are turning up the volume.

Well, here's my Prophecy. It's all going to collapse, the whole lefty world view. Because? Because the progressive agenda is a conceit of the educated Gentry that does nothing for ordinary Commoners. It is an excuse for the educated Gentry to puff itself up with Important Issues and activisme and peaceful protests and Goals and Timetables. But it does nothing for ordinary people.

And, I would argue, it devastates the Clients, the Subordinates, the grateful serfs that suck on the tit of the admninstrative state and its entitlement programs. But that is another story.

So our lefty friends are desperately lunging for the finish line. One last WWI-style Big Push. One last ideological purge to clear the world of deplorables and haters.

The argument of Anatomy of Revolution is that the Reign of Terror is followed by a Thermidorean Reaction that ends up as Napoleon.

The Thermidorian Reaction was a liberal-conservative counter-revolution that followed the toppling of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794. It wound back the Reign of Terror, purged the government of Jacobin influence and attempted to restore some of the political, social and economic values of 1789.

Brinton argued that the ideological frenzy of revolution cannot be sustained. Eventually, people demand to return to ordinary life.

In our day, if you like, the Sixties Kids were followed by the Nixon Reaction of the Silent Majority and the Reagan era.

And the "fundamental transformation" of Barack Obama was followed by the Trump Reaction of the bitter clingers and deplorables.

Notice the common denominator of the Nixon and the Trump Reaction? Both Reactions were really revolts of the Commoners. Or, as Nietzsche might have said if he were writing today, revolts against the hoity-toity Gentry secular "priests" that were teaching us to hate ourselves.

But maybe I am wrong. Maybe this time really is the Millennium of the Wokerati. Maybe.

What's that? You are looking for a bridge to buy?

The Millennial Cult Problem

Obviously, millennarian cults, prophesying the end of the world, are a recurrent human phenomenon. And I suppose it issues from a fairly obvious cause. There are times when a human community is faced by an existential peril and everyone must respond to the call of the leaders, or the group faces oblivion.

This obvious fact surely underlies every politician predicting doom unless we act now. It obviously underlies all the climate change urgency. Irrespective of the validity of climate change claims or of the time scale involved, the only way to provoke a political response is to say that we face doom unless we act now, or at least within the next ten years.

The point is that any period outside about ten years -- or 12 years in some appeals -- is not a peril that requires the community to act now. It is something that can be put off for a year or two. But the point and the internal logic of every political campaign, every activist movement, is that we have to act now.

Actually the call to action is an incredibly risky proposition, because it is really a call to arms, a call to suspend normal life and enroll in the community's army that will face and vanquish the foe. It is only warranted when there really is an existential peril requiring the mobilization of every person in the community. We, who have lived in the aftermath of the two greatest wars in human history, must surely understand how incredibly risky the suspension of normal life and the conversion of all wealth and activities to the fight against the existential peril can be.

We are talking here about human deaths in the millions, not just in the war itself but in the aftermath. I've been reading in the last couple of days a book about the end of World War II that might be ridiculous conspiracy theory or it might be true. Leaving aside the 6 million Jews, there were probably millions of German soldiers and German civilians that died after the end of the war as they were captured and/or expelled from German-settled areas in Eastern Europe. Apart from the question of "who is to blame" there is another point, that once you disrupt normal day-to-day life and normal human work and interaction, people start to die really quickly unless you take heroic action. The US Army, for instance, liked to have about 100 days of food on hand for its forces in the field during World War II. Hmm. I wonder how many days of food are on hand here in the good old USA during the piping days of peace. Somehow I suspect that there are a lot less than 100 days of supplies in the "supply chain." So what would happen if there was a natural or man-made disaster right here, right now?

My point is that in the political world we make a big deal about all the horrible things that are wrong with society, but seldom think about what has to go right -- and what is going right at this moment -- just to keep everything running day to day, so that we all go to work, buy our food, shop for things, drive around, and do 101 things without thinking that are in fact essential for the day-to-day continuance of life as we know it.

I was thinking about this as I penned yet another look at the Democrat's Failure of Prophecy situation. Here they are, prophesying the end of the world, stopping the usual corrupt progress of politics-as-usual so they can harass and harm the president and also bring all racists sexist and homophobes to book. But meanwhile, life must go on! Otherwise we all die!

And what a remarkable thing it is that normal life does go on. And people make the products, serve the consumers, cook the food, make the babies, feed the children, look after the aged, and all that continues irregardless of the pantings and the shoutings on the hustings and in the TV studios.

My point is that probably we should be listening a lot less to the predictions of disaster and merely keep on keeping on with the daily routine. For the daily routine that delivers food and light and energy and life and health and all the rest is a moment-to-moment miracle, and must be carefully weighed against any proposed frightful peril that requires us to suspend all usual activity and instead fight the foe.

You better have a real foe, Mr. We Must Act Now, or millions of people will die for nothing.

Waging Permanent Ideological War

Over at The Federalist Joseph Backholm has some fun with progressive writer John Pavlovitz who writes about how he's not a radical leftist, but belongs in the "human middle."

Then Backholm goes on to show how whacko the left has become in 25 different ways, like:

They went from “coexist” bumper stickers to suing grandmothers who preferred not to decorate a same-sex wedding.

According to La Wik, "Pavlovitz is an American Christian pastor and author, known for his social and political writings from a liberal Christian perspective."

And just today, Pavlovitz has issued a rant about he who shall not be named. You see, someone asked him: “John… what happens if he wins again?” and he gave him a comfortable answer. But he was thinking:

He can’t win again.

That isn’t an option.

It simply cannot be allowed.

If he wins again, November 2016 will seem relatively uneventful; a partly cloudy day in advance of a Category 5 hurricane.

And on and on into a lefty partisan rant.

And here was I thinking that the Trump win in 2016 was just the normal "time for a change" election after 8 years of the other guys. With the innovation that Trump made a connection with the white working class that has been abandoned by the Democrats as the ruling class has pivoted away from class politics to race and gender politics. And all he did was get them to feel that "he cared about people like me." Which is Job One for every politician.

I suppose that Pavloitz belongs to the political tendency that interpreted Barack Obama's two terms as president as a "fundamental change" in American life.

And here I was thinking that Barack Obama was First Black President: been there, done that. We've elected a black president, so we can't be called racists. Now back to your regular scheduled programming. Not.

One of the interesting things about the last half-century is how giving people political rights doesn't solve anything. You abolish government-mandated race laws like Jim Crow and instead of race dropping off the radar you find that the whole of society becomes obsessed with race. The Supreme Court declares gay marriage to be a thing, and gays start running around finding deplorables to cancel and put out of business.

Couple of dozen PhDs there, in my humble estimation. Because more research is needed.

And then you have politicians that don't concede elections. I remember, back in the day, when Time magazine would have a post-election issue about how the election is over, and we are all Americans, and how we all come together after elections, and how, bless their hearts, the losers can content themselves with "wait until next time."

Here's what I think, and I think that the John Pavlovitzes should pay attention.

I think that it is a problem when 90 percent of media articles about a president are negative.

I think that it is a problem when the government schools and universities are almost uniformly Democratic, and where conservative voices get silenced and canceled.

I think it is a problem when corporations are enforcing an ideological line in response to pressure from left-wing activist groups.

I think it is a problem when there is no defence against an accusation of racist-sexist-homophobe.

In other words I think that, whatever your beliefs and certainties, it is a really good idea, from a strategic point of view, to let the other guys have their say. Hey, if nothing else, you get to see what absolute clueless idiots the other guys are. It doesn't get any better than that!

 I also think that we should understand left-wing ideological activist enthusiasms strictly as religious "great awakenings." And sometimes we should think of them as religious cults activated by "prophecy."

And then what happens when "prophecy fails?"

You can think of the leftist frenzy since 2016 as a case of a failure of prophecy. Lefties thought that the world had changed, that progressives like Obama would rule forever. And their prophecy failed.

Which, you might say, is why the Founders decided against a state church, so that prophetic cults would not get mixed up in national politics.

Of course, there is no way to keep prophecy out of it. But you can at least put in roadblocks, to make it hard for prophetic groups to grab a hold of the political power, the way that the Bolsheviks and the Maoists did.

And there is nothing like repeated failure at the ballot box to bring the prophetic urge down to Earth.

That's what happened with the Sixties. The Democrats thought they were going to rule forever. Then they lost four out of five presidential elections in a row, and finally, the New Democrat Bill Clinton got elected as a moderate.

But then, as the Bible says, there came a Pharaoh that knew not Joseph, a rising generation of lefty progressives that did not live through the aftermath of the Sixties.

And so it looks like they will have to learn about politics and ordinary lunch-bucket voters the hard way.

Yeah. Because the guys that wage what seems like permanent ideological war are usually rich kids, scions of the ruling class.

But most ordinary people just want to live their lives and wive and thrive without being jerked around by ruling-class jerks.

I wonder what they mean by that?

Will Medicare For All and Green New Deal Sell?

It is my belief that all political endeavors must adhere to one of two notions.

First is the notion of Loot and Plunder, more politely known as Free Stuff. Vote for me, and I will reward you with loot and plunder taken from...

Well, that is the question. Who are the evil knaves and beasts that deserve to be stripped of their ill-gotten gains to feather the nest of the good guys like you and me? In the old days the bad guys were the village next door. By the time of the Greeks of the Iliad, we were looting and plundering Lyrnessus and its darling princesses on the way to Troy. By the time of Hitler, we are talking about acquiring Lebensraum in the east to the Germans would feel comfortable growing their own food, because it was all the Jews' fault. With lefties we are talking about rightfully looting the bourgeoisie of their ill-gotten gains to give the proletarians what is rightfully theirs.

So Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and her Medicare For All is just the latest in this ancient human tradition. We will all get universal health care and the middle class will have no tax increase. Instead the health care will be paid for by the rich and the insurance companies.

Yep, if you believe that, I gotta bridge to sell you.

But here is the dirty little secret about progressive politics. It was enunciated years ago by Irving Kristol, neoconservative Jewish intellectual extraordinaire and father of the present NeverTrunp Bill Kristol. Kristol the Elder said that the secret of progressive politics is that, in order to help the poor, you have to deal in the middle class.

Thus, Social Security. The idea was to help the poor in their old age. But to pass it the Democrats had to deal in the middle class. And today I'll bet that the program mostly benefits the middle class. with a little nod to the poor in giving relatively higher pensions to people with low wages and a limited working life.

Same thing with Education For All. Sounds like a great idea. But where are the school districts that perform well? Right, in wealthy suburbs. And where are the school districts that perform badly? Exactly in minority inner cities.

Now the problem with Medicare For All is the same problem that faced Obamacare, and before it, HillaryCare. The middle class already has health insurance and the middle class likes its health insurance. And it's a strange thing, but the middle class isn't all that keen on paying a ton more in taxes or premiums to pay for the uninsured.

Back in the Nineties, in the Age of HillaryCare, I already knew about Kristol's Law. So it didn't surprise me in the summer of 1994 when the local PBS newsreaders marveled in disbelief at the failure of HillaryCare. It was, they admitted, because the middle class, the Harry and Louise of the insurance company commercials, already had health insurance and didn't want to pay more.

Enter Obamacare in 2009 with the cunning Jonathan Gruber doing the policy analyst work. Obama and Gruber -- and presumably the rest of the deep state -- had learned the lesson of HillaryCare so they first squared the insurance companies and then promised that "if you like your doctor / health insurance you can keep you doctor / health insurance." And you will save $2,500 a year. All lies, but necessary lies if they hoped to pass the program. Now that Obamacare is passed Republicans are afraid to terminate it because all the people getting Obamacare subsidies, every one of them, will go out and vote for Democrats, do not pass Go.

This is Chantrill's Law. Government programs cannot work because you cannot reform them.

So now we are offered Medicare For All. Naturally, Sen. Warren has enlisted one of Gruber’s Obamacare accomplices to cobble together a document to make the math on Medicare For All come out --without a middle class tax increase. Of course she has. The only question is whether she call sell it, and whether she can cobble together enough lies, like the lies of Obamacare, in order to pass it in Congress.

But Warren is sailing in a square-rigged ship against a pretty stiff wind. Because the middle class already has health insurance, thinks it already costs quite enough, and is not willing to risk it all on a promise that only the rich will pay.

The other political strategy you can try if you want to Do Something is embedded in my maxim, that "the only warrant for government power is existential peril." This is when the tribal leader rallies the men with the threat that the Mongols are already at the door. Every man must come out and fight, or we will all be killed! This was normal in the good old days, when, e.g., the Vikings would kill all the men in their raids and then sell the women into slavery.

In religion this expresses itself in various prophetic cults and their end-of-the-world scenarios. Currently, with considerable cunning, our global elite is selling the idea of end-of-the-world global warming, perhaps 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The notion was put together by Maurice Strong, who "served as the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme."

Let me ask you. Suppose you wanted the UN to head up a global environmental program with considerable global powers, as a first step towards beneficial and wise global governance? What would you do? Exactly. You would propose an existential peril, amounting to the End of the World, Unless We Act Now.

But, of course, ordinary humans are a bit reluctant to give up everything in order to enlist in the army of some UN bureaucrat, or indeed in anyone's army. You have to really amp up the fear and paint a frightful picture of rising sea levels and dying coral reefs and dead baby seals and extinct polar bears in order to sell the people on your prophecy.

So the question with the Green New Deal, to basically stop all normal life for the next decade in order to completely transform the economy away from fossil fuels to renewable resources, is whether you can make the sale. Obviously it isn't that hard to persuade empty-headed young women who know nothing, like AOC and Greta Thunberg. And many of the liberal women here in Seattle are at this very moment contentedly driving around in electric cars knowing that they are saving he planet. But can the prophets persuade the ordinary man and woman with job and house and family to give it all up: "Will you join in our crusade? / Who will be strong and stand with me?"

In general, it seems, people are quite happy to help save the planet. Unless it is going to cost them money. So, the only way forward is to form a religious movement and stoke it with prophecy. That's the way that humans band together to fight an existential peril.

In 2020, it seems that Democrats are pushin both political strategies, the Loot and Plunder strategy and the End of the World Unless We Act Now strategy.

The only question is the old one enunciated by Harry Percy about summoning spirits from the vasty deep. "But will they come when you do call for them?"

Conservatism: What Comes Next

The Zman is doing what I am doing, trying to imagine what comes next. He says that conservatism has failed, but that the Left is hysterical for a reason.

Their anger starts from the secret sense that their moral framework is no longer relevant. They are unable to quantify or even comprehend it. They just sense it, like an ill wind. Like primitives confronted with some natural mystery, the men and women defending the established order are in a defensive panic at the shadow of change falling on the West.

Yes. But what is going wrong? What is the natural mystery that the current rulers do not understand? Well I say that the left's  problem is a failure of prophecy. Everything they said was going to happen hasn't happened. They said that worker rights and entitlements and welfare would make the lower classes live happily ever after. Didn't happen. They said that civil rights and then affirmative action and then diversity and inclusion would end racism and sexism. Didn't happen. In fact the left seems to feel that the world is suffering from a plague of racists, sexists, and homophobes right now. So they are beside themselves.

What should come next on the right?

Whether one chooses to call what comes next an alternative Right or something else, it must be a genuine alternative. The main reason conventional conservatism failed in its opposition to the Left is that it was not an alternative to liberalism. It was a slightly different implementation of it. What replaces conservatism cannot start from the same error, but must be a radical departure from both Left and Right, as commonly understood. It must be a radical alternative to the prevailing morality.

Now, I don't think that way, the logical, reasonable way. I think that everything is religion. I think that the left's anger is a failure of prophecy.They had an idea of a perfect world and determined to create it. But their prophetic system failed: millions of dead, and millions of people diverted into the neo-feudalism of the welfare state. But, like any religious believers, they are unable to think outside the box. And the way of the world is that when your prophecy fails your religious group falls apart, because people don't join a group whose prophecy has failed. But not right away.

What was the error of conservatism? I guess my answer would be that conservatism never thought itself in a competition with the left. Conservatives believed that their way was practical and logical and that anyone would logically and rationally agree with them in due course. But the real game at the time was to compete for the votes of the working class, to play the game of loot and plunder in return for votes, because that was what appealed to the workers. Conservatives didn't do that because they didn't believe in an auction for votes, and that the workers wouldn't really benefit from being the beneficiaries of loot and plunder. Whaddya do when you think that politics is not really the most important thing in the world and you are competing against people that believe that politics is the very essence of life?

But what does "a radical alternative to the current morality" mean? Traditional conservativism with backbone? Christiantiy plus nationalism? Cuture war on the left? Zman doesn't say, and that's the end of the article.

Well, I have thought about what comes next. It is about all I think about, and the bottom line for me is that conservatives or traditionalists or whatever need to radically raise our game. The basic issue is that we need a new religion, one that understands and goes beyond traditional religions like Christianity and Judaism. Our new religion will also understand the secular religion of the left. It will understand and correct the flaws that have led to millions of dead and vile, unjust totalitarian regimes wherever lefties have had sway. And it will also understand the spiritual needs of people who, just a minute ago, were subsistence farmers. And now the time is about right to do something about this.

My feeling is that the left had to run its course, had to betray its working class clients, had to lead women astray, had to confine blacks in a racial walled garden, had to ruin education and make college unaffordable, had to utterly bury itself in corruption, had to propose a ludicrous end-of-the-world climate change, had to get to a failure of prophecy before it got to the point it could realize that something was wrong.

And above all, non-lefties had to get to a place where they created a world view that comprehended the victims of the world and comprehended the left, and then constructed a moral universe that understood the just yearnings of people just entering the city economy from centuries of peasanthood and also the yearnings of intellectuals, revolutionaries, and activists.

This world view would have judgements about the just demands of the workers while demanding that workers learn to master the city's ways, because we are all citizens -- i.e., "bourgeois," now. That includes accepting the market economy and the fact that nothing, especially no job, is forever.

This world view would also sit in judgement on the educated class. It would recognize its legitimate yearning to live a creative life that is not just responsible but aspires to make an original contribution to human society. But this world view would also deny the right of cultural domination and political hegemony that the educated class presently considers its right and that has led to tens of millions of deaths, and brutal oppressive regimes wherever leftism has had sway.

And I mean that all lefties need to learn that every lefty regime that ever was, and doubtless ever will be, is necessary violent, unjust, murderous. This is no longer debatable. It has been the one definite fact of the last century.

Now I think I have solved all this. Yes, me. Little old me.

I think that my reductive Three Peoples theory comprehends workers and victims, the ordinary middle class, and the educated class and understands why they believe different things and want different things from life, from work, from culture, and from politics.

I think that my Great Reaction critique of the left illustrates why it has failed in almost all its projects and why, at its worst, it is the most evil political-religious-cultural movement that has ever come upon the Earth.

And I think that the German turn, through Kant, Nietzsche, and Jung, comprehends what creative people want and also specifies what they should want and what they must be categorically restrained from wanting and doing. In other words, it outlines what the religion of a creative person should be and also why the current religion of creative people is evil and disastrous.

Ι think also that Jordan B. Peterson is getting close to this, because his Maps of Meaning builds on the German turn. And his 12 Rules clearly speaks to the hunger for a code of responsibility in the modern American male.

But there is lots more to be done.

Lenin's Philosophy of Force

I have been developing the notion that the left movement is a Great Reaction against the market-economy-limited-government cultural turn of the last 200 years.

And because it is a religious movement that believes in its prophecy that politics leads to justice, every one of its revolutions ends in disappointment. Crane Brinton in Anatomy of Revolution traces the arc of all the modern revolutions from their origin in existential hope to the Reign of Terror when the prophetic hopes are dashed to the eventual return to normal in the Thermidorean Reaction.

But Gary Saul Morson in The New Criterion argues that Lenin didn't go through this process. He believed in terror from the outset.

An admirer of the French Jacobins, Lenin believed that state power had to be based on sheer terror, and so he also created the terrorist state.

In other words, Lenin didn't wait to get disappointed that his revolution wasn't turning out the way he hoped. He went for out-and-out force from the outset. Unlike the Nazis, for instance.

Under the Third Reich, an ethnic German loyal to the regime did not have to fear arrest, but Lenin pioneered and Stalin greatly expanded a policy in which arrests were entirely arbitrary: that is true terror. By the time of the Great Terror of 1936–38, millions of entirely innocent people were arrested, often by quota. Literally no one was safe.

But guess what. When people are terrorized by arbitrary arrest then they are going to bunker down and do nothing with their lives. As the Soviet joke went: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

Hey, at least our woke lefties today only cancel people when they have foolishly shown their heads above the parapet. But Lenin arrested people on principle. So,

as far back as 1906 Lenin had defined dictatorship as “nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.”

Now I think that one of the central contributions of Jordan B. Peterson is his story of the lobster, that male lobsters are programmed not to fight every time there is a question of hierarchy. In other words, even way down the evolutionary hierarchy we see this primitive species adopting a behavior that limits the use of force. And this notion applies throughout the animal kingdom. Animal interactions are designed to minimize the use of force.

But Lenin decided to turn that upside down.

Now I believe that the salient point of the last 200 years, the Great Enrichment, is the discovery of a new reason to limit and reduce the use of force. The market economy is built upon the simple notion that you trust people that act trustworthy and you maintain those trust relationships by making those relationships as permanent as you can.

This is why I call the left the Great Reaction. Because the left is a return to force; it says that to get to the perfect society of peace and justice we need more force, to hammer humans into shape, as though we were a block of marble. And then that perfect human marble statue will stand for a thousand years.

Sorry lefties, but you are wrong, dead wrong, for a simple reason. Every day, every moment, the world changes, and so we humans have to adapt to that change. The change could be anything: a change in women's shopping tastes; a change in the weather; a technological invention. Every single change in the world ripples through the economy, courtesy of price discovery, and it changes the world forever.

The whole philosophy of the left is that heroic intellectuals, revolutiinaries, or activists can imagine a perfect world and then implement it using politics. But they are wrong, dead wrong, as wrong as wrong can be. In the real world, things are changing all the time and we humans have to adapt. In the real world we construct hierarchies and relationships that are mutually beneficial and reduce or eliminate the need for force.

Do you see how the Leninist philosophy is worse than a crime, it's a blunder? Lenin is saying: forget about the lobsters; forget about the human extension of lobster hierarchy into community and into the mutual advantages of market relationships. Lenin says that force is the answer.

Force? To force people into executing the ruler's plan? But suppose some guy, some nobody, has a better plan. How would we know? How would that guy, that nobody, get to the Vlad the Ruler and say: Hey Vlad, your idea stinks. Here's a better idea. Yeah, like that's going to go down well, because the way politics works, the leader that changes his plan shows weakness and the whole point of leadership in politics is to demonstrate strength.

Do you see the issue here? The point about political leadership is to lead the people in an existential struggle against some enemy. For that you need leadership, strength, courage, marching towards the sound of the guns, willingness to die defending your homeland. And the cost of that is fearful, in blood and treasure and young men dead before their time.

But everyday life is not like the Spartans defending the pass at Thermopylae. It is people working with other people, people doing things for other people, people living in natural hierarchies and going with the flow unless there is some big reason not to.

And yet our lefties say the answer is force.

Well, I would have thought that Lenin would have settled the issue for us. Economists talk a lot about the difficulty of testing economic theories, because of the moral problem of testing the ideas out on human guinea pigs. But Lenin did the whole thing for us. He applied maximum force and arrested and tortured and killed and put people into slave labor camps. And then Stalin went one better on him. We still don't really know the bottom line of the full butcher's bill and hunger bill and just general impoverishment. Because the Soviets didn't publish properly audited accounts the way that corporations have to do. But we know that Lenin's plan was the biggest disaster in modern history -- after the double disasters of Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

I mean: our lefties are proposing Lenin-lite: that's what AOC's Green New Deal and Just Society are all about. And the lefty cancel culture is Mao-lite; it's a cultural revolution complete with naming and shaming. Just not actual executions and sending people to the collective farms to teach them a lesson.

And as I say, it's worse that a crime -- which it is. It's a blunder. We know, from the experience of the Great Enrichment, that the market economy and limited government are the ways to go, the way to fill the lives of ordinary people with unimaginable riches. Force is not the answer, not in the economy, not in the culture.

Tell that to a lefty.

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.