Ch4: But How Does a New Regime Come into Being?

Now that Curtis Yarvin is well into his Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince I think I am ready to start making a critique.

And I think my basic problem is the idea that the Nihilist Prince could actually know what he is doing. As I understand Macchiavelli's The Prince I believe that his notion was to teach princes how to maintain and hold power: what worked and what didn't.

But Yarvin is going deeper. For instance in his Chapter 4 on Principles of the Next Regime he is getting into religious and cultural matters: should the new ruler be running a zoo for humans, a video game to let people get off on their natural aggression, or putting people to work doing satisfying work?

But this assumes an almost totalitarian concern for peoples' moral welfare as well as physical welfare.

And I would say that the lesson of the 20th century is that governments that get into the details of welfare, whether physical or cultural or moral, are setting themselves up for failure because the scale of the job is too big for a top-down social structure. The regime just doesn't have the bandwidth.

Yarvin writes about the "Cathedral" and its top-down structure of moral and cultural control:

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

But I think that, as with the physical medieval cathedrals, the ruling class builds the structure of the Cathedral after it has gained religious and cultural power. The Cathedral is the method of maintaining power.

But when putting together a new regime? What does anyone know, except that the old regime has to go?

And in the old regime, what does anyone in the Brain or the Voice know except that any new regime would be worse -- especially for the rulers and their supporters. For in the old regime, the Brain is not really thinking but only defending the orthodoxy, the correct opinion, of the existing regime.

And this is as it should be. Nobody goes out looking for new knowledge unless there is a problem, a glitch in the Matrix.

In normal times the ruling class and its Cathedral are unopposed. Everything is working as it should be: God is in His Heaven and the King is on his throne and the people prosper.

But if things seem to be going wrong: defeat in war, bad harvests, financial crises, mobs in the street; why, then people start to ask what is wrong and What Is To Be Done. But only a very few people.

Moreover, I suggest that the "very few people" are regarded by all sensible people as complete idiots, not really worth taking seriously. Why? Because for all sensible people everything is still working as it should. No glitch in the Matrix here, no sir.

But what if the Cathedral detects dangerous heresy and the Brain and the Voice and the Conversation swing into action to destroy it? 

I wonder. I wonder if, usually, the hierarchs and heretic hunters will really understand that, if there is a problem, it is probably not that the heretics are evil monsters, but that the apparent smooth surface of the glorious ruling class doctrine and its Cathedral and Cathedral spires are all an illusion. That there is, in fact, corruption and decay, and the foundations are undermined.

We see this is the current situation in the United States. Our ruling class and its educated Gentry cannot see that it is producing less than optimal results for great numbers of the people. That's because the whole job of the Cathedral is to demonstrate to the world that everything about the regime is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

So when the American Committees of Correspondence started talking to each other in the decade leading up to 1776 dear old King George and his courtiers didn't really take them seriously. And anyway, did the Committees really know what they wanted?

Or in the run-up to the French Revolution, did the chaps in the cafés at the Palais Royal really know what they wanted and why, and did Louis XVI's courtiers really have a firm grasp on the problem? Life was good under the old regime, according to Talleyrand:

He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life. 

Look at the current situation in the US. In the debate on September 29, 2020 candidate Joe Biden railed against the white supremacist Proud Boys but said that AntiFa was "just an idea." But President Trump said of the Proud Boys that basically there was nothing to see here, while AntiFa was a problem.

So the two main political parties can't agree on who the current "peaceful protesters" and/or rioters are, who is behind them, and how significant each group is. But each party agrees that the people in the streets identified with the Other party are clearly a menace.

So what is the solution to the problem of the Next Regime?

Well, I would say that it starts with religion, with people that find the current moral framework ill-adapted for the needs, the meaning of life for people like them. So they start bumbling around trying to create a new religion.

Then there is the broader cultural question of a general moral framework, in which, I would say, the great mass of educated and suburban women establish their expectations of each other and the men that protect them.

And then this cultural framework starts to influence the politics.

And the beginning of wisdom, I believe, is for the folks developing new religions and moral frameworks to recognize that different people need and respond to different religions and moral frameworks; there is no one size fits all.

And the beginning of wisdom in our current left-liberal Cathedral is to understand that its Religion of Creativity doesn't really work for the rest of society. In my reductive Three Peoples theory this means that the religion of the Creative People looks like evil to the Responsible People. And vice versa.

And if the Creative People keep ramming their religion down the throats of the Responsible People they are cruising for a bruising.

Just sayin'.

Politics Can't Change Anything, Unless...

In his description of the "System," the combination of military, business, bureaucracy, and "Cathedral" that rules over us, Curtis Yarvin is at pains to note that there is no way to for political elections to countermand the orthodoxy of the "Cathedral" -- the Brain, Voice, and Conversation among the elite -- that defines the "Dream," the orthodoxy of what fashionable people of the "upper social class" think. (Or rather not think, but fashionably repeat, imagining themselves as clever and wise).

Simply put, there is no way to  promote a heresy against the orthodox view without getting eaten for lunch. Especially at times like this when the "Cathedral" feels embattled and is openly conducts a Holy Inquisition to deal with the heretics with its cancel culture.

Except.

Except whatabout the Protestant revolution? The fact is that the Protestants -- Luther, Calvin, and the rest -- changed the Cathedral, and changed the Dream, the "doctrine... [that] defines good and evil for all decent people."

But why did it work for Luther and Calvin and Co.?

I guess because the Gutenberg printing revolution made it possible for the idea guys to get their ideas out there so that their ideas could become part of the "Conversation." Before Gutenberg this rebellious distribution of ideas just couldn't have taken place, because hand-copied manuscripts were too expensive for broad distribution.

And, of course, the burgeoning cities and trade of Europe in 1500 had created a "bourgeoisie" in the cities of Europe ready for a new ideological Dream, a new notion of good and evil for all decent people to believe. A new notion that was better aligned with their need for a meaning of life.

And then, in due course, the Protestant Cathedral and its Dream got replaced by the current System, run by an educated Gentry with its professor ideologist Brains in the university, its fake-news Voice in the media, its Conversation among the educated upper class that fashionably imagines itself the "allies" of the "oppressed peoples" fighting against the "white oppressors."

As in, I don't think so. Listen pal. If you are the political elite, whether eevil feudal lords or robber barons "the rich" or noble "allies," then you are the oppressors, not some bitter-clinger Trump supporters in a Trump Car Parade.

So yeah. Politics doesn't change anything, but ideology does. 

And wouldn't you know, in our generation we have another publishing revolution, the Internet, that allows Brains with new ideas to have a Voice without necessarily getting the fake news media on board to spread the word and get the word out into the Conversation.

Of course, whatever happens, it ain't gonna be easy. The current ruling class is pulling out all the stops to prevent the rebels from talking to each other and getting into the Conversation. But then the Protestant Revolution wasn't easy either.

But here's the point. If the new wave of ideologists, brainiacs like Curtis Yarvin, come out with ideas that seem to answer the questions that today's people have about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" then those ideas will tend to get in the Conversation in spite of the Woke Holy Inquisition that is traveling the world busily stamping out every heretic it can lay its hands on.

Now my notion is that the key to the future is to understand that there are Three Peoples, and each of the Three Peoples needs its own religion, or Dream, the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything that appeals to people like them.

That is what my Three Peoples Religion notion is all about. We must understand that in our modern world we need to create not one but three Dreams, because the Dream of good and evil for Creative People, the Gentry, is going to be different from the Dream of good and evil for Responsible People, the Commoners, and different again from the Dream of good and evil for Subordinate People, the Clients.

So I say that if you want to persuade the world, you need a sophisticated Dream that understands the world not just for people like you but for all the other people in the world too. Is that so hard?

Notice that our wokey friends, with their "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors," notion have a Dream that is basically tailored to the interests of the allies. The allies decide who is oppressed, who is oppressor, and who is an approved ally. The allies, needless to say, are the best people in the world. And the rest of you can go pound sand.

And another thing. The big thing about the Trump Effect, I would say, is that Trump is encouraging the bitter-clinger deplorables towards self-consciousness. And if you listen to the Trump Rallies, it is clear to me that President Trump is reciting a Dream, a narrative of what it means to be an American. Same thing about his speech at Mount Rushmore. Same thing with his appearance in California pinning medals on the helicopter crews that rescued people from the fires.

But what do I know?

Three Peoples Religion -- Script

Hello, I'm Chris Chantrill, and let's talk about my Three Peoples -- about their religions.

In the last section I introduced by reductive Three Peoples theory and its three kinds of people. 

There are People of the Subordinate Self that experience themselves as helpless victims that need to adhere to a powerful lord. There are People of the Responsible Self that experience themselves as responsible workers and householders called to make the best of life according by using their talent in the market economy. Then there are People of the Creative Self that believe they are called to make the world anew.

But what of their religions? Because everybody has a religion, especially people that insist they don't.

I argue that the People of the Subordinate Self experience God as a powerful and unpredictable lord to whom they must sacrifice and subordinate in order to enjoy his patronage and avoid his wrath.

I argue that the People of the Responsible Self experience God as the creator of the world and the maker of divine law that humans are called to observe. It is up to humans to responsibly use the created world that God has provided and to follow his divine law that tells them how to wive and thrive.

I argue that the People of the Creative Self experience themselves as God, for they are called to create the world anew. There are two strategies for this. One is the way of the Egoist Hero that creates a new world in his own image. The other is the way of the Sacrificial Hero that creates a new world through an internal journey into his unconscious and that sacrifices his life on the border between Order and Chaos.

It is the beginning of wisdom to understand that different people have different religions, and different ways of understanding the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Of course they do.

And it is a madness of enthusiasts down the ages to demand that everyone profess the enthusiasts' religion, or else.

We shall next see that all the problems of the world are caused by Egoist Heroes, their self-centered religion, the Activist Culture and how their religion results in the Great Reaction that is the source of most of the troubles in the world.

I'm Chris Chantrill, and thanks for watching.

The Meaning of Life and the Gods of the Three Peoples

As I finish up a long-form article about what "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" means to our highly educated moderns, I find the need to reduce it all to a maxim, a maxim that reflects the different world views of the Three Peoples and their different gods.

So, the meaning of life, for People of the Subordinate Self, comes down to the will of the gods. Whatever the gods are deciding up on Mt. Olympus or as the spirits in the trees, everything on this Earth comes down to the capricious Will of the god in question. And, as we see in The Iliad, the gods tend not to agree among themselves. So God's Will may be the result of a dust-up in the halls of the immortals.

But for the People of the Responsible Self things are different. Because here the monotheistic God is not a capricious member of a court of the gods, but a perfect Creator of the world who has constructed a perfect set of divine laws to guide humans in the right path. Do you see the difference? Now life is not just a question of suffering under God's Will, but a question of understanding divine law and acting on it. Now life is not the Chaos of the will of the gods, but the Order of divine law.

As usual, the interesting situation is the People of the Creative Self. Because the idea now is that there is no God's Will, no divine law. No, things are not that simple. Now it is up to humans to figure it out for themselves. Notice that now we do not have God setting forth his laws but scientists discovering scientific laws; philosophers discovering the limits of reason; psychologists discovering the boundaries between genius and madness; artists stumbling into the music of the spheres. Life is no longer a question of just living God's law but the rather more challenging question of figuring out just what law will promote the welfare of mankind and -- here's a puzzler -- whether the welfare and mankind would be best served by no law at all!

Of course that is where things get complicated. Because it is clear that after you have figured it out for yourself you are faced with two options. Do you proclaim your discovery from the mountain top and demand that the whole world gets with the program? Or do you just live life according to your new wisdom, and tell people what you found out? Do you live your new meaning of life even if it means that the whole world gangs up against you as a heretic and a hater?

This is the difference between the Egoist Hero and the Sacrificial Hero. Your Marx is an Egoist Hero. Listen to me, pal, he says. I just solved the problem of the ages, that the capitalists are going to "immiserate" the workers, and the only way to stop it is to give power to chaps like me so we can stop the capitalists in their tracks and save the workers from evil exploitation.

So when Satan takes the Egoist Hero up into an exceeding high mountain and shows him the kingdoms of the world, and says "all these things will I give thee," he says, "Yeah! Revolution, Baby!"

But the Sacrificial Hero is different. He travels into the echoing caverns of the unconscious and slays the personal demons he finds there, and becomes a sadder and a wiser engine.

When he emerges from his Hero's journey he does not go up into the heavenly precincts of Sils-Maria or fancy Magic Mountain resorts, but simply lives his life, illuminated by the wisdom he has discovered on the boundary between Order and Chaos, and illuminating all around him with the light of his hard-won knowledge.

So, what does it all mean? It looks like we are reduced to the following aphorism:

How to find the meaning of life. For Subordinates, follow the gods' will; for Responsibles, follow God's divine law; for Creatives, figure it out for yourself and leave the rest of the world alone.

But maybe tomorrow I will have a better idea. 

Three Layers, Three Peoples, Three Religions

I just had a brain wave. It happened, of course, during the night.

I realized that Curtis Yarvin's three-layer theory is related to my reductive Three Peoples theory, in this way.

Yarvin's theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients is a political theory. It divides the world into three classes, and it is an external theory. It looks at how the world categorizes people.  You look at someone and you say, oh yeah: educated Gentry. Or, if you are Hillary Clinton, you look at Commoners and call them a "basket of deplorables." Or, if you are an activist, you look at subordinate victims and see them as potential Clients of your activism. Yum.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is a cultural theory. It divides the world into three experiences, three ways of living, as a Subordinate, as a Responsible, or as a Creative. It is an internal theory, how people look at themselves, how they experience themselves. So you feel yourself as helpless, thrown about in the world and needing a strong leader? Or do you think of yourself as responsible, living off the script of God and His Divine Law? Or do you think of yourself as a creative person, able to understand and navigate the world without the help of a divine script?

And, of course, let us not forget Andrew Breitbart's dictum that politics is downstream from culture.

But, as John C. Wright says, culture is downstream from religion. So whatabout religion?

Perfectly simple. You look up my Three Peoples Religion label. And my Three Peoples Religion says that the Three Peoples each have a different god. Of course they do.

The People of the Subordinate Self have a vengeful power god, that helps and hinders people as the mood takes him. These gods are like the Olympian gods that run things in The Iliad. Humans are the pawns in their Olympian political wranglings.

The People of the Responsible Self have a God that has created the world and set forth His divine laws and left humans to get on with it. Humans are, of course, responsible for their acts and will be judged at the Last Trump.

The People of the Creative Self have themselves as their god. For them the nature and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not a mystery known only to God, but a Gordian Knot that creative man himself is unraveling. Notice the fundamental advance over the Responsible Self: now the Creative person imagines himself possessing the means to extend his understanding of the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Do you see the breathtaking scope of this three-times-three theory? It lets you look out upon the world and understand that the Brave New World hath such different people in it, and this is normal. You look say, at a helpless victim, beloved of our leaders and betters, and you say, well, someone like that is going to want to nestle under a strong leader, and they are likely to feel helpless and subordinate, and they are likely to feel that the world is a nasty, vengeful place. You can do this because you have three ways of looking at everyone, from a political point of view, a cultural point of view, and a religious point of view.

But, most important of all, you are equipped to understand and judge the world's Big Problem, the Gentry, the People of the Creative Self, the believers in themselves as gods.

And you begin to see, in a glass, darkly, why the Creative chaps have been making such a dog's breakfast of the last century or so: boosting socialism, which is nothing but a return to slavery; the welfare state, which is nothing but a return to feudalism; and activism, which is nothing but a return to the noble conceit of the Middle Ages, the cult of knight-errantry.

I mean, when you are getting everything wrong, maybe you have a problem!

Getting Beyond Binary Thinking

The Zman today writes about "Binary Thinking," as in good v. bad, as in gay marriage.

One trick the Left has used is to alter the shared consciousness in such a way that everyone is a binary thinker. That is, every issue, not matter how trivial, is assumed to be one thing or the other... 

The classic example of this was the homosexual marriage debate. Before anyone knew what was happening, the beautiful people were insisting that anyone opposed to the idea must hate homosexuals.

Well yes. But what do we do about it? There's no doubt about the grounds of all this. It is the natural, instinctive human programming to come together in a crisis. What human can stand back when the call goes out to rally to defeat the invaders?

And one of the achievements of the Axial Age religions has been to transfer the physical response to danger to the moral realm, for the community is just as much at risk from a moral horror as from a physical threat.

But obviously, 97.2 percent of life is not about the crisis to end all crises in which all good men come to the aid of their country. Or else.

On the other hand, sometimes there really is a crisis and the best way to respond is to call All Hands on Deck!

My line, in my writing, is that in the modern era we have developed, in the market system, an extremely effective way of being social animals and using hierarchy to reduce violence. And I argue that the left represents a Great Reaction against the modern turn with a multi-layered attempt to return to the Good Old Days.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is an attempt to propose that, since there are three very different types of people in the world they will each want very different religious, cultural and political frameworks to fit their different views of the world. And that all enlightened people should agree on that.

Moreover, I argue that in the modern Great Enrichment the old reality that food-growing land was life and wealth has been replaced by a new reality that cooperating in the market economy and developing "intangible capital" inside peoples' heads is the way forward, and since land isn't so important any more neither is the culture of defending Us against Them.

But, there is no doubt that there is a huge "rush" that humans experience from political and moral combat and driving the other guys before us and hearing the lamentation of their women.

I suppose that the only way to defeat the instinct for the moral binary is to defeat the moral binary enthusiasts in single combat.

Because the reason the left uses its moral binary tactics is that up to now, it has worked.

And that is why we got Trump. Because "he fights." He fights for the Commoners and their get-along culture against the Gentry and their I'm-in-charge culture.

Now, of course, I know what we need. We need the Gentry to abandon their Ego Heroism culture that features brave counter-cultural artists and writers, revolutionaries, activistes, and knight-errants of all kinds. They need to be dunked in the ancient and modern notion of the Sacrificial Hero.

The idea is really simple. If you want to change the world, or, as the Jungians say, explore the border between Order and Chaos, then you need to understand that you are not going to succeed as the strutting Creative Hero. You will only make the world a better place by sacrificing yourself on the border of Order and Chaos as you render to the rest of the world, by your sacrifice, a knowledge of how the world works beyond that terrifying border.

There will not be any ego-satisfying "ambition, honor, and vanity" as described by Curtis Yarvin in his "Clear Pill" evisceration of our liberal Gentry. No, on the border between Order and Chaos all that goes out the window. And who amongst us is ready to surrender even one of those egoist conceits, let alone all three?

You can see what is required to get out of our "binary politics." Our liberal Gentry has to abandon its present religion that experiences the Gentry as Creative Heroes saving the deplorables from themselves. And the only way that people abandon their religion is if it utterly betrays and abandons them.

In other words, our liberal Gentry friends have to go, like it or not, on the Hero's journey into the underworld of the unconscious and its terrifying dragons.

I don't think they will do that until well after it is clear to them that their Lefty Prophecy has utterly failed.

Meaning of Life: Let Me Count the Ways

There are, writes Johan Huizinga in The Autumn of the Middle Ages, three different meanings of life that humans attach to. Let's just list them:

• The Path of Denial. "The more beautiful life sees to be attainable only in the world beyond". Therefore it is a waste of time to put effort into the present world; only the next world "will prove to be a deliverance from all earthly concerns." Big thing in the Middle Ages. And Buddhism.
• The Path of Improvement. It is the idea of "the improvement and perfection of the world itself." Not something the Middle Ages believed in. "The world was as good and as bad as it could be". God had made the good things; "it was man's sinfulness that made the world miserable."
• The Path of Dreams. "If earthly reality is so hopelessly miserable and the denial of the world so difficult, this leaves us... to live in a dreamland of shining fantasies, and to soften reality in the ecstasy of the ideal." E.g., the medieval romance full of knights-errant and damsels in distress. Not to mention fabulous feasts and rich tapestries.

But, I just happen to have read the Zman this morning, and he has some different ideas. Each of us has a set of beliefs based on assumptions:

• Communists "assumed that human beings are naturally cooperative, but that private property creates conflict. The greed of a few, exploiting the many, results in conflict between the classes. Eliminate private property and you eliminate that social conflict."
• Libertarians believe in natural cooperation. "Because humans are motivated by self-interest, they naturally cooperate with one another to increase their material prosperity."
• Our Rulers believe in the "blank slate." They see "people come into the world as amorphous blobs that can be shaped into whatever society makes of them." Of course, "The differences we see in people are the result of racism, poverty, inequality and the legacy of white supremacy."

These are all, I would say, versions of The Path of Improvement. Rubbish, writes the Zman. "The engine that drives humanity is the need for safety."

• The Need for Safety "[D]own deep, in the store of man’s oldest desires, is the urge to huddle in the cave with the rest of the tribe, as the storm rages outside. That is man’s oldest desire as a social animal."

Now, I look at all this from my lordly perch and say: Rubbish. What is perfectly clear to me is that my reductive Three Peoples theory explains everything.

I would say that it is the Subordinates, the "thralls" of the Vikings, that believe in The Need for Safety. Of course they do, otherwise they wouldn't be sheltering in place on the demesne of some great lord or the benefits of the welfare state.

I would say that Responsibles or Commoners are the Libertarians that believe in natural cooperation. They are the Adam Bedes of the world that believe they can make a life with their talents and hard work. This is close to the Path of Improvement.

The other meanings of life are ruling class conceits in the Gentry and the Creatives. But, to give them credit, they are all over the map, between the Path of Denial, the Path of Improvement, and the Path of Dreams.

First, Our Rulers believe we are all helpless blobs that cannot thrive without their supervision and direction. Darling. So our rulers must be charged with directing the Path of Improvement.

Pompous rich kids, Communists from Marx to Marcuse, believe that the rich (forgetting that they are the sons of the rich) are screwing the plebs. Probably what they mean is that it is an outrage that their glorious talents have not yet been recognized by their fathers. Hey, Fredo, how yer doin' pal? Is this a Path of Improvement of a Path of Dreams?

Now we come to the two remaining Paths developed by Johan Huizinga. Obviously the Path of Denial is another rich-kid thing. Siddhartha, the Buddha, was a prince who walked away from his wife and kids and princely responsibilities and decided to meditate under a Bodhi tree. Thank goodness rich-kid Trump didn't decide to do this.

Whatabout the Path of Dreams? Isn't it obvious? That's the path of our beloved Wokerati who, realizing that they probably don't have the moxie or the grit to make something of themselves in the real world, decide instead to dream of being progressive knights-errant like the Sir Whatsits in the medieval romances and Arthurian legends. Only they aspire to be Quixotic activistes nobly going forth on their NGO palfreys to bend the arc of history towards justice. And to fight the dragons of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

And thus do we humans wrestle with the problem of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

And what am I doing this lovely shelter-in-place morning? I am listening to dear old Hans Knappertsbuch's recording of Parsifal, nestled deep in the 70 gig-o-bytes of my smartphone musicology. That's the German version of the Sir Perceval medieval romance, Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach. The main thing about Parzival is that it takes the young lad three nights in bed with his lady love, the virgin Queen, to get to the point. And then the next morning he heads out on his knightly quest.

Wagner in Parsifal takes a gentler tone, with Kundry begging, unsuccessfully, for "nur eine Stunde" with the pure fool Parsifal. That's "only an hour" for you German students.

Understanding the Left's Secutar Religion

Radio host Dennis Prager, author of The Rational Bible, proposes that the left's worship of nature is a return to the old religion. Quoting G.K. Chesterton, he writes

"When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything." 

One of these substitute gods has been nature. 

Indeed, of all the false gods, nature is probably the most natural for people to worship. Every religion prior to the Bible had nature-gods -- the sun, the moon, the sea, gods of fertility, gods of rain and so on. 

That is why the farther Western society gets from biblical, i.e., Judeo-Christian, religions, the more nature is worshipped.

And, of course, this new religion has adopted all the trappings of the old. He quotes Ross Douthat at The New York Times,

"The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs: a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of 'thou shalt nots,' and a piping-hot apocalypse."

But I take a different tack, which you may accept or not, as you wish. And, of course, my tack is informed by my reductive Three Peoples theory, and its adjunct, the notion of what religions the Three Peoples believe in. I set out the following notions:

The God of the People of the Subordinate Self is the great lord or patron.

The Subordinate does not experience the possibility that his actions may make a difference. He is like the Achaeans before the walls of Troy, whose battles were completely determined by the Olympian gods. He doesn't pretend to know how the world works; he just submits to the power of his lords and gods.

Compare that with the God of Responsibles.

The God of the People of the Responsible Self is the abstract, though personal, God of the Axial Age religions... The problem for humans is no longer to submit to the actual power and might of the ruler, but to submit to the abstract rules of the Law.

The Responsible still does not understand how the world works, but he acts on the general principles of God's Divine Law in the faith that such action will be successful.

But the world of the Creative is different.

The God of the People of the Creative Self is the Creative Self. If the old God was the creator of the universe, or at least in on the design, the modern creative self aims to become as God. The nature and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not a mystery known only to God, but a Gordian Knot that creative man himself is unraveling and will eventually master. That is why our modern ruling class is full of plans for improvement and bending the arc of history towards justice. Society is, for them, a creative project.

The point is that in the modern age since the scientific revolution mankind has come to believe that he can understand the world enough to make a difference. It is no longer a question of following orders from the Olympican gods or following the Divine Law of the Axial Age God. The world seems to be understandable. That is why, as Prager notes,

When you ask atheists, as I have for decades, what they believe in, the most common answer is "science."

The point is that, if you believe in science, you believe that humans can make a difference through improving their understanding of science, or "how the world works."

And "we" all believe this, these days.

The question is, of course, whether human knowledge should be a social project, of humans in social cooperation, or a political project, deploying science with force.

The basic fault line between Right and Left, I would say, is the question of force. Shall we use science to enact a forced march to the future? Or shall we let the natural social cooperation of humans, informed by experiment -- and most important of all by mistakes -- to illuminate the future.

Yes. The $64,000 question. Shall we lordly rulers permit our underlings to make mistakes? In my view we humans advance to the future over the rubble of our mistakes.

Now it is my belief that the left's faith in political force represents a return to the past. Because I think that the whole principle of all social animals is the principle of the reduction in force.

You see this in the present Chinese Virus epidemic. Our lefty friends are horrified by the off-the-cuff remark by President Trump about the encouraging prospect of (hydroxy)chloroquine. Where was the FDA approval? Where were the double-blind studies? Where was the protocol?

And CNN journalist Jake Tapper just asked President Trump about the return to normal: "What's the plan?" In that he echoes Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) who campaigned on the theme of "my plan is..."

Well, it was the Prussian general von Moltke that said "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." He meant that, once the battle starts, everyone from the general in charge to the lowliest subultern is going to have to improvise and react to the changing conditions on the ground.

Do you understand what that means, Jake Tapper? It means that now, six weeks into the Corona War, the plan, if there was one, is dead and buried. All the administrative state procedures and chains of command and expert advice are there only to enforce "settled science" and medical knowledge. But when the war starts all that safe-spaces stuff goes out the window. Because we are now all guinea pigs, and nobody knows what will work.

The perfect example is the AIDS epidemic. Gay AIDS activists did a remarkable job putting pressure on the medical and administrative hierarchy to permit the use of experimental drugs on AIDS patients. Because when you are under a death sentence, you are not worried about double-blind studies and administrative regulations. You are willing to be a human guinea pig and try anything that might save your life.

So I don't think that our secular religious friends are going back to the past with their nature religion. Of course Nature is amazing. Indeed the more we learn about Nature the more we are amazed.

My problem with our secular religious friends is the return to force, the idea that we know all we need to know and here is The Plan. Or else.

And that's why I call the left a Great Reaction.

What Path Should We Follow?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that's all settled.

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

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

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

Three Peoples Religion - Table of Contents

What gods do the Three Peoples believe in?

0. Three Peoples Religion in Brief

1. What Gods do the "Three Peoples" Believe In?
Powerful patron, creator of universe and lord of divine law, and the creative self

2. Religion and the Three Peoples: The Big Problem
The creatives don't think that the responsibles have a right to their religion

3. Ancient Myth and my Three Peoples Theory
Trying to blend Three Peoples with post-Jungian archetypes.

4. Peterson and Jung and Nietzsche, Oh My!
Reconciling with the notion that reason is not the last word

5. At Jordan Peterson's Road Show
We all see the world through the lens of our values

6. Three Peoples: There is no One True Faith
What I think as right and true may be the royal road to disaster.

7. Searching for a New Religion: Leftism, Feminism, Wokeness, etc.
In a time of religious revolution you are bound to have crazy whacko cults

8. The Elite's Religion: We are Holier Than Thou because We Care about the Victims
But does the elite understand this?

9. It's Too Soon for a "Dissident Right"
First we need to get the left on the back foot and gasping for air.

10. What the Three Peoples Should Reach For
Subordinates for responsibility; responsibles for creativity; creatives for humility

11. Yes, Secularists Do Too Have Religion
No gods, but lots of sacred objects

12. Lefties: Getting the Hero's Journey Upside Down
Where the lefties get to the Promised Land and the deplorables get sacrificed

13. Our Ruling Class Does Too Have Religion. And How
It believes in equality, education, climate change, by the creative/educated

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

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

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

17. Understanding the Left's Secular Religion
The problem is its faith in force

18. Meaning of Life: Let Me Count the Ways
Mixing it up with Huizinga and the Zman

19. Getting Beyond Binary Thinking
Gentry won't go there until their project has utterly failed

20. Three Layers, Three Peoples, Three Religions
Political theory, cultural theory, religious theory, three times three

21. The Meaning of Life and the Gods of the Three Peoples
Each of the Three Peoples has a different meaning of life

22. Politics Can't Change Anything, Unless...

23. But How Does a New Regime Come Into Being?

Three Peoples Religion in Brief

My reductive Three Peoples theory proposes three kinds of people in the modern era. There are People of the Subordinate Self that experience themselves as helpless victims that need to adhere to a powerful lord. There are People of the Responsible Self that experience themselves as responsible workers and householders called to make the best of life according by using their talent in the market economy. Then there are People of the Creative Self that believe they are called to make the world anew.

But what of their religions?

I argue that the People of the Subordinate Self experience God as a powerful and unpredictable lord to whom they must sacrifice and subordinate in order to enjoy his patronage and avoid his wrath.

I argue that the People of the Responsible Self experience God as the creator of the world and the maker of divine law that humans are called to observe. It is up to humans to responsibly use the created world that God has provided and to follow his divine law that tells them how to wive and thrive.

I argue that the People of the Creative Self experience themselves as God, for they are called to create the world anew. There are two strategies for this. One is the way of the Egoist Hero that creates a new world in his own image. The other is the way of the Sacrificial Hero that creates a new world through an internal journey into his unconscious and that sacrifices his life on the border of Order and Chaos.

See also "Three Layers" and "Three Peoples."

Next step: Three Peoples Religions Table of Contents.

Suffering, Religion, History, and the Three Peoples

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

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

[S]uffering proceeds from the magical action of an enemy, from the breaking a taboo, from entering a baneful zone, from the anger of a god -- and when all other hypotheses have proven insufficient -- from the will or the wroth of the Supreme Being. (p.97) The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

Our Ruling Class Does Too Have a Religion. And How.

Here is the Zman bewailing "The Collapse of Authority." He means an authority that decides things.

The cancer eating away at the modern West is a lack of authority to which people can point to judge public policy, public debate on those polices, as well as the reactions to those policies and debates. As a result, debate has degraded into various camps striking poses, usually by signaling their unhappiness with the pose of other camps in the public sphere. The lack of an agreed upon authority means there is no way to judge the merits of any claim. Instead, it leaves force to resolve disputes.

But the reason that there is no authority is that we deplorables are contesting the authority of the current ruling class's religion. And they are striking back at us, trying to marginalize and eliminate us.

The Zman says that we don't have a religion any more.

In the current age, normal religion has been sidelined, not only as a source of authority, but as a legitimate part of public discourse. Fifty years ago, a public discussion of morality would have had representatives of various faiths to discuss what ought to be according their religions. A century ago those representatives would have provided authority for the current morality. Today, no public debate about moral issues, about what ought to be, includes religion, much less priests or theologians.

To which I say that you just ain't looking hard enough. I take this position from Roy Rappaport, who wrote:

No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion.

 So I say there must be a religion. Because no human can exist, in my view, without a religion, something that declares "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Of course, in our society there are competing religions, and no one religion is generally accepted by almost everyone as the one true religion. I have, of course, explored this question under "Three Peoples Religion." Briefly, we have:

The Religion of the Creative/Educated Class. These people, our rulers, believe in: equality, supervised by them; education, supervised by them; the administration of the economy, supervised by them; the elimination of pollution, supervised by them; the prophecy of the end of the world, due to climate change caused by the sins of mankind. See the New Yorker. "What If We Stopped Pretending?" that completely endorses the ruling class prophecy of the end of the world, because human-caused warming. Anyone that contests this religion is evil, a modern Satan, and must be named, shamed, and ostracized, or worse.

The Religion of the Responsible Class. These people, you and me, believe in one of the Axial Age religions or their modern precipitates. We believe in a world created by God -- or the Big Bang -- and we believe that it works according to laws set down by God -- or learned through the transmission of tradition. We the People are empowered, indeed required, to work out our lives according to the laws of nature and nature's God.

The Religion of the Subordinate Class. These people do not believe they have agency, the ability to direct their own lives. They look for a powerful lord or politician to be their protector. Of course, they may determine, from time to time, that the lord or protector has betrayed them and riot in the streets.

When the Zman talks about the Collapse of Authority I believe he is really saying that we Responsibles have not yet come up with a modern religion that can take on the current lefty religion and its adherents in the educated and creative class. This is illustrated in the failure of "Buckleyite conservatism" which appealed only to Responsibles and did not attempt to win the hearts and minds of the educated class or become the champions of the Subordinate class.

My take is that we deplorables and Responsibles and dissidents need to formulate a new religion that merges the religion of creativity with the religion of responsibility. It would introduce the creatives to the notion of humility, that almost all creative action in this world is doomed to failure and irrelevance, and that certainly no creative activist should believe that just because they believe in something that they have the authority to force the rest of humanity onto their Procustean bed. It would encourage the Reponsibles to step out a bit, to challenge the hegemony of the Creative class and to seek the support of the Subordinates by becoming their patrons.

My belief is that this new religion is suggested in the German Turn from Kant to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Jung. Where Kant starts with the statement that we do not know things in themselves, but only appearances, Nietzsche shows us a clouded vision of what the creative life is all about: that it means getting away from the herd, that it means getting away from hating yourself, that it is hard. Jung shows that the Hero's journey is a descent into the unconscious where you relearn all the lessons that are hidden below the horizon of self-consciousness. Jordan B. Peterson elaborates on the Jungian framework to remind us that the Hero is always a Sacrificial Hero, that sacrifices himself exploring the border between Order and Chaos.

What I say is that the religion of the future is all there, waiting for us to grasp it and prosletyze it. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Now, let us say that our lefty friends are not totally clueless. But, like all creative endeavors, their record is full of disaster and error, and like most humans, they refuse to learn from their errors and disasters.

Really, all our lefty friends have to understand is that creativity is a wonderful thing, except that almost every creative endeavor is a failure, just as nine out of ten business startups is a failure. Every true creative hero understands that he will not end his days in clouds of glory, but in the oblivion of sacrifice, for the true hero is not a Supreme Ego, but a Sacrificial Hero, who dies that others may live.

This is not that hard. Except for the would-be hero.

Lefties: Getting the Hero's Journey Upside Down

I believe, following the logic of my reductive Three Peoples theory, that the tripartite nature of our modern society requires that the elites realize that each of the Three Peoples really does live in a different world, and that the essence of wise governance is to respect that different People will want and need -- and deserve -- the right the live their lives according to their lights.

Of course if you believe, as I do, that the fundamental nature of the creative person is that they must follow the Hero's Journey, first into the underworld of the unconscious and then into the sacrificial role of exploring the boundary between Order and Chaos, between the known and the unknown, then you will understand this. The Hero is the sacrificial Christ-like figure, reprising the role of the Son, like Marduk, Horus, and Co.

The antithesis of the Sacrificial Hero is what John Ralston Saul in Voltaire's Bastards calls the Egoistic Hero. You can see what is going on here. The man that works on the border between Order and Chaos, discovering new knowledge and power, is a very dangerous person. So it is bad enough if he is a modest sort of chap. But if he has delusions of grandeur, then it is Katy bar the door.

And, if you didn't get the point, the 20th century has produced magnificent specimens of the genus Egoistic Hero, from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to Mao and beyond.

Our problem today is that the more influential members of our ruling class, as People of the Creative Self, have institutionalized the Egoistic Hero as the best and most wonderful thing in the world, unless he is a businessman or a right-wing politician.

Creatives of all kinds: artists, writers, intellectuals, activists, politicians, gurus; these are celebrated as the highest and best of all humans and deserving prizes, accolades, pensions, and human material on which to experiment. Every youngster from an educated home dreams of a life of creativity; that is what he has been carefully taught.

But I think the opposite is true. I think that young people should be discouraged from a life of creativity. The truth is that most people should just do the right thing and live lives of wiving and thriving. The whole creativity thing just encourages people to shortchange their life on the wiving and thriving front, and this is a great social danger, because Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

You can see the result of the celebration of the creative life. People are encouraged to think contributing to the economy, finding a life partner, and having children is not all that great shakes. They are encouraged to dream up some creative sexual identity for themselves that is a lot funner than the dull routine of selecting a life partner and being true to her through thick and thin. They are encouraged to spend their twenties "finding themselves" in some yeasty urban safe space rather than getting a job.

The truth is that the creative Hero's Journey is, in great part, an anti-social path, which will probably end in failure and misery. Because many are called but few are chosen. He who descends into the underworld of the unconsciousness will probably disappear forever, mourned only by his mother. Only he who can get through the descent into the underworld and learn its lessons can hope to return to the social world and bestow on his fellows the benison of the wisdom he learned in the darkness of the underworld.

In other words: you really don't want to try out for the Hero's Journey. You have no idea what you are signing up for.

The truth, I think is contained in the notion expressed in my latest American Thinker piece:

The Jungians, guys like Jordan Peterson, say that the crux of all religion is the hero, the Christ-like figure, that sacrifices himself exploring the border between Order and Chaos, between the known and the unknown, so that the rest of us get to the Promised Land.

But our lefty creative friends think that they get to go to the Promised Land, and the deplorables get to be sacrificed.

No, no. True religion is not like that, lefties. Trouble is that, so long as you chaps live like Alice in your Wonderland, so long will millions suffer and die for your conceit and your folly. Because that is what happens when an egoistic activist organizes millions of victims and then fails to deliver, as Lenin and Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Castro and Chávez and Maduro failed to deliver.

Oh and don't forget Barack Obama. He went down to South Chicago for a year to organize the laid-off steelworkers. Only he discovered it was too hard. So he went to graduate school instead.

If you want to be an activist and save the victims; an artist to discover a whole new vision; a writer to describe a whole new world, you should understand that this is hard, much harder than you can possibly imagine.

And at the end of it you must submit to the Sacrifice and become a scapegoat. Because that is the fate of he that toils at the border between Order and Chaos, between the Known and the Unknown.

Notice how that updates the notion of the scapegoat in Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred. In Girard's notion the community chooses a scapegoat as a sacrifice to heal its divisions. In the Jungian Peterson vision the scapegoat offers himself to be sacrificed.

Until you understand that, you understand nothing.

Yes, Secularists Do Too Have Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not making this up.

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

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

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

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

What the Three Peoples Should Reach For

There is no doubt that my reductive Three Peoples theory is as good as it comes. But what should the Three Peoples reach for? Of what should they dream? What should be their goals?

I'm glad you asked that, Senator. The answer is pretty simple. They should reach for what comes next.

Now, for the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, they should strive for responsibility. And there happen to be convenient religions all over the place to help them with that. Evangelical Christianity is one such. The whole point of the religions that emerged in the Axial Age is that they propose a god that does not get involved in daily life like the gods of the Iliad, but set up the world with rules and roles, and you are supposed to live responsibly in the world that god has created for you, or else divine judgment.

For the People of the Responsible Self, the great middle class, they should strive for creativity. It is not enough just to go to work, obey the law, and follow the rules like a good bourgeois. Step out a little! And try something new.

As always, the big problem is with the People of the Creative Self. That's because they think so highly of themselves. I was thinking about this today, as I was reading about the Muslim terrorists that organized the terror bombings of Christian churches and slaughter of "Easter worshippers" in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday. These were not helpless victims, according to Terry Glavin in The National Post.

At least two of the suicide bombers had law degrees. Two were brothers from a wealthy Colombo family, one of whom attended university in the United Kingdom and earned a postgraduate degree in Australia. There were nine of them altogether, eight men and a woman. Most were “well-educated and come from (the) middle or upper-middle class,” Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka’s deputy defence minister, told reporters.

Well, well. Now there's creativity for you! And it is a creative act, to think up and plan a series of terror attacks on Christians and their churches. But obviously it is wrong.

Obviously, also, our Educated Youth has a problem with the problem of good and evil. In fact, one might even start to think that Nietzsche had it wrong when he wrote about the world Beyond Good and Evil. It is precisely when you are starting to think about what lies beyond good and evil that you need to get a grip on yourself about good and evil. Because obviously, some creative things are good, and some creative things are bad.

Obviously the key question here is power. Without power the question of good and evil does not arise. But with power, the question of good and evil does arise, and it becomes more important the more powerful you become.

Nietzsche railed against "the priests" for teaching us to hate ourselves with their notion of good and evil. But I think that it is natural that as people started to throng to the cities that the issue of good and evil should become more salient.

It's just that as we rise even further from mere city life to creative life we do not get beyond good and evil, but even deeper into the question of right and wrong. With great power comes great responsibility, as Ben Parker told Peter Parker, the Spider-Man. Power, responsibility.

Now, we might say that the People of the Subordinate Self have no power, and therefore have no opportunity to do evil. They can, I suppose be the unwitting agents of evil by subordinating themselves to an evil lord, and becoming his agents.

We might say that the People of the Responsible Self have little power, since all they do is follow the rules and act responsibly. But, of course, the responsible course of action is not always so obvious. And as Dickens makes clear in Bleak House, even the lower parts of the middle class like the Smallweeds can lord it cruelly over their one and only servant girl, Charley.

Obviously, when we come to the People of the Creative Self the issue of power and agency becomes overwhelming. The whole notion of Creativity is to hack a new path through the jungle. The new idea might work; it might not work. It might be a good idea; it might be an evil idea.

What is more, there is the temptation to think your idea is a good idea. Of course it is, a good plan, a most excellent plan; it is bound to succeed.

But, in fact the originator of a plan is not the best judge of its potential, or its value. In the marketplace ideas are judged by the market. In crime, the accused is judged by the jury. In politics the politicians are judged by the voters.

Of course, this is nothing new. It is right there in the aphorism of Juvenal: who will guard the guardians?

And so we may say that the People of the Creative Self should beware of power, and accept the verdict of the deplorables. They should turn away the offer of power, to listen to the verdict of the underlings.

It is all very well for Google to cry "Don't Be Evil," but who is to determine how and when Googlers might be evil?

The modern age is really the first era in which the People of the Creative Self have attained battalion strength, the ability to spread real damage. And so it comes to the deplorables to insist that our glorious betters -- the creatives, the artists, the writers, the activists, the generals, the politicians, the geniuses -- establish as their faith the importance of humility, and the need to refuse, and more than thrice, the kingly throne offered by Mark Anthony to Caesar.

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, said Henry Kissinger. And so Jesus, the creative Son of God, must refuse the offer of power over all the kingdoms of the world.

The People of the Creative Self must reach for humility.

It's Too Soon for a "Dissident Right"

Back from Finland, the Zman is thinking about what a post-Buckleyite right should call itself, now that the alt-right seems to have crashed and burned. He wants a "dissident right" to represent a non-blank slate view of human nature and society.

Above all, for him, the right should not be a clean-up crew after the latest lefty eruption of radicalism as most right-wing movements of the last 200 years have been.

What we need to found ourselves upon is English biologist William Donald Hamilton rather than Nietzsche, he writes. Hamilton's signature achievement was to show the limits of "altruism" and actually found Darwin's notions in biology.

Whereas the traditional right assumes that "traditions, customs and institutions are the result of accumulated wisdom."

The dissident right, in contrast, thinks of traditions, customs and institutions as evolved solutions to human organization that are peculiar to a people, because of their peculiar evolutionary arc.

So, students in a high school cafeteria self-segregate by gender race, intelligence, everything you can think of.

This is not the result of accumulated wisdom in the form of custom or the result of tradition. It is not the result of mystical forces like white privilege or social constructs. It is the nature of humans to attract to those with whom they share fundamental connections, which are rooted in biology. Their hierarchical relationships are similarly rooted in their biology. 

So politics and culture must deal with this reality. I think that Jordan B. Peterson was making this point with his famous lobster story.

Only I would say that human society is the result of all of the above: custom and tradition; privilege created by force; and the roots in biology. I would say that religion and culture and politics are social experiments that, if successful, will end up encoded in the biology.

You need both Hamilton and Nietzsche. But you probably also need the failed experiments of the left. Why? Because humans really do proceed through the debris of failed experiments. For instance, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was an attempt to learn the hard lessons of the wars of religion. You need the bloodbath of the 20th century socialist states to become sadder and wiser about Heaven on Earth politics. When will these hard lessons be encoded in the genes? Not any time soon.

I think that the failure of the right has been to concentrate its thinking and its politics on the social and cultural world view of the middle class and to ignore the interests of the workers and peasants of the world. Also to fail to understand what is going on in the minds of the creative class and the left.

That, of course is what my reductive Three Peoples theory is intended to demonstrate. There are people in the world that think and feel like subordinate peasants. Our politics and our economics must accommodate their needs at least to the point that they don't opt for bloody rebellion. But we middle-class deplorables also deserve a voice. Human culture and politics and economics must allow us middling ones to wive and thrive in the way that satisfies us. And the creative educated class deserves to live in their way, as artists, writers, activists, and LGBT, provided they don't pollute the water for the rest of us. Yes, every way of life has its toxic waste. Even artists and writers and LGBT and especially activists.

But. I think a true "dissident right" would focus on the needs of the non-deplorables. We know what we want, but we also want other people, people not like us, to get what they want too.

What do I mean by that?

I mean we should be thinking about what the People of the Subordinate Self want. They want someone that fights for them. They want job security. They want someone to do the thinking for them, provide them with the infrastructure to get an education for their kids, and get training for a job for themselves. And then there are women. I think that we need to do the thinking that will mend the sexual and family chaos that the welfare state has visited on the poor. That means creating a culture that helps women find a partner that will be a decent husband for them and a good father to their children. I feel that this should be done as much as possible outside government through labor unions and fraternal organizations and churches that socialize and raise up people that think of themselves as subordinate and powerless. That's because these community organizations can only thrive if they benefit their members every day. Government and politics seem unable to pull back from failure and stasis.

I mean we should be thinking about what the People of the Creative Self want. Actually, this is rather presumptuous, because, according to the developmental psychologists, we deplorables don't have a clue about the consciousness of the creative people. But I am conceited enough to believe that I can; this is because, I feel, I think and feel along snowy ridges way above the dusty plain of the thought of the People of the Creative Self.

But let us start with what the People of the Creative Self should not want. They should not want to be the saviors of the victims. That's because everything they have proposed thus far for the victims amounts to a Great Reaction to reinstate the worst features of the past. Their socialism is neo-slavery; their welfare state is neo-feudalism; their identity politics, from class to race to gender politics is neo-tribalism. So on the one hand we should damn the creative left to hell with a brutal narrative of assertion that blames them for all the sorrows of the world, and as the culprits for all the crimes of the last century. On the other hand we should neutralize the left's victim politics by offering a positive agenda for the People of the Subordinate Self that helps them integrate into the city culture and economy, on the road to the middle class from victims to responsibles, showing that we care about people like them.

Another thing we need to do for the People of the Creative Self is encourage them into creative lives that are actually beneficial rather than corrosive. I mean by this a narrative that tell the creatives that aspiring to be an artist or a writer is fine and dandy, but it is hard. Society does not owe them a living as a creative artist; indeed all the narratives down the ages tell us that if you want to be a hero, it means being a sacrificial hero, who really gives up his life that others may live. If this hero ends up the dictator or president for life then he is living a lie, the opposite of the hero and nothing but a villain.

In other words, the creative life as political activist is nothing but a lie. We know that for two reasons.

The first is that almost all the political activism of the last two centuries has been a mixed blessing at best and a crime against humanity at worst. I mean by this that the activism for the working class led directly to the white working class dying of despair because the creative class did not teach the working class how to wive and thrive in the city but merely to live on the liberal plantation as slaves or serfs that were abandoned when the political weather changed. Needless to say, any candid socialist politics has led to mass graves and/or starvation. Period, full-stop, end of story.

The second reason is that we now know, almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we need a lot less politics and government in the world than we used to. We humans thrive best in a self-adjusting and self-creating culture and economy that is governed by law rather than executive fiat and the price system rather than administrative regulation. But this is poison to our creative friends because in their dull world view they imagine that political power is the highest and noblest of callings. In this they are a weak echo of the faith of the feudal lords.

Obviously the effort to create a cultural narrative that can lord it over the People of the Creative Self is not going to be easy, but it is essential. We deplorables need to put the People of the Creative Self on the back foot, and develop a good cop bad cop narrative that on the one hand scorches them for their vile activism and reactionary faith in politics, and on the other dangles before them the truth about the creative life that it is not a free lunch but a descent into the underworld and a dangerous Hero's Journey along the boundary between Order and Chaos. To choose the creative life is not to idly "want to be an artist or writer" but to descend into the fearful underworld of the unconscious and live to tell the tale.

You can see that it is far too early to imagine that we can create a "dissident right" and push back against the left. Not right now. There is too much thinking to be done. But we can do it. And the effort to do it starts today.

What I have suggested is not new and untried. It is the accumulation of thinking and understanding among all kinds of thinkers in the past 200 years, of whom the only common denominator is that they are Not Left. They are all, I believe, thinkers that have asked the question: Now What? What is it about the modern age that has changed and how should we humans live in it? The only thing is that nobody has put it all together so that we have a combined narrative that makes sense of the past and its traditions, the present and its challenges, and the future with its unknowns.

It's not that hard, and it shouldn't be that hard to get the left on the back foot and gasping for air.