My Three Theses: Wokism Does Not Pay

 I understand race and slavery through My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

I discussed Thesis One, on slavery, here, and Thesis Two, on racism here. Now let's discuss Thesis Three, that wokism Does Not Pay.

The first question, of course, is to decide what Wokism is, and why our current ruling class believes in it. I discuss this at length in "A Hollow Elite: The Roots of Wokism." I use my analysis of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 to show how life is good for the "cognitive elite" in America and elsewhere in the world with "great careers and merger marriages" -- for the cognitive elite. But life is not so good for the ordinary middle class, what I call Commoners or Responsibles. And not good at all for the lower class. Murray shows that in the white lower class the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. And things are worse in the black lower class.

Murray's point is that the world of Coming Apart is the world made by the cognitive elite, and it's not working for everybody else. I would add, as a Jungian, that while the cognitive elite denies that anything is wrong, it understands, instinctively, that something is wrong. And, I say, that when religious or political believers face this situation they typically do not give up. Instead they double down. And when the believers form the ruling class they have the power to harass, or imprison, or cancel their critics. And they do.

So I say that Wokism Does Not Pay. 

Obviously, Wokism does not pay for blacks. Murray says that to live a happy and meaningful live you have to score on the four ancient virtues: industry, honesty, marriage, religion. Where are the ruling class worthies that are encouraging the virtues in the black underclass? Not a bit of it. Instead they are encouraging a culture of victimism and "we are owed." The supposed anti-racists are encouraging blacks in the racism and ethnic solidarity that is ubiquitous in lower classes. But Black Lives Matter is not an organic black movement. It is an AstroTurf movement of educated-class activists prodding the black lower class into a tribalist racism that prevents blacks from climbing into the middle class.

Obviously, Wokism does not pay for the ordinary middle class, the Commoners. What Commoners need is a fairly free and flexible economy, with inexpensive paths to getting a good job; affordable housing in safe suburbs, good schools, low crime, and good roads. What our cognitive elite has delivered is expensive education, rampant credentialism, expensive housing, war on suburbs, declining schools, rising crime, and light rail and bike lanes instead of new highways.

But whatabout the educated class, the cognitive elite? What do you mean, Does Not Pay? Things are pretty good if you are a credentialed educated person. Very true. But the continued prosperity and glory of the cognitive elite depends on its continued occupation of the commanding heights of the economy and the culture as the ruling class. If there were to be an "insurrection" -- God forbid -- things might not end up very well for the cognitive elite. That is how to make sense of the absurd overreaction to the January 6 invasion of the US Capitol.

In The Ruling Class Gaetano Mosca makes it clear that one of the vital functions of any ruling class is to make sure that its rule benefits the non-ruling class. Otherwise, he thinks, the ruling class might find itself replaced. He has various proposals to make sure that the rulers stay in touch with the needs of the lower orders.

Right now I am in the early chapters of Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. I have a couple of takeaways thus far that seem to be relevant to our current situation.

First, the French were unable to sort out their government finances. The Brits had accumulated just as much debt -- what with all the wars -- but they had a central bank and managed to avoid financial trouble. The French collected taxes through a farm system and the tax farmers were a very strong special interest. Andz they couldn't get it together to create a central bank.

Second, the French knew they had a problem. They had the great intellectuals, from Voltaire to Diderot to Rousseau who were arguing for reform. Then they had government officials like Turgot and Necker that were trying to reform the system from the inside. Schama mentions a mid-level official, an aristocrat, Malesherbes, who tipped off the publishers of the Encyclopédie when the royal council decided to suppress it, and tried in various ways to get Louis XVI to reform.

See the relevance to our own time? We have a problem in government finance, but the current Biden administration is doing nothing to solve it. We need intellectual critics of the current regime, but there are no publicized figures like Voltaire and Diderot around these days. There are no genuine critics that get a hearing in The New York Times. The whole ruling class today seems to be united around the idea that the problem is the racists and white oppressors in the middle class. They instinctively combine to suppress dissent rather than secretly enable it.

Now, with the Frenchies, it didn't do any good to have the Rousseaus and the Diderots calling for reform and the Neckers and the Turgots and the Malesherbes trying to do something about it. They still ended up with the disaster of the Revolution and the dead-end of Napoleon. But our ruling class doesn't even seem to have the suggestion of an intellectual reform movement or officials trying to right the ship from inside.

I don't know what you think, but I'd say that our position is worse. Especially when you consider the educated class's reaction to Donald Trump, who represents, if ever such a thing were possible, an organic revolt in the Commoner class. Our rulers seem to have no idea that they have a problem, and that their rule is fundamentally unjust and harmful to everyone not in the cognitive elite.

I mean, seriously. Donald Trump was a clear a wake-up call to our present ruling class as any ruling class has ever had in world history. And what did they do? They shut their eyes; they turned away; they decided they didn't like his attitude. They gussied up a conspiracy theory that Trump was conspiring with the Russians! Hey! Remember McCarthyism? That's when liberals said it was the worst thing in the world to accuse them of conspiring with the Russians. Shades of the French courtiers that sneered at the shabbily-dressed Malesherbes.

So yeah, ruling-class Wokism does not pay. It does not pay for the lower class that the rulers keep in dependency and prevents from rising into the middle class. It does not pay for the middle class whose interests get pushed aside in favor of ruling-class conceits like climate change, urbanism, and the racist policies of affirmative action and diversity and inclusion.

And ruling-class Wokism does not pay for the rulers either, because sooner or later the plebs will rebel. And that will be the end of the glorious reign of the educated class, the cognitive elite. Just because they were too snooty to let the plebs live in their own way in a couple of things without being closely supervised by their betters.

My Three Theses: Racism Does Not Pay

I understand race and slavery through My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

I discussed Thesis One, on slavery, here. Now let us discuss Thesis Two, that racism Does Not Pay.

Really there should be no need to go beyond the fact of Jim Crow laws in the South of the United States after the end of Reconstruction -- i.e., the military occupation of the South -- after the Civil War.

Why did the South need Jim Crow? Because otherwise people would not discriminate against blacks. At least, not enough.

Yes. Political folk have a real problem with businessmen and employers and corporations. They really don't want to discriminate. It's costly to have racially segregated railroad trains. It is crazy not to hire marginalized minority workers at a lower wage than privileged majority workers -- if it is more profitable. It is annoying to have to send blacks to the back of the bus. It means unhappy customers.

And clearly, the racism in employment since the Civil Rights era, half hidden by a score of euphemisms such as Affirmative Action, Diversity and Inclusion, Equity, and so on, costs money. Because all the HR and race-counting and Human Rights Commission busy work that a modern corporation is obliged to perform is a pure cost. Oh boy, what it would save not to have all those busybody women in HR collecting race and gender data so that the government can use it against the corporation!

But let us not just blame the racists for screwing the economy. Basically all wage and hour laws are put there to stop eevil corporate chieftains from using employees to get the maximum profit out of them, just like Marx said. 

Only, of course, nobody knows what makes the most money. Is it treating the employee as a widget? Is it treating an employee like a human? Is it reducing everyone to contractors with no benefits and no tenure? Encouraging and subsidizing employees that improve their skills? Firing everyone over thirty? Providing extensive benefits from pensions to health insurance? Paying premium wages? Paying low wages supplemented by profit-sharing in the good years?

Basically, I believe, the culture of capitalism is that you are the slave of the consumer. Whatever the consumer wants, and whatever price the consumer is willing to pay, that is final. And then there is trust. The point of trust is not that it is a good thing, although it is. The value of trust is that it reduces costs. That is why diamond merchants are often Hasidic Jews: they have a closed community and trust and reputation is everything, so they can exchange valuable diamonds and have faith that none of their fellow merchants will cheat them.

There is a Science to explain this. It is called the iterative Prisoner's Dilemma. It does not pay to cheat unless you will never see the other party to a transaction again.

This capitulation to the market is hard, very hard, for humans to do because we are all social animals and instinctively look for protection from our kindred and from the people that we know. Capitalism is an utter revolution in social relations that says that you trust those people that are trustworthy. It says that your life and prosperity depends on you serving your fellows, doing things that they are willing to pay for. And the customer is always right.

Racism is the old way, the way of the hunter-gatherer band, the way of the village, the clan, the ethnic ghetto in the big city. And it Does Not Pay.

Next up: We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

My Three Theses: Slavery Does Not Pay

I had a brainwave a week ago, about slavery and race, and I announced my brainwave in a piece at The American Thinker. I call it My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

Oooh look. I already mapped the idea out in "Stop Moralizing about Race, Slavery, Empire" back in January 2020.

What on earth is this idea of Three Theses all about?

Obviously it issues from the first principle of my life, that all my ideas must cut across the grain of liberal ideas, creating confusion. Hopefully, strategic confusion in liberal-land.

But we are bigger than that. We really want to know. Why should we, in the current epoch, have decided to abolish one of the most ubiquitous human institutions, probably dating back to the beginning of agriculture.

Yes, what do the scientists say? Nils Petter Lagerlöf of York University:

The institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development and less often among hunter-gatherers and advanced agrarian societies.

Oh oh. There's a clue. We just emerged from the agricultural age. So maybe there is something about agriculture...

We know all about the Romans and their slaves. They had Triumphs, parades in downtown Rome, to exhibit the slaves and plunder from their successful military -- shall we call them colonial imperialist? -- campaigns.

Don't forget the Vikings, bless their Scandinavian hearts. Sarah Pruitt:

Historical accounts make it clear that when they raided coastal towns from the British Isles to the Iberian Peninsula, the Vikings took thousands of men, women and children captive, and held or sold them as slaves—or thralls, as they were called in Old Norse. According to one estimate, slaves might have comprised as much as 10 percent of the population of Viking-era Scandinavia.

Dublin, Ireland, was the principal slave market in Northwest Europe.

Then there were peasants that actually requested to become slaves. You can read about that in The Year 1000 by Danny Danziger and Robert Lacey.

People also surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress...  [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands...  It was a basic transaction--heads for food.

Oh, and let's not forget the women slaves from Circassia that were sold at Kaffa in the Crimea and distributed to harems all over the Middle East. As I understand the Venetian and the Genoese merchants were very much into that business.

But, writes Max Weber in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, slavery is problematical. Yes, the slave-owner enjoys "a more complete power of disposal over the worker than is the case with employment for wages.:" But there are costs (p.276):

1. Capital to invest in slaves is usually more expensive than "employment of free labor," including the "capital risk" of slave ownership.
2. Fluctuations in the price of slaves, and problems with recruitment of slaves.
3. If slaves can marry, then cost of women and children is borne by the slave-owner.
4. Difficulty in using slaves to operate "tools and apparatus" because of need for "high level of responsibility and... the operator's self-interest."
5. Impossibility of selection, hiring and firing.

Thus, writes Weber, slavery only works where slaves are cheap, with a well-supplied slave market, and put to work in slave plantations or "very simple industrial processes."

Of course, it would be remiss not to mention the greatest slave experiments in all history, the slave state of the Soviet Union, 1917-89, and the slave state of Maoist China, 1949-79. And why did Maoist China take the capitalist road under Deng Xiaoping in 1979? Because slave socialism Did Not Pay. And why did the Soviet Union start "perestroika" under Mikhail Gorbachev and collapse in 1989. I wonder why the noble Commies, devoted students of Marx and Engels, decided to end their experiment in slavery? I will tell you, it is because communism -- i.e., slavery -- Does Not Pay.

This is not to completely marginalize the noble activism of people like William Wilberforce, son of a wealthy British merchant in the Baltic trade, or the importance of the abolitionist movement that helped end the slave trade and thus make slaves a lot less cheap.

And it is not to hide the guilt of Venetian merchants that invented slave plantations on Cyprus to grow sugar cane. Or the Brits that made money growing slave sugar in the West Indies, or the Virginians that grew slave tobacco, or the Southerners that grew cotton with slave labor.

But if slavery Does Not Pay, then maybe we didn't need to have a civil war over it.

Yes, imagine what would have happened if the abolitionist activists and their mostly peaceful protests had cooled their jets? Suppose US had not decided to turn the question of slavery over to a civil war? Suppose our fearless leaders had just ended slavery by buying off the slave owners with 10 cents on the dollar for their slave investments as they did in Brazil and elsewhere. The Brits paid out £20 million in compensation to slave owners in the Slave Compensation Act of 1833 when Brit GDP was about £500 million. That's about 4 percent of GDP. So, in today's money that would cost the Brit taxpayer about £80 billion., Here in the US 4 percent of GDP is about $800 billion. I think that, in today's terms, with $2 trillion infrastructure programs it would be chump change. I bet it would have been cheaper than the Civil War.

Of course, in our day we have reintroduced the voluntary slavery of the Year 1000 where people can "surrender themselves into bondage." We call it "welfare."

Next up: We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.

The Question of George Washington and His Slaves

My line on slavery is the same as my line on conquest and plunder.  Slavery Does Not Pay. 

And that is why we don't have slavery any more. Not because we are moral giants but because we can calculate profit and loss.

But then I read an interesting biography George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father's Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World, by John Berlau.

Did you know that George Washington started work as a surveyor at age 14? His dad had died and the kids from dad's first marriage got all the money. So the father of our nation had to get a job.

When Washington married his Martha, he was marrying money, for Martha was rich from her first marriage. Lots of slaves and all.

Here's the deal: Washington had a few slaves personally, and when he died he freed them all. This was considered a bit radical in 1799.

But the big thing for me was that George Washington, and a number of other slave-owners, had determined not to buy and sell slaves if it broke up the slave families.

In other words, he experienced his slaves as people, rather than commodities. But, when you experience your slaves as people there are all kinds of other issues, like what do you do about slaves that are too old to work.

That is where the Does Not Pay comes in.

The thing about slaves is that while you get work out of them -- if you are lucky -- you are also responsible for housing and feeding them. And clothing them and I know not what. 

OK, here are the details. In his will Washington stipulated after the death of his wife Martha all his slaves should be freed, and that former slaves unable to support themselves due to advanced age or disability should be clothed and fed by his heirs. And he provided for the education of "many of the former slave children." And no slaves were to be sold.

So if you actually care about them as people, they could cost you a bundle.

In other words, as soon as you start to care about slaves as people, Slavery Does Not Pay.

Do you see how free labor might appeal to the business class? If you are a good guy like George Washington the care and feeding of your slaves is going to cost a bundle. But if you free them and give them wages in return for their work then the responsibility for the care and feeding falls on the now-freed slaves.

So now it occurs to me that my line that conquest and plunder and slavery went out because They Do Not Pay has an important qualification.

If you do not care about the Other as people, then conquest and plunder and slavery are cool. If you conquer and kill, nobody cares about the widows and orphans of the conquered. If you plunder the conquered of all their grain, who cares if they all die of starvation. If you enslave the conquered, who cares if half of them die on the Middle Passage, or the voyage from Kaffa in the Crimea to the harems of the Middle East.

But once you do start to care about the Other as people, then everything changes. And all of a sudden the cost of treating people like people starts to come into view.

So you tell me the answer to this moral dichotomy: which is moral, to have people as virtual slaves and thralls and accept the responsibility to look after them? Or to employ them as free labor and just have to worry about the work they do and how much you pay them?

So, in our welfare state we have struck a middle course. We expect people to get a job, but we also look after the people that fall by the wayside. Is that a middle course, or a muddle? You decide.

Here's an interesting way to look at it. Our wokey friends divide the world up into oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors. Makes life pretty easy, don't it? You care about the "oppressed peoples" and the "allies" -- who are people like us wokies. The "white oppressors," whoever they are, can go hang.

Here's my take on morality. It's a lot more complicated than you think.

My Three Theses -- Table of Contents

My Three Theses on Abolition

1. My Three Theses: Slavery Does Not Pay
   
   
2. My Three Theses: Racism Does Not Pay
   
   
3. My Three Theses: Wokism Does Not Pay
   

Commentary

1. Capitalism Ended Slavery
   
   
2. Return to Slavery in Islamic Lands
   
   
3. The Power of Nostalgia
   
   
4. Yeah, Let's Talk About Reparations, Concentration Camps, etc.
   
   
5. Bronze Age Mindset Gets the Michael Anton Treatment
   
   
6. The Weird Benefit of the NYT "1619 Project"
   
   
7. Could Chile's Collapse Happen Here?
   
   
8. Stop Moralizing About Race, Slavery, Empire
   
   
9. The Question of George Washington and His Slaves
   

Stop Moralizing About Race, Slavery, Empire

There's a sweet article at The Federalist by Indian-born Paulette Varghese Altmaier who married a white American:

My two daughters, born of my marriage with an Iowa farm boy-turned-Silicon Valley engineer, were brought up with no sense of racial difference, no focus at all on the fact that half their family was white and the other half was not. 

She thought she was living Martin Luther King Jr's dream. So how come "we face a new brand of racism" with whites required to bow to the shame of "white guilt." And then there's slavery.

Altmaier points out that, if you want to talk racism, the Indian caste system is a good place to start. And slavery was going strong in Africa until the start of the 20th century. And imperialism? Everyone was attacking everyone else and didn't think about it.

So what's all the moralizing about?

Well, I suppose it is the self-congratulation of the modern Educated Gentry that thinks that it created the modern moral world and that but for its educated activists slavery, imperialism, and racism would still rule the world.

Allow me to differ. And yes, I come to this with a Nietzschean attitude that says that morality tends to come along after the fact to justify and formalize a new correlation of social forces.

Slavery? How come that slavery was accepted since forever as just the way things are until about 300 years ago? My answer is that up until 300 years ago a feudal system obtained in which the farmers were helpless before any warlike marauder, and had to subordinate themselves to a warrior caste that would protect them. Nearly everyone was a subordinate farmer. And just a few people were proud castellans and warriors. So serfdom, slavery was part of the way things were.

But when a market system arises, with cities and free exchange and trading, then, in my opinion, people start to realize that slavery does not pay and in fact free labor is much more profitable. Sorry, lefties. No glorious moral apotheosis for you.

Imperialism? How come that warfare and empires and subjugation were normal and ubiquitious right through the agricultural age? And why should imperialism suddenly become scandalous? My answer is that up until about 300 years ago the only wealth was in land and gold. If you invaded the neighbor's land and took his land and his gold, you were better off, and never mind about the neighbor's dead and dying.

But when trading takes over the world, and wealth starts to become "intangible capital" it doesn't do you any good to wipe out the neighbor because you also wipe out his "intangible capital." So, the Brits in India were, from the beginning, interested in trading. The expansion of their empire occurred because they were continually annoyed by some predatory prince raiding their trading empire, of which the Maratha Confederacy chiefs were the principal perps. Plus, of course, when you are an industrial power, what's the point of planting your flag in some fly-blown outpost that is 50 years from developing a modern economy? Raw materials? Not really. You can buy raw materials for money. So, in our modern era, imperialism does not pay.

Racism? Again, in the old days when agriculture ruled the world, it made sense to develop a tribal identity of us against the world. Because your food-growing land was life and to be conquered meant being sold into slavery.

But when trading takes over the world, the possession of food-growing land doesn't matter much any more. People are now organized into religions, nations, and corporations. And what matters is not your race but whether you can be trusted. And now, with the 5-star rating system used for just about everything and everyone on-line, it is your reputation not your skin color that matters. And so now racism does not pay.

But, for a season, the accusation of racism, imperialism, and slavery does pay.

Until we Commoners get a pair and tell the lefties to go take a hike.

But here is the real mystery. Why are our lefty friends so intent upon a Great Reaction, in which socialism is the new slavery, the welfare state is the new feudalism, identity politics is the new tribalism? What is wrong with these people?

Could Chile's Collapse Happen Here?

Here's the thing. "Chile's Collapse Foretells America's If Dems Win." What in the world is wrong with Chile? I thought that since the days of th eevil Gen. Pinochet that Chile had set up a pretty decent free-market economy that was the envy of the rest of South America. But no. Things are not copacetic in Chile these days. Writes Axel Kaiser in the Wall Street Journal about Chile's very own Elizabeth Warren,

The economic pain started with the antimarket reforms of the previous government under Socialist President Michelle Bachelet, from 2014-18. Ms. Bachelet increased corporate taxes by 30%; signed a law banning the replacement of workers on strike, thereby dramatically increasing the costs of labor; increased public spending at three times the economic growth rate; and unleashed armies of regulatory bureaucrats on the private sector.

Of course, I dare say thaat the reduction in copper prices plays a role in this.

Now I am reading Deirdre McCloskey's breezy Why Liberalism Works and you would think, from her, that all good-thinking people know that liberalism, the 18th century Enlightenment one, not the 20th century US version, is the way to go.

But actually they don't. As we know. Because our Educated Gentry are all in favor of race politics, big government politics, gender politics, and canceling anyone that doesn't agree with their secular religion.All over the world.

Now maybe somewhere in Why Liberalism Works I dare say that McCloskey has some winning argument to persuade the Wokies to give it up. But I doubt it. If I had any doubt my mind was made up by the simple notions of Curtis Yarvin in "The Clear Pill."

Yarvin writes that the present ruling class plays beautiful "anthems" -- no doubt on a magnificnt pipe organ -- to the Educated Gentry that appeals to its "ambition, honor, and vanity."

Yarvin's three layer theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients fits moderately well with my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we moderns live in a status hierarchy of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates. When you are a creative the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is all tied up in your ability to do creative, original work.

So the problem with the notion that we should all relax and enjoy it because, Why Liberalism Works, is that there is no "ambition, honor, and vanity" for the Creative Educated Gentry in a minimum government society. Yes, yes. Everyone will be prosperous and happy. But what about the workers, er, gentry? What ambition is satisfied for the gentry? What honor will crown the gentry with fig leaves? What will appeal to their vanity (not that the gentry are vain, oh no)?

Let's take a smart ambitious woman like Elizabeth Warren. Here is a woman that has played the Gentry game to the hilt. She has converted herself from her Commoner origins into a rootin' tootin' Gentry mandarin. She got into Harvard Law as a professor by faking Native American heritage. As a graduate of Rutgers Law School she would never have got into Harvard without the Native American scam.

As a smart ambitious woman she knows instinctively that she is never going to have a top-fight political career humming the anthem of Why Liberalism Works to the Gentry. Or telling the Clients that the trouble with big government is that sooner or later you run out of Other Peoples' Money. No. She's running with her pedal to the metal of Big Government Über Alles.

Or take my Four Laws.

"Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices." Oh yeah? Whatabout the homeless? The children stuck in cages at the border? Let's worry about prices and profits next week.

"The administrative state cannot work because it doesn't have the bandwidth to direct the whole economy." Oh yeah? But whatabout the folks that don't have health insurance? Are we just going to sit here while people die?

"The regulatory state cannot work because of the law of 'regulatory capture.'" Oh yeah? So you are going to let monopolies make obscene profits for ever and ever?

"Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them." Oh yeah? So you are going to put little children back to work in the mines because the education system isn't perfect?

Now I think the problem is even bigger than that.

First is the notion I picked up from the best-seller The Millionaire Next Door. Suppose you are the wife of a businessman that made a nice little fortune with a string of dry-cleaning stores? Whatabout your children? So you send them out into the marketplace at age 18 and tell 'em to work it out? No you don't, because in the world of business many are called but few are chosen and you don't want your kids suffering through the agony of failed businesses and bankruptcy. No, what you do is send your kids to university and get them into nice regulated professions like medicine and law, or you buy them a nice pair of striped-pants for a career in the State Department, where you have to go through years and years of fees and 80-hour weeks before you get licensed to print money.

And then there is the basic fact of politics. First, the political leader is the tribal chief that protects you from pirates and plunderers. Second, the political leader recruits his warriors with the offer of loot and plunder. Got a solution to that age old fact of life?

So when are we going to rise above these wee problems? Next week? Next year? Next century?

Well, I offer hope. Three hundred years ago, people in the west were just beginning to worry about slavery. Then Christian evangelicals like William Wilberforce taught us to be ashamed and we abolished slavery. Then lefties created the biggest slave states in history, the sweeties. But the slave states have kinda dialed down the slavery thing because slavery does not pay, Mr. Gorbachev.

Three hundred years ago, according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash, the lower orders were indeed regarded by all respectable gentry people as rubbish. And if white people weren't slaves, there were plenty of them that were indentured servants. But now they are Commoners. Although the gentry still sneers at them as racist sexist homophobes and deplorables. And along comes Donald Trump to champion the Commoners.

But the problem is that a world with less government and less Studies degrees and less moral lecturing about toxic masculinity and white supremacy is also a world in which the Educated Gentry has less scope for its "ambition, honor, and vanity."

You think that the proud Educated Gentry is going to put up with a world that crimps their style? In fact, as I argue in my Great Reaction series, the Educated Gentry seems determined to take us back to the past, with socialism as a return to slavery, the welfare state as a return to feudalism, identity politics as a return to tribalism, and all the rest of it.

Me neither.

So could the Dems screw the place up like Chile? Of course they could. And they'd blame "greedy bankers" and white supremacists all the way to the guillotine.

That's why I think that a rude crude rootin' tweetin' bigot like Donald Trump who is focusing his program on the needs of the Commoners is a much better prospect than any of the big-government anti-deplorable Democrats.

The Weird Benefit of the NYT "1619 Project"

As you would expect, conservatives have been in the forefront of mocking the New York Times "1619 Project" that proposes that African slavery is the story and the meaning of America.

But I must say that it helped me think a bit more deeply about slavery.

Because it encouraged me to think instead: why should we, in the last two centuries, have been the ones to experience slavery as a scandal, and do something about it?

And it encouraged me to think up a counter-narrative, that we might call the left's "1848 Project" to reinvent slavery as socialism and to create the two biggest slave states in history.

Anyway, now the Wall Street Journal has published a pay-walled opinion piece "The '1619 Project' Gets Schooled," in which it takes the NYT to the wood-shed on the 1619 Project with the help of historians and Trotskyites.

The project's creator, Mikole Hannah-Jones, is proud that it "decenters whiteness" and disdains its critics as "old, white male historians."

It would be funny, if not so serious, that this woman, who has "an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies and a master's in journalism", is so up-front and, dare I say, mindlessly racist.

But, in a way, it is helpful for The New York Times to front such a superficial project, because it makes people like me think about the issue. Why did we, the paragons of "whiteness," abolish slavery?

Was it because of moral superiority of our white patriarchal culture? Was it because of the moral fervor of Christian evangelism in the 18th century? Was it because slavery does not pay, compared to free labor? Was it because the North hated the South and cooked up the slavery issue in the 1850s as a club to beat the South?

Or was it because of popular literature like Frederick Douglass's 1845 autobiography and Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin? Or was it because of black Americans that, according to Hannah-Jones, "fought back alone" against racism?

Whatabout a Brit sailor like William Richardson in A Mariner of England that in 1790 joined a slaver bound for Guinea as Fourth Mate, and spent six months at anchor slowly buying slaves on the Bonny River from the local African chief?

Or whatabout the white slave trade in Circassian beauties from the NE coast of the Black Sea -- sold by their families into slavery -- that were trafficked to harems in the Middle East?

The truth is that, when we construct our historical narratives, whether as a credentialed historian or as a young journalist that "literally knows nothing," we are picking documents to tell a story. Some people want to celebrate the glorious arc of "white" progress; others want to "decenter whiteness." We all pick the items that help us tell the story we want to tell.

My own approach is the notion that slavery does not pay, compared to free labor. So no moral story. Just bottom-line thinking. Just as, in WWI and after, the Germans changed the basic organization of the battle by assigning responsibility downwards from commissioned officers to NCOs because, in the "lethal battlefield" of machine guns and artillery, there was no way for the higher officers to supervise every detail of the battle.

In other words, the world does not change from brilliant strategic thinking. It just reacts to the facts on the ground.

You could have the same argument about labor unions. Some people say that it was unions that raised the wages and benefits of workers; others that it was "productivity" and the simple action of supply and demand for labor. Some people say that it was unions that forced companies to treat their employees like human beings; others that unions make a company so inflexible and uncompetitive that unionized companies just can't survive in the global marketplace.

Hey, whatabout my argument about the welfare state being neo-feudalism? You can argue that the serfs of the old feudal system, abandoned by their lords in the agricultural revolution of the 16th century, voted for a resumption of feudalism in the modern administrative welfare state that tasks the ruling class with looking after the welfare of the workers. So you have the voters of Britain voting for a little more NHS from Boris Johnson rather than a lot more NHS from Jeremy Corbyn. But nobody is proposing to put the responsibility for health care on the shoulders of each individual citizen.

So, is the modern feudalism a step towards slavery? Or what? I doubt if the young journalists of The New York Times would have a clue about that, beyond what they had been carefully taught in our nation's schools and colleges.

Bronze Age Mindset Gets the Michael Anton Treatment

I had no idea that Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) had cracked the top 150 on Amazon. No idea! Right now it is #3,872.

But that is what Michael Anton, of "The Flight 93 Election" tells us in a Claremont Review of Bronze Age Mindset. Anton got his copy from Curtis Yarvin, the software geek that wrote "Unqualified Reservations" as Mencius Moldbug. Of course, Anton has a bit of a struggle with BAPs Nietzschean view of the world. Whatabout a "stable, just, and lasting regime?"

And what exactly does BAP mean by "pirate?" Not, I assume, what they mean in The Pirates of Penzance when the hero got accidentally apprenticed to a pirate instead of a pilot. Hey, accidents happen. But still, this young man discovered, "it is a glorious thing to be a pirate king."

Anyway, I thought a bit about the "pirate" thing, because it really was shocking to read about in Bronze Age Mindset. And then I thought: Elon Musk. There's your modern pirate for you.

Elon Musk is a modern rascal, who is ruthlessly taking advantage of all the government money and investor money going, for solar cells, for electric cars, and even space rockets. But why? I think it is pretty obvious. Musk is from South Africa. If I were a native South African white like Musk I suspect I would say to myself and the world: screw you. Screw you vile hypocritical lefties that pitched me out of my homeland with all your sanctimony about apartheid. Hey, how did that turn out, down the road, with a murder rate at 36 per 100,000, which is positively medieval? So now I owe nothing to nobody. Scew you.

Ditto for any young man in the west today living under the sanctimonious racist twaddle of our globalist educated ruling class.

I was reading a biography of Nietzsche, written in 1940 by a man I respect, Crane Brinton, and it joins the chorus blaming Nietzsche for the Nazis.

And certainly there is plenty in Nietzsche that would suggest things to a Nazi-to-be. So, shall we bury Nietzche because he helped bad people have bad thoughts and so became "the Nazis' favorite intellectual?" Sure, if that's what floats your boat.

But I think that what Nietzsche is saying is that, if you think you can rationally philosophize your way to a stable, just, and lasting political regime you are smoking something. The truth is that the world is a shitshow. There is nothing stable and lasting, and probably if you try to make things stable and lasting you will cause instability. There is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

So, the truth about life, the universe, and everything is that we are winging it, always have and always will.

So, will the pirates of BAP enslave us all and bring on a new Dark Age? Maybe, but I don't think so, and not because I believe that BAP's pirates are any nicer that the pirates of old. It is because the modern era does not lend itself to ruthless political power.

Surely, the lesson of the Soviet Union and Maoist China mean that if they mean anything. The point of Marx was to prophesy that a ruthless movement of political action led by Educated Youth was the one thing needful to smash the bourgeoisie and prevent the "immiseration" of the working class in a new feudalism. How did that work out, Chuck? It was an absolute, pedal-to-the-metal, bloody disaster. Unequaled in history, I dare say.

So what do we learn from the disaster?

I think the lesson is that the modern movement of human rights, of ending slavery, of limiting the power of government and politics says nothing about us moderns being better and moral. It is because all these things assist in human flourishing.

Or, if you want me to get crude, the clunking fist of political power does not pay.

Not only that, but slavery does not pay. It is too hard to supervise, and the slaves don't work very hard, compared to wage labor.

And so, over the last half millennium, in fits and starts, we have entered a new era, where the old rules of power have been replaced with new rules.

Back in the 19th century the Fabians sneered at the capitalists forever asking: does it pay? But, of course they are fools for saying that. All "does it pay" asks is, are you throwing money down a rat hole by doing that? Because if you are, it could be that you are dumb or something.

But that is what the market economy is asking every moment. What is this product, this service worth to you? A lot? A little? More than yesterday? Less than yesterday? And what it means is that most everything can be worked out by the decisions of people to buy or not to buy interacting with other people. No clunking fist needed, but it really helps if you are trustworthy and the people you deal with are trustworthy too.

But that still leaves the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

As men, we can think of it this way. After we have provisioned and protected the women so they can put the next generation on the ground and get it off the nest, what then?

The fact is that men are programmed for adventure. Used to be the adventure of hunting megafauna until we killed them all. Then it was the adventure of protecting our food-growing land from the chaps next door.

So now what do we do? What is there in the world of risk, and adventure, and developing courage, and making a name for yourself?

I don't know and neither, I think, do you. But that is what the young'uns are trying to figure out. When they get it all figured out, I hope that they will go gently with racist sexist homophobes like me. But you never know.

Yeah, Let's Talk About Reparations, Concentration Camps, etc.

The problem with our lefty friends is that they don't really want to have what they call a "conversation." Their idea of conversation is the deployment of catchphrases by activists in ideological combat: words as weapons.

Let's take slavery and reparations. First, slavery.

Slavery was ubiquitious in human society up until the day before yesterday. Ancient Greeks? Slavery. Romans? Slavery. A thousand years ago in Europe? Here are a few words from The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

Welleas, or Welshman, was one of the Old English words for slave -- which showed where the Anglo Saxons got their slaves... Bristol was a slave port, trading with the Viking slave merchants based in Ireland. According to contemporary chronicles, eleventh-century Dublin operated the largest slave market in western Europe.

People also surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine and distress... [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands... It was a basic transaction -- heads for food.

And, of course, plantation slavery started right after the Crusades when western Europeans learned about sugar cane from their Muslim enemies. The first slave sugar plantations were established on Cyprus, were financed by Venetian merchants, and used local serfs and Muslim slaves as labor. I should say western capitalistic slave plantations. It was the beginning of a big business that spread westward to the Islas Canarias and then to South America. The Brits got involved in 1640 when they learned the business from the Dutch and set up slave plantations in Barbados.

And then, sometime in the 18th century, slave plantations started to become a scandal. Why? My take is: partly the populist moralism of the Great Awakening, and partly upper-class resentment of the new slave barons -- think the Bertrams of Mansfield Park -- that were building obscene mansions and pushing their way into the Brit Parliament. Also, I suspect, there is this. Slaves have to be guarded and disciplined with the cow-hide whip -- and fed, and housed. But free labor just has to be paid: must less bother. And, lefty politicians have been glad to take the workers off the hands of the ca-pittle-ists and make them into neo-serfs and neo-slaves in the great plantation -- or concentration camp -- of the welfare state. And then the biggest reason of all. With free labor the ca-pittle-ists make more money than with slave labor. Who knew?

What about reparations? Old as the hills. Back in the day, of course, the whole point of "conquest warfare" was loot and plunder. Reparations was the plundering of a defeated people. And it makes sense because back in the day wealth was equal to land and to grain stores and livestock. So the Vikings would visit the Brits every fall, sail up the rivers, take the grain, kill the men and transport the women and children to the slave market in Dublin. That'll teach 'em.

My take is that loot and plunder -- the noble and woke civilized looting operations of the big government welfare state excepted -- has only become scandalous because it does not pay in the modern world where something like 80 percent of wealth or capital is "intangible" capital, the kind that resides between human ears. And I predict that the days of the welfare state are numbered because it does not pay. Much better to have the workers save for their own retirement and health care. They will work a lot harder than when retirement and health care are managed neo-feudal style in entitlement programs run by the educated ruling class.

That's another reason why concentration camps are probably on their way out. (Modern concentration camps were invented by the Brits, by the way, in the Boer War in South Africa. They were not concentrating the innocent Bantu warriors of Shaka the Zulu, by the way, but the Dutch Boers, who were conducting a guerrilla war against the armies of Britland.) Just look at the absolute waste of the Nazi concentration/labor/death camps. I'd say that if you were conducting a global war for Lebensraum you would want to mobilize everyone in the glorious Reich to produce the sinews of war. And that means mobilize their minds. And who has sharper minds than the Jews? And let us not forget the labor/death camps of the Bolsheviks: the Gulag Archipelago; the White Sea Canal; the Kolyma goldfields.

Sorry, Mao ZeDong and Pol Pot. I didn't mean to insult you guys. You chaps had slavery and concentration camps that were tops. And your famines were the best. Made those white supremacists in Europe and North America look like pikers.

My point is that slavery and concentration camps and piles of skulls are as human as apple pie. The astonishing thing is that we moderns, for all our follies and faults, have come to think of slavery and concentration camps and Trails of Tears as scandalous.

But I do not think our modern ideas indicate a more advanced morality. Not at all. I just think that we are stumbling towards a realization that loot and plunder and slaves and camps are brutally inefficient ways for the ruling class to get rich off the labor of their deplorable subjects. Much better to let creative minds loose and turn responsible wage-earners to their jobs. And just tax 'em at the rate approved by Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Art Laffer according to his eponymous curve.

And then everyone will live happily ever after.

Reparations? I agree with Ryan Bomberger, who identifies as half-white half-black. Let the Democratic Party pay for reparations. They, after all, were the party of slavery, of Jim Crow, of the KKK, of Bull Connor, of the neo-slavery of the welfare state. Let the enthusiasts of the Great Awokening pay reparations, and save their activist souls.

The Power of Nostalgia

One of my Big Ideas is the notion that the left, far from being a progressive force, is in fact a movement of nostalgia, a Great Reaction back to the good old days of perfect community and justice. I suppose that this becomes obvious in the writings of Rousseau and his celebration of the Noble Savage and the opening of his Social Contract: "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." (French: L’homme est né libre, et par-tout il est dans les fers. So, strictly speaking, "fers" should have been translated as "irons.")

But we deplorables would say that the opposite is true. Freedom is not a category in ape society or in hunter-gatherer society. Freedom only gains salience later on. But when?

I know. Let's get all Hegelian and start looking at things through their opposites, in this case, slavery.

Slavery, said someone I read recently, only begins with the agricultural age. Hunter-gatherers, he assumes, did not know slavery. I suppose that is true in the sense that back then in your average dawn raid you would kill all the men and appropriate all the women.

But why not enslave the men and put them to work? I suspect that would be because it was too dangerous. The way I understand it, men did nothing, back in the hunter-gatherer age, except hunt and prepare for war. I don't think that captured men can be trusted to be slave spear-carriers in a hunter-gatherer society where the armed forces are the entire male population. But once agriculture has started and most males are disarmed, or at least not raised as warriors, then you can afford to have subordinate men doing subordinate tasks subject to the overseer and his whip.

But then why does slavery not continue today? Max Weber argued that slavery does not pay in the modern economy. Only when the supply of slaves is plentiful and their price is cheap does slavery make economic sense. Yet clearly in the agricultural age some form of slavery is universal, if we consider feudalism as a form of slavery, where humans are bound to the land of their feudal masters. And feudalism only started to break up when the market economy began to thrive towards the end of the Middle Ages.

 Now, I was reading Trollope's Last Chronicle of Barset yesterday and Trollope had some gentlewomen complaining about the men and their devotion to hunting, fishing, and shooting. Do you see what is going on here? The average gentleman of Trollope is installed in a country estate where all the work of managing the agricultural estate is done by others. So the gentleman may do as he pleases, and what he pleases is to revert to hunter behavior, as a pastime. In our age, we have men that enjoy getting up a workshop full of power tools where they can make things, as the craftsman did in olden times before the invention of machine industry.

So it is perfectly natural and physical for humans without a real job to revert to olden times. Of course we would expect Educated Youth of the 19th century to have a nostalgic regard for the good old days of the feudal estate with its comfortable fixed hierarchy about which any young sprig can imagine himself having a paternal and beneficial role.

So, of course, in our modern era, we should expect a huge Great Reaction among foolish young people. Of course we have the neo-feudalism of the welfare state and the corporate hierarchy: people imagine with nostalgia the good old days of feudal security where people actually "belonged" and the master took care of them. Of course we have the neo-tribalism of identity politics: and the comfort of belonging to the kindred. Of course we have the neo-looting-and-pillage of the modern tax system that takes 40 percent of people's work for the ruling class to reward its supporters. Looting and pillage goes all the way back to hunter-gatherers and jolly good fun it was unless you were on the receiving end.

But I remind you of the advice given in Robert Graves I, Claudius to the Roman emperor by an advisor: trust no-one, not even me. Anyone that lives in subordination to a boss, a politician, a general, or a noble lord, is a hostage. His bread and meat come from the fact of his utility to the power project of his superior. But if his utility should ever shrink, or if the superior should lose the war in his power project, well, it is curtains for his supporters.

Thus we have Marx: "A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers[.]" Well of course, because once the feudal lords were forbidden their private armies they didn't need so many workers on their estates.

Thus we have Hobsbawm and Rudé writing about the "protests" of the agricultural laborers being shed by the farmers when the threshing machines came in.

Then we have Howard Zinn in A People's History of the United States in 1892 where at the Carnegie Homestead steel plant manager Henry Frick "decided to reduce the workers' wages and break their union." Or, as La Wik puts it: "As the mills expanded, the labor force grew rapidly, especially with less skilled workers. In response, the more-skilled union members reacted with a strike designed to protect their historic position." Of course they did.

Or my own experience, when my employer suddenly laid people off in a business downturn. How could they do this, moaned my co-workers, pointing to the employee manual that spoke about how the bosses cared about the professional development of their employees? No doubt they did care, until their business was threatened by losses.

One thing to remember about almost all "protests" and riots is to look for the guys that are losing a traditional way of life, and resorting to politics and violence to maintain it. Call it the Cornered Rat Syndrome.

 If you are a subordinate then you have hitched your star to someone else's fortune. If they go down, then you go down with them.

So, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything must include something about keeping your powder dry, and your skills up to date, and an emergency kit, and a full tank of gasoline, and so on.

Because when the balloon goes up then it is every man for himself, or, in French, sauve qui peut. And every story you ever heard from another's lips is a survivor story.

And, politicians don't care about you. They only care about your vote.

The antidote to slavery, and going down when your boss goes down, is Freedom and Responsibility. It is the notion that nobody is going to be there for you when it really counts. So you'd better take care of yourself and make sure, as much as possible, that you are not a helpless victim, without an option, without a bolthole, without a way out of Dodge.

Or as I like to say, don't be a "little darling" of the ruling class. Because your nostalgia for the Good Old Days is going to kill you.

Return to Slavery in Islamic Lands

Just this week the usually lefty suspects are reporting slave markets in Libya: BBC, Aljazeera, Guardian. The deal seems to be that migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are held for ransom in jails and put to work for no pay. If no ransom is forthcoming, then the slaves are killed.

We've already had the case of Boko Harum kidnapping high-school girls and distributing them to their soldiers as concubines. Not to mention the ISIS policy of using humans in conquered cities in whatever way seems appropriate to the local commander.

Now it happens that I have been doing a bit of reading on the subject of conquest and slavery over the years, and it is obvious that slavery and concubinage were ubiquitous in the good old days. Clearly, in the hunter-gatherer age, a tribe ceased to exist if it didn't have enough young men to defend its territory, and the surviving women and children would be distributed around as concubines and slaves.

Feudal Europe did not have slaves as such, but plenty of people were serfs, and it was OK to enslave non-Europeans and/or non-Christians.

Oh, and let's not forget the women slaves from Circassia that were sold at Kaffa in the Crimea and distributed to harems all over the Middle East.

Then we have the Vikings, who ran a jolly old slave market in Dublin, Ireland a thousand years ago. These slaves would have been Brits captured in autumn raid up the rivers of Britain. And the Vikings also ran slaves down the rivers in what is now Russia.

The remarkable thing about plantation slavery in sugar and cotton, which is held to be the original sin of the USA, is that it became a scandal at all. Because slavery has been ubiquitous down the ages.

Why did plantation slavery become a scandal? Was it because the old gentry in Britland didn't like the jumped-up nouveau-riche owners of West Indian slave plantations of the 18th century and decided to teach them a lesson? Or was it because capitalism and markets really don't like force and subjection?

What is interesting is that the movements opposed to capitalism have all tended to return to slavery and feudalism. The great socialist empires of the 20th century, the Soviet Union and Maoist China, used slavery on an unimaginable scale. And all the big-government schemes of the progressives involve high levels of human compulsion, what I call neo-feudalism.

So it really isn't surprising that the latest reactionary movement opposing modern global markets and freedom, the Islamic reaction, is virulently pro-slavery and is reviving the cultural and economic order of the European order prior to the Peace of Westphalia, that ended the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648.

So that when the Soviets invaded Germany in 1945 they only raped the women for a season, and in Berlin for a month. Oh wait. They sent millions back to the slave labor camps in Siberia.

My point is that there is something about capitalism that finds a problem with slavery, and I don't think it is because "we" are more evolved or moral than our ancestors. It is something more mysterious.

But as soon as capitalism gets pushed back, out come the slavers again, and out come the slave markets.

Why is that? Is it because capitalism rolls back the frontiers of power? Is it simply because slavery does not pay? Is it because under capitalism it pays to treat everyone as a potential business partner? Is it because under capitalism people are focused on making money rather than on accumulating power?

I don't know. But I think it is telling that the Great Islamic Reaction is featuring slaves and slave markets.

Capitalism Ended Slavery

So you think that capitalism was founded on slavery do you?
Here are some arguments
for you to think about.

Capitalism rejects slavery because it does not pay.

And what if you are wrong? Suppose that lefty ideas about capitalism and oppression are wrong and
promote slavery (viz. Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba). What then?