Nationalism, Socialism, Regulation, and One Candidate for Each

I just got my Bourgeois Era, Vol 3, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. And what do I read on the second page of the "Exordium?"

For reasons I do not entirely understand, the clerisy after 1848 turned towards nationalism and socialism... and proliferating regulation for imagined but not factually documented imperfections in the market[.]

What do you think I thought about that?

I thought that today in America we have one presidential candidate for nationalism, Donald Trump. We have one presidential candidate for socialism, Bernie Sanders. And we have one presidential candidate for regulation, Hillary Clinton.

So we have one candidate for each of the reactionary movements that arose in the 19th century to battle against "capitalism."

And who is the one candidate that stands for the bourgeoisie and freedom and God, against all that horrible reaction? Why, the much maligned Ted Cruz, that everyone hates. (Actually, it turns out that Ted made a lifelong friend in college. A black guy from Jamaica, David Panton)

But let's get back to nationalism, socialism, and regulation.

The reason that people hate capitalism so much is that it gives them no place to hide. If your skill starts to decline in value, partly because people in another country can do what you do for less, capitalism tells you to get back out there, train for something else. If you find yourself in adulthood with a wasted government education and you can't even get a job dismembering chickens alongside illegal Mexicans, then capitalism says find a job, any job, at any wage, and learn by doing. If prices shoot up because of a war or a government stupidity and you want the government to control those evil CEOs, capitalism says, get a clue: No government can outsmart the market.

So when Donald Trump says that he will make America great by whacking on foreigners, it seems to offer a way out of competing mano a mano with the rest of the world.

So when Bernie Sanders proposes to hammer the banks and give hard-pressed millennials free college and health care, it seems to offer a way to fight back against the demoralizing reality that the market demands you shape up to it.

So when Hillary Clinton... well, I'm not sure what Hillary Clinton stands for, except that she is a ruling class elitist that proposes that people like her make all the decisions for us. Only we know that the elite educated bureaucrat in Washington DC cannot know what millions of producers and consumers know from the signals of the price system. Settled science.

But why are all these people rebelling against the will of the market? It is because, I think, the natural and instinctive thing to do when the world turns against you is to lash out. See, the point is that if you are a hunter-gatherer and you are all out of food because of weather and animal migration, the sensible thing to do is to raid the neighboring village and steal their food. If you are a farmer and your harvest got destroyed in a hailstorm, then the practical thing to do is go to your lord of the manor, place your hands in his, and enter into slavery and three meals a day. If you are a corporation and your market just dried up because the boss's son screwed the business up, then the sensible thing to do is to go bribe a politician in return for a spot of beneficial regulation from the Clinton Crime Syndicate.

So, of course when capitalism fairly got started in the 19th century reactionary movements of opposition sprouted out of the ground. Capitalism, exchange economy, free market, whatever its name it is a wrenching change from the old ways. And even without the periodic messes from government stupidity, there are always people experiencing decline because capitalism has invented something new that has made their skill obsolete or at least less valuable.

And so we have presidential candidates bidding for the support of the disappointed ones. Some people seek shelter in the nation. Some seek shelter in the collective under some great lord. Some seek shelter in government manipulation of the market. And hey presto, there is a candidate for each reaction, for each lunge for the sweet use of force.

Because when peaceful cooperation fails to deliver the goods, humans instinctively resort to force.

The Whys and the Wherefores of the Factory System

If you are like me your understanding of the factory system that started up with the Industrial Revolution is a mish-mash of history and Marxist revisionism. Yes, the factory system was efficient, but it achieved its efficiency by exploiting the workers. Yes it produced cheap products, but it threw artisans out of work, "de-skilling" the work environment so it could pay workers less. And, of course, it replaced production for use with production for profit, replacing use value with exchange value.

But now I've read Joel Mokyr's review of the factory system in The Gifts of Minerva, and I find I'm not quite sure what he argues. So I figured I better write a blog post and get the whole thing clear in my mind.

Big picture: The industrial revolution was not a finance thing, of capitalists accumulating and profiting. It was a knowledge revolution, an interaction of "propositional knowledge" with "prescriptive knowledge." Some people invent a machine or a technique; the next question is: how or why does it work? Then there is a theory like Newton's mechanics. How can it be exploited into useful products? When you have a world of constantly expanding knowledge and constantly improving technique, people have to get together to compare notes and transfer knowledge.

Now the British economy at the time of the industrial revolution was typically a domestic economy. People usually worked at home. The stereotypical process at the time was the textile "putting-out" system, where entrepreneurs supplied cottagers with machines and materials and paid piece-rates on finished products.

Why then did entrepreneurs change the system to a factory system, where workers had to commute to work and get paid hourly wages instead of work at home and get paid piece rates? You'll be shocked to learn that it wasn't so that they could extract more socially necessary labor and convert use value into exchange value. No, the reason was practical and prosaic. Mokyr comes up with four main drivers towards the factory system.

Fixed costs and scale economies. Many of the new technologies could not work at the scale of a domestic cottage. Many of them represented fixed costs, and the employer had an interest in supervising the workers and maximizing the machine utilization.

Information costs and incentives. Piece-rates incentivize the worker to maximize quantity. But suppose consumers are more concerned about quality? Then the employer will also focus on product quality. Then he will want to bring the work in-house and pay the worker a time wage so he can specify exactly the process to be used and inspect the quality of the product. Also, in a complicated production process it is difficult to "disentangle" the value of the individual contributions of workers. In addition, the new processes required more "team production," such as the continuous flow, or assembly-line production system.

Labor effort. The Marxians argue that putting labor in a factory makes it easier to get workers to work longer hours and increase profits. Alternatively Gregory Clark argues that the factory helps get more effort from workers lacking self-control. There is, of course, an economy of scale in supervising workers at a central location rather than running around visiting their cottages.

Division of knowledge. Mokyr argues that the new factories required a lot of specialized knowledge. How to build them, how to fix them, how to improve the process. "[A]fter 1760, efficient production required more knowledge than a single household could possess." Here we have an interesting counterpoint to the Marxist "de-skilling" argument. The new processes required specialized knowledge. The machine operator or line worker may have needed less skill than the old domestic artisan worker, but could not thrive unless backed up by mechanics, process experts, and specialized knowledge that were constantly adapting to new propositional and prescriptive knowledge.

So let Joel Mokyr sum up:

[A]s long as the minimum competence requirement is small, plants can be small and coincide with households with all the associated advantages; when it expands it will require either a sophisticated and efficient network for the distribution of knowledge or a different setup of the unit of production... Factories thus served as repositories for technical knowledge and vastly reduced access costs to this knowledge for individual workers. (p.141)

In addition, of course, the industrial revolution featured "professional associations of mechanics, machinists, engineers, and skilled workers" which provided communications channels for the propagation of knowledge.

Similar arguments are made regarding the creative synergy of artists' colonies, and the concentration of the IT industry in Silicon Valley. The more you can concentrate people together at their work, the more they can talk to each other and exchange ideas and experience.

And, of course, there is the modern argument that, with the Internet and its efficient communication of information, we can all work at home as "telecommuters" and save the significant cost of commuting.

So there you have it. The factory arose because of the need to bring people together to exchange knowledge and information.

Students Were Wrong in 1962, and Wrong Now

Here is a lefty professor, Jonathan Zimmerman, author of Too Hot to Handle: a Global History of Sex Education, chastising modern students for doing the opposite of the kids that issued the Port Huron Statement in 1962.

Back then students wanted to take power away from university administrators; now students want new administrative structures at the university to implement their agenda for them. In 1962,

Students needed to ‘wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy’, The Port Huron Statement declared. Otherwise, the empty suits who ran the university would drown its emancipatory potential in a sea of bland rituals and senseless rules.

Now students want more bureaucracy in an already over-bureaucratized university.

[U]nlike their predecessors, these protesters demand more administrative control over university affairs, not less. That’s a childlike position. It’s time for them to take control of their future, instead of waiting for administrators to shape it. 

Well, I'd say that the infantilism starts with the idea that politics is good for anything except destruction. The infantilism of the 1960s was the infantilism of left-wing male activists, who wanted to create a dawn-raid-like chaos that appeals to the young male mind, with rape and pillage to follow.

The infantilism of the 2010s is the infantilism of left-wing female activists, who want a mean-girls naming and shaming of everyone not in the lefty mean-girls clique, and if anyone offends the lefty mean girls they get to go into their lefty safe-space kaffee-klatsch, no boys or townie girls allowed.

It cannot be said often enough: the university, down the centuries, has tended to be a seminary for the training of the ruling class's orthodoxy. When fictional Fred Vincy, son of a businessman in Middlemarch, went to university, it was to become a nice respectable clergyman.

But the Germans had other ideas; they made the university into a regime idea factory that would make the state strong. It was one of the seminal ideas of the last 500 years and it has strengthened the state enormously and covered university professors and administrators in money, power, and the love of beautiful women.

In the US we have adapted the German model to make young scions of the elite into "activists" who will advance the ruling-class agenda while appearing to challenge it.

The Port Huron Kids, in the age of "liberal parents, radical children," dutifully advanced the left-wing cause of their parents into new channels.

The Safe-Space Kids, in the age of diversity and hate speech, are also preparing the battle space for further left-wing advances.

But I argue that all these left-wing movements are tearing society apart. Government is Force; Politics is Violence. The end of government and politics is the silence of the grave and grass growing up in the streets. Yet human society is based on the idea of reducing force and curbing violence.

My old math teacher, Commander Bateman, used to complain that math was easy, just based on four rules. Yet everyone thinks that the complexity of the arts is easy, and the elegance of math is hard. Of course, the Commander was dead wrong. The simple elegance of math is the hardest thing in the world.

The same thing applies to capitalism and politics. All capitalism asks is that we all observe a simple principle. Find something useful, that other people will pay money for, and do it. Easy? Not at all. Grasping its simple elegance is the hardest thing in the world.

The whole effort of politics and government is to short this gentle idea with the mailed fist of force and the hurricane winds of political discord. People will be made to pay for my support and my security, or the lefty students thrilling to the fantasy du jour will know the reason why.

It is scandalous that we the people have not put an end to this madness that threatens our society and the safety of our children and the generations yet unborn.

It is even more scandalous that we have not even begun to fight.

Human Orgasm vs. Human Love

Once is happenstance. That's what Goldfinger told James Bond back in the day.

So it must just be happenstance that I encountered on the same day two articles that spoke about the intersection of love and sex.

First, let's talk about the Death of Rock around 1960 when, Brent L. Smith tells us, the powers that be decided to kill the racial mix and orgiastic combination that was the rapidly metastasizing rock-and-roll scene. They did it with the payola scandal, that ruined the career of disk-jockey Alan Freed. He quotes Bob Dylan:

I was still an aspiring rock n roller. The descendant, if you will, of the first generation of guys who played rock ’n’ roll — who were thrown down. Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis. They played this type of music that was black and white. Extremely incendiary. Your clothes could catch fire. When I first heard Chuck Berry, I didn’t consider that he was black. I thought he was a hillbilly. Little did I know, he was a great poet, too. And there must have been some elitist power that had to get rid of all these guys, to strike down rock ’n’ roll for what it was and what it represented — not least of all being a black-and-white thing.

Then Smith goes on into Norman Mailer descanting about orgasms. So you can see the incendiary mix that rock represented circa 1960. Race and youth and sex. Any ruling class would probably want to put a damper on it. Because the whole point of human society is to control sex, Virginia, so that the men don't kill each other off in sexual competition.

Oh, and so that women can practice love. Because there is another side of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Women get treated like sex objects.

And that is rather thoughtfully communicated in a piece  by M.D. Aeschliman about Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein, born in 1797. Mary Shelley was the daughter of radical lefty William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft -- of A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

[Mary's] mother was the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, like Godwin an opponent of marriage as “the grave of love,” but who had nevertheless persuaded him to marry her for the sake of their child[.]

In 1816 when Mary wrote Frankenstein she was the mistress of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the radical circle that included Lord Byron, of whom it was said he was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Shelley married Mary in December of 1816 and she had four children by him, of whom one survived. Life was not easy for a woman in those free love circles. One of Mary's children at least died of neglect on Shelley's part as his radical clique bucketed across Europe. Then we have the testimony of Claire Clairmont, only discovered in 1998.

Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, one of Byron’s many lovers and the mother of one of his illegitimate children, accompanied Mary and Shelley on their elopement to Switzerland and subsequently formed part of their household in England, Switzerland, and Italy. As Daisy Hay points out, Claire left an autobiographical manuscript about Byron and Shelley that was discovered only in 1998 in a collection of letters now owned by the New York Public Library. It vindicates Tom Stoppard’s clever but profound insight that “What free love / is free of / is love.” Claire, William Godwin’s stepdaughter, had been part of his London circle, and in her manuscript she looked back on her relations with Shelley, Byron, and their friends, wishing to demonstrate “from actual facts what evil passion free love” caused, “how it abused affections... into a destroying scourge,” and “what victims it immolated.” “The worshippers of free love,” she went on, “not only preyed upon one another, but preyed equally upon their own individual selves” and turned “their existence into a perfect hell.”

Now, I like to say that men are fighters and women are lovers. And my further insight is that the big problem for society is to promote the safe practice of woman's love.

The sexual revolution, which occurred for rich bitches, male and female, at the turn of the 19th century, was experienced by your F. Scott Fitzgeralds in the 1920s and by the ordinary American middle class in about 1960. That is what Brent L. Smith is writing about. Bliss was it in that morn to be alive / To be young was very heaven.

Yeah. Actually, it was great for young men, but not so great for young women, as Claire Clairmont reminds us.

Nor, I think we can say, is it so great for the special snowflakes in college in 2016. Because the rules of the sexual revolution are that sex is free and without consequence. But the rules of the female heart are that love is forever, and that is what the snowflakes are complaining about. They give their bodies to the local yokel in college and then get angry weeks or months later when they come to resent that their love has been tossed aside like a used condom.

Of course young women get. Mary Shelley or Claire Clairmont could have told them that two hundred years ago. But I suspect that the solution is not anything on offer from the left. And that is the real tragedy of the sexual revolution. Because the sexual revolution, especially for women, turns "existence into a perfect hell."

Did Anyone Ask the Poor What Education They Wanted for their Kids?

I was reading a piece from a pro-home-schooling site recently. This particular site is strong on self-directed learning, letting the kids figure out what they are interested in and letting them get on with it: "Having a set curriculum is so last-century."

Which is fine when you are a whip-smart Jewish mom and your kids are smarter than average smart Jewish kids. And it makes sense for the folks I call the People of the Creative Self. That's why education in general has been genuflecting towards the idea of an education in creativity. Our ruling class believes in creativity and so it believes that everyone else should too.

Back in the day the ruling class had different ideas. The French revolutionaries wanted government education that dished the Jesuits. The Prussians in the Napoleonic War wanted government education that raised up soldiers and an economy that could dish the French. The Brits started out opposing the education of the poor. In the US the Boston Brahmins in the 1830s wanted a state education that would cure the Irish of their Catholicism.

But by the end of the 19th century everyone agreed that education should prepare children to be obedient factory workers, and in this they had a point because research shows that it is extremely difficult to socialize post-pubertal men to factory discipline. It takes violence, just like it did in the good old days of the slave plantation. Or, to put it more gently, it takes basic training and drill instructors.

Of course since then the ruling class has decided that its scions that don't want to take their places in the establishment should all be creative artists, and so they have adapted the west's education systems to suit.

A creative education makes sense for the People of the Creative Self. But what about the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary job-holding middle class? I'd guess that they would be wanting more of the old-time system: start with the three Rs, and then add in other useful arts that will help in the entry to the job market and the graduation to becoming a responsible citizen.

But what about the poor, the folks I call the People of the Subordinate Self? What do they want for their children? Has anyone ever asked them?

The only thing I know about the poor and education is anecdotal. I know about oversubscribed lotteries for slots at places like the Harlem Success Academy. I know about DC Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee getting fired for trying to get the teachers to work harder. I know also that the government schools serving the poor are the worst around.

Seriously. What do the poor want for their children? Do they want a baby-sitting service? Do they want discipline and the basics? Do they want jobs for teachers? Do they want their children to climb up into the middle class? Do they want to keep their kids out of gangs?

When you ask these questions you come to realize that, in the public square, we don't have a clue what the poor want in the education of their children.

And I think that's a shame.

Can We Teach the Corporate Elite Before it is Too Late?

I had always assumed that the US corporate elite were apolitical, and the reason that they slewed liberal was just taking care of business. If you are Warren Buffett with your oil trains you chime in with a call for tax increases because that's how you buy protection from the liberal ruling class.

But now comes David French to tell us, in the wake of Paypal deciding not to invest in North Carolina because the state doesn't like men in women's bathrooms, that the corporate elite is not liberal out of prudence but liberal out of conviction. He writes:

The business world’s turn toward progressivism is the result of peer pressure, not market forces. It reflects the personal values and interests of the corporate world’s liberal elite, not the values and interests of the country as a whole. Apple, Disney, and PayPal fish from the same cultural and academic pond as the elite media and elite universities. When I was at Harvard Law School, my classmates were recruited not just by top law firms but also by top consulting firms and multinational corporations. Very few of them were conservative. Barely any of them were social conservatives.

So it's war.

But before we open hostilities, let me tell you corporate barons how insulated and narrow-minded and bigoted you are for falling in with the left's cultural and religious orthodoxies. Maybe some of you will see the light.

Oh, and if you don't understand that leftism, progressivism, whatever, is a religion, and just as bigoted as the bitter clingers of Obama's report, then I have a bridge to sell you, cheap, because you look like an easy mark.

The central idea I want to get across is that enthusiastic Christianity, fundamentalism, the sawdust trail, whatever you want to call it, is the royal road to the middle class from the victim culture of workers and peasants. Hey, I even wrote a book about it, The Road to the Middle Class. You could start at Chapter 1.

What is the point? The point is that, to succeed in the industrial, capitalist age, people need to lose their age-old submission to fate and the local warrior lord, and take responsibility for their lives. Here is what a commentator said during the Great Awakening in the 18th century when a ton of people in the Anglosphere were doing just that.

When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.

Do you see that progressivism is the opposite of this? It says, oh, you poor victimized dears. There is no hope for you in this cruel and unjust world. Just vote for us, the progressives that care for you, and we will right your wrongs and feed you entitlements forever.

How did that work out for the white working class that got good jobs at good wages thanks to progressive legislation that empowered unions? It ended up with the extinction of the unionized corporations and the good jobs at good wages. And the extinction of the white working class in drink and drugs.

I call this "little darlings" syndrome. If you ever sign up to become the little darling of the ruling class you end up like anyone that cuddles up to a sugar daddy. You end up thrown away for something younger and sexier. How do you think it is working out for African Americans, one of the latest little darlings of the liberals? Even Al Sharpton is discouraged after seven years of a black president.

Hey, CEOs, that you be you! If you get in bed with the government, taking its subsidies and it set-asides, it could all end in tears. Do you ever wonder what will happen when it is politically convenient for the government and the ruling class to dump you and loot you?

Yes, but what about gays and trans and women and minorities?

Well, I have developed a reductive theory to 'splain it all so that Lucille Ball's Lucy character could get it. I call it Three Peoples theory.  Here's how it goes.

Throughout most of history, humans have lived as People of the Subordinate Self. They knew that the world was stacked against them unless they became the client of a powerful patron, such as the village Big Man or the lord of the manor. Even the heroes of The Iliad knew that they were merely the playthings of the gods on Mt. Olympus. But then came the Axial Age religions which advanced the idea that gods were predictable lawgivers. Follow the divine law as a responsible individual and you could go to Heaven. Notice that this applies across Hinduism (get reborn as  Brahmin for good behavior) and Judaism and Christianity. As Nicholas Wade writes in The Faith Instinct, it is a really powerful idea to say that, even if bad guys get away with it in this world, don't worry. Because there is no escaping divine justice after death in the next world.

So the people that bought into the new Axial Age religions became People of the Responsible Self, and they tended to live in cities and engage in trade. That makes sense, because when you are in business, you are in the responsibility business. But most people still lived out on the farm, subject to the vagaries of the weather and the local lord.

With the growth of capitalism in the last 500 years, almost everyone has had to come in off the farm and live in the city. This movement has been marked by notable religious revivals. The Reformation, that centered in the commercial Low Countries. The Puritans in 16/17th century England. The Great Awakening at the dawn of the industrial age. Did you know that the Second Great Awakening centered in the "burned-over district" of upstate New York where the cheap transportation of the Erie Canal had suddenly awakened the population from the sleep of ages?

Yes, but that was then, this is now. Well, now we have the People of the Creative Self. We creatives don't just want to be responsible, we want to make a mark with original and creative work. So we celebrate the courage of the rebel, in business, in culture, and in sex. We celebrate this, the People of the Creative Self. But not the rest of America.

And this is my point. If you are a truly advanced and evolved and compassionate person you will recognize that the creative life is not for everyone. Most people still want to live responsibly under rules, or subordinately under powerful patrons. And the laws should reflect this.

Back in the day advanced progressives said that it was cruel to chuck the working class into the capitalist crucible. They ought to be allowed to maintain their authentic working-class culture, and the state ought to honor this. In other words, if People of the Subordinate Self were not ready to enter the capitalist world of the People of the Responsible Self they had a right to stay where they were, and the laws should recognize this right.

But now the People of the Creative Self are saying that if you don't bend the knee to our creative culture that celebrates all kinds of genders and life styles then you are a bigot and we will name and shame you back to the stone age.

I don't think so. And you corporate chieftains had better get evolved and compassionate on this and step out of your Creative People bubble. Because the culture of progressives and their political correctness and their social media naming and shaming of anyone that dissents from the liberal line is narrow, and cruel, and unjust, and flat-out bigoted.

Progressivism celebrates the People of the Creative Self; it patronizes and manipulates the People of the Subordinate Self; and it anathematizes the People of the Responsible Self.

And two wrongs out of three don't make a right.

Silencing the Opposition Means Your Side is in Trouble

A defining characteristic of the Obama era is the widespread adoption of the president's advice to argue with your neighbors and "get in their face." And so on.

Actually, that's fine in an election; an election is a show of force, a contest to see who has the biggest army of voters behind him or Herself. The trouble is that the president continued his robust rhetoric into his presidency, and his supporters have followed his lead.

First we had partisan stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank bills. Then we had the IRS harassing Tea Party groups. Now we have Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse calling for prosecution of climate change critics using the RICO laws that were designed as a tool to break up organized crime syndicates. And we have state attorneys general going after ExxonMobil for misleading investors and the American people about the dangers of climate change 20 years ago. And they are also going on a fishing expedition after CEI, the Competitive Enterprise Institute. And that's not to mention the harassment of social conservatives that don't want to get with the latest gender-bending fad.

See, whatever the actual issue, whether climate change is the defining issue of our time or just a liberal fantasy, or whether gay and transgender rights are a fundamental human right of just liberal folly, liberals are making a fundamental mistake here.

If you decide to resort to intimidation and punishment-by-process in your issue advocacy, then you are conceding that you are not winning in the court of public opinion. You realize at a gut level that you are losing the argument. You have concluded that only the clunking fist will get the job done. In fact, you are starting a war.

Now our liberal friends insist they are all in favor of peace and justice except for the occasional peaceful protest designed merely to raise public awareness about an issue. In this faith they are probably as delusional as the European colonialists that rationalized that their colonies were beneficial to the backward "natives." What a benefit western traditions of public administration and law were to the people of India!

I have argued this week in the American Thinker that liberals are delusional when they think that their activism is merely a helping hand for the traditionally marginalized. No it isn't. Liberal activism is the power play of the scions of the rich and powerful. Liberal activism is a problem. It tries to turn every issue in America into a political issue, and thus into the moral equivalent of war.

Let us ask our liberal friends what might be the problem of turning every problem in America into a moral equivalent of war. Why, our liberal friend's answer would be immediate if we were talking about the Cold War. The problem is Escalation. Yes. Once you set up conflict between two parties there is always the danger of escalation.

There is also the little problem, as Glen Harlan Reynolds points out, that conspiring to deny Americans their constitutional rights is a crime.

The great problem of the modern age, in my view, is that it has reduced the need for warrior monarchs, warrior marcher lords, and warrior dawn raiders. The logic of the post industrial revolution era is that nearly all things can be resolved by market relationships, based on the profoundly social impulse to make yourself useful to your fellow humans by offering products and services on the global market. The fate of the world need not be decided by feats of arms or even entitlement programs. It can be resolved by peaceful cooperation.

But this is too radical for our hunter-gatherer brains to grasp. And there are plenty of people who want the excitement and the danger of moral war that excitingly verges towards actual war. Thus the liberal activism culture.

If that were the end of the story, there would be no hope for us.

But the saving grace is that power makes you stupid. The whole point of power is to be able to ignore feedback, to silence the opposition and respond with a clunking fist. But clunking fists, like incoming mortar rounds, tend to concentrate the minds of the recipients wonderfully. And when you silence the opposition, and force them to keep their heads down with your mortar rounds, you do not know what they are thinking.

And sooner or later the grateful recipients decide to stop thinking about their problem and decide to do something about it.