The Fundamental Error of the Left

I went to a neighborhood dinner with a bunch of liberals, and they all knew the hits on Trump. So they are empty headed idiots. I lunched with a liberal friend a couple months ago and she asked about "hate" and "xenophobia." So she is repeating the liberal pejoratives du jour. I lunched with another liberal friend and found, as I expected, that she is engaged in the First Woman President thing, just as she was proud of the First Black President thing back in 2008.

All very innocent. But then you get the woman novelist, Lionel Shriver, that argued against the sin of "cultural appropriation" at a writers' festival in Australia and set off a storm of controversy.

This is not going to end well, writes Kurt Schlichter. Remember the guy in the Rockwell "Freedom of Speech" painting? You can tell he is supposed to be an ordinary young working stiff, standing up in a meeting to speak his piece to the approval of the older men around him. That was then; but today liberals are all against freedom of speech by working stiffs.

You see, to liberals, what our guy has to say isn’t important – what’s important to liberals is to shut him up. It’s to punch down upon him with cheap mockery so he’s beaten into submission. It’s to use shame to silence him and every other irredeemable deplorable in order to consolidate their progressive death grip upon America’s throat.

The problem is that liberals have convinced themselves that they are the good guys and the white working stiff is deplorable and irredeemable. And naturally, if these people are racists and sexists it is one step for liberals to give themselves permission to use force to shut them up and deny them the right to participate in politics.

They think this way because they believe that the way to a just and peaceful world is through politics and activism. Therefore anyone that opposes them is evil and should be suppressed.

There is a fundamental error here, and it is this. You cannot achieve justice with politics. What you can do, you hope, is to avoid civil war with politics. You can give people the notion that they have a voice, that their grievances will be heard, and that the most egregious outrages may be redressed. That is all.

Politics cannot create a heaven on earth, or anything close to it. Anyone that thinks that politics and government programs are solving anything has got a screw loose. The reason is simple. Politics is division; government is force, and force is the sharp end of injustice. So when you use government to correct injustice you are using the very weapon that is used to create injustice. You are diffusing one head of rebellion and creating another.

The whole point of the constitutional age of Montesquieu and the Federalist Papers back in the 18th century was to figure out how to create a government that could do the basic things needed, like keep the peace and make the state strong enough that it would not attract the attention of international predators. But they wanted to make it really hard for any group to make the state and its power into their personal power project and force its agenda on the rest of the nation.

And the first thing that happened after the US Constitution was ratified in 1787 was a demonstration by the French, starting in 1789, as to why good constitutional institutions were such a good idea.

Because the French had a revolution that spun completely out of control and ended up in a Reign of Terror. Worse than that, it got France into a war that ended France's centuries-long reign as the top dog in Europe.

What happens in a Reign of Terror is that government gets really interested not just in punishing wrong actions but punishing wrong thinking and wrong speaking.

Yes, but why? Why do these lefty revolutions always end up in a Reign of Terror, or a Great Purge, or a Cultural Revolution? I will tell you why.

A new lefty government thinks that its enlightened program of government spending and taxation, of forcing Adam to pay for Bruce, will work and create justice and equality. But of course it doesn't because the economy is much too complicated for a government bureaucracy to make sense out of it. So the program starts to go off the rails.

But how could this be? It was formulated by the best minds and executed in exact detail. How could it go wrong? The answer is obvious: saboteurs and wreckers, opponents of the regime that are trying to destroy it. It couldn't be anything else.

Actually, settled science says that socialism can't work because it can't compute prices, and administrative government can't work because 10,000 bureaucrats can't out-think 1,000,000 producers and consumers: there just isn't enough bandwidth. Well, it would be settled science if liberals and lefties weren't in denial. Actually it isn't really denial, it is faith, the leftist faith in politics and activism and government. That is the problem.

My judgement is that the current leftist program of intimidation and punishment of thought-crimes, calling out Trump voters as deplorables and irredeemables, is a sign that liberals know their program is going off the rails. If the program is going off the rails, there can only be one reason: racists and sexists are wrecking and sabotaging it.

Give it up, liberals! Your program is rubbish! Yeah. If only.

The faithful believers never give up after falling at the first fence. They call for another mount and continue; they know that they are going to win. Because after all, everyone agrees that leftism is the only way to bend the arc of history towards justice, and government is the name for things we do together.

Yeah. Maybe so. But the weight of government force bends the minds of men towards rebellion. Unless the mind of government lurches towards terror. That's what Mao and Chou discovered in their guerrilla Red Base in the 1930s. If they relaxed their terror, the people that they had taxed and enslaved would start combining against them. So the only way they could keep their non-popular government going was with terror.

And that is what liberals just do not understand. Unless they are on the receiving end of, e.g., George W. Bush. Then they get it.

The Post-Conservative Right

Over in Britland the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, spoke at the Tory party conference about what the post-Brexit Conservative Party would be all about.

Just listen to the way a lot of politicians and commentators talk about the public. They find your patriotism distasteful, your concerns about immigration parochial, your views about crime illiberal, your attachment to your job security inconvenient. They find the fact that more than seventeen million people voted to leave the European Union simply bewildering.

And the new party would be a center party.

Time to reject the ideological templates provided by the socialist left and the libertarian right and to embrace a new centre-ground in which government steps up – and not back – to act on behalf of us all.

And so that would still mean big government.

Supporting free markets, but stepping in to repair them when they aren’t working as they should. Encouraging business and supporting free trade, but not accepting one set of rules for some and another for everyone else... [provide] security from crime, but from ill health and unemployment too.

So the new Tory party in Britain is shaping up pretty well the same as the Trumpian GOP in the US. Of course it is, because it is trimming its sails to the same political winds.

Why? It is because the left is driving the white working class out of the leftist parties both in the UK and the US.

The reason for this is the same both in the UK and the US. The left has tired of its white working class little darlings, and now is leading a new tribe of victims -- minorities and women. And gays, and Muslims! Yeah, you tell me how the left is going to square that little circle.

It's easy to sneer at the parties of the right and ask why they didn't rope in the white working class a generation ago. The answer, of course, is pretty simple. The right is not out looking for voters to bribe with offers of shining sparkling free stuff. That is because the right is not that interested in power.

So the right wasn't thinking about abortion and school prayer back in the Sixties. In fact Ronald Reagan as the governor of California signed divorce and abortion laws.

But when the Christian Right revolted against Roe v. Wade and the left's war on religion it had only one place to go. The result is that the GOP is now not the country-club party of the houte bourgeoisie but the pro-life family party of the ordinary middle class.

Now the white working class is coming into the GOP out of the political wilderness. And the GOP is changing to accommodate the new arrivals, becoming more nationalist and less libertarian. Frankly, if I had my druthers, I would like more libertarian and less nationalism. But that is water under the bridge.

Over a century ago in Britain, Benjamin Disraeli tried to rally the working class to the Conservative Party with his "Tory Democracy." Something went wrong there, and the working class went Liberal and then Labour. But now it looks like, a century and more later, the working class in Britain is giving the Tories a look.

Of course that is because the white working class is not really working class any more. It is solidly middle class and wants what middle-class people want: the chance to work and to wive and thrive without having to truckle to the lord in his manor or the political boss in his Chappaqua compound.

Michael Barone has written that the Republican Party has always consisted of people that think of themselves as "typical Americans." When you look at videos of folks attending Trump rallies that is what you see. Just ordinary typical Americans rallying to the notion of making America great again.

And that, to our liberal friends, is a triumph of hate and xenophobia.

Hey Globalists: Here is Why Your Program is in Trouble

If politics is division, then how can you get people unified?

Simple. You fight a war.

The nation states of Europe solved a problem. How do you stop the feudal nobles from squabbling with each other? Answer: you disarm the nobles and unify the people to fight wars with other nation states.

This was all very well, but it led to the two World Wars in the 20th century.

So the global educated elite decided to marginalize the nation states and erect supranational and global institutions to supervise the nations.

The way the elite has done it is by getting the sub-nations -- the races, sexes, and classes -- to fight with each other. Then the global elite can divide and conquer, and rule over all. Thus George Soros funds Black Lives Matter to rail against the police, because racism, as I wrote at AT last week.

But the classical scholar and failed British politician Enoch Powell argued that this won't work. The European Union could not work because there was no European demos, no self-identified European people.

That is a problem, because, see above, the only way to create a European people that would feel loyalty towards European leaders would be to get them into a war. With who? Russia? The Middle East?

You can see that the global problem is even bigger. How in the world do you create a global demos, a sense of the whole human race here on Earth. How do you rally the people of the Earth for a global unifying war?

I suppose that is what Maurice Strong's war to save the world from climate change is all about: rally the people of the world to fight the existential peril of global warming.

However, I suspect that the peril of global warming is not really direct and immediately threatening enough to rally the people of the Earth to the global banner, although my liberal neighbor around the corner sighs frequently about "global warming." All the globalists are doing is dividing people without having a practical program to unify us.

Anyway, the globalist program seems to be running into trouble over immigration. Ordinary people seem to think that the job of their ruling class is not to mix all the people of the world together, but to defend and protect their own homeland from the immigrant hordes. You can see that people are merely responding to the age-old territorial imperative. A group of humans, just like a group of apes, must have a territory to call its own, because the group needs territory with food on it in order to survive, and the men in the group must defend the territory from invaders that would take territory and its food -- and women -- from them.

Now, of course, in the modern era with capitalism the existential necessity of territory with food on it is not so pressing, because in the capitalist world everything is for sale. You do not grow your own food; you buy it. Exhibit A: the outer harbor at Vancouver, BC, which always features about 15 grain ships waiting to go upriver to load up on good Canadian grain and transport it across the Pacific Ocean to ports unknown.

However, not everyone has bought into the capitalist proposition. The principle of loot and plunder is still very much alive: witness the western nation state that plunders its people of 35-45 percent of their income to reward its supporters. And in the immigration waves of the last century or so, each immigrant group has set up quasi-states in the cities where the writ of the host government does not work. For instance the 19th century Gangs of New York, the Mafia, the Crips and the Bloods, and now the Latino gangs and Muslim no-go areas. These gang-ruled areas are beachheads of an immigrant army, and they are governments in everything but name: they occupy and defend territory, they tax, they reward their supporters. Up to now the immigrants have tended to learn how to thrive in the capitalist economy and abandoned the gang culture when they learned how to connect with the new culture.

Today the people of the western nation states are experiencing the globalist-sponsored groups, from Black Lives Matter to the Muslim no-go areas, as an existential threat to their national cultures and national homelands and personal safety. And they are right. The whole purpose of the globalist program is to pierce the shell of national sovereignty to rule through the nation state down to the local level. The globalists want to destroy the nation state.

But the gaping error of the globalists is that they have not created a globalist culture to replace the nation-state culture, a new form of belonging that can stir the hearts of men and women in a new, expanded notion of solidarity, a new place to belong. Why? I'd say because the globalists are secure in their own culture of jet-setting globalism. Everyone they know is content to belong in the global village, and they are all with the globalist program. So why are the rubes rebelling?

Well, the rubes are rebelling because they are afraid. And they should be. The globalists, like all politicians and leaders down the ages, are clueless, and they are using the peoples of the nations as cannon fodder for their globalist project without dangling some promise of loot and plunder to entice the peoples of the nations to support them.

In my view the nation state, bad as it is, remains the best thing on offer for the protection of the ordinary people of the West. That is the immovable object into which the irresistible force of the globalist project is crashing.

Hey! Why Not Lend Your Pension Money to Fund Government Infrastructure?

The governor of the State of Washington and the premier of British Columbia just met, according to the New York Times. And what do you think they talked about as a way to tie Seattle and Vancouver into the Next Big Tech Corridor.

They proposed a $30 billlion high-speed rail link.

Oh great.

But the Euros have a better idea. According to Phil Gramm, once a US Senator from Texas, since the Euro governments are all tapped out, debt-wise, they want to tap the insurance companies to fund infrastructure investment.

Oh great. If I were a Euro I would go straight into the streets to object. Because if they don't the governments will spend their retirement savings on climate change boondoggles. If they are lucky.

Hey! Did you see that the vitally important wind-farm infrastructure in lefty South Australia just crashed the electric grid with a total blackout? Who could have seen that coming?

All this leads me to suggest Rule One.

Rule One: No government may borrow except to fund a war -- a real shooting war, not a war on poverty or a war on global warming.

Everything else should be funded privately. Of course, there are important government functions and buildings that need to be built. Great. But if a government building needs to be built, let it be built by a crony capitalist with private money, with the government paying for it out of today's tax revenue. Then, if the project is a white elephant the risk is taken, as much as possible, by the private sector and the evil crony capitalist.

So we want to build a high-speed rail link between Seattle and Vancouver? Let it be a private venture. If eminent domain is necessary to acquire the right-of-way, then let the government acquire the land. If there needs to be a subsidy to make the project viable enough for risk investors to put up the money, then let the subsidy be paid out of tax revenue.

There is a real advantage in crony capitalism for infrastructure investment. It is easier for the politicians to walk away from the crony capitalists if the project goes south. It is impossible to dump the US Postal Service, but who cares about FedEx and UPS? It is impossible to reform government education because of Our Teachers. But who cares about private colleges? Sue 'em and run them out of business; the Obama administration just did, and the liberal media is cheering it on as it deals with "shady for-profit colleges."

The point is that all government programs, every one from the Defense Department down to the local public utility, is a bloody mess of waste and failure. Of course they are. If there was money in it, the private sector would have picked it up and made money with it. The more we let government borrow the more it can hide its messes and put off the day when it has to cry Uncle and shut down the waste, fraud, and abuse.

Then there are the other government programs, from Social Security to Medicare. It seems like they benefit the people, you and me, but you can be sure that there is somebody getting in line ahead of you and making off with most of the loot before you get there.

It's the old story. If you are in a poker game and you don't know who is the sucker, then the sucker is you.

The Problem with the Obama-Clinton Administrative State

The problem with a Hillary Clinton presidency, according to Victor Davis Hanson, is that Clinton will continue the huge expansion of presidential power that President Obama has practiced over the last eight years.

OK, so what? If Congress won't go along with the president then surely it is up to the president to get things done. If Congress won't act to end the rape culture on campus, then the president must act through the federal administration. If Congress won't act to fight climate change then the EPA must act to shut down carbon polluting coal power plants.

This, of course, is the model of government championed by the educated elite since the Civil War. First, the idea was government by the "best men." Then, in the Progressive Era before World War I, the idea was government by educated experts who would apply natural and social science to the problems of the day. Now the idea is championed by the so-called "globalists" that want to marginalize nation states and replace them with an interlocking network of global institutions that will administer a kind of world government by piercing the shell of national sovereignty.

There are three things wrong with this model.

The first thing is the old, old question: quid custodiet custodes? Who will guard the guardians? Or, as I say, what happens when things go wrong, when the ruling class decides to implement a program that simply does not work, or does not work very well, or could work better? The problem with having government do complex tasks that need constant revision and adaptation is the government doesn't do revision and adaptation. The only thing it does is do or die. The top-down administrative nature of government means that government just keeps on doing what it is doing until it completely crashes and burns.

The second thing is that a top-down administrative government loses the consent of the governed. This is illustrated magnificently in Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the Revolution. France under Louis XIV and Louis XVI was a pure administrative system, run by the king's chief administrator in Paris. Nothing could be done, not the repair to a village church or the repair of a road, without the say-so from Paris. The result, according to Tocqueville, was that the French lost the art of working together to solve problems. And when the monarchy got into trouble and ran out of money, it found that it had no support among the people.

The third thing is that a top-down government just does not have the bandwidth to do all the things it wants to do. The reason that the administrative government gets started in the first place is, of course, that the ruling class gets frustrated by the very low amount of governance that is possible in a legislature of 535 prima donnas. So, just like President Obama, it decides to bypass the slow and corrupt Congress and rule by administrative fiat and by executive decree. But administrative government suffers from exactly the same problem as the legislature. In a nation of 300 million people there just is not enough bandwidth in a system of 1,000,000 bureaucrats to get things done. That's because the bureaucrats cannot act without the approval of the Big Boss, because the point of being the Big Boss is that you get to call all the Big Shots. That's why they call it Monarchy.

The solution is obvious. You don't do big administrative government, because of the three things above. You start by saying that anything that requires a complicated administrative apparatus is a bad idea, because a big complicated administrative government apparatus just won't work. You decide that, whatever the problem, it has to be solved through the market system which just happens to be a social system that constantly adjusts to deal with problems and changing situations. Then you say that anyway a centralized system is a bad idea because it reduces the people to the status of serfs waiting for the lord to give orders rather than treating them as competent responsible people that can and ought to work out their problems with each other without constant centralized supervision.

And finally, you say that the great complexity of national affairs cannot be concentrated in a central government because government cannot respond when things go wrong. We already have a system that responds instantly when things go wrong. It is called the market system and it constantly and daily forces people to fix their mistakes and improve their products and services. Or else they go out of business.

The way to understand government is that the only thing it knows to do is to fight a war. That is because government is force. Government is not the name for things we do together, as President Obama has said. Government is the name for things we do by force. You can tell that this is true because government has a habit of calling everything it does a war. On the military side this is obvious as we fight wars against fascism and Communism and now are pretending not to be fighting a war against violent Islamism. But the same is true in domestic politics. We fight wars against want, or ignorance, or injustice, or racism, or sexism or drugs, And now we are fighting a war against global warming.

The tiny little problem at the heart of modern administrative governance is that fighting a war is probably not the way to deal with poverty, ignorance, racism, sexism and climate change. Probably, the way to deal with these things is not to mobilize the people for war and enroll them in an army and pay them out of taxes for their support. Probably the way to deal with these things is for the best people to get together with the educated people to get together with the ordinary people to get together with the poor people to cooperate and work their differences out and keep politics and its division and government and its force out of it.

The tiny little problem with the modern administrative state is that the whole idea is to teach people to fight with each other for the spoils of the government's wars. Once the ruling class has taught people to fight with each other it becomes impossible for the government to rally all the squabbling factions together. That is what Louis XVI found out in the run-up to the French Revolution.

On my view we should see the government on the Obama type getting into more and more difficulties with its administrative model. Not only will it not have enough money to fix things but it won't be able to fix things because government doesn't do fixing. In fact, as we all know, what government does when things go wrong is not try to fix things but to look for a scapegoat instead.

If the government wants to fight a war it needs to foster unity. That's why World War II was such a success. If you don't succeed in fostering unity you get the Vietnam and the Iraq wars, where set-backs were immediately followed by division and name-calling. Indeed the opponents of the wars were waiting for setbacks so they could call the whole thing off. You can see that recent government initiatives that have been implemented without getting unity, from Obamacare to climate change, are bound to end in tears.

Working to foster unity is a big job. It has to start with the whole ruling class reading from the same page. There needs to be almost no opportunity for dissenting voices to sow dissent. And in World War II, after Pearl Harbor, there was no dissent. Men were drafted and sent to war and wounded and killed and nobody objected. Goods were rationed, wages were fixed, and nobody complained, not publicly. And after it was all over, everyone agreed that World War II was a Good Thing. Except for a few lefties who said that the A-bomb was a Bad Thing.

Today our present ruling class attempts to foster unity by name-calling. Anyone that disagrees with its race policy is a racist; everyone that disagrees with its women policy is a sexist; everyone that disagrees with its climate policy is a climate denier. You can see the difference between World War II and today. Back then unity was established by a process that seems to be a consensus; today unity is established by shaming the dissenters.

My argument is that people are going to start objecting to the name-calling policy, and then the ruling class will have to decide whether to ramp up the name-calling to actual repression.

I have one word of advice for the ruling class on that. Don't.

The problem is that our ruling class is already in too deep. It cannot retreat without losing face and power. And if it turns name-calling into repression is will multiply the number of its enemies.

So it is all bound to end in tears. And that is a tragedy. Because we know better.

What to do if a LIberal Talks Climate Change in the Hot Spring

I know I shouldn’t care when a liberal art historian from San Luis Obispo says that he’s known about climate change since 1998.

Because anything you say is just going to spoil the relaxed atmosphere around the steaming pool fed by sulphurous hot water at Sol Duc Hot Springs here in the Olympic National Park in western Washington.

What are you going to do? Everywhere you run into them the privileged members of the ruling class are going to do their cultural imperialism bit with a little microaggression to make you feel uncomfortable and to remind you who has the whip hand in America. And no safe spaces in sight.

And really, what good would it do to remind your friendly local art historian that according to settled science we are presently in an Ice Age. That’s why they call the current climate an “interglacial.” Or that you worked as an environmental engineer for 30 years. Or that you’ve created and worked with computer models man and boy, and you’ve always made sure that the computer model doesn’t make you do something stupid.

Because, after all, you can always tell a liberal, but you can’t tell him anything.

What about some other ripostes?

To the “97% of scientists agree” we could say that 97% of scientists like a big budget. The biggest budget they ever got was for making a bomb, and they only felt regret after they had spent the money and they knew that it worked.

To “climate deniers” we could ask if liberals really regard disagreement on science into the scientific equivalent of anti-semitism.

To the idea that the climate might spin out of control, we could argue that if so it would have done so billions of years ago when carbon dioxide was a much bigger proportion of the atmosphere.

When it’s all about saving the planet, we could say that we thought that salvation was a religious concept.

But all this is beside the point. Right now if you tell a liberal what you think they are going to be outraged, because the whole point about being a liberal is to be in the in-crowd. The truth is that we non-liberals are all Aunt Ems. For twenty years we have wanted to tell liberals what we think of them but because we are decent people we can’t.

And anyway, first we change the culture, then we stop the racist, sexist, homophobe insults. And then we win the politics. Anything else is just a meaningless culture of complaint.

Three Peoples: What If Most People Want to be Peasants?

In my Three Peoples theory, there is a basic assumption. In today's world, people start out as People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants. But each in their own way, people are not content with the life of the subordinate; they struggle upwards and become People of the Responsible Self, and start to contribute to society and the world as responsible individuals, not as subordinate peasants and working stiffs.

But what if this is wrong? What if people are perfectly content to sit on their behinds, doing what they are ordered to do and not a jot more, forever complaining about "them," yet forever waiting for "them" to solve their problems rather than solving them themselves?

That is what has crashed in upon me with the Trump phenomenon. Donald Trump is promising to Make America Great Again. Not the American People. Not business owners and entrepreneurs. Not responsible individuals each doing his or her share. And the white working class, dying of despair in the ruins of the old manufacturing economy, has rallied to his promise of good jobs at good wages.

Maybe this is the last hurrah of the white working class before it succumbs to the verdict of history, which is always oblivion. Because everything is born to die, humans, jobs, cities, towns, nations, civilizations, religions. Even gods die, Nicholas Wade has written, when people stop believing in them.

On this view, the People of the Responsible Self are a subculture, squeezed in between the vast rabble of subordinate workers and peasants. The real cultural and political action is the Patron/Client relationship between the People of the Creative Self -- who used to be warrior landowners but are now the ruling class of the educated elite and the Social Justice Warriors -- and the People of the Subordinate Self, the foot soldiers in the social justice army. The first provide the ideas and the leadership; the last provide the votes and the street muscle. The first enjoy the money, power, and the love of beautiful women that come with primacy; the second get a modest competence, and such free stuff as the social justice lords distribute to their loyal servitors.

Is that all there is? I would it were not so.

For instance, the whole point of the modern world and modern capitalism is that people go out and innovate; they create new products and services for their fellow men, acting without permission from the lords, and create the Great Enrichment. Where would we be without these creative, responsible souls that have brought us so much. And yet these inventors and business creators have been roundly excoriated as robber barons and exploiters.

And yet, as Eric Hoffer writes, there are two options in the world. Either people work to the command of a master, or they are responsible for figuring out what to do and doing it. Economics and the theory of the market and the experience of socialist states tell us that the boss-driven economy cannot work. Because, as Ludwig von Mises wrote, the socialist command economy cannot compute prices.

And yet, as Hegel says, in the Patron/Client or Master/Slave relationship, despite appearances, it is the Client or Slave that learns through his work how to master the world and make it serve his needs. The Master sits around, enjoying the perks of money, power, and the love of beautiful women while the Slave acutally learns how the world works.

And yet, as the market participant learns, the way of the world is to find something that other people want and give it to them, in products and services.

And yet, despite the rhetoric of the liberal Patrons that teaches everyone to kow-tow to their Masters or be flayed alive as racists, sexists, and homophobes, in fact almost everyone pitches in with a good grace, and with a live-and-let-live attitude, and almost everyone contributes willingly to the common good, and accepts with a good grace the verdict of the market.

In other words, despite the temptations of subordinate helplessness, people do not wait around for the boss to call the big shots, as bosses like to do. They get on with things and make decisions on their own without waiting for the big guy to tell them what to do. This has been the theme of the modern era both in the civil economy of the industrial revolution and latterly in the just-in-time culture developed by the Japanese. It is also the theme of military doctrine, because the lethal battlefield inaugurated with rifled guns has forced soldiers into hiding where they cannot easily be ordered around by officers and NCOs. Instead, soldiers must be resourceful and self-motivated; otherwise the army cannot function.

There is in this a profound contradiction, and expression of negativity, of two principles wrestling with each other. And that, according to Hegel, is how the world works

Indeed, if all the world's problem were resolved tomorrow it would be the end of life as we know it. The whole point of life is that we do not know the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

And we never will.

So it may be that, however much we humans seem to be tempted by the Patron/Client relationship, our fate is that we must, like Adam and Eve of old, leave the Garden of Eden and go forth into the world of uncertainty and risk. Because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge and can never go back to the bliss of ignorance and instinct.