What Gods Do the "Three Peoples" Believe In

In my reductive Three Peoples theory I propose that three kinds of people live in the modern world. There are the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants who are clients to some great lord. There are People of the Responsible Self, citizens that work in the city as responsible individuals. And then there are People of the Creative Self, that believe life should be more than just responsible; it should aim for a work of original creation.

But no man is an island; each of us must live in society. That is the point of social animals, that we work together. So what does that mean to each of the Three Peoples?

We humans symbolize this situation with the notion of "gods." Our God is the something to which we surrender and bend the knee, and that is what makes us social and connected rather than alone on an island.

The God of the People of the Subordinate Self is the great lord or patron. In return for his Patron's patronage he must surrender to the power and might of his lord, his political boss, his work supervisor. And the Patron distributes loot and plunder as the mood takes him. I have argued, in my "little darlings" notion, that in the end the People of the Subordinate Self get left by the roadside, for they are, in effect, the soldiers in the great lord's army, and when they are no longer useful, the lord will abandon them, as Napoleon abandoned his troops on the retreat from Moscow.

The subordination to a fickle lord or Patron is not an easy life, and so from time to time the peasants arm themselves with their pitchforks and rebel. But they are always too late.

The God of the People of the Responsible Self is the abstract, though personal, God of the Axial Age religions. He is no longer sitting in the middle of the village or on Mt. Olympus playing power games with the human lives under his charge. Now God is retiring from active rule, and setting forth abstract rules for humans to follow. The problem for humans is no longer to submit to the actual power and might of the ruler, but to submit to the abstract rules of the Law. This was incredibly sexist, for it is men that demand to be told the rules, so the new God came out with a girl concept as well. Now the thing to do was to submit to God's love, for God offered the perfect relationship: love God and God would love you right back. In our latter days, People of the Responsible Self have learned to submit to the market, that remarkable human notion, and offer themselves and the work to the rest of society in return for the hope of reward. Of course, the market also has its girl aspect, as in the long-term relationships between businesses and their customers.

The submission to an abstract God or to the market is a hard and challenging life, for all its rewards. And so the People of the Responsible Self are always tempted to take the easy way and return into the orbit and the protection of some new Patron. But they betray their responsibility when they do.

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

The relation of the Creative Self to society has almost come full circle to the great lord or the Patron god. It is a temptation that few creative people seem able to resist, to sit on Mt. Olympus and order around the humans under their rule as the mood takes them. But I would say that the essence of the creative life is to submit to the verdict of the creative Muse. The fact of a life devoted to creation is that is is a failure: many are called, but few are chosen. Many people aspire to become artists and writers, but few make the grade. Many people start businesses and tech startups, but almost all of them are failures. If it is hard to be a peasant, and harder to stay responsible in the face of setbacks, it is harder still to aspire to creative notability.

You can see that there is a common theme here. A true and faithful person must surrender and submit to his chosen God, and not to do so is to betray your God and become antisocial and corrupted. A Person of the Subordinate Self has surrendered his life to the pleasure of his great lord, and the subsequent cruel fate that awaits him. A Person of the Responsible Self has surrendered himself to obeying God's laws and the verdict of the market. If it seems hard, well, it is. A Person of the Creative Self must submit to the creative process, and accept that very few people that aspire to works of original creation actually succeed in that Olympian ambition, just as very few aspiring Olympic athletes get to participate in the Olympic Games.

The whole point of this little exercise is, of course, to point out that humanity's Big Problem right now is the globalist Creative Class and its overweening conceit that it is called, like the peerless Lina Lamont, to bring a little joy to our humdrum little lives, so that all its hard work "ain't been in vain for nothin'."

Zuckerberg in the Pulpit over Peter Thiel

You won't get a better summary of the liberal line this week than this from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. He's defending Facebook's early investor Peter Thiel, a gay that has committed the h-heresy of supporting and contributing to Donald Trump.

There are many reasons a person might support Trump that do not involve racism, sexism, xenophobia or accepting sexual assault. It may be because they believe in smaller government, a different tax policy, health care system, religious issues, gun rights or any other issue where he disagrees with Hillary.

Look at that paragraph. What Zuck is talking about is the thoughtcrime of thinking racist, sexist, xenophobic thoughts. Everyone agrees, he implies, that they must be stamped out with the utmost ruthlessness. But hey, on the issues, people have a right to advocate. At least for now.

OK, racism. Think about it. The time to be anti-racist was when government mandated that blacks should sit in the back of the bus -- and the bus companies went along, just as today Silicon Valley companies go along with political correctness. To be anti-racist at the end of the second term of the First/Worst Black President is to be a mind-numbed robot of the liberal line. The only problem with racism right now is that blacks with no jobs are killing each other in the inner cities and blaming the police, and the white victims of 50 years of liberal racist politics are finally deciding that they can't take it any more.

And sexual harassment! Honey, it's a bit late for that. That was the whole point of the sexual revolution, which posited the idea that men and women should get it on, irregardless. The unanticipated consequence was that women felt pressured to have sex on the notion that if they didn't give in they wouldn't get a boy-friend/husband/partner. The whole sexual-harassment game is an attempt by feminists to put the horse back in the barn again, the horse that they helped let out fifty years ago.

OK, let's get all Hegelian about this. Hegel says that opposites are really the same thing, as in the north and south poles of a magnet. If you have the notion of an Ego then you have a notion of an Other. But the Other is just another person's Ego (das Ich in German). So racism and anti-racism are just two sides of the same coin. If you make race into a big thing then you are a race-obsessed, whether you are racist or anti-racist.

Yeah. And what about this Othering of Peter Thiel. First of all he´s gay, so by going after him you are Othering a gay, i.e., you are a hater and a homophobe. Then, on top of that, he's a Republican, which in Silicon Valley is very Other. So Othering a Republican is flat out "hate." But wait! Thiel is gay and Republican! So Othering Peter Thiel must be racist, sexist, hate-ist, Other-ist, homophobic, whatever lefty pejorative you can dream up.

Not to get all sexist on this, although I am a profound sexist, all this Othering is really high-school Mean Girls stuff, as in "I can't believe she said that." It is tremendous fun if you are one of the Mean Girls but not so much fun if you aren't. And, of course, it is punching down, oppressing people that can't answer back. And we know that punching-down is bad, really bad.

But the thing is that high-school Mean Girls stuff is cat-nip for high-statue women. That is why the Trump pussy-tape was such a big hit. Every woman in America is telling her friends: "I can't believe he said that!"

Of course, the woman's culture of complaint, and talking about people behind their backs, is probably the most important human survival trait out there.

So I suppose we should just shut up and let the Mean Girls take over.

What Comes After Trump

Let us assume that the pundits and the polls are right and that Hillary Clinton is elected President of the United States.

What happens next?

Obviously we will see an intensification of the left's cultural hegemony. I do not mean, as I read in Child of the Revolution, that we will be arresting people for wrongthink and that people will go "pale as ashes" for saying the wrong thing. I do mean that we will all be more careful what we say, and we will get more angry.

I just think that we are probably reaching Peak PC. After the nonsense of the First Black President and the First Woman President we will wake up in four or eight years and ask "what was the point?" And Hegelians like me will say that the thing is really the same as its opposite, as in racism vs. anti-racism, just as, in Hegel's words, the north pole of a magnet is the same as its opposite, the south pole.

What will come next? Well it won't be anything I am thinking, because at 70 I am in the exit lane. It all depends on what aggressive young men in their 20s and 30s are thinking and doing.

And really, what is the point of getting on board the Hillary train at the back of the bus and waiting for all the well-born scions of rich liberals to get theirs first?

Now, I am a profound sexist, and I believe that women are cultural curators, keeping the old ways alive and remembered as long as possible. Men are creators and destructors. Young men are being kicked out of education as it gets taken over by women. Men are being pushed aside as women come into the mature Silicon Valley and dissolve its reckless culture for something more kind and gentle. Good. It couldn't come at a better time.

So men are out there, right now, creating a new world about which we know nothing but nods and winks. Is the future in the fusion power startup the chap across the street is running? Is the future with a young guy I know that dropped out of college to get into a BitCoin startup and general software consulting? Is the future in creating a whole alt-right infrastructure by forking Wikepedia into Infogalactic and Twitter into Gab?

There is a simple answer to that. We Don't Know.

Donald Trump effectively demolished the old conservative infrastructure that had been tottering on since the end of the Reagan era. He could do it because the conservative infrastructure couldn't effectively represent people that were non-progressive, that wanted to be typical Americans and left alone by government and its enthusiasts, and wanted someone to lead them.

There will be life after Trump, and life after Clinton. That's because government is force, and force is injustice, and one of the strongest human emotions is the burning sense of injustice, the rage against the Man. It need not be egregious injustice, just the feeling that we are not going to take it any more.

At some point a bunch of young men show up and determine to put their feelings into action.

In many ways I fear that a Trump win puts off the Turn from the moment of Peak PC, that we need a continuance of Bush followed by Obama followed by Clinton, the dull routine of the old regime counting out its shrinking pile of political authority, until the old ways just cannot continue any more.

The Trumpers are mourning the end of the 1950s good jobs at good wages; the baby boomers are mourning the end of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And women are mourning the bitter aftertaste of the sexual revolution.

A new world is aborning, but you probably won't like it, and neither will I.

What About the Victims of Politics?

Conservative scholar Thomas Sowell has a three part piece on The Left and the Masses, essentially arguing that the Left never stops to wonder whether their ideas really do benefit the masses.

[T]he left is so invested in the idea that they are helping the disadvantaged that they seldom bother to check the actual consequences of what they are doing...

Surely the intelligentsia of the left have access to empirical evidence and the wit to understand such evidence. But the real question is whether they have the stomach to face the prospect that their crusades have hurt the very people they claim to be helping.

Examining hard evidence would mean gambling a whole vision of the world -- and of their own role in that world -- on a single throw of the dice, which is what looking at hard evidence amounts to. The path of least resistance is to continue going through life feeling good about themselves, while leaving havoc in their wake.

Of course, this is not remarkable. All humans embark on projects without serious thought about the consequences, and when they fail, and ruin other peoples' lives in the process, they rarely stop and think about how cruel and thoughtless they were to spread ruin and disaster in their wake.

It is obvious why this is so. The show must go on, and so, like sharks, humans must always be going forwards, and so the losers get trapped in the undertow.

But it is the conceit of the left that it is uniquely concerned with advocating for the poor, and morally empowered thereby to force its saving political agenda upon an oppressive and exploitative world.

Now you would think that those that make special claims, as the left does, should be subject to special review, in the same way that the government regulates the way that promoters of financial securities should follow detailed regulatory requirements in the official statements about their projections.

But political projectors are not subject to regulatory review. The only review is history, the record of the victims of political leaders left to rot by the wayside of time.

I have made a special point of "little darlings" abandoned by politicians when the mood takes them in the modern era, going all the way back to the European peasants that were kicked off the land when the nation state disarmed the private armies of the nobles. But then there are the other people that got blindsided by history, that were never the favorites of the politicians, and disappeared, never to rise again. We know all about the indigenous tribes and civilizations murdered by western capitalism and imperialism over the last 500 years, because the left never lets us forget them. But what about the rest: victims of wars, victims of local feuds, or just some group that took a wrong turn?

Who cares about the kulaks eliminated by Joe Stalin, and who cares about the millions that died in Mao's Great Leap Forward?

The temptation for modern man is to believe the promises of the politician and believe that he cares about you. But the truth is that the politician only cares for people that can serve his power project, and only so long as they prove to be useful.

Nobody should think that a pension from the state is any good. There is no substitute for the ability to survive when the state gets into a jam and the promises of the politicians melt into air. 

The Muddle of Liberal Thinking

What if the Trump Locker-room-gate ends up a damp squib? What if, instead, the voters really don't like Hillary Clinton exposing all our national secrets to the Russians and the Chinese not because they care about national security, but just because they know that they would go to jail if they tried that stuff?

So what about these two Chinese-American women, one who took a lot of abuse as a political prisoner in China and one who has taken a lot of abuse for her conservative views in America? Jeremy Carl:

These women aren’t just Americans, they’re super-patriots — and as you’ll soon see, neither is a fan of political correctness.

Imagine: two women from the culture of Confucius voting for the vulgar Tr\ump!

Conservatives have blathered a lot about political correctness over the years. And I am not sure exactly what good it has done, because the liberals are still here humiliating people with the wrong views, and ruthlessly dividing the country.

And did you know that, over at La Wik, they have deleted their entry on "Cultural Marxism." You can see why in their article on the Frankfurt School. The term Cultural Marxism is an artefact of conspiracy theorizing, don'tcha know. Only, dear liberal friends, the term is appropriate because the Frankfurt School is a change from the economic Marxism of Marx to a cultural Marxism of cultural identity where the helpless victims are no longer marginalized economically, but culturally.

So the term Cultural Marxism is perfectly appropriate.

The problem with cultural Marxism and political correctness and Alinsky tactics is that it is the tactics of war. And the point of social animals like humans is to minimize the occasion for war.

Let's go back to the original Marxism which posited that there was a basic divide between the employers and the workers of the Industrial Revolution. Really? The factories were taking starving people kicked off the land by the agricultural revolution and putting them to work making cheap cotton textiles for other poor people. The employers were organizing the process and the workers were making the textiles that were designed to be bought by people like them. I don't see the fundamental conflict of interest between the employer class and the working class.

Now the original Marxism saw a fundamental exploitative relation between employers and employees. Which meant that class war was the inevitable result.

The new Marxism, inspired by the Frankfurt School that we will call cultural Marxism, saw a fundamental exploitative situation between black and white, between men and women, between gays and straights. So the only solution was culture war.

But humans are social animals. We cannot afford to be at war all the time because war drains society of all its resources in a climactic battle with the other. In fact, in War before Civilization the point is made that primitive tribes could not afford to be having full-scale battles, because it would kill off the men and that would mean that the women and children would have to join another tribe -- no doubt as slaves or concubines like the princess Briseis in The Iliad.

So the idea of all politics all the time is a culture of collapse, because people cannot be at war all the time. They must, most of the time, be doing their daily business of working and earning and wiving and thriving. Because that is how you stay alive and bear children and pass the baton from one generation to the next.

Actually we know what happens with all politics all the time. And it is not a pretty sight. The Soviet Union. Maoist China. Castro Brothers Cuba. Venezuela. Obamacare.

Look, I get it. I get that, in the turmoil of the industrial revolution, some sons of the bourgeoisie imagined something higher and better than the desperate struggle of the working class to scratch out a living. Only their vision did not work, and that is why the Frankfurt School chappies had to come up with another brilliant idea to keep the Marxist flame burning bright.

The only trouble is that the battle of the races and the battle of the genders is just as sterile and destructive as the battle of the classes. We cannot be always fighting. As Voltaire's Candide said: I must go and work in the garden.

To me, the fascinating thing is that the market economy is an astonishing solution to the age-old problem of domination. In the old days you had to subordinate yourself to a powerful lord to survive. But now all you have to do is subordinate yourself to the verdict of the market. Because if you can find yourself something useful to do you will find that the market will pay you for it. Oh, for sure, if you are black, you may have to work for less for a while to prove your worth to a skeptical, racist employer. If you are a woman you may work for less than a man prepared to work 60 hour weeks. But you still get to participate. And the employer willing to risk employing marginalized groups may end up making a killing, because his costs may end up lower. Imagine that!

And all this works itself out in the market without the expensive necessity of well-born activists bullying their way around and humiliating people that dare to object to their ideological hegemony and their cheap idea of enforcing Peace and Justice or else.

So here is the profound weakness of the progressive agenda. It is that we cannot always be fighting, not on the battlefield of armies, and not on the battlefield of ideas. Eventually, the war stops because everyone is exhausted. And then the only thing left to do is to go out and work in the garden.

At some point every religious, cultural, political, economic system must have a notion about how ordinary life goes on, without the clunking fist of power and domination. Because power and domination are all about destruction, not about construction. The longer you keep at war, the more you reduce the human landscape to rubble, so that at the last your power plays do nothing more than make the rubble bounce.

And that is something that our liberal friends are going to have to learn the hard way.

The End of My Fantasy of Welfare State Reform

I like to imagine all the cutting things I could say to my liberal friends, but in the end I don't use them. So, when dining with a liberal couple recently, I merely said that, with Trump, I see the end of my libertarian-conservative dream.

The point is that Trump is bringing a bunch of people into the Republican Party that don't care about reducing the weight of government. They just want it to act for them and give them back their good old good jobs at good wages. Oh, and treat them with respect. 

So what does it matter that Paul Ryan wants to privatize Social Security? Good luck on that, pal. Nobody is talking about entitlement reform: not Clinton, and not Trump. Why? Because everybody getting the entitlements already paid in. And the young are too stupid to understand how they are getting ripped off.

So if the white working class stays in the Republican Party after Trump, the old agenda -- of limited government and grow the economy -- is dead.

And why not? Government is all about rewarding its supporters with loot and plunder. And Social Security and Medicare are the loot that the great middle class expects in return for its support of the ruling class. Or at least in return for turning out and confirming the ruling class in its power and privilege. So what government in its right mind would even consider meddling with the basic entitlement loot that the government offers to its supporters?

That saddens me, because I believe in an America that is higher and nobler than a neo-feudal Patron/Client regime, where the ruling class struts its stuff  and strips the land of its increase, and the peasants touch their forelocks, grateful for the crumbs that fall from the lord's table.

Yet obviously you can't elect a mouse based on what used to be called retrenchment and reform. People expect loot from their politicians, and the politicians tell them what they want to hear.

Why do I care about limited government?  How am I different from the average bear? Is it because my father's family in Russia got cleaned out by the Bolshevik revolution, and ended up in Britain depending, for a season, on the kindness of relatives? Is it because my mother's family was cleaned out by the start of World War II right after the Great Depression when her father had to sell his business in Japan in 1940 to a Czech Jew that had no place else to go and my grandfather lived his last years in a boarding-house in Kent?

That kind of family history does tend to make you think on the lines of the emperor Claudius's friend and aide in Robert Graves' I, Claudius who told the Roman emperor: "Trust no-one, not even me."

So I do not believe the blandishments of politicians and their promises of loot. In the end the loot will vanish and the promises will evaporate in the desperate measures of the next emergency. It is up to me to keep a sturdy ship that can survive the gales and the storms of government folly.

The example of Venezuela is front and center. President Chavez sets up programs to delight his supporters in the bright glare of the noon-day sun, when oil prices are high and revenue abundant. But when the storm appears over the horizon and the winds begin to blow, the government is hog-tied. Because the one thing a government cannot do is reef its sails and cut the spending and disappoint its supporters. So instead of sensible retrenchment of unaffordable programs it bellows "steady as she goes" to the helmsman and piles the ship of state on the rocks. And now the government's supporters are starving.

People like me complain and yearn for another Reagan. But the time is not yet for another Reagan. We are not yet thrashing in the toils of "stagflation," the Carter-era combination of inflation, sky-high interest rates and a no-growth economy. In the 1970s Ronald Reagan was perceived as a fool, an extremist, a light-weight, and anything else the liberal ruling class could use to anathematize him. Even I, in early 1980, rallied to good safe George H.W. Bush until I went to a precinct caucus and encountered the Reagan supporters, the deplorables and bitter clingers of that time, and got to understand that something was afoot. Things are not yet bad enough for voters to rally to a Reagan.

So I told my liberal friend about the end of my libertarian-conservative fantasies. And I did not segue into my "little darlings" meme, how the white working class Trump supporters are the little darlings betrayed by the liberals of 50 years ago, who switched from pouring benefits over the heads of working stiffs and decided that they liked women and minorities much more. Because the white working class was, after all, merely a bunch of Archie Bunker racist, sexist bigots.

(I'm sure that they would have called Archie a homophobe, but the word hadn't been invented back then. Leastways, I don't think so.)

And I did not say that the next group to show up at the Republican Party, turned out of the lord's Democratic estate, would probably be Catholics, followed by the Jews.

Going forward with Trump, we aren't going to reform entitlements. And with Clinton we aren't going to reform health care, education, and end the climate change boondoggle. So nothing changes, and the rocks get closer. And Lord knows what happens with the Russians the the Chinese and the Muslims.

How to Unify America and the West

For years I couldn't figure out why Bismarck decided to unify the German states with wars. What was the point? Why didn't he just get everyone in a room together and work it out?

Silly me. There is only one way to unify a nation -- or indeed any human grouping. You have to go to war. The only thing that unifies fractious humans is war. If you are a leader you have to figure out just the right war you need in order to get everyone on board and reading from the same page.

The genius of Bismarck was that he executed just about the perfect Goldilocks and the Three Bears operation. Neither too hot or two cold. First he went to war against the Danes over the Schleswig-Holstein question. Presumably this was just for practice, to see if he could get everyone on board for a dry run.

Round Two was Austria. I suppose this was a dress rehearsal to see if all the planning and concentration of troops with railways would work.

Round Three was the real thing, where Prussia and the North German Federation went up against Germany's traditional enemy, France. And the result was a humiliation for the French and the announcement of a new German Reich, uniting all the German states except Austria.

In my view World War II united the fractious America resulting from the huge immigration from southern and eastern Europe around 1900. All the trials and divisions of the Great Depression and the 1930s were forgetten as all Americans united to fight Nazism. The result was 20 years of unity until the baby boomers grew up and decided to get rebellious. Of course, it wasn't just them getting rebellious. Our lefty friends in the US were all in favor of fighting Nazism, at least they did after they got their marching orders from Uncle Joe in 1941. But fighting the Cold War against the arc of history? The left and the fashionable liberals begged to dissent on that one.

So here we are in 2016 with new existential threats. Shall we all join up and fight "hate" and "xenophobia" as a liberal friend implied to me? Or fight against the existential threat of climate change before we get fried? Or shall we all join up in the West to fight the Muslim threat?

From time to time I bring up Enoch Powell, who warned that the European project would fail because there was no European demos, no European people. He is right, of course. The European project is a top-down ruling-class project that imagines it can order the peasants around at its pleasure.

But there is a way to create a European demos, and for that matter a Western demos. And that is to fight a world war against Islam.

No doubt we will have to do it, eventually. But not just yet. Right now, the ruling class is on one page and the people are on another. So things will have to get worse before they get better and the ruling class decides to bravely lead the West against Islam and create a western demos.

In a way, our jihadi friends are doing us a favor. They are creating the feeling that we are not safe. And that will eventually create the feeling that we need to do something about it. Reporters will be sticking microphones in presidents' faces and demanding to know: "Mr President, is it safe?"

And then the ruling class will have the warrant to gin up a lovely war. Which is tremendous fun for all ruling classes, ancient and modern.

Just make sure you win, you rulers.