The Liberal Ruling Class Don't Know Nothing

LIberal Mark Lilla has a book out, The Once and Future Liberal, an expansion of a New York Times article "The End of Identity Liberalism" from last November. He gives a flavor of the book in The Wall Street Journal: "The Liberal Crackup."

But the WSJ article rather shows just how Mark Lilla doesn't get it.

He writes that

Ronald Reagan almost single-handedly destroyed the New Deal vision of America that used to guide us. Franklin Roosevelt had pictured a place where citizens were joined in a collective enterprise to build a strong nation and protect each other. The watchwords of that effort were solidarity, opportunity and public duty. Reagan pictured a more individualistic America where everyone would flourish once freed from the shackles of the state, and so the watchwords became self-reliance and small government.

Oh really. I'd say that Mark Lilla has a profoundly fantastical notion of life, the universe and everything. The point of the New Deal was a massive increase in government force. More taxes, more spending. More compulsion. You want a job? You pay into the government's Social Security program. You work under the shadow of labor laws that make a mockery of "employment at will." And in the 1960s the Democrats ratcheted up another big notch with Medicare and welfare expansion. Some solidarity; some opportunity; lots of public duty, as in taxes and subordination to government experts.

Has any of that stuff been repealed? Reagan may have "pictured a more individualistic" America, but it sure did nothing to roll back the power and the force of government. And Obama cinched the wrench another notch with Obamacare.

Here's another whopper.

To meet the Reagan challenge, we liberals needed to develop an ambitious new vision of America and its future... Instead we got tangled up in the divisive zero-sum world of identity politics, losing a sense of what binds us together as a nation.

This is why I insist on the catchphrase: Politics is Division. Liberals have always practiced identity politics as the highest and noblest form of politics, because their politics advocated for the poor and the marginalized. So to say that anything changed after Reagan is to be willfully blind.

For half a century before 1965 liberals practiced class identity politics, advocating for the workers and damning business owners and capitalists to hell and back again. In doing so they divided workers from owners very effectively, and loaded up the workers with swingeing taxes on their labor by pretending that the taxes were really paid by management.

Then, with the civil rights acts of the 1960s liberals changed horses. They dumped the working class as narrow and bigoted, and cranked up their race and sex identity politics. Nothing has changed. Liberals are still ruthlessly dividing America and telling each other that their divisive politics is bending the arc of history towards justice.

But, and here Lilla starts to make sense, the liberal identity politics started to migrate from just dividing people in a normal political way to being a personal identity politics.

[Liberals] wanted their political engagements to mirror how they understood and defined themselves as individuals. And they wanted their self-definition to be recognized.

Well, yes. This is why I call liberals "People of the Creative Self" in my reductive Three Peoples theory. Liberals believe that the meaning of life, the universe and everything is found in what liberal philosopher Charles Taylor calls "expressive individualism," the personal expression of beliefs and creativity in the public square. Thus liberal politics becomes less about what we are forcing the American people to do with our government programs and regulations, but more about what the whole thing means to me, the liberal in question.

And because liberalism is a secular religion, the daily practice of politics becomes the daily practice  of what it means to be a good or, as they say, "ethical" person. Thus people that do not practice the faith are bad people and their utterances are stigmatized as "hate speech" and they are expelled (or rather excommunicated} from the secular religious community.

The problem with this has been played out on the big screen of the two most monstrous political regimes in all history, the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China, and immortalized in the work of George Orwell.  When secular religion is welded together with government you get a situation in which disagreement with the ruling-class's secular ideology becomes identical with opposition to the government. Sinners are also traitors.

Meanwhile Mark Lilla longs for "classic liberal ideas like citizenship, solidarity, and the common good" that the new generation of leftists have lost.

But Lilla does not understand that citizenship cannot survive when every citizen is fenced around with detailed and intrusive regulations. Solidarity is not solidarity when it is compelled, and the ciiizen is reduced to the status of an army draftee. The common good is not common unless people are free to disagree and negotiate, without fear of humiliation from the local activist, about the nature and the composition of the common good.

My Three Peoples theory makes this obvious truth implicit in its view of society. Clearly, the folks in the middle, the People of the Responsible Self, are the citizens who, by their relative independence and responsibility, can come into the public square and debate questions of common concern without looking behind them to worry about what their boss or the local political bully might do to them. But the People of the Subordinate Self are not yet citizens: they are still subjects. They do not have the relative independence that allows them the space to disagree with their betters. They know that their job is to support their political or economic patron as part of his rank-and-file political army. And they do.

Then there are the People of the Creative Self. Their culture is the culture of "expressive individualism." But for too many of them, the only way of expressing themselves is in political activism, and advocating for some government program or regulation. But this means that their individual creativity can only express itself by dividing people into us and them, because Politics is Division, and by forcing their world view on other people, because Government is Force.

So my political agenda comes naturally out of my view of the Three Peoples. For the People of the Subordinate Self, we should encourage the development of the bourgeois ethos, as recently suggested by Dr. Amy Wax to universal horror. When you acquire the bourgeois ethos of individual responsibiiity then you become a citizen, enrolled in a sense of national solidarity, with an interest in developing and negotiating a notion of the common good.

For the People of the Responsible Self we encourage the notion of the creative ethos, going beyond the simple agenda of following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law. And we encourage a gentle kindness toward the People of the Subordinate Self that only know that they are oppressed and exploited by their "betters."

For the People of the Creative Self we discourage the temptation in the practice of creativity to imagine that you are a god. Creativity is in fact a very dangerous thing, and the chances are that your own individual effort at creation will turn out to be a disaster -- just like most business startups and most political revolutions. So the one really important thing for People of the Creative Self is humility, to think about the possibility that the Grand Creative Plan might end up a Grand Creative Disaster and that millions of people might suffer and die in the aftermath.

When we ventilate these ideas two thoughts seem to come forth. The first is that liberals are idiots that know nothing, because they are pompous ruling-class functionaries that don't get out much. The other is that if there really is to be a revolution of the deplorables, liberals like Mark Lilla will be the last to know, and probably not realize what is happening until it is too late.

Who Will Bell the Lefty Cat?

Even the dark knight himself, Steve Bannon, has to do the ritual washing of hands when it comes to right-wing extremism. Axed by the 60 Minutes on-air talent the ritual question of whether he was now, or ever had been soft on the radical right, he answered:

[T]he Neo-Nazis and Neo-Confederates and the Klan, who, by the way, are absolutely awful – there’s no room in American politics for that.

Now Steve Bannon is a smart guy, so if he is saying that rather than:

Look, there are always kooks and clowns on the radical extremes. In a way a healthy politics demands it. But here is what I worry about. I  worry that you fake news journalists spend all your time asking me to disavow the radical right. I don't recall ever hearing about a fake news journalist demanding that the racist Representative Maxine Walters to disavow the racist Black Lives Matter. Why is that?

There must be a reason.

Yes, why is it that fake news journalists aren't out there attacking Antifa and the Black Block that are actually rioting and physically attacking "peaceful protesters?"  Why aren't they axin' lefty politicians from Kamala Harris to Bernie Sanders "have you now or have you ever had a soft spot for the radical left organizations like Black Lives Matter and Antifa? Well because.

I think that the reason we have Donald Trump as president is precisely because the conventional conservative movement and the conventional Republicans have failed to protect ordinary people from the vile accusation of racism. And the vile accusation of sexism and homophobia and hate speech and I know not what else.

What this nation needs is a political genius that can turn the left's rhetoric back on itself, to accuse the accusers, to tell the racists on the left that they are the haters and the racists. That Black Lives Matter is black racism. That feminism is sexism. That the gay mafia is heterophobia.

Look I get it. If you are a moderately dull scion of the professional middle class, from Marx to Lenin to Castro, and you have have appetite for power, the go-to strategy since at the latest 1848 is to advocate for the Wretched of the Earth: the poor helpless working class, poor helpless women; poor helpless non-whites; poor helpless gays; poor helpless coionized peoples. Now the well-born scions of the professional middle class are advocating for illegal immigrants and Muslims.

It would be much harder to do something really useful, like invent a new product, build a business, start a family. Or even restore the wasteland that is Detroit, Michigan. Really today's political activist is merely the modern equivalent of the young feudal lord bucking against his king. Because rebellion is the obvious thing to do if the king won't ransom the young lord's prisoners home.

I like to think that politically we are presently in a Panic, like the 1907 Panic when Belle da Costa Greene, J.P. Morgan's African American librarian asked him to tell the folks what to do to get the nation out of the crash. And Morgan is said to have replied that

I don't know what to do myself, but sometime, someone will come in with a plan that I know will work; and then I will tell them what to do.

Well, I don't know about that, because the solution to every Panic is to cover the uncertain credit of troubled financial institutions with the credit of a bigger, sounder institution. And these days that means the credit of the United States government, as in guaranteeing the trillions of dollars in money market mutual funds during the Crash of 2008.

But the solution to the 150 year Panic where nobody has the guts to tell lefties to put it where the sun don't shine, is that someone, somewhere has to brush back the vile accusation of racism, or right-wing extremism and live to tell the tale.

In that moment the sun will come out, the fake news journalists will turn on a dime, and we will all "move forward into broad, sunlit uplands."

Meanwhile, I am sitting in my library goggling at Belle Greene and wondering if she is really as Portuguese as she pretends, and waiting for that chap to turn up with a plan.

Don't Get Mad, Get Even

I must say that when I read about President Trump doing a deal with the Democrats over the debt ceiling and funding the government through mid-December I was pleased.

Because I am really annoyed about the failure of the Republican Congress to pass President Trump's agenda. And, it should be said, their own announced determination to "repeal and replace" Obamacare.

So my reaction to Trump's Art of the Deal was: Serves 'em right.

Republicans are whining that Trump's action will make it more difficult to put coalitions together to pass the rest of his agenda. Oh really. Do tell.

Now they are whining because Steve Bannon has decided to go on the immortal Sunday night CBS war-horse 60 Minutes. Well, of course he is. I assume that Bannon reckons that a ton of conservative-lite Americans will find out for the first time about Bannon and Breitbart News and others will find out that Bannon and Breitbart are economic-nationalists and not the racist sexist homophobe white-supremacists of which they've heard tell.

I know I shouldn't get worked up about this. This cold civil war is a big deal and it isn't going to be over by bedtime. If we are going to win, it means a shocking culling of RINO Republicans in the 2018 midterms and increasing the Republican numbers in the Senate. It means a re-elected Trump in 2020 with shocking increases in black and Hispanic vote percentages.

It means that Democrats need to find out that their street protests and their street thugs in Black Lives Matter and Antifa are costing them millions of votes.

But my wishlist includes three more vital milestones.

First, we need to delegitimize the culture of protest. This is at the center of the left-wing culture, because the left-wing lives on the conceit that they, and only they, care for the marginalized and the excluded. And that advocating for them requires protestin' and marchin'. No it doesn't. we have universal franchise; that means that all grievances can be channeled through the political system.

Second, we need to roll back the culture that assumes that lefty activists are caring compassionate activists and anyone to the right of Sarah Palin is a white-supremacist fascist.

Third, we need to restore the rule of law. I don't know if you've noticed, but liberals live the idea that they don't have to obey the law, not the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law. If they don't like the law, why, they declare their city a sanctuary city and defy the law. And they get away with it. Or if Hillary Clinton defied the law on classified information, hey, she didn't really mean it. Yeah. Don't you try that. You will be made to obey the letter of the law, and you will lose your job for exercising your right to free speech.

I've been puzzling lately about just what the left means when they affirm their opposition to "fascism." I'm starting to think that for them fascism is any popular movement that is not part of the left. Because popular movements and street action are reserved for the left, who are on the side of history, but popular movement inspired by patriotism or nationalism are fascist, and will turn back the clock on history.

The trouble for the left is that demonizing the opposition drives the opposition underground. And I don't think that is a good idea. When you demonize the opposition you get the surprise of a Donald Trump and a Republican Congress and Republican state legislatures are far as the eye can see. And you still don't see that your side has a problem, because, after all, anyone that opposes you is a white supremacist and a fascist.

No, It Is Not All the Fault of Romanticism

Yesterday I read a piece in American Greatness by Robert Curry,"What's the Matter with Germany," blaming German bad behavior on the Romantic movement. Curry more or less argued that the trouble began when the Romantic movement starting whittling away at the Enlightenment. The result was two world wars and Nazism.

Well.

Yes, of course the themes developed by Herder and others helped Nazis push the idea of a national people, das Volk, about as far as it could go.

But the Romantic movement had a point. It was a critique of the Age of Reason, and it said that life, the universe, and everything could not just be reduced to reason. For one thing, in the mechanism of the Enlightenment what became of free will, or just the basic contingency of moment-to-moment life?

Look, there is plenty of blame to go around, if we want to start  pointing fingers.

I would rather say that Communism is the mechanism of the Enlightenment carried to a ridiculous extreme, and Fascism is the Volk concept carried to its ridiculous extreme.

Fortunately, I just happened to read a bit by Bernard-Henri Lévy on the whole question of universals in the modern era, and he gives the philosophers a potted run through in the final chapter in Left in Dark Times.

There was the Romantic crisis, a direct reaction to the Enlightenment: universality doesn't exist; the only thing that does, said Herder, are individual cultures.

Then Lévy says, comes Hegel, arguing for a combination of universal morality (from Kant) and ethnicity (from Herder).

But all this "murderous generality suffocates me, crushes me" says Kierkegaard. Then came Nietzsche, shattering universalism with his will to power and the transvaluation of all values. Finally Franz Rosensweig's Star of Redemption in the midst of the blood and horror of World War I.

In other words, everyone is stumbling around in the dark, each of these Germans feeling with their hands a different part of the elephant.

OK, so what IS the matter with Germany?

Well, I'd say it starts with the demoralization of the defeated nations of World War II. Ever noticed that all three, Germany, Italy, and Japan, are experiencing very low birth rates? If you  ask me, a lot of this comes from the endless guilt-tripping that the western left has slung at, in particular, Germany.

Plus the modern feminism that teaches women to do anything but get married and have children.

So the German ruling class has allowed itself to be corralled into the European Union to make everyone feel better. But, of course, since the Germans are serious about having an economy that works, they become irritated with other nations, from France to Greece, that want to play unlimited entitlement politcs and get the Germans to pay for it all. And if their German women weren't going  to have children, why then the ruling class would have to import them.

How was the German ruling class to know that everything would go frightfully wrong?

Meanwhile, lefty intellectuals like Bernard-Henri Lévy run around shouting imprecations against another fascism, as if that was humanity's Big Problem.

You know my line on that. Fascism is the desperate lunge of a people stranded in economic hell by a foolish and incompetent ruling class that can't get the economy right. It is not the sign that the people are racist sexist homophobic brutes. It is simply that, time and time again, the ruling class gets itself into a bind which can't be solved without taking previously awarded free stuff away from the people.

The problem is that the people absolutely hate having their free stuff taken away, and the ruling class knows it. Thus Greece and Venezuela.

The solution to this problem is simple. Dismantle and privatize the welfare state. Privatize pensions; privatize health care. Privatize education, and privatize welfare. I mean that the people do all these things instead of the government.

Then, when you have a nasty downturn, either due to losing a war or the aftermath of a stock market or housing bubble, the government can step in with temporary aid that helps people get over the disruption. So the government increases spending from 10% of GDP to 20% of GDP for a couple of years. No problem. But when the government is already spending around 35-40 percent GDP you can see that an additional 10% GDP in stimulus is probably not going to stimulate but rather dampen the economy.

The fact is that Romanticism got one thing very right. It focused on the vital importance of individual creativity. And these Germans were thinking this right at the beginning of the most extraordinary flowering of individual creativity in human history, the two centuries that we call the Great Enrichment. There has been nothing like it, ever.

Today, Everyone is Writing About "Resistance"

Ever since the election of 2016 our liberal friends have been patting themselves on the back for their #Resistance to President Trump and his hateful cabal of white supremacists.

But today there are a whole bunch of pieces telling us that there are two resistances. There is the public liberal one that gets to pat itself on the back for its diversity and its inclusiveness.  Then there is the underground conservative one that dare not speak its name in public. Because there is a cost to public conservatism in the land of the free and the brave.

Victor Davis Hanson writes about it. Dennis Prager writes about the conservative professional musicians that emailed him after he was attacked as a conservative that dared to conduct a community orchestra. Then there are the lonely lives of tech industry conservatives.

And obviously this will not end well.

I return to this theme time and again.

The fact is, of course, that left and right in America view politics in two completely different ways. The left experiences politics as a way of saving society from exploitation and oppression. The right experiences politics as a mechanics of channeling people's rage into non-violent streams.

For the left, the "activism" of politics is about advocating for wretched of the earth. I've been reading over the past week a book by ageing lefty Bernard-Henri Lévy which is all about which group lefties should be advocating for: the Palestinians, the folks in Darfur, or elsewhere in Africa. Or should they be fighting against the new anti-semitism or "fascislamism." But always it is fascist this or fascist that. Do these lefties not see how their obsession with fascism and stamping it out is so very fascistic?

On the right we believe that the point of political institutions is to channel the passions and the rage of enthusiasts into political organizing within the law: backing candidates for office; proposing changes in the law; accepting the verdict of the voters. That was how the American founders thought. They argued about how much power was necessary for a government to do its necessary tasks, and how much was too much.

Personally, I think it is a strategic mistake of cosmic proportions for the left to give itself permission to send violent Antifa mobs into the streets to beat up anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. Personally, I think it was a strategic mistake of cosmic proportions for the Democrats to ram through Obamacare on procedural shenanigans. Personally, I think it was a strategic mistake of cosmic proportions for Obama to govern with "phone and pen." Personally, I think it is a strategic mistake of cosmic proportions for tech company diversity administrators to name and shame employees with the wrong opinions and to censor conservative groups as "hate" groups and take away their domain names.

Maybe the way to understand what is going on is to compare leftist politics to a big stock market bubble, or a tulip mania.

On that view the left began with a real issue, advocating for the workers in the 19th century. That's when workers didn't have the vote and couldn't get the attention of the political system without street action. This was pretty novel because previously everybody worried about the poor, mainly of course the rural poor starving and dying on the land, but nobody did anything about it. Then we had the civil-rights revolution, that included women and racial minorities in the political community.

Thus does a great stock bull market get started, on real improvements in earnings and company formations. But eventually a great bull market ends in hysteria as people scramble to get aboard "before it's too late," and there is a period of upside panic just before the whole thing collapses in a crash.

Are we experiencing late-stage leftism right now as lefties scramble for something, anything, to be outraged about and to make non-negotiable demands?

I do hope so.

But I am deeply conscious that, crazy as every bubble may be, the downside is usually worse -- after the bubble bursts -- as good decent people get ruined.

The reason to have free speech is not to allow fools and knaves their chance to strut and fret their hour upon the stage; it is because it is better to have such people identify themselves and not be forced to develop their conspiracies out of sight. The reason not to name and shame people for wrongthink is that if you fire them from their jobs and cancel their email accounts you create really angry people that have experienced real injustice and are eager to combine with other sufferers in a head of rebellion.

But in the current resistance mania, liberals seem to think that it is the end of the world unless they #Resist!

They are probably right. It probably it is the end of the world -- for their foolish brand of politics that has forgotten all the practical knowledge about politics and government that the Montesquieux and the Tocquevilles wrote about and our Founders seemed to pick up in their mothers' milk.

But the trouble with folly is that there is always a price to pay, and it is not just the foolish that get to pay to clean up the mess.

There is a Reason Why the Left is Always Attacking Middle-Class Values

I had a minor epiphany the other day reading a piece about how the left is always in permanent attack mode against middle-class morality, things like faith, hard work, responsibility, volunteering, respect for authority, stable families, and all that.

Naturally this epiphany occurred within the horizon of my reductive Three Peoples theory.

My point is this. The emergence of the People of the Responsible Self -- and I just came up with a history of this emergence -- has a consequence of world-historical significance.

By and large, the People of the Responsible Self can be relied on to govern themselves. That's because they go to work, follow the rules, obey the law, show up to volunteer, stay in school, stay married, have children within marriage, and all that. When you live like that you don't bang up against the guard-rails very much. You don't need a government program to educate your children; you don't need a government program to pay for grandma's end of life. You don't even need much of a welfare program. Because People of the Responsible Self think that they are supposed to pitch in and do all that stuff themselves.

Do you see what would happen in a society where the People of the Responsible Self were not being attacked by little lefty thugs every day? I will tell you. Every day, some Person of the Subordinate Self would be saying to themselves: I oughta try that. Pretty soon, nearly everybody would be trying it. And pretty soon we wouldn't need a big-government state with all its jobs and power for ruling-class liberals.

Our liberal and lefty friends instinctively know this, and that is why they hate the middle class and everything it stands for. That is why the left advocates for life-styles that are just not going to end in people living happily ever after. Let us look at a few examples.

Suppose you are a union member. Your life is set up for you: benefits, pensions, rights. But what happens if the big corporation you work for, say a steel company, goes out of business? Well in that case you need big government to take care of you, because your whole life plan assumed that your corporation and your union had taken care of that for you.

Suppose you are gay. You probably won't have children, and you won't have an extended family network. So if things go wrong and you lose your job, or you get short of savings in retirement, or you are getting to end of life, why then you are going to want big government to take care of you.

Suppose you are underclass, a woman who isn't married to the father of your children or a man that doesn't work much. Well, obviously, you are a fan of big government. Period. Your whole life is a cunning pursuit of government benefits.

So it is clearly in the interest of the left to encourage social pathologies, because social pathologies need  government benefits and strict government supervision and extended government regulatory power to keep them in check. It is clearly in the interest of the left to attack middle-class morality, because if everyone got to adhere to middle-class morality and started to marginalize people that resisted the middle-class culture, well, you would get a culture that didn't need much in the way of government, and there wouldn't be much opportunity for people to acquire political power by offering to lead the People of the Subordinate Self.

Now, my Prehistory of the Three Peoples narrated its emergence, first of all, from the void about three thousand years ago with the beginning of the Axial Age, where people with a responsibility culture first emerged in the rare cities of the agricultural age and built religions and cultures based on the idea of gods that wanted humans to be independent and responsible. But, of course, nearly all people were serfs and slaves, subordinate to the proud rulers and Pharaohs of the time. And jolly good fun it was, for the rulers and their supporters.

But the big thing of my Prehistory is the breakout of the People of the Responsible Self in the Great Enrichment of the past 200 years. Instead of being unusual people merchanting and trading in the rare cities of the agricultural world, suddenly the People of the Responsible Self living in the burgeoning cities of the industrial revolution reached critical mass, and started occupying significant cultural space. It was shocking.

It was the end of the old world of the Two Peoples, Masters and Slaves, Herren und Knechte.

It was shocking for the old agricultural ruling class, the Herren, suddenly confronted with the end of their millennium-long cultural and political hegemony. But it was also shocking for the People of the Subordinate Self, the Knechte, for it was no longer possible to live as the serfs on some powerful lord's estate, with at least the comfort that he needed you to hoe the weeds and serve in his feudal army from time to time. Now the People of the Subordinate Self were swept up into the economic turmoil of the Great Enrichment, and subject to the new concept of industrial discipline.

But the real shock was the emergence of a new class, the folks I call the People of the Creative Self. It turned out that these people, usually the educated sons of the haute bourgeoisie, chaps like Marx and Engels -- or Lenin, whose parents were both teachers and administrators -- had an appetite for power, and developed a secular faith that a heaven on earth could be created with the muscle of political power.

You will notice that this new ruling-class culture is the complete mirror image of the bourgeois culture of responsibility in which the state truly does wither away, not because of the glory of cooperation under socialism, but because responsible trustworthy people don't need much supervision, and don't see why other people should be set up in authority over them.

You can see how this notion I have been developing explains what is going on with our lefty and liberal friends. It is natural for them to attack ordinary middle-class morality, because such people do not need and do not vote for big government. It is natural for them to force non-bourgeois life-style and culture right in the face of the bourgeoisie to demoralize and intimidate the bourgeoisie into fearful silence. It is natural to encourage immigration of pre-bourgeois people off the farm in Latin America, or from the rough-and-ready herding culture of the Middle East. Such people are about one-and-a-half generations away from embourgeoisification, and are the natural rank-and-file for the left's political army.

But against the left's program of subordination and disorganization is the fact of the modern economy. You may read of interracial hate and identity politics, but when people work in the global economy they are required to be kind and helpful service workers rather than political street thugs, and their only job is to serve the customer, regardless of race, creed, sex, or any other distinguishing characteristic. The only thing is to be trustworthy and diligent.

Of course that is why the left is utterly opposed to capitalism and the market economy. Why, if everyone trusted everyone else, and thought of nothing but serving the consumer what would happen to big government and the power of politicians and government functionaries and the activists in activist organizations?

Obviously we are not just in the middle of a cold civil war; we are in the middle of an unprecedented cultural transformation, from a culture based on the defense of a patch of land, to a culture based on the propagation of trust and responsibility to the four corners of the planet.

And a lot of people are doing everything they can to put a stop to it. They are people that want to be Herren, lords, masters, leaders. Their god is politics and political leadership. I guess you could call their culture a cult of leadership.

The Germans have a word for that: Führerprinzip.

The Prehistory of the Three Peoples

In my "Dance of the Three Peoples" I have developed an idea of humans as Three Peoples: People of the Creative Self; People of the Responsible Self; and People of the Subordinate Self. It is, of course, absurdly reductive, but really not as reductive as Hegel's narrative of the Master and the Slave or Marx's narrative of the bourgeoisie and the proletarians. And it provides a helpful way of understanding our crazy modern world.

But the question arises: how did the Three Peoples get started?

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

In the beginning there was only One People. Each community lived as a simple tribe and the men were ranked in a simple hierarchy from the Big Man down to the lowliest cripple, and everyone knew his place. His place was to defend the borders from the raids of neighboring Peoples. Of course all the real day-to-day work -- of gardening and food-gathering and preparation, of making clothes, and the care of children -- was done by the women.

But then the world began to change.

The change, of course, was the invention of agriculture, and the One People became Two Peoples. Now, instead of every man taking his place in the border defense force, most men specialized in growing food, principally grain. It turned out that the heavy work of plowing could not be done by women without risk of miscarriage, so men had to do it. That was OK because the work of border patrol was now chiefly done by marcher lords and their followers in the borderlands. Thus humans divided into a class system, a ruling class of warriors and a ruled class of farmers. We are talking about the men, of course. Women still did nearly all the work of food preservation, preparation, textile weaving and sewing, and the bearing and raising of children, all except for a few high-status women that had servants to do all that for them.

Let us call these two classes Masters and Slaves, after Hegel. So that you can get a flavor of Hegel's intent, you should know that, in Hegel's German, Master is "Herr" which translates on Google to anything from ruler to gentleman to master to Mr. And Slave is "Knecht" which translates on Google as servant and farmhand.

I like to use The Iliad to demonstrate this Master/Slave culture. Only, in The Iliad, the Masters are the Olympian gods and the Slaves are the Greek heroes who are completely at the mercy of the whims and power plays of the gods on Mr. Olympus.

Now, almost from the beginning there was a worm working in the depths of this simple and glorious Two Peoples culture of Herrschaft and Knechtschaft that would eventually destroy it. This worm was and is the middle-class culture of the city. Once you get a city you no longer just have farmers producing "for use." You have merchants and traders exchanging goods and services for money, and you have the birth of writing -- which began as a means of keeping records of goods stored in temple warehouses and the like. You can see that this new culture starts to break down the vertical hierarchy of lordship and servantship because the market economy requires horizontal relationships between traders. And another thing. The horizontal relationships between lords are always potentially heading towards conflict, whereas the relationships between traders must feature trust and reciprocity, if for no other reason than the fact that trust lowers transaction costs.

Pretty soon these merchants and traders invented new gods, all across the world in the Axial Age. These gods were no longer the jealous and power-driven gods of Mt. Olympus but gods that set up a set of rules for humans to live by, and humans were judged at the end of life or in the next on their faithfulness in observing the rules and the commandments of their gods. Instead of just being the playthings of the gods, humans now had to be responsible and trustworthy in their lives just as they had to be responsible and trustworthy in their trading lives.

For thousands of years these new People of the Responsible Self got tucked into the royal train of the Herren. That's because the rulers and the traders needed each other. The rulers needed the taxes and tolls they could get from the merchants. And they also needed the credit they could borrow from the merchants for their wars. On the other side the merchants and traders needed the police protection they got from the rulers, to keep pirates and plunderers away from their ships and their caravans. And in due course they appreciated a legal system that could use state power to enforce contracts.

By the early modern period this condominium had become so mutually beneficial that the kings could disarm their feudal lords and fund their armies out of taxes on trade. They could deepen the credit system with a central bank that doubled as buyer of government debt and as lender of last resort, with access to the entire wealth of the ruler's domain in the case of periodic credit crises. The Dutch used this system to throw off the yoke of Spain, and the Brits used it to conquer the world, and to deliver a blow to the French from which they have still not recovered.

But then the world changed.

Let us date the moment of change to the year that the Brit Carew Reynell wrote in 1685: “Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer." And the reason was manufacturing.

By 1848 even a rich kid like Karl Marx could realize that the new industrial world had transformed the world. But this was awful. It would mean that the kings of the new economy, the middle-class capitalists, would rule the world and that would be disastrous because they would exploit the industrial working class of proletarians just as the Masters of the agricultural era had exploited the Slave peasants for thousands of years. The only solution was for a new class of educated, progressive minds that understood the arc of history to stop the capitalists in their tracks with violent revolution. Now instead of a dark world run by the owners of satanic mills grinding the faces of their workers in the mud, a new era of light would be born with enlightened and creative minds administering a world of peace and justice using the best ideas that had been thought and said.

Thus died the old world of Two Peoples, of Herren und Knechte, and thus was born the new world of the Three Peoples: the People of the Creative Self, artists and writers and activists, that wished to guide the world into an age of perpetual peace and end the vile exploitation of the People of the Responsible Self, merchants and businessmen, over the People of the Subordinate Self, victims and oppressed groups everywhere.

To be continued.