Hey Whites! What Took You So Long!

The goodwhites at NPR have just released a bombshell study; it says that a "Majority of Whites Say They Believe Whites Face Discrimination." It's 55% according to the poll.

Golly, fellas. What took you so long? I mean, the ruling class has been running a protection racket for women and minorities for the last 50 years telling them that if they vote Democratic then they'll give them lots of affirmation action/diversity/inclusion.

On the other hand here are the full results of the poll, by race and sexual orientation ('cos we are all racist sexist homophobes now).

Group	Percent of each group saying that discrimination against their own group exists in America today
African Americans	92%
Latinos	78%
Native Americans	75%
Asian Americans	61%
Whites (non Hispanic)	55%
Gays	90%

Now the question is: what is the poll measuring?

I will tell you. The poll is measuring what the ruling class has been telling people for the last 50 years.

The really big message that the ruling class has been sending, through the schools, the universities, Hollywood, the Democratic operatives with bylines, and through elected politics, is that blacks and gays are the most discriminated-against groups in history.

So of course gays and blacks think that they have been monstrously treated. Of course they do. Teacher told them! Freshman orientation told them! John Stewart told them! CNN told them!

Hey! What about  women? How come women got  left out of the poll? It just shows NPR is a tool of the patriarchy! Sexism!

Look, let's get things straight here.

Affirmative Action is racism, straight up.

Diversity is racism, straight up.

Inclusion is racism, straight up.

Why? Because all of these government programs count by race and gender. They presume to say what the right number of non-whites should be in every classroom and every job. Hey kids! Guess what racists do! They run everything in life through the lens of race.

Raacism!

Let's look at what has actually happened over the last 50 years. First of all, there were the Civil Rights Acts which forbade discrimination by government and businesses on the basis of race. On top of that the ruling class made the accusation of racism into the worst thing in the world against which there was no defense. Can you say witch hunt?

Then, following the Stonewall riots, the government folded gays into the civil rights revolution, and spent billions on AIDS research. And then the Supreme Court legislated gay marriage into existence in the face of votes in many states against gay marriage. And you better not say anything negative about gays, because homophobia.

So the United States is a country that discriminates against blacks and gays?

I don't think so. I think that America is a country where if you have a discouraging thought about blacks and/or gays or diversity or inclusion you better have a nice little nest egg handy in case you lose your job for badthoughts. Hello James Damore.

Let's see what the Supreme Court has been saying on this lately in Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District.

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. 

Gosh. Who could have come out with an idea like that?

But really this is the way the world works. The ruling class, through its control of the churches (divine and/or secular) and its control of the national dialog, is always tempted to force the subjects to repeat their lessons verbatim or they will regret it. This works well for years, decades, or even centuries if the ruling class is both lucky and smart.

But then comes a day when the deplorables just can't ignore the evidence of their own lying eyes. Or some man on a white horse tells it like it is.

And then you get 55% of whites believing that the government programs of diversity and inclusion are actually programs to discriminate against ordinary run-of-the-mill whites.

Oh well, it was great while it lasted, eh, ruling class?

Another thing. How come there wasn't a category for transgenders and non-binary gendered in the poll? Transphobes!

How Does Trump Do It?

For the benefit of the young 'uns, you should know that it's not just Trump. Republican Presidents have always been represented as idiots. Yes, President Eisenhower was thought to be a bumbler that couldn't speak a coherent sentence. Of course some presidents were exempt: they were evil, like Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon.

(Then it turned out, years later, that Eisenhower deliberately fumbled and bumbled at his press conferences, to put the newsmen off the scent.)

So back in the days of St. Ronnie, before the glorious economic boom, before the end of the Cold War, before the official canonization, we Reaganites always had in the back of our minds the fear that Reagan might indeed be the mad bomber and the amiable dunce of liberal imagination.

It's the same thing with President Trump. Is he really up to the job or is the liberal caricature, of a bumbling pussy-grabbing reality show actor, true?

Well, we just had an interesting retrospective on Trump and regulations from Reagan appointee Donald Devine. Devine writes that Trump seems to have done the impossible.

He has withdrawn 469 regulations at this early stage of his term compared to half that for second best regulation-cutter Ronald Reagan at 200 for the same point in his administration (although the measures are a bit different).

And he has done it without staffing up his administration with the requisite undersecretaries and pooh-bahs. Back in the Reagan days the idea was that you could not get anything out of the Democrat-dominated bureaucracy without invading it with take-no-prisoners appointees to knock some sense into what we now call the Deep State. So how did Trump do it?

The point is that Donald Trump can't do all the regulation cutting all on his lonesome. But somehow, sometime, somewhere, somebody put together the plan for this regulation harvesting, and the purchase of the requisite combine harvester, and the deployment of the elite regulation-cutting special forces. And someone also thought of the Oval Office ceremony complete with photo of a frowning Trump showing the signed Executive Order in a leather binder for the benefit of the Fake News devotees. And at the very least, Trump signed off on it.

Now, we don't know if Trump is a genius or an idiot, and we won't know until after he is gone. But if you are a guy like me, that imagines he understands something about strategy, you say to yourself: Hmm. Wheels within wheels. Something is going on here, and it is highly significant that we know nothing about the whys, the wherefores, and the whatevers.

It's like the whole business of Trump's tweets. I was talking with a protest liberal over the weekend, a guy that thinks "protest" whenever any issue comes up. And he, like the Lady Marjorie, is disturbed about the Trump tweeting and the insults.

Well, yes. But maybe there's a method in the madness. It could be that Trump's tweets are an essential way to keep up the morale of his supporters, not to mention a tripwire for the Very Fake News guys that are always running the president and the country down when there is a Republican president.

Remember the Bush administration? The liberal cars here in Seattle were driving around for years with ReDefeat Bush bumperstickers. The media had him as an idiot, when he wasn't a Christian fundamentalist. If you ask me someone, somehow, somewhere decided that Trump needed a way to fight back. And of course all the nice people are a bit nonplussed by this, because Republicans never do this, and when they do it always boomerangs. Until now.

Hey, maybe there is genius in the tweet policy. Maybe a political leader needs to throw his weight around a bit. He is, after all, the guy whose job is to protect us from the existential dangers of a cold, heartless world. Maybe a lot of people in America are looking for a guy that you don't want to mess with.

Think of the Clintons. It is certainly true that, if you were a Democrat, that any time in the last 30 years you didn't want to mess with the Clintons. Oh, until yesterday afternoon when the Washington Post allowed as how it was the Clinton campaign and the DNC that paid for Fusion GPS to gin up the Trump Dossier. Golly Geewillikins! How could that be!

More important, what took them so long?

But look what is now in prospect. There is the whole Uranium One issue, that was going on when Robert Mueller was FBI chief. Then there is the question of the intelligence community treating the very fake Fusion GPS dossier as intelligence and maybe using that as an excuse to unmask Republican phone calls during the presidential campaign of 2016.

So why is Robert Mueller heading up an investigation into possible Trump collusion with Russia? Shouldn't he be recusing himself, like right now, 3:00pm EDT, on October 25, 2017, from the investigation because he was involved in the whole procedure back in 2009?

And why did the Trumpists allow Mueller to head up the investigation? Was it because they knew (remember, everyone knows, except us rubes) that Mueller was mixed up in it, and that would wreck the whole Trump collusion narrative?

Rule One in politics is: Don't believe a word of what the liberals are shoveling. Rule Two is: Keep your powder dry.

And we won't know if Trump is a genius or a bumpkin until the last dog is hung.

Politics is Downstream from Culture is Downstream from Religion

Over at his blog, scifi writer John C. Wright is writing about his Last Crusade. No not the Ninth Crusade in 1271, but right now, to save Christian civilization from the new menace that is threatening our modern Jerusalem. Wright began in January with "The Last Crusade."

But a week ago he wrote "Last Crusade: Fighting the Wrong Battle," in which the basic argument is to extend Andrew Breitbart's catchphrase that "politics is downstream from culture."

Yes, he writes, "politics is downstream of culture" and that is why conservatives have been losing to liberals, because we have been concentrating on politics rather than culture.

But the White Identitarians, he writes, also have it wrong, because they think that "culture is downstream of race".

Wrong! They are missing the point, for "culture is downstream of religion." You can't change the culture unless you change the religion.

One cannot change a man’s mind unless his heart allows it. But one cannot change a man’s heart unless his soul allows it.

In the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion. In the same way a man’s actions are dependent on his beliefs, his beliefs are dependent upon his primal and fundamental assumptions that form his character.

What we are fighting is not a culture war but a religious war, for leftism is not a culture, it is a religion. Wright's answer is to raise high the banner of Christianity against the leftist hordes: the Last Crusade.

But I think that Wright misunderstands the problem. And I come to this from my reductive Three Peoples theory. Back on October 21, 2016 I wrote "What Gods Do the 'Three Peoples' Believe In?"

I said that the People of the Subordinate Self believe in "a great lord or patron." This god, may be an earthly or a divine god but, I think, is a false god because sooner or later the People of the Subordinate Self get left by the roadside, like the soldiers of Napoleon on the road back from Russia.

I said that the God of the People of the Responsible Self is "the abstract, though personal, God of the Axial Age religions." In these religions it is up to each person to take the world that God created and make the most of it, as a thoughtful, responsible individual. The most intense moment of this religion is people experiencing the transition from Subordination to Responsibility. Here is a young woman that just made the transition, after six abortions:

When I came to church, I had no reservations about Jesus because I hadn’t heard much about Him. I was tired of giving my body to men, but I was weak and lacked self-control. I hated that I got those abortions and couldn’t stop myself. Jesus was my only hope, a hope I didn’t know existed. His love warmed my cold heart and the forgiveness available to me quickly became my greatest desire. My sin became more evident each Sunday I showed up and it wasn’t more than two months before I was ready to surrender my life to Jesus, making Him the Lord of my life.

There is a reason I call Christianity a "girl religion." It is because Christianity promises the ultimate love relationship: you give your love to God and God loves you right back with the best love you will ever know. So, to me, it is utterly right and proper that this young woman, child of a single mother, should come to Jesus and his perfect love.

But what about the People of the Creative Self? Here is what I wrote:

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.

Charles Taylor has a slightly different take; he talks about "expressive individualism."

Here are some People of the Creative Self on a journey to understand the heartlands after the shocking Trump victory in 2016, with überliberal Molly Ball coming along for the ride. She introduces us to Nancy Hale, the leader of the team:

Hale, who is 65 and lives in San Francisco, is a career activist who got her start protesting nuclear plants and nuclear testing in the 1970s...

Hale, a tall woman with a breathy voice and a mop of curly red hair, had come to Wisconsin fresh off a silent Zen meditation retreat in California. She had spent her career building organizations and training activists to work for social change. 

There are people like this all over the nation, diligently and worthily practicing their religion of creating a new and juster America, in America's own best interest. I was in a liberal bookstore in Winslow, Washington, on Sunday and there was a 60-something woman giving a talk about climate change. (Good news: the Chinese are committed to renewables!)

Do you see the problem here? The People of the Creative Self want to live creative lives, to make original works of art, to imagine new ideas and then to instantiate them. That is what they believe in.

So far so good. I think it is a good thing that well-educated people are out there trying to do good in the world.

But very often their creative project is other people.

What I do not like is the narrowness of their vision. They do not think past their own need for creative projects. They do not think that other people have a right to live in other ways and not be subordinate to their goodness. It does not occur to them that other people have rights, except the "little darlings" they patronize, and that one of the rights that other people have is to have nothing to do with the creative projects of the People of the Creative Self.

Then there is the intolerance for the religion of the People of the Responsible Self. And that is our Big Problem, that the People of the Creative Self are trying to impose their religion upon the rest of us, and are trying to drive the religion of the rest of us out of the public square.

See, I think it is great that our most educated are interested in living creative lives. That's my religion too. But how do we deal the creative appetite for power, and the natural tendency in all religions to anathematize the unbelievers and the heretics? We are probably three-quarters of the way to a full-on state religion of progressivism, and that is not good. But how to persuade these folks that they have a problem? How do persuade them to live and let live?

This is where I bring up Charles Murray and Coming Apart. In white America, the top 25 percent, mostly, I imagine, People of the Creative Self, are doing fine with great careers and merger marriages. Then there are the middle 40 percent, and things are not so well with them. Finally there are the bottom 30 percent, where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

Our progressive friends in the People of the Creative Self do not understand that this is the world they have created, with their religion to create a new society, with their culture of expressive individualism for them, but better-behave culture for the People of the Responsible Self and a no-guardrails culture for their "little darlings," the People of the Subordinate Self. Right now, it's a wonderful world for 65-year-olds from San Francisco coming off a silent retreat for a cross-country trip to interview America. But it is not so great for the rest of us.

So what can we do about it? Honestly, I don't know, short of an all-out religious war. Because the People of the Creative Self driving around America wondering What Happened a year ago do not understand that the problem is them.

In the first place they do not even understand that their faith in creativity is a religion. They do not understand that they are using the public schools as "parochial" schools of social justice, and universities as secular seminaries.

They do not understand that their whole culture of political correctness and "cultural appropriation" is a totalitarian movement that makes the Puritans look like pikers.

They do not understand that their political culture of top-down administration and regulation was exploded as deficient a century ago by Ludwig von Mises.

They do not understand that their entitlement programs are bound to fail and then the people hurt will be precisely the victims and marginalized that they claim to represent and care about.

They do not understand that their identity politics will descend into mayhem when the white middle class starts voting for their race as liberals and progressives have encouraged blacks and Hispanics to do for 50 years.

What we need is for 65-year-olds from San Francisco to develop a little bit of compassion for ordinary middle-class Americans in addition to their their much advertised compassion for the marginalized and the exploited.

What we need is for the children of the Creative Self to mend their practice of hanging out in their twenties wandering in and out of university and dabbling with a career in the arts, and get a life.

What we need is for people like me to construct and practice and advertise a Reformed religion of Creativity that is purged of the conceits of the Romantics of 1820, the Communists of 1850, the Progressives of 1910, the New Dealers of 1933, the Kids of the Sixties, the Feminists of the 1970s, the Gays of the 1980s, and the Antifa of the 2010s.

Hey! Should be no problem!

Freedom is Great! Or is it?

We conservatives and American patriots declare before all the world that Freedom is the bestest thing ever.

But is it? Is Freedom really the glorious dawn that opens up all vistas?

I think that it is important for anyone promoting Freedom to recognize that Freedom comes with a terrible cost. Who better to explain that to us than lefty Herbert Marcuse?

In Five Lectures Marcuse argues, from Freudianism, that the sublimation of instinct from the repression of sexuality releases human energy to be expended in work. In other words, society dominates us by forcing us to repress our sexuality and channel that energy into work.

As soon as civilized society establishes itself the repressive transformation of the instincts becomes the psychological basis of a threefold domination: first, domination over oneself, over one's nature, over the sensual drives that want only pleasure and gratification; second, domination of the labor achieved by such disciplined and controlled individuals; and third, domination of outward nature, science, and technology.

These dominations are in a dialectic with the freedoms:

And to domination subdivided in this way belongs the threefold freedom proper to it: first, freedom from the mere necessity of satisfying one's desires, that is, freedom for renunciation and thus for socially acceptable pleasure--moral freedom; second, freedom from arbitrary violence and from the anarchy of the struggle for existence, social freedom characterized by the division of labor with legal rights and duties--political freedom; and third, freedom from the power of nature, that is, the mastery of nature, freedom to change the world through human reason--intellectual freedom.

But Marcuse is not finished:

The psychic substance common to these three aspects of freedom is unfreedom: domination of one's instincts, domination that society makes into second nature and that perpetuates the institutions of domination. But civilized unfreedom is oppression of a particular kind: it is rational unfreedom, rational domination. It is rational to the extent that is makes possible the ascent from a human animal to a human being, from nature to civilization.

The dread truth of this reminds us that many people will not want to make this Faustian bargain. To insist on Freedom in civilization is to bind yourself to self-governance, to repressing your instincts in living as a social animal that is not directly dominated by a Master and must therefore take on oneself the responsibility of being useful in the world. It is to renounce the limited kind of freedom in being a Slave, that you do not need to take responsibility for yourself. You do your Master's bidding, and in absence of direct instruction, you relax and follow your instincts, which is freedom of a certain kind.

Now, on my reductive Three Peoples theory,  the ascent to Freedom occurs at the boundary between life as People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, and life as People of the Responsible Self, city people, and that agrees with Marcuse's notion, except that what he calls Freedom I call Responsibility.

And the notion of Responsibility correctly understands that Freedom is not free. Actually it is the opposite. Freedom comes at the cost of Responsibility, and that is a very high cost, and that is why a lot of people don't want it, and prefer the freedom from Responsibility by choosing Hayek's Road to Serfdom in the welfare state.

In fact you can explain the history of the last 150 years as the working class dissenting from the middle-class culture of Freedom and the Limited Government that set up the modern state and its representative government, and clearly telling the world that it preferred a much lower level of responsibility than advertised in the culture of the middle class. Ditto women half a century later and ditto African Americans a century later.

Then you add into this mix the cult of the Creative Ego in the People of the Creative Self who seem to want absolute Freedom for themselves to be creative and want the People of the Responsible Self to pay for it.

OK, so where I am going with this? Well, I'd say that with the failure of gentlemanly conservatism of which you've heard tell, we now have to pick ourselves us and figure what to do next.

For me, the desideratum is to live as a Responsible person without truckling to a beneficent Oz of a Master, be he a political boss or a Social Justice Warrior. But the fact of life is that there is a ton of people that don't want to be Responsible: they just want to write that novel or do Activism as taught in their secular seminary. Or they just want to get their share of the loot and live their life around the free stuff that is handed out to faithful servants of the regime.

So the challenge is to stake out a patch of land, in a world where tons of people want free stuff, and make our non-negotiable demands that we demand the right to live our lives as Responsible individuals, and if we don't get it we are going to make life very difficult for the current ruling class, what Glenn Reynolds calls the Front Row Kids, and what I call the People of the Responsible Self. In fact, we might even toss the ruling class out if we have a mind to do it.

Remember when Nancy Pelosi said that Obamacare would be great for artists and writers, 'cos they wouldn't have to work any more, but follow their bliss in creative work? We People of the Responsible  Self demand as of ancient and immemorial right that the bloody artists and writers get a job, and stop pretending to be helpless People of the Subordinate Self. Because artists and writers are Cloud People and should not be free-riding on the Dirt People of the Responsible Self.

As they say in China, the first step is a modern Rectification of Names, to make sure that we know what we mean and mean what we say. And that goes double for Freedom and Responsibility.

What Do "Toxic Masculinity" and "White Supremacist" Have in Common?

Whenever the name "Richard Spencer" appears in print it is always as "white supremacist Richard Spencer."

But my question is: what does Richard Spencer call himself? I'm glad you asked. Here is La Wik:

Richard Bertrand Spencer (born May 11, 1978) is an American white supremacist... Spencer has stated that he rejects the label of white supremacist, and prefers to describe himself as an identitarian.

So that's all right. Or alt-right.

Now, of course, this is a very bad thing, because if Richard Spencer is allowed to call himself an identitarian that puts a rather bad spin on what we have all learned to call "identity politics."

Because, as someone recently remarked, if you liberals are going to go all-in on identity politics, sooner or later whites in America are going to play the identity politics themselves.

But, as they say, whites will probably sign on too late to avoid being thrown on the ash-heap of history. Because most cornered rats don't realize they are cornered until they are well and truly cornered, and that means it is really too late to fight your way out of the corner.

But what is "white supremacy?"  I'm glad you asked. La Wik.

White supremacy or white supremacism is a racist ideology based upon the belief that white people are superior in many ways to people of other races and that therefore white people should be dominant over other races.

But is that the doctrine of Richard Spencer? Or is Richard Spencer merely a cornered rat trying to find a way for whites to fit into the identity politics framework advanced by our liberal and lefty friends? Or is Richard Spencer just like everyone else, he likes his kind best.

I mean, what would you call the current leftist academic culture that favors left wing over everything and consciously discriminates against anything else? Academic supremacy?

As I understand history, even the fascists and Nazis were not movements of confidently superior Italians and Germans. Instead they were experiencing after World War I what seemed to them to be a real danger of national annihilation. In fact, they thought of themselves as corned rats. My favorite quote is that of a woman in a train in Germany in 1920 in the middle of the post-WWI hyperinflation. She said, as I recall, how can this be happening to Germany, the most advanced country in the world?

I like to suggest that Germany invented just about everything in the modern era, from modern philosophy to relativity and quantum mechanics and nationalism, as in the most advanced country in the world. Oh, and the Germans invented Nazism, from a congeries of Romanticism and Nationalism. Yeah, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Recently, with the Harvey Weinstein episode we have had a flood tide of "toxic masculinity." What is that? OK, back to La Wik, which explains the "concept of toxic masculinity as used in the social sciences":

According to [Professor Terry] Kupers, the term toxic masculinity serves to outline aspects of hegemonic masculinity that are socially destructive, “such as misogyny, homophobia, greed, and violent domination”. Kupers states that other aspects of hegemonic masculinity such as “pride in [one’s] ability to win at sports, to maintain solidarity with a friend, to succeed at work, or to provide for [one’s] family”, are not part of the concept of toxic masculinity.

 Excuse me, Wikipedia, liberals, and all the lefty ships at sea, but from my corner terms such as "white supremacy" and "toxic masculinity" have nothing to do with social science; they are left-wing terms whose purpose is to marginalize and delegitimize non-lefty people and ideas.

Hey kids, I think that is a bit of a problem. But it goes with the normal day-to-day stigmatization of any non-leftist political actor as a racist, sexist, homophobe.

I must say that it is an astonishingly successful tactic. You can marginalize and stigmatize just about anyone by pasting a lefty pejorative on them. And it works! What is not to like, if you are a lefty?

OK. But what about the rest of us?

I would say that the first thing in political discourse would be to give people the decency of letting them define themselves, in their own terms, so that their ideas can succeed or fail in the cockpit of political combat.

So pasting a lefty pejorative on someone is No Fair.

But, of course, it is impossible for lefties to do this, because with the left politics and power is everything. Lefties are going to save the world with politics and political power, bending the arc of history towards justice.

And politics is always about us and them. "We" are always the good guys, gathering the good people together in a protective association against "Them," the bad guys.

From the point of view of the non-left, this is a problem.

The problem is that in politics you end up becoming like your adversary. The problem is that in order to end the left's use of pejoratives to marginalize and stigmatize ideas and people that are opposed to them, you have to find leaders like Donald Trump who can fling the pejoratives right back in the lefty faces with the best of them.

And then the lefties amp up the pejoratives, because "activism" and political rhetoric are the only things they know. So where will it end?

At this point I usually cite Crane Brinton and his Anatomy of Revolution. He argues that amped up ideological warfare is a necessarily temporary period, as he rehearses the ideological frenzies of the  British Puritan revolution, the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, the Bolshevik Great Terror in the 1930s, and the recurrent upheavals of Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Eventually they collapse in exhaustion in the so-called Thermidorean reaction, because people cannot be kept forever in an ideological frenzy, any more that armies can be kept fighting on the front forever. Eventually people need to get back to wiving and thriving.

It's nice to think that all this rubbish about white supremacy and toxic masculinity will subside and be thrown on the ash-heap of history.

Trouble is that, like in the previous ideological frenzies, a lot of ordinary people are going to get drowned in the undertow. And it might be you. Or worst of all, me!

What Do We Know? No, Really!

Theodore Dalrymple, the British doctor writer, keeps bringing up the name of Belgian Simon Leys, the sinologist writer who was born Pierre Ryckmans and died recently in Australia.

So I looked him up and bought Chinese Shadows, his book on the Cultural Revolution in China. The book mostly covers Leys' travels in China in 1972 after the worst of the Cultural Revolution was over and the army and the bureaucracy had regained control from Mao's teenaged Red Guards.

Of course what Leys wanted to look at in his travels, given that the average Chinese wouldn't talk to a foreigner at that time, was museums and temples and rare Chinese manuscripts. Not to mention books. Trouble was that all the museums were closed, most of the temples had been destroyed by the Red Guards, and the bookstores had nothing in them except the collected works of Mao, Stalin, and Enver Hoxha.

And the arts? The great tradition of Chinese opera had been reduced to Madame Mao's (she of the Gang of Four) six utterly dreadful Revolutionary Model operas.

There's a touching scene where Leys talks his guide into getting him to a bookstore that has some ancient manuscripts rolled up in the back room. When he shows up to look at the manuscripts a quiet assembly of other connoisseurs has gathered to look and appreciate this hidden treasure.

But I thought about the utter folly of thinking you can order society and its culture from the top with appropriate buzz-words and directives. There's a page where Leys rehearses a few slogans of Maoist China: "the five stories," the "Tachai spirit," "the four cleanups," "the eight-word constitution," "the three rightisms," and so on. And there is a description of an impossibly foolish irrigation project, that was supposed to have been conceived and executed by the workers, without a lick of help from engineers and technicians -- or earth-moving equipment.

Of course I think immediately about the utter folly of our social justice warriors, and the kiddies being taught Activism 101 at the university. As though the problems of the world can be solved by peaceful protests and political chants.

I mean, after the example of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, not to mention that black hole without electric light at night, North Korea, who can possibly think that activists can remake a country in the image of its revolutionary leaders with the help of chanted slogans?

The answer is, of course, that every new generation of kiddies can easily be taught to go out into the adult world and tear everything up, and they will do it willingly and vigorously without a clue about what they are doing on the strength of a few slogans and a rage to set the world right.

So I woke up in the night trying to think of a word to describe what we think we know.

Because really, we know nothing, and that has been confirmed for my by reading Werner Heisenberg's (he of the uncertainty principle that bears his name) Physics and Philosophy with an introduction by My Guy F.S.C. Northrop. Heisenberg talks about the difficulty of talking about the micro-world when the micro-world is just not like the normal world of everyday life that our brains and our language are programmed to deal with. He writes of the paradox of quantum mechanics:

It starts from the fact that we describe our experiments in the terms of classical physics  and at the same time from the knowledge that these concepts do not fit nature accurately.

We have to do that, because classical physics is merely a "refinement of the concepts of daily life and are an essential part of the language which forms the basis of all natural science." This is a pretty mind-blowing thing. We know that the sub-atomic world is nothing like the everyday world, and yet we use our everyday concepts to describe it. How crazy is that?

But, the thing is that our knowledge about quantum mechanics works. The smartphone in your hand is proof of that. Take this equation:

.

What is it? I don't know. But you can check it out. But I will tell you what I think. I think it is an "incantation." Or even a line of poetry, written in the ideograms of mathematics. The only people that would know what it means are people with a deep and esoteric knowledge of math and quantum mechanics. But that is no different from temple priests in ancient Egypt with an esoteric knowledge of the scriptures.

All equations, all catchphrases, all political slogans, all religious beliefs, all of them are incantations. The question is: do they work? Shakespeare has the last word on this, in Henry IV Part One.

GLENDOWER

I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR

Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them? 

Do you see what I am getting at? The fact of modern physics is that we cannot imagine what is going on at the sub-atomic level; we only have the equations, which issued from the problem of black body radiation and the discovery that energy is discharged in "quanta" and yet behave like a wave. In other words, it takes two "concepts of daily life" to begin to get a handle of the concept of what is going on. But these two concepts, of a particle and a wave are, for us, contradictory. In our concepts of everyday life, we think that a thing can be either a wave or a particle, but not both. Until now. We talk about the sub-atomic realm using our "concepts of daily life" even though we know it is nothing like the everyday world or earth, air, fire and water.

But the same thing applies to God, to politics, to the economy, to the dance of the sexes. We know nothing, but our incantations: God is love; power to the people; supply and demand; boy meets girl. These are all incantations, they are all attempts to call spirits from the vasty deep. But do they work? Will they come when you do call for them?

You will note that I have my own set of incantations: Government is Force; Politics is Division; System is Domination. The liberals down the street have their incantations in their #WeBelieve yardsigns: Black Lives Matter; Science is Real; Love is Love; Kindness is Everything. And the point is exactly the same as for Glendower or quantum mechanics. Does the concept work? Does it illuminate? Does it help you avoid the big beasts when you walk out in the world?

What is clear about all the incantations of the Maoist Cultural Revolution is that they were all rubbish. The world doesn't work that way, and never did. But this is nothing new. Most human incantations are rubbish, and soon get liquidated and sent to the ash-heap of history, because they don't work.

But some incantations are supported and enforced by political power, and they take longer to prove whether they can summon spirits from the vasty deep. When you have political power you can force people to repeat your incantation, and you can tell them that they better believe it or else.

And most of the people, most of the time, including me, will go along to get along, and even come to believe the incantations that their leaders have commanded them to recite.

But in the end, all knowledge is an incantation, that anyone can recite, and that few ever understand. The question is: does it work?

My Bannon Conspiracy Theory

I have a theory, that when Steve Bannon resigned as White House Chief Strategist in August under a cloud, there wasn't a cloud at all.

It was all a strategic play by Trump and Bannon to play the Washington establishment and advance the Trump agenda.

I think that they decided for Bannon to leave under a cloud to provide a mis-direction to the swamp.

And the first thing that happened after Bannon left the White House was that he went 100% rogue, threatening to primary every senator that didn't support Trump. Oh No! How could he?

The next event was that Bannon backed Roy Moore, the chap that put the Ten Commandments up outside the Alabama Supreme Court, and took partial credit for Moore beating the establishment Strange in the primary runoff to win an election to serve the rest of Attorney General Sessions term in the Senate.

The next event was the "best pals"joint presser between Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday October 16. McConnell got in a word to say that we all wanted the same thing, to get electable candidates to the Senate and avoid the Tea Party amateurs of 2010 and 2912.

Conservative radio host Michael Medved was encouraged by this, a return to sanity, because he thinks Bannon is a loose cannon that will lose the Senate in 2018.

But the next day Bannon was pointing out that he is vetting the candidates he supports to make sure they have the smarts and the savvy to win the general as well as knock off the GOPe guys in the primary.

What is going on here?

Of course, nobody can know.

But I think it is a conspiracy between Trump and Bannon to knock off the old GOP establishment and at the same time tame the survivors into supporting the Trump agenda.

Really it doesn't take a conspiracy theory to understand that Trump and Bannon are playing a game of good cop/bad cop. And if you ask me it is working.

On the one hand, it looks like Mitch McConnell is finally working with Trump. Who woulda thunk it? On the other hand Bannon is thundering around in the bushes stirring up the deplorables.

So on the one hand we have an indication that the swamp is getting ready to work with Trump. On the other hand we have his operative making a big noise in the bushes and that forces the swamp incumbents to move right, both now when votes come up in Congress and next fall when they are up for reelection. Just to be safe.

The problem for conservatives, libertarians and every other form of white supremacist is that liberals have created a convenient path of non-resistance for conservative pols that come to Washington. Just get moderate and we won't demonize you as a racist, sexist homophone. Tom Bethell at the American Spectator defined that as the phenomenon of "strange new respect. Once a Republican firebrand put out the fire he suddenly got accepted into the DC in crowd as journalists started to express their strange new respect for the former Neanderthal.

So how to conservatives and libertarians get any conservative and libertarian agenda through Congress? The answer is: they don't, because if they do they get attacked as racist sexist homophobes and they lose their strange new respect props.

The point about Trump is that he has apparently cut this Gordian knot. He has found that his social media skills have conquered the old regime where conservatives and libertarians behaved themselves, or else.

You see this happening all the time, most notably with Charlottesville and the NFL anthem controversies. Under the old rules, a President Bush would have known to only attack the white supremacists in Charlottesville and not the Antifa "mostly peaceful protesters" as well. And he would never have waded into the NFL anthem controversy.

Of course the whole thing may collapse next week, and Trump will then go down in history as a bumptious failure, and his attack on the liberal worldview will end in a glorious victory for the liberal secular religion of political correctness. Of course. But if we normals do nothing we are still dead. That is why there are numerous catchphrases about: do or die, dying with your boots on, nothing ventured nothing gained.

But back to my conspiracy theory. Think about Bannon's title in the White House: Chief Strategist.

Now what do you think is the job of Chief Strategist? I'd say it is pretty obvious. Find recruits for the Trump Army that can win elections in 2018 and support the president when he runs for reelection in 2020. Because without a more Republican Senate the Trump agenda is in trouble and Trump's reelection is in trouble.

So I'd say that Steve Bannon is doing exactly what President Trump wants him to do.

And I'd say that it serves their joint purpose for liberals and NeverTrumpers to think that Trump and Bannon have parted ways. That way Bannon can make mischief and mayhem in the boondocks and Trump can keep a bit of distance between him and Bannon to make it easier for him to make Great Deals with Mitch McConnell and the Democrats in Washington DC.