Peace Be to the Deplorables

Item Two of my Perfect Plan is that the People of the Creative Self should be compassionate and understanding of the People of the Responsible Self, in the same way that the People of the Creative Self demand that the People of the Responsible Self be compassionate and understanding of the People of the Subordinate Self.

Put into everyday language, we demand that the educated elite stop beating on the Deplorables as racist sexist homophobes, just as they demand that "the rich" stop exploiting and oppressing the traditionally marginalized. Sauce for goose is sauce for the gander.

You see, I think that the biggest problem in the world right now is the conceit and the sense of entitlement in the educated elite. On the one hand the educated elite is afflicted with the conceit that they are the lions, the movement, the chosen (as in Skip Marley's "Lions") to lead and lift the marginalized out their eternal slavery. And that is to be done by political power, the kindly attentions of the chosen to provide benefits and entitlements to said oppressed and marginalized.

I would say that the record of the last 150 years is that the more that the educated elite succeeds in getting political power to lead and lift the marginalized the worse it is for the marginalized. Oh yeah, it was great to help the working class and give them free education, and union rights, and government pensions. For a while. But now look at the white working class: abandoned by their patrons in the educated elite as Deplorables, and desperately short of the middle-class skills and culture that you need to wive and thrive in the modern economy.

Or women. What has the sexual revolution and women's liberation and careers for women really done for women? The divorce revolution has allowed men to cast aside their wives; the sexual revolution plus abortion on demand has forced women to surrender their young bodies to men, and allow men to love without commitment. Oh and it has pitched many a woman into a life of regret about the babies she "got rid of." What is the point of careers for women? Don't people understand that "career" is a cunning plan to get men to compete for the spoils of corporate office rather than the spoils of war? It is crazy to teach young women that "careers" are the highest and best thing in life. One day, women will discover that the whole women's liberation movement is a crock. And they they will be angry. Oh wait, they already are.

Or blacks. What has the civil rights revolution done for blacks lately? And what did the First Black President do for blacks? No doubt the police have it in for blacks. But maybe that makes sense, given that black men murder at a rate about eight times greater than white men. I dare say that your average policeman is well aware of that. But to act on it is called "profiling" by the educated elite. No doubt that many murders go unpunished in inner cities. But that is because witnesses are intimidated from testifying in court, per Jill Leovy's Ghettoside. And no doubt the police harass the local gangbangers: that's because the gangbangers can only be prosecuted for "breaking windows" when witnessed by a police officer. Meanwhile Latinos seems to be taking over the homebuilding industry. And the educated elite seems much more interested in the plight of the "gender-nonconforming" than the continued marginalization of blacks. One day, blacks will discover that the race politics of the Democrats is a crock. And then they will be angry. Oh wait, they already are.

No, the educated elite should not be leading the marginalized into an orgy of marginalization and a Skip Marley fantasy about being the chosen, the movement to lead the marginalized to glorious vengeance. Sorry chum, the dreadful oppressive capitalist class has just spent 200 years flooding the world with cheap products for the masses. The capitalist Deplorables are in the business of inventing new products and spreading them around for all to enjoy, and they are very good at it. How bad could it be?

Then there is the other war of the educated elite upon the Deplorables, the culture war that declares the cultural norms of the bourgeoisie to be suffocating and patriarchal for the glorious educated elite and their creative spawn. I've been reading Peter Gay's Why the Romantics Matter in the past few days and it reminds me that the war on the responsible middle class has been going on for 200 years, with the various Romantic movements defining themselves by their difference from the awful, dull, patriarchal, rule-obsessed, kitschy, tasteless middle class.

The point of difference between all the Romantics -- and that is why I call them People of the Creative Self -- is the difference between ordinary middle-class individualism and what Charles Taylor calls the "expressive" individualism of the educated creative elite. Call it the difference between responsible individualism and creative, "expressive" individualism. All your artists and writers think that the ordinary middle class stinks, because of what My Fair Lady's Alfred P. Doolittle calls "middle-class morality."

No doubt, from the lordly height of a Lord Byron or various other scions of wealthy families that could afford to become artists and writers, the middle class is rather mean and pathetic. But I think that attitude fails to put itself in the place of the Other. And understanding the Other is the beginning of wisdom, according to Schopenhauer.

The center of gravity of the middle class is the merchant class, people who live their lives trading goods and services, and this way of life goes back to the founding of cities, 3,000 years ago. The whole point of a merchant is to be trustworthy and responsible, so that people will trade with him. It obviously is a Big Thing, because the religions of responsibility -- Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity -- started their emergence about 3,000 years ago. The idea was and is that humans are responsible individuals, responsible in particular to God, who will judge them at the end of days. In my view Christianity is most particularly the religion of people just entering the middle class from rural idiocy and the rough comfort of the village and the blood kindred. I have a quote that I like to use to illustrate this, the words of a preacher in the Great Awakening of the mid 18th century.

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

This is exactly the point of the People of the Responsible Self, to experience yourself as a responsible being for whom the abdication of responsibility is a damning sin.

Now, the People of the Creative Self are always tempted to regard this experience of people just learning how to make it in the city as rather small beer, a thing for little people, Deplorables really, that lack the courage and the fortitude to step out into the uncharted waters of a creative life.

OK, then why is the same not applicable to the People of the Subordinate Self that want to live by handouts from their political patrons? Get a life, kid! Stop gang-banging and get a job!

I have been dipping into Jungian psychology recently, and touched Jung's idea of "individuation," which means the difficult process of getting to understand yourself, in a gradual process, as an individual person with your own particular character and history. What Jung is not saying is that creativity is the only thing, and that a refusal to use the means appointed to be creative is a damning sin of the patriarchy.

It's a sad thing, to me, that everyone seems to be attacking the middle class. It is a difficult row for the middle class to hoe, because, as I insist, the defining thing about the middle class is that it is not that interested in power, and yet, beset by the educated elite on one hand and the underclass catspaws of the educated elite on the other, it looks like the middle class is going to have to take up the weapons of power in order to defend itself and its responsible culture.

I would tell our liberal friends in the educated elite that they really don't want to get the middle-class Deplorables angry. That's because the culture of responsibility and trust has the potential to be more powerful than anything the creatives or the victims are capable of doing.

I say, Peace be unto the Deplorables, if you know what is good for you.

The Two Reactions: How Do We Deal With Them?

In recent weeks I have been developing the idea of the Two Reactions against the modern world, and that is the way to understand the Left. It is the most natural thing in the world that the staggering social and economic changes of the last 200 years has provoked a movement of reaction against the modern phenomenon of wage labor and market capitalism. What I call the Double Revolution is utterly strange and disruptive to the old ways of the world.

So the left has raised the banner of identity politics, a neo-tribalism that reenacts the culture of the tribe that is mobilized forever against the danger of the neighboring tribe that wants "our" land. Naturally, there is in every one of us still the spirit of the hunter-gatherers and their existential need for tribal unity.

And the left has raised the banner of the patron/client relation, symbolized for us by powerful lord and its grateful retainers, a neo-feudalism that reenacts the culture of the agricultural age in which farmers needed military protection from raiders and pirates that might descend on them and steal their grain stores, for every agricultural village must store grain for the next year from the harvest until the next crop is harvested and is therefore always vulnerable to plunderers.

Our lefty friends imagine that their fight against "fascism" is proof enough of their virtue, yet they seem to be utterly blind and deaf to the truth that their identity politics, their encouragement for people to identify themselves by race or gender rather than by citizenship, is pure racism and sexism, the very thing they rail against.

Our lefty friends imagine that their welfare state is the acme of compassion and justice, yet are blind and deaf to the creaking inefficiency and injustice of a system that pays billions out to well-to-do retired folks like me while taxing young and less well-to-do working people to pay for our benefits. Of course they do: they are the guys that get to occupy the commanding heights of the welfare state in comfortable sinecures and pensions that issue from their hard-gained credentials and connections.

There is a spirit in conservatism that longs to roll up tribalism into a global community that gets beyond race or gender or class identity, but I do not think it is practical to expect humans to do that. We humans are tribal; the question is how to channel our tribalism into beneficial channels that don't set us against each other within our current political boundaries.

There is a spirit in conservatism that longs to roll up the welfare state and replace it with a non-governmental system of private charity and mutual-aid societies in which people are responsible for their own social insurance. But I do not think that it is practical to assume that everyone can do that. There is clearly a big part of each human that wants to snuggle up to a powerful lord and have him take care of making us safe.

So my mind proceeds to wonder how we can accommodate our instinctive tribalism but without the bloodthirsty naming and shaming that sometimes escalates into witch hunts and Reigns of Terror. And I wonder how we can accommodate people that do not want to try the rigors of the marketplace but want to live a life of safety.

And I come to this from my recent reading of Jungian psychology that emphasizes the continuing role of the unconscious and its vast underworld of instinctive "archetypes" or scripts for living. Obviously we cannot consign the unconscious to the dust bin of history. It is a vital part of us; indeed recent science says that the brain seems to make decisions about 1.5 seconds before the decision appears in our conscious mind. So what is that all about? Does it mean that our glorious consciousness and rationalism is all a mirage and a delusion?

But then it occurred to me that we have already accommodated the tribal and the feudal impulses in our modern world. After all, we are humans, we are not as dumb as we seem.

In the stead of tribalism we have invented the nation state. Instead of the actual ties of the blood kindred we have the fantasy of a nation united by its language, its culture, its glorious history, and the memory of the Fallen, those who died to Make Us Safe. How cool is that? There are a lot of people that sneer at the nation state. They should cool their jets; it is nothing less that amazing that we could have transformed the culture of the actual tribe into a myth of the imaginary tribe made up out of whole cloth by clever thinkers and propagandists. And that is the problem of the globalists; they have not thought through how to create a transnational demos to which ordinary people can pledge allegiance. Their transnational experiments cannot succeed unless they create a demos for their transnational creations. I like to joke that we humans will not create a global political community until we have to fight a war against the Martians or the Trisolarians from Alpha Centauri.

What we need to work on is how to keep tribalism inside the guardrails. The problem right now is that our global elite has discouraged a nation-level identity politics on the grounds that we must never allow fascism to rear its ugly head. But its strategy to retain its power has encouraged and normalize sub-national identity politics with appeals to labor unions, Black Lives Matter, the Latino La Raza, women's liberation groups, and environmental groups. Hey, groups like that are natural and physical, but should not have special privileges, as unions did for a century. And when the ruling class encourages sub-national identity politics it is playing with fire.

In the stead of feudalism we have invented the corporation. Instead of the subordination to the local lord we have subordination to the corporate hierarchy, with its pretty safe employment prospects, its chance for advancement, and its basket of benefits and pensions. If you don't like the uncertainty of employment at will, you can get yourself into a nice safe corporation with an HR department and a code of conduct. In my view, it is not really safer to work for a corporation than to accept the rigors of employment at will, but it sure feels like it.

What we need to work on is how to keep the neo-feudal baronies from plundering the rest of society. It is clear that the industrial corporations of the 1950s in concert with industrial labor unions were allowed to raise prices and wages above the market level, and this was unjust. But then, in another proof of God's existence, the proud privileged steel and auto industries got soft and entitled, and got sucker-punched by emerging German and Japanese corporations in the 1970s. Then they ran out of money to pay their defined-benefit pensions. We could have avoided that if we had kept the corporations and labor unions honest and written beneficial legislation to prevent labor unions from forming a combination against trade and prevent corporations from getting carve-outs from politicians and regulators. Today we have the scandal of government employees earning way above the levels in the private sector and getting defined-benefit pensions that threaten to bankrupt states like California and Illinois. The truth is that people may run from the market and its prices, but they can't hide, not forever. Eventually everyone of us must surrender to the will of the market and its prices, and it is the job of a good ruling class to teach the people the truth of the emergent phenomenon we call the price system.

Is this possible? Can we contain the tribal and the feudal impulse within safe channels, with wise recognition of their profound humanness, and cunning strategies to keep them from plundering us all?

We should all hope so.

What the Trump Skeptics of 2016 Got Wrong

Over at the American Spectator libertarian Ross Kaminsky admits he was wrong about Donald Trump (he voted for Evan McMullin) back in 2016. Donald Trump has emerged as a "president of consequence."

So I got to thinking about why chaps like Kaminsky got it wrong, and why chaps like me got it right.

Nothing wrong with being wrong: it is impossible to predict the future. Everything we do when we look to the future is a leap of faith. And obviously Ross Kaminsky had no faith in Donald Trump. The reason is obvious: Donald Trump ran as a populist, and for a hard-core libertarian like Kaminsky or a traditional conservative populism is foolishness at best and the first step to totalitarianism at worst.

But now that President Trump has governed as a pretty mainstream conservative/libertarian we can see that the populism was in part a ruse. To win the election Donald Trump understood -- either consciously or unconsciously -- that he had to appeal not just to the normal Republican base but to another sector of the electorate that wasn't libertarian or conservative: the white working class.

Imagine that: to win an election you have to be popular.

Trump promised to Make America Great Again and to fight against the free-trade policies and the immigration policies that had brought the white working class low. And he promised to bring jobs back.

Now we doctrinaire libertarians and economic conservatives would argue, from our deep understanding of economics, that the way to Make America Great Again would be to lower tax rates and cut regulations, and we were troubled that Candidate Trump did not really spell that out, but just talked in generalities about a great tax cut and draining the swamp.

Let us assume that Donald Trump is not an idiot, but just plays one on TV. This Donald Trump would understand that, in order to bring the white working class into the Republican camp, he would have to de-emphasize the details of tax-cutting and regulation cutting, because the white working class has been fed lefty propaganda for generations about evil corporations that get tax loopholes and screw the worker and the consumer. The Republican Party has obviously failed in the past to sell the white working class on traditional economics, so Trump would have to soft-pedal the pro-business aspect of his agenda.

So Trump campaigned on Making America Great Again and assumed that when his tax-cutting and regulation-cutting hit the street they would provide enough of an economic surge to deliver on the basic promise of Making America Great Again -- by creating jobs and lifting wages for the average employee -- and never mind how he got there.

In that he was obviously right. The average voters understand bupkis about economics and tax rates and regulations. They just regurgitate catch-phrases, and most of the catch-phrases come from the left, thanks to the schools and the media. But the average voter does respond to an improving economy, and that response seems to kick in at about 3 percent growth per annum.

The other thing that Donald Trump has done that people like Kaminsky -- and many others -- do not like is the insulting and the tweeting.

Maybe so, but it has to be understood that the nice polite conservatism of George W. Bush and the establishment Republican Party has not worked. While we act all nice, with white gloves and all, the left amps up the insults.

After all, what could be more insulting than to call everyone right of center a racist, a sexist, and a homophobic bigot? Not to mention a hater and a xenophobe? Whatever may be the right and the wrong of left-wing propagands, a politician of the right cannot allow his supporters to be attacked and humiliated in this way. He must fight for his supporters.

Now, a lot of nice polite people don't like the Trump Culture of Insult. Of course they don't. It goes against the polite culture of the bourgeois middle class. But I argue that the default culture of men is the Culture of Insult that comes from the male honor code of courage under fire. And if politics is not a war of insult I don't know what is.

For instance, "Chuck and Nancy" have reacted to the Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as the end of the world. Sen. Schumer (D-NY) has said that Republicans would "rue the day" they passed the bill, and Rep. Pelosi (D-CA) has warned of "Armageddon." Really? And Trump is supposed to smile sweetly in response?

In reality, the Trump insults are nothing like enough. What is needed is a full-frontal culture war on the left's neo-tribal identity politics from a solid cultural fortress that defends bourgeois culture, understands the problems of the marginalized, and drives past the educated elite's culture of creativity to something higher and nobler. Problem is that the genius needed to build that solid cultural fortress has not yet emerged from the brow of Zeus, and so we are stuck with guerrilla tactics, worrying at the flanks of the dominant left and keeping them off-balance with Trumpist insult tweets.

One fine day, we righties will emerge trailing clouds of glory with a religious faith that understands the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in a way that satisfies everyone: from the folks just emerging from rural idiocy into the immense challenge of life in the city; to the middle-class bourgeois that obeys the law, goes to work, and follows the rules; to the educated elitist that wants to do something creative with their life.

But that day is not yet.

Meanwhile, as Donald Rumsfeld said, "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

You also go to war with the general you have, not the general you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Basic Training for Women in the Workplace

If you read the stories of the victims of Pervnado you encounter the same story, again and again. When the victim in question was touched or otherwise subject to a male's power play, she froze.

That is a problem. Either women can take care of themselves in public places or... well, Sarah Hoyt thinks that corporations just won't want to hire women any more: too much trouble. Given that a man can now be fired just on the accusation of a woman, it means that no sensible man will want to be around women in the workplace.

[T]his will give companies pause before hiring women, which will lead to a lot of decent and qualified women being left unemployed.

Oh dear. How come the feminazis never thought of that?

So I have a solution. Basic Training for Babes in the Workplace.

The problem of "freezing" at a frightening moment is not just a problem for women in the workplace. It is a problem for soldiers in wartime.

Yeah, that's right. Armies have a big problem with training their soldiers not to freeze when frightened out of their wits. So do airlines, when it comes to an emergency in the air.

So what do these outfits do? Perfectly simple. They train their employees to deal with emergencies, to follow orders when the skies are falling, and not just emergencies in general, but what to do, step-by-step, in specific emergencies.

I have experienced how that works in my own life. For several years I was a soaring pilot, flying gliders. The big problem in gliding is what to do if you don't find lift from a thermal and cannot get back to your home airfield. In that case, you have to "land out," probably in a farmer's field. So you get trained how to pick a suitable field, how high up you need to be to do a proper approach pattern, and above all, when to make the decision to land out. In my soaring days I found myself too low to return to base twice, and both times I followed my training and set myself up for a land-out in a suitable field. But both times, as I was flying the approach pattern to land, I found lift and was able to abort the approach and circle in a thermal and eventually return to my home base.

Despite all the fear and adrenaline I followed my training, and I can see why. When you have the option between: heading for home hoping against hope that you make it, and a procedure drilled into you by your training that has a safe result ending up in a suitable field, you go with the "safer" option.

In the aftermath of US Airways Flight 1549 that landed in the Hudson River after a bird strike that knocked out its engines, I got to read a few articles about airborne emergencies. The experts said that when there is an emergency in the air, flight crew do what they are trained to do.

Then there was Air France 447 that crashed after getting into clouds in the tropical convergence zone. Reading the reports on the accident I was amazed at the cluelessness of the flight crew. They clearly had not been properly trained to deal with a stall situation: so they panicked and flopped around and lost their lives, and the plane, and the passengers.

So, when it comes to women in the workplace we have two options. Either we place women in protected safe spaces, or we train them to deal with a variety of unwanted attentions.

If we decide to put women into safe spaces, then we are saying that the whole business of women's liberation was a failure, because women are just too frail and risk-averse to deal with threats against their person. Bring back the patriarchy.

So the only sensible alternative is Basic Training for the Workplace. I am not talking about martial arts and well-aimed kicks in the groin. I am talking about training women to respond automatically to the kind of aggression practiced by the Harvey Weinsteins and the Matt Lauers of the world. Oh, and the Joe Bidens of the world:



And frankly, it would be a good thing if women just automatically followed their training before worrying about creating a scene, as above or worse, thinking about whether there might be an angle to going with the flow and hoping for a quid pro quo for a bit of nookie.

Oh, and it would really help if the Harvey Weinsteins and Matt Lauers and Joe Bidens of the world knew that women would automatically go to their training instead of freezing.

This is all very well, you might say, but are you sure that women are up for this sort of thing? Isn't Basic Training a guy sort of thing, that issues from the male honor culture and its street manifestation, the Culture of Insult? Can women get beyond their Culture of Complaint and actually do something about male aggression other than complain about it and #metoo about it?

That's a good question. Another thing that came out of my glider pilot experience, was that they found that whenever a woman glider pilot had a frightening experience in the air she was done with gliding. In other words, women tend to respond to a frightening event by never going near it again. Whereas the essence of the male honor culture is the courage to go back into the maelstrom to show that you are a member in good standing of the band of brothers.

I don't know the answer to that. But I do feel that either women decide it is their responsibility to look after themselves at the office or return to the protected status of the patriarchy.

And maybe it is too late, if the Women of the New York Times are to be believed.

OK, so maybe the Women of the New York Times just want Daddy to get their blankie. But when someone else has the job of making you safe, then you are their subject, their creature; you are not an independent woman.

The Two Heads of the Forces of Lefty Reaction

A while back I introduced the idea of the Double Revolution of the modern era. In my view this is a revolution in physics, from the mechanical model of the Newtonian era to the uncertainty model of the quantum era, and a revolution in economics from the mechanical supervisory model of the feudal era to the emergent price-driven economy of the post-industrial revolution.

And I said that, inevitably, there arose a reactionary movement opposing the Double Revolution, what we call the left. I called out the communist-socialist reaction as the example of this.

But this morning I was re-reading Jonathan Haidt on the current political divisions, his "Age of Outrage" in which he worries about the outrage culture on campus, and I clarified my thinking.

The reaction against the economic part of the Double Revolution comes in two flavors. The first is what I call "activism," a faith in politics as a form of salvation. This reactionary movement is best seen as neo-tribalism, as it uses the unconscious drives of the tribe against the threat of the Other to motivate and to inspire. The second is the hierarchical practice of the administrative state, the rule by educated expert and administrative bureaucracy which has precipitated into the modern welfare state. I consider this part of the reactionary movement to be a neo-feudalism.

There is nothing scandalous, nothing monstrous about this movement of reaction. It is what you would expect to happen in response to the utterly transformative Double Revolution in its economic manifestation. This is confirmed by the developmental psychologists and their epigones like the New Age philosopher Ken Wilber. When people are frightened and disoriented by trials and setbacks while living the higher levels of consciousness they turn to the tried and true of the old, lower, levels of consciousness.  That is why Hitler was able to appeal to the German people, the most advanced country in the world but frightened by the post-World War I convulsions and failures, with a program of blood and soil.

Yes, of course the reactionary movement of "activism" appeals to tribalism. We are, as Jonathan Haidt writes, profoundly tribal.

We are exquisitely designed and adapted by evolution for life in small societies with intense, animistic religion and violent intergroup conflict over territory. We love tribal living so much that we invented sports, fraternities, street gangs, fan clubs, and tattoos. Tribalism is in our hearts and minds.

Anyone that wants to bring humans together in any enterprise or project is going to appeal to their tribalism, for good or ill. The problem with tribalism is that it is designed to raise consciousness for the inevitable conflict with the neighboring tribe, for death or glory, and this is very seldom required in the modern economy and society where the fundamental requirement is for people to submit to the notion that they are obtaining their livelihood by serving others, not fighting others. The fight, if there is one, is between different businesses to see which one will win in the fight to serve the consumer.

The problem is that over the last 150 years the left has marched through the institutions and taught every Good Little Boy and Good Little Girl that "activism" is the highest way of life, so even though almost every Good Little Boy and Good Little Girl is really not cut out to be a Social Justice Warrior, everyone of them has a yearning to "get into activism."

I wrote a week or so ago in "Militarism vs. Activism: Ruling Class Culture Then and Now" that I thought that "activism" was just as harmful a culture as the "militarism" culture that led the leaders of 1914 into World War I. Too many people now are instinctive "activists" and don't really understand the awful consequences, just as too many people in 1914 were instinctive "militarists" and really did not understand the consequences.

Somehow, some way, some day we are going to have to lance the boil of modern "activism."

The other reactionary movement is the neo-feudalism of the welfare state and the administrative state. It is telling that in The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels prophesied that capitalism would rehearse the subjection of peasant to lord with the subjection of proletarian to bourgeois capitalist. Only that is not what happened, because subordinate peasants and serfs were not particularly useful to the capitalists. They found that they needed responsible, resourceful employees not dumb-as-dirt peasants and slaves.

I am trying to think of a single word to describe the neo-feudalism movement, but it hasn't come yet. Serfism, subordinism, administratism, expertism, manorialism, patronism? I can't figure it out yet, but I will.

While the "activism" culture organizes humans into a permanent war of all against all, just like the old "militarism" of the dynastic monarchs and the tribalism of the hunter-gatherers, the neo-feudalism puts people into a permanent subjection to an administrative system that has significant powers over their lives but is usually unable to adjust to changing conditions. In other words, it promises security and safety but in fact cannot deliver them, because security and safety can only be delivered by reacting to dangers and threats, and the bureaucratic welfare state cannot do that, not until it is too late.

It is remarkable, but the model for how things ought to be in society are present daily in the life of the human body. Some of the larger, cruder things are directed by the brain and the central nervous system, but the moment-to-moment, day-to-day life of the body is conducted cell by cell in exquisite instinctive individual responses by each individual cell to the overall needs of the body according to chemical codes and operations that we barely understand.

That is what the modern economy and society asks of us: to respond to the prompts of prices of goods and the needs of other people that we can serve, each of us individually and without the clunking fist of some political or economic overlord telling us what to do and when, or the rage of tribalism inspiring us to fight to the last man against the hated Other.

Politics of the Three Peoples: The Trump Gambit

In yesterday's piece, "The Politics of the Three Peoples," I attempted to describe the natural political tastes of the the three kinds of people in the modern era. How the People of the Subordinate Self want a neo-feudal welfare state to take care of them; how the People of the Responsible Self want a minimal state that protects life and liberty and defends a law-based people going about their business; how the People of the Creative Self want to run things, to create a perfect state abounding with compassion and justice, as a witness to their wonderfulness.

But what, you may ask, is the consequence of these Three Peoples with their conflicting ideas about government and justice?

The first, and obvious thing, is that the People of the Subordinate Self and the People of the Creative Self are natural allies. The People of the Subordinate Self want stuff in return for their support of their liege lord, and the People of the Creative Self are glad to give away Other Peoples' Money in return for the support of the People of the Subordinate Self so they can creatively create the perfect state with Hope and Change.

This is clearly demonstrated in my catchphrase that government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters, with the "supporters" as the People of the Subordinate Self, the "inhabitants" the People of the Responsible Self, and the "armed minority" the People of the Creative Self.

The only problem with the happy dance between the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self is that it is not a self-regulating system. This is brought out by Ilana Mercer in a recent piece on African politics. There is no regulating system to tell African dictators just how much loot and plunder to reward their supporters is too much, so they tend to loot the place to the bare walls. This is obviously true also in lefty dictatorships like Venezuela. Any country experiencing hyper-inflation has a ruling class that has seriously screwed up its sums: the amount of loot that can be consistently extracted from the populace to give to its supporters. In countries like the United States we merely have an obvious prediction that things cannot go on as they have forever: the entitlements will run out of Other Peoples' Money at some point, but not yet.

The dance between the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self is a big problem for the People of the Responsible Self. We really do not want to play the game of taxing the inhabitants to reward our supporters. We think that such a philosophy of politics is stupid. The world is much too complicated to reduce it to a matter of loot and plunder. We do not really want to live at the expense of our fellow citizens and we do not thrill to the orgasm of ordering our fellow citizens about and putting our hands in their pockets. We do not boil with a rage to be revenged upon corporate profits or greedy bankers, and we do not thrill with the prospect of fundamentally transforming society.

And that is why conservatives have been in retreat for the last century. We do not want to use the state to advance our power project, because we have no power project. We just want to let the exchange economy have its way and keep a sharp eye out for the occasional egregious injustice that might be correctable by beneficial legislation.

That is why Donald Trump is such a phenomenon. He has cut this Gordian Knot by the simple expedient of exploiting the egregious injustice suffered by the white working class in the past generation and linking it to the negative agenda of the libertarian, conservative Right.

The Trump phenomenon is perfectly simple, in retrospect. In their enthusiasm to right the wrongs of the past, our liberal friends determined to help the women and minorities that had been marginalized under the regime of "white privilege." But they forgot to check the possible operation of the Law of Unintended Consequences. It turned out that their post Sixties identity politics harmed not the scions of "white privilege"-- people like me -- but the white working class, the sons and daughters of the Irish, the Italians, and Scotch Irish, that in 1900 and through the Great Depression were considered to be the working stiffs of the marginalized working class.

So today the cunning President Trump is standing up for the rights of the white working class by passing a tax bill that lowers federal income tax for the broad middle class, including the white working class, and puts a cat among the international pigeons by lowering the rate on the corporate income tax below the rate in most First World countries.

Do you see what he has done? He has put himself at the head of the white working class, giving voice to its feeling that it was robbed, but is actually going to help it by reviving the whole economy through reduction of business regulation and taxes. If he can pull it off this ploy he will go down in history as another Ronald Reagan.

So, on my view, the Politics of the Three Peoples plays out with the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self ganging up on the People of the Responsible Self and milking them dry. And so it will continue unless the People of the Responsible Self can find a group that has been lately shafted by the criminal conspiracy between the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self and offer that group assistance, as in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

See? Life is not that complicated after all.

The Politics of the Three Peoples

In my reductive Three Peoples theory I propose that humans come in three flavors. First there are the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, that understand life as subordination to some lord or patron. Then there are the People of the Responsible Self that first emerged in the cities of the Fertile Crescent some 3,000 years ago. Cities require their inhabitants to be independent and responsible rather than waiting around for instructions, and so they are. Then we have the People of the Creative Self, that believe in creating something new in the world. I first developed this notion in "The Dance of the Three Peoples."

Obviously each of these three peoples have different ideas of politics.

Let us begin with the political agenda of the People of the Responsible Self. These people obviously want a minimal state that will provide a law-based framework for them to work and trade in the market economy. So the political program is what developed in the late 18th century during the rise of the bourgeoisie: constitutions, limited powers, defense of trading networks, sound money, government limited to defense and infrastructure and defense of property rights. But this political regime started to break up when the working class obtained political power after the industrial revolution; the working class did not experience themselves as responsible individuals but as a subordinate class of victims. They wanted education for their children, and social insurance for themselves, and they wanted somebody else to organize it for them.

The People of the Subordinate Self experience themselves as victims. They are looking to powerful leaders to protect them from the vicissitudes of the world, both natural and man-made. During the feudal era these people were serfs and peasants, living on land "owned" by some warrior lord. This lord protected his serfs from predators, but the price of this protection was that the lord got to predate on his serfs. In addition, the serfs were expected to serve in their lord's army. Between lord and serf there grew up a culture of expectation. The lord expected the serfs to loyally serve him, work his land, and fight his wars, and in return, with his "grace," he looked after his loyal retainers. It is obvious that this culture has been reborn in the western world in the neo-feudal welfare state, where the people expect benefits because of their status as supporters of their political liege lords. Rather than responsibly provide for their own welfare against a rainy day they submit to a system of welfare organized and administered by their betters.

The People of the Creative Self experience themselves as creators. They might be artist and writer creators; they might be business entrepreneurs creating a tech startup. Or they might be "activists" that want to create a just society through the process of "change" or revolution. These creators in their different realms all want to be the agent of change, with a world-changing book, a world-changing business, or a world-changing political system. 

There is nothing problematic in wanting to make a great movie; you can recruit tons of people willing to finance and work on it, and after it is finished the creative team will disband and coalesce again on another creative project. There is nothing problematic in wanting to creative a great business; the great business creators of the last 200 years have assembled teams of people to help them make great products. When the business was a success, the investors and employees shared in the success; when the business failed they used their experience and their skills to help them in a new venture. But political creativity is problematic. That's because government is force, politics is the art of division, and administrative system is domination. When you create a new political project, by election or revolution, your supporters expect to benefit forever, and rebel and mutiny if their checks fail to arrive. Plus, despite the vision of "change" in the service of justice, the fact is that there no such thing as justice, only injustice. So if your vision of change imagines anything more than the reduction of a few egregious injustices, you are probably changing old injustices for new ones.

So the great problem of the modern age is creative political elites thinking they can design and implement some perfect plan to change society from a state of injustice to a new regime of justice -- for the workers, for women, for minorities, etc. All the great creative political projects of the last century have been disasters: communism, which turns out to be a sort of holy war against the bourgeoisie; the welfare state, which is really a neo-feudalism with the creative class strutting around as modern squires and barons of the bureaucracy;  fascism, which is a desperate populism against the previous failure of the creative class to provide a stable and prosperous society; globalism, which is a kind of monarchical absolutism, with a global elite perpetuating itself in power like a high-class crime family.

You can see that there is no easy solution to the problem of the competing political agendas of the Three Peoples. The People of the Subordinate Self are condemned to disappointment, because they cannot live forever as the serfs, the "little darlings" of some lord. Eventually the lord will discard them. The People of the Responsible Self cannot have their minimal state, because the People of the Subordinate Self want more protection than the minimal state affords. And the People of the Creative Self desperately want a starring role for themselves, forgetting that almost all creative projects end in failure, which is a big problem when the lives of millions of people are at stake.

There is a solution, of course: it is my Perfect Plan. Part One is that we should encourage the People of the Subordinate Self to become responsible, and reward them when they do. Part Two is for the People of the Creative Self to practice compassion and tolerance when it comes to the People of the Responsible Self. 

OK, my Perfect Plan is not really a perfect plan. It is just a couple of really sensible ideas that could help us move forward without descending further into a brawl of all against all.