PA-18 Moderate vs. Clinton Loser

In the late special election for PA-18 the apparent winner is a moderate Democrat that sounds like he wants to appeal to the more mild-mannered Trump voters. Shades of 2006 when Chuck Schumer recruited a whole slate of moderate Democrats to run for Congress and won the House and the Senate with his moderate candidates.

They say that's how you win elections, by appealing to the mushy middle.

But Hillary Clinton is another matter. She who found a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband back in the 1990s and wrote off half the country as deplorables in 2016 is still going strong. In India last week she declared that she won the coasts of America while the Republicans won the heartland.

But what the map doesn't show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.

Then she went in for the kill.

Then she turned to Trump's voters: “And his whole campaign — 'Make America Great Again' — was looking backward. You know, you didn't like black people getting rights; you don't like women, you know, getting jobs; you don't want to, you know, see that Indian American succeeding more than you are." 

 In a way this is comical. Used to be that Democrats railed at Republicans for telling everyone to get with the program and board the capitalist train. Because what about the people left behind, particularly "the workers?" Not any more.

Clinton is telling us what Democrats and liberals say to each other when no-one else is listening. They still think it is 1965 and blacks and women lack basic civil rights. And why not? The years 1964-1965 were the miracle years for Democrats, and things have never been the same since.

Civil rights for blacks? But 50 years later, with liberals cheer-leading every step of the way, blacks are still woefully lagging.

Jobs for women? But those meany-jellybeany tech firms won't hire enough women for STEM jobs.

Indian Americans? You know what? I doubt if Indian tech guys really exist for your average Trump voter in a Rust Belt state.

The point is that politics is always about the grievances of the left-behind. That's because the left-behind experience the head-winds of life, and very often they attribute their lack of progress to "the rich," "injustice," not to mention the black guy that got a Fire Department job because inclusion and diversity.

That's why my basic line is that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. Of course, it may be that there really is justice in a more perfect world, but in the real world the ruling class or the ruling majority writes laws and regulations to benefit itself and its supporters and they call it justice. Anyone that objects is guilty of "hate speech."

Such a situation is the history of the world, and the result can go one of two ways. One way is for the folks on the receiving end give up, and either die out or merge into the majority population. The other way is for the folks on the receiving end to get angry, form a head of rebellion, and determine to end the rule of injustice that the ruling class has lowered over their heads.

In this sense Hillary Clinton magnificently represents the existing ruling class. For this ruling class the whole history of the last century has been one of bending the arc of history towards justice by political means. First the liberal heroes gave the workers the vote, then they gave them wage and hour laws and unions, then they gave blacks and women the vote and now they are allowing gays and transgenders to emerge after an eternal marginalization.

But there is always a counter-narrative, even if the ruling class manages to shut it down. Maybe, the workers would have done better if they hadn't had labor union power to loot the great industrial corporations like steel and auto, for maybe they would still have their jobs. Maybe blacks would have thrived better if they just got civil rights in 1964 and then had to work their way up by picking up the mantle of middle-class culture. Maybe women would be happier now if the sexual revolution and abortion hadn't stripped them of the right to say No, and maybe the whole idea of women getting jobs is a conceit of educated women who want to differentiate themselves from "mere housewives."

Maybe. Or maybe not. But one thing is for sure. Ageing dinosaurs of the ruling class like Hillary Clinton are usually the last to know.

GOP Russian Collusion: Just an Incompetent Deep State Job

Yesterday the House Intelligence Committee reported "nothing to see here" on the Russian collusion theory, and today there's a long tic-toc piece on NRO Online that provides the narrative of "why." Why have the Democrats been pushing their Russian collusion narrative?

In the NRO piece by Michael Doran the whole thing just grew, in a Deep State, Creatures of the Swamp way, as the 2016 election year developed. In Doran's telling, first there was Hillary's emails, then there was the DNC emails showing that the DNC and Hillary's campaign had conspired to keep old Bernie down. Then there was Trump saying: "hey, why dontcha ask Putin about those emails." Then you had the developing Steele dossier gambit that needed Russia connections for the Trump campaign and the only two remotely available were Manafort and Page. Then there are the talking points that appeared on Hillary's campaign website:

1. What’s behind Trump’s fascination with Vladimir Putin?

2. Why does Trump surround himself with advisers with links to the Kremlin?

3. Why do Trump’s foreign policy ideas read like a Putin wish list?

4. Do Trump’s still-secret tax returns show ties to Russian oligarchs?

5. Why is Trump encouraging Russia to interfere in our election?

Yeah! Go get 'im! How dare Trump insult our intrepid intelligence agencies by suggesting Putin might lend a hand! See how this might encourage the duller dogs in the Swamp to interpret this as the famous line of Henry II: "who will rid me of this troublesome priest."

Also, do you think that, in a clumsy Hillary Clinton way, the Clinton people wanted to deflect the huge scandal of Hillary's emails and Hillary/DNC deep-sixing Bernie with a cry that cut across the whole thing: what about those Russians!

In my "they are all idiots" theory, the whole Russia collusion narrative is nothing more than idiots making a complete mess of things: in the campaign, in the intelligence agencies. And then you have dear President Obama putting his oar into the Hillary email issue by declaring in April 2016, well before the completion of the FBI investigation, that Hillary merely displayed a "carelessness in terms of managing emails."

Earth to ordinary US military and government employees: Do not try this! Carelessness in terms of managing classified emails will land you in jail!

They say that the boss of an organization sets the tone for everyone. You can certainly say that President Obama set the tone that anything was permissible in the service of bending the arc of history towards justice. And the point is that, when the boss shows a rather cavalier attitude towards the rules this translates, for the operatives down in the organization, to you'd better bend the rules for the boss, or else.

The question is what happens next. When the Republican House Intelligence Committee, perhaps soon followed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, followed by the conservative commentariat are all saying "nothing to see here" it puts pressure on Special Counsel Mueller to put up or shut up, a challenge that I am sure Tweeter-in-Chief Trump is up to.

And, of course, the longer that the Mueller train keeps on going, the more justification arises to ask questions about Hillary Clinton and her emails, and the curious case of Uranium One and the Russians way back in the Obama administration.

Here's how the world should have been, starting November 8, 2016. First, Hillary Clinton appears at her campaign headquarters on election night and concedes the election. Congratulations to Donald Trump, and we are not just Democrats and Republicans, but we are all Americans, first and last. Then the Obama guys assist the Trumpists in their transition, and the whole Hillary email issue quietly disappears beneath the waves.

But when you don't concede the election and you raise the Russia Collusion issue then you allow all the issues around the election to be raised and investigated: hello emails. If you have half a head on your shoulders you realize that, and so you concede the election, pronto.

But if you are an idiot, in accordance with my "they are all idiots theory," then you don't see this, because you are an idiot and you can't see the strategic issues that are staring you right in the face.

I think that Hillary Clinton is an idiot. She just doesn't have the strategic chops to be in high politics. And that is why her record in high politics is one long trail of mistakes and blunders. And that goes for her recent remarks in India about the Republican red states being all losers.

By the way. President Trump is not an idiot. He just plays one on TV.

The Political Response to "Change"

I'm reading a biography of the second Lord Melbourne, who was Queen Victoria's Prime Minister and her "Lord M" in the early years of her reign. One can argue that it was his care and feeding of the 18-year-old monarch that kept Britain from revolution in the mid 19th century.

In The Young Melbourne & Lord M David Cecil also attempts to tell the story of the rise of the middle class and the working class to political recognition in the first half of the 19th century.

The point is that in 1800 Britain was entirely run by its landed aristocracy, either directly in the House of Lords and the main offices of national government, or through their elder sons sitting in the House of Commons. By 1850, after the Great Reform Bill of 1832 and the Chartist movement of the 1840s there was no doubt that Britain would be ruled with the contribution of the middle and the working classes -- even though the working class didn't yet have the vote.

But I would say, reading David Cecil, that while the ruling class in Britain pretty early on realized that things were changing and would never be the same again, they were always divided on what to do about it, in every way possible. We often hear about the "Tory ultras" that were opposed to all change. But the Whigs, who get the credit for pushing Reform in the critical years leading up to 1832, had their own ultras.

Not only that, but the middle class also had a voice, even before the electoral reform. In the late 1820s and early 1830s there was a lot of unrest in the countryside, with mobs and rick-burnings, so the middle class became very pro-law-and-order. So even though the middle class didn't have the vote, the middle class support for law and order influenced the government when it was wondering what to do about the unrest.

Naturally, I am trying to use the past as a lens into our current political divisions. You see, my main feeling is that our liberal friends just do not have the slightest inkling that the world has changed, that their governing philosophy is in deep trouble, and things will never be the same again.

Maybe the difference is that the "change," whatever it is, is just in its early stages, and the folks on the commanding heights of liberal opinion have not really grasped the situation. Maybe it is because in 1800 the ruling class was really a very small world where everybody knew everybody and intelligence about what was going on was widely shared. Today, in a more ideological age, our ruling class is kept informed by ideological media. Most members of the ruling class are not in high politics -- or in contact with someone who is -- but in patronage jobs in education and NGOs and culture where ideological rectitude is a condition of employment and intelligence about what the leaders are really thinking is not available.

The big thing, I think, is that the modern economy and culture is very good for the ruling class, those that I call the People of the Creative Self. But living in what we call the "liberal bubble" these folks really do not have a clue about how life feels in the rest of the country.

For instance, I would say that, outside the highly educated, average Americans are utterly confused by the "gay turn" and the rise of "non gender binary" culture. This culture, in my judgement,  is only possible for People of the Creative Self getting creative about sex. Average people can't get beyond the accepted cultural practices of courting, marriage, and household formation, and the consequences thereof. I don't think that my liberal friends have a clue about how confusing and frightening their imposition of LGBT culture appears to ordinary Americans.

It was telling to me that when the Tea Party emerged in 2009-10 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi muttered about AstroTurf. She assumed that any protesters and protest groups were organized and funded from above. Because that's the way it's handled in the liberal world. All the left-inspired protests you see do not represent the authentic voice of the people, but political action ginned by the the ruling class made to look as though it were authentic. The assumption here is that "we liberals" have everything under control and nothing moves without we give the OK. In fact, of course, the Republican establishment was taken completely by surprise by the Tea Party, and "change" is not a game played by lefty activists but real response by real people to real economic and social change impacting their lives.

The first thing America needs, according to me, is for the liberal ruling class, the People of the Creative Self, the Prius drivers, the gentrifiers, the MSNBC watchers to get to the realization that they and their political culture and their governance agenda have a problem, that the current liberal world-view is the only thing that counts, and anything else is racism, sexism, or homophobia.

They haven't got there yet and that is a problem.

Put it this way. Here in the United States we had a civil war in the 1860s because the two sides were determined to teach the other guys a lesson. But in Britain the rise of the middle class and the working class was managed without a civil war.

What does it take to get "change" without a civil war? And what will it take this time?

350 Million Years of Hierarchy: Get Used to It

If you have been going through the Jordan B. Peterson videos you will probably come across his assertion that hierarchy has been around for 350 million years: get used to it.

His point is, of course, that hierarchy is everywhere in nature, so if you believe in Evolution, darling, then you must believe in hierarchy. The only question is: what is the point of hierarchy?

The answer is obvious: hierarchy, like love, makes the world go round.

The question is important because of the modern rage for equality. Why, you might ask, is equality so important to so many people?

The short answer, I suspect, is that for anyone concerned about equality the wrong people are in charge. And that has to change!

I am seeing this in David Cecil's The Young Melbourne & Lord M. The Lord Melbourne that became Queen Victoria's "Lord M" was in 1810 a young Whig aristocrat in the great era of Whig aristocracy. But it was a moment when "equality" was rearing its head, as the rising bourgeoisie of trade and industry wanted a piece of the action. Apart from any resentment, the rising middle class wanted the rules to be changed to accommodate the new industrial economy that was starting to replace the old agricultural economy. The Whig aristocracy was fully aware of this; the question was what to do about it, and what would happen to the Whig aristocracy as a result.

I think that tells us all about "equality." Anyone flying the flag of "equality" is not happy with their place in the hierarchy; they want it changed. The big question is the response of the existing top dogs to the challenging young dogs.

Usually, people do not want the whole society upset: they just want more respect, for themselves and people like them. You can see that in the Chartists of mid-19th century Britain, and the working class that wanted the franchise, and the women that wanted the vote, and the African Americans that wanted civil rights.

But, I would argue, gradually the authentic movements-of-the-people became polluted by upper-class wannabes that wanted a movement to lead, so that now your average social justice warrior is an upper-class high-status person that wants their fifteen minutes of fame leading the victims along the arc of history to justice.

In his piece today, Christopher DeGroot interprets the "Sham of Equality" as a rage for status.

That one person has something that another hasn’t, or more of something than another, is certainly sufficient to inspire resentment, the most poisonous of feelings. And having resolved to conceal his motivation, perhaps including from himself, the envious soul now proceeds to wax indignant about inequality.

But it is really about status, that I don't have enough of it. We are talking about "rank and titles," now called "handles" in Britain, and we can't get enough of them -- for ourselves, of course.

But here is another aspect of this, that people flock around artists and celebrities. In this case they are abasing themselves before the demi-god, but for what? To shine in the reflection of the demi-god's light?

Human beings are powerfully attracted to anyone or anything that seems greater than themselves. There is in human psychology a deep animal instinct of veneration and idolatry; into this has gone all our history, all our terrible struggle to survive and endure. 

So goes the game of hierarchy. We are resentful of people that have more than we have; yet we fawn and truckle at the feet of the powerful. What is going on here?

How about 350 million years of hierarchy?

So the question is not how to rail against hierarchy, but how to understand it. One of the ways that Jordan B. Peterson understands it is by differentiating between "power hierarchy" and "competence hierarchy." And the way I interpret this is by noting the difference between a feudal baron or a political magnate and a successful business entrepreneur.

Your feudal baron or political magnate sits atop a power hierarchy, and I suppose your Whig aristocrat like dear Lord M sits atop an inherited power hierarchy. Good for them.

But your John D. Rockefeller, your Henry Ford, your Bill Gates, your Steve Jobs, your Elon Musk, your Jeff Bezos sits atop a competence hierarchy. Like the Pope, these folks are not rated by their number of divisions, but their ability to deliver something else to humanity.

Meanwhile we have the scions of our society, the kids that went to all the right schools and got the right rank and title, and they want in on the action. But they cannot win at the competence game because the stakes are too high, the odds too long for the average liberal SJW to shine like a supernova.

So the only option for them is to stir the pot of equality and play the power hierarchy game.

I think that this is the world's Big Problem. We are in a period of transition from the old world, where power was more important than competence, to the new world where competence is all the rage. President Trump acknowledged this recently when he spoke about rich men and rockets. You could tell that he really would have loved to be the guy that brought those two Falcon Heavy boosters down to land at Cape Canaveral side by side. Hey! So would I!

Meanwhile, for us Normals, the important thing is to make sure that we understand hierarchy backwards and forwards. Because the thing about our liberal friends is that they know nothing, and you can always beat nothing with something.

Sorry, Socialism Had Its Try, Ms. Bruenig

In theWashington Post on March 6, WaPo opinion writer Elizabeth Bruenig wrote "It's time to give socialism a try." She is concerned that capitalism does not always turn out right, that it is not true that "if we only have the right attitude, everything will set itself aright."

So I am writing her a personal letter, via snail mail, in the hope that this unusual method of communication will actually get through to her.

Dear Ms. Bruenig:

I was disturbed by your recent article that "it's time to give socialism a try," and so I am writing to try to convince you to change your mind.

In the first place, I think that in 2018 it is up to the advocates of socialism to show, with irrefutable science and logic, that it is a good idea to get off the capitalist train and trying something else.

I recommend to you Deirdre McCloskey, a transgender economist, whose "Bourgeois Era" books are a celebration of the culture that gave us the market economy. Her main argument is this. The last 200 years represents a Great Enrichment in which any country that allowed capitalism has increased real per-capita income from about $1-3 per day in 1800 to over $100 per day in 2018. That is a 3,000 percent increase in 200 years, or 30 times. As McCloskey writes, there has never been anything like it, ever.

Inspired by McCloskey, I have put up "Great Enrichment" pages on my government spending websites, and I enclose copies of the charts of real per-capita income over time. Your challenge is to produce the science that can prove that democratic socialism can do any better.

I wonder why you propose the "decommodification of labor." Marx proposed this notion in the period just before the apparent contradiction of "use value" and "exchange value" had been exploded by the marginal revolution of 1870. Really, wage labor (or salary labor for you and me) is rather liberating. It lets you know how much other humans value your contribution to society, and it detaches you somewhat from the risks faced by the businessman that has hired you.

Sincerely, etc.

Well that's all I wrote to Elizabeth Bruenig. But here are the charts:

First US Great Enrichment.

The interesting thing to me is that it doesn't really show much response from the changes in government policy. It seems like a S-curve with a slow acceleration in the 19th century and a slow deceleration since 2000.

Hey. only one big glitch, in the Great Depression. Even the Great Recession wasn't so bad.

Now look at China. I only have a couple of data points before 1960.

Yes. Oy. China started the same as the US in 1800, at $4 per person per day. It was down below $3 per day by 1900. The reason the chart plunges below the x-axis is that per-capita income in China was below $1 per day for perhaps 40 years. It was $0.53 when the St. Louis Fed data starts in 1960, and went down to $0.36 by 1962. That was what the Chinese got from half a century of revolution, civil war, socialism, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution. God save us from the experience of China. $0.36.

I only wanted to write a one-page letter to Elizabeth Bruenig, but of course there is a whole world of reasons why democratic socialism is a bad idea.

First, there are the "classical liberal" writers have assembled a devastating critique of socialism in all its forms.

• Economic calculation argument. In 1918 Ludwig von Mises argued that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices.
• Bureaucrat vs. producer/consumer argument. After World War II, F.A. Hayek argued that it was impossible for a few thousand bureaucrats in the administrative state to outperform the millions of producers and consumers in the market economy.
• Regulatory capture argument. George Stigler argued that whenever government regulates an industry, the regulators end up being "captured" by the industry.

My own contribution is what I call the "government can't cut" argument. It is that governments find it almost impossible to cut spending programs, even when they are looking right into the face of disaster. Think Germany after World War I. Think Greece during its Euro crisis. Think Venezuela right now. The reason that governments, even authoritarian governments, can't cut is that they are afraid to. They know that the beneficiaries of any program they might try to cut will want to have their guts for garters, and may very well succeed. Indeed, any legislative reform, like Obamacare, can't get passed unless it bribes the opponents to silence their opposition. So once a government starts a program it finds it almost impossible to reform it or cut it. And as for actually ending it, well, good like with that. It is perfectly understood by my catchphrase that government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters. Yeah. Those supporters. They are mean and nasty.

Really, Ben Rhodes is the go-to guy on this. He was the Obama media guy that said that:

The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.

Only someone that "literally knows nothing" would write a piece suggesting that we give socialism a try. 

The Grand Narrative of the Postmodernists

The grand narrative of the post-modernists is that they don't believe in grand narratives. I was reminded of this as I watched a Jordan B. Peterson speech on YouTube titled "Identity Politics and the Lie of White Privilege."

Peterson correctly told his audience that the post-modernists sail under the flag of "no grand narratives." He provided a slide with a definition of post-modernism (at 32:01):

Postmodernism: an attitude of skepticism: irony toward/rejection of grand narratives, ideologies and universalism, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, absolute truth, and objective reality.

Then he lays out the findings of the post-modernists (at 44:30):

• The Enlightenment's objective of an objective and reasoned basis for knowledge, merit, truth, justice, and the like is an impossibility...
• The Enlightenment itself merely replaced one socially constructed view of reality with another, mistaking power for knowledge
• There is naught but power

Hey post-modernist kids! I call that a grand narrative! To say that that the Enlightenment's grand narrative is wrong is the first step to a new grand narrative. And then to say there is naught but power is to construct a new grand narratives on the ruins of the old grand narrative. Then the post-modernists unveil their program, which is to fight power, such as patriarchy and white privilege, with power. Hey kids! That's a grand narrative to beat all grand narratives!

So here is my grand narrative.

• The post-modernists' notion of a world without grand narratives is an impossibility. Of course, there is no such thing as objective knowledge, but there is knowledge, usually understood by humankind in the form of grand narratives, that is really useful for wiving and thriving in the world.
• The post-modernists have merely replaced one socially constructed view of reality with another, completely missing the point that traditional concept of "power" in our modern age is in radical decline.
• Not power but competence.

OK, I got the "competence" bit from Peterson.

Peterson makes a very powerful point. He says that hierarchy in this world is about 350 million years old, and the point of hierarchy is to reduce the need for power. In other words, any social animals in a group need to arrange themselves in a hierarchy so they are not constantly fighting among themselves. When the post-modernists rail against hierarchy and power they are missing the point.

Hey kids. Do you realize that anyone who wants to fight hierarchy is actually saying that they want a world with more conflicts over power?

But the post-modernists miss an even bigger point, and that is that the modern world since the industrial revolution has needed much less power. That's because in the old days the only thing that mattered was to defend your food-growing territory from others. For that you needed power. But today territory is nothing; the whole world is a market and you can buy anything, anywhere, for a price.

Today, real power is the power of knowledge, what the World Bank calls "intangible capital," the knowledge inside men's minds that manifests itself encoded in everything from smart-phones to LED lights. It is the power, the Great Enrichment, that has raised per-capita real income from $1-3 per day in 1800 to over $100 per day right now.

What does political power, what does ideological power, what does territorial power mean when you can buy a smart-phone for $100 and access all the knowledge in the world?

Now, our post-modernist friends have got one thing right. It is perfectly true that there is no such thing as objective knowledge. The warrant for knowledge is not that it comes from God or that it is self-evident, or that it is objective. The modern revolution in knowledge that starts, if you like, with Descartes, and certainly with Kant, is that we don't know what the really real is. Instead, we have knowledge that works. Special relativity must be valid knowledge because we use it in GPS technology. Quantum mechanics must be valid knowledge because we assume it is true when we make LED lights.

One fine day, I dare say, relativity and quantum mechanics will be superseded by new and deeper knowledge about the structure of the universe. But meanwhile both theories are highly serviceable. Notice that relativity and quantum mechanics reveal themselves to the world through the competencies of physicists and engineers and the folks that make stuff. Without that competence they would be merely airy-fairy theories about how many quanta fit on the head of a pin that people would argue about in coffee houses.

There is another form of knowledge that has transformed the world. It is the market and its prices. At its basic level it solves the problem of getting access to physical resources. Time was that the only way you could get access to resources was by invading another guy's territory and taking it. But with the price system you can say: wow, our tribe really needs more grain. How about we buy some from you? And the answer is: oh yeah? How much are you willing to pay, pal?

But hey, getting access to physical resources is just the beginning.

The point is that the modern world, by dethroning the "power" of hierarchy as the be-all and end-all of everything, has unleashed the unimaginable power of competence, of knowing how to make things and do things and distributing those things all across the world.

The interesting question now is: what is their problem? How can these post-modernists not see what is right in front of their eyes, that "power" in our modern era has been utterly transformed, and that the guys with a real raging "grand narrative" fever are the folks that imagine they have conquered "grand narratives."

Maps of Meaning: What Failure to Respond to Chaos Looks Like

I'm only part way through the first part of Maps of Meaning, where Jordan B. Peterson is setting up his view of reality, so I really don't know what I am talking about yet.

But Peterson's basic line is that we are not rational actors living in a world of scientifically understood objects. We are really just rats.

You put a rat into a new cage, or introduce a cat into its life and it freezes up in terror. For a while. But then it starts to explore and figure out what the new situation means and where the dangers are, and it starts to relax.

In other words, any living thing goes along as unconcerned as a seagull until something unexpected happens. Then the living thing has to figure out what that unexpected experience means. Is it nothing? Is it a potential mate? Is it a threat? And what should the living thing do about it?

It is just like Anne Elliott at the climax of Persuasion. when she gets the all-important and utterly unexpected letter from Captain Wentworth.

On the content of that letter depended all which this world could to for her. Anything was possible, anything might be defied rather than suspense.

So then Anne reads the letter, in which Captain Wentworth renews his offer of marriage. She finds herself overwhelmed with emotion.

Such a letter was not to be soon recovered from. Half an hour's solitude and reflection might have tranquilized her; 

But it was not to be. She has to pull herself together so that she could go out and meet Captain Wentworth and communicate her acceptance of his offer. And of course, she did.

Now, in Jordan B. Peterson's world view, we have a sudden unexpected event that pitches Anne Elliott into emotional turmoil. How will she act? Well, we already know that Anne Elliott is a dab hand at dealing competently with an unexpected event. Thank goodness, for it would not do for our heroine to collapse onto a fainting couch.

Now, just today I ran across a piece in the New York Post by a woman diagnosed as "borderline personality disorder" of BPD. Her problem is that she gets overwhelmed by everything, and has difficulty managing her emotions.

Borderline Personality Disorder is described by SANE, a government-run mental health advocacy group in Australia, as a mental illness where the “people affected have difficulty managing their emotions and impulses, relating to people and maintaining a stable self-image.”

In essence, it’s the inability to regulate emotions appropriately.

Now this ties in completely with Peterson's model of human response and action. The whole point of emotional response is that you realize that something has happened and life ain't gonna go on like it did.  The flood of emotion stops you in your tracks. But obviously, if you are going to make a sensible decision that will make things better for you then you need to manage your emotions and your fight/flight instincts.

However, there is a problem. We rich westerners,

the civilized, amiable, and admirable part of mankind, well brought up and not constantly in a state of fear... [live in] an environment in which the stimuli to excessive emotional response are at a minimum.

That is nice; we humans like to live in "safety." However, the safe and predictable social environment "will make small deviations from custom appear increasingly strange and thus... increasingly intolerable." In other words our safe and predictable environment ill-prepares us for the inevitable vicissitudes and setbacks of life. I find in my own life that I absolutely hate to be pitched out of my routine, but once pitched out am able to reconcile to a period of actual action and decisions and stay out of my normal-life rut.

Our NYPost BPD sufferer explains the things she struggles with.

• Skewed sense of self
• Maintaining personal relationships
• Splitting
• Engulfment and abandonment
• Self-destructive behaviors
• Intense emotions and anger

All of these things, it seems to me, align with the failure to do the basic thing we living things are designed to do, which is to react when something changes, and then make a successful adaptation.

You can see that the culture of the modern helicopter parent is not going to do a very good job of rearing a child that can adapt to shocks and setbacks, because Mom is raising her children in a cocoon of safety and predictability that extends into college and its dormitories. It cannot be surprising that these children are then unable to deal with "microaggressions" and demand "safe spaces."

The problem is, in addition, that the left encourages helplessness and rage and the victim culture. Because people with BPD syndrome are useful political fodder for the left to use in its power project.

So it is not surprising that Peterson, in talking to a nice center-lefty is telling young people to forget activism and changing the world and change themselves first.

Because the first thing you need if you want to act in the world is to train yourself to deal with the unexpected and respond successfully rather than collapsing into a heap of self-destructive behaviors, intense emotions and anger.

It is notable, I should think, that modern armies have found it necessary to train up recruits to the frightening experience of combat soldiering with "boot camp" and "basic training." It is, you might say, a sensible way of preparing the raw recruit for the terrors of uncertainty and the necessity for instant adaptation in the world of armed conflict.

Maybe the same is needed for young women: basic training for the endless Battle of the Sexes in the post-sexual revolution world.