Even Though Wealth is Knowledge, You Still Need to Build a Wall

In recent months I have been advancing the idea that the fundamental fact of human life up to now, that land is life, has been invalidated by the industrial revolution.

My argument is that in the agricultural age the essence of wealth and survival was to possess land that could grow the food that kept you and yours alive and to defend that border to the death. But today the possession of food-growing land is a footnote. What matters is the knowledge to make things and the means to trade those things across the world. Or just download stuff from the Internet.

In the terms of a World Bank paper on capital that you should read, learn, and inwardly digest, this question is the difference between physical capital and intangible capital. For instance, compare the US and Russian Federation, then the oil state of Iran, then two traditional enemies, Greece and Turkey.

Wealth Estimates by Country, 2000, $ per Capita

Country	Natural Capital	Produced Capital	Intangible Capital	Total Wealth
United States	14,752	79,851	418,009	$512,612
Russian Federation	27,217	15,593	5,900	$38,709
Iran	14,105	3,336	6,581	$24,023
Greece	4,554	28,973	203,455	$236,972
Turkey	3,504	8,580	35,774	$47,859
Germany	4,445	68,678	423,323	$496,447

With these numbers, you can see that it makes no sense to  invade another country, kill all the men and rape all the women, and loot and plunder it. Because the real wealth of the country is in the intangible capital that exists between peoples' ears.

First of all, do you see how the big story for the US is "intangible capital?" It's about 82 percent of the total wealth of half a million dollars per person. Hey, how about Russia where it is about 15 percent of $39,000? Or the oil state of Iran, where it is 26 percent of $24,000?

Now, I put in Greece and Turkey because I met with my Greek friend last week and he pointed out to me that for Greece, land is very important, because the Turks are always turning up with some government boat harassing some Greek island. In particular, the Turks are interested in the hydrocarbons beneath the Mediterranean Sea. The only policy for the Greeks is to stop the Turks  in their tracks, wherever those tracks appear.

You can see that for the Greeks, intangible capital is 85 percent of total wealth whereas for the Turks it is 75 percent of a much smaller number. Is it surprising that the Turks, with a very low intangible capital number, are still interested in territory and the natural capital of oil resources?

So I would adjust my argument about land vs. knowledge. The fact is that tons of people in this world are still obsessed with physical capital: land and oil wealth and factories. And until they are up in the stratosphere with the US in the intangible capital game they are still going to be living in the old world, where, in the words of fictional Gerald O'Hara, plantation owner, "land is the only thing that lasts."

But Gerald O'Hara was wrong, and his world was going away even as he spoke. It is knowledge and its application in human innovation that is the thing that lasts. The question is: what do we do while the world is still full of people that believe that land (or physical resources like oil and gas) is the only thing that lasts?

The answer is the one that my Greek friend gave me. It is all very well for us advanced types that have moved on from the old ways to say that land doesn't matter any more. That doesn't cut any ice when you are dealing with people that are still living in the past. You gotta stop the land fetishists dead in their tracks. You gotta defend your land while there are still people in the world that think that the answer to their problem is to acquire someone else's physical resources.

Of course, the great demonstration of the futility in the modern era of land conquest in search of wealth was the Hitler invasion of Russia, in search of Lebensraum in the east. No, Adolf, you idiot. Germany in the 1930s was one of the most advanced countries in the world, having just invented relativity and quantum mechanics. And hey, the Otto cycle for spark-ignition cars and the Diesel cycle for compression-ignition cars have German names: I wonder why? Germany had no need of Russian wheat-growing areas, nor yet of Caucasian oil fields. In fact Germany, by 2000, had more per-capita intangible capital per capita than the United States. Russia, to this day, is way behind. Its intangible capital is a pathetic $6,000 per person.

Of course, it certainly helped Germany that in the Cold War it had the United States defending its border and asserting that the Soviets better not put a foot into Western Germany, and forget trying to force that Fulda Gap, comrade.

So, even though land doesn't matter much any more, you still need to  garrison the border to keep the barbarians out.

Maybe build a wall.

Liberals and the Bill of Rights: They Just Don't Get It

Well, maybe liberals do get it, since they have the sense to run an ex-Marine and pro-lifer in Conor Lamb for PA-18. They get that intersectional non-binary whack-jobs ain't gonna cut in in Trumpland.

But what liberals really believe in is "activism" and, we might say, "activism now, activism tomorrow, and activism forever."

It is my argument that politics, whatever it was in the old days, is a very blunt instrument for ordering the affairs of communities and nations in the industrial age. Why? Because things are much too complicated to be conducted out of the feudal lord's manor, the absolute monarch's court, or the administrative state's bureaucracy.

Liberals don't get that, and so with every setback they think of one more Big Push, the bankrupt strategy of Britain and France on the Western Front.

You can see the bankruptcy in real time in the liberal retreat from the Bill of Rights.

Let's leave out the 9th and 10th Amendments. Who cares about maintaining state powers when all the world's a stage for liberals?

How about the 8th Amendment, on excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishments? Don't our modern prosecutors deliberately try to bury their targets in the bottomless expense of endless process?

How about the 7th Amendment and trial by jury, with the modern administrative courts where the administrative state is judge, jury, and executioner?

How about the 6th Amendment with the right to a speedy trial?

How about the 5th Amendment with Special Prosecutors all over the place and the idea that no "private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Good luck with that, pal, when liberals want your land to save the planet.

Hey, how about that 4th Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure, when liberals in Wisconsin were searching and seizing information from their political opponents in John Doe investigations?

The 3rd Amendment, about quartering soldiers seems pretty secure right now, although I dare say that liberals think that they should be able to force people to AirBnB their activists when they are gathering for a peaceful protest.

Well, we all know that liberals hate the 2nd Amendment, because who needs a semi-automatic assault rifle with a 30-round magazine that is fit only for gunning down kids in a public high school?

And now liberals are in the middle of abolishing the 1st Amendment, because hate speech.

Hey liberals! I guess you chaps really aren't that much into rights, and I get it. What are rights when it is time to bend the arc of history towards justice?

Today I happened to see write-by-the-numbers John Hawkins, with "7 Techniques Liberals Use to Silence Conservatives." Wanna know what they are?

1. Libsplaining. Yeah, it makes "mansplaining" look like a walk in the park.
2. Violence. Yeah, call ANTIFA's riots "mostly peaceful protest" why dontcha?
3. De-platforming. Because hate speech.
4. Political Correctness / Safe Spaces / Microaggressions. I'd say this is mostly a lefty Mean Girls thing. But you may disagree.
5. Liberal Fakes. Hawkins means the "David Brooks, David Frum, Brett Stephens, Max Boot, Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin, Kathleen Parker" folks that are represented as conservative in the mainstream media.
6. False Labeling. Shut up, you "white supremacist, Nazi, Fascist or racist."
7. The Ventriloquist Dummy. You know, the spontaneously activist Parkland kids that you are not allowed to criticize.

All of Hawkins seven by-the-numbers are ways in which liberals betray the First Amendment that they were all in favor of when it meant sticking up for the Hollywood Ten in the Fifties and lefty students back in the Sixties.

See, I think the real story here is that liberals have lost the plot. They are hanging on, trying to keep their Administrative State dynasty going, and trying to stave off the evil day when the whole thing collapses.

That's why liberals have completely abandoned the Bill of Rights. For them, power comes before rights, because their religion is politics and "activism."

Why don't you liberals just go quietly? Your hour upon the stage is over, and it is time for you to stop strutting and fretting. Go and watch "Russian Ark," the single shot movie about the end of Old Russia, which the camera ends up going out the side door of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg after a ball in 1913 and into an icy wilderness.

The Three Health Cost Drivers: What Could It Mean

There's a report from the Journal of the American Medical Association that fingers the three main reasons that US health care costs are higher than other first world countries, according to a piece in the American Spectator.

First, drug costs. "We expend almost double on pharmaceuticals than the mean for the peer group [of "ten other wealthy countries"). A lot of that is from drug prices being much higher in the US.

Second, "We pay healthcare professionals much greater salaries than every other nation examined." That includes generalist doctors, specialist doctors, and nurses.

Third, “Administrative costs of care (activities relating to planning, regulating, and managing health systems and services) accounted for 8% in the US vs a range of 1% to 3% in the other countries.”

The JAMA authors also write that usual explanations for high US costs,

such as underinvestment in social programs, the low primary care/specialist mix, the fee-for-service system encouraging high volumes of care, or defensive medicine leading to overutilization, did not appear to be major drivers of the substantially higher US health care spending compared with other high-income countries.

Another cost driver is that "Out-of-pocket spending was also surprisingly low in the United States" compared to other countries.

Well. The first thing to recognize is that, per Jason Riley in Rising Life Expectancy, "bio-medicine" is only one of several factors that contribute to modern life expectancy. Among the others are women's education, wealth, better food, better sanitation, and better disease control. So it really doesn't make much difference how much you spend.

But really, it doesn't seem a mystery to me why the US spends so much and gets so little. In the first place, countries like Britain and France have a two-tier system. The poor get a lousy government system that is "free at the point of delivery" while the middle class with jobs buy private insurance. Actually the same is true in the US, where the poor get a lousy Medicaid system for free while the rich pay a bit more and get a lot more.

But the obvious problem is the cartelization of health care. It takes a ton of time for doctors and nurses to get credentialed, and the doctors get to define what hoops medical students have to go through to get qualified, and what medical schools get chartered. So of course their salaries are inflated. That is what you get with a regulated industry, as in "regulator capture."

And drug prices? Well, most of the drug research is done in the US by US companies whereas other countries set low drug prices on the notion that the rich and greedy US can pay for all the research.

Administrative costs? Well of course, when you have third parties paying for most medical care then people are going to be scamming the system and you have to have bureaucrats in place to pretend to be doing something about it.

So what is to be done? I'm afraid I'm a complete whacko on health care, as on most things.

First, I believe that routine health care should be conducted on the WalMart model. You want basic health care? Go to WalMart. You want to be fussed over and get charged three times as much? Go to Neiman Marcus. No, really! Why not?

Second, let each person decide how much they want to get extraordinary care. Let there we bronze, silver, and gold plans that specify how much money you are prepared to spend on heroic life-saving measures. The point is that once your kids are grown then you are no longer a mission-critical human. Your continued life is a luxury, and I for one, as a fiendish Medicare recipient, don't think that young people in the middle of raising families should be paying big bucks for my health care. (Actually the majority of Medicare revenue comes from the federal income tax, meaning rich people. I would rather the rich people spend money investing their ill-gotten gains in new jobs for young people rather than health care for grandpa).

Third, de-cartelize health care. How much education is needed to become a physician? I don't know but I bet that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos could drive a bulldozer through the current system without impacting health outcomes. And let hospitals and doctors compete for business; let a hundred flowers bloom.

But really nothing will change because government is all over health care like a cheap suit. Nothing will get done; nothing will improve, because government rewards its supporters and its supporters include everyone from "our" doctors and nurses to individual men and women that want free if they can possibly get it. And government cannot cut its entitlement programs, not even if the whole country is going down the toilet.

Plus women. Liberated or not, women live by caring, and one of the things that women are always talking to their friend about is health care. And women understand that society just has to provide what women want. Whether it is health care or schools, women want and expect the necessary resources to be available for them as they raise their children or care for their ageing parents; it's in the DNA. When it comes to saving the life of their child or easing the pain of their parents women instinctively feel that the sky is the limit.

And that is the real reason why health care in the US is so expensive. It's what women want. For some reason women in the other countries haven't yet figured out how to get what they want. But they will.

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.