Omnibus Bills and Us

My American Thinker piece this week made fun of the girlish horror at President Trump signing the bulging omnibus bill: "I Can't Believe He Signed That Omnibus Bill." But some people took me seriously; they thought I was tearing my hair out at the folly of Trump signing such a bill.

Actually, it was a joke, son. My notion is that whenever two women are gathered together, a lot of their conversation is about other women not present, as in: "I can't believe she said/did that." This ganging up on other women is probably why we humans still survive. It is, as Jordan B. Peterson writes,  "informal social control" by the community of women in a face-to-face community. As opposed to the "formal social control" of governments and men with guns.

But the Bigger Point is the point of the cartoon character Pogo: we have seen the enemy and he is us.

The reason for omnibus bills is the same as the reason for big government, and liberals wanting to take our guns "for the children" and the government taking 35 percent of our income every year and the Trump administration advertising special exemptions to its tariff proposals. We are all of us inclined to resort to force when our own interests are involved.

I was talking to a political candidate the other day and he complained lightly that too many people  in  politics are in it for the power. We agreed that power is an empty shell. This guy is a very personable man, who has been able to bring people together to do impossible things.

Very nice. But government, all government, is force. And once it gets beyond the simple acts of "formal social control" of repelling invaders and cracking the heads of thieves and robbers, then it is frankly serving the agenda of people that want something for nothing. Which is all of us.

Walter Williams had a characteristic piece today about this. Said he:

Suppose you are a 22-year-old healthy person. Rather than be forced to spend $3,000 a year for health insurance and have $7,000 deducted from your salary for Social Security, you'd prefer investing that money to buy equipment to start a landscaping business.

Well? What would be the best use of the money? The answer is obvious. The young man should use the $10,000 a year to start a landscaping business. The idea of surrendering the money to insurance  companies and politicians is utter folly. It is, in the biblical phrase, surrendering your birthright for a mess of pottage.

But what if you get ill and need expensive cancer surgery? Yes. It's a problem. Of course there are options. You could protect yourself with a true catastrophic insurance policy. Or you could hope to pile it all on your credit card. Or mortgage your business or your house.

And what if you ended up at 65 without any savings? Well, you might. But you would probably not have been so foolish. Instead, like the overwhelming number of people you would have saved for the rainy day. Plus, if you had any sense, you would have children.

And there is another reason. It is the secret of capitalism. Money given to the government is dead money, the same as the value of capital assets owned by the government in a dam or a municipal electric system. But private assets are the basis of credit, the means by which ordinary people lubricate each other's economic lives. They are what makes the world go round. Young people are usually on the receiving end of credit, to start businesses and pay for schooling. Older people are on the giving end of credit: advancing money and/or equity to young people to get a leg up on life. There is a word for this: generational justice. And the point is that there is no compulsion, only trust and reciprocity, and hard feelings if the deal goes wrong.

But when people engage with government, then we are talking about force. Of course, we do not talk about force in this context, oh no. We talk about the children, the workers, the disabled, the elderly. So we do. But conveniently forget that there are two ways to help people: with force and without force.

There is, of course,a certain frisson that comes from getting your share of the government loot. If you are Chuck Schumer, it says something about you and your power that you can get $30 billion for a tunnel across the Hudson River. The same goes for the chap that wants a new Air Force fighter jet, or the liberal that wants more money for "choice." But then there is also the frisson that comes from sailing up the rivers of Britain in the year 1000 and grabbing all the grain, killing all the men, and selling all the women and children into slavery. What is the difference.

And we are all players in this game, from the grandpa that paid into Social Security all those years, and the daughter that needs Medicare for her end-of-life mother, to the liberal all proud about the grant they just got for their activism.

And what exactly are we deplorables all upset about with the omnibus bill? Are we upset that it didn't slay enough liberal cows? That it didn't end Obamacare as we know it? The real money in the federal budget is the troika of Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and Defense.  That is $3 trillion a year. The entire rest of the budget, including interest on the national debt, is $1 trillion. Here:

Federal Government Spending Fiscal Year 2018
Federal Pensions	$1.0 trillion
Federal Health Care	$1.2 trillion
Federal Education	$0.1 trillion
National Defense	$0.9 trillion
Federal Welfare	$0.4 trillion
All Other Spending	$0.6 trillion

So what's your problem, pal?

Ancient Myth and My Three Peoples Theory

My reductive Three Peoples theory, as I am sure you know, proposes three kinds of humans: There are the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants that experience life as if they were feudal peasants. There are the People of the Responsible Self, responsible individuals that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. You need to be a Person of the Responsible Self in order to function competently in the modern market economy of the city. Then there are People of the Creative Self, artists and writers.

I think this theory brilliantly illuminates the modern world and its political and cultural wars. But now I am reading Jordan B. Peterson, with his distillation of scholarship on myth and post-Jungian psychology. And I have a problem.

The problem is that, in the mythological framework, you have the Great Mother, the Great Father, and the Son as Hero.

The Great Mother represents the axis of creation / destruction. She is mystery, with unknown and unfathomable things happening within her mysterious body. She is the source of life, and yet also the author of destruction. Frankly this is shocking to me, carefully taught to think of women as lovers and helpless carers and helpless victims of the patriarchy, and not to think about Mean Girls, and goddesses like the furious Kali, not at all. But we deplorables can understand the affinity between creation and destruction in the famous concept of Joseph Schumpeter, that capitalism is "creative destruction."

The Great Father represents the axis of order / <->tyranny. This is easy to swallow, because it isn't that different from our patriarchal states that protect us from enemies, foreign and domestic. But there is always the danger that too much protection and government can slide from the beneficial establishment of order into the cruel and unjust imposition of tyranny. We know all about that, we sons of the 20th century.

The Son is the Hero that stands at the border between order and chaos. It is his job to explore the chaos of the time, to understand and tame it, and lead the people into the Promised Land where the dangerous and unknown chaos can be brought into the light and understood and mastered. Yes: Marduk, Horus, Jesus Christ: those chaps. And actually, I think that the liberal idea of the "activist" partakes of this notion.

I tell you what bothers me. It is the notion that creation/destruction is a feminine trait of the Great Mother. Because I think that the Great Enrichment of the last two centuries, when real per capita income has grown by 30 times, is mostly a male thing of creative destruction. So where does that connect with the Great Mother theme of creation and destruction? It's a problem!

Now here is one way to think about it. We can say that in the modern world the roles of Great Mother, Great Father, and Hero Son have become blurred and blended. If men are no longer needed to guarantee order by standing on the border and keeping the barbarians out then that reduces the role of Great Father protectors. So maybe the solution is for men to get into the creation business, not by gestating babies, but by gestating start-up businesses. Needless to say, the business startup game also partakes of the Hero myth, for every businessman that starts a new business is going down into hell, confronting the great unknown, and trying to explore a new technology or business idea and make it habitable and productive for his fellow humans. He clearly sacrifices himself for the potential good of all.

So also for women. If women are not longer needed to devote their entire lives to the creation of babies, maybe they can partake of the Father role of maintaining order and become politicians. I think we can say that Margaret Thatcher did that successfully, and Hillary Clinton did not. Hey, maybe women can even harden themselves and become Heroes, going down into hell and bringing back a great boon to mankind.

But you know what? I think that the road for women to partake of Great Father and Hero roles is much harder than the road for men to partake of feminine creativeness. Anyone that has looked at the life of Margaret Thatcher understands that. It took her ten years to find a constituency and get into Parliament; yet she never whined about the Tory patriarchy that would not have her for a candidate. And I think that we are seeing this difficulty right now with the whole cultural froo-fra from women in STEM to "hate speech" in social media and the feminization of education with the drugging of boys and the attack of the open-outcry culture of debate with the concerns about microaggressions and safe spaces.

The point is that if you want to be the guarantor of order, then you can't be demanding that someone else protects you from the brickbats of the public square. If you want to go down into the underworld where there be dragons you can't be worrying about the pinpricks of microaggressions. Ain't no safe spaces down in the underworld, old girl.

So that's why I think that, when the votes are finally counted, women will choose to return to the domestic sphere, the family and the neighborhood, which indeed badly needs their care and attention. Men may be able to soften themselves from warrior-warriors into road-warriors, but they ain't gonna be no good raising babies and interacting with the ladies of the neighborhood, not nohow.

In Media Res: Peterson and Stark

I'm in the middle of Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning, but also reading Rodney Stark's Why God. Oh, and my book right now to read at the gym is a compendium of Nietzsche's writings.

It's all very exciting because they are all talking about the same thing, only with different sound systems. Strictly speaking, I should not write about them while in the middle of reading them, in media res, just like the great classic myths, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, that all start "in the middle." But hey, if the great story-tellers can start in the middle, why not me?

For instance, this morning in "The Gay Science" Nietzsche was talking about both "heroes" and "chaos." That, of course, is exactly what Jordan Peterson is talking about.

Peterson's premise is that to understand myth and humans you have to understand that non-scientific people have to live in a world of the known and the unknown. At any moment, you may have to deal with an irruption of the unknown into your life, otherwise known as chaos.

Now in our world we think the known world extends all the way out to space, to the solar system, to the galaxy, to other galaxies. We have theories that explain the whole thing. We have a bit of a problem with the Big Bang and dark matter and dark energy and multiverses, but hey, the priests, er, scientists at the temples of knowledge will soon figure out the whole procedure.

Actually, I maintain that, despite all our modern knowledge we still don't have a clue what it is all about, the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" as Douglas Adams repeats again and again in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

In fact, even though we don't like to admit it, the whole stuff about the Big Bang, dark matter and dark energy and so forth play pretty close to a creation myth. "In the beginning" there was the big bang, then inflation, then atoms started to form, then stars then galaxies. But here's  a funny thing. They say that galaxies do about one revolution in a billion years. So that means that, given the current scientifically determined age of the universe, the galaxies have only made about 13 revolutions since the Dawn of Time.

Know what? I don't think so. I think that in time there will be another theory that replaces the Big Bang. The Big Bang will be consigned to the lumber room as an ancient myth of those superstitious 21st century loonies, and we will find out that the galaxies have made a lot more than 13 revolutions in their lifetimes.

But back to Peterson. His line is that our basic human problem is dealing with the unexpected, the irruption of the terrifying Unknown, potential chaos, into our ordered world. And it is the job of the hero to venture into the unknown, explore it, understand it, and bring it into the predictable known world. You can see that this narrative does not end with the birth of science. Science is always butting into unexpected results that disturb our current understanding. Indeed, good scientists are aching for such a situation, because that creates the possibility to become an Einstein, a Heisenberg, or a Richard Feynman: a hero.

And yes, that hero, that Son, in venturing to solve mankind's problems, is also sacrificing himself so that others may live. Mother, the creator of life, Father, the guarantee of order, and the Son the sacrificial hero. It's right there in all myth and religion. It's even in left-wing activism. What do you think the brave young activist going against the evil status quo and bending the arc of history towards justice is all about?

But I am also getting some clarity about modern monotheism from Rodney Stark. He makes me adjust my ideas about the Axial Age when cities and monotheism got started.

(By the way, Stark points out that all the monotheisms got there by demoting the auxiliary gods, making them into angels and Satans saints and whatnot).

Stark's line about the Axial Age, which he puts definitively at the 6th Century BC, rather than the 800 BC to 300 BC at La Wik, is the social crisis of the transition from village to city.

Quoting Karl Jaspers, who coined Achsenzeit, Stark states that the Axial Age marks the beginning of ethical religion, religion concerned with morality. The old gods, you see, were not moral.

[F]rom infancy, humans are raised to believe that the norms of their group are the "right" way to behave and are trained to conform. In addition, all groups exert informal methods of social control -- pressures to conform imposed by those in our immediate  environment... But as societies become larger, and many people are unknown to one another, informal social control breaks down.

That's when you need "formal social control," i.e., the state, to execute on "deterring and punishing moral violations, usually involving specialists in detection and punishment." But, as Nicholas Wade points out in his The Faith Instinct, there is a problem. People don't like the enforcers from another family enforcing on their family. There is a danger of social strife between people in the community. Plus, no human enforcement specialist is going to bring every malcontent to justice. Enter the monotheistic God. Stark: "Being all-knowing and all-seeing, God is the ideal enforcer of morality." Wade:

A system of supernatural punishment carries enormous advantages for a primitive society. No one has to assume the thankless task of meting out punishment and risk being killed by the offender or his relatives; the gods perform this chore willingly and vigilantly.

Now, as a racist sexist homophobe, I am drawn to the idea that the informal social control of the village was (and is) performed by women. That is what the women's culture of complaint is all about: "I can't believe she said/did that." But it is clear that formal social control is a guy thing. That's why the monotheistic gods are male. When the cracking of skulls is needed, you need a man for the job.

Oh, and by the way, I'd say that the modern godless administrative state, especially in its extreme instantiations of Communist and Fascist regimes, relies way too much on actual mortal, human formal social control without the help of the immortal gods. I'd say that a little bit of faith in a God who knows all and sees all can fill in for a whole bunch of policemen, who are, after all, nothing but time servers counting the day till they get their pensions.

Oh and by the way, how about the market economy that rewards trust and fair dealing and pretty soon cuts out the untrustworthy and cheater, and given its head, can increase human income by 30 times in 200 years? You could call it a rebirth of informal social control. It ain't perfect, of course, but everybody benefits from reciprocal trust. And you know why? Because it is cheaper: it reduces transaction costs and that goes straight to the bottom line.

Down in the Swamp with the Brennans and the McCabes

As Vox Day reminds us, the job of Donald Trump is to Build the Wall and Drain the Swamp. And so it is a problem that the monster omnibus spending bill for the next six months (!) builds Chuck Schumer's tunnel under the Hudson but doesn't Build the Wall.

We deplorables ain't happy about that.

This omnibus bill is a problem, everyone seems to say, if Republicans want to win the midterms. Because if Republicans can't figure out that their job is to build the wall and stop Chuck's tunnel, they have, as the Brits say, lost the plot.

But enough of Build the Wall. What about the Dreaded Swamp?

I am coming to think that the Swamp is in Deep Doodoo over their corrupt effort to mess up Donald Trump during the election and drive him from office after the election.

And my feeling, from reading a piece about "John Brennan, Obama's Head of the Innuendo Community," and a piece about "The Real Andrew McCabe," both in the American Spectator, is that there's a little problem out there in Swampland. And that is that swamp creatures like Brennan and McCabe are not that good at what they do.

Hey, you expect that, what with Versailles and silken courtiers and mature and corrupt dynasties in general. Their functionaries really are not as smart and tough as the revolutionaries they oppose. Because they are soft. And they are stupid.

What courtiers do is sit around in the king's court and stab each other in the back. And they get chatting to their pals in the foreign king's intelligence service, and use the completely unbiased information from their pals in the foreign king's intelligence service to play their own little power games in their own king's court.

A member of the intelligence community tells TAS that he was approached by FBI investigators inquiring about Brennan’s improprieties at the CIA. He was startled to hear them venting aloud about Brennan’s practice of using British intelligence officials to spy on the Trump campaign.

As the saying goes: "what could go wrong?" Because, you see, getting info from British intelligence on the Trump campaign would be an act of "collusion" if Trump's people did it. Every MSM journalist knows that.

Rule 1: Republicans and conservatives know that they have to play by the rules otherwise the Swamp will eat them for breakfast, vide Watergate.

Rule 2: Even though Democrats and liberals expect to get away with everything, there are "little people" down in the bureaucracy, deplorables, if you like, that hate them for it. Particularly in the FBI.

We see this with the fired Andrew McCabe. Apparently he had it in for Special Agent Robyn Gritz. She'd had a great career at the FBI in the years after 9/11, working with the CIA and under Michael Flynn at the Defense Intelligence Agency. But then she went to work for Andrew McCabe.

All of a sudden she started getting bad work reviews, and in the end had to resign from the FBI. Not surprisingly straight arrow Gen. Flynn went to bat for her.

In 2015, Flynn publicly supported Gritz in an NPR broadcast in which he questioned why Gritz had been driven out of the FBI. Citing her years of valuable national security experience, he praised her as one of the “bright lights and shining stars” in the intelligence community.

Golly! Can you connect the dots here? You think that maybe Andrew McCabe was pissed off with Flynn for backing Gritz? You think that maybe the Flynn indictment was a setup by McCabe to teach Flynn a lesson?

You may think that; I couldn't possibly comment.

But the thing is that these senior Swamp Creatures aren't all that good at what they do. And I blame the Fake Media.

You see, if the Fake Media did its job, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable instead of toadying to liberal power, then the Brennans of the world would think twice before dancing the tango with Brit intelligence guys as a way to launder Russian Kompromat (компромат, I expect, but you  never know with Russian). He would think, wow, I better keep my hands clean, just in case.

You see, if the Fake Media did its job, then weenies like AndrewMcCabe wouldn't try underhanded stuff on employees they didn't like, because the weenies would be afraid it would all come out in the wash, and then what about the weenies' pensions?

You see, if the Fake Media did its job and rooted out government and political malfeasance wherever it was found, then these Brennans and McCabes would do their jobs and stop playing courtier politics and stabbing decent people in the back.

OK, but who cares? It looks to me, what with all the firings of the McCabes and the demotions of the Strzoks and Pages and Ohrs, that things are not going all that well in the Swamp right now.

They say that the Trump Surveillance is worse than Watergate, but they don't know what they are talking about. There could be 20,000 Swamp Creatures fired, demoted or reassigned over the monstrous and unjust surveillance and calumnification of the Trump campaign by the "intelligence community," but it will all just disappear into the ether. There will be no bringing up of "Brennanism" comparable to McCarthyism for the next 60 years, no bringing up of  "FISA-Gate" comparable to Watergate for the next 40 years. Because our noble journalistic crusaders jihadists in the media just don't think that what good old Brennan and McCabe do is in the same league as the vile actions of the tail-gunner anti-Communists and the hated red-baiting Nixon. Yeah! Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas!

And that's a shame, because if there is one thing our rulers need to understand, it is that their glorious century-long Whig ascendancy of the liberally educated and the progressively evolved is coming to an end in the way that all things come to an end, in flaccidity and corruption and injustice.

Because, as I keep saying, every government official should have on their desk not "the buck stops here," but "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice."

My point is that when you have the power of government, which is force, then you should assume that your every action has the potential for injustice, and that knowledge should keep you awake at night.

Or, as Jordan B. Peterson writes, the male principle operates on an axis of Order <-> Tyranny. But how do you tell the difference?

The Real Facebook Game

I know we are all supposed to be outraged about the way that Cambridge Analytica harvested tons of Facebook data for the Trump campaign. But maybe it's the usual conventional wisdom, sound and fury signifying nothing.

I went to a Republican fundraiser yesterday -- in the heart of liberal Seattle -- and met a young man that reckons he knows how to run political campaigns using Facebook.

Forget the ruinously expensive TV campaigns that reach 20-30 percent of voters. Facebook reaches 60 percent of voters. Forget a commercial with a talking politician. Just paint a few slogans on the screen and put it on Facebook advertising.

Here is how Facebook advertising works. Suppose you have a quote from some local pillar of the community. Using Facebook's ad tools you draw a circle around the location of that notable's house and set up an ad for everyone within a mile, that's a homeowner, that meets other available criteria. You craft the ad so that it tells a quick story and you make it work without sound, because most people have the sound off.

The guys says that Mitt Romney, in 2012, should have run a Facebook ad during the Olympics. He should have said Go USA, and added that the most meaningful thing in his life was the opportunity to manage the Salt Lake Winter Olympics and turn it around and make it into a success. In other words, the idea is not to pump himself up, or beat up the opposition. The idea is just to give a little nudge, tell a little story, and leave the Facebook viewer with a warm fuzzy feeling.

OK. Is this a brilliant idea? Or a kid with a crazy obsession. Who knows? The point is that all new things in this world start out seeming improbable and unlikely. And if and when they take off it all seems inevitable.

This, for me, is an interesting story in the week where all the right people are outraged about Cambridge Analytica getting access to Facebook data -- the same sort of people that thought it was cool when the Obama guys got access to Facebook data in 2012. Really, who cares? You can just do straight Facebook ads, and it is way cheaper, and probably more effective, than regular TV ads.

Apparently, in 2016, Clinton spent $10 million on Facebook ads, and Trump spent $70 million on Facebook ads. Is that the difference between the win and the loss? Who knows? Maybe they do know, but they aren't telling.

Meanwhile, the current campaigns still seem to think that the key is the final-week artillery barrage and Big Push on TV. Are they still right? Or is the better tactic a special forces infiltration on social media? In another decade we will know for sure, and everyone will agree that the old way was for losers.

Midterm Madness

The question is: will the 2018 midterm election be a rout for Republicans, as nearly everyone seems to think, especially after the Democratic victory in the PA-18 special election that elected ex-Marine and pro-gun and anti-abortion Democrat Conor Lamb to Congress? Or not?

Well, yeah. I dare say that if Democrats run clones of Conor Lamb all over the place they will clean up.  But I thought that the Democrats were against a moderate chap like Conor Lamb. Because white privilege.

But would all those clean-cut moderate ex-Marine Democrat Conor Lamb clones all vote to impeach President Trump? I suppose they would, just like the moderate Democrats that Chuck Schumer recruited in 2006 that all loyally cut their throats and voted for Obamacare in 2010.

But I would say that the only thing that matters for the mid-terms is how the pending report of Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email affair plays out.

See, I suspect that in the next month or two we will find out that the DOJ and the FBI were doing bad and illegal things with respect to Hillary Clinton and her email server, and that they illegally spied on the Trump campaign, and that it goes to the very top of the Obama administration. We have already seen several demotions and reassignments of the principals in this affair, culminating in the recent firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. I believe this is what they call "smoke" in respect of "no smoke without fire."

I dare say that from now until the mid-terms in November we are going to see a parade of revelations on the subvention of the Department of Justice and the FBI to the political needs of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, and it ain't gonna be pretty.

So the question will be: do the voters care? Honestly, I don't know, but I would guess that the fabled #Resistance will get somewhat demoralized. That's the way politics works. You want your own partisans to be motivated, the other side's partisans to be demoralized, and the independents in the middle to be pleasantly surprised by your side and disgusted with the other side.

Now I  expect that what the Trump people want for the mid-terms (and who knows what the official Republicans want) is to cry Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, trumpeting Trump's brilliant economic leadership, to demand we Build The Wall on immigration, and to demand that we Drain the Swamp on all the DOJ and FBI shenanigans.

What's not to like?

Meanwhile, I suspect, the Democratic cry on Russia Collusion is going to be getting a bit old in the tooth. Oh, and I wonder what happens if there is headline news on the Clinton Foundation and the Uranium One issue. Did you know that there is an ongoing investigation into this? Apparently, "FBI agents are interviewing people." Who knew?

Tonight I'm going to a Republican fundraiser for Dino Rossi who's running for WA-08 in November. I wonder if I'll learn anything about what the smart people think is going down this Fall? The Cook Political Report rates WA-08 as "Republican Toss-up." 

Humans Demand Good vs. Evil

Today in the American Spectator there's a piece by Christopher deGroot critiquing Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. The problem with chaps like Pinker is his naive faith in reason as the basis of society.

If your car breaks down, there’s a mechanic who can fix it, and so too, if only men and women would follow the way of reason and our Enlightenment heritage, we could count on amelioration like death and taxes.

 The missing link is that reason and science and not enough, and that humans, and I suspect all living things, are creatures of affect. We are what we feel.

For we are essentially passionate animals. The loss of a loved one, like the prospect of our own demise, would not matter to us if life did not already have an inherently affective value, which we feel long before we can have any idea of death.

And if reason and science were all there were, why haven't we solved all the world's problems by now? And why, after the triumph of Enlightenment reason, did the 20th century feature so many death cults, from Leninism and Hitlerism to Maoism? No, deGroot will not admit Pinker's line that Nietzsche was to blame for the "romantic militarism" of World War I. (Of course another lefty I have read, Michael Mann, blames World War I on the militarism of the old regimes, the pre-Enlightenment feudal regimes, of Russia, Germany, and Austria).

Now I happen to be in the middle of reading a couple of books on all this: Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning and Rodney Stark's Why God? They both emphasize the primary importance of "affect" in understanding humans. The point is that, while reason and science are super-duper, they only provide answers for what is already known.

Peterson goes on at great length to unearth the world that "primitive man" experienced and relates that world to religion and myth.

His basic notion is that man in life is suspended between the known and the unknown. Imagine a man walking in the lands close by his encampment, knowing and understanding all the plants and animals and humans around him. Suddenly he spies an animal he has never seen before. Now he is in the realm of the unknown, and the immediate feeling is Fear, and everything has changed. Now this man must stop everything, figure out what this strange animal is all about and also protect himself in case the animal is dangerous. In other words, the normal even life of the known is suspended by a period of exploration to bring the unknown animal into the realm of the known. The point Peterson makes is that emotion, feeling, or affect is a signal for us to stop everything and pay attention to an irruption of the unknown, the unexpected, into the known world.

But the rational world view leaves this out, on the assumption that we already know everything we need to know and therefore can proceed and live as though life was completely known and mapped out. No it ain't.

And Steven Pinker should know better. What, after all, is the reality of the Left, but that the world is in a complete mess, because injustice, and we must do something right now to bring it back to peace and justice. The left is insisting of the primacy of affect, the intolerable experience of misery of poverty, injustice, oppression. Here is Jordan B. Peterson arguing with a lefty that insists that kids should go straight out and solve all the world's problems with activism.

I am also reading Rodney Stark, about why people believe in gods, and why the rise of monotheism. The reason, as I understand it, is that people need to believe in the promise that good will win out in the end, and they will participate in the triumph of good. But why monotheism?

Two things, according to Stark. First of all, in the Axial Age, starting about 600 BC, humans started to live in larger communities, and the old informal social control methods of the village started to break down, requiring the substitution of expensive force to keep the malefactors under control. But gods could also help by dealing with the malefactors themselves, and, according to Stark, the more powerful the god, the more effective the god. Thus, he says, where gods get involved in good and evil there tends to be a move to monotheism.

According to Peterson, then, the basic trajectory of human life is that it is inevitably punctured by unforeseen events that require a non-rational response. And according to Stark, people are programmed to want a world in which good is rewarded and evil is punished.

You can see that the best-of-all-possible-world of Pinker does not compute with this approach to the human condition.

And indeed, if we just look around we see that everyone is all worked up about good and evil all the time, no matter that we have just raised per capita income by 30 times in 200 years. The left is concerned about the horrors all around us, from the under-representation of women in tech to the over-disciplining of minority youth in schools to the gun-violence problem to immigration and Muslims, oh and The Planet! Conservatives are worried about the evils of abortion, the decline of marriage, and the Muslim threat.

Hey, everything may be copacetic, as per Steven Pinker, but nobody seems to be listening.

And anyway, as deGroot writes, "civilizations are organic, rising and falling in endless cycles of progression and regression." So what do we do about that, Professor Pinker?

The answer is, of course, that each civilization is based upon some grand assumptions about how the world works, and, what with stupidity and corruption, the day comes when the civilization is suddenly confronted, like the primitive man above, with something completely unknown for which the current knowledge base does not have an answer. Typically, the civilization fails to adjust to the new reality, and so gets flushed down the toilet, maybe because it was ruled by a bunch of Steven Pinkers that know that they already had all the answers.

Actually, The Climate is the best illustration of all this. All of a sudden, various people in the Pinker educated elite have decided, on the basis of limited data (and data is always limited), that we are in the dangerous unknown, that the planet is heating up uncontrollably, and Something Must Be Done before The Climate eats us all for breakfast. The reality is that there really isn't much science and reason out there, just a few theories, a few climate computer models, and a lot of Fear and Emotion. The Pinkers say we should pay them a lot of money to study the problem and pay for their expensive answers requiring more center-left government. Other people say that there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

What's a mother to do?