How to Solve the Lefty Boycott Problem

What do we do about the lefty habit of launching boycotts against conservative media types?

This week it's Laura Ingraham's turn as young teenage activist David Hogg, presumably prompted all the way by David Brock's Media Matters outfit, has successlfully scared most of the Laura's advertisers to stop advertising on her FoxNews TV show.

Oh, and don't forget the NRA. Lefties love to launch boycotts against the eevil NRA.

Of course before Laura it was Sean Hannity,  and before him Bill O'Reilly. And they have tried a few times to scare Rush Limbaugh's advertisers off his program.

So what do we DO about it?

Do we return fire, and punch back twice as hard, as a famous community organizer once said, and target advertisers on lefty shows? Do we ignore the lefties? Do we turn the other cheek?

Or do we adopt the strategy of Vox Day, advertised in his SJWs Always Lie and SJWs Always Double Down ebooks. Here is the SJW Survival Guide from SJWs Always Lie. Rule Three is:  never apologize, because it only encourages them.  Rule Seven is: make the rubble bounce.

So Laura Ingraham should not have apologized to David Hogg.

Vox Day's bigger agenda is that, if you don't like social media deplatforming you then you need to take action and make your own platforms. That's why Day has produced a "fork" to Wikipedia, calling it Infogalactic. Only trouble is that Infogalactic's traffic is going down, not up.

The problem for conservatives and non-lefties is that we don't believe in boycotts. That's because we don't believe in the basic faith of the left in political action. We don't believe that labor unions are the solution for the workers. We don't believe in the wonders of the welfare state. We don't believe in the efficacy of government experts. We don't believe that Affirmative Action or "inclusion and diversity" is going to correct historical discrimination.

So, while everyone on the left believes in the use of activism and "peaceful protest" to fight against injustice, we don't. Oh, we believe in laws against major discrimination, but not much more.

Actually, we believe that only government should be forbidden to discriminate on the basis of race and sex. Because the whole point of freedom is the freedom to discriminate. So, on this view, if Google and Facebook want to drive conservatives out of the public square, go ahead fellahs. Of course it might not be a good strategic plan and good for business to piss off half of the country, but, as they say, it's a free country, and the whole point of freedom is the right to make mistakes.

The big risk for companies that bail on conservative media advertising is that sometimes the boycott backfires as the listeners and viewers decide to boycott the boycotters and, sometimes, the conservative show won't have the advertisers back if they suddenly get sadder and wiser.

The best thing to happen would be that all the rumpus and accusations the 2018 activist wave result in the reelection of the GOP Congress in November. Because what cooled the jets of the last lefty activist era, the fabled Sixties, was that the voters elected Republican Presidents five times out of six between 1968 and 1988. It was only when Bill Clinton declared himself a New Democrat that the voters elected a Democrat. And then, after he sicced Hillary on the health care system, the voters elected the first GOP Congress in 40-odd years.

That is the sort of thing that people with a faith in the saving grace of political power really understand. The trouble is that there is always a new generation of well-born youngsters with a desperate hunger for revolution, baby.

Myth and Religion in an Age of Science

I sent a piece to American Thinker last night to urge that we reclassify all lefty ideologies as religions. The idea was to be able to apply the First Amendment to our lefty friends respecting establishments of religion.

Because if the US has an official religion right now it is the congeries of lefty ideologies, and don't you dare question the experts on their political correctness.

However, I was also reading Jordan B. Peterson yesterday, and he says this about your modern ideologies. And he means all of them, from the story of "benevolent nature threatened by the rapacious forces of the corrupt individual and the society of the machine" to the brave pioneer "wresting the good life... from the intransigent forces of nature."

These stories are all ideologies... [But they] are dangerous. Their power stems from their incomplete but effective appropriation of mythical ideas... Ideologies only tell part of the story, but tell that part as if it were complete.

Peterson wants us to understand that everything is two-edged. Benevolent nature? Yes, but it includes malarial mosquitos. Noble pioneers? But what about the original inhabitants? The Great Mother is creation and destruction. The Great Father is security and tyranny, and if your appropriated myth doesn't weave that into the story then, in the words of Mary McCarthy, every word is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Yes, but isn't myth and religion old hat, because science? Well, I quoted Rodney Stark in my AT piece to the effect that

The everlasting basis for religion will be the human conviction and hope that life has meaning.

Or, as I like to quote from Douglas Adams, it is all about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." I think the point is that the reason that all living things do what they do is that they act as if their life has hope and meaning. Maybe there is no meaning of life in this universe. But it seems to me that everything in the universe seems to be acting as if there is. Or, to put it in terms of Jordan Peterson, our lives are based on affect, responding to unexpected stimuli with the response we call "emotion."

I see that he gets some of this from Nietzsche. I am reading Beyond Good and Evil at the gym and Nietzsche is pretty clear on science, philosophy, and everything. Kant and his categories? Sure, but suppose he was mistaken? Schopenhauer and his "will?" So let's unpack it:  the fact is that "will" is not something simple and certain, but complicated unit into which a whole world of meaning has been packed. Cause and effect? We should use them "as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication -- not for explanation." Or,

It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world explanation[.]

That is to say that science demonstrates the world; it does not explain it.

Actually I think the whole thing can be understood by turning Marx on his head. In his Theses on Feuerbach he famously writes:

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Er, no Chuck. Let's look at this from the Peterson point of view. We achieve new interpretations of the world from experiencing the unexpected as an irruption of the dangerous unknown. There is a whole universe out there of which we know nothing, because it does not affect our lives. But when the universe whacks us upside the head we struggle to achieve a hard-won new interpretation the world. The point is not to change the world but to change  ourselves so we can better continue our lives in a less dangerous and more effective way.

Going along in the old way and ignoring new interpretations of the world may be sensible, or it may be suffocating. Going off in a new way may be beneficial, or it may be suicidal.

Changing the world, Chuck, might be the point or it might be a recipe for 100 million dead humans.

The point is to figure out the difference. And that is the job of myth and religion, not science, and not half-baked lefty ideology.

Why Pope Francis is Wrecking Catholicism

Here we are on Good Friday, and the big story is Pope Francis telling an atheist journalist that he is not  that into Hell. Writes George Neumayr,

In an interview with the Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari, Pope Francis declared that the unrepentant don’t suffer in hell but simply “disappear.”

Of course, nobody really has a right to be scandalized by this. The Catholic Church operates as a "magisterium" which means more or less that what the pope says goes. So if the pope says that you don't get to burn in Hell for your sins but instead disappear into oblivion, hey, that's the plan.

However, in my judgement, what the pope is doing  is destroying the Catholic Church as an institution where people go to get an answer to the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in the felicitous phrase of Douglas Adams.

Ever since the Axial Age, humans have approached this problem through the cultural notion of a God that cares about good and evil.

(Did you know that before the Axial Age gods did not care too much about good and evil? A good place to start is Homer's Iliad. Those gods were playing politics, using humans as their chess pieces on the chess-board of the plains of Ilium).

The reason that gods suddenly became interested in good and evil in about 600 BC was that the "informal social control" of the village was breaking down as humans started moving into larger, and more impersonal communities. That's from sociologist of religion Rodney Stark.

But Rodney Stark has also analyzed the workings of what we might call the religious marketplace. What do believers want, and what do religious entrepreneurs offer them?

The answer is that people want a religion that enacts the drama of good and evil, but they want it tailored to their specific needs. Some people want a very strict and demanding religion; others want a medium strict religion (and this is the sweet spot where most people live); some people want a very liberal religion. In times of trouble, people tend to want more strict religion. That is why, for instance, western New York State during the chaos of building the Erie Canal was called the "burned over district" and birthed a lot of religious movements including the Church of Latter Day Saints.

There is a tendency for religious entrepreneurs -- the Wesley brothers, Joseph Smith & Co -- to start fairly strict religions. There is also a tendency for religious bureaucrats to gradually ease up on the strictness of the church they direct. This is because, like all bureaucrats, religious bureaucrats tend, over time, to focus on the emoluments and perquisites of office rather than the actual mission of the church.

So it makes complete sense that during our lives the Catholic Church has de-emphasized the strictness of good vs. evil. But there is a problem, according to Rodney Stark. When ecclesiastics liberalize their churches and soften their doctrine the believers tend not to like it, and the ecclesiastics pretty soon start preaching to empty churches. On Rodney Stark's view this is exactly what happened to the Catholic  Church after Vatican II. Used to be that both clergy and laity were enthused by the specialness of their faith: the priests and nuns in their distinctive uniforms and status, the laity in their strict requirements for fidelity and observance.

Now, if you believe in the ideas of Rodney Stark you would think that, if the Christian churches are relaxing their religious discipline, then something would be likely to come along and fill in the gap left by the churches that were reducing the level of enthusiasm for the drama of good and evil. And of course this is exactly what has happened. The Gospel has been replaced by the Social Gospel. The moral drama of personal good and evil has been replaced, especially for educated people, by the moral drama of social good and evil, the plight of the poor, inequality, and the blight of capitalism.

There are many people that assert that the secular movements of the last two centuries are not religions, but I am not one of them. All these movements -- from the Jacobins of the French Revolution to the Communists of early to mid 20th century to the postmodernist SJWs of today -- are all running religions, that are intensely concerned with the moral drama of good vs. evil.

For instance, you may be concerned with the violence of Good Friday, the sacrifice of the Son of God in expiation of our Sins, and the almost melodramatic resolution of the Passion of Christ on Easter Sunday when Christ rises again from the dead. But surely the secular-religious passion of AntiFa, the anti-gun movement, and the campus SJWs show that ideological passion is alive and well, and that all over the world, people are motivated by the passion to fight for good against evil.

You might think, for example, that martyrdom is a dead-end. But in fact people are highly motivated to become martyrs. We see that in the Islamic movement -- and we see it with the mass shooters. Hey, the easiest way to go down in history is to get your 15 minutes of fame with a semi-automatic assault rifle.

And the proof of this is the reverse of it. During the Great Purges of the Stalinist Soviet Union, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the most effective ways of breaking down non-believers was to tell them, in the isolation of the interrogation room, that they would disappear without a trace so they might as well give in and confess. This tactic did not work for religious believers, who already knew that they would go to Heaven.

For me, the current moral drama of the left and the SJWs is a dead end, for the simple reason that it has not confronted the "indirect social control" culture of the market economy. In my view, the true religion of today must blend the good vs. evil culture of the monotheisms with the "service is perfect freedom" culture of the market. For this is the basic proposition of the market economy. Think of some service, some product that other people want, and deliver it. Deliver it not just to your tribe, your clan, but to all the people, all over the world. What a concept!

So my idea is that the Religion of the Future must blend the women's culture that is best adapted to the culture of informal social control with the men's culture that is best for running the culture of formal social control with the impersonal culture of indirect social control that comes with the market and its prices.

Hey, it should be no problem. We will wake up on some Sunday soon and find that we have all risen as if from the dead and that all the world is new again.

But I wish that Pope Francis were a sadder and wiser man.

"Informal Social Control" and "Formal Social Control" and the Left

I  was reading a piece today by ZMan about "Puritans and Progressives" and how similar they are.

[Just like the Puritans] [t]he modern Left is consumed with defining who is inside and who is outside their thing. The people inside are the righteous, while the people outside are all evil.

And it happens that today David French is reporting on the liberal rage at the idea -- the idea! -- of hiring National Review writer Kevin D. Williamson to write for The Atlantic. And then there is John Derbyshire writing about the travails of Amy Wax, a law professor who is getting in trouble for suggesting that “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half” at the law school at the University of Pennsylvania.

What is going on here? I think that the way to understand it is to use Rodney Stark's concepts of "informal social control" and "formal social control" from his book Why God?

Stark argues that the appearance of monotheistic religions in the Axial Age occurred because people were starting to live in communities that were too big to be regulated by the face-to-face informal social control of the village. In the village everyone knows everyone else and the community of women determine who is naughty or nice, as in my immortal catchphrase: "I can't believe she said/did that."

But when the world gets too big you need the impersonal authority of formal social control with governments for the external control of people's acts and monotheistic gods that can  peer into your soul to control your mental acts.

But the thing is that we are all programmed for the intimate world of the village and informal social control. So we are outraged, outraged that there are people out there actually allowed to write stuff that we know is evil and opposed to everything we believe. The nerve! And so we get the Puritan witch hunts of Salem, Massachusetts, of which everyone has heard tell. And we get the Reign of Terror witch hunts of the French Revolution, of which everyone has also heard tell, but with which some of our lefty friends fail to make the connection. Oh and the Great Purge of 1930s Soviet Union, and the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s, and the Maoist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Today we are having a similar experience with the postmodernists and "political correctness." And this witch-hunt was specifically recommended by left Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay on "Repressive Tolerance."

Our Big Problem, I think, is that there is another social control concept that has taken hold in the last 200 years. It is what we might call the "indirect social control" of the market economy. The market economy does not directly say: "Thou Shalt" and "Thou Shalt Not." It only gives you a nudge.

In my view there is a problem with the indirect social control of the market. It does not have enough valence, enough moral drama of good against evil. People want to live in the moral drama of the battle of good against evil, and they think something is missing in their lives if the moral drama is missing.

Against this appetite for moral drama is the opinion of Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. In his view humans cannot handle the heightened drama of a witch-hunt or a Reign of Terror for too long. And so there is always a return to normalcy, what the left calls "Thermidorean Reaction" because the French Reign of Terror ended in the revolutionary month of Thermidor.

There is also a theory that witch-hunts stop when the hunters start coming for respectable women that are wives of local notables. It is one thing to sweep up witches on the margins of society, but quite another when high-born women are involved, darling. So does Prof. Amy Wax count as a high-born notable? Does the reign of microaggressions stop with her?

We shall see.

But I think that the key to the whole matter is to understand the interplay of the cultures of "informal social control," "formal social control," and "indirect social control."

And remember what Harry Hotspur said about the claim of Henry IV to be the King of England.

[The king]
Broke oath on oath, committed wrong on wrong;
And, in conclusion, drove us to seek out
This head of safety; and withal to pry
Into his title, the which now we find
Too indirect for long continuance.

Yeah! You give 'em hell Harry.

Because that is what the left has been doing in respect  of the market  economy for a century and a half: prying out the title of capitalism, which  they find too indirect, too lacking in moral drama, for long continuance.

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.