The Alt-right Takes Out After Jordan Peterson

I got a bit of a shock the other day when Vox Day took out after Jordan B. Peterson for something he'd written about Jewish IQ. One of Day's memes is that Jews are not as smart as they/we think.

I can understand why the alt-right doesn't like Peterson. That's because Peterson's work is not about defending Christian culture and the nation state. I see that in Peterson's interest in Nietzsche and Jung.

What Day and the alt-right are doing is fighting back against the left's war on the bourgeois culture of responsibility and the Christian world-view. Nothing wrong with that. But Nietzsche's most famous books are Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. And Jung at one point was trying to get Christian divines to recast their theology in the light of his study of myth and the unconscious.

Do you see what is going on? Here is what I think. First of all, my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we humans come in three flavors. First there are the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants that are moved by the neo-feudalism of the welfare state; their god is the local lord. Then there are the People of the Responsible Self, responsible citizens and middle-class who believe in the formal social control of law and right and wrong; their God is the Axial Age god of divine justice and mercy. Finally there are the People of the Creative Self, artists and writers; their god is the creative spirit in each of us.

On my view the story of the last two hundred years is this. The newly emergent People of the Creative Self decided that all the sins of the world were caused by the People of the Responsible Self -- the bourgeoisie -- ragging on the People of the Subordinate Self and exploiting and oppressing them. So the newly emergent People of the Creative Self would beat up the People of the Responsible Self and save the poor helpless People of the Subordinate Self from the cruel oppression of the Responsible bourgeoisie. This all started, if you like, in the 1840s with Marx and Engels, and got tried out in the Bolshevik and Maoist Revolutions with about 100 million deaths. So there was a problem. But the revolution continues with today's left warring on the People of the Responsible Self for their racism, sexism, and homophobia against helpless women, minorities and LGBTs and the left's promotion of global migration and apology for Islamism.

Now I think that the War on the People of the Responsible Self has been a tragic and evil mistake. But the critique by Marx and Engels had a point. The middle class of the mid-19th century, the People of the Responsible Self, were busily remaking the world in their own image, of cities, trade, manufacture, prices, law, trust, etc., exactly what seemed natural and physical to them and their world view. But for the People of the Subordinate Self, streaming into the cities from serfdom and starvation in the countryside, the agenda of the People of the Responsible Self was alien and horrible. And it seemed to require them to slough off the sleep of ages in ten minutes and join the join the responsibility revolution right now. But since the bourgeoisie extended the vote to the workers the problem eventually got softened by the welfare state that allowed the workers to continue as their Subordinate selves and put off their assimilation into middle-class respectability and responsibility.

But here is the problem. The bourgeoisie might have been a bit hard on the workers and peasants, but their culture of responsibility was just the thing to midwife the Great Enrichment from $3 per day to $150 a day in 200 years. Talk about a poverty program! Yet the People of the Creative Self have been ragging on the People of the Responsible Self and attempting to destroy their responsibility culture. Really? Turning back the clock on the Miracle of the last 200 years? I don't think so.

So, the People of the Creative Self have been doing exactly what they were accusing the People of the Responsible Self: bullying people less enlightened than themselves, and trying to force feed them with a cultural narrative which didn't make any sense to them. This is sick and wrong.

In the stead of this folly and failure here is my noble and perfect agenda. The People of the Creative Self and the People of the Responsible Self should unite on a thoughtful and compassionate agenda to bring along the People of the Subordinate Self, the workers and peasants, into the middle-class culture of responsibility. This must mean a dilution of the welfare state and a program to lead the Subordinates out of their victimhood and envy and their desire to sit in unionized good jobs at good wages forever without regard to the inevitable changes in the labor market. If you don't teach the workers to be responsible they end up dying of despair like the white working class of which we've heard tell, and we don't want that, do we.

Next, the hard part. The People of the Creative Self need to be just and tolerant of the People of the Responsible Self as they demand that the People of the Responsible Self be tolerant of the People of the Subordinate Self. That means they must stop beating up on Christianity, marriage, motherhood, family, manliness, and capitalism. All these things are markers of the responsibility culture and are just what the doctor ordered for People of the Responsible Self and also the People of the Subordinate Self if they want to master life in the city.

Therefore the world's Big Problem is to teach the People of the Creative Self how to abandon their current religious Crusade on the People of the Responsible Self and find a new religion, one that is tolerant of the People of the Responsible Self and does not cruelly draft the People of the Subordinate Self as foot-soldiers in a War Against the People of the Responsible Self.

This is not an easy task, but this is what, I think, people like Jung and Peterson are trying to do. I have just finished Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning: the Architecture of Belief and I can say that he helps us on the road, but he doesn't get us to the Promised Land.

Suppose we accept that, with the current world we are Beyond Good and Evil. But then what? What Jung is saying is that, for better or worse we are the creatures of our unconscious, both the personal unconscious and the precipitate of the ages in the collective unconscious; therefore we need to incorporate that in the Religion of the Future. What Peterson is saying is that "change" does not come from left-wing activism, but from sacrificial heroes, living dangerously (and creatively) on the border between the known and the unknown, and bringing the unknown into the known by their courageous and humble willingness to explore the unknown, begin to understand it, and bring back its meaning to us. On this view, what the left does today is a travesty of the hero's journey. It assumes that anyone can do activism -- even good little girls that need safe spaces when traumatized by microaggression; it assumes that we already have the answer to the modern question, and that is a fight against oppression and exploitation; it demands that the hero get a grant from the government to carry out his plan.

Very nice. But how do we get there from here? Well I think we need both the work of the Petersons and the counter-offensive of the alt-right. We need to paint a new picture of Heaven in the sky and a develop a religion of creativity that tells its novices that the way ahead is hard and traumatic: no safe spaces and don't forget that many are called but few are chosen. And we need to give the left a stunning blow in the solar-plexus to demoralize it and send it into the mythical underworld from which it can, after a long sojourn in the wilderness, return sadder and wiser with a plan for humanity that can avoid the disasters of the Soviet Union, China, and Venezuela.

Anti-Barker: Don't Know Much About Philosophee

Our liberal friends at The New York Times just published an apology for Marx written by an associate professor of philosophy in Seoul, Korea: Jason Barker. His piece appears  to be part of a book of essays.

But what does he argue? Let's go through his points, one by one. He starts by quoting Alain Badiou that "Marx had become the philosopher of the middle class."

I believe he meant that educated liberal opinion is today more or less unanimous in its agreement that Marx’s basic thesis — that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit — is correct.

Oh dear. The class struggle argument, that I thought was exploded by World War I, when the workers fought for their nations, not for their class. I thought that was why the Frankfurt School had to come up with the race struggle and the sex struggle as a replacement to justify the argument for revolution and "activism."

As for the class struggle, it hadn't really occurred to anyone until Marx invented it, in the Communist Manifesto  as a way to smear capitalists with the tar of feudal lords. In the feudal age there were lords exploiting the peasants; in the capitalist age the bourgeoisie exploited the proletarians. QED.

Only, under capitalism the daily per capita income has increased by 30 times in 200 years and 70 percent of Filipinos are now on Facebook. Some exploitation!

And oh dear, the surplus labor argument, that was completely demolished in 1870 with the marginal revolution. But you see, you will read Marxists for an eternity without encountering any economic ideas birthed later that 1865. If there is a grain of truth in the surplus labor argument it is that everywhere under capitalism people mark up prices. The chap that buys grain from a farmer marks it up before he sells it. The engineering consultant marks up the cost of labor before he bills the client. But here is the thing. Even with the markup the employer may not make a profit on his capital. Profit, you see, is not the markup on labor. It is whatever is left after paying for labor, for materials, for rent, for interest, and for paying the equity investors.

OK, what next? How about the capitalists grabbing all the wealth?

Marx arrives at no magic formula for exiting the enormous social and economic contradictions that global capitalism entails (according to Oxfam, 82 percent of the global wealth generated in 2017 went to the world’s richest 1 percent).

Are you saying 82 percent of wealth generated? Or income? Are you sure? The point is that wealth is not "generated" or "accumulated" as Thomas Piketty argues. It is discovered when, e.g., the stocks of frackers vault into the stratosphere when fracking brings down the price of oil. Or when John D. Rockefeller makes a billion by creating an oil industry that reduces the cost of illuminating oil from 89 cents a gallon to 8 cents. So consumers benefit from lower prices and investors benefit from taking a flier on a crazy kid with a crazy idea. Now that is what I call a contradiction. Lower prices and gigantic wealth!

OK how about this:

Marx and Engels wrote: “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.”

Well, I don't think that stripping the halo off medieval guilds and their modern equivalent cabals of lawyers and doctors is such a bad thing. Nor is wage labor such a bad thing. The point about a regular hourly wage or a monthly salary is that the laborer -- or noble professor of philosophy -- trades away risk. He says: just give me a regular income and you, Mr. Employer, take the risk that my labor will have any value when you come to calculate profit and loss at the end of the year. For most of us, that is a pretty good deal, and it is echoed by Stanley and Danko in The Millionaire Next Door. How do millionaire businessmen educate their children? They educate them to the elite professions, because the regular salary of a professional is much less risky than the income of a businessman.

OK, let's proceed to the classless, stateless society. By turning Hegel on his head and substituting materialism for German idealism, plus the death of God, Marx proposed doing away with classes and with states.

The idea of the classless and stateless society would come to define both Marx’s and Engels’s idea of communism, and of course the subsequent and troubled history of the Communist “states” (ironically enough!) that materialized during the 20th century. There is still a great deal to be learned from their disasters, but their philosophical relevance remains doubtful, to say the least.

Actually, the philosophical relevance of the Communist states is clear. If you try to do away with the state you get the ultimate Hegelian negation, a state founded on brutal and unremitting terror that makes even Genghis Kahn look like a piker, and a rigid class system by which the lordly party viciously exploits the vast mass of proletarians and, as often as not, starves them into their graves, as in the Soviet Union's Ukraine famine, China's Great Leap Forward famine, and now Venezuela.

But Marx's real legacy is not philosophy, but critique, as in

"the ruthless criticism of all that exists: ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be."

Ah yes. Critical Theory.

Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the “eternal truths” of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress...

But enlightened or rational thinking is not enough, since the norms of thinking are already skewed by the structures of male privilege and social hierarchy, even down to the language we use. Changing those norms entails changing the very foundations of society.

But, Professor Barker, there is one kind of critique that is not allowed. It is the critique of any and all liberal ideas, the ideas of the educated elite, the ideas of people like you. Because, as all the world knows, any critique of the left is automatically "hate" speech and subject to criminal sanction.

So let us rephrase your text. Let us say that the norms of thinking are skewed by the structures of liberal privilege and social hierarchy, even down to the language we use.

In America today, and even more so in Europe, you are not allowed to disagree in public with the privileged educated elite like Jason Barker. And people know it. As Dennis Prager writes today in "Fear of the Left," he gets people coming up to him all the time and whisper in his ear: "I am a conservative."

This happens just about everywhere I speak. People whisper -- yes, whisper -- that they are conservative or they support Trump. The last time I experienced people looking around to check whether they were seen speaking to me was with dissidents in the Soviet Union.

Where is the white privilege if people have to whisper their political identity? Where is the male privilege when men get convicted in the court of public opinion for an accusation of sexual impropriety? Who gets to dominate "the language we use?" Certainly not anyone to the right of Jason Barker.

The point about the left is that its ideology of hegemony and domination is the ideology of today's ruling class. So-called "Critical Theory" is a license for the bribed apologists of the ruling class to beat up on ordinary powerless people that are not represented by the ideological militia of the ruling class such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. That is why ordinary people are reduced to whispering "I am a conservative." Because if "they" found out the truth the conservative whisperer might easily lose his job,

Some male privilege. Some "critique." Some liberation. Some emancipation.

Nothing has changed since Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolution. "In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows."

Only you are not allowed to say things like that. Because "hate" speech.

On the Receiving End of the Ruling-Class's Cultural Narrative

The Big Problem for conservatives is that we are nowhere to be seen when it comes to establishing the cultural narrative. It is liberals and lefties that decide what story to tell about who we are and how we got there.

And anyone that has a clue about religion and history and myth knows that the chap that gets to tell the story gets to rule the nation.

So I've been watching a series of P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh mysteries from a DVD set that I picked up on 50% off day at HalfPrice Books.

My takeaway is that James fillets 1980s Britain with almost savage determination. It's a wonder to me that she ever got the accolades and the handle she did. Many of her mysteries are set in government or quasi-government offices. And most of the offices are not exactly run with professional skill and devotion to the mission. Almost all the police officers in the series, apart from the incandescent poet Dalgliesh, are at best lazy time-servers and at worst evil and corrupt.

Put it this way. If you've run through the Dalgliesh mysteries you wouldn't be shocked to read the latest on the late Alfie Evans, that the NHS children's hospital in which Alfie died was noted for its mistakes and incompetence and that it seems likely that mistakes and incompetence played their part in the death of Alfie.

But then over the weekend I got to watch the start of Unforgotten Season 2, an ITV mystery series created by Chris Lang about cold murder cases. Here we have a crack London police investigative team led by a woman and seconded by DI Sunny Kahn. We have an earnest Muslim woman teacher of Shakespeare trying to get a school principal's job. And we have a gay couple with their darling little daughter.

In other words, the TV series is all about the ruling-class's cultural narrative, normalizing the cultural agenda of the ruling class and boosting their "little darlings."

Hey, that's the whole point of a ruling class; you get to set the stage with your favorite cardboard heroes and your chosen cartoon villains. And there ain't nothin' we deplorables can do about it.

There happens to be an actual cultural history of Britain out there. It is the Up Series, an ITV documentary series about a cohort of Brits that were seven-year-olds in 1964 when the first episode  was broadcast.

The idea of the Up Series was clearly to show the triumphant success of the post-WWII welfare state and spotlight the rising working class and show them to advantage against the over-privileged toffs. So the first episode shows three delightful working-class girls in the bright-and-cheery living-room of their "council house" (public housing), while three rich boys are shown in all their insufferable snobbishness. In the middle are a bunch of middle-class kids and one boy-of-color.

Only the whole thing went wrong. The upper-class twits all hit the marks set by their helicopter moms and went on to successful lives and careers. The upper-class daughter of divorce got her act together after an angry teenage period and married a good man. But the sparkling working-class girls all ended up as single-parents living in a shabby squalor. The ordinary middle-class kids kinda faded away; the earnest boy who wanted to help the world gave up teaching South Asians at government schools in the East End of London and switched to teaching in a private school. But Tony, a fists-first working-class kid from the East End of London grows up to become a London taxi-driver and an Essex Man -- i.e. working-class that has moved out to the suburbs. The key thing about Tony was that he belonged to the good old British criminal class, and his dad was in jail when he was seven. I wonder if his dad's underworld connections gave Tony the inside track to get his foot into the London taxi cartel.

Do you see what I am getting at? Having buried the old white working class, and bollixed up the dutiful middle class, the ruling class imports a whole new population from the Caribbean and South Asia and drive their former "little darlings" to despair.

So in the BBC TV series Last Tango in Halifax, the white working class woman played by Nicola Walker (the heroine police inspector in Unforgotten), is clearly in a mess because of her own character deficiencies. Indeed the only Good Person in the Halifax series is the POC lesbian girl-friend of the white school principal.

Now, I don't really blame the TV series creators for telling the ruling-class's narrative. Apart from the fact that it would be career suicide to tell the true story, I doubt if any of the folks with the connections and the track record to put together mass-media vehicles can ever be anything other than Good Soldier Schweiks going along with the ruling-class narrative.

For an alternative to the ruling-class narrative you need a writer like P.D. James, who worked full-time through the Fifties and Sixties in the government bureaucracy, first in the NHS and then in the Home Office, supporting her disabled husband. An unknown author can create a new narrative, and if it takes off and she becomes a best-seller, then she has achieved a cultural fait-accompli.

Or you need an unfortunate accident like the Up Series, that shows up the abject failures of the ruling-class idiots, but only if you have eyes to see.

We conservatives dream of a possible world where our narrative would get the respect it deserves. But really we are whistling past the graveyard. What happens in real life is that the ruling-class goes on pushing its narrative and favoring its latest "little darlings" until one day it runs out of other peoples' money, an accident reveals its incompetence and folly and the whole project lands on the dust-heap of history.

And the one thing for certain is that the "little darlings," past, present, and future, will be hardest hit.

"Studies:" The Munitions of the Activists

The thing about the market economy is that it doesn't need "studies." Everything bows to the reality of the market and its prices.

Of course the market is not perfect; it has what we call "externalities," meaning that some market participants can unjustly allocate costs from themselves onto others. As in pollution, or when the neighbor erects a horse-barn that inflicts horse flies and the smell of horse manure on the neighbors.

Strictly speaking, of course, the common law system can take care of externalities, because a neighbor damaged by externalities from next door can sue for relief, and an accumulation of cases can build into a series of legal precedents that can routinely provide relief for people on the receiving end of externalities.

But this incremental approach to life is not much fun for people that want to cut a dash in the world. Thus "studies" have become the favorite way for people with a political agenda to illuminate some kind of crisis that needs heroic intervention by government. The "study" is the stock-in-trade of the activist of whom we have heard tell.

Troublemaker Steve Sailer has a number of posts today illustrating this problem. First there is the "redlining" issue, in which lenders, starting the 1930s, would outline urban areas not suitable for home mortgages. These areas were often black residential areas. Activist have made a big deal out of redlining, and the whole 2008 mortgage meltdown was an "unanticipated consequence," an externality of the war on redlining, because it became federal policy to lend to sub-prime borrowers with low down-payment loans in order to fight against redlining.

Only it wasn't the greedy bankers. The redlining started with a study by the feds, for

More than 80 years ago, the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation released its “Residential Security” maps, guides of American cities for lenders and brokers infamous for the color they used to condemn black neighborhoods to decades of disinvestment: red.

 You can see the point of the original study. If the feds are going to be spreading free money around to stimulate home-ownership in the aftermath of the Great Depression then they have to regulate the brokers and lenders with administrative guidelines to prevent them from doing what the feds mandated that the brokers and bankers should do in the 2000s. Your faithful regulators want to limit the damage that unsound lending practices by shysters could do to the credit system.

Sailer notes a study that says that redlining probably didn't amount to more than 15 percent of the difference in home prices between neighborhoods. So the whole flap about redlining may have been a storm in a teacup.

But redlining then and now has been a huge deal, because racism, and the eternal need for any up-and-coming activist to find an issue on which to found his political career. And the political response to redlining ended up with the federal mortgage giants doing the opposite of what the Federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation did in the 1930s, which was to curb the enthusiasm of fly-by-night lenders and brokers to make unsound loans which might lead to a credit meltdown.

I remember my own experience: listening to radio ads in the early 2000s where the voiceover had the style and accent of your stereotypical used-car salesman, and thinking: Hmm.

The thing is, of course, that racial discrimination by market participants creates a market opportunity. If your average corporate employer discriminates against a certain class of employee then there is an opportunity for a rascally entrepreneur to hire those people at under-market rates and make a killing. Same with the wage gap of which we've heard tell. If women are really making less than men, then there is a market opportunity out there.

Or, if the market discriminates against Italian home borrowers in, say, early 20th century San Francisco, that creates an opportunity for a self-styled Bank of Italy to specialize in lending to Italian immigrants and knowing the lay of the land and dividing the good borrowers from the bad ones. Eventually your Bank of Italy restyles itself as Bank of America. "The Bank of Italy was founded in San Francisco, California, United States, on October 17, 1904 by Amadeo P. Giannini", says La Wik.

But obviously, the doings of a Bank of Italy, or today a Bank of Mexico or a Bank of Wakanda, does not provide an opportunity for political activism, for outrage, for peaceful protests, and beneficial legislation and reams of regulations, and incandescent political careers.

Sailer is not finished yet. What with a ton of South Asians piling into the US, what about caste and  untouchables? There's a new survey out, "Caste in the United States" that is very worried about South Asians bringing their caste culture to the United States and discriminating against Dalits. Well, it could happen, but my feeling is that most of the South Asian immigration is Brahmins getting away from India so they can Brahminize in the US without all the politics that in India is starting to make life a bit difficult for the higher castes.

It could be a problem, but not a very big problem so long as government does not mandate discrimination the way it does by mandating diversity. For one thing, if you are a Dalit in the US and you keep away from other South Asians my guess is that the average employer would not be able to detect the caste markers that as well-tuned South Asian could. And here is something to think about. I once worked for a tech firm owned by a mid-caste South Asian. But his company was overflowing with gorgeous highly-cultured Brahmin girls. I wonder why.

Or this. Sailer IDs an NPR piece on a study about "test-optional" universities that might help increase diversity. Their poster boy is a student from Nicaragua at the most expensive university in America, George Washington University. Ian Haimowitz:

“I know for a fact I’m the first Nicaraguan-American, the first Latino, the first Jewish Latino that a lot of kids meet,” he says.

Somehow, looking at his photo, I don't think the kid grew up in a Nicaraguan barrio.

Anyway, as a classic racist sexist homophobe, I just don't believe any of this "studies" stuff, especially now that there have been studies showing that 50 percent of studies can't be replicated.

Back in the day politics was all about the valiant ruling class fighting back the Huns and the Mongols, and also nobly exercising its heaven-granted droit de seigneur as a rich reward for their courage. Today it seems we have the educated class valiantly fighting against the racists and the sexists, and nobly exercising its studies-granted droit-de-seigneur to order around the peasants and the deplorables.

So nothing has changed.

The Sexist Folly of First Woman President

Well, well well. So now it can be told, way after the news had any salience. Hillary Clinton is not, and never was, a people person. That's the takeaway for me on reading about Amy Chozick's Chasing Hillary through two presidential campaigns.

Yeah, all the rubbish about Hillary Clinton being a great person in private seems to be rubbish. Hillary Clinton simply is not a people person, and she really does not like interacting with people. And "everybody" always knew it. Only they never told us.

Really Hillary Clinton. If you are not a people person, the sort that cannot exist for a moment without pressing the flesh and meeting people, then for God's sake don't run for political office.

I once asked a Seattle city bureaucrat about this, about how politicians can keep it up, day after day. He replied that in his experience, unlike ordinary people that find public events very draining, the real politician gets energy from being out in public and interacting with people.

And so now we finally get the unvarnished truth about Hillary Clinton. She absolutely hates being out in public. She even thought that the admiring fan club of female journalists would be hard on her. Really.

Chozick and the other reporters covering Clinton in 2015–16 were pulling for her. You could hear it in the questions they asked. Chozick makes it obvious in her new book. Yet Clinton was convinced this gaggle of liberal women was somehow out to take her down, and she barricaded herself off from them. 

“She told aides she knew women reporters would be harder on her. We’d be jealous and catty and more spiteful than men. We’d be impervious to her flirting.”

Oh please. In fact writes Amy,

“I still felt some kind of feminine bond with Hillary then,” she writes of her early months on the beat, and later describes her coverage as “neutral to positive, with plenty of wet kisses thrown in.” 

I think that Rule One of life is that you really do not want to go into a field for which you are signally unsuited. It will make you compensate with excessive amounts of Chardonnay.

So is it sexism that Hillary Clinton did not get elected president? Who knows? But all the girls on the bus were all invested in America's First Woman President. I imagine because that is what they were taught in school and in college. And women  tend to believe what they are taught, much more than men who, like me, tend to think that teachers are full of it.

Is that sexism, or one of the Universal Truths of Life? You decide.

The funny thing is that all this fainting and hugging and "you go girl" and "breaking glass ceilings" stuff is silly mean-girl high-school stuff. And it is sexist to assume that any proportion of any particular profession of executive suite should be female. Or black, or Asian, or anything else.

And it is stupid. For instance, the political leader of a country preeminently needs to be a person that will protect the people from existential perils. Sexism or no  sexism, women have a steeper hill to climb on this than men. In fact, women aspiring to executive political office practically have to re-invent themselves as men: see Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir. Yeah, it didn't hurt Margaret Thatcher that she led the UK into the Falklands War.

But nobody ever suggested that politics and feminism and intersectionalism and the whole culture of the left is anything other than really dumb and stupid. Really dumb and stupid because it has spent the best part of 150 years railing against the very thing that has brought the majority of humans out of the indigent poverty and utter subjection of the ages. How dumb do you have to be not to see what is right in front of your eyes?

OK, I know. Really, nearly all of us all of the time and all of us nearly all of the time are still pre-modern tribesmen and women. So we, like all humans, don't even notice what is right in front of our eyes.

This present era is a remarkable one for women: the energy revolution and the health revolution have liberated women from lives shortened by death from childbirth, and their children saved by the radical improvement in life expectancy. It means that women can do things other than get pregnant and struggle mightily to have one or two children survive into adulthood.

But this freedom means that women now have the opportunity to make complete fools of themselves. This is the meaning of freedom: the freedom to make mistakes, and beyond that, courtesy of the left, forcing the rest of us into saying nothing while they insist on making complete fools of themselves.

I was talking to a lefty friend about lesbianism, and said that he and I were both People of the Creative Self. We believe in being creative. Lesbianism, I said, amounts to women getting creative with sex.

But, I said, what we forget to remember is that the creative life is incredibly hard. Chances are that if you try to live a creative life you will fail miserably, because you don't have the talent or your don't have the luck, or you don't have the grit, or something. Most of us are better advised just to go with the flow and be good sensible People of the Responsible Self.

So, girls. Don't forget that your "you go girl" culture is bound to be a total failure for most of the women that try it. And the reason for the failure is the fact that going against nature, going against instinct, going against your strongest abilities, and just trying something new is almost sure to be a disappointment.

Now I think that in a hundred years women will have discovered new and better ways of living in the era of abundance, when women don't die in childbirth, when women can control their fertility, when women can be whatever they want to be. But first women -- and the rest of us -- are going to have to go through what a sci-fi author a called the Great Ravine.

And one of the bodies in the Great Ravine is Hillary Clinton.

But First, Humans are Tribal

Jonah Goldberg's new book, The Suicide of the West, is out this week, and I haven't ordered my copy. I'm not exactly sure of his argument, but it seems to include at least Deirdre McCloskey's Great Enrichment, because I hear him talking about $3 per day, which is the daily income of Brits, Indians, Chinese, USians in 1800. Jonah calls it the "Miracle" of getting from $3 per day to $100 per day.

From the blurb on Amazon:

As Americans we are doubly blessed that those radical ideas were written into the Constitution, laying the groundwork for our uniquely prosperous society:

• Our rights come from God not from the government.
• The government belongs to us; we do not belong to the government.
• The individual is sovereign. We are all captains of our own souls.
• The fruits of our labors belong to us.

In the last few decades, these political virtues have been turned into vices. As we are increasingly taught to view our traditions as a system of oppression, exploitation and “white privilege,” the principles of liberty and the rule of law are under attack from left and right.

Time was, I would have agreed completely with Jonah. But now I don't. That's because, since July 2016 with the accession of Trump to head the Republican Party, I have had to face the fact that the capitalist/libertarian world view that I held is not good enough.

The reason, I have come to believe, is that the notion of the material world understood by science and the notion of the rational actor that is understood by post Enlightenment theory misunderstands the nature of man the animal.

Yes, reason and science are the amazing developments that have enabled the "Miracle" but we are still 90 percent the social animals that survive because we live in groups and we conform to the world-view of the group. And we act not on a rational analysis of the situation but from emotion, or "affect."

I have been able to come to a reasonable understanding of all this by reading Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning. In that book Peterson runs us through myth, religion, alchemy, Jung and Nietzsche to try and make sense of it all.

And the most important thing he says is that we do not go through life as rational actors, deciding every moment what to do based on a scientific analysis of alternatives. Not at all.

What we do is go unthinkingly, unconsciously, from moment to moment in our "known world," which is known to us partly from our own experience and mostly from the socialization we get from the group, through its myths, religion, and its menu of "things we believe." Anyone that disagrees with the norm is typically labeled as a madman, if relatively harmless, or a dangerous heretic, if not relatively harmless. Thus our life in the "known world" is partly just unconscious life on auto, and partly an unconscious subordination to the culture of the group we belong to.

Thus it makes complete sense that lefty mobs combine to anathematize anyone that dares to diverge from the liberal line. That is what humans do. It is the way we preserve our human groups and keep everyone safe in the "known world" and its best practices, and keep klueless klots from bashing into the guardrails and killing themselves. The punishment of dissenters and heretics is how we preserve our group way of life, the way of life that has brought us successfully to the present moment.

But what happens if suddenly our unconscious life lived moment to moment in the "known world" bumps into something unexpected? What happens right away is Fear. Here is what rats do when they encounter something unexpected. They stop, freeze in Fear for a while, and then tentatively start exploring around them, in an attempt to understand what has happened, and how they should adapt to the unexpected, whether it is dangerous or useful or what.

We humans do the same thing. When we come upon something unexpected, we freeze in Fear. Then, after a while, we start to figure out what went wrong, and what to do about it. But this sort of thing happens not just to individuals but to groups as well. The bulk of Peterson's book is about the social process of adapting to the new and unexpected at the group level, the irruption of the "unknown world" into the known world of the group and the way in which the group responds to the chaotic challenge of the unknown.

In Peterson's view, the agent of adaption is the creative, sacrificial, revolutionary hero, the Christ figure, that explores the frightening unknown and proposes, and suffers, for his solution to society's problem. He suffers, of course, because society never wants to change. Even as the world is collapsing in ruins, people still want to go on in the old way, and they still want to punish heretics that propose a new world view.

Now in my view the Axial Age religions -- Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- are astonishing ways of adapting the received "way of life" from a small tribal group to a larger agricultural-plus-city group. It proposes the brilliant notion of divine justice to deal with the problem that, in a society larger than the village, we do not know what everyone is doing, and who has done what to whom, and therefore cannot mete out justice to all the malefactors.

In my view the nation state is an astonishing way of replacing the actual tribe of the kindred, people actually related to me by blood, with the totally fake and artificial and much larger tribe of the nation, united by a centrally imposed language and a totally fake and artificial glorious history.

But we are now in a place where the old Axial Age religions are no longer meaningful to educated people in the West. And we are now in a place where the nation state is no longer meaningful to educated people in the West.

In my view the Axial Age religions were responsibility religions, with a God that spelled out a vision of divine justice that people were expected to follow on their own -- with a bit of help from priests and churches and Inquisitions. But our new educated class is in the process of replacing the old responsibility religion with a religion of creativity. In their view what is best in life is to be creative; everything else is deplorable. Nietzsche is the guy that is really starting to face up to this, with his "Beyond Good and Evil" and his "we free spirits." What does a culture of creativity look like? That is what Nietzsche is trying to do.

Very nice: I am all in favor of the culture of creativity. But I doubt if the overwhelming majority of humans are ready for this. So a culture of creativity has to account for the fact that most people are not ready for it.

In my view the nation state is an astonishing human and cultural and political achievement, even though its birth has everywhere been the work of some dominatory and conquering elite. But our educated elite has determined that the nation state is the cause of all wars, and that the nation state must be replaced by supra-national institutions like the EU and the UN. Ordinary people cannot be trusted because they are all proto-fascists, so educated experts must rule. However, the educated elite still needs to use politics in order to gain the support of ordinary people for their elite agenda. In the nation state era they would appeal to the national idea, through notions like "British is best," the "American way of life." The Germans, of course, developed the idea of the national "Volk." But what were the elite to to do if nationalism was a bad word and Volk is nothing more than genocide? Well, what the educated class has done is revive the tribalisms of old. Instead of the nation they are using what we now call "identity politics" to rally people. First it was the identity of class, in the Communist Manifesto. The workers belonged to no nation, but would join in a Communist International across national borders. Then the educated class started to appeal to people on the basis of gender and race within nation states -- all this to achieve equality of gender and race.

This is all very well, but I doubt if turning the clock back to the smaller identities of class and race and gender is really a better fake tribalism than the fake tribe of the nation.

So here we are in a chaos of warring cultures and tribalisms. What is the solution?

The solution is marked out in Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning. We need a new sacrifical creative hero to lead us to a Promised Land with a new understanding of the confusing world situation that will, in time, harden into a new religious and group orthodoxy. And this new orthodoxy will convert the rational ideas of modern science and the economic "Miracle" into a new system of religious and cultural "affect" that ordinary people will pick up with the air they breathe.

In my view the new religion must combine several features that serve the "Miracle" and are notably absent from the thinking of the global educated elite.

• First, we must all serve the market as we once served our feudal lords. This is a very difficult concept for most people to accept, and a lot needs to be done to assist people when the market leaves them by the side of the road. We need to make a cult out of serving the market, and make it ordinary and natural for people to pick themselves up and find a new way to serve when their old job no longer serves. Right now we have a chaos between "free trade" and "jobs for life" and everyone feels betrayed.
• Second, we must revive the nation state or some other artificial tribal notion which almost all people can support. Now the point of a tribe is protection from the neighboring tribe, because the land the tribe occupies is its source of food, and must be defended if the tribe is to continue. This old point has lost its salience because food can be bought and transported from anywhere to anywhere in the world. So the nation state is no longer in the business of protecting the food supply. And yet humans still need protection and the group is what provides protection. So the nation state must provide protection. But from what? Obviously, the terrors of the market, not to mention robbers and mass murderers, and natural disasters. But here is the thing. We should not protect people from the market with gigantic entitlement programs that completely insulate them from the world. Government is here to protect us from existential perils, not to hide us away from day-to-day annoyances.

But the key is that these two things must be done not as rational, sensible programs, but as religion, as the dividing line between good and bad. They must partake of the fundamental nature of human life, which is not reason but emotion.

Our problem, the problem of the non-left, is that we profess the futile notion that we are rational whereas the left is all about feelings. Sorry chum, but the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is all about feelings. The trick is to use feelings in the service of rationally acquired knowledge, to realize that religion is upstream of culture is upstream from politics, but that behind the scenes is knowledge and reason.

It is my belief that the whole arc of the left, from Marx to Marcuse to McKinnon, is a religion upstream from culture upstream from politics that is a Great Reaction against the findings of modern knowledge and reason. I mean, what idiots would set themselves against the ideas that have released billions of humans from hunger and bondage?

Really, this is not that hard!

Which is Best: Excellence or Average?

Today my fellow ex-Brit John Derbyshire is complaining about James Comey. What a dreadful thing it is, he writes, for a dullard like Comey to become Director of the FBI. Chaps like him are "Outer Party" types:

They are the obedient, unquestioning enforcers of ideological orthodoxy: schoolteachers, college lecturers, local TV newsreaders, the Human Resources staff at big corporations, and so on.

What we need, says Derb, is not a George Orwell 1984 banal Outer Party type, but a smart Inner Party type. Head of the FBI is an Inner Party job.

For Inner Party I want people super-smart and canny—clued in and up-to-date with social and cultural issues.

No you don't Derb. You want dumb-as-a-post. If Comey had been smarter maybe he and he minions would have succeeded in entangling Trump in their attempt, first, to neuter him with Russia-salted oppo. research and, second, by trapping him in the coils of their Russia Collusion narrative.

But fortunately, they are all idiots at the Deep State. They can play at leaking state secrets to the media, but really can't get the job done. Any Deep State worth its salt would have dispatched Trump. Instead all their dirty laundry is showing up in the wash, and some of them may go to jail.

Here is the Z-man complaining about the tendency of democracies to have the worst rise to the top.

The main issue in our politics is that our system attracts the worst people. It is nearly impossible to find an elected official who has ever done honest work. Most are phenomenally stupid, outside their reptilian ability to fool voters and cozy up to the billionaires that bankroll them.

And this is a problem? If they were really smart they would probably lead us into the most appalling messes. Think of really smart political leaders: Lenin, Mao, Castro, Chávez. They were so smart that they managed to lead their countries into poverty and still keep their jobs!

No, I think that we need brilliance in the individual entrepreneur, and stupidity in the politician. My kind of guy is Freeman Dyson, reviewing a book, Scale by Geoffrey West, that praises the big urban city and its cross-connections. Because Grand Unified Theory and Sustainability. Writes Dyson:

The last time humans invented a grand unified theory to make our existence sustainable was when Karl Marx came up with dialectical materialism. The theory had great success in changing human behavior over large areas of our planet. But the changes did not prove to be sustainable, and the theory did not remain unified.

I suspect that Grand Unified Theories always tend toward sameness and enforced conformity, a resistance to organic change and adaptation. Says Dyson:

The choice of an imagined future is always a matter of taste. West chooses sustainability as the goal and the Grand Unified Theory as the means to achieve it. My taste is the opposite. I see human freedom as the goal and the creativity of small human societies as the means to achieve it. Freedom is the divine spark that causes human children to rebel against grand unified theories imposed by their parents. 

My kinda guy. But Dyson presents another idea, which I hadn't thought about. It concerns the notion of "genetic drift." See there are two things driving evolution: natural selection and genetic drift.

Genetic drift is the change in the average composition of a population due to random mutations of individual genes. Genetic drift causes species to evolve even in the absence of selection. Genetic drift and natural selection work together to drive evolution, selection being dominant when populations are large, genetic drift being dominant when populations are small.

On this theory you get occasional outbursts of genius in small, isolated, populations. Which is the handmaid of the kind of imagined future that I like: isolated geniuses inventing crazy things that turn out to transform the world. Think Ashkenazi Jews, isolated in small communities for centuries, who combine genius with troubling genetic anomalies like Tay-Sachs disease.

All this folds back on the issue of creative and sacrificial heroes, the chaps that redeem a sick society that finds itself in a box canyon with no apparent way out. Society does not advance in a straight evolutionary, sustainable line. It goes on doing the same thing, kept on the straight line by religion and convention, until the brain-dead culture reaches a crisis where the good old ways cannot continue.

Call it creativity if you like. But here is the problem, upon which I and a lefty acquaintance recently agreed. We People of the Creative Self tend to think of creativity as the natural and sensible way to live. But we are wrong. Creativity is hard, and  nearly everyone that tries it fails miserably, partly due to a lack of genius and partly due to a lack of courage.

The fact is that change is fraught with peril. And so is keeping on keeping on in the same old way. As Freeman Dyson relates, the last time someone came up with a Grand Unified Theory of change it was Marx, and his idea was a bloody failure.

On the other hand we have the 200 years of the Great Enrichment, through individual mad geniuses bringing us one technological revolution after another that the Powers That Be failed to stop before each revolution took over the world. Lefty Greens say that this Great Enrichment is going to kill the planet, and they may be right.

So what happens next? Well, the truth is that we don't know. We will blunder into the future, following various geniuses and plenty of idiots, and whatever happens, a ton of people will pay the price. Here is Dyson again.

[T]he life expectancy of a company at any age is about ten years. The short lifetime of companies is an essential feature of capitalist economics, with good and bad consequences. The good effect is to get rid of failed enterprises, which in socialist economies are difficult to kill and continue to eat up resources. The bad effect is to remove incentives for foresight and long-range planning.

Now, the question is: should the "foresight and long-range planning" be conducted by geniuses or by dull banalities like James Comey? It's a good question.