Jordan B. Peterson's "Maps of Meaning:" It's a Start

I finished reading Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning a couple of weeks ago and have been wondering since how to write about it.

Let me tell you what I think Peterson is trying to do, consciously or unconsciously. He is trying to find a way out of our current western dilemma, the apparent stand-off between the stolid bourgeoisie, who I call the People of the Responsible Self, and the artists, writers, and activists of the educated elite, who I call the People of the Creative Self.

And the people that are going to have to change are the People of the Creative Self. Their current line is that they are called to save society from its racism, sexism, and homophobia through transgressive humiliation of the stolid bourgeoisie and government grants to do activism to help the marginalized and the oppressed.

Peterson's Maps of Meaning says that this sort of thing, this salvation of the poor and weak, is not done by regime-approved activism and grants. It is done in the old way, in the constant theme of myth and religion, through the tragic witness of the sacrificial Son and Hero, who redeems a society out of joint with his selflessness, his witness, and his courageous suffering on the border between Order and Chaos.

By the way, there is a YouTube video series of Maps of Meaning.

The constant theme of Maps of Meaning is the play of opposites (hello Hegel?): Order vs. Chaos; What Is vs. What Should Be; Security vs. Tyranny; Creation vs. Destruction; Base Matter vs. Gold; Known World vs. Unknown World.

For Peterson the humans that inhabit this world of opposites are not the rational actors of our modern understanding. In saying this he is merely continuing the narrative that began with the Romantic reaction against the Age of Reason. Instead of rational actors we are creatures of habit that live almost unconsciously until we experience something that shatters our Known World. Peterson illustrates this point with the story of a young executive that thinks his career is going great guns until one day HR calls him in and tells him he is fired because everyone else finds him impossible to deal with. Bam! The whole world of the young man is destroyed: all his assumptions, all his plans, his whole world view is shattered. Until he can figure out what went wrong and develop a better understanding of the world.

On Peterson's view this encounter with the Unknown must be the way of the world. It's the way that the whole of creation except for mankind must live, because our rational-actor model is predicated on the reality of our conscious mind which, we believe, is not available to the rest of creation. This is the meaning of the great instincts like Rage and Fear; they arise at the moment that the world surprises an animal, humans included, and these emotions, these "affects," force us to confront reality and do something about it.

The normal thing for an animal to do, after being surprised, is to freeze, and then to begin to explore the world around it to figure out what went wrong and what to do about it. That is what the young man mentioned above did. And that is what we all do.

But what we humans can also do is strategize about our situation, and develop a rational plan in addition to our hastily acquired knowledge about the world that just surprised us. This human ability is obviously a very big thing.

But whatever the rational plan may be, it must sit atop the more primitive and immediate reality of instinct and affect and, above all, Meaning. Peterson argues that the way to understand this is by studying the great hero narratives of myth and religion and their reality of great opposites: Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil, Creation and Destruction. The world of opposites is a world of Meaning.

But Peterson does not present us with a 12 step method to save the world, as he does in his later book. For there are no slick answers on the border between Order and Chaos. There is no telling what may happen after the hero descends into the Underworld there to confront the Dragon of Chaos within his own breast. Nietzsche echoes this in his Beyond Good and Evil where he writes that suffering -- not good and evil or pleasure and pain -- is the real coin of the realm:

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering -- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?

 So, in Peterson's story, it all comes down to two Hostile Brothers:

One of these "hostile brothers"  or "eternal sons of God" is the mythological hero. He faces the unknown with the presumption of benevolence -- with the (unprovable) attitude that confrontation with the unknown will bring renewal and redemption...

The other "son of God" is the eternal adversary. This "spirit of unbridled rationality," horrified by his limited apprehension of the conditions of existence, shrinks from contact with everything he does not understand... His weakness, in combination with his neurotic suffering, engenders resentment and hatred for existence itself.

But who of us knows whether inside of us dwells the hero or the adversary? The answer that Peterson proposes is that the hero is willing to sacrifice himself. I think that Peterson's famous refusal to obey Canada's C-16 law on non-binary sexual pronouns is his way of living out this heroic path. You have to be ready to sacrifice your job, your reputation, your life, in witnessing to the truth in the face of the mob and the rulers. In this event, his refusal made him into a cultural hero, and now he is traveling the world giving lectures and signing books.

Still, Maps of Meaning was a mild disappointment to me. It does not end in a rousing coda, but subsides almost in confusion. But it ends like this:

The human purpose, if such a thing can be considered, is to pursue meaning -- to extend the domain of light, of consciousness -- despite limitation. A meaningful event exists on the boundary between order and chaos. The pursuit of meaning exposes the individual to the unknown in gradual fashion, allowing him to develop strength and adaptive ability in proportion to the seriousness of his pursuit. Meaning is the subjective experience associated with that contact, in sufficient proportion. The great religious myths state that continued pursuit of meaning, adopted voluntarily and without self-deception, will lead the individual to discover his identity with God. This "revealed identity" will make him capable of withstanding the tragedy of life. Abandonment of meaning, by contrast, reduces man to his mortal weaknesses.

It hardly needs saying, I think, that this "meaning" cannot be found in the vile snake-pit of microaggressions, safe spaces, and accusations of hate speech from the left. Nor can be be found in the retreat to mere nationalism on the right.

Really, the current culture war is about warring notions of safety, either in the identity politics of race and gender or in the identity politics of nation. Of course, humans have always been tribal. The question is whether we can find a way emerge from our various safe spaces to transcend our current tribalisms and reinvent them at a higher, more heroic, level.

David Brooks' Conventional Wisdom

Assuming the conventional wisdom that Trump and the Republican Party represent an ageing minority party, David Brooks tries to imagine what the next emerging Democratic majority would be like.

It couldn't be a Clintonian or Obami moderation: the only game in town on the left is "Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren-style progressivism." So what would that look like? Well, it wouldn't be Marxist, because

My sense is these ideas have been rejected by most on the left. It’s become clear, to those on the fair-minded left, that global capitalism has produced the greatest reduction in poverty in human history.

No, Brooks is  confident that on the economy the left would be working on the margins, rewriting "rules to redistribute wealth... [and] raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour."

But then there is tribalism, and on the left that means "the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez," and even for the left that means more nationalism, such as Bernie Sanders's opposition to open immigration and the ever-present identity politics. So the left's governance is bound to circle back into us-against-them economic war of the oppressed against the oppressors with progressives calling the shots, only this time not on a class base but a race/gender basis.

Yeah. I'll agree that the next progressive government won't be nakedly economic Marxist. But it will still believe that politicians and experts can manipulate the levers of the economy to benefit the good guys and make the bad guys pay. And that was the whole point of Marx's ideas, that it was possible for politicians and experts to create a just and prosperous society. The difference today is that the smarter minds on the left understand that manipulating capitalism is much more effective than abolishing it. But they still think they are smarter than the average business owner.

The trouble is that while manipulating capitalism is not nearly as bad as abolishing it, the Law of Unintended Consequences still applies. Manipulating the economy, whether by interest rates to "stimulate" it or by price controls like minimum wages to help the low-wage worker, always ends up with negative results such as housing bubbles and immense difficulty for low-skilled people to get their first job.

We libertarians and conservatives like to rail at the folly of the left, but if you think about it, why the surprise? We humans are programmed to be tribesmen, alert to the possibility of the young men of the neighboring tribe plotting a dawn raid on us. The only thing to do is to strike first and kill their men and rape their women before they get to come over here and kill our men and rape our women.

But over the last 200 years in the Great Enrichment (or Miracle if you prefer) an utterly radical notion has started to take hold. The chaps in the next town are not an existential threat, but potential suppliers and customers. The only thing to determine is whether they can be trusted and the best way to find out is by trusting them, for one transaction only, and see what happens. The people that have taken up this challenge have wived and thrived; the people that do not get it and maintain their ancient suspicions have struggled.

And this is to be expected. Since time immemorial humans have survived by living in tribes of the kindred, trusting only their kin, and being on guard constantly. The idea that we should throw all that away, the cultural agenda that kept us alive for ages, and trust people from across the world, is very hard for people to understand and to surrender to. Every person migrating from the countryside to the city is a person of the old culture, and it takes a while, a generation at least, before the migrant to the city is ready to trust the trust culture.

That is why the new tribalisms, of nation, of class, of race, even of gender, have rushed in to fill the tribalism gap. When your average rich-kid activist tells the newly-arrived migrant not to trust anyone not of his ethnic origin, and to take up arms against the oppressor, he is mining an ancient vein.

But did you know that there were other tribalisms, of a noble and beneficial kind, that were coming along nicely in the 19th century before the left and the welfare state came along and strangled them in their cradles? I am talking about the fraternal associations, the fanciful brotherhoods of Elks and Eagles, of Masons that never chipped a rock and Oddfellows that weren't odd at all, that were mutual-aid organizations devoted to helping brothers and widows in their need? Sounds like a really cool idea. So cool that the racists got in on the action and formed the KKK after the Civil War to beat up on whites that might be a little soft on the freedmen.

Yeah, really. Why not emulate the KKK and create racist associations like Black Lives Matter and La Raza, and sexist associations like the NOW and Human Rights Campaign to beat up on the Other? Of course, like the KKK these neo-KKKs are not self-help mutual-aid organizations that ordinary people formed in the 19th century but simple political shells for rich kids to practice left-wing activism and tribalism.

Yeah, the left is a curious phenomenon, but hardly surprising. It cannot be true that the lion will lie down with the lamb, because capitalism rewards anyone that is eager to serve their fellow human with useful work. The world must be like the olden times, where every tribe must be on its toes, ready to repel the enemy next door. And people must be organized into neo-tribes to fight against the modern perils of the One Percent, the patriachy, the greedy bankers, the racist sexist homophobes, and worst of all, the xenophobes and Islamophobes.

So  the challenge for you and me is that, given that we humans are still tribal people that instinctively band together against an existential peril, what should that peril be? We have tried the Nazis, the Russkies, the ozone layer, the climate threat, the polar bear extinction, and the ever-present racist sexist homophobes. But we really need an existential threat around which to rally.

No doubt, pace David Brooks, the next lefty administration in the US will launch itself on new follies, replacements for the follies of affirmative action, sub-prime lending, lifetime employment for union workers, bike lanes, wind farms, and all the other failed follies of the last century. What else is new?

But we free spirits need to think about how to invent a neo-tribalism that would unite all humans against some common peril that doesn't require some human Other to defeat. It can't be that hard.

Trump Staffs Up for the Collusion Endgame

Our liberal friends like to think that Donald Trump is an idiot, a blowhard. But how dumb can a guy be to get elected president from a standing start. And how dumb can a guy be that thrived in the shark tank of New York City real estate?

So let us assume that Donald Trump knows what he is doing. Can we get a clue from the doings of the last week or so?

Suppose that Donald Trump is a bit of a strategist. What would a guy with a strategic mind be doing right now. I'd say he'd be fixin' to win the midterms by hiring a really smart political hand, attacking the Russia Collusion narrative, touting the good economy, and making the #Resistance the issue.

Oh and I think he would be palling around with a black rapper and chatting up a couple of black church ladies.

OK. Let's deal with the outreach to the black community. The Kanye West thing has doubled his poll numbers with black males in a week. And his Diamond and Silk pals can't hurt him with black women, who are the most anti-Republican demographic on the planet.

Now it seems to me that the best strategy on the Muller investigation is to utterly demolish it by showing, with the help of DOJ Inspector General Horowitz, that the fix was in in the Obama administration to spy on the Trump campaign and do it by colluding with Russia to use Russian spies to dig up dirt on Trump. Whatever Trump might have done with the Russians is all speculation. But we do know that Clinton operatives were slow dancing with Russian spies.

Put it this way. Suppose the Bush administration had used a GOP opposition research shop to talk with Russian spies about Obama's extracurricular activities and used the post-9/11 intelligence rules to go to the FISA court to approve surveillance of people connected to the Obama campaign. Can you imagine the media frenzy? Really, it would have made Watergate look like a walk in the park.

Here we have a situation where it seems that everyone in the Obama administration from the Director of National Intelligence to the Director of the CIA to the top people in the FBI to the Attorney General were all involved in queering the election. Can you imagine the outrage if a Republican administration had been doing that?

But if you are the Trump administration I would say that timing is everything and you don't want to peak too soon.

After all, what you need is to cool the jets of the Democrats, to defeat them in the political arena, to make them think they are losing the battle for the voters, to worry that they might be out of power for a generation. That is how you remove the threat of Muller and how you get CNN to shut up for a while.

So the key to the whole thing is the win the midterms, keep the House of Representatives and increase your majority in the Senate. How do you do that? You do it by accusing the Democrats of cheating. You say that the DOJ lied to the FISA court; you say that the fix was in with Hillary's emails. You say that the fix was in when Muller didn't prosecute on the Uranium One issue back in 2010 when lots of money flowed into the Clinton Foundation when the Russians wanted to buy a uranium miner. And you point to the perps that got named in the Horowitz Inspector General reports that will be coming out in the coming months.

From a strategic point of view you do not want all these things coming to a head until shortly before the midterm elections. You want them front and center for the voters so that the message is that, after 2 years of investigations the Muller got nothing. But it turns out that the real colluders were the FBI and DOJ deep staters that were colluding to spy on Trump and steal the election. Don't like that? Vote Republican.

Oh, and I think that the whole Hillary email thing is key. It reminds me of the House Banking Scandal back in 1992 engineered by Newt Gingrich. Back then, Newt made a name for himself by publicizing the fact that House members could bounce checks at a quasi bank available to House members. American voters can understand that, because it relates to their own lives, where bouncing a check is a big deal and no mulligans. Same with the Hillary email scandal. Ordinary bureaucrats and members of the armed services get hanged from the yardarm for innocent violations of the laws and regulations on classified information. The feds even taught hero Gen. Petraeus a short sharp lesson for allowing his book-writing mistress access to his classified diaries. Ordinary people know that if they mishandle classified information they will get the book thrown at them. They can be taught to resent Dear Hillary who got to skate.

As I keep saying: Trump isn't an idiot; he only plays one on TV and Twitter. As the sequel will prove.

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.