Peterson and Jung and Nietzsche, Oh My!

If you've dabbled in cultural sensation Jordan B. Peterson as I have, and got through his Maps of Meaning, and if you are not mad at him, like the New York Times set and alt-right Vox Day, you want to check the backup. Because Peterson owes a lot to Nietzsche and Jung.

Nietzsche is a problem, because Nazism and Nationalism and Anti-Semitism. And Jung--

Also, Jordan Peterson is proposing the primacy of instinct and affect, rather than reason. And that is a problem for most of us moderns, because whether you are on the left or the right, you believe that your side is based on reason and the other side is based on emotion, or worse. Because science.

But Peterson is saying that humans are basically instinctive creatures, and that the great issues of life are not reducible to reason. Moreover in his system, if it is a system, the highest and best is the sacrificial hero, the one that dares to live on the border between the known and the unknown, between order and chaos, the man that surrenders his life to the exploration of this dangerous territory, and bringing it into our understanding and consciousness, and sharing that understanding with the rest of humanity.

From Jung Peterson brings the notion that the unconscious mind is primary, both in its manifestation of the personal unconscious, our personal instinctive response to day-to-day life, and also in the manifestation of the collective unconscious, the ways in which humans as a whole symbolize and experience the larger meaning of life in spirits and gods and the like.

You can see how foreign this is to the official narrative, which is that we are rational creatures. In the right-wing version we are rationally seeking a way from serfdom and subordination to freedom and liberty. In the left-wing version we are rationally seeking a way from slavery and oppression to liberation along the arc of history bending towards justice.

And yet I propose that the right-wing version of reason has brought us to the neo-serfdom of the welfare state, and the left-wing version of reason has brought us to the über-slavery of the communist state. So maybe there is a problem.

What if this is all wrong, and reason is not the means to anything in particular? What if, as settled science is starting to discover, reason evolved out of humans rationalizing their social behavior, and just accidentally happened to be a good basis for math and physics?

In many ways, the whole story of the last 200 years of western culture is the realization, beginning with Romanticism at the turn of the 19th century, that reason cannot be the whole story. How can it be when humans are overwhelmingly consumed by "affect" or passion?

It really changes things when you decide that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not the construction of the best rational system but something else.

Then comes Nietzsche with the scandalous notion that the Christian framework of the last 2000 years is outta here, and the only reality is the will to power, and that morality is a cheap trick.

Now I have been slowly trudging through the Germans in the last few years, from Kant to Hegel to Schopenhauer and now Nietzsche.

The thing about Nietzsche is that you are never sure when he is being serious and when he is just trying to nudge you off dead center and make you think. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche praises the Jews for their amazing survival down the ages through all travails and hardships -- "the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe"-- and sneers at German anti-Semitism. Later on he develops his notorious "master morality and slave morality." But by The Genealogy of Morals he divides the noble masters into the "warrior caste" and the "priestly caste," and while the warriors are simple and forthright, the priests are the most appalling haters. And guess what: the most obvious instantiation of a priestly people is the Jews, and Christianity is a 2000 year cunning plot to dethrone the warrior caste. And the Jews are therefore the world-historic leaders of a slave revolt that has demolished the old aristocratic masters.

Hey Fritzi! Doesn't your division of the masters into warriors and priests rather chip away at your initial notion of the masters as true unselfconscious aristocrats?

I know! Why not divide the human race in three, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory. Then we still have the slaves, the People of the Subordinate Self, we still have the masters, divided into the natural aristocracy of the business world and the priestly haters of the politically correct. In between are the People of the Responsible Self that are neither leaders nor followers, but partaking of something in-between: neither groveling slaves sucking up to their liege lord in return for handouts, nor ego-maniac masters, either business masters-of-the-universe or priestly left-wing haters. What's not to like?

Notice that your business masters-of-the-universe can be the sacrificial heroes of Jordan Peterson's narrative, for in business many are called but few are chosen. Here is how the natural aristocrat lives, from Nietzsche:

To be incapable of taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds seriously for very long -- that is the sign of strong full natures is whom there is a excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate, and to forget{.]

He has a point. If you are a man of action you really don't have time for worrying about enemies, mistakes, because it is always time to get on with the next thing.

But as for the lefty priestly haters.-- Yeah. Hating, remembering accidents and misdeeds, forgetting nothing. And doing nothing. That is where they live and breathe. For the whole point of a lefty activist is to live in the festering wound of a grievance, and make it bigger.

The thing about reason is its one-dimensionality, its uni-directionality. But life, the universe, and everything is contingent, uncertain. Oh, and hidden. Could it be that the means that living things have appropriated for life in this world, instinct, passion, archetypes, "affect," are necessary and flexible ways of getting on the world whereas reason, with its path to freedom and its arc bending towards justice, is not?

The Problem with Politics

Here's a poll result to tell you something about America. About 54 percent of White Democrats now think that racial inequality is caused by discrimination, up from about 42 percent in 2006.

So. After half a century of race politics, repeatedly "doing something" about civil rights and racial discrimination, White Democrats think that nothing has changed. Even that things are getting worse. So we need legislation to bend the arc of history towards justice.

What planet do these people live on?

Well, we know. They live on a planet where the stories are written and told by lefty adepts of the Frankfurt School and Herbert "intolerant tolerance" Marcuse. They live in a left-wing culture that believes that the way to get to justice is with political power. They relentlessly blame and divide, because that is how you motivate people to get out and vote.

But I think that this just shows the utter folly of ideological politics. Because it never knows when to stop.

The point about racial discrimination is that it is only a problem when government actively enforces discrimination, as in the Jim Crow South. The Southern Democrats wrote Jim Crow laws because the railroads really didn't want to have segregated railroad cars. Bus companies didn't want to divide up the bus and put their black passengers at the back. So the segregationists had to write a law.

OK. So you write a Civil Rights Law to sweep away all those Jim Crow laws. Then what?

What happens is that the activists that built the political movement that passed the Civil Rights laws aren't satisfied. You can see why. As with any army after you storm the citadel of your enemy, the question is what to do next? Unfortunately, the usual response to victory is to double down and build an empire. It is not enough to defeat the racists: they must be hunted down and the last vestige of their evil spawn eliminated from the world.

And so, in the wake of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s the victorious liberals could not just declare victory and go home. They had to enact Affirmative Action -- a  program of flat-out racism -- through their power in the administrative state. The feminists could not rest with equal pay laws; they had to amp up the pressure with the notion of comparable worth. And then they noted all the areas in which women were "underrepresented" as in the executive suite and STEM and demand inclusion and diversity.

Now we have gays that cannot be satisfied with gay marriage. They have to go after bakers that don't want to bake cakes for gay weddings.

Meanwhile, what are the evil corporations and entrepreneurs doing now? They are trying to defeat the new segregation. You see, all nation states have laws against foreigners migrating to and working in the homeland. So the big corporations are busy figuring out how to get around laws limiting the employment of foreigners. The corporate suits get people here to the United States on various visa programs, people that cost them less than Americans born in the USA. And the  cool thing is that employees on temporary visas that do not have green cards are in a position similar to the indentured servants of old. They cannot leave their employment without risking their visa, and so are tied to their employers and the lower wages.

It's interesting. What is the difference between the Jim Crow laws of the South and the normal laws of any nation state that limit immigration? They both discriminate against people that have not yet enjoyed the bounty of the Great Enrichment.

Actually, our liberal friends are not shy about criticizing people that want to limit the access of foreigners to the US labor market. Those evil Southerners were racists. The immigration restrictionists are xenophobes. No skin off the liberal noses, of course. They figure that what with their education and their Deep State connections they are in with the in-crowd. Conservatives and deplorables need not apply.

So maybe the next glorious movement is to lower all national barriers and make the workplace open to all. Or maybe, on the notion that immigration is invasion -- ask the Native Americans -- we should keep the nation state and its borders until something better comes up.

The point remains. Once you have struck down the legal discriminatory barriers, then if there exists residual discrimination there exists a market opportunity for any canny entrepreneur. Hey, if minority  and female and transgender workers are not getting their fair whack, then an entrepreneur can hire them and make money. Until the day comes when the previously discriminated against are no longer underpaid, and there is not longer an opportunity to make money.

That is the whole point of the market economy. In fact that is what the left complains about. The market doesn't think of people as people. The only thing the market understands is  produces and prices and service. And this is supposed to be soulless. Well, so it is. It means that the market doesn't select people because of their gender or their race or their national origin. It only asks: can they get the job done, or, if they can't, can I train them up to get the job done.

Of course, the market does appreciate that beauty in newsreaders on TV is a plus. And in actresses in movies. And this is wrong. Maybe it is time for a a political movement to promote ugly people to the  screen.

And what about nerds? How come nerds don't get their fair share of jobs in the executive suite and all the plum jobs go to alpha males and sweet talkers?

Mind you, there is another way to look at this. Nietzsche does it with his analysis of Master and Slave morality. There is, he suggests, a need for hardness.

What if we resolve all our inequalities with a complete and total administrative program that litigates every possible inequality so that everything is fair and just? Nietzsche's argument is that this will lead to a flabby, weakened society that will topple over the day that the next Attila or Genghis Khan appears on the scene.

And maybe this is a flaw in capitalism. Maybe we are all getting too soft in the online smartphone world where everything is at our beck and call and we never have to sweat. Maybe we will all be swept away, to be replaced by --.

Maybe we need the storm and stress of politics and people forever fighting over the political spoils, and arguing about whether discrimination is getting worse. Otherwise we might all go to sleep watching youTube videos, and wake up one morning finding that humans are finished, over, departed.

On Political Insults and Worse

In the last week the MSM cabal has been chiding President Trump for calling immigrants "animals." Actually, as far as I can  see, the president was  referring to members of MS-13 the Salvadorean criminal gang.

Hey Donny, what's the big deal? The US has had criminal immigrant gangs since whenever.

But really, lefties. Have you looked in a mirror lately? Your whole cultural and political operation right now is about insulting people that don't agree with you as "racists, sexists, homophobes." Not to mention liberal use of "alt-right hate groups" and the very worst thing in the world, apart from Nazis, "hate speech."

Now I would say that, compared with the lefty insults, President Trump's use of "animal" is mild and humane. After all, he is merely demoting the human crooks at MS-13 to the status of the non-self-conscious denizens of the animals kingdom: beasts and monsters. But our Democratic friends are declaring their opponents to be evil, not merely bestial. Of course, I realize that our lefty friends are generally not believers in God, so they cannot believe in the Devil. Or can they?

Of course they can. According to settled science, like the psychological school that descends from Carl Jung, all our religious and cultural memes are manifestations of our unconscious minds. On this view, it doesn't matter whether you call it Satan or monster, everyone still has a hatred and a fear of the threatening Unknown and Chaos. And they are not shy about pointing it out.

So liberals are frightened to death of President Trump. Of course they are. President Trump is threatening to upset their nice comfortable world of nice comfortable sinecures for liberals and activists as far as the eye can see. I mean! It is possible that the great research universities of North America might have to retrench just a teeny bit! Oh no! What will the tenure-track associate professors do then poor things?

Why, President Trump is even hacking away at the administrative state, the notion that all liberals should have a job telling middle-class deplorables to get lost and damn well bake that cake for a gay wedding or else.

And it doesn't hurt to call all these people haters and deplorables. Not if it saves just one liberal administrative state job.

What our liberal friends do not understand is that, according to German philosophy, for every thesis there is an antithesis, for every magnetic north pole there is a magnetic south pole. If liberals are moving the arc of history towards their notion of justice, sure as heck there will be people out there that experience the arc of history bending towards injustice. If the government and the culture are making life more comfortable for liberals then chances are they are making life less comfortable and more frightening for deplorables.

They do not understand that if liberals politicize everything with their noble and righteous political activism to promote justice and equality, which seeks to make political issues of anything and everything, and then use insults and pejoratives to demean and marginalize the opposition, then there is likely to arise a counter-political movement composed of people that experience the political activism of liberals as a direct attack on them and everything they hold dear. These people will find themselves a political champion to say and do the things that they are afraid to do on their own.

Really, this isn't that hard.

Really, the only thing we don't know is whether SpyGate, the incompetent deep state effort to trip up the Trump campaign in 2016 and cover up its illegal activities in 2017, will be the biggest political scandal in US history or whether it will all get covered up and smothered in a blanket.

Oh, silly me. Of course it will all get covered up and smothered in a blanket. If you want the biggest scandal in US history then you need MSM news-anchors day after day with eyebrows descending like thunder on the evil miscreants. And that ain't gonna happen.

And anyway, any criticism of the Obama administration and its minions is racism, straight up.

Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt. 4

I've set forth some of the oppressions that the liberal ruling class has committed, here, here and here.

We all know that any ruling class is bound to commit injustice, because as a well-known philosopher said: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. And who are the people empowered to commit injustice? You got it: the ruling class.

So it stands to reason that the ruling class in the West of the last 100 years and more, the educated class, will have committed injustice upon injustice, most likely in the implementation of its own vision of justice with the help of government force. 'Twas ever thus.

Previously I have discussed, starting here, its injustice committed with respect to socialism, big government, the war on the middle class, the war on religion, education, welfare, government pensions, and housing. Now let's look at:

The Homeless. The homeless began as an issue during the Reagan administration, no doubt as a way for liberals to do Activism. It was only to be expected that, in the aftermath of the cruel Reagan budget cuts -- courtesy of Budget Director David Stockman -- that there should be a tragic consequence. That consequence was "the homeless."

To put this in perspective, I suspect that after every major economic downturn there is a swelling in the ranks of people that got spat out of jobs and that never get their stuff back together again. The iconic example is the Skid Row bum that was the consequence of the Great Depression. The Reagan 1980s took place after the serious recession of 1980-81 when the Fed started wringing out the 1970s inflation. So you would expect a flux of men unmoored by the recession and cast upon the homeless shore. Now we have the aftermath of the Great Recession that started with the Crash of 2008. Obviously we should  have expected another wave of castaways landing on the beach.

The question is what to do about it. Should we have government programs to provide food and  shelter to the homeless, or should we leave it to the charities and the charitable?

In this sense, we should remember the 19th century approach to poverty. The ABCDEFG system was advocated by outfits like the New York Charity Organization Society, and advertised by Marvin Olasky in The Tragedy of American Compassion in Chapter 6: The Seven Marks of Compassion thus:

1. Affliation: getting the poor back in touch with their families, i.e., people that can be persuaded they have an obligation to help a particular individual.
2. Bonding: charity volunteers were instructed to bond with their charity cases, and "maintain 'the greatest patience, the most decided firmness, and an inexhaustible kindness'" towards the people they helped.
3. Categorization: are applicants truly helpless?  Or are they "Needing Work Rather Than Relief," or "Unworthy, Not Entitled to Relief." Inquiring minds want to know.
4. Discernment: this is about smoking out the frauds and cheats.
5. Employment: as in "Labor is the life of society, and the beggar who will not work is a social cannibal feeding on that life."
6. Freedom: "the opportunity to work and worship without governmental restriction." Hello credentialism.
7. God: as in "True philanthropy must take into account spiritual as well as physical needs."

It is fairly obvious that the current bureaucratic response to homelessness does not use this wisdom of the ages. Today, we allow the homeless to violate laws against using public spaces as encampments, public intoxication, public begging, etc. And this is unjust.

This is just part of a larger problem that liberals and their clients are exempt from many laws, and this is unjust.

Of course, no problem handed to a government bureaucracy is ever solved, for it goes against the basic rule of bureaucracy, that it progressively does less and less, and eventually does nothing while collecting salaries and pensions. Indeed, to solve the problem would to be put the bureaucracy out of business, a prospect not to be endured. And this is unjust.

Here in Seattle we have had homeless programs for over a decade, and the problem has only gotten worse. In a way, you can't blame the politicians, who are merely responding to political activists whose meaning of life is bound up with finding oppressions and exploitations to protest against. Thus, opposition to homeless programs has only now emerged in response to the Seattle City Council enacting a "head tax" on medium to large businesses in Seattle in order to expand funding homeless programs that, in accordance with a law of bureaucratic nature, keep expanding.

Notice how my definition of government applies.

Government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

It really doesn't matter who those supporters are: activists, bureaucrats, welfare clients, entitlements recipients, contractors, investment firms. Everyone wants free money from the government. The only question is how to frame your wants into non-negotiable demands. Politicians are not fools; they can see that today's activists are tomorrow's supporters, and so every new entitlement and program creates a new activist group that will provide funds for reelection and fight like cats to keep its loot.

And this is unjust.

Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt. 3

I've set forth some of the oppressions that the liberal ruling class has committed, here and here. As I wrote,

To paraphrase Marx, it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

So I have discussed its injustice committed with respect to socialism, big government, the war on the middle class, the war on religion, education, welfare, and government pensions. Now let's look at:

Housing. All humans need shelter, but shelter is expensive, and so humans have expended extraordinary effort to obtain shelter. They have developed many ways in which to obtain shelter from the elements. One way is to live in the house of your liege lord. Another is to board in the house of a widow. Another is to rent a dwelling or a part of a dwelling from its owner, popularly called a "landlord." Finally, due to the modern western idea of private property in land, people can own a parcel of land and the dwelling that stands upon it.

It seems to be the ambition of very many people to "own" their own home. Even the socialists appreciate this, as George Bernard Shaw writes of the first Adam seizing the most fertile and favorable patch of land he can find. But there is a problem. The time of life at which humans need to obtain shelter, in young adulthood, is also a time when they are ill-equipped with the financial means to do so. Thus, in the Middle Ages in Britain, young people could not get married unless they could obtain resources from both families, either by right of inheritance or by dowry or both.

In our time, young people can live in the house of their liege lord, as in public housing. They can rent space from a landlord. They can buy a house by borrowing a down payment from their parents and by pledging the house as collateral for a loan, a home mortgage. The culture of widows operating boarding houses seems to have gone out of fashion.

Now, we know from the rather young social science called economics that there are two ways to distribute things of value. You can do it with the price system, which basically balances the prices, purchase-wise or rent-wise, of houses against the amount of money that buyers and renters are willing to bid. Or you can resolve the matter by force, with government or liege lords establishing prices and rents by force. Government also has the option of meddling with the price system with subsidies and interventions in the credit system: semi-force.

The ruling class of the last 100 years has made many interventions in the housing market. It has devalued the currency; it has instituted rent control; it has subsidized mortgage credit with government-subsidized loans; it has instituted building codes to prevent the construction of "jerry-built" houses and latterly to require expensive "environmentally friendly" features; it has limited housing construction in environmentally sensitive areas. All these government actions are actually or potentially unjust, and simply enact the agenda of the ruling class without regard to the welfare of the nation.

But let us unpack the subsidization of home mortgages. As usual, a program advertised as creating "affordable housing" has achieved the opposite.

Let us start before the Great Depression. In the United States, you could borrow money to buy a house. Typically you had to put down about 50 percent of the purchase price and get a 10 year mortgage.

Do you see what this means? It means that the price of houses had to balance with the fact of buyers that could only borrow 50 percent of the purchase price and put down 50 percent of the purchase price as a down payment. It means that prices would tend to be low, low, low. It would, of course, privilege young people who could borrow down payments from their parents.

But after the Great Depression the FDR administration created the Federal National Mortgage Association to provide a secondary market in mortgages. Perfectly harmless, except that, with the government's backing, FNMA could buy 30-year mortgages and sell them bundled to widows and orphans and pension funds.

Do you see what this means? It means that people are now able to bid more for houses, because 30-year mortgages mean lower monthly payments. This means that house prices will go up.

Is this a good thing? I don't think so.

After World War II the federal government enacted other housing programs, mortgage loans from the Federal Housing Administration with lower down-payments. And of course, the Veterans Administration created the zero-down VA loan for veterans. The result, you can see, is to raise housing prices because the government low-down-payment policies allow buyers to bid up prices for housing.

Is this a good idea?I don't think so.

In the 1970s the feminists discovered that the practice of banks to count only the income of the husband in qualifying home buyers for a loan was male chauvinism. And so lenders were now required to count the income of both partners to a housing loan. The result, you can see, was to raise housing prices because the non-chauvinist rule allowed buyers to bid up the price of houses by qualifying them for bigger loans.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

In the 1930s, after the creation of FNMA, the bureaucratic mindset invaded the home loan market and the regulators started grading neighborhoods for creditworthiness. You can see that this is an inevitable result of government intervention, because once you have government subsidies then you have an opportunity to scam the system and therefore you have to have regulations to stop the scam artists. Certain neighborhoods were "red-lined" and often enough these were black neighborhoods. So activism organizations like ACORN pushed to pass the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 to stop redlining and increase the availability of mortgages to minority borrowers. Good idea, you may say. And I'll agree, up to a point.

But activism never stops with its victory. And so the war against redlining kept escalating, through the 1990s and into the 2000s. The federal government kept lowering the down-payment on mortgage loans and started requiring lenders and FNMA to increase the proportion of loans to people with lower credit scores. You can see that this kind of policy increases the number of people who can bid for houses and increases the amount they can bid with. So it tends to increase housing prices.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

You know what is coming next. By the 2000s the federal government was pressuring FNMA and Government National Mortgage Association to increase mortgages to "sub-prime" borrowers. And they were pushing 100 percent loans. What could go wrong? A couple of things. First of all, "liar loans." I can't imagine what that means. Also, because pension funds are often required to buy only the highest rated bonds, financial speculators figured out how to buy bundles of mortgages with high-risk loans and convert the high-risk bonds into lower-risk bonds with financial instruments called "derivatives."

Now for a quick lesson in finance, from Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market published in 1872 after a major financial panic. Bagehot argued that to avoid panics the credit system needed two things to work. First of all, loans must be properly collateralized, so that if the loan is liquidated the lender will recover his investment by acquiring the collateral for the loan. Secondly, the borrower must have the means to service the loan. If either of these notions are ignored then, in a financial downturn, people in the money market will be afraid to buy loans, because they will worry about the quality of the loans out there and the ability of borrowers to service their loans. This worry is called a "loss of confidence" and you will hear a lot about it during any bear market.

So in the glorious 2000s both of Bagehot's principles for a solid credit market were being grievously violated by the government's subsidizing and support of low down payment loans and sub-prime borrowers. Thus, in the 2006-08 bear market people in the credit market started to stay away from outfits like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers that had invested heavily in housing-related derivatives. Both financial houses failed.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

Now back in 1913 the US passed the Federal Reserve Act to provide the United States with a central bank so that the panic of 1907 could never happen again. It was unconscionable that the United States should have to rely on a "money trust" headed by private banker J.P. Morgan when threatened by a financial panic. It needed a "lender of last resort."

Only in the next two financial crashes the bureaucrat in charge of the Federal Reserve Board did not act as lender of last resort. In September 2008, when Lehman Brothers failed, little Ben Bernanke said that he didn't have the legal power to act as lender of last resort and bail out Lehman Brothers. The Dow Industrials started losing 500 points a day, every day. Can you spell "loss of confidence?"

Is Ben Bernanke a coward and a poltroon? I think so.

You can see what this is all about. In its efforts to help would-be homeowners the government has raised housing prices, engineered at least one bone-shattering financial crash, and almost certainly made things worse.

There is a word for this sort of thing. Injustice.

More to come.

Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt.2

Yesterday we listed four instances of the cruel domination of leftist hegemony in Socialism, in Big Government, the War on Middle-Class Culture, and the War on Religion. But how much can you get through in a single blog post? So let us continue with:

Education. The notion of child education -- extending now into young adulthood -- is so universally accepted and celebrated that you wonder what humans did before universal childhood education paid for by taxes. Clearly, the whole point of education is for adults to get a hold of children's minds. That is what is behind the alleged Jesuit claim: "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man."

Charles Dickens famously represented the schools of his age as vile prisons of mental torture and physical abuse, for which the solution was... what, exactly?

The father of the "common school" in the United States, Horace Mann, predicted in the 1830s that the government school would reduce crime by 90 percent.

Well, we know how that worked out. In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting in Florida we discovered that, in order to reduce crime statistics, police and education bureaucrats determined, as recommended by the Obama administration, not to put criminal-suspect children into the criminal justice system. And then one day a kid shot up the school. Way to go, bureaucrats!

What we have, in modern government education, is the elite running a system to educate children according to their model of how children should be educated. But there is not the least effort to discover how the parents of the children want their children educated, least of all poor parents.

Or even a double-blind study to compare different models of education with outcomes by race, class, and gender.

So let me ask you: what do poor and minority parents want for their children? Frankly, I haven't a clue, except that I've heard tell that many charter schools are oversubscribed, and that many minority parents like the high-discipline KIPP academies.

Look, this is not surprising. The ruling class thinks of education from inside its liberal bubble as a preparation for a creative and well-connected life, culminating in college and a master's degree and entry into government-financed education and activism. Anything else is not that interesting to the rulers.

Plus, of course, since education is a government monopoly, it is almost impossible to change it. To implement an education system that would respond to changing times and to parents you would need a fee-paying market-based education system. But any idea like that terrifies people.

My model for education would be mothers in the neighborhood getting together to teach their kids the basics and an end to child labor laws. Yep, why not get Junior running  spreadsheets at age 7? However, I would draw the line at allowing children to operate power equipment. Some fun things must be reserved for adults. For the poor? Billionaire-financed KIPP academies. Most kids would quit school at 12 or 13 and become interns and apprentices. Anyone wanting to go to college would have to crawl over broken glass to get there. And no student debt, because that just encourages colleges to jack up fees and hire administrators.

That is the only way to end the injustice of liberal-dominated education.

Welfare. The current welfare system is a pension scheme to reward supporters of the government; both the actual welfare clients and the bureaucrats and vendors that benefit from the system. That is all.

Otherwise we would have to come to the uncomfortable notion that the whole idea of government welfare is to break up the families of the poor, make sure that the poor never rise up into the working class and get a job. And certainly never rise to compete with the middle class for jobs, housing, and good schools in the tonier suburbs.

In the good old days, welfare was run by charities and by mutual-aid associations. There was a strong notion that you only helped people that helped themselves. The charities had a ABCDEFG system. A is for Affliation: who is responsible for this person? EFG is Employment, Freedom, God.

Really, what else would you expect? Government is an armed minority, using taxes to reward its supporters. What does government care of decency, responsibility, self-respect? As long as the punters are voting for our guy the system is working. That's how a politician thinks.

But here is the real injustice. Imagine what happens to the welfare recipient in a place like Venezuela, presently going down the tubes. What is life like for the welfare classes in Venezuela right now? For some reason I read nothing in the media about that. The fact is that if you repose upon your government benefices you are remarkably ill-prepared for life when the government runs out of money. And it is when the government runs out of money, dear lefties, that people turn to the Man on the White Horse, the evil fascist.

Government pensions. Half a century ago, Peter Drucker (I think) observed that defined benefit pensions (that define the income from a pension) could not work because it is impossible to predict 30 years in advance how much an employee should pay in order to enjoy a defined pension at age 65. Anyone that organizes a defined-benefit pension is allocating the risk of providing the future pension to somebody in the future. For instance just this week it was announced that in Seattle, the city employee pension funds made a series of mistakes in investing their funds. So who takes the loss? The city employees? The managers of the pension funds? The insurance companies providing liability insurance to the pension fund managers? The taxpayers?

In fact, while corporations have abandoned the defined-benefit pension plan for "defined-contribution" plans in which the employer just puts funds into an employee pension account the government is still going strong with the defined-benefit plan, all the way from Social Security to the notorious California government employee pension fund, CalPERS, that is likely to cause the State of California to go bankrupt. Actually the defined-benefit pension plan is the perfect fit for politics because it offers glorious vistas of wealth -- way off in the future when other people will have to deal with the fallout.

Obviously defined-benefit pension plans are a monstrous injustice, what I call "generational injustice." They promise a wonderful cornucopia for people now, but require somebody in the future to cough up real cash in order to make good on the promises.

OK, that's enough for now. More in the future.

The Many Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony

To paraphrase Marx, it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

This is all in accordance with my doctrine that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

I mean merely this. If you are railing about justice, you are really complaining about the real or perceived injustice that you experience at the hands of the ruling class. But suppose that, as a result of your activism and peaceful protests that you actually acquire political power. I guarantee you that many people will experience your beneficial legislation to bend the arc of history towards justice as the very opposite, as injustice, straight up.

Now our liberal friends have been telling themselves for over a century that they are an insurgent movement from below that is nobly and sacrificially bending the arc of history towards justice by the use of political power, reversing the injustices of the ages.

I believe the opposite is true. I believe that the progressive movement, the left, has been a top-down tyranny, using the excuse of injustice to impose an unjust order upon the people of the western world, to replace the partial tyranny of feudalism and the apparent tyranny of industrialism with a quasi-military mobilization of society into an administrative hierarchy that is tyrannous, totalitarian, oppressive, exploitative, and ultimately ruinous.

The idea has been that the industrial era has introduced new and frightening monstrosities upon a hapless people, that the left are the chosen ones to fight these monsters and protect us all from their evil spawn. And the means appropriate is politics and government and administrative system.

Unfortunately, as I insist, government is force; politics is the art of unifying "Us" to fight against the dangerous "Them"; and system, administrative system, is domination. So you would expect that no good would come of the left's efforts.

Socialism, the ownership of the means of production and distribution in common. This notion is a nostalgic dream to return humans to the alleged community of the tribe, where nothing is owned and everything is shared. And indeed you can see the survival advantage of sharing food in the hunter-gatherer band. But in today's world of cities far from the production of food, socialism does not work because there is no survival advantage in sharing food with the neighbors. And there is the little problem that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices. So what? Well, the purpose of prices is to tell people what to do next, in other words, change their behavior in accordance with the scarcity of goods and services. That is the point of the market economy: every moment people are adapting their contributions to the economy based upon their experience of prices. And the point of government is to prevent change, particularly the kind of change introduced at the point of a spear by rapers and pillagers. The problem with socialism is that when prices and individual ownership are forbidden then there is no way to adjust production in response to developing problems; the socialist managers at the top of the administrative hierarchy are not going to see developing problems until they have become disasters. So socialism at the scale of the nation state is not a survival advantage but a road to ruin. Hello Venezuela. But the big problem with socialism is that it can only operate by force. The natural thing for humans to do is to barter and trade, and then produce a little on the side, and then improve the product and then borrow from a neighbor and then expand production and then start selling to folks in the next village. All this is forbidden because it trespasses on the power of the government's socialist managers. And that is unjust.

The Neo-Slavery of Big Government. All across the west, governments spend about 30 to 50 percent of GDP. This means that about half of the economy is directed not by market forces but by government force. This is unjust, for it forces every individual to fund his master's political project, which is to tax the people to reward his supporters. In effect, people are forced to support a vast political project as the price of earning a living. But it gets worse. It is clear that every government is eager to invent new spending to reward new supporters, but every government quails before the prospect of ever reducing spending. Indeed the only way that government tend to reduce spending is through the trickery of inflation and devaluation of the currency. If slavery is unjust, then Big Government is unjust.

The War on Middle-Class Culture. It seems likely that the bourgeois culture, of companionate marriage, of the nuclear family with married parents living with their children, of distance from the extended family, is a recent phenomenon. It is founded on the notion of individual responsibility and it is hard, because young men move out from under their father's domination (and experience), and young women are free of the influence of their mother-in-law. It means, to a great extent, that young people starting out a family are on their own. It is obviously harder to make a success of this when government is getting you into debt for college and sequestering up to 50 percent of your income. More than that it is clear that the sexual revolution, that stigmatizes female modesty, and abortion, that empowers male sexual appetite, and non-binary genders, that makes a zoo out of sexuality, all combine to confuse and demoralize ordinary middle-class people. That is the whole idea of war, to confuse and disorient the adversary.

You can read that this war on the middle class is a Jewish conspiracy, or the natural program of the ruling class to make the people dependent. But I rather prefer the verdict of my Three Peoples theory. Our ruling class, the People of the Creative Self, believe in creativity à outrance. That's French for creativity to the max. So you get existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir advertising a life of creativity in everything, including sexuality. They seem to believe in complete personal reinvention without any credit for tradition or the way it used to be. The only problem is that if you try that you will probably ruin your life as, arguably, Sartre and Beauvoir ruined theirs. Indeed, the whole story of the universe is that it does not wipe the slate clean with every generation, but it builds upon itself. It may break out in a new direction, but almost always it will build on previous knowledge (encoded in DNA) and practice (encoded in culture). Anyway, it is cruel and unjust to make war upon a people's culture, whether the culture is hunter-gatherer or 20th century bourgeois.

The War on Religion. The reason that "God is Dead" is that the People of the Creative Self do not believe in the God of the People of the Responsible Self. They believe instead in... well I would say that the People of the Creative Self have not yet really found a new God, beyond the faith in their own creativity. But they know that the God of Christianity is sick and wrong. And bigoted, and superstitious, and racist and sexist and homophobic. So it must be driven out of the public square. And that is unjust. As I develop in my book The Road to the Middle Class, the Axial Age religions are an irreducible part of the journey from rural idiocy to urban competence. The point is made clearly by a minister from back in the days of the Great Awakening in the 1700s:

When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.

See what I mean? When people make the journey from countryside to cityscape they discover that they need a new religion.  And the religion they seem to choose is the local derivative of the Axial Age religions, with creator Gods that set  up an understandable world book-ended by divine law.

So when liberals make war on Christianity they are building roadblocks and barricades on the Road to the Middle Class. And that is unjust. But that is the way of the world. We humans are pretty good at figuring out what we want and need. But we are a lot less competent at figuring out what other people want and need. And that is the beginning of injustice.

OK. This is End of Part One. More to come.