The Fault, Dear Liberals, is in Your Religion

The conspirator Cassius famously says to Brutus:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

He means that it is not fate that ruins us but our failings.

So here we are with liberals in terminal hysteria about Trump. What gives?

This time, I don't think it is fate, nor even the personal failings of a tired and incompetent ruling class. It is the very ideas, the secular religion taught to all Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls in our schools all across the land.

Poster girl for that is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist that won, on June 26, 2018, the Democratic Party nomination for Congress in New York's 14th Congressional District that includes parts of the Bronx and Queens. Alexandria is the daughter of an architect, and grew up mostly in Westchester County. She got her BA at Boston University. So of course she believes in socialism, in activism, and all the rest; if she believed anything else she would be a notable rebel, going against her whole upbringing. And Good Little Girls very seldom do that; it's in the genes.

When you see pictures of "protesters" these days they usually seem to be well-brought-up young women. Why is that? It is because well-brought-up young women all go to college and they all ingest the "activism" culture that is being taught in the various Studies curricula.

As you know, my whole life and every word I write is devoted to explaining and exploding this leftist nursery tale. To paraphrase Marx,

It is high time that [normals] should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of [activism with a return to common sense].

But I get it. I understand who the left are and how they got there.

To begin with, in 1848 when rich kids Marx and Engels wrote their Manifesto it was reasonable to assume that the rising bourgeoisie would become a ruling class like the feudal nobles and thus, instead of the exploitation of peasants by nobles we would now have the exploitation of workers by capitalists.

Then Marx wrote Das Kapital that used classical economics to prove that the whole capitalist experiment would end in "immiseration" as profits were slowly squeezed out of the system and the workers took in in the solar plexus.

Makes sense, doesn't it. Only Marx turned out to be wrong. Dead wrong.

In the first place, it turned out that the bourgeoisie and their top dogs, the capitalists, were not that interested in power. Did the workers want the vote, labor unions, and social insurance? OK. You got it, even though it plays merry hell with the ability to adjust to the dictates of the market. It didn't even take bloody revolution to get it. That happened after, in Russia and China, in the aftermath of defeat in war.

In the second place, the promised "immiseration" did not take place. Oh sure, individual industries rose and fell, and the workers lost their well-paying jobs (and the investors lost their money). But there was always an economic revolution around the corner to rescue the economy and drive it to further heights. Hello fracking.

Yeah, the Great Enrichment, that has increased real per-capita income in places like the US from $3 per day in today's dollars to $150 per day. There has never been anything like it, ever. And certainly not in the old feudal era.

But. The idea of activism, of rich kids turning to revolution, baby, in order the right the wrongs of the "excluded and the dispossessed," caught on big time. Marx and Engels: rich kids. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse: Frankfurt School rich kids. Sixties radicals: rich kids. Michael Moore: not quite a rich kid, but he is now.

Really, it makes sense. If you are a rich kid you have a real problem finding a life that has meaning. You could just retire to an estate in eastern Connecticut and let the private bankers take care of the money stuff. Or you could go to parties in Manhattan. Or you could get New Age religion. Or you could go into activism and become a "author, social activist, and filmmaker" like Naomi Klein, daughter of a physician. Much easier than doing a business start-up that might end up losing all Daddy's money. Yeah. My feeling is that political activism is not that hard. You don't really get judged on your results, but on your effort.

Yeah. I don't envy your modern rich kid. There's a lot of potential downside and, what with the reversion to the mean, not so much upside. And mere marriage and children! That's for deplorables and nannies.

The problem is that the warrant for 21st century activism is a lie. Back in 1850 there was an excuse. Nobody knew back then that the capitalists were not that interested in power, that Rockefeller would retire at 50 and invent modern philanthropy. That Ford would allow the unions, after the Battle of the Overpass, to loot his car company and eventually turn Detroit into a hollowed-out shell. That Gates could be shamed out of Microsoft and crank up his Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation ten years earlier than he planned.

And nobody knew in 1850 that the slaves would be freed, that women would get the vote, that Jim Crow would eventually be tamed with the civil rights movement. But now we do, and the only sensible reaction is that activism, the threat of street action and revolution baby, is not warranted. The activists are believing and living a lie.

That is how I make sense of the lefty hysteria we are experiencing right now. Their activism is utterly superfluous, because in the modern state, if you have a real grievance, the government will eventually get to you and do something about the injustice that is raging in your breast.

But activism is what they do, it is their faith, their religion. And what would happen to them if a yellow-haired Nietzsche should come forth and declare "Your God is Dead!"

In my view, the whole left cultural and religious experience is a Great Reaction, as follows:

1. The welfare state is neo-feudalism, a nostalgia for the agricultural age.
2. Identity politics is neo-tribalism, a nostalgia for the hunter-gatherer age.

There is a sword of Damocles poised over every lefty, and inscribed upon its flashing blade is the awful motto: your activism is a lie.

No wonder our lefty friends are upset.

Sunsetting Labor Unions

Of course, The New York Times is deeply worried by the US Supreme Court's decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, et al. It significantly reduces public sector union power by allowing government employees to opt out of paying union dues.

Now, the Supreme Court's conservative majority justifies their decision of the First Amendment rights of government employees: they shouldn't have to pay for political action they disagree with. But Justice Kagan said this was baloney. This was just an attack on labor unions.

Actually, I agree with the dissent. Let's face it, government employee unions deploy their finances to support politicians that will pour money into the pockets of government employees, with salaries, benefits, and pensions and tenure that would be complete fantasy for almost any worker in the private sector. So any government employee objecting to paying for this is living in fantasyland, and merely wants to be a freeloader, benefiting from the union's political power without having to pay for it.

And let's face it, from the point of view of the average government employee, the government worker unions have been a stunning success.

So really, what the conservative wing of the Court is doing is finding a convenient way to scupper the government worker unions. And hey, why not the First Amendment, on which liberals have hung a bunch of their big-government goodies over the years!

But the irony is not lost on me. The whole point of the welfare state, what I call neo-feudalism, is free-riding. The legislature passes a law to give benefits to e.g., senior citizens for end-of-life health care, and senior citizens like me get to free-ride on the benefits forever. Until the whole country goes Venezuela.

And the whole point of the labor union movement is to free-ride on the wealth created by business corporations. Back in the early 19th century the courts held that labor unions were conspiracies in restraint of trade, like business price-fixing cartels. But then the courts started to bend to popular opinion and decide that, hey, da workers got their rights!

Well, yes. We all want to be able to defy the market and its prices when it benefits us.

But then there is the long term. In business a labor union can end up bankrupting it, as the business commits to pensions 30 years out that no corporation can responsibly agree to. Hello Detroit auto companies.

And in government a labor union can get politicians to legislate pensions in the great hereafter that can crowd out basic expenditures on services and bankrupt the government. And in fact in many blue states in the US the states are well on the way to bankruptcy and are cutting services. Because, you see, it's in the state constitution. Pensions cannot be reduced. Because justice.

So the Supreme Court's decision on Janus is piled high with irony. Here we have a decision based on First Amendment absolutism, just like liberals used to do. And it enshrines the right of a union member to freeload, just as liberals insist on everything else. Naturally, the dissent is outraged at this monstrous injustice.

Actually, I happen to think that no government employee should be allowed to join a union. Period. But I believe that anyone in the private sector should be allowed to belong to a union. But for one thing. No defined benefit pensions, not guarantees about the future. At. All. If you wanna have a pension, then it is a defined contribution pension, with absolutely no guarantees about the future. When you retire, you get the capital sum, or an annuity, based on your contributions and your employer's contributions and their increase over the years due to the magic of compound interest. Nobody gets to defer their contributions: not the employee, not the employee. Because reality.

The interesting thing to me is the utter decline of labor unions in the private sector, presently down to 6.7 percent. Why is this?

I suspect it is because, willy nilly, people now accept that it is their job to become and to stay employable. And no labor union can protect you from that.

But 35 percent of employees in the public sector are union members. Of course, because labor unions have produced amazing gains for their members. That's because government is not governed by the prices of the private sector. The only cloud on the horizon is the bankruptcy of the government in question, and how can that ever occur, given the state's power to compel taxes from the people to pay its supporters?

A Conservative Supreme Court is Not the Answer to our Prayer

With the resignation of Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy from the  US Supreme Court the nation is plunged into another no-holds-barred fight over a Supreme Court nomination.

For liberals, evidently, there is a full-on panic about abortion and gay marriage. Do you see the problem, liberals? If you make the Supreme Court the supreme arbiter of everything cultural and moral, then your very lives, your fortunes, and your sacred honor depends on a majority on the Supreme Court. The proper way to go is to persuade the voters to elect representative that will write laws to enact your agenda.

Of course conservatives have our own problems with the Supreme Court. It was called the "Strange New Respect" problem by Tom Bethell at the American Spectator 30 years ago. Simply put, when the Washington Post starts according "strange new respect" to a conservative in Washington, DC, it means that the said conservative has surrendered to the ruling-class culture and will no longer hold out for conservative principles. Justice Kennedy is the poster-boy for the "strange new respect" syndrome. The strategy of the Federalist Society and the apprenticing of staunch conservatives in the judiciary has been a conscious effort to inculcate heroic values in young conservatives so that they will go to their deaths like Antonin Scalia without ever getting "strange new respect" from chaps like Peter Strzok.

OK, great. So President Trump gets to convert the "strange new respect" Kennedy that voted for abortion and gay marriage with a guy that won't. But that doesn't solve our problem.

Our problem is that the elite culture of the US is pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage. What we need is an America in which educated evolved people in the ruling class would say: look, I understand the liberals and the feminists on abortion: it's a terrible burden to bring a child into the world because of a breakdown of contraception or without the support of the father. But we are talking about human life here. Or they would say: I understand the yearning of gays for the stamp of normality, to come in from the cold of the sexual wilderness, but we are really talking children here. The purpose of marriage is not to make life all cozy for couples, whether they be heterosexual or homosexual or the lastest wizard wheeze of intersectionality.  The purpose of marriage is to protect the mother of children, to bind the father of her children to her, to enforce the woman's instinct for eternal love against the male appetite for sexual adventure.

So, we are faced with the Andrew Breitbart maxim: "politics is downstream from culture." If you want to win in politics you have to win first in the culture. And conservatives are not winning in the culture. Instead our children are being marinated in left-wing culture K thru grad school, and every day by the left-wing entertainment and news industry.

But even that is not the whole story, as I wrote just yesterday. And I got that from sci-fi author and Christian John C. Wright, who wrote in "Last Crusade: Fighting the Wrong Battle" that it is not enough to fight the left on the cultural front knowing that "culture is downstream from religion."

[I]f the Left retains the moral high ground, the people (who in the long run always seek moral validation before any other factor, including wealth or gratification, applause or power) will cleave to the Left.

The Identitarians will find that their cultural ammunition, the memes and short videos which are this generations version of folk songs, will not have any deep or lasting effect.

One cannot change a man’s mind unless his heart allows it. But one cannot change a man’s heart unless his soul allows it.

In the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion.

See, when that foolish woman owner of the Red Hen chucks Press Secretary Sarah Sanders out of her restaurant she thinks she is doing the moral thing. Because she is a Good Little Girl that has learned her lessons well.

So I believe that our present problem is that our ruling class, the people that have learned their lessons well at the woke university, have been taught a false religion. This religion is one part "activism," the fantasy that "peaceful protest" on behalf of helpless victims is the highest form of life, and one part "paternalism," the conceit that "we" are selfless educated and evolved people that are called to minister to the people and organize and administer the welfare state on their behalf.

I will tell you what is wrong with both these conceits. The add up to the Great Reaction, the retreat from the modern society that has advanced beyond tribalism and subordination to an independence of sorts in the free market society of the nation state. But the religion that Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls are taught in school and in the media is the reactionary neo-tribalism of identity politics, and the neo-feudalism of the welfare state. Thus, Great Reaction.

One Fine Day, the best and the brightest will wake up from this nightmare and take up a religion that rejects neo-tribalism for a much broader pan-human identity, and rejects neo-feudalism for a cooperative and human community rather than an administrative and mechanical community. But that day is not yet.

And that means that we conservatives are reduced to depending on nominating brave Supreme Court justices to hold the line against the follies and the injustices of the left until the dawning of a new age.

Reality Hits the 19th Century White Ethnics

It was Lee Kwan Yew, long time prime minister of Singapore, that said:

In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.

Now that Hispanics and Asian-Americans are coming into political contention, people are in a panic because the emerging race-based politics will threaten the white majority.

But actually, isn't this old news? If you read about presidential politics down the years you will discover that in our lifetimes it has been about appealing to the Irish vote, or the Italian vote or the Catholic vote. And, of course there is no group more electorally unified than African Americans who have recently been voting 90 percent Democrat.

So yesterday we had the shattering news that a good old Irish pol, Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), had been defeated in a Democratic primary by Puerto-Rican beauty and Bernie Bro-ess, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a district that is 40 percent Hispanic.

The chaps on the alt-right like to say that the US has been ruined ever since the original Anglo-Saxon posterity was irrigated with the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews in the 19th century.

But that means that we have been doing Lee's race-religion politics here in the US for over a century. The Irish have been notably Democrat since whenever, because when they first came to the US they automatically voted against the party favored by descendants of England. And, of course, Protestant New England invented public education to cure the Irish of their Catholicism. Yeah, how did that work out, geniuses? The deep state has always been a couple of french fries short of a Happy Meal.

And that works for regions as well. Back in the day New England was Republican and the South was Democratic. Now the opposite is true.

But I'd say there is nothing like a few more Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez congresscritters to send the remainder of the 19th century immigration wave into the Republican Party of American nationalists.

Now Jonah Goldberg in his latest piece reminds us that politics can't fill the hole in our souls.

Humans crave what philosopher-anthropologist Ernest Gellner called “re-enchantment creeds.” According to Gellner, modernity — i.e., the trinity of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and the market economy — dissolved the old creeds that gave people a sense of meaning and belonging. When traditional religion gets chased out, we adopt other causes, movements, and ideas to fill the holes in our souls. Nationalism, socialism, psychoanalysis, neo-paganism, racism: These are all forms of re-enchantment creeds.

Hmm. I'm going to have to read Gellner. He's also anti-Wittgenstein, which will be interesting after reading a Wittgenstein biography. But.

What you see is that everyone these days, from left and right, says that my side is the rational, give-me-the-facts side, and the other side is all about feelings. And they are all wrong.

Remember Andrew Breitbart's "politics is downstream from culture?" Back in October, 2017, after John C. Wright, I revised and extended it: "Politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion." Let's rewrite this amazing wisdom.

Facts are downstream from emotions which are downstream from unconscious instincts.

I am getting that from Jordan B. Peterson who got it from Jung who got it from the whole 19th century German intellectual ferment.

And the point that Peterson is making is that we see facts through a filter of values: facts are downstream of values. This means that when it comes to politics peoples' notions will be completely colored and probably determined by their values, and their personal values come from their cultural and religious memberships.

And anyone that says they believe in facts and the other guys believe in emotions is missing the point.

This is not to deny that science and Enlightenment and the market economy are vital. Hello Venezuela.

Now in the United States at this time we are witnessing a culture war between the left's religion and culture of identity politics and the right's culture of nation. There is no mystery about this. If you are a lefty you instinctively know that you must devalue and demoralize the old US culture of America as the land of the Free and the Brave, etc., if you want to bend the arc of history towards justice. Instead you want to put in its place the notion of numerous suffering groups that noble lefties will lead to the Promised Land over the bones of heteropatriarchal white men and the lamentation of their women.

But of course, this new culture and politics is putting the old 19th century ethnics, good old boys like Joe Crowley, on the spot. How much longer can they vote for the race-based identity politics party that is determined to put them on the ash-heap of history?

The whole point of nationalism is to create a fake tribe to compete with the other tribes, of race and religion.That is what President Trump is up to with his Make America Great Again meme. And he is consciously trying to tempt African Americans and Hispanics into his nationalist tribe. The immigration issue is a great way to do this because, studies show, once immigrants get their whole family here in the US then they become anti-immigration.

Put it this way. Under the recent cultural norms, various groups have been encouraged to rub the sores of their group grievances against the United States: racism, sexism, big business, corporate power, whatabout the workers. Politics must be this way, unifying some group against a threat. But two can play at that game. You can also unify people as Americans against the dangerous immigrants that want to feast on our entitlement benefits and take away our jobs.

Looking at things this way, you could ask: how come it took them so long? And how come that the 19th century white ethnics didn't all switch to the Republican Party a generation ago?

The answer is that it is not enough to see the writing on the wall. Most people need to have the writing on the wall flashing like a neon sign, to the accompaniment of a police siren.

Blame Activism Culture for "Red Hen" Expulsion

Everyone to the right of left-wing lunacy is talking about the expulsion of Trump Press Secretary Sarah Sanders from the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia.

And the first thing that comes up are the gay wedding-cake incidents, where gays deliberately targeted Christian bakeries to force them to make cakes for their weddings.

The good old Double Standard.

But you may be asking: Why? Why do liberals do this?

And my answer is: the Activism Culture, about which I write from time to time.

There are two events in my life that have crystallized the left-wing activism culture for me. The first was when a liberal friend told me that she had always wanted to get into activism. Wat? I thought. Why would a nice liberal woman with conventional liberal ideas think that? The second was when I read in The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi that after the workers got the vote in England they stopped marching. Why? Because now they were represented in the corridors of power.

Do you see the point here? It is that riot and revolution are the necessary tactics of those who are outside the system. In the mid-19th century, when Marx and Engels issued their Manifesto the workers, now coming into the cities for the first time, were not represented. This was a time of revolutions, marches, and disturbance. But 50 years later, the workers had the vote and the kind of legislation they wanted, a neo-feudal system of rigidly defined labor union rights, free education, and government-run administrative pensions and insurance had been legislated.

When in World War I the workers of Germany, and France, and Britain all fought for their countries, a basic faith of the activism left was exploded: the workers saw themselves as citizens first and workers second.

But leftism was and is a belief system on the holy quest of activism, activism by well-born activists in behalf of the disfranchised who are not represented by the political system. It is, of course, a battle of good against evil, and it makes perfect sense for a political class that has lost its Christian faith and the Christian enactment of the battle of good versus evil in every human heart.

The other thing to understand is this. The whole point of politics is to redirect the battle for justice from the streets and civil war to the election hustings. The point is that politicians, instead of leading their supporters in pitched battles on the street, now conduct their battles in Parliament, with the majority getting the right to tax the nation to deliver benefits to their supporters, instead of the military victors getting to loot and plunder the losers, as in olden times.

Thus I understand leftism and the activism culture as a constant search for new helpless victims outside the system for whom street action is the only option. And this was the genius of the Frankfurt School thinkers. It was they in the 1920s that realized that, with the working class now integrated into the political system, new clients for the well-born activist were needed, and this meant women and minorities.

Of course, by 1920 and the 19th Amendment the US already had universal franchise for men and women, and even minorities. But not exactly in the South. So the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s universalized the elimination of the Jim Crow system in the US South as a glorious liberation for all women and minorities.

But once women and minorities were brought into the system, what then? Well, the well-born activists had to find people who were still outside the system. By the 21st century, in the United States, this boiled down to Muslims and illegal immigrants.

So if you wonder why the left has its knickers in a twist over the unintended consequences of immigration law, in which the children of people applying for political asylum in the US become a custodial issue, understand that for them the whole point of life, the universe, and everything is to do activism for some disfranchised group outside the system. If ever there was no longer some group outside the system then life would lose its meaning for the activist believer.

Now, in my view the activism culture is problematic at several levels.

First, the basis of human life is no longer about access to a patch of food-growing land. When survival is dependent on your tribe's access to food-growing land then the bottom line is the military defense of that patch of land. In hunter-gather societies the entire male adult population is engaged in defense of the patch of land. But in feudal  agricultural societies the defense of territory tended to devolve upon "marcher lords" on the "marches" between one feudal regime and another. If you want to know what a marcher lord looks like, think Shakespeare's Harry Percy, son of the Duke of Northumberland. If you look at a map of Britain you will discover that Northumberland butts right up onto the border between England and Scotland. Today, we call the people that used to live in those borderlands "rednecks." They have a reputation for being quarrelsome and aggressive. But today human life is about finding a way to contribute to the economy by exchanging your skills and your labor for wages; or exchanging your savings for dividends and interest; or starting a new business to make something completely new. And this new world does not seem to need so many marcher lords and other high-status folk to make us safe.

Second, it seems that the market and its prices do a pretty good job of regulating the economy. In other words, it is not usually necessary for political power to step in and decide what to do. Indeed, the record of the last 150 years is that politicians and activists are clueless about the needs of the economy, and usually do more harm and good in their interventions. In other words, the price system tells people what to do and, more important, what not to do. When the price system is telling you what not to do and you fail to pay attention, it is usually very annoying and expensive. People get really angry when the market tells them they have made a mistake, and they often resort to force to register their objection. Businessmen get the government to protect them from competition with tariffs and licensing and regulations; workers go out on strike to object to "give-backs."

Thirdly, given the reduced need to defend the patch of land and the evident self-regulating nature of the market economy, there is now a much-reduced need for political and military power. We humans have barely begun to address this fact. In fact I would argue that in general, political and military power are today both highly damaging, because they are systems of rigidity; their whole rationale is to stop change. And yet the point of the market economy is that its prices are signalling for change every day, and everyone should be responding to the price signals of the economy, every day. Obviously this is a problem. All down the ages, political and military chiefs have been indispensable and have dominated society, and they have dominated it for a reason, because fixed political relationships and defense of the border were the absolute requirements of any society that hoped to survive. But now everything has changed, and what will the robin do now, poor thing.

Let me reiterate: all down the ages, the one thing was to have a patch of food-growing land for your tribe and to successfully defend it. Now, the one thing is to have a skill that can be exchanged in the global economy for money. This is, to coin a phrase, a Great Transformation. To expect that everyone would change in a moment to adapt to the new system is, to say the least, unrealistic.

And so the lefty reactionaries are running riot, utterly unable and unwilling to accept that their old faith and its superstitions are being thrown onto the dust-heap of history.

They also find it impossible to understand how their activism culture and its peaceful protests visit monstrous injustices upon Americans less well educated and less well connected than themselves.

So of course the well-born owner of the Red Hen thinks it right and proper to expel President Trump's press secretary from her restaurant, and then go across the street and "peacefully protest" when the Sander party went to eat at another restaurant. Activism and peaceful protest are her religion.

But, as they say, those that won't listen and learn will eventually learn "the hard way."

Things That Liberals Are Getting Wrong

In his Anatomy of Revolution Crane Brinton argues that the Reign of Terror episode in many revolutions arises because the revolution is failing.

Of course, this is not surprising. Revolutions tend to have an over-optimistic view of the wonders that will ensue when the revolution succeeds. It is terribly disappointing when the millennium fails to show up on cue. So it must be the evil people that are not down with the revolutionaries! À la lanterne, as my mother used to say. In jest.

The current cultural and political situation in the West is that much of the cultural and political agenda of the Left is failing.

1. The Administrative State. The problem with all government programs is that it is almost impossible to reform them. That's because almost all government programs involve a subsidy of some behavior. And once a subsidy is in place, humans will fight to preserve that free stuff.  Plus, all government/administrative programs violate the principle of Ludwig von Mises, that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices.
2. Attack on Bourgeois Culture. You can rail against the patriarchy, against heteronormality, against female modesty, against sex roles, against sexual freedom all you like. But the bourgeois culture of the nuclear family, children after marriage, women mothering their children, men with careers, has a lot going for it, not least that it is a pretty good blueprint for wiving and thriving in the city. But the worst thing is to make it hard for the immigrants to the city to learn the bourgeois code. Put it this way: bourgeois means burgher or city person. So bourgeois culture means city culture, the culture that grew up in cities over the centuries. You wanna  do well in the city? Learn the bourgeois code. When in Rome, etc.
3. Equality under the Law. No doubt non-white non-male non-hetero people suffer under some disabilities. But any political culture that excuses its supporters from the application of the law, as the left proposes as a principle in, e.g., immigration, diversity and inclusion, sex on campus, the homeless, political protest, is experienced by its victims as injustice, straight up. The point of equality under the law is to rectify the problem that political partisans tend to excuse the excesses of their side, and that infuriates the opposition. So the law must apply equally to prince and pauper, otherwise there is no reason to obey the law.
4. Conceding Elections. I remember reading Time, or maybe Newsweek, a decade or so ago in the month after a presidential election, and I think the Republican won. What struck me was that the liberal reporters of that era were writing stories about the peaceful transfer of power and what a wonderful thing that was. Well, the last two change elections where Republicans won were not conceded by the losers and their bribed apologists in the media, not the 2000 election, when Al Gore failed to concede and, even after the Supreme Court ruled for Bush, did not concede gracefully. Then there is Hillary Clinton in 2016, who started the whole post-election "we wus robbed" meme. Sorry, libs and Dems and deep staters. If you do one thing, and one thing only, you concede the election when you lose, and wish the winner well, and say "we are all Americans because we come back together after the divisions of the election campaign." This is important, because the whole point of the peaceful transfer of power, and the alternation of power between the major parties is that it removes the excuse for civil war. With the conceding of elections and the peaceful transfer of power you can say "wait until next time" and actually believe that there will be a next time. So you don't need to prepare for civil war, as must be the case in Venezuela right now.

It is said that President Obama said to Ben Rhodes shortly after the 2016 election:

“Maybe we pushed too far,” the president continued. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe...”

"Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.

This demonstrates the fundamental contradiction at the center of the liberal and the lefty world view. First of all, these people think they are the avant-garde leading humans to a glorious future. Second, they do not understand that the path they have chosen is in fact a neo-tribalism. In other words, they actually believe that their identity politics, that defines and organizes everyone by their tribe, is leading us to a future without identity and tribe! And it demonstrates a fundamental self-ignorance. Do you not understand, President Obama, that your affirmative action, followed by diversity and inclusion, is experienced by people like me as racism, straight up? No, you don't. Because at the center of your belief system is that you and yours are the educated, evolved ones, and other people are the racist sexist homophobes, period.

See, Mr. Obama, people like me never doubted that America was ready for its First Black President. I was shocked when a liberal friend said to me in December 2016: isn't it wonderful we elected the first black president! I thought, but did not say: Racism! If anything Obama's election was the gate to liberation from the vile accusation of racism, to be able to say: OK, we elected a black president; now let us stop the divisive and destructive identity politics that has poisoned the culture for the last 50 years. But no. What we learned, after you got elected, was that this was just the beginning. Echoing George Wallace, you and your chaps were saying: Diversity today, diversity tomorrow, diversity forever.

Oh, and by the way, it's one thing for a vile bigoted Christian baker to decline a custom commission to bake a cake for a gay wedding, but quite another for a highly evolved cousin of Meryl Streep to decline service to the woman press secretary of President Trump. How does that work, Mr. President?

The one saving truth of left-wing politics is that the recent immigrant to the city is not yet ready for full immersion in bourgeois culture and it is unjust to chuck them in at the deep end. So it makes sense to provide neo-feudal institutions like the labor union and government insurance to provide safe spaces for people not yet ready to take the bourgeois oath of surrender to the market.

The trouble is that the understandable temporary notion of providing a refuge from the bourgeois responsibility culture has become a war against the bourgeois culture, and the educated, evolved ruling class everywhere teaches children and adults to resist it.

This war on the middle class culture of responsibility is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.

At Jordan Peterson's Road Show

Last night, June 21, 2018, I was to Jordan B. Peterson's road show, publicizing his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos. Every seat at Seattle's Moore Theater was taken.

Of course, it's ridiculous to suppose that you will learn anything from such an event. Read the book, kid.

On the other hand, in the format of a 70 minute monologue, an author is bound to try and reduce his ideas to their foundation. And Peterson was clearly focused on that, the fundamental point he is trying to make, since he was scheduled to debate on the morrow with atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith.

Peterson's fundamental point is that we see facts through a lens or a matrix of value. In other words, if you are a Thomas Gradgrind from Dickens' Hard Times and you say you believe in "facts, facts, facts," you are deceiving yourself. Whatever you think, you start out in the morning with a Theory of Everything, a story about what the world means, what your life means, and you look at facts in the light of the meaning you make of the world.

An example of this would be the media frenzy about The Children in last week. From the point of view of facts, facts, facts, what does it matter that children of illegal aliens are being separated from their parents at the border of the United States? What do we care?

But we do care. The fact is that we humans do not look upon children as facts. We see them through the filter of our beliefs about children. In other words: first comes the value, the story about children, then comes the fact.

It is Jordan Peterson's contention that religion issues from this "fact" about human life. If we humans all view life through the lens of our values then the values we hold and express are the most important thing in the world. You may say that religion is the story about value by humans, the social animals.

If you think about it, it must be so. It is true that we moderns have accumulated an astonishing trove of facts about the world. Only they are not facts; they are theories that have an astonishing ability to predict sense impressions. And what exactly are theories? I would say they are the way we make a connection between Kant's unobservable things-in-themselves and our sense impressions of those things-in-themselves.

But humans lived long before we had developed sophisticated theories about a solar-centric universe and curved space and quantum mechanics.

Whatever our human fund of knowledge at any point in time, we must live our lives with what we have. So the ancients had spirits in trees, the Elizabethans had nine circles of Heaven and nine circles of Hell. And we have... Yes, what do we have?

Enter my reductive Three Peoples theory. If you are a Person of the Subordinate Self your religion is the religion of Homer's Iliad. The gods decide everything, just like your local lord decides everything. There is really no occasion for agency, because you are not an agent; you do not have the right or the power to decide anything about yourself. Agency belongs to your lord.

Enter the People of the Responsible Self and the Axial Age religions from Zoroastrianism to Hinduism, to Judaism to Christianity to Islam. The whole point of these religions was expressed by a minister during the Great Awakening in the 18th century.

“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.”

Notice how, for our lefty friends, it is a damning sin to expect agency from their catalog of victims.

Here's another quote, from Robert Bellah:

[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.

In my Three Peoples lingo, these Axial Age religions address the existential issues that people experience when they are moving from being People of the Subordinate Self to becoming People of the Responsible Self. They construct a story, a matrix of values, to make sense of life as you leave behind your subordinate life and put on the armor of responsibility.

But what we are interested in is the transition, the existential issues, that people face when they are moving from being People of the Responsible Self to People of the Creative Self. Because if the Axial Age religions arose to respond to the existential issues of people at the Subordinate-Responsible boundary then it stands to reason that there must be religions that respond to people at the Responsible-Creative boundary.

It is my contention that everything from Romanticism to the Young Hegelians, to Marx, to the Fabian Society to feminism to art for art's sake to the activism culture to the startup culture in business to the recent explosion in getting creative about sex are all attempts to navigate the Responsible-Creative transition, to ask the question: What does it mean to live a creative life?  Through what filter of values, with what story should I experience and understand the world?

And I believe that Jordan Peterson's books are another attempt to do that, to illuminate a path for navigation from the world of Responsibility to the world of Creativity.

Up to now, I would say, the most militant of these new religions has been the religion of leftism. It sees the facts of the case through a value filter of bending the arc of history towards justice through politics. If you want to make sense of your lefty friends that is it.

However, I believe that the left's sacralizing of politics is a monstrous error. You are never going to bend the arc of history towards justice using politics. That is because politics and government are not saving truths showing the way to the Promised Land, but necessary evils to keep the peace in this Fallen World. I symbolize this truth with my maxim "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice."

Peterson is proposing a different road to the Promised Land, through the agency of the sacrificial hero, an archetype that appears again and again in the history of humans and our religions. The sacrificial hero creatively explores on the boundary between order, the realm of the known, and chaos, the lawless world without the law. Yes, and the sacrificial hero usually sacrifices himself so that we might live.

In my view Jordan Peterson fully understands that he is a sacrificial hero. At his road show in Seattle on June 21 he said that the last two years have been terrifying, for he knows that a single wrong word could immolate him in some Twitter inferno and end his public life.

So what is Jordan Peterson saying? He is setting forth the parameters for a religion, a filter of value through which to view the world, that appropriates all the astonishing increase in understanding about the world in the last centuries and that provides meaning for a person trying to live a creative life, a creative life that does not bow to the false god of politics.

And so it is unsurprising that the audience at the sold-out Moore Theater on June 21 were... Well, the only thing for sure is that they were not liberals, or anything else from lefty world. They were not white working class, but many of them could be Trump voters. And I would say they were overwhelmingly 30-40ish.

I believe that Peterson is bringing to the Anglo-Saxon world the results of the German turn. I mean everything from Kant's dictum that we cannot know things-in-themselves and therefore no objective knowledge, Hegel's philosophy of contrast and opposites, naughty Nietzsche's they-are-all-liars effusions, to Jung's reconnection with ancient myth and the notion that our faith and our pride in our conscious mind is negated by the truth that we have almost no idea what is going on in our unconscious mind, that tumbling river of instincts and lost world of archetypes.

It's not a bad idea: construct a religion of lordly tolerance, allowing to the ancestors the dignity of knowing the truth by their own lights rather than stigmatizing their faith as superstition, while maintaining a radical openness to the future as a creative project, an exploration of the border between order and chaos.