The Three Ages of Trust

I just realized that I am going to have to read George Gilder's latest book, Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy.

Why? Because I realized, reading a review of Gilder's book, that blockchain technology radically changes the nature of trust. To see why, let's look at trust through the lens of the three great Ages of Man.

In the hunter-gatherer age, we are talking about a pure face-to-face society. In that culture the dictum of Jürgen Habermas applies. Here is how I describe Habermas in my American Manifesto.

Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action, [is] an attempt to rescue Marxism from the obsolescence of its labor theory of value and the despair of Horkheimer and Adorno. Habermas still carries forward Marx’s two-world system of abstract labor and social labor; only now he finally detaches it from the exploded labor theory of value. Habermas converts the world of abstract labor and social labor into system and lifeworld. System is not just the alienating force of big bad capitalism, but of the terrible twins, rational government and rational business, the system of force and the system of money. Lifeworld is not just social labor producing social value, but, following Husserl and Heidegger, a full face-to-face culture of shared experience in the world, for being is not just consciousness of the ego, but being-there in the world, and being-with the Other.

I would say that the "lifeworld" of Habermas is the face-to-face world of the hunter-gatherer tribe, "a shared culture in which all things and all situations are 'always already' familiar." In this lifeworld trust, the social glue of human social cooperation, is obtained through the unified shared culture in which everyone is down with the always already familiar. To depart from this universal shared culture is to betray the trust that is automatically extended to all the members of the culture because they all know the rules. Such betrayal of trust is unthinkable.

But when communities grow bigger, and the hierarchy of kings and priests develops, then the universal lifeworld no longer applies. That is when written law and legal enforcement begins. It is very hard to betray the trust of the community in the hunter-gatherer tribe, but not so hard in the agricultural hierarchy. In fact it is notorious that underlings almost always steal from their bosses, from servants taking a nip of the master's gin and employees raiding the stationery cabinet at the office to the anonymous young men of the city forming into criminal gangs and confidence tricksters defrauding trusting old women. In other words, once you get out of a simple face-to-face community you have the problem of enforcing trust. And notice also that you see the emergence of a public politics in which the untrustworthiness of the Other is the basis of membership. Politicians make hay out of stirring mistrust in their supporters. In class politics they teach their followers to hate the rich and the businessmen; in race politics they teach them to hate the other races; in gender politics they teach their followers to hate the other gender. Still, people have managed to construct trust networks in the modern age. We see, of course, the growth of markets and brands, which are all about creating trust. And in the internet age we have credit cards, online retail and banking, in which trustable people can travel the globe and be trusted everywhere. Then there are online services like Uber and Ebay which create artificial trust reputations with their star systems.

Enter Blockchain. As I understand it, blockchain technology creates a quantum leap in trust. An example is title insurance. If the history of a piece of real estate is encoded in a blockchain it means that you can trust the history of the property you are buying. In fact, no need for Title Insurance Companies! But this means that we don't need government to enforce trust anymore. Trust is already encoded in the blockchains in which trustworthy people conduct their business. I imagine this also makes it much harder for cheats and frauds to practice their depredations. Thus trustworthy people do not need to pay for a bunch of government heavies to keep the peace and punish the evildoers. The system becomes trust-enforcing.

The most obvious application of blockchain is money, where government has been indispensable in enforcing a network of financial trust and has monstrously betrayed its trust. Imagine a world where the government can no longer cheat and inflate and muck around with the credit system by favoring its supporters.

Of course, it is early days, and nobody really knows what will ensue with the blockchain economy. But we can hope, and what I hope is that the ability of governments and politicians and activists  to sow distrust and loot the wealth creators will be seriously diminished. If that happens then humans may live into a new Golden Age where trust and fair dealing becomes not just the right thing to do but a matter of life and death, where it is no longer the poor that go to the wall, but the untrustworthy.

I have an idea, which I admit is just wishful thinking, that when crooks and frauds find that their cunning tricks no longer pay then they will pretty quickly mend their ways.

And find other ways to misbehave.

Founding a New National Myth

One of the problems for we racist sexist homophobes is that we haven't yet constructed a belief system, a world view, that can replace the globalist/identity politics model. The Z-man is looking into it; he talks about the "absolute intolerance of secular religions:"

When people assign the natural order to divine forces, they can be indifferent to alternative forms of worship, as a part of the great mystery of life. When the natural order is a man made creation and the moral code is created and maintained by man, any deviation must be viewed as a challenge to the creator’s legitimacy.

That is one of the reasons that the left is so relentless in breaking down all the bricks of the religion of the People of the Responsible Self. The separation of God and State does not make sense for them, for it is reason and power -- combined in the hands of specific political "creators" -- that will bring on the millennium.

Now my notion is that we cannot know where the world will go next, so we cannot construct a cultural framework on the lefty model that subjugates everything to political power and its marching orders, and we do not want to. Cultural, economic, and political change are the fruit of individual decisions made by unexceptional individuals that just happen to stumble on the Big New Thing.

The lefty model is that lefty creators and revolutionaries will conquer the existing world of injustice and domination and clear the ground for a reign of justice and emancipation.

My idea is similar, but different. In my model the creators are not political actors and revolutionaries, called into being by the arc of history, but rather low-level economic and cultural actors that create and develop something new outside the political power field. In my concept the political system merely reacts to and finally grudgingly accommodates the economic and cultural innovators. I suspect that is the way it has always been, but that the Narrative of rulers and priests down the ages has cunningly stolen the credit properly due to the ordinary innovators and awarded it instead to gods and heroes. You can see this in our current era where our lefty friends claim that the social benefits legislated by politicians and the wages won by labor unions have brought the workers out of poverty rather than the unintended benison of successive economic revolutions that created mountains of goods and jobs for the common people.

And that's the problem. How do we get from here to there? How do we spread the gospel of bottom-up innovation and trade-tested betterment and trust out from our avant-garde of racist sexist homophobes into the hearts and minds of the people? And how do we teach the Educated Youth, the Sarah Jeongs of the world, to abandon the false gods of leftism and the totalitarian terror that issues from the conversion of the natural order and its mysterious state function into the rigid mechanistic forced march of a top-down society?

Maybe this world is already aborning in the mysterious and partly-understood blockchain revolution that is right now gathering strength, but which we do not yet understand. Maybe its guarantee of trust will remake the world, and hurl the lefties headlong, not to bottomless perdition there to dwell in adamantine chains, but into comical irrelevance.

For it may well be that the meaning of life, the universe and everything is not a deadly serious business as we have been taught to believe by "the priests" since time immemorial, but is merely a joke: "Don't Panic."

Can There Be a Theater That Can Challenge the Ruling-Class Narrative?

I'm in Ashland, Oregon, again at the Shakespeare Festival, and this afternoon I saw a decent Henry V. But walking home I reminded myself that Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays are all said to be Tudor regime propaganda. So the French king and the Dauphin and the French lords don't come off too well in Hentry V. Just as Richard III of York is represented as a mean old hunchback, to be eclipsed by the glorious rose of Tudor.

So it is with today's theater people. They are all in on the liberal agenda, 2018 edition, as expressed in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's program, starting with Artistic Director Bill Rauch's intro that starts out: "Based on our plays this season (never mind the political landscape) the theme of leadership is certainly in the air." Golly, what could he mean?

Don't worry, in the intro to Othello Bill Rauch tells us how the "characters disastrously navigate differences of race, religion, gender, and national origin."

In Sense and Sensibility director Hanna S. Sharif tells us about the "smartest people in the room... navigating a world that denied them access to property, wealth, and personal agency." Oh, you mean like the neo-feudal welfare state? Not to mention identity politics?

Liberals are clueless.

Oh, and guess what! In Oklahoma Curly is played by a girl, so the "intentionally inclusive cast... joyfully suggest[s] an alternative utopian community that reflects progress and acceptance for our time." Yep, you'll have left-wing LGBT religious revivalism rammed down your throat and you better like it.

But director Bill Rauch thinks of his audience as "the most adventurous audience in the American theater" when all he is doing is ramming ruling-class conventional wisdom down our throats. This year, for the first time, the program includes preferred pronouns for each artist. The interesting thing about preferred pronouns, for me, is that they are third person pronouns, (he/him/his), which means that people want to control how other people speak about them between themselves. I guess it makes sense in liberal world which is all about ordering other people around.

One of the constants at OSF is liberal race and gender politics. So there is usually a black-themed play (with black actors, of course) and this year there is a Chinese play (with East-Asian actors, of course). But the non-white actors get to play northwestern European characters in the Shakespeare canon.

But wait? What is OSF doing putting on non-white plays? Isn't that cultural appropriation? In Love's Labours Lost there is a lot of rock music and a lot of gesturing that I assume is supposed to be the way they do it down in the 'hood. But wait! Rock music is cultural appropriation of blues and rhythm and Blues. So what in the world is OSF doing insulting blacks with this aping of black culture?

Yeah, I know. It's different when we do it.

I was thinking today that if I did Love's Labours Lost about rich bitch Frenchies and Basques, I would cast the Basque nobles of Navarre as Harvard men and the French princesses as feminists from the Seven Sisters colleges. And all the women would wear black rimmed glasses like MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. But I don't think that Bill Rauch, he of the adventurous audience, would even think of satirizing our ruling class in that way.

Because as they say: That's Not Funny.

Look. Bill Rauch puts on liberal-themed plays with liberal-themed race and gender themes because he's a liberal and that's what liberals do. As to what the almost completely white audience thinks about it, I haven't a clue. Ashland is a pretty liberal city -- it has no plastic bags and a paper bag fee at the supermarket -- but I doubt if the audience is that liberal.

Still, if I ruled the world, we wouldn't have liberal race and gender drama. We would be exploring the boundaries between the Three Peoples, what being creative really means, and what it really costs. And there would be a lot of moral posturing about rich bitch liberals leading the People of the Subordinate Self into the wilderness and abandoning them there when they were no longer useful to the liberal power project.

But would anyone want to come to my plays?

The Secret Ingredient of Development

Here we are, the developed nations, and what we are worrying about is what to do about the underdeveloped nations.

Should we send aid? Should we send in the technocrats? Should we tax ourselves to help them develop renewable resources?

Maybe none of that works.

In the First World countries we have benefited from first mover advantage. When we mechanized textiles, developed fossil fuel oils, etc., nobody had done it before. But the underdeveloped countries can't even make money out of pre-industrial agriculture because it is much cheaper to produce food with mechanized agriculture.

Politics offers all its usual options: send aid to the developing countries -- oh yeah, like the Poor Law in the 17th to the 18th centuries. Or send credentialed experts and technocrats to teach them how to do it. Only, of course, technocratic development in the First World ain't up to much. And once a government program gets started it gets to be almost impossible to reform or stop it. How about sending money to help the undeveloped countries to skip the evil step of fossil fuel power plants and go directly to renewable resources? Sorry, Charlie, that is just going to create fields of dysfunctional wind turbines and dusty solar panels.

So do the undeveloped countries just have to wait until Apple comes calling to open an assembly plant and Nike comes calling to open a shoe manufactury? Yep, that's about it. When it becomes cheaper to open a factory in Africa than in East Asia or South Asia, that's when Africa will take off.

But hey, there is something that Africans can do about this. They can create a relatively corruption-free economy for the western brands that come calling. I mean this is not that hard. Your western brands are going to do the math. If the sums add up, as the Brits say, then the western brands will start to set up in African countries. If the sums don't add up then the western brands won't come.

A few more things that are real deal-killers: civil war; Boko-Haram kidnapping teenaged girls; South Africa sending out the word to kill Boer farmers; ethnic cleansing.

When you think about it, there is a profound cultural issue here. Business and economic development thrive where tribal conflict has been reduced down to a dull roar, where the whole of life is not taken up in the jealous conflicts between political rivals, and where the land has not been stripped of resources to pay for the ruinous conflicts between the local lords.

That's why I always come down to Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays. Think of it. What sort of economic development could take place when Henry Bolingbroke is duking it out with the Duke of Northumberland's perky kid Harry Percy from 'oop North? Any businessman worth his salt would know to keep away, because where ravenous politicians are casting around for resources to fight their petty fights for domination, in those places there is not much call for doux commerce.

It is funny, is it not, that our friends on the left are utterly clueless about this. For them the issue is that businessmen are The Rich and are denying the poor a just and equitable standard of life, because greed. So they are perfectly willing to bring down the temple and destroy the economy because Justice.

It all goes to show, I think, that reality, science, facts on the ground have nothing to do with the case. What really matters is the moral imperative of creating the perfect world, either in heaven, or right here on Earth.

Because over and over again political and religious leaders have chosen to fight for justice and Heaven rather than just step back and let people get on with it.

The issue is not that the undeveloped nations of the world are poor and need help. The issue is the utterly unfathomable fact that in the First World, to an extent, people are allowed to get on with their business without having to bow and scrape every moment to get the approval of the local lord.

The miracle of the modern age is that economic development in the First World ever happened at all.

Non-whites Can't Be Racists

When you think about it, the notion that non-whites can't be racist because they don't have power makes complete sense. Or at least to liberals.

It makes complete sense to a liberal once the liberals have made the turn from the race-blind Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s to the race-obsessed Affirmative Action of the 1970s.

After all, how can you justify the swing from race-blindness in the law to race-obsessed quotas, and under-representation without a new theory of race and racism?

No problem, humans are masters at that sort of thing. That's why we invented Reason in the first place, to manage our difficult social relationships and justify ourselves to the wider community.

And really, how do you excuse a flat-out racist like Rev. Al Sharpton or Ta-Nehisi Coates?

Really, I'm surprised you even have to ask the question. You come up with a rationalization that it is OK when we do it. Because power.

Yes, of course, why didn't I think of it. If you don't have the power then you can't be racist! No problem! And if you do have the power then you can't say racist things, not nohow.

But here's a problem for you rationalizers. Let's take Ta-Nehisi Coates who has a good living writing racist chaff for The Atlantic. Coates is employed by the very white Atlantic and gets published by the very white Penguin Random House.

In other words, Ta-Nehisi Coates is what you might call an Uncle Tom, a tame black writing racist screeds for the white Massa. Only this time the Massa is a noble, educated, liberal white Massa not the hateful Southern white plantation Massa of yore.

But if Coates is writing for the white overlords, that means he is writing for The Power, and so anything he writes is probably the most vile and monstrous racist bilge, because it is wrong for the Powerful to write racist bilge. If you are paid and publicized by the white power structure then you can't make racist remarks, because power. That's the Narrative.

Only liberals don't seem to get it. No yet.

We had a perfect example of this over the weekend when the black conservative activist Candace Owens reproduced the tweets of New York Times Korean American darling Sarah Jeong, only where Jeong's racist sexist tweets were anti-white, Candace substituted "Jewish" or "black."  Immediately, Candace's Twitter account was suspended! And only after a Twitter storm had erupted did Twitter admit it had made a mistake and restore her account.

Notice the Power equation here. Candace Owens is a black woman conservative. Hey! That should be about as marginalized as can be, because the liberal lefty ruling class regards such people as, well, gap-toothed? Deplorable? Hey, what about sub-human?

So Candace Owens can't have power, right? And the proof of it is that Twitter's Hate Speech detector detected her right away and the Good Little Girl monitoring Hate Speech at Twitter immediately suspended her account. So no power there, therefore no problem there, right? Candace Owens doesn't have power, therefore she can't a racist. The proof is that the powerful, Twitter, dumped on her.

On the other hand if you are a Korean American woman you can spout off on Twitter at the edge of Hate Speech without getting suspended. Because you are a little darling of the powerful.

Yeah! Sarah Jeong! No problem with her at Twitter. She can spout of anti-white and anti-male drivel all day and Twitter has no problem. And now Jeong is going to work for The New York Times, the epitome of ruling class conventional wisdom! Can you spell Power, baby?

So what happens next? Do liberals and lefties all of a sudden decide that their race game has reached its sell-by date and needs to be replaced with another apology for power?

All I can say is that I just can't wait. After all, powerful people gotta power.

Until the revolution, of course.

What Does Happen When Whites Become a Minority?

As if we didn't know, it turns out to be OK for a Korean American woman that has issued racist tweets in the past to work at the New York Times.

Of course, like any red-blooded American and rock-ribbed Republican, I am outraged, outraged, by the hypocrisy of  The New York Times of "Pooch" Sulzberger.

(Yes, this is the real question of the hour. After "Punch" and then "Pinch" what comes next? I've read "Paunch" and now "Pooch." All good clean all-American fun.)

Seriously, let us think clearly and rationally about all this, by asking a few questions.

Why didn't the race thing just go away after the 1960s Civil Rights Acts? The answer is obvious. No fun. What is the point of passing a law making racial discrimination illegal and then just walking away and leaving the whole thing to the police and the lawyers? That is not the way that politics and religion work. We humans need the vision of a shining city on a hill, and the will to get there. We need a vision of a gloriously diverse and inclusive America, to provide the opportunity for political activists to ply their trade of politics-is-division and march their political armies all over America like Sherman's March Through Georgia until not a single Rebel dares to show his racist, sexist, homophobic face.

Why is it OK for Sarah Jeong to send racist tweets but not white males? The point is that when you are the ruling class you get to make the rules. So you come up with notions that minorities and women cannot be racist because racism is connected with power and minorities and women don't have power. It really doesn't matter what rules you come up with; the rules are there to humiliate and marginalize the "other" which in the case of the white liberal ruling elite is "deplorable" whites that don't vote Democrat.

But what happens when whites become a minority? Well, first of all, the Singaporean philosopher Lee Kuan Yew:

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

Notice what he does not say. He does not say that in multiracial societies the whites are opposed by everyone else. He just says that people divide up by race and religion. And this is nothing new. If you read, e.g., Theodore White and his Making of the President books you will find exhaustive analyses of the Catholic vote, the Irish vote, the Italian vote. and so on. In other words, multicultural voting in the US is nothing new. Notice that today's assumed monolithic white voters are the very people that used to be divided by ethnic origin and religion.

So what will happen in the US as whites become just another minority? I  think the answer is obvious. The two political parties will adapt. Instead of the Republican Party remaining a white party and the Democratic Party the home of minorities the Republicans will pick up another minority. Will it be East Asians? South Asians? Will Latinos divide? John Derbyshire, an ex-Brit married to an East Asian, writes about Ice People and Sun People. Would that be the divide? The point is that politics is division, and the political genius is the guy that divides up the nation so that he gets 51% of the vote (or a majority in the Electoral College).

What about Donald Trump's effort to rally Americans as Americans? I don't know about you but it is pretty obvious to me that Donald Trump's political game is to divide America between Americans that think that America is the last best hope on Earth and Americans that think that "America was never great." This rather obviously divides America between American nationalists on the one hand, and a coalition of globalists and minorities, the intellectual elite that experiences the world as their oyster and the minorities that experience themselves as embattled and separated from the American mainstream. Trump is rather obviously trying to win over, e.g., blacks with proposals for criminal justice reform. Will he succeed? Who knows?

Will the left succeed in dividing us into the "woke" and the rest? Who knows? I'd say this. In my view the current multicultural politics arose out of the failure of the original Marxian plan to divide us up by class, between the working class and the middle class. It turned out that the working class identified first of all with their nations, not with their class. So, led by the Frankfurt School, the left went on to divide people by race and gender. And then between straight and gay. And now between legal residents and illegal residents. Now it may be that this progression of dividing lines is pure genius, or it may be that the progression is merely reactive and tactical, a grasping at straws in the instinctive knowledge that the politician must have a way to divide the sheep from the goats. My instinct is that the left does not really understand what it is doing, an it derives from the assumption that "they are all idiots," and that political activists know nothing except how to pick at peoples' scabs.

One thing at which political leaders excel. Once they have got you into their rank and file they make it very difficult for you to leave. This relates to the curious way in which it is very hard for a soldier to desert from his army, especially in enemy territory. If you work for the government, it is hard to leave because you leave behind your pension benefits. If you work for a corporation, it is hard to leave behind the comforts of a big organization and great health insurance. If you are an American citizen you hang on like grim death to your Social Security and Medicare benefits.

And even if the government utterly ruins the country, like the government of Venezuela, what can the ordinary Venezuelan do about it?

Like I say: the way to unify a people is to start a war. Oh, and you better win it!

When Your Faith is in Force

The latest wizard wheeze from our liberal friends is the plastic straw ban. Because plastic in the oceans, although the plastic in the oceans comes mainly from poor countries that don't pick up their garbage. Kinda like the homeless in Seattle.

And then there is the piece in NRO about the debacle of Liz Warren's favorite wizard wheeze, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was to be a special sovereign agency paid out of the Federal Reserve System with perpetual Democratic directors. What did the Democrats think they were doing?

And then there is the foolish idea of Medicare-for-all, as a perpetual administrative bureaucracy detached from the price system. So what the Democrats really want is VA healthcare for all.

I will tell you what the problem is. These liberals and Democrats and lefties have a saving faith, that politics will heal the sins of the world. Sorry Charlie.  No it won't. Because your gospel of politics is a gospel of force.

That is why I have developed my maxims: Politics is Division, so if you believe in politics you believe in setting Americans against each other. Government is Force, so if you support any government program you are saying that peaceful cooperation has failed, and that the only solution is brute force. And System is Domination, so if you are proposing some administrative solution to a problem you are proposing that only domination and hegemony is the solution.

Now, I was reading a piece from a good Democratic socialist yesterday, and here is what she said.

The eventual goal is to transform the world to promote everyone’s needs rather than to produce massive profits for a small handful of citizens.

Do you not understand, you foolish woman, that cap-it-al-ism is the best and thus far the only method divined by mankind to do that? All down the agricultural ages the "small handful of citizens" in the ruling elite promoted their needs and the "everyone's needs" went by the board. Then came capitalism and 200 years later even US welfare recipients and sardine fishermen off the west coast of India have smartphones.  Oh yeah. The chaps that brought the smartphones to market have made billions.

Oh, wait. Not quite. The techie chaps are worth billions not because they have socked away the billions in an evil robber-baron castle, but because the market values their companies into the hundreds of billions as it reckons the future profits of the company selling its world-beating technology to the millions.

On the other hand in socialist countries from the Soviet Union to Venezuela the ruling class has made a bundle and the poor have gone  to the wall. How do you like them apples?

Actually, I get this. Because I get that down through the ages, what mattered was the "patch" of land your tribe or nation occupied, with its food-growing potential. Either your group occupied its food-yielding acres or someone else did. Zero-sum world, baby.

But not in the market system. Because now food and resources are universally available for money, and the only question is whether you can offer services on the labor marker or the product market to pay for your food and resources and everything else. Of course you still need to defend your patch of land, your home, from pirates and plunderers. But almost everything is negotiable for money, not by force.

But this only really started 200 years ago. It is still early for everyone to grasp this, and to understand that the utility of force is very clearly circumscribed.

So it is time for foolish Democratic socialists to get with the new world, and shed the failed ideas of the past.

First of all there is the need to avoid invoking force on foolish and petty things, like plastic straws. Government force is only warranted where there is existential peril. Plastic straws don't meet the test.

Secondly, there is the need to let the price system work its magic, making products and services more efficient and less expensive. This cannot happen when products and services are all mewed up by credentials and administrative force, and everything is frozen in place until it breaks catastrophically. Hello health care.

Thirdly, there is the message you are sending to the opposition. When you set up something like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a partisan club to beat the opposition, you are sending the same message as the Bolsheviks: we are in charge, and anyone that disagrees is a saboteur and a wrecker. You really did not intend that, dear liberal friends, did you?

I really don't think that the progressive folks and the Good Little Girls that have been taught to protest really understand what they are saying.

When you want to ban plastic straws, you are saying that you believe in force.

When you want to implement Medicare for All, you are saying you believe in force.

When you set up a regulatory agency so that it cannot be corrected by the opposition party next time it gets in power, you are saying you believe in force.

Surely that can't be true. Because we all believe in Peace.  Correct?