There is Something in the Air

Something I notice: when I am thinking about my American Thinker piece on Friday or Saturday, I often pick a topic that turns out to be what everyone else is thinking too. Today's piece "Defend Conservatism by Going on the Attack" is an example.

Everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Ed Kilgore is writing the same thing. Rush:

The argument is America sucks versus, no, it doesn’t. 

So it's not an argument about "policy." It's a fight over the meaning of America, and the next time we get to do something about it will be in November.

Really, we shouldn't be surprised that all of us normals are resonating in a collective unconscious. Democratic elections are merely a cunning way of doing civil war in the sham fight of an election "campaign" where the "victor" gets to win political power and the loser says "wait until next time." So it is not surprising that conservatives are feeling that we have "got" to win the midterms in November. It is rather obvious what liberals and Democrats want to do to us if they win.

Really liberals? Is this your mobilization and resistance a good idea? To proudly announce to the world that you will impeach President Trump if you win? To call everyone that disagrees with you a "hater?" To pressure the social media giants to deplatform InfoWars guy Alex Jones? Or even worse to take down a campaign video by a Republican woman running for Congress in California?

I keep coming back to The Sixties. That's the last time that the left got off the leash and filled the streets and told America that it sucked. That was when the media breathlessly reported on the amazing Kool Kidz that were changing the world. That was when ordinary non-political people were told they were bigots, and when they unaccountably rallied to GOP politicians that stood for the "silent majority." That was when the Democrats decided to force a Republican president out of office.

But the point is: how did that turn out, Democrats and lefties? It ended up with Bill Clinton running as a moderate. Nobody here but us moderates. And when he proved himself a leftie, the Democrats lost Congress for the first time in 40 years in the 1994 midterms.

Hey, then Democrats ran a bunch of moderates in the 2006 midterms and won back Congress. And Barack Obama ran as a moderate. But as soon as he showed his true colors in office the voters gave the GOP the House in 2010, and the Senate in 2014. And now we have Trump.

Here's how I understand the situation. The lefties are practicing a secular religion and they are trying  to unify it with the government, using the government to legislate their morality -- only they call it "ethics" and "humanism."

The trouble is that, for people on the receiving end, someone else's religion looks like a reign of terror: conform to our faith or face the consequences. And its governmental edicts look like injustice.

So even though the whole ruling-class apparatus of schools, and culture and education are saying what a wonderful thing the left's program is, the fact remains that many people experience it as an attack on their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

See, I think that Rule One in politics is: don't get the other guys riled up. Mobilize your own side, but don't mobilize the opposition.

Only trouble is that Big Government automatically mobilizes the opposition. Notice how all my maxims illustrate the problem: Government is Force, so everyone on the receiving end is going to be mad; Politics is Division, so the more politics the more divided and the more people get aroused to action on both sides; System is Domination, so folks on the receiving end of the governmental bureaucratic system are going to experience Injustice.

And finally: There is no such thing as justice, only injustice. I mean a lot with this simple maxim. I mean that almost all legislation is unjust, because it takes tax money and spends it on a powerful client group. And I mean that even with the most popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. Why can't the care of older Americans be done by voluntary savings and the intervention of the odd billionaire to take care of older citizens impoverished by-no-fault-of-their-own?

In fact, if you look at law, "justice" is something the legal system attempts to provide for someone that has experienced harm from someone else. But, of course, the legal system can never really make the victim of harm whole again, in the sense that no wound can really ever heal so that it seems that it never occurred. All the legal system can to is make a statement that a harm or injustice has been done, make some redress, and that society, by the verdict of the trial, acknowledges the harm done.

And this is why I believe that our lefty friends are chasing a chimera. You cannot achieve justice through politics; you only end up compounding past injustice with new injustice.

Well, we shall shortly find out if I am right. If Republicans do better than expected in the November midterms it will mean that the "silent majority" lives: people that just want to be left alone to wive and thrive and survive without the Sturm und Drang of secular lefty religions with its street marches and protests and banners.

How About "Access to Property, Wealth, and Personal Agency?"

The director of a delightful dramatization of Sense and Sensibility at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Hana S. Sharif, understands the Jane Austen novel as women

navigating a world that denied them access to property, wealth, and personal agency.

That got me to thinking.

First of all, contra feminist agitprop, the key to Sense and Sensibility is not the patriarchal hegemony of evil patriarchal patriarchs working out its evil will on helpless innocent young women but that the two men seeking the hands of our young Dashwood daughters, Elinor and Marianne, are denied access to property, wealth, and personal agency by widowed elderly women. No unsuitable marriages for them! 

So the matriarchy did it! The grande dames (or rich old biddies), Mrs Ferrars and Mrs Smith, are determined to disinherit the young men if they marry the propertyless Dashwood sisters. And the powerful older women are careful to make sure that the young men, Ferrars and Willoughby, do not have professions that might give them some independence from their parental moneybags.

A moment's thought tells us that it must be so in an agricultural hierarchy where the social position of an upper-class family depends on its rents from its rich acres. Everything depends on the prudent management of those riches from one generation to the next. And upper-class women were just  as invested in making strategic marriages as the upper-class men. In fact, according to Gergory Clark in A Farewell to Alms, the agricultural society of Britain was a society of downward mobility, in which second sons (and daughters) descended the social hierarchy from upper class to middle class, and kicked the middle class downward into the lower class. You can see that this is a high-stakes world.

Notice too that the feminist narrative about the patriarchy is really only interested in the upper class. What was life like for the middle class of the towns in the agricultural era? Who knows? But we can guess that the further down the social scale you go, the more life becomes a desperate struggle to stay alive at any cost, hierarchy and patriarchy be damned.

Let us think instead about our own age, and the access to property, wealth, and personal agency afforded to young men and young women.

First of all, in our age we infantilize young people by confining them in government schools and government-ruled universities in which they have very little agency, particularly since all educational institutions are now liberal and ne'er is heard a discouraging word against the liberal ruling class. As for property and wealth, the liberal ruling class has instituted a vast program of debt slavery by encouraging young people to get into debt while obtaining higher education; this seriously hampers their ability to acquire property and wealth and exercise personal agency.

Notice that the way that young people are selected for selective colleges is by toadying to the ruling class party line in their college applications. where is the  access to property, wealth, and personal agency in that?

Also, the characteristic job today is a subordinate position in a vast corporate bureaucracy or hierarchy where young people are taught to be obedient and good team players. Where is the personal agency in that?

And this is not just for deplorables and helpless minorities but well-born scions of the ruling class. They must all get with the program or suffer the consequences, just as it was with Edward Ferrars and John Willoughby back in 1811. Then and  now, if the ruling-class scions get with the program then they are rewarded as their parents and their connections shower them with ruling-class benefits. But woe-betide the rebel.

Are there any rebels in the liberal ruling class? Inquiring minds want to know.

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.