The Pure Theory of Tribalism

I was writing a piece about patriotism vs. nationalism, and experiencing them as "fake tribalism" over the weekend, and in the middle of it got started into Amy Chua's World on Fire and her "market-dominant minority" meme. Her notion is that economically successful minorities like the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia tend to find themselves cast as the enemy of the impoverished ethnic majority. Well, not exactly. It is more that democratic leaders "opportunistically whip up hatred against the resented minority" and propose to loot them and return the country's wealth to the "true owners of the nation."

Why not just say that all political leaders need to establish themselves as the protectors of "us," our tribe, and thus almost inevitably need to advertise a threat from "them," real or imagined, for which the leaders propose to mobilize us in order to prevent our annihilation by the threatening foe. If you are a nationalist leader of a nation not actually threatened by the Huns or the Mongols or the Commies then you have to invent a threat, otherwise what's the point?

So let us begin.

Humans are tribal. We are tribal because hunter-gatherers needed to protect their "patch of land" (as they put it in the Creation story in Fabian Essays in Socialism) from the neighboring tribe. The way this works is that the tribal leader is the first in a band of brothers that unite to fight to protect the patch of land from the enemy. They must fight to the death because if they lose they will be slaughtered by the enemy tribe next door, and their women and children taken over by the neighboring tribe.

Actually, it turns out from War Before Civilization by Lawrence H. Keeley that hunter-gatherer tribes did not have pitched battles, because they could not afford the casualties as we can. Instead they had dawn raids and massacres, both driven, I imagine, by the advantage of surprise. Given that hunter-gatherer tribes had an annual violent death rate of 500 per 100,000, two orders of magnitude greater than our violent death rate here in the good old US and A, you can see that they were right not to go in for pitched battles.

So all the young men in hunter-gatherer tribes were the border police. Their job was to protect the border and stop any dawn raids and massacres. Naturally they developed a warrior culture, and the acme of warrior culture is the concept of Honor, described in Honor, a History by James Bowman as the reputation among men for standing shoulder to shoulder with the tribal brothers to defend their patch of land and not breaking ranks and running away. You can see that this is no accident. Any armed group must be a band of brothers that will always stand together and never flinch when the going gets tough.

Also, each tribe had its shaman, a man that connected the tribe with the meaning of life, the universe and everything through what Jungians would call his connection with the unconscious. So each tribe really had its own religion, as explicated by its tribal initiations, its tribal animal mascot, and the peculiar talents of the local shaman.

The important thing to remember about the tribe is that it was a group of people related by blood. They were all brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts. We all know how, the closer that people are related, the more likely they are to help one another when in difficulty. That would be real helpful in the blood-related hunter-gatherer tribe.

The important thing to realize is that all humans have lived this way from the Dawn of Man down to the Neolithic Revolution, the dawn of agriculture about 12,000 years ago. Studies of chimpanzees described by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn indicate that they have a similar culture, occupying food-growing land and defending the border by means of young males attacking any border violator in a three-against-one massacre.

So the notion of the tribe united against threats and dangers from without is programmed deep into our DNA. It must be so, because without a defended food-growing territory it is, as Bugs Bunny said, "curtains."

However, in the last 12,000 years, with agriculture, and more recently industry, humans have created a society where the men are not all enrolled into the border protection force. Most men in the agricultural age became farmers, converting their strength and aggression from defense into plowing and reaping. Most men in the industrial age have "jobs" and work in the exchange economy for wages. This is a far cry from the hunting and border defense of the old days, and humans have had to learn to adapt and live in new ways.

But under it all we are still tribesmen; we men still respect men of courage. And we are still ready to rally to our brothers if called by our tribal leaders to face the foe.

It stands to reason, therefore, that as mankind moved into the agricultural era and now the industrial era, we would need to adapt our tribal ways to the new realities.

And the most important thing we did was to adapt our tribes and tribalism to the new order. We invented new ways of belonging, not just to the old tribe of the kindred, but to new "fake" tribes, where people not related by blood came to experience each other as the moral equivalent of blood brothers.

We shall see next how this worked in the agricultural age.

The Dilemma of the Well-born Human

Contrary to the notion that the Big Problem of life, the universe, and everything is The Poor and Marginalized, described in the 19th century as "the Social Question," I argue that the Big Problem is what to do about the Well Born, the child of a prosperous, or powerful, or educated family.

See, if you are the child of, shall we say, "privilege," then any life significantly less notable than your parents is shameful, a descent into anonymity. And that is often demoralizing. And yet, if you are, say, the child of a notable, such as the recently deceased Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), what are the chances that you would ever equal the life and notoriety of your noble father? Pretty low, alas.

Think of it. Suppose you are Prince Hal, son of the Henry IV who seized the throne of England. Why, the only thing to do is to seize the throne of France. At which young Hal failed despite winning the Battle of Agincourt.

Or suppose you are the son of John D. Rockefeller, inventor of the fossil fuel industry. We know next to nothing about him.

Of course, sometimes the son of a local notable goes on to become world-famous. Heinrich Marx was the leading lawyer in Trier, in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, in the early 19th century. His son never really amounted to much, except that, with the help of another rich kid, he penned two of the most famous political titles ever: the Communist Manifesto and Capital.

And that is what every progressive rich kid has wanted to emulate, ever since.

In my view, the situation of a young Karl Marx is iconic for well-born young people in our age. What  can they do with their lives to make them special? To be just an ordinary educated bourgeois family man is a humiliation. And now we have the same problem with well-born women, as Christopher DeGroot describes it, in taking apart a lefty analysis of sexism. Here is the problem, as the lefty scholars describe it.

[Their analysis] defines prevailing sexism in a market as the extent to which its residents believe that: (i) that women’s capacities are inferior to men’s; (ii) that the family unit is hurt when women focus on activities outside the home; or (iii) that men and women should occupy specific, distinct roles in society.

They are talking, of course, about the success or lack of success of women in the workplace and in notable careers such as politics, business, and the academy.

These lefty academics take it as Written that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is to have a meaningful career. And they believe (i) that women have the same interest in notable careers as men; (ii) that women's lives are hurt when women focus on activities inside the home; and (iii) that men and woman should occupy, in equal proportion, the various distinct roles in society.

Which is fine for people like them. If you want to believe that the meaning of life is a fulfilling career then go ahead. But what about the rest of us? Suppose there are  people in the world that believe that career and conventional success are false gods? What then?

The consequence of  the ideology of careers for women means that, if a well-born woman in today's world does not create a notable life for herself in addition to marriage and children, she is looked down upon by the other women in the well-born Mean Girls clique. In fact she might herself unwelcome in the well-born Mean Girls clique.

And this is wrong. Whatabout a woman like the Saigon domestic servant I mentioned in my piece yesterday. What she would not give for a responsible husband and a settled home from which she could launch her children into the world! What she would give not to be living on the edge, cadging life from the accidents of fate?

Whatabout the deplorable women in Rust Belt states?  They would love for their husbands to have stable, well-paying jobs so they could attend to children and family and contribute to neighborhood groups and activities!

Whatabout the well-born women that really aren't inspired by a corporate career, or "activism," or advanced degrees? They would love for the traditional roles for women to get a little respect, so the Mean Girls wouldn't look down on them so much.

And this is why we need my reductive Three Peoples theory. See, your academics coming up with another crap theory about sexism would never do that if they had read, learned, and inwardly digested my Three Peoples theory.

For instead of their mindless left-liberal obsession with "sexism" they would say to themselves: I wonder what kind of of life would be considered the best by your average Person of the Subordinate Self, a woman recently arrived in the city from the country and wondering what kind of life she could hope for? What would float her boat? Earth to lefty! I don't think she would be thinking too much about an advanced degree and a professional career. And I don't think that "you priests" should be indoctrinating her with your secular religion to become that kind of person.

And what about our Person of the Responsible Self, a woman that goes to church, that wants a good marriage and several children? Are we to tell her to forget the children and get thee unto a corporation? Is she to be ashamed of her interest in nursing? Or her decision to home-school her children? The truth is that the vast  majority of people are perfectly content to live a quiet responsible live in a network of friends and family, and don't feel the need to get their name up in lights. And I don't think that "you priests" should be shaming her as an ignorant religious bigot.

Finally we come to our Person of the Creative Self. Does such a woman have to fit her life into the strait-jacket of approved left-liberal life trajectories, which always seems to mean a bureaucratic career in a credentialed job that has street-cred among the urban professional classes?

See, I think that the approved life trajectories negate the very idea of the Creative Self. If you go to university and get an advanced degree, and then go into government, or the academy, or corporate life, you are really living as a dull routinist. Peter Thiel points out the issue in the very title of his From Zero to One. He is saying that any creative endeavor represents going from nothing to something, starting in a trackless waste, and then bringing it to order. And that is a very hard thing to do. It is like deciding to become a writer, where the truth is that many people would like to be a writer, but very few people have the chops to do it.

Do you see what I am saying? I am saying that any creative life cannot be a routine thing, mapped out and gridded by routine left-liberal academics, and the acquisition of approved academic credentials. Because creativity is surprise; it is the eruption of the unexpected. It cannot be made to order, and marked out by political activists, and judged according to the self-appointed priesthood of the arc of history.

In other words, Sorry Charlie. You well-born scions of the notable may wish to conquer the world with your educated and evolved "good taste." But the world wants ideas that "taste good." Not the approved notions of the creative class to change the world according to their priestly dicta, but the accidental creations that turn out to change the world.

When you grasp this then the utter failure of the left to realize their vision over the last century and a half makes sense. The left imagines that it grasps the meaning of life, the universe, and everything and that all that remains is to execute on the politics and the ideology to bring this vision to reality. But that is not how the world works. Real creativity, real change, is not a planned or routine thing. It is the eruption of the unexpected, an accident: a resolution, if you like, of the uncertainties of a state function.

And for those, the well-born and the would-be notable, there is the truth that in the field of creativity, many are called but few are chosen.

And so, the Great Question of our age is not the mapping out of the meaning of creativity as "rigidly defined areas of uncertainty and doubt," and the enforcement of diversity and inclusion, but the problem of creating meaning for those millions of would-be creatives that were called but not chosen.

Life as it Used to Be

I was to the dentist today, and the dentist opined about the frightfulness of things. Since I had a cotton wad in my mouth I couldn't contradict her.

Because, even with the ongoing refusal of the Democrats to admit they lost fair and square in 2016, the world is a pretty wonderful place for us deplorables here in the land of the free and the brave.

But Linh Dinh writes from Saigon about life -- as it used to be almost everywhere. Not exactly nasty, brutish and short, but certainly very precarious. For instance, back in the good old days, people either had servants or they were servants. Dinh writes about a servant in Saigon, one of ten siblings, whose father was a drunk and beat her mother.

And my "domestic violence, we are not just  talking about in the house. Neighborhood violence was not uncommon. The servant's relatives got into a meat-cleaver fight with neighbors involving nearly-severed arms, and after that she was afraid to go to school, so she is illiterate.

At age 16 she took the bus to Saigon and eventually got a restaurant job for $23 a month, including room and board. She married a Cambodian, but he soon stopped working and started drinking. So back to the city, and a job for $500 a month working till midnight looking after two kids and enduring the mistress accusing her of theft. Now she's working for $345 a month looking after a baby. But her 15-year-old son has a factory job and her 13-year-old daughter is working as a domestic servant and apprenticing at the same factory. So life is good, as she shows Dinh a picture of her father on her cellphone.

Yeah. Funny thing about that factory work, that is supposed to be so demeaning. Compared to what? Working in the rice paddies? Work as a domestic servant? The fact is that, all over  the  world, for the last 200 years, people have walked off the land to the city as fast as they can, because life in the city is good. They walked off the land in Britain 200 years ago to work in the coal mines. They sailed in coffin ships from Ireland to fall onto the dock in Boston more dead that alive. They took ship from the starving Scandinavia of the 1890s to end up in Minnesota. Life was hard in the city, but by God it was better than starving on the farm.

So life is good in Saigon.

Ỵ has many changes of clothes, tasteful fake eyebrows, persuasive false teeth and a used cellphone, bought for just $15. Two years ago, she purchased her second stolen motorbike, this time for $65. Most domestic servants can only afford bicycles.

Yes, imagine that. A cellphone for a 3rd world domestic servant. Now, back when I was in Thailand in the mid 2000s, they told me that a used 100ml motorbike was $300. But I guess the stolen ones go cheaper. Vietnam per-capita GDP in 2016: $2,185. Compare to US at $57,000.

But, wait a moment. Here we have a poor woman in Saigon. And she has cellphone and a motorbike. What a world!

I remember reading about the workers at a Nike factory in Vietnam. They asked the workers what they liked best about working for Nike. The reply: Working indoors. Next best thing? Getting a job at the Nike factory for their relatives.

Meanwhile, in the US, the Census Bureau reports: "There are no jobs Americans won’t do, poor citizens hurt by illegal immigration." Imagine that!

I know what you are thinking. Is  the Census Bureau allowed to do studies like that?

Wat? Patriotism vs. Nationalism

In the aftermath of the death of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) there are a number of articles out about the difference between patriotism (good) and nationalism (bad).

In The American Spectator Ralph Benko, after Adam Gopnik, defines patriotism vs. nationalism thus:

The patriot loves his place and its cheeses and its people and its idiosyncrasies; the nationalist has no particular sense of affection for the actual place he advocates for... but channels his obsessive grievances into acts of ethnic vengeance.

Then Jonah Goldberg calls John McCain a patriot (good) and President Trump a nationalist (bad). Actually, it is not too clear to me how Jonah defines patriotism, beyond that

McCain's worldview was, properly speaking, patriotic, not nationalistic, in that it was credal, bound up in democratic principles. 

For John McCain wanted to form an international organization:

[I]n 2007, for instance, McCain proposed creating a League of Democracies to counter the influence of the United Nations and other organizations that do not really care about democratic values.

Here's National Review's Jim Geraghty on America as a war against identity politics.

Identity politics in the American context almost inevitably carries an undercurrent of “we, in this group, are the good Americans; those, in that group, are the bad Americans.” Whether we like to admit it or not, that’s a near-dominant theme in our modern politics and our arguments on social media.

 But America was supposed to be different.

The point of the American experiment, fueled in large part by Europeans fleeing a continent full of rigid class roles, limited opportunities, political and religious repression, was to create a country where you could be whatever you wanted to be, and your group identity didn’t matter.

Well, I'm sorry. This is all so much special pleading for the author's own preferred mode of tribalism, the principle on which the "we" and the "they" is defined.

So let us try to understand what is going on, from my point of  view.

The basic fact is that humans are tribal: we are social animals. We protect ourselves from the rest of the world by defending our patch of land from pirates and plunderers, and we do that by banding together in tribes. From time immemorial this tribe has been a tribe of the kindred, of people fairly closely related by blood, defended from the world by the armed might of their men.

But certainly since the dawn of agriculture, things have been more complicated than that, because the first thing that happened, with the dawn of agriculture in the Middle East, was the agricultural empire. The empire could not really be a tribe of the kindred, so we humans started to fake the tribal thing.

We started to develop the notion that the Pharaoh or the King, or even God, was the Father of us all. So we were not a bunch of warring clans, but really children united into the greater family of the abstract Father. Not the tribe of blood relationship but the abstract notion of relationship, as children of the king, or children of God, created a new sense of belonging.

I tell you what I think of that. I think it is brilliant. Fake tribes! Who would have thought it!

In the feudal era we have the notion that the feudal lord was the father of his vassals. And there was a certain fatherly duty that the lord owed his vassals and his serfs, one of which was to defend them against other feudal lords.

But then came the end of the feudal era in Europe, and the rise of the absolute monarchs, so a new sense of belonging and membership was needed. Enter the nation state, the notion that the basic unit of  human membership was not the feudal principality but the kingdom, with its king, its language, its  people, its history, and its sacred land.

Of course, the idea that Britain or France was a single nation with sacred borders and a divine right of  kings was a bunch of made-up baloney, a new notion of membership that was needed because if you  were not a strong nation in the Europe of 500 years ago you got stomped on.

For instance Germany, in the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648. In those days Germany was a collection of smaller states headed by princes and counts and bishops. So the nations of Sweden and France felt free to march all over Germany and strip the German peasants of their food. About a third of Germans died in the war. You can imagine that the Germans really fell in love with the national idea after being tromped on for thirty years by the lovely French, but it look them 200 years and the genius of Bismarck to actually make them into a nation.

Or Austria in 1900. Suppose you were a German speaker in Austria. Austria was a multicultural empire, presided over by the German-speaking Hapsburgs, but it had slowly given more and more autonomy to the various nationalities: Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, Serbs. If you were a chap like  the young Adolf Hitler, the outlook for German speakers looked pretty bleak. So why not have a Greater Germany, a Großdeutschland, of all the German speakers?

Cool idea, Adolf, except that where would you stop? At the Austrian Anschluss? At the annexation of German-speaking Czechoslovakia? The German speakers in Poland? Hey, what about western Russia, which had been importing good German farmers for centuries? You can cook up a reason to invade just about anywhere, if you have an army and a mind to do so.

Obviously, the national idea, for all its genius in promoting the idea of all Brits or all Germans or all Americans as one tribe, all in it together, can get out of hand.

Anyway, starting in the mid 19th century a new notion of fake tribal membership began, with the idea of all the workers of the world belonging to an imagined international community of workers. In this formulation, the workers were "we" and the bourgeoisie was "they." Workers of the World Unite!

Cool idea, except that in World War I the various workers of the world fought for their nations, and not for the workers of the world. Plus, we have learned in the decades since, the idea of a workers' state is a bad one, that leads to starvation, mass murder, and secular religious wars.

Meanwhile a new form of membership was growing up with the rise of global capitalism. Lots of people started working for large corporations, and when not angered by layoffs and wage-cuts during recessions and depressions, seemed to like the neo-feudal community of the big corporation. Here is a piece about the relative contentment of Amazon workers.

Meanwhile, the left, that invented the idea of worker solidarity, found it necessary to invent a new form of membership: race and gender solidarity, what we now call identity politics.

In my view it makes sense. The left does not like nation states, because colonialism and imperialism and aggressive nationalism and fascism. But if you are not going to organize politically around the nation, then what? The answer is to organize around sub-national groupings, such as race and gender, what Steve Sailer calls the Coalition of the Fringes.

The problem is, I suggest, that setting all the non-whites against the whites, and all the women and non-hetero-males against toxic white masculinity, means that the defining membership idea is not longer the nation, but the sub-national tribal identity. The assumption of the left is that they can manage all the disputes among their Coalition of the Fringes, especially if it can keep them united against the eevil white heterosexual male. But if you ask me identity politics leads straight to civil war.

Enter Donald Trump. He is proposing to reestablish the nation as the basic membership unit, as in Make America Great Again. But there is a problem. Do you see what it is?

The problem is that politics is division; if there is an "us" then there must be a "them" to unite the "us." In the old nation state this was, for the Brits, the French; and for the French, the Germans. And for the US, since World War II, the Soviets. And latterly the Islamofascists. So there must be an enemy, otherwise politics is not needed.

So Donald Trump came up with the brilliant idea to blame everything on multinational trade deals and immigration. Other countries, or international bureaucrats, were stiffing the American worker. But Trump would fight for the American worker, by renegotiating trade deals, Oh, and on immigrants that were taking jobs away from American workers.

Do you see the genius in this? It unites all Americans, male, female, white, black, Latino, and Asian into one community, of Americans that want to Make America Great Again. And it doesn't propose waging actual war on Mexico or Canada or China in order to do so.

Really, the only people that might be opposed to this agenda would be the international educated elite that can always get a visa to work abroad as visiting professor, or working for an international agency, or getting transferred to a foreign subsidiary of a global corporation. Because the current system runs as though it were designed to benefit people like them.

My point is this. There is always going to be tribalism. The only question is: which one? The old tribalism of the blood kindred is dead and buried. And, believe me, we won't have world government until we detect the Martians coming to attack us. So we humans have to devise a workable abstract tribalism based on some principle other than kinship. So we invent fake kinship.

Personally I believe that nationalism is the best thing going, the idea of a people, living in a sacred space, joined together by some fake national myth. Not because nationalism is so great, but because every other -ism is so stupid.

But the worst thing going is the identity politics of the left, the idea that, after two centuries of the Great Enrichment from $3 per person per day to $150 per person per day, that this group or that group is horribly oppressed and exploited and has nothing in common with the average white middle-class married, patriotic family man.

The Two Paths: for Rich Kids After the Death of God

Today the formerly-Facebook-censored Dennis Prager issued part 3 of his "Explaining the Left" series. Quoting Victor Frankl, he writes:

[T]he greatest drive of man is meaning.

Frankl's book is titled "Man's Search for Meaning." And golly, whaddya know, Jordan B. Peterson's book is titled "Maps of Meaning."

That is what God and religion down the ages is all about. As Douglas Adams jokes in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: it's "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

But now God is Dead, at least to the educated people of the West. So what do we do? The Left is one answer to that question. Prager:

The answer to the great dearth of meaning left by the death of biblical religion in the West is secular religion. The first two great secular substitutes were communism and Nazism. The first provided hundreds of millions of people with meaning; the latter provided most Germans and Austrians with meaning.

In particular, both ideologies provided the intellectual class with meaning. No groups believed in communism and Nazism more than intellectuals. Like everyone else, secular intellectuals need meaning, and when this need was combined with intellectuals' love of ideas (especially new ideas -- "new" is almost erotic in the power of its appeal to secular intellectuals), communism and Nazism became potent ideologies.

And, after Communism and Nazism failed the God is Dead crowd, inspired by the Frankfurt School, adapted a new secular religion. You will notice that it curiously combines the class warfare of Communism with the race warfare of Nazism.

What is notable about both Communism and Nazism and the modern derivative we call postmodernism, or political correctness, or "woke" -ness, is that it is a doctrine of political power: we will redeem the world with a political movement to eliminate the sins of the world.

It is telling that the old religions all conceded that we were not going to be able to create a heaven on Earth. Eternal Bliss was only available in the afterlife, and only to the folks that got with God in this life. But with the growth of science, maybe we could do better!

Now it is my belief that the left's faith in politics is a Great Reaction, a nostalgic move back to the old days when political or military power was all in all, because it was needed to defend your tribe's patch of land and its life-giving food. In that world you had to be perpetually armed against all others, because only one tribe could eat the food from a patch of land.

So I understand the left's secular religion as a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the Death of God. The left is reacting rather as the Germans reacted after the disaster of World War I. This most advanced country in the world -- that had invented modern philosophy, modern cars, modern physics -- returned to the pre-modern faith in race and land. People normally do this when the world turns against them, according to new-age philosopher Ken Wilber. They instinctively seek a return to "what worked."

But here's the thing. There is an alternative to the left's nostalgia, and it has been here all along and, in many ways, it reflects the left's return to the past, with a difference. We are talking about the cultural movement represented by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jung, Frankl, and people like Joseph Campbell, and this year's sensation, Jordan B. Peterson. All of these people are looking back to the old religions to figure out what religion and myth were all about, and then used their new understanding of the role of religion and myth in human life in order to inform the present.

If you read Campbell, and I just checked through my late mother's copy of Creative Mythology, you find copious references to Nietzsche and Jung. Ditto Peterson. So what is going on?

I will tell you what I think.

The rise of science in the last millennium has changed the way we think about the world. In the old days we used to think that God created the world and all we could hope to do was to live in it according to his plan. But science has taught us that we can learn a lot about how the world works, and successfully do something about it. In other words, we are now able to go about the world creating things. So Creation is no longer a monopoly of God. Mankind has figured how to get in on  the creative action.

That is why the top dogs of my reductive Three Peoples theory are the People of the Creative Self. We are people that realize that we are not born into this world to be subordinate peasants or merely responsible individuals. We are called into the world to create.

The lefties have chosen to create according to a Gospel of Force. They will use force, through politics and government, to wash away the sins of the world, inequality, oppression, exploitation, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia and create a new world.

But the gospel of Nietzsche is different. He tells us not to change the world but to change ourselves, to "become who you are," to go on an individual journey of self-discovery like his Zarathustra, to rise above the herd and become exceptional.

The gospel of Campbell is to live The Hero's Journey of myth and descend into the underworld (i.e., the unconscious) and only after you have learned your lessons well to return to the world to give your life and knowledge to your fellow humans. The gospel of Peterson is to live on the edge of order and chaos and become the Sacrificial Hero that dies to redeem the world.

Notice the difference between the two gospels? One is a gospel of force, conducted by people who already know what the world needs. The other is a gospel of self-discovery, conducted by people who know they have have a lot to learn, and that one day, by the grace of God, they may find a way to benefit their fellow humans.

Notice that even at the level of economics the differences are stark. The lefties already know what needs to be done: the only thing necessary is to encode their doctrine in beneficial legislation, even to the extent of molding the entire economy into a government administrative bureaucracy.  But the market economy requires each of us to go out into the world to discover how each of us might find something with which to contribute our labor and our skills and our ideas to the world. Only after self-discovery do we find out what our contribution might be.

It is telling that Peter Thiel's book about the market economy is called From Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build  the Future. Yeah. How do you get from Zero to One?

It needs to be said that the life of creative discovery is much more challenging than the life of a subordinate peasant or modern "victim," and also more challenging than the life of a responsible citizen and worker. It is not for everyone, nor yet for everyman.

But let it be said that, for the well-born, folks that have had all the advantages of being born to intelligent and resourceful parents, there are Two Paths. One path is the nostalgia of political "activism," that has bewitched young rich kids ever since Marx and Engels. The other path is the existential challenge of self-discovery in the hope of one day getting from Zero to One.

One of the Two Paths fails in blood and misery every time it is tried. The other has brought us from $3 per person per day to the present $150 per day, and a world of astonishing peace and trust.

And we, each one of us, get to choose which path to take. What a world.

The Problem with Grand Strategy for Empires

Just in the last few days I have encountered articles proposing that Presidents Xi of China and Putin of Russia are strategic geniuses setting their countries up for global domination.

The Chinese one was from "Spengler," or David P. Goldman. He thinks that the Trump tariff threats are a strategic error because the Chinese economy is much stronger than Trump's advisors (and also supply-sider Art Laffer) think. Anyway China is in the midst of an economic transition at the end of which it will rule the world.

Deng Xiaoping began a convulsive transformation in 1979, launching the largest migration in world history, a movement of 550 million from countryside to city – two Americas, or the whole of Europe from the Urals to the Orkneys. Xi Jinping is presiding over another convulsive transformation, from a smokestack-and-export economy to a high-value-added, consumption-focused economy.

In the first transition "Thousands of years of custom, habit and history have been uprooted in a single generation, and China has created a new people." In the second:

China is engaged in a second transformation, from a country of industrial workers one generation removed from the farm, to an economy led by technology and services. And the Chinese propose to accomplish this in a single generation, while shifting a great deal of their industrial operations to cheap-labor venues from Turkey to Malaysia. That is part of the object of the One Belt/One Road initiative.

Well, yeah. Maybe. Or maybe the top-down my-way-or-the-highway ideology isn't that well adapted to the creation of a creative market-driven economy of "technology and services." Maybe the folks left behind, like the white working class in the US, will rebel at being catapulted into the 22nd century.

OK, now let's look at Russia, where Andrei Martyanov thinks that Putin is the second Pyotr Stolypin. Stolypin was Prime Minister of Russia in the aftermath of the failed 1905 Revolution.

[Stolypin's] strategic dictum was simple to grasp: “Give Russia 20 years of internal and external peace and quiet and it will change beyond recognition.” Vladimir Putin and his team follow this dictum to the letter.

And the major objective of this, then and now, is to be a world-class military power. China seems to agree too, as they build a blue-water navy.

But I think this is all rubbish.

Look, I think it is great that Russia and China are serious about playing catchup. This chart from usgovernmentspending.com shows what they need to do on the GDP front.

This chart shows that Russia, China, and India are all playing catchup with the West and Japan. So yeah, they should all be copying what we are doing and becoming global, trading nations that live by trade rather than political domination.

But then what? That is where the strategic mindset fails. For it assumes that power is everything, and that the wise ruler should have a long-term power plan going out to the near horizon.

Frankly, I doubt that.

Put it this way. The US, you might notice, is on the top of the heap, GDP-wise. Did the US come up with a magnificent strategy 100 years ago about how to rule the world? Hardly. We just stumbled and bumbled along, as usual, making it up as we went along. And along the way we were the leaders in a number of technological revolutions, from electricity to air transport to computers and the internet. All completely unforeseen by the smart set. So it is probably a good thing that our ruling class didn't have a clue, because sure as can be, whatever grand strategy we might have formulated in 1900 or 1950 would have been useless in 2020.

OK, so we did have a grand strategy from 1950 to 1990, to "contain" communism. And it worked.

Moreover, the grand strategists are usually backward looking, trying to keep the existing regime going, and usually making a mess of it. Think of the German and Russian and Austrian emperors that bumbled into World War I and crumbled into dust, giving us the Great Reaction that featured Bolshevism and Fascism. Think of Hitler's grand strategy of blood and soil. Think of Mao ZeDong's strategy of cultural revolution.

Right now, for instance, in the United States, the ruling class is transfixed with the idea of erasing the guilt of colonialism and racism and the age-old subjection of women. Is this a brilliant idea or a Great Reaction into a neo-oppressive politics that subjects the entire population to the latest wizard wheezes of intersectional crazies? My belief is that the current ruling-class obsessions have nothing to do with the case. It is all just the posturing of rich kids, churned out by our elite finishing schools, that have been educated in useless mush.

No wait. When you think about it, the ruling class is doing the sensible thing. By filling young elite heads full of mush they are making sure that the little geniuses never have an original thought in their heads and thus never think how the whole ruling class ideology sucks from head to tail.

Look. Of course Russia and China need to play catch-up. And they need to stay out of trouble and let the market breed peace and prosperity, and lead their people out of the country into the city and then socialize them to the market economy.

But as to what happens after that, let's be clear. Nobody has a clue. If Russia and China look to emulating the US so they can become world hegemons in their turn, I have this to say to them.

When you guys reach up to US levels of GDP, meaning that your intangible capital reaches to 80 percent of total capital just like it is here, then the game will have changed.

I hope that the US will have stumbled onto the right road by that time, in accordance with Bismarck's dictum that there is a "special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America."

But you never know.

Great Reaction: The Story So Far

For me, the great social movements that have dominated the headlines and dug the mass graves of the last century and a half -- Communism, the welfare state, environmentalism, identity politics -- amount to a Great Reaction against the most astonishing event in world history, the Double Revolution, that in physics that has given us relativity and quantum mechanics, and in everyday life has given us the market economy.

When the world is suddenly utterly changed it is natural for people to look back to the past. New-age philosopher Ken Wilber describes it as people stepping back to "what worked" when it seems that things are all going to hell around them. So of course, with the unparalleled changes of the last two centuries there are many people that yearn for an older simpler time.

This nostaglia was evoked by Archie Bunker in the title song of All in the Family, "Those Were the Days" of the time when "Girls were girls and men were men." And the whole point of All in the Family was to sneer at the white working class that was all of a sudden finding itself left behind by history. Or at least by the ruling class.

Or, in a less innocent manner, it was natural for the Germans to revert to blood and soil after the disaster of World War I. And that is what Hitler offered them: a pure Aryan race, and a Drang nach Osten for land to the east of Germany. Absolute insanity for the nation that had invented the automobile and the new physics and left behind the old faith of slave-farmer Gerald O'Hara that "land was the only thing that lasts."

Every effort in the Great Reaction is to re-invent some social or religious or economic facet of the good old days, so my way of illustrating this is to "neo" everything about it.

Most obviously, there is the neo-feudalism of the welfare state. In the good old days of feudalism, the peasants were held in thrall, as semi-slaves, to the warrior class. The peasants tilled the fields and grew the food, and surrendered a good part of their labor to their lord in return for his protection against pirates and other lords that might come and relieve the peasants of their food and land. Same thing now: the ruling class makes all kinds of promises to the workers and offers all kinds of benefits, and people feel secure in their work and in their lives. But this is an illusion, a confidence trick. As the feudal peasants found out when the lords threw them over, and as  the white working class has found when the ruling class went global about half a century ago.

Then there is the neo-tribalism of identity politics, that unscrupulous politicians and ideologues use to divide modern voters into race and religious and gender tribes. In the modern era we have tried to use the nation state to create a new kind of membership, to get people to feel membership in something bigger than their kindred and their tribe. But the truth is that our natural human instinct is for the clan of about 120 people, and any politician worth his salt knows how to activate those ancient instincts.

How about the neo-piracy or neo-plunder of modern taxation? Back in the old days under slavery the lords would appropriate as much of the slaves' or serfs' production as possible. Then in the 19th century the expropriation of taxation came as low as 10 percent of GDP. Now it is back up to 35-40 percent in the advanced countries. But what is this expropriation but a return to the old days when the way to get rich was to steal resources from the neighboring tribe? We are better than that, because for us wealth comes from the ideas and labor of humans and the knowledge in between their ears.

Then there is the need to propitiate the gods, in neo-sacrifice. In the good old days humans would sacrifice animals -- or even the first-born son as Abraham nearly did with Isaac -- to propitiate the anger of the gods. René Girard proposed the notion of the scapegoat, an individual sacrificed to carry all the blame for social discord, as a way to restore social harmony in a social group divided by conflict. Our modern politicians are masters at this. Recessions and financial crashes are never the result of reckless government policy but always the fault of greedy bankers and speculators. Or The Jews. The disasters of socialist regimes are always due to "saboteurs and wreckers." Also, of course, we have the environmental movement that wants us to "live simply so that others may simply live" which assumes that there is a fixed amount of resources and that my sacrifice is needed to put food in the mouth of somebody else.

Don't forget the rise of neo-guilt. Nietzsche blames Christianity and "the priests" for the widespread incidence of guilt. He represents this as a cunning trick to get us to turn our healthy tribal hate and cruelty back on ourselves. I like to propose a more innocent notion, that turning warrior rage back on ourselves in Original Sin tames us for the market economy in the city where Viking berserkers are really not helpful to a prosperous economy. Back in the day our modern evangelizers were, like Nietzsche, anti-guilt and anti-Christian. But now all the best people are trying to make white people guilty about their "white privilege" and men guilty about their "toxic masculinity." I think we need a new history of guilt so that we can really understand the social origin and significance of guilt.

One of the most obvious manifestations of the Great Reaction is the emergence of the neo-tyranny of totalitarianism. It's remarkable that, despite the universal horror of tyranny, of man's inhumanity to man, we have seen the most tyrannous political regimes in history in living memory: Stalinism, Hitlerism, and Maoism, and various lesser lights. And here in the United States we have the neo-tyranny of the politically correct to stamp out "hate speech" using the power of the state.

Now my judgement is that these neo-isms reflect basic human instincts that cannot really be abolished. The fact is that many people prefer to live in subordination, and thus we will always need institutions in which they can diminish the risks and rewards of life. But I'd say that it is best for such people to go work for a corporation rather than saddle us with the weight of the welfare state. We humans are tribal down to our toes, but we are also smart enough to imagine new, less exclusive, ways of belonging. We humans need ways to resolve conflict, but we can surely find new ways to do that without blood sacrifice and guilt-tripping whole communities.

And surely there is a higher, better way to provide for common needs than by taxing -- that is, taking by force -- from every worker over a third of his wage.

The Great Reaction is a challenge to us all to imagine something for this age, after the Double Revolution of modern physics and the modern economy, something higher and better than a cowardly return to Old Ways of olden times.