Our Big Woman Problem. Again.

Over a century ago, the German sociologist Georg Simmel opined that women were going to change the world. Given the decline in the need for women to do domestic tasks by hand women would venture out into the public square, and inevitably they would change it.

Obviously, Simmel wrote, the public sphere, the world outside the home, in the short term would still be defined by men for men, but in the long term women would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility." 

Our modern default assumption is that this would be a "good thing," both for women and for men.

It is clearly coming to pass, for anyone that has eyes to see, and ears to hear, that in many ways the opposite is true, and I think that there is a simple reason for it.

The culture of women that has developed over the ages is supremely adapted for life in the domestic sphere, and maybe we needed the emergence of women into the public square to really understand this.

What is the supreme goal of the domestic sphere? Obviously, it is to keep everyone in the home alive, with whatever resources that can be obtained. So, even today with women running around in the public square, women are supremely interested in food safety. In keeping their children away from danger. In health care, health care, health care. Here is the foundation of the female Culture of Complaint. Whatever resources are provided by the man of the house to keep everyone alive, it is not enough, and so every woman is always complaining and needing more.

But what about the public square? Obviously, in the old days, it consisted of the men getting together to defend the tribal territory, unto the death. Notice the difference with the domestic sphere. In the domestic sphere, the woman must stay alive if she is to keep the others alive. But for men, they must keep the women and children alive by being ready to sacrifice their lives: men are expendable.

But now, in the modern public square, I think that the watchword is "get with the program, Jenkins." Whatever the market decrees, that is what you do. Whatever your employer needs, that is what you do. There are no sure things, no lifetime jobs, no guarantees. Just Do It. Thus the male Culture of Insult. If you are a man and expendable, and ever needing to get with the program, nothing is sacred, least of all oneself.

With these two ideas in mind, we can analyze the current scene. Here is a piece worrying about the coddling of kids: an interview with Jonathan Haidt. He comments, apropos trigger warnings and safe spaces:

Many people in children’s worlds want to be helpful, supportive, and empathetic. So if we try really hard to seek out the threats that young people face and protect them from those threats, aren’t we being nice? Aren’t we being helpful?

In other words, whatabout keeping everybody safe, as per the woman's goals in the private sphere? Well, it doesn't work, because humans come into the world as unfinished animals and they need to learn a lot before they are complete as adults:

It requires a lot of experience to finish itself. And that experience requires a lot of exposure to small challenges and small risks. It is essential that a young mammal take risks, get hurt, and learn about the effects of its behavior. 

So the more little children are protected from all the dangers of life the less they are prepared for the life after childhood. The reason we are facing this problem of an obsession with safety is that women coming out into the public square bring their culture of the private sphere of safety and staying alive and enforce it in the public square.

Then there is the sexual revolution. And of course we are seeing this week the parading of the Holy Grail, abortion, by the usual progressive suspects in the question of the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. These activists don't seem to understand that abortion on demand licenses the unworthy man to say: just get rid of it.

My bigger point is that I don't think women do very well with the "get with the program" culture of the sexual revolution. Here's a tiny example from Suzanne Fields. College football player has what he thinks is consensual sex with a college co-ed, but.

The sweetheart described their sexual encounter to her roommate, remarking that he did not use protection against disease and pregnancy for a couple of seconds... [T]he roommate said that the couple of seconds was rape and reported it to campus authorities.

And the kid is suspended from school until the woman in question graduates.

Sorry Charlie, but women don't want "consensual sex," they want a relationship, and what we are seeing on campus and in the #MeToo movement is women nominally believe in the sexual revolution -- and remember legal abortion means that sex should have no consequences unless you want it to -- but in fact, from deep down inside them where their feelings live, they don't.

But because nearly all women are Good Little Girls they don't have the strategic chops to see around corners and realize that what they are being taught, that you can be a woman and compete in the public square just like a man, is straight-up rubbish.

Here's Christopher DeGroot weighing in on all this and quoting surveys that say that women are less happy than back in the 1970s. Golly! Who knew!

And the problem is that women are getting involved in a project to change the culture using the methods of the private sphere, manipulation and complaint, rather than the open outcry of the public square, insult and the open advertisement of goals, aims, and tendencies.

The problem, if you ask me, is that elite women need to be special, while the vast majority of women want to care for their families although they would like a part-time job to get them out of the house. Elite women are turning the culture upside-down so that they can be special. And they don't give a damn about ordinary women that have to live in the undertow of their elite fashionable specialness.

Of course, one of the reasons we got Trump is that the elite has been doing the same number on men for the last 50 years, and finally Trump came along and got deplorable men to believe that he "cared about people like them."

Maybe in another 50 years we will get Trump II when some candidate figures out how to speak to deplorable women and get them to believe that she "cares about people like them."

Tribalism in the Agricultural Age

In my Pure Theory of Tribalism installment I wrote about what tribalism really is: the culture and religion of hunter-gatherers in a small band occupying territory and needing to defend it.

But with the Dawn of Agriculture, the Neolithic Revolution about 12,0000 years ago humans started growing food in fields and they started living in bigger communities.

Actually, I imagine that most people still lived in villages, but their villages were no longer independent; they were subordinate to something else, and that something else was very often an agricultural empire. Think of all those Mesopotamian empires in the Fertile Crescent. And the grand-daddy of them all, the Old Kingdom of Egypt where they built the Great Pyramids at Giza to bury their Pharaohs. I suppose that back in the beginning of the fake tribe era it seemed really important to build up the upstart kings with monumental architecture.

In his Sources of Social Power, Volume 1, Michael Mann talks about "rank societies" where there

occurred a series of transitions, to agriculture, to the domestication of animals, and to permanent settlement, which brought humanity much closer to power relations. Stable, bounded, supposedly "complex" societies developed, embodying a division of labor, social inequality, and political centrality.

Obviously the tribe of the kindred was no longer the defining unit of meaning. What happened was that the tribal leader morphed into the great king, and the tribal shaman morphed into a semi-religious semi-secular priesthood that managed inter-village relations and that also came to be the prop and support of the great king. In these larger political units it was no longer necessary for all the men to be warriors. This became specialized into the job of "marcher lords" and their followers who patrolled the borders of empire: think Shakespeare's Harry Percy.

So what did these new rulers and priests do, sitting on top of these new hierarchies? They reinvented tribalism. No longer did each village have its warriors sworn to defend their tribe, but the king had his royal army of soldiers that owed loyalty to him and not to the local tribe. And the temple priests merged religion with kingship and diminished the role of the local shaman. Obviously all this congeries of humanity needed to be formed into a new demos that thought of itself as one people.

And as for the marcher lord and his own private army -- well, he became a problem for kings all the way down to the invention of modern armies and the point where no local baron could afford it.

So in the agricultural age the kings and the priests created a fake tribalism to try and get the local humans to belong to a fake tribe centered around the king, and religion became a routine affair that depended less and less upon the charisma of individual shamans and more and more on holy scriptures. Yeah. Proto-writing started about 9,000 years ago.

Let us develop this notion a little further. It is said that the natural size of a human community is about 120 persons. This is the size of the military company, the Roman century, and also the natural size of a fundamentalist church, where larger church communities tend to split in two. Thus any organization of a hundred people -- military, religious, or economic -- will need to create hierarchy and fake tribalism if it wants to get any bigger than about a hundred people.

An iconic attempt to create a fake tribe is the effort of the Twelve Tribes of ancient Israel to become the Chosen People of God: in other words to create a fake single tribe out of the twelve tribes of the kindred that used to obtain. It is fair to say that this Chosen People project has been a success.

The Roman Empire seems to have developed a balancing act where tribalism is concerned. It developed the cult of the emperor, but also allowed the conquered territories to continue their local affinities -- so long as there was no rebellion! But notice this: the Roman Empire financed itself with conquest and slaves. Each expansion involved loot and plunder and slaves from the helpless victims of the Roman legions, all of which enriched Rome and the soldiers that seized the loot and the slaves. So the old rules of tribalism still applied, only on a more limited scale, since all-in loot and plunder only applied beyond the border of empire.

Of course, all governments, then and now, practice a routine plunder on their own subjects, requiring taxes on anyone that works, and anyone that buys and sells. But we will not speak about that.

The problem then and now is how to invent new concepts of fake tribe to service the power project of the rulers as they propose to increase their rulerdom.

Let us look at two ordinary fake tribal concepts.

There is the notion of "race." In our era we tend to think of race on a very large scale: "whites" means all Europeans; "blacks" means people from Africa. Of course, "race" meant something different in the past. La Wik:

A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society. First used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations, by the 17th century the term race began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits. Modern scholarship regards race as a social construct, that is, a symbolic identity created to establish some cultural meaning. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race is not an inherent physical or biological quality.

Translated, "race" is what the ruling class of the time wants it to mean, to categorize people as Ins and Outs, Us and Them. In other words, it is a fake tribalism.

And then there is "ethnicity." La Wik:

An ethnic group or an ethnicity, is a category of people who identify with each other based on similarities such as common ancestry, language, history, society, culture or nation.[1][2] Ethnicity is usually an inherited status based on the society in which one lives. Membership of an ethnic group tends to be defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language or dialect, symbolic systems such as religion, mythology and ritual, cuisine, dressing style, art or physical appearance.

Can you spell fake tribalism?

The problem for any ruler is of course to bring disparate social groups into his power project, to invent a story that will get people to think of themselves as one people. One important means is religion, to get the community of the faithful to think of themselves as One People. It is said that the fierceness of Islam reflects the difficulty of uniting the warring tribes of Arabia into a single unit back in the day. We can understand the temptation of uniting church and state into a single unit, so beloved of all rulers down even to our modern lefties and their desire for the total state.

Now it is my contention that the modern era, industrial and post industrial, has required a whole new dimension of fake tribalism, and we in 2018 are right in the middle of an argument about what kind of fake tribe we want to be.

But that is a story for another day.

Liberal Freakout, Pt. 742

Why are the liberals freaking out about the Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court? Why are they freaking out about Donald Trump? Why are they freaking out about any conservative speech as "hate" speech?

Answer: it is because the liberal project is going wrong.

When a political project starts going wrong (and that goes also for religious and military projects too) the leaders of the movement amp it up. That is why you get Reigns of Terror a few years into a successful revolution. Things start going wrong, and the obvious and only reason must be, in the immortal words of the Bolsheviks, "saboteurs and wreckers."

And when the monster that runs the Reign of Terror dies -- as in Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin, Mao -- then you get rhe "Thermidorean Reaction:" the return, or at least the beginning of a return, to normalcy. That is because, as Crane Brinton writes in Anatomy of Revolution, humans cannot live in the frenzy of an ideological movement forever. Eventually they insist on returning to wiving, thriving, and surviving.

But notice the horrors that all the recipients of modern revolution had to go through. The French had to go through the Reign of Terror and then lose a huge war to the other nations of Europe. The Germans had to suffer through the humiliation of World War II and the guilt of genocide. The Russians had to go through 35 more years of economic stasis after the Death of Stalin. The Chinese finally got to start an economic renaissance after the horrors of Mao.

So I declare that the frenzy of our liberal friends is about the failure of their movement of the last century, in the words of Barack Obama, to effect fundamental transformation, because it was never going to work anyway.

That is because the so-called fundamental transformation has been a Great Reaction trying to resurrect the past, in the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-piracy of high taxation, and the neo-slavery of the administrative state.

And it was always bound to fail, because the modern industrial era needs less politics and government not more as the left honestly imagines. The reason is that the market economy adjudicates outcomes without the need for force, unlike the hunter-gatherer and agricultural era when a tribe's access to food-yielding land was not just everything but the only thing.

I understand why our liberal friends are beside themselves. Their brand of politics, for the last century, has been based on the educated ruling class having the last word about everything, and it turned out that required the educated ruling class should have the power to resolve all issues at the Supreme Court. So to lose power in the Supreme Court is to lose everything, because everything decided at the Supreme Court is a judicial ukase, not a compromise effected with the consent of the governed.

Instead, conservatives argue, the great questions of politics should be determined by politics, not the judges of the Supreme Court. The "originalist" movement that is associated with the Federalist Society proposes that Supreme Court supremacy is not what the founders intended. Nor, I would argue, is it a solution to any political problem.

Actually, I'd say that the doctrine of the "living constitution" and Supreme Court supremacy is an admission that big government is a bust. On the one hand, the results of elections cannot be guaranteed to yield the results desired by the educated ruling class, and thus the ruling class needs to have a way to annul the decisions of the voters. On the other hand the administrative state is a consequence of the ruling class making government a lot bigger than can possibly be supervised by 535 legislators. With gigantic national political programs from pensions to health care to education and welfare there is no way that mere legislation can resolve all the injustices that are bound to occur under the government's clunking fist.So you end up with adminstrative decrees and administrative courts and the whole unjust apparatus of the modern state.

Notice the hypocrisy. The educated ruling class agitates  to make government bigger, because justice.  Then it decides that government is now too big and complicated for the little guy to understand and therefore the little guy and his vote and his representative must be kept out of the loop.

Eventually ordinary people start to get pissed off by a government that looks after its own but does not look after the ordinary Joe and Jane. This is not rocket science.

But when the ordinary Joe and Jane start to object the well-born activists, the children of the functionaries of the administrative state, go wild. Because the rebellion of the Joes and Janes threatens their political power -- indeed their privilege -- and their assumed right to make all the decisions for the rest of us.

Now, I suppose it is naive of someone like me to hope that the old ruling class will give up its power and perquisites quietly in response to a couple of election results. After all, the notion of rule by  educated and evolved people from the right schools is the very faith and religion of our ruling class. So even if the Trump GOP party should win the midterms, as now seems unlikely, the old ruling class is not likely to go quietly.

And that is a pity, because, as illustrated in my Great Enrichment page, and in Factfulness by Hans Rosling and family, the last two centuries of the market economy have created prosperity and peace for billions of humans, and there has never been anything like it, ever. And, I would argue, this has all been achieved despite the best efforts of the educated ruling class.

So expect the liberal freakouts to continue, and expect things to get worse before they get better.

And, of Course, Tribes are Sexist

Just after I posted my Introduction fo Tribalism yesterday I happened to read a bit out of Factfulness, by Hans Rosling and family. And he raised at important point about tribes.

Hans was out in darkest Africa, setting up a test in a remote village, complete with blood analyzers and generators. He "was part of a team investigating an epidemic of the incurable paralytic disease called konzo[.]"

All of a sudden he realized that there was a crowd of villagers outside his tent, men with machetes, and they intended to kill him because he "meant to sell [their] blood." Hey, better be safe than sorry where those white devils are concerned!

Er, no, fellahs! We are just conducting tests!

Bit of a sticky wicket, what?

But it was all resolved by a 50-year-old woman who stepped forward, reminded the villagers about their measles shots a while back, after which the kids stopped dying of measles. Then she bared her arm, and said "Here Doctor. Take my blood." And everyone lived happily ever after.

So what does it mean?

It means that the job of tribesmen is to defend the border to the death against the tribe next door. The job of tribeswomen is to keep our kids alive.

I don't know if you have noticed. I do, now that I am older and spend a lot of time listening to women chattering with each other like magpies. They are interested in healthy food, to keep their loved ones, and especially children, alive and healthy. They are interested in clothes, in part for personal adornment, but mostly to make sure that everyone in the family has the right clothes so they won't get cold or hot or wet or sweaty or shivery: to keep people alive. And, of course, women are passionately interested in healthcare, to keep their family members, and especially children, alive.

So what was going on in that remote village in darkest Africa? The men were saying: kill the stranger before he steals from us. The women were saying: work with the stranger so he can help save our children and let them live.

So here are the basic facts of life at the tribal level. Men are fighters; women are lovers. Male honor is about bravely outdaring the dangers of the time by standing in line with the brothers on the border; female honor is about chastity, being a good little girl that does the right thing. Men are about killing the enemy, just to be safe; women are about saving lives, for the children. Men have a Culture of Insult, which I think is probably about chaffing other men and asking, hey, pal, are you really up to standing with the brothers? And women have a Culture of Complaint, which I think is all about prompting the rest of us to supply the food and clothes and medicine to keep family members alive.

I think that all this is important to realize -- to read, learn, and inwardly digest -- because this is exactly what humans were, up to 12,000 years ago. Since then, of course, things have changed radically, first with the agricultural revolution and second with the industrial revolution. But, if the settled science can be believed, we humans have not yet had a chance to evolve much beyond the instincts of the hunter-gatherer era. So that means that men are still fighters, and women are still lovers.

And that means, at the level of national politics, that men are focused on issues about defending the  homeland from border-crossers, and women are mostly focused on issues about keeping us all alive and well fed and healthy. Men say, like Shakespeare's Casca: Speak, hands for me. Women say, as I argue: I can't believe she said that.

Now, in our modern era, these gender-specific instincts are no longer dispositive; they may note even be socially useful. But that is, Who We Are, and who we will be, for many generations yet to come.

This is important, for anyone interested in politics. Because in a democracy a politician has  to appeal to voters  based on who they are. And who they are, by and large, is tribal men and tribal women.

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?