When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going

Salena Zito defines the great divide in America as between the "placed" and the "placeless." By "placed" she means people that want to live and work and stay in their native city. By "placeless" she means the gifted and credentialed that can live and work and move to anywhere, and do.

Actually, I'd say that the great divide in America today is between the "favored" and the "unfavored." The "favored" are the educated elite and their "little darling" victims; the "unfavored" amounts to everyone else, the racist, sexist, homophobic normals.

This is not surprising. The whole point of politics is to reward your supporters with government revenue and favors, and screw everybody else. So the bigger government gets, and the more that outcomes are directed by government, the more you are going to get a "favored/unfavored" division in society.

But I want to challenge the idea of "place" as a good thing. The basic nature of humans is that we are nomads, happy to sojourn in a favored land for a while, but whose survival always depends on knowing when it is time to move on before it is too late.

This is personal for me because my father's family was caught in Russia in 1918 and got out alive, and my mother's family was stuck in Japan in 1940 and got out alive. Then my two parents were stuck in India at independence and got out to England in 1948. Now I live in Seattle; one daughter lives in Connecticut, and the other daughter in Britain.

So, on Zito's definition we are "placeless." Very well. But the point is that we got out in time. And so we continued to wive and thrive.

It is natural for ruling classes to sell the idea that the thing to do is to stay in one place and pay taxes. you see that attitude in Marx: "Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels." Yeah, Chuckie, baby!

In our time the left has encouraged the working class to believe that they could settle down in a place and get good jobs at good wages forever. So they did. And then the world moved on; the good jobs at good wages went away, and the "places" turned into ghost towns.

Was the white working class betrayed? Of course, but not by the corporations that hired and fired them, but by the lefties that sold the working class on the lie that they could work and prosper in one place forever.

The truth is that there is a name for people stuck in one place:  Slaves -- and their kissing cousins, the serfs -- are people that cannot leave their place, whether that place is a slave plantation or a communist utopia. Free men and women are free to get up and go, and they do, before it is too late.

It is nice to think that you can live in one place for generations in one place, but it is not really the way of the world. Something always changes, whether it is the weather, the king, the Mongols, the Nazis, ISIS, or the Communists. And you better be ready to get up and get out before it is too late.

That, after all, is the reality we are experiencing today. All over the world people in the less-favored locations are getting up and getting out of the "shithole countries" that they are living in. They want to get to non-shithole countries so they can wive and thrive. And because air transportation is so cheap, they actually can get up and leave.

Hey, maybe some lefties will even help them move if they agree to become poster children on the TV news for some lefty activist NGO. And that is the trouble with migrants; they seem to be easy marks for the left.

But the lesson of history is: don't be a mark. It doesn't matter what the priests tell you, or the politicians, or the real-estate salesmen. If things don't look good in the months and years ahead you'd better do something about it. If you want your genes to survive.

It's really cool that Donald Trump has arisen to Make America Great Again and give the white working class a chance to get out of the rut they were in. But nobody should think that Trump is going to save their bacon forever. The world moves on; it always has and it always will.

And you better be on board when the last train leaves the station.

Why I Think Jordan Peterson is Important

In response to my review of Vox Day's Jordanetics, Vox Day kindly averred as how Immanuel Kant was "wrong, completely wrong, and utterly wrong... And the Jungians are not merely wrong, they are mad."

But here is a Rex Murphy piece in the Canadian National Post on Jordan B. Peterson, about how the left too has a problem with Jordanetics, about how the whole Peterson phenomenon started with a bunch of U of Toronto students that tried to get the prof fired for crimes against leftism.

[They were outraged by] Peterson’s “gross misconduct,” his “efforts at agitation … inflammatory denunciations … evident connections to white supremacists … disruptive behaviour.”

In response, Peterson

more or less told the pack of puerile leftlings chasing him with pitchforks and torches that their grandmothers wore severely unstylish army boots.

OK, so why do both left and right disapprove of Jordan B. Peterson?

The answer, as you would expect, is completely comprehended by my reductive Three Peoples theory. That's the one with the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary middle class, and the People of the Creative Self, everyone from artists and writers to start-up businessmen and political activists and revolutionaries.

See, the point is that lefties see the world as creative revolutionary activists like them making the world safe for their "little darlings," the People of the Subordinate Self -- the workers, peasants, and historically marginalized people like blacks, women, gays -- from the depredations of the evil bourgeois middle class and the worst thing in the world, Christianity. But Peterson defends the right of the ordinary middle class to pursue its destiny of responsibility and even regards religion as a Good Thing.

Now, chaps like Vox Day believe that the middle class of the nation state, the People of the Responsible Self, and reason and logic are the good guys. The lefties of the People of the Creative Self are the bad guys, and the workers and peasants of the People of the Subordinate Self, are the foolish dupes of the lefties.

My Three Peoples theory takes the reductive position that all three of the Three Peoples are perfectly natural and physical. There are tons of people in the world that just want to be safe and leave all the heavy lifting to their lord or their political patron. So be it. There are lots of people that want to get a job, get married, have children, and retire in good time with a nice little nest egg. More power to them. Then there are creative geniuses on the border between the known and the unknown that bring new inventions and economic revolutions. They are amazing.

So you can see that my theory of the world is a sophisticated and balanced view of the world that understands that there are all kinds of people in the world and they have a perfect right to be who they are. In any case, we can't be sure about who has the inside track on Truth, Justice, and the American Way. That really is the point that Kant is making with his notion that we can't know things in themselves, but only start guessing from what we pick up with our senses. My Three Peoples theory also tracks with Jung, because Jung proposes that all religions are attempts by historical peoples to make sense of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and that the same themes keep coming up in every religion. With the left, we are saying that all religions are superstition and bigotry. But with Jung we are saying that all religions are an honest attempt to get to the heart of things.

So of course Vox Day would be anti-Kant and anti-Jung.

Now, I'm not sure what Jordan Peterson has to say about the People of the Subordinate Self, but he clearly in his 12 Rules says that the first thing to do is get out of the basement, stand up straight with shoulders back and discipline yourself to become a responsible person. In Maps of Meaning, his first book, he proposes that the highest and best thing is to be a sacrificial hero trying to make sense of the border between order and chaos. That is a celebration of the creative self.

So of course I think that Jordan Peterson is a good guy. He is saying what I am saying, only better.

See, my world view is that for most of history, and certainly since the dawn of the state-based agricultural age nearly everyone was a subordinate peasant or a slave. It was the genius of Christianity and the other Axial Age religions to develop the idea that humans were responsible to God for their lives, not subordinate to their lords, and ought to do something about it. But now, in my view, we have entered into a creative age, where people think that the highest and best thing is to be creative. The last 200 years of the capitalist explosion is nothing if it is not a creative explosion.

This means that the old religion of responsibility, Christianity, no longer can win the hearts and minds of people that yearn to be creative. They all want to be artists and writers, and activists and start-up entrepreneurs, not mere deplorable responsibles. Now modern leftism, in my view, is the idea that only political creativity is meaningful, and that responsibility is for the birds. So their religion excludes responsibility as a good.

But I think that the religion of the future must combine a faith in responsibility with a faith in creativity, rather than choose one or the other, and I think that Jordan Peterson's ideas are a sensible step in that direction.

 On my view you can easily see that it makes perfect sense that Vox Day, with his faith in responsibility, and lefties, with their faith in political creativity, would think that Peterson is a dangerous crank that ought to be vilified and suppressed.

My only complaint is that the woods are not full of Jordan Petersons celebrating a combination of responsibility and creativity.

But we can't have everything. Not right away.

Yes, There is Objective Truth, But We Don't Know It

Vox Day has a thoughtful riposte to my review of his Jordanetics. He says that Kant was wrong:

And the only thing you need to know about Kant is that he was wrong, completely and utterly wrong. His entire life's work was an unnecessary attempt to square a philosophical circle. The objective truth exists regardless of our ability to correctly perceive it at any given point in time.

Well, yes. The objective truth, or Kant's ẗhing-in-itself, presumably does exist independently of our ability to perceive it. But Kant's point is that, whatever really exists, we don't know what it is, and cannot directly know it, the things-in-themselves, because we only experience appearances. The immense cunning of Kant's idea (whether it is right or wrong) is that we should never assume that we have arrived at a complete understanding of anything. All we ever know is that we have a pretty good grasp of things, thus far. Hence Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

And the fundamental fact of our time is the notion from Werner Heisenberg that the 20th century physics revolution means that the really real, deep down at the micro level, cannot be described by every-day notions by which we talk about the every day world as we experience it moment to moment. So we have to fake it with the likely stories of atoms and quarks and stuff by which we try to understand the math through metaphor.

Nor does Vox Day put any faith in Jung:

And the Jungians are not merely wrong, they are mad. That's not you make sense of the world. That's not how you make sense of anything.

In my view, all Jung is doing is starting with the notion that all religions and all accounts of the really real are the accounts of blind men encountering an elephant. It's a trunk. It's a big flappy ear, etc. But what is it, really? Well Jung -- and Peterson -- say that all religions are attempts to understand the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, given the state of human knowledge at the time. Therefore they are reprising the same old themes, but shining a new light as human knowledge and expertise expands.

I was talking to a math-whiz acquaintance a few months ago, and opined that in due course the physicists would come up with a theory of reality that goes deeper than quantum mechanics and its present account of energy and mass. He agreed. So what is objectively real? What we know today, or what we will know tomorrow?

And that is, for me, the meaning of Kant. He is just saying: don't think that you've got the final word on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Just remember that all we know are sense impressions and the story we have made up to make sense of them. Assume that the thing-in-itself is still a mystery.

Whether the real is real, or just an phantasm, no human can go far wrong by accepting that he still has a lot to learn.

For me there's a bigger thing going in with Kant and Jung and Peterson. And it is this. "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers," through thinkers like Kant and Jung, and even Peterson, are starting to develop a theory of the meaning of life, the universe and everything that can show up the left as the shallow, reactionary, and cramped movement it is, that makes a god out of politics and power, instead of going beyond politics and the lust for power, given that the market economy has provided a means where humans can negotiate practically everything through trust and exchange rather than battle to the death over the exclusive right to a food-growing patch of land, which has been the fate of mankind since the dawn.

I think that ideas like my reductive Three Peoples theory and the notion of the sacrificial hero in Jung provide a means of developing a higher and better concept of human meaning than the cruel leftist faith in politics and force, and a better way of showing up its barren world view as an utterly futile and foolish fantasy.

And I think that Jordan B. Peterson's revival of meaning for the life of the responsible person in 12 Rules is a first step.

The Trouble is that the Yellow Vests are Already Toast

So now all the experts are predicting that the current regime in France is toast, because the French regime, like the France of 1789, is running out of money.

Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. The whole point of government, as I keep saying, is to occupy territory, tax the inhabitants, and reward its supporters. The problem is that you have to keep upping the ante, because your supporters Want More Money, and eventually you run out of other peoples' money to keep rewarding your supporters.

But that is not the point. The point is whether we, the people, are going to play the government's game.

The reason that the yellow vests, the gilets jaunes, are angry is because they bought into the regime's promises, long ago: vote for them and get benefits. That's great, except that when you do that you turn yourself into a peasant, dependent on your master's favor. You sit there, on your peasant allotment, or in your union job, getting your handout, until the day that the handouts stop.

Like I said. The trouble about being a Little Darling is that one day your sugar daddy ups and leaves. Then what?

That is what happened to the peasants. They were useful to their lords until the day came that the lords didn't need them for their personal armies. Or until the lords got into agricultural "improvement" and didn't need so many agricultural laborers as in olden times.

That is what happened to the white working class. Vote for us, said the socialists, and we will protect you from the bosses.  We will provide you with pensions, health care, good jobs at good wages. Until "we" didn't. Because? Well because the unionized corporations started having to compete with up-and-coming countries like China using workers that were just off the farm and would work for a fraction of the wage of good all-American union workers. And the progressive politicians lost interest in the white working class and started bidding for the votes of women and minorities, and then legal and illegal immigrants.

That is what is happening to the gilets jaunes. France has all kinds of regulatory wonders, from the 35-hour week to mandatory benefits to near lifetime employment guarantees. But now the political class with their haute école degrees believe in helping helpless migrants, and saving the planet from Maurice Strong's notion of climate change.

So here is my analysis from my reductive, but brilliant, Three Peoples theory. Choose your poison: choose what you want to submit to. There are three options, one for each of the Three Peoples.

You can submit to your loving lord, if you are from the People of the Subordinate Self. That means you are fine until the day that your loving lord -- or your loving politician -- no longer needs your support. Then you are toast.

You can submit to the market, if you are from the People of the Responsible Self. That means you will always have a job, because if your current gig ends when the market has moved on and your skills aren't in demand any more you just shrug your shoulders and get trained for something else, or convert your skills into something else. Because you just accept that the market's verdict is final. If you don't accept the market's verdict you are nothing but an underling.

You can submit to the gods of creation, if you are from the People of the Creative Self. That means you need to accept that, most likely, you won't make it, because in the world of creativity many are called but few are chosen. If you accept this truth you are a mensch, and accept that if you can't make it as a creative then you just have to suck it in and submit to the market. If you don't you are a menace, because you will probably try to get into politics or activism, trying to be creative in politics, where the name of the game is to get people to vote for you in return for benefits.

So if the yellow vests think they can solve their problems by defacing a few glorious French monuments, or electing a populist leader, like the US, Hungary, Italy, and now Brazil, they are wrong.

Trump ain't gonna solve the problems of the white working class in the US. Only the individual folks in the white working class can do that by training for and searching for and finding good jobs at good wages. Right now that would be the fracking industry, but that means heading off to North Dakota or Texas. Otherwise they are toast.

Victor Orbán ain't gonna save the native Hungarians from the Muslim migrants. Only they can do that by adapting their skills to the market, and heading off to Germany or Britain if that is what it takes. Otherwise they are toast.

Salvini ain't gonna save the Italians from ruin. Only they can do that. Otherwise the Italians are toast.

Bolsonaro ain't gonna save the Brazilians. Only they can do that. Otherwise the Brazilians are toast.

And what doesn't work is voting for entitlement programs. Because entitlement programs are programs that take money away from some people and give money to other people. By force. And sooner or later your employer or the government runs out of other peoples' money to pay your benefits.

This is not rocket science, folks. You submit to the verdict of the market or you or your children end up as toast. No matter what some damn politician has to say.

The Amazing Ajanta Caves Near Aurangabad

Today we took a road trip from the city of Aurangabad -- beer, pharmaceuticals, and cars -- to the Buddhist caves near Ajanta. These caves were "discovered" by a British cavalry officer in 1819; of course the local people already knew about them. Maybe they didn't think the Brits ought to know about such things.

It took a couple of hours and more to get from Aurangabad to Ajanta because the road was under construction for the entire 100 km distance, apparently getting expanded from 2 to 4 lanes. You can imagine the traffic chaos of buses, trucks, cars, and motorcycles all dodging and weaving around the construction

About 30 caves were hewn out of a basalt cliff over the centuries, starting in the 2nd century BC. Typically, as you enter the cave you are confronted by a Buddha facing  the entrance across a square hall with columns around the walls to reduce the stress on the ceiling. Many of the caves feature rock-cut sculptures and decorations. But everything is chiseled out of the original basalt. Many of the caves have dry fresco paintings rehearsing the life of the Buddha.

It's all pretty impressive, especially as you go from cave to cave and see yet another Buddha -- or perhaps a stupa -- hacked perhaps 50 feet into the cliff, with columns and small meditation cells around the perimeter of the cave.

There were lots of people there, including a troop of noisy teenage school kids that wanted to do selfies with the exotic foreigners, which we were delighted to do. In fact, it was delightful to share the experience with people from all over the world, including China and the very Buddhist country of Thailand. We did selfies with some charming Thai girls on the bus that gets you from the parking lot to the caves and back.

Yes. It's travel in the modern age: nothing but selfies, selfies, selfies, with all and sundry from all over the world. Whatever will be next?

A Couple of Days in Mumbai

It's a long grind from the west coast to India, whichever way you go, and when you get there the time is twelve-and-a-half hours out of sync. with Pacific Time. We went through Frankfurt, Germany, flying Frankfurt to Mumbai in a big Lufthansa 747-8 with 80 percent Indians on board.

The most startling difference between the US and India is the street scene. Every street in Mumbai seems to be teeming with life: pedestrians, of course, and tuk-tuk cabs and motorcycles and endless traffic. And also a huge cavalcade of tiny stores stuck in front of larger buildings and street vendors everywhere selling from open-air stalls or simply occupying sidewalk space.

What is going on? What is the property situation with all the sidewalk hawkers of endless cellphone protectors and food and juice vendors that seem to just occupy space on the sidewalk?

And it seems like everyone is hard at work on some micro-business. Are these people migrants from the countryside, or smaller towns, or what? There seems to be no equivalent of this seemingly low-value-added business environment in the US. And every real store has a security guy at the door. Is that to police criminals or just keep loiterers away from the customers?

The answer is, of course, that most of the lower-end workers are migrants from the countryside. Kid comes to the city, starts sending money home to the village, and comes home for a rest after he's saved some money. Next time, another couple kids from the village go to the city with him.

And the traffic! It teems, whether in the city or the suburbs, an endless flow of motorcycles, tuk-tuks, cars of every description, and buses, trucks large and small, all jostling and tooting their horns and darting in front of the oncoming traffic and either starting a new lane between two lines of traffic or cutting off some guy that seems to be getting too aggressive.

The kind of Indians we meet, from the hotel breakfast room to the tour guide, all seem to have children who are either in the US working, or in the US going to college, or going to university majoring in IT of some kind. These must be the crème de la crème because the street world teems with people doing all kinds of other things.

When you see a political sign it is always in the local language. But high-end billboards for dream  apartments in new or projected high-rises are always in English. Signs for government and military installations are in both local and English language and all the government sign writers seem to have gone to British bureaucracy school.

Everyone mixes freely in the street, but the bearded Muslim men with white skull-caps and their black-clad wives are a distinctive contrast from the Hindu men that all have mustaches and wear western shirts or t-shirts and western pants or jeans. The Hindu women wear everything from saris to western pants -- but no bare-ass leggings yet, and clearly, the more young and educated the more western the dress.

Off to Bollywood, east of Goregaon in the outer northern suburbs. It's in a wooded hilly area, and the sets and studios are curiously weathered and run-down looking, with the usual dust and confusion and piles of debris that are ubiquitousin India. There's a film-city temple at the end of a road which can be painted and dressed up for any sort of religious song-and-dance ceremony. All curiously ordinary and day-to-day, considering the glamorous frenzy that Bollywood presents to the movie-goer. But ain't that the truth: Glamor is all make-believe, pal.

We took an early morning tour in downtown Mumbai, starting with the Sassoon Dock fish market run by the Koli fisherfolk that have been fishing off Mumbai for over 500 years. It's a view back to the past and an efficient distribution system that auctions fish right off the boat to women who then distribute the fish to their clients throughout the city. Then on to the newspaper distribution game just yards from the main railroad terminus, where guys sort newspapers for home delivery. Then the fruit-and-veg market, the chicken market, and the flower market.

A morning visiting the markets provides a view into a world that has been wholly swallowed by the supermarket system in the US, and reminds us that the "local" movement and its weekly farmers markets in the US are yet another liberal conceit, imagining that the low-wage jobs of the old system are viable in today's Amazon-impacted distribution system. Of course, the main reason why such a system has disappeared in the US is that people won't and don't work for the kind of wages you can get from this system of micro-distribution, and the welfare system means that people won't work until it becomes worth their while vis-a-vis what they can  get for free.

But you'd have to say that learning how to hustle in the street distribution systems of a place like  Mumbai provides a very solid education in How To Make It in the City.

All the time, as we drove around Mumbai and its suburbs, I was wondering who lived where. The guide this morning provided an answer. Anyone living in a building is middle class. The poor all live in shanty towns or the equivalent. So there is that.

Today we fly north to cave temples near Aurangabad.

All Politics is Identity Politics, Jonah

The subtitle of Jonah Goldberg's latest book, Suicide of the West, is "How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy."

So Jonah waffles into a column about people who have interviewed him on his book. Everyone is opposed to "tribalism" but "each side thinks only their opponents are guilty of it."

On nationalism, I get the most pushback from the right and the least from the left.

But what does he mean?

However on identity politics,

It's hard for many liberals to understand (or at least admit) that there might be something pernicious about dividing everybody up into categories of race, sex, ethnicity, etc. Meanwhile, many on the right struggle to see how their side might be guilty of doing the same thing.

 Of course the answer to this conundrum is that all politics is identity politics. All politics is division, dividing people up into our tribe and their tribe. Only, of course, our tribe/identity and its memes are good, while the other side's tribe/identity and its memes are bad and threaten the body politic.

All politics divides people into our tribe and their tribe, and all religion, including modern secular religion divides people up into the Chosen and the Rest.

Conservatives in general want to keep domestic politics down to a low roar, in accordance with their idea that government should be limited and politics just a disagreement among friends. But as for those Commies and those Islamofascists...

The left is the same only different.  For the left the question of justice is the only thing, and political power is the one best way to bend the arc of history. But as for the inordinate fear of communism and Islam, well, only racists, sexists, and bigots have a problem with that.

It all makes sense. On matters of life and death, or what we take to be matters of life and death, humans  are intensely tribal and deploy identity politics to rally supporters to their banner. On  other matters, we humans ask "what's your problem?"

It was the Founders and the writers that inspired them that proposed to build governmental institutions that would put roadblocks in the way of political and religious enthusiasts. Limited government and three co-equal branches of government were designed to keep the partisans busy reducing the other guy's idiotic plans to dust. And the separation of church and state were designed to prevent religious enthusiasts from invoking the power of the state in their establishment of a heaven on earth.

And, of course, there is the market, that puts its thumb very firmly on the scales of getting along and trusting the stranger.

I'd say that it's a shame that so many people cannot grasp the wisdom of the Founders and the market and instead live for the revolution and the triumph of the Chosen.

But nobody said that life was easy. And nobody is going to stop the other guys and their evil tribalism with the weapon of our sacred identity and vision of the truth.