The Curse of the Educated Class's Religion of Power

Yesterday I proposed that "we needed" a new religion for the educated, now that Christianity doesn't "do it" for the educated.

Perhaps I should have started with what we do not need in a religion for the educated.

What we do not need is a religion that proposes that the educated should be given plenipotentiary powers -- political, economic, and moral-cultural -- to solve the problems of the world.

Because what we see today among the educated is what seems to be a religion of entitlement, that the educated are the only people with the moral and intellectual standing to decide matters of right and wrong for the rest of us.

Moreover, what our educated friends all seem to gravitate towards is the notion that all matters of right and wrong should be decided by them and their political power.

Of course, down the ages, political and moral power have tended to be combined, although I suppose there is an argument that back in the pre-state era, the religious and the political were divided, between the shaman and the Big Man.

But at least in the state era, there has been a strong tendency for a condominium between the political and the religious, between king and temple. Also, we may say, following Nietzsche, "the priests" did the king a favor by teaching us to hate ourselves. What kind of rebellion is possible from people taught to hate themselves?

And yet. One magnificent feature of the Catholic Church is that it represented a power structure independent of and competing with the various political powers in Europe. This was clearly evident in the era of the Franks, Charlemagne and all that. Hey, why do you think that Henry VIII broke off relations with the Catholic Church and founded the national Church of England. Yes, apart from the opportunity to loot the monasteries. It was very convenient and helpful for Henry to have the priests as functionaries of the state.

But.

In my view the crucial turn in the modern era has been the notion of the separation of church and state, of the moral and the political. This is what all the political theorists of the post-1648 Treaty of Westphalia, post religious wars era, were getting at with their three branches of government, their toleration, their limitation of government powers.

Indeed, I would go further. I say that the Great Enrichment of the last two centuries is founded on the limitation of political and religious power. The fact is that all along, the political and religious elites have hated the new manufacturies and rising bourgeoisie. But they were too blind and too ineffective to put a stop to it until it was too late. And where they did succeed, as in revolutionary France and Bolshevik Russia, they made a complete hash of things.

This to say that, in the modern era, political and religious power is not that important. Indeed, where political and/or religious power dominates, it creates a mess. That is, after all, the lesson of socialism, the idea that we can create the perfect society if the right politics and moral agenda is enforced from on high by the educated class.

Why is that? There are many reasons, but the main ones are that the modern society and economy are so complicated that a political and religious elite just doesn't have the knowledge, the wisdom, the bandwidth to control it all. And even if they do, they still get it wrong.

Indeed I would say that the lesson of the last 200 years is that political and moral leadership is not that important any more. The first reason is that the defense of food-growing land is not that important any more, so the political-military elite is not that important any more. The second reason is that the modern economy places a huge benefit on trust, from trustworthy people to trustworthy transactions. And the pressure upon us all to be trustworthy makes us into better, more moral, people, much more than invocations from the pulpit.

Let us interpret the question of religion in the modern era in these terms. On the one hand there are totalizing ideologies, from socialism to fascism, to postmodernism, which seek to totalize all power into the educated elite, and which lead every time to death and disaster. On the other hand there are attempts to find meaning for the educated elite -- and creative people generally -- from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche to Jung, that proposes to Heal Thyself and avoid the corrupting temptations of political and moral leadership.

For this is the great challenge for our educated class: to find meaning in the world without having to be the wise kings and priests with the answer to everything.

Yes, imagine such a world, in which the educated were not puffed up with conceit about the value of their contribution to the world.

It's easy if you try.

Global Problem #1: Birthing a Religion for the Educated

Ever since modern science changed the world 200 years ago, the educated class has been thrashing around looking for a new religion.

With Newton's mechanics educated people learned that we didn't need God to run the world. All the Axial Age religions that began about 3,000 years ago propose a world in which God sets things up, physically and morally, and then leaves humans to get on with it.

Don't rag on those religions. It was a brilliant way to understand the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, back then. But not After Newton.

In my view the best way to understand the intellectual world After Newton is to experience the educated folks of the world casting around for a new religion to tie the inconvenient ends together so that we can once again understand the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- in the light of the modern scientific revolutions in mechanics, biology, and physics.

So when I was back in Limeyland a week ago I availed myself of the opportunity to scan the shelves in a university library. And one of the books I noticed was a naughty volume about The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement by Richard Noll. In came out 1994.

(Wouldn't you know, my pals at HalfPriceBooks had a copy: thanks fellahs!)

Well yes. In my view Freud said that all religions were rubbish, and Jung said that all religions were circling around the same truth.

Indeed, my Big Idea is that, for the last 200 years we educated people have been frantically looking for a new religion to help us understand the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Only we still haven't got there.

Socialism is merely the biggest, and most deadly, and most failed effort to fill the religious hole left by the Death of God.

The benefit, to me, of The Jung Cult is that it puts Jung and Freud in the context of all the intellectual cults that were blazing away at the end of the 19th century. A lot of people were worried about a fin de siècle, really an end of times caused by degeneration. But then there were the regenerative notions like nationalism, the Volk, Lebensphilsophie, Nietzsche, Wagner, the effort by evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel to produce a "natural religion." And then there was Spiritualism, Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy, etc.

So both Freud and Jung were trying to make sense of the world in the context of all this intellectual ferment that was sweeping around them at that time, especially in the German world.

And it is clear that both Freud and Jung inspired movements that cannot be described as other than religious cults. To me, this is not scandalous, but natural and physical. Of course charismatic people like Freud and Jung found themselves founding religious cults. They were, after all, proposing a new way to understand the mysteries and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

And, I would argue, we, the educated, are still looking for a religion that gives meaning to our lives. I think that this is Global Problem #1.

But, you may ask, why does Christianity still survive, two centuries, give or take, since the Death of God? My answer is that Christianity, and the rest of the Axial Age religions, provide the meaning of life, the universe, and everything to people just entering into the life of the city. That is why it thrives in Africa, in Latin America, in the black community. It is the religion of responsibility, appealing directly to people on the cusp between subordinate peasantry and bourgeois responsibility. In my reductive Three Peoples theory it all makes sense.

But for the People of the Creative Self, Christianity now offers nothing. It is the Marxes, the Nietzsches, the Freuds, the Jungs, that provide meaning to educated creative people.

What I would like is for my fellow creatives to plump for a religion that does not make us into demi-gods, as with Marx licensing creative activists to remake the world, and with Nietzsche proposing an aristocracy of talent -- to do what, exactly? Whatever the new religion is, I think it must soft-pedal the idea that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything should be founded on the glorious power of educated creative people to remake the world for their greater glory.

That's why I return, again and again, to Charles Murray's Coming Apart. Things are pretty good for the top 25 percent, he wrote; not too good for the middle 50 percent; and in the bottom 25 percent, the men don't work and the women don't marry.

That is what you get when you let the educated creative elite make all the rules.

LGBTQ is a Bigger Problem Than I Thought

Up until yesterday I had thought that the LGBT cult was marginal, with about 3% of adults "identifying" as gay or lesbian, and 0.5 percent identifying as transgender.

But now the Audacious Epigone says that the numbers for millennials, Americans under 30 from a Reuters-Ipsos poll, are much higher. As in:

	Ident. LBGTQ+
White men	12.0%
Black men	11.4%
Hispanic men	15.0%
Asian men	12.4%
Jewish men	18.3%
White women	16.9%
Black women	20.4%
Hispanic women	20.0%
Asian women	13.9%
Jewish women	25.2%

All I can say is Oy. This is foolishness on an intergalactic scale.

Oh, I get it. These youngsters are doing what they have been carefully taught. Just as my baby-boom generation was carefully fed a menu of drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll, today's young'uns are being carefully taught the ins and outs of non-binary heterosexual genderology.

And I get why. Getting creative about sex is the easiest way to get creative, if you self-identify as a Person of the Creative Self according to my reductive Three Peoples theory.

And non-binary genderology fits the left's desire to re-classify the human experience as one of oppression-marginalization. Therefore supposed minorities -- or those counted as The Wretched of the Earth -- are to be honored and celebrated, and used as a weapon against the white married-with-children middle class.

Thus, the college-educated urban white LBGTQ people -- the upper class if anyone is -- are to be considered helpless victims and given license to lord it over Christians and the white working class, among others.

Can you spell injustice?

Of course, but don't forget that the nice educated liberals you know have absolutely no idea about how their world view is a monstrous blight upon our society.

It is not just the 100 million dead as a result of socialism. It is the millions of the working class that were taught to hate their middle-class bosses, and to stay becalmed in the subordinate working class instead of learning the culture of the middle class and responsibility.

And it is the left that has taught the working class to hate the middle class.

Then there are the black Americans that have been taught to wallow in victimhood, imagining a racist white cabal determined to do them down. Forgetting that the whole point of the Jim Crow South was to force the private sector to discriminate against blacks. Oh and the Davis-Bacon Act. The dirty little secret? Eevil capitalists don't really care much about race; they just want to buy low and sell high.

And it is the left that has taught black Americans to hate white Americans.

Then there are women that are taught that abortion and careers are the very summit of feminine liberation, and that the confusion they feel about sex and marriage and children is an artifact of the eevil patriarchy. Alas, this is going to get worse before it gets better.

And it is the left that has taught women to hate men.

And what about LGBT? In my youth in Britain I understood completely that gays were upper-class poofters. That is what the enlightened left taught the young skulls full of mush back in the day. Thus Brideshead Revisited. Now, gays are not corrupted upper-class twits, any more, but helpless victims! Who knew? And who cared?

And it is the left that teaches LBGTQ+ to hate straights.

Look, I get it. Politics is division, and that means that every politician is trying to line up 51% of the voters on his side and use the remaining 49% as a punching bag. When you are a white-guy conservative like me you understand the need of our lefty friends to cover us with hate. When you are a politician you gin up hate wherever you can find it. And doubtless the reason that liberals are beside themselves about Trump is that Trump is dog-whistling that liberals are not your friend, America: how dare he!

But to me the overriding truth about life, the universe, and everything, apart from the importance of grandchildren, is that you never want to become the Little Darling of the ruling class.

Here's a piece in The Intercept mourning how blacks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have had their community blown to bits by the closing of the A.O. Smith factory on West Hopkins Street. And how Democrats have done nothing about it.

Well, in my view, the problem starts with the whole idea of lifetime union jobs. Because nothing lasts forever. Thus, the more you prop up some class of voters with special privileges -- like pro-union legislation that legitimizes restraints against trade and pushes wages above the market -- then the nastier the crash will be when the market changes and the world moves on.

Trump is promising to Make America Great Again. But whatever folks in the old Rust Belt think, Trump is not going to bring back lifetime union jobs at good wages and guaranteed pensions. That whole promise of union jobs as good wages was a lie, and gave workers a false sense of security.

Just as much a lie as the notion that Affirmative Action would raise blacks out of their marginalized state. Or that diversity and inclusion will transform the lives of women. Or that gay marriage will transform the lives of gays.

I like to say, at the ripe old age of 72, that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is: grandchildren.

If that statement does not bring forth a chuckle in you, dear Reader, then you don't get it. Not at all.

And if you don't think that 25% of Jewish women millennials identifying as LGBTQ+ is a problem, I gotta bridge to sell you. Cheap.

So, Are the Jews Now "Us" or "Them"?

With the resolution passed in the House of Representatives Thursday opposing all "hate" (except hate on white nationalists) -- but not censoring the anti-semitism of Rep. Ihlan Omar -- the question for conservatives is whether Jews in America are for us or against us.

If you read alt-right chappies like Christopher DeGroot and Vox Day, the answer is no. Jewish Americans want the US tied to defense of Israel; Jews will never assimilate into one-hundred-percent Americans.

No doubt. Or maybe in politics there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies: only permanent interests. If Jews have been chucked out of the Democratic Party, because black and Muslim anti-semitism, do we deplorables refuse to give them succor when they show up as refugees at our camp of the "haters"?

All I can say is that I am a sucker for a chap like the American Spectator's Dov Fischer, an orthodox Jewish laywer who 'splains it all by tribalism: It takes a trauma for people to abandon the political party -- or the sports team -- of their ancestors.

Anyway, people in politics are looking for protection, and when you first arrive in America that protection is your ethnic group, and the left has made book out of that going back to Marx offering protection to the working class.

Back in the day Jews in America felt threatened by the WASP elite, so they naturally voted for Democrats, that represented all the groups that felt threatened by the established middle class.

Just like the white working class that back in the day was Irish, Italian, Polish, even German ethnics that felt threatened by the snobs that came over on the Mayflower.

It took 50 years for the white working class to realize that the Democrats did not care for people like them and for a presidential candidate to connect with them.

Now it's the turn of the Jews. I know some young Jews that were implying to me that they would vote Republican if it weren't for the Bible-thumpers. Hey, I don't know: if it comes to a choice between the Bible-thumpers and the Koran-thumpers -- not to mention the Torah-thumpers -- what's a girl to do?

Yes, but won't the Jews turn on "us" like they did when they helped power the left from 1850 to 1950? Maybe. But right now it looks like it is whites against the Democratic Coalition of the Fringes, and the Fringes are making it perfectly clear in Congress, from the Black Caucus to the Muslims and the young progressives, that Jews are not welcome in today's Democratic Party. Nor, Nance my dear, are white Italian Catholics.

So I'd say that when Vox Day writes that, in due course, the Jews will find themselves unwelcome in both the US and UK and will have to emigrate, I say it doesn't matter. Right now Jews are going to be making common cause with middle-class whites in the US and UK, and that is good enough for me.

Look, I'm not that enamored of the politics of the white working class, because, for my taste, the white working class has far too much faith in big-government entitlements. But the fact is that middle-class conservatives like me are, willy-nilly, in the same boat with the white working class. So it makes sense that we should all pull our oars together.

Look, I feel the pain of the white working class. My Little Darlings notion says that if you become the Little Darling of the ruling class, you are like any draftee in an army. You don't get to decide when to demobilize and go home. The way the world works is that, at some point, the power interest of the ruling class no longer includes you. So the ruling class just abandons you. Sorry Doreen, the sex was great, but now...

So the white working class Little Darlings got left by the side of the road and reviled as deplorables, and now it looks like Jewish Little Darlings get left by the side of the road as well.

OK. So let's all us deplorables get together and see if we can't make a little political music together. You never know, it could end up as a beautiful friendship.

Why Government Can't Be Trusted With Entitlements

The iconic job of governments is to fight wars of national defense. It's a short term thing, and the government commandeers all the resources of the nation, by taxation, inflation, debt to fight the war.

Then the war is over and the nation is saddled with the debt and the taxes and the inflated money supply. Time, as they used to say, for retrenchment.

But now government uses the tools of national mobilization to give seniors pensions and health care, to educate youngsters, and to relieve the poor.

I say this is wrong: morally, epistemologically, and logically. It is especially wrong to inflate the currency and increase the debt to pay for current programs.

First, the moral objection. The care of ageing parents is the responsibility of children. It is a moral horror to shift the burden of caring for the aged onto other peoples' children. It is a moral horror for middle-class people to shift the relief of the poor onto government functionaries. We should be relieving the poor and making the age-old distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor as iconically represented by the drunkard dustman Alfred P. Doolittle. It is a moral horror to have government functionaries educating children in government child-custodial facilities. Instead, children should be educated by their parents in a collective effort among all the neighborhood parents -- and that usually means the neighborhood mothers.

OK, maybe we could have a government program to educate the children of illiterate parents, although I would much prefer the approach of the Catholic Church, and other voluntary approaches that might even include the assistance of billionaires.

Government is force. Are we moderns so depraved that we will not look after our ageing parents or relieve the poor or educate our children unless under the lash of government compulsion? I hope not.

Then there is the mal-appropriation of financial instruments for use by government. For instance, debt in the private sector is the loan of money usually backed by the commitment of collateral in case of failure to pay. Thus a car loan or a home mortgage is guaranteed by the use of the car or home as collateral. The car or home is seized by the creditor in case of non-payment. In the case of corporate debt, the bondholders have the power, specified in the bond covenant, to seize corporate assets in the case of failure to service the loan.

But this is impossible in the case of a government. For government is sovereign; it pays what it chooses, and the devil take the hindmost. Of course, it is usually foolish of a government not to pay on its obligations. But plenty of governments get away with it.

The basic situation of government is that it bets the nation as collateral when it runs up government debt. This makes sense in the case of a war, except that the government should really issue equity rather than debt to finance wars. But if you look at the US's federal debt, now north of $22 trillion, it is really playing poker with our money. Hey, I got your money, sucker! What yer goin' to do about it?

All these entitlement programs are also wrong from a logical standpoint. Governments cannot legally bind themselves -- or the entitlement beneficiaries -- the way that the law allows for private pensions and health care. In other words, if I sign up for a private pension scheme I have a contractual obligation with the corporation offering the scheme, and that puts burdens both on me and the corporation. What happens if I can't make the payments in the future? What happens if there is a great recession? What happens if the climate changes? What happens is that my pension provider and I make prudent adjustments to our mutual obligations. And the one thing that cannot be guaranteed is a fixed pension thirty years into the future. But government? It can change the law any time it wants. Thus every government entitlement program is not what it advertises, a "social insurance" program. It is simply government paying off its supporters with the cover of decent draperies. And, of course, with future pensions and health care "guaranteed" to the voters, the whole thing depends on the ability of the government to apply force in future years to make good its promises.

It really is astonishing how much faith people have in government. I suppose it is a faith in force, a natural human instinct to solve intractable problems by the magic of binding other people to obligations to look after us, and to punish them if they offend us.

I just want us to be better than that.

Solving the National Debt Problem

What are we going to do about the National Debt? Right now, the US Federal Debt is about 100 percent of GDP. Back before the Crash of 2008 it was about 60 percent of GDP.

And that's not really the whole story, because Social Security and Medicare have unfunded liabilities estimated at $50 trillion on up. $50 trillion is about 250 percent of GDP right now.

And then, bless her heart, AOC wants to spend $90 trillion on the Green New Deal; that's 450 percent of GDP.

Actually, national debt at over 100 percent of GDP is not that scandalous. US Federal Debt went up to 120 percent in World War II.

And then it went down.

The Brits took their national debt above 250 percent of GDP twice. The first time was at the end of the Napoleonic Wars; the second time was at the end of World War II. No problem -- if you win the war!

Running the federal debt up to 120 percent of GDP in World War II worked because the US ruling class of the the 1940s decided to go fight the war, and then after the war inflated and/or ran surpluses until they got the debt down. The ruling class was more or less united on all this, so The People didn't really have a voice as to whether they wanted to go to war, or whether in the aftermath they wanted more spending on programs or to drive down the debt as a percent of GDP. The ruling class decided for them.

But, in the 1970s, the ruling class split. The lefty side had started the Great Society in the 1960s to use government spending on programs and wanted that to continue, and the righty side wanted to cut tax rates but knew they could never persuade the American people to cut spending. It's been that way ever since.

Then we had the generational financial Crash of 2008, when the federal debt doubled as a percent of GDP. If you read books like This Time is Different by Reinhart and Rogoff they will tell you that this doubling of national debt in in the aftermath of an economic meltdown is typical.

But what do we do about the debt? I argue that if the ruling class is united it will pay down the national debt. If it is divided then it won't.

This makes sense, because if a united ruling class keeps the debt down then they keep the people fat and happy. But if the ruling class is divided and things start to go wrong, as they might when the state's finances are stressed by high levels of government debt, then there is always the possibility of revolution and riots in the streets.

Not good. For the ruling class or anyone else.

But why is the ruling class divided today? It is divided because one part of the ruling class has supporters that expect rewards in the form of government spending, and because another part of the ruling class has supporters that expect rewards in the form of tax cuts. And right now there is a standoff.

So really, the debt problem is really a symptom of a bigger problem, that the American people are divided on the question of spending and taxes. And really there is no solution until the rubber hits the road in inflation and/or debt default. That's because no red-blooded American right now is about to agree to cuts in spending on his Social Security or her Medicare. And no Republican can run for president without promising tax cuts.

So it will have to get worse, so that people have bigger things to worry about than their government checks or their tax bill.

Only then will our ruling class "do something" about the debt.

But note this: The Canadian Liberal government Did Something about the debt in the 1990s -- and got shut out of power for a couple of decades. The German Social Democratic government liberalized labor-market rules in the 2000s, and the SDP is now close to being the third largest party in Germany.

If you do the right thing, the voters will probably punish you at the ballot box. But at least you did the right thing.

Lefty Politics is One Way Politics

Apart from its out-of-this-world foolishness, the thing that strikes me about the Green New Deal is its simple-minded focus on The Future.

But what about life in the present, greenies? How about we fix a few things right here in the Present before we blunder into the Future?

Let's see. The latest guesstimate on the cost of the Green New Deal is something north of $90 trillion. With 2018 GDP at $20 trillion, that means that the Green New Deal is going to cost almost 5 times the current GDP.

Hey, GNDers, before we spend 5x GDPs on the Green New Deal, how about we fix a few programs here at home?

I mean, Social Security and Medicare have a $50 trillion unfunded liability. At least. Then there is the wasteland of K-12 government education. How about we Do Something about that before saving the planet? For the Children.

But that is the curious nature of millennial cults. They do not give a thought for life down here on Earth. They direct the attention of their members to the Heavenly Future. Indeed, anyone that dares take a backward glance better watch out.

It seems to me that this Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative approach to life is necessary when you are sending people out to get killed, as just before a battle. You need this if you are Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. You need it if you are preaching to the dullards on the Sawdust Trail. You need it when you are Gen. Patton giving a pep talk to the troops before the race to the Rhine.

You need it when you back is up against the wall. And obviously, if we humans are programmed to respond to the Call to Arms, the instinct is there for a reason.

That is why the climate change movement presents the issue of climate in apocalyptic terms. Because if our backs are not against the wall, if a degree or two of warming is not catastrophic, then we can all go about our business, and what will the climate-istas do then poor things?

OK. I know. They will gin up some other crisis for which We Must Act Now!

Every generation of the left is selling some version of the existential crisis for which We Must Act Now and for which we must give up our freedom, because The Cause.

But most of life is not the Do or Die breakout of a cornered rat. Most of life is social, dealing with other people, and the key thing about that, as Kevin Williamson writes, is trust.

Who do you trust? Even if you are just, like Kevin, looking for a dog-sitter for your dachshund. I mean, you are not just giving up your house keys to anyone!

One of the key developments of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is the expansion of trust beyond "people who are related to us, who are known to us, and who are demographically similar to us." In fact today we are perfectly happy to trust strangers as long as they pay with a credit card, or have a high star rating on Ebay or Uber.

This expansion of trust, that we all take for granted, is astonishing and miraculous.

Notice that our politician friends are in the business of drawing lines where trust is concerned. You can't trust the Commies, for one side, and you can't trust Trump, on the other side. You need to teach people not to trust Commies if you are going to wage a Cold War; you need to paint Donald Trump as a racist hater if you want to keep your liberal base all riled up.

So I look upon lefty activists that want to enlist us in their eternal moral equivalents of war as One Way people. There is only One Truth. One Way: Our Way. And anyone that thinks different is evil, a racist sexist homophobe and a hater.

I get it, that in the old days, when each human community was a tribe or a village of the kindred, the only people to trust were close blood relatives. And the community had to be ready to arm up in an instant to repel the young men from the neighboring tribe or village if they decided on a dawn raid on our village.

But if you can expand trust, and teach everyone that trust can work for them, then you can get to USA today, where people routinely trust strangers and deal pleasantly with everyone they meet, and we are all rich beyond the dreams of avarice of kings and emperors.

But the activists can still teach us to hate each other on election day. And they probably always will.