Me and the Boeing 737 Max Crisis

I don't know nothing about the current flap about the Boeing 737 MAX grounding, but I am a pilot, and so I think I know a thing or two about flying and airplanes, such as:

One More For the Gipper. As I understand it, it is much cheaper for Boeing to modify an existing airplane model than to develop and entirely new one. From the regulatory standpoint. In other words, it makes much more financial sense for Boeing to tell the FAA that its 737 MAX model is merely a development of the 737 model line than to call it a new model. So there is a big temptation to squeeze one more modification out of an existing model rather than to break new ground on a new model.

And I've read that the problem with the 737 MAX is that the engines are much bigger/heavier/powerful than the previous non-MAX and this has created problems on the center-of-gravity of the airplane.

Regulatory Capture. The Federal Aviation Administration is responsible for the airworthiness of US-built airplanes. But the settled science of "regulatory capture" says that a government regulator eventually becomes captured by the corporations it is supposed to regulate. Could that be a problem here?

Why can't Boeing's insurance company be in charge of airworthiness? It would have, after all, "Skin in the Game" as Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues in his latest book.

Pilots and Emergencies. When a pilot experiences an emergency situation in flight his response is to follow his training. But there is a problem. If an emergency has not been covered in training the pilot will not have any training to follow. And he will probably not have time to figure out what went wrong, consult his flight manuals, and then decide what to do. When I was a glider pilot I had been trained in what do do if my altitude was too low to glide back to the airport. On the two occasions when this happened to me it was remarkable how I dutifully followed my training.

Now it seems that in the 737 MAX accidents it may well be that the problem was a failed angle-of-attack indicator that prompted an AI system to assume the plane was in a stall when it wasn't. No problem if pilots are trained for such an event; big problem if they are not.

Corporate bureaucracy. I was talking to a guy the other day that spent most of his working life in small print shops. But he ended his career doing printing for a big corporation. He found the big corporation to be crazy-making with all their rules. Life was much simpler when he just worked for the owner. For me, living in Seattle, it has always been impressive to me how Boeing has a huge depth of knowledge and experience in plane-making. No doubt part of this is all the rules that keep people from doing stupid stuff. But then there is the situation where all the rules don't protect you. And maybe that stems from the fact that the bottom line of flight-testing is a process of getting sign-offs from the FAA rather than the deep thought of "what could go wrong?" I am not saying here that the Boeing flight-test guys don't care about safety; I am just saying that their job is to follow the rules and get the signoff and not to think deep thoughts. And even if some guy half way up the food-chain wanted to do a bunch of testing around the angle-of-attack indicator and the AI systems, he would still have to get his superiors to sign off on a budget. And the problem with all corporate bureaucrats is that, over time, the bureaucrats end up taking care of themselves, not the mission of the corporation, because that's how bureaucracies work.

Don't forget the lawyers. I'll bet that Boeing and the FAA have known for months that they have a problem. But being humans they would not want to admit to it until they had a solution -- proposed, implemented and tested. Why? Probably because of the lawyers, that would extract damages for all the folks killed in the two crashes thus far. Oh, and of course to save the airlines money, because there is nothing more expensive than an expensive airplane being grounded for months while the wheels of bureaucracy and regulation grind away on a corporate and regulatory solution.

Don't Panic! If we have a pretty good idea what the problem is, and we can, in ten minutes, train all the 737 MAX pilots what to do when the plane gets a false stall warning, then problem solved, right? Alas, no. Because our faith in bureaucracy and regulation means that we can't return the 737 MAX to service until all the bureaucratic and regulatory hoops have been jumped through. Because everything in this world has to pass the "Is it safe, Mr. President?" test.

In a better world, we would trust airplane manufacturers and airlines to be responsible, and let them get on with it.

But we do not live in that world. I doubt if we ever will.

Democracy, Schmocracy, or What Do You Expect?

Everyone is all upset at their governments: Ann Coulter with Donald Trump. And the bloody Brits with Brexit. The Zman complains about "The Fiction of Democracy."

Well, yeah. But what do you expect? Do you expect that the ruling class of the last 100 odd years would just fold their tents and.. what, exactly?

The fact is that government offers "protection." This protection might be protection from the invading Mongols, protection from invading hordes on the southern border, or it might be protection from racist sexist homophobes. Who cares?

Above all, of course, government offers rewards to its supporters, as in pensions, health care, education, welfare, tariffs, you name it. And there are precious few folks that are determined not to accept any goodies from government.

I am presently in the middle of updating my usgovernmentspending.com site with the latest data from the federal government: the federal budget for FY2020. Guess what: the feds are projecting trillion dollar deficits through the 2020 election and beyond:

Ain't that cute? So President Trump will have the deficit down by the time he leaves office in his second term! Providing we don't have a recession first.

Actually, I think the proper way to look at government is "spending as percent of GDP." That shows how much of our commonweal the government is spending on its supporters. Here is the spending data since 1900. Federal plus state plus local.

I think that this chart shows something really important, that government spending seems to be topping out at 35ish percent of GDP. That's assuming that the Dems don't get to enact their Green New Deal any time soon.

But why? Why is government spending topping out, really since about 1980? Well, I'd say because at a deep level -- say the Jungian "collective unconscious" -- modern government has gone about as far as it can go.

That doesn't mean that we won't stumble-bum our way into a Venezuela-style meltdown. Anything can happen.

But the point is that we stumble-bummed our way into the Great Enrichment, the increase in per-capita income by 30 times in the last 200 years. Didn't have a clue what we were doing, and some people, like the AOCs of the world, still don't get it.

I've been reading a book of essays On Primitive Society by anthropologist C.R. Hallpike. He takes out strongly against the idea that there is any Darwinian evolution involved with human society as in the survival of the fittest. In his view, the way to understand human society is the survival of the average.

Most human societies, on his view, are wasteful, vengeful, stupid, and lazy. But they usually stumble-bum their way to survival. So what is the key to survival? Don't look now, but it just might be God playing dice, even though Einstein said it couldn't be so.

Right now, our right-wing friends are advancing the idea that "migration is invasion." And over at Vox Day we are looking at DNA studies of the Iberian peninsula where Spain and Portugal presently reside. A while back, 4,500 years ago, the Iberian peninsula experienced a substantial change in DNA.

Though 60 percent of the region’s total DNA remained the same, the Y chromosomes of the inhabitants were almost entirely replaced by 2,000 B.C. That suggests a massive influx of men from the steppes, since Y chromosomes are carried only by men.

Well, bless my buttons. As they say: men are expendable. Survival? Only the women survive.

As I have been reading Hallpike I have been thinking that maybe our Great Enrichment society is too efficient, too hard-working, too focused, for long continuance. The point is that when you are efficient and focused then maybe you are not leaving enough room for error.

After all, if the story of primitive humans is the "survival of the average" then maybe our Great Enrichment is not such a good idea. Instead of being so efficient, maybe we should just chill out for a while and revert to the mean. In a way, that is what our environmentalist friends are saying. Except, of course, that they are not proposing that they should be the first to get their Y chromosomes replaced.

Meanwhile, don't expect Trump or Brexit or AOC or Beto or anyone to solve all our problems. That ain't the way of the world, old chum.

Leftism: First the Fear, Then the Hate

About three weeks ago I had a brainwave about the left. It is a school of hate, I realized. But then, yesterday, I had another epiphany. It is this.

First the left teaches its clients to fear; then it teaches them to hate. This is a natural progression that is entirely consonant with the logic of leftist politics.

The whole arc of leftist politics is to identify a class of helpless victims, about to be demolished by some class of oppressors and exploiters, and to lead them to justice and safety.

Obviously, this class of victims will be people that are afraid. So the lefties will play upon their fear.

But what happens when the left has led their victims to victory, and won their victims by peaceful protest their own pot of gold from the modern state? Obviously, following the famous victory the time for fear is now over. But the left will not want to disband its merry band of activists and protesters. What? Surrender that hard won power and prestige? No, in Phase 2, the left switches to hate, and teaches its Little Darlings to hate the oppressors and exploiters it formerly feared.

As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, the movement becomes a racket.

So let us begin with Marx. After extolling the rise of the bourgeoisie, he exposes its soft underbelly, in The Communist Manifesto:

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

Slaves, they are, the proletarians, embittered slaves. And not just the workers, but the lower middle class, " the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants," they "sink gradually into the proletariat" immiserated by the monster of capitalism and the neo-feudal overclass, the bourgeoisie.

And so the workers got the vote. Why was this? Because the bourgeoisie was persuaded that it was right and just that the workers should get the vote, even though the middle class could see that the workers would not want the same things that they did. And the workers got free education, and labor unions, and then government pensions and health care. Again, the middle class didn't really like the welfare state; it wasn't going to help them, who already saved their money for pensions, and got health care, at the very least, through the local "lodge doctor."

But if the workers were getting what they wanted, what would be the point of voting for lefty politicians? That was when the left started teaching the workers to hate. The workers were part of the center-left coalition, and they had to be kept in a fever of hate against the bosses, who might at any time force the workers to "give back" their benefits. And so it went, until the left started to tire of the workers in about 1970.

With women, early feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft argued for men to tender rights to women out of the goodness of their hearts, as an expression of goodwill of the males to the females of the middle class. But by the end of the 19th century, the tone of feminism turned darker. Mrs. Pankhurst spoke of the women's franchise not as "a right, but as a desperate necessity:" women as victims. Well, women did get the vote, and careers, and divorce, and abortion. And that's when they started to hate.

It cannot be an accident that all the vile hate of the modern feminists occurred after the great political milestones. How could that be? Because, once the political marginaliztion of women had been removed, the mobilization of women as feminists had to be conducted on a program of hate. It must follow from the logic of left-wing politics.

In the campaign for civil rights, the early narrative was clearly fear. Jim Crow could work his evil power on southern Negroes as the mood took him. And if the government didn't do its thing, a lynch mob from the local KKK lodge could make the point instead. Just look at how the police beat up civil-rights marchers in the great Selma march on Bloody Sunday, in which Alabama State Troopers clubbed and tear-gassed civil-rights marchers on the road from Selma to the Alabama state capital in Alabama!

But in fact the 1965 Selma marches proved that blacks were no longer helpless victims of Southern racism, because after Bloody Sunday, a subsequent march was protected by "1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard under federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals".

Thus it makes complete sense for a new generation of black leaders to realize that hate, not fear, should be the face of black America, and the age of Martin Luther King, Jr., gave way to Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton.

The point is that, when your peaceful protests are protected by the federal government it is time to put away fear. But what happens to the movement then? Perfectly simple, you substitute hate for fear, and the movement can go on from strength to strength!

Clearly, the movement for gay rights follows a similar arc. We begin with the terror of the New York City police attacking the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City, in June 1969. So gays are taught to fear and we are taught that gays live in fear, of being "outed." But now that gay marriage is a fait accompli, courtesy of the US Supreme Court, the days of fear are over, and gay activists can deploy their hate without fear upon hateful Christian bakers.

There is one startling question about this century and a half of left-wing fear and hate. Was it necessary? These incessant campaigns against the bourgeoisie, against men, against whites, against straights: were they needed to get the rights the helpless victims demanded? For the fact is that, almost without exception they were achieved without a violent counterattack by the bourgeoisie, the men, the whites, the straights in question. Which suggests that maybe all the Sturm und Drang was purely for effect. It could all have been achieved by conversation and persuasion, not by the agency of activism and peaceful protest.

Who knows? But without the activism, the protests, the non-negotiable demands, what would have been the point?

We have now entered into a new phase in left-wing activism: the campaign of hate against the white working class.

As the need for activism continues, even though the rights of workers, women, blacks, and gays have been confirmed by the political system, there is still a need for an enemy, because without an enemy there is no need for politics. And so the left has coalesced upon a campaign of hate and fear on the men of the white working class. This is perhaps the terminal campaign of the longue durée of the left. Because the working hypothesis of the new campaign of hate is that all the Coalition of the Fringes -- the erstwhile marginalized and oppressed victims of what we now call the patriarchy and toxic masculinity and white supremacy -- should combine together in a campaign of activism and peaceful protest against white males.

Notice that this campaign cannot be against all white males because educated white males are down for the struggle; that is how they make their bones. No, it is the working class males that don't get to college on diversity and inclusion, that don't get the government jobs because of being a woman or minority, that don't get into STEM because they don't like school: these are the monsters that the left is now attacking as the far right, as white nationalists, as fascists.

Only thing is that the white working class are not civilized and successful middle class professionals that could be persuaded to give the workers a break, to give well-born women a leg up, to give the former slaves their dignity. And this is because, as I say, the middle class is not that interested in power, and not for reasons of virtue.  It is because in the middle class universe the magic bullet is not political power but, as Jordan Peterson points out, competence. If a middle-class person fails to get ahead, he does not blame the system; he blames himself. He understands that the economy ebbs and flows, that failure is a part of life, and that following failure you just have to get up and get going again.

Then there is the little problem that the white working class is not a privileged elite that has been keeping the people down since time immemorial. The white working class is the former Little Darling of the ruling class that has now been cast aside like an ageing mistress. So the white working class is not likely to gracefully concede as the targets of the left have done in former times.

In other words, the game has changed, and it may be that the courses in activism in the left's school of fear and hate no longer prepare activists for the future, but for the past.

For it seems to me that, while it was fair to characterize the left's politics up to now as a coalition of the powerful and the powerless against the middle class, today I think that it is better understood as a campaign of the powerful against the powerless. And I don't think that our lefty friends have a clue about that.

The Worm in the Apple of all Administrative Institutions

Oh dearie me, so wealthy parents were trying to get their little darlings into fancy-pants colleges. So what else is new? And they used their wealth to corrupt college administrators. I can't believe they did that!

Look, the problem is not that university administrators are corrupt, or that parents will use money and influence -- even cheat -- to get their kiddies into name colleges. Of course they do! That's what the Barnacles and Stiltstockings at the Circumlocution Office do with their working hours. And that is what wealthy women do to get their children ahead.

This was illuminated for me originally in The Millionaire Next Door by Stanley and Danko, two profs that thought to publish their findings on the wealthy in a bestseller rather than in an academic journal.

According to Stanley and Danko, the average millionaire is not the robber baron of legend, but the chap next door that has built a small fortune out of humdrum businesses like dry-cleaning stores.

But, if you are such a successful businessman, what about your children? For every businessman knows that to make a fortune you have to beat the odds. It is not just enough to be a hard worker with a good idea; you need to get lucky. Chances are that your children won't beat the odds. What do you do?

Well, the answer is that you send your kids to a good college to prepare them for the professions. The fact is that the professions -- lawyering, doctoring, corporate administration -- provide a much better chance of a prosperous life than starting a business, and that is what wealthy people do for their children.

And obviously, today, the fanciest college offers the best chances and the best connections. The point about the Harvards and the Yales, I've learned, is not the education but the "extracurriculars," the lifelong connections that you make.

But what about the education? I'm glad you asked. I've been worrying about education for a while so I picked up a book by British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead on The Aims of Education. He starts out with this:

In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine.

Well! Who could have foreseen that!

It stands to reason, of course, that education in our time would exhibit "pedantry and routine" because under the influence of the educated class of the last century, they have been made into palaces of administration, and no more so than in the last 50 years. I read a chap recently who recalled that, in the schools of his youth, there would be a headmaster, a second master, a secretary for the headmaster, and a bursar. All the rest of the administration would be teachers. This, I confess, was my experience with the British private schools of my youth. But now? You tell me!

The whole point of administration is to prevent change. The whole point of a government program and its administrative bureaucracy is to make change impossible. But that is a problem.

The problem is that although we humans all dream of a world where our comfort and prosperity is guaranteed forever, the only workable world is one in which we are not allowed to deploy our own personal police force to guarantee our emoluments forever. Or, needless to say, deputize that police power to some damn politician.

We need, instead, to get with the program, Jenkins, however upsetting it is to our digestion.

This should not be a mystery to you, unless you read a newspaper fed daily scandals by Media Matters for America or the Southern Poverty Law Center. There have been, over the past century or so, real life scientific experiments in this which have yielded staggering results.

One scientific experiment has been the Great Enrichment, in which complete nobodies have revolutionized the economy countless times and yielded real per capita incomes 30 times larger than 200 years ago.

The other scientific experiment has been the Great Reaction, in which demi-gods, praised to the heavens by their publicists and supporters, have yielded poverty and death on a staggering scale. Why? Because they led revolutions that instituted top-down administrative control of the economy that did not have a clue how to deliver prosperity. And that blamed "wreckers and saboteurs" when things went wrong, as the government of Venezuela is presently doing.

In another proof of God's existence and sense of humor, there is a germ of truth in the "wreckers and saboteurs" remark. For the nobodies, the start-up entrepreneurs of textiles, steam, electricity, oil, transportation, computers, did indeed "wreck and sabotage" the existing economy. Hand-loom weavers were wrecked by mechanical weaving; stage-coaches were sabotaged by railroads; whalers were wrecked by mineral oil providers; ten-key adder experts were sabotaged by spreadsheet programs.

It's all so unjust, and in a perfect world of administrative hierarchy, it would never have been allowed to happen. And we would be as poor as we were two centuries ago, and women would be dying in childbirth, and agricultural laborers would still be threshing corn by hand instead of being starved out by those evil threshing machines.

However all is not well, because we are buried in all kinds of administrative government programs that cannot be reformed and cannot be changed, in pensions, in health care, in education, in welfare.

So, we see how the government infestation of higher education has turned it into a corrupt administrative nightmare. What did you expect?

So, Social Security is going to run out of money? I can't believe they allow that!

So government health care is ruinously expensive? No kidding!

So welfare demoralizes the lower orders. Amazing!

And as the notorious racist Charles Murray has observed in Coming Apart, things work pretty well for the folks that run the administrative apparatus, the educated top 25 percent of America. But at the bottom, the men don't work and the women don't marry.

I just can't believe that the politicians and experts have allowed this to happen.

Oh. So the Swamp was Afraid of Crossing Hillary

All along, during the Obama administration, I had this nagging feeling that the enormous latitude given to President Obama was not just because people were in awe of his First Black Presidentness, but because of fear.

Everyone, from media hacks to middle-to-high level federal bureaucrats, knew that you'd better not cross Obama's people if you knew what was good for you.

After all: the royal road to media glory is to ask the president a Tough Question. Right?

Wrong, when the president is Obama.

And it goes without saying that, for the last 25 years, you'd better not cross the Clintons.

Because, beneath the veneer of "our democracy" and equal protection of the laws, and due process, is the jungle of political enforcers and fixers. Because that's the way power, and rulers, and politics work.

The whole point of the limited-government movement way back in the 18th century was to curb the violence of nature red in tooth and claw that always obtained to kingly power.

But then came the Left and its religion of politics and its faith in political power.

So now we learn, from the transcript of Lisa Page's testimony to Congress last summer, the reason the FBI went soft on Hillary Clinton. As she texted to her lover Peter Strzok:

One more thing: She might be our next President. The last thing you need is us going in there [to Clinton’s interview] loaded for bear. You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more DOJ than FBI?

In other words, as David Catron writes:

Page was clearly worried about the unhappy fate that inevitably befalls anyone who crosses Hillary Clinton — Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) verified that the “she” referred to in the text was indeed Clinton. She obviously knows the mere fact that it is the FBI’s job to investigate such cases will carry zero weight when Her Majesty glares balefully around the Cabinet Room and demands to know, “Who will rid me of these turbulent G-Men?”

That is the currency of the left. Fear. That is the point of the Clintons running their Clinton Crime Syndicate all these years. Because that is what most politics down the ages has been about.

Indeed, part of my notion of the left as a Great Reaction is the return of politics to simple civil war by other means, to pursue and defeat your political opponents by any means short of overt civil war.

And the reason why racist, sexist, homophobe deplorables like me ended up supporting Donald Trump is that we are fed up with a generation of gentlemanly conservatives from the Bushes to McCain to Romney. We want someone to put fear in the hearts of the left.

Yes, but what about avuncular Ronald Reagan? Let me tell you, the avuncular bit came after he was elected. In the run-up to the 1980 election Reagan used to do regular radio commentaries. And the Reagan of those commentaries was angry.

So, the task ahead of us is to put the fear on the lefties. Campus protesters should be afraid, not the helpless targets of their rage. Lefty hack outfit Media Matters, that runs campaigns to frighten the advertisers on conservative radio and TV, needs to be shown the door. The fake SPLC, that brands mainstream conservatives as hate groups, needs to be humiliated, and the social-media outfits that use its accusations to censor conservatives need to be taught the facts of life. Racist and anti-semitic politicians need to be humiliated and shamed.

But who will bell the cat?

The problem is that a conservatism with the rage to fight leftist fear mongers is also a conservatism that can lose sight of the basic wisdom of the modern era, that government power should be limited and politics is not the way to salvation.

Well, that is really yesterday's problem. We are in a fight, whether we like it or not.

So, it will certainly settle matters to win the 2020 election with the nice suburban housewives recoiling from the radical politics of the Democrats. For a while.

But here we are, nearly 50 years since the Sixties Kidz were shocked by the Silent Majority reelecting Richard Nixon in a 60-40 election. And the left is still not demolished.

Indeed a whole new generation has been raised up through the government education system to believe in socialism and identity politics. As if there had never been a Nixon or a Reagan. As if the 100 million deaths of socialism and the Maoist cultural revolution meant nothing.

And it is not know-nothing idiots pushing this, but the educated ruling class that believes in the saving grace of political power -- their political power. Oh, of course, it is horrified by other people -- Trumps, publicans and sinners -- getting political power.

Like I say. There is no solution to our problem until the educated class gets religion. That would be a religion that decides that the way to salvation in not through political power.

And I suppose that the only way it will learn that truth is when a political regime arises in America and elsewhere that owes nothing to the educated class, and indeed, threatens to separate the educated class from all its privileges and perquisites, its sinecures and its pensions, and above all separate it from the intoxication of whispering into the ear of the powerful.

Then, and only then, will our educated ruling class decide that political power is a very dangerous thing that needs to be limited by legislation and Notorious RBG Supreme Court justices.

We need to make our liberal swamp creatures afraid, not of Hillary, but us.

Meanwhile, as I like to say: there is only one privilege in America: liberal privilege.

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.