Our Real Problem is Religious

In the aftermath of the Trump Collusion flameout and the Senate Democrats voting "present" on the Green New Deal, one might ask what is happening?

My answer is: religion. My reason: This quote from anthropologist Roy Rappaport: "No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion."

So, if the educated class since the early 19th century has reckoned, after Nietzsche, that "God is Dead," what comes next?

What comes next is the educated class finding a new religion under every rock. I am reading The Jung Cult by Richard Noll right now. It is, frankly, an anti-Jung screed, saying that Jung was dabbling in all the hazy-crazy religious and spiritualist stuff in the German world around 1900, especially the völkisch movement, and that leads straight to anti-semitism, which, by the 1930s, Jung and his followers were anxious to obscure.

OK, fine. So, on the one hand we have the spiritualist-crystals-cultish-back-to-nature thing -- which is always in danger of anti-semitism and 6 million dead Jews. And on the other we have the rationalist-materialist-administrative-state thing which is always in danger of big government and 100 million deaths and counting. Choose your poison: Jung or Freud. Yes. If you say that Jung is the inspiration for anti-semitism, then it is remarkable how lefties still like Freud.

Let's back up a step. In my view, universities have always been about the education of what Nietzsche calls "the priests." Read Middlemarch and Fred Vincy, son the the mayor of Middlemarch, gets sent off in, I suppose, the 1820s to the University of Cambridge to become a priest. The point is that, for the local businessman Walter Vincy, sending his kid to Cambridge to take holy orders is a step up, socially. Or the university was for the education of the political elite: that's what education in the classics -- "Greats" -- was all about.

Nothing has changed. Only now young heads full of mush are educated in the religion of today's political elite, which means a farrago of lefty cant and postmodernism and identity politics.

So if you wonder about Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, stop wondering. She is a perfect product of today's elite education system. She believes exactly what she has been taught to believe.

Now I believe that the big human problem down the ages has been the dance between religion and politics. Let us say that politics, or government, is the need for humans in a community to combine against an existential peril, which might be a flood or an invasion. Religion is the existential need to come to some sort of a common understanding about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Both of these, in my view, are essential to the human condition.

But there is a problem. What happens when the political power of the kings and the religious power of "the priests" are combined? What you get is totalitarianism.

But you also get two rival centers of power, as the political elite and the religious elite jockey around each other, jealous of the other's power. Thus you get "the priests" of Egypt doing for the Pharaoh Akhnaten who wanted to shift Egypt's religion. You get the Catholic Church in Rome in a curious dance with the kings of the Franks in Trier in the era of Charlemagne. And you get King Henry II allegedly asking someone to rid him of the turbulent priest, St. Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.

When there is turbulence in the political sphere you get civil war, with rebels determined to replace the corrupt and ineffective ruling class; people get all riled up about collusions and traitors. When there is turbulence in the religious sphere you get witch hunts and Inquisitions; people get all riled up about agents of the Devil and other heretics.

When you get political and religious turbulence combining you get the killing fields; you get the police states of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and their descendants.

Now it is my belief that the whole phenomenon of The Left is a gigantic effort to create a religion to replace the Christianity that the western educated class has abandoned. But our lefty friends know no way to save the world from sin than through politics. This is the meaning of the obscure phrase invented by Eric Voegelin: "the immanentizing of the eschaton." It means creating heaven on Earth, rather than leaving heaven to the next life. The point is that if the notion of death meaning "going to heaven" no longer has traction, because you don't believe in God and the afterlife, then humans will try to create heaven on Earth instead. And, conservatives say, when you do that you pretty soon create a totalitarian political-religious system that mobilizes the entire society to bring heaven to Earth. Or else.

You will notice that the Green New Deal combines both political and religious themes, and Good Little Girls like AOC have been perfectly taught to believe both in the religion and the politics of the Green faith. The world is going to hell, unless we repent. The world will burn up, unless we replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

In the old days of the West, subsequent to the Peace of Westphalia, a certain distance was established between church and state, so that religion dealt with heavenly matters and politics with mundane matters. This worked, sorta, until Zarathustra came to preach the Death of God. And until the murderous efficiency of modern technology made war into a rather dicey affair that carpet-bombed everything in sight so that there was very little loot left for the winner.

The left's solution to this problem, that God is Dead and war is hell, is "activism." If you are a young person with a burning desire to do good in the world, then you become an activist and organize the oppressed and the marginalized in a political movement to demand their rights. You do not actually practice a religion, but you certainly have your Articles of Faith; you do not actually conduct a civil war, but you do enact shows of force that you call "peaceful protest."

Now my belief is that the left has got it all wrong on the religious front. If you have a burning need to learn the meaning of life, the universe, and everything you should do as Nietzsche's Zarathustra did, and go off into the mountains and live in a cave as a "free spirit," and when a bunch of followers show up at your cave to get the Truth from the Master you send them all packing.

And the left has it all wrong on the political front. If you want people to live in peace and prosperity then you should enable the market system to work its magic, and you should keep government and its administrative state down to a bare minimum. Wanna help your fellow humans on the material front? Go invent something, create a startup, hire a bunch of workers, and try to sell your brilliant to the world. Oh, and do it all without benefit of the dead hand of government compulsion.

One fine day, maybe, we will get to a world in which our educated elite has abandoned its Great Reactionary faith in a poisonous combination of secular religion and big government. But that day is not yet.

When You Strike at a King...

"When you strike at a king, you must kill him."

That remark was made by Emerson to young punk Oliver Wendell Holmes in respect of an article the young fellow had written attacking Plato.

But what about Donald Trump?

Did the swampies think about that when they launched the Holy Office of the Inquisition, Robert Mueller, Grand Inquisitor, on President Trump? I don't think so. I think that the whole Russia Collusion narrative was a weak and feeble attempt to cover up the use of the US intelligence community's powers of surveillance to spy on the Trump campaign.

Because, like, that's illegal, like, whatever.

As they say: "What did the president know, and when did he know it." Obama, that is.

The thing about Obama, I think, is that Margaret Thatcher's famous remark about European leaders applies: "Weak. Feeble." And weak and feeble leaders and weak and feeble swampies do stupid underhanded things that end up biting them in the you know where.

"What does not kill me makes me stronger." That's my pal Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche, you will know if you are a north London luvvie with a TV media gig, is "the Nazis' favorite intellectual."

Yes, dear liberal friends: what happens now? What happens to all those nice moderate Democrats that got elected to Congress in 2018 on the strength of the false accusations against the president? What will the nice suburban women that just instinctively went with the Mean Girls on the block? Will they now turn on the Mean Girls "I can't believe they said that" about the president?

What happens to the noble objective media with its layers of fact-checkers now? After they have acted like Democratic operatives with by-lines for the last three years?

What happens to all the Democratic House chairmen that are all cranked up for impeachment with nowhere to go?

What about all the Subaru drivers with their COEXIST bumper stickers? Can they coexist with Trump? Perhaps they should sell the Subaru and take the bus.

Well, we old time conservatives are revved up by a president of whom it may be said, after President Lincoln speaking about Gen. Grant, "I can't spare this man: he fights."

It really is an extraordinary feeling, and helps me understand the campaign website of, I think Hillary Clinton way back. It was a list of warlike messages: fighting for women; fighting for children; fighting for workers, etc.

But, of course, that is exactly what people want in a politician, someone fighting for them in the eternal battle of life.

Of course, in the end such heroes end up betraying the people that trusted them. Or they get betrayed. Or they get defeated.

And the play goes on.

But the fact is that, after the submission of the Special Prosecutor's report, the swampies have lost. For now.

But take courage, lefties. There are no final victories. There is only: wait until next time.

Yes, Our Ruling Class Stinks, But...

OK, so now Mueller Time is over and it's time to get back to...

Politics as usual?

Yes, but that means that the politicians just get back to bribing us election time with our own money, as prescribed in my definition of government:

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory and taxing the people thereof to reward its supporters.

There is only one way out. You say to the government: you can take your rewards -- your pensions, your free health cares, your free educations, your relief of the poor, and put 'em where the sun don't shine.

Anything short of this means that the game goes on. Because if you are taking money from the politicians then you are just another serf.

Of course, as indicated by my reductive Three Peoples theory, there will always be serfs, People of the Subordinate Self, who want only to live under the protection of a great lord. More, there is something in all of us that just wants to be safe. As Cassius put it:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Shakespeare, don'tcha know.

See, in my better world, we would all have pensions; only we would get them from saving all our lives at Fidelity and Vanguard. And all of us would voluntarily kick in for people "without the means to retire through no fault of their own." Perhaps some billionaire would thoughtfully put himself at the head of Pensions For No Fault of Their Own.

In my better world, we would all have health care; only we would get it, we cheapskates, at Health-Mart: Low health prices, always. And some billionaire would run Health Care Through No Fault of Their Own and we would all kick in to help widows and orphans.

In my better world, we would all educate our kids; only we would do it through all the moms in the neighborhood home-schooling together. And Google would provide a complete smorgasbord of educational tools for the moms and the kids to use. Conservative billionaires would provide conservative alternatives to the sickeningly woke lefty Google material. Game designers would provide addictive games that got kids to learn everything they needed, just by "playing" a silly game. And some billionaire would run Education Through No Fault of Their Own for kids with lousy or ignorant parents. And the neighborhood moms would attach the odd kid, ignorant through no fault of its own, to the neighborhood home-school.

And so on, with welfare. Only, I suspect that the relief of the poor without government would not just be about dishing out money for nothing.

It wouldn't be that hard, and it would be very good for us, because it would exercise our humans-as-social-animals instincts. It would force us, as the lefties say, to be more "ethical" and "altruistic."

And we would all spend a part of each day telling some damn politician to go put his free stuff where the sun don't shine. This would be mandatory, subject to a fine for defaulters that went three or more days without telling some politician where to put it.

See, unless we all get together and "collude" and decide not to take the bait from the damn politician offering free stuff, then the fault, dear reader, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

If we said No to all the free stuff, then we could say No to all the taxes. And maybe get from the current taxation of about 35 percent of GDP down to 10 percent GDP or less.

Imagine an America with taxes at 10 percent of GDP. You can do it if you try. We did have an America like that in 1900, and for some reason immigrants came over to that mean-spirited America by the ship-load.

Gosh, I wonder why.

Thoughts on the Culture War

In the current culture war we cannot expect "the other" to understand our point of view. That is because, as Christopher DeGroot writes, all living things live by prejudice. He quotes anthropologist Mary Douglas, who points out that we all need to evaluate new experiences in the light of what we already know and believe.

In other words, it is a waste of time to start from the beginning whenever something new shows up. Life goes on, and we use our experience and our knowledge, and our cultural inheritance, to navigate past each new event in our world.

So it is not surprising that our Democratic friends are fit to be tied by the Trump phenomenon. Remember, from back in the 2000s, Democrats have believed, with John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority, that they owned the future, with minorities, the educated, and women all coalescing in a glorious new political hegemony.

Their notion, their ideology -- prejudice if you like -- saw them ruling wisely and well over a populace of diminished ability, partly of prejudice and superstition in the religious middle class, and partly of ignorance and marginalization in the lower orders. No problem, because our educated rulers were notably free of prejudice and superstition and also notably full of care and compassion for the marginalized.

But here comes Trump with "tropes" from another era: nationalism instead of cosmopolitanism; protectionism instead of free trade; insult instead of urbanity. Our Democratic friends thought all that was well and truly buried with Hitler and the disaster of Smoot-Hawley.

Of course, in the comfort of their ideology -- their prejudice if you like -- they cannot see how they have replaced the us-and-them of nationalism with the us-and-them of identity politics. They cannot see that they practice their own form of protectionism with the help-our-friends activities of the administrative and regulatory state. And they cannot see how their activism culture licenses them and their clients to insult anyone they please while criminalizing their opponents for "hate speech."

Thus, for DeGroot, "winning the culture war" will not involve what our liberal friends like to call "a conversation" but the usual incidents of war: "strategy, manipulation, and, perhaps, sheer force."

After all, that is what the whole Russian collusion operation of the last two years has been about: the current ruling class trying to overcome the cognitive dissonance of the Trump presidency by combining to undermine President Trump and demoralize his supporters.

As DeGroot writes: "all moral systems and all political systems require some concept of an enemy". It could be the Devil; it could be the Jews. It could be the "robber barons." It could be illegal aliens; it could be white nationalists.

But in a world of enemies, there must be friends, the bonds of trust that we call social capital.
According to sociologist Robert Putnam there are two types of social capital:

bridging capital refers to trust between groups, between people who have different values and identities, while bonding capital refers to trust within groups.

And, according to Putnam, "diversity" tends to reduce both "bridging capital" and "bonding capital." In other words, people need to be secure in like-living-with-like communities if they are to start building social structures of trust, both within their community and without.

But, of course, the whole point of identity politics and political correctness is to create distrust in the national community.

The only good thing about our ruling class is that they are idiots. Imagine if they really knew what they were doing!

2020 Election: What I Hope For

It was strange listening to the audio of Elizabeth Warren's recent townhall on CNN. Medicare for All? Yay! Wealth Tax? Yay! Climate change? Yay! All her lefty proposals were met with (a preponderantly female) cheer, as in: what universe do these women live in?

Well, we know. They live in Liberal-land, and they believe. They believe what "the priests" tell them. As I've said before, when you peruse the #WeBelieve yard signs, you are reading a liberal Ten Commandments, brought down from the mountain-top by a liberal Moses.

The point about the sentiments in #WeBelieve is that they are religious. And in every case where these religious sentiments enter into politics they amount to the legislation of morality. Religious freedom? Then why are liberals harassing Christian bakers that don't want to bake cakes for gay weddings?

Yes, but what does it mean? What does all the legislation of morality, plus the total socialization of health care, plus the climate change cult, mean?

It means, I think, that despite all the excitement of the last 500 years, with science, technology, capitalism, the Great Enrichment, and all, we are still humans, living animals that live by our feelings -- or instincts, or "the unconscious."

And one of our "feelings" is the dream of "altruism." Yeah, like back in the good old days when human community was truly egalitarian, and share-and-share alike.

Only, according to C.R. Hallpike in On Primitive Society, here is how things worked out in the Tauade tribe in New Guinea. They had "big-men" at the top of the social hierarchy, with two or three wives, and "rubbish-men" at the bottom, with no wives.

The principal roles of the chiefs are the organization of feats and dances, at which they make speeches on behalf of their group; the negotiation of peace between their group and others; and, to some extent, leadership in war. Their essential personal attributes are generosity, oratory, and political skills, and a willingness to accept compensation for wrongs rather than resort to violence at the slightest provocation.

What about the "rubbish-men?"

[They] are the poorest and least effectual members of society; often unmarried, they are mean and avaricious, attempt to renege on their co-operative responsibilities such as contributing to feasts or making gifts on appropriate occasions, and are also said to be the worst thieves (theft being below the dignity of chiefs) and to be generally irresponsible.

The point is that the notion of selfishness or altruism is beside the point. The chiefs are rich -- and also generous. It is part of their self-image and reputation to be noble and above the common ruck of men, and their nobility and generosity pays them back in prestige and popularity. The rubbish-men are ineffective because they think in terms of immediate benefit and cost.

It seems pretty clear to me that the big-men are more social, and the rubbish-men are more selfish. But the big-men are not "altruistic." It is just that they can see around corners, and understand, either instinctively or strategically, that generosity and nobility of manner pays off in wives and reputation.

Now, I would say that the chap that is going to win the 2020 presidential election is the candidate that looks most like the tribal big-man and least like the tribal rubbish-man.

You will notice that the Democrats and the mainstream media have been doing their best to represent President Trump as a rubbish-man, a vile monsters that is cheating and treating with the hated Russians.

And yet what is the best way to characterize our liberal friends, with their haughty demeanor, their attacks on free speech, their social media frenzies, and their over-the-top spending proposals? How about mean, often unmarried, refusing to contribute to feasts, etc.?

You'll forgive an old man if I say that this looks like a replay of the Sixties, when The Kidz thought they were remaking the world in the image of Herbert Marcuse, and nothing could stop them. Only Richard Nixon did, appealing to the Silent Majority that just wanted a job, a family, a house, and a car. And then, just to make things clear, the man that liberals called an amiable dunce won two presidential elections going away. This B-movie actor was called Ronald Reagan.

Is the US electorate still a bunch of deplorables that can't see further than a job, a family, and a house and car, unable to lift their eyes to the mountain-top of Medicare For All and renewable energy?

I have no idea, and neither does anyone else.

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.