Notre Dame: Civilizations Fall When The Elite Scam Fails

OK, so the image of the Cathedral of Notre Dame burning seems to many of us to be a metaphor for our age.

When I was last in Paris I went to up to Notre Dame, but decided not to go in. I guess my experience with the cathedral in Florence, and the duomo in Siena, is that these buildings are monuments to civic pride, more an expression of "our team is better than yours" than religious devotion.

But it wasn't the burning of Rome that caused its downfall. It was simply that the rulers' economic game didn't work any more.

Rome had operated for centuries on a loot and plunder model. The Roman Army would conquer some place out in the hinterlands, and the loot and plunder would flow back to Rome and enrich the coffers of the state and the ruling class.

But by, let's say, 200 AD, the game was about played out, because the frontiers of the empire were too far out. It was just too hard to find new lands to plunder, keep control of the commanders of the legions, and get the loot back to Rome.

Of course the end of the feudal era was a bit different, but still, similar. The rise of manufacturing disturbed the loot and plunder model of the landed feudatories. And the agricultural revolution meant that wealth and power belonged to people that could adapt agriculture from conservative peasants sitting on the land to energetic improvers using land drainage and new methods to increase crop yields.

Even then in the later stages of the agricultural era the landed magnates still had a good thing going. A lot of their revenue was not from land rent, but from court fees in their manor courts from local farmers buying and selling the leases on the land they farmed.

But ruling classes are all alike. They want to set up a system to loot and plunder the people so they can reward and keep their supporters. As in my maxim:

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

The problem is that the world is always changing, so a system of taxing and rewarding that has worked like a charm for centuries may cease to work, at some point. And, of course there is the little problem that the supporters always want "more."

The beautiful thing about our current system of the market economy is that it is the complete enemy of the fixed system, with some elite "farming" the nation for themselves and their supporters. The market insists of serving the consumers, and it insists on what we might call "permanent revolution," so that today's dominant corporation becomes tomorrow's basket case.

So the wise ruler rails and complains about the evil capitalists, but still lets things take their capitalist course. Our Bolivarian socialist pals in Venezuela show what happens when the rulers think they are smarter than the capitalists and staff the technostructure with political hacks: they can't even keep the lights on!

So, in the United States in the wake of the Crash of 2008, caused by the ruling-class policy of low-down and liar mortgages, which resulted in the nationalization of bankrupt General Motors and the bankrupt mortgage twins Fannie and Freddie, the government has sensibly let their nationalized basket cases return to private ownership, and they have eased up a bit on the liar loan thing.

But everyone in the ruling class believes -- and always has believed -- in command and control. That is the internal logic of political power. You rally the nation -- or tribe or army -- to face the foe, and of course that means that all the young men must be enlisted in the army, and the rest of the nation must be subordinated into a common effort that will save us from existential peril.

And jolly good fun it is for the ruling class, win or lose, and indeed for many down the chain of command that get to step out of the normal life of wiving and thriving and do their bit for the cause.

Yes, this is a crucial aspect of a ruling class. They get to thrive, most likely, win or lose. Did Napoleon die on the battlefield of Borodino? Not a bit. When the decision was made to retreat from Moscow, Napoleon rode home in his carriage; the rest of the army struggled and starved their way home to France -- if they got home at all.

We are in a situation today where all the cunning plans of our ruling class are coming to ruin, because they are inflexible top-down stupidities that cannot adjust to changing times.

The US rulers could have set up a pension plan that forced every worker to save ten percent of his wages in a private savings account. In a system like that the worker retires when he can afford to. If there is a nasty recession then maybe he has to put off retirement for a couple of years. But in the system our rulers did set up the pensions are fixed by the politicians, with no idea what will happen in 30 years, and we just hope that the money is there.

Our rulers could have set up a system for senior health care that allowed seniors to determine whether they wanted heroic care or palliative care at their end of life. Obviously, if the government is going to force the income taxpayers to pay for elderly care, as we do now, then everyone wants the gold-plated version. But, I tell you, if I were paying for my Medicare without government assistance, I don't think I would want to pay for heroic surgery up onto my late 80s. But the system our rulers gave us doesn't have that flexibility, at least, not on the surface. But below the radar they have done all kinds of cunning things to make Medicare viable by limiting care. Here's one little item. If you are on Medicare and you can no longer swallow, they don't put you on a feeding tube. The protocol is that you go on Medicare Hospice, and you die in a couple of weeks in a flurry of home health care aides.

Back to the top, and the ruin of Notre Dame and the threat of the end of the world.

The end of a civilization is generally not due to God's will or the sins of the people. It is usually due to the fact that the ruling class's loot and plunder system runs out of other peoples' money.

The Transformations of Modern Life, for Men and for Women

Back in the day, real men were warriors. Or they were hunters.

OK. So most of us were serfs. So now you know the meaning of Cassius' sneer to Brutus, that "our" fault was that we were underlings.

To be an underling means not to be a real man. And only a real man gets the girl.

The fascinating thing, for me, about the modern era is the way that we men have replaced the old order with immensely ingenious social institutions that fill in for the annealing fire of war and the thrill of the chase.

Instead of the hunt we have careers, where the ability to stalk a deer is replaced by the skill to navigate the jungle of business. And instead of war we have team sports where we can all cheer our city's team in the eternal battle for dominance and venerate our heroes. Or maybe it is business that provides the war experience and sports that replicates the hunt. Who knows?

All so we can determine who is the real alpha male that gets the girl.

The remarkable thing is that this all happened in a flash. Back in 1700 the only thing to be was a warrior. By 1900 we had corporations -- which are really reflections of armies, with the same notion of rising through the ranks and doing battle with the competition -- and we had sports teams up the ying-yang.

But what about women, you ask? Exactly my point.

Back in the day, 1800, the lives of nearly all women were entirely engaged as wives and mothers. Their entire lives were consumed with getting a couple of kids out of the womb and keeping them alive until they were out of the nest.

This life was just as nasty, brutish and short as men's lives.

But now things are different. For one thing, women don't die in childbirth. For another children don't die like they used to. Yet another, women can control their fertility, and only get pregnant when they want to.

But I think that women have made a dreadful mistake. They have wanted to become as men, because, I assume, life as a man looks pretty good from the outside.

So women have wanted to become educated, as men. They have wanted to have careers, like men. They have wanted to become "independent women" as men. They have even wanted, some of them, to approach sex as men.

I think this is foolishness, and a dreadful mistake.

I don't think that women need to be sent to schools to learn stuff. I think that women and girls naturally learn everything needful. Indeed, in my experience, women love to go to school and learn stuff and will do so at the slightest excuse. In my view, the purpose of schools is to ram stuff down the throats of boys that, at least since Shakespeare's time, go "unwillingly to school." Shall we run the whole quote? I think we should:

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel.
And shining morning face, creeping like snail.
Unwillingly to school.

Exactly my point. Whoever heard of a girl creeping like a snail to school? Unless, of course, the Mean Girls are making her life a hell.

I don't think that women are that interested in climbing the greasy pole, and their natural way of socialization does not lend itself to the administrative hierarchy of the army and the bureaucracy. Many women complain of women bosses in business and in government. In my view, women practice a form of socialization where there is indeed a hierarchy, but where there is a conceit, at least, that all women in the neighborhood are equal. And then there are committees. If you are a man you assume that when you get on a board or a committee you shut up for a year until you have shown that you deserve to be listened to. But women expect to be able to "share" the moment they get on the board, and they get insulted if they are not treated as an equal from day one.

Sorry girls. I don't think that women in business makes much sense. But there is a lot that women could be doing instead: running neighborhood home schools, charities, and just maintaining a community of women in the neighborhood that keeps an eye on all the kids and the old people.

But here is a Good Thing. Women as writers. I'm all in favor of that. And health care. Let's give the whole health care system over to women. They live and die for health care.

I don't think that women want to be, or even can be "independent women" as Simone de Beauvoir proposed in The Second Sex. And the truth of this is in the absurdity of Oscar Wilde's question: What Do Women Want? No Oscar, old chap. It's not what do women want, it's What Do Women Expect. Just between you and me, anyone that "expects" things is someone that has a servant or a husband providing her with services. Because she expects it.

Then there is sex. I remember a unit on the Dennis Prager radio show years ago where he interviewed a bunch of college girls. What did they yearn for? To be romanced, rather than getting a booty call. No wonder educated women are going every which way except conventional sex and marriage. What they want -- what they expect -- is to be courted, cherished, and loved. What they do not want is to be picked up, pressured into sex, and then dumped after a few weeks: that is my takeaway from Mattress Girl and the frequent lying Title IX accusations of college women against their former lovers. They are dying of despair in the modern sex scene.

Then there is abortion. It is sad that women are joining men in the eternal refrain: "get rid of it."

Now I have kept the prophecy of German sociologist George Simmel close in recent years. He noted that "19th century technologies 'made for less labor in the household.'"

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

This is fine and dandy, except that not everything in the world lends itself to "a more feminine sensibility." And I am afraid that we are going to have to find that out the hard way.

But there is plenty of human life in the "world outside the home" that would benefit from "a more feminine sensibility." It's just not where the feminists and their ilk think it is. And I am sure that, in the end, women will show us the way.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Searching for a New Religion: Leftism, Feminism, Wokeness, Etc.

What are we to do about the demoralization of young people? Why are the Kids so unhappy, The Atlantic worries? Christopher DeGroot answers that it's the "autonomy paradox," Yeah, sure, autonomy is great, but it brings new problems to life. For instance, after the sexual revolution, the Kids find themselves battered in a wild world of sexual licence, finding free sex to be a torpedo that has circled round and attacked them in a perfect storm of resentment and rage.

Or feminism. David Solway at PJMedia wonders how, in our amazing age of "the rule of law, scientific discovery, technological invention, educational opportunity for the masses" we have "radical feminism, which seeks the ruin of motherhood and the breakdown of the relation between the sexes." I mean, here we have women freed from the thankless toil of ages, and they are fit to be tied.

Suzanne Fields notes the curious dialectic between the #MeToo movement and the hypersexualized depiction of women in media and screen and notes that in

a provocative article in the conservative journal First Things, published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life, Katherine Kersten blames "false feminism," where there has emerged a serious disconnect between women's feverish attention to sexual impropriety on the part of men at the same time they embrace the nation's sex-drenched popular culture that demeans and hypersexualizes women.

Stalwart David Limbaugh worries "how intolerant and filled with rage leftist extremists have become[.]" It's like the runup to the French Revolution, he thinks.

Well, I am not surprised by all this at all. Because you should understand that we are in a period of religious revolution, rather like the Reformation, in which people are all at sea about the "meaning of life, the universe and everything."

The reason that people don't get this is that they have been carefully taught to believe that, oh well, old-fashioned religious frenzy was then: witch hunts, Galileo imprisoned for daring to suggest that the Earth goes around the Sun. But now...

Well, now we have exactly the same situation. People are going off into crazy new sects, the ruling class is trying to clamp down, and people are chasing Evil Ones all over the place. Nothing new under the sun.

But, but, Science, you say. No doubt, but science doesn't tell you anything about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Just the facts, ma'am, and often not much of that.

Oh sure, "science is real" as the #WeBelieve yardsigns say. But it doesn't tell us what we really want to know, which is the meaning of reality. And right now, if you really believe science is real, science can't really tell us whether CO2 is a killer drug or the loving friend of plants and all living things.

What I am saying is that we humans are in the position we have always been in: we need to tell a story about who we are and what our lives mean. But we have a problem. The Great Enrichment of the last two hundred years, not to mention the stunning success of science in explaining how things work and how to use things as a source not just of food but of power, has, shall we say, invalidated the religious narratives of old.

Now, what would you expect of a sudden change in the experience of daily life? You would expect that it would show that the old narratives about the meaning of life, the universe and everything needed a spot of paint.

They might need more than a spot of paint. They might need paint remover, a vigorous sanding, and a complete do-over.

Now actually, most people are perfectly happy with the way things are. Only a few people are all riled up, and as you know, this is perfectly illustrated by my reductive Three Peoples theory.

The People of the Subordinate Self are perfectly happy. Their religion is that you need to stick together in your ethnic enclave and you need a strong leader to defend you from the employers and the fat-cats and the KKK. All they need to do is punch up their political Uber app and an activist will be right along to peacefully protest on their behalf.

The People of the Responsible Self are perfectly happy. Their religion is that you need to believe in the God of divine justice and live a moral and responsible life according to the precepts of their Axial Age religion.

The People of the Creative Self are not happy, and that is what all the fuss is about.

In my view all the fuss and feathers -- not to mention the death of the 100 million -- is about creative people thrashing around looking for a new religion, something that answers the need for a narrative that explains the meaning of life, the universe, and everything for them.

The French Revolution was all about a religion of Reason, only it ended in Terror and the Thermidorean Reaction and Napoleon.

Romanticism was a religion of feeling, that life was clearly not a mechanical thing of logic and reason and Newton. The Romantics believed in a religion "characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature." That's what La Wik says. But what about the workers?

The Communist Manifesto was all about Educated (and creative) Youth in the mid 19th century on a hero's quest to bring justice to the working class -- and more importantly find meaning in their own lives.

Nietzsche and the religion of "free spirits." Forget nationalism; forget the morality of "the priests;" forget socialism and its encouragement of big government. You wanna be a creative genius, a free spirit thinking and doing new things? Then you belong, like Zarathustra, all alone in a cave in the mountains. And that life is hard.

Blavatsky, spiritualism, the discovery of the "unconscious" with Freud and Jung. A religion that tries to mate the conscious mind with the buried unconscious of affect and instinct to solve the problem of the creative life. This is life after bourgeois Christianity, whether you are Freud blowing up the world with your infantile sexuality, or Jung bonking the babes in his Jung cult.

Bolshevism, and educated-class revolutionaries shall be as gods! And kill about 100 million innocents in their project to subordinate all humanity to the wisdom and knowledge of political activists.

Feminism, the religion of female creativeness above and beyond the crude creativity of making children.

Cultural Marxism, a new project for Educated Youth: to bring justice to women and minorities -- and more importantly find meaning in their own lives.

The sexual revolution: finding meaning by breaking the barriers of bourgeois respectability and getting creative about sex by letting it all hang out.

Intersectionality: finding meaning by demolishing the bourgeois culture and making everything into activists and victims -- and more importantly find meaning in their own lives.

What I think.

I think there is room in the world for the religions of subordination, responsibility, and creativity. What we need is the sense to realize that our own religion is not right for everyone.

We enlightened ones should be perfectly happy for People of the Subordinate Self to live in their tribal communities and imagine that the employer or the KKK or the patriarchy is out to get them. We just need to be smart enough to build political institutions around them that prevent the workers and peasants from empowering their leaders to plunder and/or demolish the rest of the world.

We enlightened ones should be perfectly happy for People of the Responsible Self to live their responsible lives and wive and thrive and go to work, obey the law, and follow the rules. We just need to be smart enough and wise enough to do our naughty creative stuff without frightening the horses in the street.

We enlightened ones need to understand that our religious activities and beliefs, in creativity, in breaking the mold, in doing the hero's journey down into the underworld of the unconscious, etc., is not for everyone. Indeed it is probably not for the overwhelming majority. So we should follow Nietzsche's hint and do it in a cave in the mountains. And when the adepts and the fans show up at our door, we should send them away, back, in the words of Lina Lamont, to their hum-drum little lives where they will be much happier than in our lonely cave of creativity where we hope to understand, one day, the meaning of the shadows on the wall.

The big lesson that we creative people need to understand is that we should not draft the rest of the world into our creative projects. We free spirits should have the wisdom to realize that we are not God's gift to humanity, but just a bunch of Educated Youth with more enthusiasm than sense.

O-Kay! "Investigating" is not "Spying"

Thank goodness former Attorney General Eric Holder has 'splained the whole procedure to me. See, when Attorney General Barr replied to a senator's question.

"I think spying did occur," Barr said during the explosive hearing before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. "The question is whether it was adequately predicated. …Spying on a political campaign is a big deal."

No, no, no, tweeted Holder.

When there is a predicate, a legitimate basis, it's called "investigating" not "spying."

O-Kay. But it is amazing, is it not, that a whole wall full of Democrats erupted onto Twitter saying what a monstrous thing it was for Barr to talk about "spying."

Hey kids! Isn't that what intelligence agencies do for a living? Spy on people? In fact isn't the fact that we call them "intelligence agencies" just another Orwellian lie? Because what they do is spy on people. S-P-Y. With a capital S.

What the spy agencies are supposed to do is spy on the nation's potential enemies, so we have an idea about what said enemies are up to.

But there is always that little problem, sports fans, that a spy agency might get used for the partisan political interests of the party in power, or the general interest of the ruling class, rather than in the national security interest of the nation.

'Cos it's all so easy to imagine that your own particular interest is the interest of the nation, particularly when the candidate of the Other party has yellow hair.

Of course we have laws and regulations and procedures to prevent the improper use of national spy assets for partisan political purposes. But the truth is that the system is no better than the folks operating it. And if you have the worst ruling class in living memory, full of knaves, crooks and people that got their political education in Chicago...

The point is that, back in 2016, there was nobody that said: "hey, wait a minute guys! We are getting awfully close to spying on the Republicans with this surveillance! Maybe we should just send a word to Trump Tower, word to the wise, and all that, that some of their campaign chappies are getting a bit too close to the Russkies, and maybe they better be careful in case they get compromised." Maybe there was someone that tried to hit the alarm. If so, we deplorables would like to hear from him.

I mean, that is how people of good faith would act. Because we are all Americans, all in this together, right? And we don't want to flush our nation down the toilet, not even by accident.

Only that is not what the Obama spy guys did back in 2016. That is not what the FBI/DOJ did in the presidential transition. That is not what the Democrats and the media and the deep state did in the two years of the Russian Collusion inquiry.

No, instead it was pedal-to-the-metal hysteria that Trump was a traitor. And should be removed from office! Impeached! Imprisoned!

And now all the Democrats in unison are tweeting their outrage that Attorney General Barr should compromise himself with a remark about "spying."

Hey kids! I think it is a bit too late for that. You guys started this whole spying thing.

And the question that lingers in the minds of all patriotic Americans is: what in Sam Blazes was going on in the Obama administration that they were "investigating" peripheral figures around the Trump campaign? Because it sure looks to many of us that there was some dirty pool going on. Not quite cricket, old chap. What do we do about it? As the Mikado put it, so elegantly:

The billiard-sharp whom anyone catches
His doom’s extremely hard—
He’s made to dwell
In a dungeon cell
On a spot that’s always barred.
And there he plays extravagant matches
In fitless finger-stalls,
On a cloth untrue
With a twisted cue
And elliptical billiard balls.

It just seems to some of us nerds that there was something rotten in the State of Denmark, Obama administration version, and it might be a good idea to give a few bad apples in the Deep State a real going over -- kinda like the two year pursuit of Trump -- pour encourager les autres.

Nothing personal, you understand.

Imagining "No Left Left" in the US

Over at This Week, sorta-centrist Damon Linker is writing, after the Israeli elections, that "There is no left left in Israel." Says he:

Center-left social democratic parties have been in sharp decline in recent years across the Western world. But nowhere has the collapse been more stunning than in Israel, whose founders and ruling class for the first 30 years of the country's existence were very deeply linked with the labor movement. Labor has been in retreat ever since the collapse of peace negotiations with the Palestinians in 2000. But its showing on Tuesday was truly astonishing: With 5 percent of the vote, the Israeli Labor Party is now less than two percentage points away from failing to clear the minimum threshold (3.25 percent) for winning seats in the Knesset. The party is approaching the possibility of extinction.

Oh no! How could that be? Never mind.

[The left] exists now primarily in the minds of the right — as an existential threat, a sort of suicidal impulse toward surrender to Israel's many blood-thirsty enemies that must be resisted at all costs.

Sounds delicious to me, but what do I know?

But "It Can't Happen Here," to coin a phrase. Or could it?

Of course, it makes sense that "social democratic parties have been in sharp decline in recent years" because, after all, the average voter is no longer a "woiker," of eternal memory. The average chap or chapette is an office worker, or a retail worker. He or she is no longer a factory worker that experiences the world in class terms. In fact today's average person probably owns a home -- in partnership, of course with the bank -- and a car and expects the kids to go to college.

So what? Well, I suspect that despite the effort of today's ruling class to panic us all into either climate crisis or intersectional crisis, the fact is that most people want a government that keeps the trains -- or rather the jobs -- on time, and the mortgages available and the SUVs on the dealer's lot.

On this view, the woke left in the academy and the media is a frantic effort to keep the old system going, and the more it seems like Trump is winning the more frantic the woke left gets.

Or what about the House Judiciary Committee hearings yesterday on “Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism." Huh? What is all this about? Maybe, as the Zman suggests, it is just

that our political class is simply consumed with rage to the point where they are defined by it. Who they are is entirely dependent upon how much they hate heritage America and native stock Americans.

There is the notion that, ever since World War II, the western elite has been obsessed with a "never again" attitude towards Nationalism. Because Hitler. And now the whole anti-nationalism culture is starting to break up. There is, after all, a "the Russians are coming" aspect to the ruling class marginalization of nationalism, as in "the fascists are coming." Really, you mean like those tiki-torch bearers of Charlottesville? The horror of peaceful protest Walmart-style?

Look, all politics is based on some version of "the Russians are coming." It might be "the capitalists are coming" if you are trying to scare the pants off the workers. It might be "the patriarchs are coming" if you are trying to scare the pants of women. It might be "the lynchers are coming" if you are trying to scare the pants off blacks.

The problem for our ruling class is that Trump has opened a pretty useful front with his Make America Great Again, where he is doing quite a good job of scaring the pants of us deplorables with "the illegals are coming," not to mention "the Chinese are coming" to take our jobs.

Hey what's yer problem ruling class? You've had a pretty good run with "the capitalists are coming" and "the racists are coming" and "the sexists are coming" and "the homophobes are coming." You think your game is going to last forever?

The point about all these political memes is "if it takes." If it takes, then you get to win the election and pass out the goodies to your supporters. If it doesn't take, then it is time for you to think again, and find some other meme to scare the pants off the voters.

But you can imagine that any ruling would get into a fine old rage when the good old memes don't seem to be working any more. How dare the peasants do a thing like that!

I always like to use the World War I notion of the next Big Push. That's how they represented the Battle of the Somme and Passchendaele. Quite so, chaps. Only they were bloody useless and stupid, the products of minds without a strategic vision. And they killed off a generation of young men. Anyway, what on Earth were the European nations doing having a Great War?  To do what, exactly?

Yeah. So these days our ruling class is obsessed with another Big Push to stamp out White Nationalism, or Hate Speech, or whatever. Because they don't have any better ideas.

But what, dear leaders, does White Nationalism and Hate Speech have to do with the concerns of the average person, who is probably more interested in jobs, the price of health care, and the ruinous cost of college?

Nothing, but politicians gotta politick, and what the ruling class has succeeded in doing, over the last century, has been dividing people first by class and then by race and gender.

Obviously that works until it doesn't work.

As I say, humans are tribal, and so politics is all about which tribes we are going to be this week. Tribes can be anything: nations, families, races, religions, language speakers. The only question is which tribal notion is going to win the election this week.

Now I would love a world in which there is no left left in the US. But, I have to say, there is no telling if the replacement will make me yearn for the good old days when lefties ranged across the Earth like the dear old dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs seem pretty cute to us moderns; but I wonder what life was like with those chaps romping around needlessly. It might very well have been nasty, brutish, and short.

You Want Conspiracy?

In a recent piece Victor Davis Hanson went through all the anti-Trump plots of the deep state -- "All the Progressive Plotters." So I think I should list them. Because. Because I want to get them straight in my mind.

1. "Green Party candidate Jill Stein... sued in three states to recount votes and thereby overturn Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College."
2. "B-list Hollywood celebrities mobilized... to shame electors in Trump-won states into not voting for the president-elect during the official Electoral College balloting in December 2016."
3. "[M]ore than 60 Democratic House members voted to bring up Trump’s impeachment for vote. Trump had only been in office a few weeks."
4. "[C]elebrities and politicians hit social media and the airwaves to so demonize Trump that culturally it would become taboo even to voice prior support for the elected president.
5. "[D]uring the president’s first year in office, the Democrats and the media at various times sought to invoke the 25th Amendment, claiming Trump was so mentally or physically impaired that he was not able to carry out the duties of president. "
6. "200 congressional Democrats in late 2018 sued in federal court to remove President Trump, claiming he had violated the esoteric Emoluments Clause of the Constitution."
7. "[T]he ongoing “Resistance” both covertly and overtly sought ways to retard or destroy the Trump presidency—often by leaking presidential memos, conversations, and phone calls."
8. "Michael Avenatti reintroduced pornographic film star Stormy Daniels to the public [because] supposedly improper and now invalid non-disclosure agreement."
9. "[F]ederal law enforcement officials stormed the offices of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, in search of incriminating materials."
10. "Russian collusion hysteria continued to sweep the country. The moribund phony Steele dossier... was reignited by the media and progressive politicos after the firing of FBI director James Comey,"
11. "[C]ongressional committees and the left-wing mob next went after William Barr, Trump’s “hand-picked” attorney general... Barr’s crime was that he had followed the law to the letter."
12. "[C]ongressional committees mobilized to sue and force Trump to release at least six years of his private income tax records, elements of which already in bits and pieces had been leaked."

Just sayin'. Of course, Hanson leaves out Brennan's use of the intelligence community to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016. Never mind, we will get back to that in good time.

Perhaps this little item tells us something about the whole procedure. That Donald Trump is now a survivor. He has been through political hell and lived to tell the tale. Dov Fischer, in The American Spectator told, back in January of his own experience as a survivor after three years of being attacked as a rabbi.

That vicious and despicable experience was so jarring, so disruptive to my core, my soul, and my essence — and also to my wife and my still-innocent then-adolescent son, both of whom personally were subjected directly to behavior that only G-d could punish — that I have not been the same person since... In short, the persecution and sustained three years of public efforts to destroy me — even to ruin my family — actually resulted in the opposite: they liberated me, and they persuaded me that there is no compromise with evil.

Then he goes on to list three other survivors: Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Donald Trump. As he says, after you have been through an experience like that, and are now a survivor, you learn to say about your tormentors: To heck with you.

And there is also the lesson of Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution. He describes the typical arc of a political/cultural revolution, from extravagant hope, to disappointment, to enraged determination in a reign of terror and virtue, to the dénouement in a "Thermidorean Reaction."

The reaction comes, he asserts, because you cannot keep everyone living at fever pitch forever. At some point the vast majority of people just want to get back to normal life: wiving and thriving and all that. That is something that the committed activist -- Puritan, Jacobin, Bolshevik, intersectionalist -- does not understand.

Just sayin'.

Hallpike: Human Tribalism is only 12,000 Years Old

I just finished C.R. Hallpike's book of essays On Primitive Society: and other forbidden topics. The essays are all about whacking other anthropologists over the head for a variety of sins, and asserting Hallpike's notion that we should apply Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development and Kohlberg's stage theory of moral development to primitive societies.

And his main assertion is that primitive societies -- meaning societies that are not states and do not yet have central governments -- usually do not operate beyond Piaget's Stage 2, the "pre-operational" stage.

Why? Because in hunter-gatherer and agricultural village life the "higher stages" aren't necessary. Hallpike proposes the notion that humans are lazy.

People do what is easiest or most attractive for them to do in the circumstances, and what is easiest to do is unlikely to be very efficient or even very sensible. It is easiest for most people to follow the crowd, to go on doing things in the same old way, to be lazy, gluttonous, and revengeful... Once people have devised something that works better than nothing, the natural temptation is to rest on one's laurels and go no further, unless there is a compelling reason to do so.(p.89)

Hallpike calls this the "survival of the mediocre." And I don't things have changed much on the mediocre front.

For people raised on the Darwinian "survival of the fittest" and the Great Reaction that insists on our right to be lazy, this is shocking. It means, by the way, that "primitive" people are not, necessarily, dumber than we are. In fact, Hallpike writes, young men from tribal villages in New Guinea go to mechanic school and become perfectly competent auto mechanics.

The point is that, since agriculture is probably no more than 15,000 years old, we humans are still genetically the same as hunter-gatherers, with the same intellectual horsepower. It's just that, in the old days, people didn't bother to exercise their full intellectual faculties. Because they didn't need to.

One of the things we didn't need to do was live according to what we think of as a moral sense. We are talking about guilt, the internal feeling of being in the wrong, versus shame, the horror of appearing wrong to our fellows. Let's set forth a table of values from Hallpike's book.

	Piaget/Kohlberg Stage 2	Piaget/Kohlberg Stage 3
What is right (p.370)	Following rules only when it is to my immediate advantage and need. Right is also what is fair, and what's an equal exchange, a deal, an agreement.	Living up to what people who are close to you or what people generally expect of you in your role as son, brother, friend, etc.
Reasons for doing right (p.378)	To serve one's own needs or interests in a world where you have to recognize that other people have interests too.	The need to be a good person in your eyes and those of others. Your caring for others. Belief in the implicit Golden Rule. Desire to maintain rules and authority which support stereotypical good behavior.

The point that Hallpike is making is that humans don't need to think about what someone else is thinking -- as in Stage 3 -- when they are living in an agricultural village. So they don't. But when they start living in bigger societies, then the whole question of hierarchy and self-conscious rules and feeling good about yourself -- the internal life -- become necessary for a functioning society.

And if we apply Hallpike's notion of the "survival of the average" notion then we have to take very seriously the idea that the development of the idea of being "a good person in your eyes and the those of others" became a necessary part of human society when real cities started appearing 3,000 years ago.

And here let us insert Nietzsche and his complaint about "the priests" teaching us to hate ourselves, whereas in the good old days we hated our enemies as we should. On Hallpike's theory I propose that the reason that the Axial Age religions came up with sin and salvation was because in the larger-scale societies of 3,000 years ago it was no longer OK for men to get mad with some other chap and whack him with a club. How do you stop the fellas from fisticuffs outside the tavern at night? Sin and guilt.

One other thing. I had always thought of "tribalism" as an instinctive thing that went way back into the mists of time. But Hallpike insists that hunter-gatherers are not tribal. Their groups are small enough that they don't really experience anything bigger than family. And when they get annoyed with each other they go their separate ways, and maybe join another band.

So if tribalism developed with the agricultural village, before the birth of the agricultural state, it means that all tribalism is what I call "fake tribalism." It is not an ancient and immemorial human instinct, but a new cultural adaption to the problems of living in villages of up to 3,000 people where you do not know everyone and everything about them. Tribalism as we understand it is not more than about 15,000 years old, pal.

Let us make the whole thing outrageous. Tribalism is like modern "branding;" it helps you know what to think about something without having to think. Oh that's a Honda: good solid Japanese engineering. Oh that's a Whatsit tribal member: one of them. And in fact that is the way we all live; we make snap judgments about everything all the time, unless a particular situation forces us to step back and rethink things.

This means that all tribes, from extended families to clans and feudal lords to cute little German princedoms to the modern tribalisms of class and race and nation, are all modern adaptations to the modern facts of living around a lot of people that you don't know, but with whom you have to interact anyway.

And capitalism does the same thing. We work in neo-tribes called corporations; we vote in neo-tribes called political parties; we get educations in neo-tribal universities complete with their tribal colors and mascots; we buy our preferred brands.

And then there is the tribiest tribe of all; the modern tribe of educated and evolved lefties and their activisms and intersectionalisms. Why do they do it? To differentiate themselves from the common herd, darling.