What the Three Peoples Should Reach For

There is no doubt that my reductive Three Peoples theory is as good as it comes. But what should the Three Peoples reach for? Of what should they dream? What should be their goals?

I'm glad you asked that, Senator. The answer is pretty simple. They should reach for what comes next.

Now, for the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, they should strive for responsibility. And there happen to be convenient religions all over the place to help them with that. Evangelical Christianity is one such. The whole point of the religions that emerged in the Axial Age is that they propose a god that does not get involved in daily life like the gods of the Iliad, but set up the world with rules and roles, and you are supposed to live responsibly in the world that god has created for you, or else divine judgment.

For the People of the Responsible Self, the great middle class, they should strive for creativity. It is not enough just to go to work, obey the law, and follow the rules like a good bourgeois. Step out a little! And try something new.

As always, the big problem is with the People of the Creative Self. That's because they think so highly of themselves. I was thinking about this today, as I was reading about the Muslim terrorists that organized the terror bombings of Christian churches and slaughter of "Easter worshippers" in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday. These were not helpless victims, according to Terry Glavin in The National Post.

At least two of the suicide bombers had law degrees. Two were brothers from a wealthy Colombo family, one of whom attended university in the United Kingdom and earned a postgraduate degree in Australia. There were nine of them altogether, eight men and a woman. Most were “well-educated and come from (the) middle or upper-middle class,” Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka’s deputy defence minister, told reporters.

Well, well. Now there's creativity for you! And it is a creative act, to think up and plan a series of terror attacks on Christians and their churches. But obviously it is wrong.

Obviously, also, our Educated Youth has a problem with the problem of good and evil. In fact, one might even start to think that Nietzsche had it wrong when he wrote about the world Beyond Good and Evil. It is precisely when you are starting to think about what lies beyond good and evil that you need to get a grip on yourself about good and evil. Because obviously, some creative things are good, and some creative things are bad.

Obviously the key question here is power. Without power the question of good and evil does not arise. But with power, the question of good and evil does arise, and it becomes more important the more powerful you become.

Nietzsche railed against "the priests" for teaching us to hate ourselves with their notion of good and evil. But I think that it is natural that as people started to throng to the cities that the issue of good and evil should become more salient.

It's just that as we rise even further from mere city life to creative life we do not get beyond good and evil, but even deeper into the question of right and wrong. With great power comes great responsibility, as Ben Parker told Peter Parker, the Spider-Man. Power, responsibility.

Now, we might say that the People of the Subordinate Self have no power, and therefore have no opportunity to do evil. They can, I suppose be the unwitting agents of evil by subordinating themselves to an evil lord, and becoming his agents.

We might say that the People of the Responsible Self have little power, since all they do is follow the rules and act responsibly. But, of course, the responsible course of action is not always so obvious. And as Dickens makes clear in Bleak House, even the lower parts of the middle class like the Smallweeds can lord it cruelly over their one and only servant girl, Charley.

Obviously, when we come to the People of the Creative Self the issue of power and agency becomes overwhelming. The whole notion of Creativity is to hack a new path through the jungle. The new idea might work; it might not work. It might be a good idea; it might be an evil idea.

What is more, there is the temptation to think your idea is a good idea. Of course it is, a good plan, a most excellent plan; it is bound to succeed.

But, in fact the originator of a plan is not the best judge of its potential, or its value. In the marketplace ideas are judged by the market. In crime, the accused is judged by the jury. In politics the politicians are judged by the voters.

Of course, this is nothing new. It is right there in the aphorism of Juvenal: who will guard the guardians?

And so we may say that the People of the Creative Self should beware of power, and accept the verdict of the deplorables. They should turn away the offer of power, to listen to the verdict of the underlings.

It is all very well for Google to cry "Don't Be Evil," but who is to determine how and when Googlers might be evil?

The modern age is really the first era in which the People of the Creative Self have attained battalion strength, the ability to spread real damage. And so it comes to the deplorables to insist that our glorious betters -- the creatives, the artists, the writers, the activists, the generals, the politicians, the geniuses -- establish as their faith the importance of humility, and the need to refuse, and more than thrice, the kingly throne offered by Mark Anthony to Caesar.

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, said Henry Kissinger. And so Jesus, the creative Son of God, must refuse the offer of power over all the kingdoms of the world.

The People of the Creative Self must reach for humility.

Nietzsche on the Criminal Law

When we get beyond the lex talionis, an eye for an eye, to a more civilized form of law, what and how should it be? That's what Nietzsche looks at in The Wanderer and His Shadow §22. It's all about a "Principle of Equilibrium." And that goes for the brigand and the defender of the peace.

The brigand and the man of power... are probably at bottom very similar beings, except that the latter obtains what he wants in a different way from the former, namely through regular tributes paid to him by the community and not by imposts levied by force.

Hmm. Seems like an echo of St. Augustine who wrote that the only difference between a government and a band of outlaws is the addition of impunity. Notice that both the brigand and the prince levy their imposts by force. "But the essential thing is:"

this man of power promises to maintain an equilibrium with the brigand; in this the weaker perceive a possibility of living.

Equilibrium: that's the point of government and law. So, says Fritzi, when he gets down to our modern criminal law. The point of disgrace and punishment is to burden the criminal with burdens to equalize the burdens he has placed on his fellow citizens.

Within a community in which  all regard themselves as equivalent there exists disgrace and punishment as measure against transgressions, this is to say against disruptions of the principle of equilibrium: disgrace as a weight placed in the scales against the encroaching individual who has procured advantages for himself through his encroachment and now through the disgrace he incurs experiences disadvantages which abolish these earlier advantages and outweigh them. The same applies to punishment against the preponderance which every criminal promises himself it imposes a far greater counter-weight, enforced imprisonment for acts of violence, restitution and punitive fines for theft.

So, says Nietzsche, "the transgressor is reminded that... he has excluded himself from the community"; he is reminded of "the harshness of the state of nature" for those outside the beneficial meadow of human community.

It's an interesting idea: disgrace for the guy that can feel shame; punishment for the guy that doesn't; and for both a reminder of the blessings of the peace of society, in the curious middle ground between brigand and kindly father, where tribute paid to the powerful is at least predictable and bearable.

OK, here's more Nietzsche-ness. What about the punishment of criminals (in aphorism 23)? In our legal system we require the convicted criminal to be accountable for his deed, acting in a rational manner rather than "unconsciously or under compulsion."

For an offense to be punishable presupposes that its perpetrator intentionally acted contrary to the better dictates of his intelligence. But how can anyone intentionally be less intelligent than he has to be?

It must be "pure willfulness" wot done it. But that means free will, and the assumption of the philosophy of sentencing is that the criminal has to be rational and responsible to be punishable. But free will implies an action that takes place outside the rational use of intelligence. What's a mother to do?

So. Let's forget free will and responsibility. If someone offends, or breaks the equilibrium of society, then you punish them with disgrace to restore social equilibrium if they are capable of shame -- or of blushing. If the perpetrator is not capable of blushing with shame then you just simply punish them with fines and/or imprisonment. To restore the equilibrium disturbed by the criminal.

Well, it's something to think about.

It's Too Soon for a "Dissident Right"

Back from Finland, the Zman is thinking about what a post-Buckleyite right should call itself, now that the alt-right seems to have crashed and burned. He wants a "dissident right" to represent a non-blank slate view of human nature and society.

Above all, for him, the right should not be a clean-up crew after the latest lefty eruption of radicalism as most right-wing movements of the last 200 years have been.

What we need to found ourselves upon is English biologist William Donald Hamilton rather than Nietzsche, he writes. Hamilton's signature achievement was to show the limits of "altruism" and actually found Darwin's notions in biology.

Whereas the traditional right assumes that "traditions, customs and institutions are the result of accumulated wisdom."

The dissident right, in contrast, thinks of traditions, customs and institutions as evolved solutions to human organization that are peculiar to a people, because of their peculiar evolutionary arc.

So, students in a high school cafeteria self-segregate by gender race, intelligence, everything you can think of.

This is not the result of accumulated wisdom in the form of custom or the result of tradition. It is not the result of mystical forces like white privilege or social constructs. It is the nature of humans to attract to those with whom they share fundamental connections, which are rooted in biology. Their hierarchical relationships are similarly rooted in their biology. 

So politics and culture must deal with this reality. I think that Jordan B. Peterson was making this point with his famous lobster story.

Only I would say that human society is the result of all of the above: custom and tradition; privilege created by force; and the roots in biology. I would say that religion and culture and politics are social experiments that, if successful, will end up encoded in the biology.

You need both Hamilton and Nietzsche. But you probably also need the failed experiments of the left. Why? Because humans really do proceed through the debris of failed experiments. For instance, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was an attempt to learn the hard lessons of the wars of religion. You need the bloodbath of the 20th century socialist states to become sadder and wiser about Heaven on Earth politics. When will these hard lessons be encoded in the genes? Not any time soon.

I think that the failure of the right has been to concentrate its thinking and its politics on the social and cultural world view of the middle class and to ignore the interests of the workers and peasants of the world. Also to fail to understand what is going on in the minds of the creative class and the left.

That, of course is what my reductive Three Peoples theory is intended to demonstrate. There are people in the world that think and feel like subordinate peasants. Our politics and our economics must accommodate their needs at least to the point that they don't opt for bloody rebellion. But we middle-class deplorables also deserve a voice. Human culture and politics and economics must allow us middling ones to wive and thrive in the way that satisfies us. And the creative educated class deserves to live in their way, as artists, writers, activists, and LGBT, provided they don't pollute the water for the rest of us. Yes, every way of life has its toxic waste. Even artists and writers and LGBT and especially activists.

But. I think a true "dissident right" would focus on the needs of the non-deplorables. We know what we want, but we also want other people, people not like us, to get what they want too.

What do I mean by that?

I mean we should be thinking about what the People of the Subordinate Self want. They want someone that fights for them. They want job security. They want someone to do the thinking for them, provide them with the infrastructure to get an education for their kids, and get training for a job for themselves. And then there are women. I think that we need to do the thinking that will mend the sexual and family chaos that the welfare state has visited on the poor. That means creating a culture that helps women find a partner that will be a decent husband for them and a good father to their children. I feel that this should be done as much as possible outside government through labor unions and fraternal organizations and churches that socialize and raise up people that think of themselves as subordinate and powerless. That's because these community organizations can only thrive if they benefit their members every day. Government and politics seem unable to pull back from failure and stasis.

I mean we should be thinking about what the People of the Creative Self want. Actually, this is rather presumptuous, because, according to the developmental psychologists, we deplorables don't have a clue about the consciousness of the creative people. But I am conceited enough to believe that I can; this is because, I feel, I think and feel along snowy ridges way above the dusty plain of the thought of the People of the Creative Self.

But let us start with what the People of the Creative Self should not want. They should not want to be the saviors of the victims. That's because everything they have proposed thus far for the victims amounts to a Great Reaction to reinstate the worst features of the past. Their socialism is neo-slavery; their welfare state is neo-feudalism; their identity politics, from class to race to gender politics is neo-tribalism. So on the one hand we should damn the creative left to hell with a brutal narrative of assertion that blames them for all the sorrows of the world, and as the culprits for all the crimes of the last century. On the other hand we should neutralize the left's victim politics by offering a positive agenda for the People of the Subordinate Self that helps them integrate into the city culture and economy, on the road to the middle class from victims to responsibles, showing that we care about people like them.

Another thing we need to do for the People of the Creative Self is encourage them into creative lives that are actually beneficial rather than corrosive. I mean by this a narrative that tell the creatives that aspiring to be an artist or a writer is fine and dandy, but it is hard. Society does not owe them a living as a creative artist; indeed all the narratives down the ages tell us that if you want to be a hero, it means being a sacrificial hero, who really gives up his life that others may live. If this hero ends up the dictator or president for life then he is living a lie, the opposite of the hero and nothing but a villain.

In other words, the creative life as political activist is nothing but a lie. We know that for two reasons.

The first is that almost all the political activism of the last two centuries has been a mixed blessing at best and a crime against humanity at worst. I mean by this that the activism for the working class led directly to the white working class dying of despair because the creative class did not teach the working class how to wive and thrive in the city but merely to live on the liberal plantation as slaves or serfs that were abandoned when the political weather changed. Needless to say, any candid socialist politics has led to mass graves and/or starvation. Period, full-stop, end of story.

The second reason is that we now know, almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we need a lot less politics and government in the world than we used to. We humans thrive best in a self-adjusting and self-creating culture and economy that is governed by law rather than executive fiat and the price system rather than administrative regulation. But this is poison to our creative friends because in their dull world view they imagine that political power is the highest and noblest of callings. In this they are a weak echo of the faith of the feudal lords.

Obviously the effort to create a cultural narrative that can lord it over the People of the Creative Self is not going to be easy, but it is essential. We deplorables need to put the People of the Creative Self on the back foot, and develop a good cop bad cop narrative that on the one hand scorches them for their vile activism and reactionary faith in politics, and on the other dangles before them the truth about the creative life that it is not a free lunch but a descent into the underworld and a dangerous Hero's Journey along the boundary between Order and Chaos. To choose the creative life is not to idly "want to be an artist or writer" but to descend into the fearful underworld of the unconscious and live to tell the tale.

You can see that it is far too early to imagine that we can create a "dissident right" and push back against the left. Not right now. There is too much thinking to be done. But we can do it. And the effort to do it starts today.

What I have suggested is not new and untried. It is the accumulation of thinking and understanding among all kinds of thinkers in the past 200 years, of whom the only common denominator is that they are Not Left. They are all, I believe, thinkers that have asked the question: Now What? What is it about the modern age that has changed and how should we humans live in it? The only thing is that nobody has put it all together so that we have a combined narrative that makes sense of the past and its traditions, the present and its challenges, and the future with its unknowns.

It's not that hard, and it shouldn't be that hard to get the left on the back foot and gasping for air.

Suppose Liberalism and Communism are Just the Same, Only Different

Let us start with my quote from Roy Rappaport: that "No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion."

Actually let's go a bit further than that. Every society since the dawn of time, and especially ours, is drenched in religion.

Why?  Because for humans, that self-consciously experience themselves as living for a purpose, there is always the question of what should be done. This question presents itself to every human every moment; that is why many humans dull their minds with drugs.

It follows from this that to suggest that ours is an era that is Beyond Religion, or for which God has Died, completely misunderstands the nature of humans and humanity.

Let's go further still and say this: Every human alive has a religion, a religion that explains for him, and especially her, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

So now let us discuss The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies
by Ryszard Legutko. I haven't yet read the book, only the review by Adrian Vermeule at First Things. For the Polish Legutko -- the chap too far-right for Middlebury College -- liberalism and communism are birds of the same feather.

Twin children of the Enlightenment, raised in the same nursery of the Revolution, communism and liberalism have the same inner logic, the same intellectual structure, and the same dynamics over time—such is Legutko’s main thesis. Both embody the secularized soteriology of the Enlightenment, the narrative of Progress. The liberal and communist polities are both perpetually poised in the now and not-yet, between the emergence from the dim night of unreason and the final triumph. 

If you want to boil liberalism and communism down to their essence, we are talking about the perpetual situation, “We have made progress, but there is still much to do.” That is why the rights of women come up as soon as the workers get theirs. And that is why transgender rights arise as a burning issue the moment after the Supreme Court puts gay marriage comfortably to bed.

There is always the next battle before us.

And, of course this "much to do," this next battle is a question of politics, of writing laws and regulations to hack progress out of the jungle, and a question of religion, of identifying saints and sinners and dispatching the latter to an auto-da-fé, real or metaphorical. And the whole thing is to be led by enlightened and compassionate activists free of the taint of Sin. That goes without saying.

The point is that all religion and all politics are about the existential fight against the forces of darkness, real and spiritual. And they always have been. Politics is concerned with the physical threat of the Commies, the capitalists, the racists, the sexists; religion is concerned with the spiritual threat of the Evil One that motivates the actions of evil humans.

The problem we face is that the current enthusiasts for the cults of liberalism and communism imagine themselves as something new in history, as a singular movement arising from the swamps of bigotry and superstition to lead the world to a Heaven on Earth. They do not understand that nothing has changed, that they are just the current crop of ambitious politicians and cult-creating religious leaders.

But let us try to think outside of the box on this. Let us propose that human society is based on the risk that something may come and destroy us all, and that this is perfectly natural and physical. If this threat materializes as from a human enemy mobilized into an army or a criminal gang, then we must rally under a political/military leader to defeat the foe and and prevent him from destroying our community from without. If this threat is from someone that wishes us ill but that represents something short of a physical danger, then naming and shaming will keep this Evil One from destroying our community from within.

OK, fine. But how do you know? How do you know if the enemy that the politicians are warning you against is real or just an excuse for them to increase their power? How do you know if the enemy that the moral crusaders are warning you against are real or just an excuse for them to name and shame people that think differently from themselves?

The answer is: you don't, not until it is too late. So all politics and all religion are battles against an existential peril that may or may not be real.

For instance, what about the Chinese? Is the Belt and Road initiative an existential threat to truth, justice and the American Way, that will destroy the world in 12 years unless we do something, or is it a stupid top-down excuse for political power that will self-destruct in 12 years or so?

For instance, what about feminists and gays? Are they a a moral/cultural movement that will destroy our market-based economy and Judeo-Christian culture  and ordinary wiving and thriving in 12 years unless we do something, or are they foolish cults that will self-destruct anyway because of their shallow foolishness?

You tell me.

Or are all political and religious ideologies with their One True Ring a symbol of evil forged by some monstrous Sauron to gain dominion over the ordinary harmless Hobbits of the Shire?

Because if the meaning of life, the universe, and everything cannot be solved by a militant politics or a militant religion, then what?

Back to the drawing board.

Yes, It is Really About the Elite's New Religion

I just finished a book about Jung that complained that Jung was not doing science, but founding a religious cult. And so, in The Jung Cult by Richard Noll, we get chapter and verse on how, clearly, Jung was veering away from the much more scientific approach of Freud, and consciously building a religious cult that would teach its cult members how to have transcendental experiences and become a cut above the ordinary mortals.

Good. So now I picked up a book on essays on Freud, by Bruno Bettelheim, in which he earnestly argues that Freud was not that interested in science. In the 1930s the Freudians in the US wanted to -- and succeeded in -- making psychoanalysis a monopoly for physicians, as a medical specialty. Not what Freud wanted, but there was not much he could do about it because Hitler had demolished the Freudian community in Germany.

Freud wanted psychoanalysis to be done by "lay analysts." So, referring to a couple of his books, according to Bettelheim -- The Question of Lay Analysis and The Future of an Illusion, Freud wrote:

I do not know whether you have guessed the hidden link between 'Lay-Analysis' and 'Illusion.' In the former I want to protect analysis from physicians, and in the latter from priests.

Further, says Bettelheim, Freud recommended psychoanalysis

not as therapy but rather because of what it reveals to us about what concerns man most closely; and because of the connections it uncovers between the widest variety of his actions.

He wanted his ideas to influence child raising, because it could free the largest number of people from

unnecessary repressions, unrealistic anxieties, and destructive hatreds... could help us, in short, become more human.

OK, I get it. We are talking about religion, just like Jung. Just like Christianity. Just like the social activists. Just like everyone of the People of the Creative Self who are trying to find meaning in life beyond the the white picket fence of the bourgeois middle class.

And one thing the creative class knows above all else is that they must lose their "repressions." Good point. The creative life is a voyage of self-discovery and you have got to get beyond the cramped life pettiness, of anxiety that prevents you from risking things, and hatreds that make your life small and mean.

So yeah. Of course the Jungians were trying to start a new religion. And so was Freud, only he didn't want his new religion to become ensnared in the coils of priests and experts. At least, not priests and experts of the old school.

I can relate to all that. I would like us to break free of the priests of the lefty education system and the experts of the lefty administrative state.

And this is the way to understand almost all the stuff coming out of our educated ruling class. Their politics, their cultural hegemony is not really about making a better society for us, the proles and the deplorables. It is about making the educated ruling class learn about themselves and feel good about themselves.

The interesting thing about Jung and Freud is that they both clearly are trying to find the source of meaning in the old myths. Jung's archetypes and his personal and collective unconscious are clearly trying to find some clue from the unconscious residue of the human past. Freud's recasting of the Oedipus myth -- turning it upside down, as I would  say -- is doing the same thing, only differently.

And, if you think of it, my line that the left amounts to a Great Reaction is mining similar territory. Our lefty friends are trying to find meaning in a lost idea of community in socialism, in providing social benefits and collective security with the welfare state as we used to do when the lord of the manor felt some sort of responsibility for the serfs on his domain, and in reviving the spirit of belonging with identity politics.

Only, I like to say, our lefty friends are blind to the benefits of the new world order that is aborning, and that is creating a new community of service and trust with the market economy. Their socialism has only ever resulted in slavery; their welfare state a clumsy return to feudalism, and their identity politics to a crude and divisive tribalism.

And we have to sit here while they slowly learn the facts of life -- on our dime.

There oughta be a law against a dull and foolish ruling class using us as their playground. In the old days, according to the myths rediscovered by Jung and Freud, your hero went on a personal journey into his unconscious -- into the underworld or the wilderness -- and only came back when, in the words of Joseph Campbell, he had become sadder and wiser so that he really could bring a boon to his fellow humans.

I think that the ancients may have stumbled on a piece of real wisdom there. Go and learn your stuff in the underworld and the wilderness, you foolish liberals, and let us get on with the vital business of wiving and thriving.

What's an Elite Scion to Do with his Life?

One of the problems our ruling class has is that its concerns are not the concerns of ordinary Americans.

As a congressional candidate that I recall in the dim mists of memory said. It is all about jobs, jobs, jobs. That is the primary concern of ordinary people.

But the sons and daughters of the ruling class already have jobs. So they must find something else to do in order to find meaning in life.

It is, of course, a problem we would all like to have.

One thing that you can do if you are a wealthy Peter Buttigeig or a Beto O'Rourke is go into politics.

I'd say that it is a sensible and practical thing to do. I suspect that using family money to jump-start a political career is probably a good way to go, especially if you are a likable guy or gal.

(Hillary Clinton need not apply).

But, I would like to say, this is a pretty low-rent way to live.

Or put it another way.

If you are a creative person, as all educated people imagine themselves, what is the best way to be creative and benefit mankind? Artist? Writer? Business startup? Activist? Politician?

I suspect that if you ask a young head full of mush about this they would respond by putting activist first, followed by artist and writer, then politician, then business startup.

I think that I would probably order the list the other way around. If you want to benefit mankind, the most concrete way to do it is the business startup, to bring to market something that nobody ever thought of. But it is the hardest. Then I'd say artist and writer which is relatively harmless, but also much less likely to make a difference. Then politician, which is a way to muddle through with clumsy programs of compulsion because you are too dumb to figure out cultural changes that could do the same thing without force.

At the bottom I'd put the activist, which is 97.2 percent conceit and very little chance to "change lives." Why? Émile Zola made the point way back in 1885 with his novel Germinal. It's about the union activist, Étienne, that comes into a mining district, riles up the miners into striking and sabotaging the mines, bonks all the girls, and then heads out of town to his next activism gig.

Yep. That'll do the trick, Étienne, old chum.

So, I'd say that politics and activism are cheap ways for well-born youngsters to get their names up in lights. But politics and activism don't actually do anything to make human lives better.

Politics in its defensive aspect is protecting people from existential harm; in its offensive aspect it is loot and plunder. In practice politics and government is loot and plunder disguised as protecting us from existential peril. And the politicians are forever conjuring up existential perils, real and imagined, from which we need protection.

And then activism. I think the word on that was given by Barack Obama, who started an activism career organizing the laid-off steelworkers in South Chicago. He quit after a year, and went to law school. Why? Because there was nothing that could be done for the steelworkers. The jobs had gone, and were never coming back, at least not as basic steel union jobs. So all Barack the activist achieved was raising false hopes.

And this is a basic problem with activists and politicians in general. The facts of life are that nothing is forever. When the gig is up, you up-sticks and move on. Politicians and activists propagate the lie that, no, it's not necessary to move on. Instead it's the cruel corporations, the greedy bankers, the system. And we will fight the system and bring back your jobs.

No. Usually the jobs never come back. Not because of the perfidy of the capitalists, but because technology changed and it would cost too much to update the factory to utilize the new technology. Plus the workers were already getting paid well over the market rate, so, from the point of view of the capitalists, it is better to get out of town and start anew with workers that are not yet organized by activists and politicians to demand above market rates for their labor.

Remember this: the real per-capita income of Americans has gone up by 30 times in the last 200 years. There has never been anything like this Great Enrichment in human history, says economist Deirdre McCloskey. And what did it? Innovation. Guys with an idea that put it into a business and made peoples' lives better.

What politicians did do about that? They failed to stop the innovations, probably from ignorance and stupidity. Bully for them. What activists did is they failed to peacefully protest against the innovations until it was too late. Thank goodness for that.

And artists and writers? Maybe they occupy the sweet spot, between the grueling struggle of the business startup and the negative spiral of the politician and activist. And they create the narrative by which we attempt to understand the past and wonder about the future.

But it's a problem. What can elite scions do to make their lives meaningful?

The Elite's Religion: We are Holier Than Thou Because We Care about the Victims

I had an email from a regular correspondent today reminding me that the "backlog of asylum cases at the US border stands at 855,000." Thanks Lon.

You may wonder: why? How in all the world did we get to a situation like this? I mean, come on, fellahs, a border is a border.

So why do we have 855,000 applications for asylum in these United States?

The reason is that the religion, the morality, the "ethics" of our elite educated class is that they care about "the victims."

And everyone in this world has a religion, particularly those people that deny they have a religion. Oh, you may say, with Nietzsche, that God is Dead. No doubt for our educated classes the God of Abraham is dead; the God of whom Christ was the Son is dead. Dead for them, the educated, the compassionate, the enlightened.

So, the fundamental thing to ask, when people say they don't believe in God is to ask: OK, so what do you believe in, that can answer the question of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

For many of our nation's Subaru and Prius and Leaf drivers, the meaning of life, the universe and everything centers around advocating for the victims. That is their religion.

Like I say: first it was the workers, then it was women and blacks, then it was the indigenous, then it was gays. Victims for whom young well-born people advocated and peacefully protested. Now it is Palestinians, Muslims, and "refugees."

There is a double bonus in this religion. In the first place, you get to fight against sin, the sin of exploitation, oppression, genocide; so you get to virtue-signal your virtue to the world. But there is a bonus: you get the political support of the victims, and so your virtue-signaling is a royal road to political power. Really, what's not to like?

Well, you might look at the previous victims, antecedent to the current Little Darlings of the in-crowd: the workers now dying of despair, the women who are less happy than they were half a century ago, the 77 percent of black children not born to two married parents. You may wonder: what was the point of advocating for those victims if this is the payoff?

The point is that, as far as the Subaru and Prius and Leaf drivers are concerned, the system is working. They get to practice their religion and get the absolution of sins -- the sins of you and me -- and they get political power from representing the victims-du-jour.

As you may know, this is not new. Charles Dickens was making fun of this 170 years ago in Bleak House with Mrs. Jellyby, who was working hard on helping "the natives in Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger." While neglecting her own husband and children.

President Trump has been playing on this hypocrisy by proposing to dump illegal aliens in so-called "sanctuary cities" that do not cooperate with federal authorities when it comes to illegal aliens. On cue, the singer Cher has tweeted in opposition to this, because in LA they are already overwhelmed.

I think there are a number of things going on here. There is the need for any upper class to differentiate itself from the common crowd: 100 years ago the rich were fat and the poor were thin; today the opposite is true. And today there is the whole idea of your car making a moral statement about you.

Now, I don't think I am different from anyone else on this. I consciously like to differentiate myself from the liberal hypocrites and their version of virtue-signaling. I think that the vilest, cheapest thing in the world is to be an activist. I think that the vilest, cheapest thing in the world is to advocate for the Green New Deal and kick the global poor out of their cars before they even get a chance to own one. I think that the vilest, cheapest thing in the world is to advocate for big government programs that keep the poor and a lot of the middle class in permanent subordination to government entitlement programs.

But hey! I don't pretend to be anything more than a racist sexist homophobe.

And I say to my betters: you are better than this. If you want to cut a dash in the world, to be a creative, compassionate person to whom everyone genuflects, then this victim game is the last thing you should be doing. Because it is vile and it is cheap. And it is advocated by the ruling-class stooges in the schools, in the universities, in the media, in politics, in the activism community, and in north Seattle.

Eeeuuw! Who would want to be like them?

Actually, I believe that the problem of what do the People of the Creative Self believe in when they no longer believe in God is the biggest problem in the world today.

And we need to solve the problem before the People of the Creative Self kill us all with their compassion and their virtue.

You can quote me on that.