If Not Progress, Then What?

After reading of the deplatforming of Polish intellectual Ryszard Legutko at Middlebury College I thought I should buy his book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies.

Demon starts with the argument that both communism and liberal democracy have a progress theory of history: we are progressing towards a better world. Thus more communism, or more liberal democracy, equals more progress.

Obviously this doctrine is pretty reductive. How do you know, lefties?

Obviously, they don't. They have a religious faith, and their faith is faith in progress, as defined by them.

In fact, we all believe in some version of this faith, whether it is faith in economic growth, in more freedom, in more creativity, in more godliness.

In fact, returning as always to my reductive Three Peoples theory, we could say that the People of the Subordinate Self believe in progress towards a level playing field in which the government distributes free stuff more equally; the People of the Responsible Self believe in progress towards a world that rewards people that lead responsible lives obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules; the People of the Creative Self believe in progress towards better opportunities to live a creative life.

What do I believe in? I believe in a government that defends us from enemies foreign and domestic. I believe in social institutions such as churches, and civic associations in which we can develop our faith in the meaning of our lives.

The problem with the faith in progress is that it combines the need for safe spaces against invaders and robbers with the need to act according to a faith in the meaning of it all. "Progress" is, after all, a thing that armies do, as in advancing towards our inevitable victory.

There is a name for this sort of belief system that conflates the political and the moral: totalitarianism.

But, hey, everyone of us is tempted by the opportunity to use force to advance our notions of the just and true, and the meaning of life. There is, after all, no fixed, sure boundary between the need to repel boarders and the passion to elbow all the competing visions of the meaning of life to create breathing space for our own vision.

I suppose it comes down to drawing the line between "must haves" and "nice to haves." We must have protection against what I call existential perils. But not so much against things that would be nice to have, like bike paths that are separate from roads with cars on them.

But what about welfare for the poor? You could argue that it is a "must have" because it keeps the poor down in the ghetto and not peacefully protesting in the streets in what used to be called "bread riots." Or you could argue that it is better for our souls for each one of us to be engaged in relief of the poor instead of letting the government do it.

Here's a notion. Let us insist that nothing the government does relates to progress or the advancement of humanity. Let us merely say that government is there to protect us from existential perils, and it usually and probably forever will do the job badly. But as to progress, to the improvement of the race, to the question of justice, of enlightenment, of creating a better world, that is up to people in their voluntary social groups to work on. And it is up to each one of us to persuade other people to join our voluntary community, rather than force them by government edict or by naming and shaming.

Of course, the problem is that people instinctively know this, and so they cheat. They invent existential perils so that they can get the government to force each of us to enlist in the government's war on whatever: poverty, ignorance, climate change.

And as for curbing the naming and shaming: good luck with that, pal.

Liberals Legislating Liberal Morality

One of the really frustrating things for a conservative these days is that our liberal friends are so busy "legislating morality."

Yeah. Remember the days when liberals were howling about conservatives "legislating morality?" The morality they were objecting to was what we would now call "Judeo-Christian" values: things like banning pornography and public nudity.

Today, of course we are drowning under a tidal wave of left-liberal attempts to legislate morality, from recycling and banning plastic bags, to the marginalization of Christian bakers that don't like gay marriage, to the whole ethos behind the Green New Deal that fossil fuels are eevil.

How do we get away from this universal rage to instantiate our values and morality into the statute book and utterly object to the other guys doing the same?

The answer is: we can't. That's because, as Jordan B. Peterson says, we see the world through the lens of our values. Our values imagine a world as it should be, not as it is, and humans are inclined to fight to the death to be able to fight for the world as it should be.

After the last great Wars of Religion, back in the 16th and 17th centuries, that culminated in the Thirty Years War that devastated Germany, the various parties agreed to ease back on the legislation of morality, and then, as the Enlightenment proceeded, various thinkers proposed devices such as religious toleration -- for other religions -- and the separation of church and state as means of avoiding the religious war of all against all.

Great idea, and it got instantiated in the US Constitution that was ratified in 1787. But right before Congress passed the Bill of Rights in Sepetember 1789 the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 and guaranteed the right to free speech and denied the state the power to found a state "establishment of religion." That was two years before the beginning of the French Reign of Terror and Virtue in 1793 which established the cathedral of Notre Dame in September 1793 as a Temple of Reason not with fire and the sword as in olden times, but with guns and La Guillotine.

And as we know, the French Revolution was just a walk in the park compared with what came after it in Russia and China and Eastern Europe and Vietnam and Cambodia.

Of course, all these new secular religions are adamant that their beliefs are not religious but founded on reason and logic.

Actually everyone thinks that their beliefs, their world view, their religion -- call it what you will -- is founded on reason and logic. St. Thomas Aquinas deduced the whole of Christianity with Aristotelian reason and logic. Marx called his notions "scientific socialism." Our modern cult of environmentalists call their opponents "science deniers." Your alt-right chappies are also firm in their attachment to reason and logic.

What's the answer? Well, I would have everyone admit that their attachment to reason and logic is really their adherence to their religion, their faith in some cult leader's attempt to understand "the meaning of life, the universe and everything." But I don't expect that to happen any time soon.

The best that I can hope for is for all parties to sit down and ink out a peace treaty, that only the very worst acts are to be subject to the criminal law and the power of government. And that most anti-social -- or immoral or unethical -- acts be regulated by social disapproval.

It's the difference, if you like, between peacefully protesting the campus speaker you don't like and physically preventing the speaker from speaking on campus.

But what will it take for our SJW pals and campus safe-spacers to back off their current attempts to deplatform anyone that makes them feel "unsafe?"

It will take a Trumpian renaissance that starts shutting down universities that don't allow free speech. So that our liberal friends will start worrying about "legislating morality" again.

For nobody objects to their own side legislating morality. They only object to the other guys doing it.

And that is why I say that there is no such thing as justice: only injustice.

Melinda Gates Validates My Theory of the Sexes

Over the course of a rather sheltered life, I have come to believe two things about men and women. Men have a Culture of Insult; women have a Culture of Complaint. That is to say: men and women are not equal; they are different.

The men's Culture of Insult is obviously related to the question of Honor. As related by James Bowman, in Honor: a History, honor among men is the reputation for courage, the courage to stand in line with his brothers in battle. To publicly doubt a man's courage is an insult that must be defended. Thus the Culture of Insult, in which men cunningly doubt each other's courage, but below a threshold that must be defended by force of arms.

Women, as I said, are not equal; they are different. Honor among women is the reputation for chastity, and I mean this not just in the sexual sense, but in the larger sense of being a good little girl that never does anything wrong. Thus the women's Culture of Complaint, in which one woman complains to a second woman about a third woman's behavior.

Don't doubt me on this. Just go abroad with an open mind, and see how often I am right.

Enter good little girl Melinda Gates, wife of the billionaire. She's a feminist, dontcha know. (But not so much of a feminist that she has forsworn hypergamy). Oh no. Not that!

According to Nicholas Kristof (H/T Steve Sailer) Melinda found the office culture at Microsoft toxically masculine.

One of Melinda’s first challenges came in the harsh, male-dominated techie culture at Microsoft. “It was just so brash, so argumentative and competitive, with people fighting to the end on every point,” she writes.

See what I mean? Culture of Insult, going full throttle, pedal to the metal. And Melinda as a woman didn't like it.

So what did she do? She complained to another woman.

Then she found a woman colleague, Charlotte Guyman, who felt the same. “It’s not O.K. for women to cry at work, but it’s O.K. for men to yell at work?” Guyman once asked.

Or, as I like to put it, Charlotte complained to Melinda, "I can't believe the way that the men yell in meetings."

Believe me, I am not making this up.

Which brings me to my Georg Simmel gambit, that women coming into the public square would adapt it to suit "a more feminine sensibility." That is exactly what Charlotte and Melinda proceeded to do at Microsoft.

With other women employees, they began to create oases in Microsoft where courtesy was not seen as a sign of weakness. A critical mass of women employees helped civilize the company.

Am I right or am I right?

Now my second-hand take on Bill Gates -- what I have heard -- is that he was a holy terror in meetings. If you brought some idea or project to him that wasn't up to snuff he would say that it was the most stupid thing he had ever heard. I dare say he is still like that, unless the fair Melinda is in the room.

But here is the question. Was it a good idea for Charlotte and Melinda to "civilize" Microsoft? I'd say: it depends.

The point about Bill Gates and also Steve Jobs is that they were both impossible people heading up tech startups that changed the world.

Bill Gates' effort with MS-DOS enabled IBM to put its PC into every office. I was there; it was transformative. And then Gates did it again with Windows. What about Microsoft in recent years? Well I'd have to say that it is steady as she goes. In the 15 years from 2000 to 2015 the stock went sideways. Now it is going exponential again, under South Asian management.

What about Apple? Under the turbulent leadership of Steve Jobs, it produced amazing products, and magnificent failures, but ended up with the earth-shattering technology in the iPod and the iPhone. All the evidence is that Jobs was impossible to work with: not "civilized" at all. And since Jobs' death? Well, right now it is doing fine under the civilized leadership of Tim Cook.

What does it all mean? I think it means this. If you are talking about business startups, you are talking about men. If you are talking about steady as she goes, you are talking about introducing a more feminine sensibility into corporate culture.

Then there is this. Joseph P. Schumpeter described capitalism as a process of "creative destruction." In other words each technological revolution that transforms our lives is built on the wreckage of the old technology and the old ways.

If women had been in charge we would not have experienced the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years.

In my view men are adapted to the creative destruction aspect of things, and women are more adapted to the preservation of things. This is unremarkable, since the job of men is to defend the border, even unto death, and the job of women is to bear children, to stay alive and keep the home fires burning until the children leave the nest.

“Bill and I are equal partners,” Melinda Gates said. “Men and women should be equal at work.”

That is not what Charles Dickens thought. His Mathew Bagnet, former soldier, basically deferred to his wife -- "the old girl" -- in all things. But never admitted it: "discipline must be maintained" he told his army pal Sgt. George in Bleak House.

And frankly I think that Chuck knew a lot more about the world than Good Little Girl Melinda Gates whose main claim to fame will always be that she married the richest man in the world. The old-fashioned way.

The Limits of Free Stuff

Our Democratic friends are having a real festival of free stuff these days, offering the voters Medicare For All, free college for all, minimum wage, reparations, you name it.

Of course that is all in accordance with the principle enunciated in my aphorism:

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

Doesn't matter what the government is, as you can see from the following table:

Robber gang	Your money or your life
City gang	Nice little business you got here. Pity if something should happen to it.
Lefty guerillas	Kill the capitalists!
Center left	Make the rich pay their share.
Center right	Cut taxes now.
Trump	Mexicans pay for the wall.

If you want a more philosophical take, there is the doctrine of Irving Kristol that if you want to help the poor, as with Social Security, you must deal in the middle class. That is why Social Security is called the "third rail" of US politics.

As I said, back in 1993, the problem with HillaryCare was that the middle class already had health insurance, so there was no way they could be included in the loot handed out to the folks that were suspended between Medicaid and employer-paid health insurance.

Then, with Obamacare, the Obama guys had to flat out lie, and tell us that we would save $2,500 and if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. All lies.

Now, the question is: Does the free-stuff program still work? Put it this way. Is there still something that government can give away for free for which the majority of people will think they are getting free stuff?

OK. Look at this chart of government spending in the US since 1900, expressed as percent of GDP. Do you see what I see?

Apart from the spending surge in response to the Crash of 2008 government spending in the US has been rocking along at about 35 percent of GDP since the early 1980s.

I wonder what that means. I wonder if it means that the majority of voters do not want any more government spending because they suspect that any increase in government spending is free stuff that will go to other people, and not to them.

Anyway, it seems to me that in 2020 we are going to get a test of my notion. The Democrats are out in full force offering free stuff to their primary voters. But will they be able to sell the general election voters on their free stuff?

Will general election voters think they will benefit from Medicare For All?

Will general election voters think they will benefit from free college, and college debt forgiveness?

Will general election voters think they will benefit from the Green New Deal?

Will general election voters think they will benefit from reparations to the descendants of slaves?

And so on.

My guess is that the average voter will think that all these ideas are going to cost them.

I wonder if I am right.

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.