Both Dennis Prager and Vox Day are Wrong on Nationalism

Dennis Prager has a piece this week on good nationalism vs. bad nationalism. He starts with two dictionary definitions from Webster. Good nationalism:

[L]oyalty and devotion to a nation.

Bad nationalism:

[A] sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups.

He goes on to say:

Nationalism is beautiful when it involves commitment to an essentially decent nation and when it welcomes other people’s commitment to their nations. Nationalism is evil when it is used to celebrate an evil regime, when it celebrates a nation as inherently superior to all others and when it denigrates all other national commitments.

Nationalism is evil when it is "conjoined" with racism, according to Dennis.

But Vox Day chimes in and says baloney:

Nationalism is, by logic, linguistics, and definition, a subset of racism because nation is a subset of race. 

And you better get used to it.

Well, I think they are both wrong.

Nationalism is the ideology, the "narrative," put together by the victor's tame intellectuals after a nation-creating war.

Let's take France. In 1000 it was a collection of princedoms, including Normandy, Flanders, Languedoc. Oh and the Ile de France, where the Capetians ruled. But the Capetians managed to dominate the other princes and force them into a kingdom of France. The language of Ile de France developed into what we would call "French." The Capetians and their successors the Valois achieved "absolute sovereignty over France in the 16th century." Says La Wik.

So when Charles de Gaulle wrote about his "certain idea of France"

Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France

Where do you think he got his "certain idea" from? The dictionary?

The same thing happened elsewhere in Europe during the early modern period. Dominant princes upped their game and made their lands into the kingdoms that today we call "nations."

The only guys that missed out were the Germans that didn't form a "nation" until Bismarck bashed them together in three wars from 1862 to 1870.

The US? The various Brit colonies rebelled against the Brits and then called ourselves a nation. Then we got together and started to write a narrative about the United States. But everyone understood that the war of liberation was the thing. Veterans of the Revolutionary War would forever after be called by their rank during the war, as in "Colo." Hamilton. Same thing happened after the Civil War. President McKinley was always "Major" McKinley to his buddies.

But, in my view, once the war of conquest or liberation is won, then ordinary politics takes over and various political actors start to divide the nation according to their own vision of a road to power. There is obviously a tendency for this division to end up in a civil war, as it did in the US in 1861. Or, you can unite the nation and do a war in Europe, as the US did in 1917, or in the Pacific, as the US did in 1941, and unify the country around your war. But after the war, the wartime unity starts to fade. So, with the end of the Cold War in 1990, we Yanks could afford to divide into two camps and start beating each other up.

The only way to avoid this division, I would say, is to have an overarching national ideology that beats competing ideologies into submission. For a while. Thus in the 1930s the Dems beat the GOP into submission with their New Deal ideology. After World War II, the McCarthy era had the Dems on the back foot for a while until they managed to make Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) into a scapegoat. But the escalation of the Cold War kinda meant that we had to unify to "contain" the Soviets before they contained us. Vietnam started as a unified effort to contain the Commies until the Dems figured out how to rile up college students against going to Vietnam as cannon fodder. 9/11 was a unifying moment for a year until the Dems figured it was safe to be anti-war again.

Is Trumpian Make America Great nationalism good or bad? You tell me.

Is politically correct Diversity and Inclusion good or bad? You tell me.

But the point of both Trumpian nationalism and Diversity and Inclusion of the Coalition of the Fringes is to unite Our supporters into a victorious political movement and to marginalize and deplatform Their people as contemptible bullies and deplorables.

So there is always a two-way struggle going on during normal times, between rivals jockeying for power. Who will define "who we are?"

But when there is an external threat, real or imagined, and our leaders manage to persuade us of the existential threat, then we all come together in national unity.

Yes, but what about the real baddies? What about Hitler's Nazis and Mussolini's Fascists?

Well, here's a little insight into Mussolini and the Fascists. Here's how Mussolini got his Fascists going. It was a pathetic rally right after World War I:

It was a ragbag of a gathering. On Sunday morning, March 23, [1919,] Mussolini addressed a group of perhaps 120 men and several women: dispirited socialists, ex-soldiers, futurists, anarchists, and other unclassifiable revolutionaries. What united them, among other things, was a belief that Italy’s horrific sacrifice for the Allied cause in the Great War — over 650,000 killed and 950,000 wounded — demanded national regeneration. She must not be denied the spoils of war: no vittoria mutilata, or mutilated victory.

In other words, Italy was a mess, and chaps like Mussolini determined to do something about it.

Same thing in Germany, with the hyperinflation of 1918-23 and then the debacle of the US Crash of 1929 in which the newly-minted bureaucrats of the Federal Reserve failed to act as "lender of last resort." What are you going to do when the whole place is falling apart?

My point is that Hitler is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up. Like our mammalian pals, the rats, we humans understand that when we are cornered, then it's Do or Die. When you are about to be killed, then you can either lie down and bare your neck for the descending scimitar, or you can gather your buddies together on Flight 93 and say "let's roll."

My point is that saying that this or that political narrative is good or bad misses the point. The point in practical politics is whatever works. After the event then the myth-making can begin, creating heroes out of the honored dead or vile monsters out of the defeated foe.

So, if you want history to be kind to you, then, like Churchill after World War II, you need to write it yourself. If you have the chops. Then the whole question of "good" nationalism or "bad" nationalism or this race or that race is beside the point.

You win; you write the history: our guys good, their guys bad. Then, you ask: Any questions?

I thought not.

And "race" is beside the point. Race just means "our guys."

Amazon and Google Don't Have a Clue

Yes. I know that we deplorables are right to be outraged at the Google Girl coming right out and saying what we already know. That Google knowingly and with malice aforethought is discriminating against anything that isn't right on with the woke agenda.

And it's hardly surprising that when Justin Danhof, General Counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, went to the Amazon general meeting to complain about anti-conservative discrimination in, e.g., their Amazon Smile program, the assembled lefties

booed and heckled me throughout my presentation. After my proposal, a representative from Arjuna Capital suggested that I was there to “protect white males.” Then, after the meeting, a representative from the Nathan Cummings Foundation tracked me down to suggest I should get going so I wouldn’t be late for my “next Klan meeting or book burning.” This is the guy who introduced a shareholder proposal calling on Amazon to ban content!

But I think that we need to understand that we are not facing a deep and dark conspiracy here. We are just talking about Good Little Girls and Good Little Boys in the top 20 percent -- the ruling class, for short -- that are reciting the lessons they were carefully taught.

The thing about ruling classes and their minions is that, a short time after the revolution that got them into power, they start to get out of touch with reality. They start to believe their own lies. And, of course, because they have political power they, almost without thinking, write law on law, regulation on regulation that fluffs their nest and fouls the nest of millions of others.

A prime example is the higher education system. Yeah, it seemed like a noble idea to expand higher education after World War II. But it sure gave a lot of liberals jobs. It seemed like a just thing to introduce student debt so poorer kids could afford to go to school. But it seems to have ended up creating a lot of jobs for women administrators -- scions of the ruling class and indentured servitude for millions of student debtors.

So the ruling class is thunderstruck when a Trump arises and mobilizes the folks that have been ignored by the ruling class for decades. And the truth of their surprise is the resort to the conspiracy theory of Russian collusion. This from the guys that have been dining out on McCarthyism for decades!

I got to read a piece on China and its wall-to-wall war on the least peep of political opposition. What I wonder is: what does the Chinese ruling class think it is doing?

Well, I know. They are politicians, rulers. And all people like that think about is staying in power, and doing whack-a-mole on any opposition.

Just like the Democrats who can't deal with the eevil Republicans winning ordinary change elections.

Actually, that was the idea of the separation of church and state. So that when you lost an election you didn't think it was the end of your belief system. But our liberal friends have built a political culture where their religious beliefs -- bending the arc of history towards justice -- are completely entangled with the ordinary governmental job of protecting people from the baddies.

The eternal problem of the elite is evoked in this piece on "What hope for America's deplorables?"

The great calamity of poverty in modern America is not the material distance between the comfortable and the struggling. It is the social, the spiritual distance – and the fact that the upper middle classes (to use the British terminology) have stolen everything – all the stuff that’s nice and all the ladders to get to it.

But one thing more. The "upper middle classes" have no idea what they have done to the ordinary deplorables from the "unanticipated consequences" of their brilliant ideas to bend the arc of history towards justice.

That's why I say that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." The idea is to tell the ruling class that all its ideas about justice tend not to deal with who gets accidentally hit in the solar plexus by its brilliant forced march to justice and equality.

My big thing is to ask the question. Suppose there is a problem with your brilliant idea for universal justice, or whatever? How does the system respond to this?

Because my belief is that government -- any government -- is uniquely incapable of responding to injustice, short of revolution. That's because the whole point of government is to make war on the baddies. And the ruling class, not the market or the people or the local notables, gets to define the baddies.

I would say that the nature of a ruling class is that it defines the "baddies" not as evil people but as the people threatening their power. Or rather: evil people are defined as people threatening ruling-class power. Of course.

So a ruling class is never going to deal with the problem of injustice. Just threats to its power.

And that is what we see with the Trump Russia thing, with the carefully taught top 20 percent in the Google and Amazon bureaucracies, with the Chinese Communist Party.

The only thing they understand is power and threats to their power.

Mind you, there is another side to this. And that is the folks that sign on to be supporters of the ruling class in exchange for loot and plunder. I always say that the supporters of a ruling class are like soldiers in an army. At some point, when the ruling class gets into a bind because second raters that don't have a clue have ascended to power, you will be left by the side of the road during the retreat. To die if you are lucky, or more likely to be killed.

So the deplorables are the walking wounded of the working class that once was the love of the ruling class's life. So watch out blacks, women, and sexual minorities. You are next to be left on the side of the road. 

Reich: Three Consciousnesses is Not Enough

Well, so now Charles A. Reich, who enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame in 1970 with his Sixties manifesto The Greening of America recently passed on. Roger Kimball has a long piece about him at American Greatness.

What caught my attention was Reich's notion of the Three Consciousnesses, as follows, from La Wik:

Consciousness I applies to the typical values and opinions of rural farmers and small businesspeople which dominated society in 19th century America. 

Consciousness II represents a viewpoint of "an organizational society", featuring meritocracy and improvement through various large institutions, the ethos of the New Deal, World War II and the 1950s Silent Generation. 

Consciousness III represents the worldview of the 1960s counterculture, focusing on personal freedom, egalitarianism, and recreational drugs.

OK. So Consciousness I is the bourgeois ethos; Consciousness II is the educated ruling class ethos of socialism and the administrative state; Consciousness III is the ethos of creative artists and activists and stuff, the vision that our liberal friends have of themselves.

Do you see what is missing? Call it "Consciousness 0," except that I don't think there is a zero in Roman numerals. It's the consciousness of the People of the Subordinate Self, people who nestle up to a powerful leader -- in Consciousness II -- and surrender themselves as foot-soldiers in his power project.

But really, I find Reich's notion interesting, because of what it tells us about our liberal friends. It tells us that a gay professor like Reich knows that the welfare state is not the last word in human evolution. Who knew?

However, you will notice that our liberal friends have not proposed any reform of the liberal administrative welfare state they have built. So even though all evolved people have moved on to the creative project of Consciousness III they still need the structures of Consciousness II. And you can see why. Our liberal friends obtain their political power and the resources for their creative projects by staffing the bureaucratic slots of Consciousness II, keeping the peasants -- of Consciousness 0 that does not even exist in the world of the Three Consciousness slots! -- enslaved to entitlement programs and whacking deplorable racist sexist homophobes from their fire-bases in corporate HR. They must keep the sub-human rubes under control even as they explore the cosmos of intersectionality and creativity from their safe spaces.

Also, Reich leaves out what we might call Consciousness IV, which is the label I would put on the German notions from Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung, the understanding that consciousness is only a pimple stuck on the vast unknown of the unconsciousness, and that "personal freedom, egalitarianism, and recreational drugs" are a wet and adolescent first attempt at the Hero's Journey into the unconscious in which terrible monsters are experienced, and from which the creative person does not necessarily return. And only when the Hero has passed his trials in the underworld does he return as the Sacrificial Hero that has acquired the wisdom that empowers him to guide those left behind on the terrible border between Order and Chaos upon which he is called to sacrifice himself, to die so that others may live.

You can see that Reich's hot mess is nothing compared to the glorious vision afforded for the adepts of my Three Peoples notion. Let us express it in a way close to his own Three Consciousnesses notion.

Subordinate Consciousness applies to the dawning self-consciousness expressed in a felt lack of agency in the slave, the serf, the worker, the employee in a big bureaucracy. Their reality is the subordination to the will of the overlord who makes all the decisions and who we would say shamelessly exploits and sacrifices the subordinate in the pursuit of his power project.

Responsible Consciousness represents the viewpoint of people that experience themselves as responsible, usually to God, for the actions of their lives. The idea is to conform one's life not to the power of an earthly lord who eventually betrays those that follow him, but to a heavenly lord who a dispenses a perfect heavenly justice. These people are self-conscious as responsible agents before God.

Creative Consciousness represents the viewpoint of people that have come to believe tht it is not enough just to live a responsible life, but that humans are called to create, to be, in the words of Nietzsche, a free spirit. But, the creative realizes, the creative life is not a walk in the park with an occasional blast from a mind-altering drug, but a terrifying journey into the unexplored land of the unconscious, and the frightful temptations and monsters therein. Nor does the journey end with prizes and encomiums and "good jobs" and all, but with the sacrifice of which the Passion of Christ is the model. In fact, the sign that the hero is a false hero is that his life is a power project of self-worship rather than the equivocal fate of the Sacrificial Hero or the Scapegoat. Read all about it in Rene Girard and Violence and the Sacred.

You can see the Big Problem with our liberal friends. Their project always ends up as self-worship, demanding that the world genuflect before their wonderfulness.

Sorry, dear liberals. The meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not like that at all.

Yeah, Let's Talk About Reparations, Concentration Camps, etc.

The problem with our lefty friends is that they don't really want to have what they call a "conversation." Their idea of conversation is the deployment of catchphrases by activists in ideological combat: words as weapons.

Let's take slavery and reparations. First, slavery.

Slavery was ubiquitious in human society up until the day before yesterday. Ancient Greeks? Slavery. Romans? Slavery. A thousand years ago in Europe? Here are a few words from The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

Welleas, or Welshman, was one of the Old English words for slave -- which showed where the Anglo Saxons got their slaves... Bristol was a slave port, trading with the Viking slave merchants based in Ireland. According to contemporary chronicles, eleventh-century Dublin operated the largest slave market in western Europe.

People also surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine and distress... [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands... It was a basic transaction -- heads for food.

And, of course, plantation slavery started right after the Crusades when western Europeans learned about sugar cane from their Muslim enemies. The first slave sugar plantations were established on Cyprus, were financed by Venetian merchants, and used local serfs and Muslim slaves as labor. I should say western capitalistic slave plantations. It was the beginning of a big business that spread westward to the Islas Canarias and then to South America. The Brits got involved in 1640 when they learned the business from the Dutch and set up slave plantations in Barbados.

And then, sometime in the 18th century, slave plantations started to become a scandal. Why? My take is: partly the populist moralism of the Great Awakening, and partly upper-class resentment of the new slave barons -- think the Bertrams of Mansfield Park -- that were building obscene mansions and pushing their way into the Brit Parliament. Also, I suspect, there is this. Slaves have to be guarded and disciplined with the cow-hide whip -- and fed, and housed. But free labor just has to be paid: must less bother. And, lefty politicians have been glad to take the workers off the hands of the ca-pittle-ists and make them into neo-serfs and neo-slaves in the great plantation -- or concentration camp -- of the welfare state. And then the biggest reason of all. With free labor the ca-pittle-ists make more money than with slave labor. Who knew?

What about reparations? Old as the hills. Back in the day, of course, the whole point of "conquest warfare" was loot and plunder. Reparations was the plundering of a defeated people. And it makes sense because back in the day wealth was equal to land and to grain stores and livestock. So the Vikings would visit the Brits every fall, sail up the rivers, take the grain, kill the men and transport the women and children to the slave market in Dublin. That'll teach 'em.

My take is that loot and plunder -- the noble and woke civilized looting operations of the big government welfare state excepted -- has only become scandalous because it does not pay in the modern world where something like 80 percent of wealth or capital is "intangible" capital, the kind that resides between human ears. And I predict that the days of the welfare state are numbered because it does not pay. Much better to have the workers save for their own retirement and health care. They will work a lot harder than when retirement and health care are managed neo-feudal style in entitlement programs run by the educated ruling class.

That's another reason why concentration camps are probably on their way out. (Modern concentration camps were invented by the Brits, by the way, in the Boer War in South Africa. They were not concentrating the innocent Bantu warriors of Shaka the Zulu, by the way, but the Dutch Boers, who were conducting a guerrilla war against the armies of Britland.) Just look at the absolute waste of the Nazi concentration/labor/death camps. I'd say that if you were conducting a global war for Lebensraum you would want to mobilize everyone in the glorious Reich to produce the sinews of war. And that means mobilize their minds. And who has sharper minds than the Jews? And let us not forget the labor/death camps of the Bolsheviks: the Gulag Archipelago; the White Sea Canal; the Kolyma goldfields.

Sorry, Mao ZeDong and Pol Pot. I didn't mean to insult you guys. You chaps had slavery and concentration camps that were tops. And your famines were the best. Made those white supremacists in Europe and North America look like pikers.

My point is that slavery and concentration camps and piles of skulls are as human as apple pie. The astonishing thing is that we moderns, for all our follies and faults, have come to think of slavery and concentration camps and Trails of Tears as scandalous.

But I do not think our modern ideas indicate a more advanced morality. Not at all. I just think that we are stumbling towards a realization that loot and plunder and slaves and camps are brutally inefficient ways for the ruling class to get rich off the labor of their deplorable subjects. Much better to let creative minds loose and turn responsible wage-earners to their jobs. And just tax 'em at the rate approved by Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Art Laffer according to his eponymous curve.

And then everyone will live happily ever after.

Reparations? I agree with Ryan Bomberger, who identifies as half-white half-black. Let the Democratic Party pay for reparations. They, after all, were the party of slavery, of Jim Crow, of the KKK, of Bull Connor, of the neo-slavery of the welfare state. Let the enthusiasts of the Great Awokening pay reparations, and save their activist souls.

Is Running Against Hillary a Mistake?

In President Trump's maga-rally in Orlando, Florida, announcing his candidacy for President of the United States in 2020, he took out after Hillary Clinton. And the usual suspect among the Democratic operatives with by-lines all took out after this as fighting yesterday's war. Hey, Mr. President, they tweeted, you want to redo 2016? Big mistake!

Maybe it's a good thing that our Democratic friends are finally ready to stop re-fighting the 2016 war

Maybe the critics have a point. Maybe it is time to put the whole Trump-Russia-Hillary-emails to bed and concentrate on The Issues. You remember them.

But obviously, I reckon, the Trump campaign has taken a strategic decision to be prosecuting deep state actors in the "intelligence community" all next year. I suppose the reason is to rally the faithful on the one hand, and to demoralize the Impeach Trump folks on the left.

After all, if the Trump administration is prosecuting bad actors in the intelligence community that spied on a presidential campaign, isn't that "draining the swamp?" Doesn't that mean that Trump is doing exactly what he promised to do in his 2016 campaign? And isn't that smart politics?

Look I don't know which end is up, but I suspect that having malfeasance of high government officials in the news during 2020 tells ordinary Americans what they want to hear, that someone is doing something about corrupt government officials. And I suspect that ii also insistently pricks the liberal bubble that our lefty friends have been living in over at MSNBC & Co. for the last two years and more. And it tells them something that they desperately do not want to hear, that their party is the most corrupt entity since Boss Tweed.

But whatabout our friends the "educated suburban women" that are definitely not Trump fans? Would they get turned off by trials and accusations? Well, maybe we can do something about them. I suggest that Trump enlist a corps of women to run around the world of suburban women repeating the refrain "I Can't Believe That Hillary/Brennan/Clapper/Comey/McCabe Said/Did That!" Everywhere. All the time. On TV. On social media.

That's the way you communicate to women. You inject yourself into their Culture of Complaint and let 'er rip!

Or, at least, that's what I think. I could, of course, be completely wrong.

For instance, the whole election could turn on whether or not it is a Bad Thing that Joe Biden once actually talked to a racist Democratic Senator from the racist South.

But then that might be a good thing if we can lay the "raciss" canard to rest. Along with literally Hitler.

Choose the Form of the Destructor

I don't really know what "choose the form of your destructor" means. I didn't even know it came from Ghostbusters till I looked it up.

But I am going to assume that it means that the very thing you set up to make yourself safe is the very thing that destroys you. As in:

Labor Unions. Yeah, pal. Labor unions are supposed to protect the workers from their rapscallionly employers. Only the trouble is that labor unions tend to raise the workers' wages above the market rate, and encourage the workers to concede nothing to their rapscallionly employers. So that one day the labor union has priced the workers out of the market and the corporation they work for collapses into bacnkruptcy. And the fact is that when there is a big downturn in the economy, everyone has to take a haircut: workers, ca-pittle-ists, widows, and orphans.

Liberal Arts Colleges. There was Bernie's wife's college, Burlington College, that went bupkis over some land deal or something. Because Jane Sanders, probably, is an idiot that don't know nothing. And then there was Newbury College of Brookline, Mass. The girl journalist Alia Wong writing in The Atlantic about the closure spent half the article talking about girl stuff like the "grieving process after hearing the news that went from shock to panic, curiosity to nostalgia, heartbreak to acceptance". And the college president talks about what he might have done to avoid bankruptcy. But hey, stuff happens. There is no "but critics say" paragraph about what the administration coulda woulda shoulda done. And why it should go to jail, like Trump.

Public High Schools. You've heard all about the shocking racism at New York City's specialized high schools where you have to pass a white supremacist test to get in. Did you know, writes Walter Williams, that

Dr. Thomas Sowell provides some interesting statistics about Stuyvesant High School in his book "Wealth, Poverty and Politics." He reports that, "In 1938, the proportion of blacks attending Stuyvesant High School, a specialized school, was almost as high as the proportion of blacks in the population of New York City." Since then, it has spiraled downward. In 1979, blacks were 12.9% of students at Stuyvesant, falling to 4.8% in 1995. By 2012, The New York Times reported that blacks were 1.2% of the student body.

No, Dr. Williams, I didn't know that. But I think it is probably close to the crime of the century that black educational performance has taken such a plunge. But hey, what can you do in the face of all those Tiger Mommed Asian kids? Who knew that those kids would ace the tests designed by white supremacists to racially institutionalize white supremacy? Yeah. Blend in a little government force, lefties; that should do it.

SJW Social Media. So social media SJWs are busily deplatorming anodyne conservatives, because hate speech, or something. And my usgovernmentspending.com organic search traffic from Google fell by 50 percent on April 2 when Google, presumably, changed the rules. Hey, Sergey, how yer doin', pal! It's too early to say what will actually precipitate out of all this. But I suspect that the result will be far different from what the SJW and ruling-class conventional wisdom thinks.

Welfare State. Yeah, we are all about helping the people. And we need Medicare-for-all, and free college for all, and Green New Deal, and justice for refugees and migrants, and all. Because Scandinavian countries. Except that did you know that the Scandi countries have been privatizing their state pensions plans, and education, and are now privatizing their health care? Who knew? Because, you see, if you really care about The People then you are going to make sure that there is actually a system around in 15 years to deliver the sacred benefits, and not just close up one day because, oh well, stuff happens.

Some of our Democratic friends like to rail at Republicans for failing to raise taxes to fund the welfare state. They get it wrong, because it is Democratic voters that depend of the welfare state. It is Democratic politicians that should be obsessively reforming and repairing the great monuments of the welfare state. But they aren't, because there are no votes in reform and repair; there are only votes in more free stuff.

And that means that one day the whole thing will collapse, and, to coin a phrase, it will be women and minorities hardest hurt. Because it is women and minorities that actually believe the promises that politicians make to get their vote.

The whole point of limited government is to limit the damage that politicians and their bribed apologists can do, and to try and have a cultural and political and economic system that is self-repairing.

But you knew that.

What the Three Peoples Want from Society

The problem for our modern society is that we have three distinct kinds of people living around us, and many of those people are not "us" but "them." When we are confronted by the fact that other people are different and want different things out of life and society, we get mad.

But the beginning of wisdom is to understand why other people are different and why what they want -- and what they do not want -- makes complete sense, if you try to understand a little about what makes them tick. So let us think about what our Three Peoples -- the People of the Subordinate Self, the People of the Responsible Self, and the People of the Creative Self -- want from society and this life on Earth.

The People of the Subordinate Self, unquestionably, what someone to take charge and relieve them from the responsibility of making tough decisions -- that very likely will be wrong decisions -- in this life. But, as Georg Simmel reminds us, though people want to follow a leader they also resent the leader. So I dare say that the more you lust after a leader the more you are likely to rail against him for not providing perfection for you. No doubt people in a hierarchical organization like a big corporation or a government office choose that employment for the presumed safety. But once comfortably tucked up in bed they immediately complain if their needs are not met, and the well-deserved promotion is not obtained. And, of course, the presumed safety is often an illusion, for the safety promised by the organization lasts only so long as the subordinate remains useful to the organization's goals and timetables, and so long as the organization thrives.

Above all, I suspect, the People of the Subordinate Self want to live in a group that approximates the personal relationships of the village, where the Big Man runs things and the men know their position in the hierarchy. In such a world, a man knows who he is and where he stands among his brothers. And if he wants to change things then he has to have the courage of his fists.

The People of the Responsible Self are people that have reconciled themselves to living in the city. They understand that the only guy that's going to look after their interests is them. It is a curious thing to behold, for the main difference between the Subordinate and the Responsible is that the Responsible subordinates himself to the market and society and its norms in general rather than to a leader and his group in particular. The Responsible individual accepts responsibility for making his way in the world: choosing a job or career, a spouse, a home, to insure against the perils of life. And yet, for all that, he probably lives a pretty conventional life, accepting the norms dished out by society without question. One might very well ask: what really is the difference between life as a subordinate peasant and a responsible citizen? In the end they stand and fall by the success of the society and the group they live in.

So what is the difference? I think it is symbolized by the "get on your bike" phrase that made British politician Norman Tebbit famous and scandalized the North London luvvies.

I grew up in the 30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot; he got on his bike and looked for work and he kept looking 'til he found it.

The other version of this is "when the going gets tough the tough get going" quote attributed to football coach John Thomas of the Green Hornets. The truth is, of course, that we are all hostages to history, and there may be little each of us can do to change our lives and rise above our misfortunes. But for the People of the Responsible Self the idea that the individual has control of his fate is central to his faith.

If the People of the Subordinate Self are focused on what society should do for them, and the People of the Responsible Self are focused on what they can do for themselves, the People of the Creative Self have a different point of view. What gets them up in the morning is what society should do for them so that they can gloriously transform society with amazing creative innovation.

It's obvious. The entrepreneur wants to amaze us with his amazing startup. But without society right there as unformed clay and willing consumers, the poor chap is just mucking around in his garage. And what kind of a life is that, Steve? The activist wants to amaze us with his activism and his organization of helpless victims into a peaceful protest that will awake the conscience of the world. But unless society is a vast impersonal mass, what kind of scope does this ambitious little Hitler have to wield the power of activism in the world? The artist and writer wants to paint a picture of some imagined world that either evokes timeless verities or imagines verities waiting to be born. What would be the use of living in a little village that does not afford the genius global scope? The politician is just a village Big Man or a local yokel unless he gets to become a United States Senator and hector witnesses from on high, or run for President and direct traffic across the entire world. If you want power you have to have power over something, and the bigger the better.

Let's look at things the other way. Suppose you wanted to rile up the People of the Subordinate Self, what would you do? You would show them the man behind the curtain and show them what they don't want to know, that this world is uncertain and contingent, and the people in charge really don't know what they are doing, and will abandon them when the going gets tough.

Suppose you wanted to rile up the People of the Responsible Self, what would you do? You would force them to contribute to all kinds of government programs and take away their imagined agency. And you would criminalize their religious faith and make life difficult for voluntary organizations. And you would call them racists, sexists, and homophobes.

How to rile up the People of the Creative Self? I know! Enforce the First and Second Amendments. End government subsidies for the arts. Make activists pay for the "hate" they stir up. End government education. Make colleges personally responsible for the "mostly" part of their peaceful protests. And reduce government so that politicians are playing with nickels and dimes instead of billions and trillions.

But there is a serious side to this. The more we understand that there is a good reason why other people are different, the more we will put teeth in the notion "why don't we all just get along."

And in the end, people are people.