What is the Point of Religion and Morality?

I was writing a while back about why Nietzsche is wrong about "the priests" teaching us to hate ourselves: beyond good and evil, and all that.

Because, I argued, people living in the city need to work with strangers and they need to get beyond a simple notion of my kin right, your kin wrong. And one of the ways to do this is to think to yourself: "Hmm, maybe I'm not right about everything. Maybe that weird-looking guy has a point.

AntiFa please note.

But then I thought a couple of days ago that maybe, ever since we stopped being hunter/gatherers, we have needed to gussy up cultural rules. Because we are no longer living according to our great-ape instincts. First we had to learn how to be farmers and subordinate serfs. Now we have to be good faithful cogs in the industrial machine.

So my line this week is that once humans got beyond being hunter-gatherers living in a band then we had to frame up new rules for living in groups, because the instinctual rules that our genes are programmed with probably won't all work in the new order. But, because we were able to reason, we could construct new rules without waiting for the genome to catch up.

So when you look at religion, all religion, from the earliest cultivators down through the Axial Age religions to the modern "woke" religions of the campus and the protest march, they are all artificial cultural structures that we humans have built to help us live in the new world we have built.

This comes into particular relief for me because I have been reading manosphere stuff recently, including The Rational Male by Rollo Tomassi, The Decline of Males by Lionel Tiger, and also Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert. All these guys are trying to make sense of the present highly feminized culture.

Tomassi is saying that, since women have become ruthless hypergamists since the Pill and the sexual revolution released their inner slut, then men should stop being white knights and act like rough tough hombres. Bronze Age Pervert -- with many a Nietzsche reference -- suggests that we should get back to being pirates.

And Tiger, who is an academician and has a job to protect, proposes that maybe the culture is right and we don't need men any more.

When I read stuff that is off the reservation my mind starts to jump the fences too.

Let us take the Tiger world, and think about what it means that, back in the agricultural age, there were very clear rules about marriage, in which it seemed that the patriarchs ruled, and there was a clear division of labor between men that did the muscular stuff outside and women did the affective stuff, from sewing to child-minding and family relationships, inside. Yes but what did it mean? Did it really mean that the men ruled? I wonder, because in Victorian novels it seems that it is always the women that are most invested in promoting the best marriages.

Then we have the early industrial world in which married men were exclusively involved in work for wages outside the home 40 hours and more a week, surrendering almost all their wages to the wife, and the woman worked in the home and raised the children and related to the neighbors. So was that a patriarchal world where the men ruled the roost?

Now we have women all getting educations and careers, with the assumption -- that Lionel Tiger seems to accept -- that this is a good liberatory thing. Is it? Is it good for women when men start easing back on work? When they divorce their husbands, according to Tomassi, in order to hypergame to a better provider? When women are expected to have sex on the third date? When college students all get blind drunk before going out for the evening? Suppose this Brave New World is all a stupid mistake?

And I believe that we humans progress by blundering from one mistake to the next.

Here's an interesting note from Lionel Tiger. He suggests that in India, the infanticide of girls is primarily among Brahmin families, and the infanticide of boys is primarily among low-caste families. Could this be hypergamy at work, where it is difficult for Brahmin girls to marry up, and impossible for low-caste men to find anyone willing to marry?

See, I believe, with many others, that really it is women that are important and men that are expendable. But, I suspect, it is important for men to feel they are important because otherwise they will just take off and drink and whore and leave the women to get on with being important. In other words, human society has to figure out a way to keep men in the system contributing to society and helping get kids on the ground and provisioning the mothers until the kids get off the nest.

So, Sherlock, how would you set all that up in the modern post-industrial age? Honestly, I don't know, but I suspect that in 50 years things will look a lot different from now. Because I suspect that by then society -- high-status women, don'tcha know -- will have figured out that the current dispensation is a foolish mistake and that we need to honor men more. Not because men are better but because we need to give them a reason to stay in the game.

And the way you do that is by adjusting religion and morality and good and evil and make people  believe it.

Four Golden Rules of National Economics

Since our Democratic friends are raising the banner of socialism for the 2020 election season, perhaps it is time to rehearse the Four Big Reality Checks again, which demonstrate, with the help of "scientists say" that socialism and its kissing cousins, the administrative state and the regulatory state, cannot thrive.

Socialism cannot compute prices. It was shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution that the Austrian Jew Ludwig von Mises wrote a paper in which he stated that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices. This paper, "Die Wirtschaftrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen," in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft, was translated into English as "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" (1920) and published by Hayek in Collectivist Economic Planning in 1935.

In Socialism: an Economic and Sociological Analysis (1923) Mises reprises his argument. First he talks about marginal value and how money prices are, at best, a crude effort to tease out marginal value. And yet, money calculation is the only thing that works.

Only under very simple conditions is it possible to dispense with money calculations. In the narrow circle of a closed household, where the father is able to supervise everything, he may be able to evaluate alterations in methods of production without having recourse to money reckoning....

To suppose that a socialist community could substitute calculations in kind for calculations in terms of money is an illusion...

It will have no means of ascertaining whether a given piece of work is really necessary, and whether labour and material are not being wasted in completing it.

Actually, the socialists are right in their critique of money pricing, reducing all human economic interaction to the reductive test of "does it pay?" Surely we humans are better than that! No doubt we are, but the problem is that we don't have a better way of interacting with each other, to signal to other actors in the economic commonwealth what their products and services are worth to us, and they to signal to us what our contributions are worth to them. There ought to be an absolute scale of value, but there isn't. Not yet.

The theory of marginal value, that was discovered by three or four economists in the same year of 1870 -- the way that most discoveries are made -- shows the shifting sands of economic value. It says that we can have no theory of use value or theory of exchange value -- that prices reflect either an object's use value or its exchange value -- as the classical economists had proposed. All we can say is that, when buying the next (or marginal) item of some product, an actor is willing to pay a certain price. Why he was willing to pay that price and no more, and the counterparty was willing to sell for a certain price, and no less? We Don't Know.

The Man in Whitehall cannot direct the economy. Friedrich von Hayek, a student of Mises, came up with another way of expressing the economic calculation issue. He said, starting in The Road to Serfdom, that the big problem about socialism is that, by subordinating the economy to an administrative governmental authority, it treats the economy like a war.

[W]hile the general who is put in charge of a campaign is given a single end to which, for the duration of the campaign, all the means under his control have to be exclusively devoted, there can be no such single role given to the economic planner, and no similar limitation of means imposed upon him. The general has not got to balance different independent aims against each other; there is for him only one supreme goal.

And yet every administrative hierarchy implies the war metaphor, that there is a single goal to which all must contribute as directed by authority. It does not work, as Lenin said as a result of the experiment of war communism during the Russian Civil War,

Let us frankly admit our complete inability to conduct affairs, to be organizers and administrators. . . . If we are to be absolutely definite, we must know exactly what we are going to do over the year ahead. Who knows that? No one. 

Do you see the point? If you are fighting a war, then everything and everyone are to be sacrificed to winning the war. There is no competing goal, no alternative, to assembling all economic and human resources in the winning of the war. But an economy is different, for there the goal begins with the fact that there is not one goal, the survival of the nation, but a million goals, starting with the provisioning and survival of every single human in the nation. How in the world can "the Man in Whitehall" as they say in Britain, or the man in Washington, begin to have a clue about how to organize the economy to adjust it yearly, or monthly, or daily, to meet the needs of its millions of citizens?

And even suppose you have half a clue when you establish your budget at the beginning of the year, what about half way through the year when conditions have changed?

I have expressed this issue, in the past, as a bandwidth issue. The bandwidth of a centralized Department of Economic Planning is, at most, a thousand people (allowing that most of the bureaucrats will be filling out paper). But the economy is millions of people, as consumers and producers, making millions of decisions about what to buy and what to produce every day. And the price system adjusts the prices every day in response to changing conditions. In a way, it is a pitiless system, as businessmen that make the right decisions get rewarded with profits and people that make the wrong decisions get punished with losses. The successful businessman may be a monster that exploits his workers; the failed businessman may be a pillar of the community. But what else are we to do, other than reward correct decisions and and soften the blow of bad decisions with a law of bankruptcy?

Regulatory Capture. But at least we can tame the excesses of capitalism by regulation of the business sector, identifying hurtful and beneficial, and making sure that everyone earns a fair return on capital, whether human or physical. Right? Unfortunately, the economist George Stigler proposed that when you set out to make things fair and regulate an industry, the result is "regulatory capture," where the regulated businesses end up rewriting the regulations to favor established businesses and prevent competitors from disturbing the market. Even La Wik gets it.

Regulatory capture is a form of government failure which occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.

And in fact we see that all businesses that get tangled up with government start to "capture" the politicians and bureaucrats that regulate them. We see this with the green energy industry that has fattened on green subsidies. We see it with the health care industry that is probably the most credentialed industry in the country. It need be nothing more than the desire of the bureaucrats to live a quiet life, and reduce the complexities of regulation. They will find themselves the handmaidens of the special interests.

The truth is that there is no substitute for a free and open economy. Any kind of a short cut is going to favor the powerful and loot the powerless. Because that's the way that politics and power operates.

Government Can't Reform. But now we come to an even bigger problem, which I call Chantrill's Law. It is that, if you look at almost any government program you see that it is almost impossible to reform or change it. This is absurd. We know that every business and every consumer is making changes every day, based on perceived changing needs and market conditions. But government finds it almost impossible to change its programs. There are many reasons for this, including:

1. Government programs are, at bottom, loot and plunder, taking money from someone and giving it to someone else. People in receipt of government benefits will resist to the knife any attempt to reduce their benefits. The only way to reduce benefits is to introduce a moral factor, that the recipients are "welfare bums" or "greedy bankers" that deserve to lose their benefits because they are moral lepers.
2. The economy is too complicated for legislatures and bureaucracies to regulate. A legislature can only produce about three or four major bills a year. You think they have time to adjust and reform any of the dozens of programs the government runs? Especially as the committee chairmen and bureaucratic leaders resist the idea that there could be anything wrong in their feudal fief. Especially as there is an election coming up. The truth is that the only way a program gets reformed is when it is so screwed up that even a journalist can understand that something is wrong.

Really, the problem is not so hard to understand. We humans are biologically programmed to be a small hunter-gatherer band in which economic issues are resolved by reciprocal gift-giving and the charisma of the Big Man. But we have blundered into creating a society that has tribes and nations and empires, notions completely beyond the ken of our forebears of 100,000 years ago. The miracle is that, as we humans have clumped into larger communities, it turns out that we can adjust the reciprocal gift-giving through the price system, and the Big Man through presidents and legislatures, and that the price system works to coordinate all our different needs and abilities.

Who would have thunk it?

Trump Honors Armed Services on Independence Day

In all the arguments about President Trump's speech at the Lincoln Memorial on Independence Day, July 4, 2019, one thing seems to have been missed out.

What did he actually talk about?

I'm glad you asked, Senator.

First, he welcomed the distinguished guests.

Then he talked about the Declaration of Independence, and how Gen. Washington had it read to the troops in New York City facing the Brit invasion fleet.

Then, he mentioned the Constitution.

Then he celebrated explorers, the patriots that ended slavery, fought for civil rights, and expanded liberty; the inventors, the astronauts, culture and the arts, not to mention

the musical, the motion picture, the Western, the World Series, the Super Bowl, the skyscraper, the suspension bridge, the assembly line, and the mighty American automobile.

Then he called out living patriots in the audience by name that had made great contributions to America.

Then he mentioned service members that had died for our country, and their Gold Star families present at the speech.

Then he thanked Clarence Henderson, who in 1960 sat down at the segregated "Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina."

Then he mentioned the

heroes who defined our national character — from George Washington, John Adams, and Betsy Ross, to Douglass — you know, Fredrick Douglass — (applause) — the great Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Amelia Earhart, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Jackie Robinson, and, of course, John Glenn.  

Then, for the second half of the speech, the president honored the armed services of the United States in turn, starting with the Coast Guard, then the Air Force, then the Navy, and finally the Army. At the end of each tribute, there was a flyby of military planes.

At the end of the speech he told us that America was the bestest nation ever and that it would live for ever and ever.

We will always be the people who defeated a tyrant, crossed a continent, harnessed science, took to the skies, and soared into the heavens because we will never forget that we are Americans and the future belongs to us.  (Applause.)

The future belongs to the brave, the strong, the proud, and the free.  We are one people, chasing one dream, and one magnificent destiny.  We all share the same heroes, the same home, the same heart, and we are all made by the same Almighty God.  (Applause.)

And from the banks of the Chesapeake to the cliffs of California, from the humming shores of the Great Lakes to the sand dunes of the Carolinas, from the fields of the Heartland to the everglades of Florida, the spirit of American independence will never fade, never fail, but will reign forever and ever and ever.  (Applause.)

What, so to speak, is not to like?

Or, to put it another way. What is the point of a president who does not extol the United States of America and the American people to the heavens? 

Independence and Slavery and 3/5 of a Betsy

Yes indeed. It is a shocking thing to recall on this Independence Day that not a few of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave-owners. And that slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of apportionment of the House of Representatives.

And that therefore it is shocking for Nike to sell shoes with the Betsy-Ross-designed flag of the United States of America.

Hey lefties! How about utterly deploring the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union because all 170.6 million subjects of Union were slaves. Cat got your tongues?

Because as everyone knows, from my Great Reaction maxims, that socialism is neo-slavery. And ignorance is no excuse.

The truth is that the United States was formed in a remarkable time, the crazy hazy years of the transition in Europe from feudalism to something else.

From what to what? From Agriculture to Industry, certainly. From serfdom to freedom, or village communism to wage slavery? From subsistence to prosperity. From the rule of kings to the rule of the people? Or from feudal lords to industrial lords? From the administrative state of the absolute monarchs to the administrative state of the educated class? You tell me.

The fact is that everything is a muddle, always was, and always will. Our Founders lived in a time when would-be rulers were trying to think how government should be organized if it were not to be ruled by a dynasty of hereditary kings. They were also living in a time when, of all things, evangelical Christians were raising the question of slavery and its injustice.

So the fact that they had not solved all these problems by 5:00pm on July 4, 1776, is not a scandal. It is just life.

Here in North America, 250 years ago, a bunch of hotheads were outraged at the taxes that the Brits had raised to pay for the French-Indian War of the 1750s. They also were annoyed by special privileges accorded the ruling-class appointed East India Company.

In other words, then as now, there were a number of activists doing activism and outraged at the injustice they saw around them.

Hey! Me Too!

I am outraged at the injustice of the Social Security system that sequesters the savings of ordinary workers through the FICA tax so that, maybe, the savings can be paid back in their retirement years. But that meanwhile they don't have money that could be starting a business, or an IRA account at Fidelity. And the unemployment tax, that sequesters the savings of the workers as a tax against the possibility that they might be unemployed. Yeah, well. Most unemployment is due to the government's mismanagement of the economy. So how about politicians, economists, and bureaucrats get to pay for unemployment.

I am outraged at the incompetence of the government school system, K-12, and the daylight robbery of the university system that condemns our young people to years of indentured servitude through the student loan system. I demand a system where parents -- yeah, poor parents too -- get to direct the education of their children.

I am outraged at the collapse of the black family, through the cunning of lefties everywhere that have made black women into their electoral serfs, married to the government's welfare services system.

I am outraged by the cultural suicide of the sexual revolution that has reduced the war between the sexes to a war of all against all, as the manosphere battles the fem-o-sphere.

I am outraged by all the injustice I see around me and I demand justice!

Some people are demoralized by the cultural hegemony of the left, and I am too, on many days.

But then I remember that most lefties are idiots, that have never read a book, and never had a thought about anything in their lives but just parrot what they saw on MSNBC or read in The New York Times.

And I remember that power, political power is a very blunt and clumsy instrument, and that the people attracted to political power as a means of salvation are unusually blunt instruments. And that the secret ingredient of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is to let nobodies create new products and services and ideas and try not to get in the way too much.

And I remember that the old certainties that, in the words of the fictional Gerald O'Hara, "land is the only thing that lasts," is probably no longer true, that the defense and/or plundering of land and its food no longer really matters very much.

And I remember that our lefty friends are engaged upon a Great Reaction, a movement of monumental existential folly, reinventing slavery as socialism, feudalism as the welfare state, monarchical absolutism as administrative absolutism, the politics of plunder for the old wars of plunder. And so on.

And then I don't feel so bad.

What Do You Think Parades are For, Lefties?

I first realized that liberals were all in a twist about Trump's Fourth of July tank parade yesterday when my yoga teacher expressed his disappointment at the beginning of class and all the liberal ladies moaned their agreement.

Actually, I understand the liberal ladies. If you are a woman then invasion and conquest are merely inconveniences. Sure, you may get raped and sold into slavery, but you are a woman, and every regime needs child-bearing women. Never mind tanks: what about health care?

For men, of course, invasion and conquest is a matter of life and death, because successful conquerors have a nasty habit of killing all the defeated men, just to be on the safe side.

And the point of government, any government, is to defend and protect its people against enemies, foreign and domestic. Period, full stop.

So, the point of having a national holiday to celebrate the glorious Day on which Independence was declared is to rehearse the whole point of a government: we are going to protect you, so you can put your trust in us. And, apropos, we have the guns and the tanks to make it stick. Plus, we honor the young men that put their lives in harms way so that the rest of us won't get killed and the womenfolk won't get raped and/or sold into slavery.

The whole point of parades is precisely to make the point that we got the power. Did you know that the first St. Patrick's Day parade was held in New York City in 1762, by Irish soldiers in the British army?

Yeah, those Irish soldiers would not have been allowed to have a St. Patrick's Day parade in Ireland at the time, and certainly not in England. So those Irish soldiers were establishing that, in the colonies, they had the power. Yay!

That's the point about all these civic marches. Columbus Day?

For many, the holiday is a way of both honoring Columbus’ achievements and celebrating Italian-American heritage.

That, sports fans, is the point of having Gay Pride marches and Martin Luther King Day. It is to make the point that "we" got the power, to make our ethnic day a holiday, and to "march" to show the world that nobody can't mess with us.

Next up will be an LGBTQ national holiday. Because nothing says that you have arrived better than a national holiday to go along with your march.

But obviously the flip-side of having a march and a holiday for your patron saint is denying the validity of the other guy's patron saint and national holiday. That's the point of all those lefty activists demanding that Columbus Day be replaced by Indigenous Peoples Day (Google "columbus day in" and see what the autocompletion comes up with), and that Confederate statues be removed. And the liberal ladies at yoga moaning about Trump's tanks. It isn't enough to have your holiday. You only show real cultural hegemony when you can deny the "deplorables" their holiday.

Reading post-NRO Jonah Goldberg today and he's moaning about the pure accident of Trump's election, that he was running against Hillary and that the Democrats' leftward turn was a reaction to Hillary (I don't think so):

[I]t sure looks like Hillary Clinton's candidacy was an inflection point, because it galvanized not only the GOP's turn toward nationalism but the Democrats' turn toward socialism.

No, Jonah. What galvanized the GOP turn to Trumpian nationalism was the fact that guys like you didn't protect us as political leaders ought to do, as in protect the people from enemies foreign and domestic. The Democrat's left turn is just the progressive left returning to normal after the end of Bill Clinton, who was the guy that got the Democrats out of the ditch in the 1990s by pretending to be a New Democrat and getting the rest of the party to pretend with him. What happened then was that after his reelection, Barack Obama turned the spigot on "full left" and let all the lefty activists run riot in his administration. Of course, the Dems lost about 1,000 legislative seats nationwide during the Obama years. I wonder why, Jonah. Hillary? You think?

Let nobody doubt that parades are important. If you have your own parade it tells the world that you count and that politicians better not take you for granted. That is why President Trump is proposing a Fourth of July parade with tanks and a special speech by Trump at the Lincoln Memorial. And why if you Google "trump fourth of july" you will see pages and pages of liberal tut-tutting.

If you have the power to have your parade, then you count. If the ruling class can put a stop to your parade it means you are close to exiting history. Sorry pal.

When Was Peak US?

Now that our little kiddies are being carefully taught at the local library about the fabulousness of Drag Queen Story Hour, maybe it is time to take seriously the notion that America is past its peak.

Every civilization or empire or nation goes through the cycle of birth, growth, decay and death. It's nature's plan, I dare say.

So let's think about the Peak of the great civilizations and whatsits of the world.

Ancient Greece. Was Peak Greece at the Battle of Marathon when the heroes blocked the pass? Or the death of Socrates, showing that then and now, free speech is a movable feast.

Ancient Rome.Was Peak Rome the destruction of Carthage -- Carthago delenda est -- or maybe the reign of the first emperor, Caesar Augustus? Obviously things were going downhill by the time of Caligula and his horse.

I think that Peak France was probably the reign of Louis XIV. Seems to me that it was all downhill after that, culminating in the folly and failure of Napoleon.

What about Peak Britain? I'd say it was the Battle of Waterloo. Yes, the glories of the Empire still lay ahead, but the supreme effort was to defeat Britain's ancient enemy. The proof is that the French have never recovered from that defeat.

Then there is Germany. I'd say that Peak Germany occurred the day before Bismarck was fired by Mr. Genius, Kaiser Bill, in 1890. Germany had already produced Kant, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Freuds and Jungs and Einsteins were already alive.

Then there is Russia. I'd say that Peak Russia occurred in May 1945 when the Red Army had conquered the whole of eastern Europe. But then the Soviets had their hats handed to them in the Cold War. Sorry about that, lefties.

Now the US. Unless things change real soon, it is pretty obvious that Peak US was the end of the Cold War in 1989, which proved the point of Chinese strategist Sun Tzu that the best way to defeat an enemy is to have them give up without a shot being fired. OK, so there were quite a few shots fired in the Cold War, but the US proved the Germans wrong by winning without a "decisive battle," thus proving the armchair western strategist intellectuals wrong.

Now we come to China. Obviously there was a Peak China back in the day. Maybe the day they sent out their fleet in 1421 to explore and impress the world. But we are interested in modern China. Will it wax and grow and dominate the world as the US did in 1945-89? Or is its Commie leadership leading it to disaster as almost all Commie leaders have done over the last century?

And then there is Peak India. The thing about India is that it doesn't seem that exercised about being Numero Uno in the world. It's been invaded time and again, but who cares? The Brits stumbled and bumbled around in India for 250 years, and ended up teaching the Indians how to unite into a nation, at least for five minutes. But India might make a bigger peak than China, because the Indian political class is less interested in being Numero Uno than the Commies in Beijing. So they might make India the world's City on a Hill without even really trying. My thing about succeeding in the modern world is that you have to forget about Peak Anything being about political power.

See, I think that the lesson of the last 200 years, the Great Enrichment, is that wealth, power, and the love of beautiful women comes from "intangible capital," the stuff between human ears that has created the wonders of the economy and the culture that have been bequeathed to us.

But I could be wrong.

Government and Politics: Force and Division

If, as I have, you have reduced your understanding of life to two maxims, that government is force, and politics is division, it rather colors your experience of, say, the Democratic Debates for 2020.

Because when everyone on stage holds their hand up to pledge free health care for illegal immigrants, they are saying that average Americans -- or at least income taxpayers and property taxpayers -- should be forced to pay for other peoples' health care. Really? Is the problem of health care for illegal immigrants so vexed a question that force is the only option?

And when Kamala Harris lays a haymaker on Joe Biden on the race question, suggesting that she was a poor helpless little black girl being bused to school in lefty Berkeley, CA, you can see that the whole point of politics is to divide people and stir up enmity.

And that is why I have created this idea of leftism being a Great Reaction to the modern era.

See, the astonishing thing about the modern era is that it proposes, gently, tentatively, that maybe we don't need as much force and division as we thought.

In day-to-day economic production of the necessaries and the not-so necessaries of life we have stepped partially away from the age-old notion of subordination. Instead of the workers being confined and subordinated to a feudal warrior lord, we have found that workers can wive and thrive perfectly well as free labor.

But there is a cost, and that is that, when the market moves on and makes your skills obsolete, or at least less well paid than in days of yore, then you have to get on your bike and update your skills and find a new job. And that is hard.

But notice what happens with government in the economy. You get Bernie Sanders saying that government must take over the whole of health care, period, full stop. Really Bernie? You mean that health care could not operate the same as retail, where you can get bare-bones from Walmart, and cheap too. Or you can buy at an upscale department store attended by numerous assistants and buy only the very best. I wonder what Walmart health care would look like? Hey, I know. Why don't we try? We could always call the whole thing off if it turns out that cheapie health care is no bargain at all.

In the day-to-day relations between people we have found that trust need not be limited to people of our own blood, or "race," or language. We have found that the question of trust is simple. You trust people that demonstrate trustworthy behavior and you interact and exchange with them. But people that don't act trustworthy? Those guys you try to keep away from.

But with politics we rely on politicians to tell us who to trust and who to beware. I wonder whether this is a good idea. For instance, if I were to encounter Kamala Harris in real life I would be very reluctant to trust her. A woman that got her start in politics as the mistress of a headline politician? I don't think so. A woman -- the daughter of two PhDs -- that uses the race card to humiliate an old white guy that obviously can't hit back? Not quite out of the top drawer, old chap.

It's my belief that we are living in an unprecedented era, where all the old assumptions are being transformed. And people are asking whether the transformations are really as good as advertised. For instance, my Greek friend tells me about life in Greece 70 years ago when the men in the villages did about two months work a year -- harvesting grain for the animals, and olives for cash -- and spent the rest of the year drinking and playing cards. What a life! Today we all work for wages, and we mortgage ourselves up to the eyebrows to live in a city with a decent school system, and we are taxed at about 35 percent of income. We are, indeed, under enormous pressure to conform and be useful, to our employers, to our governments, to our spouses. In fact we labor night and day. Is that really "freedom?"

Now, the point about government is that government is force. But what is force for? Answer: to meet an existential peril, such as criminals despoiling people, and invaders threatening to conquer us. But suppose that our leaders kinda fake the existential threat? Of the streets being full of criminals? Of aggressive foreign empires that want to bury us? You can see there is a real temptation to overdo the existential threats, because only then can the government leaders get more power.

And again, politics as division. You can see that with no division, no "hate" for the other guy, there is very little for a politician to go on. You can see how this works with our present generation of political activists that are determined that racism, sexism, and homophobia are monstrous perils, even when civil rights is the law of the land and gays get to marry. Really? Things are that bad?

But imagine a world with a lot less government, in which people are a lot less energized to do everything by force? What kind of a world would it be? It's hard to imagine, because in the normal politics of today we are constantly assailed with a huge list of existential perils that require resort to force. What would we do, how would we live, if there weren't a whole list of frightful perils terrifying us and needing our immediate attention?

And what would life be like without the constant moral battle for hearts and minds, the constant battle of good vs. evil, that has to be conducted on our agenda, and death to the other agendas!

As I say, we are living in an unprecedented age, where the need for force and division is battling with a counterargument that maybe we don't need to be fighting each other all the time.

And there is no telling how it will all turn out.

Because, if we humans weren't battling and fighting all the time, what would become of us?