The Left Led the Workers into a Wilderness

On Labor Day we honor the workers, those who toil that we may live. But on this day I wish to raise the question of the betrayal of the workers, by those that claimed to love them and give them the justice and respect they deserved.

I am talking about the Left.

We see throughout the West that the old working class championed by the Left for over 150 years is coming on hard times. Many have blamed the global corporate elite, and they are probably right, in part.

But I wish to advance the notion that the miseries of the old working class and the lower middle class today is a direct result of leftist politics. The Left seduced the working class with glorious promises of love and security; but it led the working class into the wilderness.

What the working class needed in the early 19th century in the maelstrom between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution was a Road to the Middle Class. Instead it got a neo-feudalism.

The problem with feudalism, from the point of view of the serfs, was that they were helpless before the power of their lords. They enjoyed, indeed, an informal right to live and grow food on the lord's land, but only at his convenience. There were, you may say, two understandings between lord and serf. The first was that the lord would allow the serf and his descendants to live, to wive and thrive, on the lord's lands, in perpetuity. The second was that the peasant would be protected from raiders and plunderers.

The truth is, however, that these understandings were, like everything in life, merely empty promises. The serf got to live on the lord's land so long as it was convenient for the lord. When the lord could make money with "improvements" he kicked the peasant off his land. When the lord could no longer enlist the peasant in his private army, then he pretty quickly got rid of the extra mouths to feed.

The central fact of the dilemma of the modern working class is that the rising educated class has used the working class as its foot-soldiers in its war to rule the world. And now the working class is no longer useful in the ruling-class power project. So the educated ruling class has abandoned the working class.

What the working class needed, as it became a "thing" in the 19th century, was to learn how to thrive in the culture and the economy of the city. The fact is, as I explored in my Road to the Middle Class that you need to acquire the culture of the middle class if you want to thrive in the city. There is no reposing upon your patch of land. In the city the economy changes all the time and you need to change with it. And this means that you must acquire the middle class culture of adaptability and responsibility. In my book I identified four cultural markers of the middle-class culture: religion, education, law, and mutual aid. You must acquire one of the Axial Age religions that teach you your responsibility before God's creation and God's law; you must acquire education in the skills that will make you useful, and thus employable, by your fellow citizens; you must learn and acquire the culture of law, the settlement of disputes by judges rather than vengeance; and you must enter into the culture of mutual aid, that thrived in the 19th century where very ordinary people banded together in lodges and societies like the Masons and the Elks to insure themselves against the uncertainties of life in the city.

What happened in the 19th century is that the rising educated class adopted the working class as its special project, and made the working class into its "little darlings." In return for becoming its neo-serfs, the underlings of the new class of political activists and administrative state experts, the new neo-feudal ruling class declared that it would protect the working class from the rigors of the market economy.

In other words, instead of becoming independent and adaptable to the changing trends and technological and market changes in the industrial economy, the working class became utterly dependent on the beneficence of the great Oz. And the day came when the working class no longer mattered to the political project of the educated class.

You might think that wage and hour laws and labor union laws universally benefit the working class, but you would be wrong. Perhaps the worker wants a more flexible arrangement than the 8-hour day. Or perhaps he would be willing to work for nothing to learn his employer's business. Or perhaps he would prefer to obtain health care outside the employer's benefit system. It might seem that labor unions universally protect the worker from the employer. But labor union agreements tend to privilege existing workers and protect them from competition. They encourage workers to think they have a job for life. They encourage workers to plunder their employer. The truth is that all life is contingent, and we must all adapt to the changes or die. To erect wage and hour laws and union protection panders to a mirage, that we can wish away the unalterable contingency of all life on this Earth.

You might think that free government education is an unalloyed good. And yet government education has become a huge and dysfunctional structure that is almost impossible to change. And it caters to current ruling-class conventional wisdom. What kind of education does the kid of a single-mother in a black ghetto need? Anybody ask her? What kind of an education does the child of a unionized factory worker need? Anybody ask? How useful is a college degree? For a child of privilege? For a kid that wants to be a programmer? Or a web designer? Should people start working at age 8, as of old? At 12? At 16? At 25 as a kid with a masters degree might? A century ago conventional wisdom in the educated class was that children should be eduacted to become tractable factory workers. That's what universal high-school education was all about. Is that a good idea? Has it been good for the children of factory workers? The truth is that education is a tributary of the ruling class; it is intended to confer rewards on the supporters of the adminstrative state. If it educates children, so much the better. But educate them for what?

You might think that the welfare state combination of old-age pensions and health care and unemployment benefits and industrial accident insurance is an unalloyed benefit. Except that the government collects the money and uses any surpluses for its own agenda.

Suppose all contributions to welfare-state benefits were owned by the individual beneficiary? In other words, for Social Security, you would have an actual account with Fidelity or Vanguard, and your current contributions to FICA, presently 6.2 percent of your wages from your employer and 6.2 percent of your wages from you would now be deposited every payday in your personal account and would grow over the years according to the laws of compound interest. Then, when you retired you could decide whether to take your pension out of the income of your account or to purchase an annuity. If you decide to live off the interest, then your children would inherit the balance of your retirement account.

Whatabout retirement health care? If you determined how to save for health care in your retirement years you could determine whether you wanted heroic care to keep you alive into your nineties, or whether you wanted minimal care. You tell me. Under present law, the ruling class decides what sort of health care seniors get, one size fits all.

Whatabout unemployment? Suppose instead of the current system, where the government collects money from your employer and distributes unemployment benefits as the mood takes it, you had your own unemployment account, paid into by your employer and backed up by a government insurance plan in case you lost your job and emptied your unemployment account. Perhaps you could use the money that had accumulated to start a business, or buy a house, or educate your children. Why not? Because some people would abuse it? But you wouldn't abuse it, so why do you have to be denied access to your savings, because "we" know better? In any case, big time unemployment events, like the Great Depression and Great Recession are really failures of government not of individuals, so why should you individually have to bail out the government and its follies?

My point is that the welfare state has been great for the ruling class: by, for, and all about the ruling class. It has handed out benefits to people, and earned their undying gratitude. Only, of course, the money originally belonged to the people; the ruling class is buying the loyalty of people using their own money sequestered away in government accounts and spending programs that the ruling class uses for its power projects rather than actually helping people.

And now the ruling class is tired of the working class. It has gone on to bid for the loyalty of others: women and minorities. But the game is the same. Offer to protect the people, and then charm them with benefits paid out of their own taxes, and pretend you are doing them a favor.

I say that every ruling class is basically in it for the power. They don't care about people like you. They only care about acquiring power. That's why it is probably best to confine governments to basics, like defending the people against enemies foreign and domestic. Everything else ends up with the government buying our support with our own money. Or, worse, buyin our support with other peoples' money.

Let me put it this way. Whenever the government is buying your support with free stuff it is only temporary, like wages paid to soldiers. When the time comes that you are no longer interesting, because the votes of people like you are no longer interesting to politicians, then look to your own resources rather than the help of government.

Dems That Believe the Talking Points

How should we understand the current Democratic presidential campaign? The crazy promises ranging from Medicare For All to student debt forgiveness to slave reparations to the Green New Deal? At the current stage it does not seem to be offering strategically pitched items of loot, but something more existential.

I think that the way to understand the Democratic campaign is as a religious festival. As sacrifices to the gods. And as the promise of Paradise. Take the climate change issue. Tucker Carlson:

Do you really think Nancy Pelosi believes climate change is an existential crisis? Of course, she doesn't think that. Plus, she flies private. Obama can say whatever he wants about carbon emissions. He can shake his chin and be concerned, but when you're spending 15 million of your own dollars on a beachfront estate on Martha's Vineyard, you're not too worried about the oceans rising. But the Democratic base doesn't get the joke. Democratic primary voters believe the talking points.

That's the point. Belief. "Democratic primary voters believe the talking points." Yes, actually believe the blandishments of politicians and the passionate declarations of activists. But why?

It comes down to the basic truth, that everyone has a religion, a way of coming to grips with "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." And everyone has that basic fear, that is so cunningly expressed in the notion of Original Sin, that we humans are basically flawed, that the world as we know it is coming to an end, and that something must be done, something dramatic, to prevent the End of the World.

But most people do not -- why, they cannot -- individually conduct a spiritual quest to determine, for themselves, what life means for themselves. To do that, they would have to read a book. Instead they rely on religious experts -- priests, evangelists, inspirational teachers -- to do the heavy lifting, and plump for one of the prefabricated religious doctrines on offer. I was just reading a Zman take on that; he writes about ageing baby-boom women and their "various self-actualizing fads." Religious cults, by any other name.

I think that we experience this feeling in different ways at the different stages of life. Take the eternal problem of the End of the World. As young'uns we fear that the older generation will wreck the world before we get our chance. Getting older as parents we worry that the world will come to an end before our children establish their place in the world. As we get older still we worry that the world as we have known it will come to an end before our death. Or, as John Derbyshire reports of his working-class mother's thought on her deathbed: "At least I knew England when it was England." At that point, you know your world has ended, but at least you had experienced it in its glory.

Now, our Founding Fathers, like many wise heads of their era, understood that this religious experience of the End of the World exists uneasily with government and politics. That's because their generation experienced as disastrous all the religious wars in Europe of the previous century. They wondered how to relieve the tension between existential religious fears and hopes and the mundane question of who has political power to knock people over the head for breaking the peace.

So they came up with the notion of the Separation of Powers and the Separation of Church and State. To express it in terms that our liberal friends used to to be able to understand, the Founders wanted to make it difficult to "legislate morality."

Of course, in the event, it is impossible to separate law and morality, because morality is implied in every law passed by a legislature or legal decision promulgated by a court of law. But at least the notion of the separation of church and state recognizes that there is a problem, that there are other people out there with a different view of the meaning of life. It expresses the notion that, while the view held by many other people is obviously wrong, still, there is a need for people of different views to get along, if they can.

The trouble is, of course, that there is always a new enthusiastic religious cult coming on the scene with an apocalyptic view of life that knows that, unless we act now, we are all doomed. We know these religious cults by the identities of their enthusiasts: Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Fascists, Nazis, Maoists, Environmentalists, Climate Activists. We wise ones aggregate them under the heading "totalitarian," meaning the recombination of politics and religion into a single millennarian movement.

It's understandable. In my view the notion that the world is not coming to an end, that we should not all act now to prevent the Second Fall, that there are not Evil Forces that need to be smashed is a world view of almost unimaginable nobility and sophistication, completely inaccessible to the average member of the Democratic base that never read a book.

In other words, the idea that life is always in existential tension, that the meaning of life is always going to be uncertain and unresolved, that there is both good and evil in every human heart, that in the end we must just keep on keeping on: this is a world view that few can hope to attain.

And meanwhile there is always another generation grasping impatiently on a new religious cult that promises redemption from the intolerable burden of a Fallen World.

I suspect that the cult of redemption tends usually to be an upper-class thing, a conceit of people that have it made, or almost made.

In the terms of my Three Peoples theory, I would say that the People of the Subordinate Self only get restless when reacting to immediate problems like the loss of a job, or a collapse of the economy. In that situation they strike out like cornered rats. They are not looking for redemption, just the chance to live another day.

The People of the Responsible Self tend to think of setbacks and perils through the lens of personal responsibility and their existing religious beliefs that prompt them to work out what a responsible person should do in the present emergency. Come what may, they are already "saved" or redeemed by their Redeemer. So their response to existential peril is likely to be measured and rational.

It is the People of the Creative Self that are likely to respond to existential crisis with a new religious cult. For them the temptation is always there to use their creative talent to make the world anew. They do this because they are people that imagine they have the power to "make a difference" in the world. You would too if you thought that you had the brains and the truth to set the world to rights.

Obviously, politicians are no fools. Their métier is to know how to push peoples' buttons and turn them into supporters, even true believers. What every Democrat running for president knows is that their base is panting for a leader to lead them out of the Land of Trump, where every firstborn is in danger of -- well, something or other -- into the Promised Land of peace and justice, and on the way to vanquish the monsters of racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia.

See? Nothing has changed. We humans are eternally slaves of the Pharaohs, eternally hoping for the Messiah to save us from the hell of the present. And eternally threatened by evil monsters.

Especially educated members of the Democratic base.

Shakespeare and Austen: Things They Never Told Me

I am swinging through Britland with my daughter, with stops in Stratford and Bath. And I am learning things I never knew.

For instance, I now understand why the ordinary Brit Bill of Stratford could write about Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida. It's because of the school he attended at the Guildhall in Stratford.

See, back in the 1570s, a kid like Bill, son of the local glover, could go to work, at age 8, or he could go to the free school at the Guildhall.

Here's how the school worked. There was a master, paid 20 pounds a year, and about 40 to 60 students. These students sat on forms -- that is boxes that contained the beer they would drink during the day -- by age. The youngest boys sat on the First Form, the next youngest on the Second Form, all the way up to the Sixth Form. British schools are still organized on this model.

Back in those days the instruction was entirely verbal, because paper was so expensive. So students learned their Latin and arithmetic and multiplication tables verbally. Also, the master did not teach them all the time. How could he when there were 60 kids from 8 to 16? So most of the instruction was from the older boys to the younger boys. And if a younger boy didn't know something, he would apply to an older kid for help. Studies show that people remember 90 percent of what they teach.

Since the kids were learning Latin they were also learning Classical history.

So now I know how it was that Shakespeare, a nobody from Stratford-on-Avon, could write plays about Roman history. He had a remarkable education from the local guildhall school, and thus knew about all that stuff.

I asked the chap telling us about all this where he got his information. He said it came from a book, The Scholemaster by Roger Ascham. It is available on Google Books and elsewhere. I will be checking it out.

But I want to know: how come I didn't know this? And how come such a system worked, at such a low expense? And how the students learned all this stuff, even though there was no paper and no textbooks?

And how come our present system is a total failure even though it is drenched in money and teachers? How come a schoolmaster paid £20 per year could educate 60 boys without a scrap of paper? And how come the kids could come out with a serious knowledge of the classics? Seriously, how come?

Now, my theory of education is that kids should be chucked out of school at about 11 or 12 and told to get a job, or an apprenticeship. The ones that wanted to continue in school would have to crawl on their knees over broken glass begging to be allowed to stay in school. You can see that the system in Shakespeare's time was not all that different. Only in those days you started work at 8 unless you could get yourself enrolled in school.

The guild school had a punishment day, Friday, on which all defaulters would be "birched" or beaten with a bundle of birch twigs. But here's the thing. You could redeem yourself by good behavior in the interval between your infraction and the Friday birching ceremony. What a concept!

It's interesting that our entire knowledge about early education comes from Dickens and Dotheboys Hall and Mr. Creakle and Dr. Wackford Squeers. What if education in former times was nothing like Dickens' notions? What indeed.

Then we went on to Bath, location of Jane Austen novels like Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Jane spent several years in Bath, four years in the house of her father who had moved there after retiring as a parish priest, several more years in reducted circumstances after his death in 1805.

Here is what shocked me. The Pump Room is right next to Bath Abbey, quite an imposing church. But I never recall reading about the Abbey. Just a hundred yards away from the Pump Room and the Abbey is the river Avon. How come Jane Austen never mentioned the river? She lived in Sydney Place, just across the river from the Abbey and the Pump Room, so would have frequently crossed the bridge across the river Avon.

But another mystery was solved. Sir Walter Elliott, father of Anne Elliott the heroine of Persuasion, lived in Camden Place. There is no Camden Place in Bath, according to Google Maps. But, on a map of Bath in 1800 there is a Camden Place. It is close to what is now Camden Crescent. So we are to assume that there has been a lot of demolition and building in Bath. Which is odd, because you would think that Bath emerged complete and entire like Minerva from the forehead of Zeus and has remained pure and entire ever since. Apparently not, although the terraced houses of the Circus and the Royal Crescent are still as magnificent and entire as they ever were. Only today they are mostly broken up into flats.

I'd talk about our visit to Stonehenge, only we bailed out after we found that the entrance fee was £34. So we took off for London and took a photo from the road. Back in my day little kids could run in and out of the stones; my dad took movies of me to prove it. But now visitors are kept at a distance. Because preservation.

What a world!

Understanding the Left

The Zman is trying on ideas to understand the left. Is it just a bunch of cat ladies? Is it a plot to undermine white-created society?

Or is it an assault on "rationality and order," using the idea that the world is a "narrative of opinion?"

But if that is the case then

If race is a social construct, then diversity must also be a social construct. In fact, it is irrational, as what would be the point of decorating an organization with things that do not exist? That also means so-called hate speech is a social construct, as it is rooted in the belief in racial and ethnic differences. If those differences are imaginary, then hate speech is imaginary as well.

Of course it doesn't matter because whatever social construct the left comes up with is treated by them as the truth, whereas other peoples' constructs are treated as racist sexist homophobic lies.

So the whole thing depends on the ability of the left to control the conversation.

Now I think that it is a mistake to imagine that anyone's world view is based on "rationality and order." It is all based on some narrative opinion, some notion, upfront, of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

Every world view is based on the situation of humans that, as self-conscious beings, we are able to construct a view of the world, and then marshal knowledge and "rationaliity and order" that seem to us to explain the world and what comes next.

We conservatives have a world view that is based on the notion that we do not know what heaven on earth would look like. Because we believe this we believe that religion and government should be separated, that religious world views should not have the power to use government to enforce their world views.

Indeed we believe that there is only a limited amount that government can do to make a better world.

But our lefty friends believe that with political power they can make the "arc of history bend towards justice." So every lefty action is devoted to the notion of using political power as an agent of justice. Part of that strategy involved delegitimizing other world views in any way possible. So it doesn't matter what they say about other people, how many people they deplatform, if it brings us a step closer to justice and equality.

If you believe that your political beliefs represent The Way to truth and justice then it makes complete sense to push aside people that disagree with you, to accuse them of being worse than Hitler. For they are roadblocks on the road to justice.

Now my belief is that the lefty idea that political power is the royal road to justice is the problem. Political power is only useful for defending us against enemies, people that wish to use force on us.

But once that is achieved, we believe, there is not a lot that government can do to make the world a better place. And the point of the Founders and the thinkers that inspired them is that the thing to do is to create limitations on the use of government power, to make it difficult for anyone to use government power to alter the arc of history. Because the idea that the arc of history is moving towards justice if it agrees with your ideas is baloney.

Anyone can come up with a vision of a better world, and anyone can imagine that, with him in charge and the naysayers out of the way, that we could abolish poverty and injustice in short order.

And that is the problem with the left. Lefties have the naive idea that they are the good guys, period. And so we ought to do what they want. But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that in one aspect, they have got it wrong. How would we know? What would we do about it? What mechanism would there be for rolling back a program that, despite good intentions, does not achieve what it promised?

Supposing some Koch Brother came up with a critique of a lefty program. How would he get the lefty government to give it some consideration? Then how would the lefty government deal with the fact that it considers all Koch Brothers and their ilk as un-redeemable?

The fact is that humans are not good at taking correction from people they believe are evil, as lefties believe the Koch Brothers are evil.

Reduced to its essential, the best way to understand the left is as a religious group, a cult, with a vision of paradise on Earth. It wants government power to legislate its moral vision and enforce it on the rest of humanity.

Well, the left has been pretty good at realizing that if some Christian group tried that it would be disastrous. That is why lefties are very strong on opposing any attempt to "legislate morality."

But the beginning of wisdom is to understand that it is wrong for anyone to "legislate morality." Anyone can see that when the other guy legislates morality is is a Bad Thing. But only a wise fool can see that when I legislate morality I am just as bad.

That is why the government governs best that governs least. Because it will mean that the government is doing very little in the line of legislating morality, and imposing its moral view on other people.

Try convincing a lefty friend of that. You can't, because he believes that his belief is a saving truth and only racist sexist homophobes could or would disagree. And since anyone that disagrees with him is evil à la lanterne with them!

Trying to Put Multiculturalism on the Stage

Last night I saw As You Like It at Stratford-upon-Avon from the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was as multicultural as you like, with a black Orlando, a vaguely non-white Celia, a woman Jaques, a black female Silvius, and thus a lesbian thing with Phoebe. And deaf or dumb Audrey who needed another character to interpret her sign language.

Oh and there were minor parts for a South Asian and and East Asian.

Really, considering the effort that went into providing satisfaction for the progressive political community it is amazing that the production team had any creative energy left for the play itself.

But it was great fun and My Girl Rosalind was delightful.

I get the problem. As You Like It is about the travails of a bunch of rich kids involved in family power and inheritance problems. The only character in the least bit modern, and the least bit non-patriarchal-white-supremacist is Jaques, the professional pessimist reciting his Seven Ages of Man.

Do you see the problem faced by our lords and masters in the educated ruling class? The great cultural monuments that the 50-ish white woman wants to go see are all about white culture, and often pre-industrial revolution white culture at that. The issues and concerns of the left have no place, were not even thought of back in those days. What's a woke theatre creative to do?

Well, they do what they did with As You Like It here in Stratford in 2019. And I got to see an As You Like It by the semi-pro Seattle Shakespeare Company earlier in the year. They too had a couple of reversed genders. Just to maintain their street cred in the theater community.

What these chaps really want to do is the musical version of The Boy in the Dress, "the story of a twelve-year-old boy who enjoys cross-dressing, and the reactions of his family and friends." Hey, whaddya know, RSC is doing just that this summer.

Actually, I get it. My reductive Three Peoples theory gets it. What our educated class wants these days is to be "creative." And the easiest thing to be creative about is sex. Let's ring all the changes, and the more it épates the bourgeoisie the better.

But here is my thing. What we need today is not navel-gazing by the educated class and their bribed apologists in the theater community. What we need is cultural product that explores much more the situation of the ordinary middle class in the 21st century. Not to mention the immigrant community.

What does it mean, today, living in the world of the flyover middle class, scorned and abandoned by today's educated class? What does it mean to be an immigrant to the developed west, torn between your ancestral culture, the business workaday culture and the political culture? Your ancestral culture still tugs at you and seems to be a safe place but it isn't; the workaday trust and customer-oriented culture of work and business is something that you need to master in order to make it in the city but it is frightening; and the political culture offers all kinds of temptations and short cuts, which all come with a hidden cost, that you are cannon fodder for the various political power factions in the society.

And where are the satires of modern life, satirizing all the sacred cows of the educated ruling class? Why aren't we assailed from morning to night with penetrating satires of abortion activists, LGBT organizations, journalists, NGO activists, AntiFa, woke Google employees, idiotic tweeting celebrities, and so on? How about a satire on the modern university and its feminized bureaucracy? How about a searing look at K-12 education, that looks at the insanities of failing to educate inner-city black children? Why is it that movie villains can only be white military officers and white businessmen?

Look, I get it. The reason we have the currrent "divided country," and that everyone on the left is spitting cotton, is that the left's Great Reaction is failing everywhere. But, as is the way with all cultures, the first and second encounter with failure only prompt the culture leaders to call for a bigger effort, a Big Push, in the language of World War I, an extra effort to get the team over the goal line.

It cannot be true that the whole endeavor is heading for disaster, that its glorious vision metastasizes into misery wherever it is tried. That realization doesn't come till later, till the gutters are running with blood, till the day before Thermidor.

Now, as you know, my Three Peoples theory has an exact prescription for all our ailments, and it should be taken daily.

For the People of the Subordinate Self, the prescription is to learn the trust and service culture of the city and of Axial Age religion, to graduate from the tribal and hierarchical culture of the agricultural age to the trust and responsibility culture of the city.

For the People of the Responsible Self, the prescription is to step out a little beyond the comfort of merely obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules, and dare to do something a bit dangerous.

For the People of the Creatie Self, the prescription is to understand fully the Hero's Journey, that it starts with the terror of the descent into the underworld of the unconscious, and it ends not with glorious success and the adulation of the multitude, but with a Sacrificial Death, pointing out the Way along the borderlands between Order and Chaos: dying that others may live.

Now, imagine if our theater and arts community was writing plays and movies about the meaning of life, the universe and everything informed by the wisdom of the Three Peoples theory.

That would a a world of wonders.

David Koch was a Good Guy

At some point in the last 20 years, someone on the left decided that "The Koch Brothers" were evil. And ever since, lefty boilerplate has routinely identified "The Koch Brothers" as the very fount of evil and oppressive capitalism.

So when David Koch died, aged 79, after a long battle with prostate cancer, all kinds of lefties expressed their delight.

I'm not really inclined to attack them for that. Most lefties are fools, that have never read a book, and merely spout the hate that they have been carefully taught, from year to year, in their little ears.

The Koch Brothers were exemplary businessmen that inherited a family business from their father and turned a business worth tens of millions into a business empire worth tens of billions.

That means, lefty friends, that they created jobs, jobs, jobs.

But to the New York Times he and his brother Charles were right-wingers.

David H. Koch, an industrialist who amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune with his brother Charles and then joined him in pouring their riches into a powerful right-wing libertarian movement that helped reshape American politics, died on Friday at his home in Southampton, N.Y.

It's weird isn't it. The right-wingers that I read are mostly annoyed with the Kochs because they are pro-gay, pro-abortion, and pro-immigration. And they funded libertarian enterprises like Reason magazine. But to the New York Times obituary writers, Koch was "right-wing."

Which meant, of course, that when David Koch stumped up $100 million to help refurbish the New York City Ballet, all the fashionables with the right opinions -- as in correct rather than right-wing -- expressed their horror at allowing this monster a shield of respectability.

Give me a break.

I honor the Kochs for putting so much money into libertarian ideas, although I stop short of true libertarianism. That is because my reductive Three Peoples theory recognizes that the People of the Subordinate Self want protection, not just political protection from pirates and plunderers, but economic protection from the tides of the market. My politics tries to give them that -- or at least an illusion of economic security -- rather than declare that government has no business in the economic safety net business.

But what I honor the Kochs for is their work with dad's business. You don't get much information from the NYT obit, which is heavy in politics and family lawsuits, but I understand that when the Koch brothers inherited the business it was in trouble, partly because of a lawsuit relating to technology that Koch père had developed. But the Koch brothers persevered and made Koch Industries into a thoroughly modern corporation that encouraged its employees to take responsibility -- and even dare to make mistakes.

That is a big deal for me, because I think that the secret of life is to develop the courage -- or what my daughter calls resilience -- to try out ideas, knowing full well that most new ideas end up in failure.

But for our liberal friends the Kochs were all about "dark money" and funding "the right" and being a secretive private corporation. I get it. Private corporations don't have to tell the world very much about their affairs, and lefties hate that. And they also hate people that they can't effectively bully into conformity. It really is offensive to them that the Kochs could live and work and fund their ideas and charities when the Kochs were opposed to everything good and woke.

It's a strange world, isn't it. You take your dad's company, and instead of clipping coupons you expand and deepen it and provide jobs for tens of thousands. But that makes you into cartoon villains for our lefty friends. What is wrong with you guys?

Never mind. David Koch, of The Koch Brothers, was a good guy. Rest in peace.

Innocence and the Three Peoples

Earlier this week I discussed the Culture of Innocence that is defining for the Left. The clients of the Left are always helpless innocent victims being unjustly oppressed by the capitalists, or the patriarchy, or the white supremacists, or the fascists.

Mark Bauerlein in "Deliver Us from Innocence" observes that the nation state partakes of this culture.

Niebuhr saw it at work in foreign policy: “Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem, are insufferable in their ­human contacts.”

But Bauerlein goes on, real innocence only applies prior to The Fall.

Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were sinless, ­cognitively ­innocent and morally innocent. But after the Fall, with moral innocence shattered, this other innocence turns into a mode of obtuseness. It is ­sin-blind and self-unaware. It will not and cannot see itself addressed when Jesus looks upon sinners and says with authority, “go and sin no more.”

Or, to put it bluntly, once you have acquired self-consciousness which includes, I think, the ability to sort-of see yourself as others see you, the continued protestation of innocence is an exercise in bad faith. Innocence went out the window once Eve bit into the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

But. Whatabout the innocence of nations? Whatabout the innocence of the Jews? I think the answer is simple. When you are fearful, when you are living in a dangerous place, then you must regress to a previous place. Because when you are fighting for your life you do not have the luxury or the leisure to start thinking "on the one hand this, on the other hand that." So you regress to a place of fake innocence to help you face the dangers of the times.

Now we apply this to my reductive Three Peoples theory.

It seems to me that, to a considerable extent, the People of the Subordinate Self are not yet self-conscious; they are, in fact, innocents. They experience themselves as helpless victims of the gods, of their lord. They are fatalistic, and do not imagine that they have the agency to do anything about their situation. The left has played on this in a masterful way by offering to take the place of the gods or the lord and lead the subordinates to safety.

The Jews were the guys that put all this together, and why not. They just extended their own situation as an endangered minority and applied it to any non-majority group. Because, I think, the same rules apply. If you are Strangers in a Strange Land then you must stick together, for safety.

The People of the Responsible Self are not helpless innocent victims. We believe in personal responsibility. In a way, of course, this is a mirage, because the truth is that individuals are, to a great extent, the helpless victims of circumstance. You could be caught in a storm at sea; you could be caught in the middle of a bloody revolution or a Great Depression or a war through no fault of your own. But you are still thinking: how do I get out of this situation? You do not lie back and think of England. And even if the worst comes to the worst, you think to yourself, well, I fought the good fight. You do not think how come the government didn't protect me.

The People of the Creative Self, of course, cannot be helpless victims, nor even responsibles. Because the whole point of human creativity is that now, we humans are creating the world, not just living as the subordinates of the gods, or as responsibles living in the world that God created and according to the Law that God set forth. But things are not so simple, as Ariel Levy relates in "The Rules Do Not Apply."

[38-year-old] Levy was married to a woman and five months pregnant, having been impregnated with a friend's sperm, when she lost her baby, delivering it alone in a hotel room in Mongolia, where she was on a reporting trip.

Yes. You can kick over all your middle-class morality and its suffocating rules. You can marry a woman; you can decide to have a baby in your late 30s. You can go on your reporting trip anyway.

But evidently someone forgot to tell you that the creative life is hard, and will likely end in failure. You might have learned that by reading Nietzsche, but of course you have been carefully taught that Nietzsche was a Nazi. Or maybe you would have got a clue from Joseph Schumpeter that wrote about "creative destruction." Or you might have learned that 9 out of 10 business startups end in failure.

Our great global problem is that, like Toad of Toad Hall, the globalist educated ruling class wants to play all the roles from helpless victim to rulemaker for the deplorables, to courageous creative artist and activist. And if things go wrong, it's the patriarchy's fault.

But creativity is hard. That is what all the myths about going into the underworld (of the unconscious) and finding out if you are really up to the mark are all about. And that is why, if you survive your Hero's Journey, it will probably end in a sacrificial death on the border between Order and Chaos.

Our glorious creative class is, right now, on its own collective journey into the underworld of the unconscious. It is a journey of frightful peril and most will not return to the light of day with all their marbles.

If you discover that you are not up to the journey, that you don't have the necessary hardness for the creative life, well then better slide back to a life of Responsibility where The Rules Do Apply and protect you from doing stupid stuff. Or you can become a helpless innocent victim and wait for someone else to tell you what to do to solve your problems.

But don't complain about the patriarchy or white supremacy or America being a racist slaveholding country since 1619. Either suck it in, follow the rules, or fall in line.

What I am saying is that you can't pick and choose. You wanna be a fancy-schmancy creative? Then no fair acting like a victim. No fair saying "but they didn't tell me."

And no fair playing the activist game, pretending to be taking it to the Man when really you are just a regime thug doing the dirty work for the rulers.