Let's Check Out the Woman Question

I suppose the most important thing to know is that when people are arguing about the number of angels that fit on the head of a pin, you know that the age is coming to an end, and will be replaced by an age in which the number of angels on a pinhead is irrelevant.

And so, in Quillette they are looking at the absolute madness ongoing between transgender activists and radical feminists. Since it is left against left, you can imagine that the question is: Who can outshame the other girls? Or guys, depending on your identification.

Well, I just want to cue Nietzsche in on this, from The Gay Science, Book Three:

Whom do you call bad? -- Those who always want to put to shame. 

What do you consider most humane? -- To spare someone shame.

Just saying. Hey, lefties, how ya doin' today! Is there anything on your agenda that does not involve naming and shaming someone?

Here's an interesting take. In the American Spectator Ann Hendershott observes that the decline in marriage seems, according to schientists, to involve the fact that women like to marry up.

[M]en who found women to marry them have an average income that is about 58 percent higher than the actual unmarried men who are currently available to unmarried women. The researchers conclude that the decline in marriage is due to the “putative shortage of economically attractive partners for unmarried women to marry.”

In other words, if a woman can't find a good provider -- compared to her own economic status and education -- she'd rather not marry at all, darling, and that means not to have children at all.

But back to the vital important of non-binary gender identity. Let's not lose sight of the important things!

I know! Let's take a look at the Zman.

The thing about the war of the sexes is that it is really a war on normal women. When you examine the arguments from the Left and from feminists, not a lot of it is aimed at changing male behavior that is beneficial to women. Mostly it is aimed at eliminating the protections a healthy society has for its women. The resulting social breakdown creates more unhappy women, who can then be recruited into the coven of feminism.

Zman raises an interesting question, for which I do not have the answer. Are women in fact helpless victims, condemned eternally to repeat the conventional wisdom of their Mean Girl betters and spiral into bitterness without the agency to save themselves?

Because if the result of the war of the sexes is that women get unhappy and turn into cat ladies, then it makes sense that women have not, in the past, been recruited into the happy band of philosophers, politicians, and warriors.

Let us turn again to Nietzsche in Part Four of The Gay Science,  where he longs for an heroic age for ideas "which will restore honor to courage above all" and

human beings who know how to be lonely, silent, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome; humans beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished[.]

Well, you can see why lefties want to brush Nietzsche aside as "the favorite intellectual of the Nazis."

I am reading a history of the tech world, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara. This foolish woman stops the action every couple of pages to recite lefty pieties on race and gender. I call that racism and sexism, straight up.

Here's a piece where normal women are fighting back aainst the gender activists. They are protesting against trans-boys using the girls' restroom, against trans-boys competing in girls' athletics. Or the Scottish teenager that was thrown out of class for insisting there are two genders. So maybe women do have a clue.

I suspect that the fuss about "microaggression" and "safe spaces" is a visceral reaction by women -- normal women -- against the "virile, warlike" nature of the public square. For the only human activity that really matters is the bearing and raising of children. And that requires women, or men pretending to be women, retreating from the public square to bear, and suckle, and raise, and nurture those children. They leave it to others to act all virile and warlike and lonely, silent, resolute, and cheerful and all that other Nietzschean stuff. If the women in our human society forget all that, in some periodic religious cult, then, like the Shakers, we are not long for this world.

It is odd, is it not, how many millenarian religious cults react against the simple agenda of wiving and thriving. What is going on, I wonder? Why would people rebel against the most obvious and necessary activities of every living thing, to make more of them. Maybe it is just Hegelian, in that the thing is the same as its opposite.

I wonder whether it will be normal women that insist on the return to normal wiving and thriving or whether it will be "virile, warlike" men that do it for them. Perhaps it will be a combination, for in Spirit and Flesh James M. Ault observed that while men hold all the offices in a fundamentalist church, the women run the church through their husbands.

Comte's Three Stages vs. My Three Peoples

August Comte was the inventor of what he called Positivism, which called attention to the last of his three stages of history. The notion of three stages is one that is very comfortable for humans. Even though it is obviously a gross simplification, nevertheless it has an enormous attraction for humans who must identify the important signals coming in throuh their five senses from all the noise of the world out there. Think of the Garden of Eden, the Fall, and the hope for Eternal Life in Paradise: there's a three stage theory for you.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is one such three-stages theory. It's a gross simplification of the irreducible complexity of human life, but it is trying to filter some really important notions from the flux of events.

So what about Comte's three stages theory? La Wik:

The Theological stage refers to explanation by personified deities. During the earlier stages, people believe that all the phenomena of nature are the creation of the divine or supernatural. Adults and children failed to discover the natural causes of various phenomena and hence attributed them to a supernatural or divine power.

My People of the Subordinate Self are people that believe themselves subordinate to another's power. It may be a god or it may be a warrior lord. The point is that Subordinates experience humans as not capable of agency, of changing things in this world; they must submit to the will of the gods and the will of their earthly lord. I think I am talking about the same thing as Comte, but with different emphasis.

The Metaphysical stage is the extension of the theological stage. Metaphysical stage refers to explanation by impersonal abstract concepts. People often tried to believe that God is an abstract being. They believe that an abstract power or force guides and determines events in the world. Metaphysical thinking discards belief in a concrete God.

I suppose this is supposed to refer to things like Greek philosophy that attempt to explain the world by reason and logic alone, rather than the combination of reason and experiment in Comte's final stage.

The Positivity stage, also known as the scientific stage, refers to scientific explanation based on observation, experiment, and comparison. Positive explanations rely upon a distinct method, the scientific method, for their justification.

Now, I would say that my People of the Responsible Self straddle the Metaphysical and Positivity stages. My responsibles regard the world as set up by God and regulated by His Law, for people to live and wive and thrive using their knowledge of God's creation and God's law. But in fact they combine the metaphysics of rational speculation with the experimental ethos of the mechanic, and create wonders. But here is the thing: they do not think of themselves as creative; they just think of themselves as responsible beings living according to the law.

Whatabout my People of the Creative Self? I think that our modern creatives have gone beyond the Metaphysical and Positivity stages to become self-conscious of the notion of creativity, that humans can create the world anew. In short, our modern creatives experience themselves as gods.

The interesting point, I think, is that humans all along have been creative. That is the whole point of a conscious mind; you do not just do things according to instinct. You consciously attempt to understand the world, and do something about it. My Subordinates consciously imagine themselves as helpless victims before the power and the will of the gods of heaven and earth. In fact, they have a lot more agency than they think.

My Responsibles are notably creative, but they do not think of themselves as creative. They think of themselves merely as responsible agents of God's law. My reference point for People of the Responsible Self are the two heroes of Adam Bede: Adam Bede himself and his remarkable love interest, the lay Methodist preacher Dinah Morris. These two think of themselves as just working out their lives according to God's Will. But in fact their responsibility and their earnest analysis is in fact remarkably creative and projects them out of their subordinate roles in the old agricultural world into purposive and creative lives as moral and economic actors in the modern world.

The difference between the People of the Responsible Self and the People of the Creative Self is that the creatives are self-consciously creative. They see themselves ordained by history to make the world anew, according to their own Law, or notion of justice and peace.

This is where we come to the point of what I consider my important insight. If you are a creative God it does not mean that you sit on high and direct the affairs of the world. That was, after all, one of the great Temptations of Jesus Christ, where Satan took him up unto a high mountain and offered him all the nations of the world to rule. In fact, as we know from the Passion of Christ and from the Jungian notion of the Sacrifical Hero, the act of creation is also an apotheosis of self-destruction, just as economic growth emerges phoenix-like from the ashes of the destruction of the old order. This is the lesson that our educated ruling class has yet to understand. The creative does not get to rule the rubes from a glorious educated throne supported by glorious titles and sinecures. That is not how the world works. To imagine yourself as the Director of mankind is, as we say, the dreadful conceit of a Stalin or a Mao.

It is interesting that the world of Positivity and the mechanical certainties of the Newtonian age gave way almost immediately to the scientific revolution of relativity and quantum mechanics, in which the fundaments of the universe are relative and hidden in an uncertainty principle and the probabilities of the wave function. This means to me that the self-conscious belief of the Creatives of themselves as gods is in fact not an apotheosis of the modern but a regression to the ethos of the Olympian gods that ruled the world by jealousy and power, as the mood took them.

Thus, I call our lefty friends as the authors of a Great Reaction, back to the primitive. They think of themselves as noble creatives, but in the event they aspire to be the cruel and vindictive lords of Olympus, directing the affairs of mankind as the mood takes them and as their petty Olympian squabbles direct them. Hello Stalin; hello Mao.

Gut-Check Time for the Educated Ruling Class

My idea is that the salient fact of the last two centuries has been the replacement of the old landed ruling class of kings and lords by a new ruling class of the educated. In a sense Marx's Communist Manifesto was the Declaration of Intent of the new ruling class that was termed, in those days, Educated Youth.

We may say, perhaps, that the new ruling class proposed to rule by the words of its propaganda and its administrative bureaucracy, replacing the old ruling class that ruled because of its military power that enabled it to protect the tillers of the soil.

Now the only warrant for government power is the sense of existential peril. In the old days the existential peril was the armed warriors next door who might sweep down at any moment and seize the grain and sell the wives and children of the tillers of the soil into slavery. As bad and oppressive as the rulers were, there was no substitute for their protection. Either put up with their nonsense or deal with the Vikings -- or the Huns or the Mongols -- on your own.

The new ruling class came up with a new existential peril: the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. Where the old ruling class had promised to protect the peasants from the depradations of the old warrior pirates and plunderers, the new ruling class would protect the workers from a new eruption of piracy and plunder, the capitalist "robber barons."

You have to say: it was brilliant! Because a ruling class must conjure up some sort of existential peril: otherwise there is no justification for its political power.

Of course, if the educated ruling class had not conjured up this existential peril they would not have become the ruling class.

Now I say that the rise to power of an educated ruling class amounted to a Great Reaction and a profound misreading by the educated class of the meaning of the industrial revolution and the rise of the bourgeoisie.

I say that the educated ruling class's enthusiasm for socialism is nothing more that neo-slavery, and that its marquee political achievements of the Soviet Union and Maoist China are the most egregious slave states in history. Hey! How does that feel hanging round your necks, lefties?

And I say that the educated ruling class's welfare state is neo-feudalism, the reduction of the workers to the status of feudal peasants, their lives and occupations supervised by a bureaucratic army of educated experts. And the false promise of the new feudal lords is the same as the old ones: the promise to protect the peasants is always, in the end, reneged upon. This is not rocket science. The truth is that the world changes, and mankind must change with it. Whether we are talking about drought and famine or the interminable wars of the warrior class or the fluctuations of the modern economy and the successive technological revolutions of the last 200 years, the fact is that the feudal lords could not, and the neo-feudal lords cannot, deliver on their promise of security and safety.

But that is all beside the point. The Big Thing of the modern era is that while the peasant was worth a lot less than his grain -- which was why the Vikings killed the peasants and stole the grain back in the day -- in the new world the skills and the "intangible capital" in every human brain is worth more than the product the worker produces.

This means that good old armed plunder, or its modern equivalent, political plunder, does not pay.

For, how do you plunder the "intangible capital?" The simple answer is, you can't. The ruling class doesn't have a clue, and its constant plunder of the productive sector just means less for all. As any ruling class will agree, its instinct is to prevent economic change because such change always disturbs the status quo and hurts the ruling class and its little darlings. Look at all the technological revolutions of the past 200 years, from machine textiles for the masses to steam transportation for the masses to personal transportation for the masses to electrical power for the masses and now smartphones for the masses as in 4 billion smartphones worldwide. Every one of these innovations was a complete surprise and the educated ruling class had nothing to do with it. The only thing the educated ruling class could think to do was to tax it and spend the revenue on buying votes.

For years the workers seemed to like the rule of the educated class: the union wages, the pensions, the health care, the education that the educed ruling class shoveled out at them.

But now the bloom is off the rose. The workers just want a decent job, a decent home, a family; the educated ruling class wants something different: a world in which it can execute on all manner of creative projects from politics to art to sex. And the new warrant for political power is the existential danger of climate change.

If you are an ordinary middle-class or working-class person you are bound to feel that the educated ruling class "doesn't care about people like me." And you would be right.

That is the meaning of Trump and Brexit and nationalism in Europe. The ruling class has gone off at tangents, feeding its need for creative projects rather than stolidly providing a solid and stable ground for ordinary people to wive and thrive.

What will happen next? Obviously, things are going to change. The current ruling class will object, and it does object. Because when you have been a ruling class for a while, it is inconceivable -- inconceivable -- that the natives would be restless. Why, what would they do without us, the wise and compassionate ruling class, to run things for them? What do the deplorables know about politics and programs?

Thus we have predictions of civil war, of an end to the current era, of a Reign of Terror, of the conquest of the West by the migrants. And we have the spitting rage of the ruling class in its hatred of the existential threat of Trump and Brexit to its privileges and sinecures. And we have the educated ruling class plunging into cultish fantasies of white nationalism, toxic masculinity, and racism, racism, racism.

We do not know what will be the end of it.

But I tell you this. Whatever the future, the educated ruling class is going to hate it. Maybe they will get to reproduce Xi's China where everyone better toe the party line, but I doubt it, because that level of political control will throttle everything else in society and conjure up a head of rebellion. Or maybe we Normals will get to tell them to put it where the Sun don't shine.

It ain't gonna be Paradise, and it is not all going to be over by bed-time and all well, as Falstaff hoped.

Yes, Democracy is a Fraud. So What?

The Zman today is expatiating on the Fraud of Democracy. "According to the political class, democracy allows for public policy to reflect the will of the people."

In reality... the parties put on a show for the voters, rarely intending to actually do what they claim. Instead, they manufacture differences between one another, so they can pretend the choice before the voters is stark.

But after the election is over, the rulers just go back to business as usual. Perfectly true. But.

But after a while the malfeasance of the ruling class -- any ruling class -- starts to have consequences. And that's where we are in the West at this time. Because government and politics -- any government and any politics -- is like a dam of fallen trees holding up the natural flow of the river. At some point the waters behind the dam will break through, and the world will change.

Yes, our ruling class in the United States is appalled by the Trump phenomenon, its whiteness, its bigotry. And they have done a lot to hold it up, to prevent the Trump agenda of reduced immigration and payback against China. And the elite is right that the Trump voters are a bunch of bigoted nationalist fools that don't know what is good for them.

Only, of course, the elite cannot see how much they have gamed the political system to benefit educated credentialed elitists like themselves. Life in great, in the United States, if you have a masters degree in anything except "studies."

But if you are the child of the white working class, and you don't have credentials up the yin-yang, then things are not that great. Because the elite has imported a lot of immigrants that are competing with you for the low-skill jobs. Because the elite has outsourced everything from car manufacture to plastic toy manufacture. OK, so you don't have a ten-point plan to get America back on track. But then who does? Joe Biden? Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders? If the agenda of President Trump for reduced immigration and tariffs on Chinese imports is pretty lame, whatabout Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal?

Back in the day the educated ruling class was delighted to enact labor laws to benefit the suffering working class, and prided themselves on the glory of the civil rights laws to help blacks and women. But for some reason today's ruling class is not much interested in the sufferings of today's white working class. They seem to think that the travails of the white working class are their own fault.

Then what about Brexit Britain? You can say that Britain will do best economically if it stays in Europe. But Europe demands that Britain import millions of immigrants from Eastern Europe, from the Middle East, and from Africa. And these low-skill immigrants are going to be competing for jobs with low-skill natives. And how about that Brit education system that is failing its most vulnerable citizens? The average Brit feels that they are being screwed.

For now, the Brit ruling class is holding off on Brexit, because it has the power to defeat the will of the people. But in the end, something's gonna change, because the average Brit feels that he is being screwed. It won't be pretty, as we can see with the current political shenanigans. And it won't necessarily change things for the better. What people want is not necessarily what they need.

The way I understand democracy is not as a logical and rational discussion of the issues, and not as the fiction that the people rule. It is a blundering, corrupt, subconscious cultural phenomenon that, as Winston Churchill said, is the worst form of government, except for all the alternatives.

So, it may be that the current Western educated elite will hold off the rubes and maintain their cultural and political hegemony for another 50 years. Or it may be that the rubes manage in some way to force some kind of political realignment. It may be that the economic policy of the educated elite will result in economic ruin, or it may be that the policy of the Trumpians and Brexiteers will result in economic ruin. Or it may be that the whole thing will dissolve into civil war.

Something's gonna change, but be careful what you wish for.

Accepting the Fact of Exile In America's Jacobin Terror

At American Greatness, Jared E. Peterson reminds us that the Democrats have gone full Jacobin. Or Leninist, or Stalinist or whatever.

Today’s Democrats condemn conservatives, traditionalists, and patriots in words chosen to promote hatred and intensify existing social divisions. Their opponents are not wrong for rationally stated reasons—they are dismissed as racists, white supremacists, white nationalists, xenophobes, homophobes, Islamophobes, climate deniers, “deplorables.”

Thus the 2020 election will be a contest like no other.

It will be a contest between those animated by loathing who pursue revolution, and those animated by affection who seek improvement. It will be a struggle for national survival against those who despise the nation and openly seek to replace both it and the descendants of its European founders and later immigrants.

For the Democrats, it is a battle against "whiteness." David Cole writes about an Amazon movie The Aeronauts based on the real-life story of a man who saved himself and in compadre from death in a balloon.

Above cloud level, at unprecedented heights, Coxwell, fighting to stay conscious, bravely climbed up the balloon’s rigging to release the blocked valve that was preventing descent. Oh, and he released it with his teeth while holding on for dear life with both hands.

In the movie, this death-defying heroism is done by a woman. I don't think so. Same with James Cameron's Avatar where the girl helicopter pilot joins the dissidents and uses her helicopter to hide the Avatar machines from the evil Marine general. Wouldn't have happened. Girls just don't do stuff like that. Instead, they insist on safe spaces, freedom from microaggression, and how they feel offended.

But the question is: what do we do about it? Beyond winning the 2020 election?

The Zman writes about the situation of the dissident. The natural resort of dissidents, at first, is to seek access to the institutions "to make their case." But what if that doesn't work, and that, as now, we conservative nationalist dissidents are all dismissed as racists etc. as above? In that case, the dissident is facing "exile" like the Puritans:

[The Puritans] began as reformers of the English church, but eventually ended up as exiles. They were not only exiled from the church, but from English society and eventually their country. As a result, Puritanism was able to develop into a fully formed and independent set of religious and social beliefs. Puritanism probably could not have survived if not for the exile of its adherents.

That is what is facing us "normals" or "deplorables" or "white supremacists." Or whatever. It will no longer do to live as the Outer Party to the Democrats' Inner Party, living by the grace and favor of the Inner Party deep state. We have to develop an "independent set of religious and social beliefs." And this set of beliefs must, at a minimum, put the current Jacobins of political correctness and identity politics on trial as enemies of all that is good and true.

Of course, this is what my whole life is about. I define the broad nature of the people in our society with my reductive Three Peoples theory, where I characterize our current educated ruling class as People of the Creative Self that have defined the ordinary bourgeois People of the Responsible Self as the enemy, the essential political "other." I define the Progressive world view as the Great Reaction, where socialism is neo-slavery, the welfare state is neo-feudalism, and identity politics is neo-tribalism. And I try to pull a solution together in my Perfect Plan.

My idea is that we all of us have something of serfs in our personality: we want someone to take care of us. So there will always be some sort of welfare state. Most of us, however, possess the bourgeois culture of responsibility, that we should each set our own course within the framework of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules. So there must be a market economy that makes us all adjust to the price signals of the consumers.

The big problem is our creative class that believes in their miraculous role to effect the transformation of the world according to their vision of the anointed. Yes, perfectly understandable, but monstrously evil if it includes the utter demonization of the ordinary deplorable People of the Responsible Self.

And this is especially evil since the clear tendency of capitalism is to encourage and reward people for being responsible and cooperative.

Clearly, it is the nature of the People of the Creative Self to get into religious and cultish enthusiasms from time to time and want the utter transformation of society, right now, as did the Jacobins. Here in the United States they did it in the Sixties. It took Republicans winning four out of five presidential elections in a row to cure them of that, for a season in 1992. But Barack Obama triggered a new Reign of Terror and Virtue against the deplorables of the Responsible Self.

Despite all this, the fundamental datum of human existence is the necessity to return again and again to the basic task of wiving and thriving, putting the next generation on the ground and feeding it and keeping it alive until it leaves the nest. That is all the ordinary people of the earth ever wanted and all they ever will want.

It is up to us to teach our betters about this truth. Otherwise they will consume the earth in the terrible wrath of their genius and their conceit that they are the Chosen Ones that have come to lead us to the Promised Land.

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.