My Journey from Common Sense to Common Sense

One of the complaints of conservatives is the death of common sense. Logic and reason and common sense are what we assume inspired the Founders when they rebelled against the Brits to form this more perfect union.

And, we complain, the lefties have declared "War on Common Sense." Thus, Robert Curry in American Greatness:

Political correctness is quite simply a war on common sense. It is a war by the elites on the common people and on the shared understanding of basic realities of life that has made it possible for us to rule ourselves under the Constitution. Once this common-sense understanding of reality has been vanquished, it is “mission accomplished” for the Americans who reject America.

I would have agreed 100% with this 20 years ago. But then I read F.S.C. Northrop in The Meeting of East and West.

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been showed by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

And, of course, our Constitution and political culture in the United States was based on the truth, the common sense, of Descartes, Locke, and Hume. So began for me an intellectual journey in which I made my way through Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and now finally Nietzsche and Jung.

I still think our lefty and politically correct friends are wrong, as Curry does, but not because they are opposed to common sense and logic and reason. I think they are wrong because I believe that the German Turn does not invalidate the British empirical philosophers, but puts a new layer on knowledge on top of it, in the same way that relativity does not replace Newtonian mechanics completely, but only when dealing with astronomical distances and speeds close to the speed of light.

See, the "common sense" of the politically correct is that there is not one correct view of life but that diffferent cultures experience a different view of the world. It's all relative and uncertain.

And indeed modern science argues that all living things must choose, from the overwhelming amount of data pouring in through the senses, which data is important to them.

Prior to the Germans we Anglo empiricists thought there was mind, and matter, and common sense to put it all together. But actually Hume, the skeptic, noted that we cannot, for instance, justify the notion of cause and effect. Just because some event comes after another does not mean the first event caused the second. It is our faith -- in science, in Newtonisn mechanics, in common sense -- that connects the two.

Then Kant came along and questioned everything. Never mind cause and effect, he said. Really we cannot know things-as-they-are. All we know is what comes in throught the senses as sense impressions, and the theories we spin in our mind to make sense of it all. It is my belief that this radical notion, that really we are making it all up, leads directly to Einstein's relativity, do not pass Go. Because Einstein tells us that space and time are not absolute, as openly assumed in Newton's mechanics, but relative.

Do you see the amazing thing here? By casting loose from the notion of absolute space and time and matter vs. idea and believing that we know reality we humans made the most radical step forward ever in understanding how the Universe works.

Another thing that got moving in the German world was modern psychology. By the time we get to Freud and Jung we are saying that our conscious mind is just a tiny thing riding on the top of a fathomless unconscious. That really we are not conscious rational actors, but mostly the slave of our unconscious instincts. I recently read that scientists have discovered through brain scans that our mind makes its decision to act about 1.5 seconds before we experience the decision in our conscious mind.

Now, I believe in "common sense." It's just that my common sense is built upon all the work of Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Freud and Jung. I walk around the world realizing that my eyes are seeing far more stuff than I am aware of. It's just that my mind ignores 97 percent of the visual information and only concentrates on what it thinks is important. That could be a problem if I am stopped at a stop sign and my visual processing system fails to notice a car coming up in the corner of my eye. Indeed the whole modern concept of "situational awareness" understands that the processing of information in our brain is a tricky thing. And they say that at 79 your situational awareness starts to make such a serious decline that over-79s get involved in lots of "failure to yield" accidents at stop signs. Roll on driverless cars!

Now, I think that my journey, from the common sense of the British empiricists to the common sense of the post-Jungians is a glorious and liberating thing. Because it means to me that I can understand all the people in the world that have a different view of common sense than I do. And I have the conceit that I know where they go wrong. So I can forgive them, the poor little dears.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is supposed to show how it is perfectly natural and physical that people are different. The People of the Subordinate Self are workers and peasants; they think the world is run by vengeful gods and lords and political bosses. They do not yet know science. The People of the Responsible Self are citizens, that live and work in the city. They believe in a God that created the world and then told humans to get on with it, and he'll judge our performance on Judgement Day. Thus is pays Reponsibles to develop science and laws and stuff to make sense of the world and act responsibly in it. The People of the Creative Self are people that realize that humans are like gods, they can create the world anew, and change the Law, and even dream of a world of perfect justice.

But, if the People of the Responsible Self treat the People of the Subordinate Self like slaves and use them up as slave workers in satanic mills and slave plantations and factories with child labor then they are monsters. That is what Marx was talking about. Actually, the People of the Responsible Self were not that interested in driving slaves; that's why they abolished slavery just about at the moment that lefties first appeared over the horizon. They were OK with giving the workers rights and giving them the vote. So everything is now copacetic on the border between the Responsibles and the Subordinates.

However, if the People of the Creative Self treat the People of the Responsible Self as racist sexist homophobes, and declare them to be deplorables, and create politcal regimes to deliberately oppress and dis-empower Responsibles then they are monsters. And that is exactly what Stalin and Mao did, and plenty of Creatives to this day have failed to utterly deplore and condemn this great crime of history.

Yes, lefties, the People of the Responsible Self may be a bit slow, and bigoted and superstitious, compared to the woke, the educated, the evolved folks like you. But they still have a right to live according to their lights. Just as you chaps insisted, back in the day, that the workers had a right to live according to their lights and demand their rights even if it was mighty inconvenient to the bourgeoisie.

The point of any knowledge or world view is: does it help me understand the world? I say that my "common sense" helps me understand why lefties are going bat-shit crazy right now.

The lefty world view says that lefties are involved in a sacred project to "bend the arc of history towards justice." Obviously anyone that tries to stop this process is a monster and should be named and shamed and ostracized and fired from their job and deplatformed from social media. And yet, Donald Trump and his deporables!

Do you see how it makes complete sense that liberals would be beside themselves right now? Call it a Failure of Prophecy. By now, all the old racist sexist homophobes were supposed to be a thing of the past. And yet here we are, with a president elected by the votes of white working class deplorables in the old industrial states that liberals once loved and revered.

How could this have happened! What is going wrong! Obviously, the only thing to do is to redouble our efforts to bend the arc of history towards justice and suppress all the hate speech and toxic masculinity and extremism and fake news from whacko sites on the internet. This sort of reaction is normal. It is explained by Leon Festinger et al. in When Prophecy Fails and also by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution as the Reign of Terror that revolutionaries enact when their revolution fails to transform society in ein Augenblick.

See how my world view enables me to understand the Trump Derangement Syndrome of our liberal and lefty friends? My world view must be a good one, that's what I have to say.

And there is this. The world seems to be one religious outburst after another, when some religious group prophesies the end of the world unless we act now. As in socialism and as in climate change. But the overwhelming majority of people, most of the time, just want to get on with life, wiving and thriving and raising a family and pursuing happiness. When these two cultural forces clash then you are going to see some fireworks.

And by the way, that is why our Founders decreed a separation of church and state. So that religious fanatics could not seize the reins of state. Hey, I just came up with this maxim:

Politics is the division between "us" and "them;" Religion is the division between "good" and "evil." Totalitarianism is the division between "us good people" and "them evil people."

And the problem with our liberal and lefty friends is that they are mixing their politics of big government with their religion of bending the arc of history towards justice. History tells us that nothing good comes of uniting religion and government.

Let us end with a word from Nietzsche, who suggests in The Gay Science §292, to preachers of morals that they deprive the best things of honor and worth by praising them all the time.

Deny these good things, withdraw the mob's acclaim from them as well as their easy currency; make them once again concealed secrets of solitary souls; say that morality is something forbidden.

That way, writes Nietzsche, you might win over the only people that matter, the heroic.

Well, that's a thought. Maybe our liberal and lefty friends are making the case for tolerance and good fellowship by demanding absolute conformity to woke morality and lock-step conformity. 

Jane Austen and the Resumption of Manners

Last week the Wall Street Journal did a piece on Jane Austen and manners, "Jane Austen Knows That Manners Make the Man." Author Paula Marantz Cohen notes that, when Jane Austen became respectable, in the 20th century, the question of "manners" and "civility" was depreciated by critics. They preferred her "moral depth and astute satire."

And of course, by the mid 20th century manners went right out of fashion, and things have only got worse in the decades since.

But Cohen wants us to understand that in Jane Austen, civility and manners are a guide to morality, and that manners "need to be strengthened by practice." Maybe so, but I would say that the current moment shows a revival of interest in manners. The whole #MeToo movement is not so much a movement against sexual harassment as an attempt to revive the importance of manners.

So when the feminists bring out accusations against Brett Kavanaugh, they are really complaining about the lack of manners. A girl can't go to a party and expect the men to behave themselves any more. A girl can't work in an office without some man making her uncomfortable.

I think this raises an interesting question. Back in the day, when rough tough feminists were telling us that women could do anything a man could do, they were really telling us that the old rules, where women expected to be protected, were over. Women could take it, and they could give it right back. We are still in the aftertow of this, with female superheroes and rough, tough female helicopter pilots in Avatar.

I think we are seeing that those days are over. Women have now instinctively returned to the old culture, in which women expect to be protected. That is what special snowflakes, microaggressions, and safe spaces are about. It is women, now dominating the culture of the university, demanding a return to a protected space.

Of course, because it is lefty women leading the charge, it will be a complete mess, because lefty women "literally know nothing," in the famous phrase.

Now I believe that the culture of manners is the way that women dominate the domestic space. Among themselves, men do not have a culture of manners. Indeed, as I say, men have a Culture of Insult. This is related to the nature of honor among men, which is the reputation for courage, for in the casual insult between men, the guys are raising the question of courage. They are wondering if the other guy would really rise to the occasion when the chips were down. They are also testing the current state of the male hierarchy.

But women have a culture of manners among themselves and for mixed company, and they are pretty good at naming and shaming and even ostracizing people with bad manners. My notion of women having a culture of complaint, and of complaining about other women with "I can't believe she said that" is my way of understanding the women's culture of manners. By the way, the women's culture of complaint ties into the nature of honor among women, which is a reputation for chastity. I don't just mean sexual chastity, but being an all-around good little girl. Being a good little girl is the price she pays for protection and the right to complain about other people.

The dirty little secret about the sexual revolution -- and women's liberation -- is that it did not liberate women. By dismantling the culture of manners, women dismantled the major way in which women dominate the face-to-face culture of daily life. The point is that when there is a culture of manners in place then women dominate. That is the point of Jane Austen. The men in Jane Austen are mostly ciphers. The women run everything. And some of the women -- well you wouldn't want to get anywhere near their force field. I am thinking of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park.

Oh sure. The women don't own the mansions and the income. They don't have to. They command the domestic space, and that is nearly everything. Indeed, you might say that the overriding issue in Jane Austen is how a young woman crosses the bridge from vulnerable singlehood to a secure domination in her own married household. It is made perfectly clear at the end of each novel that the heroine, newly married, is to become mistress of all she surveys.

Think of the sexual revolution as the sexual equivalent of going off the Gold Standard. This usually happened because of war, back in the day. Getting back on the Gold Standard was called "resumption," and it usually included a tough time of deflation and social disruption, as after the Napoleonic wars, the US Civil War, and World War I. And the truth was that the losses suffered in the wartime inflation could never be made up, not without hurting innocents.

So I would advise that the resumption of manners is not going to be pretty. And the reason is that the educated women who will likely be in charge of the resumption are, like most men and nearly all women, completely blinded by conventional wisdom. These are the women that in North Seattle are putting #WeBelieve and "We're Glad You're Our Neighbor" and "Hate Has No Home Here" yardsigns in their front yards and thinking that they are demonstrating their superior morality and wisdom.

So, in many ways, it's going to get worse before it gets better. But nobody said that life was a bowl of cherries.

Nowhere Else to Go: Understanding Identity Politics

You may wonder why it is that our liberal friends have chosen to champion illegal immigrants and Muslims.

Actually, you may wonder what the whole universe of identity politics is about, apart from the fact, suggested by my Great Reaction meme, that identity politics is neo-tribalism.

The answer is that the name of the identity politics game is that the subject group needs to have no place else to go.

Or rather, said group needs to believe that it has no place else to go.

You can see that this cunning little trick started way back with Marx. Hey, he said, you workers better get with the program, for unless you sign up with the Communists the capitalists will oppress and exploit and "immiserate" you like you wouldn't believe. Really, you chaps have nowhere else to go.

Now, I am not saying that the workers didn't have a rough time in Britland back in the 19th century. Of course, the rough time was nothing compared with the rough time that the peasants experienced after the lords dumped them following the nationalization of the armed forces in Britland by Henry VIII. That was what the Elizabethan Poor Law was all about: trying to Do Something about the starving peasants causing chaos throughout the land. The last event in this story was the Captain Swing riots in SE England in1820.

But the truth is that the industrial revolution was the best thing that happened to the lower classes until the invention of sliced bread. Do I need to rehearse the reasons? First, working indoors. Yeah, I bet you never thought of that, but the Nike workers in Vietnam sure think that. Then, by moving to the city, the lower classes became the Social Question and achieved strategic concentration. And got the vote. And got to share in the loot and plunder of politics. And what with steam power and electricity and oil and manufacturing and all, they eventually got up into the middle class and bought houses and cars.

Anyway, the left tried the same game on women. Oh lord! Women had been oppressed since the Dawn of Time by their violent patriarchal husbands. Listen you ladies: unless you sign on with us lefties you will be raped and pillaged and kept barefoot and pregnant -- and Offended -- forever more. And as for a nice career in corporate HR, forget it! Really, you have nowhere else to go.

And so on with blacks, and gays, and transgenders and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. Hey, with Hispanics, not so much.

But today, the truth is that all the victims of the left, that once had nowhere else to go, are really in the catbird seat. Government, the ruling class, is forever fussing and worrying about whether their diapers need changing.

So the lefty rulers need new recruits to their political army. Nothing new here, nothing that the Ottomans didn't do centuries ago with their slave Janisseries, kids that were plucked out of their Christian families and forcibly converted to Islam and made into elite soldiers -- with no place else to go.

Whatabout illegal aliens? Really what's not to like about them? Because they have no legal rights, being illegal residents of the US, they rely for their continuance on lefty activists acting for them, and exempting them from the law of the land through the cultural and political power that any elite possesses. Yeah! Why not declare all the liberal cities in the nation to be sanctuary cities! Then the illegal aliens know who their patrons are, are really, they have no place else to go.

You can see how this applies also to Muslims. Because Muslim terrorists demolished the Twin Towers, patriotic Americans are naturally a little suspicious about them. And it doesn't help that their women wear headgear that broadcasts their difference. I mean, when every other woman in America is broadcasting her sexual assets far and wide with leggings, what kind of a weirdo would cover her hair? Still, given the way that Muslims keep themselves separate from the rest of America, can you blame them for sidling up to our lefty friends when they have no place else to go?

The whole point of identity politics today is to keep the liberal little darlings in fear and trembling. If it is blacks, the Republicans "wanna put y'all back in chains." If it is women, we are just one abortion away from women barefoot and pregnant. If it is gays, homophobia is ready to break out and throw gays back in the closet.

All I can say is that it works. And why not? The whole point of tribalism is to keep "our people" united and mobilized against the tribe next door, because you never know when the tribe next door will try to kill us all in a Dawn Raid. So, in the movement of the Great Reaction, the neo-tribalists are playing the same game. Unless you support us, the next thing you know the racist sexist homophobes will be eating you for breakfast.

Disagreeing with the Zman

I like to disagree with the Zman because, I suppose, he is plowing the same field as I am, only with a different plow and a different tractor. Not that much different, of course.

Today he is talking about the ineffectiveness of the right in countering the left.

The Democrats figure out how to get a majority and push through some reforms, which never work as intended or satisfy the base. The majority falls apart and the Republicans come in to preserve the real reforms, while cleaning up the collateral damage and telling their base they plan to roll all of it back. This never happens, of course.

But, I would say, this is not because the Republicans don't want to roll it all back. It is just that, since

government is an armed minority, occupying territory and taxing the people to reward its supporters

the Republicans have a problem. If you want to roll it all back you are going to make the supporters of the Democrats, the guys that got "rewarded" for voting Democrat, really mad. And in politics you don't want to do that. You want to motivate your own supporters to vote and you want to demoralize the supporters of the other side or put them to sleep.

That is why I say that it is impossible to reform a government program -- or the welfare state. The whole point of government programs is to hand out loot and plunder to your supporters. But the second after anyone gets a government check they decide they deserve it. So to take the check away is to take away something that the recipient is convinced he deserves.

This is why the only way to end government programs is in a general breakdown of law and order and the economy, after a losin war or a hyperinflation, so that people are worried about much more than the continuance of their checks.

The Zman represents our current politics as a dance between reformers and restorers, reformers trying to bring on a bright future through government programs and restorers trying to bring things back to the good old days. But now the restorers are losing credibility and a radical revolutionary right is appearing. And this legitimizes a radical revolutionary left.

My line is that the reformer left is running out of plausible plunder to offer the broad middle of the voters. If you have already provided pensions, health care, and education, then you are running out of new goodies to offer. Thus, the Democratic presidential candidates are proposing not just loot and plunder but radical ideas to overturn the present order, because that is all that is left to offer. And the Radical Right is reacting to an obvious attempt to name and shame and ostracize them, which merely encourages more extremism.

My belief is that the current annoying divide between a radical left and a radical right will continue, with the average American in the middle demanding a continuance of his or her benefits. This will continue until we run out of other peoples' money.

Note that President Trump is appealing to the middle that just wants things to continue. So he promises to Make America Great Again while not touching Social Security and Medicare. This is a cunning strategy that will work until Social Security and Medicare run out of money.

But what will come next? Well, that is where my Three People theory comes in. I'd say that it will be a contest between radicals of the People of the Creative Self, the Educated Youth that has been demanding the right to create the world in their own image for the last 170 years, and the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary middle class that just wants the right to wive and thrive and serve their fellow humans without being bossed around too much by the swells. I'd say the whole thing will turn on which of the two radical movements, one Creative and one Responsible, manages to earn the trust and followership of the People of the Subordinate Self.

The big question is who will the People of the Subordinate Self consist of? Clearly, the People of the Creative Self have been trying to import a new Subordinate class so they can continue just as they are, imposing upon America their religion of creativity for themselves and subordination for the rest of us. And we Responsibles have been trying to head them off at the pass.

So I believe that the key is a New Right that is based upon the notion of the fundamental injustice of a creative class that believes in the absolute right for them to refashion society according to their vision of justice. The whole point of revolution is to run on injustice. A wise ruling class understands that however blind and bigoted and superstitious the plebs may be, a ruler still needs to patronize and flatter them. A foolish ruling class believes that it has the right and duty to eliminate all beliefs and people that stand in the way of bending the arc of history towards justice: i.e., injustice.

I believe that the solution to all our woes is for the creative class to learn a bit of tolerance for the folks that aren't quite and wise and evolved and educated as them. But I am confident that it will not learn this lesson except by the hard way, as is usual in human affairs.

So it is up to the rest of us to stick it to the Man and tell 'em to put it where the sun don't shine.

Forget 1619 NYT. Learn About 1917

One of the things our liberal friends want to ram down our throats, as evidenced by the New York Times "1619 Project," is that the United States was born and raised on slavery and racism.

Of course, the interesting story is not that, in 1619, North Americans from northern Europe were racist and introduced the first slaves from Africa into North America. The interesting question is why slavery and racism should have become a scandal. I would say that slavery became a scandal not later than 1800 and racism became a scandal around 1900.

The question is "why?" I have a short, Nietzschean, answer to that. It is because slavery and racism Do Not Pay. Yes, yes; I know. The issue is much more complicated than that, but still...

Now let us talk, NYT girls and boys, about something much more important: 1917. Anyone want to guess what I am talking about?

I am talking about the Bolshevik Revolution that enslaved the entire Russian people (and other non-Russians in the Russian Empire). If you want to talk about slavery, how about the Soviet Union, the second biggest slave state in history?

What? Only the second biggest slave state in history? So what was the biggest? Really, do you have to ask? I am talking about Maoist China, that enslaved the glorious Chinese people in one of the greatest crimes of history.

Get it NYT? Slave State #1: Maoist China. Slave State #2: Soviet Union. Total dead as a result of Communism, according to The Black Book of Communism by Stéphane Cortois et al., 100 million men, women and children. Population of the world in 1950, the heyday of the Communist states. was 2.55 billion. So the death toll of Communism was approximately four percent of the total world population.

So how does the United States rank with those two slave states? You tell me, pal.

Another thing, NYT. Those two slave states, the greatest slave states in human history, were not just socialist, or Communist. They were national socialist states. That is to say that they were both self-consciously about "socialism in one country." I thought you guys were nothing, if not anti-fascist.

Hye NYT. How about a "1917 Project" all about the great slave states of the 20th century.

And now we have the comical tweet you NYT chaps sent out on Twitter on 9/11 (and have since deleted):

18 years have passed since airplanes took aim and brought down the World Trade Center.

Hey NYT. How about a "9/11 Project" all about how educated liberals in the United States rammed 9/11 down the memory hole just as soon as journalistically possible.

You know, back in the day, NYT, your national socialist pals in the Soviet Union -- hey, remember NYT chappie Walter Duranty that said of the Ukraine famine in the 1930s, nothing to see here, move right along -- and your national socialist pals in Maoist China -- hey and in NYT's Herbert Matthews' beloved Castroite Cuba -- used to send people to "re-education camp." Do you think that maybe some of the folks in your Twitter unit need a spot of re-education, to purge them of the folly of their woke lefty stupidities?

Of course, I am not talking about a real "re-education camp" of the kind presently universal in our glorious US universities where youngsters are prepared for a life of debt slavery for the glorious necessity of keeping all the diversity and inclusion administrators and deputy diversion and inclusion administrators in work. Oh no. I just think that you should send some of the good little boys and good little girls presently working at the NYT -- that have been carefully taught from year to year in their little ear to hate and to fear the good old US and A -- to Seattle so they can have coffee with me. Maybe I could teach them something, or maybe not. Because, after all, those good little boys and good little girls at the NYT know which side their bread is buttered, ideologically speaking.

Hey! I was driving south on Highway 99 and there was a guy, a white guy, by the side of the road peacefully protesting with a TRUMP RACIST sign. This on the day before Trump lifts the ban on federal funding for faith-based historically black colleges. As Ed Driscolll notes on Instapundit: "WORST. RACIST. PRESIDENT. EVER." I get the guy's point. Whatabout the non-historically-black-faith-based-colleges?

But back to my original point. Why is it that we have put slavery, universal throughout the world until the day before yesterday, behind us?

Inquiring minds want to know. You chappies at the NYT might want to start an "1863 Project." For it was on January 1, 1863 that the US President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

See, I think the big queston is why slavery became a scandal, and why good little boys and good little girls at the New York Times know to say "Eeuuww" when the topic of slavery comes up.

Our Ruling Class Does Too Have a Religion. And How.

Here is the Zman bewailing "The Collapse of Authority." He means an authority that decides things.

The cancer eating away at the modern West is a lack of authority to which people can point to judge public policy, public debate on those polices, as well as the reactions to those policies and debates. As a result, debate has degraded into various camps striking poses, usually by signaling their unhappiness with the pose of other camps in the public sphere. The lack of an agreed upon authority means there is no way to judge the merits of any claim. Instead, it leaves force to resolve disputes.

But the reason that there is no authority is that we deplorables are contesting the authority of the current ruling class's religion. And they are striking back at us, trying to marginalize and eliminate us.

The Zman says that we don't have a religion any more.

In the current age, normal religion has been sidelined, not only as a source of authority, but as a legitimate part of public discourse. Fifty years ago, a public discussion of morality would have had representatives of various faiths to discuss what ought to be according their religions. A century ago those representatives would have provided authority for the current morality. Today, no public debate about moral issues, about what ought to be, includes religion, much less priests or theologians.

To which I say that you just ain't looking hard enough. I take this position from Roy Rappaport, who wrote:

No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion.

 So I say there must be a religion. Because no human can exist, in my view, without a religion, something that declares "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Of course, in our society there are competing religions, and no one religion is generally accepted by almost everyone as the one true religion. I have, of course, explored this question under "Three Peoples Religion." Briefly, we have:

The Religion of the Creative/Educated Class. These people, our rulers, believe in: equality, supervised by them; education, supervised by them; the administration of the economy, supervised by them; the elimination of pollution, supervised by them; the prophecy of the end of the world, due to climate change caused by the sins of mankind. See the New Yorker. "What If We Stopped Pretending?" that completely endorses the ruling class prophecy of the end of the world, because human-caused warming. Anyone that contests this religion is evil, a modern Satan, and must be named, shamed, and ostracized, or worse.

The Religion of the Responsible Class. These people, you and me, believe in one of the Axial Age religions or their modern precipitates. We believe in a world created by God -- or the Big Bang -- and we believe that it works according to laws set down by God -- or learned through the transmission of tradition. We the People are empowered, indeed required, to work out our lives according to the laws of nature and nature's God.

The Religion of the Subordinate Class. These people do not believe they have agency, the ability to direct their own lives. They look for a powerful lord or politician to be their protector. Of course, they may determine, from time to time, that the lord or protector has betrayed them and riot in the streets.

When the Zman talks about the Collapse of Authority I believe he is really saying that we Responsibles have not yet come up with a modern religion that can take on the current lefty religion and its adherents in the educated and creative class. This is illustrated in the failure of "Buckleyite conservatism" which appealed only to Responsibles and did not attempt to win the hearts and minds of the educated class or become the champions of the Subordinate class.

My take is that we deplorables and Responsibles and dissidents need to formulate a new religion that merges the religion of creativity with the religion of responsibility. It would introduce the creatives to the notion of humility, that almost all creative action in this world is doomed to failure and irrelevance, and that certainly no creative activist should believe that just because they believe in something that they have the authority to force the rest of humanity onto their Procustean bed. It would encourage the Reponsibles to step out a bit, to challenge the hegemony of the Creative class and to seek the support of the Subordinates by becoming their patrons.

My belief is that this new religion is suggested in the German Turn from Kant to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Jung. Where Kant starts with the statement that we do not know things in themselves, but only appearances, Nietzsche shows us a clouded vision of what the creative life is all about: that it means getting away from the herd, that it means getting away from hating yourself, that it is hard. Jung shows that the Hero's journey is a descent into the unconscious where you relearn all the lessons that are hidden below the horizon of self-consciousness. Jordan B. Peterson elaborates on the Jungian framework to remind us that the Hero is always a Sacrificial Hero, that sacrifices himself exploring the border between Order and Chaos.

What I say is that the religion of the future is all there, waiting for us to grasp it and prosletyze it. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Now, let us say that our lefty friends are not totally clueless. But, like all creative endeavors, their record is full of disaster and error, and like most humans, they refuse to learn from their errors and disasters.

Really, all our lefty friends have to understand is that creativity is a wonderful thing, except that almost every creative endeavor is a failure, just as nine out of ten business startups is a failure. Every true creative hero understands that he will not end his days in clouds of glory, but in the oblivion of sacrifice, for the true hero is not a Supreme Ego, but a Sacrificial Hero, who dies that others may live.

This is not that hard. Except for the would-be hero.

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.