The Problem with the Notion that Power is Everything

Here's a Quillette piece by a university instructor discussing the follies of the "sexual harassment" binge on campus. Because it shows that the assumptions of the regulators is that women students -- even graduate students -- are unable to deal with the power of their instructors. Really? So maybe they should stay home under the protection of Daddy.

Actually, in a way, I get it. The fact is that, for a man, agency is central to identity. But for a woman, it is fitting into the community of women, worrying about what other women are saying about her. A man is defined by his ability to step out of line, to outdare the dangers of the time. But a woman is defined by her ability to get along.

However, if any woman in an university has to be protected by a mountain of rules, because she is helpless before the toxic males in her environment then maybe we cannot mix men and women together in the public square.

Then, I was reading a piece -- can't remember where -- that took it for granted that "power" is stronger than it has ever been. And that jived with a comment by gay British writer Douglas Murray commenting on Michel Foucault, Mr. Postmodernism, and "his obsession with power and the significance of power in life."

It’s all to do with power. Power in politics, power in personal relations, power in life, power in knowledge. An d this is, of course, as I say, a perverse way of looking at all human, any human relations really.

See, if everything is power then the only thing to do is to strike back with power. And that is the assumption of the left, that the whole world should be interpreted through the binary of the powerful vs. the powerless. And that, because the left is on the side of the powerless, we should give more power to theleft.

But is it true?

Is it true that women students are helpless before the power of the university instructors? And that therefore their relations should be adminstratively regulated down to the last dotted 'i' and crossed 't'? I don't think so, because woman has in our society the power of "no." In fact women in almost all societies have the power of "no" at least since Odysseus's faithful wife Penelope had the power to say "no" to the Suitors.

And, if you check with Hegel and his Master and Slave narrative, particularly if you read the exegesis of Alexandre Kojève in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel that all French lefties have read, you find that the Master is not exactly the master of the Slave. It's a lot more complicated than that. So we might wonder if the relationship between women and the representative Toxic Male is a little more complicated than the simple power of the patriarch.

Example? When Frederick Douglass was sent to a slave breaker the guy eventually had to admit defeat. But, he wanted to make sure that his failure was a secret between him and Douglass. Really? How could that be if the slave-owner was the complete Master of the Slave?

So, how powerful is Power? People in politics all say that this or that power, whether the Soviet Union or Big Oil, is too powerful and therefore you need to give them power to protect you from the other power. Do you see the contradiction? Give us Power, they say, so we can protect you from The Power.

What if they were lying? How would we know?

Then we get back to Jordan B. Peterson and his lobster story. The fact is that power is mediated by hierarchy. You don't fight every day against the Power. On a day-to-day basis you accept your place in the hierarchy. But from time to time you may challenge the person next upstream in the hierarchy. Your challenge may be a physical fight, mano-a-mano, or it may be a trick that floors the other guy, or it may be an appeal to say "why don't we just get along?"

Now my belief, my faith, is that most of the time humans get much more bang for the buck by trusting each other and holding back on the use of power. There are many modern examples of this, from the pricing system to the German Army's decision during and after World War I to push responsibility downwards, not because the generals were sissies, but because the lethal battlefield meant that the higher-ups simply could not supervise every detail of combat; they had to trust their underlings. Then we have the Japanese automakers and their policy that allows any worker to stop the assembly line. In other words the idea that humans are social animals and succeed through trust is not a fairy tale but real truth on the ground.

But we return, again and again, to politicians and activists and the fact that their trade is power. They need to persuade us that we need to give them more power, because Russkies, or Muslims, or Climate Change, or toxic masculinity. Of course they do, because otherwise they have no warrant to deploy political power, and then they are out of a job.

And the worst of it is that many of the reasons for giving them more power is really because their current programs have made things worse. Health care is too expensive because government is all over it. College is too expensive because government subsidizes it. So the politicians are saying that the solution is more power to the politicians and the administrators? I doubt it.

Anyway, my belief is that the dirty little secret is that, with the market economy and its Great Enrichment over the last 200 years, we really need a lot less power in this world, and the more we dismantle power and encourage and reward trust, the better for all of us.

But what the politicians and activists will do in that glorious dawn of trust and reciprocity I have no idea. Perhaps they will all commit ritual suicide. Because unless there is power, power, power: power to fight and power to project, what will the robin do then poor thing?

But never mind. Whatever happens to the politicians and activists, the world will go on.

The End of Wokism Won't Be Pretty

The overwhelming fact about the current left epitomized by the Woke left erupting in the Democratic Party and in SJWs and the cancel culture is that it is not going to go away until the American people strike it on the head, right between the eyes, with an axe.

Here's an American Spectator piece reckoning that the Democrats have No Idea what they are getting themselves into with an impeachment trial in the Senate. Why, the GOP could even order Hillary Clinton to testify. This shows that the young Woke Democrats have not yet developed a strategic instinct that allows them to understand what may well happen around the next corner.

Here's an NRO piece reporting on the Democrats' plans for their next administration.

This president could roll back Trump’s deregulatory efforts, bring backed stalled Obama initiatives, and launch government giveaways and major assaults on business, all without the legislative branch’s help.

Erase student debt, Green New Deal, hit up drug companies. All without a vote of Congress.

There are two problems here. First of all is the idea that the educated and the evolved think we need massive new injections of Force into American life: that everyone should be Forced to enroll in a one-size-fits-all health program; that everyone should be Forced to completely change energy use, etc., because End of the World.

This philosophy flies in the face of the One Big Thing of the last two centuries, that it is amazing what humans can do by cooperating together without the resort to Force.

Now, our lefty friends have seized upon one aspect of this, in their utter condemnation of War and Imperialism. Couldn't agree more, chaps.

But then they amp war up to the limit on the domestic front with class war, race war, sex war, etc. The whole point of leftist politics is to "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Golly Saul. Your Rules for Radicals sounds suspiciously close to War, old chap. Sounds like the first thing you radicals need is an Enemy. Are you telling me that all this stuff about Peace and Justice is just a cunning trick to disarm the deplorables so that you can then drive your lefty SJW panzers into our heartland and enslave us to your fantastical power fantasies?

Still I understand why. If you elevate politics to the status of a religion then you have to have war, and armies, and enemies. Because politics is war by other means.

And indeed, Lenin took the natural tendency of revolutions to end in the frenzy of a witch hunt or a Reign of Terror and made it the central principle of his Bolshevik regime, to use Force to the utmost. To make domestic politics into total war. He understood the internal logic of leftism. That it is all about Force.

But Lenin and all the lefties that come after him, down to the Four Idiots that call themselves The Squad, have completely missed this fundamental lesson, that the whole point of humans is social cooperation, not human force.

Now back in the old days cooperation was encouraged by, e.g., Christianity. Indeed, Nietzsche points out how that works, with his insult that "the priests" taught us to hate each other. Yes, Fritzi, that is exactly the point. Before you plunge your sword into the other guy, you think, hey, maybe I'm the guy that has the problem.

But in the Great Reaction which is the Left, it is always the other guy that has the problem: the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, the rich. And now white supremacists and racist sexist homophobes.

Hey lefties! Suppose the problem was You.

OK. Let's back off a bit. Suppose you lefties are right about almost everything. But what about that one little thing that you got wrong? How would you know?

And, lefties, don't forget that now we have settled science on a lot of this stuff. Economics. Game theory. Prisoner's Dilemma. All of this settled science tends to explain why the last 200 years has been the age of the Great Enrichment, in which slavery and subordination has been radically reduced so that nobodies could invent stuff and get it built and change the world.

And then you lefties came along and built the two biggest slave societies in history.

Yep, that's some achievement. Lefties. Greatest slave societies in history. Put that on a monument!

Hmm. I'd better put that in my Maxims. Lefties created the two greatest slave societies in history.

How about them apples, lefties?

So I say that the current eruption of Wokism is bound to end in tears. The only question is whether the tears will be the tears of all the widows and orphans caused by the lefty Celebration of Force or whether the tears will come from the lefties weeping over the failure of Wokism to win the votes and the hearts of ordinary Americans.

And with everything in this world, the jury is still out.

Conservatism: What Comes Next

The Zman is doing what I am doing, trying to imagine what comes next. He says that conservatism has failed, but that the Left is hysterical for a reason.

Their anger starts from the secret sense that their moral framework is no longer relevant. They are unable to quantify or even comprehend it. They just sense it, like an ill wind. Like primitives confronted with some natural mystery, the men and women defending the established order are in a defensive panic at the shadow of change falling on the West.

Yes. But what is going wrong? What is the natural mystery that the current rulers do not understand? Well I say that the left's  problem is a failure of prophecy. Everything they said was going to happen hasn't happened. They said that worker rights and entitlements and welfare would make the lower classes live happily ever after. Didn't happen. They said that civil rights and then affirmative action and then diversity and inclusion would end racism and sexism. Didn't happen. In fact the left seems to feel that the world is suffering from a plague of racists, sexists, and homophobes right now. So they are beside themselves.

What should come next on the right?

Whether one chooses to call what comes next an alternative Right or something else, it must be a genuine alternative. The main reason conventional conservatism failed in its opposition to the Left is that it was not an alternative to liberalism. It was a slightly different implementation of it. What replaces conservatism cannot start from the same error, but must be a radical departure from both Left and Right, as commonly understood. It must be a radical alternative to the prevailing morality.

Now, I don't think that way, the logical, reasonable way. I think that everything is religion. I think that the left's anger is a failure of prophecy.They had an idea of a perfect world and determined to create it. But their prophetic system failed: millions of dead, and millions of people diverted into the neo-feudalism of the welfare state. But, like any religious believers, they are unable to think outside the box. And the way of the world is that when your prophecy fails your religious group falls apart, because people don't join a group whose prophecy has failed. But not right away.

What was the error of conservatism? I guess my answer would be that conservatism never thought itself in a competition with the left. Conservatives believed that their way was practical and logical and that anyone would logically and rationally agree with them in due course. But the real game at the time was to compete for the votes of the working class, to play the game of loot and plunder in return for votes, because that was what appealed to the workers. Conservatives didn't do that because they didn't believe in an auction for votes, and that the workers wouldn't really benefit from being the beneficiaries of loot and plunder. Whaddya do when you think that politics is not really the most important thing in the world and you are competing against people that believe that politics is the very essence of life?

But what does "a radical alternative to the current morality" mean? Traditional conservativism with backbone? Christiantiy plus nationalism? Cuture war on the left? Zman doesn't say, and that's the end of the article.

Well, I have thought about what comes next. It is about all I think about, and the bottom line for me is that conservatives or traditionalists or whatever need to radically raise our game. The basic issue is that we need a new religion, one that understands and goes beyond traditional religions like Christianity and Judaism. Our new religion will also understand the secular religion of the left. It will understand and correct the flaws that have led to millions of dead and vile, unjust totalitarian regimes wherever lefties have had sway. And it will also understand the spiritual needs of people who, just a minute ago, were subsistence farmers. And now the time is about right to do something about this.

My feeling is that the left had to run its course, had to betray its working class clients, had to lead women astray, had to confine blacks in a racial walled garden, had to ruin education and make college unaffordable, had to utterly bury itself in corruption, had to propose a ludicrous end-of-the-world climate change, had to get to a failure of prophecy before it got to the point it could realize that something was wrong.

And above all, non-lefties had to get to a place where they created a world view that comprehended the victims of the world and comprehended the left, and then constructed a moral universe that understood the just yearnings of people just entering the city economy from centuries of peasanthood and also the yearnings of intellectuals, revolutionaries, and activists.

This world view would have judgements about the just demands of the workers while demanding that workers learn to master the city's ways, because we are all citizens -- i.e., "bourgeois," now. That includes accepting the market economy and the fact that nothing, especially no job, is forever.

This world view would also sit in judgement on the educated class. It would recognize its legitimate yearning to live a creative life that is not just responsible but aspires to make an original contribution to human society. But this world view would also deny the right of cultural domination and political hegemony that the educated class presently considers its right and that has led to tens of millions of deaths, and brutal oppressive regimes wherever leftism has had sway.

And I mean that all lefties need to learn that every lefty regime that ever was, and doubtless ever will be, is necessary violent, unjust, murderous. This is no longer debatable. It has been the one definite fact of the last century.

Now I think I have solved all this. Yes, me. Little old me.

I think that my reductive Three Peoples theory comprehends workers and victims, the ordinary middle class, and the educated class and understands why they believe different things and want different things from life, from work, from culture, and from politics.

I think that my Great Reaction critique of the left illustrates why it has failed in almost all its projects and why, at its worst, it is the most evil political-religious-cultural movement that has ever come upon the Earth.

And I think that the German turn, through Kant, Nietzsche, and Jung, comprehends what creative people want and also specifies what they should want and what they must be categorically restrained from wanting and doing. In other words, it outlines what the religion of a creative person should be and also why the current religion of creative people is evil and disastrous.

Ι think also that Jordan B. Peterson is getting close to this, because his Maps of Meaning builds on the German turn. And his 12 Rules clearly speaks to the hunger for a code of responsibility in the modern American male.

But there is lots more to be done.

Lenin's Philosophy of Force

I have been developing the notion that the left movement is a Great Reaction against the market-economy-limited-government cultural turn of the last 200 years.

And because it is a religious movement that believes in its prophecy that politics leads to justice, every one of its revolutions ends in disappointment. Crane Brinton in Anatomy of Revolution traces the arc of all the modern revolutions from their origin in existential hope to the Reign of Terror when the prophetic hopes are dashed to the eventual return to normal in the Thermidorean Reaction.

But Gary Saul Morson in The New Criterion argues that Lenin didn't go through this process. He believed in terror from the outset.

An admirer of the French Jacobins, Lenin believed that state power had to be based on sheer terror, and so he also created the terrorist state.

In other words, Lenin didn't wait to get disappointed that his revolution wasn't turning out the way he hoped. He went for out-and-out force from the outset. Unlike the Nazis, for instance.

Under the Third Reich, an ethnic German loyal to the regime did not have to fear arrest, but Lenin pioneered and Stalin greatly expanded a policy in which arrests were entirely arbitrary: that is true terror. By the time of the Great Terror of 1936–38, millions of entirely innocent people were arrested, often by quota. Literally no one was safe.

But guess what. When people are terrorized by arbitrary arrest then they are going to bunker down and do nothing with their lives. As the Soviet joke went: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

Hey, at least our woke lefties today only cancel people when they have foolishly shown their heads above the parapet. But Lenin arrested people on principle. So,

as far back as 1906 Lenin had defined dictatorship as “nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.”

Now I think that one of the central contributions of Jordan B. Peterson is his story of the lobster, that male lobsters are programmed not to fight every time there is a question of hierarchy. In other words, even way down the evolutionary hierarchy we see this primitive species adopting a behavior that limits the use of force. And this notion applies throughout the animal kingdom. Animal interactions are designed to minimize the use of force.

But Lenin decided to turn that upside down.

Now I believe that the salient point of the last 200 years, the Great Enrichment, is the discovery of a new reason to limit and reduce the use of force. The market economy is built upon the simple notion that you trust people that act trustworthy and you maintain those trust relationships by making those relationships as permanent as you can.

This is why I call the left the Great Reaction. Because the left is a return to force; it says that to get to the perfect society of peace and justice we need more force, to hammer humans into shape, as though we were a block of marble. And then that perfect human marble statue will stand for a thousand years.

Sorry lefties, but you are wrong, dead wrong, for a simple reason. Every day, every moment, the world changes, and so we humans have to adapt to that change. The change could be anything: a change in women's shopping tastes; a change in the weather; a technological invention. Every single change in the world ripples through the economy, courtesy of price discovery, and it changes the world forever.

The whole philosophy of the left is that heroic intellectuals, revolutiinaries, or activists can imagine a perfect world and then implement it using politics. But they are wrong, dead wrong, as wrong as wrong can be. In the real world, things are changing all the time and we humans have to adapt. In the real world we construct hierarchies and relationships that are mutually beneficial and reduce or eliminate the need for force.

Do you see how the Leninist philosophy is worse than a crime, it's a blunder? Lenin is saying: forget about the lobsters; forget about the human extension of lobster hierarchy into community and into the mutual advantages of market relationships. Lenin says that force is the answer.

Force? To force people into executing the ruler's plan? But suppose some guy, some nobody, has a better plan. How would we know? How would that guy, that nobody, get to the Vlad the Ruler and say: Hey Vlad, your idea stinks. Here's a better idea. Yeah, like that's going to go down well, because the way politics works, the leader that changes his plan shows weakness and the whole point of leadership in politics is to demonstrate strength.

Do you see the issue here? The point about political leadership is to lead the people in an existential struggle against some enemy. For that you need leadership, strength, courage, marching towards the sound of the guns, willingness to die defending your homeland. And the cost of that is fearful, in blood and treasure and young men dead before their time.

But everyday life is not like the Spartans defending the pass at Thermopylae. It is people working with other people, people doing things for other people, people living in natural hierarchies and going with the flow unless there is some big reason not to.

And yet our lefties say the answer is force.

Well, I would have thought that Lenin would have settled the issue for us. Economists talk a lot about the difficulty of testing economic theories, because of the moral problem of testing the ideas out on human guinea pigs. But Lenin did the whole thing for us. He applied maximum force and arrested and tortured and killed and put people into slave labor camps. And then Stalin went one better on him. We still don't really know the bottom line of the full butcher's bill and hunger bill and just general impoverishment. Because the Soviets didn't publish properly audited accounts the way that corporations have to do. But we know that Lenin's plan was the biggest disaster in modern history -- after the double disasters of Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

I mean: our lefties are proposing Lenin-lite: that's what AOC's Green New Deal and Just Society are all about. And the lefty cancel culture is Mao-lite; it's a cultural revolution complete with naming and shaming. Just not actual executions and sending people to the collective farms to teach them a lesson.

And as I say, it's worse that a crime -- which it is. It's a blunder. We know, from the experience of the Great Enrichment, that the market economy and limited government are the ways to go, the way to fill the lives of ordinary people with unimaginable riches. Force is not the answer, not in the economy, not in the culture.

Tell that to a lefty.

Not Quite Getting It on Progressive Ideology

Here's National Review's take on Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-MA) "limitless ideology." According to Greg Weiner liberalism of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan variety or conservatism "allows its adherents to ask how much good government can feasibly do." But today's progressivism sees no limits; "progress is like wisdom and beauty: More is always better than less."

So does the internal logic of progress reject limits, when progress is employed as a system of political thought or a principle of political action. It cannot respect dissent because progress is an inherent good, not a matter of dispute. For this reason, Warren describes advocates of progress as enlightened while she characterizes its opponents as categorically retrograde or corrupt.

See how limiting this is? It falls short of getting to the heart of the matter, describing today's progressivism as a religion, as a religion that believes that progressive government is the way to make a better society, and it believes that only through government directing the allocation of resources and activists defining good and evil can we bend the arc of history towards justice. And a government religion for a nation that has outlawed an "establishment of religion."

And, of course, this religious doctrine just happens to align perfectly with the natural tendency of rulers which has been, since time immemorial, to advertise for supporters by promising loot and plunder. In other words progressivism makes loot and plunder into a religion: that it is the essence of the just society to plunder bad people for the benefit of good people. I was to the site of the Battle of Marathon, and a nearby memorial advertised how it was financed "from the 1/10 of the Persian booty from the Marathon battle." It seems it was the regular thing to give 10% of your loot and plunder to the gods. So the notion of "tithing," donating 10% percent of your income to the church, is not as recent as we might think.

My point is that complaining of the ideology of limitless progress that amps up government loot and plunder every time you get a chance is not going to get the job done. It needs to be opposed by another religious doctrine, that the doctrine of limitless progress, increasing the size of every government program every half generation, is wrong, logically, epistemologically, scientifically, and morally. Period, full stop, and everyone that proposes bigger government is evil.

Back in the day the Founders fashioned a government of limited and separate powers. They deliberately created notions like the Electoral College and the Bill of Rights as advertisements against unlimited government. On their system it was wrong to propose to meddle with the power limitation provisions of the Constitution because the whole point of the Constitution was that it was a Good Thing to limit government powers and whoever has their hands of the levers of power at any moment. It worked while the overwhelming majority of Americans were God-fearing Christians. It worked partly because each Christian sect was suspicious of the other sects and did not want another sect to get an inside track on "legislating morality."

The problem with the modern secular religion -- socialism in its different versions from communism to progressivism -- is that it does not recognize itself as a religion. It merely experiences itself as progressive activists bending the arc of history towards justice. And in this religion you are either an activist bending the arc of history towards justice or you are a racist sexist homophobe toxic masculine white nationalist that ought to have been cancelled last week. The word for this in theology is "manichaean."

So I think it is bootless to speak of Elizabeth Warren's "limitless ideology." That does not get the job done. We should speak instead of her extreme and bigoted religion that sanctifies loot and plunder. We should condemn the Tiwtter mobs as the New Inquisition. We should demand the end of diversity administrators at universities as violating the Constitution's prohibition of an establishment of religion. And so on.

I'm not sure what the language should be to do this. That is up to the wordsmiths to develop. The point is that when you combine religion and government you get totalitarianism and religious wars and, as they delicately say in India, "communal violence," meaning Hindu and Muslim mobs killing each other.

In a way, I think we righty racist sexist homophobes have the inside track, because the wokians do not understand, literally do not get, that what they are doing is religion. They think they are modern and progressive and enlightened and educated and on the right side of history. They think they are the good guys advocating for peace and justice. But, to coin a phrase, they "literally know nothing."

I mean, look at AOC. First she comes out with her Green New Deal, an absolutely stupid administrative scheme to upend the whole economy. Anyone with half a brain knows it would starve half the world. And this week she has come with "A Just Society." Now, I'm sure that AOC herself has not put these ideas together. Some lefty brain trust has been doing the heavy lifting. But Egad! This stuff was rubbish 50 years ago! What kind of idiot is still marinating in this stuff! Whatabout the science! Whatabout the 100 million dead! Whatabout the failure of socialism from the Soviets to Venezuela! These people are idiots! This should not be that hard! The fact is that deputizing the government to do anything other than fight a war is a losing proposition!

All this stuff is religious doctrine. Green New Deal: if we don't act now we are all going to Hell! A Just Society: our guys are good and you guys are evil. But never mind the injustice it creates according to my maxim "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." For those of you that only got your education in government school, my maxim means that anyone embarking on a program to create A Just Society is almost certainly creating injustice by the bucket-load.

Hey! How about that! Socialism is the religion that sanctifies loot and plunder as moral obligations -- if executed by approved activists upon economic criminals.

Warren Understands that Politics is Loot and Plunder

Rightly or wrongly, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) understands that elections are not about religious questions like abortion and gun control and climate change. Government is about loot and plunder. You promise your supporters goodies in return for their vote.

So she is promising Social Security recipients $200 per month extra on their monthly checks. To be paid for by people earning over $250,000 a year with a 14.8 percent tax on wages exceeding $250,000 a year and a 14.8 percent tax on investment earnings over $250,000 ($400,000 on families) per year.

Really, what's not to like? The top 10% of federal income taxpayers already pony up a little less than 40% of the income tax take. Go where the money is.

I suppose it is useless for a guy like me to point out that untaxed income of the rich is a "live" resource that will be used by the rich to create jobs from anything from the wages of startup company employees to the wages of yacht-builder and mansion-builder employees. Whereas once resources are seized by the government in taxes they are dead as dead can be, paid out to people who are not taking the money in exchange for services rendered but just as loot.

The "science" is pretty clear on this, from the classical economics of Adam Smith to the marginal economics of 1870, even to the Keynesian economics of post World War I. The less the government gets its cotton-pickin' hands on the earnings obtained by people in voluntary economic activity the better.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has to know this. Even though her law degree comes not from Harvard or Yale but from Rutgers Law School, she is bound to know Economics 101. But Economics 101 does not get you elected President of the United States, and for some reason the same people that blather on about "settled science" when it comes to climate change are notably silent when it comes to settled economic science, about the human knowledge that explains the unprecedented Great Enrichment of the last 200 years.

Imagine a better world. Imagine a world in which an impressionable teenager like Greta Thunberg was lecturing the United Nations about the iniquity of taxing young workers and taking economic growth away from their futures in order to pay the pensions of older workers. Why, if government teachers spent five minutes teaching economics in government schools instead of climate change orthodoxy who knows what impressionable kids would think? Look, this is not that hard; conomics is not rocket science. Why, I dare say you could design a computer game to show children how economics works.

But here is the point. Just as nobody thought about gravitation until Newton, nobody thought about supply and demand until Smith. But, boy, what a difference it made. So our educated class knows all about the science of the modern era. But it would prefer not to, not when it is going back to the future on its Great Reaction, not when it conflicts with its power project.

Of course in a better world the voters would understand that when Sen. Warren offers them loot and plunder she is really bribing them with their own money. And, of course, if you are not in with the in-crowd you get to stand in line to get your share, and, if money is being handed out as loot it is not going to grow the economy so that the next generation can be better off that we are.

In a better world humans would not be tempted by loot and plunder, but I am not holding my breath. Obviously loot and plunder is one of the ways that humans have survived over the millennia. It has been a successful adaptation, at least up until now. 

Now I think that the age of loot and plunder is over, because humans don't get into a cornered-rat situation too much any more where it pays to loot and steal when you are starving in the hope that it will get you over the hump.

But we are still programmed to go for loot and plunder, and politicians know it. A politician like Sen. Warren started out her professional life with a lie, that she had native American blood, and so would be the first diverse law professor at Harvard. So what's another lie to her? Where's the downside for her in conning the peasants into voting for a little loot and plunder?

Meanwhile let us all look with disdain upon the educated ruling class, of which Sen. Warren is a perfect exemplar. They tell us they are all for justice, for fairness, for science, for saving the world. But really they are just like any ruling class since the dawn of time. They are into power, they want power, and will do whatever it takes to obtain that power and keep it.

Until.

Until the land fails to yield its bounty, because the productive and the creative have been stripped of their seed corn, because of the looting and the plunder of the ruling class and its supporters.

And the whole cycle begins again. With new rulers.

Understanding Postmodernism and Science

Here's a piece from Quillette about postmodernism and science by Maximilian Werner, who suffered under postmodern profs back in the day. Says he:

Although, in principle, challenges to the mainstream tradition are much needed, they reveal a bias toward culture as a vehicle for determining truth:

Well, yes. That's how the world works. That's what liberals are doing by challenging the mainstream tradition. And the whole point of lefty-liberals is to be the hegemon in charge of culture and be the guy that determines truth for you and me.

Competing narratives attempt to revise the dominant narrative according to their own particular ideological, racial, ethnic, or cultural experience. The voicing of these perspectives is, of course, long overdue, and because of it we have begun to appreciate the uniqueness and complexity of human experience.

Diversity, jolly good show, and all that.

But as the work of Foucault and other social constructionists shows, if truth is subjective, and one truth is as plausible as another, as long as there is a dominant group, particular subjective truths will prevail.

Exactly. Which is what liberals are doing with their "cancel culture" that deplatforms and gets people fired for disagreeing with the liberal narrative. In fact, I would say that the dominant culture under liberal postmodernism, that liberals tell us is diverse, is the opposite. It demands a suffocating uniformity. It does not allow competing narratives to challenge the dominant narrative, which is the lefty-liberal postmodernist narrative. It uses the supposed diversity of "racial, ethnic or cultural experience" as a Trojan horse to occupy and demolish the cultural space of the supposed "dominant narrative."

But the postmodern idea that there is “no underlying meaning” in the world apart from what people may produce is nonsense.

Right. Ish. The point is that we do not know if there is an underlying meaning, but we all assert some sort of underlying meaning based on the implications of our own narrative. The only thing is that the dominant group -- lefty white liberals -- gets to impose its dominant subjectivity, other groups licensed by lefty white liberals are only allowed to advertise their narrative providing it conforms with lefty white narrative, and don't you forget it, peasant.

That a certain perspective is exclusive and hinders access to other ideas is a comment on the limitations of the perspective, not on the degree to which truth can be known and shared.

Sure. Except that no "truth can be known and shared." All truths are asserted. The question is: does the dominant group allow other narratives any cultural space or does it marginalize and cancel anything that dissents from the dominant group narrative? Oh, and does the asserted truth work? But everyone disagrees about what works, up until it is too late.

And yet Foucault’s oversight persists, as evidenced by the popularity of writing texts that privilege subjectivity over objectivity; lived experience over scientific fact; difference over similarity; orthodoxy over exploration.

Sorry, there is no "scientific fact." There is only lived experience and faith. Here is how faith works in respect of science. You have faith in the equations of quantum mechanics, and all the lived experience of semiconductor technologists, and so when you next apply Moore's Law and design the next generation of chips you have faith in your scientific theory and the lived experience of your technology. And so the beat goes on. But most likely, in getting to your next generation of chips you find that you made a lot of mistakes, and that some of your science about semiconductor technology, in which you had faith, turned out to be less than factful.

The whole fuss about climate change illustrates this approach. There are a bunch of scientists that say that with current trends in greenhouse gases they have a scientific theory that proposes runaway atmospheric warning. They have developed computer models that they say model the atmosphere usng their theories sufficiently to show significant warming over the next few decades. Activists take those results and declare that unless we act now we will see the end of the world in 12, or 50 years. Yes, but will the warming actually take place? Will it significantly change the climate as in moving agricultural zones and in causing species extinctions? The truth is that there are no scientific facts. that can tell us whether there is a problem. All we have riht now are prophesies. Almost certainly, whatever happens, the scientists will discover that they have made a lot of mistakes. If they are lucky the mistakes will cancel out.

From the postmodern perspective there is an dominant mainstream narrative supported by high government officials, government-funded scientists, and left-wing activists. According to Foucault, then, "if truth is subjective, and one truth is as plausible as another, as long as there is a dominant group, particular subjective truths will prevail." Which is exactly what is happening.

But are liberals up in arms about the dominant group naming and shaming the dissident groups as "denialists" and demanding a diverse approach to climiate science? Of course not. Because lefty-liberals use postmodernism only as a club with which to beat their political opponents. In other words, for liberals and lefties postmodernism is for use in attacking their political opponents. But when they are anxious to maintain their own idea as a dominant narrative then forget about subjectivity. Climate change is settled science -- scientific fact -- and anyone that disagrees is a science denier that rejects scientific objectivity.

What these blind lefties do not understand, because they do not want to, is that nothing is really settled, everything in science or politics or culture is faced with serious questions that have no easy and agreed-upon answers. This means that orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of educated liberals, must not snuff out exploration by others.

The point is that a successful society operates at a delicate balance point between subjectivity and objectivity and orthodoxy over exploration. Societies like Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were notable for not allowing any dissent from ruling-class orthodoxy and the result was not good. Our present era of lefty white postmodernism is an echo of those regimes. But what matters is, does the subjective narrative deliver the goods?

Or as Shakespeare put it:

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. 

Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?

And suppose, after the summoning, that Owen Glendower says that the spirits have come and Harry Hotspur says that they have not?

The truth is that if you are an open-minded person you are perfectly willing to allow a diversity of opinion and allow orthodoxy to mix it up with exploration. So if you are an open-minded person you are really a postmodernist.

But the supposed postmodernists are closed-minded people that are only interested in postmodernism when it can be used as a club to smash dead-white-male-toxic-patriarchy. Otherwise their truth is scientific fact and you better not take a step out of line.