Men Demoralized: What Does It Mean?

OK. Yesterday we determined that the reason that women complain that they are "stressed" is because our modern culture denies them the life of learning, caring, and teaching. Which is what comes naturally to women.

But whatabout men? Men, they say, are demoralized these days. Why is that? Well, the answer is obvious. It is because men are creators, fighters, and destroyers. And life in the modern admistrative state, in schools, in government or in corporations, denies men that kind of life. The schools deny boys that kind of life. The left denies men that kind of life, except when conducting fake revolution through activism.

Yeah, that's interesting. Men are to be odedient serfs, but activists in their peaceful protests are allowed and encouraged to cause chaos and destruction, as approved by the ruling class. They get to be real men.

So women like beauty, and romantic comedies, while men like chaos, and superhero movies.

So what is to be done? Hey I know! Let's dismantle the welfare state!

For women, the welfare state reduces their opportunities to care, for parents and children, as it encourages women to dump their parents on government healthcare and assistance and forces them to dump their children in government schools. It institutionalizes their instinct to teach by funneling all schooling through government and thereby killing it. It does, of course, encourage learning, but only lefty-approved learning, which would turn any sensible person off learning forever.

For men, the welfare state forces them into government schools where they are forced to sit still and learn from women that don't understand boys. It discourages the natural play of boys, which is simulated warfare. And it channels them into conformist wage jobs of stultifying boredom.

But what terrifies me is the realization that my reductive Three People theory applies only to men. People of the Creative Self are men totally devoted to creativity, fighting, and destruction. People of the Responsible Self are men willing to encounter creativity, fighting, and destruction in limited, rule-bounded situations. And People of the Subordinate Self are men that would rather not outdare the dangers of the time at all, unless in the last extremity when they join the mob.

What about women? The truth is that women can only be women, and learn, care, and teach, in a structured and safe environment where all chaos and uncertainty have been removed. This makes sense, because the central business of a woman's life is the safe delivery of babies and keeping them alive, while caring for them and teaching them, until it is time for them to leave the nest. Perhaps that explains woman's love of beauty: the material expression of an harmonic life where everyone is learning and caring and teaching without the irruption of the chaos of creativity and destruction.

This is all very disconcerting, because if the Three Peoples theory does not apply to women then with what reductive Three Stages theory shall we understand women and how should we implement that in politics downstream from culture downstream from religion?

Maybe that points to the fundamental error of the modern era, the idea that men and women should live and work together in the public square and that they should be raised, educated, socialized in the same way.

Back in the day, in A Mariner of England by William Richardson, the author's dad decided that being around his mother was making him too soft so he sent him off to sea as a cabin boy.

But maybe if we are getting it all wrong that's why women all feel stressed and men all feel demoralized.

Women Stressed: What Does It Mean

I saw one of the usual pieces about women and stress yesterday.

The study, conducted by the Meredith Corporation and The Harris Poll, found that women across generations feel more stressed, tired, overwhelmed, anxious and burned out across every aspect of their lives than in the past — and significantly more so than their male counterparts.

Hmm. I always wonder about this. Because I think that the culture is teaching women to feel stress. When two women meet for Kaffee Klatsch they will probably try to outdo each other on the stress front.

In a way this is baloney, because, come on, girls. Could you be more stressed than the average woman of years gone by that lost half of her babies in the first year of life? Or that endured the "stress" of famine in a dry year?

But there is amother side to this. Talking about stress is a girl thing. No man should ever admit to stress. "Suck it in, baby." That's the guy approach to stress. Because the whole point of being a man is boldly to "outdare the dangers of the time." Of course, most men do not measure up to that, but we wish we did, and we honor the man that does. In other words, men honor the Sacrificial Hero.

But what about women?

I dug around in my Jung stuff, looking for the Great Mother. Not to mention the Terrible Mother. And I thought: this is all guy stuff. This is women as experienced by men. So, if women don't like stress, which is to say, danger, then What Do Women Want? Or Expect?

I realized that I really did not have a good handle on this. So, I went off on a bookstore run, in a bad frame of mind, looking for a Tolkien biography -- after watching the movie Tolkien on the plane -- and some Herman Wouk stuff.-- because of reading The Caine Mutiny. There, if you like, is an example of the guy thing. Never mind if the captain of your ship is a coward and a monster. You don't get to mutiny in order to save your miserable lives, guys.

Anyway, guess what happened. I stumbled into a 1984 book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education by Nel Noddings. I didn't buy it; I couldn't bear to. But it goes into great detail about the moral situation of the carer and the cared-for. Etc. Nel Noddings, 90, had 10 children, and became a math teacher before getting a PhD in Education. Yeah, that was back in the day, when girls went to college and majored in Math. Only later did they discover that they really wanted to become teachers.

The point is clear. OK, for guys, it's all about the descent into the unconscious to slay the monster therein and become a Sacrificial Hero.

But for women, it's about becoming a Carer and a Teacher. Period. This is so obvious that it is ridiculous. Watch a mother out in public with her children and what is she doing? She is caring for them, making sure they don't get into danger, and she is instructing them. Dear God how she is instructing them.

Another thing about women. They love to go to school and learn. Any excuse, and they are off to the local university to take a course.

Now the point is that Learning and Caring and Teaching is what comes naturally to women. And I suggest the reason that modern women are all dying of stress is that the feminists have insisted that women should be like men, and bravely outdare the dangers of the time and do anything men can do, such as become superheroes and fighter pilots.

But all the superhero and fighter pilot and CEO stuff is keeping women away from Learning and Caring and Teaching. So they feel miserable and stressed.

Back to guys. Being a Sacrificial Hero does not come naturally to men. We have to be carefully taught. Well, actually, we have to decide to slay the monster within, the rapey, piratical monster within, in order to rise to the occasion, which is to die heroically on the border between Order and Chaos so that others -- principally I imagine women and children -- may live. And need I say, we men really don't want to have to rise to the occasion. It's too hard. We don't like to go to school; that's why we have Shakespeare's schoolboy "creeping like a snail unwillingly to school." In order to make soldiers out of us they send us to boot camp, which is an exercise in humiliation.

But women are good little girls; they will dutifully Learn and Care and Instruct without being forced to because it is right there in their genes and in human culture from the dawn of time. And you are not allowed to humiliate them.

Feminists want women to be just like men only better. So women find themselves having to be superheroes and fighter pilots as well as Learners, Carers, and Teachers. And it is driving them mad. Or "stressed" as we say.

We can see women pushing back against this. In the "microaggression" thing; in "safe spaces." And of course in the whole sexual harassment thing. Women want to be safe. They expect to be safe and the reason is obvious. Women need to be safe in order to be Learners and Carers and Teachers.

Any questions?

The Democrats' Impeachment Fantasy

Really, this is 1972 all over again.

In 1964 the Democrats rolled over Republicans in a 60-40 election and then legislated Medicare/Medicaid and a host of welfare programs. They were shocked when Republican gained a bunch of seats in 1966, and poleaxed when Richard Nixon -- Richard Nixon! -- beat dear old Hubert Humphrey who had beaten the left's great white hope Gene McCarthy for the Democrat nomination.

Then Richard Nixon won a 60-40 election after four years of lefty demonstrations and anti-war politics. So Nixon had to be impeached.

In those days Republicans in Washington were good scouts and so when the Dems (using a disgruntled FBI official) dug up dirt on Nixon, the GOP warhorses in the Senate, including Barry Goldwater, drove down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House and told Nixon he had to go. So he did, without being impeached by the House and without being tried in the Senate. Because he was a good scout too.

Then, 24 years later, Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for lying and the Democrats drove down Pennsylvania Avenue and held a pro-Clinton rally at the White House. Clinton was tried in the Senate and acquitted, because no Democrats were going to vote for conviction.

Oh yeah. We deplorables remember that like it was yesterday. If GOP Senators ever vote for removal of a Republican president ever again on trumped up charges -- or semi trumped up charges, or demi-semi trumped up charges -- we will have their political hides.

Just to remind us about this every day, we deplorables elected a man called "Trump" to be president of the United States.

So. In 2016 Democrats nominated an old political warhorse after President Obama had encouraged the party leftward for eight years. Educated class Democrats were poleaxed, devastated that their unlikeable candidate lost in a normal change election. For it is really unusual for one party to win three presidential elections in a row. The last time was Bush One in 1988, and before that FDR in 1940 with World War II in the offin

When the Democrats lost their candidate Hillary Clinton did not concede and tell her supporters that we are all Americans and wait until next time. No, she was drunk on election night and encouraged her supporters to oppose Trump's win. Which partisan supporters are usually only too ready to do.

So now we are three years into a campaign to keep Democrat partisans bettle-ready at fever pitch with various fake issues, the latest one being from a disgruntled CIA mole -- sorry, "whistleblower" -- leaking a classified presidential conversation with a foreign leader to congressional Democrats.

I don't know about you, but I am fed up with this. I will crawl over broken glass to reelect President Trump and teach the lefty educated class -- that "literally knows nothing" about religion, philosophy, politics, economics, science, climate, you name it -- a well-earned lesson.

And I will keep doing it until the educated class learns the following Lessons.

1. The USA is the best country in the world.
2. The American People are the best people in the world.
3. When you lose an election you concede with a good grace.
4. Anyone that accuses someone of being a racist is a monster.

This is not that hard.

Lessons 1 and 2 are all about the simple fact that the most successful way of organizing people politically these days is the nation state. The fact is that politicians and intellectuals have done a good job of getting ordinary people to believe that they are part of a nation state. Let's not undo their achievement. The fact is that organizing people globally as "the human race΅ is not going to work until the Earth is under threat of invasion from aliens. That is how most of the nation states got started, by political leaders uniting a divided people to fight a foreign threat, and if you don't know that then you know literally nothing.

Back in the day H.L. Mencken wrote that "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

Today we should rather say that "Wokism is the theory that the educated people know literally nothing, and deserve to get it good and hard."

It must be that the educated class knows literally nothing. Otherwise they would understand the importance of Lesson 3, alternation in office, so that each party can get its turn in pulling the levers of political power. After a party has had two terms in office it doesn't matter if the out party steals the election, as the Democrats did in Texas and Illinois in 1960, you still concede the election as Richard Nixon did. Why? Because the important thing is not the clean election but the alternation in office.

Alternation in office keeps the crazies in each party on the sane side of craziness. If you don't know that then you know literally nothing. And if you start digging for conspiracy theories when the out party has won a normal change election after your guys have been in office for two terms then you know literally less than nothing. You really are a danger to shipping.

Then we come to Lesson 4, the racism question. The problem of racism used to be that people of certain races lived under legal discrimination; they were treated, under the law, as second-class citizens. In the United States that question was decided, finally, in the 1960s. Everything since then has been mere bagatelle.

It would be nice if more minorities were in powerful positions, but it is not a question of their legal civil rights. It is a nice-to-have. Just as it would be nice to have more conservative professors in the nation's universities, liberals.

But for liberals and lefties and Wokies to be acting as if racism, sexism, and homophobia were an existential peril in the US and A in 2019 is worse than literally knowing nothing. It is evil.

And if you don't understand that, that you literally know less than nothing.

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.