Leading Under Combat Conditions

Scott Johnson blogs at Powerline and he's been one of the guys pulling apart the Rep. Omar (D-MN) shenanigans. Which the Minneapolis home town paper, the Star Tribune, has not. Hey Strib guys, what's yer problem?

But Scott got a call from President Trump's people to attend last night's presidential rally in Minneapolis, and got to meet the president.

My wife told the president she doesn’t understand how he can do what he is doing while under nonstop assault. “I don’t either,” he said. It was both self-deprecating and funny.

Of course, it is this quality of the president to "keep his head," as memorialized by Rudyard Kipling in "If--" that makes him a leader.

If you can keep your head when all about you 
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, 
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too; 
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

It is, of course, in particular, a male quality, this question of courage under fire. The opposite is a squib about millennials and Generation Z, about half of whom have quit a job over "mental health" issues.

But really, the only thing men are good for is to have courage under fire. And even the best of us have their limit. It is said, for instance that a man cannot endure more than 100 days in combat. He goes through three stages: thinking "it won't happen to me," then thinking "it's bound to happen to me," and finally "why hasn't it happened to me?" After 100 days, the combat soldier goes mad -- battle fatigue, shell shock, mental health issues, PTSD.

This is related to honor among men, which is the reputation for standing in line with your brothers in battle.

There is a vignette in the first of Solzhenitzin's First World War novels of a Russian general utterly confused and paralyzed by the hurricane of battle reports coming in. But the essence of generalship is to keep your head in the chaos and thunder of battle.

We saw that problem in the US Civil War when the vacillating Gen. McClelland was replaced by Gen. Grant. President Lincoln said of Grant in response to critics: "I can't spare this man, he fights!"

Herman Wouk's novel The Caine Mutiny is precisely about leaders failing to "keep their head" as ship captains when the bullets are flying, or the ship is on its beam ends in the middle of a typhoon.

It is a quality that I do not claim to have. That is one reason that I have not attempted to beome a leader of men.

It is the big question relating to women CEOs and presidents. When I was a glider pilot, I read about the problem with training women pilots. If ever a woman pilot gets frightened, she's done with flying. A man will go out next day and do it again.

This is not shameful; it is obvious. Women are genetically programmed to keep out of danger and keep the children alive. Men are programmed to get out on the front line and protect the women and children from harm.

So why, you ask, was Margaret Thatcher such a fearless politician and leader? I can only say that she was an outlier, fearless and determined enough to plug away for ten years trying to get elected to Parliament, and then dealing with what we now call the "toxic male" culture in the House of Commons when she became a minister. I think that she taught herself to become a man.

But, scientists say, when women reach 30 percent of any community, they transform it into a woman-friendly culture. That is what all the stuff about "microaggressions" and "safe spaces" in college is about. It is about women administrators creating and enforcing a woman-friendly culture to replace the male confrontation culture. I suspect that this will cause problems down the road.

Trouble is that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. If they don't then, as Bugs Bunny says, it's "curtains."

Among all the problems that leftism has created for the world over the last century -- the millions of dead, the slave regimes, the cultural brutalities of left-wing hegemony -- the problem of women in the public square is just one.

Because there will always be a need for leaders with the inexahustible courage of President Trump. And yet, not always. Because if every president were a Trump, lord knows what sort of trouble they would get us into.

But then, the GOP voters would not have nominated Donald Trump unless we felt that we needed a leader to go mano-a-mano with the left after the leftward shift encouraged by President Obama. Back in the day we nominated "happy warrior" Reagan, and kinder, gentler Bushes, and the worthy Romney to be our leaders. By 2016 we had decided that it wasn't working. We needed a Grant, not a McClelland. So we nominated our Grant and he fought for us, and he won.

So now President Trump is touring the land speaking to his supporters at venues like the 20,000 seat Target Center in Minneapolis. He is obviously working to raise enthusiasm for his leadership as King Henry V once did with his "Once more unto the breach" speech imagined by Shakespeare.

We will see if this is the leadership that the American people want next November.

Suppose Lefty Activists are Just Faking It, Like Actors

The whole thing about the left is the notion that they are brave revolutionaries, taking it to The Man. Only, of course, in the present age, lefty activists are not revolutionaries, but just the stooges of the ruling class taking to the streets under the beneficent eye of their seniors.

Activism is a form of acting. As in plays and movies. I feel much better after writing that.

This came to me through a happy coincidence this morning. First I was reading an oped by Victor Davis Hanson noting how, in the old days, Americans could build a transcontinental railroad in six years. Now, the State of California can't even do a high-speed railroad from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Yes, yes, I know. Why would anyone with half a brain build a high-speed passenger railroad from SF to LA when you can take a plane from any one of four or five airports in the Bay Area to any one of four or five airports in Southern California? I dare say that a 737 cruising at Mach 0.8 at 30,000 feet uses less energy than a train doing 150 mph at sea level.

We look back at a heroic age like the ancent Mycenaean Greeks -- I was at Mycenae a couple weeks ago -- and

We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.

 Wouldn't you know, I went off to the gym and found myself reading Section 356, "How things will become ever more "artistic" in Europe" in The Gay Science by Nietzsche, and he is talking about the same thing.

In the old days, men used to identify themselves with their role in life, their "so-called occupation," and "men believed with rigid confidence, even with piety, in their predestination for precisely this occupation... this way of earning a living." They refused to admit the "element of accident, role, and caprice."

But then, Nietzsche says, there are opposite ages with a certain "cocky faith."

The individual becomes convinced that he can do just about everything and can manage almost any role... and all nature ceases and becomes art. 

This, he says, is what the Greeks achieved, starting with the Periclean age, and thus, step by step, "They really became actors."

[W]e modern men are even now pretty far along on the same road; and when a human being begins to discover how he is playing a role and how he can become an actor, he becomes an actor.

But when you reduce life to play-acting you end up enacting life on a stage -- as if it were real life. This is the way to understand our lefty activists, from AntiFa to Extinction Rebellion. AntiFa is acting out the idea of a street mob. But it is all just a show. Extinction Rebellion is going through the motions of a revolution to force the powers-that-be to get serious about climate change. But really, it is all theater.

And this is the way to understand the whole theater of the left's activism, in particular what Victor Davis Hanson is complaining about, that we can't get anything done in America because the activists block everything with their rebellion theater.

That's what Macbeth proposed as his political plans turn to dust:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more:

If you are merely an actor, your actions mean nothing; they are merely a shadow of real life. And I suppose that is the fate of all that inherit the past, as the later monarchs in a dynasty, as politicians in a functioning democracy. You are play-acting, enacting political theater to keep the plebs from seeing the man behind the curtain.

Our lefty activists that play the game of revolution do not really want revolution. They just want to play-act at it, pretending that they are fearless revolutionaries risking everything for peace and justice. Not really. They are just play-acting at revolution, under the kindly eye of the ruling class, and jolly good fun it is.

But this fake revolution doesn't really play to the ordinary middle class that doesn't experience itself as acting a role, but just obeying the law, going to work, following the rules in order to support a family and raise some children. The deplorables don't really get the game the activists are playing.

And neither do the activists. They have been taught by their teachers that they are changing the world with their activism. But they have been lied to. Whatever you get taught in a government school or a government university it is not how to overthrow the existing order.

Government schools and government universities are not in the business of overthrowing the government. Surely that ought to be obvious.

But as for me, I feel liberated after reading Hanson and Fritzi this morning. And writing about it.

But am I an actor, merely playing a role like the lefty activists? Good question.

Policy Failures? So That's the Liberal Word for Total Screwup

Well, well. It looks like the liberals are getting worried. The New York Times has put out a piece on "The Middle Class Crunch," and Eric Levitz -- he's a New York magazine chappie -- has chimed in with a piece that says that

I’ve come to think that the decline of America’s middle class can be attributed to three distinct (though related) policy failures. Namely, the failures to sustain American labor’s bargaining power; to contain rent-seeking in the housing, health-care, and higher education sectors; and to update (and expand) the social welfare state for the 21st-century economy.

Notice the basic assumption with the notion of "policy failure." That means that we educated elitists need to rejigger our administrative state a bit. More resources needed for policy analysis, for a start, old chap. Maybe a bit more activism!

But let's go through his argument.

Labor's Bargaining Power The problem, apparently, is Reagan's PATCO strike-breaking and "monetary policy that continued to prioritize low inflation over full employment".  Hmm. I'd say that the biggie is the 1965 Immigration Act that increased immigration and therefore labor competition in the US. Plus, of course, the competition from industrializing countries from Japan to China. Oh, and don't forget the competition from "undocumented workers." Plus, of course, more women in the workforce.

Costs of Huusing, Health Care, Education Housing? "Restrictive zoning" is the problem that has allowed existing property owners to "extract a rising share of middle-class workers’ earnings." Well, yes. And who is responsible for that? Liberal activists who are the chaps behind the restrictive zoning and environmental game, not to mention oppressive regulation by administrative deep staters. Health care? Our premiums, says Levitz, are buying insurance company bureaucracies, Big Pharma profits, and "American doctors’ extraordinary salaries." Well, yes. And who is resonsible for that? The insurance scam is an unintended consequence of Ted Kennedy's push for "health maintenance organizations" and 3rd party payment systems back in the 1970s. Then there is political system's regulatory failure with medical education and licensing: of course it led to high prices. And Big Pharma profits? Well, I dare say that if the FDA weren't so scared of another Thalidomide scare that we could all happily become human guinea-pigs for all kinds of experimental drugs -- just like the AIDS activists managed to do for experimental AIDS drugs back in the day. Funny, isn't it, how liberal activists manage to make the system work when their needs are involved.

The problem is not "the costs of our government’s refusal to confront the health-care lobby." The problem is that every "policy failure" is a natural result of the way that liberals want to supervise and regulate everything. If we swept away all the regulations and cartelization and licensing and 3rd party payments, you'd be amazed what would happen.

And as for education. Liberals run that ship from stem to stern. If there is anything wrong with it -- anything at all -- it is because of liberals and their mania to reduce everything to a government program supervised by them. The problem is that once you reduce education to a government program you turn it into a loot-and-plunder operation rather than a social-cooperation operation.

Social Welfare Institutions Outdated The New Deal bargain, apparently, was that corporations would provide the equivalent of government social benefits, and a "family wage" would let mothers stay home. But corporations have gutted their benefits and replaced them with 401(k) contributions.

Corporations first. Sorry pal, my info is that corporate defined benefit pensions were and are unaffordable, because they put an impossible risk upon corporations planning for 30 years into the future.

And then there is women in the workforce. Liberal Levitz has to do quite a dance on that. On the one hand,

through political mobilization, women have secured greater autonomy and freedom in their economic lives, and have therefore drastically increased their participation in the workforce. But as the Times’ report suggests, this jump in women’s working hours wasn’t driven solely by female empowerment; the necessity of compensating for male wage stagnation or decline was also ostensibly a factor[.]

There's a cart and horse problem here. Was increased female labor force participation the cause of male wage stagnation or did women go into the workforce because of male wage stagnation? Good question. I think the policy analysts should go to work on that.

But certainly one of the problems is the high cost of housing. It has gone up for a number of reasons, one of which being that girls like big houses. Another reason is that government subsidies for home mortages and encouragement of low down payments and 30-year repaymenet schedules means that more people can compete for the available houses. Oh, and liberal activists making it hard to develop new housing. Supply and demand darling. So, because every woman wants as big a house as Suzie down the street, women have to go out to work to pay for the big, overpriced houses that liberal activism has given us.

Of course, the problem is bigger than Levitz is willing to admit. And it starts with the fact that goverment programs are not, and never will be "social welfare." They are loot and plunder paid to voters in exchange for their votes, according to my maxim that

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants to reward their supporters.

If you want real "social welfare" it should be social, person to person, rather than politician to supporter. And the government with its loot-and-plunder mentality should be nowhere near it.

My Plan In my world income security would be provided by everyone contributing to their own wealth fund -- if you liberals want, contributions could be mandatory -- from which they could take monies when out of work, when starting a business, when sending the kids to college, and especiallt when retiring at age 60 -- as they do in Chile -- to give the young'uns a chance in the labor force.

In my world health care would be provided for the plebs by the healthcare equivalent of Walmart and its low prices always. Walmart?!? I can't believe he said that! Well, honey, you got a better idea? One of my favorite stories is from a cousin that had a kid in the 1930s. The baby was born using the lodge doctor at the local Masonic lodge (in an age when everyone belonged to the Masons or the Elks or something). Boy, said my cousin, what a deal! The lodge doctors were usually young guys just out of medical school. And they were cheap! Hey policy analysts! You payin' attention? Lodge doctors: you could look it up.

In my world education would be provided by the neighborhood women doing home-school together. Hey, 150 yeaars ago the average woiker was barely literate, but today everyone needs to be literate enough to use a smartphone (Yes, what do "studies say" about that?). For boys, they need to be literate enough to play video games; for girls they need to be literate enough to text and Instagram with all the other Mean Girls. I doubt if they can write essays and personal letters, but they sure know they need to be able to use smartphones.

Well, that's enough of that, for now. Back to regularly scheduled programming.

The trouble with the good old US and A, which is the best country in the world, is that our liberal educated class "literally knows nothing." And how could they, if they are educated in government schools and colleges and read The New York Times and watch CNN and MSNBC? They have built up a gigantic administrative state that takes about 35% GDP in taxes and who knows more in regulatory costs, and are shocked, shocked, that everything seems to be collapsing in ruins. How could this happen with all the best people advocating to bend the arc of history towards justice?

Hey, I got news for you, Mr. Writer Eric Levitz. Little bit of settled science, from the Maxims of Christopher Chantrill:

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). Regulation does not work because "regulatory capture" (Stigler). Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

Do you understand, Eric, that the "policy failures" that you are complaining about are completely comprehended and understood by these four items of Settled Science?

If not, then you are certainly one of the corps of people identified by Ben Rhodes as people who "literally know nothing."

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.