Of Course America is Materialistic. Also Nationalistic

Our good friend the Zman is indicting America for its materialism.

This is particularly true of conservative white people, who have been trained their whole lives to define their existence by the amount of stuff their heirs will throw away when they die. Theirs is an entirely materialist existence, so the transition to cultural thinking is going to be difficult.

The great challenge, he avers, "will be re-conditioning people to think culturally, rather than materially."

Well yes, but not because of conservative white people. Our white culture is bound around the notion expressed in the Founding that we want to put a short leash on government and political power through the separation of powers. And that the normal day-to-day acquisition of material goods should be regulated throught the market economy where people labor to provide goods and services to meet other peoples' needs and that the material problem is solved by mutual service.

This is a cultural agenda that works pretty well for people that feel materially secure. But what about the rest of us?

I'd say that the success of leftist politics over the last 200 years is founded on the fact that, for the workers in 1848, and the blacks in 1958, the material question was front and center. As it had been for nearly everybody down the ages.

And really, it doesn't take much of a genius to convert the age-old culture of loot and plunder from looting the neihboring princedom to looting the princes of commerce.

When the lefties have adapted the old loot-and-plunder culture for use in democratic politics, then that is only game in town, until it isn't. We have seen how the polite conservatism of the last 50 years worked out. It didn't. Lefties always come up with a new reason to loot the capitalists and plunder the middle class and divide the nation into Us and Them.

And even if the left left off proposing new ways to tax and loot businesses and billionaires there would always be the backup: protecting the existing loot and plunder in entitlements and government employee pensions and stuff: don't let Republicans take it all away!

The problem -- and it is a gigantic problem -- is not "re-conditioning people to think culturally." The problem is to "condition" the workers and the minorities to think in cultural terms rather than material terms for the first time in history. Now there is a project for the ages!

And what better way to do that than to work on what the Zman in another piece calls the false idea of America as one nation.

The United States was never a nation in the tradition[al] sense. It was always a federation of nations. The structure the Founders created was an explicit acknowledgement of it. The regional difference in the colonies at the time of the founding were not superficial. Those regional differences are still with us today, despite the migrant wave unleashed on many parts by the ruling class. America was always a house with many mansions. 

Therefore, to speak of national character, other than in the most general terms, is to misunderstand the country and its people.

Baloney and balderdash! For sure, the Founders understood that to create the United States they had to condone the various localisms in the various colonies. But that was then; this is now.

In my view all nationalisms and tribalisms are fake tribalisms; they are the cooked up idea that "we," whoever "we" are, are a single People. But nothing is cast in stone. People change, and if you play your cards right you can persuade people to switch from one fake tribalism to another. When are disaparate peoples most likely to be persuaded that they are one People? Exactly, when their leaders unite them to fight a war.

So let us accept the idea that the United States started out as a federation of nations. After the Civil War, it was two nations, North and South. But then in the later 19th century it split up again, particularly on class and ethnic lines. World War II, I argue, united the disparate quarreling parts into a single nation. But in the Sixties the New Left split us apart again.

Let us be clear. The left believes in salvation by politics. But politics is division, into Us and Them. So inevitably everything the left does results in division and splitting. And one thing that our lefty ruling class is always working on is the fundamental Original Sin of America in slavery and racism and now toxic masculinity. It is a world view of division, between innocent slaves and evil racists, between innocent women and monstrous men.

The idea of the Nation is to unite all the peoples in America into a single People. And that is what Donald Trump is trying to do, to make people think of themselves as Americans rather than hyphenated Americans.

The question is whether anyone can unite us from our squabbling tribes without uniting us into a new tribe to fight a war.

Downward Mobility for Graduates with Elite Values

One of my beliefs is that the purpose of universities is to indoctrinate the youngsters of the ruling class, to make sure that, when they rise to rule, they are all on the same page.

And then I go on to say that the Germans doubled down when they invented the research university during the Napoleonic Wars so as to strengthen the German state to meet and beat the French.

But what if there aren't enough jobs to go around for all the eager young elitists? That is the argument of a couple of pieces H/T'd at Instapundit.

The first, from Mary Harrington at UnHerd.com, points out how rough life is for recent graduates in the arts in England, and how the expansion of university education inculcated a whole generation into the culture of "openness," or

the values of equality, tolerance, openness, solidarity, internationalism, rationality and truth.

But there's a problem.

the boom in openness-promoting tertiary education produced not so much a boom in graduate jobs as inflation in the qualification levels required to do the jobs we already had. This has left many young people struggling to service a mountain of debt on salaries that are never likely to show much of the “graduate premium” they were promised.

Part of that "inflation in qualification levels" of course, has to be the entry of women into "careers." And when you talk about "the jobs we already had" you are talking about routine professional jobs in the professions that arts graduates compete for. So, the current culture of "woke" educated youth

expresses the class anxieties of the lower echelons of those supposedly elite “open” classes, provisionally accepted as such via their graduate status, whose access to the perks of the open culture is at best precarious but whose cultural identity depends on it.

The Volokh Conspiracy was talking about this back in 2011. I'd say that this means trouble ahead. Because disappointed would-be elitists have the skills to make political trouble. And our center-left ruling class has a soft spot for lefty activists, ever since it was detected by Midge Decter years ago in Liberal Parents, Radical Children.

And that is to say nothing of the rage of disappointed women, who have been taught by the feminists that they can have it all, etc. There are four lies that women are being told, writes Suzanne Venker, that 1) women don't need men, 2) men and women are the same; 3) ignore the biological clock; 4) career over marriage. And I have to say that disappointed women are a danger to shipping.

But hey, here's a tip from one of the commenters.

I had to give career advice to a younger male relative recently and one of my key tips was, "don't do anything women like to do." The reason for this is simple: if you are competing with women for the job, it doubles the competition, and halves the salary, all else equal. There's a good reason why the labor market today is full of jobs like cell tower maintenance or cable installer which are not particularly complex, yet offer phenomenal compensation: because women don't do them.

There's another version of this: the Rule of the Short Lines. Don't join the line that everyone else is joining. Or the Brit saying: "Where there's muck, there's brass." That is Brit Speak for "dirty jobs pay better."

The truth is that activism, politics, NGOs, non-profits, academia is a small world, and you have to have connections, and have a natural aptitude for networking. Otherwise, get a job.

And the fact is that the reality of our world is that there is a technological revolution about once a generation that opens up a whole new area of business and employment. And that means that the existing areas of employment stagnate and decline.

Put it this way. When all the well-connected kids are flocking into an industry -- today think tech -- it probably means that the industry is reaching its peak.

Go find something else. You'll be glad you did.

And for God's sake try to find something different to believe in than the elite's conventional wisdom.

Hey, maybe the support for socialism in our young generation makes sense. If they think that their future has been stolen from them, because student debt and barista jobs, why wouldn't they want to wreck it all with socialism?

The Big Problem with Politics in the Mature Welfare State

Whatabout those opinion polls that show President Trump behind the leading Democratic candidates? Is Trump in trouble? Dov Fischer, the American Spectator's  resident rabbi, points out the basic problem with such polls. it is this:

The Average American Is Painfully Ignorant, Strikingly Uninformed, and Hopelessly Clueless — Until a Matter Becomes Imminently Personal.

So, the average American is all for Medicare For All when presented by the CJC, the Corrupt Journalist Corps, until she starts to find out what it means to her.

Pollsters find that 70 percent of Americans prefer “Medicare for All” when initially surveyed. “Sure, let’s guarantee ‘free’ health care for everyone — even those here illegally. It’s only right.” Then, after pollsters follow by asking whether the surveyed person would be OK with losing his or her own private insurer option, support plummets to 37 percent. “What? You mean I can’t have my PPO and will have to lose my family doctor or my long-time pulmonary/coronary/neurological/gastroenterological specialist, and will need to go to some clinic where I get whoever they have on duty that day?” And then when apprised that single-payer government health care also will mean enduring substantially increased waiting times just to see a doctor and brutal scheduling delays to undergo an urgently needed surgery, the results suddenly crash to 26 percent. 

Notice the three levels here. First, the abstract unicorns and rainbows level: oh yeah, let's have healthcare for everyone. Second, the "they'd better not take away my doctor/insurance" level. Third, the "waiting in line" realization, what you might call the "imminently personal" stage of understanding.

OK, fine. But let's look at the bigger picture.

The fact is that democratic politics, like politics in any age, is all about what you can get in the world by force. All politics is about loot and plunder, as in my Maxim:

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

In hunter-gatherer bands, it's all about the dawn raid on the neighboring band, for loot, plunder, and women. In the agricultural era it's all about invading the neighboring country to loot them of their grain stores and their women. Or, in Hitler's version, it is conquering the East in order to establish the Germans with land to grow their own food supplies and its corresponding Lebensraum.

In our day, during the industrial era, it's "vote for me and I'll give you free stuff."

In the early days of the democratic era this was a real winner, because the state spent something like 10 percent of GDP on government programs and a lot of that was defence. So it was a no-brainer to sell the workers on social insurance and free education because the workers wouldn't appear to be paying for it.

But, as Irving Kristol pointed out half a century ago, there is a catch. If you are a lefty wanting to help the workers or women or blacks or undocumented immigrants, you pretty soon learn that your plan won't fly unless you deal in the middle class. And there is another catch. The wonderful program to help the workers and women and blacks will end up being skewed towards the agenda of the middle class. So free education, beloved by the workers in the 19th century, turned out to benefit mainly the middle class who were already paying for education for their children. Today, it is clear that education works best in middle-class suburbs where the middle-class mothers are running herd on the school system. Social Security benefits mainly the middle class. Ditto Medicare.

So, when you propose to meddle with Social Security, its middle-class beneficiaries immediately start wondering about the security of their pensions. When you propose to expand Medicare into Medicare For All, its middle-class beneficiaries immediately grasp that they are going to be getting worse health care.

So this really creates a problem for the politicians that have got elected in the last century by promising benefits to the workers and the traditionally marginalized. It worked well when the government was still devouring less than 10 percent of GDP. But when, as now, the government is spending north of 35 percent GDP, then the middle class is going to get the feeling that they are not going to benefit. They instinctively realize that any change in government entitlements is likely to hurt them.

So I would say that the loot-and-plunder operations of democratic politics has gone about as far as it can go. If you start looting and plundering beyond our current level at 35-40 percent GDP you are risking a meltdown like Argentina, or Venezuela.

So, in the current election cycle, our Democratic friends are proposing glorious new vistas of loot and plunder with Medicare For All and student loan forgiveness that sound really cool until you get beyond the unicorns and rainbows and start realizing how, at the imminently personal level, it's going to hurt the average middle-class voter.

Now there is another approach to this, that is exemplified by the Green New Deal. This is a quasi-religious program, to heal the world of its vile sludge and make it new again. It sounds wonderful in its unicorns and rainbows aspect, but when it comes to the nitty gritty, with gas prices in the stratosphere, paying for a complete do-over of the electrical generation and transmission system, etc., average people are going to find themselves paying big bucks -- for what?

And yet, it has to be, politics must operate on a basis of loot and plunder, as it has always done.

My question is: how do you do loot and plunder in the digital age? Clearly the loot-and-plunder of the industrial age as reached its limit. But what comes next?

I have to admit that I have no idea. 

Suppose Education is All a Scam?

A month or so I went to Stratford-on-Avon in Britland and visited the schoolroom where William Shakespare allegedly went to school.

The spiel of the guide was that, back in 1570 in Stratford at age 8, the average boy started work. Or he went to a school with 40-50 boys of all ages in one room with a single schoolmaster. And what they learned was Latin and Arithmetic by rote and recitation.

Oh No! Rote learning! But that made sense because there was only one schoolmaster and you had to pay big bucks for paper. Plus, if you had a problem you asked the older kid sitting on the next Form to help you.

But then I got to read Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt. Clearly the guide's spiel came from this book.

But Greenblatt added another wrinkle. Parents liked the idea of their kids not starting work and learning Latin because of the prestige. And the uselessness. Latin wasn't really going to give you any useful skills. But it sure proved that your parents could afford it.

So you tell me. How much of modern education is all about showing "I can afford it." I mean everything from kindergarten through grad school?

Because if we were purely trying to be practical, and save money, I reckon that the practical thing to do would be for the neighborhood women to get together and teach the kids the Three Rs: reading writing and arithmetic. And then the kids would become apprentices at some employer, that would be mandated by the ruling class to teach the kid a useful trade and extend their education, subject to the most frightful penalties for non-performance. And the employer would bear the cost of the training. Of course he would because he would be the beneficiary of the low wages paid to the apprentice and the skills evenutally acquired by the apprentice.

Hey, I think that kids should start work just about as soon as they have completed their Three Rs. Unless.

Unless your parents want to demonstrate their wealth and status and have you learn useless stuff like Latin and French and History and Music and Social Studies and Ruling Class Ideology.

I mean: that was the point of young ladies in Jane Austen novels becoming a "proficient" in the piano and in singing. They were "accomplishments" that a young lady was expected to have if she hoped to attract a husband. To say nothing of that all important dowry.

And, really, isn't that the point of sending today's Woke young activist feminists to college? Accomplisments? Maybe not. Maybe the point is the dowry, that upper-middle-class young men won't marry a woman unless she has a professional credential, worth at least $80k a year in salary. Or is the minimum level these days more like $120k?

See, I reckon that if you are the average white working-class people your goal is a job, a house, a family. But that is not enough for the upwardly bound. That is why the average selective college makes its applicants jump through all the ridiculous hoops writing essays about their experience in charitable work and basically starting their own charitable foundation and planting trees in the Himalayas. Accomplishments. Just like the young ladies of old.

Also, I suspect, it is necessary to gild the lily of the average boring jobs in the administrative bureaucracy of the ruling class -- academia, lawyering, foreign service, foundations, art -- and represent them as creative, caring, compassionate careers. Completely different from the average dead-end job of the average deplorable. Not.

And, of course, the whole point of the big-government administrative state is to provide meaning for the lives of ruling-class scions, so they have deplorable boobs to order aound and punish when they step out of line.

No really. Imagine an America without a big-government state. What would average dull scions of the nobility do then, poor things? No creative careers -- boring jobs -- for people of no particular talent. No opportunities for ordering the plebs around. It would be a very living hell. For dull scions of the ruling class.

I think the opposite is true. I think that nobody has a clue about educating children. I think that nobody has a clue about what teenagers and young adults should be doing. I think that nobody has a clue about how to organize work and career and blend it with the real work of humans, which is wiving and thriving.

But this is what I think. I think that the neighborhood women should get together and cooperate to allow the kids to learn the Three Rs. And I'll bet that the kids of literate parents would automatically learn the Three Rs without too much trouble or much educational expertise in their mothers. As for the children of the lower class, well I'd say that is the job of us, the educated class, to organize on our own without benefit of government monopoly.

I think that skills training should be done by private business, who are probably the folks most likely to know what skills we should be teaching the kids and what skills will be needed around the next corner. And let's put kids to work as soon as possible. And become Really Useful Citizens.

As for the folks wanting to display status, I'd say all power to them. Let them spend fortunes on getting their prestige kids into prestige schools to learn prestige things and accumulate prestige contacts. But hey, if there aren't prestige careers in the administrative state -- that afford the scions of the rulers plenteous opportunities to order the deplorables around and pat the ruling-class Little Darlings on the butt -- then these scions of the rulers will have to get a job and do something useful rather than something prestigious.

That would be an America worthy of the name, and worthy of the American people, and worthy of our beloved Founders.

Sebastian Junger: Why Doesn't He Talk about Hunter-Gatherer Loot and Plunder

Reading Sebastian Junger's book Tribe: Homecoming and Belonging you are treated to the pro-social wonders of hunter-gatherer culture. No beastly inequality and a culture that insists on sharing. As opposed to our dysfunctional rich with their billions and the poor with nothing and millions suffering in loneliness and depression.

But somehow Junger never gets around to discussing the ancient practice of loot and plunder among our noble ancestors. Warriors from our tribe looting and plundering the tribe next door.

Of course, back in the day, there was not much percentage in loot and plunder because the more mobile hunter-gatherers didn't have much to loot.

Oh, except for women. According to researchers, the Yanomamö tribe in the Amazonian jungle did a lot of raiding on each other, and the game was always the same as the Romans and their legendary Rape of the Sabine Women. The Yanomamö warriors were "looting" their neighbors to obatain their women.

In other words, our back-to-nature forefathers were, just like us moderns, intensely interested in the concept of loot and plunder. In Empire of Blue Water by Stephen Talty, about the real pirates of the Caribbean, it appears that the pirates never had an idea bigger than loot and plunder: "they had no faith, no law, no institutions that would hold them together beyond the next raid."

Gosh, I thought. That means they were a couple steps behind our modern lefties, who have built a saving faith and several states that lasted a decade or two on the institutionalizing of loot and plunder, because workers, or women or civil rights.

Actually loot and plunder can last you for a while. The Roman Empire was built on progressive conquest of an ever-larger empire, with each conquest bringing a surge of plunder and slaves to beautiful downtown Rome. This cunning strategy only ran out of steam in the 2nd century AD when the boundaries of empire were so far from Rome that... Well, I wonder what did happen? Did the Roman generals sit on the loot? Did it evaporate on the way back to Rome? Or were potential Roman generals from the senatorial classes no longer interested in the stress and challenge of military conquest in the far east or the far north? More research is needed.

But now! Let's face it, in a democratic society every election is really a market for loot and plunder. Vote for me and you will be richly rewarded. And Republicans play the game too with their tax cut plans.

But do you know? I have no idea how we can move our modern era beyond the modern replacement of actual loot and plunder of the good old days that featured armies paid in plunder with the new method of rewarding voters with free stuff.

I mean, the only issue right now that does not include free stuff for the masses is the Green New Deal. But I am confident that it will fade as soon as average voters get to understand that the trillions in Green New Deal spending and subsidies will go to the educated voters of the mandarin class, not to ordinary middle class voters and workers.

It is comical, really. We make a big song and dance about the glories of democracy and justice and the rule of law. But when it comes to actual elections it is really just an auction of loot and plunder livened up with a bit of three-card monte, or the fooling of the punters into thinking they are going to strike it rich.

Really, if the current administrative state is reaching its sell-by date because there is just not that much more loot that can be promised without crashing the economy, what comes after it?

Is it possible to have a politics without loot and plunder? Is it possible to get beyond my maxim that "government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters"?

Well, all I can say is that no genius has invented that politics yet. But we can certainly hope.

Sebastian Junger: 2008 Crash Was Because US De-tribalised

Back in the day, when we were tribes, writes Sebastian Junger in Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, we had a natural solution to bad behavior, such as "tribe members who steal more than their fair share of meat or other resources." It was "group pressure. Not only are bad actions punished, but good actions are rewarded."

But now we have rampant cheating, from Medicare/Medicaid fraud at "around $100 billion a year" to insurance fraud at "$100 billion and $300 billion a year[.]"

All told, combined public- and privtae-sector fraud costs every household probably around $5,000 per year -- or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job. A hunter-gatherer community that lost four months' would face a serious threat to its survival, and its retribution against the people who caused that hardship would be immediate and probably very violent.

And then there is the real-estate crash and banking bailout and Great Recession of 2006-08. These "illegal and unwise banking practices, cost American shareholders several trillion in stock losses and is thought to have set the American economy back by a decade and a half.

So the solution is to go back to the Stone Age and revive the pro-social face-to-face practices of the hunter-gatherers.

I don't think so, and the fact that a good little boy from elite Boston thinks this should be is, I think, one of the major items in the Bill of Indictment against our ruling class.

Because the whole basis of modern electoral politics is loot and plunder. Vote for me and I'll give you free stuff. (Hello Liz! How yer doin' gal?) If you look at our welfare state and the current financial system it is designed to be used as an instrument of power by the educated mandarin class, the people who have been to the right colleges -- Wesleyan in the case of Junger -- and got the right credentials and intoned the correct responses.

And, being as Sebastian Junger is a best-selling author he'd better toe the ruling-class line or forget his best-selling publishing deals and all the publicity that good little boys get from the fake media.

See, back in the day, Americans belonged to mutual-aid societies like the Masons and the Elks. These voluntary institutions run by their members provided a whole array of social services from employment referrals to job help when moving to a new town to "lodge doctor" medical plans to life insurance, death benefits, and looking after members' widows. They were incredibly pro-social and enacted the "group pressure" on defaulters that Junger praises in the hunter-gatherers.

But then the Progressives came along and replaced the mutual-aid system with government pensions and welfare. And I'll bet you that college-educated Sebastian Junger doesn't have a clue about the old system that florished in the 19th century and to which "everyone" belonged.

Instead what we now have is a full-scale loot and plunder operation that we call the welfare state. Scamming the system is the point, as you can see from the behavior of, e.g., the government employee unions in California.

Oh, and about the real-estate crash. That was a direct result of government policy that forced banks to loan to borrowers with small-to-none down payments and bad credit. Because redlining back in the day.

Anyone that knows anything has read Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street written after the failure of a bank on Lombard Street in London in 1866. Here is Bagehot's big idea.

1. Loans must be adequately collateralized so that, in the event of failure to service the loan, the value of the collateral will be sufficient to liquidate the loan.
2. Borrowers must service their loans -- make their payments -- and be seen to be doing that.

Unless these two requirements are met You Got Trouble, as the song says.

But the US government set up a system that violated both these provisions and they directed the government subsidized mortgage twins, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to have a minimum percent of low-quality loans -- low down payment and low credit -- in their portfolio.

But here was the problem. Your pension plans and other regulated financial institutions were only allowed to buy top-rated bonds. How to enable them to purchase the Fannie/Freddie bonds with low-quality loans in them? The answer was derivatives, that attempted to neutralize the extra risk and thereby "create" highly rated financial instruments. Only it all fell apart in the market meltdown of 2006-08. Sorry Charlie.

Oh, and then Little Ben Bernanke choked and didn't think he had the authority to bail out Lehman Brothers.

Yeah, that's one thing that the hunter-gatherers were big on. Punishing lack of courage.

Do you see what I am saying here? I am saying that it is bootless for Sebastian Junger to complain about widespread cheating and fraud, everywhere from welfare to financial institutions.That's because the whole system has been designed by our modern ruling elite to be a scam. So that they could Divide and Conquer amd distribute the loot to their supporters.

And the worst thing is that we had institutions that replicated the pro-social world of the hunter-gatherer era. But Progressives "canceled" that world. And why? Because they wanted to be the Big Boys. They wanted to rule the new world. And they needed to be able to offer loot and plunder to the voters in order to win political power.

The point about the market economy is that it encourages pro-social behavior. It encourages people to offer products and services that other people want and at prices they are willing to pay. It encourages people to trust anyone that is trustworthy. And it requires everyone, every day, to align their behavior with the price signals of the market.

But the fact is that almost everything in the political sector is involved to some degree in allowing people to scam the system. Because marking your life to market is really hard. And, as Junger says, you need "group pressure" to keep that kind of stuff under control.

Now do you see why I call the left, all of the left, a Great Reaction? Because they have this woolly idea of how wonderful things were back in the day. But socialism is neo-slavery, the welfare state is neo-feudalism, identity politics is neo-tribalism, and so on.

What hope is there when bright young chaps like Sebastian Junger don't have a clue?

Sebastian Junger's View of Tribes

Sebastian Junger, whose breakthrough book was The Perfect Storm, is a guy from privileged Boston. And by the time he got out of college in 1986 he wanted an adventure. So he hitchhiked out West.

On the way, just outside of Gillette, Wyoming, he met a marginal guy who was worried Junger didn't have enough food, and gave him the contents of his lunchbox. He treated Junger "like a member of his tribe." So Junger wrote a book about Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.

This book is about why that sentiment is such a rare and precious thing in modern society... It's about what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty and belonging and the eternal human quest for meaning.

And, most importantly,

It's about why -- for many people -- war feels better than peace and hardship can turn out to he a great blessing and disasters are remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations.

What people don't like is "not feeling necessary." And these days there are a ton of people that feel they are not necessary. And are alone, and depressed and so on.

Here's something to puzzle over. When the whites first came to North America they started to experience a real problem.

[A] surprising number of [white] Americans -- mostly men -- wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their towns... And the opposite almost never happened: Indians almost never ran away to join white society.

Maybe that's because Indians "lived communally in mobile or semi-permanent encampments that were more or less run by consensus and broadly egalitarian... Anyone who didn't like it was free to move somewhere else."

I was glad to read this because it confirms what I had read from C.R. Hallpike, that hunter-gatherers lived in "bands" and when men got into a row with the other men they would leave and join another band. (Yeah: I'm glad you asked. Whatabout the women? I bet they were being named and shamed and shunned by the other women just like today!)

But, of course, when it came to a fight, the whites rolled up the Indians, starting in 1763 when the Swiss Henri Bouquet rolled up the tribal army assembled by Ottawa chief Pontiac.

Maybe that's the definitive thing about modern man and agricultural man vs. the hunter-gatherers; we industrialist and agriculturalists always beat them in battle. Except at Little Big Horn.

But, I thought, after reading 170 pages of the glories of the North American Indians and our dysfunctional society. Whatabout slaves? Aha! Wouldn't you know, from an internet search:

Indigenous American slavery, rooted in warfare and diplomacy, was flexible, often offering its victims escape through adoption or intermarriage, and it was divorced from racial ideology, deeming all foreigners—men, women, and children, of whatever color or nation—potential slaves.

The Native Americans even got into the plantation slavery business with West African slaves!

In the Southeast, an elite class of Indians began to hold African Americans in transgenerational slavery and, by 1800, developed plantations that rivaled those of their white neighbors.

No kidding! But probably, in their Noble Savage innocence, this "elite class of Indians" had no idea about plantation slavery until a racist sexist homophobe white supremacist suggested it.

But aside from this embarrassment -- not covered in his book -- Junger praises the social nature of hunter-gatherer life.

They would have experienced high levels of accidental injuries and deaths. They would have countered domineering behavior by senior males by forming coalitions within the group. They would have been utterly intoleratnt of hoarding or selfishness. They would have occasionally endured episodes of hunger, violence, and hardship. They would have practiced extremely close and involved childcare. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others.

Yes. And they also experienced, according to scholars, 500 violent deaths per 100,000 per year against our 5 per 100,000 per year.

But now, after the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, we have property. And alienation.

The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day -- or an entire life -- mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.

Speak for yourself, lefty. I'd say that the industrial revolution birthed a whole universe of communal inventions, from the workplace to mutual-aid societies.

But then along came lefties. They taught workers to hate their bosses. They drafted children into government schools. They replaced the pro-social mutual aid societies with administrative dominations like "social" insurance and government pension plans. And they subjugated the financial system to finance their wars and then their entitlement programs.

Hey! Suppose the men were all "going through the chairs" at the local Masonic lodge or the Elks club. Suppose the women were all involved in home-schooling and cooperative child care with their neighbors. Suppose the care of the poor was delegated to billionaires and millionaires and their charitably-minded wives -- or else! Hey, if that had been allowed to happen everyone would be as happy as clams, living pro-social, meaningful lives.

And that says nothing about the way that employers these days consciously attempt to create the illusion of community in the workplace. And says nothing about the way that the market economy pretty well forces everyone to practice the notion of trusting everyone that demonstrates trustworthiness, or getting along with anyone that demonstrates they will get along with you.

No. I'd say that the reason that people are miserable these days is lefties. Because lefties have harvested all the pro-social roles and said: all social activity is to be controlled and directed by us lefties with wonderful government programs. All you plebs and deplorables have to do is show up to get your benefit. We lefties and liberals and mandarins will do all the thinking and the deciding. Isn't this new world wonderful! (Better say yes, or you will be canceled.)

OK. That's just for a start. More tomorrow.