Little Girls Believe What They Are Carefully Taught

The father of St. Greta of Thun Mountain says that her climate activism is a good thing because prior to that she was depressed about climate change and refusing to eat.

And now I read of a BP executive telling how his daughter's friends are "taking anti-depressants because they are so worried about climate change."

But you see. These girls and women are not scientists. They have no independent knowledge about climate. They literally know nothing about science, which takes half a life to master. They are just responding to what they have been carefully taught.

If there was no news about climate change and how it is going to destroy human life on his planet, then Greta Thunberg wouldn't know about the Horror. And the friends of the daughter of the BP executive would not know about it. They would be taking anti-depressants because of the meanness of the other women.

Now it may be that in fact the activist-driven climate science is right, and that human action is upsetting the climate. Or it may be yet another millennarian cult predicting the end of the world.

Of course, according to science, when we descend out of the present Interglacial into the next glacial age, then things really will get pretty tight around here. Western Washington, where I live, was under ice in the last Ice Age. Our beautiful Puget Sound was ground out by glaciers! The eastern Washington landscape was formed by ice dam collapses.

As a profound sexist I am bound to say that there is a difference here between men and women. I find that women are much more likely to believe what they have been carefully taught and that men are much more likely to resist being carefully taught.

That is why, I maintain, it was boys that were first sent to school and punished if they didn't learn stuff. Girls have always dutifully learned what they were supposed to learn.

Boys and men seem to have bullshit detectors that tell them to regard all information as suspect. Or maybe they are lazy and just don't want to learn anything.

Then comes the moment when the woman feels betrayed, and Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

That's where I'd like to get in our present political situation. Nice respectable women don't like Donald Trump because he is insulting.

You'd think that, by now, they would be hopping mad because of the humiliation of the sexual revolution, the dead end of careers, the get-rid-of-it culture of abortion, the demolition of marriage.

But I think that women only "get it" when it is too late. Why? Well I think it has to do with the woman's instinct to go with the program to keep the kids alive. Because if you have kept the kids alive one more day... And the women in A Woman in Berlin kept the teenage girls safe in the attic while they submitted to the Russian soldiers in May 1945.

And so I think that, probably, women shouldn't be involved in politics, which is a game of risk to hit the other guys before they hit you.

Prediction: I think that at some point women will retreat from the public square and reestablish the old community of women where women maintain the local community of care and domesticity. Just sayin'.

You see, I experience the whole progressive project as being a War on Women.

Back in the day, men did nothing except defend the border and kill animals for meat. Men only started to work when they were needed for plowing, heavy work that tends to induce miscarriages in women.

Then came wage labor, which got men tied down working under near slave-labor discipline, and meant that women could stay home and raise the kids. Hey! What a deal for women!

But why did women decide they had to get out of the home and get jobs in the labor market? Could it be that Gentry women decided that they were special and were above mere domesticity? Or did some women decide they couldn't take the name and shame and shun culture of the community of women in the neighborhood and had to get into the more civilized male culture of the workplace? More research is needed.

See, I believe that men are expendable -- chiefly in war but also in dangerous mines and agriculture and fracking with their dangerous machines -- but we have to humor the poor stiffs to make them feel useful and wanted. I mean, if men went out on strike then women would have to pick up the slack!

I believe it is beneficial for men to think that they won't get laid unless they have a good job. I think it is good for men to battle away for market share, symbolizing in a harmless way the battles of border warfare. I believe it is good for men to believe that if you made the baby, you signed up to raise it.

So if I had the education of girls I would teach them the glory of children, the wonder of faithful husbands, the satisfaction of neighborhood cooperation, and the adequacy of the 1,000 sq ft house in the suburbs and the superfluity of marble-top counters. And for God's sake stop buying stupid electric cars!

And I think it will all come to pass once women and girls are carefully taught that progressives and lefties are the worst people in the world that have betrayed and abandoned them.

It shouldn't be too hard, surely. It has the advantage of being true.

Ten Things the Educated Gentry Got Wrong

Since everyone is doing lists over the New Year, I thought I would too.

My basic idea is that we are experiencing a changing of the guard, culturally and politically, because our Educated Gentry has spent the last century doing stupid things.

Legislation by Supreme Court. The way I see it, courts are great for cleaning up messes, in particular in the commercial world. Oh, and inheritances! That's why the merchant/commercial world developed the idea of resolving their disputes with judges. Then the nation state took over the courts, because of the reputation for probity, and the chance to use the law in its power projects.

But of course, politicians ruin everything. Now, in my view the point of elections and legislation is to demonstrate a social and political consensus, to tell people where the power lies today. You wanna change it? Then start persuading more people and have an election. Thus, for the Educated Gentry to use the courts to advance their class agenda is not a good idea, because it doesn't have to persuade people, just persuade the elite.

First, it's unjust. Second, it doesn't resolve anything. Third, it means you have to keep your hammerlock on the courts for ever and ever, amen. Thus, the Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade. Thus the Supreme Court decision of homosexual marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges. Thus the Supreme Court decisions on Affirmative Action. The problem is that when you legislate by Supreme Court ukase you have not won the people to your side. You have just created an injustice. And then you have to fight to the death to keep the Supreme Court reliably Gentry by "borking" the wrong kind of candidates.

Justice by Politics. The purpose of morality is to maintain a consensus about what human behavior is antisocial, and thus deplored by all good people. The purpose of politics is to protect the people from enemies foreign and domestic. In other words, politics is about life and death issues that threaten a human society; and morality is about the less critical stuff.

Back in the day, through the genius of the separation of church and state, our forefathers rather neatly separated these two zones of human social collision. Problem is that, since the Death of God to the more progressive Gentry, moral issues have tended to become questions of politics. The less violent methods of social control practiced by the community of women, such as naming, shaming, and shunning, have been shut down in favor of the methods used by men, the police power of incarceration and execution.

The reason I say that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice, is that I believe that the modern habit of "legislating morality" is in fact almost always the legislation of injustice.

Government Pensions. I think that the only government pensions I approve of are for veterans of the armed forces. Especially veterans wounded in the nation's wars. Otherwise government pensions degenerate into pure loot and plunder. And the injustice of government pensions is that the old'uns like me outvote the young'uns and tax away their youth -- when they are marrying and having children -- to keeep the old'uns in clover. If we had a private pension system -- even if it featured compulsory saving -- then people would retire when they had acquired enough savings to create jobs for the young'uns that could support the old'uns.

Government Healthcare. Let's say that it is a Good Thing to make sure that old people and poor people have access to healthcare. Maybe it is also a Good Thing to force healthy people of working age to get health insurance. But provision for the poor and the aged doesn't need to be a government program. It could be provided by billionaires, by mutual-aid societies, by churches, by charities. And the problem with government healthcare is that you can't reform it, not without bribing tons of people. Put it this way: suppose Walmart was a government program. Do you think it would ever have come close to providing an abundance cheap stuff for Commoners and Clients?

Government Education. Let's say that it is a Good Thing for children to become literate and numerate. Then how would we do it, today? Would we really create a universal government program of child incarceration in government child-custodial facilities? Would we really ban all child labor? What really is the purpose of child education? We could say that, back in the day, it was a Good Thing to make the children of illiterates literate. But won't the literate mothers of children automatically make their children literate? And should we render up children unto Caesar so he can teach them regime ideology? I tell you what I think. I think that the neighborhood women should get together to teach the kiddies. And any women that didn't get with the program would be named and shamed and shunned.

Government-sponsored Racism. All societies all down the ages have been "racist" in that they have defined themselves by some real and/or imagined identity: of the kindred, the tribe, the principality, the nation. But obviously identity politics is a very sharp-edged weapon. You can whip up national identity into an agenda for world conquest. Or you can use differences in race and origin to divide people in a nation. And really, once a political entity goes beyond forbidding the government to discriminate on the basis of whatever, you are trafficing in racism. And Anti-racism is just as racist as Racism straight up. In other words, if you are using government to fight racism, you are spotlighting racial and identity differences, making people "notice."

Crisis Mongering. The only warrant for government power is existential peril. Thus, every ruling class is on the hunt for some peril, real or imagined, that gives it the warrant to take the nation to war and draft the young generation into the rank and file of the army. In our day these crises usually involve some kind of victim that "we" must save. Or it is the planet that we must save. The problem with all such noble efforts is the casualty list. Of course, in a real shooting war the casualties these days are likely to mount into the millions. But seemingly innocent efforts have their casualties: the childless cat-ladies of the feminist revolution; the fatherless black men of the civil-rights revolution; the underclass of the welfare state where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much; the folks that lost their jobs in the Great Recession so that deadbeats could own homes. And Lord knows what the butcher's bill of the fight against climate change will look like.

Jobs for Gentry. I understand the whole administrative state as one giant Jobs for Gentry program. See, life is uncertain. How does a scion of the Gentry get that good job doing something meaningful? I look at all the Deep Staters in the Get Trump game and I think: Jobs for Gentry. I look at all the Studies professors and I think: Jobs for Gentry. I look at the deep and wide world of activism and NGOs and think: Jobs for Gentry. Yeah! Whatabout the Commoners?

OK, that's only Eight. But I'll have more later, see if I don't!

The Question of Whether The Deep State is Clever or Stupid

There is a natural instinct in all of us, I propose, that assumes that people in authority know what they are doing. More or less.

Thus, we tend to think that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must have a card up her sleeve when she omits to send the impeachment of President Trump over to the Senate. But suppose she doesn't? Suppose she is just playing the next card in her hand because she doesn't know what else to do? Maybe she knows that a) to send the impeachment to the Senate as is would end up as a disaster for Democrats, so that b) playing manipulative games at least puts off the inevitable.

My 70-year-old yoga teacher usually manages to blurt out some New York Times conventional wisdom about Trump at the beginning of the class. This week it was that Trump would easily win in 2020 on the economy: if only he wasn't so crazy.

Earth to liberal bubble: it was Trump's attack on the liberal Gentry that made him president! Millions of Commoners that had given up suddenly discovered a politician that seemed to "care about people like them." Whoa! Who'da thunk it?

Or the Deep State intelligence community chappies that let themselves be suckered into spying on a presidential campaign. Are we to think they are cunning Svengalis? Or just easily duped Barnacles and Stiltstockings hoping for preferment from the next admininstration?

Or the geniuses that gave us the Great Recession. Science says that the credit system needs two things: properly collateralized loans, and borrowers that can service their loans. So how come our governing geniuses gave us 100% mortgages and liar loans? Are they dumb or somep'n?

Whatabout the brilliant Democratic Socialists that want to bring everything under the aegis of the admininstrative state after a century of proving that it doesn't work? And 100 million dead slaves under Communism? Are they evil or just stupid?

The truth is that they are just humans and, as usual Nietzsche explains the whole procedure -- The Will to Power §517. Our lords and masters are just average Joes walking in the world assuming that the conventional wisdom and things-as-they-are explain the world.

The fictitious world of a subject, substance, "reason,"etc., is needed--: there is in us a power to order, simplify, falsify, artificially distinguish. "Truth" is the will to be master over the multiplicity of sensations:-- to classify phenomena into definite categories. In this we start from a belief in the "in-itself" of things (we take phenomena as real).

Of course, it's been a long road for me to accept the Nietzschean view. That, as animals in the world, we have to discriminate among all the welter of information coming in through our five senses that deluges us every moment, and filter out the things that might kill us! So we -- so much higher than the ordinary animals! -- conjure up narratives about the world to try and understand it: gods arranging battles from Mt. Olympus; spirits in trees; reason and logic; matter; energy; Four Elements; atoms and molecules; quarks; dark matter and energy.

And I wonder what comes next!

Truly, human understanding has gone through an astonishing transformation since, well let's say since Descartes and "I think, therefore I am."

The truth is that all of our knowledge is conditional and a likely story. Good until it fails to explain the world. And we have to edit out 97.2 percent of the possibilities in order to stay sane. So everybody lives in their comfortable bubbles paying attention only to the edited information that tells them comfortable things that confirm their world view.

But, of course, what is comfortable to you in your bubble may be a perfect hell for me in my bubble.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

And I suspect that James Delingpole is right with his analysis that "The 2010s were the Twilight of the Elites." Would that be Führungsschichterdämmerung, James? Or something shorter?

Happy New Year!

Is the Left to Blame for All the "Hate"?

We had a couple of shooter attacks against religious groups over the weekend: one in New York City against orthodox Jews and one against megachurch Christians in Texas.

I don't want to get into the gun control argument, because I think it is a politics-downstream-from-culture issue.

No. I blame the larger leftist project, which, in my view, is going backwards, by elevating politics to a sacramental level when we should all be "moving on" and relegating politics to the basement.

Politics/government is what we humans have developed to help us all come together to face an existential peril that threatens to destroy our community.

So, in my view, politics should be locked away in a glass cabinet with the notice "In Emergency, Break Glass."

You can see the point of politics with our relatives the chimpanzees. The males patrol the borders of the troop's territory and attack and kill any male trespassers, and for good reason. The food that grows within the troop's territory is what sustains the females that bear and raise the young. The more territory, and more important, the more food, the better for the troop. That's how Nicholas Wade describes it in Before the Dawn.

And thus it ever was until the day before yesterday, when trade took over the world: I mean, in particular, with wage labor in which everyone enters the cash economy, exchanging labor for money rather than growing food for the immediate family as subsistence farmers outside the market economy.

The market economy means that we should interact faithfully with anyone that behaves in a trustworthy fashion. This is a radical transformation from the old days when anyone outside your territory was an enemy just waiting for a chance to catch you unawares.

Obviously, this gigantic cultural transformation is not going to be completed by next week.

But still, the job of the educated and evolved, the people that have already absorbed the cultural memes of the post-agricultural culture, is to help people adapt to the new reality.

Only they don't. And that is why I write about a Great Reaction. It is an amazing thing, that the most educated and evolved are people that have developed a religious faith in politics in the Old Ways -- and have organized groups into ideological combat, from race to gender and everything in between, on issues large and small.

See, what the left did, starting in the mid 19th century, was to encourage newly arrived groups in the city to trust only their own, to condone urban gangs that recreated the old days of border warriors defending their turf from the neighboring tribe, and to teach workers that their interests and needs were diametrically opposed to the employers that hired and trained and paid them.

You can see how this works a treat for the power project of the educated and evolved. If you believe in the saving grace of politics then it makes complete sense to divide off lower-class groups from the national community and use them as shock troops for the wars of your religion of politics.

And then your educated and evolved gentry decide that the members of their client groups can't really be held responsible for their "rage," arising out of generations of oppression and marginalization, rather than from their inherited culture of defending the borders.

So, if you are a member of a scheduled victim group, you might get the idea that it's OK to act out your rage on other people. For instance the latest Crime Victimization Survey  says that whites are 62.3% of the population but are 50.2% of the violent offenders in violent incidents, while blacks are 12.0% of the population but 21.7% of the offenders in violent incidents.

In other words, whites are slightly underrepresented in the national violent offender community, while blacks are grossly overrepresented in the violent offender community. Talk about a crisis of diversity!

And what is the reaction of our liberal friends? To make victims out of blacks that attack "white Hispanics" and white policemen.

I think it is dirty trick for our liberal Educated Gentry to make excuses for blacks. It's hard enough as it is to make the transition from rural tribal culture to city market culture. But to represent the problems that blacks experience in adapting to the city culture as the fault of the majority culture is worse than an error. It is a profound injustice, and not particularly to whites but to blacks who are not getting acculturated to the trust culture of the city and its commerce.

I don't know where the left's culture of victimhood and activism, the raising of political activism to the level of holy pilgrimage and sacrament, will end up.

All I know is that at the very least, the activism culture has delayed the adaption of many millions of people to the culture of the market and its trust of anyone that demonstrates trustworthiness. At worst it has provoked millions of innocents into a cruel culture war where nobody will be the winner.

See, I think that our Educated Gentry has got everything wrong.. It has rewarded people that behaved like victims; it has sneered at responsibility, and it has ludicrously valued creativity as a human right.

In fact, the opposite is true. Victimhood is a miserable hell, and everyone should be encouraged not to think of themselves as victims; responsibility is the basic skill needed to navigate the market economy; and creativity is a very dangerous business that should only be attempted only by people prepared to make the Hero's Journey into the unconscious and battle with dragons.

The lesson of life in the world is that a single mistake is very often fatal. But when almost everything you believe is wrong, you have to wonder what the upshot will be.

So, to blame the left for all the "hate" it has created is to miss the point. The point is: what we can do to help the victims of the left's power project and help them graduate from subordination in the victim culture to responsibility as ordinary Commoners?

Nietzsche on Knowledge and Reality

For some time I have been reading people that tell me to forget the conceit of logic and reason. Everything in the world is "affect," or feelings.

Except that when I have a "feeling" it is the rising to consciousness of an event that took place in my pre-frontal cortex up to seven seconds ago. And the fact that I have a feeling is because, after the chaos of sense impressions bombarding my body, something unusual has tripped an alarm that has brought this something to my consciousness.  What is going on here?

What is going on is that the Freuds and Jungs -- and latterly Jordan Petersons -- peddling this stuff all go back to Nietzsche.

In The Will to Power: Book Three: Principles of a New Evaluation Nietzsche blows everything apart.

For instance, "everything of which we become conscious is a terminal phenomenon, an end", in other words the opposite of our common belief in understanding the world through "thinking, feeling, willing!"

Or this: "'inner experience' enters our consciousness only after it has found a language the individual understands". Thus, "'to understand' means merely: to be able to express something new in the language of something old and familiar."

Or this:

There exists neither "spirit," nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use. There is no question of "subject and object," but a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness; above all, regularity of its perceptions (so that it can accumulate experience)--

Knowledge works as a tool of power. Hence it is plain that it increases with every increase of power-- 

In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it.

See what he is up to? That everything that we "think" and "feel" and "know" about the world is an epiphenomenon that wells up out of our body and its six senses and its sensors and its ganglia of nerves and brain cells and who-knows-what as part of its project of staying alive. And we really do not have a clue what is going on!

Whatabout the "ego" and the "subject" and "facts?"

There are only facts -- I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations... 

[Even the] "subject" is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.

"It is our needs that interpret the world." And we better hope that our interpretation is correct. This time.

Here's a concept that I find useful:

Everything that enters consciousness as "unity" is already tremendously complex: we always have only  a semblance of unity.

What is going on here? I think that it reflects our modern knowledge -- call it the paradox of our modern knowledge -- that things are a lot more complicated and a lot weirder than we ever imagined, and that we ever could imagine.

One of the things that helps deal with this unsettling thought is this piece from Nature in 2008: "Your brain makes up its mind up to ten seconds before you realize it, according to researchers."

Because if that is true, that stuff is going on in what we call the "unconscious" that the "ego" knows nothing about, then what other stuff is going on that we know nothing about?

Here is Nietzsche on "words:"

We set up a word at the point at which our ignorance begins, at which we can see no further, e.g., the word "I," the world "do," the word "suffer":-- these are perhaps the horizon of our knowledge, but not "truths."

I guess Lewis Carroll knew all about this when he had Humpty Dumpty opine on "words."

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

But Lewis Carroll -- real name Charles Dodgson, academic and mathematician -- was not a student of Nietzsche; he wrote Through the Looking Glass in 1872, and Nietzsche was writing his late stuff in the 1880s. But the question is: were Charles Dodgson and Friedrich Nietzsche swimming in the same intellectual pond?

Because, when Humpty Dumpty talks about "which is to be master" is he not talking the same language as Nietzsche's Will to Power?

Suppose the Dem "Resistance" is Not Just Wrong, but Stupid?

What is going on with the impeachment extravaganza? Or, asked another way, is impeachment all about Nancy Pelosi caving to the New Social Democrats, or is it about trying to hide the facts about FBI and intelligence community malfeasance?

A savvy politician, Pelosi is well aware of how the Clinton impeachment boomeranged on Republicans when they were in the majority...

But

The argument that Pelosi could simply no longer resist the agitation of her party’s leftist base makes little sense... If she could resist the leftist loonies determined to run her party over the cliff with impeachment over “Russian collusion,” she could certainly reject their calls for impeachment over the even more transparently ridiculous charge of an “improper” call, particularly when it distracts valuable attention from her party’s looming presidential primaries. 

Therefore we should look to something else.

No, the real explanation for Pelosi’s sudden flip is that those in the know — in the intelligence community, on congressional committees, and even in the Democratic mouthpiece media with their Deep State sources — warned her in early September of the potential political catastrophe that would ensue as a result of the devastating revelations in both the Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s abuse of the FISA process and U.S. Attorney John Durham’s more comprehensive investigation into the origins and perpetuation of the bogus “Russian collusion” narrative.

I suppose. But, really, do they really think it is going to work? That the CNN-MSNBC-Project 1619 effort is really going to crowd out the drip-drip of reports and indictments that will be coming out in the next few months?

Especially when "paid media" starts in the presidential election campaign?

Really? Nancy Pelosi is doing impeachment in order to lay down smoke to hide the horror of using the FBI and the intelligence community to spy on a presidential campaign?

Has Admiral Pelosi forgotten that we now have radar that can see through smoke?

Hey, I know, Nancy! How about you come clean, and declare that we are all Americans and that there are real, substantical questions about the behavior of the FBI over the last few years and that it is time to put partisanship aside and do a bipartisan investigation of just what went on, and find out who used the powers of the government to swing an election, and how, if it all turns out to be true, we must make sure it never happens again.

After all, remember what you Dems have been reciting from your Watergate prayer book for the last 50 years? It's not the crime, it's the coverup! That's what you geniuses have been teaching us since forever.

Well. Whatabout the coverup of the Obama administration spying on the Trump campaign? "What did [fill in the blank] know and when did he know it?"

See, I think that the really big downside for the Dems is to allow Trump to make the case that the whole Democratic Party knew what was going on, knew that the whole idea that the Trump campaign colluded with Russkies was a hoax, knew that Steele was an unreliable source, knew that the whole Comey-Mueller-Ukraine thing is balderdash. And that the awful truth is that they flat out used the government's surveillance capacity to swing and election and then try to force a duly elected president out of office. Because they could.

So I think that the sooner that some Democratic genius comes forward and say, look, this was worse that a crime it was a blunder, the sooner that Democrats can get back to normal politics instead of playing with smoke and mirrors and pretending that their raft is not heading straight for the waterfall.

Look. What the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media have been doing for the last three years is one cover-up after another. Just like they sneered at Nixon for doing. And, I suspect, they are getting in deeper and deeper. Hey the latest shoe to drop is that, after the FBI dropped Steele as a reliable source, he started leaking stuff to the now-deceased Sen. John McCain who leaked his stuff to the media. Hey, Mr. Patriot McCain. Thanks, pal!

And I just think, because I was brainwashed by the media back in the day over the Nixon coverup, that the longer this coverup goes on, the worse it will be for the Democratic Party and for Democratic Party officeholders.

And I think that the one person that ought to confront this is Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But because I am a "far right misogynist" I don't think that Our Nance has the cojones to fall on her sword as the Sacrifical Hero. Because women don't do Sacrificial Hero; it's a guy thing.

Just sayin'.

"A Healthy Appetite for Free Stuff"

The woke patrol at Patheos recently noticed me for the hate crime of being a "far right misogynist," God bless @EdBrayton.

But what I am really interested in is the profound differences between men and women, and, as Steve Sailer says, "noticing" them, or rather, "Noticing" anything you are not allowed to notice.

And this is at no time more obvious to me than at Christmas, our midwinter festival of feasting and gift-giving.

• That women have been shopping for gifts for family and women friends for over a month, while men run out and get gifts at the last moment as they realize they have to reciprocate, at least a little, the tidal wave of gifts being heaped up by the women.
• The internal decoration of houses, and perhaps an uncurtained window to let passers-by get a glimpse of the perfect jewel of a home within.
• The gathering of the family, from all across the city, or the nation, or the world.
• The feast, to celebrate the comfort of abundance.
• Santa Claus, the gift-giver.

I don't know about you, but every year I stand back and marvel at the remarkable energy of the world's women.

And then My Man Kevin Williamson writes about the mess of Obamacare, and the "healthy appetite for free stuff" both from Republican and Democratic voters that prevents either proper repeal or proper paying for the benefits.

Can we stop ourselves and our fellow Americans from gorging on free stuff before it takes the very food out of our mouths, like our friends in Venezuela?

I think that the appetite for free stuff and for loot and plunder comes from this, that I read in Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger. In the deserts of Arabia humans lived by grazing sheep. The problem is to find grazable land, and that is not easy, because in the desert rain will fall, and stimulate plant growth, in a particular area perhaps once in two years.

You can see that finding grazing for your animals is not just a matter of skill and experience, but outright luck. And sometimes you run out of luck. Then what?

Then, what you do in the Arabian desert is you raid a neighboring band that has had better luck than you, and you steal their livestock. But, interestingly, the rules are that you don't touch the women. You just rob the other guys of a grub-stake, to get your band restarted.

So loot and plunder does have a sensible survival value. In pre-agricultural human bands. Of course, sometimes it can get out of hand. See Mongols, invasions and conquests of.

And you can see that this applies to the agricultural era. If our food-growing lands are afflicted with drought and our people are dying of hunger then it only makes sense to make a last go-for-broke effort and plunder the neighbors for food.

However, in my reading of The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon, we begin to see the modern experience of drought and famine is different. As the 19th century advanced the Brits -- eevil colonial rulers in India -- started to experience famine as a failure of government, a scandal. And you can see why. With steam transportation, rail and water, the means are at hand to relieve famine.

Let us understand the earth-shattering importance of this. It means that for a people to wive and thrive and survive it does not have to occupy food growing land. Not any more, because food can be obtained from across the world for mere money.

But it takes a while for humans to adapt their instinctive culture to the new reality. Evidence: Adolf Hitler, leader of the most advanced country in Europe that invented everything from modern philosophy to modern relativity and quantum mechanics. He felt that, of course, the Germans needed Lebensraum in eastern Europe. No, Adolf, they didn't! All they needed to do was to be able to trade for food and let the Mittelstand do its thing.

Here's another thing. Back in the 19th century the big surges of labor-union membership were in the Great Depression that went on from 1873 to the 1890s. Do you know what that was all about? Mostly, the aftermath of the US government getting back on the Gold Standard after the inflation of the Civil War, which threw debtors and workers for a loop. So the debtors and workers attempted to seize the means for survival.

Then there was the Great Depression of 1929-39, caused by the Allied nations getting back on the Gold Standard after WWI and then the new Federal Reserve totally effing up the Crash of 1929. More growth of unions and also of left-wing politics until national hero FDR led us into the War of the Ages and needed manfacturies to churn out tanks and planes and Jeeps for his glorious war.

But guess what. In the aftermath of the 2008 crash we did not have a surge in unions or in left-wing politics, even though the crash was another classic bungle by the ruling class. And even though Little Ben Bernanke broke the first rule of central banking, to be the lender of last resort to the banks, like, you know, Lehman Brothers, whatever. Oh Ben. And we now know, Little Ben, that if you had bailed out Lehman instead of whining that you didn't have the legal authority, the Deep State would have rallied round and made sure you didn't go to jail. Hey, they might have given you a medal. Silly Ben. Cowardly Ben.

My analysis of the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2006-08 is that the social safety net actually worked. The people thrown out of work got tided over by the welfare state with its unemployment benefits and its food stamps. So no mobs in the street. No surge in union membership. And no left-wing revival.

Therefore no need any more for desperation efforts to stay alive by plundering the neighbors.

But it will take centuries for humans to adapt our culture to the new reality.

Meanwhile we free spirits can start thinking about how to imagine the new human world in which dawn raids and loot and plunder and "a healthy appetite for free stuff" are no longer needed.

That is what my Great Reaction notion is about. It proposes to understand the present as an attempt bythe educated gentry to recover the past -- the good old days for political elites when rulers really ruled -- with socialism as neo-slavery, the welfare state as neo-feudalism, identity politics as neo-tribalism, etc. When what we need to do is to get away from those cultural echoes from the past.

My reductive Three Peoples theory and Little Darlings notion are all about taking the next step in understanding, to try and understand why the educated gentry is doing this to us. I am attempting to think about how we can first understand and then find a way of neutralizing the edcuated gentry's exploitation of the proles to advance their reactionary power project.

Part of that process is understanding what drives the left's Activism Culture and enumerating the Left's Errors,

Also, we can explore how The Road to the Middle Class is paved with the cultural moving sidewalks of monotheistic religion, education, law, and mutual aid, which teach the workers and peasants just off the farm and the feudal estates how to wive and thrive in the city.

And we can construct An American Manifesto to imagine life after liberalism where the coercive dominations and oppressions of educated gentry rule are replaced by a new culture of responsibility and voluntary exchange, and yes, exciting cultural adventures for the children of the educated gentry: something for everyone.

But perhaps the most important thing of all is the greatest challenge and adventure for creative spirits ever conceived by the mind of man. To create great seminaries all across the world to induct the young sprouts of the educated elite into a great spiritual movement to teach their fellow humans how to rise above "a healthy appetite for free stuff."

Wow! Someone ought to write a book about that!