Stop Moralizing About Race, Slavery, Empire

There's a sweet article at The Federalist by Indian-born Paulette Varghese Altmaier who married a white American:

My two daughters, born of my marriage with an Iowa farm boy-turned-Silicon Valley engineer, were brought up with no sense of racial difference, no focus at all on the fact that half their family was white and the other half was not. 

She thought she was living Martin Luther King Jr's dream. So how come "we face a new brand of racism" with whites required to bow to the shame of "white guilt." And then there's slavery.

Altmaier points out that, if you want to talk racism, the Indian caste system is a good place to start. And slavery was going strong in Africa until the start of the 20th century. And imperialism? Everyone was attacking everyone else and didn't think about it.

So what's all the moralizing about?

Well, I suppose it is the self-congratulation of the modern Educated Gentry that thinks that it created the modern moral world and that but for its educated activists slavery, imperialism, and racism would still rule the world.

Allow me to differ. And yes, I come to this with a Nietzschean attitude that says that morality tends to come along after the fact to justify and formalize a new correlation of social forces.

Slavery? How come that slavery was accepted since forever as just the way things are until about 300 years ago? My answer is that up until 300 years ago a feudal system obtained in which the farmers were helpless before any warlike marauder, and had to subordinate themselves to a warrior caste that would protect them. Nearly everyone was a subordinate farmer. And just a few people were proud castellans and warriors. So serfdom, slavery was part of the way things were.

But when a market system arises, with cities and free exchange and trading, then, in my opinion, people start to realize that slavery does not pay and in fact free labor is much more profitable. Sorry, lefties. No glorious moral apotheosis for you.

Imperialism? How come that warfare and empires and subjugation were normal and ubiquitious right through the agricultural age? And why should imperialism suddenly become scandalous? My answer is that up until about 300 years ago the only wealth was in land and gold. If you invaded the neighbor's land and took his land and his gold, you were better off, and never mind about the neighbor's dead and dying.

But when trading takes over the world, and wealth starts to become "intangible capital" it doesn't do you any good to wipe out the neighbor because you also wipe out his "intangible capital." So, the Brits in India were, from the beginning, interested in trading. The expansion of their empire occurred because they were continually annoyed by some predatory prince raiding their trading empire, of which the Maratha Confederacy chiefs were the principal perps. Plus, of course, when you are an industrial power, what's the point of planting your flag in some fly-blown outpost that is 50 years from developing a modern economy? Raw materials? Not really. You can buy raw materials for money. So, in our modern era, imperialism does not pay.

Racism? Again, in the old days when agriculture ruled the world, it made sense to develop a tribal identity of us against the world. Because your food-growing land was life and to be conquered meant being sold into slavery.

But when trading takes over the world, the possession of food-growing land doesn't matter much any more. People are now organized into religions, nations, and corporations. And what matters is not your race but whether you can be trusted. And now, with the 5-star rating system used for just about everything and everyone on-line, it is your reputation not your skin color that matters. And so now racism does not pay.

But, for a season, the accusation of racism, imperialism, and slavery does pay.

Until we Commoners get a pair and tell the lefties to go take a hike.

But here is the real mystery. Why are our lefty friends so intent upon a Great Reaction, in which socialism is the new slavery, the welfare state is the new feudalism, identity politics is the new tribalism? What is wrong with these people?

Could Chile's Collapse Happen Here?

Here's the thing. "Chile's Collapse Foretells America's If Dems Win." What in the world is wrong with Chile? I thought that since the days of th eevil Gen. Pinochet that Chile had set up a pretty decent free-market economy that was the envy of the rest of South America. But no. Things are not copacetic in Chile these days. Writes Axel Kaiser in the Wall Street Journal about Chile's very own Elizabeth Warren,

The economic pain started with the antimarket reforms of the previous government under Socialist President Michelle Bachelet, from 2014-18. Ms. Bachelet increased corporate taxes by 30%; signed a law banning the replacement of workers on strike, thereby dramatically increasing the costs of labor; increased public spending at three times the economic growth rate; and unleashed armies of regulatory bureaucrats on the private sector.

Of course, I dare say thaat the reduction in copper prices plays a role in this.

Now I am reading Deirdre McCloskey's breezy Why Liberalism Works and you would think, from her, that all good-thinking people know that liberalism, the 18th century Enlightenment one, not the 20th century US version, is the way to go.

But actually they don't. As we know. Because our Educated Gentry are all in favor of race politics, big government politics, gender politics, and canceling anyone that doesn't agree with their secular religion.All over the world.

Now maybe somewhere in Why Liberalism Works I dare say that McCloskey has some winning argument to persuade the Wokies to give it up. But I doubt it. If I had any doubt my mind was made up by the simple notions of Curtis Yarvin in "The Clear Pill."

Yarvin writes that the present ruling class plays beautiful "anthems" -- no doubt on a magnificnt pipe organ -- to the Educated Gentry that appeals to its "ambition, honor, and vanity."

Yarvin's three layer theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients fits moderately well with my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we moderns live in a status hierarchy of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates. When you are a creative the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is all tied up in your ability to do creative, original work.

So the problem with the notion that we should all relax and enjoy it because, Why Liberalism Works, is that there is no "ambition, honor, and vanity" for the Creative Educated Gentry in a minimum government society. Yes, yes. Everyone will be prosperous and happy. But what about the workers, er, gentry? What ambition is satisfied for the gentry? What honor will crown the gentry with fig leaves? What will appeal to their vanity (not that the gentry are vain, oh no)?

Let's take a smart ambitious woman like Elizabeth Warren. Here is a woman that has played the Gentry game to the hilt. She has converted herself from her Commoner origins into a rootin' tootin' Gentry mandarin. She got into Harvard Law as a professor by faking Native American heritage. As a graduate of Rutgers Law School she would never have got into Harvard without the Native American scam.

As a smart ambitious woman she knows instinctively that she is never going to have a top-fight political career humming the anthem of Why Liberalism Works to the Gentry. Or telling the Clients that the trouble with big government is that sooner or later you run out of Other Peoples' Money. No. She's running with her pedal to the metal of Big Government Über Alles.

Or take my Four Laws.

"Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices." Oh yeah? Whatabout the homeless? The children stuck in cages at the border? Let's worry about prices and profits next week.

"The administrative state cannot work because it doesn't have the bandwidth to direct the whole economy." Oh yeah? But whatabout the folks that don't have health insurance? Are we just going to sit here while people die?

"The regulatory state cannot work because of the law of 'regulatory capture.'" Oh yeah? So you are going to let monopolies make obscene profits for ever and ever?

"Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them." Oh yeah? So you are going to put little children back to work in the mines because the education system isn't perfect?

Now I think the problem is even bigger than that.

First is the notion I picked up from the best-seller The Millionaire Next Door. Suppose you are the wife of a businessman that made a nice little fortune with a string of dry-cleaning stores? Whatabout your children? So you send them out into the marketplace at age 18 and tell 'em to work it out? No you don't, because in the world of business many are called but few are chosen and you don't want your kids suffering through the agony of failed businesses and bankruptcy. No, what you do is send your kids to university and get them into nice regulated professions like medicine and law, or you buy them a nice pair of striped-pants for a career in the State Department, where you have to go through years and years of fees and 80-hour weeks before you get licensed to print money.

And then there is the basic fact of politics. First, the political leader is the tribal chief that protects you from pirates and plunderers. Second, the political leader recruits his warriors with the offer of loot and plunder. Got a solution to that age old fact of life?

So when are we going to rise above these wee problems? Next week? Next year? Next century?

Well, I offer hope. Three hundred years ago, people in the west were just beginning to worry about slavery. Then Christian evangelicals like William Wilberforce taught us to be ashamed and we abolished slavery. Then lefties created the biggest slave states in history, the sweeties. But the slave states have kinda dialed down the slavery thing because slavery does not pay, Mr. Gorbachev.

Three hundred years ago, according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash, the lower orders were indeed regarded by all respectable gentry people as rubbish. And if white people weren't slaves, there were plenty of them that were indentured servants. But now they are Commoners. Although the gentry still sneers at them as racist sexist homophobes and deplorables. And along comes Donald Trump to champion the Commoners.

But the problem is that a world with less government and less Studies degrees and less moral lecturing about toxic masculinity and white supremacy is also a world in which the Educated Gentry has less scope for its "ambition, honor, and vanity."

You think that the proud Educated Gentry is going to put up with a world that crimps their style? In fact, as I argue in my Great Reaction series, the Educated Gentry seems determined to take us back to the past, with socialism as a return to slavery, the welfare state as a return to feudalism, identity politics as a return to tribalism, and all the rest of it.

Me neither.

So could the Dems screw the place up like Chile? Of course they could. And they'd blame "greedy bankers" and white supremacists all the way to the guillotine.

That's why I think that a rude crude rootin' tweetin' bigot like Donald Trump who is focusing his program on the needs of the Commoners is a much better prospect than any of the big-government anti-deplorable Democrats.

"Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry

In her magnificent "Bourgeois Era" books Deirdre McCloskey celebrates the achievements of the western bourgeoisie, and I have written about it. As La Wik says, the bourgeoisie, contrary to its self-advertisement as "prudence only" actually practiced all the Seven Virtues. And its appetite for innovation provoked the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, from $3 per person per day to $100 per person per day. In today's dollars.

In her new book, Why Liberalism Works: How true liberal values produce a freer, more equal, prosperous world for all, McCloskey advertises an inclusive libertarianism, and proposes to reclaim the word "liberal" from the progressives.

McCloskey argues for "the continuing desirability of a liberalism conceived in the eighteenth century" and how it has created good things like "economic success" the "arts and sciences" plus "its kindness, toleration, its inclusiveness, its cosmopolitanism, and especially its massive liberation of... people from violent hierarchies ancient and modern." Then there are the critics.

Progressives and conservatives and populists retort that liberalism and its rhetoric also explain numerous alleged evils, such as the reduction of everything to money and markets or the loss of community and God of the calamity of immigration by non-whites and non-Christians. But they are mistaken.

Twenty years ago and more I might have agreed with her. But then I read F.S.C. Northrop, who wrote:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

"Inadequate?" Everything I believed? But what does that mean? At the time I was perfectly happy with the world view of the British Enlightenment. And yet. For one thing didn't German thought lead directly to Nazism?

So I gradually embarked on the study of the Germans. For instance, Kant. He famously developed his philosophy from problems in Hume, especially Hume's showing that there is no warrant for our faith in cause and effect. And so Kant proposed that, contrary to the Newtonian era's confidence in matter and mechanics, we do not know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances, and we construct a world view from information coming in through our senses. Then there were the German Romantics that argued that we know directly that there is more to life than facts and reason. That's what all those Romantic paintings of a young German looking out into a prospect of magnificent nature were about.

Then there was Hegel (that McCloskey dismisses as an inspiration for authoritarianism and national-socialism). Does anyone understand Hegel? I certainly don't. But I rather like his Master and Slave analysis, which suggests that the Master is not exactly master, and the Slave not exactly helpless. And his notion of dialectic proposes that we humans proceed by lurching from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, rinse and repeat.

Then there was German physics that drove the relativity-quantum mechanics revolution. What was that all about?

And Freud-Jung and the mostly German developmental psychologists that invented modern psychology that, amongst other things, reminds us that our fabled rational minds sit on top of an undiscovered country of the unconscious. And it may be that our conscious mind is just a fake image projected like a movie from the unconscious to make us feel good.

Now, I reckon that out of all this came my reductive Three Peoples theory that owes a lot to the developmentalists. And then there is Curtis Yarvin's three-layer picture of modern society as Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

So tell me "Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry. And "Why Liberalism Works" for the Commoners. And "Why Liberalism Works" for the Clients.

See, I believe with McCloskey that liberalism and the discoveries about how markets work for all of us and have driven the Great Enrichment are true -- as far as anything can be true, given that as far back as Nietzsche we have to understand that our understanding of the world are remarkably constrained by, say, the need of every living thing to stay alive when danger strikes.

The fundamental world view of my People of the Subordinate Self and Yarvin's Clients is that to survive in this world you have to have a patron, a powerful man that can protect you from a cruel world. How does McCloskey's liberalism speak to them?

The fundamental world view of my People of the Responsible Self and Yarvin's Commoners is to accept that it is your job to get on in the world, to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, but that in return you expect some sort of protection from the rulers. How does McCloskey speak to them?

The fundamental world view of my People of the Creative Self and Yarvin's Gentry is that life is a creative project and a fine thing it is: it is their creative innovation that gave us the Great Enrichment. But the Gentry also seem to believe that the scope for their creativity should be almost limitless and that the plebs should not have the right to oppose their brilliant ideas. Yes, of course, McCloskey is a creative and naturally thinks that creatives should rule the world with "kindness... toleration... inclusiveness... cosmopolitanism" and so forth. But whatabout the people that experience the "kindness" etc. as mere patronizing bossiness?

I call my Three Peoples theory "reductive" partly out of irony, because of course all human knowledge is reductive. Nietzsche: "a priori 'truths' are for me -- provisional assumptions" Or this:

Within the mechanistic view of the world (which is logic and its application to space and time), that concept is reduced to the formulas of mathematics -- with which as one must emphasize again and again, nothing is ever comprehended, but rather designated and distorted. Will to Power §554.

The mistake of the original 18th century liberals was to assume that everyone would identify with the creative bourgeois ethos. And that ethos is certainly my culture and feels comfortable to me.

But humans are not like that. We humans are social animals that find safety and survival in groupish behavior and instincts. Most humans down the ages, I think, experienced themselves as subordinates in the hierarchy; they submitted to power to enjoy the benefits and safety of being in a community.

And, of course, one of the basic facts of life was that land was life. You, or your group, had to possess food-yielding land, or else. So you had to belong to a group.

Now I think that modern socialism as a prescription for groupishness is a disaster. But clearly there are a lot of people that think it delivers community and safety.

I notice that everyone these days is shocked, shocked by slavery. I ask, instead, why has slavery become, in the last centuries, a scandal? What changed?

I even think I get the Death of God. It is because modern Gentry believe that they are the creators. No God needed.

So I think that the modern problem is how to deal with the fact that people have different ideas of community, of work, of wealth, of rules, of morality. And the place to start, to be able to look at the world from different perspectives, I believe, is with a reductive Three Peoples or three layers theory.

How to make a better world that subordinate Clients will appreciate?

How to make a better world that reponsible Commoners will appreciate?

How to make a better world that creative Gentry will appreciate?

It's a problem!

Soleimani: Escalation or Lesson to Iran?

The response of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the Trump administration's assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani was that nobody informed her.

The response of Obama foreign policy chappie Ben Rhodes was to hope for the best but worry that there is "serious escalation to come."

The general shock-and-horror response from Democrats makes me wonder: what is going on that I don't understand?

And more to the point, what exactly was the strategic rationale behind the Obama administration's accommodation of Iran -- not to mention the sending pallet-loads of actual cash? (Hey, wanna job as a fork-lift driver?)

I mean, in my view of the world, you look at an expansive ideological power like Iran as something to be resisted: not maybe through all-out war but certainly by throwing sand in the gears. You look at the bigger picture and say, well, chaps, we sure don't want Iran dominating the entire Middle East -- not that there was anything wrong with those Zoroastrians back in the day.

I tell you what is intriguing to me. On the one hand our Democratic friends wage ceaseless ideological war in schools, universities, social media and cake bakers, with no quarter given.

So our Democratic friends believe in ideological war to the knife.

But then, when it comes to international affairs they are always whining about "escalation." Or Jimmy Carter is pontificating about our "inordinate fear of communism."

You mean the communism that caused the deaths of 100 million humans in the 20th century, Jimmy?

OK, I do understand it, in this way.

Our Democratic friends believe in global hegemony and domination by and for the Educated Gentry. They do not believe in the nation state, and the do not believe in the citizens of the nation state, the Commoners. Thus, they instinctively dislike all expressions of the nation state, from Trump to the US imperium. And within the nation they conduct politics by setting one group of Americans against another and conducting a non-stop Olympics of the Victims, which makes sense for them because it weakens the nation state of America.

I do not think that they have seriously thought where all this ends up.

Now, I don't know what is really going on in the Middle East. I don't know if the assassination of Soleimani is a good idea tactically or strategically. But I would say that when Iran-backed "protesters" attack the US embassy, which is a definite provocation and a jab in the ribs to US power, then the US needs to "send a message."

After all, the point of hierarchies is that the order of rank is understood by all and the hierarchy reduces violence and death. So that if someone in the order of rank jabs a chap higher up then the rules of hierarchy require that the higher-up chappie delivers a short, sharp lesson to the lower-down chappie. That restores the status quo ante and the peace of the hierarchy.

Of course, this may be rubbish. President Trump may indeed be stirring up a hornet's nest and starting a global thermonuclear war. You never know for sure.

But my instinct is that Iran cannot afford to torch the whole Middle East, because the outcome would, I suspect, involve the end of the current Iranian regime.

And now a word for you, Speaker Nance.

If you want to get advance word on US military strikes it might help if you weren't weakly allowing a left-wing-inspired impeachment of the president and going along with outrageous use of the intelligence community to bollix up a presidential election. Because when the House is impeaching the president, and when Democratic Party leaders seem to perfectly copacetic with spying on the opponent's campaign with the help of the intelligence community, I would say that it rather lowers the level of trust between the leader of the House and the President.

If you get my meaning, Speaker Nance.

And that is bad for America, Speaker Nance.

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!