Cloud People vs. Dirt People is Three Layer Too

I stumbled over Zman grumbling about Cloud People today and thought I'd better Google the Cloud People vs. Dirt People meme.

Why? Because I can't believe that it is really a two layer theory. There must be a third layer in there hiding. I thought.

The top billing on Google Search is a Medium piece by Dennis Price: "CLOUD PEOPLE, DIRT PEOPLE," in caps.

He describes the Cloud People as "generally" believing in:

• Open borders/ globalism
• Pro-choice
• Atheism
• Climate Change
• Pro-LGBTQ
• Pro Euthanasia
• Liberalism
• Big Government

And the Dirt People "generally believe" in:

• Controlled immigration/ nationalism
• Pro-Life
• Theism
• Climate Sceptic
• Traditional Family Structures
• Anti-Euthanasia
• Conservatism
• Small Government

So, his two layers pretty well equal Curtis Yarvin's Gentry and Commoners, and my Three Peoples Creatives and Responsibles.

Are there any other people? Sorta. He quotes Thomas Sowell on the bad effect of liberal policies on black people, and then suggests the notion that the Cloud People are interested in 

creating a sub-class of voters that are dependent on the State and therefore will always vote for the side of politics that will likely vote for the political wing that will perpetuate those systems.

So that agrees with Yarvin's Clients and my Subordinates. But then he heads off into reason and science vs. postmodernism and how postmodernism leads the Cloud People into a wilderness of lies.

Zman gets an entry on "Cloud People Blues" from June 2016 and then "A New World" in October 2016. But he has two pieces in 2015 on Cloud People: "The Cloud People" in January and "The Cloud People" in July. Thus:

The global elites are the cloud people. They float above us, detached from language, culture and history. They have no loyalty to a country or the people and traditions of a country. It’s like the British Raj. The people in charge are fine with the rest of us engaging in our quaint customs, as long as it does not interfere with their looting of the resources. When the ground people cause trouble, then the cloud people step in to remedy it.

So, at this point the Dirt People were still "ground people."

Whatabout the victims? In a reference to lefties and their notion of "alienation" he notes it didn't apply because:

the lower classes always had other primary identities that trumped all else. The neighborhood, the gang, rooting for a particular football team are all ways working men give their lives meaning.

They are, in fact, "sub-national."

It is interesting that both Price and Zman don't really show the lower classes as actors, but as adjuncts to the Cloud People.

And that accords with Yarvin's three layers and my Three Peoples. Yarvin's Clients are the clients of the Gentry. My Subordinates are subordinate to their lords. They do not act in society; other people act for them.

Now, I'd already put the Zman's theory in as a three layers theory with Dirt People as the lower class. That was wrong, and I'll fix it.

Why is Everyone Going Crazy?

Back in 2016 it was the Republican Party that got blindsided by a outside candidate, Donald Trump.

All the wise heads agreed that it just didn't make sense that everyone should be going crazy. Except it did make sense. Trump appeared and put himself at the head of a disorganized rabble of ordinary Americans, people that were neither educated swells or subordinate serfs: call them Responsibles, Commoners, Yeomen, whatever.

The point is that in the last 50 years the ruling class and the educated Gentry -- or Creative Class or clerisy -- has been implementing a cultural and political agenda that makes the ordinary American the scapegoat, because racist, sexist, homophobe. And Trump came along and made himself the leader of those selected to be scapegoats.

Today, in 2020, the Democratic Party is falling apart as Bernie Sanders, unreconstructed Sixties Commie, is the leading candidate for president. What is going on?

I mean, come on chaps! This is crazy! Nobody really believes that socialism works do they?

Sorry, but they do. And I would say that it is a consequence of the educated Gentry playing with gasoline for almost a century.

What the Democratic Party and the educated Gentry have been selling since, say FDR and the New Deal, is Oh No! We are not crazy lefty socialists, but boy, how you poor victims have been screwed by the system! And how about some free stuff if you vote for us!

The problem is, of course, that to win elections you have to promise free stuff, and the free stuff you handed out at the last election doesn't count.

As I say in my reductive Three Peoples theory and as Curtis Yarvin says in his three-layer theory, the current political setup is that the educated Gentry gets to occupy the commanding heights of the culture and education and the bureaucracy by organizing the Clients -- or victims or serfs -- against the ordinary middle who are racist sexist homophobes.

Plus, because the educated Gentry is also a kind of priesthood, a clerisy, it promulgates from a thousand cultural pulpits its religion of woke virtue. Due to the internal logic of such sermonizing you get to a point where ordinary Commoners that don't intone the correct responses to the Creed get named and shamed and shunned: canceled.

Now it is my belief that the current religion and culture of the educated Gentry is is fact a peculiarly nostaglic longing for the good old days, the prehistoric days: a Great Reaction. To use a Jungian notion, the educated Gentry is rediscovering the hidden harmonies and resonances of the old archetypes.

One of the points of the Jung doctrine was to say: don't you imagine that you are a modern that is all about logic and reason. Those ancient prehistoric archetypes are still at work in your unconscious mind, and don't you forget it.

Thus when I say that socialism is a return to slavery, I am saying that there is a peculiar satisfaction, if you are a notable in the Gentry, to ordering the plebs around.

When I say that the welfare state is a return to feudalism, I am saying that there is a peculiar satisfaction, if you are a functionary in the Deep State, to sashaying around like the local lord in caring for your flock of peasants.

When I say that activism is a replay of medieval knight-errantry, I mean that there is a peculiar frisson from pretending you are a brave revolutionary waving the flag of revolution on the barricades.

My belief is that the Left and its culture and its instantiation in the United States in the Democratic Party is a reactionary movement that is really cool for the educated Gentry, spending other peoples' money on themselves. But it is not good for the Commoners and Yeomanry.

And it is not good for the serfs, the Clients, the subordinates. Why? Because it does not help them master the Code of the City, that you leave the comforts of your ethnic tribe in the city ghetto and bravely, one step at a time, learn how to master life in the city as a contributor and cooperator in the market economy. The Gentry says to the victims, oh, don't worry about silly little things like getting a skill or learning how to be a good employee, or how to use the finance system. Just vote for us and we will take care of you.

Only the day comes, as it did for the white working class, when the Gentry reneges on its promise to its "Little Darlings" and leaves them by the side of the road. Sorry about that.

But that is not all.

The day also comes when the whole progressive project starts to split at the seams. You see that with Our Nance and Chuck the Schmuck. This week they are issuing crazy pronouncements blaming President Trump for his Coronavirus response. You mean, instead of going to the White House and saying: "Mr. President. How can we help!"

In other words, they don't have a clue what they are doing and where they are going. They are just reacting to the latest news and blaming it all on Trump.

Let us give the educated Gentry its due. Back in the day it made some kind of sense to imagine that the destiny of educated children of wealthy businessmen ought to be to help the workers in the city, who would otherwise die of "immiseration" among those Satanic mills.

Actually, they turned out to be wrong about that. The Industrial Revolution saved the peasants from starvation and gave them jobs in the cities and then the workers could climb up from being mere "hands" to a modest respectability as, in the 19th century, the Irish in America rose in half a century from "shanty Irish" to "lace-curtain Irish."

But whatabout the blacks? We need to give them their rights and end the shame and injustice of slavery and Jim Crow.

OK. Done that. Yes, but whatabout institutional racism, and disparity and exclusion? And toxic masculinity! And homophobia!

Oh yeah. I see. You chaps want a job. You want to maintain meaning in your Gentry lives. You are looking around you and want get your name up in lights again.

Well, now the whole project is in ruins. Actually, in this situation, Bernie Sanders makes sense. As developmental psychologists like Clare Graves and Don Beck and Ken Wilber say: when your life seems to be failing then you reset back to a lower developmental level. So if the woke-and-identity politics seems to be failing let's go back to the class politics of our fathers!

Of course, I know exactly what should happen next, because I am all-wise and all knowledgeable.

First, the educated Gentry should actually think about how to help the serfs, clients, and subordinates. My advice is to help them to get out of the victim culture and become Commoners and Yeomen and middle class.

Then, the educated Gentry should think about how to help the Commoners, Yeomen and deplorables. My advice is to help them imagine that they could step out of the set routines of middle-class life and become just a little bit creative. But nobody should pretend that the creative life is just a walk in the park.

Then, the educated Gentry should think about themselves. What does it actually mean to be woke and evolved and creative? My advice is that the real creative life is the life of the Sacrificial Hero, that descends into the underworld of the unconscious to confront the truth about himself, and if he survives that journey he may return to the world to live on the border between Chaos and Order and try to explore that terrifying land -- and hope that his experience will be a boon to his fellow humans. And to recognize that there will be no hosannas and statues and adoring crowds. In other words, better leave ambition and vanity and honor at the door.

But back to the excitement of today.

Conrad Black says that the Dems need to commit (temporary) suicide.

An ineluctable process of national political renovation is proceeding apace... the Democratic Party will... slouch off to Milwaukee to consummate temporary suicide, enabling a sensible resurrection worthy of that historically great party.

And if their wise heads plump on my suggestions above, then future generations will sing hosannas to their vision and their wisdom.

Another Three Layer Theory: From Joel Kotkin

Really, anybody that has half a brain understands human society in some kind of a three-layer theory. Now Joel Kotkin joins the party. In "The Two Middle Classes" he divides the middle class into clerisy and yeomanry. Then there are the serfs. Actually he also has a class of oligarchs on top. So does Curtis Yarvin with his three layers system. Thing is the top class, whether you call them oligarchs or ruling class, aren't a lot of people.

But Kotkin describes his clerisy in the same way that Yarvin describes his Gentry.

[T]he clerisy [is] a group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions, notably universities, media, the non-profit world, and the upper bureaucracy.

Just like Yarvin's Gentry. Back to the clerisy.

Although certainly not unanimous in their views, the clerisy generally favors ever-increasing central control and regulation...

Today’s clerisy are concentrated in professions whose numbers have grown in recent decades, including teaching, consulting, law, the medical field, and the civil service... Some professions that were once more closely tied to the private economy, such as doctors, have become subsumed by bureaucratic structures and—in the United States, at least—shifted from a dependable conservative lobby to an increasingly progressive one.

Yeah, like my yoga teacher, a retired physician.

At its apex, the clerisy today is made up largely of the well-educated offspring of the affluent. This class has become increasingly hereditary, in part due to the phenomena of well-educated people marrying each other—between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 – 48 percent.

That is one of the findings of Charles Murray in Coming Apart. But you knew that.

Enough about the bloody clerisy. Let's talk about the yeomanry.

The perspective of the traditional middle class [yeomanry] generally differs from that of the clerisy, and constitutes what Piketty labels the “merchant Right.” These people make their living in the marketplace, and that often places them in conflict with both the oligarchs, who continually seek to crush or absorb their businesses, or with the clerisy, which hands down environmental and other regulations that inhibit their activities. 

Yeah!

Now Kotkin has a basically pesssimistic outlook on things, that unless we do something...

An independent and assertive property-owning middle class that can thrive remains the only force able to challenge ever-growing centralization. Without them, there is likely no way to prevent a new feudal order from emerging in the future. As the radical social theorist Barrington Moore suggested a half-century ago, “no bourgeoisie, no democracy.” 

But I am more optimistic. That's because my world view says this essentially Marxian view, that the workers and the petite bourgeoisie will be "immiserated" as profit margins decline, has been proved wrong by history.

Why? Because the story of the last 200 years is that the forecast "immiseration" has always been liquidated by yet another technological revolution that upset the apple cart and removed the "ever-gowing centralization."

Of course, maybe This Time is Different, and we have reached the limit of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years in which real per-capita income in the rich countries has increased by 30 times.

But maybe not. And the truth is that nobody knows. The neighbor across the street is doing a fusion-power startup. And down in California Lockheed is doing the same. What happens if and when those chaps come on line? Does Google get even bigger, or does an ageing Google get pushed aside by the young upstarts figuring out how to leverage fusion power into the stratosphere and beyond?

And another thing. One of the problems with a clerisy sitting in the catbird seat protected by government power and perquisites is that it loses its sharpness. The whole point of going into the clerisy is to avoid the greater risks of the market system and its startup culture and Peter Thiel's Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. But that means that you are choosing the easy path instead of hiking out into the unknown.

It's a sensible choice, to stay safe. And most people that hike out into the startup jungle are never heard from again. But the ones that do make it change the world, and put the old oligarchy and its fawning clerisy out of business.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

You Get Revolution When...

The Z-man uses a software metaphor to explain revolution. A business creates a software system to implement its business processes, but then needs to modify it. At some point the system becomes too expensive to modify, so the business throws the old system out and buys or develops a new one. So it is in politics:

When the humans can no longer change the system or work around it efficiently, the users of the system start to question the system. 

Thus 2016 and Trump and 2020 and Bernie:

The first round of efforts to modify the existing system started in 2016 with the election of Trump. We’re seeing a second round now with the apparent nomination of Bernie Sanders as his challenger. Trump was always a reformer who believed in the fundamental integrity of the system. Sanders is a revolutionary who promises to first remove the legacy system. 

Sorry. Don't agree. I think that Bernie is a last ditch effort to pedal-to-the-metal the welfare state, to preserve the legacy system. If Medicare is good, Medicare for All is better. If subsidized college is good, then free college is better. Bernie is saying: let's just pour more money into the legacy system. It's worked all these years; why change now?

What Bernie is doing is exposing the lie at the heart of the welfare-state project. It was not about what is good for America and Americans but what it takes to win elections with free stuff.

As you can see from the chart, US government spending as a percent of the economy has gone about as far as it can go.

So, really, when Bernie is proposing to double down on everything from Medicare to the Green New Deal, he is really telling us the the game is over. Because the net effect of politics since 1980 is steady as she goes.

Now I believe what is happening is that Americans are being offered two futures, by two competing upper classes. The old future, represented by the Democratic Party and the educated gentry is the old game of the Gentry combining with the lower-class Clients to loot the Commoners. Loot in return for votes. The new future, represented by Trump, is for the Commoners to rebel against the old system and demand that their Commoner concerns and aspirations be addressed. Something that the old Republican Party was failing to do.

But, the question is, can the Commoners possibly win this game, when you consider that the whole educated Gentry would get totally screwed if politics in the US were reoriented towards the needs of the Commoners? No doubt the Gentry would fight to the last Client in order to keep their privileges and authority and feed their ambitions to be the wise rulers teaching the deplorables their needed daily lesson.

But then you look at the chart above and see that government spending has gone about as furr as it can go. Are the American people -- those suburban moms -- really going to vote for a massive increase in government spending? Probably not, unless you can stampede them into believing that the planet is about to die.

See my analysis of politics so far is that the creative class, the educated Gentry, has been running for the last century on the idea that, oh, we are the guys that care about the helpless victims, the workers, the women, the blacks, the immigrants, the homeless.

That line was gold when the vast majority of Americans were indeed workers struggling up through the industrial revolution. And, in the post-WWII world, the program adapted to the workers as they became suburban home-owners.

But since the Civil Rights revolution the gentry game has been to give free stuff to minorities -- and now immigrants -- out of the hide of the white working class, which is now really the Commoner class.

Back in the day the Republican Party was a Gentry party of the educated and the fairly well-to-do that was arguing for moderation in the expansion of government. It accepted the premise of benefits for the workers, but not so fast that it wrecked the economy.

But Trump has reinvented the Republican Party into a Commoner party that is saying: why should we Commoners pay for you Gentry to bribe your Client voters with our lives and our money?

So US politics has been transformed into Commoners-stick-together against the century-old coalition of educated Gentry and Clients.

I'd say the situation is that the Democrats are beside themselves; they really do not have a clue what to do next. Because all of them are apparatchiks of the old order, where you offered a little bit more free stuff to the Clients, and that was enough to get you over the finish line, most of the time. And don't forget the Irving Kristol rule that you must deal in the middle class if you want to help the poor.

Notice something? The Dems have stopped dealing in the middle class. Because Medicare for All doesn't offer anything to the middle class; instead it takes away their health insurance for... Yes, for what exactly?

But why? Why would the Dems do this?

Well, I think it is because in any ruling class, or any corporate hierarchy, the guys that understood what they are doing are the founders -- of the state or of the corporation. The chaps that come along later and step into the slots created by the founders know how to check the boxes and how to recite the anthems, but they don't know why. And so when they turn the dials and press the buttons and nothing happens, they really don't know what to do next.

So Bernie is punching his buttons, and Joe is punching his buttons, and the others are punching various buttons they learned from the Elders. And nothing is working.

What they need is someone that knows what he is doing.

Everyone thinks that Trump is an idiot, and is fumbling and stumbling like an amateur and really does not know what he is doing. Or maybe he got lucky. Maybe.

But if I were a Dem I would tell everyone I know to cut the crap and assume that Trump does know what he is doing.

And I believe that the future of politics in the advanced countries is going to be Commoners-stick-together. Oh, and any of you Clients that want to join us Commoners, come on in; the water's fine.

Hey, it makes sense. Commoners are the majority. They oughta have a politics that responds to their needs.

Democracy, dontcha know.

Don't Panic! I Say Bring Bernie On!

It looks like all the usual suspects are panicking, as usual. And none more so than your regular Democratic operatives with bylines in the media. (Imagine! Wikipedia actually has that!)

OK. So I panicked for a moment. But then I thought, hey, we gotta fight this battle sooner or later. And really what better with a moonbat like Bernie Sanders going up against a street-fighter like Donald Trump?

I was to yoga this morning and what do you think? Jim the yoga teacher was all embarrassed about President Trump mispronouncing the name of the guy that brought yoga to the West. Well, I doubt if the 100,000 Indians at the cricket stadium -- what? there's a 100,000 seat cricket stadium? -- were too worried about that! Turning the tables, I think that there is something charming about furriners trying to pronounce Anglo-Saxon names. But at least they tried!

But notice what my liberal yoga pal did not talk about. Bernie. Oh, last week, before the Mike the Tyke debate rout and the Nevada rout, he was mumbling about Bloomberg or something.

Here are a few Good Things about a possible Bernie nomination:

• It would teach all those nice suburban women a lesson. You girls ready for Bernie to take your health insurance away? Your SUV? Make higher education free so that your professional income can't compete against bright students with less money than you?
• It would teach those twentysomething kids a lesson. Yeah kids! Americans don't like socialism. So why don't you grow up!
• It would give America's gun owners a reason to show up and vote.
• It would make it harder for nice moderate Democrats to win in nice moderate suburban districts. Remember how all those nice moderate candidates in 2018 were going to vote against Pelosi? Hey girls! Cat got your tongue?
• It would permit eevil right-wing racist-sexist-homophobes like me to say forever after that, back in 2020, America was offered socialism and it voted it down (I hope) 60-40.
• It would help the next Clinton to move to the center and declare on a stack of Bibles that he was a New Democrat and utterly rejected the divisive politics of Bernie.
• It might even roll back the identity politics/intersectional priests and their ilk. For a while.
• It might help President Trump clean out the Swamp in his second term.
• It would make Florida red. Those Cuban-Americans aren't going to take Bernie lying down.
• And so on.

Of course, socialism is personal for me. My dad was born and raised in Russia and escaped in 1918 at the age of 16 ten feet ahead of the Bolsheviks.

Shall we rehearse my anti-socialist notions, just for fun? First there are the Four Laws.

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises).  

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek)  

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler).  

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

I think that is perfectly clear, don't you? And if you don't understand the first law, about prices, then you really don't get it. Prices, you see, are perhaps the most amazing cultural invention of humans ever. Prices enable us -- even the poorest -- to broadcast to the world what we are willing to exchange in the moment to moment dance of social cooperation, and for what value in exchange. It is what enables the unfathomable complexity of the market economy to function at all. The reason that socialism fails every time it is tried is because, under socialism, the consumers don't get a chance of feedback, to signal to the producers what they want -- or what they can be persuaded to want -- and what they are willing to pay.

Do you think that is enough? No. I think we need to mention the Great Reaction, the mad reactionary enthusiasm among lefties for the old days.

Socialism is a return to slavery;  

the welfare state is a return to feudalism;  

identity politics is neo-tribalism; 

reparations is neo-vengeance;  

activism is part medieval knight-errantry, part pro-regime street-thuggery, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a play;  

helpless victims are a return to sacrifice,  

social justice is good old loot and plunder.

 I'm sure the list isn't really exhaustive. But I'm working on it.

It all comes down to this, my US Politics in Four Lessons:

The American People are the best people in the world. 

The USA is the best country in the world. 

When you lose a normal change election you concede with a good grace. 

Anyone that accuses someone of being a racist is a monster.

Anyway. I am sure that Brad Parscale and the boys are busy working on the framework of a campaign against Bernie. 

And I am sure that President Trump is up to the challenge.

In face, think about it. What GOP nominee of the last 50 years is better adapted to run a campaign against a socialist and win? OK. Maybe Ronald Reagan.

Suppose We are Approaching the End of the Age of Politics

Here's what I think is interesting:

• That about 250 years ago slavery became scandalous. Then we had the two biggest slave states in history. What was that all about?
• That about 150 years ago war became pointless. Then we had the two biggest wars in history. What was that all about?
• That about 250 years ago educated gentry decided that government power could and should be limited. Now we have the biggest governments ever that supervise endless details of people's lives. What's that all about?

I think that, following Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution, the sign that an age is ending is a frantic effort to keep it going, no matter what. That is, when you need a Reign of Terror to keep your movement going then your movement has a problem.

Let's recall slavery. We've all been carefully taught to hate and to fear slavery. But the fact is that 1,000 years ago it was ubiquitous. Viking society was divided into earls, peasants, and "thralls." Thralls were slaves. And the Vikings had a grand old time trading in slaves, from Dublin to the Volga River. At that time in England, according to Danziger and Lacey in The Year 1000, you, as a serf, could make yourself into a slave -- and the three squares that came with it -- by kneeling before your lord and placing your hands within his. And, if you want to know, the Venetians and Genoese did a grand trade in shipping Circassian beauties to the harems of the Middle East. And, I believe, the Circassian beauties were often sold by their families to the slave traders. Then, you may say, a curious thing happened. Slavery started to pay, as Venetian capitalists started slave sugar plantations on Cyprus. And then slave sugar spread west to the Atlantic, and then South America, and then, in 1640, the Brits got into the sugar slave game on Barbados. A grand old time was had by all except the slaves for about a century until, with the rise of evangelical Christianity and William Wilberforce, plantation slavery became a scandal. And we the US had the granddaddy of all civil wars over slavery. And then socialism inspired the two biggest slave states in history. You know who they were.

Today, of course, everyone hates slavery with a passion. Only, some people say that we are enslaved to our worker-bee corporate jobs, and work harder than any humans in history. What's that all about?

Let's think about war. Let's admit it: war was ubiquitous since whenever, whether it was hunter-gatherers contesting territory, or marcher lords patrolling the borders of feudal agricultural empires, or the Romans marching their legionaries all over the Mediterranean area, or the Frenchies and the Swedes marching all over the German lands in the 17th century. The trade of high-status males was war. And everyone down to male serfs was likely to get involved in the lord's nice little wars. Then, of course, the northwest Europeans conquered the world, starting in 1492. Europeans completely took over North America in flat-out conquest. And dominated the Central and South Americas without actually killing off the inhabitants. But then a funny thing happened. The Brits went to India and didn't really conquer it. They just wanted to trade, and keep the native princes from their traditional loot and plunder. And when it came to China, the westerners couldn't or didn't want to get anything more than a foothold in China and demand the right to have treaty ports where they could trade with the Chinese interior. Then we had Napoleon wrecking French primacy in Europe with his abortive conquest of Russia. But Bismarck cleverly united Germany with three finely sewn wars against Denmark, Austria and France. Then we had the reign of the idiots and World War I and II. What were they thinking?

I don't think we have really begun to process what has happened to the war culture over the last two centuries. Except that war really is not the cosy thing it used to be back in the day when the Franks did a nice bit of loot and plunder every year beyond the eastern borders of the Frankish empire.

And now politics. Politics used to be a natural hierarchical thing, with the king the lord of his lands, and everybody in their place beneath him. The king was mainly concerned with keeping his barons in check, and the barons mainly concerned with keeping their yeomen and serfs in their place. The fact is that political power had a limited reach because it lacked the technology to extend its power. But then, during the second millennium, an idea began to grow about limiting political power. First the barons pushed back against the king in Magna Carta. Then came all the theories of politics from chaps like Montesquieu proposing a division of powers between various political sectors that got instantiated in the US Constitution. What was that all about? And then we get what I call the Great Reaction of the last 160 years in which rich-kid sons of bnourgeois businessmen and merchants developed a theory of totalitarian unification of all human sectors: religion, politics, and economics, under a single leader, in which all life was militarized into a quasi-military hierarchy under a Great Leader. We have, now, the idea of the great war leader extended into all areas of life, so that administrative and hierarchical power from the top is concerned in all areas of life, political, economic, and religious/cultural.

I have a whole jumble of ideas about this, but I have an overall notion that politics is past its sell-by date, that we don't really need a vast political-ideological structure, that the human future is something completely different. And I believe that the current frenzy in the educated gentry for political and ideological power is a sign of the end of the political era. See, I don't think we need powerful muscular political institutions. Modern people are remarkably pliable and cooperative; they don't need a blow in the solar plexus to teach them a lesson. They respond pretty well to the social and economic cues they get from the people they interact with in day-to-day life. It is a conceit in the educated gentry, in my view, to think that the power and wisdom of the educated gentry is needed to keep us all from falling into a dark place of hate and bigotry and exploitation and poverty.

They say that every human generation thinks it is living in the end times of irreversible decadence, and that strong action is needed to reverse the slide. Probably not.

What is probably true is that the world is heading towards a future that nobody has a clue about. And that, indeed is scary. But the chances are that our descendants with muddle through. Imagine that!

But meanwhile we have to get through the current mania in the Democratic Party -- symbolized by unreconstructed lefty Bernie Sanders -- to have comprehensive and mandatory administrative solutions for everything for all time. Which is merely to say that the mess that comprehensive and mandatory administrative solutions have created in our society is reaching the crisis point, and that comprehensive and mandatory solutions for everything have reached their sell-by date.

Suffering, Religion, History, and the Three Peoples

According to Nietzsche, the Eternal Recurrence is the end point of decadence, the decline from growth and optimism. When you start to fall away from the faith of the fathers, then you get to nihilism, where you don't believe in anything. Then you get to the Eternal Recurrence, where your life is a meaningless repeat, day after day: Groundhog Day.

But in The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History Mircea Eliade tells a different story. For him, the Eternal Return is a way, invented by our ancestors, of dealing with the unbearable suffering of life by escaping from history, and it is characteristic of all primitive peoples, pre Axial Age.

[S]uffering proceeds from the magical action of an enemy, from the breaking a taboo, from entering a baneful zone, from the anger of a god -- and when all other hypotheses have proven insufficient -- from the will or the wroth of the Supreme Being. (p.97) The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

But, in addition, primitive man escapes from history, the whole miserable story of endless suffering, with the Eternal Return, the annual renewal of the world in New Year celebrations, which erase the past and starts the world anew with a celebration that both marks a return to the chaos before the Creation and celebrates a new creation in the New Year.

You can see that this attitude survives into the modern era in the belief systems of the People of the Subordinate Self or Yarvin's Clients. Our lower classes attribute their sufferings to the malevolence of employers and billionaires. Or Jews, according to taste. And our periodic elections provide a chance for a new beginning, a Time for a Change, or Hope and Change, endlessly recycling without end.

Notice how this approach conflicts with Nietzsche. According to him, the Eternal Recurrence is the end point of decadence and failure and meaninglessness: really dumb. According to Eliade, the Eternal Return is an attempt to erase the eternal sufferings of life and begin anew: pretty clever.

Now, according to Eliade, when we get to the Axial Age religions, the priests are now trying to deal with history instead of hiding from it. Well, almost.

[History] can be tolerated because it is known that, one day or another, it will cease. History is thus abolished, not through consciousness of living in an eternal present... nor by means of a periodically repeated ritual... [as with primitives;] it is abolished in the future.

But the point is that, at some point, all the sufferings, i.e., history, will end. Yay!

Now, in Eliade's account, the question of "sin" arises when, e.g., with the Children of Israel, the prophets start selling the idea that the misfortunes of the Israelites are a consequence of them losing their faith in God.

Through their terrifying visions the prophets but confirmed and amplified Yahweh's ineluctible chastisement upon His people who had not kept the faith.

Do you see what is going on here? All of a sudden "the priests" are demanding that people take responsibility for their actions. You fall off the wagon, pal, and disaster will ensue. In other words, the Israelites are now supposed to be People of the Responsible Self, responsible for their lives before God and not mere helpless thralls that go crawling to the sorcerer or sacrificing the firstborn to the Supreme Being when things go wrong.

Note that Nietzsche excoriates "the priests" for teaching us to hate ourselves. But on Eliade's version, the priests are merely asking us to take responsibility for our lives, that our suffering is not the result of "the magical action of an enemy" but our own faults and sins. Got it, Fritzi?

OK. Whatabout our pals the People of the Creative Self? Where do they get off in this battle of the intellectual giants. Perfectly simple.

Nietzsche is telling us that we need to be free spirits, strong, growing, fearless. Willing to take the rough with the smooth, indeed actually seeking out challenge and difficulty. He is saying that we should stop whining about suffering, and trying to hide from history. Be a Man. That is what Nietzsche is saying.

Now it may be that the Nietzschean ideal is not just Übermensch, over-man, but beyond-man, that it challenges us to be something that is really beyond the capabilities of humans. That we cannot forget our sufferings and our fears, and need the comforts of the Eternal Return of the primitives or the Eternal Rest of eternity after history has ended.

And you may say that the collapse of Nietzsche into madness in 1890 proves this. Nietzsche, despite all his bold writing, could not really deal with the ideal he had conjured up. He set up his ideal of the man that lives without the comforts of home and the promise of paradise, but in the end couldn't live up to his ideal.

And you may say that our own overlords, the People of the Creative Self and Yarvin's Gentry, are jolly good at thinking up rules and standards for us Normals to live up to. But when it comes to themselves, the law doesn't apply to them. Any backtalk from the deplorables is rejected as racist-sexist-homophobic hate.

All true. But I think that it just shows that the Creative Turn is a lot more difficult and challenging than we first thought, back in the day when we special people decided that God is Dead.