Three Peoples Religion -- Script

Hello, I'm Chris Chantrill, and let's talk about my Three Peoples -- about their religions.

In the last section I introduced by reductive Three Peoples theory and its three kinds of people. 

There are People of the Subordinate Self that experience themselves as helpless victims that need to adhere to a powerful lord. There are People of the Responsible Self that experience themselves as responsible workers and householders called to make the best of life according by using their talent in the market economy. Then there are People of the Creative Self that believe they are called to make the world anew.

But what of their religions? Because everybody has a religion, especially people that insist they don't.

I argue that the People of the Subordinate Self experience God as a powerful and unpredictable lord to whom they must sacrifice and subordinate in order to enjoy his patronage and avoid his wrath.

I argue that the People of the Responsible Self experience God as the creator of the world and the maker of divine law that humans are called to observe. It is up to humans to responsibly use the created world that God has provided and to follow his divine law that tells them how to wive and thrive.

I argue that the People of the Creative Self experience themselves as God, for they are called to create the world anew. There are two strategies for this. One is the way of the Egoist Hero that creates a new world in his own image. The other is the way of the Sacrificial Hero that creates a new world through an internal journey into his unconscious and that sacrifices his life on the border between Order and Chaos.

It is the beginning of wisdom to understand that different people have different religions, and different ways of understanding the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Of course they do.

And it is a madness of enthusiasts down the ages to demand that everyone profess the enthusiasts' religion, or else.

We shall next see that all the problems of the world are caused by Egoist Heroes, their self-centered religion, the Activist Culture and how their religion results in the Great Reaction that is the source of most of the troubles in the world.

I'm Chris Chantrill, and thanks for watching.

Ch1: Curtis Yarvin's "Gray Mirror" Project

The polymath Curtis Yarvin, smart Jewish kid that blogged for years as Mencius Moldbug and created Urbit, a new software environment, is at it again. He is writing "Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince" that proposes a politics for the 21st century.

But Yarvin is writing his book online, using Substack, "a place for independent writing." So you get to read the first two chapters of Gray Mirror on Substack for free. And then you can pay $22 for a subscription, or wait until the book comes out. I paid my $22 because I am fascinated by Yarvin, and think his ideas, right or wrong, should make you think. He certainly makes me think.

But Yarvin issues a dire warning. If you subscribe, he says, he'll send the fragments of his book to you by email. But:

If you forward them, kittens will die. If I violate the sanctity of your email, my kittens will die.

Oh no!

However, I assume that it is OK to analyze and discuss what Yarvin has written. So here goes on the first installment, "#1. A General Theory of Collaboration."

Back in the day, maybe, people could just hide from the world. But now in 2020 "everyone is relevant" and "everyone is either a collaborator or a dissident." with respect to political power.

Everything is about power. Everything has to have a side. Everyone knows what side they should pick. Pick it—and you're a collaborator. Reject it—a dissident.

It's a "total state" where everything is about power and everybody has to care. But if, as Yarvin proposes, the current regime is "broken, cannot be fixed, and merits neither your fealty nor your odium," and you should be neither collaborator or dissident, then what?

"Detachment," that's what. It's the strategy of Czech dissident Vaclav Havel. The strategy for people who wish to be free of their enslavement, as collaborators or dissidents in the total state, is this:

First, they must teach themselves to be powerless. They must fully inhabit their private irrelevance. Above all, they must stop trying to change the world.

So, in this, Yarvin is congruent with me, for I say that the important thing to understand about the modern world is that power is no longer that important, because wealth is no longer in land, but in peoples' minds, and you can't loot and plunder minds like you can good food-growing land. In fact, if you want to enjoy the fruits of peoples' minds you would want to fertilize and water those minds rather than plunder them.

Now it is time for a Three Phase history. Pre-civilized societies were total states, says Yarvin, because everyone was relevant. But then came pre-modern civilization:

[These] were partial states, in which power only concerned a small set of rulers, or regime. Everyone else was a subject[.]

But now, since Gutenberg and especially since the Internet, everyone is connected, everyone is relevant. And everyone has to love the regime: back to the future.

But power is insecure. That is why it wants us to love it. And the worse it gets the more it wants us to love it. "The closer a regime feels itself to death, the worse its behavior must become."

Sound familiar?

Our big problem in the current moment, says Yarvin, is the power leak, that "confers sovereign power on an individual or institution not formally entrusted with it." It is all around us, with lobbyists, corporations, non-profit groups that have power without responsibility. Unaccountable power is evil.

The point is, if I get it, that in any society beyond a hunter-gatherer band, there must be a regime and subjects, because the society is too big for everyone to be totally relevant like they are in a prehistoric society. In other words, ours is a society with "power leaks" in which people get to feel good because they have appropriated power from the regime. In fact we merely contribute to the gathering incompetence of the regime. Like right now.

So Yarvin wants an "ultramodern partial state" where we honestly admit to having officials with power and subjects without it -- and no power leaks. But that's OK, because

There are two principal advantages of a well-designed partial state. First: it tends to work much better. Second: its subjects, since their opinions don’t matter at all, can think and say what they want.

But what if the officials oppress the subjects? You mean like right now? Exactly. what could be worse than the current dysfunctional regime and its general incompetence? And if power is not really that important anyway, and not something that really benefits anyone, well, why not be "detached" and get on with life? 

For instance, you could spend five years on a disquisition about politics and power, in Unqualified Reservations, then invent a whole new software universe, like Urbit, and when you have got Urbit pretty well up and running, you take off and write a book about the new ultramodern partial state that is to come.

Interestingly, Yarvin is proposing what the Zman is writing about today, about people being unplatformed. Zman says: Don't fight back. "When you engage with them, you are giving them oxygen."

The way forward is to reduce the number of contacts between them and us.

In other words, "detachment." 

The Woke Contradiction in CorporateLand

Trying to keep up with the tech Joneses I get a email from Benedict Evans that tells me about the latest and greatest in the tech universe. A couple of days ago his email had two links that illustrate the cultural contradictions in the culture of Tech Land.

One of the links is about Apple, and the extraordinary vision and determination at Apple: "Apple's Relentless Strategy, Execution, and Point of View." Stephen Sinovsky, a Microsoft veteran, compares and contrasts Apple's execution that seems to care little for its installed base, but goes where others fear to tread. While Microsoft is all about serving its corporate customers that want a stable platform. Apple's approach is:

• Fearless multi-year strategy
• Clear unified planning/prioritization
• Wildly unprecedented execution

In other words, "the people at Apple are amazing. Yes everyone says that and believes that but boy everyone at Apple is the world’s best at their thing." And when Apple changes the technology, as they are now moving their Macbook laptops off Intel, they change it. If you want to come along, great.

But at Microsoft, Sinovsky says, 

It is literally impossible to end something at Microsoft. I can’t tell you how many times I (or we) tried. A running joke was how long the Excel team kept doing bug fixes on OS/2 Excel for a European bank. It was long after no one used OS/2 (except that bank).

So, Apple is like explorers in the desert. They just go on, fearlessly and creatively.

But then all these techies are all-in on woke politics. Read about Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer. He's commenting on "a good deal of employee backlash to Mark's decision to leave President Trump's posts about Minnesota protesters up." Says he:

Obviously the events of the last few weeks have had a disproportionately negative impact on anyone who's personally experienced or been afraid of experiencing violence at the hands of police, discrimination, bias either in the world or at work. We've been having a lot of hard conversations over the last few weeks with lots of people who are sharing their story, their experience, how these events have touched or triggered them and wanting to know that the company sides with them as individuals, sides with the ideals of better racial justice and equality, and that we're doing whatever we can to further connection and cohesiveness in the world. It's been a tumultuous few weeks, and I think understandably so, particularly for friends and colleagues in the Black community.

See, I don't believe this. I don't believe that anyone working at Facebook has seriously experienced "violence at the hands of police." I just don't. Because people that work at Facebook are good little girls and boys that never blotted their copybooks in their lives. The are absolute team players, dedicated to the sort of culture they have at Apple: to be the best in the world at what they do. I think that Facebook employees feel all this triggering and racial justice and equality because that is what good little girls and boys in the educated Gentry are taught in their Woke Bible classes.

Because the guys that need to beware of police violence are guys like the drugged George Floyd with a violent criminal record and children from several women left behind. Or the drunk Rayshard Brooks, who broke away from police when he realized that he was going to be arrested and imprisoned.

It is a fatuous conceit for the good little girls and good little boys at Facebook to imagine themselves in danger from police violence. It is virtue signaling. It is social-moralizing. It is nice church ladies gasping to each other about the horrors of life in the lower orders.

The fact is that we have police to isolate the function of keeping order, and keeping the lower orders from breaking the peace in the city; that is what it takes for ordinary commerce to proceed in peace. Or, to put it in a less anodyne way, we have police to do the dirty work of knocking the heads of knuckleheads so we don't have to.

The alternative is, well, the Montagues and Capulets of Verona. No police there, so you have the notables of each big family keeping order. Only, there is the problem of the notables of the other families in town, and you know what they are all about. In our modern era with police, the notables aren't in conflict with each other. But instead we have the criminal gangs of the ethnic groups presently in the middle of adapting to life in the city and not yet transitioned to the middle class. So, back in the day, we had the young swells of the Montagues and Capulets having a bit of a rumble. In Leonard Bernstein's time we had the Sharks and the Jets going at it.  Now we have black gangs and Salvadorean gangs and young punks blowing each other away in cities like Chicago every weekend. And now Seattle.

But our wokey corporate good little boys and good little girls literally know nothing of all this. How could they? They spend their lives on video games and social media. And instead of actually reading a book, they get nothing beyond the woke ideological indoctrination they get at school from the educated Gentry.

The tech people are brilliant when it comes to stuff they know, like tech. They are utterly clueless when it comes to culture and politics. And the "internal contradictions" of the current woke culture are going to bite them, sooner or later.

Want to know why? It arises out of my maxim, that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." The educated Gentry has been executing on a monstrous program of injustice, injustice to ordinary Commoners so they can feel good about bringing justice to the traditionally marginalized. They are absolutely blind to the truth that, when you are patting yourself on the back for fighting for justice, you haven't really thought that maybe, yes maybe, your noble quest to bend the arc of history towards justice may instead be creating new injustice, and doing the opposite of what you imagine.

Codex of Preferred Progressive Pejoratives

The following is a Codex, manually assembled from Ancient Progressive Manuscripts and diverse Instructions to the Faithful and brought into the public square for public information and education.

Item	Explanation	Applies to:	Toxicity
Racist	One who does not profess enthusiastically and support the orthodox progressive doctrine on race, mostly as it applies to Americans descended from people enslaved by the tribes of West Africa and sold to European slave traders.	Whites1	Very high
Sexist	One who does not profess enthusiastically and support the orthodox progressive doctrine on sex or gender, particularly one who does not bend the knee to educated American women.	White Males2	High
Homophobe	One who does not profess enthusiastically and support the orthodox doctrine on non-heterosexual identity and activity, particularly as it relates to homosexuals and lesbians.	Straight White Males	High
Transphobe	One who does not profess enthusiastically and support the orthodox doctrine on transsexual identity and activity, particularly as it relates to young people "transitioning."	Hetero-sexuals	High
Xenophobe	One who expresses skepticism about immigration and who mentions the word "border" or "illegal immigrant".	Patriotic Americans	High
Islamophobe	One who worries about "terrorism."	Patriotic Americans	High
Fascist	One who fails enthusiastically endorse the progressive political enthusiasm of the moment.	Non-Left Person	Medium
Nazi, Hitler	One who has just won an argument against a progressive. See Godwin's Law.	Non-Left Person	Medium
Bigot	A general term of abuse against one who might not profess enthusiastically and support an unspecified item of progressive secular-religious orthodoxy.	Religious Believer	Medium
Hater	One who does not hate the haters that all progressives rightly hate.	Unspecified	Medium
Science Denier	One who fails to enthusiastically endorse the progressive political position on progressive planetary prophecy.	Oil Co. Grantee	Medium

Notes:

1. Progressives of European descent are not included in this category.

2. Not even progressive white males are exempt.

The Conflict of Interest of the Educated Gentry

One of my notions, coming out of my reductive Three Peoples theory, is that life for the People of the Creative Self is not easy.

Of course, I do not mean that their physical life is hard, but that the agenda of each person that desires to be creative is daunting.

We can show that by comparison with the others of the Three Peoples. If you are a Subordinate then all you have to do is suck up to your lord, and if things go wrong it is his fault. If you are a Responsible then all you have to do is follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. In both cases you go along to get along, presuming that is the way to survive and prosper.

But the essence of the life of the Creative person is to create something new. This is hard, very hard. We know, from the experience of artists and of people that start new businesses, that almost all creative endeavors fail.

What do humans do when facing failure? We tend to cheat. So if you are a Subordinate you probably steal from your lord or your employer. If you are a Responsible you don't always follow the rules or work as hard as you might.

Whatabout the Creatives? In this case, you might fake up some routine project as creative. Or you force your creativity on the rest of mankind.

In the fake department I like to use the example of LGBT. Everyone is interested in sex. So almost anyone can think up some lame way to be creative about sex. But the real program of sex is to bond with a person of the opposite sex and create children and a family and a home and stick to it through thick and thin. Anything else is really just faking it, taking the easy way out.

So a lot of what we call "creative" is not really creative at all, but people playing at being creative.

But then there is the other way, to force your creative project on the rest of mankind. Here's trivial example, how the educated class has mucked around with the regulation of automobiles: first it was gas mileage, then it was crash protection, then it was ethanol, then it was ASS, automated engine start/stop. But ethanol makes engines run hotter, which uses up old cars faster. 

Then you could be a health-science professional and order people around with creative ideas about how to fight epidemics.

Or you could be an environmental scientist and order people around with creative ideas about how to save the planet.

My point is that the regulation of cars and fuels, and the regulation of health care -- and the whole environmental game -- is all about the educated class having a creative project to work on. And it has to be backed by force, otherwise failed ideas would never get implemented or, if implemented, soon discarded. And then the educated gentry in question wouldn't feel creative.

To me, the whole project of the left suffers from this problem, going back at least to Marx. Hey, the fathers have been screwing things up since forever. So now we educated youth have a new idea, to end centuries of oppression and domination. And we demand the right to impose this idea on the rest of you, by force.

Put that way, it looks absurd. But it never occurs to the young sprouts full of rage.

Hey Uncle Joe! How yer doin', pal?

Now, it is my contention that most of the glorious moral and political advances of history are not glorious and moral at all, but just an adjustment responding to the fact that the old way just does not pay.

For instance, the change from sacrificing the first-born to sacrificing a goat. From sacrificing domestic animals to sacrificing the Son of God so the rest of us don't have to. Not moral; just practical.

Changing from the rule of the fathers and the conflict of the tribes to the state with its monopoly of violence, encoded in our time with police forces. Not a moral advance, just practical common sense.

Switching from slave labor and from serfdom to free labor. Not moral, but practical because free labor is more profitable to all concerned.

Emancipation of women. Not moral but practical because women aren't needed to birth lots of kids and spend their lives preparing and preserving food. They could do other things.

The next thing, I think, is the reduction of the administrative state and the rule of the educated gentry that makes them creative and important. Not because the administrative state is immoral and the educated gentry have a conflict of interest but because, first, the administrative state does not pay. And the educated gentry could be doing more productive things than ordering us all around in a pandemic. and sending their children to mostly peacefully protest about issues that were decided half a century ago.

But, but! What would the educated gentry do then, poor things?

Exactly, they would have to face up to the real challenge of all creative endeavor, that they are probably not creative enough, and not courageous and not persevering enough to get much beyond having a creative idea or two that they fail to develop and bring to fruition.

And then there is my bigger theory, that we are in the twilight of the political era, die Politischedämmerung, because, with our market economy and its trust culture, we really don't need much policing and administrating, except for the few people that haven't yet got with the program. And for them we need a few of Dickens' Inspector Buckets to tap their noses and straighten out the thugs and malingerers.

But whenever humans enter a new era we seem to have to go through a period of transition where some reactionary movement falls in love with the past and pushes the pedal to the metal trying to revive the old days. Like our lefty friends and their Great Reaction.

Like right now.

I Wonder What Women "Expect" on Currrent Mostly Peaceful Protest

It is a basic point of my philosophy that to ask, as Oscar Wilde did (or was it Sigmund Freud), "What Do Women Want," misses the point.

It is not What Women Want, but What Women Expect. If you don't instinctively know that you don't know nuttin'.

And what women expect, in particular, is they expect to be protected. If the men don't protect them then they will find other protectors. This is evoked most clearly in the book A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous. This Anonymous was actually a 30-year-old woman journalist, and she was writing about being a woman in Berlin in the two months from May to July 1945.

You may recall, or you may have read, that the Women in Berlin had a bit of a problem in May 1945. Their men were all imprisoned in POW cages all over Germany and they were left alone to face the occupying Russians.

So what did they do? They sought out the highest rank of Red Army officer suitable to their age and beauty to be their lover and protector. Of course they did.

One good thing they did. They put the teenaged girls in the attic during the two months that Berlin was under the martial law of the Red Army.

So I wonder what the women of Seattle and indeed all progressive cities all across America right now "expect" in regards to their protection.

See, I think that it is one thing to put out a Black Lives Matter yard sign outside your North Seattle house. It is another thing for Karen to realize that the police may not come to protect her if she is attacked by AntiFa thugs and she calls 911. Or if the local gang enforcer turns up at the door demanding money for the protection of home and hearth. That's what's been going down in the CHAZ/CHOP zone down in Capitol Hill in Seattle.

So I am keeping my ear to the ground, listening to the women as they complain to each other in the manifestation of the Women's Culture of Complaint. Are they saying to each other "I can't believe they let those protesters get away with trashing the whole neighborhood." Or, "I can't believe the way they let the homeless camp all over the city." Or what?

My point is that the Women's Gossip Network does not operate according to the progressive culture of mostly peaceful protest and intimidation. It operates in the one-on-one conversations of women in neighborhoods.

And all of a sudden, if you are a politician, you wake up in the morning to find that the universe changed. Because the organic consensus of the women's gossip network has changed social reality.

I wonder if this will play out in the election in November. I wonder if women will be saying one thing to their liberal friends, but another thing in the ballot box. I wonder if it is one thing to repeat after me Black Lives Matter but another thing to feel unprotected from rioters and looters.

Honestly, I don't know how this will turn out. 

I do believe this, that the Nancy Pelosis and Chuck Schumers are in a half panic because they need to stay one step ahead of the mob which really wants to kick them out and make the Democratic Party into a truly woke and truly progressive party at last. And the more that they veer left the more it means that the Republican Party will be the only party for ordinary Commoners that just want to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.

Toppling Statues: The Problem with Iconoclasm

Back in the day, "iconoclasm" -- the destruction of icons -- was considered a Bad Thing. But now that the progressive mob is pulling down statues of everyone from confederate generals to Saint Junípero Serra, it's all in a good cause.

Of course, I am completely opposed to the destruction of monuments. Hey, I was to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece last year. And do you know why it survived? Because they had an earthquake in 373 BC that buried the temple. Then the Roman Emperor Theodosius I had the temple destroyed in 390 AD in the name of Christianity. And so the temple lay buried under a village until the German and French archaeologists came along in the 19th century with the idea to dig it up.

The reason I don't like destroying monuments is because I am really interested in how ancient and not so ancient peoples thought and acted. Of course, they were dreadfully ignorant, darling, but what can you say?

Actually, they were all people of their time. And when we think about anyone in high politics -- and you'd have to be a Somebody to have a monument built to commemorate you -- he or she is probably pretty thoroughly flawed. I'm all in favor of Winston Churchill being commemorated, and I filed past his bier in Westminster Hall in 1965. But the guy was a piece of work, and I put him in the basket with all the dumb politicians of the 1930s from Chamberlain to Hitler to FDR. Hey, maybe it took two dreadful world wars to convince the Great and the Good that maybe world wars were not such a good thing.

But you know what? I want statues of everyone from Churchill to Hitler and Goebbels. So that little kiddies can go see them and be carefully taught what idiots people were back in the day.

See I don't think it helps to say that all the Confederates were evil. Yep, they were wedded to plantation slavery, as invented by the Venetians on Cyprus. And we now, from our great moral height, condemn slavery as the worst thing ever.

Worse than Soviet Bolshevism? Are you sure?

See, I don't think we ended slavery for moral reasons. I think we ended slavery because slavery doesn't pay. Not compared with free workers. Hey, even Adam Smith thought that.

See, I think that morality very often follows the market. Just saying. I mean, how difficult is it, when evaluating two things, one that benefits you and one that does not, to decide that the thing that benefits you is a Good Thing and the other thing is a Bad Thing?

But I get what the inconclasts are doing. Thay want to erase history so that the only thing that people are able to believe is their sacred orthodoxy. Because everything else has been canceled.

But that's OK. Because it focuses the minds of the racist sexist homophobes like me that love America as it is, warts and all.

And Wokies, let me tell you that you are the biggest wart on the flesh of America right now. By a mile. 

But that's OK, because you have clarified the issues rather thoughtfully. As Victor Davis Hanson said on FoxNews,

This election no longer is about Donald Trump's tweeting. It's not about Joe Biden's cognitive impairment. It has nothing to do anymore with a lock-down, the virus, the economy, foreign policy. It's an existential question, a Manichean choice, between whether you want civilization and you believe America doesn't have to be perfect to be good and we are not in this third century going to destroy all that people died for, or you feel that was is inherently flawed with a cancer and we have to use radiation and chemotherapy and kill the host to kill the cancer. And that's the choice we are looking at and I'm going to vote for civilization.

Know what I think? I think that President Trump should make short videos about the eminent Americans whose monuments were pulled down. And he should prepare a few words about each of the canceled monuments. Like General Grant. He could say:

Grant was a heavy drinker. He married a women in a family that had slaves. But then he took his slave down to the courthouse and freed him. And went on to lead the Union armies to win the war against slavery. Ulysses S Grant was a great American and a flawed American. But flawed Americans are all we have, and all we will ever have, to Make America Great Again.

When I walk around my neighborhood and look at the social-moralizing yard-signs, that started with #WeBelieve and then "Hate has no Home Here" and "Be the One" and now feature "Black Lives Matter" I think about the people that have put those signs up.

And what they are is educated Gentry, People of the Creative Self, that think themselves -- know themselves -- a cut above ordinary Commoners and People of the Responsible Self. And certainly higher and better than white nationalist deplorables. Because, you see, they advocate for the victims of oppression and and fight against systemic racism.

And yet they know literally nothing.

As I have been reading and writing for these many years, I have developed the conceit that I can figure out where the pre-digested political rhetoric I am hearing from other people comes from. Because, of course, most people don't read, don't think; they just pick up memes that they hear in the agora. Thus it ever was and thus it ever will be.

And what we should all hope for and work for is for the day when it is our ideas and rhetoric that ordinary people and journalists unthinkingly repeat.