Great Reaction -- Script

Hello, I'm Chris Chantrill, and I want to talk about the Great Reaction of our age, my way of understanding the Left as a gigantic lurch back to the primitive world of our ancestors.

The old world, before capitalism, was feudal, a system of domination and subordination, from the king and his direct vassals down to the meanest serf on a lord's estate.

Then came the 19th century with ordinary people running all over the world without permission, inventing new things and selling them. 

All over the world. And it worked! Trade and cooperation could work on the basis of trust between nobodies, with the legal system as a backstop to take care of cheaters.

Nobodies? Doing things without permission? Inconceivable! Something had to be done!

It was in the middle of the 19th century that rich kids invented socialism. What a concept! To reestablish the old regime of top-down control. Rich kids would save the workers from a fate worse than death by beating up on the employers and capitalists. After World War I another generation of rich kids extended the notion to include other marginalized groups as approved victims that would be saved by rich-kid activism.

I call this movement the Great Reaction, a nostalgic lurch to the imagined Garden of Eden of a vanished past, a reassertion, if you like, of primitive archetypes that still dwell in the human collective unconscious.

I say that:

Socialism is a return to slavery

The welfare state is a return to feudalism

Identity politics is neo-tribalism

Reparations is neo-vengeance

Activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents

Helpless victims are a return to sacrifice

Social justice is good old loot and plunder

I say that the Ally Narrative of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" is a lie, including "and" and "the."

And I say that there is no greater task for humans than meeting and answering the challenge of the Great Reaction, the deeply instinctive turn, away from the disruptive change of the modern era and its Great Enrichment and back to the primitive.

Next time let's talk about the ideas that birthed the Great Reaction. In my view it's all part of the German Turn, the revolution in ideas created by a succession of German, Good and Bad.

I'm Chris Chantrill and thanks for watching.

Our Big Problem -- Script

Hello, I'm Chris Chantrill. I want to talk about Our Big Problem in America and the world today.

For many of us, something has gone wrong with America. What is it? And what do we do about it?

Is the problem the "oppressed peoples," the folks struggling under the yoke of systemic racism -- despite 50 years of the Civil Rights Act? No, I don't think so.

Is the problem the ordinary middle class, people who live by obeying the laws, going to work, and following the rules? Hardly.

No, I argue the the Big Problem of our age is the existential problem faced by the well-born sons and daughters of the educated class. They are taught that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is to be creative, to make a difference, to make the world a better place. But how?

Ever since Karl Marx, the dominant belief of Educated Youth is to make a difference with politics, to smite the oppressors, to abolish the racists, to liberate the women. The best thing in life is to imagine a just world, create a political movement to implement that vision, and right the wrongs of the oppressed by bending the arc of history towards justice.

I say that this movement of Educated Youth is a Wrong Turn, that looks to create meaning on the cheap, and improve the world from the top down, for the greater glory of the educated class. And it has never worked.

The progressives, the liberals, the leftists that believe saving the world with politics live in an "Activist Culture" that reminds me of Don Quixote. Remember him? A reader of medieval romances, he wanted to be a noble knight as in ages past and do great knightly deeds. So it is with our modern activists. They long to be revolutionaries and smite the oppressors, long after the end of the age of revolution.

And they never stop to ask whether the real oppressors, the frightful white oppressors of which you've heard tell, are in fact white educated left-wing activists.

But does it matter? I think it does. I think the Activist Culture is not progressive but reactionary. I believe that wages of educated-class Activism has been a Great Reaction, a lurch towards the primitive, a neo feudalism, where the feudal lord has become the nomenclatura of the modern state and the old peasant has become the ordinary wage slave, and where lefty activists imagine themselves as knightly heroes battling the dragon of systemic racism.

But I say that Activism is baloney; I say that politics is a dead end. I say that the knightly activists, the radical children of liberal parents, the modern Don Quixotes, are making things worse.

But wouldn't it be nice to create a world that helps all kinds of people flourish -- not just knightly activists?

Is that possible? Well, if you are watching me right now, you probably think so already, but don't know how to put it into words.

So tune into the next exciting episode.

I'm Chris Chantrill, and thanks for watching.

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.