The Wrong Turn -- Script

Hello, I'm Chris Chantrill. Let's talk about why I think that the left -- and indeed most of our educated elite -- has taken a Wrong Turn.

If I am right that we modern humans can best be understood as Three Peoples -- Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates -- each with its own understanding of the Meaning of Life, and if I am right that it is right and proper for each of these Three Peoples to live according to the light of their religion, then what about the left's moral narrative, of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors?"

In the left's narrative, the oppressed peoples are oppressed by the white oppressors and it is the sacred duty, the calling of the allies, to smash the white oppressors and redeem the oppressed peoples from their bondage.

Notice the basic assumption that the allies have the whole world figured out. There are oppressed peoples and they want to be liberated. There are white oppressors and they ought to be smashed. And the allies. These noble people have no purpose other than to redeem and liberate the oppressed peoples.

Not.

Do you see the problem? The ally narrative interprets the whole human world as a cheap morality play, with the hero and the ingenue and the villain already determined. How do you know, allies? Are you sure? This is real life, not cheap entertainment.

How do the oppressed peoples want to live their lives? Did the allies ever ask them?

Whatabout the white oppressors? After they have been properly stripped of their evil powers, how do they get to live?

And what exactly is the angle of the allies -- after they have set the world to rights and there is no more need for politics and power?

I say that the world view of the educated elite -- the allies, the evolved people -- is a cramped and narrow view of life by, for, and all about the educated elite, and shut up you peasants.

And I call it a Wrong Turn.

German Turn -- Script

Hello, I'm Chris Chantrill. Let's talk about what I call The German Turn.

Ok, you ask, why? Because I think that the way to understand the modern world is through the arc of German thinking, from Kant to Jung.

Some of these Germans were good Germans, some of them were bad. And one or two were just naughty.

Most Anglo-Saxons are proud to believe logic and reason -- and sneer at people led by their feelings. 

But the Germans, prompted by the British David Hume, realized that this was not so. We are all governed by our feelings, including the unconscious feelings that we don't even feel.

With Immanuel Kant, the Germans believed that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances, appearances that get processed by our brains into a picture of reality.

I maintain that Kant leads directly, do not pass Go, to the modern physics of relativity and quantum mechanics -- developed mainly by Germans and a Dane or two.

I believe that Kant leads directly to German psychology, with Schopenhauer, Freud, and Jung and the theory of the unconscious. 

Guess what? It was Schopenhauer that invented "repression," not Freud.

Then there is Richard Wagner. His operas were all about characters in medieval romances, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and a rehash of the Nordic myths in The Ring of the Nibelung. You could say he was digging into the past in order to understand the future. Wagner was a bit of an anti-Semite.

But then there were the bad Germans. I mean guys like rich kid Karl Marx that created an economics of worker "immiseration" on classical economics the day before it was superceded by the marginal revolution of 1870. But enough of them.

Let's talk about Nietzsche: he is my naughty German. Lefties dismiss him as "the Nazis' favorite intellectual." Maybe so, but Nietzsche argued that for guys like him the old God had Died, and this meant a brutal process of decadence -- the dying off of the old order -- followed by nihilism, then the terror of the eternal recurrence -- think Bill Murray and Groundhog Day -- and finally the birth of a new god with the revaluation of all values. 

Nietzsche's man of the future was his egoistic Übermensch, but I think that the new man will be a Sacrificial Hero rather than a Warrior Hero.

Why is that? Because the Good German that came after Nietzsche was Carl Jung. OK, so he was Swiss. And Jung, following Wagner, reckoned that if we wanted to understand human nature it would help to look at the ancient myths in a new light: not as superstitions but as universal human experiences. 

Jung talked about archetypes and the collective unconscious. And one ancient archetype is the Sacrificial Hero, as in Jesus Christ.

After Jung? The Frankfurt School, in particular Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. They took the Marxian narrative of bourgeois vs. proletarian and made it bigger: mankind vs. the world. "Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men."

Finally, there is Jürgen Habermas. He was a leftist, but he climbed out of the Marxian hell-hole.

For him, humans are not merely rational actors dominating the world with instrumental reason. They also live in a community in the world -- he called it the life-world. Humans live with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement.

Oh, and don't forget the German Wernher von Braun. He helped America win the race to the moon.

What does it mean that humans live in a life-world animated by a shared experience of archetypes ancient and modern and the mystery of the collective unconscious?

That's what my reductive Three Peoples theory is all about, up next.

I'm Chris Chantrill, and thanks for watching.

Who Said: "Never Trust Experts"

Yeah. Back in the day, there was a politician that said, in a letter to a pal:

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Right first time. It was Lord Salisbury, three times Prime Minister of Britland. And he actually practiced what he preached, because he acted as his own Foreign Secretary and kept the Brit Foreign Office and Sir Humphrey out of the loop.

But, in the end, I am not sure that keeping the striped-pants boys out of the loop was such a good idea. Because, 13 years after Salisbury gave up the premiership to his nephew Arthur Balfour, Britland got into World War I. Idiots. And I think the main reason for that was that Balfour and the striped-pants boys didn't have a clue.

For a start, they entered into an Entente Cordiale with France that Germany interpreted as an aggressive act against the Second Reich. Great going, guys! Generations of British politicians insisted that Britain should not ally with any continental power because the other powers would feel cornered. So the first thing that genius Balfour did was ally with a continental power.

Well, we know all about experts now, don't we, after the glorious success of the Wu Flu epidemic. They really didn't have a clue, and they recommended to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other blue-state governors that they should unload hospitals of recovering Wu Flu patients and send them into nursing homes.

Except that nursing homes have a ton of elderly patients and the recovering Wu Flu patients infected the elderly and as a result about 50 percent of the Wu Flu deaths have been among the elderly nursing home and retirement home community.

Now I know that everyone wants to blame bossy Karen Cuomo for this, but, hey, did Cuomo ever bother to read a word about Lord Salisbury and his advice about experts? Or, for that matter, the wisdom of another 19th century statesman that was probably not an idiot, Otto von Bismarck, the chap that figured out how to unite Germany in three nice little wars instead of one big one? I doubt it.

So Gov. Cuomo was just ignorant, an idiot like most politicians.

Now, of course, I have a deep philosophical system that addresses the Expert Problem. I understand, from reading The Millionaire Next Door and other works that the natural and physical thing for the scions of the educated Gentry is to become Experts, salaried experts in government and tenured experts in universities. It is much easier than a genuine life of creation, as in creating a new business, or even creating a new political party.

The scion of the educated Gentry loads up on university degrees at selective colleges and internships at well-connected institutions and then gets to work in the bureaucracy that supports the ruling class. In the government and in the university. Good work if you can get it.

And it doesn't matter if you make a complete mess of everything and bring the nation to the brink of disaster. You still got your gubmint pension, don't you Peter Strzok? You still got your tenure don't you, Professor Numbskull? Although, I suppose, things could get a little dicey if you once did a comic turn in blackface.

Now, I believe, according to my Four Laws, that administrative government of the experts cannot work because 1) there isn't enough bandwidth, 2) when you regulate business the regulated end up dominating the regulators, and 3) Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them, public school teachers. And that's to say nothing of the First Law, that socialism -- i.e., any gubmint program -- cannot work because it cannot compute prices.

So you should never trust experts because the only thing you should trust is the market and its prices and the fundamental fact of the market that it forces people to act responsibly and trust-worthily. Not because that is good or bad but because if you are not responsible and trustworthy nobody will want to deal with you.

But our liberal friends rather like the experts, and you can see why. First of all, it means jobs for liberals. Secondly, you can appeal to experts as kings once appealed to tame priests and diviners.

Yeah, funny thing how experts so often propose things that give the government more power. I wonder why that is so? And when the Little Darlings of the ruling class want to go out and protest, why, the experts say it is just fine. But it is not fine for ordinary commoners to go out and socially distance on the beach.

Yep. We live in interesting times. But I wouldn't mind if the present moment ends up giving experts a black eye. It might save these United States from civil war and demolition.

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."