History Lesson for Our Nance on "Stormtroopers"

You may have noticed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) recently accused President Trump of using "stormtroopers" when he dispatched federal police units to Portland, Oregon, to defend federal buildings in the Rose City.

Unidentified stormtroopers. Unmarked cars. Kidnapping protesters and causing severe injuries in response to graffiti.

These are not the actions of a democratic republic.@DHSgov’s actions in Portland undermine its mission.

Trump & his stormtroopers must be stopped.

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 18, 2020

Er, which kind of stormtroopers did you have in mind, Madam Speaker?

See, the Germans invented the notion of stormtroopers in World War I when they developed new tactics on the battlefield in France -- yes, they were way ahead of the Brits and the Frogs on that. These Sturmtruppen were specialist troops trained in infiltration tactics, particularly effective in the German offensives in the spring of 1918.

Was that the kind of stormtroopers you had in mind, Madam Speaker? Because those imperial German stormtroopers were soldiers in the army, rather than federal police dispatched to a city wracked with riot.

Then there were the Nazi stormtroopers in the 1920s. These stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung, or storm department, were a paramilitary unit of the Nazi Party. La Wik:

Its primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Red Front Fighters League (Rotfrontkämpferbund) of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

 Was that the kind of stormtroopers you had in mind, Madam Speaker? Because those Nazi stormtroopers were not government police but the street thugs of a political party. 

The Nazi stormtroopers, the Sturmabteiling, seem to have been rather like the present AntiFa that presently operates in the Rose City, Portland, Oregon, and other US cities. Conspiracy theorists like me assume that AntiFa operates with the nod and the wink of Democratic Party officials in liberal cities like Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, etc. 

I'm not aware, for instance, that the Republican Party, or Donald Trump personally, have any informal shock troops or street thugs to neutralize the AntiFa mostly peaceful protesters that are clearly tolerated by officeholders in various woke cities in the US.

I assume that what you were really trying to do, in your typically lazy fashion, was to create the impression that President Trump's attempt to prod Democratic civic officials into actually keeping the peace in our nation's cities was in fact a departure from legal norms, an illegal attempt to beat up peaceful protesters for justice and black lives. Literally Hitler, as they say.

Or worse, you were making a lame attempt to make it look as though you were down with the movement, tagging along with the Democratic Party's lurch to the left in order to stay relevant and not get tossed out by the radicals in the House after the 2020 election.

Of course, I understand that the reason why we have so many militarized federal government law-enforcement operatives is that  every sub-bureaucracy worth its salt wants to have its own SWAT team, to show that it belongs in the front rank of government. For, whatever the current rubbish being spouted by liberal activists, the truth is that government exists only to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. Everything else is either loot and plunder, handing out free stuff to supporters, or it is "legislating morality" as liberals used to say back in the day when the government had a tendency to do stuff that liberals didn't like.

Here's my advice to you Speaker Pelosi. At age 80, you really should not be in high political office. Speaker of the House is not an office for someone of your age. It's not as if there weren't dozens of Democratic House Representatives that could do the job. Since I don't know you, I don't know what combination of conceit and vanity have prompted you to remain as a House leader. But I do know that nothing becomes a leader so much as the way of departing his or her high office.

And you, Speaker Pelosi, have failed in this fundamental duty.

Contra Harari: Analyzing "Sapiens" on Religion

There's a women's book club book out there, recommended by Bill Gates and others, that gives us the human story so far.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind by Israeli prof Yuval Noah Harari is, as you might expect if Gates likes it, carefully located within the Overton Window of acceptable thought. As in: science good, Nazis bad, European imperialism bad, capitalism questionable.

The book was published in 2015 before wokiness became a global problem, so it doesn't really deal with the critical theory problem and the current ferocious ideological campaign that represents the ordinary middle class as the worst racist sexist homophobes ever.

To introduce the agricultural age Harari presents the colorful idea  that humans did not domesticate wheat; wheat domesticated humans. In the good old days of hunter-gathering humans didn't work much. They hunted, they gathered, and everyone lived happily ever after. But wheat is a demanding master. 

The ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, human in various parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants.

Wheat takes a lot of looking after, including clearing rocks and pebbles, weeding other plants, keeping the rabbits off: you name it. And, of course, you needed warrior lords to protect your grain stores and they don't come cheap. But the Earth could support a lot more human farmers than human hunter-gatherers.

But the larger communities of the agricultural age needed a change in religion. 

Stories about ancestral spirits and tribal totems were strong enough to enable 500 people to trade seashells, celebrate the odd festival, and join forces to wipe out a Neanderthal band, but no more than that.

So what humans came up with is an "imagined order," a religion or ideology, a shared belief system so "large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively." In other words, religions like "Christianity, democracy, or capitalism" are an imagined order imposed on the human community and insist "that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature." And "you also educate people thoroughly" in the imagined order.

But suppose you want to change things: revolution baby! Then you have a big task.

In order to change the imagined order I must convince millions of strangers to cooperate with me. For the imagined order is not a subjective order existing in my own imagination -- it is rather an inter-subjective order, existing in the shared imagination of thousands and millions of people.

You can see what our wokie friends are up to. They want to change the imagined order. They want to change the shared imagination of America. Of course, they do not want to do it by persuasion. Canceling and struggle sessions are more their style.

In fact this has always been the agenda of the left. They don't like our current imagined order of Christianity and the market economy. They want to change it, and they will turn the world upside down trying.

But Harari sees a different religious landscape. He sees three versions of "humanism" competing to create an imagined order in which "the supreme good is the good of humanity," thus:

Liberal humanism. "Humanity" is individualistic and resides within each individual Homo sapiens.

Socialist humanism. "Humanity"is collective and resides within the species Homo sapiens as a whole.

Evolutionary humanism. "Humanity is a mutable species.Humans might degenerate into subhumans or evolve into superhumans.

The "evolutionary humanism" is the Nazi one. Just so you knew.

Yes, but I'd say that that what unites these three humanisms is that they presume that humans have the ability and the opportunity to create a new man. And this fits into my reductive Three Peoples notion that the Subordinates have a god that orders them around, the Responsibles have a god that sets out a divine law for them to follow as responsible humans, and that the Creatives get to create their own world and law.

So, while the humans in the world come in three flavors (which Harari admits in his analysis of Hammurabi's code, with its superiors, commoners, and slaves) the only religion that counts for him is a religion that appeals to the creative types.

And that, in my opinion, is humanity's Big Problem right now. Its educated gentry cannot conceive of anything outside its own walled garden of creativity, cannot understand that other people don't want creative types creating wonderful new worlds for them that look to the outsider like oppressive hells.

See, I think that the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that there is a world outside your own little walled garden and that what works for you may not work for others.

Don't You See? Police Brutality is the Point

Our liberal friends know everything, so there is no point in a dialog. But the rest of us are not quite so sure about vitally important issues like, oh, police brutality.

For instance, if you ask me the whole point about police is to be brutal. Not with ordinary folks that follow the rules, got to work and obey the law. But the punks: you want young punks to think that they better not mess with the police.

And the only thing that young punks understand is force or the threat of force.

Because young punks are not yet assimilated into the culture of the city and the market economy. They are still living in a neo-tribal world where might is right. They believe that you gotta punch the other guy before the other guy punches you.

But that is not the way the city works. In the city we trust people unless they show themselves to be untrustworthy. We do not enforce our own justice with our own private enforcers; we leave that to the police.

Hey, we are using the police to do our dirty work, to rap the knuckles of the thugs out there.

And then we get all worked up because some poor schmuck of a cop puts his knee on a drugged-up ex-con that tried to pass a fake $20 bill. Please!

That is exactly what the police are for: getting rough with ex-cons trying to pass a fake $20 bill.

Oh, I get it: lefties. The whole point of lefties is to beat up on the middle class, because it's there. 

You know how it works. It makes lefties feel good to be advocating for the victims. Since they are the good guys, the educated and evolved people, and the victims are the innocents, obviously the middle class are the problem. And why not start with the poor schmucks that we employ to keep the underclass and the drug dealers and gang bangers down to a dull roar. Yeah! That guy put his knee on the neck of an innocent drugged-up criminal. Off with his head!

And now it turns out that putting a knee on the neck of a suspect on the ground is a recommended way to keep a suspect under control. Who knew?

There are of course many reasons why the left is one of the great crimes of history: its slave states; its death toll; its war on the middle class; its ruination of decent ordinary people. But I think the bigger issue, worse than a crime, a profound cruelty, is the non-stop campaign to direct first the working class and now the non-white underclass away from the road to the middle class, away from learning the code of the city and remaining outsiders to the city in a pre-civilized culture of ethnic membership and the subjugation by criminal gangs.

Back in the day conservative intellectuals invented the idea of "broken window" policing. The idea was for police to target the young punks that committed minor crimes of vandalism and disorder, to make them feel that The Man was watching them. This, it was thought, would scare a bunch of punks straight and also capture and incarcerate the punks that were also committing more serious crimes. And it worked. It was "broken window" policing that brought New York City's annual murder rate down from 2,000 a year to 600 a year. That was what Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg were all about. In the 20 years of their leadership New York City experienced a renaissance. Because the whole point of a city is to make the punks keep their heads down so the rest of us can wive and thrive and swive.

But Mayor de Blasio is a leftie. He's down for the movement. He believes in the lefty cant about oppression and police brutality. And wow, murders are going up! Who woulda thunk it?

Guess what Mayor Bill. The whole point of police is to take it to the punks and make them keep their heads down. So the rest of us can live in peace.

The idea is that the police are there to beat up on the punks. The idea is not that politicians get to beat up on the cops to impress their lefty friends in the Activism Olympics.

So You Want a Revolution

Curtis Yarvin is churning out more stuff on his Gray Mirror book. Yesterday he wrote about revolution, "Persuasion and the Mensheviks." Not the play-acting at revolution of our lefty activist friends, but real revolution: how to change the regime.

But first to identify the players. The wokies, according to Yarvin are the kiddies, the "youth militia of happy, hopeful teenage volunteers" in the Czar's religious police. And then there are the Mensheviks.

[All over], people are being busted all over the place for their long-past mindcrimes, which were not even crimes when they thought them, or which were misdemeanors but have become major felonies.  Our Mensheviks are against this—as they should be.

Only, of course, our Mensheviks, the good old centrist liberals like Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, are being canceled too. But "we" are Bolsheviks. What does that mean?

It means we need to be "reactionaries," by which Yarvin means people who can see beyond the horizon of the present, one who "has taken his passport as a citizen of history." And let's learn from that genius of revolution, Lenin.

Revolution is not an ideology, it is a strategy, and Yarvin calls it Lenin's Rule, the first law of revolution.

The essence of revolution is not that a new class shall govern with the old government machinery, but that it shall smash up the existing machinery and govern with a new machine.

"It is easier to replace than reform an old government," says Yarvin: as with software, and he should know. But we modern "techno-Bolsheviks" are not monsters like Lenin & Co. Ours must not be a violent revolution, but rather a "cosy" revolution.  How do you do that?

Here is an easy test: in any truly cozy sovereign transition, even the officials of the old government machinery must wind up with better, happier, and more fulfilling lives.

Call that the second law of revolution: "the new regime must not punish anyone for good service to the old regime."

It ain't gonna be easy, because of our chimp-like tendency to "maim any falling power on the way down." But it is not a hopeless cause: Lenin was into butchery, but not Caesar and Napoleon, and not the post-war Germans. Guess what happened to the average SS man and Stasi veteran? They got new careers and new lives. But not generally in the new regime.

Obviously there is no law to cover replacement of the regime, so our "cozy revolution" must pass through a "legal singularity,"

The singularity, while inherently above law, must be as quick and smooth as possible.

Then there's the third law of revolution: "surgery not butchery."

Any revolution requires a process of "expropriation and sequestration." In the singularity the new regime will need the power of expropriation. That's because the billionaires need to be humbled. But not humiliated.

Did you know, for instance, that our Constitution provides for the suspension of habeas corpus?

But do we have to be so mean to the billionaires? Well, yes, says Yarvin, because money is power, and "No regime is safe with a super-plutocratic class of questionable loyalty." But maybe, says Mr. Softy here, only a couple of billionaires need to be expropriated pour encourager les autres. Why do billionaires suck up to the current lefties? Because they know which side their bread is buttered.

Then there is "sequestration." Any revolution needs to separate the "critical human nodes" from the levers of power. They need to be sent on luxurious vacations to various tropical islands, the kind that feature in the NYT travel section.

Such is the sharp edge of 21st-century Bolshevism: a wealth tax on a few zillionaires, involuntary swank vacations for a few VIPs. Is this too much? Red Terror run wild? Must we refuse to countenance such naked violations of the non-aggression policy?

Surgery not butchery means separating the functionaries of the old regime from their power, but not from their lives. 

Had enough yet? Yarvin's not quite through. 

The fourth law of revolution is that "any new regime must be an unconditional and accountable monarchy." Yes, that means an absolute monarchy. Yarvin wrote a lot about the benefits of monarchy in his Unqualified Reservations blog.

The fifth law of revolution is that "any new regime must be universal. It cannot govern as the regime of a faction—cultural, ideological, religious, racial, linguistic, economic, or geographic."

Well, that is pretty obvious, because the reason for the need for revolution is that our current regime is indeed the regime of a faction, the globalist, leftist educated Gentry faction that believes in a religion of political power as a path to justice. The trick for the new regime is to bury the enmities that led to the crisis: in our case the educated Gentry against the Commoners. That means that the new regime has to honor Gentry as Gentry, and Commoners as Commoners, because all "communities" deserve equal respect.

Do you think this is all a bit too much, "going too far" in the words of George Eliot's Mr. Brooke? Most people usually do, says Yarvin. But,

For any malady of state, there are three possible solutions: do nothing; repair the government; or replace the government. 

And usually repairing the government doesn't work. That's because of my Fourth Law, that government programs cannot work because you can never reform them. But if we are going to succeed in our replacement strategy we will have to get the support of the Mensheviks, the good centrists that right now are not ready for extreme action

What is a Menshevik? A Menshevik is a small and good person—an intellectual hobbit. This small and good person is naturally attracted to small and good ideas.

And then Yarvin goes into a long disquisition about the fatuously useless resistance to the "cancel culture" by the centrists like Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan and the Harper's Wet-Noodle Manifesto and a new Substack blog called "Persuasion."

Obviously those guys are not going to free us from the the clinking fist of the Czar's cultural police. And yet we need them on our side. How do we do it? Yarvin doesn't tell us. Not yet.

The Third Imperial Age Is (Was) The Lefty Age

A couple of days ago I was commenting on a piece by Financial Times conventional-wisdom journalist John Lloyd that maybe we are entering the Third Imperial Age. His notion is Russia and China taking over the world.

Where the Second Imperial Age was the European imperialism of the last 500 years. But a sharp-eyed reader emailed me to say:

The power seeking imperial types turned their attention from conquering neighbor lands in 1917.  The Russian Revolution launched the third imperial age of socialism.  Power seekers expanded their power and wealth by attacking with taxes the productive endeavor of wealth creators.  Imperial government expanded and their welfare clients bred themselves into over supply.  The peak occurs when government harvests near half of all wealth created.

Hey! How come I didn't think of that! Is he right or is he right?

Yes indeedy. Lefties are all about power, political power, and only power. Talk about imperialism! The worst: the very worst.

Now let us rehearse imperialism down the ages.

First Age of Imperialism. It features chaps like China that believed -- when not distracted by a Time of Troubles -- in conquering neighboring states and making them into tributary states, states that send tribute to the Son of Heaven at the center of the world in Beijing. As it should be. Also Rome, which believed in sending the legionaries out every now and again for a spot of loot and plunder and slaves. But most of the rest of the time they let the folks trade to and fro. Except for the Carthaginians. Carthago delenda est. When the Romans ran out of loot and plunder and slaves they inflated the currency and slowly deflated the Roman Empire so that Edward Gibbon could write a book about the whole procedure.

Second Age of Imperialism. It features European nobodies heading out across the world to trade. Christopher Columbus, son of a Genoese wool-worker that owned a cheese stand. Robert Clive, son of a small landowner. A troublemaker, he was sent out to India and started out "as little more than a glorified assistant shopkeeper." But then he learned a spot of soldiering and went on to win the battle of Plassey. Captain Cook was the second son of a Scottish farm laborer. He began his naval career as a merchant navy apprentice in coasting ships carrying coals from Newcastle. Alexander Hamilton, "bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,"was a teenaged businessman in St. Croix, and was so smart the local gents sent him to New York to go to school, where he taught the Yanks how to do the National Debt. Cecil Rhodes, son of a curate, was asthmatic and was sent out to South Africa for his health. He and his brother failed trying to grow cotton, but then he headed out to the Kimberley diamond fields. All these nobodies were advancing the frontiers of trade, and if they made a spot of money they often returned to the home country and were stigmatized as "nabobs." Not quite out of the top drawer, old chap.

Third Age of Imperialism. It features rich kids with a faith in the power of politics to bend the arc of history towards justice. It has featured the two biggest slave states in history. Karl Marx, son of the top lawyer in Trier. Friedrich Engels, son of a textile manufacturer. Vladimir Lenin, from "a moderately prosperous middle-class family" got kicked out of university for mostly peaceful protesting. Mao Zedong was the son of "one of the wealthiest farmers in Shaoshan." Frankfurt Scholar Max Horkheimer was the son of "a successful businessman who owned several textile factories." Herbert Marcuse, of "repressive tolerance" was the son of "a well-off businessman." These intellectual giants advanced the idea of societies that were, at very least neo-feudal, with the ruling class taxing 35-50 percent of income to hand out to its supporters, and at the worst, as in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, the most savage slave states in history.

So, on this notion, we would say, pace John Lloyd, that the Putinist regime in Russia and the Xi regime in China probably represent the "Autumn of the Third Imperialist Age" as the internal contradictions of big government and its force and the divisiveness of politics-with-everything combine to inspire educated rich kids in general -- and foolish young women at The New York Times in particular -- to indulge in witch hunts and cancel culture to force the world to bend the arc of history towards justice, or else. Until we normals get a clue and tell them to go drink their fair-trade coffee where the sun don't shine.

See, my impossible dream is that maybe, maybe, we are entering a post-imperial age based on the principle that loot and plunder does not pay. I'd say that the First Imperial Age proved the limitations of the loot-and-plunder model; that the Second Imperial Age proved the potential of the trading model, especially when led by nobodies; that the Third Imperial Age proved beyond a doubt that we humans should be better than loot-and-plunder lefties.

But that's just my opinion. You opinions may differ.

When All the Gubmint Programs Fail At Once

I watched the Ken Loach movie Kes last night, because I'd read a piece arguing the child actor actually was viable. Usually, child actors are hopeless.

Kes is the name of Billy Casper's trained kestrel, that he took from its nest as a chick and trained up all by himself using a book on hawking he stole from the local used-books store.

Billy is a "hopeless case" kid whose Yorkshire mining village is a hopeless case in the 1960s as oil takes over the world from coal.

So Billy is a "hopeless case" going to a hopeless case gubmint school where the kids all sit around like zombies, living in a hopeless case gubmint "council house" in a village where the men all work in the gubmint coal mine, a hopeless case industry that you will remember blew up during the Margaret Thatcher years.

The school Billy attended and that is featured in the movie is a "comprehensive school" built in 1963 and demolished in 2011. Comprehensive schools were a hopeless idea of the Labour left that helped demolish the "grammar" schools that had provided a route up out of poverty for British youngsters since before the days of William Shakespeare, son of a glover that went to the grammar school in Stratford on Avon.

I say all this because it seems to me that the current cancel culture frenzy really comes down to the fact that the whole gubmint-program world that our liberal friends have created for our benefit is falling down around their ears. And they cain't stand it, as Lina Lamont would say.

Ken Loach is a lefty film director whose "socially critical directing style and socialist ideals," according to La Wik, "are evident in his film treatment of social issues". I suppose the idea back in 1969, when Kes came out, was to highlight the injustice suffered by the Working Class in the Tory years of the Fifties and early Sixties. Of course, today a Ken Loach would be directing movies showing how the white working class in the North of England were a bunch of racist-sexist-homophobe haters as proved by their recent shift to the Conservative Party in the latest "Get Brexit Done" election.

What struck me in Kes was the hopelessness of being on the receiving end of lefty politics and government. Back in the immediate post-WWII era the left was serving up gubmint education, gubmint housing and gubmit nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy. And the poor working class was on the hopeless receiving end of it all.

But whatabout Reform? Can't we reform all those well-intentioned programs and make them work? I doubt it. Because of the fourth of my Four Laws. It says

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.

And you can see the truth of that in the current presidential election campaign here in the good old US and A. Our liberal friends are not proposing to reform education or housing or union-blighted industry. They are merely proposing new stuff, defunding police and ramping up racist DIE and going full bore on the Green New Deal.

And who is going to get screwed into hopelessness by the current lefty agenda? Why, almost certainly black voters. Defund the police? That'll really improve the safety of inner-city "communities." Kill school choice? That'll really brighten up the scene in inner-city schools. Green New Deal? That'll really help the workers that depend on trucks and diesel-powered equipment to do their construction and technician jobs.

You can read about this all the time: Stephen Greenhut writing about California's "absurdly high cost of living, driven by a host of progressive policies." Do you think our liberal friends have a clue about this?

Then there is the nearly two-century cultural effort to steer the subordinate class away from middle-class values. There's the absurd effort of the Smithsonian -- now taken down -- to identify middle-class values such as "rugged individualism... emphasis on scientific method... protestant work ethic" with "whiteness." Do these progressive nut-cases not understand that these "civilized" values are exactly what they say they are: the kind of values you need to wive and thrive in the city. "Civilized" means "citified" because the Latin "civis" means "citizen." Get it, wokies?

Actually it all makes me realize that I need a "Four Laws Explained" maxim. As in:

Four Laws: Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). But socialism means More Jobs for Gentry.

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). But the administrative state means More Jobs for Gentry.

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). But regulatory agencies mean More Jobs for Gentry. 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill). But government programs mean More Jobs for Gentry.

Yeah. Who knew? Cui bono? I could go on.

Marxism means more jobs for Gentry. 

Universities mean more jobs for Gentry. 

Safe spaces means more jobs for Gentry. 

Think tanks mean more jobs for Gentry. 

Climate change means more jobs for Gentry. 

Systemic racism means more jobs for Gentry. 

Systemic oppression means more jobs for Gentry.

I never would have guessed. Government, any government, means more jobs for the educated Gentry. So you know what side they are going to come down on any issue. Does it mean more jobs and more power for the educated Gentry?

What is the Good Life Better than the Left -- for Women?

I've established to my own satisfaction that the meaning of "life, the universe and everything" for educated male Gentry or People of the Creative Self is symbolized by the notion of the Sacrificial Hero that comes through the Nietzschean/Jungian tradition, and through adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson.

But whatabout women?

Truth is, women are not into heroes. You can see that in the whole "safety culture" that powers the "cancel culture." If you make me feel unsafe, well, your words are hurtful and you should be canceled. We have seen this in the resignation of Bari Weiss at The New York Times.

This safety thing, to me, is a girl thing. Being safe, intellectually and emotionally, is not something that occurs to a guy. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That's the guy approach to wordplay.

And this takes us back to Georg Simmel's prediction a century ago, that with women coming into the public square, they would transform it to suit "a more feminine sensibility." I have been thinking about this for a few years and have come to the conclusion that women don't relate to the public square; they aren't comfortable at all with a frank and fair exchange of views; they don't believe in "debates." That's because women that have a disagreement don't have it out woman to woman. They complain to their friends about the woman they have a problem with, and the whole thing gets massaged by the neighborhood community of women and spat out, eventually in some collective decision of naming and shaming and shunning.

The proof of this is the "safety culture" that is emerging in universities and in the prestige media as women take over. Most of your university students these days are women; most of your university administrators these days are women. And it certainly seems that most of your young journalists are women. That is why you see the rise of the "safety culture." Women expect to be "safe;" they insist on being safe. Being a hero doesn't make sense. Not to a woman.

(Yes I know. There are exceptions. I know a few of them, personally).

So what is "best in life" for a woman?

The answer, I believe, issues out of the basic concept of honor among women. As James Bowman writes in Honor: A History, 

[In] spite of the discrediting that honor has undergone, the basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of popular culture what has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut. (p.5)

I think the woman's notion of honor comes out in the #WeBelieve yard-sign which usually closes with "Kindness is Everything."

Then, of course, we turn to My Girl George Eliot, Mary-Ann Evans that was. In Adam Bede, the heroine Dinah Morris is the kindest and most thoughtful person in the world. She is always thinking about other people and how she can help them. Her antagonist, Hetty Sorrel, is the most selfish person in the world who thinks of nothing but her beauty, her self-adornment and herself. You can see the question of chastity in women blazing across the sky: goodness, thoughtfulness, kindness.

In Middlemarch we have a rainbow of young women exemplars, from Dorothea Brooke, who really wants to do good in the world, to Rosamond Vincy, who is completely selfish and cannot see out of her needs and her truth of her eternal innocence, to Mary Garth, the Mary-Ann Evans name-alike, who is not to be dislodged from her determination that Fred Vincy has to deserve her before she will accept him as her affianced husband. Dorothea is the kindest, noblest, most thoughtful young woman in the world, and yet, as her uncle Mr. Brooke might say, she has a tendency to "go too far." Rosamond is a peerless beauty, yet frozen in place, determined never to do anything wrong, yet unable to see the wrongness of her mindless selfishness and sense of entitlement. Mary Garth is the balance between the two: kind but firm; thoughtful but not yielding; good, but no pushover.

So, after the alpha and omega of womanhood in Adam Bede George Eliot in Middlemarch gives us a spectrum of women and the opportunity to reflect on the question of woman's honor in more depth and breadth.

Now let us think about how this works out in the context of the modern educated woman in the educated Gentry or the People of the Creative Self.

Clearly, for such women, the need is for something original, something that steps out of the Commoner context of being good and kind and thoughtful by following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. We are trying here to think outside the box of goodness, thoughtfulness, and kindness, all the while avoiding falling into the trap of becoming a Lady Bountiful.

So, obviously, our Dorothea/Dinah/Mary would not be doing conventional things such as nice liberal women do, just aping the current liberal line and doing good, being kind and thoughtful and Lady Bountiful around the usual liberal victims.

In other words, the role of the creative good/kind/thoughtful woman is hard, as the role of the male Sacrificial Hero is hard.

OK. We have solved the whole problem and the future of womankind is set for the next millennium.

But what shall we call this paragon of femininity, the name, the feminine ideal corresponding to the male Sacrificial Hero.

Frankly, I don't have a clue. So I will just lay the question aside and leave it to my Jungian unconscious to rummage around in its archetypes to come up with the right answer.