What Does the Modern Sacrificial Hero Look Like?

In this series on "The Good Life" I have been trying to answer the question raised by Spencer Klavan in a review of Douglas Murray's The Madness of Crowds. We need “a vision of the good life more compelling than the fanatical march toward a virtuous future that the Left offers.”

Of course, I pointed out that the vision of the good life depends on who you are. If you are a Subordinate it has always meant being a loyal servitor to your lord. If you are a Commoner, it means living up to God's divine law, as you follow the rules, go to work, and obey the terrestrial law.

But, I said, if you are a Creative, a member of the educated Gentry, it means being a Hero. And I proposed that there are two versions: the left's version in which the Hero is an egoistic political revolutionary; and my version, derived from the German Turn and Jungian psychology, in which the Hero is a Sacrificial Hero, like the Sacrificial Hero Jesus Christ.

Fine, but what does that mean to a modern man? Well, I just ran into an example: Sick Heart River written by John Buchan just before his death in 1940. Buchan is famous for his Richard Hannay spy thrillers, The 39 Steps and Greenmantle. 

In real life Buchan, born in 1875, was a scholarship boy who won a First at Oxford, that promoted him in 1901 to private secretary to the High Commissioner for Southern Africa. In World War I he wrote government propaganda and was elected to the British Parliament in 1927. In 1935 he was made a baron and appointed Governor-General of Canada. In 1937 he went on a 7,000 mile tour of Canada's arctic North, and that forms the background to Sick Heart River, the story of a successful lawyer and politician, Sir Edward Leithen, dealing with a death warrant from his doctor that he had a year to live: tuberculosis.

Yes, what do you do when you have been told you have just one year to live? In Leithen's case the question is answered for his as he gets asked to look for a friend of a friend who had disappeared. This young man, Francis Galliard, was a successful finance man and husband to a devoted wife, Felicity. Leithen agrees to go find him.

Naturally, Galliard, a French Canadian from a decayed landowning family, has gone up North, into the vast wilderness that fascinated John Buchan. Teamed up with a half-Scot half "Indian" guide, Leithen goes after him and finds out that Galliard -- with his guide, the brother of Leithen's guide -- is on a trek to find a mysterious valley, Sick Heart River.

Leithen and his guide catch up with Galliard, who has been abandoned by his guide and is within days of death. Having saved Galliard's life, Leithen goes on alone with an Indian guide from the Hare tribe (even though he physically weakened by his TB) and finds Galliard's guide in the valley of Sick Heart River. Only, it's almost impossible to get out of Sick Heart River, for the valley is surrounded by steep cliffs. Except that Leithen is a mountaineer and can rope himself and his guide and Galliard's guide out of the valley of Sick Heart, thereby saving their lives.

But with the exertion of getting out of Sick Heart valley, Leithen collapses, and is nursed by the guides back to health in a log cabin they have built against the Canadian arctic winter. So the Indians and half-Indians have saved Leithen's life.

On their way back to civilization they learn that the Hare tribe is dying. The snowshoe rabbit, source of food from the trapper Hares, has succumbed to a periodic collapse in numbers, and the Hare men have given up. So when they get to the Hare village the men are dying, the children are dying, the sled dogs are dying, and the women are about to give up.

But Leithen decides to rally the Hares; he sends his guides out to hunt for caribou and moose to feed the Hare villages; he builds a huge fire in the village, and rallies the Hare people back to life.

But he kills himself with his exertions, and dies from his TB, despite the pleas from his guides to save himself.

But the Hares live; Francis Galliard lives and is reunited with his loving Felicity, and Leithen dies a noble death as the Sacrificial Hero.

An undercurrent in the book is that everyone is falling into the valley of the Sick Heart because their religion isn't delivering for them. Leithen is a successful barrister and politician, but not really supported by his nominal faith. The French Canadian Galliard has fallen away from his Catholic faith, and the Hares in their village are unable to face the vicissitudes of life, either from their traditional beliefs or from their local Catholic priest. So what is the answer to the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in the world of 1940 with Christianity falling away, the tribal religions useless, and the world plunging into war?

I would say, 80 years later, that we still don't have a clue.

Except that we do; we have a glimmering about the Hero's Journey into the depths of the unconscious, even into the underworld of Sick Heart River from which there is no return, and the miraculous ascent back from the depths with a wisdom obtained by facing the demons of the underworld.

And thus armed we can illuminate the darkness at the border between Order and Chaos, and bring our fellow humans back from despair and into the Light.

But we will probably die in the attempt.

Humans and Reality: the New Science of Categorization

For a while now, I have been slowly reading George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Well, that's a mouthful!

I had previously read his Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. It get into notions like "strict father" and "nurturant parent" moralities. 

But the big point is that we humans are not rational, logical scientists. We are animals, social animals, and our brains are coded to live -- survive -- in the world. Like other animals.

George Lakoff is a linguist, and Women, Fire and Dangerous Things is about linguistics, about how we humans came to realize that the traditional notion of categorization, handed down for a couple thousand years from the Greek philosophers, that we categorize things abstractly, is wrong. Here is how he describes the "classic theory of categories" as "abstract containers."

From the time of Aristotle to the later work of Wittgenstein, categories were thought [to] be well understood and unproblematic. They were understood to be abstract containers, with things either inside or outside the category. Things were assumed to be in the same category if and only if they have certain properties in common.

In fact, we are all taught to believe this. I suppose it has to do with our worship of logic and reason. We logical reasoners observe the world and mentally put things into the right boxes. Because logic.

All wrong, says Lakoff. In fact, beginning with the work of linguist Eleanor Rosch, our categories reflect our human embodiment. She noted that, in fact, things are not either "in" or "out" of a category, but graded.

Rosch... demonstrated that categories, in general, have best examples (called "prototypes")[.]

In other words, we humans use categories "to perceive, to form mental images, to learn and remember, to organize things learned, and to communicate efficiently."

And, it should be added, animals do this, and we humans have been doing it long before we created our modern cult of reason.

Let us illustrated this with Wittgenstein, who got deep into the idea of a "game." There are all kinds of games, from ring-around-the-rosy to chess. But what really is a game, the prototypical idea of "game?" Says Wittgenstein:

Someone says to me "show the children a game." I teach them gaming with dice, and the other says "I didn't mean that sort of game."

Yes, Ludi. Stop teaching the kids to gamble! That's not a good idea of a game!

So what Lakoff is saying is that categories are not abstract but coded into our bodies and our brains and our culture, as part of survival etc. And what we categorize at a "basic level" are the common objects of daily life: things like "dog" "cat" "chair." But this is just the basic level: we categorize dogs as representative of "animal" and chairs as representative of "furniture." Thus this sort of hierarchy: 

    

Superordinate	Animal	Furniture
Basic Level	Dog	Chair
Subordinate	Retriever	Rocker

 

Guess what. Human children learn to categorize at the basic level by age 2, and are pretty good at it by age 3. At age 4 they start to show skills at the subordinate and superordinate levels.

But, it is at the edges that things start to get complicated. For instance whatabout birds?

[Rosch's] experimental ranking shows that subjects view robins and sparrows as the best examples of birds, with owls and eagles lower down the rankings and ostriches, emus, and penguins among the worst examples.

Yes. When we go to the zoo we are amused by ostriches and emus and penguins. Because they appear exotic to us.

 

You can see from this that humans do not categorize things in the world as if they were philosophers and scientists. They categorize things in ways that are useful and meaningful them in their daily lives. 

Actually, when you look searchingly at science, it has followed the same paradigm. For instance Linnaeus puts "genera" at the center of his classification system as "'practical units of classification' upon which all biologists should be able to agree."

The same thing happens in modern physics, especially beginning with the problem of light. Was light made out of particles or waves, typical basic-level categories? The problem for all of us, where modern physics is concerned, is that basic-level categories and notions are not adequate to describe our notions of the micro-level of quantum mechanics and the macro-level of general relativity and the presumed vastness of the universe. So we have sophisticated math to do it for us. But when physicists are talking about physics they adapt ordinary concepts from daily life as metaphors for the impossible things going on at the macro and micro level. Or they show how sophisticated they are by using names like "quark" from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

All of which reminds us that the universe is nothing like it appears to us through our senses and our human-concocted categories. Which goes back to Kant and his declaration that we do not know things-in-themselves but only appearances.

But notice that our modern physics has a Creation Myth, called the Big Bang, and it has all kinds of theories about what happens at the end of the universe, as humans have always had all kinds of theories about the end of times, and "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in general.

So scientists are humans, after all.

Contra Harari: Analyzing "Sapiens" on Empire

Because Yuval Noah Harari is a professor he naturally sees the coming empire of the educated Gentry as a Good Thing in his Bill-Gates pleasing Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind.

Most of the time in the past 2,200 years, most humans have been ruled by an empire. Says he:

As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground. More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority, rather than the members of a particular nationality, and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics.

You know, because "melting ice caps."

I suppose that Sapiens was conveniently written at the last moment before a clear rebellion against the global elite of educated gentry really got into the saddle, such as the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the nationalist Fidesz party in Hungary, Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK.

My line is that we won't get global government, a single human empire, until the Trisolarians are on their way to take over the Earth. Why? Because politics is division. So long as there is no global threat, so long will humans be disunited. (Yes, that is what the global threat of climate change is all about.)

However, Harari wouldn't be properly within the Overton window of fellow professors and think-tankers without tut-tutting about the 500-year European world empire of roughly 1500-1945: the Spanish clobbering the Aztecs and Incas, and looting them of all their silver and gold; the Brits going to India and causing the First Bengal Famine: "the British conquest of India cost the lives of millions of Indians, and was responsible for the continuous humiliation and exploitation of hundreds of millions more." Then introducing slavery to the Americas after it has been eradicated in Europe. And Africa.

See I think that the European imperialism of the last 500 years is far more consequential and interesting than that. 

First of all, the initial voyages to the Americas were conceived and sold as investment opportunities, not as the natural expansion of a territorial empire ruled over by Pharoahs or Roman Emperors.

Secondly, although the Spanish and Portuguese started out frankly as looting expeditions, plundering the Americas of gold and silver for use in military adventure back in Europe, things started to change quite quickly. The Brits in India, the Dutch in Indonesia, they were there to trade. (Because hey, kids, trading makes a lot more money that simple loot and plunder). Their military dominations issued from the need to deal with neighboring feudal chieftains and stop them from looting and plundering the trading operations of the Europeans and the Indians and Indonesians that joined them. I suspect that the scandal of the Bengal famine of 1770 was that, since the Brits were ruling Bengal, it became a "thing." I'm sure there were famines aplenty before the Brits showed up, but, hey, back in the day, famines were just a part of life! A bunch of people died; the local rajah had do deal with reduced revenue for a while, and life went on.

Thirdly, the "imperialists" were mostly nobodies, like Clive and James Cook. And that was true not just of the leaders but the ordinary nobodies. My father's family had a business in St. Petersburg in the late 19th century; my mother's family had an export business between the world wars in Kobe, Japan. They were nobodies that could earn a decent living doing business across the world in countries that weren't yet up to speed on capitalism and the life of the market economy.

Fourthly, issues like slavery and human rights became issues as the European empires developed. I like to think that is because the nobodies weren't to the manor born; they weren't really into being top dog as the old nobles were. Plus, I believe, slavery and serfdom did not pay. And then came the moment in 1820 when some Brit administrator in India observed that the Indians didn't really like their imperial overlords. Really, old chap? The imperator cared whether his subjects liked him? That's the point: as the European hegemony proceeded, notions of self-government began to take over the world. As early as the Indian Mutiny in 1857 advanced Brits began to realize that they couldn't rule India forever. But it wasn't time to leave, not just yet, old chap.

Harari is a loyal member of his tribe, the global educated elite. And that tribe fervently believes that the average Commoner can't be trusted to govern with the enlightened wonderfulness of the educated elite. Thus nations are over, finished, and can never be allowed to raise their brownshirt face again because you know what happens with nationalism: literally Hitler! We see that with the current political emergency in the US. The educated elite fervently believes that we are one and a half steps away from "far-right" white supremacy, unless the educated elite cancels anyone that shows his head above the parapet.

I believe that the global educated elite are fools and knaves, and have no better idea about governance and human welfare than the emperors of old. Far better for the nations of the world to blunder along from one self-imposed crisis to another than for a self-congratulatory elite to seize the reins of power, for the benefit of all the world.

Because here's the problem. What happens when the globalist rulers rulers screw things up? As they always do. Who gets to step in and fix things? Under our current flawed system, we get alternation in office where the voters get to throw the rascals out every 8-10 years. I haven't seen anything from our global masters to indicate how they propose to enact the principle of Alternation in Office in their global empire that allows for the correction of mistakes on the political front. In all the supranational institutions from the EU to the UN to the World Bank to the IMF it's a case of Buggins' Turn, with one globalist turning the reins of office over to the next apparatchik in line. And a jolly good racket it is, for those in on the inside.

I look forward to an age of nation states all over, quarreling like mad, but never quite coming to blows. As the US never quite comes to blows with Canada and Mexico, and indeed as the nations of the Americas never quite come to blows.

But there is a problem. Without the hegemony of the global educated Gentry, where is honor, where is vanity, where is power for the worthy elite that is wiser and more evolved than you and I? It's a global problem.

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.