Our Rulers: Are They Playing Us for Idiots, or are They Idiots?

When you are the poor helpless victims it is hard to decide if the rulers that are bearing down on you are cunning and ruthless or whether they are mindless thugs.

The Zman takes the latter position in a rather dense piece on "The Parable of the Lizard People." He says that a group using political "violence on behalf of their cause is assuming there is no other option." But then he says that the folks being targeted, the shop owners, by BLM and Antifa are supported by corporate sponsors to the point that there are practically mega-corporation commercials supporting the rioters -- who are, of course, sponsored by the ruling class regime. Thus the folks targeted by the rioting,

the people under attack in our world lack self-awareness. They think they are in charge and that the corporations and politicians will respond to market pressure. You can be sure most of them think they will have their revenge in November. They think “get woke, go broke” is a reflection of reality. A big part of the war being waged on them is a psyop to reinforce this false consciousness.

Well, it could be. But that assumes that the "powers that be" are competent and know what they are doing. And I don't think so. I think that powers that know what they are doing are very rare. They are people like Bismarck and Lord Salisbury that kept Europe in the late 19th century under control. They they died and the idiots, Kaiser Wilhelm and the Brit and French politicians, burned the whole place down through stupidity.

I just can't help feeling that our ruling class today is shot through with idiots. It now appears that the whole Trump Russia thing was an incompetent sh*t show from the start, with the fabled Steele dossier put together by a "sub-source" Russian drunkard that had worked at the Brookings Institution. Just so the Clinton campaign could spy on the Trump campaign. And then the whole post-election stuff, including Special Prosecutor Mueller and the inpeachment effort: come on Dems, you can do better than that.

Or take the AntiFa riots. It would have been cool to have some huge peaceful demonstrations after the death of George Floyd, to rally the black vote to the Democrats one last time. But the present riots by young white gentry: Please. And we clearly have all the Dem mayors frozen in place like deer in the headlights, because their political education is in the fraud of "activism" and "peaceful protest." Which have been, for 50 years since the end of the Civil Right Era, fake play-acting by the ruling class's kidz. If the rioters had been eevil "far-right" white supremacists the mayors would have known exactly what to do and they would have done it if AntiFa didn't do their work for them.

See, I think it was staggering stupidity by Hillary Clinton not to concede the election in 2016 and send everyone home.

See, I think it is staggering incompetence by Nancy Pelosi and the other House leaders to allow the radical left to set the agenda.

I think it is staggering incompetence by the Dem mayors not to snuff out the lefty riots.

I think it is staggering stupidity for the Soros-supported prosecutors to do things like harass the St. Louis couple that defended their historic home with firearms. That's the sort of thing that transmits in a second through every gun-nut in the nation.

I think it is staggering stupidity for the tech-lords to have allowed their woke censors to be censoring center-right content and for Google to practically disappear Breitbart from its search results. Actually I think it is stupid to be censoring far-right content as well.

I think it is staggering stupidity for Judge Sullivan and the Court of Appeals to be still harassing LTG Flynn. I mean really fellahs. The definition of injustice is a powerful government hounding a private citizen using the full extent of the law and its staggering expense.

But what do I know? I'm just a guy that read a few books and thinks he knows something.

Here's what I'm thinking about. I wonder how we get through all the trillion dollar deficits and Federal Reserve money printing without a nasty inflationary bubble and a worse nasty recession a couple years down the road.

Now that, to me, is a real problem.

Liberal Woman Journalist Doesn't Get Conservative Women

One of the corollaries of my reductive Three Peoples theory is that people in one layer can't understand, and don't respect people in other layers. Example:

In Vanity Fair TV critic Sonia Saraiya asks "Is Hollywood too soft on conservative women?" Yes, she says, using "Mrs. America" on Phyllis Schlafly, "Bombshell" on Megyn Kelly, and "The Iron Lady" on Margaret Thatcher as examples. That's because Saraiya reckons "that they belonged to a group of “white nationalist racist gender traitors.”

In other words they had the wrong ideas, and weren't down-for-the-movement feminists. So launch the lefty pejoratives.

Did you know that "pejorative" means making things worse?

This attitude so common among educated women is, according to my theory, because People of the Creative Self, or educated Gentry, all have a culture in which women are supposed to believe in careers for women, and therefore abortion, and the notion that the "patriarchy" has oppressed women since the dawn of time.

And these people cannot understand or give the time of day to anyone outside the Overton window of their liberal world view.

But if you are a Woman of the Responsible Self, or a Commoner, you do not see yourself breaking the glass ceiling; you do not see the point. You see yourself as a wife, a mother, the caretaker of the family. So, you don't see the point of a career, not if it interferes with taking care of your family, you don't like the idea of abortion, because it implies that babies are expendable. And you don't see your husband as an oppressor, but rather as a provider that maybe doesn't always live up to the standards you have set for him. Yes, Commoner women tend to be a little patronizing towards their husbands.

Now, the women examined by Saraiya are/were not in fact ordinary Commoner women although they were born Commoners. Shlafly's father was a machinist and salesmen hammered by the Great Depression; Thatcher's father was a corner grocer in Grantham in England. But they got educated, starting with a Catholic girl's school for Schlafly and a British grammar school for Thatcher. 

Schlafly and Thatcher were both Amazon warriors, who learned how to operate in the men's public square utterly without fear -- or at least not showing any fear, which is what matters. They were extraordinary women, by any standard. Schlafly more or less singlehandedly ditched the Equal Rights Amendment; she argued that the ERA would be a disaster for women. Thatcher learned how to be a politician in Britain long before the parties prepared special women-only shortlists. It took Thatcher ten years of work before she got herself selected as a candidate for Parliament and elected to the House of Commons. And to see any of the videos of her as Prime Minister in the House of Commons shows her in complete mastery of the House of Commons culture, which is a male Culture of Insult. Only, because of House Rules, the insults must be indirect, which makes them much more fun.

The point of my Three Peoples theory -- and the reason I also use Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients -- is because it proposes a world in which there are people Who Are Not Like You. And it thereby allows you to live with The Horror! that these other people are not going to agree with you.

"Because I am so wise" -- that's Fritzi's line, not mine -- I understand and empathize with the fact that the world is full of people that do not see it the way that I do. I realize that all the liberal Gentry women up the street with their #WeBelieve signs naturally believe all the liberal shibboleths like Love is Love and Women's Rights are Human Rights. But I also understand that they are sitting in their liberal bubbles talking to their liberal friends and just have no clue -- because their liberal world view does not admit such a clue -- of how the other half -- or rather two thirds -- lives and experiences the world. So, of course it makes sense for them to think of Other People as superstitious bigots or, in today's argot, “white nationalist racist gender traitors.”

You see, I believe in a world in which it is OK for a woman to be a furious feminist, breaking glass ceilings and non-cis-gendering to her heart's content. But I also believe in a world where it is considered worthy and honorable and respectable to be a wife and mother. And I also understand that there exists a world of Subordinate women, living in a pre-city culture in which women... Well I know not exactly how such a world operates. I assume it operates something like the community of women of the hunter-gather band or the village women of the agricultural era, or the working-class mothers of the industrial slum. But more research is needed.

Yes. What do lower-class women want? Or expect? Has anyone inquired, ever? Anyone thought twice about imposing their own world view upon these women?

Didn't think so.

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.