What Does Soros Want?

Over a century ago, it was Oscar Wilde (no, Freud) who worried about "what do women want." Now, the question is what does billionaire speculator George Soros want? And why?

I've been thinking about this for a while, and was prompted to focus my mind on it over the weekend when I read a piece about Soros and his Open Society operation: "Mapping the Open Society Network on Soros’s 90th Birthday." Hayden Ludwig dismisses Soros thusly:

Each group in the Soros Network is a cog in the larger “open society” machine, so named for Soros’s affinity for the philosophy of the communist-turned-lefty-libertarian Karl Popper, Soros’s professor and personal mentor during the young man’s time at the London School of Economics...

Their vision of an open society is globalist and utopian, rejecting both objective truth and established tradition in favor of technocracy: rule by the “experts.” The net result is open borders, supranational governments such as the European Union, enforced secularism, and dissolution of the U.S. Constitution by a new American Revolution designed by plutocrats to wipe away the republic and replace it with socially engineered tyranny.

OK, I decided, let's check out Karl Popper and George Soros and try to understand them. I have several of Popper's books and my rough feeling is that Popper isn't quite as eager to pull down the USA as George Soros. 

But there is this. Both Popper (b.1902) and Soros (b.1930) are assimilated educated Jews from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These folks all tend to be anti-nationalists and supra-nationalists. Like Stefan Zweig (b. 1881) in The World of Yesterday, they believe in Europe. It makes sense, of course, especially when you consider the opposing view of Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf that ethnic Germans were getting the shaft in multi-cultural Austria-Hungary before World War I. The supra-national Austro-Hungarian Empire worked well for assimilated Jews, until it didn't.

You can see this attitude working out in Soros's equivocal attitude to Israel. His Jewishness wants to support it, but his anti-nationalism wants to deplore it. So he kinda sits on the fence.

I've always been a bit flummoxed about Soros and his anti-nationalism because I didn't read Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies as an indictment of the nation state, but as a broadside against totalitarianism from Plato to Marx and Marxist historicism, that "history unfolds inexorably according to universal laws." Popper believes in the transition from

the magical or tribal or collectivist society [that] will also be called the closed society, [to] the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society.

So he believes in the opposition between magical thinking and logic and reason. But, of course, so do Plato and Hegel and Marx.

And I'm sure so does George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. But then, you might ask, why does the Open Society Foundation support the "trained Marxists" of Black Lives Matter?

I suppose because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." If Soros experiences nationalism as the enemy, then the Marxist enemies of the nation state are his friends.

Yes, but can't Soros see that the trained Marxists are just taking him and his money for a ride? It's a good question. I answer it by invoking my idiot theory of conspiracy. Don't think that there is a dark conspiracy out there that is cunningly planning the destruction of all we hold dear. The conspirators are probably bumbling idiots; they imagine themselves a lot smarter than they really are. I suspect that Soros, like the rest of us, has not really thought through exactly what he wants, and is reluctant to change his plans in the light of mistakes and new information. Plus, the guy is 90. His sons, that are already in charge of the Soros empire, seem to be ordinary woke members of the educated Gentry.

It comes down to this. Soros, like many of his generation in the educated Gentry, thinks that nationalism is the foundation of all our miseries. For him, the lesson of World War II is "never again." And I get it, for central European Jews like him, that the nation state is problematic.

How about another idea? The rule of the educated supra-national Gentry is problematic? That, to me, is the meaning of the populist nationalism of which we've heard tell. It is saying: hey wokies: you may think that you chaps are the first and the last in human wisdom and ordained by Gaia to bend the arc of history towards justice, and you may be right. But meanwhile, we Commoners think we are getting screwed.

See, what is going on right now is that the educated Gentry is just dismissing the critics of its rule as far-right, or white nationalist, or systemic racist, or whatever pejorative comes to mind. You can see this in its Three Layer theory of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." Who says that the "allies" really have the interests of the "oppressed peoples" at heart? Oh, the "allies" say that. Could it not be that the "allies" are interested, first of all, in their power and status and vanity? Just sayin'.

And that's the problem with George Soros. He's concocted this Open Society notion from his understanding of Karl Popper. But suppose that his understanding of Popper is mistaken and that his notions would lead to a closed society of lefty neo-tribalism and magical thinking? How would we know? How would he know?

Is all the "mostly peaceful protesting" and liberal prosecutors that Soros is funding going to lead to the political destruction of Donald Trump and systemic racism? Is the current Thing about mail-in voting and protests at the home of the Postmaster General really going to advance the Democratic cause? Or will it inspire a counter-movement?

Does George Soros really know what he is doing? Does Nancy Pelosi? Does anyone?

I'm reading Desperate Sons by Les Standiford about the Sons of Liberty in the ten years leading up to the American Revolution. It suggests to me that the opposition to British rule was deeper and wider than I had previously understood. One of my takeaways is that the Brits in London -- that were passing Stamp Acts and Quartering Acts and banking laws that resulted in severe deflation in the colonies -- really had no clue about what was going down in the colonies.

Same thing applies to George Soros and our global elite. They know they are the good guys, the evolved and educated guys, but they really do not know what is going down on the ground. They do not know whether their policies help or hurt. They just know that they are the good guys, so shut up, peasant.

The Wokies Really Do Have a Beef

Over at American Greatness Ned Ryan sympathizes a little with the Wokies that are having such a great time ripping up downtown all over liberal America in "The Misdirected Rage of Young Rioters."

Problem is, he says, that they have been taught all their lives that they are special, that they are winners, and they aren't. Most of them are just average.

Then they get shipped off to 

indoctrination centers of higher learning where they are spoon-fed all these lies about how evil our country is, that this place is rotten to the core, and that it should just be burned to the ground.

No wonder they are angry.

They can’t find jobs, so they rage against the system they’ve been indoctrinated to believe is the source of all their troubles: that evil, free-market capitalist system that has betrayed them. They’re blaming the wrong system.

Instead, they ought to be blaming the indoctrination centers and the flawed parenting methodology according to which they were raised up to believe these lies. 

Well, allow me to disagree. The young'uns ought to be angry, but not for this reason. Indeed the foulest injustices have been committed against them. But it is not the fault of systemic racism or eevil capitalists. 

No indeed. It's all the fault of the liberal educated Gentry that has run things for the last century. What else could it be?

Nothing remarkable here. Government is force; there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. So you would expect that after a particular ruling class had been in power for a while the result of its governance would be an accumulation of injustice. I am not saying that the injustice was deliberate. Mostly it is just the result of "unanticipated consequences" of government action.

But you would also expect that they young sprouts, while feeling the chill, would not really know enough to figure out where the arctic blast was coming from.

Here kids, let me help you. Here is what you should be mad about.

Government education. If you are half paying attention, you might notice that the union ladies that currently run the government schools don't want to open school this fall. But they still want to be paid. It is a profound injustice that your parents do not get to send you to the school of their choice, or, even better, club together in their neighborhoods to set up mini-schools that can cost a mere $5,000 per year per student. And, when the government runs the schools it is not going to tell you that it makes a dog's breakfast of education. Hey kid! The clients of government education are not parents, not children, but union teacher ladies.

College for All. Back in the day youngsters got their start in life through an apprenticeship. Sometimes, the apprenticeship amounted to "indentured servitude," where the apprentice was the virtual slave of his master. But once you had served your time you were now a "journeyman" and free and clear of educational expense. Not like today where college is "free" or funded by a student loan that is not dischargeable in bankruptcy and may hang around your head for decades. Hey kid! Do you realize how unjust the current university system is? And how it screws you and benefits the professors and administrators?

Immigration. The labor market is simple: supply and demand. The more immigration, the lower the wages for everyone, including native-born Americans. Moreover, the benign neglect of illegal immigration encourages under-the-table "informal" employment which also undercuts wage rates, if you are an employer that doesn't mind not paying taxes on your employees. Hey kids! Don't you realize that immigrants are your direct competitors in the labor market?

Home mortgages. Ever since the 1930s, the government has subsidized home mortgages in various ways, including providing a secondary market in mortgages, particularly 30-year mortgages. It also encourages low down payments. The result is to allow more people to bid for houses. Back in the day you couldn't get a loan with more than a 10-year term, and you couldn't often get away with less than 50 percent down. Do you see how the old system helped frugal savers and the new system allows everyone to bid up the price of houses? Of course, the current system has benefited the World War II and Baby Boomer generations because they bought their houses before prices really took off. Hey kids! Wouldn't it be cool if the OK Boomers experienced a 30 percent drop in their over-priced homes and you could afford to buy?

Social Security. The way Social Security works is you pay a tax on your earnings for 40 years and then the government gives you a pension based on political considerations. Suppose instead you saved your own money and kept it at Fidelity or Vanguard. Then you could use the money to start a business or send the kids to college, and finally you could retire whenever you had accumulated enough and the SPY and QQQ had grown your savings enough. Instead, the government sequesters your money in a so-called "trust fund." I wonder what the government does with that money? Build highways that grow the economy? Or bike paths that don't. Hey kids! Do you realize what it would mean if you could save your own money instead of the government taking it, in your own best interest?

Medicare. Actually, Medicare is probably not too much of a problem, because most of its funding comes from the federal income tax which means that most of the money comes from rich people. But, no doubt, Medicare rules tend to make the health care system more expensive and less responsive to the needs of ordinary people. Hey kids! Government health care means that you are not the client: Big Health and Big Drug and the Medicare bureaucracy set the rules!

Welfare. Welfare is not all that expensive, at least, not compared to the expense of Social Security and Medicare, but there is the little problem that welfare encourages poor women to have babies without fathers. Something like 70 percent of Black babies don't have fathers around. You think that might have something to do with the fact that over 50 percent of murders are committed by Black men? That's what the experts say when they are not writing for The New York Times. Hey kids! How about the biggest systemic racial injustice of them all: to deprive Black kids of fathers?

Economic Regulation. The science is clear on this. Economic regulation of business does not work, as first pointed out by George Stigler, because "regulatory capture." This means that all regulatory agencies eventually become "captured" by the industries they regulate.Think railroads and trucking, back in the day. Think doctors and lawyers right now. Think environmental regulation. Hey kids! Don't believe the activists promising to protect you from Big Business. All they do is make it impossible for Little Business to compete.

Gentry Activism. The higher orders of our society are full of ideas to "benefit mankind." Mostly, these ideas do not benefit mankind, but they do make the educated Gentry feel good about itself. And our economy is riddled with ideas that some Gentry-funded and Gentry-staffed NGO has advocated. An easy example is ethanol in gasoline. It makes cars more expensive; it tends to corrode engine parts; it makes cars less efficient; it benefits Big Ag; it increases the price of corn which hurts poor people; it puts more land under the plow. There are thousands of regulatory interventions like this that well-meaning activists have introduced into our economy. And the trouble is that, according to Chantrill's law, it is nearly impossible to walk these programs back. Hey kids! Do you realize how much goody-goody regulation costs you?

Race Politics. I wonder how much of the present rage is due to the straight-up racial and sexual discrimination against young white males, the youngsters we call beta-males and soyboys. We made discrimination illegal half a century ago. We said, if you discriminate on the basis of race or sex it is criminal. But that wasn't enough for our moralists. They had to go to work to change the effects of discrimination with quotas and Affirmative Action and Diversity and Inclusion. I agree, morally, that we ought to have a society where every race and group is properly represented in the structure of power in every walk of life. But should we use the apparatus of force to do that? And would it make things better? See, it is one thing to say: hey, you discriminated in this instance on the basis of race. It is another thing to say, well, we should put a thumb on the scale for a while until this or that classification of human is no longer "underrepresented."

The problem with all populist explosions is that while the people are rightly angry, they usually have no clue about why things are all screwed up.

And when you are the ruling class, the fact that people do not know what is screwing them over is not a bug, it is a feature.

And so, the angry kids lash out, not knowing who is really screwing them over. If only they could listen to people like me!

Nothing New: Movements that Decide to Cleanse Society of Evil

The indispensible Angelo Codevilla, pseudonymous author of "The Flight 93 Election" back in 2016 has another one. It's called "Millenarian Mobs" and it's about the movements that arise all the time to cleanse and purify a fallen world.

Our present movement of purifying wokies are nothing new.

The Americans who confess other people’s racism absolve themselves inexpensively by a moral mechanism common to humanity: the more I profess to hate evil, the more I showcase my own goodness...

Again and again over the centuries, persons who have imagined themselves cleansed by ritual confessions have believed themselves elevated above the rest of humanity and, hence, entitled to oppress or even annihilate those around them.

And the toppling of monuments is nothing new: "Smashing others’ idols was, and remains, a staple of tribal warfare."

But down the ages the social-cleansing have been attacks by subordinate revolutionaries on the ruling class, today's revolutionaries are not exactly opponents of the ruling class. As we would say, the wokies are youngsters often from the educated Gentry class that, in normal times, would expect to ascend in good time into the ruling elite. But, 

Always, millennial movements grow out of ordinary struggles. A few firebrands interpret the struggles radically, gather followers, and lead them along their own apocalyptic logic to bloody disaster. Social dislocations, as well as injustices, failures of leadership, and excessive expectations have been like tinder waiting for sparks.

In our time these millennial movements have tended to be "violent, revolutionary totalitarianism," combining political hegemony with a secular-religious puritanism.

Almost invariably the leaders have been outcasts, or what Marxists call “lumpen-intellectuals.”... Their initial focus was some obvious evil. As often as not, they claimed heavenly messages or apparitions as their authority. Their audience was twofold: those who saw themselves as the evil’s primary victims and those who wished to shed their responsibility for it. To the former, the prophets promised redress and immediate relief, while to all, and especially to the latter, they promised a role in a holy enterprise. Some sort of confession of sin and cleansing ritual would follow.  

 "Those who had undergone cleansing believed themselves so pure that they were no longer capable of sin." But there was work to be done: cleansing the rest of society. And lower down the scale it was simply a question of killing your enemies.

I think this is the key point of the article. Educated people don't justify just going out and killing people; they have to persuade themselves of their innocence; they need to rationalize their revolution. Only when educated people feel that they have cleansed themselves do they proceed to the vital task of cleansing others. Don't they just!

But the rioters that plundered the Magnificent Mile in Chicago, they are just looking for an excuse to lurch to the primitive, back to good old loot and plunder and vengeance. As one BLM organizer put it: "That's reparations."

In our day we have a political elite concerned with holding onto power, and apparently using "the revolutionary movements as allies against their socio-political competitors." As I would say, they are Gentry using their lower-class Clients to sock it to the Commoners. Thus we have the rulers joining with the wokies to make ideological war on the Commoner middle class that, led by Trump, is getting restless.

Don't be fooled by the talk about the "oppressed" and the "oppressors," says Codevilla.

Today, we need not imagine that the corporate magnates, the hard-bitten politicians, the FBI officials, who kneel draped in Kente cloth in penitence for “white racist America,” who declare solidarity with the mobs that deface statues—that any of them believe in anything other than their own power and advantage. Nor need we imagine that the majority of those mobs’ members are doing anything other than enjoying a holiday from the law.

 These people are playing an old, old game, the game of divide and conquer to stay in power. And the only thing to do, the only thing that would ever do, is "to treat the millennialist mob as the enemies they are" and do something about it.

It may just be necessary to win an election or two. Or not.

The Moment Before Wile E. Coyote Falls to Earth

The recurring drama of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner is that the Coyote keeps coming up with a cunning plan to blow up the Roadrunner, but every time the cunning plan blows up in his face.

I am reminded of this as the unremarkable Joe Biden picks the unremarkable Kamala Harris as his running mate. They are both, I think, caricatures of who we do not want as president.

I wonder if that has been true about the Democratic Party for the last 50 years. Let us suppose the Democrats were genuinely shocked when Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968. But hey, accidents happen.

Then Nixon won a second term, going away. Well, the Democrats taught him a lesson and booted him out of office. But then came Reagan, the "amiable dunce," in swampy Clark Clifford's memorable phrase. And a Republican Senate.

OK, so things returned to normal in 1992 with Bill Clinton, the master politician of the ages. But the next thing was the first Republican Congress in 40 years!

OK, so we got the First Black President in 2008. But the next thing was a Republican House in 2010 and a Republican Senate in 2014.

What in the world is going on? 

What is going on is that the Democrats are becoming more and more desperate to hold onto the reins of political power that they had come to regard as theirs by divine right -- or at least the arc of history -- and the good old ways just aren't working any more.

Let us say that the problems began when working-class Americans first started breaking away from the New Deal coalition and voting Republican. It started with Nixon's Silent Majority, and reasserted itself with the Reagan Democrats.

I experienced the Reagan Democrats directly in 1980 at a Republican presidential caucus in Kent, Washington. There was I and another gentry guy as Bush supporters. But on the other side of the room were guys that looked like phone-repair technicians: they were Reagan supporters and they carried the day. On that day I knew that the world had changed.

Democrats have been pretty cunning about neutralizing this trend, by increasing immigration and turning a blind eye to illegal immigration. They understand that most immigrants start out as Democrats until they find their economic place. And they respond to a racist appeal until they experience themselves as Americans rather than hyphenated Americans.

The problem is that this approach to politics requires that you taint all ordinary un-hypenated Americans as white supremacists. Thus the progressive three-layer theory of politics, as suggested by Matt Taibbi:

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

So, in this lefty world there are the innocents, the good guys, and the bad guys. 

Contrast that with my reductive Three Peoples theory, which has People of the Creative Self, People of the Responsible Self, and People of the Subordinate Self. Or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer theory, which has Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

In the Chantrill/Yarvin world, there are special people, ordinary people, and subordinates. It is a world which naturally has different kinds of people, but they ought to be able to rub along, with a little give and take.

But in the lefty world, things are black and white. And the only thing to do is for the allies to defeat the white oppressor monsters with the votes of the oppressed peoples before they grind the noses of the oppressed people into the dust.

I don't think it is that tendentious to suggest that the left's three-layer theory is, as lefties like to say about other people's ideas: Overdetermined.

And the Democrats' politics seems to have got them to a weird place, where the leading candidates for the presidency were a couple of old guys, one a socialist and one an old wheel-horse of the New Deal era. The rest of the Democratic candidates were diverse caricatures from central casting. The gay guy Buttigig! The fake Latino O'Rourke, the black guy Deval Patrick. The fake Indian Elizabeth Warren.The hedge-fund guy Tom Steyer. The Jewish billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

Who among them could you say "cares about people like me?"

Let us notice the Big Lie at the heart of the three-layer "members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors."

It is that the ordinary white middle class, the Commoners, are in fact implacably powerful "white oppressors." Really liberals, are you sure? The conservative guys that I had lunch with last week are a cabal of white oppressors just back from their white-supremacist meeting?

And yet this is the lie that powers the whole Diversity and Inclusion politics of today's Democratic Party, and what prompts corporate America to immediately side with Black Lives Matter upon the death of George Floyd -- who, it turns out, was resisting arrest, was clearly under the influence of drugs, and was being restrained merely until the emergency medical folks got there.

When you play ducks and drakes with the truth, you get Trump. Because Trump is the candidate of the Commoners, of ordinary Americans without gorgeous qualifications, without access to power, without special privileges.

More and more I get the point of Curtis Yarvin's notion that the ruling class strokes the "ambition, honor, and vanity" of the Gentry layer. All the folderol about the First Black President, the First Woman President is all bubba bait for the Gentry. Oh yeah! We are so evolved! Isn't it wonderful that we elected the First Black President! Finally, gays get to marry! We are so evolved! So compassionate! So inclusive!

But, it seems to me, this politics gets you the present gargoyles on the Democratic ticket for president. Joe Biden, the underwhelming senator from a tiny state, Delaware, Chosen By Obama so as not to outshine the underwhelming guy at the top of the ticket. Kamala Harris, who made her way to headline politics as the creature of Willie Brown, the Mr. Big of California politics, and has clearly not developed an essential instinct for what to say and what not to say.

The question is: how do these gargoyles get to be presidential candidates? The answer, I think, is the poisonous race and gender politics of the Democratic Party that cannot let ordinary politicians make their way to prominence, but must be always putting the race/gender finger on the scales, must always be reducing everything to good-guys/bad-guys race war.

And the bottom line of their politics is that if the rulers can get the votes of the Gentry and the votes of the Clients then who cares about the Commoners?

Well, nobody cares until the Commoners rebel, because of the injustice of the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" theory of politics.

And then the Democratic Wile E. Coyotes are stunned when the latest cunning product from Acme Corporation blows up in their faces.

Message to Lefties: The Age of Politics is Over

So, yesterday the Seattle City Council decided to Defund the Police. Next year. When you think about it, this is exactly how politics works. 

Some interest group gussies up a bunch of rage, and the politicians realize they have to Do Something about it. But they know, in their heart of hearts, that it's all baloney. So what do they do? They pass a bill to make it look like they are doing something but push the big stuff off till next year when, maybe, the patient's fever will have subsided.

Anyway, the black woman Seattle chief of police Carmen Best resigned. Or rather, retired.

Doesn't that make the whole Seattle City Council into racist sexists? You tell me.

But I think there is a bigger issue here. And I think it is this:

The Age of Politics is Over. 

You think? I think that the Age of Politics ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts 55 years ago.

I went to the website of my Seattle Councilman Dan Strauss and he says this.

My priority as a Councilmember will be to create bold solutions at the scale of the problems we are seeking to address. I will fight to ensure Seattle is a healthy city, one connected by transit, that supports our small businesses, that has accessible and affordable childcare, and has safe, affordable places to call home.

Know what, Dan? The Age of Bold Solutions is over. What we need is an absence of bold solutions, a long withdrawing roar of undoing the Bold Solutions of yesteryear. For the only Bold Solution worth thinking about relates to my maxim that "Government programs cannot work because you cannot reform them." Which is to say: don't even think of a bold solution.

Of course, you can reform government programs, but only when they are broken -- completely broken, as in government can't borrow money any more. 

But we are better than that. 

This is why I say that the left -- liberals, progressives, choose your poison -- is a Great Reaction, a lurch back to the primitive, where socialism is a return to slavery, the welfare state a return to feudalism, and the activism culture a replay of the medieval romance, when knights were bold and damsels were in distress.

See, the whole point about humans is that we are social animals. That means that we do a bunch of things in order to reduce violence and conflict. One of those things, highlighted by Jordan B. Peterson in his lobster thingy, is hierarchy. Male lobsters don't fight over every little thing; instead they have a hierarchy. So unless a male lobster just can't take it any more, he accepts his place in the hierarchy. Lobster Lives Matter.

Now, one of the Big Problems down the ages is that humans have lived by the food available to them on the land. They have attempted to secure this food supply be defending a territory. Men have specialized in territory defense. Because land, and the food grown there, was life.

But now things are different, as I keep saying. It doesn't matter where food is grown. You can buy it. You can buy it thousands of miles away and have 100,000 ton grain ships move it all over the world from where the food is grown to where it is wanted. It doesn't matter where any product is produced; it can be loaded into a container on a container ship and dispatched across the world.

The only real wealth in the world is "intangible capital," the knowledge and knowhow in human minds. And this knowledge and knowhow can create incredible fortunes: the Microsoft fortune, founded by a guy that bought an operating system for personal computers and sold it by the item to IBM; the Apple fortune, starting with the iPod music machine and culminating in the iPhone that has transformed the world.

Notice what is missing from these tales of fabulous wealth? Force. Government. Politics. Bold Solutions.

Now, all is not completely copacetic, not yet. It is true that we no longer need to live as the underlings or the thralls of a Strong Leader that will protect us from all the dangers of the world. Instead we now are subservient to the market, what other people are willing to pay for our services and our products. It is, many people think, a worse slavery than the old household slavery or plantation slavery. For there is no hiding from the market in some rural paradise. We must all mark to the market every day. We must all keep updating our skills and improving our products. If we don't then we will find that the market no longer rewards us very much for our trouble.

And we need police to bash the heads of knuckleheads that haven't yet got with the program. That still like to loot.

But is the new market order unjust? Does a social animal deserve to thrive even if it is unwilling to serve its fellows with services and products that those others want to buy? That, of course, is the Great Question that all of us are confronted with every day. By what right can and should we demand to be supported by others when we cannot provide for ourselves?

There's a yard-sign on my morning walk that declares "Equality Hurts No one" and it features the clenched fist of Black Lives Matter. Well. So equality doesn't hurt anyone but if you don't provide it we have a clenched fist ready to enforce the notion. Thanks, pal. 

I would say that the only way to have equality is to enforce it. And you'd have to do it every day because tomorrow some entrepreneur will have a remarkable idea that is worth millions -- or maybe trillions. And that would be the end of equality until you enforce it. So equality needs a clenched fist.

In fact, though, social animals have found that equality is impossible. The only thing that works is a benevolent form of hierarchy, just like the lobsters. In our society the chap that ascends the hierarchy is often an entrepreneur with a good idea that turns out to be worth trillions. Then there is the politician that ascends the hierarchy by promising Bold Solutions.

And there is the fact that young men are programmed, coded to be defenders of the border. That is what all the LARPing AntiFa warriors are doing. They are doing what comes naturally.

Only, in our day, we don't need no stinkin' border warriors. We have road warriors, professional sports stars, the chance to found a new business and take it public in an IPO, instead.

And a glorious thing it is, to be, not a pirate king, but a software billionaire.

But you tell Councilman Dan Strauss. Or Councilwoman Brahmin-from-Puna Kshama Sawant about that.

Because I don't think they would understand. They still live in the primitive world of the Age of Politics and don't understand that the world has moved on.

Think of them as primitive savages, or primitive progressives. What does a primitive progessive understand about the market and the idea of trusting anyone that acts trustworthy?

The Question of George Washington and His Slaves

My line on slavery is the same as my line on conquest and plunder.  Slavery Does Not Pay. 

And that is why we don't have slavery any more. Not because we are moral giants but because we can calculate profit and loss.

But then I read an interesting biography George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father's Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World, by John Berlau.

Did you know that George Washington started work as a surveyor at age 14? His dad had died and the kids from dad's first marriage got all the money. So the father of our nation had to get a job.

When Washington married his Martha, he was marrying money, for Martha was rich from her first marriage. Lots of slaves and all.

Here's the deal: Washington had a few slaves personally, and when he died he freed them all. This was considered a bit radical in 1799.

But the big thing for me was that George Washington, and a number of other slave-owners, had determined not to buy and sell slaves if it broke up the slave families.

In other words, he experienced his slaves as people, rather than commodities. But, when you experience your slaves as people there are all kinds of other issues, like what do you do about slaves that are too old to work.

That is where the Does Not Pay comes in.

The thing about slaves is that while you get work out of them -- if you are lucky -- you are also responsible for housing and feeding them. And clothing them and I know not what. 

OK, here are the details. In his will Washington stipulated after the death of his wife Martha all his slaves should be freed, and that former slaves unable to support themselves due to advanced age or disability should be clothed and fed by his heirs. And he provided for the education of "many of the former slave children." And no slaves were to be sold.

So if you actually care about them as people, they could cost you a bundle.

In other words, as soon as you start to care about slaves as people, Slavery Does Not Pay.

Do you see how free labor might appeal to the business class? If you are a good guy like George Washington the care and feeding of your slaves is going to cost a bundle. But if you free them and give them wages in return for their work then the responsibility for the care and feeding falls on the now-freed slaves.

So now it occurs to me that my line that conquest and plunder and slavery went out because They Do Not Pay has an important qualification.

If you do not care about the Other as people, then conquest and plunder and slavery are cool. If you conquer and kill, nobody cares about the widows and orphans of the conquered. If you plunder the conquered of all their grain, who cares if they all die of starvation. If you enslave the conquered, who cares if half of them die on the Middle Passage, or the voyage from Kaffa in the Crimea to the harems of the Middle East.

But once you do start to care about the Other as people, then everything changes. And all of a sudden the cost of treating people like people starts to come into view.

So you tell me the answer to this moral dichotomy: which is moral, to have people as virtual slaves and thralls and accept the responsibility to look after them? Or to employ them as free labor and just have to worry about the work they do and how much you pay them?

So, in our welfare state we have struck a middle course. We expect people to get a job, but we also look after the people that fall by the wayside. Is that a middle course, or a muddle? You decide.

Here's an interesting way to look at it. Our wokey friends divide the world up into oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors. Makes life pretty easy, don't it? You care about the "oppressed peoples" and the "allies" -- who are people like us wokies. The "white oppressors," whoever they are, can go hang.

Here's my take on morality. It's a lot more complicated than you think.

What I Believe

I'm going to lunch with some regular guys today, organized by a man that emailed me a couple of weeks back to thank me for my American Thinker articles. So maybe we will talk politics, not to mention "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

So I thought: what do I believe? What is "the meaning of life?" I think that my basic belief is that "we don't know." But everyone feels the need for a purpose, a meaning in life, so we make it up.

Correction: we don't make it up; we pick up someone else's belief system, a religion or ideology, and believe in it. Here is how a Portland stay-at-home mom experienced the woke belief system:

I started noticing [in 2016], throughout the neighborhood, a massive movement. Resistance to everything without an understanding of the issues themselves, the underlying data, what was really happening, it just felt so surface oriented, emotionally driven, and a repeat of media talking points. Yard signs popped up everywhere and are still on proud display. 

I believe that different people have different beliefs, and that this is natural and physical, and comes out of the modern understanding of the human psyche through things like developmental psychology. On this view, you would expect a hunter-gatherer to have a different world view than a college professor. You would also expect a construction worker with a mega pickup truck to have different ideas on transportation and grocery shopping than a college professor driving a Prius and shopping at Whole Foods.

I try to understand this "diversity" through my reductive Three Peoples theory. I use the word "reductive" because of course I know that things are not so simple that you can put all humans into three boxes. But, you have to start somewhere, and dividing humans into three parts is better than the more usual two-part "Us" and "Them."

Thus, I believe that we humans in the modern world come like this. There are, first of all, Subordinate people. These are people that experience themselves as victims, tossed around by indomitable powers. So the answer is to find a powerful lord or political patron and stick to him like glue. Then there are Responsible people. These are the middling sort of people that have a basic competence and skill set that enables them to make it in the market economy of the city. They think it is their responsibility to follow the rules, go to work, and follow the law. Finally, there are Creative people. For these people it is not enough to go out in the world and live a responsible life. As rich-kid Karl Marx wrote,

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Now I think it is important for Creative people to understand that it's all very well to talk about "changing" the world. But what if you are wrong and your plan for change is a disaster? You got insurance for that, pal?

I also think it is important for Responsible people to realize that it is all very well for them to say "get a job" to the Subordinate people of the world. But there is a whole cultural transformation between the life of the subsistence peasant in the feudal countryside and the knowledge worker in the city. I discuss this in my book The Road to the Middle Class.

I also think that it is important for Subordinate people to realize that their feudal lords or elected politicians or woke "allies" don't really care about people like them. Subordinates are what I call the "Little Darlings" of the rulers, at best, and their cannon fodder, at worst. When the day comes that the Subordinates are no longer useful for the lordly political project, they will be cast aside like an aged mistress. Case in point, the white working class, that progressives once loved, and now dismiss as white supremacist bigots and fascists.

Like everyone, I do have plans for how other people should live. For Subordinates, that I experience as people learning how to make it in the modern city, I propose The Road to the Middle Class, a program to learn the ways and the culture of the city, that I define as learning the code of Axial Age religion, education in modern skills, mutual aid rather than government welfare programs, and learning to live under law rather than under a lord. In other words, I recommend growing from Subordination to Responsibility.

For Responsibles, I recommend growing from Responsibility into Creativity, to experience life as not merely living according to God's law and living within set parameters, but learning to create a little, as in creating your own business, trying out some idea of betterment, of doing things better.

For Creatives, I have a plan. See, I think that the wokies -- ever since Marx -- have made a fatal error. They think that the future will be made by Creative people like them "fighting for change." This kind of person I call the Egoist Hero and they think of as the Revolutionary Hero. It is the modern equivalent of the tribal leader leading his people to victory on the border against the dangerous tribe next door. So I have developed my own idea of "The Good Life" which comprehends the wokey approach but reaches higher. 

For Creatives, I propose, the highest goal should be to become a Sacrificial Hero. This notion comes out of Jungian psychology and his idea of "archetypes." As developed by Jungian adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson, the Sacrificial Hero means a person that conducts the Hero's Journey into the underworld of the unconscious, and if he survives this dive into the depths he may return to help his fellow humans, by illuminating the border between Order and Chaos, between the known and the unknown. And he probably sacrifices his life in the process.

The key thing to understand, I think, is that politics is not the way to the future. Politics, in my understanding, is the defense of our tribal patch of land from others that would conquer, plunder, and enslave us.

Only, in my understanding, conquest, plunder and enslavement are so yesterday. No, not immoral, so much as belonging to another age. For the point is that in our world, conquest, plunder, and slavery Do Not Pay.

Why? Because in modern developed countries 80 percent of wealth is "intangible capital" between the ears of intelligent creative responsible people. If you conquer, and plunder, and enslave, you have gained nothing. Because the wealth of the world is intangible.

If only our lefty friends would wake up one day and realize this.