The Mostly Peaceful Hellscape

Yesterday in a mostly peaceful effort, law enforcement officers caught up with accused AntiFa killer Michael Reinoehl. 

In the report of Reinoehl's mostly peaceful death I noticed a number of tweets from mostly peaceful AntiFa related Twitter accounts that seemed to be advocating violence.

Hey @Jack! How come those violent mostly far-left accounts are still mostly unlocked?

OK. We can all trust @Jack to deal with the mostly hateful haters. But, we have to ask, what is wrong with the generation that seems to be represented in the mostly peaceful protests of the past few months?

One only has to review the sickening recordings of the recent “peaceful protesters” around our nation-- Atlanta, Saint Louis, Seattle... and Portland to confirm the “peaceful” perps were almost exclusively young adults born between 1990 and 2002—people who have been brainwashed into progressivism by their education and lack of ambition or work for a living.

Thank you, Senator, I am glad you asked me that. The whole thing is explained by my reductive Three Peoples theory, that people in the modern world can be reductively classified into Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.

In this reductive theory the great story of the modern era is the astonishing pilgrimage of Subordinates -- once starving peasants -- from feudal subordination to a noble lord to the alternative, the subordination to the rule of the market. And for those that made the journey the consequence has been a increase in real per-capita income over the past 200 years of 3,000 percent. See my Great Enrichment page.

But whatabout the people that have been born into the middle class, for whom a life of Responsibility is a given?

For these life is inexpressibly hard. Oh, not in the physical sense, of scrambling to make a living. But in the emotional sense of what we today call living a creative life, as a person of the Creative Self.

This is because nearly everyone that yearns to live a creative life ain't up to the challenge.

If that weren't enough, the rise of the Left two hundred years ago has meant that many young people are being fed a fake narrative on how to be a creative and live a creative life.

I call this fake narrative the Activism Culture. It is as fake as the medieval romance culture of King Arthur and his Knights enjoyed by the courtiers of the early absolute monarchs. And the Activism Culture is the moral framework of what I call the Great Reaction of the left, its lurch back to the primitive.

The notion behind the Activism Culture is that the way to live a creative life and "make a difference" is with revolutionary politics, by peaceful protest, marching against the injustices of the day. But I am here to say that the Age of Revolution is over. The logic of the Age of Revolution was the rising bourgeoisie wanting to replace the hierarchical culture of the agricultural feudal age with the transactional culture of the market economy and business.

Once that was achieved then the logic of revolution was over. Do you know why? Because when it came to the rise of the working class, the bourgeoisie was perfectly happy to accommodate the workers. And when it became time to accommodate women and minorities, the bourgeoisie was perfectly happy -- if a little slow -- to accommodate them too.

So the Age of Revolution is over. But I also think that the Age of Politics is over.

This is because I think that politics cannot go much beyond the crude domain of force. If you are talking about defending the border, then you need politics and government to do the job. If you have criminals harassing ordinary citizens then you need police to crack the heads of robbers and gangsters.

And you need laws to punish people that defraud and exploit others in normal commercial transactions.

But pretty soon you get to the point where you are legislating morality, and that's where things get sticky. Whatabout the annoying tree in the neighbor's yard that is threatening to grow into a monster that might one day fall upon your house in a storm?

In the regulatory state we have assigned a ton of moral questions to the supervision of the state, and I wonder if it is time to wonder if there isn't a better way to do it.

So I say that the Age of Politics is over. We need another way of negotiating between neighbors than the resort to regulation and lawyering. And we haven't really even begun to think about this.

And I believe that young people that have been carefully taught the culture of Revolution and the culture of Politics have been sold a bill of goods and that is why they are going crazy in the streets.

But if young people of a creative bent or a desire to Do Good in the world are not to do it with Revolution and with Politics, what are they to do?

Thank you, Senator, I'm glad you asked that.

They need to reject the Egoist Hero's Journey of fighting for justice and embrace the Sacrificial Hero's Journey. This journey is the journey down into the underworld of the unconscious that emerges from Jungian psychology and was popularized by Joseph Campbell. It is as new as social media and as old as the Jungian archetypes that try to make sense of the ancient human world before writing and maybe even before language.

I have tried to make sense of this in my series on the Good Life.

My point is simple. If you want to be creative, if you want to create a new world, then you are embarking on a journey of unimaginable difficulty and trial. It will take you up to the border of madness and possibly over it. At the very least it will involve a journey into the underworld of the unconscious that will expose all the monsters in your Self that you are hiding, not from the world but from yourself.

But most of us don't want that. We want something easier. Like the left's Temptation of Activism.

Become an Activist! Change the World!

You mean like lefty icons Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro?

Wanna become an Activist? The simple answer is: Don't. You can do much more good in the world by simply working, marrying, raising a family, and hanging on for the grandchildren.

As My Girl George Eliot writes at the end of Middlemarch of her heroine Dorothea Brooke:

that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs

instead of blazing across the firmament like a comet. 

Making Fun of the Ruling Class

What we are experiencing these days is the day-by-day falsification of the world view of our educated Gentry class.

Only, they have No Idea.

If they had an idea they would be saying to each other: you know, things aren't working. 

They would be saying to each other: our glorious project to end racism and sexism seems to be on the rocks. Where did we go wrong? Only they don't. They might have said to each other: wow, First Black President! So the race thing is done. Instead they are amping up the race rhetoric.

They might be saying to each other: look we humans might be changing the climate. But, realistically, according to the science, our plans to end fossil fuels ain't gonna make much difference. And we should hearken to the basic facts of Darwinism, that the survivors are the ones that adapt to new conditions. How do we adapt to climate change, given that in a century or two we might be looking at the end of the current Interglacial? They might be looking at failures of electrical supply dominated by renewables and say: wow, maybe we should listen to the electrical power engineers. But they don't.

In fact, on climate, you can see from WattsUpWithThat.com that the climate agenda is relentless. Pipeline companies are basically giving up on trying to propose new pipelines because the courts always side with the environmentalists. Of course they do, because the judges and the lawyers and the environmentalists are all educated Gentry. They all worship at the same shrines.

Here's another piece: that the politicians and activists will be mandating "autonomous cars" and you will have to have one in order to travel in special autonomous car lanes. Did you get a vote on that?

Right now, in the Puget Sound area, we are in the middle of building a $60 billion light rail system that basically parallels Interstate 5. Thing is, the mostly overhead structures are a bit like the celebrated "elevated" lines in Chicago and elsewhere that blot out the sun on city streets. If the structures were highways they would be stopped cold by the environmentalists as monstrous and ugly and killing endangered species.

And guess what: if dense cities get hollowed out by the new work-from-home movement, reprising the old wisdom that cities are plague central, then the new "El" ain't gonna get used. And the bondholders aren't gonna get paid. And the $60 billion will be wasted.

Or the race thing. One thing is consistent among the young black men like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd. They are men that grew up without a father. And how does that happen? How about liberals and their Great Society programs? How many liberals even have an inkling of a clue how their programs have devastated the lower classes -- including the white bottom 35 percent where, according to Charles Murray, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

Look, we know what needs to be done. It's not rocket science. But our liberal friends all live in their liberal bubble. They have no idea -- No Idea -- that their ideas and their programs and their activism is a blight upon the land.

Truth is, rulers and their supporters always try to hang on way past their sell-by date. They are like bureaucrats that are loyal to the bureaucracy and not to delivering on the responsibilities they are charged with.

Which means that things will have to get worse before they get better.

Really, opponents of the Gentry regime should not be working on alternatives to regime stupidities and self-dealing. We should just be concentrating on discrediting the rulers, making fun of them and dancing on their failures. 

Like Nancy Pelosi and her BlowoutGate. All the educated Gentry live by their Ambition, their Status, and their Vanity. And by targeting their ambition, status, and vanity we can hope to demoralize them.

Hmm. Donald Trump. His big thing is making fun of his opponents.

The reason that making fun of the opponents works is that the generals need the foot-soldiers to keep the faith, that the generals know what they are doing and will soon deliver victory.

So, it doesn't help to argue about strategy, because strategy is trying to look around corners where the future isn't yet known. But what you do is make a big fuss about the failures. And there are always failures.

No doubt that is why big-tech social media is clamping down on "hate speech." Because we cannot allow the plebs to criticize their betters.

Imagine! The BLM/AntiFa Riots Were The Fault of Infiltrating White Nationalists!

You gotta hand it to our Democratic friends: they can turn on a dime and, in unison, sing a different song. All in one day.

Back in the winter, all of a sudden, the word went out from the Democratic Mr. Zbig deep in his tropical volcano to vote for Joe Biden in the primary. And there it was. Joe won the primary that Tuesday and dear old Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was done to a turn.

And a couple of days ago the Dems decided that the BLM/Antifa riots were all the fault of white nationalist infiltrators. You can't make this up! Joy Reid:

Let me repeat this for those inventing the idea of 'Black Lives Matter riots.' BLM doesn’t 'riot.' They march against police violence. And note that those caught setting fires, assaulting and shooting people are consistently of the RIGHT, not the left," Reid tweeted. "So let’s stop giving in to the narrative Trump and his allies are inventing to try and help him cling to power. Autocrats always eventually get to this place: accusing the opposition of being anarchic and violent to cover up their own rot and violence."

Well, bless my buttons. I Had No Idea. I thought that white nationalists were gap-toothed idiots. The idea that they are up to the task of organizing fires, assaults and riots and passing themselves off as AntiFa lefty rioters! Amazing. Now read this:

You are MUCH more at risk from unmasked Trump cultists coming home to your suburb from a superspreader rally and coughing or sneezing on you in Walmart or touching the door handle after wiping their nose than you are from a Black Lives Matter rally.

Imagine! All the mostly peaceful protests of the last few months ever since the drugged up George Floyd invoked the revised Zeroth Amendment. As reported by Steve Sailer:

The new Zeroth Amendment to the Constitution reads “No Black man must submit to being arrested if He’s really not in the mood to be arrested.”

 All these protests were organized by the right! Golly! Who knew!

But I wonder. That soyboy chappie, "Commander Red," that got arrested on the way to a riot in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and curled up into a fetal position and started crying. Could a real white nationalist be enough of an actor to do such an amazing job of representing himself as a soyboy-lefty-coward? A ordinary pickup-truck driver? A veteran of Trump Boat Parades and Trump Car Parades? 

I don't know. I don't think I can wrap my brain around that one. It seems it would require several semesters at a prestigious acting school to pull that "Commander Red" shtick off. And, as we know, working class whites without ten years of teenage activism in approved wokie fights for justice don't get to get into prestigious acting schools, because that would be racist.

OK. I wonder what the Trump campaign is going to do with this one.

Somehow, I suspect that the Trump campaign is going to prove to be well up to the mark as it responds to the Dems' latest 180.

My advice to my activist friends: The Age of Revolution is Over.

And all you chaps that think that politics is going to solve the problem of No Justice No Peace. The Age of Politics is Over.

You chaps are dinosaurs from the previous age. The world has moved on. As I like to say, you are like medieval courtiers listening to minstrels telling the medieval romances of King Arthur and his knights rescuing damsels in distress. It was rubbish 600 years ago, and your neo-medieval romances about revolution baby and justice! are just the same.

But, now that your mostly peaceful protests are turning out to be a political disaster you want us to believe that gap-toothed white nationalists and bitter clingers are to blame for the riots.

Hey! Come over here! I gotta bridge to sell yer!

How Did Our Modern Era Get Started?

Up till now I have argued that the end of the feudal system occurred when the absolute monarchs like Henry VIII (reigned 1509-1547) nationalized the armed forces and disarmed the nobles. The response of the nobles, I argued, was to send the peasants packing because if they couldn't use them for arrow fodder, what was the use of them?

In addition, the nobles became courtiers and needed to start making money out of their estates to finance their courtier life in the capital. Hence the agricultural revolution.

But. I am now reading Thomas More's Utopia published in 1516, and he is whining about enclosures and the conversion of land and villages into sheep pasture. Also, there's a timeline that notes the 1495 act against vagrants and beggars. So it would seem that people were being chucked off the land before Henry VIII nationalized the armed forces.

On the other hand, an emailer notes that 

The western custom of personal business, and employment began after the great European plague of 1350. Under the previous feudal system every man living on the land belonged to the landowner.  After the plague most of the land owners were dead. Many people farmed to their own advantage.  Labor and craftsmanship were scarce.  Some migrated to the protected bourgeois cities and worked a skilled trade for pay.

So what is going on? More research is clearly needed. 

It seems that the rise of the bourgeoisie could be said to start in the aftermath of the Great Plague: people -- anybodies -- working for money rather than growing their own food as the serf of a lord.

But if there is a problem with vagrants and beggars then I interpret that as peasants being chucked off the land due to the monetization of agriculture and a culture of "improvement." And remember that vagrancy was a problem right up until the 19th century when the "surplus population" got sucked up into factories.

Let's just say that the period from, say, 1350 until 1850 was a period of staggering transformation -- socially, culturally, economically, politically, militarily and religiously -- and there ain't been nothing like it in human history.

You can say, with me, that the nobles kicking their peasants off the land after the nationalization of armies was cruel and unusual, and you would be right.

You can say, with Sir Thomas More, that the enclosure movement was cruel and unusual and kicked honest peasants off the land, and you would be right.

And the end of the union-based industrial corporation after 1965 was cruel and unusual and kicked honest white working-class men onto the trash heap of history, and you would be right.

In fact, you could say that any subordinate group that just sits there enjoying the patronage of a noble or a corporate or political patron is heading for disaster, and you would be right.

Indeed, anyone that does not live with half an eye on what's just around the corner, the need to adapt to the unexpected, is heading for disappointment, and you would be right.

But I must say, I sure would like to know a little more about what was going on back then at the dawn of the modern age. Was it the stirrings of a city-based market economy? Was it the appearance of guns in warfare? Was it the development of knowledge in agriculture? Was it the move of nobles into the capital city? Was it the revolution in navigation, with ships sailing all over the world?

Like I say, more research is needed.

The Crisis of White Liberal Hegemony

There are a lot of end-of-the-world opinion columns out today. I wonder why.

Why is the world apparently coming to an end?

Of course, the world is not coming to an end. But politically, culturally, economically?

I think that what is coming to an end is the rule of the white educated middle class.

You can say that the rule of the educated middle class goes all the way back to the late Middle Ages when educated priests in the Roman Catholic Church were setting the agenda.

In the early days, the question was how to wrest political power from the landed nobles and give the educated middle class their rightful place in history.

Then, let us say, it was about bringing the ordinary middle class into the equation. Then the working class.

Because politics is politics, this process always involved a fair amount of loot and plunder. You don't get the political support of people by descanting on noble ideas. You need to address the question of "what is in it for me."

And, in the current era, the government and ruling class have had a lot to give away. Until now.

Call it the Law of Overhanging Fruit. Over the past century, as government expenditure in the US has gone from about 7 percent of GDP to the present 35-40 percent of GDP, the rulers have handed out loot to the parents of school children, to workers for their old age pensions and health care, and welfare for the workless. And lots of jobs for the educated in the various bureaucracies in government, education and corporations.

But now all the low-hanging fruit has been harvested. If we increase government spending to 50 percent of GDP and beyond it is not going to be pretty.

Also, the over-under coalition preferred by the educated ruling class started out with a small educated class and a large working class against a modest sized middle class. It made political sense.

But now the educated ruling class is fairly big -- and that means a lot of Jobs for Gentry are needed before getting down to distributing loot to the lower class. And the middle class is much bigger.

So the voting arithmetic doesn't work as well as it used to.

You can see how this works by comparing the old Marxist equation with the new Wokey equation.

Marx proposed that the poor helpless proletarians should be helped by the Communists, the vanguard of the proletariat, in their existential fight against the bourgeoisie. Back then there was a ton of proletarians, a fair amount of bourgeoisie, and just a few Communists.

Today our wokies propose that the helpless "oppressed peoples" should be helped by their lefty "allies" in the fight against "white oppressors." The "white oppressors," I assume are the white working class voters that are presently most notable for their Boat Parades and Car Parades in support of President Trump.

I mean who else could they be? Not the nice liberal ladies in gentrified neighborhoods sporting their #WeBelieve yard-signs. Not the university professors and administrators. Not the corporate execs down for Black Lives Matter. Maybe the local home-builder or construction-equipment rental operator.

The old Marxist political narrative was problematic, starting with the fact that the bourgeoisie was not, in fact, organized for the plunder and oppression of the workers. Indeed the story of bourgeois supremacy in the latter half of the 19th century is that the bourgeoisie was open to satisfying the political agenda of the working class.

Today, the wokey narrative is a lie from start to finish. "Oppressed peoples?" Would they be women who earn almost as much as men, even though they tend not to work at dangerous jobs? Would they be the Hispanics that are working willingly away all over my neighborhood building and remodeling homes? Would they be the Black women working in government bureaucracies and in healthcare? Would they be gentry gays and transgenders?

Whatabout "allies?" You mean gentry liberals in their professorships and activist groups and professional careers and nice liberal ladies with their yard-signs? And how do we know that the "allies" are really helping the "oppressed peoples" and not just using them in their own power project?

And are you seriously suggesting that the folks in those Trump Boat and Car Parades are really the "white oppressors" of the narrative? Do they really have any serious political power?

So my explanation for the current political crisis and the end-of-the-world rhetoric on all sides is that the political and cultural narrative of the educated ruling class is falling apart. So they are reduced to upping the ante to preserve their political hegemony. In an era where racial discrimination has been outlawed they accuse everyone of being a racist. In an age where gays get to marry they are accusing everyone of being a homophobe. In an age when young black men are the principal authors of violent crime they make a global issue out of police brutality against young black men. In an age where global termperatures are modestly increasing they demand to save the planet from runaway warming.

So I decree that the reality of the moment is that our current white liberal ruling class is facing an existential crisis, a terminal collapse of their authority, and, as Linda Lamont said, they cain't stand it.

The only question is: will the white liberal ruling class go quietly, or not?

Dems are for the Allies; GOPs for the Commoners

You know me. I see everything through the lens of my reductive Three Peoples theory. Or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer theory.

But our Democratic friends see the world through something close to another Three Layer theory.

In my theory and Yarvin's theory we have the Creatives or Gentry on top; we have Responsibles or Commoners in the middle; we have Subordinates or Clients on the bottom. This is a descriptive theory.

In the progressive or Democratic theory we have "oppressed peoples" who are championed by "allies" who fight against "white oppressors." This is a moral theory; I call it "allyism."

However both theories are kinda all about the proper role of the ruling class. It's clear that my theory suggests that the job of the ruling class is to provide a helping hand to all three Layers: to help Creatives be creative; to help Responsibles be responsible; to help Subordinates climb out of subordination into responsibility.

The lefty theory proposes a moral war, by the ruling class allies against the white oppressors on behalf of the oppressed peoples. That, of course, is what we are seeing on the streets right now as mostly white "allies" are mostly peacefully protesting against... Yeah, what exactly? The police? The businesses that they have been torching? Or what?

Now I think that both the party conventions have perfectly illustrated all this. 

The Democratic convention was all about young people and their activism on behalf of helpless oppressed peoples. 

The Republican convention was all about... Well, if you ask me it was all about persuading Black Subordinates that they really belong in the party of Commoners and that their struggle and sacrifices are understood and valued and that, if they make the awful decision, and #WalkAway, they will all live happily ever after.

All lies, of course, from both parties. Life is not that simple, and politics certainly is not the answer to your problems. But we humans are social animals, and politics is unavoidable.

So the question is really: how do the Americans in the middle react to all the play-acting? My judgement is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are really Commoners, people trying to Responsibly live the lives they are given and trying to make something good out of it all.

I think that the allies and oppressed peoples narrative is a conceit of the educated Gentry. It makes human life into an opera with the educated Gentry as the stars singing the most glorious arias and the oppressed peoples as the chorus of peasants. (It's amazing how many 19th century operas had a chorus of rural peasants).

My analysis of history is that, ever since the French Revolution, we keep getting outbursts of Creative conceit, that the educated Gentry are going to save the world with politics by bending the arc of history towards justice. And it always ends up with a very large body count.

Although, I would say, in the United States it has tended to result in the repudiation of the Creative Gentry by the middling sort of Commoners.

So here we are, at Labor Day, with another presidential election campaign before us. Will America elect to let Commoners live their ordinary lives or will we empower the educated Gentry to fight glorious wars against systemic racism and climate change?

That is the question.

We All Live in a Bubble

If you are a racist-sexist-homophobe like me you are struggling to figure out the Democrats.  Really? They think they can get elected "defunding" the police? Really? They can call riot and arson a "fiery protest?" Really? They think they can win elections by insulting non-liberal whites as "white supremacists?"

I find myself asking myself: what planet are they living on?

The answer, though, is simple. They are living in their liberal bubble.

And everyone lives in a cultural bubble.

And in my gentry liberal neighborhood there are no Trump signs, not one.

• There are Black Lives Matter yardsigns.
• There are hand-drawn Black Lives Matter signs.
• There are #WeBelieve signs, mark one and mark two.
• There are Hate Has No Home Here signs.
• There are Be The One signs.
• There are Biden 2020 signs.
• Oh, and there is a Bye Don sign. Get it?

There is one, very modest, house with a Thin Blue Line flag.

This morning I went by a house with a hand-lettered "I Can't Breathe" sign. That, I assume, is predicated on the notion that George Floyd was being prevented from breathing when he was being restrained while police were waiting for the Medic One to arrive. Only, his autopsy established that his lungs weighed twice the normal, because of the weight of foaming water, probably due to Fentanyl.

One of the things that has struck me during the recent George Floyd era is the bullshit that police have to put up with from Black men that they stop and interview. Their arrestees seem to be expert in a just-short-of-active resistance to arrest. 

And then, a lot of the time, the arrestee is strung out on drugs.

If I were a cop, it would drive me crazy.

But, as we know, if the police don't treat their Black arrestees with the utmost patience and courtesy they will get the book thrown at them.

Of course, I live in my bubble. But there is a difference between my bubble and the liberal bubble.

I always know what is going down in the liberal bubble, because the liberal bubble is the default cultural norm. It's what you get in school. It's what you get on TV. It's what you get from The New York Times.

When you are a racist-sexist-homophobe like me you have to know what is going on in liberal land. Just like you have to pay attention to the weather forecast.

But you can still hope.

And what I hope is that the present liberal craziness is like the liberal craziness of the Sixties, when liberals thought that they were riding a cultural revolution that was going to bury the horrid Fifties middle-class suburban conformism forever.

Only the American people elected Richard Nixon, twice. In 1972 Nixon won with a 61% to 38% of the popular vote.

As I say, it took until 1992 for Democrats to say, No, we've changed, we are New Democrats now. Then they got elected and immediately proposed to nationalize healthcare. So Americans elected the first Republican Congress in 40 years. Then the Democrats got moderate, for a season.

Is history repeating itself? No, of course not. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. 

Ever since the Obama election in 2008 Democrats have started to believe that this time is the time when we will transform society with politics and activism and programs and peaceful protests.

Are they right?

We Don't Know.

So we will have to wait until election night to find out.

My guess is that on election night my gentry liberal neighbors will discover that they have been living in a bubble, and that ordinary Commoner Americans will vote for law and order.

And then, as seems to happen whenever a Republican wins a presidential election, all across the nation therapists will be discovering a new post-election stress disorder.

But I could be wrong.