All the World's a Social Construct

The arts and the sciences have been on the outs with each other for a while, if not for ever. Certainly long before C.P. Snow spoke about the "Two Cultures."

I suppose the big reason for this is that scientists think of themselves as objective investigators dealing with facts and reason, while artists and writers think of themselves dealing in intuition and metaphor.

I suppose we might say that science thinks of itself as Apollonian, and the arts thinks of itself as Dionysian.

And in the middle are the postmodernists that say, correctly, that race is a social construct. No doubt, but the fact is that all of science is a social construct, in the sense that science is a basket of theories that we use to explain how the world works.

And even though race is a social construct it is still an attempt to understand why different people are different and different peoples are different.

All of human science is an attempt to understand the world.

But so is a work of art. A work of art is nothing unless it explains how the world works.

Now you may say that science shows us how the world works with logic and reason, and the arts show us how the world works by triggering the unconscious and its emotions, its instincts, and its archetypes.

However, what with pyschology and all, we now have the beginnings of a science of the emotions, and Jungian pyschology is trying to provide the beginnings of a scientific explanation of the unconscious.

Now the postmodernists propose that science as a social construction is a scandal, a cunning power trick of the ruling class.

I would agree, up to a point. Our present ruling class uses its "Jobs for Gentry" program to keep science as a kept woman of the ruling class, and a particular kept woman of the ruling class is the whole postmodern community. Scientists know that grant money comes only to scientists that provide the right answers to the ruling class, particularly on climate change, race, and gender. There is no objective knowledge. It is all social construction and "narrative."

I wonder why the current ruling class encourages and promotes postmodernists. What's going on here? Because the postmodernist helpfully beat up on the middle-class Commoners? I wonder.

The best social-construct narrative I know is that of lefty linguist George Lakoff. He is famous for describing conservatives as inspired by a "strict father" model for the state, while liberals are moved by a "nurturant parent" model. I guess that in 2020 we would update his theory to say that Commoners are inspired by a Trump Boat Parade model of society while lefties are inspired by an AntiFa mostly peaceful protest model of society.

But Lakoff proposes a social construct of language that for me is dispositive. He proposes that humans start to understand the world using "basic-level categorization." By the age of three, children are able to understand a world of "socks and shoe, dog and cow." And table and chair, house and bike.

Get it? "Dog" is a social construct.

In fact, as the child soon learns, the world is a lot more complicated than that. There are, for instance, different kinds of dogs. And then dogs are a kind of animal. So right off the bat the kid learns about three levels of categorization:

Superordinate	Animal	Furniture
Basic-level	Dog	Chair
Subordinate	Retriever	Rocker

Now, the point is that there is no limit to the number of levels. Beyond Animals? Living things. And beyond that? 

That is why the ancients decided that the world is sitting on a turtle. But what is the turtle sitting on? Fuggetaboutit. It's turtles all the way down. We have a similar problem. The Earth is set in a Solar System, and the Solar System is set in the arm of a galaxy, and galaxies are scattered in space. And beyond? Is there Something? Nothing? A multiverse of Universes? We Don't Know.

Scientists have determined that we humans block out nearly all the information that is pouring into our five senses. We only pay attention to the stuff that our brain -- or whatever -- determines is significant. So, you might say, the basic-level objects are the most significant objects in our world: parents, siblings, dogs, food, angry neighbors.

But once we master the world of basic-level objects we start to explore the rest of the world.

Things we understand are in the world of Order. Things we do not understand are in the world of Chaos. But how do we get to understand the world of Chaos? That is what science and the arts and religion and culture are for. They are different ways of trying to get a grip on the Unknown world of Chaos.

There are, of course, different ways of understanding the world of Order. And that is what the successive revolutions in science and religion and the arts are all about.

Our postmodern friends of the last century think that the white supremacist bourgeois way of understanding the world of Order is a false narrative. And it is true, the white bourgeois world-view overdetermines the idea that we are logical and rational, and that the middle-class bourgeois way in the highest and best way to live, to organize society, and to establish the inevitable hierarchy. The fact is that the bourgeois culture is a social construct imagined and built by good solid bourgeois thinkers and what they thought not surprisingly seemed to be good to the good solid bourgeoisie.

Hey, how about this?

Lefty activist: Race doesn't exist; it is a social construct.

Trump Car Parade Attendee: So white supremacy doesn't exist; it is a social construct.

Exactly. Our postmodern friends have erected their own social construct, for instance, that the whole of western civilization is a white male patriarchal social construction designed to oppress and marginalize every one else.

Only I would interpret the postmodern world view as a social construct imagined by educated Gentry that proposes to oppress and marginalize the white-male bourgeoisie under the hegemony of postmodern thinkers and activists.

See, I think that my social construct sails into the stratosphere far above the put-putting ideologies of the postmodernists. And it does it because it comprehends the whole of the German Turn from Kant to Hegel to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Jung and beyond with Wittgenstein and Habermas, whereas our postmodern friends get tangled up in the bushes with Marx and Freud. Silly geese.

See, I think that if you have grasped the German Turn you understand that everything is a social construct, a step-by-step analysis from the First Social Construct of the "basic-level" notion onwards and upwards and that each step always partakes of both the Apollonian consciousness and the Dionysian unconsciousness. And each step is complicated by false starts and errors. 

So it is rubbish to think of science as Apollonian and the arts as Dionysian. Or to get all hung up on social constructs. Unless you access both and understand that everything is a social construct you will be stuck on a rock. Or in the bushes, like a silly goose.

What Happens After November 3

Everyone seems to think that the losers on November 3 aren't going to accept the results. If you are Hillary Clinton you are Zooming your instructions for your pals not to concede. And if you are "far right" commentators like the Zman you are wondering if the left is going to mount a coup if they lose or just incompetently mostly peacefully protest.

I suspect that the answer depends on how close the result are. If the popular vote is 55-45 then I think it's a done deal.

If not?

Then it all depends on how competent are lefty friends really are. It's one thing to mostly peacefully protest when the liberal mayor looks the other way -- don't try this if you are a "far right" white supremacist -- it's another thing when all the liberal Democrat-run cities go up in flames and the rest of the country climbs into their cars and trucks for a Trump Car Parade.

For instance, will the Deep State rally to the Dems' banner? I wonder. Based on the Russia Collusion game it looks to me as though the Deep State is more attached to its pensions that to follow the leader.

For instance, the only guy they got on the Russia Collusion so far is the low-rank lawyer Kevin Cleinsmith who has pleaded guilty to making a false statement on a FISA application. Hey, all he did is say that Carter Page was not a CIA asset when the CIA said he was! But the other guys, the higher-ups, seem to have been pretty careful not to get their hands dirty.

And hey, why should they bother to risk anything? They will still have jobs in the vast intelligence apparatus. Why Worry?

Now I think that all the BLM/AntiFa street rioters are pretty competent. I am reading commentaries about their organization and command structure and it all seems pretty competent. But the only reason they get to strut their stuff is because the powers that be aren't arresting and jailing them. One fine day the liberal politicians will get the message that the party's over and they will send in the cops and they will not let the perps out on bond. Because re-election.

Another thing. Some time soon the liberal politicians in the liberal cities are going to get the message that people are moving out, big time, taking their tax dollars with them. How can you strut your stuff as a big-cheese progressive politician if there ain't no money? You ain't gonna get re-elected if you don't have loot and plunder to promise to your supporters.

Then there is the problem that the leaders of the Democratic Party are old-stagers that learned their game half a century ago. I think they are being played for a fool by the young lefty radicals. But what do I know?

Thing is, the Nancys and the Chucks learned their game in the aftermath of the Sixties when it had become obvious that to win national elections a Democrat had to campaign as a moderate. That's because the vast majority of voters are middle-class commoners. Middle-class Commoners just don't get the racist-sexist-homophobe stuff and the whole critical race thingy. Except that they understand that if they put a foot wrong they lose their job.

I wonder what middle-class Commoners think about that?

So this morning I saw a video of a black guy in a truck in a Trump Car Parade yelling at some white college girls sporting Black Lives Matter protest signs. What's that all about?

Oh, and has anyone asked Latino voters what they think about all this BLM/AntiFa stuff? Bueller? Anyone?

It all comes down to this: has all the mostly peaceful protesting this summer been a cunningly conceived plan to bend the arc of history towards justice or is it just a bunch of educated Gentry idiots peacefully protesting as they have been carefully taught?

I'm inclined to believe the latter. But then, I want to believe that.

The Three Peoples and Revolution

In this "summer of love" featuring "mostly peaceful protests" in Democratic governed cities across the USA, there is a question. 

What do the Three Peoples in my reductive Three Peoples theory think about it all? Perfectly simple.

The People of the Subordinate Self (and Curtis Yarvin's Clients) follow their leaders. They are subordinate, haven't really cottoned to the middle-class city and its individualism, and they feel left out. So they are often ready to be led to the barricades.

The People of the Responsible Self (and Curtis Yarvin's Commoners) expect the police to control the streets so they can live their responsible lives obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules. To the Responsibles all political disagreements should be sorted out in elections. That's what the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th century were all about: to curb the warlike nobles and gravitate power to the middle class where things would all be sorted out in frank and free discussions according to Robert's Rules of Order. So Responsibles really hate riots, demonstrations, mostly peaceful protests and all the rest. Because to them, what's the point? Everyone has a vote, and the time to change government is at election time. You want to change things? Then persuade a majority at the next election and bring your agenda to the legislature.

The People of the Creative Self (and Curtis Yarvin's Gentry) are special people. They regard themselves as a cut above the rest and are irritated by the comfortable blandness of middle-class morality and politics -- or of Trump Boat Parades. The whole point of being creative is to strut and fret your hour upon the stage, to think up something new, not get on with your work and tend to your family.

Actually, as Jung and Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson and I write, the real creative hero is the sacrificial hero. I develop this notion in my Good Life series.

But our Creative Class, our educated Gentry, thinks that the good life is bending the arc of history towards justice with politics and peaceful protest. That is where they get meaning in their lives. They live what I call an Activism Culture. It is what you might call a surgical culture where these Creative people are acting rather like surgeons in an operating theater, operating on society to remove its cancerous growths.

And notice how this surgical metaphor tracks pretty closely to the medical profession. Medical professionals are not emotionally engaged in the lives of the people they treat. Their patients are, for them, statistics. Of course, they like to do the right thing, but if someone dies on their watch, well, that's life. They are careful to observe the established protocols, but let's face it: today's patient is today's patient. Tomorrow there will be another one.

Thus, I argue, when you see a mostly peaceful protest on the streets of Portland, Oregon, or an earnest activist demanding we implement the Green New Deal to address climate change, you must understand that this is an ego trip. It is all about the protester, all about the activist: the play's the thing.

In my view the Creative Class and the educated Gentry really have no idea how their protests and activism are received and experienced by the ordinary Responsible Commoner. That's because it is not a dialog; it is a performance.

Back in the last eruption of left-wing culture, the Sixties, it took about 20 years before the Sixties Kidz realized that they had a problem, that the ordinary American commoner hated their protest culture, that if they wanted back into command they had to moderate their message and pretend to be moderates.

But all along they were still dreaming of being Ché Guevara, of setting the world aflame, of bending the arc of history: Revolution Baby!

Only the Age of Revolution is over. Surely anyone with half a brain can see that: all the revolutions since the bourgeois revolutions have been bloody failures that have not brought justice but bloody killing fields. Revolution has been replaced by ordinary corrupt politics, of loot and plunder by tax and spend rather than by conquest and subjugation.

Of course, my line is that the follow-on Age of Politics is over, too. Almost anyone with a brain should be able to see that anything and everything run by the government is incompetent and dysfunctional. We know why this is so: it is dictated by my Four Laws: that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices; that administrative government does not work because it does not have the bandwidth; that regulatory government cannot work because of "regulatory capture" of the regulators by the regulated; and that anyway, government programs cannot work because you cannot reform them, except by handing out more loot.

I interpret the current situation as the utter folly of the educated Gentry, thinking that a couple of nice peaceful protests can solve the injustices of the world. That, obviously, is what the Democratic mayors and councils of Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, thought when all this violence started with the death of a drugged up felon who had just passed a fake $20 bill. That's because they believe what they have been carefully taught, that the way to justice is through the annealing flame of protest, acting as "allies" of "oppressed peoples."

Of course, they have no idea about how they have buried the ordinary Commoners in injustice, how they have betrayed the support of the "oppressed peoples" over the last 50 years.

If there is any justice in the world then our Creatives, our educated Gentry, should be up before the Bar next.

But don't forget that they have No Idea that they have done anything wrong. Not yet.

Boy, that would be a Revolution, the day when our conceited Gentry gets a Bill of Indictment from the Responsibles, the Commoners, they have exploited and oppressed for so long.

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.