Why the Age of Revolution is Over

Starting with an oped at The American Thinker on September 1, I have been tossing around the notion that "the Age of Revolution is over."

What I mean by that is that, once the old feudal hierarchy and its bastard child, the absolute monarchy, had submitted to the rise of the non-noble bourgeoisie there was no more work for revolution to do.

What is revolution? Good question. At the very least it is a Singularity between two oil-and-water regimes that seem unable to mix.

Or at least, you have to have a ancien régime that cannot get its head into the idea of discussing questions of power and precedence with those people, darling.

Thus Charles I of England and Scotland. It just seemed unthinkable to deal with those Roundhead Puritans. So coarse, old chap. So the Brits had a Civil War.

Thus also the American Revolution. Just shut up, peasants, and pay your taxes to pay for the French and Indian War that benefited you! So we got the shot heard around the world.

But when we get to the French Revolution, I'd say that Louis XVI had already kinda inhaled the new ideas. He couldn't bring himself to bring the hammer down on the lawyers and activists that were brewing revolution in the cafés of the Palais-Royal. So he went to the guillotine, but not from a civil war.

Thus also the Russian Revolution. The Czar Nicholas was already less than the pure autocrat of Czarist ideology. So he got pushed aside by a bourgeois revolution that only later got beheaded by the cunning Bolsheviks.

I want to set this up, because when we come to the Sixties and Revolution Baby, we are not talking about revolution. Why not? Because the Sixties Kidz were tolerated, even encouraged by their parents and their professors. Liberal Parents, Radical Children wrote Midge Decter. Liberal parents were already the upper social class that dictated what other people thought and said. The Sixties Revolution was not an old ruling class being replaced in a Singularity by a new elite. It was more of a changing of the guard of one sector of the ruling class -- call it the old WASP elite -- by another, the liberal educated elite.

Incidentally, the ordinary all-American middle class didn't like the Sixties, not one bit. But, as they say, we are all living the Sixties culture now, letting it all hang out unless strictly forbidden by the cancel culture.

But here we are again, with the Kidz in the streets enacting their kabuki dance of "mostly peaceful protest." Is this the Revolution, baby? No, it ain't. This is the street theater of the ruling class, by the ruling class, and for the ruling class.

And what is it all about? It is rehearsing what seemed to work back in the Obama era when President Obama and the ruling class decided to make a big deal about the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of a "white Hispanic," George Zimmerman in early 2012, the year in which President Obama was running for reelection after a less than stellar first term. What do you do to rally your supporters before an election or before a war? You get them to think that the enemy is coming to get them. And that is the point of the Trayvon Martin / Michael Brown / George Floyd phenomenon. To get African Americans to think that, once again, the white racists are coming to get them.

I wonder if the real story is that the monolithic Black vote is in danger of breaking up, is breaking up, unless the ruling class whips it into shape with a racist panic?

And could it happen that One Fine Day, the black vote will not rally to the usual racist Police Brutality canard?

Anyway, whatever the current mostly peaceful protests may be, they are not Revolution, because they are not in any way threatening the ruling class of educated Gentry.

Unless, of course, the mostly peaceful protests provoke the voters to reelect Donald Trump in a landslide.

Here's how we get to Revolution. We get there if the current ruling class of educated Gentry continues to refuse to consider the grievances of the Commoners of America when presented to them politely from a peaceable assembly.

See, that's how Charles I lost his crown and how George III lost his American colonies. They and their advisers just could not get their heads around the idea that their critics belonged in the same room with them.

And that is the message that President Obama sent with his "bitter clingers" remark and that Hillary Clinton sent with her "basket of deplorables" remark.

So, if the Age of Revolution is not in fact over, the reason will be that our liberal friends in the ruling class have No Idea that their current rule is starting to give the ordinary American Commoner no option except to raise a head of rebellion that will, without doubt, force him to pledge his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to a less than peaceful protest against injustice.

Thoughts on the Lefty "Successor Ideology"

The term "successor ideology" was coined by Wesley Yang to describe a "melange of academic radicalism now seeking hegemony throughout American institutions." That's how Reihan Salam at the Manhattan Institute describes it while leading off a discussion on "The Successor Ideology" with Ross Douthat, Coleman Hughes and Wesley Yang.

But what are we to think?

I had several takeaways from the discussion. First of all, if you are a minority, especially if you are black, it is really rough trying to make it in the educated culture of the academy, the corporation, and the bureaucracy. It explains the mania about "microaggressions." Wesley Yang:

There's a process that people go through when they enter into... new social settings where they don't know what fork to use at the dinner table, so on and so forth.

In other words, the climb from being a middle-class "anybody" into an upper social class "somebody" is fraught with embarrassment and setback, because you are learning the culture as you go. In fact, the chaps that were "to the manor born" are going to sneer at you. Back in Britland, this sneering is encapsulated in the putdown: "not quite out of the top drawer, old chap." 

So, you can react to difficulty by steeling yourself for the struggle, or you can complain about the meany-jellybeanie white supremacists that are laughing and sneering at you. Guess what: if you want to rise in the world, it is hard! Get used to it.

But, on the other hand, according to Ross Douthat, there is among ordinary white people in the upper social class "a sense of exhaustion with the culture of meritocracy." Or, to put it another way, there are a lot more people competing for the glittering prizes than there were a while ago, and the problem is that there are only a limited number of glittering prizes.

There was this period that coincided with the kind of Fukuyama and end of history, where meritocracy really believed in itself, I think, and there is this sense that you could just run this system of high SAT scores and plucking people from all over and putting them into elite institutions and making them experts and it would all work out pretty well.

So, even white people from good families can get on the successor ideology bandwagon because it gives them an excuse to fail.

Then there is the need for sin. In the old Christian dispensation original sin was a personal thing. But what to do if you no longer believe in the Christian concept of sin? Perfectly simple: you can believe in the collective sin of "enslaving black people" and fill your "original sin shaped hole in the human psyche" with the sin of slavery.

Then there is the baby-boomers-owning-the-world problem. If you are a millennial, and especially a non-white millennial, it seems like the white baby boomers have got the whole world cornered. No fair!

Then there is the class aspect. Black Coleman Young says:

When I go to my family reunion, which is just middle class black people from Ohio, some college educated, some not, there's not a hint of [woke]. There's a lot of center left politics, but not a single hint of the vocabulary of the successor ideology could be found, and it would be alarming if it were there.

Meanwhile, I'm at Columbia and I can't find anything. I can't even find the person using the language of Christianity. It's just intersectionality all the way down in the culture.

In other words, this successor ideology is a thing of the upper social class, the educated Gentry. Commoners need not apply.

Coleman Young then relates how he got to go to a "People of Color Conference" that was led by "this extremely charismatic gay black man... the type that... could be selling books on the road and be drawing audiences to get his self help stuff." Er, no, Coleman. We are talking about a revival meeting and the sawdust trail. Good to know that the good old tent revival meeting is not yet lost to history, thanks to our lefty friends. And remember back in the day when revival meetings were just eeeuw!

Then Ross Douthat blames it all on Donald Trump whose "approach to racial issues, to put it mildly, is inflammatory and ineffective" and who has accelerated the leftward move in US institutions and driven a lot of suburban white Americans -- and white female suburban white Americans -- away from conservatism.

Yeah. Except that as far as I can see, Trump is running a full-court press for blacks and Hispanics to think of themselves as regular Americans. He is saying: come on in and join the party, because you belong as ordinary Commoner Americans.

Then there is the curious fact, introduced by Wesley Yang, that the current move away from entry to university on the basis of test results happens to coincide with a period in which a huge wave of Asians are outperforming whites in the test department. And these Asians come from a culture that determined "the life chances of their young people on the basis of a single high stakes examination for more than a thousand years." I mean. If you are exhausted with the competition of more and more people competing for the same glittering prizes...

I have a modest connection with this. Back when I was a kid in Britland as a baby boomer, I was conscious that I was the first generation of public-school boys that were not going to get into Oxbridge without extraordinary effort and brilliance. Oh well; I was not really that interested in competing for the glittering prizes anyway. But suppose I had wanted to dance with the girl who danced with the Prince of Wales? Then I might have been bitter for the rest of my life.

Oh, and I had my share of "microaggressions," like the prof at university that told me that I was taking a place away from a deserving working-class boy; or the managing partner at work that asked "where did this guy come from" when I made a mild remonstrance against something in a cultural sensitivity training session. But you know what? That is life. You don't let other people get you down. After all, they are knaves and fools!

My takeaway?

Yep. Life is rough right now for the scions of the upper middle class, the children of people that, without particular standout talent, rose to professorships and deputy assistant directorships. And life is rough for the young folks, particularly blacks, trying to make it in the upper social class of education, corporation, and bureaucracy, because you are learning a new culture, and that is hard.

But here's the thing. If you want to be a "somebody" then a career in the educated bureaucracies, whether in the university, media, coporations, or government or activism is actually fake. You will not make yourself into a "somebody;" it will all be let's pretend. 

You wanna be a "somebody?" Well, then try to be an Elon Musk. Or a Steve Jobs. Dive into high tech for a season and then try your own startup. I know a young man that dropped out of university to get into a blockchain startup. One thing  led to another and he's sold his company for a tidy sum to an outfit doing 401(k)s and IRAs. That is what I call real achievement; that is the real arc of getting from "anybody" to "somebody." 

But if you are just checking the boxes in the existing upper-class hierarchy? Well, Charles Dickens had you figured out nearly 200 years ago when he wrote in Little Dorrit about the Barnacles and Stiltstockings at the Circumlocution Office.

If you fancy a career in the bureaucracy, which are you? Are you a Barnacle, just hanging on to your job until you get the pension? Or are you a Stiltstocking, strutting and fretting your hour upon the stage with the illusion that your dull post in the hierarchy will make you into a "somebody?"

Here's what I think. I think that this whole successor ideology or leftist reign of terror is a reflection of a cultural crisis in the educated elite, a failure of meaning.

The fact is that going through the chairs in the administrative elite is a life without meaning. You can see this in the parade of swamp creatures we have seen in the War on Trump. They are anybodies pretending to be somebodies. But the scions of the elite have always expected to jump the queue, to get a nice plum job without having to brave the dangers of the time. 

And when they get frustrated they need to blame someone. They can't blame the minorities trying to come up through the system. They cannot blame themselves -- heavens no! -- so they blame the Trump deplorables.

Yeah, no kidding! Life is hard, even in these times when everyone in the world except way out in the country has a smartphone. Life is no longer a struggle to survive, to get the next meal on the table. But it is still a struggle for status, for being the equal or the superior of your fellows. People are still jockeying for position in the hierarchy. Indeed, according to the modern notion of the hierarchy of needs, once you have food on the table then your whole life turns around the next stage in the hierarchy. And there is no end to this.

The experts at the Manhattan Institute think that the successor ideology still has ten years to run before it runs out of steam.

Very good. But then what? What will succeed the successor ideology?

Politics Can't Change Anything, Unless...

In his description of the "System," the combination of military, business, bureaucracy, and "Cathedral" that rules over us, Curtis Yarvin is at pains to note that there is no way to for political elections to countermand the orthodoxy of the "Cathedral" -- the Brain, Voice, and Conversation among the elite -- that defines the "Dream," the orthodoxy of what fashionable people of the "upper social class" think. (Or rather not think, but fashionably repeat, imagining themselves as clever and wise).

Simply put, there is no way to  promote a heresy against the orthodox view without getting eaten for lunch. Especially at times like this when the "Cathedral" feels embattled and is openly conducts a Holy Inquisition to deal with the heretics with its cancel culture.

Except.

Except whatabout the Protestant revolution? The fact is that the Protestants -- Luther, Calvin, and the rest -- changed the Cathedral, and changed the Dream, the "doctrine... [that] defines good and evil for all decent people."

But why did it work for Luther and Calvin and Co.?

I guess because the Gutenberg printing revolution made it possible for the idea guys to get their ideas out there so that their ideas could become part of the "Conversation." Before Gutenberg this rebellious distribution of ideas just couldn't have taken place, because hand-copied manuscripts were too expensive for broad distribution.

And, of course, the burgeoning cities and trade of Europe in 1500 had created a "bourgeoisie" in the cities of Europe ready for a new ideological Dream, a new notion of good and evil for all decent people to believe. A new notion that was better aligned with their need for a meaning of life.

And then, in due course, the Protestant Cathedral and its Dream got replaced by the current System, run by an educated Gentry with its professor ideologist Brains in the university, its fake-news Voice in the media, its Conversation among the educated upper class that fashionably imagines itself the "allies" of the "oppressed peoples" fighting against the "white oppressors."

As in, I don't think so. Listen pal. If you are the political elite, whether eevil feudal lords or robber barons "the rich" or noble "allies," then you are the oppressors, not some bitter-clinger Trump supporters in a Trump Car Parade.

So yeah. Politics doesn't change anything, but ideology does. 

And wouldn't you know, in our generation we have another publishing revolution, the Internet, that allows Brains with new ideas to have a Voice without necessarily getting the fake news media on board to spread the word and get the word out into the Conversation.

Of course, whatever happens, it ain't gonna be easy. The current ruling class is pulling out all the stops to prevent the rebels from talking to each other and getting into the Conversation. But then the Protestant Revolution wasn't easy either.

But here's the point. If the new wave of ideologists, brainiacs like Curtis Yarvin, come out with ideas that seem to answer the questions that today's people have about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" then those ideas will tend to get in the Conversation in spite of the Woke Holy Inquisition that is traveling the world busily stamping out every heretic it can lay its hands on.

Now my notion is that the key to the future is to understand that there are Three Peoples, and each of the Three Peoples needs its own religion, or Dream, the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything that appeals to people like them.

That is what my Three Peoples Religion notion is all about. We must understand that in our modern world we need to create not one but three Dreams, because the Dream of good and evil for Creative People, the Gentry, is going to be different from the Dream of good and evil for Responsible People, the Commoners, and different again from the Dream of good and evil for Subordinate People, the Clients.

So I say that if you want to persuade the world, you need a sophisticated Dream that understands the world not just for people like you but for all the other people in the world too. Is that so hard?

Notice that our wokey friends, with their "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors," notion have a Dream that is basically tailored to the interests of the allies. The allies decide who is oppressed, who is oppressor, and who is an approved ally. The allies, needless to say, are the best people in the world. And the rest of you can go pound sand.

And another thing. The big thing about the Trump Effect, I would say, is that Trump is encouraging the bitter-clinger deplorables towards self-consciousness. And if you listen to the Trump Rallies, it is clear to me that President Trump is reciting a Dream, a narrative of what it means to be an American. Same thing about his speech at Mount Rushmore. Same thing with his appearance in California pinning medals on the helicopter crews that rescued people from the fires.

But what do I know?

Why a Sorority Sister Got Arrested at a Riot

In the BLM riot over a man shot by police in Lancaster, PA, after he charged them with a knife, a certain

Kathryn Patterson, 20... was “charged with felony arson, felony vandalism, felony riot, failure to disperse and other protest-related charges.” It turns out that Patterson is a junior at Franklin and Marshall College, a private liberal arts college in Lancaster where the annual cost of attendance is $75,801, including room and board. She’s also a Kappa Delta sorority member and an “ally” (whatever that means) of the college Black Student Union[.]

Readers of this blog will know that "ally" refers to the current notion of society as "oppressed peoples" and "allies" fighting against "white oppressors." Obviously, as a white sorority sister, Kathryn cannot be an "oppressed people." But she can be an "ally."

Why in the world would a sorority sister at a swank private college be into rioting? Because it's fashionable. And fashion is where it's at. Curtis Yarvin is the guy that 'splains it all. 

You see, we are ruled today not by politicians, but by "the System," and the System is directed by the "Cathedral." 

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class.

Stop right there and read it again. The Cathedral is professors and journalists and artists and authors. And they tell us what to think. Just as fashion magazines tell sorority sisters what to wear.

As I wrote yesterday:

"The central fact of the Cathedral, the center of power in our System, is its "monopoly on legitimacy." It works like this:

Prestigious information passes from Brain to Voice, and Voice to Conversation. This process is subtle enough, and its product is of high enough quality, for the Conversation to believe it is actually making up its own mind—from filtered inputs. The Conversation—all of legitimate public opinion—always admires the System. It thinks of this as a completely voluntary and spontaneous critical assessment."

And the Conversation is all about fashion.

And the Conversation, which is the discourse of the upper social class, is always the discourse of fashion. For the nobility (rich or broke), fashionable ideas are de rigueur.

In other words, when you walk around your nice gentrified neighborhood, and see all those fashionable #BackLivesMatter and #WeBelieve yard-signs, you are seeing people wearing the current fashion in political ideas in the "upper social class."

For some reason, I have rebelled against this. And I don't know why. Maybe I have the fashionable notion that it is fashionable to be a rebel.

So of course sorority sisters are out there protesting. That's what a fashionable young woman does these days. Better still, protest at Trader Joe's; then you can do some shopping after you are done protesting.

I first cottoned onto this Activism Culture years ago when a woman friend allowed as how she had always wanted to "get into activism." That is what you do if you want your life to have meaning and purpose if you are a member of the "upper social class" these days. As Yarvin writes:

A noble's [or sorority sister's] life purpose is the highest stage on the pyramid of needs: self-actualization. The most obvious way to be self-actualized is to be important, so nobles crave power and importance. 

Back in his Three Layer days, Yarvin wrote about the Gentry and its need for "ambition, "vanity" and "honor." Of course! How else would the educated Gentry sorority sister get to "self-actualization?"

Or you can explain it with my reductive Three Peoples theory, in that the People of the Creative Self have an existential need to be "creative" and what that generally means is doing the current fashionable thing decreed for creative people by the Cathedral.

The point is that all this fashionable "upper social class" activity is all about them. It is not really about "oppressed peoples." It is not really about the dreadful bitter clingers and deplorables and Trump supporters and "white oppressors." All the Gentry are merely players, strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage, signifying nothing. And the bitter clingers are just the usual opera chorus of peasants.

By the way, who would the "white oppressors" be but the "upper social class" that imagines itself to be "allies" of the "oppressed peoples?" It can't be the bitter clingers and deplorables because they are all far too busy attending Trump Car Parades, Trump Boat Parades, and Trump Rallies. And they have no power.

My question is: can't we start a new fashion that the fashionable sorority sisters can get down with? And all the gentry liberals in their gentrified neighborhoods? One that gives the liberals their ambition, their vanity, their honor, but doesn't beat up the poor bloody commoners and doesn't entangle the "oppressed peoples" in the dysfunctional hell of the welfare state and its programs?

Ch3: America's Real Constitution: The "System"

Curtis Yarvin's Gray Mirror is a modest project to imagine a politics for the 21st century. In his previously published chapters he proposed the emptiness of political action, for if your political action supports the regime it is merely serves to prop up the regime and if your political action opposes the regime its certain failure props up the regime.

And I have been analyzing it, step by step, mostly so I could understand what Yarvin is writing.

Now, in Chapter 3, the Descriptive Constitution of the Modern Regime, Yarvin sets out to show the difference between our formal constitution and the real, unwritten constitution, the "System" we live under. 

The form of government that the Constitution’s text prescribes, that its initial leaders created, and that its citizens emotionally believe in today, is an elected monarchy. The Republic in one sentence: the voters elect the chief executive of the government, who holds power for four years.

In fact we are not ruled by our elected monarch, nor by the electors, the demos. We are ruled by the System, as follows:

We divide the System into four great organs: in ascending order of power, the Castle, the Factory, the Bureau and the Cathedral. (Later, we will add a fifth: the Show.)

Castle is the military and the police. Factory is "production of goods and services: all companies, trade and finance, mining and agriculture." Bureau is "administration, the professional civil service." Cathedral is "information: truth, philosophy, ethics, narrative, art and intelligence."

Now, if we are are not a monarchy, for the elected president does not have much power, and if we are not a democracy, for the people cannot rule, we must have oligarchy.

There are four forms of oligarchy: hereditary oligarchy (rule of nobles), military oligarchy (rule of soldiers), commercial oligarchy (rule of the wealthy), and clerical oligarchy (rule of thinkers). The System is a clerical oligarchy.

 But, but, but. Surely we are supposed to have a separation of church and state? Well, not if you understand religion in a broader sense than understood by your average bear. For me, religion is all human energy devoted to the question of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Here is the composition of our clerical oligarchy.

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

And, you might add, its Inquisition is the corps of eager beavers that runs the "cancel culture" on social media.

The central fact of the Cathedral, the center of power in our System, is its "monopoly on legitimacy." It works like this:

Prestigious information passes from Brain to Voice, and Voice to Conversation. This process is subtle enough, and its product is of high enough quality, for the Conversation to believe it is actually making up its own mind—from filtered inputs. The Conversation—all of legitimate public opinion—always admires the System. It thinks of this as a completely voluntary and spontaneous critical assessment.

In other words, all the folks with their Black Lives Matter and #WeBelieve signs think that they are spontaneously critiquing the bad people. But in fact they are just repeating-after-me the "prestigious information," the articulation of the Dream, that has proceeded from Brain to Voice to Conversation. 

And the Conversation, which is the discourse of the upper social class, is always the discourse of fashion. For the nobility (rich or broke), fashionable ideas are de rigueur.

Yeah, fashionable ideas. Boy, do we have fashionable ideas in our modern world. And don't you dare criticize fashionable ideas, pal.

Notice that Yarvin's idea that the Cathedral is in charge is completely vindicated in the current cancel culture. Where is the bureaucracy, the Bureau? It is busily conducting critical race seminars. Where is business, the Factory? It is busily getting down with Black Lives Matter. Where is the military, the Castle? The generals are down with the movement with women fighter pilots. The police? Oh yeah. There is a bit of a problem, because the police are still beating up on the helpless spawn of the welfare state, the wild young men that never had a father.

So the Cathedral runs the whole System; everyone who is anyone takes his cue from the Conversation on the street decreed by the Brain of the Cathedral. It is infallible, because there is no appeal. But what if the Cathedral is wrong?

[T]he Cathedral is either marching faster toward utopia or sliding deeper into mania. Wherever it goes, the System follows; wherever the System follows, the country follows. To answer this question is to read the future.

And what the Cathedral promulgates is the Dream.

The Dream is the ideal future of the noblest, most fashionable people in the world. It really is a nice Dream. The problem with the Dream is not that it is evil, but that it is impossible. From that error (also a sin: the sin of vanity), all the evil it does proceeds.

For, when the Cathedral needs an Inquisition to enforce its Dream, then you know that something is going wrong.

Yes, but couldn't we elect a president who would sidestep the Cathedral and actually reform something? Not really, because the President is not really chief executive, but "chief oracle." Most of his job is not directing traffic but making decisions on issues that bubble up from the Bureau, the bureaucracy, where he gets to choose between three options. So when we elect a president nothing changes.

Yes, but couldn't we elect a new Congress that would actually reform something for a change? Not really. First, people do not care about congressional elections the way they care about presidential elections. Second, there are no real local notables and celebrities to act as symbolic representatives of the people. Third, we elect congress-critters, in effect, for life. Some do get defeated, occasionally. But not often. Fourth, a newly elected congress-critter is a nobody, with no power to change anything. (Except AOC, but she is the mouthpiece of the Cathedral, so that's different.) In fact, Congress is driven by the lobbyists and the activists. Period.

The point is that to change anything, through a presidential election or a congressional election, would require a level of energy orders of magnitude greater than the current levels of political energy we experience from day to day.

Yes, Americans can still elect a new regime—but they have to really, really want one, and they all have to want the same one, and it has to be one that can actually work. The distance from here to any such regime change can hardly be exaggerated. 

And let's face, it. Today, very few people "really, really want" a new regime. The only people pretending are the BLM/Antifa folks, and they are merely the stooges of the System, play-acting revolution.

The problem with the System is that its director, the Cathedral, is corrupted. In a perfect world, its Brain, the thinkers, would be like mathematicians working away like squirrels on their equations, and only equations that worked would become agreed-upon mathematics. But, for the Brainiacs, there is the problem of power. And "power corrupts ideas."

A marketplace of ideas, like any Darwinian system, evolves for whatever it selects for. If it is selecting for power—for “impact,” for “changing the world"—it will evolve powerful doctrines: ethical justifications for wielding power.

Which is exactly what we have today. And if you want to escape the poisonous killing fields of power you are going to have to be doing Brainiac things where your ideas are not going to make you famous or powerful or encourage you to believe you are "changing the world."

But what would that look like? Ah yes...

Be sure to watch next week's exciting episode. 

Suppose the Wildfires in California Are Not Due To Climate Change

Up here in Seattle we have smoky haze this morning, resulting from the California wildfires. According to the science, the wildfires are a consequence of global warming. Says former President Obama.

The fires across the West Coast are just the latest examples of the very real ways our changing climate is changing our communities. Protecting our planet is on the ballot. Vote like your life depends on it—because it does. pic.twitter.com/gKGegXWxQu

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 10, 2020

Yes. And here is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

“Mother Earth is angry,” the San Francisco Democrat said during an appearance Thursday on MSNBC. “She’s telling us -- whether she’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is … that the climate crisis is real and has an impact.”

Notice how the Catholic Pelosi uses religious language -- actually pre-Christian religious language -- to make her point.

Of course, climate deniers like this nobody say that the California wildfires are due to the environmentalists. 

I live here. Have a seat and learn something, sir. In the state of California the environmentalist lobby sets policy. Controlled burns? Bad for air. Logging to reduce forest density? Bad for the owls. Focus on replacing ancient transmission lines? Nah, we're building wind farms.

So who are you going to believe? The former President of the United States backed by the scientists or a nobody?

And, if you are a climate denier, that still doesn't believe, no matter what a former President of the United States says, what do you do about it? Particularly when all the best scientists agree with the former President of the United States.

I guess there are two available strategies.

The first strategy is to appeal to peoples' selfish interests. If you are campaigning in Pennsylvania, which has benefited enormously from the fracking revolution, you say that the Green New Deal will cost Pennsylvania jobs.

This is, after all, the strategy of the anti-capitalists for the last 150 years. Doesn't matter that the economics says that capitalism is great, that real per-capita income is up by 30 times in 200 years. When a factory closes down or a CEO makes a fortune, a Robert Reich will show up to blame "robber barons." And it works.

But pro-Green New Deal Joe Biden goes to Pennsylvania and declares that he won't ban fracking. Yep, and I gotta bridge to sell you.

The second strategy is to capitalize on failures of prophecy. Science is science: it is merely a technique for trying to understand how the world works. It has achieved amazing results, particularly in the last 500 years, particularly in the last century. But whenever science makes predictions about the future, it is still prophecy, just as in the old days. That is because science is not the final word on how the universe works; it is just the latest human attempt to figure out what is going on. Thus Kant: we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances. 

Only, modern science is a lot better at predictions than the old methods of divination and examination of intestines. Still, weather forecasting, despite the biggest computers in the business, is still a pretty chancy affair. So is hurricane prediction. So is stock-market prediction. So is climate modeling.

Ultimately a failure of prophecy is what will kill off the climate change religion. But not yet. For the climate-change enthusiasts have cunningly arranged that just about everything is a confirmation of climate change.

And it doesn't matter that Karl Popper declared that science isn't science unless it opens itself to "falsification." He meant that if everything is interpreted as confirmation of your theory you do not have science, you have prophecy.

The way real science works is the confirmation of general relativity in 1919 by Sir Arthur Eddington. Einstein's relativity predicted that light passing close to a heavy body like the sun would be slightly bent. Because space is curved by gravitation. And it was.

So, using the bones and the entrails of general relativity math, Einstein prophesied that light from a star would be bent as it grazed the surface of our Sun. And he was right.

The best way to understand prophecy is the helpful book When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al. It's about a UFO cult in the late 1940s predicting that a UFO would come and rescue them before the Earth was destroyed. It didn't, and the Earth was not destroyed. Oops.

But a cult doesn't collapse the day after the predicted end-of-the-world. It takes a while. So even if the global temperatures stop increasing -- say, due to a new grand solar minimum -- it won't change minds, not right away. But a while after the failure of prophecy, the cult starts to break up, to make room for the next great prophetic cult.

Meanwhile, you can blame electrical blackouts on climate crazies. You can blame soaring electrical rates on climate activists. You can resist restrictions on automobile use. You can let billion-dollar light-rail projects wither on the vine. And you can vote against politicians that want to raise your taxes and kill your job.

What you cannot expect to do is discredit the ruling-class narrative. Not yet.

Suppose "Politics is Division" is a Good Thing

At American Greatness Curtis Ellis is observing that the Davos set, the corporate globalists, are shedding their camoflage.

The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions,” the oligarchs of the World Economic Forum helpfully advise. “Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.” (Emphasis added.)

Or the Zman is saying that, "maybe it is simply the end of Left and Right. The Left won." But I say that when the Left has vanquished all its foes, then what?

And Willis Eschenbach is wallowing in Scott Adams' Win Bigly: Persuasion in a world where facts don't matter, in which Scott talks about the idea that mass delusions are not infrequent, but normal. As in, you would expect the world's scientists to all buy into the climate change delusion since their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor depend on it being true. Scott says this a bit differently:

[S]cientists who oppose the climate change consensus have a high degree of career and reputation risk[.]

So why bother, pal? Just go with the flow.

Let's go back to Scott Adams and his 3-D world view:

This worldview says humans are irrational 90 percent of the time. The only exceptions are when decisions have no emotional content. 

This is actually what the science of the German Turn says. Our conscious -- and supposedly rational -- mind is only 10 percent of the whole. The rest is the unconscious mind, and who knows what it is thinking? We know, at least, that it is operating instinctively and emotionally.

If you are not going to have mass delusions going on all the time and leading us over the cliff, then you have to have a counter mass delusion to even things out.

As in, two party politics, where the mass delusionists of each side can hurl their vitriol at each other.

As in, a world open to all religions, so that the moralists of every description can damn the other guys to hell and back again without the benefit of canceling their opponents in the public square and lighting up a nice cozy auto-da-fé.

As in, a free economy where there is not just one monopoly corporation in bed with the political elite, but different corporations each with a different strategy for market domination.

But boy, do we all hate it when the other side dares to question our mass delusion!

As in, the Davos globalists hating on Trump for questioning their august authority and right to direct traffic from the Magic Mountain.

As in, the deep state in the US that has run the US for decades with a nod-nod-wink-wink consensus throughout the corridors of power. Until Trump came along and upset their apple cart.

It's curious, isn't it, that everyone is insulted by the idea that there are people over there that don't agree with Our Saving Truth.

Here's something to think about. If the educated Gentry managed to completely vanquish the bitter-clinger Deplorables, what would they do then, poor things?

Because I would say that the only reason that the Davos special people are united is that they have the awful populist nationalists to kick around. I think that if the nationalists ever succumbed, then the globalist elite would divide into factions and start to fight each other.

And if the critical race theory postmodernists ever succeeded in purging the last racist-sexist-homophobe from America then they would split into two and start beating up on each other.

And so, really, the health of the state, or of the culture, or of science, is when everyone is beating up on the other guy -- verbally, of course.

Those Davos Pooh Bahs are fools if they think that the right thing is for them to step up and tell the rest of us what to do.

Those deep-state anonymous sources are crazy to think that they should not be roughly sorted out every decade or so.

Those critical race theorists would be out of luck if they ever won and condemned the hated racist-sexist-homophobes to the University of Outer Slobbovia.

I realize what I am saying. I am saying that the chaos agent Donald Trump is probably the best thing that has happened to the US since sliced bread.

OK. So the worst that can be said about that is that it is a mass delusion of the Deplorables driving around aimlessly in their Trump Car Parades.

And that my maxim that "politics is division" points to the good thing about politics. That a true mano-a-mano politics -- Marquess of Queensbury rules, old chap -- is the best thing going.