First Principles of Yarvin's Next Regime

After telling us all about the "System" and the "Cathedral" political philosopher Curtis Yarvin wants us to think about what the Next Regime is going to be all about.

Today, "In 2020, we are all nihilists." Because, whatever we have inherited from the 20th century, "almost none of us has any significant positive belief in it."

What does that mean? I suppose we can say that it means that almost everyone is extremely dissatisfied with the political status quo. Only, we all believe that it is the Other guy's fault.

But nihilism, for Yarvin, involves both detachment and absolutism. What on earth is that all about?

Detachment... means disengaging, detaching, withdrawing or resigning from every form of power, or ambition for power, influence or relevance, under the present regime. 

This is, if nothing else, practical, because it reduces the likelihood that the regime will come hunting for you. It has other fish to fry.

Absolutism... means thinking ex nihilo: from scratch, from first principles, not relative to any specific past or present reality.

OK. Fine. So what's that when it's at home? Well, it recognizes that, while anyone trying to develop new knowledge is standing on the shoulders of giants, we have to recognize that a lot of knowledge these days is baloney, and if we carelessly accept it, we will be standing on the shoulders of ogres instead. So we have to climb down and step back and reevaluate all the knowledge extant to determine what is good giant stock and what is useless ogre stock.

For instance, suppose we had to choose between "government of the people" and government for the people," what should we choose? Yarvin says government for the people is a necessity, while government of the people is a luxury.

Government for the people ideally means an overlord that makes the "justest laws and enforces them efficiently and impartially".

Government by the people could easily mean "chaos and anarchy, in which we are bullied, assaulted, extorted, beaten" by our crazy cousins.

Simply put, Yarvin is arguing that no-one has a moral right to political power. In fact the world is full of Hamlets, Prince of Denmark, that imagine that they are born to rule. Hello wokies!

Our modern system is based on the notion of vox populi, vox dei that the people are the voice of God. Only, of course it doesn't quite work that way in practice. Our real ruling principle is "the people are always right, if rightly educated." That way, of course, the powerful only have to deal with the teachers, rather than the people. And if the rulers have all the teachers, professors, journalists, bureaucrats on their side...

So what we have is an oligarchy, with the Cathedral of moral teachers defining orthodoxy and using Karl Popper's "paradox of tolerance," "So we tolerate everyone, except the intolerant." That, of course was the argument of Herbert Marcuse in his doctrine of "repressive tolerance." Says Yarvin:

Popper’s advice is pure Machiavelli. Its message to any regime is: take and hold the levers which control public opinion, before someone else does.

And that is what our Wokie cancel cultists are all about. Fire the heretics before they do any more damage.

But what the "if rightly educated" hierarchs are really doing is handing out goodies to the people: the greatest good to the greatest number? Utilitarianism. Only, it ends up as luxury. It makes sense when we humans are scrabbling around for basic necessities, but not when we are, like the Crazy Rich Asians, engaged in an orgy of  name-brand luxury. Luxury, in the hands of Kevin Kwan, becomes a major motion picture joke.

A political system devoted to delivering luxury is not government for the people.

If we now examine the Latin tag Salus populi, suprema lex, or "the health of the people is the supreme law" we see we are dealing with the luxury problem. But it ain't that simple for "while the health of a body can be quantified, sort of, the health of a soul is a qualitative and aesthetic judgment."

OK, so if we have a government for the people that is truly devoted to the health of the people what would it look like?

Would it be like a zoo, with a worthy zookeeper devoted to the health of the people in it? Not really, because in a zoo, the lions are not really living as lions, dealing with "the real challenges of being a lion."

Would it be like a video game? Well, the experience of video games is that what gamers want is a game of total intensity, and that means "virtual worlds with only violence." That might be too much of a good thing. We could put individuals into video game pods, and harness their energy to do stuff in the real world. Or we could combine people into village pods.

But we still have a situation where the video game producer is directing traffic according to his own notion of what people should be doing.

Maybe we should reimagine the economy and throw away all the cheap plastic toys and put everyone to work making good old-fashioned wooden toys. That way people could once more become artisans rather than mere industrial labor. But that gets awfully close to Bastiat's notion of creating work for glaziers by breaking windows.

But that, it appears are Yarvin's three options to make human health, physical and spiritual, the purpose of government for the people: Put humans in a zoo; put them in a video game; put them to work making toys by hand.

But I would say that if this is the three possible modes of "absolutism" then Yarvin is missing the point, for he is assuming the one thing we do not know, and that is "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." In every generation, in every era, we cobble together some religious and cultural and political answer to this eternal question, but we never get close to answering it.

And he seems to be imagining a closed system: that is what a zoo, or a video game, or a toy manufacturing program is all about.

And I would say that the truth of existence is that it is an open system. We men all thirst for challenge and adventure, which we used to get from defending the border, and more recently in global world wars. But there are alternatives, like exploration. We men had a grand old time between 1500 and 1900 exploring and colonizing the world. The 20th century has taught us that the exploration game is over. No doubt that is why tech billionaires are planning the exploration of the solar system.

And then there is the question of women. Oh yeah. Because the point of men defending the border is to provide a safe place for women to have babies, and the food-growing land to produce the food to feed the babies until they are full grown.

And in the last 200 years we have converted the energies of men from fighting on the border to fighting for market share, or fighting to supply the consumers with the best products. I think that the future of politics and governance and culture and religion and economy is to find something for men to fight about that, like fighting for market share, actually benefits mankind.

Women, as ever, will do exactly what they are carefully taught while simultaneously manipulating the world of men to supply them with the protection and the support they need to bear and nurture the future of humankind.

For me, I don't believe in going back to first principles. That is the error of the whole progressive project. As Yarvin says, each of us live by standing on the shoulders of giants, and hoping to avoid getting tangled up with ogres. The task before us is to tag the ogres and build upon what we already have been given by the giants.

We all start from where we are: in this age, this decade, this day, this moment. We never get to start over.

My "1584 Project"

Remember when the peerless New York Times journalist put up her "1619 Project" and the editors announced it thus?

The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. [emphasis added]

Yes, of course, that bold bit has since been memory-holed. Because reasons, chiefly because a lot of historians weighed in and said this narrative is, as they say in Critical-Theory-Land, "overdetermined." And, I understand, the chief writer in the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has taken her Twitter feed private, because reasons.

I get all this. It's because we humans all want to recite "the story so far," the comforting story about how "we" -- whoever "we" happens to be -- are the culmination of the history of the world so far. Educated blacks like HNJ want a narrative special to them. And our liberal friends are deeply in love with the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" narrative which is all about how liberals are the saviors of the world because they are the allies of the oppressed peoples and plucked them from out of the clutches of the eevil white oppressors.

The purpose of the 1619 Project is, of course, to throw offal on the "founding narrative," that the American people are the best people in the world, the United States is the best country in the world, and our founders are the best politicians in the world.

Which is really cool if you are a liberal, but not so much fun if you are, say, a gap-toothed white redneck. Where do you fit in to all this virtue-signaling?

Enter my "1584 Project." It is critical theory on steroids, because it is a critique of the "1619 Project" as a prime example of the domination and hegemony of the educated class. You see, it may very well be that August 20, 1619 marked the arrival of the first slave ship in North America. But back in 1584 the first ships from England arrived off the coast of North America to found the Roanoke Colony.

What was the Roanoke Colony? According to La Wik, It was the brain-child of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was awarded a charter by Queen Elizabeth I to "discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous Lands, Countries, and territories ... to have, hold, occupy, and enjoy." He sent an expedition out in 1584 which made landfall at "Port Ferdinando" by Roanoke Island. Raleigh's people spent the next couple of years trying to establish a colony, but gave up, probably abandoning a few colonists to their fate.

But what was this colonization all about? If you read Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, it is all about the problem of "waste population" in England in the 16th century.

I know, let's tell a story.

Back in 1000, let us say, the Brits lived in a pure feudal system where they lived as serfs in a medieval manor. They could, if they chose, become slaves of their lord, and get their three squares a day directly from the loving lord rather than scratching for it as agriculturalists farming the open field system.

But in the 12th century, according to La Wik, "some fields in England tilled under the open field system were enclosed into individually owned fields." Then came the Black Death and that really got the break-up of the feudal system going.

Many farms were bought by yeomen who enclosed their property and improved their use of the land. More secure control of the land allowed the owners to make innovations that improved their yields.

The nobles also liked the enclosure concept. Their idea was to enclose land so they could graze sheep. This became a political issue by 1500, so that in his Utopia Thomas More could speak of how when gentlemen "that carry about with them... a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving men" die, their heirs "thrust [them] out of doors."

And what do they do, these landowners?

[They] leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all into pastures... and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made into a sheep-house.

The money, says More, is in the growing "of the finest and the dearest wool" and that is what the "noblemen and gentlemen" were doing. Not coincidentally, the first vagabond act was passed in 1495.

To add insult to injury, monarchs in the 16th century started disarming their nobles and creating national armies. This created another reason for nobles to kick their "idle and loitering serving men" out of doors.

By 1584, Richard Hakluyt in his "Discourse Concerning Western Planting" proposed not just the advantage of merchants and artisans improving the waste lands of the Americas, but the benefit of exporting the human detritus from the improvement and enclosure movement. Isenberg:

[T]he bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless... Idle and unused they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land and be better... put to use.

Then the convicts. Here is what Hakluyt planned for them in America.

Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar, and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export.

Anyway, after the Roanoke Colony failed the Brits tried again with Jamestown, founded in 1607. It struggled as badly as Roanoke, but then in 1609 John Rolfe introduced a strain of tobacco from Bermuda, and "tobacco quickly became the new gold --  the ticket to wealth."

But for that the planters needed labor, and so they pleaded for "more indentured servants and laborers, who, like slaves were sold to the highest bidder." Actually, the normal game was that men that did not pay for their own passage to the Americas paid instead with a term of indentured labor. And contracts of indenture bound servants to their masters and even their heirs. If an indentured servant died, his wife and children were expected to work out the term of indenture.

So the waste population of England was not that different from the conquest slaves of West Africa.

Of course, some of the indentured servants escaped, and learned to live off the grid as squatters and crackers.

They lived off the grid... disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down... anywhere and everywhere.

As early as the 1750s they were called the "scum of nature" and "vermin"; they had no means of support except theft and license.

Thus the whole pejorative vocabulary of White Trash, from Nancy Isenberg:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [n-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

Don't you think it is time for a new movement among the elite, to champion the White Trash against their oppressors? Oh wait. In that case the moral narrative would be about "oppressed white trash, gentry oppressors, and don't cares."

Did you know about the "maroons?" They were communities of escaped African slaves all up and down the eastern coast of the Americas. They usually lived just far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't be bothered to bother them.

So really, the maroons were the same as the white trash, the squatters and crackers, that lived far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't bother them. Both white trash indentured servants and negro slaves were useful to the ruling class to work in their money-making plantations, if they could keep them from escaping.

In my narrative of The Story So Far, I reckon that, at some point, the benefit of slave labor began to burn out. Eventually the powers that be started to realize that free labor was much more profitable than slave labor. And so indentured servitude and slavery became a scandal to the great and the good.

However, I maintain that the pendulum has swung back somewhat to feudalism, for in my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, I call socialism a return to slavery and the welfare state a return to feudalism. In the welfare state the workers give a lot of their wages back to the government in return for benefits. And what is that, in effect, but a kind of quasi-serfdom?

There seem to be only two ways of recalling the past. Either it was a golden age or it was a shameful barbarism. Or both.

But I think a better way is to be understanding about the past. It was what it was. We should be hesitant to praise it unduly, and we should be disinclined to sneer at it.

For who knows how our own age will be judged by those that come after us.

Angelo Codevilla's "Revolution 2020"

How can one begin to deal with the prophecies of Angelo Codevilla's "Revolution 2020" just out at American Mind?

Where he says that, whether they intended it or not, America's ruling class has declared the Deplorables beyond the pale and therefore ordained a totalitarian future in which nobody will be allowed to dissent from the orthodoxy, or hold an opinion at odds with the orthodoxy, or hold a job if they they are not orthodox.

The point is that Donald Trump represents an inchoate rebellion against the supremacy of the ruling oligarchy:

More and more, America’s ruling class, shaped and serviced by an increasingly uniform pretend-meritocratic educational system, claimed for itself monopoly access to truth and goodness, and made moral as well as technical-intellectual contempt for the rest of Americans into their identity’s chief element. That, along with administrative and material power, made our ruling class the gatekeeper to all manner of goods.

Because, of course, to oppose the oligarchy's "monopoly access to truth and goodness" is the very definition of Satanic evil. And it must be stamped out, in every detail of its satanic systemic racism.

And, of course, once you get the whip in your hand, there is no end to it.

Affirmation of one’s own superiority by punishing inferiors is an addictive pleasure. It requires ever stronger, purer doses of infliction, and is inherently beyond satisfaction.

Codevilla laughs at the pompous notion of the "resistance" to Trump's 2016 election by the ruling class. Yes, of course, the ruling class resisted; it is still resisting.

In fact, the election’s outcome had resulted from the general population’s resistance to the ruling class further solidifying its oligarchy.

And, let us be clear, this resistance of the general population is barely organized or led by anyone. It is inchoate, instinctive, organic.

The warrant for the ruling class oligarchy's power has always been its self-image as certified experts, as truth-telling scientists, its moral concern for "education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health." And of course, it moral stand against racial and sexual oppression.

But each and all of these campaigns produced mostly the ostensible objectives’ opposites while increasing the numbers of the oligarchy’s members and their wealth and power[.]

In other words, the oligarchs have wrecked education, demolished the poor, used environmentalism to oppress ordinary people, and used oppression narratives to oppress the deplorables. No wonder the deplorables are rising up.

As with Crane Brinton's notion in An Anatomy of Revolution, the need for totalitarian domination arises from just this failure, of political action failing to achieve its promises -- even producing "the ostensible objetctives' opposites." When your revolution fails to create the Promised Land, that's when you have the choice to admit your failure or double down.

But the ruling class has a problem. The mostly peaceful protesters of the Summer of 2020 have inadvertently made it clear that their real enemy in not Donald Trump but the whole race of deplorable Commoners.

For the ruling class, the electoral problem is that the intersectional coalition’s actions and demands have made far too explicit that crushing Donald Trump is only incidentally its objective—that crushing the spirit of independence in America’s “deplorable” population is its essential objective. 

But, if Trump wins in 2020 and the Republicans maintain their position in Congress, what then?

The greatest benefit that would come from the Left’s defeat in the 2020 election is the possibility that it may become possible to convince the ruling class, if not the intersectionals, that such accommodation is the best deal they can get. But the intersectionals are violent enemies—who must be dealt with as such. Fortunately, there are more spoiled children among them than heroes.

So, the question is whether the oligarchy, the educated Gentry, decides on a truce with the deplorables, to let them go on being deplorable if they don't make too much trouble, or whether the oligarchy truckles to the "intersectional" extremists and goes for broke. Right now, I'd say that the Chucks and the Nancys are finding the AOCs and AntiFas a bit to hot to handle. So there is the temptation to loose them upon the American people as a whole.

And maybe it would work, for a while. But as I say, "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." What prompts people to form a head of rebellion is perceived injustice.

Oh, and there is one other thing, that women expect to be protected. If you don't protect them, dear oligarchs, then they will look for another protector.

And I suspect that our oligarchic rulers have no idea, literally No Idea, of the depth and breadth of the injustice they have loosed upon the land. Rulers seldom do, until the peasants with pitchforks show up at the door. 

Science, Climate Change, Politics, Prophecy and Reason

California Governor and nephew of Nancy Pelosi Gavin Newsom just issued an executive order to ban the sale of fossil-fueled powered cars in California in 2035.

Because the science of climate change demands it.

Over at UnHerd.com they have an article suggesting that only by harnessing the power of Nationalism will the world be able to tackle climate change.

Because the disconnected politicking of left and right can't do the job. We need to act as if we were fighting the Nazis or the Commies.

Or take the wonderful City of Seattle Council that has overridden the veto of Mayor Jenny Durkan and made "a down payment" on defunding the police with a reduction of 100 officers in the upcoming fiscal year.

Because, as Marx wrote, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. Just because Revolution, Baby, failed in the Sixties doesn't mean it won't succeed today!

What is going on? Why are these politicians doing all this stupid stuff?

Fear not. I have the answers right here.

First of all we must recognize the nasty bind in which today's politicians find themselves. Politics is all, and only, about rallying the men to fight against the foe -- external and internal enemies -- in the present emergency.

Or as I say it in my Maxims: "The only warrant for government power is an existential peril."

But, that was for the old days, the tribal days, when the men of the tribe had to be ready to foil the neighboring tribe's dawn raid. What do you do when the threat of invasion and conquest has diminished to a nothing?

You make it up. That is what climate change is all about. That is what systemic racism is about. Because if there weren't any climate change or systemic racism to worry about we wouldn't need our brave political leaders leading us into battle against the evil giants.

Yes, but what about the science?

OK. Here is where I am going to lose you. Science is nothing more than Prophecy. Oh, it is very good prophecy, much better than divination and the entrails of a goat. But science is still prophecy, meaning it makes predictions about how stuff in the world moves and shakes and changes from moment to moment and day to day and eon to eon.

But isn't science all about logic and reason? Yes indeed. But did you know that humans invented logic and reason to manage their social relationships, and especially their lies? Sorry, I forgot to save the link. But here is another look, "Why Do Humans Reason?" by Hugo Mercier that argues that humans reason in order to argue and persuade: 

Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade... Skilled arguers... are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.

Actually, it was not that long ago that the philosophers descanted upon logic and reason in their coffee houses completely separate from the mechanics across town that made the clocks and the carts and the cathedrals. And ne'er the twain would meet. Until they needed really accurate clocks for global navigation and the mind-guys got together with the clock-maker guys and the European adventurers conquered the world.

The only point of science is to help predict the future, which may be anything from predicting the flight of a cannonball to predicting whether a bridge will fall down. But if you are an engineer you will know that engineers always build in a "factor of safety" when designing a building or an airplane.

Now, this notion of science as prophecy is built into what I call the German Turn in modern knowledge. It begins with Kant saying that we can't know things-in-themselves but only appearances. He was responding to the canceled Hume's dictum that there is no such thing in human knowledge as cause and effect, but only correlation. Just because a building fell down right after a raven flew across the face of the moon doesn't mean that the raven caused the building to fall down.

The German Turn reaches its peak with Jung saying that, for all our conscious knowledge, we are still mostly programmed by unknown "archetypes" in our unconscious, the primordial instincts that kept us as a human species alive for millions of years, and other living species for hundred of millions of years.

What does a living thing need, most of all? It needs to have some glimpse of what happens next, so that it can react in time to make a kill of a mega-fauna or dodge the spear or the bullet. And then whatabout next week? Whatabout next year?

That is what Prophecy is all about. Generally, once a prophetic tradition gets a hold of human minds it becomes an orthodoxy, enforced by the powerful and their priests. Notice that a prophetic tradition does not necessarily have to have a track record, just that influential people support it and enforce its doctrine.

This even extends to science. That's what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was all about. A new scientific theory doesn't just come along and everybody agrees with it. The new theory -- or "paradigm" -- is not just a harmless idea; it proposes to humiliate the supporters of the old theory. It threatens jobs and reputations in academia. So it really doesn't succeed until the old generation dies off. Best of all, the new theory should make a prophetic prediction: like the prediction of General Relativity that light is bent as is comes close to a very massive object like our Sun.

You can see why climate change and the COVID-19 epidemic are like catnip to politicians. The politician really has nothing to do unless there is an existential peril requiring bold action. The world is coming to an end and we will all die! Unless we act now! There is a new plague and we will all die! Unless we all act now. And this is not just the politician acting up. He is activating Jungian "archetypes" deep in our unconcious.

Do not underestimate how vital and powerful these archetypes are. Writing in 1936 Jung said in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:

There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to. If thirty years ago anyone had dared to predict that our psychological development was tending towards a revival of the medieval persecutions of the Jews, that Europe would again tremble before the Roman fasces and the tramp of legions, that people would once more give the Roman salute, as two thousand years ago, and that instead of the Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure onwards millions of warriors ready for death -- why, that man would have been hooted at as a mystical fool. (p.48)

So it is not surprising that politicians lurch towards any existential peril as a warrant for political power; that well-born young men and women throng the streets in mostly peaceful protest, that scientists go with the program and advocate for the hot thing that gets the grants, and that nice liberal ladies throng to the meetings of the latest prophet. 

The thing is to jump off the prophetic train before it transports us to disaster. But how?

Hamnet and "A More Feminine Sensibility"

As I keep writing, I read, years ago, the German sociologist Georg Simmel who wrote that while the public square -- Öffentlichkeit in German -- was invented by men for men, the emergence of women into the public square starting in the 19th century meant that women would start to change the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

I pondered that for a few years but have since come to believe that women don't relate to the public square, not at all. The public square is a relic of the duel, the fight between two men for dominance, only conducted today with words rather than fists. That is not how women live, or interact. As I say, women communicate one-on-one over coffee and in that conversation they do not disagree with each other, not at all. They talk about other women, as in "I can't believe she said/did that." The public square is not just a thing invented by men for men. It is inaccessible to women because they are women and their brains are wired differently.

So whenever I read a woman author I am thinking about her world-building: how does she present her women characters? Are they presented as just like men only better, like Mulan or a thousand martial-arts female heroes in the movies of the last two decades? Or are they handmaid victims in The Handmaid's Tale? Or what?

Recently a friend gave me a copy of Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O'Farrell, an Irish-born writer that seems to have worked her way up in the Brit world as a journalist. The book is about the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet, as experienced by Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway, of the well-known cottage.

Hathaway -- called Agnes in the book -- is not your regular feminist kick-ass heroine. Instead the whole book is about her feelings and emotions: what it was like when she first had sex with our Will, what it was like to be left behind in Stratford with the in-laws when Will went to London. And above all what it was like when her beloved son Hamnet dies of the plague and our Will heads back to London after a couple of days: things to do, people to see. And what it was like when Will wrote and produced a play called Hamlet.

Considering that Maggie O'Farrell lives and works in the liberal and woke environment of Brit journalism -- being at one point "deputy literary editor of the Independent on Sunday" -- it is remarkable that she writes a book so free of feminist cant and orthodoxy. And it makes me feel that the worm is turning, and that high-status educated women are starting to get beyond the fantasy of competing mano-a-mano as "independent women" with men in the public square. Instead these high-status women are realizing that the life of a woman just isn't anything to do with strutting your macho stuff on the public stage. It is about who you love, who you hate, who you look after, who you mourn, and what you feel about the day-to-day events of life -- oh, and, of course, the kind of people you invite to dinner.

Now, of course we know, with Curtis Yarvin, that for people in the educated Gentry life is all about "ambition, honor, and vanity." So well-born women are still going to be all about that, only of course, in the feminine sense of ambition, honor, and vanity. And don't forget from Honor: a History by James Bowman that honor among men is the reputation for courage, and honor among women is the reputation for chastity -- or as they say over at Washington Examiner, "Am I a good person?"

Nobody should doubt the emotional wear and tear that come from living a life in a male skin suit, doing that male swagger and male hierarchy thing while still being a woman inside that instinctively is programmed to life a completely different life.

I've been appreciating this more and more from reading Jung and his notion of the battle between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind. When you remember that almost the whole animal world lives only by the instinct and stimulus and image-making from the unconscious mind -- or whatever it is that prompts ants to ant and swallows to swallow -- it helps you appreciate that we humans, that have distinguished ourselves from all other animals by our conscious mind, are still complete beginners in the consciousness game. And, to use Jung's emphasis on the importance of dream analysis in understanding the operation of the unconscious, every time we fall asleep the unconscious mind rears its head and rushes forth from the shadows on to center stage and performs a little playlet, starring the archetypes.

So, I would say that the worm is starting to turn on the women-in-the-public-square front. But don't get your hopes up. Not yet. Not for a while. But it is a start.

"We Get to Play-act on Your Dime"

I was exchanging emails with a friend about Colorado's Governor Jared Polis, who is putting a vegan on the state board that regulates livestock.

Polis is gay, and he and his "husband" have two children, who go to private school.

Up until now, I have proposed that one of the main aspects of the left's Great Reaction, its lurch back to the primitive, is the Activism Culture, that I say amounts to "play-acting revolution."

But now I am inclined to think that the whole culture of the left, from LGBT to climate change, is all about play-acting.

The idea is that the children of the educated Gentry get to play-act, with sex, with culture, with the environment. On our dime. And if any particular play results in negative results -- even disaster -- well too bad.

Notice how this goes against the notion advanced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his Skin in the Game. He says:

What should I do? I want to help mankind. His suggestion:

1) Never engage in virtue-signaling;
2) Never engage in rent-seeking;
3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.

In other words, don't do anything unless you have Skin in the Game, so that if your idea to help mankind turns out to be a dud -- and most such ideas are -- then you are the one that suffers the losses, not the rest of mankind.

See what I mean? Everything our liberal friends do is at other peoples' expense. If they are professors advocating for the Green New Deal, then it's all gravy for them. Government grants for now, and maybe Green Czar jobs down the line. But if the whole thing wrecks the economy? Hey. don't blame me; I only work here.

Oh no! A pandemic! Shut the economy down, because even one life lost is too much! But whatabout the millions of young people and semi-skilled that get furloughed and fired, while gubmint employees skate for a year and the bureaucrats that set the rules are entirely unaccountable for their mistakes? (And everyone makes mistakes).

If it is the Great Society, to give money to unmarried mothers, and results in 70 percent of children in the black community being born outside marriage? Hey, what's your problem, racist?

If it is gay marriage, suggesting to suggestible youngsters that it is kinda cool to experiment with your gender, well whatabout the kids? An American philosopher once told me that all children want a mother and a father: their mother and their father. I wonder what the social-science research says about children raised by gays and/or lesbians? Or is that even allowed?

If it is "affordable housing" and brilliant academic economists propose low-down-payment loans and liar loans, and the whole thing ends up in a generational financial panic where millions lose their jobs and millions more their life savings, where are the ones responsible? The academics with the brilliant ideas? The activists that sold the idea as a matter of justice? The politicians that bought votes with promises of home-ownership?

If it is electric cars, then electric car manufacturers get subsidies, electric car buyers get subsidies, Elon Musk makes a fortune, and German car manufacturers promise to stop making diesel-powered cars. What happens if renewable energy wind-turbines and solar cells can't deliver the power? Who takes the losses? The greenie activists? The rent-seeking billionaires? The ordinary consumers suffering power outages? The politicians that told us we had 12 years to save the planet?

There are literally dozens, if not hundreds of "issues" for which professors want research money, activists want to virtue-signal, special interests want to rent-seek, and politicians want to buy votes. But none of them have Skin in the Game. None of them will go bankrupt and lose everything they have if their brilliant idea turns out to be a dud. They are, in effect, play-acting on the public dime, kids playing on the jungle gym at the local park.

And what happens if all these grand plans all come crashing to Earth at the same time?

Hey kid. Grow up and stop with the play-acting. Learn what it means to have Skin in the Game and get a life!

It's Not a Good Idea for the Supreme Court to Legislate Morality

So here we are, with another Supreme Court nomination fight on our hands.

I was to dinner with the liberal neighbors last night and they were all sighing over the death of Supreme Court Justice and liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They had seen the documentary of her life, RBG, and were full of scenes like the moment in law school when the professor publicly made fun of her taking a place away from a guy.

For me, Ginsburg was a problem, because as a Good Little Girl of her feminist generation she thought that the job of the Supreme Court was and is to legislate liberal morality.

Of course, liberals high and low are horrified by the idea that Donald Trump might nominate a conservative Christian woman like Amy Coney Barrett. The Noive!

All I have to say, liberals, is that this is the wages of your strategy of legislating from the Supreme Court.

That is not what the law is all about. In the end, you will rue the day that you decided to start legislating your agenda through the administrative state and the law courts, but that time is not yet.

Now, some years ago I read The Story of Law by John Maxcy Zane. And the big takeaway for me was how much that the story of law has been about inheritance and commerce. In other words, when things go wrong with inheritance and with trade, that's when you have to call in the lawyers. It's amazing how complicated things can get. Why is this? Zane writes:

Nothing is more silly than to say that the law made private property. The fact is the exact opposite. Private property came to exist and it made the law. (p.147)

In other words, once humans began to treat some or all property as private, attached to an individual, then humans needed law to sort out conflicting claims about private property. 

That has made me skeptical, ever since, of the usefulness of law when it comes to morality.

Let us ventilate three ideas.

Politics and government are all about force. On what grounds can the state apply force to people? Because of violence? Because the state needs the money to pay for its wars?

Law is all about private property. What do you do when the heirs to railroad magnate -- and notorious robber baron -- Jay Gould start fighting over his $30 million fortune?

Religion is all about morality. What do you do about behavior you regard as immoral?

May I say that I regard this separation of powers as one of the most amazing achievements of humankind?

Let us investigate the question of abortion in this light of this separation of powers.

What do you do, for instance, about a woman who aborts her fetus? Immediately after conception? After the first trimester? Just before normal birth? Right after birth?

Now, I would say that a man that tells a woman carrying his child to "get rid of it" at any point is a cad. I take the moral position that if you have sex with a woman then your act is a commitment that says you would like her to have your child. Don't like my morality? Fine. I ain't forcing it on you.

But whatabout a woman who decides to abort her fetus?

In the first trimester? I'd call her flighty and foolish.

In the second trimester? I would call her very flighty and very foolish.

In the third trimester? I would call that flat out immoral.

At or immediately after birth? I would call that a crime.

See, I believe there is a difference between an immoral act, where all good women agree to name and shame and shun the immoral wench in question, and a criminal act, which implies an act of force, where police and criminal courts and hanging judges and gaolers are needed to take care of things.

But there is always a temptation, especially if you are a fervent believer or an ambitious elitist, to legislate morality, to treat questions of morality using the state institutions for dealing with human-on-human violence.

And that is the Big Problem of our times. Our liberal educated Gentry have abused their position as cultural arbiters, as what Curtis Yarvin calls the "Cathedral," to impose their morality on the rest of humanity.

See, even though I think that a woman that gets an abortion is flighty and foolish, and a man that encourages his partner to "get rid of it" is a cad, I still don't think that it should be a question of criminal procedure.

However, when a woman encompasses the death of her newborn baby, as George Eliot dramatizes in Adam Bede, where the abandoned mother Hetty Sorrel abandons her baby in a pile of leaves, well, that is something that requires the state to intervene. George Eliot makes it perfectly clear that Hetty Sorrel is both flighty and foolish. But she saves her from the gallows and sends her off to Australia. George Eliot was a sweetie.

Back in the day it seemed like a good idea to liberals to legislate Roe v. Wade from the bench and bring the US into the 20th century and legalize abortion like all modern societies in Europe. But did you know that the "modern societies in Europe" all pretty well ban abortions after the first trimester? Whereas in the US liberals are toying with OKing abortion "after birth?"

Then, of course, liberals legislated Affirmative Action and gay marriage and I know not what from the Supreme Court.

Problem is that what yesterday's Supreme Court decides last year can be reversed next year. So all your liberal Supreme Court decisions rest on a knife-edge, the partisan composition of the nine justices. So that is why all liberals go crazy whenever there is a vacancy on the court that takes place when a Republican is president. Because suddenly everything is at risk!

Let me tell you a story. Back in 1984 in Washington State, the religious right put Initiative 471 on the ballot to ban public funding of abortions. It went down, 53%-47%. And that decided the question of abortion in Washington State. Basically, we haven't  had a peep from the religious right since.

Do you see the difference of deciding this by a vote of the people and a vote of the educated elite? When the people decide, that is final. When the elite decides they end up having to enforce their decision with cancel culture. Why? Because they didn't take the trouble to persuade people. They just used their power as the educated elite to change the rules, and don't you dare object, peasant.

I don't know when our liberal friends will see the error of their ways. I would guess not for decades, not until there is a permanent Republican majority on the Court and a permanent Republican majority in the Congress.

What? Is that even conceivable? Well, it does according to my reductive Three Peoples theory. The evolving Republican Party under Donald Trump is a party of the ordinary middle class Responsibles, the Commoners. And our liberal friends have no idea, No Idea, that Commoners have a different view of the meaning of life, and have a right to have the government and its laws take account of that.

But, the bigger question would be for the government to get its cotton-picking hands off morality and let ordinary religious communities take care of the question of naming, shaming, and shunning the members of their community that violate their unwritten moral values.