Will The Diversity Gospel Take Over The World?

An acquaintance emailed today about the situation of white guys in STEM. What do you do, as "the 40-something engineer, with wife, house, car, kids" in the face of the current diversity madness, knowing you are "not of the appropriate gender or color?"

The simple answer, of course, is that you don't work for a big corporation, or any other place where they have time for piddling around with ruling-class inanities. You go work for a smaller company where they can't afford to have a DIE policy:  because "Get Woke, Go Broke."

But why? What is really going on with "diversity in the workplace" and diversity in movies, and the current panic on "systemic racism" that will be a major thrust in the Biden administration, along with climate change?

And will this diversity religion take over the world?

I think the diversity thing issues from the conceit of our ruling class, its self-image, that the educated elite is the virtue elite. As I am learning from The Ruling Class by Gaetano Mosca every ruling class lives on the narrative that it is the most valiant, or the Best and Brightest, or the most moral thing going, and that is why we peasants should bend the knee.

That is what the Deplorables and Bitter Clingers are about. Ruling-class virtue-signaling.

In my view the two big things the Biden administration proposes, climate change and systemic racism, illustrate the driving forces of any government and/or moral elite.

Government is about defending us from existential peril. In the past this has been the danger of the dawn raid from the tribe next door. Then it was the Nazis, then the Commies. But now, China aside, we really don't have an existential peril to arm against, the global elite has come up with climate change, to save us from runaway warming.

Then the moral agenda. What better than to save America from the notorious "systemic racists?" Only I think that government cannot help us on the moral front. Morality is a girl thing, what women enforce in the home and around the neighborhood. If it is enforced by government is it no longer morality but simple coercion, or, as our liberal friends used to say, "legislating morality."

But whatabout all the stereotype smashing, with the black astronomer in Interstellar, the endless superheroines bashing the living daylights out of big male thugs, or the brilliant female scientist? With the white male as the villain?

I just think that this stereotype bashing isn't going to work. My reason, of course, is deeply intellectual. We humans are, above all, storytellers. Why? Because stories are the way we remember: our life, the past, the birth of the nation, everything. Stories are the way we fill the world with meaning. And in those stories, as Carl Jung reminded us, we fill the cast with "archetypes:" the sacrificial hero, the cruel monster, the dumb jock, the good mother, the evil mother, the innocent girl, the nerdly boy.

Notice that in the original Star Wars all the characters were straight out of Jung's archetypes That's because director George Lucas was a fan of Joseph Campbell who was a follower of Jung. So all the characters are all straight out of mythology: Luke, the innocent boy learning to be brave; Hans Solo, the flawed but lovable rascal; Princess Leia, the beautiful maiden; Obi Wan, the wise teacher; Darth Vader, the satanic villain.

That is why Star Wars was such a mega success: because it connected deep into the human psyche. And that is why the later Star Wars movies are so mediocre: because they abandoned classic Jungian archetypes for lefty wokeness.

If you start turning the story upside down, putting people into roles that make no archetypical sense, you are going to lose your audience.

Now I think that what we need to do as a nation and a society is to refound our culture in the light of Jung's archetypes. So that men can be brave warriors, defending the hearth, and teaching the children to be worthy and honorable adults. So that women can be devoted carers, keeping the kids alive and ordering the local community, organizing learning pods and micro schools, returning to charitable work.

I think we need to stop the gender-bender madness, not because I think that gays should be strung up, but because I think that if you want to be creative with sex you should have to sign a release first, saying that if you screw up your life it is your fault, not society's fault.

Actually I think the same is true of all non-traditional role-playing. Sure, you can go and do all that, but before you go, you have to go through a briefing that educates you on the science of driving through the guard-rails.

The point of stories, whether in books or plays or movies, is to take the standard archetypes and mix them up. Sure, you can turn them upside down, but if you do that you should realize that you are doing screwball comedy; you are making a joke about archetypes.

Sure, there are blacks who can be rocket scientists, but right now it just ain't believable to cast them like that in movies. Now, a nerdly east-Asian: that would work. Nor does a girl superhero work: not unless she is some sort of a Kali, the destroyer of evil -- but not featuring kick-boxing stunts. Read this narrative about Kali:

In relation to Shiva, she [Kali] appears to play the opposite role from that of Parvati. Parvati calms Shiva, counterbalancing his antisocial or destructive tendencies; she brings him within the sphere of domesticity and with her soft glances urges him to moderate the destructive aspects of his tandava dance. Kali is Shiva's "wife" as it were, provoking him and encouraging him in his mad, antisocial, disruptive habits. It is never Kali who tames Shiva, but Shiva who must calm Kali.

See what is going on here? The good goddess Parvati calms Shiva; the evil goddess Kali provokes him.  Notice that neither Parvati or Kali are actors; they are whisperers, the power behind the throne. Recast your superheroines as Parvati and Kali and your stories will work -- all the way to the bank.

See, my belief is the the whole wokey phenomenon will crash and burn. I think it is a last desperate effort of our educated elite ruling class to maintain its relevance before it crashes and burns on the waste-heap of history.

I think that what we are going to do in the future decades is create new religions and politics that are based on the old archetypes, but reformulated to fit the modern age. I have attempted to imagine how this might look for men in my "Good Life" blog series where I propose the highest and best role for men is the Sacrificial Hero.

Somebody should do the same for women. Should they be Kalis or Parvatis?

Whither the Good Old USA?

There is really only one narrative out there about the long-term future of US politics. It is the one proposed by Judis and Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority back in 2004. Their thesis is that the future belongs to Democrats because of women, minorities, young people, and the professionals.

Well, it's obvious isn't it? Even Pat Buchanan darkly foresees the end of the Trump era, as in:

1. Demography: the white fraction of the population is going down
2. Free stuff: Democrats are the party of government
3. Blue wall: "carrying every state that touches the Atlantic from Maine to North Carolina."

But. Here's Powerline with some post-election numbers. and a concerned analysis from The Guardian.

Biden’s win depended on suburbanites tired of Trump, who voted Republican down ballot and will certainly vote Republican in future elections... 

Most concerningly, Democrats hemorrhaged votes among non-white working-class voters. . . Even in the crucial states Biden was able to flip, Trump reduced Democratic margins in Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. These results should be setting off alarm bells among Democrats.

I guess my analysis -- which of course expresses my hopes -- is that race is not as important as we are carefully taught to believe, Black Lives Matter. My belief is that national origin matters for a generation or two, but then class takes over.

Class in the sense of my reductive Three Peoples theory and Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers theory. In this theory the electorate divides up:

1. Educated Gentry: Democrat, because we are qualified to direct traffic (we want power)
2. Commoners: Republican, because we want to live our own lives (not that interested in power)
3. Clients: Democrat, because we want the powerful to protect us

Obviously, the genius of Trump was to create a class consciousness among ordinary Commoner Americans and it seems, from the Guardian, that he is making headway among non-white Commoners as well as white Commoners.

However, let us not forget Michael Barone's theory:

The Republican Party appeals to “typical Americans” as understood at a given time, and the Democratic Party represents a coalition of “out-groups.” 

Now do you see why Dems are still playing the race card? They want everyone to think of themselves as an "oppressed" out-group. But Deplorables are not an out-group. They are "white oppressors."

Nor should we think of the parties as hopelessly out of touch.

[B]oth parties have adapted, swiftly or haltingly, to shifting opinion and emerging issues, to economic change and cultural currents, to demographic flux.

Then there is the actual party history in the US House of Representatives over the last century:

Well. So if you figure that Judis and Teixeira made their predictions back in 2000, I'd say that so far, nothing has happened. Indeed, you might say that the House of Representatives has been going slowly GOP ever since 1937. Or you might say that there was a Dem wave that lasted from 1900 to the 1960s and ever since the opposite has been true.

OK. Here is my fearless prediction. I think that we have in our future a battle royal between the educated Gentry and the Commoners:

The educated Gentry wants the climate change grift because it means tons of power and jobs for educated experts and administrators and it wants continued intersectional politics because it encourages Americans to think of themselves as members of "out groups."

 The Commoners want ordinary economic growth because they want to wive and thrive. But don't touch their Medicare and Social Security, you Green New Dealers.

The point about Donald Trump is that he found the way to energize the ordinary Commoners with the notion of appealing to them directly as typical Americans and boosting economic growth -- for Americans. No professional Republican had figured out how to do that before, except maybe Ronald Reagan.

I think the place to look is the white professional elite. Do they really want to keep with the Woke movement and its cancel culture and its flirtation with socialism that might easily turn on them as a privileged and exploitative upper-class, bearded @jack?

Also, I would say, in the short range, the Democrats seem to be divided between the moderate Democrats that represent swing districts and the ideologues that represent safe districts. Just sayin'.

I don't think that Republicans are similarly divided right now.

My only problem is that if Trump wins the cheating wars, and continues in office till 2025, the country will be so fed up with Trump that Dems will win it all decisively in 2024, White House and Senate and House. 

And then you ain't seen nuttin´ yet.

It's a Bit Late to Start Condemning Beheadings, Globalists

There's a piece over at Quillette by writer Brian Stewart that approves of French President Macron for taking a stand against beheadings of secular Frenchies by Muslim religious fanatics.

Pointing to France’s tradition of secularism, known as laïcité, Macron has insisted that it “is the glue of a united France,” which must be defended against Islamism’s “conscious, theorized, politico-religious project” to subvert the freedom of the republic.

No doubt. and I was just reading Gaetano Mosca in The Ruling Class. He says that in a multi-sect society the ruling class has to develop a unifying ideology so that, e.g. in France, you can be a good Muslim and a good Frenchie.

Unfortunately the time to have done that would have been 20-30 years ago. Instead the French ruling class, like ruling classes elsewhere in the West, have tended to be patronizing towards "victim groups," permitting them to develop ideologies of separation that they would never permit in ordinary middle-class Westerners.

And we know the reason why. Because condoning the primitive tribalist ideologies of the victims has been great for the ruling class on the voting front. Peoples that have not yet succeeded in finding a place in the city's market economy tend to hunker down in sub-national identities, and they protect themselves from the larger society with urban gangs. The job of a ruling class worth its privileges and its self-regard is to encourage by all means the ethnic group to identify with the nation rather than the tribe. 

But not our ruling class. Because, for the time being, they could be the champions of the oppressed, the "allies" if you like, and rule by dividing ordinary Americans.

So it's a bit late for President Macron suddenly wake up and say: Wow, these beheadings have got to stop!

Why, that's almost as radical as a Democratic Party leader getting up and saying "this mostly peaceful protesting has to stop." Yeah. We are a few years away from that happening.

It would be funny, a topic for late-night comedy shows, if it weren't so serious. Imagine a skit about the global elite running around turning up their noses at "patriotism" and "nationalism" and sneering at the populist nationalists from France's Le Pen and Britain's Farage and Hungary's Orbán, and Germany's Meuthen, and the US's Trump.

(Interesting: I didn't even know the name of the leader of Germany's Alternativ für Deutschland. I wonder why, MSM?)

Then all of a sudden the ruling class wakes up one day and decide sthat this beheading thing, that it has basically condoned for decades, Has Got To Stop!

The problem with history is that it is all one step forward and two steps back. And if you are lucky, you finally get a step ahead. That's because your average ruling class just inherited the job from its fathers and it really has no clue how its forefathers created the regime so many moons ago.

Here's a radical idea, you educated-evolved-compassionate ruling class. Start praising the Nation. Start praising the Founders (of whatever nation); start encouraging the immigrants to join the cult of the nation. And stop being snobby globalists meeting up in Magic-Mountain-ville in the Swiss Alps to teach the rubes how to "build back better."

Here's the reason. A good ruling class is always sensitive to the passions of the masses. Its glorious beribboned members dripping with knightly stars and magnificent awards want to know what the plebs are thinking and what is bothering them. Because, after all, the ruling class, every ruling class, lives on the conceit that it knows what is good for the country -- and the world! And it cannot have an idea about this unless it is pretty knowledgeable about what is actually going on in Fly-over Country or the banlieue of Paris.

But you can see what a useless ruling class would propose to do. Hey! I know! Let's get rid of Trump by fixing the mail-in votes in Pennsylvania. That will give us a fabulous mandate to Build Back Better.

Not!

Hey. You know what? For the last four years the US had a president that encouraged Americans to identify as Americans, and he encouraged the marginalized -- you know who they are -- to join the party and be proud of belonging to America. Because the American people are the best people in the world and America is the best country in the world and the best is yet to come.

Golly. You would think that Donald Trump had spent the last ten years reading, learning, and inwardly digesting The Ruling Class by Gaetano Mosca. But that would be impossible, because Orange Man Bad.

What Will Make Our Next Ruling Class Special

Here am I fizzing along with Gaetano Mosca's The Ruling Class and writing it all up here. And one of his aperćus is that every ruling class lives -- and dies -- on its specialness. Because that is the basis for its right to rule.

The special people are the people that get to rule. All over the world.

Back in the day, of course, the ruling class was simply the warriors. The best warriors were the ruling class, period. I suppose that when we get to the feudal era we get not just the warrior virtues, but blood and lineage which the ruling class advertises as a marker of their superior character and wealth and power. 

But whatabout our own ruling class? What do they advertise to signify their specialness and their right to rule? The answer is obvious. It is a whole cluttered drawing room full of conceit.

What our rulers know is that they are

more educated, more evolved, more caring, more inclusive, more intelligent, more knowledgeable, more kind, more scientific, more virtuous, more compassionate, more honest, more open, more empathizing, more involved, more sharing, more encouraging, more apologizing, more forgiving 

than the common run of deplorables and bitter-clingers. (I got a lot of these from the "Be the one to" website).

And their clients, the "oppressed peoples" are innocents.

No really! Go up and read over that list again. Is it not true that your liberal friends really believe all that?

That is why I think that our liberal friends are making a strategic mistake with censoring social media, with canceling racist-sexist-homophobes, with pursuing Donald Trump for four years, with stealing elections, with nominating a man in his dotage and a woman who made it up the old-fashioned way.

The reason is obvious: such low-life behavior completely negates the virtue-signaling PR. And it signals weakness.

A truly educated-evolved-caring-inclusive-intelligent-kind, etc. person does not censor, cancel, fake-dossier, fake-impeach, or steal. Not nohow. And not just because it is wrong, not just because it is beneath a truly educated-evolved-caring etc. person of high estate. But because it signals weakness.

Should I repeat that? Yes I think I should.

When you censor, cancel, fake-dossier, fake-impeach or steal elections you are signalling weakness. As in "they're a weak lot, some of them in Europe, you know. Weak. Feeble."

Now I believe that the true markers of specialness are the three virtues of @nntaleb.

Never virtue-signal 

Never rent-seek 

You must start your own business

Since I don't want to be sexist, I have also included three virtues for women

Never virtue-signal 

Never say "I can't even!" 

You must learn to forgive

As opposed to what I regard as our ruling class's real markers.

We are all virtue-signallers 

We are all rent-seekers 

We never quite got to start our own business

Am-I-right or am-I-right? 

Yep. My fearless prediction is that our next ruling class will live or die on the @nntaleb virtues. 

Because it's the only thing left.

Ten Reasons Why Our Liberal Ruling Class is in Trouble

In The Ruling Class Gaetano Mosca writes that a ruling class needs certain qualities in itself as a group and in its individuals.

1. It should be united. 
2. It should be careful about unrest in the masses and respond to it. 
3. It should be able to adapt to changes, in wealth, knowledge, etc. 
4. It should be excellent in the virtues of the age. 
5. It should be seen to be excellent in the virtues of the age. 
6. And so on.  

 You can see that our liberal friends are not doing too well on the ruling-class virtue front. But let us count the specifics. Just to help them out.

1. A good Ruling Class does not steal elections; it does not need to.
2. A good Ruling Class does not even appear to steal elections; such behavior is beneath it.
3. A good Ruling Class does not call the masses "deplorables" or "bitter-clingers." It is the benevolent lord of all it surveys.
4. A good Ruling Class does not legislate a "Great Society" and instrument it with social science so it can praise itself and then find out that it made things worse, and then do nothing about it. (Charles Murray in Losing Ground)
5. A good Ruling Class does not call Charles Murray a racist for pointing out in The Bell Curve that the modern era benefits the "cognitive elite" and that blacks, that exhibit lower than normal IQs, would likely not do too well compared to people with high IQs.
6. A good Ruling Class does not ignore Charles Murray in his Coming Apart when he writes:  that the top 20 percent of whites in America is doin' fine with great careers and merger marriages; that the middle 50 percent of whites is doin' so-so; that the bottom 30 percent of men don't work much and the women don't marry much.
7. A good Ruling Class does not hang the white working class out to dry for half a century.
8. A good Ruling Class does not let blacks molder away in crumbling, crime-ridden cities for half a century.
9. A good Ruling Class does not censor the opposition with its tame tech lords. It does not need to.
10. A good Ruling Class does not let its supporters riot in the cities. It would be beneath such crudity.

I could go on. My point is that a good Ruling Class does not have to cheat. It does not make life great for itself and its supporters at the cost of real decline in the welfare of people outside the Ruling Class. It allows a little fun and frolic from the masses, because it wants to know what the masses think and feel, the better to rule them.

And another thing. A good Ruling Class knows when it is in trouble, and knows what to do and does it. It does not dig the hole deeper.

A Week Later, Where Are We?

I am reading The Ruling Class by Gaetano Mosca in a desperate attempt to understand the present post-election chaos. For Mosca deals, as does Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, with the fact that the majority, or The People, do not rule. They cannot rule. Instead we are ruled by a ruling class, and the ruling class is necessarily a minority.

So how does the ruling class do it? And, more important, when "the natives are restless," what does the ruling class do to stay in power and/or accommodate the restlessness of the natives?

That, it seems to be, is the current political situation in the United States in the Trump era.

Obviously, the ruling class does what is best for the ruling class. But how much should it accommodate the feelings and tendencies of the lower orders? Should it just tell the rubes to shut up? Or should it accommodate the lower orders, catering to their agenda even if the rulers think the lower orders are deplorable bitter clingers?

The Z-man reckons that the whole show is a sham.

All human societies have elites and those elites control the institutions of the society. In theory, popular forms of government either check the power of the elites or place real power into the hands of the people... 

In reality, voting is entirely meaningless in a liberal democracy, as the elites control public policy exclusively.

Is voting "entirely meaningless" or would a wise elite take the results of elections into account when making its ruling-class decisions?

Victor Davis Hanson categorizes the various flavors of NeverTrump, the GOPers that didn't like Trump back in 2016, that

First, were a small cadre of self-described conservatives and doctrinaire Republicans, who under no circumstances would have ever voted for Trump or embraced his agenda, or in some extreme cases, ever voted for any who would vote Trump. 

So there are gradations of NeverTrumpers. But mostly the general pique comes down to cultural, comportment, class—and often careerist—concerns, rather than policies per se.

It is hard to avoid the notion that the NeverTrumpers are not that smart. Does not the smart political operator put himself at the head of the parade rather than grumbling in a café on the sidelines?

Mark Bauerlin looks at the establishment Republicans in DC, and how the likely 2020 outcome, 

To hold the Senate, close the gap in the House, and get rid of Donald Trump—that’s a big, big win for establishment Republicans in and out of office.  

They’ve lived in Washington, D.C., for a long time. Life’s been very good to them, and so has the swamp. If you don’t live here, if you’ve never worked in an agency or met with congressional staffers or been to the dinners, it’s hard to imagine the sublime air in which these people circulate. It’s like Versailles under Le Roi Soleil, an American version of courtiers and entourages, rivalries and intrigues, who’s up and who’s down and who’s next, what is the king’s and the duke’s and the general’s pleasure. Most importantly, the whole scene is limited to insiders.  

So on this view DC is just like the Capitol in The Hunger Games. They are all courtiers, and the Trump people are all poor schmucks living from hand to mouth out in the Districts. 

The big question, between the three takes above, is how much the ruling class is a ruthless criminal gang, cunningly manipulating the plebs for power and profit, and how much of it is clueless courtiers that really don't look much beyond the ins and outs of court life in the Capitol, cluelessly assuming that they will rule over the Districts forever.

Honestly, I don't know. But I do know this: ruling classes don't rule forever. They get slack and corrupt. They are like family business empires, started by a cunning and lucky upstart, kept going by the son and heir, and eventually bankrupted by the clueless grandson.

But read what Mosca writes on France and England, from The Ruling Class at the end of Chapter IV: "Ruling Class and Social Type."

One should note... that in the course of the nineteenth century England adopted peacefully and without violent shocks almost all the basic civil and political reforms that France paid so heavily to achieve through the great Revolution. Undeniably, the great advantage of England lay in the greater energy, the greater practical wisdom, the better political training, that her ruling class possessed down to the very end of the past century.

Really, how did they do it? It wasn't from reading Anthony Trollope's The Pallisers. For Trollope was merely anticipating Mosca, that, in the crunch, the Brit ruling class still had its wits about it.

For Mosca politics is not just a dumb show, a Hunger Games at the Capitol to amuse the courtiers. It is real power politics, and the wise ruling class sees which way the wind is blowing and prunes the trees so that they do not get blown down in the storm. And if it transpires that the old ruling class must give way to new men, well, there is a graceful way of doing that, that preserves the honor of the old regime as it exits the stage, and that avoids a butcher's bill.

The fact is that Donald Trump took the Capitol by surprise. They had no idea that a guy like him appealing to ordinary Commoners had a chance of winning a presidential election. Their response ever since has been to get rid of him, by shenanigans.

So the question is whether we have an English-type ruling class with its "practical wisdom" or do we have a court of the Sun King, the roi soleil, that does not have a clue and that abandoned France to a century of revolution and turmoil.

If you ask me, today, it looks like we have a Frenchie ruling class rather than the Wellingtons, Disraelis and Salisburys of the 19th century Brit ruling class.

Clinton Rallies the Democratic Troops

So why did Bill Clinton “lose his temper” with Chris Wallace last weekend?

Perfectly simple, writes William Kristol. He was helping Democrats.

He rallied the troops, and he “reminded them of their talking points on Bush's alleged passivity” during the runup to 9/11. Which is the line that the Democrats were pushing on the 9/11 Commission. So now Clinton can take credit for showing up the evil Republican push on terror as a mere campaign ploy.

Then, of course, Clinton helps his wife with her presidential campaign in 2008. She hasn’t been doing too well with the Democratic left wing lately. Clinton’s defense of his terror record and his attack on the evil Fox News rallies the left and makes them forget how angry they are at her.

It was interesting, of course, to read Noel Sheppard’s quotes of Republican officeholders supporting President Clinton when he sent cruise missiles against Bin Laden in August 1998. How quaint it seems to hear bipartisan support for the president. Said former Vice-President Dan Quayle on CNN:

I don't have a problem with the timing. You need to focus on the act itself. It was a correct act. Bill Clinton took--made a decisive decision to hit these terrorist camps. It's probably long overdue.

We won’t be getting that kind of support from Democrats on national security any time soon.

Maybe that’s OK. It is likely that the developing conflict with Islam needs to mature a lot more before we can get our progressive friends on side.