Getting a Word In Against Liberal Cultural Hegemony

Should all journalists be college graduates, asks Kevin Mims in "Journalism's Ivory Towers"? Because back in the day they weren't. Not Mark Twain, for sure. Not even Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker who was born in a prospector's cabin in Colorado. But now, of course almost every journalist has a college degree. Some of them write sympathetically about the lower orders, but there's a fat chance that any of the lower orders will get to work at The New York Times.

Look out drivers, writes Eric Peters in "No More Camaros For You". In California they are regulating high-performance Chevy Camaros out of existence because they emit too much copper.

The fade-resistant, high-performance pads used in these models “emit” trace amounts of vaporized/powderized heavy metals such as copper and asbestos during braking.

And in five years "California law will require that all brake pads be zero emissions." It's a cunning way of forcing the move to electric cars, because electric cars use much more engine braking than internal combustion cars.

OK, then here is Tom Chivers on "The perils of liberals politicizing science."  Yes, of course we've got to take moral positions on bigots and racist-sexist-homophobes, he writes. But major science journals should not be endorsing Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Hey, we already know that nearly all scientists are Democrats!

Of course science is political: its findings have political implications; its practitioners have political beliefs. But its questions are fundamentally different from moral and political questions: What is real? vs What do we want? 

To which I say, yes, of course. Ruler gotta rule; gentry gotta pursue a life of "ambition, honor, and vanity." Case in point, Joe Biden's wife, who wants to be addressed as "Dr." even though she's not a medical doctor but a Doctor of Education. See, she is a true Gentry, interested in honorifics.

Yes. I get it. Gentry gotta gent. And that seems to involve a lot of virtue-signaling and rent-seeking. You know, as in my liberal neighbors putting out Black Lives Matter signs and buying subsidized electric cars.

No doubt nearly all journalists have college degrees these days. And no doubt nearly all college graduates these days have been carefully taught the moral ins-and-outs of critical race theory. But maybe, just maybe, a few journalists at elite prestige titles should tumble to the notion that not everybody thinks like them, not everybody wants what they want, not everybody has the same moral calculus as them, and that maybe people should be allowed to be different and have a different moral calculus, and that the elite should ease up a bit on sneaking its agenda in the back door by, e.g., mandating zero-emission brakes by 2025.

Here's a group I had never heard of, "Atheism+" that has a very clear moral agenda.

We are:
Atheists plus we care about social justice,
Atheists plus we support women’s rights,
Atheists plus we protest racism,
Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,
Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

Well, I don't know that you chaps at Atheist+ do much critical and skeptical thinking, because the first thing is to decide, well, what do we do about people that don't believe in social justice, or feministm, or anti-racism, or don't want us to cast gay and bi and trans characters in all the movies, and don't want to enforce critical race theory on the world?

Yeah? What do we do about them? Send them to reeducation until they recant? Fire them from their jobs? Name, shame, and shun them? Imprison them? Exile them? Execute them? 

Do we force everyone to pay to support the Atheist+ agenda?

See, for me, it comes down to this. If you believe that the world is composed of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors," then of course the only thing to do is to exile the oppressors to Outer Slobbovia.

But if you believe, like me, that there are three kinds of people in the world: Subordinates that just want to be told what to do; Responsibles that believe in an Axial Age god, and want to live as God directs; and Creatives that believe in creativity for everyone; then you think, OK. That Atheist+ agenda might be just great for Atheists, but whatabout people that disagree with the Atheist+ agenda? What is their place in the world?

And this brings be back to my basic line, about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." The reason that Douglas Adams rehearses this line in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is that he is making a joke about the fact that we don't know the meaning of life and all the rest of it. So we make it up.

What everyone has to do is to sign up to some faith tradition that says: "This is the meaning of life." Like the Atheist+ chappies. And then a satisfying moral calculus falls out naturally.

But supposing you Atheist+ chaps are wrong? Suppose that social justice results in concentration camps and millions of dead, like in the USSR and Maoist China? Suppose that women's rights end up with women not having children and that leads to the decline and collapse of civilization? Suppose that anti-racism ends up in irreconcilable conflict between woke liberals and bigoted deplorables and the breakup of the United States? Suppose that gays and transes are just mixed-up kids wanting out of the heavy-duty life of work and marriage and children? And suppose that Atheist+ chaps are deluded if they think that they are critical and skeptical thinkers? What then?

That, of course, is the moral basis for the notion of tolerance. Cromwell's Rule.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

Only, of course, in reality, Cromwell was pretty well convinced that he was right, and that King Charles should be executed, if that is what it would take. Oh, and the Irish should be taught a lesson.

Yep, this is not that hard, and it is part of the reason for the separation between church and state, including the Church of Atheist+. 

But it is apparently way beyond the comprehension of our liberal friends.

Two Strikes Against the Ruling Class -- in One Day

Here is a piece right out of Mosca's The Ruling Class. In "Our Coddled Ruling Class and All the Pain They Can't Feel," Oliver Bateman and Malcom Kyeyune write that the problem is not that our elite is censoring us deplorables for deplorableness, but that it is insulating itself from the real world. And that is suicidal.

The true goal, rather unfortunately, is to instead insulate our failing elite in a hermetically sealed bubble, where only those who hold unthreatening, regime-affirming ideas are ever allowed to set foot.

For Mosca is quite clear on this: a good ruling class, while keeping a firm hand on the tiller, is also sensitive to the passions roiling the masses. And does something about it. On the remarkable assumption that the bitter clingers may actually have a real claim to their grievances.

Elites who have stopped listening to the pain signals from the body politic not only risk hurting or killing themselves in similarly gruesome ways, but they also threaten the very societies they supposedly rule over, and the countless lives of the human subjects they are committed to neglecting.

Actually, I suspect that the "ruling clique" does have a clue. But the broader ruling class wants nothing to do with the bitter clingers. And the ruling clique doesn't have the cojones to straighten the lower echelons out.

OK. That's Part One. Part Two is the same, only different. "How race politics liberated the elites" by Matthew Crawford is all about how the basic faith of the elite class that their societies are racist-sexist-homophobes but that they are different, because they acknowledge the evil of racism. And this liberates them from loyalty to their nation states into the rarefied air of the globalist elite. Crawford starts with the superrich and totally dissolute media clan in the HBO series Succession.

Dropping down a rung or two on the pyramid of power, consider the moral ecology inhabited by the broader gentility: the salaried decision-makers and ideas-managers who service the global arrangement from various departments of the ideological apparatus... They, too, enjoy a kind of freedom, but it is decidedly not that of the high-spirited criminals depicted in Succession. So far from living “beyond good and evil”, this broader class of cosmopolitans asserts its freedom through its moralism, precisely. In particular, they have broken free of the claims of allegiance made upon them by the particular communities they emerge from.

These elite chappies have invented a moral hierarchy with themselves at the top. Because they have broken free of the Original Sin of racism-sexism-homophobia.

The decision-making class has discovered that it enjoys the mandate of heaven, and with this comes certain permissions; certain exemptions from democratic scruple.

The permission structure is built around grievance politics. Very simply: if the nation is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, I owe it nothing. More than that, conscience demands that I repudiate it.

This actually traps our ruling class masters in a glass cage, from which they cannot escape.

The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently aggrieved. Unless their special status as ur-victim is maintained, African-Americans cannot serve as patrons for the wider project of liberation. If you question this victimisation, you are questioning the rottenness of America. And if you do that, you are threatening the social order, strangely enough. For it is now an order governed by the freelance moralists of the cosmopolitan consensus. 

Imagine that! Blacks have to be victimized, for ever and for ever, because otherwise we Übermenschen lose our super-status as educated lordlings way above the common ruck of humans.

Maybe that explains why Google has branded my "1584 Project" as dangerous and violent speech. For in that article I asked my readers to consider that black slaves were not unique. There were all kinds of slavery and semi-slavery back in the day, and the "waste population," the White Trash of Europe was right in the middle of it, as the agricultural era waned and the ruling class rural magnates "hurled" their "useless retainers" into vagabondage and beggary so they could strut their stuff as courtiers in the capital city.

But what do we do about it? I've got a series of posts under my topic of "pejoratives" where I argue that we must stop cringing under the accusation of "racist." Or fling it back in their face with the Hegelian notion that racism is the same as anti-racism, an unhealthy obsession with race. Etc.

But these two articles broaden and deepen my thought about all this.

In the first place, maybe we should stop worrying about what the rulers are censoring and just go on about our business, thinking and planning about what the next regime will look like, and stop worrying about the foolish and knavish actions of the bearded @jack and the Zuck.

In the second place, we really do need to stop apologizing, stop acceding to the crime of racism, to stop recognizing the elite as our betters, and utterly reject the pomposity of their claim to virtue.

Government is force, politics is power, cultural domination is about marginalizing the plebs. You ruling class think you are our moral superiors? Get a clue: all power corrupts, pal, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Got that, Mr. Moralist?

Here's How to Start That Trust Thing, David Brooks

In an MSNBC on-air piece David Brooks allowed as how "blue cities are thriving" but that many folks left behind in the red states are "threatened economically, culturally, socially and they have no contact with the expert class." 

That set the rubes a-growling, because apart from Silicon Valley and the Capitol of Panem in Washington DC, what blue states states are thriving? New York? Jaysey? I mean, people are leaving blue states in the hundreds of thousands.

But Brooks finished up with the idea that the "expert class" in the Capitol should reach out to the folks in the Districts, for "those of us in the expert class – journalism and academia – have to do a better job of reaching out in post-Trump, establishing relationships and showing some respect."

And this: "the only way to cure distress is through trustworthy relationships. It's by keeping promises to people who are unlike yourself."

Well, yeah, David.

Here's an idea, pal. To rebuild trust relationships.

How about you "experts" decide that the drip, drip, drip move from in-person voting with voter ID to mail-in voting with no checks, no nothing, and anyone can make a provisional vote on Election Day, trust us, we will check to make sure that no duplicate voting happens. How about we put a stop to that, which seems, from our deplorable point of view, to be a way for Democrats to manufacture how ever many votes it takes to win.

Of course we all know that Democrats are as clean as the wind-driven snow, starting with crystal-clear Joe Biden that has never had a hint of scandal in 47 years in the Capitol, and Kamala Harris, who is almost a nun when it comes to purity. But, wouldn't you say that elections should not even have the teenyist smidge of an appearance of skullduggery?

See, from our twisted point of view it looks real weird that, year after year, Democrats keep wanting to change the rules on voting, whether it is Motor Voter to let people register when they get their drivers licenses, to early voting, to all-mail voting like we have in Washington State.

The last time we had in-person voting in Washington State was in 2008, as I recall. And I found it interesting when I went to vote on Election Day that there were a ton more young voters than I was used to. See what I mean? In-person voting gives you a feet-on-the-ground feel about what is going down.

There are a lot of other things on my agenda, but never mind about that right now.

How about the ruling class, the expert class, the graduates from selective colleges, the educated people, the evolved people, how about you chaps all extend the hand of trust. How about you say look, you bitter clingers really have no ground for suspicion, because, after all, we experts are all educated and evolved and anti-racist, and compassionate and passionately devoted to justice, but still, just this once we will do something to show you that we really are the good guys. We will let you have your cringingly old-fashioned and stupid in-person voting.

And meanwhile, we experts and moralists will go full speed ahead on climate change and systemic racism. Because we are special.

Why the Good Guys Always Lose: It's Not Their Fault

One of the perennial complaints of guys like me is that our conservative and Republican leaders are wusses, that they always roll over for the Dems.

Like with the current stolen election. Like with cheap foreign labor for Big Tech. Like with climate change. Like with systemic racism. Like with the eternal entitlement programs.

I'm here to say It's Not Their Fault. Let me count the ways.

Ruling Class Argument -- There is a ruling class in America and elsewhere in the world and it's a kinda club. You wanna be a member? Well you better wear the right clothes, express the right opinions, support the right programs, or you can't advance to higher "degrees." Just like in the Masons. Right now the ruling class is the "educated class" that has been to all the right selective colleges. 

So, if you didn't go to the right college and express the wrong opinions you just aren't going to get ahead in the ruling class.

Cathedral Argument -- Curtis Yarvin argues that reality in the western world is defined by a Cathedral, a quasi-religious cultural establishment that defines what you think and feel.

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 now, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Google's YouTube is establishing an Index of proscribed videos. You are not allowed to post videos suggesting that the election was stolen.

Truth is, all societies make it very difficult for visions of good and evil that compete with its Cathedral orthodoxy. Usually such visions are considered heresy.

There Must Be An Enemy Argument -- Since whenever, human communities have had to defend themselves from the Enemy. Now, you may think that, in this day and age, we are past all this, because chimps, for chimps survive by defending their food-growing territory in which the females and young can eat and grow, as argued by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. True, because now you can buy food, not grow it. But you think that the defense instinct, that goes all the way back to chimps and beyond, is going to wither away in the two centuries since possession of food-growing land hasn't mattered?

Actually, when the rulers don't have a foreign enemy to rally their people, they invent a domestic one. That's what our rulers' "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative is all about.

The whole point of this argument is to rally the males, because all males are instinctively defenders of the border. It goes with the male Culture of Courage/Insult.

Yes, right now, the enemies of the state are people like you.

All Good People Agree Argument -- If you are a good person everybody likes you; if you are a bad person then everybody hates you. If you are a good person you will go to Heaven; if you are a bad person you will go to Hell. If you are a good person you may be a saint; if you are a bad person you may be a witch.

And if you get on the wrong side of the good people you may find that you have become one of the bad people.

The whole point of this argument is to get all the women conforming to the ruling class narrative, for women must, for good reasons going all the way back to our chimp ancestors, get along as they live with each other every day preparing food and caring for the children. Women have a Culture of Conformity, which is enforced by the women's Culture of Complaint.

Yes, right now all the bad people are people like you.

Failed Revolution Argument -- All religious and cultural and political movements eventually face a "failure of prophecy" moment. Because they are all confidently predicting a glorious future that almost certainly will not show up. The more cunning religious movements prophesy that Heaven and Paradise are the reward for a virtuous life after death. Our modern socialist and culture war religious doctrines prophesy Heaven on Earth.

What do lefty movements do when the promised Heaven on Earth doesn't arrive? They usually amp it up, to keep the sect together. In politics, the ideologists amp it up with a Reign or Terror or a Great Purge, or a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Eventually the amp-up collapses, because, as Crane Brinton says in The Anatomy of Revolution, humans cannot live forever in a state of ideological fervor. Eventually we have to get back to wiving and thriving.

Yes, right now our Wokies are amping it up. Nobody knows when normal programming will resume.

Creative People Gotta Create Argument -- In my reductive Three Peoples theory I suggest that, for Responsibles, God made the Heaven and Earth and the job of humans is to responsibly wive and thrive on the Earth that God created. But I argue that Creatives are called to be gods, to create the world anew.

This means that for Creatives, if they are not creating, doing something new, bending the arc of history towards justice, advocating for traditionally marginalized people, imagining a new and better world, they are nobody.

Yes, right now if you are not creatively advocating for a better world, you are a nobody.

Stupid Ruling Class Argument -- A good ruling class knows that it must refresh its membership with talented people from the lower classes. A good ruling class creates a "political formula" that values all the people in the realm. A good ruling class keeps a weather eye on the passions and the obsessions of the "masses." A good ruling class knows that it is a minority, and that if the people ever got serious they could kick the rulers out in a New York minute.

A stupid ruling class knows that it knows best and it makes sure the plebs keep quiet. A stupid ruling class thinks that only members of the ruling class are smart, and that the lower classes are stupid. A stupid ruling class lives and entertains itself in the Capitol and doesn't get out much. A stupid ruling thinks that the ordinary people are too stupid ever to form a head of rebellion against their wise rule.

Yes, right now we probably have a fairly stupid ruling class.

Why to the Good Guys always lose? I would say that over the last 50 years we have had several political moments where our rulers could have altered their rule to accommodate various populist moments: The Silent Majority in the Nixon years, the Reagan Democrats in the Reagan years, the Ross Perot moment in 1992, the Republican Congress in 1994, the Tea Party in 2010, the Trump election in 2016. But they didn't.

The point is that, of course the Good Guys are going to lose, short of an actual rebellion and civil war, if the ruling class refuses to accommodate to their grievances. The rulers have the upper hand; that's why we call them rulers. And It's Not Their Fault if the rulers outmaneuver the suckers every time, using all the bolded arguments I have listed up above.

And so it goes. Until the day that it doesn't.

Progressivism is Like a Shark

Suppose I were a progressive strategist, high up in the rarefied air of the top-flight Biden transition team, planning for the glorious future of progressivism. What would I be thinking?

Well, of course, I couldn't be that person, because I would not want to be part of a team that was going to turn America into mush.

See, I see our Big Problem this way. The problem is that, as far as big government is concerned we've gone about as furr as it can go.

But government can never say, OK, bit of a cock-up on the spending front; we are going to have to cut all your favorite programs so that we can heal the nation's economy. As in, no, really, it's serious this time!

Exactly. No politician is ever going to get elected, or long stay in office, with that kind of a program. In reality, of course, it would have been a good idea not to pass Social Security, and instead implement a mandatory national savings program. If you are going to force workers around with a FICA payroll tax why not force them to put the money in a 401K at Fidelity or Vanguard? But it's too late for that. Because the folks that paid their payroll tax all their lives expect to get their gubmint pensions: I certainly do.

It's Chantrill's Law, last of the Four Laws. Government programs don't work because you can never reform them. The whole point of a government program is to bribe the voters. But the voters do not take kindly to being unbribed.

So now we have all these programs sucking the life out of the economy, but you can never unsuck them. Of course, with Medicare and student debt we have created monsters where the cost of health care and a college education have ballooned into the stratosphere as a consequence of the subsidies to the health-care professionals and the education professionals. It's like mortgage subsidies, peasant. If you subsidize mortgages so that peoples' mortgage payments go further and more people can qualify for mortgages, why, the result is that you bid up the price of housing, and you are back where you started, if you are lucky. No kidding!

But there is a problem. You can't get people to vote for you just because you gave them loot and plunder a couple of elections ago. You have to rejustify government every election cycle with new glorious vistas of the future. This is why the Democrats are pushing the notion of climate change.

On the one hand, climate change is a physical necessity, because we are burning the Earth up with the burning of fossil fuels. So we have to act now. On the other hand it puts money into the pockets of millions of educated gentry supporters of the regime. Only problem is that it will be paid for in reduced income for the vast majority of people, specifically ordinary Commoners with ordinary jobs and lives, and by the Clients, the lower classes that won't have the jobs afforded by a growing economy.

Meanwhile, what the US government ought to be doing in the next couple of years is putting America back to work after the economic devastation of the COVID epidemic.

But do you know, I think we are going to see a replay of the Obama administration. Instead of focusing like a laser on reviving the economy after the Mortgage Meltdown of 2006-08, the Obamis instead decided to go for Obamacare and burden the US economy with yet another entitlement program. The result was the slowest recovery from a recession in the post-WWII era.

Because Obama was a Lightbringer he was able to survive this foolishness and get reelected. But my fearless prediction is, assuming that the fix is in and Biden gets inaugurated on January 20, that by the Summer of 2022 the natives will be restless, and the Dems will lose bigly in November 2022. By November 2024, I dare say that there will be "mostly peaceful protests" against the feckless Biden administration, and whoever is running for president as a Republican -- as Trump or the heir to Trump -- will be conducting Trump Rallies that make the originals look like out-of-town tryouts.

Why do I say this? Because, for me, the consequence of the ruling class spending the whole of the last four years on getting Trump out by hook or by crook is that they have not begun to think about where they went wrong, and how it was possible for a clown like Trump to win the presidency, and how they should redirect their political and economic strategy for the future.

At least the colonialist Brits had the sense to understand that when the District Officers reported to the Governor that "the natives were restless" it meant something had to be done to quiet the natives back down again.

But our ruling class just does not seem to register that "the natives are restless" means that the rulers have a problem.

Maybe they can't do anything. Maybe politicians are like sharks; they have to keep moving forward to keep the water flowing over their gills.

So you keep moving forward until you run on the rocks and break up.

But I have a feeling that, to change the metaphor, when the ship of state goes aground on the rocks, the captain will not be going down with the ship. Instead the captain and officers will commandeer the lifeboat and the Deplorables and Bitter Clingers will be the ones left on the wreck of the USS America.

Maybe I Have Been Too Tough on the Lefty "Great Reaction"

As I get deeper and deeper into the psychologist Carl Jung I understand more and more the curious condition of humans. 

On the one hand we are proud rationalists, building cathedrals of logic and reason to explain the meaning of life, the universe, and everything and how we are rational agents as we plan our every move and our ideal society. On the other hand we are just a hop, skip, and a jump from our primitive ancestors who, as Jung writes, did not think they had "agency." For instance in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 153: 

Primitive mentality differs from the civilized chiefly in that the conscious mind is far less developed in scope and intensity. Functions such as things, willing, etc are not yet differentiated; they are pre-conscious, and in the case of thinking, for instance, this shows itself in the circumstance that the primitive does not think consciously, but that thoughts appear. The primitive cannot assert that he thinks; it is rather that "something thinks in him."... Moreover, he is incapable of any conscious effort of will; he must put himself beforehand into the "mood of willing,"or let himself be put... His consciousness is menaced by an almighty unconscious: hence his fear of magical influences that may cross his path at any moment; and for this reason, too, he is surrounded by unknown forces and must adjust himself to them as best he can. 

Jung goes on to say that our rational consciousness puts an intolerable burden on us, because in every way our conscious mind is rebelling against our unconscious instincts. "This means, on the one hand, the possibility of human freedom, but on the other it is a source of endless transgressions against our instincts."

And that, Jung suggests, can lead to hideous catastrophes. "For ages man has dreamed of flying, and all we have got for it is saturation bombing!" Of course, that was before the invention of the jumbo jet.

So when I sneer at our left friends with my Great Reaction motif, that

Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice; totalitarianism is a return to the scapegoat; social justice is good old loot and plunder.

Maybe I am doing them an injustice. For, following Jung, if lefties are committed to "fundamental transformation" and implementing an absolute standard of justice, this would create in their minds and souls a hideous sense of conflict, for a totally rational society is the complete opposite of the instinctive culture of the primitive, the pre-agricultural human. And actually, lefties have a huge nostalgia for the assumed simplicities of the pre-civilized life, for the good old community of the Russian Mir. And both Rousseau in his Second Discourse and Shaw in Fabian Essays make a Garden of Eden moment out of the invention of private property, the first man that fenced in his plot or patch of land and called it his. 

Yet socialism, with its dream of equality, has implemented the most severe hierarchical societies in world history. While under capitalism, there is a constant turnover of the economic winners: the average company that gets into the Dow Jones Industrial Index lasts 20 years in the index.

So, we may say that whenever we encounter a movement of nostalgia for the good old days, or for a simpler, less corrupted time, we are seeing a person or a movement breaking under the strain of life under the logic and reason of consciousness, over-replacing the old ways of pre-conscious instinct. And that applies too, I suppose to mental illness: a collapse, a fall from the heady heights of consciousness, rationality, and agency into pre-consciousness.

Notice the irony of the notion of the Fall of Man, in which religion takes the position that the emergence into self-consciousness is actually a Fall into Sin. And so it is, because while in the old days, good and evil were the acts of good and evil spirits, in the new order, everything that goes wrong is the fault of the rational agent himself

So, of course, the medieval courtiers, tamed and disciplined into the courts of the absolute monarchs, were nostalgic for the good old days when knights were bold and were cantering about the country on their trusty steeds instead of moldering away in the dog-eat-dog world of a royal court.

Of course conservatives hanker after the good old days when the rules were clear and enforced: an age of clarity that shines like a beacon upon our chaotic times when all values are getting revalued.

But what is interesting, to me, is the realization among the best and the wisest among us -- in other words you and me -- that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything means a constant uncertainty and randomness. We cannot know what the weather will be tomorrow; we cannot know if our brilliant start-up will in fact succeed; we cannot know if China will be the next to rule the world or collapse in Commie stupidity. Our lives are not ruled by logic and reason, but by hope and luck and relentlessness.

Then there is the line of Giacomo Puccini:

The music of this opera (Madame Butterfly) was dictated to me by God. I was merely instrumental in getting it on paper and communicating it to the public.

Yes indeed. Where does a Puccini or a Mozart -- or the young piano sensation Alma Deutscher -- come from?

So, let's not be beastly to the lefties. We should expect them to break under the strain of trying to believe ten impossible things before breakfast, and that they would lurch back to the primitive in instinctive recoil.

Still, it would be nice if they were not so beastly to us: calling us every nasty name under the sun, from racist to sexist to homophobe. I wonder what they mean by that?

The Problem with Yarvin's Plan of "Indirect Rule"

One thing I like about Curtis Yarvin. The guy is brimming with ideas, good, bad, and indifferent. So, when you read him, you are probably going to learn something. For instance back in November 2019 I read his "Clear Pill" piece where he wrote about the concept of the "political formula" developed by Gaetano Mosca in The Ruling Class and then I blogged about it.

I ordered The Ruling Class from Amazon three days later. Some time in the summer of 2020 I started reading it, and then I decided I had to blog each chapter to make sure that I absolutely understood it: not just the "political formula" but "social type" and "moral sense" and "juridical defense" and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

But now in his Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince, Chapter 5, Yarvin is talking about the governance of the yeomen, the Commoners of America, and he is proposing it should be done using the Brit practice of "indirect rule" that they practiced in India and elsewhere in the Empire. His idea is that the yeomen should be pretty well self-governing in their "sections" and virtual "villages" with only a little supervision from above.

Everyone is best governed by those like them. Everyone still has to share one physical country. The national regime handles all the conflicts between sections, and all the exceptions that cross sectional boundaries.

Only, when you have read Mosca, you can see that there are multiple problems with that. Mosca's basic line starts with the notion that any country consists of the head of state and his ruling clique, plus the broader ruling class, and then the masses. The overall ruling class is a "social type," that I define, after Mosca, as:

a community of like-minded people with the same language, religion, interests, that propagates itself down the generations unless interfered with.

So, if you divide us up into four strata in The Gray Mirror, of armigeri, yeomen, lazzari, and autochthons, then each is a "social type" in Mosca's sense.

Now, Mosca notes that in the feudal era society was a multi-level affair, 

An important feature of feudalism was that local leaders were bound by loyalty to their immediate feudal superior, not to the king. So they would fight for their liege lord against the king. 

Hmm.

The whole point of the absolute monarchs was to replace this multi-level society featuring each feudal lord and his local clique running his feudal fief with a single ruling class ruling over the rest of society with no organizational level in between.

But when you have "indirect rule" are you not setting up an intermediate level? Let's look at the Brits in India. What happened was that after about a century, from 1700 to 1800, the Brits started to detect, in 1825, that the natives didn't like them. They liked their stupid corrupt local lords that had misruled them since whenever. And then came the disorganized Indian Mutiny and the subsequent organization of the Indian National Movement.

To put it bluntly, with "indirect rule" you are setting yourself up for a "head of rebellion" at some point in the future, because you are encouraging the development of a "social type" and a "social type" is a group of humans with the same "language, religion, interests" that will want to propagate itself down the generations.

Now, our liberal friends are presently the ruling class of America and their policy is clearly to bomb the yeomen or Commoners or Responsibles into human rubble. They are following the strategy of the absolute monarchs that would brook no intermediate power center between them and the masses. The only question is whether they will succeed or whether the Commoners will rise up under some Trumpian leader and take them out.

Because, the ideal strategy for a ruling class, according to Mosca, is to refresh and reinvigorate itself with infusions from the lower classes. In our world, that would mean that the ruling class of educated Gentry would not stigmatize the Commoners as bigots and Deplorables, but would gently educate them and allow them -- the best of them, of course, darling -- to rise into the Gentry and the ruling class, and maybe the Gentry would even learn a thing or two from the lower classes.

Now, maybe, the policy of "indirect rule" of the yeomen would work OK. After all, back in the 19th century the rising bourgeoisie was pretty well self-governing, and the yeomen of the era all belonged to mutual-aid societies and fraternal organizations and churches and stirred the admiration of Frenchie Alexis de Tocqueville. As Mosca wrote, the rising bourgeoisie might have decided to replace the old feudal lords, but, in Britain, did not. And as I say, the bourgeoisie was not that interested in power. It just wanted its legitimate interests to be considered by the ruling clique.

On the other hand, now that the Brits have given Scotland and Wales their own parliaments they have encouraged separation movements. Who could have seen that coming?

Or, as we see with the current COVID crisis the Democratic governors take the opportunity to raise up an opposition to Trump and Trumpism, and, oblivious to anything except the interests of the work-from-home gentry, implement shutdown after shutdown to symbolically show they are "doing something" about COVID.

On the other hand, you could say that our liberal friends, by encouraging "women and minorities hardest hit" to identify as other than American, they are, in most cases, condemning the said women and minorities to social and cultural oblivion unless they are already part of the Gentry, as BLM and AntiFa and feminists and LGBTs flying their flags from their homes certainly are.

See, I like Trump's strategy of trying to expand the Commoner class by encouraging blacks and Hispanics to think of themselves not as separate ethnic tribes but as all-American Commoners, because it blunts the strategy of our liberal friends that encourages "oppressed peoples" to experience themselves as victims of the "white oppressors" but for the saving grace of the lefty "allies."

It's not that hard to see. Trump is offering the "oppressed peoples" a way out of their victimhood by becoming proud Americans that believe in Making America Great Again. In effect, our liberal friends are proposing to the "oppressed peoples" that the only way out of their victimhood is as soldiers in the army of the left, fighting the "white oppressors" in their horrible trucks till the death of the last Mater and his Cars tow truck.

But, as the whole world of wokism and intersectionality critical race theory and White Fragility and the "1619 Project" makes clear, the whole point of today's gentry liberalism is to create Jobs For Gentry, and satisfy the Gentry's appetite for "ambition, honor, and vanity."