You Noticed: Our Rulers are Going Stark Staring Mad

You might ask: why don't the wokerati just leave us alone? Why do they have to be in our faces about our racism-sexism-homophobia? Why get in the faces of the police? Why allow the homeless to trash the place? Why release violent suspects onto the street? Victor Davis Hanson goes on and on about the ridiculous behavior of our ruling class.

Is there really a legal system any more, at least as we once knew it, in our major cities—New York, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles? Violent crime has soared. Murders are up 30-50 percent in many of those places... 

In 2020, whether an arsonist, looter, or rioter was arrested, indicted, and jailed depended on the ideology of the perpetrator and the political context of the crime. Old ideas like “broken windows” preventative enforcement went down the memory hole. Did Rudolph Giuliani’s crime-reduction miracle in New York City ever really exist? Is it legal for a district attorney simply to announce that he will no longer enforce the legal code?

A clue comes from Curtis Yarvin's latest, "Socialism and capitalism are both fake."

We can say: “socialism,” in the 20th century, is an aristocratic movement which intends to promote the interests of the working class.

Of course, the followers of the movement, people motivated by fashion -- I suppose the folks with their virtue-signaling yard-signs -- don't really count. It's the real aristocrats that count.

Yet for those betters, the true aristocrats, the motivation of the ideology is at least as much ambition as empathy.  

Socialism has never really been a working-class movement to help the workers. It was always been an aristocratic movement, an intellectual cult and, as very often happens, a clerical nobility.

But things aren't really going too well for the clerical nobility. There is still sin in the world: blacks are still doing badly in school, and still the leaders in violent crime. And the white working class are now the leaders in dying of despair.

How could this happen, with all the good sort of people trying to make things better. Strictly speaking, we could all agree, if things are going wrong then dollars to donuts, it is probably the fault of the ruling class, the clerical nobility.

But, of course, nobles never blame themselves when things go wrong. It is always the "other." That's the beauty of the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative. We allies are putting the pedal to the metal to help the oppressed peoples. If something is going wrong, it must be the fault of the white oppressors. QED.

It could not be, could not be, that the programs and policies -- even the very idea that government can make a society better -- are wrong, and instead of making things better are making things worse.

As I have written many times, from When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al, a religious group does not just give up when its prophecy fails, when the promised socialist heaven on Earth does not appear. It redoubles its efforts, for a while.

Now I say that the whole idea of a just society is a pipe-dream. The best we can hope for is a society where injustice is kept down to a dull roar. I say that the whole idea of the top-down administrative state is a conceit of the ruling class, and bound to increase injustice. I say that the whole idea of government education is a disaster, because it ends up being an indoctrination in ruling-class ideology, whereas I think education should be a "diverse" environment where parents can try out their kooky ideas on their children -- which, I suspect, would turn out to be a lot less kooky that the ideas of the ruling class. I say that the whole edifice of entitlements is a disaster because it sequesters the savings of the people as handouts that can never be reduced.

And I say that the Age of Politics is over. We've got to find new ways to indulge in our masculine lust for loot and plunder, and our feminine lust for virtue-signaling. These lusts are All Too Human, and will not go away. The question is how to divert them into social beneficial channels, like converting warriors into sports heroes. Yes. How do we convert virtue signaling into socially beneficial channels?

Meanwhile we are condemned to live in a world where our ruling class is going stark staring mad.

Still, they haven't started a world war recently.

America's One and Only Problem: Our Ruling Class

Today, New Years Day, is the day that writers write hopefully about the future. Or we worry about the gathering storm.

I'm a pretty simple-minded fellow, and I believe that the future is golden, but for one thing: the inability of our betters to think out of the box -- their box.

Our ruling class cannot think beyond its own moral benefit, its own advantage, its own "ambition, honor, and vanity," to quote Curtis Yarvin. We see this play out in the three major "issues" front and center at the moment.

The first issue is the COVID pandemic. Our ruling class instinctively assumes that the way to tackle the COVID crisis is the supervision of politicians advised by experts.

Well, we have seen that the experts don't know much, and the politicians less. They are quick to impose actions to "lock down" the populace, without really a clue about what such actions will do to the people.

Politics and government are peculiarly unsuitable for dealing with an uncertain problem because politicians and experts are very reluctant to admit they are wrong. A politician is the leader of his people, and must seem almost godlike; he must seem to enjoy the Mandate of Heaven. If things go wrong then it must be because he has lost the Mandate of Heaven, and no politician wants that. Experts are similar: they live and die by their credentials. But the truth is that life is uncertain; we advance by correcting our mistakes.

We see this play out in the difference between NASA and Elon Musk's SpaceX. NASA hates to have accidents and mistakes; Elon Musk is unafraid and just learns from each mistake.

The second issue is Climate Change. Our ruling class has bought into the Climate Change Prophecy, hook, line and sinker, and you can see why. The Climate Change Prophecy is a classic end-of-the-world play, and appeals to politicians because it is an existential peril, and as I say, "the only warrant for government power is existential peril." But is the warming all it is cracked up to be? Maybe not, but suppose it is true! Better safe than sorry! Only, the great skill of humans -- and of Nature in general -- is adaptation. If the climate really does change, then we humans are in a position to adapt, and how! Anyway, the most likely effect of climate change will be the movement of climatic regions towards the poles. Thus, for example, the wheat-growing regions of North America will move northwards into Canada. Will the oceans rise? Maybe, but we humans are, I think, up to the challenge of either moving our cities inland or protecting them with dykes, like the Dutch.

The third issue is Systemic Racism. Ruling classes have always been eager to be the military saviors of their people, to save us from the invaders. But running a close second has always been the temptation to be moral saviors as well, to save people from a fate worse than death. The temptation has grown particularly in the last few centuries as rulers have stopped being warriors and become administrators. Even military leaders now are more administrator than warrior. Since a leader must distinguish himself somehow, it makes sense to celebrate the moral virtues if the opportunity to vaunt martial virtues diminishes over time.

In my view, the folks most tempted by moral leadership are rich kids, the scions of wealthy or powerful families that lack, perhaps, the warrior personality. Thus we had the rich kid William Wilberforce that wanted us to repent of our slavery sins, rich kid Marx that wanted us to repent of our class sins. And now we have veritable armies of children from notable families eager to moralize over us on the "activism" front and demand that we repent of our racism sins.

The thing is that anyone can gussie up a moral narrative. The Systemic Racism narrative proposes a Three Layer moral universe of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." Lucky is he or she that gets to be an "ally!" I prefer a slightly different narrative, using "human rubble, liberal oppressors, and ordinary commoners," because I think our Big Problem is liberals and their gubmint programs that have reduced the lower classes to demoralized victims dying of despair.

But the bigger issue, I think, is the recognition that there are at least three kinds of people that live in modern society, and they have the right to live their lives each according to his lights; it is the world view of my reductive Three Peoples theory. There are the Subordinates that just want someone to take care of them; there are Responsibles that want to be left alone to work, marry and have children without having some liberal interfering all the time, and there are Creatives, the educated Gentry, that live for "ambition, honor, and vanity" in making a better world. Our problem is to figure out how these three rather different kinds of people can all live their lives according to their lights.

I say that our religions, our culture, and our politics should start from the knowledge that different people want and need different things, and the beginning of wisdom is to understand that.

But when your are a ruling class it is easy to assume that it's your way or the highway. That works fine, of course, unless some folks find that the ruling class way is not their way.

Hey, Black Americans: Grow Up!

We just finished up a year in which the arrest of a black man, who was high on fentanyl and subsequently died, was the usual election-year pretext for a race-card play by the ruling class.

Wags like Steve Sailer are talking about the new Zeroth Amendment to the Constitution:

That's the new Zeroth Amendment: "No Black man need submit to arrest unless He's damn well in the mood to be arrested."

— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) August 29, 2020

Because what was really going on with George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, was that they were going to jail if the arrest succeeded.

For some reasons these police killings of black men with criminal records a yard long only get publicized in election years.

Since I get to walk past at least a dozen Black Lives Matter yard-signs up at the top of liberal Phinney Ridge every day, my unconscious mind has been pondering the whole question.

And I have come to realize that the whole race politics thing has nothing to do with blacks, or African Americans, or Blacks. It is all to do with the moral posturing of well-to-do whites.

Since the 18th century.

Back in the 18th century, was the anti-slavery movement, William Wilberforce, proprietor, responding to a slave rebellion? Were there Spartacuses all over leading the slaves in revolt? Er, no. La Wik:

Wilberforce was... the only son of Robert Wilberforce (1728–1768), a wealthy merchant[.]

The family fortune had been made by little Billy's grandfather in the Baltic trade. Our William, who became an evangelical Christian, was what we now call an "activist." Hey, it was no skin off his nose to advocate against the Atlantic slave trade!

Fast forward to 1850 and the United States. Was there a massive slave rebellion that prompted the ruling class to ease off on the slave front? Not at all. It was much more a moral crusade, with Ladies' Anti-Slavery Societies having Frederick Douglass in to talk about the evils of slavery.

Then as now, the ruling class had to have an "Other" to blame for all the sins of the world, and the South would fill the bill. So why not have a jolly old war and teach the South a lesson. After all, the young men of he North were expendable, as the young men of 1917 were expendable, and the young men of 1941. Not to mention the young men sent off to Vietnam to prop up the dominoes, and the young men sent to the Middle East in 2002 to prop up the Saudis.

Yes, but whatabout the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? The fact is that the ruling class was down for the struggle. Dr. King was supported by the Northern elite and nice Jewish boys went down to the South to register voters.

Dr. King based his non-violent movement on the non-violence of Mahatma Gandhi. Which is a "tell."

I now realize, having read The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon, that the Brits decided pretty soon after the Indian Mutiny in 1857 that they would be handing India over to the Indians. But not yet, old chap, because the natives weren't yet ready for self government. A real imperial empire wouldn't have given Gandhi the time of day. They would have arrested him and disappeared him, and nobody the wiser. Like the Chinese and the Uygurs.

But if the imperial empire is planning to hand India over to the Indians, why, then it makes sense to permit and even encourage a nationalist Indian movement. That way you have a new ruling class ready to take over when the time comes. As it did come after World War II. And it even makes sense to condone a whacko activist like Gandhi with his taste for young women.

If you condone a non-violent activist like Dr. King it yields all kinds of benefits, like the incident at the Edmund Pettus bridge and all those eevil Southern policemen beating up helpless peaceful protesters. OMG, I can't believe they did that! And all those liberal kids going into the South to register voters as Freedom Riders -- with a book and a movie to follow! Weren't they special!

See, my line is that all this had nothing to do with blacks, and everything to do with liberal moral fluffing and preening. And when the votes in Congress were in on the civil rights acts, the northern liberals were almost completely Yea, the Republicans were majority Yea, and only the Southern Democrats voted Nay. Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) , the Jewish libertarian Republican, voted Nay, because he thought the bill should just ban gubmint discrimination, and allow private citizens to discriminate to their hearts' content.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) recently characterized himself "I am Spartacus." As if. Watch the movie, kiddo! Kirk Douglas, playing a real slave, not a Senator, gets crucified right at the gate of Rome. And, thanks to the movie director, Stanley Kubrick, and leftie scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo, ol'Kirk gets to see his kid just before he expires on the cross. There is a line of slaves, crucified, going right down the Appian Way, or whatever. Just to make the point about who is boss in the Roman Empire.

In the American Empire, blacks kept a pretty low profile until after the passage of the civil rights acts. And I don't blame them. Why put yourself on the line when white liberals are going to do the heavy lifting for you? And then when blacks started rioting in 1965 and thereafter, they were helpless victims reacting to 500 years under the yoke. Pity that Detroit is still hollowed out 50 years later.

Looking back at the whole thing, going back to rich kid William Wilberforce, you gotta hand it to our liberal friends. What a ride! What glorious self-congratulation! What moral peacock feathers! What it is to dine out on your moral specialness for 200 years! And no end in sight!

But I have a question for blacks. Is this all there is to Life, the Universe, and Everything? To be the Little Darlings, the political playthings of the ruling class? To be riled up every even year? To get to do a bit of loot and plunder at Target once in a while? To get to be the First Black President just for showing up? To be the first woman black vice-president just for being a politician's moll? To sire 70 percent of your children outside of marriage? To have your young men committing half of the murders in the US?

Because back in the day there were magnificent American blacks. There was Frederick Douglass, who was sent to a slave breaker and broke the breaker! Who escaped, found his love and married her, and worked his way up to luncheon speaker, first hating America and then learning to love it. Or Booker T. Washington, who traveled half way across America, sleeping under the sidewalk, to get himself an education.

Here's the thing. For a young head full of mush it feels kinda cool for the ruling class to give you free dissing privileges. The white working class had it for a while: they could strike and carry on and bankrupt their employers, and who cared. But then the liberals tired of them and left them to die of despair in the most recent half century.

And now the ruling class has issued free rioting privileges to the white wokies of AntiFa. What fun!

I'd just like to say to my black friends: why not get your act together before your liberal masters tire of you?

Postmodernism! We Hardly Knew You!

We all know that postmodernism is the movement that... Yes, what exactly does it say?

I would say that postmodernism argues that every narrative about Life, the Universe, and Everything is ultimately a narrative of power, the way a ruling class, every ruling class, creates a story that proves conclusively that it has a divine -- or historical -- right to rule.

In part this movement was part of the German Turn, a movement away from the rationalism of the Enlightenment and from the notion that you could establish a just society on Earth from rational principles. A philosophy of reason was just as much an apology for rule as the divine right of kings.

In part, of course, the postmodernists saw themselves as heroic resisters against bourgeois supremacy, pushing against the notion that the philosophy and faith of middle-class property and business owners was the highest and best form of life.

So in the little book I picked up on Nietzsche and Postmodernism by Dave Robinson, we are to understand that 

Postmodernists like Jacques Derrida celebrate difference, diversity and the marginal, those things that flourish in a pluralist and tolerant democracy.

Derrida is against "logocentricity," the idea that languages rule.

The conviction that language can create stable and "total" certainties is dangerous as well as misguided. Language can only be made to do this by excluding alternative readings by excluding what is considered to be "other." 

Quite right, Jacques, mon vieux.

In practice this has usually meant the establishment of hegemonies that marginalize all those whose values and beliefs don't conform to some limited and contingent world view. 

Well, we are certainly a couple of marbles short of the celebration of difference from establishing norms where your average white working-class deplorable is concerned right now. Shall I go on?

Ethical and political doctrines are always founded on some essentialist myth about human nature. But language cannot establish essentialist "truths", so ethical values and political doctrines are nearly always the constructs of authoritarian institutions imposed on the rest of us.

Exactly, Jacques. So that helps us understand the current notion from gubmint "bioethicists" that access to the COVID vaccine should be prioritized according to race. It's just the current ruling class of educated Gentry imposing its world view on the rest of us, because systemic racism.

Or Jean-Francois Lyotard, who decided after 1968 that "Marxism had inbuilt authoritarian tendencies" and that "the latent passions of human beings will always make it impossible for them to be marshalled under some theoretical doctrine."

Guess what postmodernist Lyotard wants instead.

Lyotard himself recommends a society that is tolerant, pragmatic and pluralist, libertarian and anarchist, one which again celebrates difference and avoids monolithic certainties. 

Good luck with that when you chat with our wokey friends, Jean-Francois.

Jean Baudrillard thinks we are all living in "a fragmented world of alienated individuals with no sense of self or history" but "just consumers of media in a world of signs without signifiers." Well, not if our "trained Marxists" at Black Lives Matter have anything to do with it.

Robinson's Nietzsche and Postmodernism was published in 1999, at the last moment before we could begin to speak of "woke leftism" as a movement of neo-Marxism devoted to imposing a single ruling-class world view on the rest of us, because systemic racism.

The funny thing is that all the critiques of the postmodernists, which were sorta true back the bad old days of the patriarchy, now apply in spades. And the reason is that while the old ruling class was indeed a hegemony that dominated society as any ruling class does, it did not do so with a deliberate strategy of liquidating certain groups and classes, and enforcing its class supremacy, but in reaction to actual rebellions and opposition.

The new ruling class -- from its "trained Marxist" at Black Lives Matter to its educated Gentry with a divine right to salaried tenured pensioned positions of power of the rest of us -- has a direct faith in domination and hegemony, that derives from its essentialist doctrine of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

The "allies" movement has a transparent argument for power that blithely ignores the findings of the postmodernists. It denies "difference" and imposes the "monolithic certainty" of systemic racism. It shows, I suppose, that people will believe anything so long as it is to their personal advantage.

In American Greatness, Edward Ring proposes an end to the bitterness and rancor of the last four years by "reaching out" to the good people on the other side and trying to find a common ground upon which to move forward together.

But I think he misunderstands the situation. Right now our educated Gentry friends are in the grips of a religious prophecy, a prophecy that decrees that the world is on a trajectory to climate disaster, unless we act now, and decrees that America is on the way to a racist hell of white supremacy, unless we act now.

They don't just argue this. They believe it as a saving truth.

The point about prophecies is that you can't argue rationally about them. You can only move forward when the prophecy has collapsed in ruin, as argued in When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger et al.

And right now our globalist friends are determined that we must end fossil fuels, because end of the world. What can you say to them? That Derrida says that they have got it all wrong?

What can you say to our Wokie friends that are determined that systemic racism is tearing us apart? Because anything you tell them just confirms their conviction that you are a racist and that racism is systemic, just as they believe.

Humans do not respond to argument. They respond to ruin.

Now You Know Why the Germans Did Nothing

When our liberal friends are in a mellow moment, taking time out from canceling everyone for racism, they like to emit moral lectures about the Germans under Hitler. How come millions of Germans said nothing and did nothing while Hitler's thugs were beating up the Jews in the 1930s.

Let's take the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as a case in point. All the following is official revealed truth from La Wik.

• Heidegger was a student of the Jewish philosopher Husserl.
• Heidegger was rector of the University of Freiberg for a year in 1933. A week before his appointment, his predecessor had suspended all Jewish professors at Freiberg, including Husserl. Heidegger did nothing.
• Heidegger joined the Nazi Party a week after his appointment as rector.
• Heidegger resigned his rectorship in 1934 after about a year on the job.
• Heidegger did not go to Husserl's cremation in 1938.

Here is a quote from Hans Sluga, in La Wik.

Though as rector he prevented students from displaying an anti-Semitic poster at the entrance to the university and from holding a book burning, he kept in close contact with the Nazi student leaders and clearly signaled to them his sympathy with their activism.

You mean, like today's university administrators and politicians turn a blind eye towards BLM and AntiFa activism, "clearly [signaling] to them [their] sympathy with their activism?"

And look: Heidegger had published his Being and Time in 1927 and established his reputation as a philosopher for all time, so why didn't he have the guts to be a Sacrificial Hero against the murderous Nazis? To this day, there is a black cloud over Heidegger.

And to this day, our liberal friends have dined off the horrors of Heidegger, and the Germans "who did nothing," and the Americans who did nothing during the McCarthy period.

Yes, liberals. But now the shoe is on the other foot, as you liberals allow ordinary Americans to be canceled by left-wing Twitter mobs, while university administrators and university presidents do nothing. Here's the latest, a girl's university admissions offer canceled from because of a 3-second SnapChat video she sent in 2016 when she was 15: "I can drive, n***a". I assume that she used the word n***a and not n****r, but you never know. Says The New York Times,

[The young woman] was among many incoming freshmen across the country whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after videos emerged on social media of them using racist language.

Pretty cool, liberals isn't it. You chaps boost gangsta rap as really cool, and then your brave college admissions administrators do the cowardly thing and whack a naive little girl for taking you up on it. 

Because, like Heidegger, you wouldn't want to lean against the political wind, no siree.

Earth to liberals: the current leftist cancel culture is exactly like Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Prudent, ordinary administrators and bureaucrats and industrialists go along to get along. Hey, it's the prudent thing to do! After all, who could have known in the 1930s that it would all end in the Holocaust?

The kid that outed the girl on the n-word is proud of what he did.

“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Mr. Galligan, 18, whose mother is Black and father is white, said of the classmate who uttered the slur, Mimi Groves. He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right.

Of course he is proud. That's what he has been carefully taught: to be a noble activist and fight, as an ally, against white supremacy and systemic racism.

Or you could say that he is a dupe of the ruling class, that wants to use blacks as their political tool: on the one hand getting 90 percent of the black vote, because racism, and on the other permanently cowing the ordinary white working class into subservience, because racism. 

Here's a question for you scholars and philosophers. How come the naming and shaming of someone as "literally Hitler" carries a real zing, while calling someone "literally Stalin" doesn't have quite the same canceling power?

And calling someone "literally Mao" has even less zing. Yet, Mao was a bigger mass murderer that Stalin, and Stalin was a bigger mass murderer than Hitler. What gives?

You know as well as I do. It all comes down to what we have been carefully taught. And our noble and dedicated teachers have been more interested in teaching us about the crimes of Hitler than about the crimes of Stalin and Mao. I wonder why?

And meanwhile, all across America noble philosophers and academicians and administrators are "doing nothing" to stem the tide of neo-fascist leftism.

Towards a Critique of Meaning

One of my little conceits is to parrot Douglas Adams' line in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Only, I got it wrong.

I just looked it up in my five-books-in-one Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, and that is not how it is presented. Chapter 24, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"O Deep Thought computer," he said, "the task we have designed for you to perform is this. We want you to tell us..." he paused, "The Answer!" 
"The Answer?" said Deep Thought. "The Answer to what?"
"Life!"urged Fook.
"The Universe!" said Lunkwill.
"Everything!" they said in chorus.
Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.
"Tricky," he said finally.
"But can you do it?"
Again, a significant pause."
"Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it."
"There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement.
"A simple answer?"added Lunkwill.
"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But," he added, "I'll have to think about it."

Now, at La Wik, they phrase this as the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." And the Answer, of course, is 42.

So I got it wrong. And so did La Wik. But I am going to have to change my quote. I think that I will henceforth refer to "the meaning of  'Life, the Universe, and Everything.'" Just to make it fair.

The thing about the meaning of Life is that everyone wants a short-cut. And why? Because you need to have some idea about the meaning of Life before you get up in the morning. It is much harder to live life in the knowledge of ignorance, that you don't have a clue what is going on, than living life when everything has been decided on the meaning front by your local priest or your local activist.

The fact is that the meaning of Life is unfathomable. Indeed, the more we know about "the Universe, and Everything" the more we wonder. How is it possible? How did it come to be? How big is it? Is there Life elsewhere? What is Life? What is the Universe?What is Everything? And what does it all mean?

Also, the question of the meaning of Life only occurs for a being that has a conscious mind. If you are a dog or a lion or a mosquito, you just live the life you are programmed to live, as we now think, by your DNA. You don't think about it; you don't worry about it: you just wake up in the morning and go about your business.

So our primitive forbears didn't think about the meaning of Life. They just went about it. And as they began to acquire the glimmerings of a conscious mind, they initially attributed all the angst of life to evil spirits. Notice that, at this stage, the human does not yet feel responsible for his life. Therefore, he does not really need to know the meaning of Life. The gods have decided all that. All the primitive human has to do is get on with it. And suffer, if the gods will it.

It is only with the gods of the Axial Age that humans get to be responsible for their own lives. Even then, God has decided pretty well everything you need to know about the meaning of Life. God just says: now you are responsible for organizing your Life according to the meaning of Life that I have vouchsafed to the Prophets.

Indeed, I would say that down to the Protestant Reformation, all the Average Joe had to do was listen to the priests, and do what he was told.

But with the Reformation a new concept arises. With the advent of printing, your bourgeois citizen wanted to read his own Bible. But that meant that the bourgeois citizen was taking on the new responsibility of trying to figure out what it all means in the Bible.

And now, with Nietzsche's Death of God, we are on our own. It's up to you to figure out the meaning of Life on your own.

Only, of course, most people don't do that. If they can't believe in God anymore then they pick up the secular gods of their school teachers. Or the meaning of Life revealed to them by a political leader, or a religious guru.

I would say that the urgency of knowing the meaning of Life has increased radically in the last century. It is not an accident that with Freud and Jung we see the beginning of a new age in which we have highly trained specialists to help us with our angst. And it is not just a question of taking the word of a priest or a guru to solve your existential problems. With "analysis" it is the patient, the analysand, that is supposed to do the heavy lifting, not the expert psychologist.

The less that society has already determined the meaning of Life, the more the responsibility falls on the individual. And the heavier the weight on the shoulders of the individual.

Even so, nearly everyone picks up a pre-packaged Meaning of Life kit at the store, or the church, or the meeting, or the activist group. Because, really, the alternative, to stand in the full horror of not knowing what you are here for, and what you should do next, is a terror that few of us have the resources to deal with.

But I think with my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we should at least begin to recognize that different people need different meanings of life.

In my reductive system, we can say that your average Subordinate should not worry about such things, but just do what his lord orders him to do. The average Responsible has the overall divine plan all set out for him, but he has to fill in the details, and that is not easy.

Obviously we can see that the Creatives, that are supposed to be figuring it out for themselves, are in completely over their heads. That is why, for the last 200 years, they have been grabbing whatever half-baked canned cults and religions are on offer, like passengers on the Titanic grabbing for life-belts.

Maybe that's as it should be. I just wish that the cults and religions that the Creatives have been grabbing for were, as the Brits say, "fit for purpose." That is what my Great Reaction theme is all about. It is about Creatives grabbing for something to steady their lives: only time and time again, they lurch back to the primitive, to belief systems that are more primitive than the Axial Age religions that they can no longer believe in. Because they are not yet ready to face the Universe without he comfort of a ready-made belief system.

That is the real challenge and the real problem. How do you face the world if you accept that you do not know the meaning of Life and never will, and accept that it is a cop-out to just buy a ready-to-wear suit right off the rack?

How About a Critique of Critique?

We all know that everyone who is anyone has created a "critical theory." The current rage for "critical race theory" is just the latest effort from the global sophomores.

Now, in the official introduction to its Critical Theory page, La Wik writes that critical theory is

an approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures.

Very commendable. In case you weren't aware, 

critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. 

And we can't leave La Wik's article without this gem:

Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

"Challenge power structure." "Liberate human beings." Couldn't agree more, Max old chap. Because I'm sure if you were alive today you'd agree with me that today's "power structure" is a lefty power structure, and its objective is to enslave the minds and the bodies of so-called "deplorables." For their own good, of course.

Now "critique" starts with Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason where he argues that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances.

Then along came Marx with his "critique of political economy," that is to say the economics of the classical economists. He was only just in time, because his critique was exploded in 1870 when the marginal revolution in economics completely set aside the opposition of exchange value and use value that the classical economists used and that Marx critiqued. You could look it up.

Our modern critical theory is a post-WWI phenomenon, based upon the post-Marx reality that needed a non-economic basis for its critique.

And in my opinion it is just as wrong. Here's why. It was crazily wrong for Marx to propose that capitalism was an essentially oppressive system. Why? Because in the first place the market economy rewards people for serving the consumers. Because in the second place, capitalism is associated with an unprecedented rise in income, over 30 times in 200 years. Thirdly, because the capitalists then and the ordinary middle class today are not that interested in power.

So, to develop a critical theory based on the theoretical foundation that the one thing needful is to attack and destroy "power structures" misses the point. Under the market system, power structures come and go.

We see this with the fairy tale of "systemic racism." We made systemic racism illegal half a century ago with the civil rights acts. We made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or sex. And ever since we have had lefty activists, funded by lefty billionaires, running around looking under every rock to find discrimination and root it out.

Oh, there's discrimination still, of course. People are wary around young black males. And when young black males mostly peacefully protest a lot of people head for the suburbs.

Actually, city people have been wary around young uneducated unemployed males since whenever. Because young unassimilated males are dangerous and violent. What do you think Dickens' Oliver Twist was about?

So you can see that for me, there is a desperate need for someone to come along and liberate lefty minds "from the circumstances that enslave them."

Now, when I awoke from a dream during the night the book's chapters presented themselves to me thus:

A Critique of Meaning 

A Critique of Religion 

A Critique of Creativity

A Critique of Morality 

A Critique of Revolution 

A Critique of Activism 

A Critique of Politics 

A Critique of Force 

A Critique of Responsibility 

A Critique of Slavery

I think that will do for a start. Of course, you can see what I am about. I am trying to find a framework in which to fit my overwrought ideas, from my reductive Three Peoples theory, to "downstreamism" -- that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- to my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, to my critique of Activism Culture, to my various critique of the Left's Conceits, Crimes, and Errors, to the problem of the Little Darlings.

And it all starts with the eternal question: why do humans seem to need, nay demand, a sense of "meaning?"