My Three Theses: Wokism Does Not Pay

 I understand race and slavery through My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

I discussed Thesis One, on slavery, here, and Thesis Two, on racism here. Now let's discuss Thesis Three, that wokism Does Not Pay.

The first question, of course, is to decide what Wokism is, and why our current ruling class believes in it. I discuss this at length in "A Hollow Elite: The Roots of Wokism." I use my analysis of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 to show how life is good for the "cognitive elite" in America and elsewhere in the world with "great careers and merger marriages" -- for the cognitive elite. But life is not so good for the ordinary middle class, what I call Commoners or Responsibles. And not good at all for the lower class. Murray shows that in the white lower class the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. And things are worse in the black lower class.

Murray's point is that the world of Coming Apart is the world made by the cognitive elite, and it's not working for everybody else. I would add, as a Jungian, that while the cognitive elite denies that anything is wrong, it understands, instinctively, that something is wrong. And, I say, that when religious or political believers face this situation they typically do not give up. Instead they double down. And when the believers form the ruling class they have the power to harass, or imprison, or cancel their critics. And they do.

So I say that Wokism Does Not Pay. 

Obviously, Wokism does not pay for blacks. Murray says that to live a happy and meaningful live you have to score on the four ancient virtues: industry, honesty, marriage, religion. Where are the ruling class worthies that are encouraging the virtues in the black underclass? Not a bit of it. Instead they are encouraging a culture of victimism and "we are owed." The supposed anti-racists are encouraging blacks in the racism and ethnic solidarity that is ubiquitous in lower classes. But Black Lives Matter is not an organic black movement. It is an AstroTurf movement of educated-class activists prodding the black lower class into a tribalist racism that prevents blacks from climbing into the middle class.

Obviously, Wokism does not pay for the ordinary middle class, the Commoners. What Commoners need is a fairly free and flexible economy, with inexpensive paths to getting a good job; affordable housing in safe suburbs, good schools, low crime, and good roads. What our cognitive elite has delivered is expensive education, rampant credentialism, expensive housing, war on suburbs, declining schools, rising crime, and light rail and bike lanes instead of new highways.

But whatabout the educated class, the cognitive elite? What do you mean, Does Not Pay? Things are pretty good if you are a credentialed educated person. Very true. But the continued prosperity and glory of the cognitive elite depends on its continued occupation of the commanding heights of the economy and the culture as the ruling class. If there were to be an "insurrection" -- God forbid -- things might not end up very well for the cognitive elite. That is how to make sense of the absurd overreaction to the January 6 invasion of the US Capitol.

In The Ruling Class Gaetano Mosca makes it clear that one of the vital functions of any ruling class is to make sure that its rule benefits the non-ruling class. Otherwise, he thinks, the ruling class might find itself replaced. He has various proposals to make sure that the rulers stay in touch with the needs of the lower orders.

Right now I am in the early chapters of Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. I have a couple of takeaways thus far that seem to be relevant to our current situation.

First, the French were unable to sort out their government finances. The Brits had accumulated just as much debt -- what with all the wars -- but they had a central bank and managed to avoid financial trouble. The French collected taxes through a farm system and the tax farmers were a very strong special interest. Andz they couldn't get it together to create a central bank.

Second, the French knew they had a problem. They had the great intellectuals, from Voltaire to Diderot to Rousseau who were arguing for reform. Then they had government officials like Turgot and Necker that were trying to reform the system from the inside. Schama mentions a mid-level official, an aristocrat, Malesherbes, who tipped off the publishers of the Encyclopédie when the royal council decided to suppress it, and tried in various ways to get Louis XVI to reform.

See the relevance to our own time? We have a problem in government finance, but the current Biden administration is doing nothing to solve it. We need intellectual critics of the current regime, but there are no publicized figures like Voltaire and Diderot around these days. There are no genuine critics that get a hearing in The New York Times. The whole ruling class today seems to be united around the idea that the problem is the racists and white oppressors in the middle class. They instinctively combine to suppress dissent rather than secretly enable it.

Now, with the Frenchies, it didn't do any good to have the Rousseaus and the Diderots calling for reform and the Neckers and the Turgots and the Malesherbes trying to do something about it. They still ended up with the disaster of the Revolution and the dead-end of Napoleon. But our ruling class doesn't even seem to have the suggestion of an intellectual reform movement or officials trying to right the ship from inside.

I don't know what you think, but I'd say that our position is worse. Especially when you consider the educated class's reaction to Donald Trump, who represents, if ever such a thing were possible, an organic revolt in the Commoner class. Our rulers seem to have no idea that they have a problem, and that their rule is fundamentally unjust and harmful to everyone not in the cognitive elite.

I mean, seriously. Donald Trump was a clear a wake-up call to our present ruling class as any ruling class has ever had in world history. And what did they do? They shut their eyes; they turned away; they decided they didn't like his attitude. They gussied up a conspiracy theory that Trump was conspiring with the Russians! Hey! Remember McCarthyism? That's when liberals said it was the worst thing in the world to accuse them of conspiring with the Russians. Shades of the French courtiers that sneered at the shabbily-dressed Malesherbes.

So yeah, ruling-class Wokism does not pay. It does not pay for the lower class that the rulers keep in dependency and prevents from rising into the middle class. It does not pay for the middle class whose interests get pushed aside in favor of ruling-class conceits like climate change, urbanism, and the racist policies of affirmative action and diversity and inclusion.

And ruling-class Wokism does not pay for the rulers either, because sooner or later the plebs will rebel. And that will be the end of the glorious reign of the educated class, the cognitive elite. Just because they were too snooty to let the plebs live in their own way in a couple of things without being closely supervised by their betters.

Our Rulers Don't Have a Clue What to Do

Today, Victor Davis Hanson tells us that our rulers are lashing out at "Scapegoats, Boogeymen, and Hobgoblins" because they really don't have a clue why things have gone wrong. And therefore don't have a clue what to do about it.

Actually it's worse than that, because the Biden administration's American Families Plan is still throwing money at the problem. As though that worked. So the Bidenoids are Making Things Worse.

That's what rulers do when they are completely befuddled. They just keep on keeping on, punching the same old buttons and expecting things to work.

And the fact that we have a completely be-fuddled old gent as President of the United States right now in July 2021 is a "tell." It is God telling us that our rulers are completely be-fuddled and be-clowned. God is saying: Get a Clue, Kids!

Yesterday, in another proof of God's existence, I read a harrowing story on Quillette about the horrors of teaching in today's academia. Written by pseudonymous Gregory Hanson, "How All My Politically Correct Bones Were Broken" it tells the story a college English instructor that started in the trade 50 years ago .

In my first 10 years of college teaching, from the mid-60s to mid-70s, I modeled myself on my best teachers—men and women who questioned my ideas vigorously. They let me know that I mattered to them, they praised when praise was due, and they pushed me hard. Often I balked, and they continued to push. Indeed, the teachers who sternly, even at times angrily, called me out on my intellectual arrogance and sloppiness became mentors and, in several cases, lifelong friends. 

But, over his 50 year career, things changed.

But inexorably, questions of identity inserted themselves into teacher-student relationships. It became increasingly dangerous for me to question, to challenge, to push—let alone to betray frustration or even anger when a student was conning me or not working to capacity. Year by year, as I met each new cohort of students, I had to calculate how much my own disfavored identity (white, male, heterosexual, middle-class) made it risky for me to push—depending on whether or not a student’s identity was (given the political climate of the moment) favored. 

Because, you see, if you insist on high standards in English class with your average angry black male who has skated through K-12 without really learning to write, he would get angry, even threatening. And, of course, the administration would be no help at all. But that means that blacks -- who, remember, have lower average IQs -- don't get the special impetus they need to achieve competence in everything from English to Physics. But diversity!

You can see why our education system got ruined. All the right people assumed that the problem with blacks was discrimination. Slay the dragon of discrimination and racism and the world would be set to rights.

And if that didn't work, then slay the dragon of racism again. And then slay the dragon of white supremacy. And then the dragon of systemic racism. And so on.

Only it doesn't work. It will never work, and the reason is simple: discrimination and racism is only part of the problem, and maybe a very small part of the problem. The problem is that The Road to the Middle Class from rural peasantry to middle-class competence in the city is long and arduous. In fact, I would bet my nickel that the transition is harder than the previous transition, from hunter-gatherer bands to village horticulture and thence to agricultural peasantry.

Why? Well, I'll bet that the transition from hunter-gatherer-ology to agricultural peasant took thousands of years. But the industrial revolution is roughly 200 years old. It is proceeding ten times faster.

Put it this way. One of my great-grandfathers was a dairyman; another was a "maltster," a guy that makes sugar from grain. My grandfathers were both small businessmen; my father was an engineer; I was a computer guy. Both my daughters have master's degrees, and one is about to get her PhD.

And now we know exactly what the industrial transition is like, from Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang. We are talking about rural girls in South China leaving the farm for the big city sweat shop and being chucked head-first into a total individualist hell, where they have no-one to fall back on, except themselves. So, at the level of an individual life, the transition is immediate! One day you are living in your village; the next day you are on the bus and the day after that you are working in a factory and living in a dorm.

Hey There Rulers and Sycophants! The problem is not racism and white supremacy! The problem is that if a black kid from the inner city wants to get on in the middle-class world of jobs and marriage and home-ownership they have to utterly walk away from the culture of the inner city where they were born and raised. And that is the hardest thing in the world to do!

Gubmint entitlement programs ain't gonna help! Quotas and diversity ain't gonna help! Reparations ain't gonna help! Blacks in every ad and commercial and movie ain't gonna help! Critical Race Theory ain't gonna help! In fact all those things are Making Things Worse!

The only thing that is going to get blacks into the mainstream of American life is for each black youngster to walk away from the inner-city culture and the victim culture -- and, dare I say, the Democratic Party -- and submit, without complaint, to the rigorous cultural transformation that every person undergoes when they join the middle class. And It Is Hard!

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Dueling Narratives: Who's the Fascist?

Over at Salon Dean Obeidallah has a podcast with Ben Rhodes, author of After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made. He says that he "was kinda knocked on my back after the 2016 election." We are now like Hungary.

Hungary has gone from being a democracy to a single-party autocracy in a decade. And I said, "Hey, how did this happen? How did Viktor Orbán, your prime minister, do this in 10 years?" And he said, "Well, it's simple. He got elected on a right-wing populist backlash to the financial crisis. He redrew the parliamentary districts to entrench his party in power. He changed the voting laws to make it easier for his supporters to vote. He packed the court with far-right judges. He enriched some cronies who then bought up the media and turned it into a right wing propaganda machine. And he wrapped it up in a national us vs. them message. Us, the real Hungarians, against them — Muslims, immigrants, liberal leaders, George Soros."

So, he concludes, "I can understand not just why democracy is threatened globally, but why it's threatened in the United States[.]"

On the other hand, at UnHerd.com, Joel Kotkin says the Dems are all fascists, and he is writing about

the alarming transformation of the US Democratic Party, the putative “party of the people” , now increasingly a subsidiary of the corporate elite. Among financial firms, communications companies and lawyers, Biden outraised Trump by five-to-one or more. Today’s oligarchs are particularly keen on the progressive non-profit sector, which provides important support for their political and social advocacy — a means for them to make politically correct statements about climate change, gender and race, while still obtaining enormous profit margins and unprecedented wealth.

So everyone reckons that they are the real democrats and the other guys are the eevil fascists. Living on different planets, you might say. Or maybe different sides of the same planet. Or maybe right next door on the same planet but interpreting the world in radically different ways.

Actually, let's get real here. If Democrats like Ben Rhodes -- who is supposed to be one of the smart ones in the room -- got blindsided by Trump, then how come he's in the executive suite with Obama?

Or is Ben Rhodes just shoveling ruling-class narrative at the progressive rubes at Salon? That's one of the interesting things in politics. Do the partisans really believe their partisan talking points? I guess it doesn't matter. The narrative is everything. But let's just analyze this paragraph from Deah Abeidallah:

Rhodes also detailed how other authoritarian regimes, such as Russia and China, mandate teaching students not the accurate history of their nation but a mythology that helps them remain in power. This should sound familiar, since Republicans have recently been enacting laws to ban "critical race theory," but what they're truly doing is copying the Chinese Communist Party tactic of only allowing the teaching of "history" that helps them politically.

"Accurate history of their nation?" But it is lefties that say that everything is narrative, a ruling-class narrative, that marginalizes the poor and the oppressed. Wow. You think maybe that the recent Democratic embrace of the "1619 Project" is accurate history? Or do you think it, and "critical race theory," is all about "teaching of 'history' that helps [Democrats] politically?"

I know. How about we agree that the "1776 Project," that America is a "city on a hill," and the "1619 Project," that America was founded on slavery, are both mythologies advanced by different factions of the ruling class. That is what critical theory is all about. That there is no such thing as "absolute truth" or "accurate history." It is all narrative. The point of critical race theory is to debunk the Whiteness narrative that the United States is the "last best hope of earth" -- said by President Lincoln in a message to Congress on December 1, 1862 -- and to substitute another narrative, that the United States is and was all about white supremacy and slavery and exploitation and imperialism. The point of conservatism is to debunk the leftist narrative that FDR was a light unto the nations and the century of the welfare state is the most progressive and just and equitable political movement ever. Yeah, it's a narrative.

Just a thought here. If Trump represents an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, then how come his administration was confronted by an 18 month special prosecutor investigation, by non-stop media attacks from top media like The New York Times and The Washington Post and popular cable news like CNN and MSNBC. And how come he was impeached twice in the House of Representatives? How is it possible that an authoritarian president would put up with such attacks? Wouldn't a real authoritarian just put his opponents in jail?

As you know, my analysis of politics says any movement that says: "OMG the orcs are taking over the world" is in fact a failing movement that is facing a "failure of prophecy." And typically, when religious cults or political movements sense that something is wrong -- because the world is not turning out as they confidently predicted with their narrative -- they lash out, detecting conspiracies and reds under the bed.

But I get our lefty friends and their push to force their "critical race theory" into the schools. Heck, if I had political power I would be inclined to force my "critical woke theory" on the kiddies. How everything that lefties have ever said and done, since Marx, is a lie, including "and" and "the." And how pretty much everything that lefties have advocated and implemented "makes things worse."

Cosby Out of Jail

OK, so Bill Cosby finally got his get-out-of-jail-card. On a technicality. And now he is a free man again. And yes, if you want a non-feminist take on all this, Ilana Mercer is your gal.

I must say that the Cosby-Weinstein thing has been educational for me. It illustrates the problem of a high-status male that had never occurred to me, as a not-particularly high-status male. 

Obviously, when you are a high-status male, women are always "presenting" themselves to you, because hypergamy. But you really don't have time to wine and dine and court them and even have an "affair," as they called it in Swing Era songs. So what do you do?

If you are Harvey Weinstein to take 'em out for champagne and caviar and then take them up to the office where you expose yourself and jerk off. Before returning to the restaurant with the girl rather the worse for wear.

If you are Bill Cosby and the university bureaucrat you -- time after time -- make sexual advances and she puts up with it. Because? Because she likes that he's interested in her? That he might help her in her career? That he might one day actually love her? Actually marry her? Or that she is just instinctively practicing hypergamy and really doesn't have a clue?

And if you are one of these high-status males, why not? Only, you don't want all the bother of treating her like a love object rather than a sex object. Because there are only 24 hours in a day.

A while back, I said it made me understand the rules in a Trollope novel.

[W]omen were protected from male aggression back then by simple rules about when a woman might be alone with a man that is not her father, her husband, or her fiancé. The rule was: never!

Why? Because the natural instinct in women is to "present" themselves to eligible men in pretty clothes and alluring make-up and nicely turned curves. I don't think that women really understand that all these things are automatically picked up by male "target acquisition radar" and turn on the "pursuit" instinct. They do it because it is programmed into their unconscious. I assume that goes also for the millions of women today that walk around in "leggings" that mold and present their butts and their thighs to the male gaze. Some of them wear pink leggings!

And, I think, the natural instinct in women is to submit to sexual aggression. I mean, whaddya do after the Vikings storm your village and kill all the men and herd the women together so the warriors can look them over and take their pick in strict warrior hierarchy order?

So I say that, sooner or later, we will have to return to the Trollope rule, where a young woman is never alone with a man unless he is her father, her husband, or her fiancé.

Mind you, I don't defend Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein. You play with fire, pal, and you gonna get burned.

Because women never forget.

Ferguson's "Great Degeneration" and How Things Are Getting Worse

I just picked up a copy of Niall Ferguson's 2012 book The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. He says: Look, there are four things a society needs to get right. He calls them black boxes.

1. Democracy meaning the political black box.
2. Capitalism meaning the economic black box.
3. Rule of Law meaning the legal black box.
4. Civil Society meaning the social interaction black box.

Obviously there are ways in which each of these black boxes and work well and interact well with the other black boxes. And there are ways in which they degenerate and make things worse, both in their internal operations and in their interactions with the other black boxes.

Ferguson creates a beehive metaphor and uses it to analyze our present political situation.

In politics, Ferguson asks if we are creating too many dependent drones for the worker-bees to support. And in economics, Ferguson asks if we are creating problems when corporations play an active part in political life and governments distort the economy with subsidies, tariffs and regulation. In law he asks if the rule of law has not degenerated in the the rule of lawyers. In civil society he asks how a free society can flourish when its voluntary associations -- created for objectives other than profit -- are in decline.

So, he argues, we should be putting curbs on the ability of the political system to distribute loot and plunder, and in particular for the elder generation to loot the younger generation through explicit and implicit debt.

In the economy we should be limiting the power of regulation to encourage a house price bubble that leads to the Great Recession of 2008, where regulation and government supervision creates a more fragile system. Shouldn't regulation make a system more "anti-fragile" that "becomes stronger when subject to perturbation."

In law we should be encouraging a system that develops "low-cost enforcement of contracts." One measure of the health of the legal system is the length of time and the expense of setting up a new business. Ferguson prefers the Anglo-Saxon "common law" to the Continental "civil law." 

When it comes to civil society, Ferguson cites his experience in "clearing the beach" at his house on the coast of South Wales. When he moved in the beach was cluttered with rubbish, from plastic bottles and bags to beer and soft-drink cans. When he found that the local council would not help, he organized volunteers to clear the beach. After a couple of beach cleans the Lions Club got involved.

The Lions brought a level of organization and motivation that far exceeded my earlier improvised efforts. As a result of their involvement the shoreline was transformed.

Yeah. Maybe we should apply the civil-society model to all kinds of other things, from education to welfare.

Of course, everything that Niall Ferguson proposes is, to me, conventional wisdom -- my conventional wisdom: the sensible things we should be doing -- should always be doing -- at the political, economic, legal, and lifeworld level to regenerate the health of our society. And not just once, but all the time.

But our lefty friends want to do the opposite. And reading the book made me realize just how crazy things have gotten since 2012.

One of the things that Ferguson warns about is debt: that government debt is a generational charge on the young generation. Our lefty friends are heaping debt upon debt. One of the things he warns against is loading too much regulation that distributes political favors around and, like in mortgage finance, makes the economy more fragile. One of the things he warns against is the rule of the lawyers. But our lefty friends are all over the legal system trying to enforce changes that they cannot get by legislation and the political process. One of the vital parts of human society is the social lubrication of civil society organizations; the only thing our lefty friends understand are AstroTurf activist organizations.

In other words, if you accept Niall Ferguson's world view, you can't help feeling that everything our lefty friends are doing and want to do are making things worse.

And the reason for all this isn't mysterious. As the educated elite has enforced its political formula, of allies helping oppressed peoples against white oppressors, the ordinary middle-class commoners have staged an organic Great Rebellion that switched Congress to the Republicans and then elected Donald Trump as president.

For now, after herculean effort, the ruling class has rolled back the Rebels. But, as they said of the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, and instead are doubling down on the agenda that Niall Ferguson judges is the cause of The Great Degeneration.

The purpose of politics and economics and law and civil society is to help the society of humans flourish and live in harmony. They are, in the notion of Jürgen Habermas, the Lebenswelt, the life-world in which humans communicate and develop moral agreement and resolve their differences.

Obviously, when the parties do the opposite, then that spells Trouble, right here is River City. And that, I think, is a shame.

How Whiteness Transformed China

China is celebrating the centenary of its Communist Party this week as a glorious liberation from western colonialism. Here is President Xi Jinping (hey, I thought that presidents were a white thing): 

The Chinese nation is a great nation.

Stop right there. Nation? What's all that about, whitey? 

With a history of more than 5,000 years, China has made indelible contributions to the progress of human civilization. After the Opium War of 1840, however, China was gradually reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society and suffered greater ravages than ever before. The country endured intense humiliation, the people were subjected to great pain, and the Chinese civilization was plunged into darkness. Since that time, national rejuvenation has been the greatest dream of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.

To save the nation from peril, the Chinese people put up a courageous fight. As noble-minded patriots sought to pull the nation together, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, the Reform Movement of 1898, the Yihetuan Movement, and the Revolution of 1911 rose one after the other, and a variety of plans were devised to ensure national survival, but all of these ended in failure. China was in urgent need of new ideas to lead the movement to save the nation and a new organization to rally revolutionary forces.

With the salvoes of Russia's October Revolution in 1917, Marxism-Leninism was brought to China. Then in 1921, as the Chinese people and the Chinese nation were undergoing a great awakening and Marxism-Leninism was becoming closely integrated with the Chinese workers' movement, the Communist Party of China was born. 

In other words, China's rebirth was nothing but Whiteness, Whiteness, Whiteness.

Let's start with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement. This was started by a young Chinese man that read a Christian missionary pamphlet after he had failed the state examinations. La Wik:

The uprising was commanded by Hong Xiuquan, an ethnic Hakka (a Han Chinese subgroup) and the self-proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ. Its goals were religious, nationalist, and political in nature; Hong sought the conversion of the Han Chinese people to the Taiping's syncretic version of Christianity, to overthrow the Manchus-led Qing Dynasty, and a state transformation. 

Can you spell Whiteness? Then there's the Reform Movement of 1898 initiated by the Guangxu Emperor and canceled by Dowager Empress Cixi. It included.

abolishing the traditional examination system... eliminating sinecures... establishing Peking University... building a modern education system (studying mathematics and science instead of focusing mainly on Confucian texts)... changing the government from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy... applying principles of capitalism to strengthen the economy, modernizing China's military and adopting modern training and drill methods... rapid industrialization of all of China through manufacturing, commerce, and capitalism... establishing a bureau for railways and mines[.]

 Whiteness squared. Then there was the Yihetuan Movement (or the Boxer Rebellion). Now we are talking. It really was an anti-western, anti-Christian anti-Whiteness movement.

Villagers in North China had been building resentment against Christian missionaries and the growth of foreign spheres of influence after the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. In a severe drought, violence and murder spread across Shandong and the North China Plain, targeting foreign property, Christian missionaries and Chinese Christians.

Then the Revolution of 1911. It established the Republic of China. Republic? That's Whiteness, if ever I saw it.

Then in 1921, "the Communist Party of China was born." But, but, but, Communism is a western idea. Whiteness. Now read this, from Unherd, the Brit opinion site: "China's Communist Party owes it all to colonialism."

Trigger Warning: the following hate speech may blow your mind.

The CCP was not founded in Shanghai by accident. The first congress was held in the newly built home of one of the 15 revolutionary pioneers, Li Hanjun, at 106 Rue Wantz in what was then the French Concession.

Shanghai was home to a nascent labour movement and its international ambience meant that not only people but also ideas flowed freely. Moreover, the foreign concessions meant that the activists could meet and conspire out of the reach of the Chinese authorities.

There were, of course, a ton of Christian missionaries in China.

One of these missionaries, a Baptist from Carmarthenshire [Wales] named Timothy Richard, is still remembered in the Communist Party Museum on the former site of Peking University as the first person to publish the names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Chinese.

A group of 2,000 Chinese studied in France during and after World War I.

After their exposure to the radical ideas circulating among workers and activists in Europe they returned home and, in January 1921, formally adopted the creed of Marxism-Leninism. 

How dare, how dare the French indoctrinate those 2,000 innocent Chinese with their Whiteness ideas!

My favorite quote to illustrate the experience of the Chinese people encountering the West is this, the comments of a "Dr. Wu," at the beginning of David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing published in 2003. Dr. Wu and others had been tasked with accounting "for the success, in fact, the preeminence of the West all over the world."

We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism, and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this.

Yes. And now our lefty friends are determined to eliminate Christianity from the West. Because Whiteness or something.

Personally, I have enormous compassion for the Chinese and their "century of humiliation." There is nothing harder than living in a political and cultural world that is coming to the end of the line. Who is to blame? What do we do? Will these foreign ideas help us or will they destroy us? And, you can bet that the ruling class of the time is going to be up to all kinds of tricks as it tries to hang onto power and blame anyone and everyone else for the problems.

Kinda like our own ruling class that, after a century of spend and elect, seems to be hitting the wall. It sees that something is wrong, but can't even begin to figure out what it is. Whiteness! Yeah, that must be it!

When the Ruling Class is Wrong

The thing about the market is that every day it is commenting on who is right and who is wrong. Mostly it is right; sometimes it is wrong.

But politics is different. In politics the ruling class, right or wrong, gets its way almost all the time. That's because of the natural human instinct to trust its rulers and suspect that the opposition is close to being traitors.

And, given that the one job of the ruling class is to defend the people against enemies, and lead the nation in wars to defend itself, it makes sense that its view dominates the public square and that objectors don't get much air time. It is only when the ruling class has been defeated in war that it loses its warrant to set the agenda. The Chinese have a phrase for this: losing the Mandate of Heaven.

The most obvious case where this is a problem is the question of climate change and green energy. Right or wrong, the ruling class has bought into the idea of dangerous warming due to emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. If the rulers are right then they will be saving us from a fate worse than death. But if they are wrong they will be causing enormous misery and suffering, all for nothing.

Now I believe that the whole climate change and green energy thing is a grift, a chance for the entire global ruling class to use its political power and go to war against a dreadful existential peril and also do what comes naturally, which is to hand out loot and plunder to supporters, such as subsidies for billionaires to build wind farms and subsidies to nice liberal ladies to buy hybrid cars and for lesbians to buy electric cars.

Suppose they are wrong and we are right? How do we effect "change?" The answer is: we don't; we can't. Not until things start to break. 

Here's a developing possibility: "NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio urges residents to reduce electric use during heat emergency." If you read the article it mentions power outages and voltage reductions, all on a day when the temperature at La Guardia Airport reached a mere 98 degrees F. What is not mentioned in the article is that Indian Point Nuclear Power Station, just up the Hudson River, with over 1 GW capacity, was shut down on April 30, 2021. Total demand right now is about 12 GW.

Obviously, it will take blackouts, big blackouts, blackouts that shut down whole states, before the ruling class will reverse its aversion to nuclear power and fossil fuel as demanded over the last generation by lefty activist groups. Oh, and also, it will require blackouts in locations where our ruling class lives and works.

Meanwhile,the energy contribution from "renewables," despite government subsidies and compulsion, is still minuscule. My guess is that it is physically impossible to power the whole economy from "green" energy.

So, in my view, a magnificent crash is coming. And really, the sooner the better. Because the sooner the crash comes the less expensive it will be, and the less suffering it will cause.

Of course, this applies not just to energy but every other foolish thing that our ruling class has done over the last century, whether it is government pensions, government health care, government education, government welfare, all the programs that amount to loot and plunder and which cannot be reduced because of the risk of insurrection by the folks presently in receipt of loot and plunder.

It is said that young people today approve of socialism, particularly if it gives them free health care and free college. I sympathize. They are entering the adult world after a century of loot-and-plunder politics and all the good ones are taken. So the kids are saying: we want some too!

Sorry kids. If you were smart you would start a comprehensive and mandatory movement to "end privilege now." You would want to end the taxes that go to pay for boomer entitlements, taxes that go to support dysfunctional schools and universities, "free" health care that is provided by a huge expensive corporative and credentialed blob, home mortgage subsidies and low-down payments. Because all that stuff is what is making it impossible for you guys to get a start in life.

But you don't get it. You've been carefully taught by the monopoly government education system that the solution to all problems is another loot-and-plunder operation.

People who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Because, as Margaret Thatcher said: at some point you run out of other people's money.

I should say: the ruling class runs out of other people's money.