Anatomy of Revolution: Introduction

The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton is a comparative study of the four great European revolutions: English, American, French, and Russian. They are not necessarily "typical" but they are four important revolutions about which Brinton proposes to try to observe parallels.

He does not expect to divine the truth of these revolutions; he is a Kantian, and does not expect to find the truth, the thing-in-itself. Nor is the book about the "facts." But he does propose to use a "conceptual scheme" to approach the analysis of the four revolutions, which he will use to frame questions and hypotheses about them, and facts, but not rigidity. And he hopes to steer clear of wishful thinking about "what he would like to prevail" with respect to the four revolutions.

But what conceptual scheme? The notion of a storm, starting with rumblings, building to a thunderous climax, and then subsiding back into sunshine? The notion of equilibrium, of a society getting out of equilibrium and then rocking to and fro before returning to some sort of equilibrium?

Brinton chooses the conceptual scheme of a "fever." In the old regime, 

there will be found signs of the coming disturbance... Then comes a time when the full symptoms disclose themselves, and when we can say that the fever of revolution has begun. This works up... to a crisis, frequently accompanied by delirium, the rule of the most violent revolutionists, the Reign of Terror. After the crisis comes a period of convalescence, and the patient is himself again,

and maybe "strengthened by the experience... perhaps in some respects stronger for it[.]" But, in later chapters, he also uses the notion, as in "disequilibrium" as a sign of regime ill health.

Three of the four revolutions, the British, the French, and the Russian, have a "social or class" basis.

All are begun in hope and moderation, all reach a crisis in a reign of terror, and all end in something like dictatorship -- Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin.

The American Revolution is different. It was "predominantly a territorial and nationalistic revolution, animated by patriotic American hatred for the British." But it had a social, class character, and had "some terroristic aspects." It does not fit quite as well into the "fever" conceptual scheme.

There will be no "great discoveries," Brinton warns, and the reader should expect the anatomy of revolutions to yield familiar results. The uniformities in four the revolutions will turn out to be "just what every sensible man already knew about revolutions." 

Next: The Old Regimes.

Censoring "Misinformation:" Don't Do It!

Why are our rulers so bent upon censoring "misinformation?" As a Thoroughly Modern Millie that believes in the truth of Critical Theory -- the original truth, that you cannot know things-in-themselves, so every fact and every truth is subject to change -- I can't believe that our wise rulers want to censor non-regime narratives.

We've seen, in living color over the last year, how the narrative changes.

First of all, masks didn't work. Then they did. Now it seems that masks don't make a blind bit of difference. Probably.

Then hydroxychloroquine, a non-prescription drug for malaria seemed like a good idea, then it wasn't because Trump, and now it seems to work. Ditto Ivermectin. But did you know that hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin are over-the-counter drugs and so Big Pharma doesn't make too much money on them?

Eric Erickson has more details on all the changing narratives.

Why do governments -- and religions -- insist on a single narrative, and label conflicting information as "misinformation" and "heresy." Why do they think that there is a good reason to block annoying voices that challenge the official narrative?

I suspect that it has something to do, first, with military culture, because once the military leader has decided upon a route of march or a tactic or an attack, then it would be disastrous in the short term to keep debating the options.

I also suspect that it has something to do with the female culture, where all the women in the community pretty well agree on things. And any woman that does not agree finds that nobody will talk to her.

There is also, of course, the shabby reason that most of politics is about division, shaming the opposition, and getting on with the loot and plunder. So the sauntering politician does not like to have his narrative or his policy questioned, because that challenges his status as glorious leader.

You can see that in the recent flap about the Biden administration wanting to silence several voices that were challenging its policy on COVID, particularly the efficacy of vaccination. The Biden administration and all good people want everyone to get vaccinated. Because science.

But there's a lot of pushback out there, from various quarters, suggesting that the vaccination doesn't stop transmission, doesn't stop you from getting reinfected, has serious side effects. From the point of view of the rulers, this is all dangerous misinformation -- insurrection even! Michael Barone:

[Biden press secretary Jan Psaki] called on Facebook to suppress 12 accounts that she said were spreading "misinformation" about COVID-19 vaccines. These accounts, she said July 15, were "producing 65% of vaccine misinformation on social media platforms."

"Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts. Posts that would be within their policy for removal often remain up for days, and that's too long. The information spreads too quickly."

Well, maybe. If we assume that the Biden administration is really leveling with us, and really knows its stuff, and really has the science straight and is not just playing politics with us. 

See, the reason we have a First Amendment and the reason we have LEDs is that back in the day our rulers agreed that nobody had a monopoly on the truth, and that anyone that did have a monopoly on truth would abuse that monopoly. Just like monopolists in the business world.

And that is what Critical Theory was about, before lefties decided to turn it into a political weapon. Critical Theory says that your brilliant theory of "life, the universe, and everything" may explain everything so far, but what about tomorrow? That is why the physicists' union demands "rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty."

Now, the theory of the moment with respect to the COVID epidemic and the response to it is obviously not a theory with the prestige of Newton's mechanics, or Einstein's relativity. The government and its scientist bureaucrats are dealing with a disease about which we do not know everything we need to know. The facts change every day. And the government, like all governments, tends to be slow to change its mind when the facts change. As they do. Governments tend to stick with a narrative and demand people conform to the narrative until the day when the narrative is utterly exploded and even nice liberal ladies with virtue-signaling yards signs in the front yard realize it.

But I don't care. I think that the Biden administration and its Democratic operatives with bylines in the media are going to end up with egg on their faces. Because they cannot control the narrative, and shouldn't imagine that they can, or think that controlling the narrative will have a better outcome for the Biden administration, the Democratic Party, and the nation than allowing a frank and fair discussion of the science and the issues.

But what do I know?

Putin's Russian History Lesson

Let's see. What do I know about Russian history?

I know that, back in the day, the Vikings were running slaves down the Volga. I know there was a thing called the Kievan Rus. I know about the Mongols and how they rolled over Russia, leaving behind the Golden Horde.

Then I know about Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and the Nicholases.of the Romanov dynasty. And somewhere in there the Prussian Frederick the Great was fighting with Russia over Eastern Europe when he wasn't playing the flute in the evening.

And the pogroms and Fiddler on the Roof.

Then came World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War between the Reds and the Whites, followed by Lenin's New Economic Policy and Stalin's famines and purges. Then World War II and the occupation of Europe. Then the Cold War. Then the breakup of the Soviet Union into separate nations like Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, etc. Then the Russians retake the Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

And now the US is involved in stirring things up between Russia and the Ukraine and Hunter Biden is using his dad's connections to pay for his cocaine.

And that's about it.

But did you know that Vladimir Putin has just published an article about Russian history, in particular how Russia and Ukraine have united and divided over the centuries? Nor did I until prompted by "The Saker."

Putin's article is called "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." You can see what his angle is: hey, we Russians and you Ukrainians have always been part of the same religion and the same culture going all the way back to the Ancient Rus. We should get together again!

Well, of course he does. But the article -- obviously not written by Putin -- was remarkable. Here are my takeaways:

Putin's article at least pretends to be history, rather than ideological narrative, Nikole Hannah Jones, the wokies and all the ships at sea.

Here are a couple quick takes:

• Egad, what a mess Russian history is, with all kinds of conquests, divisions, reunitings, religious divisions. 
• And what's this Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that was forever encroaching from the west into the sacred Russian lands?

Wow, I had no idea that the civil war after the Bolshevik revolution was so complicated. Not just Reds against Whites, no indeed. There were, instead, all kinds of minor political entities and rebellions and local political entities rising and falling until everything was united, by fair means and foul, into the USSR.

From the perspective of Putin, the invasion of eastern Poland in 1939 was a recovery of Russian lands.

In 1939, the USSR regained the lands earlier seized by Poland. A major portion of these became part of the Soviet Ukraine.

See back in the 19th century, says Vlad, Russia's pals to the west, Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were interested in stirring up the idea of a separate Ukraine. Because, of course they were.

At the same time, the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia. 

"Malorussia" means "Little Russia" and includes a lot of what is now the Ukraine. 

Since the late 19th century, the Austro-Hungarian authorities had latched onto this narrative, using it as a counterbalance to the Polish national movement and pro-Muscovite sentiments in Galicia. 

Galicia is a region between Poland and Hungary and Ukraine and includes the city of Lviv (or Lvov). Back in the day when Austrian economist (and Jewish) Ludwig von Mises was born there in 1881 Lviv was called Lemberg and was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now it is part of Ukraine.

But the really big take was that Putin aims to sound reasonable, not taking a the straight ideological line that we know and love from our lefty pals. He starts the article with this statement:

First of all, I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy. These are, first and foremost, the consequences of our own mistakes made at different periods of time. But these are also the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity.

Whoever imagined that a Russian leader in our lifetimes would speak with such an obvious effort at "on the one hand, on the other hand" rhetoric? I found it shocking. Or this:

Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe. Slavic and other tribes across the vast territory – from Ladoga, Novgorod, and Pskov to Kiev and Chernigov – were bound together by one language (which we now refer to as Old Russian), economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty, and – after the baptism of Rus – the Orthodox faith. 

An ex-KGB guy writing in an avuncular way about Orthodox Christianity. Who woulda thunk it?

He's right, of course. You don't solidify and unify a country with reckless talk about America's or Russia's Original Sin. You talk about the shared culture, the shared sacrifice, and the shared history of the past.

Obviously, Putin wants Ukraine and Belarus back in the Russia. But so would we want to reunite the good old USA if the left coast decided to split off in the the Woke States of America.

Stay tuned. This ain't over.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT): What's the Grift?

Since we all need to know about the left's latest wizard wheeze, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), it's time to make sure we understand it and put it in the context of government finance in general and how government finance developed in history.

I understand the historical progress of government finance as follows:

Stage One: Physical Collection. This occurred in the days before Italian banks. Governments collected tribute in grain and silver from their feudal vassals, and the vassals collected the same from their underlings. But the king was always short of money. Always. Of course, if the king were conquering another country then he and his soldiers would loot and plunder the country to the bare walls. The Roman Empire ruled the world for centuries on this plan.

Stage Two: Italian Bankers. By the time of England's Edward III (reigned 1327-1377) a European monarch could borrow money for his military adventures from the leading bankers in the world: Italian bankers. Pity that Edward defaulted on his loans, and all. Maybe that's why the Brits lost the Hundred Years War and have had a soft spot for the Italians ever since.

Stage Three: Dutch Finance. In their war of independence from Spain the Dutch invented the central bank, the Exchange Bank of Amsterdam, to finance the war. It worked so well that they exported their idea and their regime to Britain and the British used the idea to win the Second Hundred Years War against the French at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The beauty of Dutch Finance is that enables the rulers to loot and plunder using the indirect method, partly through seigniorage and partly by the advantage of having its debt as the foundation of the banking system. In the 20th century the various nations used central banking and unlimited debt to fight two world wars. They could do this because they could use money printing and debt to loot their countries to the bare walls without the people rebelling.

Stage Three and a Half: Hamilton Economics. Alexander Hamilton, first US Secretary of the Treasury, ignited an economic boom when he determined to honor the war debt of the various states in the Union at par, and service the debt with new federal taxes.

Stage Three and Three Quarters: Bagehot Economics. After the Crash of 1873 Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street proposed that in the case of a credit collapse the government's central bank should act as "lender of last resort" to keep the financial system alive.

Stage Four: Keynesian Economics. After the cock-up of the Great Depression western political leaders needed a real simple strategy (like in The Manchurian Candidate) to know what to do when the economy was wrecked by a financial crash. The strategy was spend and borrow and elect, preferably with a genius like Lord Keynes in charge.

Stage Five: Bretton-Wood Economics. A big problem in the aftermath of wars conducted under Dutch Finance was "resumption," the attempt to return the value of a national currency to its pre-war value after the monetary inflation of war. After the Napoleonic Wars, the US Civil War, and World War I this resulted in "deflation" and social unrest, and usually a big credit crisis. So, after World War II the US did not resume gold payments at the pre-war level while pretending the value of the dollar was still $35 per ounce. The pretense of $35 per ounce was abandoned in 1971 by President Nixon at Camp David.

Stage Six: Supply-side Economics. After the cock-up of the inflationary 1970s politicians needed a real simple strategy to know what to do when Keynesian Economics wasn't working. The idea was to think about what government taxing and regulation was doing to actors in the economy. Maybe high marginal taxes on the rich wasn't a good idea. Notice the cunning in this strategy. It doesn't attempt to deal with the real problem, the loot and plunder of entitlement programs, but attempts some fine-tuning of the loot collection game in order to restore the economy after the stupidity of a Keynesian episode.

Stage Seven: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). After the cock-up of the 2006-08 Great Recession -- caused by under-collateralized and non-performing home loans and a sub-standard recovery -- politicians that hated Supply-side Economics needed a real simple strategy to know what to do when Keynesian Economics wasn't working. La Wik says that MMT 

describes currency as a public monopoly and unemployment as evidence that a currency monopolist is overly restricting the supply of the financial assets needed to pay taxes and satisfy savings desires.

So, print money until the economy begs for mercy. MMT also says that the government should run "a budget deficit large enough to achieve full employment through a job guarantee." using "non-accelerating inflation buffer employment ratio (NAIBER)" rather than "non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU)," which I take to be the conventional Keynesian option.  In other words, politicians should do what comes naturally without limit.

Stage Eight: Schachtian Economics. Hjalmar Schacht was the guy that ended the hyperinflation in Germany after World War I. He simply stopped printing unlimited paper money.

Here's what I think.

I think that going back to the dawn of time, governments are always cocking-up the economy with their wars or their loot-and-plunder economic policies. And it's worse than it used to be. Back in Stage One it was really hard for the king to loot the place to pay for his wars. Stage Three: Dutch Finance made war-making much easier, but didn't have a real simple theory for dealing with the financial crashes that occurred from time to time, especially after wars when the government attempted to return to the gold standard at the pre-war parity.

Also, I think that as governments have fine-tuned and learned more and more how to use money printing and debt to loot the country that they have had to let the financial system in on the action. So now we have highly leveraged private-equity funds that the government permits, probably because the finance sector is willing to pay powerful people for the privilege of doing highly-leveraged finance.

My guess is that almost all government spending amounts to loot and plunder and is a net loss to the prosperity and the well-being of the people. So, with government spending at 40 percent of GDP in the US and 50 percent of GDP in the UK you can see that there is a lot of looting and plundering going on, and it subtracts from the possible prosperity that might obtain if the government weren't collecting so much of peoples' incomes and handing it out to its supporters.

And, I would say, as government collects and spends more and more money, it needs new theories to justify its looting and plundering and to get it out of a jam when its cock-ups wreck the economy.

The interesting thing to me is that even lickle AOC knows all about MMT. Like in The Manchurian Candidate, your average politician needs it to be "real simple."

But we wouldn't need all these dodges and cunning tricks to pay for wars and entitlements if government would only keep out of wars and away from loot-and-plunder entitlements.

In another world.

One Man's Truth is Another Man's Disinformation

I guess that White House Press Secretary Jan Psaki's statement that:

"We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We're working with doctors and medical experts…who are popular with their audience with accurate information. So, we're helping get trusted content out there."

is what they used to call a "bombshell" back in the days of Russia, Russia, Russia.

"Disinformation"? How do you know? How do you know that, say, anti-vaxxers are spreading disinformation rather than government experts? Hey, back in the day Democratic heavyweights like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sending out tweets that were trying to sow mistrust in President Trump's Operation Warp Speed vaccine program.

The whole mania about "fact-checking" during the Trump administration and the notion that he committed 30,573 false or misleading statements over four years, is nothing more than liberals being outraged by the other guy's lies. Liberals don't notice their own lies as lies. If the "fact-checkers" were conservatives doing their thing on President Obama, I'm sure they could have come up with similar statistics.

If you do not understand that all politicians and activists lie, all the time, then you are a fool and a knave.

The funny thing about this is that critical theory, the parent of critical race theory -- that all good people agree is logical and true -- says that you can't trust anyone, can't give anyone the power to determine what is true and what is false. And that goes back to Kant and his dictum that we can't know things-in-themselves. Everything we know is a theory. Actually, it goes back before Kant to Hume, that correlation is not causation. Or to Descartes, "I think, therefore I am." How do you know "I think," René? Got a direct line to God?

So, when we get to the Frankfurt School Horkheimer and Adorno say, critiquing Newtonian mechanics:

Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase in their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them.

Everything, everything, is a guess, a theory, and when politics is involved, a power play.

And yet now we have gubmint schools using critical race theory as a tool of the ruling class to marginalize the opposition. See, back in the day, the critical theorists imagined themselves as heroic activists battling against the rulers and the powerful.

So the reason we have a First Amendment and the idea "not abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" is that one man's "disinformation" is another man's truth. And vice versa.

And when we talk about "petition the Government for a redress of grievances" we are not yet saying anything about whether the grievances are true or just a bunch of people bewitched by some lying political activist.

Surely, after the last 18 months of COVID stupidity, that started with Brit scientist Neil Ferguson's model that turned out to be off by about a factor of ten, that continued with various bureaucratic ukases about lockdowns and masks and not-lockdowns and not-masks, we should understand that everyone, everyone, is playing it by ear.

And, may I suggest, playing it by what will advance the political interest of the player.

For instance, why do you think that politicians all got on the lockdown train? Because Science, or because they needed to be Doing Something? If you think "because science" I gotta bridge to sell you.

Here's a shocking idea. Everyone, everyone, thinks that they have the truth and that anyone that disagrees with them is peddling "disinformation." Especially if they are in the religious or political worlds.

That is why we have the First Amendment. And that is why our lefty friends were First Amendment absolutists back in the day. Back in the day when it was lefties getting censored by eevil McCarthyite anti-Communist rabble-rousers.

Hey, how about this. Right now, if you want, you can go get vaccinated. If you get vaccinated then chances are about nil that you will die from COVID. (But, say the anti-vaxxers, you might die of a reaction to the COVID vaccine. But what are the odds? I don't know).

Here's the deal. 

First, if you don't trust the vaccine and you get COVID and you die of COVID, then it is your fault. You did it.

Second, the COVID virus turns out to be about five times more lethal than the average flu virus. Just between you and me, I doubt if this is a justification for shutting down the world economy. Maybe a year ago it made sense, when we didn't have the epidemic data to tell us what the risks were. (Although we did have the Diamond Princess data that the experts are still busily arguing about whether the fatality rate was 0.6 or 1.2 or 2.0).

Third, the whole idea of modern society is that people are responsible and have the right to make informed judgments. So the government's word is not the last word.

Fourth, all people in politics lie. Because we the people insist upon it.

The basic problem is that all humans think that the other guy, that disagrees with us, is full of it, and should be deplatformed for spreading disinformation.

And that ain't gonna change.

The "Tell" on Election Law, Immigration, and More

More and more I am understanding the political world through the notion of the "tell" in poker, the idea that the other player unconsciously signals the value of his hand in his face and body language.

And so I interpret the behavior of our Democratic friends as desperation, the last mad bet of a gambler about to get cleaned out.

Take the Democratic Texas legislators that left town and headed to Washington DC so they could gesticulate about racist election laws. Really? Are the arcane election laws really that important to you? Why would that be?

Now we read that the Senate Dems are putting immigration law changes into the budget reconciliation package. That's because it is much harder for Democratic senators who might be on the fence about immigration to vote against the juicy loot-and-plunder items in the reconciliation package. But why would you snuggle immigration into the budget package unless you knew it was a vote loser that would never have a chance of passing if it were offered up by itself?

You really want election laws that do not have the imprimatur of a straight-up bill passed by both Houses of Congress with a Moynihanian 70-30 vote in the Senate. If you don't understand that then you don't belong in national politics.

I keep reading my racist-sexist-homophobe friends agonizing about the Democrats setting up a "one-party" state. But you don't even think about a one-party state unless you are afraid that you are about to lose the whole game.

But still.

I get that our educated ruling class has the notion that it knows best, on everything from race relations to mass transit and climate change. What is interesting that it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that the way to advance these ideas is through a free and open discussion of the issues, in which the opinion of the "other" party is at least accommodated in the final result. In other words, to persuade. Instead all opponents to the educated-class agenda are stigmatized as "deniers" and "bigots." What's that all about?

I mean, really. Does our ruling class think it can rule without even a pretense of accommodating the opinions and the world view of the great middle class?

I get that with the current ruling-class ideology of "antiracism" you are either an ally, an oppressed people, or a white oppressor. So, obviously, the only thing to think about are the needs of the oppressed peoples. Otherwise you are not an ally, but a white oppressor.

But, how do you allies know what is best for the oppressed peoples? Done any social science lately? Do you have any ideas that contradict the ideas of Charles Murray that say that the ruling educated class has Made Things Worse for the lower orders starting not later than the Great Society programs of 1965? Other than saying Charles Murray is a racist?

I mean, why all the pedal-to-the-metal opposition to President Trump? Can he really mean the end of everything we hold dear when you Dems won back the House in 2018? How much damage can a president do when he is facing a divided Congress?

Or is the problem the very idea of a middle-class rebellion against your rule? I mean, given that the educated class takes pretty well all the bandwidth of the public square, wouldn't you expect an inchoate revolt of the deplorables every now and again? And wouldn't it be the very height of political wisdom to throw the plebs a bone every now and again?

See, the way I think, it is a "tell" to overreact to the election of a populist nationalist in a normal change election. The "tell" is that you regard the rise of an opposing narrative as a threat to your very being. Really? Is your rule based on such a weak foundation?

And what's with the trillions upon trillions of spending this year? What does it mean? That your supporters demand a huge payoff right now or else they are goin' fishin'? Or what?

For instance, I expect that the inflation and consequent efforts to contain it will fall heaviest upon the lower class and upon the middle class, who will react by voting for Change. Did you chaps think about that before you put your pedal to the metal on the spending accelerator?

And climate change. I read a piece that suggested we need to build a 1.2-gigawatt nuclear plant every month till 2040 if we are going to eliminate fossil fuels. Because certainly wind and solar ain't gonna do it. Yeah. Good luck getting even one nuclear plant built between now and 2040. So what is this climate change thing really about?

Did you chaps think about the effect of your COVID lockdowns on the livelihoods of ordinary American workers? Or that it would toss millions our of the workforce into homeless camps?

I just have this nagging feeling that you rulers really don't have a clue, that you are madly punching buttons up there in the cockpit without a clue what you are doing.

I just hope I am wrong, and that everything turns out for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Predicting the Future When the Universe Changes

The ZMan has an interesting take today on the similarity between today and the world before World War I.

This is supposed to be the peak of liberal democracy, but it feels more like the dying embers of the old aristocratic order that evolved out of the 19th century in response to the French Revolution and the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, the one thing agreed upon is the current order is not satisfactory. The old order has failed.

The Commies, he writes, were the only people back then seriously trying to predict "what happens next."And they said that "the arc of history bent towards socialism."

I think that gives the Commies too much credit. Everyone understood that the industrial age was transforming the world. Everyone, back then, was eagerly proposing plans to improve the world through politics. It's just that the Commies had a full-blown religion that promised Heaven on Earth if only we followed the Prophet Marx's True Prophecy.

More likely, says the ZMan, everyone is reverting to type.

Russia, for example, has kept reverting back to being Russia, despite the changes in political economy. We see this quite clearly with China today, which is a high tech version of the Tang Dynasty. 

In our own age, we are experiencing that the technological revolution is changing everything, just as the industrial revolution changed everything in its time. "The world after the internet is a very different place from the world before it." The Commies understood that the industrial order involved a huge movement of people and changed power relationships; "Similarly, technology has created new power relationships and set up a massive movement of people." 

For the ZMan, it is "the dissident subculture in which there is any serious thought about what is driving the ongoing crisis." 

The dissident knows that today is the result of the millions of decisions that have happened up to this moment on the timeline. A man is the sum of the mating choices of his ancestors and a people is the sum of all the choices that made the people.

But the future? "Nothing is inevitable other than the fact that people have always been wrong about the future."

That sets me to thinking, about what we humans are consistently wrong about. And I think that there are a couple things to seriously deal with.

1. Don't prophesy! The temptation of all religions is to try to prophesy the future. Don't do it! We humans are never going to wrap up the future in a comforting -- or a terrifying -- prophecy about what God or Gaia or the arc of history or climate change is going to do.
2. Be ready to adapt. The whole point of humans is that we are pretty good at adapting to whatever God or Nature or out boss throws at us. So let's keep those skills sharpened.
3. Help others to adapt. The problems of the last century, I feel, occur when political and religious leaders teach their followers that there is no need to adapt. The Commies teach their followers to follow them and they will smash the exploiters. Wrong! Teach the workers how to wive and thrive in the new world. The modern educated class teaches its followers to just sit there and they will take care of everything. Wrong! Everyone has to learn how to deal with the future and deal with its challenges.

When you think about it, the prophets are bound to be wrong. They might be telling us that God will provide, or that God will damn us to Hell unless we repent. But, it seems to me, both these approaches are trying to reduce fear by prophesying certainties. And there ain't no such thing.

For there is no way to know what the "unanticipated consequences" of our actions are going to be. We humans are always meddling with things without a clue about what we are meddling with. There is no way to figure out, in advance, what is going to happen when some butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil. Maybe nothing, maybe the end of the world. But we can respond to "unanticipated consequences" and try to mitigate them. I think that, on the whole, we are pretty good at that.

The other thing we can do is help other people adapt. That, I think is the great takeaway from the fraternal associations and mutual-aid societies of the 19th century. They developed a culture of helping and coping and getting on with life. I feel that the dominant movements arising out of the educated class have operated on the conceit that all we needed to do was to follow the leader, the political or intellectual leader, because He Knows!

And to reduce it to my reductive Three Peoples theory, the People of the Creative Self need to get out and set an example of creative adaption to the curve balls that the world throws at us, the People of the Responsible Self need to responsibly adapt within the framework of their culture of doing the right thing. And the People of he Subordinate Self need to up their game, because following along and looking to someone else to pull your irons out of the fire tends not to work when everything is changing. Because when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Nobody can predict the future. Not God, not prophets, not scientists, and not political leaders and bureaucrats. What we can do is adapt.