The Lesson of the COVID Mess

I think it is pretty clear, by now, that the masks and the shutdowns and the vaccine mandates that were pretty universally applied by the world's governments during the COVID era Did Not Work.

And there is a real possibility that the government actions and mandates Made Things Worse.

Of course, I am biased here. I believe that, in general, government action Makes Things Worse.

Why? Because governments are an expression of politics, and politics is all about uniting to defeat the Enemy. And then sharing out the loot among the supporters.

And that is all.

Five hundred years ago there was little doubt that every human community needed a brave king to defend it from marauders and looters. And the way for a human community to thrive was to conquer and plunder. Anyway, that's what all leaders did, and nobody seemed to have much of a problem with that, except for the people on the receiving end.

But then emerged the modern economy in which ordinary people grew their own food less and less and labored instead for wages that they used to pay for food.

And the natural conservatism of the peasant -- for whom an agricultural mistake could result in starvation -- began to be supplanted by the creative experimentation of the business entrepreneur.

In the last 200 years, with one entrepreneurial revolution after another, the average real income of people in the developed nations has gone up by 30 times. You could look it up.

Nobody predicted it; nobody planned it. In fact, if the powers that be had an inkling of what was coming they would have strangled the baby in its cradle.

But the culture of the lord in his castle dies hard. Today, we don't have many lords in castles, but we do have lots of administrators in offices.

This is weird, because the science™ says that the world works not by top-down planning but by "creative emergence." Somebody has an idea, it works, and lots of people copy the Somebody's idea, and the world changes.

Thus, it is not surprising that the administrators in their offices all responded to the COVID crisis with top-down plans and regulations and mandates. That is what administrators do.

And administrators do not respond to changing conditions the way that markets do, by making bets on the future. They regulate and command. And then, long after the fact, they change their policy in the dead of night hoping that nobody will notice.

Because they are government they cannot make a mistake, because there is only one thing for a political or administrator to do when he makes a mistake, and that is to resign. That is why, when they make a mistake, they deny it and blame saboteurs and wrecker.s

In fact, I would say that the mistakes of the COVID era issue mainly from the necessity that administrators and politicians cannot ever admit a mistake.

When political leaders and their administrators make a mistake there is really only one thing for the people to do. They must form a mob and embarrass their leaders into resigning and leaving the leadership for others, sadder and wiser after the event.

This, of course, is the sense of René Girard's Scapegoat mechanism. We all get together to blame someone for what went wrong, and then come together and live happily ever after.

But I think that the whole COVID experience is telling us that there must be a better way, a different way from top-down administration and ukase. A way that issues out of modern science and its present doctrine that the world works by way of creative emergence: people having bright ideas that work and everyone else going along. Not because someone forced them but because humans naturally want to do what works.

Could that happen after the COVID screwup? Maybe, but I wouldn't place a bet on it.

De-banking the Opposition

So, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau has declared and state of emergency in which, maybe, the gubmint will have the power to seize the bank accounts and other financial instruments of armed insurrectionist trucker.s. Although the usual suspects don't mention that.

But then some wag posted a tweet that alleged that Gen. Washington, the armed North American insurrectionist of the 18th century, maintained an account at the Bank of England right throughout the Revolutionary War.

During the American War of Independence, General Washington had an account at the Bank of England. His monies were not seized. The belief at the time was the Govt could not seize private property absent due process and a judicial proceeding.

Tell #Canada

— Seth Barrett Tillman (@SethBTillman) February 16, 2022

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin, the conservative columnist of color, has been de-B-and-B'ed by Air BnB. 

Hey, you know what? My Argentinian friends tell me that back in the day, when Argentinians used to prefer to have US dollar-denominated accounts rather than Argentinian pesos, one day the government stepped in and converted their accounts from dollars to devalued  pesos, essentially taking away two-thirds of the value of their money. Yay Internet!

You know what I think. I think that it's time for Republicans to propose a new Civil Rights Law. It would go something like this:

No business or financial institution shall discriminate on the basis of armed insurrectionism, subject to penalties to be enacted by Congress.

This shouldn't be hard. I'd say that every institution that cancels an account should be forced -- subject to arrest and solitary confinement of the CEO -- to provide a link at which the former account holder can obtain a monthly payment of three-fourths of the outstanding credit balance at the time of cancellation. Until four months after the restoration of the account. Additional monies to be paid to the lawyer of the account-holder's choice. (Because Rule One: you have to deal in the lawyers.)

Justice for protesters! Right, lefties?

I mean. Back in the day, did the Weathermen have their accounts seized? Did the Communist Party of the United States have its accounts seized? Did black churches in the Jim Crow South have their bank accounts seized? Or what?

And there's this from Instapundit:

MORE TO COME: Doxxed Freedom Convoy Donor Forced to Close Her Restaurant After Threats. “Anyone who donated to the Freedom Convoy is now subject to partisan doxxing and potential threats or actual violence.”

Really, this can't be hard. Since the police aren't allowed to arrest "aspiring rappers" they have all the time in the world to go after lefty white oppressors who are doxxing their political opponents.

Why aren't the police pursuing these doxxers? Because they are the children of headline politicians? Because they are Activists of Color?  Or what?

I guess the only thing that will persuade our liberal friends about this is when liberal activists find themselves on the wrong end of it. Maybe the liberal fact-checker sites should be sanctioned for false fact-checks.

It all comes down to the eternal wisdom of Cpl. Jones in Dad's Army. Said he: "they don't like it up 'em." I have no idea what he meant by that, but I do know that our liberal friends are peculiar in their lack of strategic vision. They seem to be unable to understand that the weapons they deploy against their hated enemies could by turned against them.

Of course, I understand why this is so. When your ideas and your beliefs come direct to you from Gaia, they come to you direct from Gaia. And that is all you need to know.

Canadian Truckers and the Great Rebellion

I first crystallized on a narrative about the political suppression of ordinary Commoners back in November 2020. I wrote about how it all started when the Commoner-born Richard Nixon was cheated out of the White House with a stolen election in 1960.

My point is that the Commoners of America have been gradually coming to cultural and political consciousness in the last half century. Call it a Great Rebellion. And the educated ruling class keeps trying to sabotage this movement.

I don't want to suggest that the sabotage is scandalous. It is just natural that our present ruling class -- that practices an over - under political formula -- would find the middle-middle as a threat to its power, and the ruling class would be right. The rising tide of Commonerism is a threat to its power.

To me, Nixon, Reagan, and Trump were all elected by ordinary middle-class Commoners, the great middle-middle of America, to represent them and their ordinary needs as ordinary Americans.

And, I think it fair to say, our Gentry ruling class did its utmost to kick all three out of office, and succeeded with two of them. Hey, two out of three ain't bad.

Now with have the Canadian Truckers and their bouncy castles entering the fray.

Now, I don't want to say who is right and who is wrong in all this.

But I would suggest that the COVID activities of the ruling class have been felt most cruelly by the middle-middle, that is, by people that neither have laptop jobs that can be done by computer at home and with Zoom calls nor are people just getting a check, like retirees and the lower class that doesn't work much.

And, because nobody in the ruling class really knows anyone in the middle-middle, the rulers don't really have a feel for how all the scientific and beneficent COVID restrictions and regulations are hitting the middle-middle.

And thus, when the middle-middle objects, the Gentry ruling class is caught by surprise. Naturally, it experiences the resistance to its beneficent rules as an insult. And so the cry goes out: Does anyone know one of These People?

Of course, it is worse than that, because the over - under political formula of today's ruling class experiences the middle-middle as the enemy. That is the logic of its Allyship notion, that the rulers are Allies of the Oppressed Peoples fighting the White Oppressors.

What I am suggesting is that, because of the ruling-class political formula, any member of the ruling class would already be primed to regard people protesting its wise and thoughtful COVID regulations as the Enemy. 

Because that is how politics works. I notice when I walk in the neighborhood that all the dogs being taken for a walk are very interested in me. Except for one thing: if there is another dog around, the dogs in question are going to be much more interested in each other than in the humans.

But here is something that shocked me this morning. I was walking towards a dog and its owner, but in between us was a squirrel. And the dog paid no attention to the squirrel. Didn't that dog know that squirrels are the Enemy? Hey, maybe the dog was blind, because in my experience dogs have highly sensitive radar that picks up squirrels at one hundred paces.

So it is with politicians. Their radar is tuned to pick up Enemies, the enemies of their political formula.

And so, if you want to understand a politician, keep a sharp eye on him and see who or what pricks up his attention. Chances are that's the Enemy that he has sworn a blood oath to track down and demolish.

I don't know what will happen with the Great Rebellion of Commoners. Up to now our Gentry ruling class has done a pretty effective job of heading it off at the pass. But it does seem to me that its anti-Commoner campaign is getting a little more active of late.

And I wonder what Peter Turchin's "over-production of elites" will mean in the long run. I mean if the over-produced elite scions can't find a nice Stiltstocking job at the Circumlocution Office, maybe they will join the Resistance. 

Or maybe not. Because Darling, have you ever been inside the house of one of those Deplorables?

In Politics You Never Admit You Were Wrong

For years I've used Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution as a way of understanding politics, that when things go wrong, the activists amp it up and start canceling their opponents: Reign of Terror.

But I can see, back when I started writing about reigns of terror, that I didn't have the key insight that drives political activists to destroy the opposition.

The problem with politics is that you can never admit you were wrong. Or made a mistake. Or shoulder the blame.

Obviously, this is crazy. Human life, every human life, is one mistake after the next. Successful people, happy people, are the kind that realize that "Houston we have a problem" and work like mad to solve the problem.

If fixing mistakes is one of the key skills for a happy and successful life, why don't politicians admit their mistakes?

I think it is because politics is always about fighting an enemy. As in: Nazi Carl Schmitt, that the political is the friend - enemy distinction. As in: Curtis Yarvin, that there is no politics without an enemy. 

Think of it.

• If you've been leading the fight to an enemy for years, can you turn around and say: wow, this enemy is not as bad as we thought?
  
  
• Can you admit that your strategy for fighting the enemy was all wrong, and so now it's back to square one?
  
  
• Can you admit as President Roosevelt in December 1941 that you screwed up the intelligence and the Japanese were able to cruise a force half way across the Pacific to bomb Pearl Harbor?

Obviously not. 

If you admit any of these things, then there is only one thing to do, and that is to resign. So the only way to hang onto your political leadership is never to admit being wrong. And the political system accommodates this. After a couple of presidential terms, the voters typically decide it is Time for a Change. What they are really saying is: you promised Heaven on Earth, you failed to deliver, and so you are outta here.

This approach allows us to understand the present moment.

• If you have spent the last two years pushing mandatory masks and mandatory vaccinations and the science starts to show that you were wrong, then you have a bit of a problem.
  
  
• If you have been pushing entitlement programs for the last century and the entitlement programs are broke, then maybe your brilliant plan was not o brilliant.
  
  
• If you have been enacting welfare programs and the result is that lower-class men don't work much and lower-class women don't marry much, and the young men of these families are violent criminals and only aspire to rapping, then maybe you have a problem.
  
  
• If you passed civil rights laws half a century ago, and you elected the First Black President fifteen years ago, and blacks are still poor and criminal and violent, then maybe you have a problem.

Do you see the point? The last thing that any politicians does is admit he screwed up. The last thing that any ruling class does is admit that its programs and policies were and are a disaster. 

Because once you admit your mistake, there is only one thing to do, and that is to resign.

• Would any politician of your acquaintance admit a mistake and resign?
  
  
• Would our educated ruling class ever admit a mistake and resign?

There is a reason for this, and I use Nicholas Wade and his Before the Dawn to illustrate it. Male chimps defend the troop's territory from other male chimps. But when there are no more male chimps left, then the troop ceases to exist and the females are absorbed into another troop. Same thing with human hunter-gatherer bands.

So, for males, politics -- the pursuit of the enemy -- really is a matter of life and death, or at least status vs. oblivion.

But what do humans do when they are oppressed by rulers that are screwing everything up? There seem to be several alternatives.

1. Exhaustion. That's how most reigns of terror and great purges end.
2. Bouncy castles. Truckers get together and set up inflatable castles in the capital city.
3. Scapegoat. We all come together and select a scapegoat and make them responsible for everything. As in "time for a change" elections.
4. Revolution. The ruling class is ejected and replaced by a new one.

I sure would like it if our problems could be solved by something less than bloody revolution.

But here is a new concept: Any problem that is less than life-or-death shouldn't be the responsibility of politicians and politics. Because almost every human activity is likely to go wrong and require people to get together and fix it. It needs people with a "Houston we have a problem" attitude.

And politics is the one human activity where you can never admit you were wrong and then get together and fix it.

Making Sense of George Soros, Klaus Schwab

One of the questions in the back of my mind is about George Soros. What is this billionaire Jewish currency speculator think he is doing with all his support of lefty activism? 

Does it issue from the trauma of being a Jewish kid in Hungary in the last days of Hitler's Reich? Or is is simply the conventional wisdom of an educated post-WWII European that the nation state equals nationalism equals Hitler?

And whatabout Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos every year and pushing the Great Reset and Build Back Better? Michael Rectenwald has a long piece "What is the Great Reset?" in Hillsdale College's Imprimis.

Apparently the Great Reset is "a means of addressing the 'weaknesses of capitalism' that were purportedly exposed by the COVID pandemic.

Appararently Klaus Schwab has been pushing the idea of "stakeholder capitalism" since the 1970s. "Stakeholder capitalism" means that

the management of a modern enterprise must serve not only shareholders but all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity.

Schwab and the WEF have promoted this idea ever since.

They can take credit for the stakeholder and public-private partnership rhetoric and policies embraced by governments, corporations, non-governmentals organizations, and international governance bodies worldwide.

Then there is a thing called the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Index, a kind of "social credit score" for corporations that has the effect of promoting lefty ideas like "commitments to already-vulnerable communities within their ecosystems."

BlackRock, Inc., the world's largest asset manager, is solidly behind the stakeholder model. 

And BlackRock is all-in on the climate-change movement.

In recent publications, Schwab and Thierry Malleret have pitted "stakeholder capitalism" against "neoliberalism," which they define as "a corpus of ideas and policies... favoring competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention, and economic growth over social welfare."

In other words, today's corporate elite is in bed with the administrative elite which is in bed with the political elite, and a grand time is had by all. 

It does all help make sense of the whole COVID experience. Because the whole elite is using the same hymnal, reading the same music and singing the same words.

So of course the social media giants are all-in on suppressing "misinformation" and "disinformation." 

Did you know that Mark Zuckerberg was nominated to be one of Klaus Sachwab's Young Global Leaders -- along with Google's Sergey Brin and others you may have heard of?

Really, it makes much more sense for corporate leaders to be "in alignment" with political and cultural leaders than opposed to them. It avoids being branded as "robber barons" and "malefactors of great wealth" and all the other pejoratives that have been hurled at businessmen down the last couple of centuries.

And it gives the corporate elite a stake in the over - under politics of the current era. If you support "stakeholder capitalism" it means you care about the oppressed. It makes you one of the good guys.

But the science™.

See, the science these days says that a benevolent top-down hierarchy is not the recipe for peace and prosperity. The science tells us that top-down politics and economics tends to set the economy and the culture in concrete. And it keeps on going on until the day that it doesn't. On that day, the dam breaks and all hell breaks loose.

See, the modern view is that life, the universe, and everything is "emergent." New ideas, new complexities emerge from the primordial soup, and if they work they take over the world. If they don't work then you never hear of them.

A notion like "stakeholder capitalism" that operates with the conceit that it knows how to organize "all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity" is wrong. We tried that back in the day with unionized manufacturing. All the workers at GM and Ford and General Electric were unionized and well-paid and pensioned. Until they weren't.

But that's OK. Because we now know that the white working class that benefited from the union-worker era were in fact racist-sexist-homophobes  and "bitter clingers" that had it coming.

So let's revisit the hit on "neoliberalism" that it favors "competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention, and economic growth over social welfare."

Very good. But who gets to define "solidarity," "government intervention" and "social welfare?" And who gets to use their political and economic power to implement these ideas? And what if their brilliant idea is wrong?

We see what typically happens with this model from the late COVID experience. We are told that our betters are "following the science." But we learn later that they are just winging it. And when the opinion polls turn decisively against their policies of masking and vaccination they change their tune. But the science?

There's no doubt that we humans can help people when the market turns against them and their comfortable lives are threatened by a new technology. But we cannot stop "creative destruction" in its tracks with "government intervention." Because chances are that "government intervention" will make things worse, because ten-to-one government intervention will help the powerful and be completely oblivious about the non-powerful.

For example, the governments in the United States have fallen over themselves to make unionized teachers safe and force children to wear masks in school. But they have been oblivious to the harm done in all kinds of ways to ordinary non-organized workers like truckers.

I suppose then that the way to understand George Soros and Klaus Schwab is to understand that, like most humans, they think that what is best for them is best for the rest of the world. And you better fall in line, peasants.

Oh, and Whoa, listen to Dr. Robert Malone with Tucker Carlson on WEF and Young Leaders starting at 46:30.

Wokeness Has Only Just Begun, Says Blogger

Thanks to the links at Powerline, I got to read this piece about Wokeness, by N.S. Lyons: "No, the Revolution isn't Over." Because:

1. Wokeness is a religion, a set of "metaphysical beliefs.
   
   
2. The "void of meaning hasn't been filled." There's nothing out there that can compete with Wokeness.
   
   
3. "Social atomization hasn't reversed." No communities, civic associations, "little platoons" to fill the gap.
   
   
4. "Atomization is probably the inevitable byproduct of liberal modernity." And Wokeness is a kind of desperate attempt to recover meaning.
   
   
5. The Information Revolution isn't done yet. Makes it easier to form mobs.
   
   
6. There is no authority that can "establish any kind of common metaphysical framework, common moral narrative, common vision of a properly ordered life, common norms, or even a common reality that most of society will respect, trust, follow, and collectively defend."
   
   
7. Political parties can't help because "All they can actually do is ride the chaos of the Zeitgeist,"
   
   
8. Majorities don't matter because, per Taleb, the most intolerant minority rules.
   
   
9. "Personnel is policy" and don't expect the teachers and the HRs to back off their wokey agenda.
   
   
10. Wokies occupy all the institutional high ground.
    
    
11. "Long marches are long" and we haven't even started a counter-march.
    
    
12. "Culture wars are generational wars, and the young are woke as hell." Well, yeah. Because they have been carefully taught.
    
    
13. "The youth are still coddled and mentally broken"
    
    
14. "Elite overproduction is still in overdrive"
    
    
15. "'Wokeness is still required by law." And that goes all the way back to the Civil Rights Laws.
    
    
16. "Money is still power... This Wealth-Foundation-NGO-Government Complex thus works in unison to pour huge amounts of money-power into causes that are essentially by definition progressive ones (being to affect rapid change)."
    
    
17. "The opposition is still only political." There is no "resistance on the cultural, educational, economic, technological, and media fronts," not yet.
    
    
18. "Partisanship is still getting worse" and a Trump election in 2024 might unleash an "outbreak of the Second Woke Crusade to extirpate all the Racist Forces of Evil from the nation once and for all."
    
    
19. "None of the levers of power have changed or will change hands." I.e. "The intelligence agencies; the domestic security services; the military officer corps; the diplomatic service; the regulatory administrative state; the Ministry of Information [sic]; and so on."
    
    
20. This is just like Mao's Cultural Revolution. The leaders using the woke young to beat up on their rivals. But, like the Cultural Revolution it may not end well for the rulers.

Yeah. Don't get too optimistic, especially if the GOP wins the midterms.

But Who Will Be the Ruling Class?

In the last week or so I have been blogging on the crisis of our time. And the basic problem is that we are in the Autumn of the Educated Ruling Class, because the program of the educated ruling class has failed. It failed for the working class, it has failed for blacks.

And, of course, it has ended up being unjust to the ordinary Commoner middle class, because its over - under political formula, that was intended originally to feature the fat-cat bourgeoisie as enemy, has ended up with the ordinary Commoner middle class as the enemy, because racist-sexist-homophobe.

I have been noting how we have had a succession of presidents - Nixon, Reagan, Trump -- who have really campaigned and governed as the leader of the Commoner middle class.

I have noted how, despite all this, the Republicans have no clue what they are doing. And it is true, as the Zman writes, that conservatism really doesn't have a clue.

The question is: who would be the ruling class in the Next Regime, assuming that the Next Regime is a regime that features what I call an expanding-middle political formula, that regards the ordinary Commoner middle class as "friends" and anyone that wants to beat up on the ordinary Commoner middle class as the "enemy." But, anyone that wants to ally with the ordinary middle class is welcome as a friend.

And I don't mean here the top-dog part of the ruling class, but the second-tier, that today is the entire educated and credentialed class that benefits from the administrative state: the bureaucrats in the government, the lower-order politicians, the teachers, professors, journalists: everyone that Curtis Yarvin calls The Cathedral. Down to the nice liberal ladies that have #WeBelieve yardsigns out front.

And the answer is: I don't know.

But there is an even bigger problem. It arises from a notion from economist Milton Friedman. He wrote that government is always running against the limits. It always spends as much as it can, and it taxes as much as it can. And, I would say, it borrows as much as it can.

The question is: can modern government be cut back so that it is spending not 35-40 percent of GDP but, say, 15 percent of GDP? I don't know, but I suspect that it can't be done, partly because politics is always about loot and plunder for the supporters, and also because "women expect to be protected."

All I can say is that I am going to think about this. I am sure that someone has already figured this out, and that the answer is obvious. But I haven't figured it out.

Who will be the rank-and-file of the new ruling class that governs in the interest of the ordinary Commoner middle class? I don't know.