How Humans Deal with the Unknown

My pal Fritzi Nietzsche famously wrote "God is dead." La Wik comments that

Nietzsche used the phrase to express his idea that the Enlightenment had eliminated the possibility of the existence of God.

Then La Wik starts to waffle. 

However, proponents of the strongest form of the Death of God theology have used the phrase in a literal sense, meaning that the Christian God, who had existed at one point, has ceased to exist.

But I think that they are all missing the point.

I say that all humans have to deal with the things we do not know. And I say that the problem has got worse with the explosion of knowledge in the last 500 years.

Take the whole question of life. How did life get created? Every civilization has a story about that, and it usually involves God -- or one of the gods -- creating the first living thing.

And today? We are still unable to account for the creation of the first animate object. I am reading a review of current thinking on the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" by a Brit philosopher J.J. Clarke. His book is The Self-creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview.

The book is really about how to talk about things that we really don't understand. Like Evolution. Used to be that we attributed it all to God. But then came Darwin and evolution. Animals and plant "evolved" to form new species and characteristics. But how? Well, because of the natural selection of small, inherited variations. Then came the gene theory, of gene variants that changed from parent to child. Now, I believe scientists are talking about "microevolution.̈"

But how? Clarke side-steps that question with the notion of "emergence." Changes in plants and animals and communities and the market "emerge."

Do you see how clever this is? It avoids dealing with the actual mechanism of change, whatever it is, and just proposes that the way the world works is that change "emerges."

Another clever sidestep in the notion of "agency." We avoid the sticky issues of "freedom of choice" and "rational decisionmaking" versus "instinct" and unconscious decision making by noting that all living things exhibit "agency." They seem to exhibit a decision-making ability. Really, it comes down to observing that even simple organisms seem to exhibit purposeful behavior, such as in the pursuit of food. Where does it come from? Never mind. Call it "agency."

In other words, humans -- and other living things -- need to make decisions all the time without fully understanding what they are dealing with and how it works. So we come up with all kinds of cunning notions about the world that fall short of really understanding what is going on.

So I tend to chuckle about our current Creation Myth, the Big Bang. It's a very satisfying myth, and engages all our knowledge about the the way the world and the universe works. So far. But that was true in the Genesis account of Creation.

Now, I might say, why bother with a new Creation Myth? Why not just say this? Here we are. We don't know how we got here; we don't know where we are going. We don't know if our modern technology is a boon or if it is destroying the planet. We don't know what came before life, and we don't know what happens after life.

But we don't. Doesn't matter if we are hunter-gatherers or lefty activists. There is always a Creation Myth. There is always a God and a Satan. There is always Heaven and Hell. There is always a Beginning and an End.

And the person that doesn't believe in God? Don't worry: they have a god. They just call it something different.

And we humans are always inventing of new ways to think -- and opine confidently -- about things that we don't quite understand.

It really is amazing.

Two Views of Our Ruling Class and Its Power

If you are like me you are always looking for reports of cracks and infirmities in our ruling class. To keep hope alive!

But the question is: is the ruling class on its last legs, or cunningly playing us all for mugs?

Or, to put it directly, has Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just administered the coup de grace to the Canadian truckers? Or has he displayed a fatal weakness and overreaction that will bring the rule of the Canadian educated crashing down in the weeks and months ahead?

The Zman has a piece out at Taki's that presents the rulers -- and particularly the media -- as all part of a seamless coordinated monster. He mentions Joe Sobran writing twenty years ago about The Hive. Exactly:

The managerial class is now an organism. It now has collective awareness in the class-consciousness sense, but none of the subsystems are aware of themselves as integrated parts of this organism.

Thus its propaganda, its policy, its reaction to events, everything about it is as natural as a coordinated hive of bees. The ruling class doesn't need to tell its functionaries what to do or what to say. They already know, instinctively.

On the other hand, Victor Davis Hanson views the elite bubble as a weakness.

Our elites like Trudeau and Newsom seem angry they are unfairly underappreciated by their clueless beneficiaries. The latter supposedly never appreciate the needed remedies for climate change, the thought cleansing required to eliminate systemic racism, and the mind reprogramming demanded for true diversity, equity, and inclusion thinking. 

Or is it like this?

On stage, a petulant cast of clueless Justin Trudeaus and bumbling Joe Bidens simply cannot fathom why few anymore are listening to them.

My view is that both Zman and Hanson are right. Our rulers do indeed act like a Hive, instinctively knowing what to say and do to guard and protect their power.

Until.

I've been reading a biography of Andrew Mellon, banker and industrialist and Secretary of the Treasury in the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. And Mellon didn't know what to do as thousands of banks were going under in 1930, 1931, and 1932. Of course his liberal biographer, David Cannadine, Hive member, contrasts the cluelessness of Mellon with the all-knowing all-successful Roosevelt. 

And that's the point. When the economy in going good, ordinary people just go about their business while the ruling class builds castles in the air "tackling" climate change and "fighting" systemic racism.

But when inflation hits ten percent, and gasoline is up 50 percent and the people are harassed by a blizzard of COVID regulations and ukases from the laptop class, that's when ordinary people rise up and dump the old rulers for new ones.

Not because they know what the rulers did wrong. Or because they know what needs to be done. But because the only thing The People can do when everything seems to be going wrong is to dump the rulers and try new ones. 

That's what they did in 1932, when clueless Mellon didn't know what to do. Looking over the blizzard of projects that Roosevelt's brain trust came up with, I'd say that only two were worth a dime. First, was an Emergency Banking Act that printed a bunch of money so that banks could meet heavy withdrawals, and banks wouldn't fail any more. And the second was going off the Gold Standard. All the rest, the NRAs, the CCCs, the TVAs? Baloney and nonsense on stilts and Jobs for Gentry.

The point is: will the same ruling-class rejection happen in 2022 and 2024? The answer is simple. We Don't Know.

And if we kick out the current ruling class from executive power, will it make a difference? We Don't Know.

But we do know this. The century-old ruling-class doctrine of wise top-down regulation and organization goes right against the Science™. Because the science today says that the universe works not by mechanical organization but by creative emergence, lots of people trying new ideas and the good ones surviving and making a fortune for their inventors.

As in: Elon Musk thinks that his reusable Starship spaceship and booster system can replace current jet passenger transportation, and do it cheaper. Is he right? We Don't Know. But stay tuned...

Changing the Tribal Rules

Here's a piece from Carl M. Cannon on the "Five Tribes" of America.

Back in 2018 the Five Tribes were:

Make America Great Again	12%
Mainline GOP	14%
The Detached	24%
Independent Blues	24%
The Resistance	26%

That was then. Now in 2022 the numbers are a bit different.

MAGA	14%
Mainline GOP	27%
Institutionalist Democrats	20%
Woke Democrats	19%
Multicultural Moderates	20%

Hmm. It seems to me that the second set of percentages are intended to obscure what is happening.

Is The Detached now supposed to be the Multicultural Moderates? 

Is The Resistance now the Woke Democrats?

Or what?

Or should we add the MAGAs and Mainline GOP together and make 26 percent in 2018 and get 41 percent as GOP supporters in 2022?

And add Independent Blues  and The Resistance in 2018 to get 50 percent Dem supporters in 2018, and add Institutionalist to Woke Democrats and get 40 percent Dem supporters in 2022?

So we would get Three Tribes, like this for 2018:

GOP Supporters	26%
Not interested	24%
Dem Supporters	50%

And again, Three Tribes, like this for 2022:

GOP Supporters	41%
Not interested	20%
Dem Supporters	40%

In other words, are the establishment pollsters trying to obscure the collapse in support for Democrats and the surge in support for Republicans, or what?

Look. There is no politics without an enemy. If you are into politics, the First Question is: who is the Enemy?

Ever since Marx (and probably before) the rising ruling educated ruling class has operated a political formula where an enlightened ruling class uses its enlightenment to advocate for the helpless lower classes. The Enemy was the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. Only today, two things have changed.

Back in the day, the Helpless Ones were the workers. Today the Helpless Ones are non-whites and non-heterosexuals. Back in the day the Enemy was the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. Today the Enemy is the broad white middle class. That is all.

Only, of course, there is a little problem. There is a real danger that the broad white middle class is now starting to include the rising Hispanic middle class, and the Tiger Mom East Asian middle class.

Nobody thought about that back in the day. Not that anybody thought about anything. They just established their political formula and the Enemy as the broad white middle class without really thinking about which side Hispanics and East Asians would end up on.

And even then, the Hispanics and East Asians might have stayed as Democrat voters. I mean, it's the sensible and practical and no-decision thing to do if you want to stay out of trouble, truckers. But now we have the lockdowns and the mandates and the inflation, and they are falling hard on the broad white-and-every-other-color middle class.

And what is the ruling class doing? It is not saying: wow, bit of a cock-up on the political formula front. Maybe we should have an all-hands meeting of the ruling class to figure out what to do.

No, the ruling class is doubling down on its folly. It is declaring emergencies over a peaceful trucker protest. It is declaring an armed insurrection when the wrong sort have a mostly peaceful protest. 

And that won't end well, ruling class.

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.