The Fatal Conceit of Every Ruler

Politics, according to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, is about the enemy. Any human community that experiences an enemy must rally together under a war leader to defeat the enemy. And a community at war must subordinate itself to its leader and fight as one to defeat the foe.

But when the enemy is defeated, what then? Then the leader comes up with all kinds of reasons why a top-down hierarchical system is still needed to save the community from chaos. And that is why just about every society we know about features a hierachical system with the war leader at the top, his lieutenants as his faithful followers, and the ordinary peasants at the bottom.

In fact, that is not the way that the world, or human society, works. We have realized, especially over the last 200 years, that human society is much more complicated than mere hierarchy, and that the horizontal interactions between humans are more important, both economically in trade and gift-giving, and socially, in the “lifeworld” where, according to Jürgen Habermas, it is not the single consciousness of the ruler that defines the world but all of us together, and we test and share our experience of the world in conversation with each other using the language we share.

And, from our market and social transactions and conversations, we leave behind a precipitate of agreement that becomes our culture and our understanding of the way things are.

Rulers are different. In his Vision of the Anointed Thomas Sowell writes about how our modern rulers believe and act as if they have a special relationship to the truth. They know, whereas ordinary commoners don’t. In Chapter 2: The Pattern, he relates how our current rulers have advanced policy in “The War on Poverty,” “Sex Education,” and “Criminal Justice.” In each case, the rulers declared a “Crisis,” declared a proposed “Solution,” ignored or explained away the negative “Results,” and came up with a “Response” that interpreted the failed “Results” as a need to redouble our efforts.

I experience “The Pattern” as the fundamental limitation of the political that I learned from Carl Schmitt. In politics, everything is about the enemy and defeating him. Obviously therefore, any setback, as in war, is interpreted as a need to redouble our efforts; otherwise we will be defeated and be driven before the enemy and hear the lamentation of our women. As I say, if a political leader admits he is wrong then it is time to resign. But no political leader is willing to do that!

We see this in the current situation of the Biden administration in June 2022. Basically, the Bidenoids made a grand strategic error in 2021 by going full bore on a trillion dollar handout and closing down oil exploration. But can President Biden address the nation and say “sorry, my bad?” Absolutely not. So he resorts to absurd complaints about Putin and oil companies not using their full refinery capacity, and ridiculous ideas about suspending the federal gasoline tax for 90 days.

But what if we are not in a war, or a “crisis?” Then, I would argue, we don’t need politics, but the normal human interaction and conversation that leads to agreement. Of course, down the ages, aside from court politics, people lower down the totem pole did exactly that. But in our modern era our rulers have developed the conceit that they can direct traffic from the court all the way down to the ordinary Joe and Jill at work and at home. I say that the results are in: top-down politics doesn’t work.

Another view is that of J.J. Clarke in The Self-creating Universe. His idea is that new things emerge out of the interaction between entities, from sub-atomic to living things to humans.

If this is true then all the conceit of our betters, from the welfare state to economic regulation to The Great Reset to ESG to the Green New Deal are bound to fail. That’s because they are not emergent, a coming together of different proposals and adaptations, but a top-down imposition of a single notion on everyone by some special person on top.

I suspect that this top-down culture is not just a folly our our present educated class but a failing of all political regimes, that issues out of the necessity of any war leader to coordinate his forces upon a single purpose, to defeat the enemy.

However, even in war, the Germans discovered in World War I, you need to push responsibility downwards as far as it can go, because the general in charge cannot comprehend everything that has to be done to attack and destroy the enemy. He can only propose the general outline of what has to be done, and that general outline is worked out and interpreted into more detailed orders as the instructions get retailed from army to division to regiment to company to platoon.

In life there is interaction, and give and take, and buying and selling, and giving and receiving, and conversation and disagreement and agreement. In politics there is only conflict, the war against the enemy.

I say that the next Big Thing in history is the emergence of rulers that know, as Susan Sowerby taught in The Secret Garden, that they don’t own the whole orange, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if they did.

The Age of the Commoner

Back in the day, King Henry VII of England had a problem. The Wars of the Roses had killed off most of the male feudal aristocracy. So how to repopulate the ruling class?

Perfectly simple, according to Liah Greenfeld, author of Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Henry promoted a bunch of commoners into the aristocracy. And thus was born the notion of the “nation,” a combination of people and nation. Because previously, “nation” meant the elite.

Redefined as the English nation, the English people was elevated to the dignity of the elite… A nation was a sovereign community of fundamentally equal members and inclusive identity, which cut across class and status.

And thus began an age in which, again and again, people of ordinary origin soared into the social stratosphere, not because of who they were, but what they achieved. What about Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII? Word is that he was the son of a butcher. Henry’s other Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell was the son of “a yeoman, fuller and cloth merchant.” His descendant was Oliver Cromwell.

What about Sir Francis Drake, scourge of the Spanish Main? La Wik suggests he was the illegitimate son of a well-connected farmer that got farmed out to a neighbor who ran a ship in the coasting trade.

Then we have the United States of America. The commanding general of the Revolutionary War was George Washington, a landowner by marriage and a slave owner. But his eminense-grise was “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar” from the island of St. Croix: Alexander Hamilton. It was the twenty-something Hamilton that kept Washington’s army going as his chief of staff. And then, as the first Secretary of the Treasury under Washington this brilliant commoner set up the National Debt of the new nation and organized its accounts so that today we have a continous recording of US spending and revenue going back to 1792.

And who can forget Benjamin Franklin, escaped apprentice, who built a fortune from printing and publishing in Philadelphia. He created the American culture of thrift, hard work, and community spirit in his Poor Richard’s Almanack. In his seventies he was the agent of the rebels at the court of King Louis in Paris and talked the French into supporting the American Revolution.

Andrew Jackson was the son of Scotch-Irish pioneers; his father died in a logging accident just before Andrew’s birth. He was captured by the British in the Revolutionary War and orphaned at age 14. He studied for the law and was admitted to the bar at age 20. At 35 he was appointed head of the Tennessee militia, and ten years later achieved immortality at the Battle of New Orleans. In 1828 this commoner became President of the United States.

Abraham Lincoln was the son of an unsuccessful farmer in Kentucky. With intermittent schooling, Lincoln worked on his father’s farm until age 22 when he moved to New Salem, Illinois. After serving in the Blackhawk War he opened a store with a friend. Then he became a postmaster and finally determined to study to become a lawyer and entered into politics, serving in the Illinois legislature and then the US House of Representatives. In the 1850s Lincoln was active in anti-slavery politics and the new Republican Party. He was elected president in 1860.

Warren Harding was the son of a farmer and schoolteacher who later became a doctor. His mother was a midwife. In 1870 his father bought a local newspaper, and Harding learned the business. He went to college at age 14, and purchased the Marion Star after graduation at age 18 and managed eventually to make the Star into a success. Starting in 1900 he was successively elected state senator, lieutenant governor, and in 1914 US Senator. He was elected president in 1920.

Richard Nixon’s father ran a lemon ranch, and then a grocery store and a gas station. He worked his way through Whittier College at the family store. He studied law at Duke, and was called to the bar in California. After WWII service in the US Navy, Nixon ran for Congress in 1946 and the US Senate in 1950, winning against liberal Democrats. In 1952 he was elected Vice President, and in 1968 President.

Ronald Reagan was the son of a salesman. After high school and college he worked as a radio and sports announcer. In 1937 he took a screen test and became a B-movie actor. In 1947 he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild and testified before Congress about Communists in Hollywood. In the 1950s he became the host of General Electric Theater on CBS and famously toured GE plants making speeches. In 1966 he was elected Governor of California and in 1980 President of the United States.

Then there is Andrew Carnegie, son of a handloom weaver who got steel production going; John D. Rockefeller, store clerk who created Standard Oil to provide safe kerosene for oil lamps. The Wright brothers were sons of a bishop in the evangelical United Brethren and neither went to college. Henry Ford was born on a farm and never attended high school, but did learn how to operate the Westinghouse portable steam engine. Steve Jobs was the adopted son of a coastguard mechanic. He developed a “blue box” with Steve Wozniak to make illegal free long-distance phone calls. He dropped out of college after one semester and then got a job at Atari.

Our modern world has been created and enriched by Nobodies and Anybodies: people without much breeding and without much education and without much polish. I wonder why.

Understanding Our Ruling Class

Ever since the French Revolution “we” have believed in a politics of Left and Right. Because the supporters of the French king in the National Assembly in 1789 sat to the right of the president and the opponents to his left.

Thus the Right came to be identified with the old order, with privilege, with feudal hierarchy, and the Left with reform, with ideas, and with the common man.

It is the saving faith of the Left that it stands for the worker, the oppressed, the victim, against the powers of privilege, of oppression, and stasis.

I I have been reading today a couple of pieces by the Zman proposing that the Old Order is ending, that the West is out of time.

The people will remain but what defines them, that old Western tradition, including its messianic claims, will fade away, slowly replaced by something not yet born.

On the other hand, he writes at Taki’s, the West’s utter folly in Ukraine marks the end of Russia trying to be a part of Europe from the East and the end of the Global American Empire trying to be a part of Europe from the West.

A question that I have is: what on Earth does our ruling class think it is doing? Here’s a piece by Leighton Akira Woodhouse about the homeless scene in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, in which the homeless demand for drugs leads to shoplifting and the whole thing run by an industry feeding money for drugs to the Mexican drug cartels.

Taken together, the dealers, boosters, and fences comprise a vast illicit industry that generates the cash that pays a Mexican drug cartel to import narcotics into San Francisco’s streets. Those drugs kill two people a day directly.

Then there are the “victims, from targets of muggings, burglaries, and home invasions to working class, elderly San Franciscans.” Their pharmacies and grocery stores get shut down, etc.

And yet our rulers do nothing about the whole operation, from homeless to drugs to petty crime to criminal gangs. Their philosophy is that criminals are victims, that police are thugs, that accused criminals should be released with no bail and society doesn’t care about oppressed peoples.

I am in the middle of Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed in which he notes that the rulers’ approach to problems doesn’t change and doesn’t respond to results on the ground.

War on Poverty. The idea back in the early Sixties was “to help our less fortunate citizens help themselves” and to effect a “decline in dependecy.” The record is that the War on Poverty has increased dependency, but our rulers have not changed their approach to poverty.

Sex Education. The idea back in the early Sixties was that sex education in the schools would help reduced venereal disease and pregnancies before marriage. In the event, STDs increased, pregancy outside marriage increased and marriage decreased. But our rulers have amped up the sex education to include celebration of LGBT.

Criminal Justice. In the Sixties the idea was promulgated from on high that the criminal justice system was primitive, vindictive, and a “deeply childish fear” without punishment crime “would run amok.” Why not turn jails into rehabilitation centers? In the event, crime, including murder, has increased, but fifty years later our rulers still think we are being too punitive, as in Soros prosecutors.

The point is that, despite the results of these policies being failures, our ruling class has not changed its approach to these issues over the past 50 years. If anything it has increased its commitment.

Now Sowell has a Five Point analysis of the ruling class’s approach to the world.

1. Social problems exist because people other than the rulers “lack the virtue or wisdom of the anointed.”

2. Social beliefs are “socially constructed” rather than an adaption to reality, so that problems should be solved by ruler rationality rather than “evolved traditions” or social adaptation.

3. When things go wrong it is intentional rather than “systemic.” Someone is to blame.

4. Great social dangers can only be averted by “imposition” of ruling class vision.

5. Opposition to the rulers issues not from a valid difference of opinion but from intellectual or moral faults in the lower orders.

What, you may ask, is wrong with these people? I think the answer is that, in politics, you can never be wrong. The whole point of politics is to lead the people to war against an enemy that threatens to annihilate us. If our gloroius leader fails to lead us to victory, he is outta here. So, he can never say: gee, fellas, I guess I screwed up that one.

The lesson, then, is that anything short of a war to the death against annihilation should not be a political issue, but assigned to other social institutions, from economic to social to religious.

But for our ruling class it’s too late for that.

So what do we do? I say that we work on a new narrative to replace the old narrative of our present ruling class, that the Zman says is “something not yet born.”

Only I think that its outline is pretty clear. The new narrative will say that the wisdom of the ages is in the semi-conscious evolution of the culture of the middling sort of person, that lives engaged in the sinews and the day-to-day social and economic relationships of society. As opposed to the vision from on high of our present educated evolved ruling class.

And I say that the day will come when the whole superstructure of our present ruling class, represented by the analysis of Thomas Sowell above, will come crashing down. Rather like the whole structure of late-feudal/absolute monarchy came crashing down in France in 1789.

Why did it come crashing down in 1789, and lost the Mandate of Heaven in that year of all years? Good question. But come crashing down it did.

Change: Billionaires Want to Change the World

Friedrich Hayek's last book was title The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. In it he labels as the "fatal conceit" the idea that "man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes."

Now comes Karen Hunt at American Greatness in "Know your Enemy" like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Jef Besos and others that think with a bit of technology they can change the world.

These elite firmly believe they are so smart, so wise, so all-important that they have the right—indeed the obligation for the good of the planet—to exploit everything and everyone, right down to the last pound of flesh and even our most private thoughts.

Funnily enough, they already did! Inadvertently, with their PC operating systems and their iPhones and their online buying. They changed the world by accident, and then, a billion or so dollars later decide they want to change it by design.

In A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles Thomas Sowell takes another tack. He says that our modern elites have two different visions. Some of them have a "constrained vision" that believes we don't know the half of it. The others have an "unconstrained vision" that believes we can remake the world using our logic and reason and science. Thus the Age of Reason.

In Sowell's narrative the father of the modern unconstrained vision was William Godwin with is 1793 book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. For Godwin it was a crime not to use all our logic and reason to make the world a juster place. We could say that the father of the constrained vision was Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. In this vision there is a lot more respect given to the unseen wisdom of habits and cultures and ways of life that develop unbidden in society.

The interesting thing to me is that today it is the conservative man in the street that talks about logic and reasonn and the lefty that talks about "lived experience." And yet the lefty is still trying to upend society with his "fundamental change" and the conservative that is still saying: Whoa Neddy.

And yet, the lefty still wants to redesign society. Because justice.

I suppose we should just be grateful for the Law of Unintended Consequences. La Wik has a history starting with John Locke -- who discussed the unintended consequences of interest rate regulation -- through Adam Smith, Engels, and Robert K. Merton. Today it is, of course, the commonsense of every conservative that every new liberal program is wrecked by unanticipated consequences of gubmint mucking around where it don't belong.

We see the weakness of the lefty approach to life right now in the utter disaster of the Biden administration that thought it was going to shut down oil exploration and fossil fuel electric generation and push electric cars and have a war in Ukraine and shovel money at its supporters and fight racism and transphobia and not think for a moment that everything would blow up in its face.

I wonder if the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of the world appreciate that they got their billions because they had an idea that worked, and that other people got a say. Because we wouldn't have Apple and Microsoft bestride the world if the world hadn't decided, one purchase at a time, to buy into their brilliant ideas. Nobody forced people to buy iPhones and Microsoft Windows back in the day.

I like to say that the difference here is the change created by Anybodies, where one in a million has an idea that changes the world, and the change created by Somebodies, where the ruling class and its stooges tells the world to change, or else.

The point is illustrated by the business startup culture. Lots of people come up with ideas that they are convinced will change the world and they try to put them into practice. But very few of them actually end up amazing the world.

There is no reason why the same should not apply to political and cultural ideas. Lots of people have great ideas for changing the world. But how do we decide which of them are any good?

When the Recession's on the Democrats' Watch

Dp you realize how rare it is for a recession to occur on the Democrats' watch?

2008: Great Recession was on President Bush's Watch. Cause: blowup of Dem cheap mortgage policy.

2000: Tech Bubble broke in 2000 but wasn't felt until 2001, on President Bush's watch. Cause: probably excess enthusiasm from tax rate cuts plus the easing of credit in the 1998 Russian bond default.

1990: Recession took place on President Bush I's watch. "Worst economy in last 50 years," said Candidate Clinton.

1980: Stagflation on President Carter's watch but recession on President Reagan's watch. Somebody had to curb 10-20 percent inflation.

1969: Recession on Nixon's watch. Hangover from LBJ's double wars: on poverty and Vietnam.

But I think we are staring at a recession that will be 100 percent on Biden's watch. And do you know what I think? I think that nobody in the Democratic Party has a clue about what to do. Because the Democratic Party agenda is always a new round of spending that they advertise as a boost the economy, but which really boosts Democratic constituencies and voters.

There has never been a time in my adult life where Democrats have authoried a policy that would curb the loot and plunder getting shoveled out to their supporters.

But the current economic nightmare has many authors:

1. President Trump jawboning the Fed not to raise interest rates in the fall of 2019.
2. The administrative state's lockdown policy response to COVID.
3. The Fed's print-money response to COVID.
4. The reluctance of the administrative state to end lockdowns and travel restrictions.
5. The Biden administration's belief that Obama didn't stimulate enough in 2009.
6. The Green New Deal policy of shutting down fossil fuel exploration and use.
7. The Fed's delay in returning to a post-COVID monetary policy.

Yeah. All in all, I'd say that the combination of all these economic errors is not going to be any fun.

But here's my point, going back to the list of recessions in my adult lifetime. In none of these recessions were the Democrats in charge while the thing was developing. In almost all cases, Republicans were the ones having to take the unpopular policy decisions needed to fight inflation or curb an excessive boom.

Obviously, President Biden is the last person you would choose to be president in such a time. Heres's a guy that sat around in the Senate for 50 years and never did anything serious in his life. Plus, his administration is staffed by a bunch of DEI appointments chosen for their race or gender or sexual orientation rather than for their competence in rallying an army on a stricken field.

It's easy to say that it serves them right. But, of course, it isn't the ruling class that suffers during inflation and recession. It's ordinary people, especially the lower class people I call Subordinates.

And it's easy to tell ordinary people that it serves them right for voting for Democrats. But our society basically teaches everyone that Democrats are the people that care about people like them; that's what Curtis Yarvin's Cathedral is all about. You have to be an ornery old cuss to break with The Narrative handed down from on high at the altar of the Cathedral.

But someone is going to have to come up with the ideas and the policies and the intestinal fortitude to lead us out of this mess with the least suffering for the American people. And I don't see that leader coming out of the Democratic Party.

Put it this way. If someone asked you to name the go-to guy in the Democratic Party that everyone regards as a safe hand on the economic tiller, what name would you come up with?

I rest my case.

Panic at Activist Organizations

Now, as never before, because Trump etc., progressive activist organizations need to be effective so they can fight injustice. And yet, progressives worry, today's activist organizations are becoming totally ineffective. Said a progressive organization head:

[there are] millions of people depending on these [progressive] organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way.

But, it's as if the right wing had deliberately succeeded in sabotaging them.

Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. … Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.

This is in an article by Ryan Grim at The Intercept about how progressive advocacy groups are so embroiled in making the organization itself a just place -- and free from racism, etc. -- that they have abandoned their sacred duty of making the world a better place. He starts with meetings at the Gutmacher Institute, the pro-abortion research organization in the wake of George Floyd.

Heather Boonstra, vice president of public policy... talked about the role systemic racism plays in society and the ways that Guttmacher’s work could counter it. Staff suggestions, though, turned inward... Staffers suggested additional racial equity trainings.. With no Black staff in the D.C. unit, it was suggested that “Guttmacher do something tangible for Black employees in other divisions.” 

In other words, the cancel, safetyist, self-care culture is not just ruining the effectiveness of our schools and colleges and woke corporations, but the very social justice organizations that are trying to create a better world. It has resulted in "wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years" in organizations like "The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement." Oh no!

But my interest in the article was really the taken-for-granted idea that progressives today are fighting like never before against a tsunami of injustice.

• In the wake of George FLoyd progressives were united in "a reckoning with racial injustsice".
• In mid 2021 the Biden administrations program of "transformational change" stalled as organizations broke down into "internal strife and internal bullshit" instead of fighting for "reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change."
• "Trump’s shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike... A period of mourning turned into fierce determination to resist."
• "The ACLU alone collected almost $1 million within 24 hours of Trump’s election and tens of millions more over the next year."

Know what I think? I think that when social justice organizations are as focused on the internal justice of an organization it means that the threat of injustice from those monster racist-sexist-homophobes of which you've heard tell is not that urgent.

That's the way humans are programmed. When there's an emergency, and our lives are threatened, we all come together and we subordinate ourselves selflessly to the self-appointed leaders.

But when the emergency recedes a bit, then we start to want to renegotiate our place in the hierarchy and demand that the boss is nicer to us. And whatabout that promotion he promised in return for a job well done!

Which goes to prove that the existential threat of injustice is not quite as bad as we've been told.

Don't Do Anything Stupid, Rulers

Last week President Biden blamed Putin and Republicans for inflation.

President Biden on Tuesday blamed Russia’s war in Ukraine, corporate greed, the pandemic and the policies of “ultra-MAGA Republicans” for causing record-high inflation...

“It’s not because of spending,” Mr. Biden said when asked whether he is to blame for inflation. “I think our policies help, not hurt.”

OK. So how do you tell when a politician is lying? The answer is because his mouth is moving.

Plus, my little maxim: Why do politicians lie? Because we the voters insist upon it.

Now, I don't know if President Biden really thinks all those stupid things he is saying in his speeches. He is lying because if he didn't then the only thing to do would be to resign.

By the way, how are you Fact Checkers doing these days? Somehow I haven't heard much from you lately.

What I am starting to worry about is that, with everything going wrong, the Biden administration will do something stupid.

It looks like the Ukrainians are losing the war in the Donbas. Which means that Biden and the Europeans could do something stupid, so they don't look bad, and start World War III.  

It looks like the stock market and the economy are totally screwed, with inflation and recession occuring at the same time, even as the Fed is determined to raise interest rates. Which means that Biden might do something stupid so that he looks like he is "doing something."

It looks like we are having a meltdown on the crypto front, with Bitcoin down from $68,000 to $22,000, and I read that "One of the biggest lenders within the crypto market, Celsius Network, is struggling as the booming sector turns sour." Hey, Chairman Powell of the Fed, and all the Euro ships at sea. You do know that you guys are the "lenders of last resort," right?

It looks like the Democrats are going to get wiped out at the midterms in November. So what are they doing? Running J6 show trials and threatening to indict President Trump. That would really solve all our problems, right?

It looks like there is a bit of a cock-up on the China front, with:

China's High-Speed Rail Network is a Trillion Dollar sinkhole

The run on regional Chinese banks, plus people losing their down payments from Evergrande 

The CCP "order a few weeks back for top party officials to keep all their money in China." But what about nephews and nieces?

Suppose China had a real economic crisis, and invaded Taiwan to distract attention. Could the Biden administration avoid doing something stupid?

It looks like "minorities and women hardest hit" in the baby formula crisis. Imagine if Biden & Co. decided to nationalize baby formula to solve the crisis.

But really, what could go wrong?