Three Peoples: There is No One True Faith

One of my maxims sneers at the People of the Subordinate Self. The meaning of life for workers and  peasants is to shelter as a "little darling" of a powerful patron, a lord of the land, a union, or a powerful politician.

But, I argue, the day will come when that powerful patron will abandon you, because you are no longer useful to his power project. There is no long-term safety in subordination.

But then, I realized yesterday, the same is true for the other two of my Three Peoples. In other words, it is not enough to have a fixed principle of life, because life, the universe, and everything changes.

If you are a Person of the Responsible Self you live as a responsible person by fixed rules, maybe handed down from God and the Bible, or maybe from good bourgeois cultural memes. But what happens if the world changes, and the good old rules no longer work? A responsible person goes to  work, follows the rules, and obeys the laws. The same work? The same rules? The same laws? Forever? Obviously that cannot work, not forever.

Ah, say the People of the Creative Self, you deplorable responsibles just don't get it. The world is changing, and we, the creatives, the educated, the activists, will show you the way.

Only, of course, what if it is the wrong way? I was reminded of this by a piece by Jonathan Cook taking our "liberal elite" to task and complaining  of "rampant creativity." Or this piece about the decline of classical music since Debussy and critiquing creativity for the sake of creativity. It is not for nothing that Jungians present the creation and destruction as two sides of the same coin. It is telling that critics of, say, Jordan Peterson are flummoxed by the definition of the feminine as the opposition of creation and destruction. They have been carefully taught to think of creation as good, destruction as bad.

But obviously it all makes sense. If you are a creative person then you should be thinking that your brilliant idea may be a brilliant mistake. That is what the environmentalists are going on about with their Precautionary Principle. Don't do anything without thinking about the possible unintended consequences.

That's why I think the Three Peoples should open their eyes and recognize that there are different ways of looking at the world, and different ways of living, and that the other guys may have a point.

Above all, what I may think as perfectly right and true may in fact be the royal road to disaster. Obviously, it is much easier to grasp that what another person thinks as perfectly right and true is in fact the royal road to disaster. One thing we humans really excel at is picking apart the ideas, the beliefs, and the actions of other people.

So what is the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?

It's a good question. And isn't it comforting that everyone is working on it, and most of us are pretty confident that our answer is the right one?

Let's Apply Three Peoples to This Week's Issues

Yesterday I triumphantly showed why my reductive Three Peoples theory is a triumph of humanity, because it understands that all kinds of different people need to be accommodated in this world so that "we can all get along."

By contrast, I showed that the Left's Three Peoples theory is a recipe for conflict, because it reduces Good vs. Evil to a caricature of noble activists vs. evil deplorables -- with the noble activists wanting to help the helpless victims of the world, and the evil deplorables wanting to oppress and marginalize said helpless victims.

Why should this be?

It all makes sense if we understand the Left as a secular religion that wants to save the world by bending the arc of history towards justice. This means that our lefty friends have not got Beyond Good and Evil as Nietzsche proposed. The clue is clueless Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) calling border walls "immoral."

Now, in Beyond Good and Evil our pal Fritzi made a big deal about "the priests" teaching us to hate ourselves. We had to get beyond the self-destructive culture of blaming ourselves for all the problems of the world if we were going to become amazing Zarathustras thinking deep thoughts at the top of the mountain.

Actually, I think that Nietzsche didn't quite get "the priests" right. What they were saying, from the Axial Age on, is that we all had to get right with God if wanted to transcend the sins of the world. And then we would be saved. But those that didn't listen to "the priests" and the Word of God that the priests preached would go to Hell.

Now, tell me the difference between "the priests" of old and "the priests" of today preaching salvation by social justice -- and if you don't believe in the Word of the Left then you will lose your job, won't get your book published, and certainly will not be allowed to teach at the nation's schools and universities?

The joke is that the enlightened have been teaching us for two hundred years that we must never go back to the bad old days of the wars of religion when people were burned at the stake for the crime of heresy.

Hey, it's only been a hundred years in which the world has seen political regimes that make the autos-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition look like a walk in the park. One hundred million dead at the hands of the left's murderous regimes, and that says nothing about the lives merely brutalized and ruined by the all those lefty thug regimes from Lenin to Maduro.

Anyway, a while back a bunch of white supremacists said: I know! Let's reduce the power of government and religion to get together and teach the government rebels and the religious heretics a lesson. Let's forbid a state religion, and any condominium between government and religion!

I know: they should make a movie: Crazy Rich Founders.

Egad! What a crazy idea! Why, in a regime like that who will be teaching the racist sexist homophobes a lesson? What kind of a world would it be in which free range bigots were running around without the proper correction from the righteous Twitter enforcers?

I am trying to say that our lefty friends have recreated with their own three peoples theory -- featuring creative activists, evil deplorables, and helpless victims -- the old regime of the Axial Age and its various priestly religions. There is only One God, and his Word, as interpreted by his priests, is final.

In the political regime set up by our Founders an attempt was made to introduce the notion of tolerance, in which it was understood that people have all kinds of different beliefs, and that people ought to live almost side-by-side with the Other. Questions of life and death would be decided by government; questions of social cooperation would be decided by the gentler give and take of  interpersonal cooperation.

And, of course, my Three Peoples theory recognizes, as a first principle, that each of the Three Peoples is really different, and not likely to agree on a lot of things, some of them  pretty central and important to the question of how do we all get along.

So what about the Covington Kids at the March for Life. Our lefty friends say that it is monstrous that a white supremacist teenager wearing a MAGA hat should smirk at a Native American mostly peaceful protester, because "hate." I would say that anyone in America can smirk at anyone else. Period.

So what about the Democratic presidential candidates coming up with Medicare For All and wealth taxes and higher marginal income taxes and Green New Deals? Do you see that all of these ideas are monolithic one-size-fits-all notions where you will sign onto the official line and there is no opting out? That is the basic point of big government. There will be one size fits all; there will be no exceptions. And you will be forced to pay for it. I  think that we have a word for this kind of thing: injustice.

So what about abortion, in which New York State just legislated that any woman can abort a fetus up to and after natural birth? I think that abortion is a terrible mistake for any woman to make, because what is the point of a woman but to bear and rear children? And for a man I would say that telling a woman to "get rid of it" is utterly despicable, because what is the point of a man if he does not protect and support the mother of his baby?

See, in the old way, the Age of Good and Evil, there can, indeed, be Only One Way. That was so during the Wars of Religion, and it is so in the left-inspired socialist and welfare-state regimes across the world.

In my way, founded on the understanding of my reductive Three Peoples theory, we understand that there cannot be Only One Way, because, for a start,  there are Three kinds of People in the world.

We say that it is one thing to decry racism, but another to insist that everyone toes the liberal line on race, or else.

We say that helping the poor and the aged with e.g., health care, is a good and proper thing, but making health care into a single comprehensive and mandatory program of government force is another thing.

We say that swingeing taxes -- except in wartime -- whether to teach the rich a lesson, or to save the planet from global warming, are an abomination.

We say that abortion at full term is a monstrosity, whereas abortion before viability is merely shameful.

One of the big differences between government and religion is that government operates by force, but religion -- when not a state religion -- operates by naming and shaming.

So when you separate government and religion you can get the government to focus on evils for which overwhelming force is the only option -- such as arresting a 66-year-old Russian colluder with the full force of the FBIs and their SWAT teams.

And we can get religion to focus on things that are merely shameful, such as smirking at people trying  to get you all riled up. And if everyone's religion is a private community without access to the coercive powers of the state then people that are merely shameful still get to live, and however riled up people get about the sinner next door there is no chance that they are going to be able to get the FBIs and their SWAT teams to wake that sinful neighbor up one winter morning.

Unfortunately, every religion that I ever heard of finds it very difficult to avoid the temptation of what liberals used to call "legislating morality" and forcing the other guys to bow to our gods.

What is needed is for everyone to believe in my Three Peoples theory that proposes, as a basic principle, that there are three kinds of people in the world, that they experience the world differently, and they want and need different things to successfully wive and thrive, and that this is perfectly natural and physical.

And that if we all  accepted this we could all live together and live happily ever after.

Of course, there is the problem of people that have not yet accepted the saving truth of my reductive Three Peoples theory. As of right now, I do not have a solution to that problem.

My Three Peoples vs. the Left's Three Peoples

As you may know, I divide people into three parts, as Caesar did with Gaul. It's a very human thing to do: Past, Present, Future; Garden of Eden, present misery, future Heaven; past perfect society, present injustice, future heaven on earth. The Rule of Threes is all over the place.

My Three Peoples are: the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants; the People of the Responsible Self, middle class individuals; and the People of the Creative Self, artists, writers, and activists.

The left has a different Three Peoples. There are: the historically marginalized helpless Victims, that lack agency. There are the Creative Activists, dedicated to bending the arc of history towards justice. And then there are the vile Deplorables, racists, sexists, and homophobes, that are responsible for all the world's wrongs.

Do you see the big difference? In my Three Peoples theory the question of Right and Wrong has not already been determined. In fact, it seems to me, the big point about my Three Peoples is that each People is living life according to their lights. Sure, my People of the Subordinate Self choose to minimize their responsibility, but this is a sensible decision based upon their understanding of the world and the disadvantage of living as a subordinate peasant or a worker. But the subordinate peasant or worker still lives in a responsible, if subordinate, way.

The People of the Responsible Self accept the suzerainty of the market, and do their responsible best to respond to its demands, while living according to the Word of God or other fixed menu of how to live. Obviously, for the responsibles everything hinges on how well you have followed the rule book. Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell, follow from that.

The People of the Creative Self accept the hardness of the creative life; how creative acts are not available by signing up for a course, or for following the rule book, but found in a perilous life on the border between Order and Chaos, ending perhaps in the death of the Sacrificial Hero.

In the Left's Three Peoples, the world is much starker, and simplified.

The Helpless Victims have no agency. They are not to be judged, for they are innocents, crushed under the wheels of oppression and injustice. Their only hope is to be led by activists in mostly peaceful protests to demand their rights.

The Deplorables have agency, and they have used it for ill by oppressing the Helpless Victims with racism, sexism, hate, homophobia, and all the other -phobias since whenever. And their very culture is poisonous: white supremacy and toxic masculinity.

The Creative Activists have agency, and they have used it for good, by rooting out long-buried oppressions and injustices visited on the helpless and the powerless, particularly in the capitalist age, because profits and patriarchy, and by advocating for the helpless and the powerless, and leading them in mostly peaceful protests to bend the arc of history towards justice.

Well? Am I right, or am I right?

I think that I am exposing the absurd moral drama that the left conjures up. It can't be true that the noble activists are always the good guys. Are there really no bad apples? And if there is an occasional bad apple, how could we tell? It is an insult to present the Helpless Victims as incapable of agency, forthat makes them subhuman. And it is a vile injustice to present the whole middle class -- as Marx did -- as evil.

Now, in my admittedly reductive Three Peoples system, the agency is understood to be graded, with the People of the Subordinate Self practicing the least amount of agency, and the People of the Creative Self practicing the most amount of agency.

And one of the most important things to understand is that the more you act in the world whether as a simple bourgeois that follows the rules, goes to work, and obeys the law, or as a creative artist or start-up businessman or as a political activist, the first thing you should grapple with is that, when you make a mistake, people will be hurt. That is the argument of the environmentalists' Precautionary Principle. In other words, the more talent you have, the more creative chops, the more ambition, the more lofty your goals, the more you should think about who gets hurt if, as the Brits say, you get your sums wrong.

Ain't it cute? When it suits the left to stop the capitalists and their projects dead in their tracks, the Precautionary Principle is front and center. But when we are talking about, e.g., a government takeover of health care, then nothing but crickets.

The reason for this little problem is quite simple. The left does not have the basic decency to look at itself in the mirror and ask: am I really helping the helpless, or am I merely flattering my conceit as history's gift to the helpless?

And that is worse than a mistake, worse than a crime. It is a blunder.

So, Kamala Harris Won't Axe Private Health Insurance. She Says

In her triumphant presidential campaign kickoff, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) promised Medicare For All. And when asked by an interviewer a couple days later, she said that it would be the end of private health insurance.

“Let’s eliminate all of that,” Harris said when asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if, under her proposed “Medicare For All” proposal, Americans with private insurance plans could retain them.

Now she has backed off. Of course she has.

Let me rehearse the reason why.

Way back when, neoconservative god Irving Kristol said that the only way to help the poor with social programs was to deal in the middle class.

If you wanted to help the workers in their old age with government pensions you would have to create a comprehensive and mandatory program that would also give benefits to the middle class. Thus the popular Social Security.

If you wanted to help the elderly poor with medical care you would have to enroll all the elderly, including the billionaires. Thus Medicare.

So when HillaryCare emerged in 1993-94 I thought to myself that it can't work because the average American worker already has health insurance at work.

I still remember where I was, in the summer of 1994, when a bewildered NPR woman reporter told us Seattle liberals that the American people were against HillaryCare. Of course they were: Because of the Kristol Rule. The average American already had health insurance, so HillaryCare would do nothing for her.

The Democrats had learned their lesson when pushing Obamacare. President Obama lied, and lied again when he insisted that, "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." Oh and keep your "health plan." He had to lie, otherwise Obamacare would never have passed.

But, of course, after Obamacare was passed the voters wised up and elected a Republican House of Representatives on the spot, and a Republican Senate four years later.

Because, Senator, the voters were damned if they were going to give up their private health insurance to help the 30 million or so marooned between Medicaid and workplace health insurance.

So now comes Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) with a brilliant and wizard wheeze for BernieCare, or KamalaCare or whatever, and her first step out of the gate she says "let's eliminate all that" private health insurance.

Which, I think, tells us that Willie Brown's best girl is not yet ready for prime time. Because, Senator, you can only pass new government programs if you deal in the middle class. Or brazenly lie about it.

The problem for our Democratic friends is that there is almost nothing left in the loot-and-plunder department in which the middle class has not already been dealt in. Yeah, you can propose Medicare For All, but the middle class already has health insurance. You can increase taxes on the wealthy but guess what: you ain't gonna collect much new revenue because all the tippy-top rich are going to get their money out and that means that their money ain't gonna be creating much in the way of middle-class and working-class jobs. You can pass your glorious program to save the world from climate change, but the ordinary yellow-vest middle class isn't going to stand for paying swingeing energy taxes to get there.

Hey, it's not just Democrats that have a problem here. I'd like to reform Social Security and make it into a real savings program: but today's workers and grandpas basically say "over my dead body." I'd like to reform Medicare so that it provides a basic decent health program for the elderly poor, and get everyone else to pay for their own end-of-life health care. But grandma says "they'd better not touch My Medicare." I'd like to reform government education, but the teachers and administrators say: "over my dead body."

So that's why we have a deadlock in US politics today. The Democrats are becalmed because the middle class doesn't want to pay for somebody else's benefits. The Republicans are becalmed because the middle-class doesn't want to give up a dime of the benefits that they "already paid for."

What's the end game here? I have no idea. Maybe, when the crisis arrives and the government runs out of other people's money we will elect a leader that will propose and administer the bitter medicine that will repair the government's finances. Or maybe, as in Venezuela, the government will flush the whole country down the toilet rather than admit that it was wrong.

Hey, maybe the wonders of 5G will unleash such a tidal wave of prosperity that the deficits and the debt will disappear. But I doubt it.

All I know is that when the crash comes, minorities and women will be hardest hit. Just like last time.

And you can take that to the bank, Senator Harris.

The Educated Class Have Had It Wrong Since Before World War II

I am reading Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday which features a pretty big helping of "we intellectuals" were the good guys, back before World War I, who were building trans-national friendships and understanding and creating the idea of a united Europe, so how come the haters and the narrow-minded gave us World War I and the haters and the fascists gave up World War II?

Well, Stefi, I will tell it to you, straight. But I warn you, you won't like it.

You don't found political entities on the basis of international friendships and hoity-toity rich-kid writers all getting together in a cafés in Paris -- or in meetings up in Magic Mountain land.

You found political entities, Stefi, in the crucible of war. That's the only thing that can create the experience of unity that persuades people to give up their old allegiances for a new one.

Sometimes the sense of unity is created by the agony of defeat. Take France, within which was the semi-independent Duchy of Burgundy taking up about half the land area of modern France. La Wik.

[W]hen Charles the Bold died in battle without sons, Louis XI of France declared the duchy extinct and absorbed the territory into the French crown. The daughter of Charles the Bold, Mary of Burgundy... refus[ed] to accept the loss of the duchy. The War of the Burgundian Succession took place from 1477 to 1482. Eventually, King Louis XI of France and Archduke Maximilian I signed the Treaty of Arras (1482). Maximilian recognised the annexation of the two Burgundies and several other territories.

So, the King of France said: That's it, Burgundy is part of France, and after a couple of wars, the Burgundian rulers capitulated.

When did Britain arise as a nation? Probably as a result of the Civil War of the 17th century, and certainly by the end of  the Second Hundred Years War against France from 1688 to 1815.

The US? Obviously the sense of US nationhood was forged in the Revolutionary War, and then, for those that didn't get the message, in the Civil War. Did you know, by the way, that politicians that had served in those wars were always referred to by their Revolutionary/Civil War rank? As in Colo. Hamilton and Major McKinley. Those guys were brothers-in-arms forever after.

Now, Germany is the example that proves the rule and that, after many years of confusion, made the whole matter clear to me.

See, Germany was a collection of more-or-less independent states, ruled over by a collection of princes  and bishops, and nominally joined together in the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. But the empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. And you can imagine what the various princes would say about being subsumed into a Prussian-dominated German nation.

So what was Bismarck to do if he was going to unite Germans into a single nation that could take on  the French nation that had been trampling Germans underfoot for the last two centuries, and very likely more?

Answer: fight and win three convenient little wars against Germany's neighbors, starting with the easy one, against little Denmark in 1862, continuing with the medium one against a decliningAustria in 1866, and finishing up with the big one against France in 1870. With each war Bismarck got more and more German princes to send their hometown troops to contribute to the effort. You can see why this worked: with each victory, the prince that kept his troops out looked like a pansy. And so the German Reich was announced in 1871 in Versailles.

Now, the reason that there is no European nation is that Europe has never fought a war as Europeans against some eevil anti-European foe. It really doesn't matter that elite Europeans all have friends across Europe, or that elite Europeans can get together in Brussels and cook up various bureaucratic dodges to force the nations of Europe into a European nation. Without the unifying experience of a war it will never happen.

Obviously, the only candidate for eevil anti-European foe is Russia. But somehow, I don't think that a nice quickie war against Russia would be a very good idea.

And then, assuming that the Europeans did unite against some dastardly foe, what about the aftermath? Who is going to be the Big Cheese? The French or the Germans? If you have the brains to solve that problem, you probably should not be in politics but working on the next Physics revolution that will make quantum mechanics look like a walk in the park.

Look, I think that Stefan Zweig is a great writer, and he can evoke the Zeitgeist of intellectual Europe magnificently. But in important ways, Zweig and Co. are idiots, the kind of idiots that have got Europe to its present state of dysfunction, where in various ways the people are rising up against the clueless cultural and political leaders that have led a continent whose women aren't much into having children, and whose men aren't much into shouldering manly responsibilities, and that think that the solution is to import millions of Muslims.

Our ruling class has got three things wrong during its dynastic domination of the past century. First, it has betrayed the migrants to the cities by encouraging them in their tribalism and by failing to teach them the ways of the responsible bourgeoisie. Second, it has failed to be tolerant of the great middle middle class, imposing its own religion and culture in a kind of soft Reign of Terror. Third, it fails to understand that the only way to get a united Europe is by a war.  And, by the way, the only way to get global governance is through an interplanetary war. Think of that!

Other than that, our educated ruling class is tops. In other words, no better than any other stupid ruling class down the ages.

I admit I am prejudiced, but I think that the only ruling class that had more than half a brain was the US Revolutionary generation. If you ask me, the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, and Hamiltons were so miraculous that they constitute a proof of God's existence.

Explaining Hate: My Pure Theory of Politics

So what are we going to do, Americans? How are we going to heal the divides in our beloved country?

Here's the thing. The only time people in a country come together is when they are threatened by an existential peril. The rest of the time they are free to argue and quarrel, and they do.

Example #1: World War II. The divisions of the 1930s were all healed and all Americans were united in fighting and destroying the threat of Nazism. But after the war we went back, not to our old divisions, but new ones.

Notice that there are two kinds of existential peril. There is the threat of an army on the border threatening invasion. It's amazing how people can bury the hatchet when the Nazis or the Mongols are massing on the border.

Then there is the existential peril of a natural disaster. If your barn collapses in a storm you'd be amazed how your neighbors will rally round to help.  And if you neighborhood is flooded by a hurricane, you'll be amazed by all the fishermen launching their bass fishing boats to help out.

It is pretty obvious why this is so. It's a question of survival. Down the ages, humans have rallied together when faced with an existential peril -- and survived.

Notice that there is another kind of evil that humans combine to fight against: a moral evil. So whereas it is political leaders that bring us all together to fight an existential peril, it is moral leaders, the priests, the bring us all together to fight a moral evil.

In the present fight over The Wall, President Trump is making the existential case to keep out dangerous foreigners, while Speaker Pelosi is making the moral case that a wall -- or at least This Wall -- is immoral.

A vital part of every appeal to unity to fight the existential danger is: Hate. The political leader always teaches us to hate the enemy on the border. And the moral leader teaches us to hate the Evil One that is threatening the moral order. The best thing is to represent the Hate you generate in your supporters as a rage for justice and to represent the Hate in your opponents as Literally Hitler. Because we wouldn't want anyone to think that we are all Haters at heart.  No, no. We are the good guys, and the other guys are the Haters.

So, if you want to get anything done in politics, you have to conjure up an existential peril, and rally your supporters to fight the foe. In normal times this means that the two political parties will be rallying their supporters to fight the other guys over some existential issue. Sometimes the issue will be physical, such as an army on the border; sometimes the issue will be moral.

In the good old days local political differences were resolved by civil and dynastic wars. But we are above all that, at least for now.

The idea of democratic politics with a legislature and all is to convert actual civil war into a fake civil war called an "election" and then continue the sham fight with lively debates in the legislature where elected politicians throw verbal barbs instead of real ones at each other, and then defuse the natural tendency to fight endlessly over some real or imagined issue by splitting the difference with half a loaf, or by shifting the costs of the issue on some third party that isn't at the negotiating table.

It really is very clever. Instead of plundering the losers by sacking their cities and robbing them of all their worldly goods right then and there, you plunder them gradually with taxes laid by democratic votes in the legislature. Instead of grabbing the loot and passing in out among your supporters in the smoking ruins of your opponent,  you pass out the goodies to your  supporters every month with a check. This is not that hard to understand. Any shepherd will advise you not to kill the sheep to get its wool, but rather to shear the live sheep every year.

Obviously it is not good when the political parties can't agree to disagree and instead insist on all or nothing. But it is not surprising. After all, if we are facing an existential crisis, it obviously will not do to compromise; we are talking life and death here!

Going back a couple centuries or more we had a bunch of political thinkers here in the West who invented a politics that would try to dial down the natural enmities among men. That was what all the fuss and feathers about democratic elections, dual-camera legislatures, and separation of powers was all about. These chaps decided that politics and conquest was not the best way to resolve human differences. So they attempted to mew up politics and politicians with a web of rules and opposed institutions to discourage squabbling and reward fair dealing in the corridors of power.

But then came a bunch of political thinkers that invented a politics that made political power into the very salvation of mankind. There are still a lot of them around, and this kind of politics is taught to all our young people in the government schools and government-funded universities.

It becomes very tricky to conduct politics when one side thinks that politics should be confined in a zoo and the other side thinks that their particular brand of saving politics should roam free and unconstrained -- while the other side is nothing but privilege and hate.

But that is where we are.

Attempting a Scientific Explanation of Elite Hate

The last couple months have been definitive, if you ask me.

First, our lefty friends utterly abandoned all the principles of our Anglo-Saxon legal tradition in their hate-filled attacks on a nominee to the Supreme Court. "Believe all women" they cried.

Second, our lefty friends utterly abandoned all principles of decency when they took out after a white Catholic teenager wearing a MAGA hat in the face of a Native American mostly peaceful protester.

I think the two events show our human propensity to go with our faith rather than the facts. And I think that this is both natural and physical.

In other words, I propose that to "keep the faith" with your tribe or your religion, or your family, or the place you work is a fundamental part of being human. I propose that the reason we humans are alive today is in part because of this blind allegiance to "our" side, and our blind hatred for the "other" side.

And I like to say that the big reason for humans "keeping the faith" has been the necessity of defending our own little patch of food-growing land from other people. Nothing wrong with other people. It's just that only one tribe or village at a time can occupy a patch of land and harvest its food. Same thing goes for chimpanzees where the males defend their patch of food-growing land from the males in the neighboring troop. If you don't defend your patch of land from competitors then you soon will be out of food. Curtains, according to philosopher Bugs Bunny.

But then came cities, and then the industrial revolution, and the world changed. All of a sudden, it didn't really matter who owned the patch of land. Because now humans could trade for everything. Now the only thing that mattered was deploying a skill that you could trade for the necessaries of life.

I don't think we really appreciate what a staggering change this is.

By the way, do you remember that "H" word chap? One of the basic principles he propagated in his book was the obvious fact that a people needed to live on their own food-growing land.

Formerly, what humans needed was a firm tribal solidarity so that, at a moment's notice, its young men could be mobilized to defend the border of its patch of land. I dare say that the whole panoply of tribal culture that involves worshiping the same god, loving our tribe, and hating the next tribe over, is all a part of the human need, right until yesterday, to defend the patch of land.

But now everything has changed. Now the question is not how do we figure out new ways to defend our patch of land from other people. Now the question is how do I figure out new ways to increase my skills and create products and services, all so that other people will buy my labor and purchase my products and services.

Do you see the difference? Formerly, other people were a danger. Today, other people are an opportunity.

So, the world has changed.

But, obviously, there are bound to be people that don't get it. And there are bound to be people that, after repeated demonstrations of fundamental transformation, still don't get it. That, after all is what religion and culture and politics is all about. You hold onto your religious, cultural, and political faith even though you are getting signals that everything has changed.

So when Marx and Engels said, in the years when the industrial revolution was starting to hit Germany, that nothing had changed, that the old domination of feudal lords over agricultural peasants would be replaced by the domination of the bourgeoisie over the industrial workers, they had a point. It stood to reason that once the rising bourgeoisie had achieved political and economic hegemony it would rule and dominate just like the feudal barons of old.

Only Marx and Engels were wrong. The bourgeoisie did not become a new feudal elite, and exploit the workers into the ground. They were willing to dilute their power by giving the workers the vote. I like to say that the reason this happened was because the bourgeoisie was not that interested in power.

Too bad, because by the time that the facts on the ground indicated that Marx and Engels were wrong, the two agitators had been transformed into the prophets of a new religion, a religion of believers in the holy commitment to advocate for the wretched of the earth and lead them in a political movement against the bourgeoisie and its program of domination and exploitation that the prophets had foretold.

But I don't want you to think that this disinterest in power demonstrated any particular virtue in the bourgeoisie. It is just that in the bourgeois religion and culture and experience it pays to get along with other people as co-workers, as customers, as clients, as lenders, as borrowers. So that is what bourgeois people do.

The problem is that the movement that Marx and Engels created is based on the old principle of implacable opposition between my group and your group. It didn't matter that the facts on the ground belied the lefty faith in class conflict. Humans live by faith. And when our human faith is challenged we tend to redouble our faith rather than question it. By the time that facts on the ground indicated that Marx and Engels were wrong the new religion was in the saddle and propagating its faith all over the world.

And just in time a new generation of prophets arose. When World War I demonstrated that the old class conflict theory was problematic, because the workers identified with their nation before their class, a new generation of prophets prophesied the white male exploitation of women and minorities.

OK, so in the Sixties, the males and the whites were persuaded to accede to Civil Rights Acts to guarantee rights for women and minorities. Once again, the broad middle class demonstrated that it was not that interested in power. It was perfectly willing to allow women and minorities into the charmed circle of male white privilege. (Dirty little secret: it is not power that makes the world go round, not any more; so the evil white male monsters were not giving up the philosopher's stone or the Ring of Power).

But the Faith! The Faith in the power of educated enlightened activists to Smash the Power! Just because the world has demonstrated that Power is not the only thing, or not even much of a thing at all, that has nothing to do with the Faith of educated white ruling-class activists of good family in the sacred calling of activism to save the wretched of the earth from oppression and exploitation with the Ring of Transformative Political Power.

And this is what we are seeing. People, especially white liberal ruling-class people, are interpreting the images of the day in the light of their faith. In the affair of Brett Kavanaugh the faithful did not see the monstrous injustice of using un-corroborated accusations from high-school days. What mattered was their faith in abortion and their terror that their abortion rights might some day be reduced -- and this from women mostly beyond their child-bearing years. People, especially white liberal ruling-class people, are interpreting the Covington Kid as a smirking toxic white male oppressor. They do not see the vile racism of black religious cultists that had spent a hour yelling vile racist, sexist, homophobic slurs at the kids. They do not see the vile bigotry of a Native American forcing his drumming culture in the faces of people that maybe weren't all that interested in Native American drumming culture. They saw nothing except what their faith taught them to see: a white male kid in a MAGA hat "smirking" at a helpless Native American victim.

My point is that the faith of our liberal masters believes in a world in which racism sexism and homophobia are everywhere. It is not surprising that, in faithful observance of their faith, our liberal masters do in fact find racism, sexism, and homophobia everywhere they expect to find it. That is the whole point of faith.

And our liberal masters are utterly oblivious of the fact that their program of Affirmative Action that became diversity and inclusion is racism and sexism, straight up. Their program uses government power to privilege people according to their race and gender.

But have some compassion for these poor deluded ruling-class folks. They are merely believing and practicing what they have been carefully taught, to hate and to fear the people that their teachers have told them are racists, sexists, and homophobes.

At some point, I think, our liberal masters are going to experience a crisis of belief, when the world will start to crash in on their walled garden of faith, and it will suddenly start to dawn on them that everything they believe is a lie, including "and" and "the."

In my view these crises of belief occur in witch-hunting events that we also call a Reign of Terror, a Great Purge, or a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The crisis occurs because the saving faith of a revolution is not quite delivering on its promises. So the faithful amp up the voltage, because obviously the only way to bring on the millennium is to start eletrocuting the heretics.

And then the whole thing collapses in a Thermidorian Reaction.

Of course, this natural and physical process of purging might take years, even decades. But you never know. It might all be over tomorrow, or possibly November 4, 2020.