Liberals Don't Have In-group Bias. Are You Kidding?

Here's a puzzler, reported in his regular Friday piece by Christopher DeGroot. According to a study by GenForward at the University of Chicago, of the four major racial groups in the United States -- white, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians --  whites have the least "in-group bias" and white liberals the least in-group bias among whites.

Oh dear. Why do I have to 'splain everything to the fools of the world?

Whites have the least in-group bias because that is what we have been carefully taught by our liberal teachers and professors. And most people believe what they have been carefully taught in their dear little ear from year to year.

But to speak of white liberals having the least in-group bias of all misses the point. For liberals the "in-group" is not their racial identity. Or ethnic identity, or whatever we call it this week. For liberals their ïn-group" is their cultural and political identity. That's why the #WeBelieve signs went up in my rich liberal neighborhood after Trump's victory in 2016. And the You Are Welcome signs. And the Hate Has No Home Here signs. Talk about in-group identification! Educated liberals are the worst! That's why liberals ended years-long friendships with conservatives after Trump's victory.

Think of this: If liberals are so low on in-group bias how come no conservative can get a job at a liberal university?

The whole point of liberalism and leftism and the like is to provide religion and identity and the meaning of life to post-Christian educated people.

Unfortunately, religion is a curious human artifact. Reading H.R. Hallpike about primitive peoples it is clear that religion is and always has been crazy-cakes. I mean that people believe crazy things that completely misinterpret the world, but that the net cultural result of the crazy-cakes beliefs can still be beneficial to human social cooperation. Or not, as the case may be.

This explains why post-Christian religion has been complete crazy-cakes; it has been one crazy notion after another. Religions always are.

Think about it. First the Enlightenment that said everything should be understood as the operation of mechanical reason, or something. Then the Romantics said that can't be true, because that is not the way that humans, even Rationalists, actually live: whatabout Art? Then the Marxists mashed Reason and Romanticism in a apocalyptic combination of Reason and Rage that thoughtfully killed 100 million people in the next century. Then you have Freud imagining sons wanting to ravish their mothers. Really, Siggy? Speak for yourself! Or you have Jung mashing Freud and Romanticism together with all his personal unconscious and collective unconscious and individuation stuff. Then you have the cultural Marxism (don't you know that is a conspiracy theory now, according to Google?) proposing that meaning comes in our ethnic and gender identities. And so on.

Now I believe, following my reductive Three Peoples theory, that each of the three peoples properly believes in a different religion. The People of the Subordinate Self believe in a powerful god or gods that, if in a good mood, will shower them with benefits. The People of the Responsible Self believe in a God that sets up the world and tells them to get on with it, get out there and love one another, remembering that at the end of life there will be a spot of divine judgement. So watch it, pal!

Now all this religion so far is right and proper. The question is: what religion is right for the People of the Creative Self. Thus far, in the last century or so, our creative friends have gravitated towards a religion where the god-is-dead god has decided that the People of the Creative Self are the gods, the creative wonders of the world, and should be the wise and compassionate rulers of all the rest of us.

I believe that this religion of the People of the Creative Self is sick and wrong. I believe that the best word on religion for creative people was already written over a century ago by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra. According to Nietzsche the right an proper thing for a creative genius to do was to go up into a cave in the mountains. And when people started to show up and want to be devotees and cult members and creative worshipers the creative genius tells them to get lost.

Notice how my three religions notion understands "in-group bias." The People of the Subordinate Self are pretty tribal; they have strong in-group bias. That's OK, because that's how the humans of the village wived and thrived. The People of the Responsible Self are not that tribal. That's because they have been taught by Christianity and Judaism not to be so tribal. That's because Christianity and Judaism are religions of the city where in order to wive and thrive you have to trust the stranger -- providing he proves to be trustworthy: Trust but verify, as St. Ronaldo once said.

But the foolish People of the Creative Self think of themselves as gods; this is what happens after you decide that God is Dead. Now this is a curious thing: after deciding that God is Dead they have immediately determined that they are the new gods. But here is another curious thing. They have not decided, like the gods of the Axial Age, to set up the world, publish divine law from some convenient mountain, and then let humans get on with it. No. They are gone all the way back to the Homeric gods that were knee-deep in micro-managing human affairs 24-7. The neo-Homeric creatives have become obsessed micro-managers and have proposed one disastrous thing after another and sent their policemen out with billy-clubs and worse to enforce their tiny-little-minds wisdom. I call this movement the Great Reaction. These neo-Homeric gods have turned nations into slave plantations with their socialism; they have turned citizens into serfs with their welfare state; they have turned citizens into tribal members with their identity politics.

They are fools, knaves, and monsters.

And, they are the most obsessed with in-group bias. Because boy, they sure adhere to their own particular tribe, the tribe of educated progressives.

Today's K-thru-grad-school Sucks. But What Do We Do About It?

Polemicist Kurt Schlichter does a grand job today reaming out our government and elite education system. Says he: "The Admissions Scam is Another Reason to Destroy Academia as We Know It."

Well, yes, Kurt. But what do we do about it? You can't beat something with nothing, old chap.

Fortunately I have been thinking about this in my usual destructive free-spirit style. Because I certainly agree with Kurt that we should burn the whole thing down.

Now I think that the answer for K-12 is pretty simple. First, the little kiddies should all go to home school, run by the neighborhood mothers, and any neighborhood woman that doesn't kick in would be named and shamed in the usual way of the community of women down the ages, featuring the eternal complaint: "I can't believe she is so stuck up that she won't help out." We could have a government program -- or better a billionaire funded program -- to school the children of pre-literate parents. But every other mother should get with the program of educating their own kids, and get the hell out of their job in corporate HR.

Then, I think that we should re-introduce child labor. Really, what is worse: having a kid help around a business or sit still drugged to the nines, because ADHD, in a government child-custodial facility?

Oh and forget the minimum wage, which is Baldrick's cunning plan to make young people unemployable.

Anyway, after age 12, kids should be allowed to work full time. Period. Maybe they start with unpaid internships. But hey, if a kid doesn't have the sense to learn to be useful and to get paid for his labor after a few months, well...

Now, in my view, schooling for a lot of teenagers is a waste of time. For them we should have a comprehensive and mandatory apprenticeship scheme. Call it Apprenticeships For All. This should appeal to our liberal friends because it would be a way to force employers to provide free services to their employees, and it could be a wonderful source of investigative reporting on employers that scam their young employees by short-changing their education obligations.

For, back in the day, the indentures for an apprenticeship usually included an obligation for the employer to pay for education for the young apprentice. I dare say that this could be done by outsourcing to community colleges or even private apprenticeship schools -- modern day mechanics institutes -- or it could be just a computer in the back room at which a kid could take on-line courses, the way they do it at Wal-mart.

Personally, I think that the government should be forbidden to run schools, except for the armed services, because no government that I know of refuses the temptation of teaching the little kiddies ruling-class ideology.

But what about universities? Really, the technical subjects: science, engineering, medicine, law, ought to be free of the university system. Abraham Lincoln learned his law by clerking in a law office. And many employers seem to be eager to help their employees increase their knowledge and skills.

But, down the ages, the university has been a device for ruling classes to teach ruling-class ideology. and to teach the scions of the ruling class how to run the government and continue the blessed rule of the enlightened and the better sort. I think this is a bad idea in the long term because it creates a deep state that knows nothing except ruling-class ideology and so sets itself up for rebellion by the disaffected plebs. When you get rulers that have half a brain -- chaps like the Duke of Wellington, Benjamin Disraeli, Bismark, Lincoln, Thatcher, Reagan -- they rose to greatness by rising above the mundane and the ordinary ruling-class ideology.

So I would argue that no university should be allowed to teach ruling-class ideology, on pain of admitting 20,000 deplorables a year and paying them to attend. The only politics and philosophy that a university should be allowed to teach should be critiques of the current system.

This means, dear liberals, that no university should be allowed to teach "activism." Activism, we know, is a conceit that the obedient scions of the ruling class are in fact root-em toot-em revolutionaries. No, chum, they ain't. Just about every activist marchin' and protestin' today is a good little boy or good little girl doing exactly what they have been carefully taught by government-paid teachers in school. Real activists get put in jail for disturbing the peace, and when did you last see that happen to a lefty protester?

Can we do without schools? I don't know.

Reading C.R. Hallpike, I realize that literate human society needs a different way of raising children from the old days of pre-literate society. Says he:

Bruning suggests that the factors in childhood experience making for difference in cognitive development are, apart form literacy itself, the extent to which children are surrounded, as in a modern urban environment, by the works of man; the degree to which they are reared apart from the rest of the community and from which their schooling is in subject matter a separate world; the degree to which children have imparted to them the rules of their society verbally and explicitly by their parents instead of learning them by participating in social life[.]

 He reports that young children in primitive society rarely ask "why" of their parents. That is because "much of their learning occurs in real situations"  in a "normal environment" whereas our way of "instructing the young [is] based heavily on telling out of context rather than showing in context."

There is an interesting consideration here. On the one hand it is clear that modern raising of the young requires getting them out of the house so they can transcend the limitations of their parents. But on the other hand children away from their parents are vulnerable to the power agenda of teachers that may have nothing to do with the welfare and the interests of the child.

So how much of a child's education should be supervised by family and neighborhood, and how much by "a separate world" of e.g. teachers and classrooms?

I don't know, but I think we need to find out.

Great Reaction: Reparations is Neo-Vengeance

Because I am reading a book of essays about "primitive peoples," On Primitive Peoples: and other forbidden topics, by anthropologist C.R. Hallpike, I am experiencing the critical border between the world of pre-literate peoples and post-literate peoples.

And one of the critical differences is the emergence of law, meaning the disposition of interpersonal conflicts by means of courts and judges, rather than what I believe is called the lex talionis, or an eye for an eye, or, more prosaically, Vengeance. Hatfields and McCoys, and all that.

Now, I was also reading extracts from Frederic Bastiat the other day. And he was expatiating on the whole point of law: that it resolves disputes without the use of force. For, he repeats again and again, when you are talking about force you are talking about plunder. Says Walter E. Williams:

Bastiat observed that "when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

Only, when you do that you do not have a legal system any more. You just have loot and plunder.

So when our Democratic friends running for President talk about "reparations" they are talking about plundering their fellow Americans in pursuit of vengeance for African Americans.

I am not going to go into the question of whether blacks are owed something, or whether it is impossible to determine who owes what to whom a century and a half after the freeing of the slaves, or even whether, since slavery was ubiquitous two hundred years ago it makes sense to draw a bright line between the villains and the victims today. No. I prefer simple-minded stuff.

So that is why I say: Reparations is neo-vengeance.

The point about the lex talionis is that there is no end to it. There is no end to the fight between the Hatfields and the McCoys until all the men on one side are dead. Right now I am reading the second novel in the By the Hands of Men series by Roy M. Griffis. He's writing about the Russian WWI nurse returning to Russia during the Red-White civil war. When a town is captured by the Reds the Cheka, the first iteration of the Soviet secret police, moves in next day and starts shooting all the bourgeoisie: you can tell who they are by their clothing and their soft hands. Teach 'em a lesson.

See why I say that the Left is a Great Reaction? What a grand idea, to wipe away the accretion of centuries of written law -- going back to Hammurabi or earlier -- and replace it with the good old ways of murder, rape and plunder. And Vengeance, because it is time someone taught those guys a lesson.

As I say, it is really not surprising that, in the aftermath of the most astonishing cultural revolution in human history and prehistory that a movement of rejection should appear: a Great Reaction.

For when I say that socialism is neo-slavery, that the welfare state is neo-feudalism, that identity politics is neo-tribalism, that activism is neo-knight-erranty, and now that reparations is neo-vengeance, it all connects. If you are trying to gussie up a political movement the obvious thing to do it to appeal to some instinct deep in what we now call the unconscious.

Slavery, you ask? Well, back in the day, 1,000 years ago, serfs could go to their lord, place their hands within his, and become slaves. Hey, what's not to like? You get three squares a day, or at least the promise thereof. And slaves, they tell me, do very little work.

Feudalism, you inquire? Well, it is clear that most of us are more comfortable working for wages for an established business than founding or going to work for a tech startup. What is a corporate employee but a gussied-up serf?

Tribalism, you ask? What else explains the multitudinous tribes in the leftist Coalition of the Fringes? Yes, you can organize humans into tribes every which way from Sunday, on any basis of affinity. Used to be that this affinity would be blood relationship, but even then it was possible to get adopted into a tribe as an honorary member. The point of the tribe, of course, is to have an implacable enemy. Thus all the neo-tribes of the left have frightful enemies that are about to commit hate crimes without number. Christian bakers, for example: better keep a sharp eye on those guys. But everyone has an enemy. The workers have the bosses. The feminists have the patriarchs. The blacks have the KKK. Of course, back in the day, we Americans had the Commies.

Knight-errantry? What else do you call the ruling-class-approved culture of activism, traveling the world on your faithful nag Rocinante in the search of the next helpless victim?

So what, you ask, is the point of all this?

Imagine you are talking to you liberal friend about the new crop of democratic socialist politicians. Suppose you say, well, this is all very well, but let's face it: socialism is nothing but neo-slavery.

You lefty friend will not really know how to respond to this. After all, nobody talks like this on MSNBC; nobody writes like this at The New Yorker.

Good point. So, you should get out more, lefty. You might learn something.

Then you add, just for an encore, that of course the whole leftist project is a return to the primitive culture of vengeance.

Great Reaction: Activism is Neo-Knight-Errantry

I am so pleased with my notion of the left as a Great Reaction -- socialism is neo-slavery, welfare state is neo-feudalism -- that I keep wanting to add more fuel to the fire.

So, yesterday I thought: what about "activism?" How does that fit into the scheme of things? What kind of neo- is it? Of course, I didn't have an answer, not right away.

But then the answer came to me -- in another proof that the Freud-Jung notion of the unconscious has real legs.

Here it is: Activism is neo-knight-errantry. As in Don Quixote and tilting at windmills.

And the more I think about it, the more I know I am right. Activism is Don Quixote on stilts -- I mean Rocinante.

The joke about Don Quixote is that its hero had spent so much time reading "chivalric romances" that he imagined himself to be reviving that ancient way of life, wandering the world righting wrongs and saving damsels in distress. So, says La Wik,

Don Quixote, in the first part of the book, does not see the world for what it is and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story.

Of course, the chivalric romances -- like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and Parzival -- were, even in their time, highly romantic notions of the life of the aristocracy. The whole point, I imagine, was to make the feudal lords feel good about the purpose of their life on Earth. Heck, they were not mere armed looters and plunderers, but noble do-gooders, riding around the country righting wrongs with sword and spear in the name of the lady-love whose scarf they displayed on their helmets.

So there is a double joke with Don Quixote: he's all revved up about a fiction which was itself a report on a fictional Golden Age of a ruling class righting wrongs instead of merely running their feudal fiefs and keeping the serfs in their place.

See how this applies to our activist friends? The conceit among our activists is that they are revolutionaries, in the mold of those famous revolutionaries of 1789 and 1848, sallying forth into the world to lead "the workers" or "the marginalized" to justice. Because the injustice!

But the reality is that every lefty revolution has lead straight to injustice, do not pass Go, and to death, and killing, and starvation. That is what you young heads full of mush want to model your lives upon?

And there is another thing, that I symbolize with my maxim: the middle class is not that interested in power.

If you form a movement, or even a minor political group, and you petition our modern middle-class governments for a redress of grievances, chances are good that the political system will try to "do something" for you. That is how we got the whole bloody welfare state costing 35 percent of GDP in taxes. People want free stuff, and the political system responds to them.

Notice that the left does not believe in the redress of grievances, not when it's the bourgeoisie or toxic white masculinities.

But think about the current situation from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. All this free stuff is poison to us. Apart from the fact that it is all based on force, because government is force, there is the soul-destroying stupidity and inefficiency and inability to adapt that applies to all government programs. Yet we put up with it. And we believe in live and let live, not in punishing Christian bakers.

So why do we need activists to lead the downtrodden and fight for justice? The answer is: we don't. Because middle-class government is a government of laws, not of plunder, or it would be if the middle class had its way. If someone has a genuine grievance, then middle-class people will give him or her a hearing. That is the record of the last century, subsequent to the moment when the middle class got the vote and replaced the old monarchical and feudal governments.

The point of the old notion of chivalry, I imagine, was the need for young aristocratic blue-bloods to think up something glorious, something a little more glorious than administering their boring aristocratic agricultural fiefs. That is why, I presume, as late as the time of Henry VII in England in 1500, they held tournaments, where aristocratic hot heads could tilt lances at each other, riding expensive horses and wearing expensive plate armor, while the ladies watched in terror. Merchants need not apply.

Same thing today. Activists fret and strut their hour on the stage, reading the historical romances of Marx and Zinn, and imagining themselves like the revolutionaries of a former age bravely out-daring the dangers of the time (only they would not be quoting Shakespeare). But today's activists are not brave rebels: they are the little darlings, the scions of the ruling class. And Marx and Co. were not brave revolutionaries either. Sure, Marx got kicked out of Europe for his doings in 1848, but he didn't get sent to die as a slave laborer in the Kolyma goldfields. He lived out his life in London, bonking the help, writing books, and supported by his rich kid friend Engels.

The fact is that our lefty activist friends want to take us back to a time that never was. Revolutionaries are not noble activists; they are murderous thugs.

Where Do We Go From Here?

It's not just the Collusion Confusion that has me worried. There's the utter collapse of the education "system" into lefty narrative: that's why it's possible to have a phenomenon like AOC. There's the censorship of conservatives on social media; last weekend Twitter was manipulating the account of the movie "Unplanned" and its followers. There's the whole stumbling bumbling dishonest stupidity -- thank goodness -- of the administrative state that we got to see throughout the collusion drama.

Maybe there's a real silver lining to all this: that the educated, the credentialed, the wise, the advanced are no better than the rest of us. They all, as Jordan B. Peterson says, look at the world through the lens of their values, their model of how the world works. They didn't want to see that the deep state conspired illegally to entrap President Trump, starting during the Obama administration, and because they didn't want to see it, they never did see it.

Maybe that's good news. The ruling class, like all ruling classes that inherit power from their forefathers, is a bunch of idiots. Those guys really aren't that smart.

But here is the thing. What happens next?

We know that everything about the left is a lie, including "and" and "the." That is because the left is a curious movement of reaction, what I have called The Great Reaction. Actually, I am conceited enough to think I understand it. The whole explosion of city living, of humans all over the world leaving the rural life of subsistence -- or near subsistence -- farming for the market economy in the city, is terrifying, unlike what humans have experienced for millennia. So it is natural that leaders of reaction should arise and tempt people back to the old ways.

I sneer that socialism is neo-slavery, that the welfare state is neo-feudalism, that identity politics is neo-tribalism. But there is this: the fact is that slaves usually don't work very hard. Primitive man, according to chaps like C.R. Hallpike, didn't work too hard either. So, pal: whaddya want? Freedom and enslavement to the market, or slavery and a neo-childlike existence where most everything is provided for? Freedom and hard work, or feudal subordination and the implied promise that your feudal lord will protect you when the going gets tough? Individual responsibility and its cares, or the comforts of tribalism within the crowd of a nation or a liberal identity group?

But where do we go now?

The Zman is obviously thinking the same thing, as he states that Left and Right have been arguing about equality and hierarchy, Horizontal and Vertical, for the last 200 or so years to little effect.

If there is to be a next chapter to the story of European people, it will require a conception of society that acknowledges the hierarchical relationships that are natural to man, but also the interlocking horizontal loyalties and commitments that allows for a strong cultural core.

The funny thing, of course, is that the Left, that worships the horizontal ideal of equality, has created the most horrific vertical hierarchies in all history. And they attack the market system as hierarchical, when it treats all alike, and only asks if they have something to contribute, something that other people will be willing to pay for.

But where is the Next Thing? Who is the Next Thing? If we look back to previous cultural upheavals -- the Reformations, the Enlightenments -- we see the Names that excited the young'uns. Calvin, Luther, Voltaire, Goethe. Marx.

But in this stumble-bumble era there seems to be no Big Name. What is going on? Is it, perhaps, that the previous intellectual revolutions were revolutions from above, an internal affair of the intellectual elite, peons need not apply? Is it that now the intellectuals are all bought and paid for by the ruling class and that there is no opportunity for an intellectual rebel to make a name for himself by forming a phoney-baloney "resistance" to the status quo?

Maybe the future will be determined not by Stars in the Intellectual Firmament but by nobodies whose ideas and notions will infuse the culture the way that market innovations take over the market. And so the world will change without anyone even noticing. Could that happen? Is it possible?

Who knows? All I know is that, for me, the current ruling class has lost the Mandate of Heaven so that an idiot like Trump could run for president and win. And that the dumb and stupid deep state couldn't even shoot straight enough to entrap him with its Baldrick's Cunning Plan of surveillance intended for use on terrorists and not on the opposition party.

Exactly. Jolly good fun.

The problem with the emperor losing the Mandate of Heaven is that the next thing is a Time of Troubles. That is a polite way of saying that a lot of people are going to get killed.

But what would a Time of Troubles look like in the digital age? I was reading a piece this morning about how the Chinese government has a cunning plan to rule the world by a combination of "resource warfare" and "legal warfare." Maybe. But I have this curious feeling that the Chinese ruling class is just as dumb as ours, and that it just does not get the modern age -- any more than anyone else. And that the name of the game is adaption, not power.

Yes, But Don't Mess with Obama and Hillary

Now that we know that Collusion is Schmollusion, the hounds are yelping to go after the real crooks. And one thing we can put money on is that President Obama knew that his chappies were spying on the Trump campaign. And Hillary. Well, after a lifetime of corrupt dealings she sure knows how to insert multiple cut-outs between her and the dirty deed.

Except, of course, that Hillary Clinton is dumb enough not to realize just how monumentally stupid it is to have a private e-mail server.

So now let Hercules go to work and clean the Augean stables of DC swamp-dwellers.

But one thing, Herky baby: Leave Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton alone.

Know why? Of course you do.

If we put Barack Obama in the dock, it is racism, straight up. I mean everyone knows that the First Black President is half way to canonization, and anything that besmirches his reputation is the worst thing that ever came down the pike.

Plus, it would make blacks furious, and delay by at least a decade their inevitable Blexit.

If we put Hillary Clinton in the dock, it is sexism, straight up. I mean everyone knows that the shoulda-coulda-woulda-been First Woman President is a national treasure, and anything that besmirches her reputation is the worst thing that ever came down the pike.

Plus, it would make liberal women mad as hell, and send them out to vote in their tens of millions.

No. I'd say we should stop our stable-cleaning at the Brennans, the Clappers, the Comeys, the Susan Rices. And really, it is they, and others of their ilk, that need to fear the arm of the law. It might -- might -- discourage some future swamp creature from acting like a courtier of an absolute monarch and betraying the Constitution, the Nation of Laws, and basic human decency upon the recommendation of the monarch to rid him of that troublesome interloper.

Also, there is a certain advantage to the political insurgent when justice is not done. That is the point of my maxim: "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." Or, if you prefer, that justice is merely the absence of injustice.

What I mean is that what keeps people enraged and ready to go out and vote is a burning sense of injustice, that the system is rigged, and they are not going to take it any more. But if you bring the crooks to justice then the sting is removed and everyone goes home, fluffs up the pillow, and gets a good night's rest.

What President Trump needs for a blowout 2020 election is that people remember the Collusion scandal and that all the real culprits got away scot free, that they remember the scandal of Jussie Smollett's black-gay-Hollywood Get Out of Jail Free card, that they remember the crooked college admissions system and nobody went to jail.

Oh and Trump also needs AOC and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib running free all over the media. Because those three young ladies are a constant reminder to the average American that the system is rigged. Hey Social Media! How about enforcing your glorious "community standards" on your lefty pals!

One thing that comes out clear to me over the last years is that the lefties are clueless. They have, as I say, been carefully taught to hate and to fear, but they lack a strategic sense of how to play the game; they just know which buttons to press. And it has also become clear that all the swamp creatures are small-minded bureaucrats, Barnacles and Stiltstockings, that know how to play the bureaucratic game, but cannot think outside of the box.

And the media: well, they are beneath the gaze of we free-spirits.

The thing to remember is that while all these sheltered snowflakes have been ascending the greasy pole (which for many of them has been cleaned up to make it less hazardous) guys like Donald Trump have been living in the real world, building buildings in Manhattan and living to tell the tale, going through corporate bankruptcy and living to tell the tale.

And now he has through a three-year effort by the educated ruling class to knock him out of the presidency -- and lived to tell the tale.

As I told my liberal yoga instructor on the occasion of the end of Collusion: Nietzsche, I said. What does not kill me makes me stronger. (Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker, for you German scholars.)

Hello liberals. Was that Collusion game really such a good idea, or just another mindless activism culture action that was such a feature of the Obama years?

Strange Death of Europe: But Why?

I spent an hour watching Mark Steyn interview Douglas Murray on his new book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. Mark titles his piece "The West in Existential Crisis."

I think I'd rather say that the problem is that the western elite is bollixed up in the internal contradictions of its ruling-class ideology. Why not? Marx predicted that the internal contradictions of capitalism would lead to its fall. Couldn't we apply his wisdom to all rulers and oppressors?

Just what Marx meant by the internal contradictions of capitalism, I'm not sure. After all, as a Hegelian he ought to think that capitalism will go from strength to strength as it overcame the antithesis of every contradiction with a new synthesis. Which it has.

But listening to Murray and Steyn talk about the sad decline of Europe, it seemed to me that they were tip-toeing around the elephant in the room. Why, for instance, would Swedes say that they are all in favor of diversity while they remove from the vibrantly diverse center cities of Sweden for rural whitey-ness?

The answer is, of course, that they are good little boys and good little girls that know the correct -- orthodox -- opinion they are supposed to hold if they know what is good for them at work and on social media.

Now, I take it as given that whatever is the correct and orthodox opinion in society will have something to do with the class interest of the ruling class. I hope you will not think this is a bridge too far.

So, what is the class interest of the ruling class?

Thank you, senator, I'm glad you asked that.

The class interest of the ruling class is to stay in power, and about a century ago -- and in the US no later than the New Deal -- young educated folk decided that the royal road to political power was to put themselves at the head of the working class, then struggling to convert from the rural culture of feudal -- actual post-feudal -- agriculture to the market economy of the city.

Now I believe, following my reductive Three Peoples theory, that the thing for the working class to do would be to lose the subordinate culture of the feudal peasant and learn how to be a responsible middle class participant in the wage economy of the city. But the working class did not feel that way. It experienced the vibrancy of the city economy as a frightening burden and a loss of all security. So its instinct was to take arms against a sea of troubles by forming labor unions as a means of protection and fighting back against the bad faith of the bosses.

It was the historic role of the Educated Youth of the 19th century to say Yeah! Those stinkin' bosses! Vote for us and we will save you from the exploitation and oppression of the capitalist economic system. Hey, how about Free Education?

This, in my view, is one of the great crimes of the last half millennium. What the Educated Youth should have done is give the working class temporary aid while doing everything to help them assimilate to a middle-class culture. For, to get all Hegelian on you, I believe that the way to get on in the city and obtain a lasting prosperity is to utterly surrender to the market and its prices. To admit that no job, no skill is forever, and the only security is to never settle into a secure job, but always be ready to acquire a new skill as the market economy continually renews itself and puts the "buggy-whip makers" of the day out of business. Instead, the Educated Youth confirmed the workers in their feudal habits, and told them that their neo-feudal capitalist bosses should protect them from economic storms just like the feudal lords protecting the peasants from the Mongols. (Not!)

But you can see what a grand ride it has been for the Educated Youth of the 19th century and their sons, the educated ruling class of today. Political power, administrative state sinecures, social science research grants, activism, peaceful protest: what a ride!

Nothing lasts forever, of course, and when the educated ruling class got tired of telling lies to the working class. There, all of a sudden, were Negroes, victims of a century of Jim Crow in the South. And women: dying of despair in the suburbs, if we were to believe Betty Friedan! So just as the old gig was getting past its sell-by date, up came a new gig, and the educated class jumped in with both feet, promoting special privileges for blacks and women and a delicious expansion of the administrative state and with postmodernism opening up a whole new horizon for academic research, and expanding the old game of class politics into gender and race politics.

Of course, the educated ruling class lied to women and minorities too. Instead of passing the civil-rights laws and letting people get on with it, the ruling class has riled up women and minorities for the last half century with the notion of "institutional racism" and a "glass ceiling" and "white supremacy" and "toxic masculinity" preventing their final arrival in a perfect world. So instead of letting women and minorities find their own way in an economy where government would not discriminate against them, they made women and minorities into their special charges, or what I call "Little Darlings" and fed them a constant narrative of oppression and exploitation.

Well, now the United States has enjoyed its First Black President. What is the educated ruling class to do now? Perfectly simple: encourage migration of the poor from the South and the Muslim lands to immigrate to the city. With any luck they will become the favored political clients of the educated ruling class and continue its rule for another half century. Yay!

You can see that all this is catnip to you if you are an educated person with an advanced degree and interested in a job in the administrative state or social science research or if you are a "woke" twenty-something that has been carefully taught to want nothing so much as a life in activism. But if you are just an average Joe or Jane you might not be quite as enthusiastic. For it might seem to you that you have become a second-class citizen. You might even start to act like the embittered and discarded mistress of a rich guy that likes to trade in last year's model for a hot young thing.

Also, as a disinterested observer, you may feel that we are darn lucky that so far, with the educated ruling class endlessly riling up the latest arrivals to the city, we haven't had any serious political unrest. You would probably have noticed that the educated-class power rests on an immensely cunning and astonishingly successful narrative of naming and shaming any dissent from its agenda as racism, sexism, and homophobia, and now Islamophobia. In 2019 no educated white person wants to have the Scarlet Letter of "Racist" embroidered onto his clothes.

And so the beat goes on. And you gotta say, it has been an astonishingly successful gig for the educated class.

But now we have a cloud on the horizon: Trump, and Brexit, and nationalism in Eastern Europe: ordinary people proposing that government is supposed to serve them and not the latest hot number from wherever.

Of course, if the Trumps and the Brexits and the Eastern European nationalists succeed then it could be "curtains" for our beloved educated ruling class. So it makes complete sense that the educated ruling class has mounted a soft coup to kick President Trump out of office, or at least discredit him enough to prevent his reelection. Same with Brexit: the British ruling class is doing its best to muddy the waters and stay under the rule of the European Commission in Brussels and its army corps of educated administrators.

What would be nice is if we could get onto the "next thing," whatever it is, without blood in the streets.