Managerial Madness

Posted on June 7, 2023 by thezman

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One of the lingering questions about the Covid panic is why did the West suddenly go insane over a regularly occurring phenomena? Pandemics hit the West every generation or so with varying lethality. Most are like Covid in that they are bad for the old and the sick, but mostly a bad flu for everyone else. Once it was clear that Covid was not the Spanish flu, much less the Black Death, the response should have been like those of the past, but instead we got a panic.

In the United States, the panic started when Trump announced the cancellation of travel to and from Europe. That was March of 2020. Europe quickly returned the favor and then the race was on to see who could be the most egregious with regards to abusing their subjects in the name of health and safety. In the United States that meant laughably ridiculous policies like mask mandates, social distancing and the forced closure of restaurants and barbershops.

Panics are what they are because they are irrational, so much of what happened at the beginning is just mass insanity egged on by the media. The nonsense stories about bodies stacked up in morgues kept getting recycled because there was an eager audience of panic-stricken people. Social media was full of people needing to feel like part of the story by spinning personal tales to support the narrative. Many people derived psychic pleasure from feeling like the end was nigh.

After the chubby nurses had finished their TikTok videos, someone had to notice that the hospitals were not overwhelmed. Forgotten now, but people got curious, defied the lockdowns, and went to their local hospitals to see what was happening. Contrary to the reports, the hospitals were not panicked triage centers. They were ghost towns because everything had been cancelled except emergency care. At some point, the staff had to know what was really happening, but they remained silent.

That is the biggest concern about the panic. We were getting good data on the reality of the virus by the autumn of 2020, and it was clear the virus was something like the Asian flu or Hong Kong flu at the worst. The doctors and nurses had to know this by late summer and early fall, but the public health officials insisted otherwise. In fact, we now know they colluded with the tech companies and the media to silence anyone pointing out the facts about Covid. Why did they do this?

The most common response to this question is to shout, “money or power” and then move onto another topic. No doubt some people made money from the panic, and it did give the managers a sense of power. The trouble is we had plenty of state governments go the other way on the issue of lockdowns. Ron DeSantis is going to make a big deal of the fact he did not succumb to the panic. He was not alone, but he had all the same incentives as other states but did not follow the herd.

Maybe the way to think of the money and power answer here is to put it in the context of the managerial society in which we live. The millions of administrators and their managerial bosses finally had their war. The people who populate the array of public and private bureaucracies dedicated to managing some aspect of your life were finally being called upon to defend the world from destruction. The army of public health experts were going to have their turn on the big stage.

The managerial madness that set in and stayed with us long past when it made any sense was not the crude form of money and power that is the most popular answer to every question regarding the behavior of our rulers. People were not taking bribes or gaining new authority in the system. Instead, the vast managerial class and their administrative underlings finally had the sense of control they had always imagined they should have over your life.

It is important to understand that the people who populate the big chairs in the big offices of this age have been bred for this life. They are like dogs selectively breed for certain sorts of work. Anyone who has owned a dachshund, for example, will tell you they have an innate need to dig. If you let them, they will turn the backyard into the surface of the moon trying to find whatever it is they think is there. The wiener dog lives to root around and find what lies beneath.

Like a working dog, the people in the managerial class are bred for their role, so they have that same desire. Instead of digging around the backyard, they desire to manage the life of people that fall under their area of management. In a crisis, that desire explodes in a mania of micromanagement. In other times, it expresses itself as an endless need to expand their roles and thus expand their control. The manager is bred to manage, and she will manage something.

This managerial madness also explains the manufactured crisis. The same people who went berserk over Covid made the predictable mistakes with Ukraine war. If who you are is defined by how you handle the unexpected, after all, you are the one your people come to handle the exceptions, then you will be tuned to seek out the situations that need your particular set of skills. A form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy has infected the managerial class resulting in endless crises.

The reason the system often feels like it is shaking itself apart is that we are plagued with people looking for a crisis to manage. That has resulted in people finding a crisis where none exists. The end point of a society run by managers is a society run by females standing on chairs shrieking at imaginary mice. This also explains why females now outnumber males in the managerial class. You see this most clearly in health care, where the demand for crisis managers is the highest.

It must be said that a fair bit of what went on during Covid was driven by corruption, stupidity, and avarice. The vaccine boondoggle was just a scaled-up version of the Sackler family opioid scam. It was not the genocide the Sackler’s committed against poor people, but there is still time. The negative effects of the Covid vaccines will not fully be known for a long time. A competent system would have stopped both, but stupidity and corruption make avarice the coin of the realm.

Even accounting for the simple answers, we are left with the question as to why the managerial class went mad with Covid. The simple answer here is that perpetual panic is the natural end to managerialism. Once your society is consumed by a ruling class that imagines itself as the indispensable answer to every problem, they eventually are consumed with the need for problems to solve. We are being destroyed by an out of control need to manage the next crisis.

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Pandora’s Ballot Box

Posted on June 6, 2023 by thezman

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According to Merriam-Webster, hope is a desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment. You want something to happen. You have little or no reason to think it will happen, yet you sense that it is going to happen. Hope and faith are traveling partners, in that hope is often the result of trusting a system or person. The system has worked in the past, so despite evidence that it is not going to work this time, you hope that it carries through again.

Hope and faith are the cornerstones of elections. In the best of times, people are left to hope that the guy who wins will do a decent job. Even when it is obvious that the winner will be a dud, maybe even crazy, people have faith in the system to carry us through the ineptitude of the office holders. Popular government requires people to believe that all of us are smarter than most of us. Every couple of years people hope this is true as they cast their ballots for people they barely know.

What we have seen over the last thirty years is that some people, the people we call the Left, have increasingly lost faith in the system. Their reason for voting is not the hope that it will continue on, but that this time it finally fails. Barak Obama was the turning point with his constant talk about hope and change. The whole point of his presidency was to destroy the old system and replace it with a new one. He was the change they had been waiting for.

The looming presidential election is looking like a similar inflection point for the people we call the Right. In 2016, most of them voted for Trump, hoping he would be a message to the system. People voted for Trump as a rebuke, an often crudely humorous rebuke, of official Washington. These people still had faith in the system, so they hoped that Trump could deliver the message. The people were unhappy, and Washington needed to address their concerns.

This time, much of the support for Trump is like the hope and change business that Obama ran on in 2008. People saw what happened in the Trump years and they have been following the aftermath. They no longer have faith in the system. The system produced this corrupt ruling class. The thinking is that another Trump term will cause so much anger in official Washington that they will go berserk. Everyone else will then see that the system is hopelessly broken.

There is still some faith in the system. Lots of the MAGA hat wearing folks think this time will be different, but a good chunk of his support is cynical. This is why his support is so solid, despite the presence of Ron DeSantis. People know that in a normal country with a functioning political system, DeSantis would be the far better choice, but America is no longer a normal country. Prudent administration is not the answer to a demonic ruling class hellbent on pulling the roof down on us.

On the other hand, Ron DeSantis is the hope and faith option. His support is entirely from people who still have faith in the system. Here is the venerable Paul Gottfried coming out in support of DeSantis over Trump. Josh Hammer, a member of the common good conservative club, is also supporting DeSantis. Pedro Gonzalez sounds like Bill Kristol in coming out in favor of DeSantis. Three people from three different perspectives making the same argument.

These folks and the others supporting DeSantis think the system is mostly fine, but it needs the right guy to get the right result. They hope DeSantis is that guy, because after all, he “got things done” in Florida. For his supporters, Florida is a model for how things ought to run. DeSantis is therefore the model for how an executive pulls the right levers in the system in order to get the desired result. The fact that Florida is nothing like Washington plays no role in their thinking.

DeSantis is the last gasp of conservatism. Until the catastrophe of the Bush years, the subtext to conservatism was that it needed to be presented to the Left in just the right way so as not to upset them. Conservatism had to sneak up on lefty with a pleasant-sounding program presented by someone they liked or at least they could not plausibly claim was Hitler. For the DeSantis supporters, their guy is Trumpism without the crude orange man that makes the regime so angry.

Of course, their support rests on the assumption that the right man can get in there and pull the right levers to get the right result. It also assumes that the people in opposition will go along with this. The shadow of ignorance about the nature of the people in charge hangs over the DeSantis supporters. They are sure that the other side wants what they want and that they do not believe what they say. They just need a good talking to and they will stop the nonsense.

The hard reality is that the people who run the empire want what they want, and they will not be talked out of it by an election. The reason they recoiled like a startled snake when Trump came to town is because they feared him. He represented a threat to their preferred order, so they sunk their venomous fangs into his presidency. They will do the same thing to the next guy if he proves to be a threat. There is no way to clear out this nest of vipers at the ballot box.

In the 2016 election, Michael Anton famously penned the Flight 93 election essay that allowed many on the Right to throw in with Trump. The essay was an argument in favor of Trump as one last desperate attempt to save the system. The fact that the Trump presidency ended like the famous flight did not register with many people. Some of them are now throwing in with DeSantis for the same reason. It is one last desperate attempt to save the system, in which they still have faith.

According to Hesiod, when Prometheus stole fire from the gods, Zeus took vengeance by giving the lovely Pandora to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. She was left with a jar and told not to open it. Being a woman, this meant she could do nothing else but open it and out came all the evils that plague the world. She quickly put the lid back on, but the only thing remaining was what is often translated as hope, but which could also mean deceptive expectation.

In 2016 the Dirt People stole fire from the gods in that they defied their masters and supported Trump in the primary then the general election. Instead of sending a jar containing plagues, they sent another ballot box. In 2020 that box was opened and out came the secret police to carry Joe Biden to the White House. Despite it all, some still cling that that ballot box, hope trapped inside, thinking that maybe this time when they open the box, their hopes will be realized.

The Death Of The West

Posted on June 5, 2023 by thezman

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Since the French Revolution, the West has been cursed by a political framing that operates along an axis. At one end we have the Left, the people demanding radical change to liberate humanity in some way. At the other end is the Right, the people not just opposed to change, but the defenders of the natural order. Both ends see the other as the bad guy in the relationship. For over two centuries, all political movements have been forced to pick a spot on the axis.

This often leads to some ridiculous alliances. Libertarians are supposed to be the polar opposite of communists. Hitler is the polar opposite of Stalin, which then puts Hitler in the libertarian camp. This causes those sympathetic to libertarianism to claim that Hitler was actually a leftist. After all, he was a socialist! While this is idiotic, it does underscore the problem with the Right-Left political axis. It fails as a way to describe politics over a long period of time.

It also precludes right-wing radicalism. By making change a left-wing phenomenon, it means the right-wing must always be for stasis. This is popular with the Left, as it lets them pretend to be the good guys, but it also turns the other side into mindless reactionaries with no reason to oppose change. It is also wrong in that the Right, in all of its forms, does not oppose change. What the Right opposes is experimentation that treats institutions as arbitrary objects.

There is a bigger problem with the Left-Right political axis. It eliminates the possibility for right-wing radicalism. If the only people who can contemplate a radical reordering are those who embrace change, then the logic of the political scale says that it is impossible for right-wing people to imagine radical change. Yet we know that people on the Right, however defined at the time, often want radical change. It may simply be a rollback of prior change, but it is still change.

For example, most people defined as right-wing in the current year would like to see the sexual revolution rolled back at least forty years. A growing cohort thinks it is necessary to roll things back to the 1950’s. A small, but growing portion of the right wonder if we should roll it all back to the very beginning. If a right-wing Joe Biden comes to power and rolls back the sexual revolution, even if it is just to the 1980’s, most people would see that as a radical change in the culture.

In fairness, you could call these people reactionaries. Granted, their reactions are incredibly slow, taking at least a generation to form, but strictly speaking they want to return to some point in the past, not break with it. Left-wing radicals imagine themselves making a clean break with the past and creating something new. The fact that it is not new in the least is another matter. One side wants to break from the past while the other side wants to return to what it imagines is the past.

That seems to solve the problem, but what about the people who think we must make a break with liberalism in order to save Western people? These are not people seeking a return to some point in the past. Some joke about the return of monarchy and feudalism, but they are not serious about it. Instead, they see the future as a clean break with liberal political traditions. The people now calling themselves post-liberal think we must produce something new to replace liberalism.

Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard scholar, and champion of common good conservatism is not entirely clear about the details of his post-liberal order, but he is quite clear in his rejection of liberalism. Patrick Deneen, who is a Notre Dame political science professor, has a new book in which he argues for overthrowing the liberal order and replacing it with a dictatorship of working-class, by which he means the people who actually work and sustain the culture.

Read what these post-liberals have to say about what we would consider to be the status quo and they certainly sound like radicals. Unlike the standard model of radicalism, they are not challenging the human condition. There is no post-liberal man in their conception of the future, other than to argue that mankind will be free of the utopian claims that lie within the liberal order. Mankind will be liberated from the relentless coercion of its liberators.

Dissidents, of course, seek something similar. The main difference is that the Dissident Right is willing to address the demographic issue. To be on the Dissident Right is to wrestle with the question of what kind of society is possible with the demographics we will have in the not-too-distant future? More important, are the possible options tolerable and if not, what must come next? Like the post-liberals, the Dissident Right is ready to leave the old liberal order in the past.

For all the usual reasons, the dissidents and post-liberals get called fascist by the people who claim to be on the Left. It is proof that the universe has a sense of humor that the most dogmatic defenders of the status quo and the holders of power are the people who claim to be on the side of revolutionary change. In the modern age, the antifascists are sponsored by major corporations, who are in a close partnership with government and the centers of cultural production.

Putting that aside, if we broaden the definition of the term “liberalism” to include all Western thought since the late Middle Ages, then we are left with a universe that includes Marxism, libertarianism, liberal democracy, anarchism, fascism and all the combinations of these ideologies. To one degree or another, all of them imagine a world where mankind is freed from the human condition. What we now call liberalism is the final form of this long ideological struggle.

This gets to a truth about the modern world and its opponents. That political axis that has been with us since the French Revolution is increasingly incoherent because it assumes something that is not true. It assumes that ideology is a constant of the universe and therefore politics is a war between competing ideologies. In reality, ideology is a novelty. For most of human history, the moral questions were decided by religion, not by men with utopian schemes.

What the incoherence of that old political axis may be telling us is that we are reaching the end of the ideological age. What the post-liberals are doing, even if most do not realize it, is challenging the moral claims of liberalism. It is not an accident that the champions of post-liberalism are overtly religion. Both Deneen and Vermeule are traditional Catholics. Their post-liberal order assumes the moral questions have been answered by a revived traditional church.

The signs of the post-ideological age are most evident on the global stage. The last ideological state is at war with Russia because Russia rejects liberalism. The Russians are happy to borrow from the West but wish to remain Russian. The West is preparing to attack China for similar reasons. China’s capitalism with “Chinese characteristics” is unacceptable to the West. Soon, the rest of the world will join the enemies list for the crime of rejecting the liberal moral order.

For over two centuries, the West has been defined by that political axis that was born out of the French Revolution. What most people think of as the West is that long ideological struggle that has given us what we call liberal democracy. With the end of the Cold War, the struggle was over and liberal democracy won. In reality, the Cold War was the penultimate struggle of a dying age. What was born with that political axis will die with the final rejection of it.

Maybe This Is What It Is

Posted on June 1, 2023 by thezman

A popular plot device in movies is the hidden conspiracy where the main players slowly learn about a secret group that is actually running things. This secret group makes it look like the official systems are running things, but in reality, they are manipulating things behind the scenes for their own purposes. The movie The Matrix is basically a conspiracy story, except that the conspirators have conjured all of reality for humanity, who they have enslaved as batteries for some reason.

The flaw in all of these stories is that the people behind the conspiracy are so good that they are able to pull off the conspiracy. On the other hand, they make basic errors that allow the good guys to discover the conspiracy. This is done for the sake of expediency so we can get to the showdown between the good guys and the villains. Movies are about two hours of run time, so the filmmakers have to rush through the discovery phase in order to have time for the final act.

What they get right though is that those little things that do not make sense but are generally ignored by people. After all, if there is a secret group running things, it means they are changing things in violation of the rules. This was the basis of the Russian collusion hoax mania. The believers in this conspiracy were sure they had stumbled onto an event that had clearly violated the rules of the universe, thus proving that there is someone secretly manipulating things.

This makes even more sense when you consider that the people who fell for this conspiracy theory live in the world of narratives. Their understanding of existence is through narrative devices created by the likeminded. The people sure Trump was the result of a secret Russian plot think they live in a long running movie. For them, all of reality is just a long running story, the flow of history. The Russian collusion hoax was proof that existence is just one long story.

As nutty as these people sound, they are right in that if we are living in a simulation or one long story, then there is someone responsible for it. Maybe it is just a first mover who set the story in motion or maybe it is a computer programmer. Like The Matrix, our consciousness exists in a computer simulation. Instead of something cool like Warhammer 40K, we are stuck in a poorly drawn version of a world where child molesters get a whole month to honor them.

The other thing about those movies that ties in with the Russian collusion hoax and other popular conspiracy theories is that the people who discover the truth are always the weirdos and oddballs. It takes a person who naturally lives outside the normalcy of life to see the flaws of the narrative. Pursuing these anomalies in the story in the face of popular opposition requires a willingness to be unpopular. The movies are right that the people who will discover the conspiracy will be the oddballs.

The Russian collusion hoax was not real, but the people who were into it were strange characters who do not get along with others. We live in an age in which these people are selected by the people running the media, but it does not change the fact that these people are not right in the head. They are the same people who think their food is out to get them, that their gas range is in a plot with the minivan to kill Gaia and that there is an invisible Nazi army lurking in the shadows.

If you were a character in a conspiracy movie, the stuff in that previous paragraph would be a clue that things are not as they seem. After all, if the world operated by the rules everyone swears are in place, it should not result in the mass media being dominated by paranoid lunatics. Once it was clear, for example, that Rachel Maddow was wrong about the Russian conspiracy stuff, someone would replace her who is not suffering from these paranoid delusions.

It is not just the crazies that fall outside the rules. It is possible that these people are selected by the media because some people like freak shows. Most people do not like a freakshow, but some people do and it is a lucrative audience. In other words, it makes no sense to employ foaming at the mouth nutters in the media, but it makes sense if that part of the media is a circus. The universe suddenly makes sense again when you can explain these anomalies within the rules of the universe.

Of course, like the characters in a movie wrestling with the contradictions in the narrative, the story does not end there. What explains Jennifer Rubin? Look at her life story and explain how that makes any sense. Throw in the fact that she is clearly insane, and she is a massive bug in the code. Now, there are people out there who would offer an explanation, but that is just an alternative explanation for who controls the simulation that is our consciousness.

Like the kooks in the circus part of the media, the “serious” part of the media is full of examples that are not easily explained. How has a goofy looking bugman like David French risen to a perch at the New York Times? How has a talentless hack like Jonah Goldberg become a rich and famous pundit? Look around at public life and little of what you see makes sense within the rules as stated. Maybe the answer is we are living in an increasingly bug riddled simulation.

Again, maybe there is an explanation that does not require us to question the very nature of reality. Maybe there is a good reason we only have two mobile phone companies or two political parties that say the same things. Perhaps within the rules this all makes perfect sense once the rules are explained properly. You always have to keep open the possibility that it is not the world that is going crazy. You are the one who is going mad, and the world is perfectly fine.

Alternatively, the madness of this age, including the popularity of conspiracy theories and narrative hoaxes, could be in response to the fixes in the code. As the late physicist John Barrow explained, complexity results in error and the more complex human society gets, the more errors we experience. Many of these fixes fall outside the rules of our reality, so they lead some to question reality itself. The madness of this age is the result of a cumulative bug fix some have noticed.

If we take a step back from the simulation and conspiracy stuff, maybe the answer is simply that the incoherence of the world is due to an incoherence in the rules that govern our world. Through some combination of evolution, design, and serendipity, we have ended up with a set of rules that make perfect sense in terms of outcomes, because the rules are just as nutty as those outcomes. In other words, it is not a conspiracy we are seeing. It is entropy.

That may also explain the increasing popularity of conspiracy theories, especially among the primary beneficiaries of the system. It is far more comforting to think the rules are mostly fine and it is just some secret forces out there in the shadows responsible for the anomalies, than to think that maybe the problem is the rules and that maybe the system is in collapse. Most people would prefer to think they are living in a computer simulation than face up to reality.

The Future Of Fed Plenty

Posted on May 30, 2023 by thezman

Americans have been conditioned to believe we live in a market economy where producers chase customers. The subtext to American politics for generations has been protecting the marketplace from the socialists. In reality, America is more of a command economy than a market economy. We do not think of it as a command economy because that phrase brings to mind commissars arguing about why the left shoe factory has a different quota than the right shoe factory.

While we have never had five-year plans or an official industrial policy, the people in charge have always had a tight grip on the economy. The primary lever since the 1980’s has been the money supply. The bank of all banks, the Federal Reserve, controls the flow of money in the system. While it does not decide how many shoes get made, it does decide the shoe maker’s cost of money. The Fed can create a recession to reduce demand and it can create plenty through cheap money.

This is not the only lever of our command economy. The regulatory state exerts an enormous amount of power on the economy. Right now, the EPA is plotting to kill off the gas stove market in order to please Gaia. The claim is gas stoves give people the cooties or something, but the real reason is the people in the EPA are primitives who follow a spirit religion. They can and often do change economic activity based on what their shaman has to say about Gaia.

It is not just the federal administrative state with power over the economy. The states have their own junior varsity administrative state. In Maryland, for example, they have decreed that all new homes must be equipped with sprinkler systems, like the sort you see in office buildings. The National Fire Sprinkler Association just happens to be located in Maryland. Their members, conveniently enough, have the exclusive right to install and maintain sprinkler systems.

That is the other level of the command economy. Large private operators can exert enormous pressure on the administrative and politics systems. They also get favors that small players cannot purchase. Every Walmart in America enjoys free infrastructure and tax abatements from local government. One reason the big box store eliminated the small retailer is they colluded with the state. Like the Bolsheviks in the 1920’s, America’s ruling party prefers consolidation into controllable industries.

The Bolsheviks liked large enterprises because they assumed they would be easier to control, and they would drive off the vestiges of capitalism. They were somewhat right about the last part, as we see today. The first part they never got right. By the 1970’s, the Soviet system grew increasingly complicated as it became less efficient, because the scale of the system outpaced the ability to manage it. There were too many variables and too many interactions between those variables.

The American command economy would have faced the same problems, and it was headed in that direction in the 1970’s, but a couple of big things happened. For starters, the decision was made to ship the manufacturing base overseas. Instead of trying to centrally manage an industrial economy, production was handed over to the third world so they could do it. The Fed could use the money supply to control the flow of manufactured goods into the system.

The other thing that happened was the microprocessor revolution. The Soviets recognized this as their way out of the complexity problem, but they were already past the point of diminishing returns by the time cheap computers and trained computer programmers were in sufficient supply. America escaped this fate, as the economic planners were able to harness these new tools to control the economy. The managerial state would not be possible without computers.

The trouble is our system is now suffering from the same problems the Soviets faced in their command economy. The complexity is overwhelming the system. The Federal Reserve has been fighting inflation for two years now. At the same time, spending has spiraled upward with no hope of arresting the growth. This forces the Fed to create more money through various means. The recent debt ceiling drama suggests there is no political way to solve the fiscal crisis.

It may not feel like a crisis as there are plenty of jobs and there is plenty of money to buy consumer goods. People have lots of complaints, but few of them are about the economy, as far as anyone knows. Given the monolithic nature of the media, we cannot assume that what we see in the press is reality. Even so, there are no bread lines and sales of houses and consumer goods are strong. Whatever problems that exist are not showing up in consumer behavior.

Of course, the years following the death of Stalin were good times in the Soviet Union, as their economy grew faster than any economy in the West. After recovering from the devastation of the war, shops were full of basic goods and the Soviet system seemed to be working better than capitalism. The Russians were ahead of the West in the space race, and they enjoyed a missile gap. Then red plenty slowly ground to a halt and their system fell into a generation long decline.

The fed plenty that American has been enjoying for the last thirty years may be about to turn negative for the same reasons. The system has become too complicated for the masters of the system to operate. In the Soviet times, the result was too many left shoes or mountains of concrete with shortages of winter coats. In this age, it means bans of gas stoves and diversity programs because companies care more about ESG scores than the desires of their customers.

This was always the argument against command economies. It was not so much that some unelected authority made decisions. It was that over time, they would always succumb to complexity. The lack of price signals subjected the economic trade-offs to political jockeying. In the Soviet system, the politically favored got what they wanted, even when it made no economic sense. In our system, we see the same phenomenon but colored with liberal jargon.

Perhaps this is where AI steps into the breech. The next great leap in data processing and decision making will overcome the complexity issue. Instead of armies of analysts with economics degrees pouring over data to draft reports for the managers, AI systems will do the work in real time, making changes to the flow of money and information in the system to overcome bottlenecks and political jockeying. Fed Plenty will become the objective of the robots put in charge of the economy.

Artificial Familiarity

Posted on May 29, 2023 by thezman

The internet has made it possible for people around the globe to easily pass information back and forth among one another. This is taken for granted these days, but it is truly a revolutionary event. Since the dawn of civilization information spread no faster than a man could run. In the 19th century the train made this process a tiny bit faster then cars and planes made it even faster in the 20th century, but the internet puts all of us, if we choose, together in real time.

While this feels like a miraculous development for the curious and productive, it may also be a curse we are struggling to understand. The internet puts the smart, curious, and productive people together, but it also puts crazy people together. That nutty woman in the suburbs who thinks she is a psychic can now join up with other women who also think they are psychics. They can form a “community” online where they encourage and reinforce their delusions.

The apparent rise in the number of pedophiles is made possible by the ease with which these people can now associate. In the analog days, these people could not easily collaborate with one another. Those cursed this maladaptation could not easily access this material and there was high risk in trying to obtain it. The internet made it easy for these people to work together to produce and disseminate this stuff. The curious now find this material after a few clicks of a mouse.

Recency bias is the tendency to overemphasize the importance of recent experiences or the latest information when trying to understand current events. The news seems to be full of pedophiles lately, so we think it is a growing problem. The Left coming out in favor of pedophilia now certainly adds to the sense that it is a growing issue, so we have to adjust for that possibility. On the other hand, the number of cases is growing at the same time the Left is celebrating it.

In other words, when it comes to child abuse, the internet is making it easier for the pedophiles to meet one another, thus increasing the phenomenon, but the internet is also making us more aware of it. This increased awareness is made possible by people aware of this trend easily communicating the particulars. The same forces that allow the pedophiles to collaborate in their activity allows normal people to become aware of it and organized to oppose it.

Counterintuitively, the internet is tribalizing society. In the analog days, the pedophiles were a small and manageable problem. These were individuals forced to work in isolation and therefore caused the minimum of harm. Normal people could trust that the odds and the police would protect them, so they saw no need to know much about this issue or work with others to guard against it. The internet brought these people together and they formed two warring camps.

Obviously, the pedophile issue is an extreme example, but relevant due to corporate America embracing the child molesters over their customers. The same tribalizing forces unleashed by the internet are most likely at play here. The beautiful people who make corporate policy now see the Dirt People everywhere. Whenever they go online, they are confronted by Trump voters, heterosexuals, white people and all the other demons their “community” says are evil.

A part of what makes internet tribalization work is that it allows people with a minority view to interact with others holding the same view. This reinforces the belief, but also gives them the sense they are a growing community and therefore their minority view will soon be the majority view. When disconfirmation appears, these people can trust that their online pals will find a way to cope with it and thus provide them a way to not only explain it but reinforce group solidarity.

A good example of this is the recent events in the Ukraine. As events have gone against Ukraine in the war, online communities create pleasing alternative realties where their side is on the march. This guy spends all day everyday explaining to the likeminded why bad news is actually good news. This guy spends his days creating an alternative reality for the likeminded. These online communities operate like the UFO cult at the center of this famous study in the 1950’s

T. S. Eliot famously wrote “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” To some degree all of us are susceptible to escapism. We want some result, and we look for information that suggests it is happening. Some people, of course, go the other way and fear some result and look for information showing their worst fears are happening. It is two sides of the same coin and all of us are prone to it. Some people are more prone than others as belief operates on a scale like all human traits.

In the analog age, the limits placed on the flow of information left the believer in isolation unless he could physically connect with others. Joining a cult took effort, which is why so few people joined them. In the digital age, the internet is full of cults catering to every conceivable belief. Not only can you connect with thousands who hold your same hopes and fears, you can get instant confirmation that you are the good guy, and the rest of the world is the bad guy.

Of course, the internet is making us more aware of this reality. In the analog days we would have no idea that the Jewish guy across the street had a seething hatred for white people, but in this age we just look at his Twitter profile. Not knowing he hates you made it possible to not hate him. Knowing that he wants you dead makes it impossible to not hate him back. The more we know the more aware we are of the dangers that are lurking around every corner.

Since the dawn of the computer age, people have worried that the machines would become aware and then set about killing off humanity. The truth is, that process has already begun, except the machines are not doing the killing. Instead, they are holding up a mirror to society and letting us see ourselves. We do not like what we see, so we will find others who agree with us that we must kill off those other guys. It is not Artificial Intelligence that will get us, but Artificial Familiarity.

Past And Present

Posted on May 25, 2023 by thezman

This week we have seen two more contenders join the Republican primary field, promising to be happy warriors to save America. Tim Scott from South Carolina and Ron DeSantis of Florida bring the field to eight, as far as the candidates with any chance of getting on the debate stage. With the exception of Trump and Ramaswamy, the field is all doing some version of conservative nostalgia. That is a mix of the crucible, the covenant, and the creed.

That last bit comes from a short little book titled After Nationalism which describes the three main ways the American ruling class has unified the country. The crucible is the melting pot story of America. The covenant is the claim that America has a special purpose in the world. The creed is the old familiar civic nationalist argument that America is just a collection of ideas. Conservatism has relied on all three to market candidates and programs over the years.

The theme of the book is that those three unifying narratives are no longer working as the country devolves into warring tribes. You can see that in the presentation from the Republican candidates as they announce their campaigns. The Tim Scott show was like a 1990’s Conservative Inc. fantasy about the black vote. The DeSantis campaign teased his announcement with this ad on Twitter, which is Bush era patriotism without the promise of a crusade against Islam.

What the Republican primary is going to give us is another unhealthy dose of the old conservative formula. On the one hand, you are supposed to ignore the fact that you live around people who look nothing like you. On the other hand, you are supposed to focus on those nebulous ideals that allegedly define America. As long as everyone forgets about the long list of harms that have been inflicted on them over the last several decades, we can unite to save the country!

The one exception to all of this is Trump, who is a weird product of the two main forces colliding in the present moment. The one force is the old civic nationalism that held the white middle-class together and tightly bound it to both the Republican party and the political system itself. The other force is the radical changes unleashed by the ruling elites who no longer believe in the old civic nationalism. Trump and his fans exist in that incoherent vortex created by these colliding forces.

In fairness to Ron DeSantis, he seems to share the moral outrage of the average white person over the things we are seeing. His opposition to the sexualization of children is genuine, as well as his opposition to the tribal politics of the Left. Unlike the rest of the field opposing Trump, DeSantis is a normal person who is properly offended by the lunacy that has been unleashed on normal people. Like most normal people, he does not understand why this is happening.

The terms Left and Right have lost their meaning, but we still use them because we have nothing else at the moment. We can, however, see the vague outlines of a new scale developing when we look at the Republican field. Instead of the old 20th century poles of Hitler at one end and Stalin at the other, the new poles are the post-Marx culture warriors at one end and the biological realists at the other. The former is more fully developed, while the latter is still evolving.

Most of the Republican field is left of center. They largely agree with the moral claims of the culture warriors. They disagree, mildly, with their tactics. Tim Scott has no real objection to the antiwhite pogroms run by the military, for example, he just worries that they make it more difficult to wage pointless wars of choice. Nikki Haley is fine with the woke capital media campaigns, but her consultants tell her that she has to pretend to be upset about these things when she is interviewed.

DeSantis is one guy right of center on this stuff. He does not agree with the culture warriors, but he thinks the old system remains intact and that these weirdos are just random lunatics that have slipped their leash. He thinks the system can deal with these people without making any changes to the system. All we have to do is go back to our American principles. In other words, he is a guy who sees the iceberg, but he does not appreciate the part under the water.

On this scale, Trump lies just to the right of DeSantis. In fact, the main difference is style, owing to the difference in temperament. DeSantis responds to the current madness by pulling out the rule book. Trump responds to the current madness by throwing a chair out the window. It is not that either man is more or less offended by what is happening. They have different personalities and different worldviews, based on vastly different lives, so they react differently.

Even so, Trump is still in the camp that thinks the system can solve this crisis, if the right people are running the system. Viscerally he senses that this may not be true which helps explain his vacillation. Since Trump came on the scene, he has been hearing the distant calls of right-wing nationalism, but he lacks the understanding to make out what is being said. He is a man being pulled in multiple directions because he senses that something is terribly wrong with the system.

This conflict between the past and the present is why the Republicans are about to replay their 2016 primary. They have a more diverse field than in 2016 and Trump is not viewed as a novelty act. DeSantis is a better version of Ted Cruz, but he is occupying the same place as Cruz occupied in the 2016 race. Trump, of course, is an improved version of himself, having suffered the full force of the regime. He is not just a rambunctious rebuke, but a legitimate victim of the regime.

Even so, this replay of the 2016 election is due to the fact that the party and the country are stuck in the past. Everything about our present politics is backward looking, as if no one really wants to face up to the present. The 2016 election should have broken both parties free of the past, but instead it made them cling tighter. This election will be a reboot of the old franchise, not because the original was so good, but because no one can think of anything new that better fits the times.

The Death Of Conservatism

Posted on May 24, 2023 by thezman

It is fair to say that American conservatism is dead, at least the version that has been sold to us by the conservative industrial complex. They still rake in millions from corporate donors, but the public audience for this stuff is largely confined to rest homes in the sun belt. Flag waving and tax breaks for corporations is just not the crowd pleaser it was a decade ago, much less forty years ago. Conservatism as a political force is headed to the dustbin of history.

The question is, why did it fail? Lost in the endless stream of outrage, real and manufactured, is the fact that the winners are ridiculous. Conservatism lost to men in sundresses demanding to wave their genitals in the face of school children. They lost to people who think Hitler is hiding under their bed. They lost to childless middle-aged women drunk on cheap wine, complaining about men on Twitter. It took effort to lose to this collection of bourgeois misfits.

One reason conservatism failed in America is that conservatives could never accept that people lie in politics. In fact, lying is an essential part of politics. The reason is you must paint your opponents as the bad guys and your side as the good guys, which means gross exaggeration. Conservatives never accepted this. Instead, they demanded as much factual accuracy from their side as possible. When people on their side would exaggerate, conservatives were there to set the record straight.

This was not the result of stupidity. American conservatism evolved into the 1980’s as the antidote to politics. They used to make this point in the Reagan years. Conservatism was the lack of politics. Instead, it was just problem solving. That was very appealing to people who did not like rolling around on the mud with left-wing kooks, but it was a terrible way to engage in politics. It is part of what made conservatism the beautiful losers described by Sam Francis.

Related to this was the fact that American conservatism embraced the libertarian idea that people are motivated by rational self-interest. For conservatives in the 20th century, people were not spiritual beings, so much as moist robots who naturally responded to incentives, particularly economic incentives. This is why conservatism was the accounting department for the welfare state. The only way they could relate to their audience was through the jargon of popular economics.

Another result of this was the habit of conservatives to rely on charts and graphs in response to moral claims. The Left would demand we do something about some victim group and conservatives would respond with a table of figures showing that the victims were not really victims. It was not that it made conservatism heartless, but that it made them seem brainless. They kept falling for the same traps, eventually succumbing to the moral claims of the Left.

That is the probably the main failing of American conservatism. To this day they insist that politics is about solving problems. This is false. Politics is always about friends and enemies and those are defined on moral terms. No one wants to fight someone for making a math error. Politics is so nasty and feral because the opponents see one another in moral terms. The other guy is the bad guy because he does not love what you love and hate what you hate.

The Left has always understood this. The reason that the demand for Nazis exceeds the historic global supply is the Left always needs villains. Even when their opponents agree with them, they still call them the worst names in their book. Donald Trump would have been happy to make generous deals with the Democrats, but they needed to hate him more than they wanted a deal. This is why the Left steamrolled conservatives on every issue. They work only in morality, not facts and reason.

This inability to understand what drives politics may explain the inability to accept that their opponents genuinely believe what they are saying. Much of what makes up conservative commentary is a claim that the Left does not actually believe what they are saying, but instead they are using it as cover for money and power. For conservatives, everything is reduced to money and power, because this is what motivates the moist robots they imagine as their audience.

This is why conservatives have always underestimated the Left. Because they cannot accept that these people believe what they are saying, they just assume they will stop saying it once they have money and power. Instead, the Left uses their newly acquired money and power to act on what they said and produce more outlandish things they can push onto society. When you think people are moist robots, you stop believing that people can be evil, which is how evil triumphs.

Finally, the great failure of American conservatism will be seen in the Republican primary that kicks off this summer. The field challenging Trump will insist that everyone must rally around cleaning up the mess created by the Left. They will make the oldest of conservative arguments. That is, you must forget about the crimes committed against you by the other side and instead rally with your fellow citizens, even the ones who hate you, to fight for America!

Of course, this requires you to not get anything you want and instead normalize the latest insanity from the Left. You see, it is your duty as an American to sacrifice your interests for the nebulous concept of America. This was powerful magic forty years ago when the country was 85% white and had a handful of foreigners. In a country being overrun by migrants and hyper-racialized lunatics attacking white people, this rallying cry sounds like a suicide cult.

Robert Lewis Dabney famously described conservatism as “merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.” This was always true, for sure, but it worked for a long time because the radicals were still aspirational, rather than suicidal. The dialectic between the Left and the Right in American was a useful engine for maintaining the ruling class consensus. One side proposed, the other side opposed, and the consensus was some compromise.

This changed just as conservatism reached its peak. The triumph of conservatism in the 1980’s was followed by the descent of progressivism into the dark, suicidal politics of nihilism and Gnosticism. Conservatives have never come to terms with this and as a result have been a steep decline ever since. As America descends into tribal politics that must follow the transition to majority-minority demographics, conservatism will become a museum piece and then forgotten.

Liberal Theocracy

Posted on May 23, 2023 by thezman

Since the late Middle Ages, political thought in the West has started with the assertion that the point of social organization was to reduce coercion. The ideal society is one in which everyone naturally played their role without being forced into it. The assumption is that forcing people into roles for which they are not suited, or they do not wish to perform is both unjust and dangerous. It is also more costly to compel people to obey the law than if they voluntarily abide by the law.

If the goal of your political model is to reduce coercion to the absolute minimum, then you ideally want a society that agrees on everything. After all, if everyone agrees that society must have gong farmers and some people are better suited for the task than others, then everyone is going to agree on having gong farmers. Even the guy chosen for the task will agree if it is explained to him. He may not like the task, but he will understand he is playing a vital role in his society.

Straight away you can see the problem for individualism and the natural rights crowd when it comes to organizing society. If we start from the assumption that we are all unique individuals in control of our own destiny, then we are free to not go along with being the town’s gong farmer. Even if all the facts point to that role being best for the person and his community, he is free to reject it because he is an autonomous person free to live his life as he sees fit.

If we assume we have magical rights bestowed upon us by the gods, then it is fundamentally immoral for society to coerce us into anything, much less a profession we do not like. Since coercion is not limited to physical force, the gong farmer who sees himself as a sovereign man with natural rights is going to look at the social arrangements that result in him being the gong farmer as coercion. In other words, he has a right to not be the gong farmer.

You can see the obvious problem with trying to organize a society composed of individuals who think they have God-given rights. Your proposed social order must first convince all of them to accept the results of the system, even if the results favor some members over others. That is a tall order, given that everyone believes that they have the same rights as everyone else. After all, if God gave them the same rights, why would he then not give them the same talents?

Since it is not possible to get even a small community to agree on everything about the particulars of organizing the community, especially when everyone believes they are God’s special little snowflake, you are going to need something that leads these individual snowflakes to voluntarily submit to the social order. They will have to believe that their individual rights rest on their sacrifice of those rights in order to maintain the society which makes their rights possible.

That last bit is what has vexed the natural right crowd for generations. They desperately want to believe that natural rights exist independent of society and the men who create and maintain it, but logically this is not true. The concept of rights, natural, individual, human or any other version, is an invention of man. Rights are a claim on society, a demand that the rest of society protect certain entitlements bestowed upon members in exchange for their membership in the society.

We see this at work all over today. The man who subdued the subway lunatic operated on the assumption that he had a duty to defend the rights of his fellow subway riders from that crazed lunatic. The people who will put him in jail operate under the assumption that they have duty to defend their race against any and all actions by people of the white race. Since the latter group has control of society, the former’s individual rights will mean little in the courtroom.

Putting the particulars of that aside, we see a problem of trying to organize a society based on individualism and natural rights. The first thing that must happen is that such a society exclude anyone who does not accept these principles. Even a small number of people who reject these concepts will create two problems for your society organized around individualism and natural rights. One is they will violate the rights of others and second, they will force society to violate their rights.

Now, science tells us that the closer humans are genetically, the more likely they are to agree on the basics of human behavior. Put a group of random Finns together and they will quickly display the group characteristics of Finns. Put a group of Bantus together in the exact same circumstances and they will quickly display the group characteristics that we associate with Bantus. If you want a society with the least amount of coercion, then you want the least amount of biodiversity.

What follows for the individualism and natural rights people is they must insist on a society composed of people who naturally cherish individualism and natural rights if they have any hope of maintaining these things. Further, they must also conjure an exception to their moral code that allows them to act collectively in order to repel attempts to undermine their individualism and natural rights regime. They end up in the same dilemma as the libertarians.

Hans Hermann-Hoppe observed that within libertarian ideology there is no way to maintain a libertarian society. After all, if John Galt suddenly decides to be a Marxist, what business is it of his neighbors? If others join Galt in his new civic religion, what can the libertarians do about it? The non-aggression principle forbids them from compelling Galt and his followers to remain libertarians. The individualism and natural rights crowd run into the same problem with the defenders of the subway lunatic.

The solution for the individualism and natural rights people is a moral code that transcends individual rights, but also supports individual rights. If you believe that your people have been given rights by your God and those rights are what distinguish you from other human groups, then collectively defending those rights is not only permitted, but also necessary. You have a God-given duty to defend your society which is organized around individualism and natural rights.

What you need to maintain a society based on individualism and natural rights is a folk religion that sacralizes those rights and the people who possess them. The same God that grants your people natural rights commands you to defend the people granted those rights, as well as their society that maintains those rights. Under such a condition, the individualism and natural rights people would be justified in rioting in New York and chasing off the prosecutors in defense of their God and his people.

The missing component for the individualism and natural rights crowd is a moral component that compels the believer to defend these principles. Nature cannot be the moral authority for anything, as natural operates outside the domain of the prescriptive, but God or gods can certainly be that moral authority. God tells us what we ought to do, so if our God tells us we ought to respect individualism and natural rights, then we have a duty to do so by any means necessary.

What all this means is that if you want to live in a society in which individualism and natural rights are respected by everyone, then you need to come up with a folk religion that sacralizes those things. What you want is to live in a liberal theocracy in which dissent from individualism and natural rights is not tolerated. What liberalism needs is not a Karl Marx, but a Moses, someone who lead his people to their promised land where they can create their liberal theocracy as God intended.

The Tyranny Of The Stupid

Posted on May 22, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the paradox of tolerance, a post about the growing Ukraine quagmire and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

In The Past is a Future Country, Ed Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles, argue that the West is about to be swamped by an unsustainable wave of stupid people. This is not the result of immigration, but rather the culmination of an evolutionary process that began in the Industrial Revolution. Darwinian selection weakened along with the increase in living standards. The result is a steady increase in narcissistic stupid people who undermine the fundamentals of Western society.

In this post, Ed Dutton makes the point that liberal female politicians are getting dumber, as a result of this process he outlined in his book. He relies on two examples, Sanna Marin of Finland and Angela Rayner of Britain, to make his point. Both women are on what we insist on calling the Left and both women are morons. Not only are they stupid, but they appear to have come from stupid parents. They are Nth generation morons who have risen to the top of politics.

It is an amusing and satisfying read for people who think of themselves on the Right, even if he is making sweeping claims from just two examples. For as long as anyone can recall, the people we call the Left have claimed that their opponents are unsophisticated morons who should be dismissed. Having this turned on its head with the use of the human sciences is good fun, but it may be missing the real cause for the great dumbing down of Western politics.

The ideal politician in a liberal democracy has an extremely high verbal dexterity along with an extremely low degree of self-awareness. In fact, the best politicians of this age are glib narcissists who have never done anything useful. Much of the panic over Donald Trump is due to the fact he worked in the dreaded private sector. Having had anything other than a ceremonial position in the real economy is so strange in politics that the political class naturally views it as a defect.

The reason for this is despite the fact we insist on calling it politics, there is little in the way of politics happening in a modern liberal democracy. Everyone in the political system agrees on the moral claims. As Marx noted, when you get the morality settled, there is no need for politics. Put another way, once everyone agrees on the goal, then you are left with a debate about how best to achieve it. The barrier to entry in modern politics is the moral questions.

As a result, the selection pressure in politics is for people who will never color outside the lines and always promote the latest thing. The more natural someone is at conforming to the prevailing orthodoxy, the less likely they are to question what is demanded of them. Of course, if they are especially good at appearing enthusiastic about the latest thing, then all the better. The people in charge are always on the hunt for the glib toady who can really sell the latest thing.

As we see with actors, a lack of self-awareness is key. Someone who is painfully aware of how they look to others, or worries about how they look to others, is not going to be a particularly good performer. Humiliating yourself for laughs or applause works best when you cannot imagine the concept of humiliation. It is why the narcissistic moron is a well-known type in the entertainment world. An idiot who thinks highly of himself, but never questions the script is an ideal actor.

Just as an actor who easily “believes in the project” is always in demand, the politician who is always ready to run with the latest thing is always rewarded. His donors will make sure he is kept in the lifestyle he thinks he deserves. His party will always rely on him to take point on the latest thing. Joe Biden made a long career in politics being a narcissistic simpleton, despite stealing everything in sight. Joe Biden is the perfection of modern democratic politics.

It is not just electoral politics where we see this process, but the politics of the managerial elite as well. David French is a goofy looking buffoon but he has risen to the top of the political media because he has no shame. He will say whatever he needs to say in order to shine amongst the other simpletons. French is the combination of oleaginous rumpswab and narcissistic simpleton that has come to define the chattering classes in the United States.

All of this is the result of democracy. Not the mechanics of voting, but the belief that the general will is the moral authority. Once a society accepts this claim, turns the mob into a god, then moral conformity must follow. After all, if there is no agreement, the general will is unknown, then the people are left with no moral authority. Therefore, the solution is to impose a moral consensus and religiously oppress dissent. The only way democracy can work is if everyone agrees.

This is why Western societies are now policed by a volunteer army of simpletons, prodded along by the autocrats. Democracy collapses if there is not a perceived agreement on the moral questions. Even though the people who rise to the top are stupid, they understand the need for consensus. This is why they so enthusiastically impose the latest thing on the public. Who they are depends upon the belief that everyone supports the latest thing.

None of this is to say that Dutton is wrong about Darwinian selection pressure declining with material prosperity. That is certainly true. Smart people made society safer for stupid people, which allowed the stupid to multiply like tribbles. The reason the stupid are dominating politics, however, is that democracy selects for stupidity because stupid people are much more likely to support the moral consensus. Poverty would not arrest our descent into democratic imbecility.

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