The Faith Of Our Betters

Posted on August 29, 2024 by thezman

Western elites are in a competition with one another to see who can be the most creative in violating the old rules of the liberal order. Every week seems to bring a new outrage from a Western government. The reason it seems like they are looking to outrage rather than work from an understood ideological foundation is that they do not fully understand their new ideological foundation. It is an evolving paradigm, as they used to say, to which they are forced to adapt.

A good example is this rather weird story out of the UK. A company was taken to court because they paid warehouse workers more than their retail workers. The warehouse staff was predominantly male while the retail staff was predominantly female, thus creating a situation in which men are earning more than women. The company pointed out that this is normal and there was no evidence that women were discriminated against in hiring or evaluations. They lost the case anyway.

Something called an employment tribunal agreed that “the difference in pay rates between the jobs was not down to direct discrimination, including the conscious or subconscious influence of gender on pay decisions, but was caused by efforts to reduce cost and enhance profit. Even so, it ruled that the “business need was not sufficiently great as to overcome the discriminatory effect of lower basic pay.” In other words, it just looked bad so it must be bad.

This is like saying that a man was not directly or indirectly responsible for the death of someone he did not like, but the man’s death just looked bad, so the fellow who did not like him will be convicted of murder. In the new normal, you can be guilty of violating a rule or law, even if you did not actually violate the rule or law, simply because the rule or law is not getting the intended result. You could literally end up in a British jail because the judge thinks it looks bad for you to remain free.

For those familiar with American discrimination law, this may sound like disparate impact, which is a legal term that refers to practices that unintentionally discriminate against people of protected groups in areas like employment and housing. This doctrine was imported to the UK for the same insane reasons it exists in America. It is the only way around objective reality while maintaining the radical delusions of universal human equality and the blank slate.

The logic of disparate impact works like this. Since there are no immutable differences between people or groups of people, any differences between groups of people must be due to some form of discrimination. Logically, there can be no other reason if universal equality is true. Therefore, if there are group differences that negatively impact nonwhites, then it must be from discrimination by whites. Discrimination is the ghost in the machine that explains what we see every day.

That is not what appears to be going on with this UK case. The tribunal clearly stated that the company policy is neutral, as far as intent and application. Apparently, there are female warehouse workers who make what male warehouse workers make and male retail workers who make the same as female retail workers. It is just that females prefer retail while males prefer warehouse work. This bit of biological reality is so disturbing to the court they ruled it must be eradicated.

It is a good example of two things we see with the new religion we see with the managerial classes in the West. One is there is a strong whiff of world rejecting Gnosticism about it. It is never clear if they are trying to recreate the human condition to their liking or they simply reject the human condition along with the objective reality in which mankind resides. Perhaps Justice William O. Douglas’ use of the terms “emanations” and “penumbras” was a clue.

The other thing you see is how the power of narrative warps their sense of reality to the point where it is often at odds with reality. This is something we keep seeing in things like the Ukraine war and now the Harris campaign. The narrative provides an a model of reality that is untethered from physical reality, so they must always be altering their mental model of reality. Alternatively, they seek to force reality to comply with the demands of their alternative reality.

It is not hard to imagine the judges in that UK case thinking, “We know how things should be, so even though they are not that way, and we cannot find evidence of Old Scratch in this, we will just set everything right and all is good.” There is no thought of the secondary and tertiary consequences to their ruling. If the company automates it retail area to address the problems created by this ruling, they will be back in court to explain why they are not living the court’s model of reality.

All the loose talk about creating a new religion misses the fact that we have a new religion, the religion of the managerial class. This new religion has roots deep in the Western tradition. Not only does it contain the egalitarianism and universalism of Christianity, but it also has the mysticism from the ancients. At the heart is the suspicion that reality is a figment of our imagination, so if we reimagine reality then we can have a reality that frees us from the human condition.

In the end, this weird new religion is a luxury good. The parade of lunacy we see is only possible because the masses have food and entertainments. Each new bit of lunacy chips away at it but until it reaches a critical state, the cost of these religious fantasies is spread around the respective economy. The great enabler of managerial lunacy is the ability to socialize the cost of it. At some point, the cost becomes unbearable, and the new religion goes into the dustbin of history with its adherents.

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Starting A New Religion

Posted on August 28, 2024 by thezman

There are three things true about the modern West and all three of them are connected to the issue of religion. One is the obvious fact that the religion of the West, Christianity, is in steep decline. The second is that the West itself is in a steep cultural decline, which may be the result of the decline of Christianity, or it could be another symptom of a deeper issue behind both of those problems. Then there is the ongoing invasion and subjugation of European people in their own lands.

Objectively, occidental people look more like Native Americans right now, in terms of the things we can measure, than their ancestors of the last century. Low birth rates, declining life spans, rampant discrimination against people of European heritage, drug and alcohol abuse. Like the Indians on the reservation, European people now live at the pleasure of an alien ruling elite. As we are seeing in the UK, European people no longer have their ancient rights in their own lands.

What needs to happen to arrest this process is for occidental people to fight back against the gathering darkness. For that to happen, people need to be inspired to sacrifice for something and the best way to get people to sacrifice is through the mechanism of religion. A healthy people have a religion that reflects what they love and celebrate about themselves. This is what provides the motivation to sacrifice present happiness for the future happiness of their people.

The trouble with this line of thought is that the religion of the West, Christianity in its various forms, is in total collapse. That means creating a new religion, but new religions do not have a great track record. Not only that, the secular religion of the West, liberalism, is drenched in Christian priors. If you want to start a new religion, you not only have to contend with the old religion, but that which has slowly displaced it in the name of secularism and openness.

On the other hand, you could take a page from the last successful new religion, Mormonism, and create a spinoff of sorts. It is debatable as to whether Mormonism is a Christian denomination. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints consider themselves Christians. They share many Christian beliefs, such as the divinity, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the end it does not matter much as they managed to make it work and continue to thrive.

In other words, the Mormons rebooted Christianity in a new religion that served the needs of a growing number of people who did not see what they wanted or needed in the existing Christian denominations. Another way of putting it is a group of religious entrepreneurs saw an untapped market and created a product that fit the needs of this underserved market for religion. They set about creating a new religion, using many of the familiar parts of the existing religion.

The first task of Joseph Smith and his early converts was to create a new moral authority for his new religion. In order to avoid the trap of current interpretation of Scripture, Smith said he was visited by an angel who led him to the “golden plates” which would form the basis of a new religious text and the foundation of the religion we call Mormonism. The Book of Mormon is not another Gospel or considered Scripture, but it sits alongside Scripture for the believers.

The important thing about this additive process is that Smith was recentering the moral authority of Christians between the God of the Old Testament and the God of Jesus and the New Testament. The Hebrew God is masculine, cruel, and often terrifying, while the God of Jesus is infinitely merciful and benevolent. God of the Old Testament is a warrior who loves the smell of burning flesh. The God of the New Testament is a loving mother who always forgives you, no matter what.

By the 19th century the Christian God was becoming something of an alien weirdo, especially to men. How could a man trust a God who cannot savor the thrill of dominating his opponent or who cannot enjoy sin? What is the point of worshipping a God who will forgive you if you fail to worship him? Men sacrifice their goods and their person, not because of trust, but because of fear, a fear of the consequences of doing otherwise, either from their fellows or from their God.

The Christian was no longer a sinner in the hands of an angry God, but a sinner who was clutched to the bosom of a loving God. The former did not care if sin was an inevitable plight of man. You were still going to be punished. The latter did not care if you sinned or that you did so with guilt free enthusiasm. You were welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven just as long as you accepted Christ. The masculine God was gone from the house of man and the feminized God was in charge.

What Mormonism did was recreate the authority of Christianity as something that could both inspire men and terrify them. It is from this reimagined authority that the new rules of the new religion rest. Modern Mormonism may have been feminized over time, like everything else, but there is no doubting its initial masculine appeal. A God that promises men multiple wives is a God who both loves man and also enjoys, at times, tormenting him with too much of what he desires.

The other thing about this new masculine God and his new followers was that they were exclusive and it was not easy to join this new religion. Anything that is easy to obtain quickly loses its value and this was the curse of Christianity by the 19th century. To be a Christian of any type, maybe multiple types, was no more challenging that buying a new suit or changing fashion styles. Then as now, the mature Christian denominations asked nothing from the believers other than cash.

The early Mormons had to suffer, and to some degree they are still required to suffer, due to their peculiar habits. Smith and his followers were chased around the Midwest by angry mobs who viewed them as dangerous heretics, until an angry mob eventually killed Smith and his brother. Smith was a martyr for his cause, but unlike Christ, he was not a martyr in denial of human reality, but a martyr in service to the people of his new religion, thus an example for all of them.

Regardless of how you feel about Mormonism, it is a great example of how to form a new religion from the rubble of Christianity. Smith was the product of the Second Great Awakening, a period of renewal for Protestant sects that had lost their way and a time for new approaches to the life of Christ. Adventism and Dispensationalism also came from this period of religious revival. The Social Gospel Movement also had roots in the Second Great Awakening.

If any society and people are due for another “great awakening” it is the people of the occident who find themselves on the cusp of oblivion. If you are thinking about starting a new religion or resurrecting an old religion, now is a good time, as there are millions of people unhappy with the current offerings. It might also be a good time to reimagine God as something more terrifying than the benevolent old black guy who is happy to drive around Miss Daisy.

The New Christianity

Posted on August 26, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the send gamers to labor camps, a post about finance socialism and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Was Jesus a loser? By the standards of the age, the human standards, he was most certainly viewed as a loser, with the exception of his followers. That was the point of crucifying someone in that period. The Roman authorities used the practice as a form of humiliation as well as capital punishment. The point of displaying the condemned as they suffered and died was to let the rest of the population know that the guy on the cross was at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Modern Christians would take exception to calling Jesus a loser, but early Christians would not have been offended. The humiliation of Jesus was integral to both understanding the life of Christ and the message of Christ. If the Romans or the Jews had executed Christ in the fashion reserved for prominent people, then the life and message of Christ would mean something quite different. The stripping of all human dignity at the end was essential to the life of Christ.

Therein lies the problem for modern Christians. By the standards of this age, Christ is a loser, just as he was two thousand years ago. The message of Christ not only runs counter to the way in which modern people live and are expected to live, but the bad end runs afoul of how modern people expect the life of a hero to end. The modern person expects the hero’s life to end in a great triumph and universal acclaim or at least the acclaim of the major characters in the story.

Of course, the message of Christ does not work too well either. Eschewing material prosperity is just not a thing people do in this age or for a long time. In fact, the point of life for a long time has been to increase your material wealth. All of the heroes of the modern age are those who either got rich for their own sake or got rich for having upheld the modern morality. The way around this for the modern Christian is some form of the prosperity gospel, but that often looks like a grift.

More important, the message of Christ was aimed at the losers. From the start, Christianity was a religion for losers. Its appeal assumed that the audience was composed of people who were losers and would remain losers until they died, which would probably be soon. For them, investing in this life made little sense, so they should invest in the next life. Their time on this plane of existence was best used to prepare for everlasting life in Christ.

It is a powerful message if you are a loser and most people in the late Roman Empire and post-empire Europe were losers. Nasty, brutish, and short is a famous line from Hobbes to describe pre-society man, but it was also a good description of life for most people in the early Christian era. It was true for many people when Hobbes was writing in the 17th century. The typical person was subjected to violence, disease, and the constant fear of running out of food.

A religion that tells the losers that their suffering is part of a transition from this life to everlasting life and bliss is going to find a lot of interest. The folk religions of the age were not so rosy about what comes next. Worse yet, if you were going to get any sort of reward in the next life, it meant living this life heroically. That did not offer much for the peasant farmer or the man tied to the land. It is not hard to see why a religion for losers would spread rapidly through Europe at the time.

This insouciant description of Christianity as a religion for losers is not intended as an insult to Christians or Christianity, but to make a point. The rise of Christianity in the West was due to two things. One is the majority of the population, even the upper classes, lived harsh lives. Therefore, a promise of relief from suffering and everlasting life had a strong appeal. The second factor was the embrace of this life as a means to an end, rather an end in itself.

Fast forward to this age and you see that poor people live lives of luxury relative to just a century ago. The typical poor person in America is obese because he has unlimited cheap food. His home is full of conveniences and entertainments. Even in the most terrifying modern ghettos, violence is a fraction of what people experienced even a few hundred years ago. A religion aimed at people living a life of misery is not going to sell to a population living in luxury.

Compounding the problem is a new religion of sorts has evolved in the West that celebrates material success. The point of life, according to the new religion, is to increase your material wellbeing. The point of the state is to foster those conditions and measure success by society-wide material increase. In every election, the economy is the top issue because in this age, we worship stuff, so the promise of more stuff is a sign of virtue. The point of life is more stuff.

A much bigger problem for Christianity is the fact that the ruling elites of this age have no use for Christianity. In the Middle Ages, not only did the ruling elites have lives of struggle, but they also saw utility in a religion that shifted the focus of their people from their current squalor onto what comes after this life. Marx was not entirely wrong when he wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Probably the biggest challenge for Christianity is the modern Christian, who like the modern grammarian, refuses to evolve. The grammarian clings to the rules of grammar as if they are timeless truths. Any thought of ignoring them for the sake of clarity is treated as a crime against humanity. The fact that most of what he clings to is a relative new invention is lost on him, because what matters most to him is wielding the blue pencil like nuns used to wield the ruler.

This is the problem with the modern Christian. He is ossified in a mode of thought that is relatively new. Transport a modern Christin back to medieval England and he would be burned at the stake as a heretic. Plop him down among the early followers of Christ and they would be baffled by his Scriptural dogmatism. The early proselytizers charged with converting the pagans would find the modern Christian to be a rigid and irrational burden on their work.

Christianity, as we understand it, is the result of a long evolutionary process that adapted the life and message of Christ to the audience and times. The inability and unwillingness of modern Christians to evolve and adapt is probably the biggest challenge facing Christianity. Put another way, the problem with modern Christianity is not its opponents, but its most dogmatic defenders. They have made failure their security blanket and refuse to let go of it.

If Christianity is going to survive, it will have to adapt to this age and repurpose itself as a replacement for liberalism, rather than an enabler of it. Christianity gave birth to liberalism, but it does not have to sink under the waterline with it. Instead, it will have to either replace it with a new Christianity or give rise to a secular alternative that cannot just coexist with Christianity but allow it to once again flourish. Otherwise, Christianity will go into the dustbin of history along with Western civilization.

College Football

Posted on August 22, 2024 by thezman

The college football season kicks off this weekend with a game between Florida State and Georgia Tech in Ireland. This is what is now called “week zero” of the college football calendar where a handful of teams start the season early. Labor Day weekend remains the “official” start of the college football season. For the longest time, football season was Labor Day to Thanksgiving, but like everything else that tradition has given way to rapacious greed by all involved.

College sports is a genuinely American thing. On the one hand, it is amateur sports played by college students. On the other hand, it is a billion-dollar sports entertainment industry operating on college campuses. Even elite colleges like Stanford, Northwestern and Boston College find a way to be in the circus, while pretending to put academics ahead of the sports entertainment business. It is a uniquely American form of mass self-deception that the rest of the world does not understand.

The roots of college football are as normal as any other tradition. The game evolved from both rugby and soccer, which were popular sports in the 19th century. The old English line that “Soccer is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen” carried over to America. Young college men would play one or both, depending upon their inclination. Before long they combined into what eventually became American football.

Naturally, the young men playing sports on their college campus would want to test themselves against the young men on the nearby college campus. Until fairly recent, this was the normal habit of young males. Legend has it that Princeton and Rutgers played the first American football game, but it was more like soccer. Harvard and McGill played the new game which quickly became popular and eventually supplanted both soccer and rugby on the college campus.

To some degree, the popularity of college football was due to one of those threads that made up the American character. In every region of the new country, self-organization was an essential element of life. This is something Tocqueville noted when he traveled around America in the 19th century. Self-organization was the antidote to the alienation and isolation that arises from democracy. Instead of withdrawing from mass public life, the individual forms islands of free association.

You see that in the early days of college football. The sport got its big boost in the Great Depression when local leaders were looking for ways to rally the people and keep them from organizing revolts against the government. Cheering on the local team as they did battle with the team from across town or across the state line was a good way to bring people together and to give them a healthy outlet. Many sports rivalries were born during the Great depression, even high school rivalries.

Of course, free association is at the heart of the college experience. For most families, primary school is a function of where they live. Your kids go to the local public schools whether you like it or not. It is why in the current age it has become common to ask the realtor showing you houses about the local basketball team. Parents understand that they are not just buying a house, but they are committing their children to the schools that come with the community in which the house is located.

College has never been that way. Young people are free to pick whatever college they like as long as they get accepted and can afford it. That plays a part in how the alumni of every school view their rival. Every school’s rival is populated with impoverished simpletons for some reason. While most students attend college within a three-hour drive of home, they are still spoiled for choice. This makes the rivalries between the schools possible and often makes them quite intense.

That is why college football rivalries remain, despite the fact that the localized logic and self-organization have given way to financialization and greed. The family who has always gone to Oklahoma continues to suspect that the people with the Longhorn sticker on their car are Harris voters, because it is the way it has always been and every autumn, they are reminded of that at the big game. America has always been a diverse country and that has always been the root of college rivalries.

The acid of modernity is slowly eroding this bit of social capital. The television oligopolies have decided it is good for them to have Oregon and Rutgers in the same football league. The league Oregon played in since forever was destroyed so they could join the Big Ten, which is still technically a Midwest conference. Washington, USC, and UCLA have also joined a conference whose center is two times zones away, because that makes sense to the bankers.

What is happening to college football is a microcosm of what has been happening everywhere in America since the dawn of financialization. The money men find a way to monetize social capital in order to haul it away to their vaults, leaving behind a shuffling husk of that which they sucked dry. College football is well on its way to becoming as artificial and synthetic as the suburban town center. The reason it exists is nothing organic is allowed to replace it.

Whether or not this is sustainable is never asked, as the point of the American economic model is for connected people to create bottlenecks they can then use to skim money from every transaction that passes through that bottleneck. This was the point Peter Theil made in his book. Once that bottleneck or monopoly is played out, then the parasites get back in their wagon and go looking for a new opportunity to exploit and never look back at what they left behind.

College football attendance has been in steady decline for a decade, even though the television dollars have exploded. They claim ratings are great, but no one cares about TV ratings, as most of the revenue comes from subscriptions. Television in America is one of those bottlenecks the oligarchs exploit. It is why CNN remains in business, despite having few viewers. At some point, the empty seats at football games will become a problem, but no one worries about it now.

For now, like so much of American life, what sustains college football is the echo of old America on which college football was built. Men watch games on Saturday because they watched games with their father, who watched games with his father. Maybe you make a trip to your alma mater once a year to see a game. The tradition has been hollowed out and is now worn as a skin suit by oleaginous television executives and grasping college administrators, but it is all you got.

That is the thing about traditions. People will hang onto them, no matter how tattered and lifeless, until something comes along to replace them. College football is a good example and representative of America as a whole. The fumes of old glory and old traditions fuel the present, but something will come along to replace those things and the people profiting off the nostalgia for them. After all, on any given Saturday, something could happen that changes everything.

This Ain’t It

Posted on August 21, 2024 by thezman

“Once you get the morality right there is no need for politics” is an aphorism generally credited to Karl Marx. Once everyone agrees on how we ought to live, then the only thing left to debate is how best to make sure that it happens. In this context, therefore, politics is the fight over how we ought to live, not how we should achieve the end upon which everyone agrees. This also means that the point of politics is to settle the question, once and for all, as to how we ought to live.

Within the radical framework, this makes sense, but within the framework of reality the opposite has been true. For example, in the West, economic policy has been settled, despite any agreement on how we ought to organize our economies. There is plenty of emotive language about pleasing Gaia, racial equity, and other moral claims, but economic policy follows a corporatist path. The economy is run by technocrats in partnership with corporate interests.

Notice at the American political conventions that there is little talk about things like spending, debt, or the general health of the economy. When was the last time a major politician talked about the debt problem? The best you get is some back and forth on inflation or energy prices. There is never any discussion about what is the morally right goal for economic policy. It is not that the issue has been settled, but that no one thinks it is appropriate to discuss it at all.

You see the same with immigration. Everyone agrees that illegal immigration is bad, not because it is immoral, but because it violates the rules of technocracy. We know this because it has the word “illegal” in its name. It is why conservatives want to make all immigration legal. That way, it does not violate the rules. It also pleases the technocrats who manage the economy. It is also why no one asks if any immigration is moral, as such questions are forbidden.

Contrary to what Marx and most radicals believed, the order of settling has not been to first get the morality right and then sort the details. The order of things has been to first create a complex bureaucracy around the issue so that it is impossible to ever talk about the morality of the issue at all. The great trick of managerialism is that it produces a self-referential morality for everything. The answer to what we ought to do is whatever the managers are doing at the moment.

This is why our politics are content free. The Democrats are putting on their show this week, at which they are introducing their “leaders” and platform. They have dancing bears, bearded ladies and all the other things you see at a circus, but the one thing missing is anything resembling policy. Speaker after speaker promises to boo at the bad things and cheer at the good things. It is a litany of emotive jibber-jabber that is so devoid of content it makes Finnegan’s Wake seem pithy.

The sterility of our political rhetoric is often masked by the emotive preening, but once you get past the pointless emotionalism you find nothing but white space. Note that no one ever provides a detailed answer for why they hate Trump. They hate Trump because he is bad or likes bad things, but why do they think he is bad and what is bad about the things he likes? No one knows. What they do know is Trump is bad and therefore his voters are bad. Boo Trump! Boo MAGA!

That gets to why they hate Trump. For good or ill, Trump represents the fundamental question of politics. That is, how should we live? Once you start thinking about how we ought to live, you then must confront the central question at the heart of every human organization and that is, who are we? This terrifies the managerial class who prefer to operate like a miasma that is just accepted as a default. It also terrifies the oligarchs who sit atop our society as an alien ruling class.

It has become popular in certain circles to quote Stafford Beer, who said, “The point of a system is what it does.” The point of managerialism is to smother the basic realities of human organization in mountains of technocracy so that there is no room to ask, “who are we” and “how should we live?” The trouble is, no society can live at all without answering those basic questions. The current crisis lies in the conflict between managerialism and the fundamental reality of human society.

This conflict provides the energy to this strange dialectic in which each turn of the election wheel results in more bizarre options. The arc of our presidential candidates since the end of the Cold War has led to Kamala Harris. Regardless of how you feel about Trump, he should not be leading a global superpower, but he is now the sober-minded option in national politics. In eight years, he went from the outlandish option to the safe option, simply by waiting for the next turn of the wheel.

In all seriousness, if Kamala Harris is the best the system can produce, then it is perfectly reasonable to think that what lies ahead is something worse. How far are we from having a block of wood at the top of the ticket? If we can be made to pretend that biology does not exist, we can be made to believe an inanimate object is the best choice to lead the government. It sounds ridiculous, but the current president is a vegetable and his handpicked replacement is day-drinking prostitute.

In the end, those questions at the heart of every human society are immutable, so they will need to be answered. The answers will have to be reflected in the elites of our society who eventually rule our society. It is unlikely that the answer to “who are we?” is going to be “deracinated strangers.” That means the answer to how we ought to live is not going to be “by the whims of alien oligarchs and their managers.” Whatever the answer, it will come with a broom that sweeps clean.

Boozy Brown Tinkerbell

Posted on August 20, 2024 by thezman

Anyone who has been part of a failed enterprise or has done a post-mortem on one is familiar with the weird psychology that comes to dominate the leadership of the enterprise as it reaches its final stage. At some point, the people in charge begin to assume their plans to arrest the decline are working as their default position, rather than taking a wait and see approach. A combination of hope and the desire to remain optimistic clouds their view of reality.

This is why the people inside of a failed company are often shocked when the collapse arrives and they are suddenly out of a position. Some people may have noticed that in their small piece of the puzzle things did not look exactly right, but the big bosses maintained a positive outlook, even as they were made aware of the problems. A form of social proof manifests where everyone inside overlooks the problems because management remains optimistic.

The funny thing about this dynamic is that the people at the top are often as shocked as the rank and file when the final collapse arrives. The history books are full of failed banks, for example, scrambling at the last minute to secure additional capital when it should have been clear for months that the bank was toast. The people running Enron had convinced themselves that their shell game could go on much longer if they could just get some additional capital.

Another great example of this is the mortgage crisis. Long before the handful of smart people inside the system realized what was happening, normal people began to wonder how poor people were affording middle-class houses. All of a sudden, the guy riding a leaf blower at your office park is living in your neighborhood. Normal people wondered how the banks could possibly accept the crazy loans at the time. Right up to the last-minute, however. insiders were sure the system was fine.

The mortgage crisis is probably the one to think about as the regime kicks off the biggest gaslighting party in human history. The Democratic convention is something like the lavish parties the mortgage industry threw for itself in Las Vegas in the months leading up to the crash. On the one hand, there are signs of trouble, but on the other hand the party is too much fun to think about those things. The red flags popping up here and there are a reason to party even harder.

One way to look at this gaslighting operation is as the final chapter in a story that started way back in the Trump term. The people chanting “by any means necessary” created a narrative in which Trump was not only defeated, but he, what he represents and who he represents are removed from the narrative. Trump would be in jail, the right-wing extremist MAGA would be on the run and the brown tide would sweep over the lands that produced this threat to our democracy.

The trouble is the narrative collapsed. It is hard for normal people to grasp how terrifying it is to the progressive cult that Trump remains free. They were sure he would be in jail long ago. The fallback to this was that the party would have excluded him due to the lawfare stuff. They were all sure this was inevitable. Like the people running a failing company, they could not bring themselves to see that their schemes were not working, so they just kept pretending they were working.

This explains the unprecedented gaslighting campaign for Harris. Given the choice of accepting reality and creating a fantasy, they have picked the latter. In this fantasy, the boozy Harris goes from a cackling simpleton to a dusky version of Daenerys Targaryen from the Game of Thrones, carried by the masses to her place on the throne. In this version, not only has the wicked orange man finally defeated, but he is also written out of the story altogether.

The excessively online are downing handfuls of black pills this week, as they are the most susceptible to media gaslighting, but reality is not as pliable. The polling in all of the important states has not changed much over the last month. The top issues for the voters are all bad for the regime. It does not help that Harris is sounding like a tanked-up version of Jimmy Carter, proposing wage and price controls, to deal with the inflation problem the regime claims have been fixed.

The regime is now setting up a scenario in which Harris and Walz never take an unscripted question or debate the Trump – Vance ticket. Harris has dropped out of the first debate schedule for the first week of September. There is a good chance that they will pull the plug on all debates and anything that could possibly lead to these two speaking off the cuff. Like the people running the failing bank, the regime has landed on a plan they are so sure will work, so they will pretend it is working.

There is a name for this sort of collective delusion. The Tinker Bell effect describes the idea that something exists because people believe in it. In the fairytale, Tinker Bell is brought back to life by the audience’s belief. This week, the assembled foot soldiers of the progressive cult and the regime toadies are holding hands, telling each other that they believe, as one character after another is brought forth to pretend that the Neverland of the convention is real.

Time will tell if they manage to gaslight this boozy simpleton and her Elmer Fudd sidekick into the White House. Like a failing bank, Americans may prefer the happy talk of their rulers to the reality of their lives. Civilizations in decline often have a series of bizarre rulers at the end. On the other hand, people may decide that a boozy brown Tinkerbell is beyond their ability to suspend disbelief. Regardless, reality remains undefeated, no matter how hard you believe otherwise.

Will And Reason

Posted on August 19, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the microprocessor revolution and its discontents, a post about the drama within the chronically online community and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Many of the leading figures of what came to be known as the Human BioDiversity (HBD) movement are reaching the age where they are no longer producing new work, but instead are part of retrospectives of the movement they created. This post in Aporia by Bo Winegard is a good example. It works as both a summary of Murray’s work and a summary of the hereditarian perspective on the human animal. “Hereditarian” is another word used for the biological realist wing of the human sciences.

It is not entirely accurate to call these people a movement as they have had no impact on how Western societies view human organization. If anything, the West has raced in the opposite direction of what should follow from the realities that have come from the human sciences. Since The Bell Curve was published thirty years ago, the blank slate, fanatical egalitarianism and universalism have become so entrenched in elite thinking that dissent is now criminal in many countries.

That is what you are seeing in the UK. The people being sent off to prison for voicing complaints about immigration are not being punished for opposing public policy, but for violating official orthodoxy with regards to the human condition. Across the West, any noticing of difference between groups of humans is blasphemy. Not only would The Bell Curve not get a publisher today, but it is also something of a miracle that it has not been put on the index of banned books, next to The Camp of the Saints.

Therein lies the most important lesson to come from the HBD scene. Facts and reason can never overcome belief. There is no questioning the science with regards to the human condition. It has confirmed thousands of years of observation that nature does not distribute her gifts equally. That is true with regards to individuals and with regards to groups of individuals. The reason you never take the MLK exist is not because you are immoral, but because you are rational.

Rationality is no match for belief, at least when it comes to politics. The promise of a guilt free future has won every battle regarding biology. Of course, it is the echo of Calvin that embedded racial guilt into the Western mind. Facts and reason had no impact on belief before, during or after the Civil War, because the fanatics behind the abolitionist cause were immune to facts and reason. Like all fanatics, they saw only that which confirmed their fanaticism.

The point here is that the defeat of human biodiversity, hereditarianism, biological realism, or whatever term you have for the facts of the human condition, was simply another battle in the long war between belief and reason. One side, the winning side, believes the human condition can be solved because they believe the cause of human conflict lies in the human mind and can therefore be eradicated. The other side has never had an answer to that claim.

Another lesson from the twilight of the human sciences is that knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a dead end. What matters in the affairs of man, therefore what matters with regards the human condition, is knowledge that leads men to act either on behalf of that knowledge or in opposition to it. Anything else is at best useless and at worst a reason for opponents to act on the claim that this new knowledge is a threat to the wellbeing of society.

In one of life’s great ironies, the HBD people never understood how their work could be seen as dangerously heretical. For all their knowledge about the mechanics of mankind, they have never understood the will that lies behind human action, preferring to believe what lies behind the motivations of their accusers is just as mechanical and sterile as their own understanding of man. Materialism is a terrible way to understand the why of the human condition.

More important, the HBD people could never shake their civic nationalist priors or even question them in light of their own work. The Bell Curve is the argument against liberal democracy, an argument understood long before the HBD people arrived. Despite the obvious conflict between what the science was telling us and what political science was demanding of us, the HBD people never lost faith in liberalism. They remain convinced it is the only political option.

It is not all bad for the HBD scene. It has, at least for a while, provided a moral authority of sorts for resisting the gathering darkness. There remains an “E pur si muove” mental space for dissidents to gather their thoughts about what is happening. Inside the mental space lies the flicker of hope that reality cannot be swamped by the fantastical reality of the prevailing orthodoxy. The foundation of the dissident cause are the people who accept the reality of the human condition.

In the end, however, it will not be men armed with charts and graphs who shall beat back the forces of darkness but the men who know that society is determined by those who understand it is always who shall overcome whom. If the West is to survive, it will be due to those who will it so and use any means necessary to prevail over those determined to turn out the lights on civilization. The only justification needed will simply be the desire to make it so.

Baseball

Posted on August 15, 2024 by thezman

Watch an American baseball game and the thing you quickly notice, especially if it has been a while since you bothered, is that the game is riddled with interruptions to the point where it feels like more stoppage than gameplay. Baseball was always a leisurely game that evolved for a people who had long attention spans, so it is a poor fit for the modern American with their low IQ’s and high time preference, but it is also made unwatchable by the constant stoppages.

The league has tried to address the problem by speeding up the gameplay with a pitch clock that gives pitchers 30 seconds between at-bats, 15 seconds between pitches with no one on base, and 20 seconds between pitches with runners on base. According to major league baseball, this has resulted in a 24-minute decrease in the total length of the game compared to the 2022 season. The average length of a game is now two hours and 40 minutes.

That is fine, but it does not change the fact that the number of breaks in play has not changed much and is probably a little worse. The reason for the breaks is the specialization in the game. The days of nine guys playing nine guys are long gone, as now teams employ specialists who enter the game at various points, which slows the game play down. Specialization is the result of quantitative revolution that has happened in all sports, but especially baseball.

Baseball used to be a game run by men who wanted to put on a show for fans and build hometown pride. The owners of baseball teams were local rich guys who not only wanted to make money off the game but took some pride in their local community and wanted their team to win. They hired people to run their teams who had played the game and presumably knew what it took to win. Those guys found and developed players who had the skills to play the game.

That started to change with the growth of advanced statistics. Baseball was always a game of numbers, like batting average, earned run average and other measures of a player’s success in his role. Advanced statistics took that a step further and used quantitative measures to predict the impact of players on winning games, based on measures like on-base-percentage and wins above replacement. These new measures not only determine rosters, but they also determine gameplay.

That is why we get so many breaks in the game. After every at bat, both teams basically re-crunch the numbers to determine what they should do next. That may mean pulling the pitcher who has been on a roll to this point or pinch hitting for a guy who has had a monster game thus far. We now have scenarios in which a pitcher is pulled from a game while throwing a no-hitter. The numbers say he has reached his pitch limit, and the reliever has a better chance against the rest of the lineup.

You can see how this works by looking at the roster of the current best team in baseball, the Baltimore Orioles, and the roster of the 1970 Oriole team that went on to win the World Series that year. The first thing you will note is that the 1970 squad used a total of thirty-two players for the entire season. The current year Orioles have already used fifty-four players and will use many more once rosters expand in September. Baseball is now a game of roster rotisserie.

Another thing you will note is that the best starting pitchers on the current team will not reach 200-innings this year. Most likely, they will rest their best pitcher down the stretch so he will finish the regular season with around 175-innings. On the 1970s team, three pitchers pitched 300-innings. More shocking is the fact that the 1970 pitching staff had sixty complete games, while the current staff has none. Last year there were a total of 34 complete games in all of baseball.

The stat guys will tell you that the use of advanced statistics makes for a more competitive game by removing chance from the equation. People with a soul will tell you that the stat guys should be sent to a labor camp. No one watches any sporting event to see the stat guys show off their latest number crunching. Sport is human drama with all of the flaws that come with it. Removing the flaws inevitably removes the humanity from it and you are left with robots playing robots

The reason everyone who was aware in 1988 remembers Kirk Gibson hitting the homerun off Dennis Eckersley in the World Series is because it is the thing every kid who played baseball dreamed of doing. It is a scene every father taking his son to a game hopes they will see. The aging slugger called in to face off against the game’s best closer in the deciding moment. The old man mustering what little he has left to stroke one last home run to win the game.

If the modern stat head had been in charge, that moment never would have happened because Gibson would not be on the team, much less sent up to bat. Tommy Lasorda would not have been in the dugout to make the call. Instead, the robot manager would have sent up a specialist whose only role was to face Eckersley. Maybe the Dodgers win anyway, but no one would remember it because there would be no reason to remember what in the end was a statistical anomaly.

The reason that any of this matters is that baseball is a microcosm of American life in that society, like baseball, is now run by people who have no appreciation for the things that make life worth living. Instead, they view people as mere economic units or perhaps items to manipulate in the transactional world of managerialism. Society has been drained of its authenticity and in its place is the drab materialism in the meat space and the superficial drama of the virtual space.

The answer to fixing baseball and other sports is to open the windows of the skyboxes where the stat guys run the game and throw them out of those windows. Let the players play the fans enjoy the human drama. Similarly, the answer to what ails the modern world is to throw the managers off the roof of their offices and let people go back to figuring out how to live. The results may not make for an impressive pivot table, but no one should live inside a pivot table anyway.

An Old Story

Posted on August 14, 2024 by thezman

For a little over a year, it has been clear to people who have followed the war in Ukraine that there is no winning scenario for Ukraine. The sanctions on Russia failed to change the Russian approach to the war. The hundreds of billions in NATO weapons, planning and support were not enough to beat back the Russian army. The great Ukraine offensive of 2023 was a stunning failure that eliminated any possibility of the Ukraine army holding the line in the Donbass.

The question has been how does the war end. For Ukraine, the best outcome is a negotiated settlement that includes a change in Ukrainian attitudes. Maybe NATO abandons the project and the Russians install new leaders. Maybe Zelensky figures out that he is about to be cut loose and cuts a deal with the Russians. Maybe Washington, hoping to save face, backs Zelensky in making a deal with the Russians. No matter how, the best option for Ukraine was a negotiated settlement.

That appears to be off the table now that the Ukrainians have launched this crazy incursion into the Kursk region of Russia. It appears that the plan was to reach the nuclear power plant in Kursk and then use it as blackmail. The Ukrainians would not just demand negotiations but require a Russian withdrawal as a condition for negotiations or they would blow up the nuclear power plant. As ridiculous as that sounds, the other explanations for this gambit are even nuttier.

Of course, this plan sounds like it is from a poorly made Hollywood action thriller, rather than a sober-minded military operation. The reason for that is the people running Ukraine are actors. For going on three years now they have spent far more time crafting creative narratives about the war than thinking soberly about how they can avoid being wiped off the map. For people who imagine reality is just a clever written story, this operation sounded brilliant.

The supreme role of narrative for Western political elites is evident in how they have reacted to this new production. It seems they had no part in its construction, or at least they were not told about it in advance, so they were unprepared to play their role in selling this as the next great event in the drama. Western media was not provided with a script, so they had no idea what to say. Eventually they settled on this being bad for Putin’s narrative, a thing that does not exist.

It is another example of the total lack of realism in our political class. The Ukraine war is an unnecessary venture for everyone involved except the Russians. A thousand years of history says they will not allow Ukraine to fall into the Western orbit. Otherwise, everyone else involved has practical reasons for not having this war, but the good feelings that come from good narratives have been too much to resist. The result is an unfolding catastrophe for the West.

This total lack of realism in the West seems to have finally reached an end point with the Russians after this latest caper. In a recent press conference, Putin said that it is now impossible to deal with Ukrainian leadership. While not closing the door to negotiations completely, he has now ruled out dealing with Zelensky. Other Russian officials are floating the idea of regime change in Kiev as a necessary precondition for any negotiated settlement to the war.

What that means is that the eventual collapse of the Ukrainian army, which is now accelerating due to the nutty decisions made by Kiev, will be followed by a political collapse, by force if necessary. In other words, if the West deciders it is time to make a deal with the Russians, that deal starts by cutting Zelensky loose, which in the context of Ukrainian politics means the whole crew must go. They will not go voluntarily, so it means the end game includes a civil war in Western Ukraine.

The Ukraine war is a microcosm of what is happening in the West. Every decision is based only in the moment without any thought of what comes next. Things are done voluntarily that should have been avoided, not because they are part of a larger strategy but because they fit the current narrative. It is as if once the story is created, the writers are sucked into it, losing all control of the plot. All they can do is respond as if they are now unwitting characters in the story.

This is harmless in the low-stakes world of parlor games in which members of the political class evolve, but in the practical world, it is a disaster. It leads to a scenario in which no one knows if the current president is alive or dead. No one seems to care because his character has been written out of the story. Who is actually making decisions is a mystery. It is the dynamic that created the condition for war in Ukraine and is now pushing it towards catastrophe.

On the one hand, it certainly seems like the West is now governed by emotion and symbolism, rather than practical considerations. The Kamala Harris campaign can be boiled down to a promise of feel goods. The entire production is a collection of symbolic shapes and sounds to transmit the simple idea that it feels good or that the alternative will make you feel bad. To his credit, Trump is offering tangible things that have some connection to practical reality.

The lesson of the Ukraine war, however, is that reality still matters. All the feel-good stories and symbols has not changed the fact that the Russian army is chewing up the Ukrainian army. The clever narratives cannot conceal the massive cemeteries full of dead Ukrainian soldiers. The question that arises from this war is whether Western elites will learn that the clever stories by the managerial class will not keep them from the gallows if things start to crumble.

The great lesson of history is that there is always a price to be paid for failed leadership and that price is paid by the people, then their rulers. Joseph de Maistre famously said that the people get the government they deserve. He was wrong. The lesson of the French Revolution is that the ruling elite gets the people they deserve. A ruling class that is concerned more with clever narratives than practical reality will face a people, who out of practical necessity, decide they must get a new ruling elite.

Escape From Reality

Posted on August 13, 2024 by thezman

The great fear as the internet spread across American society was that things in this virtual world would somehow cross over into the real world. Usually this meant that the machines would get super intelligent and take over society. This is the underlying theme of movies like The Terminator. Alternatively, a being from inside the internet would make the jump into the meat space. This is the plot for the film Virtuosity. A virtual serial killer gets loose in the real world and does his worst.

Nothing like that has come to pass, but something worse may be happening and that is reality is being sucked into the virtual world. More accurately, people are spending so much time online that the virtual world is supplanting reality for them. We are seeing this with the Harris campaign, which is probably the most intensely online political program we have every experienced. Everything about it is based on winning the internet that day, which means it operates by the rules of the internet.

The most obvious example is how the Kamala Harris character has been reimagined by her developers into something disconnected from reality. From the presentation, one would never know she has been Vice President for the last four years or that she has spent those years arguing for the administration’s positions. Like a discarded scene from a video game, all of that is gone now. In its place is the new character whose only connection to the prior character is the name.

The disconnectedness extends to her campaign and its supporters. Trump has been stumping on the idea of exempting tips from income taxes. Whatever the merits of the idea, it is a clever way to appeal to young people. The other day, the Harris character announced its plan to not tax tips, as if it were something totally new that had never been mentioned by anyone. Miraculously, the people playing the Harris character online responded as if it was a total novel idea.

Of course, this being the age of mendacity, the new Harris gameplay comes with manufactured crowds online that cheer for it. There are fake polls that claim this character is now the most popular character in the game. It is destroying all of the orange baddies in this expansion pack. We know this because every day the lie machine we call mass media fills the game space with stories about how Trump is raging in his bunker about the greatness of the Harris character.

This upgraded version of Kamala Harris is now equipment with a lacky to do the things lackies do for the hero. Like the new Kamala Harris, the character called Tim Walz bears little resemblance to the old version. Instead of being a bloviating windbag who bores people with his imaginary tales of heroism in the military, this version is a folksy good old boy who just happens to hold all of the same opinions as the developers who created his character for the game.

What we are experiencing right now is a political campaign that exists only in the virtual world of the highly online. If you are not playing in this part of the game or you live in reality, you may not know about any of this. Maybe one of your favorite “influencers” has gone into panic mode for some reason and that got your attention. Otherwise, if you are not in this part of the game, none of this is real to you. The main reason for that is that nothing about this campaign is real thus far.

This is why the people most affected by this new release are the self-styled influencers who live entirely online. These people spend all day, every day, looking for something they can front-run in order to maintain the illusion that they are not just playing the game, but they are controlling it. The reason they are called influencers is not that they influence anyone, but that they are the most easily influenced. The right-wing influencer crowd cannot stop playing the new Harris character.

The highly online, of course, will argue that this is reality, and it is now changing the meat space, but how would they know? One of the weird aspects of virtual reality is that it is self-affirming to the people who have been sucked into it. For many of them, Twitter is reality and people outside of it do not exist. This is why influencers banned from Twitter were so desperate to get back on the platform. Having your account suspended is what passes for Hell in the virtual world.

That still leaves the question as to whether this is working. More people get their news from online sources than from legacy sources, so if you win the internet then it suggests you can influence people. On the other hand, the internet is a big place and people gravitate to that which confirms the opinions. One reason the undecided voter is a thing of the past is everyone now has an online tribe. Alternatively, they have a cable chat show they watch every night for their opinions.

The highly online like saying that arguing with a boomer is arguing with the television because all of their opinions come from television. Ironically, arguing with the highly online is arguing with the internet. The people playing the Nick Fuentes character right now have no ideas of their own. They have the ideas of the other players in the Nick Fuentes game space. It turns out that right-wing zoomers are just like the right-wing boomers they criticize. They just have a different god.

That is what will be the interesting thing about the Harris game. Eventually, the Harris character will have to step outside the curated world of gameplay and talk to flesh and blood humans, as well as debate Trump. As much as the developers would like to believe the reality they have created has supplanted the old reality, the test of this will be their character leaving the game space for the meat space. The same holds for the lackey with his Elmer Fudd costume and reimagined backstory.

What it will ultimately come down to is whether the voters will prefer the game space reality to the meat space reality. Will they believe the upgraded Harris character is preferable to the meat space Harris and continue to play the game character as a form of escapism or will they experience the meat space version and get turned off by the game itself? That is the central question of this election. This is the first election where people are asked to choose reality versus escapism.

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