Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

Nice Guys Finish Last

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One of the main battles within Western liberal democracies over the last seventy years has been the war between partisanship and objectivity. Those on the side of partisanship see politics as a war between interests, like labor versus capital or minorities versus the majority. Objectivists see politics as a battle about finding the best solution for the problems of society. For them, even their own narrow interests must take a back seat to the truth. Being right counts for everything.

The partisans have always had the advantage, because they correctly understand that the “right answer” or even the “best answer” is a matter of perspective. Your class or identity interests shape your ideology and you will always see as the correct answer that which fits your ideology. Put another way, it is human nature to root for your own team, whether you do so consciously or unconsciously. Those who think they are being objective are just flattering themselves.

Once free of the restraint of objectivity, partisans are free to press their interests through whatever means are available. They are not constrained by the rules, because like all things in politics, the rules are a means to an end. Forcing an opponent to abide by their rules, while you violate them, for example, is perfectly acceptable, as long as it advances your group interests. The most recent election is a great example of partisanship triumphing over objectivity.

A good example of how this clash of world views has been going on for a long time is this post from American Renaissance. A long lost interview of the great IQ researcher Arthur Jensen was discovered on YouTube or maybe re-posted to YouTube. It is from the old daytime chat show called The Phil Donahue Show. Long forgotten at this point, Donahue was the godfather of the modern daytime chat show. He was the first to involve the audience in a town hall style format.

If you watch just a few minutes of the interview, you see Jensen was trying to answer the questions about the facts in his work. Donahue, on the other hand, is not interested in the facts, but how he can use them to further the cause. Donahue was one of the smarmier television liberals at the time. He was the Bill Maher of the 80’s, infamous for tricking guests into coming on his show, only to put them in terrible positions, in which they inevitably looked foolish or disreputable.

Early in the interview, Donahue knows he cannot use the old liberal gag of dismissing an enemy as stupid, so he keeps shifting the focus from the facts in the book to the alleged motivations for writing about them. He wants the audience to come away thinking that Jensen is an immoral person for having an interest in the topic, so good people should therefore dismiss him out of hand. To the partisan mind, all disconfirmation is personalized and the person is then anathematized.

In that American Renaissance post, Jared Taylor adds some commentary about his personal interactions with Arthur Jensen. This comment is illustrative of that gap between partisans and objectivists. “I was struck by his mild and profoundly scientific reaction to his attackers. He wasn’t angry at them; he was baffled. Why couldn’t they just look at the data?” The partisan knows exactly why he is in the fight, while the objectivist is perpetually baffled as to why there is a fight.

The objectivist will counter that facts matter and eventually, factual reality must triumph over wishful thinking. In the case of IQ, for example, the diversity of intelligence and what it means for modern society is immutable. Gather up a bunch of 65-IQ Somalis and dump them into Minneapolis and before long the city is struggling with the sorts of social problems that come with a 65-IQ population. Intelligence is driven by genetics, not environment, so these experiments must fail.

The thing is though, while the results of the current experiments with diversity are certain to fail in the long run, there is no guarantee that the critics will be around to see their predictions proven correct. Another immutable truth is the future belongs to the winners of today, for better or worse. Being right, but losing the fight over who will shape the future simply guarantees you will be proven correct. That makes being right hardly worth the effort, unless you are a masochist.

This has been the story of all opposition to Progressive racialism in America since the middle of the last century. The opponents go on about facts and reason, while the radicals scheme to get around those objections. Maybe it is anathematizing an opponent by calling him a racist, as with IQ researchers. Maybe it is violating the rules, while forcing the other side to obey the rules. At every turn over the last three generations, the partisans have beaten the truth-speakers.

Interestingly, this is the one bit of objective reality that the objectivists always find a way to look past in their analysis. When it is pointed out to conservatives that they have managed to conserve nothing, they have no answer. The best they can muster is the weak claim that playing to win makes you no better than the Left, which is suggests they are not committed to the causes they claim to champion. Instead, it is about their personal honor. They want to lose with dignity.

Taylor finishes his commentary on Jensen with the following sentence. “He was a model of dignity, courage, and fair-mindedness for all dissidents.” On a personal level, this is a fine sentiment, but lousy advise. In this long twilight struggle to save the West, those concerned with dignity, courage, and fair-mindedness must be relegated to the drawing room to comfort the women, while those willing to do whatever is necessary go out and subvert the enemy on the field of partisan politics.

This should not be read to mean that the answer to Progressive radicalism is to ape their tactics. In fact, that is usually the wrong course. The Left deployed their street terrorist this year hoping to draw a response, which they were prepared to use in their election efforts. They can do this because they control the courts and the police, so the tactic is low cost for them. For dissidents, however, such a tactic is high cost and promises a small or even negative return.

Instead, the dissident must learn to view “dignity, courage, and fair-mindedness” as tools in his political toolkit. When they advance the cause, they can be deployed, but when they weaken the effort, use other tools. Like the craftsman, the partisan dissident uses his tools in furtherance of the project. No one cares if the master craftsman is dignified or fair-minded. He is judged on his work. The dissident right will be judged by its deeds, not by its adherence to abstract personal qualities.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The New Corporatism

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Note: I have a post up behind the green door on the Mary sue that was allowed to play sportsball with the boys last week.

In the industrial age, the power centers in Western societies were capital, the government and the workers in that order. Because money is power, the capitalists could exert influence over governments, so they were at the top of the power structure, but that had its limits. Government has the monopoly of force and must be responsive to the people, even in private government. Labor, of course, had numbers and even in the most repressive regimes, numbers count for a lot.

Of course, there was natural conflict between labor and capital. Then as now, capitalists wanted to exploit their workers as much as possible. One solution to this was tripartism, which is economic corporatism. Labor, government and employers work together to form economic policy. Labor would be organized into unions, whose leaders would sit at the table with representatives from the state and industry to fashion polices that maintained social stability and economic prosperity.

For most of Europe, this has been the explicit arrangement. In Scandinavia, what is often called socialism is actually corporatism. Workers get generous benefits, but the state protects business from competition. In other parts of Europe it is not as explicit, but the social contract is based on the cooperation of the government, business and labor unions. The irony is that this was the approach favored by fascist movements, but no one dares mention that bit of history.

In America, this arrangement was never formalized. Industrial unions flourished in the north, but never got traction in the rest of the country. Into the 20th century, the central government was too weak to bring labor and capital to the table. Instead we got an informal version of tripartism, with activist groups inside the political system negotiating on behalf of labor. The political class used regulation, rather than force, to bring business owners to the table.

For the most part, this system worked well enough through the 20th century. It was not perfect, nothing is, but all the measures of society improved. Even as the West moved into post-industrial economies, the system held up. That’s increasingly not the case, especially in America, as we move fully into the technological age. That old informal arrangement is falling apart and being replaced with a bipolar social order, centered on money and information.

You see this with the Democratic Party. A generation ago, Democratic politicians would court industrial labor unions and salt their platforms with promises to the middle and working class. They were the party of labor. Today, Democrat politicians would not be caught dead with a union boss. Instead they hang out at Davos with bankers and global titans of the information age. They salt their platforms with weird aspirational messages that resonate with bourgeoise bohemians.

The new system is an informal arrangement between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the political class in Washington. Left out of this is not only labor, but the bulk of business, which does not operate globally. You see this with Covid. Exceptions were made for the giant corporations, but not the small and midsized business forced to knuckle under to draconian measures. A great transfer of power and money is underway from the middle-class to the elites.

Just as capital was able to exert influence over the state in the old industrial tripartite system, money and information is now able to push around the political class. You see this with the tech monopolies. Many in Washington know this is a serious problem, but they are powerless to stop it. Not only can the tech giants buy the votes they need, they get to read everyone’s e-mail and text messages. In the information age, control of information is as important as controlling the money.

What America is racing into is bipartism, an informal alliance between Silicon Valley and Wall Street, with Washington as junior partner. Silicon Valley controls the flow of information, while Wall Street controls the flow of money. When necessary, Washington supplies the force. There is no role for labor or even for the public at-large. In a world where elections are ceremonial, there is no need for Washington to appeal to the voters or even pretend to do so.

The problem with this emerging social arrangement is that it is not rooted in anything other than short-term greed. Corporatism of the industrial age was rooted in Catholic social teaching, where the parties had reciprocal duties. Human dignity and the common good were overriding concerns. The three parts of the system were bound by reciprocal duties to the other, but also bound by a duty to society. There was a clear moral component, rooted in 2000 years of history.

The system that is emerging is explicitly free of any moral duty to society, as it rejects the very notion of society. After all, society is about boundaries and the open society is about no boundaries, which is a contradiction in terms. The rhetoric is to disguise the fact that the whole point of this new order is to consume social capital, converting it into money and power for the two stake holders. Human dignity and the common good have been monetized to benefit the new ruling order.

The main flaw in this is that a world without social capital is a world without trust. This is why personal liberty is quickly shrinking. Prisons are low trust societies and they are controlled by limiting the choices available to inmates. The emerging social credit system and “freedom passes” are what the new ruling class thinks will replace the social capital they have devoured. Instead of a sense of community and an obligation to society, people will be motivated by their smartphone.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Suspicious Minds

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The Panic of 1873 is one of those events that was important at the time, but gets little discussion today. One reason is it does not fit modern narratives, as the villains and victims are not familiar today. It is one of those events that just seemed to happen and all of these years later it is not clear why it happened. There are lots of possible causes, but not one obvious cause. The resulting decades long depression, however, setup the 20th century and the two great industrial wars.

Another important event that gets little attention these days is the Great Fear that preceded the French Revolution. This was a period of panic, fear and conspiracy theories that swept rural France. Rumors circulated about various plots by the King and the aristocratic classes. For reasons no one has been able to explain, the peasants became increasingly sure the First Estate was about to overthrow the Third Estate, which eventually led to the revolution.

One of the many interesting things about the Bolshevik Resolution is the parallels between it and the French Revolution. Lenin was supposedly a student of the latter, so the lessons of it informed his decisions. Whether this is true or not is like so much else about our history. No one can say for sure now. One clear parallel, however, was the fear and panic preceding the February revolution. Suddenly, no one could trust anyone, so everyone was willing to believe the most outlandish tales.

The one thread that runs through economic panics, periods of civil unrest and great social upheavals like revolutions is the collapse in trust. It is not just the trust in individuals like a king or rich people. Human societies have been dealing with dishonest rulers for a long time. Monarchs come and go and people quickly adjust. When everyone knows the problem is a man or group of men, the solution to the problem is always at hand. No man, no more problems.

Panics are different. The fear is driven by the sense that nothing can be trusted, even one’s own assessment of events. In the case of economic panics, when a big powerful bank fails, impoverishing its clients, how can one trust anything about the financial system at that point? If all of a sudden the currency loses a big chunk of its value, how can anyone trust the economic system itself? In times when the foundations of the system lose credibility, no one can trust anything in the system.

A simple example makes this clear. If in your place of work, the software system used by the company suddenly produces errors, everyone raises an alarm. Work stops until the people in charge of the software either explain why the unexpected result is, in fact, correct or they find the cause and repair it. The software system holds the business rules of the company, so when those rules appear to be to failing, the logic of the business is called into question. The users begin to panic.

The reason people panic is that trust is built on predictability and predictability relies on rules and the orderly enforcement of those rules. When the rules stop making sense or their enforcement becomes arbitrary, it becomes impossible to predict the outcome of one’s actions. When you cannot trust the rules, you cannot trust the results of your own decisions, which means you cannot trust even yourself. When people can trust nothing they are willing to believe anything.

America appears to be in one of those moments when the people are suddenly thrust into a world in which they can no longer trust anything. The extraordinary events of the last election have caused tens of millions to question the system itself. Even those who voted for Biden are coming around to the idea that it was not on the level. Now we are seeing wild claims rocketing around the internet about what is happening to various people and what is happening behind the scenes.

The new rumors and claims are a bit nutty, but the fact is this has been building for a while, going back to before the prior election. Think back and there were all sorts of rumors about Hillary Clinton. People were willing to believe them because she is a terribly corrupt person and a notorious liar. You cannot trust anything that is said by her, her associates or anyone aligned with her. Today, everyone views the system the same way we have viewed Hillary Clinton for decades.

Another interesting aspect to this time of rumor and panic is the fact that the political class has not learned from the economic class. The lesson the bankers learned from the depression of 1929 is that one tool in their arsenal had to be a form of shock and awe as they addressed the crisis. The display of power by the central bank would fill the void of trust and quell the panic. This has proven to be highly effective, as we saw with the mortgage crisis in 2008. Everyone trusted the Fed.

Looking back at the French and Russian revolutions, there were points when the ruling class could have restored some trust in themselves and the system. They had opportunities to change the dynamic and bring people back into a political process they could trust. They failed to do so, often choosing a path that further eroded what little trust the people had in them. We’re seeing similar failures today, as the ruling class carries on as if nothing is happening outside their mansions.

This is how suspicious minds become radical minds. When people get suspicious over something like the election anomalies, they are looking for an explanation from a source they want to trust. When that natural authority mocks or dismisses their suspicion, that becomes part of a new narrative to explain both the anomalies and the unexpected reaction to it. That why the rumors are flying. Suddenly, tens of millions are in the market for a new narrative to explain what they are seeing.

Just as important, tens of millions of American are moving from a mode where they think the government has bad elements to a mode where the suspect the government itself is the bad element. When public trust in the system sharply declined a generation ago, the system had a solution. Reagan channeled that distrust into a reform effort that restored trust in the system. Today, the Pretender Biden and his coterie of flunkies and door holders is channeling that distrust into conspiracies.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Kulak Solution

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Note: There is a new post up on Taki about the emerging gyno-fascism and I have a new post behind the green door about what escapism is like in Wokanda.

One consequence of the Trump victory in 2016 was that many people were reassured that reform was still possible. Trump was an imperfect vessel for a reform movement, but he was just the guy to shake things up. He would be both a warning to the establishment and a catalyst for reform. The last four years proved that to be a false dawn, but people had hope for the 2020 election. The rigged election has probably put that idea to bed for most white people.

The question now is where do we go from here? If the Republican Party is a waste of energy and the Democrats are now the anti-white party, conventional politics looks like a pointless exercise. One way out of that is to either create a new party that transcends the GOP as the opposition or infiltrate the Republican party. The former solution is the dreaded third-party route and the latter is the “reform within” approach. Chris Roberts at American Renaissance points out that neither is a new idea.

Taking over the GOP has proven to be impossible for the same reason reforming Washington has proven to be impossible. If you have a leadership that is so corrupt it needs reform forced upon them, you have a leadership that is so corrupt they will find a way to thwart reform. It’s like forcing a lion to be vegan. It is so against its nature that it will just eat the keeper, rather than accept fake food. This has been the case for the Republican Party going back to Pat Buchanan.

The third-party route has the same problem. The system has been designed to prevent outside challenges. Both establishment parties take turns playing the loyal opposition, so that discontent with official policy is funneled into one side or the other. That way the discontent is recycled as fuel for the establishment. Generations of conditioning have made white people hostile to third parties. Even if a third party were to succeed, they would face what Trump faced as a reformer in Washington.

Roberts suggests a third option in which people focus on narrow interests and press those interests within the system. He points to various pressure groups that have had varying degrees of success. The NRA has probably been the most successful of the groups named, because it has influence within both parties. In this model, whites can press issues like immigration or economic reform in a bipartisan way, rather than hoping to make these platforms in one political party.

This approach could be described as the Kulak option. The Kulaks were peasants at the end of the Russian Empire who owned their own land. As the revolution rolled on, the term came to mean property holder, especially those who were hesitant to support the Bolsheviks, but were also unwilling to side with the peasants. The kulaks would chastise the peasants for not supporting the revolution, but they were never completely onboard with giving up their land in service of the revolution.

In this age, the Kulaks are those who view politics merely as a way to protect their diminishing economic and social status. These are people in the upper middle-class, economically and culturally. That last bit is vital to understanding the most bourgeois class in modern America. Flattery is the mother’s milk of this group. No people need to be told they are a good boy, a very good boy more than the white professional class. It is why they recoiled at Trump’s lower-class aesthetics.

These people are willing to embrace half measures in the same way the Kulaks were willing to meet the Bolsheviks halfway. It’s not that they hate white people or the cause of white people. It’s that they think it is icky to be seen on the same stage as people who shop at Walmart. This is the group that first fell for using grimy canvas sacks to tote their groceries and now wear their mask while driving their foreign sedan. For them, moderation in politics is a moral signifier.

This is where single issue politics comes into play. Some of these people can get behind immigration reform, not for racial reasons but for fairness reasons. It is unfair to current immigrants to leave the spigot open. They can back tough trade policy, because globalism is bad for minorities. Many of these people supported Trump as a social statement, but abandoned him in 2020 as a social statement. Like the Kulaks, they could not fully support the forces of change.

What this means is the people with the money to fund a reform movement will always want a firm hand on the leash. This is why the Republican Party is never willing to press their advantage or follow through with their promises. The people who they rely upon for funding resist anything that puts their interests at risk, but mostly they resist anything that offends their elevated sense of self. As a result, their politics are ceremonial. It is about where you stand on the stage, rather than what you do on it.

Of course, the dissident project is about bringing people over the great divide and part of that journey is the realization that dissidents are the radicals now. The people calling themselves radicals are just deluded tools of the establishment. Antifa and BLM should have corporate sponsors on their outfits like sports teams. The real radicals are those standing outside the prevailing moral and civic orthodoxy, questioning the very basics of the liberal democratic project.

Like those old Bolsheviks, who courted support from the Kulaks, and their urban analogs the intellects, dissidents need to appeal to upper middle-class whites in order to advance the cause. Because this group responds primarily to symbolism and moral signifiers, the appeal can and must be superficial. It is a means to an end. They want to be part of something that promises change, but never threatens their position. In time, they will be forced to choose or the choice will be made for them.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Dissident Thanksgiving

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Thanksgiving is considered the most American of holidays, as it is nothing like the typical holiday celebrated in the West. It has rather specific origins located in the founding of the country. Those origins are complete nonsense, of course, but that’s often the case with cultural traditions. Even so, since Lincoln imposed the holiday on the conquered nations of America, Thanksgiving has been the quintessential American holiday and probably most people’s favorite time of year.

The origins of the holiday may be nonsense and the reason we have it may be less than noble, but a time to count your blessings is a good thing. It is made more important in an age in which the ruling class is trying hard to destroy the social capital that is an essential part of human society. When everything is transactional and artificial, having a few days in which you are supposed to think the exact opposite looks a lot like leaving the back door of the Death Star open.

That may be especially true this year. According to current polling, more than half of American adults think the recent election was rigged. No one has asked, but there is a good bet that most of those people think the mass media, Wall Street and Silicon Valley were in on the caper. In other words, most adults right now have lost trust in the controlling institutions of our society. A holiday in which we are encouraged to think about what really matters could not come at a better time.

Of course, this year has seen our rulers go mad with power and inflict all sorts of indignities upon us. There are the absurd lock downs and costume requirements related to the Covid panic. In the states where the tyrants have arbitrarily banned the sale of alcohol and installed snitch lines for people to rat out their neighbors for enjoying themselves, this will be a special time of year. A few days to think about all of this is just what the doctor ordered.

For those in areas where the Left’s street thugs have been running wild for most of the year, something similar is at work. The point of civilized society is to provide leisure time, when you can enjoy the simple pleasures with those you love. That is a sharp contrast to what the wreckers who bankroll the street mobs think. Over turkey tomorrow, a lot of people are going to think about what those oligarchs are really trying to take from us with their street thugs and gangsters.

Most important, of course, those engaged in the fight against the gathering darkness will be fortified by a few days of good food, good friends and time with family. While the forces of darkness are driven by avatars of the promised land and envy at what they can never attain, the dissident it driven by the thoughts of home, community and the daily struggle to make those things possible. For the dissident right, this is the best holiday of the year, even more so in the current crisis.

The challenge, of course, will be the spiteful mutants who will try to wreck the good times with their politics. The wine aunt who wants to gloat about the election, the unstable uncle who thinks Hitler is hiding under his bed and the young person whose mind has been poisoned by the system will all think this is their time to be the wrecker they imagine themselves to be. Dissidents everywhere will have to find a way to deal with these people, but this is the nature of the struggle.

Probably the most important thing to take away from this year, the thing to contemplate over the next few days, is the fact that we are on the cusp of a new age. Those promises from the ruling class puppets, like the Pretender Biden, to “build back better” should not worry anyone, as these people are parasites. They are wreckers, unwittingly clearing a path for what comes next. Someone will build back better, but it comes after the reckoning that awaits every radical wrecker.

It may feel like a small consolation, but Thanksgiving has always been about looking forward, as much as looking back. You take the time to count your blessings and enjoy what you have, family, friends, your health and so on, but it is also about giving thanks for being in the great struggle of life. Whether it is carving a new society out of the wilderness or preserving the seeds of civilization in the great storms of the present, Thanksgiving is mostly about the promise of better days.

That is the thing that should keep the dissident going. The rage the other side has for what is good in life is rooted, to a great degree, in their fear of tomorrow. They know they are “always exposed to sudden unexpected destruction. As he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall, he cannot foresee one moment whether he shall stand or fall the next.” This is the source of their rage. They know they stand upon the slippery stones of radicalism, while we stand on the firm ground of truth.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Cynical Phase

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Note: I have a new post up behind the green door on the move Mr. Jones, which I recommend to those mulling over the current age. Learning about the realities of Soviet communism is a good palliative to those prone to optimism.

The Soviet Union, like all radical experiments, went through several phases in its roughly three generations of existence. The first phase, of course, was the revolution, in which the old order was toppled and a battle ensued to fill the void. This initial phase of revolution is always the one that attracts the most attention. This is when the great heroes of the revolution and the great villains of it are made. It is in this phase we get both Lenin and Stalin, hero and villain.

There is a phase that gets little attention and that is when the people come to terms with the irrationality of the world that has been created for them. One reason Stalin was able to send so many to their deaths or to labor camps is so many people kept thinking there was some rationality to the world being created. Some remained idealistic believers in the cause, while others became critics of the cause. They assumed the revolution would bring clarity and rationality when it brought only the opposite

In time, the people came to terms with this. The humor of the Soviet Union reflected the fact that one got along by accepting the irrational in the same way you accept that the grass is green or the sky is blue. You don’t think about it. The jokes were often about these daily contradictions and how the unfortunate were those who did not get the joke that was at the heart of those contradictions. In other words, the joke was always on the fool who was not cynical enough to anticipate the lie.

This is relevant in our current age as we may be past the revolutionary stage and into that time when the people adjust to the irrational. The legacy conservative media keeps pounding the drum about how “we’re lurching into socialism” when we have been a socialist society for generations now. There is no aspect of our economic life outside the grip of the now semi-permanent ruling class. Telling people otherwise is just part of the way the ruling class controls the population.

Of course, this reality is dawning on even the dullest people, so we are being told that the bad guys are planning a “radical revolution.” The truth is, that revolution is well past the planning stage. It has already happened. From top to bottom, despite party labels or rhetoric, the system is stacked with people committed to the great reordering of society into the egalitarian paradise. The expulsion of Trump from office like a foreign body is the proof that the organism of state is wholly alien now.

In other words, a revolution has occurred out of view from the rest of us and now we are seeing the revolutionaries step out of the shadows. This is not a lot different than how Stalin took control of the party and government. He quietly consolidated his hold on the party, while his rivals were thinking the revolution was still ongoing. By the time they realized what had happened, it was too late. This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head.

Now we are in the phase where we get used to the often-bizarre contradictions in the rules being imposed by the new rulers. Some are easy, like the fact that states have put mentally disturbed Jewish men in sundresses in charge of public health. These are ornamental positions, so putting a crazy person in the role allows the governor to display his piety at little cost. Until the Covid hysteria, no one had any reason to know their state had public health officials.

Other bits of the new normal have no explanation. For example, states are now telling people they cannot make noise in their home, as part of the alleged fight against the spread of Covid. In Europe, they are banning the sale of alcohol at certain times, claiming this is to fight Covid. Maybe they believe Covid hates loud noises and people get loud when they drink. It is insane, but it makes more sense than the official explanation, which is no explanation at all.

The lunacy of official policy will not always be humorous. The freedom loving Boris Johnson is now promoting a plan whereby Brits will be issued “freedom passes” if they comply with official edicts on Covid. For a long time, people threw around the word “Orwellian” to mean something they did not like. The English-speaking world is about to learn the real meaning of the term. Getting a freedom pass for doing exactly what the government has instructed is the very definition of Orwellian.

Another part of this phase where we come to terms with the madness of the situation is the acceptance of official silence. In a country with anything resembling an independent media, these officials would be asked to explain their polices. Boris Johnson would be asked about his Orwellian freedom pass scheme. Instead, the media is full of lectures about how we’re all in this together. You see, this is an opportunity to build back better, so you need to embrace this glorious opportunity.

Westerners have been trained for generations to think the media has an adversarial relationship with the government. This will change during this time. We will come to understand what the Soviet citizen understood. The official media is just that, official media promulgating the new lies. It’s value to the people is only in letting us know how to stay out of the camps and in providing a laugh at the absurdity of living in a society based on obvious lies. Everyone becomes a cynic.

That is something else we will learn. Pessimism is not the opposite of optimism. The man who is sure the end is near is really just another type of optimist. He believes that soon, his struggle will come to an end. The opposite of optimism is cynicism. Both the optimist and the pessimist are willing to accept the moral framework as stated. Their actions and understanding of the world are tightly bound by the orthodoxy. Both the optimist and the pessimist give up their agency to faith in the rules that govern them.

The cynic, in the context of an authoritarian society, accepts that there is no inherent logic in the system, other than to insulate those who prosper from their position. The cynic accepts that there is no truth in the system and the outcomes are random, based on the changing desires of the people you interact with in the system. The cynic knows there is no truth in a world of lies, other than his own acceptance of it. It is in this phase we are in now where we learn that you can never be cynical enough.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Our Abductive Mind

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Note: I have a heretical post full of crime-think behind the green door. This is a post about the sitcom The Big bang Theory.

One of the odd experiences you have on this side of the great divide is you notice just how many ridiculous things people accept as true. It’s not just gullible and stupid people who walk around with heads full of nonsense. Lots of smart and thoughtful people cling to ideas that are superstitious and primitive. Often people who make the journey to this side of the great divide struggle with the fact that for most of their life they have believed things that are ridiculous or devoid of any truth content.

A good example of something most people think is true, but is complete nonsense is the claim that your diet determines your health. More specifically, the claim that the Standard American Diet, as recommended by the rulers, is the key to long life and healthy lifestyle. That means lots of carbohydrates, rather than proteins and fats, especially from meat. Not only is there no truth to these claims, the Standard American Diet is probably the exact opposite of the truth.

The fact is, outside of the extremes, like starvation or morbid obesity, diet has little to no impact on your health. All of the “evidence” trotted out in favor the SAD is based on nonsense studies that are easily refuted. Humans are omnivores, which means we can survive on a wide range of foods. The main problem for modern humans is too much food, so many become obese. Otherwise, the combination of foods you eat has no measurable impact on your health or your lifespan.

The thing is, you can carefully explain this to someone and they will nod along maybe, seeming to get what you’re saying, but as soon as they get the chance, they will repeat the approved lines about diet. A man who has seen every man in his family get colon cancer, despite their diet and lifestyle, will cling to the idea that he can prevent colon cancer by eating oatmeal for breakfast. It’s no different than thinking he can appease the gods by sacrificing a goat on the prescribed day.

Another great example is mass media. One of the funny things about this age is the more partisan you are, the more trusting you are of the media, despite the fact partisans on all sides are sure the media is covering up the truth. Trump haters have fallen for every race hoax perpetrated by the media over the last five years. The old alt-right, the guys sure the media is controlled by little men in volcanoes, accepted without question the media claims about the Covid pandemic.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is one of those remarkable observations that gets to the heart of why mass propaganda works. It’s not that good propaganda tricks people into believing lies. It’s that in every population, there is a percentage that will believe the lies being spread. It is not always the same percentage, which is what makes this so useful to the propagandist. That percentage does the hard work of repeating the lie in private conversations to friends and family.

Joseph de Maistre said, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” That right there is why so many people, even very smart people, believe some amount of nonsense. They get the nonsense from people they know and trust, so they are inclined to believe it. At the minimum, they play along with the nonsense, for the sake of social peace,

This is the great insight of the propagandist. The purveyors of the big lie don’t start with the big lie, but the small ones. Maybe the small lies undermine some authority figure in society or maybe they nibble away at some accepted truth. Other small lies offer alternatives to the official truth or suggest motivations for why the authority is not being honest with the people. Over time, the little lies accumulate to the point where some people are unwilling to believe their own eyes.

Again, the diet stuff is a great example of this. Everyone who goes to a new doctor has to answer tons of questions about health history and the health history of family members, maybe going back a generation or two. They do this because disease runs in the family and disease runs in families because it is genetic. Yet, the same doctor will tell you to eat more grains and vegetables and lose a few pounds. A lifetime of little lies about diet have conditioned him to doubt his own training.

The most likely reason for this strange willingness to accept pretty lies is that humans are natural story listeners. For a very long time, most of human history, in fact, humans passed around knowledge with stories and songs. Most likely, we are wired to be more receptive to a good tale, than the hard truth. A story about how eating the right food pleases the gods and brings good health is something our ancestors heard around the campfire when they first climbed out of the branches.

Our deductive mind is that which allows us to know important truths about the world, while our inductive mind allows us to think about how the world should be. That conflict between is and ought is resolved by the abductive mind, which resolves these conflicts with amusing tales and easily remembered sayings that let us ignore these conflicts and focus on the act of living. Trog angered the gods is more easily accepted than Trog was eaten by a bear, because that’s what bears do.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Trade-Offs

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Back in the Cold War, one of the unanswered questions that came up from time to time was why did the people in the Soviet Union put up with it? American propaganda said that the living conditions were terrible. They had to stand in line for essentials like toilet paper and meat. The secret police regularly hauled people away, sending them into exile in Siberia or worse. Despite it all, the people, including those in the captive nations never revolted against the state or the communist party.

It is a useful question to ponder now as America and the West slip into the abyss of soft totalitarianism. We don’t have cops busting down doors and hauling away dissidents, at least not yet. We do have ideologues armed with the power of the state pushing people around because they can. The Covid hassles are the result of petty pipsqueaks in government offices dreaming up new ways to torment us. Curfews and bans on alcohol are punitive measures, not palliative ones.

It brings up that old question. Why are people tolerating this? There were some flickers of resistance during the early stages of the lock downs, but governments sent out the cops to harass dissenters and the media revved up the fear campaign. Here we are in a second wave of pointless lock downs, more petty and stupid than the first, but no one is raising hell about it. Back in the Cold War, stories like this elicited oaths about how the tree of liberty needed to be fertilized with the blood of tyrants.

A popular answer, for why people willingly allow themselves to be stripped of their liberty and dignity, is our material prosperity. The Boomers care more about their stock portfolios and their kids care more about the game consoles. The reason everyone goes along with this stuff, according to popular thinking, is everyone feels like they have too much to lose. That material prosperity has made everyone lazy and cautious, so they are easily pushed around by the petty tyrants.

While there is some truth to it, that can’t be the answer for why the people living under communism never revolted. The stories about people waiting in line for bread were no doubt exaggerated by Western media, but there is no doubting that the people in the Soviet Union lived well below Western standards. The Soviets may have had great military gear, but their consumer goods were terrible. Only party members had access to the small luxuries taken for granted in the West at the time.

In retrospect, we now know that life for most people in the Soviet Empire was not the dystopian nightmare portrayed in the West. Once Stalin died, there was a brief period of reform and then communism fell into a long period of conservatism. That is, it was more about maintaining a set of rules and enforcing them. Ideological experimentation came to an end and the focus was on the basics of life. For most people this meant a predictable life, where they had the necessities.

There’s no doubt that material standards of living for people in communism were far below that of the West, but this was not something they saw everyday. They just knew that life was better under communism than in the past. They were also free of crime, disorder and the great uncertainty of the first half of the 20th century. In other words, lacking a plausible alternative that was clearly better, most people were willing to knuckle under to the ideologues in order to get on with life.

We see that in America now. An under appreciated subplot to the Trump phenomenon is that Trump represented disorder and uncertainty, while his establishment opponents became stability and order. They selected the Pretender Biden because no one could possibly see him as a revolutionary. To use the old movie concept, the election was about the blue bill of Biden or the red pill of Trump. Note that the old alt-right greedily gobbled down the blue pill of Biden.

Another historical parallel is important. The captive people of the Soviet Empire were not all willing to go along to get along. The Hungarians revolted in October of 1956 against the party and the Soviet occupation. In November the Soviets sent in the Red Army to crush the revolt. The Politburo was initially open to dealing with the leaders of the rebellion, but changed their mind and crushed the revolt. The reason was they did not want to encourage more rebellions.

In January 1968, the reformer, Alexander Dubček, was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. This set off what is known as the Prague Spring, which was an effort to liberalize Czech politics and economics. This reform effort did not go over well with the Soviets who sent in half a million Warsaw Pact troops to suppress the reform movement and restore the old order. The scenes from Freedom Plaza last Saturday had a Prague Spring vibe to them.

What the Hungarian Revolt and the Prague Spring showed is that raw power has an appeal that can never be underestimated. There is no question that the people of the captive nations were in support of their independence, but the raw power of the Soviet Empire was more than enough to counter popular support. When the rebels had no answer for the Soviet tanks, the people did what Osama bin Laden observed many years ago. They chose the strong horse.

This is a lesson the Poles learned and put to good use in the 1980’s. The Solidarity Movement was as much about making the Polish communist party look weak as it was about organizing the people. Instead of hoping the party would yield to popular will, they played a game of chess with the party, putting them in positions where they looked weak and indecisive. This allowed the people to trust that the cure for communism was not worse than the disease of communism.

This brings us back to the current time. One obvious failing of the populist movement that put Trump in the White House is it was never able to create a plausible alternative in the mind of the people. Was the goal a return to the past or was the goal the present with specific modifications? Was it some undefined future? Trump was not skilled enough to grasp this and lacked the imagination to articulate a plausible alternative, even if he recognized the historical moment.

This is something that the reformers and rebels in the late Soviet Empire did not fail to grasp when their time came. When the party tried to oust Yeltsin, for example, the public rallied to his side because he represented a clear alternative. The Solidarity movement in Poland had a clear set of goals, rather than a list of complaints. When the party tried to muscle them, they were opposing more than just a rebellious rabble, but a set of specific reforms popular with the people.

Getting back to the central question as to why people throughout the ages have been wiling to submit to the most terrible crimes against their liberty and dignity, the answer is that life is about trade-offs. Instinctively, people make their choices based on the options put before them. They do not rebel against the present arrangements because they fall short of some ideal. They rebel, either because the alternative is misery and death or they see some better option on the table.

This has been the magic of the two-party democracy, which is explicit in America and implicit in Europe. The options before the people are always the two faces of the establishment, Republican and Democrat, Liberal and Conservative. Unless and until that dynamic is broken, either with a third option or the discrediting of the two option system, the status quo remains the strong horse. Nothing will change until the trade-offs presented to the people change.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Next Phase Of The War

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Note: I have a movie review up behind the green door. This time it is #97 on the AFI top-100 list, Bringing Up Baby. I must admit, I’me finding it a lot of fun to sample these very old movies. Like reading old books, there is a lot of secondary cultural stuff to be learned from watching old movies.

Very bad people back in the cultural revolution of the 1960’s noticed that radicals were very good at the first phase of their project, but not the second. The radicals wanted to knock down the institutions of society and replace them with something better, but they never managed to pull off that last part. In fact, the thing they cooked up as the new and improved version of what they destroyed tended to create new problems, which required new solutions that created new problems and so on and so on.

An obvious example of this is family life. The nuclear family, with clear and natural roles for the sexes, worked pretty well. The radicals, on the other hand, could not understand why divorce laws and custody laws were as they were. They could not understand why those sex roles existed. They smashed them up and replaced them with family courts, liberal divorce and weird feminist ideas about sex roles. The result has been three generations of family and social dysfunction.

At some point, even the radicals realized that their project was not the best for their cause, so they simply took over the existing institutions. The long march through the institutions was largely over by the 1990’s. The Baby Boomers had taken over and pushed out their parent’s generation. Along the way they made sure that their generation had the right opinions. Those who did not were cast into the outer darkness of dissident exile. The radicals were in charge.

This is what makes the current revolution a shabby and ridiculous version of the cultural revolution of the 60’s. Today’s radicals are the sons and daughters of those radicals, who now are in charge of everything. The street fighters are not attacking “the man” as the man pays their allowance. They are attacking an avatar of the man their parents vanquished generations ago. It is one-part public theater and one-part cargo cult, put on as if it is an initiation ritual for young adults.

There is a more sinister aspect to it. Read what the young radicals in the academy, politics and even in business, are demanding and you see that their assault on the institutions is really an assault on knowledge itself. The radicals of yesteryear were content to embrace the logic of the institutions, just put to use for their purposes. The new radicals want to wreck the logic itself. They want to replace institutional logic with something different, something that does not exist and cannot exist.

This is the heart of the anti-whiteness stuff. When they claim that institutions suffer from whiteness or are Eurocentric, what they mean is the internal logic that operates the institution is coherent and rational. The STEM fields, for example, still abide by the rules of mathematics. Medicine is still rooted in the logic of Western medicine. Because these rules are barriers to all but the talented tenth of non-whites, these rules must be racist and therefore these rules have to be eliminated.

If one is over a certain age and a fan of dark humor, there is an amusing bit of irony to all of this. The people in charge are now getting the same treatment from their pets that they gave to the Occidentals, who they assaulted as youth. After all, the reason whiteness persists is the white Progressives, and white presenting Progressives, have maintained that whiteness for their benefit. It would take a heart of stone not to enjoy the sight of woke females of color screaming at the aging radicals.

Putting that aside, a medical system “disrupted and decolonized” in order to allow for the dominance of non-whites will result in something dangerous and primitive. A world with Africanized math is a world spinning off its axis. Allowing the wrong answer to stand alongside the right answer in the name of equity and equality will result in disorder and chaos within the institutions. In other words, it is not just a threat to the people in charge of the institutions, but the institutions themselves.

In order to maintain the simplest of things, you need to be able to make some simple predictions about the future. Predictions rely upon order, which in turn is the product of rules about the world and how people will act. Imagine a road with no rules. If you cannot know what other drivers will do or how the road surface will be around the next corner, the road becomes useless. You are better off walking through the woods than taking your life into your hands on the road.

This is what the woke revolution is promising and beginning to deliver. Consider the news media, for example. A generation ago it was predictably biased, but it contained some truth in the bias. If you knew the rules, you could watch a chat show or read a newspaper and get a sense of things. Today, in order to strip all that ugly whiteness from it, the news is a random nonsense with no truth value at all. The only point to it is to stimulate the true believers of the revolution.

What the woke revolution and its promise to decolonize Western societies is really promising is a return to a form of occasionalism. The formal definition of this is that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Humans are “created substances” which means they live in a world of miracles. There are no rules, only the whims of the creator. In a world without fixed rules, there is no point in knowing the rules and therefore no point in predicting what comes next.

This is a world of primitive oogily-boogily. It is why the people in charge are suddenly getting nervous about the golem they released on white people. The Democrat leaders in Washington are claiming their radicals have gone too far, while the Republicans are cheering them on, as they silently watch Trump be removed from office. Whether or not they can put the golem back into what holds a golem is unknown. The woke warriors are now everywhere in the institutions and they are not ready to quit.

What this means is the next phase of the revolution shifts from attacking normal white people going about their business, to a fight between the rulers and their pets. The political class can probably handle the people in their ranks, but what will they do about woke capital? How do they plan to contend with the suddenly woke intelligence agencies and the foreign-dominated foreign policy establishment? How will they reign in the woke mayors, governors and police departments?

None of this is to imply that the coast is clear for whites. Attacking whites is now an integral part of what makes the new radical. It’s just that the purpose of it will change from pleasing their masters to attacking their masters. The Pretender Biden does not know it, but Team Kamala has stocked up on My Pillows. The war did not end with the removal of the evil Trump. It was just the opening phase. The next phase is between the ideology of the woke and the cupidity of their masters.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Fanatic’s Ball

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Note: I have a post up on Taki about the end of liberal democracy. As according to the new normal, I have posts up behind the green door on popular culture.

The great British evolutionary biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, famously said that fanaticism is man’s greatest invention. The obsessive, uncritical belief in an idea or cause is the opposite of the sober-minded and rational. The fanatic is intolerant of anything that contradicts his views, while the rational man is willing to update or even abandon his views when presented contradictory information. The fanatic sees only that which confirms his fanaticism and refuses to yield in his opinions.

The fanatic, of course, has been in the middle of every man-made social disaster since the French Revolution. It was fanatics who brought on the Reign of Terror and it was fanatics who brought on The Great Terror. Fanatics let loose by Mao in the Cultural Revolution terrorized the Chinese population. Man’s greatest invention turns out to be man’s most terrible invention. Once it is let loose, it is not easily put back on the leash, at least not until it runs out of things to smash.

This year has seen the fanatic set free to run wild in our streets. They were deliberately agitated and let loose by the petty men of the ruling class, frustrated that the people’s champion had not been vanquished. It’s hard for modern people to understand how the French radicals, for example, could have killed so many in the name of the revolution, but current events make this much easier to comprehend, even if we have not reached the bloodbath stage yet.

The thing is, fanaticism is not a well-defined group of people held in reserve and then deployed when needed. It’s more like a spiritual force that sweeps through a population, afflicting the weak minded and those desperate for a purpose. We see this with the election shenanigans. The desire to be part of the great fight against the bad man and his minions caused hundreds, maybe thousands to follow their fanatical rage and engage in thousands of acts of election fraud.

That is what is coming into focus as various parties look into what happened and whistle blowers step forward. The image that is emerging is of an orgy of corruption where the participants are free of any moral restraint. They were not working from a plan, but a belief that they were on the side of angels and therefore free to use any means necessary to help the cause. They were the righteous engaged in the great war against the wicked, unleashed by the ruling class.

The defenders of Trump will work hard to make it sound like a wide-ranging conspiracy, but that’s just how mass media culture works. Facts and observations cannot be presented as is. They have to be part of a narrative with a well-defined protagonist and an easy to hate villain. In reality, there is no grand conspiracy at work. The people involved in the election rigging are true believers. They believe what they are doing is for a just cause and they cannot see the corruption in it.

Fanatics in numbers are a lot like a flock of birds of a school of fish. They instinctively coordinate their efforts without needing to be told. Like fireflies at dusk, they are constantly signaling one another, which intensifies their fanaticism, making them more sensitive to the movements of the group. The people at the top cheered the fanatics in the streets, excused their behavior and reminded them that the evil Trump must be stopped by any means necessary. They were on a holy mission.

The thing is though, what motivates those unleashing the fanatics on the population also motivates the fanatic. That is a search for purpose. These are people who wish to be part of something bigger than themselves, but they lack the skill and ability to create anything but mayhem. This manifests as the smashing of whatever they see in their way, which can be anything. It is why they eventually turn on one another, because at some point they run out of things to smash.

That’s what makes this such a dangerous time. The petty and stupid people surrounding the corpse of Joe Biden are not going to be satisfied with expelling Trump from Washington. They will want vengeance. Part of that will be swinging wildly in what they perceive to be the opposite direction out of spite. It’s not hard to imagine them unleashing a Camp of the Saints event, for example, by reversing Trump’s immigration rules and inviting the world to their celebration.

It’s not that the people around the Pretender Biden want millions rushing the border in the hope of getting a promised amnesty. They are too stupid and short-sighted to think that far ahead. It’s that they will want the quick rush of smashing those rules and gloating over their work. Like the fanatics cheering the executioner holding up the head of his victim, they will simply be looking for the thrill of seeing their enemies, real and imagined, facing their holy wrath.

What the past tells us about times of terror is the fanatics are never satisfied with the blood of a few enemies of the revolution. The sight of the enemies blood just makes them hungry for more. There may be some in the ruling class sensing that they must first put their fanatics back on the leash, but most of too dull and self-loathing to grasp what they have unleashed. There is a good chance that the summer riots were just a taste of what lies ahead in the woke revolution.

It is tempting to assume that this revolution will eat itself, but that is not the pattern people think they see in the history book. People point to Robespierre as the example, but he seems more like an exception. Stalin’s terror campaign ended when Stalin died of natural causes. The Cultural Revolution ended when Mao died. Pol Pot lived to old age and according to his own words, died with a clear conscience. Perhaps this time will be an exception, but that is never the way to bet.

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