Tunneling Into The Clouds

Posted on January 10, 2024 by thezman

By now everyone has seen the videos of weird looking Jewish men popping up from sewer grates in New York City. The men were popping out of underground tunnels built by the Chabad cult in Crown Heights. The city discovered them in December and was attempting to fill them with cement, when the Chabad members rioted in an effort to thwart the city’s efforts. The cops were forced to arrest many of the members and physically clear the facility of Chabadists.

Needless to say it was the best day ever for the antisemites, who naturally looked at the scenes as confirmation of their claims. It was also a great day on social media as the jokesters had some of the best material ever. The images of soiled mattresses being pulled from the tunnels reminded many that this subculture has long been accused of hiding terrible things. Of course, the scolds were out wagging their bony fingers at the world for noticing what was happening.

Lost in all of this are the questions about who these people are and why are they allowed to operate in this country. Most news sites just called the facility a synagogue but it is the world headquarters of the Chabad cult, which is an international movement that aims to influence government through the conversion of secular Jews back into what the cult thinks is the authentic Judaism. This group has centers in every Western capital and many major cities.

Imagine if white nationalists bought a building in New York City and declared it their international headquarters. Imagine they imported men from around the world to live in and around it. The videos online of the riot tell us that many of these men at this location are foreigners. Instead of white nationalists, imagine it was supporters of Palestine doing this. It is a good reminder that providing special status to groups of people comes with downstream consequences.

The more important question, however, is why has the ruling class allowed this bizarre international cult to setup shop in the United States? This cult formed in the 18th century in what is now Poland. They remained there until the Second World War when the head of the cult relocated to New York City. The circumstances at the time probably prevented careful scrutiny, but since then the ruling class has had plenty of time to figure out whether these people should be allowed to remain.

Immigration is always a tool of the ruling elite. This was true in the Roman Empire and it is true in the American empire. Outside of some very narrow exceptions, immigration is a tool of the ruling class to weaken domestic opposition. In the 19th century it was used to suppress wages and prevent unionization. In the current age it is used to maintain the power of the managerial class by diluting the demographics of the country and disrupting the formation of natural community.

How does Chabad fit into this scheme? They do not work in the normal sense which means they are useless in suppressing wages. This cult operates within the Hasidic community, so they are like an economy within an economy. They self-segregate, outside of their recruitment of secular Jews, so they are not showing up in your suburban subdivision to create problems with the neighbors. What they mostly due is recruit secular Jews with access to power in order to influence the elite.

Again, this cult has centers in every Western capital. They operate near the centers of power in the West, so that means they have facilities in cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a member of the Chabad cult. Given the scrutiny on Trump, one has to wonder why the media never did a deep dive on why and how this cult was able to place a member at the center of global power.

None of this should suggest that Chabad is evil or at the center of an international conspiracy to destroy the world. The point is that this extremely bizarre and alien religious movement is allowed to operate unfettered in a time when Western ruling elites are increasing paranoid about internal threats. One would think a cult digging secret tunnels under New York City streets would produce more concern than some grannies wandering around the capital waving Trump flags.

What all this points to is two things. One is the dynamic of American society, especially within the managerial class, is a non-linear system. It is not a top-down system where a small group engineers everything from the shadows. Instead, there are a lot of players jostling with one another seeking advantage. The paranoia we see from the ruling elite is not due to fear of a peasant revolt, but genuine fear of a palace coup that uses a peasant revolt as a pretext.

The other thing this Chabad business tells us is the ruling class is not thinking far beyond one move on the board. A strong ruling class would have packed the Chabad guys off hours after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not that Chabad is evil, but that no smart ruling class tolerates a cult it cannot control. Instead, the managerial elite seems to be blind to this weird movement. It helps explain why foreign governments find it so easy to manipulate the political class.

All of this is a good reminder that America has never been a country in the conventional sense, but rather something like a large distributed network. The nodes on this network are the power centers that wield influence in certain areas. These nodes are often networks themselves, like the news media. The New York Times is the major node within the news media, which itself is a node on the ruling network. These nodes influence one another and jockey for power with one another.

As a result, no one is ever really in charge, like we see in Russia or China, where the state is the dominant power and controls all the power centers. We saw this with Trump when he was thwarted by the various nodes within government. When he overcame those problems, he was stymied by the judicial and corporate nodes operating within the general network of the managerial class. The ruling elite of America is a mesh network that operates atop society.

The Chabad people understand this, which is why they recruit members who can infiltrate these nodes. Most Chabad members do not look like those guys scurrying out of underground tunnels. They look like anyone else in society. Foreign governments see this is well, which is why Israel can have so much influence. China, despite enormous wealth and willingness to buy politicians has less influence than Saudi Arabia because the Saudis understand how America really works.

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DIE Another Day

Posted on January 8, 2024 by thezman

Note: There was no Sunday podcast this week. I got back from the new house and was simply too tired to do it. I may put the Sunday show on ice until I get the house finished, which means doing something else in its place. Behind the green door, there were two written items this week. A post about my trip to the witchdoctor and post about the aesthetics of modern cars. Subscribe here or here.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the massive food fight that erupted among the worst people over how the allegedly best people cheat like crazy. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard, was supposed to be a proof of concept for the egalitarian blank slate religion of the Cloud People. In reality she was as synthetic as their empathy for people of color. Claudine Gay was a modern lawn jockey. Instead of standing on their lawn with a lantern, she held up her diplomas.

Then we have Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund guy who started this when Gay made unpleasant noises about Israel. He first threatened to withdraw funding and when that did not work, he went after her credentials. In a world of credentialism this was a declaration of war on the system. Soon the internet dug into Gay’s background and found examples of alleged plagiarism. Harvard then demoted her to being a million dollar a year political science instructor.

In response, MIT decided to get into the fight, and they leaked dirt to Business Insider about Ackman’s wife, who supposedly had a cut and paste problem too. It is ironic that people who are immune to the charge of hypocrisy thought they could use the charge of hypocrisy against people famously immune from the charge of hypocrisy. It is an example of how the hive mind operates. Once Ackman was declared outside the hive, he was no different from Trump or Hitler to the hive.

For his part, Ackman has declared a jihad against MIT. He is asking for volunteers to scan the academic work of everyone at MIT. He has also offered to fund the use of technology to expedite the process. Interestingly, the MIT president said all the same things as the Harvard and Penn presidents about Israel, but she has been immune from criticism to this point. Perhaps she thought the force field was not enough to protect her, so she launched this preemptive strike.

Again, it is hard not to enjoy this poo-flinging contest, but it obscures a reality at the heart of the whole thing. That is the logic of the egalitarian religion must lead them to these self-destructive ends. The reason for that is there is no way to reach the stated goals of this new religion without dismantling the standards and practices of the Western society that made the modern university possible. In other words, to dismantle whiteness they must dispense with the rules of whiteness.

The only reason Claudine Gay can exist is if the rules of the academy are changed to make it possible for her to exist. All along the way her mostly white advisors cut corners for her so she could move along through the system. They do this because it was the path of least resistance, but also for self-interest. They could subtly mention how they were once the advisor of this shining example of the new religion. This is social capital an academic can use for status seeking.

Systemic rule breaking is not confined to the grievance studies areas. The need to acquire totems of the new religion is everywhere on campus. The chemistry department at Rice University, for example, spends scarce resources on thirty different diversity and inclusion programs. The department now offers a for-credit course in Afrochemistry, which is taught by this woman. She will no doubt be lifted up on the shoulders of academics and socially promoted into a leadership role.

This all sounds fine except that when you populate your new system with people who are both incompetent and entitled, the results of that system will reflect this. The long running discussion about the decline of elite universities is centered around the fact the graduates are often astoundingly incompetent. The truth is, they may be incompetent at traditional things, but they are stars at the rules of the new system. The products of dismantling whiteness are good at dismantling whiteness.

The reason we have a crisis of competence in America is the managerial system is slowly being taken over by people who are only good at gaming the system to produce diverse, equitable and inclusive results. The managerial system is slowly being bent to the goal of denying its own existence. No one would dare hire Brooke Johnson to do chemistry, but she plays a role in who gets hired to do chemistry. Get enough Brooke Johnsons and Claudine Gays and the system begins to fail.

All of this was inevitable as soon as the moralizers of the mid-twentieth century declared a fatwa against nature. Once it was immoral to notice natural inequality and the fixed nature of people, the old system was doomed. The only permissible explanation for the persistent inequality was to blame the system and that meant destroying the system was the only moral path forward. The social promotion system is about maintaining the myth of egalitarianism.

That also means there is no way out for these elite colleges. Bill Ackman can expose all of them as plagiarists, cheats, and fools, but nothing will change because nothing can change as long as the core tenets of the faith remain. Unless Bill Ackman has a new religion for these people to embrace, they will burn the whole system to the ground before abandoning diversity, equity, and inclusion. This means the collapse of the university system is inevitable.

Liberal Intolerance

Posted on December 26, 2023 by thezman

There are certain assumptions about the world that modern people take for granted, without thinking about in any detail. These assumptions are about how things ought to be arranged in a modern society. Things like the rule of law and freedom of speech are just assumed to be social positives. Deliberate violations of these liberal principles are a sign that a society is in trouble or corrupt. No one ever wonders why this is the case as it is just part of the shared reality of modern life.

You see this in this essay by Paul Gottfried, which is a response to Canadian historian Ricardo Duchesne, who has taken Gottfried to task for his defense of the old bourgeois liberalism of the past. It is a good essay on the general topic of liberalism and whether or not it is to blame for the current crisis, but of interest here is the assertion that things like religious inclusiveness, individual freedom, and constitutional government are in of themselves good things and signs of progress.

Gottfried does not spend any time arguing these points, as he just assumes them to be good things that a good society ought to seek. This is not peculiar to Gottfried, as most everyone assumes the same thing. Go around a public area in the West and ask people if they favor more or less freedom and they will always pick the former. The same is true for the rest of the principles we associate with liberalism. The moral framework of the West is just assumed to be right and reasonable.

Now, we do not wonder about gravity or the sun rising in the east and setting in the west because these are settled. Few people know why objects fall to the earth when dropped and even fewer know that they accelerate toward the earth at thirty-two feet per second squared, but they know about gravity. Like the sun rising in the east, gravity is a settled matter, so there is no need to debate it. The same is generally assumed about the basic principles of liberal democracy.

What would go unnoticed is the inclusion of religious tolerance in there with reasonable things like individual liberty. Most of the liberal project can be justified, as much as possible, by reason. We can make logical arguments in favor of a rights-based society and limited government. You can make a rational argument in favor of parliamentary rule over a king or dictator. The same cannot be said for religious tolerance, which is something taken for granted, but never examined.

Western societies are moral societies. Instead of being bound together by kinship or force, as we see with most of the world, what holds Western people into political entitles is a common morality. Sure, blood, soil and history play a big role, but every European pollical entity has included significant minority populations. At the dawn of the French Revolution, most people in France did not share the same language. They spoke various local dialects, and in some areas, deferent languages.

This is even more true today as the elites of the West preach open borders, pluralism, and democracy as the holy trinity. The only way this can work is if all the new people agree to the old moral code or the moral code is adjusted to accommodate the new people coming into these old societies. The new speech and thought laws are all about policing the new moral code which prohibits the old stock from thinking anything but happy thoughts about the newcomers.

This is the basis for pluralism. Anyone can be an American if they embrace the American creed, which is a secular way of saying they can be an American if they embrace the religion of Americanism. Vivek Ramaswamy and Ben Shapiro have based their lives on this assertion. They are just as American as the descendants of Quakers or 19th century German immigrants. They say this because they embrace the religion of America and therefore meet the moral criteria to be American.

The problem here should be obvious. If Americanism is the moral code of America and by extension the West in general, and it insists on a general universality, then there can be no tolerance for alterative moral codes. Not only can American liberalism not tolerate alternative moral codes internally, but it must be intolerant of alternative moral codes external to the West. If you want to know why the West has waged war on Islam and now Eurasia, there is the answer.

The reason that Western societies now function like secular theocracies is liberalism has evolved into a religion. It has crowded out Christianity from the public square because no society can have more than one moral framework. Just as science replaced religious explanations for the natural world, liberalism has displaced the explicitly supernatural basis for societal morality with an esoteric moral code based vaguely on things like equality and openness.

What this means is that the assumption that religious tolerance is a liberal principle or could ever have been a liberal principle is false. The opposite is true. Liberalism must drive out or suppress any alternative moral framework, because it is the moral framework that evolved to replace the old moral order. That means it is not just intolerant or Christianity, but any morale framework that places itself above the morality of the liberal order. Everything must submit to the liberal faith.

The question, of course, is why has the liberal project that started at the end of the Middle Ages evolved into something like a secular Gnosticism? Gottfried looks for things outside of liberalism, like Protestantism, while Duchesne looks for things within the liberal tradition like pluralism. In both cases and in most critiques of liberalism the assumption is there is a worm in the apple. The apple being the liberal project and the worm being some sort of corruption.

In reality, the problem may simply lie in the fact that you cannot have a moral order based on reason. Reason cannot be the authority for how people ought to treat one another or how government should be organized. Reason can only take us to the point where the people need to sort these issues for themselves, because the great diversity of man means there is no universally right answer to these questions. How we ought to act is up to us or our gods.

When the gods are removed and tradition is discarded, something that must happen when all things are subjected to the acid wash of reason, there are no standards against which to measure moral claims. That leaves force as the determining factor, which means the moral order is decided by people who see it as their purpose to impose their sense of the moral order. Liberalism must end with a ruling class of secular clerics engaged in a never ending sermon.

Thoughts On Christian Nationalism

Posted on September 25, 2023 by thezman

Note #1: I was on with Mike Farris to talk about stuff. You can find the resulting product on Rumble and iTunes.

Note #2: Behind the green door I have a post about the struggle to find joy in the dissident life, a post about ide cream and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Over the last decade the usual suspects have directed a great deal of resources into anathematizing the term “Christian Nationalism.” One reason is the long war against Christianity in general that dates to the start of the last century. Since these people assume nationalism is a bad word, whatever they can attach it to becomes bad as a result of the linkage. This sort of linguistic guilt by association has been a popular tactic with the usual suspects for a long time.

Another attack is from the establishment churches and affiliated political operations, who worry that their people are getting wise to the grift. Like conservatism in general, social conservatism has been a massive failure. Since so-called Christian organizations have been at the forefront of the culture war, the rank and file are now looking around for an alternative way forward. The people who got rich off losing the culture war see Christian nationalism as a threat to their grift.

The idea behind Christian Nationalism is to provide an alternative moral authority that is in direct contradiction of the one used by the ruling class. No one talks about the moral authority of the ruling elite, especially the ruling elite, but it is assumed that they have some reason for promoting things like diversity and the sexual fads. Maybe it all boils down to bourgeois spite or maybe they think the cause of justice requires them to annihilate society, but whatever the authority, Christian Nationalists reject it.

That is where things get complicated. Within the Christian Nationalist subculture, you see Catholics and Protestants, which raises an obvious issue. You also see many within this space migrating to Eastern Orthodoxy. The reason for the latter is the people in the former are disgusted by the direction of their churches. Of course, you also have the churchless who rely only on their reading of Scripture. They tend to be the most vocal in the public square about their political intensions.

Putting aside the theological differences that exist within this subculture, the bigger question is how to square the Christian with the nationalism. The one thing all of these people would agree upon is Christ died for all mankind, so all men, regardless of race or ethnicity, can accept Jesus Christ and thus become a Christian. If your church is open to everyone, then it stands to reasons that your community is open to everyone, which contradicts the logic of nationalism.

This is where we bump into the elephant in the room. The big exception to the open-door policy is non-Christians. This is where the usual suspects come back into the story, as they claim Christianity is just a fig leaf for the nationalism. When they hiss the word “nationalism” they mean “fascism”, of course. In fairness to the usual suspects, the Christian Identity Movement was exactly this approach. Many of the most vocal Christian Nationalists today are hostile to Jews.

This is especially dangerous from the point of view of the usual suspects because this line of reasoning applies to the very idea of nations. If you want a nation, one with a single language, culture, and people, then you are seeking an exclusive society, rather than an open one. Just as a Christian society must be intolerant of non-Christians, a nationalist society must be intolerant of minorities. Otherwise, you open the foundations of society up to challenges from those minorities.

This brings us back to the eternal question. For Jews to maximize their opportunities in a society, it must not be exclusive of them or their activity. This is the Karl Popper – George Soros argument for the open society. The moral foundation must not be exclusive in any way, which eliminates both nationalism and Christianity from the moral foundation of the open society. Obviously, this logic benefits all minorities, not just Jews, but it also comes at the expense of the majority.

The logic of Christian nationalism puts them at odds with the bulk of modern Christians who are no longer Christian in the theological sense. Most are Judeo-Christian, a weird modern phenomenon that defines Christianity in terms of Israel. It is not unusual for ads like this one to appear on platforms that cater to modern Christians. Much of what modern Christians do is undisguisable from Zionism. That presents and an obvious problem for the people promoting Christian Nationalism.

That brings us back to the theological issue. The Christian Nationalists have a problem in that they think they must operate within the tradition of Christianity. That does not leave them a lot of room to operate. Even those who think Scripture is the only source of truth are faced with the fact that Scripture is a man-made thing. There are lots of lost and excluded books of the Bible. Someone decided to exclude things from Scripture, maybe even things lost to us entirely.

By accepting the framing of the past, they are limiting what they can do as both Christian and nationalists. There is no getting around the fact that the arc of Christianity has led to this point. The universalism is one problem, but the inherent individualism is another big challenge. if all men have an individual relationship with God and are judges as individuals, there is not much room for collective virtue. The virtue of the community will always came second to individual virtue.

What the Christian Nationalists face is a bigger task than reasserting or defending the idea of a Christian nation. They first need to revolutionize both terms. Their Christianity needs to break free of the traditional framing in order to avoid being trapped in a mode of thought that precludes nationalism. At the same time, they have to rethink the idea of nationalism so that it comports with and promotes the compassion that must lie at the heart of their new Christianity.

That sounds like an impossible task, especially given the makeup of the Christian nationalist subculture. These are people with homes and families, hardly the sort to overthrow the current order. On the other hand, Christianity was a revolutionary movement from the start. Nationalism, despite what the usual suspects claim, has also been a revolutionary cause. In other words, the Christian Nationalists are working with material that has always been dangerous to the status quo.

What makes it possible for them to think in these terms is the fact that the old forms are no longer working. The old regime is in crisis because the old systems and old moral claims are no longer working. The last time a world bestriding empire fell into crisis it gave birth to a new religious movement that eventually swept the world. Whether or not there is a theologian or even a charismatic leader ready to accept the challenge is unknown, but the ground is fertile for such a thing.

The Spirit Of The Law

Posted on September 6, 2023 by thezman

In the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist, Mr. Bumble is told by the court that the law assumes his wife acts under his direction. Mr. Bumble responds with, “If the law supposes that, the law is a ass – a idiot”. The ass in this case is the donkey, an animal known for its obstinance. Over time the expression has been used to point out that the letter of the law can not only contradict the spirit of the law, but the law itself can contradict common sense and objective reality.

The more important point here though is that the law is an effort to formalize the commonly held moral code, a set of rules that determine what members of a society ought to do and ought not to do. It is not the moral code itself, but an effort to write it down on paper so it is clear to everyone. Fundamental to most ethical systems is the assertion that ignorance of the law is no excuse. You need to know the rules, which is why they are written down so that you can know them.

Despite the law seeming to be an ass, there is a logic to the law. That logic, like all systems, starts from some foundational items. These are the things that everyone in the law assumed to be true. For example, the Bill of Rights is supposed to be a list of starting points for understanding the limits of government. These are not supposed to be up for debate. As far as the law is supposed to be concerned, these are settled truths that cannot be challenged or violated.

This gets to an important point. Every system of oughts, the list of things you ought to do and the things you ought not do, begins with a set of eternal truths that rest on a recognized authority. Christians are free to eat pork because they do not recognize the moral authority of the Muslims and Jews. The prohibition against eating pork rests on the moral authority of those two religions. It is not an objective truth, but a subjective one that works only when you accept it.

The law is a system of oughts and therefore assumes an authority and that authority is supposed to be the Constitution but also tradition as expressed through precedent or the accumulation of court decisions. The Constitution is the starting point for what we all agree is the system of oughts. Precedent is the accumulated decisions over time on the things that were not expressly covered in the Constitution. Combined this makes up the system of oughts that define the morality of our society.

That last bit is what is often missed. Once something is formally put on the list of things you ought not do, it quickly becomes part of the informal list of taboos. The reason for this is that we naturally assume that in a democratic society the law reflects not only the general will but general morality. If the law says it is not allowed, it must mean that it is outside of that which is morally acceptable. In other words, once the court makes it against the law, it quickly becomes immoral.

An obvious example of this in action is homosexual marriage. Up until a few years ago people understood that marriage was about creating children. Since nature dictates how this is done, marriage must be one man and one woman. Then one day some people decided that the laws of nature are up for debate. Two men, it was argued, could be married, despite the biological impossibility of it. This group remained a ridiculous minority until they were able to get the courts to side with them.

In the blink of an eye, the issue of homosexual marriage went from absurd poke in the eye of Mother Nature to settled moral principle. Conservatives who opposed the idea then suddenly defended it. Even social conservatives have dropped their public opposition to homosexual marriage. You can see the change in moral attitudes in the polling on the issue. This absurd mockery of the laws of nature became part of the accepted moral code with the stroke of a judge’s pen.

Another example is the Brown decision. Central to the jihad against white people in this age are the novel moral principles invented by the court. In fact, the court not only created two new moral claims, but made those the controlling principles, superseding even those items written in the Constitution itself. As a result, the constitutional order went from a system of limits on government power to a system of demands on the white population of the country.

The same process is happening with the Bostock decision. In this case a majority of the justices agreed that discriminating against men pretending to be women so they can beat up girls on the soccer field is a form of sexual discrimination and therefore violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule points out, this is a ridiculous claim on its face, but it also opens the door for adding yet another novel principle to the legal order.

As we have seen with other novelties from the court, it will not be long before this one sinks into the moral fabric of society. If you do not want your daughters pulverized by burly men in sundresses on the ball field, you will be shunned from polite society or maybe even suffer legal persecution. The fact that the Bostock decision was written by a so-called conservative judge, one anointed by the allegedly conservative Federalist Society and appointed by Trump is critical.

We used to worry about putting Catholics on the bench because it was assumed they would operate from Catholic morality, rather than the morality of high church Protestantism that informed the political order. It was assumed that judges were like all men, and they would operate from within a moral framework, formally expressed through organized religion until recent times. Catholics had Catholic morality, while Episcopalians had Anglican morality.

In other words, the text of the Constitution and the traditions and precedents that informed it were based on a moral framework that existed outside of it. The political system was founded by and for people who assumed a moral order based in high church Protestantism. It did not prohibit men dressed as women from beating up girls on the ball fields because no Christian people would ever conceive of such a thing, much less tolerate advocacy for it.

Once that morale framework was removed from the system, the Constitutional order was left without a moral foundation. It no longer had moral authority on which to rest the list of things members of society ought to do and ought not do. The political system was left to conjure one to replace it. The Brown decision and now Bostock rest on the moral authority of the new religion that has evolved since the middle of the last century, which promises salvation through universal liberation.

In the end, the law is a formalization of the moral code of a society. That moral code reflects the identity of the people who rule society. The foundation of which is either something outside of the human condition like the gods or the collective identity of the people who control society. Once the American ruling class abandoned Christianity as the moral foundation, it eventually settled on the collective identity of the ruling elite that emerged in the middle of the last century.

The trouble is, that ruling elite cannot settle on an exclusive identity as it is a hodgepodge of people from various tribes. Exclusivity therefore runs counter to their shared reality, so their new identity is the Open Society. It is a polite fiction but all ethical codes contain polite fictions. The new ruling elite is every bit as exclusive and discriminating as any ruling elite, it is just that they assume their calling is to usher in the Open Society, a world of free of discrimination and prejudice.

The Religion Of X

Posted on August 1, 2023 by thezman

Imagine if Elon Musk decides that he is a messenger from “Old Ones” sent to earth to start a new religion based around technology. The “Old Ones” are the spirits of Martians who have transcended this plane of existence. They have gifted Musk with certain abilities that have allowed him to become the world’s richest man, thus freeing him from all social constraints but also leaving him with the understanding of how normal people relate to the world and one another.

Musk’s new religion, the Church of All Worlds, combines the hedonistic elements of libertarianism with incomprehensible elements from Western epistemology to give the new religion a mysterious quality. Initiates learn the insider language of the religion and how to use the new phrases to signal their status in the religion. Most important, they learn that they are an elect chosen to ruthlessly rule over the rest of mankind and punish the weak for their weakness.

You see, in Musk’s new religion, he is the holiest of holy because he is the richest and most powerful man on the planet. Everyone’s holiness quotient is measured against the standard of Musk. Therefore, weakness and vulnerability are considered the worst sins and punished by the Church of All Worlds. This is not a religion promising salvation for the oppressed, but a religion promising the believers salvation from the oppressed by licensing violence against the weak.

For those sure that the word “religion” means only what they believe, this will not sound like a real religion. After all, the definition of religion is exactly what they believe, so by definition anything calling itself a religion that does not exactly match their beliefs is a false religion. Others might point out that Musk’s new religion lacks the essential elements of a religion like a liturgy or a holly book. Others will argue that the “Old Ones” business is just warmed over paganism.

Most people, however, will be troubled by the fact that his new religion seems to justify kicking people while they are down. This religion of the elect, or “master race” as Musk prefers to call his followers, is providing a justification for the strong to attack the weak, which is the opposite of what people think of with regards to religion. Thousands of years of conditioning have taught us that religion promises the weak salvation from the torments of this world, especially from the predation of the strong.

Sensing that his new religion is not working, he changes the name of the new religion from the Church of All Worlds to X. Atop his megachurch he has installed a giant neon X that you can see from space. He changes the definition of weak to include those who choose not to join the new religion. Their doubt is their weakness. The weak can enjoy earthly power if they give up their old ideas and join X. Those who refuse remain fair game, but the door is always open to them.

That sounds a bit better, even if the new name strikes everyone as stupid. His new religion still celebrates the abuse of the weak and vulnerable, but it gives them a path out of their condition. All they have to do is stop fighting the tides of history and they can enjoy the benefits of being on the winning team. Musk and his lieutenants will still be at the top and the material life for the convert will not change that much, but they will avoid having mobs of black-clad street activists attacking them.

In this way, Musk’s new religion incorporates that old Christian concept of salvation but retains the Nietzschean notion that the strong must dominate the weak. The believers still get to demonstrate their superiority by attacking the weak, but they get to view it as salvation from the wicked. The weak now have a clear path out of their condition, so if they remain in their condition, they must secretly reject the new religion. Their condition is proof of their rejection of and attack on the elect.

This new configuration also opens up whole new areas of scholarship for otherwise useless people to explain why the weak persist in their weakness. Weakness studies leads to weakness experts, who make a living explaining to the faithful why the weak are actually a threat to the strong. In fact, the weak are proof of a conspiracy against the strong, thus making the weak a public display of violence against the strong. It is a matter of self-defense for the strong to attack the weak!

Probably the most important innovation in the religion of X is that it turns success within the new moral order into proof of strength and moral fitness. Those at the top are free to think poorly of those below them, who are thankful for the reinforcement, as it justifies their own shabby treatment of those below them. In this way, everyone in the religion has a sense of moral superiority over someone, but also a strong motivation to maintain the rules of the new moral order.

The trouble with the religion of X is that it could run out of weak people, so it has to create a mechanism to make sure the supply of weak people is steady. This is where the weakness studies people really show their stuff. They police the lower ranks of the religion for troublemakers, declaring them weak while focusing the attention of the lower ranks on them. This maintains the supply of weaklings and serves as a reminder to the faithful that the price of strength is eternal vigilance.

Eventually, a schism develops between the wing of the faith that is in it only for the debauchery and those who are in it to destroy the world. The latter camp is actually stronger than the former camp, but they continue to insist they are the weaker party, which triggers a mob from the former camp to attack them. Musk is killed and the church collapses, leading to a civil war. This ends when a new powerful group, led by a man claiming to be a descendent of Musk restores order.

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Thoughts On The New Gods

Posted on July 10, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about my trip top the doctor, a post about watching television in the rain and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Note: American Renaissance is having its annual conference in August at the usual location in Tennessee. It is a great event and anyone who is interested in the sort of politics discussed here should make it there at least once. You can sign up for the event at the American Renaissance website.

Despite their many parallels in practice, we separate ideology from religion as two separate things that appeal to different aspect of man. Ideology is an integrated set of assertions, theories, and goals for achieving a social end, while religion is assumed to be a set of beliefs with a supernatural basis. The ideologue is focused on imposing changes in how we live as humans in a human society, while the believer is someone primarily focused on how the individual reaches the afterlife.

This distinction is entirely due to Christianity, which is a universal set of beliefs that apply to all individuals, even those unaware of it. Christians start with the belief that all people have an individual relationship with God. The point of life is to discover and embrace this relationship so that you can sit at the feet of God in the afterlife. As a result, we think of religion as a world-rejecting phenomenon. It is focused on what comes after this life, not how to improve this life.

This has not always been how religion works. What we used to call paganism was not particularly concerned with the afterlife. The religions of pre-Christian people were often world-affirming and specific to their people. A people had their gods to whom they could appeal for practical things like a good harvest or protection from the bad people on the other side of the valley. Their gods were tied to their identity as a people and their customs that gave meaning to their lives.

Some of the old religion still exists in this age. You cannot become a Druze, for example, even if you learn their religion. You have to be born into their faith in order to be accepted into their religion. Shintoism is not as strict, in terms of outsiders joining the religion, but for all practical purposes it is a Japanese faith. It is impossible to disentangle Shinto belief from Japanese identity. These are what people who study religion call folk religions.

Here is where you see the lines between religion and ideology blur. While Marxism does not possess a god or gods, it is not without its mystery. Marxist historiography is a central tenet of Marxism that must be accepted without proof. Then you have the assertion that this arc of history must bend toward communism. Of course, there is the assumption that all of mankind will eventually progress to the point where they join the rest of humanity in the communist paradise.

The similarities between religion and ideology have been noted many times, but always as a way to underscore the irrationality of the ideologue. The climate change people are compared to a cult, because they carry on as if they are worshipping Mother Earth and fear she is unhappy with mankind. Calling it a religion is a way to dismiss their claims to science and reason. Joe Sobran made the comparison between the Left and religion in his essay about the hive.

There may be another way of using this comparison. For example, the distinction made between universal religions like Christianity and folk religions like Shintoism provide an insight into why one triumphed over the other with some exceptions. Christianity pushed out paganism in Europe because it offered something that paganism either did not offer or did not address as well as the new religion. Similarly, Christianity has been a failure in Japan because it lacks something the native religion possesses.

A simple example is the Gaia worshippers. What is it about this doomsday cult that the believers find appealing? There is a money racket to it, for sure, but this is only possible because millions of people sense that the way we are living in the modern age is leading to some sort of supernatural doom. Is this belief appealing because it offers salvation from this world or is the appeal that it provides them with something to supplement their identity as a group?

If we take that last part a bit further and incorporate Gaia worship into the basket of things we call the Left, the result is a collection of beliefs that define a group of people and give them an elevated sense of status. Proof of their uniqueness is their membership in a group that holds these beliefs. They are on the right side of history because they carry their groceries in grimy canvas sacks and take their young children to drag shows at the local library.

Perhaps the appeal of what we call wokeness lies in the sense of identity it provides to people who live in highly conformist societies. The people who embrace these ideas are uniformly white, educated and upper-middle-class. They live in inorganic sterile suburban developments and work in fields with high levels of enforced conformity, like education, government, and corporate management. The folk nature of the new religion is what helps give their lives meaning.

On the other hand, it is possible that the new religion is the vestigial part of the old world-rejecting religion expressing through social fads. The gender stuff is a clear rejection of biological reality. Gaia worship is the rejection of human progress and civilization itself. The thread that runs through all of these social fads is their destructiveness to Western societies. The new religion of wrecking things appeals to people seeking an escape from this life.

The other appeal is that the destruction of the old order and the coming of the new world orders is full of uncertainty. The weirdness of these beliefs operates as a selection mechanism, filtering out anyone who questions the project. The new religion selects for those seeking the same shelter from the storm, but also those who think that when the storm passes, they will lead the way into the next phase of humanity. There is, after all, a whiff of Calvinism to all of this.

At this point, it is hard to know where the new religion will go or where it will end up on the folk-universal spectrum. What we can know is that new religions are like new ideologies in that they appeal to those unhappy with the present. Communism appealed to disaffected intellectuals and the urban industrial poor. Christianity appealed to provincials in the failing Roman empire. The reason this new religion appeals to the managerial class is they are unhappy with the present.

Religious Equity

Posted on June 22, 2023 by thezman

Recently the Supreme Court struck down an Alabama redistricting plan on the grounds that it needed one more black district. The majority claimed that the Voting Rights Act demands racial proportionality in congressional districting, even though it says no such thing and if it did, it would be unconstitutional. The courts follow the news, and these judges understand what happens when you question racial orthodoxy, so they invented a new reason to conform with orthodoxy.

While the trend toward threatening judges, as is common in other corrupt societies, is an interesting topic, what matters here is the proportionality claim. One of the ideological shadows over this age is an old claim by the post-Mark culturalists, or what used to be called the New Left, is this idea that equity demands proportionality. Equity is the claim that a just society requires all people to equally participate and equally benefit from the stuff that come from society.

Back in the old days when left-wing meant high taxes on rich people, racial antagonists would argue that representation should be by race and sex. Congress should be composed along racial and sexual lines. If thirteen percent of America is black, then there should be fifty-seven blacks in Congress. Since roughly half the adult population is female, half of Congress should be female. This idea never got far, but the concept is embedded in the calls for equity.

At this point it is common to note that it makes no sense to hurl men into the void for noticing race while also demanding racial filters be applied to all outcomes. If it is true that black people know things about blackness that only black people can know and that requires that they be proportionally represented in all matters to ensure they get what they deserve, then race is not just real, but it is the only reality. The same can be said of sex, which gets the same treatment.

The inherent stupidity of the new religion is the main appeal. Ingratitude and grievance are functions of intelligence. The smarter you are, the less likely you are to think the world is unfair or that you are owed more than you deserve. Stupid people prefer to think their condition is the fault of others. The more magical and mysterious the cause, the more appealing it is to the aggrieved. Disproving something nutty like institutional racism is like disproving paranormal activity or astrology.

Putting that aside, the proportionality idea is not without some merit. Politics is about normative trade-offs. There is no empirically correct tax code, for example. Taxes are collected to pay for government. Who pays those taxes is a moral decision. The same is true for all public policy. The right policy is not something that can be established by the scientific method. It is what the rich people who control government think is the right policy or what they hope will keep the peasants docile.

With that in mind, if you are going to have representative government, then the legislative bodies should reflect the moral diversity of the people. The easiest way to sort people in terms of moral outlook is by their religious affiliation. Jews will have a different moral code than Muslims or Buddhists, for example. While all religions share moral claims, they have important differences. If the differences were superficial, there would be no need for separate religions.

Here is a recent list of congressmen and senators by religion. Presumably, this is based on what the person says about his religious identity. Many no doubt lie. For example, Joe Biden claims to be a Catholic, but he actively promotes things that are specifically against Catholic dogma. Is Hank Johnson a Buddhist? He is the guy who thinks Guam might flip over if too many people stand on one side. Moron is not a religion, but it could probably describe many members of Congress.

With that said, the most represented faith in Congress is Catholicism. They make up 28% of the elected officials. Catholics are 21% of the population, so the Vatican is significantly overrepresented in Washington politics. The next group is listed as “Protestant unspecified” at 20%, which probably means the person grew up in a secular home with a Protestant history. If you add this group to those who have no religious identity, this cohort of American is well-represented.

The group not getting equitable treatment, using the language of the new religion, is the largest religious identity in America. Protestants are roughly 45% of the American population but only 35% of Congress. Again, many of the people calling themselves Episcopalian or Presbyterian are faking it like we see with Catholics. What are the odds that Senator Chris Van Hollen can name a single Episcopal church in his state, much less the last time he went to mass?

This raises another consideration. About 30% of Americans attend services regularly, which is usually defined as at least once a month. About a third of Americans attend services for events like weddings, funerals, and holidays. It is fair to assume that a good portion of that group would attend regularly if the churches had not succumbed to the modern disease. Why go to church when you can hear a similar sermon during half time of the football game?

Now, how many elected officials regularly attend church services? How many of them even believe in God? There is no data on this, but it is a good guess that only a small portion of elected officials are genuinely religious. Instead, their views on religion and morality reflect the people who bankroll their campaigns and control the important parts of the managerial state. If you want to have a good career in Washington, you best keep your religious views to yourself.

If you want to know why so-called conservatives fall for every left-wing social fad, there is the answer. These people are experts at talking about religion and morality, but they exist in a world that has a different moral order and a radically different moral code from the people over whom they rule. Congressman X instinctively puts a sodomy flag on his Twitter profile, because that is what everyone else he knows is doing. The fact that he claims to be a Baptist is not in the front of his mind.

The point of all this is that one major cause of the current crisis of trust is that the ruling class of America has a different and district moral code. This shows up in the normative decisions made by Congress and elected officials. If Congress truly reflected the morality of the people, much of what drives Americans crazy about national politics would not exist, much less be the center of debate. Our politics would reflect our shared moral code and our shared moral priorities.

One of the ironies of this age is the people hopping up and down about equity also rail against religion and religious people. Yet the most likely way of reaching some sort of equitable result would start with equity in Congress. If the house and Senate truly reflected the moral sensibilities of the people, many of the issue at the heart of the social justice demand would be resolved. Religious equity in Washington would go a long way toward creating a just society.

What Is Woke?

Posted on April 17, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about Star Trek, a post about the Bud Light imbroglio and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

A small debate on-line was kicked off by this post from the venerable Paul Gottfried regarding the topic of Wokism. Gottfried pointed out that it is an error to confuse this new ideology with Marxism. While many of the thinkers who laid the groundwork for what we presently call Wokism were Marxists or came out of the Marxist intellectual space, this new ideology is not Marxism. Marxism and Wokism operate in separate intellectual domains and traditions.

This did not sit well with those in the bourgeoning industry that revolves around verbal antagonism toward Wokism. James Lindsay felt it necessary to call Paul Gottfried an idiot while dismissing his post entirely. Lindsay makes his living these days peddling the idea that Wokism is “Marxist-Fascism” which is completely nuts, but it appears that he has been driven insane in his effort to make sense of the material within post-Marx culturalism that informs this new ideology.

It needs to be said that Paul Gottfried’s dog probably knows more about this topic than Lindsay will ever know. Given Gottfried’s connection to Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse, he is as close as we get to an expert on the forerunners of this new ideology gripping the minds of the ruling class. Gottfried is also a world-renowned expert on fascism as an intellectual concept. Paul can be an idiot like everyone else, but on this topic, he knows more than most.

That said, there is a tendency of people on what we call the Right to engage in the same binary thinking we see with the people we call the Left. That means playing the old game of linguistic guilt by association. Since Lindsay’s intended audience has been trained to hear “Marxism” and “Fascism” as scare words, he associates Wokism with those two words to stimulate his audience. Wokism, Marxism and Fascism just mean “bad” to the people in that scene.

On the other hand, there is a segment of the civic nationalist space that insists everything can be reduced to money and power. Their theory is that the people with all of the money and power are doing this Wokism thing because they want even more money and power. In other words, there is no reason to think too much about these novel cultural fads. The people behind them do not really believe that destroying whiteness leads to the promised land.

There is another camp that has chimed in on this topic, mostly in response to those who chant about liberalism being the only antidote to Wokism. The claim from this camp is that liberalism or some aspect of liberalism, like individualism, is responsible for the phenomena we call Wokism. Some say Wokism is just the full expression of liberalism, while others say liberalism is the manure that fertilized Wokism. Either way, this weird new ideology is the result of Western liberalism.

There is an interesting contrast here with the Hazony camp, who argue that Wokism is just a new form of collectivism. He says the antidote to this collective ideology is nationalism, which he defines as a collective defense of the tradition, culture, and history of a people. Those blaming liberalism, however, think the answer is a dictator acting on behalf of the people to defend their traditions, culture, and history. Put another way, the answer is either “good” nationalism or “bad” nationalism.

The result of this debate is a muddled picture of Wokism that mostly serves as a platform for whatever is being promoted as an alternative. They all agree that Wokism is bad, but they do not agree on what it is or why it exists. Everyone agrees that the 20th century was a disaster, giving birth to this bizarre mind virus called Wokism, yet everyone agrees we have to go back to the 20th century to reanimate one of the dead ideologies, but which one is the point of contention.

Interestingly, there is little attention to the word “woke” and why it became the preferred label of the people in this new ideology. The generally accepted explanation for the term is that it broke out of black politics into the broader Left as shorthand for being aware of the reality of the system. That reality was oppression, first in the name of white society, but then in the name of the abstract concept of whiteness. Awareness of the reality behind this false reality is what it means to be woke.

Not only is there nothing Marxist about the origins of the term, but there is also nothing liberal about it either. If anything, the root is paranoia and delusion. To be woke is to dismiss reality as a trick by white people. You must substitute your own reality, your lived experience, as it were, for the false reality. This is the sort of thinking that used to be associated with conspiracy theories. At essence, Wokism is simply awareness of the great conspiracy that lies behind reality.

This strikes most people as insane, but there is a logic to it. The core assumptions of the people we call the Left are egalitarianism and the blank slate. They assume that all people come into this world with the same potential. People are shaped by family life, society, and experience. The great variation we see in people is due to these social forces molding people during their life. You are a product of your environment, which means inequality is the result of those social forces.

Obviously, if some people benefit from the rules and others suffer, then there must be a reason for the rules benefiting one group over another. From a black identity perspective, this is a much better answer than biology. The condition of blacks in America is no longer a product of biological reality and instead the result of a system that harms them to the benefit of white people. This not only justifies questioning the system, but it also justifies attacking the system.

Of course, this framing can work for any identity group, real or imagined, that views themselves as oppressed. Anti-Semites use the same logic to explain why Jews run the world, despite being a tiny minority. Reality itself is a part of the great trick being played upon the oppressed. The people behind this false reality use it and their control over the systems of power to benefit themselves as an oppressor class at the expense of whoever is feeling oppressed at the moment.

This is something the “blame it on Marx” camp has right. Wokeness has borrowed the idea of class conflict and applied it to identity politics. For Marx, the proletariat was the only legitimate class, but for the Woke, every identity group is legitimate, no matter how obscure, except for the oppressor class. This is why white people, especially white males, are not allowed to be “allies” unless they either adopt some novel identity or fully confess their sins as a member of the oppressor class.

Of course, the anti-liberals can point to the business about oppression and claim it comes from liberalism. Liberalism has always conceded that coercion is a necessary part of every society. The goal of politics should be to reduce coercion, which is the argument for both popular government and cooperative government. Taken to its logical conclusion, the goal should be a society free of coercion, which by definition is a society that is free of all oppression.

Wokism would amount to nothing more than bourgeois decadence if not for the fact that rich white people are acting on it. Striking the radical pose has been around since the birth of the American empire. Things like black identity politics or novel sexual movements have always been popular with the bourgeois radical, but it never amounted to much in terms of policy. What is new is that it is aggressively embraced by the ruling class, which should fall into the oppressor bucket.

That is the key to understanding the reality of Wokism. Why all of a sudden are oligarchs investing in things like Black Lives Matter, which raked in billions and did nothing but set cities on fire? Why is the Secretary of State lecturing Saudi Arabia on their intolerance of crossdressers? America puts the sodomite flag up on its embassies during homosexual month. We now have months dedicated to various identity groups, real and imagined.

In this regard, the reductionists are correct in that this new ideology does something for the people embracing it. They get something from it. The reductionists are wrong, however, in assuming it gets them money and power. They have money and power, so the last thing they should want is to undermine the system that provides them with all of the money and power. They are getting something from this new way of thinking, but it is not the stuff they already possess to excess.

That is the key to understanding Wokism. It is not so much what it is but what it does for the people who embrace it. For the managerial elite, it provides a sense of legitimacy to their place atop the social hierarchy. For the climbers dreaming of a perch at the top and those who gain satisfaction aping those at the top, it provides an ever-changing set of cultural fashions. Primarily, Wokism provides a way to distinguish who is inside and who is outside the dominant social group.

This is why you see the convert-adherent dynamic within Wokism. For some people, delving into the esoteric thought that underlies Wokism is a revelation that cuts them off from their old life and sets them off into a new life. For most, it is just the thing they need to do to operate within their social class. These are the adherents. They are often the most aggressive at enforcing the moral code because they connect it with their own standing inside their social class.

Of course, all elites have two primary concerns. One is the peasant revolt and the other is the palace coup. Wokism provides a defense against the former by putting the peasants on their backfoot, always defending themselves against an evolving set of moral codes that violate their sense of decency. Like the corporate HR department, Wokism is always ready for a new initiative to change the culture by preventing the people from discussing the current culture.

The other side of Wokism is it enforces discipline withing the managerial elite by demanding the converts and adherent focus on the moral code. Those people with Ukraine flags on their Twitter profile used to have a syringe and before that a mask and before that a BLM badge. From the entry level to the C-suites, the managerial class spends more time keeping track of the current thing than they do in performing whatever task they are assigned in the system.

This is not as much of a novelty as it seems. In the court of Louis XIV, the people in Versailles often participated in humiliation rituals. A part of who they were was their willingness to degrade themselves. It is an elite version of the Theodore Dalrymple observation about communist societies and political correctness. “A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.” Wokism provides a necessary enforcement mechanism to maintain elite solidarity.

What Wokism does is fill the role of religion for the ruling elite. If you go back and examine the language of abolitionists or New Deal reformers, you will find that the language is not particularly different from the language of Wokism. The main difference is the overt references to God and Christian morality. It is not hard to imagine the grievance studies departments singing a Woke version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic before every staff meeting.

Every elite needs a sense of legitimacy. This is what authorizes their use of force to coerce the people into compliance. “Because we can” is never enough. Elites must operate from “because we must” and Wokism not only provides the moral force behind their actions but justifies their position at the top. Their commitment to these social causes, to the liberation of man from the human condition, is proof that they deserve their position at the top, as leaders of the people.

Finally, we are left with the question of why this ridiculous collection of beliefs has filled the elite’s need for an organizing purpose. One reason is timing. The radicals that fled Europe in the middle of the last century arrived when the elite of the new American empire was in need of a new organizing ethos. Protestantism was no longer a good fit as Jews took up positions in the managerial elite. A new elite needed a new ideology, and the new radicalism was there to supply that need.

The necessity of the Cold War, however, limited the growth of this new religion among the elites, as the threat of nuclear war required serious men. When the fate of the world is on the line, you cannot afford to humor the man in a dress. Of course, the conflict with the Soviets provided all the required villains for the ruling class. In fact, a radical complaint in the Cold War was that anti-communism sucked all of the air out of the room, leaving no space for the new ideas.

The end of the Cold War removed that constraint. It also left a void in the ruling elite that what we now call Wokism was ready to fill. Now that we have reached the end of history, the ruling elite of the empire could get on with the project of liberating mankind from the oppression and unfairness of the human condition. Wokism is the new religion of this new ruling elite that exists to liberate humanity. From the war on Islam to the current war on Russia, Wokism is about freeing the world.

Many have noted that Wokism sounds like Gnosticism. That is because embedded in human experience is the desire to transcend this life. That sense becomes acute for those who rise to the top of society. If you possess God-like power over your fellow man, why not take the final step? Our managerial elite embraces Wokism because it promises to give them power over the human condition. When you can turn boys into girls, you have become a god.

In the end, this is where most of the critics of Wokism fall short. They cannot accept that vagueness as the answer. They insist that the Woke know why they believe what they believe or that they know it is all nonsense. None of this matters. Beliefs exist because they serve a purpose. For our present elites, Wokism fills a need, so they do not have to think about the logic behind it. If the time comes when Wokism stops filling the needs of the elite, they get a new religion, or we get a new elite.

Chasing The Dragon

Posted on February 1, 2023 by thezman

Recently, whoever owns the Dodge car brand announced that the brand would stop making sports cars in the near future. They will discontinue their line of muscle cars in favor of electric cars. Many other car makers have promised that they will soon cease making cars with internal combustion engines. Reminiscent of the Soviet five year plans, they are promising to be right with Gaia in five years. Like those five year plans this is unlikely to happen, barring societal collapse.

The main reason this will never happen is that electric cars are and always have been a stupid lie against practical reality. The stupidity lies in the fact that at the end of every green scheme lies a smokestack. There is no such thing as renewable energy so that leaves the only way we know to get usable energy, breaking atoms. The lie is that these new cars are better in some way. They are not. In fact, electric cars are inferior at all of the things that make normal cars useful.

This short post summarizes the more obvious problems with eclectic vehicles, but you could write a book on the topic. The cost of ownership is significantly higher to the user and even higher for society, if one thinks mountains of old batteries is a problem that society should mitigate against. Then there is the fact that they will forever be impractical for most people. The biggest problem is they will require trillions in infrastructure changes that will never happen.

Like the eBook, the electric car is a solution in search of a problem. In fact, the eBook is the place to start in order to grasp the lunacy of the EV. Deliberately swept down the memory hole is the fact that the same people who say the electric car is the future also said the eBook was the future. The claim was the reduced cost of making an eBook versus a real book would end printing entirely. The publishers would simply abandon the practice of printing books.

There is the first comparison to ponder. Hidden in the selling of the eBook idea was the claim that you would be forced to burn your paper books in favor of Amazon deciding what you could read. It was a form of the old communist line about capitalist selling the communists the rope they would use to hang them. In this case, the greed of the publishers would be used to enforce the eBook dream. Behind every radical project are men holding pistols, waiting for their chance.

We see an advanced version at work with electric vehicles. First the regime rolled out incentives for battery makers and car makers. Then they rolled out incentives for people to buy these cars. There are incentives for municipalities to install charging stations and find ways to encourage EV use. Now we are into the stick phase where car makers are getting bullied to stop making normal cars. The regime enjoys the carrot and stick approach, but they most really enjoy the stick.

In both the eBook and the eVehicle, we saw form up what amounted to a religious community in support of these novelties. When the eBook hit the scene, the same people who swore Starbucks made great coffee suddenly decided that they could only read off a device. It was the future! The same people who swore eBooks were the future are now saying the same thing with electric cars. They are the same people who swore masks and standing on one foot would prevent Covid.

The electric car and the electric book are two examples of the other side of the moral panic, which is the moral crusade. Both moral the panic and the moral crusade arise from the same desire among the people swept up in them. They are seeking both salvation and a sense of security. On the one hand, they want to be secure from whatever it is that is causing the panic, like climate change or Covid. On the other hand, they want to be seen as a good person, one of the elect.

For a very long time, almost all of human history in fact, religion was the vessel into which these aspects of belief were contained. Religion told the faithful that as long as they were pious they were going to be okay. Maybe that meant an afterlife or maybe it meant justice in this life. If they followed the rules, they would be safe. It also promised a little extra for those who were particularly pious. The public act of piety has been with us since Gobekli Tepe for this reason.

It turns out that reason, appeals to nature and historical inevitability are poor replacements for the supernatural. In the Christian era, the faith supplied all of the spiritual security one needed, because it truly sated the desire. It made clear what one could expect from salvation. Ideology, on the other hand, ironically enough, is like an opioid, in that it provides an initial euphoric satisfaction, but then an insatiable craving for even more of what it promised.

It turns out that we are plagued by these moral crusades and panics because the people behind them are like drug addicts. For them, modernity is an opium den in which the are condemned to chase the dragon for eternity. It is why during Covid so many of them had that same dead expression in their eyes you see from addicts. With their mask firmly on, they were in the only space where they were both free from the agony of desire and the ecstasy of the narcotic high.

Now that the high priest of the electric vehicle has revealed himself to be nothing more than an opportunist, the religion of the EV has been shaken. The people who told us the electrical car was the vehicle to spiritual satisfaction are now turning on the idea as a way to smite the evil Elon Musk. Of course, practical reality will eventually reduce the idea to a niche item, like the eBook. Somewhere, someone like Elon Musk is thinking about the next moral crusade to monetize.

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