Category Archives: Culture

The Surplus Value Of Robots

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The very, very abbreviated version of the Marxist concept of creative annihilation is that capitalism not only destroys previous economic orders to make way for the new, but also that it must ceaselessly devalue existing wealth. The manufacturer that implements automation destroys the value of plants that lack automation. When the fully automated plant comes online, the semi-automated plant loses it’s value.

For Marx and those who followed him, this seemed rather obvious. Acme Widget pops up to make a new gadget that eliminates the need for some old gadget. The plant making the old gadget would close and the workers would be fired. The new and better had to displace the old and that naturally meant capital always declined in value. The math would follow. At least from the perspective of a man in a rapidly industrializing world, it felt that way.

The trouble with Marxism was not so much that it had everything wrong, but that it could never square basic tenets with observable reality. The new gadget was, in fact, better than the gadget it replaced. Capitalist societies did, in fact, experience a general, as well as a specific, increase in material wealth. Clearly something else was going on which is why we have the phrase, Schumpeter’s gale.

The core of Western economic thought is that two things are essential to a thriving economic order. One is a growing population and the other is the multiplier effect from technological advance. The value created by each unit of labor, in turn makes subsequent units of labor more productive and thus more valuable. The value of the buggy whip factory may have been vaporized, but the value of the fuzzy dice factory that replaced it is much higher.

Libertarians, of course, will bore the hell out of you preaching about creative destruction. To some degree, we all accept it, even the socialists. It’s impossible not to as we have seen the process with our own eyes. The fax machine makers followed the typewriter makers into the dustbin of history, but you can now read this off your phone. Even old school socialists understand this now.

A very hard thing for people to understand is the idea that things can be true for a while and then stop being true. Alternatively, something can be true and important today, but unverifiable and insignificant tomorrow. Feudalism made a lot of sense in the 7th century, but then stopped making sense in the 14th century. By the 19th century no one really cared about it anymore. In other words, lots of things are true and important for a while, but not forever.

That’s where we may be headed with economic growth. The whole point of pushing for economic growth was to increase the general welfare. Sure, some people getting rich was nice, but that was a necessary evil. The point was to increase the overall bounty in order to make your society prosperous. Reducing scarcity has been the goal of man since the dawn of time. Even Marx accepted this as the starting point of political-economy.

We are reaching a point where vast segments of a modern economy can be turned over to robots. Japan is building indoor farms that are almost entirely automated. Automating warehousing is just about here. Driverless car technology will make driving a truck a thing of the past. Read the news and you can see the future of manual labor. It has no future. In a generation, maybe two, it will all be done by robots. More important, it will be done better, faster and cheaper.

Of course, financial transactions can be automated now, eliminating the gambling aspects of finance. It has not happened for a number of reasons, but it is coming. We talked about the law last week and how it is slowly being overrun by algos. Health care is another profession where automation will be making a huge impact over the next decades. Dr. Google is already the first consult for many people. Put in the symptoms and out pops hundreds of sites full of useful information.

Instead of the value of the widget factory being vaporized by the essential processes of capitalism, it is the value of human labor, both manual and cognitive. In fact, cognitive labor is what will most easily be replaced with automation. Instead of having the value of our labor stolen by greedy capitalist, mankind is about to have the value of its labor vaporized by our own inventions.

We are already seeing hints of the problems to come from mass automation. America has a record number of people not working. This is causing disruption in our politics and our economics. It’s hard to pitch the American Dream to people who are on an allowance from the state. More important, it is impossible for people to maintain the habits required of citizenship when they are on an allowance from the state.

The bigger challenge is how to distribute the bounty. Human societies from the dawn of agriculture have distributed wealth based on the value of labor. The great warrior who saved his people would be rewarded with lands he could pass onto his heirs. Today the smart guy who is good with the language gets rich in the law or on TV, while the smart guy with high math skills gets rich on Wall Street.

How do we distribute the bounty of society when everyone’s labor is worthless? There are a few possible answers, but none of them include maintaining cultural items like a work ethic or self-reliance. Free markets would also become an artifact for the museum. In other words, the robot future will require an entirely different culture based on the value of labor being zero. That may require a different type of human too.

America and the Russians

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Some time ago, frequent visitor, Karl from Germany, asked why it is that Americans view the Russians as a permanent adversary. This is something many Europeans find puzzling, given that the Cold War has been over for a generation now. Russia is no more of a threat to America than Sweden, but our leaders still want to wrestle the bear. China on the other hand, is a threat, but America’s foreign policy elite loves China.

From the outside, it confirms what most of the world thinks about America, which is the country is run by provincial bumpkins not equipped to conduct proper diplomacy. That’s certainly part of, but not the main reason for these inconsistencies. There’s a cultural aspect to it that is a product of the fact America is a very young country. When Europe was playing chess with Napoleon, America was still working out the basics of government.

For most of American history, there was one foreign policy item and that was how best to avoid having a foreign policy. In 1821 John Quincy Adams famously said that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.”

This mild form of isolationism was the core of American political thought into the 20th century. Most Americans at the dawn of the 20th century wanted nothing to do with Europe and the scheming of the Continental powers. Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressives were the first to start talking about America having an active role in world affairs. The success of the Spanish-American War was too much for the Yankee missionaries to resist.

So, America’s first large scale foray into an activist foreign policy was the Great War. The fact that it was an unpopular war, confirmed that it was a mistake for American to let itself get involved in European politics and chicanery. The result was a return of traditional American isolationism. By the 1930’s, the one thing the political class of America had in common was a deep desire to stay out of European affairs and thus world affairs.

Obviously, that all changed with the Second World War. Unlike the Great War, this one ended with a decisive result. Even better, from an American perspective, is that we won! Even better, we stood alone as the protector of the civilized world. For a country whose dominant region saw itself as a city upon a hill, the result of WW2 felt like confirmation, a fulfillment of the covenant, to the people running the country.

That last bit is the key to understanding Americans. We are, for the most part, a moralistic people. We believe in good guys and bad guys. Hitler and Tojo made great bad guys. The Soviets were near perfect bad guys. They were foreign enough to feel like the other and they were a bunch of God-hating commies. Every American over the age of 45 grew up thinking the Russians were evil.

The Cold War was the birth of the American foreign policy establishment. It was created in response to war and evolved afterward in the context of the competition with the Soviets. The period immediately after the war is what made American diplomacy. Our duty as the keeper of the flame was to stop the Bolsheviks from turning out the lights in Europe and by extension, civilization.

All of the old hands in the current American foreign policy establishment are former Cold Warriors. Similarly, their proteges grew up believing the Russians were the great adversary. There are other elements to this, but the main culture of the US foreign policy elite is an instinctive distrust of the Russians. Like a tribe bred for certain traits, it has been generations since anyone with warm feelings for the Russian has been in the club. Distrust of the Russians is baked into the DNA at this point.

This multi-generational competition with Russia is also the source of our blindness to China. In the Cold War, it became an article of faith that China could be brought over to our side. Nixon going to China was viewed at the time as a great triumph. A billion people were about to turn from godless communism and join us in opposition to the Soviets. The subsequent trade dealings with the Chinese feels like confirmation to our foreign policy elite.

What is happening in America today is sort of a delayed response to “winning” the Cold War. Close to three generations of Americans were trained to be Cold Warriors. Three generations of American voters were trained to be either “socialists” or “capitalists”, Blue Team or Red Team. Even though the rationale for this construct fell away a long time ago, there was too much invested to just toss it all away. But it is now starting to crumble, like an abandon building.

Obama, for all his defects, started out trying to change the relationship with Russia. He failed, but that may have been timing, as much as his own incompetence. Trump is clearly ready to try a new approach to the Russians. The next generation of foreign policies thinkers are also rethinking American diplomacy, including the relationship with Russia. Even so, these things move slowly. Old men are never fond of seeing their life’s work abandoned by their proteges.

Alternative für Deutschland

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Americans always struggle understanding the politics of continental Europe. For starters, the European Right has usually sounded like the American Left, while the Euro Left has sounded like the faculty lounge at Oberlin College. For my European readers, Oberlin is an insane asylum in Ohio. Buckley Conservatives may not have been sincere in their goals, but they put a lot of effort into sounding like small government, Classical Liberals.

Of course, there has also been this weird phrasing that Americans are just now adopting. That is the phrase “extreme far right” that is always center stage, ironically, in European political discussions. The “far left” never gets mentioned. Stalin is never described as “far left” but Hitler is “far right” even though he was a socialist. This has always been confusing to Americans, but we are catching up. Donald Trump is now far-right.

Then there are the political figures. In America, we hold veterans in very high regard, maybe too high, so military service is a good thing for politicians. In Europe, military men command little respect compared to other vocations. In America, we like it when someone goes from rags to riches. Therefore, we like politicians with humble origins. Europeans prefer men and women from the aristocratic and academic backgrounds.

As a result, unsophisticated Americans, like myself, have found European politics a bit murky. Well, that used to true. Americans can now relate to what our brothers and sisters across the Atlantic are experiencing in their politics. The evil Donald Trump is smashing up the political class with his extreme right-wing populism. Across the pond, extreme right-wing parties across Europe are smashing up their respective political classes. It is springtime for Hitlers and they are blossoming across the West.

The most stunning development, the one that has good thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic in a panic, is the sudden rise of Alternative für Deutschland, an extreme right-wing extremist party of the most extreme right-wing kind. Led by the elfin Frauke Petry, this new party rang up surprisingly large vote totals, exclusively on the issue of immigration, particularly opposition to the Merkel policy of Islamification of Germany.

In addition to the ruling class Hitler fantasies, Americans and Germans now appear to have two things in common. One is that the political classes in both countries have displayed a staggering disregard for public welfare in their pursuit of personal salvation. Merkel out posing for selfies with refugees is as tone deaf as Republicans demanding open borders and amnesty for tens of millions of illegals. Cui bono?

The responsibility of the people put in charge, their chief responsibility, is to maintain public order. You cannot have a civilized and prosperous society with civil unrest. Deliberately inviting in these problems, as we see with Merkel in German and the open borders lobbies in America, is a betrayal of the public trust. In another age, the elites would not have to fear these populist parties as the people would have hung the elites before it got to this point.

The other overlap and the most important to consider is the source of support for these extreme right-wing far right extremist movements. Alternative für Deutschland is decidedly middle-class. It has the nickname “the professors party” because its founders were mostly academics. It is vote is coming from middle-class Germans who work in professions. It is support is also overwhelmingly male at this time, with some estimates at 85% male. This is a point that will become central to our future political debates.

Smart people have figured out who is voting for Donald Trump and the thing that jumps out is that Trump has broad-based support across the American middle-class. In fact, he is the candidate of middle America right now. Despite all the hooting and hollering about his angry voters, his rallies look like the crowd at Little League baseball games in a typical American suburb. His issues are also directly aimed at the middle.

Like AfD, Trump is drawing in male voters who have dropped out of the process, but also males who have thrown in the towel on the main parties. Current estimates suggest a 2-to-1 ratio male-to-female for Trump. This is not an accident. German culture has seen the same war on men we have seen in America. German men were literally told they had to urinate sitting down. When you have to get permission from a judge to take a whiz, you’re going to begin to think the people in charge are against you.

One last thing, related to the middle-class nature of these movements, is how the elites are responding. Instead of co-opting the issues, they are trying to link these movements to bogeymen like Pegida and the KKK. That is a telling response and suggests the ruling classes have become decidedly anti-middle class. It is also legitimizing the taboos against xenophobia, racism and ethnocentrism. You can only call decent people Nazis so many times before it loses its power to shame.

What is happening across the West is the people are awakening to the fact that their rulers have a very different vision for their societies than they disclose in public. In many cases, it feels like the rulers have plans for the future that do not include their voters. Those plans may be great ideas, but in stable societies, they must be debated in public. Otherwise, society becomes unstable. That is what is happening in Germany and America. The system is becoming unstable.

Stupid CoNT’s

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Most people think of cults as being a collection of suicidal weirdos led by a madman, who thinks he is Jesus. That’s understandable as they are the most colorful and therefore get the most attention. David Koresh and the Branch Davidians are the gold standard. Before him Charlie Manson was the guy Americans thought of whenever the subject of cults came up in conversation. The suicide cult is a regular feature of television police dramas for this reason.

The truth is cults don’t usually end in mass suicide. In fact, it is rare. Usually they run their course, eventually running out of steam and the adherents wander off to other things. People are natural believers and the more intense the inclination to believe, the more likely they are to sign onto mass movements, even wackadoodle nonsense like UFO cults and recycling campaigns. They go from one to another, looking for salvation, sometimes even signing onto a movement built on the negation of their prior cult.

Think of the nutty aunt who is always into some new age nonsense. Maybe she was into crystals and then it was a fake shaman that helped her discover her aura. Then it was off to volunteer for one social cause after another. We all know these sorts of people, yet we seldom think of them as members of a cult, but that’s what’s going on with them. Cults are just small, temporary mass movements.

The assumption is that cults always have a charismatic leader, but that is not the case. Scientology is a cult and it lacks this feature. Modern American liberalism latches onto temporary leaders like Barak Obama and now Bernie Sanders. The Obamasoxers of ten years ago are BernieBros today. Buckley Conservatives have been calling every GOP nominee “Reagan” since ’92. It’s a type of cargo cult where they think if they pretend their man is the Gipper, they will be transported back to the 80’s.

This brings us to the Cult of Never Trump, known on-line as #nevertrump and billeted at on-line sites like the Federalist, National Review On-line and The Blaze. Like every cult, the adherents are convinced beyond all reason that their cause is based in indisputable mathematical truths. These truths are so obvious, they repeat them with a regularity that resembles a chant. Every CoNT I’ve encountered says the exact same things, like they rehearse them.

This was something visitors to Maoist China and Stalinist Russia noticed about the bureaucrats. They always said the same things in response to questions. In most cases, it was simply pragmatic. The party stalwarts, the spear catchers for the cause, they chanted the party line with the enthusiasm of the fanatic. They did not just believe the party line, they were defined by it and defined by their adherence to it. They would die for it.

As an aside, I knew an Iranian that served in the Iran – Iraq War. He told me a story about how his unit came up to a minefield. The Revolutionary Guards in their unit ran into the field, sacrificing themselves to clear a path through the mines. For these men, their life was only useful in service to the cause. They had given themselves over completely to the cause and the proof of it was their willingness to die for it. Before they stepped on the mine, they were already dead to themselves.

The other thing every mass movement requires, particularly cults, is the bogeyman. To quote the go-to source on these things, Eric Hoffer, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”  The Nazis had the Jews, the Stalinists had the Kulaks and now the CoNT has Donald Trump. The enemy is what comes to define the cult and gives it a reason to continue on, even when all the prophesies fail.

The interesting thing about the CoNT is that it started a lot like a UFO cult, rather than a mass political movement. Last summer, they dismissed Trump as a ridiculous showman and not a real candidate. Then he was a vanity candidate who would drop out by fall. Then he would be crushed in the debates. Then Iowa was going to be his demise. This has been a pattern right up to now. After each setback, the CoNT rejiggers the prophesy and comes up with a new date for when the Dirt Monster will be slain.

The gold standard on this type of cult is the study, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. The group they studied was a UFO cult led by a woman named Dorothy Martin. It eventually disbanded, but she went on to start other fringe spiritual movements. I’ll just note that she was initially involved with Scientology. Again, true believers tend to move from one mass movement, one cult, to another.

Like a UFO cult, the CoNT becomes hyperactive as the next big date arrives. For the last week they have been waging a campaign to prove that the Dirt Monster is Hitler, hoping to bring about the great reckoning this Tuesday. This will surely go on until Trump clinches the nomination in a month or two. What happens at that point is tough to tell. I doubt we see a mass suicide, like the People’s Temple, but they will have to contend with what experts call “dis-conformation.”

This is when the true believer is presented with irrefutable evidence that contradicts their belief. In the famous Dorothy Martin case, the Seekers explained that the aliens did not come and destroy humanity because the faith of the Seekers convinced the aliens to relent. My guess is the CoNT will come up with something similar, maybe claiming Trump has changed and their efforts to stop have reformed him and made him acceptable.

Others will never go along with this. Neo-conservatives like Max Boot and Bill Kristol can never reconcile themselves to Trump. These are Trotskyites, who have a vision of the world wholly incompatible with anything one can call conservative.  The smart money says they head back over to the Left and find some way to reconcile themselves to their old friends on the

Either way, we are bedeviled with CoNT’s for a while longer, then it will be something else.

iMagistrate

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I recently had the unpleasant task of working with some young attorneys on a contract. Lawyers tend to carry on like they spend their days splitting atoms, but reality is much different. They spend most of their days cutting and pasting from one document to another. Contract law is simply not that difficult, but it has been made vastly complicated by a massive bird’s nest of verbiage. Too many lawyers with too much time and too much software.

Of course, contract law should not be difficult at all. In fact, it is something that could easily be automated. After all, a contract defines a relationship. Party X agrees to do something and Party Y agrees to do something. Then there are consequences for when either party fails to do what they promised. Life is simply not that variable where there needs to be new language for each contract. There is a reason we have the expression “boiler plate” to describe contract language.

A system where the two parties could answer a series of questions about their expectations of the other in the agreement would be easy to code. Writing some code that would force compromise over contradictions would be a bit more complicated, but no more complex than answering an on-line survey. Once the parties agree, the system would get a signature from both parties and register the contract.

My bet is most people would find this much better than dealing with human lawyers, who tend to get competitive over trivialities. The machine would present both parties with the most common agreement for their situation and that would satisfy the parties in most cases. This sort of normalization would also minimize disputes as people accepted the rules, rather than look for ways around them.

Disputes would go before the machine. Rather than two lawyers trying to trick a human judge into going for their version of events, the parties would answer questions on a touch screen. If you think lie detectors work, maybe add those into the mix. Either way, the robot judge would calculate the odds of each side being truthful and then render the verdict most likely to be in the interest of justice.

Having been in court too many times, human judges always try to force a deal. It is part of their process. Imagine the parties answering the questions, given their odds of success and then offered a compromise. Since most contract cases are money cases, a haggling module would allow the parties to find a middle ground and that would be that. No deposition and interrogatories, just a couple of hours in front of iMagistrate on-line.

The beauty of the robot judge is he does not need to be in a courtroom. He could be a kiosk at the mall or an internet presence. Since the judge is automated, there would be no need for lawyers. Contract law would, for most situations, become a self-service issue, like pumping gas or washing your car. It would probably save Americans billions just in contract stuff.

Of course, there is no need to limit this approach to contracts. I am just starting there because it is fresh in my mind and one of the minor nuisances of my life. If you think it sounds preposterous, consider that you sign a contract every time you rent a car. The law regarding car rentals has become so formalized and regulated, it is just part of the background noise of vacation. Applying this to employment and services is no great leap.

Many criminal issues could also be automated as well. Drunk driving is just about to that point in America. The cop pulls you over and you are given a choice of taking a breath test or confessing. It has not put that way, but that is the reality in most states. If you refuse the breath test you lose your license until you see a judge, who always finds you guilty. Taking a breath test is just standing before the robot judge, when you think about it.

Imagine instead of arresting T’Quan and parking him in a booking cell, T’Quan is immediately brought before iMagistrate. The police enter their data and T’Quan answers a series of questions. Hard evidence like video and fingerprints are uploaded and the verdict is rendered. Maybe iMagistrate can offer the accused a plea deal. Either way, the process could take hours rather than months.

That will never happen, of course, because it is too frightening to us. Maybe not never, but no one reading this will live to see Robocop and RoboJudge, but the civil stuff is not unrealistic. There are on-line services for wills and setting up a business and even filing for divorce. Vast chunks of the law simply do not need a highly trained mouthpiece. They can be turned over to software. If software can write your will, it can sure as hell handle probate.

Got legal trouble? There is an app for that!

Reality on the Rhine

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There are two ways you can concede reality. One is to keep running headlong into it with a bucket over your head until you pass out and are dragged off the stage. The other way is to adapt but pretend that reality has decided to accommodate you. This means an assault on the language or sending an inconvenient truth down the memory hole. This way everyone can pretend they were not the guy running headlong into reality with the bucket on their head.

Angela Merkel’s decision to turn Germany into a province of the Caliphate was based on fantasies popular with our ruling classes. Namely, that all people everywhere are the same and want the same things. All those messy differences we see are just social constructs or the legacy of white racism. Throw open the doors of civilization and we will have paradise!

Instead, Germany now has Muslim rape gangs, migrant ghettos and growing social unrest. Further, this has destabilized the very sensitive political balance in Europe. Britain could very well bolt the EU and it is entirely due to the migrant hoards trying to swim the Channel. Across Europe, xenophobic political parties are moving from the fringe to respectability, even in Germany where they are allergic to such things because of you know who.

While there are few signs that the good thinkers in Germany are ready to take the bucket off their head, the rest of Europe is trying to adjust to observable reality. The Balkan states have sealed their borders with Greece, turning the birth place of western democracy into the Camp of the Saints. Greece is quickly becoming a sort of ghetto for migrants denied access to Germany. If the average Greek did not hate Germans after the financial debacle, they do now.

That, of course, should have been the lesson everyone learned from the show down over Greek debt. The EU may have been a French initiative, but it is a German institution now. If you’re the French or Dutch, this is not a bad deal. Hungarians and Poles are probably fine with it for the most part. But the Golden Rule always applies. The man with gold makes the rules and in Europe, that’s Germany.

This brings us back to reality. Germany, as the dominant nation in Europe, has to accept the responsibilities that come with the position. Europe is best served when led by a Frankish coalition, dominated by the heirs of Louis the German. And yes, I’m being fast and loose with history here, but the point is Germany and France are the heart of Europe and must dominate the politics. There can be no other way.

Merkel’s trip to Turkey and the resulting “deal” to help address the migrant problem, suggests the German political elite is starting to figure out that reality is not going away. A united Europe means a federation of ethnic states led by Germany and France. It can never mean a monolithic super state that has no natural identity. Borders exist for a reason. They help maintain order, inside Europe and outside it.

There’s another bit to this and that is Germany will have to take the lead in defending Europe militarily. History has not ended and that means Europe will have to maintain a foreign policy and a military to back it. Russia will forever make mischief in Europe. That’s what Russians are put on earth to do so that has to be addressed. Then there’s the demographic issue to the south.

That brings me back to the beginning. Fair or foul, the idea of a re-militarized Germany is a tough sell, even if the reality of it is a necessity. The political class of Europe is going to have to find a way to accomplish the goal while pretending reality has given in on this point. The rather obvious lesson of the last 25 years is that the institutions designed for fighting the Cold War are falling away. NATO is operating on borrowed time. Something must replace it.

The bigger issue facing Europe, one no one dares mention, is that the Germans need to put their past behind them. You know who was an aberration and it is long past time for Germans to regain their national pride. They cannot be the leader of modern Europe if they are psychologically crippled by events no one alive remembers. Hitler has been dead for 70 years now. Time to close the books on him.

That also means closing the books on the neutered German too. The Cold War required West Germany to be a super-charged Switzerland full of gregarious beer drinking bureaucrats who meticulously adhered to the latest political fashions. The new Europe requires a confident Germany willing to take on the hard work of defending civilization from threats internal as well as external. That’s going to require retiring the old thinking as well as the old men and women currently in charge.

Call it whatever you like, but the reality of Europe is that it is defined in Germany.

Lawyers and Salesmen

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One of the things I’ve learned in life is that the salesmen for a company will be the most honest with you about their company. That’s not to imply that salesmen are all honest in their sales pitch. That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about life inside the company. Ask a sales guy, who is not selling you something, about his boss and his co-workers and he’ll usually give you the unvarnished truth. Often, they are the guys who know the flaws best, because they have to work around them to make deals.

That’s the thing with salespeople.  They work for themselves, even though they take a salary and are employees. Some portion of their pay, maybe the bulk of it, is derived from their performance as a salesman. All salespeople have quotas and have to produce. Otherwise, they get fired. There’s no hiding in the bureaucracy for them. That means self-deception is not of any use to them. They have to know the defects of their firm and its products in order to mitigate them in front of clients.

The weird thing about salesmen is they never assume they are the cleverest guy in the room. Paranoia is a healthy trait in sales, as there are a million little things that can scuttle a deal. Working from the assumption that there could very well be someone in the room who knows something you don’t is a good way to avoid surprises. You ask more questions and you listen better. If you’re walking around thinking you are Wile E. Coyote, a safe could fall on your head.

I used to fish with a guy who made his living selling cars. He got into it as a way to pay for college. He would sell cars on the weekend and at night, while going to school during the day. When he finished college, he found that he could make a better living selling cars than anything else so he kept selling cars. Eventually he settled into selling BMW’s and Mercedes. He was able to make a nice, middle-class living at it, without too much stress.

Making small talk one day I mentioned something about lawyers and he laughed and told me that lawyers are his best clients, followed by stockbrokers. I naturally assumed it was because they made a lot of money and had expensive tastes. That was not it at all. He told me that overselling a lawyer was one of the easiest things to do in car sales. They walk around thinking they know everything and so they fall for every car sales trick in the book.

I’ve been thinking about this watching the political ructions. Donald Trump is a salesman and a very good one so he is doing extremely well as a novice politician, because politics is about sales. His competitors are mostly lawyers, who never took him seriously, because they are lawyers and smart. Everyone knows this so surely the smart lawyers will have no problem with the sales guy and his cheap theatrics.

The commentariat is similarly full of lawyers and people who went to law school. The funny thing about media lawyers is they rarely ever did real legal work. Those that did work in the business got out quickly and signed on for TV work. The other chattering skulls popped out of prep school and then went onto a private college, majoring in a soft field like political science. Like the lawyers, they walk around thinking they are the smartest guy in the room and they have been wrong about Trump at every turn.

To some degree, this is due to the difference between fields that reward the right answer and fields that reward clever answers. There’s no right answer as to why the French decided to attack uphill in the rain against the forces of Henry V at Agincourt. On the other hand, there is only one answer to the question of how many one centimeter spheres can fit into a one meter cube. You either have the correct answer or you do not and you have to show your work.

Where I’m heading with this is that lawyers probably suffer from the Dunning–Kruger effect because they were always the cheekiest and cleverest person in the classroom. They have high verbal skills and pretty credentials so they naturally assume that means they are brilliant. Steve Sailer points out that Barak Obama went from wall flower to social butterfly once he got into Harvard Law. His acceptance letter bestowed on him the sense he was the smartest guy in the room.

Now, the guys in the sales department have a different experience. They also have high verbal skills, but they spend their days losing many more deals than they win. They face the reality of their limitations every day. They also know that if they don’t sell, they don’t eat. There’s no failing up in their business. It’s why the sales guys can feast on lawyers. They have no illusions about themselves.

It’s another reason to wonder if the recipe for the managerial state contains ingredients that poison the stew. Failing up is a feature of the managerial class. They go from one failure to the next, rarely ever answering for their blunders. The economic team that advised Obama on the stimulus, for example, landed cushy positions in the academy. Tim Geithner is making millions influence peddling for Wall Street. This despite being 100% wrong about in their predictions.

A system based on mediocrities walking around convinced they are the smartest people in the room will inevitably become unstable. The unforced errors we are seeing could simply be a feature of a system that lacks a way to police the ranks. Instead, it rewards the most ruthless bureaucratic operators who are skilled at things useless to preserving the system. In many cases, like we saw with the housing bust-out, the most skillful members of the managerial class cause the greatest damage to it.

Ruminations on The Shadow Party

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One of the favorite gags among the hate thinkers is to mock the Republicans for their indifference to 40% of Americans. Every election, characters from the GOP drama club come out with elaborate plans for lower capital gains taxes, eliminating taxes on carried interest and increasing the pool of cheap foreign labor. How can the under-employed carpenter resist such a platform?

That’s not entirely fair, of course, The Republicans will also drone on about the need to restart the Cold War and drop more bombs on the muzzies. Hilariously, they never put it that way, instead insisting they love Islam and welcome a flood of Muslims into the country, because “that’s who we are as a people.” That’s usually when they launch into promises to expand the surveillance state.

America in 2016 is a three-party system. One party is made up of people who fantasize about murdering white people. The other party is made up of people who fantasize about helping the other party. Then there is this third, unofficial shadow party for normal people who increasing fear voting for either of the two official options. Trump is officially a Republican, but he is unofficially the shadow party candidate.

I find myself in an odd position. I’m enjoying the mayhem caused by the Dirt Monster, but Donald Trump is hardly my idea of a good leader of a rebellion, much less leader of a sane nation. At the same time, either of the two official parties winning the election most likely means something really bad awaits us around the next corner. Sometimes there are no good options.

There’s a Social War vibe to what is happening in that one group of Americans has finally had it with the other group of Americans. The GOP has been a Cavalier/Deep South/Appalachian party for 25 years now, but it still retains a Yankee leadership with a Yankeedom sensibility. The people voting Trump are, whether they know it or not, demanding a place at the table.

This “Open Letter” has been bouncing around Twitter for a few days. The gag among the hate-thinkers is that an open letter is the asshole version a regular letter. The reason is an “open letter” is usually written by a Cloud Person excoriating his fellow Cloud People for not enthusiastically applying the lash to the Dirt People. This is one of those rare occasions when it is a Dirt Person appealing to the Cloud People.

Let me say up front that I am a life-long Republican and conservative. I have never voted for a Democrat in my life and have voted in every presidential and midterm election since 1988. I have never in my life considered myself anything but a conservative. I am pained to admit that the conservative media and many conservatives’ reaction to Donald Trump has caused me to no longer consider myself part of the movement. I would suggest to you that if you have lost people like me, and I am not alone, you might want to reconsider your reaction to Donald Trump. Let me explain why.

The rest of the letter is a recitation of facts and an explanation of why support for Trump is actually a proxy vote sending a message about the Dirt People unhappiness with their masters. Clearly, the writer is hoping his letter will cause the Cloud People to reform and welcome his kind into their midst. The villagers are appealing to the Lord for relief, a phenomenon as old as man.

What’s interesting to me is the Cloud People had not bothered to look out the castle windows at what’s been happening. They finally decided to send out Rubio to suppress the brigands. Yesterday his head was sent back in a box. What comes next is an organized response from both parties to put an end to Trump’s campaign and suppress the Dirt People. National Review is creating a proscription list as a warning to their colleagues about what’s coming.

Pessimists are betting that the Cloud People will agree to let Cruz run as the GOP option and lose to Hillary Clinton. That will allow the Buckley Conservatives, the outer party, to purge their ranks of anyone remotely sympathetic to the plight of the Dirt People. They will rush to help the Democrats, the inner party, pass amnesty and legislation eliminating citizenship. The Brazil-ification of America will accelerate.

Maybe that’s how it plays out. The fact that whites are offing themselves in record numbers suggests they are not all that interesting in fighting the tide of history. The fact that blacks are fine with having 25% of their ranks either in jail or on parole suggests they are fine with being zoo animals for the Cloud People. Latin America makes clear that Hispanics are not going to put up a fight.

Still, the Shadow Party will still be out there for a while no matter what happens in this election. The Social War ended when the Romans welcomed the Italians into the club. The guy who wrote that letter is hardly alone. He represents maybe a third of the population. These events have surely been noticed by men with better political skills than Trump. The string of unforced errors by the Cloud People suggests this insurrection is just the beginning of a period of instability.

The Master’s Servants

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Every employee harbors a bit of resentment toward the boss. It’s human nature. The employee sees the benefits of being the boss, but not the burdens. This resentment is amplified if the boss makes a lot more money than his employees. Everyone fantasizes about having a big pile of cash and what they could do with it. If the boss is viewed as undeserving, maybe being an idiot or ill-tempered, it seems unfair so a natural resentment develops.

A stock character in popular dramas is the bitter employee who thinks the boss is a dunce or has lucked into his position. That leads to the bitter employee becoming a Raskolnikov of some sort, committing a crime or treachery. The Simpsons have been doing a version of this with Sideshow Bob for 25 years now. It works because we can all relate to it, even if we are not prone to jealousy and resentment.

I was reminded of this a few years ago, when American Liberals were running around bitching about the 1% and how the bankers were screwing everyone. What struck me at the time is that all of these people were on the payroll of some rich donor or taking bribes from Wall Street. Liberal pols love Wall Street money. Liberal think tanks count on billionaires to fund their operations.

The carping and moaning about the 1%, from someone like Elizabeth Warren sounded to me a lot like what you hear from a bitter employee. Mx. Warren gazes upon her credentials and believes she should be at the top of society. More important, she thinks she should have the wealth of someone at the top of society. Instead, she is reduced to being a servant to rich donors.

John McCain has suffered from this malady in the past. His comical jihad against campaign financing was a just a complicated way of saying he deserved better than being just a servant. These rich bastards he had to beg for money did not deserve their position. They lacked his credentials and gravitas.  His servant’s revolt went nowhere and we have even more rich people buying servants in the political class.

It’s an important thing to understand about American politics. The boys and girls we see running for office are just servants. They could just as well be actors, hired for the role. The Great White Hope of Buckley Conservatives, Ben Sasse, is an extreme example of the exam system we have allowed to develop. He is a man who has never had a job outside government. His resume looks like a spoof of managerial technocracy.

The slobbering over Sasse by Buckley Conservatives is a great contrast to their reaction to Donald Trump. In Sasse they see one of their own, a fellow servant. He works in a different part of the master’s estate, but he is still a servant. He went to the same finishing schools, subjected himself to the same humiliations and made all of the same compromises in order to gain the master’s favor.

Trump, of course, is an unapologetic rich guy who has no respect for the toadies and coat holders in the political class. It’s not that he is from the wrong side of the tracks, which is certainly a big issue here, but that he is a reminder to all of them that they are just the errand boys of the rich people, who pay their salaries. They are not the kingmakers and trend setters they imagine. They’re just servants.

The response from the servants is a sneering contempt for Trump and his voters. I’ve long suspected that this contempt is part of what is driving the Trump phenomenon. To most Americans, the response from conservative media reminds them of the snotty girl at the coffee shop, who carries on like she is better than the customers. She can’t afford shoes, but she sneers at people who spend more on bottled water than she makes in a week.

What’s being revealed now is just how much these people truly despise themselves for living the servant’s life. They can’t take it out on the donors, who they are required to stroke once a month and fundraisers, so they are letting loose on the only guy in the race with a job. Their frustration grows as their assaults fail, because it reminds them of their impotence.

There’s another side to it. The boys and girls of the managerial class look at normal Americans as field slaves. A part of how they have reconciled their subservience is to pretend that they are superior to the field slaves. Now that the field slaves are slaying the overseers and eyeing an assault on the main house, the house servants are reminded of their own servitude. They hate the field slaves for it.

It’s why slave revolts rarely succeed. Ultimately, the house slave will defend his master against the slave revolt. It is his nature. It is what he is bred for and what gives meaning to his life. The field slaves are rarely willing to do what must be done to succeed and that’s wipe out the house slaves fist. In the end, it is the house slave with the whip in his sending a message, on behalf of his master.

The Hothouse Flowers

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It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin’ on the porch with my family, singin’ and dancin’ down in Mississippi…

OK, OK. I’m kidding, of course. I was born into poverty and grew up in what is elegantly described as a white trash culture. There are a number of uninteresting reasons for it, but I was raised with decidedly lower class sensibilities. I still retain those sensibilities, despite a lifetime outside the world that created them. It’s why I live in the ghetto. It’s as close to home as I can get, even though I’m the minority.

The hillbillies have a saying, “don’t get above your raising” which means to never forget where you came from. The Irish like to say, “don’t outgrow your hat.” Those are the two that come to mind, but my guess is every culture has some pithy way of stating the obvious. While there is some random variation in all of us, we are products of the people and environment that made us.

A few years ago, I was at Yale visiting with someone doing work there and I had the chance to spend a long weekend on campus. I don’t do this very often so I come to campus life as a stranger. Most of what the students and professors take for granted jumps out to me as new and different. For them it is just daily life. For me it is a trip to the zoo to see exotic animals.

One night, my friend took me to what I think was a grad student/faculty mixer. I’m not really sure what it was exactly, but that’s what it seemed like. I fell into conversation with some people doing post doc work and I flattered them by appearing interested in their studies. It’s the thing a guest should do and I’m pretty good at it. Sometimes I even learn a few things. One of them was working on currency issues, a subject I enjoy a great deal so I got to pick his brain a bit.

Anyway, one of the things that I found astonishing was just how naive they were about the world outside the campus. One guy was in his early thirties and had never held a job off-campus. The other guy had never held a job at all and he was about to turn thirty. He was expecting to land in a teaching position either at Yale or Princeton. To them, I was a visitor from another planet. They were far more curious about me than I was about them.

We had a good time swilling beer and talking about ourselves, but I came away feeling like John the Savage in Brave New World. These were not my people. They could never be my people. I’m sure they felt the same way about me as they pretty much said it to me. The guy without a job said, “I have no idea how you make it out there. I never could do. I’d never want to do it.”

This is common and why so many end up in fields that are similar to college life. Think tanks in and around DC are pretty much just privately funded faculty lounges. Rich people get tax breaks for funding people to write papers that extol the virtues of rich people. Government, and the companies that live off government, have gone from dreary bureaucracies to self-actualizing, nurturing workplaces, where everyone feels safe.

It is an important thing to understand when watching the political turmoil going on in the West. Everyone in the British managerial class, for example, thinks ever closer Union is the sensible thing to do. They look at Brexit as a sop to the chavs who need to blow off some steam. My bet is Cameron and his cronies just assume they will win. After all, everyone they know is for staying in the EU.

There is another element to it and what I heard that night at Yale. The sneering contempt we see on our televisions is really just the false bravado of the timid. For them, the typical citizen is like a bad odor. They may not be able to describe it, but they instinctively recoil from it.

It’s what’s so horrifying about people like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage. It’s not what these guys say about the issues so much as the working class odor that causes the beautiful people to crinkle their noses and flee the room. The coarseness reminds the hothouse flower that on the other side of the glass, there’s danger.

It used to be that the political class was populated by men, who had made something of themselves in the regular world. Many politicians started out in life by serving in the army and then working as a lawyer or in business. The civil service was basically working class people who were willing to take less pay so they could avoid the factory or field.

Rich people and their children had a dominant place. of course, but they had to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi, often serving in the military or private business. Jack Kennedy served in the military with an eye on a career in politics. He entered the Senate very familiar with and comfortable around normal men.

That’s not the case today. The political class is just the bit of the managerial class above the waterline. Underneath it is this class of people who pop out of the hothouses of academia into the grow rooms of government, thinks tanks and government contracting. Even the people with military service went from law school to JAG and then back to a law firm that does government work.

This separation may be the undoing of the managerial class, assuming mass democracy and mass media are the future. These hothouse flowers look silly to the voters when standing next to Trump on stage at these debates. The reason is Trump lives in the world. He’s familiar to us. He’s normal. That just makes the actors on stage with him look even more ridiculous. Most people say Marco Rubio talking butch the other day and just laughed, thinking, “who is he kidding?”

Of course, the one way to protect the hothouse is to do away with mass democracy.