Contemplating The Numbers

Posted on July 12, 2023 by thezman

A genuinely novel feature of the modern age is numbers, as in statistics about all sorts of things regarding daily life. Every day some new set of numbers is announced and people who allegedly know about the subject will comment upon them. The government is about to release a fresh batch of inflation data and the volunteer army of economists will talk about them for the next week. The modern age is a game of numbers about everything including the numbers.

This was not always so. For most of human history people could only tell if there was food inflation by noticing that food was more expensive. The king did not send someone out to read the latest inflation figures. The main reason is the king did not know those figures and had no reason to know. That is the other thing about numbers. They only mean something to us in context. The official inflation rate matters only when you understand the concept behind those numbers.

Months after Bud Lite decided to associate their brand with child molesters, people are still tracking the numbers associated with the brand. They have lost X million in market value and X percent of market share. Bud Lite is no longer the most popular cheap beer and has lost X percent of sales year-over-year. To the people in the culture war, these numbers have meaning. It says that lots of people agree with them on the moral question at the center of those numbers.

Moral arithmetic is everywhere. Nick Fuentes went on a ghetto internet program the other day and his fans cannot stop talking about the numbers. They say that over one hundred thousand people got to see him use the N-word in front of a group of black people who look like they work at a strip club. What he said and did and where he did it is not what matters. It is how many people saw it that matters. The underlying logic is the bigger the number, the better the result.

The entertainment business is all about numbers. An artistically grotesque film that sells millions of tickets is better than a great film that only appeals to a niche audience or people with refined tastes. The reason is we do not have a moral metric to use to rate the artistic quality of films. We have ranking lists, but they often rely on the numbers related to popularity. The first Star Wars movies got high ratings from critics because they made a lot of money, despite being mediocre content.

One reason popular politics looks like a carnival is that we can measure popularity through polling and voting. If fifty percent plus one think candidate X is best, then he is the best, even if he is a brain damaged hobo. This is why political actors degrade themselves for attention. The math of politics says that X percentage of people who notice you will agree with you, so the goal is to always increase the number of people who take notice of you. That is the math of the circus.

Roger Scruton once described conservatism as the understanding that there are things too important to be subjected to the marketplace. This is essentially a rejection of the math of democracy. Just because one idea has a bigger number next to it than the other idea does not mean it is true or qualitatively better. Having a brain damaged hobo in the senate is not normatively better than having a Turkish carny in the senate, no matter what the numbers tell us.

This is the problem with conservatism. Who decides that something is too important to be subject to the numbers? There are only two choices. Either a supernatural force like God decides or the people through time and experience decide what is no longer subject to the numbers. The former requires a strong religious foundation for society and the latter is just democracy in slow motion. It turns out that Sir John Filmer was right, and John Locke was wrong.

Of course, we value the numbers of life in this age because we trust that the numbers are not just a reflection of some normative truth but that they are accurate. Low inflation is a good thing so when the government comes out with numbers that say it is at or near the target of two percent, the experts cheer the rulers. This only makes sense if you think the government numbers are correct. The math of this age rests on people trusting the numbers of this age.

Is inflation really near three percent now? Did Joe Biden really get more votes than any human in the history of elections? Do most Americans back Ukraine? Was last Thursday the hottest day in the history of the planet? Despite the lack of evidence to support most of the numbers, most people seem to trust them. At the same time, most people do not trust the people issuing the numbers. For most of human history people would know to never trust anything from untrustworthy people.

That is the other novel thing about this age. Christianity has faded for most people as a foundation for moral claims. Something has to fill the void, so we have been flooded with new numbers to function as the authority. This explains why people trust the numbers while distrusting the people issuing the numbers. People are believing machines so when they stop believing in God, they will find something else. In this age people have come to trust the numbers as a last resort.

In a way though, this is the metric of the liberal society. It works when people can trust the people in official positions. They can trust those people because they trust the institutions to police the people in the institutions. Even in times when the office holders are distrusted, the people can still trust the numbers because they are viewed as the product of the institutions. As long as people still trust the numbers, the rulers are safe, despite the fact they do nothing but lie to us.

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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.

Death By A Thousand Lies

Posted on July 6, 2023 by thezman

On July 4th, a Federal judge in Louisiana issued an injunction against the Federal government barring various departments from contacting social media companies with regards to censoring speech online. This is a practice that started in the Trump years but took off under the Biden administration. On a daily basis government actors contact the censors at these companies and tell them which posts to remove, users to ban and topics that are to be suppressed that day.

In the Trump years, this practice consisted mostly of government officials calling to complain about things that were obviously fake about the White House. Given the lunacy of the people running these companies, the complaints were ignored, but the complaints from fellow partisans were not ignored. A working relationship between the censors and the FBI, DHS and other agencies evolved. Under Biden it is one click away from being enshrined in government regulation.

Most people alive today remember when the media proudly refused to cooperate with the government on this stuff. They would make a big deal about not going along with government requests to suppress stories. It was all a lie, of course, but they felt the need to make a big show of it. The secret police had long ago infiltrated the major media companies to shape the news. Operation Shamrock and Operation Mockingbird we both used to control the media.

The response from the media was much different when the Twitter Files revealed the level of cooperation between Twitter censors and the government. The primary response was to ignore the whole thing. This is the real power of the media. They can simply ignore a story and let it be buried under a mountain of nonsense about carny folk or conspiracy theories about things like global warming. The second response was to trash the reputation of Matt Taibbi who did the reporting.

So far, the media response to this injunction is what you would expect. On the one hand, they are treating it as a partisan issue. You see, it is the nasty Republican states that are hassling Biden for no reason at all. On the other hand, this ruling is preventing the government from defending our democracy against election interference. The brave disinformation researchers are now prevented from doing their work to protect you from words and sounds that threaten our democracy.

Disinformation is information that is intended to deceive, usually from an official source, like the media or the government. This is an easily solved problem by having an adversarial relationship between the government and the media so both sides police each other. Instead, the media has teamed up with the state to battle this invisible fiend who is attacking our democracy. It is tempting to call this language Orwellian, but it is too ridiculous and insane to be Orwellian.

This is a feature of managerial polyarchy that does not get attention. An enormous amount of time is spent on imaginary things. The Russian collusion hoax probably cost over a billion dollars in the end. It was something that obviously did not exist, because it could not exist, but for the people in the hive it had to exist, so they treated it as if it were as real as a rose bush. Take a tour through the fever swamps of the hive and you will see plenty of people who still believe in it.

Then you have the innate need to credentialize everything. Since Grog sold a faulty wheel to Trog, humans have been trying to deceive other humans. In fact, the second oldest profession rests on this very idea. Of course, you cannot have public debate without people trying to convince others of things that are not true. The argument in favor of democracy starts with accepting this trade-off. You accept false opinions in order to encourage the free flow of ideas.

Suddenly, the people who used to claim to be the guardians of this idea are obsessed with disinformation. So much so they will help the government crush anyone who dares say anything that has not been approved. Of course, this means there must be disinformation researchers and disinformation experts. Colleges are now offering courses on the subject. How long before we see someone with the title “licensed disinformation researcher” on a cable chat show?

Notice no one ever asks what a disinformation expert does. The most likely reason for this is the people in this racket could not tell you. Here is the Wilson Center’s page on their disinformation project. Nina Jankowicz is listed a senior fellow. Read her bio and you will see that her only gainful employment has been as a professional liar, spreading government propaganda. Perhaps the theory here is the same as the government hiring former criminals to solve crimes.

If you put “disinformation expert” into a search engine you get millions of links to stories featuring them. If you search on how to become a disinformation expert, then you will see tumbleweeds on your screen. Everyone seems to accept that this profession is real, but no one has the slightest idea how you get the title. One would think that someone in the media would do a deep dive into the topic, but that would risk being accused of disinformation and who wants that?

What this reveals is the inherent decadence of managerialism. Since all authority lies with the expert, every opinion must have an expert behind it. The demand for experts is unlimited, so you end up with experts in things like disinformation. The same process unleashed the army of bigots known as antiracism experts. In place of a holy book or the word of the local shaman, moral authority lies with the expert, so the managerial system manufactures an expert for every normative claim.

There is a practical value to this for the system. These make-believe jobs provide work for the swelling army of credentialed mediocrities. There are now millions of people calling themselves “open-source intelligence researchers.” What this means is they spend all day on Google, going past the first couple of pages. This is the town busy body for the digital age. They work with the disinformation experts to get you banned from Twitter for noticing things.

It is tempting to focus on the un-American aspects of these censorship campaigns, but the fact is America stopped being a rights-based society long ago. The important issue is the vulnerability it reveals. The regime is employing armies of people to control information online and failing miserably. It turns out that the unguarded entrance to the Death Star is a well-formed meme. This probably explains why they are treating Douglas Mackey like his public enemy number one.

It is a sweet irony that a regime that is built on a foundation of lies thinks that its vulnerability is clever lies on Twitter. They are not wrong about this. The regime of lies was possible because people trusted the system. People living in a world of lies are not going to trust the system and they are certainly not going to trust the people who are responsible for the world of lies. They will seek out alternatives. It turns out that the answer to the Big Lie is millions of little lies.

Antiracist Constitution

Posted on July 3, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the movie Amadeus, a post about Affirmative Action and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

When the typical person thinks about the law, he thinks about it as a list of behaviors that are prohibited. You cannot fish during certain months, for example. You are not allowed to drive over a certain velocity. The law is a list of limitations on what you can do as well as a list of things others cannot do to you. This is largely true as a practical matter, but the law is more than a list of prohibitions. It is a moral system that turns those limitations into a habit of mind for the citizenry.

Although the law often looks chaotic and self-contradictory, it is a system made of properties and methods. The properties are things like constitutional rights, precedents, and legislation. These are statements that are treated as facts. Your First Amendment right to assembly is assumed to be a fact of nature. The Court’s decision that the First Amendment does not permit you to yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire is now assumed to be a truth in the Constitution.

The methods are the rules that govern how the people inside the law interact with those properties as well as the other people inside the legal system. The courts have processes for adjudicating disputes between citizens, for example. The government has to meet certain conditions when they infringe on the rights of a citizen. All of us exist inside the legal framework, as it is the implementation of the moral framework of our society and the framework determines how we interact with one another.

This is the starting place for reading this new booklet titled How We Got Our Antiracist Constitution: Canonizing Brown v. Board of Education in Courts and Minds, which is part of the Claremont Provocations Monograph Series. The author is Jesse Merriam, who teaches government at Patrick Henry University. His focus is on the history of the famous Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which has transformed not just the law by the Constitution itself.

The author starts with a short history of the famous case. This is one of those things that will be a revelation for most readers. Even though the case was decided in 1954, the process started a generation earlier when a young communist radical received a million-dollar inheritance from his father. He was going to reject it, but the founder of the ACLU convinced him to use the money to fund left-wing causes. This was in 1922, long before normal Americans thought about civil rights.

This money was used to start the Garland Fund, which gave the NAACP $100,000 to begin the litigation that eventually led to the Brown decision. The author does not spend a lot of time on it, but the point is clear. The civil rights movement was not something organic and spontaneous. It was a long-term project organized and financed by wealthy and important individuals. They set out to change the moral framework of the country and committed their lives to the cause.

That brings us to the heart of the topic. The author walks the reader through the process by which a legal decision becomes canonical and then how that status in the law warps everything that comes after it. In the law, “canonization” is “the process by which a single Supreme Court decision comes to control constitutional theory, debate, and interpretation.” A case can become so important that it changes the methods by which the Court views the Constitution itself.

This is a three-step process that starts with the construction phase. This is when the new moral principles are introduced to the moral framework or old moral principles are challenged as antithetical to the core principles. Brown was the end point of the construction phase where two new principles were added. One is that diversity is a constitutional good. This is why diversity is a strength. The other new principle was that discrimination, private or public, is always unconstitutional.

The next phase is what the author calls submission, which is the process “whereby critics of the initial decision capitulate to the new paradigm.” The author provides data on how conservatives changed over this phase. He counted negative stories in National Review before and after Rehnquist was nominated to the Court. He also looks at opinions on Brown during this period and notes that they went from uniformly hostile to neutral and then accepting.

The submission phase with regards to Brown is a great primer on what lies behind the internet meme “the conservative case for…” These new moral claims are first embraced by the people with control of the institutions. That power is then used to select against critics, which has the desired effect of selecting for those willing to bend their knee to the new moral paradigm. What has shaped conservatism over the last several generations is this process of submission to the Left.

The final phase of canonization is weaponization. This begins “when the former critics marshal the decision and its values for their own legal and political agenda.” As the former critics incorporate the moral principles in their own arguments, the case then becomes a controlling moral authority. Those former critics of the new morality transform themselves into its champions, often trying to stake out positions that are more extreme than those of the original advocates.

Again, the author dives into the writings of conservatism to provide examples of how they now embrace the moral claims of Brown. This is the origin of another well-worn internet meme, “democrats are the real racists.” For a generation after Brown, opposition to this decision was central to conservative arguments. Over the last thirty years Brown has taken center stage in conservative arguments in favor of diversity and opposition to discrimination.

The final result of this process is that the original Constitution has been hollowed out and in place of the rights-based moral order we now have the twin moral demands that have come from the logic of the Brown decision. Not only are your enumerated rights subject to the “Brown test”, but the federal system established by the Constitution has collapsed in order to comply with the new moral paradigm, leaving us with what the author calls the antiracist Constitution.

The author does not get into this, as it falls outside the scope of the essay, but the new legal framework created by Brown reflects the new moral framework that has come to dominate the thinking of the ruling elite. Diversity as the primary good and discrimination as the primary bad haunt every aspect of modern life. Not only must you avoid discriminating against members in the league of the oppressed, but you must also swear allegiance to diversity.

This is fundamental to the new religion which imagines the end point of social progress as the open society. If all people are inherently equal, then the differences we see must be due to social structures, which means that people are infinitely malleable. This is the universal truth of mankind. Thus, we have the holy trinity of the new religion, equality, the blank slate, and universalism. The logic of Brown reflects this spiritual sensibility as well as the ultimate goal of the open society.

This is a topic of critical importance for dissidents, so this booklet on the Brown decision and its canonization in the law is an important entry point. As the author notes, the road forward is not in fighting the tentacles that have grown out of Brown, but to understand how we got to this point. In order to remove the tentacles of Brown v. Board of Education from the neck of society, the moral claims that lie behind the decision must be understood and then defeated.

Questions Of Competence

Posted on June 29, 2023 by thezman

The crisis of competence has been a popular topic in dissident circles but largely ignored by mainstream politics. Human intelligence is a dangerous subject in this increasingly primitive time because it points to immutable differences in human beings, which contradicts the new religion. If who we are is determined by our genes, then many of the popular social fads are invalid. This makes discussing the declining competency of Western societies difficult.

Even so, the reality of the situation is hard to ignore, and we are seeing more mainstream writers notice the topic. Here is a post in the Claremont Review of Books discussing one cause of the decline. While the article focuses on how civil rights theology has warped the law, this warping of the legal system is having a deleterious impact on society by reducing competence to happy accident. When vague notions of social justice are primary, competence is an afterthought.

The most recent Budweiser panic is a good example. The ethic inside the company was built around notions of representation and equitable outcomes. These magic phrases did not spring from nothing. They are rooted in the same civil rights theology as the legal mechanism that enforce diversity quotas. It is a straight line from expecting equal outcomes to thinking you need to market cheap beer to crossdressers in order to make sure everyone is represented in your marketing.

Instead of a company making cheap beer, imagine the same company making airplane parts, elevator controls or military equipment. Competence is just as essential to beer making as making any other product. There is no reason to think that the company providing safety services to airports is less concerned for their diversity goals than the company making cheap beer. When diversity is our greatest strength, it means competence is somewhere down the list.

Of course, the new religion is not the only cause of the crisis of competence we are seeing throughout American society. This long article on the impact of diversity quietly mentions another elephant in the room. While not explicitly stated, the decline in intelligence brought on by immigration is making it more difficult to maintain the complex systems of our society. The millions moving to America are not fleeing well-run, high-IQ, high-trust societies. They are the exact opposite.

Again, this is not a new topic on this side of the great divide. Here is a post from 2022 on how the decline in competence led to the Ukraine war. Here is another post from last year going into the impact of the general decline in IQ. In 2018 Ed Dutton and Michael Woodley wrote a book on the topic of declining Western intelligence. Quantitative bloggers and HBD commentators have been talking about the impact of intelligence on society for decades now.

There is a chicken and egg angle to all of this. Is the spread of the new religion the prime mover of these observed phenomenon? For reasons as yet explained, the ruling elite of the Global American Empire embraced these vague notions of equity and diversity because they solved some unexamined psychological need or maybe they were deemed useful in promoting group solidarity. The resulting policies led to a decline in competence and general intelligence.

On the other hand, material prosperity reduced the risks in life, which resulted in more stupid people making it to sexual maturity. More of these people were then able to reproduce thus increasing the percentage of stupid people in society. Generation after generation the stupid multiplied due to the work of the intelligent in making life safer for the stupid. At a certain point, ideas like diversity and equity start to make sense as the stupid begin to overwhelm the competent.

The best evidence in support of this theory is the social fads. You have to be outlandishly stupid to think people are assigned a sex at birth. In fact, stupidity alone does not explain this lunacy. It must be amplified by a fanatical zeal to conform. In other words, people are not just dumber, they are increasingly terrified of the world around them and naturally seek safety in numbers. Western man has gone from being wolves taking on nature to moronic sheep hiding from nature.

All of this reads like a warning, as if there is something that can be done about the rapid decline in general competence. The immigration people say that ending immigration will help arrest the decline, but it is probably too late. Even if all immigration ends today, America becomes majority-minority by 2050 at the latest. It would also take competence to end immigration and we probably lack the ability to do it now. In other words, we have passed the point of no return.

The question then shifts from what can we do about it to what happens as the population loses the ability to maintain the social systems? For example, you cannot have a rights-based political culture with a low-IQ, low-trust population. You cannot leave people to question the rules and be inventive when you have to fear the consequences of their inventiveness. The Western way of organizing society can only work when the population is smart and competent.

This raises another question. It is not as if the future will be universal stupidity as it was in the movie Idiocracy. The future is going to be pockets of occidental competence in a sea of vibrant stupidity. Will high IQ, homogeneous New Hampshire want to be in the same country as diverse and stupid New Mexico? The former has an average IQ of 103, while New Mexico comes in at 95. Throw in the language and cultural barriers and you can see the problem.

This brings us to a final question stemming from the crisis of competence. If we cannot have the social structure we had when America was a European society, then what sort of social arrangements can we have in the diverse and stupid future? What sort of society is possible with the demographics of the future? Will all of the people of the future accept such those arrangements? Will the rump occidental population tolerate those conditions or seek to change them?

Brain Dead Idiots

Posted on June 27, 2023 by thezman

If you were around in the 1980’s and old enough to have noticed politics, then you probably recall the smug satisfaction of liberals when they criticized Ronald Reagan and the people who supported him. You see, conservatives were uneducated rubes easily fooled by a jocular actor who took naps during the day. Smart and educated people were not fooled by this stuff. It was mostly a coping strategy, of course, as Reagan was wildly popular so liberals could only grumble.

The claim was not entirely without support. For most of the 20th century it was the Left that could claim intellectual rigor. Smart people went into various forms of liberal politics and churned out new ideas and proposals. From the New Deal to the Great Society, liberal intellectuals drove American politics. It was in the 1980’s when that started to change, and the right started to be the place where smart people went to debate the issues of the day and the polices to address those issues.

In fairness, there were very smart people on the Right prior to the Reagan years, but it was a small club. James Burnham, for example, wrote his foundational work during the Second World War. Bill Buckley was challenging the Left in the 1960’s. In other words, there were conservative intellectuals before the 1980’s. It is just that Reagan’s success worked to legitimize the right as an intellectual endeavor, which in turn brought in waves of young smart people.

The truth is the American Left never recovered from the civil rights era. The arc of American progressivism begins with demands to end slavery and ends with the demand that fat naked men have a right to wave their genitals in your face. While it is reasonable to say that the Left is degenerate and evil, the reason they embrace this stuff is that they are morons. The Left is now dominated by credentialed idiots who think being loud and obnoxious is the peak of humans thought.

As is their nature, however, the people who continue to identify as conservative followed their friends on the Left into idiocy. There was a time when the flagship publication of conservatism, National Review, sported some of the smartest and most original thinkers and critics in the country. That was a long time ago. Today you will find jarringly stupid posts like this one. That post is an echo of this longer and much dumber post in something called Law & Liberty.

There was a time when a phrase like “right-wing Marxism” would have been met with howls of laughter. The reason is the term is ridiculous. More important, there was a time when conservatives knew enough about Marxism and what it meant to be right-wing to know the term is ridiculous. The person who posted that item at National Review does not know this. The author of the source item seems to think the word “Marxism” is just another word for “bad.”

Putting aside the stupidity of the key phrase, the original article is riddled with errors that should have been noticed by the editor. An easy example is his claims about Russell Kirk, who has been forgotten by modern conservatives. The reason National Review types sent Kirk down the memory hole is he sided with the paleos. He proudly supported George Wallace, for example. Kirk was also the Michigan chairman of the Pat Buchanan campaign.

The author of that Law & Liberty article is either an idiot or a liar. He clearly does not understand the material. He does not know the history of the intellectual tradition that he is claiming to defend. Worse yet, his main argument is that the paleos were unpopular, which is proof they were wrong. There is no form of conservatism that claims truth is determined by popular consent. In fact, the rejection of that idea is the very first principle of conservatism as presented by Russell Kirk!

This brings us back to where we started. There was a time when conservatism was a vibrant and dynamic intellectual space. There was room for Sam Francis to critique Russel Kirk and a place for Mel Bradford to rebut the claims of Harry Jaffa. Those days are long gone now as conservatism has suffered from a long brain drain. What has replaced it is a narrow conformism. Dimwits like Bobby Miller and Michael Lucchese are now what passes for conservative thought.

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor, this state of affairs was predicted by many of those old paleos hated by modern conservatives. Sam Francis observed that Buckley’s movement would inevitably have to compromise its principles in order to have a place at the table. The price of admission was accepting the moral claims of the people who controlled the political system. You could not be a critic of that system and be a beneficiary of it. Something had to give.

These moronic posts on conservative platforms are the inevitable result of the necessary brain-drain that started when conservatives joined the club. Smart people ask questions and asking questions is always a good way to fall afoul of the prevailing orthodoxy, so conservatism began to select for the incurious and dull. The long arc of conservatism ended with morons shrieking phrases like “right-wing Marxism” while they point at the intellectual debate to their right.

The Hour Is Late

Posted on June 26, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about a terrible, but instructive movie called Ooga Booga, a post about the Grim Reaper and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Corruption is a natural part of government, regardless of the type of government, because men are not angels. Government has the power to compel which means it will always attract the sorts of people who are comfortable using force to take the property of others. In this regard, government corruption is a measure of the tolerance of corruption in the system. Government corruption is a function of the culture that controls the actions of the people in government.

By way of example, think about cheating in sports. Baseball developed a steroid problem because the culture within the sport came to tolerate it. No player dared report another player as it would lower his status in the sport. Once the league instituted tough drug testing measures, the culture changed. Players caught cheating let down their teams and even cost teammates money. This lowered their status so the culture of tolerance flipped to a culture of intolerance.

Police departments have always struggled with the culture of corruption. In the last century, big city police departments would go from clean to dirty almost overnight due to the actions of a few crooked cops. The crooked cops would find ways to get other cops to take bribes or participate in shakedowns. This made all the cops guilty to some degree, even if they just remained silent. An otherwise honest precinct quickly became corrupt because the culture changed.

Police corruption is useful in understanding government corruption. Police departments have a high degree of group loyalty. Fraternity is promoted and reinforced in many ways, thus discouraging cops from reporting corruption. No one wants to be seen as a rat, so the natural tendency is to ignore bad behavior by fellow cops. Corrupt cops easily turn this virtue into a vice, by using this high group loyalty as a way to pressure their fellow cops into ignoring their corruption.

When you look at corrupt police precincts, the pattern repeats. The dirty cops start small, often roping in fellow cops on small things like stealing money from the people they arrest. The victims are not only outsiders, but viewed as the bad guys, so no one is running to the boss to report it. At some point, a critical mass of cops is doing this stuff and the culture changes. The “cool guys” are the ones shaking down drug dealers, while the “squares” look the other way.

We may be seeing the same process in Washington. The credible charges against the Biden family are piling up, but so far, few are speaking out about it. Fringe bomb throwers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are making noises about it, but people with status have been slow to say anything. Chuck Grassley is the most soberminded person to raise the issue, but he was mostly ignored by his fellow senators when he raised the issue last month.

What we know so far is that while Joe Biden was Vice President, he extorted the government of Ukraine. We know this because he used to brag about threatening them into firing the prosecutor looking into corruption. We now know that the Ukrainian prosecutor was looking into Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, which was making deals with prominent Washington people. Hunter Biden was given a no-show job at the company, so we know what was happening here.

We also know that Hunter Biden shook down a Chinese company via text message, using Joe Biden as a threat. We also know the Chinese company gave money to Hunter Biden immediately after the threatening text message. In any other context this is a simple case of extortion. In the political context it is influence peddling. When this is added to the millions of dollars in mystery payments received by members of the Biden family, it suggests a long-term pattern of corruption.

Again, this sort of thing is to be expected. What matters here is the weird cone of silence around this story. Regime media mentions it in passing, often shaping these revelations as partisan bickering. Senior Republicans are trying hard to ignore the whole thing. One reason for this wall of silence is that this sort of corruption is so common that no one knows who is clean and who is dirty. Like the corrupt police precinct, the culture of corruption breeds a culture of silence.

The Hunter Biden stuff strongly suggests that this is not an isolated thing. Everyone in Washington knew that Hunter Biden was a crackhead. The only reason anyone would do business with him was to gain favors from his father. Everyone in Washington knows how things work, so no one can claim ignorance. It is a small town and everyone knows what everyone is doing. They may not have the nitty-gritty details, but they know the general outlines. There are few secrets in Washington.

The other thing that points to a widespread culture of corruption is the outlandish nature of the crimes. Biden bragging about threatening the Ukrainians never raised any alarms in Washington, because it was the new normal. Hunter getting a no-show job at a foreign company raised no eyebrows because everyone was doing it. Hunter being a crackhead doing deals with foreign companies should have raised alarms, but official Washington looked the other way.

This raises the question as to why we are hearing stories about Biden corruption from various whistleblowers and anonymous leakers. Speculation is that it is a way to ease Biden out of the way without a messy primary. That is possible, given his failing mental condition, but there is another reason. Based on his recent public appearances it is clear that he is fading quickly. It is possible he drops dead soon and that would mean putting the moronic Kamala Harris in charge.

Another answer is that no one cares. Things have reached the point in Washington where everyone shrugs at this stuff. Like the corrupt police precinct, morality has been turned on its head. Those not involved in shakedowns and influence peddling are viewed as fools, while the smash and grab people are high status. This behavior is now a form of ingroup signaling. Your willingness to take money and your creativity in doing it is what elevates your status in Washington.

None of this bodes well for the civic nationalist types. A system that presents the voters with a choice between two men in ski masks is not going to result in one of them turning on the other. What this all points to is that we are in the final phase of what Sir John Glubb described in The Fate of Empires. The American empire has entered the final phase where looting is the norm and decline is embraced. Everyone is grabbing what they can before the music stops and the party ends.

The Crisis Of Trust

Posted on June 20, 2023 by thezman

The primary concern for any ruling elite is to remain the ruling elite, which means they must always look out for the peasant revolt. By definition, ruling elites are a minority population that rules over the majority. The relationship between the elite and the masses must be asymmetrical, which is why there are no elites that are poorer than the people over whom they rule. Combined with the numerical disparately this makes managing the relationship a primary concern for elites.

Second, but still in the primary group of concerns, is the palace coup, which is a way of saying instability in the elite class. There is a hierarchy within every elite and elites are composed of humans with a fixed lifespan. This means the people at the top of the elite class will not be there forever. This gives hope to younger members at the bottom who have ambitions about rising up the ranks. Every ruling elite needs a way to control this so that the elite can appear unified to the masses.

To see how this works, one only has to consider the most common form of rule in human history, which is monarchy. The king must always balance the needs of the people against the needs of his family, but he must also balance the interests of the prominent families against one another and his own interests. The king does not want angry peasants showing up at his castle, but he also has to make sure the nobility thinks he is their best bet to remain a nobility.

This is the key to the monarch’s success. The nobility, the church and the peasants all have to see the king as their best chance at peace and prosperity. If any of the three begins to see the king as the cause of their troubles or a threat to their position, they no longer have a reason to support the king. Maintaining the balance, therefore, requires the king to be the very symbol of order. It is only in an orderly world that you can be sure that your interest will be protected.

In the modern age, the same rules apply, but they are expressed in more abstract and arbitrary terms. For example, the party in charge is responsible for keeping a good economy, which is not always easy to quantify. Even in the best of times, there are people unhappy with the economy. In the booming 1980’s, the working classes were not happy because their jobs were being sold off to foreigners. The middle-class was thrilled because their jobs were booming.

That three-legged stool on which monarchy rests, the nobility, the church, and the peasantry, does not work in a liberal democracy. No one is loyal to anyone in liberal systems because we are all individuals. What fosters cooperation is individual loyalty to a set of ideas that define the system. The three-legged stool of monarchy is replaced with economics, security, and culture in a liberal democracy, which is held together by trust in the official holders and the institutions.

If you look at American elections going back since the dawn of this liberal democratic empire, they have always been about the same topics. Economics is always a top concern of voters and the pols seeking their vote. Security is a close second, expressed as crime fighting or foreign policy initiatives. The third item always on the list is something from the culture war that never ends. Elections turn on which side is most trusted at the moment on these items.

Go back to the beginning and you see it in presidents. Eisenhower was trusted on foreign policy because that was the top concern. Kennedy won in 1960 because the culture was becoming the top concern and Nixon was not viewed as a trustworthy political actor, despite his competence on other issues. Nixon won in 1968 by appealing to Southerners on cultural and security grounds. He also won votes from other regions due to his foreign policy credentials.

While democracy obscures elites from the people, the superficial aspects of the system operate by the oldest of rules. The people will generally support those who are most trusted on the pressing issues of the day. If it is the economy, then the side viewed as sympathetic to that issue will do well. When people are concerned about the culture, then those viewed as normal will triumph over those indulging in cultural experimentation and novelty.

This brings us back to the needs of the ruling elite. The dynamics of democracy are supposed to address both of their primary concerns. On the one hand, it is a useful feedback loop to keep the peasants from revolting. Instead of angry peasants showing up at the castle with a list of demands, the peasants select the options presented by the ruling class on election day. The rulers then know where to fix their attention and the peasants feel like their concerns are being addressed.

Of course, elections and the industry around them help solve the other problem within the elite, which is the palace coup. Elections are a sort of scoreboard used by elites to settle differences between the sides. It also helps them gauge how the peasants are responding to elite initiatives. This prevents elites from imposing polices that are good for the elite, but hated by the peasants. It reinforces the survival logic that must guide the internal behavior of all ruling elites.

If we look back at the two great revolutions in Western history, we can see how this natural order was at the center of the revolt. In pre-revolutionary France, the peasants were facing increasing pressure economically. The nobility was increasingly at odds with the king. The church was coming under pressure by the changing cultural landscape brought on by new ideas. All three legs of the system were faltering while trust in the king was declining.

Tsarist Russia faced a similar crisis. On the one hand, the peasants were under pressure from the changing economic conditions of the empire. On the other hand, the urban working class was demanding reform. The conservative culture was failing the peasants, but it was in opposition to the workers. The fracturing culture threatened the position of the nobility. Instead of being that which held the system together, the Tsar was increasingly viewed as the problem.

When you look at the current crisis, you first see that the feedback loop that allows the elite to take the temperature of the peasants is broken. The elite stopped trusting the election system after 2016. The elite response to this collapse in trust resulted in the peasants losing trust in the system in 2020. In other words, the trust system is collapsing on both sides of the relationship. This is what makes the debate over economics, security, and culture so bizarre.

The disconnect can be seen in the issues. The people are worried about the collapse of the American system, but the elites are pushing radical cultural fads like pedophilia and ritual child mutilation. The people are increasingly concerned for their safety, but elites are unleashing black criminals and promising global war. Inflation remains the top concern for Americans, but both parties ignore it. The political system and the voters are two ships passing in the night.

When you look at the other half of the elite concerns, the palace coup, it is clear that the elites are highly paranoid about one another. The behavior of the secret police toward the political class reflects that loss of trust in the political system. The increasing narrowness of debate within the media reflects the general fear of being seen as disloyal to the system. The people at the top are not just paranoid about the peasants but they also fear their own people.

Following the loss of the Russo-Japanese war, a delegation of liberal reformers led by an aristocrat named Sergei Trubetskoi went to the Tsar and told him that the people still trusted him, but they could no longer tolerate the chaos. In other words, it was not the policies of the Tsar that were causing civil unrest. It was the failure of those polices to restore order. Therefore, reform was needed to restore trust. The Tsar seemed to agree and then set about doing the opposite.

What followed was increased activity by the secret police and the unleashing of gangs loyal to the regime. Like Antifa, the SPLC, the ADL and the other regime aligned toadies and thugs, the Black Hundred set upon anyone suspected of questioning the Tsar or the tsarist system. Disorder was met by elite policies that created more disorder. Tsarist Russia was plunged into a spiral of declining trust by the one thing that held the system together, the Tsar himself.

The relevance to this age should be obvious. The current unrest is not due to incompetence or perfidy among the political class. That is an issue, but that has always been a feature of the liberal system. The cause of the current unrest is a collapse of trust in the system itself. In order to preserve their status, the elite is acting outside the agreed upon rules. This further erodes the peasant’s trust in the system, which feeds the elite distrust of the peasantry.

America is rapidly approaching that point where the calls for reform contradict the demands for order. The elite can initiate reform, but this puts their position at risk, so they view calls for reform as a physical threat. Therefore they choose to impose order, which is viewed by the peasants as a threat to their safety. Those two irreconcilable forces, reform and order, end up on the same track heading for a crash. This is never settle by the ballot box, but by the cartridge box.

Juneteenth Musings

Posted on June 19, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about drone technology, a post about the classic antiwar film All Quiet on the Western Front and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Integral to the managerial polyarchy is the narrative. This is the semi-official story for how the managerial elite believes events ought to unfold. The narrative promotes some cause or issue popular with the elite or it can simply work to promote solidarity in the managerial class by underscoring the difference between the members of the managerial class and the masses. The narrative not only frames reality, but often it is expected to shape reality by altering behavior.

The Ukraine war has provided good examples. When the war started, regime media figures were decorated with Ukraine flag lapel pins and instructed to say “keev” rather than Kiev, which everyone used up to that point. The official narrative was that Ukraine was the good guys and Russia the bad guys. For no reason at all, the evil Vladimir Putin decided to launch an attack on Ukraine. Soon, the volunteer army of regime toadies online was chanting the official lines.

The concept of “no reason at all” is a standard feature of regime narratives that are primarily about establishing a moral dichotomy. The bad guys are always described as acting irrationally and without a describable reason. The good guys being good are always acting from the best and most easily understood motives. Vladimir Putin is “crazy Ivan” capable of anything, while Zelensky is the heroic defender of democracy who only wants to defend his country.

It is an interesting inversion of cult behavior. To members of a cult, the rules of the cult are perfectly rational. The appeal of the cult is it provides clarity to the members who struggle with a disorganized mind. The member find herself surrounded by people who see things through the same lens. On the other hand, to those outside the cult, what happens inside the cult is strange and counter to objective reality. It is why cults have a negative connotation. They appear irrational.

The managerial class looks at the masses as a cult. The people who vote for the wrong candidate in elections are not acting from rational self-interest. They are not even acting from subjective preference. They are irrationally lashing out out of fear and anger for no reason at all! The role of the managerial class in the great narrative of life is to impose their rules on these people. Those wreckers and deviationists are cast into a role that supports the narrative.

We see this with the holiday of Juneteenth. If you lived in some parts of the South, you may have known about this event prior to now. Most black people did not celebrate the holiday, contrary to the current narrative. In fact, most black people heard about it when most white people heard about it a few years ago. As part of the ongoing pogroms against white people, the managerial elite decided to take this obscure regional event and turn it into a national holiday.

Of course, this holiday is part of a narrative that has been central to the managerial class since the middle of the last century. The great struggle is one of the main plot lines in the story that justifies the existence of the managerial elite. The struggle is against those backward, recalcitrant bad white people who tirelessly work to turn back the clock and overturn progress. As Joe Biden likes to say, those bad whites want to put black people back in chains.

Essential to the success of any narrative, according to managerial culture, is control of the means of cultural production. They have a materialist’s view of culture as a product that comes from the television or the internet, rather than the result of human interactions over a long span of time. They think they can use the media to flood the public space with their narratives. That will change the behavior of the masses as people will assume the narratives are true.

This has the side effect of reinforcing to the managerial class that their current narratives are not only factually correct, more morally correct. Afterall, everything they read in the media tells them that they are on the side of angels. Right now, they are sure that black people around the country are gathering to celebrate their Independence Day with public readings of the Emancipation Proclamation. Maybe they cap off the day by singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing”.

Reality is probably closer to this, but that does not make this weekend any different from most weekends in the summer. In heavily black cities crime remains an immutable fact of life, no matter how many black holidays are created. Maybe if the energy put into these antiwhite pogroms was directed toward cleaning up the inner-city ghettos, more black people would live to see the absurdity of Juneteenth, but no one in charge cares about black people, so the point is moot.

It does, however, point to the limits of narrative control. They can bang on about Juneteenth as much as they like but it will remain an artificial holiday that most people ignore unless they work at a bank or the Post Office. Then they get a three-day weekend to enjoy while their neighbors are at work. Martin Luther King Day has fallen into the same pattern. No amount of narrative framing will change the fact that for most people it is a meaningless day on the calendar.

There is a parallel here to Kwanzaa. This was invented as black Christmas in the 1960’s and promoted by the beautiful people as an authentic black event. It was mostly a joke, even among black people. The lesson of that experience was to make Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday. That did not quite work, but you cannot roll back a federal holiday, so it was good enough. That is why they skipped the marketing campaign and went straight to the federal holiday for Juneteenth.

The limits of the narrative tool may explain the panic and paranoia that have become a defining feature of the managerial class. Enormous effort was put into making Martin Luther King Day into black Christmas and it largely fizzled. This effort to make Juneteenth into black Independence Day is following the same arc. If you cannot convince people to celebrate a free day off according to the narrative, then it does not bode well for other projects.

Death Of The Hired Man Society

Posted on June 14, 2023 by thezman

One of the criticisms of the public company model is that the managers tend to think in the short term rather than long term. This was a popular critique of American business in the 1980’s when Japan was on the rise. The Japanese magically thought long term, which allowed them to benefit from long term investments in industry. Sinophiles made similar arguments about China as she rose economically. The Chinese think long term, it was said, while America thinks short term.

Up until Trump came to town and started making bad noises about China, those same Sinophiles made this point about democracy. The democratic West, they said, was hobbled by the short-term thinking that arises from regular elections, while China avoids this problem through one party rule. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times was fond of making this point. China’s system was winning because the Chinese were not thinking from one election to the next.

Of course, the real reason Japan and China rose from the ashes to challenge American industry is that connected people in the United States saw a profit in helping these countries at the expense of America. They flung open the gates, so to speak, on deindustrialization of America, which led to the shifting of manufacturing to low-cost places like Japan and then Korea and China. It turns out that both China and Japan were the beneficiaries of short-term thinking.

Putting that aside, this difference between short and long-term thinking with regards to how an organization functions does matter. A business with lots of fixed assets, for example, will have to think long term, while a business with no fixed assets can operate in the moment. The reason for this is the former has assets that are not easily transported or converted into cash. The latter is not tied down this way, so it does not have to worry about long term asset protection.

You also see this in how the people in a business think. The person who has been with a company for a long time will often take the long view. This is exclusive to privately held companies, where the owner is directly involved. Those long-term employees take on the owner’s time horizon. The people who move from job to job are opportunists, making what they can from their current situation and then moving onto the next opportunity in which they make little investment.

This is why small business tends to be better at customer service than the big chain stores that now dominate life. That small business owner thinks in the longest of long term, his own life and that of his children. The business owner sees his business as an extension of himself. The hired man, in contrast, looks at the business as just a place he toils for money. Who he is exists outside of what he does. The customers are no more meaningful to him than the coffee pot.

This mindset is what harmed Trump in office. He spent his life leaping from one real estate or media opportunity to the next, never stopping in one place very long before he leaped to the next opportunity. His opportunistic thinking makes him a special campaigner, but it made him a terrible president. To be successful, a president must think about his legacy, which is the longest of long-term thinking. That means forcing through big changes with your name on them.

Ironically, Trump reflects what is wrong in Washington. His opportunism is different from the people in permanent Washington only in its presentation. The people who run the government are all hired men with the time horizon of hired men. None of them have ever built anything or even left footprints on the beach. The point of their existence is to never be tied to anything, so they can flit from one opportunity in the system to the next opportunity, building the resume for the next job.

One of the weird things about life in Washington is that it is an insult to ask one of these people what they do for a living. Lewd acts are met with less offense than asking one of these people what they do for work. The reason for that is they do no work in the way in which people in the dreaded private sector think of it. The resume of the Washington man is a list of places and people with whom he has a connection. Where you are and who you are with is what matters in Washington.

Of course, the politicians for whom this army of hired men in Washington allegedly work are hired men as well. In theory, at least, the elected official is a servant of the people, temporarily holding an office. The whole business about the people paying the salaries of the elected officials is supposed to remind the office holder that he is just a hired man, easily replaced at the next election. The fact that 97% of incumbents win reelection does not change the fundamental mindset.

Therein lies the problem with the American managerial state. The politicians and the army of policy makers all have the mindset of the hired man, but they also live consequence free lives. Victoria Nuland, the architect of the disastrous Ukraine strategy, will never pay for being terrible at her job. Anthony Blinken will bounce from this job to a turn at the Kennedy school then maybe a comfortable ambassadorship somewhere in the Gavin Newsome administration.

Imagine a business owner hiring a general manager that he can never fire. Once the general manager figures out that he can never be fired, he is no longer going to think much about the business, beyond how it benefits him. His hired man mentality will be turbocharged by his immunity to consequences. This is what has happened in Washington over the last few decades. Personal success is now fully detached from the outcome of public policy.

This is why Washington is so hostile to white people. They see white people as the owners, and they are the general manager who cannot be fired. They gnaw away at the assets of the owner but resent that the owner exists. That is why they are so comfortable using terms like “whiteness” and “white power structure.” Everyone they know is in the same position and harbors the same resentments, therefore this language of resentment comes naturally to them.

What this points to is the truth of managerialism. Managers are essential in every enterprise, but they can only exist at the pleasure of the owner. The CEO must respect the shareholders. The hired man must respect the owner. To do otherwise turns the relationship on its head, putting the dispensable above the permanent. That is the root of the current crisis. America is ruled by easily replaceable men, while the owners are treated like day workers.

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