The Reality Of Model Dependent Reality

Posted on June 12, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about what is happening with the war in the Ukraine, a post about the The Sound of Music 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.

One line of attack against various forms of socialism has been that these organizational models run contrary to human nature. Humans naturally want to keep the produce of their labor, so any system that requires them to give over their labor to the whole is going to require a great deal of force to implement. Similarly, humans are not equal in ability, so there will always be unequal outcomes. A system that supposes no one is in charge and everyone is equal is unnatural.

Libertarianism has a similar problem. Like communism, it assumes things about humans that are not true. This is why there are no libertarian societies. As Hans Hermann-Hoppe observed, there is no way to go from the present to a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. More important, there is no way to maintain a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. Like communism, libertarians imagine a world that is odds with the human condition.

In both cases, what we see is a clash between the model-dependent reality of the ideology and reality itself. It is not hard to imagine a society that operates by the sorts of rules the ideologue prefers. The trouble comes when you try to implement the scheme on flesh and blood human beings. As with every model, there are going to be things the model must ignore in order to make sense. In real life, the things that exist outside the model tend to land in a death camp.

It is becoming clear that liberalism, as in Western liberalism or liberal democracy, has the same problem as communism and libertarianism. That is the model makes perfect sense and answers the main problems of human organization. In reality it falls prey to what the other great ideologies have found impossible to address. That is, it requires things from human beings that do not come naturally to man. Like those other models, the only available solution is coercion.

The madness that is gripping the West can be viewed from two angles. One is that the system has been taken over by spiteful mutants who exist to trample the underlying assumptions of the liberal order. These are the people who intrude in on your private space and tell you how to live and think. They also seek control of the common space in order to impose increasingly deranged rules on society. These people are overrunning the liberal democracies of the West.

What this tells us is that the model does not contain within it the tools to defend itself against these people. While the current madness is novel in many respects, it is part of a wave that began long ago. You can draw a line from the abolitionist fanatics to the pride parades of this age. All along the way, liberalism has had no way to defend itself against these people. For that matter, it had no way of dealing with communists and fascists, other than extreme illiberal violence.

The other way of looking at this problem is that something within the liberal order cultivates the spiteful mutant. Perhaps as Ed Dutton has proposed, scarcity requires a firm hand on the spiteful mutant. They must either be controlled or culled from the population, which keeps their numbers and influence at a minimum. Liberalism results in material excess, which in turn eliminates the apparent need to control the spiteful mutants and so they multiply like rabbits.

A simpler answer is that the liberal model is lacking something that is critical to understanding the human condition and human organization. Like communism, not accounting for an essential bit of reality leaves a choice. You either change the model or you change reality. As anyone who has worked with model makers will tell you, the model maker is like God in that he loves his creation and will do anything to preserver it, no matter how terrible it seems.

In this long post in defense of liberalism and conventional conservatism, Harvey Mansfield provides a clue to the problem. He writes that the goal of liberalism is a society where no one is in charge in the sense that anyone is compelling anyone else to sacrifice for the common good. The liberal model of reality “yields a fundamental right to consent that protects all other rights from infringement by rulers.” In other words, human society is purely voluntary.

Therein lies the two critical flaws in the liberal model. The first and most obvious is that it assumes a human society of equals. No one is in charge because no one can compel another to act either against his own interests or in the common good. This not only flies in the face of observable reality, but it contradicts the point of society. Human beings organize into groups for more than material benefit. The group provides structure to the individual identity, which provides a rationality to existence.

Human organizations possess properties not present in the members. The most obvious is culture. Just as individual atoms do not possess temperature, individual humans do not possess culture. Temperature is the product of atoms interacting with one another. Similarly, culture is the product of humans interacting with one another, not just in real time, but over generations. In other words, essential to what makes us who we are and our lives worth living is our people.

As Mansfield explains in his post, liberalism does not account for this bit of reality and instead substitutes what amounts to magic. The private and public choices of the members will magically address the common good. The decisions of members in their private deliberations and ad hoc public choices will somehow result in conditions that preserve the society. As with other models of human reality, liberalism inevitably falls back on magic to solve its problems.

The other critical flaw is the assumption that a society in which no one is compelled to act in the public good is possible or even desirable. The reason communist systems failed is they finally accepted a truth of the human condition. That is, human societies are always hierarchical. Whether it is the party, the ruling class or the aristocracy, a group of people will rule over the rest. What reality tells us is that coercion is just as much a part of the human condition as left-handedness.

This is why Western liberalism looks a lot like communism in practice. On the one hand, the model requires everyone to pretend that no one is in charge, and everyone is voluntarily submitting to the rules. On the other hand, a model-dependent elite is making the rules and ruthlessly imposing them on the whole. As with communism, the “good of society” is easily confused with the good of the ruling elite. Instead of abandoning the model, the ruling class works around the flaws.

The liberal model of society is failing because like all models it leaves out the bits of reality that make the model messy or impossible. On the one hand, it has no defense against the illiberal tyrants that are multiplying like rabbits. On the other hand, it lacks a method to compel members of society to act in the common good or to even conceive of a common good. As a result, the liberal model is leading to the destruction of the people who conceived it.

Finally, the growing similarities between the liberal model and the communist model are rooted in two common assumptions. The first assumption is that the point of human organization is the liberation of the individual. This means freedom from political coercion, as in an aristocracy, freedom from economic coercion, as Marx explained and now freedom from cultural coercion, as we see with our woke rulers. None of this is ever explained or justified. It is simply assumed to be true.

The other assumption is that these models must never be opposed. It is why the great champions of communism and liberalism sound more like religious fanatics than reasonable advocates. Once one accepts the moral claims about human freedom, one is compelled to attack anyone who questions these moral claims, as to do otherwise suggests doubt. If you accept that maybe liberation is not the point of society, these models fall apart and take their champions with them.

In the end, the answer to the flaws of model-dependent reality is reality. Once one accepts the reality of human organization, the political models fade away and what you are left with is an understanding that human society is only possible when the members feel a duty to maintain it and defend it. Anything or anyone which undermines this primary mission must be removed from society. In other words, the point of human society is to preserve itself and thereby preserve the members.

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The Death Of The West

Posted on June 5, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about a disgusting and vulgar film with no redeeming qualities, a post explaining all of the letters and symbols in the slogan of the new religion and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Since the French Revolution, the West has been cursed by a political framing that operates along an axis. At one end we have the Left, the people demanding radical change to liberate humanity in some way. At the other end is the Right, the people not just opposed to change, but the defenders of the natural order. Both ends see the other as the bad guy in the relationship. For over two centuries, all political movements have been forced to pick a spot on the axis.

This often leads to some ridiculous alliances. Libertarians are supposed to be the polar opposite of communists. Hitler is the polar opposite of Stalin, which then puts Hitler in the libertarian camp. This causes those sympathetic to libertarianism to claim that Hitler was actually a leftist. After all, he was a socialist! While this is idiotic, it does underscore the problem with the Right-Left political axis. It fails as a way to describe politics over a long period of time.

It also precludes right-wing radicalism. By making change a left-wing phenomenon, it means the right-wing must always be for stasis. This is popular with the Left, as it lets them pretend to be the good guys, but it also turns the other side into mindless reactionaries with no reason to oppose change. It is also wrong in that the Right, in all of its forms, does not oppose change. What the Right opposes is experimentation that treats institutions as arbitrary objects.

There is a bigger problem with the Left-Right political axis. It eliminates the possibility for right-wing radicalism. If the only people who can contemplate a radical reordering are those who embrace change, then the logic of the political scale says that it is impossible for right-wing people to imagine radical change. Yet we know that people on the Right, however defined at the time, often want radical change. It may simply be a rollback of prior change, but it is still change.

For example, most people defined as right-wing in the current year would like to see the sexual revolution rolled back at least forty years. A growing cohort thinks it is necessary to roll things back to the 1950’s. A small, but growing portion of the right wonder if we should roll it all back to the very beginning. If a right-wing Joe Biden comes to power and rolls back the sexual revolution, even if it is just to the 1980’s, most people would see that as a radical change in the culture.

In fairness, you could call these people reactionaries. Granted, their reactions are incredibly slow, taking at least a generation to form, but strictly speaking they want to return to some point in the past, not break with it. Left-wing radicals imagine themselves making a clean break with the past and creating something new. The fact that it is not new in the least is another matter. One side wants to break from the past while the other side wants to return to what it imagines is the past.

That seems to solve the problem, but what about the people who think we must make a break with liberalism in order to save Western people? These are not people seeking a return to some point in the past. Some joke about the return of monarchy and feudalism, but they are not serious about it. Instead, they see the future as a clean break with liberal political traditions. The people now calling themselves post-liberal think we must produce something new to replace liberalism.

Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard scholar, and champion of common good conservatism is not entirely clear about the details of his post-liberal order, but he is quite clear in his rejection of liberalism. Patrick Deneen, who is a Notre Dame political science professor, has a new book in which he argues for overthrowing the liberal order and replacing it with a dictatorship of working-class, by which he means the people who actually work and sustain the culture.

Read what these post-liberals have to say about what we would consider to be the status quo and they certainly sound like radicals. Unlike the standard model of radicalism, they are not challenging the human condition. There is no post-liberal man in their conception of the future, other than to argue that mankind will be free of the utopian claims that lie within the liberal order. Mankind will be liberated from the relentless coercion of its liberators.

Dissidents, of course, seek something similar. The main difference is that the Dissident Right is willing to address the demographic issue. To be on the Dissident Right is to wrestle with the question of what kind of society is possible with the demographics we will have in the not-too-distant future? More important, are the possible options tolerable and if not, what must come next? Like the post-liberals, the Dissident Right is ready to leave the old liberal order in the past.

For all the usual reasons, the dissidents and post-liberals get called fascist by the people who claim to be on the Left. It is proof that the universe has a sense of humor that the most dogmatic defenders of the status quo and the holders of power are the people who claim to be on the side of revolutionary change. In the modern age, the antifascists are sponsored by major corporations, who are in a close partnership with government and the centers of cultural production.

Putting that aside, if we broaden the definition of the term “liberalism” to include all Western thought since the late Middle Ages, then we are left with a universe that includes Marxism, libertarianism, liberal democracy, anarchism, fascism and all the combinations of these ideologies. To one degree or another, all of them imagine a world where mankind is freed from the human condition. What we now call liberalism is the final form of this long ideological struggle.

This gets to a truth about the modern world and its opponents. That political axis that has been with us since the French Revolution is increasingly incoherent because it assumes something that is not true. It assumes that ideology is a constant of the universe and therefore politics is a war between competing ideologies. In reality, ideology is a novelty. For most of human history, the moral questions were decided by religion, not by men with utopian schemes.

What the incoherence of that old political axis may be telling us is that we are reaching the end of the ideological age. What the post-liberals are doing, even if most do not realize it, is challenging the moral claims of liberalism. It is not an accident that the champions of post-liberalism are overtly religion. Both Deneen and Vermeule are traditional Catholics. Their post-liberal order assumes the moral questions have been answered by a revived traditional church.

The signs of the post-ideological age are most evident on the global stage. The last ideological state is at war with Russia because Russia rejects liberalism. The Russians are happy to borrow from the West but wish to remain Russian. The West is preparing to attack China for similar reasons. China’s capitalism with “Chinese characteristics” is unacceptable to the West. Soon, the rest of the world will join the enemies list for the crime of rejecting the liberal moral order.

For over two centuries, the West has been defined by that political axis that was born out of the French Revolution. What most people think of as the West is that long ideological struggle that has given us what we call liberal democracy. With the end of the Cold War, the struggle was over and liberal democracy won. In reality, the Cold War was the penultimate struggle of a dying age. What was born with that political axis will die with the final rejection of it.

Artificial Familiarity

Posted on May 29, 2023 by thezman

The internet has made it possible for people around the globe to easily pass information back and forth among one another. This is taken for granted these days, but it is truly a revolutionary event. Since the dawn of civilization information spread no faster than a man could run. In the 19th century the train made this process a tiny bit faster then cars and planes made it even faster in the 20th century, but the internet puts all of us, if we choose, together in real time.

While this feels like a miraculous development for the curious and productive, it may also be a curse we are struggling to understand. The internet puts the smart, curious, and productive people together, but it also puts crazy people together. That nutty woman in the suburbs who thinks she is a psychic can now join up with other women who also think they are psychics. They can form a “community” online where they encourage and reinforce their delusions.

The apparent rise in the number of pedophiles is made possible by the ease with which these people can now associate. In the analog days, these people could not easily collaborate with one another. Those cursed this maladaptation could not easily access this material and there was high risk in trying to obtain it. The internet made it easy for these people to work together to produce and disseminate this stuff. The curious now find this material after a few clicks of a mouse.

Recency bias is the tendency to overemphasize the importance of recent experiences or the latest information when trying to understand current events. The news seems to be full of pedophiles lately, so we think it is a growing problem. The Left coming out in favor of pedophilia now certainly adds to the sense that it is a growing issue, so we have to adjust for that possibility. On the other hand, the number of cases is growing at the same time the Left is celebrating it.

In other words, when it comes to child abuse, the internet is making it easier for the pedophiles to meet one another, thus increasing the phenomenon, but the internet is also making us more aware of it. This increased awareness is made possible by people aware of this trend easily communicating the particulars. The same forces that allow the pedophiles to collaborate in their activity allows normal people to become aware of it and organized to oppose it.

Counterintuitively, the internet is tribalizing society. In the analog days, the pedophiles were a small and manageable problem. These were individuals forced to work in isolation and therefore caused the minimum of harm. Normal people could trust that the odds and the police would protect them, so they saw no need to know much about this issue or work with others to guard against it. The internet brought these people together and they formed two warring camps.

Obviously, the pedophile issue is an extreme example, but relevant due to corporate America embracing the child molesters over their customers. The same tribalizing forces unleashed by the internet are most likely at play here. The beautiful people who make corporate policy now see the Dirt People everywhere. Whenever they go online, they are confronted by Trump voters, heterosexuals, white people and all the other demons their “community” says are evil.

A part of what makes internet tribalization work is that it allows people with a minority view to interact with others holding the same view. This reinforces the belief, but also gives them the sense they are a growing community and therefore their minority view will soon be the majority view. When disconfirmation appears, these people can trust that their online pals will find a way to cope with it and thus provide them a way to not only explain it but reinforce group solidarity.

A good example of this is the recent events in the Ukraine. As events have gone against Ukraine in the war, online communities create pleasing alternative realties where their side is on the march. This guy spends all day everyday explaining to the likeminded why bad news is actually good news. This guy spends his days creating an alternative reality for the likeminded. These online communities operate like the UFO cult at the center of this famous study in the 1950’s

T. S. Eliot famously wrote “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” To some degree all of us are susceptible to escapism. We want some result, and we look for information that suggests it is happening. Some people, of course, go the other way and fear some result and look for information showing their worst fears are happening. It is two sides of the same coin and all of us are prone to it. Some people are more prone than others as belief operates on a scale like all human traits.

In the analog age, the limits placed on the flow of information left the believer in isolation unless he could physically connect with others. Joining a cult took effort, which is why so few people joined them. In the digital age, the internet is full of cults catering to every conceivable belief. Not only can you connect with thousands who hold your same hopes and fears, you can get instant confirmation that you are the good guy, and the rest of the world is the bad guy.

Of course, the internet is making us more aware of this reality. In the analog days we would have no idea that the Jewish guy across the street had a seething hatred for white people, but in this age we just look at his Twitter profile. Not knowing he hates you made it possible to not hate him. Knowing that he wants you dead makes it impossible to not hate him back. The more we know the more aware we are of the dangers that are lurking around every corner.

Since the dawn of the computer age, people have worried that the machines would become aware and then set about killing off humanity. The truth is, that process has already begun, except the machines are not doing the killing. Instead, they are holding up a mirror to society and letting us see ourselves. We do not like what we see, so we will find others who agree with us that we must kill off those other guys. It is not Artificial Intelligence that will get us, but Artificial Familiarity.

Liberal Theocracy

Posted on May 23, 2023 by thezman

Since the late Middle Ages, political thought in the West has started with the assertion that the point of social organization was to reduce coercion. The ideal society is one in which everyone naturally played their role without being forced into it. The assumption is that forcing people into roles for which they are not suited, or they do not wish to perform is both unjust and dangerous. It is also more costly to compel people to obey the law than if they voluntarily abide by the law.

If the goal of your political model is to reduce coercion to the absolute minimum, then you ideally want a society that agrees on everything. After all, if everyone agrees that society must have gong farmers and some people are better suited for the task than others, then everyone is going to agree on having gong farmers. Even the guy chosen for the task will agree if it is explained to him. He may not like the task, but he will understand he is playing a vital role in his society.

Straight away you can see the problem for individualism and the natural rights crowd when it comes to organizing society. If we start from the assumption that we are all unique individuals in control of our own destiny, then we are free to not go along with being the town’s gong farmer. Even if all the facts point to that role being best for the person and his community, he is free to reject it because he is an autonomous person free to live his life as he sees fit.

If we assume we have magical rights bestowed upon us by the gods, then it is fundamentally immoral for society to coerce us into anything, much less a profession we do not like. Since coercion is not limited to physical force, the gong farmer who sees himself as a sovereign man with natural rights is going to look at the social arrangements that result in him being the gong farmer as coercion. In other words, he has a right to not be the gong farmer.

You can see the obvious problem with trying to organize a society composed of individuals who think they have God-given rights. Your proposed social order must first convince all of them to accept the results of the system, even if the results favor some members over others. That is a tall order, given that everyone believes that they have the same rights as everyone else. After all, if God gave them the same rights, why would he then not give them the same talents?

Since it is not possible to get even a small community to agree on everything about the particulars of organizing the community, especially when everyone believes they are God’s special little snowflake, you are going to need something that leads these individual snowflakes to voluntarily submit to the social order. They will have to believe that their individual rights rest on their sacrifice of those rights in order to maintain the society which makes their rights possible.

That last bit is what has vexed the natural right crowd for generations. They desperately want to believe that natural rights exist independent of society and the men who create and maintain it, but logically this is not true. The concept of rights, natural, individual, human or any other version, is an invention of man. Rights are a claim on society, a demand that the rest of society protect certain entitlements bestowed upon members in exchange for their membership in the society.

We see this at work all over today. The man who subdued the subway lunatic operated on the assumption that he had a duty to defend the rights of his fellow subway riders from that crazed lunatic. The people who will put him in jail operate under the assumption that they have duty to defend their race against any and all actions by people of the white race. Since the latter group has control of society, the former’s individual rights will mean little in the courtroom.

Putting the particulars of that aside, we see a problem of trying to organize a society based on individualism and natural rights. The first thing that must happen is that such a society exclude anyone who does not accept these principles. Even a small number of people who reject these concepts will create two problems for your society organized around individualism and natural rights. One is they will violate the rights of others and second, they will force society to violate their rights.

Now, science tells us that the closer humans are genetically, the more likely they are to agree on the basics of human behavior. Put a group of random Finns together and they will quickly display the group characteristics of Finns. Put a group of Bantus together in the exact same circumstances and they will quickly display the group characteristics that we associate with Bantus. If you want a society with the least amount of coercion, then you want the least amount of biodiversity.

What follows for the individualism and natural rights people is they must insist on a society composed of people who naturally cherish individualism and natural rights if they have any hope of maintaining these things. Further, they must also conjure an exception to their moral code that allows them to act collectively in order to repel attempts to undermine their individualism and natural rights regime. They end up in the same dilemma as the libertarians.

Hans Hermann-Hoppe observed that within libertarian ideology there is no way to maintain a libertarian society. After all, if John Galt suddenly decides to be a Marxist, what business is it of his neighbors? If others join Galt in his new civic religion, what can the libertarians do about it? The non-aggression principle forbids them from compelling Galt and his followers to remain libertarians. The individualism and natural rights crowd run into the same problem with the defenders of the subway lunatic.

The solution for the individualism and natural rights people is a moral code that transcends individual rights, but also supports individual rights. If you believe that your people have been given rights by your God and those rights are what distinguish you from other human groups, then collectively defending those rights is not only permitted, but also necessary. You have a God-given duty to defend your society which is organized around individualism and natural rights.

What you need to maintain a society based on individualism and natural rights is a folk religion that sacralizes those rights and the people who possess them. The same God that grants your people natural rights commands you to defend the people granted those rights, as well as their society that maintains those rights. Under such a condition, the individualism and natural rights people would be justified in rioting in New York and chasing off the prosecutors in defense of their God and his people.

The missing component for the individualism and natural rights crowd is a moral component that compels the believer to defend these principles. Nature cannot be the moral authority for anything, as natural operates outside the domain of the prescriptive, but God or gods can certainly be that moral authority. God tells us what we ought to do, so if our God tells us we ought to respect individualism and natural rights, then we have a duty to do so by any means necessary.

What all this means is that if you want to live in a society in which individualism and natural rights are respected by everyone, then you need to come up with a folk religion that sacralizes those things. What you want is to live in a liberal theocracy in which dissent from individualism and natural rights is not tolerated. What liberalism needs is not a Karl Marx, but a Moses, someone who lead his people to their promised land where they can create their liberal theocracy as God intended.

The Tyranny Of The Stupid

Posted on May 22, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the paradox of tolerance, a post about the growing Ukraine quagmire and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

In The Past is a Future Country, Ed Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles, argue that the West is about to be swamped by an unsustainable wave of stupid people. This is not the result of immigration, but rather the culmination of an evolutionary process that began in the Industrial Revolution. Darwinian selection weakened along with the increase in living standards. The result is a steady increase in narcissistic stupid people who undermine the fundamentals of Western society.

In this post, Ed Dutton makes the point that liberal female politicians are getting dumber, as a result of this process he outlined in his book. He relies on two examples, Sanna Marin of Finland and Angela Rayner of Britain, to make his point. Both women are on what we insist on calling the Left and both women are morons. Not only are they stupid, but they appear to have come from stupid parents. They are Nth generation morons who have risen to the top of politics.

It is an amusing and satisfying read for people who think of themselves on the Right, even if he is making sweeping claims from just two examples. For as long as anyone can recall, the people we call the Left have claimed that their opponents are unsophisticated morons who should be dismissed. Having this turned on its head with the use of the human sciences is good fun, but it may be missing the real cause for the great dumbing down of Western politics.

The ideal politician in a liberal democracy has an extremely high verbal dexterity along with an extremely low degree of self-awareness. In fact, the best politicians of this age are glib narcissists who have never done anything useful. Much of the panic over Donald Trump is due to the fact he worked in the dreaded private sector. Having had anything other than a ceremonial position in the real economy is so strange in politics that the political class naturally views it as a defect.

The reason for this is despite the fact we insist on calling it politics, there is little in the way of politics happening in a modern liberal democracy. Everyone in the political system agrees on the moral claims. As Marx noted, when you get the morality settled, there is no need for politics. Put another way, once everyone agrees on the goal, then you are left with a debate about how best to achieve it. The barrier to entry in modern politics is the moral questions.

As a result, the selection pressure in politics is for people who will never color outside the lines and always promote the latest thing. The more natural someone is at conforming to the prevailing orthodoxy, the less likely they are to question what is demanded of them. Of course, if they are especially good at appearing enthusiastic about the latest thing, then all the better. The people in charge are always on the hunt for the glib toady who can really sell the latest thing.

As we see with actors, a lack of self-awareness is key. Someone who is painfully aware of how they look to others, or worries about how they look to others, is not going to be a particularly good performer. Humiliating yourself for laughs or applause works best when you cannot imagine the concept of humiliation. It is why the narcissistic moron is a well-known type in the entertainment world. An idiot who thinks highly of himself, but never questions the script is an ideal actor.

Just as an actor who easily “believes in the project” is always in demand, the politician who is always ready to run with the latest thing is always rewarded. His donors will make sure he is kept in the lifestyle he thinks he deserves. His party will always rely on him to take point on the latest thing. Joe Biden made a long career in politics being a narcissistic simpleton, despite stealing everything in sight. Joe Biden is the perfection of modern democratic politics.

It is not just electoral politics where we see this process, but the politics of the managerial elite as well. David French is a goofy looking buffoon but he has risen to the top of the political media because he has no shame. He will say whatever he needs to say in order to shine amongst the other simpletons. French is the combination of oleaginous rumpswab and narcissistic simpleton that has come to define the chattering classes in the United States.

All of this is the result of democracy. Not the mechanics of voting, but the belief that the general will is the moral authority. Once a society accepts this claim, turns the mob into a god, then moral conformity must follow. After all, if there is no agreement, the general will is unknown, then the people are left with no moral authority. Therefore, the solution is to impose a moral consensus and religiously oppress dissent. The only way democracy can work is if everyone agrees.

This is why Western societies are now policed by a volunteer army of simpletons, prodded along by the autocrats. Democracy collapses if there is not a perceived agreement on the moral questions. Even though the people who rise to the top are stupid, they understand the need for consensus. This is why they so enthusiastically impose the latest thing on the public. Who they are depends upon the belief that everyone supports the latest thing.

None of this is to say that Dutton is wrong about Darwinian selection pressure declining with material prosperity. That is certainly true. Smart people made society safer for stupid people, which allowed the stupid to multiply like tribbles. The reason the stupid are dominating politics, however, is that democracy selects for stupidity because stupid people are much more likely to support the moral consensus. Poverty would not arrest our descent into democratic imbecility.

The Modern Mirsky

Posted on May 16, 2023 by thezman

In 1904, Prince Pyotr Mirsky was appointed Minister of the Interior by Tsar Nicholas II, after the previous Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav von Plehve, had been assassinated by Jewish revolutionaries. This was a volatile time in Tsarist Russia, as trust in the system was at a low. Liberal reformers wanted what they thought the West had in terms of political freedom. Revolutionaries were conducting terror campaigns in order to undermine the tsarist system.

For his part, Mirsky was both a reformer and loyal to the Tsarist system. In his role as Governor-General of Vilna, which is modern day Lithuania and Belarus, Mirsky implemented liberal reforms like granting political rights, ending the pogroms against the Jews, and allowing a degree of autonomy to ethnic minorities. In his role as Minister of the Interior, he granted freedom of the press, freedom of religion and increased the power and authority of local self-government.

Mirsky was not a reformer because he had dreams of creating a liberal paradise to replace tsarist Russia. He was a reformer because he worried that the lack of reform would result in more radicalism, like the sort that had claimed the life of his predecessor and the life of the Tsar’s grandfather. For Mirsky and his supporters within the system, liberal reform was a way to address some of the issues of the people, while also maintaining the legitimacy of the tsarist system.

Uncertain times always product men like Mirsky. He was not the only reformer around Tsar Nicholas before the revolution. There were others but all of them failed to arrest the process that eventually led to revolution. Reformers were around the King Louis XVI and among the aristocracy prior to the French Revolution. They failed for the same reason Mirsky failed. There were men who feared reform would go too far and there were those who feared reform would not go far enough.

This is what should come to mind while watching Elon Musk try to navigate his way through the current crisis. Musk is a reformer at heart. He bought Twitter because he thought it was drifting away from its essential purpose which is to allow for free and open debate about the issues of the day. His inhospitable takeover of the company was driven by a genuine concern for what is happening in the West. Like all reformers, Musk fears what could happen if current trends continue.

It may seem a bit odd to compare Musk to Mirsky or any of the other reformers who existed in revolutionary times. After all, Musk is the world’s richest man. In the managerial age, however, that only buys a seat at the table. The nine other men in the top-10 richest list are worth five times Musk combined. Apple has a hedge fund that is ten times the wealth of Musk. Blackrock controls trillions in assets and has unlimited access to the highest reaches of government.

While Musk may be the world’s richest man and the most famous of the plutocracy, he is just one voice among many. The managerial elite is thousands, and the managerial class is millions of people. This new class is analogous to the aristocratic classes that existed in 18th century France and 19th century Russia. The best Musk or any liberal reformer can do is influence the people in the system. This is what Musk is attempting with his mild reforms of Twitter.

In this illiberal age, Elon Musk has appointed himself to be the minister of speech on-line and is attempting to roll back the reactionary controls that were put in place by the ruling class over the last decade. While Twitter is not the internet of old, Musk has rolled back much of the censorship. He still bans certain accounts, mostly as a way to tell the reactionaries that his reforms will not go too far. Otherwise, he has had a light hand on the censorship of his platform.

This is where that old revolutionary vice shows its jaws. The side that fears the reforms will go too far has successfully organized an advertising boycott. State sanctioned pressure groups like Media Matters have organized other pressure groups to harass companies that were advertising on Twitter. Those companies dropped their ads, resulting in a fifty percent decline in ad revenue. Musk has been forced to hire a girl boss approved by the reactionaries to be his new CEO.

Meanwhile, the other jaw of the vice sees what is happening and assumes Musk will eventually be brought to heel. Open sites like Gab continue to flourish, building on the alternative platform model. Amusingly and a bit ironically, the hard-core censors are abandoning Twitter for the opposite reason. Mass media companies, no longer assured of artificial reach on Twitter, are also jumping ship. Musk is facing the same dilemma all reformers face when taking the middle position.

On January 22, 1905, soldiers of the Imperial Guard fired on demonstrators in Saint Petersburg as they marched towards the Winter Palace. Hundreds were killed and thousands were arrested in what came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Mirsky denied having any role in it, but he was blamed by his conservative opponents, as well as the radical opponents of his half-measures. Mirsky did the honorable thing and resigned from his office and retired from politics.

In the end, Mirsky was like all prior reformers in that he was both right and wrong about what was happening. He was correct that radicalism was spreading due to the inability of the system to address the issues of the times. He was wrong in thinking that the solutions to the problems of the system could be found in the system. Just as there was no saving King Louis XVI and the old order, there was no saving Tsar Nicholas II and the system that made him possible.

This is where liberal reformers like Musk find themselves. On the one hand, they are correct in fearing a rising tide of radicalism. He rightly sees that it is driven in part by the abuses of the ruling class, of which he is a part. The trouble is the system cannot withstand open debate. It cannot risk questioning the shibboleths that sustain the moral framework at the heart of the managerial system. In the end, reformers will be crushed by that old vice that has destroyed prior reformers.

We Deserve Better

Posted on May 15, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about my travel woes, a post about the ungovernable country and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

The ancient Greeks had a rule at one time where anyone proposing a change in the current laws did so with a rope around his neck. He stood in front of the people with the noose around his neck and made his appeal. If the people adopted his idea, then he removed the rope and went on his way. If his idea was rejected, he was hanged using the noose that was around his neck. Needless to say, this reduced the demand for change to that which was obvious to the vast majority.

From time to time, as in a crisis, they would pass a rule with regards to whatever course of action they agreed upon to address the crisis. Anyone who questioned the agreed upon approach or offered up a change to it, was killed or banished. The point of these extraordinary measures in times of crisis was to prevent the minority from undermining the will of the majority and thus the agreed upon policy. Once the majority agreed upon a course of action, the time for debate ended.

While the idea of our current legislators offering amendments while wearing a noose is amusing, we should be able to see why the Greeks did this. In this age, all everyone talks about is change. The way to show your virtue to the rest of those desperate for acclaim and affirmation is to demand change. The managerial elite and their flunkies in the managerial class spend so much time producing new changes, none of the basic things are getting done.

This is because the spring of democracy is morality. In a democratic society, even if it is not actually democratic, the thing that motivates people is the desire to be seen as moral, which means on the side of the people. When moderns say they are on the right side of history, what they mean is they are on that leading edge of change that is carrying the people toward the goal of the general will. They are turning the wheel of progress toward the promised land.

We have no information to suggest the Greeks viewed it this way, but they clearly understood that those always demanding change were a menace. Even in a genuine democracy, someone has to be in charge so that things get done. That person or group of people could not function if they were constantly fielding criticism or adapting to new policies pushed through by the change artists. The noose was the way to limit this impulse and prevent the chaos we are experiencing today.

In this age, this would start with the Federal bench. The executive branch of government is now hobbled by judicial fiat. Trump could get nothing done because crazy judges kept inventing novel reasons to block him. Some of his stuff eventually made it through, but the courts ran out the clock on most of it. The same thing happens with governors. They are constantly blocked by judges who just make up reasons to block their policies.

A simple way to stop this is to institute a three strikes rule. A judge who is overturned three times is removed from the bench. In a short time, this would clear the court of most left-wing judges, who are overturned on a regular basis. What would remain is judges who adhere to the point of their role. Further, judges who are removed from the bench are barred from practicing or teaching law. While banishment would be the best option, removing them from the law is good enough.

A similar problem is in the legislatures. All across the country, deranged state legislators have crafted new gun laws. These laws will be struck down by the courts but create mayhem for years. These legislators cook up these laws knowing they will not pass muster with the courts. This is performative legislation. The point of it is to show the intended audience that the legislator is on the right side of history, mostly by tormenting the normal people who are the victims of these laws.

While hanging is the right course here, a less entertaining option is to impoverish the people who vote for laws that are overturned by the courts. For example, when the courts overturn the latest gun grabbing from the New York legislature, the people who voted for it have all of their assets confiscated. They are immediately barred from politics and practicing law. Instantly, the legislative calendars will be free to work on the practical things that are currently neglected.

These small, common-sense changes are not a panacea, but what they would do is reintroduce the idea of a limiting principle. The current civic religion starts with the assumption that anything is possible. If anything is possible, then your version of Utopia is possible, which means it should happen right now. After all, what could be the argument against having paradise right now? There has to be a way to anathematize that impulse and thus curtail this behavior.

Of course, this would require a ruling class that sees the danger. The Greeks were often blessed with an elite that knew society could tolerate only so much debate and so much criticism, so they found ways to limit it. Instead, the current ruling class celebrates the resulting chaos that comes from a culture of critique. They somehow think that paradise is a world where nothing is beyond the destructive forces that lie at the heart of this endless demand for change that animates our age.

Joseph de Maistre famously said, “Every country has the government it deserves”, but this is always misinterpreted to blame the people for bad government. This is the thinking of the mind poisoned by democracy. Joseph de Maistre was not a democrat, so it is incorrect to think he was blaming the people. Instead, he was laying the blame at the feet of the ruling class. The elite get the government they deserve and they take the people with them, even if the people deserve better.

Imagination Land

Posted on May 11, 2023 by thezman

One of the strange and unnoticed aspects of the modern age is how much time is spent debating imaginary things. In fact, most of our public debates are about things that may happen or could never possibly happen. The things that are actually happening get very little attention. In some cases, like the ongoing criminal operations of the Biden family, the only people discussing them are “conspiracy theorists”, a term that has been transformed to describe imaginary villains.

In fact, much of what passes for public debate is the shift from things that are real and observable in the present moment to things that do not exist. Crackpot libertarian congressman Thomas Massie spends most of his time warning about a highly unlikely problem with E-Verify, so that his voters do not notice the waves of migrant invaders filling up their cities and towns. He is not alone. Every politician is an illusionist now, making reality disappear behind a curtain of deceit.

What has happened to modern American society is a form of the Peter Pan syndrome, in that society prefers to live in a world of make believe, rather than face up to the tough choices that come with adulthood. Libertarian kooks would rather think about a world governed by the non-aggression principle than think about the problems that the current world is presenting to us. Ten thousand migrants a day cross the border, but libertarian guy is concerned about theoretical abuses of state power.

It is not just libertarian kooks who avoid reality. It is a system-wide phenomenon that now defines our public life. Trillions are being spent on climate change, which probably exists as a concept. We know the earth’s climate is always changing. As a real threat to humanity, however, it exists only in the imagination. Given the rampant fraud in the world of science, it is possible that everything about climate change is a lie, yet we are pretending that it is a real as a rose bush.

To fight climate change, governments are putting mandates on carmakers to force them to make electric cars. The people who produced this mandate have no idea if this makes any sense or is even possible. In fact, it is not possible. We do not have enough lithium, for example, to make the required batteries. Our power grid will have collapsed long before that is an issue. In fact, it is already happening. We are spending trillions on climate change while the power grid is failing.

Imagine a politician running on a platform of upgrading the power grid. He promises to improve reliability and toughen it against storms. Many of the lines will be put underground to improve aesthetics. This could never happen because his opponent would instead promise to use the money for “gender affirming care” or maybe combat racist road systems. She would win in a landslide because who cares about the power lines when imaginary problems need our attention?

Imagination land is so powerful, it even warps the mundane things. Here is a story about a sportsball coach who used salty language in public. It was rude and he apologized for it. In the world of real things, this would be enough, but in the world of imaginary things, he must be punished. Imaginary people were traumatized, maybe even physically harmed by his words. According to his boss, the imaginary people now have scars that cannot be seen, because they are not real.

Much has been made of the public apology in these matters. It is a weird ritual that never has the intended effect. The coach just got fined millions of dollars for harming imaginary people, despite his real groveling. What gets missed is these apologies are always directed at people who do not exist. In the material world, you apologize to a person who you can identify as a victim of your actions. In imagination land you apologize to imaginary people for imaginary crimes.

Last month, Douglas Mackey was found guilty in Federal court of violating the civil rights of people who do not exist. The government claimed that his tweets mocking Hillary Clinton voters in 2016 harmed these people. They produced no one claiming to have been harmed by these tweets. They did not establish that such a harm was even possible, but that did not matter. In imagination land, anything is possible. When anything is possible, you go to jail for imaginary crimes.

Another example of how imagination land now crowds out the world of reality is the Bud Light marketing fiasco. The people who cooked up the idea were sure that there are millions of crossdressers desperate for a beer that appeals to them, so they created a campaign around a crossdresser. The fact that in the real world there are more left-handed ginger midgets than men who wear dresses did not matter. In imagination land, the crossdresser is the future.

Everywhere you look in the modern age, the imaginary is crowding out the real, as if everyone is now terrified of reality. The media fills the zone with terrifying stories of disinformation campaigns and hate speech be imaginary actors, while ignoring the tsunami of lies that comes from the government. More time has been spent trying to pretend a brown guy is a white supremacist than looking into the very real problem of the Biden family taking bribes from foreign governments.

The usual suspects rush in at this point and claim it is all a plot by the “deep state” or some other catchphrase to get money and power. As ridiculous as this age has become, one has to leave open the possibility that we live in a simulation controlled by men living in a hollowed-out volcano. Alternatively, maybe Wells was right when he noted “It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.”

Generations of easy living, living outside the world “change, danger, and trouble” has turned us into Eloi. Our triumphs over the material problems of human existence have left us incapable of dealing with the reality of human existence. If we just wish hard enough, they will go away. If not, then we just fill our minds with the pleasing conflicts that exist only in imagination land. We are a society of helpless children determined to remain children regardless of the demands of reality.

Official Madness

Posted on May 8, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the Amazon show Clarkson’s Farm, a post about the Republican brown plan and the Sunday podcast. I was on live with Patrick Casey last week and the replay is here. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

If you were around in the 1980’s and old enough to pay attention to the news, you remember the debate about the news media. One side, the conservatives, complained about the media bias against them. The other side, the liberals, dismissed the claim as something like a conspiracy theory. For its part, the media spent time trying to prove they were not biased at all. They would point to the one conservative story in the back pages as proof they were giving both sides equal treatment.

The funny part about that debate is everyone was right. The conservatives were right in that self-described conservatives outnumbered self-described liberals two-to-one, but the media was almost entirely liberal. The liberals were right in that it was not some sort of conspiracy to silence conservatives. The media simply reflected the opinions of the people who were in the media and politics. The media was being generous to conservatives, given that everyone they knew was a liberal.

Fast forward to the present and the media is insane. Right now, they are claiming a Mexican immigrant, who shot up a Texas mall, is a white supremacist. Here is the Washington Post version of this whopper. Here is Rolling Stone. Here is the Daily Bleat hyperventilating over it. Of course, the volunteer army of regime toadies is uncritically posting this on social media. The thing missing from all of these stories is a picture of the shooter, Mauricio Garcia.

Of course, by the time they get around to showing a picture of the shooter, someone will have doctored the photo to make him look like a German. The previous Texas spree killer, also a migrant from Mexico, was whitewashed so he could look the part, but the real photo was soon on the internet. The media did the same trick with the Uvalde, Texas shooter last year, then they edited their own news articles when the fraud was detected, but by that point it was too late.

Texas seems to be having a problem with migrants going on killing sprees and not just the mass shooting variety. Over the weekend a migrant drove into a group of migrants, killing eight and wounding ten. This does not get the same attention as the Texas mall shooter, because we are supposed to think it is perfectly normal for illegal immigrants to drive cars into pedestrians. Sadly, it is becoming normal as the country is being invaded by tens of millions of migrants right now.

The regime media telling us that brown people are now the face of white supremacy is just the next click of the ratchet in terms of media perfidy. Over the last year they told us the Russians bombed their own pipelines and the Azov battalion, festooned with Nazi iconography, are freedom fighters. Before that they told us the unvaccinated people cause vaccinated people to get Covid. Before that, they said Russians used mind control to alter the 2016 election results.

In other words, there is a pattern here. The lies from the regime have become more common, but also more outlandish. The crossdresser who shot up a Christian school was characterized as the victim. Imagine what it must be like to sit in a room with an editor who is explaining how the narrative position on the school shooter will be that the little kids she murdered are to be ignored, while the shooter is the victim. Imagine that being the new normal in the media because it is.

Lost in the mounting vulgarity is the question at the center of that old debate from forty years ago regarding media bias. Back then, people in the media could not see their own bias because from their perspective, there was no bias. Everyone they knew agreed that the media was playing it fair. If anything, the media was being too generous to those horrible conservatives. We are seeing the same thing about the grotesque dishonesty in the regime media today.

The reason the crew of eight people responsible for that Washington Post story are willing to post nonsense about the brown guy being a white supremacist is everyone they know thinks this is obviously true. When the FBI guy told them on the sly that the shooter was their primary bogeyman, they had no reason to question it. Normal people would have laughed themselves silly, but not Post writers. For them, it was confirmation of everything they know to be true.

Forty years ago, media bias was simply the result of media culture. What had been a working-class profession came to be dominated by credentialed professionals from the same upper-middle-class backgrounds. Media bias reflected the class of people who working in the media. The paranoia and penchant for wild conspiracies involving fictional bogeymen we are seeing in the regime media today also reflects the culture of the people in media. They really believe this stuff.

In fact, it reflects the managerial elite as a whole. These crackpot tales about Mexican white supremacists are not intended to sway the public. They do not care about the public, so they do not care about public opinion. They do care about opinion in the increasingly isolated elite circles. You can be sure that all of the flunkies, seat warmers and coat holders in Washington read that Post story and believed it. They believe because their bosses believe and everyone they know believes it.

That is probably the hardest thing for normal people to accept. Forty years ago, conservatives were sure they could talk their liberal friends in the media out of their obvious bias. Forty years on, normal people still think the media must know what they are doing is madness. They have to know it is fake. The truth is, they think these nutty conspiracy theories and outlandish whoppers are real. Our ruling class is as nuts as they appear to be, maybe even worse.

The Gods Have Gone Crazy

Posted on April 26, 2023 by thezman

The primary difference between a god and a man is that the gods have powers that no man can possess. It is not that the gods are bigger, faster, and stronger than men, even though that is often the case. It is that the gods can violate the rules of nature or even harness nature itself. Gods can defy gravity, change the course of rivers, or make it go dark in the middle of the day. The gods are gods because they get to make exceptions to the rules that bound the life of man.

Of course, this is not the only role of the gods. If the gods violated the rules of the universe all the time or helped man violate those rules, then the rules would be meaningless and all that would matter is favoring the gods. A big part of what makes the gods is their enforcement of the rules. What man can expect is the rules to apply at all times and all places. It is the exceptions that remind him that his world is the creation of the gods, and he has to respect them.

Christianity changed this relationship a tiny bit. The old gods were relegated to folklore and the new God was the only god. God was not playing an active role in the affairs of mankind, but more of an observer. Even so, God was the great enforcer of the rules of nature, by not violating those rules, outside of miraculous circumstances that lie beyond the ability of man to comprehend. God made the world. It operates by fixed rules and only God can make exceptions.

This is an important concept to understanding the world. Human society is based on the idea that the rules apply to everyone, except the sovereign, who is allowed to exempt himself from the rules and make exceptions to the rules. The king, for example, can pardon a condemned man, even though the man broke the rules. The king is the only member of society to judge himself because he is the only member of society responsible for maintaining the rules of society.

Like the gods, this special position falls apart quickly if the king is making exceptions to the rules to the point where the rules are meaningless. The king goes from being the sovereign to being a tyrant. What defines him is not the rules and his role in the enforcement of the rules, but rather his lack of rules. This is the fundamental definition of tyranny. There are no rules, just the caprice of the ruler. Everyone lives in terror of being on the wrong side of the tyrant.

If one wanted to produce a universal definition for hell, it would start with the complete lack of rules. After all, if the Devil has rules, then you can theoretically appeal to those rules for relief. There is some hope that you can end the torment by complying with the rules or finding a loophole. On the other hand, if there are no rules then there is no hope for appeal as there is no rule to which you can appeal. There is nothing but the desire of the Devil to inflict torment upon you.

The point of all this is that order depends upon rules, but it also requires an enforcer of those rules and that is always someone with the power to make exceptions. If that person or entity abuses that power, we slowly move out of the world of order and into the hellish domain of rule by tyrant. The tyrant flips the concept of the rule of law on its head so that the rules become dangerous. Today’s lawful action can be deemed unlawful tomorrow by the tyrant.

We see this in miniature on the social media platforms. YouTube creators must spend time self-policing their old content because even though they complied with the rules at the time, the rules change constantly. That old video about Rumble was within the rules two years ago, but all of a sudden, it is now a violation of the rules, so you can lose your channel as a result of it. This applies across all social media platforms. The “terms of service” is a license to unleash hell on the platform users.

The same people turning the rules of the internet into a jumble of exceptions administered by petty tyrants are doing the same to the law. It used to be that you could have an opinion about the powerful people. You could get a bunch of your friends to hold a rally in order to express that opinion. In theory you can still do these things, but it is impossible to know if it is legal. Years after the fact the state of Virginia is prosecuting Charlottesville protestors for carrying tiki torches.

Of course, the people turning the law into a dangerous labyrinth are also redefining the phrase “new world order” to mean unpredictable chaos. America is supposed to be the keeper of the rules-based world and the defender of order. Instead, the Washington regime spreads chaos around the world, mostly by violating the rules they demand others follow and punishing those who do follow the rules. Washington has become the global tyrant, the great violator of order.

What one finds behind this spread of lawlessness and chaos are people appropriating for themselves the right to make exceptions. Whether it is trivial things like the rules of social media, the mundane things in our courtrooms and boardrooms, or the big things on the global stage, it is always the same people turning the rules into an unnavigable jungle of exceptions. They have declared themselves gods and have driven the rest of us mad with their endless exceptions.

They may be crazy, but they are not gods, despite their claims. They are just the ruling class of the American empire. Ironically, a founding document of the American experiment provides the remedy. “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

This is what we see happening in the world. The emerging global powers, along with smaller powers like OPEC, are abandoning the old gods of the unipolar world for the new gods of the multipolar world. The new gods promise to respect the rules and avoid exceptions without consent. The same must happen inside the West and eventually in the heart of the American empire. There will be peace only when there are new rules that are enforced by new men who know they are not gods.

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