No Enemies On The Right

Posted on October 4, 2023 by thezman

Charles Haywood of Worthy House has a post up explaining and defending his concept of “No Enemies On The Right”, which he originally formulated as “No Enemies To The Right” last December. He used that original phrase when discussing the jihad led by Rod Dreher against a schoolteacher who was accused of heresy. Dreher was doing his Christian piety act to both attack someone who could not defend himself and to curry favor with the people he pretends to oppose.

Dreher panicked when Haywood used the phrase “No Enemies To The Right” because it would be very bad for business if people embraced it. Like everyone in for-hire conservative politics, Dreher exists to attack people to his right. That is his reason to exist and why rich people fund his operations. What we insist on calling the Right in America is primarily a policing operation. They impose the morality of the Left on the rabble that the Right is charged with keeping at bay.

Over the last year, Haywood has defended his original argument, refining it as necessary, in response to criticism. Haywood has no interest in becoming the Emily Post of right-wing politics, but his continuing work on this concept is producing something like a rulebook of right-wing etiquette. His ten-point outline for what he means by “No Enemies On The Right” should be viewed as a useful guide for discourse between the various groups in dissident politics.

The slogan “No Enemies On The Right” is not new to Haywood. Those around way back in the alt-right days, which feels like a lifetime ago now, will recall this was a slogan with some of the more popular figures in that space. In fact, it was the motivation for organizing the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville. The idea was to both bring everyone together but also break the pattern of the Left pitting one group against the other to enforce their moral code.

Amusingly, before the alt-right used the term, it was a popular way for the neocons to stamp out dissent during the Bush presidency. They argued in the runup to the 2004 election that their war plans were too important to let the many lies of the Bush administration divide the Right. Their basic argument was “Sure, Bush is Lyndon Johnson, but the Democrats are worse, so you have to hold your nose and vote for the guy who is the opposite of what we promised.”

Of course, like everything political on the Right, this concept has been lifted from the Left, which coined the term “No Enemies to the Left” during the French Revolution for the same reason Haywood is promoting his version today. Opposing the King and the aristocracy was too important to let petty squabbles drive the many opponents of the regime into the ghetto of endless quarreling. Overthrow the system first then everyone can argue about what comes next.

There is an obvious appeal in this age. The one thing everyone outside the political class can agree upon is the system now only works to serve the interest of the people at the upper reaches of the system. There is a zero-sum game mindset in the ruling class where they assume what is good for them is bad for the people, so what is bad for the people must be good for them. The result is a system run by people who hate the people over whom they rule.

The logical answer is to hate them back. Since the people have numbers, the only way to use this advantage is to unite enough people under an opposition banner that has as its singular goal the removal of the ruling class. This is why this idea terrifies the house slaves of Conservative Inc. They know exactly what this means, which is the toppling of the people who keep them in the lifestyle they think they deserve. From the point of view of people like Rod Dreher, it is Only Enemies On The Right.

There is another advantage to this mode of thought. It forces clarity on the politics of dissent that helps flush out the poseurs and profiteers. Those committed to the larger project will refuse to condemn anyone on their side for crimes against the regime or regime orthodoxy. At most they remain silent. The poseurs and profiteers are always quick to point their bony finger at someone and condemn him for violating the morality of the opposition, like you see with Rod Dreher.

There is one major flaw with the “No Enemies On The Right” concept. It makes it difficult to police the ranks for lunatics and crackpots. Populist politics has always struggled with the weirdo problem precisely because it is unwilling to criticize anyone willing to join the fight against the Left. You can chant “No Enemies On The Right!” until you are blue in the face, but you must have some way to filter out the lunatics or you end up being defined by them.

There is also the problem of what constitutes the Right. The drug addled Antifa marchers oppose the system, but they are not of the Right. Jimmy Dore, the old school progressive comic, opposes the regime, but he is a socialist. The Grey Zone people oppose the America military machine, but they are communists. There has to be something more than opposition to the Left or you end up putting a leash around your neck and handing the other end to people you hate.

This leads to the third problem, which Haywood addresses in his seventh item in his list of “Tenets of NEOTR.” Disagreement is vital for any opposition to the regime as this is the only way to improve the opposition. Ideas need to be debated and that often results in hurt feelings, which leads to public disputes. Chanting “No Enemies On The Right” in these times will just alienate the people in the dispute. There needs to be a way to argue but in a way that keeps the focus on the enemy.

Finally, there is no escaping the fact that this is not a new idea and prior efforts at practicing it have failed. There is a reason it has failed. The main reason is the people chanting it were never really serious about it. Instead, they tended to use it as a shield to ward off criticism. This is how we got to Charlottesville. The way forward with this concept must be to go back and address the past failure. That means more discussion about “No Enemies On The Right” with the aim of getting it right.

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Walking With Death

Posted on October 2, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the classic Hitchcock spy thriller North By Northwest, a post the idiocy of politics and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

The other day on a long walk I came upon a dead deer lying across the sidewalk that must have been recently hit by a car. The animal was lying stretched out, as is always the case for some reason, head and neck arched back with one big brown eye looking up innocently at anyone who came upon it. There is a sadness in the look of a dead deer, even when the death comes at your hands. Despite this reality, millions of deer hunters are preparing for the coming season.

On my way back I saw a couple of older boys, maybe even their late teens, looking at the animal from a distance. They took turns taking pics of each other in front of it, always from a safe distance, as if they thought the animal would roar back to life and attack them for some reason. Even at a distance, it was clear it disturbed them. As I approached, they warned me that there was a dead deer in my path, which suggested this was a novel experience for them.

A few moments of banter between us confirmed that they had never seen a dead animal this close. At first that seemed unbelievable, but they probably spend most of their days inside playing games or in controlled experiments we call school, so the odds of seeing anything in nature are low. At that age, their experience with death is their character dying in a video game. There are no sad lifeless eyes looking up at them in whatever game is popular at the moment.

Of course, there is no youth hunting to speak of in the built-up areas, so it is unlikely those two young men will experience death that way. In the United States only about five percent of young people hunt. The numbers around urban areas on the coasts are probably so small that it cannot be measured. There are more males under the age of sixteen who identify as trans now than those who hunt. Those two young men are less disturbed by crossdressing than they are by death.

Much of what we call progress in the last three centuries has been about insulating ourselves from the reality of the human condition, especially death. Few people know where food comes from or how it is possible. There is a growing sense among the urbanized populations that what they call meat is a crime against Gaia, in the same way that your car is an offense to the mother goddess. Fake meat exists to exploit this growing unawareness of the cycle of life.

We are not far from the point in science fiction where humans who reach their expiration date mysteriously disappear, sent off to the recycling plant. One day Uncle Bob is struggling up the stairs and the next day no one talks about Uncle Bob. He was picked up and loaded into a wagon overnight. Rich people are racing to find the magic elixir that will let them avoid death or at least stay young until the end, because progress means reaching a point when we overcome death.

There is a good chance that the present lunacy is made possible by the apparent insulation so many feel from the reality of the human condition. In a world where the consequences of flouting nature are brutal and personal, one must respect the reality of the human condition and pass that respect onto the next generation. The man with a son makes sure his son learns the reality of death at a young age, usually by having his son take the life of an animal hunting or farming.

In an age where life and death are abstract concepts, there is no need to think about it, much less talk about it with the next generation. This removes the essential element for understanding the arc of life, especially the arc of your life. When you see every day that all living things have an end, often a brutal end, you can understand that life is a beginning, middle and end. Since the middle part is the only bit you can control, you never lose sight of it as it is how you will be judged in the end.

Death has another value that we have lost. It is the thing that binds people together in the common struggle of life. When every man is aware of the death sentence that was issued to him at birth, he is keenly aware of the death sentence that hangs over his family, his neighbors, and his community. Just as he must struggle every day to reach that predetermined end point, he must struggle with his family and neighbors in order to give the next generation the chance for their struggle.

For most of human existence, the answer to the great question – who are we? – was answered every week at a funeral or execution. That last bit is something lost to the mists of time, but it was an essential element of social life. The punishment of the guilty was part of the glue that held society together. The condemned was not just hurried away like Uncle Bob but brought before his neighbors to be expelled from the life of society in the most extreme way possible.

The public execution had another value. As Joseph de Maistre observed, the executioner absolves the condemned man of his sins and sends him out of this life as an innocent man. At the moment of death, the price is paid and at that second, he moves from guilty to innocent. His last gasp takes all of his sins with him. It is not the executioner who has absolved the condemned. The executioner is the agent, the tool through which the community acts to cleanse itself of sin.

In this way, familiarity with death brings familiarity with life and sin. The former comes easy, but the latter must be relearned almost daily. When life, your life, has a clear end and that end can come in a variety of ways, those ways provide a different sense of purpose to each life. The purpose of the man swinging from a rope is different from the man dying to defend his people. Death provides clarity about purpose and therefore clarity about the crimes against that purpose.

All of this is lost in the modern age. Few young men will ever hold in their hands the still warm, but lifeless body of an animal. They will never see the executioner perform his duty to his people. Death is an abstraction. The closest people get to it is through the unreality of the digital world. In that realm, death is a problem to be overcome, while in the physical world it is a thing that no longer exists, because it is just assumed that one day, before your last day, death will be overcome.

In a world of that sort of certainty, there is no reason to think about the purpose of life or the crimes one should avoid committing against that purpose. In a world full of people with no purpose other than momentary pleasure, the society in which they operate must be a sterile playground. Anything with meaning must be stripped away as it could lead to unpleasant thoughts about the lack of meaning and purpose. To defeat death, we must first defeat any notion that there is a meaning to life.

A Haunting In Canada

Posted on September 27, 2023 by thezman

“There is a specter haunting the West, the specter of fascism” could be the opening line to a manifesto from just about any group in the modern West. Three generations after fascism ceased to exist as a real political and intellectual movement, it hangs over the Western mind like a terrifying fog. Every issue in the political debate is there because it relates to fascism in some way. It either defines who is and who is not a fascist, or it is assumed to be a precursor to fascism.

In every political debate, the people we continue to call conservatives are defined by their fear of being called fascists or an equivalent label. Racism, for example, is nothing more than a crude synonym for fascism. The people we call the Left have a deep sack full of terms that essentially mean fascist. If they call you an extreme right-wing extremist, they really mean you are a fascist. Of course, fascist now simply means “outside the moral consensus” as defined by the Left.

It is not just a rhetorical game. Western liberalism is now just a reactionary, but still revolutionary, cause that has evolved around fear of fascism. All of the weird cultural fads are driven mostly by a desire to strike out at the people the culture warriors assume to be fascists. These are the white people who are trying to live normal lives in middle-class suburbs. Woke is not for anything. It is against fascism and all of its manifestations, which can be anything.

Eric Hoffer famously wrote that “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This is clear when you look at what has happened to Western liberalism. Long stripped of its Christian moral foundation, it staggers on in opposition to one devil after another. The devil can take many forms but strip away the covering and what lies beneath is always an Austrian painter in the imagination of the Western mind.

This is a purely negative identity. Western liberalism no longer has an internal, independent definition for itself. Those concepts still linger in the past, occasionally referenced by the people we continue to call conservatives, but only as a way of trying to slither out from under the boulder labeled “fascism” that has been hurled at them by the people we call the Left. Both sides agree that everything they do not like is Hitler and Hitler is their forever enemy.

You see it in the recent scandal in Canada where all the best people were seen cheering a guy who turned out to be a former Nazi. Yaroslav Hunka, who is 98, got a standing ovation after House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota called him a hero during a Friday visit by Zelensky. Rota called him a hero because he was told that Hunka fought the Soviets in the war. Since Western liberals now think Putin is Hitler, Russians are Nazis, so Hunka must be a hero.

The haunting of the Western mind by the specter of fascism is right there in that ridiculous performance. Because Putin is Hitler, it means Russia is the new Third Reich, which makes Ukraine the symbol of the West. Zelensky has been transformed into Churchill, but not the drunken degenerate version. He is the lion of the West version who rallied the forces of good against fascism. To the dullards who put the event together, Hunka connected the present to the past.

In reality, Hunka was and remains a Banderan, a follower of Stepan Bandera, who was a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist in the middle of the last century. Bandera collaborated with the Nazis because he hated Russians. Ukrainian nationalism is and remains, like Western liberalism, a negative identity. It is haunted by fascism because they see fascism as the great enemy of Russia, which they hate as much as the Western liberal thinks he hates fascism.

Of course, the question is how did this Ukrainian fascist end up in Canada after the war and remain undetected? He is wanted by Poland for war crimes. It turns out that the West welcomed a lot of these guys after the war. John Demjanjuk was a famous example from the 1980’s. He was the center of a moral panic, mostly over the prospect of running out of real Nazis due to the actuarial tables. All the best people turned up to point their bony fingers at Demjanjuk.

That gets to the reality of fascism and why it haunts the West. Fascism is impossible to define, in part, because it is the universal bogeyman. Both communists and liberals have spent generations heaping every sin imaginable on fascism. Those sins, of course, are the things these ideological camps fear most about themselves. With communism in the ash heap of history, fascism is now just the warted, gnarled face of Western liberalism’s worst fears about itself.

Another reason fascism is impossible to define is it was never really a standalone ideology, but a reaction to ideology. Fascism would never have existed if not for the apparent failure of liberalism and the very real threat of communism, especially the Bolshevik variety. Fascism was an ad hoc defense against cultural and spiritual genocide by people who saw both Western liberalism and communism in their raw form as they evolved in the 19th century.

This is why modern liberalism looks strikingly like fascism. We live in an age where the lines between the state and capitalism are impossible to see. Corporate America and the apparatus of the state are two heads of the same hydra. The media, the academy and entertainment are the other heads. The body that controls them is managerialism, which looks a lot like fascism. If James Burnham were alive today, he would easily make the connection between the two.

For a long time, people have wondered what would happen when the last real Nazi or alleged victim of the Nazis is no more. In the next decade that whole generation will be gone, leaving no more devils for liberalism to chase. Similarly, people have wondered what comes after liberalism reaches its end point. Both questions seem to have the same answer in that one cannot live without the other. When both are gone, the long nightmare of the West will finally come to an end.

The How And Why Of Things

Posted on September 26, 2023 by thezman

Those over a certain age in the dreaded private sector will have noticed a change in how the workplace operates with regards to managerial relations. The days of hands-on management and management by walking around are done. Instead, it is management from beyond the veil. Managers, no matter how junior their rank, seek to avoid anything that looks like confrontation with their direct reports, so they avoid as much personal interaction as possible, preferring things like e-mail.

This is how we get things like firing people by e-mail or even text message. The people making the decisions not only seek to avoid firing the employee in person, but they also remove the person from the equation entirely. Instead, it is a robot controlled by the company that informs the digital expression of the employee. Someone in human resources then discontinues the character from the simulation. The point is to avoid anything the resembles human interaction.

Look a little closer and what you see in the workplace is a technological layer forming up between management and the staff. The people in positions with impressive titles fear anything resembling pushback so what is forming up between them is a technological and organizational callus. It shields both sides from the human necessity of management and staff interaction, replacing it with a technological interface that allows both sides to interact with that interface.

When Rachel from the training department is putting together the latest sermon on diversity, she will never have to stand in front of a room full of humans and deliver the sermon and see the faces of the people receiving it. She uses a piece of software her company purchased for qualitatively managing the diversity initiative. One combination of commands produces reports for management. Another result is some black guy with an X in his name running a workshop in the breakroom.

One result of this is that the presumed common morality is baked into a system, often a software system, rather than the heads and hearts of people. The latest lecture about the importance of safety is not based on collective agreement but the dashboards from the safety software and the posters that decorate the breakroom. No one asks why we need to make sure our coworkers feel safe from heteronormative body shaming as there is no one to ask. The claim comes from the ether.

This is not just a private sector phenomenon. This disease of the impersonal has infected all parts of the managerial system. Politicians used to have townhall meetings with their constituents where they would field questions. If they bother doing this at all these days, it is a rigged room with plants asking fake questions. Instead, politicians have someone interact with their voters through social media. Their Twitter is an avatar of a person who is now just an avatar.

The media has been sucked into this as well. On the one hand, no one in the media dares ask a party member a tough question. That could put the media person in bad odor with the party. Of course, the party member is not interested in confrontation either, so she avoids anyone who might ask tough questions. The exception is those on the outs with the party, but even there the fear of confrontation is keeping all but the dullest media hacks from interacting with people like Trump.

Another driver of this depersonalization of the managerial class is the feminization that we see throughout society. Males expect confrontation, then some sort of agreement with a clear winner, typically the man in charge. Women prefer consensus, especially if it facilitates endless gossip and intrigue. This is why homosexual males decorate the upper reaches of the management class. They love drama. Combined with male intellect, they thrive in the new girl powered world.

Logically, you cannot have consensus if people are disagreeing with one another so the goal is to avoid situations where people can disagree. This is the benefit of that technological callus between management and staff. There can be no disagreement because the morality of every situation has been decided by the system. If you are unhappy with the result you need to reconcile yourself with the system, not take it up with your boss, who would prefer to never see you.

In a large company, the result is a vast disconnect between what the people in charge think about the company and what the staff thinks about the company. A very modern phenomenon is management asking for systems that can help them monitor the “wellness” of their staff as they use other software systems. Imagine the accounting system doing a wellness check before you can enter invoices. This is only possible in a world stripped of anything resembling humanity.

At scale, you end up with a culture that looks like what space aliens imagine culture is like among the humans they detected with their scanners. How is it possible that a real human created an account on Twitter called “safety” from which they post about the magical and imaginary world of online safety? What is an “open, accurate, and safe political discourse”? The answer is it is approved content transmitted and enforced through the interface of technology.

That is the final driver of the depersonalization process. Marx observed that once the moral questions are resolved, politics no longer exist. The trouble is the only way to settle the moral questions is through debate and conflict. By removing normal human interaction, you remove all avenues of debate and conflict. That leaves management to slip their moral claims into the systems they now use to run the world. Again, who can argue with the software that controls your life?

In this way, the censorship we are seeing is part of a larger process of baking managerial morality into the system. The people on the “safety” committee are not banning you personally from the platform. They are just following the rules of the system and you broke the rules. It is all right there in the terms of service, which change as frequently as the constitution on Manor Farm. If you think there was an error, click the link in your suspension notice and fill out an appeal.

The problem, something you see in the dreaded private sector, is that someone has to be in charge and the rules have to make sense. The reason the “good boss” spends time talking with staff is he wants to make sure the rules make sense, but also make sure the rules make sense. The former is about the staff understanding why the rules exist and the latter is about the rules coordinating the combined efforts of the staff toward the goals of the company.

In a world where everyone deals with every through the interface, this is not only impossible, but it would undermine the system. Software and management systems can never be viewed as moral agents. No matter how high management stacks these things between themselves and their direct reports, they will still hear those questions that are integral to human organization. Why are we doing this? Who says we have to do what we are doing this way? Who made this decision?

The how and the why are the only things that matter in human organization, with the former resting on the answer to the latter. Managerialism seeks to elide this reality by slipping the why into the how via process. The process becomes an interface to prevent anyone from asking someone in charge the why questions. That could lead to the scariest question of all, the “who decided this” question. Managerialism is all about avoiding the answer to that question.

Thoughts On Christian Nationalism

Posted on September 25, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Universally Left And Right

Posted on September 20, 2023 by thezman

One of the many problems that plague this time is the poverty of language when it comes to our politics. We remain stuck with the language of the past, even though the political and ideological structures of the past are no longer relevant. The use of antiquated language forces people to use those old mental structures, which in turn means jamming the present into the molds of the past. The most obvious example is Left and Right, which have lost any real meaning.

Is Ben Shapiro a conservative? He calls himself a conservative, but Steve Sailer calls himself a conservative too. While they may agree on many practical things, it should be clear that they have different motivations. Ben Shapiro’s conservatism is driven by a desire for what is good for his people, while Steve Sailer thinks his positions are good for the country of his birth. They get lumped in with many other people on the Right, but they clearly have different political goals.

Therein lies the main problem with the most basic of political labels. Steve Sailer and Ben Shapiro assume that the rules of morality are rational. If they are rational, then we can reason our way to the correct morality. If we can do that then there is no reason that everyone cannot do the same thing. This is also the position of people like Karl Marx and John Rawls. It is the view of the current Left. They think they have found the right moral system and you just need to realize it.

Right there is the central problem of this age. We hold onto terms like Left and Right but have forgotten why they exist. The Left used to be those who said that the rules of morality must be rational, because the natural world is rational. The Right said morality is based in Scripture and the will of God but shaped by tradition. Scripture does not cover everything, so history, tradition, and custom fill the gaps. Those items are central to understanding the central morality of Christianity.

This is the fundamental difference between Left and Right that has been lost, resulting in the incoherent use of the terms today. Both the modern Left and the modern Right assume that there is one universal moral code that is rooted in reason. Because morality is rational, it applies to everyone, just as the rules of math apply to everyone, so it means it is the duty of those who know to educate those who do not know in the same way we spread other knowledge.

This is what Paul Gottfried and others have been trying, unsuccessfully, to explain to Michael Anton over the last year. His “natural rights” argument must lead to that which he claims to reject, because it relies on the same assumptions and logic as that used by left-wing radicals for centuries. Once you assume morality is based in reason, you must assume there is one universal morality. The next steps from there do not matter as they all lead to the same place, death camps.

Of course, this must lead to the end of tradition. If morality is based in reason, then it means past practice is a form of trial and error, mostly error. The way we used to understand morality, say basing it in local custom, must be wrong because reason has brought us to a new and better understanding of morality. Tradition, history and custom, if they have any value at all, are a warning. Those who cling to antiquated moral claims based in tradition are rejecting reason.

This explains another bit of incoherent vocabulary. The people celebrating diversity are the least tolerant of diversity. The reason for that is diversity for them is a narrow tool, a wedge to be used to separate people from their history, traditions, and customs so that they can more easily be herded into the new moral framework. Diversity is a means to an end, not an end in itself, even if they claim otherwise, because there can be no diversity within a settled moral order.

The biggest problem that arises from universal morality based in reason is that it must come with a duty to impose that morality on others. This is the central insight of Nietzsche, who argued that once you conclude that morality is rational, you must accept it is universal and therefore binding on everyone. This divides the world into moral and immoral actors, where the moral actors are judged not on their individual compliance with moral reason but their willingness to enforce it.

If reason tells us that everyone can and must have the same morality, then there is no room for things like national borders. Borders are about dividing people based on how they think they ought to live. People over there live the way they do because they think that is how they ought to live, while the people over here live as we do because it is how we ought to live. The border dividing the two people is to preserve these moral differences, which flies in the face of reasoned morality.

Similarly, free association is about separating people, which rests on the assumption that people may be different not just in their superficial characteristics but in how they think they ought to live. The men’s club exists because men do not think like women and therefore must have a different moral outlook. Logically, it means they must have different roles in determining how we ought to live. If the moral questions have been settled, then this form of association is unacceptable.

What all this leads to is a way of sorting people in the modern age. If you are sure morality is based in reason, then you are in one camp, along with Locke, Rousseau, Karl Marx, and John Rawls. If you think morality lies outside the domain of reason and is instead based in the supernatural or tradition, then you are in another camp along with people like de Maistre, Burke and even many of the Framers. One camp is on the Left and the other is the Right.

What Lies Beneath

Posted on September 13, 2023 by thezman

Imagine a world of perfect candor where any hint of deception or inaccuracy is considered a blot on a man’s character. Everyone is raised to answer every question as honestly and forthrightly as possible. When the wife asks the husband if he thinks she is getting fat, he tells her he does think she is getting fat. Instead of getting upset and running into the bedroom, she excitedly hugs him because he was perfectly honest to her regarding an extremely sensitive matter.

This Vulcan-like candor would alter social relations. For example, stores would seek the best way to show their customers that they are completely honest. When they put something on sale, they would say it was because no one liked it or that they mistakenly bought too much of it and now need to unload it. The sign at the customer service window would read, “The customer is usually wrong.” Clerks would never say “have a good one” to customers.

That would still leave room for deception, so the stores would insist the product makers use candid labeling for their products. Frozen pizza boxes would read, “It tastes like cardboard, but it is cheap and easy to heat in the microwave.” Ingredient lists would include all of the ingredients, even the ones that cause cancer and those would be highlighted so the customer could see them. Organic food would not exist as everything about it is fake and therefore a lie.

Keep in mind that this imaginary world is not enforcing honestly at the point of a gun but as a matter of cultural preference. For some reason, the people in this society came to believe that only through perfect honesty can they have moral society. Therefore, the customs, folk legends and religious practices are all geared toward enforcing this idea that honesty is the highest virtue. Because honesty comes with status, everyone in public engages in honesty signaling contests.

It may seem ridiculous at first, but every human society selects for subjective qualities and against other qualities. The English prefer interesting over boring, which is why their popular figures appear eccentric and weird. Americans dislike phonies so popular figures try hard to look sincere, even when lying. There is no objective reason to prefer interesting over dull or sincere over inauthentic. Preferring these qualities is not more or less strange than celebrating candor.

Now think about this in the American context. Walk into any grocery store in America and the first thing you will experience is a lie. Typically, the produce section is located at the front of the store. There will be piles of fruits and vegetables labeled organic, but as a practical matter there is no such thing. Even if the fruit is grown according to the rules of the organic cult, the suppliers lose track of it long before it reaches the store, so there is no way to know what is organic and what is inorganic.

The stores know this. They put the best-looking stuff on the table marked organic and jack up the price to reinforce the lie. The suppliers know this, and the growers know it too, if you can get them to be honest about it. Everything about that organic tomato you bought is a lie, including your belief that it is better than the other tomato. You reward yourself by accepting the lie. You reward the store for lying to you and the store rewards its suppliers for lying to them. It is liars all the way down.

You have made it a few feet into the store, and you are deluged with lies. Venture further and you are swimming in an ocean of lies. The packaging of food is carefully designed to trick consumers. Tens of billions of dollars have gone into figuring out how to trick people into buying things. Of course, everything about the American diet is a lie perpetrated by the government at the behest of agribusiness. A man from Planet Candor would be horrified by the frozen food section.

Now, think about what sort of government would work best in a society run on the principle of complete candor. Monarchy could work, but it would be less than honest to claim that the son of the king is the most qualified to rule. A ruling council of the most honest citizens, maybe picked by the people, would probably be best as it would reward candor with the highest office. Candidates for seats on the council would prove their worth through campaigns of total honesty.

In fact, democracy would work well on Planet Candor. One of the foundational principles of democracy is that “all members must have equal and effective opportunities to learn about the consequences and alternatives of a proposal.” In a society where honesty is the highest virtue, the pressure to make sure everyone is as well informed as possible would lead to the most informed citizens. You would not have to worry about voter fraud or ballot stuffing on Planet Candor.

This is where you might think something is wrong. America is more democratic than any society in history and it is riddled with lies and corruption. The man holding the highest office recently claimed he was at the World Trade Center on 9/11. He repeatedly tells outlandish whoppers like this about himself. He is in office because he was the beneficiary of the most corrupt election in American history. That was made possible by a tsunami of lies from the mass media.

We seem to have a dilemma. On the one hand, the society of perfect honesty seems like the ideal place for democracy. On the other hand, democracy in practice results in a society ruled by the least honest people. When you think back to how our marketplace operates on a foundation of lies, it suggests any open market, whether it is for goods and service or ideas, becomes an elaborate game of liar’s poker. The marketplace rewards deception, so you end up with a lot of liars.

There are some possible solutions to this dilemma. One is that humans naturally want to live in a society controlled by liars. We have steadily become more democratic because mankind is slowly reaching its desired end. Alternatively, democracy and the marketplace turn even the most honest people into liars. If someone unleashed democracy on Planet Candor, it would quickly devolve into Planet Deception and come to resemble modern America.

There is a third option. Let us suppose that Planet Candor operates on perfect honesty because long ago a powerful force came to their planet and told them that unless they stamped out deception, their planet would be destroyed. Over time this belief in the risk of deception became a central part of who they are as a people and who each person is in relation to society. Put another way, honesty has become a religion for them, one that leads to salvation for themselves and their posterity.

Under such conditions, the acid of democracy and the free market would land on a society immune to its corrosive effects. All those snakes selling organic apples in the produce section of the grocery store would find no takers. Similarly, the fig leaf makers would have no reason to exist. After all, those they did manage to tempt would be selected out of the gene pool due to low status. In time, democracy would be a mechanism to select against the dishonest.

John Adams said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Outside of the various forms of authoritarianism, this is true of all governments. You cannot have an honest monarchy if the people over whom it rules are immoral. You cannot have a benevolent dictator if his people are liars and crooks. Morality is what ultimately controls the behavior of the people and what makes good governance possible.

That is the source of what plagues us today. The structures we inherited assume a specific moral foundation. When the ruling class that emerged with the American empire in the middle of the last century exiled the principles that made up that moral foundation, society was left without any protection from the temptations that lie in the marketplace for goods and ideas. The endless haggling over what we ought to do is only possible when there is no moral authority.

It also explains the panicked frenzy by the ruling class to conjure a moral framework to justify their behavior. The endless chanting about diversity is not intended to convince anyone that it is a strength, but to prevent anyone from asking who gave them the authority to fill our communities with strangers. The weird sexual fetishes they have unleashed are squid ink to prevent anyone from asking them upon what moral authority they are basing their sweeping claims about society.

The great critic of the Enlightenment, Joseph de Maistre, famously said, “Every country has the government it deserves.” Most people think this means the people deserve punishment for supporting unscrupulous politicians. What de Maistre meant here is the morality of society determines the type of government. In the case of France, stripping away the Catholic Church and the monarchy left French society without a moral foundation for government. Tyranny is what followed.

That is what we see happening in the West. The American empire jettisoned its moral foundations a century ago and the result is an empire that imposes cultural and spiritual chaos on the West. Democracy and the promiscuous lying that we see are just symptoms of the moral hollowness of the empire. The West is now ruled by moral nullities who demand to be treated as moral arbiters and in the end, they are left to operate as dictators holding power by force.

The Spirit Of The Law

Posted on September 6, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Musk Versus The Demon

Posted on September 5, 2023 by thezman

Imagine you have a business contract with someone who is supposed to provide a service of some sort to you. They do the work, and you pay them. The contract has conditions for when they do the work and how much you pay them, depending upon what they do and how they do it. There is also a clause that says they will pay you if they fail to fulfill their end of the contract. If for some reason they fail to fulfil or break the agreement, they pay you an agreed upon sum.

Before the contract begins, they notify you that they are no longer willing to perform the work and will be breaking the agreement. You try to get an explanation, but the only thing they say is that they are sending you a check for the stipulated amount in the liquidating damages clause of the contract. Quickly you learn that no other vendor performing the service will take your business. You then learn that some shadowy group is threatening anyone who would do business with you.

Naturally, you will think this must be against the law. This shadowy group is deliberately trying to harm you by threating people with whom you conduct business. That has to be illegal, at least it should be illegal. Even if it is not illegal, it has to be something you can bring to court and ask for damages. After all, this shadowy group is deliberately trying to damage you and your business. That is the only logical reason for their action. Now that they have done quantifiable harm, you should have a case.

Putting aside the corrupt state of American courts, your expectation for compensation and maybe even relief is reasonable. There are exceptions. For example, if the shadowy group in question is a criminal enterprise, like the Mafia, then the civil courts are not the right venue. The judge is probably going to be afraid to rule against them and if you get a jury trial then getting a fair jury will be difficult. The threat of death will overcome their zeal for justice.

You also have the issue of foreign governments who operate in the United States and outside American law. The Israeli group Black Cube, for example, does work for people like Harvey Weinstein, who regularly intimidated his victims. Suing such a company in civil court would be pointless. There is also the strong possibility that they would get the government to intervene on their behalf. Serving them and getting them to appear in an American court would be extremely difficult.

This is the background for what could be a very big story. The last few days Elon Musk has been making noises about suing the ADL. He is claiming that the ADL has been threatening advertisers as a way to control social media platforms. Further, he says that the ADL is intimidating his potential advertisers with the claim that Musk is an anti-Semite, and his platform supports antisemitism. As a result, he may take them to court for defamation and dump their private communications.

Assuming Musk is confining himself to American courts, he is most likely wasting his time with the defamation claims. American courts have decided that connected people like the ADL can say anything they like about people who are currently out of favor with the beautiful people. The New York Times just about admitted they lied about Sarah Palin and did so on purpose with malice of forethought. The judge told the jury to rule in favor of the Time because Palin has cooties.

Musk would get the same treatment, but he has another angle. He could argue that the point of the ADL’s campaign against him and his company is to harm his business by interfering in the contracts he has with advertisers and partners. If he can show that their claims of antisemitism are a threat against anyone who would do business with him, which is probably not a hard thing to do, given the behavior of the ADL, then he may have a case against the ADL.

Further, Musk is an extraordinarily rich man with lots of rich friends. There is no question that some of them have had run-ins with the ADL. He could put out the call for others to join the case if they have similar claims. Imagine if his buddy Mark Zuckerberg was willing to support Musk in confirming that the ADL uses gangster tactics to threaten social media platforms. It is unlikely for obvious reasons, but there are millions of potential victims of the ADL’s gangsterism.

This brings us back to those exceptions. Putting aside the grotesque corruption in the American legal system, there is the Mafia and foreign player issue. The ADL operates like other organized crime groups. They use intimidation of government officials as a way to avoid the law. They have their tentacles wrapped around state and federal government agencies. Getting lawyers to take the case, much less getting a judge to hear it is an enormous hurdle for Musk.

Then you have the outlaw nature of the ADL. In a Twitter space on the subject, someone pretending to be a Canadian named Vivian Bercovici was exposed by Keith Woods as an agent of Black Cube. She tried to deny it, but when that was impossible, she dropped off the call and then deleted her Twitter profile. Elon Musk and everyone around him can be sure that these people will unleash all of their intelligence assets against any effort against the ADL.

In the end, the best Musk can hope for is a successful public relations campaign against the ADL and their tactics. For generations, the ADL had exploited the sense of fair play that is a central part of the American character. Their central message is they just want for Jews what everyone else gets, a fair shake. If Musk can expose that as a fraud and expose their gangster tactics, then they lose their moral standing, which is the only reason their tactics are effective.

There is more to it, of course. As we saw with Jeffrey Epstein and Robert Maxwell, these people play the hardest of hardball. Maybe things have reached the point where the ADL decides to send a message to the rest of the oligarchs by making an example of the world’s richest man. Maybe this is all theater by Musk and the ADL to shift focus away from more pressing matters. If one is looking for a little hope, this Musk versus the ADL is a nice bit of sunshine to brighten the mood.

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The Star Chamber Phase

Posted on August 30, 2023 by thezman

Note #1: If you are thinking the kids need something to wear to school that celebrates our diversity, consider buy one of these new shirts. Nothing tells the world how hard you celebrate our diversity like a Lagos Trading Company t-shirt.

Note #2: I was invited on to chat with Peter Quinones about the Republican debate, the courage of Trump, the Tucker interview and many other things. For those missing the sound of me droning on each Friday, you can get your fix here.

The term “star chamber” has fallen out of use over the last few decades, but it was a common term used by the American Left in the 20th century. They would use it when arguing that the courts were acting arbitrarily. Other times they would use it in the context of public opinion when one of their guys was in trouble. The point was that the media was being unfair to their guy. Star chambers were bad so anything with those words associated with it must be bad too.

The Star Chamber was a real thing. It was an English court setup in the 15th century to oversee cases involving socially and political important people. This court was staffed with advisors to the king. This way the judges would not be intimidated by the status of the accused. No one knows for sure how it got the name “star chamber” but the most popular theory says it comes from the decorations. The ceiling was painted with gold stars on a blue background.

Of course, like all government power, it was soon abused by the people wielding it to first attack their enemies in court and then to suppress dissent. The main reason it was subverted into an instrument of oppression is it lacked due process. There was no appealing the decisions of the court and since it operated by its own rules, there could be no appeal to a fixed set of rules. This allowed the king to use the system to persecute his enemies and stamp out dissent.

It is why up until the last few decades, the American court system was based on a fixed set of rules that governed all courts. This was ensured by an appeals system that ended with the Supreme Court. Forgotten today, the primary purpose of the Supreme Court was to make sure the court system followed the rules, the primary source of which is the Constitution itself. The courts being open to the public was an additional check on abuse of the legal system by the powerful.

The reason “star chamber” has fallen out of fashion in America is the Left has seized control of the institutions, including the centers of cultural production. They no longer look at the abuse of power as a problem because they have all the power so by definition all uses of power are justified. Note that their objections to the secret courts created after 9/11 were ceremonial and halfhearted. In reality they welcomed this new tool they could use in pursuit of their agenda.

Note also that the only thing we know about these secret courts is they were used against Donald Trump in the 2016 election. To date no one has produced an example of how these courts prevented terrorism. The documented abuses of these secret courts by the FBI have gone unaddressed. Because the courts are secret, we have no idea what goes on inside them, so there is no way to know they are not being used against dissidents in the same way they were used against Trump.

Putting that aside, the court system we can see is also going through a transformation toward the Star Chamber model. Again, Trump provides some examples. In his Florida case the court has warned him about making public statements. There is the threat of a gag order hanging over him. In Washington, Jack Smith has asked the court for what amounts to a gag order on Trump. In Georgia, Trump cancelled a press conference about the case for fear of retribution from the court.

Since we get our information about court proceedings from the media and the media is now an agent of the state, it is not hard to see why proscribed people would want to have their say outside the courthouse. The only chance for fairness in the courtroom now is for the accused to make his appeals outside the courthouse. Naturally, the courts now wish to stifle such conduct. If they can gag the accused, he cannot shine a light on the abuses inside the court through appeals to the public.

This is not just a phenomenon in high profile political cases. Increasingly, local judges and prosecutors are doing the same thing. Here is a case of a famous college football player accused of heinous crimes. If you read between the lines, he was framed by the cops but was forced to remain quiet in order to get out of the case. He comes from money and his father is famous, but none of that matters in a court system that is increasingly the tool of arbitrary state power.

The difference between the rule of law and rule by men is that the former has a clear and precises set of rules open to the public, while the latter is based on the momentary whims of the people who wield power. The proliferation of laws along with a proliferation of ways to interpret the laws has made everything illegal. No one can now list all of the federal crimes on the books. As a result, most people are breaking the law every day of their life without knowing it.

The reason this matters is one of the predicates for social upheaval, like civil wars and revolutions, is the collapse of trust in the law. The Star Chamber system, for example, ended with the English Civil War. The American Revolution was, in part, a response to the collapse of legal authority. The American Civil War was due, in part, to a collapse in trust by both sides in the courts fairly dealing with the slavery issue. The legal system no longer provided a solution to disputes.

When no one trusts the law or the legal system, no one has a reason to obey the rules, much less respect the system that creates them. Put another way, when everyone is in violation of the law, then everyone is motivated to live outside the law. This is the fundamental definition of the outlaw. He is an outlaw because he rejects the system of laws and therefore exists outside the law. This is also the starting place for every revolutionary and revolutionary movement.

In the end, the test of a legal system is the test of a society. That is, how much protection does it provide to those with the least power. A society that provides only protection to the powerful is a tyranny. A legal system that provides no protection to those without power from those with power is also a tyranny. The Star Chamber became the symbol of tyrannical rule because it was the instrument of tyranny, just as our legal system is today.

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