Brain Dead Idiots

Posted on June 27, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Hour Is Late

Posted on June 26, 2023 by thezman

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Crisis Of Trust

Posted on June 20, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Juneteenth Musings

Posted on June 19, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death Of The Hired Man Society

Posted on June 14, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Category Archives: Culture