The Great Stupidification

Posted on November 17, 2022 by thezman

If you were alive in 1985 it would have been perfectly normal for you to argue with your liberal friends about the issues of the day. This was the time of the Great Interregnum, when it was possible to have open debate about most topics. People like Peter Brimelow and Jared Taylor were allowed on television to speak their minds about topics that are now totally forbidden. There were some limits, but for the most part everyone accepted that everything can and should be discussed.

It is hard to imagine such a condition, given the world of harsh censorship that we experience today. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but daytime talk shows would regularly have people on who claimed to be fascists. The host would make sure to let the audience know they were bad guys, but they got to say their piece. Holocaust deniers and black nationalist also were part of these shows. It was entertainment, for sure, but these people still got on the big stage.

Then as now the people we call the Left in America controlled the institutions, but forty years ago there more confident. The typical liberal person was fine debating a typical conservative, because they thought they were right. Both sides figured a good dose of facts and reason would bring the other side around. The people putting Black Hebrew Israelites on daytime television were sure that once people got a look at these people, they would laugh and then forget about them.

The thing that has been lost in all of the censorship and cancellation campaigns is the panic that motivates these things. The people trying to purge the public square of normal debate are doing so out of fear. That fear comes from a lack of confidence and that is driven by a sharp decline in intellect. The Great Fear we are experiencing is mostly due to a growing intellectual darkness that is consuming the liberal class that controls the institutions of cultural production.

You can get a sense of it from the Twitter drama. Musk bought a company that had 7,500 fulltime employees and 5,500 contractors. He summarily fired half of the staff and ninety percent of the contractors. Twitter has not gone dark or failed to work properly since the mass layoffs. It appears there were sabotage efforts, but those have either failed or were found out before they could be executed. In other words, half of the people working at the firm contributed nothing.

Slowly we are getting some insider accounts of what life was like for the people inside this company and it offers an insight into the rest of the hive. Most of the “workers” did no actual work, even people employed as programmers. Instead, they spent their days playing make believe, creating things like workers co-ops and support groups for increasingly exotic identities. Twitter had become an adult daycare center that catered to the needs of the increasingly unfit.

If this was going on at Twitter, a company that had to try and make a profit, imagine what happens in places with no need to turn a profit? It explains why CNN turned into 24-hours freak show. They were collecting over a billion a year in revenue through the tax farming system that is your television service. Corporate activism threw billions more onto their coffers for political reasons. When ratings ceased to be a concern, it is no wonder Don Lemon was their featured star.

The most extreme example, the engine of wokeness in the modern age, is the American academy, which is totally disconnected from reality. Hundreds of billions pour into the system regardless of the product. Small private colleges tend to be more practical because they have to make ends meet, but even there they have found a way to get on the free money gravy train. Oberlin College is a finishing school for the mentally unstable females of bourgeois America.

The American university is awash in cash, so the administrators are free to indulge the whims of the infantilized faculty. In fact, all of the selection pressure is in favor of the sorts of people who fall for these ridiculous academic fads. Absurdity and stupidity have become moral signifiers on campus. Empiricism and probity are now seen as the sins of the white power structure. Acting white is now the greatest sin, so the inhabitants seek to produce the most antiwhite fads possible.

The great stupidification of America is obvious in the language. The great and good now salt their language with abracadabra words like disinformation. The fact that they regularly confuse disinformation with misinformation is the tell. The hair-hat on CNN wailing about disinformation on-line has no idea what the word means nor does he even care, because for him it just means forbidden. Like a chimp flinging his poo at an enemy, he flings the word disinformation at the audience.

Conspiracy theory is another popular abracadabra word. The World Economic Forum posted on Twitter a video they labeled The New World Order. This is a phrase they have been using for decades. Twitter then puts a warning on the tweet that reads, “The New World Order is a conspiracy theory which hypothesizes a secretly emerging totalitarian world government.” Clearly, the term “conspiracy theory” now simply means anything the hive mind has banned from the hive.

The hive now has lots of these words and phrases. They seem to think they just need to position one of these magic words next to the thing they fear and it will magically disappear from their presence. Alternatively, if they label someone with one of their magic words enough times, that person will disappear. The dullards at the ADL now believe if they chant “antisemitism” enough times everyone they hate, which is 70% of the population, will simply vanish.

This is not the behavior of intelligent and confident people. This is the mindset of a primitive man, terrified of the world around him, so he embraces various rituals and incantations to provide him protection from the unknown. Instead of chanting a magic phrase to invoke the gods, the modern progressive chants “racism” and “fascism” to chase away the evil spirits they are sure lurk in the shadows. This is why public debate has suddenly become impossible.

It has been said that the Eskimos have many words for snow. The reason is snow plays a huge role in their life, so they need a nuanced understanding of it. Similarly, the modern progressive has many words for outsider. The reason is they are obsessed with the imaginary wall between themselves and the outside world. The reason all of these magic words mean outsider is the obsession is the wall. The modern progressive is defined by that wall, so it is his obsession.

What appears to have happened within the managerial class is that the smart fraction is slowly being overwhelmed by the deranged faction. Twitter is a good example of how an insulated institution succumbs to bourgeois excess. This is surely happening all over government, just as it is happening in the academy. Work still gets done, but the capable are now dragging a massive sack filled with gender theorists and critical race theory workshop participants. The burden is becoming unbearable.

Twitter may be a foreshadowing of what comes next. Now that the election system has been fortified for democracy, the ruling class can begin to relax. The threat is receding so they can begin to shed the defense system of howling lunatics they accumulated over the last decades. Like Twitter hacking off its useless parts, we may see something similar across the ruling class. These useless primitives are no longer worth the cost of carrying them, so they will be cut loose.

On the other hand, Twitter could be a rearguard action. The Marching Morons solution is no longer possible, because the smart fraction within the managerial elite has already been overcome by the crazies and stupid. The people who had to be protected from criticism because they were too weak cannot be challenged now, because they are too strong, so they will now define the managerial elite. The system will collapse under the weight of its own stupidification.

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Third Rate Managers

Posted on November 15, 2022 by thezman

Starting somewhere in the middle of the last century, American corporations decided that they needed to invest in developing their managers. Historically, American business relied on nature and the tools of society to cultivate their workforce. The workers would get a basic education in the public schools. Natural talent and upbringing would sort the workforce the rest of the way. The best and brightest would naturally rise through the ranks to populate the management layer.

This was slowly replaced in the 20th century with a new model where senior management implemented programs to train their people, but also cultivate the sorts of people who would become managers. In the back quarter of the 20th century leadership training became popular in corporate America. Managers would receive the same sorts of leadership training officers in the military receive. Developing the next generation of corporate leaders is now a hundred billion dollar industry.

Because it has been normalized over several generations, no one notices the contradiction in these programs. All of the people subject to this training are in positions where no one would want leadership. These are administrative jobs filled with people tasked with following the rules. They may be required to supervise others who are also tasked with following rules. These are not positions that demand leadership, but rather roles that demand obedience.

Of course, the military has solved this contradiction. A squad leader is trained to use the materials at his disposal, including his men, to achieve the assigned objective within the rules of the operations. He is not allowed to question the rules of engagement or the objectives of his squad, but he is free to utilize the resources made available to him, plus what he can find on his own. In other words, it is leadership within the artificial construct of the military system.

Corporations borrow this general idea. The want their managers to be goal oriented and use the resources available to them to achieve the goal. The shipping manager does not select the shippers or what gets shipped, but he is given a crew, tools to box and ship items and certain goals to meet. He gets to select within a limited number of options how best to get the assigned items shipped out and the incoming items received into the shipping department.

Another way this is put is they want the shipping manager to take ownership of his department like it is his business. It is not his business and will never be his business, but they seek to trick him into acting as if it is his business. That way he will sacrifice, and perhaps encourage his people to sacrifice, in order to meet the goals laid out for him by his superiors. Like the actual owner of a business, he will act as if there is no separation between him and his work.

All of this leadership training sounds good in theory, even if it contains a central contradiction, but there is another problem. The nature of management and the nature of man tell us that the last thing a manager will want is a natural leader as one of his direct reports. That hotshot in shipping could get noticed by the big bosses and be promoted up the ladder, perhaps at the expense of his boss. Systemic pressure will always reward obedience over leadership.

It is the old line about leadership. First rate men attract first rate men, while second rate men attract third rate men. To a great degree, this is the problem that leadership training is trying to address. The people at the top, the senior managers, want to keep the pot bubbling so that they can spot the managers with potential and promote them into middle management. They do not want the natural talent boiling off because it is blocked by a ceiling of mediocrity.

The military has always suffered from this problem. Peacetime armies tend to develop a leadership class that is good at politics, but not war fighting. Wars always result in changes at the top and a restructuring of the officer class. We have seen this in the Ukraine war where both sides have changed their command structure in response to the reality on the ground. Corporations suffer the same phenomenon; except they lack war to force a pruning of the system.

The exception to this is the private company. The owner is there and he has every reason to find the best people to populate his ranks. Elon Musk has fired half the Twitter staff because they were there to serve the goals of managers, not owners, so as far as he was concerned, they were useless. The owner of the business does not need leadership training in the corporate sense, because he does not have to be trained to take ownership, as he is the owner.

This is the dilemma facing America. It is a society run by managers who have turned the owners into passive share holders. This is managerialism. Like a publicly traded company, the owners care only about returns. The overall management of society is left to a class of managers. Those managers, in addition to making sure the owners think they are getting a positive return, have the additional goal of making sure they remain the senior managers of the system.

Like senior management in a corporation or the senior officers in a peacetime army, the management class of America is primarily concerned with preserving their position at the top of the system. That requires them to always be on the lookout for people down the ranks who could be a threat. The solution to that is the solution all second rate men find and that is to promote third rate men. The managerial system that runs America selects for decreasingly talented managers out of necessity.

You see this with the Twitter situation. Elon Musk replaced a collection of ridiculous people with himself and a small team of his people. When you examine the titles of the people wiped out in the first wave of layoffs, it is clear they played no role in the profitability of the company, other than as an expense. They and their roles existed to serve the narrow interests of management. They were of no use to a genuine owner taking an active role in the running of the company.

Managerialism was on display in the past election. Mitch McConnell diverted tens of millions of dollars to safe Senate races, but starved out many contested ones, because that served his interests as the senior manager of the party. It is better for him that a third rate zombie like Murkowski returns to the Senate than a potential threat like Blake Masters gets promoted into the Senate. Instinctively, Mitch McConnell selects third rate people because it serves his interest.

That is the key to understanding the current crisis. The system selects for the sorts of people who naturally become Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi. Even the richest people are forced to select between two narrowing options. The second rate men select third rate men who in time take their place at the top, selecting for people who will be non-threatening to their position. Managerialism always ends with incompetence at the top and that fosters a culture of paranoia.

This is the inherent contradiction in managerialism. It is supposed to check the power of the ownership class, but it ends up replacing it with an increasingly incompetent management class. That management class, sensing its own vulnerability, selects for increasing incompetent people up and down the system. It is how we have a political system run by octogenarians promoting brain damaged zombies and obsequious sycophants into the highest offices in the system.

This always ends one way. In the corporate sphere, companies like Twitter either go bust or they get taken over by ownership. In the military sphere the rulers are forced to replace the politicians in the officer ranks with genuine wartime leaders. For the managerial society, the result is systemic collapse and replacement with a modified form of private rule. This is what happened with the Soviet Union. Communism was replaced with a form of oligarchy.

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Not Even Wrong

Posted on November 14, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up and it is related to the topic of the day. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door so if you do not have a subscription, get one. SubscribeStar and Substack.

A new paper on the long term impact of slavery and Jim Crow is making the rounds with the usual suspects. The paper claims to have studied the life outcomes of black descendents of freedmen, which were the blacks who were out of slavery before the start of Civil War. This group is then compared to the descendents of those who were only made free after the Civil War. The latter group has lower education, income, and wealth today than the former group.

Steve Sailer has filled up the comments section on the post about it at Marginal Revolution, telling the world it is not nature or nurture. It is both. This is a favorite hobbyhorse of the older HBD crowd. They seem to think this is a compromise their detractors will accept. This is always wrong because their detractors make moral arguments, for which there can be no compromise. For them it is always nurture and those who say otherwise are evil.

The study assumes that those who were freed at the end of the Civil War resided in states that eventually adopted Jim Crow laws. This deprived them of things like education that were available to blacks in other states. The other assumption is that blacks in the north had easy access to education, while blacks in the South were not allowed to read. This cartoon version of our social history is part of the larger morality tale that drives the civic religion of the managerial class.

The big problem with this study is that we have to assume that the freedman and the slave were cognitively equal, on average. That is a rather big assumption that is not based in the historical record. We have mountains of contemporaneous accounts suggesting that freedman were extraordinary blacks who earned their freedom in various ways. Freedman often continued in service to their former owner, but as a paid employee rather than as a slave.

There is a better than average chance that the freedman in the 19th century were significantly smarter than their enslaved counterparts. Some may have been clever enough to escape and make a life in the north. Others may have provided such great service to their owner that they were freed as a reward. In other words, the descendents of freedmen may have done better because their ancestors were smarter than the general slave population that was eventually set free.

There is also the problem with assuming that Jim Crow deprived blacks in the South of an education. We know that black illiteracy sharply declined in the first half of the twentieth century. At the start of the century, about a quarter of blacks in the South were literate, while 80% of whites could read. By 1950 the gap had closed to a few points, which says blacks were getting at least a basic education. Depending on the study, it appears that black literacy has declined since 1950.

The far larger problem is the assumption that social policies cast a shadow long after they have been eliminated. If we use 1965 as the end of Jim Crow, then we are onto the third generation who never experienced these laws. Despite the massive efforts to address the racial gaps, the gaps remain. In some cases, like literacy and illegitimacy rates, the gaps have grown larger. The whole cause and effect relationship starts to fall apart quickly when you look at the data.

Even if we can adjust for all of these factors and make a case that modern black people are suffering in some measurable way from ancient polices, so what? If the point is to compensate them in some way, as the restorative justice crowd demands, you create a moral contradiction that cannot be resolved. Compensation is a contract imposed on at least two parties to the contract. The side receiving it must accept and the side providing it must also accept.

The logic of compensation starts with the assumption that one party is at fault and caused measurable harm to the other party. Even if you wish to pretend modern black people are victims of policies that have been gone for generations, you cannot pretend that there is anyone alive today who can be held liable. The slave owners have been dead for over a century. They were all ruined in the Civil War. The creators of Jim Crow have also been dead for generations.

Then you have the problem with compensation. For it to be just, it must compensate the aggrieved party for measurable harm. There is no way to compensate someone for hurt feelings or a loss of cultural pride. This cannot be measured. Compensating someone for pain and suffering is a convoluted way of punishing the guilty party in order to discourage the offending behavior. The court fines the offending party and hands the money to the victim.

Punishing modern white people for behavior they did not do in order to prevent them from doing the thing they did not do is grotesquely immoral. In one of life’s many ironies, it is similar to the German principle of Sippenhaft. This is the claim that the clan or family shares responsibility for the crimes of a member. The difference is that there is no claim here that the group being punished had any role in the alleged crime, because the alleged crime happened generations ago.

Of course, logic and morality do not matter here. At least not the sort of logic and morality that makes civilized life possible. People cook up these papers because they serve the interests of the people who underwrite this stuff. The audience for this material needs to believe they are justified in their hatreds. Without a holy book or supernatural authority, they are left to conjure some other justification for what has evolved into an intergenerational blood feud.

The Moral Divide

Posted on November 7, 2022 by thezman

Note #1: I was on with Mike Ferris to have a causal chat about current events and the midterm elections. You can listen here. The Monday Taki post is up and it is related to the topic of the day. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door so if you do not have a subscription, get one. SubscribeStar and Substack.

Note #2: If you post a comment and it disappears or says something about it being in moderation, do not keep hitting submit. Do not change the wording thinking you will game the robots. Be patient. I check moderation several times every hour so your post will appear shortly. The best way to avoid moderation is to not link to video or images, as they always get flagged and I rarely approve them.

Every human society has a set of rules that define the society and answer the most fundamental question for any human society. You cannot have a society without first answering the question, who are we? History and biology do the heavy lifting for large human societies, while smaller societies, like social clubs, will have some sort of founding document to define the society. Of course, constitutions are not just for small scale societies. Big countries have them too.

The United States has had at least three unifying concepts. Originally, what held America together was a common religion. The founding generation were English people who practiced a common form of Christianity. Subsequently, the country was held together by republican virtue. A civic religion based around the liberal principles in the Bill of Rights. This was replaced in the 20th century with the melting pot idea, where diverse people emerge from the crucible of liberty as one people.

Throughout our history, in every framing of American unity, a set of principles has defined the morality of American society. First and foremost, Americans have the unfettered right to speak their minds, even to those in positions of authority, without fear of retribution. Free speech, the freedom of belief, the freedom to assemble and the freedom to do all of these to petition the government for the redress of grievances is the first principle of American morality.

There are other moral principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The right of self-defense, even from the government, is in the Second Amendment. The Fourth Amendments prevents the state from spying on citizens. The Fifth Amendment prevents double jeopardy and compulsory self-incrimination. The things we think of as our rights are enumerated in the Bill of Right, but in practice these are the moral principles we consider to be beyond questioning.

It is those rights in the First Amendment that are the most sacred to Americans, as they are the cornerstone of American morality. The right to believe what you want to believe, say those beliefs out loud and organize fellow believers to promote your beliefs is the encapsulation of the American identity. It is not just how Americans see themselves, but how the rest of the world defines American identity. The rest of the world may not like what we say, but they envy our right to say it.

This is what makes the assaults on Kanye West and Kyrie Irving important. These two are not simply getting jeered by detractors. There is a highly organized effort to destroy their lives and strip from them their most basic right. In the case of Irving, he has been told that he must publicly condemn the movie he promoted and denounce everyone involved in it. This is what the Red Guards did to their victims. They were forced to publicly confess and wear dunce caps in public.

There is also the race issue. Black people in America get a free pass on speech, even when their speech offends common decency. Kanye West promotes himself as a Christian, but he got rich in a business built on peddling vulgarity, violence, drug taking and criminality. Everyone has been forced to use euphemisms in order to discuss crime, because blacks get special treatment. Here we are, however, with two famous black people forced into a humiliation ritual.

What this suggests is the bigots opposed to this core moral tenet, the right to speak freely and without fear of retribution, have removed themselves from what we have always considered the fundamental morality of America. Bigot is the correct word, as a bigot is someone obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices and intolerant of those outside their group. This is the factionalism that the Founders warned was incompatible with a republic.

Kanye West and Kyrie Irving are ridiculous people whose heads are full of nonsense, but these are the people who have always been the proof case. In our society, we tolerate ridiculous people with nonsense in their heads. To paraphrase Jefferson, we try to set them right to the facts. If they remain unpersuaded, we persuade everyone else to ignore them. From time to time, the ridiculous guy spouting nonsense turns out to be right and we are all better for it.

That is unlikely to be the case here, but it is not the point. What this incident reveals is that there is a moral divide. There is no middle ground when it comes to these moral principles that define American civilization. There is no ADL exemption to our moral code that permits this. There is no moral scold clause that permits the SPLC to organize an economic war on Elon Musk. These people have chosen to remove themselves from our common morality.

The moral separation is at the very heart of American identity. The Declaration of Independence is a moral document that spells out how the colonies and Great Britain no longer shared the same moral space. Because the colonies had evolved a new moral code that was different from that of the mother country, it was necessary that the colonies break free from the mother country. Two people who lack a common more code must separate from one another.

What normal Americans now face is the dilemma imagined by Hans Hermann-Hoppe when thinking through the challenges of a libertarian society. Hoppe has tried to address a well known contradiction in libertarian theory. How can a libertarian society deal with people who embrace socialism or monarchism? If your principles prevent the use of coercion, what do you do when members of a libertarian society embrace something contrary to libertarianism?

The starting place of every human society is that set of moral principles that answers the most fundament question for every human society, who are we? What must be done when a segment of society decides they are no longer us? This is what the bigots are presenting to the rest of us. They refuse to uphold our morality, the thing that defines us as a people, so they are in effect making war on us. How should we defend ourselves from this assault on our very nature?

Storytelling

Posted on November 3, 2022 by thezman

Imagine you are presented with evidence of some sort, maybe pictures of a crime scene or some sort of accident. You see all of the physical evidence and you are given three stories to explain what you see. Each version is presented by a person who comes into the room to give their theory of the event. What we know about human nature tells us that you will agree with the best storyteller. Even if his story requires some leaps of logic.

Humans have been telling each other stories since we acquired language. Much of our social activity is story telling. When you go to a party, everyone there tells each other stories about their lives, their experiences, current events and so on. Some people are better at storytelling than others. These people tend to get invited to more social events, because they are entertaining and therefore pleasing. Even if they polish the apple a bit, people still like a good storyteller.

This is most obvious in politics. Ronald Reagan was famous for his short, pithy stories he would tell audiences on the stump. Sometimes they were just funny and other times they had a point. In the latter case, that point had something to do with some larger political point he was making. In the former case the story relaxed the audience and made them more open to his pitch. A man who can tell a good story is always someone we feel we can trust, even if we disagree with him.

Storytelling can be a highly effective form of logic. A persuasive storyteller will start with a set of objective facts. These are things that even a skeptical audience will accept as being true. Then the speaker provides a narrative to explain those facts and tie them to some cause, like a person or group of people. The narrative is presented in such a way that it appears to be the simplest and most likely explanation. For the listener, there is not obvious reason to dispute the conclusion.

This is a form of abductive reasoning. The conclusion is not proven in the sense that all other explanations have been eliminated. It is not proven in a scientific sense in that the causes are demonstrated to result in the stated conclusion. There is some doubt that the causal relationship is true, but it seems to be true and there is no obvious proof that it is not true. If the narrative is presented by a persuasive and charismatic speaker, then the listener is disinclined to question the conclusion.

The writer Ben Novak wrote a book explaining how Adolf Hitler was able to use the power of narrative to persuade the German people. For those looking for the short version, Greg Johnson reviews it here. The key to Hitler’s success as a politician was his ability to reframe events in such a way that changed how people viewed those events and the people involved in those events. Hitler changed the way in which people interacted with their world through his speeches.

Getting back to the example of three people trying to explain images from what looks like a crime scene, the reason you will go with “the best explanation” is that your brain has an idea of what the best answer is before you hear the stories. If you hear three dry presentations, then you will pick the one that matches the one in your head. On the other hand, if one is presented by a great storyteller and he takes you on a journey to an entirely new conclusion, your mental model will change.

Take a step back and the three great ideologies of the last century were basically narratives that framed how people experienced politics. The communist narrative was a story of class struggle. The workers versus the capitalists. The liberal democratic narrative was the story of political struggle. The people versus the powerful interests that rule every society. Fascism was the story of national struggle, the people versus the internationalists who run the global economy.

The point of all this is that human beings have evolved to understand the world through a mental framework. We have a conception of how the world works and we process information through that framework. That framework is the product of our upbringing, our experiences and the culture in which we live. It is not a permanent part of our consciousness that forms and remains static. It evolves and therefore it can be altered by new experiences, like a great story from a great speaker.

We see this in the current election cycle. Gavin Newsome, the governor of California, says his party is in trouble because they are “getting crushed on narrative.” It is not the economy or culture; their problem is they have not presented a “compelling alternative narrative” to the Republicans. No one can tell you what the Republican narrative is, but he is sure it must be better. How else can one explain why voters appear to be moving against the Democrats next week?

This incredible op-ed in the Financial Times lays the blame for inflation at the feet of the storytellers, rather than economic policy. You see, corporations are taking advantage of inflation to raise prices higher than necessary. They can do this because “the power of storytelling has conditioned consumers to accept price rises.” You see, “consumers seem to be buying stories that seem to justify price increases, but which really serve as cover for profit margin expansion.”

What those two examples suggest is that the great promoters of liberal democracy think the tenets of liberal democracy are nonsense. The politicians think people are morons who will fall for a good story, rather than vote their interests. The economists think consumers are not swayed by prices but by irrational beliefs. The premise of liberal democracy is that people understand their interests. If given the chance in a democratic system or a market economy, they will express those interests.

In reality, people will go along with that which keeps them in good standing with their fellows, even if it is against their interests. It is why a good storyteller can be so effective in liberal politics. He can get the crowd nodding along. Each member sees those around him agreeing to the pleasing story. Even if the story is clearly against his interests, he will justify nodding along with it. After all, every human brain has a narrative of sacrifice built into it at a young age.

The Revolutionary Potato

Posted on November 2, 2022 by thezman

In his essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Karl Marx famously described the French peasantry as a sack of potatoes. This was in response to calls from fellow socialists and anarchists to focus on radicalizing the peasants. At the time this was a big topic of debate among European radicals. One camp thought the peasants held great revolutionary potential as a class, while the other camp thought the urban workers were the only revolutionary class.

The title of the essay refers to the Coup of 18 Brumaire in which Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in France, linking it to the French coup of 1851 in which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte assumed dictatorial powers. In addition to the topic of the peasantry, Marx was discussing current events in the context of the history of revolution in France and the future of the socialist revolution. That last bit was the main concern of his intended audience of socialist radicals.

As far as the peasantry of France, Marx observed that they formed an enormous mass whose members lived in similar conditions but “without entering into manifold relations with each other.” As small independent farmers, “their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse.” These small farmers lived independent from one another, despite being organized into villages. In this way they were like a sack of potatoes.

What Marx was getting at was the sense of identity among these small landowners versus the sense of identity among the urban working class. Unlike the proletariat, the peasant had a sense of independence that defined his relationship with his fellow peasants and his relationship with the state and society. The peasants lacked the sense of togetherness and commiseration of the industrial workers, as they did their work as individuals for their own purposes.

There was something else that made the peasants a tough nut to crack as far as the socialist revolution was concerned. Because they owned something, they had something to lose, which made them risk adverse. Unlike the urban worker, the peasant was unwilling to break with tradition or custom. According to Marx, this is why they supported strong men like Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis-Napoléon. A strong state was good for their narrow interests.

This insight into identity has remained a part of Marxist thinking to this day. The post-Marx culturalists that now run the West are always scanning the fields for identity groups that they view as anti-democratic, which is just the modern way of saying counter revolutionary. People make the mistake of thinking individualism is the opposite of collectivism, but that is false. The real enemy of Marxist collectivism is the alternative identity group, rooted outside of economics.

Putting that aside, the Marxist understanding of the 19th century peasant is useful in this age for understanding the revolutionary potential of normie. Like the peasant, the suburban white guy remains a frustrating element in politics. He understands that he is under assault from inhuman forces but refuses to band together with his fellows in order to defend his interests. Instead, he spouts the morality of the enemy, while hoping a hero arrives to save him from the bad guys.

This was most obvious with Donald Trump. The bad guys clearly understood what Trump could represent, which is why they despised him. He could radicalize normie, they thought, and get him thinking collectively, but in a way that would oppose the interests of the narrow ruling elite. It is why they insisted he was Hitler, despite the absurdity of the claim. Like Hitler, they saw Trump as a radical alternative to the radical assault on normal society.

What Trump represented to normie was the low-risk savior. He would be their Napoleon, but he would not ask anything from them. They could continue to grill, watch sports and consume the cultural products of the regime, but Trump would make sure their small plot in the suburbs was safe. From the perspective of normie, Trump was the low-risk defense against the predation of the people they saw on their televisions burning down cities and assaulting people.

Like the 19th century French peasants Marx observed, the modern suburban peasant is atomized and isolated. He lives in a manufactured house. A dozen or so houses make his neighborhood. A hundred or so houses makes his development, always named after what was destroyed to build it. A collection of developments makes for a socio-economic zone important only to the people who sell them product. The suburban peasant is a potato in sack.

Unlike the French peasant, the suburban peasant has been stripped of his cultural, ethnic and moral identity. His church is the television and his traditions are limited to whatever he can manage among the strangers that make up his world. His spiritual fulfillment comes from playing make believe on-line. The 19th century French peasant had the stability of his environment. He stood where his ancestors stood. The modern peasant stands wherever he is told.

The main difference between the 19th century peasant and the modern suburban peasant is communications. The French peasant could go weeks or months without speaking to neighbors. The suburban peasant cannot go five minutes without information bombarding his senses. The same information storm intended to keep the suburban peasant suspended within a solution of information, often insulates him from his conditioning, resulting in radicalization.

Marx was right about the French peasants. They were never much use for the revolution, something the Bolsheviks would eventually learn as well. For the modern dissident, there may be some portion of the suburban peasantry that has radical potential, even if he is immune to direct radicalization. The phenomenon of normie going from zero to eleven on the radicalization scale after an incidental encounter with forbidden material is well known.

This subset of the suburban peasantry, the alternative to normie, is what the sociologist Donald Warren identified as the Middle American Radical in the book The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation. These are people who defy conventional political framing, so they are often ignored. They are noticed when a Pat Buchanan, a Ross Perot or a Donald Trump comes along. It is why all efforts are made to funnel them back into the chute of conventional politics.

In the end, the portion of the suburban peasantry called normie will have little use for the cause, but there is a portion of the peasantry that has potential. They see the futility of trying to exercise power within the system, but they lack the structure to develop into an alternative moral order that challenges the system. The guy with the Gadsden flag on his house is a potato in a sack. The neighbor who reads old books and no longer has a cable sub is a normie with revolutionary potential.

Affirmative Musings

Posted on November 1, 2022 by thezman

The upcoming midterm elections are sucking most of the oxygen out of the newsroom and what is left is consumed by the usual drama, but the big story looming on the horizon is the Supreme Court race cases. The court has been hearing oral arguments on two related cases. One involves Harvard’s anti-Asian admission policy and the other involves North Carolina’s antiwhite admission policies. Both schools are fighting to maintain their race based admissions system.

The makeup of the court and prior statements by current justices on the matter strongly suggest these polices are in trouble. In fact, it has been clear that the court has been skeptical of affirmative action for a long time, but the thinking was that legislatures would eventually solve the problem on their own. There is no way to square these policies with equality before the law, if the law says you cannot discriminate based on race, even in private matters.

People who follow the court have thought for a long time that the Supreme Court has been waiting for the right case to junk the whole regime. Now it has two cases and oral arguments suggest the court is looking to do something dramatic. Even the regime toadies on the bench expressed skepticism. The lawyers defending these policies are struggling to justify them. In this corrupt age, one can never be sure of anything, but it does look like affirmative action is doomed.

Most people assume that the court in this area has been struggling to balance equality before the law with the moral claims about race. These policies were based in good intensions to right past wrongs, but they slammed into the basic principle of equality before the law. Punishing someone alive today for things someone long dead may or may not have done is patently immoral. It is a blood libel. It is the central contradiction of what the progressives call restorative justice.

There is some truth to this but the real issue the court will eventually face with regards to this issue is the private versus the public. Where is the line between what a citizen can do as a private citizen and the duties of every citizen. In other words, where does private action end and public duty begin? Put another way, where does one’s public duty give way to private preference? This is an age old question that every human society must solve in some way.

In the case of racial discrimination, no one thinks you should be required to date outside of your race or have friends from other races. On the other hand, it is considered immoral for a restaurant to deny service on the basis of race. If you put up a sign that reads, “No Asians”, you will go to jail. Why is the first example entirely acceptable but the last is not acceptable? Why must you invite people you do not like into your business, but you can bar them from your home?

The answer, in part, has always been that the business is a public accommodation, but that was simply a way to avoid the issue. This bit of civic theology is not applied to most other areas of business. The tech companies and banks actively discriminate against white people and promote antiwhite bigots. The two universities defending their race based admissions proudly discriminate against whites and Asians in the most public of public accommodations in America.

Clearly, the public accommodation principal is a farce. This is why the court decision next spring to junk affirmative action is just the beginning. The court will probably say that the state cannot discriminate based on race. Harvard is a private college, but they get government grants and their students get government loans, so current law makes them a government entity. At least it makes them subject to the same limitations that the law places on government institutions.

Harvard could simply stop taking government money. Religious schools have taken this road to avoid anti-Christian discrimination. Hillsdale College famously foregoes government money. Harvard could do the same and then fight this fight in the courts all over again, but this time as a private entity. The question at that point would be the question at the core of all of this. Where is the line between private rights and public duties with regards to these moral questions?

If the court were to say that a private college is free to select students by whatever criteria they choose, then they would have overturned the entirety of antidiscrimination laws, including things like hate speech and hate crimes. On the other hand, if they extended the prohibition against discrimination to the private sphere, then that would mean no one can express their preferences in private. Your dinner party would be subject to claims of discrimination.

This gets back to the public accommodation issue. Is a private college really a public accommodation when it is designed for a narrow purpose like religion? How about private clubs, which have been banned due to discrimination? Would a male-only club be allowed if it is private? At some point, a clear line has to be drawn between what is private and what is public. The real issue in these race cases is where does that line exist and how best to codify it in the law.

This raises a much larger issue, in that liberal democracy relies on morality as the spring to motivate the citizens. Aristocratic systems rely upon the desire to attain greater rank and privilege, bestowed from above. Authoritarian systems rely on fear of the people in charge of the state. A republic relies on the willingness to put the interests of the institutions ahead of private interests. Liberal democracy relies on the submission to a common morality.

If there is a line between the private and the public, it rules out a commonly held moral code to which all must submit. After all, simply going along with the latest thing to avoid trouble is different from embracing the new morality. We see this all the time with the various social fads. Being indifferent to antisemitism, for example, is unacceptable because it suggests you may not be enthusiastically opposed to it. You have to show your opposition in a public way.

If all of a sudden, we have a clear line between the public and private, it means you can oppose public morality in private, but play along when out in public. This makes public morality a polite fiction. The fact is morality only works if people either believe it or fear falling outside of it. One does not do the right thing when no one is looking if one does not think it is the right thing or fear it may be the right thing. Simply put, acknowledging the private sphere undermines democracy.

That, of course, leads to another problem. If all of a sudden, colleges have to use objective criteria to select students, everyone knows what will happen. What happens when fire departments and police departments are forced to follow suit? Even if they fashion a way around it, the implication is clear. It means that all men may be equal in the eyes of God, but they are not equal. Some are smarter, stronger, bigger, faster and this tends to track with sex and race.

The entirety of the affirmative action regime rests on the assertion that people are amorphous blobs that can be shaped into anything. Overturning affirmative action exposes this nonsense to public view. All of a sudden, the quest for diversity is nothing more than a private preference masquerading as a public good. It has no basis in reality and often contradicts reality. Another piece of the liberal democratic moral superstructure is yanked away.

No one should be deceived into thinking the court will swing a wrecking ball through the liberal democratic order. Even if they overturn the concept of affirmative action, which seems likely based on the current court, all they will have done is tip over the first domino in the process. Even so, it does suggest we may be nearing an end point to the last surviving ideology of the 20th century. Like the others, its internal contradictions will eventually succumb to the realty of the human condition.

Times Are Changing

Posted on October 31, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up and this week it is somewhat related to the topic in this post but from a different angle. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green doo so if you do not have a subscription, get one. SubscribeStar and Substack.

Last week the people in charge of Penn State University decided to get in the way-back machine and relive the alt-right days. They invited onto campus a bogeyman so that the usual suspects could engage in performative protesting. They invited internet performers Gavin McInnis and Alex Stein to talk to a student group. A group of entitled children was then invited to throw a tantrum outside the event. Eventually, the school cancelled the event for security reasons.

The only people interested in any of it was the regime media that has yet to find a new set of bogeymen to replace those from the Trump years. McInnis went along with it because it is all he has at this point. His edgy right-wing guy act fell apart with the Proud Boys fiasco and dissidents have no interest in him. Alex Stein is trying to be the Matthew Lesko of ambush comedy, so this provided him with a chance to do his act in front of some purple faced coeds for the streaming audience.

The main takeaway from the event is that the white supremacist bogeyman act has run its course and the regime has found nothing to replace it. As a result, the usual suspects are resurrecting old villains like McInnes. The term “Proud Boys” is still something of a dog whistle for the crazies, even though the rest of the world lost interest in the whole thing years ago. It is sort of like how Nixon remained a villain for the crazies well into the 1980’s, after the world had moved onto Reagan.

Of course, the point of these manufactured dramas is for the people running the college campus to pretend they are in a state of emergency. The college campus is the safest place on the planet, but the inhabitants need to feel they are under siege. The forces of darkness are closing in so they have to heroically defend their abracadabra word from the enemy of the abracadabra word. They stage these events so that they can have a few minutes where their fantasies seem real.

If it were anything other than a performance, they could easily handle these things by either not hosting the speakers or putting an end to the protests. There is no reason for a college campus to have these sorts of people on to talk to students. In theory, at least, the students are there to learn, not hear hacky gags from an aging comedian and an internet prankster. Not only are these two not bringing anything to the campus, their act is easily accessible on-line.

On the other hand, the campus could end the protest business by expelling those who create trouble. The students are there to learn and this event was a good time for them to learn that it is immoral to prevent people from speaking or prevent others from hearing a speaker. Expel a few of the troublemakers and the protest culture comes to a screeching halt. This is a state college. These are not future leaders. They are there to get a credential in order to get a middle-class job.

What these sorts of events amount to are something like the historical reenactments around events of the Civil War or Revolutionary War. Historical reenactors enjoy learning the fine details of the period. They spend hours getting their costumes right and working with others in the subculture. Another part of it is escapism. They get to spend the weekend pretending to be a person in another era, an era they find more interesting than the current era.

That is what we have seen on campus for half a century. The long march through the institutions put the old protestors in charge, so they set about recreating the events of their youth, except this time they were the cool administrators. Unlike the squares running the place in their youth, they were down with the cause, at least until something got broken or someone got hurt. Decade after decade this farcical game of make believe gets rebooted on the college campus.

That said, this nonsense may have run its course. One of the weird side effects of the Covid panic is it broke the pattern. For two years no one was allowed on campus, so they could not stage these dramas. The attention whores that agree to play the bogeyman role for these shows have had to move onto other things. Penn State was left with what can charitably be called D-list bogeymen. Instead of playing weddings they jumped at this campus gig.

There is also a growing regime fatigue. That is another consequence of Covid and the events of the 2020 election. The endless lying from the media has shifted public opinion away from this sort of drama. When people thought the campus was simply biased, they could justify people trying to get on campus to counter the bias. In a world where people use the term “regime” and assume everything that comes from official authority is a lie, these dramas make no sense.

Of course, the January 6 pogrom has changed minds as well. In a world where the state will arrest you for being attacked by regime agents posing as protestors, going onto the street to speak your mind is a fool’s errand. Even the flag and costume crowd has figured out that they cannot march around in public. This leaves the regime elements on their own, which makes for a boring performance. Without a bogeyman to attack, they are left to stare at one another.

All of this points to a slight maturing of dissident politics. Guys like McInnis are not getting attention anymore. He staged his own arrest and the response was mostly indifference at his pathetic play for attention. Similarly, more and more dissidents are simply tuning out of regime media. These dramas only work if there is an audience and that audience is drying up. Slowly, it seems, dissidents are disconnecting from the machine and accepting the new reality.

Managerial Reality

Posted on October 19, 2022 by thezman

There is a Hollywood plot where a troubled ventriloquist either begins to think his dummy is real or the dummy has actually come to life. The dummy then begins to direct the ventriloquist to do terrible things like kill people. Another take on this is where actors in some sort of fantasy performance get sucked into what appears to be a real life version of the fantasy world. The underlying premise is that playing make believe for too long causes one to lose his grasp of reality.

There is some truth to this concern for unreality. Extremely rich or famous people often cut themselves off from the world. In the case of the rich guy, it simply becomes a haven from the hassles of the real world. For the famous person it is the one place they are free of the fans. Over time they become increasing detached from reality or overindulge in drugs and alcohol. Howard Hughes is the famous rich guy example, while Elvis and Michael Jackson are famous people examples.

The French Revolution provides a more general example. The king was certainly divorced from reality, while clearly not insane. His actions were rational, based on the rules of the world in which he lived. The same can be said for the aristocracy that was competing with him for power. The trouble is that world was separate from the reality of France at the time. The Ancien Régime was operating in an unreality, based in rules that were quickly being washed away by events.

Of course, the comparison between this age and that age is common on this side of the great divide because of the general weirdness of the managerial class. Normal people, regardless of their income, are concerned with things like rising prices and the dramatic spike in violent crime. Meanwhile, the people running for office are telling you that their penis is imaginary and climate change is our greatest challenge. “Let them eat cake” sounds reasonable in comparison.

What is not well known or at least not discussed in the history books, is if the Ancien Régime invested a lot of time in story telling. That is, did they spend their days spinning tales that confirmed their version of reality? Were there people responsible for telling the important people that the peasants were running out of steam and soon they would fall back in line? Did the official information guy at court tell everyone that the unrest in the countryside was transitory?

It sounds ridiculous but look around the mass media. So much of what passes for the news is just a form of wish-casting. The stories, opinions and analysis are all designed to buck up the ruling class in the face of disconfirmation. When inflation began to rage, they were falling all over themselves to preach the gospel of transitory. It was obviously ridiculous but they wanted to believe it, so everyone in the managerial class put on the transitory face and explained how it was all transitory.

The last two years has been an elaborate game of Covid charades. It seems like a million years ago, but at the start they were claiming the hospitals were overrun and people were dropping dead in the street. None of that was true. In fact, the opposite of that was true with regards to hospitals. We wrecked our medical system because the managerial class believed the scary stories they were telling one another. In retrospect, the whole thing was a deadly and expensive farce.

We are seeing a replay of this with the Ukraine. For close to a year the media has been brewing up one whopper after another about the war. A batch of fake stories are released about Ukrainian babushkas destroying Russian tanks with household products and Western capitals erupt in celebration. According to the storytellers, Russia has been running out of missiles since February. The whole thing looks like a deranged game of make believe to console the managerial class.

This is not a new phenomenon. Way back in the Obama years, the Democrats passed a big spending bill to fund “shovel ready projects.” That was in the winter and by spring they had all the stuff ready for a big party called the summer of recovery. They expected to have Obama roam the countryside, standing in front of construction sites for new bridges while he talked about his great polices. Their narrative said he would be the new FDR, along with the new Lincoln and new Jesus.

They were so sure their stories were true they spent tens of millions on materials for the expected rallies. Things like signs and t-shirts with the “Summer of Recovery” printed on them in Team Obama colors. They were using the slogan into the early summer, despite the reality on the ground. It was as if they thought they could will their preferred version of reality into existence if they just pretended it was happening. The script said it would happen, so it was going to happen.

This has been the pattern for a long time now. Someone in the managerial class creates a pleasing narrative. It catches on and before long everyone is repeating the pleasing narrative in public. Experts are brought in to explain why this pleasing narrative is realty and then other experts are brought in to present proof. It is as if they think that once everyone agrees that the pleasing narrative is reality, then reality has no choice but to submit to the new moral consensus.

Again, Ukraine provides examples. A month ago, the Ukrainians launched a series of counter offensives. The mass media was instantly full of stories about how the Russian army was collapsing and the Ukrainians would soon be in Moscow. Retired generals were brought in to confirm the story. Analysts with funny names wrote columns about how the war has turned decisively against Russia. Everyone was sure it had to be true because they believed it was true.

Getting back to that old Hollywood plot, the managerial class seems to be in a pattern where they create a fantasy and then the fantasy convinces them it is real. Like the ventriloquist who believes his dummy has come to life, the narrative makers seem to be sure their alternative reality is more real than reality. They have come to believe that a good narrative is something like an incantation. If it is repeated enough, the narrative bends reality to fit the plot line of the narrative.

The assumption is that the endless telling of whoppers is to shape public opinion, but that is just a story normal people want to believe. No one in charge gives a tinker’s damn what the people think about anything. There is no evidence that public opinion has any impact on public policy. After the next election, all of those new faces in office will melt away revealing the same old faces behind them. Public opinion will have changed nothing about Washington.

A better reason for the explosion of narrative realty in the managerial class is that this is how the managerial elite controls the system. The people with complicated titles and inscrutable qualifications control the vast leviathan that is the modern managerial state using tales of what lies just over the horizon. The millions in the system, like ants in a colony, response and act accordingly. The leviathan moves in the desired direction with the help of a million administrative hands.

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Surf & Turf

Posted on October 18, 2022 by thezman

Since ancient times, the great civilizations have been divided into two distinct categories, land powers and sea powers. The best example is the rivalry between Athens and Sparta that culminated in the Peloponnesian wars. The Peloponnesian League was led by Sparta, the dominant land power. The Delian League was led by Athens, the dominant sea power. The great ancient conflict still casts a shadow over the West because the dynamic is still with us.

To be a great sea power requires different human capital than what is required of a land power, which makes them cultural opposites. As a result, they look at war differently and they fight their wars for different reasons. Sea powers tend to be driven by profit while land powers tend to be driven by cultural forces. Culture and economics play a role for both, but the priorities tend to be reversed. The sea power is moved to act by money while the land power is moved by cultural issues.

The Athenians were arguably the first financial empire. They built their power through shrewd business relations with the other city-states. The alliances that were established to fight the Persians quickly became a business for Athens. They provided security while their “allies” provided money and men for the ships. Their aggression toward the other city-states was driven by opportunities for trade and profit. The Athenian empire was as much about business as Athenian culture.

The Spartans, on the other hand, were not driven by profit. Their willingness to join the rest of Greece against the Persians was purely in defense. When the Athenians wanted to take the fight to the Persians after the Greeks had successfully driven the Persians back across the sea, the Spartans were not interested. Their eventual war with the Athenians was purely defensive from their point of view. It is probably why they chose not to obliterate Athens after they won the war.

We see the same dynamic today. The Global American Empire is the new Delian League, spreading democracy to the world at gun point. The Russian Federation is the new Peloponnesian League. The Cold War was often cast the same way, but it did not work as an analogy. The communists were just as obsessed with spreading their form of utopian politics as the West. This time it works as the Russians are at war with an ideological and financial empire.

The clash of cultures is clear. The GAE just assumed the Russians would do what the GAE always does in war, which is systematically destroy the civilization of the opposing culture with air power. The West is still puzzled as to why the Russians never unleashed shock and awe at the start of the war. Further, the West concluded that the incremental approach was due to a lack of resources. The GAE is a sea power so it thinks like a sea power and fights like one as well.

The Russian Federation is a land power, so putting on a big symbolic light show to start a war makes no sense to them. Sea powers move like the sea, while land powers move like the land, slowly and incrementally. This is why the Russians had not bothered to put together a public relations campaign for the West. They saw no point in it as their purpose was to force the Ukrainians to submit. That happens at the bargaining table and on the battlefield, not on Twitter.

Another contrast in the two sides is in the weapons. The Russian have the best air defenses in the world. They have the best artillery in the world. The GAE has the best air force in the world and the best navy in the world. This contrast is due to the assumptions of both sides. The Russians assume their great wars will be defensive while the GAE assumes its great wars will be offensive. The two contrasting worldviews results in two entirely different military postures.

This contrast in warfighting is turning up in the weapons. Land powers assume long wars of attrition so they plan accordingly. That means squeezing the maximum from the resources available. The Russians are famous for making cheap, reliable weapons that can be used by anyone. The Kalashnikov is the prime example. The new drones the Russians are now using follow the same pattern. They are cheap, easy to operate and extremely effective against enemy targets.

Sea powers have to assume short wars. You can only keep a fleet at sea for so long so you have to inflict maximum damage up front. A naval battle is not going to last months like a land battle, so you need to prepare for the short haul. In the old days, ships were expensive, complex weapons. Today, the jet fighter is the cutting edge of technology and human organization. All of America’s best weapons are complex systems that require lots of training to utilize.

The flip side of the time preference aspect is that sea powers can take a loss and bounce back quickly, while land powers take time to recover. The GAE suffered a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, but quickly shook it off. The loss in Vietnam stung for a few years, but then the war machine was back in business. In contrast, the Russians needed decades to overcome the failure in Afghanistan. It has only been in the last decade that they have moved past it.

What that means for the Ukraine is that barring a collapse of the EU or the global financial system, the GAE will shake of this failure too. Whatever is left of Ukraine will be ignored and the GAE will turn its sights to some new opponent. Land powers must always be on defense, because it is their nature. Sea power must always be on offense, because it is their nature. That means when one war ends a new war must start, regardless of how the prior war ended.

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