The Market Devil

Posted on June 23, 2022 by thezman

In the movie The Usual Suspects, one of the characters says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” It is a clever line that gets to the heart of the human condition. When people have a clear understanding of right and wrong, most of life’s dangers are avoidable. In the context of the film, it turns out to be a perfect summary of what happens to the main characters. They are undone by their unwillingness to accept clear moral boundaries.

A similar thing can be said of this age. The greatest trick democracy ever pulled was convincing the world that the marketplace exists. Much of what ails the modern West is this naïve belief that the world is controlled by market forces. The invisible hand, guided by the desires of the majority, picks the winners and losers. Those who vex or offend the majority will eventually be laid low by the market. Those on the side of the majority will be raised up as the winner.

What is truly remarkable about this belief is not that people buy into the surface logic but that they keep believing it despite the results. To use another movie idea, this belief is the forever blue pill. Just when people begin to see reality, someone comes along with a handful of blue pills labeled “marketplace” and the people gobble them down to the cries of “go woke, go broke” or some other ridiculous claim about the beauty and majesty of the great god called the marketplace.

The power of this belief is best seen in the entrainment world, where people channel their passions into entertainment franchises. The popular YouTube movie critic, The Critical Drinker, has this bit about the Star Wars franchise. Despite being well aware of the politics motivating the people in Hollywood, a big part of his act is in identifying “the message” in films and television shows, he is baffled as to why the people behind this popular franchise are forcing their politics on their fans.

The underlying assumption of his critique is that the marketplace is a real thing and it will one day punish the people ruining his favorite franchise. Yet, by any objective standard, the franchise was ruined a long time ago. The second set of films was a clear cash grab and the politically charged nonsense that followed looks like a critical studies department at a fifth rate state college exploded on film. The franchise has been a two decade long, carny trash political sermon.

In those two decades, the franchise has grossed eight billion dollars for a rough profit of seven billion dollars. The most grotesquely political bits of the franchise, the last five films, has netted over four billion in profits. In other words, the more they jam their carny trash morality in the faces of the fans, the more money they make. The clear lesson here is it does not matter what they do. The next Star Wars could literally be Disney executives raping kids and it would make billions.

Another aspect of the false consciousness is the assumption that the people making entrainment product are motivated by money. Because money comes from the magic of the marketplace, the desire for money must lead to a desire to please as many customers as possible. If this is true, logic then says that the degenerate politics being pushed in these films pleases the marketplace. After all, replacing the normal stuff with abnormal stuff has been a boon to the franchise.

The believer in the marketplace cannot accept this so he remains baffled. The truth is the people making our entertainment product are motivated by money, but they know it does not come from magical market forces. It comes from the people who control society and impose their morality on the rest of us. Please the feminist orcs from HR and you get a fat paycheck. In other words, in a democratic society it is not the marketplace but the moral space that decides.

Entertainment has always been about public morality. Look back at the earliest days of filmmaking and this is clear. The very first films were efforts to undermine the prevailing morality in an effort to insert a new moral code. The communists and fascists were trailblazers in filmmaking, inventing things that are still with us today, because they saw the power of entertainment to shape public morality. Go back even further and the Greeks used theater to control public morality in Athens.

All of this points to the fact that the marketplace is a creation of man and like all of man’s creations, it is controlled by those with power. After all, the marketplace is simply a set of rules and those rules must be enforced. If the parties to a transaction have no fear of the rules, they have no reason to abide them. Enforcement of the rules must come from a party with power over both sides of the transaction. It is fear of that power which makes the marketplace possible.

The people making movies and television shows understand this because the people underwriting their projects remind them of it all the time. The near monopoly held by the big content makers is possible only because people with power have shaped the rules so that a small number of players control the industry. The movie makers fear and respect that power, so they always seek to please it. The reward is a lifestyle beyond anything normal people can imagine.

This clearly applies to democracy itself. The overwhelming majority of white people have been voting Republican for decades. In that time the Republican Party has moved steadily away from the interests of its voters. In fact, they have increasingly embraced policies explicitly at odds with the interests of their voters. They have now reached the point where they are mocking their idiot voters for trusting them. After all, what are you going to do? Vote libertarian?

Despite the obvious, people continue to vote in the belief that the marketplace will eventually punish these people. If a majority of voters elect people who hold the opinions and values of the voters, the government has to yield. People often say that Christianity has no future because people no longer accept the supernatural, but this November’s election will prove otherwise. People trust the supernatural more than ever, but they now call their god the marketplace.

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Thinking About The Possible

Posted on June 22, 2022 by thezman

A popular setup for the cooking shows is a gameshow format in which the contestants are forced to cook a meal using the wrong ingredients. Maybe they have to compete for ingredients and all of them end up with a partial list of required items. Maybe they are given wacky items and tasked with making a traditional dish. The secret ingredient is aardvark noses and the dish is chicken cacciatore. The entertainment is in watching them solve the puzzle in amusing ways.

The underlying truth of these shows is that a dish is not just the sum of its ingredients or just the skill of the chef. The dishes that are famous in our culture are the combination of ingredients in the right proportions, assembled by people with the skill and cultural understanding to create the dish. A Spanish guy who grew up on paella knows how it is supposed to look and taste. He may be able to get the same effect using ingredients not traditionally used in the dish.

This is the truth of politics. The old line about politics, that it is the art of the possible, depends on the same set of assumptions. To get something passed through a legislature, you have to get a majority. Outside of symbolic items like momentary resolutions, this means finding a compromise that a majority can accept. Put another way, in order to get a bill passed the ingredients for it must exist. Then you need someone to assemble those ingredients into the final bill.

Strangely, when the subject moves up into meta politics and political philosophy, this understanding gets tossed away in favor of the blank sheet approach. It is just assumed that the remnants of today, after the collapse of course, will be easily swept away and a new system can be built from scratch. After the revolution, the winners will get to conjure from nothing a new political system. The facts and events that led to the great starting over are left out of the discussion.

This blank slate mentality infects the Left and Right. For the Left, the glorious future that is free of suffering and exploitation is otherwise undefined. In fact, its lack of specifics is the appeal. They just know they will be able to fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and do critical theory at night. In other words, the glorious future can be what the believer wants it to be because the future will be free of all of the things that made the glorious future possible.

For the Right, this blank slate thinking imagines a do-over based on a fictional understanding of the past. The Founders, for example, assembled in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution, carrying loads of virgin parchment. They were going to start from scratch and create what they hoped would be their ideal republic. The American conservative imagines himself going back to that time, with the knowledge of today, to help tidy up the bits that have gone wrong.

Of course, the reality of the founding is something different. The Founders came together like the contestants on those cooking shows. They had a vague idea of what they wanted to make. They knew they had a limited set of ingredients. They also had the experience of the prior effort to create a national government. These were practical men focused on what was possible given the constraints of the age. They were not dreamers and idealist. They were wizened realists.

Left-wing people are incapable of thinking in these terms because what attracts them to the various subcultures on the Left is the desire to escape this fallen world. It is why facts and reason have no effect on their politics. Right-wing people, in contrast, are much more realistic about the human condition. They should be inclined to focus on what is possible, given the ingredients, than they are, which raises the question as to whether there even is a genuine Right.

Putting that aside, if one wants to imagine what comes next for America, the place to start is the ingredient list. Just as the Founders had to think first about what was possible with the ingredients at their disposal, the man of the Right in this age must first think hard about the ingredient list. What sort of civic life will be possible in America given the probable list of ingredients. There is some uncertainty on some of them, like technology, but others are better understood.

For example, there is no avoiding demographics. By the middle of this century, just a generation away, American will be a nonwhite society. That means that the people taking up positions of authority in two decades will have spent their entire lives as a minority in a society made by white people. Whatever civic life is possible will be one where Nick Fuentes and Ocasio-Cortez are typical. That is not a demographic for which the Founders designed the Constitution.

Is it possible to have a society with things like equality before the law when the society is composed of adversarial tribes? Of course, the idea of the individual being the building block is not going to hold up in a world where competing groups fight for the spoils of society. On the other hand, maybe there is a common ground in a fragmented, multiracial society around which to build a politics. What unifying set of understandings or beliefs could emerge in the society of the future?

There is also the possibility that civil society is impossible under the conditions that are shaping up at the moment. Immigration is a good example. America has no border as a practical matter, yet the public seems to be fine with it. Maybe that changes as the reality of this becomes clear to people. There has been some movement in the polling on immigration. On the other hand, the rulers are for open borders so that will be the policy until events force a change at the top.

That brings up the other important ingredient. The starting point for a new politics based in the reality of society is that it can only come after events lead to a replacement of the current elites with a new elite. How that happens will cast a long shadow over those tasked with shaping a new society. The Founders were certainly affected by their experience in the war against England. What will that conflagration look like and how will it impact the people who come after it?

An honest examination of the present trends says that two things are true about current politics and what comes next. One is that there is nothing to be done to arrest the current trends. It does not mean they will continue indefinitely, but that they will run their course to their logical end. The other assumption is that the ingredients available to build a civic society in the future will look nothing like the past. In fact, it is possible that a civil society as we understand it is not going to be possible.

The point of this exercise is that the past is not going to be terribly useful for the people tasked with creating a civil society in the future. Western man will soon find himself in the same situation as those cooking show contestants. Their training and skill at making traditional dishes is often a liability when they are handed bizarre ingredients like aardvark lips and bat testicles. The clean sheet of paper is in their mind, not the canvas on which they will create their masterpiece.

This is the next phase of dissident thinking. The critiques of this age and its causes is nearly complete. What must come next is acceptance that there will be no great restoration after the revolution. Instead, what comes next will start with the available ingredients and the experience of the failure of this age. That is a hard project but whoever shapes the future will first have started out with a plan for a future that lies within the possible, rather than fantasies of the past.

The End Of Time

Posted on June 20, 2022 by thezman

Note: My Taki post is back from the celebration of Juneteenth. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for those who are in need of audio stimulation. If you need even more audio stimulation, then there is this from the weekend. I was very active over the weekend, so there is this bonus post behind the green door.

The terms Left and Right have been ubiquitous in Western public discourse for so long people just assume they are universal constants. The fact is though, they are neither universal nor constant. There is no African Right or Burmese Left. These cultures have not been shaped by the French Revolution. Similarly, what it means to be on the Right or Left has changed over time. Today’s left-wing American genuinely detests yesterday’s left wing American, who is probably on the Right today.

There is not much in the way of ideology on either side. There has not been an important thinker on either side in a long time. The last important radical thinker was probably Herbert Marcuse or perhaps John Rawls. On the Right, Paul Gottfried and Sam Francis are recent, but their influence is only on the fringe. The main driver of politics is the Left and they are wildly ignorant of the intellectual history that shapes left-wing politics today.

In the main, people divide up over history. What controls the American Left is the sense that the past is littered with monsters. These monsters are things like slavery, discrimination, morality, decency and so forth. The fact that these things have existed means they could exist again. The practical effect of something like slavery, for example, is zero, but the possibility it could return shapes the present. These monsters haunt the dense fog that is the left-wing mental space.

This is why the Left maintains all of its focus on the future, a place that is free of those monsters like inequality and human suffering. It is a secular Gnosticism in which a mystical and esoteric understanding of what lies at the end of history justifies the assault on the present. The monsters of the past haunt this fallen world and the only way out is to destroy this world thus freeing mankind from its grip and allowing man to move into the next phase of human history.

On the other side of this is the Right. They share the Left’s disdain for the present, but for entirely different reasons. They see the present as a degraded version of some past they hold up as the ideal. To be on the Right is to consume yourself with discovering forgotten kingdoms and then imagining yourself in them. Just as the future is an escape for the man of the Left, the past is a refuge for the man of the Right. The difference is his escape is much more detailed and appointed.

It is on the Right where you see the immutable differences between American and European politics. In Europe, the man of the Right can embrace ancient social structures like pre-Christian paganism and tribalism. He can embrace the aristocratic age of the high Middle Ages. These are not pasts that an American can conjure as they do not exist in the American past. The one shared alternative is the period of the interwar years but that brings unique problems.

For Americans, the most popular past is the Founding. Throughout the 20th century, right-wing Americans have said some version of, “If we just return to our founding principles everything will be fine.” Even at this late date there is an effort to conjure the 18th century colonial experience into the present. Implementations of this have been a desire to return to the America of the 1950’s or the 1980’s. In both cases, it is a desire to go back before the start of the present troubles.

This difference between Left and Right explains the difference in tangible results over the last century. Left-wing activity can move forward. Time marches on regardless of human desire, so the illusion of progress is easy to maintain. It just requires the destruction of present customs and traditions. The image of a toppled statue provides the left-wing mind with s symbolic step toward the promised land, which in turn provides a motivation to keep moving forward.

The Right has the insurmountable problem of time. There is no way to go back in time to start over. Time only moves forward. This physical reality that provides the Left with hope provides the Right with dread. Every day they move further from their desired spot in the past, suggesting it will never be attained. This despair results in a stubborn defense of the present, not because of its superiority to the proposed future, but for its vantage point into the desired past.

The reason modern conservatism is stuck in 1985 is because that was the last good viewing point for 1955. Of course, that was the last good viewing point for 1925 and so on into the founding period. Similarly, for many on the European Right, the interwar years were the last high ground to see the fading aristocratic order. For the Right, history is a series of signal fires leading back to a romanticized ideal order where Western man could fully express his nature.

While the Left has the advantage of time, they are increasingly haunted by the fact they are running out of it. The old Marxist framing said that once economic relations were solved, political relations would be solved. That proved to be both impossible and incorrect, so they moved up to the institutions. Once they controlled those, they would guide society into the future. That led to the seizing of the culture. By controlling the means of cultural production, they can build the desired future.

Of course, the reality of the human condition is once again unravelling these plans for the great temporal leap. The only thing that remains is something like a rapture in which the political elect is taken off this fallen world into the promised land, leaving the rest of humanity behind. One reason the Left sounds increasingly like a UFO cult is they are sure the end times are approaching. They cannot articulate it, by they sense the hour is short and the great finale will happen any minute.

The Right is not prepared to make the leap into the abys but they are also haunted by the prospect of time. In their case, it is the reality that is too late to defend the present from the ravages of the Left. There is nothing left to defend. The last bridges to the past have been severed. Like survivors on a lifeboat, the Right is terrified by the prospect of floating along for eternity in a sea of nothingness. For the Right, hell is the eternal present, cut off from the past.

Perhaps this signals the final denouement of the cycle that began with the French Revolution and ushered in ideological politics. The dream of the glorious future will die with the dreams of a return to the glorious past. Politics will lose its sacredness and return to being the struggle over practical things. The sacred and the profane will return to the sphere outside of earthly demands. The sacred will produce moral men to debate the practical, rather than practical men to debate morality.

On the other hand, maybe the West is simply out of time. The long cycle that began in the high Middle Ages has run its course. The people will remain but what defines them, that old Western tradition, including its messianic claims, will fade away, slowly replaced by something not yet born. The West is now a death row inmate waiting execution, terrified of both the future and the past. The former for obvious reasons and the past because it is what brought him to this point.

End Phase Phenomena

Posted on June 15, 2022 by thezman

A cause that has any hope of surviving past the novelty phase will demand from its followers a sacrifice to show commitment. Criminal organizations are the simplest and easiest examples of this phenomenon. A street gang will require all of the members to get a tattoo, for example, to show their commitment. More mature criminal organizations will require new members to commit crimes in front of other members to prove their willingness to sacrifice for the gang.

In more sophisticated movements, the adherents will perform rituals or make symbolic sacrifices to show their commitment to the cause. It has not been unusual for cultural movements to adopt a style of dress. The macaroni style, for example, was an extreme expression of commitment to a cultural and social class. In this age, the sexual subcultures often embrace clothing styles like the “lesbian kit” to set themselves apart and show commitment to the subculture.

Whether it is getting the gang symbols tattooed on your face, wearing an unofficial uniform or committing yourself to a way of life, every cause requires something from the members as a payment. This sacrifice is not only a signal to the other members, showing their shared commitment to the cause, it is also a form of advertising to potential members of the cause. More important, it adds a sense of value to membership in the cause. The members feel committed.

The people displaying their pronouns in their e-mail signature and social media profile are signaling their commitment by sacrificing some portion of their dignity. There is a noticeable discomfort in these people then they say “I go by they/them” because they know what they are doing is foolish. It is as ridiculous as wearing a flowerpot on their head, but that is the point of the ritual. They are making a fool of themselves in public as a way to show their commitment to this cause.

The same thing is at play when white people take to the stage and begin hectoring their fellow white people about racism. It is patently absurd for a white person to stand up and condemn their ancestors for being white or for the crime of having created a culture that is now called white supremacy. Some of what drives this is mental illness, for sure, and some is the “my fellow white people” act. Much of it, however, is the need for the adherent to show their faith by committing an act of lunacy.

For example, look at this post¹ from a gym teacher about the racists power structures at the local swimming hole. His profile makes clear that he is a fully enculturated bug man, but as a white male, he is at the bottom of the woke subculture. His post about how the man is conspiring to keep black people from swimming is a sacrifice of whatever dignity he retains as a man. The point is not to change minds, but to show others in the subculture that he is fully committed to the cause.

A key part of the cult ritual is the irrationality of it. The systemic racism claims are just modern magic. There is no rational or empirical argument behind these claims, but that is what makes them appealing. You just have to accept them on faith. That is the sole appeal of the trans business. One has to strip themselves of all sense of self in order to claim that humans are assigned sex at birth. The ridiculousness of the claim does not allow for even a shred of dignity.

This is why we are being flooded with a wave of public testimonies about how the trans community is ignored in some way. In this post, we learn that the guitar makers have ignored transgenders and women. The fact that the sex of the performer has no bearing on the instrument or that there is no such thing as transgender is central to the sense of sacrifice the writer feels when posting this. In another age, he would have been writing about elves and sprites with the same conviction.

Part of this self-degrading ritual within the identity subculture is the attention these humiliation rituals gain the adherent. It is why we have gone from publicly tolerating homosexuals to take your child to a drag show events. Each step has been more bizarre and degrading than the next. Post-Marx culturalism has been a weird race to the sea that has finally led to mothers offering up their children to predators. The believers seek the ultimate sacrifice they can make to the cause.

How much the shot callers on what we now call the Left understand the forces they are manipulating is hard to know. It is not particularly clear that the trend setters in this cult understand the intellectual history behind their movement. They have simply embraced the primary modes of thought and let nature take its course. Robin DiAngelo could simply be a fame seeking huckster who landed on the right cause at the right time to make money from a movement desperate for a purpose.

Despite this cult’s efforts to tart up their thing with jargon from the sciences, what drives it is a need to vanish into a cause. The appeal to the adherent is the need to sluff off the identity of the adherent and take on the identity of the group. Self-loathing has always been at the heart of mass movements. Christianity explicitly embraced this reality with the concept of sin. To be a Christian is to not only accept the teachings of the particular sect, but to accept and embrace your sinfulness.

These modern identity cults are less sophisticated, feeding on a population desperate for immediate gratification and lacking the intellectual capacity for high culture organizational structures like mainstream Christianity. This is why the rituals are so primitive and crude. The barrier for entry is low, so the people flooding into this scene tend to reflect that standard. It is also no surprise that they have arrived at the cusp of child sacrifice. Spilling innocent blood appeals to the savage mind.

Counterintuitively, these spasms of ritualized self-degradation may be a positive sign that the culture is finally ready to free itself. For generations, American culture has been locked into cultural norms so ingrained in the land that the present culture has not been able to evolve to fit the times. The energy of each generation is channeled into civic nationalism, which is throwing seeds among the stones. American culture has been a zombie shuffling along with no real purpose.

Oswald Spengler used the term pseudomorphosis to describe “an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness.” This is most obvious in the obsession with the Founders you see on the Right. All of the energy of youth for building something new is channeled into ideas from men who wore powdered wigs.

What left-wing identity politics is signaling is the old culture finally losing its grip on the present, which is why these maladapted mutants can easily organize in public and attack the symbols of the old culture. The subculture is not a replacement for the old culture or a genuine culture in itself. Instead, it is a cancer on the old culture, slowly eating away at its organs. Coinciding with it is the swelling hatred by the young culture ready to break free from the old body.

There is the other part of Spengler’s concept. At some point, after enough pseudomorphs have been created, the next flowering of cultural energy is fueled by a hatred for the old forms. In the present age, it is those asking how useful is that old civic nationalism rooted on the culture of the Founders when it has led to suburban mothers sacrificing their children to groomers? Perhaps it is now time to shed the old forms and think about creating a new model appropriate to this age.

Of course, everything comes to an end. The current spasms of degeneracy could simply be the death throws of a dying West. What comes next may not be a new West, but a return to the barbarism that has been the standard for humanity. What gets left behind is a reminder that a people once thrived and reached for the heavens. Like all prior civilizations, this one will end in rubble. What will remain is the high achievements along with the mystery as to why it failed.

¹https://findmyguitar.com/blog/female-signature-guitars

Friends And Enemies

Posted on June 7, 2022 by thezman

Imagine you are an advisor to a politician facing a difficult re-election campaign in the fall and you are tasked with planning a campaign strategy. If you are a rational person, you would first start with the polling. What are the big issues on the minds of the voters and how do they rank your guy on those items. The best way to get back in good standing with the voters is to show them you care about their issues and most important, you agree with them on those issues.

Now, this is easier said than done. If the top issue with voters is energy prices and your guy has spent his career talking about the need to ratchet up energy costs in order to please Gaia, then you have a problem. The voters are stupid, but there are limits and your guy is a true believer. In fact, you worship Gaia as well, so the idea of speaking against the climate cult is a bridge too far. Still, you have to figure out a way to convince people that Gaia cares about gas prices too.

This is the problem with impractical politics. When public policy is about putting two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot, politicians are free to acknowledge error and change gears to chase the voters. In happier times, politicians were the guys chasing the parade, hoping to get to the front so they could pretend to be the parade leaders come election time. That can only work when the only thing you believe in is being on the good side of the voters.

When politics is dominated by true believers, then the range of choices is limited to what ideology permits. Even worse, disconfirmation, those bits of reality that contradict the tenets of the faith, must be seen as a plot against the faith. After all, to acknowledge reality would require questioning the ideology. Instead, the ideologue is required to attack reality as a challenge to the faith. Politics for the ideologue is reduced to the friend-enemy distinction.

We see this today. The number one issue for voters is gas prices. The ruling class likes high gas prices because it pleases Gaia. They also like it because it harms the Dirt People, which reinforces the friend-enemy distinction. The Cloud People are largely defined by not being Dirt People. It is why administration officials start giggling whenever they are asked about gas prices. It is also why they cannot pivot to take the side of the voters and promote policies that lower gas prices.

Getting back your job of promoting a candidate in bad odor with the voters, this ideological trap is a problem. If the reason the voters are unhappy is an issue like gas prices and your guy is giggling about it in public, then there is no way you can fix his problems on that issue. That only leaves one option. You have to find some other issues on which your guy is good with the voters. With the right “messaging” you can distract the voters from the bad stuff and focus on good stuff.

This works if there are issues where your guy’s ideology is popular with the voters or issues outside of ideology. Right there is the problem. Since ideology is political, everything political will fall within ideology. In other words, there is nothing within the political space that falls outside of ideology. You could have your guy campaign on the latest sports scores, but the voters would just assume he lost his mind. They expect him to talk about the political. That is the point of politics.

Since the Cloud People define themselves in opposition to the Dirt People, it means their ideological position on all things political must in someway be in opposition to the very nature of the Dirt People. When hunting around for issues to distract the voters, your guy will inevitable stake out a position that separates him from the Dirt People as a matter of ideological identity. Even when trying to distract the voters you run the risk of alienating them on these secondary issues.

We see this with the current frenzy of gun grabbing in Washington. The Biden people put out word that they were going to distract people from the economy by grifting on the latest school shooting. The problem is the gun grabbers are consumed with spiting normal people who support gun ownership. Instead of the issue being a way to distract voters, it is a reminder that the people in charge hate the voters. The distraction quickly becomes a reminder of why people are unhappy.

The upcoming January 6 show trials are another example. The whole point of this thing is to remind the Dirt People of their place. They could sell some of this right after it happened, as most Dirt People are in favor of order. At this point, when shelves are empty and gas prices are soaring, the Dirt People are starting to wonder if the QAnon Shaman was onto something. This show trial is exactly what the party should be avoiding, but they cannot stop themselves. It is who they are.

Of course, from your perspective as an advisor, none of this matters. If your guy loses in the fall, you will still have a job. You may not be working for an office holder, but you will catch on at a think tank or cable channel. Politicians are just actors hired for the role and the supply is endless. You just have to remember who your friends are and who are the enemies and you will be just fine. After all, friends take care of friends who never forget who is the real enemy.

This is the crisis in American politics. The primary thrust of American politics is defending the prevailing orthodoxy from challenges. This reinforces class identity and that friend-enemy distinction. As a result, public policy is about maintaining the great divide between the Cloud People and the Dirty People in order to maintain ideological and class solidarity. This informs all of their actions. Pragmatic solutions to current problems are seen as apostacy.

Quitting The Circus

Posted on June 6, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Taki post is up. This week the subject is another take on the subject of today’s post, just from a more serious angle. The Sunday Thoughts podcast is up behind the green door for subscribers.

Politics in a democracy not only devolve into theater, but they select for the sorts of people attracted to the theatrical. The reason for this is democracy is about winning the crowd, which rewards those best at winning the crowd. Inevitably, elite interests will invest in those who show the ability to stand in front the mobs and win them over without making too many promises. After all, if you need to bribe the crowd then why bother investing in a guy trying to win the crowd?

Of course, the best stage performers are the people who are extraordinarily high in extraversion and very low in agreeableness. This person loves being the center of attention and likes meeting new people. A good actor can light up a room full of strangers and come away energized by it. He will also be very low in empathy and see others as either competitors of victims to be exploited. Great performers tend to be horrible people when away from the stage.

This is what you get with democracy. It is rule by the sorts of people who run away to the circus because it is their best shot at a happy life. Liberal democracy is supposed to correct the defects of democracy by bounding the choices of the mob with a set of principles like equality before the law. In reality, these principle are turned into props by the performers to add moral weight to their performance. They are no long winning the crowd, but instead are leading them on a moral crusade.

This is why morality in a liberal democracy gets turned on its head. Society’s least principled people are elevated to the top of the moral hierarchy. Carny folk are made into the priestly class. Naturally, they warp public morality into that which best serves their interests as performers. Like all carny acts, the political class in a liberal democracy is always on the look out for a new act and new bit. The highest moral good becomes the new act that brings in the crowds.

This is why American politics is so shallow. The current gun grabbing show being staged in Washington is a good example. Like a reboot of a comic book franchise, the gun grabbers are performing fan service. They know the slobbering idiots will show up with their t-shirts and home made costumes. It is a low cost way for the performers to get a big audience. The only point of the gun grabbing act is to please this narrow market sector so the performers can get a quick payday.

One of the ironies of this system is the biggest clowns come from the wealthiest and poorest congressional sectors. The obvious example is Nancy Pelosi, who represents one of the richest and most progressive districts in the country. The people who live in her district are rich and presumably have serious responsibilities. Yet, in their politics they go for the most ridiculous and absurd. Their politics are not about serious matters, but about the gestures that control bourgeois life.

That is what liberal democracy becomes at it zenith. It is a form of escapism for the class wealthy enough to escape the consequences of bad government, but not so wealthy as to enter the ruling elite. These are the people who promote pointless nonsense like climate change and gun grabbing campaigns. At the same time, they refuse to even think about practical problems that haunt society. Fixing roads is for poor people, while fixing the climate is for special people.

Another side effect of liberal democracy is the race for novelty. In the 1990’s, the luxury opinion was homosexual marriage. That was the thing bourgeois simpletons waved around to signal their aloofness from practical politics. Since anyone can acquire these luxury opinions, we have quickly moved along the clown line to the point where major corporations are celebrating child molesters. When novelty is the highest moral principle, who has time to worry about the kids?

Some will argue that the circus of politics is an intentional creation by the usual suspects to conceal their grip on society. That is a form of escapism, like all conspiracy theories, to avoid the reality of liberal democracy. Elites do run society, but they do not run the circus of democracy. Their only role is to make sure the actors do not accidentally shoot one another with a prop gun. Otherwise, they let these frivolous freaks do their shows and keep the masses occupied.

This is the beauty of the system, when you think about it. If the only way to fix the system is to get a bigger crowd, that means all opposition must select for greater novelty and narcissism than what is currently on stage. The winners of every election end up with a bigger clown than what was on stage. The losers get the new clown as well, which means no matter the result, you get stuck with a clown. Elections are always heads they win, tails you lose.

Just as the solution to a drinking problem is not more drinking, the solution to democracy is never more democracy. The drunk can only begin to recover himself by quitting the booze. Similarly, a people can only recover from the rule by carny trash by exiting the theater of democracy. Usually, the drunk has to hit rock bottom before he has the will to conquer his addiction. Most likely the same applies to democracy. America will have to hit rock bottom before it abandons the clown-ocracy.

Ideological Capture

Posted on June 2, 2022 by thezman

Image that you are a management type and you get hired into the third tier of management at a good sized firm. The top tier is the executive staff like the CFO and CEO who control the overall direction of the firm. The second tier is the policy making tier, like vice presidents and regional directors. They take the vision of the top tier and turn into company policy. The tier into which you have been hired is tasked with implementing and enforcing these company policies.

Further, let us assume you are an enthusiastic follower of a management style that is called “management by committee.” You think the best way to run any organization is through committees that debate amongst themselves and then create reports that some other committee turns into directives. Your new job is in a company that is still in growth mode, so they are not burdened with management philosophy. The third tier is just supposed to get the job done.

Soon into your new job you find other fans of the MBC school and you form a clique within the company. None of your bosses are MBC types, but they are not hostile to your ideas, just as long as the job gets done. One of the ideas you talk them into is having managers in the third tier incorporated into the hiring process. Candidates for management jobs will sit before a committee of middle managers who will then pass on their assessment to the people making the hire.

You are a committee guy so you make sure to be on this committee and you get your buddies in the committee subculture on the committee as well. This is exactly the sort of innovation you have been seeking. The “promise” of this new step is that people hired in will fit the general culture. As a practical matter, it means the committee will select for people who like committees. It does not take long before adherence to the management by committee philosophy is a selection criterion.

Since there is a decent amount of turnover in the middle and lower management ranks, it does not take too long before most managers are committee men. This new selection process, controlled by committee men, selects for committee men or the type who could be groomed into committee men. A big part of the management by committee philosophy is grooming normal people into the committee lifestyle. Being a committee man is a de facto requirement for employment.

The second tier of management has far less turnover than the third and fourth tier, as these are important posts that pay exceptionally well. By their very nature there are few of these jobs in any company, so there is not a lot of circulation, but from time to time a spot does open in this layer. Ideally, the executive layer selects from the third tier of managers to fill these roles. Presumably, these are people who know company culture and have been vetted through trial and error.

Because you and your fellow committee men have been selecting for committee men in the ranks of management, the options for the executive staff when it comes time to fill a vice president slot is all committee men. The management by walking around guy who ran the West Coast division retires and there is no one like him to bump up into his position, because that type does not exist on the bench. That means hiring from outside or elevating a committee man into the second tier.

The executive staff of the company is now faced with a crisis. While they were busy with setting the general direction of the company, they have been infested with a new management style that now limits their range of motion. If they want to change the company culture, say reduce the number of meetings and standing committees, it means making wholesale changes in the ranks. Alternatively, it means finding a way to make this new management paradigm work.

Now, if instead of starting point being a middle manager from a management cult it is a homosexual priest, a climate change crank or a neoconservative. The homosexual priest gets into the ranks and starts to agitate for his people and before long you have a lot of homosexual priests. This is how climate change cranks have infested the ranks of energy and environment to the point where they control these areas in the managerial class, publicly and privately.

The neocons are front and center at the moment and they are the most obvious example of this process. Over time they have infiltrated every nook and cranny of the foreign policy establishment. When the Democrat president takes over for a Republican, the neocons who infest Republican ranks move out to think tanks, while the neocons who infest Democratic ranks take their positions in government. When the parties swap again, the neocons swap again.

If like the executive management of the hypothetical company, you are the new president with a rational vision for foreign policy, you will be faced with the problem of finding anyone who is not neocons. Everyone with any experience in the State Department, foreign service or national security is going to be a member of the bizarre cult that has taken over these fields. Before you could do anything, it means a revolution within these areas of government.

Something similar is happening with energy. Putting together a rational energy policy is impossible because everyone in that sector is now committed to the “green agenda” which embraces irrational energy policies. Notice that the response to the war in Ukraine is a series of policies that harm normal people in the West by furthering the agenda of the environmental movement. The war in Ukraine has given license to the people making war on climate change.

This is why elections are now meaningless. So meaningless, in fact, that they will slowly go away entirely. The ruler of Italy, for example, was not elected. He was installed by Brussels, which is not elected either. The response to Russia is being crafted in Brussels, not the capitals of Europe. Closer to home, elections are now just an orgy of absurd corruption like ballot harvesting, mail in voting and so on. Why try to convince people when you can just make up the results?

The collapse of elections is just a reflection of reality. You can vote yourself bloody, but the people holding office are faced with the same dilemma as the executive managers in the above example. They must fill their staff from the pool of true believers that exist in the Washington policy establishment. They are set upon by true believers from think tanks and lobbying firms, who actually write the legislation. They are swimmers trying to change the direction of the ocean.

What we are witnessing is ideological capture. This is where a small, but committed group can wield majority power, as long as the majority is divided into smaller groups or not bound by an alternative ideology. The homosexuals could infiltrate the priesthood because the Church was not explicitly anti-homosexual. The normal priest worried about the issue would be outnumbered by the pink mafia and have no internal structure on which to rely for support in the fight.

The priest problem is good example of how you cannot solve the problem of ideological capture with rules or systems. The Church had rules against raping altar boys and fornication, but that did not deter the homosexual priests. Instead, they organized to take over the system in order to get around these prohibitions. It turns out that rules and principles are no match for a dedicated minority that has no respect for the spirit behind those rules and principles.

This is the problem faced all over the managerial class. Any reform attempt must start with the removal of the infestation. In the case of foreign policy, it means a decapitation of the neocon establishment, both in government and outside government. You would have to fire everyone, remove their security clearances and maybe put a few in jail to publicly discredit the cult. Given the scale involved, that may not be possible, even if a president was committed to it.

The same process would have to happen with the climate cranks who have infested energy and environment. The regulatory state is now stocked with people who think their lawnmower is out to get them. The same holds for the Department of Justice and the FBI, as we saw in the Trump years. The managerial class has been captured by what should be described as a cult. Across the system, members of this bizarre new religion now wield power and control policy.

This is the truth of ideological capture. Once the infection sets in, the rules are slowly turned to the favor of the ideologues. Therefore, any effort to use the rules to disinfect the system ends up profiting the ideologues. The people vote for George Bush and they get Lyndon Johnson. They vote for Barak Obama and they get a different version of Lyndon Johnson. They vote for Trump and they get Nixon. The outputs no longer reflect inputs, because the rules no longer matter.

Perpendicular Parallels

Posted on June 1, 2022 by thezman

For those old enough to recall the 1970’s, the present economic turmoil looks a lot like the stagflation from fifty years ago. Just like a half century ago, we have a mix of inflation, economic stagnation and incompetent leadership in Washington. Joe Biden is not exactly Jimmy Carter, as Carter was an honest man, but like Carter, the public sees him as a man out of his depth. Like Carter, he wound up in the job due to a crisis within the political class over a previous president.

It is a comforting parallel for many people, because if the pattern holds, it means there is a Ronald Reagan coming after Biden. The saner elements in the ruling elite will rally to a sober minded governor who can withstand the progressive crazies. Many people are looking at Ron DeSantis as the man who can save the system. Trump running in 2024 could throw a wrench in the story, but maybe the ruling elite has a plan to get that element out of the script so the story can continue.

This problem with the script is a reminder that historical parallels are like all generalizations in that they are a starting point. They help frame the times to better understand the details. We know the general plot of one side of the comparison, so it allows us to infer things about the other side. From there we have a basis from which to analyze the present. In this comparison, however, the observable similarities have different direct and root causes.

For example, the current energy crisis is different from the crisis in the 1970’s, which was mostly driven by the currency war and an oil embargo. The collapse of the post-war currency arrangements not only gave us inflation, but it also created havoc in commodities, which are sensitive to currency fluctuations. The big driver was the Arab oil embargo over US support for Israel. The embargo was always a short term strategy to get a better deal from the West.

The present energy crisis is primarily systemic. Generations of mismanagement are finally showing up in the price. The United States was the largest exporter a few years ago, but then the government reversed course and exports have collapsed, making America a net importer again. Europe is smashing its energy system in an effort to make the Russians look bad on Twitter. There is more than enough energy to go around, but the system to distribute it is collapsing.

In the 1970’s, the solution to the energy crisis was to make a deal with the Arabs so they would end the embargo. There were lots of new energy schemes launched to take advantage of the crisis, but the final solution was a deal with the Saudis. This current energy crisis does not have a simple solution. In the West, energy policy has been corrupted by the same cranks who have corrupted the culture. It will take a revolution to fix that problem in order to fix the policy problems.

Systemic problems are also at the heart of the inflation crisis. In the 1970’s, the issue was the old fashioned Econ 101 problem. There was too much money chasing too few goods, resulting in inflation. This time, the issue is more about systemic problems in the global monetary system and in the global supply chain. This is where dumb people like to say, “it is as simple as…” and then finish with their favorite bromides from the Mises Institute, but the current inflation crisis is not a simple one.

For starters, the monetary system that was put in place in the 1980’s assumed a few things that are no longer true. One was that the excess dollars created by Washington would be absorbed and laundered by low cost counties. This worked while Asia had an infinite supply of cheap efficient labor. Extra dollars could flow into these countries as economic investment. The extra from developing countries would then return in the form of assets like treasuries and equities.

That system is breaking down for two main reasons. One is China is becoming a mature industrial nation, which means labor is no longer cheap. The Chinese understand this and they are shifting policy to encourage domestic consumption rather than focus on exports. All of a sudden, those extra dollars are no longer as welcome in China as in the past. Instead of returning as assets to America, they hang around the system chasing too few retail goods.

Another cause is the breakdown of the dollar system. The dollar itself is doing great, but the rest of the global currencies are not doing so well. Their strength has been pegged to the health of the system based on the dollar being the global currency. As this system shows signs of crisis, the weaker currencies are in free fall. The Euro, the secondary global currency, is falling sharply. Of course, the ruble is booming, due to the crackpot policy response to the war in Ukraine.

The point is the solution to the current inflation is different from what happened fifty years ago because the causes are different. In the 1970’s, the Fed could tighten the money supply, wring out inflation and force a corresponding correction in the system with a deep, but short recession. This time, simply raising rates will not be enough to address the inflation problems. It could also trigger a crisis in the financial system, which is built on the assumption of free money from the Fed.

There are more comparisons like this, but the bottom line is that the crisis of the 1970’s is similar to this crisis, but the causes are different. Back then, America was a healthy business in need of new management. The demographics were good, the social capital was still strong and the working population was young. More important, the ruling class wanted a strong America and saw it as their duty to deliver it. A few tweaks to the system would unleash the economic power of the country.

The current crisis is driven by different forces. This is an end of cycle crisis as the American empire reaches its terminus. Critically, the demographics are much worse, the productive population is old and the social capital has been spent trying to prove Mother Nature wrong for fifty years. More important, the ruling class is now populated by feckless grifters and ridiculous people. They see their duty as throwing fuel on the fire in order to prove how little they care about the country.

What this comparison between this crisis and that of fifty years ago reveals is that this crisis is different in nature. There are general parallels, but the underlying causes are vastly different and that means the results will be different. New management may walk through the door in the next election, but unlike 1980 they will be taking control of an enterprise that needs bankruptcy protection. It may even require a fire sale to clear out the unproductive segments at the top.

The Game

Posted on May 31, 2022 by thezman

There is an argument that we live in a novel political environment in which the mass media is the political authority. They get on an issue and the political and corporate classes respond to it. We saw this with the George Floyd story that was orchestrated by the big media operations. On the other hand, political actors will seed the media with fake stories hoping they will put it into their megaphones. The Russian collusion hoax cooked up by team Clinton is an example.

A couple of weeks back, Tucker Carlson observed that most Republicans wake up in the morning and go to the New York Times. They and their staff read the thing over breakfast, because it is their guide throughout the day. This is true of mainstream conservatives as well. What passes for the Right in America is entirely controlled by the Left, which is controlled by the media. Old school liberals sound like Trump people when they complain about how the media runs their party.

There is a lot of truth to the media-ocracy claim. The backers of the Ukraine fiasco have been feeding the media nonsense tales about Ukraine. They handed them Ukraine lapel pins they had made up for the occasion. Note no one in the media looked into who supplied everyone on television with those pins. Instead, it was a unified media voice, a wall of sound, selling the Ukraine story. Washington and the political class in Europe were swept up in this unfolding disaster.

The thing is though, the Russia hoax makes clear that the media does not have a coordinated center. The details of the hoax have been supplied in the court case against Clinton crony Michael Sussman. He relied upon confidence men like Franklin Foer, who exist to inject false narratives into the media echo system. Once these fake stories get loose, they rocket around the system, repeated by the sociopaths who are attracted to life in the media echo system.

Further proof of the passive nature of the media system is the war in Ukraine, a place few in the media can find on a map. There are three observable trends in the coverage of the war thus far. One is there are few Western reporters trying to cover the war on the ground in Ukraine. They went over for the photo-ops when it started but made sure to stay in Kiev. They quickly went back to their countries and left the reporting to contractors and interested think tanks.

That is the other thing about the media response to the war. The work-at-home war correspondents now do their reporting from press releases issued by outfits like the Institute for the Study of War. Alternatively, they rely on Ukrainians on the payroll of the American of British intelligence services. In both cases, a five minute search on-line would reveal these sources to be entirely fake. Instead, they just pass on the information without bothering to question any of it.

The lack of original reporting and reliance on single sources with narrow agendas has resulted in a uniform opinion in the media. Even the so-called conservative media, which took off their American flag pins and put on the Ukraine pin, repeated the same stories from the same sources as if it was holy writ. What the Ukraine story reveals is the media echo system operates like a murmuration of starlings, rushing through the news cycle in response to external stimulus.

This reality will lead some to assume this system is controlled by a tiny cabal of deep state actors in a hollowed out volcano. In reality, the people trying to inject their special brand of poison into the system are often tangled in the system. The Covid panic is the perfect example. It was people hoping for media recognition who kept injecting ridiculous claims into the system. These were not deep state players, but often just ordinary people hoping for fifteen minutes of fame.

The “frontline workers” posting their made up tales of woe on social media is the perfect example of how small players can move the media swarm. Hoping for attention, nurses and doctors started positing on social media stories that made them look like selfless heroes trying to save Covid victims. This psychosis, and it was a form of psychosis, was picked up by the media and amplified. These fake stories became fact, which spawned new fake stories made up by media members.

The Covid hoax, and it is fair to call it a hoax at this point, was not the result of clever scheming like the Russian collusion hoax. Instead, it was something like a stampede over a cliff. Unlike the animals in the herd, the people in this media stampede could question the rush over the cliff, but like the animals in the herd, they feared being trampled more than they feared the end result. As a result, fantasy became holy writ and Covid turned into a bizarre mass media religion.

In a way, the berserk obsession with disinformation and misinformation is not entirely motivated by malice toward the general public. The people running the New York Times and Washington Post still cling to the old myths about the media. They think they should be the cynics not falling for their hoaxes. They sort of get the problem, but they lack the proper perspective from their position inside the swarm to see that it is the nature of the swarm, what makes it possible, that is the problem.

It is tempting to think that at some point the public will get wise to the fake news and this madness will come to an end. If no one believes what is in the media, then the media’s ability to shape the news comes to an end. The trouble with this theory is most people have already figured out that the news is fake. The Ukraine war is a prime example, as most people never cared enough about it to listen to the story. Public apathy and skepticism have not changed the behavior of the media.

Instead, what we may be heading to in the short run is a world in which the mass media operates like an on-line role playing game for the managerial class. They get to play the various quests that get created in the media echo system. Since they live in a consequence free world, as in they never pay the price for their error, they are free to explore their dreams within these fantasies. Once the quest is over, they transition to a new quest or maybe play a different character.

We see this happening with Ukraine. As it becomes clear that this story will not end well for Ukraine or the Europeans, the players are looking for a new quest. Joe Biden’s heroic management of the economy through the Putin-Trump inflation spiral looks like a fun new expansion pack. Maybe they play the China as dangerous dragon add-on that came with the Covid edition. Maybe someone is about to release something entirely different and inject it into the media echo system.

The result is we are headed to a world in which the normal people go about their lives as best they can. Every once in a while, they will take notice of the streaming role playing game that keeps the managerial class busy. That will usually happen when the role players mistake their world for the real world, gas prices and baby food shortages being two current examples. Otherwise, the managerial class is becoming a virtual world, a metaverse to occupy an otherwise worthless ruling elite.

The Rocks Of War

Posted on May 27, 2022 by thezman

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Wars often turn over rocks exposing truths about the age that have either been ignored or hidden from the world. Old tactics, in the case of the Great War, were exposed as obsolete by modern weapons. Sometimes it is in war that the hollowness of a great power is exposed. This was the case of the Soviets in Afghanistan. That war exposed the internal weakness of the regime. The war in Ukraine is similarly exposing problems in the collective West.

The first lesson of this war so far is that Western intelligence has been exposed as useless in understanding modern Russia. At every turn, the information provided to political leaders about what Russia is doing and planning to do has turned out to be more fantasy than reality. The West has been operating on assumptions that may have been true twenty-five years ago but are no longer true today. The result has been a total political failure in response to the invasion.

The big example of this was the claim that the Russians could only support their army in Ukraine for a couple of months. Western strategy was built on the assumption that the Ukrainians just had to hold out for a month or two. They would dig into fortified positions and wait out the Russian assault. Instead, a highly mobile and patient Russian assault is slowly decimating the Ukrainian army. Three months into the conflict and the Russians are on the cusp of victory.

This is another rock turned over in this war. The West has been preparing for a war with a Russian army than has not existed since the Cold War. The Soviet way of war was something called deep battle doctrine. This is based on a highly mobile, combined arms approach to fighting. The Russians would find a weak spot in the enemy front, concentrate forces there, break through the lines and then flood the zone with armor and infantry, creating chaos in the enemy rear.

The Soviet approach required large numbers of men. It imagined millions of men mobilized to fight in the West. This is not the new Russian way of war. The Russians, like everyone else in the West, have been living in the age of low fertility and rising standards of living. Mobilizing millions of men and throwing them into battle like Stalin did against the Nazis is no longer acceptable. Instead, the Russians have organized around reducing casualties to the minimum.

As a practical matter, what those hunkered down Ukrainians have been facing is something like what the Mongols brought to the fight. Instead of one massive army centrally controlled from the rear, it is a collection of small units, self contained and self-directed toward narrow goals. These units combine infantry, armor, mobile artillery and air support, along with the use of drones. This is combined arms warfare reduced to small units working independently.

Because these units are smaller, they are more intolerant of personnel losses, so they are more cautious. A unit that loses its tanks is no longer effective as a unit, so the premium is on reducing losses. The goal is to use speed and mobility to find weak spots in the enemy and quickly exploit them, with minimum losses. Overall, this is a much slower approach to fighting, but once a weakness is exposed, it can be exploited much faster due to the improved mobility and flexibility.

This is on display in the Donbas. The Russians used artillery and airpower to break down the Ukrainian defenses at Popasnaya, which is a strategic town in the middle of the contact line. The Russians were then able to rush units into this breech and employ the modern version of deep battle doctrine. These small units combined to turn the contact line into a series of pockets surrounded by Russian units. Now the Russians are pounding these cauldrons with artillery and air power.

The result is the West, primarily Washington, prepared the Ukrainians to fight the wrong war against the wrong army. Instead of a short defense against a Soviet siege, they are getting a war of attrition against a highly mobile and flexible army using the right weapons for such a fight. That is another aspect of this war that should be a wake up call to Western planners. The Russian weapons are better and more useful than the Western weapons supplied to the Ukrainians.

In line with the new way of fighting, the Russians have developed weapons that can be incredibly useful with small, combined arms units. They do not require a complex information grid so that commanders in the rear can direct the action. Modern technology is used to make it easy for these small units to fight effectively on their own or quickly combine with other units on the fly. The Russians have also done their homework and have evolved effective counter measures.

This is why the many “game changers” the West has sent to the Ukrainians have failed to do much damage to the Russian forces. The javelin has been a bust. The Man-portable air defense systems (ManPads) are worthless. The Russians have made these weapons obsolete. The big shock is their drone defense. The kamikaze drones and the Turkish TB2 have not been the game changer that was promised because the Russians have evolved effective jamming tools.

Probably the biggest rocks turned over in this war are economic. The assumption of the West when they instigated this war was that the Russian economy had not changed since the end of the Cold War. For a long time, the West has looked at Russia as a gas station masquerading as a country. It was a version of Venezuela, wholly dependent on selling natural resources to the West. If the sale of those resources slowed just a bit, then the Russian economy would collapse.

This has turned out to be wildly wrong. Now, part of this failure is due to the raging bigotry of the neocons behind the war. Their seething hatred for the Russian people has blinded them to many things. The economic revolution that has taken place in Russia is the biggest one. It turns out that the Russian economy is much more resilient and flexible than anyone in the West realized. As a result, the sanctions regime has turned out to be a disastrous failure.

That has turned over another economic rock. The European economy has been revealed to be a house of cards. The sanctions regime is creating havoc for the Europeans, because their economy was based on the assumption that the Russians would always supply them with cheap necessities. The EU is a mommy economy where Mother Russia makes sure her babies are warm and fed. Shortages and spirally prices are bringing this reality home to Europeans.

In total, what the war in Ukraine is revealing is that the collective West has been living in a fantasy world for the last few decades. Without a real challenge, they have been allowed to indulge in whatever fantasies they liked. Like trust fund babies raised in insular opulence, Western leaders are unprepared for a world where they have to perform their role as elites. The war is exposing them as a toxic blend of self-indulgence, stupidity and ignorance.

The truth about war is that the rocks that it turns over cannot be turned back over to hide the truth underneath. The West will now have to face this new reality, especially on the economic front. The grand schemes for creating a new world order in the image of Western elites will now have to give way to this new realty. What has been revealed is that the new world order is one in which the West must compete in a multipolar world of civilizational equals. That means a new elite for this new age.

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