The Baby Shortage

Posted on November 27, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the wacky Finnish movie Sisu, a post about the thoroughly ridiculous book by Zinc Wigger, which may be the worst book I have ever read. Then there is the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

People tend to look for linear explanations for the problems they see in the world, as they are the easiest to solve. If X is causing Y then you just have to do something about X and Y solves itself. If on the other hand, a combination of things is responsible for the undesired result, then things get more complicated. It is no longer a matter of fixing one thing, but of untangling a set of things, which may have their own set of causes, thus making the problem feel intractable.

An example of a multivariate problem that is the collapsing fertility rates that threaten the existence of the West. For example, Italy has a total fertility rate of just over one, which is below half of replacement. A people cannot sustain themselves very long if they are not having children. In fact, it only takes a generation of not having babies to overturn the population. In time, Italians will have only a vague idea of what it means to have a brother or a sister.

The first-place people look to understand the collapse in fertility is the soft, intangible things like culture and morality. In the middle of the last century birth rates started to fall and Western societies embraced materialism. In truth, birth rates started falling in the 19th century as the West industrialized. Having lots of children no longer made economic sense like it did on the farm. Among the wealthy, lots of kids stopped being a status symbol, so they lowered their reproduction.

Even so, family formation was still the norm. It was just that people had three or four children rather than seven and eight. There was no push to remain childless or avoid even basic family formation. It is fair to say that the trend away from marriage and family formation got going after the Second World War. There was the post-war baby boom in America and later booms in Europe, but by the time the West had become fully post-modern and materialistic, fertility was collapsing.

That is where most people look for an answer. Starting in the middle of the last century, the role of women started to change. First, they were encouraged to work outside the home, in addition to being a wife and mother. Then they were encouraged to work in lieu of becoming a wife and mother. The final leg on the transformation of the female role in society was the career woman. The point of her life was to compete with men and go home to a home full of everything but children.

The changing role of women is one big contributor to the baby crisis. If you want to destroy a people, put their women to work. If the ovens are being used for things other than making bread, the bakers can be put to other uses as well. The revolution in the female role has also revolutionized the male role. The pattern of normal family formation has been disrupted by putting men and women into the workforce for the sole purpose of serving the economic needs of society.

This is the most popular answer to the problem because it points to a spiritual sickness that confirms our bias. The hedonistic lifestyle of the present age comes with a punishment as it is morally wrong to have a materialistic society. Western people worship the golden calf, and the price is childlessness. The trouble with this answer is it does not explain why societies made this shift. It does not explain why people have so easily overcome the biological imperative.

That leads to the environmental answer. One version of this is the proliferation of birth control and abortion. Women trained to be men were handed unlimited supplies of contraceptives so they could have as much sex as they like, in fact they have been encouraged to have lots of indiscriminate sex, while not getting pregnant. Easy access to birth control along with strong social pressure on women to avoid having children has short-circuited the normal biological process.

This is where things get tricky again. Males should still want to find wives and have children, so what happened there? Clearly, the collapse in family formation and fertility is more than just a female problem. While women have been trained to be boys while gobbling down birth control to keep from getting pregnant, men have lost interest in doing what men have always done, which is find a mate. Simple observation says that men have become vastly less masculine over the generations.

In other words, both buyers and sellers in the sexual marketplace have changed in ways that discourage fertility. The females seek to be anything but wives and mothers, while males look for females that have no interest in motherhood. Of course, females reward this disinterest with casual, noncommittal sex. Even if a male wants children he enters a sexual marketplace as baren as the wombs of the women. The same is true of females who want to live the traditional female role.

Unlike the female problem, this is not easily explained by pointing to social conditioning or the introduction of birth control. One answer is that as society has made women less interested in being women, this has reduced the supply of females that males imagine as a potential mate. Men look for certain qualities in females that indicate they will be sexually loyal and committed mothers. Raise up a generation of wine guzzling whores and males will simply stop looking mates in that group.

There may be an environmental issue here that works on both sides of the sexual revolution in similar ways. An underappreciated truth of modern materialistic societies is they are awash in chemicals. Industrial society poured smoke into the air and trash into the water. You could see it. Post-industrial society fills the environment with tiny little bits of feel-good intended to make life easier. It is in the food, the water, personal products, and our physical goods. We are awash in alien chemicals.

Take for example, those birth control pills. Monkeying around with the most fundamental of life’s processes has been done without much thought. There have been no serious longitudinal studies on the impact of these drugs. Yet it is possible that they cast a shadow long past their initial purpose. This study suggests that oral contraceptives damages the fear circuitry of women. The female assessment of risk is an essential part of the female role in traditional societies.

Of course, lots of females with unbalanced emotional responses to the normal social stimuli is not going to go unnoticed. The same people making contraceptives are going to be right there to make drugs to treat the downstream consequences, which is why young females are gobbling down antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. We have also seen a spike in female binge drinking. A society full of paranoid and neurotic females is not going to promote family formation.

This may also be working the male side of things. Boys are routinely pumped full of drugs to keep them mellow in school. The ADHD crisis started just as fertility rates began to decline in the West. Pumping boys full of powerful chemicals is a lot like handing out birth control to females. All of the long-term studies on these drugs have been funded by the makers of the drugs, so we have no way of knowing if there is a long-term impact, but it is factor to consider.

Then you have the massive chemical bath that is daily life. Modern people eat food full of things they cannot pronounce. They douse themselves with personal products that are also loaded with alien chemicals. Individually and in the short term, these chemicals are all deemed to be safe, but what about mixing them into a long-term cocktail that is life in the modern age? No one knows and no one cares to know. It could very well be one more bit of pressure against our biological circuitry.

That is what makes changing the direction of Western fertility a challenge. The old Greek expression about a happy society being one where old men plant trees in whose shade they will never rest applies here. Children are the trees men plant in their youth, because they expect to be that old man, planting trees for generations they will never see, but they know will exist. The West does not plant trees or have children because Western people have no purpose.

In the end, there are certainly other factors that may be contributing to the collapse of fertility rates in the West. The environmental and economic factors are rarely discussed, because the cultural and social factors preclude any serious discussion of the fertility problem in the West. That means the first mover is the prevailing bias against families, family formation and the production of children. What drives it all is a dominant, top-down bias against reproduction, especially among Western people.

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Trust The Unhappiness

Posted on November 9, 2023 by thezman

One of the few things most everyone can agree upon is that things are not good, and everyone seems to be unhappy about something. Conversations in real life or online revolve around this general sense of unhappiness. In fact, it is fair to say that online life is just one long airing of grievances. Often, people are primarily unhappy with the unhappiness of some group that is using their unhappiness to make demands on everyone else, which makes everyone unhappy.

This is not just a case of the internet skewing perception. Polling on the issue says that people think we are headed down a bad road. Three quarters of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. As you can see in that poll, the last time a majority thought the country was on the right track was right after the January 6 protests, suggesting the people wanted to see a genuine insurrection. Since then dissatisfaction with the direction of the country has climbed steadily.

The funny thing is that most people would not be surprised to learn that record numbers of people are unhappy with the current state of affairs. If anything, they would be stunned to learn that thirty percent are content. How is it possible for these people to exist in the same reality as the rest? If the split were fifty-fifty, it would make sense as it would simply reflect the party divide. When it is seventy-thirty it means something is going on with that thirty percent.

Putting that aside, the question that naturally arises is what is it that is making people unhappy with the direction of the country? Again, polling provides a clue. The number one issue for people is inflation. The thing is the government tells us that inflation is slowly ticking down. It was 8.7% last year and is 3.7% now. If anything, people should be thrilled with the direction of inflation. In fact, they should be cheering the people who control the economy for their great work on inflation.

There is a another small clue. According to official figures, everyone who wants a job can have a job and the economy is humming along. Inflation was a problem, but it is going away, so the economy is officially in great shape. People seem to agree as unemployment is way down the list of concerns. Not only that but consumers keep spending and people keep buying houses. Despite the rise in mortgage rates, the housing market remains strong all over the country.

In other words, the economy is not a particularly good measure of happiness. Another big clue is that the one thing everyone agrees upon is the political situation in Washington is a problem, the main problem in politics. Large majorities of both parties think the endless drama in Washington is a problem. It is just behind health care, which is a serious problem with practical consequences that no one discusses. Health insurance costs continue to rise at multiples of inflation.

The thing is though, politics in a democracy is not supposed to be a polite and cooperative affair. It is supposed to be an ugly food fight. For the most part, it has always been an ugly food fight. Even in times of relative peace and tranquility the two sides torment one another. In the Reagan years, when the quality of life was near a peak, the Democrats tried to impeach Reagan. Under Clinton, when conservative actually got things they wanted, they hated Bill Clinton.

Another clue here is that there are things on the list that are complete nonsense, but they vex people to some degree. A good example is climate change, a thing that does not exist, but it worries 64% of democrats. At the same time, terrorism is not a real concern for most people, but Washington cannot shut up about it. Now they are claiming Hamas is under your bed. Last week it was racists. According to Washington, the next terroristic bogeyman is antisemites.

Put it all together and maybe the reason that the lack of cooperation is number three on the list, just below things that should matter to people, is that the people never see anyone in Washington talking about those things that matter. Not a single candidate has anything useful to say about inflation or health care costs. They have nothing to say about the drug problem or the growing crime problem. It is not that the parties do not get along. It is that they agree to ignore the important issues.

Even so, if things are good in the economy, despite some concerns over things like health care and inflation, people should be mostly content. Not only are people not happy, but there is also a sense of looming disaster in the air. The reason for that is something that is not captured in basic economic data. Things are slowly eroding for the white middle-class and that is what is causing the anxiety. A little here, a little there, middle-class white people are getting poorer.

This coincides with two other things. Once is the browning of American, which everyone sees everywhere they look. When the military put white guys back in their ads recently, everyone started laughing about it. It was assumed they did this because they are plotting a big war and will need competent soldiers. This is one of those data points that does not show up in economic data or polling. People sense the lights going out on their culture and they see signs of it in the household budgets.

Of course, they are not allowed to speak of it. That is the other side of this general unhappiness that does not turn up in polling. The ways you are allowed to express yourself have been reduced to generic economic questions or silly things like how the parties get along on your television. Not only do the people on television avoid talking about what matters to you, you are not allowed to talk about what matters to you and this is extremely frustrating for a growing number of people.

The way to think of it is the public square has fallen victim to the same forces that wrecked internet forums. The point was to create a place for vigorous debate, but certain people did not like the direction of the debate, so they found ways to shut down the debate, which crashed public trust in the system. It turns out you need high trust to maintain a vigorous public debate. With trust at all-time lows, everyone is going to be unhappy, not matter how good things are on paper.

The Emotive State

Posted on November 6, 2023 by thezman

Note #1: A young fellow I met at a secret handshake meeting has published his first novel and I would like you to buy many copies and recommend it to everyone. If you are a fan of the fantasy genre, then give it a try and let me know your thoughts. Supporting the people on our side, especially in the arts is the best political thing you can do.

Note #2: Behind the green door I have a post about house hunting, a post about the robot art critics of our future and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

If you look back at the government propaganda of the Second World War, you will see that it was rather generic in how it framed the enemy. The propaganda about the Germans was not much different from what was used in the prior war, except this time the Nazis were often portrayed as stupid. The Japanese were portrayed as absurdly Asian looking and monstrously cruel. Both were described as villainous aggressors who had no reason to launch their war on the world.

In other words, there was nothing special about the bad guys relative to prior bad guys, other than some superficial differences. There has always been a circular logic to wartime propaganda, going back to the Greeks. The bad guys are bad because they are the enemy, and they are the enemy because they are bad. What makes them bad, of course, is they do things we would never do, and they never do the things that we know good people are supposed to do.

Fast forward to the present and villains are either Hitler or Bull Connor, who have morphed into a Janus like creature that haunts every conflict. The foreign villains are always going to be Hitler, while domestic villains are the generic racist. Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were Hitler, despite the obvious differences, while every white conservative is a fledgling Bull Connor. Donald Trump managed to be both, despite his Zionism and love of black people.

The language of public discourse now sounds like wartime propaganda because we now live in the age of emotivism. The term “emotivism” comes from an early 20th century school of ethics that claimed all ethical sentences are actually expressions of emotional attitude, as in positive or negative. When a speaker says something is good or bad, he is not stating an objective fact, but merely expressing his own emotional attitude toward the object in question.

Like a lot of 19th and early 20th century ideas around ethics and philosophy, this one fell out of favor due to its lack of utility. You cannot build a grand moral theory if morality is a subjective construct that arises from tradition or superstition, so there must be some universal and objective morality. Similarly, you cannot make a career in ethics if ethics are nothing more than conditioned responses. There must be some universal ethical code buried in the desert that must be found.

That does not mean the emotivists were correct when they made their sweeping claim about ethical statements. Just because the war propagandists say the bad guys are bad as a way to generate support for the cause, does not mean everyone who says the bad guys are bad is merely acting on their conditioning. Nor does it mean that everyone saying the bad guys are bad is a propagandist. It is possible to think the bad guys are objectively bad and do so without emotion.

Even so, it is a useful concept when thinking about how modern humans interact with one another in the public space. America is an empire built by war, so it is built for war, and therefore it is always on the hunt for war. As a result, generations of Americans have grown up in a wartime culture, which means the public square has been flooded with what amounts to wartime propaganda. There is always a war, which means there is always an enemy that demands you jeer at it.

Public discourse in this age is not about presenting facts or contesting various claims, but about displaying your allegiance to a perceived moral divide. The white people installing the “Hate has no place here” signs on their lawn would never live within a bus ride of black people, but they feel they must show the world that they are on one side of the racism line, the good side. The yawning gap between their emotive gestures and their lived experience does not register with them.

This is why the people we call the Left love the word extremism. The word is meaningless but in the mouth of a Cloud Person it is ridiculous. They accuse normal people living normal lives of extremism, because those normal people do not want to dress their son as a girl. Logically, it is nonsense, but emotively it is highly appealing as it not only expresses the users state of mind toward the bad people, it amplifies the distance between the speaker and object.

Of course, this is why everyone is Hitler now. It is not that Hitler is the evilest person in history or that he is an outlier in political villainy. Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and many others were much bloodier and villainous. Unlike those other baddies from history, Hitler lets the speaker express a clear emotional state. That emotional state, of course, indicates your emotional commitment to a collection of people and ideas. Calling someone Hitler is like violently crying at a North Korean state funeral.

That is the way to think about public discourse in the emotive state. The ambitious and self-conscious are always looking around for a way express their “boo/hooray” instincts to the crowd. When the pro-Israel people rushed to their nearest platform to claim Hamas is Hitler, they were letting the world know their emotional state on this issue, not expressing an ethical or moral position. That is why the language spiraled into the absurd as they competed with one another.

That last part also helps explain the weirdness of public discourse. Since every issue is instinctively understood to be an opportunity to express an emotion, there is a natural competition to see who can be the most emotional. Piety in the emotive state is no longer about adherence to a set of ethical rules, but a consistency in showing the popular emotional response to issues. Instead of sacrificing a bull to the gods, the great and the good have a good cry at a candlelight vigil.

A biproduct of this emotionalism is that politics are purely performative. There is no practical point to any of it, as the primary motivation is to be seen expressing the best emotions at the time. While the mob sorts through their own emotional response to the emotive performances, the people with real power go about exercising that power to maintain and enhance their power. Politics has become the feelies from the novel Brave New World, rather than a marketplace of ideas.

While this is useful to the people with power, it may be short lived. There is a limit to how much raw emotion one can tolerate. Every day there is some new thing that everyone must emote about in public. Just as drug takers find they need increasingly powerful doses to get the desired effect, the emotive need increasingly stronger emotional responses. Like the drug taker, the end of this road is the inability to feel anything other than the lack of agony.

All human societies are moral societies. The rules governing virtue provide meaning and purpose to individual lives. The emotive state, in contrast, channels the natural desire to do the right thing, however society defines it, into the onanistic act of crying in public over violation of the right thing. As a result, the good life has no point, other than an endless crying jag. There is no point to this way of living, which may explain the catastrophic social measures of modernity.

Came For Dinner And Never Left

Posted on November 2, 2023 by thezman

Note: More housing shenanigans today, so this is an item from the early days of the green door when I got the idea to review the AFI top-100 films.

Some movies are on the top-100 list because they are great stories told very well, while others are on the list for their great technological breakthroughs. Some are on the list for their cultural impact. That is the case with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a comedy about race mixing from 1967. The film had two legends, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, and a big star at the moment in Sydney Poitier.

The film was viewed at the time as groundbreaking because it featured a mixed-race couple in a positive light. Right around the time the movie was released, the Supreme Court had struck down anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia. Of course, the civil rights movement was at its peak, so this was just what white liberals wanted to see, which was white liberals being celebrated for their goodness.

The movie itself is pretty simple. It opens with the couple in question, generic rich white girl and her much older black boyfriend, Sydney Poitier, getting off an airplane and strolling through an airport like lovers on a walk in the park. Keep in mind that this is 1967, but no one in the airport notices, because you see, this is the glorious future where race no longer matters, so get used to it you terrible bigots.

I was not around in 1967, but I was around in 1977. I was around in 1987 and 1997 as well, so I have some idea what it was like in 1967. I know in 1987, a mixed-race couple would have drawn a lot of stares. It was an extremely rare thing. In 1967 you can be sure the people in that airport would have been dumbstruck, but the story needed everyone to be cool with it so the rest of the story would make more sense.

Anyway, the couple arrives at the mansion of the white girl’s parents. The black maid, played by Weezy from the Jeffersons, is predictably flabbergasted by the site of the master’s daughter bringing home a black man. The two blacks are uncomfortable for a moment, until Poitier asks to use the phone. He goes into the den to use the phone, where there is a bug picture of FDR on the desk. That could be important.

The first parent home to meet the new man is the mother, who is uncomfortable, but tries to play it cool. This is where we begin to learn that Poitier is not just a black guy, but a special black guy. He not only knows exactly how the mother is feeling, but he knows exactly how to break the tension. Unlike the rest of the characters, he alone can rise above the situation and see everything from every perspective.

Next home is the father, who is home early to get ready for his golf outing. For some reason he is not surprised to find a middle-aged black man in his home with his daughter, so he just makes small talk for a while. Eventually, he notices there is a middle-aged black man in his home with his daughter and that is when they tell him that his daughter is planning to marry the middle-aged black man.

This is when we learn that Poitier is the most successful black man on the planet, as he is a famous doctor and world leader. Because the world depends on him, he is going to fly to New York to visit smart people and then head off to Geneva to run the World Health Organization. He has a plan to save Africa by teaching the smart African kids how to do stuff so they can make Africa great again. No kidding.

This is what sets the plot in motion. The parents have a day to give their blessing to the marriage or Poitier will break it off, as he is so noble and kind that he will not come between the white girl and her people. You see, he is not just the most accomplished black man on the planet, he is a numinous Negro. He is the saintly black character who exists to help the whites make their journey to enlightenment.

For a while Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn fret over what to do. Then a priest arrives and hams it up as the stereotypical Irish priest, accent and all. He thinks the whole thing is wonderful and this is where we see he is supposed the be the audience in this drama, enjoying how the rich white liberals struggle with their hypocrisy while trying to get with the times and accept the race mixing.

The catch phrase that is the title of the film comes when Tracy learns that Poitier’s parents are coming for dinner. Tracy is at his wit’s end over having been put in this situation when Hepburn says, “guess who’s coming to dinner?” Then she explains how Poitier’s parents are flying up from Los Angeles. Then the priest invites himself to the dinner, because he is the voice of the audience and needs to be there.

At the big dinner we learn that the black parents are opposed to the race mixing, but the mother is more open-minded to it than the father. We now have the predictable setup of the females trying to bring their stubborn husbands along. At some point the women commiserate and agree to work on the men. Poitier tells off his father, not so subtly implying that old blacks were responsible for keeping blacks down.

Finally, the black mother has a heart to heart with Spencer Tracy and he finally sees the light and agrees to bless the marriage. He then gives a big speech that sounds like it was written by the ad hoc committee of the revolutionary council on race in the 1967 people’s assembly. I actually felt sorry for Tracy having to say such stupid things in what would be his last movie before he died. It was ten minutes of cringe.

You have to judge movies in the context of their age, but even making big allowances for the age, this is a bad movie. It is ham-fisted, predictable, and preachy. The main characters are shallow and basic, with little to no development. Poitier is not even a real person in this movie. He is just a ridiculous version of the Magic Negro. The only character with any depth is Tracy and that is not much.

That said, the movie belongs on the top-100 list for its cultural value. It made $54 million in 1967, which is $420 million in today’s money. That is a massive success, which tells us that whites were enormously gullible and stupid back then. Sure, the movie had big stars and it was intended to be a comedy, but the fact they could not see that this was nothing but anti-white propaganda does not speak well of them.

There is also the fact that fifty years ago the usual suspects were pushing the idea that the only way for white men to be saved was to allow their daughters to run off with non-white males. The reason that white people face a long war to regain dominion over their societies is because it has been a long war against them. The people on the other side played the long game. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a good reminder of that fact and therefore worth watching today.

A Night In The Future

Posted on November 1, 2023 by thezman

I had a long day yesterday, as I had to start early in order to get my day job items finished by noon, so I could use the rest of the day on another project. That project took me out of the house and on the road until late in the evening. By the time I got home and settled in it was near bedtime. That also meant I had no time to eat along the way, so by the time I was making the trip home I was starving. The last thing I wanted to do was cook, so I decided to stop at a fast-food place.

The first stop was McDonald’s, which is probably the default for most people around the world when you need food in a pinch. The food is not terrible tasting, a bit nostalgic for most Americans, but it is always the same. Outside of the rare exceptions, the burger from the McDonald’s in Europe is going to taste the same as one from Asia, which will be the same as one from Idaho. I was not hankering for a Big Mac, but I had to eat something and that seemed like an easy option.

The drive through had about four or five cars in it when I arrived. Ten minutes later there were a few more cars and I had not moved an inch. Then more cars and then finally the line started to move. It was one of those deals with two ordering lanes and one pay and get your food lane. I question whether this is any better in terms of speed of processing, but it does let them stack up more cars. This last bit is something that is becoming a feature of fast food – waiting for your food.

I get to the order spot and a saucy sassy diverse female voice flippantly asks me what I want, like I just rolled up to her crib, as the locals put it. I asked for the number seven, which is two cheeseburgers, fries, and a drink. McDonald’s no longer has a small, so the small is now a medium. We had a minor debate about my demand for medium as she kept saying large. At least that is what I thought as it sounded like she was at a house party rather than the drive up window.

I am fifteen minutes into this by the time I creep up to the first window, where I expected to pay nine dollars for what used to be on the dollar menu. There is no one there, but the car in front of me is in loud negotiations with the person handing bags of food, so I just sit waiting. A young urban youth appears at the window and begins doing a funky dance for some reason. He is twirling and spinning, while he laughs and talks to someone off screen. He then leaves the scene.

Finally, I pull up to the second window, expecting to pay, but a sassy female who sort of looked like Grimace, if he had been in the sun too long, tells me that I need to pay funky dance guy in the previous window. I told her there was no one there, so she left, and I think she went to yell at him. She comes back and tells me funky dance man is back in his window. I think she expected me to get out and walk back to pay him, as she just stared at me, but I drove off instead.

Next up was a Wendy’s a block away. It has been a long time since I visited with Dave as I do not have fast food very often. When I was on the road all the time, Wendy’s was a preferred stop of the conventional chains. Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Burger King were my order of preference if I had to choose. That was long ago and now I avoid this stuff for the most part. They have added things since my last time. The big special item was what looked like nachos between two trashcan lids.

After a ten-minute wait, a sassy diverse female demanded to know why I was bothering them, and I told her I wanted a double burger meal. I noted that the prices were a bit better than McDonald’s. The double burger meal was $7.49. The big garish looking things were all over ten bucks. I get to the window, and I am told by the man in every ad now that I owed them $11.49. I told him the sign says $7.49 and he told me he did not give a bleep; the meal is $11.49. I drove off.

At this point I was thinking that maybe Uncle Ted was right all along. I am not talking about industrial society and its future. I am not even thinking about the letter bombing campaign, at least not now. He may have been onto something with the off grid living business, despite the compromises on hygiene. At these moments, I can understand why so many white guys still think Ayn Rand speaks to their soul. At least they would never have to see another funky dance.

I have written often about what happens when you try to run a technological society with lots of low-IQ people. Anyone who has spent time in South America or California has glimpsed the future. Even simple things become increasingly inefficient and then people seek to work around the bottlenecks, which adds to the inefficiency. In South America they have an expression called “the Latin way” which means lots of people buzzing about looking busy, but not accomplishing much.

If you add in an aggressively hostile and entitled population to the mix, it is hard to see how we keep the plates spinning. Fast food places keep going mostly on inertia, as they have been a part of the culture for generations. At some point, they either get automated or people abandon them. In other words, in order to maintain the technological society, it will mean masses of unemployed, aggressively hostile and entitled people looking for something to do.

One final thought. The 1990’s action flick Demolition Man probably had the near future about right when they imagined a world run by managerial silly people attempting to control a population of troublemakers. That is where our rulers think this is heading, except they are smart enough to keep a lid on things. The beautiful people and their attendants will manage a giant outdoor penal colony. Maybe they are right, but they best not expect to get a fast-food meal late at night.

Virtue And Justice

Posted on October 11, 2023 by thezman

In the Western world, concepts like justice and virtue are thought about as objective things, as if they have been handed to us by God. You cannot have personal justice as it is a thing that exists independent of you. You can have personal virtue, but that just means you voluntarily abide by a set of objective rules. The modifier in that phrase is for emphasis rather than to shift the meaning of the word. To be a virtuous person is to live by a set of rules that apply to all individuals individually.

This is most obvious in the way we use the word justice. It is often treated like a god that must be made happy or bad things will happen. The internet is full of videos where an idiot is breaking the law in a flagrant and gratuitous way only to come to a bad end by his own hand. The popularity of these videos is due to the notion that this proves justice will always be served. Justice is like a ledger and in the end, both sides of the ledger must sum to zero or else.

Justice is the great balance between right and wrong. There are things that are right and things that are wrong. If you do something wrong, like break the law, then the needs of justice say you must be punished. It is not the cops or the prosecutor or the judge punishing you because they are upset by your actions. They are punishing you because justice demands it. They may even have sympathy for you, but justice is justice and criminals have to be punished.

Something similar exists with virtue. The virtuous person abides by the rules of society and maybe the tenets of his religion. Our sense of virtue in the West is a very republican one in that it is based on your relationship with the social systems, not how you serve your family, your community, or your people. The virtuous person adheres to the rules and defends the institutions without regard to personal consideration. It is why every politician claims to be a public servant.

Of course, the word “public” is entirely impersonal. The reason you never hear a politician say he serves his people is there is no sense of a people. There is the public, this abstract collection of individual economic units, who have nothing more than a transactional relationship with one another. In this way, the public servant is not serving real flesh and blood people, but an implementation of them. The public is the interface for whatever lies behind it.

This was not always the case in the West. Justice, for example, was a personal matter for pre-Christian people. If a guy in the next village killed one of your people, justice required you to kill him or one of his people. On the other hand, your people might decide that it is not in their interest to exact revenge this way. Instead, they decide to kill the cattle of the other village. Justice was both a personal and collective concept that was only loosely tied to universal concepts.

In Germanic societies, they had trial by combat. In a dispute between two people, justice would be determined by the two parties fighting it out. The idea was not that the gods would pick the winner in the name of justice, but that justice was a personal thing to be imposed on others. It was not the duty of the ruler to sort this out for the two parties in a dispute. His job and that of society was to set the conditions for the two sides to figure this out for themselves.

When it comes to virtue, the reverse was the case. The measure of you as a person was not against an objective set of rules for individuals, but wholly in the context of you as the member of a people. You see this in Homer where the heroes perform great deeds on behalf of their people. The Norse legends have similar tales. Virtue was all about your service to your people. It was simply impossible to be a virtuous man without contributing to the defense and prosperity of your people.

This is why exile loomed so large. Death was a terrible end because you were forever exiled from your people, so you could no longer serve them. Exile was the next worst for the same reason. It also brought the torment of living with the fact that you are denied the opportunity to serve your people. Virtue was defined by you fulfilling your potential in service to your people, so it was simply impossible to be virtuous outside the context of you as a member of a people.

There are still some flickers of this sense of virtue in the modern age. Men who volunteer for the army are thanked for their service. Military honors are often tied to selfless commitment to fellow soldiers under duress. We have parades for cops who get killed chasing criminals. Again, politicians call themselves public servants so they can pretend to be virtuous. All of this, however, is limited to a narrow space of life and measured against a universal standard of justice.

This contrast in the old views on virtue and justice with the modern views is obvious when you look at the current war between the Jews and Arabs. Hamas committed an atrocity against the Jews because their justice demanded it. The Jews are the enemy of their people and justice demands they strike at their enemies. The men who no doubt volunteered for the mission will be celebrated, because they accomplished a great feat in the war against the enemy of their people.

For their part, the Jews are following the same path. Twitter was full of Jewish commentators demanding vengeance. They were not demanding justice in the way in which modern Western people think of it. Look at how Washington reacted after the 9/11 attacks. The promise was to go after the people responsible. George Bush did not promise to carpet bomb Kabul. Jews around the world and the Jewish government are promising to exact vengeance on the people of Gaza.

The contrasting views on virtue are also obvious on the Jewish side. Diaspora Jews conflate their sense of virtue, which is service to their people, with the Western sense of virtue and demand you give over everything to their fight with one of their ancient enemies in the Levant. A similar mindset drives the neocon demand that the West risk nuclear war in the Ukraine. Note that they speak of Russians as the enemy, not the Russian state or the current form of government.

That last bit is vital to grasping the differences. The sanctions regime was specifically aimed at the Russian people. The hope was that sanctions would collapse the economy and throw the population into starvation. We see the same thing happening with Gaza, as the IDF bombs residential areas. In both cases, the point is to harm the people, holding them responsible, not specifically their leaders. In both cases, it is assumed the leaders are acting in service to their people.

It is tempting to think that modern Western views on virtue and justice are superior to these older forms, but there is much to favor in what we see in the Levant. If the Palestinians adhered to Western views, they would no longer exist as a people, at least not in the Levant. Most would have fled to new lands and lost their identity. The Jewish people would have gone away a long time ago. Their old school views of virtue and justice have allowed them to exist in the most hostile places.

The test of these two outlooks is happening within the West. As non-European people flood into the West, bringing their Bronze Age mindset on virtue and justice, they are challenging Europeans and their universalist and individualist mindset. Will the former naturally give way to the latter or will the latter have to be imposed by force on the former and is this even possible within the framework of the latter? Will Europeans just have to return to their old ways to preserve themselves?

Whither Rufo-ism

Posted on October 10, 2023 by thezman

Since the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump swung through the walls of conservatism almost a decade ago, there has been a desperate attempt to either rebuild the wall or fill the void left by the old conservatism. The Never Trump project was mostly an effort to chase the barbarians out of the city so the good people can rebuild the wall and restart the old politics. For the most part, this project has failed as the massive hole in the wall remains.

A good recent example of this is this post by neoconservative writer Mathew Continetti in Commentary Magazine. He claims that the populists supporting nationalist policies and candidates are actually Marxists. This has become a popular theme with the East Coast Straussians, of which the neocons are a part. It is a hilariously insane line of thought, owing to the steep decline in the human capital we see everywhere in politics, but especially in the neoconservative subculture.

On the other hand, the project to recreate the old dynamic of Left and Right, has quietly plodded along with a new generation looking to create a New Right. Many are just the hucksters we have come to expect in this age. These are the people who live on social media and front-run whatever is happening at the moment. Others are rejects from the old conservative rackets hoping for a fresh start. These are the buzzards that arrive at the end of every movement.

Then you have the more professional and perhaps sincere players who operated on the fringes of conservatism but now see a chance to spread their wings. The Claremont crowd, for example, is working hard to create a New Right based on the primitive notion of natural right, supplemented by appeals to the classical liberalism of the Framers along with large dollops of Lincolnism. Claremont subscribes to the apocryphal version of the founding and Lincoln promoted by Harry Jaffa.

It is from this world that we get Chris Rufu, the guy best known for waging jihad against critical race theory in the schools. He also has waged campaigns against the sexual exploitation of children in the schools. He worked in support of the Florida bill to ban child pornography in grammar schools. He now has a book out titled, America’s Cultural Revolution, which describes the New Left and how it gained power. Paul Gottfried reviewed it here and Charles Haywood here.

Most of what Rufo describes in his book has been kicking around dissident circles for the last decade, mostly due to it kicking around paleo circles for decades. Contrary to the claims of conservatism, the New Left was never an economic or purely political movement, but a cultural and spiritual movement. With the collapse of 20th century conservatism and the cultural revolution of the last decade, this reality has become clear to everyone except libertarians.

Rufo is not without his critics. In fact, Rufo-ism is a very modern political phenomenon in that it is as much about its critics as its content. Thanks to the cultural revolution and the internet, we now live in a purely Schmitt-ian world, as in the German philosopher Carl Schmitt. Politics is only about friends and enemies, so Rufo-ism is becoming one of those points of the friend-enemy distinction. In a follow up post, Paul Gottfried talks about some of Rufo’s critics.

One of the interesting things about the critics of Rufo, as well as his supporters, is the dog that never barks. That dog is race. This is odd, given the material at the heart of his current project. Critical Race Theory is about race. Then there is the fact that Rufo spent much of his early time on this protect lecturing white people that the real victims of CRT were black kids. He put most of his effort into shooting down the idea that CRT is antiwhite, on the grounds that the term is “racist.”

This is an important part of Rufo-ism and the milieu that spawned it. These are people who are opposed to any discussion of race. It is not that they oppose the New Left’s view on race but that they embrace the New Left’s view on race more completely and sincerely than the Left embraces it. Rufo does think race is a social construct and it must be eliminated from all discourse. This New Right imagined by Rufo, Claremont and others is not just colorblind, but colorless.

It is tempting to assume this is just the old conservative two-step. They embrace the moral claims of the people they oppose but they have a different and more lucrative proposal for how to achieve them. Of course, there is the constant fear of being called “racist” which has haunted conservatism since the Old Left declared discrimination the greatest sin and diversity the greatest good. In other words, it is tempting to think Rufo’s act is an effort to avoid the R-word.

This is a reasonable suspicion, but it does not appear to be the case with Rufo nor the other popular figures from Claremont. Rufo married outside of his race and has mixed-race children, so unlike his New Left critics, who live like White Nationalists, Rufo’s “lived experience” comports with his stated views on race. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in this subculture. Further, the Claremont view of politics leaves no room for race or even natural inequality.

There is another reason for the aversion to race. Rufo is a science-denier. He rejects biology as we know it. He worked for the Discovery Institute, which peddles crackpot theories like intelligent design. Of course, the Claremont people largely reject the last two thousand years of scientific progress. They instead embrace the Straussian belief that nature comes with a secret code book on how humans should act. If you say Aristotle’s name enough times, the secret is revealed.

The starting place for the New Right is the assumption that humans are infinitely malleable in terms of character. What you are as a person is determined by the society into which you are born. If you get the moral code of society right and enforce that morality through the institutions, you end up with virtuous citizens. Since virtue in their view is a life lived to the benefit of the polis, there can be no place for things like race, because that undermines their idea of virtue.

If this sounds a bit like Marxism, it should, because this is the basic assumption of Marx and most radical thinkers. Once you assume that morality is an objective truth that lies outside of collective agreement, it means there can be only one truly moral way to organize human society. The goal of politics, therefore, is to discover it and then ruthlessly enforce it. Instead of historical materialism as the moral authority, the New Right embraces their interpretation of classical philosophy.

Putting aside the underlying philosophical reason for their embrace of colorless politics, it sounds a lot like the colorblind politics of the old conservatism. In the 1980’s conservatives were sure America was ready to move beyond race. Everyone had the same opportunity and society would finally escape the long shadow of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Race would still exist. It simply would not matter in our behavior as citizens and as a society.

The New Right is more reactionary, but the idea is the same. Instead of the optimism of the 1980’s, they are informed by the pessimism of the present. While they agree that discrimination is the worst sin, they see the antiracists as bad as the racists they claim to oppose. The New Right wants to use any means necessary to remove any discussion of race and biological reality from the public square, mostly because they see it as a tool of the people they claim to oppose.

From a dissident perspective, this New Right seems doomed to failure because reality is undefeated, but that view suffers from a flawed view of success. The New Left, like the Old Left and it antecedents since the Mayflower needs a dancing partner, one that shares its ultimate goal. That means something will rise up to take that spot now that the old Buckley-style conservatism is caput. Rufo-ism is a good bet to be what fills that void on the New Left’s dance card.

Numbers

Posted on October 5, 2023 by thezman

If you were a young person in the 1980’s and caught up in the swelling conservative movement, you needed to know the numbers. Conservatism, to a great degree, was about making rational arguments which meant starting with the numbers. Things like the budget deficit, economic growth, crime rates and inflation were a common part of the conservative counter to progressive claims. At its most basic, conservatism was rational while liberalism was emotional.

For a while it seemed like the conservatives had carried the day on this issue as the public discourse slowly mirrored conservative discourse. When public figures talked about politics and social issues, it was about the numbers. The media would make a day of covering the latest speech by the Fed chair. Alan Greenspan became a rock star who gave speeches to huge crowds. Every politician made sure to have the Congressional Budget Office bless his latest idea.

Through the Bush years, economists took the place of the court astrologer, providing empirical authority to every normative claim. This reached its peak in the first Obama term when they said that every dollar spent by the government created more than a dollar of economic activity. A line of people with impressive sounding credentials provided the math of this claim. This was the argument in favor of the massive spending program unleashed by the Obama administration.

It was not just politics that got the numbers treatment. After every Super Bowl, the media would spend a day or two crunching the numbers to prove that you were the only weirdo who did not set aside the day to watch the big game. Television ratings were a mainstay of media coverage. The stock market became the central measure of social happiness, with cable channels dedicated to telling us the numbers and what the numbers meant for your happiness.

Today, no one discusses the numbers. Someone arguing for a policy on the grounds that it is good the economy sounds like someone arguing for free silver. In fact, it is the primary criticism of Conservative Inc. They do not care about crossdressers chasing your son around the playground or the tidal wave of brown people pouring over the border into your neighborhood. They care about the carried interest deduction and locking in tax cuts that few experienced or remember.

What is the current projected federal deficit? Without googling it, few people would know, and most people would not bother to do it. The same is true of the total federal debt, which used to be a headline topic. How much does the Federal government owe and to whom do they owe it? Washington is embroiled in a huge drama right now set off by the Federal budget debate and no one bothers mentioning that about forty percent of what they spent is borrowed.

One reason no one talks about the economic numbers is they have become inconceivable large, so they have no impact. People can grasp a million and they can sort of grasp a billion. Being a millionaire would be nice and being a billionaire would be awesome, but trillionaire? It is probably better than billionaire, but what is bigger than anything you can imagine? The thirty-plus trillion federal debt is a meaningless number because it is outside of what most people can imagine.

There is a bigger issue that applies to all the numbers. Decades of lying about the numbers have made all of them suspect. The totally fake economic data pumped out in the Obama years sunk the credibility of the court wizards. When those people with impressive credentials put on their serious faces and said that taking money from you and giving some of it to your neighbor would grow the economy, even the most innumerate started to question the math.

It is not just the big stuff where lying has undermined the trust in the numbers that used to be the guideposts of society. Television ratings are obviously bogus or not as meaningful as claimed. If the people making the content cared about ratings, they would not have smeared their feces all over popular content. Ad makers would not have replaced most of the white people with nonwhites. They certainly would not have every white woman paired with a black guy.

Probably the most egregious offender of the numbers are the tech companies, who clearly fake all of their numbers. How many users are really on Twitter? No one knows but we know the official number is a lie. We can clearly see that the follower counts and impressions are fake. Before buying Twitter, Elon Musk made the rather obvious claim that the site was riddled with bots and fake accounts. Once the deal closed, he stopped talking about the bots and fake accounts.

There is more to the general fakery than the unreliability of the numbers. It is that it reflects a collapse in trust. When the government claims inflation is under control, but you keep seeing your expenses climb, you are reminded by the numbers that the people in charge cannot be trusted. When some new personality bursts on the scene claiming to have a huge audience, but no one you know heard of the guy until last week, you cannot help but wonder if it is a lie.

The numbers of life are not supposed to tell us what we ought to do, but to be a measure of what we are doing. If we cannot trust the numbers or the people issuing the numbers, then we cannot know what they are doing. We have no way of judging what is being told to us or if it is on the level. The only logical response is to assume the numbers are fake and the people issuing them are lying. A society with unreliable numbers is a society run by unreliable people.

Of course, this is most clear in politics. The most important numbers are the votes counted on election night. The logic of democracy is that everyone gets their say, then everyone votes and the side with the most votes wins. Along the way polling tells us how the various arguments and people are doing. If all of these numbers are fake, then what is the point? If the numbers at the soap box and the ballot box cannot be trusted, you are left with the numbers in the cartridge box.

Since the end of the Cold War, American society has travelled along an arc that started with a trust in the numbers and the people behind them to a place where no sane person trusts the numbers or the people behind them. That is probably why it feels like this pirate ship of a society called America is sailing into dangerous waters. Odds are just numbers, and the odds say that in a world without reliable numbers, the most likely outcome is the ship eventually sinks.

No Enemies On The Right

Posted on October 4, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walking With Death

Posted on October 2, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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