Category Archives: Culture

Binary Thinking

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In the movie The Usual Suspects, the wily main character utters one of the most memorable movies lines in recent times. “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The line is allegedly lifted from the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire. According to the Quote Investigator, versions of the line have been used by Christian ministers before Baudelaire. That seems plausible, given the inclinations of reformist Christian ministers.

Something similar can be said for radicalism. Perhaps its greatest trick is to convince the world they did not win and rule the West for the last century and a half. Instead, the radicals go from triumph to triumph, convincing their adherents that the fight must go on, as well as convincing their opponents to fight future battles in a way that is guaranteed to result in their defeat. It really is a remarkable thing, when you stop and think about the past century or so of political conflict.

One trick the Left has used is to alter the shared consciousness in such a way that everyone is a binary thinker. That is, every issue, not matter how trivial, is assumed to be one thing or the other. Whatever the issue, there are only two options, so if one is made invalid, the other is the right answer by default. Therefore, everyone participating in political discourse is forced to defend one side or the other. Further, they think they advance their side by discrediting the other side.

The classic example of this was the homosexual marriage debate. Before anyone knew what was happening, the beautiful people were insisting that anyone opposed to the idea must hate homosexuals. In fact, anyone not embracing everything about the homosexual lifestyle must be a hate-filled bigot. This binary thinking has now extended to men dressed as women. The only options for the debate were one extreme position or the other, which obviously worked to the advantage of the Left.

Another example is the current debate over the pandemic lock downs. The alarmists insist that the choices are lock everyone in their homes until there are no more sick people or allow people to die in the streets from the virus. Most people have happily accepted this framing, so that anyone questioning the lock down is viewed as a dangerous nut. The idea of a third or fourth position is no longer possible, as those are lumped into one extreme or the other by the two sides.

Yet another example is one that has turned up in fringe politics. Those opposed to the current economic order are cheering the lock down, as they assume it must be bad for those they blame for the current economic order. This urge to harm their perceived enemies is so intense, they seem willing to harm themselves and their friends in an economic collapse, if it harms the bad guys. Any questioning of this is characterized as a defense of the current order, possibly even a betrayal.

Probably the clearest example of this binary way of thinking is something you see from the intelligent design people. They assume if they can discredit evolutionary biology, their preferred explanation of life must be true. They make no effort to prove their claims about a great designer. They just assume that if they discredit the alternative, they must be proven correct by default. It is why they invest all of their time and energy into attacking evolutionary biology. Theirs is an either-or worldview.

There’s almost always a strong moral component to binary thinking. Side A looks at Side B as immoral, perhaps evil. We see this now with the lock down. Those questioning the policy are accused of being indifferent to their fellow humans or even putting lives at risk with their crazy ideas about going outside. The same moral signaling was at play with the homosexual marriage debate. In the binary worldview, there are only good guys and bad guys, black hats and white hats.

This hyper-moralized binary thinking can have some bizarre results. The Left is endlessly mewing about the danger of right-wing authoritarianism, but cheers what can only be described as authoritarianism during the lockout. Right-wing opponents of cosmopolitan globalism are now embracing left-wing schemes to crash the system, like rent strikes and overloading the welfare system. The so-called hard-right now sounds like a bunch of leisure suit wearing Progressives from the 1970’s.

The reason for this is the hyper-moralized world of binary thinking must necessarily be detached from anything resembling fixed truth. If all that matters is opposing the bad guy, then the only truth that matters is they are wrong and therefore the opposite of what they say is the truth. In a world of binary thinking, everyone is defined by who they hate and what they oppose, not by objective truth. In the great dance with the Devil, he leads by simply existing in the mind of his partner.

That is the great trick of the radicals. By convincing the world that politics is a constant struggle against some enemy, the corrective of factual reality has been abandoned in favor of binary logic. Since radicalism itself is rooted in the endless revolution against something, societies in a constant struggle to find some new devil to oppose must always embrace radicalism. The very identity of a radical society is rooted in the constant struggle to move past some evil onto the next.

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The Rewind

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In his book The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukyama argued that humanity has reached the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the triumph of Western liberal democracy. This does not mean stuff stopped happening, just that the evolution of political thought had reached an end-point, where liberal democracy was the best we could muster. All the alternatives had been explored and tried only to fall short of what liberal democracy could provide materially and morally.

There is a lot to be said for and against Fukyama’s claims and whether he is even the first person to make this argument. Alexandre Kojève made similar arguments from a Marxist perspective in the middle of the last century. Given the trajectory of liberal democracy since Fukyama’s book, Kojève has the better claim. Regardless, there is no doubting that the West has gone a down a cul-de-sac of sorts intellectually. Whatever comes after liberal democracy, we cannot imagine it.

This dead end is most obvious in fringe politics. This debate the other day between an anarchist, a Marxist, and some flavors of fascism is a good example. The debate itself is puerile and stupid, but it is illustrative of the state of the fringe. Rather than debating novel ideas as alternatives to the current orthodoxy, they shout at one another about archaic ideas that have no salience in the modern age. The far Left and far Right these days just engage in a form of live action role playing.

Fascism and Marxism are as relevant as the free silver movement, but for people unhappy with the status quo, and hoping to seem edgy and dangerous, they are the only options. Classical liberalism is what suburban dads embrace when they are unhappy with the status quo, while mom can throw in with the gynocracy. The middle-class radicals are left to embrace old ideas that never had much purchase in America and have not been popular in Europe for close to a century now.

One common item to both sides of this fringe debate is the unspoken agreement that the current order is unacceptable. Their critiques of liberal democracy fall into one of two categories. On the one side, the claim is the system does not adequately provide for the material comfort of the people and the wrong people benefit. The other side mostly focuses on the wrong people benefiting, but largely agree that the system does not adequately provide for the materially well-being of the people.

Strangely, the race angle is mostly a prop, a fig leaf to disguise the fact that both sides largely agree with one another. Both sides agree that socialism is the right economic model and both sides agree that the bankers and corporate executives are the bogeyman in this drama. The neo-Marxists, however, make a big deal of being anti-racist, despite all of them being white, while the neo-Fascist make a big deal of being racist and anti-Semitic. Race is mostly a costume for both sides.

There is another element to this neo-revanchism we see in fringe politics and that is the strong desire to start over. Having reached the end of the tournament and being relegated to the loser bracket, the various teams in fringe politics now seek to start the tournament over again. It’s why the Left side calls themselves anti-Fascists and the Right side embraces the Fascist aesthetic. It allows both sides to believe they can start the process over again and this time, get a better result.

That’s why both sides were hoping the virus panic would destroy the economy and usher in a great depression. The Right-side imagines people taking wheelbarrows full of cash to buy food. The Left side imagines working men being entertained by folk singers after they hear a speech by the local communist cadre. There is the assumption that if the whole liberal democratic order fails, we just rewind the clock and begin the process over again, but this time with a different result.

Another angle to this neo-revanchism is a new romanticism among younger white males for a return to a what they imagine was a more honorable and possibly heroic way of living as political actors. They want to be poet-warriors, who read political philosophy and fight the enemies of their cause. The neo-Marxists kit themselves out as beatniks and repeat lines they picked up movies about prior left-wing movements. The neo-fascists embrace Nazi iconography and language.

Richard Spencer tapped into this romanticism with his Faustian man act. Prior to his ascension as the face of the alt-right, he busied himself writing banal paleocon essays about current events. Then he started doing videos and speeches about how it was the destiny of European man to conquer and rule. He threw in enough literary references to pass himself off as a philosopher. A lot of young white men fell for it, because they dreamed of going back to a more honorable and heroic age.

Of course, this type of fringe politics is almost exclusively male. In fact, the reason for so much interest and energy in fringe politics in general is that mainstream politics is almost completely feminine now. Both sides of the liberal democratic order are dominated by harpies and schoolmarms. There’s simply no place for a normal male in conventional politics, so normal males are filtering into antiquarian politics. For many, this is just a better version of the video game of life.

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Custodialism

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Every political philosophy starts with a set of beliefs about the human condition that are claimed to be universal and timeless. Based on these assumptions, there is a critique of the present state of affairs and the political organization responsible for it. What comes after that is an alternative. The claim is that the alternative will more closely correspond to man’s natural condition. Usually, there is a list of principles put forward that are intended to increase the good and diminish the bad.

Communists, for example, assumed that human beings are naturally cooperative, but that private property creates conflict. The greed of a few, exploiting the many, results in conflict between the classes. Eliminate private property and you eliminate that social conflict. They argued that the move to industrial societies meant scarcity could be eliminated through collective ownership of capital. The elimination of private property would lead to the equitable distribution of production.

Libertarians see cooperation as the result of the diversity of talents among humans and their rational self-interest. Once two people figured out that they could increase their output by combining their efforts, the foundation of society was set. People soon figured out that combining diverse talents increases collective productivity and material prosperity. Because humans are motivated by self-interest, they naturally cooperate with one another to increase their material prosperity.

The people who currently rule over us, start from the assumption that all humans possess the same natural raw material. The differences we see in people are the result of racism, poverty, inequality and the legacy of white supremacy. Otherwise, people come into the world as amorphous blobs that can be shaped into whatever society makes of them. Whether the rulers truly believe this is not important. Public policy is based on the blank slate and extreme egalitarianism.

If the starting point for a political philosophy is a set of universal truths about the human condition, then it is necessary that those truths be based in reality. Marxism has been a bloody disaster, because it assumes things about man that are contrary to the reality of the human condition. Marxists tried to remedy this by killing off the inconvenient, but it turned out that you just can’t kill enough people to make it work. Transforming society into an abattoir lowers productivity, rather than producing plenty.

Similarly, but without the bloodshed, libertarianism has been a complete failure as a political movement, because homo economicus is not real. Material self-interest is certainly part of the puzzle, but humans are motivated by all sorts of things. More important, the assumption that people will deal with one another in good faith, once the monopoly of the state is removed, is false. Every society has some portion motivated to rule over the rest. Someone will always be in charge.

Much of what vexes the modern West is that the people in charge have embraced a political philosophy based on invalid assumptions about human nature. People are not born as amorphous blobs that can be molded into model citizens. Instead, they are the genetic result of thousands of mating decisions that came before them. Further, nature does not distribute her gifts equally between individuals or groups. The diversity of man extends to all aspects of the human animal, not just the superficial traits.

The main reason the West is struggling to square what it believes about humanity with what is happening in the world, is that the core assumptions of the West were formed in the Enlightenment. The great debates about the nature of man were between Europeans, who were primarily concerned with how Europeans would organize themselves, manage relations between groups of Europeans and conduct commerce between and within groups of Europeans.

Another issue is that Western style liberal democracy is a creation of an age when smart people knew very little about the human sciences. Their speculation about the evolution of settled society was a work of imagination. They may have had some sense that humanity progressed from savagery to civilization, but they had no understanding of genetics, evolution or the interplay between culture and biology. They had no knowledge about what we inherited from our simian ancestors.

The big flaw is the assumption that there is some reason, beyond the material, for why humans are the only intelligent species on the planet. We’re special. As such, there must be some reason for it. The very notion of human progress assumes there must be a reason for our existence. After all, to what are we progressing if there is no purpose to our existence? What is the point of the arc of history if it does not have a beginning, middle and end? There must be some reason for it.

Current events are a good lesson in the reality of the human condition. Humans are not relentlessly pursuing their self-interest or naturally cooperative. The engine that drives humanity is the need for safety. We see that all around us as people meekly hide in their closets because they are told the bogeyman is outside. The great panic would not be possible if people were driven by self-interest. Why would the overwhelming majority sacrifice for the one or two percent vulnerable to the virus?

The fact is, people have gone along with this because down deep, in the store of man’s oldest desires, is the urge to huddle in the cave with the rest of the tribe, as the storm rages outside. That is man’s oldest desire as a social animal. To bind together in a shared fear of the natural world is what makes us human. The great motivator of mankind is the desire for safety. If there is a point to our existence, it is to shelter with our cave mates trembling in fear at the great danger outside.

For sure, people do more than just shelter from the danger, but it is the desire for safety that drives our actions. We will cooperate with one another to defeat some threat and will profit greatly from saving people from a threat. Safety and its traveling companion comfort are the great drivers of human progress. A great way to get rich is to eliminate a danger from life. The most popular way, however, is to make the sheltering from the dangers of life as comfortable as possible.

If there is to be a new moral philosophy for the post-Enlightenment age, it will have to be based, at least in part, on man’s nature desire for safety. In fact, the neo-liberal order may very well be the moral philosophy to first root itself in safety. The legion of schoolmarms and harpies monitoring our speech and making sure we have no unclean thoughts are all here for our collective good. They even say their role is to create safe spaces for every conceivable type of person.

The Enlightenment was as much about observing what was happening on its own as crafting blueprints for future societies. Marx, for example, had plenty of examples to draw from to form his ideas. Maybe that is what we are seeing today. As the custodial state forms up, what we call the neo-liberal order will become more formal and get a new name that captures its essence. Perhaps we are living at the dawn of Custodialism, the politics of keeping everyone safe from any possible danger.

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Integral Thoughts

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Integralism, sometimes called Catholic integralism or Christian integralism, is the revival of one of the oldest concepts in Christianity. The very simple definition of integralism is that worship is essential to the common good, therefore political authority, in order to maintain legitimacy, much recognize and promote the religion of the people. Since this is primarily a Christian concept, at least in this context, the religion must be Christianity or in the case of Catholic societies, Catholicism.

At first blush this may sound like theocracy, but that is not the case. Instead, it is both a critique of and reform of liberal democracy. In the most general sense, liberal democracy is a set of rules that ensures that the general will of the people is expressed through the state. In theory, at least, liberal democracy is silent on the nature of the social arrangements of the people, as long as those arrangements are arrived upon through the mechanism of the ballot box and marketplace.

Integralism is first and foremost a critique of this definition of liberal reality. They point out that in every liberal democracy, an ideology evolves to limit the choices at the ballot box and in the marketplace. Homosexual marriage is the most obvious example. The public rejected it, so it was imposed. Often, the liberal-democratic ideology limits or removes choices within the family. For example, parents are forced to put their sons on mind-altering drugs in order to please the public schools.

For the integralists, the first line of critique is observable reality. Liberal democracy, whatever it claims in theory, results in degeneracy and the destruction of the social capital of the people. A system that is supposed to be devoid of morality is quickly consumed by a destructive civic ideology. This defect, according to the modern integralists, is the absence of morality. A system constrained by and subordinate to a Christian moral code would not make war on the people.

The aim of the Catholic integralist is the integration of religious authority and political power. This is not some fringe idea promoted by people living off the grid. Leading integralists include Edmund Waldstein, Patrick J. Deneen, Gladden Pappin, and Adrian Vermeule. Notre Dame’s main journal posted a long essay explaining Catholic integralism a couple of years ago. This was written by the aforementioned Edmund Waldstein, who is a Cistercian monk from Austria.

Catholic integralism has a traveling partner in the Protestant sphere that is called Christian reconstructionism. This is a 20th century movement, rooted in prior reform movements, which argues that modern government should be ruled by divine law, including the judicial laws of the Old Testament. The Christian Right in the United States, the home school movement and various other social conservative movements sprung from Christian reconstructionism in the last century.

The main criticism of integralism in all its forms is that not all people are Christian in modern Western societies. Jews, for example, would oppose any effort to integrate Christian ethics into secular law. Darren Beattie, the right-wing critic of multiculturalism, is very opposed to integralism, calling Vermeule a dangerous joke. Nationalist Yorham Harzony opposes any role of Catholicism in modern society. Neocons, of course, oppose anything with the hint of decency.

From the Jewish perspective, this is not a small thing. A society limited by Christian ethics, even broadly defined, is one that will encourage the inclusion of Christians and the exclusion of non-Christians. Mormons will support their fellow Mormons. Baptists will support their fellow Baptists. Being of the faith will be a qualification for access to power and authority. Jews understand all too well the nature of tribal identity, so they must oppose any role of religion in a society, other than Israel.

There are, of course, secular criticisms of integralism. Right-wing Progressives like David French argue that it is just Christian authoritarianism. It is a curious claim from someone who favorably compares himself to Christ. Civic nationalists and constitutional originalists oppose the idea of introducing morality into the law. They make rather curious claims about the nature of modern society, like we are governed by the written law, in order to defend the current kritarchy.

All of these criticisms of integralism miss the mark, because they refuse to acknowledge the reality of liberal democracy. America is now an ideological state, closer to a theocracy, rather than the liberal ideal. The debate is not about whether the state and its agents, private and public, will impose a moral order on the people. The question is the source of that morality and how will it be imposed. To pretend otherwise is to live in the realm of fantasy. Morality is part of what defines every society.

The integralists, however, come up short and for a similar reason. One big elephant in the room is the open society. You cannot, in fact, have an open society, as it is quickly overrun. The integralist insist that you can maintain the open society, just as long as it is governed by divine law. This is not a lot different from what civic nationalists argue with regards to immigration. If every newcomer agrees on the rules, then why not let everyone move to wherever they think is best for them?

America has a long experience with this reality, as the country has been multiracial and multicultural from the start. Blacks in America are every bit as Christian, more so, in fact, as whites, but the races continue to live culturally separate. The typical black neighborhood is nothing like the typical white neighborhood. Black culture remains stubbornly immune to modernity. The truth is, God may love us equally, but he gave us different continents as homelands for a reason.

The same critique of liberal democracy can be made of integralism, in that both have the same plank in their eye. That is biology. The Christianity of one people differs from that of another people because the people are different. They have a different past, a different set of ancestors and different sense of who they are as a people. The same is true of the people’s sense of civic duty and their relationship to their society. New England remains alien to Appalachia because of biology.

That said, given the choice between integralism and civic nationalism, biological reality will come down on the side of the former. If one accepts that the divine law of one people will differ from that of another, integralism is an excellent critique of liberal democracy. It offers a moral argument in response to the ideological claims of the current ruling elite. More important, those moral arguments are rooted in something with genuine moral authority, rather than the general will.

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What Must Be Done

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The Financial Times, the strange colored newspaper you see at airports, is not known for its skepticism of modern global economics. Therefore, it was a bit of a shock to see the mouthpiece of global finance come out in favor of a radical rethinking of the economic order. They argued that all options must be on the table in order to address the tattered relationship between the people and their governments. In their words, the social contract must be restored after the virus panic ends.

The alleged sentiments behind the editorial are not wrong. The primary duty of any government is the welfare of the people. It’s why we have government. Sure, we assign it functions like protecting private property and enforcing contracts, but that’s not the reason we invented government. Similarly, the state defends the privileges of the rich at the expense of everyone else. This has been true since the dawn of man, but again, this is not why human societies have governments.

The point of government is the general welfare of the people. That means defending against attacks from abroad and attacks from within. The former is straight forward, but the latter is where things get complicated. Defending against internal threats is about a set of laws and customs for the purpose of maintaining order. The character and nature of the people will determine these internal structures. Good order in the lands of the Mohammedan is different than good order in the Orient.

This is not a concern in a world of nations and nation states. In a world of global capital and the free flow of goods and people across borders, it is nearly impossible. The state cannot enforce the customs of its people when its people change with each generation, maybe with each decade. When economics requires the people to yield their ancient customs and liberties, the point of government is no longer the welfare of the people, but as middle-man, facilitating conformity to economic necessity.

This is where the globalist on the Financial Times editorial board fail in their analysis of the current crisis. The social contract, if there is one, is not built around a set of economic policies. It is not a set of rules imposed by the keepers of the economy in order to make transactions as efficient as possible. The social contract is the invisible bonds between the people. It is this dedication to the shared welfare that necessitates the creation of the state in order to maintain those bonds.

Those invisible bonds are not the creation of the state, but the result of the mating decisions of our ancestors. The social contract between Finns is just the conceptualization of their shared history and ancestry. It is unique to them. What makes a Finn and Finn is not where he stands on the map or how he does business. What makes him a Finn is he is the fruit of the Finnish family tree. To be Finn means the ability to one day make more Finns. That’s biology, not economics.

The social contract can only exist among a people with a shared ancestry. If the goal is to restore the social contract, the first step is not a new round of economic fads, but a restoration of the ancient bonds among people. The West must first become a collection of nations again. Only in a world of nations can the governments of those nations preserve and defend the social contract. Safeguarding the welfare of the people can only happen when there is a people, rather than just people.

This is the fundamental flaw of the current order. Cosmopolitan globalism rests on the false notion of homo economicus. This is the assumption that humans are rational, self-interested, and pursue their subjectively-defined ends optimally. More important, it assumes that people are defined internally, rather than by the untold number of invisible bonds and interactions with their society. Globalism assumes man lives in a particular society, because it benefits in some way to do so.

Not only is this false, but homo economicus is in direct contradiction with the concept of a social contract. Socrates could not flee Athens and avoid death, because to do so would mean he was no longer Socrates. Who he was as a person was defined by his membership in the polis called Athens. The social contract cannot exist in a world of atomized individuals. The social contract can only exist in a world where people are defined by their membership in a society of their people.

The editors of the Financial Times are not wrong in their observations. The great inequity in the West is a not only disruptive, it is fundamentally immoral. The strange blend of casual indifference and despotic intolerance by the state, the anarcho-tyranny, is intolerable and will lead to conflict. The heavy-handed abuse of power by the surveillance state will lead to conflict. These are not root causes, however. They are symptoms of an ideology at odds with human nature.

That is, of course, the radical idea that must be on the table along with crackpot ideas like universal basic income. The restoration of nations with governments dedicated to maintaining the welfare of their people. This means the end of mass immigration and the repatriation of as many foreigners as practical. It means the end of global institutions that supersede national sovereignty. It means the embrace of the great diversity of man and the value of good strong borders between people.

Of course, this revolution in thinking will not come voluntarily. This fact is made plain in that Financial Times editorial. The reason the great defenders of cosmopolitan globalism suddenly sound like Marxist undergrads is they want to preserve the current order at all cost. If it means embracing nutty ideas like universal income, that’s fine, just as long as the class of international pirates can ride the oceans of global capital. If that’s what it takes to keep homo economicus going, so be it.

It is another reminder that any reform effort that begins with economics is a fraud, intended to delay real change from being discussed. Tinkering about the mechanism of global capitalism is always an effort to maintain global capitalism. That gets to the heart of what must be done. The first step in restoring the social contract is to accept that the people at the top are irredeemable. The Cloud People hate the Dirt People. It is what defines them. Real reform comes when the Dirt People hate them back.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The End Of Gynocracy

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A decade ago, the Cloud People celebrated the fact that for the first time in history, women were the majority of the workforce. Not only were women the majority of workers, they were the majority of managers. They were also the majority on the college campus. Women have been the majority of college graduates for over a decade and now outnumber men in advanced degrees. It is not unreasonable to say that we are now celebrating the first full decade of the gynocracy.

Of course, the celebrating is being done from inside closets and under beds, as the world hides from the virus. America is not just run by women; it is now run by overprotective schoolmarms. Social distancing is just the latest thing in a world now run by childless women. On-line, the harpies have been demanding males with the wrong ideas be social distanced right off the internet. The great purging of dissident voices from social media was a dry run for social distancing.

If you think about it, the timeout has now become the go-to move from the gynocrats in charge of our culture. If you use the wrong word or phrase on social media, you get put in timeout for 12-hours. If you repeat the error, you end up in detention. Since the gynocrats have replaced the parents, there’s no parent conference for those who can’t conform to the rules. Instead, you are relegated to the trailers out back, which for the internet means setting up an account on Gab or Telegram.

This is just one reality of the world run by women. Since women have come to dominate the workplace, the fastest growing parts of the economy are those where women have the dominant position. For example, while STEM jobs get outsourced to barbarians, either imported from tribal areas or through outsourcing, health care, which is dominated by women, has been booming. Tech workers have seen declining wages, but registered nurses have seen their wages grow.

Of course, the feminization of society has been hardest on the working classes, as the jobs for working class men are replaced by jobs for women. The rise in death from despondency has been acute among working class males. A man with no way to support a family, relegated to living off a woman, has no reason to live. Inevitably, drugs, alcohol and eventually suicide become the answer. The white death that has afflicted our people is not all that different than what happened to the Indians.

The middle-class males have not escaped the ravages of the gynocracy. We’re onto at least the second generation of middle-class males raised by women in a female dominated society. The process began with the liberalization of divorce, which spread through the middle-class like a plague in the 70’s and 80’s. By the 1990’s, the feminization of America life was well underway. We’re onto our second generation of young middle-class males raised to live in the gynocracy.

You see it in marriage and dating. With scrambled sex roles, the males are ill-equipped to play their role, so they are less marriage worthy to females. On the other hand, men instinctively suspect a career woman will be a poor mother and mate. The subsequent drop in marriage and fertility is hardly a surprise. For the young men in the gynocracy, life is a bachelor’s ball on-line, punctuated by mock battles in video games and mock intimacy in the form of pornography.

As an aside, this is why someone like Richard Spencer was so appealing to young men in the alt-right days. He is the non plus ultra of gynocritic male. He is reckless, feckless and irresponsible, but immune to the consequences. Mom is always there to make everything better. He is the perpetual adolescent, unable to care for himself, but always in rhetorical revolt against the gynocracy. As a result, many young middle-class white males saw him as the ultimate expression of themselves.

For young women, the gynocracy offers a short-term elixir of a career, independence and power over her personal life. By middle-age, the elixir wears off and it means a lifetime of lonely nights being an on-line harpy or one-night stand. Many women escape the clutches of feminism to marry and have children, but in the gynocracy, it still means a career, because they have to support the husband and family. They get to pay the price for upper middle-class women feeling empowered.

Of course, feminism has been hard hit by the rise of the gynocracy. The purpose of feminism for close to a century was to give homely women a reason to feel good about themselves. In a world where women are made hideous on the inside by the pointlessness of their existence, but given power over society, feminism has had to find a new audience. In the gynocracy, feminism is now the domain for those born insane, rather than those driven mad by the prevailing reality.

That may be the light at the end of the tunnel. Increasingly, women are seeing the disaster that is modern life for what it is. The slow flowering of traditional women living life as traditional wives and mothers is a little green shoot. Despite the bellowing from the media, Trump remains quite popular with married women. The contempt in which these women are held by the gynocrats suggests this is the Achilles heel. The end of the gynocracy is single women seeing a mom playing with her kids.

On the other hand, Aristophanes was surely right. Practical reality will break the gynocracy on the wheel of reality. The great lock-down is madness that will eventually force great changes. This hysterical response to the virus will force a lot of rethinking about practical matters, like the habit of outsourcing manufacturing to China and the outsourcing of child rearing to the state. This is what we may be witnessing in this great panic over the virus. it is the beginning of the end of the gynocracy.

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Man’s Greatest Invention

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The great British biologist J.B.S Haldane said that fanaticism was one of mankind’s greatest inventions. By “fanaticism” he meant the burning desire to save mankind from some imagined evil. The fanatic is not just trying to help his fellow man. He feels as if it is his purpose, his reason to exists. Therefore, he will die in his effort to reach his goal, as to give up on his quest or accept defeat would be no different than denying the reason for his existence. To die trying fulfills his purpose.

Haldane credited this to monotheism. If there is one god, then no people could be favored by one god over another. All men were the creation of one god and therefore of equal importance. This leads to the great battle to decide who has the correct understanding of God’s desire for mankind. The only way to know this is to do whatever is necessary in order to bring your understanding of god’s will into being. Fanaticism therefore was the great molder of human history for the last 5,000 years.

Of course, Haldane was a fanatic himself. He was a foaming at the mouth atheist, as they tend to be, so blaming the belief in God, especially Christianity, was a natural instinct for him. A central tenet of atheism is that if man drops the superstition about invisible men in the sky, they will stop trying to impose their beliefs on one another and thus a new post-God era can begin. Mankind will be driven by reason and the underlying facts of natural reality. Logic will be the religion of man.

This is nonsense, of course, but Haldane was not wrong about fanaticism. It is a great mover of history. Where he got things wrong was in thinking monotheism was the root of human desire to save mankind. Instead it was egalitarianism, the idea that all men are naturally equal and therefore naturally worthy. This did not require the belief in one god, as we see today with our humanistic fanatics. The modern intellectual is as indifferent to God as he is committed to belief that all men are equal.

An example of this comes from the legacy site National Review. This piece argues that the coronavirus is the great leveler. Mother nature is reminding the world that all men are equal in her eyes. Because, in theory, rich people can get the virus and die, it proves the fundamental equality of mankind. Time will tell on that score, but most likely the smart and rich will do better in this than the poor and stupid. That’s because Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally.

Of course, if this virus turns out to be the scourge of the poor or the great killer of the stupid, the egalitarians will have an answer for that as well. As the author of the piece says, it will be due to the rich and smart taking precautions to insulate themselves from the virus. For the egalitarian fanatic, there is always some behavioral reason to explain why one group does better than another. The equality of man is the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of their thinking.

A great driver of history is the belief that if only everyone would do things the way they should do them, then the human condition can be overcome. It is not the only driver, for sure, as not everyone has bought into egalitarianism. In fact, egalitarianism was, for the longest time, an exclusive belief. The tribe, nation or people knew they were equal before god, but those other people, well, not so much. Conquering them and taking their stuff was fine, as it was good for your people.

In recent years, this thirst for universal equality has turned into a weird cargo cult, where simply making people appear equal will cause universal equality to spring forth. You see a bit of that in the National Review post. The author seems to be hoping the virus is a great plague that hits the elites as hard as everyone. In the midst of the suffering, so the thinking goes, everyone will suddenly embrace the equality of man. Only a fanatic can believe that he not so subtly hopes for a plague.

In fact, disaster, man-made or natural, is proof that egalitarianism is rooted in our biology, or at least in the biology of some. The great destruction of man’s creation, the bodies stacked upon one another, a scene seen in every age by every generation, has not purged this instinct from our being. There’s no reasoning with a fanatic and there is not reasoning with an egalitarian. They are immune to reality. They see only that which confirms their belief that all men are created equal.

It is why, by the way, Africa is getting a good leaving alone in the pandemic chatter. They were all revved up a month ago to display their sorrow for the poor Africans, who would surely suffer the worst from this virus. This has not happened, so the egalitarians are busy editing on-line maps to remove the whole continent from our vision. Any discussion of why some groups have done better or worse is prohibited, even by the human bio-diversity crowd. Egalitarianism is powerful magic.

It is a good reminder that whatever comes out of the other side of this pandemic, the egalitarian will still be with us. No amount of reality can dissuade him. If he can see a man in a sundress as just another one of the gals, not even the complete failure of the system built on the dream of equality will dissuade him. He will be right back at it, picking through the rubble for signs that all men are equal. Egalitarianism is man’s greatest invention, a doomsday device we cannot disarm.

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The Cost Of Profit

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Every businessman understands that every dollar of revenue that comes in has with it a cost required to earn it. If the business provides a service, then the biggest cost of sales is the labor required to provide the service. If the business sells a physical item, then the cost of making or acquiring the item is the big driver. There are indirect costs like rents and administrative expenses, but the starting place for any business is the cost of sales, as that is what ultimately determines profits.

There is another cost that is important, sometimes the most important, that does not show up in the financials. That is the cost of profit. This is an intangible cost. What unpleasant things do you have to do in order to make a profit? Maybe you have to be terrible to your employees or tolerate nasty customers. You can make a nice living running a pawn shop, but most people don’t think it is worth having to deal with the sorts of people, who avail themselves of the pawn shop.

As a society, this concept is easier to quantify, or at the minimum articulate, as a society has a shared morality. There is an agreed upon set of things that a society wants to minimize and a set of things it promotes. It may be better for the economy to rely upon slave labor in certain kinds of agriculture, but the moral cost of slavery is too high to contemplate such a policy. One reason manufacturing was shipped abroad is the cost of the pollution and the aesthetics was too high for our rulers.

The point is that certain types of economic activity may be lucrative for the people in that business or for the economy as a whole, but the intangible cost is too high. It is not just the moral cost either. There is the cost of risk. To allow certain types of lending, for example, puts the credit system at risk, so we forbid it. The cost of profit can also be the long term risk it poses the society, which generally means the cost that will be imposed on future generations when those risks become real costs.

A good example is the very lucrative basis trade popular with hedge funds, where they buy US Treasuries, while selling equivalent derivatives contracts. There is a small difference in price between the two, but when done in volume and with cheap credit, the profit to the hedge fund can be enormous. This is great for the private investors in the hedge funds, but it has huge risks for the economy. The recent bailout by the Federal Reserve is a good example of socializing the cost of profit.

This is just one example of economic activity that is profitable to the people doing it and good for those GDP numbers. It’s also high risk and therefore has an unacceptable cost for the profit gained. Throughout the financial system we see high risk strategies that can be highly profitable and serve some important purpose, like lowering the cost of borrowing, but bring with them unacceptable risks to the system. Socializing the cost profit through bailouts does not make it go away.

Another example of how the cost of profit works in the financial system is this story from Reuters about Capital One. This is the bank that peddles high interest rate credit cards to poor people and non-whites. They can specialize in high risk borrowers, because they charge mafia-esque interest rates. That covers the cost of collecting from deadbeats and the inevitable defaults. It turns out another one of their activities was gambling in the commodities markets, namely the energy markets.

Now, the obvious question is why is a credit card company that preys on dumb people playing at the high stakes tables in the commodities casino? Betting commodities is like playing at the baccarat tables in Monte Carlo. Actually, the odds are better in the casino, as the odds of winning are just 1.23% lower than the odds of winning a hand. The answer, of course, is the potential profit for the bank was huge, just as long as energy process never fell below a certain level, like they have recently.

As American states lost the will to directly tax their people, especially their rich people, they turned to indirect ways to fund government. One is the legalization of gambling, especially state-owned casinos. Since every state is in the gambling racket, a new type of casino has evolved. This is one with a grand shopping mall and Potemkin town center attached, so people can dine and socialize. The idea is to get everyone under one roof in order to encourage more consumption.

This model is the symbol of modern America. Our economy is a massive shopping mall, an international bazaar operated by traders from around the globe. Attached to it is a massive casino called the financial system in which the profits from the bazaar are wagered on increasingly high stakes bets. It has become so unstable that the landlord, the Federal Reserve and central government, has to keep stepping in to keep everyone afloat. It is a high tech, high stakes palace economy.

This is very profitable for the nation’s rich people, which get to enjoy luxury unimaginable just a couple generations ago. Even Louis XIV could not have rode out a pandemic aboard his floating castle. Meanwhile, the cost of such luxury will be his fellow citizens (does he consider them his fellow citizens?) lining up for miles to get food distributed by the local food bank. The price of such profit in terms of risk and inequality is simply too high to tolerate much longer.

In times of want, people are forced to think hard about their priorities. The same is true of a people facing a crisis. The Great Madness over the plague is going to send the economy into a depression. The West in general, but America in particular, is going to have to decide if the cost of profit, the cost of this high stakes casino economy, is truly worth it. Is this how we want to live?  For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul?

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Great Madness

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Has the world gone mad? It certainly seems that way to some of us. Even the most cynical never imagined the government shutting down the country for fear of a virus, but it has suddenly become the new normal. The cynical, if they thought of it at all, would have thought the opposite. Instead of a great lock down, the response would have been for the beautiful people to insulate themselves from harm, while abandoning the rest of us to the plague. Instead, we have all gone mad together.

Not everyone has got the fever, that is this panic fever, not the one caused by the Chinese coronavirus. Our world is now firmly divided into two camps. There are those fully invested in the great panic over the virus and there are those who look at the other camp, gobsmacked by what appears to be a general madness. Those in panic look at the rest of us the same way preppers look at normal people. They just assume the gods will strike us down for doubting the virus

Of course, the people in the skeptic camp could be the ones suffering from some form of madness that prevents them from seeing the threat. The trouble is, the great plague is not exactly lighting up the scoreboard. America has tested over 600,000 people suspected of having the virus. Over 500,000 tested negative. Of the positives, 12,000 needed hospital care. In a country of over 320 million people with 200,000 empty hospital beds at any one time, that’s not much of a crisis.

Yet, despite the numbers, formerly sober-minded people continue to carry on as if there are bodies in the streets. Steve Sailer, a man not known for excitability, is calling this virus a great adversary of the human race. Greg Cochran has completely lost his marbles over this thing. Geneticist and HBD enthusiast Razib Khan is in hiding, convinced the end times are upon us. In fact, the whole HBD community is a click away from fleeing to Antarctica to wait out the end of civilization.

Of course, part of the panic, a symptom of that particular virus, is a set of abracadabra phrases that have become so common they seem like something from a secret society, understood only by the initiates. The duller sorts chant about “exponential growth” while others talk about “the hospitals being overwhelmed.” That’s why we have to “flatten the curve” and “slow the spread.” These incantations are to chase away doubt and reinforce the belief that people are dying in the streets.

The dying in the streets bit is not much of an exaggeration. A popular bit of folklore now among the panicked is some version of the anonymous ER doctor or nurse relaying how they are overwhelmed and letting people die in the hallways. This urban legend turned up in China, Washington, Italy, New York and now New Orleans. Formerly sensible people now pass these whoppers around on-line, never bothering to think that maybe they are being fed a just-so story by people seeking attention.

One emerging aspect to the madness is the moral dimension. The HBD crowd seems to have been hardest hit. They spend a lot of time contemplating nature and their fellow man’s refusal to respect it. Part of what is driving them now is a sense that nature is going to finally exact some revenge. In other words, this panic is part of a strange revenge fantasy, where they are finally vindicated by biological reality. This sudden sense of moral purpose has made them immune to reason.

Another aspect to this general panic, unrelated to the virus itself, is a different type of revenge fantasy. Many people are cheering the collapse of the economy and civil life on the mistaken belief that what emerges from the rubble will have them at the top of the social hierarchy. This is a phenomenon shared across the political spectrum. It seems to be most popular with young people unhappy with the status quo and far too caught up in purge fantasies to be reached with facts and reason.

Probably the most salient aspect to this panic is the role of women. As has been noted too many times to count, the West is now a gynocracy. It is not a matriarchy, as women have stopped bearing children and stopped caring about children. Look around and you see childless women in positions of authority all over the West. In fact, these are women who reached their status by rejecting every aspect of womanhood. The West is now a world run by middle-aged childless women.

Anyone who has been around women in a crisis has observed a strange phenomenon among childless adult females. Some switch gets flipped in a crisis where their protective instincts get misdirected at the adults in the room. This part of their nature was never allowed to mature in the raising of children, so it comes bursting forth in an incoherent desire to help when their help is not needed. They become like mother ducks loudly herding the brood to safety.

For a society run by such women, every crisis is met with demands that everyone shelter in place. Notice how over the last few decades that public officials no longer call for volunteers or tell people to pitch in and work together. Such independent action violates the frightened female’s sense of duty to her brood. Instead, mild weather events now close the schools and force people to work from home. This virus scare is every middle-aged women’s Hunger Games moment.

Mass panics are a known phenomenon. The general panic that took place in France between July 22 and August 6 1789 is known as The Great Fear. It was a period of rural unrest, driven by both a grain shortage and rumors of an aristocrats’ “famine plot” to starve the peasants. The exact reason for this panic is in dispute. Ergotism is a favorite reason for those with a certain sense of humor, but most historians consider it one of the primary causes of the French Revolution.

At some point, the bloom comes off this lock-down rose once people start to feel the real cost of listening to madmen. People will remember that the same folks who swore Boris and Natasha had used their mind control devise to install Trump in the White House are the many of the same people peddling this panic. Necessity will force a lot of people to stop going along with what they have suspected from the start is nothing more than a mass panic. Soon, this all comes to an end.

Like the Great Fear, the Great Madness will leave a mark, or at least it should leave a mark on our society. You never can be sure about these things, as the West seems to be unusually immune to learning from these events. Two centuries ago The Great Fear meant the end of the feudal order and eventually a revolution. It was not the sole cause of the revolution, maybe not the main cause. It was certainly an example of how the old order was no longer able to maintain order.

It is too soon to know what this panic means for us. Perhaps it further undermines the legitimacy of the system and the people that profit from it. Perhaps it sets off social changes that slowly transform our society in ways we have yet to imagine. Maybe the fever breaks and this event, like the Russian hoax, gets forgotten. Given what most likely awaits on the other side of the lock-down, it is hard to imagine this great madness being forgotten. There’s always a price to be paid for following madmen.

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The Magic Box

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Anyone who works in the right answer fields, like engineering and computer science, has run across the magic box gag. This is where someone draws up a process, describing the various inputs and sub-processes. Somewhere toward the end of the diagram is a box into which all of this stuff flows. What comes out of the box is the desired result of the entire process. That box at the end, where all the good stuff happens, is labeled something like “magical happens here.”

It is a stale gag, but a persistent one as it is a very good way to simplify a project for the people who put the magic in the box. The people who will get the magic really don’t need to know what happens inside the box. That’s not their concern. That’s the job of the technical people to solve. In fact, the whole point of the exercise is to make sure everyone shares the same understanding of all the other stuff. The users of the process must trust that the technical people put the right magic in the box.

It does not always go that way through. Even the simplest processes have peculiarities that are not appreciated until you start monkeying around with them. The combination of inputs may create conflicts that require immensely complicated solutions inside the box in order to get the desired result. It’s why after the meeting ends, the technical people erase the board and spend a lot of time figuring out exactly what form of magic will have to go into that box. Magic is not as easy at looks.

This concept is one to keep in mind when evaluating the responses to the virus panic and soon the economic consequences of it. Loads of people on both sides of the great divide think something momentous has happened. They see the flood of changes that have been imposed and rightly assume that it will have a profound long term effect on the country and the West in general. They are probably right, but they disagree as to what will come out of the magic box that is this panic.

The most obvious starting place is with the people demanding we take this extreme measure to stop the virus.  As has been discussed at length here now, they fail to consider the consequences. Instead, their response is something like, “The economy is not important. That will fix itself.” In other words, something magical will happen and things will get back to normal. The magic box will not only fix all the damage done to civil life, it will restore everything back to where it was before the panic.

It’s possible that things bounce back to where they were to start the year. No one knows, because this has never been done. Maybe in a year this whole episode will be forgotten, like the Kavanaugh hearings or the Russia hoax. On the other hand, we could be facing a long depression. The blows to the system could be so profound they cannot magically heal themselves. Instead, things remain broken. In other words, maybe the magic in that box is bad magic, the very worst kind of magic.

That brings up another camp that is now deeply invested in the magic box. There are a lot of people on this side of the great divide that are cheering the lock down. They think it will forever discredit the things they don’t like. The consequences of globalism and the neoliberal order will flow into the hive brain of the public and what comes out the other side is a rejection of all of it. Magically, everyone will come to the conclusions many people on this side held before the panic and subsequent results.

It’s possible that some of those things Greg Johnson lists will come true. It’s also possible that none of them will happen.  People are remarkably resilient to reality, as we see with the panic. If your first response to the prospects of a pandemic are to fill your basement with toilet paper, you are unlikely to draw the best lessons from this panic and its results. The ruling class, the people who triggered this panic, are also unlikely to abandon all the things that allow them to be in power.

The point here is not to take issue with Greg or his post. Greg’s lessons are correct, but they were correct before the panic. He is assuming this sudden crisis will be the magic box that transforms everything. The last half century of history is flowing into this panic and the resulting turmoil. What will come out the other side is a great awakening, as the scales fall from the eyes of everyone wondering how they will pay their rent and feed their kids. The coronavirus panic is the magic box.

Similarly, there is a subset of this thinking that exists in fringe socialist circles, like the remnants of the old alt-right and the Bernie Sanders camp. They cheer the coming collapse, because they think the prophesies will finally come true. America will become Weimar Germany. One version of the game has Richard Spencer delivering his first speech to the new Ethno-Reichstag. The other side thinks they will finally be free to punch those Nazis that secretly control the world.

It is an interesting key value pair. Both camps think their political ideology is timeless and forever relevant. Both sides think history must repeat in the exact same way it happened 90 years ago in Europe. It’s like coordinates on a map. Because the coordinates never change, their place on the great map of human history never changes either. It’s a form of mysticism. In this case, they assume an economic collapse must magically result in conditions most favorable to them.

Again, that magic box may not contain what they imagine. The most likely result is the increased power of the tech oligarchs. They are now helping government track people, all in the name of safety, of course. A world in which drones are used to police citizens identified through their mobile phone as having stood next to the wrong person is not favorable to the revolution. You see, the people in charge have been planning for the arrival of you-know-who for a very long time as well.

In fairness, maybe the critics of the response to this virus are engaging in magic box thinking as well. To assume lots of bad things come out of the other end of the box is just as presumptuous as assuming only good things will emerge. Maybe the great reorder that will occur after this will be better for the Nazis and Bolsheviks camped out in the pumpkin patch. Maybe people will wake up to the reality of neoliberal order and demand changes. Maybe things get back to normal in a hurry.

The one true thing in all of this is no one knows what is inside the box that events appear to be leading us. The panic itself is unprecedented in the modern age, so we are left to guess about what follows. What’s happening with the global financial system is less novel, but the scale is unprecedented. No one can know if the economy will spin back up, as no one has tried to turn it off and then back on. We are in the world of unknown unknowns, the part of the diagram labeled “Magic.”

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