Category Archives: Greatest Hits

Kritarchy Then Chaos

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Imagine if in a local courthouse, we discover that the judges are giving accused child pornographers a free pass. The accused come into the system, get booked and then a judge finds some reason to either leave them free on their own recognizance or simply drop the charges. After a while, someone notices that this sleepy little courthouse has a rather high number of people arrested for kiddie porn, but that all of them get set free on some technicality by one of the judges.

Upon further inquiry, it is learned that the head judge belongs to some weird club that thinks the age of consent is immoral, that adults should be free to have sex with children and consume child pornography. Once installed at the courthouse, he hired other judges from his club, as well as clerks and secretaries. The whole courthouse was full of these people. Further, the child porn people heard about it so they would travel to this jurisdiction to indulge in their fetish, knowing they would get a free pass.

Such a thing would be the scandal of the century. Now, instead of something abhorrent like kiddie porn, let us say the secret club is composed of people loyal to some strange religion or bizarre ideology. They think the laws of the country are immoral and seek to overturn the entire legal system. Instead of operating in a local courthouse, they are targeting the federal system. In other words, it is the same sort of conspiracy, but the motivation is ideological, and the target is national.

That is what happens in the federal court system. It is riddled with judges who belong to a bizarre political cult. They are members of a legal sub-cult that does not accept the rule of law. Instead, they think the law and the enforcement of the law should always be in support of their cult’s radical agenda. As such, they no longer abide by the law as written and refuse to obey the authority that issues the law. That is what we are seeing on a daily basis, as federal judges revolt against the legal system.

This is not a new thing. The legendary ninth circuit has been a dumping ground for lunatics appointed to the federal bench. Rulings come out of the ninth circuit, only to be struck down on appeal. The reason the ninth existed was that everyone acknowledged the existence of this cult, but instead of exterminating it and its members, the idea was to keep them bottled up in specific circuits. It was like a quarantine around an infected zone. Rather than kill the afflicted, they would be isolated.

To continue the metaphor, the virus has jumped the quarantine and now the entire system is showing signs of infection. For two years the Trump administration has been plagued with federal judges who just make up rulings. In many cases they are ruling on behalf of plaintiffs who have no standing in the court. In other cases, they are simply making up legal theories so bizarre they would get a first-year law student dismissed from school on mental health grounds.

In this particular case, the law is clear. It is not just US law, but international law. There is a legal process for applying for asylum. No country is required to accept anyone who does not follow the procedures. US law is crystal clear on the issue, yet this judge is making up stuff that is in direct conflict with the law. This is no less deranged than if the judge stood up, stripped off his clothes and declared he is an invisible chicken and that everyone in the court must cluck in worship to him.

Yet, this judge is not an exception. He is now the rule. The federal system is full of his fellow cultists, trained in a bizarre legal theory that insists there is no law, just an unwritten ideology that is the rejection of the basis of Western civilization. People jokingly call it the kritarchy, but it is not a bad way to think of it. Instead of the judge being a neutral interpreter of law, as is the Western tradition, the judge in this cult is a shaman, charged with spreading the cult’s ideology.

Kritarchy is a system associated with pre-modern societies, in which there was no central rule making authority. Instead of a written laws, there is custom. This works well enough, it is better than anarchy, if the people within the community adhere to the same customs and beliefs. The idea is to reach a peaceful and practical result, not a logically consistent one. In a modern, rule-based society, this form of legal theory is as alien as human sacrifice. It is an assault on civil order.

The thing is the outcomes are not important here. Even if this lunatic is overruled, the damage that is being done to civil order is incalculable. Every time one of these cult members gets on the bench and starts making these bizarre rulings, public trust in the legal system is eroded. We are very close to the point where most people no longer think we have a legal system at all. Instead, it is arbitrary rule by robed shamans, so the law is irrelevant and the system for writing laws is illegitimate.

We now live in an age in which the federal court says the White House cannot decide who gets a press pass, but it is perfectly fine for the banks to collude to shut you out of the financial system, because they do not like how you voted. The law says a business can fire an employee, because he does not accept the company values, but the same business must hire a mentally unstable man in a sundress and let him watch the female employees undress. This is a revolt against rationality and reason.

Getting back to where we started, the remedy for that courthouse overrun by perverts is to clear out the perverts. What America faces is the near total takeover of the institutions by a secular cult that is evolving into a suicidal mystery cult. Removing the believers from positions of authority will not be peaceful. Allowing their madness to run its course will not be peaceful either, as the overthrow of order can only lead to anarchy and what always follows is chaos.

Between Barbarians And Fanatics

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For most of human existence, the great conflict was between ordered civilization and chaotic barbarism. The Bronze Age societies had to contend with barbarians from the north. The Greeks and Romans had to deal with various barbarian tribes to their north and east. Medieval Europe had to deal with the Viking raiders and the Mongol invaders from the east. Then there were the Muslim invasions from the South that threatened Christendom. The story of the West has been the story of fighting barbarians.

By the time the West reached the Enlightenment, barbarian invasion was a thing of the past. In fact, it was inconceivable. The Nordic people were just as settled as the rest of Europe. Their days of raiding and pillaging were over. The idea of Asian tribes crossing through Russian into Europe was equally ridiculous. Of course, the Muslims had been beaten back and were no longer a threat. In fact, it was the West that was now heading south into the Middle East and Africa. The barbarians were no longer an issue.

Instead of organizing to keep the barbarians from coming over the horizon, it was the West sailing over the horizon to conquer the barbarians. The thing is though, all those years of organizing to defend civilization from barbarians, however one wants to define the terms, meant a degree of internal vigilance. There could be no tolerance of internal actors and actions that weakened the social and political structures. Civilization was a near-run thing so anything that weakened the West internally could not be tolerated.

The Catholic Church gets a bad rap for being intolerant of science during the Middle Ages, but that’s mostly left-wing nonsense. In an age when dissent could pull the support posts out from society, intolerance of troublemakers made a lot of sense. Of course, from the perspective of the secular rulers, a theological consistency, one that supported the order atop which they presided, was seen as essential. Anything that threatened the internal logic of the social order, even unintentionally, had to be treated very seriously.

That meant an extreme intolerance of religious fanatics. The post the other day about the Flagellants is a good example. The Church and secular rulers suppressed the movement because their fanaticism threatened order, by questioning the legitimacy of the Church. After all, if God was punishing people with the plague, that implied the Church was not on good terms with the Almighty. Throw in the fact the Flagellants were preaching about a coming age of bliss, and it is easy to see why the Church suppressed them.

The point is, the West was good at policing the ranks for fanatics, because they had no choice. The very real threat from beyond the borders coupled with the fragility of the feudal order meant anyone coloring outside the lines was a mortal threat. As the alien threats receded, the need to impose a uniform intellectual order receded with it. While it resulted in a great intellectual flourishing in the West, it also let all the fanatics off their leash. The result is the West has been convulsed by fanaticism since the Enlightenment.

That is how you must look at radical ideologies like Marxism. These theories defy observable reality and imagine something that has never existed. There is simply no way for a sober-minded person to accept the idea of the worker’s paradise. Only a true believer is willing to commit their life to something that has never existed on earth. It is the same cognitive tool set that allows someone to think they can appeal directly to God or conjure miracles, simply because they believe. The fanatic is the fuel of radicalism.

In The Inequality of Man, the great natural scientist J. B. S. Haldane argued that fanaticism was a Judaic-Christian invention. That is most certainly wrong, but he was not wrong to think it had been a feature of mankind for a long time. It is the fuel that drives people to build a great culture. As we saw in the last century and now in our present age, it is also the fuel of great raging destruction. Other than allowing the rage of the fanatics to run its course, no one has yet to come up with a way to meet the challenge of the true believer.

That really is the challenge of this age. Lacking anything resembling a unified religion, our overabundance of fanatics are free to indulge in whatever is handy. One minute they are threatening order if gays are not allowed to marry. The next minute they are tearing down the borders, inviting in the barbarians our ancestors pushed over the horizon. It’s as if some strange mind virus is sweeping our societies, turning the afflicted into berserkers, beyond the reach of reason. As a result, we edge closer and closer to collapse.

What is happening in America, at least, is a replay of what happened in the Pennsylvania colony at the founding. The eastern part of the state was home to many fanatics, convinced they were part a project to immanentize the eschaton. To the west were the borderland people, living in the hills as pre-settled people. In between was where the civilized people lived, just looking to live peaceful, orderly lives. Eventually the middle aligned with the east to keep the hillbillies in the west from overrunning the middle.

To a great degree, this was true for the country as a whole. The emotional energy of the crazies, mostly located in the northeast, fueled the expansion across the continent. The Indians never stood a chance, not because of technology, but because the pale face was driven by a sense of destiny. It powered the northern conquest of the South and the expansion of America into a global power. It came with a price. Just as Pennsylvania is still dominated by Philadelphia, America remains captive to the Northern crazies.

That said, geography kept the crazies on their leash into the 20th century, except for the Northern invasion of the South. As technology made it possible for the fanatics to extend their reach into every corner of the country, the threat of nuclear annihilation forced a degree of discipline on the elites. With that gone, the fanatics were free to run wild, pulling at every support beam and cable they can find. That is where we find ourselves today. There are no barbarians at the walls, just our own fanatics.

If the West in general and American in particular, is going to survive this age, it will mean coming up with a way to control the fanatic. Perhaps it will mean finding a DNA test to look for the lunacy gene or simply changing the culture to fear fanaticism. We were once willing to do what had to be done to ward off the barbarian.  Maybe we learn how to cull our herd to remove the crazies, no matter how unpleasant. Civilization lies between the barbarian and the fanatic. Both must be tamed if we are to survive.

The Wizards

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In the 1980’s, one of the great puzzles for conservatives was how left-wing economists could not bring themselves to acknowledge the obvious. The Soviet economic model was a failure in absolute terms, as well as relative terms. Even long after the Soviets collapsed, guys like Paul Krugman remained puzzled by the inability of the communist system to keep pace with the West. His answer was that the Soviets either lost their will or lacked the moral fiber to make revolutionary socialism work.

As Greg Cochran has pointed out, the failings of socialism were obvious to anyone willing to look at what was happening. Once the Soviet Empire fell, it was undeniable, but economics never paid a price for being so wrong. In fact, the status of the field went up after the Cold War. Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz became a shaman to the ruling class, despite a miserable track record. He is another guy who thinks the morality of socialism should make it work.

Now, part of this is something that John Derbyshire pointed out in his infamous review of Kevin McDonald’s book, The Culture of Critique. “Jews are awfully good at creating pseudoscience—elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” In fairness to John, he was summarizing what McDonald had written, but he largely agreed with the assertion. There is a fair bit of this in economics, where smart Jews conjure alternative reality.

That is a fun point to make, but that is not the reason for economists to be wildly wrong about so much, yet immune from criticism. By now, someone in the field should have pointed out that Joseph Stiglitz is a crank. Someone like Christine Romer, who was Obama’s top economist, was completely wrong about the effects of his stimulus plan, yet she was rewarded with a plum job in the academy. In most every field, even astrology, being that wrong is disqualifying.

Now, it is fun to mock economics, but it really should be a useful field and play a positive role in public policy debates. There are useful observations that come from the field, with regards to how people respond to various economic policies. In theory, the economics shop should provide objective analysis of government performance, policy proposals and basic data about the state of the economy. Government is about trade-offs and economics should provide the details of those trade-offs.

Of course, there are reasons for the field being a mess. One reason is that economics is not science. It is a basic set of immutable truths swimming in a sea of pointless analysis, clever models that mean nothing, and wishful thinking. Then there is the fact that there is money to be made in putting your stamp on the polices. When Christine Romer was selected by Obama, it was the golden ticket to elite of the New Keynesian Economics cult. She and her husband are now senior clerics.

There is something else that can be teased out of this phenomenon and that is the corrosive effect of democracy on objectivity. Democratic forms of government lack legitimacy, because they start with the assumption that anyone can hold any office within the system. No one is going to respect the office of legislator if the job can be won and held by anyone. Even in a republican form of government the assumption is that anyone can enter the process.

Unlike other forms of government that can rely on the blessing of the religious authority, democracy inevitably obliterates any threat to itself. Christians like to believe that the decline in faith corresponds with the rise in public corruption, but it is the reverse. The spread of democracy is what drives the decline in faith. Everywhere democracy becomes ascendant, religion moves into decline. This is an observation Muslims have made, which is why they oppose democracy.

That need for moral authority is still there, so inevitably democratic system evolves a civic religion and before long a civic clerisy. This intellectual elite, supported by the political elite that control the democratic institutions give their blessing to the whims of the office holders. The role of economist is that of the court astrologer in Persia or Merlin in the court of King Arthur. They appear to be consulting hidden knowledge, but they always end up endorsing whatever their patron desires.

The other side of this coin is there is no reason for the political class to attack their court magicians, even when they are completely wrong, because they will need them to bless the next set of policies. Romer is the worst case. Her and her husband have lifetime positions at an elite university. Stiglitz gets treated like the senior shaman by all sides of the political elite, because someone must fill that role. It is a lot like how the Catholic Church handles pedophile priests, when you think about it.

The College Collapse

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Back when National Review allowed comments, they would post all sorts of things in their group blog, so readers could respond. For example, when they were looking for a receptionist, they posted the job on the blog. Hilariously, one of the requirements was a four-year degree. Why anyone with a college degree would take a receptionist job was a mystery, but an even bigger mystery was why they would require it. The comments on it were the best things posted that week.

Of course, Rich Lowry was not really thinking about the requirements of the job when he posted it. What he wanted was someone from his world, the world where everyone goes off to college and sends their kids off to college. In other words, he was signaling to potential applicants that he did not want Rosie from the neighborhood, who likes to file her nails while on the phone. Instead, he wanted a young white girl fresh out of college, who just needed a job while she sorted out her life.

That is what a college degree has become since the 60’s. It tells potential employers things about yourself that they could never ask directly. For example, if you went to a private college, it means you most likely were raised upper middle-class. If you went to the satellite campus of the state university, it probably means you came from the lower ranks and you were not a great student. These are the sort of subtle clues that are reflected in the education section.

Attending an elite university is the big flashing neon sign on a person’s resume, which is why entrance is super-competitive. It is also why it is not difficult to graduate from one of these colleges. The graduation rates are near 100%, even for athletes. Compare that to Ranger School, where 60% fail the first time. Yet, if you have the former on your CV, it counts for more than if you have the latter. The people hiring for elite positions care much more about what the former says about the applicant.

This is why a few years ago the elites started to panic over the influx of foreign students into elite colleges. The competition for these slots was already tough. Having to compete with the children of foreign ruling classes would make the process even more difficult for the children of Cloud People. This is why Harvard, and most likely the other elite colleges, discriminate against Asians. The elite is for whites and Jews, with a sprinkling of diversity to spice it up.

This “problem” with the elite colleges has been an excuse for the conservatives to shriek “hypocrite” at their progressive masters, but it is a good thing that the people in charge are fine with racial discrimination. At the minimum, it suggests they still have the will to survive. It also reminds us that they are not bound by their own rules when defending their privileges. No ruling class in human history has peacefully agreed to step aside based on the logic of their own rules.

At the other end of the spectrum, colleges that serve the hoi polloi have been struggling with a different set of problems. A diploma from State U is about practical things like getting a job and bargaining for a salary. In fact, it only matters for the first decade after graduation. After that, the work history is what counts. The great bust-out that is the American public college system has reached a terminus and enrollments are now starting to drop, as people figure out the scam.

As a result, the public universities in America are beginning to change. One remedy has been to import foreign students, who will pay full rate. This started with small private colleges like Boston University in the 1980’s. Japanese kids would come to Boston, pay tuition in cash, if they were not required to study too hard. For state colleges, there is the added benefit of being able to charge full rate, rather than the discounted rate for in-state students. That and it counts for diversity points.

Of course, like every business, cost cutting is on the table. In America, much of college is just an extension of high school. Look at the requirements of college fifty years ago and compare them to now. Then there are the frivolous things like gender studies or communication arts. Pretty much everything in the core curriculum of a modern college should be tackled in high school. The rest should be discarded. That’s why we see colleges dropping large chunks of their current offerings.

There is something else going on that speaks to the larger issues looming over the North American Economic Zone. The Cloud People are starting to drop the college requirement for new hires. What this tells us is the elite are beginning to set fire to the bridges over the river that separates them from us. The positions in the Cloud will require passing through one of the monasteries. In the future, the Dirt People will have to sort out their status system within their favelas.

It also opens the door to further polluting the standards. By dropping the college requirement, the companies are free to hire the black over the white, the female over the male. After all, without anything close to an objective standard, the latest moral fads handed down from on high are the default filter. It also makes it explicit. Companies will be expected to hit their vibrancy quotas, because they will not have the excuse that they cannot find qualified non-white candidates.

The Seekers

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The book, When Prophecy Fails, is a classic work of social psychology written in the 1950’s based on a study of a UFO cult called the Seekers. This group was led by a woman named Dorothy Martin, who claimed that aliens spoke through her to warn of a coming apocalypse. She employed something called “automatic writing” to channel the messages from the people of the planet Clarion. Through her, they were telling humanity that the world would end on December 21, 1954.

The study documented the believers and how they coped with the fact the word did not end on December 21, 1954. What they found is that instead of the group realizing they had been duped by a lunatic, they quickly developed an explanation for why the great event had not occurred and came to believe that with the same degree of intensity they had believed the original prophesy. In the case of the Seekers, within hours they were telling the world that their faith had convinced God to spare the world.

It is a useful thing to keep in mind. We tend to assume cults have a charismatic figure at the top, but that’s not always the case. Hassidic Jews are not led by a charismatic leader, unless you consider the Rabbi a cult leader. In fact, that may not be a bad comparison, in that Rabbis come and go, temporarily holding the position of sect leader, but not really a cult figure. Progressives swap out their chief lunatic as well. Look at their list of three initial heroes.

In the summer before the 2016 election, the left was sure Hillary Clinton would be anointed as their new leader. They were so sure of it, people quitting their jobs so they could prepare to move to Washington and serve the new ruler. Then disaster struck and the prophecy failed. Like the Seekers, they waited all night for a miracle, but there was no miracle. Also like the Seekers, they cooked up an elaborate explanation, rather than accept the result. Russian collusion is a coping mechanism.

It does not stop there with the left. They have a new prophecy that they are sure will come true on the first Tuesday of this November. They believe the magical blue wave will cleanse the the land of sinners, who defend the evil Donald Trump, by concealing the Russian hacking scandal. It’s why fiction writer Bob Woodward released his book this week and why the NYTimes ran the fictional op-ed. These are intended to be evidence at the trial of Donald Trump, when he is impeached.

It’s also why Elizabeth Warren was out demanding they invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump now. After all, if it is inevitable, why wait for the election? As far as she and the other hormonal crazies in the cult are concerned, the impeachment and removal of Trump is written in stone. True believers always succumb to the Tinker Bell Effect, because they believe so intensely, they inevitably begin to see everything as confirmation of their deeply held beliefs.

You’ll also note that these periods of extreme mania come and go. When Trump fired Comey, the Left was apoplectic for a week. Comey himself was out there casting himself in the role of martyr for the cause. Then it passed and no one talks about him anymore, outside of grand jury rooms. When Trump met with Putin, there was another week of fevered lunacy in the media. This week’s spasm coincided with the Kavanaugh hearings and next week, all of this will be forgotten.

What’s happening is the left is responding to disconfirmation in the same way the Seekers handled it. Rather than reevaluate their positions or beliefs considering obvious reality, they escalate their intensity to pull the faithful together. Firing Comey showed Trump was not about to resign, as the left believed. When he met with Putin, it annulled their Boris and Natasha fantasy. Now that Kavanaugh is obviously going to be confirmed, it undermines those beliefs.

Another aspect of the Seekers is relevant here. Dorothy Martin came out of the same cult that gave birth to Scientology. She later went on to reinvent herself as Sister Thedra and start a new cult called the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara. Progressives have similarly morphed into different things over the years. You’ll also note that spiritual cults tend to be led by women or have a lot of high-profile females.  The same thing is happening with the progressives.

All of this is amusing but imagine a country with a powerful army and nuclear weapons being run by nutters like Elizabeth Warren. Imagine a situation room that looks like the editorial board of the Huffington Post. There are no obvious remedies to having the ruling class succumb to mass insanity. The public can accept that their rulers are corrupt or evil. It’s hard to accept that they are insane. The proof of that probably comes too late as the loonies have already pulled the roof down us.

Feudalism.Net

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There are certain words and phrases that have lost their formal definition in favor of an emotional definition, so the use of them usually says more about the person using them, than the object being described. Like “fascism”, the word “feudalism” was mostly a term of disparagement in the 18th and 19th century. According to scholars of the subject, the word “feudal” was first used in the 17th century, as in feudal order. It later came into more common usage via Marxist political propaganda.

Just because feudalism was largely used as a meaningless epithet, it does not mean it did not exist. Scholars generally agree that feudalism was “a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs.” The lord owned the land, and the vassal was granted use of it by the lord. The land was the fief. In exchange for legal and physical protection, the lord expected service, usually military service, but also rents.

Marxists later pointed out that this system relied on the lord owning the one thing of value, the land. The person at the top of the feudal order had a monopoly on the one store of value and that gave him a monopoly on the law. The old saying about the golden rule is true. The man with the gold makes the rules. This is why as coinage made a comeback in the medieval period, kings took control of the mints. It was both a source a wealth, seigniorage, and a source of power.

A useful example of this is the decision by Henry VIII to dissolve the monasteries of the Catholic Church. By seizing church lands, which constituted about a quarter of the national wealth, and redistributing it to favored aristocrats, Henry fundamentally altered English society. He weakened the power of the old nobles, by filling their ranks with new members loyal to Henry. He also eliminated an alternative source of economic power and moral authority in English society.

Feudalism only works when a small elite controls the source of wealth. In Europe, as Christianity spread, the Church required lands, becoming one of the most powerful forces in society. The warrior elite was exclusively Catholic, thus they had a loyalty to the Pope, as God’s representative on earth. Therefore, the system of controlling wealth not only had a direct financial benefit to the people at the top, but it also had the blessing of God’s representative, who sat atop the whole system.

That is something to keep in mind as we see technology evolve into a feudal system, where a small elite controls the resources and grants permission to users. The software oligopolies are now shifting all of their licensing to a subscription model. It is not just the mobile platforms. Business software is adopting the same model. The users have no ownership rights. Instead, they are renters, subject to terms and conditions imposed by the developer or platform holder. The users are literally a tenant.

The main reason developers are shifting to this model is that they cannot charge high fees for their software, due to the mass of software on the market. Competition has driven down prices. Further, customers are not inclined to pay high maintenance fees when they can buy new systems at competitive rates. The solution is stop selling the stuff and start renting it. This fits the oligopoly scheme as it ultimately puts them in control of the developers.

It also means the end of any useful development. Take a look at the situation Stefan Molyneux faces. He has been otherized, so the Great Church of Technology is now in the process of having him expelled from the internet. As he wrote in a post, he invests twelve years building his business on-line, only to find out he owns none of it. He was always just a tenant farmer, who foolishly invested millions in YouTube. Like a peasant, he is now about to be evicted.

How long before someone like this monster discovers that Google and Apple will no longer allow him to use any apps on his phone? Or maybe he is denied access to his accounting system? How long before his insurer cuts off his business insurance, claiming the threat from homosexual terrorists poses too high of a risk? Federal law prevents the electric company from shutting off his power due to politics, but federal law used to prevent secret courts and secret warrants.

The power of the church in medieval Europe was not just spiritual. They owned vast amounts of land and could marshal tremendous resources in support of or in defiance of the secular rulers. In fact, this is the reason the Church acquired lands. What drives the tech overlords of today is exactly the same thing. Their desire to impose their moral order on the rest of us is driving them to monopolize the source of power in the information age. They are imposing a new form of feudalism on us.

The difference today is that this new religion is ill-defined and lacks the outward symbols to distinguish it from the rest of society. The rules of the new religion are always changing, making it impossible to predict. In the 12th century everyone was clear about who set the moral order. The local bishop may have been nuts, but he was predictably nuts. The new religion is formless. It is an anarcho-tyranny because it is an anarcho-religion.

The solution to this will not be the same as last time. There is no secular authority willing to challenge the power of the new theogarchs. Mark Zuckerberg went to Congress and lied his face off, knowing they were afraid to lay a hand on him. After  the 2020 election, social media will have banned Trump and his supporters. The solution is the oligarchs will have to fear the peasantry in real space. The same civil authorities that are too weak to oppose the theogarchs will be too weak to protect them.

Peisistratos

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In the late 7th and early 6th century BC, ancient Athens fell into crisis. As is often the case with the classical period, historians disagree about the causes. One issue upon which everyone agrees is that economics played a part. The wealthy families had become an oligarchy, owning most of the land. Debt-bondage was common. The collateral for loans in that age was the person. This meant that if the Athenian tenant farmers did not pay his rents, he and his children could be seized as slaves.

The way it worked is the farmer would borrow to finance the operations of the farm. If the farm did not produce enough to pay the debt, he would fall into debt bondage. In theory, he literally worked off his debt, so it was a temporary status. There was a special status in the law for someone in bondage for a debt, versus the normal type of slave. The reality was that debt bondage was becoming a permanent state for a large fraction of the population. The result was increasing social strife between the classes.

Rivalry between the leading families was also a problem. As is always the case when there is social unrest, some factions tried to take advantage of it and gain power for themselves at the expense of their rivals. in 632 BC, an Athenian nobleman named Cylon made an unsuccessful attempt to seize power. Many Greek city-states had seen opportunistic noblemen take power on behalf of sectional interests. Factions sought to gain control of the state, to gain an edge over rivals.

There were also regional rivalries that exacerbated the personal and economic turmoil of the age. The rural population had different interests than the urban population. Traders had different interests than farmers. Since most Athenians lived in rural settlements, and debt bondage was an increasing problem, Attika was increasingly resembling Sparta, where a small elite ruled over a large population of helots. This exacerbated the personal and economic rivalries convulsing Athens at the time.

Regardless of the causes, Athens was at a crisis point and fear of a tyrant rising to impose order, led the Athenians to turn to the wisest man in Athens. That man was Solon, a statesman, lawmaker and poet. He was of noble birth, but he was sometimes described as a self-made man, suggesting his family was of modest means. In 595 BC Solon had led the Athenian forces against the Megarians, resulting in a heroic victory. Allegedly, it was the power of his poetry that inspired the Athenians to carry the day.

By the time the Athenians turned to Solon, he was rich, a famous poet and a famous military leader. Solon was awarded temporary autocratic powers by Athenian citizens on the grounds that he had the wisdom to sort out their differences in a peaceful and equitable manner. His task was to find a way to resolve the factional rivalries. The result was a series of economic, legal and moral reforms that are remembered to this day as the Reforms of Solon. Once instituted, Solon gave up his position and left Athens.

The Athenians agreed to abide by these reforms for a period of ten years, but within a few years the old problems and rivalries were back. In addition to the old problems, the defects in the reforms created new problems. Some officials refused to perform their duties as described, while other posts were left vacant. The reforms worked if Solon was around to lend his name to them. Once Solon was gone, the result was worse than before the reforms. As a result, the people blamed Solon for the breakdown of order.

Eventually one of Solon’s relatives, Peisistratus, ended the factionalism by force, becoming tyrant and confirming what everyone feared would happen prior to Solon’s reforms. Solon was still alive, and he mocked the Athenians for allowing Peisistratus to seize power, by standing outside his home, wearing his uniform. Despite being driven into exile twice, Peisistratus was eventually able to impose order on Athens and he ruled as tyrant until his death. His sons succeeded him and ruled until 510 BC.

Solon gets positive treatment from history for having tried to preserve Athenian democracy and for having some success at curbing the power of the aristocrats. Aristotle credited Peisistratus with laying the foundation for the eventual rise of Athens. He changed the economy to be based on trade and he reformed agriculture, away from grains to olives. He did this by offering loans to farmers so they could make the transition. He also built a water system capable of sustaining a large population.

The lesson here is that reform is rarely successful, unless it is imposed by force. The reason is the status quo will always be preferable to those in power. Any reform through mutual consent must involve trade-offs that do nothing to alter the fundamental power arrangements. That was the defect of Solon’s reforms. While they temporarily alleviated the results of the power arrangements in Athenian society, they never attempted to alter them. The result of Solon’s reforms was nothing more than a pause in the factionalism.

This is something to keep in mind in the current age. The problems we see are not caused by errors in voting or mistakes in public policy. There is an underlying systemic problem that cannot be voted away. At the end of the Industrial Revolution, similar problems existed, but the political class was strong enough to impose reforms on the industrial barons and alter the power relationships in American society. That was possible because politics was a power center with the monopoly on violence.

Today, the political class is composed entirely of hired men, speaking on behalf of the interests that back their political careers. In fact, most are just actors, hired because they fit the right profile and look good on television. They have no power. This is the problem Trump is confronting as he tries to push through reforms. It’s not that Congress opposes these reforms. It’s that their paymasters oppose the reforms. He’s dealing with flunkies and errand boys. We don’t need a Solon right now. We need a Peisistratus.

Modest Proposals

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The paleo-conservative thinker, Sam Francis, introduced the term “anarcho-tyranny” into the dissident vocabulary. He defined it as “we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy), so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).” For example, the streets are littered with speed cameras, red-light cameras and other surveillance equipment to tax motorists. On the other hand, if your car is stolen, the cops cannot be bothered to look for it and you must hope the insurance company is generous.

Francis focused on crime, but we see it everywhere. Because it has crept up slowly on us, the chaos of our age just feels normal, but so does the shrinking freedom of the surveillance state. A way to see this is to think about the small, relatively easy to impose rules our government could do now, that would make life better. Yet, these modest proposals are never mentioned, much less debated. In fact, the very idea of the state imposing quality of life measures is outrageous.

For example, the scourge of mobile phones is obvious to everyone. We have people walking into traffic while texting. Every summer, there are stories of people coming to harm as they try to take a selfie. Even if those are rare exceptions, driving has become a stressful adventure, because of drivers talking and texting. Spend time around the imperial capital and you come to hate the cell phone. This is an easily remedied problem that the government could address tomorrow.

For example, the Feds could tell mobile phone makers that their devices must shut off when they detect movement. Cars with media centers have this feature, so drivers are not fiddling with the thing while driving. If mobile phones were so equipped, the number of drivers smashing into one another over texting would drop to zero. Idiots and teenagers would hate this, but so what? There’s never a need for a human to talk or text while driving. If you need to talk, pull over and have your conversation.

The assault on privacy by tech companies could be also addressed. Your picture, your name, your financial information, all the stuff that defines you is yours. It should be treated like any other property. Google is not allowed to build a surveillance point on your front lawn. Why are they allowed to spy on you and sell your information to the highest bidder? A law that requires written permission to possess and distribute private information would put an end to the abuse of privacy.

In case you think this is impossible, keep in mind it used to exist. Credit bureaus used to need permission to release your credit history. One of the things you signed in the loan process was a form giving the lender the right to pull your credit report and call on your references. The same is true of employers. The application process included you giving them permission to call former employers. Simply restoring a basic of civil society – property rights – would solve many problems.

To get a sense of just how far we have gone down the road to serfdom, ask a normie friend about such a proposal. Ask them if the government should require Facebook to get your written permission to use your data. The right leaning normie will recoil in horror at the state doing anything. The left leaning normie will most likely give you a blank look, as they are unable to process the concept of privacy. The very idea of you owning you is now alien to most Americans.

On the other hand, the idea of transparency among the ruling class has become an artifact of a bygone age. Around the imperial capital are thousands of not-for-profit operations that are financed by rich people. You can look up some basic information about them, but you can rarely find out who pays the bills. Take, for example, The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. This group harasses white people and is run by a white-hating woman named Kristen Clarke. Who pays for this?

Politics is now a clash between these types of groups financed by shadowy characters that none of us see. Instead, we see trained actors as spokesman for these front groups that essentially operate as money laundering operations. Because the billionaire class is unable to hire politicians directly, they funnel their bribes through non-profits. Cliff Asness gets to pay Jonah Goldberg to be his mouthpiece and he gets a tax break. He’s not just a member of the over-class. He’s a philanthropist!

Cliff Asness may be a civic minded patriot, but the only reason we can know his name is he chooses to let us know it. He could just as easily have made the gift anonymously or under some other name. Unless you are into dissident politics, you would never know that every utterance of Jonah Goldberg is paid for by some billionaire with interests that may or may not be your interests. Every nickel that comes into a not-for-profit should be public information, so we can know who is paying the paid actors.

The point is, there are probably a hundred small things that could be done today to significantly improve life in America, for the citizens of America. The increasing shrillness of public debate is closely linked to the lawlessness of modern life. There’s a reason the state is incapable of even small reform. It goes back to what Sam Francis observed with crime. The class-consciousness of the managerial class is the same phenomenon that we see with public bureaucracy.

The Russian Stain

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During the Cold War, popular culture portrayed the Soviets in two ways, often at the same time. There was the ruthless ideologue, efficiently going about his business as an implacable enemy of freedom. The other type of Soviet character was the morally conflicted guy, whose honor compelled him to serve his country, but he also understood that communism was immoral. As far as villains go, both types of Soviet were given a lot of respect, because Hollywood is sympathetic to Bolshevism.

Today, Hollywood rarely uses Russians as bad guys, but our political class sees them as the epicenter of evil in the modern world. Steve Sailer noted the other day that the pundit class has rewritten recent history to fit this narrative. The neocons are celebrating the tenth anniversary of something that never really happened, at least not in the way they currently tell it. Here is neocon puppet Mikheil Saakashvili, and Robert Kagan and Condoleezza Rice repeating the same whopper.

The funny thing about this myth-making is that it is unnecessary. The number of people in the political class who could locate South Ossetia is tiny. Most normal Americans would be puzzled to learn that there is a country named after the peach state. As a public relations item, this ten year old non-event is useless. There’s also the fact that the actual events are easily accessible on-line. It looms large for the neocons, though, so they can’t stop thinking about it.

The neocons love mucking about in that part of the world. Some would say their interests go back to the pale of settlement days. That is the sort of thing that can get your in trouble. Still, there’s pretty good evidence that the American foreign policy establishment has been meddling in the region since the Soviet Empire. The Boston Marathon bomber was probably recruited by US intelligence at some point. His uncle seems to know a lot of people in the CIA.

The thing that no one has yet to explain is why has the American ruling elite become fixated on Russia. Even if the reason for the neocon obsession is ancient hatreds, why is the America left nuts about the Russians? It could simply be convenience, but there are better villains in the world for them to hate, at least in practical terms. China, for example, makes for a much better villain. Iran or Saudi Arabia work much better with the left’s current deep dive into matriarchy.

Even if you want to believe that the left has been infected by the ancient hatred that animates the neocons, the tenor of the left’s hatred is different. The neocons see Russia as a problem to be controlled so it does not revert back to its imperial habits. The left now sees Russia as Old Scratch. Russia is not a problem to be managed and more than the devil can be managed. The very existence of Russia is seen as an affront to the neo-liberal world order.

This visceral hatred has some similarities to the orogressive loathing of the imperial governments of Europe prior to the Great War. Wilson despised the old order, which is why he was so aggressively vengeful toward the Austrians and Germans. American progressives seem to have developed the same view of Russia, and to a lesser degree the Visegrad counties. Their resistance to the neo-liberal order is viewed as an ideological challenge and that can never be tolerated.

The difference is that a century ago, Wilsonian democracy was ascendant, while the monarchical order was in decline. America and American leaders were the new kids on the world stage, pushing aside the old guard. Today, the neo-liberal order is in a defensive crouch. Meanwhile, Russia and Eastern Europe are pretty much just normal countries do pretty well. Perhaps part of the hatred for Russia is the need to find something to blame for the current troubles in the West.

Of course, it is a reminder of the absolute intolerance of secular religions. When people assign the natural order to divine forces, they can be indifferent to alternative forms of worship, as a part of the great mystery of life. When the natural order is a man made creation and the moral code is created and maintained by man, any deviation must be viewed as a challenge to the creator’s legitimacy. The stubborn existence of European countries practicing the old ways is an insult to the neo-liberal creators.

There also may be the issue of reach. Russia is poor and relatively weak compared to the West, but it remains out of reach. It’s ability to thrive outside the new world order suggests the new world order cannot include the whole world. Central to the liberal impulse, going back to Wilson, is totalitarianism. Russia is like a stain that they cannot get out of the fabric of global society. Putin is a new Tsar, the return of that same stubborn problem they cannot resolve.

Waiting For The Spark

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At lunch recently, I overheard two young women talking about the coming revolution, which I assumed was a joke, so I eavesdropped for a little while bit turned out that they were talking about revolution. The bossy looking one was going on about something Trump did, and how it was going to be the thing that “woke people up about what is really happening.” My guess is the part I missed had something to do with Russians or maybe the Manafort Trial. The Left is obsessed with that now.

Since the election, the Left has been dreaming up scenarios in which the results of the election are overturned. For a long time, they were sure Trump would be impeached, but that seems to have faded. Last year my left-wing office manager was deep into the impeachment scenarios. Now the talk is of revolution, which probably fits better with their conception of themselves as the heroic resistance. They imagine Trump as a strong man, against whom they must resist until the system cracks.

Most of us think of revolution in the sense of people flooding into the streets to protest the government. Either the government makes an error, causing the mob to turn violent or radicals use unrest to foment a full-on revolt. The two models in the Western mind are the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution. Given the make-up of the anti-Trump forces, it’s hard to imagine either scenario. The “resistance” is mostly girls and non-whites prone to committing violence against one another.

There is another model of revolution, that may be what our current rulers have in mind for us and that is the Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao Zedong. This was a revolution from above, where the revolutionary elite enlisted the masses at the bottom to purge the middle of bourgeois traitors. Mao purged the party of rivals and then used subsequent protests to advance a lurch into radicalism. The complaints about party leaders were an excuse to start a cultural revolution.

The most famous aspect of it was the Red Guards. This was a student movement aimed at unleashing “a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a deeper and more extensive stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country.” Sinophiles hate the comparison, but this sounds a lot like our billionaire class financing the various radical groups and social justice warriors we see rampaging through the culture today.

Another point of comparison is the war on the “Four Olds” which were old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. This was both a war on the past, as well as a war on the culture itself. For example, the Red Guards pulled the remains of a Ming dynasty emperor out of his tomb, denounced him and then burned the remains. They went around renaming streets and toppling statues.  Today’s radicals do the same thing and preach against racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism.

No historical comparison is perfect. Again, Sinophiles really hate the comparison, but people are conservative about what they think they know best. There’s also the fact that Chinese culture is remarkably strong, and it was largely able to resist the ten-year campaign to obliterate it. American culture appears to be brittle and falling apart under the weight of a fifty-year planned invasion. The Chinese did not fill up their lands with hostile foreigners, armed with a ballot by the ruling class.

On the other hand, there are limits to everything. As the outrages from the Left stack up, the average white person in American grows angrier. Talk to anyone sympathetic to this line of thinking and they will tell you they have grown far less tolerant of their remaining liberal friends. I know I’ve lost touch with quite a few former friends, because I will not tolerate their nonsense. I have friends who just a few years ago thought Ben Shapiro was edgy and now think I am too soft.

The question is what it would take to move people from yelling at their televisions over the latest liberal outrage to marching in the streets. Sometimes, the smallest spark sets the biggest fire. The reaction to Alex Jones getting purged from the internet has been surprising, given that he is not a serious person. People, who never heard of him until yesterday, are angry over his banishment. My guess is the percentage of people thinking fondly of Pinochet is at an all-time high right now.

As far as the spark, a move against Trump is good bet. The glue that keeps things from flying apart right now is middle-class white people, who still have faith in the political system. These are the middle American radicals Sam Francis wrote about 30 years ago during the Reagan moment. They will tolerate just about anything, if they think they can fight the other side within the system. An effort to remove Trump or even silence his advocates, could be a spark that gets these people into the streets.

Extra-political efforts to ban guns are another possible spark. The coordinated efforts to cut off gun makers from the financial system is dangerous. Gun owners follow this stuff and there are a lot of them. The pink pussy hat people think they have numbers because billionaires will bus fifty thousand of them into DC. The NRA could get a million people in the streets if there is ever a real threat to gun rights. A big part of gun culture is the idea of the patriot bravely taking up arms to resist tyranny.

It is tempting to think this will all blow over. I just don’t see how it will ever be possible to make peace with the Left. They hate us and will use any means necessary. The lack of code is the critical part. How does one make peace with someone that will never abide by the rules? Whether this results in revolution, counter revolution or civil war is hard to know, but the number of people thinking the gap cannot be bridged is growing every day, so we wait for the Cossack’s wink.