Category Archives: Greatest Hits

Gefälschte Nachrichten

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Last week, the German publication Der Spiegel was forced to fire its star performer, when it was revealed that he was a fabulist. Claas Relotius had written for the publication for close to a decade. He had been handed several awards by other media organs. His exposure as a serial fabricator was the result of his piece on the small town of Fergus Falls Minnesota, after the 2016 election. The thrust of his story was that rural America voted for Trump, because it is full of xenophobic weirdos and economic losers.

His mistake was to pick on a small town in the age of the internet. The yokels were able to look up the article and compare his version of reality with their own. More important, they could go to a popular platform and post their reactions to his article, so the world could then compare his work to reality. Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, who live in Fergus Falls, posted their analysis of the article on Medium. Eventually, it took over a year, Der Spiegel was forced to address the issue publicly.

In Germany, this is quite a scandal in media circles, because Der Spiegel is like their version of New York Times. That is, it positions itself as the official arbiter of truth, with regards to public morality. They not only decide what is true, they decide which truths can be said. Worse yet for them, they have been bragging about their fact checking for a long time. As a result of this tent pole toppling over, the German media is scrambling to convince everyone that it is an isolated incident, not a system failure.

The amusing bit is the German media is rushing around looking puzzled, as to how the vaunted fact checking system could have failed. After all, the best people are in control of the media. How could the best people have made such basic errors? As is the case in America, whenever these things happen, the media handwringing is just a dodge. What really concerns them is how easy it was for two bumpkins from dirt country to sluice out the facts from the fiction in this article.

That is always the thing with these scandals. The media big shots always come off as if they have been insulted about their shenanigans being revealed. In this case, the other major media outfits are rallying to defend Der Spiegel. In the dreaded private sector, competitors are always quick to take advantage of the mistakes of a competitor. In the mainstream media, the opposite is always true. They circle the wagons and begin lecturing the hoi polloi about the dangers of questioning the media.

That is the real cause of these scandals. For a long time, the mass media in the West has been a monoculture. You cannot have a career in the media if you do not hold all the right opinions. To call the media an echo chamber for the left is to understate the problem. The better analogy is a school of fish. Everyone just reacts to those around him, giving the effect of the school having agency. What looks like collusion is just the result of a uniformity of mind, experience, and social class.

That is why no one at Der Spiegel, or anywhere else in the German media, noticed the fraudulence of Claas Relotius. He was writing the things his coevals and superiors said at luncheons, cocktail parties and in the office. His story about slack-jawed yokels in the American heartland ticked all the boxes popular with the left-wing cultural outlook. He was not sent there to report on the place. He was sent there to confirm what his employers already knew about Middle American and Trump voters.

This is why Western media is something worse than propaganda. The person hired by the state or hired by the corporate marketing department has self-awareness. They know their job is to polish the apple of their superiors. The tricks they employ to do that are done with knowledge and forethought. The guy telling the public that his employer, the pesticide company, is deeply concerned about the environment does so knowing full well that no one believes him, including his family.

The media is a different thing. They really believe their own nonsense. They think they are part of a special class of humans, a priestly class that not only reports facts to the public, but provides moral instruction. The mass media is so intoxicated by their own self-righteousness, they lack the ability to question their own actions. When Claas Relotius came back from the bush, reporting exactly what his bosses knew was the case, they had no reason to question it. It was too good to check.

After Conservatism

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National Review was founded in 1955 by Bill Buckley and, until the last few years, it has been the prestige publication of American conservatism. The late 50’s is a good starting point for the movement that has been the alternative to progressivism. Buckley was greatly influenced by Russel Kirk, so the magazine took on progressivism, but also the libertarianism of Ayn Rand and the failures of previous efforts to create a legitimate conservatism in the United States. The goal was to create a new right.

Reading the take down of Ayn Rand by Whittaker Chambers all these years later, it is easy to see how things have changed. In the early days of Buckley conservatism, it was understood by people claiming to be on the right that libertarianism suffered from the same materialism as Marxism. Rand loved ideology so much that there was no room in her cold heart for humanity. Today, the so-called right is indistinguishable from the libertarianism of today. The editor of National Review actually celebrates it.

It has become a cliche of sorts that what passes for conservatism today is just yesterday’s liberal fads. The social media gag “the conservative case for [fill in name of liberal degeneracy]” stopped being funny because it became common on the pages of National Review. Here they make the conservative case for homosexual marriage and here they make the case for transgenderism. Of course, one of the leaders of what passes for conservatism these days is a man who walks around dressed as a woman.

When confronted by the ridiculous spectacle that is Conservative Inc., it is tempting to fall into the same trap as Muslims, Marxists, and libertarians, when they confront the lunacy of their cults. Whenever a Muslim explodes in public, the response is, “well, that’s not the real Islam.” In the Cold War, Marxists professors would always say that Bolshevism was a mongrel and defective form of Marxism. Of course, libertarians spend all their time wheeling around those goal posts on roller skates that define libertarianism.

The fact is the conservatism of Bill Buckley was always defective. It was a continuation of what Robert Louis Dabney observed a century ago about Northern Conservatism. Russell Kirk saw conservatism as a disposition, the lack of ideology. What Buckley conservatism was, in fact, was a pose. The range of allowable opinion on the left, however, allowed for the existence of a reformist element that drew on the old right, as well as Western traditionalism. The managerial state had not yet snuffed out liberalism.

A couple decades ago, the great paleocon academic Paul Gottfried noted that the managerial state had killed liberalism. By liberalism, he meant the philosophical view that distributed powers and bourgeois moral standards worked to restrain the state and protect civil society. The system of governance refined in the 19th century was being wiped away and something new would replace it. Today, what passes for the left and the right both agree to call it neoliberalism and both sides strongly embrace it.

In that Fred Bauer post, you see that Buckley conservatives are on the last leg of the journey into the sun. They no longer see a reason to oppose the left, because the left disappeared into the sun of neoliberalism a long time ago. As has been its habit since birth, the conservatism of Bill Buckley follows progressivism around like a puppy. Its last act on the stage will be fusing itself permanently to what was once called the left to form the bipartisan fusion ideology of the American managerial state.

Paul Gottfried coined the phrase “alternative Right” in his speech at the Mencken conference, when discussing what happened to the paleocons. Richard Spencer appropriated the idea and started the alt-right, but it was never a coherent movement, nor did it have anything resembling an intellectual foundation. It was, at best, a grab bag of ideas plucked from various subcultures in the larger umma of the dissident right. As a result, it became a cult of personality and then fizzled out entirely.

It is easy to lay the blame for the alt-right at the feet of Richard Spencer, but the real problem is something you can pick up in Gottfried’s speech at Mencken. Paleos never fully grasped the reality of Buckley-style conservatism. Paul remains puzzled by how easy it was for the neoconservatives to overrun the conservative institutions. The reason, of course, was that those institutions were built on the same manor as the progressive institutions. Conservative institutions were just outhouses for the main house.

If there is to be a genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, the first task is to accept a central truth of the managerial state. That is, it must approach an intellectual and moral singularity to exist. While it will never reach the point where all opinion is assimilated, the allowable differences are now so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye. A system that evolved out the principle of universal truth, must evolve a morality that is intolerant of anything that challenges it. There can be no room for an alternative.

That means that whatever comes after conservatism must first sink roots outside the neoliberal order and maybe even outside the Enlightenment. It cannot be a reaction to neoliberalism, as that implies dependency. The obvious implication is that what comes after conservatism, in the framework of the American right, is nothing. That line of discovery and inquiry has reached a dead end. It is an intellectual tradition with no future and no shadow. What comes next must be a clean break from northern conservatism.

The Lincoln Option

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After two years in office, Donald Trump finds his presidency at a crossroads. His style as president has been the same as his style as a candidate. He says a lot of flippant things about the establishment, many of which are true, and the response is mockery or possibly some pearl clutching. Otherwise, from a policy perspective, the Trump era looks like the Jeb Bush era. The donor class got tax cuts and regulatory reform, while the voters have thus far gotten more of the same.

He can continue down the same path he has been on, reacting to the machinations of his enemies, like a hyper-active version of Richard Nixon, but that promises he will be a one-term president. While the political class ignores him on policy, the Mueller investigation operates as cancer on his administration. It is sucking the life out of his agenda, by filling the media with salacious nonsense stories and reactions to them, while scaring off serious people interested in joining the administration.

A strange result thus far is that Trump is bad at the thing he was elected to do. That is confront the political class. From the beginning, he has allowed them to push him around and bluff him into bad policy. For example, the Mueller fiasco could have easily been avoided by refusing to appoint the guy. Was the GOP House really going to start impeachment hearings? Would the media be worse on him for not signing off on this ridiculous idea? Foolishly, Trump takes the advice of his enemies.

The conspiratorially minded think the “deep state” has something on him so he is being forced to go along with their agenda. That is an entertaining theory, but the so-called deep state has shown itself to be all thumbs. The real reason behind his failure thus far is that Trump still believes in old America, a system of laws and rules where eventually the truth rises to the surface. Trump’s “assault” on the swamp is a defense of that old dead American ideal.

After two years of learning that the rule-based system of politics is a myth and what happens in Washington makes New York City real state look innocent, Trump needs to accept the reality of his situation. He can let the Mueller investigation go on forever, as his opponents so desperately desire, or he can end it. If he chooses the former, he is a one-term president whose name will be forgotten. The victors may even have Trump and his family imprisoned, as a warning to others.

The other option is to learn a lesson from Lincoln. When you scrape away the slobbering praise, Lincoln faced a simple dilemma. He could try to preserve the old order, fail and be remembered as a blood thirsty tyrant, who tried to upend the Constitutional order created by the Founders. Alternatively, he could be the tyrant and overthrow the system, win the war, and create a new order. The reason Lincoln is not remembered as Sulla is his side won.

That is the dilemma Trump now faces. He can keep trying to win within the rules being imposed upon him by the establishment, or he can reject those rules entirely. After all, he is in the White House because he did exactly that in the campaign. His primary run was an example of an outsider genius. His use of novel metrics to create new votes in the general was mostly due to necessity. It is a great reminder that necessity is the mother of invention – and revolutions.

Trump needs to accept that things have reached the breaking point. It is no longer possible for him to strike a compromise with the establishment. They must be brought to heel, and reform must be imposed upon them. They know this, which is why they are endlessly bluffing on what they are doing. Trump needs to call their bluff and fire Mueller, end his investigation and begin the process of investigating the rampant corruption in the intelligence services.

Imagine news breaks one Friday that the Secret Service has raided the offices and homes of the Mueller team. Their computers, phones and materials were seized and their access to those materials revoked. All of them fired on the spot. Imagine the media hysteria over that move. Now imagine Trump addressing the nation that night, telling the country he has fired Team Mueller and is instructing his new AG to appoint a new special counsel to get to the bottom of the FBI corruption.

That would turn Washington on its ear. When it is further learned that all the material in the Mueller probe is under 24-hour armed guard and off-limits to everyone until the second investigation is commenced, the game is on. That means the new prosecutor can and will prosecute leaking information in those files. Bob Mueller goes from being the grand inquisitor to a person of interest. His flunkies suddenly become a liability to him and the rest of the conspirators.

Would the House Democrats commence impeachment proceedings? Probably. Even if they went forward, would the GOP senate convict? Maybe. There are plenty duplicitous cowards in the Republican Party. Regardless of how it goes, Trump suddenly becomes an inflection point in the nation’s history. If they remove him from office, exactly no one will believe American democracy is anything but a sham to protect a corrupt ruling elite and the system will be discredited.

That is where Trump is right now. In a very different context, he is in the same place Lincoln when he assumed office. Lincoln could only fail by maintaining the old order, so he had to end the republic. Trump can only fail if he tries to restore the old civic order he fondly remembers from the 1980’s. His choice is to fail or overthrow the current order a slow death or a revolutionary act. The latter does not guarantee success, but it means the end of the old order, for which he will be remembered.

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.