Our Weird New Reality

Posted on August 16, 2022 by thezman

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One of the great unnoticed things about the current crisis is that the rules that everyone said were inviolable no longer seem to apply. This is most obvious in the economic realm where nothing makes any sense. Things that were said to be impossible a generation ago are now the default. Similarly, politics is now operating by a set of rules that no one can explain. Things that were considered outside of the realm of the possible are the new normal.

Way back in the before times, when Covid got going, the world literally shut itself down in response to the virus. In America, over twenty-five million people were laid off and tens of millions more were sent home to work. The official unemployment rate peaked at thirteen percent and was then restated to be just under seven percent. What the actual unemployment rate was at the peak is unknown. Regardless, it was an unprecedented attack on the economy that should have been devastating.

According to official statistics, the economy shrugged it off. The official figures say the economy contracted by 3.4% in 2020 but all of the decline was contained in the third quarter of the year. The fourth quarter began a massive rebound. The official numbers say the economy grew by 5.7% in 2021. That more than made up for the decline in the prior year due to Covid. It turns out you can literally shut down an economy and nothing serious will happen. No wonder people want to stay home.

It is not just in America where the laws of economics have been suspended. In Europe they are allegedly facing an energy shortage. Since forever we have been told that steep increases in energy prices trigger recession. Germany is literally facing the prospect of having no gas and no one seems to notice. The massive disruptions to the flow of energy into the EU has thus done little to upset the economy. According to the old rules, this should not be possible.

It is possible that the media is simply lying to us. Maybe people are seething at the suffering that has been inflicted upon them. The official media, controlled as it is by state actors, is ignoring this in favor of happy talk. It could also mean that all of those economic rules were just made up. No on really knows why the economy does what it does but like court magicians, economist pretend to know in order to provide authority to the ruling class. The whole thing is a put-on.

It is also possible that we live in a simulation. What we think of as reality is just a bit of software that the creators can tweak as they please. Those old rules had to be abandoned because the system got a computer virus. In order to keep the simulation from crashing entirely they changed the code. It is a temporary patch to the system until the next upgrade. Maybe that is why big events from the past, like the lockdowns, suddenly feel like distant memories. We rebooted.

Politics has the same weirdness. Everyone reading this is absolutely certain that we did not arrest people for speech. That was written down somewhere and everyone agreed that you could say what you like with some very narrow limits. Yet Douglas Mackey faces a decade in jail for making fun of Hillary Clinton on Twitter. Maybe like the economic rules, there was a patch done to the software, a hard reboot and we are suddenly operating under a totally new set of rules.

This confusion is obvious with the political actors. Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage in New Jersey. All of a sudden, the people dedicating their lives to suppressing speech were bemoaning this attack on free speech. In Britain, Boris Johnson has people thrown in dungeons for using the wrong pronouns, but he was out there decrying this attack on our sacred liberty. Maybe the software engineers forgot the update these guy’s code during the last service pack.

Even taking a step back and looking at things in the most general sense, the rules no longer seem to apply. Politics used to be defined by the three big human motivations, money, power and sex. How does drag queen story hour fit in here? Who is benefitting from this lunacy? The point of this assault on the children seems to be the promotion of general mayhem, which used to be the opposite of what rulers sought. The old rules said order was the goal of the people in charge.

Of course, we know that a tenet of the new religion states that only through mass confusion can we transcend this world. They believe if they get everyone into a state of agitation that we somehow break free from our old thinking. This lets us adopt a new model of thinking which is the passage to the glorious future. The endless “subverting expectations” is a deliberate effort to make everyone crazy. It is hard to accept, but this does explain why the rulers now prefer chaos.

That does not explain why the system trundles on, despite violating all of the rules we have been told are inviolable. We have double-digit inflation, periodic food shortages and record high gas prices. The whiplash effect is now emerging, where price hikes are followed by demand destruction, which collapses prices, only to see demand return and drive prices back up again. In other words, we are seeing stagflation in the economy but no one seems to notice or care all that much.

Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing it. Maybe it takes us a while to recognize reality after a long absence. Perhaps what lies ahead is a mass recognition of reality and a sudden return of the old rules. Maybe the people running the simulation get bored and shut us down. At this point, given the general weirdness we are seeing, we cannot safely assume anything. For now, at least, we are in a new world with new rules and a new sense of reality.

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The Lying Game

Posted on July 27, 2022 by thezman

Note: If you are familiar with Moldbug, who now calls himself Curtis Yarvin, I did a review of and comment upon his work behind the green door. Here is the SubscribeStar link and here is the Substack link.

At first blush, logic says that deception should have been bred out of humans long before humans settled down. Deceiving the tribe would be bad for the deceiver, resulting in exile or even death. That would significantly lower the reproductive success of the deceiver. On the other hand, tribes with deceivers would be less cooperative which would lower their overall success. Given enough time, it seems like deception should have disappeared from humanity.

Clearly that is not the case. We have lots of liars. That means deception has some useful role in human society. At the minimum, deception is not so negative that it would significantly lower the reproductive success of the deceiver. In fact, deception has probably always been an asset on the mating market. Even in the narrow world of the tribe, sweettalking Pebbles into a roll in the cave has obvious benefits. Perhaps lying for sex is enough to make deception a feature of man.

On the other hand, every society has prohibitions against deception. In European cultures, reputation is tied to honesty and trustworthiness. Someone who gains a reputation for deception loses status. In more clannish societies, deceiving outsiders is not so bad, especially if it helps the in-group, but lying to people in the clan can have severe consequences. Someone who deceives his own people can be exiled from the group or possibly worse.

This apparent contradiction has been known for a long time. It is not just humans who display the willingness to deceive others in the group. In many animal societies, like bees and ants, cooperation is rewarded and deception is punished. As with humans, deception should have been selected out a long time ago, but that is clearly not the case which suggest deception has some value. The deceiver gets enough benefit over time to make deception useful in some way.

A new study suggests that cooperation is what makes deception possible, as cooperation involved complex rules. An individual can exploit those rules to gain benefit without having to contribute. The more cooperative a society, the more opportunities there are for free riders to game those rules through deception in order to prosper from the cooperation of others in the group. The less cooperative a society, the fewer opportunities to exploit the rules through deception.

Given that we live in an age of universal deceit, at least by those in positions of authority, the evolution of lying suddenly matters a great deal. Part of it is that we are better able to see the lying of the people in charge. Before the mass media age, it was hard for people to get information on official lies. Of course, it was also much harder to promote official lies. Mass media results in a sense of mass cooperation, which means the communications revolution has revolutionized mass lying.

Even adjusting for our natural recency bias, institutional lying has exploded over the last thirty years in America. Every day someone from the government stands in front of cameras and blatantly lies about things. They know they are lying. The people in the press room know they are lying. Everyone in the room knows that the people watching it know everyone involved is lying. There is the sense that the people in these positions look at lying as a game where the biggest liar wins the day.

This is not a new thing. For twenty years the drug companies have said that serotonin levels are responsible for depression. It turns out to be wrong and the studies they relied upon were obviously wrong. In other words, they should have known their claims were false, but they had a billion reasons to lie, so they lied. This sort of deception has become the norm. Here is a story about a prominent cancer research facility caught faking their research.

Of course, we are still living through one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on human society, which is the Covid pandemic. The virus is real, but the claims around it have been nonsense since the start. Mask wearing and social distancing never had any basis in science or reason. Important people not only insisted it was science but forced people to play along. Now we are learning that the vaccines are not what was claimed and may have made things worse.

Many people have noticed the scale and degree of lying from official quarters, but the assumption is always that the cause is degeneracy. That is the people slithering into positions of authority are responsible for the rise in deception. The solution is to round them up, put them on boats and send them out to sea. Put honest people back into positions of authority and we return to the normal levels of deception. That may be just as wrong as the things coming from our leaders.

It may be that we have reached a point where the people in the ruling class of society, this includes the managerial and administrative classes, no longer feel any connection to the rest of us. They lie and willingly repeat lies, because it causes no harm to them and solves immediate concerns. Like people in clannish societies, deceiving outsiders brings no penalty as outsiders simply do not count. The ruling class is now an alien clan that is indifferent to the rest of us.

Alternatively, this evolving class awareness may bring with it a sense that the people over whom they rule are a constant threat. Like the Alawites in Syria, the new class at the top of the social hierarchy now sees their position dependent on keeping the masses confused and disorganized. Israel has always done this with her Arab neighbors, preventing them from uniting against her. Perhaps the explosion of lying is due to fear and hostility by the ruling class.

Another possibility, suggested by that British study linked above, is that deception tracks with cooperation. The more cooperative a society, or at least the more it appears to cooperate, the more deception in the society. This seems counter intuitive as cooperation is about trust and deception undermines trust. On the other hand, the more people experience deception, the more they are willing to cooperate with those who display trustworthiness. Trust and deception rise and fall together.

An underappreciated aspect of the communications revolution is how unity has become the standard of politics. Fifty years ago, people understood that politics was the art of the possible, which meant compromise. You give a little to get a little, but often there was no deal to be had and you just accepted it. Today, politics is all about uniting everyone behind a narrow cause. Every day our rulers demand we put aside our interest for something. Mass cooperation is the norm.

These demands for mass cooperation track with the growth of mass media and they track with the rise in anathematizing of dissent. As communications have increased, the demand for cooperation have increased. As cooperation increases, the deception increases with it. Some of the lying is in an effort to trick people into putting their interest aside for the good of the cause. Much of the lying is just opportunism. The greater cooperation has led to an explosion in deception.

The prisoner’s dilemma game is a classic example of how even simple human interactions can become quite complex. Rational self-interest can lead someone into a trap depending upon the rules in which they are forced to operate. This may be what we are seeing with the explosion of lying. The communications revolution has altered the ancient rules of human cooperation within large scale society. The ability to enhance mass cooperation has resulted in mass deception.

Like that prisoner’s dilemma game, the people doing the lying think they are acting in their self-interest but they are actually undermining their collective interests. The more they lie in defense of “our democracy” the less valuable the system that makes it possible for them to be a ruling class. Their efforts to enhance the value of their position in society is undermining their position. Taken to its logical conclusion, the collapse in trust will bring about a collapse in the ruling class.

Shark Sightings

Posted on July 14, 2022 by thezman

The sharks are begging to accumulate off the coast of the Biden administration, as his popularity falls along with his cognitive functioning. The current polling has him at or near the lowest ever recorded for a sitting president. His party is in a panic over the upcoming midterm elections. There is an obvious shift going on in the media where they signal that it is time to think about what comes after Joe Biden. Now the first dorsal fins of potential replacements are showing up in the water.

The first fin to pop up was that of Gavin Newsom, the current governor of California and former mayor of San Francisco. He recently ran an ad in Florida telling the locals that their state is terrible, they smell like feet and the smart ones should leave the filthy place and come to California. Presumably, his team thinks this is a way to pick a fight with Ron DeSantis, who has become a bogeyman for his cult. They seem to have forgotten that Florida is a critical swing state in elections.

Newsom turning up at the White House while Biden is visiting Israel suggests that the people in charge wanted to send a message. A child of extreme privilege, Newsom got richer by partnering with the fourth so of oil tycoon John Paul Getty. They started a winery and then a private equity firm that targeted entertainment properties catering to the managerial elite. Newson got bored with that and bought himself a mayoral office and then the governorship of California.

To his credit, he is one of the few politicians alive today who has ever signed the front of a paycheck and done any sort of real work. Granted, these are silly businesses that look like they were underwritten to make his resume look good. Boutique wineries and hipster restaurants are different from making car parts or fixing refrigeration units, but it at least looks like real work. He will no doubt run as a self-made man who knows how businesspeople struggle in these difficult times.

Another fin in the water is Gretchen Whitmer. She is up for reelection and has been getting lots of favorable news coverage. She gets to speak to important Democratic party groups and was on Biden’s short list of VP choices. He passed on her as she is too ambitious. The people around Biden had him select Harris as a form of life insurance policy. Just as no one would take out Obama with Biden as VP, no one is going to take out Biden with Harris as VP.

Whitmer’s resume is the dreary stuff we have come to expect. She has been on the dole her whole life. Her biggest claim to fame is the kidnapping hoax, which may have started as a campaign trick. It is hard to know, but so far, we know it was orchestrated by the FBI and not the patsies they put on trial. Her former lawyer seems to be involved with the FBI handlers. The whole thing is a seedy example of FBI corruption but also how big a role they play in politics.

The final fin in the water of Kamala Harris. Up until a few weeks ago, she was programmed to chant about how she looked forward to running with Biden in 2024 whenever asked about it. Someone swapped out her response code with a new response designed to give the impression she hopes Biden dies soon. This is probably the only way she ever becomes president. Even with support from Biden she stands little chance of winning the nomination on her own in 2024.

The main reason for looking at this is to note the long term planning that goes on with presidential candidates. Rich people thought Newsom could be president twenty-five years ago so they have been grooming him for this moment. That is a long term commitment to a project. The same is true of Whitmer. The kidnapping hoax is the sort of thing you do when you think she can run ten years hence as a tough independent female who stood up to the patriarchy as a governor.

The other interesting thing about the fins sticking out of the water is the Democrats are going to look for a white person in 2024. Harris ticks the brown boxes, but the wrong brown boxes as far as Democratic voters are concerned. Look around at other potential fins in the water and they all look like great whites as well. The Left’s commitment to diversity is like Pelosi and Biden’s commitment to Catholicism. It is a ceremonial item that has no bearing on how they live or think.

This is something the dullards in conservatism, which is pretty much all of conservatism, never seem to grasp. The chanting about white supremacy, antiracism, diversity and so on is a uniform these people wear to signal their commitment to their class. Fifty years ago, they walked around in brand new work clothes to signal their solidarity with the working man. Today they wear the language of diversity, inclusion and equity to show their solidarity with the swarthy fellows tending their gardens.

Putting all of that aside, the next six months promise some good political entertainment as the number of fins in the water reaches critical mass. While there is no reason to vote for Republicans, there are enough people mad at the economy to switch both the House and the Senate this fall. That will lead to a public debate about what to do with the aging Joe Biden. Do they let him serve out his term or do they push him down a flight of stairs after the election?

A year ago, the way to bet was on the unexpected tumble, but Harris has been so bad that swapping Biden for her is probably a bad bet. The people running the White House need Biden in place as they secure new places in the next regime. That means they put out word that Biden is re-thinking his 2024 plans. Sometime in the winter he announces his retirement after his first term in office. That also shifts the focus from the failures of Biden to the future failures of the next regime.

On the other hand, the 2020 election says that anything is possible so Biden running and winning in 2024 is not unthinkable. The beautiful people love firsts so he can be the first man in a coma to win election. Maybe the first man with a single digit approval rating to win reelection. After all, he was the first man to lose the first four primaries and still win his party’s nomination. He also got eighty million votes in the general election, which says that in America anything is possible.

Bad Choices

Posted on July 7, 2022 by thezman

Note: I was once again interviewed by a recovering libertarian. This time it was Peter Quinones and you can find it here and here.

Word from Britain is that Boris Johnson has agreed to step down as Prime Minister as soon as his party finds a replacement. His party will have an election to pick his replacement in October. According to the news, the main reason he is resigning is that his party worries that his personal scandals will drag them down in the polls and risk their majority in Parliament. This is one of those stock answers that the news supplies when no one wants to use the right answer.

The right answer is that the plutocrats who control British politics never liked Johnson and they seized this chance to get rid of him. In many ways, Johnson is like Donald Trump in that he represented the unhappiness of the Tory voters, even though he never really sympathized with them. Trump rode popular discontent into the White House but was obsessed with gaining elite approval. Johnson rode a populist wave into power, but never seemed to understand any of it.

There are, of course, lots of different opinions on the two men, but the one thing everyone agrees upon is the best people hated them. The reason the best people hated them is they appeared to side with the rabble against their betters, which is the one unforgivable sin in this age. Just about any degenerate act can be forgiven, but if you go against the family, you will never be forgiven. Like Trump, Johnson never seemed to understand this for some reason.

Another parallel to Trump is that the British ruling elite now faces the same trouble as the American elite in that a replacement is not obvious. In 2020 the selectors in Washington settled on a bumbling old simpleton because the other options were terrifyingly incompetent. No matter how angry you may be at the orange dirt monster, the thought of Elizabeth Warren in charge is a bridge too far. Bernie Sanders was literally their next best option.

For the Brits, the options are only slightly less ridiculous and that is only because the Brits tend to like the ridiculous. According to the European press, the favorite to replace Johnson is a Hindu bugman named Rishi Sunak. His great accomplishment in life was marrying the daughter of a Hindu billionaire while at Stanford. His other big accomplishment was wrecking the British economy as Chancellor of the Excheque during the Covid panic. You cannot make this up.

The other option for the selectors is Jeremy Hunt, who is something like the British version of Mitt Romney. He is a blend of oleaginous mendacity and obsequious rumpswabbery that would make him an ideal Republican. He represents the fink-on-the-voters wing of the Tory Party. He also looks like a character from a Mr. Bean sketch that gives him something Rishi Sunak lacks, which is some connection to the country over which he wants to rule.

The third likely option is Liz Truss. She should be a favorite as she is in many ways the most representative of the modern political class. Truss is noisy, self-aggrandizing and as dumb as a goldfish. As Foreign Secretary she encouraged Brits to volunteer to be killed in the Ukraine. She confused the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea while making bizarre threats against the Russians, while in Moscow. The woman is the poster child for the modern professional woman in the managerial class.

Interestingly, two other options, both considered longshots at this point, are Sajid Javid, from Pakistan, and Nadhim Zahawi, from Iraq. That makes three of the top contenders who are clearly not British. Further, they represent the party that claims to represent the traditional British nation. One could argue that the traditional British nation is a polyglot mishmash of people from the empire, but it is unlikely that most Tory voters think of Mumbai or Lahore when they are feeling sentimental.

This is the problem of empire. For an empire to work, the people at the top must eventually reduce their own people to the same level as the conquered. Initially force and grandeur is enough to keep the subjects in line but over time that no longer works so the imperial leadership must incorporate the conquered. This means granting them the same status as their own people, which can only be done by reducing their own people in terms of their place in the empire.

This is why the Tories and the Republicans have come to be the great champions of diversity and multiculturalism. They are the conservatives, but in the imperial sense, not the national sense. They are defending the empire, which means they defend the system that raises up the various people absorbed into the empire at the expense of the core population of the empire. This is why Tories and Republicans are sure their opponents are the real racists.

The final parallel to the Trump phenomenon here is that Johnson will end up being an unheeded warning because the people who could hear it lack the ability to respond to it with anything but anger. Trump was a sign of disgust by the white population of the country toward the political class. Similarly, Brexit and the dynamics that it unleashed, leading to Johnson becoming PM, was a warning shot. The British people were unhappy with their political class.

The trouble is, there is no answer for this. Like America, the British political system is controlled by people who hold the core population in contempt. Even if they could get past that, their options within the political system are terrible. The system has become a weird carny act, selecting for increasingly ridiculous people. Replacing a gasbag like Trump with a dementia patient was not an upgrade. Replacing Johnson with a simpleton like Liz Truss will not make life better.

What Johnson and Trump will come to represent was the dead end for a political system that evolved to its logical conclusion. When politics became theater, the stage was soon filled with carny acts, rather than serious people. In easy times, picking between the bearded lady and the sword swallower was fine, but in difficult times, these are not acceptable choices. That is where the British elites find themselves now, left with nothing but bad choices among terrible actors.

The Road To Revolution

Posted on July 4, 2022 by thezman

Note: My Taki post is on the same topic as today’s post. Sunday Thoughts is on a short break for the holiday, but I did post this about our spoiled rulers.

For the longest time, Americans were told that class did not exist because in America anyone could grow up to be president. While theoretically true, everyone understood that this was never to be taken literally. It simply meant that if you worked hard and made the right choices, you could maximize your potential. A person born poor could become rich is they had the talent for it.

This has been true, at least as far as economics. Many of our rich people started out as modest men. Through good fortune and tenacity, they made billions. Even today you can go far if you know how to work the system. Ibram X. Kendi has made himself very rich working the race hustle. Robin DiAngelo got rich in the same hustle. Even these sorts of mediocrities found riches by working the right angles.

This economic egalitarianism has fooled people into thinking the same rules apply to the management of society. America is a democracy where the people pick their leaders and guide public policy. The fact this is not true and never had been true is something with which Americans have always struggled, but good times made it is easy to conceal, because the system seemed to be working.

Things have not been working for a couple of years now. In fact, the sense that things are going wrong has probably been with us since the Bush years. While the economic numbers given to us by the government painted a rosy picture, people were starting to question things when the Iraq War went bad. The sense that things were heading in the wrong direction grew during the Obama years.

The election of Donald Trump was confirmation that a significant share of the voting public was worried about the direction of things. He was a blow against the Deep State that was secretly rigging things in favor of certain elites. The response from Washington seemed to confirm that shadowy actors are putting their thumbs on the scale, eighty million of them perhaps, to alter outcomes in their favor.

The concept of the Deep State is another form of escapism. Instead of questioning the system itself, blame goes to invisible players who corrupt the system. Even the most unhappy people want to believe the system can work. Those shadowy players use this to pit one group of Americans against another. “It is the Left!” for some, “It is white supremacy” for others.

A recent poll claimed that most people think the government is completely corrupt and barely half trust election results. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of Americans say they are proud to be an American. In fact, well over half say they are very or extremely proud. The fact that the poll headline suggests the opposite of the results could explain the apparent conflict in these polls.

People are starting to figure out that they are ruled by aliens and they have no peaceful way to alter this reality. The two parties are just two sock puppets operated by the people who are in charge. In the fall, one sock puppet will “win” the election, but they will just do all the same things the other party was doing. It will be done in the name of bipartisanship, which is when you are supposed to clap.

This is where that gap between the two polls creates trouble. The various campaigns waged by the ruling class over the last few years were intended to destroy pride in being an American, especially among a certain group. Instead, it has evolved a sense that the people in charge are alien and hostile. They have corrupted the people’s system for their benefit at the expense of the people.

In other words, the managerial elite wanted people to become more docile and dependent on the people running things. In order for that to happen the people needed to lose trust in themselves as “Americans”, whatever that means, and increase their trust in the experts running the system. What those two polls suggest is the exact opposite of what the managerial elite needs to happen.

Things will get interesting in the coming months as inflation, recession and supply chain problems eat into the economic wellbeing of the public. Again, people can and will tolerate just about anything if they have a good economy. Juvenal mocked this about the Romans and many do the same about Americans, but this practicality is the thing that makes civilized life possible.

People get political when forced into it. Bad times force people to look around and update their judgement about society. Those drag queen story hours piss off politically inclined people in good times. In bad times, they infuriate everyone else. In good times, a president who struggles to remember his own name and soils himself in public makes for some good jokes. In bad times it stops being funny.

None of this is to suggest that there is a revolution brewing. Right now, inflation is tolerable and gas prices are worrisome for most people. Revolution is a process that starts with a tiny minority realizing that the system is beyond reform. If they are right, this awareness slowly grows among the politically inclined, changing their rhetoric and how they engage with the public at large.

This is what happened when the colonies revolted 250 years ago. A sense of separation between the rulers and the people crept in like the fog. Some people never lost their connection to the king. Others lost it at the first sign of trouble. Most were in the middle somewhere, eventually coming around to the fact that they no longer had a natural bond to the people who claimed to rule over them.

The first rebellion in the colonies was close to a century before the big rebellion that led to independence. In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led an army of 1,000 Virginia colonists against the governor William Berkeley. They suspected the governor was in league with the Indian tribes, which made him reluctant to go after the tribes that were massacring settlers on the frontier. That should sound familiar.

The fact is, there were many revolts, rebellions and insurrections prior to the war for independence, all of which stemmed from the same problem. The people in charge were not safeguarding the interests of the people. Often, they ignored their duty for personal gain. In time, the general population was in revolt spiritually, if not physically taking up arms. The result was inevitable.

This is where we are in America. Every day, more people have that revolution in the mind where they realize that it is the system that created these loathsome creatures who inhabit positions of authority. The system was not captured by them. The solution is to throw the whole thing into the ocean and start fresh. Perhaps in time January 6th will be Culpepper’s Rebellion or the War of the Regulation.

The American revolution was not a singular event. It was the culmination of a process that began generations earlier. The same is true of all revolutions. The events that made this day possible happened over a long period of time. Present day America is somewhere on the timeline, maybe closer to the end than most realize, but still not quite at the revolting stage. Time will tell.

The Story Tellers

Posted on June 30, 2022 by thezman

The war in Ukraine has brought into focus a strange belief among the ruling elites of the West that the world is controlled by narratives. If they can conjure a good story that seems to cover the facts in evidence, then the story is not only true, but it will control reality for the people in it. It is a form of abductive reasoning where they start with observations of varying degrees of plausibility, make sweeping conclusion and then declare war on anyone who raises doubts about them.

Formally, abduction is a form of logical inference. You begin with a set of observations and then look for the most likely conclusion from the observations. It is simply the best available explanation for what is observed. There is the possibility that some less likely or entirely unknown explanation is the correct one. This is where the ruling class logic departs from the formal definition. The explanation deemed most likely becomes an article of faith, often in support of some other belief.

Another difference from the formal definition is that the initial set of observations are never debated or reevaluated. The faith of the ruling class in their own ability to observe and define the world rules out uncertainty about their observations. Since many of the observations are part of this process, reconsidering these observations means questioning the reasoning behind them. More important, it means doubting the reasoner behind them and that is forbidden.

With regards to the war in Ukraine, Western leaders told the politicians that Russia was nothing but a big gas station with large land holdings. They could not sustain a large army in the field for very long. They lacked the capacity to make the ammunition and equipment needed for the war. Her economy was no better than Venezuela, so a boycott would bring it crashing down and before long it would lead to one of those mysterious color revolutions so popular these days.

This set of observations dates back to the post-Cold War days when the Russian economy was recovering from the collapse of communism. To whatever extent they were true at the time, no one has bothered to update them. They have become articles of faith, pillars upon which all relations with Russia are based. Over time, the new set of observations about Putin have been synthesized by the same crowd to fill in the gaps between the prior observations.

This mental framework with regards to Russia and the war in the Ukraine is so brittle and inflexible, it is forced to ignore facts on the ground. This story in a main Western media organ has become a standing head. In the old days of the newspaper business, a standing head was a headline used so often that it was made into a permanent block for the printer. For five months, Western media has been quoting regime experts claiming the Russians are about to run out of supplies.

The first quoted official is illustrative. “There will come a time when the tiny advances Russia is making become unsustainable in light of the costs and they will need a significant pause to regenerate capability.” This is true only within the logical framework of the belief set. The fact that Russia is obliterating the Ukrainian army and seizing large chunks of territory is ignored. The fact that the prior predictions have been false and the Russians show no signs of running out material is also ignored.

The undeniable truth of the war is that the Russians are using an expeditionary force of about 200,000 men from its professional army to systematically annihilate the Ukrainian army, which is larger and dug into fortified positions. This is possible because Russia is not a gas station with land holdings. In fact, it now has a military industrial capacity greater than the West. It can sustain its operations in Ukraine for as long as it takes to destroy the Ukraine and its ability to field an army.

None of this seems to register with the decision makers. This quote from retired Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. forces in Europe who is now with the Center for European Policy Analysis, is illustrative. “I remain very optimistic that Ukraine is going to win.” He then added, “Right now it sucks to be on the receiving end of all this Russian artillery. But my assessment is that things are going to be trending in favor of the Ukrainians in the next few weeks.”

The natural assumption by people in control of their faculties and aware of what is happening in the Ukraine is that these people are lying. Many of them, especially the ISW types, have a well known cultural affinity for lying. This general, and many like him in the decision tree, display no signs of sociopathy. They genuinely believe the narratives that they have played a role in creating. The fantasy world they have made for themselves is now more real than physical reality.

This disconnect between the world the elites imagine they control and the world that exists for everyone else is the crisis in the West. Four months ago, that general should have seen that their plan to bunkerize the Donbas and wait out the Russians was quickly becoming a suicide pact. The Russians are simply standing off and hammering these fortifications with artillery. This reduces their losses to the barest minimum, while it slowly and systematically destroys Ukraine.

That is reality, but for Western elites, this does not exist. Instead, they imagine a world where heroic fighters, who look a lot like them, are defending against an increasingly desperate horde of barbarians from over the horizon. It is the great battle for Middle Earth and the beautiful people are the elves and the Ukrainians are the humans, hobbits and other lower creatures of the world. Meanwhile, Putin is Sauron and his army are those vicious, bloodthirsty orcs.

The war in the Ukraine is but one glaring example. The gap between reality and the narratives created by the ruling class are everywhere. The energy crisis they created is not angry people paying five dollars a gallon for gas. It is the struggle to break free from hydrocarbons and transition to a world powered by fairy dust. Food shortages are just the price to be paid for transitioning to sustainable food created in labs using twigs and bugs so that the woodland creatures may be free.

No matter the problem, they have a story for it. They call these stories “messaging” but they are just stories to comport the bits of reality that interrupt the dream, with the larger narratives that define ruling class reality. This summer we will be awash in messaging in the run up to the election, which now works like an award show for the freaks that populate the political class. The best message wins. The winner then gets to spin some new narratives to please the Cloud People.

The Crisis Of Competence

Posted on June 28, 2022 by thezman

One of the subtexts to the current war in the Ukraine is the fact that the West has been wrong about every aspect of the conflict. None of the predictions about the actual fighting have been correct. Even the propaganda has been hilariously wrong, often making the West look foolish. The economic response, which was supposed to be a fatal blow to Russia, has gone horribly wrong. Europe now faces an unprecedented energy shortage this fall and winter.

The bulk of the blame lies at the feet of the neoconservatives running foreign policy for the Global American Empire. The same cast of characters who were horrifically wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan in the Bush years have managed to turn a regional issue into a global disaster. London and Brussels, along with the provincials occupying legacy positions in national government share blame as well. They enthusiastically went along with a war plan that had no chance to succeed.

The degree of wrongness is a thing of beauty, when you can look at it from a purely objective point of view. Rolling dice, flipping coins or pulling policy ideas out of a hat would have had a better result. One could be forgiven for thinking that maybe this series of errors is somehow deliberate. Maybe that ridiculous bald guy from the World Economic Forum really is a super villain. The masters of the universe are setting the West ablaze so they can build back better.

The question that should be pondered is why has everything gone so terribly long for the collective West? One reason is competence. The Global American Empire is led by a man who barely knows where he is most of the time. In his prime, Joe Biden was known as an affable moron. In his dotage, he is a confused and incompetent old man unable to perform his duties. His handlers give him stage instructions for basic things like where and when to sit.

Biden is the bit of the iceberg we see. There is a whole apparatus around him that was instrumental in getting him into office. The Washington political community thought a dementia patient was better than Trump. That says nothing about Trump and everything about the people who engineered Biden’s ascension. People forget that the Democratic Party had to rig its own primary to get Biden the nomination. They never stopped to think what this would mean after the election.

Of course, this degree of incompetence is made possible by a political culture that is defensive, isolated and insulated. They picked Biden because he was the safest option to get rid of Trump. Biden’s primary appeal to the political class was that he was a vegetable they could move around however they pleased. Biden and his family were simply happy to fill the role and play their part. He also provided the best chance of liberating the city from the scourge of Trump people.

That decision gets to the insularity of the political class, not just in Washington, but across the collective West. These are people without any understanding of the societies over which they rule. When you look at the resumes of these people, the common feature is no experience in the dreaded private sector. Politics has been their life since they were adults. In fact, we have reached a point where private sector experience raises suspicion in the political class.

These are people who simply have no idea how things work. They just take for granted that things work. Like the heirs of a family business, the political class has spent their life in a system without ever having to think about how it came into being. The system of power they command is a permanent feature of life. The only variable is who will have control of the institutions of power. That is politics, the game of verbal chess which picks the winners and losers in the system.

Therein lies the other cause of this unfolding disaster. The West is a collection of people who deal in words exclusively. They have never done anything, other than talk about making other people do things. Nancy Pelosi has been in Washington for eighty years and there is no single physical thing she can point to, other than her ten-thousand-dollar freezer, as a product of her political career. When she is dead, the next wave will wash away her footprints in the sand and she will be forgotten.

On the other side of this fight is a different system, one that is the result of people doing things and rising in the ranks as a consequence. Putin is a man who had to navigate a world where failure meant prison or death. When that world collapsed, he had to navigate a world of chaos. When he gained power, he then had to impose order, often taking on powerful oligarchs backed by Western interests. Putin and his ruling circle are a collection of men who do things, not just talk about things.

Six months ago, the West was prepared to give the Russians a good tongue lashing, cancel her from the internet and de-platform her from the financial system. On the other side, the Russians prepared to fight a war against a well-armed and prepared enemy in Ukraine and a well-armed and prepared West on the world stage. One side was ready for a battle of words while the other side was ready for a battle of actions. It turns out that words count for a lot less than actions.

All civilizations have periods of incompetence. The Russians suffered through the Gorbachev and Yeltsin periods. The difference for the West is that the system has been selecting for bourgeois obsequiousness for a long time. The reason Washington is run by fossils is the next in line is much worse than the geezers. Mitch McConnell knows something about running the party. Kevin McCarthy was selected because no one in power worried that he would be a challenge.

The crisis of the West is that it is now run by a managerial class that was selected for being the teacher’s pet, ticking the right box on a form and making sure to never utter a discouraging word around the boss. It is why presidents have been increasingly ridiculous since the Cold War. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden are all mileposts in the decline of competence. Next up is Kamala Harris, an absurd manifestation of a system that selects against competence.

Thinking About The Possible

Posted on June 22, 2022 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barbarians At The Ballot Box

Posted on June 21, 2022 by thezman

For the longest time, the debate over immigration has been about how both sides can agree on open borders while appearing to disagree. The Left made the spurious claim that America was the result of immigration. If immigration declines, then the country will decline. The Right made the claim that immigrants were natural conservatives and the only way for the Right to compete in the future was to load up on those super-duper conservative immigrants via open borders.

Outside of this immigration two-step, race realist would point out that immigrants tend to support the government party for practical reasons. In the West, the government party is always a few clicks to the left of the people and several giant leaps to the left of its heritage population. In America it means seventy percent of immigrants will vote for the Democrats, regardless of their policies. The cultural inclinations of the immigrants will have no impact on their political activity.

There has always been a cynically pragmatic thread to the immigration debate centered on the crude reality of politics. The Democrats supported open borders because it brought them extra voters to exploit. Their call for more immigration parallels their ballot stuffing measures. Republicans want more immigration because their donors want cheap labor. The “cheap labor lobby” theory relies on the antiquated claim that the business lobby still wears monocles and top hats.

It is starting to look like these claims make sense, but only within the context of a good economy, stable demographics and a pacified white population. In the post-Cold War America, the Democrat-Republican two-step on immigration made a lot of sense for both sides of the dance. Similarly, the observations of the race realists and cynics played out in every election. All of sudden, none of this is making any sense because the logic in which it worked is falling to pieces.

The first bit of logic that is breaking is the economy. When the white middle-class is doing well, they want their government to be generous. The government becomes an extension of their moral sensibility. When the middle-class feels stress, this swings around the other way. Now that the white middle-class is hitting retirement, that swing is looking quite dramatic. There is not going to be a lot of sympathy from a group living on savings when the stock market has lost twenty percent.

There is also another aspect to the changing economy. Airline pilots and engineers are not floating over the Rio Grande. The sort of people coming over the border are not bringing anything of value. There is no shortage of unskilled labor. The real labor crisis in America is in competency. The real struggle for business is in finding people who can do skilled work and will want to do it well. Rather quickly, immigration is no longer an exploitable asset for the open borders lobby.

Another problem for the open borders people is the collapse in institutional trust that accelerated in the last half dozen years. Trump was a warning that the people were losing faith in their institutions. The response by the institutions was to prove the people were correct in their suspicions. Anything the two parties try to sell is assumed to be part of some conspiracy to harm the country. The reaction to the latest gun grabbing by both parties is a perfect example of this new normal.

One other bit of the old structure that has started to crumble. The ruling elite of America, sensing the “browning of America’ have embraced leucophobia. This is a bigotry toward all things white, driven by a fear of being white or acting white. The defining feature of the popular culture the last decade has been a snarling, aggressive war against white people, especially white men. This pogrom was institutionalized in the late Trump years as part of the color revolution against him.

This is turning out to be a poison pill for the antiwhites with regards to the Spanish speaking immigrant population. It is turning out that the conservatives were sort of right about migrants being naturally conservative. They were simply wrong about what they naturally want to conserve. The Hispanic vote does not want to be lumped in with the freak show the Left has assembled and they are not down with the leucophobia that has become a standard feature of American life.

The polling over the last year that has suggested a shift in Hispanic voting is now turning up at the ballot box. Surprisingly, the only Republican to get that this has nothing to do with boiler plate conservatism and everything to do with ruling class degeneracy is Marco Rubio. It turns out that Hispanics are more revolted than white people by the sight of a man in a dress. They are willing to vote Republican because anything is better than a crossdresser.

There is a similar dynamic going on with the color wheel. Hispanics have a much more intimate relationship with blacks in America. They tend to live near them, often taking over their neighborhoods. Hispanics are extremely race realist. The effort to lump them in with blacks, as part of the rainbow coalition is offensive to them. Democrat efforts to make them a stripe on their flag is turning this block into a collection of extremely race realist Archie Bunkers.

Politically this is creating an amusing dynamic. One side is demanding the Hispanics get in the back of the bus with the other BIPOC’s while the other side is screaming at them about the evils of racism. Hispanics are about to learn what white people have been learning the last ten years. That is, they have no voice in politics. Forty percent of the population is white-wing and no one in either party speaks for them. Hispanics are about to join the politically disposed.

None of this should be viewed as good news. The Republicans winning a landslide in the fall elections will only make things worse. Whenever the people vote the wrong way, the ruling elite forces the Republican party to punish them. Then there is the prospect of the government being run by Biden, McConnel and McCarthy. The long simmering Irish question will finally burst into the open. That and having three morons, one with dementia, running things can only lead to disaster.

All that aside, there is a late Roman empire feel to this. The ruling elite, in an effort to conceal their weakness, chooses to settle barbarian tribes rather than fight to keep them at bay. Rather than create a constituency for the ruling elite it just adds to the number not represented in the ruling elite. At some point, the newly settled barbarians and their new neighbors decide that the new group of barbarians are a better play and they throw open the gates.

The End Of Time

Posted on June 20, 2022 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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