Monthly Archives: September 2016

The Great Western Rage Virus

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Greg Cochran has a post up wondering about the explosion of recreational drug use in the West starting in the mid-60’s. He makes the point that drugs were available, in addition to alcohol, for people in the West, but we have little evidence that people used them for fun, despite what libertarians claim. As far back as we have information, Western societies would abuse alcohol, but that was it, as far as recreational drug use. Other substances were limited to medicine if used at all.

The Greeks and Romans had opium, but there’s no record of it being used for anything other than medicine, at least among the public. Move forward and that remains true into the medieval period. There are reports here and there of people using various things for medicine, but there’s no record of smoking hash or opium as a party drug. It was not until the age of exploration and the arrival of the Chinese and opium dens into the West that we get reports of recreational drug use among western people. Even that was very limited.

In the United States, marijuana was available, along with indigenous hallucinogenics, from the earliest days of the colonies. In the 19th century you have references to morphine addicts, but those are rare. Into the 20th century morphine was sold retail, as no one considered it a public health risk. Everyone has heard about the use of cocaine in consumer products like tonics and beverages. Well into the 20th century, drugs like heroin, cocaine, marijuana and some hallucinogenics were available, yet rarely used or abused.

Then something changed in the 1960’s. If you were an American teen in 1960 hanging out with friends, the odds that any of you had smoked pot were extremely low, unless maybe you were black. It does appear that drug taking was associated with black culture, but more on that in a bit. By 1970, the teenager of that same town would know many pot smokers and probably tried it at least once. In fact, within that decade it went from rare to common. By the 70’s, not having smoked pot made you an exception if you were young.

The question is how did this happen? It is not a small change in cultural norms. This is a huge change and it happened faster than anything else that comes to mind. Humans were just as susceptible to the charms of opiates in the 19th century as they are today, presumably. In the first half of the 20th, doctors were quick to prescribe things like cocaine to children to sooth teething. People were given liberal amounts of morphine for pain as it was the only effective pain killer. Even during Prohibition, drug use did not increase, despite the obvious demand to get wasted.

My initial thought, at least in America, is that the explosion of recreational drug use corresponds with the collapse of racial barriers in the US. If you read American fiction from the early 20th century, particularly the 20’s and 30’s, you get some oblique references to smoking pot, associated with Jazz. People up into the 50’s used to call joints “Jazz cigarettes” for that reason. Jazz, of course, was always strongly linked to black culture and strongly linked to whites and blacks mixing socially. This was not just in America. Josephine Baker got world famous in the Paris jazz scene.

The explosion of drug use does appear to correlate with the break down of racial barriers. Opium, for example, was always associated with the Chinese. Cocaine use was strongly associated with blacks going crazy in the South. After Prohibition ended, FDR turned the Prohibition Bureau into the Federal Narcotics Bureau. They immediately began to campaign against things like marijuana, which were linked to anti-social behavior of Mexicans and blacks. Even today, there is a racial component to drug taking. Crack was largely a black problem, while meth is a white problem.

Music followed a similar path out of American black culture into the dominant white culture. Jazz clubs were the first places whites and blacks could mingle socially. Eventually, whites were playing jazz and then rock-and-roll followed the same path.  It’s not just music and weed, but the modern West now gets all of its cultural cues from the American black ghetto. Hip-hop being the latest example. I was in Dublin and I saw Irish kids dressed like extras from Straight Out of Compton.

If we take a step back, the break down of racial barriers corresponds with the breakout of multiculturalism in the West. For half a century, the West has been raging against itself and even raging against biology. Feminism, and the more recent anti-white male stuff, is not just a war against the culture, but also a war against reality. The explosion of drug taking is just one item in the satchel of madness the West picked up somewhere in the middle of the last century.

If you are a fan of Greg Cochran, then you may see where this is headed. The great mixing of people that happened in the first half of the 20th in the great world wars brought masses of common people into contact with their contemporaries from around the world. That’s lots of foreign people breathing on one another, bleeding on one another, fornicating with one another. Just as trade facilitated the Black Plague, the great wars facilitated the movement of all sorts of things around the world.

Hold that thought and think about the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Rodents infected with this parasitic protozoa are drawn to the smell of cat urine, apparently having lost their otherwise natural aversion to the scent. This parasite can only reproduce in the gut of a feline so it is a very useful feature of this parasite, but not so good for the rodent. This parasite also causes trouble for humans, which is why pregnant women are told to avoid cat litter. It is entirely possible that it has other affects on humans. In other words, your cat may be controlling your brain.

Now to tie this all together. Greg Cochran came up with something called the Gay Germ Hypothesis, which suggest that maybe a germ or virus causes homosexuality. Others have suggested that pathogens could be at the root of other conditions as well. What if some sort of pathogen got looses in the West and is at the root of the anti-social behavior? What if there is some benefit to this bug in having humans mix together across the normal ethnic and tribal barriers? What if all the things we are seeing in the West are the result of a germ or virus that got going in the great wars of the 20th century?

The Death of Official Conservatism™

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Over the last year or so, corresponding with the rise of Donald Trump to the nomination of the Republican Party, there has been a lot of talk about what is the alt-right and what it means. This also corresponds with the term itself, alt-right, being transformed from the narrow white nationalism stuff of Richard Spencer, to a catch-all term for the growing number of people criticizing the orthodoxy from the Right. In fact, this thing they call the alt-right is no longer much about race and much more about culture, Western Culture.

Another way to think of it is to imagine a town with two social clubs, organized for the same purpose, but they disagree over the goals and how to go about it. Over time, one club has fallen into quarreling and regularly kicked out its best members. Many just quit out of frustration. The result is there are more that agree about what is wrong with the clubs than are in still the clubs. The reason the dissenters have a name is the people still doing the old social club racket gave the dissenters a name they thought was insulting.

Steve Sailer has a fun way of looking at it in his Taki column, comparing the alt-right to punk rock. That’s a good way of looking at, but within that column he quotes himself from the olden thymes, where he pointed out that jazz lost its audience because it became elitist and esoteric. That’s a good way of thinking about what is happening to Official Conservatism™ today. The people scribbling and thinking for the orthodoxy have become elitist and detached, consumed by esoteric hair splitting and purity tests.

A good example of this can be seen in this piece on National Review regarding Ann Coulter’s appearance on a Comedy Central roast of actor Rob Lowe. According to the news reports, it was a setup so the beta male comics could feel butch by calling Coulter a “cunt” over and over. A normal man would wonder why such a thing was permitted to happen, but not Christian Schneider. He is only concerned about the image of Official Conservatism™ as he thinks Coulter being pilloried makes his weird little identity cult look bad.

That’s Official Conservatism™. It is a bunch of men standing aside as men from the Left assault whomever happens to be to their Right. It is a movement that never moves. It remains relatively stationary, fixed to a spot just to the Right of the Progressives. When they are not refining the narrow differences they have with the Left, they are expanding the list of people to their Right that are no longer welcome in the club. Official Conservatism™ holds its audience in contempt, preferring to focus on itself and its peculiar aesthetic.

Sailer’s jazz reference works at another level. In the first half of the 20th century, jazz was the most popular form of music because it was fun and functioned as the soundtrack for the young and rebellious. By the time rock and roll came along, jazz was no longer fun. The kids looked at it as the music of their parent’s generation. That’s what’s happening with Official Conservatism™ now that the internet has opened the field to all sorts of new voices and ideas. Much of it may be crap or crazy, but it’s fun and rebellious.

There’s more to it, of course, but being new and fun is the energy that is making the alt-right work right now. The bigger issue is the fact that Buckley Conservatism has nothing to offer. An ideology that leads men to stand aside while thugs from the Left assault the institutions of society is not much use to people, who would like to preserve their culture. It’s hard to be inspired my a movement that thinks it is OK for men to call a woman a “cunt” on TV, just as long as it does not reflect poorly on their movement. Why would anyone sign up for that?

It’s why the threats from the geezers about purging the alt-right from Official Conservatism™ are met with roars of laughter and funny memes on twitter. If you are a young guy that thinks Progressivism is a cancer, what has Jonah Goldberg ever done for you? What has Hugh Hewitt ever done, beside collect a paycheck and lecture you to be quiet? The answer is nothing. When the bully boys of the Left come to put a beating on you, these two will be penning articles about how you tarnished the brand.

Skepticism, about attempts to define the alt-right, is wise as the people doing it have an agenda. Some are hoping to elevate their status as media personalities, while others are just hoping to tar members of the establishment, by associating them with something scary. The reality is it is just a new label for what Nick Land called the Dark Enlightenment. I’ve always found this map to be useful in understanding the wild and crazy world of alternative media on the internet. As you can see, there is a lot of overlap, but a great diversity in starting points.

The Right has always been a perspective from a number of starting points rooted in the human condition, biological reality. It has never been a fixed ideology and that is why Official Conservatism™ is dying off now. It was a long attempt to build a fence around the free range of thinking, to set borders and apply rules within it. It is why the Buckleyites look increasing like the Progressives they claim to oppose. In the end, ideologues all come to agree on the same thing – control.

Eric Hoffer said, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Official Conservatism™ is well into the racket stage. The adherents, if they even believe in anything other than personal enrichment, defend the cause solely because it is where the money is at the movement. They are ideological Willie Suttons. They are “conservatives” because right now that’s where they can make money. When the time comes, they will move on to something else.

The Low-Trust State

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Social trust is one of those things that we know is important to economic growth, sound government and social stability. When the people of a society generally trust one another and wish to be trusted by others, their society prospers. The question that always arises is over causality. Some would argue that altruism is a biological trait that scales up to social trust. Others would argue that good government and the rule of law encourages positive economic growth, which in turn increases social trust. It is one of those topics that keeps academics busy.

The distinguishing characteristic of low-trust societies is a near total lack of trust in the state by the people. Russians, during the old Soviet Union, understood that everything that was said by the state was a lie of some sort. In fact, the only thing they could trust from the Bolsheviks was that whatever they said was untrue. This amplified the natural distrust of Russians as they did not have an authority to which they could appeal in order to arbitrate disputes. Contracts have to be enforceable before anyone will enter into them.

The point here is that you can debate the causality of social trust, but a society with a corrupt and untrustworthy state is going to be a low-trust society. Alternatively, to use the language of the pseudo-sciences, social trust correlates with public corruption. The causal arrows may point one way or both ways, but public corruption is a good proxy for social trust. There are measures of public corruption and the most popular is from these guys, who publish downloadable statistics every year for the pseudo-sciences.

Trust in the state is always going to drift over time, but you can spot some trends. Just take a look at the US over the last few decades. In the 1980’s, the savings and loan crisis put a lot of people in prison. Even some politicians got dinged for getting too cozy with the crooked bankers. A decade later we had the dot-com bubble and the accounting scandals, but no one went to jail. They just lost money. Less than a decade later we had the mortgage crisis and the crooks got bailed out by the government with taxpayer funds. This is a trend worth noticing.

Now, look around at what we are seeing today. The Clinton e-mail scandal is so outlandish, it is now threatening the rule of law. In the 70’s, Nixon was run from office from 18 missing minutes of tape. Clinton erased 17,000 emails, some may have been under subpoena. It is blazingly obvious that she and her cronies violated Federal law by mishandling classified information. The most logical explanation for all of this is they were selling it for cash through that ridiculous charity they run. A charity that has systematically violated the law with regards to accounting for donations.

How is it possible that this woman and her flunkies are not in jumpsuits waddling around Danbury FCI?

The first problem is the head of state appears to be a pathological liar. This Iran story is the sort of thing that used to bring down governments. It was certainly the sort of thing that should have administration officials hiring lawyers in preparation for the FBI visit. That would require an FBI that is not equally corrupt. Of course, the FBI is a product of the political class and ours is proving to be astonishingly corrupt. Today we learn that the politicians are conspiring to rig public hearings, which are the bedrock of popular government.

A certain amount of public corruption is to be expected. Politics will always attract shady characters, but it should also attract honest characters too. These are the folks that enjoy the boring work of good government. They police the system, enforce the rules and make public appeals for cleaning up the problems. Today, those people either do not exist or they have become too afraid to speak up. The American political class looks a lot like a corrupt police precinct. The crooks are in charge and they have inverted morality so that the honest fear detection by the corrupt.

It is not unreasonable to think that we may have passed the point where the political class can be expected to reform itself. Their unwillingness to even try to thwart the rise of these vulgar grifters from the Ozarks suggests the the political elite has lost the capacity to feel shame. Anyone willing to defend Hillary Clinton to the public is someone, who will lie about anything, violate any law, violate any taboo. That is a person lacking in anything resembling a soul. A political class populated with such people is a ruling class at war with itself, the very definition of a low trust state.

The truly frightening thing is that the only institution the public trusts is the military. Take a look at what is happening with the sports ball players protesting during the national anthem. This coming Sunday is 9/11 and even the most reptilian of Progressives are saying such a protest on that day would be a slap in the face to the men and women who serve the country. When no one trusts the ruling class, and the military is the only institution in which the public has faith, there is always one result. It does not have to be that way, but that’s the way it has always been.

At some level, some portion of the public understands this. The Trump phenomenon is not about Trump in the conventional sense. There’s a lot not to like about the man, but he is honest, he loves his countrymen and he is not doing this for the money. Whether or not he understands his role and the movement he is leading is unknown. Maybe his election will just be a false dawn and what follows is what always follows the onset of a low-trust state. If things are going to turn out different for us, Trump will win and usher in an era of reform.

Otherwise, what comes next will be much worse.

Travelogue: Dubliners

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On the plane ride into Dublin, I sat next to an older man, who was from Kilkenny. He consumed half of the flight boasting about his hometown and his country. The Irish are very proud of being Irish and they are not ashamed to boast about it. People with a strong culture are prone to this and I find it appealing. He was coming back early so he could watch his hurling team in a big match. This allowed him to tell me that the national game of Ireland was the greatest thing in the world. I feel the same way about baseball so I could relate.

The other half of the flight, the back half, he spent asking me about American politics. I got the impression that he wanted to talk politics from the first moment he saw that I was an American. The glories of Ireland stuff was just to butter me up. Of course, he wanted to know about Trump. My assumption was that he thought Trump was terrible, but he was going to be polite until I revealed my allegiances. There was an Ivy Day in the Committee Room quality to our conversation, when another person joined in the discussion of Trump.

The Irish love their politics and I got the sense they were mystified by Trump or maybe mystified as to why Americans are considering him. Alternatively, they may simply have been wondering why a country as big as America is unable to find better options. That’s not an unreasonable question, but there is no answer. Every country can ask the same of their political leaders, so size has nothing to with it. For some reason, politics attracts the sort of people no sensible people should ever want involved in politics. It’s a paradox.

My response when asked why Trump might win was , “Because what comes next would be much worse.” At first I assumed this would elicit questions, but people seemed to understand. Perhaps they were simply being polite, but I came away from every political discussion with the impression that the Irish are fully aware of the dangers that loom just over the horizon. Something has gone wrong and no one knows exactly how to make it right. Tossing out the people currently in charge is simply the option available.

The puzzle they left me was that they never once spoke of Hillary Clinton. They both agreed that Trump was a typical American, by that they meant big and boisterous, as well as a bit silly by their reckoning. Even so, Hillary Clinton has been in politics for almost three decades now. Her husband was president and made a big show of coming to Ireland and pretending he was Irish. I would have expected them to be pro-Clinton and dismissive of Trump. Instead, all they cared about was how a TV guy could become President.

I chewed on that mystery a bit as I walked around the city. Dublin is an old city that does not like being old. All over the city you see efforts to show that Dublin is a modern, hip city, equal to any of the hipster cities around the world. The young people are fully engaged with their phones and seem to be divorced from their past and the past of the city. All over people were quick to tell me that Dublin had the latest of whatever I was inquiring about at the moment. Maybe the locals simply get tired of stupid Americans asking them where the Shire is located.

The the thing about Dublin that will stick with me is the whiteness of the place. There were about 25 thousand Americans in the city for the college football game. In the pubs, you could hear them marveling at the whiteness of Dublin. In America, cities are very diverse and some are dangerously diverse. Portland Oregon is the whitest city in America at about 65%. Dublin is probably 95% white as their immigrants are mostly from eastern Europe. The only blacks I saw were tourists from America.

That is, of course, why you don’t see the police presence you see in other cities. I was at a pub and noticed that the street was packed with young drunk people, but I could not see any cops. As a cab driver told me, if you want trouble you can did it in Dublin, but you have to look for it. In more diverse cities, trouble is always on the prowl so the cops have to be out showing the colors in an effort to keep the peace. I would be lying if I said I thought for a minute that Dublin needed more diversity. It manages to get along just fine without it.

The funny thing I noticed in Ireland was how the city had turned itself into a tourist trap. By that I mean everyone is hooked into Ireland Inc., a community enterprise to sell everything Ireland in an effort to boost tourism. I saw this in Iceland too. I was told by a cabby that after the bust, they figured it was the best way to make money, so the local economy converted quickly to tourism. In fact, the cab drivers were all hilariously over the top in their tourism pitch. Everyone of them I encountered sounded like he was working for the department of tourism. Perhaps they had all been real estate agents.

One of those cab drivers said a funny thing to me. He was pointing out a section that caters to students, when he said it is the one thing he dislikes about driving a taxi. He has to witness the debauchery of the young. “It’s as if they have no respect for themselves, particularly the men. They treat women like whores. How could they ever marry one of them?” Every city, every country, is a city of the dead. We live in the shadows of those who came before us. What spurs on progress is the desire to get out of those shadows and make our lives our own. It’s not without its consequences though, as often the past is where the future lies.

My taxi driver was one of 14 kids. His best friend was one of 18 and his father had a second wife with whom he produced a handful of kids. The taxi driver, a man in his fifties, had four children, but his kids were childless. The Irish fertility rate remains the highest in Europe, but it stands at 2.02. The average age of new mothers is close to 30. The young, those in their 20’s, are not getting married and that is of concern. When you tease out the births to immigrants, the Irish youth seem to be following the same path as the rest of Europe.

A people without children is a nation of dead people, soon to be a forgotten people. It is not a guarantee with the Irish and perhaps the debauchery of their youth is just a temporary phase, but I wonder if I had not just visited a museum without realizing it. Joyce supposedly said Irish history is a nightmare from which they never wake up. That’s no longer the case as Ireland is prosperous and free of the sectarian violence that came to define them for close to a century. Even so, they may have woke from their nightmare to find the future does not include them.

Travelogue: Diversity

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Iceland is a barren moonscape created by tectonic plates rubbing against one another on something called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The result is a beauty you see nowhere else, but it also means not much can be grown on the island. The natives have to deal with a limited food supply from the ocean, thus developed a form of cannibalism in which the dead are processed into a product called Skyr. I’m kidding about that, of course. There are no cannibals on Iceland, but food is expensive and lacking in the sort of diversity we are used to seeing in the West.

The consequence of this is the range of desirable flavors in their food is very narrow. I was given a ham and cheese sandwich and surprised to learn how they eat them. Warm without any adornments or condiments. In the States, you would have more “other stuff” on the thing than the main ingredients. Most people would also have mustard or maybe mayonnaise as a condiment. Chatting with a couple of local women, they told me Icelanders think Americans make weird food that tastes funny.

That’s nature at work. Iceland was populated by Nordic males, who brought Celtic women with them. Recent DNA analysis suggests that around 66 percent of the male settler-era population was of Norse ancestry. The female population was 60 percent Celtic. They arrived, we think, in the year 874 AD, so this population landed on the island very recent. Inevitably some strong selection pressure was at work. You had to be within a small group, who would want to give it a go on Iceland. You had to have a certain constitution to thrive there.

Icelandic women are notoriously beautiful and that’s true, assuming you are a male from west of the Hajnal line. I could be wrong about that, but that’s my guess. The women are tall and thin with angular faces. You don’t see many fat women in Iceland, but that may be due to the cost of food. The other thing is the women do not wear much makeup, but when they do it, it is to accentuate their eyes. There is a great diversity of eye color with most being a shade of blue, but brown and green are common too.

I found myself staring at their eyes, registering the different colors and patterns. This was true in Ireland, but not so obvious. Many Irish women have let themselves go so they are not, on average, as beautiful as the Icelandic women. The Irish say the Icelandic settlers carried away the most beautiful Irish women. That’s a fun legend and probably a little true, but the numbers involved make that a bit implausible. What has ruined Irish women is alcohol and excess calories, but that’s true all over the West.

Diversity of eye color is a European thing. Africans and Asians lack this diversity and it is a good question for science to ponder. Humans evolved to be social animals and a big part of that starts with the eyes. There are something like 200 species of monkeys and apes with humans the only one with a visible sclera. That’s the white of our eye. In humans, it makes our eyes a signal. From any angle, we can perceive the thoughts, to some degree, of another humans. We can see where another is staring and infer something of what they are thinking.

This feature did not evolve for no reason and it is assumed to be a part of how we evolved as a social animal. Further, the diversity of eye color, as well, as hair color and texture, in European populations, is not an accident. If it had no value, it would not have happened. Clearly, diversity of hair color, hair texture, eye color and the features around the eyes began to have a reproductive advantage at some point. A purely social feature like eye color that is so strikingly different in Europeans, than anywhere else, suggests that European sociality may have evolved down a different path as well.

It is an example of what you hear from the more sophisticated in the HBD community. Early man in Europe was faced with much more difficult challenges than in Africa. As a result, males would have been at higher risk of death when hunting and traveling. When the sex ratio ceases to be balanced, when too many of one sex are competing for too few of the other, sexual selection intensifies. So a surfeit of females, relative to the male population, could have resulted in the diversity of eye and hair color, as women competed for the attention of males.

Put another way, environmental pressure changed the people, but then the people changed their environment, that is, their culture. Diversity of eye color, for example, resulted from nature killing off more males than females. That preference for diversity by mates would ripple through the population. People got better at being around people that did not look like them and better at having kids that did not look like them. Nature changes people, people change their culture and then the culture magnifies or mitigates the forces of nature.

It is what makes the Diversity™ rackets so craven and shallow. People are more than their skin, but that’s not what the grifters and charlatans would have us believe. According to the prevailing orthodoxy, people are all the same with pointless physical differences. Such thinking is anti-science and anti-human. It has been a long and complicated road for humans. No all of us went down the same roads or faced the same complications. Appreciating that is truly appreciating diversity.

Travelogue: Open Borders

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Whenever an American is required to go out into the provinces, he is inevitably forced to hear some harangues from the locals about the doings in the Empire. Europeans believe themselves to be worldly sophisticates and they invest a lot of effort into maintaining that delusion. At this point in history, it may be the only thing Europeans are good at doing. They really are a bunch of ridiculous posers and they are so endlessly smug about it. This suggests it is a studied and cultivated habit, not just a weird quirk.

In Iceland, I was subjected to a long boring lecture by an Icelandic woman over the wonderfulness of open borders. She was unaware that I am a FOP (Friend of Pepe) so she was operating under the impression I was sympathetic. It was hard to keep a straight face, given that Iceland is a rocky island in the North Sea. Even if they welcome the world, the world will not be moving to a barren moonscape that is cold in the dead of summer.

Open borders is a strange religion with many in Europe. The news is a pretty much just a non-stop celebration of open borders. They talk about it with such reverence, you could be mistaken for thinking “open borders” is the new name for God. Today the news is celebrating the first anniversary of Alan Kurdi, the hoax perpetrated by the Western media to help sway public sympathy for allowing in a billion Muslims. The news, of course, still maintains it was a real story, which is like watching people talk seriously about Big Foot.

On SkyNews they had one of the typical panel discussion things that American news channels like so much. It was, of course, a multi-culti festival of virtue signaling. All of them had on their serious face as they competed for the title of most pompously pious on the subject of migration. One of the people was a middle-aged honky with the title “comedian” which was the only thing funny about him. The others were brown women representing both diversity and girl power

The moderator, to his credit, brought up the fact that most people just saw it as virtue signaling. The unfunny comic looked as if he was about to have a stroke. If he did fall over, it would probably have been the only time he had made anyone laugh. The African woman next to him then explained that she did not understand the phrase virtue signaling, so she went into a speech about her virtue.

The backdrop to much of this is Brexit. In the run-up to the Brexit vote, the remain side was at great pains to show the issue was about economics. Now that they lost, they are sure it was about xenophobia and racism. They carry on like Brexit is going to return the world to the Dark Ages. One of the Girl Power! Trio on the set went on a rant about how awful it was going to have to show her passport when traveling to Europe. She made it sound like customs was the showers at Auschwitz.

In a conversation with an Irishman and another Icelander at breakfast, I was told that nationalism was the worst thing since the other worst thing and that open borders has made the peace in Europe. The absurdity of this was amusing for a bit as the two of them competed with one another as to who was the most ridiculous person in the room. Finally, I had enough and reminded them that Europe was at peace because the US kept the peace.

That went over like a Hitler salute and the reason is many Europeans have come to define themselves by their relationship to America and Americans, or at least what they imagine to be America and Americans. The median age in Europe is 38 so few living Europeans have known anything other than life in the American Empire. As a result, the culture has changed to reflect this reality. Dependence eventually creates a dependency culture and that’s the culture of Europe today.

Talking Monkeys in the Robot Future

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By the time this is posted I will be with the bog monkey somewhere in Ireland, mesmerizing them with tales of indoor plumbing and a diverse diet. Since there is some chance I may be tricked into having an adult beverage or two and thus be rendered unable to post, the following has been pre-recorded.

–Z

A favorite theme here is the consequences of the post-scarcity world. For as long as modern humans have been modern humans, people organized to mitigate against the consequences of scarcity. Hunter-gatherer societies worked out systems of cooperation so they could hunt, protect their women, defend territory, rear children and so forth. It is largely assumed that human settlement was a cooperative effort in response to scarcity. People figured out that they could work together in larger and larger groups to increase and stabilize their food supply.

All of that is speculative, but we know there has never been a time when there was plenty of food, shelter, safety and access to women. The story of history is, in part, the competition for resources. It’s not that there was never enough in aggregate, although that has been the norm. There have been societies with plenty, but the distribution of the plenty has never been equal so there were plenty without plenty. This observation is how we got communism and roughly a 100 million dead trying to make it otherwise.

The West is well into a post-scarcity world. In America, our poor people are fat because we provide everyone unlimited calories. Even the poorest of the poor get government money so they can buy massive amounts of calories. You can argue that a ten pound bag of frozen chicken nuggets is unhealthy, but you can’t deny they possess loads of calories. Go into any ghetto grocery store and you see the locals filling carriages with mounds of processed food that provide vastly more calories than they need, but it beats the alternatives.

All of this is familiar ground if you read blogs like this one. We no longer have poor people in the way in which we think of poverty. There is another angle to this that does not get much attention. The robot revolution is not just going to give us even more plenty with less human labor. The robot revolution will also strip away many of the positional goods. Robot cars, assuming it happens, turns the car into a public utility. Most likely robot cars will require banning human drivers so there will be no reason to own a swank ride to impress the neighbors.

It does not stop there. Putting the slack-jawed yokels out of work by automating the widget plant still leaves Cletus and Junior at the bottom of the social order. Instead of working, they will be provided a stipend so they can sit around all day playing games and taking drugs. When the plant managers and accountants are sent home with the stipend because robots took their jobs, something else happens. Suddenly, the old rules of status fall apart. Vast parts of the professional classes can be eliminated with automation, according the futurists.

Frankly, this is the one area where automation is most likely to have an impact. Automating manufacturing has been going on for decades and we could be bumping up against the point of diminishing returns. Automating office work is another matter. Lots of that can be automated. The law is a great example. We could automate a lot of it know, but the profession has always been slow at adopting technology. That’s changing and we’ll see whole areas of the law turned over to software in the next decade

If you hate lawyers or office workers, this may sound great, but there’s another side to this. Humans are hierarchical. Take fifty people at random and put them on an island and before much of anything gets done, they will begin to arrange themselves hierarchically. The males will compete with one another in some way to establish dominance. By the time they figure out how to get fresh water and build a fire, someone will be in charge and he will have lieutenants. That’s right, it will be a male in charge. That’s how it works.

In the modern world. The social order is determined by one’s choice of work. Doctors have a higher status than garbage men or college professors. They may not make more money than the garbage man, but they have higher status. Usually though, status and income correlate closely so we know the guy in the high status job because he has the Mercedes and lives on the hill. The low status guy has a jalopy and lives in a rundown part of town. This is how we assess one another and ourselves. It is as much a part of our nature as left handedness.

How this works in the robot future is not easy to figure. Right now about 63% of adult Americans are in the workforce in some way. This includes part-time work. That sounds good, but it is around an historic low and all the data suggests it is going lower over time. Obviously, the robot future promises to throw just about everyone out of work in time so defining social status by work is going to become less useful. In fact, the people still working will begin to envy the vast majority sitting around, taking drugs and watching television. The Marching Morons is funny, but unrealistic.

We’re probably seeing the beginnings of a replacement status system in the managerial class. They covet credentials to the point of absurdity. More than a few times I have run across someone with what appears to be an eye chart under their name. It is the list of credentials they display so others can assess their position in the hierarchy. In the robot future, humans will have all the same stuff, but they will compete for meaningless credentials so they can decorate their chests with ribbons and medals. The robots in charge of the robot future will pretend the guys kitted out like third world dictators are in charge, based on their chest full of medals.