The Kulak Solution

Posted on November 30, 2020 by thezman

Note: There is a new post up on Taki about the emerging gyno-fascism and I have a new post behind the green door about what escapism is like in Wokanda.

One consequence of the Trump victory in 2016 was that many people were reassured that reform was still possible. Trump was an imperfect vessel for a reform movement, but he was just the guy to shake things up. He would be both a warning to the establishment and a catalyst for reform. The last four years proved that to be a false dawn, but people had hope for the 2020 election. The rigged election has probably put that idea to bed for most white people.

The question now is where do we go from here? If the Republican Party is a waste of energy and the Democrats are now the anti-white party, conventional politics looks like a pointless exercise. One way out of that is to either create a new party that transcends the GOP as the opposition or infiltrate the Republican party. The former solution is the dreaded third-party route and the latter is the “reform within” approach. Chris Roberts at American Renaissance points out that neither is a new idea.

Taking over the GOP has proven to be impossible for the same reason reforming Washington has proven to be impossible. If you have a leadership that is so corrupt it needs reform forced upon them, you have a leadership that is so corrupt they will find a way to thwart reform. It’s like forcing a lion to be vegan. It is so against its nature that it will just eat the keeper, rather than accept fake food. This has been the case for the Republican Party going back to Pat Buchanan.

The third-party route has the same problem. The system has been designed to prevent outside challenges. Both establishment parties take turns playing the loyal opposition, so that discontent with official policy is funneled into one side or the other. That way the discontent is recycled as fuel for the establishment. Generations of conditioning have made white people hostile to third parties. Even if a third party were to succeed, they would face what Trump faced as a reformer in Washington.

Roberts suggests a third option in which people focus on narrow interests and press those interests within the system. He points to various pressure groups that have had varying degrees of success. The NRA has probably been the most successful of the groups named, because it has influence within both parties. In this model, whites can press issues like immigration or economic reform in a bipartisan way, rather than hoping to make these platforms in one political party.

This approach could be described as the Kulak option. The Kulaks were peasants at the end of the Russian Empire who owned their own land. As the revolution rolled on, the term came to mean property holder, especially those who were hesitant to support the Bolsheviks, but were also unwilling to side with the peasants. The kulaks would chastise the peasants for not supporting the revolution, but they were never completely onboard with giving up their land in service of the revolution.

In this age, the Kulaks are those who view politics merely as a way to protect their diminishing economic and social status. These are people in the upper middle-class, economically and culturally. That last bit is vital to understanding the most bourgeois class in modern America. Flattery is the mother’s milk of this group. No people need to be told they are a good boy, a very good boy more than the white professional class. It is why they recoiled at Trump’s lower-class aesthetics.

These people are willing to embrace half measures in the same way the Kulaks were willing to meet the Bolsheviks halfway. It’s not that they hate white people or the cause of white people. It’s that they think it is icky to be seen on the same stage as people who shop at Walmart. This is the group that first fell for using grimy canvas sacks to tote their groceries and now wear their mask while driving their foreign sedan. For them, moderation in politics is a moral signifier.

This is where single issue politics comes into play. Some of these people can get behind immigration reform, not for racial reasons but for fairness reasons. It is unfair to current immigrants to leave the spigot open. They can back tough trade policy, because globalism is bad for minorities. Many of these people supported Trump as a social statement, but abandoned him in 2020 as a social statement. Like the Kulaks, they could not fully support the forces of change.

What this means is the people with the money to fund a reform movement will always want a firm hand on the leash. This is why the Republican Party is never willing to press their advantage or follow through with their promises. The people who they rely upon for funding resist anything that puts their interests at risk, but mostly they resist anything that offends their elevated sense of self. As a result, their politics are ceremonial. It is about where you stand on the stage, rather than what you do on it.

Of course, the dissident project is about bringing people over the great divide and part of that journey is the realization that dissidents are the radicals now. The people calling themselves radicals are just deluded tools of the establishment. Antifa and BLM should have corporate sponsors on their outfits like sports teams. The real radicals are those standing outside the prevailing moral and civic orthodoxy, questioning the very basics of the liberal democratic project.

Like those old Bolsheviks, who courted support from the Kulaks, and their urban analogs the intellects, dissidents need to appeal to upper middle-class whites in order to advance the cause. Because this group responds primarily to symbolism and moral signifiers, the appeal can and must be superficial. It is a means to an end. They want to be part of something that promises change, but never threatens their position. In time, they will be forced to choose or the choice will be made for them.

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The Rise of Gyno-Fascism

Posted on November 30, 2020 by thezman

A dozen years ago, the neoconservative gadfly Jonah Goldberg wrote a book titled Liberal Fascism, in which he argued that it was the American left that had the love affair with fascism, rather than the right. Like everything that comes from neoconservatism, his tract was actually a left-wing polemic dressed up as a right-wing critique of the left, but it made a useful point.

That is, the American left has always been rhetorically opposed to fascism, hysterically so at times, but there has always been a great deal of overlap between Progressivism and fascism. The fascists a century ago borrowed from the American left. Over the past century, the American left has returned the favor. As a result, Progressivism has evolved into a strange hybrid form of fascism.

Of course, this does not mean that Progressives will be sporting arm bands and khaki outfits anytime soon. That cartoonish version of fascism that has been a staple of American pop culture for generations is not making a comeback. Even putting aside the absurd characterizations, early-20th-century fascism was a product of the industrial age and has no place in post-industrial, technological societies.

Instead, what we are seeing in America is a highly feminized, mutant form of fascism that is unconcerned with the practical aspects of governance and instead obsesses over the aesthetic and moral aspects or rule….Continue Reading

Emerging Lunacy

Posted on November 27, 2020 by thezman

Emergent behavior is one of those things that people struggle to grasp, because it seems to violate the expected cause and effect relationship. Most people operate on the assumption that whatever we are seeing is caused by something that can also be seen or at least described. Of course, most people like to think there is some human actor behind everything, operating from the normal human motivations. It is always tempting to reduce things to the personal as it is relatable.

There are lots of examples in nature of emergent behavior. Cross-breeding of plants can result in a characteristic that does not exist in the two plants that have been crossbred by a curious gardener. Domestic animal breeders, from time to time, will bump into this. The Ocicat is a great example crossbreeding two animals and getting a result that has qualities not present in the parents. Insects colonies are a great example of emergent behavior.

Something similar can happen with human behavior. Put the right group of people in the right situation and you get behavior that seems to spring from nowhere. Some historians have argued this is what happened in Germany in the period after the Great War when the Nazi rose to power. The panic over witches and witchcraft in early New England is another cited example. All of a sudden, people began to act in ways that were not typical of their past behavior.

This is, in part, what we are experiencing today. The people in charge have unleashed forces they do not understand for short term gain. The massive wave of irregularities in the election are one result. The bizarre, superstitious behavior of the Covidians is another manifestation. These people have been swept up in a frenzy and have become untethered from the normal restraints. “Through any means necessary” has become a rallying cry for direct action against the imagined enemy.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Me Talking A Lot
57:00: Closing

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/m5qCJJeT3_Y

Happy Thanksgiving

Posted on November 26, 2020 by thezman

Dissident Thanksgiving

Posted on November 25, 2020 by thezman

Thanksgiving is considered the most American of holidays, as it is nothing like the typical holiday celebrated in the West. It has rather specific origins located in the founding of the country. Those origins are complete nonsense, of course, but that’s often the case with cultural traditions. Even so, since Lincoln imposed the holiday on the conquered nations of America, Thanksgiving has been the quintessential American holiday and probably most people’s favorite time of year.

The origins of the holiday may be nonsense and the reason we have it may be less than noble, but a time to count your blessings is a good thing. It is made more important in an age in which the ruling class is trying hard to destroy the social capital that is an essential part of human society. When everything is transactional and artificial, having a few days in which you are supposed to think the exact opposite looks a lot like leaving the back door of the Death Star open.

That may be especially true this year. According to current polling, more than half of American adults think the recent election was rigged. No one has asked, but there is a good bet that most of those people think the mass media, Wall Street and Silicon Valley were in on the caper. In other words, most adults right now have lost trust in the controlling institutions of our society. A holiday in which we are encouraged to think about what really matters could not come at a better time.

Of course, this year has seen our rulers go mad with power and inflict all sorts of indignities upon us. There are the absurd lock downs and costume requirements related to the Covid panic. In the states where the tyrants have arbitrarily banned the sale of alcohol and installed snitch lines for people to rat out their neighbors for enjoying themselves, this will be a special time of year. A few days to think about all of this is just what the doctor ordered.

For those in areas where the Left’s street thugs have been running wild for most of the year, something similar is at work. The point of civilized society is to provide leisure time, when you can enjoy the simple pleasures with those you love. That is a sharp contrast to what the wreckers who bankroll the street mobs think. Over turkey tomorrow, a lot of people are going to think about what those oligarchs are really trying to take from us with their street thugs and gangsters.

Most important, of course, those engaged in the fight against the gathering darkness will be fortified by a few days of good food, good friends and time with family. While the forces of darkness are driven by avatars of the promised land and envy at what they can never attain, the dissident it driven by the thoughts of home, community and the daily struggle to make those things possible. For the dissident right, this is the best holiday of the year, even more so in the current crisis.

The challenge, of course, will be the spiteful mutants who will try to wreck the good times with their politics. The wine aunt who wants to gloat about the election, the unstable uncle who thinks Hitler is hiding under his bed and the young person whose mind has been poisoned by the system will all think this is their time to be the wrecker they imagine themselves to be. Dissidents everywhere will have to find a way to deal with these people, but this is the nature of the struggle.

Probably the most important thing to take away from this year, the thing to contemplate over the next few days, is the fact that we are on the cusp of a new age. Those promises from the ruling class puppets, like the Pretender Biden, to “build back better” should not worry anyone, as these people are parasites. They are wreckers, unwittingly clearing a path for what comes next. Someone will build back better, but it comes after the reckoning that awaits every radical wrecker.

It may feel like a small consolation, but Thanksgiving has always been about looking forward, as much as looking back. You take the time to count your blessings and enjoy what you have, family, friends, your health and so on, but it is also about giving thanks for being in the great struggle of life. Whether it is carving a new society out of the wilderness or preserving the seeds of civilization in the great storms of the present, Thanksgiving is mostly about the promise of better days.

That is the thing that should keep the dissident going. The rage the other side has for what is good in life is rooted, to a great degree, in their fear of tomorrow. They know they are “always exposed to sudden unexpected destruction. As he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall, he cannot foresee one moment whether he shall stand or fall the next.” This is the source of their rage. They know they stand upon the slippery stones of radicalism, while we stand on the firm ground of truth.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

The Cynical Phase

Posted on November 24, 2020 by thezman

Note: I have a new post up behind the green door on the move Mr. Jones, which I recommend to those mulling over the current age. Learning about the realities of Soviet communism is a good palliative to those prone to optimism.

The Soviet Union, like all radical experiments, went through several phases in its roughly three generations of existence. The first phase, of course, was the revolution, in which the old order was toppled and a battle ensued to fill the void. This initial phase of revolution is always the one that attracts the most attention. This is when the great heroes of the revolution and the great villains of it are made. It is in this phase we get both Lenin and Stalin, hero and villain.

There is a phase that gets little attention and that is when the people come to terms with the irrationality of the world that has been created for them. One reason Stalin was able to send so many to their deaths or to labor camps is so many people kept thinking there was some rationality to the world being created. Some remained idealistic believers in the cause, while others became critics of the cause. They assumed the revolution would bring clarity and rationality when it brought only the opposite

In time, the people came to terms with this. The humor of the Soviet Union reflected the fact that one got along by accepting the irrational in the same way you accept that the grass is green or the sky is blue. You don’t think about it. The jokes were often about these daily contradictions and how the unfortunate were those who did not get the joke that was at the heart of those contradictions. In other words, the joke was always on the fool who was not cynical enough to anticipate the lie.

This is relevant in our current age as we may be past the revolutionary stage and into that time when the people adjust to the irrational. The legacy conservative media keeps pounding the drum about how “we’re lurching into socialism” when we have been a socialist society for generations now. There is no aspect of our economic life outside the grip of the now semi-permanent ruling class. Telling people otherwise is just part of the way the ruling class controls the population.

Of course, this reality is dawning on even the dullest people, so we are being told that the bad guys are planning a “radical revolution.” The truth is, that revolution is well past the planning stage. It has already happened. From top to bottom, despite party labels or rhetoric, the system is stacked with people committed to the great reordering of society into the egalitarian paradise. The expulsion of Trump from office like a foreign body is the proof that the organism of state is wholly alien now.

In other words, a revolution has occurred out of view from the rest of us and now we are seeing the revolutionaries step out of the shadows. This is not a lot different than how Stalin took control of the party and government. He quietly consolidated his hold on the party, while his rivals were thinking the revolution was still ongoing. By the time they realized what had happened, it was too late. This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head.

Now we are in the phase where we get used to the often-bizarre contradictions in the rules being imposed by the new rulers. Some are easy, like the fact that states have put mentally disturbed Jewish men in sundresses in charge of public health. These are ornamental positions, so putting a crazy person in the role allows the governor to display his piety at little cost. Until the Covid hysteria, no one had any reason to know their state had public health officials.

Other bits of the new normal have no explanation. For example, states are now telling people they cannot make noise in their home, as part of the alleged fight against the spread of Covid. In Europe, they are banning the sale of alcohol at certain times, claiming this is to fight Covid. Maybe they believe Covid hates loud noises and people get loud when they drink. It is insane, but it makes more sense than the official explanation, which is no explanation at all.

The lunacy of official policy will not always be humorous. The freedom loving Boris Johnson is now promoting a plan whereby Brits will be issued “freedom passes” if they comply with official edicts on Covid. For a long time, people threw around the word “Orwellian” to mean something they did not like. The English-speaking world is about to learn the real meaning of the term. Getting a freedom pass for doing exactly what the government has instructed is the very definition of Orwellian.

Another part of this phase where we come to terms with the madness of the situation is the acceptance of official silence. In a country with anything resembling an independent media, these officials would be asked to explain their polices. Boris Johnson would be asked about his Orwellian freedom pass scheme. Instead, the media is full of lectures about how we’re all in this together. You see, this is an opportunity to build back better, so you need to embrace this glorious opportunity.

Westerners have been trained for generations to think the media has an adversarial relationship with the government. This will change during this time. We will come to understand what the Soviet citizen understood. The official media is just that, official media promulgating the new lies. It’s value to the people is only in letting us know how to stay out of the camps and in providing a laugh at the absurdity of living in a society based on obvious lies. Everyone becomes a cynic.

That is something else we will learn. Pessimism is not the opposite of optimism. The man who is sure the end is near is really just another type of optimist. He believes that soon, his struggle will come to an end. The opposite of optimism is cynicism. Both the optimist and the pessimist are willing to accept the moral framework as stated. Their actions and understanding of the world are tightly bound by the orthodoxy. Both the optimist and the pessimist give up their agency to faith in the rules that govern them.

The cynic, in the context of an authoritarian society, accepts that there is no inherent logic in the system, other than to insulate those who prosper from their position. The cynic accepts that there is no truth in the system and the outcomes are random, based on the changing desires of the people you interact with in the system. The cynic knows there is no truth in a world of lies, other than his own acceptance of it. It is in this phase we are in now where we learn that you can never be cynical enough.

Election Math

Posted on November 23, 2020 by thezman

Note: I have a Thanksgiving themed post up at Taki this week. I have a long essay in my long promised on the subject of the Puritan Question. This a small taste.

An iron rule of the universe is that anything that has value will inevitably be forged or stolen, usually both. This is especially true of elections, because the election promises to bestow the most valuable thing of all to the ruling class. Elections give the ruling class legitimacy. As a result, every American election has had irregularities. Whether it is the Democrats calling out the dead vote or Democrats busing in illegal’s to vote in the suburbs, Democrats have been gaming elections since forever.

This most recent election may set a record for irregularities. It is hard to know if the claims being made by Trump are real. Trump’s track record on truth telling is not great, but even putting his claims aside, this election has more strange angles than any election in American history. Too many states have had ballots magically appear in the middle of the night or last minute rule changes that favor one side. When this happens in the third world, the West demands new election.

Here’s a bit of data that should jump off the page. In the modern era, no incumbent that has increased his vote total from the previous election has lost. Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and Bush all won reelection by increasing their vote total from their first election victory. Obama saw a slight down turn in his vote total, but his 2008 victory was landslide. Trump increased his vote by 17% over his 2016 total, 73,763,979 versus 62,984,828, yet his vote share declined and he lost.

To call this unprecedented is a wild understatement. A contested election between two new candidates generates a lot of interest. Elections with an incumbent are referenda on the person holding the seat. If people are happy with him, his vote total goes up. The voters now have more certainty about the man. If the voters are not happy, then his vote total goes down, as people who voted for him sit out or vote against him.

What the vote totals are telling us this time is that millions of people who did not vote for Trump in 2016 either came out to vote for the first time in their life in 2020 or switched from opposing him to supporting him. Yet, despite millions being happy with his term in office, millions more were so outraged that they came out of nowhere to vote against Trump. The improbability of this is hard to overstate.

This brings up probably the most absurd anomaly in election history. According to the official narrative, Joe Biden brought in close to 15 million new voters. The last four elections saw the following vote totals: 121,056,394, 129,390,000, 126,035,116, 128,824,246. The vote total for 2020 was 153,548,144. If we net out the 11 million extra who voted for Trump, we are being told that the vibrant and exciting Joe Biden, a man who could not win a primary, added 15 million new voters.

Everywhere else in life, an extreme outlier is a red flag that warrants investigation, because it suggests something unexpected has happened. If a sprinter shows up at an international event and runs a sub-nine second 100-meters, his life will be torn apart on the assumption he is cheating. If it snows in July, people are going to wonder if the gods are angry at us for some reason. When things don’t follow the normal patterns, people naturally wonder why. Can you spot the oddity here?

Election Year	US Population	Total Vote	% of Population
1948	146,600,000	48,399,989	33%
1952	157,600,000	61,093,955	39%
1956	168,900,000	61,319,768	36%
1960	180,700,000	68,334,742	38%
1964	191,900,000	69,972,432	36%
1968	200,700,000	72,514,998	36%
1972	209,900,000	75,645,594	36%
1976	218,000,000	79,973,609	37%
1980	226,500,000	84,843,024	37%
1984	235,800,000	92,032,260	39%
1988	244,500,000	90,695,171	37%
1992	256,900,000	103,756,701	40%
1996	269,700,000	94,686,514	35%
2000	282,200,000	104,338,854	37%
2004	292,800,000	121,056,394	41%
2008	304,100,000	129,390,000	43%
2012	313,900,000	126,035,116	40%
2016	323,100,000	128,824,246	40%
2020	331,000,000	153,548,144	46%

Now, the claim will be that the public was so outraged over the terrible Donald Trump that people who had never voted came out to vote for Biden. The plausibility of that claim is undermined by the fact that we have no example of this. The pattern is that the unpopular incumbent sees his voters either stay home of vote against him. Carter lost 13% of his vote in 1976. Bush lost 20% of his vote in 1992. We’re supposed to believe that Trump increased his vote by 17% because people were angry?

Compounding all of this is the fact that exactly no one found evidence of this in their polling in the run-up to the election. It is one of the things that pollster try to gauge when doing a poll. How enthusiastic are the voters for each guy? Trump had a big lead in enthusiasm, which was obvious in the final weeks. He was speaking to massive rallies, while Biden was speaking to empty parking lots. Apparently, those enthusiastic Biden voters really went out of their way to conceal themselves.

Of course, the basic vote totals make the post-election analysis about why Trump lost sound rather ridiculous. You cannot seriously claim he failed to appeal to his voters in some way when he increased his vote total by 17%. That means we have to believe that an 80-year old dementia patient inspired millions to vote for the first time, because Trump did not appeal to his base enough. That’s the sort of logic you get from people who want attention, not answers.

Now, we will hear a lot about the “Tucker Carlson standard” where any questioning of the system must include incontrovertible proof. That is just an effort to create a false dichotomy in order to avoid explaining the weird anomalies about this election. Where the facts lead us is to shift the burden of proof. The principle of parsimony says that something very unusual went on during the voting and counting process. It is on the defenders of the process to explain what happened.

The Struggle Continues

Posted on November 20, 2020 by thezman

In the business world, a regular topic of conversation is the cost-benefit analysis to solving business problems. It is easy to see that you don’t solve a fifty dollar problem with a million dollar solution, but most problems are not so simple. Figuring out the real cost of the problem is not so easy and then imagining the solution adds a whole new layer of complexity. One of the ironies of problem solving is figuring out the cause of the problem can cost more than the problem itself.

Watching the election shenanigans roll on, it seems that the ruling class may have created an expensive problem while trying to solve the Trump problem. The wholesale election fraud has created a very expensive problem for them. They cannot sit back and let Trump’s lawyers find examples of fraud or use those examples to overturn one of the disputed states, as that creates a big problem for them. Joe Biden becomes the Pretender Biden for most of the country.

On the other hand, the only way to prevent any of this is to double down on the shenanigans in all of these states. That means threatening judges, lawyers and election officials. It means more midnight capers to alter the rules and results. In other words, the way to prevent Trump from establishing his claims is to prove another set of claims. They will convince a large number of people that the whole system is rigged and controlled by thugs and crooks.

This is a managerial class feature. A group of experts identify a problem, real or imagined, then set about solving it. In the process, they create a whole new set of problems that require a new set of experts to solve. That new set of experts are conveniently the proteges of the first set of experts. This cycle has rolled through the culture since the middle of the last century. It now appears to be consuming the system that makes the managerial class possible.

It is remarkable, when you think back over the last five years. They could have easily co-opted Trump, by cutting some deals with him. He would have put the MAGA stamp of approval on things like DACA, higher immigration levels and big new administrative initiatives, in exchange for some trinkets like the wall project. Instead, they cut off their nose to spite their face. It is insane and suggests that maybe they are the victims of the same process that has consumed the Trump movement.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Giving Thanks To Our Enemy (Link) (Link)
17:00: Goodbye To Bad Cess (Link)
27:00: Stupid People (Link) (Link)
37:00: Welcome To The Madhouse (Link)
47:00: The Ungrateful (Link) (Link) (Link)
57:00: Closing

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/kNRRqM6S8sk

Our Abductive Mind

Posted on November 19, 2020 by thezman

Note: I have a heretical post full of crime-think behind the green door. This is a post about the sitcom The Big bang Theory.

One of the odd experiences you have on this side of the great divide is you notice just how many ridiculous things people accept as true. It’s not just gullible and stupid people who walk around with heads full of nonsense. Lots of smart and thoughtful people cling to ideas that are superstitious and primitive. Often people who make the journey to this side of the great divide struggle with the fact that for most of their life they have believed things that are ridiculous or devoid of any truth content.

A good example of something most people think is true, but is complete nonsense is the claim that your diet determines your health. More specifically, the claim that the Standard American Diet, as recommended by the rulers, is the key to long life and healthy lifestyle. That means lots of carbohydrates, rather than proteins and fats, especially from meat. Not only is there no truth to these claims, the Standard American Diet is probably the exact opposite of the truth.

The fact is, outside of the extremes, like starvation or morbid obesity, diet has little to no impact on your health. All of the “evidence” trotted out in favor the SAD is based on nonsense studies that are easily refuted. Humans are omnivores, which means we can survive on a wide range of foods. The main problem for modern humans is too much food, so many become obese. Otherwise, the combination of foods you eat has no measurable impact on your health or your lifespan.

The thing is, you can carefully explain this to someone and they will nod along maybe, seeming to get what you’re saying, but as soon as they get the chance, they will repeat the approved lines about diet. A man who has seen every man in his family get colon cancer, despite their diet and lifestyle, will cling to the idea that he can prevent colon cancer by eating oatmeal for breakfast. It’s no different than thinking he can appease the gods by sacrificing a goat on the prescribed day.

Another great example is mass media. One of the funny things about this age is the more partisan you are, the more trusting you are of the media, despite the fact partisans on all sides are sure the media is covering up the truth. Trump haters have fallen for every race hoax perpetrated by the media over the last five years. The old alt-right, the guys sure the media is controlled by little men in volcanoes, accepted without question the media claims about the Covid pandemic.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is one of those remarkable observations that gets to the heart of why mass propaganda works. It’s not that good propaganda tricks people into believing lies. It’s that in every population, there is a percentage that will believe the lies being spread. It is not always the same percentage, which is what makes this so useful to the propagandist. That percentage does the hard work of repeating the lie in private conversations to friends and family.

Joseph de Maistre said, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” That right there is why so many people, even very smart people, believe some amount of nonsense. They get the nonsense from people they know and trust, so they are inclined to believe it. At the minimum, they play along with the nonsense, for the sake of social peace,

This is the great insight of the propagandist. The purveyors of the big lie don’t start with the big lie, but the small ones. Maybe the small lies undermine some authority figure in society or maybe they nibble away at some accepted truth. Other small lies offer alternatives to the official truth or suggest motivations for why the authority is not being honest with the people. Over time, the little lies accumulate to the point where some people are unwilling to believe their own eyes.

Again, the diet stuff is a great example of this. Everyone who goes to a new doctor has to answer tons of questions about health history and the health history of family members, maybe going back a generation or two. They do this because disease runs in the family and disease runs in families because it is genetic. Yet, the same doctor will tell you to eat more grains and vegetables and lose a few pounds. A lifetime of little lies about diet have conditioned him to doubt his own training.

The most likely reason for this strange willingness to accept pretty lies is that humans are natural story listeners. For a very long time, most of human history, in fact, humans passed around knowledge with stories and songs. Most likely, we are wired to be more receptive to a good tale, than the hard truth. A story about how eating the right food pleases the gods and brings good health is something our ancestors heard around the campfire when they first climbed out of the branches.

Our deductive mind is that which allows us to know important truths about the world, while our inductive mind allows us to think about how the world should be. That conflict between is and ought is resolved by the abductive mind, which resolves these conflicts with amusing tales and easily remembered sayings that let us ignore these conflicts and focus on the act of living. Trog angered the gods is more easily accepted than Trog was eaten by a bear, because that’s what bears do.

Trade-Offs

Posted on November 18, 2020 by thezman

Back in the Cold War, one of the unanswered questions that came up from time to time was why did the people in the Soviet Union put up with it? American propaganda said that the living conditions were terrible. They had to stand in line for essentials like toilet paper and meat. The secret police regularly hauled people away, sending them into exile in Siberia or worse. Despite it all, the people, including those in the captive nations never revolted against the state or the communist party.

It is a useful question to ponder now as America and the West slip into the abyss of soft totalitarianism. We don’t have cops busting down doors and hauling away dissidents, at least not yet. We do have ideologues armed with the power of the state pushing people around because they can. The Covid hassles are the result of petty pipsqueaks in government offices dreaming up new ways to torment us. Curfews and bans on alcohol are punitive measures, not palliative ones.

It brings up that old question. Why are people tolerating this? There were some flickers of resistance during the early stages of the lock downs, but governments sent out the cops to harass dissenters and the media revved up the fear campaign. Here we are in a second wave of pointless lock downs, more petty and stupid than the first, but no one is raising hell about it. Back in the Cold War, stories like this elicited oaths about how the tree of liberty needed to be fertilized with the blood of tyrants.

A popular answer, for why people willingly allow themselves to be stripped of their liberty and dignity, is our material prosperity. The Boomers care more about their stock portfolios and their kids care more about the game consoles. The reason everyone goes along with this stuff, according to popular thinking, is everyone feels like they have too much to lose. That material prosperity has made everyone lazy and cautious, so they are easily pushed around by the petty tyrants.

While there is some truth to it, that can’t be the answer for why the people living under communism never revolted. The stories about people waiting in line for bread were no doubt exaggerated by Western media, but there is no doubting that the people in the Soviet Union lived well below Western standards. The Soviets may have had great military gear, but their consumer goods were terrible. Only party members had access to the small luxuries taken for granted in the West at the time.

In retrospect, we now know that life for most people in the Soviet Empire was not the dystopian nightmare portrayed in the West. Once Stalin died, there was a brief period of reform and then communism fell into a long period of conservatism. That is, it was more about maintaining a set of rules and enforcing them. Ideological experimentation came to an end and the focus was on the basics of life. For most people this meant a predictable life, where they had the necessities.

There’s no doubt that material standards of living for people in communism were far below that of the West, but this was not something they saw everyday. They just knew that life was better under communism than in the past. They were also free of crime, disorder and the great uncertainty of the first half of the 20th century. In other words, lacking a plausible alternative that was clearly better, most people were willing to knuckle under to the ideologues in order to get on with life.

We see that in America now. An under appreciated subplot to the Trump phenomenon is that Trump represented disorder and uncertainty, while his establishment opponents became stability and order. They selected the Pretender Biden because no one could possibly see him as a revolutionary. To use the old movie concept, the election was about the blue bill of Biden or the red pill of Trump. Note that the old alt-right greedily gobbled down the blue pill of Biden.

Another historical parallel is important. The captive people of the Soviet Empire were not all willing to go along to get along. The Hungarians revolted in October of 1956 against the party and the Soviet occupation. In November the Soviets sent in the Red Army to crush the revolt. The Politburo was initially open to dealing with the leaders of the rebellion, but changed their mind and crushed the revolt. The reason was they did not want to encourage more rebellions.

In January 1968, the reformer, Alexander Dubček, was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. This set off what is known as the Prague Spring, which was an effort to liberalize Czech politics and economics. This reform effort did not go over well with the Soviets who sent in half a million Warsaw Pact troops to suppress the reform movement and restore the old order. The scenes from Freedom Plaza last Saturday had a Prague Spring vibe to them.

What the Hungarian Revolt and the Prague Spring showed is that raw power has an appeal that can never be underestimated. There is no question that the people of the captive nations were in support of their independence, but the raw power of the Soviet Empire was more than enough to counter popular support. When the rebels had no answer for the Soviet tanks, the people did what Osama bin Laden observed many years ago. They chose the strong horse.

This is a lesson the Poles learned and put to good use in the 1980’s. The Solidarity Movement was as much about making the Polish communist party look weak as it was about organizing the people. Instead of hoping the party would yield to popular will, they played a game of chess with the party, putting them in positions where they looked weak and indecisive. This allowed the people to trust that the cure for communism was not worse than the disease of communism.

This brings us back to the current time. One obvious failing of the populist movement that put Trump in the White House is it was never able to create a plausible alternative in the mind of the people. Was the goal a return to the past or was the goal the present with specific modifications? Was it some undefined future? Trump was not skilled enough to grasp this and lacked the imagination to articulate a plausible alternative, even if he recognized the historical moment.

This is something that the reformers and rebels in the late Soviet Empire did not fail to grasp when their time came. When the party tried to oust Yeltsin, for example, the public rallied to his side because he represented a clear alternative. The Solidarity movement in Poland had a clear set of goals, rather than a list of complaints. When the party tried to muscle them, they were opposing more than just a rebellious rabble, but a set of specific reforms popular with the people.

Getting back to the central question as to why people throughout the ages have been wiling to submit to the most terrible crimes against their liberty and dignity, the answer is that life is about trade-offs. Instinctively, people make their choices based on the options put before them. They do not rebel against the present arrangements because they fall short of some ideal. They rebel, either because the alternative is misery and death or they see some better option on the table.

This has been the magic of the two-party democracy, which is explicit in America and implicit in Europe. The options before the people are always the two faces of the establishment, Republican and Democrat, Liberal and Conservative. Unless and until that dynamic is broken, either with a third option or the discrediting of the two option system, the status quo remains the strong horse. Nothing will change until the trade-offs presented to the people change.

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