Many Realties

Posted on January 31, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. After sending it off I thought about the idea of world building, so I addressed than a bit today. The Sunday podcast is up behind the green door and it is mostly about the usual stuff.

The old paleo-conservative gag about the demand for Nazis exceeding the available supply has become something of an iron law of the universe. Each generation discovers that the American Left is obsessed with fascists, white supremacists, the Klan and so on, despite these things no longer being real. Other than some cartoonish play-acting by those desperate for attention, these things are no longer real. They certainly play no role in politics or the general culture.

The lack of supply, however, has been no deterrence, especially now that the internet allows people to create these reality from thin air. The intensively on-line far-left invests all of its time finding someone they can label as the bogeyman or one the many members of the bogeyman army. The Antifa subculture, for example, is organized around the hunt for fascists and white supremacists. They spend all day looking for new baddies and obsessing over the prior baddies.

This being America, this means there is a subgenre of fringe-left media that caters to this subculture with ghost stories about Nazis. Hoffer said that all mass movements in America become a corporation, a racket or a business. The world of on-line hate-hunters is a racket that supplies world building materials to the intensively on-line Left so they can maintain their fantasy space. The witch hunters need witches, so there are people supplying them with witches.

This obsession with imaginary fascists is written off as the work of the mentally unstable, which is true, but it is more than that. What these people are doing is world-building within the alternative reality of their own creation. They live in a reality that says they are the guardians of the future utopia, keeping the world safe from its enemies, which come in many styles and guises. In order to keep this fantasy going, they have to find characters that fit the role of the villain.

In a way, this subculture has become something like the massive on-line role playing games that sprang up a dozen years ago. People can join, but they have to assume a character and then join a band on-line. This band is a set of social media accounts that support one another in their imaginary struggle. Doxing is both a weapon and a world building tool. The revelation of someone in league with the Dark One helps perpetuate the fantasy by supplying social proof to the members.

This is why these people look so outlandishly weird when they turn up in public to riot with other fantasy groups or hold what amounts to a street convention. They take their on-line character out into the real world, but the real world does not have these sorts of people or the bogeymen they are chasing. Antifa, BLM, furries, cosplayers, the alt-right and so on are normal in the alternative reality of their subculture, because the rules of that subculture have been created to normalize this stuff.

That is how to view the now defunct alt-right. Like the intensely on-line far-left, the alt-right formed up on-line as a form of escapism. They quickly became a foil for the intensely on-line far-left, because the interaction with that subculture shaped them into the much needed opponent. The intensely on-line libertarians became intensely on-line fascists because that gave them an enemy, the intensely on-line antifascists, who were happy to have the new villain in their version of reality.

It is not just the intensely on-line far-left that lives in an alternative reality. The anti-Trump movement quickly evolved into an alternative reality. Of course, its was the existing alternative realties of neoconservatives, the intensely on-line far-left and others that coalesced around this new boss introduced to the game. Trump allowed these alternative realties to align against a commonly imagined enemy. It is why they cannot stop talking about him, even after he has been defeated.

Eric Hoffer famously said that mass movements can survive without a god but they must always have a devil. This seems to be true of these alternative realities that are shaping the reality of the modern age. The inherent conflict with reality is masked by the obsession with imaginary adversaries. This has now become a form of world building where the players invest their time inventing new bosses to fight, always based on the general archetype required of their alternative reality.

While this phenomenon is mostly a product of the internet, it is jumping from the virtual into the physical world. The ridiculous Spotify story is a good example. The people running this company are responding to a fictional controversy, when they could easily ignore it. This is because many of the people who work at the firm are also deep into one of these alternative realities where Joe Rogan is the devil. In other words, the alterative realty is spilling into the reality of the CEO.

Of course, the people occupying the C-suites at these companies are not exactly living in reality either. Theirs is a world that is as alien to the daily reality of normal people as the reality of the intensely on-line far-left. In their world, the gesture counts for more than an action. If the Spotify CEO were to tell these loons to bleep-off, that would be viewed as a bad gesture in his reality. It would suggest he is not sensitive to their perspectives and in that reality, insensitivity is a mortal sin.

Much like the intensely on-line far-left, our ruling class is now increasingly occupied with world building in order to make their reality more realistic. The Covid panic is a great example, where a whole industry grew up to feed materials to the world builders of this fantasy game of pandemic. A bizarre aspect of the mass media age is that the ruling class now has an unquenchable thirst for crises. In the absence of real problems, they busy themselves creating them.

Of course, there are real problems, but those problems are boring. Like the kid who has played the game so many times he no longer finds it interesting, the ruling elite no longer has an interest in fixing roads or addressing the issues of society. As Pete Buttigieg made clear the other day, fixing potholes is boring. Instead, he will focus on make traffic fatalities more equitable. This new quest will allow him to have much more fun and feel much more important.

Diverging realities is not exactly new. The French Revolution featured at least two alternative realities. There was the reality of the Old Regime that had lost contact with reality in the late middle-ages. Then there was the new reality of the radicals, forming up in salons and public houses. When the reality of the Old Regime was no longer sustainable in the face of reality, it collapsed. Into the void rushed the new false reality of the Jacobins, which soon foundered on reality.

What is unique about this age is both the novelty of these alternative realities and the proliferation of them on-line. America is becoming a balkanized collection of alternative realties increasingly disconnected from actual reality. The tech giants are now promising to strap VR goggles on every face, which will only accelerate this phenomenon. Instead of people taking soma and living in a dream state, the drug of this brave new world will be the virtual reality and the world building it requires.

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The New McCarthyites

Posted on January 28, 2022 by thezman

While doing homework on the Army – McCarthy hearings, I was reminded of two things that seem to come up regularly. One is that the people causing the mayhem in our society are lacking in self-awareness. The term McCarthyism has dropped out of use of late, I cover this in the show, but most people are old enough to remember when it was popular and what it meant. The new McCarthyites are totally unaware of that rather easy comparison between themselves and McCarthy.

The other thing that comes up repeatedly is that the people causing trouble have a weird blind spot about the internet. Often, they will make a big bold moral statement and then sometime later make another big bold moral statement that is the exact opposite of the previous statement. Even crazier is they will do this on Twitter. Not long after, people will post screen caps of their prior statement alongside the new statement, easily revealing the contradiction.

You are left with the impression that these people are unaware of the internet, despite using it for their political drama. You really see this with the January 6 show trials they are cooking up. The claims they are making against these people are for things these people have done in the recent past. Adam Schiff spent four years claiming the 2016 election was illegitimate. Now he is tormenting people for the crime of questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

What lies at the heart of this is the problem presented by McCarthy. The sorts of people attracted to these moral crusades are without the normal sense of self that mentally healthy people possess. They need a foil, someone they can point to as bad in some way, so they can claim to be good by virtue of opposing that person. It is why their politics are highly personal. Liz Cheney cannot stop obsessing over Trump because she is a moral nullity who needs a villain to feel like a hero.

That is what makes the January 6 commission worth following. These people are so morally obtuse they could very well set themselves up like McCarthy. None of the people on that commission are sympathetic to the public. None of them seem to be smart enough to see this. They are so sure they are on the sign of angels, because they are certain their opponents are evil. That is how these people eventually find themselves on the other end of the inquisition.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Background On The Hearings
22:00: The Morality Of McCarthyism
42:00: The New McCarthyites

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Odysee

Legal Insurrection

Posted on January 27, 2022 by thezman

One of the features of every societal crisis is that the elites of the society stop enforcing the rules of society, especially on themselves. Prior to the collapse of the Roman Republic, the elites started making exceptions to the rules. In the short term they seemed practical, but in the long term these exceptions undermined the moral logic of the rules entirely. Before long, a man in Gaul could decide that the rules no longer applied and he was free to do as he pleased.

This is at the core of the current crisis in the American empire. The rules have become arbitrary with regards to the elite. In turn the elites no longer enforce basic principles that are the foundation of the country. One of the principles is property. It used to be understood that you own the produce of your labor. That was the default and infringement on your ownership had to clear a high bar. Today, the powerful can steal your property without consequence.

This collapse of property rights is at the core of this story out of Florida about a law banning theft of private images. A local politician says nude photos of her were stolen and distributed on-line without her consent. She is leading the charge to change the law regarding ownership of your image. She is also doing the rounds to draw attention to herself, but also raise awareness of the issue. She thinks there should be federal law to protect ownership of your image.

In truth, it used to be understood that you own you and therefore you own whatever you produce, including your image. Forty years ago, a television show maker would have to get a signed release to use footage of you walking down a city street. They did not have to pay you, but you did not have to grant them permission. Today, your image can be freely distributed on-line and you have no recourse. Similarly, your activity on-line can be used by others and you can do nothing about it.

Reasserting property rights to include things like your image, your internet activity, your resume and other non-tangible products of your labor would go a long way to restoring order to society. One reason for that is it would torpedo the business model of the tech monopolies, who rely on your free labor to make a profit. What Facebook calls ad revenue is actually the sale of user activity and content. They sell this data in bulk to marketers, government and corporate interests.

If Facebook had to get a signed release from you every time they sell your data their business model would collapse in a month. Their margins would collapse even if their user were okay with being exploited this way, because the cost of this model would be shifted back onto their balance sheet. The same is true of the other big socials. All of them would have to rethink their business model. This would most likely take place in bankruptcy court as there is no easy answer for them.

Of course, for this to work it would require the return of the old model for enforcing contracts, especially contracts of adhesion or one-way contracts. That is what the terms of service is called in the law. It is a take it leave it offer. These sorts of contracts used to come under careful scrutiny by the courts. The reason is they saw a powerful interest issuing terms to weak interests, so the way to level the playing field was the court would act on behalf of the weak interest.

The reason that the back of car rental contracts all look the same is they went through the legal process over many years. That standard language has been approved by the courts and will therefore be enforced by the courts. That means the car rental firm does not willy-nilly change the language during your rental. The same process has been applied to residential leases and utility contracts. The same legal standards should be applied to terms of service agreements.

A world where the big social media players have to get permission to alter their terms of service and those terms have to be legally clear and concise, is a world where they cannot abuse their authority. They go back to being passive service providers, rather than arbiters of truth. In a world where they have to respect your property rights, they revert back to a traditional business that offers a service in exchange for a fee, rather than a monopoly with socialized costs.

Of course, to return to a rule-based world requires Congress and the courts to rediscover the rule of law and the advantages of an orderly society. That would require them to suddenly get the courage and morality to turn down the massive bribes that flow into Washington from the tech firms. The great lesson Silicon Valley learned during the Microsoft antitrust case is that everyone in Washington comes with a price tag and there is always a sale going on in Washington.

An old adage about money is that if you need hard money to control your corrupt elites, your corrupt elites will find a way around hard money. This axiom of history applies to the law as well. if you need to codify the basics of a civilized society in order to control your elites, those elites will get around the laws of civilized society. That is the fundamental problem in America. Unless and until the elites are replaced with and by a moral people, the chaos will continue until collapse.

Terms Of Service Society

Posted on January 26, 2022 by thezman

If you were to come up with a simple explanation for the difference between the modern era and the feudal era it would be about rules. The West went through a great transition from the 18th century into the 20th century in which the rules that govern society changed to be both clearer and universal. There were other things that happened during this transition that are important, like industrialization and urbanization, but the big one was the change in the rules.

The feudal age was not without rules. In fact, the feudal age had more rules than even the current age, but the rules were opaque and complex. The line between the law, custom and privilege was never all that clear. Privilege was often the thing that prevailed, even over written laws. Most important, the rules of life were not the same for everyone in feudal society. Feudalism was an interlocking set of rules and customs that governed relations horizontally and vertically.

The changes ushered in with the Enlightenment did two things. One is the separation between law, custom and privilege became formal and clear. The law was a separate body of rules that superseded custom and privilege. The latter was possible only when the law was universal. It applied to everyone. It did not happen overnight, but by the time the West moved into the 20th century, the prevailing morality said that the law must be clear and apply to everyone equally.

This change did not spring from nothing. The feudal order evolved out of necessity and circumstance, without too much thought. No one planned it. The Enlightenment brought along the concept of a planned society. We could consciously organize our societies around a new set of rules. The reason we could do this is the natural world was not some great mystery. Men began to see that the natural world operated by a fixed set of rules that could be understood.

What the philosopher John Locke bequeathed to the world was the notion that we could not only figure out the rules of nature, we could discover the rules of society that best comported with man’s nature. If we can figure out those rules and implement them, we will have a society that allows for the full blossoming of man. The debate since the 18th century has been about the nature of man. Communism, fascism, capitalism, libertarianism and so on are all based on this assumption.

Fast forward to this age and we appear to be in another one of those great transitions in how we look at the rules of society. You can see it in the language. Hardly anyone in power speaks of rights anymore. The term civil rights has morphed into a dog whistle by the race hustlers, stripped of any connection to natural rights. Of course, the systemic assaults on basic rights like assembly and speech are so common now, the repression of these rights and the people exercising them is now normal.

The reason for this is we are transitioning from a society based on rights codified in the law to a society based on privileges based on a terms of service. You get to do things promised in the terms of services, as long as you are compliant with the terms of service, which can change at any time. What we used to think of as rights are now privileges, no different from access to Twitter. You get to do things based on your level of compliance to the current set of rules.

The obvious example is Covid. The remarkable aspect of the Covid panic was just how easily the political and administrative state created new rules and imposed them on people without ever mentioning rights. In fact, it has become fashionable for politicians to mock those who mention rights. They point to community standards, trust and safety, much in the same way we see with internet platforms. Your rights do not count as long as they can claim to be protecting the community.

The other aspect of the terms of service society is that the terms of service are opaque and impossible to understand. To this day no one can explain the term “hate speech” yet it turns up in every terms of service agreement. It is turning up in an informal sense all over society. Men are sent to jail for hate crimes, even though there are few laws defining hate crimes. The concept of “hate” is now a spectral force that no one can explain, but it animates the terms of service of life.

One of things that clarity of the law requires is the clarity of the process. In the before times when the law was supposed to be clear, the process of adjudicating disputes was supposed to be clear as well. In other words, the rules defining the process were supposed to be as clear as the law. In the terms of service society, the process for adjudicating disputes is as mysterious as the rules. No one can explain how Twitter enforces its terms of service, not even Twitter.

The citizen in a rules based society is expected to live within the law, but in return he gets protected by the law. In the feudal order, protection was from the man to whom you pledged loyalty, because privilege transcended the law. In effect, the law was a one-way street that imposed rules on people but offered little protection in return. The liberal order was about making the law clear and reciprocal. Men would follow the law because it was in their interest, as the law was what protected them.

The terms of service society is much closer to the feudal order in that we have a proliferation of rules, but we are not in a rule-based society. Because the rules are always changing and their implementation is dependent on a privileged elite, people cannot depend on the rules at all. Creators on YouTube, for example, spend a lot of time policing their past in order to remain compliant. What matters is not the rules but the whims of the censors.

Another aspect of the terms of service society is that citizenship is no longer a thing that has any value. From the point of view of the people enforcing the terms of service, you are compliant or non-compliant. It is why the French president feels free to terrorize French people over the vaccine. They are non-compliant, so their services from the state have been terminated. This is the new relationship between people and those who rule over them. You are compliant or non-compliant.

It is tempting to think this cannot work, but feudalism carried on for roughly a thousand years before things changed. At least a third of a human population is happy to be treated like a prisoner. For most people, freedom is terrifying. They want to be told what to do and some are happy to have no choices at all. To date, no politician has been hanged for imposing Covid mandates. What the last two years has told our trust and safety councils is they can go much further than they dreamed.

On the other hand, feudalism worked in an age where death from disease, violence and starvation was common. Feudalism was a survival response to the breakdown of order, rather than a replacement for it. The terms of service society can only last if it can actually follow through on the promise to turn society into a giant daycare center. If not, then the terms of service collapses and we have no order at all. Trust and safety, as it were, goes away entirely.

Woke Dawn

Posted on January 25, 2022 by thezman

A popular bit of wish-casting among conventional conservatives has been the line “Go Woke, go broke”. This is the unfounded belief that the companies embracing the latest cultural Marxist fads are being punished by the marketplace. It has become a Pavlovian chant among the sorts of people who comment at sites like Breitbart, whenever they do a story on a major brand jumping on the identity train. The fact that no one has gone broke does not seem to register with them.

This is why Hollywood, which should be the most sensitive to the marketplace, proudly embraces the latest cultural Marxist fads. Contrary to the claims in this post at the Daily Mail, Hollywood knows they have no fears of going broke. They have been siding with the cultural commissars since the dawn of the mass media age. Watch an old Chaplin film and his communism jumps out, even without sound. Watch a film like the Manchurian Candidate and the politics are plain.

One reason Hollywood has no fear of going broke is they know most people will find a way to look past the propaganda. They can pack a superhero movie with a lot of propaganda, as long as they also pack in the special effects. The people rushing off to see this stuff are too culturally illiterate to catch the messaging anyway. Even if they do see it, they happily filter it out so they can enjoy the explosions and cartoon fight scenes that are the main draw off these shows.

There is also the fact that people have to watch something. The reason Soviet cinema was hugely influential on American cinema is because it existed. Even in the most repressive regimes, entertainment flourishes. Stalin understood the power of movies, he was a huge film buff, and not just because of the propaganda. He knew, as all authoritarians know, the people need their entertainment. This is why he supported Soviet film and so much of it was produced.

The Soviet citizens were happy to consume it. The typical urbanite in communist Moscow consumed party product then waited for the next party product. Sure, the stories were wrapped around popular communist themes, but they also had all of the human drama and plot twists of any other story. Obviously, there was no box office, but the party kept track of what was popular and rewarded those filmmakers who were popular with Soviet audiences.

This has always been the paradox of marketism. The people who preach the power of the marketplace never look up to notice that the market does not work like their libertarian textbooks claim. The cereal aisle at your local market is not a bizarre full of vendors demanding your attention. It is a couple of cereal makers, one main link in the supply chain and strategically planned shelf space. Your decision was made for you long before you discovered the joy of Cap’n Crunch®.

The reason is, not all consumers are the same. The guy with power commands more attention than the guy with no power. Every Soviet filmmaker thought first of what Stalin would like and then what the party would like in the same way that Hollywood frets about what the cultural commissars are thinking. The reason is the people who insure and underwrite films care about those things too. The “me too” movement revealed that Hollywood is an effect, not a cause of culture.

This is why the ad makers have erased white men from their ads. The people making the ads do not care about the consumers. Why should they? They are not the customer for the ad maker. The customer is the bitter, middle-aged single woman decorating the C-suites at the corporate client. They need to hear they are empowered; despite the fact they have pointless jobs as ornaments. The ad makers know their business, so they sell them ads that tell them they are important.

That is one aspect of this explosion of cultural madness. The last thirty years has seen an explosion in credentialed luxury people. These are people who went through the credentialing system, told at every step that their life not only has meaning to them but is vital to the world, only to find themselves doing busy work. Ask the diversity officer what she does for a living and the shame on her face is obvious. At some level, she knows her life really has no meaning whatsoever.

Of course, to many it is just a grift. Watch a video on the life of a pornographer and you see the same ethical reality you see with many of the people pushing diversity. Robin DiAngelo is a grifter and she has always known it. She is not morally troubled by her grift, because she has the moral compass of a pimp. The big diversity conferences look like a white bread version of the Players Ball. The reason is the people involved at the top of the game have the mentality of a hustler.

This falseness is why the “diversity” is usually ridiculous. When they cast a black actor to play Henry VIII, it is not for diversity. Sure, in their pitch meeting the people plotting this will make the proper noises, but that is just part of the process. This is just the easiest, laziest way to tick the box and get attention for it. Otherwise, nothing has to be changed, as the “diverse” version is just the previous version with different costumes and the costume is the actor’s skin.

A good recent example of this is the Amazon series The Wheel of Time. It is a fantasy show based on a novel series of the same name. When it debuted it got some press for its diversity, but that lasted a week. The reason is the industry sponsored fan sites care as much about diversity as the writers, which is not much at all. What mattered is the sensitive psyche of the harridans at their one client, Amazon. They wanted lots of skin tone, so they were shown lots of skin tone.

That is why the diversity is shallower than the writing and dialogue. All of the characters are stock figures from the fantasy series casting company. In fact, other than skin tone, the series is less diverse than an NBA team. This is a fantasy show so the writers could have produced a variety of different and complex races, but that would be more trouble than it is worth. Once Amazon saw the cast, they quickly signed the show for a second season, because the right boxes were ticked.

A truth of life is that all societies are hierarchical. Democracy and capitalism are very clever ways for the elites to drug the masses into thinking they have a say in how society is managed. There is always someone in charge of every human group and America is no different. Those people have embraced this weird religion we call wokeness and they intend to impose it on society. The marketplace is not going to magically protect you from this madness.

On the other hand, it does tempt people from the fog of democracy and the marketplace into the sober reality of human organization. Before these cultural pogroms launched thirty years ago, the typical right-winger was sure all he needed to do is vote harder and buy the right brand of cereal. Despite their rhetoric, the typical left-winger also bought into the myth of democracy and the marketplace. They thought the will of the people mattered to the decision makers.

Now, the right is increasingly skeptical of democracy and the marketplace. Reality is beginning the breakthrough and that is largely due to the wokeness. The old Left is also having to reevaluate their view of these things. The political divide is forming up around the old “who? whom?” partisanship. There are those with power and access to power and those who have no power. The people with power wear wokeness like it is a symbol of party rank. Everyone else now gets to see it.

Commodus Americanus

Posted on January 24, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Not related to the topic of the day, but a topic that is I pray Allah will make more important every day. The Sunday podcast is up behind the green door and it is mostly about the moral crisis of this age.

There is an old expression, “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”, that has haunted powerful people since forever. A variation on this is “The first generation makes it. The second generation maintains it and the third generation blows it”. While not an iron law of the universe, it is an observation that has held up over time. Whether it is business empires or political empires, the work of the great man somehow turns into a curse that plagues the lives of his descendents.

The funny thing about this bit of reality is that it is well known and many very smart people have tried to come up with a solution, but the problem remains. In the business world, expert planners work with business owners to help them mitigate this disaster, but only about 10% of family business make it to the grandchildren. The trust system was designed with this in mind. The grandchildren will never amount to much, but at least they will have an allowance to sustain them.

It is fair to say that popular forms of government were invented to address the problem of private rule going sour by the third generation. Caesar Augustus was the great founder of the empire. Tiberius Caesar Augustus was solid, but he suffered from the predictable maladies of every second generation ruler. Caligula is arguably Rome’s most famous lunatic. Of course, we have Claudius, an interregnum of sorts, before we get to Nero, who was literally the end of the line.

The promise of popular government is the elites are in a competition with one another to run the society. The people get to pick the winner, based on their interests. This way the great man does not hand control over to his disinterested son and his disinterested son does not leave things to a maniac. Every generation gets to figure out who is the most fit to rule society. The theory takes the natural hierarchy of society and allows it to keep renewing itself through merit. That is the theory.

Reality seems to be that old adage at the start. We see this with the current ruling classes of the West. They are looking like Commodus, the heir to the great Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, the last of the five good emperors. Unlike his father, Commodus was much more interested in spectacle and what we would today call bourgeoise degeneracy. It was his excessive self-indulgences and reckless disregard for order that brought an end to the Pax Romana.

Commodus is a good emperor to study when thinking about what is happening with the managerial elite of the American empire. When you look around at this elite, you see a lot of people like Commodus. They were born into privilege, dotted on by parents who dreamed big dreams for them. They came into the world expecting the world to comport to their desires. Most important, you see that appropriation of authority that was never earned, but passed down from the prior generation.

The news currently tells us that we are on the brink of war with Russia over Ukraine and one of the best minds on the job for the Biden team is Jake Sullivan. There is nothing in his resume that says he should be running a hot dog stand, but he has been told his whole life he is fit to rule, so he believes it. Victoria Nulland is another member of the foreign policy brain trust. Her career is best described as one disaster after another, but she was born for the role in every sense.

Look around at the elected class and you see the same pattern. There are no men who went from the middle class to elected office on their own merit. In fact, it is hard to find anyone in national politics who has ever had a job. No one in the leadership of both parties has a line for “private sector” in his resume. The reason for that is they have never done productive work. Instead, like our old friend Commodus, they were groomed from birth to take up positions in the ruling class.

Taken as a whole, the Commodus comparison becomes clear. Marcus Aurelius never would have set foot in the Coliseum, but his feckless son thought himself as Rome’s first entertainer, so he spent a lot of time performing. Our current ruling class looks more like carny folk than the men who built the empire. This is where you see the other comparison to Commodus. Like the doomed emperor, our ruling class cannot stop indulging its increasingly deranged whims.

Historical analogies are never perfect. They only serve as a starting point for understanding the present or the past. One is the fixed understanding while the other side of the analogy is the thing you want to analyze. We know what we need to know about Commodus and many other men like him. He is a familiar type in history because he was part of that long observed phenomenon at the start. This observation was famously applied to civilizations by Oswald Spengler.

What this suggest about the current age is that there is not much that can be done to arrest this cycle once it has begun. The transformation of the American republic into an empire in the 19th century, despite maintaining the republican pretentions, meant that this period was as inevitable as the seasons. That old republican competition was replaced by an imperial selection system, which inevitably results in a generation more interested in being elite than doing the work of an elite.

The question, of course, is what comes next. Rome never returned to its republican nature, but centuries of empire erased it from the collective memory. Depending upon how you mark the beginning, the American empire has been around for no more than a century and less than half that if you use the Cold War as the beginning. Further, most people in the empire think popular government is the only moral choice. In this way, America is more like Athens than Rome.

Again, Commodus may provide some short term answers. Once he proclaimed himself a living god and renamed the city Colonia Lucia Annia Commodiana, it became clear he had to go, so he was assassinated. This set off a power struggle, a period known as the Year of Five Emperors. Septimius Severus was eventually able to defeat the various factions and claim control of the empire. The Severin dynasty was short-lived, however, and was followed by The Crisis of the Third Century.

In other words, the correction to the generational decline was a housecleaning of the elite in a period of turmoil. If you date the start of the American empire to Gettysburg, then this means a series of crisis until North American returns to its natural divisions that have been there since the Founding. If you date the empire to the middle of the last century, then maybe the end is a return to mid-century normalcy. Regardless of your preferred future, all paths lead through a crisis.

The World State II

Posted on January 21, 2022 by thezman

This week’s show is a continuation of last week’s show. The point of the effort is to describe the various aspects of the ruling regime. We don’t have a good name for this form of rule and one reason for it is it just sort of happened. Unlike various forms of socialism, there is no one guy at the center of it. It is the combination of historical and economic events over the last two centuries. The great contribution of Karl Marx was having a last name that made for a pithy label.

In last week’s show, I thought the segment on managerialism was the best, but it is also the most studied aspect of the system. We have 80 years of writing on the growth of the administrative state. This week I think the two segments that are most important are Custodialism and Quadripartism. This growing sense by our rulers that they need to take care of us is rising from and encouraging this blending together of the power centers of the American empire.

There is a feudal aspect to this arrangement. People think of feudalism as knights saving damsels in distress. That makes for good story telling, but it was really a fully integrated social control system. The reciprocal relationships between the warrior elites evolved into a set of customs governing all of society. The duties and responsibilities the warrior elite had with one another became a model for society. The life of every person was defined by his duties and responsibilities.

Something similar is happening with the power centers of the empire. They are working out the rules with which they regulate behavior towards one another. At the same time, they are working out rules to govern those within their domain. Instead of a code of chivalry it is terms of service. Like life in feudal Europe, people are either compliant or non-compliant. The compliant get the privileges and protection of the system while the non-compliant are fair game.

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.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
03:00: Quadripartism
18:00: Custodialism
33:00: Universalism
48:00: Revolutionary

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The Last Stop

Posted on January 20, 2022 by thezman

Way back in the 1980’s, it was popular for members of the conservative movement to claim that the Left had run out of ideas. It was true to the extent that the Left had run out of policy ideas, having used them up in the preceding four decades. Conservatives were brimming with ideas on how to fix those policies. The big talk of rolling them back was really just a politically astute way of making reform look radical. The Right was always about fixing what the Left had broken.

The truth is though, those old progressive ideas from the early part of the century had run their course, but a new set of ideas were percolating in the academy. What we think of today as cultural Marxism and “wokeness” was coming together in the flophouses and brothels of left-wing politics. After the Cold War ended, these ideas started to take over the Left until we reached the present crisis. This crisis, however, seems to be the end of the line for radical thinking.

You see it with the obsession with Trump. Stable minded people with an agenda, even a nutty agenda, would have erased their old foe from the history books after dispatching him in the 2020 election. Instead, they cannot stop thinking about him and the army of imaginary bogeymen they think he leads. The Democrats have now hatched a plot to charge him with sedition so he cannot run for office in 2024. In reality, it is just a way to keep him alive as an adversary.

To normal people, this looks like madness. The truth is, Trump is old news and by the time 2024 rolls around he will probably not be a lock to win the nomination. This Ann Coulter column is a good indication that many of the people who supported Trump in 2016 are ready for someone new. Coulter’s judgement on these things is not always the best, she was a fan of Mitt Romney, but she speaks for Populist Inc. They are ready to move on and the Democrats would be wise to let them.

That said, Trump is a master marketer and he could very well retool his act as a revenge tour in 2024. Given the state of things right now and the chaos that looms on the horizon, the public could be ready to burn it all down. The GOP will surely win both house this fall then set about finking on their voters. The next presidential election could be a battle to win over factions in a purple-faced rage at the politicians. In that environment, Trump could look like the sober choice.

Still, the Left won the revolution and should be busy enjoying the fruits of victory but instead they long to return to the battle. The reason is the ideology that fueled the revolution is turning out to be nothing but clever words with no truth content. There is no end of history, no promised land of equality. Rather than being a strength, diversity has turned out to be a clever marketing scheme by corporate communists who live like white nationalist while lecturing everyone about race.

What the Left has quickly become is a glaring example of negative identity. They are not for anything that exists. Instead, they are a laundry list of things they oppose, with the claim that these things stand in the way of paradise. The fact that many of the things they rage against do not, in fact, exist, makes the agony all the more severe. It turns out that bellowing about white supremacy, something that does not exist, is not as fulfilling as screaming in the face of someone wearing a red hat.

In the movie Conspiracy about the 1942 Wannsee Conference, one of the actors tells another a story about a man who hated his father and loved his mother. When his mother died, he did not weep at her grave. When his father died, he was inconsolable, crying like a baby. The lesson of the story was that the man had defined his life by his hatred of his father. When his father was gone, he lost that which gave meaning and purpose to his life. That was why he was crying.

The American Left and their political party are now that man weeping at the grave of Donald Trump’s presidential career. This is, in part, why they cannot let go of the Covid madness, despite their party’s efforts. The mask is a reminder of better times when they had a reason to get up every morning. It is why their party is putting on the insurrection show for them. It is a bit of nostalgia for better times. It is why they hope to reanimate the Trump movement with an indictment.

That is the trouble with negative identity. A political movement organized around it can only end in sorrow. If it wins, it loses the reason to exist. If it fails, it runs the risk of retribution from the people it assaulted and it runs the risk of internal dissention over not having defeated the enemy. Negative identity becomes a self-made Alamo, a desperate last stand by people afraid of the future. It is why these movements attract so many weirdos and degenerates.

Unlike in the 1980’s, the sputtering of the prevailing radicalism is unlikely to give way to a new radicalism, at least not from the Left. Cultural Marxism was a reaction to the failing of economic Marxism. There is no next step in the underlying theory of history that animated both ideologies. This really is the end of the road for the theoretical framework that gave birth to Utopian radicalism. What comes next will probably be outside the old model of Left and Right.

The Crisis Of Doubt

Posted on January 19, 2022 by thezman

A basic requirement of every human society is that it must have a set of rules that define the society and the people in it. It is this shared understanding of what defines the society that keeps the thing together. “Who we are” is defined by “what we do” and it is the commonsense of the people. People living in a monarchy take the king and the nobility for granted. To question the legitimacy of the king is to question the very nature of society and the rules that define it.

In modern America, the experts who run the country have become one of these fixed things that everyone accepts. For example, the head of the Federal Reserve runs the banking system and controls the money supply. Since Alan Greenspan made the job famous, Americans have just accepted that the person in this job is responsible for keeping the economy from danger. He does not set taxes or control spending, but he makes sure the economy avoids catastrophe.

This general assumption is not without merit. It was the Federal Reserve that pulled the country out of stagflation in the 1980’s. They kept the Savings & Loan crisis from creating a bank run. In the 1990’s, they organized the bailout of Long Term Capital Management and then navigated the Dot-Com bust. They came to the rescue of the global economy in the mortgage crisis. So far, they have managed to prevent the Covid panic from cratering the economy.

There is a lot one can quibble with in that list and many will say that those crises were the fault of the bankers, including the Fed. To most people though, the mysterious group of people who run the economy are one thing you can trust. Even though trust in government at all levels has declined sharply over the last few decades, the Federal Reserve remains the most trusted institution. Most years, the Fed chairman has better approval than the president.

In a world where people assume there is an answer to every problem and an expert able to find the answer, there is an assumption that whatever problems crop up, the people in charge will find the solution. This is what makes managerialism both possible and tolerable. If the experts keep getting things wrong, what is the point of having a society run by experts? People put up with the metastasizing set of rules because there is a general trust that there is logic behind them.

This trust in experts is not new. It has been a defining characteristic of American society since at least the 19th century. Taylorism was the attempt to use science to improve management of companies in the 1880’s. That gave birth to the Efficiency Movement, which sought to apply engineering principles to social policy. What we think of as the Left in America grew out of this belief that social reform could be achieved by experts changing the rules of society to achieve the desired outcome.

The fact is the strength of the American system over the last century has been this faith in the experts to find the right answer. When things go wrong, the current experts are fired and new experts are brought in to solve the problem. Elections have been an indirect review of the experts class. If the people are not happy, they vote for the other party who come in with new experts. If things go well, then the party is rewarded with a good election the next time.

That is what makes the current crisis so serious. Most people think the experts badly bungled the Covid problem. The experts said we had two weeks to bend the curve and two years into it the curve is not bent. The vaccine was supposed to be the great triumph of science and technology and it is looking like it is not only not working but possibly a billion dollar boondoggle. The last two years have been a massive blow to the credibility of science in modern America.

Then you have the economic troubles. Most people assumed there would be some trouble from the Covid panic. You cannot close down the economy for months and not have consequences. Unlike those prior economic crises, the Fed is not skillfully navigating this one. Empty shelves and spirally prices are not what people expect from the expert class. Things that could be acquired in days now take months because the supply chain is a chaotic mess.

The deeper problem is the old habit of just voting for the out-party when things are not doing well has not been working either. People voted for Obama to close the books on the history of race. Instead, race relations got sharply worse. Obama was supposed to end the forever wars and he expanded them. Trump was the shot across the bow by the people and the system responded with a four year tantrum. Biden was supposed to be the return to normal and we have chaos instead.

This is why 70% of Americans think the country is in a serious crisis. They are not puzzling it out like this, but they just sense that the system has broken and there is no one around with an understanding of how to fix it. One of the paradoxes of the current age is the people in charge say we are in the middle of a crisis, but then wage jihad against anyone proposing a way out of the crisis. Their solution to “save democracy” is to eliminate any trace of it from society.

The core of the current crisis is that no one can honestly answer the question that is the basis of all human organization, who are we? It is no longer easy to say what it means to be an American. The commonsense that are the rules of society are no longer making sense, which calls into question the basics of society. We used to be a people who assumed the experts would eventually get it right. Now we are a people wondering if there is such a thing as experts at all.

Little Revolutions

Posted on January 18, 2022 by thezman

Revolutions come when people suddenly realize that everyone else is privately thinking the same things about the current arrangements. Most people tend to keep their grievances private. Complaining is boring and considered bad form even in the worst of times, so people tend to keep their grievances to themselves. It is when they begin to notice that everyone else has similar complaints that the cascading effect turns complaints into demands and then into rebellion.

It is why the corporate communists who dominate the official social media platforms like Twitter are more deluded than they seem. Their entire public life is nothing but a litany of complaints, shared with other miserable wrecks on-line. They literally know everyone who shares their grievances, as they are all in the same groups. The only awakening that will happen from their endless griping is that the rest of society will realize that these people are nuts and need to be pushed back to the fringe.

A version of that took place a couple of weeks ago when Douglas Murray was assigned the task of purging Pedro Gonzalez. Murray took issue with Gonzalez making sport of various internationalist types on Twitter. Gonzalez was doing the “physiognomy is real” thing where he posted pics of the people he was mocking. Murray responded with, “Mr. Gonzalez spent his holiday weekend bringing what many have worked hard to relegate to the gutter into respectable conservative circles.”

This is an old stand-by for the neocons. Starting in the 1980’s they have slandered anyone who opposed their sociopathic agenda as anti-Semites or racists. The fact that the favorite tool of neoconservatism has always been the favorite tool of the far-left is not an accident. Despite their claims, the neocons were never conservative. Theirs is an ideology of the Left. They imagine a new world order where they sit atop as the moral arbiters, using extreme force to impose their will.

That incident was not all that interesting, but what is interesting is that few people bother to notice and those who did mocked Douglas Murray. His own comment section reads like satire cooked up by the anti-Semites. Many had to be trolls having a laugh at the expense of the geezers. On Twitter, Murray was mocked as a relic from an age in which people were still fooled by neoconservatives. Gonzalez just laughed the whole thing off as the rantings of an old man.

While a tempest in a teapot, there was a time when a bigfoot chattering skull like Murray could have someone thrown into the void this way. Bill Buckley was used this way back in the 1990’s when Bill Kristol forced him to denounce Buchanan. This trick worked thirty years ago but today it gets little more than a shrug. What people did notice is that it did not work. The ad hominem and guilt by association stuff is no longer the super weapon it was thirty years ago. The world has changed.

It is not just that these tactics do not work it is that they increasingly sound like the rantings of old people complaining about the world changing. This column from George Will before Christmas is a good example. His quill pen act was effective into the Bush years, but now it seems anachronistic and a bit ridiculous, like a man wearing a denim jacket with “disco forever” spelled out in rhinestones on the back. It reads like something that should have been written 40 years ago.

The tattered look of these old tactics also reveals the general shabbiness of the arguments behind the name calling. Will’s claims about individualism are pure nonsense and his claim that nationalism is collectivism is ridiculous. How did this man get through high school with such nonsense in his head? In other words, the datedness makes it easier to see that these people were never smart. Neoconservatism, like so-called conservatism, was a tactic, not a set of ideas.

It is not just among the chattering skulls that we are seeing a change. All of sudden, without anyone noticing, Gab is no longer the bogeyman. Hundreds of right-wing pols have joined and legitimate political players like Rasmussen have joined because they see that is where the crowd is going, the crowd they need to survive. People have noticed that the biggest players on the planet tried to destroy Torba and his company, but he simply refused to buckle to them.

Of course, this change in attitudes reflects the growing divide in society. Half of the people who voted for Joe Biden support internment camps for dissidents and house arrest for the non-complaint. Behind every double mask is someone who would volunteer to be a camp guard. One of the causes of revolution is that there is always some portion of society willing to support the regime. Disordered minds seek the order of the bloody fist imposing its will on society.

Those people, the fringe crazies who have been allowed to run free in the public square, are a fixture in human society. A central part of every human society is maintaining the rules that define the society. This means keeping the crazies under control and away from the levers of power. That is, perhaps, what we are beginning to see with these recent events. People are rejecting the moral claims of these people and living their lives in spite of them.

There is a great scene in the movie Braveheart in which the main character captures the leader of the kings guard. He looks down at first, as was required when addressing a superior man, but then he looks up into the man’s eyes as an equal. It is a great scene, because it reflects how control is exercised and broken. It seems that many are now willing to look moral scoundrels like Murray in the eyes and give them the treatment they so richly deserve.

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Monthly Archives: January 2022