By Whose Authority?

Posted on September 15, 2023 by thezman

One of the curiosities of this age is that no one ever asks the simplest of questions when faced with a social justice warrior. That question is “Who says?” Given that our society is drenched in moralizing, it seems like a good question. After all, any demands about what you ought to do have to come with a moral authority. The reason you must do something or not do something is because X says so.

What makes this even weirder is the taboos are not passed down to us from some ancient source that we no longer remember. The prohibition against making crossdresser jokes was made up a few years ago. The taboo on noticing things about group behavior dates back to the last century. It seems logical that people would want to know by whose authority these things are now taboo.

Maybe that is why the taboos proliferate. The explosion of things that are now prohibited or required is a form of squid ink. Keeping everyone busy sorting through the latest rules keeps them from asking this basic question. The reason for this is there is no adequate answer to this question. The moral code of what we call our democracy rests on nothing more than an empty space where God and tradition existed.

On the other hand, maybe this is just the natural end point of the process that got going in the late Middle Ages. The search for a rational explanation for normative claims like justice and equality has led us to the madness of this age. Since reason cannot be a moral authority, we have created something like the Krebs cycle that throws off novel taboos through the destruction of inherited traditions and customs.

It could also be that humans are moral animals. Common morality is what is needed to hold a large society together, so extreme selection pressure has been in favor of those who naturally assume there is a moral authority for a moral claim. Perhaps most of us are bred to never ask who says? Those who lack this natural instinct and dare ask this question end up thinking about it on the fringes of society.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Who Says?
Authority
- The Physical World
- The Moral World
Macintyre
A Godless Religion

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The Natural Solution

Posted on September 14, 2023 by thezman

What is the purpose of your life? How should a man live his life? How should we organize our societies and to what end? These are the questions that have vexed mankind for an awfully long time. In the modern age, we are enveloped in messaging about these questions. It seems that every ad is really a lecture about how you should live or how we should organize our societies to some end. This ad from a well-known toy company is a perfect example.

The liberal project, dating from the late Middle Ages to the current year, is about using reason to answer these questions. It is assumed that every life has a purpose and that there is a correct way to organize society. No one accepts that the purpose of the meth addict’s life is to be a meth addict and die on the street. Similarly, no one wants to accept that the best way to organize society is however you like. In other words, there is a right answer to these questions, not just an answer.

This is why thinking about how humans actually live is such a dangerous topic to those with an interest in such things. If you notice that one group of people behaves in a different way compared to other groups, then the right people may get the wrong idea about your commitment to the grand project. If you suggest that who we are is not something we can do much about because it is written in our genetic code, then it suggests the whole project is a waste of time.

This is why we see people in the human science take time from doing what they like to let the right people know that they do not have the wrong idea about things. This post from Gregory Clark professing to be a communist is one example. No one should care about his opinions on economics. He is not an economist or a politician. He is a historian known for tracing the heritability of social success. His book The Son Also Rises suggests genes play a large role in life outcomes.

Mr. Clark may have some interesting things to say about economics or economic policy, but no one who makes economic policy will ever read his book. That is not how economic policy gets made in the modern world. The point of his post and other public statements is to let everyone know he is not going to be any trouble when it comes to those big questions at the heart of Western society. This a ritual that academics must perform if they dare look at how man actually lives.

The irony, of course, is that if you are the sort of person who studies surnames as a proxy for genes in order to see if there is a correlation between genes and life outcomes, you probably know the answers to those questions. Further, your research just happens to confirm the answer. Even more ironic, the people who worry about the implications of such things are not fooled by the public ritual. There is something rather primitive about how these high-minded people act.

Putting all that aside, what lies at the heart of the great terror that has swept the academy and now society in general is the assumption that observations about human beings and their nature will answer those questions. If we notice that not all people are blessed with the same talents, it will tell us something about the purpose of our lives and how we ought to organize our societies. The people in that Apple ad are terrified of Mother Nature, because our best people are terrified too.

The truth of it is, a truth Gregory Clark surely knows, is that nature is silent on those big questions about how we ought to live and organize our societies. Nature cares about one thing and that is fitness. Specifically, every living thing is driven by its gene’s desire to make it to the next round of the game. If your genes make even a partial copy of themselves in the form of your children, that is a win. How you make that happen is of no interest to your genes or Mother Nature.

That sounds terribly cold, which may be one reason our best people are terrified by that being an answer to those questions. If we live in a world that does not care if we live or die and does not care if we experience any joy in the middle, well, that is a terribly harsh reality we have made for ourselves. Maybe we would have been better off not knowing the reality of the human condition. Perhaps that is why anyone who ventures in that direction gets the Eye of Sauron on him.

Another reason for the fear of Mother Nature is that if she is indifferent to those big questions at the heart of human existence, it means the answers must lie elsewhere, which leads to the most terrifying answer of all. That is, we will not be able to gain the answers to the big moral questions through reason. Reason is, after all, based on nature and our observations of the natural world. At least we assume our reason is our evolved ability to comprehend the natural world.

If we cannot reason our way to the right answers to those moral questions, then it leaves three options that no one likes. One option is the supernatural. For most of human existence, the gods answered these questions. Often, the gods answered these questions through what we think of us culture and tradition. We do things a certain way because of this thing that happened with Zeus in the before times. Of course, reality could be an illusion, but that is a topic for another time.

Where that leaves us if we rule out nature as the answer to the big questions, and we never think about the illusion of reality business, are the two things that the liberal project has been trying to erase since the beginning. The main role of the liberal project has been to remove what the liberals called superstition, but which everyone else calls God, as a possible answer. Secondarily, the project has removed past practice as an answer for why we live as we live.

That is the great dilemma of the liberal project. Like a scientist who has spent his career chasing one idea only to find that his work is a dead end, the liberal project perpetuates itself through control of the institutions. The reason they say science progresses one funeral at a time is because the old guys in every field tend to be the biggest obstacle to the young guys with new ideas. In the case of liberalism, the defenders of the dream for an answer in pure reason terrorize those who think otherwise.

In the end, Mother Nature is indifferent to the demands of her creation for answers to the great questions and she is indifferent to whether we understand this. The answers to the great questions do not lie in nature or in a natural reason. The best we can do with our natural reason is improve the general material well-being of the human condition and maybe reduce the friction in human relations. Otherwise, our reason is not much use to us in this process.

If we wish to know the answers, then it means returning to that which we have abandoned, which is to ask the gods for the answer. If that is unsatisfactory, then we can pretend they answered through our traditions and customs. It is not that any of this will provide the universally corrects answer. It is that it will provide an answer and then maybe we can stop arguing about these questions. Then maybe Western man will be able to live in peace with the rest of the world.

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What Lies Beneath

Posted on September 13, 2023 by thezman

Imagine a world of perfect candor where any hint of deception or inaccuracy is considered a blot on a man’s character. Everyone is raised to answer every question as honestly and forthrightly as possible. When the wife asks the husband if he thinks she is getting fat, he tells her he does think she is getting fat. Instead of getting upset and running into the bedroom, she excitedly hugs him because he was perfectly honest to her regarding an extremely sensitive matter.

This Vulcan-like candor would alter social relations. For example, stores would seek the best way to show their customers that they are completely honest. When they put something on sale, they would say it was because no one liked it or that they mistakenly bought too much of it and now need to unload it. The sign at the customer service window would read, “The customer is usually wrong.” Clerks would never say “have a good one” to customers.

That would still leave room for deception, so the stores would insist the product makers use candid labeling for their products. Frozen pizza boxes would read, “It tastes like cardboard, but it is cheap and easy to heat in the microwave.” Ingredient lists would include all of the ingredients, even the ones that cause cancer and those would be highlighted so the customer could see them. Organic food would not exist as everything about it is fake and therefore a lie.

Keep in mind that this imaginary world is not enforcing honestly at the point of a gun but as a matter of cultural preference. For some reason, the people in this society came to believe that only through perfect honesty can they have moral society. Therefore, the customs, folk legends and religious practices are all geared toward enforcing this idea that honesty is the highest virtue. Because honesty comes with status, everyone in public engages in honesty signaling contests.

It may seem ridiculous at first, but every human society selects for subjective qualities and against other qualities. The English prefer interesting over boring, which is why their popular figures appear eccentric and weird. Americans dislike phonies so popular figures try hard to look sincere, even when lying. There is no objective reason to prefer interesting over dull or sincere over inauthentic. Preferring these qualities is not more or less strange than celebrating candor.

Now think about this in the American context. Walk into any grocery store in America and the first thing you will experience is a lie. Typically, the produce section is located at the front of the store. There will be piles of fruits and vegetables labeled organic, but as a practical matter there is no such thing. Even if the fruit is grown according to the rules of the organic cult, the suppliers lose track of it long before it reaches the store, so there is no way to know what is organic and what is inorganic.

The stores know this. They put the best-looking stuff on the table marked organic and jack up the price to reinforce the lie. The suppliers know this, and the growers know it too, if you can get them to be honest about it. Everything about that organic tomato you bought is a lie, including your belief that it is better than the other tomato. You reward yourself by accepting the lie. You reward the store for lying to you and the store rewards its suppliers for lying to them. It is liars all the way down.

You have made it a few feet into the store, and you are deluged with lies. Venture further and you are swimming in an ocean of lies. The packaging of food is carefully designed to trick consumers. Tens of billions of dollars have gone into figuring out how to trick people into buying things. Of course, everything about the American diet is a lie perpetrated by the government at the behest of agribusiness. A man from Planet Candor would be horrified by the frozen food section.

Now, think about what sort of government would work best in a society run on the principle of complete candor. Monarchy could work, but it would be less than honest to claim that the son of the king is the most qualified to rule. A ruling council of the most honest citizens, maybe picked by the people, would probably be best as it would reward candor with the highest office. Candidates for seats on the council would prove their worth through campaigns of total honesty.

In fact, democracy would work well on Planet Candor. One of the foundational principles of democracy is that “all members must have equal and effective opportunities to learn about the consequences and alternatives of a proposal.” In a society where honesty is the highest virtue, the pressure to make sure everyone is as well informed as possible would lead to the most informed citizens. You would not have to worry about voter fraud or ballot stuffing on Planet Candor.

This is where you might think something is wrong. America is more democratic than any society in history and it is riddled with lies and corruption. The man holding the highest office recently claimed he was at the World Trade Center on 9/11. He repeatedly tells outlandish whoppers like this about himself. He is in office because he was the beneficiary of the most corrupt election in American history. That was made possible by a tsunami of lies from the mass media.

We seem to have a dilemma. On the one hand, the society of perfect honesty seems like the ideal place for democracy. On the other hand, democracy in practice results in a society ruled by the least honest people. When you think back to how our marketplace operates on a foundation of lies, it suggests any open market, whether it is for goods and service or ideas, becomes an elaborate game of liar’s poker. The marketplace rewards deception, so you end up with a lot of liars.

There are some possible solutions to this dilemma. One is that humans naturally want to live in a society controlled by liars. We have steadily become more democratic because mankind is slowly reaching its desired end. Alternatively, democracy and the marketplace turn even the most honest people into liars. If someone unleashed democracy on Planet Candor, it would quickly devolve into Planet Deception and come to resemble modern America.

There is a third option. Let us suppose that Planet Candor operates on perfect honesty because long ago a powerful force came to their planet and told them that unless they stamped out deception, their planet would be destroyed. Over time this belief in the risk of deception became a central part of who they are as a people and who each person is in relation to society. Put another way, honesty has become a religion for them, one that leads to salvation for themselves and their posterity.

Under such conditions, the acid of democracy and the free market would land on a society immune to its corrosive effects. All those snakes selling organic apples in the produce section of the grocery store would find no takers. Similarly, the fig leaf makers would have no reason to exist. After all, those they did manage to tempt would be selected out of the gene pool due to low status. In time, democracy would be a mechanism to select against the dishonest.

John Adams said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Outside of the various forms of authoritarianism, this is true of all governments. You cannot have an honest monarchy if the people over whom it rules are immoral. You cannot have a benevolent dictator if his people are liars and crooks. Morality is what ultimately controls the behavior of the people and what makes good governance possible.

That is the source of what plagues us today. The structures we inherited assume a specific moral foundation. When the ruling class that emerged with the American empire in the middle of the last century exiled the principles that made up that moral foundation, society was left without any protection from the temptations that lie in the marketplace for goods and ideas. The endless haggling over what we ought to do is only possible when there is no moral authority.

It also explains the panicked frenzy by the ruling class to conjure a moral framework to justify their behavior. The endless chanting about diversity is not intended to convince anyone that it is a strength, but to prevent anyone from asking who gave them the authority to fill our communities with strangers. The weird sexual fetishes they have unleashed are squid ink to prevent anyone from asking them upon what moral authority they are basing their sweeping claims about society.

The great critic of the Enlightenment, Joseph de Maistre, famously said, “Every country has the government it deserves.” Most people think this means the people deserve punishment for supporting unscrupulous politicians. What de Maistre meant here is the morality of society determines the type of government. In the case of France, stripping away the Catholic Church and the monarchy left French society without a moral foundation for government. Tyranny is what followed.

That is what we see happening in the West. The American empire jettisoned its moral foundations a century ago and the result is an empire that imposes cultural and spiritual chaos on the West. Democracy and the promiscuous lying that we see are just symptoms of the moral hollowness of the empire. The West is now ruled by moral nullities who demand to be treated as moral arbiters and in the end, they are left to operate as dictators holding power by force.

Staircase Wits

Posted on September 12, 2023 by thezman

Whenever the downward trend in Western intelligence gets discussed, the focus is always on the right side of the curve. America is no longer able to get to the moon because NASA is full of diversity, but it also lacks the smart guys it used to have to solve the necessary problems. In other words, the West is no longer able to make these great leaps because the decline in human capital has reduced the number of geniuses that are always needed to make those leaps.

At the heart of this line of thinking is the assumption that a society can only be successful if it is moving forward toward something and expanding in terms of material prosperity and cultural progress. This may be true, but it is one of those assumptions that has been handed down so many times that no one remembers who made the original claim or why they made it. Why must the economy always expand? Why must humanity expand its domain to the stars?

One reason to ask those questions is to think about the other side of the bell curve that gets neglected in these discussions. What happens to a society when the supply of stupid people increases? The model of societal intelligence is always a smooth normal distribution, so when the number of smart people declines it means the number of stupid people must increase. The curve moves left. What is the impact on society when the curve moves beyond some critical point?

The easy answer is Somalia. East Africa has some of the lowest averages IQ’s in the known world so it is used as an example and a warning. Without the interference of the more developed countries of the world, East Africa would quickly move back to a lightly populated land full of pastoral people. The societies of East Africa would look like what we think the world looked prior to agriculture. Life for the people who lived there would be nasty, brutish, and short.

There are a number of problems with this line of thinking. For starters, the West is not going to suddenly drop thirty IQ points. It is a process. According to Ed Dutton and others who have tried to quantify Western IQ decline, every ten years we are losing about one IQ point. Put another way, we are about three hundred years from reaching the level of East Africa if nothing changes. The fact is Western man was never at this point and will never decline to that point.

More important though is the fact that people do not live on the smooth bell curves preferred by those who like modeling things. Model makers are the sort of people who like a tidy universe, so they move back from reality as far as they need to in order to get a model of the subject that is neat and tidy. Smooth normal distributions make for aesthetically pleasing graphs, so it is assumed that everything that needs to be measured will result in a normal distribution.

That is not how intelligence works in daily experience. Instead, it is like a weird set of stairs on which people are various IQ groups stand. The people who are in your IQ group are the people you see every day. The people a step above and below are people you will experience less often. The people several steps above and below are people you rarely encounter. When you do encounter them, you do not notice until something happens the requires intelligence.

For example, when an averagely smart person stops at a sandwich place for lunch, he may run into a low IQ person working there. The guy tasked with keeping the floors clean and stocking the shelves might be a dumb guy. The shop itself is run by a smart guy and he has people mostly at or just below normal level, but he has a few guys a step or two below that for the menial work. If it is a sole proprietorship, then the owner is probably a step above the average person.

This is where to think about the decline in intelligence. In many jobs like this, the owner used to depend on people from the normal step to do the work. Many were young in their first real job. Many were part-time people. These jobs were designed for people at or close to the average IQ of the West. The few people a couple of steps below were supervised officially and unofficially by the normals. Normal people served the normal customers close to their level.

Now, when the curve moves left, the supply of people who can fill the jobs at the sandwich show will also decline along with the supply of guys who can build rockets to take people to the moon. Sure, many of the jobs can be staffed with people a step or two down the IQ staircase, but something else happens too. The demands on the guy running the place and the remaining normal people increases. Suddenly, customers of the sandwich shop experience smart fraction theory.

This is where that staircase image is important. The confusion at the sandwich shop resulting from an overloaded smart fraction means the people on that large average step make direct contact with people several steps below them. They suddenly have to deal with people with whom they lack a common understanding. Assumptions about things like timeliness and efficiency are missing. All of a sudden, lunch becomes a safari into an alien world of incomprehensible ineptitude.

For all of human history, as far as we know, the people of sub-Saharan Africa existed like people everywhere. The typical African lived his life on one of the steps on the IQ staircase, rarely experiencing anyone beyond a step above or below. Then Europeans arrived and the African was suddenly confronted by people several steps above the experience of the average African. Europeans did not just have better stuff. They had an alien and incomprehensible way of thinking about things.

The West is now experiencing the reverse. Through generations of dysgenic cultural policy and mass migration from the global south, your typical European is like the typical African centuries ago. Instead of people with magical abilities to conquer nature, the normal person is experiencing people lacking the basic ability to function in even the most basic jobs. It is not that the sandwich shop is disorganized, but that the people working there are too stupid to be organized.

Roll this out across society and European people are not only experiencing a decline in their own IQ, but they are experiencing people with an IQ several steps below them on a daily basis. Intelligence suddenly moves from the periphery to center stage for the average European person. This means it becomes even more acute for the people a step above them for whom the experience is even starker. Most Europeans are about to go on safari in their own societies.

Just as contact with the West has permanently changed the identity of sub-Saharan Africans, this new process will change Western people and society. If you cannot run the sandwich shop along Western lines due to the decline in intelligence, the guy running it must find a new solution. The dilemma of the sandwich shop owner will play out across that vast middle step on the IQ staircase. The people on that step will have to suddenly recognize the staircase itself.

Our Democracy

Posted on September 11, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the creative problems in the making science fiction television, a post about the the Hitchcock film Rear Window, and the Sunday podcast which is a rant about fate women. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

The phrase “our democracy” has become a popular chant among the political class, always used as an excuse for anti-democratic action. You can be sure they will be saying it like they have a weird form of Tourette’s when the time comes to bar Donald Trump from the Republican nomination. “For the good of our democracy, we are going to remove the most popular guy from the Republican ballot.” In his place they will appoint someone with little or no support.

Of course, this will be met with howls from the usual corners. They will jump up and down demanding everyone notice the hypocrisy. What “hypocrisy” means in the sector we call the Right is “they are doing that which we would never have the courage to do even if allowed.” When the group we call the Left uses this word they mean, “We have found some minor contradiction in the criticism of us, so we are now free to ignore all of that and continue on with our work.”

This difference in language is important to understanding why the political class has become so fond of the phrase “our democracy.” For normal people, democracy is a process by which the policy preferences of the majority win out. In the crudest form it is understood to mean majority rule. For most people, however, it means a process by which the voters select representatives who then haggle and bargain over public policy in legislatures while following an established set of rules.

Democracy can have things that are not majority rule. The most obvious is the Electoral College system for electing a president. Normal people understand that this is not majority rule, but a way to protect the interests of small states against the interests of large states within the democratic process. The Senate is another example of something that is not democratic in the narrow sense, but part of the democratic framework of the system to maintain balance.

There used to be a time when students were taught that the American system was not a democracy but a representative republic. Democracy is mob rule and mobs can be very fickle, especially under stress. The system of checks and balances in the system is to slow the mob so that the will of the people can mature. The people may not get what they want initially, but after a series of elections the will of the people wills out and we get public policy that reflects the general consensus.

Obviously, that is nothing like reality. One part of becoming a dissident is accepting that this stuff you learned in school is at best naïve and at worst a lie. The two-party system that we have is designed to prevent ideas outside the consensus of the two parties from entering the political debate. It also works to prevent the ruling class from having to address the concerns of the people. The “democratic process” is a fig leaf used by the ruling elite to subdue any resistance to their rule.

Now, the right side of the political class does not think about this as those people are generally selected for their stupidity. Their job is to wave their pom-poms at the suburban peasants while the system celebrates itself. The left side, on the other hand, does think about it and they have a different definition of democracy. Their definition of democracy begins with what they think the will of the people ought to be if it is completely informed and allowed to blossom.

You see, you can only have democracy when the people are equally informed and allowed to fully participate in the debate. In order to do this, the citizens must fully understand their own interests and to do this they must come to understand their purpose within the framework of society. Until you can fully know yourself, you cannot fully participate in the democratic process. As a result, most people are tricked into voting against their interests or the interests of society.

One part of defending democracy is to prevent this from happening. The defenders of “our democracy” are always seeking to shape the public space so that the people can discover their true purpose and act on it through the process. This cannot happen if there are people out there spreading disinformation or misinformation, so one job of the democracy defenders is to root out the bad actors from the public square. You cannot have democracy if everyone is allowed to speak.

What is important here is that the defenders of democracy are not defending a process but the idea of the true will of the people. Since the process can be corrupted, it can result in undemocratic results, like the 2016 election. In a true democracy bad people like Trump and his voters do not exist, much less win elections. In order to defend democracy, the defenders of democracy were forced to use any means necessary, even undemocratic ones, to stop Donald Trump.

Now, the defenders of democracy assume certain things about the purpose of society, its natural end point, which means they assume certain things about the purpose of the people who will one day populate the fully flowered democracy. The most important foundational item is the assumption that once everyone is fully democratic and fully understands her purpose, everyone agrees on the purpose of society. This means politics withers away as there is nothing to debate.

Since the defenders of democracy understand all of this, the presence of people who oppose them means society is not democratic. The larger project requires that these people be removed by any means necessary. As long as these enemies of democracy are standing in the way of progress, the defenders of democracy have a right and an obligation to do what is required to defeat them. It turns out that you can only reach true democracy through authoritarian means.

That last bit is critical. The defenders of democracy assume that once the conditions for democracy are firmly and unquestionable in place, the people in the system will have no choice but to realize their true purpose as democratic people. At that magical point, politics collapses as all moral disputes are gone. There is no need for elections and the rule of law because everyone at all times agrees on everything. There is no coercion because there is no dissent from the moral order of democracy.

This is why there can be no compromise between the people who see democracy as a process and those who see it as a moral conclusion. The former group not only tolerates dissent but sees it as proof the system works. The latter group sees dissent as proof the system is failing. This contrast in moral visions makes it impossible for the two camps to coexist in the same society. If you want a democratic society, you can never tolerate people who want a democracy.

The Social Gospel Hour

Posted on September 8, 2023 by thezman

I mentioned in a previous episode that I might do a show on the Social Gospel Movement so I thought it would be a good topic to start the fall season. When I sat down to put the show together it occurred to me that there was another way to talk about the topic other than describing the people and ideas. After all, the only reason to care about this is for how it still casts a shadow over the present day.

Instead of doing a history type show I went in another direction. One of things that is striking when you read about the Social Gospel Movement is just how much of their language is with us today. In the show I point out that if you remove the references to God and Scripture, these people would sound like our current scolds. They would be demanding Musk ban me from Twitter.

That is one point of the show for those who will not listen. The present lunacy we are experiencing is not due to some bug in the system or the work of alien outsiders exploiting our kindness. The modern Social Justice Warrior is a uniquely American thing, the full flowering of part of the American character. That blue haired crazy at the office is more American than anyone in the dissident right.

That is not an easy thing for people to accept because it means the problem is far different from what is comfortable. It means there is no simple answer. We do not just have to win an election and then ban CRT in the schools. We do not just have to get back to our constitutional principles. Those simple answers are not answers, but ways to avoid looking at the real problem, which is in the mirror.

This Week’s Show

Contents

The State of Things
The Debate About How We Got Here
The Blame Game
American Identity
Social Gospel Movement
In Practice
Legacy
The Problems

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Fortune’s Wheel

Posted on September 7, 2023 by thezman

In August 1936, the Soviet Union held the first of a series of trials of former Bolsheviks who had been accused of various crimes against the state. The first group accused were Old Bolsheviks who had been allies of Stalin at one point. They had later sided with Trotsky and been stripped of their positions. By this point Trotsky was in exile and his supporters were all in various states of disfavor. One element of the first trial was the claim that the accused were still in contact with Trotsky.

At the time, the international Left was firmly in the Bolshevik camp, as this was the first successful radical government in the world. Whatever the doctrinal difference within the international radical camp, no one could deny that the Bolsheviks had managed to take power in a large important country. As a result, radicals found a way to justify what was happening to the accused. The cause was more important than any man, so no one dared criticize what was happening.

Even when it should have been clear that the trials had little to do with the alleged crimes, radicals around the world found a way to justify what was happening in the name of solidarity. “No enemies to the left” was never a real thing in radical politics, as left-wing politics has always been defined by endless schisms and disputes among rival factions but as the show trials progressed, it became a useful way to rally support in the face of criticism from outside radicalism.

What followed, of course, was more show trials of Old Bolsheviks, who were found guilty and then shot. A few escaped death and were sent to labor camps where they were expected to die. The show trials were then followed by waves of arrests, executions, and purges of the party. No one knows for sure how many died in Stalin’s purges, but the general consensus is between seven hundred thousand and one million people were killed in the process.

There are a lot of lessons about the nature of human society to be drawn from the Bolsheviks and especially Stalin. Radicalism since the French Revolution has always been about a radical break from the past, but in every case, it turns out be a horrific replay of the worst of mankind’s past. Stalin was the extreme example of the worst Tsar, an industrial strength version of Ivan IV, rather than the leader of a revolutionary movement to usher in a radical new form of society.

Another lesson of the purges was that there is never any appeal to the humanity and compassion of the radicals. Even when Stalin purged the beloved Nikolai Bukharin, radicals found a way to justify it. Stalin’s decision to murder his old friend and most loyal Bolshevik should have been viewed as a monstrous crime that could only be committed by a monster, instead radicals found a way to explain it away. Again, the cause is bigger than any one man or group of men.

Of course, the greatest lesson of all is that when the old rules break down or are willfully destroyed, what is left is a lawless world. Once the law collapses, everyone becomes an outlaw by definition. In a world where everyone lives outside the law, the people who survive and thrive are always the most cunning and ruthless. In the case of the Bolsheviks, Stalin was not the smartest or the most persuasive, but he was the most cunning and ruthless, so he came out on top.

All of this would be ancient history if not for what we see happening in Washington with the show trials being run by the ruling junta. Calling the people in charge the Biden administration is no longer sensible as it is clear that Biden is deep in the throes of dementia and barely able to do basic things. The government is now run by a collection of people who operate in the shadows. They control things through the people appointed to various posts in the administration.

Much like Stalin’s trials, the process has moved from arresting minor figures on trumped up charges to now arresting the former president. It is not inconceivable to think they may exile Trump in order to keep him off the ballot. Of course, the viciousness and cruelty of the show trials grows worse with every turn. A judge just sentenced the leaders of the Proud Boys to decades in prison. The judge used the sentencing hearings as a chance to denounce the enemies of the party.

That is another feature of the Stalin trials that bears attention. In every one of the show trials, the judges were outlandish supporters of the party and the charges brought against the accused. These were men picked because of their uncertain status within the party, particularly with regards to Stalin. The judges in the current show trials seem to feel the same pressure, so they are making sure the cases proceed exactly as the party expects them to proceed.

Of course, the radicals in the cheering sections are following the same script as the radicals who cheered the show trials. The same people who cry salty tears over a black criminal getting shot in the commission of a crime are cheering the harsh penalties handed down to grandmothers in these show trials. The cause is more important than the rule of law and their thirst for the blood of their enemies trumps whatever sense of justice that ever existed in their souls.

The most important lesson of the Stalin years is that the terror that Stalin inflicted ended when Stalin’s life ended. At no point was he talked out of murdering people. He never had second thoughts or pangs of guilt. After his death, a letter from his old friend Bukharin was found in which Bukharin appealed to Stalin as a friend. Stalin kept it in his desk so he could read it from time to time, presumably so he could remember how he outmaneuvered even his closest friends.

Tyranny ends when the tyrant and his supporters end. That last part is the most important part of the process. When Stalin died his supporters were then purged and sidelined, with some ending up in the camps. The party leadership went through a de-Stalinization phase. The reason is the tyrant is always a symptom. It is his supporters in the cheering section who are the ultimate cause. It is only when you remove the fanatics and psychopaths that normalcy can return.

During the Napoleonic Wars, there was a British officer named Sir William Sidney Smith who was particularly good at vexing Napoleon in battle. Eventually, the French captured him and Napoleon had him put in a Paris prison. Smith was able to escape with the help of royalist enemies of Napoleon. In the prison was found a shingle on which he had written a letter. In the letter Smith quoted a passage from Rousseau that should be inspiration for all political prisoners

“Fortune’s wheel makes strange revolutions, it must be confessed; but for the term revolution to be applicable, the turn of the wheel must be complete. You are today as high as you can be. Very well. I envy not your good fortune, for mine is better still. I am as low in the career of ambition as a man can well descend; so that, let this capricious dame, fortune, turn her wheel ever so little–I must necessarily mount, for the same reason you must descend.”

The men and women rotting in dungeons at the hands of the regime are in the very condition of Sir William Sidney Smith. They are in prison because they vex the regime, not because they are outlaws. In a general sense, all of us are in the same condition, just free to talk around until another example is needed. Like Sir William Sidney Smith, fortunes wheel will turn, and we will rise the regime shall fall. Those who cheered the loudest for the show trials will be remembered the most.

The Spirit Of The Law

Posted on September 6, 2023 by thezman

In the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist, Mr. Bumble is told by the court that the law assumes his wife acts under his direction. Mr. Bumble responds with, “If the law supposes that, the law is a ass – a idiot”. The ass in this case is the donkey, an animal known for its obstinance. Over time the expression has been used to point out that the letter of the law can not only contradict the spirit of the law, but the law itself can contradict common sense and objective reality.

The more important point here though is that the law is an effort to formalize the commonly held moral code, a set of rules that determine what members of a society ought to do and ought not to do. It is not the moral code itself, but an effort to write it down on paper so it is clear to everyone. Fundamental to most ethical systems is the assertion that ignorance of the law is no excuse. You need to know the rules, which is why they are written down so that you can know them.

Despite the law seeming to be an ass, there is a logic to the law. That logic, like all systems, starts from some foundational items. These are the things that everyone in the law assumed to be true. For example, the Bill of Rights is supposed to be a list of starting points for understanding the limits of government. These are not supposed to be up for debate. As far as the law is supposed to be concerned, these are settled truths that cannot be challenged or violated.

This gets to an important point. Every system of oughts, the list of things you ought to do and the things you ought not do, begins with a set of eternal truths that rest on a recognized authority. Christians are free to eat pork because they do not recognize the moral authority of the Muslims and Jews. The prohibition against eating pork rests on the moral authority of those two religions. It is not an objective truth, but a subjective one that works only when you accept it.

The law is a system of oughts and therefore assumes an authority and that authority is supposed to be the Constitution but also tradition as expressed through precedent or the accumulation of court decisions. The Constitution is the starting point for what we all agree is the system of oughts. Precedent is the accumulated decisions over time on the things that were not expressly covered in the Constitution. Combined this makes up the system of oughts that define the morality of our society.

That last bit is what is often missed. Once something is formally put on the list of things you ought not do, it quickly becomes part of the informal list of taboos. The reason for this is that we naturally assume that in a democratic society the law reflects not only the general will but general morality. If the law says it is not allowed, it must mean that it is outside of that which is morally acceptable. In other words, once the court makes it against the law, it quickly becomes immoral.

An obvious example of this in action is homosexual marriage. Up until a few years ago people understood that marriage was about creating children. Since nature dictates how this is done, marriage must be one man and one woman. Then one day some people decided that the laws of nature are up for debate. Two men, it was argued, could be married, despite the biological impossibility of it. This group remained a ridiculous minority until they were able to get the courts to side with them.

In the blink of an eye, the issue of homosexual marriage went from absurd poke in the eye of Mother Nature to settled moral principle. Conservatives who opposed the idea then suddenly defended it. Even social conservatives have dropped their public opposition to homosexual marriage. You can see the change in moral attitudes in the polling on the issue. This absurd mockery of the laws of nature became part of the accepted moral code with the stroke of a judge’s pen.

Another example is the Brown decision. Central to the jihad against white people in this age are the novel moral principles invented by the court. In fact, the court not only created two new moral claims, but made those the controlling principles, superseding even those items written in the Constitution itself. As a result, the constitutional order went from a system of limits on government power to a system of demands on the white population of the country.

The same process is happening with the Bostock decision. In this case a majority of the justices agreed that discriminating against men pretending to be women so they can beat up girls on the soccer field is a form of sexual discrimination and therefore violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule points out, this is a ridiculous claim on its face, but it also opens the door for adding yet another novel principle to the legal order.

As we have seen with other novelties from the court, it will not be long before this one sinks into the moral fabric of society. If you do not want your daughters pulverized by burly men in sundresses on the ball field, you will be shunned from polite society or maybe even suffer legal persecution. The fact that the Bostock decision was written by a so-called conservative judge, one anointed by the allegedly conservative Federalist Society and appointed by Trump is critical.

We used to worry about putting Catholics on the bench because it was assumed they would operate from Catholic morality, rather than the morality of high church Protestantism that informed the political order. It was assumed that judges were like all men, and they would operate from within a moral framework, formally expressed through organized religion until recent times. Catholics had Catholic morality, while Episcopalians had Anglican morality.

In other words, the text of the Constitution and the traditions and precedents that informed it were based on a moral framework that existed outside of it. The political system was founded by and for people who assumed a moral order based in high church Protestantism. It did not prohibit men dressed as women from beating up girls on the ball fields because no Christian people would ever conceive of such a thing, much less tolerate advocacy for it.

Once that morale framework was removed from the system, the Constitutional order was left without a moral foundation. It no longer had moral authority on which to rest the list of things members of society ought to do and ought not do. The political system was left to conjure one to replace it. The Brown decision and now Bostock rest on the moral authority of the new religion that has evolved since the middle of the last century, which promises salvation through universal liberation.

In the end, the law is a formalization of the moral code of a society. That moral code reflects the identity of the people who rule society. The foundation of which is either something outside of the human condition like the gods or the collective identity of the people who control society. Once the American ruling class abandoned Christianity as the moral foundation, it eventually settled on the collective identity of the ruling elite that emerged in the middle of the last century.

The trouble is, that ruling elite cannot settle on an exclusive identity as it is a hodgepodge of people from various tribes. Exclusivity therefore runs counter to their shared reality, so their new identity is the Open Society. It is a polite fiction but all ethical codes contain polite fictions. The new ruling elite is every bit as exclusive and discriminating as any ruling elite, it is just that they assume their calling is to usher in the Open Society, a world of free of discrimination and prejudice.

Musk Versus The Demon

Posted on September 5, 2023 by thezman

Imagine you have a business contract with someone who is supposed to provide a service of some sort to you. They do the work, and you pay them. The contract has conditions for when they do the work and how much you pay them, depending upon what they do and how they do it. There is also a clause that says they will pay you if they fail to fulfill their end of the contract. If for some reason they fail to fulfil or break the agreement, they pay you an agreed upon sum.

Before the contract begins, they notify you that they are no longer willing to perform the work and will be breaking the agreement. You try to get an explanation, but the only thing they say is that they are sending you a check for the stipulated amount in the liquidating damages clause of the contract. Quickly you learn that no other vendor performing the service will take your business. You then learn that some shadowy group is threatening anyone who would do business with you.

Naturally, you will think this must be against the law. This shadowy group is deliberately trying to harm you by threating people with whom you conduct business. That has to be illegal, at least it should be illegal. Even if it is not illegal, it has to be something you can bring to court and ask for damages. After all, this shadowy group is deliberately trying to damage you and your business. That is the only logical reason for their action. Now that they have done quantifiable harm, you should have a case.

Putting aside the corrupt state of American courts, your expectation for compensation and maybe even relief is reasonable. There are exceptions. For example, if the shadowy group in question is a criminal enterprise, like the Mafia, then the civil courts are not the right venue. The judge is probably going to be afraid to rule against them and if you get a jury trial then getting a fair jury will be difficult. The threat of death will overcome their zeal for justice.

You also have the issue of foreign governments who operate in the United States and outside American law. The Israeli group Black Cube, for example, does work for people like Harvey Weinstein, who regularly intimidated his victims. Suing such a company in civil court would be pointless. There is also the strong possibility that they would get the government to intervene on their behalf. Serving them and getting them to appear in an American court would be extremely difficult.

This is the background for what could be a very big story. The last few days Elon Musk has been making noises about suing the ADL. He is claiming that the ADL has been threatening advertisers as a way to control social media platforms. Further, he says that the ADL is intimidating his potential advertisers with the claim that Musk is an anti-Semite, and his platform supports antisemitism. As a result, he may take them to court for defamation and dump their private communications.

Assuming Musk is confining himself to American courts, he is most likely wasting his time with the defamation claims. American courts have decided that connected people like the ADL can say anything they like about people who are currently out of favor with the beautiful people. The New York Times just about admitted they lied about Sarah Palin and did so on purpose with malice of forethought. The judge told the jury to rule in favor of the Time because Palin has cooties.

Musk would get the same treatment, but he has another angle. He could argue that the point of the ADL’s campaign against him and his company is to harm his business by interfering in the contracts he has with advertisers and partners. If he can show that their claims of antisemitism are a threat against anyone who would do business with him, which is probably not a hard thing to do, given the behavior of the ADL, then he may have a case against the ADL.

Further, Musk is an extraordinarily rich man with lots of rich friends. There is no question that some of them have had run-ins with the ADL. He could put out the call for others to join the case if they have similar claims. Imagine if his buddy Mark Zuckerberg was willing to support Musk in confirming that the ADL uses gangster tactics to threaten social media platforms. It is unlikely for obvious reasons, but there are millions of potential victims of the ADL’s gangsterism.

This brings us back to those exceptions. Putting aside the grotesque corruption in the American legal system, there is the Mafia and foreign player issue. The ADL operates like other organized crime groups. They use intimidation of government officials as a way to avoid the law. They have their tentacles wrapped around state and federal government agencies. Getting lawyers to take the case, much less getting a judge to hear it is an enormous hurdle for Musk.

Then you have the outlaw nature of the ADL. In a Twitter space on the subject, someone pretending to be a Canadian named Vivian Bercovici was exposed by Keith Woods as an agent of Black Cube. She tried to deny it, but when that was impossible, she dropped off the call and then deleted her Twitter profile. Elon Musk and everyone around him can be sure that these people will unleash all of their intelligence assets against any effort against the ADL.

In the end, the best Musk can hope for is a successful public relations campaign against the ADL and their tactics. For generations, the ADL had exploited the sense of fair play that is a central part of the American character. Their central message is they just want for Jews what everyone else gets, a fair shake. If Musk can expose that as a fraud and expose their gangster tactics, then they lose their moral standing, which is the only reason their tactics are effective.

There is more to it, of course. As we saw with Jeffrey Epstein and Robert Maxwell, these people play the hardest of hardball. Maybe things have reached the point where the ADL decides to send a message to the rest of the oligarchs by making an example of the world’s richest man. Maybe this is all theater by Musk and the ADL to shift focus away from more pressing matters. If one is looking for a little hope, this Musk versus the ADL is a nice bit of sunshine to brighten the mood.

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The Coming Crackup

Posted on September 4, 2023 by thezman

Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about the most taboo film in history, a post about the terribly racist film King Kong, and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

We tend to think of wars as isolated stand-alone events, but in reality, most wars are a part of a long process. A new power is on the rise and seeks to exploit its new status at the expense of other nations around it. The eventual war formalizes its new relationship among those nations. Wars can also reveal an underlying change in relations among nations that is not easy to see until there is war. That is what we are seeing with the war in Ukraine, which is well into its second year.

With the war in Ukraine, Americans fall into three buckets. The vast majority of people are not particularly interested. If they think of it at all it is in the context of another political boondoggle. Then you have the regime toadies who reflexively support giving the store away to Ukraine. These are hyper-partisan people who think what the party tells them to think. The final group are the realists who see the war as another neocon project that promises to end in disaster.

In Europe it is a far different matter. The pro-EU camp is the majority and totally onboard with the Ukraine project. They see this as an extension of the EU project to bring all of Europe into the post-nationalist world. Then you have the conservatives who are small in number and sound like American dissidents. They are skeptical of the Ukraine project and see it as another power grab by the EU elite. These are the voices calling for dialogue and negotiations.

There is a third group, the nationalists, that are unique to Europe. These are people who are opposed to the European project on strictly nationalist grounds. In the small countries, these people are fanatically behind Ukraine, mostly because they are spasmodically anti-Russia. It is not so much that they support Ukraine in the war but that they hate Russia. They see Azov as an example for themselves. For them, nationalism has become opposition to Russia.

There is a big caveat here. The nationalists from the traditional major powers, countries like Britain, France, Italy and even Germany, are more like American dissidents in that they see the war in nationalist versus internationalist terms. For them, Ukraine is just another project of the Global American Empire. The EU is tagging along because it is what they always do when they see a chance to grow their power. They also have a sympathetic view of Russia in this conflict.

The gap between these two camps within the European nationalist space reflects a much larger divide that cannot be closed. This post by Scandinavian nationalist Frodi Midjord gives a sense of it. The tone and content are what an American expects from the neocon critics of dissidents. The content operates in a reality that it is outside the reality of even pro-Ukrainian supporters in America. Frodi’s starting place is an entirely different conception of the reality of the war.

That starting place is the moral framing. Small nation nationalists, like Frodi, see Russia as the only villain. For no reason at all, this multi-racial empire invaded Ukraine in order to crush their nationalist dreams. Large nation nationalists, like American dissidents, see the war as another globalist project. They point to the many regime change operations over the last decades and see Ukraine, which also got the regime change treatment in 2014, as a continuation of that trend.

This explains the nasty, hyperbolic tone of that post. From his point of view, Tucker represents that other side, the nationalists and American dissidents who view Russia as just another country dealing with the empire. For him, it is not about facts and reason, but about the moral framing. If you see Russia as anything but the locus of evil, then you are on the wrong side of the issue. You see the same tone from Greg Johnson, who is close to the small nation nationalists.

Again, this difference in moral framing with regards to the war in Ukraine is reflective of much larger differences in general. The most obvious is between American dissidents and European nationalists. The nature of America means that European style nationalism is an alien concept. American nationalism is impossible for obvious reasons, but even white nationalism is unworkable. There is simply too much diversity within white America to make it work.

Here is a reality that is hard for Americans to accept. America, as in North America or even the New World, is not Europe. North America, to limit things a bit, is a different civilization than Europe. It was built by Europeans, but by and for a different sort of European than exists on the continent. While there is a lot of shared culture and history, it is not enough to overcome the differences. Europeans cannot understand North American civilization because they are not us.

In Europe itself, we see a similar gap between the small nation nationalists and the big nation nationalists. The former group’s identity as nationalists is always in the shadow of the latter nations, which have a history of invading them. Survival for small nations is always about navigating around the large nations. For the large nations, survival is never really the question. Instead, their nationalist impulses are directed to their relative status among the great powers of the world.

It is why micronations like Estonia and Finland are boiling with passion about beating Russia in the Ukraine war. They have thrown their lot in with the EU, which means the Global American Empire. They see the world as a choice between masters, so their nationalism is about picking the best master. French nationalists, in contrast, see the choice as between a master and no master. They have no fear of Russia, but they do see the Global American Empire as a real threat.

As the Global American Empire continues to decline, the gap between American sensibilities and European ones will become too big to ignore. This will become apparent in the next year as the war weighs on Europe. At some point, European elites will have to make a choice. They can continue to follow the Americans into the abyss or make a break and look out for their own interests. The concept of the West existing on both sides of the Atlantic will come into question.

In Europe, the logic of the EU will come under pressure. How reasonable is it for France, Italy, and Germany to take advice from Estonia? Why is Poland enjoying the benefits of the EU when it is Germany and France that make it possible? Why is Hungary in the EU and Britain outside of it? Why is Germany bankrupting itself over Ukraine just to pacify Latvia? The war is exposing the vast difference in world view between small Europe and big Europe.

In the end, the coming crackup of the West is really just a return to the natural order of things that should have happened in the 20th century. The Continent has always been defined by France, Germany, and Italy. As the American empire recedes, those three nations can reclaim their place atop Europe. The smaller nations will return to doing what they must, and the periphery will return to the periphery. The great crackup will return the West back to its natural order.

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