The Empire Of Lies

Posted on June 11, 2024 by thezman

One of the defining features of this age is the collapse in respect for the spirit of the laws through the reinterpretation of the letter of the law. In every aspect of life, clever schemers are either crafting documents that conceal their intent or they are reinterpreting commonly understood words and phrases so they can claim some new intent behind the words. This is driven not just by a disrespect for the intent behind the words, but a disregard for the very idea of rules.

The spirit of the law, of course, is the intent behind the rule, while the letter of the law is the almost always imperfect implementation of that motivating spirit. Originalism, for example, rests on the assumption that we can know the intent of the Framers when they wrote the Constitution, even if the result is not always clear. Debates over the Second Amendment are a good example. We know what the framers meant by “well-regulated militia” even if it is a vague term today.

Now, the Second Amendment issue is a good reminder that clever tricksters have always been trying to nibble away at the fabric of American society. Disrespect for the spirit of the law is not a new thing. Since the first written laws there have been people trying to twist the written words to get around the intent behind them. It is an argument against having a written constitution. It gives the tricksters an opportunity to play their word games on the trusting public.

The 2A topic, however, shows the limits of such games until recently. Despite their best efforts, the intent behind the Second Amendment has prevailed because the people and the bulk of the ruling class continued to respect the spirit of the law. Even something like abortion rights, which was invented by the court fifty years ago, tried to tie the new entitlement to the prevailing spirit behind the Constitution. Respect for the spirit of the laws is the cornerstone of a civilized society.

That respect has largely vanished over the last few decades. You can probably date it to when Bill Clinton famously tried to claim there was some ambiguity in the word “is” during his famous deposition over the intern business. A decade prior he would have been run out of town for such outlandish behavior, but in the new age where anything goes, the finest people cheered his willingness to find a loophole in the vocabulary in order to slither free of the net.

Of course, the arrival of these grifters from the Ozarks coincided with the arrival of the new managerial man. This is the highly credentialed expert with no practical knowledge, who slithered up the social system by making the right connections, belonging to the right groups, and flattering the right people. These are people who traffic is word play in a world where genuine accomplishment is a liability. Therefore, the better you are at escaping the restraints of the language, the higher you rise.

We have a practical example of this in Ukraine. The Russians have made clear that if NATO forces attack Russian forces from bases in NATO countries, the Russians are then free to attack those NATO bases. By all reasonable measures Russia could treat NATO as a belligerent just for supplying arms and intelligence to Ukraine, but they have drawn the line a bit further back. If NATO attacks Russian forces from NATO countries, then Russia will hit these bases.

This presents a problem for NATO, which would like to supply fighter jets to Ukraine, but Ukrainian pilots cannot fly the F-16 and Ukrainian airports cannot host of the planes, due to logistics and the threat of Russian missiles. That means the only way to put the F-16’s into service is to fly them with Western contractors out of NATO bases, but that runs into that Russian red line. So, the tricksters that now dominate the West have set to work on a workaround to this problem.

The solution is this. They will give the planes to Ukraine and then the Ukrainians will decide on their own to keep the planes at NATO bases. When they use these planes, the mercenaries wearing Ukraine patches will then fly the planes to a Ukraine base to be loaded with missiles, then take off from that Ukraine base to attack Russian forces with those missiles. You see, according to the letter of the law, this is not NATO attacking Russia with NATO weapons. It is Ukraine doing it!

Obviously, the Russians are not going to be tricked by such nonsense, but it reveals the thinking of the moral nullities who now dominate the West. Only people with no concept of right and wrong can think such a scheme is acceptable. These are people who always look for a way to slither around the rules by playing word games to evade the spirit behind the written rules. These are people who can talk themselves into anything because they are sure they can talk their way out of anything.

In a high trust society, there is less of a need for putting things in writing as the parties to an agreement come to that agreement trusting that the other party will respect the spirit of the agreement. A handshake agreement works when the men shaking hands trust one another to keep their word and they live in a society that respects the spirit of the law even when the letter of the law is confusing. In that society, writing things down serves only as a reminder to the honest.

In a world dominated by tricksters, who profit from finding ways around the words in order to undermine the sprit those words attempt to capture, the language becomes a weapon wielded by the guilty against the innocent. Notice that the lawfare campaigns all rest on the novel interpretation of the law, in direct contradiction to the spirit behind the laws, or the imaginative use of language to redefine common practices into violations of those newly reimagined laws.

This seems to be an end point of managerialism. In the accelerated lifecycle of fascism, they quickly arrived at a point where clever tricksters like Albert Speer were able to rise to senior positions. After the death of Stalin, the foxes came to dominate the party system to the point where even the people benefitting from it joked about the profound dishonesty of Soviet life. America seems to have arrived at a similar point, where only the naive are shocked by the rampant perfidy.

On the other hand, maybe all empires succumb to the liars who see empire as an opportunity to do their worst. A society held together by force, or the fear of the alternatives is not one that can respect the spirit of the law. As a result, empires may simply select for the sorts of people who eventually subvert the host. Maybe that is what we are seeing with the collapse of social trust. The empire of lies is the final stop for every empire on its way to the dustbin of history.

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America Inc.

Posted on June 10, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about grammar robots, a post the general weirdness of dissident politics and the Sunday podcast, which thankfully had nothing to do about Trump or the anti-Trump kooks. Subscribe here or here.

One of the criticisms of the paleoconservatives is that they never got around to formulating an explanation for why the managerial state emerged. They did a good job describing it and how it differed from the straightforward administrative bureaucracies that have been a part of society since Diocletian. How the bureaucracy transitioned from instrument of the ruling elite into a ruling elite itself has remained a bit of mystery, with only some stabs here and there at an explanation.

The fault probably lies with Burnham, who was the first guy to create a political theory from observing the emergence of the managerial system. He wrote his most famous book, The Managerial Revolution, during the Second World War when the Nazis were at the peak of their power. Therefore, his understanding of managerialism was shaped by the militant authoritarianism of it. Burnham was still a communist, so this no doubt played a role in his understanding of managerialism.

The emergence of managerialism in interwar Europe is easy to explain simply by pointing to the conditions that prevailed after the Great War. Fascism emerged on the losing side of the war because of the chaos that emerged as a result of the collapse of the old order and the general lunacy of liberalism and communism as they fought to fill the void left by the old order. Fascism rode the popular demand for a return of order to power in places like German and Italy.

Once in power, the fascists had to actually govern. The existing institutions they inherited were either badly damaged by the war and the post-war chaos or antiquated holdovers from the prior era. Managerialism provided both a blueprint for governing but also a source of authority. Gather up the best people and set them to work rebuilding infrastructure, the economy, and the state. Once they began to make progress, public support for the system provided the necessary legitimacy.

This model for managerialism being a modern, industrial response to both the collapse of the old order and the chaos of the present works pretty well for the emergence of it in communist Russia. The collapse of the tsarist system and the Russian civil war left Russia as a chaotic mess. Into that void flowed Stalin first inside the party and then as something of an industrial age tsar. He gathered up and developed an army of people to manage, govern and control the new Soviet society.

That same process does not work for America, where managerialism emerged at the same time as it did in Europe. Many have noted the parallels between FDR’s New Deal revolution and the emergence of fascism in Europe. Until the war, many New Deal progressives were fans of Mussolini. They never liked Hitler, due to his crudeness and antisemitism, but they liked Mussolini. There was in the 1930’s a great deal of cross pollination between the two systems.

America, however, was not emerging from a failed war and its political order was not destroyed as a result of it. On the contrary, America was remarkably stable in the aftermath of the economic collapse in the 1930’s and the political system seemed to be working very well. There is no doubt that FDR revolutionized the relationship between the citizen and the state during this period, but he did not do so in response to the loss of legitimacy of the old arrangements.

It should also be noted that the managerialism that emerged in America was different from the militaristic version that emerged in the fascist countries, which built upon trench socialism. Similarly, Stalin’s managerialism was a way to recapture the collective spirit of the revolutionary years in which the Bolsheviks finally seized power and won the civil war. The managerial revolution of FDR was softer and an outgrowth of volunteerism of early America.

Therein lies a clue as to why managerialism emerged in America. Through the 19th century, Americans were largely governed by local association. Other than the post office and military service, the typical American had little reason to think about the federal government. It was an abstraction. Even state government played a limited role in his life compared to local government and the community associations that defined the life of most Americans.

The industrial revolution changed America by urbanizing large chunks of the population, thus destroying rule by association for large numbers of people. The shift from industrial work also changed the relationship between the man and his work by making it individualistic rather than communal. The failure of a farmer impacts many more people than the farmer and his family. The failure of a factory worker is a burden only on the worker and his family. Work became a solitary pursuit.

Like the rise of managerialism, the rise of individualism is one of those things that many recognize as a problem, but no can explain. Why all of a sudden did Europeans stop thinking collectively and start thinking individually? Racial solidarity among Europeans was so natural it did not require a vocabulary to describe. Today we have a vast array of labels to describe white ethnic and racial solidarity, despite the fact that it barely exists and only in the virtual reality of the internet.

As work isolated men from one another, the natural response was to think individually and see the man next you as competition. This was obviously good for the factory owner, so work in many cases became a competitive arena, a Hobbesian existence where the owner harnessed this war of all against all to increase productivity, reduce costs and maximize profits. The result was a class of citizen who was no longer defined by community but by alienation from community.

This alienation inevitably led to unhappiness as man is a social animal and evolved to be so within small groups. The emergence of masses of Americans living in big cities fighting one another for wages lead to a disenchantment of the world. The rise of urban political machines was one consequence. Another consequence was a looking inward for spiritual happiness. When community can no longer provide a larger purpose to life, the only option is to seek it individually.

The shift from community man to individual man naturally leads to the individual abandoning his duties to the community. Self-government rests on the assumption that the bulk of the citizens have a moral duty to the whole. Who they are is not just what they have or even what they contribute to the whole. A big part of what defines the community man’s sense of self is the success of his community. Individual man lacks this entirely, so he has no reason to participate.

This is the same void of order into which managerialism flowed in interwar Europe and post-tsarist Russia. The tutelary state that emerged in America in the 20th century was not imposed on an unwilling populace, but simply filled the void left by a growing population of people uninterested in anything outside their window. Urban and now suburban peasants needed the protection of the state because as atomized individuals, they were no longer willing to participate in their own protection.

This is why the state has also become a church of sorts. Much of what the managerial state does is moral guidance. Painting rainbows on crosswalks and then daring anyone to defile them is intended to create sinners so the priests of the system can punish those sinners thus providing the needed moral instruction. What used to be done by community pressure and the local minister is now done by credentialled members of a faceless and remorseless managerial class.

Managerialism is the natural form of government for an industrial people as it mimics the life of the industrial worker. Republican government and aristocratic government reflected the reality of the people, who were primarily organized around communal activities like farming and trade. Twentieth century America turned into a continent-sized business park occupied by one business, American Inc. Like every business, America Inc. needed a management class, so it got one.

The question is can this model survive the post-industrial age? America began to deindustrialize fifty years ago. The old industrial model of governance has tried to adapt to the transition to the information economy, but managing information is vastly more difficult than managing capital and labor. In fact, it may not even be possible to manage information without poisoning the minds of the managers. The current crisis may simply be due to this problem.

On the other hand, it may be that you cannot have a society organized around marshaling data and data frameworks. Perhaps America Inc. is simply a legacy business parasiting off the societies that continue to make things, fix things, dig things from the ground and invent things. Perhaps the end point of managerialism is the same for all antiquated business models. The current crisis is the struggle to avoid the inevitable bankruptcy of the managerial system.

Summer Surprise

Posted on June 7, 2024 by thezman

The real power of the media is the power to ignore, so noticing what they ignore is a good way to get a sense of what is happening in the regime. Sometimes they ignore something because it has no interest to the rulers and sometimes it is just to prevent anyone from discussing it. There are times when the media gives something a good leaving alone because the regime does not know how to respond.

The Trump verdict may be the last option. We had the usual stuff on the day it happened, but then the story sort of just disappeared. There were a few conservative cucks doing their normal cuckery, but otherwise the conservatives followed the crowd, which laughed and jeered the verdict. The kooks even had to accept that this was not going to be the winner they imagined. As a result, the story just died.

One possible reason is the verdict has created more problems for the regime, as no one has any idea what to do about it. The whole point of the lawfare gambit was to scare away Trump’s support or bully him out of the race. Instead, he has bulled his way forward to the nomination and he has more support than ever. Like Project Ukraine, the prophesies have not come true and there is no plan B.

There may be other things going on behind the scenes. There are signs that the people with real power are worried about what is going on and this Trump verdict may simply be another log on the fire. That is the show this week. It is a bit of thinking out loud about what could be going on with our rulers and what sort of surprises they may have for us this summer.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Introduction
Trump Trial: Narrative Collapse
Something Is Up
Who Decides
The Election
Sentencing & Convention
Scenario Manager
What It All Means

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The Diversity Cult

Posted on June 6, 2024 by thezman

The 2023 Irish action thriller, In the Land of Saints and Sinners, is one of those films that offers some insight into the machinations of our cultural overlords. It is one of those small budget adult dramas that does not get a ton of attention but does well on the streaming services after its initial release. It is not that these are bad films, but they are not expected to pack the theaters. These are the new version of the B-Movie that fill up the spaces between the heavily hyped, big budget films.

Anyway, the film is set in Ireland during the Troubles because every movie about Ireland is set during the Troubles. It stars Liam Neeson, who plays Finbar Murphy, a hired assassin who lives in a quiet coastal town. It is not all that clear who is assigning the hits, but they come through a local businessman who gets the assignments and hands them out to men like Finbar. This local businessman is not connected to the Troubles and makes sure to not get involved in politics.

The story arc for Finbar starts during his final assignment when the guy he is about to kill gives him some advice rather than beg for his life. Finbar’s habit is to grab his target off the street and take him out to the woods, where he makes the guy dig his own grave before shooting him with a shotgun. He then plants a tree on the grave. This target is a former contract killer, who urges Finbar to make something of the rest of his life before he ends up in the same place as him.

This leads Finbar to have a crisis of conscience and he decides to retire. Meanwhile, some IRA terrorists have come into town to hide out after having set off a bomb in Belfast that killed some children. They are staying with a relative who lives in the town and that relative just happens to have a run in with Finbar. Of course, Finbar solves the problem by taking the guy out to his favorite killing field. Thus, we have the central conflict of the film as the terrorists face off against Finbar.

This all sounds like the basis for a good old-fashioned thriller. You get some Irish history as a backdrop, and you get to see Liam Neeson use his “particular set of skills” to slowly take care of the bad guys. Neeson has been playing this role since he got super famous for doing it in the movie Taken. He is in his seventies now, but he still manages to make it work, just as long as he does not have to move around too much. In this film he is the wise old version of the lethal weapon.

Somewhere in the middle of the film, there is a black guy. Finbar is in a pub and there is a black guy playing Irish tunes on a fiddle. He is not a black leprechaun, but he is a short guy so that would have made some sense. Instead, he is a refugee from Africa who somehow settled into this tiny coastal town in rural Ireland. He tells Finbar that the reason he picked the town is he wanted to escape the violence of his home country and he once heard Irish music as a kid.

It gets more absurd. Later in the film there is the big show down between Finbar and the terrorists at the pub. The terrorists are shooting the place up and Finbar sees the sacred African hiding under a table, so he rushes over to save him. In other words, the wandering African is not just a ridiculous addition to a film set in 1970’s Ireland, he is now a sacred symbol of the film. In that scene you expect the people to scream, “leave the women and children but save our sacred African!”

Clearly, the quality control committee realized that their film did not have the required amount of diversity, so the script was sent back for a rewrite. The writers probably thought they were okay because they made the head terrorist a sassy girl boss with two thick headed male henchmen. That was not enough so they needed to figure out a way to add some color to story set in rural 1970’s Ireland and they settled on having a peripatetic African midget playing the fiddle in the pub.

We have all become used to the black washing and race swapping that goes on in the culture, but in a film like this you see how mechanical it has become. Somewhere in the process there is a crew of shrews and scolds who make sure there is a girls boss and the proper amount of color. They do not care if it makes any sense. Like people with rubber stamps in a bureaucracy, their job is to make sure the film has enough diversity points before it goes into production.

Eric Hoffer famously said, “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” In fact, it often becomes all three and you see it with the diversity rackets that now infest every institution. It is a lucrative racket for those who master the arcana, but it has been embedded in the economy. Like the green rackets, the diversity rackets are now part of the fabric of corporate life. It is assumed to be an essential part of every large enterprise.

The thing that holds it in place, however, is that it is a cult. There is little doubt that many of the people in that film thought it was stunning and brave that they had a little African guy skittering around the set. Those who thought it was a ridiculous addition to the film kept their head down because they did not want the lunatics from the cult of diversity hounding them over it. The result is we now have diversity everywhere when what we need is to have it nowhere.

When Prophecy Fails

Posted on June 5, 2024 by thezman

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the logic of the West has rested on the theory that the Russians cannot sustain a long war. In the winter of 2022 the argument was summed up by Francis Fukuyama in this legendarily wrong post. In that post he claimed the Russian army was about to collapse at any minute and maybe take the Putin government down with it. He then followed up on that claim with a similar post, in which he claimed to have been right, amazingly enough.

It is tempting to dismiss Fukuyama as just another brazen hustler that circulates around the managerial class, but he is one of the more successful ones. His famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, was a massive best seller primarily because he pushed all the right buttons for the post-Cold War elites. It was massively successful flattery because the people being flattered believed it. They continue to believe it, which is why they maintain a bellicose foreign policy.

Put another way, these grifters passing themselves off as intellectuals tell us something about the system that hosts them, but also the people they flatter. Fukuyama gets to travel around the empire passing as a sage, because the people hosting him think he is right and that is because they want him to be right. Meanwhile, a guy who has been consistently right, John Mearsheimer, gets called mean names, mostly because he is right and the people calling him names hate him for it.

This blinkered view is how we got the war in Ukraine. This almost religious belief that the triumph of the West in the Cold War was the beginning of the final journey into the promised land, the end of history, has shaped imperial policy, both foreign and domestic, for decades. Fukuyama wrote his book in 1992 and others have been building on it ever since. In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski argued for the breaking up of Russia to finish the Cold War.

In other words, the war in Ukraine is not something that happened for no reason at all, but rather it is the product of a messianic outlook in the West that has existed since at least the end of the Cold War. In fact, the war looks like it comes right from the Western playbook to undermine and topple the Putin government. This study by the RAND Corporation, the most important think tank in the empire, talks specifically about this type of project as a tool to destabilize Russia.

The point of all this is to properly frame the war as part of the overall belief system of the West, rather than just something that happened for no reason at all. Washington expected this war because they had been planning for it for decades. Even though they were wrong in most of their assumptions, there is no reason to think that belief structure has changed. History shows that believers do not abandon their beliefs when faced with disconfirmation. They just believe harder.

That is important to understand when thinking about what comes next. The micro-countries of NATO are now yapping about war with Russia. Hilariously, tiny Estonia is offering security guarantees to Ukraine. The Estonia military is about the size of the Las Vegas police department and probably just as lethal. Lithuania is now inviting in the Germans to build defensive structures for the assumed Russian attack. Perhaps the Germans will bring their broomsticks with them.

The reason these small players are making these noises is the same reason Fukuyama wrote a book, calling the people he wished to flatter, the deliverers of mankind from the clutches of irrationality. These micro-countries organize their foreign affairs around flattering the powerful. Without NATO, Kaja Kallas is as well-known as the mayor of Wichita, but in NATO she can stand on the big stage, just as long as she tells Washington what they wish to hear.

This is what makes the moment so dangerous. Kallas is a simpleton, but an obsequious simpleton, so she often speaks the truth about her masters. Washington has no plan for ending the war other than the total defeat of Russia, something that can only happen if they launch nuclear weapons. The current debate about letting Ukraine use NATO weapons to attack inside Russia is mostly about normalizing the idea of NATO attacking inside Russia, something the Russians will never tolerate.

Compounding all of this is the fact that Ukraine is slowly being ground down by the Russian war machine. All of Ukraine is now forced to ration electricity. Major cities have long blackouts due to the lack of energy. The Ukraine army is desperate for soldiers, but all of the men have gone into hiding to avoid being grabbed off the streets and sent directly to the front. These raw “recruits” are being trained at the front, which means thrown into a trench with a rifle and a few grenades.

The point is we will soon see something like what Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter described in their study of a UFO cult. Western political leaders have been assured for decades that the promised land lies just after the final disillusion of Russia, which will come any day now. Like the people waiting for the space aliens, they have been waiting for regime change in Russia. Instead, they may be facing angry mobs outside their own palaces as the project collapses.

We live in an age of wonders, but the greatest wonder to be revealed will be when the regime realizes that the future promised to them by the neocons and their fellow travelers was never going to be reality. When the Ukraine army starts to buckle and the politics in Kiev become violent, how will the West react? Will reality suddenly descend upon Washington, or will they do like the cult members in When Prophesy Fails and find some way to internalize it and keep the faith?

The Use And Abuse of History

Posted on June 4, 2024 by thezman

In the 1976 election, there was a scene at the Republican National Convention that turned out to be a vision of things to come. President Gerald Ford had successfully fended off the primary challenge of Ronald Reagan, but at the convention it was clear that Reagan was the more popular man with the people. The institutional party took the safe route and backed Ford, but at the convention it became clear that the voters were ready to move on from the old guard.

This was largely true of the managerial class in America. Corporate America was pushing for reform against an intransigent old liberal guard. Wall Street wanted changes to the financial system in preparation for the emerging global economy and the looming microprocessor revolution. This book, written in 1976 coincidentally, talked about the looming revolution in economics that was coming with computers. Of course, a sizable chunk of the political class was ready for change.

What the convention revealed was that the public was also ready to move on from the cultural revolution of the 1960’s and the general political and economic stagnation that defined the 1970’s. On other words, the public was in a mood for reform, and they would be willing to take some tough medicine if the right man was put forth to sell them on it. That man was Ronald Reagan, who won the 1980’s election and ushered in the reforms that came to be known as the Reagan Revolution.

There were elements of the institutional left that opposed Reagan. The media called him Hitler, of course, and spent his entire time lying about everything. They invented the concept of homelessness as a counter to the booming economy. The academy was also opposed to Reagan and responded by diving head long into the antecedents of what we now call the woke religion. The Democratic Party remained trapped in the past throughout the decade.

The point of this walk down memory lane is that reform is always a top-down process that begins with elements of the elite either looking around and sensing danger or growing restless with the prior generation of elites. In the 1970’s, there was a little of both as some elites feared the country was headed to a crackup, while others sensed a new day was dawning and the old bulls needed to step aside. Once they found a champion, the reform effort took off.

Fast forward half a century to our time and we can see some of the elements that existed in the middle of the 1970’s. The world is at some sort of inflexion point economically due to the underlying currency arrangements. In the 1970’s the dollar’s status was under assault due to Western incompetence. Today the dollar is under pressure mostly due to Washington perfidy. There are serious efforts to reduce the dollar’s role in the global economy.

You also have a looming demographic change. In the 1970’s the baby boomers were hitting the labor market and the adult economy like a tidal wave. Much of what drove the economic revival was the loosening of the rules so this massive wave of young adults could earn and spend. Today we are at the other end of that long cycle as the baby boomers exit the work force. They are not being replaced. Instead, we have diversity which must be overcome to maintain the economy.

There are a lot of parallels like this. It is the reason that old paleos like Steve Sailer often compare the present to their salad days. Not only does it help explain the present, but it is comforting to think that like the 1970’s, this period of tumult will give way to another great interregnum, a time of relative peace and prosperity where politics gives way to practical pursuits. That certainly sounds comforting but there are some obvious problems with taking the comparison that far.

The first problem, and the main problem, is the country of today is nothing like it was half a century ago in terms of demographics. Instead of having a massive wave of young, smart people ready to build their future about to enter the system, we have a vibrant tide ready to wash away the white middle-class. Demographically, America is like the film World War Z where the new vibrancy is scaling the walls. No one knows what to do about it, other than build the walls higher.

Then you have the fact that there are no signs that any element of the ruling elite is interested in reform. Instead, they look like toadies of a rock band after a long weekend of partying in a fancy hotel. Theirs is a life of self-indulgence and their highest goal is to maintain the system that lets them self-indulge. What passes for an opposition in elite circles is just geezers and their dim-witted acolytes chanting catch phrases that ceased to resonate half a century ago.

Now, not all things are discussed openly. It is possible that behind closed doors in the elite institutions there are top men working the problem. Perhaps they think AI is the analog to the microprocessor. Maybe it is genetics that will be the revolutionizing force of this coming epoch of reform. It is also possible that those are just more overhyped items in an economy that has been running on hype for decades. Elon Musk is the world’s richest man because he is the biggest hype man.

Even if there is something happening behind the scenes with the revolutionary potential of the microprocessor, where is the Ronald Reagan in the political system to sell the changes that must come with it? Where is the socio-political movement that could produce a salesman like Reagan? The political class now looks like that expensive hotel room the elites partied in all weekend. It is a scene full of sadness and memories of better days that now seem long gone.

You can probably take this a bit further and suggest that Trump was the elites vehicle to make the needed changes to stave off crisis. Despite his faults, he is an oddly charismatic figure, who has wanted nothing more than to be embraced by the ruling elite of his country. He would have been a great pitchman for a renewal, but the system has treated him like an alien virus. Imagine if Reagan had been arrested at the 1976 convention instead of cheered.

Historical parallels are often used to inspire a pursuit of future greatness and sometimes they are used to command a return to past habits. We see both in this age as old men like Joe Biden feebly mumble about the glorious future. We see slightly less feeble old men chanting about a return to past principles. There is a third way to use history and that is to show that the present does not have a comforting analog in the past and therefore we are on our own to sort our future.

That is where the West finds itself now. Those who will make the future will first have to close the door on the past. The challenges of the demographic age have no corollary in the past, so the solution, if one exists, does not live in the past. Put another way, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and John Paul II are not walking through that door, so there is no point in leaving it open. The only reason for understanding the past is to know that it is not the future.

The Revelatory State

Posted on June 3, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is the final review of and commented upon the Planet of the Apes franchise, a post about roots and leaves and the Sunday podcast, which was all about the Trump trial. Subscribe here or here.

Political science claims to have sorted the various types of political systems that have existed and could exist in the world. As a practical matter this means reducing Aristotle’s list of regimes down to “our democracy” and “fascism.” What is called “our democracy” looks nothing like democracy and it has long ago lost its liberalism. As Paul Gottfried noted many years ago, we now live in post-liberal societies. The trouble is, we lack a label that seems to fit what we are seeing.

The reason we lack a label is our socio-political system is amazingly good at disguising itself by shifting focus away from how it acts onto something else. Every month brings the official celebration of some designated victim group. There are many remembrance days for bad things that may or may not have happened. Of course, there is the perpetual foreign bogeyman who threatens our democracy. Russia is currently the bogeyman, but China is warming in the bullpen.

One way of thinking about our socio-political system is to imagine a Protestant minister who had a vision of some sort. Maybe he got a glimpse of a dreadful future or perhaps a new path to enlightenment. He then sets about telling everyone he can find about his vision and what he thinks it means. Of course, he just assumes his vision requires him to tell the world about that vision and what it means. No one ever has a vision that requires them to keep quiet about it.

Now, imagine hundreds of such people working in the institutions having hundreds of these visions. Instead of one eccentric minister claiming to have received a message from God, it is hundreds of mediocrities working in offices around the country claiming to have found some new bogeyman or maybe some new path to the assumed end point of human existence. Every day is spent hashing out these visions in the marketplace of visions and visionaries.

This sounds a bit wacky but consider the fact that it is rare to see a product sold on its features and benefits. Even the most mundane products are sold based on their alleged benefit to some cause or your moral benefit. No event is just presented as it is, but instead it is cast as part of a morality tale. A person cannot simply be famous for something like kicking a ball around or singing a song. Instead, he must claim that his fame is in service to a cause.

In all of this is the turmoil of competing revelations. June is now called “pride month” for things that up until recently did not exist. There have always been male and female homosexuals, of course, but their private acts were kept private. The concept of “coming out” is a novelty that brings with it normative claims. Somewhere, someone had a vision that said the path to the promised land is through elevating this tiny minority to the top of the social order.

The market for visions and visionaries is like all other markets, so it did not take long before imitators were on the scene. Lesbian and gay, the L and G of the now famous initialism has been joined by Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer/Questioning, Asexual and other, which gets the plus sign for some reason. It turns out that the commodification of sexual deviance has its limits. The next guy or gal with a sexual vision will be stuck with the plus sign.

While much of this stuff seems novel, and much of it is recently invented, the practice of inventing new normative claims is not new. We see it with the various alien bogeymen conjured over the last three decades. The Muslims could not be left to be Muslims in their own lands. They had to submit to this thing called liberal democracy, a thing that does not exist, but when it did exist, it prohibited the imposition of alien socio-political forms on people who rejected them.

Think back to the Bush years and the crusades against the Muslims sounded like Protestant ministers talking about converting the savages. As if my magic, everyone in Washington got it into their heads that the world was at risk unless the Muslims accepted liberal democracy. Put another way, someone, or a group of someone’s, had this revelation and convinced the rest that it was true. Those who did not accept it as a revelation were packed off to the outer darkness.

We now hear the same sorts of sermons about the Russians, except this time the doubters are accused of cavorting with Old Scratch. Suddenly, all the best people are filled with righteous anger at Russia and determined to defeat this enemy in a holy crusade called Project Ukraine. Next up is China, a country all of these people admired until they started having visions about China doing bad things. The gods have spoken and now it is time to act.

The origin of this crusader mindset can be dated to the abolitionist movement when all of a sudden, northern Protestants decided that slavery was a sin, even though Scripture seems to be fine with slavery. Not only was slavery a sin, but the slaver was an irredeemable sinner, and he must be destroyed. Why all of a sudden did masses of people have this shared vision? No one knows because no one asks, just as no one asks why all the best people now say “Keev.”

That is the other feature of the revelation state. Once the vision finds a market, no one bothers to question it. In the revelation state, novel moral claims go from inconceivably strange to irrefutably true in the blink of an eye. Homosexual marriage is the best example of how a joke became holy writ overnight. No one ever asked how this happened as to do so could suggest it does not belong in the catechism, which is a good way to get hurled into the void.

That is another feature of our socio-political system. It demands total, unconditional submission to its moral claims. It is never enough to agree on most things or be indifferent to some things. You are either one hundred percent in tune with the prevailing morality or you face annihilation. The sinners are forced to confess their sins, but always face punishment, no matter how much they grovel. Absolution is arbitrary, but confession is mandatory.

This revelatory aspect of the American ruling class does not explain everything, but it is one aspect of the system. The socio-political system that emerged after Gettysburg was built on the pre-ideological fanaticism that animated abolitionism. In time it seems to have become an ideology all its own. For most of the 20th century it was held in check by practical necessity, but now it has been unleashed and the result is decades of increasingly deranged revelations.

What we may be seeing is the end of a long sociological arc that began in the 19th century with the Great Awakening. Lots of pundits have compared the present to past Protestant fervors, but they snicker in their sleeve and move on. Instead, what we may be witnessing is not echoes of the past but the final end point of a trend that started in that period, mutated along the way into the final virus we see today. The revelatory state may be the logical end point of the Great Awakening.

The New Religion

Posted on May 31, 2024 by thezman

The show was put together before the Trump verdict, so it is not about the Trump verdict or how we are supposed to think and feel about it. It is a shame, in a way, as the topic of the show gets at the reason the regime is persecuting Trump. From their point of view, he is not just a heretic, but a genuine threat to the new religion because he operates outside the framework of the new religion.

The reason they often refer to Trump as a racist, but not an antisemite, is they associate him with the region they continue to see as a holdout, in defiance of the dictates of the new religion, which is the South. Trump represents exclusion and hierarchy, which are the things they associate with the South and what they oppose. He also represents unreconstructed whiteness.

The funny thing about this new religion is that it is not entirely clear that the adherents understand that they are following the dictates of a new religion. The low-level zombies who charged and convicted Trump are not very smart and they seem to lack self-awareness, so they are most likely acting on instinct. The new religion is just what everyone they know says, so they believe it.

This may even be true higher up. People at the highest reaches of the managerial hierarchy often talk about themselves as if they are the oppressed, fighting the gathering storm of exclusion and discrimination. The fat women in the clip I played during the show has been handed a charmed life but speaks of herself in terms we would expect from a political prisoner or a crime victim.

The joke from the old movie the Usual Suspects is that “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist.” Perhaps the greatest trick from the usual suspects is to create a religion the adherents do not know exists. The power of the open society is that it habituates the people in it in such a way that this alien religion becomes a habit of mind.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Introduction
The Setup (Link)
The Clip (Link)
What Do We Mean By Rights
What Diversity Means By Rights
The Moral Standard Of Access

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Escalatory Delusions

Posted on May 30, 2024 by thezman

Most men can remember back to a time on the schoolyard when two kids got into a confrontation and one of them kept promising to do something bad to the other if the other did not stop whatever it was he was doing. The threat of consequences was supposed to deter the other, but the other kid was undeterred, and the result was a fight, with the kid making the threats getting the worst of it. Bullies often come to a bad end like this as their bullying is based on threats.

If you are a member of the managerial elite, it is unlikely that you have such a memory as you were raised by women, so no school yard fights. As a result, the logic of the bully, issuing escalatory threats, makes perfect sense. After all, if you can conjure something worse than the other guy is conjuring, then you win! Therefore, success is determined by who has the greatest mastery of escalatory dominance, the alleged ability to escalate a conflict beyond that of an opponent.

This is the engine that has been driving the war in Ukraine. For close to a decade the Russians have objected to what Washington has been doing on its border in Ukraine, but Washington has responded with the promise of more of what the Russians found objectionable, rather than search for a compromise. Once the Russians crossed into Ukraine, Washington unleashed the sanctions war and promised even more punishments, including the promise of regime change.

Throughout the war, the approach from Washington has been to create some artificial red line for themselves or Russia, and then cross it in such a way as to suggest all future red lines will be crossed. Currently NATO is having a debate about launching long range missile attacks on Russia, from NATO countries or with NATO personnel, while pretending it is being done by Ukraine. This is the bully threatening the kid who refuses to back down with something worse than backing down.

Unreported in the West, Ukraine has been using Western supplied drones to attack early warning radar stations in southern Russia. These are part of Russia’s nuclear defense system. They play no role in the Ukraine war, but Ukraine’s handlers are having them do this as a form of escalatory dominance. The point is to signal to the Russians that the West is not afraid of nuclear war. The madness of this is obvious, but to a great degree that is the point, to seem mad.

We see a similar thing shaping up with China. Washington is going out of its way to provoke China over the issue of Taiwan. Various officials have been sent to the island for no other reason than to antagonize the Chinese. A big package of weapons has been shipped to Taiwan and Washington has increased the number of military personnel on the island. Washington regularly talks about how it is actively preparing for a war with the Chinese over the issue of Taiwan.

A great example of how the concept of escalatory dominance controls how American ruling elites deal with the world is the last trip by Anthony Blinken to China in which he went out of his way to insult the Chinese. The State Department insisted on Blinken visiting China, where he held meetings with Chinese leaders. He then went out of those meetings and threatened them with sanctions. This was done to let the Chinese know that there is no red line Washington will not cross.

This is not just a foreign policy strategy. The reason Trump is waiting to hear a guilty verdict is the regime has always assumed that if they cross enough red lines with regards to the rule of law, Trump or his supporters will fold. For going on four years, it has been ever increasing violence against both the rule of law and the customs that have controlled our politics. The point of each new escalation is to warn that there is no limit to what they will do unless you obey.

It is the unquestioned assumption in Washington that there is always some threat they can issue that is so terrifying that the other side will back down that has led them into a crisis for the regime. Half the country now thinks the courts are corrupt beyond reform thanks to the lawfare unleashed by the regime. We are remarkably close to the point where a majority of Americans think we are ruled by lawless gangsters, which even in easy times is an impossible state of affairs.

The crisis gripping the West is due, in large part, to the fact that the system now selects boys and girls with no practical knowledge. Never having had their bluff called and walking away with a bloody nose or a black eye, they just assume such a thing is impossible, so they are free to escalate their threats. It is not so much that their threats work, but that they ought to work. In the artificial reality in which these people live, the ought is the same as the is.

The Trump trial is a good bit of foreshadowing for how this widely held delusion about escalatory dominance will end. At some point, the bluff is called, and the bluffer has to either follow through or their raison d’etre evaporates. This is the story of the bully who finally has to fight and gets beaten. It is not the beating that ends his reign as a bully, but the fact that someone stood up to him. This is what is happening with the lawfare against Trump, who has called their bluff.

Unlike the schoolyard, the end of a regime that relies on escalatory dominance is not so simple and tidy. The regime now has to hope the Trump trial ends in a hung jury so they can maintain their stance. An acquittal has them looking like fools and a guilty verdict has them in a crisis far worse than Trump winning the election. Soon, the bluff will be called over Ukraine and Taiwan. Once this happens, the regime has no answer other than the unthinkable.

Peaceful Separation

Posted on May 29, 2024 by thezman

How best to govern a diverse population is a part of the subtext of public political debates in America, mostly because no one is permitted to debate the orthodoxy on immigration, so America gets more diverse every day. This is treated as a novelty that only the best minds in the managerial elite can tackle. In reality, humans have been dealing with diversity since the first human settlements. It turns out that there are only five solutions to the problem posed by diversity.

The most common way of dealing with the problem of diversity is also the oldest way of dealing with diversity. That is for the dominant tribe to subjugate or even eradicate the alien tribes from their land. The people of one place finally get the upper hand over the people adjacent to them and wipe them out. Alternatively, the main identity group in the newly formed society compels the minorities to adopt their identity. Wiping out diversity is the oldest cure for diversity.

The trouble is it rarely works, especially when you are dealing with large numbers of people in tight communities. The Israelis are trying to drive off the Arabs in Gaza, even going so far as to deliberately massacre civilians, but they are no closer to pushing out the Arabs than when they started their genocidal campaign against them. Even with modern tools, it is extremely hard to remove a large population. It is possible, but in this age, even the Israelis cannot get away with it.

That leaves the four more civilized options. One is to simply keep the various identity groups apart to reduce friction. This was common in the northern cities of the United States into the 20th century. The old neighborhood system that is romanticized today used to be rigorously policed by the authorities to make sure blacks were not going into Italian areas and vice-versa. Keeping the peace meant keeping the groups as separate as possible from one another.

In the South there was a soft version of segregation. Diversity primarily meant blacks, who were systematically segregated from whites in largely symbolic ways. Blacks and whites could share public spaces, but had to maintain separation, even if it were mostly symbolic like riding in the back of the bus. This performative segregation was to reinforce the notion that the two races could never mix. Segregation became a habit of mind, rather than physical separation.

Both of those effective and popular systems were overthrown by the managerial elite in favor of the chaos of the present. This system does not have a catchy name, like segregation or Jim Crow, but proportionalism will do. The system of rights that had been the basis of America society was abandoned in favor of egalitarian ideals to which the elites make exceptions in order to achieve what they arbitrarily see as a proportional outcome among the various tribes of America.

The growing tyranny that must come from such a system is what is driving the academic debates about the civil rights revolution and the rear guard action to hold the line against DIE programs in the institutions. Of course, the people responsible for this disaster are not interested in altering course. They are especially uninterested in the fourth option which is to not manage the diversity at all. This was the way America managed diversity through most of the 19th century.

A good example of this is in this interesting post about an old house by one of the professors in that linked video. He bought an old farmhouse and got curious about its history, so he did the research. It turns out that his house has a diverse history that reflects the way diversity was managed in early America. Basically, people were left to sort themselves out as best they could, which generally meant peaceful separation when peaceful cohabitation was not possible.

As pointed out in that post, who people are, in terms of their primary identity, is how they live, and no amount of downward force can change it. This is why the path of proportionalism as practiced by our tyrants must lead to that first and oldest option for dealing with diversity. They are trying to wipe out whiteness, by which they mean white people, through a campaign of cultural genocide, along with the importation of nonwhites in numbers no society can sustain.

The trouble is that wiping out even a small minority is difficult. Purging America of “whiteness” when most of the population is white and determined to live as they prefer, in the teeth of the cultural pogroms, is impossible. This brings us to the irreconcilable contradiction that lies at the heart of the current crisis. For the ruling elite to remain the currently constructed ruling elite they must continue with proportionalism, even though it must fail and lead to their eventual overthrow.

What all of this points to is both a solution to the current tyrannical regime and the challenge of diversity. Because whites will remain the largest population and will increase their self-segregation in response to their shrinking majority and the cultural assault on them from the elites, the racial tyranny must collapse. Put another way, the old solution of self-sorting, the habit of frontier America, will be the rocks upon which the racial tyrants will be destroyed.

This may seem overly optimistic, but the reality is the current regime is fighting human nature, which is undefeated in fights of this sort. Ideology, and the racialized politics of this age are ideological, is hostile to human nature. Communism did not fail due to technical errors. It failed because it was inhuman. The same is true of the racial ideology of the managerial class. Peaceful separation is the natural state of Americans, and it will be it natural order again.

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