"Mr Trudeau’s government has expressed shock that racist symbols were displayed during the protest. It appears to be planning to reintroduce an “anti-hate” bill that could lead to the imprisonment of people who use racist speech. This could include a clause which would allow individuals to take other people to court if they fear that they may be about to say something which falls under the definition of “hate propaganda”. They could also be charged for contemplating an offence “motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other similar factor”."
Hate pre-crimes! Spectacular. I don't think even Mr. Putin or Mr. Xi has had the audacity to conceive of such a useful measure. Trudeau's Liberal party is truly trying hard to live up to its namesake.
Calling out the physical class as being unacceptable is a hate crime in itself. For those who thought Biblical events wouldn't happen in their lifetime, welcome to a glimpse of the New World Order to come. There can be no tweeners. Pick your side and be ready to take what's coming.
Retired. Need to stay here to care for my elderly mother. 92 years old. I have a cargo van I'm slowly converting to a camper van (I just found out there are $2,000 toilets that burn poop, lol) so I can explore other states for possible relocation when she passes. Utah, Nevada and Arizona are the main candidates.
Because I live in the midwestern part of northern california, things have not really changed much in 20-30 years, except more people all around. The mountains are crowded with people in areas that could easily get completely wiped out in forest fires. I drove up highway 32 during the Dixie Fire last summer to try to get a look from the distance, but the side roads with the good views were closed off. Still looking for a light aircraft with a big enough engine to fly in the mountains (VFR) and do visual surveys/photos of wildfire burn scars patterns, known as "mosaics" by ecologists and foresters. I drove through Greenville, the town that got almost completely wiped out in the Dixie fire, at the end of September. It looked like it got hit by a nuke. Same with the big part of the Feather River Canyon. Went to Burns, Oregon (Steens Mountain) via Winnemucca, that is a very nice area, mostly ranchers and hunters-fishermen. Came back through Alturas/Modoc, which seemed about the same as it was 40 years ago.
Retired. North/Mid CA. Looking for something outside of CA (of course). Familiar also with Alturas/Modoc area. Nevada, AZ, Utah very good--esp. areas in the lower elevations and away from large populations. Fire went thru my farm, but nothing substantial lost.
Metal buildings and well-controlled vegetation saved it. Would like
What about the facts that the virtuals have turned the cities they physically live in into virtual crap holes ? That makes them virtually self destructive and very dumb
Not so much in Canada. Our cities are still somewhat more liveable in than in the US. However, I have a feeling that will change quite soon as inflation pushes more people onto desperate shores. Canada is planning to allow 1.3 million immigrants over the next 4 years but our infrastructure is no where near able to handle it. Remember, we have state allowed healthcare where it is against the law to buy healthcare directly (that's basically it but the actual law is somewhat different). I chose the words 'state allowed' deliberately because what we have is a very rationed system. It is possible and it happens that people die waiting for healthcare.
The irony being that in such case, no protest is necessary.
If, in some Bizarro World Canada, truckers were en masse to demand the abolition of pronouns or something, they would not need to protest, Premier Trudeau would be happy to grant your request.
I long for the day's, like just 5 years ago when Stalinist thought was the stuff of comedy. It makes me fearful of what 5 years from now will look like.
Pre-Hate Crime would be harder in other parts of the world as the central location for woketopians, the cult hive minded persons who would foolishly support something like this are all in the West primarily in the US but also prevalent in Canada. If only government had enough power to make everyone be nice to each other we'd have utopia, that is what the woketopians believe.
This framing of the issue in terms of Virtuals vs. Physicals cuts right to the heart of the matter. Has anyone else put the argument in this way? It’s astonishingly brilliant analytically and clearly simplifies things in a way superior to the Woke vs Anti-Woke or Progressive vs Classical Liberal framing. New essays in Upheaval are rapidly becoming my most anticipated Substack destination.
I think it's very close but not quite spot on. There are a lot of people whose jobs involve doing things in the physical world who are on the woke side of this and a lot of people with digital jobs that support the truckers.
The real distinction here is ever so slightly different: Do you earn a living by performing labor or producing something, or are you granted one in return for being visibly loyal to the party. Is your job an actual job or a sinecure.
This is why you see actual programmers, tech support staff, and the like who'll support the truckers while "community managers", middle management, useless executives, and legions of HR staff are all firmly on Trudeau's side. The former have real jobs that actually require them to competently do something, the latter have bullshit jobs that exist primarily to further their own existence.
And then at the very top you have the people who are neither. The hereditary nobility who earn money just by having money and who simply aren't part of the economy in the same way as the rest of us. Those are the people that get to do things like have stock trading frozen to protect them while robinhood forcibly steals and sells people's gamestop shares without their permission.
Yes, as a software developer who supports the truckers, I would agree this is slightly more accurate. I think the key distinction, even in my world, is those who get by through competence vs those who get by through obeisance.
The simplicity of the original thesis does make it attractive for purposes of exposition, and agree it is very close to the mark.
Agreed - same here for accounting. The most competent accountants tend to be apolitical in the workplace; it's the mediocre accountants who tend to be woke as fuck, because it's seen as an alternate way to climb the career ladder if you can't cut it on merit.
I’d love for that to be true but that’s not what I’m seeing around me - software developers are just as susceptible to mass formation as everyone else which is quite surprising to me as I thought they’d be critical thinkers. While I agree a lot of “physical” are against mandates , this is not a full explanation as I bet a lot of people on this and other substacks belong to “virtual” category. At one point I thought that all immigrants who where exposed to totalitarian regime would recognize the signs but that turned out not to be 100% accurate either. In addition to broad categories maybe there are some people who can resist mass formation better than others?
I've puzzled on that a bit as well. I would be considered a "virtual" in some ways but my psyche is more "country girl" because I was raised around animals and nature and love solitude. I think there is something, as you identified, that makes a person more immune to mass psychosis. I conjecture that it is in part being independent minded and a little skeptical which would tie nicely into being a "physical " because you are expected to get your job done with no excuses. I suppose no broad theory will cover human behavior entirely but in general I think the "physical/virtual" explains a lot.
I'm a retired Marine, mechanic, machinist, and I see the key being "independent and solitude". I often go days without a visitor in the shop, and it gives me much time, running machines, to think. Semper Fi.
I'm a machinist and welder, used to work avionics, deep tech, and I only wish I weren't old and sick. I was my twenties, maybe, when truckers shut D.C. down, back in the eighties, and that made change. We need to support our own trucker movement, perhaps more enthusiastically, and vigorous.
Good point. And bullshit jobs are everywhere, not just restricted to virtual world. 80/20 rule applies to all of humanity as a whole. Projections on to a 2d plane will always miss nuances. However, Lyon's "model" fits the data well.
Feb 17, 2022·edited Feb 17, 2022Liked by N.S. Lyons
Yes, I agree with that characterization, and like @Sue has said in another comment, "This is so good."
This essay opened a whole basket of thoughts and questions as I read it; i.e, the Pareto principal surely applies to the Virtuals much more than the Physicals; what is the impact of that economically, an 80% of them be eliminated? Which group is most vulnerable to AI and other technology advances? Sure, they can develop self-driving trucks over the next few years, but surely a whole ton of "Virtual" jobs, many of them not really necessary, can be eliminated with software.
What of the jobs (people) the Virtuals can not eliminate, but may not be able to be co-opted; the police, the military, etc. In a reality based world, those jobs are critical.
Does the Virtuals group shrink as people grow older, as they choose to move out of the cities, as their lifestyle lends them to worse health outcomes, etc.
This essay is so good, and I find it to be hopefully enlightening.
Maybe N.S.Lyons could write an article about the connection between Virtuals and Physicals, and intelligence, measured by IQ and alternatively by common sense ?
Charles Murray`s book, The Bell Curve, details how American society is becoming divided between classes based upon IQ, but if the Virtuals are the high IQ group, and they are also the ones becoming most detached from reality, then what exactly does IQ measure ??
It is beginning to seem that we do go mad in crowds, and it is up to us to maintain our sanity individually. Maybe that is not a quality that can be measured, like IQ ? Do we call it intelligence, or meaning, or value, or proportionality, or does it not matter what we call it because it underlies thought and language ?
heard quoted last year..."you will never find Jesus in mob mentality". Because it is relationship and heart and coming to know your "right mind". These brainiac idiots will self destruct because they refuse the only path to God's Wisdom...that is HUMILITY. You cannot hide from it nor create an alternate new way that the universe will work. and you can not legislate the Truth away.
See E.O. Wilson and others in the field of sociobiology.
From an evolutionary perspective, the human species is intensely eusocial, somewhat like ants or bees: an individual is willing and expected to sacrifice themselves for the common good. So, social cooperation and intense tribalism are evolved characteristics in humans that improved survival (in a given gene pool of a kinship group).
Darwin himself had great insight into that evolutionary process:
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Peter Richerson [UC Davis] quotes Darwin (as an example of group selection hypothesis and the neurobiology of sympathy in "primeval times"):
"It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection (178-179)."
Jordan Peterson is refreshing, coming from a clinical psychology perspective rather than a political one, and he also asks the relevant question : What happens when the Left goes too far ?
I don't think its really a detachment from reality moreso than a defense mechanism against reality. If the brain is the greatest tool for the IQ class it would follow that the mind is the only that that must be controlled in order to bring in Nirvana (conveniently this Nirvana is a world where the IQ class is the supreme being)
only problem is, without God, you will have chaos, dis-order, anxiety and endless fear! Continual worthless self-protection...funny you mention Nirvana...the gifted talented band member mentally self destructed from a lack of Mental peace. there are 2 choices in life, relationship with God or hell on earth in your mind alone fighting demons. And illicit drugs and alcohol nor endless amounts of money will fill the void.
in evolutionary terms, the human species survived just fine without "god" for 100,000 of years.
nature worship is suitable for nomadic hunting/gathering cultures, but not for walled city-states that have complex social hierarchies.
complex social hierarchies required a new "sense making system".
mythic culture (in which "god" was "invented") evolved as a result of the Bronze Age Collapse and the failure of pagan nature worship to solves the problem of social, spiritual and psychological order.
See the work of Kurt Fischer and his colleagues at Harvard GSE. Dynamic Skills Theory was a response to the unsophisticated, but partially correct, idea of "emotional intelligence".
Weirdly, when the creepy mobs of "blank slate" cultural-marxists tried to purge "developmental" psychologists (and later sociobiologists) from academia, the last surviving developmentalists, such as Robert Kegan and Fischer, ended up at Harvard.
It's not even the Pareto principle - the Internet actively turns things into so-called tournament professions, where a vanishingly few at the top will attain just about all the reward. Back in the day, you needed many people capable of playing music live, now most of the money is in the hands of megacorps and vast catalogs of old famous artists. Actors, same thing: Theaters need many people since their distribution ability is limited, movie actors, not so much.
Writing used to occupy very distinct modes purely as a function of the difficulty of printing and then shipping the paper - cheap, quick and dirty news was local, nationally distributed pieces necessarily had to report on at least slightly less time-sensitive matters and free from that pressure could afford to be longer, and so on. Now, everything is instantly everywhere which demolishes a lot of that old diversity of necessity, and the old flatness born of just not being able to be everywhere.
Freddie deBoer has written solid pieces about how dismal the money in writing is. They're depressing reading to say the least.
On Twitter, you can find university and college lecturers looking at ads for a fast food manager's position that pay about the same or better than their own jobs.
The thing the elimination of jobs discussion misses the mark on is that technology may mean Physical jobs can literally not need humans anymore, but they miss that while many Virtual jobs will still need a human to do them, that doesn't say anything about the raw number of people needed.
There's a reason the demands of a large number of woke tantrums include demands to establish new commissar's posts. People need work, and the only thing they've been taught is how to make people's lives worse.
Don't forget the "Climate Corps" being a key plank of the Green New Deal, i.e. hiring gender studies majors at $100k/year to take selfies next to trees and pretend they planted them.
Maybe that helps explains the huge growth in bureaucratic and academic admin positions. The managerial class might believe it is immune, but I think it may be most at risk.
Absolutely. These managerial classes are parroting whatever the elites send down (witness the garish and hypocritical explosion of corporate Woke signaling) in hopes that they will make the cut. They've been increasingly terrified of not "being on the inside" and this is just one more flavor. They're very very vulnerable as they don't really have any fallback. Many can't even change a tire. Kind of reminds me of the servant class of the Meths in Altered Carbon.
How true. I couldn't finish the 1st episode of the 2nd season. And I will say the book was better than the series, without the Woke re-writes (e.g. Faulkner).
They are very sensitive to their need to control the military and the police. Wokeness has exploded in these areas, and the mandates with their lack of any flexibility is intended IMO to drive out any that will not comply or have an objection of conscience.
For the very obvious reason. They need those without a conscience to do the unconscionable.....just like Hitler. These people are off the charts dangerous!
No, Latin America is approaching the US the same way that Britain approached China: the opium wars. Why buy milk when you can get the cow addicted to meth.
This was like a lightbulb for me. I live in a small town in Southeastern Missouri. Drug addicts wandering the streets on foot or bicycle. Everywhere, day and night. Town completely hollowed out economically. Old downtown buildings being taken over and refurbished at great expense by government agencies, all to serve the poor and addicted. The Meth Wars.
The future of the US, or the future “post-US” or the “future of the Western world” or “the future of the global order, will be rule by the techno-oligarch/new clerisy alliance, where neoliberals constitute “conservatism” and progressives/SJWs constitute “liberalism.” Everyone, including the historic WASP culture, will be a minority.
[->] We will have a highly stratified Latin American-style class system with the Rainbow Culture as its self-legitimating state ideology.
The emerging ruling class will also have a world empire, a military industrial complex and a police state that it will have inherited from previous regimes.
...
The more fanatical the SJWs become the more they will drive people away from the left toward the right, but in a way that has the effect of liberalizing the right to the point that “the right” is just yesterday’s liberalism. Imagine if the neoliberal and technocratic centrist Democrats were the “conservatives” and university and NGO leftists were the “liberals,” that’s a good picture of what the political future will look like. That’s how it is in Europe, Canada and Australia anyway. The more the “right” loses ground politically and culturally, the more extreme and violent it will become (with more violence coming from the left in the process). The more fractious conventional politics becomes, the more people with different beliefs will self-isolate in their own enclaves.
The natural tendency of people is to stab people from "out groups" in the back, unless they have some common vision, purpose or myth to the contrary.
Decades ago when affirmative action and "diversity" narratives became popular, an older black school administrator I knew from another social setting told me that the competition and back stabbing between blacks, hispanics and asians was brutal. Far more "racism" between the various non-whites than between whites and non-whites is how she put it. Before retiring I started hearing from asians that they were called "yellow whites" and were getting passed over, just like most white people, for promotions.
Due to the substack software glitch, email notification like error, I had to click "like" to get here (after which I unclicked "like"). The "Return to thread" button thingy dumps me back out to the top of the comments, not the pertinent subthread.
Victor Davis Hanson has written extensively on the subject as well, at least since Trump won, but he's framed it more as rural vs. urban. He points out though, as I think Lyons would also concede, that the divide isn't strictly geographical or occupational. A family connection or some familiarity with the other tends to soften one's antipathy. To me one of the most alarming trends is the non-stop portrayal of non-elites as sub-human, hate vessels, and the way it's lapped up by urban elites.
im someone whose lived his life almost entirely in the liberal urban bubble (NY/LA/SF) and i am still completely blown away and struggling to find words, concepts, and any historical precedents to what Trump did to liberals and their brains and souls.
basically overnight everyone i know who lived their entire adult lives as cynical tolerant libertines became raging Robespierres who are stuck in some sort of permanent psychosis/millenarian tantrum about Trump and his voters, and it has become a blind eliminationist hatred that i dont see abating till that man is either dead or otherwise incapacitated.
it seems like some sort of mass psychosis to me, which is why i come to substacks like this to find some very smart people grappling with the same questions.
I very much agree, although I'd argue that Trump was more of a symptom than a cause. Trump won because middle Americans were tired of being neglected, ignored and wished away. His win tapped into a well of latent class prejudice and sore-loserism from urban elites. The Establishment, a coalition of EVERY powerful institution, naturally viewed Trump and his supporters as an intolerable threat to their stranglehold on all things valuable, and so waged a non-stop propaganda and legal campaign against him. This has dovetailed nicely with many people's pre-existing biases.
So I think Trump will go away as well as the worst aspects of Trumpism, if not soon. But the real hatred is for the people that voted for Trump, who aren't going away.
I would like to be educated about the worst aspects of Trumpism. For my money Trump won because he was a master administrator and well connected with reality which is the core argument of this article. Thanks to his acerbic style he did not allow himself to be badmouthed to the point of being ineffective, as Bush was. He would still be President if legal remedies were allowed to apply to the last election.
Good question. In my opinion, Trump's strengths are also his weaknesses. He's a pugnacious and tireless fighter, which means his best and default position is a reactive and combative one. To your point, it allowed him to stand up to the leftist/elitist hegemony, but not to stake out a middle ground or articulate a positive vision for the country. As a result, Trumpism appeals more to the far right than to moderates and independents and will struggle to maintain any lasting political momentum.
I think Trump had a consistently strong, traditionalist, patriotic vision of and for America; see his Mount Rushmore speech on education and culture.
The aligned elitist opposition successfully repainted that position - which would have been bedrock American can-do patriotism, under Ike or JFK - as unhinged insanity, because to them it was unbridled affront to their ivory tower.
Patriotic Americans all recognized this, but moderate wafflers who likewise support these same principles were still cowed by the anti-Trump hysteria over ‘mean tweets.’
The country is still essentially red white and blue, not communist.
Trump isn't the problem. He was a catalyst. Leftist (not classic liberal) elitism is the problem. It always moves toward authoritarian, totalitarian constructs. It's a festering boil that needed lancing and was lanced when he came down the escalator. All that self loathing pent up hatred, was unleashed on him. And when he's gone they'll wield it on us. And when they run out of us then they'll eat their own. You can see it happening already. The useful idiot's are dropping like flies like Cuomo, then his shitbag brother. Trump represents the "physicals", the great unwashed like me that actually do shit like fight their stupid wars and build their infrastructure. The ones "elites" can't stand! There's a global "elite" cabal (world economic forum) that fancies itself rulers of the entire planet. Trump represents a populist threat to their goals. But after him there will be others because you can't keep the yearning if people to be free down. Dividing poeple along class, race, economic, and educational, lines keeps people from uniting. That is the only thing the cabal truly fears. Imho.
I agree, but I think we shouldn't underestimate the power and influence of the elite institutions. When I was younger there was a natural tension between various institutions as some aligned with the right and some with the left. In the last twenty years they seem to have figured out that cooperation is much more conducive than conflict to maintaining the status quo.
What's going on in Canada is inspiring. But when you see the awesome power of the state, courts, business and media aligned against them I worry that they are merely drawing a temporary line in the sand, much like other populist movements before them.
Slave and peasant rebellions have been going on for 1,000s of years.
They are the product of human nature and the evolution of the human species in small kinship groups that were intensely emotionally bonded internally, but hostile to outsiders.
When nomadic people were taken as slaves by the mass armies of the first empires, the tribal instincts of the slaves to hate the master classes as "outsiders", was natural.
Similarly, the Celtic tribes (and Scottish Border Reivers) hated the dominant, superior economic and cultural system of the lowland Frankish Manorials.
The USA inherited that gene-pool/cultural conflict, and it is being revived as the USA empire is disrupted by technologies and global economics, due to the fragility of the legacy modern-rational sense-making system.
Side note: Trump is basically a Druid that reanimated Celtic resentments and Neoconfederate resentments in the context of the internal crumbling of the american empire.
Deep dive into the evolutionary memetics of Trump's rise:
This explains why so often, when presented with the undeniable squalor and poverty evident in so many formally prosperous working-class communities, the standard Virtualist response is to "move to a better place".
In my college days I was a true Marxist. Studied him. Believed him. Wanted to lead the revolution. I've grown up, and while I am no longer ready for the revolution, I do believe Marx is dismissed far too easily by many. If he was just a kook, we wouldn't still be talking about him after 150 years.
John Locke & Adam Smith posit man as a rational individual seeking to maximize his own benefit. They're not wrong; they're just not complete. Karl Marx is the other half of that picture: man is also tribal, seeking out a group and often acting in solidarity with that group, sometimes to his own individual detriment. Locke can't explain that; Marx can and does.
However, Marx wrote in Dickensonian London, the early Industrial Rev. It's been hard for a while to apply Marxist analysis to our current world, especially since so much of the welfare state owes its existence to the bourgeoisies' fear of a worker's revolt in the early 20th century. The "woke" want to map Marxist class analysis onto race, but it's a bad fit. N.S. Lyons has a far better fit, successfully creating a new definition of proletariat and bourgeoisie that captures Marx's original "workers vs owners" viewpoint and brings it into the 21st century.
This is an extremely important article. It should be shared widely.
You think we will stop talking about Hitler in 200 years. That's your barometer for sane or insane the number of years we talk about someone. PLEASE. Let me spell it out for you. Marx was a mental midget, and possibly mentally ill and all of his thinking related to economics is and was completely wrong-headed.
Marx revolution was about his shaking fist at God, he was a freemason and atheist. We would all do well to expose him as an evil wicked man and not share his wickedness with young impressionable children.
The postmodern-left (neomarxists) does not believe that "reality" exists. They still engage in witch hunts, mostly against people that DO believe that "reality" still exists.
Marx's best insight was that with the fall of mythic culture (Divine, Kosmic order), material and physical causes of class conflict (and social change) were better predictors of human behavior than supernatural causes.
The problem was that Marx went overboard and ignored the fact that archetypal psychology ("meaning" and religion) is co-emergent with physical causes of social change.
See Gerhard Lenski on the ecological-evolutionary theory of social change, which accounts for genetics/heredity.
The "fall of mythic culture" (as you call it) was what led to millions of deaths from the atheistic regimes of the U.S.S.R., China and other communist nations, far worse than any religious institution did prior and since. Solzhenitsyn was right!
I'm super hyped about my substack feed in general - there are a number of phenomenal writers on here. The comment sections are measured, engaged and passionate as well.
This site rocks homie! It makes me feel optimistic about the future! Somehow the "physicals" (and those sympathetic to us) are attracting the best intellectuals as well awakening to an organic "class consciousness". For the last two years I've been wallowing in and out of despair, convinced that the 2020s will be some dark times indeed, but it's increasingly looking like we could swing things hard in the other direction. The Trudeau's of the world have overplayed their hand, and I can't wait to see them suffer (political) consequences for that.
There is no physical thinking world vs. virtual thinking world. The two worlds we live in have more to do with our mental facilities than this virtual or physical world the author discusses (realists vs. antirealists). The mentally ill “Virtual World” (Justin Trudeau's world) and the non mentally ill “Physical World” (common sense and disciplined citizens raised by parents and a community that cared) are increasingly living in a world where we teach our children that there is nothing wrong with them. All they need is the correct mix of pharmaceuticals. Take the phenomenon of attention deficient disorder. This isn't a disorder. This is how most young boys are wired. No amount of Adderall is going to fix this so-called mental illness. The only cure for ADD is parents showing up regularly and helping our children realize that getting distracted is a regular event. With effort and patience, one can learn without the use of drugs that you can develop the mind to break the behavior that some quacks call ADD. It’s time we ditch the participation trophies and start showing up to raise our children. You can’t buy a German Shorthair Pointer and expect that one day it will automatically be a great hunting dog just because of its excellent pedigree. It takes hours and consistent daily training, and even then, some of them never end up being great bird dogs. But when we live in a society where we think all of our children could do no wrong and are perfect miniature versions of us, and they need little to no instruction or any of our time… well, then you will get what we are all witnessing today. Justin Trudeau is an excellent example of this. Does anyone think Pierre and Margaret were ever-present raising this silver spoon spoiled little shithead?
There used to be a broad consensus that the world was flat. We now know the world is not flat. Just because a consensus of quacks says this disorder is real doesn't make it real. There are many in the scientific community and many countries that disagree. They also have meager rates of ADHD clinical assessments compared to what we have here in the US. You must be one of those over-educated dipshits that we call quacks I mean, a psychiatrist who enjoys medicating people.
By the way this wasn't the point I was trying to make. You sanctimonious son of...
Consider that one of the earliest major "progressive" political figures, Woodrow Wilson, was a blood thirsty, psychotic war monger, imperialist, xenophobe, and racist.
The "progressive-left" is simply an outgrowth of 1800s Victorian "morality", which was a religious-missionary international paradigm.
The feminists of the time, Suffragettes (also "Progressives"), allied with Woodrow Wilson because he supported their push for Prohibition, which was basically a culture war against working class men.
Some things never change. Or they change very slowly.
Based on what many futurists and systems theorists think will emerge, "liberalism' will evolve into "meta-liberalism" (co-emerging with construct-aware meta-rationalism).
There are so many different meanings to the word "liberal" that are used in different contexts (including politics/sociology), that I tend to use the phrase "not ILLIBERAL" instead, which gets at the basic point: not totalitarian, not tyrannical, not despotic, not dictatorial, not authoritarian, not intolerant.
Historically, "liberal" culture evolved in contrast to clannish social forms and in contrast to imperialist social forms.
When the early church banned cousin marriage to undermine the power of clans, the gene pool got a boost and then there were more people with "liberal" personality types (see Jonathon Haidt and other evolutionary psychologists) available for breeding. As the feudal economy gave way to modern, market economics ("capitalism"), trade increased, the urban population expanded, the wealth of the middle classes increased, literacy increased, people with higher IQs were selected since improvements in science and technology required being smarter, etc. The nuclear family played a crucial role as did delayed marriage (teen marriage was typical in clans).
As the feudal economy, medieval loyalty oaths to warlords, and clannish way of life diminished, the felt-sense of people was that peasants and the expanding bourgeoise (urban middle classes: shopkeepers, river and sea traders, scribes, craftspersons, etc.) had "natural rights" to more freedom (independent achievement outside of conformist-communion values), to own property, and so forth.
That kind of medieval liberalism, which co-evolved with decentralized (pre-nation-state) politics, was pushed aside after 1492, by the forces of political re-centralization by empire builders, for several hundred years.
Due to advances in education and science, by the 1700s what is usually called "classical liberalism" began to co-evolve with modern-rationalism, such as Enlightenment values, in contrast to the Absolutism of the empires.
Here is how one cultural anthropologist explains it:
One of the important take-aways is that there is a genetic basis for the co-emergence of all the factors in the WEIRD ("classically liberal") social form. That partly explains why many non-western societies, including Russia, are not all that compatible with "classical liberalism" in their systems of governance.
Even in western cultures such as the USA, the WEIRD social form is being disrupted by Virtuals (electronic network technologies that bypass the curated hierarchies of expertise that high-social-trust is built on) and the resulting disintegration is resulting in regression to more primitive, tribalistic, fragmented/atomized identities as the national myth collapses along with the decline in social trust.
The problem with his premise that this is an argument between the Virtuals versus the Physicals, at least in the US, is complicated by the fact that the population of Virtuals includes a huge sub-class of ‘Do-nothings’ whose existence is dependent on handouts. In the US, we’ve created an entire group of people who will never do anything at all except beg for handouts. For those people it’s way too late.
"environmentalists" (actually corrupt lawyers/lobbyists) block logging and tree thinning on national forests.
catastrophic, million-acre wildfires result from the un-thinned forests.
environmentalists and their political puppets, leftist goons and vermin, then blame their failings on "climate change".
to be fair, there is a tiny fraction of sane environmentalists that understand the need for tree thinning to forest health and resiliency. but they have very little power.
Tree "thinning" is not economical industrial forestry. Clear-cutting is almost always the only economically profitable forestry. We need to preserve more old-growth forest. I think in Michigan, where I live, less than 5% of the state's woodlands are old-growth. More public forest is the answer, and managing to keep corporate interests from corrupting the management of public forests. One more thing, some would say a natural forest, where trees die and fall down, is "wasting" those trees. I disagree, there are many things in this world of more value to society that their "monetized" value.
In the west (especially away from coastal climate), timber corporations tend to "sustainably" manage forests better than the national forests, but it is a complex topic.
The ecologists and forestry experts are now admitting that to return to historical conditions, before settlement, forests in the western USA will need to be thinned by 80%. That would largely eliminate the possibility of "catastrophic" wildfires.
Compare the cost of million acre "catastrophic" wildfires (which destroy a lot of old-growth) to the economics of an 80% tree thinning scheme.
My guess is that there is a lot of political corruption, private equty scammers buying timber corporations and then buying off politicians who then pressure national forests.
Frankly, at least in California and Oregon, "environmentalists" (D-party aligned lobbyists and lawyers) are far worse enemies of the forests than loggers.
Ghetto culture is a direct result of the gross failures of the Democratic Party "machine" model of political patronage, going back to Tammany Hall, the Pendergasts, (and including Marion Barry) etc.
Complex/Systems theorist Jay Forrester predicted doom in the 1960s:
Ah yes, the 'do nothing's'. They became the modern day brown shirts committing the destruction in 2020, beginning with looting, rioting, and generally terrorizing the soft center living in those urban settings, encouraging them to vote 'properly'. Then they went after the statues. When the need for them has passed I'm sure they'll be dealt with swiftly by the 'elites' praetorian guard!
Yes, and as others suggest, also in many ways a brilliant update for our times of Orwell’s Party versus the Proles in “1984” and how the Inner Party controlled the broader Party and everyone else: the deliberate denigration of traditional families, the constant double think, the snitching on each other to keep the single narrative, “freedom is slavery”, punishment for thoughtcrime, the technology and information control (“ignorance is strength”) and of course rewriting history. All characteristic of the Virtual class now and especially since 2020.
Yes. In philosophy we call this the realists vs anti-realists. Been a growing tension for the last 150 years. Pop culture now sees it manifests beyond the “ivory towers” of “boring, irrelevant philosophy.”
Yes. Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek series was a commentary on the human condition. It often tackled the most important questions of the day.
In this episode, The Cloud Minders, the relationship between an "elite" segment of the population of a planet lives in the clouds while the "worker class" mines the export product that supports the "elite" class.
Stephen Harper Canada’s ex-PM spoke of the ‘Somewheres” (Physicals) and the Anywheres (Virtuals) in his book Right Here, Right Now published in 2018. Not identical but close.
Somewhat related, in the "Next Generation" iteration of Star Trek episode The Hunted, the "elite class" created soldiers that they were unwilling to integrate back into their society.
As Marx (sorta) predicted, the culture wars are driven a feedback loop with technological and economic disruption.
Postmodernism "as we know it" (cultural-leftism, PC/SJWs, BLM, Antifa, etc) is the result of post-WW2 suburban consumer culture and the decline of the traditional values such as Church/Temple attendance in farm communities, legacy industrial areas, etc.
1. Did not George Orwell teach the masses thusly? "All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.” What we are seeing now is what happens after the fraud is no longer working.
2. If the Truckers tell us nothing else, they ought to tell Trudeau and his coterie just how seething mad with white hot incandescent rage a lot of people are. And it don't take a hell of a lot of people.
Imagine if this were happening in the US, where a significant proportion of Physicals have access to all manner of firearms, not to mention the training to use them.
3. Re: Physicals and Virtuals. It is often said that the Virtuals are incompetent, but that is not strictly speaking true. Rather, they are very competent players at a very abstract sort of status game, but real-world Physical expertise is, if anything, a detriment to winning that sort of game.
Something I wrote a while back:
The US in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled" or "deplatformed". Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great And Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to financial services to corporate board to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "How do I feed the kids this week and pay for school supplies and make the rent?" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Marie ("Let Them Eat Cake!") Antoinette look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribeswoman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Pious, impoverished, and tough as nails. Not only that, but mistakes can get him killed. As in "dead". Permanently.
Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to provide for it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably rifa, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism. It cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less virtuous.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
"You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably rifa, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism. It cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less virtuous."
The virtual world is also murderous. Note how few Afghans, even those not ordinarily inclined to support the Taliban, were all in when our puppet was the other choice on offer.
The Taliban was the creation of the fundamentalists in the Pakistani security forces as a weird outgrowth of Bill Clinton's teachery and the earlier "Charile Wilson's war" error. All of that goes back to the foreign policy screwups of Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The common people of Afghanistan knew that the USA's occupation was hopeless in the long run, especially after Obama told them that in 2010!
Also see the SIGAR reports. Yes, the defense establishment knew it was a huge sham.
If the Physicals stopped working for a week, the Virtuals would starve. If the Virtuals stopped working for a week, the Physicals would not be affected at all and the world would probably be a better place.
Well, a week isn't enough time to starve very many. But let's say a year.
The vast majority of Physicals are NOT self sufficient in today's world. If the Virtuals turned off every computer and satellite and power plant in the world (none of which can run today without them), most Physicals would starve too.
Quite right. Assuming that trailer dwellers have the intelligence and ability to tend themselves is a grave mistake. The last place I want to be when an EMP shuts down the country is in a city. No one will be safe; and I derive a tremendous amount of satisfaction when contemplating the Virtuals staring down at the masses from their ivory towers, seemingly unaware that they are facing some sort of guillotine, be it virtual or physical. People gotta eat. Yo.
On the contrary, Physicals would be okay with adapting to a life without the Virtuals (and contrary to what you claim, are not in charge of the power plants). They could completely live a life without any of the things you've mentioned. The same is not true of the Virtuals.
But sure, change the goalposts from a week to a year. A week without food is not a happy experience for most people.
After dozens of cites being burned by protestors in the 1960s, the war college planners developed contingency plans for "domestic disorders". First thing they do is cut power and fuel, communications and food/water supply.
The "people" would be begging for a dictator to "restore order" quick as a chicken on a june bug.
When I lived in rural Plumas County (northern Sierra Nevada) in the 1980s there was all sorts of lore about local militias that would blow up bridges and roads into the area in case of catastrophe (nuclear war, the "big one" earthquake) in the urban lowlands of California. The militias knew that an influx or starving city people would lead to the loss of their cattle and property, destruction of irrigation systems and poaching of wild deer herds in the forest.
I get your sentiment, but I am not sure if it's obvious. If virutals merely start being "austere", many physicals will starve. Modern economy is a complex beast. The Bolshevik jews thought that the workers who produce stuff were the real heroes. That did not work out well.
This is so good. Reading it was beyond satisfying. There is clarity! I had been thinking of them as the globalists vs localists but that never felt correct. It's absolutely the virtuals and the physicals. I find their virtual world terrifying so let's get to work figuring out how to shore up the future for physical reality.
Bernie Neville at latrobe . edu. au, an archetypal psychologist, educator and futurist, did a lot of work on the way that Hermes, greek god of information and boundaries (and violations), is the best image for the evolving information ecologies (sense making systems) of planetary network culture.
In other words: a "religious" revolution is needed to force the planetary elites back into thinking in real human ways, instead of serving the "gods of automata".
Each stage of societal evolution in the past has required such a "religious" revolution.
(Even modern rationalism is ultimately a set of metaphysical constructs.)
As the [hippy] Whole Earth Catalog stated in the 1960s:
Purpose
We are as gods and might as well get good at it.[14] So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.
I would add to this that the Virtuals are no longer the thinking class. They don't think at all, they merely parrot the same trite phrases and canned opinions, leading to the NPC meme that is so apt. The new thinking class is actually the rural and suburban Physicals that they so abhor. We are the ones questioning Covid. We are the ones studying political philosophy and questioning the rights of man and the role of government in our lives. We aren't blindly following, we are probing and pondering and trying to find a path forward, much like the men who brought us 1776 and touched off an upstart rebellion against entrenched and moribund power that changed the world forever.
There's so much to love here, not the least of which is "the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain."
But some of the stuff that struck me hardest (because true):
"what the Chinese Communist Party refers to as 'public opinion management,' is now the entire strategic response of the Virtual class to every political problem."
"The post-modern fish swims in a narrative sea, and their first reaction is always to try to control it (through what the CCP calls 'discourse power') because at heart they well and truly believe in the idea of the 'social construction of reality...'"
"...this is merely the culmination of a long, inevitable political realignment that’s occurred across the West as the 'left' became the party of the Virtuals, the socialist revolution became a revolution against fixed reality, and the Physicals became the backwards, reactionary others standing in the way of Progress."
This post more than anything gave me a small amount of hope that the current state of things might be overcome. Maybe I'm delusional, or just really, really need to hope.
We all need hope... Reading these comments, and comments on other substack articles, at least there is assurance that we're not alone. That there are other thinking people out there. We might be the minority, but we at least exist.
As Lyons suggests in the post, the Virtuals are eroding, and will continue to erode, the control that the Physicals have over the physical world. The rise of the Internet of Things is a huge step in this direction. Every simple analog device is becoming a WIFI-connected "smart device", which means it can be hacked, adjusted, or turned off by far-off Virtuals. Pretty soon, truckers will not be able to just drive their trucks wherever they want. Virtuals will be able to remotely disable the vehicles or, eventually, lock the misbehaving truckers inside and remotely drive the trucks straight to the local police station.
Even setting aside any active malevolence on the part of the Virtuals, the complexity that they introduce with their computer chips has the practical effect of reducing the autonomy of people who work on physical equipment for a living. A 1975 car could be more or less fully understood by an expert mechanic, but a 2022 car has many components that are effectively black boxes to even the best mechanics.
Even with the IoT, a full blown workers strike would starve out the Physicals long before they could finish building Skynet.
What happens instead of all driving into Ottawa, the truckers instead boycott the city and refuse to deliver supplies? Or park their trucks on all the highways in and out of town and remove the wheels?
Someone that worked at a defense company told me they had a "telescope" that could be made airborne and "see a tennis ball through a window 3,000 miles away". The surveillance-state is a major impediment. Any anti-state movement will be immediately infiltrated as soon as it becomes known (Curt Doolittle).
Think French revolution, American war of independence, Bolshevik revolution, Mao's cultural revolution, etc, etc.
State's monopoly of violence enforces its arbitrary mandates, dictates, laws. Regimes fall when police and the army refuse to carry out violence on citizenry. Precisely why the Second amendment is so very crucial. It sets boundaries. Just threat of non-trivial violence from citizenry is sufficient. The regime understands this and hence the desperate chipping away at the amendment.
Virtuals will be able to remotely disable the vehicles.....From the appropriately named "MUSCLE CARS AND TRUCKS:
"Deep within the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was signed into law by President Joe Biden is a passage that will require automakers to begin including what can be best summarized as a “vehicle kill switch” within the operating software of new cars, which is described in the bill as “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology”. The measure has been positioned as a safety tool to help prevent drunk driving, and by 2026 the kill switch could be mandated on every new car sold in the United States." Another Mandate.....Policy......for those who live in MeatSpace.
"the complexity that they introduce with their computer chips"
Those would be the chips the shortage of which has snarled up our supply chains and left automakers with huge fields full of metal heaps that cannot be finished and sold because: NO CHIPS! "Physicals" know for sure that damned few processes for us to live can be run when the chip shortage expands.
ONE chip fab on the *planet* makes 50% of all chips used on the planet; and it's in the threatened Taiwan. The PantsSh--ter-in-Chief (well, its handlers...) are putting out several $million to try to restart the U.S. chip making industry: U.S/ used to supply 50%; now 12% of chips. Not billion, millions. AND it will take probably ten years IF we succeed! Illiterate, no-work-ethic illegals gonna be making chips?! Yeah-NO!
But the Physical will be JUST as crippled. Trucking only: trucks can't run. Truckers can't call dispatcher or supplier or recipient of the loads. The satellite feeds that help them with the best route won't be reachable... We'll ALL starve. oops.
This is excellent commentary, and as others have said, you have cut to the heart of the matter! I am based in New Zealand, where we are currently experiencing our own smaller version of this freedom movement, and a Prime Minister who is copying Trudeau almost move-for move. I will be dedicating the next episode of my podcast (The Dispatches) to your article (it will be live in the next 24 hours on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/the-dispatches/id1584922518 AND Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/04DlgKR0sYPYLmQD3kkHbK?si=2lRzaPL_S9OesjHaf4K6fA plus all the other usual platforms!)
What I find, as a Hungarian, fascinating, is how culturally collonized both us and you New Zealanders are.
You talk about BLM protests: why are they relevant in New Zealand? You neither have African-Americans (as a class) or US-style police brutality, yet your commentators act as if it's a New Zealand topic.
The tucker protest is a lot more relevant globally, due to excessive COVID lockdowns.
You know a concept is really good when you put it on like a pair of glasses, and suddenly you see things more clearly. That was my experience with the Virtual/Physical distinction. Thank you.
Your distinction between physicals and virtuals rings true. I am an acquisitions editor and I spend most of my days reading, writing, or talking (virtual).
For a period of time I was also a member of our volunteer fire department (physical). It's hard for me to imagine two realities more different. It snows and editor me stays home. It snows and the pager rings, firefighter me gets in the car and responds.
The first time it happen I realized how much I am conditioned to a virtual life and how profoundly different this from much of the rest of the world!
I find it unlikely that some women in care professions aren't incredibly aware of the real world. Birth, health, and dying are likely to snap you back to reality. So does abuse, malnutrition, and foster care.
I know plenty of male managers that live with their head in the clouds, and male programmers that have delusions of being almost transhuman online.
Anyway, its not that your thesis is wrong, I just don't think this boils down to men versus women; I don't even think that difference is worth mentioning.
I think this is precisely why there is a drive to strip men of what makes them masculine and distance women from what makes them women. The careerist proud-of-my-abortion "Barbie" is distanced from the physical of childrearing and raising her family, the computer attached video-gaming women-hating male feminist porn junkie tooth-picked armed male knows nothing of sacrifice, grit, and providing for anyone except his individualism. These two are easy to subdue I imagine.
This did put it in stark terms but the sheer grasping and erratic nature of the response by Trudeau and co has been interesting to watch, as if shouting "Transphobia!" was somehow going to work. Because they do this when the normal methods fail - truckers aren't going to "Read the Room" or know what "Problematic, my dude" means as a social cue.
In terms of mobilizing physical power, hard to do that in February in Ottawa, so the normal rent-a-mobs didn't make a large showing.
But yeah I think in the end, digital financial system police state tactics of the kind that Canada's Foreign Ministry rightly condemns in places like China and Belarus where it is particularly bad, are effective. Very few of the participants are people with nothing to lose - if they were, their behavior would have been much different. The counter for this seems tough to figure out - crowdfunding and financial institutions are captured entities. Crypto is volatile, not all that fungible, has a learning curve that turns off a lot of people (particularly the older workforce that makes up the workers and contractors of physical world), and only remains in good graces as long as it doesn't threaten more important actors. The only thing I can think of would be radical reform of how the financial sector is directed and regulated by the state.
Someone will probably create a physical script, non-traceable for the Physicals so that it can be privately priced and exchanged amongst each other. There's always a hack.
Yes, which is exactly why the federal government wants to eliminate cash entirely. What if they succeed in doing so? What's to stop them? What will we do then?
Gold probably. No government can take away its value, which they can do with crypto regulation for example . Roosevelt outlawed gold in 1933 tho, so they could try that again. But the ultimate store of value is intelligence, which is your individual responsibility and requires maintenance
Consider that both crypto/blockchain "mining" and the rest of the Virtuals' reality only exists because of massive, energy gobbling, heat generating, Physical server farms.
While technically a member of the Virtual Class (at the moment, termination date rapidly approaching since I refuse to comply with the vaccination demand), it may be my Mississippi roots which makes me relate well to the Physical Class, or my stubborn insistence in putting my faith in God's power and not human wisdom (1 Corinthians 2:5). Thank you for writing this. It is an important essay on these times. I am a well-educated white female, born in the South, a Christian, an advocate of true inclusion, mother of two, wife of a true public servant who tries every day against all odds to teach critical thinking to his public school students. Following his lead, I have taken a deep dive into black history month. There are so many famous civil rights leaders, black men and women, fighting for freedom, whose words then apply 100% to today. So many fascinating parallels, which, again, exposes the hypocrisy we now see with this division into the Virtual and Physical. Thank you for sharing.
A small Canada update, via The Economist:
"Mr Trudeau’s government has expressed shock that racist symbols were displayed during the protest. It appears to be planning to reintroduce an “anti-hate” bill that could lead to the imprisonment of people who use racist speech. This could include a clause which would allow individuals to take other people to court if they fear that they may be about to say something which falls under the definition of “hate propaganda”. They could also be charged for contemplating an offence “motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other similar factor”."
Hate pre-crimes! Spectacular. I don't think even Mr. Putin or Mr. Xi has had the audacity to conceive of such a useful measure. Trudeau's Liberal party is truly trying hard to live up to its namesake.
Calling out the physical class as being unacceptable is a hate crime in itself. For those who thought Biblical events wouldn't happen in their lifetime, welcome to a glimpse of the New World Order to come. There can be no tweeners. Pick your side and be ready to take what's coming.
There is a hope that lifts my weary head,
A consolation strong against despair,
That when the world has plunged me in its deepest pit,
I find the Savior there!
Through present sufferings, future’s fear,
He whispers ‘courage’ in my ear.
For I am safe in everlasting arms,
And they will lead me home.
Amen sister!
Hallelujah!
If you are not locked and loaded, and trained, you need to get busy.
Picking sides is going to be an art, you nailed it. “Tweeners” will go hungry.
New World Odor!?! something stinks
Perfect new phrase! Thank you!
R U still hunkering down in California?
Retired. Need to stay here to care for my elderly mother. 92 years old. I have a cargo van I'm slowly converting to a camper van (I just found out there are $2,000 toilets that burn poop, lol) so I can explore other states for possible relocation when she passes. Utah, Nevada and Arizona are the main candidates.
Because I live in the midwestern part of northern california, things have not really changed much in 20-30 years, except more people all around. The mountains are crowded with people in areas that could easily get completely wiped out in forest fires. I drove up highway 32 during the Dixie Fire last summer to try to get a look from the distance, but the side roads with the good views were closed off. Still looking for a light aircraft with a big enough engine to fly in the mountains (VFR) and do visual surveys/photos of wildfire burn scars patterns, known as "mosaics" by ecologists and foresters. I drove through Greenville, the town that got almost completely wiped out in the Dixie fire, at the end of September. It looked like it got hit by a nuke. Same with the big part of the Feather River Canyon. Went to Burns, Oregon (Steens Mountain) via Winnemucca, that is a very nice area, mostly ranchers and hunters-fishermen. Came back through Alturas/Modoc, which seemed about the same as it was 40 years ago.
Retired. North/Mid CA. Looking for something outside of CA (of course). Familiar also with Alturas/Modoc area. Nevada, AZ, Utah very good--esp. areas in the lower elevations and away from large populations. Fire went thru my farm, but nothing substantial lost.
Metal buildings and well-controlled vegetation saved it. Would like
to communicate some time(?). --Air-Cooled Dave
dunno if substack has any kind of DM/PM/chat?
...or GIVE what they have coming.
I take Trudeau to court for wearing blackface!! and for kneeling with the BLM!!
I think trudeau himself would be most guilty of his own law.
No silly. Laws are for little people.
Policy is for People Who Matter, for Policy is what determines when the law applies and to whom.
exactly as our elite idiots think, they blame everyone for the very things they are doing in secret.
Inverting reality is his M.O. Rules of reality don’t apply to him.
What about the facts that the virtuals have turned the cities they physically live in into virtual crap holes ? That makes them virtually self destructive and very dumb
Not so much in Canada. Our cities are still somewhat more liveable in than in the US. However, I have a feeling that will change quite soon as inflation pushes more people onto desperate shores. Canada is planning to allow 1.3 million immigrants over the next 4 years but our infrastructure is no where near able to handle it. Remember, we have state allowed healthcare where it is against the law to buy healthcare directly (that's basically it but the actual law is somewhat different). I chose the words 'state allowed' deliberately because what we have is a very rationed system. It is possible and it happens that people die waiting for healthcare.
Canadien cities still better than US cities. I think not. Have you been to Calgary, Vancouver or Toronto lately. They are shitholes.
I guess no protest is ever justified?
Nonsense. Your protest is justified when your owners tell you it is.
The irony being that in such case, no protest is necessary.
If, in some Bizarro World Canada, truckers were en masse to demand the abolition of pronouns or something, they would not need to protest, Premier Trudeau would be happy to grant your request.
a classic:
"leftist" NIMBYism
https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
What a read. My head is spinning.
It's a scary thought thinking that these measures may take hold. It also seems to explain, at least to me why Jordan Peterson is so hated by the left.
Yes, the left "cannot handle the truth!"
Reliance upon overt repression of dissent is a sure sign of weakness and not of strength.
Fanciful idea. I wish that were true. But I am convinced it is nonsense when the repressive ones are willing to unleash unrestrained violence.
I long for the day's, like just 5 years ago when Stalinist thought was the stuff of comedy. It makes me fearful of what 5 years from now will look like.
Surrogates.
1984 Orwell
Minority Report
My thought exactly......
Thoughtcrimes
What a weapon. This reminds me of the movie Brazil.
How convenient.
And anyone who questions this can be smeared as a bigot and defender of bigots.
Pre-Hate Crime would be harder in other parts of the world as the central location for woketopians, the cult hive minded persons who would foolishly support something like this are all in the West primarily in the US but also prevalent in Canada. If only government had enough power to make everyone be nice to each other we'd have utopia, that is what the woketopians believe.
Thought crimes, of course
Yes, the Libtard Party
This framing of the issue in terms of Virtuals vs. Physicals cuts right to the heart of the matter. Has anyone else put the argument in this way? It’s astonishingly brilliant analytically and clearly simplifies things in a way superior to the Woke vs Anti-Woke or Progressive vs Classical Liberal framing. New essays in Upheaval are rapidly becoming my most anticipated Substack destination.
I think it's very close but not quite spot on. There are a lot of people whose jobs involve doing things in the physical world who are on the woke side of this and a lot of people with digital jobs that support the truckers.
The real distinction here is ever so slightly different: Do you earn a living by performing labor or producing something, or are you granted one in return for being visibly loyal to the party. Is your job an actual job or a sinecure.
This is why you see actual programmers, tech support staff, and the like who'll support the truckers while "community managers", middle management, useless executives, and legions of HR staff are all firmly on Trudeau's side. The former have real jobs that actually require them to competently do something, the latter have bullshit jobs that exist primarily to further their own existence.
And then at the very top you have the people who are neither. The hereditary nobility who earn money just by having money and who simply aren't part of the economy in the same way as the rest of us. Those are the people that get to do things like have stock trading frozen to protect them while robinhood forcibly steals and sells people's gamestop shares without their permission.
Yes, as a software developer who supports the truckers, I would agree this is slightly more accurate. I think the key distinction, even in my world, is those who get by through competence vs those who get by through obeisance.
The simplicity of the original thesis does make it attractive for purposes of exposition, and agree it is very close to the mark.
Agreed - same here for accounting. The most competent accountants tend to be apolitical in the workplace; it's the mediocre accountants who tend to be woke as fuck, because it's seen as an alternate way to climb the career ladder if you can't cut it on merit.
I’d love for that to be true but that’s not what I’m seeing around me - software developers are just as susceptible to mass formation as everyone else which is quite surprising to me as I thought they’d be critical thinkers. While I agree a lot of “physical” are against mandates , this is not a full explanation as I bet a lot of people on this and other substacks belong to “virtual” category. At one point I thought that all immigrants who where exposed to totalitarian regime would recognize the signs but that turned out not to be 100% accurate either. In addition to broad categories maybe there are some people who can resist mass formation better than others?
I've puzzled on that a bit as well. I would be considered a "virtual" in some ways but my psyche is more "country girl" because I was raised around animals and nature and love solitude. I think there is something, as you identified, that makes a person more immune to mass psychosis. I conjecture that it is in part being independent minded and a little skeptical which would tie nicely into being a "physical " because you are expected to get your job done with no excuses. I suppose no broad theory will cover human behavior entirely but in general I think the "physical/virtual" explains a lot.
I'm a retired Marine, mechanic, machinist, and I see the key being "independent and solitude". I often go days without a visitor in the shop, and it gives me much time, running machines, to think. Semper Fi.
https://medium.com/s/balkanized-america/the-11-nations-of-america-as-told-by-dna-f283d4c58483
yes, a lot of it has to do with genes and cultural background.
I'm a machinist and welder, used to work avionics, deep tech, and I only wish I weren't old and sick. I was my twenties, maybe, when truckers shut D.C. down, back in the eighties, and that made change. We need to support our own trucker movement, perhaps more enthusiastically, and vigorous.
Good point. And bullshit jobs are everywhere, not just restricted to virtual world. 80/20 rule applies to all of humanity as a whole. Projections on to a 2d plane will always miss nuances. However, Lyon's "model" fits the data well.
I appreciate the David Graeber reference ("bullshit jobs"), I couldn't help but think of his work in reading this essay.
Yep, the neomarxists/SJWs/etc. are foot soldiers for
1. the remnants of the financial elites and
2. the tech oligarchs (new money)
https://attackthesystem.com/2021/12/06/curtis-yarvin-mencius-moldbug-on-tucker-carlson-today-09-08-21/
Lyons (whoever he/she is) has become a master zeitgeistologist.
Zeitgeistmeister
Yes, I agree with that characterization, and like @Sue has said in another comment, "This is so good."
This essay opened a whole basket of thoughts and questions as I read it; i.e, the Pareto principal surely applies to the Virtuals much more than the Physicals; what is the impact of that economically, an 80% of them be eliminated? Which group is most vulnerable to AI and other technology advances? Sure, they can develop self-driving trucks over the next few years, but surely a whole ton of "Virtual" jobs, many of them not really necessary, can be eliminated with software.
What of the jobs (people) the Virtuals can not eliminate, but may not be able to be co-opted; the police, the military, etc. In a reality based world, those jobs are critical.
Does the Virtuals group shrink as people grow older, as they choose to move out of the cities, as their lifestyle lends them to worse health outcomes, etc.
This essay is so good, and I find it to be hopefully enlightening.
Interesting questions!
Maybe N.S.Lyons could write an article about the connection between Virtuals and Physicals, and intelligence, measured by IQ and alternatively by common sense ?
Charles Murray`s book, The Bell Curve, details how American society is becoming divided between classes based upon IQ, but if the Virtuals are the high IQ group, and they are also the ones becoming most detached from reality, then what exactly does IQ measure ??
There is nothing quite so stupid as an academic with a high IQ!
Very true !
It is beginning to seem that we do go mad in crowds, and it is up to us to maintain our sanity individually. Maybe that is not a quality that can be measured, like IQ ? Do we call it intelligence, or meaning, or value, or proportionality, or does it not matter what we call it because it underlies thought and language ?
heard quoted last year..."you will never find Jesus in mob mentality". Because it is relationship and heart and coming to know your "right mind". These brainiac idiots will self destruct because they refuse the only path to God's Wisdom...that is HUMILITY. You cannot hide from it nor create an alternate new way that the universe will work. and you can not legislate the Truth away.
See E.O. Wilson and others in the field of sociobiology.
From an evolutionary perspective, the human species is intensely eusocial, somewhat like ants or bees: an individual is willing and expected to sacrifice themselves for the common good. So, social cooperation and intense tribalism are evolved characteristics in humans that improved survival (in a given gene pool of a kinship group).
Darwin himself had great insight into that evolutionary process:
-----
Peter Richerson [UC Davis] quotes Darwin (as an example of group selection hypothesis and the neurobiology of sympathy in "primeval times"):
"It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection (178-179)."
The exception is Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson is refreshing, coming from a clinical psychology perspective rather than a political one, and he also asks the relevant question : What happens when the Left goes too far ?
Tara Henley (ex CBC journalist, now on Substack) as well
I don't think its really a detachment from reality moreso than a defense mechanism against reality. If the brain is the greatest tool for the IQ class it would follow that the mind is the only that that must be controlled in order to bring in Nirvana (conveniently this Nirvana is a world where the IQ class is the supreme being)
only problem is, without God, you will have chaos, dis-order, anxiety and endless fear! Continual worthless self-protection...funny you mention Nirvana...the gifted talented band member mentally self destructed from a lack of Mental peace. there are 2 choices in life, relationship with God or hell on earth in your mind alone fighting demons. And illicit drugs and alcohol nor endless amounts of money will fill the void.
in evolutionary terms, the human species survived just fine without "god" for 100,000 of years.
nature worship is suitable for nomadic hunting/gathering cultures, but not for walled city-states that have complex social hierarchies.
complex social hierarchies required a new "sense making system".
mythic culture (in which "god" was "invented") evolved as a result of the Bronze Age Collapse and the failure of pagan nature worship to solves the problem of social, spiritual and psychological order.
See the work of Kurt Fischer and his colleagues at Harvard GSE. Dynamic Skills Theory was a response to the unsophisticated, but partially correct, idea of "emotional intelligence".
Weirdly, when the creepy mobs of "blank slate" cultural-marxists tried to purge "developmental" psychologists (and later sociobiologists) from academia, the last surviving developmentalists, such as Robert Kegan and Fischer, ended up at Harvard.
complexity/systems theory
It's not even the Pareto principle - the Internet actively turns things into so-called tournament professions, where a vanishingly few at the top will attain just about all the reward. Back in the day, you needed many people capable of playing music live, now most of the money is in the hands of megacorps and vast catalogs of old famous artists. Actors, same thing: Theaters need many people since their distribution ability is limited, movie actors, not so much.
Writing used to occupy very distinct modes purely as a function of the difficulty of printing and then shipping the paper - cheap, quick and dirty news was local, nationally distributed pieces necessarily had to report on at least slightly less time-sensitive matters and free from that pressure could afford to be longer, and so on. Now, everything is instantly everywhere which demolishes a lot of that old diversity of necessity, and the old flatness born of just not being able to be everywhere.
Freddie deBoer has written solid pieces about how dismal the money in writing is. They're depressing reading to say the least.
On Twitter, you can find university and college lecturers looking at ads for a fast food manager's position that pay about the same or better than their own jobs.
The thing the elimination of jobs discussion misses the mark on is that technology may mean Physical jobs can literally not need humans anymore, but they miss that while many Virtual jobs will still need a human to do them, that doesn't say anything about the raw number of people needed.
There's a reason the demands of a large number of woke tantrums include demands to establish new commissar's posts. People need work, and the only thing they've been taught is how to make people's lives worse.
Don't forget the "Climate Corps" being a key plank of the Green New Deal, i.e. hiring gender studies majors at $100k/year to take selfies next to trees and pretend they planted them.
lol, yep. All Tree Genders Matter!
Maybe that helps explains the huge growth in bureaucratic and academic admin positions. The managerial class might believe it is immune, but I think it may be most at risk.
the fragility of complex social hierarchies is a classical historical problem going back thousands of years.
Absolutely. These managerial classes are parroting whatever the elites send down (witness the garish and hypocritical explosion of corporate Woke signaling) in hopes that they will make the cut. They've been increasingly terrified of not "being on the inside" and this is just one more flavor. They're very very vulnerable as they don't really have any fallback. Many can't even change a tire. Kind of reminds me of the servant class of the Meths in Altered Carbon.
That was a solid 1st season, shame the 2nd season was straight woketrash.
How true. I couldn't finish the 1st episode of the 2nd season. And I will say the book was better than the series, without the Woke re-writes (e.g. Faulkner).
I watched the full 2nd season (after having enjoyed the books), and I will never get that time back.
A consultant friend said, "In the new order, the factory needs a man and a dog. The dog to protect the machines. And the man to feed the dog.
And the machines to write these comments
They are very sensitive to their need to control the military and the police. Wokeness has exploded in these areas, and the mandates with their lack of any flexibility is intended IMO to drive out any that will not comply or have an objection of conscience.
For the very obvious reason. They need those without a conscience to do the unconscionable.....just like Hitler. These people are off the charts dangerous!
The police and military will be replaced by the illegals who they can control
No, Latin America is approaching the US the same way that Britain approached China: the opium wars. Why buy milk when you can get the cow addicted to meth.
This was like a lightbulb for me. I live in a small town in Southeastern Missouri. Drug addicts wandering the streets on foot or bicycle. Everywhere, day and night. Town completely hollowed out economically. Old downtown buildings being taken over and refurbished at great expense by government agencies, all to serve the poor and addicted. The Meth Wars.
Cartels/mafia
This is the bad news perspective:
https://attackthesystem.com/2019/02/18/the-coming-dystopia/
excerpt:
The Coming Dystopia?
BY KEITH PRESTON ON FEBRUARY 18, 2019
The future of the US, or the future “post-US” or the “future of the Western world” or “the future of the global order, will be rule by the techno-oligarch/new clerisy alliance, where neoliberals constitute “conservatism” and progressives/SJWs constitute “liberalism.” Everyone, including the historic WASP culture, will be a minority.
[->] We will have a highly stratified Latin American-style class system with the Rainbow Culture as its self-legitimating state ideology.
The emerging ruling class will also have a world empire, a military industrial complex and a police state that it will have inherited from previous regimes.
...
The more fanatical the SJWs become the more they will drive people away from the left toward the right, but in a way that has the effect of liberalizing the right to the point that “the right” is just yesterday’s liberalism. Imagine if the neoliberal and technocratic centrist Democrats were the “conservatives” and university and NGO leftists were the “liberals,” that’s a good picture of what the political future will look like. That’s how it is in Europe, Canada and Australia anyway. The more the “right” loses ground politically and culturally, the more extreme and violent it will become (with more violence coming from the left in the process). The more fractious conventional politics becomes, the more people with different beliefs will self-isolate in their own enclaves.
...
Latino’s and Blacks Hindi Muslim in USA are less than 40% ... I’m seeing a breeding frenzy winner take all in 20 years
Ok, found what you were referencing:
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back/comment/5109169
Breeding frenzy??? lol
The natural tendency of people is to stab people from "out groups" in the back, unless they have some common vision, purpose or myth to the contrary.
Decades ago when affirmative action and "diversity" narratives became popular, an older black school administrator I knew from another social setting told me that the competition and back stabbing between blacks, hispanics and asians was brutal. Far more "racism" between the various non-whites than between whites and non-whites is how she put it. Before retiring I started hearing from asians that they were called "yellow whites" and were getting passed over, just like most white people, for promotions.
I have no idea what you are referencing, sorry. Context lost due to substack link error.
-----------------------------------------------------------
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back/comment/5188874
re: context lost
Due to the substack software glitch, email notification like error, I had to click "like" to get here (after which I unclicked "like"). The "Return to thread" button thingy dumps me back out to the top of the comments, not the pertinent subthread.
Victor Davis Hanson has written extensively on the subject as well, at least since Trump won, but he's framed it more as rural vs. urban. He points out though, as I think Lyons would also concede, that the divide isn't strictly geographical or occupational. A family connection or some familiarity with the other tends to soften one's antipathy. To me one of the most alarming trends is the non-stop portrayal of non-elites as sub-human, hate vessels, and the way it's lapped up by urban elites.
im someone whose lived his life almost entirely in the liberal urban bubble (NY/LA/SF) and i am still completely blown away and struggling to find words, concepts, and any historical precedents to what Trump did to liberals and their brains and souls.
basically overnight everyone i know who lived their entire adult lives as cynical tolerant libertines became raging Robespierres who are stuck in some sort of permanent psychosis/millenarian tantrum about Trump and his voters, and it has become a blind eliminationist hatred that i dont see abating till that man is either dead or otherwise incapacitated.
it seems like some sort of mass psychosis to me, which is why i come to substacks like this to find some very smart people grappling with the same questions.
I very much agree, although I'd argue that Trump was more of a symptom than a cause. Trump won because middle Americans were tired of being neglected, ignored and wished away. His win tapped into a well of latent class prejudice and sore-loserism from urban elites. The Establishment, a coalition of EVERY powerful institution, naturally viewed Trump and his supporters as an intolerable threat to their stranglehold on all things valuable, and so waged a non-stop propaganda and legal campaign against him. This has dovetailed nicely with many people's pre-existing biases.
So I think Trump will go away as well as the worst aspects of Trumpism, if not soon. But the real hatred is for the people that voted for Trump, who aren't going away.
I would like to be educated about the worst aspects of Trumpism. For my money Trump won because he was a master administrator and well connected with reality which is the core argument of this article. Thanks to his acerbic style he did not allow himself to be badmouthed to the point of being ineffective, as Bush was. He would still be President if legal remedies were allowed to apply to the last election.
Good question. In my opinion, Trump's strengths are also his weaknesses. He's a pugnacious and tireless fighter, which means his best and default position is a reactive and combative one. To your point, it allowed him to stand up to the leftist/elitist hegemony, but not to stake out a middle ground or articulate a positive vision for the country. As a result, Trumpism appeals more to the far right than to moderates and independents and will struggle to maintain any lasting political momentum.
I think Trump had a consistently strong, traditionalist, patriotic vision of and for America; see his Mount Rushmore speech on education and culture.
The aligned elitist opposition successfully repainted that position - which would have been bedrock American can-do patriotism, under Ike or JFK - as unhinged insanity, because to them it was unbridled affront to their ivory tower.
Patriotic Americans all recognized this, but moderate wafflers who likewise support these same principles were still cowed by the anti-Trump hysteria over ‘mean tweets.’
The country is still essentially red white and blue, not communist.
I belong to the laptop class as well. However, I am grateful to Trump for blowing the lid off the "liberal" charade.
Trump isn't the problem. He was a catalyst. Leftist (not classic liberal) elitism is the problem. It always moves toward authoritarian, totalitarian constructs. It's a festering boil that needed lancing and was lanced when he came down the escalator. All that self loathing pent up hatred, was unleashed on him. And when he's gone they'll wield it on us. And when they run out of us then they'll eat their own. You can see it happening already. The useful idiot's are dropping like flies like Cuomo, then his shitbag brother. Trump represents the "physicals", the great unwashed like me that actually do shit like fight their stupid wars and build their infrastructure. The ones "elites" can't stand! There's a global "elite" cabal (world economic forum) that fancies itself rulers of the entire planet. Trump represents a populist threat to their goals. But after him there will be others because you can't keep the yearning if people to be free down. Dividing poeple along class, race, economic, and educational, lines keeps people from uniting. That is the only thing the cabal truly fears. Imho.
I agree, but I think we shouldn't underestimate the power and influence of the elite institutions. When I was younger there was a natural tension between various institutions as some aligned with the right and some with the left. In the last twenty years they seem to have figured out that cooperation is much more conducive than conflict to maintaining the status quo.
What's going on in Canada is inspiring. But when you see the awesome power of the state, courts, business and media aligned against them I worry that they are merely drawing a temporary line in the sand, much like other populist movements before them.
Slave and peasant rebellions have been going on for 1,000s of years.
They are the product of human nature and the evolution of the human species in small kinship groups that were intensely emotionally bonded internally, but hostile to outsiders.
When nomadic people were taken as slaves by the mass armies of the first empires, the tribal instincts of the slaves to hate the master classes as "outsiders", was natural.
Similarly, the Celtic tribes (and Scottish Border Reivers) hated the dominant, superior economic and cultural system of the lowland Frankish Manorials.
The USA inherited that gene-pool/cultural conflict, and it is being revived as the USA empire is disrupted by technologies and global economics, due to the fragility of the legacy modern-rational sense-making system.
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/guns-violence-again/
Side note: Trump is basically a Druid that reanimated Celtic resentments and Neoconfederate resentments in the context of the internal crumbling of the american empire.
Deep dive into the evolutionary memetics of Trump's rise:
https://medium.com/rally-point-journal/collective-intellignce-and-swarms-in-the-red-church-49f6a6d04825
And also how the family and community connections are readily cast off by the Virtuals.
The destruction of the family is a core tenet of modern leftism
This explains why so often, when presented with the undeniable squalor and poverty evident in so many formally prosperous working-class communities, the standard Virtualist response is to "move to a better place".
Which ironically is mostly why the USA exists - people escaping poverty and political or religious repression in Europe.
In my college days I was a true Marxist. Studied him. Believed him. Wanted to lead the revolution. I've grown up, and while I am no longer ready for the revolution, I do believe Marx is dismissed far too easily by many. If he was just a kook, we wouldn't still be talking about him after 150 years.
John Locke & Adam Smith posit man as a rational individual seeking to maximize his own benefit. They're not wrong; they're just not complete. Karl Marx is the other half of that picture: man is also tribal, seeking out a group and often acting in solidarity with that group, sometimes to his own individual detriment. Locke can't explain that; Marx can and does.
However, Marx wrote in Dickensonian London, the early Industrial Rev. It's been hard for a while to apply Marxist analysis to our current world, especially since so much of the welfare state owes its existence to the bourgeoisies' fear of a worker's revolt in the early 20th century. The "woke" want to map Marxist class analysis onto race, but it's a bad fit. N.S. Lyons has a far better fit, successfully creating a new definition of proletariat and bourgeoisie that captures Marx's original "workers vs owners" viewpoint and brings it into the 21st century.
This is an extremely important article. It should be shared widely.
You think we will stop talking about Hitler in 200 years. That's your barometer for sane or insane the number of years we talk about someone. PLEASE. Let me spell it out for you. Marx was a mental midget, and possibly mentally ill and all of his thinking related to economics is and was completely wrong-headed.
Marx revolution was about his shaking fist at God, he was a freemason and atheist. We would all do well to expose him as an evil wicked man and not share his wickedness with young impressionable children.
Very nicely put, when you challenge peoples perception of reality as Marx did you quickly bring out the witch burner in them.
The postmodern-left (neomarxists) does not believe that "reality" exists. They still engage in witch hunts, mostly against people that DO believe that "reality" still exists.
Marx's best insight was that with the fall of mythic culture (Divine, Kosmic order), material and physical causes of class conflict (and social change) were better predictors of human behavior than supernatural causes.
The problem was that Marx went overboard and ignored the fact that archetypal psychology ("meaning" and religion) is co-emergent with physical causes of social change.
See Gerhard Lenski on the ecological-evolutionary theory of social change, which accounts for genetics/heredity.
https://faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Essays/Lenski1.htm
The "fall of mythic culture" (as you call it) was what led to millions of deaths from the atheistic regimes of the U.S.S.R., China and other communist nations, far worse than any religious institution did prior and since. Solzhenitsyn was right!
re: https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back/comment/5207573
Yes, and before that it led to the Enlightenment, modern-rationalism, capitalism and "classical liberalism" (Constitutional order and rule of law).
I'm super hyped about my substack feed in general - there are a number of phenomenal writers on here. The comment sections are measured, engaged and passionate as well.
This site rocks homie! It makes me feel optimistic about the future! Somehow the "physicals" (and those sympathetic to us) are attracting the best intellectuals as well awakening to an organic "class consciousness". For the last two years I've been wallowing in and out of despair, convinced that the 2020s will be some dark times indeed, but it's increasingly looking like we could swing things hard in the other direction. The Trudeau's of the world have overplayed their hand, and I can't wait to see them suffer (political) consequences for that.
It will be interesting to see how long before the kooky troll bots show up, and how the site admins deal with them.
Hoping for the best, but we'll see I guess...
!
having to pay to comment helps!
There is no physical thinking world vs. virtual thinking world. The two worlds we live in have more to do with our mental facilities than this virtual or physical world the author discusses (realists vs. antirealists). The mentally ill “Virtual World” (Justin Trudeau's world) and the non mentally ill “Physical World” (common sense and disciplined citizens raised by parents and a community that cared) are increasingly living in a world where we teach our children that there is nothing wrong with them. All they need is the correct mix of pharmaceuticals. Take the phenomenon of attention deficient disorder. This isn't a disorder. This is how most young boys are wired. No amount of Adderall is going to fix this so-called mental illness. The only cure for ADD is parents showing up regularly and helping our children realize that getting distracted is a regular event. With effort and patience, one can learn without the use of drugs that you can develop the mind to break the behavior that some quacks call ADD. It’s time we ditch the participation trophies and start showing up to raise our children. You can’t buy a German Shorthair Pointer and expect that one day it will automatically be a great hunting dog just because of its excellent pedigree. It takes hours and consistent daily training, and even then, some of them never end up being great bird dogs. But when we live in a society where we think all of our children could do no wrong and are perfect miniature versions of us, and they need little to no instruction or any of our time… well, then you will get what we are all witnessing today. Justin Trudeau is an excellent example of this. Does anyone think Pierre and Margaret were ever-present raising this silver spoon spoiled little shithead?
Ya, and It would be vewwwy intewesting to see Fidel Casto's DNA compared to True-dope's DNA.
Woof!
This is what’s going on in a nutshell! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
When did I say that young men have difficulty staying attentive? I never said that.
There used to be a broad consensus that the world was flat. We now know the world is not flat. Just because a consensus of quacks says this disorder is real doesn't make it real. There are many in the scientific community and many countries that disagree. They also have meager rates of ADHD clinical assessments compared to what we have here in the US. You must be one of those over-educated dipshits that we call quacks I mean, a psychiatrist who enjoys medicating people.
By the way this wasn't the point I was trying to make. You sanctimonious son of...
What’s fascinating to me is how the “virtuous” even truly see themselves.
Do they REALLY think they’re virtuous???
- while not wanting to have children because they think life sucks??
Is it all tongue in cheek and simply contempt - much like the nerd who hates the jock at school for banging the girl he wanted?
It’s payback time?
Some stupid competition?
Ax to grind?
Consider that one of the earliest major "progressive" political figures, Woodrow Wilson, was a blood thirsty, psychotic war monger, imperialist, xenophobe, and racist.
The "progressive-left" is simply an outgrowth of 1800s Victorian "morality", which was a religious-missionary international paradigm.
The feminists of the time, Suffragettes (also "Progressives"), allied with Woodrow Wilson because he supported their push for Prohibition, which was basically a culture war against working class men.
Some things never change. Or they change very slowly.
Don’t make me hate the today’s left more than I already do!
I’ll always be a dreamer though. I think it’s possible to one day have a real liberal leader that we can trust.
Based on what many futurists and systems theorists think will emerge, "liberalism' will evolve into "meta-liberalism" (co-emerging with construct-aware meta-rationalism).
There are so many different meanings to the word "liberal" that are used in different contexts (including politics/sociology), that I tend to use the phrase "not ILLIBERAL" instead, which gets at the basic point: not totalitarian, not tyrannical, not despotic, not dictatorial, not authoritarian, not intolerant.
Historically, "liberal" culture evolved in contrast to clannish social forms and in contrast to imperialist social forms.
When the early church banned cousin marriage to undermine the power of clans, the gene pool got a boost and then there were more people with "liberal" personality types (see Jonathon Haidt and other evolutionary psychologists) available for breeding. As the feudal economy gave way to modern, market economics ("capitalism"), trade increased, the urban population expanded, the wealth of the middle classes increased, literacy increased, people with higher IQs were selected since improvements in science and technology required being smarter, etc. The nuclear family played a crucial role as did delayed marriage (teen marriage was typical in clans).
As the feudal economy, medieval loyalty oaths to warlords, and clannish way of life diminished, the felt-sense of people was that peasants and the expanding bourgeoise (urban middle classes: shopkeepers, river and sea traders, scribes, craftspersons, etc.) had "natural rights" to more freedom (independent achievement outside of conformist-communion values), to own property, and so forth.
That kind of medieval liberalism, which co-evolved with decentralized (pre-nation-state) politics, was pushed aside after 1492, by the forces of political re-centralization by empire builders, for several hundred years.
Due to advances in education and science, by the 1700s what is usually called "classical liberalism" began to co-evolve with modern-rationalism, such as Enlightenment values, in contrast to the Absolutism of the empires.
Here is how one cultural anthropologist explains it:
https://weirdpeople.fas.harvard.edu/
One of the important take-aways is that there is a genetic basis for the co-emergence of all the factors in the WEIRD ("classically liberal") social form. That partly explains why many non-western societies, including Russia, are not all that compatible with "classical liberalism" in their systems of governance.
Even in western cultures such as the USA, the WEIRD social form is being disrupted by Virtuals (electronic network technologies that bypass the curated hierarchies of expertise that high-social-trust is built on) and the resulting disintegration is resulting in regression to more primitive, tribalistic, fragmented/atomized identities as the national myth collapses along with the decline in social trust.
They are making a virtue omelette, and if some eggs have to be broken then they can live with that.
'Nerds being pissed we screwed their girlfriends', 'virtue omelets'
I'm dyin ova heya! 🤣
Yup that's pretty much it! 🤣
The problem with his premise that this is an argument between the Virtuals versus the Physicals, at least in the US, is complicated by the fact that the population of Virtuals includes a huge sub-class of ‘Do-nothings’ whose existence is dependent on handouts. In the US, we’ve created an entire group of people who will never do anything at all except beg for handouts. For those people it’s way too late.
But you can argue that the elites in a bloated government are do nothings also. Every criminal justifies their criminality right?
ya, a clear example:
"environmentalists" (actually corrupt lawyers/lobbyists) block logging and tree thinning on national forests.
catastrophic, million-acre wildfires result from the un-thinned forests.
environmentalists and their political puppets, leftist goons and vermin, then blame their failings on "climate change".
to be fair, there is a tiny fraction of sane environmentalists that understand the need for tree thinning to forest health and resiliency. but they have very little power.
Tree "thinning" is not economical industrial forestry. Clear-cutting is almost always the only economically profitable forestry. We need to preserve more old-growth forest. I think in Michigan, where I live, less than 5% of the state's woodlands are old-growth. More public forest is the answer, and managing to keep corporate interests from corrupting the management of public forests. One more thing, some would say a natural forest, where trees die and fall down, is "wasting" those trees. I disagree, there are many things in this world of more value to society that their "monetized" value.
In the west (especially away from coastal climate), timber corporations tend to "sustainably" manage forests better than the national forests, but it is a complex topic.
The ecologists and forestry experts are now admitting that to return to historical conditions, before settlement, forests in the western USA will need to be thinned by 80%. That would largely eliminate the possibility of "catastrophic" wildfires.
Compare the cost of million acre "catastrophic" wildfires (which destroy a lot of old-growth) to the economics of an 80% tree thinning scheme.
My guess is that there is a lot of political corruption, private equty scammers buying timber corporations and then buying off politicians who then pressure national forests.
Frankly, at least in California and Oregon, "environmentalists" (D-party aligned lobbyists and lawyers) are far worse enemies of the forests than loggers.
Ghetto culture is a direct result of the gross failures of the Democratic Party "machine" model of political patronage, going back to Tammany Hall, the Pendergasts, (and including Marion Barry) etc.
Complex/Systems theorist Jay Forrester predicted doom in the 1960s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Wright_Forrester#Counterintuitive_Behavior_of_Social_Systems
Ah yes, the 'do nothing's'. They became the modern day brown shirts committing the destruction in 2020, beginning with looting, rioting, and generally terrorizing the soft center living in those urban settings, encouraging them to vote 'properly'. Then they went after the statues. When the need for them has passed I'm sure they'll be dealt with swiftly by the 'elites' praetorian guard!
Yes, and as others suggest, also in many ways a brilliant update for our times of Orwell’s Party versus the Proles in “1984” and how the Inner Party controlled the broader Party and everyone else: the deliberate denigration of traditional families, the constant double think, the snitching on each other to keep the single narrative, “freedom is slavery”, punishment for thoughtcrime, the technology and information control (“ignorance is strength”) and of course rewriting history. All characteristic of the Virtual class now and especially since 2020.
Brilliant yourself! 👏 I wish I could congeal my thoughts to paper like this. You wrote what I was thinking but could not pen.
Yes. In philosophy we call this the realists vs anti-realists. Been a growing tension for the last 150 years. Pop culture now sees it manifests beyond the “ivory towers” of “boring, irrelevant philosophy.”
In memetic theory, which I assume you understand:
modernism vs postmodernism
(Kegan stage 4 vs stage 4.5)
postmodernism "as we know it" is the result of the post-WW2 suburban consumer culture.
solution: full transition to Kegan stage 5.
Kegan stage 4.5 started with the Ascona Wandervogels, Lebebsreform, both were "baby boom" subcultures from the first wave of German industrialism.
Yes. Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek series was a commentary on the human condition. It often tackled the most important questions of the day.
In this episode, The Cloud Minders, the relationship between an "elite" segment of the population of a planet lives in the clouds while the "worker class" mines the export product that supports the "elite" class.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_Minders
Somewhat related, in this episode the relationship between an "elite" class and the soldiers they created is explored.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunted_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
short version: slavery, serfdom
Yup.
Yes, similar to Cloud People(virtual reality) versus Dirt People (on the ground common sense reality), a term that Z-Man uses to good effect.
Stephen Harper Canada’s ex-PM spoke of the ‘Somewheres” (Physicals) and the Anywheres (Virtuals) in his book Right Here, Right Now published in 2018. Not identical but close.
Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek was a commentary of the human condition.
In this episode he illustrates the symbiotic relationship between the "elite" and "worker class".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_Minders
Somewhat related, in the "Next Generation" iteration of Star Trek episode The Hunted, the "elite class" created soldiers that they were unwilling to integrate back into their society.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunted_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
https://defaultfriend.substack.com/ - writes on many weird things, including how the next culture war is going to be about technology. Not quite the same, but similar idea: https://defaultfriend.substack.com/p/the-future-of-the-culture-wars
As Marx (sorta) predicted, the culture wars are driven a feedback loop with technological and economic disruption.
Postmodernism "as we know it" (cultural-leftism, PC/SJWs, BLM, Antifa, etc) is the result of post-WW2 suburban consumer culture and the decline of the traditional values such as Church/Temple attendance in farm communities, legacy industrial areas, etc.
1. Did not George Orwell teach the masses thusly? "All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.” What we are seeing now is what happens after the fraud is no longer working.
2. If the Truckers tell us nothing else, they ought to tell Trudeau and his coterie just how seething mad with white hot incandescent rage a lot of people are. And it don't take a hell of a lot of people.
Imagine if this were happening in the US, where a significant proportion of Physicals have access to all manner of firearms, not to mention the training to use them.
3. Re: Physicals and Virtuals. It is often said that the Virtuals are incompetent, but that is not strictly speaking true. Rather, they are very competent players at a very abstract sort of status game, but real-world Physical expertise is, if anything, a detriment to winning that sort of game.
Something I wrote a while back:
The US in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled" or "deplatformed". Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great And Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to financial services to corporate board to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "How do I feed the kids this week and pay for school supplies and make the rent?" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Marie ("Let Them Eat Cake!") Antoinette look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribeswoman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Pious, impoverished, and tough as nails. Not only that, but mistakes can get him killed. As in "dead". Permanently.
Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to provide for it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably rifa, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism. It cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less virtuous.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
+1 for bringing up Jon Corzine. Yes, he is still walking free.
"You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably rifa, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism. It cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less virtuous."
Exhibit A: https://twitter.com/martyrmade/status/1494196180586139648?cxt=HHwWgMCoic_gubwpAAAA
"All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.”
For some reason I first read that as "All Trannies rule through fraud and force..."
Dr. Freud... Dr. Freud... paging Dr Freud, your 4 o'clock appointment is here...
Check out tranny Nicky Reid, a "real" (pro-gun) Anarchist that really dislikes the "statist" left, including the SJW crapola.
Oh, Jake! You are so transparent.
Ya, the traditional-mythic model of evil has been replaced by a New Religion of "wokeism". (John McWhorter)
The virtual world is also murderous. Note how few Afghans, even those not ordinarily inclined to support the Taliban, were all in when our puppet was the other choice on offer.
The Taliban was the creation of the fundamentalists in the Pakistani security forces as a weird outgrowth of Bill Clinton's teachery and the earlier "Charile Wilson's war" error. All of that goes back to the foreign policy screwups of Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The common people of Afghanistan knew that the USA's occupation was hopeless in the long run, especially after Obama told them that in 2010!
Also see the SIGAR reports. Yes, the defense establishment knew it was a huge sham.
If the Physicals stopped working for a week, the Virtuals would starve. If the Virtuals stopped working for a week, the Physicals would not be affected at all and the world would probably be a better place.
Well, a week isn't enough time to starve very many. But let's say a year.
The vast majority of Physicals are NOT self sufficient in today's world. If the Virtuals turned off every computer and satellite and power plant in the world (none of which can run today without them), most Physicals would starve too.
Quite right. Assuming that trailer dwellers have the intelligence and ability to tend themselves is a grave mistake. The last place I want to be when an EMP shuts down the country is in a city. No one will be safe; and I derive a tremendous amount of satisfaction when contemplating the Virtuals staring down at the masses from their ivory towers, seemingly unaware that they are facing some sort of guillotine, be it virtual or physical. People gotta eat. Yo.
On the contrary, Physicals would be okay with adapting to a life without the Virtuals (and contrary to what you claim, are not in charge of the power plants). They could completely live a life without any of the things you've mentioned. The same is not true of the Virtuals.
But sure, change the goalposts from a week to a year. A week without food is not a happy experience for most people.
b0t
After dozens of cites being burned by protestors in the 1960s, the war college planners developed contingency plans for "domestic disorders". First thing they do is cut power and fuel, communications and food/water supply.
The "people" would be begging for a dictator to "restore order" quick as a chicken on a june bug.
When I lived in rural Plumas County (northern Sierra Nevada) in the 1980s there was all sorts of lore about local militias that would blow up bridges and roads into the area in case of catastrophe (nuclear war, the "big one" earthquake) in the urban lowlands of California. The militias knew that an influx or starving city people would lead to the loss of their cattle and property, destruction of irrigation systems and poaching of wild deer herds in the forest.
I get your sentiment, but I am not sure if it's obvious. If virutals merely start being "austere", many physicals will starve. Modern economy is a complex beast. The Bolshevik jews thought that the workers who produce stuff were the real heroes. That did not work out well.
This is so good. Reading it was beyond satisfying. There is clarity! I had been thinking of them as the globalists vs localists but that never felt correct. It's absolutely the virtuals and the physicals. I find their virtual world terrifying so let's get to work figuring out how to shore up the future for physical reality.
Bernie Neville at latrobe . edu. au, an archetypal psychologist, educator and futurist, did a lot of work on the way that Hermes, greek god of information and boundaries (and violations), is the best image for the evolving information ecologies (sense making systems) of planetary network culture.
In other words: a "religious" revolution is needed to force the planetary elites back into thinking in real human ways, instead of serving the "gods of automata".
Each stage of societal evolution in the past has required such a "religious" revolution.
(Even modern rationalism is ultimately a set of metaphysical constructs.)
As the [hippy] Whole Earth Catalog stated in the 1960s:
Purpose
We are as gods and might as well get good at it.[14] So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQstRd7opv4
Remember when the internet was the "wild west" of technology?
The historical wild west was a lawless frontier.
The problem now is similar, the lack of law and order, or some other moral-regulatory feature, of "planetary" (electronic-network) culture.
Here is a summary of many of the leading futurists and systems thinkers:
https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/the-paradoxes-of-organising-in-a-fast-changing-world-markets-networks-d96b10d86c9f
This is a terrific column. You have absolutely nailed it!
I would add to this that the Virtuals are no longer the thinking class. They don't think at all, they merely parrot the same trite phrases and canned opinions, leading to the NPC meme that is so apt. The new thinking class is actually the rural and suburban Physicals that they so abhor. We are the ones questioning Covid. We are the ones studying political philosophy and questioning the rights of man and the role of government in our lives. We aren't blindly following, we are probing and pondering and trying to find a path forward, much like the men who brought us 1776 and touched off an upstart rebellion against entrenched and moribund power that changed the world forever.
There's so much to love here, not the least of which is "the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain."
But some of the stuff that struck me hardest (because true):
"what the Chinese Communist Party refers to as 'public opinion management,' is now the entire strategic response of the Virtual class to every political problem."
"The post-modern fish swims in a narrative sea, and their first reaction is always to try to control it (through what the CCP calls 'discourse power') because at heart they well and truly believe in the idea of the 'social construction of reality...'"
"...this is merely the culmination of a long, inevitable political realignment that’s occurred across the West as the 'left' became the party of the Virtuals, the socialist revolution became a revolution against fixed reality, and the Physicals became the backwards, reactionary others standing in the way of Progress."
This post more than anything gave me a small amount of hope that the current state of things might be overcome. Maybe I'm delusional, or just really, really need to hope.
We all need hope... Reading these comments, and comments on other substack articles, at least there is assurance that we're not alone. That there are other thinking people out there. We might be the minority, but we at least exist.
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back/comment/5273884
As Lyons suggests in the post, the Virtuals are eroding, and will continue to erode, the control that the Physicals have over the physical world. The rise of the Internet of Things is a huge step in this direction. Every simple analog device is becoming a WIFI-connected "smart device", which means it can be hacked, adjusted, or turned off by far-off Virtuals. Pretty soon, truckers will not be able to just drive their trucks wherever they want. Virtuals will be able to remotely disable the vehicles or, eventually, lock the misbehaving truckers inside and remotely drive the trucks straight to the local police station.
Even setting aside any active malevolence on the part of the Virtuals, the complexity that they introduce with their computer chips has the practical effect of reducing the autonomy of people who work on physical equipment for a living. A 1975 car could be more or less fully understood by an expert mechanic, but a 2022 car has many components that are effectively black boxes to even the best mechanics.
Even with the IoT, a full blown workers strike would starve out the Physicals long before they could finish building Skynet.
What happens instead of all driving into Ottawa, the truckers instead boycott the city and refuse to deliver supplies? Or park their trucks on all the highways in and out of town and remove the wheels?
Muscle wins in the end. Always.
Waco, Ruby Ridge, McVay/Oklahoma City.
Someone that worked at a defense company told me they had a "telescope" that could be made airborne and "see a tennis ball through a window 3,000 miles away". The surveillance-state is a major impediment. Any anti-state movement will be immediately infiltrated as soon as it becomes known (Curt Doolittle).
???
If that were truly the case, humans would be extinct on Planet Of The Tigers.
False equivalence.
Think French revolution, American war of independence, Bolshevik revolution, Mao's cultural revolution, etc, etc.
State's monopoly of violence enforces its arbitrary mandates, dictates, laws. Regimes fall when police and the army refuse to carry out violence on citizenry. Precisely why the Second amendment is so very crucial. It sets boundaries. Just threat of non-trivial violence from citizenry is sufficient. The regime understands this and hence the desperate chipping away at the amendment.
The OP mentioned "muscle". Not violence or anything else.
"Muscle" is overrated. For a tiger has more muscle than any human.
Virtuals will be able to remotely disable the vehicles.....From the appropriately named "MUSCLE CARS AND TRUCKS:
"Deep within the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was signed into law by President Joe Biden is a passage that will require automakers to begin including what can be best summarized as a “vehicle kill switch” within the operating software of new cars, which is described in the bill as “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology”. The measure has been positioned as a safety tool to help prevent drunk driving, and by 2026 the kill switch could be mandated on every new car sold in the United States." Another Mandate.....Policy......for those who live in MeatSpace.
"the complexity that they introduce with their computer chips"
Those would be the chips the shortage of which has snarled up our supply chains and left automakers with huge fields full of metal heaps that cannot be finished and sold because: NO CHIPS! "Physicals" know for sure that damned few processes for us to live can be run when the chip shortage expands.
ONE chip fab on the *planet* makes 50% of all chips used on the planet; and it's in the threatened Taiwan. The PantsSh--ter-in-Chief (well, its handlers...) are putting out several $million to try to restart the U.S. chip making industry: U.S/ used to supply 50%; now 12% of chips. Not billion, millions. AND it will take probably ten years IF we succeed! Illiterate, no-work-ethic illegals gonna be making chips?! Yeah-NO!
But the Physical will be JUST as crippled. Trucking only: trucks can't run. Truckers can't call dispatcher or supplier or recipient of the loads. The satellite feeds that help them with the best route won't be reachable... We'll ALL starve. oops.
This is excellent commentary, and as others have said, you have cut to the heart of the matter! I am based in New Zealand, where we are currently experiencing our own smaller version of this freedom movement, and a Prime Minister who is copying Trudeau almost move-for move. I will be dedicating the next episode of my podcast (The Dispatches) to your article (it will be live in the next 24 hours on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/the-dispatches/id1584922518 AND Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/04DlgKR0sYPYLmQD3kkHbK?si=2lRzaPL_S9OesjHaf4K6fA plus all the other usual platforms!)
What I find, as a Hungarian, fascinating, is how culturally collonized both us and you New Zealanders are.
You talk about BLM protests: why are they relevant in New Zealand? You neither have African-Americans (as a class) or US-style police brutality, yet your commentators act as if it's a New Zealand topic.
The tucker protest is a lot more relevant globally, due to excessive COVID lockdowns.
You know a concept is really good when you put it on like a pair of glasses, and suddenly you see things more clearly. That was my experience with the Virtual/Physical distinction. Thank you.
Your distinction between physicals and virtuals rings true. I am an acquisitions editor and I spend most of my days reading, writing, or talking (virtual).
For a period of time I was also a member of our volunteer fire department (physical). It's hard for me to imagine two realities more different. It snows and editor me stays home. It snows and the pager rings, firefighter me gets in the car and responds.
The first time it happen I realized how much I am conditioned to a virtual life and how profoundly different this from much of the rest of the world!
I find it unlikely that some women in care professions aren't incredibly aware of the real world. Birth, health, and dying are likely to snap you back to reality. So does abuse, malnutrition, and foster care.
I know plenty of male managers that live with their head in the clouds, and male programmers that have delusions of being almost transhuman online.
Anyway, its not that your thesis is wrong, I just don't think this boils down to men versus women; I don't even think that difference is worth mentioning.
I think this is precisely why there is a drive to strip men of what makes them masculine and distance women from what makes them women. The careerist proud-of-my-abortion "Barbie" is distanced from the physical of childrearing and raising her family, the computer attached video-gaming women-hating male feminist porn junkie tooth-picked armed male knows nothing of sacrifice, grit, and providing for anyone except his individualism. These two are easy to subdue I imagine.
This is an alterntive to the new divide proposed by David Goodhart: The Somewheres and Anywheres (in The Road to Somewhere).
This did put it in stark terms but the sheer grasping and erratic nature of the response by Trudeau and co has been interesting to watch, as if shouting "Transphobia!" was somehow going to work. Because they do this when the normal methods fail - truckers aren't going to "Read the Room" or know what "Problematic, my dude" means as a social cue.
In terms of mobilizing physical power, hard to do that in February in Ottawa, so the normal rent-a-mobs didn't make a large showing.
But yeah I think in the end, digital financial system police state tactics of the kind that Canada's Foreign Ministry rightly condemns in places like China and Belarus where it is particularly bad, are effective. Very few of the participants are people with nothing to lose - if they were, their behavior would have been much different. The counter for this seems tough to figure out - crowdfunding and financial institutions are captured entities. Crypto is volatile, not all that fungible, has a learning curve that turns off a lot of people (particularly the older workforce that makes up the workers and contractors of physical world), and only remains in good graces as long as it doesn't threaten more important actors. The only thing I can think of would be radical reform of how the financial sector is directed and regulated by the state.
We might be headed back to the days of cash stuffed into mattresses.
Someone will probably create a physical script, non-traceable for the Physicals so that it can be privately priced and exchanged amongst each other. There's always a hack.
Yes, which is exactly why the federal government wants to eliminate cash entirely. What if they succeed in doing so? What's to stop them? What will we do then?
Gold probably. No government can take away its value, which they can do with crypto regulation for example . Roosevelt outlawed gold in 1933 tho, so they could try that again. But the ultimate store of value is intelligence, which is your individual responsibility and requires maintenance
Already considering.
Consider that both crypto/blockchain "mining" and the rest of the Virtuals' reality only exists because of massive, energy gobbling, heat generating, Physical server farms.
Probably too late for that. The financial sector rules the State.
While technically a member of the Virtual Class (at the moment, termination date rapidly approaching since I refuse to comply with the vaccination demand), it may be my Mississippi roots which makes me relate well to the Physical Class, or my stubborn insistence in putting my faith in God's power and not human wisdom (1 Corinthians 2:5). Thank you for writing this. It is an important essay on these times. I am a well-educated white female, born in the South, a Christian, an advocate of true inclusion, mother of two, wife of a true public servant who tries every day against all odds to teach critical thinking to his public school students. Following his lead, I have taken a deep dive into black history month. There are so many famous civil rights leaders, black men and women, fighting for freedom, whose words then apply 100% to today. So many fascinating parallels, which, again, exposes the hypocrisy we now see with this division into the Virtual and Physical. Thank you for sharing.