"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.
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:
-----
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...
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?