Subscriber Community Thread (#9)

Hello everyone, I hope you and your families are all doing well amid turbulent times. I’ve noticed a sharp uptick in the last two weeks or so of people unsubscribing while citing a need to conserve spending, and this seems like some anecdotal evidence that the expected economic storm is either about to hit or – more likely – is already making landfall. That would be in line with US consumer and small business confidence indices that are both now registering record-breaking lows. What is your view on the economic situation? Do leave a comment below. Meanwhile, best wishes to all, and if you’ve had to unsubscribe I hope to see you back during better times someday soon.

In not unrelated news, I’ve advanced the timetable on this post in order to speak to the unfolding mass protests in the Netherlands, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere around the globe. This, you will not be surprised, is of significant interest to me given the parallels to the trucker protests in Canada. So that’s first up in the discussion of reading suggestions below.

Lastly, as an update, the next subscriber essay on the prophetic vision of Lewis and Tolkien and their potentially surprising relevance for our post-modern age is coming along nicely. But I have to take my time and move carefully, as I know that all you Tolkien and Inklings nerds out there are utterly merciless and will brutally savage even the slightest error in lore. So I must keep it secret and safe until fully confident in its perfection.

On to suggestions and commentary:

Philip Case, “Dutch farmer protests against emissions cuts spread across EU” (FWI); Emma Freie, “The Dutch Farmers' Uprising” (TAC); Michael Shellenberger, “Green Dogma Behind Fall Of Sri Lanka” (Substack); Noah Smith, “Why Sri Lanka is having an economic crisis” (Substack); Brendan O’Neill, “Sri Lanka and the global revolt against the laptop elites” (Spiked)

Something fascinating is happening, again. As Farmers Weekly reports:

Thousands of angry Dutch farmers have used their tractors to blockade ports, airports and roads. Straw bales have been torched in streets and manure has been dumped at government buildings.

Meanwhile, videos have emerged of Dutch supermarkets running out of food.

Now, in a show of solidarity, German, Italian, Spanish and Polish farmers have launched protests, in what is fast becoming an EU-wide campaign against “anti-farming” policies.

What are they protesting exactly? A proposed government mandate to cut nitrogen emissions by 50% in order to meet a court ruling on EU regulations. This would require farmers to cull huge amounts of livestock and, as the government admits, force many Dutch farmers out of work entirely. Multiple countries are planning similar policies to meet EU regulations targeting emissions reductions by 2030. This amid an already dire global food crisis.

Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, the people have just stormed the presidential palace and overthrown the government (they’re still working out the details of the formal resignation part). They’ve been protesting for months over government mismanagement that has almost completely destroyed the economy, plunging the country into poverty and hunger. The current crash is in part the result of a currency crisis exacerbated by long-running structural economic problems and bad debts (mostly to China), which Noah Smith has detailed. As Shellenberger writes, however:

But the biggest and main problem causing Sri Lanka’s fall was its ban on chemical fertilizers in April 2021. Many other developing nations had to deal with similar challenges, including covid and high foreign debt, but have not collapsed…

The numbers are shocking. One-third of Sri Lanka’s farm lands were dormant in 2021 due to the fertilizer ban. Over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85% experienced crop losses. The numbers are shocking. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier…

But the damage to tea was the key to Sri Lanka’s financial failure. Tea production had generated $1.3 billion in exports annually. Tea exports paid for 71% of the nation’s food imports before 2021. Then, tea production and exports crashed 18% between November 2021 and February 2022, reaching their lowest level in 23 years. The government’s devastating ban on fertilizer thus destroyed the ability of Sri Lanka to pay for food, fuel, and service its debt.

Ultimately, he believes:

The underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture and “ESG,” which refers to investments made following supposedly higher Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria. Sri Lanka has a near-perfect ESG score (98) which is higher than Sweden (96) or the United States (51).

All of this is, in my view, more evidence that the chasm between the “Virtuals” and the “Physicals” I wrote about in “Reality Honks Back” is the most important political divide in the much of the world today. Increasingly, desperate Physicals are ready to revolt against the top-down mandates of a virtual elite that are out of touch with physical reality and cannot understand it, the people who live in it, or the impact of their abstract theories and policies have on those people.

As O’Neill astutely notes, around the world now:

We are witnessing a rebellion not only against corrupt government officials, but also against the dangerously out-of-touch worldview of the international technocracy…

The uprisings are inchoate. Some are leaderless. The demands are not always clear. But it’s obvious what people are generally angry about – the irrational decision-making practices of a new class of political rulers who prefer quick-fix clampdowns and displays of virtue over the tough task of working out how to materially and spiritually improve people’s lives. Those who think populism is over now that Trump and even Boris Johnson have gone are in for a shock.

But the Virtuals are fighting back of course, with their trademark weapon: information and narrative control. Although not a surprise, it’s especially striking how the protests in the Netherlands, and now around Europe, have been covered in elite English-language media… as in not at all. The Financial Times, Britain’s top, allegedly economic-related newspaper? Not a single story. The New York Times? Nothing. Presumably they will get around to it, as soon as the right connections to undesirable groups can be developed. Meanwhile, as Freie reports, “the Dutch media has copied the American media’s practice of trotting out so-called experts to silence dissent” by denigrating the famers as out-of-touch with the nuances of modern food production and democratic governance. I’d expect the horrified Dutch and European governments to escalate to more coercive measures soon, however, much as Trudeau did to crush those uppity Truckers. We’ll see who prevails in the end.

Rasmus Sonderriis, “Voters and Quotas: Crunch Time for Chile’s Millennial Revolutionaries” (Quillette)

Sonderriis has here provided a pretty crazy dispatch from Chile, where the far-left government of new president Gabriel Boric (who captured the presidency riding a wave of violent anti-capitalist protests) is attempting to push through an overhaul of the constitution, with a referendum set for September 4. The new draft constitution is a massive document with 388 articles, making it ripe for abuse. But what’s most fascinating here, as far as I’m concerned, is that at its core the program seems to be not the classic populist Marxist-leftism long popular in Latin America, but the new distilled elite-left identitarian progressivism:

So, what does the document say? The big picture has been clear from the drafts circulating for months: a massive expansion of the role of the state in delivering services, and especially in upholding a new moral order of ubiquitous ethnic and gender quotas. The Convention’s requirement that each article receive two-thirds approval has slightly tempered the economic radicalism but not the identity politics.

For example:

The legal profession is alarmed by the establishment of a politician-controlled Council of Justice composed in accordance with ethnic and gender quotas. The single body will be vested with supreme powers to nominate, discipline, and dismiss judges, who will be required to reach their verdicts considering not only the law, but also “the gender perspective” (Article 312) and “the intersectional approach” (311).

This perspective is already having interesting effects:

The same number of men and women were guaranteed a seat in the Constitutional Convention, regardless of voting. Jaws dropped among feminists and male chauvinists alike when the gender-parity algorithm decided that 11 women were therefore required to give up their seats to men with fewer votes—in some cases less than half as many. Another five seats had to be resolved in the other direction, which left a total of 16 candidates feeling cheated… [So] the makers of the new social order went one-up on smashing the patriarchy and decided that the female quota could be anywhere between 50 and 100 percent.

But the draft constitution goes significantly farther than gender quotas:

[I]t reclassifies the republic as plurinacional. “What does that mean?” you may ask. Many Chileans do too… For all the rigidity of gender quotas, nothing prevents a man from voting for a woman or vice versa. The plurinational concept, on the other hand, requires voters to cast ballots for candidates of their own race, ethnicity, or “nation.”…

Even more controversially, there will be a separate system of justice for each ethnicity. Nobody is quite sure what this entails, but it reeks of inequality before the law. Finally, there is an indigenous veto “in those matters and affairs that affect them in their rights recognized in this constitution” (191.2). This could make many articles impossible to change.

For anyone who still thinks “Wokeness” is a North American phenomenon that will stay there, rather than flowing out on the tides of globalization to pollute and tear apart every far corner of the world, I am once again asking you to open your eyes and look around.

But Sonderriis thinks there may be some hope for Chile:

[W]hile sanctimonious millennials [i.e. the young president and his staff] have been proving themselves at least as prone to human frailty as their predecessors, the big challenges that voters care about remain unaddressed: rising crime, high inflation, low pensions, and uncontrolled immigration. A week into the presidential term, 50 percent approved and 20 percent disapproved of Boric’s performance. That honeymoon lasted a week. The latest figures are 33 percent approval and 62 percent disapproval. Worse still for the revolutionary project, in the many different polls on the exit plebiscite, approval languishes between four and 18 points behind rejection, with 10–30 percent still undecided… This time, Chile truly “woke up”! Between the Constitutional Convention’s antics and the Boric administration’s blunders, the political alarm bell has shaken the nation out of its revolutionary trance.

Jacob Howland, “Ideology has poisoned the West” (UnHerd)

This essay by Howland is excellent, and not unrelated to both of the above:

The term idéologie was coined during the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an anti-clerical materialist philosopher who believed that reason offered a way of uncovering general laws of social relations. Tracy conceived of idéologie as a social science of “ideas” that would inform the construction of a rational progressive society governed by an enlightened elite, whose technical expertise would justify their claim to rule. The illiberalism of this progressive-technocratic ideal became fully apparent in the West only with the onset of Covid. It is now widely understood that the subordination of public life to ostensibly scientific guidance and the effective transfer of sovereignty from the body of citizens to an unelected overclass are fundamentally inconsistent with liberty and individual dignity…

Although ideological regimes were not unheard of in antiquity, ideology’s focus on efficacy rather than truth, its assumption that history is a problem awaiting a rational solution, and its elevation of the possibilities of a deliberately constructed future over the present constraints of the actual world, are characteristically modern…

Descartes prophesied a future in which “the common good of all men” would be secured by “an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth”, and by the elimination of “an infinity of maladies, both of body and mind”. Should biological science ever eliminate death due to “the infirmities of old age”, as he dared to hope, what would likely be a fresh earthly hell would render the question of the afterlife largely moot. Here, too, an ill-formed utopian vision licenses fundamental social transformation…

But there is a deeper and more important connection between ideology and technology. Ideology is in fact a social technology. The implementation of an ideological programme is an experiment testing the hypothesis that a radiant future can be achieved if only political, social, and economic relations are radically restructured, a process that always involves the preliminary destruction of existing realities. That future, like Descartes’s infinity of satisfactions, is never concretely described and never actually arrives.

Read the whole thing.

Leighton Woodhouse, “The Circulation of the Elites” (Substack)

A very good essay explaining the great Christopher Lasch’s concept of “the circulation of the elites,” and how the idea of “social mobility” has been usefully coopted by the new ideological revolution in the West:

Critically, however, this new bourgeois revolutionary ideology gingerly sidesteps that which would actually force it into a real confrontation with the existing social order: the entire notion of social class. The goal of the doctrine of intersectionality is not the classless society — not even in the Laschian sense of the phrase, let alone the Marxist one. Its ambitions are, as its corporate spokespersons make clear, “diversity, equity and inclusion.” And by that they mean diversity, equity and inclusion in the ranks of the elite…

This objective is in no way antithetical to the persistence and reproduction of the class order, which is why it faces so little resistance from, and is indeed enthusiastically embraced by, corporate America. In fact, it has provided a new source of legitimation when it was most in need. As with “social mobility” before it, the social justice ideology of the professional class serves to advertise to the public that the class order is not a closed system. “Indeed,” writes Lasch, “the circulation of elites strengthens the principle of hierarchy, furnishing elites with fresh talent and legitimating their ascendancy as a function of merit rather than birth.” The social justice ideology merely replaces the word “merit” with the word “equity,” otherwise serving the same purpose quite admirably.

Katherine Dee, “Mass Shootings and the World Liberalism Made” (Substack)

This is a brilliant, if chilling, essay on what drives mass shooters. What is unique here is that Dee delves beyond all the mostly inane media explanations (on both political sides) to investigate what the shooters themselves have said about their motivations (often in great detail, while ignored by the media) and philosophical conclusions. What she finds is almost universally a shockingly similar anti-human nihilism brought about by a sense of modernity’s meaninglessness:

We imagine that these killers have nothing to do with everyone else—that they are like a leper colony set apart from the rest of us, and every so often, one escapes and spreads his disease. We want to believe that because it makes us feel good. But the reality is that the smudge of nihilism’s fingerprints stains all things, everywhere…

As I interviewed people about Lanza, a common theme emerged. Yes, there was something obviously wrong with the material circumstances of America in the early 21st century—an economy that seemed incapable of providing for the many, decaying institutions, the ubiquity of our screens. But there was something else. Something more abstract. It was that we now lived in a world where everything revolved around the individual. We had morphed from a universe of moral absolutes to broad social and communal forces to an all-consuming solipsism—a terrifying oneness, a “culture of narcissism,” as Christopher Lasch put it, where the self is central…

(Surprise Lasch sighting again!)

In this world, the individual was everything and nothing, architect of the future and hapless cog in a vast and deafening black. In this place, one murdered wantonly with the knowledge that all of us were just accidental bits of flesh bookended by eternities, that we meant nothing, that the possibility of meaning was a ruse…

Nor is this phenomenon limited to the United States—although it seems to be most prevalent here. Kimveer Gill, who killed one person and wounded 19 in 2006 before committing suicide in Montreal, believed that the whole of society needed to be eradicated. Pekka Eric Auvinen, who killed eight in a high school a little north of Helsinki, Finland, called for “the death of the entire human race.”

And Dee is not afraid to draw some spicy connections:

The debate over more guns or fewer guns completely misses the horrifying heart of the matter: the world built by modern liberalism, which took for its telos the maximization of individual autonomy, and thus guaranteed total alienation, breeds the nihilism behind these shootings. Ultimately, these killers could not cope, the way the rest of us do every day, with the crushing weight of the existential angst that is the promise of liberalism. Even the more thoughtful takes on fatherlessness and mental illness are only still addressing the symptoms of the disease. Until we see this, the ground of the problem, we will be no closer to answers, let alone solutions for these 21st-century horrors.

Read the whole thing if you want your day ruined.

Bari Weiss, “The New Founders America Needs” (Substack)

Many of you have probably already seen this one, but Bari Weiss’ recent speech, in which she calls for the building of new things as the route out of nihilism and ideology, is quite excellent. Even if she rudely goes after poor cynical reactionaries… what did they ever do to you, Bari, except try to warn you, eh?

Tanner Greer, “A Guide Map for Reading the East Asian Canon” (Scholar’s Stage)

Pivoting to a totally different topic (sorry for putting you after the mass shooters, Tanner…) this is a great suggested reading list if you are interested in beginning to explore the East Asian (mostly Chinese and Japanese) historical, philosophical, and artistic cannon. Which I highly recommend; you’re really missing out if you don’t! Especially on Lu Xun.