American Neo-Feudalism

Stop, children, what's that sound?

I have been using the Peasant Theory as a functional look at American class roughly since 2008; it’s easy enough to search here to find definitions and commentary on Rulers, Geniuses and Peasants. What’s new today is my thinking about long-term risk. There are several lessons I am taking from events which make me pessimistic about the American experiment with democracy and, quite frankly Peasant interest in the structure, function and principles of this republic. That includes me. I’m a Peasant.

The Israeli Proving Ground
The Israelis, and to some lesser extent, the Ukranians are proving something that we Americans tend to just be theoretical about. That is the ability of governments to kill and keep killing. War always has its own reasons and its own gravity. It changes everything in a way, like 7 dimensional hopscotch, that we mere humans cannot navigate in our own minds. It plays ball in our minds in a certain fixed way that generates hallucinogenic memes that last for decades. Our slop discipline and our slop AIs will generate ideologies that confirm whatever collective biases cohere. In short, military capabilities are more significant than ideological frameworks. Once conflict becomes kinetic, politics no longer matters. The theoretical whitewashing, x-splaining and conspiracy memes will issue ad-infinitum. It doesn’t change the numbers and distributions of the actual dead.

A corollary of this realization is that there is no such thing as ‘collateral damage’ in any real sense. Collateral damage is part of the inherent geopolitical pressure of war itself. The distinction between ‘the regime’ and ‘the people’ has no bearing whatsoever on the area of operations. We like to play around, we who subscribe to the luxury and pet theories of our influencers, with such terms in toy conflicts like a five day stint of domestic riots involving tear gas and pepper paintballs. Sure it’s easy to say The Apple Store downtown suffered collateral damage. And you can pontificate tautological groupings of participants like uniformed police officers, foreign nationals, undercover operatives, masked protestors, criminal facilitators, astroturfed agitprop mercenaries, and the voice of the unheard. All those cows will never come home. The riot is where the conflict is. There is force against force in the area of the operation. Your cellphone’s recording capability makes zero difference. There is the battlefield, there are the boots on the ground and there are the casualties. Period. I have written this in the context of recent ICE riots in various domestic hot zones. I have a loud barking chihuahua in that fight, but it’s really not worth it to me to let it off the chain because it doesn’t speak Red or Blue. Collateral damage is a political interpretation of a military action. It’s irrelevant.

What is being proven is that big wars and small wars are all dogs in kennels. Once they are cut loose, havoc is what you should expect. Get thee behind the castle walls, and hope that castle is not a target of the sorties to come.

The People Are Captured
We are the state. The state is us. The question vis a vis our class status is whether or not we are enlisted by the state to know anything of material value. This again is not an aspirational definition but a functional one. The more fluid capital is, the more a consumer sentiment can be led by memes of no national strategic value. This includes all identitarian movements and memes that are not explicitly nationalist. In short, the only sectarian or political aggregations within a nation that matter strategically are those other nations would fund and arm in opposition to the central government. Everyone else is just buying and selling in the marketplace of ideas, a plurality of which are not inherently useful to the function and power of the state. What is the difference between HAMAS in Gaza and people in solidarity with HAMAS in the USA? The latter are not targets of Israeli military forces.

Did you know that the US currently has no UN Ambassador? Have you perceived any tangible difference in your life? Of course not. The ire or admiration for whatever is portrayed as America’s dynamic in the world is entirely lacking any collected input from us the people. Yet we are still the Americans who get that ire or admiration.

The President has no foreign policy. It’s the thing that nobody really wants to say out loud. Teethgrinders and handwringers over the Steele Dossier still have no recourse but to rant. Why? Because if this administration had a competent and capable foreign service aside from those inside the cape of our MAGA crusader, then American interests in Russia and everywhere else could be more self-evident. So millions of us only have the habit of nationalism rather than an expedient one tied to various cults of personality. Those millions of us, especially those like me who listen to milbloggers like CDR Salamander, and The Mooch are stewing in our juices awaiting some institutional wisdom to act upon.

So we are passively loyal and undermined by idiocy and the aggregation of idiocy to the policy level by rudderless populists whose wiggles and waggles only appear to be navigation when you stand far enough away. We are captured by the state. The only honor we have is honor of the Constitution and a law too few of us actually understand.

Castle Doctrine
At the behest of my young adult daughter, I am reading young adult fiction. What’s on the menu this week is Red Rising, set in a Hunger Games meets Ender’s Game blatantly obvious authoritarian dystopia with the kind of caste society that must give self-conscious ghetto identity forward Ivy Leaguers absolute chills. If there is an emotional playbook for young, gifted and immigrant this has all the lyrics, if none of the poetry. Oh, I should tell the plot. Every caste is ordained by color. I will map them to the Peasant Theory.

The protagonist, Darrow, is a teenaged miner whose wife is murdered after the two of them are busted for enjoying one of the luxuries denied them as lowborn Reds. His death is faked and he is inducted into a grand scheme to infiltrate the management training program of the Golds, in which his natural talents and cultural heritage both serve him and split his psyche in two. “Why must I do evil to do good?” Sound familiar?

The story is beginning to get interesting after Darrow passes the rite of passage, essentially a hand to hand death match, and moves to the second stage of the gauntlet of trials, in which his class of 50 survivors are now pitted in a massive terraformed crater on Mars against a zodiac of other such classes. He now uses motherwit, while suffering the insecurity that young adults like to read about, to overcome with a motley caste of frenemies.

It is not ironic that I choose this YA bestseller which has 12 castles at this moment in the book placed in the crater wilderness. There is no democracy. The proctors of the spectacle only dictate a minimal set of rules. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt conquer. A magic banner marks other Gold youth as vassals, and there is a contingent of robot EMTs and trauma surgeons at the ready. So the contestants combat by any and all means. These proctors float above the brutal circus while the Gold youth and infiltrator Darrow figure out how to replicate the hierarchy of their larger society. The triumphant of this violent version of capture the flag are promised great rewards.

Delicious. Well, for young adults. I was captivated at this point in my own life by Clavell’s Shogun. It would sound like another story entirely but they are both about the vapid, complex and crushing hallucinations of honor societies. He who plays the game best may ultimately triumph, but one must accept that meaningless death is always the cost. To accept that deadly earthquakes are a force of nature is simple. To accept that families and tribes of mankind are an equally arbitrary and deadly force of nature ought to be simple but it is not. Every human tragedy arises from this contradiction. We always wish ourselves to be a part of nature without understanding what our very nature is. We begrudge ourselves our own deadly nature.

To realize that everybody in the world is unleashed and not peaceful but merely harmless is the essence of our Peasant dilemma. It’s utterly frightening to recognize your own mortality is held at bay by the thinnest of loyalties, the randomness of circumstance and little more than your will to survive. That is why humans build castles.

Feudalism’s Threat
In summary, feudalism is a threat to the open society. I say that even as I see it’s rational appeal in a society where rampant stupidity is quite caustic and degrades civility. Think ‘Florida Man’. You cannot sustain a republic with an open society when citizens are that retarded, no disrespect to those who serve in Pensacola. Then again, aside from Ponte Vedra, Baymeadows and the Cape, Pensacola’s castle might be the most civilized place in the state.

I am questioning whether or not our institutions in America are subject to reform of the sort that serve Popper’s conception of the open society, or if they are folding in on themselves unaccountably as bastions with moats, as feudal fiefs and crony clubs. You already know what I think about the Ivy Cabal.