Finding Orthodoxy

Now the post-game wrapup has everybody's attention.

Yes, it’s over. It’s all baked except for the final counts for Assembly in the state of California. Insiders tell me that it always takes at least a week for such votes to be counted. Maybe it’s because our DEI math grads are doing the work with their authentic and culturally appropriate abacus skills. Good luck anyway Kevin.

Idolator of Power

What’s not over is the ever present opportunities for the chatting class to make their best guesses as to what we all were thinking. This is the point at which I point out that as an oddball of the first order, I’m only tangentially moved by this. I’m just a molecule in the soup, and for me, a half dozen essays is Brownian motion. In fact, “what the hell were we thinking” is one of my favorite questions, that is why I’ve been writing since 1992, or something like that. Today, I want to draw a circle and your attention to this phenomenon we call ‘The New Normal’. What it really is has more to do with the rapid implementation of a series of scrambles and alphabet plans. In short, a mad dash to write up some screenplays coming next year to a short attention span theater near you.

My quantum of diversity, depending upon whom you ask, has something to do with my having been a notable ‘black Republican’ back when candidate Obama was the hottest [black crossover] dish since Bobby Short. Remember ‘post-racial America’? Only people with no real grip on the reality of black America could suggest such a thing seriously. You know, the postmodern Progressives, who know what’s good for all of us and will just magic up a knowledge economy to grease the skids to the glorious moral future. Be that as it may, I would prefer you consider me something of a throwback. My actual quantum of diversity is that I prefer accessing arcane streams of knowledge that isolate my emotions and inner peace from the tectonics of the interwebz. I learned about semiotics in the 1990s thanks to a cat named Marshall Blonsky and I was fascinated to learn that a great number of smart people in the Humanities were pulling our collective legs. That Ralph Lauren polo shirt literally had everything to do with my imagination about British class and civilization, not the actual thing. My excuse was that I studied Computer Science and accepted that I would always be a nerd. I desperately wanted to understand the Arts & Letters, in order to be as philosophically complete as possible, but I’d always be an outsider. I didn’t realize how outside I was. I leaned into that anyway, finally when I broke with that category of intelligence I called Domestic Affairs.

I should have known that if I actually studied the Classics, I would become intellectually rarified, but I wrongly assumed that everyone who articulated like Sir David Attenborough knew his Hesiods from his Livys and were staunch defenders of Western Civilization. Even when I visited Milan and sat in morning service feeling connected to hundreds of years of Christianity, I remained deluded. Not deluded perhaps but naive enough to be surprised that those immaterialists of the Ivy Cabal would be so poisonous to our national conscience. I mean they were at Yale! Simply being a black Republican was insufficient - there’s not quite any membership easily available. I had to go deeper than ingesting the Malcolm Gladwell brain spew of the world. I had to go learn my own Hesiods and Livys. Love of Western Civ had been less well-established than all the D-Day celebrations might indicate to us lay consumers. It’s a scary thing to discover how frightened PhDs are, unliberated by their very specific encyclopedics, adrift in a world where people don’t believe in meaning, purpose or non-Foucaultian truth. I don’t mean to sound so disappointed and pessimistic because actually I finally learned something new.

The reward for acting with integrity is acting with integrity.

All Gold Canyon - The Legend of Buster Scruggs

Or, as my favorite aphorism goes, if you’re hunting for buried treasure, fall in love with your shovel. I think that Millennial voice with the vocal fry on TikTok calls it ‘passion’. I don’t think that’s too far off the mark, so long as you make yourself useful. Useful for what? That’s the question. Well just in case you skipped the class on Foucault’s regimes of truth, ChatGPT sez:

The concept of "regimes of truth" comes from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault explored how societies establish certain beliefs, values, and knowledge systems as "truth," often through institutions, discourses, and practices. These truths are not universal but are produced and maintained by power structures within a society.

Foucault argued that a "regime of truth" consists of:

1. Mechanisms and structures that determine what can be accepted as truth.

2. Authorities or institutions (such as academia, governments, media) that produce and legitimize truth.

3. Discourses and practices that perpetuate certain truths and marginalize others.

4. Rules and standards that define what counts as knowledge.

In this framework, truth is not an objective or absolute concept but is socially and historically contingent, shaped by the dynamics of power.

The interesting thing to be noted is that a regime of truth is something well-understood by people who are successful in the realm of marketing. We keep forgetting how much of our economy is based upon desire as contrasted with that of need. We conflate the two. So with this in mind, it’s easy to follow a path towards.. how shall I say it? Mass hysteria. I tend to believe there are enough checks and balances for our system of government to restrain centralized power, but no so much in other institutional endeavors and quite frankly folks get away with unconstitutional shite. We used to talk about the death of the Fourth Amendment following the establishment of Homeland Security and warrantless wiretapping. Not so much. The point here is that we have a ready and deep infrastructure for generating regimes of truth. We used to call it ‘Madison Avenue’, but I think there are many more avenues, of course including K Street and TikTok.

Must There Be Orthodoxy?
So what is the consensus? Winners and losers both are desirous to make the most sense of this electoral mandate. ‘Mandate’ being a scientifically inaccurate, but firmly socially constructed imperative. How sanguine should we be that those who ended in screams and tears will seek to act with newfound integrity? How soon will they come to grips with the fact that a Summer of Brat Joy and an appearance on Saturday Night Live are insufficiently grounded in actual truth? Or more critically, how long will the producers of this kind of marketing keep their jobs? I pick on Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife as the sort of perennial enablers. You can do a lot of marketing when you have billions.

How sanguine should we be that those who ended in high fives and chest bumps will seek to act with newfound integrity? I’m a bit more blind to the red-pilled, primarily because I have so thoroughly disabused their mainstream political activism and genuinely embraced those early adopters in the fight against illiberalism, entangled as they are in the libertarian Right and betrayed Enlightenment Liberals. There aren’t many dude bros in my Popperian contingent, and I genuinely feel for men as men. I still have to say, especially on this Veterans Day, that my favorites are those who have and continue to struggle mightily under dorked-up civilian control. Yes, I confess I want another Colin Powell, and I’d probably give him a high five.

None of that changes the fact that I’m still an engineer nerd into ancient Rome and Greece and CIA operatives and builders of spacecraft. Speaking of which, Musk is going to be an obnoxious handful for a while. Don’t quit your day job, Elon.

I think the consensus is going to be that Lefties are gonna Left and Righties are gonna Right. Marketers are gonna market. They will continue to scramble and prognosticate and memory hole their own mistakes in the recent past and coming future. Still the people who have been forcibly excluded - the victims of cancellation and treachery will remember freshly that ‘everything they told me was a lie’. These days, I don’t feel like I’m wrong for not voting. I feel a little bit weird for expecting more than one or two things from my vote, and maybe that the biggest reason I don’t. I’ll think about it.

Maybe Not
Maybe I’m just silly to expect more than one or two things to matter similarly to dozens of millions of other Americans. The rest is too amorphous to tie down or predict anyhow. I think all we need is a solid, responsible, capable candidate who is clear on a few things from first principles, and the rest unpredictably aside from the point. We’ve seen what happens when the President is hounded. We’ve seen what happens when the President is lame. We’ve seen what happens when the electorate is frenzied. They’re not really sure what they’re looking for, they just keep swimming through the short attention span theatre. The allegory of Finding Nemo is rather appropriate.

I think I’ll stick more to my Stoicism. I’m really glad all that is over, but I’m happy to hear what you suspect the New Normal might be.