Presiding Over Chaos

Update to the Peasant Theory

Those of you who have been reading me for a while surely recall my Peasant Theory which is my functional definition of class in America which splits us up by our behaviors and incentives. Obviously it’s a simplified abstraction, but it answers the fundamental question of why our middle class is so large. Because we’re mostly all in the Peasant class subject to the powers of the Genius class and the Ruling class. Although we are interdependent, different options are available to us.

Over the past couple weeks two major concepts appeared to me that make something more understandable. We can personify it in the form of Katherine Maher, the new CEO of NPR and spitting ideological image of Titania McGrath.

Now in identifying Rulers, I don’t necessarily mean to suggest that they are all good or all bad. There’s a lot of them and there’s an M&M factory of divergent colors. But yeah some of them are bad. Even worse, some of them are evil.

If your worldview does not account for evil, you need to rethink it.

So many of our analyses over the years have shied away from saying that there are evil people in the world who are literally fucking it up for everyone, because that’s their intent. I’ve seen lots of references to people who are ‘on the spectrum’ or are ‘narcissistic’ but I’m thinking they are probably just sociopathic. You can forgive me for watching Sugar on Apple TV. Sociopaths are who we watch on TV.

One of my active mental threads has to do with understanding the differences between our personal lives and our institutional lives. I see it as an important distinction. I defy the axiom that ‘the personal is political’. You can and you should behave differently when exercising personal influence and institutional power. And it is precisely at this nexus where things go awful in the Ruling class.

My tweet last week reflects this idea when I said, “DEI is racial pork”. And it is widespread because of the influence of the viral sort that takes place among the Rulers. In other words, the reasons DEI has such deep mimetic acceptance in our institutions is because the Rulers want to represent anti-racism both personally and politically. Do you see how that works? Do you see how it’s wrong?

Oh wait, I forgot to give you the second concept. That is the steady march of crony capitalism. I do not expect to cite chapter and verse the increasing consolidation of the providers of American goods and services, but I do want you to note the agency problem of corporate capitalism which is so much more pronounced than that of bourgeois capitalism. The latter would be Elon Musk at SpaceX, the former would be the faceless executive leadership team at Boeing. Boeing as we’ve recently been shown by Congressional testimony has become institutionally incapable of building safe aircraft to spec. Whereas SpaceX has created world historical rockets and dropped the cargo cost for low earth orbit by an order of magnitude.

The problem is the cronies. The problem is the small circle of , no wait let’s call it a cabal. The problem is the cabal of sociopaths who have very limited exposure to real people and thus abstract us Peasants into mindless consumers, helpless minorities, or various forms of victims seeking succor from their corporate capitalist institutions. Or alternatively from their corporate non-profit institutions. So long as there’s fictitious name involved and it’s not you’re last name, it’s corporate. As long as it’s spending money in American free markets and competing for attention and mindshare, well it’s technically not capitalist but it walks like that species of duck.

Some Of My Best Friends
So if you’re one of those Ivy League Vegans who gets a case of the Ick whenever your axioms are challenged, you are most likely, from my perspective, apt to make introductions of yourself to a representative. Then you’ll be level-headed for the moment and then justify yourself in allyship with your new pal whom you make an honorary insider. That’s how cabals work. It has nothing whatsoever to do with merit. It has to do with consensus through special relationships. These are the Rulers we are talking about. It’s always about power.

As a Peasant outsider, for you it may be about pride or respect or dignity. For the Rulers, I say once again, it is always about power. So the trick for the Ruler is to discover how power can be maintained by acknowledging some Peasant ‘community’ complaint. Then you create a one-off alliance. One-off meaning maybe a 2 year or 4 year media cycle which disarms, mollifies and otherwise gaslights the proletariate. Once it’s not generating headlines, you can defund the outreach and marketing. Downsize.

Whatever works for the Rulers is what works, until it no longer does. Then you change up the tactic. After all, you’re a sociopathic ruler wielding institutional power. You can’t be everybody’s friend. Only those inside the cabal. Inside the moat. Inside the palace.

First Amendment What?
It has been obvious to me for at least a decade that populism is the enemy of truth and that political talking points and soundbites in the echo chamber of the MSM are the tentacles of that censorious monster. It is the new form of Ick-splaining that the cabalists are propagating and it is clearly against the interests of free speech. I know I can count on Peasant resistance to this conspiracy, even though a great plurality would rather have our own peculiar sentiments echoed from the mountains. So long as social media is what it is, we will be subject to its algorithmic dysfunctions. They’re not bugs, they are features. The point is to create and amplify populist memes. That can’t happen without centralized power, and centralized power is exactly what Rulers want.

As Columbia University proves, NYC is a great place to get a critical mass of uncritical thinkers associated with cabalists. And as I use the term ‘cabalists’ understand that I’m tongue-in-cheek and snarky about it. But I’ve also seen how particular companies in NYC are absolutely feudal, especially in real-estate, and I understand how well-connected rich dorks are comfortable being outspoken and completely wrong while commanding a kind of 92nd Street Y stage presence. Some of us humans possessed of intelligence and memory recall how Columbia U welcomed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whom I used to call ‘Crazy A’. Spin up the Wayback Machine to September 2007, Mr Peabody:

The head of Columbia U. thought that he could score points with devastating rhetoric. And so he invited Crazy A into his salon in order to make a fool out of him. He obviously was impressed by the clever remarks made by one member of the Council on Foreign Relations last year, and decided to go one better as many of us wanted to see.

But I think in the end, the snubbing would have been a better idea. Not because we are afraid of him, but simply because when it comes down to it, he's a nutcase and we all know it. And so we should treat him as just the kind of sociopath he is. If you don't have an idea how that ought to work, consider how most Americans treat OJ.

All the talk about the value of free speech means something if all you have in your arsenal are words. The leader of Iran does not need Columbia University, he can only abuse it. Beating him in a war of words is pointless when it is known that he uses guerrillas and terrorists.

Bollinger has an inflated sense of self-importance that I think is going to be over emphasized by those making points for free speech and the American way. So I don't think there's much bragging that should go on, because the hypocrisy of Bollinger's campus rules are clear. Columbia has banned ROTC from campus in its attempt to create a no-tolerance zone for insults to homosexuals. And yet they allow the man who has them executed to speak. Bollinger can practically be called disingenuous. Did he really believe that Crazy A is not 'a petty and cruel dictator'? Is he incapable of making such a judgment at a distance? If the leader of Columbia honestly believed that the leader of Iran lacked the intellectual courage to answer such questions, how is it that he is just realizing it? And now having made that determination, is the invitation still open?

If Bollinger would not invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back to Columbia again, now convinced that his apprehensions are indeed true, then he is finally as wise today as the Bush Administration has been all along.

Yeah that was back when I was partisan, but it still parses well. In the news this week of course is the decision against ridding the campus at Columbia of protesting scofflaws who have decided that blocking and disrupting students is acceptable.

Columbia University will allow students to attend classes virtually for the rest of the semester, with protests over the Israel-Hamas war continuing to roil campuses across the country.

Columbia’s move to hybrid schooling followed a decision Monday to move classes online for the day. That approach was intended to “de-escalate the rancor and give us all a chance to consider next steps.” Columbia president Minouche Shafik said Monday.

Where is the courage of conviction? It’s something not to be expected of the shiny cabalists, because their exercise of power is subtle co-optive. Similar power hungry optics have been expressed by the powers that be in my hometown of Los Angeles at UCLA. There Chancellor Block preferred the optics of having no police ridding the campus of scofflaws and thugs.

Let these two reports I upload to Substack bear witness. I have copies in my home data center; we could trust YouTube maybe. It should be part of the permanent record. Also let us not forget this history of domestic violence spawned on college campuses in America, starting at UC Berkeley in 2017 over the very existence of a gay conservative speaker.

I do have the perspective that these are mere college students. They are not particularly dangerous and I’m not scared. An umbrella is hardly a defensive weapon. Yet keep this in mind. They’ve picked a conflict happening 7500 miles away to make an ideological stand in their own backyard, which they don’t mind shitting in. The leaders of the institution have allowed a complete transformation of their campus from a sanctuary of scholarly tenure into a squatter’s encampment and coliseum for guerillas. Might these be the same kind of sociopathic Rulers who, for ideological reasons, turn a blind eye to the enforcement of law and order in the nation?

The CHAZ formula is open source. One day when Andy Ngo is murdered..

PS.