I’ve completely made my peace with the restructuring of my university in the direction of an expensive trade school. I’ve moved on mentally, and it feels great.

But daily doses of interacting with people who are in the grip of denial are getting to me.

“No, they aren’t going to fire tenured faculty.”

“I asked the Dean, and he said, yes, they will, and that’s the whole point of the exercise.”

“Maybe you misunderstood.”

“There were 30+ witnesses in the room both times I asked. The answer was always, yes, absolutely, we will.”

“No, he must have meant tenure lines won’t be filled when people retire.”

“I asked that question and he said this was tried and didn’t generate the needed savings. So now the play is to fire faculty. He said this in these exact words.”

“No, you must have misunderstood.”

“There were 30+ witnesses in the room… etc.”

I’ve started avoiding people even more than I normally do but they seek me out, grab my elbow and ask in pitiful, terrified voices, “You don’t think anybody will really be fired, do you? That’s just a way of speaking, right? You are not really worried, are you?”

One thing I’m not qualified to do is provide psychological help. I don’t know how to do it and I don’t want to have to do it. People are trying to get from me what I don’t have.

I can’t observe people’s woundedness by reality. That same dean who said yes, people will be fired. I asked him, “Did you receive any written guarantees that the money you save by firing people in the college that you run will remain in the college and will not be taken away and given to Dentistry, Engineering, or whatever other unit or initiative? Do you have anything at all in writing to this effect?”

And he gives me a pitiful, scared look and mumbles, “Well, I don’t think they’ll do that. I mean, I’d be very surprised if anybody did that.” Not a year ago, the money he saved by slashing our budget was taken out of the college’s accounts without anybody bothering even to inform him. But he doesn’t think they’ll do that. No, sirree Bob. Surely they won’t, right? Right?

Hollywood went all out, giving Oscars to films promoting Russian warmongers, angry trans whisperers, Palestinian propagandists, and anti-American wokesters.

And it’s not just in the US that this descent is present. In her autobiographical book Feria, Ana Iris Simón tells of her working class parents who by age 30 had two kids, a house, and a stable, comfortable life. In year 2019, a much more educated Simón, on the other hand, couldn’t hope for the kind of economic well-being that her mailwoman mother easily achieved back in the 1990s. Simón’s entire generation was scraping up a miserable existence out of a patchwork of temp gigs long past the age when their parents were making enough to live comfortably.

Again, why? Different countries, yet a very similar and a very steep decline. Let’s not be materialistic and only look at the economic factors. Have people become happier? Do they take fewer drugs, suffer less from addiction, have more kids, have happier, longer marriages?

Well, no. Then let’s discuss why this happened. If the favorite Soviet author Communist John Steinbeck would agree with Donald Trump that America is less great now for a regular working man, then we are definitely on to something here. There’s a wide bipartisan consensus that something important has been messed up. There was some discussion of this in very early noughties but it dried up since then. Unless you go to the very far right, you won’t find anybody even trying to figure out what went wrong.

I’m reading The Winter of Our Discontent by Communist author John Steinbeck. He was a Nobel Prize winner and majorly popular in the USSR. You can see bits of Marxist theory quoted inside his novels.

But here’s the funny thing that goes exactly to what I said in my previous post. The main character of the novel, Ethan Hawley, comes from a family that came to America in the times of the Mayflower. They lost all the money they made since then, though, and Ethan has to work behind the counter at a neighborhood grocery store. He works very leisurely hours but makes enough to support himself, a stay-at-home wife, and two children. He owns his house, has five suits, eats flounder for dinner, and has the equivalent of $50,000 in savings at the bank. A hired wage worker at a neighborhood store. Welcome to America of 60 years ago.

Once again, the author was a Communist who despised capitalism. And this is how he described the harsh, demanding reality of 1961 capitalism in the US.

We all know there’s been nothing but progress since 1961 but if somebody told us Ethan’s story as happening today, we’d laugh. How come, though? Where’s the progress?

The novel isn’t supposed to be funny but I’m heaving with laughter because the poor Marxist Steinbeck couldn’t have possibly anticipated that his story of a grocery store wage worker would sound like dispatches from the life of upper-middle classes a few decades later.

This is a good question. I like good, intelligent questions like these.

We’ve been buried under Pompeii-like mountains of pumice and ash that have hardened into a monolith. We can’t dig ourselves out without blowing up the many layers of rock-solid sediment that accumulated. Once the top layer of ossified cold lava is blown up and hauled away, we can start carefully to extract the remnants of our civilization that are buried underneath.

For me, civilization means that I can go out with my child on a Sunday morning, and we are completely safe and comfortable wandering around, the streets are clean, the playgrounds are free, open, clean and have no druggies or homeless loitering about. Everybody is polite and sweet to each other. Nobody breaks driving rules. People say compliments to strangers just because they feel good about life. There’s no garbage lying around, no cigarette butts, or dog excrement. We go to a nature preserve or one of the several artificial lakes in the vicinity where happy kids are playing baseball and climbing the playground equipment. Even children are polite, kind and generous to each other. In addition, I want there to be no festivals dedicated to sexual perversions in the park. I don’t want to explain to my kid what a “policule” is because my property taxes were used to inflict BDSM booths on us where we go to feed ducks. I want the local public library not to have its entire showcase dedicated to books like “I Am Jazz” and “Black Girl Hair Is Magical.”

I want good, civilized life to be available not in vanishing enclaves but everywhere. In Grey Mirror, Yarvin quotes some descriptions of what Cleveland was like 100 years ago. It wasn’t whatever it is now. Cleveland and most major cities in the US have experienced a massive decline. If we seek stability right now, it means we remain ensconced in the reality where oases of civilization are being devoured by chaos and barbarity. That is our baseline, our normality. That’s what we’ve been taught to accept as normal.

I was recently stuck in a huge traffic jam as I was leaving St Louis. My GPS was getting overheated trying to show me a completely clear and open exit. I’m sure that all the rest of the drivers had their GPS redirecting them to that very clear exit. But we all sat there for over 90 minutes, staring straight ahead and refusing to take it. Because it leads to East St Louis. We all recite anti-racist mantras at work, and not a single one of us would willingly drive through East St Louis under any circumstances. East St Louis has been a mess for at least 60 years. We need to go back much further than that to undo the terrible damage that’s been done in these decades. This will take an enormous effort because we’ve all been marinated in decades of stories about how we inhabit the best possible reality that is getting better every day. We didn’t go off course last year. We’ve been dismantling the Western good life for a long time. We don’t even have words to talk about East St Louis or the fentanyl dessert around my pretty little enclave because those words have been beaten out of several generations of people.

We need to go fast and hard in a completely different direction. I honestly don’t see any other way.

Leftism is and always has been, says Yarvin, an aristocratic ideal:

All the leftist revolutions—from the English Civil War to Subcommander Marcos—are led by aristocrats in the name of the people. The revolution is rightfully embarrassed by this falsity and always seeks to conceal and/or mitigate it. But every revolution is an uprising of a young upper class against the old regime. 

As a result, all these leftist revolutions are oligarchic in nature. And no other revolutions have won in the Anglophone world for centuries. 

Upper-upper classes (no typo) always initiate revolutionary change because they want to be freer. They will make life very inconvenient for all the rest of us in their pursuit of greater freedom. Greater freedom for them results in far less freedom for us. If you want an example (mine, not Yarvin’s), Governor Pritzker wants his brother to be free to pretend to be a woman, so all children in Illinois kindergartens are forced to recite lies about “gender assigned at birth”. Unless, of course, their parents can afford private school. And if those parents don’t mind their children growing up never to have access to money that could pay for their children’s private school. Because you are excluded from serious money making if you haven’t interiorized and grown to believe in gender assigned at birth.

For one oligarch to achieve the kind of freedom nobody could begin to fantasize about in the entirety of human history, the whole state has to be deprived of the kind of freedom everybody took completely for granted for the entirety of human history. Freedom is dead, long live a new kind of freedom.

Yarvin also says that “most wars are started by the loser, and caused by the winner.”

In what concerns WWII—the war I’m sure he had in mind when writing the line—it’s clearly true. Hitler, the loser, started it. Stalin, the winner, did everything to bring Hitler to power and then make him attack.

For the Spanish civil war, it’s the other way round. Franco, the winner started the war but Republicans, the losers, made the war inevitable with their overreach.

The US civil war was started by the Confederacy, wasn’t it? But goaded into it by the Yanks? I might be completely off here because my knowledge of that conflict is based mostly on Gone With the Wind.

Who knows military history? What other wars can we apply this to and see if it works?

My favorite quote from Curtis Yarvin is this:

You can teach yourself not to have limbic reactions to history.

And politics, I want to add.

By limbic, Yarvin means gushily emotional. He’s correct in that we have slopped over the entirety of the public space with our emotions. Dignity, discipline, and self-control are but a distant memory.

We’ve prayed at the altar of everything that liberates and empowers for so long that now it might be a good idea to step in the opposite direction.

Regarding Trump’s actions and their impact on Zelensky’s domestic support.

There are only three scenarios:

1. Trump knew his way of engaging with Zelensky was going to make Zelensky massively popular at home and supported even by his biggest challenger in the next election (which is what happened.) But Trump likes Zelensky and wanted to do him a solid. We can all agree that this scenario is utterly unrealistic.
2. Trump has no idea that his actions would have this effect because he’s completely stupid and has no clue what he’s doing. This is the explanation Democrats will like but it leaves open the question of why they keep losing to somebody they consider so dumb and what it says about them.
3. Trump has absolutely no interest in what Zelensky’s ratings are and whether he’ll win the next election in Ukraine because Trump’s base wants him to do stuff domestically and not be very engaged internationally. Trump is withdrawing from international engagements to fulfill his electoral promises. I believe this is the likeliest scenario.

“He threatened / disrespected / slighted our president / our country.”

The entire world is subsumed in hysteria over manufactured threats and affronts. People know that something is wrong but have no idea how to verbalize their anxiety. The nation-state is dying, and they are hoping to resuscitate it with these tantrums. Wail it back into existence. They purse their lips in patriotic resolve long after there’s last been an entity in need of patriotic attachment.

“He threatened to invade, he should have worn a suit, he didn’t say thank you, he said thank you 33 times, he did, no, he did, no, he did.”

The playground-level poutiness of this bickering shows that the nation-state is dead. We are arguing over how to decorate its corpse to make it look less putrid.

Back during COVID, we had raging debates on campus over who was at risk, what measures worked, and so on. While we raged and ranted, faceless, mediocre bureaucrats moved into our buildings, committees and responsibilities. They said, “stay home, save lives” but came to work in person every day and stayed late, putting together a structure that made us irrelevant. Now they have move in to take our Epstein arrests jobs away.

These bureaucrats go to actual seminars where they are trained how not to be emotionally incontinent. The only boundaries that exist any longer are the ones you erect and police yourself. They encourage us to rage and emote while they turn themselves into tightly guarded fortresses and they beat us every time, in every contest. They appeal to our emotions masterfully but never engage their own.