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The Folly of an End Point
I’m reading a disquisition on German Pbilosophy, from Kant to Adorno, and we’ve got to an interesting point, at the end of the chapter on Hegel. The author, Julian Roberts, argues that, for Hegel, the end point of society
was constitutional monarchy in a nation-state, and for Marx it was a victorious proletariat.
Only, Chuckie Baby, another German, Schumpeter, wrote that the people cannot rule. All they can do is decide who will rule over them. As Lenin wrote: “who, whom.”
By the end of the 19th century we had the rise of the educated class and the Progressive idea that the end point of history was political and economic rule by an educated, administrative elite.
By the mid 1900s, this administrative state would solve everything with Planning. In its most developed form, Hitler and Mussolini combined the nation-state ruler with a national bureaucracy that would Plan everything.
In our day, the end point is the Allies, that fight for the Oppressed Peoples against the White Male Oppressors.
And don’t forget the globalists that want to rule the whole world through global administrative supervision.
Against this is the growing movement of populist nationalism which advocates for political leaders who advance the interest and the culture of the ordinary middle class in the nation-state.
And don’t forget the tech lords that want the future to be decided by successful tech startups supplied by wall-to-wall data centers.
In other words, down the ages, we humans have enormous difficulty thinking beyond the idea that we, ourselves, are the culmination of human history, and the world ought to be organized in accordance with our present particular interests and political arrangements.
The notion of Hegel’s constitutional-monarchy end-point and Marx’s proletarian end-point has made me realize that we humans really don’t have a clue beyond thinking that people like us ought to be in charge.
In fact, regimes come and go; classes come and go; ways of life come and go.
And, er, species come and go.
I guess that the purpose of politics and religion is to hang onto the present arrangement. “Religio” means “to bind fast, or bind together.” In fact, of course, the only thing that lasts is “change.” All things come to an end, sooner than we think, and we don’t know what comes next.
So how do we get beyond the limited world view of a Hegel or a Marx or an educated administrator?
Oddly enough, there is a philosopher that has faced up to this problem, and his name is Nietzsche.
Because the whole point of Nietzsche is to think about what happens when the old way doesn’t work any more, when “God is dead, and we have killed him.”
In Nietzsche we go through the hell of decadence, nihilism and the eternal return and the hope of a new way through the work of the Übermensch. More recent thinkers like Jung and Joseph Campbell dig back into myth and notice how we must resolve problems by descending into the underworld of the unconscious to figure things out. And then the Hero returns from the underworld to die upon the border of Chaos and Order.
But whatabout women? “Women expect to be protected,” and if you listen to women politicians they are always wanting to keep things the way they are and talking about ways to help the helpless. How does the Protection of Women square with the Hero’s Journey?
That’s a good point. Any ideas, philosophers and theologians?
| Fri, 15 May 2026 21:50:39 GMT |
Experts Agree: Trump is an Idiot
I wonder what experts will agree about President Trump in 50 years. Right now, they agree that Trump is an idiot.
There’s Niall Ferguson at The Free Press: “Trump Wants Détente. Xi Wants Taiwan.”
There’s Luke de Pulford at Unherd: “Trump is falling into Xi’s trap on China visit.”
As for me: I don’t have a clue.
Then there is President Xi’s reference to the Thucydides Trap proposed by Graham Allison in 2010. It’s about a rising power challenging an established power.
When President Xi Jinping met US leader Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday, he posed a big question: Can China and the US avoid the “Thucydides Trap”?
What does it all mean? How about the Triple Entente of France, Britain, and Russia combining against the rising power of Germany in the 1900s — that ended up in World War I? It enabled the real rising power, the United States, to become the global hegemon.
So is that the Double Thucydides Trap?
The question for me is whether China is truly a rising power. Can a nation be a rising power when its birth rate is presently at one per woman per lifetime, against the replacement rate of 2.1? Generally, a rising power needs its women to be pumping out a surplus of young men to be sent to the front — or a suicide mission, as in Islam.
Maybe India is the Great Power of the future. Who knows?
My point is to ask whether any present expert understands President Trump. The most notable advertisement of his foreign policy is the “Donroe Doctrine,” a repeat of the Monroe Doctrine:
It declared that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits to further European colonization and interference. In return, the U.S. pledged to stay out of European wars and internal political affairs.
How did that work out, President Wilson?
All I can say is that I don’t want my grandsons drafted to protect Taiwan.
I think back to the Nixon trip to China, with the purpose of preventing an alliance of the two Communist powers of the Soviet Union and China against the US. It was Henry Kissinger at work on his balance of power doctrine. I suppose that back then everyone thought of Russia and China as rising powers.
Today, Russia is certainly not what it was, especially now that it is bogged down in Ukraine. And China? I’d say that its bid for global hegemony is seriously hampered by its totalitarian government that makes it difficult for Chinese business to take its rightful place as the center of the world.
Imagine if Russia had gone full capitalist in 1917 and China had gone full capitalist in 1949. The mind boggles.
See, I don’t think you can become a real global hegemon unless you have a real free-market economy.
Experts agree that… Hello experts! What was that you just said? Didn't quite hear…
Look maybe President XI is about to eat President Trump for lunch. But really who knows? All I can say is that President Trump seems to be operating in a another dimension, when compared to other recent US presidents.
Maybe he's a genius. Maybe he's an idiot. We shall see.
| Fri, 15 May 2026 02:31:49 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Reign of Terror equals Great Purge equals Cultural Revolution equals Cancel Culture
The last refuge of a political scoundrel is the scapegoat.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Analysis of Prophecy
