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Imagine a World That Can Fix Mistakes
Back in the day, Andrew Breitbart said that politics is downstream from culture. And I have liked to extend that to say that culture is downstream from religion. Or, in the words of Björn Merker, “Ideology is religion in the guise of politics”. Take your pick.
But now I am reading The Secret of our Success by Joseph Henrich in which he says that the unique characteristic of humans is that we learn from other people. Also killer whales and elephants.
For instance, if you eat maize you get pellagra from niacin and tryptophan deficiency. But traditional American cultures fixed this by mixing corn with ash or soaking it in an alkali like limewater. And that frees up the niacin, also known as Vitamin B3.
So, one fine day, someone mixed corn with ash and the pellagra went away. And other people copied him/her.
Henrich calls this “social learning.” Notice that you don’t need to know the biology or know your Vitamin B3. You just have to copy what works. And if you don’t copy what works, you get sick and maybe you die.
Here’s something else. Grandparents. Most animals die off soon after they get too old to have babies. But humans live another generation longer. Why? Because grandparents have life knowledge that is beneficial to the young’uns if they are willing to listen.
Now I believe that our big problem right now is that we are ruled by a ruling class that has short-circuiting this “what works” culture. I say that almost everything our rulers push on us Makes Things Worse, from government pensions and healthcare and education to feminism and no-fault divorce and abortion.
I am not taking a moral position on all that. But I believe that morality and “the way we do things” are a short-circuit way of transmitting cultural behaviors that work and avoiding things that don’t work.
I believe that our big problem today is that our political system has no way of correcting mistakes. I believe this is because war and politics are interchangeable, and if the leader of an army makes a mistake and is defeated then, at the very lest, he is outta here. Same for politicians. The defeat may result in “regime change,” and that usually involves a butcher’s bill.
Of course, the astonishing thing about modern humans is that we don’t only learn from copying another person, or just doing things “the way we always do it.” We have science and religion and culture where such things are understood not at an instinctive level but at a conscious level.
And even more astonishing is the market economy and its prices that coordinate the behavior of millions — billions? — of humans. And we just stumbled into it.
And the even more astonishing thing is that the market economy and its prices enable humans to fix mistakes without getting sick or dying. You don’t like the price at the grocery store? Go somewhere else. You don’t like your job? Quit and go find another job. Your business is failing? Declare bankruptcy and start over.
But with, say, Medicare for All, you don’t get to influence the health care system with your actions. Because everything is decided by politicians and administrators and politicians and administrators can never admit a mistake.
I think we see this “never admit a mistake” problem at work in Western Europe where the elite cannot admit that its vast social welfare programs and regulated economy and free-speech control has failed. But the leaders know this: that the “far right” must never be allowed to get into power.
You will notice that, Before the Dawn, harmful behavior — such as eating corn without ash or limewater — just killed people off with pellagra. In the present we have oceans of knowledge, partly from science, partly from religion and culture, and it is all at our fingertips with writing and books and media and the internet.
Except that in the present we have a political culture that imposes its will on the rest of society and has no mechanism — not even a “way we do things” — for identifying and correcting mistakes.
But that is what we need. We need to adapt our society away from the Dictatorship of Politics to something closer to the market culture in which good ideas flourish and bad ideas just melt away.
It needs to take care of the poor, but not with the current system where the government fails the poor at every turn from education to housing to SNAP cards.
Any ideas, sports fans?
| Mon, 09 Nov 2026 23:27:32 GMT |
After the Dem Glorious Victory, Why Change the Rules?
For some years, our Democratic friends have been pushing a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The idea is that each state will agree to instruct the state electors elected to the Electoral College to vote for the presidential candidate with the highest popular vote nationwide.
Right now, the small states are favored in the Electoral College because a state’s vote equals its number of Senators plus representatives. The big states with lots of voters (and especially those big states that vote overwhelmingly Democratic) feel like they are short changed.
Of course, the whole point of the Electoral College was partly to encourage the small states to vote for the Constitution in 1787 and partly to make them feel that they wouldn’t be buried by the big states in the future.
Obviously, if you are a Democrat, this is unjust. But I’ll bet that Democrats had no problem with the Electoral College back in the day when Democrats dominated the small states in the South.
Then, the DSA kiddies want to abolish the Senate and add additional states like DC and Puerto Rico and abolish the Senate. Of course they do, because until the day before yesterday the Republicans were a majority in the Senate and by adding DC and Puerto Rico the Dems would have more votes in the House of Representatives.
Yes, but suppose in the next few years, say because of AI, the small states all switch to Democratic and the big states all become Republican.
Be careful what you wish for.
But people in politics tend not to think beyond the next election or changing the rules so that they can win next week. Fact is, nobody knows what the map will look like 50 years from now.
Right now, our politics seems to feature right-wing populists, people of the ordinary middle class, rising to power in the Republican Party, and left-wing populists, young DSA kiddies in the educated class, rising to power in the Democratic Party. Both sets of populists are feeling that “they was robbed.” And of course they are. That’s what politics does, kiddies. It creates injustice for the losers: the more politics, the more injustice. But 50 years from now, who will be the winners, and who will be the losers?
Of course, the whole point of complicated political institutions is to slow down the enthusiasts who think that if they can only get political power then they can end injustice and create a just society with that political power.
Of course, when revolutionaries seize power they often stay in power for decades. Like the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, the Castros, the Iranian mullahs. Great fun, if you are the ruler.
Not so much for everyone else.
| Fri, 06 Nov 2026 22:33:24 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
Fascism is the idiocy you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.
Politics equals “Us” vs. “Them.”
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: Politics is downstream of culture is downstream of religion is downstream of...
