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Bjorn Merker's "Perishing Promise"
When and how did the West go wrong? Let’s call the history of the last 1000 years an “experiment in popular sovereignty.” That is what Bjorn Merker calls it in his unpublished book Perishing Promise: a thousand year history of how the West came to fight itself.
The idea was that change, in the increase of “either human equality or human freedom” or both, would lead to a society “in which every member is happy, equal, and free.”
In the introduction, Merker writes, the whole project has failed, because it has been “pursued by means of state policy, power, and programs.” We live, therefore, under a
soft despotism that wields the slogans of popular sovereignty, self-governance, and democracy as means to buttress its power over the populations under its jurisdiction.
Ain’t that the truth, DSA kiddies!
Then Merker proceeds to discuss his understanding of social reality.
We humans live with “the human brain” sitting atop “an unimaginably complex organic vehicle of survival we call our body.”
But back to the brain. Merker wants us to understand our brain in three parts:
First nature, “the nature we have as humans irrespective of the idiosyncratic particulars of our personal history.”
Second nature. In our early years we develop “much of our basic perceptual, cognitive, and social learning” by just being a kid in a family. Let’s just say that it is the time where a youngster learns to play the “social game” as playing and practiced in their family.
Third nature. This is our unique property as human beings, and it issues from “the watershed adaptation of our species: the biological singularity of human language.” And that “makes all the difference in the world.”
Obviously, our “third nature” and language is an adaption of unimaginable power. But there is a problem. How do we know whether our tribe “is descended from the gods”? If something goes wrong, “is it punishment for something we did?”
The conceptual fertility of language which allow us to ask fanciful questions with such ease also allows us to provide fanciful answers with equal ease.
But if everyone is using their language abilities to conjure up fanciful answers to fanciful questions, how to we decide what’s right and what’s wrong — short of asking Dr. Fauci to decide? No problem, we humans have solved the problem.
Each culture.. finds its way… to a set of authoritative answers that put and end to the interminable uncertainty [conjured up] by human language… Call them “closure beliefs”[.]
Yes indeed.
A “closure belief” is a fixed, traditional, answer to questions that lie beyond the powers of a given culture to adjudicate on empirical grounds… for the conduct of its practical affairs.
“Typically [these] ‘closure beliefs’ are the products of long and tortuous historical processes of cultural transmission[.]”
Or, we could say, in the age of mass media, such “closure beliefs” can be established every day at 6:00pm by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx declaring that the latest government edict represents “the science.”
I think that the notion of “closure belief” is extremely powerful and important. It helps us understand what is going on in the public square today.
You could say that, just as Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt wrote that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”, the cultural hegemon is he who decides the “closure belief” on a particular topic.
Back in the day, we can say, “closure beliefs” were decided by shamans. Then by the Church. Then by Enlightenment intellectuals. Then by Stalin’s secret police. And now?
You can see that a lot of what we argue about in the public square these days is about what discussion is closed and what discussion is open. In other words, we don’t have a way of establishing “closure beliefs” any more, because nobody today has the moral authority that shamans and priests had in the olden time.
For instance, guys like me say that the question of socialism is closed. We have tried socialism all across the world and it has failed every time it was tried. But the DSA kiddies all think that capitalism equals racism and exploitation and settler-colonialism and socialism is really cool and, anyway, young people with useless degrees like them are going to be demolished by AI by the middle of next week.
So it’s a rerun of the hand-loom weavers being replaced by machine looms. And when our whole way of life gets demolished we humans get real angry and start breaking things.
More to come, starting with our medieval beginnings.
| Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:52:42 GMT |
Social Cooperation Among the Guys
I believe that humans are social animals. We cooperate for our mutual benefit. It’s in the jeans.
But obviously that is not the whole story. Men are also coded for fighting and defending the border of the territory of the band, the clan, the tribe, the nation.
In the current era the fighting part seems to have overwhelmed the cooperating part, so that the conventional wisdom is that we need a strong government to protect us from all kinds of perils, from Nazis to Commies to racists to economic royalists to climate change.
I don’t like that, so for some time I have tuned my social media receptors to news of ordinary non-governmental cooperation: how do actual humans cooperate in the wild?
Yesterday, on my X-feed, I found out, in a post by NOBUNAGA on the deeply philosophical question of the all-American truck culture. You should go and read the post for yourself, but I will help with some quotes from the post.
I needed to move a sofa.
I mentioned this to an American. He said, “You know anybody with a truck?”
I did not know anybody with a truck.
He looked at me with real concern. Not pity. Concern. The way you look at a man who has told you he does not have a name.
“You gotta know somebody with a truck.”
Well, eventually NOBUNAGA found Kevin, and Kevin showed up with his truck and a helper, name of Tony, and they moved the bed in 11 minutes. Then NONABAGA offered to pay.
I offered them money. Both of them laughed at the same time, which felt rehearsed and was not.
I asked what I owed them.
Kevin said, “Buy the pizza.”
That is the price. That is the entire economy. The truck costs one pizza and the pizza is not negotiable and the pizza is also not expensive and everyone knows what size.
Well, they sat down next to the sofa and ate the pizza.
Three weeks later, Kevin texted me.
“You free Sunday? Helping Tony move a fridge.”
He did not ask if I wanted to. He informed me of a fridge.
So off he went.
I went. I moved the fridge. I have no truck. I contributed only arms.
Afterward, a man I had never met asked me if I knew anybody with a truck.
I said, “Yeah, I got a guy.”
I have a guy.
I am somebody’s guy now, too. Tony has told two people about me.
He describes me as “the guy who’s strong for his size.”
I have never been prouder of a sentence in my life.
Go and read the whole thing for yourself. Right here.
Up to now I have talked about men as fighters, women as carers. Men have a culture of courage, women a culture of being good. Men know they are expendable, women expect to be protected. Etc.
Here we are talking about the culture of social cooperation among men with no government, no force, no guilt-tripping in sight. And it is good.
All very well. But what do we call the culture of a “guy with a truck?”
I know: we are talking about the culture of barn raising, just like in rural America of the olden time, and the Amish of today.
OK. Been there, done that.
Now I am on the look-out for an X-post that tells us all we need to know about the instinctive culture of social cooperation among women. With no government in sight.
| Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:59:06 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
Three Religions: The religion of the educated Gentry is creativity; the religion of the responsible Commoners is an Axial Age religion; the religion of the subordinate clients is vengeful gods.
The press is downstream from activism is downstream from the Cathedral is downstream from the political formula.
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: An Analysis of The Ruling Class by Gaetano Mosca
