Intellectuals and War

The office of the wholesale parts distributor was dusty and dim. The traits that made the owner successful were on display. He was a strong and no-nonsense manager. He told a customer on the phone that his part was in, and he could come pick it up at two o’clock tomorrow. The customer asked to pick it up today. The manager said he was short-staffed and there is nobody to pull it right now. Like I said, you can come pick it up tomorrow, OKAY?

The long practice and ordered structure was obvious, in how the owner alternated between customers on the phone, and the group of people who walked in the front door, standing around waiting their turn. They had no doubt they would be dealt with in a fair order, an order which they could not influence. Finally there was just me and a woman who had been waiting several hours.

The owner made the wait less monotonous by engaging in small talk. He said “You know, the reason we are shortstaffed is because of Joe Biden.” Then the owner recited a list of blatant examples of undeniable election fraud. It was all embarrassing nonsense. The only one I remember was approximately “Biden beat Trump by 36,000 votes in Lake County. Lake County only has 35,000 registered voters. How are you going to beat someone by 36,000 votes, in a county with only 35,000 registered voters?”

I thought this is how political beliefs used to spread before Twitter. This is how they primarily spread in offices and cities, after the industrial revolution but before the Internet. Thomas Sowell imagined the left and right of his time were just two of infinite possible philosophical visions. But the set of beliefs which spreads naturally absent any refinement, or absent any natural selection cost for being wrong at the local point of contact, are a perennial manifestation of unchanged qualities of the human character.

Two things happened after the industrial revolution. First, ideas began to spread more rapidly like viruses among the common people in the new high-density population centers. Second, for the first time in history, human survival was no longer dependent on land resources like an animal. For the first time in history, the basic set of impulses people were programmed with – to live as tribes and kill strangers – were always wrong for the actual environment in which they lived. This had been locally true in bourgeois and merchant trade centers since the time of Jesus. But the populist spread of spontaneous leftist ideas, the population of common people among whom they spread, and the degree to which the ideas were wrong for the people who held them – the degree to which communist revolutions led to starvation not group love – was new.

Beginning with the Physiocrats, and including Adam Smith and Max Weber, what Sowell calls the political right was simply a more accurate understanding of contemporary capitalist society. These were men who analyzed and understood the complex new structures of human civilization, what made them work, and the appropriate human values that inflated them. You could say the two sides were a wrong side and a right side, obsolete human instinct versus imperfect human reason. But as Hayek wrote, man is a creature of imitation, morals are traits that are “between instinct and reason” (Burke’s “stock of reason”). So the two political sides competed to be recited and imitated, to form the traits and political choices of the common man.

This paradigm was made stronger by the advent of broadcast technology, TV and radio. Sowell said the two sides of the political debate were basically unchanged for 200 years since the French Revolution. But Hayek documented the emergence of a new strain in the likeminded communists and fascists, at the time of the Second World War. Primitive human impulses spread more rapidly, and submerged and overwhelmed the ideas of intellectuals of the time such as Hayek. Again something new happened after Sowell, with the emergence of the Internet and social media. We live in a time when the right-wing intellectual again seems to have vanished even more completely, in favor of grifters seeking likes on Twitter. This leaves us again with a dominance of communists and fascists, where Sowell’s 200-year political right wing and intellectual “great debate”, seems to have ended.

They key difference seems to be in whether ideas are filtered by a sort of clergy of peer review, before being broadcast to the masses for unchecked imitation. In recent history right-wing ideas were developed in think tanks like Heritage and the Hoover Institution, and then communicated directly to legislators. Retail political philosophers like Reagan and Goldwater who appealed directly to the American values and beliefs of the voters were rare. Only after being steeped and filtered by the elders, were ideas eventually distributed out to the reciters and imitators. But the main feedback shaping the ideas of the elders was not likes on Twitter, but the approval of other elders in their intellectual circles.

One big break in this was Rush Limbaugh, who communicated the ideas of his father and grandfather – “the great debate” that existed for 200 years – directly to millions of retail consumers. But Limbaugh did not get direct feedback in the form of social media likes, only ad revenue in the form of listeners. Rush had no choice but to say what he believed, and the listeners either came or they didn’t. He could not fine tune his message to exactly what he discovered people wanted to hear, like today’s Twitter promoters can.

Rush believed he was forced to have a more conservative and cerebral appeal by his medium of radio. Rush recalled how people who watched the Nixon-Kennedy debate on TV thought Kennedy won, while those who listened to it on the radio thought Nixon won. The plain imitators were going to turn on a TV, and Rush could not compete for that demographic on radio. Rush appealed to people at work in rural areas, who were neither exposed to the mind viruses of the cities, nor able to look at a television while they worked. These were people who were accustomed to relying on their own reason and experience and traditions, rather than parroting the latest popular untested ideas that emerge from the undying human impulse.

Nowadays I don’t know of a single conservative intellectual writing books. Those who want their ideas imitated, have to spend all day making clever resonant statements on Twitter, to try to win likes and drive traffic to their websites. Dinesh D’Souza who once tried to be an intellectual, is just pandering to mob myths about the 2020 election for cash, with a nonsense pay-per-view mockumentary. Thomas Sowell has retired, Ann Coulter has not written a book in some time. More than half the Twitter posts of both Ann Coulter and Hannah Cox are wrong and intellectually flawed nonsense parroted for clicks, that can easily be proved wrong. But proving them wrong takes more paragraphs than will fit on Twitter. And those paragraphs rely on a foundation of background ideas, information, and base syllogisms and assumptions, which there is no sign of anyone present being prepared with the prerequisite education in.

And so absent any kind of natural selection of ideas – whether by peer review or historical survival – except the resonance of those ideas with the primitive impulses of the human mind, the 200-year intellectual right is dormant. And we are left with two competing mobs, who will out of cultural tradition claim to be for the good, but who cannot remember any of the values which led to the good, and who have tried prosperity but no longer want it and want war. Remember, war was historically necessary for prosperity, to cull men in the absence of other predators. So we will have war until people beg for mercy from their own instincts. And until some mechanisms emerge from the destruction, to refine and filter ideas based on reason rather than instinct, and teach people like Jesus, from which their policy choices will follow, no longer aroused in their natural impulse to use government as an instrument to torture their neighbors. While concealing even from themselves the contents of their hearts.

People assume the 2022 US election will be just another in a long pattern, where the party that did not win President will gain seats in Congress. But I calculate it will be another step in our new trajectory toward war. Present trends will increase, and new conflict will happen in the US, during and after the 2022 election.

I remember shooting rifles on the range at sleepaway camp when I was seven or eight years old. Our goal was to hit enough targets to earn ranks like “marksman first class” or “sharpshooter”. The idea to turn and shoot all the other campers never occurred to me or any other camper. Because we were not that creative to think of new memes ourselves, and we had never heard of anyone doing something like that to imitate. It was a sailing camp, and the rifle range was next to the inlet where the sailboats were moored. It wasn’t until many years later that the horrific thought popped into my head: What if someone had raised a rifle a few degrees, so that it went over the berm and hit campers in a boat on their way out to the bay? But it never happened, because the programming in our heads came from a very strict filter, from adults, and to there from adults above and before them. Not from adults trying to get likes from children.