Oh, by all means, Aron, let’s see how late we can stay up, shall we?

I mean, we’re only 40 years old with a two kids, a day job, debt, and a morning radio appearance. Why get any sleep at all? ‘Twould be such a waste!

American policy went off course beginning with Reagan. Starting then, the nation’s elite, in connection with the leadership infrastructures of both parties, began to exploit dearly-held culture, the most tender sentiments, and the most basic needs in order to serve their most unpopular policy goals. They became the extortion elites, on both sides. Starting then, this was the new set of offers to the common American:

• Democrats: “We can keep you fed and housed. But only if you let us destroy your culture, traditions, beliefs, and families in favor of our utopian, individualist society.”
• Republicans: We can preserve your culture, traditions, beliefs, and families. But only if you give us all of your money and future earnings and agree to risk living on the street.”

Both sides essentially imagined that they could blackmail the public with abandon thanks to the rottenness of the deal that the other party was offering, and we have seen a tremendous political realignment since Reagan that is now reaching its apex: cultural and economic elites into whichever of the two parties matched their biases best, and rank-and-file working Americans out of the political system and mainstream of public discourse entirely.

In short, the public was not blind to the rottenness of either deal. They have long understood that two different crime families engaged in inverse protection rackets—and that are mirror images of each other—are engaged in promising to let them survive in alternate and woefully incomplete ways, at the cost of personal and community destruction.

Worse still, as the public has wavered between accepting the deal offered by one or the other racket in hopes of gaining protection from the other mafia in each case, it has discovered that neither crime family will actually provide such protection from the other on a day-to-day basis, as they had promised. So in fact there is no choice to either abandon culture, traditions, and beliefs or to abandon food and shelter, but in fact the public is destined to be squeezed by both mafias until everything they value is lost including hope itself, and the elites will control it all—all of culture, all of family, all of community, all of the money, and all of the choices—as is a protection racket’s wont.

And so the public feels increasingly compelled to do whatever they can, however irrational it may seem, to fight two crime families at once, at the risk of losing everything—their identities and selves and their ability to merely subsist.

— § —

Toward the end, what the public has experienced is even a loss of basic predictability. Not only are the deals bad, but the norms of social functioning, everyday interactions, and common economic behaviors have been neutered by such an extent by both of these mafias that the public can’t even think tactically about how to fight these two crime families.

This is by design; both parties have believed that all norms have to go to buttress the success of their crime operations, as is common for crime families.

But predictability is the basic enabler of society; it is the philosophical basis of the social contract, which seeks to make some things predictable so that it remains in the interest of society’s members to join the contract and to behave predictably themselves.

This predictability for the common person has disappeared. Who will I meet in the bathroom? Will my church and community as I know it be there tomorrow, or will they sanctioned out of existence? What does this offer of employment or do the terms of this loan really entail, regardless of what is printed on the contract? Will I have a home in a year? What will this politician do?

There remains no basis on which the average person can intelligently make almost any choice. He no longer knows how to act in his own interest; he is sure only that whatever he does at any level of his life, from talking to a neighbor to voting in the booth to purchasing a basic durable household good, it will cheat him somehow, behave in precisely whatever way he didn’t forsee (and that is detrimental to him either culturally or economically) thanks to one or the other group of elites.

It is a world of unforseen and catastrophic consequences in which the average person feels hamstrung.

Both parties use “justice” as code for “we’ll change norms so that all who are so empowered can do what they want,” Democrats meaning socially and Republicans meaning economically, and neither adding the asterisked small print that reads in part: “We realize that the list of those who are so empowered includes only our party elite.”

From the party perspective, elites have failed to realize that the “battle against injustice” that each is fighting (Democratic elites “social” injustice, and Republican elites “equitability” injustice) amounts to a battle against the existing social order. Injustice as a concept implies that the old social order must radically change, and a radical change in the old social order is, in fact, the destruction of predictability and thus, in at least some measure, the existing social contract.

— § —

And so into this melee Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders step. Trump in particular is offering the launch of, and savvy protection by, a new crime family (rather than a new public, which was the Sanders promise; it is possible that the public is now so emasculated that it is not convinced of its own ability to fight the mafias, even as a movement).

Trump: “I can keep you fed and housed and preserve your culture, traditions, beliefs, and families. But only if you give up on America and its aspirational ideals as you have known them. I can restore predictability. But only if you give up on larger questions of justice.”

Having dealt so long with the other two mafias in the neighborhood, and feeling much the worse for wear and in precarious waters indeed, much of the public is only too happy to embrace this new crime family with open arms and to take what decades ago might have seemed to be an unacceptable deal—in hopes that it might be able to turn back the other two rackets and their thugs.

The public has heard that this particular new syndicate has operated somewhere else before and was ruthless indeed—very good at skirting norms, applying the thumbscrews, and playing a street-smart brand of mob warfare. Just the thing. This new crime family may just have a shot at protecting them from the other two, who they’ve come to realize want nothing but their blood in the end.

In other words, at the end of their rope and facing what they see as destruction, many in the pubic are willing to give this new protection racket the benefit of the doubt. They’ve seen the “protection” that the other two have to offer, and want no part those deals any longer. They’ve been helpless to hide from the other two mafias for far too long and see no other choice, despite the fact that in a more merciful world they’d find a way to extricate themselves from protection rackets entirely and live more equanimitous lives.

The West is over. I don’t want to live here anymore. I want to live someplace with a social contract. It matters less what the contract is than that it exists; a social contract is legible. You can work within it, even if you’re not satisfied with it.

“A social contract?! How quaint and offensive!” say the people of the West.

Because of course the line on social contracts these days is that they are like unicorns or cerberi, mythological, made-up things that really stand in for other truths that we don’t want to confront, like “privilege” and “power.” The general belief, well-internalized, in the West right now is that the social contract is a fairy tale told to blacks and women so that they could be stolen and raped.

All there ever was, and all there ever will be, is power, and if someone comes to you with a social contract, street smarts says to tear it up and shoot them in the face, because they are playing a con on you. They are trying to steal your nads, as they always were, because there is no such thing as a social contract, only raw power.

— § —

Here’s the thing. A social contract, like all things social, is:

(1) Socially constructed. It is real to the extent that it is held by the culture and by individual belief and behavior to be real. Like a birthday party. Are we having a birthday party right now? Depends on whether everyone in the room agrees that we are, and whether we’re doing the “birthday party” things. If we all agree that it’s a party, and we are doing birthday party things, then by god, it’s a birthday party. If four out of six people in the room say that it’s not a birthday party, it’s just a regular Saturday, then the remaining two may be free to go off and declare “our own little birthday party,” but the majority will snicker at them, and the house will not have that all-encompassing “birthday party feel” about it. For social things—like social contracts—to be real, people have to believe and act as though they’re real.

(2) Objective and external to individuals. If we all claim to be having a birthday party, but we all sit quietly in different corners and do our own things, and the words are never mentioned again, then we are likely not having a birthday party. Because there is no objective reality to the party that matches the individuals’ imaginations of the thing. There must be objectivity to a birthday party; objectively observable, consensus behavior to construct it and give it reality. But if we do do the things of a birthday party—if there are plates and singing and cake and so on and everyone in the house who is asked says that “yes, this is our birthday party” then any objective observer would report that such a party is taking place. It is not just about subjectives; it comes about as an objective, exercised fact about and embodying the consensus and synchronicity of the subjectives.

Social facts are like that. They are the objective consequences of subjective submission, in consensus to an emergent social order and reality. We cede parts of ourselves to join the collective and call, by consensus, an agreed-upon reality into being.

If the tenor of a culture is to deny the reality and fundament of a social contract, and instead to reify power as the basic dynamic inherent in social activity and reality, then in fact, they are right—there is no social contract, there is only power. Social reality is what we, as social beings, agree and act as though it is. That doesn’t make it any less real. In fact, because we are its subjects, that makes it more real.

— § —

It’s tough to tell whether pure power is a cultural value that is being embraced intentionally (“I want to live in a socially Darwinist world”) or whether this is naïveté on the part of the public (“the powerful tell me there’s only power and that I’ve been had, so anyone who says that there may be something like consensus without ulterior motives and scams is lying”) but in fact that’s where we are.

The fact that so many embrace Libertarianism—which is ultimately nothing more than Social Darwinism embraced by people that can’t make connections between axioms and the logical outcomes and inconsistencies that follow from them—and the cult of the self/selfishness/self-realization/self-power (now often dressed up as “Eastern mysticism” in a deep affront to the highly communitarian philosophies of Eastern religions and traditions) suggests to me the former.

In short, having seen a few too many cheats at “social contracting” over the years, the public has subconsciously decided that social contracts are bad deal and never were embraced by others (i.e. there wasn’t any consensus, and all good-faith actors involved failed to constitute its reality), and are thus to do away with that particular social reality and set of beliefs and habits entirely. Tired of being “cheated,” they prefer now to risk going it alone by constituting instead a kill-or-be-killed society in which “self-realization” and the individual subject are king. This is both the fault of the cheaters along the way, and the fault of poor education and an impoverished culture that perhaps pursued materialism at the cost of forgetting about socializing their children with an awareness of The Virtues and of humankind’s history of utter brutality under pure power conditions.

But in any case, the West is now kill-or-be-killed as a cultural matter, and social contracting has indeed become pure fiction at the moment, while pure power is a deep consensus and constituted reality. This is more true on the left, particularly the SJW left, than on the right, but indeed it runs deep on both sides of the aisle.

And the West has yet to understand that it’s signing its own death warrant; once you dispense with social contracting and buy into pure power, you’ve set a new constellation of social conditions up for yourself that do, in fact, have consequences. People who are living comfortably with the remnants of social contracting culture haven’t quite caught on that ISIS, Putin & co. welcome the change with open arms as they have already been here for a while—and can now join the consensus with the world more unified than it has been in some time about the nature of social reality. Not to mention the fact that they are rather more practiced at kill-or-be-killed and pure power than Westerners imagine is possible or are prepared to cope with—being as poorly educated and bad at understanding the causal nexus and foreseeing likely outcomes as they are today.

— § —

And whose fault is it all? Our own. Power is seductive whenever one has the advantage. And to seize the advantage—is to reify power without reflection about what happens once one doesn’t have the advantage. It has been a chipping away at one social reality and a reification of another, over time.

Sure, the Left would blame the Right (it’s the fault of the men, the whites, the religious folk, etc.) and the Right would blame the Left (it’s the fault of the economic and cultural Marxists) but at the end of the day, these positions are facile sophistry. Both of them reify power and undermine contract in the very act of their being made. The very statements and bitterness about not having power are the acts that give power to power.

Meanwhile, I’ve heard many academics in the social science academy blame Foucault. Is it all his Fault? Why would it be? What particular power did he have over anyone that everyone didn’t in fact cede to him? There is a general inability (shocking amongst social science professionals) to recognize that social reality is socially constituted, and that to acquiesce to Foucault’s argument is to, by concrete acts, give it empirical embodiment ex post facto. Neat bit of social engineering, Foucault. Your argument tricked people into producing its evidence in response. Those few that do recognize the constituted nature of social reality but nonetheless embrace Foucault’s view seem to have skipped over the fact that this is the interior social milieu that Foucault experienced, that he was, in fact, one very fucked up and miserable dude, and that to embrace and reconstitute at scale his own internal mapping of the social is to leave us all living-as-Foucault going forward. Not my idea of a good time.

So why did you all do it? Are there just that many petulant, fucked up people in the world, who really think that much more of themselves and the advantages they’re likely to have in a pure power world than is reasonably justified?

I suppose, having known more than a few academics, I ought to answer my own question.

— § —

A reckoning lies ahead, though somewhat farther down the road than the death and fragmentation of the U.S., which is coming Real Soon Now. Somewhere in these pages, around 2000-2002 I once said that I saw another 50 years for the U.S. before it collapsed into another civil conflict at worst, or into consensus dissolution at best, resulting either way, in the long, long term, in three nations (if we survive that long in a warming world).

Sticking to that prediction. That gives us until about 2050. The wheels will start to come off before then, but I’m guessing that by 2050 we cease to operate as a generally recognized and legitimized Westphalian body with a federal center of power known as the United States of America. It’ll be one more once-cherished, rather useful social reality gone.

Seriously.

So much potential.

Gone to waste. I’m talking about the Internet, of course, and the crowd that inhabits it now, which I suppose includes everyone. Junk.

GIGO.

Seriously.

Dryer sheet stains drive me nuts. I wish they were formulated a little better, because I like to use them, and I also like to dry on high heat.

— § —

There is a whole generation of parents out there who have made it their job to justify themselves and their own bad parenting with a lot of Facebook memes about how everybody is a bad parent and that’s okay.

There are even movies.

Sorry, but if you say such things, you are a bad parent. Yes, in fact you can be expected to sacrifice anything and everything for your children. Yes, you can be expected to keep your appointments, be on time, dress them properly, not lose your temper, and just generally deal in a grown-up fashion. That’s what parenthood is. If you can’t do these things, you’re not actually parenting, you’re adolescenting.

And on those occasions when you fail, you absolutely should rake yourself over the coals and vow to do better next time, not justify your own failures and aw-shucks about how it’s not a big deal and it’s a normal part of parenting.

People used to worry about the increasing prevalence of incompetent teen parenting, but now the problem is far larger than that—an entire two generations of forty-somethings and thirty-somethings is engaged in self-congratulatory, self-absorbed, incompetent teen-style parenting.

News flash: if you get your kid to school late once, it’s a mistake and a regret and an embarrassment and you should feel pretty bad about it. If you get your kid to school late three times in a week, you just plain suck. No, it is not okay, no it is not understandable, and no, you are not forgiven and still a good parent “just because.”

— § —

Oh, and for those of you saying, “don’t judge?”

Bullshit.

We all used to judge. To judge ourselves. To judge each other.

judg·ment
ˈjəjmənt/
noun
1. The ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions.

Judgment is part of adulthood. The fact that nobody will judge, themselves or anyone else, is why we can’t have nice things, why the middle class is sinking, why people are significantly more idiotic (even if more well-read) than they were a century ago, why the planet is warming, why we are experiencing a regression in maturation over generations (60 year olds are now like 30 year olds once were, 40 year olds are now like 15 year olds once were, and 18 year olds are now like 10 year olds once were in terms of emotional maturity).

We have a responsibility, if we want to have a society that works, to constitute standards of judgment and to judge ourselves and others strictly according to these standards.

That is the only known way in which society can flourish and endure. It doesn’t matter which particular branch of social science you look at, they all concur: norms are cultural, norms are necessary, and so are sanctions if norms are to exist at all.

— § —

Rant over.

I don’t know why it started with dryer sheets.

— § —

Basic message:

Less self-acceptance. More guilt when there is actual culpability.
That is what we need right now.

Five judges in Canada just said this:

“A society that does not admit of and accommodate differences cannot be a free and democratic society—one in which its citizens are free to think, to disagree, to debate and to challenge the accepted view without fear of reprisal. This case demonstrates that a well-intentioned majority acting in the name of tolerance and liberalism can, if unchecked, impose its views on the minority in a manner that is in itself intolerant and illiberal.”

Have you ever heard anything so outrageous and infuriating?

Er, I mean, WTF is the matter with the endless population of jerk activists in the U.S. that they can’t get this through their thick, idiotic, ideological skulls?

It’s not so bad living alone.

There’s this cultural myth that it’s somehow sad or regrettable or lonely, but I find it to be suffused with a kind of optimism and openness that I’ve never experienced when living with others.

— § —

It is said that you can’t really live alone and retain your humanity; that it’s necessary to go out into the world and have “messy” interactions with other humans. Reinforcing ties, constituting norms, freshening experience and cultural literacy, finding yourself challenged by the initiative of other agents, and so on.

Problem is, I’ve never met many humans. Maybe ten in my life? I’m still in touch with most of them.

Our streets seem to be walked primarily by caricatures. They’ve stopped passing out souls in heaven, it would generally seem.

— § —

A calendar is a magical kind of thing. It captures time and structures it with a kind of repetitive beauty, in the same way that watch hands do. One thing I think that I will do when I get my next place (a nice, vintage house, hopefully) is paper one wall entirely with annual calendars (no, not flip calendars and those tiresome postcard images, annual calendars—that show a whole year on one page) stretching from my birth year, 1976, to the present. I should be able to fit my entire lifetime on one wall, just like that.

A life on one wall. That’s the magic I’m talking about.

Someone here begins to go on about how it doesn’t really capture “life” and all of that new age bullshit that comes across the television thing and now the intertubes as well, but as I say, that’s bullshit. They’re all the same, all those days. They disappear into one another. There’s yesterday, there’s today, and there’s tomorrow, and there’s nothing else. Every “worst day I’ve ever had” that anyone talks about is barely memorable six months on; they can’t tell you anything about it other than some abstract notion of “what happened” that is more denotative than it is descriptive.

People are in the business of sentimentalizing their lives so that they don’t have to regret the present and their choices in it. In fact, there is only the present. That’s your life, and mine—a wall of numbers, a well-bounded series of little calendar numbers. A day, a day, a day, a day, a day…

And in fact, that’s the beauty of it. Not the sentimental nonsense, which is all rather pedestrian, but the steely regularity of it, the gorgeous, brutal consistency of time, which stands apart, untarnished by everything else, pure.

— § —

On the notion of “regrets”—I can’t say for sure how many times I’ve been told by a caricature that “I have no regrets in my life! I don’t believe in regrets!” I don’t know how many times, but I do know that it’s a lot. This line is being churned out in vast quantities in a Chinese factory somewhere in Shenzen, and everyone is buying it.

I’ll tell you what it is, it’s stupid.

(1) Anyone who says this is lying.
(2) Anyone who truly has no regrets has never cared in their life about anyone else—they are so atomically self-absorbed as to be nearly invisible without special equipment.

Me, I have tons of regrets, and I love them. I love how they are invisibly embedded into the calendars that are my years, a whole big long string of them that are my self and my history and my living.

I love being alive. That’s why I bother to have regrets. Seriously.