Progress

Only a few boxes remain. We can pull into our garage every night. The AC blasts freonized air throughout the whole house and keeps things a comfortable 70 (warmer on the second floor, but no reason to complain).

Our Internet pulls 50 MBPS from the net, all pots and pans lie within easy reach in our rationalized kitchen. The spigot does not spew water but pumps a constant flow to my sprinkler, all across a trimmed lawn kept up by a manual push mower.

We're comfortable now, which means my Wife and I can address bigger projects. First on the list, pulling up some carpet and seeing how the hardwood floors look. Maybe we'll have to restain the whole main level, since we'll have sun-bleached floors in the kitchen and darker wood everywhere else, but we'll see.

Our kitchen is maple cabinets and maple floors. No good. We're looking to reface, which gives a good reason to bust out some Rustoleum cabinet makeover kits. Dump the white backsplash and white corian, too. I prefer a more natural looking main floor. Something like this:

That's still a little "magazine-ish" to me, but a lot closer to what I want than some 90s-esque maple kitchen and white corian nightmare zone.

Finally, some real projects!

Getting a Little Older

Two weeks ago, I described the hellish, contextual-less nightmare underpinning our society, and suggested perhaps trying to deconstruct all cultural meaning all the time might not prove valuable.

Yesterday, at Marginal Revolution, I saw why I trust my inclination to avoid the Meme-Plex:

I hate how much I love to grill. It’s not that I’m inclined to vegetarianism or that I otherwise object to the practice itself. But I’m uncomfortable with the pleasure I take in something so conventionally masculine. Looming over the coals, tongs in hand, I feel estranged from myself, recast in the role of suburban dad. At such moments, I get the sense that I’ve fallen into a societal trap, one that reaffirms gender roles I’ve spent years trying to undo. The whole business feels retrograde, a relic of some earlier, less inclusive era.

The Meme-Plex ends up destroying all meaning, remember. Everything becomes an exercise in seeing systematic oppression everywhere, even the tiniest glances become "micro-aggressions."

Thankfully, other priorities interest me these days. This week I talked to my banker for quite some time: I wanted to verify my Cook County property taxes, due the beginning of August, had been paid. After all, delinquent property taxes can force an auction on your home, and throw my Wife and I into the street.

Our bank paid the taxes in full (out of the escrow) two weeks ago.

Big sigh of relief. My Wife did not understand my sense of urgency, but this is one of the reasons why I am Head of Household.

At my 4th of July Party, the gentlemen rounded the grill (how oppressive!) and discussed or 401k packages and health care plans. Suffice to say, my friends receive many more blessings from the good Lord than I do, as they have 1:1 matching up to 6% (12%), and $1,000 deductibles for scarcely $100/month.

Time to yell at my company!

An old high school friend visited last night. He now is a dirty unionized public sector employee, in the Chicago school district. He's gained some weight over the years, as have we all. Instead of our typical lengthy rants about geopolitics, presidential politics, and economic nightmares, we talked about:

1. Pouring some gravel in my new lawn to prevent soil erosion
2. The good fortune of a homeowner replacing galvanized steel pipes with copper
3. Where to install an indoor hammock from the roof
4. Fiskars vs. Scotts Reel Lawnmowers (I own the Scott, he wants a Fiskars)
5. Seasoning cast iron skillets
6. Other boring stuff

Donald Trump's name did not come up once, nor did the Greek bailout crisis. He instead talked about how he enjoyed working in Chicago Public School system, felt he was making a difference, and wanted to show the world what his kids could do. We ended the night assembling some bar stools from Bed Bath Beyond and headed home before 10.

After a hectic work week, there's no need to wish for anything more than knocking back a few beers with a friend and finding new insights into some pressing household problems.

There's always alternatives, of course. There's other ways to live life. Whenever my in-laws get together, none of whom are homeowners, none of whom have any real responsibilities, the talk always falls into cats, internet memes, and TED Talks. We gather around the table, play a board game, and I experience what can only be described as utterly superficial ADHD banter.

1: Did you see this new thing on youtube?
2: Oh yeah my cats did something like that once.
3: What if your cats lived on the MOOOOONNNN?????

What a nightmare. I remember why I hated college so much. 

Descend into the Memeplex

In the last post, I mentioned that I have a broader perspective of history and economics than my Wife. She has been raised according to the Chicago North Shore liberal ethos and thinks accordingly. Economically and socially, school remains dominant in her mind, along with "good jobs," going to university, getting correct health care, and respecting all the historical inequities from the horrible legacy of Jim Crow.

Her perspective on life rarely surprises me. She was thinking about education the other day: she determined that she wants our schools to teach our kids, of course, but not to take the creativity out of them. To respect diversity, but to teach them confidence, and to teach them to be nice.

That's not how education has to be, of course. Why shouldn't education involve a heavy religious component? Religion has usually been a major focus of education, especially since education has usually been driven by religious institutions: literacy in Early Middle Ages remained the privilege of a few Monks. Charlemagne never learned to read: could you say the same of Barrack Obama or any leader today?

 How much "thinking" about education can she be doing if her end state remains exactly the same as the beginning? She reached no conclusions, only reinforced her old beliefs.

She rationalized.

Then again, she has no reference to anything other than what she sees. The greatest dichotomy she sees is between her style of education, the Tiger Mom rote-memorization inflicted upon Asian children, and the kind of laziness that defines the lower classes. This is the full extent of her knowledge, and therefore she has no real reason not to trust her own judgement.

I have a broader base of knowledge, not only in education, but in various facets of education. When I walk through my neighborhood, I see suburban sprawl in the 1950s and 1960s, juxtaposed against homes built in the 30s and 40s. In a few cases, I see neo-eclectic monstroties reflecting the growing wealth and desiriability of community.

I see zoning laws that allow only single family detached laws, except when used as a  buffer. When I arrive downtown, I see as Tax Incentive Financing District (quite common in Illinois but common nowhere else) creating business, and I see narrow streets initially created in the 1930s and 1940s when the village was merely a rail depot. Then we travel North into 1980s housing policy, on wider tracts of lands, with larger closets.

I see Memes.

That's how I decided to change my perspective on perspective....I do not have a broader knowledge, per se. I have a deeper knowledge in economics, social psychology, and history. Which in turn act like universal acids that simply burn through every school of knowledge and create new insights.

The way I see social interactions, towns, everything, is reminiscent of the Matrix: Much like Neo, I tend to see fundamental building blocks, at least pertaining to the subjects I know.

This is why we refer to Game knowledge as "Red Pill." Learning about Game deconstructs the social dances of one night stands, long-term relationships, marriages, and courtship into fundamental building blocks of physical human attraction and social conditioning.

Nature via nurture. 

There's danger to this, though. Man often fall into a state of madness or despair upon learning the truth: society has turned his nobility and his honor against him, to strip him of agency, to conceal from him the true nature of the world, so that he fulfill socially expected roles that demand he sacrifice most of his objectives, most of his life, most of his masculinity, and most of his soul. Only if he carries a few select genes and social skills is he allowed to pursue anything that might reasonably be called a "Life."

Man sometimes become extremist in this light.

Man has fallen into the Meme-Plex, for which he was not innoculated.

I use the term "Meme-Plex" to describe the social functions under our current society. You see a man approaching a woman and trying to pick her up, but underlying these social conventions are social ideas, ideas about how this situation should interact. For instance, traditional courtship, defined in 12th Century France, might demand a flower.

This social practice spreads through people and is replicated when men gain success. Occasionally it is modified: a flower is presented with a sonnet, or perhaps red flowers are selected for over yellow flowers. Nevertheless, these cultural memes spread and infect our entire society.

The entire combination of Memes creates our society. The society may look quite ordered, but the overall appearance of order deceives: beneath the surface lies a tumultuous world of competing ideas, much like at a microscopic level genes duel to the death to see who shall inherit the Earth.

The human mind is not crafted to look deeply into the Meme-Plex. Modernist Art like the below is what happens when a mind peers too deeply into the Meme-Plex:

Life loses meaning and becomes an existentialist nightmare. Worse, travelling into this deep underworld means exposing yourself to untold numbers of pathogens. Your civilized society gently pushes asides ideas that may prove dangerous. Yes, yes, you were told to be a Beta man and accept your place as a consolation prize in a woman's love life, but you were also told not to sacrifice children. Infanticide is a regular practice throughout history and this society blocks that notion from your mind (abortion aside for now).

Your society inoculated you against dangerous concepts like Nazism, Communism, and human bondage, though, yes, it may have trained you against "Sexism" and "Patriarchy" as well.

When you take the creaking, dark stairwell into the Memeplex, you don't know what you'll find. You don't know what idea your mind might fall prey to you. Dabbling with Memes unsupervised is no better than playing with Ebola with no protection.

This is, of course, is why certain movements throughout history have gone nuts. Second Wave Feminism, with its "all sex is rape" logic, descended into the Memeplex, and came out a grotesque perversion of the natural desire for human liberty. The French Revolution ran the fields of liberty red when reality proved "unwilling" to bend to the twisted ideas pulled willy-nilly from the Enlightenment MemePlex.

The Meme-Plex is terrifying. What we talk about here, on the internet, is terrifying. Sanitized, it can be, and will be, eventually. But when you start deconstructing your ideas, you start to deconstruct your values, your ego, your ideals, your visions of the world. The Pretty Lies perish, as Roissy might say, and nothing remains of your world but burnt cinders, remnants of an intellectual fire fueled far too well for its own good.

It's not surprising humanity has evolved to express disgust at being too liberal, too open-minded, too willing to accept new ideas. Most new ideas, like most new mutations, are bad, and require a powerful antibody response.

I spent perhaps too much of my life and too much of my energy criticizing people and entire societies for not having more intellectual vigor. There's an important humble note to recognize that intellectual curiosity bears as much risk as anything else: The 20th Century intellectuals filled many mass graves with their "intellectual vigor." 

These days, I try to rise from the MemePlex, and bask in a bright light I can now enjoy, thanks to the strong memetic foundation my forefathers built for me. 

Equality in the Middle Ages

Gender Equality isn't exactly a new thing. See the Cathars:

...the Cathars saw women equally capable of being spiritual leaders, which undermined the very concept of gender held by the Catholic Church...The Cathar movement proved to be extremely successful in gaining female followers because of its proto-feminist teachings along with the general feeling of exclusion from the Catholic church. Catharism attracted numerous women with the promise of a sacerdotal role that the Catholic Church did not allow.^[9] Catharism let women become a perfect of the faith, a position of far more prestige than anything the Church offered.

 Societies change, but many social issues remain the same. New technology always displaces old industries. Land always becomes scarce and rents rise. The proletariat always struggles to gain access to capital and money. The banker always jeopardizes the economy with poor speculation. Women always groan about their husbands, and husbands moan about their wives.

Rarely do fundamentally new issues arise. That's why you can go back to the age of Moses and see moral treatises on homosexuality: believe it or not, they had gays back in the day.

Cultural memory fades into oblivion, and the collective id myopically focuses on more recent, more pressing, more emotionally charged issues. Why concern one's self with the Albigensian Crusade when there are micro-aggressions today about which we should worry?

I find this is one of my biggest frustrations with any discussion of policy or ethical issue, particularly when my Wife offers her two cents. I see my perspective as something spanning an entire city, and her concern a little stoop on the 3200 block.

So here I am trying to discuss whether a new highway might allow more goods and services to flow in from the docks and maybe bring in new industry, and all she sees is concrete blocking out her backyard sun.

Eventually, you buy the cultural narrative that rights for women are a new thing, despite the Vikings having No Fault Divorce and the Cathars having religious leaders. You tend to think of courtship and chivalry as inherent features of men, rather than carefully cultivated attributes less than 1,000 years old and something, say, Jesus would scorn.

You tend to think of racial tolerance as something utterly new and forget the Ummayad Caliphate in Cordoba.

And then you forget that these social experiments all failed. The Cathars couldn't compete with actual French knights, honing their jousting in actual war instead of mock tournmaents. As the Vikings settled in places like England and Normandy, and had to develop and compete with strengthening societies, they abandoned their historic gender equality and perfected feudal practices so as to raise knights. You see Cordoba gradually whittled away by a missionary Spanish population dead-set on spreading the Word of (Christian) God, and simply having more fire in the belly than some decaying Muslim kingdom, despite it standing for 700 years.

A lot of modern developments look different juxtaposed against this grand sweep of history, where "Germany" has risen and collapsed multiple times, rather than merely being a former Nazi state temporarily divided and now principally known for Oktoberfest (a practice younger than the United States itself).

These thoughts tend to pre-occupy my mind more in my settled Beta life. I've always been somewhat of an intellectual, but now, with my genetic material now in the next generation, now as a fall-back guardian for the young, the future is less a concept, and more of a real place. It is the place that my children, my nieces, and nephews will inherit.

Now I feel 10,000 years since the Neolithic weigh down my mind. Where exactly ARE we headed? What is the legacy of my family? In a world where the Hellenic kingdoms rose, stood for centuries, and were swept away in a span of decades, what does it mean to be American, and what does it take to preserve that identity?  What other identities should I foist upon my progeny? Republican? Catholic? Goth?

My Wife tends not to think about these things, and perhaps I should put them aside from my mind too, but the muse wonders aloud during the quiet hours, and suggests, softly, gently, that a world remains to be forged.

Values Inside Out

I. 
Spoilers abound in the first section, pertaining to Pixar's newest film "Inside Out."

Critics hail the unique view on the mindscape, specifically the role of Sadness as a healing emotion. America is a go-getter, happy, optimistic culture, even if the actual citizenry chokes down more Prozac every passing year. Inside Out shows the unique role of Sadness in allowing a person to stop, reflect, think, and feel, which allows the Mind to shut a nightmare orchestra of Disgust, Fear, and Anger.

Letting those three emotions rule the roost turned the protagonist's mind into putty. Over the course of the movie, a child's personality slowly falls apart. Pixar shows this descent into madness by depicting the child's core personality traits as floating islands, each tumbling from the sky when a sufficient Breaking Point is reached.

Only a few days separate a child playing floor hockey with parents, cheering, smiling, and laughing, to a child running away in sheer terror. A sheer blitzkrieg of hate from her inner Fear, Anger, and Digust burns out her electrical circuits entirely. Remarkable is the utter lack of real trauma in this girls' past: Riley, the child, has almost no uniqueness to her. She is bland vanilla pudding thrown onto a movie screen, then stomped into its constituent, lifeless atoms.

Real usually acts on pre-existing factors, but if you are one of the unlucky ones susceptible to full-blown depression, your life can also fall apart in stunningly short order.

II. 
What applies to single person applies to the collective mass. No where is the most apparent than the current Greek saga. Despite years of negotiation, reform, and minor debt relief, the Greek crisis has come to full steam. After debt talks broke down, a full-blown bank run gripped Greece. Greece shut down the nation's financial system, and has proposed a referendum on the EU fiscal reforms, set for July 5th.

GREXIT, or Greece's departure from the EUROzone, now seems an immediate possibility, rather than the scare-tactic of political pundits.

Doubt's long shadow has been cast over the European project. The Euro, the EU's crowning achievement, is no more permanent a union than a Vegas marriage. Given Britian's possible referendums on leaving entirely, Switzerland's rebuke at the ballot box, and Russia's rebuke with the ammo box, the EU has been hobbled.

That's a huge change from the continuing history of progress. European unity has been an increasing phenomenon since the end of World War II. This begins with De Gaulle: seeing the strength of the USSR and the US, he makes the historic decision NOT to butcher Germany. This is at odds with France's historical enmity with Germany. After WWI, for instance, France created Saarland out of Germany. Germany responded by ordering a strike in the region, and paid its workers by inflating its currency, which tanked the German currency, which....well, you know the rest of history.

Instead, France and Germany created the European Coal and Steel Community, which began the long progress of European cooperation, which has, thus far, prevented any additional European wars from breaking out.

Seems simple enough, but the overreach of European unity resulted in a 7 year depression for Greece, which is resulting in the breakdown of the union.

Things can go to crap quite quickly.

III.
Here's where I bring back my favorite Scott Alexander piece:

I propose that the best way for leftists to get themselves in a rightist frame of mind is to imagine there is a zombie apocalypse tomorrow. It is a very big zombie apocalypse and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be one of those ones where a plucky band just has to keep themselves alive until the cavalry ride in and restore order. This is going to be one of your long-term zombie apocalypses. What are you going to want?

People on the modern Left really, really, REALLY think we have arrived at some sort of economy and social point where full disintegration is no longer possible. Because of this, they turn themselves towards dismantling social and economic injustice. They don't care about whether this might weaken the economy and society enough to collapse, because that's no longer a concern of theirs.

The US collapsing? Are you insane? We have the world's largest army. We have the world's largest economy. We have the world's best technology. We are the third most populous nation on the planet, and the only ones ahead of us are third-world hellholes.

It's true that we probably won't collapse tomorrow. But what can happen is serious dislocation and temporary harm. Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy, for instance. Or the 2008 economic collapse. Or the nearly 10 year depression Greece and Puerto Rico have been in.

One day, everything's fine, the next, BOOM! chaos.

Historically this happened quite frequently. One day the Aztecs are minding their own business, and then BOOM! Spanish army. The Aztecs are dead in a few decades.

The scariest problems, though, are the ones built into the system, that we don't see. The current Euro-crisis was a foreseeable event. The overfarming of the Midwest, which caused the Dust Bowl, is another excellent example. Europe's foreign policy post-WWI resulted in Hitler. Internal contradictions in the Soviet system doomed that society. Antebellum America's numerous slavery compromises ultimately proved unsustainable.

Etc.

Our society, like every society before, bears internal contradictions that will collapse our society if improperly managed. These go beyond traditional leftist causes like Climate Change or Civil Rights reform and into economic policy. On the Right, we believe that permissive sexual norms are contributing to the breakdown of marriage, which will water down other social compacts, and over time will hobble our society. Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy become unmanagable when the large majority of men Go Ghost, as in the black community today.

That does not even go to into other, external, existential risks. Pandemic. MERS has now spread to South Korea and can be spread by human-to-human contact. Asteroid impact. Foreign invasion. All things that might press our society hard enough to break.

IV.
You know who isn't afraid of asteroid impacts, pandemic, foreign invasions, or anything else?
 Social conservatives. 

Society itself is a safety net that functions even when government or business collapses. On a micro-scale, this means, if I lose my job, my family can take care of me. Or my sister-in-law can care for my sister's kids. Or my parents can live with me when they get old.

On a macro-scale, even Roman persecution couldn't kill the Catholic Church. Even when civilization collapsed, the Monasteries preserved social knowledge and literacy. Throughout the early Middle Ages, the church's abbots produced much of Christendom's staples, which is why the Investiture crisis became such a big deal: Kings wanted to appoint local bishops.

It's also why appropriation of church lands has long tempted national leaders. One of the French Revolution's enduring legacies was to confiscate church land and return it to the Third Estate.

Social conservatism, with an emphasis on instilling common community values and enforcing community norms, will function even when the government breaks down. Societies which emphasize individual rights and hedonism are going down, down, down, down, faster than the defunct personality islands in Inside Out, faster than the Greek banking system, and a LOT harder.

This should even make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Our major separation from the other animals is our ability to speak. Language affords us the ability to cooperate, and create complex social structures. This, more than anything else, allows humans to rule over other societies. Other species which may be stronger or more intelligent (and Neanderthals were probably both) lack any advantages against a collective society.

Bring on the Apocalypse, it won't harm the Church.

V.
Are we ever going to reach Leftist utopia?

Well, no.

There's a lot of talk about post-scarcity society, but at the moment, there's no reason to suspect we are close to it. The United States has not only eliminated famine, we have an obesity epidemic. We have eliminated the most common forms of death (preventable disease) and are going after harder disease like cancer and heart disease. Books, once the world's most precious possession, are obsolete in a world where we generate a petabyte of data every single year.

Shoes? Hell, most Middle Age people couldn't afford a single pair. We have entire stores dedicated to shoes: I have FOUR pairs of dress shoes!

If a post-scarcity society is possible, this should be it, and we're still arguing over how to divide the economic pie, and our economy is still vulnerable to massive financial shocks that make everyone feel peasant poor.

There's never going to be a real time for the kind of super-liberal free-love values that the Left cherishes. The Right will always need to be around, and social conservatism will always need to be around, always providing an additional safety net and always providing a sense of common identity for a national foundation.

The alternative is national suicide.

Hypothetical: No American Independence

We approach the anniversary of our divorce from the United Kingdom. There's a lot of could have gone worse, not just for the US, but for the entire world, had this revolution failed.

The US itself probably would not have fared that poorly. America most likely would have won dominion status in the 19th century, and remained part of the Commonwealth. Our expansion would've stopped at the Mississippi, with perhaps an AmerIndian tribe here or there. The US may have been consolidated with other British holdings in the Carribean, or Canada, though most likely not.

We would've become a rich democracy, like we are now, though less powerful. There's nothing wrong with that: we would be like Denmark. The frontier spirit which guaranteed liberty and exceptionalism would've never taken hold, and we most likely would resemble something closer to the modern European welfare state.

Everyone else is a lot worse off, though. An independent America never would've realized Manifest Destiny, and thus never would've seized valuable territories in California, the Great Plains, and the American Southwest.

These territories would've languished under inferior Mexican political institutions for decades or longer. The world's breadbasket (Iowa) would've never taken flight.

Many more people in our world would go hungry, perhaps billions more.

A weaker US would've never become the Arsenal of Democracy that single-handedly outproduced all the Axis nations combined. A stalemate would've developed along the Eastern Front between the USSR and Nazi Germany, at best. In Asia, the Soviets simply would've slaughtered Japan and dominated China utterly.

The Cold War begins in a melee a trois between Nazis, Communists, and a relatively weak Commonwealth.

The likely outcome is nuclear war, either limited or total, but who cares?

A strong America did a lot for the world.

Don't let anyone tell you differently.