death to the working class!

punching down on trad-socialism.

Scapegoating is the basis of all religions. Animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, symbolic sacrifice, shaming, stoning, accusing, witch-hunting, and projection are all fundamental to human society. If someone or something doesn’t get the blame, then power cannot be effectively wielded.

The inverse of scapegoating is formalist responsibility. In formalism, everyone is accountable for their own actions, and reaps the rewards of each. Libertarianism attempts to formalize ownership by removing property from the commons and privatizing it. Instead of pollution being a result of “corporate greed” or some malevolent spirit, pollution is traced back to the original source and punished appropriately in a court of law.

Sometimes, however, bad things happen: eating cats and dogs, tunnels under Comet Pizza, Epstein’s Island, and “the Democrats control the weather.” The result is predictable: gribbles with guns threaten violence.

This is regrettable, but not unexpected. When bad things happen, scapegoating is a 10,000 year old solution. Trump didn’t invent the game, he’s just a player. When Trump is gone, Tucker and Candace Owens will keep the game alive.

The left has their own version of scapegoating. White men are responsible for everything bad in the world. On the surface, this sounds like a catastrophic myth. The right wing blames “the Democrats,” or “the globalists,” which is ultimately a very small number of people. If the gribbles ever did rise up and take over the government, supposedly, they would only go after Soros, Clinton, and Gates, and leave the average Democratic voter alone. But if all white men are evil, then a victory of the left sounds like genocide.

Fortunately, liberals don’t actually hate whites — they hate particular kinds of whites. Taylor Swift and Harry Styles are good — Trump and Marjorie Greene are bad. The good kind of whiteness is educated, liberal, tolerant, and rich.

AOC’s fiancé is white; Kamala Harris has Doug Emhoff; even Rachel Maddow has a blond wife. For a group of people that supposedly hates whites, they sure do like sleeping with them.

Jews are an even sharper picture of this supposed contradiction. Jews are alleged by the far-right to harbor anti-white bias.

Colonel MacGregor went on Tucker’s podcast to suggest that Victoria Nuland hates Russians because:

“these people have ancestors who came from that region of the world and have a permanent ax to grind with the Russians.”

MacGregor didn’t take things one step further, which is to suggest that “Jews hate white people because of the Holocaust.”

If that were true, then it is quite odd that a majority of American Jews will end up marrying or dating white people.

The truth is that Jews are overwhelmingly liberal. Like other liberals, they hate “whites,” but when they say “whites,” they really mean a particular class of whites who they feel are responsible for all the evil in the world.

Even the Nazis accused Americans of being racist when it suited their interests. Even Nazis can recognize that beating up on weaker, defenseless people is not a good look. That’s why the Nazis never portrayed Jews as weak, but as predatory and powerful.

Nazi propaganda attacking the KKK.

Liberals use racism as a stick to beat “whites” over the head with. The archetypal racist is a conquistador, a Nazi, and a white warrior.

Which man looks more gay? Which man looks more likely to say the n-word? Which one is the liberal, and which one is the conservative?

Liberals are effectively a breeding population. They marry each other according to pedigree. This results in ethnogenesis, where liberals begin to see themselves as a different race from conservatives.

Like other ethno-religions, it is not enough to be descended from a liberal. In this sense, liberalism is not aristocratic, but meritocratic. You can assimilate into liberalism, and you get kicked out for not following the rules. But liberals unconsciously understand themselves as an identity group, and act functionally in that regard: they go to church with liberals, they marry liberals, and they befriend liberals.

It’s true that liberals go out of their way to act friendly toward non-whites, just as Pope Francis goes out of his way to wash the feet of African migrants. This is performative, and doesn’t erase the identity at the core of liberalism.

All of this is to say that leftist genocide against white people is not just unlikely, but impossible. America isn’t Haiti or South Africa — blacks are 13% of the population, not 90%. When leftists attack whites, they are generally targeting the “white working class.” On the other hand, a right-wing attack on “globalists” is punching up at the ruling class. Which is worse?

the labor theory of value.

Marxists believe in the labor theory of value. If you spend a thousand hours digging a hole, and filling it up again, that’s value. The longshoreman’s union is a great example of this. They are opposed to automation, opposed to technology, opposed to innovation, and opposed to progress. They act as a mafia and threaten to shut down the country if their inefficiencies are discarded.

The actions of protestors on January 6th, who lost an election, is another example of a destructive temper tantrum. BLM was a destructive temper tantrum.

The comments section of this article will likely feature a temper tantrum. Words matter. Constant propaganda, day in and day out, eventually leads to a decline in trust. Endless propaganda about how “the left wants to kill white people” or how the “cops are committing genocide against black trans-women” has negative consequences. All of this resentment doesn’t just float away into the vacuum of space. It poisons hearts and minds. It makes people willing to sacrifice their time, energy, and lives to hurt others, even when they stand to gain nothing from it.

the origins of charity.

Charity is a natural human urge, based on attachment and tribal reciprocity. Encouraging universalist charity is a prime directive of all social systems past the tribal level. “The Golden Rule” helps to lower the tensions that naturally arise from a stranger-based society. If everyone deserves help and sympathy, even the lowest among us, then people become more merciful and forgiving, which reduces conflict.

A society in which people are clannish, tribalistic, and nepotistic will be rife with conflict and low in meritocracy. Societies with low social trust devolve into the stupidest forms of racism, down to the level of the family. Societies which believe in equality and giving everyone a chance are more likely to resist corruption.

But giving a homeless person a house is not going to fix their problems.

winning the lottery.

Most people who win the lottery end up happier. But 30% become bankrupt, which is still higher than the 10% of Americans generally who file for bankruptcy.

One of the reasons why 30% of lottery winners go bankrupt is because lottery winners are a selected population. In order to win, you have to play. What kind of person buys a lottery ticket? Poor people high in risk-taking:

• Those in the lowest fifth in terms of socioeconomic status (SES) had the highest rate of lottery gambling;

• People in their twenties and thirties;

• Males, blacks, Native Americans, and those who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

If you take a population which tends to be poor, young, and male, we shouldn’t be surprised if that population is 3x as likely as the general population to spend all of their money on luxuries and fall behind on payments, eventually going bankrupt.

People are poor for a reason. They have high time-preference, low intelligence, are more prone to addictive or self-harming behaviors, have higher rates of mental illness and instability, and have beliefs and ideologies which reinforce learned helplessness. Instead of taking responsibility for their lives and acting in a predictable, disciplined, Stoic manner, poorer people tend to live chaotic, disorganized, and unplanned lives, living moment to moment, not planning for the future.

When Jordan Peterson suggests that you “clean your room, bucko,” he is implying that if you force yourself to be more orderly, things will improve. Some people aren’t willing or able to take Peterson’s advice. Their personality traits and ideology make it easier for them to blame others or ignore their own flaws. Some of them simply do not have the capacity for change. Throwing money at them isn’t the best strategy.

The lottery doesn’t “cause bankruptcy” by breaking people’s brains or overloading them with emotion. Instead, lottery players are more likely to go bankrupt, and receiving a huge wad of cash doesn’t change that. Irresponsible people waste money. It doesn’t matter how much money you give them — they will burn it all, whether it’s $10 or $10 million.

what is the priority?

The first directive of the government is to survive. Even if you think the government should do things other than just survive, it can only do those things if it first survives.

There are some people who engage in wishful thinking who believe that the government will collapse. There are others who believe the government is an infallible entity and cannot collapse under any circumstances. Both positions are wrong, but between a 50% chance of collapse and a 0% of collapse, there are many degrees of truth in between. If a policy would increase the chances of the government collapsing from 1% to 2%, that is a bad policy, even if the chances in either case are slim.

Pouring infinite money into the working class is a bad policy, because the working class will gobble it up and spit out the bones with nothing to show for it. On the other hand, deliberately antagonizing the working class is also dangerous. The most efficient policy would be to placate the working class symbolically with the least amount of resources.

The easiest way to not aggravate the working class is to not write articles entitled “death to the working class!” That would be a start. However, I doubt that I have increased the chances of a civilizational collapse with this single article. In fact, by forcing you to read it with my salacious sensationalism, my ideas are more likely to spread, which will save civilization.

what is the working class?

The definition of working class has changed because the economy has changed. 1,000 years ago, there wasn’t much social mobility. Most people were born as serfs and remained serfs. No matter how hard they worked, no matter whether they were lazy or alcoholics, no matter whether they were smart or dumb, a peasant would earn the same daily wages for the same work. Working as a serf on a subsistence farming plantation is mind-numbingly stupid.

There were ways that a serf could save up money, by avoiding gambling, alcohol, and other frivolities. Even in the deep South, there were some slaves who had the opportunity to buy their freedom. Social mobility is never 0%. Even if serfdom was a prison, it’s possible to escape prison. Native Americans escaped captivity and returned to their tribes; white captives taken by Natives escaped and returned to civilization. Some Jews escaped the Holocaust. 10% of the Germans sent to the Soviet gulags survived. There’s always a chance.

But for the most part, agricultural economies don’t provide immediate and disproportionate rewards and punishments for slight variations in intelligence, work-ethic, or talent. A serf is a serf, and earns a serf’s wages. Farming takes work, but due to the seasonal nature of it, most farmers aren’t out in the fields for 52 weeks a year.

feast days.

To understand how non-meritocratic farm labor is, we can look at feast days.¹

The initial numbers come from the Roman empire, where mandated feast days varied between 45 and 135, but these gradually declined over time as the Roman economy expanded and became more specialized. Most Roman feasts were declared by priests following events of weather or war. If there was a hail storm, a feast might be declared. If a war was won, a feast might be declared. The number of vacation days could have numbered much higher than 135, depending on the year.

It wasn’t until 620 and the Statues of Sonnatius that Christians began to expand the number of vacation days. Since the economy of Europe contracted, and the population decreased and de-urbanized, it’s possible that the period between 324 and 620 had less free time for feasts. It’s also possible that people were working less than previously, but the church had less structured authority to declare feasts and regiment a social schedule for the whole of society. In the latter case, peasants would slack off whenever they felt like it (or maybe even celebrating pagan holidays), rather than following the prescriptions of the church.

The population of Paris didn’t begin to recover until the 11th century, but then surpassed its historical maximum in the 12th century. During this period, the church underwent a number of reforms and systematizations, including the Gregorian Reform.

Again, it is difficult to tell whether the church was adding new feast days in accordance with a reduction in real work hours, or if the church was merely regimenting, formalizing and coordinating communal life at a continental scale. Just because the Catholic church added feast days to the calendar doesn’t mean that people were necessarily working less hours.

However, it does seem clear that between 1642 and 1884, there was a massive reduction in feast days. This is because between 1642 and 1884, Europe underwent a massive process of urbanization, specialization, and industrialization.

Estimates of the Roman workforce suggest that 85% of Romans were farmers, and 97% were engaged in some kind of manual labor.² By 1300, this had decreased to 76% in Poland, and 57% in England. By 1800, that number decreased to 32% in England. At the same time that the number of farmers was dwindling, the number of working hours per year was exploding.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever

Marx and Engels perceived this explosion in working hours as “capitalist exploitation.” But Marx and Engels also believed that capitalism, even with its exploitative working hours, was superior to feudalism, with fewer working hours. Early socialists recognized that even though feudalism had less work, it was still an inferior economic system. Trad-socialists in 2024 who lionize feudalism have forgotten Marx.

ford.

Henry Ford is credited with increasing vacation time, or limiting work hours, for the first time in the industrial era. Ford wasn’t an altruist or a saint. Instead, he was struggling to retain workers. Ford factories had a 370% turnover rate. In order to fill a single position, Ford had to hire 3.7 workers per year. That’s because the work was hard, difficult, complicated, demanding, but also extremely monotonous and boring. People quit, or were fired. They showed up to work drunk, or didn’t show up at all.

Ford didn’t implement higher wages and vacation time out of the kindness of his heart, but because he was desperate to attract dedicated, disciplined, and dependable workers. Since Henry Ford, vacation days have continued to increase, to the point now where the average German gets approximately 196 days off work.³ That exceeds any pagan or Christian feast schedule of the ancient or medieval world.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t hard working single moms with four jobs. And if you want to start your own business, start-up gurus will tell you that you need to work 18 hours a day. 25% of new business owners work more than 60 hours a week.

But even in poor countries like Cambodia, the average person still gets 58 days off work a year. It is hard to argue that working class people are earning less money or working more hours anywhere in the world than they did hundreds of years ago.

why is the working class sick?

Charles Murray in Coming Apart (2012) demonstrates that working class whites used to have similar patterns of life to upper class whites. They married and divorced at similar rates; had similar rates of out-of-wedlock birth; similar rates of religious and communal participation; and similar rates of drug use. Then, for some reason, in the last 60 years, the upper class has mostly maintained its behaviors (despite becoming less religious), while the working class has plummeted into a hellscape of divorce, single moms, drug use, and tattoos. STDs are also on the rise.

One explanation for this is that the working class has been deprived of economic or material advantages that it had in the 1960s. As a result of this financial decline, working class people can’t help but descend into depravity.

If we focus on whites alone, poverty does seem to correlate with violent crime. But is this because poverty causes people to become violent criminals? Or is it because mentally deranged psychopaths tend to be both poor and violent, at the same time, as a comorbidity?

Social mobility allows those who have the desire and ability to increase their wealth. But it also allows those without the desire and ability to lose it. Feudal peasants didn’t have much mobility, and most of them were stuck at the bottom. Since industrialization, mobility has increased, pushing the talented upwards, and the incapable downwards. Everyone loves a good “rags to riches” story, but there are also “riches to rags,” or less dramatically, “middle class to rags.”

People lose wealth and status for a variety of reasons. Mental illness, injury, exposure to toxins, drug addiction, and psychological trauma can destroy the ability for gainful employment.

Not everyone who is poor is dumb, unstable, or addicted. Some people are born into poverty, but they have the capacity to escape it. This is especially true for immigrants, who come from countries with less social mobility. When they enter America, they see a greater return on investment for their labor than in their home countries. This is why many “rags to riches” stories feature immigrants.

One such story is that of George Soros. Although he arrived in England in 1947 without any money, the education and skills he received from his family allowed him to succeed.

Source: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01904567/document

is redistribution bad?

After the fall of the Tsar, the Soviet Union spent 20 years actively discriminating against the nobility. Those who fled found themselves bankrupt and penniless. Yet many of them rebuilt their lives abroad, and became quite remarkable.

On the other hand, if you give a lottery-player a windfall, there’s a 30% chance he will burn it to the ground.

I am not against the redistribution of wealth. But I think all redistribution should be a rational and sustainable investment, rather than a victimary offering to the Gods of poverty.

For example:

1. Redistributing money from the general public to young people is an investment in the future. Children do not have the means or capacity to fund their own education, but this education will pay dividends.

2. Building up trans-continental infrastructure is difficult to coordinate and fund at a local level. Redistributing money from localities into a national pool helps fund transformative projects at scale.

3. Criminal activity that takes place across state lines, or which corrupts local police departments, is best tackled with federal forces that are carefully vetted and trained to deal with international criminals.

I support big beautiful schools; big beautiful airports; and our big beautiful FBI. I want roads to be free from potholes. I am not a libertarian or conservative on economic matters. I am happy to support big government.

However, I have no desire at all to dump more cash into the black hole that is the American working class.

fetishizing labor.

Here are some jobs I would consider “working class”:

1. Stuffing dead rats into trash bags;

2. Moving around dead bodies;

3. Lugging thousands of pounds of luggage every day;

4. Riding around on a mountain made of trash;

5. Cashiering;

6. Stocking shelves;

7. Meat packing;

8. Sex work;

9. Insulation removal;

10. Insulation installation;

11. Corrections;

12. Truck driving;

13. Kindergarten teaching;

14. Organic farming;

15. Landscaping;

16. Personal training;

17. Firefighting;

18. EMT responding;

19. Auto repair;

20. Electrical work.

I thought about adding nursing, but I looked it up and apparently nurses make over $60k, and they don’t necessarily get dirty or do heavy lifting, so I didn’t count that.

I think the common thread between all these “blue collar jobs” is that they are male oriented, either because they involve some kind of physical strength, coordination, spatial reasoning (rotating shapes in your head), or they don’t make a lot of money. Kindergarten teachers are probably the exception in this list, but I still included them as “working class” because they don’t make much money and don’t require much education.

I find it bizarre and sick that anyone would fetishize this work or elevate it above programming, writing, poetry, history, or any job that requires higher education. It should be the exact opposite.

There’s this pervasive idea that “we don’t worship plumbers enough,” and if we worshipped plumbers more, somehow the economy would be better. Yes, plumbing is a “working class” job (spatial, strength, coordination, physical) that makes a lot of money. There’s less barriers to entry to plumbing than to becoming a tenured history professor. But fetishizing the occupation of plumbing, or acting as a vicarious “hype man” and gassing up plumbers isn’t going to fix the plight of poor, uneducated Americans.

Poor people are aware that plumbing exists. The idea that there is a group of 90 IQ Americans who are unaware that plumbing exists, because of “pro-college propaganda,” is ridiculous. Learning about college, or even fetishizing college, does not prevent anyone from going to trade school.

Assume a student takes out $100k in student loans, but discovers after four years that college is a scam, and their basket-weaving degree is useless. “I wish I became a plumber!” Ok, this isn’t an RPG. You don’t have to choose a class, like bard or paladin, and then you’re stuck with it. Anyone can go to plumber school for $3,000. It takes a year or two. No one is stopping the “working class” from doing this.

Go up to a “working class” person, who is unemployed or underemployed, who is financially struggling, and start talking to them about plumbing. “Woah, plumbing? Never heard about that before. I thought I could only go to college! This is life changing.” “Working class” people have plenty of opportunities to work hard and earn money.

If you actually speak with a plumber, however, they will tell you that it requires the following:

1. You have to show up on time. If you’re late, absent, or you make excuses, you’ll never get certified.

2. You have to pass drug tests and not be hungover or high.

3. You have to actually work hard and deliver proven results. If you do shoddy, careless, or rushed work, the mistakes will catch up to you. You have to do honest work, not just “looks good enough to me.”

Plumbers aren’t perfect people, but they have standards of punctuality, sobriety, and labor integrity. “Working class” people aren’t up to the task.

I understand that people have mental health issues that prevent them from hitting these standards. People suffer from addictions, insomnia, depression, anxiety, and all sorts of other maladies. I am sympathetic to the idea that the church used to provide what was essentially a mental health service to millions of Americans. As working class Americans have left the church (or the church left them?), they have been deprived of these desperately needed services. That’s a tragedy, and there’s no easy or quick solution to this. However, a decline in religiousness isn’t going to be solved with wealth redistribution. If people are suffering spiritually, and this impacts their job performance, then throwing free money at them isn’t going to solve the root of the problem.

crisis of meaning and masculinity.

I believe the reason that trad-socialists cling so tightly to the “working class” label is because it represents for them a homogeneous, conservative, upright, honest, high social trust, sexually dimorphic society, where men were men, and women were women, daggumit! Trad-socialism is feeding off several fumes:

1. Homophobia and transphobia: disgust for deviant sexuality generally. “Try being trans on an oil rig!” The idea is that sexuality is regulated by labor, and by restoring the proper relationship with labor, especially physical labor, human sexuality will heal to a natural state.

2. Natalism: the idea that low fertility is connected with “bullshit jobs” where women tend to do better than men (human resources, office work, secretary work, digital marketing, power-point presentations, or anything requiring a combination of social skills with organizational skills).

3. Nationalism: the idea that bugmen and programmers are constitutionally unfit to lead the nation; the idea that a bourgeois information economy is too abstract to understand the value of “blood and soil.”

4. Agnostic fundamentalism: the idea that religious fundamentalism is good, no matter what religion. “I don’t care if you’re Christian or Muslim, so long as you work hard and hate those globalists!”

Christianity is slipping into sillier forms of self-parody, and atheism is becoming the second fiddle to wokism. In the absence left by these two religious movements, “trad-socialism” fits perfectly into the mold of “agnostic fundamentalism.” Trad-socialism strikes the perfect balance between materialism, victimology, anti-wokism, and traditional gender roles. And by “perfect balance” I mean a toxic brew of the worst of all worlds.

so you just hate poor people?

Imagine a BLM activist comes up to you, asking for billions of dollars of free money, “because oppression.” If you refuse his demands, he screams, “oh, so you just hate black people?”

I am not actively harming working class people, nor am I arguing for their persecution. But if I’m not fully on board with deporting 30 million migrants, or banning automation to protect the longshoremen’s union, or regulating AI to protect truck drivers, the response I get is, “oh, so you just hate the working class?”

If you force me to choose between billions for the bottom, or passively allowing technology and innovation to make society better, then I will proudly proclaim: death to the working class!

I’m not running around construction sites or grocery stores, screaming this in the face of blue-collar workers. Actual blue collar workers don’t read my Substack. But nothing disgusts me more than this moral purity test.

The message is:

“You’re not a real American, you’re a bourgeois parasite who doesn’t care about the working class; if you were a real man, you would respect the working class; you must be gay since you don’t worship the working class; I bet you couldn’t even do half the work a real working class man does; real patriots care about the working class; anyone who doesn’t support the working class belongs in a gulag…”

Etc etc. It’s all so boring and tiresome.

When I see a field full of cattle, my first thought isn’t, “how do I poison these cattle? How do I open up the gates to wolves? How do I exact my revenge upon these cattle for what they did to my ancestors?” But at the same time, I’m not interested in completely reorganizing society around cattle-worship. Just because I don’t worship cattle doesn’t mean I hate cattle.

If all cattle in the world died tomorrow, I wouldn’t be that sad. I would be much sadder if all Armenians in the world died, or all dogs died.

Each human is part of a class — warriors, managers, priests, and workers. When people fulfill the archetype of their class, this is laudable. The perfect warrior is a hero, the perfect manager is a shepherd and provider, the perfect priest is a prophet, and the perfect worker is a craftsman. The perfect worker in an information economy isn’t a farmer or a factory worker, but a programmer. Bless the programmers! They are the craftsmen of our age.

I’m not ignoring the fact that some working class people provide value. However, those who do provide value, like electricians or plumbers, are paid handsomely. They live comfortable lives in nice houses in peaceful neighborhoods. They are treated fairly and respectfully. No one is advocating for the genocide of plumbers and electricians.

“Working class” is a weasel-word that equates well-paid craftsmen with delinquent, tardy, shoddy, mentally ill, low conscientiousness, dishonest, drug-addicted, shifty, perpetually fired, low-skilled workers. They don’t show up on time. They don’t give two weeks’ notice. They just stop showing up.

No one who defends these people as “working class” has ever tried to run a business. Try getting guys out on trucks at 6am to customers on a schedule. These “working class folks” are the bane of your existence. They become predictable. They have a certain look, a certain smell, a certain way of carrying themselves. It’s petty narcissism, a victim mentality, always blaming others for their problems, never taking responsibility.

The majority of people who are poor fall into this category. White, black, Hispanic, mixed race, doesn’t matter. They come in all colors. Feeding into their self-serving / self-destructive narratives about “the man,” globalism, capitalism, the Jews, or whatever the scapegoat of the month is this time is not ultimately going to make our society better.

Society becomes better when we reward good decisions and punish bad decisions. Showing up is a good decision. Consistency is a good decision. Innovation is a good decision. Using time-saving devices is a good decision.

Blaming others is a bad decision. Time-wasting is a bad decision. Self-deception is a bad decision.

Western civilization wasn’t created by disenfranchised Shudra griping about stagnant wages. It was created by warriors and prophets; adventurers and dreamers; men who sailed across the world in search of treasure; boys on chariots with eyes of fire and hearts of steel. They weren’t “just looking for a fair shake.” They weren’t “just trying to start a family.” Greatness isn’t achieved by collective complaining, nagging, and shaming. That’s how you run a daycare, not the greatest military on the planet.

All societies and religions have scapegoating, and victim narratives are one particular form of scapegoating. It is not possible to eliminate this entirely, since it seems fundamental to non-kinship based social structures. However, it should be minimized at all costs. If we want to pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful, catering society to the whims of the defunct and dysfunctional is a recipe for bankrupting civilization.

The internet acts as fertile ground for grifters feeding into the worst instincts of friendless weirdos. As a result, trad-socialism is insanely popular and growing. JD Vance pays obeisance to it, and it is not yet clear whether this is just a cynical ploy for votes or if it will have any impact at all on policy.

The left has their own version of trad-socialism, called queer racial socialism. In queer racial socialism, the white working class can be entirely ignored, because the only thing that matters is whether trans-kids have enough money for their surgeries, and whether or not black people have gotten infinite reparations. One trillion dollars is quite a lot, but it’s still not infinite, so we have a ways to go. There’s more work to do.

We have three choices. We must either give all money to white coal miners, black scholars, or eschew government entirely and declare that it can do nothing good. This is a false trilemma. Government can do good things, just not in the service of oppressed and marginalized “forgotten men and women.”

The state has no obligation to the individual, or to the “community,” no matter how broken the individual may become. It only has an obligation toward itself. Freedom is good, not as an end unto itself, but because freedom tends to reward the good and punish the bad. Freedom is the body cleansing itself of dead cells.

As with the state, so too with a man. Whatever is weak within ourselves, whatever griping excuse springs up out of resentment, let it be purged. Man becomes strongest when he stands alone, not in the shadow of jealousy, not expecting something or waiting for a hand out, but as Jacob, the wrestler with God. Ask not for luxuries, but for burdens. It is not just the working class of the external world which deserves to die, but the working class within a man which must die, so that genius can arise. Death to the working class!

Thanks for reading.

If you made it this far, you have an extremely high tolerance for contrarian liberal elitism. I applaud you for your fortitude. Perhaps you are a conservative glutton for punishment that enjoys making himself angry. Perhaps you are an enlightened liberal like me, and if so, I tip my fedora in your direction.

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1. Much of this data is from the Catholic Encyclopedia: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06021b.htm

2. This isn’t a webpage, but you can download this word document from the Global Price and Income History Group at UC Davis:

https://gpih.ucdavis.edu/files/BLW/Roman_Empire_14.doc

3. This is calculated by taking the total work hours per year and dividing by 8.