Credulity

 

Eric Hoffer, on Page 75 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, has three entries which I shall quote and comment on.

 

Hoffer: “          128

 

 

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.”

 

My response: Socrates urged each human to come to know thyself, and maverizing is the optimum, lived, rational expression of learning, growing, self-realizing intellectually, spiritually, morally, physically, and emotionally; as one grows and becomes, one’s self-knowledge commensurately increases and deepens.

 

It is altruistic groupists, nonindividuating, emotional, anti-intellectual, group-living as falsehood-friendly joiners that have almost no self-consciousness or self-knowledge. Thus, flattery and calumny directed against one by others is gospel since one is other-oriented. What the self thinks about the self, for or against, does not cut much ice.

 

The individualist is self-oriented, and knows his worth and defects, where his actions and choices merit praise or blame. Neither praise nor blame from others much matters, because he is best situated to realize who and what he is, and how he should judge himself.

 

Hoffer: “          129

 

It is thus with most of us: we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.”

 

My response: Hoffer the champion of implicit egoist morality is signaling above that we are what others says we are, because we are group-creatures, taking on the characteristics of the prescribed, collective personality lived and exemplified by each individual avatar of such a group.

 

Hoffer: “  130

 

The people we meet are the playwrights and stage managers of our lives: they cast us in a role, and we play it whether we will or not. It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.”

 

My response: Group opinion is everything; personal opinion or self-assessment is of marginal worth.

 

To Enjoy

 

I was reading one of my free online messages (April, 2024) from the Atlas Society, and I saw a short quote from Ayn Rand which I shall quote and then comment on: “The purpose of  morality is to teach you not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”

 

My response: As a moral and ontological moderate (what is good, beautiful, lawful and right is normally half-way between posted extremes), I think Rand is half wrong and half right.

 

Christians and Jordan Peterson like to point out that suffering and encountering evil are unavoidable, existential realities, that one should not worry about avoiding suffering and promoting self-esteem so much getting right with Christ and God, to take up one’s cross, and living a meaningful, productive life, as holy and virtuous as one can muster, so that life in this world is a preparation for getting to heaven in the next world.

 

I cannot disagree with their recommendations. I would add self-realization theory and egoist morality to their recommendations to help each agent be as holy and virtuous and possible.

 

But, Rand makes great points too: both she and Dennis Prager sagely advise that one should be as happy as possible—that to be happy, maximize noble pleasure and simple pleasure, while minimizing senseless suffering and doing evil—in this life. Life is for the living, and one has a right to be happy and enjoy oneself in this world.

 

Prager goes so far as to advise that being happy is a moral obligation because unhappy people turn cruel, and happy people do not hurt themselves or others. I would argue that Prager’s adjective being happy is close to what I identity is healthy self-esteem or self-love.

 

Rand Is half wrong and half right: we need all that she offers ethically but the Christian take on life, the afterlife, humans being judged by God, and the role of suffering in life cannot be so summarily dismissed or downplayed.

Rightward Movement

 

I subscribe to electronic newsletters from Christopher Rufo: he sent me one on March 15, 2024 which I will quote and respond to. It was entitled, From Left to Right: How I became a ‘conservative culture warrior.’

 

My response: Like Rufo, I started off on the Left in high school and ended up being conservative and a conservative culture warrior. When I was 18 years old, I was attending NDSU as an undergraduate. They had quarters, not semester at that time; I was taking a psychology class from a woman professor. We met in her office and somehow, we discussed human nature, and I mentioned that I thought people were not basically good.

 

She was shocked and rebuked me accusingly by responding that that is a conservative point of view. I did not comment but secretly agreed with her—that belief in human depravity is an essentialist, conservative outlook--and I knew from that time (1972) that I was a conservative.

 

Rufo (R after this): “Many readers know me as a ‘conservative culture warrior’ who has worked with President Trump, Governor DeSantis, and other right-wing political figures. But I was not always a conservative. As I explained recently on the Joe Rogan Experience, over the past twenty-five years, I have made a long political journey from Left to Right, which is where I find myself today.

 

Here is the story, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

 

I come from the Left. I was a radical leftist. My political formation was from my father’s side, my Italian relatives, who were all unreconstructed Gramscian communists. That was my political upbringing. I remember, as a child, going to visit my favorite aunt and seeing the books on her shelf, and seeing a beautiful collection of bound books. I ask my aunt, ‘Zia, what is this book?’ She said, ‘This is the collected works of Lenin.’

 

I went to get my undergraduate degree at Georgetown with the intention of being involved in left-wing politics. The first thing that really changed me was finding out that left-wing politics in the United States is not for the common man or to uplift the downtrodden. It’s about maintaining the elite’s own status and prestige with the institutions.”

 

My response: Any mass movement, whether cultural Marxism—now reigning culturally and powerful politically in America—or fascism, racism, fundamentalist religiosity, is inherently elitist. It is manned and populated by the men of words and action that run it, but the masses have no say, none, at all. Once the mass movement overthrows the existing dispensation, the masses will once again be brutally enslaved, oppressed, terrorized, and exploited the ruling elite that populate the ruling Party. Out-of-power elites seeks to maintain their status and prestige if they are the ruling elite, and they seek to overthrow if existing order and replace it with a dispensation that they rule.

 

Revolution is never about the downtrodden, though they are its justification, and its useful idiots and cannon fodder in battle.

 

R: “It’s a McKinsey consultant worldview, with the trappings of the Left. It’s the Harvard student who’s wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh, who then goes on to become an investment banker.

 

To me, it was a profoundly phony and empty political movement, run by the sons and daughters of American elites for their own benefit.

 

The second thing that really changed me: I spent five years making a film for PBS, which examined life in three of America’s poorest cities. And, by then, my center-left views—that the Great Society and public welfare programs were trying to help people—fell apart. When you actually see how these programs manifest in the south side of Memphis, the south side of Youngstown, or the south side of Stockton, California, you realize that many of these ideals that are presented to you as care, compassion, concern, equality, and reparations for our racist past, are, at best, cynical, and at worst, deeply destructive to the people they’re supposed to help.”

 

My response: The only solutions that work for people are one pushing hard-work, self-help, liberty, opportunity in a free and capitalist America, which will really take off if one is an individuator too.

 

R: “I spent so much time getting to know people in these forgotten cities, thinking about people’s lives and how politics affects them. And I realized that the project of the Left is a human disaster, even if, rationally speaking, it should produce something good.

 

And then the final change was in the run-up and aftermath of 2020. That year radicalized me. I realized how profound the Left’s cultural capture was, and that the consequences of this process are no longer abstract.”

 

My response: Philosophical theory is upstream from culture which flows down into politics, and the lived values of the populace. Whatever a thinker conceives of, one day will be part of daily human life. Cultural Marxism has been brewing from Rousseau all through the 19^th century German thinkers, through the continental philosophers, and then into Europe and America after the 1960s. Lo and behold, cultural Marxism is the culture of the land and it is damn near political reality, our dictatorial apparatus by 2022 in America—it is no longer an abstraction only. Perhaps Mavellonialism will have such influence, though positive not deleterious, in 70 years.

 

R: “They’re no longer just destroying poor neighborhoods in South Memphis, which are totally run by the state, but now have proliferated to the middle and upper classes. It’s an ideology that wants total domination.”

 

My response: Leftism or any mass movement destroys all it touches, and when it reaches the middle and upper classes, it will win at taking down the entire society, and this is what the true believers peddling the Marxist holy cause seek to make the law of the land, as they come to control everything and everyone.

 

R: “Once I became a conservative, that was the end of my documentary career. I lost funding, relationships, distribution opportunities. And I’m launched into the wilderness. I thought, ‘That career is done. What do I do next?” And then I thought, ‘Let’s go into politics and use some of the skills that I’ve developed as a filmmaker to tell the truth about what is happening to our country.

 

I am not a traditional conservative. I’m not a college Republican. I don’t own a bow tie. But I realized that, although conservative principles might be expressed awkwardly or articulated poorly, they offered some deep truths that need to be resurrected and recovered for us to be successful again.”

 

My response: Amen.

 

R: “So, I threw in my lot with people I would never have imagined calling friends and allies. I wake up every day thinking about the people that are around me and noting that, in an odd way, I’m fight for people who are actually voiceless—not only the people in America’s cities, but normal, middle-class families, which have no representation in elite institutions.”

 

My response: Each American, poor, middle class or rich, in or out of any kind of institution, is only voiceless and in need of elite representations from intellectuals and celebrities like Rufo, if that individual does not lead a full life. If she were to maverize as an anarchist-individuator supercitizen, she would never be voiceless again, and elites could not control, oppress her or order her how to think and what to think or believe, any longer.

 

R: :I have a visceral anger at the people who have truly inherited positions of power and prestige in America’s institutions. The Left deploys all this rhetoric about helping the ‘oppressed’ and the ‘underprivileged,’ but they are actually playing a cynical game to maintain their own status. I find it a betrayal, and I don’t think that I would be where I am today had I not seen that betrayal up close and personal. It’s not only a betrayal of the principles of the Left, but the principles of the country.

To Educate

 

We cannot know how to live unless we know what is true. Once we know what is true and what is false, then we can ascribe to each proposition a moral status of being worthy or unworthy. Then we just do what we are to do, and refrain or do less of what we are not supposed to have been doing.

 

Add to this that people are born in sin, and as intelligent beings with free will, it is incumbent upon parents (mostly and directly) and society (somewhat and indirectly) to provide children with moral values, so they know how to live, so they know what to do. School education should provide each child with content education and moral training. Each generation must be so educated, or civilization will be lost. Each generation must be trained up and educated or society false apart quickly. So it has always been.

 

I subscribe to online email updates from Christopher Rufo, and I will quote it and comment on it. He sent me one of March 17, 2024. It was entitled: A World in Miniature; Raising children in an era of ideological capture.

 

Ruf (R after this): “Each generation confronts the question of education anew. The problems that face one generation are distinct from those that face the next.”

 

My response: No more than yes, though there are unique challenges for each generation.

 

R: “Today’s families feel unprecedented anxiety about the state of education. The public school, the primary mechanism for education and values transmission, has lost their confidence, as many educators have abandoned traditional pedagogy in favor of indoctrination.”

 

My response: Children need to be educated and receive values transmission, but that has been discarded by the Leftist true believers running public schools, so each child is to be indoctrinated, converted into an ideological fanatic and activist, loyal to the state, its mass movement, the Democratic/Marxist party, and parents be damned.

 

R: “Many families have scrambled for alternatives, switching districts, enrolling in private schools, or starting home schooling programs.  These families have absorbed a critical lesson: education cannot be neutral; it must be oriented to a set of principles. The only question is which ones.”

 

My response: No, the school system cannot be value-neutral, but should push the values the public majority stands for, and if parents object, they can send the kids to private schools matching the parents’ values, or the parents can home-school the kids. Kids should be given an essentialist, classical education, plus self-realization training, and perhaps a half hour a day to pray—if they are believers—or to quietly meditate if they are unbelievers or agnostics.

 

R: “ I have spent considerable effort in my professional capacity studying and exposing the process of ideological capture in American education. I have traced the rise of left-wing race and gender ideologies from the margins to the center of public life, culminating in reports, essays, and a best-selling book.”

 

My response: He has not yet defined ideological capture, but my hunch is his complaint that Progressive true believers have taken over the schools and colleges in America, and they seek to brainwash, indoctrinate all children to march lockstep in devotional loyalty to the Communist Part, all uniformity, submission, brainwashing, and groupthink.

 

R: “These investigations were, at first, objects of my intellectual curiosity. My political commitments were opposed to these ideologies, and, like an engineer, I sought to understand how they worked. But these concerns have become more personal and urgent for me since starting a family and watching my children grow up. It’s one thing to break a story about a public school drilling students in ‘heteronormativity’ or ‘white privilege’; it’s quite another to consider your own child as the pupil.”

 

My response: Yes, it is wise that Rufo studied these evil people and their secret efforts to rob America of its children, and to subvert and corrupt them into being myrmidon Commies; an enemy cannot be defeated unless exposed, what he is up to and how he is attacking society. And Rufo is correct, his children too are at risk.

 

R: “I’ve spoken with many parents, particularly those in elite cities, who lament that these ideologies are inescapable. They are not wrong. The language and assumptions of the academic Left are increasingly those of American institutions and, with assistance from technology firms and human resource departments, the informal orthodoxy of polite society.”

 

My response: Rufo needs to understand and explain it to all Americans that cultural Marxism/Postmodernist Progressivism is a holy cause, and its lethal purveyors in the public schools, academia, and corporations, are evil people hell-bent on overturning all things traditionally American. These revolutionaries and nihilists are advancing, and they are dead serious, driven by ideological fervor, hatred, rage and bottomless power-lust.

 

R: “The social costs of opposing the Left’s rotating social movements--#MeToo, BLM, transgenderism, and what is next—are swift and severe, and can render mum otherwise self-confident people.”

 

My response: All of these “reform movements” at but subgroups of the cultural Marxist holy cause. People must be brave, confident, united and fight back mightily and with iron will.

 

R: “I have tried to build a life in which I can speak freely and, after having a family, in which my children habituate themselves to sturdier principles that the current consensus offers. This has required sacrifices. My wife and I left Seattle after it became untenable. We deal with ongoing security concerns. As they get older, my children will have to negotiate the reality of having a father who is involved in political controversy.”

 

My response: We must speak out fearless for what is true and good, and that can make our families vulnerable to attack; this is painful, but we must fight the good fight as God commands us to conduct.

 

R: “But one thing we do not have to do is compromise. After settling in a small town on the Puget Sound, we built a community of people who shared our principles. We found a school and a church that challenged us to deepen, rather than undermine, our commitments. During a particularly tense political moment when we were under threat, our neighbors rallied to our defense. The men promised to show up with heavy arms if we had any trouble; the women organized a group to pray for our protection.

 

This is not to say that you can escape America’s cultural problems by leaving cities. In our town of 10,000 residents, a local high school student recently died of an accidental fentanyl overdose.”

 

My response: We cannot run, and we cannot hide from problems: my plan is to offer Mavellonialism to people in the country, in villages, in towns, cities and in red states and blue states in in countries across the globe. We must go offense and stay there.

 

R: “A friend who teaches at a local middle school told me that one-third of his female students identify as ‘trans,’ ‘queer,’ and ‘non-binary,’ which he is required to ‘affirm’ and keep secret from parents. National culture, again aided by digital technology, truly has become ubiquitous.”

 

My response: Likely 97% of girls and boys are heterosexual, and their birth sex is their unchosen, undoubted, God-given gender identity, unless sick digital technologists are brainwashing them into viewing themselves as trans, queer and non-binary when they clearly are not. It is unspeakable that kids share these fad views with teachers, but parents are not told what their children are thinking and self-referencing as. This makes me furious.

 

R: “Youth subcultures have always challenged normative standards. This is healthy for young people and, in proportion, for society. The problem now, however, is that anti-normative ideologies today are not relegated to subcultures but have become the dominant culture. These ideologies are inherently critical—based on negation, critique, deconstruction—and their proponents are not bound by a corresponding sense of responsibility. Further, they are not the creation of restless adolescents but of politically motivated adults, who seek to impose these ideologies on other people’s children from positions of authority.”

 

My response: I agree wholeheartedly with Rufo’s articulate explanation above that cultural Marxism is now the dominant culture in America, that these true-believing, ideologically irresponsible revolutionaries pushing it are close to winning, if they can rob the public of its children.”

 

R: “The ultimate problem with critical theories of race and gender is that they do not work, and they do not work because they are at odds with both human nature and human flourishing. The rising generation of American children is the most anxious, depressed, and antisocial in memory.”

 

My response: This is what is produced when children are raised as little Marxist groupists, without moral training, faith and self-realization training.

 

R: “The structures and traditions that once provided guidance and discipline are castigated as ‘racist’ and ‘sexist,’ and have been displaced by the demands of ‘social justice.’

 

Upon reflection, I am convinced that our task as parents is to create a world in miniature for our children. Not to shield them from the world beyond, but to prepare them for it. We try to create, to the best of our capacity, an ideal, knowing that is cannot be sustained forever. Given the current social moment, in which our institutions are actively opposed to preserving childhood innocence, striving for a comparatively utopian upbringing is a radical act. Those who build and sustain a local culture that repudiates the dictates of elite opinion—teachers, pastors, donors, volunteers—are nothing short of heroic.”

 

My response: Rufo is correct again: to thwart, to stunt, and to defeat the prevalent postmodern, Marxist culture today in America, parents must lead the counter-revolt politically and culturally against the elite ideologues and nihilists. In their personal lives and in their communities, parents must provide the world in miniature that protects the childhood innocence of each child, while inuring each child so she may face the world beyond her family, as a teen and an adult, to face it with competence, coping skills, courage, willfulness, and wisdom. If the children can be reared as individuating supercitizens, that would seal the deal.

 

R: “For the past several years, I have been fighting a very public cultural war against the organized Left. But the most important, and toughest, war is always at home. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci understood, modern politics is a form of trench warfare. And while offensive measures are the only way to score victories., it is imperative to build defenses around the people and institutions that one loves. We should plan campaigns—but also dig trenches.”

 

My response: Amen.

 

 

End It

 

I subscribe to periodic emails sent out by Chris Rufo. I  have one that I will quote and comment on. It was sent to me by Rufo on 3/13/24. It is entitled: Claudine Gay, Silicon Valley and Ending DEI Forever: A conversation with Mike Solana of the ‘Pirates Wires’ podcast.

 

Here writes Rufo (R after this): “Last week, I was a guest on ‘Pirate Wires,’ a popular podcast hosted by Mike Solaria. We talked about recent wins against the entrenched DEI bureaucracy, the strategies that are working, and where we’re headed. We explained how DEI has captured our most innovative, prestigious companies and why it has become the cause of our time. Fortunately, there are vulnerabilities in the system and we have begun to fight back.

 

 

“Dismantling DEI from the Inside:

 

Mike Solana (S after this): With the Claudine Gay situation,  you explained you were putting out the plagiarism story directly before a hearing, in an attempt to get her fired. You said this publicly, out loud. Whereas what we see from left-wing activists is cloaking. We all know what’s happening, but it’s cloaked in bullshit and weird semantic games. But you just straightforwardly say, ‘My goal to get this woman fired because I believe that she’s this DEI bureaucrat that I don’t like, and the way I’m going to do this is X, Y, and Z.”

 

My response: Rufo is straightforward; this obfuscating, this cloaking and weird semantic games just get in the way.

 

R: “Their usual attack on me, which I find very amusing and actually kind of fun, is ‘Christopher Rufo is a James Bond villain narrating his own evil plot . . . and it works every time.’ Everyone does this on the Left, but they pretend they’re not doing it. I’m doing it on the Right, and I’m explaining to people that I’m doing it.”

 

Solana: “Joy Reid coined this phrase for you—again, underlying how they’re really assisting you constantly. She says, ‘It’s really the Christopher Rufo theory.’ She handed it to you and thought it was a victory. There are only two things you’re allowed to be in the media: you’re either a neutered sock puppet that they smack around, or you are a supervillain—and that gives you all the attention.”

 

My response: all of this seems too much bragging and self-congratulations to me. I suggest a good influencer, with a noble cause, that is calm, factual and speak the plain truth to the public, in the long run, will win people over, not worrying about who gets the credit.

 

Rufo: “Some people cling to principles as a consolation prize. They’re happy to lose every  political fight. They’re happy to watch the schools succumb to critical race ideologies. They’re very happy to watch the state grow to the point now where the American state, as a percentage of GDP, is larger than the Chinese Communist state.”

 

My response: RINOS compromise when they should not, and mildly accept all defeats, though they are sure their principles were validated, though they were defeated. No more, we want to be right and victorious.

 

Solana: “It just does seem to me that you’re supposed to lose. That the expectation. That the polite thing to do: to not win. That’s been my experience with almost everything I’ve ever cared about in my entire political memory. Losing—not be on the wrong side of history, but by being on the wrong side of power.”

 

My response: The good people, the conservatives, must refuse to lose any long, and, as soon as they expect to be victorious, all of a sudden, they become more victorious.

 

People are born corrupt, lazy, passive: they naturally have no energy, will or activism to change something socially insufferable—they just whine and then live with it.

 

Where do the Leftists get their enviable activism, resolve and determination to win. We are in the active phase of the Marxist mass movement, so these true believers are fanaticized and electrified, honored to die for their holy cause, usually an evil cause.

 

People do not get so excited over good because we are not born very good, but, as individuating sueprcitizens, we can compensate by living as calmly resolved, energetic and unwavering opponents to fanatics and their holy causes. As we fight back, we will slow the march of Marxism down, and then then we can begin to win more and more.

 

“The Rightward Shift is Here

 

R: “Some of the most wealthy and powerful people in the world are now saying, ‘Hey, money is shifting rightward, influence is shifting rightward, in finance, tech, and venture capital.’ Are we living in a world where a dramatic single strike that removes a university president from office can change everything? No. We live in a bureaucratic world that changes slowly and has to be penetrated more deeply. But is it a symbolic victory that has real material and political ramifications? Yes.

 

S: “If the goal is to change the bureaucratic structure, America is bureaucracy—every facet of power at sufficient scale is bureaucratic. So if the goal is to alter that in some way, are you doomed to fail? Because the kind of people who are attracted to bureaucratic power and institutions are naturally left-of-center.”

 

My response: Rufo’s inside-the-bureaucracies reform is worthwhile and necessary, but it is not sufficient. Bureaucracies are more evil that beneficial, so we need our ultimate goals to downsize and right-size institutions, but we require individuating supercitizens to revolutionize bureaucracies in reach and depth.

 

R: “There is no immutable law that requires bureaucracies to be left-wing. But people within bureaucracies are cowardly. They can be silenced easily, pushed around easily, and recruited into the dominant ideology without too much trouble. Left-wing activists are brilliant tactically at manipulating guilt and shame, creating status hierarchies and incentives, and using issues (especially race and sex) to bully and cudgel people into submission.

 

My job is first to define the problem, then complicate the problem, then to fight back against the problem, and finally to vanquish, degrade and humiliate the opponents of what I’m advocating. And what I’m advocating is simply American greatness, American innovation and creativity, the principle of colorblind equality—the idea of having a hierarchy of merit, talent, and virtue, rather than one of victimology.”

 

My response: Amen.

 

R: “The game is not to change the whole bureaucracy and change everyone’s opinion at once. The game is to figure out whose opinions matter most, and to start there and work outward. When they see high-status individuals in tech like the ‘All-in’ podcast crowd, or Marc Andreessen, or others, who are legends in the field; when they see those signals shift, they have permission to change their own opinions. The big untold story is that the tech world has shifted quietly but dramatically to the right.”

 

 

 

Wokeness

 

I subscribe to online articles or emails from Christopher Rufo; I received one from him on 422024, entitled Trans Factual: Judith Butler packs her latest book with false claims. I will quote the entire email and then comment on it.

 

Rufo (R after this): “The gender theorist Judith Butler and I have been engaged in an arm’s length dialogue for several years. I have criticized Butler’s ideology in a long essay on Drag Queen Story Hour, and Butler, in turn, has criticized my efforts in helping craft reforms of the Florida university system, which she has preposterously deemed ‘fascism.’”

 

My response: Jordan Peterson was lambasting Butler’s wokeness many years ago. She seems like a true believer in Progressive ideology to me.

 

R: “Now, Butler has published a new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, that launches new and unfounded attacks on my work.

 

First, some background for the uninitiated. Butler is one of the world’s most prominent gender theorists. She has argued that society is dominated by ‘phallogocentrism’ (the logic of the male member), and that a person’s gender is an expression of ‘performativity,’ shaped by human choice rather than biological necessity. When undergraduates insist that reality, and, in particular, sexuality is a ‘social construct,’ they are echoing Judith Butler.”

 

My response: Let me quote this article from Wikipedia on Butler from today, 4/9/24: “Judith Pamela Butler^[1] (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism,^[2] queer theory,^[3] and literary theory.^[4] “

 

I will do a article at some point on her Wikipedia story, which is considerable, though I likely will be excoriated for not citing a scholarly work. That is fine, for I do not need to be or seek to  nor have the time and energy to become an expert critic against her. I do want to point out that she has a PhD in philosophy and her influence is immense not only in feminism, queer theory, gender theory but also as a postmodernist Leftist (Marxist?). Her authority is huge in Progressive circles, so this is who Rufo is disagreeing with, a big gun on the contemporary Left.

 

Both Jordan Peterson and Rufo seem to dismiss her as an ideological lightweight, and I likely buy that line, but her social credibility is enormous, nonetheless.

 

R: “An unremarkable Foucalt imitator, Butler is not particularly insightful, but her use of Latinate neologisms and dense prose give her work the appearance of profundity.”

My response: If one cannot dazzle them with one’s brilliance, one should baffle them with one’s bullshit, goes the crude, sardonic, vernacular wisecrack, but it may apply here. Butler and CRT scholars use big words and new concepts that seem impressive and profound, and it gives them weight and believability that may be suspect.

R: “She often seems impressed with herself as she turns English words into Germanic-length monsters.  Here is a quintessential sentence of Butler’s impenetrable writing: ‘The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in a homologous way to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.’

 

In her most recent book, Butler approaches self-parody, devoting chapters to subjects such as ‘Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex’ and ‘Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions.’ Rather than parse her ramblings, I’ll focus instead on Butler’s campaign against a philosophy that I know quite well: my own.

Butler has packed her book with untruths, which call into question her basic competence as a scholar—not to mention Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s apparently nonexistent fact-checking process. Consider some examples.

First, Butler writes: ‘In a lecture at the Claremont Institute in California, a conservative thinktank, Christopher Rufo railed against CRT (critical race theory), but when asked whether he could explain what CRT is, he floundered and refused, saying, ‘I don’t give a shit about this stuff.’

This sentence contains several falsehoods. First, the lecture Butler describes was not in California, but in Washington, D.C. Second, nobody asked me to explain critical race theory, which I have analyzed in countless articles, interviews, and a New York Times best-selling book. Rather I was making a specific comment about graduate students who had peppered me with ‘highly technical Hegel interpretations,’ about which, I somewhat crudely responded, ‘I don’t give a shit.’ Butler was apparently uninterested in these facts and invented her own instead.”

 

My response: Rufo so far has accused her of being untruthful, doing poor research, and being a second-rate Foucault scholar who writes impenetrable gibberish.

 

R: “Next, Butler accuses me of waging ‘a cultural war’ against queer theory, taking issue with my description of queer theory, as consisting of lessons of ‘lessons on sex liberation,’ ‘gender exploration,’ ‘BDSM,’ ‘being a sex worker,’ . . . and ‘sexually active while using licit and illicit drugs.’’ More specifically, she claims that I have ‘instigated several campaigns accusing primary schools of teaching BDSM—a wild allegation that reflects a frenzied fantasy more than any actual pedagogy.’

Butler uses scare quotes and appeals to ‘fantasy’ to create the impression that I have made up these claims out of thin air, but each of her references come from documented reporting of mine that has never been challenged. If she had looked, Butler would have discovered that the first set of terms—‘sex liberation,’ ‘gender exploration,’ ‘BDSM, ‘being a sex worker,’ and ‘sexual activity while using licit and illicit drugs’—are verbatim quotations from the curriculum of a gender-activist organization that works extensively with children.”

 

My response: I have been following Rufo for over a year, and he seems truthful, and well-researched when he takes a public position, so, based on my experience with him, I would be more inclined to side with him than Butler.

 

R: “I have never claimed that primary schools were teaching BDSM. Rather, I have reported that the School District of Philadelphia encouraged teachers to attend a conference featuring ‘BDSM,’ ‘kink,’ ‘trans sex,’ and ‘banging beyond binaries.’ Additionally, I have reported that Lurie Children’s Hospital worked with Chicago middle-and high school teachers to promote materials on ‘kink,’ ‘BDSM,’ and ‘trans-friendly’ sex toys.

Each of these stories is based on unchallenged reporting. It is Butler, not me, who is engaged in a ‘frenzied fantasy.’

 

In the book’s footnotes, Butler spreads more falsehoods—this time, about my tenure as a New College of Florida trustee. First, she claims that the trustees, including me, fired all the professors who were up for tenure during our first year. In fact, we merely denied a group of candidates early tenure, and encouraged them to reapply the following year per the regular timeline. None was fired.

Second, Butler accuses the trustees of creating a wave of ‘anti-gay harassment’ on campus. Contra Butler’s claim, however, New College of Florida has seen dramatic drops in rates of sexual harassment and other Title IX complaints under its new leadership. The campus is much safer than it was under previous leadership.

 

Indeed, the only incident of harassment that I can recall came following a speech I made on campus with Governor Ron DeSantis, in which a militant ‘non-binary’ student, who later appeared with Butler in an online forum, spat on me and subsequently was charged with battery. (I requested that the prosecutors drop the case after the student agreed to withdraw from the college.)

Third, Butler claims, that at New College, faculty were fired from their positions for teaching ‘woke subjects.’ Again, there is no truth in this charge. Many faculty members have resigned, and others have seen their contracts expire. And we abolished the gender-studies program, which was something of a farce; its director, fellow trustee Amy Reid, remains on the faculty as a French professor. Not a single professor was fired for teaching ‘woke subjects,’ or any other subjects, for that matter.

 

Butler, or her fact checkers, could have reached out to me or to New College administrators. Instead, they created a fiction that fit their priors.”

My response: In the short run, we can accuse anyone of anything, and offer wild, unsubstantiated claims to gain points of one-upmanship or to appease our true believing peers, but, in the long run, it is best to be as truthful, fair, accurate and precise as one can be, loving truth for its own sake, and for the long term best for everyone. We need truth and facts to be able to define right from wrong, to establish moral boundaries, to know how to progress before we can act make progress actual.

 

R: This serial fabrication is part and parcel of Butler’s ideology.”

 

My response: Serial fabrication is a part of Leftist ideology, and that is consistent with it being a postmodernist Marxist mass movement. Dennis Prager notes that truth is not a Left-wing value, and I note that truth is not a mass movement value.

 

R: “She has spent decades pushing theories of ‘social construction’ and denying fundamental realities—pushing the lie, for example, that men can become ‘trans women,’ and that women can become ‘trans men.’ With her latest book, Butler has gone trans factual.

There is no bottom to Judith Butler’s postmodern theories, only an endless procession of novelties. These appear to be catching up with her. The gender world has moved beyond her. Butler herself must sense this. Perhaps feeling she has lost her intersectional luster—she is, after all, an affluent, cisgender, able-bodied white woman—she has recently adopted ‘they/them’ pseudo-pronouns. Her transgressions now have an air of desperation to them. But whatever her motivations, Butler and her publisher would be better off focusing on reality, not fantasy.”

Executive Suite

 

We are seeing in America where ideology and conformity now dominate in private corporations as well as in government agencies. Competence, hard work, ingenuity and thinking outside the box have been replaced by poor service, poor quality control, and dangerous planes being manufactured by Boeing Corporation. We need individuators as employees on all levels of an organization for it to make excellent, cost effective, safe products—safe airplanes—in this case.

 

Christopher Rufo offers an email subscription which I subscribe to and his article on Boeing is very instructive as to how a corporation goes woke and deteriorates when ideology, groupism and groupthink dominate a titan of American industry. No more Yankee ingenuity and individual initiative. The Left destroys all that it touches.

 

Rufo sent out, on 4/5/24, a email entitled “It’s an Empty Executive Suite-An insider explains what has gone disastrously wrong with Boeing’; I will spot quote Rufo and then comment on what he wrote.

 

Rufo: “Boeing is—or was—a great company. From its manufacturing plants in Seattle, it produced the world’s most reliable, efficient aircraft. But after merging with McDonnell Douglas, shifting production around the world, and moving its headquarters to Chicago, and then Arlington, Virginia, the Boeing Company has been adrift.

 

Then, in October, 2018, one of Boeing’s new 737 MAX aircraft crashed. Then, a few months later, another. Recent months have seen embarrassing maintenance failures, including a door plug that blew off an Alaska Airlines plane in mid-flight.

 

To explain what went wrong, I have been speaking with a Boeing insider who has direct knowledge of the company’s leadership decisions. He tells a story of elite dysfunction, financial abstraction, and a DEI bureaucracy that has poisoned the culture, creating a profound sense of alienation between the people who occupy the executive suite and those who build the airplanes.”

 

My response: I am an operating engineer at a private, religious college in the Twin Cities, and what Rufo reports about Boeing describe eerily to a T the woke fools running the campus into the ground. The workers at the bottom know the truth, but the boobs running the place are clueless. Workers have to become individuating supercitizens, and this will force clueless elites running the organization to embrace bitter reality, regardless of their fancy for their fantasies to be applauded up and down the chain of command.

 

Rufo: “ . . . “

 

Rufo (R after this as interviewer of knowledgeable Boeing insider): “I am hoping you can set the stage. In general terms, what is happening at Boeing?”

 

Insider (I after this): “At its core, we have a marginalization of the people who build stuff, the people who really work on these planes.

 

Following the second 737 MAX crash in 2019, then CEO-Dennis Muilenburg defended the company in front of Congress and the public, he defended the engineering, defended the work—and showed he was willing to protect and support the workforce, but it caused the board and the public fear, which bought in a sweeping set of changes that caused huge turnover in talent.

 

So, right now, we have an executive council running the company that is nearly all outsiders. The CEO is a General Electric guy, as is the CFO he brought in. And we had a completely new HR leader, with no background at Boeing. There are now no engineers as part of the core team. The head of our commercial business in Seattle who was recently fired was the only engineer in the executive council.

 

The headquarters in Arlington is empty. Nobody lives there. It is an empty executive suite. The CEO lives in New Hampshire. The CFO lives in Connecticut. The heads of HR and communications live in Orlando. We just instituted a policy that everyone has to come into work five days a week—except the executive council, which can use the private jets to travel to meetings. And that is the story: it is a company that is under caretakers. It is not under owners. And it is not under people who love airplanes.”

 

My response: Where is Ayn Rand when Boeing needs her to introduce a Hank Rearden from Rearden Metals, the new owner of Boeing, that love planes, and running the company is his living as well as his path to self-realization? Such high-functioning entrepreneurs will make America great again.

 

I: “In this business, the workforce knows if your love the thing you are building, or if it is just another set of assets. At some point, you cannot recover with process what you have lost with love. And I think that is probably the most real story of them all. There is no visible center of the company and people are wondering what they are connected to.”

 

My response: The workers will care if the owners or elites running the companies care; otherwise crap, dangerous products are manufactured and shoved out to the public—safety be damned.

 

R: “If they have lost the love of building airplanes, what is the love, if any, that they bring to the job?”

 

I: “Status games rule every boardroom in the country. The DEI narrative is a very real thing, and, at Boeing, DEI got tied to the status game. It is the thing you embrace if you want to get ahead. It became a means to power.

 

DEI is like the drop you put in a bucket and the whole bucket changes. It is anti-excellence, because it is ill-defined, became part of the culture, and became tied to compensation.”

 

My response: I read somewhere that some ancient Greek philosopher (Aristotle) defined clear, encompassing definitions as basic to developing clear thinking, well-shaped concepts that lead to knowledge and real-world applied success and excellence. DEI is ideological: it is ill-defined and anti-excellence, so now Boeing is headed down the tubes, rapidly deteriorating.

 

I: “Every HR email contains: ‘Inclusion makes us better.’ We all know they don’t mean including the guy who brings his Bible to work. And this kind of politicization of HR is a real problem in all companies.

 

If you look at the bumper stickers at the factories in Renton or Everett, it is a lot of conservative people who like building things—and conservative people do not like politics at work.

 

The radicalization of HR does not hurt tech businesses like it hurts manufacturing businesses.  At Google, they are making a huge profit margin and pursuing very progressive hiring practices. And because they are paying 30 or 40 percent more in salary, they are able to get the top 5 percent of whatever racial group they want. They can afford, in a sense, to pay the DEI tax and still find top people.”

 

My response: Yes, Google and the tech companies can do ideology, group think, and politics at work for a while, but, eventually, they will tank like Boeing tanked, because they will breed out or fire any smart people that still innovate and provide excellence at work. Even the top 5% become dumb when not allow to be individuals or individuators at work.

 

I: “But this can be catastrophic in lower margin, or legacy, companies. You are playing musical chairs at the end of the dance. And if you try to do the same things that Google is doing, you are going to end up with the bottom 20 percent of the preferred population.”

 

R: “What else does the public not understand about what is happening at Boeing?”

 

I: “Boeing is just a symptom of a bigger problem: the failure of our elites.”

 

My response: we need owners, elites running companies, and the rank-and-file employees doing the companies work to all be individualists and individuators. Where this does not occur, all levels of the organization fail, period.

 

I: “The purpose of the company is now ‘broad stakeholder value,’ including DEI and ESG. This was then embraced as means to power, which further separated the workforce from the company—and it is ripping apart society.

 

Boeing is the most visible example, because every problem—a bolt that falls off—gets amplified. But this is happening everywhere around us, and it is going to have a huge effect.  DEI and ESG became a way to stop talking honestly to employees.

 

We need to tear the veil off this coded language that is being used everywhere and we need to have our elites recover some sense of service to people. They think they have it, because they are embracing the shibboleths of moral virtue: ‘I am serving because I am repeating what everyone else is saying about DEI.’ It is a form of cheap love that is been embraced by leaders. If you pay the tax to the DEI gods or the ESG gods, and use coded language with your workforce, it solves you of the hard work of really leading.”

 

My response: Every institution, of all stripes, require the abandonment of groupism and group ethics—to be replacing by individualism, workplace individuators and egoist ethics. This institutional revolution would revitalize any institution, and, in plain English, people on all elvels of the institutional will lead the organization into the future.

 

I: “No. Service means you are spending the extra time to understand what is really happening in the factory and in your supply chain. There should be some honor, in understanding  that we inherited something beautiful and good and worth loving.”

 

 

My response:

 

This insider interviewed by Chris Rufo is remarkably perceptive, not only about the inner workings of Boeing, but as to how what is happening at Boeing will tank businesses and corporations all across America.

 

Give Rufo credit that he points out that private corporations can be corrupt and inefficient, just like government corporations—and I add military, educational, ecclesiastical, mass media and entertainment institutions—when they are politicized with ideological rhetoric.

 

Note that Rufo allows the insider to get away with lambasting elites for their inability to provide service to people, their workers, clients, and stockholders. This is true but does not go far enough. No institution will thrive unless individuators are 80% of the workforce at every level of the organization, and Rufo sees the world only as improvable if the elites running the institutions are excellent by choice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who is John Galt?