The second post in this series examines how liberal individualism is a cultural construct, the dynamics of kin-groups, and how institutions are cultural creations.

A striking feature of Western democratic politics in recent decades has been how conventional centre-right politics has been recurrently pushed aside by various forms of national populism. We have seen country-club Republicans get Trumped, Gaullists get Le Penned, Forza Italia get Melonied, the Tories are being Faraged, and now the Coalition in Australia is getting Hansoned, with immigration being, again and again, a key issue in those shifts.

There is also a recurrent response to this pattern: to treat it as political pathology. For some mysterious reason, a whole lot of—particularly working-class voters—have allegedly just gone feral. The default responses from this “it’s political pathology” analysis has been some mixture of censorship, de-legitimisation (“far right”) and would-be political quarantining.

Such responses represent systematic attempts to stop democratic feedback from doing its thing. It is a striking pattern that, across Europe—while there is no systematic difference between politicians and voters on economic issues—there is a systematic difference on cultural issues, including immigration.

One might expect that economists—as their discipline prides itself on its rational actor analysis—might resist any “political pathology” analysis of the shift towards national populism in polity after polity. On the contrary, most mainstream economists and economic commentators—particularly in the US—have clearly decided that disagreeing with mainstream economists (especially on immigration) is a sign of irrationality (and probably moral inadequacy). This mixes American parochialism—ignoring European experience and debates—with academic arrogance.

The trouble with the response of mainstream economists is that they start with their Theory, use it to select what evidence they will pay attention to, and proceed from there. A much better approach is to start with history and decide which bits of Theory might be helpful in identifying and understanding the patterns we see.

The key mistake that economists make is they treat immigration as fundamentally an economic issue. This is a mistake that conventional centre-right politicians—taking their cue from the economists—have repeated. It is profoundly mistaken.

Immigration is fundamentally a cultural issue. Yes, immigration has economic implications, consequences, even reasons. But it remains fundamentally a cultural issue. Hence conventional centre-right politicians screwing up, in polity after polity, the fundamentally cultural politics of immigration.

Immigration is a matter of cultural politics for two reasons. First, we are a cultural species. People spend the first two decades of their life immersed in the culture of their family, social, and information networks long before they become significant economic transactors.

We humans cognitively map significance, not facts. We absorb cultural patterns of significance, cultural maps of meaning, from the family-and-social-networks culture we are raised in. The consequence is that people from different cultures in the same circumstances will behave differently, because cognitively, they are not the same circumstances—because humans cognitively map significance, not facts.

As I discuss in this post, formally similar institutions can and do operate quite differently in different cultures. Such differences can extend even to things with such brutal feedback effects as military performance.

Immigrants simply are not interchangeable “economic agents”. Their cultural distance from the receiving society—and the norms and rules its institutions are based on—matters. It does not help that academics—as part of their status games—recurrently misconstrue popular reactions to cultural distance as “racism”.

Norms and rules

The other reason immigration is fundamentally a cultural question is because institutions are central to how societies operate, and therefore their ability to successfully absorb immigrants. Institutions—even institutions with economic functions and purposes—are fundamentally cultural creations. This is why formally similar institutions operate differently in different cultures.

Institutions work because their norms and rules are effective and are followed. While those rules and norms may be somewhat self-reinforcing, they have to be robust against pressures to evade those norms and rules, or to follow different norms, different rules. The more congruent the cultures of immigrants are with the institutional norms and rules of the receiving society, the less pressure immigration imposes on those institutions. The less congruent the cultures of immigrants are with those norms and rules, the more pressure on institutions.

As cultural distance would predict—and as we can observe—large-scale Muslim immigration puts Western institutions, based on highly individualistic cultural patterns, under particular strain, as discussed in the previous post. We can even observe large-scale immigration tending to fracture receiving countries—the US, the UK, France—along their provincial/metropolitan divides: divides which are also, in part, cultural.

So, part of the immigrant absorption issue—how successfully for the citizenry, and the successful functioning of its institutions, a given society absorbs immigrants—is how congruent the cultures of immigrants are with the norms and rules of local institutions. One way to enable such congruence is to have lots of small groups of immigrants rather than large “lumps”, as the larger the “lumps”, the easier it is to remain immersed in—and so retain—one’s original cultural patterns. The smaller the groups, the less immersed in one’s original cultural patterns, the more adaptation to the local civic culture there is likely to be.

This is why it is deeply, deeply stupid to see immigration as simply about gains-from-trade in societies conceived as arenas for free-floating transactions where gains-from-trade efficiency is the key issue. Any politicians who take their cue from the Theory-driven delusions of economists that immigration is primarily an economic issue will, sooner or later, get seriously wrong-footed by how much immigration is fundamentally a matter of cultural politics and cultural pressures—a pattern we have now seen in polity after polity. The repeated failure of conventional centre-right politics is not because those politicians did not listen to economists: it is because they did.

It is particularly stupid of American economists to carry on like this. Not only did Robert Fogel—1992 Nobel memorial laureate in Economics—publish an entire book (Without Consent or Contract) on how mass immigration broke the American Republic along its fault-line of slavery. Not only were indigenous Americans dispossessed by invading immigrants, so was the Mexican state (of its northern territories) by Anglo immigrants to Mexico organising to separate themselves from Mexico. This is without noting how Palestinian immigration led to a brief civil war in Jordan and a long one in Lebanon.

Civil war, mass rapes and sexual exploitation (remembering that Islam sanctifies rape), corrosion of institutions: these are observable consequences of mass immigration. Yes, it is remarkably arrogant of American economists to so ignore the European experience with, and debates about, immigration. But that is classic American parochialism. It is the historical illiteracy about their own country’s history that is ridiculous.

The thicker your attention to history—in all its complexities and contingencies—the thinner your general Theory has to be. Conversely, the thicker your Theory—the more it selects for what you do and do not pay attention to, and how you construe it—the thinner your sense of history.

So much of the ambient analytical stupidity about immigration is Thick Theory and thin history: Thick Theory in both senses of thick.

Ironically, the systematic analytical incompetence of mainstream economics about immigration is, in itself, a sign of how much immigration is a cultural issue. Yes, part of the problem is Samuelsonian “social physics” Economics with humans as interchangeable “economic particles”. However, a lot of the analytical failure is from how mainstream Economics acts as an epistemic community where being positive about immigration—which entails not noticing how it can be done really badly—marks one as being a member of the epistemic community of Serious economists In Good Standing.

Saying one favours immigration is as silly as saying one favours monetary policy. It requires an utterly impoverished sense of how the thing can be done badly.

A large part of Western elite cluelessness about immigration is from the adoption by so much of mainstream media of the Pravda-media-model—of being in the business of selling narratives of righteousness; of what you have to accept to be a “good” person, a “smart” person, an informed person. Since being pro-immigration is a marker of being “smart” and “good”, the mainstream media coverage of immigration issues tends to be highly selective.

Allegedly informed Americans can be startlingly ignorant of, for example, European experience and debates on immigration in a way that, for example, people in Japan are not. Allegedly “informed” Americans are likely to be completely ignorant of the increasing contempt they and their discipline are held in within Europe by those who have observed how analytically inadequate—indeed incompetent—their treatment of immigration has been.

Moreover, any pre-determined correctness is hostile to genuine political and social bargaining. Elite status-games based on the moral and cognitive splendours in elite heads—so on pre-determined correctness—are profoundly hostile to any inconvenient information that undermines such status and authority claims. That means they are also hostile to any inconvenient democratic feedback.

Raising concerns about immigration is perennially subject to moral abuse that protects beliefs as markers of righteousness. It is also subject to the thought-terminating cliche of “far right” and similar terms.

Globalisation complications

As discussed in the two previous posts, across human societies, the main mechanisms for cooperation have been based around either lineage (kin-groups) or locality. Globalisation creates cooperation-and-connection networks not based on either locality or lineage. The people who are embedded in such transnational networks social analyst David Goodhart calls the Anywheres.

These neither locality-nor-lineage networks have come to operate on an updated version of the third great mechanism of connection: a secularised version of the ritual-and-belief coordination historically provided by sects and religions. This is the adoption of shared markers of righteousness, shared elite signals of belief.

The dynamics by which network goods tend to be monopoly goods—the larger the network, the greater the benefits of membership and the cheaper it is to add an extra person—encourage social networks to coalesce around shared moralised status games based on performative beliefs. If affirming X is the politics of ostentatious compassion, then holding not-X must be the politics of “hate”. The more people in a social or institutional milieu play such status games, the more acquiescence in such cognitive exclusions spreads via such network-monopoly effects.

The more a cause is obviously transnational, the more it is grist for networks that are based on neither lineage nor locality. Climate change—whatever the scientific realities—is made for such networks. But any cause that does not come tied to a locality will do—Trans, for example. Or supporting mass immigration. The last especially works because the costs of immigration vary so enormously by locality, with the costs generally not falling on localities where Anywheres live.

The more people are insulated from the consequences of being wrong about reality, the more such status games will appeal. Apart from anything else, it makes it that much easier to shame and shun people for dissenting—regardless of how accurate about reality their dissent might be. Indeed, the more you have to not-notice and rationalise away, the stronger the signal of commitment to the in-group is.

The social consequence of defecting from the shared moralised status-games have to matter more than the consequences to those playing the status games of the claims not being true. Hence, this is very much the politics of the unaccountable classes, of those paid to turn up. It is the politics of bureaucracy, of content-free management, of non-profit organisations, of academe, of teachers, of activists, of reality-editing zealots.

If one does not have to adjust to inconvenient information—because, for example, one is paid by coerced income—then authority-increasing status claims are going to be favoured. If beliefs are not reality-tested, but income is vulnerable to elite status games, then that encourages conformity as well.

It is precisely because the unaccountable classes are shielded from reality in various ways that status-based social feedback from within their networks becomes dominant. But wealth can have the same insulating effect.

The effect of these expanding global elite networks is to sharpen the divide between global-networks elites and those whose networks—whose social capital—is overwhelmingly locality-based: the Somewheres. This is why conventional centre-right politicians—themselves typically Anywheres, hiring Anywheres as staffers, and interacting with mainstream media dominated by Anywheres and their concerns—regularly screw up cultural politics, especially regarding immigration.

Mainstream Economics’ impoverished sense (it is just about commerce and efficiency) of social cooperation mechanisms—and what makes a successful society—has proved to be an excellent intellectual weapon on behalf of the Anywheres against the Somewheres. Economists themselves are, of course, typically Anywheres.

This dynamic of Anywheres elites dominating policy against the interests of increasingly alienated Somewhere voters is very much part of the dynamics of contemporary Western politics. National populism lives off it. Anti-elite politics makes a lot more sense when the elites are functionally out to get you.

The EU is an Anywhere creation and project. By putting commitment to “Ever Closer Union” into its founding documents, the EU has embraced a principle that justifies Anywhere elites—led by the Anywhere Eurocrats—de-legitimising any vote, any electoral response by Somewheres, that pushes back against “Ever Closer Union”.

The EU has become a structure of institutionalised social aggression against its working class Somewheres. The EU elites’ demand for discourse control—as part of this endemic de-legitimisation of the inconveniently demotic—continues to poison relations with European Somewheres, and with any American expression of Somewhere concerns.

The delegitimisation of dissent; the culturally corrosive effects of immigration; and of various elite agendas, are then deeply corrosive to maintaining the Transatlantic alliance. This is a corrosive pattern that so many Very Serious People fail to acknowledge, and one suspects utterly fail to even notice. After all, they live within Anywhere networks into which Somewhere concerns do not intrude, except as something to scoff at or catastrophise about.

Democracy is supposed to provide a corrective to such elite arrogance. Alas, modern Anywheres—greatly aided by the Critical Theory magisterium that increasingly dominates universities and generates anti-democratic-feedback elite status-games—continue to develop mechanisms to block the feedback that democracy relies on and is supposed to provide. Instead, we get what writer Wesley Yang accurately describes as non-electoral politics of institutional capture.

De-legitimising Somewhere and other dissenting feedback is something that many mainstream economists have proved to be destructively complicit in via their historically illiterate—and profoundly impoverished—understanding of what makes for successful societies. No, commerce and efficiency are not enough on their own: not even close.

A sign of how much policy incompetence has become a feature of Western elites—due to using beliefs as markers of righteousness—is the simultaneous support for mass immigration and Net Zero. Net Zero means raising the price of, and restricting access to, energy. Cheap, reliable energy is fundamental to mass prosperity—it is far more important than, for example, free trade.

Piling more people into a country while raising the price of energy means increasing contestation over resources and narrowing the range of sustainable economic activity. Only folk who are profoundly insulated from reality-tests could embrace such a nonsense combination.

The analytical incompetence of mainstream Economics regarding immigration is crucial here. Forgetting Thomas Sowell’s dictum that there are no solutions, only trade-offs, mainstream economists have utterly failed to produce useful models of the constraints on immigrant absorption that would enable weighing against policy choices.

To create such models would require acknowledging institutional and other limitations to the ability to absorb immigrants. It would require a comprehensive look at the mechanisms of cooperation in successful polities and societies—not as mere economies and not only commerce. It would require considering resilience—the ability to adapt to changing circumstances—not only efficiency. It would require not treating immigrants as interchangeable widgets. It would require not treating immigrants as the only Homo sapiens in human history who cannot make things worse. It would require taking our existence as cultural beings seriously. It would requiring noticing we are evolved beings and what evolutionary biology and evolutionary anthropology tell us about humans as social actors.

The pressure to de-legitimise

It would require noticing that the more pressure from within the society there is to de-legitimise the existing norms and rules of the society, its institutions and civic culture—something the the Critical Theory magisterium is committed to—the more corrosion of local institutions there will be. The more local elites are willing to compromise those norms and rules—e.g. to get votes and/or cash-in on various political patronage possibilities—the more corrosion of institutions there will be. Minnesota is currently providing a text book case.

The pose whereby highly credentialed people in responsible positions make a display of being “subversive” is just a way of being self-righteously irresponsible: nothing is our fault, we do not have to grow up. The associated elite status games actively reduce the ability of societies to absorb immigrants precisely because they undermine commitment to the norms and rules which generated high-functioning (and high-trust) societies in the first place.

Left-progressive politicians, bureaucrats (whether government, corporate, or in non-profits) and mainstream media—all those who play the elite status games generated by the Critical Theory magisterium—cannot be trusted to uphold or respect rules and norms of key institutions. On the contrary, they are corrosive of the same and clearly and openly use immigrants as an excuse to be so (see “decolonisation”). Thus, the more institutional influence left-progressivism—and its status-games—has, the lower the capacity to successfully absorb immigrants and the more Western democracies need to become restrictive about the scale of immigration, and selective about which immigrants are taken in.

Immigration is primarily a cultural issue. Unless and until folk understand that; until public discourse is able to wrestle with it—and the decay of democratic feedback mechanisms is reversed—mass immigration is going to continue to be a mechanism to unravel Western democracies by corroding their institutions and their civic cultures.

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Helen has been busy elsewhere, kicking off Law & Liberty’s forum on the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Liberty Fund has commissioned a number of “Smith appreciations” from non-economists this month, with a view to avoiding “a bunch of economists saying the same things about WoN over and over.” You should read the piece in light of that comment.

The first post in this series discussed how the ability of societies to absorb immigrants varies due to both the society’s characteristics and immigrants’ characteristics. This includes cultural differences. Western individualism rests on the suppression of kin-groups (e.g. clans), whereas most human societies have been based, to a greater or lesser degree, around kin-groups.

If you are a new subscriber, please read that piece before starting the one below.

China: economising on administration

In China, ruling imperial dynasties operated on such a scale that using clans as intermediaries to economise on administration was an advantage, given the limits to command-and-control bureaucracy that—from the First Emperor (r.221-210 BC) onwards—Emperors relied upon. Indeed, with the development of the keju (the imperial examination) under the Sui dynasty (581-618), Emperors came to rely almost entirely on their command-and-control bureaucracy to rule. Emperors therefore developed mechanisms to limit officials from favouring their family or clan.

Nevertheless, the trade-off of using kin-groups—clans—to economise on administrative costs by supporting their ability to provide risk-management and other services to their members and using them as intermediaries was worth it for Emperors of China, so they kept making the trade-off. Indeed, as the population of China trended upwards—so the incentive to economise on administration increased, given that there was a practical limit to how many layers of bureaucracy Emperors could control—Emperors tended to strengthen the role of clans. The more divided geography and linguistic demography of Southern China—which increased administrative costs—particularly encouraged use of clan structures to economise on those administrative costs

This pattern made sense for Chinese emperors, due to the remarkable scale unified Chinese states operated at and the level of reliance of Chinese Emperors on bureaucratic command-and-control mechanisms to rule. Even so, the temptation to use eunuchs—who had daily access to the Emperor and whose kin loyalties were atrophied by their not being able to have children—was also a perennial feature of Imperial Chinese history.

Arabising the Middle East

Far more people in the Middle East claim to be Arab than are genuinely of Arabian peninsula ancestry. Not only were the conquering Arab tribes fairly small in number, they rapidly became a largely urban elite. It is usual for conquering pastoralists to be hugely outnumbered by the farmers they conquer.

The conquering Arabs were an elite organised into kin-groups (i.e. Arab tribes). When Arab tribes were abandoned as the basis of military forces in the Abbasid Revolution (747-750), there followed a shift to use of slave warriors due to the perennial problem of kin-groups—rulers came and went, the kin-group was forever. To avoid having kin-groups colonise their military forces, rulers switched to slaves—either imported from afar or, in the case of the Janissaries, local non-Muslims. A slave’s only legally-recognised connection was to their master.

Out in the countryside, the largely Christian peasant farmers continued as before, on plots of land that were generally freehold. Locality-based congregations, dioceses (bishoprics) and villages functioned fine as organising mechanisms.

They so functioned until Islamic polities “feudalised”—that is, Islamic rulers switched to using far more fief-paid, rather than salaried, cavalry: notably under the Iranian Buyid (934-1062) and the Turkish Seljuk (1037-1308) dynasties. As property was subject to Sharia inheritance laws, warriors could not be allocated land-fiefs, since Sharia required distribution of property amongst all a man’s children. That would have rapidly dropped land-holdings below being large enough to support a mounted, armoured warrior, which was the point of such fiefs. Instead, warriors were allocated tax-collection rights which remained—at least in form—a manifestation of public authority, not private property.

This had an effect on peasant landholding, as farms were changed into, effectively, leasehold controlled by the local fief-holders. (Orchards remained freehold, as they were long-term investments.) This made the situation of local farmers much more insecure, which meant they searched for better risk-management mechanisms. The increased insecurity of property also made the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims, more onerous.

The result was a shift to adopting Islam—to avoid the jiyza tax and increase one’s social and legal status—and an Arab identity, to increase status and justify arranging communities into self-help kin-groups based on alleged common (Arab) ancestors. The states of the city-based Arab and Islamic elites had limited control of the countryside. The decentralisation of military forces to tax-fiefs weakened central control further. The adoption of Arab identity and “Arab” kin-groups by farmers gave them self-protection, risk-management and cooperation mechanisms. Hence, from the C10th onwards, the farmers “became” Arab and were organised in kin-groups.

There is an excellent discussion of all this with historian Yossef Rapoport, based on his book Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East. This adoption of Arab identity, and of kin-identifications, is a case study of how neither ethnicity nor kin-groups are primordial, but historical entities that come and go. It also illustrates the wide range of interactions between states and kin-groups.

As Prof. Rapoport notes, Old Kingdom Egypt (c.2700-2200BC) was the first nation-state—the notion that the nation-state was a European invention, or that politicised national identity was a C18th invention, is flatly not true. Pharaonic inscriptions have plenty of condemnations of damn foreigners while Aethelstan proclaimed himself King of the English (Rex Anglorum) in 927—his various successors did not swap to primarily calling themselves King of England (Rex Angliae) until John (r.1199-1216). From the reign of Gustav I (r.1523-1560) until the succession of the present King in 1973, the royal title of Sweden was rex Svecorum Gothorum Vandalorumque (“king of the Swedes, Geats and Wends”).

Islam is, in many ways, structured to foster kin-groups. You do not have to be Arab for Islam to have this effect. Both Amazigh (Berber) culture and Somali culture operate very strongly on the kin-group model. A culture which is oriented very strongly around both collective religious and clan identity is culturally very far from the individualism upon which Western institutions are based.

Whether it is foreign aid in Somalia itself, or the Swedish or Minnesotan welfare states, the pattern of you tell the kaffir outsiders handing out the money whatever they need to hear, and then distribute the goodies across your clan and patronage networks, is very strongly followed. That is how their culture works. That is how they culturally map cognitive significance. It is a manifestation of how the level of state corruption correlates so remarkably (0.91) with how collectivist cultures are.

The larger the number of Somalis imported, the more their cultural patterns are going to be maintained and reinforced. Add in Swedish and Minnesotan politicians seeking to mobilise votes, activists and donations; top it up with deference to “people of colour” and “decolonisation by immigration”; and the systematic debauching of local institutions must be expected. Hence Sweden has been reduced to paying them to go away. The US should deport the lot, pour encourager les autres. It is not as if the USA (or Sweden) could not replace them with better immigrants.

When locality wins

The imperial Chinese state’s use of clans to economise on administrative costs has little or nothing to do with the dominant forms of farming in China. Rice farming does not, in itself, encourage kin-groups. On the contrary, there is shared interest in managing irrigation by locality. This point also applied to irrigated farming generally—e.g. wheat and millet farming along the Yellow River.

Across history, locality is the dominant competing cooperative mechanism to lineage (i.e., the kin-group). Classical Athens (with Solon’s reforms); the Roman Republic; congregational Christianity—all used or use locality as a replacement connection-and-cooperation alternative to lineage.

The elevation of neighbourhood connections seems to be undermining kin-groups in contemporary Middle Eastern cities. Nowadays, Christian (especially Pentecostal) congregationalism is regularly used by Sub-Saharan Africans—especially African women—as a refuge from the demands of kin-groups and a replacement source of opportunity-seeking and risk-management connections.

The medieval Papacy took about a century-and-a-half to establish a parish church system in clan-dominated Ireland precisely because parishes elevated locality over lineage and the Irish Church itself was dominated by clan networks. It was the normal problem of kin-groups—Popes came and went, the clan was forever. If the medieval Papacy had any doubts about the importance of suppressing kin-groups, its endless trouble in asserting control over the Irish Church was a perennial reminder.

Indian jati that are based on occupations operate as an alternative social cooperation and risk-management mechanism to kin-groups. Such jati have the further advantage that marrying inside the occupation group means that both parents understand what is required to train sons to work in that occupation and for wives to bring up the next generation of that occupation. Given the enormous memorisation burden a brahmin boy originally had to learn, occupation-based jati seemed to have developed as a cascading social pattern from brahmin marriage strategies for inter-generational skills transmission.

Religions and sects

Religious identities can also operate as an alternative to lineage as an organising mechanism. The Sufi tariqa (orders/sects) of Islam regularly operate this way, though they often have a family that provides hereditary leadership. The Tong, Triads and various sects of China provided non-lineage connections through belief-and-ritual. Their role waxed and waned depending on the Chinese dynastic cycle.

The Chinese dynastic cycle was driven by:

• Population increase from dynastic pacification coming up against resource limits, limiting the number of farmer niches and tending to shrink them as population pressure increased. Such shrinkage made taxes progressively more onerous. Population increasing beyond the number of viable farming niches created an ever larger bandit/underclass.

• Elite polygyny expanding elite aspirants faster than elite positions.

• Pathologies of bureaucracy increasing over time.

Disappointed elite aspirants organising peasant revolts is a recurring theme in Chinese history. The bloodiest civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion (1854-1860), was an example of this. As the CCP itself was a form of such organising, it is very exercised about some new version developing.

As so many of the great peasant revolts that are such a feature of Chinese history were organised via sects—including the Yellow Turban Rebellion (184-205); the Red Turban Rebellion (1351-1368) that overthrew the Yuan dynasty; the White Lotus Rebellion (1794-1804); the Taiping Rebellion, via the God Worshipping Society; and the Red Turban Rebellion of 1854-6—Chinese central governments have a long history of being suspicious of sects. A history of suspicion that the CCP continues—see Falun Gong.

Divided loyalties

Imperial China was an unusual case. Generally, rulers found kin-groups frustrating: precisely because rulers came and went, but kin-groups are forever. Kin-groups would colonise every organisation, including the rulers’ own instruments of rule.

The Greek city-states (such as Athens) and the Roman Republic used locality to suppress lineage because of the urgency—when one relied on citizen soldiers—of creating a shared commitment to the polis, the city-state. Riffing off mechanisms the Romans had developed, manorial Christian Europe forged an elite alliance to suppress kin-groups.

In Medieval Europe, everyone who owned manors—which was almost everyone who mattered from knights to kings—had an interest in suppressing kin-groups as kin-groups competed with the manor-holders’ authority over their manors. Moreover, Popes did not want kin-groups colonising the Church. Kings did not want kin-groups colonising their instruments of rule.

So, the Latin Church’s suppression of kin-groups was endorsed and supported by the elite within Christian societies. This was essentially an intensified development of Roman mechanisms to suppress kin-groups: single-spouse marriage; no cousin marriage via very encompassing incest taboos; consent for marriage; and testamentary freedom.

If kin-groups can control neither marriage nor the transfer of wealth, and are not used to organise either—while locality-based connections work—kin-groups atrophy very quickly. All these measures could be entrenched via law that was not based on revelation.

Christian Europe thus had three advantages in suppressing kin-groups. First, there was the Roman example itself.

Second, “Render unto Caesar” separated law from revelation. Law was explicitly an exercise of human authority and could be—and was—mobilised against kin-groups. Even better, social bargains could be entrenched in law, making formal bargaining processes worth the effort.

The control of most law within Islam by religious scholars, the ulama—based on revelation—prevented use of the mechanisms available to Christian rulers and elites to suppress kin-groups. Grounding law in revelation also massively reduced social-bargaining possibilities. Brahmins making similar claims via Manusmriti and similar texts had similar effects. The difference nowadays is that not even the maddest Hindutvas want to revive Brahmin law.

Third, there was a series of locality-based mechanisms—manor, congregation (parish), self-governing cities—that could be utilised to replace kin-groups. There were also occupation-based guilds, while a range of social cooperation mechanisms were developed, including corporations and feasting (often based on the veneration of a particular saint).

Fourth, Germanic taboos against close relative marriage and insistence on the primacy of oaths of service over kin-group connection provided a culturally-resonant lever. The epitome of the latter was the warrior band or comitatus, forms of which seem to be a perennial across steppe cultures.

As part of its evolution of institutions remarkably convergent with those in medieval Europe, Japan was also a culture where sworn loyalty could trump kin-group. Japan is a case of a similar evolution of institutions to medieval Christendom without the specific Roman example or later Christian development of it.

Despite the Arthurian stories being originally based on Celtic sources, the personally-sworn loyalty of the Knights of the Roundtable is Germanic. The Arthurian tales provide in epic form a cautionary tale where Arthur’s “Germanic” individual sworn-loyalty Roundtable is brought down by fractious Celtic kin-group loyalties.

Germanic cultures had a more fluid openness to cooperative opportunities that advantaged them over Celtic cultures more restrictively based on clans. As a friend says, it is a principle of Welsh history that there is always a stupid younger brother.

A problem for monotheism when it comes to kin-groups is that monotheism creates a unified moral order—that is its key social-selection advantage. It is why monotheism is selected for on the ecological borders between pastoral grasslands and farmlands—people could connect and move across the ecological boundary within the same moral and ritual order. As the Middle East is where farmlands and grasslands are most intertwined—so that social-selection advantage of monotheism is strongest—all major monotheisms come from the Middle East.

Islam arose in an Arabian peninsula where pastoralism and farming were very ecologically intertwined. Because Islam is based on the sanctification of a pastoralist social synthesis, this includes sanctifying the sexual exploitation of outsider women: a pattern seen in ISIS’s theology of rape. This social script has also manifested in the British grooming gangs, the Dutch “lover-boy” gangs and (the prosecuted and gaoled) Muslim Lebanese rape gangs in Sydney.

Mass rape and sexual exploitation has proved to be a cost of Muslim immigration, though the cost is much reduced if the local civic culture is strong enough to suppress it.

The unified moral order of monotheism breaks down the ritual boundaries between kin-groups that reverence for ancestors generated. This ritual boundary is used in non-monotheist cultures to prevent marriage within kin-groups. The adoption of monotheism—by eliminating this ritual boundary—thus enabled marriage within the kin-group.

There are a lot of advantages to marrying within the kin-group. It keeps assets within the kin-group. It means the women are breeding warriors for their own kin-group, not someone else’s. In patrilineal systems, marrying within the kin-group is safer for women, as they stay within their existing kin-connections rather than being isolated inside a different kin-group.

The trouble is, marrying inside the kin-group for generation after generation is genetically bad, generating increasingly high rates of birth defects and general sickliness. The evolved mechanism of ritual-boundaries mandating out-marriage has been positive for the genetic health of kin-group lineages.

Moreover, marrying within the kin-group intensifies the importance of kin connections and narrows cooperative opportunities—something that St Augustine (354-430) (correctly) criticised cousin marriage for. Research suggests that the rule of the clan does not increase confidence in fellow clan members as much as it reduces trust for non-clan members. The net effect is to create lower-trust societies which in turn encourage more use of the dense connections of lineage for risk-management and social cooperation.

This lowering of trust in outsiders—and elevation of kin-based connections and patronage systems—is why there is such a startlingly high correlation (0.91) between how collectivist the local culture is and how corrupt the state is.

Conversely, the suppression of kin-groups in Christian Europe created highly individualist cultures that were much more fluid in their ability to engage in, and create, cooperative opportunities, tending to become higher trust societies over time. Hence, the crucial mistake that liberal universalism makes is in not recognising how much the individualism it takes for granted is a creation of a particular cultural matrix.

Institutions are cultural creations

Institutions are built around norms and rules. These may well be self-reinforcing, but they are also subject to erosion. The stronger the “capstone” civic culture of a polity is, the more those institutional norms and rules are likely to be enforced. The original civic nationalists—the Romans—were entirely correct to insist on Roman citizens, especially new citizens, adhering to the civic culture that underpinned Roman institutions.

Institutions may well have economic functions—even economic purposes—but they are cultural creations first and foremost precisely because they are based on norms. Formally similar institutions regularly operate differently in different cultures.

The more culturally distant immigrants are, the more adjustment is required by them to the norms and rules that make the institutions of the country they are entering function effectively. The less such adjustments are required of the newcomers, the more corrosive will be the impact of such immigrant cultural differences on those norms and rules, and so those institutions.

We can see Somali immigration corroding local institutions in Minnesota. We can see Muslim immigration corroding local institutions in the UK. Yes, they are being aided and abetted by local politicians and activist networks, but that is precisely the point—the civic culture of Minnesota, and of the UK, is not strong enough to stop them.

The weaker that the civic culture is, the less the successful immigrant absorption capacity of the local polity will be. This means, of course, that the more local activists and politicians undermine civic culture—and its institutional norms and rules—the lower the successful immigrant absorption capacity of that polity is.

It is a lot easier to destroy general social trust than it is to build it. Destruction of such trust—seen in such things as the mockingly named “diversity bollards”—is another cost of culturally incompatible mass immigration. Both historical experience and computer simulation suggest that reversion to lineage-based dynamics is likely if such generalised trust breaks down.

Of course, if one wants—as clearly many left-progressives do, as they say so—mass immigration to be a lever to corrode Western civic cultures; to corrode Western institutional norms and rules; then that is all fine. It is also stupidly toxic and a profound treason against one’s society. It becomes yet another example of left-progressives being the enemies of human flourishing; just as they have proved to be again, again, again, and again. Left-progressivism never, ever, achieves what it says on the tin, and is always hostile to human flourishing, due to left-progressives pathological relationship with information and the falsity of the foundational beliefs necessary for their politics.

Precisely because we humans cognitively map significance, not facts; precisely because our cultural capacities are the secret of our success as a species; immigration is far more of a cultural issue than an economic one. It is the failure to grasp this which has, again and again, led conventional centre-right politicians to screw up the cultural politics that mass immigration generates.

The capacity for culturally incompatible groups to erode institutional norms, the dynamics of globalisation, divisions within Western societies—and their implications for the ability to absorb immigrants—are further explored in Part III (forthcoming).

Welcome to all our new Spanish-speaking subscribers, many of whom seem to have arrived via , who can be found here. Although we’re quite linguistically proficient around here, those languages do not include Spanish, alas—apologies in advance.

Helen has also made use of insights from our paid subscriber chat in this piece on Epstein and British politics (for Law & Liberty). Your thoughtful remarks are greatly appreciated.

One of the things economists rarely consider is different societies’ immigrant absorption capacity. They would say of economies rather than of societies, and that is part of the problem.

By absorption capacity, I mean the capacity to absorb immigrants with the least damage to institutions and its citizens’ and residents’ quality of life. One of the reasons why this is rarely considered is because immigrants are treated as not varying in any way that matters—that immigrants can be just assessed as a single analytical category. Another reason is immigrants are treated as the only humans in history who cannot make things worse. A third reason is that commerce is treated as if it is the only relevant mechanism of cooperation, that the other mechanisms of cooperation in making a successful society need not be considered.

All these claims or presumptions are false.

Conventional centre-right politicians have, again and again, taken their cue from economists and treated immigration as an economic issue—when it is so much a cultural one. This is why such politicians have, again and again, proved to be incompetent at cultural politics and been pushed aside by national populists. It is how country-club Republicans got Trumped, Gaullists got Le Penned, Forza Italia got Melonied, the Tories are being Faraged, and now the Coalition in Australia is getting Hansoned.

The last is happening because the ALP Federal Government has pushed Australia to the wrong side of its immigrant absorption capacity. Yes, the Bondi Massacre was a galvanising shock, but that voters were beginning to arc up was already clear. Even Australia has limits.

The Liberal-National Party Coalition screwed up its response both to the Bondi Massacre and to PM Albanese’s response, one that had already alienated the wider public (this is why both major parties experienced a polling dip). They did so in the standard way conventional centre-right politicians have been doing for years: they failed to grasp the cultural politics. (No centre-right party should support any form of hate speech legislation, ever: hate speech is how Marcusean repressive tolerance gets repackaged, and is used as such.)

This collapse of support for conventional centre-right politics has happened in polity after polity: Australia is merely the last and (currently) least severe. Yet, conventional centre-right politicians never seem to learn. Part of why they never learn is they take way too many cues about immigration from mainstream economists. Economists who are remarkably clueless about, for instance, limits to a nation’s capacity to absorb immigrants.

Any economist who treats immigrants as a generic group is being stupidly unobservant. If they treat immigrants as the only group of humans in history who cannot make things worse, they are engaging in ridiculous social posturing. If they do not consider civil war as a potential cost of immigration, they are being historically illiterate. If they do all three, they are a classic instance of social science making Western societies stupider. They have certainly aided conventional centre-right politicians to repeatedly fail through political and policy incompetence.

If your default view of immigration is that it is about humans, treated as interchangeable widgets (“economic agents”), moving between societies—societies that are conceived as free-floating arenas for transactions, where efficiency is overwhelmingly the dominant concern—then the immigrant absorption capacity issue seldom arises. But that is a ludicrously inadequate view of immigration, of immigrants, and of human societies.

The absorption capacity of a society depends on, among other things, its institutional structure; how robust its civic culture is; the number and characteristics—including cultural characteristics—of immigrants. A successful polity is built on the full range of cooperative mechanisms, not just commerce. The effect of immigrants—and of the number and characteristics of immigrants—has to be considered against all the cooperative mechanisms that build and sustain a successful society.

One way to ensure mass immigration becomes more fraught is to combine mass immigration with Net Zero. Net Zero means restricting access to energy and making it more expensive. Cheap energy is fundamental to mass prosperity. If you drive up energy costs while increasing the number of people seeking to use the energy you are restricting and making more expensive, you are deliberately increasing contestation over resources. This drives up the costs of immigration generally and makes mass immigration exceptionally fraught. That so many folk do not stop to wonder if there is any difficulty about combining mass immigration with Net Zero indicates how rarely absorption capacity is considered.

If infrastructure construction lags, or simply cannot fully respond to increased demand due to other constraints, there will be congestion costs from mass immigration which people will notice every working day. Competition for positional goods—or any goods where supply does not respond fully to demand—will increase. This includes political positional goods. There are constraints on the ability to absorb immigrants, even without considering cultural compatibility.

But cultural compatibility also matters. The success of what we now call Western civilisation has been built on the development of individualist cultures that enabled, and generated, a raft of successful social cooperation mechanisms. Medieval Christian societies—through their suppression of kin-groups—put the Homo sapien super-power of non-kin cooperation on steroids and so European (and neo-European) polities came to dominate the planet.

Suppressing kin-groups meant much more fluid cooperative possibilities. It also drove people to create new mechanisms for social cooperation. This gave the processes of social selection far more to work with.

The liberal individualism that so many Very Serious People—including so many economists—in the West utterly take for granted is a cultural creation. It is the creation of a particular cultural matrix. To understand this, we need to dive into the history, into comparative historical anthropology.

The rule of the clan

Across the globe, most cultures are kin-group based. The main exceptions are Christian-origin cultures, riverine SE Asian cultures, and various island cultures.

Island cultures have a natural geographic in-group—their island or islands. Their geography very much shapes cooperative opportunities in a way that encourages broad cooperativeness within each island. Narrowing your cooperation to your kin-group is not only not likely to be an advantage, it sacrifices cooperative—and especially risk-management—opportunities without commensurate benefits. You are all, literally, in this together: especially when it comes to shared disasters such as violent weather.

You see this cooperative-islanders pattern in various contexts. The Serene Republic of Venice, for example, sitting on its islands in its lagoon, was notoriously socially stable; it did not have a single significant popular revolt in its thousand year history. Again and again on islands, locality has dominated over lineage in generating cooperative and risk-management opportunities. The Moriori of the Chatham Islands provide an extreme example of islander cooperativeness.

There are obvious counter-examples—the steep mountain valleys and swamps of New Guinea, for example. The Maori after they ate the last Moa, leaving them without a good animal protein source (except each other), is another. The pastoralism of the “Celtic fringe” in the British Isles is a third. Nevertheless, the geography of islands has often meant that locality triumphs over lineage.

South-East Asia shares a feature with most island cultures—no pastoralists. Moreover, the various river valleys are small enough that there was no advantage to the riverine rulers in encouraging kin-groups to economise on administration (the Southern Chinese model, discussed in Part II).

Pastoralists

Kin-groups are powerful where they provide an advantage in social cooperation. This is strongest among pastoralist groups. Indeed, pastoralist groups are not only very strongly kin-group oriented, they are patrilineally kin-group oriented.

Animals are mobile assets. They are easily stolen and hard to defend. You cannot look after the animals while minding the kids, so the herds are typically owned by the men and passed down the male line. Hence pastoralist societies being patrilineal (family identity passed down the male line) and patrilocal (wife moves in with husband’s family, who own the assets they live off).

Moreover, warriors who grow up together, and live within dense networks of life-long connections, have very strong reasons to maintain their reputation for bravery and reliability. One YouTuber expresses this well:

15:20 As for their daily life, their customs, their practices, their religion, it was all centred around movement and the nomadic pastoralist lifestyle. They traveled in wagon homes, moving seasonally across the steppe in search of fresh pasture for their animals. And this is important because their wealth was not measured in land or in goods, so to speak. It was measured in herds.

And there’s something very important that we need to pause on here, because when your wealth is measured by your herds, the amount of animals that you have, it fundamentally changes how a society thinks morally.

Herds can be easily stolen. And that’s why in steppe societies like the Scythians, honour and integrity were hugely important for these peoples. Loyalty mattered, reputation mattered, oath-breaking and cattle rustling were seen as capital crimes, because it threatened the very survival of the group itself and the culture at large.

And Herodotus makes this very clear. Scythian justice was not harsh simply because they were cruel, but because disorder could not be tolerated in a world that literally had no boundaries.

Pastoralists consume high-protein, animal-food diets, so tend to be strong and healthy. You deter attacks on the animal herd(s) you live off by your personal reputation as a warrior and the strength of your connections to fellow warriors. Hence pastoralist societies are both warrior societies and organised by patrilineal kin-group. Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, the Balkan uplands—the regions that resisted the suppression of kin-groups in medieval Christian Europe—were all pastoralist societies.

When Genghis Khan re-arranged Mongol society to suppress kin-based feuds, he used a form of locality arranged by a decimal system—10 warriors whose households camped together, forming 10 larger groups, forming 10 larger groups until you got to 10,000 warriors. But it was still based around warriors who grew up together living with dense personal connections where reputation mattered and mutual support was readily mobilised.

Kin-groups as mutual protection

While the advantage of (patrilineal) kin-groups to pastoralists is very strong, they are hardly the only circumstance where kin-groups are advantaged. Wherever you have assets and/or connections to defend by the use of personal connections, strong kin-group connections are likely to be favoured. This is not only true in pastoralist societies, it is regularly also true in horticultural (hoe-farming) and agricultural (plough-farming) societies.

Plough-farming families and kin-groups are likely to be patrilineal, as ploughing is also an activity you cannot do while minding the kids, so land will typically go down the male line. Horticultural families and kin-groups are likely to be matrilineal, as farming tends to be a women’s activity in societies that farm but do not use ploughs—hoe-farming you can absolutely do while minding the kids.

Moreover, women almost certainly, again and again, invented farming as a spin-off from foraging: you can do both of these things while minding the kids. Planting food plants means less travelling, more reliable food sources and—as they turn into crops from years of selecting for the more nutritious and tastier versions—easier-child minding, plus more ability to support extra children (so less infanticide/child abandonment).

Using fire to increase foraging opportunities from the landscape was an intermediate stage. Going beyond that requires deliberate planting and results in domesticated crops.

In both required territory and required skills, farming niches are smaller than foraging niches. Moreover, they create food rather than just taking it from the environment around them.

The development of farming and pastoralism greatly increased human populations by greatly multiplying (smaller) human niches. Human farmers and herders cleared so many forests, it may have warmed the atmosphere. Farming and pastoralism also created required-for-subsistence assets—farm lands and animal herds—that needed to be defended. The result, once populations reached a certain density, was intense conflict over resources.

This created the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck. Only about 1-in-17 male lineages made it through; female lineages were mostly unaffected. Effective male teams wiped out less effective male teams and took, and bred with, their women as prizes of war.

This was peak kin-group. This was kin-groups as extreme and violent “self-help” mechanisms.

This strongly favoured what anthropologists call segmented or segmentary lineage systems. Families were nested in sequentially larger kin-group identities based around common ancestors (whether real or notional). This is what folk typically mean when they refer to “tribal” systems. “Me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousins; my brother and my cousins against the world” is the classic operating dictum of such systems.

There were two sets of social mechanisms that developed in response to this intense and perennial social conflict over farmlands, herds and women. One was chiefdoms and then states. Rather than killing the men and taking their women, you kept men alive as payers of tribute or taxes, who then bred more payers of tribute and taxes.

States were more effective at this than chiefdoms, as taxes are more reliable than tribute, and so states could operate at a larger scale. Pastoralist states generally never got beyond being super chiefdoms. It’s harder to control, and extract surplus from, pastoralist warriors.

Pastoralist societies also continued to experience significant harrowing of male lineages, so continuing selection for effective (male) teams. Raiding other folk, or being paid not to, was an effective way of using pastoralist warriors to extract an economic surplus.

The other socially-selected for non-kin-based cooperative mechanism was secret (ritual) societies that would sometimes use extreme measures to prove loyalty to the society over the kin-group. Extreme measures ranged up to serving one’s own son as the meat in a cannibal feast: no, I am not making this up.

The more extreme thing you have to do to be of the “in-group”, the stronger the signal of commitment. Declaring that a person with a penis is a woman, and that the surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of minors shows “care and compassion” is a modern equivalent. You show your in-group status and commitment via horrors inflicted on the bodies of children.

Such secret societies may have led to the creation of chiefdoms. They also seem to have played a role in the shift from charismatic, apprentice-trained shamans to more systematically trained priesthoods. This leads to religions that use public rituals and distinctive doctrines to build signals of commitment on much larger scales than ritual societies can manage.

But just because states develop does not mean that kin-groups go away. The ruler’s incentive to protect taxpayers who breed more taxpayers is powerful. But there are still all sorts of circumstances where kin-groups can provide mutual self-help—including in dealing with the ruler and the ruler’s agents; or the insufficiencies of those people.

Next week: Why so many human societies have been organised around kin-groups—and the cultural and institutional consequences—is explored in Part II.

The Zoom link paid subscribers require is below the fold.

Helen has also been commissioned to write a piece on Epstein, Mandelson, Starmer, and Blair—and UK politics. Of necessity, that means drawing out the implications of this earlier piece on the Epstein Files. We want input from our readers, but we’re both also still baffled by and curious about Australian absences from Epstein—even hugely wealthy and influential ones, like Rupert Murdoch.

The few Australians that do appear do so in what are odd contexts (see Kevin Rudd, for example). There’s even a serious case to be made that British-Australian microbiologist Melanie Thomson has managed to emerge from a place in the Epstein Files with her reputation enhanced.

Because we haven’t done one of these since December, we’re offering a 20 per cent discount on an annual subscription until midnight on Saturday February 21st. That said, given many of you are new, if you’re only willing to put your hand in your pocket for a month’s paid subscription to “suck it and see,” we fully understand!

20% discount on an annual subscription

And, an apology from Helen

It’s become fashionable, these days, to celebrate what goes by the name of “neurodiversity,” and to argue that society should be re-ordered to make life easier for people like me. Sometimes, a specific learning disability or neurodevelopmental disorder is even reimagined as advantageous to the people who have it.

Well, I’m here to tell you this is cobblers. If I could wish my dyslexia away I would do so in a heartbeat. It is why I sent out a Substack email with an appointment in it that was utterly wrong (and actually dated last year).

Parental life lessons formed part of a childhood I’ve often drawn on my writing, particularly the literary non-fiction I’ve published over many years for The Australian and Law & Liberty. It was my parents, for example, who worked out how to manage a dyslexia diagnosis when I was seven. This was the 1970s; few people had heard of dyslexia then, much less understood it. That I was the youngest of four talented and verbally fluent children made the problem especially acute. Until I learnt to read, I was a cuckoo chick in the family nest.

My problems were identified in the usual way for dyslexics—I was good at maths but couldn’t read. This, I assure you, was no sort of superpower. It took me until I was nine to learn to read, and my parents had to hire a phonics tutor to help me over the barrier to learning thrown up by the then-fashionable “look-say” method of reading instruction. I’ve written about this experience for Law & Liberty.

Even now—with excellent if somewhat slow reading skills—dyslexia means I do not process calendrical information accurately. I’ve had a lifetime of double-booked meetings, missed sporting fixtures, and stood-up clients. I once failed to appear at a literary event a Brisbane bookshop had gone to some trouble to organise. 150+ people waited for an hour-and-a-half at what they expected would be a talk, reading, and book-signing from the Miles Franklin Award winner. Said winner was in a pub (having written down the wrong date) roughly 20 miles from the venue.

I apologised, explaining dyslexia’s effects, but did not expect forgiveness. Nor did I receive it. I have never been invited back to that outlet again. The rest of society does not need to reorganise itself around folk who can’t keep appointments. I have always given people the option of rejecting me for what is rude and unprofessional behaviour. I have also had one relationship come to an end because I cannot remember anniversaries or birthdays, something important to my then partner. She was upset when I forgot her birthday, and “I can’t help it” along with an apology wasn’t good enough.

One problem the UK is facing to an extraordinary and expensive degree—and Australia is encountering a bit of the same phenomenon in the NDIS—is the way many disabled people routinely expect total accommodation of what in any other circumstance would be unacceptable behaviour. This is particularly notable among the mentally ill, the “neurodivergent” or people with specific learning disabilities (like mine).

You seldom see this kind of entitlement from blind people, deaf people, or paraplegics (although it does exist). Entitled behaviour from people with what are in fact more minor disabilities costs both the state and employers an absolute fortune and diverts funds both from people with far more serious “neurodivergence” problems (like non-verbal autism) and, ahem, people who can’t see, hear, or walk.

Those of you who’ve dealt with me when I was in practice—there are a few here who go back decades—may be surprised by this, but remember, in the past I’ve always had a secretary or chambers’ clerk to handle this part of my professional life for me. When you dealt with me, you were also dealing with her (and at one firm, him).

A couple of people have already cancelled their paid subscriptions overnight because of this unprofessionalism, and all I can say is that I’m sorry, and that I will try my best to make sure it doesn’t happen again. However, as I’ve had to explain multiple times over the years, the “dis” in disability means the word and concept other people have to get used to is CAN’T. I CAN’T. No amount of trying harder or rechecking dates/times more carefully will make me any better. No amount of self-help and positive thinking will make any difference.

I hope to see you all on Saturday 21st at 10 am GMT. Please ignore the previous email; I will delete the post that goes with it after this email has gone out.

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And lo, both my observations and those of the Irish economist I quote-tweeted have been vindicated. The vast tranche of material has indeed revealed Epstein to be a midwit and a pseud—complete with an aversion to correct spelling and capitalisation—while Epstein’s wealthy and famous “marks” emerge as the worst sort of sad-sacks. These are men who struggle to woo women in the normal way and so predate upon the very young and the occupationally compromised instead.

Epstein’s USP—to go with his wealth—was getting naïve young women (and quite a large number of girls) to shag ugly old men. Setting this system up involved two-way Machiavellianism. That said, working in the incel-ish male sad-sacks’ sexual favour was the basic reality that teenage girls are notoriously shallow and easily manipulated.

As everyone who hasn’t spent the last week under a rock knows, additional revelations contained in the latest DOJ releases are upending British politics, destroying Peter Mandelson’s place in public life and seriously undermining Keir Starmer—and all this in the run-up to a crucial Manchester by-election.

Britons can be forgiven for focussing on their own country’s travails, but there’s something in the Epstein files for many other people, too, not just Americans or Brits. Australian journalist has unearthed a useful backgrounder here on the extent to which—as in Britain—the Epstein files are burning Norwegian politics and even the country’s royal family to the ground.

If nothing else, Jeffrey Epstein knew who to target.

I’ve neither the time nor inclination to try to reproduce the efforts of those currently wearing out their CTRL-F or CMD-F keys. Times of London journalist Janice Turner searched for “young girls” and, well, regretted it immediately:

I didn’t type “Prince Andrew” or “Peter Mandelson” or other craven crawlers into the vast, unwieldy US Department of Justice archive. The people I’m interested in are mainly nameless — not so much individuals as an undifferentiated mass: somehow at once pitifully worthless and a tradable commodity, the fuel rods in Epstein’s power plant.

I searched for “young girls”. And up popped 120 or so pages of links to emails, documents and FBI depositions. After hours of reading, a picture emerges both of Epstein’s industrial-scale grooming operation and of those who indulged it as a rich man’s hobby, like modern art or fine wine.

Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen’s wife, just saw Epstein’s extended household as a market for her friend’s jewellery. “I know you have a lot of … young girls, women friends and potential women/girls that you will need to get gifts for,” she wrote. “All women, and girls in your case, like jewelry.”

A typical testimony is from a woman who had three jobs when a friend at a party told her about a rich guy who’d pay $300 for a massage. He was well connected, surrounded by models, and if he really liked you, he’d pay for your education too. She had never done anything like this before but called the number, was shown in, told to undress, instructed how to touch this naked stranger. He didn’t demand sex but masturbated while groping her.

As I read her piece, I wondered if anyone was going to make the—to me obvious—sad-sack man + manipulable girl point. Janan Ganesh of the FT did not disappoint:

Let’s start with the rich. Most people do not find money — or the main ways of making money, such as banking — intrinsically interesting. This might be less true in societies that are new to wealth. But it holds in the established western cities.

There, the self-made often discover too late that all their work and risk-taking has brought them less social status than expected. A minor magazine editor outranks them at a party. A hand-to-mouth actor is more welcome at Soho House. A bureaucrat can affect their business. Most rich people don’t mind. Even those who do tend to react maturely, perhaps sponsoring the arts for some reflected glory or buying a media outlet.

But some will cross the line in seeking to be near the beau monde. Which consists of whom? Artists, intellectuals, politicians, even the occasional journalist: the public rather than private 1 per cent. Their value in social settings is high. Their income might not be. It is hard to get rich doing something fun.

Again, most of them just shrug this off as the tax on having a cool job. Even those who really mind will often find a clean solution, such as the classic private-public intermarriage, where one spouse provides the wealth and the other the social clout. (George Washington’s marriage to a Virginia plantation-owner is a template from the annals of hypergamy.) A few, however, will do improper things for the rich to get some of their crumbs. It is just too jarring for them to be the star of a dinner party and then fly economy.

What the public sees as a monolith called “the elite” is really two different tribes, and so much corruption stems from the gap between them. Their desires are not just distinct but fatally interlocking. The private elite can scratch the public elite’s itch to live beyond their means. In return, the public elite can relieve some of the boredom and anonymity of business. Even without privileged information to offer, Mandelson was beguiling to the rich because he came from the world of ideas and events, not their world of facts and numbers. Their appeal to him scarcely needs spelling out.

Other people have observed that Epstein evinced plenty of sectarian bigotry, but that some of his most abject marks were fellow Jews. US attorney Ted Frank brings this out intelligently:

Like Bernie Madoff before him, Epstein targeted wealthy Jews in particular, creating an us-versus-them paradigm (“goyim”, making fun of JP Morgan WASPs) to make his marks trust him more and disregard his common and sketchy resume. He’s just a rogue getting one over on the high school jocks; stick with me because we Jews need to stick together. Again, a low batting average, but he did pull hundreds of millions from the wealthy Jews he did persuade that he was being particularly helpful.

(Seems unbelievable unless you’ve talked to enough wealthy people to know how much trouble it is to staff a trustworthy family “office.” Grifting or just plain principal-agent conflicts seem to happen much more often than is publicly reported, if on a considerably smaller scale than what Epstein pulled off with Wexner.)

An amazing ecosystem bootstrapped out of nothing more than Epstein’s charm and his amoral shamelessness.

If this was all there was to Epstein, we can only guess what a #MeToo scandal might’ve looked like eventually (though lots of rich men have womanized extensively without real consequence), but he might well have gotten away with all of this and died a billionaire from existing investments. Epstein’s former clients hated him, but he wasn’t losing any sleep over it.

But Epstein also had an entirely separate and justifiably illegal fetish for teenage girls, spending millions in a reckless scheme to constantly import more for a sick sexual hunger. It doesn’t matter that many of the teenagers were delinquents thrilled with the sex-for-cash trade, so thrilled that they’d happily collect bounties to recruit their underage friends to work the massage tables also; it’s still illegal and immoral; the age of consent is there for a reason. He’d use his money and exaggerate his connections and his past to intimidate women from complaining, though plenty spoke to police in Palm Beach without the Mossad killing them. That’s what eventually brought Epstein (and his right-hand woman Ghislaine) down.

From a British perspective, the intervention below from New Statesman Executive Editor Oli Dugmore captures the mood of the national electorate handily. Dugmore is a lefty, but people from Media’s Carl Benjamin on the right and Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani on the left—and all shades in between—have praised it.

I do think the combined insights from Janice Turner and Janan Ganesh are on point, however. I’ve encountered a little of the phenomenon the latter in particular describes, but only in the UK, US, and Europe. That is, people have been far more impressed by my novels, various literary prizes I’ve won, or my job at a fancy think-tank than if they met me when I was making a great deal more money as a lawyer. Even bestsellers—as two of my novels were—do not amount to anything like what a commercial solicitor earns.

Australia, however, is different. In Australia—and among Australians—people were almost universally more impressed by my lawyering than by any writing of novels or working at think-tanks. The only exceptions to this were a few politicians and staffers in Canberra (all on the left, either ALP left faction or Greens) or culture mavens at literary festivals and the like.

I have now formed the view that the common Australian inclination to denigrate intellectuals—particularly academics and writers—is fundamentally a healthy one. I suspect it’s part of why few Australians have turned up in the Epstein files. Only Kevin Rudd seems to appear reasonably regularly, but always in anodyne contexts.

As many of you know—along with —I’ve taken what I hope is an informed and thoughtful approach to the reality of average differences between groups. This is something that must include IQ because it is substantially heritable. However, Lorenzo and I have also been careful to ensure that we focus on personality psychology and character at the same time. IQ is one thing. Conscientiousness, disagreeableness, emotional stability—those things matter as well.

I say this because I think there are reasons why no great ethical system of which we have record considers high intellect a per se good, something the Epstein Files exposes in its most tawdry form. People who are brainy but have nothing else going for them—no sporting ability, few social skills, emotional brittleness—are an absolute menace. High intellect in combination with low conscientiousness is a recipe for mental illness and personality disorders (particularly the Cluster Bs, as Josh Slocum argues). High IQ people with mental health problems generally fail at life just us hard as dummies do, too, while being far more bitter and destructive about it.

The photographs of Epstein schmoozing people—I’ve included one in this piece—reveal an ostentatiously trim, permatanned silver fox surrounded by fatties, shorties, uglies, and blokes with faces attached to their noses. Men like that are routinely rejected by the sort of women they find most desirable, especially if they’ve not put their intellect to work making money.

Epstein must have felt like a giant among pygmies—all very flattering to his ego, I’m sure.

I suspect this reality is why two major religious traditions—Buddhism and Christianity—went out of their way to build institutions where they could both hide and exploit intelligent but socially clueless freaks. They even went to the trouble of ensuring there were spots for both men and women who fitted the bill. And, as I wrote a couple of years ago for Law & Liberty, both those religious traditions were not above firing the monasteries out of the solar system if the people in them got too big for their boots:

Whether a given monastery was held in contempt or considered a worthy institution depended on the role it had played locally. If it gave out poor relief, educated local children, participated in regional markets, and provided spiritual services, it tended to be beloved. It was inwardness, unworldliness, and failure to engage with society—while taking people’s money in tithes—that did many of them in. If you don’t share, we won’t support was a real gripe of long standing.

Locking away both human and economic capital never goes down well, and resentment was not unique to England and Wales or Reformation Europe: it arose in other civilisations with their own monastic traditions. In 843, China’s Tang Dynasty Emperor Wuzong—like Henry VIII, short of cash—dissolved his country’s Buddhist monasteries. He began by ending their tax-exempt status. Also like Henry, he probably didn’t start the process intending to extirpate all monasticism, but that’s what it became.

Australians: not everything about your cultural cringe is bad. If it stops you putting people like Jeffrey Epstein and his sleazy friends on a pedestal, it’s probably a useful thing.

I have been known to throw things at badly done police procedurals when they turn up on my tellybox. My sister has been known to behave similarly with medical or hospital dramas. We make a good pair.

With that background in mind, let me share with you a really splendid bit of true crime that also illuminates how different people’s moral values around and towards children were less than a century ago: the key event—a murder—took place on February 8, 1964.

Retired journalist starts his story like this:

For reasons that now escape me, I started my part-time studies at WA University in 1959 with two years of German language and literature. My lecturer and guide was Dr Maurice Benn, the newly-installed head of German.

A few years later Mr Justice Hale in the WA Supreme Court put on his black cap with one corner facing forward (actually it’s just a piece of black cloth, of Tudor origin), and sentenced Dr Benn to hang by the neck until he was dead for wilful murder.

I’m writing about Dr Benn to clear some more debris from my cranial attic.

It does not spoil this extraordinary story for you to know that the victim was Dr Maurice Benn’s own son, and that very large numbers of people were sympathetic to him, willing to at least explain and sometimes excuse what he had done. This matured into a state-wide campaign for commutation of Benn’s sentence, something then followed by early release.

At the time parents of unfortunate children got little aid. Some still isolated their offspring at home to protect them from other kids’ taunts. Letters to papers nationally in the wake of the Benn conviction included a number from parents saying they had contemplated killing their child. Some hinted that parents had killed such children in staged accidents. As one woman put it, “Every one of us would have been relieved to see our child die. Perhaps the only reason that our husbands have not stood trial for murder is due to one of two things -- the good fortune to have had a sound spiritual background, or the lack of courage to commit euthanasia for fear of the consequences.”

The male secretary of a Slow Learning Children’s branch wrote that “Mongol” children should be compulsorily admitted to State care: “I know the heartbreak of losing one’s children would be of comparatively short duration – time heals all things. Release these unfortunate parents from their burden by law, and we should never have a crime like the Benn case on our conscience again.” He was immediately sacked.

There was even a letter seeking legal changes to permit some infant children “to be put to rest” via court orders. But others countered that mercy killings of the unfortunate would be no better than Hitler’s culling of the unfit.

Australia in the mid-60s was much like Australia now: orderly, prosperous, well-governed, somewhat authoritarian. It was moderately socially conservative without ever exhibiting the sort of religious fundamentalism one associates with Evangelical Christianity in the US or Islam in Iran or the Arabian peninsula.

The people who wrote into newspapers and spoke to local radio in high-trust Australia in this period signed them with their own names. Stated preferences and revealed preferences aligned.

Now read the whole thing, and see why.

Helen Elsewhere

Last week, I appeared on with Mike Graham, late of TalkRADIO/TV. Before I had this substack, I used to do a weekly spot with Mike on his show, from roughly early 2020 to early 2022. For reasons we discuss in here, my spot got canned and Mike’s own show was moved from mid-morning to early morning.

Then, last October—while I was consulting in the US—Mike got cancelled and sacked. And when I say “cancelled and sacked”, I mean a proper, old-school version. That is, someone who didn’t like Mike but who had “friended” him on Facebook screenshotted something on his Facebook profile and then tweeted it out. This is on Elon Musk’s allegedly all-singing, all-dancing, newly right-wing X. It can still do the cancellation business. Not all lefties have fled to Bluesky.

Mike has thus set up what is basically an incarnation of his most recent show on Talk, but on substack. It features many of the same guests and similar production style, and I’ll be turning up on it from time-to-time.

The previous post went through the rise and decline of redistributive postwar social democratic policy regimes, followed by the rise and decline of neoliberal policy regimes. The latter involved expanded use of market mechanisms.

This second post further explores issues arising from both systems, and those policy regimes’ interaction with blank slate delusions. We use Minnesota’s welfare-fraud revelations as a particularly florid example of policy decay.

Created order

While commerce operates within institutional frameworks, the existence of informal (including black) markets shows how ubiquitous conventions of property are because of how our cognition is structured. This means the conventions of property can and do re-emerge with startling vigour, even within the most oppressive command economies.

Marx’s claim that private property is alienating, is “self-estrangement from our species-being”, is hogwash. We create property—the acknowledgment of yours!—because we are such social beings, because we are much more social than our primate cousins. We do so even within the pseudo-ordered chaos of command economies, thereby making them more functional than they would otherwise be.

Many civilisations have had notions of proper harmony—see the Egyptian concept of maat, the Chinese concept of dao or the Mongol concept of tore. But they all realised that such harmony had to be actively worked for; that good order was fragile; that disruptive, chaotic (i.e. entropic) pressures always existed, both within and outwith humans.

The capacity for order does not guarantee its achievement—still less does it guarantee an order that is not predatory or parasitic.

It’s a notable delusion to think harmony is natural and can be achieved by stripping away the painfully erected ordering structures of human society; that a cultural heritage is inherently the enemy of flourishing social order, rather than its constructor. Human sociality became much more fluid and egalitarian—and far more capable of creating culture, of being up-scaled via cooperative mechanisms—than that of our primate cousins because we systematically murdered our hyper-aggressive outliers.

Character tests (or their absence) matter precisely because humans are so varied, albeit within identifiable ranges and patterns. A flourishing social order requires pervasive and continuous effort.

We can operate via expectations because we are all human: because we are of a single, shared species, we can have robust expectations about each other. Yet expectations provide no guarantees, not merely because we cannot predict new information, but because we vary.

We can have much more robust expectations about each other within shared cultures—within shared maps of meaning—than across them. And even the degree to which that is true depends on distance between cultures.

Social alchemy theory—the utterly false notion that if we strip away what is constraining-so-oppressive, true social harmony will emerge—comes from Critical Theory. Nevertheless, its pious hopes of harmony-through-stripping-away-the-blocks-to-our-underlying-sameness is a delusion to which blank slate liberal universalism offers weak resistance, and into which it can easily slide. This is especially so when an elite status strategy derived from Critical Theory is added to the mix.

The propensity to look for “root causes” has blank slate roots. Such approaches shy away from considering how people vary in conscientiousness, aggressiveness, propensity to violence, patience, etc. All such variance entails grasping that we are not all basically-the-same blank slates, that we are evolved beings with the variation within our species that helps drives natural (and social) selection. Instead, people look for general social causes which—not coincidentally—elevate the authority and resource claims of those who can allegedly identify, and deal with, “root causes”.

The delusions of the free-floating universalism of liberal theory, especially when wrapped in Critical Theory status games, leads to a war against human particularism, against noticing—and even worse, championing—inconvenient-to-Theory differences. We have moved from a Lockean liberalism that was confident in freedom of speech and discourse to a Hobbesian hyper-liberalism that wants the leviathan surveillance state to impose a harmonious order on discourse.

The great hope of the blank slate is perfect human harmony because of our innate sameness. So, if we just strip away the accretions of difference—including our varied cultural heritages by “de-colonising” everything—harmony will be achieved.

This is delusory nonsense based on a false understanding of humans as a species, of how evolution works, of what being genetic and cultural beings entails, how one scales up human cooperation, how incentives and information interact, risk-management.

Blank slate universalism sees the particularism of culture as an enemy of social harmony even though such universalism is, itself, a product of a specific cultural matrix. Thus, philosopher John Gray wants the leviathan state to impose a levelling individualism without any sense that individualism itself is the creation of a particular cultural matrix.

Blank slate universalism does provide a form of rhetorical dominance, via commitment to imagined harmony. It also provides a program of action—suppress all the inconvenient accretions of difference by using any and all levers of power one can grab. There are status, authority, and power differences between those to be harmonised and those doing the harmonising.

Anti-discrimination/civil rights legislation creates networks of would-be harmonisers—in effect, workplace commissars, or perhaps inquisitors—paid and empowered to treat their fellow citizens as hovering on the edge of wrong-think (racism, etc.) and wrong-act (discrimination). They operate on the inquisitors’ principle that error has no rights and that they can reliably detect error. This has proved corrosive of freedom of thought, speech and association.

DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)—often as part of ESG (Environmental and Social Governance)—has added training that regularly operates as little more than struggle sessions while producing a moralised “marginalisation” caste system—female over male, coloured over white, gay over straight, trans over cis, disabled over […]—which is corrosive of organisational harmony and function. Creating moral caste systems was very much a feature of DEI’s precursors—Mao’s Black and Red identities and North Korea’s Songbun system.

As straight white males are at the bottom of this moralised “marginalisation” caste system, the DEI mentality and commissariat has adversely affected the employment of young males of European descent (“white”), especially in entertainment, publishing and academe. The collapse in the quality of Hollywood’s offerings and box-office returns as a result has been notable—the US has thrown away a considerable amount of its “soft power”.

When contemporary Western elites look like mad utopians, it’s because—to the extent they’re operating on blank slate presumptions—they are. The blank slate is a Platonic vision of humanity, just as human rights law and international law are Platonic legal visions. These visions create Platonic guardians whose great moral understanding makes them moral shepherds and scolds for the rest of us.

International law academics tend to be particularly prone to Platonic Guardian arrogance. Striking moral poses is part of the field’s attraction. Public international law is not law—there are no remedies, beyond declarative statements—so international law academics’ pontifications are not subject to reliable and effective reality-tests. (A widespread problem within academe.)

Platonic views start with an abstract vision, typically highly moralised, and examine the world in their terms rather the world’s. In The Unity of Philosophical Experience, historian of Western philosophy Etienne Gilson writes:

Begotten in us by things themselves, concepts are born reformers that never lose touch with reality. Pure ideas, on the other hand, are born within the mind and from the mind, not as intellectual expressions of what is, but as models, or patterns, of what ought to be; hence they are born revolutionists. And this is the reason why Aristotle and Aristotelians write books on politics, whereas Plato and Platonists always write Utopias.

Platonic visions of humans as blank slates are both utopian—so give adherents a motivating sense of moral and rhetorical grandeur used to claim trumping authority over anyone who disagrees—and false, so delusional. This is a disastrous combination.

Shared delusions can be very powerful. Making shared false claims can aid social coordination. Being willing to engage in any level of rationalisation and not-noticing to affirm a shared false belief signals your commitment to motivating common claims as well as your soundness as a member of a moral in-group. This shifts the use of words from instruments of information and persuasion to signalling moral commitments and in-group soundness. For a particularly stark example of different use of words and moralised commitment to blank slate delusions see:

Cultural conundrums

One can see in neoliberalism implicit blank-slate presumptions. Everything is understood as a matter of incentives, of sticks and carrots. Get the incentive structure right, and all will be well. Show me the incentives—assumed in neoliberal Theory to operate identically across all human groups—and I will show you the outcome.

There’s no role in this for culture; no role for shared (or varied) maps of meaning; no role for underpinning norms; no concept of incentives depending on how one cognitively maps reality. This is an impoverished and delusional anthropology.

It’s clear where the neoliberal policy regime begins to run aground: on the rock of cultural differences and the ordering role of culture. It’s also clear where that will bite most strongly—mass immigration. This explains the rise of national populism.

Whether it is immigration policy, housing policy, energy policy, policing, or cultural politics (such as the debauching of beloved entertainment franchises), Western elites have systematically treated working-class concerns with contempt. (See, for instance, discussion of “toxic fans”.) For such elites, any robust sense of social solidarity and heritage is inconvenient, and probably fascist.

Much of this operationalised contempt has been via elite status games based on the normative dominance of blank slate delusions. But against whom are elite status games to be played? A country’s own working class, of course. This is why the 1991 Soviet collapse is such crucial break. The evaporation of any external existential geopolitical threat to the developed democracies made Western elites far less concerned about alienating their own working classes.

The attempt—via critiques of the postwar “open society” consensus—to re-litigate the Second World War is both fundamentally mistaken about when the key break point was and lets loose some deeply obnoxious ideas. “Weimar problems require Weimar solutions” has to be a serious contender for the stupidest political meme ever. A “solution” that leaves your country bombed flat, occupied by foreign powers, with 20 per cent less territory, and perpetrating a level of mass murder rivalled only by Communist regimes, is a much worse “solution” than the original problem.1

The toxic zealotry based on blank slate delusions that has pervaded universities, mainstream media, entertainment, arts and literature has involved a systematic attack on, and rejection of, the received cultural heritage of Western societies. This amounts to a criminal attack on the sustaining cognitive resources of our societies, and is one that actively sabotages learning.

Worse, such zealotry looks to politics to provide meaning; to provide a sense of purpose and moral validation; to generate maps of meaning—the architecture of belief. This is politics as substitute religion, as secular religion. Hence it replicates patterns that both rhyme with patterns from the Wars of Religion and also represent rejection of all the painful learning from those wars about not engaging in heresy hunting.

Cancel culture is about punishing people for words and ideas: heresy hunting and reputational witch-burning. It’s about blocking debate—and so social feedback—by enforcing a conformist self-righteousness. The leaders of Europe’s historical confessional states would like a word.

More to social life than efficiency

A pervasive difficulty for the neoliberal policy regime is that societies are not just places for free-floating transactions and efficiency is not the only criterion for public policy, human flourishing, or a successful society. Yes, the ubiquity of the pervasive conventions of property—and the power of the loss-gain-risk patterns of commerce—do enable robust predictions of general tendencies in human behaviour.

The problem comes from over-estimating the reach of those tendencies and/or over-rating efficiency. We do not only transact, we also connect. Societies and social orders do not only require efficiency, they also require resilience—the ability to operate across changes in circumstances over time. Most risk-management is about resilience, not efficiency. One of the problems with financialisation—of ever more use of debt, so promises-as-assets—is that it increases vulnerability to sudden information shifts.

If we look beyond efficiency and commerce, the claim that we produce in order to consume also becomes less impressive. We produce for all sorts of reasons beyond consumption: to have or express status; to generate leverage; as hedges against risks and uncertainty.

Off-shoring supply chains willy-nilly because efficiency is all that counts is a bad social strategy—it is all efficiency, no resilience. It is even less impressive if it allows others to maximise leverage over you. It is also less impressive if increased ability to consume for one group is bought at the expense of another group: that is, their ability to earn income has fallen more than consumption has become cheaper.

The China shock was real and grounded in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies. It was not driven by commercial motives, but sought mechanisms to maximise its leverage, both internally and externally. This included being willing to engage in remarkable levels of environmental degradation to do so (much of which it has outsourced).

The CCP has even found a way to marry genuine technological innovation with failures of economic calculation, creating economically ineffective innovation, to the Chinese people’s detriment. Meanwhile, if one wants to see toxic innovation in operation, look no further than Western universities, where research grants based on cargo-cult worship of “knowledge innovation”—unconnected to any reality-tests that genuinely select for added value—has generated florid growth in toxic nonsense. The infamous feminist glaciology paper is a relatively mild example.

Our attempt to bureaucratise the scientific revolution has been a failure. Process does not guarantee value.

If we consider more than just efficiency in maximising production, free trade is not without its costs and dangers. It’s also much less important for mass prosperity than cheap, reliable energy. The US achieved unprecedented mass prosperity under a protectionist trade policy, although expanding internal markets on that scale reduces the costs of trade protection.

Just as the social democratic policy regime of 1945-1973 broke down in the stagflation of the 1970s and a flattening of productivity growth, so the post-1979 neoliberal policy regime is breaking down under the pressures of immigration, globalisation, bureaucratisation, feminisation of discourse and institutions, and collapsing fertility, with mass immigration failures providing the key sticking point. We are again witnessing a policy regime run out of puff as something developed to solve a previous set of problems confronts problems for which it lacks useful tools.

Cultural conundrums

Even in terms of maximising gains-from-trade transactions, immigration can increase transaction frictions. Cultural diversity makes social coordination harder and increases points of potential social friction, including competition for positional goods. Particularly when matched with DEI, immigration can actively discourage hiring and training locals. Tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen says the quiet part out loud: US corporate employers import Africans so they do not have to hire African-Americans.

Immigration can also degrade people’s locality-based social capital.2 It can suppress wages and productivity growth through capital becoming relatively more scarce than labour. Immigration also directly immiserates people when population grows faster than housing supply, driving up rents.

Having lots of non-voting housing market entrants encourages restrictive zoning laws, to increase the tax revenue from, and the value of, land. Driving up land values increases infrastructure costs and undermines the tax revenue benefit of providing infrastructure. Social fracturing makes it harder to get things built. It manifests as the common public policy habit of reducing supply (shielding incumbent producers) while increasing demand (by “helping” consumers).

Moreover, the notion that institutions and organisations operate independently of the culture of people in them is flatly wrong. The work of Kenneth Pollack, from his PhD dissertation to Armies of Sand (2019), demonstrates that vividly.

People are not utility-maximising, complete-rationality, socially-interchangeable widgets. They are agents of bounded rationality with persistent cultures pursuing different bundles of life-strategies and they have maps of meaning.

It turns out—especially if migrants are from highly clannish cultures that have been marrying their cousins for 1400 years, and are generally low skill—they can be a net drain on the fisc. Making the fiscal situation of one’s welfare state worse via immigration policies seems an act of remarkable fiscal incompetence on the part of Western European states. But economists treating people as interchangeable social widgets provides cover for such policy incompetence.

Moreover, it is not in the interest of the welfare state apparat to solve or reduce social dysfunction but to sustain and nurture it. This increases its access to resources and the salience of given policy areas. This is dysfunctional social selection, remembering that we Homo sapiens are capable of the required levels of moralised self-deception to carry it off.

The policy point of neoliberalism was to create fiscally-sustainable welfare states. False claims about immigrants and immigration; a narrow market-or-state policy binary; failures to grapple with the flaws of bureaucracy; and ludicrous over-investment in higher education—which, among other effects, has meant that cultural conflicts generated out of toxic academic status games regularly overwhelm needed attention to economic policy—have led to its decay.

The neoliberal elevation of efficiency over economic—and other forms of—resilience, including resilience-through-connections, creates increasing points of vulnerability in social and economic systems. All this has led working-class voters to shift towards populist parties that are willing to elevate citizenship—and the security of common heritage—over the corrosive effects of immigration and cultural assault. Anti-elitism makes perfect sense when the elites are, operationally, out to get you.

The rise of national populism is an expression of the failures, and decay of, the neoliberal policy regime. Unfortunately, there’s no well-developed replacement policy regime on offer.

Economists, with some honourable exceptions, are rendered largely useless by their refusal to admit that anything is wrong in their Empire of Theory. Hence we see the UK Treasury sticking with an immigration economic model that is clearly false. As former UK PM Liz Truss notes, this is intertwined with a globalising moral universalism.

The universities are mostly worse than useless, dominated as they increasingly are by toxic zealotry wedded to the delusional falsities of blank slate anthropology.

The intellectual resources available to national populists are limited and suffer from the general collapse of trust in expertise. This collapse is connected to how blank slate delusions have achieved normative dominance among Western elites.

Such intellectual resources as national populists do have are focused far more on general critique of the neoliberal policy regime, not the painstaking work of policy development.

Continuing social democratic decay

The apparatus of the social democratic state did not go away. It did, however, pathologise. It metastasised. Minnesota is providing us with an example of the social democratic state in its metastasised form.

The neoliberal policy regime did not cut back on the size of the welfare state apparatus nor the scale and reach of the administrative state. In some ways, it aided both by elevating technocratic policy claims. Mastery of the correct Theory gave one the keys to the public policy kingdom.

Alas, technocracy typically presumes way more knowledge than is actually held by the technocrats; greatly narrows the consideration of trade-offs; and skirts (or worse) accountability issues. It means either pretending one is not making such trade-offs; being very narrow in your consideration of trade-offs; or making trade-offs that do not bear much public scrutiny.

Both the welfare state apparatus and that of the administrative state rely on the great advantage of bureaucracy—it regularises administration. This is no small advantage, which is why bureaucracy is used so much.

Alas, bureaucracy also comes with various pathologies that tend to get worse over time. On this point, it’s worth considering some Chinese history. It was China that pioneered the use of examinations to select and appoint officials by testing for cognitive capacity. While some form of this dates back to the Warring States period (475-221BC), it reached full flower with the keju imperial examinations introduced by the first Emperor of the Sui Dynasty (r. 581-604). As it was not abolished until 1905, we have 1300 years of historical experience to consider (apart from its suspension during the Yuan Dynasty).

The only European polity to replicate a Chinese imperial dynastic collapse was the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. Like the imperial Chinese dynasties, it was a bureaucratic autocracy on imperial scale. To add to the similarities, the resource-consuming and authority-expanding imperial bureaucracy strangled the urban self-government that had made the preceding Principate a more capable state.

The keju directed the human capital of China overwhelmingly towards the service of the Emperor. This helped along China’s loss of technological dominance. It encouraged its elite to develop what became a crippling lack of curiosity about the outside—physical, mechanical or commercial—world.

Over time, the keju became more and more focused on an inward-looking Confucianism, and mastering its complexities provided a clear selection device. In our universities, the inward-status games of Theory increasingly disconnected from reality display the same dynamic. This extends to open attack on the scientific method, seeking to subordinate them to Theory’s moralised status games.

The keju also selected for capacity not character. While Confucianism attempted to encourage good character, it was not robust enough as an ethical system to do so in a systematic way. Hence, over time, there was selection within the imperial bureaucracy for capable Machiavellians. It had no equivalent of the duel of honour that provided early modern Europe with a character test.

So, across each imperial Chinese dynasty, bureaucratic pathologies mounted. The bureaucratic tendency to accrue resources to itself, to become more corrupt via the sale of official discretions, to become more focused on internal power and status games, to suppress alternative means of information and organisation, to avoid the complexities of competence, to find ways to frustrate oversight and accountability—all increased as each dynasty aged.3

We can absolutely see these patterns across the developed democracies. Minnesota just allows us to see them in particularly florid form, with added cultural dysfunction. We can see Minnesota Scandinavians being exploited by Somali immigrants in much the same way actual Scandinavians in Sweden have been.

Aspects of Scandinavian culture may have aggravated the problem, although the US has not reached the point Sweden has of paying immigrants to go away.

Well-structured institutions require that their rules and norms be enforced and followed. It is easier to enforce the rules of institutions when people’s culture is congruent with norms than when they are very much not. What we are seeing across the West is elites who are not willing to enforce the rules and norms that make Western institutions functional.

So, the leavings of the social democratic policy regime are metastasising in ways that bureaucratic governance always does. Overweening bureaucracy is not merely an enemy of efficiency—though it is that. It consumes the resilience of its social order by suppressing, atrophying or replacing other social mechanisms. The “demon in democracy”—democracy’s tendency to reduce everything to a single pattern of legitimacy—aggravates this.

What we see again and again is, if there’s a choice between enforcing the norms and rules on which institutions were founded, or failing to do so under the cover of new, socially imperial, moral projects, Western officials and bureaucracies choose the latter. That creates “skin suit” institutions—institutions that claim legitimacy on the basis of what they pretend to be about (or once were about), but increasingly aren’t. This is what cultural collapse looks like.

The continuing normative dominance of blank slate delusions due to Western elites being addicted to status games makes it hard to even begin to discuss where to go from here. A general critique of current failures and problems is not a policy program. The post-liberals are not only a policy-free zone, they’re often innumerate as well.

Both the postwar policy regimes are dying. Yet it is not at all clear that any useful replacement is struggling to be born.

The massive corruption and welfare fraud being unearthed in Minnesota, the media culture that hid—and so facilitated it—and the intolerant opinion culture that went with both, is part of a much larger story across the Western democracies.

From social democracy …

From 1945 to 1973, the Western democracies were dominated by various versions of a social democratic policy regime. Expanding commerce and global trade—as the technological advances of the 1930s and 1940s were commercialised—funded expansion in social programs.

Welfare states became larger and more generous. Higher education expanded. With the mid c20th Baby Boom, fertility rates supported this vista of ever-greater mass prosperity funding an ever-expanding welfare state.

The fundamental idea of the 1945-1973 social democratic policy regime was that the existence of a developed society generated unearned benefits, so it was proper for the state to tax—or otherwise capture (e.g., by nationalised industries)—those benefits and distribute them more evenly.

The so-called Bretton Woods system was the international corollary of the social democratic policy regime. Exchange rates were tied to the US$ which was tied to gold. Capital flows were regulated to enable expanded trade while preserving policy sovereignty. The social democratic policy regime was very much a policy regime of nation-states, both politically and economically.

Economist Dani Rodrik pointed out—in a 2002 paper—that:

We want economic integration to help boost living standards. We want democratic politics so that public policy decisions are made by those that are directly affected by them (or their representatives). And we want self-determination, which comes with the nation-state. This paper argues that we cannot have all three things simultaneously. The political trilemma of the global economy is that the nation-state system, democratic politics, and full economic integration are mutually incompatible. We can have at most two out of the three.

The social democratic/Bretton Woods policy regime was to pick the nation-state and democratic politics while foregoing full economic integration.

The GATT system (1947-1995) facilitated trade. The US offered access to its markets—the apparently insatiable consumer demand of its ever-larger and ever-richer middle class—as the economic carrot for joining the Western alliance and supporting the US naval hegemony that underpinned the maritime mercantile order.

Nevertheless, there were distinct limits to such economic integration. The European Common Market (1957-1993) pushed against such limits and came up against social democratic resistance and critique of such integration. Complaints about the European Entity’s “democratic deficit” emerged from centre-left social democratic critiques.

The trouble is, policy regimes decay. As they implement their solutions to various policy dilemmas, the dilemmas to which they have no solution—or the dilemmas caused by policy decisions—or simply dilemmas from changes in circumstances, mount. This pattern is all the stronger in a time of technological flux—both of physical and social technology.

The massive postwar economic expansion rested on cheap and reliable energy—as expanding mass prosperity has since the application of steam power to transport via railways and steamships in the 1820s. The 1973 oil price rise had a contractionary effect, as a pervasive and adverse, supply shock.

The gains from the technological advances of the 1930s and 1940s ran out of puff. This meant that productivity growth dropped. As economist Milton Friedman had predicted in 1968, the apparently reliable trade-off between unemployment and inflation—you could have less of one by accepting more of the other—stopped working. Western economies got more and more of both unemployment and inflation—the dreaded stagflation.

So, a new policy regime was needed.

… to neoliberalism …

There was one on offer. This was what became known as the neoliberal policy regime. Neoliberal has become a much used-and-abused term. For our purposes, it simply means expanded use of market mechanisms.

Public sector firms were corporatised and privatised. States stopped setting prices or quantities across a whole range of markets, a process known as deregulation.

Commercial patterns and rhetoric were applied much more across the public sector—not necessarily with appropriate care. Trade protection was wound back, with trade becoming much freer.

Capital controls were wound back or abolished, fostering global integration of capital markets. Monetary policy focused much more on controlling inflation.

If productivity could not be improved by adopting new technology, it could be increased by adopting more efficient institutional arrangements, widening markets and expanding human capital and access to capital flows generally.

The fundamental idea of the neoliberal policy regime is that more transactions are good—as that means more gains from trade. Transaction costs should therefore be reduced so that there are fewer frictions that inhibit transacting. By this logic, immigration is inherently positive, as it means more transactors, more gains from trade. While not based on the same comparative advantage logic as free trade—though it analytically rhymed somewhat—immigration rhetorically naturally melded with it.

There are several things to note here. First, the neoliberal policy regime worked. There was a surge in economic growth. There was also a long period of macroeconomic stability—the Great Moderation. There was the largest movement out of mass poverty in human history.

Secondly, the new policy regime did not replace the social democratic institutions in the Western world, it was added “on top” of them. Centre-left Governments and politicians embraced the new policy regime precisely so that the social democratic welfare state could be paid for by improved productivity and economic efficiency.

Thirdly, there was a decisive break in policy circumstances in 1991, with the end of the anti-Soviet Cold War. The collapse of an existential threat to the Western democracies meant that Western elites lost much of the incentive to not alienate their working classes.

In 1993, the European Economic Community (EEC) became the European Union. In 1995, the GATT became the WTO. There was a sharp shift towards institutional globalisation after the end of the anti-Soviet Cold War.

Globalisation sought economic integration, so sacrificed nation-state economic self-determination. Yet democracy only operated at the nation-state level. Despite the pretensions of the European Parliament, there was no substantive updating of democratic governance. On the contrary, there was increased international elite coordination and a notable shift of policy away from popular preferences, especially on immigration.

In terms of Rodrik’s aforementioned institutional trilemma, neoliberalism chose economic integration over democracy. Nation-states were not abolished—as he points out, different value sets between nations mean they differ in how their institutions develop. Such institutional arrangements become self-reinforcing over time and it remains much easier to enforce contracts within, rather than across, jurisdictions.

Such self-reinforcing differences were all part of connections and information flows being much denser within, rather than across, jurisdictions. Indeed, one of the big social, political and cultural divides within developed democracies is between those whose connections—so social capital—are highly localised (“Somewheres”) and those whose connections are not (“Anywheres”).

Nevertheless, there was a push to technocratically expand economics and shrink politics, at least regarding economic policy. In the UK, there was active replacement of democratic feedback by devolving policy to quangoes and elevation of human rights legislation (which elevated judicial decision-making over democratic feedback). This was, however, an extreme version of a more general pattern of common integrative policy via international bodies and the administrative state. This pattern came to extend across policy areas.

The UK was simply a particularly blatant version of technocratic managerialism using human rights, international law, and international organisations as trumps over democracy. The non-electoral politics of institutional capture grew as playing to elite status-games proved much more effective than the harder ask of persuading voters. This was especially so given the liberal-conservative delusion that institutions can be trusted to run themselves.

With voluntary voting, it is relatively easy to drive working class voters away from the polls. The developed democracy which was highly neoliberal in its policy choices—yet remained relatively deferential to working class concerns—was Australia, due to the combination of compulsory voting and preferential voting. Mass immigration to Australia was not a creation of neoliberal globalisation but a deliberate postwar populate-or-perish program of nation-building that had been argued out in public.

Fourthly, there came to be an awareness in policy circles that the collapse in fertility rates had long-term implications—especially fiscal implications for funding the welfare state. Hence, in 2000, the UN came up with what it called replacement migration—bring in immigrants to replace the children that were not being born.

Fifthly, the neoliberal policy regime was based on a policy binary—markets (i.e., commerce) or the state. It represented something of a resurgence of classical liberal ideas—which were, in their original form, blank slate ideas—but in a narrow, technocratic form. Mainstream Economics—especially in its Samuelsonian “social physics” form—naturally treats people as interchangeable “social particles.” That makes the maths much easier.

So, there was no problem with replacement migration as the incoming immigrants would be the same sort of economic “social particles” as the locals. Immigrants and locals were interchangeable social widgets who would transact in predictable ways and grow the economy through gains from trade.

A false binary

The trouble is, none of this policy binary was true. Precisely because value is subjective, you cannot neatly separate culture from incentives. We humans cognitively map significance, not facts. Different cultures cognitively “map” the social world differently, hence people from different cultures will behave differently in the same circumstances because, in patterns of significance—so cognitively—they are not the same circumstances.

People display distinct cultural patterns. Thus we see Somalis in Minnesota treating the American welfare state as Somalis in Somalia treat foreign aid: you say whatever you need to non-Somalis in order to get the outsiders to hand over money, that you then channel to your clan. Somalia is a highly collectivist, highly clan-based, culture and the correlation between how collectivist cultures are and how corrupt states are is 0.91.

The stupidity was expecting that mere movement to the US—or any other Western liberal democracy based on far more individualist cultures—would lead to different behaviour. It was even more stupid to allow entry in such large numbers that their existing cultural patterns would be that much more reinforced.

Yes, institutions create incentives, but only if their rules are enforced. The demands required for well-functioning US (or Swedish or …) institutions were not enforced. Instead, the DEI-mentality—including the sacralisation of “people of colour”—married to political patronage, meant that (in both Minnesota and Sweden) Somali cultural patterns continued to operate and to corrode local institutions.

Such sacralisation of “people of colour”—extending to failure to enforce the rules, interacting with Islam’s legitimation of rape—is why the UK ended up with a massive Muslim “grooming gang” problem while Australia crushed its local problem. See ’s excellent discussion below.

But we are back to the Australian political system incorporating working class concerns. The British elite, meanwhile, is systematically contemptuous of its working class and their concerns. Britain’s Blair-and-after moralised technocratic managerialism both expresses—and provides cover for—such contempt.

As I have discussed previously, that one can walk into any shop, market, bazaar in the world and recognisable conventions for property and exchange apply—and that commerce has strong profit-loss-risk-management incentives—has systematically encouraged economists to overstate the underlying similarity of human motives and so to understate the significance of cultural differences.

People with shared cultures will behave differently in different institutional circumstances, provided the institutions generate sufficiently powerful incentives. But people of different cultures will behave differently within the same institutional order. People who are well aware of differences between groups within the US seem to somehow discount or ignore differences between groups from outside the US.

Noticing substantive differences between human groups goes against Samuelsonian “social physics” economics, which analyses humans as interchangeable social particles. Such social physics—as a general analytical presumption—extends beyond loss-gain-risk commercial incentives only if people are blank slates.

The sharp divide over immigration is between those who—whether or not they realise it—are operating off blank slate presumptions and those who are not. Thanks to our toxically incompetent universities, blank slate claims have acquired normative dominance among Western elites.

The discourse on immigration dominant among Western elites operates as if both immigrants and locals can be treated as interchangeable social widgets—hence, one can analyse immigrants in an undifferentiated way—using normatively-dominant blank slate presumptions. The dissenting discourse treats differences between human groups—including cultural differences—as being analytically significant. This flagrantly violates blank slate presumptions.

Blank slate delusions

Newsflash, we are not blank slates. There are all sorts of differences between humans—both as individuals and groups—that matter, whether genetic, cultural or in other personal traits.

If we Homo sapiens are products of evolution, we cannot possibly be blank slates. For instance, we—along with Pan troglodytes (chimpanzees)—are the most proactively aggressive of the primates. We and chimpanzees are the primates most likely to deliberately kill fellow members of our species. We humans are also, however, the least reactively aggressive of the primates. We are the primates least likely to immediately respond to another member of our species with violence. Chimpanzees. . .are not.

As those forms of aggression use different brain circuits, the most plausible explanation for this pattern is that—across many generations—beta males combined to systematically kill off the alpha males (those high in reactive aggression). In other words, we murdered our way to niceness.

We greatly reduced our propensity to reactive aggression, but we did not eliminate it. Indeed, reactive aggression continues to dominate patterns of homicide. Meanwhile, our propensity to proactive aggression was not selected against: we remain the equal most proactively aggressive of the primates.

These trends were about selection pressures. Hence the propensity to violence varies greatly between and within human groups due to a mix of genetic, other biological, cultural and institutional factors.

For example, males (particularly young males) overwhelmingly dominate perpetrators of violence (except against children). Human toddlers are very physically aggressive and have to be socialised out of such aggressiveness. As philosopher Hannah Arendt famously said:

Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians—we call them ‘children’.

Any notion that humans are naturally benign and peaceful souls is nonsense on stilts. We have the capacity to be, and often are, such. This, however, depends hugely on context. This is why levels of violence can vary so greatly by locality—even within the same city.

From the high medieval period to around 1900, there was a dramatic fall across Europe in violence and homicide rates that started in Atlantic littoral Europe and spread South and East. This is what sociologist Norbert Elias called the civilising process—i.e., the becoming-more-civil process.

Not all cultures have gone through this, or a similar, process. This means that cultures vary dramatically in their rates of violence—even without considering other differences in genetic selection pressures across millennia.

One is supposed to be very impressed, for example, with Australian Aborigines having inhabited the Australian continent for roughly 65,000 years. One is not supposed to ask what specific selection pressures operated across those 3,000-and-counting generations—with continuing consequences. Nowadays, Aboriginal metabolic health is disastrous. They’ve been going through the simultaneous metabolic disasters of the Neolithic farming revolution—which farming populations took millennia to adapt to, and is something that we Homo sapiens have never fully achieved—and the modern processed food revolution, in very few generations.

If one is operating off the blank slate presumption, consequences from differing selection pressures does not even arise. Worse, raising the question is illegitimate.

Noticing inconvenient differences between human populations is a horrible sin in blank slate world. For, without inconvenient differences—and especially noticing inconvenient differences—our blank slate sameness would enable ultimate social harmony to be achieved.

Homo sapiens have gracile features because of our low rates of reactive aggression. So, one would expect that human populations with more gracile features (e.g. East Asians) would have lower rates of reactive aggression and human populations with less gracile features—Sub-Saharan Africans and Australian Aborigines—would have higher rates of reactive aggression across human jurisdictions.

This is indeed what we observe but—thanks to the blank slate delusions having normative dominance amongst Western elites thanks to our toxically incompetent universities—neither voters nor those making public policy are supposed to notice this. It is one of the reasons why, for example, the US is dramatically under-policed.

We are a distinctively cultural species because we are the blankest slates in the biosphere. But our very nature as cultural beings—and that our brains are structured for us to be cultural beings, including structure to learn rules and norms readily—generates a whole new set of differences between human groups. Cultures generate different maps of meaning, differing patterns of significance. This operates on top of any differences in distribution of genetic traits due to different selection pressures across millennia between human groups.

The liberal delusion

So, the notion that we are blank slates who—through the application of our reason—will all become good little liberals if we are just exposed to liberal ideas, is delusional. Liberalism is the product of a very particular cultural matrix. Practical liberals such as John Stuart Mill were always aware of this. (Mill holding senior administrative positions in the British East India Company aided his awareness of cultural difference.)

Alas, liberal theory has, from its origins, been couched in universalist terms that readily deludes itself about not being a product of a particular cultural matrix. The various Lockean, Hobbesian and Rousseauian states of nature are not remotely accurate descriptions of pre-state human societies.

To take just one failure, all of them presume an absence of kin-groups. These were absent from European societies as a result of their deliberate suppression across millennia by first Classical Greek city-states and the Roman Republic/Empire, and then by the Christian Church—particularly in manorial Latin Europe.

This suppression had cultural and institutional consequences that were invisible to liberal and proto-liberal theorists and are still invisible to many Westerners. In particular, it lead to a cultural individualism that was quite specific to European Christendom and its offshoots. Liberal theory has universalised it precisely because of a delusional philosophical anthropology—borrowed, in large part, from the religion—while being utterly unaware of the distinctiveness of its own civilisational history.

Rousseau is wrong about so much it is hard to know where to start. He is wrong about property, which does not rest on mine! but on yours! All mine! does is create as contestable territoriality. Your dog can do it as well as you can—try taking his bone. It is acknowledgment by others of yours! that creates the conventions of property, of rights-to-decide.

Human toddlers have to be socialised into yours! They get mine! rather more easily. But they are remarkably easy to socialise into shared rules precisely because we are not blank slates. They are primed to pick up language—because they are primed for rules and norms—but have to be taught literacy and numeracy, which are entirely cultural creations.

Human sociality is not incidental and reason-based—as Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau claim. Human sociality is fundamental and rests on our emotional and normative cognitive architecture. That is what is so scary about psychopaths—part of that primed cognitive architecture is just missing.

Systematically killing off the highly reactively-aggressive alpha males greatly aided the development of human sociality. Hence we observe that the more gracile, less reactively aggressive, human populations show more robust sociality than the less gracile, more reactively aggressive, human populations. This absolutely creates differences that matter for immigration policy.

Open borders advocacy requires the blank slate delusion, as it requires there are no differences between human groups that are corrosive to a liberal social order. This claim is false.

The next post explores further the decay of the postwar policy regimes and the lack of a clear alternative.

I’m writing this because the exploding literary festival in question is illustrative of, well, quite a number of things—some to do with the Bondi Massacre. Others concern the parlous state of the creative arts throughout the developed world.

The short version: Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah has been on the receiving end of some pretty serious deplatforming, the effect of which has been to blow up not one but two Australian literary festivals.

First, in August last year, was the Bendigo Writers’ Festival. Australia’s Jewish lobby persuaded the festival to adopt a code of conduct requiring invitees to avoid discussing “language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful” and mandated compliance with a major university sponsor’s anti-racism policy. Writers had only two days to comply, and as a sometime attendee of writers’ festivals in the past, I can assure you their speeches would have been written and readings selected.

Led by Abdel-Fattah, this mix of inconvenience and censorship meant most writers bailed out, and the festival collapsed.

Bendigo is a prosperous regional city (pop. approx. 100K) in country Victoria, and its city council was not really in a position to save it—everything happened at such short notice.

This week, the Abdel-Fattah cancellation roadshow made its way to Adelaide Writers’ Week, which is part of the larger Adelaide Arts Festival. For British readers, the relationship between the two bodies is akin to that between the Edinburgh International Festival and the Fringe or Book Festival. It has a decent claim to being Australia’s flagship literary festival, although Sydney and Melbourne do try to contest this.

Adelaide is the state capital of South Australia, has a population of approximately one and a half million, and is famously rich, beautiful, and cultured. Cricket fans are invited to recall the gorgeous Adelaide Oval. For everyone else, the whole city is like that.

South Australia was Australia’s only “free colony”—no convicts were transported there—and this has produced some oddities. South Australians have a different accent from other Australians, and the broad culture of its intellectuals—going back long before Federation in 1901—has had an extraordinary impact on Australian constitutionalism and politics. Catherine Helen Spence, one of Australia’s Framers (and designer of the country’s remarkable electoral system), came from Adelaide.

In a story with some similarities to the Bendigo Writers’ Festival stooshie, Randa Abdel-Fattah was deplatformed from Adelaide Writers’ Week over what can be described as a pretty feral social media feed. At first blush, Adelaide’s effort appeared to be heading in the same direction as Bendigo’s—down the long slide. Writers have been bailing out left and right, and the festival website listing attendees has been deleted because so many authors are no longer coming.

However, in between the two festivals, the Bondi Massacre happened, and the country has changed. I wrote about that process for Law & Liberty.

Before Bondi, it’s fair to say that the Pro-Palestinian position had broadly “won” the public argument in Australia. Unlike in the UK, this was not achieved by intimidation or controlling the streets. Outside the universities, pro-Palestine protests were generally orderly and calm. Relatedly, Australia’s Palestine lobby had not become associated with cancellation campaigns—unlike the Jewish lobby.

This framing reached its nadir for Australian Jews when—in June 2025—the Federal Court ruled against them in Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation. That case concerned a campaign to get Antoinette Lattouf, a pro-Palestinian journalist, sacked. She litigated using Australia’s robust industrial relations legislation (the Fair Work Act), and she won. Employers that give into cancellation campaigns—and people who engage in them—were put on notice.

Attempting to get people sacked for their views is despised in Australia, something with deep historical roots in the country’s still powerful trade union movement. Among other things, the Lattouf ruling led the country’s trade unions to adopt a uniform pro-Palestine position. The current Federal government is Labor, and depends heavily on the trade unions for both political and financial support. Australia recognised a Palestinian state in short order.

Then Bondi happened.

The Australian electorate’s Eye of Sauron1 turned on both Islamism and Palestinian activism the way it had previously focussed on Jewish activism. The poll below—undertaken shortly after the massacre—indicates the consequences. Positions have only hardened since then. Until Bondi, Australia’s cheerful, smiley PM, Anthony Albanese, had been genuinely popular. Now—while people still like the Australian Labor Party—Albanese’s personal approval ratings are in the toilet.

This—as much as anything—is why Albo (as Australians call him) has ordered one of Australia’s famously toothy Royal Commissions both into the Bondi Massacre and wider anti-Semitism.

So while Australia’s (generally pretty far left; I’m the country’s only literary Tory of renown) writers and artists may view Adelaide Writers’ Week events through the same lens they used last August—when Bendigo blew up—the wider Australian electorate no longer agrees with them.

Peter Malinauskas, the South Australian Premier (equivalent of a US governor or—roughly—Scotland’s First Minister), has therefore come out playing hardball, both against Abdel-Fattah and Australian literary culture more widely.

I pause here to note that Malinauskas is also Labor, but comes from a different ALP faction and a different trade union background than Albanese. A long-standing member of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association2 (known as “the Shoppies”)—one of Australia’s right-leaning unions—Malinauskas has (probably) made use of his union’s “dirt unit” to grub up some seriously damaging information about Abdel-Fattah, viz:

Abdel-Fattah has been complaining long and loud about cancellations for the best part of six months—and getting a lot of public sympathy as a result. However, this depended on her own involvement in a cancellation campaign not coming to light.

Interestingly, Thomas Friedman did not kick up a stink when he was deplatformed in 2024. I’m not sure why this is, but—if Wikipedia is to be believed, always a big if—he appears to be a fairly conventional Jewish lobby figure, and so supports hate speech laws and no-platforming. He may have felt constrained from objecting on “sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander” grounds. Although not widely known in Australia, he is nonetheless a genuinely distinguished writer, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes.

Two things fall out of this. First, Abdel-Fattah has been exposed as a hypocrite, while her behaviour shows the extraordinary temptations of relational aggression as an activity. Secondly, she has engaged in a behaviour—female-coded relational aggression—that Arab men hate with the blazing heat of a thousand suns.

If it’s possible to despise rumour-mongering and sneaking behind other people’s backs more than Australian unionists do, then those haters will be Arabs. A (small) insight I picked up living and working in the Middle East (chiefly Syria, but I also travelled to other countries) is that one reason—among many—Jews and Arabs don’t get on is because the two peoples often define bravery differently.

A (final) literary note

When my publisher tried to organise a launch slot for my second novel (2017) and third novel (2018) at Adelaide Writers’ Week (in separate years obviously), it was stymied at every turn. This is despite its managing editor being from Adelaide literary royalty—a distinguished writer in his own right, and the son of an even more distinguished South Australian writer—and me being a Miles Franklin Award winner.3 Like the late Clive James—who also struggled to get Australian literary festival invitations—I’m non-U in Australia’s literary community. With me, it’s because of my right-wing politics. James, for his part, was a climate change sceptic despite being broadly centre-left in other respects.

Australian literary and artistic culture is, ahem, not healthy, not diverse, not of high quality, and horrendously parochial—all at once. As in Britain and the US, publishing is a censorious mess dependent on government largesse for both writers and festivals. As you’ll see from the links in this piece, the South Australian state government is in the hole to the tune of AUD $10 million (GBP £5 million; USD $6.7 million) for this year’s festival. Okay, Australia is a filthy rich country compared to the UK and US, but Malinauskas is still within his rights to be pretty pissed off with the sheltered workshop for woke hacks his state’s writers’ week has become. “Peter Malinauskas shat in our trousers” really doesn’t sound in damages, lit-gits of Australia.

The only libertarian political position I hold in unadulterated form is that there should be no state support for the arts. Make me Arts Minister and my sole ambition would be to make my place in Cabinet redundant. Since Wokery’s emergence, this has become even more urgent. The creative arts need to spend a good thirty years being forced to cater to the market/lowest common denominator to flush out the crap.

We need more starving artists forced to work normal day-jobs while being stigmatised as losers and weirdos by plumbers and shop assistants—they may even learn something. I recognise this probably means a few years of Survivor: Hay Festival (how will contestants survive the Sea of Smug that place radiates?) or Sydney Writers’ Week Luvvie Island. After that, a genuinely new avant-garde may emerge, but the cleanup has to happen first.

Addendum (added one-pm-ish GMT on Sunday 11th January)

There is evidence circulating that the reason Thomas Friedman did not kick up a stink in response to an attempt at cancellation is because he ran into a scheduling issue:

I will, here, insert a few caveats.

1. Everyone is assuming that the redacted name is Randa Abdel-Fattah. It may not be. It may be one of the other nine people involved in the original incident Malinauskas described.

2. Everyone is assuming it is genuine. I think it is genuine (I have seen it shared by people close to the Festival and of unimpeachable integrity), but we can all be fooled, and the easiest person to fool is yourself.

3. Everyone is assuming that Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation campaign was the only one that year. Speaking as someone who has been subjected to hundreds of these things, I assure you that there are almost always letters flying around left and right (only sometimes a reference to politics, and the left side is often internecine warfare) seeking to get people deplatformed/disinvited etc etc.

4. People who don’t like my even-handedness on this issue are reminded that Google is their friend. For those unwilling to let their fingers do the walking, I was subjected to a Jewish-lobby instigated cancellation campaign over my first novel. One of its leaders was Louise Adler, current director of Adelaide Writers’ Week (she has now changed sides on the issue, as you will have noted).

Finally, apologies for not putting this update in a separate piece, but the whole business is really very trivial when one considers what is happening in Iran and Venezuela, and frankly not worthy of another email on what is a genuinely intermittent substack. I do recognise this. I wrote it because it’s a world with which I’m familiar—I even know some of the players, having floated around its fringes for something like 30 years.

Yes, some of this is the wish-fulfilment power of this time will be different. It never is different in ways that are a net positive to human flourishing, but that has remarkably little purchase. People who have never had to confront any of the ghastly historical rhyming of the warmth of collectivism feel an especial pull.

But none of this explains the endless appeal of the communist ideal. People, after all, have to work at rationalisations, at ignoring, at downplaying of so much horror.

Some of it is that happy families do provide genuine communal warmth, which can be a seminal experience. Many loving and effective families do operate on the principle of from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. Problem is, cancer cells also operate on that principle.

It is not the principle here that is sound: rather, it’s a web of intimate biological connections and information that enables families to work as places of communal warmth. Such webs do not scale up: well, not very far.

Webs of intimate connections and information scale up to the foraging band—typically around 150 souls, the famous Dunbar’s Number—that was the basis of Homo sapien subsistence for the overwhelming majority of our existence as a species. That is how we evolved to live, so it makes sense such communality can have a profound, even atavistic, appeal.

Indeed, in the theory of Karl Marx, the march of history is from primitive communism—which suffered from tribal narrowness due to under-developed productive capacity—to global communism. The latter would be achieved when our productive capacity had multiplied so hugely as to enable elimination of all other classes apart from the one that does the productive work (the proletariat) coupled with liberation from the oppression that production constraints had otherwise made inevitable.

It is worth dwelling on what those foraging societies—whose primitive communism Marx cites as revealing our “species being”—were actually like. First of all, they were violent. They were violent internally: horticultural and foraging cultures have the highest rates of homicide of any human societies. Collectivism only works to general benefit if one can eliminate free riders and dominance behaviour. This elimination often involves violence.

Foraging societies were also violent externally: foraging populations genociding each other was a recurrent occurrence. Populations were small, their density was low, it was relatively easy to knock a foraging population down below the size where they could sustain the technological and social cohesion to survive.

Foraging societies were also technologically stagnant. There was remarkably little technological development for over 200,000 years of our existence as a species. Over the last 70-50,000 years, things sped up, but the rate of change was still slow. It is post-foraging societies where change really took off, with the fastest rates of change happening in the societies least like the “primitive communism” of foraging societies.

So, violent, genocidal, a strong tendency towards technological stagnation. Does this sound familiar? Marx was right, modern communism is a scaling up of primitive communism. Problem is, this is not a good thing.

So, yes, communism has an atavistic appeal. It resonates with our deep evolutionary history. A history we want to outdo—not recreate the same horrors at scale as communism does.

References

Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Robert L. Kelly, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum, Cambridge University Press, [1995] 2013.

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Read more

As background for the chat, I recommend reading my piece on Bondi for Law & Liberty, the magazine where I’m senior writer. As you’d expect from a legally-oriented outlet, I have covered some legislative background with respect to Australian immigration and its gun laws.

I did not discuss the ongoing royal commission political football—or the controls on protests the NSW state government has enacted—partly because there was a fair bit of “fog of news” getting around when I was writing (as you will see when you read it, I nearly tripped and fell down the “but Sajid Akram came from Pakistan!” hole).

Lorenzo and I will discuss the unaddressed issues for our paid subscribers; you will get a dedicated Zoom link with a complete set of instructions as usual.

One of the great puzzles of our time is how oppressor/oppressed dichotomies, and celebrations of marginalisation—ideas that came out of Critical Theory, so from meditations on Marxism—came to spread across Western institutions and throughout public discourse. There are a range of factors that matter: the dramatic expansion in universities; the massive expansion in bureaucratisation, whether government, corporate or non-profit; the feminisation of institutions and occupations.

In We Have Never Been Woke, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi provides a key part of the explanation for the spread of such ideas. They were re-packaged as elite signals, as signals of moral righteousness, of how you showed yourself to be a good and worthy person.

Social signals

These new signals of righteousness fitted in with the ideas of equality—particularly of group equality—that arose in the wake of the 1960s equal rights movements. Equality-as-equal-group-outcomes were given extra legal force by the disparate impact ruling of the US Supreme Court in Griggs v Duke Power (1971) and by waves of anti-discrimination legislation.

Consider DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion): it became a way of signalling we really care about merit; we will look for talent anywhere and everywhere (p.260). This was not remotely the only thing going on with DEI, but it was central to how quickly it managed to spread. Righteous embrace of talent had also been a factor in the original DEI programs: the Soviet Korenizatsiya program; Mao’s so-called Black and Red identities; North Korea’s Songbun system.

In the case of DEI, there is a difference between signal and action. Indeed, that difference is central to We Have Never Been Woke, and especially its title. That these moral signals did not get in the way of people acting in their own interests—indeed, they helped them to do so—was precisely the point and the appeal.

The adoption of such being moral signalling generated a commitment to curate information flows so as to protect such moralised cognitive assets; the beliefs and claims about the world that make for truly moral people. This has come to generate very considerable social costs: costs to the health of public discourse; costs to Western elite willingness to confront any moral-signal-inconvenient facts; costs to the quality of schooling and education; costs to social solidarity by the moralised denigration—amounting to exclusion—of voices that failed to play such games.

While We Have Never Been Woke is mostly concerned about social dynamics, Musa al-Gharbi is very much concerned with who is and is not favoured within such dynamics. It is clear that exclusions fell disproportionately on working-class voices who failed to keep up with the latest linguistic taboos.

Those linguistic taboos shift regularly so as to preserve their elite signalling capacity—Latinx anyone? Relatedly, it is hard to understand the sheer, vicious antipathy of so much of the British elite to the visibly working-class Tommy Robinson without understanding the threat he imposed to elite understandings of what made one—what signalled that one was—a moral person.

Those wider social costs for public discourse, institutional health and social solidarity did not fall on those playing evolving elite status games. On the contrary, the cost of undermining—by dissenting from—the shared status game was much more potentially serious. It is only moral to affirm X if it is immoral to affirm not-X.

It became morally respectable—even required—to shun and shame people over their politics. To do so not only showed how moral you were, it showed your commitment to the shared status game of moral-because-believe-correctly. A game that advantages the shrill over the competent.

The historian A. J. P. Taylor once noted that while working class people in Britain did not have to join the Labour Party to affirm their working class status, middle-class intellectuals could do so in no other way. The educated class (“post-material”) takeover of centre-left politics has become so complete that mechanisms to exclude working-class voices now increasingly dominate such politics.

More and more, working-class voters have noticed, and either stopped voting or shifted to voting for populists. The more one experiences elite contempt and exclusion, the more appeal ostentatiously anti-elite politics have.

The synergy of the offered being moral signal with elite networking led to enthusiastic adoption of the offered moral-signalling game. This adoption was beneficial to the adoptees, but that does not mean it was insincere. Our conscious cognition is only a small fraction of our cognition and we Homo sapiens are easily capable of whatever level of self-deception is required to adopt beliefs that work for us.

This is especially so as we are such highly imitative—even mimetic—species as well as a very status-conscious species. This is a moralised status strategy that could—and did—extend to all realms of life: into comedy, advertising, workplaces, schools, universities, professional associations, media, journals, sport, fiction, entertainment, games, hobbies … .

It all works so much better as an elite-signalling game if folk adopt the beliefs required to prosecute it. This then maximises the incentive to curate one’s information flows to protect such moralised cognitive assets. Maximising the personal benefit maximises the social cost of the status strategy.

The advantage of sincerity, even of self-deceiving sincerity, does not mean, however, that there will not be some preference falsification—pretending to believe what one does not. On the contrary, the more social sanctions are used to enforce the shared moralised status game, the more extensive preference falsification is likely to be.

Tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel discusses precisely such preference falsification happening in the Tech sector. The recent “vibe shift” is at least some of those falsifications collapsing in a preference cascade.

Why these ideas?

It was not accidental that meditations on Marxism were sources for these new elite signals of righteousness. The problem with OG Marxism was that it was tough sell to Western elites—we will shoot you, possibly your entire family, and take your property. Not an ideal marketing strategy. On the contrary, Western elites were all too willing to put considerable efforts into opposing Communism—both Communist Parties inside the West and Communist Powers outside the West. That was very much the dynamic of the Cold War era that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In stark contrast to we will shoot you, possibly your entire family, and take your property, the new, Critical Theory derived, package said: affirm these beliefs, using this language, and you will signal to the world how moral you are, how much you care. In other words, being truly moral is about displaying-through-affirmation the splendours in your head.

In addition to any other assets folk may have, they could add highly moralised cognitive assets. Even better, these new moralised (cognitive) assets could be used in synergy with their existing advantages. In particular, they actively assisted the networking that is at the heart of elite credentialing and signalling.

Re-packaging those moral splendours in ostentatiously progressive heads so that they could operate as elite-signalling devices turned out to be a massive winner in spreading such ideas and having them colonise Western institutions. Offering members of Western elites moralised cognitive assets proved to just the ticket.

How so? Well, to whom was this re-packaged, piety-display version of ostentatious virtue absolute catnip? To those whose position in society was already based on what was in their heads—yet did not have to face the reality-tests of wresting value from physical things—and to whom a parade of altruism was already a preferred basis to claim position, status and authority.

These are the group that Musa al-Gharbi labels symbolic capitalists. Symbolic capitalists are people whose economic position is defined by their possession of symbolic capital. Musa al-Gharbi is using a sociological definition of capital:

… someone who possesses financial resources (capital) that are used to acquire, exert control over, and extract profits from the means of (material production). (P.7)

This is a terrible definition and concept of capital. That it is central to much sociology is enough on its own to consign the discipline to the dustbin of history. It riffs off Marx’s dreadfully bad concept of capital and reflects Sociology falling into what Arnold Kling nicely calls the tarpit of Marxism. The great advantage of Marxism and its derivatives is that it offers the denizens of such Theory moralised cognitive assets.

Hence, the Communist antecedents for DEI are not accidental. Just as Critical Theory was a way of laundering Marxism so as to insulate the core ideas from the mass murders, tyrannies, and economic stagnation of actual Marxism (i.e. Communism), so ideas derived from Critical Theory proved to be an excellent way of laundering social advantages into self-righteous moral authority.

There is a wider geopolitical irony here. Geopolitically, Communism was the best thing that happened for the United States as it demographically and economically crippled the two states most able to rival it—Russia and China.

Just as the Chinese Communist Party has come to use commerce to break out of the economic stagnation inherent in command economies, status games flowing from derivatives of Marxism have been doing systematic institutional damage to the United States, robbing it of much of what had been its institutional advantages. This pattern is even more advanced in Canada, the UK, the EU. The adoption of toxic status strategies by elites is a great way to bring down a state, a society, a civilisation.

Elite signalling of moral virtue was much less of a change in the Marxian source ideas than it might appear, as left-progressivism has always been based on extolling the splendours in the heads of believers. Even in The Communist Manifesto, a clear distinction is drawn between the proletarians to be liberated and the Communists who will lead that liberation.

There is always a gulf between folk to be equalised and those doing the equalising. The most ostentatious exponents of “equality”—in whatever form, including elimination of distinct classes—are often quite vicious in asserting their moral superiority over all those not so righteously committed. This is a very conspicuous feature of Marx’s own writings, for example.

Connections before transactions

The irony is that the leaden legacy of Marx is most obvious in We Have Never Been Woke precisely in the concept of capital invoked. Economists have a fairly straightforward notion of capital—the economically produced factor of production. This contrasts with the other factors of production—land and labour. So, you can have physical capital (tools, machines, buildings, etc) and human capital (skills and knowledge). It is a fairly short step to social capital (connections and framings that help with risk management; opportunity spotting; collective action problems).

Production requires coordination of factors of production. It also requires effective information flows—plus risk management—with which connections can provide and/or assist. Ronald Coase’s famous transaction costs theory of the firm is precisely about whether to rely on transactions or on connections to manage production and commerce.

We grow up embedded in connections long before transactions become important to us. Even after they do, connections still matter; hence friends, relatives, acquaintances is persistently the most important labour market intermediary.

A large reason why conventional economic analysis of immigration is so hopeless—and a prime example of social science making Western societies stupider—is precisely because societies are treated as connectionless arenas for free-floating transactions where efficiency is the pervasively trumping concern and there are no issues of social resilience.

This analytical failure is aided by a favourable view of immigration itself having become a powerful elite moral signal. Indeed, it is clear that many regard immigrants as “purifying”—indeed decolonising—Western societies.

Hence, there really is no public debate on immigration. There are people in different informational universes shouting past each other, with economists’ commitment to the Theory which is the basis of their social-institutional standing aiding in their curating of the information they receive/take cognisance of. Those different informational universes are themselves largely generated and maintained by curation of information to protect moralised cognitive assets. This is very much part of the social cost of the elite status strategy analysed so usefully in We Have Never Been Woke.

Back to capital

Financial capital may seem a bit of a stretch for the concept of capital. It is less so once one realises that risk management is a fundamental element in economic production. Commerce is very concerned with risk management.

So, what capital does in its various forms is perform an economic function. It is not some mysterious claim on resources. The profound analytical failure of the Sociological concept of capital springs from Marx’s greatly overblown Conflict Theory of social dynamics, famously expressed in his and Engel’s statements that:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

That:

… every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.

This generates a concomitant underrating—by those who fall into the tarpit of Marxism—of the cooperative mechanisms that enable human societies to scale up so dramatically.

This replacement of attention to coordination and functionality with an analysis of “clear to us clever folk” exploitation plays much better to academic status games. Conservative concern for making things work is much less appealing in any academic status game than such lofty moralised knowingness.

This is especially as academics do not have to make anything—even their disciplines—work except as an academic status game. The notion that they may have some obligation to serve the society, culture and citizens that pay for, and protect them, is, again and again, not acceptable to academic arrogance. All this is both a reflection, and cause, of the exclusion of conservative voices from so much of academe.

Marx’s dreadful concept of capital leads to capitalist, which is a dreadful term for folk who coordinate land, labour and capital, who engage in risk management and commercial discovery. Many people in business use little or none of their own capital, however much they may be coordinating capital with land and labour.

The deeply misleading concept of capitalist—and for that matter of capitalism—has spread well beyond Marxism and leads to silly “crank the handle/just add factors of production” conceptions of economic growth and “just add capital” failures of foreign aid. It also obscures why different cultural groups can have dramatically different economic outcomes—due to having very different propensities to network productively; to coordinate; to risk manage; to discover; to generate and use capital.

The dreadful Marxian/Sociological concept of capital feeds directly into “success = oppression” and to viewing differences in social outcomes between groups as presumptive moral failures. The latter is something that Musa al-Gharbi’s commentary in We Have Never Been Woke buys into, without getting in the way of his underlying analysis—though it does help him highlight the gulf between signal and action.

After invoking the Sociological concept of capital, Musa al-Gharbi continues:

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, we can define a symbolic capitalist as someone who possesses a high level of symbolic capital and exerts control over, and extracts profits from, the means of symbolic (re)production. (P.7)

That so many of these people are employees—and even fewer of them employ anyone themselves—makes the notion of them as capitalists even more misleading. Yes, the ones that do employ people are typically doing so to help them commercialise their skills but that commercialisation is not what they have in common.

The Introduction goes through Musa al-Gharbi’s personal history and what led him to where he is. He starts the first chapter—On Wokeness—with a short biography of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) before moving on to Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital.

… the resources available to someone on the basis of honor, prestige, celebrity, consecration, and recognition. (P.24)

Moreover,

These symbolic aspects of social life are intimately bound up with power and wealth, or with material and political needs and aspirations. According to Bourdieu, the roles people are assigned to on the basis of their symbolic capital (or lack thereof) may actually be more important than more conventional economic factors in determining how power is arranged in society. And regardless of how such inequalities come about, it is primarily through symbolic capital that they are legitimised and maintained. (Pp24-25)

Given the Queer Theory nonsense of “sex assigned at birth”, we should be particularly alert to the analytical red flag in “roles people are assigned to on the basis of the symbolic capital (or lack thereof)”. The phrasing of “how power is arranged in society” is also a bit of a worry.

Why would we call any of this capital? What about issues of expectations, conflicting presumptions, contested claims, performance? If status and authority claims are such important issues, is the use of such ersatz economic terms really the way to go in analysing it? Yes, the ability to garner people’s attention is absolutely a crucial element in status but that is something that itself requires management precisely because it is so interactive. Why do we have culture anyway? What does it do and how?

No, folk do notice

Musa al-Gharbi continues:

However, symbolic capital operates much more subtly than other forms of power and wealth. Indeed, when deployed effectively, neither the person wielding this capital nor the people it is exercised on will consciously recognize the power dynamics at play. Instead, interactions, relationships and states of affairs will seem natural, necessary, inevitable, or in any case normal to all those involved. (P.25)

“Effectively” is doing a lot of work here. Many folk are patently alienated by the authority claims being advanced by so-called “symbolic capitalists”, and that fact that social sanctions are so much part of the status-signalling package means they require enforcement, precisely because they are not “just accepted”.

By contrast, legal academic Joan Williams back in 2016 picked up on class-based cultural tensions because the claimed authority of the “symbolic capitalists” is not only not invisible to working-class people, it is openly resented:

For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables

Musa al-Gharbi continues riffing off Bourdieu:

Even those at the bottom of social hierarchies will often acquiesce or resign themselves to their own domination. As Bourdieu put it, “Symbolic power is the invisible power which can be excised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it.” (P.25)

There is clearly nothing invisible about such authority claims to working-class folk. What may well be invisible is the use of morality for social signalling and social aggression by those doing so: but that is an evolved human mechanism for social aggression which seeks to avoid physical backlash—and to be more effective as social aggression—by piggy-backing off status-through-propriety; i.e. status through ostentatious norm adherence.

Moralised social aggression that does not know when to stop is a curse of our time, one greatly enabled by social media. Much of the contemporary mobilisation of such aggression was pioneered by activists on behalf of Jews. Musa al-Gharbi himself was targeted in this way, and ended up working in a shoe shop for several years. We need the modern equivalent of the ducking stool to police our social emotions as part of restoring health to our public discourse and institutions.

Fortunately, once Musa al-Gharbi has labelled symbolic capitalists as people possessing symbolic capital, then the concept of capital and being capitalists performs no more analytical work in We Have Never Been Woke. For all the rest of his analysis, he is looking at status, claims to authority, contests over position, the operation of networks.

One of the strengths of the book is pointing out that these claims are a class pattern that can, and do, attack both rightwards and leftwards. They often rely on academic and bureaucratic cowardice. al-Gharbi comes from a military family and is clearly unimpressed by the pervasive cowardice of academics.

The capitalist in symbolic capitalist thus becomes a way of saying elite/having elite pretensions and, perhaps, a labelling jab that accords with a certain cachet of Sociological Seriousness. The last resounds with me not at all, since I regard Sociology as, at best, the Anthropology of developed societies and, at worst, a mess of Theory no one should call their intellectual home.

After all, what is examining in a scholarly way: status; claims to authority; contests over position; the operation of networks? Classic Anthropology. What We Were Never Woke does demonstrate is that perceptive social noticing, backed up by careful empirical work assembling relevant and useful data, can overcome a bad analytical framework—especially one mainly used for labelling (and perhaps signalling).

Only the latest Awokening

In the second chapter—The Great Awokening(s)—Musa al-Gharbi argues that what commentator Matt Yglesias famously labeled The Great Awokening was merely the latest in a series of such Awokenings since the early C20th. The first was in the 1920s, the next in the late 60s, the third in the late 80s and the fourth from the 2010s to present.

The Awokenings represent sharpened contests for position and resources in periods when there is an over-supply of certain types of human capital, relative to demand for that knowledge and skills. Hence, a sharpening of moral claims, of ostentatious altruism, both as a way of more intensely competing for available positions—including, for younger cohorts to push aside older ones—and for expanding the number of positions available on the grounds of both commitment to worthy moral projects and analytical utility.

Both these things have been conspicuous features of the most recent Great Awokening. Discourses that can help with such claims are clearly favoured among such occupations.

Like political scientist Eric Kaufmann, Musa al-Gharbi emphasises the use of various moral discourses over their content. Yet ideas have consequences. It is not accidental which discourses get adopted. To at least some degree, these discourses then have to be acted out.

But, I would agree with Musa al-Gharbi, the acting out is the key thing. That is, however, not quite the killer point about hypocrisy—about the gap between signal and action—it looks like. Left-progressivism has NEVER achieved what it says it’ll do on the tin. Ever. “We Were Never Woke” is up there with “true Communism has never been tried”.

Yes, a discourse adopted as an elite status strategy—that then replicates and advances elite networking—absolutely can have remarkable little impact on the social outcomes it pretends to care about. Gregory Clark’s work on how little social mobility there is across human societies makes that even less of a surprise.

But the notion that we can achieve equal outcomes between social groups is as much an unnatural social fantasy as Communism itself. To set equality—particularly equality understood as equal outcomes between groups—as the supreme moral benchmark is a nonsense. Especially when it involves—as it does again and again—creating a moral caste system of stigmatisation: stigmatisation from which affirming righteous belief can be a protection.

But the very impossibility of achieving such equal outcomes makes it a useful social fantasy. The moral project that is made absolute moral trumps—but can never be achieved—is a claim on authority, power and resources that never goes away. Musa al-Gharbi seems to buy into that particular social fantasy too much to fully grasp how it being unattainable is central to its utility.

The third chapter (Symbolic Domination), the fourth (Postmaterialist Politics), fifth (Totemic Politics), sixth (Mystification of Social Processes) examine the authority claims of the symbolic capitalists, their politics, their self-deceptions and how their patterns extend beyond even the most currently dominant set of social signals.

Needed: new status games

What We Were Never Woke does clarify to the thoughtful reader, is that to fully stop “wokery”—including repackaged versions—we have to find a new elite signalling and status strategy. To be an improvement, not merely a replacement, it will need to be a pro-social elite signalling and status strategy. One that is far more conducive to open discourse, facts, science, and social solidarity than the current “woke” version, which is none of those things.

Alas, it will be hard to compete with a status strategy that is both so self-deceptively self-serving and so morally and intellectually lazy. I’m pretty sure it will continue to have life even if “woke” goes off the boil. Somehow, as a friend has noted, we have to “Make Doing Hard Things Sexy Again”. It is hard to see how we will manage that without profoundly reforming, even gutting, higher education.

There are many fine things about Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke. The book is clearly written, in a matter-of-fact style. It is full of useful empiricism, of effective and appropriate use of evidence. It has a solid historical sense. The author has the gift of noticing.

It is sad about the theoretical framework. Riffing off Bourdieu’s cultural capital suffers from way too much capital, not nearly enough culture; not nearly enough simply concentrating on the social dynamics of status, networking, authority claims and how they get contested. But the central point—that these are a series of moralised authority claims being made by a class under pressure through over-supply—is powerfully conveyed.

References

David Cayley (ed.), The Ideas Of Rene Girard: An Anthropology of Violence and Religion, David Cayley, 2019.

Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, Princeton University Press, 2014.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite,

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29581024/

Mark Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,’ Sociological Theory, Vol.1, 1983, 201-233. https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/local/Social/f15/wrap/readings/Granovetter-revisited.pdf

Oliver Heath, ‘Policy Alienation, Social Alienation and Working-Class Abstention in Britain, 1964–2010,’ British Journal of Political Science, 48(4), (2016), 1053–1073. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/70E409B4E2274FAE7844449B95DA0EBB/S0007123416000272a.pdf/div-class-title-policy-alienation-social-alienation-and-working-class-abstention-in-britain-1964-2010-div.pdf

Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Cosimo, [1921] 2005.

Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lives: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Harvard University Press, [1995] 1997.

Girijasankar Mallik, ‘Foreign Aid and Economic Growth: A Cointegration Analysis of the Six Poorest African Countries,’ Economic Analysis and Policy, Volume 38, Issue 2, 2008, 251-260. https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/99051097/v38_i2_07_mallik-libre.pdf

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011], 2013.

Industry news/gossip magazine Roll on Friday—otherwise known as the “orange time-suck” among City solicitors—has a handy run-down of the most egregious fake quotations, selective editing, and incorrect citations. It’s a concise one-stop-shop for Peggie errors, although they’ve already had to add to it since it was published yesterday.

The situation is far more serious than the single—and that was bad enough—fake quotation from Forstater, since corrected by means of what lawyers call “the slip rule”. Notably, the corrected quotation does not support the point Judge Kemp wanted to make, rendering the passage nonsensical.

The slip rule or procedure—something many of us have seen in practice—exists to fix typos, wrong page/paragraph numbers, misspellings. One common error I remember from my pupillage days is fat-fingered judges leaving the “o” out of county in “County Court,” which of course litters the judgment with “Cunty Court”. Yes, everyone laughs and says “typo,” but things like this do have to be fixed.

The Roll on Friday piece notes that the Peggie opinion presents “a summary as if it was a quote from a judgment,” something that “appears to be a recurring issue.” This, as most people know by now, is a hallmark of AI.

I can’t prove that Judge Kemp used ChatGPT or Grok or a bespoke AI made available through the Judicial Office, although my suspicions are strong on this point. As an associate back in the oughts (a special kind of pupil barrister who works for a judge in a superior state or federal court in Australia), I’ve drafted multiple legal judgments. I have a good idea about what goes into them.

I also don’t know if Judge Kemp is on the transactivist side of this particular debate. I do know, however, that the judgment is dreadfully written and full of woolly reasoning, and—as other people have pointed out—all the errors tend in one direction.

I’m now going to set out what I think has happened, with the caveat that I could be wrong—something no-one will know until the appeal is heard and an opinion handed down.

Forms, precedents, and pleadings

Lawyers—when we’re in practice, and even as academics—make extensive use of in-house banks of “styles” (Scotland) or “precedents” (England) when drafting contracts, pleadings, debt instruments, corporate structures, legislation, trusts, wills etc. These represent the accumulated wisdom of one’s firm, usually over decades and even centuries. Some of them go back to antiquity (eg contracts of insurance and reinsurance, which have roots in “bottomry loans” developed by Roman notaries). If, as an employed solicitor, you draft something useful that works well for a client or clients, it belongs to your firm, not you—the usual rule with intellectual property produced “during the course of employment.”

There are also companies that provide searchable banks of styles or precedents for a fee, and firms subscribe to them. Probably the most famous of these is PLC, “Practical Law Company”. One of course modifies the styles or precedents in one’s “firm bank” as necessary for each individual client. This is a legal draughtsman’s key skill, and is cognate with other forms of high quality technical writing, and even writing more widely. Unsurprisingly, it’s something I enjoy.

The problem with AI

Judge Kemp has—I think—treated his AI tool the way a solicitor or barrister treats a firm or chambers style/precedent/pleading bank. However, to state the bleeding obvious, an AI tool does not represent the accumulated wisdom of the legal profession over the past 2K+ years, or even the accumulated wisdom of a single law firm.

Like a lot of technical innovations in their early stages of development, AI is in large part flim-flam. Over time, the useful and accurate elements may take over from the flim-flam, but we are nowhere near that point yet. I’ll also note that Judge Kemp is over sixty, and often took notes during the hearing longhand. This is, shall we say, not a good sign.

Without making excuses for Judge Kemp, I wish to tell on myself a bit here when it comes to AI and how tempting it is to make use of it, even for those of us who should know better.

AI hallucinations

As most people know, search engines have largely turned into woke mush, littered with inaccurate AI summaries. It’s often impossible to find things that one knows to exist out in the wild.

I got very angry last week when Google refused to find me a piece on how Australia has raised its average national IQ thanks to selective immigration, a contrast with every other developed country. I have an exceptional memory for technical detail. I knew what I’d read, and could repeat many of the piece’s conclusions. Repeated searches with varied search strings got me nowhere, no matter how many pages of search results deep I went.

Obviously—as you can see from the link above—I found it. However, I did so because—in despair—I used SuperGrok. I get SuperGrok free with my premium blue tick on Twitter/X. SuperGrok found the article within minutes, after a couple of queries from a rank AI amateur (ie, me). This made me more favourably disposed towards it than I perhaps otherwise should have been.

Foolishly, I then used SuperGrok to do some research on the period I was writing about for my Rage of Party review, which was published on Tuesday this week for Law & Liberty, the magazine where I’m Senior Writer.

What I’m about to say next will make more sense if you read that review, but suffice to say the book is a well-written account of the period 1688-1725 in first England and then Britain (ie, including Scotland after 1707). Among other things, it covers the development of political parties in their modern form, a subject of genuine and global interest. Before that period, what can look like modern political parties in places as diverse as Ancient Rome or Medieval Poland routinely degenerated into civil war or something close to it.

I was keen to get more detail about Jonathan Swift’s writings on immigration policy in the lead up to the 1710 general election. And me being me, I checked the figures SuperGrok gave me, because despite my reputation as a writer and lawyer, I’m actually what the kids call a “shape rotator”. It’s just that my family already had an engineer (my first choice of profession), so dad sent me off to law school. I’ve also had the embarrassing experience of citing a paper that failed to replicate, something I was perfectly capable of checking (the dataset it used was public) in R.

SuperGrok’s figures were correct.

However, I did not check the quotation from Swift that SuperGrok spat out.

It was only when I was doing the final editorial pass that the niggling feeling I was getting about the Swift quote niggled me enough to look it up in Rage of Party. And lo! SuperGrok had hallucinated a Jonathan Swift quote. I swapped in the correct quote (included in my review) and then filed my piece, breaking out in a cold sweat borne of sheer terror as I did so.

I probably only noticed because I’d just finished a book about the period and I’ve read a lot of Swift over the years. I’m familiar with his style.

My point is this: if anyone is going to Hell for the sin of excessive scrupulosity it is me, and I very nearly let an AI drop me right in it. So—without making excuses for Judge Kemp, because I realise this is bad—I can also see how the Peggie foul-up may have happened.

To be quite frank, I think AI is going to rot a lot of people’s brains and stop a lot of other people from learning things properly before we get a proper grip on it.

These days, the latter is probably more my style, but I did once write novels—pretty successful ones, too. I do like to remind people of that fact.

If you hit this link, you can get a 20 per cent discount on tickets. There are a range of options available, as you’ll see.

The festival will be held at Church House and The Abbey Centre, Great Smith Street, Westminster, London, SW1P 3NZ.

Hope to see some of you there—do come up & say hello if you read my Substack, I’ll be curious to see if this kind of promotion works.

In June this year, I did some consulting in Edinburgh that took in an appearance at Adam Smith’s Panmure House—where the Scottish economist lived for the last decade of his life. I can now say I’ve sat in Adam Smith’s dining room and visited his loo. The building has been expensively but faithfully restored, with lots of characteristic Edinburgh stone, and is a beautiful venue for meetings and events.

The Adam Smith Museum invitation came on the back of this piece, about the rise of Reform UK. Incredibly, it was published in early June but my analysis still holds, although Reform has now cracked the 30% support pain barrier with all pollsters save YouGov. Meanwhile, Farage’s challenger often isn’t Sir Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch, but Ed Davey from the Lib Dems—loopy stunts and all.

In my presentation—available here—I first set out my stall on why liberals are losing battles they really should win (vaccines come to mind). Using the (excellent) questions I received from the Edinburgh audience, I then worked up the same argument in print, for Law & Liberty. Neither the video nor the two pieces are paywalled, so fill your boots.

Shorter me: Liberal establishments globally have made so many mistakes over the last twenty years—coupled with a pervasive failure to acknowledge those mistakes—that ordinary members of the public in significant numbers are intuitively applying an evidentiary principle to them, one that exists in both common law and civilian systems: falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

This translates, reasonably idiomatically, into “false in one thing, therefore false in all.” It arises when counsel puts a witness in the box and he lies about a fact in issue or relevant evidence around it, typically under pressure of cross-examination. This has the effect of casting everything else he says into doubt, although the rule is not irrebuttable. It just means the side for which he’s appearing must work much harder to restore his lost credit.

It isn’t very comfortable to be told that an entire ideology (liberalism, widely defined; I draw on ’s latest book for this aspect of my discussion) or an entire political movement with real heritage and history (UK Labour, UK Tories, the US Democrats) has badly lost its way. Telling a victim that he brought it on himself is never going to go down well.

Speaking of which, my latest longread—which came out on Wednesday for Quillette—uses two Australian Federal court cases as a vehicle to tell off two minorities. In the first, Lattouf v ABC, the organised Jewish lobby got a flea in its ear for engaging in what psychologists call “relational aggression” as part of a campaign to get a particular individual sacked for her views on Gaza.

Then, just to remind everyone that Australia still has the rule of law and applies it fearlessly, in Wertheim v Haddad, pro-Palestine Muslims got told off (with a big costs order attached) for arguing racism present in the Koran and Hadith and written in approximately the 7th century AD can be applied to modern Jewish people under the aegis of “free exercise of religion”.

Both judgments—as I point out—are illiberal. Speech and religious belief are subordinated to the Australian state (and be aware the Australian state has claws and teeth in a way most other liberal states don’t). However, both rulings also uphold the rule of law. Cancel culture is destructive of civil society. The organised Jewish lobby pioneered it over many decades—as most Australians know, I was on the receiving end of one particularly egregious example. Muslims, meanwhile, constantly make excuses for both their religion and their co-religionists’ bad behaviour—deeply implausible excuses, too—especially when the religion is violent, sexually incontinent, and bigoted. Both minorities have now been given an even-handed judicial slap.

My Quillette piece is mildly paywalled, in that you have to sign up to read it, but it won’t cost you anything once you do so. I do recommend it, if only because it took me a bloody month to write. I may be guilty of the sin of excessive scrupulosity.

For his part, has not only co-written (with me) a piece on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but a thoughtful piece over at his own place on the extent to which politicians don’t represent the people who vote for them—on culture. Meanwhile, those same politicians and ordinary members of the public are quite closely aligned politically when it comes to the economy.

This applies across the spectrum, by the way—so Labour voters will generally agree with their MPs on the economy but disagree with them on culture (the voters will be much more conservative). Meanwhile, Tory voters will agree with their MPs on the economy, while also being to the right of Tory MPs on culture. Notably, sometimes Labour voters are also to the right of Tory MPs on culture (when immigration is polled as an issue).

If you spend time in British wonk-world, one thing you soon learn is that majorities here still support the death penalty. Lorenzo’s piece goes a long way to explaining why this phenomenon exists.

Battle of Ideas Appearance

Finally (and I will promote this again a few days before the event), I’ll be a guest at this year’s Battle of Ideas Festival on the weekend of 18 & 19 October in Westminster. Battle of Ideas has been around since 2005; this year is the festival’s twentieth anniversary. It’s one British literary festival that wasn’t killed either by COVID-19 or Baillie Gifford’s 2024 arts funding withdrawal. I should note here that the Adam Smith Museum—discussed above—has also had the good sense to retain Baillie Gifford as a corporate sponsor.

There are hundreds of sessions to choose from, bringing together hundreds of speakers and thousands of attendees. Unlike many other events, at least half of each session is given over to audience questions and comments. The aim, set out in the festival strapline, is to have “conversations for the public, with the public, in public”.

The festival’s éminence grise is Baroness Claire Fox, and her presence is enough to ensure that it invites speakers from across the political spectrum. One of my sessions is being chaired by a Guardian journalist! Yes, you read that right—Speccie writer on a panel with a Guardian writer—wonders shall never cease.

On Saturday at 2:45, I’ll be discussing fantasy fiction (and the way publishing has exploded all over itself since at least 2020 and probably before), while on Sunday at 12:45 I’ll be discussing contempt of court and the Law Commission’s mooted changes to relevant legislation (yes that’s the lawyer panel, I always have to do a lawyer panel).

Lorenzo: Inferring something general from an individual killer is usually a mug’s game. Individuals do things, including kill, for all sorts of specific-to-them reasons. This is particularly so with political assassins.

Violence does have general patterns—its perpetrators are usually young men. Their victims are usually male. Patterns exist precisely because they aggregate cases.

The apprehended man accused of Charlie Kirk’s murder used the concept of hate speech to motivate and justify his murder. In a text to his roommate—a trans-identifying biological male with whom he was in a romantic relationship—he said, in explaining why he had committed the murder:

I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.

In explaining his act to his parents, the accused said:

there was too much evil and Charlie Kirk spread too much hate.

In other words, Charlie Kirk’s “hate” was so evil, it was a good act to kill him.

If we take the words of the accused killer both seriously and literally—which we must, a man is dead—the assassination of Charlie Kirk instances how the concept of hate speech becomes a vehicle for hatred. Even so, it is still the act of a single person, however appalling.

What is much more broadly significant has been the response from others. Thousands of people have applauded Charlie Kirk’s murder online. These posts have received hundreds of thousands of likes. It has been revealed for all to see that thousands upon thousands of left-progressives are not only fine with—but applaud—political assassination and do so on the basis of hate speech.

The concept of hate speech attaches extreme significance to words. It uses word-categories to strip people of the authority to speak and to categorise the speakers as hateful. In this case, words were given such significance as to justify killing.

There is no more complete way to stop someone speaking than to kill him. There is no more complete significance to put on words than using them to justify killing someone. There is no more complete way to categorise someone as hateful than to hold them worthy of death.

It is deeply pathological and morally perverse to claim that the “hate” in someone’s words is so serious that the person should be killed. As psychologist Rob Henderson points out, while anger is a “push-back” emotion, hate is a “you should not exist” emotion.

The concept of hate speech enables the ostentatiously compassionate to engage in rage and contempt. As writer Aldous Huxley observed:

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. … To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Aldous Huxley, Introduction (July 24, 1933), Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1934).

Alongside those who openly applauded the killing, are those who engage in denigrating the murdered on the basis of what he said, or has been alleged to have said. There are thousands of hours of Charlie Kirk speaking and debating online. These are rarely linked to or directly quoted. This is because so many of those denigrating Charlie Kirk, denigrating the murdered, are misrepresenting his views. Hence other folk are putting up online corrections—such as here—which show Charlie Kirk expressing his actual opinions.

Left-progressives misrepresenting the views of those who disagree with them is hardly new. On the contrary, it is a general and persistent pattern. But such misinterpretations in general—and those of Charlie Kirk in particular—regularly do so on the basis of hate speech. They do so on the basis that uttering wrong words, expressing wrong beliefs, makes you hateful.

Then there are the cases of quoting something Charlie Kirk did say, but stripping it of context, including any added qualifications or nuance. This is a more subtle form of misrepresentation, but it is still misrepresentation. Novelist Stephen King, to his credit, apologised for doing this. Once again, such cases invoke the concept of hate speech, that uttering certain words makes one hateful. Finally, there are cases where Kirk is quoted accurately but his words are decried as manifestations of “hate” without any attempt to prove the point.

All this is the concept of hate speech doing what it was revived in the postwar period to do: to destroy the culture of free speech. I say revived, because the first polity to criminalise hate speech was Weimar Germany. This effort in policing politics by policing discourse was, needless to say, a complete failure.

Charlie Kirk was against banning hate speech and—although he does not explicitly refer to the case—his argument against banning hate speech is a good summary of how hate speech laws went wrong in Weimar Germany.

What undermined Weimar Germany far more than the failure of its hate speech laws, however, was its grotesque failure to suppress politically motivated street violence. The US also failed similarly in 2020, with the Black Lives Matter riots. The history here is not good.

Science writer Michael Shermer points out that—not only was Charlie Kirk an effective debater—he was a notably amiable one, being unfailingly polite with people, even when they were screaming at him. Shermer further notes that Charlie Kirk’s Gen Z killer was from a generation repeatedly told that words are violence, that silence is violence. Meanwhile, our evolved psychology programs us—particularly status-seeking young males—to respond aggressively to threats of violence.

A psychologist commenting on the case remarks of the killer:

13:24 Tyler absolutely believed that he was correct. He was 100% confident that Charlie was wrong about the transgender ideology. What’s so frightening about this case is this level of confidence. There was no reasoning with Tyler.

This is, of course, in stark contrast with Charlie Kirk, who built his career on his willingness to debate. But the whole point of hate speech as a construct is to close down debate and to do so on the basis of an arrogant and destructive certainty—the certainty that error has no rights and can reliably identified by special persons. Offering refuge from the burden of fallibility is part of the appeal—and central to the destructiveness—of more virulent ideologies, particularly totalitarian ones.

Progressive politics—the politics of the imagined, golden future—is based on political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon’s principle that:

The golden age lies not in the past, but in the future.

(L’âge d’or n’est pas dans le passé, il est dans l’avenir.)

The imagined, golden future becomes the benchmark of cognitive judgement, regularly generating dismissal of past experience, of the painful lessons of the past, of embedded knowledge in institutions. The imagined, golden future becomes the benchmark of moral judgement. So the splendours in progressive heads become benchmarks of moral judgement. So progressives own morality.

This is a false claim, but it is a fundamental prop of left-progressive identity. As a foundational false claim about the world, it needs an ever-expanding bodyguard of lies to sustain it—it may require misrepresenting a murdered man’s opinions, for example.

This requirement for a bodyguard of lies is aggravated by the use of moralised claims about the world to motivate, differentiate and coordinate. Toxic untruths operate effectively to mark out the good people prepared to engage in the level of rationalisation required to uphold such claims: that a person with a penis is a woman, or that one shows “care and compassion” by the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of a gender non-conforming child.

What is also required to make this status game work on any scale is insulation from the consequences of being wrong about reality. The social consequence of defecting from the shared moralised status game have to matter more than the consequences of the claims not being true. Hence, this is very much the politics of the unaccountable classes, of those paid to turn up. It is the politics of bureaucracy, of content-free management, of non-profit organisations, of academe, of teachers, of activists, of reality-editing zealots.

It is precisely because the unaccountable classes are shielded from reality in various ways that social feedback from within their networks becomes dominant. The dynamics by which network goods tend to be monopoly goods—the larger the network, the greater the benefits of membership and the easier it is to add an extra person—encourage coalescing about shared moralised status games based on performative beliefs. Affirming X makes you a good person, while saying not-X makes you a bad one. If the politics of X is the politics of ostentatious compassion, then the politics of not-X must be the politics of “hate”.

A discussion between psychologist Jordan Peterson, law professor Bruce Pardy and comedian and commentator Konstantin Kisin explores the deep problems with criminalising hate speech. You don’t have access to people’s inner emotions, so you have to accept reports from those reacting to speech, which opens the door to manipulative liars. With criminalising hate speech, law no longer concerns itself with the intent (mens rea) of the transgressor and truth is not a defence, so you create illegal “hate facts”. These laws notoriously target jokes and humour—a classic indicator of tyranny—and break down the distinction between role and actor.

To take these points further, speech can declared hateful by those purporting to speak on behalf of some group, removing it even further from anything other than the policing of wrongthink. The abandonment of intent, and of truth—while policing wrongthink—is how Transactivist purity spirals convert would-be allies into bitter enemies by abusive enforcing of rigid taboos and doctrinal adherence tests.

Blocking disagreement is, in itself, deranging. It blocks correctives. It drives patterns of discourse in one direction, setting up purity spirals, where intent and truth do not matter, just more and more intense signalling and anathematising.

The lack of effective character tests—especially in social milieus insulated from reality-tests or other correcting feedbacks—produces malfunctioning status mechanisms. Status built around enforcing a fierce cognitive divide between good people and those designated as “full of hate” then creates echo-chambers and cognitive bubbles, which easily lead to what political scientist Russell Hardin identified as the crippled epistemology of extremism.

Hardin observes that:

Fanaticism is not a kind of belief; rather it is a characteristic of the way beliefs can be held, including obstinate ignorance of alternative views. Fanaticism requires exclusionary group practices for its maintenance because it requires the isolation that allows spurious beliefs to escape challenge.

The designation of speech as hate speech operates as such a mechanism for information exclusion, for generating “obstinate ignorance of alternative views”. This is even more so when beliefs are used as markers of moral status. Indeed, doing so requires that dissent be immoral, illegitimate; it requires a concept such as hate speech.

The entire history of Revolutionary Marxism—of Communism—demonstrates how toxic untruths can coordinate, differentiate and motivate. After its grotesque failure in Weimar Germany, hate speech was revived by the Soviet Union, by a Communist state.

What folk call “wokery”—technically, Critical Constructivism—is the popularisation of Critical Theory. Critical Theory is a derivative of Marxism, applying its Oppressor/Oppressed template to cultural issues and categories. Critical Constructivism explicitly grades all claims by their alleged consequences for various groups; so, according to the oppressed/oppressor, dominant/marginalised, moral caste system of intersectionality—where coloured is better than white; female is better than male; gay is better than straight; trans is better than cis; migrant is better than local.

The murder of Charlie Kirk was not the act of a trans person—the killer’s trans lover was horrified (he appears to have had a genuine oh shit moment) and cooperated with police—but of a trans ally. Trans ideology—coming from Queer Theory, one of the derivatives of Critical Theory—is based on a series of false claims, so cannot tolerate open debate. Transactivists attempt to close down debate as much as they can, including by punishing dissenters, treating dissent as “transphobia”, as hate speech.

A recent study quantified differences in the moral focus of conservatives (more particularist) and of liberals/progressives (more universalist). The study also found that:

liberals and conservatives differ not in the total amount of moral regard per se but rather they differ in their patterns of how they distribute their moral regard.

The arrogant belief among left-progressives that they own morality is a profound falsehood and, like all profound falsehoods about the world, needs a bodyguard of self-deceit, falsehoods and misrepresentations to sustain itself. A consequence of these shared moralised status games—based on the sense that they own morality, due to the splendours in their heads—leads to what writer Chris Bray calls the institutional left’s abandonment of persuasion. Persuasion is replaced by moral abuse. You then get what Canadian journalist Trish Wood nicely calls depersonalising rage at disagreement.

Charlie Kirk differentiated firmly between a liberal—with whom one can have disagreements—and a leftist, who attempts to close down all debate. In his sad and thoughtful recent pieces here and here commenting on Charlie Kirk’s murder—and reactions to it—commentator Ezra Klein exemplifies that distinction.

As part of left-progressive shared moralised status games, words—as manifestations of righteous or unrighteous belief—are used to rate people. Words are used to give and deny status. Words are used to give and deny authority.

Notice how often the response of left-progressives to the murder of Charlie Kirk has to been to attack, or otherwise express their contempt for, the murdered. Not only have they done this, they clearly think that doing so shows their moral seriousness, and is morally worthy.

Such behaviour flows directly from their shared conceit that they own morality. That the benchmark of morality is determined by whether one agrees with their politics or not.

This is a politics that selects for bad character and—as we can see in the public gloating—that rewards bad character. A recent study found that US liberals dehumanised conservatives more than conservatives did liberals. It also found that:

whereas liberals overestimated how much they were dehumanized, conservatives underestimated how much they were dehumanized.

The response to Charlie Kirk’s murder may be shifting that. One conservative student not knowing what to do with minority but nonetheless widespread support for violent reaction to speech evinces a very human reaction. YouTuber Rudyard Lynch points out that killing folk for what they believe destroys incentives for cooperation, especially when so much of the Left has revealed itself to be bloodthirsty.

Comedian Dave Smith notes the madness of killing the most prominent moderate voice in the MAGA/conservative/right side of US politics while expecting that any descent into violence will turn out well for the US left. Virginia legislator Nick Freitas made the point that Charlie Kirk offered civilisation—civil debate—and was met with savagery.

As various folk are pointing out, Left-progressives got to enforce their concept(s) of cancel culture for the last decade or two. Now conservatives are doing so, as people send screenshots of gloating-over-the-killing social media posts to employers, getting folk fired. Shaming and shunning people who openly embrace political murder is very different from shaming and shunning people for saying that men can’t be women or that immigration and refugee policy is complicated by the reality of average differences between groups.

Helen: Charlie Kirk was a deeply religious person, and while I don’t find religion rebarbative the way some atheists do, I do find the impulse strange. One of the reasons I called transactivism and its academic progenitor (“queer theory”) a new religious movement as far back as roughly 2017 was the absurdity of its core premise: that men can be women. I was reminded of Tertullian’s exclamation—I believe it because it is absurd!—in response to a pagan critic querying the plausibility of someone coming back from the dead after crucifixion.

As soon as people have to defend claims like that, all bets are off and the normal rules of debate no longer apply. Charlie wore his religiosity lightly by American standards, however. He didn’t fling it at people in social settings, and as the thousands of hours of video where he debates university students disclose, he tended to bring it up only in response to other people’s verbal jabs. At the function where I met him, he listened more than he spoke, and did not buttonhole people.

Yes, he was more doctrinaire among friends—there are plenty of clips showing this aspect, too—but that is the way of all religious belief. I went to school with a young woman who attended a pentecostal church that at one point became the subject of controversy. When reporting the story, various media outlets showed footage of the congregation engaging in the physical, enthusiastic worship for which pentecostals are known, and she was easily identifiable at the end of one pew. She was mortified. She told me in a moment of weakness she wanted to die of shame. The difference between this Australian woman and Charlie Kirk is cultural and social: Australian culture still values public emotional restraint—even among the religious—in a way the US does not. When Australian news outlets broadcast that footage, they inadvertently crossed the streams—something much easier to do these days than historically, by the way. Thanks, internet.

Lorenzo: The social media posts celebrating or endorsing Charlie Kirk’s murder have notably come from teachers—so, the products of education faculties—plus academics, and relatively recently graduated professionals. The toxic untruths that have been used to coordinate, motivate and differentiate left-progressive networks have disproportionately come out of academe. All this gives further support for former professor Peter Boghossian’s response to the accelerating failures and decay of contemporary academe: burn the whole lot down as they seek to kill debate, dialogue, conversation; they teach false things; they are indoctrination mills.

Helen: There has been a lot of back and forth since Charlie’s assassination on the extent to which the now politically ascendant US right is both engaging in cancel culture and undermining the First Amendment. In my view, evidence for the latter is much stronger than it is for the former. When people like the US Attorney-General start banging on about “hate speech” at a presser, there is a problem. This woman has a good law degree and extensive practitioner experience. She will have learnt the ruling in Brandenburg v Ohio in first year law (what Americans, in their lapidary way, call “1L”). She—and the others who followed her over the same cliff—need to take a good long look at themselves.

When it comes to support for political assassination, however, we really are dealing with something qualitatively and quantitatively different from left cancellations over “but men aren’t women tho”. I take Rob Henderson’s point that a belief in the justified assassination of political opponents is much closer to being an active member of the Ku Klux Klan or Muslim Brotherhood. You may believe—and yes, I concede this is also an arguable position—that my hypothetical Klansman or Islamist will still be perfectly capable of doing any number of different jobs. I suspect, however, you’ll still be adding the rider “as long as he keeps those beliefs to himself”.

Lorenzo’s point about teachers being prominent among the assassination-enjoyers is relevant here. The US is awash with guns and has a known school shooter problem. American teachers in American schools cannot, for this reason, continue to teach while articulating the view that political assassinations are justified. This is a basic child safeguarding issue, on par with keeping child sex offenders or paedophile rights activists out of schools.

Lorenzo: The ever more intense conformism of academe means that it provides ever-more degraded “education”. This is for many reasons, but a large one is the point philosopher John Stuart Mill made:

He who only knows his own side of the case, hardly knows that.

So-called “education” which embraces crippled epistemology is destructive, is intellectually and socially corrosive, and should not receive taxpayer funding.

The concept of hate speech is wielded to block dialogue, to block knowing. Comedian and commentator expresses very well the madness the concept of hate speech has visited on our societies.

This is one of the biggest problems with the position that we now find ourselves in, which is that anyone who in any way challenges the radical progressive leftist narrative in any way is automatically right-wing. A lot of these narratives, whether it’s intersectionality or these structures of oppression or all this stuff, they don’t actually have any logical or reasonable underpinning. And so the only way you can defend them, the only way you can defend them, is by shutting down people who don’t agree with you. Because if you have a reasonable, rational argument, their views crumble like a house of cards because they’re not built on anything. They’re built on fallacious logic and just assertions without any basis in fact. So that’s why I think now the left, the radical left—not all of the left, but the radical left—have come to this place where they have to shut down and label and smear anyone who doesn’t agree with them because their ideas are not based on anything. It boggles my mind that we are now in a position, that freedom of speech—which is a fundamental cornerstone of Western civilization—has become a conservative value. That is an absolutely insane position to me as someone who came from a society where freedom of speech did not exist.

Celebrating violence

Amidst the celebration of political murder from left-progressives, there has been touting of claims—such as in this 2022 paper—that there is more right-wing than left-wing violence in the US. This is a startling claim.

It is surprising in terms of world history. Communism—Revolutionary Marxism—is by far the most murderous political ideology in human history. It achieved this record of mass murder in only a half century post the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917.

It is surprising in terms of observable violence within the US. There have been two politically significant live-to-video political killings within the US in the last 5 years. One was the May 2020 death of petty criminal George Floyd at the hands of police. There followed a massive wave of rioting and an even bigger surge in homicides than there had been after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014.

The other live-to-video politically significant killing was the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in front of his wife and children in September 2025. The response among his supporters was a wave of candlelight vigils and among his opponents thousands of social media posts celebrating his death, posts which received hundreds of thousands of “likes”. It is simply observable that there has been far more left-violence than right-violence in the US during and since the BLM riots.

It is notable that the same elite universities who made such a fuss over the death of petty criminal George Floyd have not done anything remotely similar over the murder of Charlie Kirk on a campus—and an individual active on campuses across the country. In the moral caste system of “wokery”, a petty criminal of colour is clearly more to be grieved than a heterosexual cis-male with low melanin count who was openly conservative.

Remember, the more you have to rationalise, the better the test of loyalty to shared moralised status games—hence the continuing racism in US university admissions and hiring policies. Yes, this is all blatantly illegal—some of it was illegal even before SFFA v Harvard—but if you own morality, you do not have to concern yourself with such things. One can see the same socially corrosive arrogance in widespread refusals to abide by the unanimous ruling of the UK Supreme Court in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers.

The claim that there is more right-wing than left-wing violence is also surprising because we now know that US “liberals” (i.e. progressives) tend to dehumanise conservatives notably more than vice versa. Moreover, a recent poll from YouGov—a reputable outfit not given to overestimating extremism—found that US “very liberal” respondents (i.e. progressives) are far more likely to support political violence than are US conservatives, especially when young.

There are also the memes about killing billionaires, the lauding of the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, burning parked Teslas and even Tesla dealerships. Once again, support for political violence among US citizens skews strongly left:

The strongest predictors are far-left political identity and Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA)—suggesting this justification of violence is underpinned by politics and ideology. Time spent on BlueSky also emerged as a significant predictor.

So, the “most political violence in the US is right-wing” is surprising for lots of reasons.

Helen: For my sins, I spent some time on the alt-tech platform Gab, where the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting was incubated. I am also familiar with—partly through the research necessary to write my first novel and partly through significant time spent in the Middle East—what radicalisation looks like. Bluesky is starting to look like Gab did before that shooting, and I think the people who spend a lot of time on there—and who aren’t nuts—need to disengage from it or at least exercise greater caution.

Lorenzo: It is startling because it is not true. First, the 2022 paper engages in the bullshit social “science” of classing authoritarianism as a “right wing” phenomenon, which is obvious bullshit, something one can spot by dint of observing world history. Recent scholarship has identified left-wing authoritarianism—moral absolutism, punitive attitudes toward ideological opponents, and a willingness to use coercion for progressive aims—which:

powerfully predicts behavioral aggression and is strongly correlated with participation in political violence.

Second, the databases that are cited in claims about right-wing violence are deeply flawed. Prosecutions for political violence are seriously skewed by the willingness of many progressive DAs to overlook, dismiss or downgrade prosecution for the BLM riots. The ADL database for political killings is politically-skewed rubbish (see also). Black nationalist killings, for example, are coded as “anti-government” so “right-wing”. Prison killings by white-nationalist crime gangs are also coded as “right-wing”.

The PRIUS (Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States) database drawn on in the 2022 study also relies on who is or is not prosecuted and how events are reported in mainstream media. If one consults the PRIUS codebook, one finds that the criteria for inclusion is (emphases in original):

In order to be eligible for inclusion, each individual must meet one of the following five criteria:

1. the individual was arrested;

2. the individual was indicted of a crime;

3. the individual was killed as a result of his or her ideological activities;

4. the individual is/was a member of a designated terrorist organization; or

5. the individual was associated with an extremist organization whose leader(s) or founder(s) has/have been indicted of an ideologically motivated violent offense.

In addition, each individual MUST:

1. have been radicalized in the United States,

2. have espoused or currently espouse ideological motives, and

3. show evidence that his or her behaviors are/were linked to the ideological motives he or she espoused/espouses.

On the last criteria, the codebook elaborates:

Note: this includes crimes committed in furtherance of an ideological goal, such as an attack, trespassing as part of a protest and logistical support due to ideological affinity with the group. It does not include crimes that are connected to a DTO [Designated Terrorist Organization] or VEGA [Violent Extremist Group Association] but that the individual committed for non-ideological reasons; for example, an arms dealer who sells weapons to an extremist group but also sells arms to criminal gangs and other non-ideological actors would not be counted for this.

In other words, any violent act—including any homicide—by a member of, say, an Aryan Brotherhood crime gang, in logistical or other support of the gang, becomes “right wing violence”. If you have crime/prison gangs that are coded “right wing”—because they use “white” race as a membership criteria—but no crime/prison gangs are coded as “left wing”, then of course it will skew the figures.

One can also query the following statement in the codebook:

the far left differs from the far right in that its identity is grounded in economic grievances and not race-based issues

The claim that the contemporary far left does not engage in race-based activism (or violence) in an age of Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter riots is, well, contestable.

The 2022 study in particular, and various data being cited elsewhere, are a mixture of activist number-massaging and the sort of skewed “scholarship” that academe has produced in ever-greater quantity, leading to serious falls in the public standing of higher education in the US.

A 2021 study of specifically politically motivated homicides from 1990 to 2020 finds a higher rate of extreme-right than extreme-left homicides, though it notes that far-left homicides have been increasing. Homicides are a subset of violence and it is unclear from the paper how much its data suffers from the “Aryan Brotherhood” prison/crime gang problem. If “extreme right” homicide spurts in the paper coincide with wider surges in killings over drug “turfs”, that would indicate it is an issue.

The paper uses the Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), which is partial in its coverage (as the 2021 paper acknowledges and so supplements with other sources):

The ECDB collects information on violent incidents & financial schemes committed by the extreme far-right, Al Qaeda and similar groups supporters, and animal and environmental rights extremists in the U.S.

The ECDB excludes the far-left, a curious omission from something calling itself the Extremist Crime Database. It is not encouraging, regarding the “Aryan Brotherhood” prison/crime gang problem, that its website states:

the data allows for the comparison of criminal and extremist groups that do not employ “terrorist” methods with those that do. In addition, the ECDB is uniquely positioned to study the “criminal careers” of the suspects it codes. Once a suspect is included any prior or subsequent criminal incident (s)he committed are also noted in the study. The data will also be used to examine important theoretical questions such as whether ideologically motivated offenders also commit non-ideological routine crimes.

More generally, the largest takeaway is that political killings are rare in the US. The paper identifies 601 victims of politically motivated homicides from 1990-2020, of which 168 are from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The US is a country of 340m people that suffers around 20,000 homicides a year. Experiencing six-to-twelve politically motivated homicides a year—again, excluding the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing—is a very low rate of political killing.

If you sincerely believed the Right were so much more violent than the Left, increasing violence in politics would seem to be a particularly otiose form of political fantasy.

So, in that trends in violence are conflated with homicide patterns—and there is a problem with selective data and skewed figures—left-progressives are gaslighting us about political violence in the US just as the mainstream media systematically gaslit their readers and audience about the scale of police killings of African-Americans, so much so that American “liberals” have profoundly divergent from reality views on the issue.

Psychologist Dr Todd Grande concludes his comments on Charlie Kirk’s assassination with:

14:53 There will always be someone who justifies committing violence based on political beliefs. I think one of the keys to reducing political violence is the widespread and universal rebuke of this behavior. That is the real problem with this case, the real danger. Many people have celebrated Charlie Kirk’s demise and perhaps inadvertently encouraged the next killer, whoever that might be. If violence against political figures becomes normalized, those who callously celebrate death will suffer along with everyone else.

All those celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder—and endorsing such celebration—are showing themselves to be enemies of civil society, to be enemies of debate, and to be enemies of democracy, famously defined by British politician and PM Clement Attlee as “government by discussion”. Actively endorsing political murder is absolutely something people should be shunned for, should be shamed over.

In celebrating political murder they are also fulfilling what the Soviets intended when they revived the concept of hate speech postwar. It was meant to undermine freedom of speech and discourse. The killing of Charlie Kirk is explicitly a hating-speech-murder for it was the killing—not of an official or politician—but of a regular citizen while he was engaging in public debate.

A person invokes the concept of hateful words, of hate speech, to justify killing someone who built his career on a willingness to debate. Thousands of people have openly endorsed this. Hundreds of thousands of people have ticked such endorsements. This exposes the concept of hate speech for the social cancer it is and was intended, from its postwar revival, to be.

References

Celinet Duran, ‘Far-Left versus Far-Right Fatal Violence: An Empirical Assessment of the Prevalence of Ideologically Motivated Homicides in the United States,’ Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society 2021, 22 (2): 33–49. https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/26973-far-left-versus-far-right-fatal-violence-an-empirical-assessment-of-the-prevalence-of-ideologically-motivated-homicides-in-the-united-states

Thomas H. Costello, Shauna Bowes, Sean T. Stevens, Irvin Waldman, Arber Tasimi, Scott O. Lilienfeld, ‘Clarifying the structure and nature of left-wing authoritarianism,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2022 Jan;122(1):135-170. doi: 10.1037/pspp0000341. Epub 2021 Aug 12. PMID: 34383522. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341306723_Clarifying_the_Structure_and_Nature_of_Left-Wing_Authoritarianism

Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2.

https://raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/issue-index/all-volumes-issues/volume-06/volume-06-number-2

Roland G. Fryer, Jr., ‘An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,’ July 2017. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_analysis_tables_figures.pdf

Russell Hardin, ‘The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism,’ in Breton A, Galeotti G, Salmon P, Wintrobe R, (eds.) Political Extremism and Rationality, Cambridge University Press; 2002:3-22. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/political-extremism-and-rationality/crippled-epistemology-of-extremism/ECB163C524075DA730B73AFC7C5753F7

Katarzyna Jasko, Gary LaFree, James Piazza, and Michael H. Beckerd, ‘A comparison of political violence by left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist extremists in the United States and the world,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Science U.S.A 119 (30) e2122593119, (2022). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122593119

Joe L. Kincheloe, Critical Constructivism, Peter Lang, [2005] 2008.

Jacob Mchangama, ‘The Sordid Origin of Hate-Speech Laws: A tenacious Soviet legacy,’ Hoover Institute, December 1, 2011. https://www.hoover.org/research/sordid-origin-hate-speech-laws

David Montgomery, ‘What Americans really think about political violence,’ YouGov, September 13, 2025. https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll

Christopher D. Petsko and Nour S. Kteily, ‘Political (Meta-)Dehumanization in Mental Representations: Divergent Emphases in the Minds of Liberals Versus Conservatives,’ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2024, Vol. 50(12) 1675–1689. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11538778/

Fleming Rose, ‘Words and deeds,’ Index on Censorship, (2012), 41(1), 55-62.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306422012440384

Rutgers University Social Perception Lab, Assassination Culture: How Burning Teslas and Killing Billionaires Became a Meme Aesthetic for Political Violence, NCRI Flash Brief, 4-7-25. https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Assassination-Culture-Brief.pdf

Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, Stephanie Muravchik, ‘Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues,’ Working Paper, July 10, 2025 (rev. July 24). https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L6aUnf3HZPqOTJrP8ee-m2Szh-uyFKZA/view?pli=1

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011], 2013.

Adam Waytz, Ravi Iyer, Liane Young, Jonathan Haidt & Jesse Graham, ‘Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle,’ Nature Communications, 10, 4389 (2019). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0

This article can be adumbrated thusly: The academy’s incentive structures do not reward truth, they reward popularity.

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The central aim of contemporary left-progressive politics is to insert the professional-managerial class into as many resource flows as possible and then to defend and extend such insertion through control of public discourse legitimacy.

The sustained, and accelerating, social imperialism of the activist professional-managerial class has become progressivism’s central dynamic. The rise of populism—especially national populism—is one (major) a response to the social imperialism of the professional-managerial class (and pervasive contempt for the concerns and interests of the working class).

The current disruption of the Western alliance comes from Trump 2.0 prosecuting a cultural class war against that social imperialism, both domestically and internationally. Because this social imperialism has sought to bypass wider electoral consent in multiple countries—indeed, to block the articulating of dissent—various Western nations (particularly the Anglosphere)—are experiencing preference-cascades where people become aware of how unpopular various “compulsory” views actually are and move sharply away from them.

The activist professional-managerial class prosecutes its insertion into as many resource-flows as possible by creating and using dominion capital. As defined in a previous post, dominion capital is (slightly reworded):

the skills, knowledge, motivation, and networking to coordinate entry into organisations and institutions, shifting them towards serving the status and social-leverage strategies of those who possess said capital.

It’s a matter of skills (human capital) and connections (social capital) coordinated by commitment to shared beliefs, narratives, and patterns of language so as to interactively protect and elevate status and access to resources. Dominion capital is thus what is mobilised by activism when it practises the non-electoral politics of institutional capture.

Activism has a tendency to degrade everything it touches, as it imports its assumptions into each area of human action as it is imposed on them, overriding earlier patterns. Activism also tends to attract manipulative, Cluster B, personalities, as it represents power without responsibility and lauds aggressive behaviour.

Not the Emancipation Sequence

Much of contemporary activism needs to be distinguished from the “we want to be included, we want a say” activism that abolished first the slave trade and then slavery; that abolished laws against Jews and Catholics; that gave us universal male and then female suffrage; that got rid of Jim Crow and associated racial exclusions in the US; that gave us equal rights for women, and for gays and lesbians.

This was the Emancipation Sequence, where free people voted to liberate slaves, Christians to get rid of exclusions on Jews, Protestants to get rid of exclusions on Catholics, whites to get rid of exclusions on blacks, men to get rid of exclusions on women, straights to get rid of exclusions on gays and lesbians. The Emancipation Sequence represented a form of persuasion. It mobilised the institutionalised political bargaining which had existed within European and Anglo-offshoot societies for centuries. This bargaining had roots in medieval European Christendom and its development of Parliaments incorporating elected representatives, albeit on very narrow franchises.

The Emancipation Sequence’s movements allowed formerly excluded folk to participate in political and social processes that already existed. Such activism did not give institutional power to activists. Nor did it give moral projects to bureaucrats. Indeed, it sought to get rid of exclusions—often themselves moral projects—so as to enable wider participation in social processes: enabling people’s choices was the point.

The activism of the Emancipation Sequence is and was—despite fraudulent attempts to lever off its prestige—different from left-progressivist activism based on mastery of Theory, and so of epistemic authority. The latter seeks some final form of society based on notions of proper historical direction. The activism of the Emancipation Sequence was very different from the activism generated thanks to the contemporary professional-managerial class’s claim to be superior deciders.

While mostly not Marxist, contemporary left-progressivist activism is Marxian in the sense that it descends—via Critical Theory—from the original Marxist template, which it has updated and whose basic patterns it replicates. Marx’s contemporary, correspondent and critic—the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin—understood what was wrong with Marx’s program of achieving an imagined final future through an activist state, a state with a bureaucratised moral project motivated by (allegedly scientific) Theory. In his chapter The State and Marxism—written in 1867—Bakunin accurately predicted the inherently tyrannical nature of Marx’s ideas:

It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe betide the mass of ignorant ones!

The US civil rights movement went astray in part because it created (well-meaning) legislation that gave bureaucrats moral projects via a legal-bureaucratic structure. This bureaucratic regime treated the wider citizenry as if they were constantly hovering on the edge of wrongthink (racism) and wrongact (discrimination), so needed their actions, emotions and words to be policed.

Even worse, those bureaucrats became fixated on the belief that equality before the law would properly lead to equal outcomes between groups. Equal outcomes became the defining moral impulse behind what became Social Justice. This belief enabled Critical Theory to spin off rhetoric, narratives, concepts that were adopted more widely by folk who simply saw themselves as socially concerned.

Any attempt to impose equality of outcome as the highest moral goal must, over the long term, be destructive of freedom as it does not accept the contingency of human choices—and their consequences—which is fundamental to freedom. Achieving equality of outcomes requires the trumping of human choices.

Max Horkheimer, the founder of Critical Theory, was very clear that the pursuit of liberatory—i.e. equalitarian—justice requires the crushing of freedom:

Marx did not see that freedom and justice are dialectical concepts. The more freedom, the less justice and the more justice, the less freedom.

Dysfunction via moral projects

It’s a bad idea to give bureaucrats moral projects. It elevates their authority. They became moral masters and the apparently benighted citizenry their moral subjects. This profoundly undermines any notion of service to the wider citizenry while denigrating that citizenry’s status and authority.

The EU’s moral project of Ever Closer Union has undermined any ethic of service from the EU’s institutions to the wider citizenry in the EU. Like any proper-direction-for-history project, it is intrinsically hostile to the whatever-they-decide of democratic choice. The votes of citizens become “good” or “bad”, legitimate or illegitimate, depending on whether they move towards, or away, from The Project.

All forms of Hegelian politics—from the Marxist to the Fascist—are hostile to democracy precisely because they buy the idea that history has a proper direction, one not to be degraded by inconvenient voting and election results. Hegelian thought—whether Marxist, Marxian or Fascis—generates myth rather than history. It gives people pre-set roles in the course of events that are profoundly antithetical to the whatever-folk-happened-to-do that is the essence of history. Such mythic history is, however, very good at motivating activists and generating rhetoric.

Giving bureaucrats moral projects also undermines accountability, as any criticism of actions in service of the moral project by the bureaucrats becomes an attack on the moral project of which they are now the avatars.

The Activist’s Fallacy:

We are doing X to achieve Y,

You are criticising X,

Therefore,

You are against Y,

can be mobilised to defend almost any action by moral-project bureaucrats—no matter how incompetent, destructive, dysfunctional or wasteful—if any criticism becomes immoral because of the splendour of the moral project.

DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) is destructive of competence and coherence within organisations—dividing folk by preset moral statuses—and runs “training” that’s often not much more than struggle sessions. It was pushed in part by declaring that it was for good things, so any opposition must be motivated by bigotry. The Trans-agenda—extending to the surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of minors—was pushed on the basis of a (spurious) equation with the struggle for legal equality for gays and lesbians that dismissed any push-back against its claims, including its lies, as “transphobia”.

Legal equality for gays and lesbians simply meant treating them as other folk. The Transcult demands that all agree to its lies: that someone with a penis is a woman, that the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors is “care”, and that there is no problem having biological males in women’s events and activities, in the spaces of the systematically physically weaker sex. This series of lies has been prosecuted in the only way they could be: by bypassing citizen consent and the harrying, abuse and exclusion of those who resist lies.

Spurious expertise

Dominion capital rests on devaluing the choices, the standing and authority of the wider citizenry. The latter are expected to defer in the face of Special Knowledge held by those with dominion capital. A classic mechanism for it to do so is to create or mobilise spurious expertise.

Both the DEI push and the Transcult used utterly spurious claims of expertise to push their claims. The notion of “sex assigned at birth” is not only a ridiculous lie—sexually reproducing organisms have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to recognise sex within their species so they can breed—hence the issue Transfolk have with “passing”. The lie of “sex assigned at birth” is also used to signal adherence to the moral in-group. It is a grotesque manifestation of spurious expertise generated out of academe by Queer Theory.

The longer the abolition of legal restrictions on, for instance, African-Americans failed to produce equality of outcomes between social groups—despite racial discrimination being banned—the greater the need for the spurious expertise of Theory to postulate the necessary invisible sociological gremlins to “explain” why social outcomes had not equalised.

The presumption that, in a fair society, different groups will achieve identical social outcomes is nonsense. Humans, and human groups, are simply too varied for that to happen. All human societies of any complexity have average differences between groups.

Parasitism through the unachievable

That the expectation of equal outcomes between groups is evolutionary and historical nonsense is not a barrier to the advance of dominion capital. It’s a huge advantage.

First, because it gives endless scope for Theory—and spurious expertise therefrom—to postulate endless invisible sociological gremlins to “explain” why social outcomes are not equalising. Second, it massively elevates the grandeur of the project—“we will achieve what no human society has ever achieved!”

Even better, it can postulate ever greater social transformation—so ever greater control over discourse and resources—to achieve this grand vision. Third, the pattern of programs aimed at achieving such social outcomes can go on indefinitely, endlessly consuming resources, justified by the continuing inequalities of outcomes between groups that (inevitably) never go away. Such endless—because unattainable—moral projects are catnip to the professional-managerial class.

Yes, it’s destructive of freedom. Yes, it massively wastes resources. Yes, it empowers a mass of morally grandiose social parasites who consume resources far in excess of any value they provide. Yes, it’s destructive of social order in seeking guilty parties to blame for failure to achieve the impossible. The demand for racism greatly exceeds the supply. Yes, it degrades the operation of institutions and organisations. But, so long as equal outcomes between social groups is accepted as the marker of Social Justice, none of that matters, for the game can just keep going.

Well, that is until the devaluation of competency leads to a cascading collapse of complex systems. The recent LA fires gave us a taste of that, both in how appointing folk on criteria other than competence degrades the functioning of institutions as well as how destructive of policy competence restricting what it is legitimate to discuss can be.

While civil rights activism did create advocacy organisations that lingered on past their use-by date, activism based on Theory—and especially Theory that generates invisible sociological gremlins—has a much greater possible ambit for operations than the Emancipation Sequence’s “let us in” activism. It demands the achievement of pre-set social outcomes, not “mere” participation in social processes declared illegitimate because they don’t lead to equal outcomes between groups. Advocacy-activist non-profits also have interests in the designated moral or social problems continuing—or being seen to continue—so that supporters will continue to donate.

It can easily be in the interests of those allegedly dedicated to the eradication of a designated problem for it to continue. Given the power of incentives, and our capacity to moralise and rationalise our self-interest—if necessary, quite self-deceptively—you functionally pay people to do what makes their income and authority go up. Spurious expertise based on identifying invisible sociological gremlins which “explain” why the impossible has not happened is a boon to the activist-advocacy economy.

No-one finds spurious expertise more useful, even necessary, than social parasites. It provides necessary cover for social parasitism—their consumption of more value than they provide—plus protection against the inevitable inconveniences of reality. But who can generate required spurious expertise?

Well, that’s what the academy is for.

Academics and intellectuals typically do not have to make anything work—not even analysis and description of reality, if feedbacks do not systematically punish falsity and failure. Moreover—if the feedbacks about what works are weak enough—not having to make anything work means people can be as morally grandiose as they like: they’re not constrained by requirements to make things work.

If the feedbacks are sufficiently poor, then generating entire Theories and disciplines of spurious expertise is—demonstrably—easy. Idea laundering is key here. Superficial markers of knowledge, of expertise—justifying the epistemic authority of dominion capital—are generated via mutually-cited publications in academic journals.

The incentive structures of academe do not reward truth, they reward popularity. Academics only have to make what they produce appeal to other academics (or funding bureaucrats). Mobilising the moral self-satisfaction academics are so prone to is a great start. What can be more morally grand than being the Masters of Theory that will usher in Unparalleled Social Grandeur?

As academics are dependent on the opinion of other academics—and the more spurious a field or Theory, the more so dependant they are, as there are no reality-tests they can invoke in their own defence—it’s easy for risk-adverse conformity to become, as it is, pervasive within academe. The weaker the capacity to achieve the prestige of genuine discovery in a discipline is, the stronger the drive to support the Grand Virtue of social transformation—a self-serving propriety—and the greater the willingness to wield stigmatisation in its defence.

A recurring pattern in progressivism has been to use the grandeur of the Moral Project, of the Imagined Future, to justify freeing oneself from the constraints of civility, decency, or basic morality. Freeing oneself from the constraints of truth, or the inconveniences of genuine reality tests, is easy by comparison.

The combination of moral grandiosity and risk-adverse conformity in milieus of weak or absent reality-feedbacks is excellent for generating spurious expertise. Whole areas of academe thereby consume more value than they produce, so are parasitic, even toxically so. From such spurious expertise does the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors become “care” and “compassion”.

Positive-sum commerce, zero-sum coercion

The coercive power of the state is a boon to social parasitism. It is much easier to consume more value than you provide if resources are coercively transferred to you.

This is one of the many antipathies of commerce compared to academe and politics. Folk engaged in commerce have to make things work to stay in business—this can become an amoral opportunism, though much less so if one is engaged in repeated interactions where reputation matters. Marginalised groups have consistently done better through commerce than politics.1

Commerce also has a dynamism to it that can conflict with the pre-set social schemas intellectuals like to come up with, not to mention generating much more wealth than intellectual activity typically does, and so also a stigmatising envy.

These different experiences (and natural vices) produce an antipathy to commerce and the commercial that runs through much intellectual output, at least as far back as Plato and Aristotle. Marx is the epitome of this, to the extent that he is reduced to what Noah Smith correctly labels pseudo-economic reasoning to make his system “work”.

Commerce is about creating gains from trade, so positive-sum interactions. It, along with science and technology, is deeply intertwined with prestige, with status through conspicuous competence; with encouraging actions that generate benefits for third parties, what economists call positive externalities. However wealthy entrepreneurs of technology have become—from railway and steamship magnates to contemporary tech-bros—they capture but a small fraction of the wider social benefits they generate.

Unless it enables social order that then generates positive-sum interactions, coercion generates negative-sum interactions. The characteristic forms of predatory, parasitic, negative-sum interactions are slavery, serfdom, banditry and predatory aspects of the state.

A presumptive caution about mobilising state action is always appropriate. This is especially so given the deep problems of knowledge, of knowing the consequences of regulation and other state action, of oversight in spending other people’s money. State action based on spurious expertise is very likely to be destructive, as the entire history of Communism—based on the spurious expertise of Marxism—demonstrates.

Dominion capital seeks to establish status and social leverage through epistemic authority, through de-legitimating alternative views and concerns. Propriety, especially stigma, can readily be mobilised to generate social coercion. That, after all, was why it evolved. To deter and punish folk from undertaking actions that undermined the functioning of the foraging band and its networks by generating negative externalities.

Adapting these evolved mechanisms is why the claims to epistemic authority by contemporary dominion capital has become so associated with stigmatisation via terms of moral abuse—racist, sexist, misogynist, transphobic, Islamophobic, etc. The entire campaign against hate speech, against dis/mis/mal-information, serves the interests of dominion capital and its claims of epistemic authority.

Replacing the prestige of achievement with the stigmatising of dissent

A key element in this process has been a recurrent push to replace prestige with an imperial, censorious, stigmatising propriety. A major social turning point was Shirtgate in November 2014. A rocket scientist had led a project that did the very, very clever thing of landing a probe on a comet for the first time (“like landing a fly on a bullet” in the words of one engineer friend). This was classic conspicuous competence granting prestige that had fuelled the Scientific Revolution and the technological take-off underwriting mass prosperity. He was then publicly humiliated by social-media-enabled self-righteous harpies over … his shirt. (A gift from a female friend, as it happened.)

The issue was that his loud Hawaiian shirt depicted young women in bikinis. This was part of a wider attempt to police speech and artistic expression justified by utterly spurious expertise based on media effects theory, which is false.

Even when expertise is real, it’s narrow in its ambit. Given that we live in a world of trade-offs, where there are no permanent solutions—hence all species eventually go extinct, though lineages continue—even genuine expertise has to be traded off against other considerations. Spurious expertise parasites off the notion of expertise while seeking to inflate its ambit, so as to force deference from others. Precisely because it is spurious, it is not grounded in reality, so can make ever-grander claims.

Who cares if some women were offended by a shirt because it reminded everyone that straight men usually find nubile women desirable? Those offended had neither superior expertise nor superior moral standing. But this is precisely what is created by the combination of (1) making allegedly marginalised groups sacred—as political scientist Eric Kaufmann notes, the key element in “wokery”—plus (2) creating spurious expertise in social dynamics and social transformation: a moral hierarchy of presumptive deference policed by abusive stigmatisation.

Political scientist Jonathan Rauch enunciates in his Kindly Inquisitors the epistemic principle that is the basis of free society:

No one has special authority. No one gets the final say.

This is what claims to epistemic authority endemic to dominion capital denies. Since the claim is a lie, mobilisation by dominion capital of even genuine expertise can be made spurious by inflating its ambit beyond its actual expertise so as to serve dominion capital’s claims to authority.

A case study in how this works was provided during the official responses to Covid, when medical authority—some of it genuine—was wildly inflated to suppress other, very relevant, considerations. Such as: what is, or is not, appropriate in a free society; what past experience with mandatory vaccination had revealed; what past experience of pandemics told us; what the experience of clinicians was telling us; even what the patterns of illness and death were telling us.2

Central to the spurious expertise of dominion capital is its grading of expertise according to its own claims of epistemic and moral authority. Expertise from outwith dominion capital must either be characterised as not expertise, or as subordinate to the expertise of dominion capital. It uses its spurious expertise—necessary for its own epistemic authority—to grade genuine expertise.

“Don’t do your own research” is classic devaluation of citizen choice—in this case, the enquiries of citizens—to force subservience to approved narratives. The politics of being superior deciders that is the central claim of dominion capital is the politics of contempt for the choices of others. As the social leverage of the professional-managerial class comes precisely from claiming to be superior deciders—including deciding what speech, what language is, or is not, legitimate—the politics of dominion capital are deeply congenial to it.

Part of the process is generating credentials that provide leverage without earned respect. Bean-counting bureaucracy loves credentials—and other tick-boxes—as they are easy markers of who is, or is not, allowed to do what. Alas, precisely because the reality-feedbacks within so much of academe are so broken, it’s easy to generate credentials that provide much less expertise than what they say on the tin. This can extend even to serious professional training—hence churning out doctors with little training in human nutrition and its effects on human health. The record of Education Faculties in “training” its graduates in toxic falsities is far worse.

The epistemic authority of dominion capital comes from being superior deciders because they are the superior knowers. The more they can block questioning of their claims—such as by use of stigmatising moral abuse—the more dominant their social leverage becomes.

As literary critic and Slavist Gary Saul Morson notes:

Anyone can succumb to ideology. All it takes is a sense of one’s own moral superiority for being on the right side; a theory that purports to explain everything; and—this is crucial—a principled refusal to see things from the point of view of one’s opponents or victims, lest one be tainted by their evil viewpoint.

The key trick of social aggression is to parade it as being moral, as social concern. The more grandiose the moral or social concern, the greater the level of social aggression that it can justify to itself. The grander the moral or social concerns, the more wicked, the more illegitimate, dissent becomes. Such politics is compatible with neither a free society, nor a democratic one.

Conclusion

The trouble with the civil rights/anti-discrimination laws is that they did two things.

(1) Create a legal-bureaucratic network based on the idea that the citizens constantly hover on the edge of wrong think (racism) and wrong act (discrimination) and so sought to morally police the citizenry for words, emotions and actions.

(2) Create a very widespread moral expectation that they could create equal outcomes between groups.

The moral expectation of equal outcomes between groups mobilised a liberal-humanitarian sentiment that ended up, in political scientist Eric Kaufmann’s words:

making sacred of historically marginalised race gender and sexual minorities.

“Wokery” is the ever more elaborate search for malevolent reasons—i.e., invisible sociological gremlins—why such equality isn’t being achieved. The originally Marxist oppressor-oppressed template—updated via Critical Theory—provides a ready-made framing that can be adapted for any identified group open to such marginalised sanctification.

Our deeply dysfunctional universities have proved themselves more than up to the task of generating the necessary spurious expertise. They have produced politics of ultimately totalitarian arrogance that de-legitimise dissent and seek to extend claims of superior knowing—and so superior deciding—into all aspects of society (into comedy, advertising, workplaces, schools, universities, professional associations, media, journals, sport, fiction, entertainment, games, hobbies …) as part of a grand program of professional managerial class social imperialism.

——

References

Books

Donald E. Brown, Hierarchy, History & Human Nature: the Social Origins of Historical Consciousness, University of Arizona Press, 1988.

Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, Red Pill Press, [2006] 2012.

Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, University of Chicago Press, [1993] 1994.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011], 2013.

Articles, papers, book chapters, podcasts

Mikhail Bakunin, ‘Marxism and the State,’ [1867] in Michael Malice, The Anarchist’s Handbook, Chapter 7, 2021.

Joshua Charap and Christian Harm, ‘Institutionalized Corruption and the Kleptocratic State,’ IMF Working Paper, WP/99/91, July 1991. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2016/12/30/Institutionalized-Corruption-and-the-Kleptocratic-State-3152

C.J. Clark, M. Fjeldmark, L. Lu, R.F. Baumeister, S. Ceci, K. Frey, G. Miller, W. Reilly, D. Tice, W. von Hippel, W.M. Williams, B.M. Winegard, P.E. Tetlock, ‘Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors,’ Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2024 May:17456916241252085. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380636163_Taboos_and_Self-Censorship_Among_US_Psychology_Professors

Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2.

https://raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/issue-index/all-volumes-issues/volume-06/volume-06-number-2

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, ‘Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality,’ December 11, 2006. https://ssrn.com/abstract=980844

Nick Haslam, Brodie C. Dakin, Fabian Fabiano, Melanie J. McGrath, Joshua Rhee, Ekaterina Vylomova, Morgan Weaving and Melissa A. Wheeler, ‘Harm inflation: Making sense of concept creep,’ European Review of Social Psychology, 2020, Viol. 31, No. 1, 254–286. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10463283.2020.1796080

Rob Henderson, ‘Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class—A Status Update,’ Quillette, 16 Nov 2019.

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Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class—A Status Update

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Jacob Mchangama, ‘The Sordid Origin of Hate-Speech Laws: A tenacious Soviet legacy,’ Hoover Institute, December 1, 2011. https://www.hoover.org/research/sordid-origin-hate-speech-laws

Ekin Ok, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, and Karl Aquino, ‘Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021 Jun; 120(6): 1634-1661. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32614222/

F. A. Hayek, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society,’ American Economic Review, Sep. 1945, XXXV, No. 4, 519-30. https://statisticaleconomics.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/the_use_of_knowledge_in_society_-_hayek.pdf

Ann Krispenz, Alex Bertrams, ‘Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment,’ Current Psychology, 20 March 2023. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-023-04463-x

Gary Saul Morson, ‘How the great truth dawned: On the Soviet virtue of cruelty,’ The New Criterion, Volume 38 Number 1, 4. https://newcriterion.com/article/how-the-great-truth-dawned/

Harold Robertson, ‘Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis,’ Palladium: Governance Futurism, June 1, 2023. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, ‘Moral Grandstanding,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2016, 44, no. 3, 197-217. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/papa.12075

Robb Willer, Ko Kuwabara, Michael W. Macy, ‘The False Enforcement of Unpopular Norms,’ American Journal of Sociology, Volume 115, Number 2 (September 2009), 451–90. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/599250?journalCode=ajs

Daniel Williams, ‘The marketplace of rationalizations,’ Economics & Philosophy (2022), 1–25. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358989232_The_marketplace_of_rationalizations

I’m afraid you’ll have to work out what that means in your time zone—I’m incapable of doing so, for reasons explained here.

Below the fold, paid subscribers will have access to the Zoom link for the livestream. If you wish to join us, there’s still a 20 per cent discount on a paid subscription available.

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In Wednesday’s piece, I focussed on Lorenzo’s two economics essays, genderwoo, and research from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) on the covid lab-leak. However, those are things that were simply at top of mind when I was writing. Lorenzo—as is his wont—has come up with a more comprehensive list of the extent to which experts (mainly academics, but also many senior bureaucrats and think-tankers) have absolutely soiled themselves.

Independently of that, we both read ’s tremendous piece on how to go about admitting when you’re wrong. We’re both a bit annoyed we didn’t see this earlier. It’s well worth thinking about in the context of dealing with what is now widespread contempt for clever people generally and academic experts in particular.

Nigel is an Anglican vicar, so he uses a religious framework drawing on the Christian virtue of humility, but he deploys it as originally conceived of in late antiquity, that is, as mens humilis. “Mens” means “mind” in Latin. When Romans (both pagan and Christian) talked about this stuff, their concern was explicitly with clever people who’d got high on their own supply. Humilitas (the better-known Latin term) came later, and obviously applies more generally than the original phrase. If you’re not religious, park your irreligiousness for a bit and read what he’s written with an open mind.

So far, I have alluded to the role of intellectual virtue in handling historical controversy. I have spoken of my own sense of obligation to expose my viscerally unionist convictions to the arguments of Scottish secessionists, just in case those contained truths I should learn—that is, I gestured toward the virtue of docility. I have alluded to the duty to be open to the whole truth about the past, not just the convenient parts—that is, the duty to exercise the virtue of honesty. I have spoken of the duty of avoiding moral or political bias—that is, the duty to exercise the virtue of justice-as-fairness.

And I have mentioned the virtue of humility in remembering our creaturely limitation by time and place as we judge the behaviour of our ancestors. One of the most shocking revelations of my experience of the history culture war during the past six years is how many university professors of history display a lack of intellectual virtue.

Meanwhile, here’s Lorenzo’s thoughts on—and laundry list of—expert loopiness in recent times.

Lorenzo on Delusion as Moral Signal

The thirteenth essay in the Worshipping the Future series (which will recommence shortly) was entitled In the absence of reality-testing, bullshit wins. My thesis is simple: if there are not sufficiently binding reality-tests, what is persuasive wins out over what is true.

In particular, what establishes someone’s moralised in-group status wins out over what is true. What grants moralised in-group status has powerful appeal, so is likely to be persuasive. As the essay says:

If, however, such [reality] tests are weak or absent, that means the costs of error are low. If the costs of error are low, then the efficient level of self-deception, the level of self-deception that enables us to be more persuasive and more able to moralise and rationalise our self-interest, is going to be high.

This is not an idle point. Let’s consider some of the ideas recently popular among the “better educated”:

That a person with a penis can be a woman.

That there is no problem having someone who has gone through male puberty competing in women’s sports. (Why, pray tell, is there a category of “women’s sports” in the first place?)

That the surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of minors for gender non-conforming behaviour represents care and compassion.

That only fools do not believe in evolution but humans are blank slates.

That there are no differences in cognitive patterns between men and women.

That moralising racial differences is outrageous if you put whites on top but morally laudable if you put whites on the bottom.

That it is outrageous to preference men but morally laudable to preference women.

That if you criticise men, it’s feminism; but if you criticise women, it’s misogyny.

That words are violence but silence is also violence.

That Russiagate was accurate reporting (and was absolutely not QAnon for the college-educated).

That the lab-leak hypothesis was a racist conspiracy theory (when there was systematic suppression of the evidence for a lab leak).

That the Hunter Biden laptop was likely a Russian misinformation op.

That there was no issue with President Biden’s cognitive capacity (“sharp as a tack,” yes really).

That defunding the police would have no effect on homicide rates.

That a disease whose risks were overwhelmingly concentrated among the metabolically compromised demanded general lockdowns and closed schools.

That there was no such thing as natural immunity from having caught Covid. (What are vaccines designed to replicate again?)

“My body, my choice” except it was fine to make compulsory a new medical intervention if you call it vaccines (when we don’t make actual vaccines compulsory, as historical experience shows that backfires).

That migration is such that marginal benefits exceed marginal costs for everyone in society.

That requiring a photo ID for voting is outrageous voter suppression but it is absolutely fine to demand proof of vaccination (or rather “vaccination”) to go about the ordinary business of life.

That Jews are not indigenous to Israel, so can be treated as settler-colonialists, even if they are refugees from Muslim countries. But Arabs are indigenous to Palestine, despite arriving centuries later.

That it was perfectly fine—indeed defending democracy—to knock Donald Trump off the ballot for something he had neither been charged with nor convicted of (so legally outrageous that SCOTUS squished that 9-0).

Progressive politics has essentially become about inserting the professional-managerial class into every possible resource flow with as much control over discourse as possible—like pressuring social media companies to do end-runs around the First Amendment—while playing favour-divide-and-dominate identity politics and treating dissent as morally and cognitively illegitimate.

The combination of massive increases in bureaucratisation; university “training” with weak or absent feedbacks from the consequences of such training; a burgeoning advocacy/non-profit sector; and use of public funds in the US and in the EU to support astroturfed activism, has created a large, parasitic, insulated-from-feedbacks sector.

You can make an argument that we now have the most delusional leadership class in history: one that affirms things not only without evidence but against the evidence. How so? Because rationalising away inconvenient facts has become a marker signal of being one of the Very Serious People, one of the Smart and Good. This is something that works far better than it should because so many highly educated—or at least credentialed—people are insulated from the consequences of their policy choices.

In the absence of reality-testing, bullshit wins. Hence the spectacular levels of bullshit adopted and spouted by Very Serious People.

No wonder “culture war” politics—which is mostly class war politics: the professional-managerial class versus the working class, with de-banking as an instrument of industrial policy having driven the tech-bros from the former to the latter—has overwhelmed sound fiscal, economic, and other policy across so much of the West.

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The situation currently facing the universities, medical establishment, and bureaucracy is closer to Aesop’s shepherd-boy than the fictional George Washington, in large part because the latter owns up. Various establishments are not owning up on all sorts of things: if anything, they’re doubling down.

There’s a serious case to be made that the worst current instance of this globally concerns the covid lab-leak hypothesis, discussed at length in this piece (by and , both from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression). That said, the University of Sussex is refusing to resile from “men are women” despite a half-a-million + quid fine for harassing a sex realist academic out of her job.

I get that covid fuckery was very bad, killed a lot of people, ruined a lot of kids’ educations, and covered the Chinese Communist Party’s blushes—but there is something beyond bonkers about the idea that people can change sex.

The key insight here is that individuals or organisations which have either lied directly or been grievously mistaken are then disbelieved when they do tell the truth. And on this point, the people who fouled up covid origins and then suppressed dissenting voices using what has come to be known across the pond as “the censorship industrial complex” are far from alone.

Lorenzo’s last two longreads (part one here, and part two here) concern the extent to which the academic discipline of economics has either been egregiously mistaken or actively mendacious (probably a mixture of the two) about the economic benefits of immigration. This is particularly serious, because economics was one social science both conservatives and classical liberals used to bracket off from the rest of the humanities and social sciences, arguing it was more rigorous and so worth protecting.

No longer. It’s now at risk of going into the woodchipper along with sociology (which “fell into the tar-pit of Marxism,” as often points out), anything to do with gender studies (which gave us blank-slatism on steroids, viz “men are women”), and English literature (which is little more than ill-written theoretical brainrot and has nothing to do with, ahem, literature).

To that end, in our next Chatham House Zoom conversation for paid subscribers, we’ll be discussing this problem and what—if anything—can be done about it. If there’s time, we’ll also discuss this piece of mine on “YooKay plc” for the University of Texas at Austin’s Civitas Institute.

This will take place at 10 am GMT on Sunday, March 30th. Both Lorenzo and I will send out links to our paid subscribers a couple of hours before the stream starts. Below, you can take out a paid subscription and get a 20 per cent discount if you’re keen to join us. This offer expires on March 30th, the day of the Zoom call.

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For those of you who are new free subscribers, a brief background: because this Substack is free, to reward paid subscribers for their support, we do live-streamed Chatham House Rules chats and periodic pre-records with notable guests.

This means no information from or quotation of—and this doesn’t just apply to Lorenzo or me—is to be attributed to any participant in the call, outside the call. We do not want any of our supporters sacked for “something they said on the internet.”

We will hold a Chatham House Zoom chat for paid subscribers to discuss both pieces at some point in the next 10 days. Both pieces are, as always, free to read.

Income and wealth inequalities between countries dwarf inequalities within countries. Being in the top 50 per cent of the income of a developed democracy puts you in a much higher position when it comes to global income.

This is because productivity differences between countries dwarf productivity differences within countries. This dramatic divergence in relative productivity is a historically recent phenomenon that mostly took off after 1820—with the invention of railways and steamships—though some estimates suggest that NW Europe and parts of East Asia started drawing ahead from about 1500.

The current best evidence suggests a combination of culture and institutions explains these patterns. If it were just a matter of useable knowledge, one would expect economies to converge fairly quickly as folk copied what made people so much richer.

If you look where people were in more economically developed countries in 1500 and then note where their descendants live now, those are richer countries. It’s the culture and institutions they took with them that turns out to be crucial, not least because this facilitates invention/innovation and use of technology.

Some countries have significantly caught up with the most prosperous countries. Leaving aside cases of small populations with lots of natural resources, the successful “catch-up” countries adapted not merely useful technological and organisational—but also institutional—practices to their own circumstances. Much of this has amounted to East Asians catching up with NW Europeans and their descendant societies.

The societies that did “catch up” had states whose leaders were not only willing, but able, to adapt. That lots of countries have failed to emulate such successes suggests that there are some serious barriers to doing so. Then again, so does how historically recent such variable surges in productivity are.

The simple reality of such dramatic and persistent differences in productivity suggests people would be generally better off economically if they moved from poorer to richer countries. Which is, of course, why lots of people do and even more people express willingness to do so.

If people are more productive in wealthy countries, then wealthy countries should expect to benefit from having people move to them and thereby become more productive. In an accountancy sense, this is trivially true. The output of the migrants is added to the country’s GDP: voila!, migration is an economic boon to the receiving country.

The trickier question is what the effects are for the already resident population. The answer is: it depends. It depends on which migrants, the scale of migration, and on which residents.

If culture and institutions matter—as they clearly do—effects on residents will depend on how well the cultures that migrants bring with them adapt to local culture and institutions. It will also depend on how the scale and content of the migration flows affect the culture and institutions of the receiving country. What level of capital and skills migrants have will also make a difference.

Human societies are not built on transactions. They are built on connections first, then on transactions, then on the interaction between transactions and connections, and on expectations about both. The Loury principle—that we begin embedded in a series of social connections and expectations well before we start economically transacting—means social placement and cultural framings matter, as do institutions. As a review article on the role of culture in the happenstance of human affairs tells us:

Although using very different methodologies, the studies all provide evidence leading to the same general conclusion: individuals from different cultural backgrounds make systematically different choices even when faced with the same decision in the same environment. (Emphasis added.)

I am suspicious of attempts to separate the effect of institutions from those of culture, since it is clear institutions and organisations work differently in different cultures. As military analyst Kenneth Pollack notes:

… until relatively recently, Western economics and management theory took as a bedrock assumption that universal factors such as the availability of technology and the profit motive would produce similar organizations and methods of operation in any business regardless of cultural factors. This has been challenged broadly by new studies of the impact of cultural preferences on organizations, management, and leadership, such as the massive Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) study of such practices in 62 different countries. The GLOBE study found that societal culture had a far greater impact on leadership, management, and organizational behavior than market forces and industry effects (i.e., industry-wide practices across societies). This and other such studies have increasingly demonstrated that, despite the Darwinian competition of the marketplace (akin to the competition of combat), organizations function very differently in different societies. They have found that this holds true even for businesses nominally owned by foreign entities, which have to take on the patterns of behavior of the host country to survive and thrive. (Armies of Sand, P.408)

Economist is correct: economics should be the study of human interdependence, which is why countries and communities as just-places-where-transactions-happen is such an inadequate basis for analysis.

If, for example, part of what makes a country so productive is being a high trust culture with robust convergent expectations—so transactions are much easier to engage in—then any migration that generates serious divergence in relevant expectations, lowering trust, will impose significant costs on local residents.

Patchy policy understanding

In 2001, the UK Cabinet and Home Offices issued a policy paper on migration. It was an optimistic policy paper about the benefits of migration. In the words of the paper:

If all markets are functioning well, there are no externalities, and if we are not concerned about the distributional implications, then migration is welfare-improving, not only for migrants, but (on average) for natives.

Obviously, not all markets exist, there are externalities (effects on third parties), and distributional implications matter. Various “wouldn’t it be nice” gains are cited:

• intangible social and human capital: migrants may have attributes – entrepreneurialism, for example – that generate benefits for natives

• diversity: natives may gain (tangible or intangible) benefits from interacting with migrants from different backgrounds and cultures.

What is not discussed are the possibilities for the disruption of local social capital, local connections, and convergent expectations. We are a normative species precisely because of the cooperation advantages of robust convergent expectations.

The UK policy paper does not seriously wrestle with diversity imposing cultural transaction costs, leading to loss of shared expectations. It fails to grasp that these effects are differentiated by locality. How culturally different and distant newcomers are matters.

Then we get what has become a boilerplate misdirection:

Britain is a country of immigration and of emigration

Yes, there has been a lot of emigration from Britain, especially after the development of railways and steamships in the 1820s. Nevertheless, Britain has a long history with a very stable population, with incoming groups being small as a proportion of the population.

The smaller the group relative to the resident population, and the less culturally distant they are, the easier they are to absorb and incorporate. Migration is, like most things, one of decreasing marginal benefits and increasing marginal costs.

Then we get pre-emptive presumed incapacity:

… trying to eliminate migration through immigration control policy alone is likely to be very difficult.

Various countries have proved entirely been able to do so. We get false claims of necessity:

… migration is essential to growth in some areas.

The history of c19th labour-exporting Britain shows this is nonsense. Being convenient for economic transacting is the not the same as being essential.

The issue of an ageing population is raised, citing the UN Replacement Migration Report. This alleged benefit of migration is typically exaggerated in its benefits, as migrants also age.

The 2001 paper tells us that:

The Government believes that encouraging citizenship will help to strengthen good race and community relations and that ‘one measure of the integration of immigrants into British society is the ease with which they can acquire citizenship’.

Good “race and community relations” is a moralised version of social stability, but what would encourage social instability?

Every polity is based around an institutional commons: a set of interlocking institutions in a particular territory. Like any commons, an institutional commons runs the risk of people under-investing in it and over-extracting from it. Much of what successful polities do is to encourage the reverse.

The 2001 UK policy paper implicitly recognises potential cultural transaction costs while implicitly holding the locals responsible for any problems. The subsequent discourse has typically taken migrants doing less well than the national average as a moral burden on the locals. Migrants have come to be used as a moralised social weapon against locals (especially the local working class).

This is especially so if migration is turned into—as it has been—a moral project. Bringing up costs of migration for locals has become morally illegitimate, and part of that attack has turned on the claim such concerns are economically illiterate.

There are also potential problems from migrant diversity, though it is not put like that in the 2001 paper:

… migrant experiences are more polarised than those for the population as a whole, with larger concentrations at the extremes.

So, migrants can be expected to have a polarising economic effect on the wider society. As the paper says:

Migrants have mixed success in the labour market: some migrants are very successful, but others are unemployed or inactive.

Which suggests careful selection of migrants might be a good idea. There is also a touch of UK triumphalism that has not worn well:

Migrants appear to perform well in the UK labour market compared to other EU countries (although cross-country comparisons need to be treated with care, given data problems). The migrant population in the UK has an unemployment rate of six per cent compared with an unemployment rate of just under five per cent for the UK born. In France, non-EU migrants face a 31.4 per cent unemployment rate, compared to 11.1% for the French. Nearly half of migrants under the age of 26 are unemployed, twice the rate of French nationals in the same age group.Similarly, migrants are twice as likely to be unemployed as natives in Denmark, three times as likely in Finland, and four times as likely in The Netherlands.

This point goes both ways: that attention should be paid to both UK policies and institutions—what sustains them, what undermines them—and how migrants are selected. Systematically blocking voters from having their preferences on migration policy matter is obviously socially and politically corrosive.

Then there is a classic “the devil is in the details” problem:

Overall, migrants have little aggregate effect on native wages or employment, though they can have more of an effect (positive and negative) on different sub-groups of natives.

Another passage that has not worn well:

Migrants’ impacts on congestion and other externalities, like impacts on housing markets, can be both positive and negative, but not enough is known about them.

Unemployment is indeed far more of a structural than a labour-force size problem:

It is perhaps not surprising that immigration has no measurable impact on unemployment in the US and UK. The “ lump of labour” fallacy – that there are only a fixed number of jobs to go round – has been thoroughly discredited, and it is increasingly recognised that, given sound macroeconomic management, unemployment is primarily a structural phenomenon.

As the paper notes, migration affects the composition of output.

There are, however, a series of both highly supply-constrained and non-market factors that operate as constraints and so affect the consequences—including the distributional consequences—of migration. For instance, effects on rents and house prices are not seriously addressed:

many of these [congestion, housing] pressures reflect the fact that existing infrastructures are unable to adapt quickly enough to large changes in a local population.

There is an entire literature on how internal and external migration encouraged forms of local zoning that block housing provision—what has since become known as NIMBY (Not In My Backyard). California took that to levels sarcastically known as BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone).

The protection of various forms of local amenity becomes more salient as population pressures on localities rise. Of course external migration—bringing in non-voting residents—encourages NIMBYism that restricts housing supply and drives up house prices and rents: this has often been much of the point of such restrictions.

Another passage that has not aged well:

The broader fiscal impact of migration is likely to be positive, because of migrants’ favourable age distribution (a greater proportion of migrants are of working age), and the fact that migrants in work have higher average wages than natives …

Fiscal effects have not been positive for many migrants and the amelioration of ageing effects is marginal. As a recent Dutch study found:

Only 20% of all immigrants [to the Netherlands] make a positive lifetime net contribution to the public budget. Groups with large contributions come from Scandinavia, the Anglo-Saxon world and a few other countries like France and Japan.

The expectation of positive fiscal effects was taken to be a general feature of migration in the 2001 UK policy paper, despite repeatedly noting that migrants were heterogeneous and tending towards economic extremes.

Then we get a classic careful caveat:

Not enough is known about migrants’ social outcomes.

Such social outcomes include problems of organised sexual predation. Though, to be fair, they were social outcomes for non-migrants—just rather serious ones.

The above is a government policy paper, with the caution and caveats one expects from such documents. There are, however, problems with the paper due to blindspots and some key expectations not having been borne out.

A simple solution

If people are so much more productive in wealthy countries, then the more people move to wealthy countries, the greater the gain in global wealth and income. So, this logic goes, open borders should generate an enormous global gain in wealth and income.

A 2011 paper by economist Michael A. Clemens attempts to quantify this and (allegedly) think through the scale and whys of such gains. As he says, however:

These estimates are sensitive to assumptions, and in the following sections I discuss the (limited) available research on four kinds of assumptions that underlie these estimates: how migrants affect nonmigrants, the shape of labor demand, the effect of location on productivity, and the feasibility of greater migration flows.

There are lots of considerations that someone with some sense of historical practicalities would point to that are not covered. For example, how resilient are institutional orders to dramatic changes in their resident population? But to concern oneself with resilience, one has to (1) not see efficiency as the be-all and end-all policy or welfare considerations; (2) see polities and communities as something more than just places-where-transactions-take-place, and (3) see people as varying along a range of relevant dimensions.

Treating efficiency concerns as dominant—and polities and communities as primarily places where transactions happen, and happen in much the same way—means we get some truly dramatic estimates of the gains from global free flows of labour:

The gains from eliminating migration barriers dwarf—by an order of a magnitude or two—the gains from eliminating other types of barriers. For the elimination of trade policy barriers and capital flow barriers, the estimated gains amount to less than a few percent of world GDP. For labor mobility barriers, the estimated gains are often in the range of 50–150 percent of world GDP.

There are two possibilities: (1) economists are such clever people that they have noticed something huge everyone else has missed; or (2) they are ignoring some crucial factors.

In fact, existing estimates suggest that even small reductions in the barriers to labor mobility bring enormous gains. In the studies of Table 1, the gains from complete elimination of migration barriers are only realized with epic movements of people—at least half the population of poor countries would need to move to rich countries.

This is such an utter fantasy that only folk lost in Theory would regard it as a benchmark for anything. Even in terms of simple economics, what about diminishing marginal benefits and increasing marginal costs? Or is the claim that migration comes with so many positive economies of scale—and no relevant constraints—that we need not consider this? (It doesn’t.)

A conservative reading of the evidence in Table 2, which provides an overview of efficiency gains from partial elimination of barriers to labor mobility, suggests that the emigration of less than 5 percent of the population of poor regions would bring global gains exceeding the gains from total elimination of all policy barriers to merchandise trade and all barriers to capital flows. For comparison, currently about 200 million people—3 percent of the world—live outside their countries of birth (United Nations, 2009).

This requires resident citizens to agree to be swamped in their own countries. This is classic obsession with efficiency and gains from trade with no consideration of institutional resilience, interactions, or connections.

The notion that institutions are infinitely resilient in response to any rate of population increase and cultural change is deeply, deeply stupid. Any implied notion—from not grappling with this issue seriously—that either institutions or culture don’t matter is even more so.

People become mathematically convenient economic “particles” with no awkward ongoing connections, normative or other differentiation:

For nonmigrants, the outcome of such a wave of migration would have complicated effects: presumably, average wages would rise in the poor region and fall in the rich region, while returns to capital rise in the rich region and fall in the poor region. The net effect of these other changes could theoretically be negative, zero, or positive. But when combining these factors with the gains to migrants, we might plausibly imagine overall gains of 20–60 percent of global GDP. This accords with the gasp-inducing numbers in Tables 1 and 2.

We see here the Olympian Economist, sure that Theory directs them to all the relevant significant factors.

… we should expect to see proportionately greater international price wedges between different labor markets than between different goods and capital markets. … In Clemens, Montenegro, and Pritchett (2008), we document gaps in real earnings for observably identical, low-skill workers exceeding 1,000 percent between the United States and countries like Haiti, Nigeria, and Egypt. Our analysis suggests that no plausible degree of unobservable differences between those who migrate and those who do not migrate comes close to explaining wage gaps that large.

Is that because folk are blocked from moving, or because culture and institutions vary greatly? Why are folk not simply copying what rich countries do where they already are? Obviously, because some mixture of cultural and institutional factors is in the way. How do we know they will not take at least some of those blocks with them?

Do we see persistent differences in economic outcomes between groups within the same polities? If we look at who was relatively rich in 1500 and who is rich now, is it place or people that count? The answers are, of course, yes and people.

Differences among the models’ conclusions hinge critically on how the effects of skilled emigration are accounted for; the specification and parameters of the production function (and thus the elasticities of supply and demand for labor); assumptions on international differences in the inherent productivity of labor and in total factor productivity; and the feasible magnitude of labor mobility. Assumptions on the mobility of other factors matter a great deal as well; in KV [model] the majority of global efficiency gains from labor mobility require mobile capital to “chase” labor.

Thinking that these are all the key factors is Theory-drunk nonsense. The following is bizarrely inadequate as a list of relevant considerations:

To understand what underlies these various estimates of the gains from greater labor mobility, we need better information about at least four features of these models: 1) What are the external effects of (especially skilled) emigrants’ departure on the productivity of non-emigrants? Many of the above estimates rest on the assumption that this effect is small or nil. 2) What is the elasticity of labor demand, in the origin and destination countries? Are these studies getting it about right? 3) How much of international differences in productivity depend on workers’ inherent traits—accompanying them when they move—and how much depends on their surroundings? Is productivity mostly about who you are, or where you are? 4) Finally, given the many barriers that prevent emigration today, what future level of emigration is feasible?

… economists need much more evidence than we have, but that the existing evidence gives us little reason to believe that the numbers in Tables 1 and 2 greatly overstate the gains to lowering migration barriers.

Only if you regard yourself as a master of Olympian Theory and have identified all the key factors, especially what counts as evidence. Clemens does make some good points:

…it is possible that the depletion of human capital stock via emigration inflicts negative externalities on nonmigrants. However, these externalities have proven difficult to observe, their theoretical basis remains unclear, and their use to justify policy remains shaky.

Raising the expected value of human capital can, as Clemens points out, be expected to increase investment in it. His critique of the “brain drain” literature is worth reading. Though one can reasonably wonder if emigration systematically bleeding off those with greater initiative, and independence of thought and action, is a good thing for a culture.

On the other hand:

The arrival of migrants could, for example, decrease the availability of unpriced public goods at the destination like open space, clean air, publicly-funded amenities, and a degree of cultural homogeneity that may be valued by nonmigrants.

This is a distributional effect that Clemens critiques by saying migration grows an economy: which it clearly does, if only because migrants’ economic transactions are added to the economy. This does not answer the question whether various non-migrants are made worse off. Nor does it answer what stresses might be put on the existing institutional and cultural order.

There is a persistent tendency for upper middle class Westerners—particularly Americans—to ignore distributional questions they find inconvenient. Yet distributional questions are often central to why different folk have the reactions they do. That is part of the much more general “people unlike me” problem that plagues commentary in general and the social sciences in particular.

Clemens then moves to what has become a classic mechanism for ignoring locality-based social capital, a persistent “people unlike me” problem:

If people’s taste for cultural homogeneity …

Such dismissal of social capital and social resilience has been a recurring element within the migration literature in economics. No, communities and polities are not just places where transactions happen and happen in a homogeneous way. A web of connections and shared expectations makes lots of aspects of life—including economic aspects—more functional for people. Atomised communities are dysfunctional communities.

Non-kin cooperation is Homo sapiens super-ability, which does not mean localities-as-just-places-transactions-happen. Turning connections that matter into a “taste for cultural homogeneity” is patronising, Olympian arrogance. A mixture of the “people unlike me” problem and the “people as undifferentiated economic particles” problem.

Cheap consumption is not a be-all and end-all in itself. Folk need to have the incomes so as to consume. Their communities have to be functional to avoid social pathologies. Human interdependence is a thing. Communities and countries can be homes as well as individual dwellings.

The migration literature regularly finds minimal downward effects on local wages in destination countries from increased labour supply from migration. Yet Clemens cites literature that finds more substantial upward effects on wages of source countries via increased labour scarcity. There is some tension between these two findings.

Importing low-skill workers not only depresses the return to labour by reducing its scarcity vis-a-vis capital. It also depresses the Baumol effect, where labour competition distributes the benefits of increases in productivity across the labour force. Import a lot of low-skill workers and said benefits are distributed among more workers, suppressing the wages of residents from rising to what they otherwise would be.

So, it’s not merely whether wages of non-migrants are cut from mass migration, for which the evidence is indeed thin. It is also whether wages are suppressed, for which there is much more evidence—for instance, the way low-end wages rose in the US and UK, with their considerable low-skill/low-capital migration, during the Covid migration pause but did not in Australia, whose high-skill/high-capital migration had not been suppressing the Baumol effect.

Like so many mainstream economists, Clemens pays little or no attention to questions of resilience—to the ability to adjust to changes in circumstance (supply chains anyone?)—focusing overwhelmingly on efficiency:

Existing estimates of the efficiency gains from greater emigration hinge on a critical assumption: How productive will migrants be at the destination? Many have low productivity where they now are, in poor countries. How much of that low productivity moves with them?

…whether international differences in productivity are explained by differences in people or differences in places.

…finds that most of the productivity gap between rich and poor countries is accounted for by place-specific total factor productivity, not by productivity differences inherent to workers.

Place-specific how? Place-specific due to culture and institutions. Both of these things are deeply affected by people and, for example, convergence in bedrock norms and expectations which, because of cultural (including religious) differences cannot be guaranteed.

One reason why religious, or quasi-religious, disputes can be so bitter is religious notions of the sacred create realms of action where trade-offs are not accepted. This can generate increased resilience for a community, by creating robustly grounded common expectations, schemas (patterns of belief) and scripts (patterns of action). It can also generate intense—and persistent—tensions and disputes.

The Western world (painfully) evolved mechanisms for keeping religious disputes in bounds, only for the rise of political religions—with their own notions of unimpeachable (i.e. divine) authority and no-trade-off (i.e. sacred) realms of action—to kill millions. Religion rests on evolved mechanisms that are independent of any supernatural metaphysical claims. It can be—and has been—repurposed.

Islam—particularly Greater Middle Eastern (Morocco to Pakistan) Islam—has (at best) much weaker mechanisms for keeping religious disputes in check. Post-Enlightenment Progressivism aka Critical Constructivism aka “wokery” makes alleged oppressed or marginalised groups—or at least claims on their behalf—sacred, with all the attendant epistemic closure that goes with that. By declaring migrants—and particularly Muslims—a sacred group, they have systematically sabotaged public discourse, and public policy, on migration. Their stupidity-of-arrogance (Critical) Theory has interacted quite perversely with the Olympian arrogance of (inadequate) economic Theory.

The Olympian Economist attitude keeps turning up in Clemens (2011):

…finds that it is the wealthier, better-educated, and less-nationalist individuals in rich destination countries who have more favorable attitudes toward immigration.

Yes, because those with more capital—and whose social capital is less based on location—experience more of the gains from migration and far less of the costs. This difference is not a sign of moral and cognitive failure, it is a sign of different vulnerabilities and experiences. We are back to the “people unlike me” problem and the belittling of distributional effects.

Because Clemens is concerned with the potential global effects of mass migration, he also discusses the economics of emigration rather than concentrating—as a lot of the literature does—on effects of immigration.

Remittances have become a major result of migration. Such payments to family back home have become one of the larger forms of international financial flows. The benefits of remittances are likely to be much more unambiguously positive than foreign aid, which has no overall correlation with economic growth at all. Given the intentions and scale of foreign aid, this is a stunning level of failure.

Remittances also increase the chances of migration being a net cost to workers in migration-receiving countries, as it reduces how much migrants will generate increased demand for local goods and services in migrant-destination countries. Downward pressure on wages from increased labour supply by migrants will be less compensated for by any upward labour demand effect from migrant spending on local goods and services.

When it comes to potential costs of migration, does triggering at least three civil wars (in the US, Lebanon and Jordan) and an ongoing series of wars (the Arab-Israeli conflicts) count? Does mass sexual predation count—from practitioners of a religion that has, for its entire history, sanctified sex with captives and regards its rules, those of the Sovereign of the Universe discovered by fiqh—as applying to everyone, not just believers? Does degrading the access to various localities for women and gay folk count? Does importing people who have been marrying their cousins for generations, so have elevated rates of birth defects and general sickliness, count?

People really are not interchangeable widgets And yes, it is entirely possible that particular migrants may bring some anti-productivity, and anti-integration, cultural traits with them. As a study of the effects of different types of migrants on the Dutch Treasury found:

The educational level of immigrants is very decisive for their net contribution to the Dutch treasury, and the same applies to their children’s CITO scores (scores on a 50-point scale for assessing pupils in primary education). If the parents make a positive net contribution, the second generation is usually comparable to the native Dutch population. If the parents make a strongly negative net contribution, the second generation usually lags behind considerably as well. Therefore, the adage ‘it will all work out with the second generation’ does not hold true. High fiscal costs of immigrants are not that much caused by high absorption of government expenditures but rather by low contributions to taxes and social security premiums. We also find evidence for a strong relationship of average net contributions by country with cultural distance, even after controlling for average education and the cito-distribution-effect. The cultural distance to African-Islamic countries is large, and their emigrants bring large net fiscal cost, the distance to Confucian countries is modest and their emigrants on average bring the largest net benefits.

Then there is the entire question of why countries have borders and the long tradition of states worrying about integrating residents. There is a long history of states having strong integrating, or even culturally homogenising, policies. Why has nationalism had a corrosive effect on empires? What makes a polity functional or not and at what level? Why do economic outcomes vary so much between states and groups?

Treating states (and communities) as just places where transactions happen, and happen in a homogeneous way, is ridiculous. It is deeply, deeply stupid.

We see in Clemens’ paper, and in the current “open borders yay!” literature, the classic Olympian error—even apart from the people unlike me problem—of taking the continuing functioning, and its functioning at at least the current level, of the existing polity, or polities, for granted. There is no good reason to do so, and many reasons not to.

A theory of migration that is not built on a sound analysis of why states vary so much in their economic performance is nonsense. Without such an analysis, you simply cannot tell what the full effects of migration will be. Especially migration at the scale Clemens and the open border folk suggest.

Economist Bryan Caplan is the most prominent enthusiast for open borders. Garret Jones wrote a 2019 paper where he basically says “Bryan Caplan is using my model in a simple way that I wouldn’t, but if we run with that it does not lead where he says”. The analysis in the paper:

…sticks close to the theory that differences in productivity across countries are mostly externalities.

Which (1) has to be true for migration in general, and open borders in particular, to generate increased production, otherwise folk could just be as productive by remaining where they are, and (2) fits the facts. Productivity comes from transacting with others in particular cultural and institutional milieus, neither of which individual transactors have much effect on (but a critical mass of them can).

Cultures and institutions both evolve. The implication of the evidence is that they matter, a lot:

There are good reasons to doubt whether in fact permanent, unalterable elements of national productivity add up to a large number: Easterly and Levine (2003), for instance, in an influential paper, find that the historical correlation between good geography and good modern outcomes can be explained entirely by good modern institutions: in the past, good places predicted good policies. Will that correlation hold in the future? Only a structural model of institutional quality can answer that question, and such a model is beyond the scope of this paper. In any case, let's recall a critical fact: permanent productivity shocks attached to a precise location, whether explained or unexplained, are indispensable to the case for Open Borders.

There is no such thing as Magic Dirt. The only way one can mount an “all it takes is for people to move where productivity is higher”—without a robust theory of how and why polities vary so widely in productivity—is by making location Magical. Or, to put it in more theoretical language, there are “permanent productivity shocks attached to a precise location”.

One response is “those places have better public policies”. Well, yes, obviously. A much cited 1995 paper by economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner shows the systematic difference policy makes for economic growth—specifically, trade openness and reasonably stable protection of property rights.

But why do countries vary so much in their policy choices? Good public policy is a form of useable knowledge. If that was all there was to the matter, why doesn’t everyone converge towards high productivity? What if ideas don’t travel?

Moreover, let us just ponder the scale of movements required to generate the alleged global wealth gains from open borders. In any system with constraints, unless there are economies of scope or scale, there will be declining marginal benefits and increasing marginal costs.

So, to assess the potential gains, one has to assess the various constraints. Which requires, guess what, a robust analysis of why polities vary so much in productivity and—a point often missed—why groups within polities vary. It must also cover why good policy is not just readily-transferred useable knowledge.

Consider the fact that there are three factors of production—land, labour, and capital. (Some folk add entrepreneurship, but I prefer to see that as a coordinating function rather than a factor of production.)

So, what happens if you crowd a whole lot more people into a given area of land? Congestion costs and rents are going to go up. Potentially, a lot. That is going to very much generate declining marginal benefits and increasing marginal costs for migration.

This we can absolutely see happening. Who is it going to affect most adversely? The local providers of labour.

One hint that scale (and so feedback) really, really matters, is that the richest countries per capita tend to be small countries. The major exception is the US, which is a highly federal state. Turning the European Economic Community into the European Union has been a negative for European economic growth.

Feedback effects matter. We are creating societies of broken feedbacks, not least by use of a pervasive arrogance of Theory to delegitimise concerns and experiences. The arrogance of both Marxist and Nazi Theory oppressed and blighted the lives of hundreds of millions and killed tens of millions.

More recently, the arrogance of Critical Theory—derivatives of Marxism that update its oppressor/oppressed template—has corrupted education, from schooling to universities. The arrogance of Queer Theory has seen the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors passed off as “care” along with the Lysenkoist corruption of scientific research, publication, and professional associations. The arrogance of Settler-Colonial Theory has turned brutal, murderous Jew-hatred into “resistance”.

The use of overblown Theory by the activist professional-managerial class to insert itself into as many resource-flow as possible—with as much control over discourse as possible—degrades both discourse and democracy. This has been especially true with migration, as it is so useful for favour-divide-and-dominate games (aka identity politics), fracturing the demos, right down to local communities and local accountability.

The recent sentencing guidelines in the UK—which defy both overwhelming public opinion and centuries of legal thought in both common and civilian legal systems—are an emblematic example of the arrogance of Theory operating in captured institutions: including variable outcomes between groups being turned into a moral burden for the locals.

Any notion that the only issue of consent is for incoming migrants is a moral and political nonsense. Unfortunately, the “migration is a big economic positive” literature—however grotesquely inadequate it is—has done its bit to de-legitimise working-class concerns, thereby adding to the costs of migration by degrading democratic feedback and public discourse.

Bryan Caplan, in his response to Garret Jones writes:

So even though open borders nearly doubles the production of mankind, it reduces living standards of the current inhabitants of rich countries by a massive 40%. In short, we have a classic NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) picture; open borders is great for humanity, but nevertheless awful for us.

It is hard to know where to start with this piece of Olympian arrogance parading as care. First, this is a policy that will never achieve democratic consent. Any version of this can only proceed by lying or otherwise functionally disenfranchising working-class votes. We can observe efforts to do precisely this, especially in the EU and UK. Sabotaging democratic accountability has repeatedly proven to be bad for human flourishing.

Second, it is a classic example of utilitarianism not scaling down to the individual or even the national level. Human morality simply does not work like that, nor should it be expected to do so. Thirdly, it really is “polities (and local communities) are just places for transactions to homogeneously happen” reasoning.

For that is another aspect of migration: it has the potential to shift political power radically. This is precisely how mass migration has fractured polities along their fault lines, triggering civil wars and civil strife.

The notion that folk can never bring dysfunctions with them is patent nonsense. The notion that they cannot reduce the functionality of the polity they are entering is also patent nonsense.

The notions that there are no problems of culture, of trust; that institutions cannot become stressed or broken; that the operation of institutions are independent of norms, expectations, cultural schemas (patterns of belief) and scripts (patterns of action), of the life strategies, of the people operating them, is all also patent nonsense.

If, for example, you import significant numbers of people with not only higher crime rates, but intergenerationally higher crime rates, you reduce the trust level in a society. Unfortunately, as the predictors of crime have a high degree of heritability, both genetically—such as executive functions and personality traits—and culturally—such as honour cultures—intergenerational persistence in elevated crime rates is to be both expected and observed.

If you then make any negative differences in outcomes between groups a moral burden on the locals—while turning migrants into a sacred group—then utterly perverse policy outcomes are more or less guaranteed. This can be made worse again by making degrading the heritage of the locals into an ongoing moral project.

So there is a multi-level attack on folk’s sense of home: at a community, national, and cultural level. Then, with the right level of epistemic closure, one can get utterly outraged that all this—including wildly uneven benefits and costs of migration—generates political responses.

Devaluing the institutional commons

A polity is based around an institutional commons, an interlocking set of institutions and convergent expectations. Creating and maintaining an effective and resilient institutional commons cannot remotely taken for granted. Hence the effort polities have put in to doing so and how polities can come apart when that fails.

What do we see in South Africa? A country heading towards collapse through the systematic debauching of its institutional commons.

Most of the wars since 1945 have been civil wars. Most of the genocides have been internal genocides. Even the most obvious counter-example—the Holocaust—took place in a zone of destroyed states and significantly recruited local collaborators. Countries that have more recently have achieved internal peace typically had preceding histories of internal violence.

The lack of a robust theory of why productivity varies so dramatically between countries—despite clear evidence about good and bad policies—is not an unfortunate absence in migration theory. It is an absolutely disabling absence. It is why economists have got migration so seriously wrong. Polities and communities are not just places where transactions homogeneously happen.

The Samuelsonian presumption that economists are dealing with economic “particles” who can be mathematised via a social physics continues to do a lot of damage. It is the Lockean “blank slate” wreaking analytical havoc. The failure of economists on migration has been so catastrophically bad that it runs the risk of de-legitimising their entire discipline.

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