A Narrow Way Through

A Vision of Hope

“The visions are clear now. I see possible futures-all at once. Our enemies are all around us and in so many futures they prevail. But I do see a way. There is a narrow way through.”

-Paul Atreides, Dune 2 (2024)

The beliefs I hold will never win and they will never lose. We conceptualize life and history as stories because that is how our brains work, but stories have beginnings and ends, and history has neither. It’s impossible to know what will be here in a million years but we know that it will be something completely alien to us, either a strange biome bereft of humanity or some species of our descendants so bizarre that it is literally incomprehensible.

But we do not think on those time scales. I love my country and I have certain ideas about good societies, based upon my reading of history and my understanding of psychology and economics. Some of these beliefs are:

• Government is a remedy best used sparingly in most cases and always best administered by conscientious people operating close to home (federalism and republicanism)

• People react to incentives. Rewarding victimization with status will increase the number of people claiming victimhood. Reducing penalties for crime will lead to increases in crime.

• Marriage and children are the basis for a good society and for every successful social group which has ever existed. They are fundamental to the social fabric, and the fulfillment of individuals, and the continued existence of our nation and every nation. Protecting and promoting these human relationships should be the most important priority for every society.

• Happiness arises from challenges met and human relationship and service to others (family, community). Living to satisfy appetites and impulses can impart some utility but will eventually leave one feeling void and purposeless.

• Education is the inculcation of curiosity and the habits and knowledge which promote flexible problem-solving and lifelong learning. The values of citizenship, statistical principles, critical thinking, and history are all key features of a successful liberal education. Our system is mostly failing to deliver these benefits.

• History is a bloody and complicated story and we should approach it with humility and curiosity. The only way a person can be certain that they’re wrong in their approach to history is if they regard it as morally simple or allegorical, or if they use it as a vehicle to promote their own political visions. History can not serve this purpose. It is a vast canvas, most of which is unknowable, much of it unpalatable. We’re not better than those who came before.

• Culture (values, beliefs, habits, systems of socialization) is the most important factor for the flourishing of nations and groups. When assessing the dynamics of disparities and differences culture should always be the first and last factor interrogated.

• Men and women are qualitatively different (although strongly overlapping in many factors). These differences have been the fundamental social reality of every human group. Sex is the one of the most basic psychological and social traits of the individual and any public policy which tries to erode or dissolve the reality and importance of sex will only produce more confusion and upset.

The future is now quite uncertain; everyone lives for today, a state of mind in which the game of graft and swindle is played with ease — that is, it is only "for today" that they allow themselves to be bribed and bought, while tomorrow and tomorrow's virtue they reserve to themselves!

-Friedrich Nietzsche

I’ve tried to keep this brief and affirmative. Rather than talking about the managerial elite or Critical Theory I’ve listed my own beliefs and values. They form the bedrock of Western civilization and they are currently receding on many fronts, a recession driven by political opposition and technology and consumer culture and a psychological model which prizes subjectivity and emotion over duty and rigor. Here are some of the more critical pieces I have written, which might draw the shape of the ideas I oppose in better detail:

Equity & ‘Systemic’ Factors

Public Education

The Media & The Media & The Media

Narratives of Bigotry & Belief

Cowardice

Race & Policing

'Systemic Racism' as an idea

Identifying ‘Trauma’

Cultural Debates & Controversies

Hypocrisy

These pieces have a particular focus on logical consistency and ethical sense. Ethics are important. They are foundational to every ideology, even those which claim to be neutral and tolerant and relativistic (although they never are).

The purpose of this is not to re-hash those criticisms, or to add new ones to the pile. Rather, I would like to sketch a (realistic) vision for a brighter future, and how we might get there.

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Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

-Marcus Aurelius

A Vision For Hope

The United States continues to remain politically divided, but most people remain somewhere in the middle. Large cities continue to pursue destructive policies which penalize and burden business owners and enable criminals and generously aid illegal immigrants. Those cities begin to feel the effects of their policy-making choices. The inner cities become even more dangerous and poor, despite infusions of federal aid.

The people who can move out mostly do and property values begin to fall, affecting tax bases and growing rural and exurban and suburban areas and swelling the populations of the South and the conservative West. Policy-makers react by adjusting course.

The Left splits over its failed progressive policies. A growing segment of elite opinion affiliate themselves with the ‘sensible liberal ‘ position (supporting taxes and social welfare while still reinforcing social norms and institutional strength). The more radical fringe (about 1/3 of the Left) continues to split off and spirals into disarray and neurosis, having achieved nothing beyond social damage.

The anti-business, anti-merit, pro-criminal policies of Democrats cause a growing shift among black and Hispanic voters toward the right and the center. These temperamental centrists join with the pro-establishment liberals and moderate conservatives to essentially bypass Congress and the federal bureaucracy in many areas.

Rightwing Republicans and worsening inflation cause a series of drastic budget re-examinations and spending caps to be levied upon federal spending. A new federalist vision of taxes and services arises, popular in red states, which essentially pares back the federal budget in return for more state control over services and lower taxes. States can provide generous transfer payments and benefits to residents if they so choose but they are not federally administered and so vary from place to place.

The states which choose to leave social programs to their communities and spend lightly on progressive bureaucracy become more attractive for business and investment. Their populations continue to grow and their economies boom. A kind of state Darwinism ensues, in which states are essentially competing with each other for residents and for investment, absent the national mandates and broad moralism of 20th-century progressivism.

The growing pressure on federal budgets causes a shift in power and agency to the states and, especially, communities and private organizations and charities. The days of a vast millionaire nonprofit sector spending its time writing papers and applying for new grants (spinning its wheels while exerting a kind of inertial political pressure on the government and the culture) are over.

The legacy media and elite private universities continue to lose traction and resources. History will view 2020 as an inflection point. Universities end up weakened by federal controls on student aid (indirectly prompted years later by Biden’s generous debt forgiveness plans) and by weakening certification values for their degrees in the market. The employment market continues to work through its glut of lawyers and liberal arts graduates and communications majors but their resources begin to dry up in the late 2020’s and their organizations become enfeebled. People begin to choose new career paths and new majors. As professional opportunities dry up and the promise of thousands of academic and administrative posts in DEI and related fields begin to wither the ideologies wither along with them.

New education and media models (Substack, University of Austin, YouTube universities, online accreditation, new and outstanding vocation programs) arise to fill the gap and competition with these alternates further weakens the original heavyweights.

Marriage and childbirth rates continue to fall but the early-2000’s vision of gender flexibility and atomistic individualism and a lifestyle based purely upon ambition and consumption grows in its association with mental illness and unhappiness. Parents begin to pull their kids of out public schools, vitalizing voucher movements and quality private schools and locally-based education cooperatives. Parents begin to drastically restrict their kids’ access to smart phones and related technologies. Within a decade or two unfettered access to social media is considered to be a parenting decision as unpopular as cigarettes or truancy are in the present day.

New relationship norms begin to arise to rejuvenate love and dating and marriage in the digital age. This synthesis slowly grows to become a kind of new normal, different than the past but not explicitly pathological or adversarial.

Corporate music and film and television weakens itself with quotas and bad writing and conformity and content limits. New and rebellious creators arise to fill the looming gap in the market and fulfill the always-voracious appetite for novelty, truth & beauty. These new creators help to birth new ideas, which profuse across a hundred different mediums: comedy, music, poetry, documentaries, etc.

Mental healthcare experiences a drastic re-appraisal. It fragments into multiple and competing models, each with its own accreditation and professional boards system and office network. There will be affirmative therapists and virtue-based therapists, traditional therapists and radical therapists. Religion and social science are hybridized with applied psychotherapy to form a large, spiritually charged and evidence based corpus of knowledge and praxis. The idea of psychology and psychotherapy as unified fields collapses and techniques like CBT become divorced from professional practice, but also much more popular and refined.

The site of a rebirth? Perhaps…

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Are these extravagant prospects? I think not. Some of them will certainly not happen and few will happen just as they’re described here. Nevertheless, there is cause for optimism.

The future is in our hands.

Amor fati

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