Amerika

Allow me to start this post with JPW’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory on Free Trade. It gives me a nice launching pad for a discussion on freedumb versus empowering chaos. They exist in synonymy as opposite sides of an increasingly common coin. The empowering chaos is a ladder for the agile known as creative destruction. The freedumb and all of its negative externalities mordantly skulk in the back-blast area of Free Trade’s creative destruction bazooka. Just like the Valley of Ashes outside of East and West Egg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby.

Free Trade has winners and Free Trade has losers. The winners win really big. They win so big that they are the guys writing your econ text and telling you all about gains from trade and the magic of comparative advantage. The losers end up being posterized by the new economy. They get written about by cheap, evil National Review Conservatives who extol how utterly useless they are for not getting with the program.

So if you read the canonical works on international econ, you’ll hear all about the winners at Davos instead of how the Thai Bhat got ru-rued by arbitragers working for George Soros. So when you see the Thai Bhat crash or your neighbors get foreclosed on in Indy because of the glories of international trade, it leads to a dissonance. All the textbooks from that econ course where I scavenged a B-Minus told me Free Traders were the good guys. Those text books represent a narrative written by the winners. The losers are laid off and flunking out of OxyContin rehab. Their text on economic jihad would be dyspeptic at best and is about to as likely to be forthcoming in AD 2016 as George R. R. Martin’s next Song of Ice and Fire novel. The experts are all on the winning team, look like beautiful people and they express themselves so thoughtfully. The losers look like Saruman’s orc band from the 2nd LOTR Movie. Free Trade therefore must be an unalloyed good. I’m screwed up if I don’t see and extol its glories. That’s how we fail to see truth when history is written by the winners and suffered by those prostrate in ignominious, soul-crushing defeat.

So I’ve planted the seedling of an axiom athwart the elitist narrative of Anarcho-Tyranny for which Free Trade was a temporary proxy. Lighten up, Francis. Let’s hold our horses on whether potentially toxic freedom will end up being the conquering force of all history. Let’s unpack and define two terms I’ve tossed in as grenades.

Freedumb consists of the right to do stupid things, in stupid ways and *YOU* can’t make me stop doing it. Practitioners of freedumb don’t have good enough minds to prepare for chaos. They can’t see past two dimensions and add a 3rd axis for Time Preference. They are the hapless victims of Anarcho-Tyranny. Chance picks them off and fornicates them comatose like a grubby PUA with a handful of Roofie pills. The mockers go tsk-tsk-tsk. Playing stupid games will entitle you to win some stupid prizes. And as the ranks of the stupid burgeon with fresh new victims, the maintenance costs of our Amerikan orc band will increasingly stress the resources of our society.

Empowering chaos is the flip side. It’s when opportunity meets preparation. It strikes like lightning where chance interacts positively with the prepared and capable mind. Ultimately, the paths of those reveling in their heroin drip of freedumb are segregated from those that climb the chaos of Anarcho-Tyranny as their ladder out of some constraining abyss.

As the winners of this arrangement increasingly separate, it will be proven out that he who dares, wins! As our religious, nationalistic and social order fades into the twilight ether of a seemingly benighted history; those who dare will dare to be selfish. They will build that very wall they castigate Donald Trump over. It will just encompass a far smaller and more personal circumference. Peggy (((Noonan))) explains below.

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than non-elites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it. I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”

So what do? Can’t we all just feel The Bernâ„¢? Let’s just buy a few more kegs and refuel freedumb’s ongoing Visigoth Holiday. Socialism and Liberaltarianism will feed us all soma to ease the pains consequent the excesses of freedumb. We can (((tolerate))) anything to placate the louse-infested mob until our walls encompass completely our own elitist motte-and-bailey. Then why would the Eloi care whither the cretinous Moorlocks? It all works like clockwork in Brazil and Venezuela…oh, wait.

Because there will eternally be a reaction. You can consider it good, consider it evil; but must, to truly achieve ratiocination; acknowledge reaction as a component of the Tao. Man cannot tolerate long the spreading, dystopic blight of the ashen valley. It can be a controlled, thoughtful climb-down from a dangerously excited state to a more manageable ground state where we can “all just get along.” It can also explode, as a simultaneous emission, and release kilotons of destructive social energy from a point far greater than critical mass.

So let’s talk turkey about our current Anarcho-tyranny and both its positive (Empowering Chaos) and negative (Freedumb) outputs. Wealth has been created, futures and protective traditions have been destroyed in dystopic synonymy. If you don’t think outside Whig History enough to buy my Tao explanation of reaction, go back and re-read your Isaac Newton. Chaos, unleashed via Anarcho-tyranny, may serve some as a ladder. It certainly serves as a forcing vector. The reaction thereunto is implicit and mathematically necessary to describe any physical system in manner sufficient to be np-complete.

Whig-Man, by your own laws and paradigms; the reaction must be intelligently nurtured and channeled. It cannot be wished away. The return to formalistic order under the aristocracy of the capable is what will prevent the reaction from being ISIS, from being Anders Breivik or Ted Kaczynski or this coming weekend in Bulletmore, Murderland. How long? Not long. Demotism’s incestuous conjugation with Anarcho-Tyranny is amusing us all — to death.

Tags: capitalism, equality, free trade, freedom, Globalism