“Settling”

     Consider the following observation:

Sexual double standards make it so that the woman in a marriage is more often settling for a man less attractive than those she dated and wondering if she could have done better.

This actually hurts men, but they never stop to think of the harm they cause themselves.

— Jessica Pin (@jess_ann_pin) June 8, 2026

     “Settling.” A word with ragged edges, no? Don’t we “settle” about something, every day of our lives? When lunchtime rolls around, I “settle” for whatever’s in the house, rather than demanding Lobster Newburgh. When I buy this, that, or the other thing, I “settle” for what my means will support, rather than insisting on the best-of-breed. And when I chose a wife, I, a relatively ordinary man, “settled” for a relatively ordinary woman – don’t look at me like that; the C.S.O. would agree – rather than holding out for Reese Witherspoon or Christina Hendricks.

     Settling is simply what we do when our opportunities are limited and don’t include our fantasy aspirations. That applies to the great majority of our decisions, regardless of the subject matter. It certainly applies to our mating decisions.

     Settling is not, in and of itself, any kind of issue. No, my lunch will not be Lobster Newburgh. No, my next car will not be a Mercedes Maybach or a Bentley Continental GT. No, the C.S.O. is not Reese Witherspoon or Christina Hendricks. But I chose freely from among the possibilities that were open specifically to me. No one forced any of my choices upon me. Therefore I will settle, accept the consequences, and learn to be happy with them.

     The issue is realism.

     Economists – real economists, not Marxists or meliorists – are relentless about the concept of scarcity. There’s a small supply of Lobster Newburgh. There’s a small supply of Mercedes Maybachs and Bentley Continental GTs. There’s definitely a small supply of supremely beautiful women – and it’s even smaller if you insist on a woman with a sweet and affectionate character. That will never change; therefore, the prices of those things will never descend to the level of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the used Ford Pinto, or the woman an ordinary man is likely to marry.

     The tragedy is not in the settling. The tragedy is in the recrimination and the failure to adjust.

     Consider Jessica Pin’s tweet above. Do you imagine that there are many women who never fantasize about the Adonis who had no time for her? Do you imagine that there are many men who never dream of the prom queen they yearned for but who wouldn’t spare them a glance? Most of us “revisit” our past choices and the domain in which we made them, at least on occasion. Where some of us fail is in the acceptance of our circumstances.

     Time was, it was deemed a matter of course that you would learn to love your spouse. Of course, in that era, many marriages were arranged by the parents of the spouses-to-be. Families and the reputations of families were a much greater part of matchmaking. Parents were conscious of their responsibility for guiding their children into a mature understanding of reality, its constraints, and our individual limitations.

     Perhaps mature realism has become rare, now that such arrangements are no longer the rule.

     At any rate, if we must fantasize about “how it could have been,” keeping those fantasies in the box labeled as such is paramount. Alternatively, we could purchase and read absurd romance novels that will temporarily transport us to an alternate universe where each of us can have his dream lover despite being a relatively ordinary person. But that’s a subject for another time. For now, have a little music:

Uncorrectable

WARNING!
The following piece will contain a common profanity.
For today, I found that profanity unavoidable.
Read on at your own risk. * * *

     There are two kinds of people: those who believe that there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t.

     Yes, yes: it’s an old gag. But I’m an old man; what do you expect from the likes of me? Anyway, I got up humming an old song, one that everyone has heard but is light-years distant from “the charts” in our time: this one. Being analytically inclined and surrounded by people desperate for an explanation for our current state of FUBARity, I gave it some thought.

     What’s that? You don’t understand FUBARity? Aw, c’mon! FUBAR is older than I am! FUBAR is a companion concept to SNAFU: “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.” That droll assessment is commonplace these days:

• We know things are fucked up;
• We also know that fucked-upedness is “normal;”
• So we relax.

     But we’re not supposed to relax when things are fucked up. We’re supposed to fix things. Common though it may be, fucked-upedness is an undesirable state. So let’s get to work!

     Wait: there’s a missing step in the above: We can’t just blindly “get to work;” we must first understand why things are fucked up. Where is the error, the mistake, the wrong turning that led us away from acceptable conditions into the land of the fucked-up? We must isolate that first and foremost.

     So we try, and are repeatedly thwarted. Our search leads us to people much like ourselves, except that… well, they aren’t. They don’t respond to citations of that essential ingredient in all investigations of fucked-upedness: reality. We shower them with actual data drawn from the experiences of men and nations, and they dismiss it! They talk around it; they shrug it off; they change the subject, hurl imprecations, or both. There’s no getting them to live in the same universe as we do.

     Some of them counter-shower us, sometimes with inane platitudes, but at other times with “studies.” The conclusions of those studies strike us as perverse. But given our inclination to respect systematic investigations of any sort, we trace those studies back to the people and institutions that emitted them, and we find… more fucked-upedness!

     There’s an enraging circularity about it all. It can drive a sane man mad, a peaceable man violent. We resist those inclinations and try again. After all, we’re talking to people much like ourselves. They must be reachable! But nothing changes.

     Presently we give up. We accept that though we may have found the problem – indeed, we most certainly have found it – we cannot fix it without violating the “rights” of those people who, after all, are much like ourselves. We shy back from the required means. We look for other measures, but in vain.

     For what we have found is FUBARity: that condition of being which is “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.”

     There’s a small dissonance in there. We recognize the fucked-upedness; it’s those who suffer it that don’t recognize it. But fixing the condition is what matters. Fixing it eludes us because of our respect for their “rights.”

     Our frustration knows no bounds.

* * *

     It’s time for a quote. This is one for which my source is hearsay. I’m told that the person who emitted it said it at a public appearance that I did not attend. I trust the person who repeated it to me, so I’ll give it to you as he did:

     “Savages have no rights.” – Ayn Rand

     Enormous dismay ensues. No rights at all? Not even the right to life? That can’t be right! Surely there’s some escape clause here.

     But there isn’t. The problem lies in the meaning of that term savages.

     A savage, in Rand’s lexicon, is someone who doesn’t recognize or honor rights as such. His ethical metaphysic is “What can I get away with?” Dangerous as individuals, savages are genocidally lethal when they band together. And there are bands of them ravaging our land even now.

     Savages yield only before overwhelming force. But we shy back from using force against them, because… well, they have rights! The right to life, at least. So running one over is out.

     But that yields the street to the savages. Unacceptable! What, then? Drive around them? Well, if possible… which it often isn’t. To get to where we must go, force will be required.

     You cannot concede rights to others who don’t concede yours.

* * *

     As you can surely tell by now, I’m not talking about the stereotype of a savage. That “black Sambo” figure in a loincloth with a bone through his nose blocks a lot of people’s thinking. I’m talking about people much like us in appearance and overall conduct, but who are willing to do anything and everything to get what they want politically. It doesn’t matter to them whose rights they must trample, or whether the end they seek is fatally unstable. They get their satisfactions from their political stances and those who share them. That’s the sustenance they seek: acknowledgement from their sort that they’re “good people.” Compared to that, what relevance has reality?

     There’s the core of FUBARity: it cannot be corrected by reference to reality. Those people who look like us and (mostly) dress like us yearn for acknowledgement that they’re good people much too strongly to be deflected by reason or evidence. Reality is, for them, an obstacle rather than a reference point. It must be defeated, and it will! Surely older and wiser heads who share their views are already working on it.

     I could go on, but I don’t think there’s a need. In closing, please have a look at two tweets: This one, which fancifully compares those people just like us to “large language models;” and this one, which invokes a term from systems theory for the self-referential defensive behavior of an institution that resolves to ignore reality to the extent it threatens the internal logic of the institution itself. Yes, they’re a bit fucked-up themselves, and they complicate something that’s really quite simple, but they illustrate how far reasonable people will go to explain the impenetrability of FUBARity.

     Have a nice day.

“Critical Thinking”

     You cannot hold a pistol to the head of the Tao. -- C. S. Lewis

     A young woman I met recently said she intended to homeschool her as-yet-unconceived children. I was hardly going to try to argue her out of that intention, so I just murmured an affirmation. But she went on to say that her goal was to teach them to “think critically about everything.” The formulation piqued me, so I asked for a clarification.

     Her response? “They should question everything.”

     I was powerfully moved to ask “Exactly what do you mean by that?” However, among the things I’ve learned in my dotage was how upset others can become when I press that way. Most people believe their communication skills to be at least adequate, the actual evidence notwithstanding. They generally dislike the imputation that they’re not being clear. So in casual conversation, I try to restrain sharp inquiries, especially with new acquaintances.

     But she got me thinking. I suppose that’s a good thing, anyway. And you, Gentle Reader, are the ultimate victim beneficiary.

---

     Just what does it mean to “think critically?” In this usage, “critically” doesn’t have the meaning of “to criticize.” So what does it mean? Is it possible the word was poorly suited to my interlocutor’s needs? If so, a lot of people have been disserved by it.

     What people generally appear to mean is thinking of the sort that “drills down:” i.e., that doesn’t accept flummery or fluff, but probes for core concepts and confirmation.

     There’s a limit to that, though. When questioning reaches the layer of fundamental premises – objective reality and the precepts that flow from it – it must stop. Questions such as “Why is there an objective reality?” or “Why does traditional Judeo-Christian morality work so well?” are unanswerable except by stating a religious premise: “Because God wills it.” And as I’ve said before this, Deus vult isn’t really an argument.

     C. S. Lewis made this point most tellingly in The Abolition of Man:

     The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly merge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’ The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.
     This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.

     At that level we confront laws that no legislature can modify or repeal. It is the layer of the metaphysically given: that which unalterably exists whether we acknowledge it or not. So questioning can proceed no further; the critical thinker must accept that what is, is.

     In that regard, to think critically – i.e., to ask “Why?” and “How do you know?” about such propositions as are put to us – is the attitude of the natural scientist. He begins with the premise that there is an objective reality, and that we are embedded in it. He hopes to reach that bedrock layer, and add to our understanding of how it works. But he does not doubt that there is an objective reality. Neither does he insist on knowing why it exists.

---

     A great cleavage lies between the Aristotelian – i.e., he who accepts objective reality – and the Berkelian – he who doesn’t. They cannot argue; their bases are incompatible. If he is to arrive at defensible and useful knowledge, the critical thinker must be an Aristotelian. Moreover, he cannot learn from a Berkelian. Indeed, he must avoid such people; extended interaction with them can produce psychosis.

     So although the exhortation to “question everything” sounds fearlessly rational, he who adopts it must accept as an operating rule that once his questioning reaches bedrock reality, it can proceed no further. What is, is! That can sound uncritical, yet it’s the critical premise that makes all other questioning possible.

     Should you encounter someone who refuses to accept the existence of objective reality, or who insists on knowing “why” it exists, smile and walk away. Don’t get trapped in his psychosis by trying to argue with him. It would be “uncritical.”

On Weird Fiction

     No, I’m not thinking of Weird Tales, which, as far as I know, has ceased publication. I’m thinking of really strange stuff: the sort of story that makes you wonder if the writer is allowed to leave the house without a minder.

     Have a snippet from a recent novel of this kind. It’s about a house that doesn’t really exist, whose properties have intrigued a scientist named Carlos:

     Ever since Carlos’s return from the otherworld a few years back, everyone in the lab knew he had been obsessed with the house. And like most obsessions with the truth, this had made the City Council nervous.
     “Your job is being a scientist,” the council had told him via an empty-eyed child messenger who had helpfully lunged out at him from the shower when he had gotten up to pee in the middle of the night. “So look pretty and write papers. Don’t go searching around for the ‘truth.’ You’re a scientist, not a snoop.”
     “Man,” said Nilanjana, as he told her about the message from the council.
     “Yes, it was upsetting,” said Carlos. “And then of course I was stuck with an empty-eyed child messenger, and you know how long it takes the City Council to come back around and pick them up. We ended up having to give her rides to school for the next three weeks. We’re going to her eighth-grade graduation tomorrow.”...
     Often, especially on hot days, the windows of the house that didn’t exist were left open in the front living room, and he could try to get a reading of the distance from the house’s nonexistent exterior and its parallel-universe interior. A check for entrances into parallel universes and laser readings of their depths are common parts of any new home inspection, and so he had just applied this construction tool to his experimental problems. If one looked through the window, it seemed like a typical living room: armchair, settee, loudspeaker without volume control for the distribution of government propaganda, emergency backup settee. The usual stuff. But he knew this was only an optical illusion, which is a fancy scientific term for a lie.

     [Fink and Cranor, It Devours!]

     I hope authors Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor don’t mind my posting that long an excerpt. I wanted to give you a good mouthful, the better to capture the flavor of this extraordinarily strange novel about extraordinarily strange people and events in an extraordinarily strange place: the desert community of Night Vale.

     At this point some percentage of my Gentle Readers will be scratching their heads and wondering why anyone would read fiction this obviously far beyond the bounds of plausibility even with the most determined effort to suspend disbelief. I must admit, I wondered about it myself when I encountered the first Night Vale novel, Welcome to Night Vale. But I realized, after I’d gotten into step with the outright lawlessness of the thing, that it was doing me a great service: It was reinforcing my appreciation for reality and the immense value of the rules that govern it.

     There are quite a lot of folks who could use that reinforcement even more than I.

---

     Not long ago, I recorded a video in which I read “The Petrified World,” a profound short story by the late Robert Sheckley. It too is about the rules of reality, and about what might happen to our sanity were they suddenly to change out from under us. Reality is, in the most personal sense, what we’re accustomed to: what we’ve prepared ourselves to cope with, however ineptly or idiosyncratically. We seldom realize how completely dependent we are upon the rules that keep reality real: i.e., that keep it in the pattern familiar to us from lifelong experience.

     In his poem “Burnt Norton,” T. S. Eliot wrote:

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

     The late Ursula Le Guin, in her novel The Lathe of Heaven, about a man whose dreams have the power to alter reality, demurred:

     “There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality he cannot bear.”

     Perhaps both are correct. Perhaps the weight of the universe compels us to seek escapes. Virtually everyone has one or more places he goes to hide from reality. But one cannot endure all that much unreality either, whether it’s imposed upon him or he crafts it for himself.

     For my part, a dip into fiction so outré that one suspects the creator(s) of schizophrenia helps to relieve the pressures that arise from tedious daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly existence under the veil of Time. But in such a realm, where the rules are unboundedly fluid, there can be no planning, no organization, and no sense of security. Sooner or later one must retreat to mundane, commonplace, boring but reliable reality, where at least he can be certain that the egg cracked into the frying pan will not spontaneously turn into a machine gun, a door into a parallel universe, or a lobbyist or politician.

     What’s that you say? Why yes: it does help to have a few glasses of wine at both ends of such a “vacation.” I recommend Villa Bellangelo’s Seyval Blanc. But each to his own tastes.

“Down With Facts!”

     The facts of life are conservative – Margaret Thatcher

     A beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly little fact. – Thomas Huxley

     In a sense, the Left’s entire project is to oppose “the facts:” denying them, refusing to report them, deflecting people’s attention from them, and (of course) straining to change them, usually through legislation. For “the facts” are so consistently opposed to the Left that they form an impenetrable barrier to its schemes. No amount of theory can undo a fact, so what remains but to oppose them in every forum available?

     George Packer’s recent article in the Atlantic has received a lot of attention from conservatives for this reason. Packer, a left-liberal, is at least clear-sighted enough not to deny his child the benefits of a quality education, even if it means diverting him from the egalitarian course his politics would advocate. However, those same politics demand that Packer criticize “the system” in some fashion. His method: to rail against “meritocracy:”

     The system that dominates our waking hours, commands our unthinking devotion, and drives us, like orthodox followers of an exacting faith, to extraordinary, even absurd feats of exertion is not democracy, which often seems remote and fragile. It’s meritocracy—the system that claims to reward talent and effort with a top-notch education and a well-paid profession, its code of rigorous practice and generous blessings passed down from generation to generation.

     Note the dismissive “claims to” in the above. In point of fact, rewarding talent and effort is the only way one gets results. The alternative – ignoring talent and effort in favor of...what? – encourages idleness, tolerates scatter-brainedness and dilettantism, and produces aimlessness in society generally. But Packer has a beef. He says “meritocracy” produces anxiety:

     The mood of meritocracy is anxiety—the low-grade panic when you show up a few minutes late and all the seats are taken. New York City, with its dense population, stratified social ladder, and general pushiness, holds a fun-house mirror up to meritocracy. Only New York would force me to wake up early one Saturday morning in February, put on my parka and wool hat, and walk half a mile in the predawn darkness to register our son, then just 17 months old, for nursery school. I arrived to find myself, at best, the 30th person in a line that led from the locked front door of the school up the sidewalk. Registration was still two hours off, and places would be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. At the front of the line, parents were lying in sleeping bags. They had spent the night outside.

     (There’s a giveaway in that paragraph. Read it a second time. You’ll find it.)

     Anxiety is a human reaction to confronting a need, or a demand, that one is uncertain of meeting. We all feel it at some point in our lives. The cure is performance: meeting the challenge with – drum roll, please – talent and effort, whether one’s own or that of a hireling. Those parents in sleeping bags, faced with the same unpleasant challenge as Packer, performed. They acknowledged the parameters of the situation they faced and rose to the occasion. Packer, somewhat less willing to put himself out, took a place in line behind them.

     The rest of Packer’s article is too dreary for a detailed exploration. Suffice it to say that when the facts – in this case, the unadorned facts about the total failure of “public” education – are at odds with his preferences, he deplores the facts. Indeed, he often denies them. He appears to think “we” could undo them if “we” cared enough.

     Typical left-liberal.

---

     For a look at some facts you’re unlikely to get from a George Packer, have a gander at this article from John Stossel:

     [T]oday, as life gets better, my profession [journalism] wins clicks and ratings points by hyping whatever makes us afraid. Reporters ignore gradual improvement and, sometimes, miracles.

     "We live in a world of reliable miracles," says [Reason editor-in-chief Katherine] Mangu-Ward. "When I'm having a bad day, I trawl the internet for videos of happy cyborgs ... hearing-impaired people getting cochlear implants turned on for the first time ... paraplegics walking with the help of adaptive prosthetics, infants getting their first pair of coke-bottle glasses ... things that, in another era, would have caused the founding of an entire religion!"

     Even food is better. Meatless meat tastes as good as meat from an animal because "people want to make money by selling you a burger that didn't hurt a cow," says Mangu-Ward.

     I’ll pass on the meatless “burger,” thanks, but otherwise Mangu-Ward has a powerful point. It goes hand-in-hand with this deservedly famous rant from comedian Louis C.K.:

     There’s a lot of good stuff around us – and all of it was made possible by talented folks who put their best efforts to bringing it into reality – YOUR reality. But a ceaselessly complaining zero like George Packer – and pray tell, what has he done other than vent his dissatisfaction with the “meritocracy” that made New York City the world’s greatest city? — will only complain that his “chair in the sky” onboard his five-hour flight to California “doesn’t go back far enough.”

---

     I had a most gratifying opportunity to celebrate the “good stuff” in The Wise and the Mad:

     “Thank you for this, Miss Holly.” Fountain buckled herself into the passenger seat as Holly started the engine. “I enjoy cooking, but my lord has always reserved the grocery shopping to himself. He’s allowed me to accompany him to the supermarket only once.”
     “Did you enjoy it, dear?” Holly pulled out of the Sokoloffs’ driveway and headed toward the Wegmans at the edge of the city of Onteora.
     “Greatly, Miss Holly. It was a place of wonder. Even now it seems I must have imagined it, that such a dream of abundance could not have been real.”
     Holly chuckled as she turned onto Grand Avenue. “It was no dream, dear. America is a place of fabulous abundance. More than those who abused you dared to let you see or know. Think of all the other wonders you’ve witnessed since Larry found you. The comfortable homes and furniture. All the cars. The beautiful music you’ve heard and the instruments it was played on. All the books, movies, and television shows. All the kitchen gadgets that make cooking easier. The gorgeous clothes and shoes Larry and Trish have bought for you. Those things weren’t produced by miracles, but by men who wanted them to exist and labored to make it happen.” She reached over to caress Fountain’s cheek. “Just as you have labored to create your marvelous dishes. It’s what Americans do.”
     “Am I an American, then, Miss Holly?”
     Holly pulled into the Wegmans parking lot, quickly chose a space, and carefully positioned her car in its exact center. She killed the engine and turned to her companion.
     “You, Fountain, are as American as any of us,” she said. “More than I am, really. Many years ago I left America for another place far away, out of a need to escape from my family. I should have stayed and fought for myself. I’m back now, and may I never again feel the urge to flee my native land, where I have always belonged.” She smiled. “Do you have a list of ingredients in mind yet, dear?”
     “I do, Miss Holly.”
     “Then let’s grab a shopping cart and be about it.”

     Yes, we have some troubles to surmount. We’ll surmount them. It’s what Americans do. But don’t forget to enjoy the good stuff. There’s a lot of it, and that’s a fact.

---

     The alternative to a proper respect for the facts is to live in a fantasy realm in which abundant calories, warmth in the winter and coolth in the summer, smartphones, cars, and airliners are produced by “good intentions” and an obsession with “social justice.” With George Packer for a neighbor, at that. I won’t speak for anyone else, but I prefer my ranch house on an acre in the suburbs, even if it does have an annoying leak or two and the lawn persists in growing past its optimal length.

     I’ll grant an indulgent exception to the parade of pygmies the Democrats have trotted onto their national stage in pursuit of the opportunity to lose to the most accomplished president in a century. After all, if they were compelled to attend to the facts about the economy, the swelling of the workforce and the reductions in unemployment, the explosion in housing starts, our improved international relations, the reforms in NATO, the steady strengthening of our southern border, and the highest consumer confidence in five decades, they’d all concede and slink quietly away. We wouldn’t want that; the entertainment value is too great. But for the rest of us, facts.

Unrealism

     This one is “off the top of my head,” so expect more extreme lunacy than usual. (Yes, I know that’s asking a lot.)

---

     Every now and then, I’ll encounter a picture that triggers a moment of reflection. Such moments are frequent in these days of universal Internet access and broadband media. Such reflections are sometimes accompanied by a surge of gratitude...or of regret.

     Courtesy of Kenny “Wirecutter” Lane at Knuckledraggin’ My Life Away, here’s the most recent example:

     Yes, it’s a beautiful picture. Yes, the woman is beautiful: beautiful face, exquisite figure, long hair, and long, smooth legs. Fetchingly poised in a window box, striking a contemplative pose as she gazes outward. And in sexy lingerie and five inch heels! My word! How much more could a man ask for?

     The odds are pretty damned high that this wasn’t a “candid” shot. The woman is likely to be a professional model. The photo was likely taken in a studio. Householders are very seldom interested in black-and-white photography. And all of that is secondary to this:

Have you ever known a woman of any age or degree of pulchritude to sit around her home wearing only sexy lingerie and high heels?

     Nope. Me neither.

---

     Desires and dreams are important. We all have them. But realism is even more important...and it’s becoming a critically scarce commodity.

     It’s good to dream. It’s good to have grand ambitions. But the universe has laws no one can break. Among the most important of them are the laws of probability.

     The gal in the photo above is one of the most beautiful women in America. That’s a small group. Needless to say (though, as is my wont, I shall say it even so), there’s no guarantee that her beautiful face and body are united to a beautiful character. Indeed, that’s the case less often than not, as a concentration on achieving and maintaining physical beauty usually accompanies a lack of attention to character and deportment. Moreover, membership in the Raving Beauties Club seldom lasts more than a few years...and as beauty fades, those other matters become even more important.

     Gentlemen: If you were offered the opportunity to be married to that gal, sight unseen and knowing nothing else about her, would you take it? If so, why?

     You’d be taking the short end of a bet, my friends. Especially considering what family law has become in our time. Yet she’s the image in a hell of a lot of men’s dreams.

     Of course, certain risks and sacrifices go along with marriage to anyone. But even should Mr. Smith find a supernaturally lovely Miss Jones to woo, what are the odds that he, a more or less average American with an average American’s life prospects, would win her heart? Should he succeed in doing so, how long would the physical gifts that attracted him endure? And what sort of character, children, and wifely and motherly devotion would he acquire with her?

     It’s the same for women pining for the sort of men featured on the covers of romance novels, so the ladies in the audience shouldn’t imagine that I’m omitting them from the unrealism derby.

---

     By making professional entertainers a part of our usual evenings, television in its early years introduced dreams of the sort alluded to above to our aspirations. The images have grown steadily brighter, sharper, more glamorous, and more enticing as the decades have rolled past. But they remain images, not realities to which ordinary people can seriously aspire.

     The same could be said of typical fantasies of great wealth. It comes to very few persons, and in many cases it doesn’t last long. Casinos and lotteries cater to those fantasies, which is how they make their money. But the man who heads to Atlantic City with his savings in his pocket, hoping to come home rich, is in serious need of a reality check.

     Yet we all dream. We’re encouraged to dream by many forces. Dreams are not entirely unconstructive; they can serve as a spur to effort. However, a tragic fraction of us make unrealistic dreams into goals we imagine we can realize, with the right breaks and enough effort. Failure to realize such unrealisms is at the root of a lot of unhappiness. It’s a notable component of the envy plague that’s beset our society.

     When dreams displace values is when we’re in real trouble – and that, too, has become an epidemic of sorts.

---

     A still worse outgrowth was the increase of speculation and gambling. With the plethora of paper currency in 1791 appeared the first evidences of that cancerous disease which always follows large issues of irredeemable currency,—a disease more permanently injurious to a nation than war, pestilence or famine. For at the great metropolitan centers grew a luxurious, speculative, stock-gambling body, which, like a malignant tumor, absorbed into itself the strength of the nation and sent out its cancerous fibres to the remotest hamlets. At these city centers abundant wealth seemed to be piled up: in the country at, large there grew a dislike of steady labor and a contempt for moderate gains and simple living.

     [Andrew Dickson White, Fiat Money Inflation in France]

     "These people, it's no mystery where they come from. You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire. You build egos the size of cathedrals. Fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse. Grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green gold-plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own god. Where can you go from there?" -- "John Milton," played by Al Pacino, from the movie The Devil's Advocate

     Dreams that displace values are responsible for wrecking many lives, many marriages, and many careers. Political dreams, the sort that afflict many an occupant of high office or an aspirant to it, lead to self-betrayals that are often bitterly repented later on. Just now some twenty dreamers are vying for the Democrat Party’s 2020 presidential nomination. No more than one of them can succeed, yet all are making promises that no man, even one installed in the Oval Office, could possibly fulfill. To cap the ironies, they seek to challenge the first president since Grover Cleveland who’s making good on his promises, as far as human ability and the vicissitudes of federal politics will allow.

     There’s a moral in there, somewhere.

     “It is good to dream...but be sure to wake up.” – Gregory Benford, Timescape

Quickies: Predictions Versus Reality

     I’ve just viewed the video embedded above for the first time. It’s largely a compilation of predictions of doom by left-leaning commentators, most of whom will be familiar to you, made immediately after Donald Trump’s surprising victory over Hillary Clinton in November 2016. And whatever your political leanings, the refreshment of your memory is worth thirteen minutes of your time.

     Compare all the forecasts of every sort of doom made in the video with reality as it stands. Which of the predictions of those left-liberals have proved correct? Which have proved incorrect? Finally, if possible, get a left-leaning friend to view the video with you. Do you think he’ll come to the same assessment as you just did?

     What if he remains on the side of those left-liberal commentators and doom-shouters even today, after two and a half years of major Trump Administration successes? If so, it would mean that he’s immune to factual evidence. I submit that that’s a gauge for the mess we’re in: a nation half of whose voters are seriously out of touch with objectively verifiable reality.

     Success at prediction is the only valid demonstration of knowledge. By my standards, that destroys any claim to knowledge the various commentators in the video might ever have made: about politics, about political economy generally, about foreign policy, or about the mind, temperament, and inclinations of President Donald Trump. Yet millions of left-of-center Americans will continue to believe every word shrieked from “progressive” talking heads’ mouths, and reality be damned.

     Discuss.

Pretenses To Ignorance

     On many an occasion when someone says “I don’t know why...” or “I’m not sure why...” and concludes with some unpleasant observation, it’s equivalent to saying “I don’t want to know.” When the unpleasant observation pertains to a person or a group thereof, the speaker’s agony can be very nearly visible.

     There are many things we’d rather not know. Why there is evil. Why the things we value are inherently scarce. Why the speed of light is a limiting condition. Why the observance of so many holidays is now on Monday, such that garbage collection is canceled. But we do know the reasons for those things, and pretending that we don’t, or that we’re uncertain about them, is a hindrance to analysis and planning.

     Less than a month back I noted Andrew Cuomo’s plaint to President Trump about the recent limitation on the federal deductibility of state and local taxes:

     New York Governor Andrew Cuomo requested a meeting with President Trump over tax reform that he claims is hurting his state’s revenue. He went whining about New Yorkers leaving for Florida where taxes are cheaper. Cuomo could, of course, lower taxes and stop giving free everything to foreigners in the country illegally. His meeting turned into a lecture on fracking and late-term abortion, and he came back empty-handed.

     The leftist Democrat went to discuss a $10,000 cap on the on federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT). Cuomo is citing the provision for a drop in over $2 billion in tax revenue.

     THE PRESIDENT TELLS HIM TO LOWER TAXES, FRACK AND STOP KILLING BABIES

     “I told the president myself today: SALT repeal is hurting us. And if you hurt New York, you’re harming the economic engine of the nation,” he bragged after the meeting.

     New York State is losing tax revenue because high earners are leaving the state. Mind you, New York State has been losing population for quite some time. The major reasons are high taxes, an unfriendly business environment, and young New Yorkers seeking out less expensive climes. Cuomo knows that the “SALT repeal” is a marginal factor, as it’s been in force for only one year. President Trump, a lifelong New Yorker whose business is operated from a Manhattan headquarters, knows it too.

     But for political reasons Cuomo must pretend otherwise. It chafes him that President Trump refuses to play along. Trump has never been one to let others save face by shifting the blame for their choices onto his shoulders. Cuomo knows that too, or should have.

     Are you in any real doubt about the Left’s agenda for the United States? I’m not. Their sole priority is power. They’ll sacrifice anyone and any value to gain and increase their power. It couldn’t be simpler. But a lot of highly placed Republicans in Congress pretend that they can’t understand their adversaries’ behavior. Who gains from the pretense?

     Anthropological and sociological verities are similar. Why are black-heavy neighborhoods crime-ridden and impoverished compared to nearby white enclaves? Blacks are more predisposed to aggression than whites, and aggression makes it difficult and dangerous to run a business where they predominate. But maintaining the pretense that “we’re all exactly alike” is more important to a lot of people than acknowledging the well-confirmed facts and acting on them.

     Then there’s economics. Great God in heaven, economics! The pretenses there are beyond enumeration. We know that no good or service can be free of cost. We know there’s no reliable relationship between the price of a good and its cost of production. We know that beyond a certain magnitude of intrusion upon the freedom to produce and trade, businesses will haul stakes. We know that rewarding a behavior will elicit more of it, while penalizing that behavior will cause it to decrease. But politicians pretend otherwise; their antisocial occupation requires it.

     Pretenses such as the above can be mortally harmful to a society. Ours is tottering. But those who maintain the pretenses are indisposed to relinquish them, at least publicly.

     Allow me to quote you the concluding passage from a book: Dreams Come Due, first edition, by “John Galt:”

     The future (of what is left of freedom) depends upon the producers’ changing the direction of America, while they still outnumber the parasites who live from their efforts.
     In closing I would like to wish you:
     HAPPINESS,
     which will depend on your giving up illusions of justice in law, taxes, regulation and monetary affairs, and reality in government;
     SUCCESS,
     which will depend on your refusal to buy any bond or other form of debt instrument denominated in currency as opposed to money, and a personal dedication to reality at all times;
     WEALTH,
     which will unfortunately depend on successful speculation and exchanging your currency for precious metals (money) to protect you against empty government promises of stopping inflation; and most important;
     FREEDOM,
     which is waiting to be reclaimed by its rightful owner (you) if you will take personal responsibility in helping to control government (and envy) by cutting its supply of your currency and credit, and limiting its power to the legitimate functions for which it was originally formed.

     That’s the vision of a capable analyst whose eyes are unclouded by pretense. It’s the attitude of a man who knows what’s what: that force cannot create, but only destroy; that the differences among persons and classes of persons are real and cannot be papered over; and that by allowing the federal government to ignore our Constitution we have permitted exactly the sort of tragedy the Founding Fathers composed it to forestall. Realism with a capital R.

     It’s time for that, I think.

Racialism Begets Realism

     Courtesy of InstaPundit, we have this remarkable racialist rant from a major politician in a nation whose black government has decided to dispossess its whites:

     As violence against white farmers continues, following the South African parliament's decision to seize all farmland from whites without compensation, Julius Malema, leader of the Marxist-Revolutionary Economic Freedom Party, continues to spew hateful rhetoric against South Africa's white citizens....

     [Malema continued] “A racist country like Australia says: ‘The white farmers are being killed in South Africa.’ We are not killing them. Now Australia says: ‘Malema, EFF want to kill white farmers, they must come to Australia.’"

     “If they want to go, they must go. They must leave the keys to their tractors because we want to work the land, they must leave the keys to their houses because we want to stay in those houses. They must leave everything they did not come here with in South Africa and go to Australia.”

     Reynolds also reminds us of this Nick Kristof piece from thirteen years ago:

     The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970’s.

     “If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we’d do it,” said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. “Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job.”

     Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.

     An elderly peasant in another village, Makupila Muzamba, said that hunger today is worse than ever before in his seven decades or so, and said: “I want the white man’s government to come back. Even if whites were oppressing us, we could get jobs and things were cheap compared to today.”

     His wife, Mugombo Mudenda, remembered that as a younger woman she used to eat meat, drink tea, use sugar and buy soap. But now she cannot even afford corn gruel. “I miss the days of white rule,” she said.

     Nearly every peasant I’ve spoken to in Zimbabwe echoed those thoughts.

     Note that the responses he received “depressed” Kristof. Note also that those quoted in the Kristof article insist that the white-dominated government “oppressed” them...but they still want it back.

     I have three questions:

1. Did white Rhodesians enslave black Rhodesians under Ian Smith’s government?
2. Supposing, entirely for the sake of argument, that they could have a white regime back on the condition that black Rhodesians would forever after be denied the “right” to vote, would they take that bargain?
3. Again, entirely for the sake of argument, were black Rhodesians to accept the bargain outlined above, what would Western liberals have to say about it?

     It was, after all, black Rhodesians who brought about the transformation of prosperous Rhodesia into Robert Mugabe’s hellish Zimbabwe. Once blacks were enfranchised, they voted for it en masse. The destruction of Rhodesia’s prosperity was also accomplished by black Rhodesians / Zimbabweans. Now that they lament the fruits of their willfulness, would they recant on their demands? And would Western liberals, ever oh-so-sensitive on matters of race and “self-determination,” let Rhodesia Reborn go its own way without trying to interfere?

     Food for thought.

Infinities, Eternities, And Free Will: A Belated Rumination

     Dystopic’s recent piece on fate has caused me to revisit several questions that have baffled theologians and philosophers for millennia. The confusion of those earlier thinkers was understandable: they approached questions about the nature of God, His relation to Creation, and the destiny of the human soul from the vantage of a time-bound creature. However, as with all inquiries into matters beyond the reach of human senses and the extent of human intellect, the postulates make all the difference. Those baffled thinkers started from a premise that guaranteed that they’d never escape the maze they’d entered.

     Among the reasons I write fiction is that I can “put words in the mouths” of my protagonist characters: convictions and sentiments that might seem inappropriate coming from me. As my protagonists are usually several hundred percent larger than life, the trick makes them more persuasive than they’d otherwise be. Yet they’re still my words – my conjectures and reasoning – and it’s only proper that I stand behind them.

     Besides, this is some of the most intellectually exciting material ever entertained by a human mind. So let’s get excited! (To the Balmer level, at least.)

---

     “I never really got that part,” Christine said.
     Ray nodded. “Understandably so. It seems paradoxical. I don’t really think we’re expected to ‘get’ it. Just accept it on the evidence.”
     The room had grown dim. It had gotten quite late, but neither Ray nor Christine was in any hurry to conclude their chat.
     “What makes it hard for most people,” Ray said, “is that we tend to think of God as just a very powerful temporal entity, like some sort of super-magician. But He’s not. He created time. He looks down on it from above, the way you or I would read a map. He knows the path we follow because He knows all the paths we might follow, and what might flow from every one of them.” He sat back and reflected for a moment. “So our time-dependent language about ‘choosing’ and ‘knowing’ gets us into trouble when we try to apply it to God.”

     [From Shadow Of A Sword]

     Yes, that’s me expressing a personal conviction through a character – a Catholic priest, at that – that I could never, ever “prove:” that our wills are free and our choices are unconstrained by anything but the laws of physics. It arises from postulates about the Supreme Being that I regard as most plausible:

1. That God exists;
2. That all we sense or experience (and possibly a whole lot more) is His deliberate creation, including time;
3. That He stands outside it all, capable of viewing it “from above.”

     A time-bound mentality has a great deal of difficulty coping with the implications of those assumptions. We’re not equipped for it. That can cause us to overlook the possibility of the assumptions themselves. But without them, we strain to cope with the paradox of human free will versus the existence of an omniscient Creator. We start pondering “fate:” more specifically, whether we’re predestined to make the choices we make. And we find ourselves trapped in an inescapable maze.

     In other words, the postulates, whether we accept them or not, predetermine the success or failure of our attempts to find a satisfactory explanation.

---

     Despite the human mind’s difficulties at coping with infinities and eternities, the concepts are critically important to several fields. We deal with irrational and transcendental numbers, which cannot be expressed in a finite number of digits. We deal with a variety of number systems, each of which has an infinite number of elements. We conceive of “space” itself as being infinite in extent. Moreover, we silently assume that “space” – i.e., nothingness – will “exist” forever.

     An exercise familiar to physics students nicely illustrates the utility of infinity. Imagine yourself floating motionless in space, looking at a perfectly flat, featureless plane infinitely long and wide. How would you determine your distance from that plane?

     You couldn’t. Even if you were to set yourself into motion, you wouldn’t be able to do it. Without features whose perceived size would change as you move, you’d have no way to do so. By postulate, the plane itself is infinite in extent, so you wouldn’t be able to judge by the perceived motion of its edges; it doesn’t have any.

     Important exercises in calculus ask us to evaluate the limit of an algebraic expression as its dominant variable goes to infinity, and the numerical values of integrals that range over infinity. It’s possible even though the mind can’t really cope with anything that’s unbounded in extent.

     Cosmologists struggle to cope with the phenomenon of unidirectional entropy vis-a-vis unidirectional gravity. Their speculations are temporally unbounded: they deal comfortably – well, more or less – with the problems of black hole formation versus quantum evaporation: Those phenomena imply the possibility of an alternation between an ever-expanding, featureless sea of radiation and a Big Bang-style monobloc that gives birth to a “new” universe...an alternation that repeats eternally.

     Unbounded things appear to be as important to human conjectures about “reality” – a word I like almost as much as “should” – as they are to our conceptions of God.

---

     Contemporary physics has begun, tentatively and with much trepidation, to toy with the theoretical possibility of the “multiverse:” an expanded conception of existence that includes “universes” that are separated from one another by differences in the “fundamental constants” that define their physical laws. Some exceptionally daring thinkers are exploring the possibility that the “fundamental constants” aren’t constant at all. I exploited that concept in Freedom’s Scion:

     “The experimental results from our test crystal are consistent with a fifteen percent increase in the speed of light.” Althea grinned again. “That’s fifteen percent over the speed of light in a vacuum.”
     A gasp circled the group.
     “What can you do with that?” Teodor asked.
     “With that alone? Not much. But that’s just from the power we have from one eighteen-century-old fission reactor that spends most of its juice keeping us alive up here. If my equations are sound, with a terawatt of power I can get raw space to accept passage at approximately Michelson eighty. Give me a terawatt more, and I can drag a fifty-ton mass up to that speed in about two months.” She pulled a mock innocent face. “Hope to Earth in four months or a little better. That fast enough for you?”
     She swept her eyes over the stunned guests.
     “Rothbard, Rand, and Ringer,” Valerie breathed. “You actually did it.”
     Althea nodded. “We think so, Mom.”
     “Wait a moment,” her mother said. “What about reaction mass?”
     “Don’t need it.”
     “How, then?”
     “Basically, the same technique that allows me to increase the speed of light,” Althea said. “Alteration of the permittivity constant, applied differentially—a front-to-back gradient—over an ovoid volume enclosing the mass to be propelled. A properly distributed effusion of gamma rays and W-plus bosons is all it takes to get the process started. Put a negative charge on the outer surface of the vessel, and you're off. That gives you a reactionless drive and the next best thing to perpetual motion. Only works in a hard vacuum, though, so don't expect to use it for anything groundside.”
     The genesmith appeared near to apoplexy. “You altered a fundamental constant of physics?”
     Althea nodded again. “Should I have asked permission first?” She grinned. “I had to, Granduncle. The only way to breach what we call the lightspeed barrier is to alter the conditions that determine lightspeed. The only way to do that is to increase the permittivity of the vacuum. And the only possibility of doing that lay in Althea's Axiom.”
     “Which is?”
     “Constants...aren't.”

     Yes, it’s speculation – but it’s speculation that illustrates the utility of conceptions about infinity and eternity to our inherently limited minds. In our universe, the Planck Constant is terribly small: about 6.63 x 10^-34 Joule-seconds. Its tininess allows us to employ a cause-and-effect-based physics at macroscopic scale. But imagine a universe whose Planck Constant is a whole Joule-second! Causality would appear to reign only at scales so incredibly large that the behavior of objects as large as stars and planets would appear indeterminate. Life of our sort could never exist there.

     If it “exists” – whatever that word “really” means – the Lord God made it all.

---

     Yes, these are the sort of things I think about when I have time for the “longest thoughts:” the ones that trail off into infinity, that can’t reach a firm conclusion on this side of the veil of Time. They’re among my reasons for looking forward to the afterlife...assuming (of course) that there is one, that it won’t be awful, and that God will deign to answer a few questions in His free moments.

     Max Born once said that he had two questions for God:

1. Why relativity?
2. Why turbulence?

     As that great mind has gone to his reward, I hope the Almighty has gratified his curiosity...and that when my time comes, He’ll deign to gratify mine, should I have the opportunity to ask Him about the subjects addressed above. But should He be willing to help me with those, I must admit that I’ll have another: “Lord, why the Boston Red Sox?”

     Jesus said to the Twelve, “Fear no one. Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed. What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna.” [Matthew 10:26-28]

     May God bless and keep you all!

Simulation Writ Really, Really Large

     “We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God’s truth, the universe at once began to exist.”

     [Ursula LeGuin, City of Illusions]

     “Could Yarl the Omnipotent create a stone so heavy he could not lift it?”
     “No.”
     “Why not?”
     “He would not.”
     “That is no answer.”
     “Yes it is. Think about it. Would you?”

     [Roger Zelazny, Isle of the Dead]

     Scott Adams, whose thoughts and jottings have begun to range very far afield, provides evidence that we might be characters in a huge simulation:

     There should be a difference in how a real species and a simulated species views its own history. The real species would have a real history with full details. The simulations would have something closer to history on demand. And by that, I mean the history only comes into existence when current circumstances require that history. If we are software simulations, the simulator presumably has resource constraints. That means the simulation would not create every part of the universe just in case it is needed; it would create what it needed on demand. For example, a simulated universe would not contain details about undiscovered planets. Those details would be rendered by the simulation at the time of discovery.

     To put this in simpler terms, if we are real, the past influences what we do in the present. But if we are simulations, what we do in the present could be creating the past.

     For example, here’s an article describing how quantum physicists have determined that the present creates the past as needed. Freaky, right?

     If we are simulations, we should expect to see two additional qualities in the universe as partial confirmation:

1. We should expect that we can’t travel past the boundaries of the simulation.
2. We wouldn’t be able to observe the basic building blocks of our reality.

     Sure enough, we meet both criteria.

     Hmph! There are days I wonder whether I’m the only person alive who isn’t certifiably insane. But then, if I were uniquely and irremediably insane, I could easily reach the same conclusion.

     Of course we’re characters in a simulation! Haven’t you been paying attention all this time?

---

     Longtime Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch will be aware that real-time simulation was my occupational forte. At one time I was one of the foremost experts on it. (Play “Glory Days” if you must, but keep the volume low.) The art of real-time simulation rests on a pair of precepts:

• The simulation must respond to stimuli in the same way as the thing being simulated;
• The response must be generated within the same time frame as the thing being simulated.

     Indeed, all really useful simulations must be real-time simulations or the closest possible approach to it. The point, of course, is that an ideal simulation should be impossible to distinguish from the real thing. Otherwise, what good would it be?

     Now let’s talk about what we habitually call reality. Reality, colloquially speaking, is the aggregate of all real things and their behaviors. This is a critical stipulation: while the “whole” is important, the “parts” are even more so. After all, we deal with the parts, not the whole of reality.

     But that leaves us needing yet another definition of sorts. A colloquial definition of real might be “that which is unaffected by our desires, opinions, and convictions.” Real things are tough. Their properties resist our willfulness. They exhibit endurance: i.e., observable persistence over time.

     But we don’t deal solely with real things. We also grapple with imaginary things: images, which exist in our minds and nowhere else. Among the most important of those imaginary things is the concept we call causality.

     Think about causality in the abstract for a moment. Imagine, if you will, that you’re a simulation engineer confronted with a device to be simulated, who has suddenly and for the very first time asked yourself what’s the point of this? The rules of real-time simulation require that you instantiate the behaviors and response times of the device in an artifact to be governed by software. You must act as if the device must behave in a certain way. But:

• What if the specification contains an error? It’s happened before.
• What if it were to break down spontaneously? Devices do that, don’t they?
• What if the design of the device itself is faulty, such that it will misbehave now and then?
• What if it were to be interfered with from outside? (Sledgehammer or power spike, you choose.)
• Finally, what if some degree of randomness was deliberately designed into the device, defying causality?

     All of those things happen to real devices. No engineer, however gifted, could simulate all of them; the range of possibilities is unbounded.

     A useful simulation is always a partial simulation. Bounds are clamped upon it a priori, for neither can the simulation engineer nor his customer deal with anything else.

---

     The bounds clamped upon us who live under the veil of time are called the laws of nature. We don’t know them in their entirety, nor is any of our knowledge infinitely precise. We don’t even know if they vary over time or place; the universe is larger than any test bed we could build. That’s part of why Richard Feynman proclaimed that science – the quest for reliable knowledge about the laws of nature – demands that we reject all claims of infallibility from “experts.”

     The more deeply physicists probe the smallest of things – quantum physics – the more complex and variable our temporal reality seems. They keep hoping they’ve “reached the bottom,” only to find that another layer of laws and entities lies beneath their deductions. Some have thrown up their hands over the seemingly infinite depth of reality. Others soldier gamely on, determined to find “the bottom” of the stack of entities and laws that determine reality.

     As their investigations have advanced, a new idea has taken hold in a few remarkably open minds: there might not be a bottom. A small number of theorists working at “the other end” of reality have begun to entertain the possibility that there might not be a “top,” either.

---

     If I haven’t driven you to drink quite yet, Gentle Reader, feel free to congratulate yourself on your intellectual perseverance. There is a point to this, though it might not be entirely evident from the foregoing material.

     We are made so that our knowledge of reality can never be complete. Our advances, no matter the direction, never hit a terminus. Neither can we be perfectly certain about what we think we know.

     The laws of nature, if it makes sense to speak of “laws” that might have an infinite number of exceptions, keep us from traveling beyond the bounds of our mental universes. They confine us without allowing us to be certain that we’re being confined, or by what mechanisms, or to what purpose. We remake our postulates and conceptions with the greatest of difficulty: typically, one great, world-shaking mind at a time. And with each restructuring of our conception of “reality,” the next one becomes exponentially harder to achieve.

     “Reality” can only be a simulation, albeit of a sort no mortal could possibly construct. It would require a transtemporal consciousness of infinite extent...at least, infinite by the metrics we time-bound persons would use. Nothing else would be capable of coping with the demands.

     If we stipulate this for the sake of further investigation, we immediately arrive at two things: an answer, and a question.

     The answer seems bleak at first: We cannot know all there is to know. The Simulation Engineer has deliberately bounded us to make that impossible.

     The question is one that has persisted throughout the history of Man, and will persist until Man is no more:

Why?

     Have a nice day.

A Summation

     Dystopic has been doing excellent work for quite some time, but his most recent piece is a Jeremiad, a stunning summation of the tactics of the collectivist Left that lead directly to its strategic core. It’s must reading, and I beseech my Gentle Readers to head over there right now to drink it to the lees.

     Here’s an appetite-whetter:

     Underneath it all, of course, [Leftists] hate themselves. This has given rise to people who say things like “I won’t have children, because they would be white.” Or other folks, like Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King, who desperately wish to be black, perhaps because they could escape the weight of the world by identifying with the oppressed instead of the oppressor.

     Weaponized Empathy has destroyed these people, body and soul. They mutilate themselves, hate themselves, rail against the very society that created them, and then seek to unload their shame and self-loathing on to others.

     (If you’re not already conversant with Dystopic’s writings on Weaponized Empathy, repent of your sins, get over there, and start reading at once! No concept is more important to the comprehension of what’s been done to us this century past, entirely through appeals to what we think of as our better natures. But I digress.)

     I’ll wait right here till you’ve finished.

---

     The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:
     Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

     [From 1984]

     There are particular concepts within the realm of argumentation tactics that, in my view at least, constitute heinous crimes against their targets: genuine violations of the moral law that deserve to be harshly punished. The two I have in mind at the moment are of such enormity that I find myself contemplating other horrors in reciprocation: things I would normally regard as beyond the pale.

     The first of these is the deliberate contradiction or inversion of the facts: a practice that’s sometimes called “gaslighting.” This tactic, especially when substantially extended and prolonged, can erode the target’s confidence in the evidence of his senses. The point, of course, is to “persuade” him to rely entirely upon the pronouncements of others, even when his eyes and ears tell him that they’re lying to him.

     Even the strong-willed can be brought low by a persistent gaslighting campaign. The Left is aware of this. Indeed, by combining it with the deliberate effacement of history, the Left weakened Americans’ will nearly to the point of surrender.

     In that light, consider the passage Israeli Deputy Minister Michael Oren found in our “paper of record,” the New York Times:

     Michael Oren: …I talk about an incident that occurred in May of 2010 with the New York Times when Mahmoud Abbas published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he alleged that he insinuated that the Arabs accepted the U.N. partition resolution of 1947, and the Jews rejected it. And I called up the editor of the New York Times, and I said wait a minute, this is exactly the opposite. Don’t you check facts? We [Israel] accepted it. The Arabs rejected it, and went to war against it. That was the war of independence. And the Arabs rejected the first two-state solution. And he says well, that’s your interpretation. Now wait a minute, there are certain in-controversial historical facts, uncontestable facts. I mean, did the Allies land, or did they not land on Normandy Beach in June, 1944? And the editor’s response was [analogous to] well, some people think so.

     If the editors of the Times are complicit in this sort of deception, no one can be confident that he’s safe from it. The young, who have little knowledge of history owing to our government schools, are particularly susceptible.

     The second tactic is one known to every schoolchild: group pressure. He who finds himself surrounded by a chanting mob will often surrender to that mob’s pronouncements just to get out from under the pressure. The Left has made use of this tactic in innumerable ways. For example, it strives to colonize propagative organizations – educational institutions, the media, the entertainment industries – because those organizations can create pressure waves in public opinion: waves that, if unanimous among such organizations, become all but impossible to resist. John Q. Public might start “swimming with the tide” before he realizes it.

     On a micro-scale, consider how Julius Nyerere’s Communist TANU regime strove to “re-educate” the people of Tanzania via the compulsory “ten-house cell” led by a Communist apparatchik:

     TANU recognizes the urgency and importance of good leadership. But we have not yet produced systematic training for our leaders; it is necessary that TANU Headquarters should now prepare a programme of training for all leaders – from the national level to the ten-house cell level – so that every one of them understands our political and economic policies. Leaders must set a good example to the rest of the people in their lives and in all their activities. [source]

     The point of the ten-house cell was to marshal peer pressure against private dissenters – i.e., to encyst them within a chorus of Communist orthodoxy that would force the dissenter to choose between conformity and isolation. (Really stubborn dissenters, of course, were taken out back and shot.)

     The combination of gaslighting with persistent, inescapable group pressure can overwhelm all but the strongest wills. This is a key element of what Dystopic addresses in his essay.

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     ’Another example,’ he said. ’Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three one-time Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford men who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession — were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.’
     An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O’Brien’s fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston’s vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was the photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.
     ’It exists!’ he cried.
     ’No,’ said O’Brien.
     He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.
     ’Ashes,’ he said. ’Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’
     ’But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’
     ’I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.
     Winston’s heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O’Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O’Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.

     [1984 again.]

     If “we” have any collective responsibility at all, it would be a responsibility to acknowledge reality. What happens has happened; we are obligated to resist all efforts to deny or efface it. The O’Briens of the world are our mortal enemies.

     Yet O’Brien represents his efforts as beneficial, curative; he tells Winston to regard him as an ally, if not a friend. It is the supreme horror of the novel that sufficiently prolonged, O’Brien’s tortures “persuade” Winston to accept him as such. The Left aspires to a different position: as the hegemon over all things.

     The ultimate tyranny is tyranny over the mind. Dystopic notes how vulnerable any one of us could be:

     The pressure is both great and subtle. Imagine a conversation about the weather, innocent enough on its own. A friend might say “wow, that global warming sure is kicking in today!” You’ve a few choices here. You can challenge him, but the immediate counter is likely to be something like “well, 99% of scientists agree, sooooo….” The implication, of course, is that you are stupid for disagreeing with 99% of scientists (whether or not there is any truth to that claim, either). You could remain silent because it’s easier. Or you could just give in, regardless of the truth of the matter, because it’s easiest. Meanwhile, if you counter your friend successfully, you may be down a friend by the end of the night.

     Placed in such a situation, many of us would regard the loss of a “friend” as weightier than the maintenance of reality. This is especially urgent for those without support. That’s why the Left seeks to separate us from one another. That way, its gaslighting campaigns and group pressures could not be resisted or relieved.

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     “Senor D’Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?”
     “Just exactly what it deserves.”
     “Oh, how cruel!”
     “Don’t you believe in the operation of the moral law, Madame?” Francisco asked gravely. “I do.”

     [From Atlas Shrugged.]

     An old mantra of the early New Left was that “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” That’s the zygote of collectivism – yet in one and only one sense, it contains a kernel of truth. The kernel consists of a phrase that was once an essential part of international law: “enemies of all Mankind.”

     The category of “enemies of all Mankind” subsumed pirates and other felons who plied their trades on the high seas, beyond the territorial jurisdictions of Westphalian states. It was considered an obligation of every nation with seagoing capability to collaborate in expunging such felons, as they threatened the travel and commercial intercourse that made possible the advancement of civilization. In more recent years, “enemies of all Mankind” has enlarged to embrace slavers, terrorists, and those who kidnap for ransom of any kind.

     I submit that if there is any obligation that lies upon every man that has ever lived or ever will, it would be to oppose the “enemies of all Mankind” by any and every means, a outrance -- and in that category I would unhesitatingly include those who strive to deny or efface reality. Dystopic’s peroration concludes thus:

     It is, often times, difficult to resist the allure of just giving up the fight. It’s so much easier to throw in the towel, and jump when someone else tells you to. When damn near everyone accuses you of something, to just say “yes, I’m guilty.”

     But you can’t. I can’t. And even if I could make such a choice for myself, I cannot make it for my family, for my country, for my civilization.

     You are not Atlas, and you do not need to suffer his punishment. You are not Christ, and you will never be morally perfect, and can never carry the weight of another’s sins (you will have enough trouble with your own).

     If the ultimate tyranny is tyranny over the mind, then the ultimate bastion of liberty is mental liberty: the insistence upon the real, “the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” He who maintains the facts as witnessed, confirmed, and recorded by reliable record-keepers is a defender of freedom; he who excuses himself from that effort, whatever his rationale, has joined forces with the tyrants.

     And that is really all that need be said.

Realism

     There’s a substantial, threatening deficit of realism among our politically engaged. If you’ve been listening to the chatter or reading the politically oriented Websites, you might already have noticed it. Or you might be part of the problem, and thus as unable to recognize that deficit as a fish is unable to recognize water.

     But then, quite a lot of people have no idea what realism means.

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     For some years we’ve been having a kerfuffle over ideology, specifically political ideologies and their influence over the decisions of public officials. As many people don’t have a clear understanding of the nature of an ideology, much of what’s been said and written about it has been utter bilge.

     An ideology is a set of ideas (sometimes a set of one) about the cause-and-effect laws that govern some segment of reality. Those ideas must be consistent with one another – i.e., they must not imply contradictory consequences – for the ideology to be coherent. An ideology that persists for long enough and acquires enough adherents will be given a name by which it can be recognized.

     Ideologies have addressed many aspects of human life: politics, economics, social order, conventions of courtesy, morality and ethics, and so on. However, not all ideologies are recognizable as such. We most easily recognize the ones that pertain to politics and political economy.

     Ideologies must not be confused with principles. A principle is a fundamental rule about right and wrong – a rule that divides the universe of human action into the morally acceptable and the morally unacceptable. Oftentimes a set of principles will underlie an ideology, but this is not always the case.

     Consider the term human rights for a moment. Does this term denote an ideology? That doesn’t seem to be the case. Rather, human rights is a grab-bag term that summarizes certain moral obligations – an implicit invocation of the moral principle that thou shalt not violate another person’s rights. That not everyone agrees on what should go under that heading is a secondary consideration.

     By contrast, consider Thomas Mackay’s statement about welfarism:

     ...the cause of pauperism is relief. We shall not get rid of pauperism by extending the sphere of State relief...On the contrary, its adoption would increase our pauperism, for as is often said, we can have exactly as many paupers as the country chooses to pay for. [Thomas Mackay, “Methods of Social Reform”]

     That is a statement about cause-and-effect: a diminutive ideology. That it can be part of a larger ideology about political economy is not a dismissal, as several such ideologies incorporate it – and they disagree with one another.

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     The salient facts that apply to all ideologies are these:

1. They pertain to specific areas of human conduct;
2. They propose cause-and-effect models for those areas;
3. They can be wrong.

     I’ve ranted about Fact #1 before, albeit in an inverse way: An ideology must not be pushed beyond its domain of applicability. (See Part 4 of the cited essay: “The Ongoing Political Problem.”) Libertarians’ attempt to do so was motivated by a desire to solve problems in public policy to which libertarian ideas do not apply. It’s brought considerable harm to the pro-freedom cause. That harm has not yet ceased to accumulate.

     Fact #2 is definitional: a part of the differentia that distinguishes ideologies from other abstractions. A silly counterexample might go like this:

“Jelly doughnuts must always be eaten with coffee.”

     Is that an ideology? Certainly not: it doesn’t make a cause-and-effect claim. It’s really a silly attempt at a moral principle: a statement that not to have coffee with one’s jelly doughnut is wrong. Yes, there’s an implied “or else” to it: “If you don’t, you will be punished somehow.” However, the implication is too weak to claim that it proposes a cause-and-effect model.

     By contrast, the following:

“Eating a jelly doughnut without coffee will cause indigestion.”

     ...is a true cause-and-effect statement: if you will, a rather trivial ideology. However, I can testify from personal experience that it is incorrect. That brings us to Fact #3, which is at the core of this tirade.

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     “If what you’re doing doesn’t work, do something else.” – Michael Emerling

     To say that some method or procedure “works” implies the following:

1. It was aimed at producing a well-defined result from well-defined initial conditions;
2. It achieved that result, within the limits of allowable deviation;
3. The costs, including all side effects and second-order effects, were acceptable.

     All three of those conditions are imperative. They’re the touchstones by which we judge all proposals for doing anything, regardless of the subject. They apply to ideologies with full force.

     I shan’t sugar-coat the matter. It can be exceedingly difficult to meet all three of those conditions, especially in the realm of public policy. Much that Smith claims to be indisputable truth is pooh-poohed by Jones, because Jones insists on a different set of initial conditions, or places a higher weight on certain costs or consequences than does Smith.

     If we return to Thomas Mackay’s statement about welfarism:

     We shall not get rid of pauperism by extending the sphere of State relief...On the contrary, its adoption would increase our pauperism...

     ...one determined to “disprove” Mackay might insist that public welfare programs inherently diminish pauperism by converting paupers to non-paupers! There’s quite a bit of definitional sophistry there, and an ill-concealed determination to ignore the second-order effects of public welfare programs. Yet many persons dedicated to the expansion of governmental welfare programs do exactly thus...and get away with it.

     Nevertheless, there are times when an ideology is either demonstrably wrong or inapplicable to the case at hand.

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     The Obamunist foreign-policy posture of “strategic patience” is currently under discussion, especially in contrast with the still-emerging foreign policy of the Trump Administration. During the campaign, some drew parallels between the two, claiming that Obama’s reluctance to involve the U.S. in foreign conflicts was largely similar to Trump’s “America first” stance. I believe this to be incorrect: Obama’s posture didn’t actually refrain from involving us; rather, he greatly preferred rhetoric to action, unless he believed action incapable of adversely affecting his Administration. Atop that, Trump’s “America first” stance doesn’t automatically preclude involving the U.S. in a foreign dustup; it merely insists that any such involvement must serve American interests above all else.

     The arguments over Trump’s actions in Afghanistan and Syria, and the arrival of several carrier battle groups in the waters around the Korean Peninsula, have ranged from dubious to ludicrous. It is defensible to argue about what best serves American interests, though in some cases there isn’t a lot of room for disagreement. It is not defensible to argue that an intervention can’t possibly serve American interests. Indeed, it borders on lunacy.

     Foreign-policy ideologies often incorporate a large amount of lunacy.

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     The political economy ideology that advocates the free market has come in for some body blows in recent years. That isn’t really the fault of free market economics, but rather the ways in which governments have learned how to disguise their market interventions to the intended benefit of their domestic industries. For example, Country X’s subsidies and regulatory concessions to particular industries can create conditions under which Country Y’s participants in those industries will be induced to relocate to X. That’s not a market failure, but a failure of government X to respect the market. If the effects sufficiently disfavor country Y, its government can and should react – and that’s not a failure of free market economics either.

     Yet there are free-market ideologues unwilling to concede that the political conditions that surround the marketplace can cloud the desirability of unfettered international trade. They maintain that as bad as X’s policies may be, Y’s attempt to compensate for them is still “wrong.” Wrong by their dictates, perhaps, but in what other sense?

     President Trump’s proposed “border adjustment tax,” intended to create a counter-incentive to the expatriation of American industries and employers, might fail for several reasons. It might be ineffective; the costs it imposes, especially upon American consumers, might be too high to bear; or it might precipitate a second-order effect that’s far worse than the flood of industrial expatriations. But those possibilities can only be tested in the crucible of experience. To say a priori that they’re “wrong” is a different sort of pronouncement: a moral pronouncement, with which not everyone is likely to agree.

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     Realism is, above all else, the readiness, willingness, and ability to recognize when events have diverged from one’s preferences or expectations, and to admit that that is the case. The admission should imply a concomitant readiness to revise one’s ideology, if it should come to that. The resistance to making such revisions, displayed today by so many, doesn’t alter the facts. How could it?

     Realism also partakes of another practice: the willingness to confront one’s own choices. For an individual, that consists of asking oneself “What did I do to bring this about?” and answering candidly, to the best of one’s ability. For an electorate, it involves asking “What did we do – and ought we to have expected the consequences it has brought?”

     We elevated a consummate deal-maker to the presidency. He’s out there doing his best to make deals – deals that he believes will serve America’s interests. Was it really imaginable that he would superglue himself to any set of policy prescriptions?

     We returned a group of legislators to Congress who could best be described as “pusillanimous time-servers.” There’s very little courage to be found among them; they cower at the lightest criticism from the press, to say nothing of the way they shrink from the barbs of their political opponents. Their highest ambition is to die in office; by their behavior we must conclude that they believe the best course toward that end is never to offend anyone. Was it really imaginable that they would follow any bold course, regardless of the topic or their supposed positions on it?

     We consistently expect more honesty, candor, and respect for our rights from politicians than they provide in practice. We keep “throwing the rascals out” and electing a new set, “insanely assuming that they are better than the set turned out. And at each election we are, as they say in Motherland, done in.” (H. L. Mencken) How is it that we have not yet confronted the fatuity of our expectations?

     The greatest need of our time is for realism about politics, governments, and the behavior thereof. Will it come? If so, from where – or whom?