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Marx vs. Dante, Nietzsche, Jung, Campbell
I tell you, the world out there is full of useful knowledge. Like this piece about a book by Robert Orlando about Marx, arguing that Marx’s vision was a descent into Hell and no way back.
Marx and his long-time confidant Engels filled their pages with hell and its torments, with the march of history as purgation, but nowhere did they speak of paradise,” writes Orlando. “There was no ascent, no final vision of harmony — only struggle without end, revolution without transcendence.
Orlando compares this with Dante’s Divine Comedy, which has three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Marx never gets out of the Hell of Inferno.
Of course, Marxism as a political faith does have a happy ending. First the Hell of capitalism, then the purgatory of revolution, and finally the paradise of socialism. So there is that, alongside the 100 million deaths of the Black Book of Communism, which seems to confirm Marx’s world view that there was no way out of Marx’s Hell.
The idea of Marx seeing no way out of Hell made me think. Maybe Marxism is not the way to go. It’s not a if there aren’t modern alternatives if you assume, like Marx, that God is Dead.
Instead there is Nietzsche, interpreted from Grok:
Descent into Hell: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
Purgatory: Decadence and Nihilism.
Ascent:
Revaluation of All Values.
Úbermensch
Eternal Recurrence (Groundhog Day)
Will to Power: “expansion, growth, self-overcoming, and creative power.”
Then there is Jung, His journey is into the underworld of the unconscious, connecting with Greek mythology. Grok:
Confronting the Shadow: “dark twin.”
Facing Archetypes: “Wise Old Man, Anima/Animus, or the Terrible Mother.”
Integration and Rebirth: back out of the underworld
Or Joseph Campbell and his Hero’s Journey. Reduced to three stages, Grok:
Departure (Leaving the Ordinary World)
Initiation (The Adventure and Transformation)
Return (Coming Back with the Elixir)
Or you can represent The Hero’s Journey thus:
Leaving safety and comfort
Facing your deepest fears
Dying to your old self
Being reborn wiser and stronger
Sharing what you’ve learned
Grok notes that this process is echoed in Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix. Experts agree that it is not comprehended in Wokism.
However, here’s a theology instructor saying that the Kidz are converting back from secular ideology to traditional religion.
Whereas they used to be prone to dismissing religion as antiquated and oppressive, the majority of them now deem religion to be interesting or “based.” My sense of a religious vibe shift has been confirmed in recent reporting and in the record increase of zoomers converting or reverting over the past year or so. For many of the religious zoomers I meet, faith is a beacon of hope in an otherwise chaotic world.
But all is not well:
Few of my students are capable of formulating an opinion on their own without regurgitating something they heard on a TikTok reel.
Really, how many of us have anything in our brains except what we heard in church, in school, in the university, in legacy media, or in social media?
But at least the Kidz are trying.
Ed, a cradle Catholic and current college junior, tells me that many of his peers are prone to conflating religion with “some mode of anti-establishment political ideology, which they view as necessary in order to save the West.” A classmate who identifies as a monarchist told him that “culture, tradition, and the things that give humans meaning are dying under the current paradigm,” to which he believes Catholic integralism functions as an antidote. He believes many of his very online, middle-class peers are drawn to such ideas due to their “feeling of social isolation and sense of directionlessness.”
The writer, Stephen G. Adubato, seems to be sneering at the kids. But I say that at least they are trying; they want some sort of foundation and meaning to their lives.
I call it a start. And to heck with Chuckie von Marx.
| Fri, 22 May 2026 22:26:13 GMT |
Forget Thucydides; Think "Rigidity Trap"
All the best people are nodding wisely about President Xi’s wise warning to President Trump about “The Thucydides Trap.” That’s the idea that established powers often get dumped by a rising power. E.g., the US is an established power and China is a rising power.
A word to President Xi: If only that were true, old chap. Experts agree that you can’t be a rising power with a fertility rate of 1.0 children per woman.
I wonder what would persuade Chinese women to have more children so that their boys could be sacrificed to the CCP gods in a war to squeeze the US in a Thucydides Trap.
But I am here to tell President Xi and his experts that the big problem is not Thucydides but the Rigidity Trap.
What do I mean by the Rigidity Trap?
Simply this.
The natural instinct of every political regime is to bleed the economy and spend the money on its supporters.
But the more you milk the economy with taxes and regulations, the more you reduce the ability of your people and the economy to adapt to change in markets and create new technologies and opportunities.
Every political regimes tends to make the economy rigid.
Obviously, the extreme case is the Soviet Union where the entire economy was rigidified into bureaucratically administered Five Year Plans. When you rigidify the economy like that and subject it to the expertise of the Planners, you kill opportunity and growth.
(I’d say that Mao’s Great Leap Forward was not rigidity but just economic madness.)
The next step down from the Five Year Plan economy is the “Curley Effect” economy of the large corrupt city that I discussed yesterday. The natural arc of a large city is to start as a rapidly expanding center of economic growth and then mature into a spoils system where the politicians fund their supporters and drive out their opponents.
Then we come to the modern administrative state economy. Decade after decade, the administrative state comes up with new programs to entice voters with free stuff. Typically, everything government does rigidifies the economy and prevents it from adapting and growing. Thus:
Pension programs typically substitute administrative rules for simple savings programs where you retire when you have saved up enough money. But the rigid rules for taxation and benefits means that the system can’t adapt.
Health care programs mandate free care for some people and regulated care for everyone else. The system cannot adapt because of government regulation.
Education programs impose the rulers’ notion of education on everyone. It follows elite fashion rather than educational improvement.
Regulation prevents change and adaption and ends up favoring special interests.
Urban zoning licenses NIMBYism.
Environmental protection ends up as a Save the Planet Green New Deal.
Each of these efforts are inflexible and rigid and prevent people from implementing new ideas and fixing problems and adapting to changing conditions: the Rigidity Trap.
In the context of a great power, it gets into the Rigidity Trap as it matures. It usually starts as an expanding empire that has wiped away all the corrupt rigidities of the old regime. But as time passes it mobilizes the people to fight real and imagined enemies and milks the economy to fund its supporters, whether existing or new. It rigidifies the economy, because that is what governments do.
And so, an established empire tends to fail not because it is challenged by a rising empire but because it has rigidified itself into economic bankruptcy. It has fallen into the Rigidity Trap.
| Thu, 21 May 2026 22:29:11 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Great Reaction: Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice; totalitarianism is a return to the scapegoat; social justice is good old loot and plunder.
Hitler is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: The Culture of the Ally, that helps Oppressed Peoples, or not.
