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Knowing our Liberal Friends

Chinese military expert Sun Tzu says:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

And since Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt advises that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy, it seems to be important for US politics that we “non-liberals” understand both ourselves and our “liberal friends” — who are indeed our political enemy.

In reality, of course, I would say that the political distinction in the US today is between the liberal ruling class plus its dedicated supporters versus the rest of us.

So how do we go about knowing ourselves and knowing our liberal enemy?

I judge that first, we need to understand our liberal enemy, because really, our understanding of ourselves begins with the injustice that our lives suffer under the unjust rule of our liberal friends.

But liberal injustice didn’t come from nowhere; it came, I propose, from Voltaire and Rousseau.

Grok says this about Voltaire:

Voltaire’s philosophy, deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, centered on the supreme power of reason as the primary tool for human progress and the relentless critique of superstition, dogma, and arbitrary authority. He championed religious tolerance, freedom of speech, and the separation of church and state, fiercely attacking the Catholic Church’s influence and clerical intolerance while advocating deism—a rational belief in a distant creator rather than organized religion.

Grok says this about Rousseau:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy centers on the belief that humans are born naturally good, free, and equal, endowed with a compassionate “amour de soi” (healthy self-love) and a simple, uncorrupted existence in the state of nature, but become alienated, unequal, and morally degraded through the development of society, private property, civilization, and artificial dependencies that foster destructive “amour-propre” (vain, comparative self-love).

Then let’s do a jump to Marx:

Karl Marx’s philosophy, often called historical materialism, centers on the idea that the economic base of society—specifically the mode of production and class relations—fundamentally shapes history, culture, politics, and consciousness... Marx viewed capitalism as inherently unstable and exploitative, generating crises, inequality, and alienation while simultaneously creating the conditions for its overthrow through proletarian revolution, leading toward a classless communist society where production serves human needs collectively rather than private profit, ultimately enabling genuine human freedom and self-realization beyond material scarcity and domination.

Now, today we experience our liberal ruling class as being a lot more Marx than Rousseau, and not very much Voltaire. From Voltaire, our liberal friends assume that they are on the side of reason and are heroic in their “critique of superstition, dogma, and arbitrary authority.” From Rousseau they imagine a perfect world where they are champions of a “compassionate.. and… simple, uncorrupted existence“ and fighting against the “alienated, unequal, and morally degraded” world of racist-sexist-homophobes.

IIn practice, liberal politics aligns most closely with the framework of Marx. They view racist patriarchal “capitalism as inherently unstable and exploitative, generating crises, inequality, and alienation”, and it is their determination, through the political agenda of Allyism, to fight for the oppressed peoples against the white male oppressors, and eliminate exploitation, inequality, and alienation of capitalism by substituting collective programs to rectify the exploitation and inequality of unfettered capitalism.

Obviously, from the non-liberal point of view, something has gone wrong with this program in the US, whether we believe it all started with the Pendleton Act of 1883 that established administrative government, or whether we believe it started with the New Deal.

My analysis is that it is not true that “reason [is] the primary tool for human progress.” Information, from Claude Shannon, is “surprise.” It is not true that capitalism that is “inherently unstable and exploitative, generating crises, inequality, and alienation”, but life itself. And I suspect that in creating a politics to create stability, eliminate exploitation, avoid crises, eliminate inequality and alienation, you generally make things worse. I believe that:

• if you muck around with capitalism’s price system you create crises and reduce prosperity;

• if you try to direct traffic with administration you have a “knowledge problem” and the administrators never have enough information to fix things;

• if you regulate capitalism you create “regulatory capture” of the regulatory apparatus by the regulated institutions.

Christopher Rufo describes how this system has fared in California:

unsustainable finances, endemic fraud, chronic homelessness, union corruption, DEI racialism, unchecked crime, and a web of NGOs that siphon taxpayer money toward partisan ends.

Now I believe, from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, that the problem with politics is that it always reduces any issue, any problem, to the fight of the friends against the enemy. The reality of human society as a complex interactive network of cooperating and competing individuals and institutions gets reduced to the fight against the enemy. And in the fight against the enemy the question of what will benefit people, what will work, what will spread prosperity, what ideas work and what will not work, gets buried in the fight against the enemy and the natural instinct to reward friends in the battle to win the war against the enemy.

Now I believe that our liberal friends don’t see that. They know that capitalism is “inherently unstable and exploitative, generating crises, inequality, and alienation”. And they know that by legislating the right legislation and regulating the right regulation that they can replace “the frigidity of individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” If there is a problem, they know it is the result of exploitation or oppression by an evil actor, so the solution is to apply political power.

We have seen this liberal approach to the world up close and personal in the anti-ICE protests. Our liberal friends do not see that the federal government has the power and the legal right to pursue illegal aliens. Instead they see only that the federal government is mistreating “migrants” whose only crime is that they are seeking a better life. And they do not see that their “sanctuary city” policies create a safe zone for criminals and a safe harbor for drug cartels, and create the occasion for illegal aliens and drug cartels to reward politicians that turn a blind eye to their criminalities.

And finally, when you reduce human life to politics, then you reduce life to rewarding your friends — also known as corruption — and fighting your enemies — also known as lawfare.

Knowing all this about our liberal friends we should not need to fear “the result of a hundred battles.” Provided that we know ourselves.

Groundhog Day is a Joke, Son

Today is Groundhog Day and all over the world, people will be watching the Nietzschean agony of Phil Connors as he goes through thousands of replays — known to philosophers as the Eternal Recurrence — before he mends his ways and wins the love of the delectable Rita Hanson. As all the world knows, Phil was played by Bill Murray and Rita was played by Andie MacDowell. Phil is also the name of the groundhog that is called upon to decide whether winter will last another six weeks.

As all the world knows,

Every Feb. 2, Phil the Groundhog emerges from his burrow at Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, Pa. If he sees his shadow, winter will last six more weeks; if not, spring is just around the corner.

As you know from the movie,

Every year, members of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club don tuxedos and top hats, recite mock prognostications and perform choreographed rituals before roughly 50,000 spectators and millions more worldwide.

But all is not well with the world.

In a Jan. 7, 2026, letter to the editor of the Times-Tribune, Scranton-area resident Krista Murray called the Inner Circle a “symbol of patriarchal power in a society that seems reluctant to embrace gender equality, even in frivolity and pageantry.” She asked if this year’s festivities would bring “six more weeks of misogyny?”

Then there are the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). They are alleging cruelty to groundhog Punxsutawney Phil.

Earth to Krista Murray — presumably no relation of Bill Murray — the reason for ridiculous festivals like Groundhog Day is that it keeps men of a certain age engaged in harmless frivolity when they could be getting together in secret patriarchal societies to plan the final humiliation of womenkind, including not least the lamentation of all woke liberal women.

As philosopher Foghorn Leghorn once proclaimed in a very wordy philosophical diatribe: “It’s a joke, son.”

Now, it is my prejudice that women don’t have a sense of humor. At least, they don’t have a sense of humor that men can understand. On the other hand, I have come to believe, there is nothing that women find funnier than some man making a fool of himself.

My view is that jokes are a side hustle in the male culture of honor, where honor for men is courage. I believe that there is a whole hierarchy of male honor, of which the peak is the courage of Worcester:

“It was myself, my brother, and his son,
That brought you home and boldly did outdare
The dangers of the time.”
— 1 Henry IV, Act 5, Scene 1

Now, Worcester is boasting about his courage. That’s how he tells us that he’s a nasty piece of work.

Below the actual courage in battle, in my view, comes courage in sports: going at the other team and risking injury. And a very good thing it is too, if you believe that we men need something to deflect us from world wars.

Below sports is the whole Culture of Insult. Men insult each other face to face; women just complain about other women when talking to a friend.

But there is a whole hierarchy of insult: there is the insult that can only be assuaged by a duel. There are insults that result in a fight in the local tavern. And then there are jokes, with which men sitting at the bar exchange gentle playful insults that are all in good fun, and the loser pays for the next brewski.

Then there is the influence of The Jews, who, experts agree, invented the punchline joke in the Catskill Mountain resorts: the Borsch Belt. Notice the “punch”-line. Get it?

Now, I think that humor goes deeper than that. Suppose that some crazy German decided to make philosophy fun?

That is what I have come to believe. And it all started the day I saw Jordan Peterson being interviewed by British journalist Helen Lewis. You may know that Peterson’s ideas owe a little to Nietzsche, and Lewis declared that Nietzsche was “the Nazis favorite intellectual.”

Women like Helen Lewis are invaluable. They tell us exactly what we are supposed to think and what we are not supposed to think. Her latest at The Atlantic is “The Front Runner,” a piece on Gavin Newsom.

Anyway, when I saw Helen Lewis whining about Nietzsche, it decided me. I had to read everything that Nietzsche wrote.

And I think the important thing to understand about Nietzsche is that he uses humor and maxims to make his point.

His most famous maxim?

God is dead, and we have killed him.

Humor? Well I’d say that one of his most important jokes was the whole concept of “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” Zoroaster is the founding prophet of Zoroastrianism that began in what is now Iran. And I find, reading books like The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy by Yuri Stoyanov, that the dirty little secret is that Judaism and Christianity are riddled with themes from Zoroaster. Of course they are, because of the various captitivities suffered by the Jews. For instance the Babylonian Captivity:

The Bible recounts how after the fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire to the Achaemenid Empire at the Battle of Opis in 539 BCE, exiled Judeans were permitted by the Persians to return to Judah.

What with all the conquests and captivities and whatnot in the Middle East, of course there has been a ton of “borrowings” between cultures.

Here’s something to think about. One of the first things that Ptolemy the Greek did when setting up his regime in Alexandria to rule Egypt — so that, in due course, Caesar and Mark Anthony could diddle around with Queen Cleopatra — was to summon a the best Hebrew scholars from Jerusalem to come to Alexandria and translate the Hebrew texts into Greek so it could be put into the library. It’s all in The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace o the Modern World by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid.

See, I think that the ancestral way in which human communicate knowledge and wisdom is not by logic and reason but by stories and myths and epics and poems and songs and jokes and maxims. That’s why I have a blog page just for Opinions, Maxims, and Aphorisms.

For example. It’s all very well for Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt to write:

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.

Jolly good show, Chuck. But here’s Curtis Yarvin:

There is no politics without an enemy.

Which of the two statements do you think will echo down the decades?

So I think that jokey stuff like the white males of the Inner Circle of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club is profoundly human and delightful and a Good Thing. And I think that wokey scolds that play the race card and the patriarchy card and complain about everything are idiots that Literally Know Nothing.

And that is why I observe Groundhog Day every year by watching Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in Groundhog Day. It’s the philosophy, from the death of a god to decadence to nihilism to the Eternal Recurrence to the Revaluation of Values.

For instance, just think about the journey about to be undertaken by our liberal friends as they finally realize that Marx (and Foucault and Alinsky) is dead and we liberals have killed him.

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