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Sarah Hoyt Warns of “The Breaking Point”
Because I’ve been reading Björn Merker and his Perishing Promise, about how our lefty friends have been trying to “perish” the “promise” of Victorian Britain for the last century or so, I’m coded for parallel narratives. And today up popped Sarah A. Hoyt, the SF writer, with “The Breaking Point”.
She is making a similar point, that the left is busy trying to force us into their mold. She says it won’t work.
Their worst illusion is that they can infinitely tweak humans and human societies to be exactly what they want them to be.
Hoyt says No! She comments on the progressive faith that they fixed racism and sexism. So the “tweak” philosophy must be right.
The progressives — I know, I’ve talked to them — of today point to early victories, like racial integration of society and the acceptance of women in business environments.
But Hoyt says no. Integration probably would have worked after the Civil War, except the South determined to stop it. That meant that the Civil Rights movement had to undo the government-mandated racism of the previous century.
As for women in business, women were always there, in some form or another. Lower class women worked by their men’s side and upper class reared women with no other prospects often took jobs… up to and including manager. Also women always owned businesses, etc.
So, in the end, you can’t “tweak” societies from the top down. That’s just not how the world works. For backup, she quotes Alexandria Brown, @alexthechick: “humans are not widgets”. Here’s the X-poast.
This thread. People are not widgets. People are not a resource. People are not financialization opportunities.
Keep acting like they are and keep mocking those who point this out and the obvious consequences will ensue. As. They. Should.
It’s not just people, Hoyt asserts. There is culture.
And cultures are not widgets. They’re structures of modus vivendi arrived at by evolution in much the same mode as biological evolution, to be the best suited to a people and their environment. Now a lot of them are poisonous, counterproductive or have passed their sell by date.
Cultures will adapt, in the end, “to new technology or new information”.
but governments and “intellectuals” putting their thumbs on the scale doesn’t change them. It only breaks them.
And cultures at the breaking point revert to their most fundamental.
Because people, and cultures, are not widgets.
The interesting thing about Sarah Hoyt is that she was born in a village in Portugal a few miles north of Porto. But guess what: she read children’s writer Enid Blyton as a child, and that inspired her to become a writer. Then she moved to the US and became a science fiction writer.
Do you see the point. Hoyt has journeyed, in one lifetime, from pre-industrial village culture all the way to our present post-industrial intellectual culture.
I would guess that, having lived the “way things are” culture of a rural village, she understands the importance of culture to humans, in a way that our lefty friends do not.
To put it in Merkerian terms, our lefty friends believe they can transform an existing culture with their notion of “overthrow”. Hoyt’s wisdom is that that’s not how humans, or the world, works.
Perhaps we should all just go and reread Kipling’s “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”. When he writes that “the Dog returns to his Vomit” I wonder who he means. I guess that if he were writing today instead of in 1919, there would be more talk of the Gods of the Activist Overthrow than the Gods of the Market Place.
Remember how it ends?
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Yes. And Aldous Huxley didn’t write Brave New World till 1932. Of course, they both got it from Shakespeare’s Tempest. Miranda:
O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t
| Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:40:12 GMT |
Welfare vs. the Family
Reading JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and the multidimensional problems in the hollers, you wonder what should be done.
Because Vance was presumably already planning a political career when Hillbilly Elegy was published in 2016 he is fairly restrained about “solutions”.
The way Vance tells the story his Mom had multiple male partners over the years. Vance would try to connect with each male partner, but it was all in vain because at some point his Mom would break up the relationship and go on to another. Then she got into drugs interspersed with rehab and finally ended up on heroin.
Just imagine what it would be like to grow up in an environment like that, what it would do to your “mental health” every day.
How did Vance avoid the fate of drink and drugs and joblessness? First he had his Mamaw — pronounced “ma’am-or” — his grandmother who provided a port in the storm. Then, somehow, he got through high school, and joined the Marines.
It was basic training that made him a man, where he learned discipline, responsibility, “giving it my all”. The big thing in basic training was pushing the recruits to their limit, and their discovery that they could do it.
So when Vance went to Ohio State on the GI Bill he had the skills and the training to succeed. Unlike a kid with a pregnant girl friend who worked with him at a tile factory and couldn’t even work an eight-hour shift without spending half the time in the bathroom.
And by the time he got into Yale Law School he had enough horse sense to realize that elite law school was about developing connections.
In Coming Apart Charles Murray writes that in the white lower class the men don’t work much and the women don’t marry much. That’s The Science. But in Vance’s memoir you get to see the facts on the ground.
So it was a happy coincidence that I read a piece by black intellectual Colman Hughes interviewing Delano Squires, author of The Vanishing Black Family. No, the family didn’t vanish because slavery;
[there’s] census data showing black marriage rates stayed remarkably high for a full century after emancipation, only collapsing in the 1960s.
The culprit was twofold: welfare and feminism:
the explosion of welfare spending, which effectively displaced fathers as providers, and the rise of second-wave feminism, which [Squires] argues convinced a generation of women that marriage was confinement rather than partnership.
I understood this 20 years ago from reading George Gilder:
Young girls know that if they get pregnant and have a baby, “they will get a flat.” So single motherhood is an opportunity. In the United States, the sixteenth birthday of a young woman, the day she could qualify for a government-subsidized apartment, was called “liberation day,” according to George Gilder in Men and Marriage. It was the day she could get liberation from the chaotic household of her mother and the dangerous young men there and get her own place, and her own baby.
In the lower class, I reckon, life is about getting by. If that means a girl gotta find a guy that will be a good provider and husband, then so be it. But if she can solve her problems by going on welfare, what’s not to like!
Then there are the feminists: let’s just boil it down to careers and no-fault divorce and abortion on demand.
Let me just gently suggest that women haven’t really been “liberated” by careers, divorce on demand and abortion.
Why do I say that? Because I believe that women were put on this Earth to have children and keep them alive, and men were put on this Earth to protect and provide for the mother of their children. Else doth err.
Your mileage may vary.
We have welfare because liberals did it. We have feminism because liberals did it.
Could we ever get liberals to change their minds? Probably not, because liberals know they have saved the poor with government benefits, and they know they have liberated women with abortion and no-fault divorce.
They know, and they have amassed a lot of political power dishing out the bennies to welfare recipients and liberated women.
And now liberals all over the world are busy inducting “migrants” into the wonders of government benefits. When you think about it, you realize that migrants on welfare ain’t gonna end well.
Is there an answer to these problems? Maybe the answer is basic training of the kind offered by the Marines.
Young men could be taught discipline, responsibility, and “giving it my all”.
Young women could be taught… Yes, what should we teach young women, so that they can have wonderful marriages and great families. Somehow, I think that teaching young women how to be girl bosses and how to complain about being “unsafe” doesn’t really help them.
| Mon, 28 Sep 2026 22:09:52 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
We forget that for every success story there are dozens of failures.
Understanding Yarvin’s three layers: the Gentry believe in governing the Commoners and advocating for the Clients; the Commoners just want a normal life with a job, a home, and a family; the Clients think “we was robbed!”
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:
