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The Worse the Better
It wasn’t Lenin that invented the phrase; “the worse the better.” It was Nikolay Chernyshevsky, according to the experts.
Other similar judgements are:
“How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” — Hemingway.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. — H.L. Mencken.
“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop” — Herb Stein
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Margaret Thatcher
And there is the notion, from analysis of Chinese history, that the average dynasty lasts for about 70 years.
My judgement is that the dynasty of the European educated class is reaching its sell-by date. There is no mystery about this. I believe that it issues from the very nature of political power, that in politics you hammer your enemies and gift your friends.
But as far as the economy, or morality, or art, the political class doesn’t have a clue.
Sometimes the middle class is cunning enough to flummox their noble rulers. That’s what Adam Smith said:
In Book III of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith describes how medieval burghers (town merchants and artisans) secured their liberty by paying rents or taxes directly to their feudal lords or sovereign in exchange for autonomy. This arrangement established the foundation for modern markets by protecting citizens from arbitrary plundering and fostering the rule of law.
I just learned that from P.J. O’Rourke. I had no idea. Those bourgeois rascals! No wonder Karl Marx had a problem with the bourgeoisie. Apparently the burghers paid their noble masters a fixed amount in gold. The noble lords were too dumb or something to institute an unrealized capital gains tax like our present rulers are proposing in order to keep those greedy billionaires on a short leash.
Now, do you think that our tech billionaires are smart enough to pay the educated class enough to pay for their administrative state underlings and their NGO princes to keep them from demolishing the AI boom? While they change the world while everyone is looking the other way?
See, I think the current regime is coming apart at the seams because of all the stupid things they have done over the past century, and now they are running out of other peoples’ money.
And they are running out of voters, so they have to cheat to keep the grift going for one more season.
And all their noble gestures — from helping the workers to helping the poor to helping the blacks — are turning against them. Why? Because in the words of George Eliot’s Mr. Brooke, arguing against “going too far,” it’s one thing for the rulers to make sure that the workers get a decent shot at the job market, it’s one thing to help the poor when the rulers have screwed up the economy, and it’s a good thing to put a stop to Jim Crow. But when you “go too far” you create waste and fraud and abuse. And you lack the power to fix it because all the people benefiting from government programs will get really mad if you take away their bennies.
If our rulers were so good at helping workers and the poor then why are there thousands of homeless in the streets of our big cities? If anti-racism is such a good thing then why are rulers all over the west failing to be outraged as minority youth are knifing ordinary white people? And why are they pushing anti-free-speech laws to keep wrong-think out of social media? And why do our rulers need to curate the vote at every election? And why do the noble rulers of Europe keep disqualifying “hard right” parties from the electoral process.
Like I say, our rulers are desperately hanging onto power, and the only way they know to do it is to cheat.
Until, as Hemingway said, you get to the second way of going bankrupt. Suddenly.
You could say they deserve it, but I feel for them. If only they were smart enough to know that politics needs to be kept down to a dull roar, and that human society needs far more from billionaires, moralists, and artists.
But they don’t get it. Any more than American philosopher Lina Lamont, who said, to all the world: “whaddya think I yam. Dumb or something?” Bless her heart.
| Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:36:32 GMT |
Solving the University Problem
Back in the day universities were all about “the life of the mind,” experts agree. Only in my understanding, the old Brit universities were about teaching ruling-class kids the lessons of politics in Greece and Rome. That is what "Greats” was all about. Plus a bit of philosophy. Then they invented “Modern Greats,” featuring philosophy, politics, and economics, because modern elites needed to be modern.
All along, Katherine Dee writes:
the deep reading of difficult texts was the practice of a small, privileged minority.
But really, who gives a darn about Greats and Modern Greats? Most people get their understanding of the world from religion and the politics rammed down their throats in K-12 and 60 Minutes. What people want is credentials, so they can get a job.
The modern American university sells credentials: signaling to employers that you were smart and conscientious enough to get in and to finish. It sells networks: the friends you make and the alumni you can email.
Katherine Dee wants school like a shop class, to teach you how things work. I guess they call it “learning by doing.” That’s certainly how I learned to program computers. I took a short class conducted by a co-worker and then started to program in FORTRAN. Decades later, when I wanted to create a website, I went on the internet to show me how to create a simple website to say “Hello World.” And then I took it from there.
Back in the day, you needed a shelf full of computer and programming manuals in order to program computers. Now you just ask AI.
An example. Our Brother printer said that we needed a new drum. So we got one. But it still said “replace the drum.” So I looked it up on Google AI. It said that the printer can’t detect that you replaced the drum, so you have to manually tell the printer that it’s got a new drum. And Google AI tells you how to do it. Almost.
Maybe all you need to do to prepare for life is to read science fiction. I believe that Elon Musk was a great sci-fi reader as a kid.
No kidding. I’m reading Heinlein’s Friday about “an AP (Artificial Person), a biologically engineered superwoman”. Here’s where it gets weird. They have this thing called “Shipstone… a fictional, ultra-high-density energy storage device.” Then they have “pneumatic trains [that] run through subterranean vacuum tubes, using maglev-style propulsion to achieve intercontinental speeds”. You mean like Elon’s Gigafactory and Boring Company? And, of course, humans in Heinlein novels are interplanetary.
But let’s get back to the topic in hand. Universities. Guess what. In Friday, Heinlein writes about an economist noting that bachelor’s degree holders earned 30 percent more than non-degree holders.
Such an undemocratic condition was anathema to the California Dream, so, with great speed, an initiative was qualified for the next election, the measure passed, and all California high-school graduates and/or California citizens attaining eighteen years were henceforth awarded bachelor’s degrees.
It seems to me that the name of the game with AI is that you need to know how to ask the right question.
So I think the question for philosophers and experts is: how do we teach moms to teach their kids to ask AI the right questions?
I find that AI is magnificent at answering my questions. But maybe that is because I am a dab hand at asking questions, from a lifetime of asking questions.
Whatabout kids? Seems to me that kids are notorious for asking questions of their parents, as in “Why?”
So maybe the solution to all our problems is to make sure that AI can deal with kids endlessly asking: “Why?”
| Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:43:12 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
Information is surprise — George Gilder, after Claude Shannon
Good men do the right thing; good women say the right thing.
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: A Critique of Critical Theory
