Well argued, been dealing with bureaucrats for years, am now planning a flight to deeper in the north nearer to the arctic (namely the Arctic corners of Quebec), to establish a country-estate so to speak. We must re-establish and preserve the old ways slowly, one year at a time. At present, I'm doing so with my literary works and also with small moves every month towards the country and towards a freer life.
Excellent! We all must do what we must to try and preserve the old ways. Fortunately, the old ways can survive disorder in a way the present, soft society cannot
Burke believed that none of the families who received the spoils of the dissolution of the monasteries endured for long, as if those lands were cursed ever after
Your recognition of the problem with the money system is spot on. The most negligent tend to borrow the most (credit cards, mortgages, maybe even companies) and thus have much spending power. Because of their poor perception they build terrible and destructive things while not realizing it themselves.
It’s almost like the author has never heard of Benjamin Franklin or Michael Faraday or Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford or Thomas Edison or Louis Salk or Alexander Fleming or…
What is he talking about? The 20th century wasn’t a time of commerce? Really?
And Robert E. Lee was a great gentleman? Is treason to his oath and country really such a great cause?
First, pretty much all those "new men" who became quite wealthy established themselves as gentlemen after doing so, aping the British commerce to gentry pipeline in that respect
Second, of course there was commerce. There has been since the bronze age. But England before 1890 or so was the last time in the Anglosphere that being a gentleman, tradition, and traditional customs like enjoying country house life and its sports were placed on a higher plane than men of commerce. Now CEOs and peers are seen as being of the same class and group, which is both ridiculous and a great shame
I see your point that the “new men” tried desperately to become gentry. It makes sense that this was something to aspire to. But they weren’t drawn from the gentry. Broadening the pools of talent that a society can draw from may have diminishing returns, but they do have some returns. Are the tradeoffs worth it? I’d say so. One faraday or Salk is worth a lot.
Yes I agree. The English aristocracy was excellent and survived because the worst fell out of it through going broke, being dishonorable, etc., and the best of the new men joined it by buying landed estates and becoming considered gentlemen in threeish generations. So it had the infusion of new blooded needed to stay strong, and didn't stagnate and grow hated like the French, or remain constantly pinched for cash like the Prussians and Russians
Am I mistaken, or Lee's oath was to Virginia, as was common in that era? Also the myth is he didn't especially want to fight for Virginia, but that was his home country, so that is what honor demanded. Addition: Stonewall Jackson carefully freed all his slaves before fighting for the Confederacy. History is vast. It contains multitudes.
This article touches some deep truths. I've forgotten how utterly destroyed and discarded our American heros had become. Well before my childhood. Living under bureaucratic tyranny my entire life I've found my way to despise bureaucracies in general. For a time I liked libertarians, but looking at America for the past 100 years, it's quite apparent the libertarians haven't accomplished anything, other than a cheap excuse to deepen the collusion and corruption of all facets of bureaucracy and the economy since the dollar was un-grounded from reality. So we have a thieving bureaucracy that simple can't not declare crisis, especially the economic ones they cause themselves as an excuse to print even more money.
They've monopolized everything and are holding hands with all industry everywhere in opposition to honesty, virtue, skill, knowledge, and reality. They don't regulate anything for any actual purpose, like maybe protecting humans from radiation, and poison laced food, instead they only regulate to guarantee their monopolies can't be sued (vaccines, wireless technologies), or liable, and of course they regulate to waste massive amounts of resources simply to secure guarantee business for one of their monopolies.
This concept of petite bourgeoise insecurity is monumental I'll defintely be reading tradegy and hope. It is so pervasive in everything. It's a merchant mindset, adhering to systems with a fake virtue of strictness(a front for price negotiation), that at it's heart it's completely duplicitous. They have an impersonal system of rules and reasons and prices, and the price is always a lie(buy low sell high). They are always rushing urging pushing toward "grentrification", which is indeed a misnomer; it's merchantfication. They want to increase the price of everything to feed their own security, they only want "luxury" customers, they make the nice parts of town inaccessible to their own people, and complain and hate poor people that they create by their ever increasing prices and inflation, that they cannot address because the entire movement was founded on fiat money. Not just the money and bureaucracy was uncoupled from actuality, but also that's when children were un-coupled from their families for public schooling. A dual movement of replacing the government, and replacing the family, creating a frenetic ever-insecure army of cheap replaceable cogs fodder, labor, rubes, drilling in mindless rule following, god I fucking hate metrics so many things suck because retarded people can't understand metrics are artificial fake, lacking depth and reality, and so easily manipulated. A society of liars and cheaters; useful idiots enslaved to money.
I've got a challenge to anyone who sees some truth in the views I've expressed here. One check out Matt Stoller (he's on substack). He's a think-tank washington democrat. He's trying to make our centrally planned economy functional by focusing on and addressing all the retarded monopolies in our economy. Anyway libertarians can dismiss him instantly, but libertarians haven't done a damn thing worth mentioning my entire life, save make excuses for making the corruption and collusion even worse. Both parties are completely useless shills. Democrats have definitely held the majority of power since this shift to fiat money & public schooling, at first they supported unions, but then they found they could make more money by cutting out working americans from the economy. Anyway Matt stoller has a good direction, and I care about real result with in the real world right now. So I think he's worth checking out. He ignores the banking side of things, which is technically wrong. But is it at all possible to approach the banking system? Since the tea-party psyop media shit show, where our wonderful media monopoly and bureaucrats shat on grass roots, with spying feds co-opt bullshit I don't think anyone has challenged the banking cartel since then.
"Congressional Stock Traders Beat the Market...and Hedge Funds, Again in 2023" This article is great. This should be blasted everywhere constantly. Maybe open comments this needs to pervade media everywhere, anything but these incumbent worthless garbage, fake sacks of shit. I mean we have all this technology and production and people can't even afford to go to a doctor, it's assbackwards, and nothing has checked this direction for over 100 years.
Anyway thanks for the article it definitely inspired me.
If "psychic insecurity" was what led to the rise of the bourgeoise, then its absence created the complacency mindset that led to the demise of the gentry. Although, there should have been a better distinction between the bourgeoise and the bureaucrat, one doesn't necessarily lead to the other, in fact in many instances the bourgeoise is as much a victim of bureaucracy as he is of aristocracy, tradition and regulation is what led to a bourgeoise revolution in France.
Well written and interesting! But I would add that there is a big important nuance thats missing from a particular line within your essay that *partially* invalidates it. You actually touched on at one point in the essay with your apt Coolidge quote: "“No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.”"
The USA used to be a far more politically and economically decentralized country than it is today, in fact some of its biggest centralizations didn't occur until they were rammed in between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s. Most domestic policy occurred at the sub national level, much of it, including things like economic policy, the organization of scientific and engineering, etc. happened not only at the state level but also in many cases at the local level with a huge amount of variability in policy design across the country because they were formulated, designed, and executed by different local forces operating mostly independently of each other. This means we had far more "leaders" than it appears from a headline glance, and while many fit your bills, they were a quite diverse array of people, collectively they were very much a motley crew.
Also, the USA used to genuinely have things that could to at least some meaningful degree be referred to as democratic governance structures; they were formed around our former, and completely different from what we have today, decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member Republican and Democratic parties of old. They almost entirely eliminated all of our democratic governance structures decades ago and those two parties were quietly killed, their skins peeled of and worn by their replacement impostors which are essentially two versions of Technocracy parties, neither of which care much about republicanism or democracy.
This is a good point. I think to a large extent the local problem is not present when there's a lynchpin of the community who remains there...typically a landed aristocrat who's present in the community. The Marquesses of Bute in Cardiff were a good example, or the Dukes of Westminster in Cheshire, the Mosleys at Rolleston as described in the article, or men like Washington/Jefferson/Madison in the US. Even local businesses used to do that to some extent with funding little league teams, hiring local kids, etc. As you point out, the centralization process killed that, with Big Business being a particularly bad offender
Personally, I doubt that that can be possible or work with mass democracy. To some extent it did in Athens. but their voting system was closer to landed voting of our mold than current year mas democracy. Once "the people" are held to be the same as the local man/men of note, that levelling impulse wipes away the point of being a leader and the desire for respect and to be listened to that comes with being the lord of the manor
Yeah, your right, the sort of national “lynchpin” figures were there and played a very import role even if most of it was culturally symbolic. There are some time periods in our history that we here in the USA are effectively lied about, two of which, are perhaps the most successfully lied about despite them being amongst the most widely contemporaneously documented events in history were two multi-decadal times periods that were long after their lives retroactively named the “Populist Era” and the “Progressive Era”, they were characterized by something that could be fairly described as being not too many miles away from being out-right mass scale participation in all non-foreign policy areas of public policy, commercial policy, scientific policy, and just in general governance. Almost none of the participants, at eats formally as like a name for themselves or anything like that, referred to themselves as “populists” or “progressives”, and they spread across a great many independent groups operating mostly locally. They didnt start parties, they used one of the old parties but just in their respective areas, the two parties we had were in some big ways actually just alliances of many different local parties, but most all domestic policies, of all sorts and kinds, were done at lower levels of government back then.
Darkly ironically, contemporary China, at least from the 1980s to ~2015, it seems like Xi’s trying to change this somewhat, but very much during those years and at least still for the most part today, with its high degree of political and economic decentralization, high variability in policy between places, moderate local trade protectionisms between areas within the country, partially fragmented capital markets, etc.; well, in some huge and fundamental ways contemporary China more closely resembles the USA’s Old republic than the contemporary USA does.
And a lot of what we had actually held for a long time, another time period we’re lied to a about over here is a period of our history called the New Deal Era, we’re told things are blatantly false about it, we’re tole it was a hyper centralized technocracy, in some ways, but in other it was very much not so and some of things people associate with it were super not that and also werent from it, they’d been their since day one of the country. For example, in the banking/finance sphere, the nation had a paradigm of internal inter-area capital flow inhibitors from the first day of its existence until they were phased out between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s, very Big Business, Very Big Finance, and the Big Government Technocrats tried to eliminate them during the entirety of the New Deal Era and while they did make some inroads, they mostly withstood the assaults throughout the whole Era, it wasn;t until the advent of the so called “Neoliberal Era” under the Carter administration that they finally broke, and the results been disastrous, like the results have been the in some cases the literal diametric of what was promised.
Great points! Yes, I do agree. I've touched on those things in other articles, but you're quite right that it's worth noting. If you're interested in reading about this, two books on gentlemanly capitalism that are quite good are "Aristocratic Enterprise," which is about the Fitzwilliam coal mines, and "Cardiff and the Marquesses of Bute," which is about that family's investment in the city of Cardiff, particularly its port infrastructure
Tenant farming can work either way, either with mechanization or without. You're right that the farm size needs to go up, but the rented farms can just be larger, particularly somewhere like America
Well argued, been dealing with bureaucrats for years, am now planning a flight to deeper in the north nearer to the arctic (namely the Arctic corners of Quebec), to establish a country-estate so to speak. We must re-establish and preserve the old ways slowly, one year at a time. At present, I'm doing so with my literary works and also with small moves every month towards the country and towards a freer life.
Excellent! We all must do what we must to try and preserve the old ways. Fortunately, the old ways can survive disorder in a way the present, soft society cannot
Very well said, definitely agree
Burke believed that none of the families who received the spoils of the dissolution of the monasteries endured for long, as if those lands were cursed ever after
To some extent he was right…it’s mainly the old Norman families that have held onto their wealth
Note: Tragedy and Hope, not Time and Tragedy
Shoot
A ridiculous error, can't believe I made that and no one else caught it. Fixing now.
Your recognition of the problem with the money system is spot on. The most negligent tend to borrow the most (credit cards, mortgages, maybe even companies) and thus have much spending power. Because of their poor perception they build terrible and destructive things while not realizing it themselves.
Absolutely
It’s almost like the author has never heard of Benjamin Franklin or Michael Faraday or Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford or Thomas Edison or Louis Salk or Alexander Fleming or…
What is he talking about? The 20th century wasn’t a time of commerce? Really?
And Robert E. Lee was a great gentleman? Is treason to his oath and country really such a great cause?
First, pretty much all those "new men" who became quite wealthy established themselves as gentlemen after doing so, aping the British commerce to gentry pipeline in that respect
Second, of course there was commerce. There has been since the bronze age. But England before 1890 or so was the last time in the Anglosphere that being a gentleman, tradition, and traditional customs like enjoying country house life and its sports were placed on a higher plane than men of commerce. Now CEOs and peers are seen as being of the same class and group, which is both ridiculous and a great shame
I see your point that the “new men” tried desperately to become gentry. It makes sense that this was something to aspire to. But they weren’t drawn from the gentry. Broadening the pools of talent that a society can draw from may have diminishing returns, but they do have some returns. Are the tradeoffs worth it? I’d say so. One faraday or Salk is worth a lot.
Yes I agree. The English aristocracy was excellent and survived because the worst fell out of it through going broke, being dishonorable, etc., and the best of the new men joined it by buying landed estates and becoming considered gentlemen in threeish generations. So it had the infusion of new blooded needed to stay strong, and didn't stagnate and grow hated like the French, or remain constantly pinched for cash like the Prussians and Russians
Am I mistaken, or Lee's oath was to Virginia, as was common in that era? Also the myth is he didn't especially want to fight for Virginia, but that was his home country, so that is what honor demanded. Addition: Stonewall Jackson carefully freed all his slaves before fighting for the Confederacy. History is vast. It contains multitudes.
Yes this is all true
This article touches some deep truths. I've forgotten how utterly destroyed and discarded our American heros had become. Well before my childhood. Living under bureaucratic tyranny my entire life I've found my way to despise bureaucracies in general. For a time I liked libertarians, but looking at America for the past 100 years, it's quite apparent the libertarians haven't accomplished anything, other than a cheap excuse to deepen the collusion and corruption of all facets of bureaucracy and the economy since the dollar was un-grounded from reality. So we have a thieving bureaucracy that simple can't not declare crisis, especially the economic ones they cause themselves as an excuse to print even more money.
They've monopolized everything and are holding hands with all industry everywhere in opposition to honesty, virtue, skill, knowledge, and reality. They don't regulate anything for any actual purpose, like maybe protecting humans from radiation, and poison laced food, instead they only regulate to guarantee their monopolies can't be sued (vaccines, wireless technologies), or liable, and of course they regulate to waste massive amounts of resources simply to secure guarantee business for one of their monopolies.
This concept of petite bourgeoise insecurity is monumental I'll defintely be reading tradegy and hope. It is so pervasive in everything. It's a merchant mindset, adhering to systems with a fake virtue of strictness(a front for price negotiation), that at it's heart it's completely duplicitous. They have an impersonal system of rules and reasons and prices, and the price is always a lie(buy low sell high). They are always rushing urging pushing toward "grentrification", which is indeed a misnomer; it's merchantfication. They want to increase the price of everything to feed their own security, they only want "luxury" customers, they make the nice parts of town inaccessible to their own people, and complain and hate poor people that they create by their ever increasing prices and inflation, that they cannot address because the entire movement was founded on fiat money. Not just the money and bureaucracy was uncoupled from actuality, but also that's when children were un-coupled from their families for public schooling. A dual movement of replacing the government, and replacing the family, creating a frenetic ever-insecure army of cheap replaceable cogs fodder, labor, rubes, drilling in mindless rule following, god I fucking hate metrics so many things suck because retarded people can't understand metrics are artificial fake, lacking depth and reality, and so easily manipulated. A society of liars and cheaters; useful idiots enslaved to money.
I've got a challenge to anyone who sees some truth in the views I've expressed here. One check out Matt Stoller (he's on substack). He's a think-tank washington democrat. He's trying to make our centrally planned economy functional by focusing on and addressing all the retarded monopolies in our economy. Anyway libertarians can dismiss him instantly, but libertarians haven't done a damn thing worth mentioning my entire life, save make excuses for making the corruption and collusion even worse. Both parties are completely useless shills. Democrats have definitely held the majority of power since this shift to fiat money & public schooling, at first they supported unions, but then they found they could make more money by cutting out working americans from the economy. Anyway Matt stoller has a good direction, and I care about real result with in the real world right now. So I think he's worth checking out. He ignores the banking side of things, which is technically wrong. But is it at all possible to approach the banking system? Since the tea-party psyop media shit show, where our wonderful media monopoly and bureaucrats shat on grass roots, with spying feds co-opt bullshit I don't think anyone has challenged the banking cartel since then.
"Congressional Stock Traders Beat the Market...and Hedge Funds, Again in 2023" This article is great. This should be blasted everywhere constantly. Maybe open comments this needs to pervade media everywhere, anything but these incumbent worthless garbage, fake sacks of shit. I mean we have all this technology and production and people can't even afford to go to a doctor, it's assbackwards, and nothing has checked this direction for over 100 years.
Anyway thanks for the article it definitely inspired me.
If "psychic insecurity" was what led to the rise of the bourgeoise, then its absence created the complacency mindset that led to the demise of the gentry. Although, there should have been a better distinction between the bourgeoise and the bureaucrat, one doesn't necessarily lead to the other, in fact in many instances the bourgeoise is as much a victim of bureaucracy as he is of aristocracy, tradition and regulation is what led to a bourgeoise revolution in France.
Headline Pic: Who won this fight?
Well written and interesting! But I would add that there is a big important nuance thats missing from a particular line within your essay that *partially* invalidates it. You actually touched on at one point in the essay with your apt Coolidge quote: "“No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.”"
The USA used to be a far more politically and economically decentralized country than it is today, in fact some of its biggest centralizations didn't occur until they were rammed in between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s. Most domestic policy occurred at the sub national level, much of it, including things like economic policy, the organization of scientific and engineering, etc. happened not only at the state level but also in many cases at the local level with a huge amount of variability in policy design across the country because they were formulated, designed, and executed by different local forces operating mostly independently of each other. This means we had far more "leaders" than it appears from a headline glance, and while many fit your bills, they were a quite diverse array of people, collectively they were very much a motley crew.
Also, the USA used to genuinely have things that could to at least some meaningful degree be referred to as democratic governance structures; they were formed around our former, and completely different from what we have today, decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member Republican and Democratic parties of old. They almost entirely eliminated all of our democratic governance structures decades ago and those two parties were quietly killed, their skins peeled of and worn by their replacement impostors which are essentially two versions of Technocracy parties, neither of which care much about republicanism or democracy.
This is a good point. I think to a large extent the local problem is not present when there's a lynchpin of the community who remains there...typically a landed aristocrat who's present in the community. The Marquesses of Bute in Cardiff were a good example, or the Dukes of Westminster in Cheshire, the Mosleys at Rolleston as described in the article, or men like Washington/Jefferson/Madison in the US. Even local businesses used to do that to some extent with funding little league teams, hiring local kids, etc. As you point out, the centralization process killed that, with Big Business being a particularly bad offender
Personally, I doubt that that can be possible or work with mass democracy. To some extent it did in Athens. but their voting system was closer to landed voting of our mold than current year mas democracy. Once "the people" are held to be the same as the local man/men of note, that levelling impulse wipes away the point of being a leader and the desire for respect and to be listened to that comes with being the lord of the manor
Yeah, your right, the sort of national “lynchpin” figures were there and played a very import role even if most of it was culturally symbolic. There are some time periods in our history that we here in the USA are effectively lied about, two of which, are perhaps the most successfully lied about despite them being amongst the most widely contemporaneously documented events in history were two multi-decadal times periods that were long after their lives retroactively named the “Populist Era” and the “Progressive Era”, they were characterized by something that could be fairly described as being not too many miles away from being out-right mass scale participation in all non-foreign policy areas of public policy, commercial policy, scientific policy, and just in general governance. Almost none of the participants, at eats formally as like a name for themselves or anything like that, referred to themselves as “populists” or “progressives”, and they spread across a great many independent groups operating mostly locally. They didnt start parties, they used one of the old parties but just in their respective areas, the two parties we had were in some big ways actually just alliances of many different local parties, but most all domestic policies, of all sorts and kinds, were done at lower levels of government back then.
Darkly ironically, contemporary China, at least from the 1980s to ~2015, it seems like Xi’s trying to change this somewhat, but very much during those years and at least still for the most part today, with its high degree of political and economic decentralization, high variability in policy between places, moderate local trade protectionisms between areas within the country, partially fragmented capital markets, etc.; well, in some huge and fundamental ways contemporary China more closely resembles the USA’s Old republic than the contemporary USA does.
And a lot of what we had actually held for a long time, another time period we’re lied to a about over here is a period of our history called the New Deal Era, we’re told things are blatantly false about it, we’re tole it was a hyper centralized technocracy, in some ways, but in other it was very much not so and some of things people associate with it were super not that and also werent from it, they’d been their since day one of the country. For example, in the banking/finance sphere, the nation had a paradigm of internal inter-area capital flow inhibitors from the first day of its existence until they were phased out between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s, very Big Business, Very Big Finance, and the Big Government Technocrats tried to eliminate them during the entirety of the New Deal Era and while they did make some inroads, they mostly withstood the assaults throughout the whole Era, it wasn;t until the advent of the so called “Neoliberal Era” under the Carter administration that they finally broke, and the results been disastrous, like the results have been the in some cases the literal diametric of what was promised.
Great points! Yes, I do agree. I've touched on those things in other articles, but you're quite right that it's worth noting. If you're interested in reading about this, two books on gentlemanly capitalism that are quite good are "Aristocratic Enterprise," which is about the Fitzwilliam coal mines, and "Cardiff and the Marquesses of Bute," which is about that family's investment in the city of Cardiff, particularly its port infrastructure
Tenant farming can work either way, either with mechanization or without. You're right that the farm size needs to go up, but the rented farms can just be larger, particularly somewhere like America