The Iterable Game: Reciprocity & The Golden Rule

Play and reciprocity

Proof of the ethos of reciprocity is evident even among rats. So asserted Jaak Panksepp who was an Estonian neuroscientist and psychobiologist who coined the term "affective neuroscience", the name for the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. He was the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science for the Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology, and Physiology at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and Emeritus Professor of the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University. He was known in the popular press for his research on laughter in non-human animals. 

Panksepp had discovered something quite remarkable regarding rat behaviour. Rats love to play but there are rules which govern that play. His experiments involved using a big rat and a little rat, and by placing them in separate cages facing the rodent equivalent of a rat wrestling ring, he observed that both rats would beg to play with one another. Their desire for play was measured by how hard they would work to enter the ring where they could wrestle. Panksepp's research indicated that they worked very hard to do so. We can see this same behaviour in a dog park when your dog is utterly taken with the other dogs in the park. If my tiny five pound chihuahua is any indicator of the desire to play, I can assure you that he wishes that a great deal given how much he whimpers and pulls on his lead to get at them. And most dogs, even enormous mastiffs, reciprocate with him very well, if they are properly socialized. But back to Panksepp's findings, in the first bout the large rat invariably wins, yet in spite of its initial victory over the lesser rat both rats wish to play repeatedly. This was determined by separating them again and again then measuring how hard they would work to get back into the ring. Panksepp discovered that after the initial bout if the big rat didn't allow the little rat to win roughly 30% of the time in subsequent bouts, the little rat would no longer play.

The role of play in maintaining social order

Panksepp is credited with discovering the circuit in the mammalian brain which is wired to play. And the principle governing that circuitry is reciprocity. Which is why, in the end, a tyrant loses because play cannot be coerced. Even rats have a neurological circuit which governs the proper mode of conduct in a game which can be played iterably. This is the case for all mammals who live in a hierarchical social structure. To maintain social order and adhesion the participants must play reciprocally. Of course since humans are self aware we are are also the only ones who can articulate this rule. Which is why all civilized societies are organized around codified laws. If those laws aren't based upon reciprocity they will become cruel, arbitrary and/or difficult to understand. The social order in that society will then begin to break down. Lets at look of an example of a tyrannical behaviour affecting social order from our nearest kin in the higher animal kingdom, the chimpanzee from whose common ancestor we diverged some seven million years ago.

Primate Politics https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/01/chimpanzees-murder-cannibalism-senegal/#close

Dr. Jill Pruetz: https://www.txstate.edu/anthropology/people/faculty/pruetz.html  

"Since 2005, Pruetz and her colleagues have painstakingly studied the chimps of Fongoli, one of the few sites in western Africa where the apes have grown fully accustomed to human researchers. (Read more about Fongoli’s chimpanzees, which have been observed using sticks as spears.)


Pruetz’s observations have revealed a daily life full of politicking. Chimpanzee communities are led by “alpha males” and coalitions of male allies, flanked by females and the young. While females strike out for new groups after reaching sexual maturity, males stay in their birth communities, jockeying for social dominance with displays and shifting alliances. “It’s a bit like a soap opera,” says Pruetz.

In early 2005, Pruetz and her team identified Foudouko as the alpha male—the one male to which all others pant-grunted, a sign of submission. His furrowed brow and imperious air led one research assistant to nickname him Saddam, after the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

But in September 2007, Foudouko lost his grip on power, after his second-in-command—a male named Mamadou—was hobbled by a grievous leg injury. Mamadou’s fall from grace left Foudouko exposed, letting a group of younger males run him out of Fongoli in March 2008. After he disappeared, Pruetz and her colleagues thought he had died. (See intimate photos of Fongoli chimps.)

To Pruetz’s shock, Foudouko found his way back to Fongoli nine months later, a shadow of his former self. Now timid at the sight of humans, he was reduced to hiding behind trees or tufts of grass along Fongoli’s outskirts. For five long years, Foudouko would live the life of an exile, periodically ingratiating himself with the new alpha male—Mamadou’s brother David.

While Mamadou and David welcomed his return, the young males who had chafed under his rule were far less sympathetic. They regularly chased Foudouko out of the community, assailing him with strange calls the researchers did not recognize.

Scene of the Crime

Before dawn on the morning of June 15, 2013, Pruetz and her assistant Michel Sadiakho heard noises from about a half-mile away from their camp: a band of chimpanzees rapidly moving to the south from their nesting site, calling out in an uproar. Pruetz, ill with malaria, couldn’t go see the hubbub, leaving Sadiakho to run after them. (Read more about daily life in Fongoli.)

What Sadiakho saw devastated him. Foudouko, who was around 17 years old, lay there dead, his hands covered in bite marks and scratches—implying that two other chimpanzees had held him down as others beat his head and torso. A gaping wound on his foot, perhaps a bite, had peeled back much of the skin and likely led to severe blood loss.


As morning came, Pruetz and her team watched many of Fongoli’s male and female chimpanzees harass—and partially cannibalize—his body, tearing out his throat and biting at his genitals."

Tyranny never lasts forever and those affected by it don't easily forget or forgive. A big commanding male may exercises brutal dominance for a time but sooner or later, when he is asleep, ill or inattentive, a few of his lesser mates are likely to ravage him because he had failed to deal with them reciprocally and fairly.

The phenomenon of pay to play, just like a rat 😂

"Oh! The good ol' Hockey game, is the best game you can name. And the best game you can name, is the good ol' Hockey game.", so says Stompin' Tom, and he's right!

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And those fortunate enough to have them undoubtedly gladly pay the high price. Why? To watch competent expert athletes engage in reciprocal play over repeated games until the best team wins. This is instinctively admirable. We all know it. We do not admire those who cheat, connive and brutalize their way to the winning the "cup" nor do regulations which are based upon reciprocity permit such. The game couldn't be played without clear rules constraining that play. Rules which have consequences if not followed. We even hire people to access if those rules are adhered to and subsequently punish those who break them. Nothing is arbitrary. Although distinctive talent and ability are a vital part of this process of play, the players who are most admired by their fans are those who cooperate with their teammates to develop their teammates' skills as well as that of their own. Which is why those are the players most often selected to be team captain.

Can you imagine if the current insistence on applying equity laws regarding equality of outcome were applied to hockey?  If winning was not based solely on fair play and competence? Actually I am waiting for this to happen given the outrage surrounding the now infamous Don Cherry incident but I will leave that discussion aside for the moment to drive home my point. Of all the hockey teams everywhere in the world playing hockey only one team will emerge at the end of the season drinking champagne out of Lord Stanley's Cup. Namely the team who played the game repeatedly and successfully while following the rules. And winning one year certainly does not guarantee that that team will win the next.

The top one percent of the successful in any market is seldom held for long by the same persons, team or company. Having stated this, there will always be a top one percent because there are mathematical principles at work which determine outcomes. So, let's examine what these principles are.

Prices Law and the Pareto Principle: "For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away."— Matthew 25:29, RSV.

This is sometimes referred to as the Matthew Principle regarding inequality of outcome. This principle is also reflected in Price's Law and the Pareto Principle. 

"Price’s law predicts that the square root of a population produces 50% of the products produced. If I have 100 bricks produced by 100 brick layers, 10 of the brick layers (100 squared=10), produced 50 bricks. If I continued this equation, the remainder population would eventually demonstrate a graph that at some point would be very close to showing 20% of the work being done by 80% of the population. Which leads to the next point…

The Pareto Principle describes that 80% of the output, is generated by 20% of the actions. It, unlike Price’s law, is an observation of the natural inequality of many things in life, but in itself, is not a mathematical expression."

Equality of opportunity is a noble goal however it does nothing to describe outcomes. It does not tell us about who will come out on top repeatedly over time nor does it describe the fact that those who are at the top will not necessarily remain the same. This is a fact that the postmodern left simply cannot seem to understand. As an example, it is beneficial for the NHL to have the largest pool of competent players possible from which to draw. This is why so many children are given the opportunity to learn how to play hockey at their local arenas. Out of all those children very few will make it to more senior leagues such as the Junior A's and B's. And, out of the most competent among them very few will move on to the NHL. Of all NHL players very few become a phenomenon like Wayne Gretzky. Fewer still will have the honour of drinking champagne out of Lord Stanley's Cup. Maximizing the opportunity to learn to play the game does nothing to predict the outcome other than to provide a larger group from which the most competent can emerge.

The fact that the opportunity to play benefits all the children who take that opportunity cannot be ignored nor can the fact that not all of them will not succeed equally. But what we may all succeed at is to be found in the old proverb, “It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.” The essential ethos in life is reciprocity. Our very DNA is wired to it. For "Do to others what you want them to do to you. This is the meaning of the law of Moses and the teaching of the prophets." — Matthew 7:12. The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as you wish to be treated. It is the axiomatic starting point of playing an iterable game voluntarily throughout our life and this is a game which may never be coerced. As soon as the game is coerced the game will collapse. Which is why totalitarian societies are doomed to fail. This rule is to be found not only in many religions and cultures, but is rooted in our evolutionary biology itself. 

Personality, Politics and Progress

Canadian clinical psychologist, professor, best selling author and now, world renowned intellect and lecturer, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, has often pointed out the relationship between temperament and political persuasion. His premise goes something like this; the conservative temperament leans toward wanting to maintain order and structure and therefore is averse to change while the left leaning temperament wishes to weight the game in favour of keeping open boundaries between things to facilitate creativity, change, and hopefully progress. While I believe this view has a certain utility, I believe it to be too narrow and simplistic. I am reluctant to point this out since I am an ignorant man; however, I think I can argue a more workable explanation for the weaknesses in Dr. Peterson's reasoning. I will begin by using my own peculiar temperament as an example.

"The left is perfectly capable of rigid orthodoxy toward their belief system while the right is perfectly capable of adapting policies to changing demands"

I am certainly not a conservative person in any real sense of the word. I am loud, brash and outgoing. I have a reputation for questioning arbitrary authority for good reason, I dislike it. I am also an erstwhile blues musician. My very nature is to look for alternative ways of assessing things to explore their validity. If there is a method, or a process, or an opportunity to aid my personal journey of discovery, I am more than willing to consider it. Even if this means that I must exchange my current ignorance and naivety in favour of a more realistic and informed view. Which is why it has been easier for me, perhaps for more than most, to pick up and leave where I am to explore diverse perspectives and places in an attempt to learn something, invariably mostly about myself. I have sacrificed to do this. I have given up what I have in favour of pursuing discovery and of obtaining something more valuable than I have at present. Almost invariably what I thought I would experience along the way was not what I have experienced, nor was what I thought I might gain the most valuable things I eventually gained. I have made enormous, costly blunders along the way due to my own stupidity, naivety and shortcomings. In spite of this I love structure as well. I simply despise people who wish to tear down the very foundations upon which such amazing human progress has been made. And because of this I tend toward a right leaning philosophical view of the world that will afford the individual the maximum possibility for liberty, which in my case might best be described as the Classical Liberalism first proposed during the Age of Enlightenment.  I abhor the state's inference with individual liberty because of its tendency toward collectivism, "group think" and authoritarianism.

"The path to knowable, quantifiable progress: Lean Science"

One of the many things which has engaged me in former incarnations of my life has been lean manufacturing coaching to ensure the firms for which I have consulted had substantive quality management systems. My older brother Garth, God rest him, was an expert in lean science. He sold Lean Six Sigma training for Motorola University in the Asia-Pacific Region out of Melbourne, Australia. He was presented with the prestigious JM Juran Award for Quality Excellence by AOQC in 1988, which is Australia's highest honour in that field of expertise https://www.aoq.net.au/awards/jm-juran-award/. I tread very lightly when making any claims of my own prowess when walking among giants since anything that I know about quality is the result of being well mentored by experts.


Eric Walker is another mentor who taught us well the following foundational principle of lean; "What he have today, whatever progress is to be made, is all based upon past progress. Quality systems are never revolutionary since real progress is always evolutionary". The Toyota Production System did not undo the Ford Production System, rather it built upon it. Eric was a late convert to quality and like all new converts had the zeal of such. Eric had retired as the Superintendent of my department only to return to us a few years later to train us as someone who had finally realized the value of "Team Kaizen" and applying lean science and problem solving to business.

There is yet another mentor and old friend to whom I owe at very least the courtesy of an entire paragraph; Pat Cowling, https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-cowling-69749914/?originalSubdomain=ca. Pat's unique and arcane field of expertise is "lean manufacturing in low volume environments". This science is particularly suited to locomotives and military vehicles production since they are produced in lower quantities than the mass production used by the automotive industry. Pat mentored me in 2008 while I was preparing the quality management system and training for an electrostatic painting firm which applied CARC coatings for the military, among other painting applications, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I am quite certain that I learned far more than I was able to teach my clients during the eight months I was there. It was a very rewarding time for me personally and the project was a success. I made lasting friends in the West Michigan area, particular in their vibrant blues music scene.

Pat Cowling has an uncanny ability to analyze unwanted variation and arrive at solutions that save a great deal of money, time and unwanted variation, which is why he is in high demand today as a consultant largely to the military-industrial sector. He is also left leaning politically, although he certainly loves order. Also he is rather conservative by nature and dress although very outgoing as well.

"It isn't so easy to fit a personality type into a neat category since individuals are far too diverse. In fact, real diversity only exists at the level of the individual. This is oddly a fact Dr. Peterson often states in spite of his analysis of temperament and politics"

It was during my time in Grand Rapids that I had listened to the American federal election campaign with all of its bombast and rhetoric. This is also when I learned of the plans to reward corrupt and malfeasant banks by bailing them out. So the very institutions which had caused the financial crisis of 2008 were to be rewarded thereby indebting our children's children for their negligence, corruption and greed! The banking crisis had primarily been brought about by deregulation in the financial industry which permitted banks to engage in hedge fund trading with derivatives. Banks then demanded more mortgages to support the profitable sale of these derivatives. Weren't the "Dirty Thirties" enough for America and the Western World? I was appalled.

"To to find a possible solution we must first do a root cause analysis of the problem. We must understand that without integrity failure is inevitable!"

Enter Doug Ross, https://ca.linkedin.com/in/douglasross. Doug had worked with us during the 1998 Gen III V-8 engine launch at the St. Catharines General Motors Powertrain plant. We won a J.D. Power Award for that production launch beating even Toyota at their own game for the fastest start up of any engine plant in the world. Doug was our synergy guy. He was the fellow who could bring disparate parties together to find common ground thereby preventing managers from butting heads. When I retired from GM in 2005 Doug and I agreed that we would look at consulting together. I do not recall which of us reached out to the other as 2008 drew to a close but shortly thereafter we began to work on a new program to increase integrity in business which featured, "Inner Dialogue Training" similar to cognitive behaviour therapy which is geared to aligning managers to achieve more positive, productive and rewarding outcomes for them and their employees.

"What are we telling ourselves about our situation? Is the story we are telling ourselves helping us solve the problems with which we are confronted?"

The Inner Dialogue Training course we began working on had its unlikely origins on the Gaza Strip. We learned of a young female Lieutenant from the Israeli Army who had commanded a platoon patrolling Palestinians. Unsurprisingly they weren't having a very good time of it, however what is surprising is what happened next, according to the story I was told. The young officer began to ask the kids in her unit what they would rather have happen while out on patrol and like sane kids they began to tell her positive stories about interacting with people. Low and behold the more they told positive stories, the more they became a reality. A think tank in the US got wind of her success in altering unwanted outcomes and began to wonder if this method could not be developed, perfected and translated into other areas where such a change in perspective might serve to improve operational successes. So after the young lady had resigned her commission she was brought to the US to work on this. Doug in his typical curiosity to explore more effective tools to assist him with consulting put a team of us together to discover the real utility of inner dialogue training.

Enter my wife, Anne-Siri Walle. Here is a photo of her on deck watch as a young Lieutenant in the Royal Norwegian Navy. She has also served in their Coast Guard. Anne-Siri is one of the first of two women to graduate from the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy in Bergen and then went on to study at the Naval School of Staff. She did it because she is quicker, tougher, faster and better. Even in a country where egalitarianism is practically a religion it should be understood that navigating a previously uncharted course in waters traditionally sailed in by men was not easy for her. There were significant obstacles for her to overcome which have since assisted in created the thoroughly integrated Navy Norway has today. She resigned her commission at the pay grade of Commander after the birth of her son to return to civilian life to raise a family. This was also an enormous sacrifice for her since she was being vetted for senior, if not staff command. Nevertheless, when the children were old enough she eventually returned to work for the Defence Department as a Senior Adviser. During this time she got wind of the program on inner dialogue training via LinkedIn and became curious about it herself.

"The moment all things changed for the better but not how I had expected. If ever there is an object lesson in keeping an open mind and heart, this was it"

My particular role in Inner Dialogue Training was to act as a guinea pig. We had no experience or expertise in this field and none of us are psychologists. I must confess the best attempts of my colleagues to use this method on me were a dismal failure. I suspect that this is because they simply weren't asking the right questions to arrive at the root causes for my negative inner dialogue. I also believe that feelings of concern or unease over a particular situation is a sign that it is not merely a matter of how you look at the situation. There are real problems in life which must be solved. Life is bounded by suffering and infected by malice, and I have known my fair share of malicious human beings. It is also not useful to be naive about our own tendency toward passive-aggressive behaviour. We are all capable of reacting quite badly when all our buttons are pushed. It is best to incorporate our darker inner selves to use wisely as Carl Jung pointed out.

So, as I busied myself with lean training to be used on the shop floor, my colleagues busied themselves with developing inner dialogue training. Since I am an old shop floor guy; namely rude, crude and lewd, such esoteric matters were not my chief concern. I merely needed help in dealing with recalcitrant managers who don't see the value in giving their workers tools and information to do their jobs correctly the first time, or teach them problem solving methods to assist them with assigning documented corrective actions to first time quality issues. I would often warn managers several times about jerking their workers over and if my best advice was not heeded, I became angry. Workers after all are value added labour and deserve the support of their managers. Apparently my anger doesn't serve to correct managers' bad behaviour although I have yet to understand why. 🤣

This is where I knew Anne-Siri would have great utility. She was used to dealing with people who don't see the need for change or improvement. Oddly, in the most progressive societies, such as in Scandinavia, bureaucracies can become rigid and stultifying in their adherence to socially conforming orthodoxy. In the midst of this environment, for better or for worse (for her personal well being often worse), her attempts to push for process improvements or to criticize the consensus even by offering alternatives were viewed as "being difficult" at best and "subversive" at worst. It was under these circumstances that Anne-Siri sought to apply Doug's program. First she submitted to the training herself, then attempted to use it on a volunteer in Norway. Since said volunteer is a very dear friend of Anne-Siri's it is difficult for me to assess the efficacy of the course on her. Neither had Anne-Siri been sufficiently mentored in he application of the program.

I became a great admirer of Anne-Siri; of her forthrightness, her kindness and her sadly disregarded intelligence and talent. So, having fallen in love we decided that I should join her in Norway. I hoped,we both did, that we might sell the newly developed program in Norway but alas the program was met with stonewalling and disregard. It was next to impossible to explain its benefits in a place where people often deem themselves to be at the pinnacle of socio-economic success. Sadly this isn't the case, but they certainly believe it is.

"As Dr. Peterson has often pointed out, by nature humans are aiming creatures moving toward a goal from one point to another"

This is undoubtedly why we take such great pleasure in watching team sports where the goal is the at the opposite end of the field and a team works skillfully and cooperatively to reach it while the other team applies all of its efforts to prevent them. Humans are aiming creatures on the move always targeting a goal. This implies that the path to reach it requires a map. We need to develop our individual skills while working cooperatively as a team articulating and sharing the map forward. The path to our goals is seldom linear. It is circuitous in nature and full of challenges which might prevent us from scoring. And such is life. This is reality. In the face of these challenges lean science provides a way to chart a proper course we can all agree on. Process flow mapping assesses what can go wrong at each step of our journey to achieve our desired outcomes while allowing for mitigation of risk along the way. It may sound highly structured, and it is, but it also allows for the game (whatever the nature of the game be it playing football, building a car, or even running a government) to be knowable, quantifiable and provable with great leeway for change and adaptation. You cannot play an iterable game without rules because it is within the rules that true creativity will emerge.

"The left has many ideas at to what constitutes progress which are based on the orthodoxy of current leftist doctrine. This presents two problems i): is the progress defined by them an actual improvement? ii): Why are they so insistent on only talking about the goal without having a scientific method to achieve it?"

"The right has two problems as well. i): they often merely want to keep what once was without adapting to changing demands. ii): they fail to articulate real progress in a manner which appeals to win the support of the electorate"

This discontinuity virtually guaranteed a populist backlash which certainly explains Trump, Brexit and the "Yellow Vest" movement in France. It also speaks to what I have alluded before, that there is something very broken about a system which rewards corruption such as the bailout of 2008 to our current government's plan to give SNC Lavalin a "don't go to jail" card simply because they are deep in the Liberal Party's pocket, on the justifying further taxation when the taxes do not bring about the outcomes the government promised.

"Humans are the only creature that can lie to themselves and believe their own lies"

The greatest liars are the ones who are pathological enough to believe their own crap. This reality does not fit well into a simple definition of temperament since I am quite convinced there are pathologically lying conservatives as well and pathologically lying leftists. I think what may vary between the left and right is the nature of the lies they tell themselves. But, if I were to surmise based on my own experiences, I would assume the greater percentage of liars who believe their own shit are on the left for the simple reason modern leftist doctrine is so utterly unworkable and unfactual. It has become nothing even similar to the kind of socialism Orwell advocated, rather it is virtually identical to the versions he warned us about. We need to do some serious  problem solving and mapping as a society. The political elite have become a reflection of the irrationality of the postmodern university. This is occuring while perfectly rational professors like Doctors Stephen Hicks, Sir Roger Scruton and Jordan B Peterson are labelled as "controversial". Proof of such is that the institutions where they are tenured have issued them minatory and insolent warnings that they must change their opinions to suit to the will of the postmodern elite. It is time to reapply the proper rules of the game, namely rational, calm, open debate based upon sound reasoning. It is time to apply science to public discourse and leave the hyper-emotional nonsense currently exhibited by the cultural, academic and political elite to a dark chapter in our history when we momentarily lost the way on our journey toward actual, verifiable socio-economic progress.

Getting into bed with Beelzebub – The CIA, Cultural Marxism and the death of Western Liberalism

I intend to quote my sources with little elaboration for one simple reason, I want my readers to understand I have not invented yet another conspiracy theory. I will let the facts speak for themselves and I invite my readers to investigate this for themselves. Then I encourage each of you to share your conclusions with me as well as with others. Remember George Carlin’s famous line, “Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.”? The necessities of war, even for the noblest of causes such as in defeating the Nazis, will have far reaching and lasting consequences, especially if those consequences involve creating secret organizations whose entire intent is to sew unrest and create instability at home and abroad. It also needs to be understood that such organizations inevitably operate contrary to the principles of constitutional limits on government.

Also, if you notice that you are reading an edited version of this blog please understand I will continue to edit as I receive your feedback. A Norwegian economist was kind enough to share his learned opinions with me. His critique is well received and therefore I would like to clarify certain points.

The new left is no longer founded on the Marxist idea of the proletariat rising up against the bourgeoisie. The Cultural Marxist paradigm replaces that with an ongoing struggle between oppressed identity groups and what is define as the patriarchal tyranny, namely Western Liberal Culture. To the new left modern Liberal Western Democracies are essentially tyrannies. Their structure must be torn down starting with the family. The new left rejects the liberalism that resulted from the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Age of Enlightenment. In short Critical Theory posited by the Cultural Marxists and Postmodernists rejects all the grand narratives upon which the West has been built. 

Here are some of the new left's core tenets:

First “that was not real socialism” is the claim made by those who, despite socialism’s brutal history, think that they are so morally superior that if they were in to be put in charge of the social experiment to create utopia they would succeed. May I remind you that utopia means “no place”? Utopia does not nor cannot exist. Also, anyone who makes such a claim is utterly unaware of the malevolence that resides in each of us. Power is corrupting. Understand that the new left subscribes to an odd admixture of Postmodernism and Critical Theory who view life as essentially a struggle to acquire power. Therefore the ONLY thing they want is greater clout, influence, and leverage in spite of their pious smoke screen of helping the downtrodden.


“Bad men,” said the famous Classical Liberal economist Hayek, “have no inhibitions about running peoples’ lives. Good men, however, are not interested in doing so. They are willing to allow others to live their lives without interference as long they’re not harming anyone.”

It is “the unscrupulous and uninhibited” — mean people — he wrote, who “are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.” We’re not a totalitarian society. But as Hayek says, there is a “ruthlessness required” to install socialism.


Secondly, I wish you to understand that I refer to socialism in its broadest terms. By this I mean a society, so hell bent on conformity of opinion that they view it as necessary to have strict government regulation and control over virtually every cloying aspect of human activity, not merely the economy. This is why we see a government who constantly talks diversity yet wants everyone to sound alike. They have literally passed laws to make dissenting opinion illegal. Such a society invariably tends toward authoritarian illiberalism. If it moves – tax it, if it keeps moving – regulate it and if it stops moving -subsidize it defines what I view as a government which is moving toward utter social control of the economy while Bill C-16 and other pronouncements made by parliament label any who disagree with the state collective as racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc., etc.  Such states invariably ensure their schools, the schools they run, indoctrinate children into believing that the government must be given virtually unlimited authority since only the socialist elite know what is best for society at large.

Thirdly, no such authoritarian and illiberal system can emerge without a socio-cultural tendency toward “tall poppy syndrome” where individuality is not only strongly discouraged, but disparaged. Scandinavia had a brilliant author by the name of Sandemose. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/11/the-law-of-jante/

“Sandemose’s works are little read these days, except, that is, for a small fragment of one novel, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, published in 1933. The book is a thinly veiled roman à clef about the people of Nykøbing, which in the book is renamed “Jante.” It caused a storm of controversy, satirizing life in small-town Denmark as being ruled by pettiness, envy, backbiting, gossip, inverted snobbery, and small-mindedness. Naturally, the book generated some especially indignant spluttering in Nykøbing, exposing as it did the mean-spirited behavior of its residents, many of whom were easily identifiable.

The fragment of A Fugitive that has come both to define and to torment the Danes is a list of rules by which the residents of the fictional town of Jante were said to abide. These rules set out the Law of Jante (Janteloven), a kind of Danish Ten Commandments, the influence and infamy of which have spread beyond their home country throughout the Nordic region.

These are the rules of Jante Law, the social norms one should apparently be aware of if one is planning a move to the north:

1. You shall not believe that you are someone.
2. You shall not believe that you are as good as we are.
3. You shall not believe that you are any wiser than we are.
4. You shall never indulge in the conceit of imagining that you are better than we are.
5. You shall not believe that you know more than we do.
6. You shall not believe that you are more important than we are.
7. You shall not believe that you are going to amount to anything.
8. You shall not laugh at us.
9. You shall not believe that anyone cares about you.
10. You shall not believe that you can teach us anything.”

I have experienced this myself as well as witnessed loved ones’ lives made very unpleasant indeed by petty and jealous people who demand that aiming for the lowest common denominator is somehow desirable. It takes a society which lives under the influence of such strict social codes to become socialistic.

So, for the purpose of further developing my reasoning “tall poppy syndrome” otherwise known as “Janteloven” forms the bedrock for all socialist societies.

 “Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort. by FRANZ NEUMANN, HERBERT MARCUSE, and OTTO KIRCHHEIMER. edited by RAFFAELE LAUDANI. Princeton University Press, 2013, 704 pp. $45.00.

War makes for strange bedfellows. Among the oddest pairings that World War II produced was the bringing together of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — a precursor to the CIA — and a group of German Jewish Marxists he hired to help the United States understand the Nazis.

Donovan was a decorated veteran of World War I and a Wall Street lawyer linked to the Republican Party. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt tapped him to create the United States’ first dedicated nonmilitary intelligence organization. At that time, many in the foreign policy establishment saw intelligence and espionage as somewhat undignified, even unimportant. So Donovan cast a wide net, recruiting not only diplomats and professional spies but also film directors, mobsters, scholars, athletes, and journalists.

Even in that diverse group, Franz Neumann stood out. Neumann, a Marxist lawyer and political scientist, had fled Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He arrived in the United States a few years later, where he was hailed as an expert on Nazi Germany after the 1942 publication of his book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, which depicted Nazism as a combination of pathological, monopolistic capitalism and brutal totalitarianism. Neumann’s work brought him to the attention of Donovan, who was eager to mobilize relevant expertise regardless of its bearer’s political views.

During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School–Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer–worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time.

These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler’s regime and the Second World War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as a coherent plan for the reconstruction of postwar Germany as a democratic political system with a socialist economy. These reports played a significant role in the development of postwar Allied policy, including denazification and the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials. They also reveal how wartime intelligence analysis shaped the intellectual agendas of these three important German-Jewish scholars who fled Nazi persecution prior to the war.

Secret Reports on Nazi Germany features a foreword by Raymond Geuss as well as a comprehensive general introduction by Raffaele Laudani that puts these writings in historical and intellectual context.

Franz Neumann (1900-1954) was a labor lawyer and political activist in Germany before the Nazi period, and was a professor of political science at Columbia University after his work in the OSS and at the Nuremberg Trials. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a philosopher who made important contributions to the Frankfurt School critical theory of society. He taught at Brandeis and San Diego universities after his work in the OSS. Otto Kirchheimer (1905-1965) worked for the OSS until 1952. Later he was professor of political science at the New School for Social Research and Columbia. Raffaele Laudani is assistant professor of the history of political thought at the University of Bologna.”

"This collection brings alive with exceptional force the real politics behind critical theory. It highlights the range and sophistication of a vast array of intelligence reports about the structures of power and domination under National Socialist rule, compiled through the teamwork of Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer. Their cool objectivity is remarkable, and reminds us just how indebted we remain to their pioneering work."—Duncan Kelly, University of Cambridge

"An intellectual dispossessed is an intellectual driven to understand the techniques of his dispossession. This indispensable volume assembles key texts by three German-Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany who contributed to America's wartime effort and the planning for postwar reconstruction. A fascinating archive for historians and political theorists alike, it reminds us that the Institute for Social Research carried to our shores not only philosophers but also worldly critics of modern dictatorship. Their insights have lost none of their relevance or power."—Peter E. Gordon, Harvard University”

The Law of Unintended Consequences: Critical Theory’s effects on Western thought and its institutions:

In order to understand Critical Theory, we must understand how the Frankfurt School came to be, who its key players were and the nature of their ideology. I love Dr. Jordan B. Peterson’s statement that “ideologies are parasites on religious substructures”. Ideologies stand in the place of religious beliefs. Critical Theory rose like a phoenix from the ruins of the failures of Marxism, the Frankfurt School argued that reason is dangerous, mass culture deadening, and the Enlightenment a disaster.

Read this article and see how in a Critical Theorist’s own words they propose a complete restructuring of Western Civilization; Critical Theory and the Crisis of Social Theory By Douglas Kellner (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html)

It is clear they sought with more than a fair amount of success to alter the perception the West had not only of itself, but of the foundational principle of Western thought, that the individual was created in the image of God endowed with inherent rights and obligations to his fellows. It is also built on the notion that man will be corrupted by power and that therefore governments must be limited by constitutional law which will prevent too much power from falling to any one branch of the government, that all three branches should limit one another and that an individual's rights under such laws are sacrosanct.

“Understanding Critical Theory

byAshley Crossman

Updated January 24, 2019

Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it. Critical theories aim to dig beneath the surface of social life and uncover the assumptions that keep us from a full and true understanding of how the world works.

Critical theory emerged out of the Marxist tradition and it was developed by a group of sociologists at the University of Frankfurt in Germany who referred to themselves as The Frankfurt School.

“History and Overview:

Critical theory as it is known today can be traced to Marx's critique of the economy and society put forth in his many works. It is inspired greatly by Marx's theoretical formulation of the relationship between economic base and ideological superstructure and tends to focus on how power and domination operate, in particular, in the realm of the superstructure.

Following in Marx's critical footsteps, Hungarian György Lukács and Italian Antonio Gramsci developed theories that explored the cultural and ideological sides of power and domination. Both Lukács and Gramsci focused their critique on the social forces that prevent people from seeing and understanding the forms of power and domination that exist in society and affect their lives.

Shortly following the period when Lukács and Gramsci developed and published their ideas, The Institute for Social Research was founded at the University of Frankfurt, and the Frankfurt School of critical theorists took shape. It is the work of those associated with the Frankfurt School, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Herbert Marcuse, that is considered the definition and heart of critical theory.

Like Lukács and Gramsci, these theorists focused on ideology and cultural forces as facilitators of domination and barriers to true freedom. The contemporary politics and economic structures of the time greatly influenced their thought and writing, as they existed within the rise of national socialism, including the rise of the Nazi regime, state capitalism, and the rise and spread of mass-produced culture.

Max Horkheimer defined critical theory in the book Traditional and Critical Theory. In this work, Horkheimer asserted that a critical theory must do two important things: it must account for the whole of society within a historical context, and it should seek to offer a robust and holistic critique by incorporating insights from all social sciences.

Further, Horkheimer stated that a theory can only be considered a true critical theory if it is explanatory, practical, and normative, meaning that the theory must adequately explain the social problems that exist, it must offer practical solutions for how to respond to them and make change, and it must clearly abide by the norms of criticism established by the field.

With this formulation Horkheimer condemned "traditional" theorists for producing works that fail to question power, domination, and the status quo, thus building on Gramsci's critique of the role of intellectuals in processes of domination.

Key Texts

Texts associated with the Frankfurt School focused their critique on the centralization of economic, social, and political control that was transpiring around them. Key texts from this period include:

• Critical and Traditional Theory (Horkheimer)
• Dialectic of the Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer)
• Knowledge and Human Interests (Habermas)
• The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas)
• One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse)
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin)”

Talk about opening Pandora’s Box, old “Wild Bill” Donovan unleashed a mind worm through the forerunner of the CIA which has placed the entire Western World into a spiritual, moral and constitutional crisis. Which is why the new “Postmodern Left” has taken deconstructionism to an entirely new level. Postmodern types question the very nature of reality itself by claiming that anyone who speaks of that which is real are using facts to “oppress others”. Under Critical Theory through to Postmodernism there has emerged an entire cadre of professors who have deliberately corrupted the Academy. They have gone from teaching “what is” and how to reason based upon reality to instructing “what ought to be” while rejecting reason itself. It is as though simply by wishing something was something it is not that they have the power to reconstruct the world.The following video is important to watch: 


Stephen Hicks: Postmodernism: Reprise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwW9QV5Ulmw  


If you are not concerned where we are headed after watching that video, you ought to be. We are in the fight of our lives because we are confronting forces that would undo the very underpinning substructures of Western Democratic Liberalism. Why? How did we get here? Because we have taken our faith and our freedom for granted and are no longer conscious of the debt we owe to those who have gone before and the liberty their sacrifices made possible.

The Malaise in the Soul of our Culture: Sir Roger Scruton/Dr. Jordan B. Peterson: Apprehending the Transcendent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvbtKAYdcZY&t=7s

All the claims of the neo-Marxists make about caring for the oppressed are smoke screens for the fact that all they want is power.

“Postmodernism: definition and critique (with a few comments on its relationship with Marxism) by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

This is from today’s AMA on Reddit: http://j.mp/2s2TIEL

DEFINITION AND CRITIQUE

Postmodernism is essentially the claim that (1) since there are an innumerable number of ways in which the world can be interpreted and perceived (and those are tightly associated) then (2) no canonical manner of interpretation can be reliably derived.

That’s the fundamental claim. An immediate secondary claim (and this is where the Marxism emerges) is something like “since no canonical manner of interpretation can be reliably derived, all interpretation variants are best interpreted as the struggle for different forms of power.”

There is no excuse whatsoever for the secondary claim (except that it allows the resentful pathology of Marxism to proceed in a new guise).

The first claim is true, but incomplete. The fact that there are an unspecifiable number of interpretations does not mean (or even imply) that there are an unspecifiable number of VALID interpretations.

What does valid mean? That’s where an intelligent pragmatism comes into it. Valid at least means: “when the proposition or interpretation is acted out in the world, the desired outcome within the specific timeframe ensues.” That’s a pragmatic definition of truth (from within the confines of the American pragmatism of William James and C.S. Pierce).

Validity is constrained by the necessity for iteration (among other fators). Your interpretations have to keep you, at minimum, alive and not suffering too badly today, tomorrow, next week, next month and next year in a context defined by you, your family, your community and the broader systems you are part of. That makes for very tight constraints on your perception/interpretations/actions. Games have to be iterable, playable and, perhaps, desirable to the players– as Jean Piaget took pains to point out, in his work on equilibration.

RELATIONSHIP TO MARXISM:

It’s not as if I personally think that postmodernism and Marxism are commensurate. It’s obvious to me that the much-vaunted “skepticism toward grand narratives” that is part and parcel of the postmodern viewpoint makes any such alliance logically impossible. Postmodernists should be as skeptical toward Marxism as toward any other canonical belief system.

So the formal postmodern claim, such as it is, is radical skepticism. But that’s not at all how it has played out in theory or in practice. Derrida and Foucault were, for example, barely repentant Marxists, if repentant at all. They parleyed their 1960’s bourgeoisie vs proletariat rhetoric into the identity politics that has plagued us since the 1970’s. Foucault’s fundamental implicit (and often explicit) claim is that power relations govern society. That’s a rehashing of the Marxist claim of eternal and primary class warfare. Derrida’s hypothetical concern for the marginalized is a version of the same thing. I don’t really care if either of them made the odd statement about disagreeing with the Marxist doctrines: their fundamental claims are still soaked in those patterns of thought.

You can see this playing out in practical terms in fields such as gender studies and social work (as well as literary criticism, anthropology, law, education, etc.).

There are deeper problems as well. For example: Postmodernism leaves its practitioners without an ethic. Action in the world (even perception) is impossible without an ethic, so one has to be at least allowed in through the back door. The fact that such allowance produces a logical contradiction appears to bother the low-rent postmodernists who dominate the social sciences and humanities not at all. Then again, coherence isn’t one of their strong points (and the demand for such coherence can just be read as another patriarchal imposition typifying oppressive Western thought).

So: postmodernism, by its nature (at least with regard to skepticism) cannot ally itself with Marxism. But it does, practically. The dominance of postmodern Marxist rhetoric in the academy (which is a matter of fact, as laid out by the Heterodox Academy, among other sources) attests to that. The fact that such an alliance is illogical cannot be laid at my feet, just because I point out that the alliance exists. I agree that it’s illogical. That doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

It’s a very crooked game, and those who play it are neck deep in deceit”

On the corruption of the Academy: if you can subvert the validity of university’s proper role of teaching the young “how to think” and replace that with instructing young people “what to think” then Cultural Marxism will have succeeded without all that nasty business of the revolution envisioned by Marx. The remarkable thing about those who accept Cultural Marxist Critical Theory and Postmodernism is that they have no idea that they have come under their influences. As previously mentioned to the new left this is no longer a struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as Marx asserted, but a struggle between the oppressor labelled as the "patriarchal tyranny" and oppressed groups, especially the intersectionally oppressed!  As a result schools in Britain are teaching children that there are over 100 possible genders.

https://premium.telegraph.co.uk/newsletter/article3/how-dare-the-bbc-teach-children-that-there-are-100-genders/?WT.mc_id=e_DM1095020&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Edi_New_Reg&utmsource=email&utm_medium=Edi_Edi_New_Reg20190912&utm_campaign=DM1095020

To the new left the individual exists ONLY as an extension of their group identity.

From “POSTMODERNISM AND THE CORRUPTION OF THE ACADEMIC INTELLIGENTSIA” by JOHN SANBONMATSU

“The tide began to turn against truth, and in postmodernism’s favour, in the late 1970s. It was then that French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault first boldly put truth in scare quotes. ‘“Truth”’, he declared, ‘is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements …. “Truth” is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it’.2 No longer would ‘the true’ be understood, as it had for millennia, as that which is ‘in accordance with fact or reality’. From now on, for a growing and influential sector of the intelligentsia, the true would be posed as a problem to be solved. The prerogative of truth was thus transformed from a right of the oppressed into an object of study for the technical or academic expert. Only the qualified ‘specific intellectual’ or ‘genealogist’ could speak meaningfully of truth – or rather, could investigate the conditions of the possibility of ‘truth’. What discourses give rise to the appearance of truth? How does ‘truth’, as a form of power, a system of ‘constraints’, function and manifest itself? How does knowledge, as power, disguise itself as truth, in order to achieve its effects? These questions are not uninteresting. The trouble is that poststructuralism insists we are entitled to ask only such questions, and so conflates inquiry into the ways that discourse about truth produces particular effects with endorsing the claim that truth-telling as such is impossible.

This fateful move can be traced to Friedrich Nietzsche, the intellectual forefather of poststructuralism. The faith in truth of the Christian and Jewish traditions, Nietzsche held, was merely a distorted or intellectualized version of the frustrated will to power of the oppressed. It was for this reason that Nietzsche viewed truth with deep suspicion and hostility, seeing it as the origin of nihilism in European culture. ‘There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind’, he wrote. Rather, only the free, unapologetic exercise of power – power as power over – over the self, over others – could provide a ground for new human values. But the ancient prophets and theologians were not wrong to believe that the oppressed, lacking power, have only the truth to console them. Deny the oppressed even this – the right to bear witness to the way things really are – and they have nothing. Surrender the possibility of truth, and one surrenders too the possibility of comparing the way things are with the way things ought to be. Nietzsche’s contempt for justice (which is at root always and only a claim of truth against power), was thus an attack on the very desirability of general or social liberation.”

So, this plan, put into play so many years ago by the Frankfurt School, has had catastrophic results, has spread systematically throughout government and society via the Academy, not the least of which has been the normalization of intersectional sexuality with discussion of accepting pedophilia as just another expression of normal human sexuality.

On top of this, we are living in a pan-humanist age as artificial intelligence is developed. You can only imagine the depths of depravity which will result if that technology is manipulated by the Postmodern types.  Today the very notion of the sovereign individual created in the image of God has been murdered even more brutally than Nietzsche imagined because in his eyes we had killed God with science and logic while the Postmodern view has rejected reason and reality itself while making Postmodernists into their own god

The economy and Cultural Marxism/Postmodernism - in defence of the working man:

I want to remind us that the war in Vietnam ended only when the US got into bed with Communist China by making a trade deal with them. The result of which was to send North American manufacturing to them. It goes without saying that the Cultural Marxists within the CIA proposed this plan. They hated the success of capitalism and didn’t care how this would affect North American workers. The only way that Communist China could succeed economically was by taking advantage of markets in the capitalist west. By doing so the political elite and crony capitalists sold the American worker down the Yangtze River and dealt the first blow to Middle Class America which had emerged after WWII. Of course, the new left hated the fact America had become so prosperous and therefore launched a plan that led to the destruction of the Middle Class! Our current trade war with China has resulted from the crony capitalist senior management of the Big Three and other large manufacturers and our corrupted political class wanting access to China's cheap labour.

I was in China in 2009 with a firm that supplies the wire and cable industry. I saw firsthand working conditions for Chinese workers. I witnessed women being handled as pawns to advance their boss’s aspirations. I was in the first group of “round eyes” to be granted access to the Communist Party of China’s Economic Development Headquarters in Hefei. If you think they aren’t gunning for us, then your either incredibly naïve or something far worse. Patent laws mean nothing to them, they can and will make a fake anything if they can make a buck from it.

The Secret Services and The Deep State:

Thank you for reading this blog. Please share and comment. Most importantly, take your responsibility ensuring the continuance of liberty under law, free thinking, and, yes, free markets seriously. You are the resistance against ever increasing statism and social control. The sovereign individual is the most persecuted minority today. Our democracy and way of life based are as fragile as a beautiful crystal glass bowl. That precious bowl is slipping from our hands and is about to be shattered into shards on the stone cold floor of Postmodern nihilism. Oh, and be wary of secret organizations claiming to defend democracy while operating in an unconstitutional manner. These organizations have far too much power and do not answer to the public. Their stock and trade are lies and deception. They are, in fact, professional deceivers trading in secrets, lies, innuendo and unrest. The end never justifies the means. Largely because of them we are living in one of the most divided times in Western history. Populism is on the rise. Wars have been waged without finding the weapons of mass destruction they assured us would be found. Innocents and combatants have died for what, to further their perverse game? And here at home many are now unwilling to place faith in their elected representatives for the simple reason they no longer represent the people. “Wild Bill” Donovan's legacy is one of fulfillment of the law of unintended consequences, because if these consequences were intended then he must have been a monster.