The Faith of Atheists

Atheists are among the most religious and faithful of us all

Even among people who do not consider themselves particularly religious, most of us need something to fill the role that traditional religion provides its adherents.  It does not have to be a traditional religion.  It can be astrology or a cult or some new age gibberish.

But what is that role?  That is, what purpose does religion serve?  What do its members get out of it?

I can think of three primary benefits from religion, though I know there are others.  One, explanation.  People want an explanation for things that science cannot yet explain.  Two, order.  People crave order and religion provides it.  Three, guidance.  Moral guidance.  Most people cannot, or are unwilling to, provide this for themselves, so they turn to religion to do so.  It is a crutch for the intellectually lazy.

Without some kind of religion, most people feel a void, and they are desperate to fill it.  They will turn to some religion, old or new, or they will search until they find something to answer their questions, order their society, and guide their lives.

As for our atheist friends, if they rule out a divinity or divinities, what are they left with?  Because I can assure you, like everyone else, they still crave explanation, order, and guidance.  So where would an atheist turn to find these qualities?

Government, of course.

I have come to believe that the vast majority of atheists are among the most fervently religious of us all.  They have simply replaced faith in the divine with faith in government.  Their willingness to believe in the efficacy of government, without evidence and often in the face of evidence to the contrary, is indeed an article of faith.  In fact, it is a whole faith system, otherwise known as a religion.

While certainly not true in every case (see the self-described secular conservative, Heather Mac Donald), the correlation between secular beliefs and leftist political thought is astounding.  Government is their religion, and the irony is completely lost on them.

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The Banality of Academic Group Work

Back in the eighties, American businesses, large and small, were scared to death of Japan, Inc.  I am not at all sure this fear was justified, but at the time, it was all too palpable.  Consequently, business schools in the United States started studying the way business and industry worked in Japan, hoping to emulate some of their success.

Well it did not take a lot of work or intelligence to realize that Japan has a consensus culture.  And their businesses are also run by consensus.  And the only way to achieve consensus is to ask everyone for their input.  And pre-internet, the best way to do this was to bring together all the key players and discuss the situation and come to the hoped-for consensus.

However long that might take.  And however good or bad the resulting decision.

What our crack business academics saw were groups of Japanese managers coming together to achieve some desired outcome.  And they said:  Hey, we need to do that too.

To be fair, business schools were previously teaching group collaboration.  But it was Japan, Inc. that supercharged the practice.

Now it just so happened that I was in business school in the late eighties.  And we students were early test subjects for this new urgency.  So the professors started assigning group projects.  The idea, ostensibly, was for us to learn to work together to achieve the best result.  Sounds great in theory.

And while the practice was new to me, at first I did not really mind it.  Just another way of getting the work done.  But it soon became clear, that in an academic setting, even at a top-tier school, as opposed to a real, profit-driven, operating business, some group members contributed more than others.  This was always going to be the case.  It is just human nature; some people are more motivated than others.

Yet I did have the opportunity to work with groups entirely comprised of smart, highly motivated individuals.  And I certainly have over the course of my career.  These groups prove the academics' theory is true if groups are in fact so comprised.  But most often teachers assemble academic groups with a diverse mix of contributors.  Here, and without apology, the academics fully expect the strong to carry the weak.

In a business, weak performers can be fired, or otherwise removed from a collaboration.  And even if this is not done, say for political or nepotistic reasons, everyone knows.  But in an academic setting this is never done because the academics do not really understand how things truly work.  They seem to believe that one must learn to work with and appreciate weak performers.  I never have.

Two immediate problems.  One, and the professors readily acknowledged this, is that groups tend to produce results that are better than what the worst-performing members could produce on their own.  But at the same time, inferior to what the best-performing members could produce on their own.  In the aggregate, coming in slightly above average.  This is just common sense.  I guess academics believe that slightly above average is still above average and therefore worth pursuing.

But the outcome is an inferior result; certainly inferior to optimal or best.

The second immediate problem is the result takes longer than necessary because of all the time spent coming to the magical consensus.  I mean the best group members have to spend time trying to convince the worst group members of the correct direction.  And even then, because consensus is the driving force, the group will elect a suboptimal approach.

This is what happens when the real goal is not an optimal and timely result, but rather a consensus-driven result.  So groups produce suboptimal and time consuming results.

Not to pick on Japan.  Because it is really American academics who are to blame for this nonsense.  But a great example of what I am talking about was the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, where indecision and delay led to more serious consequences.  Delay caused while they were trying to reach the Japanese cultural imperative of consensus.

Nevertheless, the idea that group consensus should determine our management and business direction took off in academic quarters.  Further, this idea infused other academic departments, most notably the notoriously less-than-rigorous education departments.  Education professors just loved the idea and added it to their pedagogical methods.

Over the decades since, as businesses will do, they have adapted what works and what does not work, into useful and productive business practices.  What I mean is that if a situation calls for group consensus that is what a business will do.  But if a situation would be ill-served by such a practice, they are not about to impose it to merely fulfill some academic standard.

But no matter what, top performers hate any practice which limits their, well, performance.  This is why you find the best people in entrepreneurial roles, not middle management.  Leave the corporate bureaucracy and academic claptrap to Boeing and Disney.

Now I have no idea if business schools are still teaching groups and consensus-driven decision making.  But they specialize in producing mediocre performers, so probably so.  But you know who is absolutely still pushing this?  Education departments.  The education academics in their wisdom have decided that groups produce higher quality pedagogical results.  It's nonsense of course because the same results happen in education that happen in business.  That is, the results are only better than what the worst-performing members could produce on their own.  But that seems to be perfectly okay for our educators.

So teachers, all kinds of teachers, have been taught to use groups.  Where a couple of generations ago, the teacher would have made an assignment to all individual members of a class, today they're likely to divide the class into groups and make the assignment to each group.

So has academic excellence been drilled out of our current generation of educators?  Do teachers even recognize the inherent problem of group suboptimal performance?  Do they even care?

I do not believe they do.

Why?  Because if a teacher has twenty-eight students in her class and divides them into seven groups of four students each, then the teacher has to read and grade only seven assignments instead of twenty-eight.  Yes, it is just that simple.

So this is the why; my theory anyway.  But there is one last problem.  Who pays?  Well the best, most motivated students of course.  Because they end up doing all the work.  This is not terrible; if assignments were made individually, they would be doing all of their own work anyway.  But group assignments do tend to be larger (because supposedly all members are contributing).  But naturally this is not what happens.  The lazy, unmotivated students contribute little or nothing.  And the bright, motivated students have to carry them along.

Strangely, this never seems to concern the teachers.

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* Apologies to Hannah Arendt.

Feudalism 2030

The Age of Neo-Feudalism is Near

According to online statistics, there are approximately 24,000 private jets operating in the world today.  Which of course means there are twenty-four thousand private jet owners.  Of course, that is a small fraction of the billions of people who inhabit our planet.  It is however, arguably, just about the right number for a new noble class.  People with the connections to make the rules, and the wealth and freedom to ignore the rules themselves.

Sure, we can quibble about the numbers.  But even if the new nobility is one hundred thousand or one million, the results will be similar.  There will be two classes; one extraordinarily small group and the rest of us.  This is not an outrageous claim; most of human history worked on this very model.  China does to this day.

These people will be our new lords and princes.  It is important to note, this is not simply a question of the haves and the have nots.  That's a twentieth century analog perspective.  Today we have digital tracking in the broadest sense and the vast implications of that new reality.  No, I think this is more about freedom.  Those who have real freedom versus those for whom freedom is ever shrinking.  Our new overlords will do as they please.  The rest of us will do what we are allowed.

This is what the climate emergency, central bank digital currencies, automation, open borders, drug legalization, media capture and global healthcare administration capture, ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition, defund the police, etc. are really about.  Covid lockdowns and mandates offered a timely test of the new order.  Think anything you please about Covid and the way authorities dealt with it, but this was a very successful trial run of neo-feudalism.

In Asia, I have noticed a rush to digitalization, even before the technology has been perfected.  You see this often:  No you must use the app; no the app only works on the newest smartphones; if you don't have one, you can't do whatever it is you are trying to do.  Moreover, most of these apps require an active internet connection, which can be problematic if you are in a new area.  Say when you are traveling.

The authorities will tell you that this is about efficiency and convenience.  But I do not believe this for one minute.  It is about tracking and control.

My guess is it will be the so-called climate emergency, completely factitious, that drives the next escalation.  We will continue to drift in the direction of neo-feudalism, until our new lords get impatient, and use climate to accelerate the process.  They have been laying the groundwork for this for the last decade.

Our lords want us car-less and confined to fifteen-minute cities.  They want to limit our air travel.  Meanwhile, the princes will continue to drive their own fleet of automobiles and they will fly their own private jets as much as they like.  But we serfs will do what we're told and go where we are allowed.  Freedom of movement will be sharply curtailed in the name of saving the planet.

Sure, you can go anywhere you like.  So long as you don't have to fly or drive to get there.  You can take public transportation – But only to where they deem fit for it to go.

Government policy will interfere with how you are allowed to spend your own money.  Digital currency will include limitations on purchases.  No, no serf, you've already purchased your monthly allowance of beef.  Or you've already traveled your annual allowance of domestic air miles.  And obviously:  Your bank's credit and debit cards will decline any wayward potential purchases, like say firearms or ammunition.  Multiple attempts and you will risk debanking.  Maybe cheeseburgers will be next.

They want to buy up the farms and drive former farmers into the dystopian urban landscape that they themselves have created.  They will own the farms, or control them with regulations.  And you will eat only what they deem appropriate.

We recently traveled between two countries in Asia.  Fingerprints and photographs to exit, fingerprints and photographs to enter.  They want to know where you are and where you have been.  And of course, they're just getting started.  It was common to hear:  No sorry, we do not accept cash here.  So add, they want to know what you buy, and where and when you bought it.

And our travel required apps that, thankfully, worked on my smartphone, but not my wife's.  If you don't have the right gadget with the right apps, you don't travel.  So my advice here, to leave your smartphone at home, will not work.  It is worth noting that our founders did not envision a need to include the right to travel or freedom of movement in our Bill of Rights.  And you will certainly not find any such idea in other countries.

Now, do I expect some leviathan to be collecting and collating information?  Not initially.  But clearly, we are moving in that direction.  And god knows that would please Herr Schwab, high priest to the new nobility, to no end.  You know, it's important to keep up with what the serfs are doing.

Will social credit scores follow?  Without a doubt.  They will combine our internet usage (including social media and search history) with our purchases, and god knows what else (the correct educational indoctrination, which charities we support, what subscriptions we maintain, what books we read, etc.), to give us all a rating.  Which will then be leveraged to improve or reduce the above listed freedoms.  Want more travel miles?  Make sure to behave yourself.  Can there be any doubt that one will get extra credit for affiliating with the correct political party?

Another question:  Can we get extra points for finking on our neighbors?  Again, we've seen this before.  But this is not East Germany; this time there will be a nifty website for you to report what your neighbors are up to.

Which brings us to this:  Our overlords will not be able or even interested in the administration of our new feudalism.  So they will need to employ a class of administrators, regulators, and enforcers.  Luckily for them, government will gleefully step into this role.  And here I mean all governments at all levels.  This has already started.  Here's a question:  Is there any national government on this planet today which actually serves its citizens?  Or have we reached the point in all nations, where it is the citizenry who serve the government?

To ask the question is to answer it.

Governments today, regardless of how they are installed, serve themselves.  But the new feudal overlords are rich enough to buy off governments and powerful enough to use government to enforce the new feudal order.  If you do not believe this is true, I again refer you to the Covid trial run, where government played its new role to perfection.  Just imagine how government will act in the coming climate emergency.

Finally, I know some readers will ask, to what end?  That is, what is the incentive for the princes to act in this manner?  Well it's classic rent seeking.  Our lords need a continuous source of wealth.  And they are more than happy to use government policy and enforcement to insure the continual transfer of wealth from serf to lord.  It worked in the middle ages, and it will work today.

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