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I Prophesy a New Religion Based on Thumos
As we watch the collapse of our educated ruling class, all across the western world and especially right now in France and Germany, we are bound to wonder: how do we get out of here?
How do we fix the politics? The overspending, the corruption, the fraud?
Of course, politics isn’t really the problem, because politics is downstream from culture, as the late American philosopher Andrew Breitbart taught us.
What do we do about culture? Culture is about what we do and what we don’t do; what we approve of and what we disapprove of. We’ve had the culture of the oppressor/oppressed binary rammed down our throats for decades, not to mention the cults of feminism, LGBT, and climate change. Yet most Americans, probably, just want to live ordinary lives, working and marrying, raising a family and looking after the old folks. How come that’s marginalized as patriarchy and whiteness?
The problem is, I believe, that culture is downstream from religion. Down the ages, I’d say, the political elite has been religion-adjacent, meaning that the rulers got to have an inside track with the priests. I’m reading right now about Alexander stopping by the temple in Siwah, on the border between Egypt and Libya, to get some advice from the oracle before heading east to take care of the Persians.
Today, ordinary people in the US are Christian-adjacent, but the educated elite is, shall we say, Marx-adjacent. Their religious belief is that they are called by history to create a just and prosperous society, using all the best science and philosophy. And this requires them to rule the world with absolute political power to fight for the oppressed against the white male oppressor.
Only guess what: only the ruling class gets to be real oppressors.
About all that science and philosophy: I’d say that our elite is rather picky about which science and which philosophy to adopt as regime science and regime philosophy.
In fact, I’d say that science and philosophy have pretty well demonstrated that our ruling elite is on the wrong track, and leading us to disaster. We have learned that the three faiths of our leaders, in collectivism, in government administration, in government regulation, are false faiths that don’t work.
So what do we do now? In the words of Douglas Adams, what is the meaning of life, the universe, everything, right here and now in the 21st century?
I suggest that Marco Rubio — of all people — is trying to help us in his October 7 speech in front of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. He asked us to revive the Greek notion of “thumos.” His description of thumos was very masculine.
But I am more enlightened than that, so I asked Grok to “describe how thumos applies to the feminine” and this is what it said.
A hard thumos (firm, tight, unyielding) supports masculine-coded traits: martial courage, boldness, competitive honor-seeking, anger, and public assertiveness.
A soft thumos (yielding, flexible, pliant) supports feminine-coded traits: tenderness, affection, gentleness, moderation (sōphrosynē), shame, and protective care within the household (oikos).
Nowhere in this can I find the faith and values of our present ruling class. Indeed, I proclaim that the rise of the tech lords and their culture of business startups in the last half century is nothing less than a revival of masculine thumos: courage, boldness, competition, but without the swords and pistols at dawn. Instead the masculine has been recoded into courage, boldness, and competition in business and sports.
And I proclaim that the diversion of feminism from “the independent woman” of Simone de Beauvoir to “safetyism” and the “unwelcome behavior” issue shows that women are still feminine and “expect to be protected” from danger and male aggression as in the olden time. So the feminine thumos applies.
The recoding of masculine thumos into sports and business is already a done deal. Only our liberal friends didn’t get the message, bless their hearts.
The great question is how the reality of thumos gets encoded in a new religion for women and then works its way “downstream” into modern culture as a valid and valuable expression of the feminine in the modern world where women are not confined at home doing domestic tasks. Clearly, women do not want to “break free from traditional subordination and achieve authentic self-determination.” They still expect to be protected as in the olden time, and that means that they have to subordinate themselves to the men that protect them. It’s all because the feminine thumos is not a product of male power and the patriarchy. The feminine thumos is in the jeans.
Frankly, I don’t know how we create a new religion, a new understanding of life, the universe, everything, in terms of masculine and feminine thumos recoded for the modern age. It’s above my pay grade. For one thing, I believe that the educated class, the business class, the middle class, and the lower class all need different religions.
But I do know that once we have created the new religion then the culture and the politics will fall into line. Because it is religion that defines our understanding of reality.
| Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:18:31 GMT |
Imagine if the French Rioters Were Hard Right!
I checked with Google Search, planning to enter “france school riots” but noticed that when I got to “france school “ it filled the rest in with “protest”. And needless to say the top three entries were from Reuters, BBC, and AP News.
Imagine if “hard right” groups had been “protesting” in France over, say, woke school indoctrination. You know how that would have been reported. The reports would describe the events as violent riots and emphasize that the groups organizing the protests were neo-fascist insurrectionist paramilitaries, worse than the KKK: Literally Hitler.
Is not AntiFa a hard-left insurrectionist paramilitary force?
Look, let’s not get our knickers in a twist, and just understand. When the media reports “mostly peaceful protests” it means that the rioters are basically part of the ruling class community. When the media reports on the right, PBS…
Five years ago on Friday, extremists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in a violent demonstration that forced the city and the nation to confront the growing threats of white supremacy and domestic terrorism.
Yes, the tiki-torchers at Charlottesville were all about “extremists” and “white supremacy and domestic terrorism.” But I am not seeing the same attitude towards the widespread violent and arsonist riots in France this month.
Because? Because, we are to understand, the French riots are being run by “student groups like the Union Syndicale Lycéenne (USL), teachers’ unions such as SNES-FSU, and broader civic coalitions.”
Only in a later paragraph do we read that:
French intelligence briefed government crisis meetings that the hard-left political party La France Insoumise (LFI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and its political proxies have helped organize and fan the flames of the urban unrest[.]
Conspiracy theorists believe that Muslim terror groups are involved as well.
Here’s a thought. Suppose the riots are indeed being run by the hard-left. What is the purpose? Does the hard-left think that riots in the streets will persuade the French voters not to vote for the hard-right and the National Rally?
I have an idea. The hard-left is rioting because that is all they know how to do, to funnel the money, to organize street protests and print the protest signs and bus the protesters and rehearse the slogans.
As Björn Merker says, the left are “partisans of overthrow.” The only thing they know is to overthrow the current regime and create a better world. Only, of course, all the student organizations, all the employee unions, all the protest groups are in fact “adjacent” to the ruling class.
What are they thinking? Answer: they are not thinking. They are just doing their thing, and their thing is street protest.
But why? I like to say that the current regime is an alliance of the upper, educated, class and the lower, migrant, class. So, the scions of the upper class spend their youth organizing the lower-class migrants for Justice. It’s all part of their “political formula”, the justification of their power. They call it Allyism, that they are the Allies of the Oppressed in their fight against the hard-right neo-Nazi Oppressors. In fact, of course, the hard-right neo-Nazi Oppressors are merely the ordinary middle class that’s not really into politics and protest and street action.
How does it all turn out? Nobody knows. But what I feel is that the current ruling class has no idea what to do, other than doing what it does already, which is to lambast the “hard-right” and rile up their supporters to protest against Injustice, and keep the programs and grants and fraud going.
I suppose the big question is whether our rulers are prepared to go to the lengths reached by the CCP in 1989 in Tienanmen Square or the Iranian regime in the January 2026 riots. Or just sit there letting the country go to rack and ruin like the Castro regime in Cuba.
But, really, my guess is that our educated-class rulers really have No Clue, and all I know is that things will get worse before they get better.
| Wed, 14 Oct 2026 22:13:12 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
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A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Hayek's "Spontaneous Order" is the unintended but orderly result of individuals pursuing their own ends while obeying abstract rules of just conduct. No one plans the overall pattern; it emerges.
Every society since the dawn of time, and especially ours, is drenched in religion.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Confronting the Left's Pejorative Politics
