What's wrong with the United States? The Protestant Work Ethic.

Professor Galloway "on follow your passion".

His advice?

Don't.

More particularly, his advice is dedicated yourself relentlessly to something you are good at, and it will become your passion, in no small part as you'll make money at it.

There's plenty of evidence that's right. . . and just as much that it's wrong.

Professor Galloway is a Calvinist.  He comes by it naturally as his father is from Scotland.  

Oh, sure, you'll note that Galloway states he's an atheist. Well, like a lot of people who are something on an existential level, he doesn't know what he actual is. And what that is, is a Calvinist.  Perhaps a cultural Calvinist, but a Calvinist.

And it was Calvin, not the Church of England, or the Lutherans, who gave us the Protestant Work Ethic.

Well, that's great, right?

Not so much.

John Calvin was as French radical Protestant reformer who was grim in his outlook and basically an asshole.  One of his central core beliefs was double predestination, which held that from the moment of conception almost everyone was going to Hell.  

Calvin taught that all men must work, even the wealthy, because to work was the will of God. Irrespective of their ultimate fate, which they could in no way impact, it was the unyielding duty of men (and I do men men) to toil here on Earth as part of God's plan to continue the creation of the Earth.  Men were not, in his view, to become wealthy, I'd note, but were to reinvest the fruits of their labor over and over again, ad infinitum, or to the end of time.

Calvin held that using profits to help others rise from a lessor level of subsistence violated God's will since persons could only demonstrate that they were among the Elect through their own labor.

The Puritans were Calvinists, and so were the Presbyterians, the latter of which has generally slacked up on Calvinist theology a great deal.  None the less, the impact of Calvinism on the US has been huge.  It founded the thesis that you should work and work, well past the point where accumulation of wealth made any sense.  When you look at people like Elon Must or Donald Trump who have vast sums of wealth but keep accumulating, you are seeing the Protestant work ethic at work.

You are also seeing it when you lay people off in droves. They're lessors, and their economic plight is existentially foreordained.  If they were among the Elect, this wouldn't be happening to them.

Work is what it's all about.

You see that well expressed in Galloway's comments.  Galloway is an opponent of Musk, but they have essentially the same view on work.  Galloway presents in the grim Calvinist style.  You must find productive and useful work and love it, as that's the ticket to everything.

It isn't.

Contrary to what Galloway things, for one things, there are plenty of people who have done well in their carers and know a lot about what they do and hate it.  The legal profession is a poster child for this, but I've found it to be the case for medicine as well.  

And women have become particularly the victim of this in recent years, diving hard into careers as, John Calvin has told them, this would affirm that they were part of the Elect, in the modified American social view, only to find that they are miserable.

And all this because Calvin was flat out wrong.  His theology was wrong, and his understanding of human beings appallingly wrong.

The Catholic view has been much more nuanced than the Protestant one.  Catholicism itself holds to a degree that we work, because we have to, work being one of the results of the Fall.  It also hold, however, that we toil as part of a community and are never to put that aside.  The accumulative nature of the Protestant Work Ethic is basically antithetical to Apostolic Christianity, although there are certainly Catholics, such as Bill Gates, who have become extremely wealthy.  Largescale wealth, however, comes in Catholic theology with a heavy burden to everyone else.  Unlike Calvinist, you can't really morally justify investing over and over while those less well off suffer in your presence.  Indeed, that would be one of the four sins God hates.

Okay, so why is this a problem?

It's a massive problem in that deep in American culture is an anti human dedication to acquisition and toil, that's why.  People are expected to work themselves to death and tolerate those among us who acquire vast wealth.  Ultimately, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, who often have simply benefitted from the circumstances of their birth takes from everyone else, makes millions miserable, and actually makes the economy less and less productive.

Society doesn't exist to generate wealth for those who can accumulate.  Society exists for society.  That means, at the end of the day, that some must be protected, for the good of us all, from their appetites, weather that appetite be for drugs, dissolute living, or avarice.  

The fact that we have forgotten this is literally destroying the country.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 74th Edition. Surgery by butchers, MAGA Concubines, the Gualieter of Ohio, Portents, and the blind and deaf.

It's been a weird and horrific week for the Republic.

Surgery with a cleaver.

"DOGE" persists in making cuts that are inefficient based on Elon Musk's management style.  One of the things they did this past week was to axe a buch of employees who provide nuclear security.  They, and the Dear Leader, didn't know what they did. They had to scramble to hire them back.

They should have unionized in the meantime and asked for employment contracts, with one being that if they were terminated without cause for the next four years Elon Musk has to surrender his cash, along with Trump, assuming Trump has much.

Trump supporters, I'd note, are cheering on his actions, or rather Elon's, while the disaster looms.  The Forest Service, which only had about 34,000 employees to start with, is losing 10% of them. That's going to hit Wyoming like a ton of bricks as campgrounds close and the like this summer, and the State has to learn to fight fires with its own money and resources, none of which we're doing the slightest thing about.

That ain't conservative

Regarding Musk, Ashley St. Clair, whom I was previously unaware of, announced herself as another one of Musk's concubines who has produced a child.

St. Clair is supposedly a "conservative influencer", but whelping children out of wedlock isn't conservative.  This lays bear the whole hypocrisy of contemporary American conservatism. . . there isn't any in the US.  Spreading your legs for Elon doesn't boost your street cred with real conservatism and it certainly doesn't make you Eva Vlaardingerbroek.  It just makes you gross.

It does interestingly cast back to an earlier era, however, when men of royalty engaged in concubinage, because they could.  Both Trump and Must exhibit that trait.  They're not moral men at all, and yet somehow the peasantry attributes nobility to them.

It's interesting that the super genius Musk doesn't chose plain jane girls for his concubines.  They're all not bad looking.  Courtesans were often chosen for their looks and wits.  Maybe these were too.

Of course, this assumes that St. Clair is telling the truth.  She might not be.

It also show the weird Calvinism that prevails in the American Civil Religion, as well as, interestingly, the Boers.  Musk is from a Canadian family that moved to South Africa.  Calvinist, in their pure form, believe that God foreordained who goes to Heaven or Hell and there's nothing you can do about it.  They were heavily represented in the Roundheads who fought the crown in the English Civil War.  Anyhow, I recall reading a letter from one imprisoned Roundhead figure who asked if the Crown could send his mistress to him.  His mistress, not his wife.

Calvinism, we might note, is also responsible for the warped "Protestant Work Ethic", but more on that in some other post.

Anyhow, it's funny how the Evangelical Protestants who find Trump "Godly" don't mind his sexual behavior, or that of Elon Musk's, neither of whom behave particularly Christian.  Indeed, Musk has claimed in the past to be an atheist.

I'd like Evangelicals to explain this.

Vance lecturing the lumpenproletariat

J. D. Vance lectured Europeans, Germans in particular, on how neo Nazis really ain't that bad.

Telling.

Pete Hegseth tried to lecture people on something, but it was so spastic its hard to know what he was saying, if he knows.  That he's a small man in a big job is pretty evident.  He's not going to last in this position.

The Pentagon is bracing for defense cuts, fwiw.  They ought to be bracing for women to be removed from combat MOS's, which is one of the few things this interregnum could do at this point which I'd support.  What I don't support, however, is the elimination of education on sexual assault in the military, which the Navy and Marine Corps have done, following what they believe to be orders from up the hill.  The Service has a huge problem with sexual assault, and it'll get worse.  

In some ways, I wonder if the current leadership doesn't care about that.  It'd drive women from the service, which they may be wishing for.

Portents

It's easy to see signs that aren't there, but since Trump came into office there have been a pile of local and national oddities.

One thing has been the number of airplane crashes.  There's been a lot.  A small private plane went down in Sweetwater County a couple of weeks ago, and one went down on the highway near Rawlins last week.

Yesterday there was a massive accident in one of the Interstate Highway tunnels near Green River that killed at least two.

Wyoming can't afford its highways, fwiw, which is one of the things that it is seemingly unaware of.  Starting this year, probably, we're going to have to figure out how to.  My guess is that we just will let them decay.  There's remnants all over the state of old state highways before there was Federal money, and they're, well, bad roads and were pretty much from day one.

There's been a lot of shootings in Wyoming over the past year, not all of which hit the news.  This past week two did, one in which a mother killed three of her four children and herself.  Another occurred when a teenager playing with a handgun killed another teenager.  I"m pretty convinced, as I'll post in another thread, that gun control is coming, and Trump will be the one who brings it in.

The Gulf of Mexico and the Press

Trump has excluded the AP from press briefs as they continue to call the Gulf of Mexico the the Gulf of Mexico.

Everyone on earth except for the Trump besotted calls the Gulf of Mexico by that name, and the second Trump leaves office by any means, it's going back to that name and he'll be derided for thinking he could change it.

Time, I might note, is apparently not afraid of Trump. Their current cover:

Good for them.

You can't save everyone

I had a friend I went to grade school with who was in real personal trouble by the time we were high school.  It got worse afterword.  He died in his 30s down in Louisiana at work, of a massive heart attack, but in actually from a lifetime of booze and alcohol.

There was no saving him.

I note that as it was obvious where his life was headed, just as its obvious where the country is headed. We're headed for a real disaster, but you can't tell the MAGA people that.  They're incapable of believing it.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 73d Edition. Long outages and Donny wasting the taxpayers money.

On hating the government. Being careful what you wish for, if you don't really grasp what you are wishing for. American Populists and the return to a mythical age.

A friend and I were discussing the current state of affairs and the Donald Trump assault/Project 2025's aggault/Wyoming Freedom Caucus on the government.  We both are pretty conservatives fellows.  We both served in the Army.  We both are lawyers.  Both of our fathers were Korean War veterans.

We're both horrified.

In part we're horrified as it clear that a huge portion of Trump's base absolutely hates their own government.  Just hates it.

In the discussion, something occurred to me.

The world the MAGA/Populist/Project 2025 people wish for is one they've never seen nor experienced.  A lot of them, quite frankly, don't have the capacity to grasp what it was like.

More than a few of them don't have the capacity to live in a world like that either.

No American born before 1932 lived in the world these people imagine as perfect.  That means, in my case, as a member of Generation Jones, and even more so for the Baby Boom Generation, the last people they know who experienced it was their grandparents.

Or more likely, their great grandparents.

And our grandparents are all dead.

There's no living memory of it at all.

Nobody has one, at all.

The first President I voted for, as noted here, was Ronald Reagan in the 1984 Presidential election.  I thinking of it, the first Presidential election my father could have voted in, when the voatin gage was 21, would have been the 1952 Presidential election. The first Presidential election I can remember, although only vaguely, is the 1968 Presidential election, when I was five years old.  If that held true for my father, the first one he would have remembered would have been the 1936 Presidential election, at which time FDR was already well into establishing the government that Musk and Trump are destroying.

It was the Great Depression that brought the government into people's lives in a major way, although that it was going to happen was foreshadowed by the Progressive Era.  Theodore Roosevelt was really the first "imperial President" who was willing to broadly act with executive orders.  Franklin Roosevelt expanded the government enormously, however, in reaction to the extreme economic distress.   That gave us the government we have today, but World War Two and the Cold War expanded it.

FDR, of court, brought big government in, and with World War Two proving that it was necessary to retain it, and the Cold War building on that, we've had it ever since.  But we might be able to state that modern American government goes all the way back to 1900, before Theodore Roosevelt really started to bring in the progressives and the concept that the government was supposed to make things safe and fair for average people.  

The generation that had lived through the Great Depression and the war were grateful for the larger Federal role and accepted it.  It wasn't until the late 1960s that things began to be questioned.  Even by then most Americans had no real memory of a day when the Federal Government was only active nationwide to a limited extent.

Nobody has that memory now.

What will this all mean?

Well, assuming that Must/Trump pulls it off, starting here in a few months, a real schock.  And the best evidence is, so far, that Musk/Trump will have enormously wrecked the Federal Government in that time period, no matter what happens with Trump himself (and there are growing signs that Trump isn't really going to be around that long).

And the shock that will ensue will be in everything from what amounts to minor irritations to body bags.

Wyoming is going to have to pay for its own forest fires, and fight them on their own for one thing, snarky comments from Cowboy State Daily imported columnist aside.  The State's going to have to pay for its own highways as well, which it can't afford.  Things will just burn, and the highways decay.

And we'll be at the tender mercy of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which seemingly hates state government as well. Municipal services are really going to take a hit, to include police and fire fighting.

Education, which the WFC basically opposes, as students might learn the world is older than 5,000 years and God might not be limited to the restrictions people who can't imagine a world older than that would demand to be placed on, will be gutted.

Benefits provided to all kids of people through the Federal Government, from Veterans benefits to Medicaid, are in real danger.

A Federal and state government that makes sure your food, water, and living conditions are safe, won't be there.  

Robber Barons, however, will be there once again, for the first time in well over a century.

The truth is, most people won't like living in a United States that's a third world nation.  But the rich will, as the rich have always profited in the third world.  And that, not some sort of rugged paradise, is where we're headed.

Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated. Their distance from God could only be precariously bridged, and their inner tensions only partially relieved, by unstinting, purposeful labor.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism

As part of that, the National Conservatives and the populists seem to outright hate government employees.  That's already come up in of comments about them, one being how they'll go into "more productive" work.  This group has a very Protectant Work Ethic view of life, in which your Calvinist purpose is to prove your worth by working harder and longer and for less than the value of your work, and never retire.

Many street level conservatives have hated Federal employees for years.  I've heard them complain about how they're all lazy as they didn't do the correct Protestant thing and choose to go into the rough and tumble of the free market, by which they mean the corporate controlled market.  

This is sometimes stated by people who actually depend on the government in spades themselves, and can't recognize it.  For instance, if you are truck driver, you are living on the government dole, Mr. Knight of the Road.  Fortunately, in this instance, truckers will soon be out of business as highway subsidies will end and railroads will take back over, which is a good thing.

More than one of the NC/Populist crowd who holds this view also abhor retirement.  The comments are out there, people just refuse to recognize it.   The push in this crowd, short term, is to raise retirement age to 69, but the real push will be just to do away with Social Security in the end. That neatly solves the Social Security crisis.

So, anyhow, like driving on Interstates?

Get used to your state funding them, and they won't.

Like safe air travel?

Notice how many air disasters there have already been since Trump took over, they're likely not his fault, but you probably ought to get used to that too.

Miss polluted air and water?

Well, it'll be back.

Come to expect the Federal government to be there if you are black, or Catholic, and can't get hired?

Well, lower your expectations.

Looking forward to retirement?

Forget it.

Injured and need assistance?

Well, you have your family to turn to.  Or the church.

Lose your job and need help?

Well, move in with your parents, or your children.

Miss the days when the Marine Corps was used to make sure American economic interests weren't harmed in Central America and around the world?

Well, you'll get to live out the nostalgia.

Like living in a country where the rich get richer, the poor get dead, and the middle class are on the verge of poverty?

Well, you'll get to.

Welcome back. . . to about 1900 really.