The Leftists said that the industrial revolution had created mass poverty by making the poor poorer. But the reality was almost the opposite that the industrial revolution ‘created’ poverty by making the poor richer, by keeping them and their children alive, rather than dead.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-great-misinterpretation-that.html

When important facts resist your model of reality, your model is wrong.  The American political chattering class has never found a non-fiction model for the State, and so are ever frustrated that  “government isn’t working.”   But when once you see Congress as just a perpetual litigation, then reality synchs with your model, all the facts make sense, and you accept that government is working at what little bit government can do, which is keep blood from running in the gutters.

By “litigation” I mean a non-violent adversarial contest where the stakes are unlimited asset seizure.   A courtroom is where adversaries seek to take each other’s money away, one step short of a gunfight. The alternative models for the political process are pious fictions, amusing until they become lethal.

Most amusing is this leftist cross-stitchery:  “government is just a word for what we do together.”  I can’t tell if this is naivete, from a disinterest in human nature, or a wish-dream so strong as to amount to religious mania.  Either way, I can understand how, if this is honestly your mental model, you would be frustrated when legislators from two parties spend time and energy squabbling, and getting nothing done.   In reality, Congress always gets done what litigation is designed to do, which is take money away from the other side and hand it to this side.  If you look at the American political process and expect to see “things we do together”, your cognitive dissonance will be severe.  But, let me help:  change your model.  Look at Congress through the lens of a perpetual divorce, and you’ll feel the pleasurable click of reality synching to your mental model.

James Madison was genius enough to see this.  The American system was originally designed to keep small the pool of assets vulnerable to litigation, and to balance the litigants against each other so they would need to consume their war chests inside the modest courtroom while life went on peacefully outside in the streets and farms.   That all fell apart when the progressives decided the courtroom should annex the streets and farms.  Now we are all perpetually suing each other via elections.  This is “progress”.   It ends in anarchy.

All litigation involves a cost/benefit calculation on both sides.   As the pool of assets that are at stake in the litigation gets larger, the litigants are willing to spend more and fight longer and dirtier.   Well, the pool of assets within the reach of Congress does grow ever larger.   As the size of the central government grows, the the assets at stake in the litigation become…all of them.   This can only, ever, look like the opposite of “what we do together”.   There has never been a pious dream as neurotic as that one.

As a society deteriorates, first elections don’t matter much, then they matter desperately, then they don’t matter at all.

1. When the central government regulates and legislates just enough to keep property safe from theft, elections are an important but minor part of life.

2. As the central government metastasizes so that any prosperity is only won by rent seeking and kept by bowing to the government, elections get more furious and violent, because each election has higher stakes. An election is simply a proxy fight for all the money, because the party that wins the election has the power to move the people’s wealth around. This is a corrupt, soul-killing political environment, and the high level of engagement you see in the electorate is like the last, desperate gasps of a strangled puppy.

3. The legislative body soon is making rules about all of life, and sees that this task is too complex, so they pass outlines of desired ends but hand the means over to huge, permanent bureaucracies. These unelected, nameless officials then rule the country by fiat, and even ossify against their own elected government. The electorate learns that the outcome of elections doesn’t matter any more. At first, they blame this on “gridlock” (a mythical entity), then they give up, and set about creating the shadow, illegal economy by which the official economy will exsanguinate. The country eventually collapses into bankruptcy and anarchy, and then centuries of petty dictators, or, if lucky, a new government of limited powers.

So: elections matter a little, then they matter a lot, then they don’t matter at all.

There’s this constant obtuseness about how politics works, and it prompts a million words an hour on discussion boards, amounting to nothing. Let’s all grow up.

“The Republican Party” is a group of people who have banded together to get political power. To get political power, they use words tactically. One of the words they use is “conservative”. “Conservative” is a political philosophy.

A political party is not a church or a sewing club. It is not your family at the kitchen table. Don’t try to make it “represent your views”. A party is a group of people acting tactically together. That’s all.

To get the government to be whatever you think it should be, think about your philosophy, but use your vote, like all your other tangible assets, tactically.

Vote for whoever is 1. most likely to be given power 2. because of your vote and 3. use that power the most like you would. This is actually a fairly complex little piece of calculus – but it is entirely pragmatic.

All the rest is just what you do to make yourself feel good. “Joining” the Democratic Party” is, of itself, as meaningless as joining the GOP, feeling a part of the GOP, or trying to “change” a party.

Parties change the same way economies change – in response to real world changes, and by certain fairly explicable laws. Parties change in order to get 51% of the vote – of whatever the population happens to be at the moment. A political party is not an instrument to change the culture. It is simply an instrument to get the culture to delegate the power of the guns to these people with whom I have a transitory pact.

Conservative vision of property: If you can’t prove it’s stolen, I own it.

Progressive vision of property: You own it till we vote that we own it.

Conservative vision of government: How we prevent theft.

Progressive vision of government: What we do together.

If loyalty to the State is an insufficient defense, then disloyalty to the State is an insufficient indictment.  The world established forever at Nuremberg that immoral acts don’t have authority as a defense. If that is true, then the converse is also true: “treason” cannot be attached when the exposed secret is an immoral (or illegal) activity.  Conservatives in particular may not like this, or where it goes, but that debate is over. In fact, the American press has long sanctified this principle…Daniel Ellsberg was not a traitor, but a hero.

Listen to the very language of the current debate: “is he a traitor, or a whistleblower?” Then the discussion develops, but it typically centers on the one thing that does not matter: motive.  The media likes to personalize such things because it gives them superficial fodder for filling their daily word-count quotas, but the breathless talk of “who Snowdon is” and “what he wants” and whether he is sane or not – none of this matters one whit. I don’t know if he is a “hero”, because that does go to motive, which does not interest me.  I am interested in whether what he says is true or not.

You see, we’ve created a type, a role – “whistleblower” – that actually means “someone who exposes illegal activity”. We created this role in popular culture first, mainly on the Left, and we blessed this role with the reverse-Nuremberg immunity, as the writers romanticized corporate insiders who exposed evil capitalists – see “Silkwood”. Then we enshrined it in law, and for good or ill, that train is now running down the track.

So this debate will hinge on substance, not motive (as it should). Is Snowdon telling the truth, and if he is, is the Orwellian state he describes legal or illegal? If it is legal, he is a traitor. If it is not, he is not.

If I give away our codes to an enemy in wartime, that one is easy. But if I say to my fellow citizens “hey, your government is spying on you in ways you do not know and I believe you should know and have not authorized” – to equate these acts morally and legally is confusion.

By the way, the only thing that gives any loyalty to the government any moral force at all is individual liberty. The State has no ethical claim on me except as an apparatus by which we protect our life, liberty, and property. So the moral basis for convicting me for exposing codes to a military enemy is that I am actually endangering your hearth and plow. And that works. But go very slow before you extend that moral outrage to any leaker.  In fact, I’ll  extend the principle: any leak that endangers liberty is a crime against my fellow free people.  Any leak that protects our mutual liberties is not a crime, no matter what may written in some black-letter statute somewhere. And this has nothing to do with motive.

Don’t confuse this with another version of it, which is as relativistic as mine might sound. The current progressive left actually believes that any leak that furthers the progressive agenda is not a crime, and others are. This is very different, and deserves rejection.  It is actually what induces all the talk about motive, because as you know, on the Left, the pure motive of the State hallows it. Not so on this ground I’m staking: liberty is the objective, tangible touchstone of everything, and I think what makes my argument work where the Left bastardization does not.

This means every act of revealing government secrets has to be litigated as to substance. And if it is to be litigated, the substance can’t be secret. There is a real problem here that no-one knows how to solve and I’d suggest that once you serve on a Congressional intelligence oversight committee, no matter your party, you seem to take on the impulse to yell “traitor” quickly and before the litigation even begins. That might be because you understand just how important security clearances really are, or it might be because you understand there is no way in our legal system to litigate such events and you don’t want to have to write that law. Well, we are writing it.

Conservatives like to style themselves as patriots.  Many have been in the military, and value loyalty and discipline, and react viscerally to a violation of a security clearance and an oath.   But I’d urge you conservatives to go slow with your reflexive patriotism and consider whether this State is the same one that got into your moral DNA when you were younger.  If there is an Orwellian state, it is not immoral to expose it. In fact, the only thing that will save you from the gulag is insiders who break some sort of oath and talk about it.   Again,  those who cherish individual liberty should go real, real slow before condemning a person for claiming to know secret ways your liberties are being stolen.

Here’s my point: America, when you stripped Goebbels of his Nuremberg defense, you gave Snowdon his defense.  You are now going to have to litigate in open court.

I’d argue that the 4th Amendment in its original language, unadorned, gives Americans all we need to protect ourselves from both the Orwellian state and from domestic terrorists.  We should support the public, open litigation of the very notion that there can be secret surveillance of an American citizen apart from the probable cause and delineated subject matter that the Founders wrote into the simple language of the bill of rights.

If the NSA is doing what Snowdon describes, then it is a rogue, illegal State, and Snowdon is not a traitor.

*************************************************************************************

The surveillant state defends its legality by noting that judges authorize the snooping, apparently under the auspices of the Patriot Act, and Congress is briefed.   This is supposed to satisfy the 4th Amendment.  But the simple existence of multiple branches of government in a process does not by itself rise to constitutionality, if the entire process is shut away behind iron doors the imperiled citizen cannot penetrate.

What makes the protection of the 4th Amendment real, as opposed to just words, is that the citizen can challenge the probable cause of the search and the scope and process of the evidence collection that is the weapon against him in court. If you, as an individual before the justice system, cannot reach all the way back to the moment when there was no evidence against you and litigate the police and prosecutor’s steps along the way to where you stand today in the dock, you r rights are a sham.

But these judges are anonymous and unelected, and the briefings are classified, and limited to small circles of Congressional leadership.  So if you are ever prosecuted using evidence collected by the kind of generalized data collection Snowdon describes, how will you challenge the origin of the prosecution?   How will you claim the evidence is “fruit of a poisonous tree” if the tree is locked away in a cloistered, invisible garden?   The secrecy of the process makes the powers of the State unaccountable to the people, and therefore illegitimate.

Political debate is conducted in mutual bad faith, and I’m not just talking about the general malicious intent.   There is a specific structural pattern to bad faith debate:  while the honest debater moves toward premises, the bad faith debater actively flees from premises.

Good faith debate, like you might have with a friend, is a search for the logical point where the two views divurge. If the friends can identify the node where they part, they can move upstream, as it were, to work directly on it instead of indirectly through their discordant downstream conclusions. Their work will yield agreement efficiently and quickly. Because, after all, what they want is agreement. Neither has a conflict of interest. Each is eager to expose his own premise to critique.

Good faith arguments proceed in retrograde: from assertion “backwards” to premise, and this same movement repeatedly, to deeper premises. Soon, agreement gets easier. It’s a search for agreement, and it honors the opponent.

Bad faith argument drives in exactly the opposite logical direction. Each speaker seeks to insulate, rather than expose his premise, and he seeks to trap the opponent in his static assertion and prevent him from moving retrograde toward his own premise. Neither speaker, of course, actually wants agreement. What each wants is victory. So you have two minds at work, each with a severe conflict of interest.

It’s tempting to say that the audience insults its own intelligence by subjecting itself to this. But most of the audience is corrupted already, to the degree the politics of a nation is a struggle over whose money will go to whom.

If it is all just quarks, then my quarrel with myself can cease.  My mind will accept that it just mediates the background radiation and I’ll go gently down the entropy chute.  The sun does not regard me.  It does not number my hairs nor does it note the drop of the sparrow from the wire.

And I’ll stop caring about the sadness at the disenchantment of the world, the sadness that creeps inside like lowland fog.  Do you like or hate that conclusion?  Do you comprehend your own feeling?  Does it come from the solar energy  that is closer to you than you are to yourself?   Does the sun project disgust into the souls of those who do not meditate on her laws?

I wish I could tell you why I stop to stare inside a single silver drop of dew. I think I hope to tell you what it is. I suppose I could cite a chemical equation; would you believe it? Don’t you also talk of mystery, awe, and wonder, because the equations are not enough for you? But these are just placeholder words, what the accountants call a plug number, the semantic gods of the gaps. I don’t begrudge the materialists their non-numerical words. You can’t just talk in equations, after all.

Isn’t it the truth that we simply — you and I at least — we simply do not believe in chemistry. I am an infidel, but I would prefer to be a believer. It’s just that when I stare into the light in water, I do not believe I am seeing the chemistry, and neither do you. After all, why should we do what our quarks find boring? What moral imperative does the sun project?

So let’s go then, you and I at least, while the West is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized, while the women pace to and fro talking of Michaelangelo, let us go then you and I and dare to eat a peach.

Some think that a government filled with women would be more peaceful; a senate of women would get more done with less conflict. But there is no evidence for this, and plenty of evidence for the opposite.

Forget the “studies”. There are lots of real life laboratories, called workplaces. Go to a workplace dominated by females. There are still lots of them — hospitals, for example, where the nursing staffs are still mostly women. Ask the women what they think. Many of them will tell you that trying to manage a group of women is a nightmare compared to managing men. They’ll tell you that the conflict level is high and unremitting.

Again, the women say this about themselves. I first heard it from women whom I’ve supervised over the course of 15 years in management now. (I’m a man.) The small businesses I’ve managed have had workforces of more than 90% women. Over the years many women have spontaneously offered me their sympathy for my task of keeping the female peace. I’ve had many women say to me “I’d much rather manage a bunch of men than a bunch of women.”

There is no doubt that women value collaboration more than men do, and naturally choose to work collaboratively when given the chance. Cooperation is their default mode, while isolation is the default mode of the male. But you have to distinguish between what women value and what they actually do accomplish when in task-oriented groups. In fact, that they treasure collaberation so much that this actually makes them more sensitive to slight errors of cooperation – since they also perceive much, much more nuance in the interpersonal space than men do. (I hope this last assertion is not controversial. Have you never been married?) And it is precisely this combination which is fatal for the outcome.

Again, the combination is the problem.  The female psyche both values cooperation and at the same time perceives interpersonal imperfection.  This combination exponentiates tensions within female task groups.   Over time, they gather an exponentially higher list of mental grievances against each other, more than would a group of relatively obtuse, individualistic men. And because these issues are not just cognitive observations but are rooted deep in their value system, they cannot pass them over.

This means that a working group of women will fight more, about more, than a similarly tasked group of men. So, all other things being equal, the female group will be much more likely to break down in conflict than the male.

Of course all things are not equal, so we can’t conclude from this observation anything about the relative efficiency of a female group. Other factors count.

For example, negligence is a male specialty. The general scofflaw in the workplace, who just skips whatever he can get away with, is more likely male. Also, when they do fight, the male group’s fight is more likely to be physical and destructive.

So I’m not saying that females are less good at anything than a male group (indeed, they usually believe they are better, and I’ve not seen evidence to the contrary.) I am saying they do not have less conflict.

You might argue that productivity and efficiency are exactly the issue, since a female group that experiences more conflict yet still is productive is precisely evidence that women do something to overcome all that conflict. But do they, or is it overcome, suppressed, or dampened for them by management support? To extrapolate their productivity-in-spite-of-conflict to a hypothetical governing body, you would have to remove the influence of management — since a female Senate would have no referee.

We should distinguish between task-oriented groups and other types of gatherings. Women love to gather when there is no external task, but rather just explore the richness of friendship. These are different, and I don’t have near the direct experience of the latter as I do the former.

But, you say, the world’s literature is full of woman’s hatred for war. Of course women hate war more than men do, because they feel the bond of love more deeply then men. Mothers and wives feel the loss of sons and husbands more acutely than a man can imagine. But these are distinct matters; women’s suffering from war is not evidence they would be less warlike as governments.

Based on my experience as a manager of women and their own testimony, I’m metaphysically certain that if you elected 100 women to the United States Senate today, tomorrow the conflict level in that body would go up, not down.

Progressives believe that wealth trickling down from corporations to the poor  is evil, but wealth trickling down from government to the poor is good.

Atoms have charges which pre-dispose them to particular molecular combinations.   Congresspeople are the atoms in our political system.   They also carry “charges” which pre-dispose them to create particular laws.    This charge has nothing to do with party or even political philosophy, because in the modern era, re-election depends on bringing back to your district more than your taxpayers put in.   So the charge can be called “more out than in”, and it is now the orientation of all Congress.   It is automatic, it flows from their personal self-interest and the self interest of their district.  

Chemists understand that if you know the charge of the atom, the molecular results are entirely predictable.  They share an elective affinity.   It’s not like  the atoms decide what kind of shape to form; their properties govern their possible combinations.  You’d never combine certain atoms and then be amazed at the molecule that appears.  By now, you’d understand the intrinsic properties of the atoms predetermine the molecule.   You wouldn’t peer at the molecule and then complain about the choices of the atoms.    You wouldn’t get up in the morning and rush to the microscope to see if some other molecule formed just this one time.  

  Continue reading “The Ponzi Molecule” →

Somehow, America told herself “diversity” made her great.   Not only is this not true, the people who say it don’t know what it means.

Of course America was “built” by immigrants from many shores.   Many languages, cultures, religions came together and poof!  America.   First diverse cultures, then a “great” nation.

What do they even mean by “great”, or its synonyms?  Since “great” presumably means something more than just large, it must mean rich, or strong, or both.   So:  the multiplicity of cultures made us economically prosperous?  Militarily strong?   How?   Why would the same result not have happened in a homogenous culture?

“Diversity” also is ambiguous.  Many say “diversity” when they mean something like “suffused with open homosexuality”, or “easy to be an atheist”,  or “a large menu of self-esteem systems”.     If that’s what you mean, fine, but that’s not what “diversity” can possibly mean when we refer to the 19th century.   You just use the same word; you’re not talking about history at all.

But back to the 19th century.    Truth is, there was no particular economic or military value added by German, Irish, English, or African culture.   We’ve forgotten the wisdom of an earlier generation, who always talked of a “melting pot” when they talked of that time in our history.  Have you noticed the phrase “melting pot” has become a little embarrassing, like a quaint idea from an unsophisticated age?  I heard it routinely in elementary school, 40 years ago, but no politically correct pundit would ever be caught on tape saying it now.  The phrase was no peripheral part of America’s understanding of herself.   The important point about that age was not the diversity, but precisely the opposite:  it melted away.   The loss of diversity over time, understandably lamented from within those communities, was the unique historical pattern, and the indirect key to our greatness.

I say “indirect” because loss of cultural identity was simply a result of the focus of life shifting elsewhere.   The distinct cultures were not a bad thing, of course, and even a cultural good,  but the force of economic opportunity overwhelmed any nostalgia.

As I say, there was value in those cultures as cultures.   But they entered a political and economic system that was already built, and fitting into that system overcame their love of their culture over generations.     What was the solvent?   Freedom.   The heady air of political freedom, economic freedom.   Commerce.  The freedom to work hard and stockpile assets — capitalism — is the solvent of cultures.   You need to transcend your ghetto’s language and manners to extend your business.   And the opportunity to extend a business by hard work — as opposed to bribery or warlord allegiance — should not be underestimated.   Few times in history has property been secure enough to stockpile, and our forefathers created that here, and it is a melting pot.   There is tragedy in this, of course, but it is an economic and historical law.

These days, immigration has entered the same logic in the place of “diversity”.   We need immigrants, because diversity makes us great.   Nonsense, nonsense resurrected.

There is no value to the country as a whole to have more Mexican culture.  (Or any other kind.)   We do not need diversity.   We need freedom, and let people choose their own diversity.   Let them be whatever color (culturally speaking) they want.

Where was the tipping point?   Where, in our history, did the State take on the role of protecting or promoting cultural diversity?  (As opposed to protecting private property.)

That tipping point is the apex  of the curve of America’s greatness.

People who work in government are normal people (you might be one) but their organization hamstrings them — necessarily.    It is not possible for a government institution to compete with a private institution.

Their work takes place in an adversarial arena with legislated transparency. Nobody can do well in this environment.   It’s like practicing your disco moves in a glass bedroom; there is no way to look good.   By “adversary”, we mean “organized, intelligent bands of predators who have a religious zeal to ruin you forever.”   Yes, political Left, this is you.   Yes, political Right, this is you.

In private industry, there are adversaries, but you can keep the walls opaque.   Those who would love to kill you (professionally) can be kept out and kept relatively blind to the details of your team’s work.

No matter who you are, the closer your job is to an elected person, the more vultures there are from the other party whose hot passion is to demonstrate your evil and take your job away from you.   This usually has little to do with factual content.   There are plenty of people, in both parties, down to the local level, who are perfectly willing to falsely imprison people from the other party in order to seize their power.

Though the individual job may not be important to the zealots and party activists as a prize, they  have made “flipping” the little guys  into an art form any mob prosecutor would be proud of.   Find incompetence at some level, and leverage it, to dislodge higher ups.   This is common, and ugly.

The only protection for the little people is formal  procedure.   Government workers would be crazy not to formalize everything down to the paperclip requisition.   Paperwork, jargon, algorithms — all that we mean when we say “bureaucracy” is the inevitable product of normal people acting in an expected level of self-interest.

It’s a commonplace to note the absence of market discipline. I’ve nothing new to say, except that it can’t be rated too important.   Private companies get slovenly and weak very quickly when there is not perceptible threat from competitors.   Like the gallows in the famous quote,   the prospect of having your livelihood ripped away will focus the thoughts wonderfully.     Those of us in private companies who do well will become inefficient if this pressure goes away.   We hate it, but it is the source of whatever excellence companies create.

This pressure is wholly unlike the political pressure that ruins work, because it can be responded to rationally, by people working in teams, who can hide their tactics behind closed doors.   And there is an external check on the final product — the market — in place of the false and malicious evaluation of the political climbers.

There is no substitute for competitive pressure.   Its effect cannot be built into a federal agency by any means whatsoever.    You can fill a government agency with geniuses and the lack of competitive pressure will ruin their work.

Career politicians have never felt this pressure.   They discount it congenitally.

So the government workers have a massive pressure to be inefficient — the protective bureaucracy —  and an utter lack of healthy pressure.   They can’t win even though they are good and talented —  except by a fiat, from those who possess the guns — the legislators.

To the Left, the President is the Chief Executive of the country. That makes us his employees.

In the Constitutional vision, he is Chief Executive of the government. That makes us his customers.

You can’t have conversations when your words mean the opposite.

…in one sentence:

When “person” means anything other than “object of God’s love”, bloodbaths ensue.

I’m not sure democracy can survive as the Judeo-Christian tincture fades from the West, leaving…Aristotle.   What is a vote-deserving agent under the gaze of reason alone?   The sanctity with which people regard “one person, one vote” in the West today is deceptive.   We moderns read it backward in time, projecting it onto the Greek city-states, because we want to locate its birth somewhere and we’re embarrassed to give the credit to Jesus.   But we conveniently forget that the Greek “citizen” did not mean “person”.   Few persons actually had a vote.   No, this feeling of sanctity about the dignity of all persons is a residue of the New Testament.   It is an historical outworking of the implications of the words and deeds of one Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

It is superficial to read this as if I’m saying that everyone who has ever expressed a biblical allegiance was a democrat.   But biblical thought, worked out, leads to democracy as we understand the word: one person, one vote, and if you exist you are a person.    It often takes decades to work theoretical principles into the fabric of daily life.   America’s civil war, for example, was an exercise not only of constitutional jurisprudence but also in biblical exegesis, by means of guns, decades after the principles were established.

That was when Americans were exegeting American principles.  It was bitter, but became also sweet.   The good had triumphed, and bitterness is exorcised by the knowledge that good has ensued.   Now, though…now that the NT has been overthrown by the grand narrative of time plus chance,  there is no center of history,  there is no touchstone for the good,  so  there are no principles to constantly de-toxify the political atmosphere from its steady infusion of bitterness.    There is no transcendent view of “person” to exegete toward all who breathe, no matter how you feel about them.   So, from the poison of the cumulative bitterness of political conflict it becomes more and more thinkable to disenfranchise your opponents in order to get things done that you personally believe in.   This temptation, when the means actually appears, is too great for most political True Believers to pass up.   And when once a group has been disenfranchised, unless they are willing to be slaves, it is only a matter of time before they go to the ovens or the lynching tree.  The counterweight to this cumulative political bitterness is the memory that life is more than politics, that the person opposing me at the school board meeting, no matter how much I dislike him, is as much redeemed by Jesus as I am.   I can devalue his mind in my estimation all I want — and might even be accurate, for there really are fools — but my even nominal theology won’t let me devalue his person.   He has a counterweight to his own foolery, and it is God.   Even when “god” only means a vague tittering in the conscience.

Do not underestimate the power of this subliminal theology in steadying the civility of Western politics.   I believe that as it fades in cultures, there comes a tipping point when the bitterness goes viral, and this explains the surprisingly rapid developments of pogroms.   Those always erupt in societies where everyone thought, the night before, it couldn’t happen here.

You doubt that the “person” grows from New Testament soil?   You think it grows from Enlightenment soil, which is just the rediscovered strata of Greece and Rome, after the garbage of religion is scraped away?   You had better hope you are right.   You had better hope the guillotines of France and the adventures of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all were only coincidentally associated with their functional atheisms.