THE 3-LADDER SYSTEM OF

SOCIAL CLASS IN THE U.S.

By Michael O. Church

And

UNDERSTANDING THE
BLUE CHURCH
By Jordan Greenhall
THE 3-LADDER SYSTEM OF SOCIAL
CLASS IN THE U.S.
By Michael O. Church

https://web.archive.org/web/20151006183427/https:/micha
elochurch.wordpress.com/author/michaelochurch/

Typical depictions of social class in the United States posit a

linear, ordered hierarchy. I’ve actually come to the conclusion that
there are 3 distinct ladders, with approximately four social classes on
each. Additionally, there is an underclass of people not connected to
any of the ladders, creating an unlucky 13th social class. I’ll attempt to
explain how this three-ladder system works, what it means, and also
why it is a source of conflict. The ladders I will assign the names Labor,
Gentry, and Elite. My specific percentage estimates of each category
are not derived from anything other than estimation based on what I’ve
seen, and my limited understanding of the macroeconomics of income
in the United States, so don’t take them for more than an
approximation. I’ll assess the social role of each of these classes in
order, from bottom to top.
This is, one should note, an exposition of social class rather than
income. Therefore, in many cases, precise income criteria cannot be
defined, because there’s so much more involved. Class is more
sociological in nature than wealth or income, and much harder to
change. People can improve their incomes dramatically, but it’s rare
for a person to move more than one or two rungs in a lifetime. Social
class determines how a person is perceived, that person’s access to
information, and what opportunities will be available to a person.

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UNDERCLASS
(10%)
The underclass are not just poor, because there are poor people on
the Labor ladder and a few (usually transiently or voluntarily) on the
Gentry ladder who are poor. In fact, most poor Americans are not
members of the Underclass. People in the Underclass are
generationally poor. Some have never held jobs. Some are third-
generation jobless, even. Each of these ladders (Labor, Gentry, Elite)
can be seen as an infrastructure based, in part, on social connections.
There are some people who are not connected to any of these
infrastructures, and they are the underclass.

THE LABOR LADDER

(65%)
This represents “blue-collar” work and is often associated with
“working class”, but some people in this distinction earn solidly
“middle-class” incomes over $100,000 per year. What defines the
Labor ladder is that the work is seen as a commodity, and that there’s
rarely a focus on long-term career management. People are assessed
based on how hard they work because, in this world, the way to become
richer is to work more (not necessarily more efficiently or “smarter”).
The Labor ladder is organized almost completely based on income; the
more you make (age-adjusted) the higher your position is, and the more
likely it is that your work is respected.
Secondary Labor (L4, 30%) is what we call the “working poor”.
These are people who earn 1 to 3 times the minimum wage and often
have no health benefits. Many work two “part time” jobs at 35 hours
per week (so their firms don’t have to provide benefits) with irregular
hours. They have few skills and no leverage, so they tend to end up in
the worst jobs, and those jobs enervate them so much that it becomes
impossible for them to get the skills that would help them advance. The
reason for the name Secondary in this class is that they are trapped in
the “secondary” labor market: jobs originally intended for teenagers
and well-off retirees that were never intended to pay a living wage.
Wages for this category are usually quoted hourly and between $5 and
$15 per hour.

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 Primary Labor (L3, 20%) is what we tend to associate with
“blue-collar” America. If by “average” we mean median, this is the
average social class of Americans, although most people would call
it working class, not middle. It usually means having enough money to
afford an occasional vacation and a couple restaurant meals per month.
People in the L3 class aren’t worried about having food to eat, but they
aren’t very comfortable either, and an ill-timed layoff can be
catastrophic. If the market for their skills collapses, they can end up
falling down a rung into L4. When you’re in the Labor category, market
forces can propel you up or down, and the market value of
“commodity” labor has been going down for a long time. Typical L3
compensation is $20,000 to $60,000 per year.
In the supposed “golden age” of the United States (the 1950s) a
lot of people were earning L2 compensation for L3 work. In a time
when well-paid but monotonous labor was not considered such a bad
thing (to people coming off the Great Depression and World War II,
stable but boring jobs were a godsend) this was seen as desirable, but
we can’t go back to that, and most people wouldn’t want to. Most
Millennials would be bored shitless by the jobs available in that era that
our society occasionally mourns losing.
High-skill Labor (L2, 14%) entails having enough income and
job security to be legitimately “middle class”. People in this range can
attend college courses, travel internationally (but not very often) and
send their children to good schools. Plumbers, airline pilots, and
electricians are in this category, and some of these people make over
$100,000 per year. For them, there must be some barrier to entry into
their line of work, or some force keeping pay high (such as
unionization). Within the culture of the Labor ladder, these people are
regarded highly.
Labor Leadership (L1, 1%) is the top of the Labor ladder, and
it’s what blue-collar America tends to associate with success. (The
reason they fail to hate “the 1%” is that they think of L1 small business
owners, rather than blue-blooded parasites, as “rich people”.) These are
people who, often through years of very hard work and by displaying
leadership capability, have ascended to an upper-middle-class income.
They aren’t usually “managers” (store managers are L2) but small
business owners and landlords, while they’re often seen doing the grunt
work of their businesses (such as by running the register when all the
cashiers call in sick). They can generate passive income from
endeavors like restaurant franchises and earn a solidly upper-middle
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income standing, but culturally they are still part of Labor. This suits
them well, because where they excel is at leading people who are in the
Labor category.

THE GENTRY LADDER

(23.5%)
England had a landed gentry for a while. We have
an educated one. Labor defines status based on the market value of
one’s commodity work. The Gentry rebels against commoditization
with a focus on qualities that might be, from an extensional perspective,
irrelevant. They dislike conflict diamonds, like fair-trade coffee, and
drive cultural trends. In the 1950s, they were all about suburbia. In
2012, they had the same enthusiasm for returning to the cities. They
value themselves not based on their incomes but, much more so, on
access to respected institutions: elite universities, leading technology
companies, museums and artistic endeavors. Labor aspires to
occupational success and organizational leadership, while the Gentry
aspires to education and cultural leadership.
Before going further, it’s worth noting that the typical
socioeconomic ordering would have each Gentry level two levels
above the corresponding Labor level in social standing. Thus, G1 > G2
> (G3 ~= L1) > (G4 ~= L2) > L3 > L4.
Transitional Gentry (G4, 5%) is the lowest rung of the Gentry
ladder. Typically, I think of community colleges when trying to explain
G4. It’s the class of people who are coming into the Gentry, usually
from L2, and most people in it are looking to attain G3 (and many do).
Since the Gentry is defined by education, culture, and cultural
influence, earning a four-year degree (which about 20% of American
adults have) will usually put a person solidly into G3.
Mobility between G4 and L2 is common, and G4 is a “young
people” class, because people who don’t keep abreast of politics,
current events, and at least the “upper-middle-brow” culture of shows
like Mad Men1 tend to return to L2 (which is not an inferior class, but

1
A couple of people have emailed me to ask why I “knocked” Mad Men.
That wasn’t my intention. It’s an excellent show. “Upper-middle-brow” is
not panning. I’m lower-middle-brow on a good day.

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an approximately-equal one with different values). Those who keep up
tend to progress to G3.
Primary Gentry (G3, 16%) is what Americans think of as the
cultural “upper-middle class”. They have four-year college degrees and
typically have professional jobs of middling autonomy and above-
average income, but usually not leadership positions. Incomes in this
class vary widely (in part, because the Gentry is not defined by income)
but generally fall between $30,000 and $200,000 per year. People in
this class tend to be viewed as taste-setters by Labor but are viewed as
gauche by the higher-ranking G1 and G2 classes.
High Gentry (G2, 2.45%) tend to come from elite colleges and
traditionally gravitated toward “junior executive” roles in medium-
sized companies, innovative startups, management consultancies, and
possibly investment banking (which facilitates the G2-E4 transition).
But G2’s wouldn’t be caught dead in jobs that seem perfectly fine to
G3’s, which they view (often rightly) to be dead ends. Having
interesting, respected work is important to G2’s. To a G2, being a
college professor, scientist, entrepreneur, or writer are desirable jobs.
Creative control of work is important to G2’s, although not all are able
to get it (because creative jobs are so rare). David Brooks’s Bobos in
Paradise captured well the culture of G2’s in that time. Members of
this social class aggressively manage their careers to get the most out
(in terms of intellectual and financial reward) of their careers, but what
they really want is enough success and money to do what they really
value, which is to influence culture.
G2 is my native social class, and probably that of most of my
readers.
Cultural Influencers (G1, 0.05%) are the pinnacle of the Gentry.
Jon Stewart is a classic example. He probably makes a “merely” upper-
middle-class income working for the notoriously cheap Comedy
Central, but he has the most well-regarded members of the
intelligentsia on his show every night. For G1, I’m not talking about
“celebrities”. Celebrities are a bizarre and tiny category that mixes all
three ladders (I’d argue that they’re the upper tier of L1; most lack the
power of Elites and the refinement of the Gentry). Rather, I’m talking
about people who are widely recognized as smart, knowledgeable,
creative, and above all, interesting. They tend also to have access to
other interesting people. G1’s are not “famous” in the celebrity sense,
and most of them aren’t that rich. I’d guess that their incomes vary
mostly from $100,000 to $1 million per year, which is low for a social
5
class that is so difficult to enter (much harder than E4, and possibly E3,
to get into).
It’s quite likely that G1 is expanding, and it was probably much
smaller in the past. The internet is allowing more people to become
well-known and have some degree of cultural influence. Many
bloggers have entered G1 without relying on established institutions
such as publishers or universities (which used to be the only way). That
said, G1 requires reliability in attention; people having their 15 minutes
don’t count.

THE ELITE LADDER

(1.5%)
This is an infrastructure “at the top of society”, but many of the
people it includes are in many ways nowhere near the top. People
complain about “the 1 percent”, but the reality is that most of that top
1.0% are nowhere near controlling positions within society.
Not all of the Elite are in the top 1% for income, but most will
have the opportunity to be. The Elite includes everyone from
billionaires to out-of-college investment banking analysts (who earn a
middle-class income in one of the most expensive cities on the planet).
What they have in common is that they are exerting themselves
toward ownership. Labor provides the work and values effort and
loyalty. The Gentry provides culture and it values education and
creativity. The Elite owns things and values control and establishment.
As with the Gentry and Labor, when comparing these ladders, one
should consider an Elite rung to be two levels above the corresponding
Gentry rung, so in terms of social standing, E1 > E2 > (E3 ~= G1) >
(E4 ~= G2) > G3 > G4.
The Strivers (E4, 0.5%) are another transitional class that is
generally for young people only. They aren’t actually Elite, but they
might, if lucky, move into E3. Junior investment bankers, law firm
associates, and young startup entrepreneurs are in this category.
They’re trying to “break in” to something rich and successful. If they
get in, they’ll become solid E3. If they fail in doing so, they usually
return to G2: upper-middle-class professionals not strongly bound to
the Elite infrastructure. G2 is usually a happier place than E4, but E3’s
and E4’s tend to deride this transition. In startups, a business move

6
favoring this step (toward G1-2 upper-middle-class stability) is derided
as a “lifestyle business”.
Elite Servants (E3, 0.8%) are the law-firm partners and senior
investment bankers and corporate executives that might be called the
“working rich” and they comprise what was once called the “white-
shoe” culture. They’re quite well-off, as far as servants go, often
earning incomes from $200,000 to $5 million per year, but their social
standing is conditional. They serve the rich, and the rich have to keep
finding them useful for them to maintain their place. It’s not an
enviable place to be, because the social expectations associated with
maintaining E3 status require high spending, and even the extremely
well-compensated ($1 million per year and up) E3’s rarely have the
savings to survive more than a year or two without a job, because of
the need to maintain connections. E3’s tend to have as many money
problems as people in the lower social classes. E3’s also suffer because
they live in a “small world” society driven by reputation, long-standing
grudges and often petty contempt. E3’s still get fired– a lot, because
the pretense that justifies E3-level status (of a large-company
“executive”) requires leadership and many don’t have it– and when it
happens to them, they can face years during which they can’t find
appropriate employment.
People tend to think of face leaders (politicians and CEOs) as
belonging to a higher social class, but most are E3. If they were higher,
they wouldn’t have to work so hard to be rich. Examining our most
recent presidents, Barack Obama is G1, the George Bushes were E2,
Bill Clinton was E3, and Reagan was in the celebrity category that is a
hybrid of E3 and L1. John Kennedy was E2, while Lyndon Johnson
was L1. Most CEOs, however, are strictly E3, because CEOs are
“rubber gloves” that are used for dirty work and thrown aside if they
get too filthy. There’s too much reputation risk involved in being a
corporate CEO for an E2 to want the job under most circumstances.
National Elite (E2, 0.19%) are what most Americans think of as
“upper class” or “old money”. They have Roman Numerals in their
names, live in the Hamptons (although they’ve probably stopped using
“summer” as a verb now that “the poors” know about it) and their
families have attended Ivy League colleges for generations. They’re
socially very well connected and have the choice not to work, or the
choice to work in a wide array of well-compensated and highly-
regarded jobs. Rarely do they work full time under traditional
employment terms– never as subordinates, sometimes as executives in
7
an apprentice role, often in board positions or “advisory” roles. It’s
uncommon that an E2 will put a full-time effort into anything, because
their objective with work is to associate their names with successful
institutions, but not to get too involved.
To maintain E2 status, being wealthy is required. It takes about
$500,000 per year, after tax, in income at a minimum. However, it’s
not hard for a person with E2 status and connections to acquire this,
even if the family money is lost. The jobs that E3’s regard as the
pinnacle of professional achievement (the idea that such a notion as
“professional achievement” exists is laughable to them; paid full-time
work is dishonorable from an E2 perspective) are their safety careers.
Global Elite (E1, ~60,000 people worldwide, about 30% of those
in the U.S.) are a global social class, and extremely powerful in a trans-
national way. These are the very rich, powerful, and deeply
uncultured barbarians from all over the world who start wars in the
Middle East for sport, make asses of themselves in American casinos,
rape ski bunnies at Davos, and run the world. Like the Persian army
in 300, they come from all over the place; they’re the ugliest and most
broken of each nation. They’re the corporate billionaires and drug
kingpins and third-world despots and real estate magnates. They’re not
into the genteel, reserved “WASP culture” of E2’s, the corporate
earnestness and “white shoe” professionalism of E3’s, or the
hypertrophic intellectualism and creativity of G1’s and G2’s. They are
all about control, and on a global scale. To channel Heisenberg,
they’re in the empire business. They aren’t mere management or even
“executives”. They’re owners. They don’t care what they own, or what
direction the world takes, as long as they’re on top. They almost never
take official executive positions within large companies, but they make
a lot of the decisions behind the scenes.
Unlike the National Elite, who tend toward a cultural
conservatism and a desire to preserve certain traits that they consider
necessary to national integrity, the Global Elite doesn’t give a shit
about any particular country. They’re fully multinational and view all
the world’s political nations as entities to be exploited (like everything
else). They foster corruption and crime if it serves their interests, and
those interests are often ugly. Like Kefka from Final Fantasy VI, their
reason for living is to create monuments to nonexistence.
For the other social classes, there’s no uniform moral assumption
that can apply. G1’s are likable and often deserving cultural leaders,
but sometimes foolish, overrated, incompetent, infuriatingly petty, and
8
too prone to groupthink to deserve their disproportionate clout. G2’s
tend to have the best (or at least most robust) taste, because they don’t
fall into G1 self-referentiality, but can be just as snooty and cliquish.
As “pro-Gentry” as I may seem, it’s a massive simplification to treat
that set as entirely virtuous. Likewise, the lower elite ranks (E2, E3,
E4) also have their mix of good and bad people. There are E2’s who
want to live well and decently, E3’s trying to provide for their families,
and E4’s trying to get in because they were brought up to climb the
ladder. On the other hand, E1 is pretty much objectively evil, without
exceptions. There are decent people who are billionaires, so there’s
no income or wealth level at which 100% objective evil becomes the
norm. But if you climb the social ladder, you get to a level at which it’s
all cancer, all the way up. That’s E1. Why is it this way? Because the
top end of the world’s elite is a social elite, not an economic one, and
you don’t get deep into an elevated social elite unless you are very
similar to the center of that cluster, and for the past 10,000 years the
center of humanity’s top-of-the-top cluster has always been deep,
featureless evil: people who burn peasants’ faces off because it amuses
them. Whether you’re talking about a real person like Hitler, Stalin,
Erik Prince, Osama bin Laden, or Kissinger, or a fictional example like
The Joker, Kefka, Walter White, or Randall Flagg; when you get to the
top of society, it’s always the same guy. Call it The Devil, but what’s
scary is that it needs (and has) no supernatural powers; it’s human, and
while one its representatives might get knocked off, another one will
step up.

LADDER CONFLICT
What does all this mean? How do these ladders interrelate? Do
these three separate social class structures often find themselves at odds
and fight? Can people be part of more than one?
What I’ve called the Labor, Gentry, and Elite “ladders” can more
easily be described as “infrastructures”. For Labor, this infrastructure
is largely physical and the relevant connection is knowing how to use
that physical device or space, and getting people to trust a person to
competently use (without owning, because that’s out of the question
for most) these resources. For the Gentry, it’s an “invisible graph” of
knowledge and education and “interestingness”, comprised largely of
ideas. For the Elite, it’s a tight, exclusive network centered on social
9
connections, power, and dominance. People can be connected to more
than one of these infrastructures, but people usually bind more tightly
to the one of higher status, except when at the transitional ranks (G4
and E4) which tend to punt people who don’t ascend after some time.
The overwhelmingly high likelihood is that a person is aligned most
strongly to one and only one of these structures. The values are too
conflicting for a person not to pick one horse or the other.
I’ve argued that the ladders connect at a two-rung difference, with
L2 ~ G4, L1 ~ G3, G2 ~ E4, and G1 ~ E3. These are “social
equivalencies” that don’t involve a change in social status, so they’re
the easiest to transitions to make (in both directions). They represent a
transfer from one form of capital to another. A skilled laborer (L2) who
begins taking night courses (G4) is using time to get an education rather
than more money. Likewise, one who moves from the high gentry (G2)
to a 90-hour-per-week job in private wealth management (E4) is
applying her refined intellectual skills and knowledge to serving the
rich, in the hope of making the connections to become one of them.
That said, these ladders often come into conflict. The most
relevant one to most of my readers will be the conflict between the
Gentry and the Elite. The Gentry tends to be left-libertarian and values
creativity, individual autonomy, and free expression. The Elite tends
toward center-right authoritarianism and corporate conformity, and it
views creativity as dangerous (except when applied to hiding financial
risks or justifying illegal wars). The Gentry believes that it is
the deserving elite and the face of the future, and that it can use culture
to engineer a future in which its values are elite; while the upper tier of
the Elite finds the Gentry pretentious, repugnant, self-indulgent, and
subversive. The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is incredibly
contentious. It’s a cosmic, ubiquitous war between the past and the
future.
Between the Gentry and Labor, there is an attitude of distrust. The
Elite has been running a divide-and-conquer strategy between these
two categories for decades. This works because the Elite understands
(and can ape) the culture of the Gentry, but has something in common
with Labor that sets the categories apart from the Gentry: a conception
of work as a theater for masculine dominance. This is something that
the Elite and Labor both believe in– the visceral strength and
importance of the alpha-male in high-stakes gambling settings such as
most modern work– but that the Gentry would rather deny. Gender is
a major part of the Elite’s strategy in turning Labor against the Gentry:
10
make the Gentry look effeminate. That’s why “feminist” is practically
a racial slur, despite the world desperately needing attention to
women’s political equality, health and well-being (that is, feminism).
The Elite also uses the Underclass in a different process: the Elite
wants Labor think the Gentry intends to conspire with the Underclass
to dismantle Labor values and elevate these “obviously undeserving”
people to, at least, the status of Labor if not promoted above them. They
exploit fear in Labor. One might invoke racism and the “Southern
strategy” in politics as an example of this, but the racial part is
incidental. The Elite don’t care whether it’s blacks or Latinos or
“illigals” or red-haired people or homosexuals (most of whom are not
part of the Underclass) that are being used to frighten Labor into
opposing and disliking the Gentry; they just know that the device works
and that it has pretty much always worked.
The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is one of open
rivalry, and that between the Gentry and Labor is one of distrust. What
about Labor and the Elite? That one is not symmetric. The Elite exploit
and despise Labor as a class comprised mostly of “useful idiots”. How
does Labor see the Elite? They don’t. The Elite has managed to
convince Labor that the Gentry (who are open about their cultural
elitism, while the Elite hides its social and economic elitism) is the
actual “liberal elite” responsible for Labor’s misery over the past 30
years. In effect, the Elite has constructed an “infinity pool” where the
Elite appears to be a hyper-successful extension of Labor, lumping
these two disparate ladders into an “us” and placing the Gentry and
Underclass into “them”.

ANALYSIS OF CURRENT CONFLICT

Despite its upper ranks being filled by people who are effectively
thugs, the Elite isn’t entirely evil. By population, most of them are
merely E3 and E4 stewards with minimal decision-making power, and
a lot of those come from (and return to) the Gentry and maintain those
values. On the other hand, Elite values tend to be undesirable, because
at that structure’s pinnacle are the E1 crime bosses. There are good
people within the Elite, even though the Elite itself is not good.
For virtue, the Gentry does better. I don’t want to fall into the
American fallacy of conflating “middle class” with virtue, and there
are some awful and good people in all social classes, but I think that

11
the Gentry is a more inclusive and reflective elite– one of ideas and
values, not based on exclusivity.
One Gentry stronghold for a long time has been high technology,
a meritocracy where skill, know-how, and drive enabled a person to
rise to technical leadership of increasing scope and eventually business
leadership and entrepreneurship. This created the engineering culture
of Hewlett-Packard (before Fiorina) and the “Don’t Be Evil” mantra of
Google. This is Gentry culture asserting itself. Be ethical, seek
positive-sum outcomes, and win by being great rather than by harming,
robbing, or intimidating others. It’s not how business is practiced in
most of the world– zero-sum thuggery is a lot more common– but it’s
how great businesses are made. This weird world in which self-made
success was regarded higher than entrenchment, symbolized in Silicon
Valley, enabled people from the Gentry to become very rich and Gentry
ideas to establish lasting success in business.
What has made America great, especially from 1933 until now,
has been the self-assertion of the Gentry following the defeat of the
Elite. The first half of the American Era (1933 to 1973) utterly
emasculated the Elite. Their rapacious greed and world-fucking
parasitism was repaid with 90-percent tax rates, and they told to
consider themselves lucky that it wasn’t full-on socialism (or a violent
revolution in which they all died, Paris-1793-style). The so-called
“WASP culture” of the E2 class derives many of its norms from the
paranoia of that period (when the global elite was very small, and they
were the “robber baron” elite). For example, the demand that a house
not be visible from the road comes from a time in which that was
physically dangerous. This four-decade curtailment of the American
Elite, and the more resounding destruction of the European ones, was
one of the best things that ever happened to the world. It made the
golden age of Silicon Valley possible.
There are a lot of reasons why this “golden age” of a
disempowered Elite was able to occur, but World War II was the
biggest of all of them. Future historians will probably regard the two
World Wars as one monstrous conflict, with a period of crippling,
worldwide economic depression between them. Few disagree with the
claim, for example, that the resolution of the First World War led
inexorably to the evils of totalitarianism and the Second of these wars.
This giant and largely senseless conflict’s causes seem complex–
historians are still debating World War I’s inception– but the short
version is that the world’s Elites did that. There was a 30-year period
12
of war, famine, poverty, racial pogroms, and misery that existed largely
because a network of high-level obligations and horrendous ideas
(especially the racism used to justify colonialism, which benefitted the
rich of these societies enormously, but sent the poor to die in unjust
wars, contract awful diseases for which they had no immunity, and
commit atrocities) set the conditions up. After about a hundred million
deaths and thirty tears of war, societies finally decided, “No More”.
They dismantled their Elites vigorously, North American and European
nations included. This became the “golden age” of the educated Gentry.
In the U.S. (for which the 1950s were a decade of prosperity; in Europe,
it was a period of rebuilding and not very prosperous) it was also the
“golden age of the middle class”.
However, the Elite has brought itself back to life. This Gilded Age
isn’t as bad as the last one, but it’s heading that way. It started in the
late 1970s when the U.S. fell in love again with elitism: Studio 54,
cocaine– a drug that captures the personality of that cultural change
well, because its effect is to flood the brain with dopamine, causing
extreme arrogance– and “trickle-down economics”.
Assessing the present state of conflict requires attention to what
each party wants. What does the Gentry want? The Gentry has a
strange, love-hate relationship with capitalism. Corporations are
detested (even more than they deserve) by this class and most people
in the Gentry want the U.S. to look more like Europe: universal
healthcare, decent vacation allotments, and cheap, ecologically sound
high-speed trains. This might give the impression of a socialist bent,
and that impression’s not wrong. Yet their favorite places are New
York (the center of capitalism) and Silicon Valley (also fiercely
capitalistic). Although left-leaning, the Gentry are strong champions
for non-corporate capitalism. There is no contradiction here. European
social democracies have also managed to create hybrid systems that
combine the safety and infrastructure of socialism with the innovation
and individual liberty of capitalism: the best of both worlds.
For a contrast, what the Elite has been pushing for is the worst of
both worlds, at least for average people. The truth of corporate
“capitalism” is that it provides the best of both systems (socialism and
capitalism) for the Elite and the worst of both for everyone else. It’s a
welfare state in which only very well-connected people are citizens, it
favors command economies (which are what most corporations are,
internally) and it stifles the positive-sum innovation that is capitalism’s
saving grace. The upper tier of society wants social stability for
13
themselves (to stay in and keep others out) but they favor extreme
economic variability (also known as “inequality”) because it gives
them more opportunities to exploit their social status for economic gain
(read: private-sector corruption).
Air travel in the contemporary U.S. is an illustrative example of
this “worst of both worlds” scenario: the pricing is erratic,
unreasonable, and even a bit mean-spirited, which shows the volatility
of capitalism, while the low quality of service and the abysmal morale
of the industry feel like direct transplants from the Soviet Union.

THE FUTURE

A major battle is coming, with all three of these categories (Labor,

Gentry, and Elite) involved. The Gentry and the Elite are at funda-
mental opposites on the type of society they want to see and, for
decades, the Elite has been winning, but their victories are becoming
harder to win as technology opens up the world. Labor might seem like
a nonparticipant in the ideological battles, but they comprise most of
the casualties, and they’ve seen shells land in their backyard (especially
if they live in Detroit). Not only are they losing their jobs and social
status, but their communities have been demolished.
Something else is happening, which is relevant both in a macro-
historical sense and to the U.S. in 2012. One way to divide human
history is into three eras: pre-Malthusian, trans-Malthusian, and post-
Malthusian. I refer, of course, to the prediction of Thomas Malthus,
early in the Industrial Revolution, that population growth in
contemporary societies would lead to a catastrophe because population
grew exponentially, while economic growth was linear. He was wrong.
Economic growth has always been exponential, but for most of human
history it has had a very slow (under 1% per year) exponential curve–
slower than population growth, and slow enough to look linear. His
mathematical model was wrong, but his conclusion– that population
grows until it is checked (i.e. people die) by disease, famine, and war–
was true in nature and of almost every human society from the dawn of
time to about 1800. He was wrong that it would afflict England and the
richer European countries in the mid-19th century– because the
Industrial Revolution accelerated economic growth enough to prevent
a global Malthusian crunch. On the other hand, there were local
Malthusian catastrophes. Ireland endured severe poverty and

14
oppression, colonialism was deeply horrible and did, in fact, represent
many of the vices Malthus warned about.
The world was pre-Malthusian when societies were doomed to
grow faster in population than in their ability to support it. This led,
over the millennia, to certain assumptions about society that can be
categorized as “zero-sum”. For one tribe to take care of its young,
another tribe must lose wealth or be destroyed. For English to be rich,
Irish must starve. For Southern whites to live well, blacks must be
slaves. For capital to be profitable, labor must be exploited. If Catholic
Spain has one colony, Protestant England must have more. For the
German people to have “lebensraum”, Central European countries
must be invaded and their inhabitants killed. “Medieval” horrors were
an artifact of the Malthusian reality of that time, but such atrocities
continued even as the long-standing Malthusian inequality (population
growth being greater than economic growth) reversed itself.
We are now in a trans-Malthusian state, and have been for about
two hundred years. Global economic growth is now over 4% per year,
which is the fastest it has ever been, and there’s no sign of it slowing
down. The world has a lot of problems, and there are pockets of severe
decay, corruption, and poverty; but on the whole, it’s becoming a better
place, and at an accelerating (hyper-exponential) rate. The world is no
longer intrinsically Malthusian, but pre-Malthusian attitudes still
dominate, especially at the pinnacles of our most successful societies.
This shouldn’t be shocking, because the very traits (especially, low
empathy and greed) that would be required to succeed in a zero-sum
world are still strong in our upper classes. This legacy won’t go away
overnight. The people haven’t changed very much. Pre-Malthusian
fearmongering is also very effective on less intelligent people, who
haven’t figured out that the world has changed in the past two hundred
years. They still believe in the zero-sum world wherein, if “illigal”
immigrants “take all the jobs”, middle-class white people will starve.
The trans-Malthusian state is, I believe, intrinsically more volatile
than a pre-Malthusian one. Technology is causing the job market to
change faster, but this paradoxically makes individual spells of
unemployment longer. Another thing is that we’re seeing something
that pre-Malthusian economies didn’t have to worry about: economic
depressions. This is not to romanticize pre-Malthusian life or societies.
They would experience famines, wars, and disease epidemics that
would kill far more people than any economic depression, but those
had natural or historical causes that were not intrinsic and desirable.
15
We’ve been able to eliminate most of these evils from life without
losing anything in the process. These depressions, in my view, come
from economic progress itself (and moreover, our inability to manage
growth in a way that distributes prosperity, rather than displacing
people). The first quarter of the 20th century saw unprecedented
advancement in food production– a good thing, undeniably– which
caused agricultural commodities to drop in price. This caused small
farmers (who could not partake in these advances to the same extent)
to fall into poverty. Without the small farmers, towns supported by
them weren’t doing well either. Poverty isn’t a “moral medicine” that
clears out the bad in society. It doesn’t make people better or harder
working. It ruins people. It’s a cancer. It spreads. And it did. Rural
poverty was severe in the United States by 1925, before the Depression
officially began. Urban sophisticates and elites were OK in 1925, hence
this era is remembered as being prosperous. In 1933? Not so much. The
cancer had grown. Throughout the 1930s, the rich were terrified of an
American communist revolution.
We don’t want another Great Depression, and what’s scary in
2012 is that it seems like what happened to agricultural products in the
1920s is now happening to almost all human labor. We’re outsourcing,
automating, and “streamlining”, and all of these changes are
fundamentally good, but if we don’t take steps to prevent the collapse
of the middle class, we could lose our country. This will almost
certainly require innovations that the right wing will decry as
“socialism”, but it will also involve techniques (such as crowd-funding
and microloans for small businesses) that are far more capitalistic than
anything the corporates have come up with.
We are trans– (not post-) Malthusian because we live in a world
where scarcity is still in force (although often artificial) and zero-sum
mentalities dominate (even though they’re inappropriate to a
technological world). If Mexican immigrants “take the jobs”, formerly
middle-class white people will be without healthcare. What’s required
is to step away from the zero-sum attitude (expressed often in racism)
and recognize that no one of any ethnicity, jobless or employed, should
be without healthcare. Ever. Technology is great at helping us generate
more resources and make more with what we have, and we have to
accept that it will “unemploy” people on a regular basis, but the bounty
should be distributed fairly, and not hogged by the fortunate while
those it renders transiently jobless are allowed to fall into poverty.

16
“Collateral damage” is not acceptable and, if the 1920s and ’30s are
illustrative, it can’t be contained. The damage will spread.
What does this have to do with the ladders and their conflict?
Labor is a trans-Malthusian social category because it lives in a world
that values fair play (a positive-sum, post-Malthusian value) but that is
constrained by artificial scarcity. The Elite is pre-Malthusian; they are
obsessed with the zero-sum game of social status and the need to keep
themselves elevated and others out. The Gentry, although not without
its faults, is properly post-Malthusian. Their values (political liberal-
ism, individual freedom, enough socialism to ensure a just society,
positive-sum outlook, and a positive view of technology) represent
what it will take to evolve toward a post-Malthusian state.

17
UNDERSTANDING THE BLUE CHURCH
By Jordan Greenhall

In my Situational Assessment: 2017,2 I quoted a post from Reddit:

“The Blue Church is panicking because they’ve just witnessed the

birth of a new Red Religion. Not the tired old Christian clichés they
defeated back in the ’60s, but a new faith based on cultural identity
and outright rejection of the Blue Faith.” — /u/notjfao

A number of folks noted that they were not familiar with the
concept of the Blue Church and wondered what was meant by it. The
Democratic Party? Liberalism? Progressivism? As I mentioned in
SA:2017, I had originally lifted the idea wholesale from that Reddit post
with only an intuitive sense that it (and its juxtaposition with a Red
Religion) was useful and pointed at something real.
In this essay, I dive into the concept. Below I endeavor to provide
an answer that is adequate to Deep Code. I believe that the results are
well worth the effort, but this is not a simple journey. Few things of
importance these days are. If we want to get to the bottom of the
contemporary situation, we are going to have to get comfortable going
deep.
The abstract is this: the Blue Church is a kind of narrative/ideology
control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved
(rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century
to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment”
and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective
political and dominant cultural force in the United States.
We can trace its roots at least as far back as the beginning of the
20th Century where it emerged in response to the new capabilities of
mass media for social control. By mid-century it began to play an
increasingly meaningful role in forming and shaping American culture-
producing institutions; became pervasive through the last half of the
20th and seems to have peaked in its influence somewhere in the first
decade of the 21st Century.

2
https://medium.com/rally-point-journal/situational-assessment-2017-
trump-edition-d189d24fc046#.23vznfq7m
18
 It is now beginning to unravel.
In part it is unravelling because of developing schisms within its
master narrative, the Blue Faith. These are important, but they are not
the subject of this essay. In this essay, I am focusing on what I think is
both much more fundamental and much less obvious: deep shifts in
technology and society that are undermining the very foundations of the
Church. Shifts that render the Church itself obsolete.
If you are ready for a deep dive, come on in. The water is warm.

COMPLEXITY AND CONTROL

Yaneer Bar-Yam’s book Making Things Work3, does an excellent

job explaining the relationship between complexity and the kinds of
control structures that we humans build to try and manage that
complexity. For those who want to go deeper, I recommend the whole
book. The basic idea is actually pretty simple.
Imagine a boat. We are going to row that boat, starting with but
one paddle. If you’ve ever learned to canoe, you know that this isn’t
simple. There is an art to it. You have to hold the paddle correctly, you
have to learn how to put it into the water, how to stroke, how to return.
The difference between doing it well and doing it poorly is significant.
But, with a little practice, almost everyone can get at least reasonably
capable of rowing their canoe.
This is a “management of complexity” problem. The relationship
between oar, water, boat and person is complex. All of these systems
are feeding back on each other in subtle and hard to predict ways. But
the “control capacity” of a standard-issue human is up to the task. The
human body, adapted to things like walking upright on two legs and
throwing rocks has enough control capacity to manage this level of
complexity.
Now add another oar. Generally, even someone experienced with
a single paddle takes a little while to get it figured out. In particular, you
have to learn how to simplify the problem by constraining some of the
degrees of freedom of the paddles. Perhaps you fix the oars to the boat
so that they can only traverse a single path. Certainly, you are going to
have to make sure that you are paddling both oars in the same rhythm.
By getting the oars into “coherence,” you can get the complexity of the
problem inside your control capacity.

3
http://necsi.edu/publications/mtw/
19
 Coherence is one of the most important concepts in the
management of complexity. When you take two systems (two paddles)
and synchronize them, you radically simplify the complexity of the
overall system. By getting two paddles into coherence, you are able to
turn two paddles that you can’t manage into one big paddle that you can
manage.
Now add another person to the mix. Side by side -  each with one
oar. This kicks the complexity up a lot. We are now dealing not only
with two oars, we are dealing with two different control structures. And,
of course, the only way to get things moving is for the control structures
to get into coherence. Fortunately, humans are pretty good at this too.
Like dancers or musicians playing together, we have a lot of bandwidth
for small group synchrony. Getting into flow together takes some doing,
but with a little practice we can manage this complexity.
Now add another ten people into the boat. This is a real problem.
The complexity of this overall system exceeds the natural control
capacity of “group flow”. Try as you might, it is darn near impossible
for a group of twelve people to “self-organize” into an effective rowing
team.
Unless you put someone in charge.
Add someone to the front of the boat whose job is nothing but
synchronizing the whole team (“stroke!”) and reduce everyone else’s
job to responding to the signal coming from that leader (“stroke!”) and
suddenly the system comes back into control. In effect, you’ve replaced
thirteen individuals with one “group of people” and one “leader” in a
control hierarchy. This is a radical simplification. As the Greeks and
Romans of old discovered, it scales. As long as the people rowing the
boat stay inside their box and focus only on doing their job, and as long
as the coxswain says in a simple rhythm, you can stack dozens of rowers
and get the job done.
Notice what happens here. In particular, notice what has to happen
up and down the control hierarchy. The bandwidth (the amount of
signal) going up and down the hierarchy has to be extremely simple.
(“Stroke!”) Imagine if the rowers had to paddle and converse about
where the boat should go. It couldn’t be done. Imagine if the coxswain
had to try and control two boats simultaneously. Except in the very rare
circumstance that the two boats could be consistently and precisely
coherent, it couldn’t be done.

20
 These are the core concepts to understand the Blue Church. The
complexity of the system. Our ability to simplify the system. The
control bandwidth available to manage the simplified system.

THE COMPLEXITY OF MODERN LIFE

In 1860, the population of the United States was 30 million people.

Six short generations later, the population had increased tenfold to over
300 million people.
Consider this. For the first millennium A.D., the human population
was relatively constant. Over the next six hundred years, it only barely
doubled. Then, suddenly, with the beginnings of the industrial
revolution it began to take off. By the 20th Century, the rate of growth
in the United States (and the world) absolutely skyrocketed. The past
150 years have witnessed an unprecedented explosion of population,
and along with that population, an explosion of social complexity.
By any measure of social complexity, the transition from the 19th
to the 20th Century was extraordinary. For the first time in human
history, the population shifted from a rural to an urban majority bringing
the increased pace of life4 and social interaction that comes with big
cities. Horses gave way to railroads which were replaced by auto-
mobiles and then airplanes - shrinking the world into a single connected

4
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.full.pdf
21
meta-community5. We went from Darwin first postulating evolution in
1859 all the way to Crick and Watson’s DNA in 1953. We went from
the first theory of electromagnetism in 1864 to the actual deployment of
the Atomic Bomb in 1945. This was a hell of a century.
And just like in our example of adding a dozen people to our boat,
this expansion of complexity created a problem. The forms of social
control that had been used to get us to the 19th Century were inadequate
to the levels of novelty and complexity of the 20th Century. Society
cannot function without a regulatory structure adequate to its level of
complexity.
The Blue Church was the emergent solution to this problem.

UNDERSTANDING MEDIA

Technology is not neutral. As Marshall McLuhan wrote, when we

innovate technology, “we become what we behold. We shape our tools
and then our tools shape us.”
McLuhan’s theories are subtle and powerful. In fact, it is hard for
me to imagine anyone being able to navigate the contemporary
environment without at least a good grasp of his principles. If you’ve
never read his stuff, I recommend Understanding Media: the Extensions
of Man.6
I’m not going to try and recapitulate McLuhan’s work here.
Instead, I’m going to steal some portions of it and recast it in a very
different form to make it accessible for our present purposes.
Imagine a landscape of rolling hills. Now imagine rain falling
evenly on this uneven ground. What is going to happen? Well,
eventually, the water is going to run downhill, gather in the valleys and,
depending on the actual shape of the terrain, either form into a flowing
river or gather into a lake or pond.
Once you know the “shape” of a particular space and the nature of
the forces acting in it, you can make some neat predictions about how it
is going to play out. Of course, the future is never locked down. The
lake might overflow and transform into a waterfall. A meteor might fly

5
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/stories/how-fast-could-
you-travel-across-the-us-in-the-1800s
6
https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Media-Extensions-Marshall-
McLuhan/dp/0262631598
22
out of the sky and change the shape of the whole space. But, subject to
certain constraints, you can predict the future.
Media is like a landscape. The kind of human social dynamics and
psychologies that form around an oral tradition are quite different than
those that can (and do) form around a literate media.
The 20th Century brought a number of technological advance-
ments. One of the most important was the emergence and development
of “mass media.” While the various kinds of mass media (newspaper,
radio, television) are different, as “mass” (or “broadcast”) media they
share a basic shape: they are asymmetric. One to many. Author to
audience. Coxswain to rowers.
Not everyone can get access to the printing press, the radio station
or the television broadcast booth. Those few that can are the ones to get
to create the narrative. Everyone else is the audience. We read, listen,
watch. But not much else. (Actually, we do one very important thing
else, but I’ll get to that in a moment.)
The key insight for this post is that as an audience we are coherent.
As a mass, we transform from millions of diverse individuals into one,
relatively simple, group. So long as we can be maintained in this
coherence, we present something that can be managed.
This is the formal core of the Blue Church: it solves the problem of
20th Century social complexity through the use of mass media to
generate manageable social coherence.

THE FORMATION OF GOOD OPINION

Once you grasp the basic shape of the Blue Church control
structure, you begin to see it everywhere. There is a basic bi-directional
flow. In the upwards direction, there is the flow of “credentialed
authority.” The “experts” who are authorized through some legitimizing
process to be permitted to form and express their opinions through some
form of broadcast media. In the downwards direction, these “good
opinions” which anchor and place boundaries around our collective
social coherence.
Consider academia. The students are the audience. Their job is to
pay attention to the credentialed authority. To listen and watch closely
and to learn from the professor the nature of “good opinion” in this
particular domain. If they do a good job in this, that is, if they can answer
questions correctly according to the authorities’ evaluation process, then
they pass. If not, they fail.
23
 While the content matters, the form is crucial. Regardless of the
specific subject matter, every class is a lesson in how to play the Blue
Church game.
The professors, in their turn, are authorities largely because they
did a good job being students and were invited into the authority
hierarchy. Here they learned the nuance and boundary of good opinion,
the social pecking order (Harvard is at the top thank you) and the ins
and outs of being a good expert.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the academy is
propaganda or bullshit. In fact, in many ways, the opposite. It works.
This process of academic credentialization has proven to be a powerful
engine for filtering out nonsense and searching for truth. While there
have been a lot of digressions (string theory) and inappropriate
authorizations (economics), in the main, the 20th Century expertise
machine has been the crown jewel of civilization.
What I am pointing to here is the formal structure. Broadcast.
Asymmetry. An architecture that enables a scalable division of labor for
social sense making and decision making. No one could possibly try and
understand even a small fraction of what is going on in the world. So
we break the problem up into bits, hand the smaller problems up the
expertise hierarchy where they are processed and reduced to simple
shared “good opinion” which is then broadcast down and out to the
whole population.
This gets us good answers to hard problems and, more importantly,
gets us all more or less on the same page. And *this* enables us to run
a modern society.
For example, imagine what street traffic would look like if
everyone had their own opinions about what should happen. Disaster.
But as long as we all agree, implicitly and without much consideration,
that a red light means “stop” then suddenly millions of people flinging
tons of steel about at sixty-five miles per hour is manageable.
Similarly, as long as we all agree that “free trade is a good idea”,
or that “borders should be protected,” or that “healthcare is a human
right,” or that “people should be treated equally,” or that “carbon
emissions lead to global warming” then the still enormously difficult
job of designing and implementing policies based upon these
assumptions and frameworks can be managed and the ship of state
moved forward. (“Stroke!”)

LIFE IN THE BLUE CHURCH

24
 Going deeper, the actual playing out of the Blue Church control
structure is influenced by three characteristics of human beings:
We are a pack animal constantly trying to make sure we have high
status within the pack;
We have a really hard time distinguishing between “having
attention” and “deserving attention;”
We principally learn by doing and emulation (not by thinking).
The first characteristic leads to one of the most important
reinforcement functions that maintains the Blue Church: social
signaling. In Blue Church society, to hold and express good opinion
means that you are part of the pack, in the tribe, on the team. Holding
and expressing good opinion brings social benefit. More importantly,
failing to hold and express good opinion can be ruinous.
This social dynamic means that good opinion is self-reinforcing.
There is no need for a top-down thought police or such. Once enough
people are coherent around good opinion, natural human social
dynamics will kick-in to maintain that coherence.
This one is easy to test for yourself. If you live in any big city in
the United States, go to a social gathering and simply express an opinion
that is out of line with Blue Church orthodoxy. Then watch closely.
Particularly watch the reactions of members of the opposite sex. Pretend
that you believe, for example, that climate change isn’t real. Or that
Islam or Feminism are dangerous ideologies. What will quite likely
happen is that you will be “out grouped.” At a physical level, way below
conscious consideration, you will be assessed and found wanting. Not a
good mating prospect. Not a good social ally.
Interestingly, this is true largely regardless of where you live in the
social hierarchy. Regardless of whether you are a twenty-something just
learning how to play the game or a senior expert trading on your good
standing, social pressure will provide a strong signal on how to stay in
coherence.
After all, if you have worked for decades to achieve a high level of
social standing, this is a lot to risk for having bad opinions. Ask Sam

25
Harris7 and Jordan Peterson8 and Steven Pinker9  -  all of whom are high
experts who have recently begun to find themselves on the wrong side
of good opinion.
The downside result of this social reinforcement, of course, is the
echo chamber where opinions that violate good opinion are removed
from discourse - even when they are valuable and important. And the
contemporary Blue Church has definitely developed into an echo
chamber. There is always room to play *within* good opinion, of
course. In fact, the Church offers a broad menu of good opinions to try
on and play with. As long as you play within the coherence of good
opinion, you are free to roam. You have the freedom to be Lady Gaga
or Taylor Swift. But mind the gap. Social reinforcement has gotten very
sensitive in the wake of the Trumpocalypse. If you step on the third rail,
you are in for a shock.

THE BLUE CHURCH AND CULTURE

The habit of seeking authority is not merely a product of Blue

Church training. It is, in fact, one of the more hard-wired aspects of
being human. We are a social animal and we are constantly on the
lookout for people to watch and learn from. In many ways, this capacity
is the “secret of our success”10 and the foundation of culture itself.
However, when we look at our hardwired “attention allocation”
functions, we discover that human beings use a pretty simple model:
pay attention to the people who other people are paying attention to.
As a society, we are obsessed with who has attention, and
conspicuously less interested in whether it is deserved.
Among many things, this deficit leads to the cultural consequence
of “celebrity”. Since having attention is hard to separate from deserving
attention, simply having the camera pointing at you implicitly confers
upon you some of the power and credentials of authority. This is why
we find ourselves in the situation where Hollywood entertainers and

7
http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-versus-islamophobe-sam-harris-
has-new-atheist-movement-been-hijacked-bigots
8
http://m.thespec.com/opinion-story/7207346-opinion-jordan-peterson-a-
little-shy-on-proof/
9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFLX4x6y6r8
10
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-
Domesticating/dp/0691166854
26
professional athletes are empowered to steward good opinion far
beyond their actual expertise.
In a broadcast world, merely being “on camera” is to be
credentialed. Regardless of your actual capabilities, insight, or
character, if you can somehow manage to get on camera you are granted
actual audience *and* social authority (Kim Kardashian). By contrast,
if (for some reason), access to the camera is prevented, withheld or
otherwise not achieved, your lack of access results in both lack of
practical audience *and* questionable authority - regardless of your
actual capabilities, insight or character (Bernie Sanders during the
primaries).
As it turns out, this fact played an important role in precisely how
the Blue Church came to be, why it ended up allied with the Democratic
Establishment and why it chose the particular content of the Faith. More
on that in the next post perhaps.
Here is the kicker. Being on camera gives you authority even if you
aren’t real. This is why pop culture plays such an important role for the
Blue Church. Carroll O’Connor11 was somewhat influential as a
celebrity. But his character Archie Bunker12 lives high in the cannon of
the Blue Church. Every week for years, millions of people gave their
attention to the Archie Bunker family and tuned in to the social signaling
of good (and bad) opinion. At a human level, the signaling was very
clear. Even as a young child I could read the signs (and monitor the
laugh track). Archie was an archetype of a fading good opinion, rapidly
moving out of favor; while the rest of the family represented an
emerging good opinion in the process of establishing its position in the
social field.
Yes, we humans can discern between real people and fictional
characters. But the importance of pop culture in the operations of the
Blue Church shouldn’t be underestimated. Broadcast is powerful. When
tens of millions of people are consistently entrained to narratives honed
to a sharp edge by market forces to be hyper-capable of grabbing and
holding attention, it is going to have an effect. This is particularly true
when the entire culture has been trained for generations to learn, think
and act within the authority framework of the Church.

DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO

11
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_O%27Connor
12
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_in_the_Family
27
 The contents of popular culture and the good opinion of authorities
are important aspects of the Church, but the most central and subtle
lesson taught by the Blue Church is the Blue Church itself.
Whether you are learning algebra, or reading about history, or
watching a basketball game or listening to your favorite musician, the
commonality among all of these is the asymmetric relationship of
broadcast. Pay attention, watch and listen closely, learn and express
“good opinion” and act accordingly. The content is important, but far
more important is the form. The content varies. The form is consistent.
Just like the rowers entrained to the cadence of the coxswain, we
have all of us trained for the vast majority of our lives to find, adopt and
execute on some kind of master narrative. Some story that is
complicated enough to respond to life but simple enough to be managed.
Some framework of assumptions, axioms, truths, truth making and
authority that takes the absolutely overwhelming complexity of the
modern world and allows us poor apes some easy way to move forward
in a coordinated fashion.
This fact explains a whole lot about what is going on in America
(and most of the West) today. Perhaps it helps explain why the left is
always trying to find a narrative to simplify and make the world
manageable. It might even explain the mania on the left for
psychoanalysis. After all when your principal social responsibility is to
respond correctly to authority and deftly read where you are in the field
of good opinion, being able to peek behind the psychological curtain is
an advantageous skill. (And if you really want to go deep, the ability to
dismiss bad opinion as psychopathology is one of the most subtle, and
surprisingly common, techniques of the Church.)
In any event, the near monopoly of the Church on our ability to
make sense and meaning of the world certainly helps to explain why the
ongoing collapse of the Blue Church is creating so much anxiety.

28
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THE END IS NIGH

There are many reasons why the Blue Church is crumbling. Some
of it has to do with an increasing friction among the diverse sub-
narratives that have gathered under Blue, particularly where the
fundamental incoherence of “identity politics” is reaching a tipping
point (and is being pushed into what feels to me like a nihilist endgame
by the alt-right)13. However, while this tension is important, I don’t
think it is fundamental. Instead, to identify the real existential threat to
the Blue Church, I return to our two core concepts: technology and
complexity.
One primary driver behind the collapse of the Blue Church is the
swift replacement of the very mass media it is premised upon with a
new symmetric kind of media - the Internet. This new media presents a
niche for coherence that is very different from the one that gave rise to
the Blue Church. It is a fundamentally different landscape. Like polar
bears condemned to extinction by a thawing ice cap, the Blue Church’s
days are numbered by the relentless erosion of broadcast mindshare to
the new much more symmetrical media of the Internet.
As I discussed in Situational Assessment: 2017, I assign a
significant portion of the surprising victory of the Trump Insurgency to
the fact that the transfer of power from broadcast to digital has crossed
the tipping point.
It is this technological transition that leads me to the conclusion
that while the Blue Church (and its allies in the Deep State and the
Establishment) can certainly struggle and hold for a while, their day is
done. The climate is changing and they must adapt or die.
And then there is the question of complexity. The Blue Church
emerged in response to the explosion of complexity of the 20th Century
and the capacity of mass media to form a control structure that was
adequate to that complexity.
It worked. But the 20th Century didn’t stand still. In fact, it
accelerated. In the face of this ongoing acceleration, the Blue Church
control structure is no longer adequate. The level of complexity of the
21st Century is simply outside of the control capacity that is possible

13

http://takimag.com/article/god_bless_the_right_wing_social_justice_warri
ors_gavin_mcinnes/ print#axzz4c9ac2BrG
30
within the form of the Blue Church. Unless we abandon the Church and
move to a new approach, our race into the future will be increasingly
out of control.
However, and this is a profoundly important point, we currently
know of no form of control structure that is adequate - even in principle.
The fundamental problem is at least threefold:
Our entire approach to managing complex systems like our
environment is flawed. Until the late 20th Century we could get away
with this flaw because we weren’t powerful enough to matter. This has
changed and as Joe Brewer has been writing about beautifully,14 we
need to level up quickly. We need to switch from trying to manage
complex systems with complicated control structures and invent
entirely new techniques for intrinsically up regulating the complex
systems that make up our natural world. We don’t yet know how to do
this.
Complex systems that include human beings are different. Unlike
atmospheres and nitrogen cycles, people can forecast, strategize and
adapt hyper-rapidly to our environment. Dave Snowden calls
this anthro-complexity.15 We have to innovate an entirely new approach
to governance that is adequate to the challenging set of problems posed
by anthro-complexity. We really don’t know how to do this.
Finally, we have to come to terms with the real nature of
technology, the difficult to predict feedback loops of how we affect
technology and how it affects us. And then we have to figure out how
to navigate the actual consequences of exponential technology - on
ourselves and on our lived world. Most people aren’t even prepared to
think about how to do this.
In the context of these challenges, the Blue Church is simply in
way over its head. The world is just too big and moving too fast for this
kind of control hierarchy to keep up - even when it is trying to do its
best, it is going to get in the way. Addressing these challenges is going
to require the innovation of an entirely new approach to how we
collectively make sense of and act in the world.
I have been referring to the solution with the term “collective
intelligence” and have discussed some of the issues in a short

14
https://medium.com/@joe_brewer/why-being-realistic-feels-like-
doomsday-thinking-3eddf421ff59#.gb11wk7z5
15
http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/whats-in-a-name/
31
video here16 and in an older Medium post focused on blockchain efforts
in the space here17.
The brief on collective intelligences is that we really know very
little about them. Perhaps the most robust version of a highly
decentralized collective intelligence that has so far emerged is the Red
Religion / Trump Insurgency that I discuss in Situational Assessment:
2017. As I mention in that post, for a number of reasons, I do not believe
that this particular kind of “dCI” will get us where we need to go. But it
presents a very useful case study. For those who want to dig deeper, I
recommend taking a look at the work posted by Gustavo in Rally Point
Journal.18
If you know of other people who are doing good work here, please
mention them in the comments. If you feel like you are in a position to
help the small group of people who are gathering around trying to at
least begin to ask the right questions, drop me a line.

IN CONCLUSION

Well, that ran a bit long. I hope some of you found it worth sticking
it out to the end. I had intended to spend some time on the actual content
of the Blue Faith, but that had to be cut. If you are interested, let me
know in the comments. If enough people care, I’ll take a swing at it and
perhaps at the Establishment and the Deep State to boot.
[Author’s note, I have never read “Yarvin” or his articulation of
“the Cathedral.” This material could have inspired the original use of
the concept by the Reddit author. If what I have written here is close to
Yarvin’s analysis, that is interesting. If not, well, that is interesting too.]

16
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3OlG4OmczI
17
https://medium.com/deep-code/the-future-of-organization-
b26219e5fc95#.a0ksiy3y6
18
https://medium.com/rally-point-journal/collective-intellignce-and-
swarms-in-the-red-church-49f6a6d04825#.p2qjyvc1k
32