I recently shared a list of 26 essential books about technology.

But there was an unusual twist to this list—none of these books were written by technologists. They all came from wise humanists, philosophers, novelists, and social thinkers.

This is quite unconventional nowadays—STEM rules everything and everywhere, while the humanities are in crisis. But these are the books I’d assign if I taught in Stanford’s entrepreneur program.

They would give techies a mind-expanding vision from outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber. These books would guide them to concepts and solutions that tech, on its own, will never deliver.

Back in August, I promised that I’d write about some of the individual books on my list.

Today I’m doing just that—offering a rapid-fire overview of some insights from Hannah Arendt, one of the deepest thinkers of the 20th century.

Hannah Arendt

As many of you know, I often study predictions made 50 or 100 years ago, and try to see how accurate they were.

I have done this in the past with J.G. Ballard, Arnold Mitchell, Chris Anderson, Paul Goodman, Oswald Spengler, and others.

Today I turn my attention to an extraordinary analysis from Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition (1958). It’s so accurate, it’s almost scary.

Arendt is a constant source of inspiration for me. In this book, she warns us about technologists who are dangerous becuse they are so completely out-of-touch with their humanity. She wrote this book in the mid-1950s, but you might think she was living in Silicon Valley today.

Here’s what she says about these dangerous individuals in the opening pages of her 1958 book:

1. On page one she says that people who are disconnected with the human condition are obsessed with outer space and want to “escape man’s imprisonment to the earth.”

2. On page two, she says that these people are “directed towards making life artificial”—sort of like virtual reality.

3. On page three, she claims that they will eventually want to create “artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking….we would become the helpless slaves…at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”

4. On page four, she warns us that scientists have already shown (with the development of the atomic bomb) that they create dangerous things but are “the last to be consulted about their use.” So any prediction a scientist makes about the use of new tech is totally worthless—politicians and tyrants will decide how it is used.

5. On page five, she explains that in this kind of society, freedom becomes almost worthless, because people are deprived of the “higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.”

6. On page six, she says that the people pursuing this escape from the human condition are thus creating “modern world alienation.”

7. On page seven, she says that they inhabit “an ‘artificial’ world of things distinctly different from all natural surroundings”—so that their tech innovations will lead to an inevitable degradation of the environment, and a detachment from the real world.

I read all this in astonishment.

It sounds like Arendt had anticipated my recent article about Silicon Valley turning into a creepy cult—and grasped this potentiality more than 60 years ago.

In other word, she saw all this even before Silicon Valley had a name or a mission.

Arendt’s entire book is filled with insights. I won’t try to summarize everything, but I will share a few more of her provocative views.

Here are 12 more key passages from The Human Condition:

1. “Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world.” [It sounds like she is describing scrolling on a smartphone but Arendt wrote this before the first integrated circuit was built!]

2. “The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and things.” [Does that sound familiar?]

3. “The phenomenon of conformism is characteristic of the last stage of this modern development.”

4. “Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism.”

5. “Society always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion….imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”

6. “Behavior has replaced action as the foremost mode of human relationship.”

7. “The mass phenomenon of loneliness…has achieved its most extreme and antihuman form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world.”

8. “The loss of human experience in this development is extraordinarily striking. It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself, when it became “reckoning with consequences,” became a func­tion of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfill these functions much better than we ever could.”

9. “We have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented.”

10. “For mortals, the ‘easy life of the gods’ would be a lifeless life.”

11. “This does not mean that modern man has lost his capacities….although these faculties are more and more restricted to the abilities of the artist.”

12. “It is quite con­ceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprece­dented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”

Does any of that ring true today? Let me remind you that all this was written in the mid-1950s.

I will have more to say in the future about other books on my subversive tech reading list. But even this quick survey of Hannah Arendt’s worldview shows how much we gain from adopting a larger vision of technology from a wise and compassionate human standpoint.

On history's repeating itself

Excerpts from the History of the Peloponnesian War

So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge.

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings.

What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense.

Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one’s blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all.

Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever.

These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime.

If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.

Revenge was more important than self-preservation. And if pacts of mutual security were made, they were entered into by the two parties only in order to meet some temporary difficulty, and remained in force only so long as there was no other weapon available. When the chance came, the one who first seized it boldly, catching his enemy off his guard, enjoyed a revenge that was all the sweeter from having been taken, not openly, but because of a breach of faith. It was safer that way, it was considered, and at the same time a victory won by treachery gave one a title for superior intelligence.

And indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out.

Leaders of parties in the cities had programs which appeared admirable—on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy—but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves.

In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour.

Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action.

[… the search for truth strains the patience of most people, who would rather believe the first things that come to hand.]

As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.

As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion.

As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves. As a rule those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognized their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents; fearing that they might lose a debate or find themselves out-maneuvered in intrigue by their quick-witted enemies, they boldly launched straight into action; while their opponents, overconfident in the belief that they would see what was happening in advance, and not thinking it necessary to seize by force what they could secure by policy, were the more easily destroyed because they were off their guard.

Certainly it was in Corcyra that there occurred the first examples of the breakdown of law and order.

There was the revenge taken in their hour of triumph by those who had in the past been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed; there were the wicked resolutions taken by those who, particularly under the pressure of misfortune, wished to escape from their usual poverty and coveted the property of their neighbors; there were the savage and pitiless actions into which men were carried not so much for the sake of gain as because they were swept away into an internecine struggle by their ungovernable passions.

Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself; for, if it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice.

Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.

…

People always think the greatest war is the one they are fighting at the moment, and when that is over they are more impressed with wars of antiquity; but, even so, this war will prove, to all who look at the facts, that it was greater than the others.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, late 400s BC

In ancient times, people would spend their summer vacations reading books. It is a little quaint nowadays, but you can still do that. Above, you can see two novels I have been reading recently: “War and Peace” (1868) by Lev Tolstoy, and “The Philosophy of the Apple Pie,” by Serena Bedini (2016). Strangely, these two widely different entities have something in common beyond being both definable with the same term, “novels.” Sometimes, differences are the key to understanding what some things have in common with each other. In this case, common element is evil. More exactly, love.

A few months ago, I found a copy of “War and Peace” on my shelves, realizing that I had never read it from start to finish. So, I set myself to engage in the task. My gosh, that was a task.

This novel is more than 1300 pages in its English translation. It starts by doing all those things that manuals about novel writing tell you a writer should never do. It is a slap in the face to the basic suggestion “don’t tell, show.” Tolstoy tells all the time and rarely shows. He tells in the “omniscient” viewpoint that has the writer playing God and telling readers about the details of how characters feel and think. And it starts by throwing in a true crowd of characters. Evidently, when the novel was written more than one and a half centuries ago, people were able to manage such a feat of reading it and enjoying it. At the time, it was what we would call today a “bestseller.”

For a modern reader, it is a feat comparable to climbing Mount Everest wearing tennis shoes — we are just not equipped for that kind of task. Anyway, I managed to do that, but I frequently lost track of what was going on. There are no less than five separate plots ongoing, and I often had to backtrack to understand who was doing exactly what and why. Let me tell you, some books on quantum mechanics I read in the past were easier. But I can tell you it was worth doing — oh, yes. Worth a lot.

It is a story that, if Tolstoy were alive today, could be lifted almost intact from its settings in the early 19th century to our times. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, with all its ramifications in European politics, looks so much like what is happening today that it is both bewildering and mesmerizing to read how Tolstoy chronicles the story. Tolstoy is considered to be a genius as a novelist. He was a genius, full stop.

Before I tell you more about “War and Peace,” let me tell you something about another book I have been reading these days. It is “La Filosofia della Torta di Mele” (The Philosophy of the Apple Pie), a 2016 novel by the Italian writer Serena Bedini. In literar terms, it is the complete opposite to Tolstoy’s war and peace. It is light, like a pâte feuilletée, written from the personal viewpoint of a character whose main problem is a persistent cough. She engages in a search for a special recipe for an apple pie in the Tuscan countryside; not the same kind of drama you find when Napoleon’s armies invade Russia. An easy novel for the blasé 21st-century reader that you can complete in one hour or even less. It leaves you with the sensation of a session of wine tasting that didn’t make you drunk, just relaxed and happy.

Comparing the “philosophy of the apple pie” to “war and peace” looks like comparing a bicycle to a space shuttle. Yet, the universe is fractal, and the two novels do have one fundamental thing in common (besides the fact of being, well, “novels”). Before I tell you what is this thing in common, allow me to digress a little.

You know that one of the masterpieces of Jorge Luis Borges is “Historia del Guerrero y de la Cautiva” (history of the warrior and the prisoner). It is above and beyond the “masterpiece” term — it is on another celestial plane. And what makes it such a master-masterpiece is the audacity of the author, who puts together two stories so different that the very idea of trying makes your head buzz: what does a Germanic Warrior of the early Middle Ages have in common with an English woman captured by an Argentinean Indio tribe and wed to their chieftain? There is something, yes, a very fundamental thing: the acceptance of the “other”, that some of us call “love” which, if you think about that, means exactly “accepting the other even though different.” It is too easy to love something that’s exactly like you; that’s called “narcissism.”

Only a master-master writer such as Borges could take up the challenge of writing such a story. Picking up enormous challenges and meeting them in full is the hallmark of true genius. Now, of course, I don’t dare compare myself to Borges. I just like to point out how the two stories have exactly one point in common: they are acts of love. Read “War and Peace” from start to finish, and you’ll note something that you might have missed at first, but then it appears to you like a flash of light from heaven.

There is no evil in the whole novel.

There is drama, there are emotions, bewilderment, rage, folly, madness, the whole spectrum of human emotions is there in “War and Peace” — but you won’t find in it a character hating another character. Not that it is a light novel about apple pies and curing one’s cough. Tolstoy is a master writer who masters every facet of the events he describes. Even when he tells us of characters that he finds unpleasant, such as Napoleon himself, he describes them as bumbling idiots, which probably they were, but still human beings with all their feelings, their emotions, their desires. In the novel, French and Russian soldiers fight each other, but do not hate each other. When the French or the Russians take prisoners, they treat them as humanely as it is reasonably possible given the circumstances. Nowhere is there talk of exterminating inferior races nor of herrenvolk who should rule them. There is only one event in the novel that you could be said to be evil. It is a real historical event: the lynching of a Russian student named Vereshchagin guilty (perhaps) of having diffused pro-French pamphlets. But even Count Rostopchin, the person who acts in cold blood to direct a crowd to attack Vereshchagin, is described as having human feelings and conscious of his mistake.

You see the same in “The Philosophy of the Apple Pie,” where, of course, you won’t find battles or lynchings, but that has a light touch that makes everything glow with a certain inner light. A firefly in a hot summer night.

Now, think for a moment about the sad spectacle of our times, where hate for everything different has become the exchange coin of all discourse on the media or anywhere else. How is it that nothing can be done anymore without hating someone or something? What madness is overtaking us? We drink evil, eat evil, breathe evil, continuously see evil, think evil, speak evil.

Tolstoy, philosopher, and historian, couldn’t explain what madness had taken millions of Christians in 1812 to march on to massacre and slaughter other Christians without any conceivable reasons for doing that. He would be even more baffled by our age when millions of human beings can be so easily convinced to hate other human beings without any conceivable reason — they are not required to massacre them with their own hands but, at least, to acquiesce to their slaughter by hunger, artillery, and drones.

We know that love is mostly in the foolish things of the world that God chose to shame the wise and the weak things of the world that God chose to shame the strong. Maybe an apple pie is one of these foolish and weak things that are nevertheless God’s choice to send us a message.

What if there simply is no alternative to America's permanent war party?

[The firing of an Iskander ballistic missile. Photo Credit: By Mil.ru, CC]

What if politics in America plays out not so much via presidential elections, but through a constant, if often obscured, struggle between the permanent war party (the hawks) and, well, everyone else?   If this is the case, then it is not going to be enough to just hold our breath and wait for a more peace-loving Trump to assume office on January 20, at which time, supposedly, the threat of WWIII will be called off.  Instead, a strategy must be devised that hard-headedly accepts that the permanent war party is not going anywhere, even after January 20, and therefore a strategy must be devised which accepts this tragic circumstance, while still giving us a chance to survive.  Such is the conceptual framework which political historian Victor Taki uses as his starting point for discovering a response to the Ukraine war. -The Editors

In the old Soviet anecdote, Radio Armenia is asked about the likelihood that a Third World War will take place. Upon reflection, Radio Armenia declares that a Third World War is unlikely, but it expects such a ferocious fight for peace that not a single stone will be left standing. This joke about Soviet-American relations at the time of the (first) Cold War acquires an uncanny relevance today, now that President Biden’s permission to Ukraine to use American missiles for strikes inside Russia has shifted the discussion from possible scenarios for building a stable peace to ways of avoiding WWIII.

Paradoxically, an ostensible willingness on the part of the nascent Trump administration to end the war in Ukraine has helped the globalist hawks to secure Biden’s consent to take this highly provocative measure. Its limited potential impact on the purely military aspect of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation has long been emphasized by this policy’s opponents. After all, the Russians have already placed their bombers out of range of those few ATACMS missiles and launchers that Ukraine currently has. However, any analyst who attempts to describe the actions of the Ukrainian leadership and its Western backers in terms of purely military rationality will necessarily miss the intended political and psychological effects of those actions.

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For almost a year the theme of “permitting” Ukraine to use the ATACMS and Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles for strikes into Russia’s interior has served as clickbait to offset Ukraine’s steady loss of ground. It has helped create the impression that it is Russia’s and not Ukraine’s fate that hangs in the balance, and that the articulate representatives of smaller or bigger (East) European nations can decide this fate by convincing the American president to call Putin’s bluff. After the clearly disappointing results of the US presidential elections from the perspective of Zelensky and his American and European backers, this “permission” becomes the last trump card to be thrown on the table in a reckless attempt to thwart Trump’s announced pacification of Ukraine.

The move is Machiavellian enough. In view of Putin’s September announcement that “authorization” of such strikes would be tantamount to NATO’s entry into the conflict, it will indeed be difficult for the Russian leader not to retaliate without losing face once these strikes actually take place. Russia’s retaliatory measures will in turn make it difficult for Trump to continue presenting Ukraine as “Biden’s war.” Apart from the danger of nuclear escalation that this scenario harbors, it will surely bury the prospect of a stable peace in Ukraine, however much the returning American president and his unchanging Russian counterpart would like to see it happen. 

The desire of some to stop the war turns out to be what gives others the opportunity to continue it. Given this circumstance, the doves might have to focus on ways of keeping the conflict within acceptable limits and forsake for the time being the different peace formulas meant to bring the war to a rapid end. Even if some variant of the “Vance Plan” (i. e. Ukraine’s neutral and demilitarized status plus the [existing] frontline as the new de factor Russian-Ukrainian border) could ultimately be accepted by Moscow, last Sunday’s news demonstrates that the global war party will not step back and simply let such an outcome materialize. 

Conclusion 

When an escalating provocation becomes the only way for the sidelined hawks not to lose badly from a prospective peace, the doves might need to reappraise their attitude towards the conflict itself. Continued within certain limits, the conflict represents the lowest common denominator between the otherwise incompatible interests and stakes of the different parties involved. At the same time, once the conflict becomes routine, the logic of de-escalation is likely to eventually prevail, if only because of the implacable law of universal entropy.  

Taking this into consideration, the doves’ strategy should be the opposite of the strategy of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of Risorgimento, which was famously expressed in Giuseppe Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard (1958). Lampedusa’s characters repeatedly state that “[i]f [they] want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” By contrast, today’s doves should realize that if they want things to change, things will have to stay as they are. This minimalist approach to conflict resolution in Ukraine might strike some as cynical in light of the daily losses of hundreds of soldiers on both sides of the frontline. However, a straighter road to peace contains the even deadlier traps that have been set by those who would rather flip over the grand Eurasian chessboard than admit their defeat.

A guest post by

Victor Taki

I am a historian interested in imperial Russia’s Balkan entanglements and the intellectual history of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. My latest book Russia’s Turkish Wars was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2024.

St Moses the Black, from the Damascene Gallery

You can describe the predicament that we’re in as an emergency … and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.

Wendell Berry

One of my many problems as a human being is that I can’t quite shake my activist mindset. For many years of my life, as a younger man, I ‘self-identified’, to use a phrase we had never heard of, as something called an ‘activist.’ Activism comes in many political colours, but my particular shade was the left-green variety, which set out to save the natural world from the Machine’s toxic impacts. This was not a bad thing to do. Quite the opposite: in its aims if not always in its outcomes, it was a good and a necessary one. The problem was that it trained the mind to see the world in a certain way.

Thinking about it now, I see that perhaps this last claim is the wrong way around. Perhaps my mind always thought that way, and my ‘activism’ was a way of doing something with it. Or perhaps my society trained me to think like that. For I think it is safe to say that ‘activism’ is a child of the Western way of seeing. We are an ‘activist’ culture. We like to identify problems and then solve them. We like to generalise about particulars. We like abstractions. We exist to ‘save the world’ or to ‘fix’ it, or to offer ‘solutions’. It is never enough for us to live in this world, to be content with who and what we are, to accept God’s will. No, we have to improve things; remake them in our image. This is the activist mindset, and it has been elevated to the status of a grand moral cause. It is, I would say, the West’s reason to live: our Big Idea.

My two recent essays about what I called ‘the Void’ of Western culture were certainly the product of Western abstract reasoning. I was trying to get a handle on what had happened to ‘the West’ since its rejection of its founding faith. I suggested in part one that our present moment was not a time of ‘repaganisation’ so much as an empty ‘Void’ with no spiritual core to it at all. Then, in part two, I proposed that we were unconsciously replaying the Christian story in various secularised forms, but that this would not be enough to fill the Void. Some other spiritual force would come to inhabit our throne.

The problem with talking like this is that a logical question then arises: alright, then: what shall we do about this? Once you have offered a great big abstract idea about what’s wrong, you really need to follow it up with a great big abstract idea about how to put it right. This is how we got all the grand and terrible ideologies of the 20th century. My problem - again, one of my many problems - is that while I am still tempted sometimes to identify a Big Idea about what’s wrong, my faith in putting it right with another one has long since collapsed.

I used to believe in Big Movements and Big Ideas. I wrote whole books about them. Not any more. For a long time, I have believed something else instead: that if there is any world-saving to be done - if this notion is not in fact just hubristic and stupid in itself - then it is only going to come from the small, the local and, above all, the spiritual. And if there is no world-saving to be done - well, then our work remains exactly the same.

‘Our work’, in fact, is probably just another bit of generalising. Maybe I should instead just say ‘my work’ and stop trying to palm off responsibility for my own inquiries onto society as a whole. Because the question now, here in the Void, is probably the same one as we have always wrestled with: how, then, shall we live?

Once upon a time, I thought I knew the answer: we should get out there and ‘save the world’. Then, one day, I realised that Chesterton had the number on this way of thinking when he asked, ‘what’s wrong with the world?’ and concluded, ‘I am.’ Much later, I followed Chesterton along the unexpected path into the Christian Church, and now I have another, very different notion of what ‘our work’ is. Unfortunately, it is much harder than coming up with another clever Big Idea. It is also almost impossible to match the Christian solution to the secular problem - at least in the world’s terms. In the world’s terms, in fact, it makes no sense at all.

Rather like Christianity, in fact.

In my recent Erasmus Lecture for First Things magazine, I argued against one response to the Void that is growing in popularity: a certain type of ‘civilisational Christianity’, which sees the Christian way as a useful ‘story’ with which to ‘defend Western civilisation.’ This project seeks to use the ministry of Jesus to promote values which are directly opposed to those he actually taught us to live by. Some of the people pushing this supposedly ‘muscular’ brand of the faith are Christian, but many others are agnostics who see the Christian faith as a mythological prop with which they can support their favoured ideologies, be they liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, ‘the Enlightenment’ or whatever. Whether or not the Christian religion is true, in this argument, is less important than whether it is useful.

This is, in other words, just another breed of activism, and it is still at heart a secular project. It seeks to use an unworldly faith to achieve worldly ends, and it will fail for that reason. C. S. Lewis, who was apparently having to deal with the same thing seven decades ago, explained why:

Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.

Lewis’s final sentence contains, to use activist language again, the ‘solution’ to the age of the Void. But what on Earth could it mean? And how could it ‘solve’ anything?

More than one person has approached me since my talk to ask if I was advocating ‘doing nothing’ in the face of all the bad things happening in the world. Christ’s clear instruction - ‘do not resist evil’ - is one of his hardest teachings, though there are many more we are equally horrified by: asking those who strike us to do it again; giving thieves more than they demand; loving those who hate us; doing good to those who abuse us. All of these are so counter-intuitive that they have the effect of throwing spiritual cold water into our faces.

But it gets worse. The most terrible teaching of all, at least for those of us who can’t shake off our activist brains, is the one that goes like this:

If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?

I seem to think about this almost daily. What does it imply? The same thing, it seems, as all the other terrifying teachings: that God turns the world upside down. That in order to ‘save the world’ - and indeed our souls - we must be upside down too. That this whole faith, this whole path, is a paradox. That when we do the thing we do not want to do - the thing we fear - it turns out alright. That trying to ‘save the world’ may destroy it, but that sacrificing yourself for the world may, in the end, save it.

Every fibre of our being screams out against this. Christianity is otherworldly, and we are this-worldly. We want our faith to confirm our human ideas. But it doesn’t, and every time we try to make it do so, we get something like civilisational Christianity or ‘conservative’ Christianity; or, from the other side, liberation theology or the ‘progressive’ Catholic reforms of Vatican II. All of these, from different angles, want the faith to serve the world, because this is what we want. We all have to live our lives, after all.

And yet, on each occasion, the faith is bent by the world instead, and weakened. Why do we see so many young people, especially men, coming into Orthodoxy and ‘traditional’ Catholicism now? Because they want a faith that has not been bent in that way. Because they have seen what Seraphim Rose saw:

Christ is the only exit from this world. All other exits - sexual rapture, political utopia, economic independence - are but blind alleys in which rot the corpses of the many who have tried them.

What a mystery. What a weird, frightening, exciting mystery: that only through death can we achieve life. That he who tries to save his life loses it, and he who sacrifices his life saves it. That God’s wisdom is foolishness to the world, and that Christ has called us out of that world, to a place where we will be hated precisely because we walked away from it. The more you meditate on this, the more impossible it seems. Impossible and ridiculous and obviously true. Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.

Christ allows the authorities to kill him, without resistance. His helpless and agonising death sparks a global revolution which is still playing out.

St Anthony gives away everything he owns, runs off to the desert and holes himself up in an unused tomb. His certifiable behaviour creates Christian monasticism by accident.

Thousands of ordinary Christians allow the Roman authorities to burn them alive, feed them to lions, crucify or impale them in public. They do not resist their fates, and they often die smiling. Their sacrifice ends up Christianising the entire empire.

Other ordinary Christians share everything they own, give away the rest, and tend to the sick and dying even if it kills them too. Their sacrifice of love spreads their faith across continents, without the need for either missionaries or state support.

Later Christians, also everyday people, withstand the mass brutality of the communist empire. As they are tortured and persecuted, and as their churches and monasteries are bombed and shuttered, they refuse violent resistance and continue practicing their faith. Their strength gives their Church a strength that the weakened Western Church(es), so long in power, can only envy as they crumble beneath the onslaught of the modern anti-culture.

There are many more such stories, and they all illustrate that living paradox: that only through sacrifice does Christianity ever flourish. This kind of sacrifice is not ‘giving up’, and neither is it ‘doing nothing.’ Do we think that St Anthony or St Francis were ‘giving up’? On what? On the world, perhaps; but not on God or on humanity. Quite the opposite. By walking towards God they made themselves more fully human. They made themselves more able to serve the world than someone who is immersed in it.

What does any of this have to do with the modern Void? Well, all I can say is that my intuition points me hard towards all of these stories and many more like them. What is the ‘solution’ to our modern ‘problem’? For a start, it is to stop thinking like that, because that is Machine thinking. We do not have a ‘problem’ that can be ‘solved’ by politics or war or top-down civilisational projects. We just have a repeat of a very old and familiar pattern: a turning-away from God, and thus from reality. This ‘problem’ is only ever ‘solved’ by turning back again, and societies can’t do that. Only people can, one at a time.

Damn, activism was so much easier.

Still, activism and action are not the same thing. Nobody is called on to be inactive, as if such a thing were even possible. Jesus was so active in the world that he regularly needed to retire from it just to get his breath back. Sitting in a cave all day praying is certainly a form of action: try it if you don’t believe me. But most of us are ‘in the world’, and so the world will challenge us. It will bring us evils like this. What are we to do with them? Stand up for the truth in love. Practice what we claim to believe. Loving our enemies implies that we have enemies - and we have them because we stand for something. Being called out of the world tends to make you unpopular.

Christianity, now as ever, is a radical counter-culture, and the most radical thing about it is what the Orthodox call kenosis: self-emptying. Emptying ourselves of all our petty passions so that we are better equipped to take the world into ourselves. How can you love your neighbour if you can’t see him? How many of us can even see ourselves? Sometimes I get glimpses from the outside and I feel like hiding under the duvet for the next four days.

What, then, should a Christian response to the Void be? I can only offer that same, stumbling intuition; that it needs to be sacrifice. Total sacrifice. There are some who say that such a notion is ‘weak’ or ‘winsome’; that what we need is battle and the crushing of the enemy. They can take their complaints to Christ and all the martyrs. Me, I can’t think of anything stronger than walking towards death confident of God’s love. Are you strong enough to be eaten by lions for your faith? I’m not. Sacrifice does not mean weakness: it requires great strength.

More to the point, it is sometimes the only realistic path. Mythologist Joseph Campbell had some advice about the correct road to take at times like these:

Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the disintegrating elements. Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. 

Campbell was no Christian, but he knew what the Void represented, and he knew too what had to be done when the end of a culture arrived:

Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified - and resurrected; dismembered totally and then reborn.

Activism is no good to me anymore. I have had to let it go. All I am left with is this exhortation to sacrifice, and I don’t really know how to do it. But I know it has to be done. And I know that it has been, so many times, the paradoxical path to renewal. Change comes through walking away, walking through - and thus walking into something new. Only by losing our lives do we save them. This applies to cultures as well as people.

This means, I think, that we have to walk into the Void with a smile on our faces, like the Christians walked into the Roman arenas. Like them, we will be carrying, concealed beneath our cloaks, little spiritual bombs which will, in the end, dismantle their whole edifice. The way of Christ is a spiritual bomb. It detonates under all of our worldly projects, be they from left or right or up or down.

I suppose this comes down to radical trust. I wouldn’t pretend that I have this trust very much of the time. But I do have this intuition, which probably I cannot justify in words: that we are in a desert time again. A cave time. That we need to be ‘dismembered totally, and then reborn.’ That we need to go back to the root and the heart of the matter.

Once there was a slave in Egypt, who worked for a government official. Suspected of murder, he fled his employer and became a bandit, roaming the deserts with a feared gang. He murdered many, and robbed many more. One day, pursued by the authorities, he took refuge in a monastery. The life of the monks affected him so much that he gave up his old ways to become a Christian. He took the name Moses as his new identity.

Moses did not find the monastic life plain sailing, though. He was a violent man, and he struggled with his passions all his life. It was the struggle, though, that gave him the insight he needed. The battle he fought in his heart each day allowed him, perhaps, to see the same battles going on in the hearts of others. Once, he was invited to a meeting that had been called by the Abbot of the monastery to decide what to to about the misbehaviour of another monk. Moses turned up with a basket full of sand on his back. There was a hole in the basket, and the sand was pouring out all over the ground behind him. What are you doing? demanded the Abbot. My sins run out behind me where I cannot see them, replied Moses, and yet I am asked to judge the sins of another.

Moses the Black, or Moses the Egyptian, or sometimes Moses the Robber, is a saint these days, and what I like about him is that he could never have imagined such a thing. He had a deeply inauspicious start, and in that he was just like the rest of us. He was prone to discouragement on his spiritual path, too. To help combat it, the Abbot once took him up on to the monastery roof to see the sun rise. Look, Moses, he said. Only slowly do the rays of the sun drive away the night and usher in a new day, and thus, only slowly does one become a perfect contemplative.

Moses met a fitting end, as he perhaps knew he would. When the monastery was attacked by robbers, he refused to flee. By this time Moses was Abbot himself, and he refused the requests of some of his monks to be allowed to take up arms against the attackers. If they wanted, he told them, they could run, but he would stay. Christ, after all, had told him that those who picked up the sword would die by it. Moses had picked up the sword many times. Now it was his turn to face it. And he did, like a Christian. We are still telling his story 1500 years on.

We are all like Moses. We are carrying our manifold sins and imperfections and passions around on our backs all day, while the Void roars around us. But there is no battling the world, only ourselves. I wish I could clean up all these paradoxes with my Western left brain, but they are not to be conquered. As Moses knew in the end, war gets you nowhere. Only by surrendering do you truly become powerful. Again, the world is upside down. Again, we are called to do the impossible. The impossible turns out to be the true path to victory.

Here we are, at the end of a culture, in the howling Void we have made by walking away from God. How could we possibly save ourselves? I suppose we do it by just being Christians. By following our orders. Paradoxically as ever, we might find that, as a result, a Christian culture is born again and flourishes, for this is the only way they ever emerge: not through the sword, but through the cross.

I am offering this essay free of charge. If you can afford a subscription, it will help me to keep writing, and will also help those who cannot afford to pay to keep reading.

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  [@bears_with](https://twitter.com/bears_with)

In politics — the Kremlin is no exception — politicians don’t mean what they say.  In gardening, the plants always mean what they say. Gardeners, obliged to record what that is, are more likely than politicians to tell the truth.

In the records of Russian politicians since the Bolshevik Revolution, only one leading figure stands out as having the eye, ear, and nose for what plants have to tell. Not the present nor the founding one. The only gardener among them was, and remains, Joseph Stalin.

Nothing has been found that he wrote himself on his gardening except perhaps for marginal comments in books he read.  There is no mention of books on gardens or gardening in the classification system Stalin’s personal library adopted from 1925. He kept no garden diary. Without a diary recording the cycle of time and seasons, the planting map, colour scheme, productivity of bloom and fruit, infestation,  life and death, he must have committed his observations – “he possessed unbelievably acute powers of observation” (US Ambassador George Kennan) – to memory,  as peasants do.  

Unlike the tsars who employed English, Scots, and French architects and plantsmen to create gardens in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the royal fashions of Europe, defying the Russian winter to display their power and affluence without shovelling for themselves, Stalin dug his gardens himself in the warm weather of his dacha at Gagra, on the Black Sea. There he was photographed with his spade tending parallel, raised beds of lemon trees (lead image, top).  There is no sign of him wielding trowel and fork in the garden at Kuntsevo, his dacha near Moscow, where the photographs show him strolling in a semi-wild young forest or seated on a terrace in front of a hedge of viburnum. No record of Stalin digging at Kuntsevo has been found.

There is just one reminiscence of Stalin speaking to a visitor about his gardening. “Stalin is very fond of fruit trees. We came to a lemon bush. Joseph Vissarionovich carefully adjusted the bamboo stick to make it easier for the branches to hold large yellow fruits. ‘But many people thought that lemons would not grow here!’ [He said]  Stalin planted the first bushes himself, took care of them himself. And now he has convinced many gardeners by his example. He talks about it in an enthusiastic voice and often makes fun of would-be gardeners. We came to a large tree. I don’t know it at all. ‘What is the name of this tree?’ I asked Stalin. ‘Oh, this is a wonderful plant! It’s called eucalyptus,’ Joseph Vissarionovich said, plucking leaves from the tree. He rubs the leaves on his hand and gives everyone a sniff. ‘Do you feel how strong the smell is? This is the smell that the malaria mosquito does not tolerate.’ Joseph Vissarionovich tells how, with the help of eucalyptus, the Americans got rid of the mosquito during the construction of the Panama Canal, how the same eucalyptus helped with the work in swampy Australia. I felt very embarrassed that I did not know this wonderful tree.”   

Stalin read a great deal of philosophy, Roman and Russian history, art, and agronomy, and so he is bound to have reflected on the way in which the ideas of the classics he read took physical form in the gardens of the time. Especially so on the ancient idea of the paradise garden. It is this transference between thinking and digging, between the idea of paradise and the cultivation of it, which a new book, just published in London, explores in a radical way.

Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time, In Search of a Common Paradise, knows nothing whatever about Russia or its gardens or its politics – except for propaganda on the Ukraine war she has absorbed unquestioningly and briefly repeats from the London newspapers. That’s a personal fault; it’s not a dissuasion from the book of reflections she has written out from her garden diary to an end which Russians understand to aim at, not less than the English.

In this wartime it’s necessary to keep reflecting on this end, on the aesthetic and philosophical purpose of the paradise garden. Laing begins her book and her garden with John Milton’s lament for gardening in wartime – in his case, the English Civil War of 1642-46 and the counter-revolution of 1660. “More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang’d”, Milton observed at the beginning of Book 7 of his Paradise Lost, “to hoarce or mute, though fall’n on evil dayes/ On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues;/in darkness and with dangers compast round,/And solitude.”  

At the same time, Laing records for herself and Stalin certainly knew, “what I loved, aside from the work of making [the paradise garden], was the self-forgetfulness of the labour, the immersion in a kind of trance of attention that was as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to waking.”

Source: [https://www.rulit.me/](https://www.rulit.me/books/vstrechi-s-tovarishchem-stalinym-read-60539-2.html)

Through the near eighty years of my life, I’ve made gardens in each of the houses I’ve lived in, four of them are in Russia. The first was on the bank of the Osetr (“sturgeon”) River, in the only brick cottage of the dying village of Ivanchikovo (“Little John”).

In a semi-circle around the front of the old house and its timbered verandah (Russian has also adopted the Hindi word, веранда), I excavated a trench in which I planned a tall hedge of roses, with underplanting of blue and white scilla siberica for the early spring, iris siberica for late spring, and mauve colchicums for late summer and autumn.

They were the evil days of Boris Yeltsin, however. Ivanchikovo’s collective farm had collapsed, and there was almost nothing, certainly no seed, no bulbs, not even flowers in the local shop or nearby market. What I should plant, I decided, was what I could fossick from the wild of the untended sovkhoz fields, the verge of the river stretching up to Kukovo (“Baker”) and down to Tregubovo (“Three Lips”), and the forest nearby. I started with wild roses. 

I also asked for the advice of the other villagers, my neighbours. They were unused to speaking with foreigners: the last of them they told me were German soldiers in retreat fifty years before. The only gardener in the village was a Soviet Army officer who had been made redundant at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and pensioned off with a pittance. In his cottage garden he had planted an orchard of apple trees. By patient experiment and skilful grafting, he explained, it was his ambition to revive as many of the old varieties of Russian apples as he could find. His paradise garden was filled with apples. Ground flowers he had excluded,  he told me.

In the rear garden of my cottage the hedgerows were composed of raspberry and blueberry bushes. A tree of Bolshevik vintage cast ample shade on to the narrow sward. Shade meant more specialized plantings for which there was no obvious source but the forest. For the time being, my priority was the front garden.

After a week of hiking, searching and excavating I had enough wild rose bushes to fill the trench and promise a luxuriant screen of flowers, blooming twice in the summer, I hoped. To cheer the poverty-stricken husband and wife on the left who had taken my fence palings for their oven fire, and to deter the wealthy transplant from Moscow who was erecting a double-storey house to the right, I engaged the local priest to conduct a ceremony of exorcising the evil spirits inside and around the house and to bless the garden for fertility and beauty.

But money and force defeated the plan. Without a preliminary word, the neighbours from Moscow — formerly high-ranking officials of the now defunct Communist Party — arranged for  construction trucks to make their deliveries of bricks, cement, timber, and workers by driving  across my garden. Dozens of tyre tracks destroyed the roses.

This was a violation of my private property rights, as the Yeltsin regime had announced them. But like everything else he did, this was false, and for me there was no recourse. My little paradise garden, blessed by the Church, hadn’t been nipped in the bud. It had been annihilated before it had a chance to bud.

My second Russian garden was planned and planted at the same time in Moscow. It was in the square in front of my apartment house at Kolobovsky pereulog (“Bun Lane”), in the Tverskaya  district of the old city. The building dated from the time of reconstruction after Napoleon had left. The square had been intended for the residents, my new neighbours. Its four corners had been planted with shade trees which had survived the Revolution and the Germans. But the space underneath had long ago been covered by refuse, then cars in various states of disrepair, poisoned by patches of oil, suffocated by weeds.

As the only non-Russian to own an apartment in the building, I was the only one to think of spending personal cash on the public space in front, for the benefit of our collective, so to speak. My neighbours gave their consent to my tossing my money on to the garden.

To remove the cars first of all, I installed a waist-high fence around the square in the wrought-iron style of the century before. The next task was to clear the surface rubbish; dig up the impoverished sandy soil, adding black top soil and worms; prune the dead boughs of the trees and fertilize the roots; lay down out diagonal paths from corner to corner; and plan plantings of spring and autumn bulbs in the quadrants formed by the paths, as well as an annual display in a raised circle in the centre.

Restored public benches on Strastnoy Boulevard.

Four old wrought-iron park benches, salvaged from elsewhere in the city, were placed in the quadrants, bolted to concrete foundations sunk into the soil, repainted. The babushki of the house were invited to take their morning and afternoon sittings there. They would become the guardians of the budding paradise. They shouted off drivers attempting to repair and oil their engines. They stopped dog defecation. They prevented anyone cutting the spring display of snowdrops and daffodils. In thus defending the Kolobovsky Pereulog garden, these women were, unlike my neighbour at Ivanchikovo, true communists.

Both gardens were ruined by theft.  To steal is a venal sin but in Russia not a mortal one. It was common in Russia, not only during Yeltsin’s time in the Kremlin, but after. It continues for me. Venal sins can be repented, reversed, compensated. But to ruin a garden is a mortal sin. No  punishment fits that crime.

This is because the paradise garden is a morality play on the soil —  as Laing has discovered, without her forgetting the deadly simple mechanics of how the land is owned, the labour paid for, the neighbours fenced off.  The English garden is not such a thing, Laing concludes in a revolutionary fashion.  Rather, it’s a “confidence trick. To reshape the land in your own image,  to reorder it so that you inhabit  the centre and own the view. To fake nature so insidiously that even now those landscapes  and the power relations they embody are mistaken for being just the way things are, natural, eternal, blandly reassuring…”

In trying to understand the idea of the paradise garden and to make it for herself, Laing writes of the English precursors of communism – the Levellers  and the Diggers of the Civil War period. About them, she notes, they are remembered for “declaring the earth to be a ‘common treasury’, given by God equally to all men and never intended to be bought or sold.” Laing has studied Karl Marx and the English socialists, some of whom gardened seriously  – William Cobbett, William Morris, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson. With their point of view, Laing goes on the attack against the English style in gardens – the fashion which was aped by Catherine the Great and her tsarist successors  in those palatial gardens which remain on show in St. Petersburg.

One of the “English views” in Catherine the Great’s garden at Tsarskoye Selo, nationalized in 1917.

This month it is the 93rd anniversary of Stalin’s idea, implemented by the Central Committee on [November 3, 1931](https://johnhelmer.net/russian-gardens-and-the-war-against-the-anglo-american-grass-sward/), to design, build, and pay for public parks and gardens as national policy. The pleasure garden of the rich and powerful for the preceding three thousand years had been revolutionized and democratized for the first time. “The parks of culture and rest,” the Central Committee declared, “represent a new kind of institution that has numerous political and didactic obligations to fulfil, all of which are for the wellbeing of millions of workers”.  The creation of Moscow’s Gorky Park had been an idea of Stalin’s inside the new layout he conceived for Moscow from Red Square to Sparrow Hills (called Lenin Hills between 1935 and 1999).  

For Laing, the privatisation of peasant farmland, the enclosures by Act of Parliament, the replacement of the village common with the aristocratic lawn and the ha-ha  to view it, the creations of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton – all are to be understood now to be “status symbols and adornments, a way for money  to announce its presence in a more comely or displaced form.”

“But where does the money come from?” Laing asks. Her answer is unique in the modern English gardening literature. In probing for the origins of the great English gardens, Laing goes from the corrupt Elizabethan trade and privateering concessions of the 16th century to the sugar and tobacco plantations of the US and Caribbean worked by slavery and the East India Company slaughter of India during the 18th and 19th centuries.  “There are gardens that have come at far too high a price, and I am glad that Crowfield is now obliterated, and that the historians at Middleton Place have tried to recover and foreground the stories of the enslaved people who build and paid for its garden, with its rare camellias and azaleas.”

Laing is confident enough of her own values to record her debts for gardening imagination and skill to the English garden writers Monty Don, Beth Chatto, Rosemary Verey,  Christopher Lloyd, and to several garden custodians at the university colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. She leaves out the best known of them, Robin Lane Fox, the classics don at New College where he has been the Garden Master.  Lane Fox is also the longest continuing garden  columnist for the Financial Times, platform for the display of what very large sums of money can buy. Laing calls that money laundering – “us[ing] gardens to cleanse and frame their reputation …to rise above the degraded and exploitative sources of their wealth.”

Source: [https://johnhelmer.net/](https://johnhelmer.net/cabbages-and-rothschilds-%e2%80%93-the-special-horticulture-of-spreading-manure-grafting-and-forcing-for-the-enrichment-of-everybody-%e2%80%93-well-almost-everybody-%e2%80%93-well-somebody-with-ta/)

For the land, the peasants are bound to fight the aristos, the communists against the oligarchs, the garden writers against each other – for the idea of the land and the idea of the paradise garden are collectively and personally a moral geography that’s worth fighting for.  

Laing correctly identifies this idea with John Clare (right), the 19th century farm labourer poet who ended up locked in an asylum. “His knowledge,” Laing writes, “was another way of saying his familiar ground , the place he knew… that knowledge  is itself a function of place, in which one’s capacity  to make sense of things, to generate understanding , is a product of being in some way rooted  and at home, and that, even more strikingly, this sense of home  is reciprocal: that one doesn’t  just know, but is known.”

In the story of this book, Laing succeeds in keeping the garden she makes. Milton wasn’t so fortunate. He went blind and was pursued by the counter-revolutionaries empowered by King Charles II. They are the “evil tongues”, the “dangers compast round”, and the “evil dayes” against which Milton wrote his Paradise Lost, “propelled” — Laing retells the story — “by an almost intolerable need to understand what it means to have failed and what one ought to do once failure has occurred, both by imagining a process of future reparations and by re-envisaging  the nature of an intact , untarnished world.”

Laing’s has got the question right, but not quite the answer. “A garden dies with its owner”, her book concludes.

I believe the opposite, and Laing is honest enough to allow it — the owner may die, the garden may remain in place. I am obliged to conclude so because my third garden in Moscow is being stolen from me as I write, but not quite yet.

The fourth, in the village of Kurlek, by the Tom River in the Tomsk region of Siberia, is the garden of Tatiana Vasilievna Turitsyna, my dead wife.   

By the acts of oligarch Oleg Deripaska and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, this garden too is being stolen from me, but not quite yet.

Yet is a long time, mind you.

For how long, Old Blind John claimed optimism at the very end of his Paradise Lost, “Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;/The World was all before them, where to choose/Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide.” In the Russian politics I know, as Stalin knew, there is no place of rest and no Providence.

by Editor - Sunday, November 17th, 2024

I’ve been writing about our world’s upheavals for more than three years now. Over that time one of the most personally significant conclusions I’ve come to is that no clean separation can be made between the “big” issues of our era – the ideological revolutions, the political turmoil, even shifting geopolitics – and the “little” struggles facing the individual human soul.

Cultural narcissism and societal atomization, gender divides and demographic malaise, political nihilism and violence… the many civilizational problems we see manifesting today increasingly seem to me to only reflect something gone tragically wrong at a much deeper level. Our societies feel more and more broken and mad because we are broken and mad, and we no longer seem able to keep a collective lid on it. The political is personal. So although I won’t be going full Faulkner and concluding that “the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself,” I do often find myself hungry for those discussions that manage to go beyond surface-level commentary of culture and politics to explore more lasting human truths beneath.

Which is why I’m particularly pleased to publish this extensive dialogue with
Freya India.

Freya is in my estimation one of the very best young authors writing today. Her talent is to combine a fearless personal honesty with a genuinely penetrating examination of the human heart—with all its anxieties, hopes, and sufferings—and then to trace seamless connections between our common struggles and the realities of our broader cultural and technological landscape. Most importantly, she does this with—as I think you will see here—a startling amount of what used to be described as wisdom. Exactly how such an old soul became trapped in a Gen Z girl, no one seems to know… It’s actually a little bit creepy to be honest.

Freya India

Freya writes with a focus on issues facing young women at her Substack GIRLS, which feels a bit like reading a Tolstoy or Jane Austen disguised in the aesthetics of a teenage glam magazine. Do subscribe.

GIRLS
Girlhood in the Modern World
By Freya India

We both wanted to try something a bit new and different here and allow back-and-forth written dialogue to flow naturally and delve into some important issues in a unique way. So what follows is not a typical interview, but something more like a podcast—except in print and not three hours of shallow banter. And I do think we succeeded in producing something somewhat special, because the dialogue manages to tease out some really fascinating connections. For which I largely credit Freya’s open and refreshingly un-ironic style.

Below, we dive into everything from why therapy culture and the cult of the self has been a disaster for the mental health of young women, and why the male quest for self-optimization can undermine human connection, to how moral judgements are needed to accurately perceiving reality and why the deconstruction of authority has disordered and demoralized society.

And in the best half, after the paywall: why our culture feels so utterly unsexy now, and why we all need to learn to be playful again; what men and women really want, and why we’re so divided; the nature of true love, and why love can rescue us from selfishness; why virtue is the only sure path to sanity; why we’ve both found ourselves drawn inexorably down a road to religious faith, and how we each try to grapple with that in our writing.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did, and that you’ll check out some of Freya’s other fantastic work.

(Notes: This post will be too long for Gmail, so click on the title to open online or in the Substack app. Freya’s quaint British misspellings have been left intact for affect, do not be alarmed.)

N.S. Lyons: You’ve written extensively on how social media appears to be contributing to skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other mental health problems in our society, especially among girls and young women. The link seems well established, and the stats you’ve cited evidencing this are pretty crazy, such as the suicide rate for girls aged 10-14 increasing 138% between 2012 and 2019, after social media and smart phones became a thing. I encourage everyone to go read your work on this, on your own Substack and with Jonathan Haidt on After Babel. But I want to focus here on teasing out what I find to be a really intriguing thread running through your more recent writing, which hints that your thinking on these problems and their causes has evolved in some pretty important and interesting ways.

As I see it, this begins with your critique of “therapy culture,” which “pathologises normal distress, and presents therapy as the solution to all problems.” This is clearly completely endemic today. As you’ve pointed out, just about everything now—especially online, and perhaps especially among women—seems to be viewed through, talked about in, and marketed using the language of the therapeutic. Spontaneous romantic chemistry might actually be a red flag for past “trauma.” Relationship difficulties are probably down to “anxious attachment.” Constantly “opening up” online about your issues and medications is celebrated; an SSRI prescription is a form of “empowerment.” Getting a Brazilian Butt Lift is now sold as a “life-changing and empowering experience” of “resculpting your confidence” and becoming “your authentic self,” and so on… 

And yet individuals—especially women—and society generally only continue to become more depressed, anxious, and risk-averse. All the therapy and empowerment doesn’t seem to be working. If anything it seems to be having the opposite effect, serving to make people less confident, more fragile, and more emotionally immature. What do you think is going on here? What’s driving this turn to the therapeutic, and what is it doing to us?

Freya India: Well, firstly I think all the therapy and empowerment isn’t working because much of it is just a marketing strategy. Take the obsession with fighting the stigma around mental health. We are relentlessly reminded that mental health problems are stigmatised, that we need to tackle the stigma around medication, that we aren’t opening up enough, that we aren’t aware enough. This is just accepted as fact. Meanwhile the number of young people taking mental health medication is unbelievable. In the UK, antidepressant prescriptions for children aged five to 12 increased by more than 40% between 2015 and 2021. Five! We have girls self-diagnosing with anxiety disorders and OCD and Tourette’s. Young women putting their mental health diagnoses in their Twitter bios and Tinder profiles. There was even a study recently revealing that 32% of all adolescents aged 12 to 17 in the US received prescription medication, treatment, and/or counselling for their mental health in 2023. And it doesn’t seem to make any difference. At this point, I think it’s an insult to tell young people that stigma is our most pressing problem.   

It’s easy to forget that mental health has become an industry. And like any industry, it has profit incentives. It has to drive demand. It needs to expand its customer base. And “mental health awareness” has become a very useful marketing campaign for therapy and medication companies. I think two things can be true: girls are genuinely suffering in the modern world, but also, a major part of it is the marketisation and medicalisation of their normal distress. Their despair and disempowerment is making billions.

In terms of what it’s doing to us, I think, ironically, it’s making us mentally ill. People say therapy culture is stereotypically feminine and it harms men by expecting them to behave more like women, which I agree with—but I actually think it’s worse for women. Girls ruminate more than boys. Women are more anxious, on average. We tend to be more neurotic. And so it gets to me when I see girls being told to focus on their feelings, to take their thoughts so seriously, to search their lives for symptoms. That’s the worst advice we could give. It’s heartbreaking to see how many young women are so miserably stuck in their own heads now, and encouraged to go further and further inwards to find relief. Do the work! Go to therapy! Unpack your trauma! Reflect, analyse, ruminate! Their heads are spinning. Maybe I’m anxious all the time because I have ADHD? Maybe my ADHD is a trauma response? Wait—is it PTSD or a personality disorder?

I also think we get it backwards sometimes. People assume that Gen Z feel too much, that we’re all too emotional, but I’m starting to think the opposite is true. We don’t let ourselves feel anything. We immediately categorise and diagnose and try to control every emotion. I don’t even think we know how to open up properly. We’re all so lonely. Young people hang out with each other far less than previous generations did at the same age. Friendships are much more shallow and superficial. I don’t get the sense that young people are honestly opening up to each other. We talk to therapists. We join online forums. We open up on TikTok, or chat with mental health chatbots. When we do talk about our problems, we disguise it in DSM diagnoses and obscure therapy-speak.

And so the worst part is, therapy culture deprives young people of the language to talk about what’s actually happening in their lives. They can talk about their ADHD symptoms and anxiety disorders, but find it hard to get at anything deeper. Instead of saying oh, maybe I feel insecure because I’m in a situationship where there’s no commitment or expectations or even basic respect, we have all these young women worrying that they are anxiously attached, or have an anxiety disorder, or _relationship OCD—_and even getting medication for it.

I’m not convinced, then, that therapy culture even helps us open up; I think it shuts down our ability to talk about our problems. Maybe you’re not anxiously attached, maybe you want to be loved deeply! Maybe you don’t have social anxiety disorder, maybe you grew up with less face-to-face interaction than any other generation in history! Modern culture asks young people to accept and excuse more and more behaviour, to adjust to more and more change, and then diagnoses them when they can’t cope. So lately in my writing I’ve been trying to emphasise that it’s okay to be emotional. It’s understandable to feel anxious and insecure right now. That doesn’t make you mentally ill. We’re so determined to de-stigmatise mental health issues we’ve started to stigmatise being human. Having human reactions to things. 

Because yes, humans have emotions. Women are emotional! That seems almost offensive to say now, but I don’t see why. I actually think not properly expressing our emotions is what makes us neurotic. The way I see it, girls are getting two contradictory messages: open up, talk about your problems, but also, being emotional is bad. If someone calls you emotional it’s an insult. Strong independent women aren’t bothered, don’t care. If women do get upset or emotional they must have anxiety, or trauma, or some mental illness. That’s a cruel and confusing message for girls. And an absolute joke to call it empowering.

For most young people, I don’t think they have a disorder. I think they’re experiencing normal distress, and they do need to open up to each other. Girls shouldn’t hide when they’re really not alright. But they should be opening up face-to-face, honestly and vulnerably, in real communities, in meaningful friendships, in stable families—not on TikTok or Reddit forums or to some sketchy BetterHelp counsellor. And they need to use real words, not always couching everything in medical labels and therapy-speak. That’s what we should be encouraging.

Maybe it’s just me, but today there definitely does seem to be a deeply creepy top-down push to sever us from human connection, or even the human in general, and replace it with the digital and the unhuman. It’s as if there’s a growing suspicion of human interaction as something inherently messy and dangerous, while the virtual world is seen as cleaner and safer. We can envision this will, if taken to its maximum extent, deposit us in a “no contact society” like that which, for some reason, has been planned as a future for South Korea (with predictable results so far). Is it possible for us to disentangle the growing role of therapy culture from that of the internet and social media, or do you think these two forces have become inextricably linked in some way?

Of course the foundations for this therapeutic view of the self were laid a long time ago. Christopher Lasch, Philip Rieff and many others were writing about this in the ‘60s and ‘70s;

Frank Furedi

covered it excellently in the early 2000s.

But I think social media took things to a whole new level. Therapy culture mixed with social media is, in my opinion, a very damaging combination. Therapy culture encourages girls and young women to focus on themselves and their feelings; social media then not only spreads these messages but constantly reminds us that we are each a self. That we are the main character. That our selves are something to be endlessly managed and obsessed over.

Neither encourages actual self-improvement. Social media platforms reduce us to our identity labels or consumer preferences. Therapy culture distills us down into a diagnosis or collection of symptoms. Both fit us into neat categories. What actually matters—our character, our virtue, how we treat other people—is not something easily displayed online. Sure, people try—they tweet their political slogans and post about their activism, but that’s got nothing to do with their character. Says nothing about their private code of conduct. That, I think, is the most important thing about who we are, the most important thing for young people to work on and improve, but we can’t display it. So it holds very little value these days.

All this makes me think about how, from the outside, it looks as if young people are inundated with mental health advice. We have so much guidance! But the truth is, our culture has very little to say to anxious young people. So little to offer. We are too afraid to give actual guidance. There are no clear milestones or markers to follow to adulthood anymore. We stopped appealing to moral character. We got rid of anything more substantial—that was judgemental!—or anything to assure young people that they belong to something bigger—that was superstitious! All that’s left are endless empty platitudes. We tell young people whatever you want to do, do it! As long as it makes you happy! And if they say they feel crippling anxiety or insecurity, we don’t wonder if it’s this morally ambiguous world, the collapse of any real community, this feeling that they can’t rely on anyone but themselves. We don’t investigate further. We diagnose them and are done with it. We call this a culture of compassion, but I’d say that’s far from the truth.

While I’m saying all this, I can’t help but wonder whether young men and women even inhabit the same world now. From what I can see, young women are going further and further down the therapeutic rabbit hole—ruminating over “red flags”, obsessing over “trauma”, increasingly seeing the world and themselves through these psychological labels and terms. Do you see any of that happening with young men? Does therapy culture affect them?

Therapy culture definitely affects men, though I think in different ways. There are of course some men who adopt the feminine model of the therapeutic, becoming the soyboys of internet infamy. But increasingly the equivalent “rabbit hole” for men seems to be one of what we could call “self-optimization.” Instead of obsessing over trauma, we have young men obsessing over whether they’re doing enough. Whether they're waking up early enough to get in their daily stoic journaling practice, internet-sourced ideal workout routine, ice bath, macro-calculated meal prep, and nootropic supplement regimen—all before heading out to grind their underpaid day job while listening to Andrew Huberman podcasts and thinking about how they need to side-hustle more on their passive income scheme. Others obsess over trying to discover and capitalize on whatever laws of science apply to relationships and the female mind, so that they can potentially find a leg up in a ruthless dating market.

Frankly this is all probably still healthier than women’s tendency toward internal rumination and self-diagnosis, since it at least emphasizes personal agency and encourages taking action in the world (and so is also a healthier choice than that of the large subset of men who check out entirely and retire to a quiet life of video games and depression). But the self-optimizers’ is still an anxious response to exactly the same societal situation, in which as you say there’s been a “collapse of any real community” and the dominant feeling is “that they can’t rely on anyone but themselves.” It’s the frenzied behavior of atomized individuals adrift in a world without anything solid, reliable, or permanent to support them, in which they can’t be sure of anything except relentless competition with each other.

I also see the predicament facing both men and women as in large part rooted in our modern crisis of authority. By authority I mean that power which can tell you what to do and you will accept this decision as legitimate and trustworthy. Our egalitarian culture is basically allergic to the idea of legitimate authority, or at least moral authority and all its traditional sources. Today it tends to be associated with authoritarianism and oppression of the individual.

Without getting into a whole other rabbit hole, it’s worth noting that this negative view was imposed deliberately by the therapeutic state. After WWII, intellectual pioneers of the therapeutic worldview like Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno fingered the “authoritarian personality”—and especially the patriarchal authority of the strong father figure—as the psychological root of fascism. As Philip Rieff summarized it, their conclusion was that the “revolution must sweep out the family and its ruler, the father, no less cleanly than the old [authoritarian] political gangs and their leaders.” So they set out, with the backing of the U.S. government, to destroy that authority figure and replace it with emotional management via professional therapists and educational bureaucracies. It seems obvious that they succeeded pretty wildly in this pathologization of the authoritative father figure. How many young men and women feel they must turn first to the internet for advice and direction, even if they are lucky enough to have a father present in their lives? The result is a kind of widespread infantilization that many people fail to ever grow out of.

The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism

First Things has just put out an essay by

Nathan Pinkoski

, titled “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” that I think is one of the most intellectually important pieces to be published in some time, and which I’ll go out of my way to recommend here.  

It is essentially a detailed account of how and why the United States government decided it needed to surveil and control the bank accounts and financial transactions of the entire world in the name of fighting terrorism — and then authoritarianism… and then the hazy universal evil of “hate.” More generally, it’s the story of how Western liberalism’s former separation of public and private spheres of life was torn down, thrusting us into our current hellscape of technocratic “global governance,” in which dissidents are liable to find themselves debanked from the financial system in the name of inclusion.

With this account Pinkoski fills in some important gaps in the record by identifying and documenting some of the key figures and decisions-points that led us to where we are now. In particular, he expertly reveals just how bipartisan the scheme to transform national “government” into global “governance” was, with the twin “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” sides of American politics working hand-in-hand to advance the same ambitious revolution after the end of the Cold War.

This includes uncovering some rather spectacular facts and quotes that I at least was unaware of, such as an open declaration by Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor that America’s post-Cold War strategy would be to “pursue our goals through an enlarged circle not only of government officials but also of private and non-governmental groups,” including “private firms” and “human rights groups,” in order to fight the “intolerant energies of racism” across the planet and isolate “backlash states” “diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically.” Which is exactly the foreign policy chimera we got and still labor under decades later.

Or the fact that it was not some shadowy cabal of Blackrock and the UN that first invented manipulative “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) investing standards, but the George W. Bush administration’s national security staff, who noted that private finance “could drive the isolation of rogue entities more effectively than governments” and predicted that “the banks will fall into line” once “our campaigns leveraged the power of this kind of reputational risk.”

Or the timely reminder that in 1989 the supposedly conservative Wall Street Journal declared its commitment to achieving the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.”

Hence why we ought not be surprised that in 2021 G.W. Bush would stand beside his erstwhile establishment-left opponents on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and declare that the real threat to America comes from “extremists at home,” from the populist Trump supporters who, “in their disdain for pluralism,” are “children of the same foul spirit” as foreign terrorists — and who therefore necessitate that the same regime of coordinated public and private coercive force be applied at home as abroad.

Overall, Pinkoski’s essay powerfully demonstrates just how dramatically different Western “liberal-democratic” countries are from a mere three decades ago. Its publication is also something I’ve been awaiting impatiently for half a year now, because this summer I was present at the romantically-clandestine underground meeting of dissident scholars (aka a First Things seminar) at which Pinkoski originally presented his argument, then in the form of a much longer academic paper.

I was asked to present my own response to Pinkoski’s paper at the gathering, which I did, and which I will publish here below in case it is of interest. (Note that many of the lines cited in my response will not match the shortened version published in First Things, but I’ve decided to leave them unaltered here anyway.) In it, I make two main arguments: that the revolution Pinkoski describes is best thought of as the expansionary process of totalitarian managerialism (as described in The China Convergence), and — more disagreeably — that what he describes as “postliberalism” is in fact the triumph of liberalism unbound.

Definitely read Pinkoski’s essay first though! I expect and very much hope that he will continue to expand on it in the future, and that it will become a much-cited work in the years ahead.

Response to Nathan Pinkoski (N.S. Lyons, Palo Alto, June 2024)

Nathan Pinkoski has produced a bold, detailed, and compelling case study illuminating what is perhaps the signal phenomenon of our era: the abandonment of any meaningful distinction between state and society, between public and private power, and between public and private spheres writ large. In recent decades we have experienced the rapid rise of Western regimes that transcend any such distinction, and which thus — to cut to the point — grow increasingly totalitarian in aspect.

Pinkoski describes this as the collapse of 20th century liberal civilization and its replacement by something new. He has examined this rupture through the history of recent transformations in international monetary policy and finance. This includes the relentless expansion of the EU as a monetary union and then as a federalist empire, accompanied by the swift intrusion of the state into private finance in the name of maintaining stability and security — a trend also pioneered by the U.S. government’s expansive efforts after 9/11 to use state power to freeze first terrorist groups and then entire countries out of the putatively neutral global financial system. In doing so he traces a direct line of evolution from the neoliberal enthusiasms of the post-Cold War era to what he describes as the West’s “actually existing postliberal” present, in which “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics” means political dissidents and cultural thought criminals can now regularly find themselves de-banked by putatively private institutions in the name of “safety” and “reputational risk.”

With this history I can offer no significant disagreement. But it is only a case study of a larger pattern. And if I have any productive criticism to offer, it is that, in prudently limiting his scope to merely the realms of finance, monetary policy, and foreign affairs, Pinkoski has perhaps not been quite bold enough. Without a fuller picture of the leviathan that menaces us, we risk mistaking but one part of the beast for the whole, mere consequences for causes. In fact, let me posit that searching for the source of our era’s public-private collapse among the shadowy decisions of bankers and national security spooks — as noteworthy and telling as these decisions are — is to risk potentially getting causality backwards and understating larger forces at work.

After all, throughout his paper Pinkoski repeatedly notes that various policy decisions defy explanation in terms of pragmatic national interests. The architects of Clinton’s foreign policy are cited themselves describing taking actions they knew were unnecessary but felt to be of alluring “historical consequence.” The opening of borders to mass migration is described as a “quasi-theological event,” a “repudiation of a core culture or a fixed set of national values,” and “a response to Western guilt.” While in general after 1989, as Pinkoski puts it, “On both sides of the Atlantic, the spiritual principle became a resolve to construct a new national, social, and cultural identity.” From my point of view, such language hints that deeper forces were indeed at work. And it might be most profitable for us to try to more clearly uncover and connect at least some of these forces.

A year or so ago I wrote a long essay titled “The China Convergence,” which I bring up here because I think its main themes are quite relevant. Namely, that the same specific form of oligarchic technocratic governance, described by James Burnham and others as “managerialism,” has today successfully taken over almost the whole developed world, West and East alike.

Managerialism is, in short, the instantiated belief that everything can and should be deliberately engineered and managed from the top down, and that this necessitates an expert class of professional managers whose business it is to do so. Rooted in the techniques of bureaucratic organization and “scientific management” that sprang from the revolution of mass and scale brought on by the Industrial Revolution, managerialism took off with the early Progressive movements and flourished following the bureaucratic explosions produced by the two world wars.

Now, the evolutionary genius, so to speak, of managerialism is that it functions constantly to justify its own perpetual expansion. The larger and more complex any organization or system grows, the exponentially more managers seem needed to manage that complexity and the inefficiencies it generates; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure that their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power and resources for the managers as a group within the system; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucratic apparatus to take over an ever-larger range of functions; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be trained and educated, which requires more managers… and on and on. I call this expansionary dialectic the managerial doom loop.

But this process works just the same at the level of a country, or even an entire civilization, as it does for a company, non-profit, or government agency. The result, in the case of our societies, has been the exponential growth of a “professional managerial class,” with a permanent interest in seeing the continual expansion of managerial control into every area of state, economy, culture, and even international affairs. In this it has wildly succeeded, producing a new kind of regime — the managerial regime — staffed by a constituent managerial class and dominated by a distinct managerial elite. These elites all behave with flock-like similarity, no matter what institution or part of the world they are located in, because they all have the same basic managerial interests and personality.

To begin connecting this back to Pinkoski’s study, these managerial interests have over time in the West congealed ideologically into what we can describe as a managerial consensus: a unifying system of moral and philosophical beliefs that just so happen to not only rationalize the interests of managerial elites, but also to elevate them to a position of moral superiority, serving to legitimize their right to rule. This ideology consists of a number of core tenets, including technocratic scientism, utopian progressivism, a devotion to the “liberation” of individuals from all former norms and constraints (whether of nature or tradition), and an incentive to flatten any particularity of people, nation, or culture so as to produce more “free” individuals — in other words more predictable and easily interchangeable “undifferentiated human material,” as Renaud Camus has put it. R.R. Reno has similarly described the post-WWII ideological complex as the “open society consensus,” which I think is also accurate and an appropriate name for the same thing.

Now, I’ve rehashed these points from my own essay because I would propose that most of the events and decisions that Pinkoski observes in his history can actually be best explained as products of the sweeping advance of managerialism after achieving victory in the Cold War — or rather the victory of one particular form of managerialism: liberal managerialism.

We might divide the ongoing managerial revolution into roughly three eras, the first running from the French Revolution’s Cult of Pure Reason through to WWII; the second through the “post-war” era until 1989; and the third dawning with the end of the Cold War, alongside the concurrent emergence of the digital revolution. The end of the Cold War proved a transformative moment because, with the collapse of the Soviet Union — but before the rise of China — the Western liberal managerial regime appeared to have triumphed over its last remaining major competitor. The world had once contained not one but three rival ideological forms managerialism: liberalism, communism, and fascism. Fascism was crushed in WWII, but for decades Soviet communism still remained a competitor to liberalism. With its fall, however, liberal managerialism was effectively liberated from all restraint, the last dam was broken and the way opened for it to rush into the global power vacuum and seek complete domination.

Pinkoski argues that “1989 unleashed the revolutionary impulse in Western elites.” I concur completely. But what was the nature of this revolutionary impulse, exactly? He writes this in the context of resurgent appetite for both a new European monetary order and a new American security order. Which, true enough, are among the things that Western elites rushed to achieve. But I think these were only expressions of the full revolutionary impulse unleashed within the managerial elite: a giddy urge to fulfill their manifest destiny by expanding the mandate of their managerial apparatus to an unprecedented, truly global scope.

Whereas once these managers’ drive for technocratic control, social engineering, and cultural bulldozing had been largely restricted to the national level, these impulses could now be advanced to their maximum extent — i.e. to the whole world. And so we see the managerial elite almost immediately declare the nation-state obsolete once grander supranational opportunities beckon. The objects of managerial ambition become “global problems” necessitating “global solutions” and indeed “global governance.” Suddenly issues like the flow of “human capital” (aka mass migration) become complexities to be managed at the level of a global system, removing them from the legitimate concern of mere nations. This is the true meaning of the “globalism” which happened to appear at this moment in history: not free trade or anything so utilitarian, per se, but the conceptual expansion of the managerial elite’s eager, grasping reach to the entire planet.

In this context, the American managerial regime’s compulsion to begin attempting to surveil and manage the bank accounts of the whole world is wholly unsurprising — indeed it was essentially inevitable, as was the EU’s thirst for imposing monetary, regulatory, and ideological unity across the whole of Europe (and now beyond, as Elon Musk and others have discovered); as was the reckless expansion of NATO; as was the near-universal transformation of representative democracy into “managed democracy,” and so on. These things happened for exactly the same reason that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” apparatchiks invented themselves and burrowed into all our institutions, and why we now face the emergence of a transnational “censorship industrial complex” determined to minutely manage every word uttered on the internet: managerialism is a cancer, and cancers metastasize, it’s just what they do.

Before I conclude, however, let me address what I expect is one key difference in perspective between Pinkoski and myself: that is, the question of whether or not this managerial regime should be described as “liberal.” Pinkoski calls our actually existing regime “postliberal” on the view that “the cornerstone commitment of liberalism is to a meaningful distinction between society and the state.” But from my perspective that isn’t really a particularly liberal commitment at all; rather, liberalism has always been first and foremost about “liberation” (which is, after all, right there in the name).

Now, I’ve already described liberationism as a key part of managerial ideology, but this is perhaps to understate its centrality. For any managerial regime there is no more important task, no higher calling, than to relentlessly seek to crush the only real threat such a regime can face: any other social force able to compete for the loyalty and obligation of citizens. Any independent social sphere — any guild, association, church, tribe, or family, and any home town, region, or today even nation — is an obstacle to universal management (and to the universal proliferation of managers). For managerialism, all such communities and attachments represent competing power centers, and thus all barriers must urgently be dissolved, all bonds broken, all distinctions homogenized. All bottom-up functions once performed by other social spheres, from insurance against the risks of life to the achievement of personal fulfillment, must be replaced by top-down bureaucratic management. The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

Did liberalism ever really stand in opposition to this crusade for total liberation? I honestly can’t see a time that it ever did; in fact, it seems to have always served as precisely the universal acid employed to do the job. Dissolving traditional bonds and limits has always been the heart of the liberal project. Thus I’m not sure we can say that liberalism ever held back the invasion of the public into the private; the progressive collapse of that distinction was actually its inevitable outcome. And so I think it’s fair to argue that we don’t yet wander in a postliberal age, but at liberalism’s apogee.

If a new, truly alternative civilization is ever to arrive, it will only do so in the wake of liberal managerialism’s self-induced implosion, and will have to be deliberately constructed — or, rather, reconstructed — out of the very same kind of strong communal and spiritual ties and identities that liberal managerialism has always sought to tear apart and devour.

Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed. It rested on an essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction. The state-society distinction reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century, when the triumph and challenges of the postwar moment clarified the importance of defending social freedom from state power, while ensuring that the public realm was not taken over by private interests. Over the last few decades, this distinction has been eroded and finally abandoned altogether. Like it or not, the West is now postliberal.

This is not the same “postliberalism” that we are accustomed to hearing about. Postliberal thinkers from Patrick Deneen to Adrian Pabst have exposed the conceptual problems inherent in liberal theory. Liberals justify the separation of the public realm from the private sphere by appealing to value neutrality. This notion of separation involves a certain moral and metaphysical thinness. The commitment to neutrality is thought to prevent states’ coercing belief through law and force. It protects the private sphere, so that individuals and associations can live out their creeds. Yet by promoting civic neutrality, liberalism socializes us to moderate our ambitions for public life. Against this view, postliberal thinkers argue that the liberal state’s rejection of a substantive vision of the good hollows out politics and civil society. Liberalism produces a state bent on driving tradition and religion out of public life, an atomistic society in which money is the only universally acknowledged good. Postliberal intellectuals contend that if our ruling classes relinquished their liberal commitment to neutral institutions in favor of a substantive vision of the good, we could renew our civilization.

The Brexit referendum and Trump’s election in 2016 revealed the extent of the West’s malaise. Eight years ago, the postliberal critique seemed exciting and relevant, even as liberal intellectuals mounted impressive counterattacks. But these disputations have little to do with how we are actually governed. Governments long ago breached the barrier separating the public and private realms. Nor is the state the only danger, for the supposedly liberal institutions of civil society have given up on neutrality. Cancel culture is ­corporate and academic culture. The financial and tech giants pry into the private lives of ­citizens and punish them for their words and deeds. For quite some time, a substantive vision of the good has already been ruling over both state and society.

Leftist intellectuals were among the first to recognize the collapse of the old liberal separation between state and society. In their view, neoliberalism was to blame. Under Reagan and Thatcher, the private sector began to take over the public one; corporate power took control of the state, and economics captured politics. But this analysis gets ­reality backwards. The state has not been suborned by economic interests. Rather, political interests have come wholly to dominate economic and financial interests, fusing state and society together.

The triumph of the political is most evident in the way today’s debates about liberalism proceed. They are invariably concerned about connecting liberalism to international politics, the postwar liberal international order. To save liberalism, centrist stalwarts call for America to defend the “rules-based” order set up after World War II. It’s a familiar story: In the aftermath of the war, international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were commissioned to establish the bases for an impartial system of economic competition. But because of communism, postwar liberalism had a limited reach. The fall of the Eastern bloc changed that. The end of the Soviet empire vindicated liberalism, and after 1989, liberal institutions could truly become international. Neutral, procedural mechanisms would coordinate divergent interests on a global scale. Now, however, Russia’s military aggression and China’s ascendancy are straining this globalized system. Populists undermine it at home. So laments the narrative.

Faced with recent events, liberal intellectuals allow that they were too optimistic about the prospects for global cooperation after 1989 and may have oversold the benefits of economic freedom. Many concede that the critics of neoliberalism are right, at least in part. Yet questioning the economic decisions of the past thirty years does nothing to undermine the mythology of a continuous postwar liberal international order. Accepting the neoliberal critique allows the stalwarts of the center to shield geopolitical ­decisions—­often their own decisions—from deeper criticism. Their modified narrative—­mistakes were made in implementing a universally acknowledged global good—conceals the fact that the liberal principles that centrist intellectuals urge us to defend had already been abandoned in the international realm.

The international situation tells the tale of postwar liberalism’s breakdown most clearly. Neutral institutions, particularly financial ones, have been weaponized to serve political ends. In this realm, the erosion of the distinction between state and society has been quiet and subtle, yet startlingly effective. The political transformation of world finance has driven domestic upheavals and reordered the way we are governed. It is the engine of the West’s great transformation from liberal modernity to something new—to actually existing postliberalism.

The first sign that we don’t live in the old postwar liberal international order is that the economic system underwriting it has long ceased to exist. In August 1971, Richard ­Nixon decided to suspend the convertibility of the dollar to gold. The change shattered the economic system established at Bretton Woods during the final stages of World War II. Nixon’s decision initially shocked the global financial system, but it laid the foundation for American financial ascendancy. The dollar replaced gold as the backstop of global finance. Thus, as the United States entered the first stages of de-industrialization in the 1980s, American economic and political power did not decline, as experts anticipated. Nor did anyone really comprehend the tremendous political advantages implicit in the transition from a gold standard to a global economy based on America’s fiat currency. The American political classes were, at least at that time, only dimly aware of their own capabilities. They were focused on other objectives.

On July 3, 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Wall Street Journal affirmed its commitment to the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.” The surprise events of the following November provided the opportunity to implement this vision of a truly global economy committed to the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. But just as the Wall Street Journal editorial had opined that more minorities were needed to help Americans “acquire a renewed view of our own difficult past,” so openness meant advancing the spirit of anti-discrimination further than ever before. This imperative set the transatlantic tone for the next few years. In 1990, Congress raised immigration to unprecedented levels to boost economic growth. It also abolished much of the English-language testing for naturalization and made it easier for homosexuals to immigrate to the United States. That same year, the Schengen Convention proposed the abolition of all border controls within Europe. In 1991, Congress passed new civil rights legislation that cemented in place the doctrine of disparate impact. To abolish discrimination on the basis of sex, the European Court of Justice overturned national laws that prohibited businesses from assigning women nighttime shift work. Open borders, free trade, and the open society: It seemed that neoliberalism’s triumph was complete.

From the vantage point of the 1990s, it looked like the Americans and Europeans were using the opportunity presented by the collapse of the Soviet Empire to construct a genuinely liberal global system. Economic affairs would be liberated from statist, political competition, the crude power contests of the past.

Utopianism of that sort may have animated commentators such as Thomas Friedman, and it’s still the way the stalwarts of the center recall the moment’s aspirations. But this account downplays the political and economic anxieties of the period. 1989 had set off a discreet but decisive geopolitical contest within the West. The Europeans were using the opportunity of 1989 to take continental integration to unprecedented levels, laying the groundwork for the Euro. Led by the French, they dreamed of building a new continental powerhouse that could challenge the United States. German unification was set to be the cornerstone of a single sovereign Europe. Yet George H. W. Bush made American support for German unification conditional on the French and West Germans’ preserving NATO and expanding it into East Germany. It was a cunning move. By keeping NATO alive, Bush forestalled European geopolitical independence. As the Cold War ended, the rationale for military and economic dependence on the United States receded. Yet the first Bush administration engineered events so that American political and economic power over the rest of the West became greater than ever before.

After 1989, the United States enjoyed supreme military power. In the coming years, it would occasionally attempt to exert its influence through these means. These efforts bore mixed results. Bush Sr. would preside over the swift success of the 1991 Gulf War; he would ­also set in motion the events that led to the disaster of Mogadishu in 1993. Yet military misadventures did little to alter America’s role as global hegemon. American financial power became the true engine of dominion. The United States took charge of the globalized economy and turned it into a powerful weapon.

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony Blinken.

Lake began by denouncing neo-isolationism on the left and right. Its source, he asserted, lies in misguided economic anxiety. The speech contained the usual promises that global free trade would bring prosperity for all. But the economic benefit to American citizens was an afterthought. The speech focused on America’s new global political program. With the elimination of the “big, red blob” of communism, the United States would focus on expanding the world’s “blue areas” of market democracies—on regime change.

Yet the policy of enlargement was not just about using American military might to expand liberal democracy. Enlargement, Lake argued, had a second meaning. It was about developing and enhancing state-society partnerships. The Clintonians were learning from domestic politics. In that sphere, they were launching a revolution from “government” to “governance,” what Christopher Caldwell describes as the “great innovation of the Clinton administration.”

Borrowing from management theory, the Clintonians wanted government to expand to involve social actors. These actors were not held to the same rules of conduct as state actors were, and therefore could act much more effectively. By leaning on social actors, leaders could bypass state actors responsible to the electorate and could get good results. Domestic lessons set the precedent; after all, the civil rights revolution was conducted as a state-­society project. Court decisions had established the significant liabilities facing private organizations should they fail to be vigilant agents of anti-­discrimination. And private organizations learned to become very effective agents of this new political project. They had their vision of justice and wanted to achieve it. It was too important to leave that task to slow-moving governments. By the early nineties, there were now legions of NGOs, corporations, philanthropic associations, academics, entrepreneurs, journalists, and bureaucrats who expected to have a say in politics. They did not see themselves as bound by national loyalties, restricted by certain borders, or subject to rigid accountability structures. In the new era of “governance,” this dispersion of control was something to celebrate. It’s no surprise that Lake’s speech targeted “centralized power” as the enemy hindering the spread of the “blue” hue. Globalization’s interpreters, wedded to narratives about the obsolescence or privatization of the state, passed over the true significance of these changes. What was really happening was the deformation of the state.

The Clinton administration saw that achieving their foreign policy revolution would require looking beyond the state, just as the civil rights revolution had done at home. “We should pursue our goals through an enlarged circle not only of government officials but also of private and non-­governmental groups,” Lake argued, naming a range of social actors, from “private firms” to “­human rights groups.”

The Clintonians were offering the first theory of global management directed to geopolitical and moral objectives: a substantive vision of the good. State and social actors would be coordinated to fight the “intolerant energies of racism” abroad. They would confront what Lake called “backlash states,” isolating them “diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically.” Although he didn’t go into detail, Lake also portrayed America’s “financial” resources as “national security resources.”

Those resources were quickly put into action. As Clinton adviser James Steinberg said, “We succeeded in something that had been tried ­ever since the early seventies, which was bringing the economics into the heart of national ­security decision-­making.” Over the next few decades, the Clintonians and their successors would devise increasingly ingenious ways to put economics at the service of politics. They used America’s financial super-eminence to project political power abroad, imposing American aims without risking ­American lives.

The critics of neoliberalism recall the nineties as a time of idealistic, even naive commitment to economic cooperation. That criticism describes the peculiar American submissiveness toward China, but not much else. By the end of 1994, the Clinton administration had decided that Russia must be treated as a political competitor. “Neo-containment” was not mentioned publicly, but it was mentioned privately. Capitalizing on Moscow’s economic weakness, the Americans used their financial power to achieve their vision of enlargement; in this case, the NATO expansion that Mikhail Gorbachev had been assured in 1990 would not happen. “I think Russia can be bought off,” Clinton told Dutch prime minister Willem Kok in 1995. Under Clinton, the ­United States became Russia’s largest foreign investor. Ostensibly neutral international economic institutions were brazenly altered to serve American strategic ends. Seeing Boris Yeltsin as more moderate than the alternatives and fearing he might lose the 1996 election, the Clinton administration persuaded the IMF to give him a $10.2 billion loan, with few of the usual conditions. Yeltsin spent his way to victory.

These measures employed the carrots that American financial hegemony made possible. The sticks were even more inventive. When Yugoslavia fell apart in 1992, ethnic cleansing began, and the Serbians became the chief international pariah. In his last year in office, Bush Sr. had implemented several rounds of state-based sanctions. Clinton changed the paradigm, employing a public-private partnership that would become the norm. In April 1993 the U.S. began its first experiment with “smart sanctions.” The Clinton administration pioneered the move away from targeting states to targeting the individuals who governed the states, hitting their economic and social networks. Sanctions were imposed on Slobodan Milosevic and his entourage, freezing them out of the dollar-based international economy—effectively “unpersoning” them as economic agents. The objective was not just to try to change Milosevic’s behavior or signal moral disapproval of his actions, but also to undermine his popular support and his position as head of government. Smart sanctions looked like regime change on the cheap, changing the leadership of a national government without sponsoring bloody military operations.

The use of “smart sanctions” set a powerful precedent. Targeting individuals and their supporting institutions created new opportunities and fresh justifications for American policymakers to project influence around the world. As these uses of American financial power expanded, however, the liberal foundations of twentieth-century civilization crumbled.

Defenders of the old paradigm intuited that the new state-society partnerships could undermine the neutral reputation of America’s global economic leadership. Because of the dollarization of global finance, the credibility of the global financial system depended on international confidence in the impartiality of the United States Treasury. In the face of pressures from the American foreign-policy and security bureaucracy to act otherwise, Treasury bureaucrats tried to adhere to the liberal principle of state neutrality with respect to economic affairs. In the 1990s, the US intelligence community wanted Treasury to use its knowledge of the financial system to help disrupt the bank accounts of a terrorist organization then operating through Sudan. Treasury said no: The risk to America’s liberal credibility would be too great. The terrorist organization was al-Qaeda.

When George W. Bush entered office in 2001, he did so as a liberal. His signature initiative was supposed to be implementing capital and labor mobility across the whole continent. The summer 2001 Summit of the Americas drafted plans for expanding NAFTA, launching a “Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)” by 2005.

Bush may have dreamt of spreading liberalism more broadly than his father did. But his legacy is the opposite. Under his administration, the ­United States overturned the liberal financial system of impartial rules free of political manipulation. The apolitical neutrality of global finance slipped away. Financiers became willing instruments of U.S. foreign policy, reorienting themselves and their institutions to serve increasingly bellicose political objectives.

Globalization’s theorists often paint a picture of a global village, a decentralized community of relative equals. But globalization was always much more centralized and asymmetrical. Globalization is better understood as a hub-and-spokes arrangement, where emerging markets depend on established “hubs” to connect them to other markets. Because almost all transactions must pass through these hubs, they require the hubs’ approval. This is particularly true with respect to international finance. New York serves as the world’s most important financial hub, not just because of the size of its capital markets, but more importantly because the dominance of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, making access to the American financial system critical. The essential role of American financial institutions in the weal and woe of very nearly every major economic actor in the world confers on the United States government a vast power. Previous officials at the Department of Treasury grasped that power, but they shunned it in the name of liberalism. Under Bush, that would change.

Building on the Clintonian experiments in smart sanctions, some innovative officials working in Treasury agreed that traditional state-to-state policy coordination was inadequate to achieve the desired results. They discerned that private institutions, especially money-center banks, which financed and processed commercial interactions, could achieve the ends of state policy far more effectively than the traditional tools of statecraft. If private sector financial institutions cooperated with U.S. government agencies, great results could be achieved.

After September 11, 2001, the innovators were provided with a unique opportunity to put their proposals into action. To strike back at al-Qaeda, they banished the old liberal mentality and its hesitations about weaponizing the private economy. One of the innovators, Juan Zarate, said: “We realized that private-sector ­actors—most importantly, the banks—could drive the isolation of rogue entities more effectively than governments—based principally on their own interests and desires to avoid unnecessary business and reputational risk.” State actors started this process, but private actors did the essential work. “When governments appear to be isolating rogue financial actors, the banks will fall into line . . . Our campaigns leveraged the power of this kind of reputational risk.”

On September 23, two weeks after the attacks, Bush signed Executive Order 13224. “We’re putting banks and financial institutions around the world on notice,” he declared. “If you do business with terrorists, if you support or sponsor them, you will not do business with the United States of ­America.” The emergency executive order was broad. It enabled the targeting of financial supporters of terrorism, terrorist-owned companies or businesses, and those “associated” with them. Any bank that permitted dubious accounts or transactions to go through it risked having its American assets frozen by the U.S. government. In effect, it would be expelled from the U.S.-based international system, destroying its reputation as a trustworthy financial institution. The order created an atmosphere of ­liability for global financial institutions, just as civil rights laws had done for domestic corporations. A failure to be vigilant brought penalties. The purpose was to encourage banks to be proactive about assessing the risks associated with certain clients. The government was deputizing key players in the private economy to become its enforcers.

As its advocates anticipated, this approach to choking off funding for terrorist organizations was transformative. No bank wanted to get cut off from the U.S. banking system. Moreover, the Bush administration provided a legal framework that invigorated nongovernmental entities to target banks deemed insufficiently proactive. Banks were closely scrutinized for breaches of sanctions.

The Treasury also turned its attention to inducing international institutions to fight terrorist financing. Early on, the G7, IMF, and World Bank were brought into the sanctions regime. These measures, however, did not go far enough. To cripple al-Qaeda’s finances, the U.S. government needed information about bank-to-bank transfers. But this information is held in the databases of a private, obscure organization that serves as the switchboard for most of the world’s financial system: the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

The U.S. had tried to get information from SWIFT in the past. Under Bush Sr., a team led by Robert Mueller tried to subpoena SWIFT’s messaging system. But they had no legal authority to do so. In accord with liberal principles, communications among market actors enjoy a presumptive right of privacy. The action produced no results. After 9/11, Treasury took a different approach. It simply asked SWIFT to cooperate and provide the U.S. government with access to its transactions. SWIFT’s CEO demurred. He stressed the organization’s need to remain apolitical and neutral. The system’s ­European clientele were particularly sensitive to invasions of privacy. But SWIFT and the U.S. government developed a workaround. In public SWIFT would proclaim its neutrality. In private it would collaborate, developing a clandestine program for sharing financial information with U.S. officials. To keep SWIFT on board, government officials had to concede to the organization a significant and ongoing role in the design and implementation of the program of monitoring all global transactions. This meant providing SWIFT with classified information about terrorist suspects and their supporting organizations. The public-private partnership became profound.

The Patriot Act provided the Treasury with another powerful tool. Section 311 gives the Treasury secretary the power to label an institution risky in view of suspected money-laundering. The vagueness was ideal for targeting financial institutions. The U.S. government did not need to freeze assets directly, something difficult to do when money-­laundering is only suspected, not proved. Private banks, by contrast, are not legally constrained in this way. They are free to cease doing business with whomever they choose. Section 311 provided a powerful incentive for banks to do exactly as the Treasury recommends, to offload any entity deemed an institutional risk.

New state-society partnerships, erected on a scaffold of post–9/11 legislation, executive orders, and secret SWIFT cooperation, enabled policy-makers in government to wage the wars that American soldiers couldn’t. Beginning in 2003, after the Bush administration had turned its attention to rogue regimes and had boots on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Treasury went much further. In the following years, banks in Syria, Belarus, Burma, and Ukraine would all be hit with the new publicly mandated, privately imposed sanctions. In 2005, a Section-311 action against a small bank in Macau that did business with North Korea, Banco Delta Asia (BDA), turned the institution into a financial pariah. By July 2006, even the Bank of China, concerned to protect its reputation, froze North Korean accounts related to BDA. The final years of the Bush administration saw similar tactics deployed against Iran. The U.S. cut dollarized transactions for Iranian oil out of New York; the European Union followed with similar actions designed for European banks.

In just a few years, the Treasury had moved beyond targeting terrorist suspects to going after financial institutions associated with national governments deemed enemies, to hitting the financial institutions of targeted governments themselves. The Bush administration marked the definitive end of the old liberal financial paradigm. The private sphere would never be the same. The tradition of bank secrecy has been a quiet but obvious casualty. Banks have changed the way they understand risk. Before, banks had given priority to client privacy. A bank that divulged information about its clients was deemed too risky to work with. How can you thrive in the marketplace when your competitors know all about your financial affairs? Now, banks were eager to expose their clients to scrutiny, at first only secretly in accord with demands by government officials, but soon also those of politically engaged organizations. This explains why “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) norms, or “socially responsible investing,” took off during the Bush years. The major banks that helped launch ESG described it as risk management, with risk now defined in political terms: national security, environmental responsibility, and social justice. By encouraging companies to expand their definition of risk, the Treasury accelerated these trends. Compliance with the law was not enough; the objective was to create and expand a new notion of good corporate citizenship. Incentives and liabilities were put in place to encourage the market itself to enforce the new consensus on what risk meant. Private actors might occasionally resist the politicization of economic life, but most often they accepted the new terms and promoted them as “good for business.”

The direction of financial means toward political ends could be accomplished only with the ­cooperation of banks and other private entities. Private actors in civil society did not oppose this cooperation. Rather than check the power of the state, as liberal theorists stipulate, the private sphere of global finance collaborated with the state. Far from limiting the state, private economic actors have enhanced its powers and extended its reach, all the while changing their own understanding of their mission, the requirements of corporate citizenship, and the contours of citizenship itself.

Barack Obama took the new paradigm further. When he made gay rights a cornerstone of American foreign policy, the strategy to ensure their spread relied on state-society partnerships. Hillary Clinton’s signature 2011 speech on gay rights promised to “support the work of civil society organizations working on these issues around the world.” Breaking from prior U.S. practice, these organizations could conceal the source of their funds, hiding their connection to the U.S. government in order to pretend that gay rights was a grassroots movement.

Contrary to his hawkish critics, Obama wasn’t fixed only on “soft power.” In 2011, American conservatives were mocking Obama for “leading from behind” in the Libyan campaign, criticizing his reluctance to use American troops. This criticism was myopic. His administration was setting aggressive new precedents. Using the state-society partnership the Treasury had pioneered, the U.S. froze $37 billion of Libyan assets—at the time, the largest sequestration of assets in history. It marked the first time these financial sanctions had been used with the explicit intention of toppling a government. In January 2012, the Obama administration decided to strangle Iran. It invoked Section 311 against the country’s entire banking sector, including its central bank. This was the first time the measure had been used against another country’s central bank. Soon after, SWIFT crossed a rubicon from neutrality to partisanship in international relations. It sanctioned an entire country, expelling Iranian banks from its system. The Obama administration pivoted to negotiate with Iran about its nuclear program, and the Iranians, under intense financial pressure, were willing to talk.

These years were the high point of sanctions diplomacy. It was far less visible and militaristic than the British Empire’s gunboat diplomacy, but it seemed just as effective. At one administration holiday party in 2011, the director of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sang “Every little thing we do is sanctions,” to the tune of The Police’s “Every little thing she does is magic.” The approach seemed invincible. With an array of state-society partnerships, the United States could get whatever it wanted.

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. Stunned, the U.S. leveled up its sanction regime, striking for the first time at a great power. The scale of what was required demanded close cooperation among U.S. agencies and across the European and American financial sectors. It was, to say the least, a messy moment. The Obama administration itself hesitated, troubled by the old liberal voice of conscience. Toward the end of his term, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew worried that the American politicization of the global financial system might turn more countries against it. Moreover, it was ­unclear whether sanctions were as effective as their enthusiasts thought. Though Russia’s economy weakened, this development probably had more to do with to the decline in oil prices. Russia certainly did not withdraw from Crimea.

From his use of tariffs to individual sanctions on International Criminal Court prosecutors ­going after American soldiers, Donald Trump’s foreign policy generated apoplectic commentary: He was destroying the liberal international order! Yet Trump did not invent these tools. His innovations were to use them extensively against China and bring the tools to bear as part of hard-edged diplomatic bargaining. Along the way, his administration was ready to treat hostile legal activists like corrupt oligarchs. That’s why more sophisticated critics of Trump didn’t reject the tools. They planned to use them better than he did.

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Washington’s “geoeconomic,” sanctions-­driven strategy of “enlargement” failed, and the deep state knows it. In July, the Washington Post quoted a ­variety of active and former government officials who now criticize the excessive dependence on sanctions, including Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes. The Post also revealed that the state–society partnership is faltering. The business world has overwhelmed the federal bureaucracy with inquiries about how to implement sanctions and against whom. Corporations are thus forced to make many national security–­related decisions themselves. And the crisis is not just operational. American officials now realize that no reasonable observer believes the American-­led global financial system is still neutral. As a consequence, many countries are building alternatives. In the long run, the rise of alternative financial markets and intermediaries threatens the dollar’s status as a reserve currency and thus the financial foundation of American power.

Does the failure of sanctions against Russia mean a return to the old liberal tradition of public-private separation? Evidence suggests that the answer is “no.” Rhodes sees the foreign-policy problem, but he doesn’t grasp the effects of these changes in the domestic realm. The fusion of political power with economic power seems likely to increase, and as the political friend-enemy lines get redrawn, the application will become more ruthless. In his speech for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, George W. Bush declared:

We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.

Whether the enemy is abroad or at home, whether they are al-Qaeda terrorists or domestic rioters, they are essentially the same, and must be confronted with the same security tools.

In February 2022, just before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the Canadian government deployed the financial weapons of war against its own citizens. Canadians who had donated to the Truckers Convoy found themselves barred from accessing their bank accounts and savings. At least 76 bank accounts were frozen, assets totaling 3.2 million CAD. Many were aghast and placed the blame for “de-banking” on Canadian prime minister ­Justin Trudeau—guilty of a dictatorial misuse of the state of emergency, just like his father. But that is obsolete thinking. The measures the ­Canadian state invoked were successfully employed because they enjoyed the enthusiastic ­cooperation of Canadian banks. State and corporate goals had been fused together long before the 2022 Truckers Convoy. Like 9/11, Covid was an opportunity. It enabled states to perfect policies that they were experimenting with and which corporations were encouraging.

Actually existing postliberalism may have advanced furthest in Canada. Yet de-banking has become more and more common in the West. Tactics once employed against al-Qaeda are used against citizens deemed “children of the same foul spirit.” In 2022, the National Committee for Religious Freedom (NCRF) had its account with JP Morgan Chase closed. Chase said it might consider reopening it if NCRF divulged some of its donors’ names. Although Chase changed its story several times, the bank insists that it is complying with federal regulations on money laundering and terrorism. ­Fidelity Charitable has brought to bear similar pressures to break donor anonymity at the Alliance Defending Freedom. In June 2023, the UK bank Coutts and Co. suddenly closed Nigel Farage’s account. This decision was later exposed as politically motivated, as an internal dossier had concluded that Farage was “xenophobic and pandering to racists.” In the investigation that followed the scandal, the Financial Conduct Authority reports that UK banks are closing almost 1,000 accounts every day, a massive increase over prior years.

After the Farage de-banking scandal, British leftists observed that free speech isn’t the main issue; account closures disproportionately affect British Muslims. They have a point. De-banking is not new in Britain. It took off in 2014, when HSBC started shutting the accounts of well-known British Muslims without providing a reason. Just over a year before, in a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. government, HSBC had accepted internal monitoring to help the bank comply with money laundering and sanction laws.

Widely accepted changes in the domestic legal and financial order have banished liberal norms. As part of ever-­tightening anti-terrorist laws, governments require banks to monitor potential terrorist financing themselves. For banks, de-banking—the euphemism is “de-risking”—is necessary for responsible risk management and regulatory compliance, given present realities. Whether one strikes at conservatives, Muslims, those with ties to Brexit, or those with Russian names, there’s a pattern. Just as civil rights law allows corporations to enforce DEI ideology across the whole business world, so anti-terrorism law allows corporations to enforce political loyalty tests across the whole financial system. We are seeing in domestic life what has been happening at the global level since the 1990s. Civil society, especially its economic dimension, is being weaponized. Those who threaten the regime, or who give even the appearance of being the sort of person who might pose a threat, are at risk of being made non-persons.

As with so much in the era of actually existing postliberalism, the frankest description of its vision comes from Tony Blair. In 2006, then prime minister Blair said that the “traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong, as just made for another age.” Soon after, his home secretary John Reid elaborated. The previous age—the postwar age—began in response to concerns about the threat the “fascist state” posed to individuals, Reid said. Today, the threat comes from “fascist individuals,” not fascist states. This new threat—that of bad actors among us—calls for a new state-society arrangement. “Effective security,” Reid argued, “now relies on the participation of a much wider range of ­actors—from governments and public bodies, to companies and people . . . networks of public and private organizations have a joint role in guaranteeing local, national and international security.” In short, liberalism was a product of the postwar moment. Its time has ended. After the conclusion of the Cold War, British elites traded on the glories of the postwar moment to purify the British people, removing the stains of xenophobia, ­Euroskepticism, and racism. But when pressed, these elites thought the postwar era offered little of lasting significance beyond antifascism. Indeed, according to the new Blairite standards, more enlightened Brits might come to conclude that the whole postwar era seemed like a rather dangerous time. How many fascist individuals had been walking about then? How much fan mail had Enoch Powell received? One shudders at the prospect. Better to trust Blair and his successors, all the way down to Keir Starmer, to lead us into a safer, purer age.

Some revolutionary epochs are beset by the illusion of change. As Alexis de Tocqueville saw, the architects of the French Revolution—the 1789ers—relied on the powerful tool of a centralized state and the freedom of action made possible by a hollowed-out civil society, both created by the old regime. By contrast, the epoch of actually existing postliberalism is beset by the illusion of continuity. Its architects—the 1989ers—came into positions of power and influence just as the Cold War was ending. They knew very little of the war itself and almost nothing of its beginning. But they justified their ambitious geopolitical projects by tracing a long line of continuity back through the Cold War to the Second World War. The West’s victories over communism, fascism, and racism could be stretched further and further afield, isolating and destroying “backward states” and “rogue actors.” On these terms, the ’89ers imagined that they were the next generation of defenders of a continuous liberal tradition. But their actions indicate otherwise. Their substantive vision of the good didn’t just run up against hard limits in the last few years. It devoured liberalism. The ’89ers reconfigured the whole international system away from the liberal principles they ostensibly cherished. In due course, the domestic sphere has been bent to this new order.

The central drama of the last three decades has been the fusion of state and society. The ’89ers ushered in actually existing postliberalism, a society in which governmental power, cultural power, and economic power are coordinated to buttress regime security and punish the impure. 1989 heralded not the triumph of liberalism but its downfall. However, many refuse to recognize—or cannot recognize—how profoundly the West has changed. Our task is to live in the world into which we are thrown, to see it accurately, and to push it in a better direction.

Nathan Pinkoski is research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics.

Lecture of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the 33rd Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp

• 27/07/2024
• Source: Cabinet Office Of The Prime Minister

Good morning Summer Camp and other Guests.

The first piece of good news is that my visit this year was not accompanied by the same kind of brouhaha as last year’s: this year we have not received – I have not received – a diplomatic démarche from Bucharest; what I received was an invitation to a meeting with the Prime Minister, which took place yesterday. Last year, when I had the opportunity to meet the Prime Minister of Romania, I said after the meeting that it was “the beginning of a beautiful friendship”; at the end of the meeting this year, I was able to say “We’re making progress”. If we look at the figures, we are setting new records in economic and trade relations between our two countries. Romania is now Hungary’s third most important economic partner. We also discussed with the Prime Minister a high-speed train – a “TGV” – linking Budapest to Bucharest, as well as Romania’s membership of Schengen. I have undertaken to put this issue on the agenda for the October Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting – and, if necessary, for the December Council meeting – and to take it forward if possible.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We have not received a démarche from Bucharest, but – to prevent us getting bored – we have received one from Brussels: they have condemned the Hungarian peace mission efforts. I have tried – without success – to explain that there is such a thing as Christian duty. This means that if you see something bad in the world – especially something very bad – and you receive some instrument for its correction, then it is a Christian duty to take action, without undue contemplation or reflection. The Hungarian peace mission is about this duty. I would like to remind all of us that the EU has a founding treaty, which contains these exact words: “The Union’s aim is peace”. Brussels is also offended at our describing what they are doing as a pro-war policy. They say that they are supporting the war in the interest of peace. Central Europeans like us are immediately reminded of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who taught that with the advent of communism the state will die, but that the state will die while first constantly strengthening. Brussels is also creating peace by constantly supporting war. Just as we did not understand Lenin’s thesis in our university lectures on the history of the labour movement, I do not understand the Brusseleers in European Council meetings. Perhaps Orwell was right after all when he wrote that in “Newspeak” peace is war and war is peace. Despite all the criticism, let us remind ourselves that since the beginning of our peace mission the US and Russian war ministers have spoken to each other, the Swiss and Russian foreign ministers have held talks, President Zelenskyy has finally called President Trump, and the Ukrainian foreign minister has been to Beijing. So fermentation has begun, and we are slowly but surely moving from a pro-war European policy to a pro-peace policy. This is inevitable, because time is on the side of peace policy. Reality has dawned on the Ukrainians, and now it is up to the Europeans to come to their senses, before it is too late: “Trump ante portas”. If by then Europe does not switch to a policy of peace, then after Trump’s victory it will have to do so while admitting defeat, covered in shame, and admitting sole responsibility for its policy.

But, Ladies and Gentlemen, The subject of today’s presentation is not peace. Please regard what I have said so far as a digression. In fact, for those who are thinking about the future of the world, and of Hungarians within it, there are three big issues on the table today. The first is the war – or more precisely, an unexpected side-effect of the war. This is the fact that the war reveals the reality in which we live. This reality was not visible and could not be described earlier, but it has been illuminated by the blazing light of missiles fired in the war. The second big issue on the table is what will happen after the war. Will a new world come into being, or will the old one continue? And if a new world is coming – and this is our third big issue – how should Hungary prepare for this new world? The fact is that I need to talk about all three, and I need to talk about them here – first of all because these are the big issues that are best discussed in this “free university” format. From another point of view, we need a pan-Hungarian approach, as looking at these issues only from the point of view of a “Little Hungary” would be too constricting; it is therefore justified to talk about these issues in front of Hungarians outside our borders.

Dear Summer Camp,

These are big issues with manifold interrelations, and obviously even the esteemed audience cannot be expected to know all the important basic information, so from time to time I will need to digress. This is a tough task: we have three topics, one morning, and a ruthless moderator. I have chosen the following approach: to speak at length about the real situation of power in Europe as revealed by the war; then to give some glimpses of the new world that is in the making; and finally to refer – rather in the manner of a list, without explanation or argumentation – to the Hungarian plans related to this. This method has the advantage of also setting the theme for next year’s presentation.

The undertaking is ambitious, and even courageous: we must ask ourselves whether we can undertake it at all, and whether it might be beyond our ability. I think it is a realistic endeavour, because over the past year – or two or three years – some superb studies and books have been published in Hungary and abroad, and translators have also made these available to the Hungarian public. On the other hand, with all due modesty we must remind ourselves that we are the longest-serving government in Europe. I myself am the longest-serving European leader – and I should quietly point out that I am also the leader who has spent the longest time in opposition. So I have seen everything that I will talk about now. I am talking about something that I have lived through and continue to live through. Whether I have understood it is another question; that is something we will find out at the end of this presentation.

So, about the reality revealed by the war. Dear Friends, the war is our red pill. Think of the “Matrix” films. The hero is faced with a choice. He has two pills to choose from: if he swallows the blue pill, he can stay in the world of surface appearances; if he swallows the red pill, he can look into and descend into reality. The war is our red pill: it is what we have been given, it is what we must swallow. And now, armed with new experiences, we must talk about reality. It is a cliché that war is the continuation of policy with other means. It is important to add that war is the continuation of policy from a different perspective. So war, in its relentlessness, takes us to a new position from which to see things, to a high vantage point. And from there it gives us a completely different – hitherto unknown – perspective. We find ourselves in new surroundings and in a new, rarefied force field. In this pure reality, ideologies lose their power; statistical sleights of hand lose their power; media distortions and politicians’ tactical dissimulation loses its power. There is no longer any relevance to widespread delusions – or even to conspiracy theories. What remains is the stark, brutal reality. It’s a pity our friend Gyula Tellér is no longer with us, because now we would be able to hear some surprising things from him. Since he is no longer with us, however, you will have to make do with me. But I think there will be no shortage of shocks. For the sake of clarity, I have made bullet points of everything we have seen since we swallowed the red pill: since the outbreak of the war in February 2022.

Firstly, the war has seen brutal losses – numbering in the hundreds of thousands – suffered by both sides. I have recently met them, and I can say with certainty that they do not want to come to terms. Why is this? There are two reasons. The first is that each of them thinks that they can win, and wants to fight until victory. The second is that both are fuelled by their own real or perceived truth. The Ukrainians think that this is a Russian invasion, a violation of international law and territorial sovereignty, and they are in fact fighting a war of self-defence for their independence. The Russians think that there have been serious NATO military developments in Ukraine, Ukraine has been promised NATO membership, and they do not want to see NATO troops or NATO weapons on the Russian–Ukrainian border. So they say that Russia has the right to self-defence, and that in fact this war has been provoked. So everyone has some kind of truth, perceived or real, and will not give up fighting the war. This is a road leading directly to escalation; if it depends on these two sides, there will be no peace. Peace can only be brought in from outside.

Secondly: in years gone by we had got used to the United States declaring its main challenger or opponent to be China; yet now we see it waging a proxy war against Russia. And China is constantly accused of covertly supporting Russia. If this is the case, then we need to answer the question of why it is sensible to corral two such large countries together into a hostile camp. This question has yet to be answered in any meaningful way.

Thirdly: Ukraine’s strength, its resilience, has exceeded all expectations. After all, since 1991 eleven million people have left the country, it has been ruled by oligarchs, corruption sky-high, and the state had essentially ceased functioning. And yet now we are seeing unprecedentedly successful resistance from it. Despite the conditions described here, Ukraine is in fact a strong country. The question is what the source of this strength is. Apart from its military past and individuals’ personal heroism, there is something worth understanding here: Ukraine has found a higher purpose, it has discovered a new meaning to its existence. Because up until now, Ukraine saw itself as a buffer zone. To be a buffer zone is psychologically debilitating: there is a sense of helplessness, a feeling that one’s fate is not in one’s own hands. This is a consequence of such a doubly exposed position. Now, however, there is the dawning prospect of belonging to the West. Ukraine’s new self-authored mission is to be the West’s eastern military frontier region. The meaning and importance of its existence has increased in its own eyes and in the eyes of the whole world. This has brought it into a state of activity and action, which we non-Ukrainians see as aggressive insistence – and there’s no denying that it is quite aggressive and insistent. It is in fact the Ukrainians’ demand for their higher purpose to be officially recognised internationally. This is what gives them the strength that makes them capable of unprecedented resistance.

Fourthly: Russia is not what we have so far seen it to be, and Russia is not what we have so far been led to see it as. The country’s economic viability is outstanding. I remember being at European Council meetings – the prime ministers’ summits – when, with all sorts of gestures, Europe’s great leaders rather hubristically claimed that the sanctions against Russia and the exclusion of Russia from the so-called SWIFT system, the international financial clearing system, would bring Russia to its knees. They would bring the Russian economy to its knees, and through that the Russian political elite. As I watch events unfold, I am reminded of the wisdom of Mike Tyson, who once said that “Everyone has a plan, till they get punched in the mouth.” Because the reality is that the Russians have learned lessons from the sanctions imposed after the 2014 invasion of Crimea – and not only have they learned those lessons, but they have translated those lessons into action. They implemented the necessary IT and banking improvements. So the Russian financial system is not collapsing. They have developed the ability to adapt, and after 2014 we fell victim to this, because we used to export a significant proportion of Hungarian food produce to Russia. We could not continue to do so because of the sanctions, the Russians modernised their agriculture, and today we are talking about one of the world’s largest food export markets; this is a country that used to have to rely on imports. So the way that Russia is described to us – as a rigid neo-Stalinist autocracy – is false. In fact we are talking about a country that displays technical and economic resilience – and perhaps also societal resilience, but we’ll see.

The fifth important new lesson from reality: European policy-making has collapsed. Europe has given up defending its own interests: all that Europe is doing today is unconditionally following the foreign policy line of the US Democrats – even at the cost of its own self-destruction. The sanctions we have imposed are damaging fundamental European interests: they are driving up energy prices and making the European economy uncompetitive. We let the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline go unchallenged; Germany itself let an act of terrorism against its own property – which was obviously carried out under US direction – go unchallenged, and we are not saying a word about it, we are not investigating it, we do not want to clarify it, we do not want to raise it in a legal context. In the same way, we failed to do the right thing in the case of the phone tapping of Angela Merkel, which was carried out with the assistance of Denmark. So this is nothing but an act of submission. There is a context here which is complicated, but I will try to give you a necessarily simplified but comprehensive account of it. European policy-making has also collapsed since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war because the core of the European power system was the Paris–Berlin axis, which used to be inescapable: it was the core and it was the axis. Since the war broke out, a different centre and a different axis of power has been established. The Berlin–Paris axis no longer exists – or if it does, it has become irrelevant and liable to be bypassed. The new power centre and axis comprises London, Warsaw, Kiev/Kyiv, the Baltics and the Scandinavians. When, to the astonishment of Hungarians, one sees the German chancellor announcing that he is only sending helmets to the war, and then a week later he announces that he is in fact sending weapons, do not think that the man has lost his mind. Then when the same German chancellor announces that there may be sanctions, but that they must not cover energy, and then two weeks later he himself is at the head of the sanctions policy, do not think that the man has lost his mind. On the contrary, he is very much in his right mind. He is well aware that the Americans and the liberal opinion-forming vehicles they influence – universities, think tanks, research institutes, the media – are using public opinion to punish Franco–German policy that is not in line with American interests. This is why we have the phenomenon that I have been talking about, and this is why we have the German chancellor’s idiosyncratic blunders. Changing the centre of power in Europe and bypassing the Franco–German axis is not a new idea – it has simply been made possible by the war. The idea existed before, in fact being an old Polish plan to solve the problem of Poland being squeezed between a huge German state and a huge Russian state, by making Poland the number one American base in Europe. I could describe it as inviting the Americans there, between the Germans and the Russians. Five per cent of Poland’s GDP is now devoted to military expenditure, and the Polish army is the second largest in Europe after the French – we are talking about hundreds of thousands of troops. This is an old plan, to weaken Russia and outpace Germany. At first sight, outpacing the Germans seems to be a fantasy idea. But if you look at the dynamics of the development of Germany and Central Europe, of Poland, it does not seem so impossible – especially if in the meantime Germany is dismantling its own world-class industry. This strategy caused Poland to give up cooperation with the V4. The V4 meant something different: the V4 means that we recognise that there is a strong Germany and there is a strong Russia, and – working with the Central European states – we create a third entity between the two. The Poles have backed out of this and, instead of the V4 strategy of accepting the Franco–German axis, they have embarked on the alternative strategy of eliminating the Franco–German axis. Talking of our Polish brothers and sisters, let us mention them here in passing. Since they have now kicked our backsides black and blue, perhaps we can allow ourselves to say a few sincere, fraternal home truths about them. Well, the Poles are pursuing the most sanctimonious and hypocritical policy in the whole of Europe. They lecture us on moral grounds, they criticise us for our economic relations with Russia, and at the same time they are blithely doing business with the Russians, buying their oil – albeit via indirect routes – and running the Polish economy with it. The French are better than that: last month, incidentally, they overtook us in gas purchases from Russia – but at least they do not lecture us on moral grounds. The Poles are both doing business and lecturing us. I have not seen a policy of such rank hypocrisy in Europe in the last ten years. The scale of this change – of bypassing the German–French axis – can truly be grasped by older people if they perhaps think back twenty years, when the Americans attacked Iraq and called on the European countries to join in. We, for example, joined in as a member of NATO. At the time Schröder, the then German chancellor, and Chirac, the then French president, were joined by President Putin of Russia at a joint press conference called in opposition to the Iraq war. At that time there was still an independent Franco–German logic when approaching European interests.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The peace mission is not just about seeking peace, but is also about urging Europe to finally pursue an independent policy. Red pill number six: the spiritual solitude of the West. Up until now the West has thought and behaved as if it sees itself as a reference point, a kind of benchmark for the world. It has provided the values that the world has had to accept – for example, liberal democracy or the green transition. But most of the world has noticed this, and in the last two years there has been a 180-degree turn. Once again the West has declared its expectation, its instruction, for the world to take a moral stand against Russia and for the West. In contrast, the reality has become that, step-by-step, everyone is siding with Russia. That China and North Korea are doing so is perhaps no surprise. That Iran is doing the same – given Iran’s history and its relationship with Russia – is somewhat surprising. But the fact that India, which the Western world calls the most populous democracy, is also on the side of the Russians is astonishing. That Turkey refuses to accept the West’s morally based demands, even though it is a NATO member, is truly surprising. And the fact that the Muslim world sees Russia not as an enemy but as a partner is completely unexpected.

Seventhly: the war has exposed the fact that the biggest problem the world faces today is the weakness and disintegration of the West. Of course, this is not what the Western media says: in the West they claim that the world’s greatest danger and problem is Russia and the threat it represents. This is wrong! Russia is too large for its population, and it is also under hyper-rational leadership – indeed it is a country that has leadership. There is nothing mysterious about what it does: its actions follow logically from its interests, and are therefore understandable and predictable. On the other hand, the behaviour of the West – as may be clear from what I have said so far – is not understandable and not predictable. The West is not led, its behaviour is not rational, and it cannot deal with the situation that I described in my presentation here last year: the fact that two suns have appeared in the sky. This is the challenge to the West in the form of the rise of China and Asia. We should be able to deal with this, but we are not able to.

Point eight. Arising from this, for us the real challenge is to once again try to understand the West in the light of the war. Because we Central Europeans see the West as irrational. But, Dear Friends, what if it is behaving logically, but we do not understand its logic? If it is logical in the way it thinks and acts, then we must ask why we do not understand it. And if we could find the answer to this question, we would also understand why Hungary regularly clashes with the Western countries of the European Union on geopolitical and foreign policy issues. My answer is the following. Let us imagine that the worldview of us Central Europeans is based on nation states. Meanwhile the West thinks that nation states no longer exist; this is unimaginable to us, but all the same this is what it thinks. The coordinate system within which we Central Europeans think is therefore completely irrelevant. In our conception, the world is made up of nation states which exercise a domestic monopoly on the use of force, thereby creating a condition of general peace. In its relations with other states the nation state is sovereign – in other words, it has the capacity to independently determine its foreign and domestic policy. In our conception, the nation state is not a legal abstraction, not a legal construct: the nation state is rooted in a particular culture. It has a shared set of values, it has anthropological and historical depth. And from this emerge shared moral imperatives based on a joint consensus. This is what we think of as the nation state. What is more, we do not see it as a phenomenon that developed in the 19th century: we believe that nation states have a biblical basis, since they belong to the order of creation. For in Scripture we read that at the end of time there will be judgement not only of individuals but also of nations. Consequently, in our conception nations are not provisional formations. But in complete contrast Westerners believe that nation states no longer exist. They therefore deny the existence of a shared culture and a shared morality based on it. They have no shared morality; if you watched the Olympic opening ceremony yesterday, that is what you saw. This is why they think differently about migration. They think that migration is not a threat or a problem, but in fact a way of escaping from the ethnic homogeneity that is the basis of a nation. This is the essence of the progressive liberal internationalist conception of space. This is why they are oblivious to the absurdity – or they do not see it as absurd – that while in the eastern half of Europe hundreds of thousands of Christians are killing one another, in the west of Europe we are letting in hundreds of thousands of people from foreign civilisations. From our Central European point of view this is the definition of absurdity. This idea is not even conceived of in the West. In parenthesis I note that the European states lost a total of some fifty-seven million indigenous Europeans in the First and Second World Wars. If they, their children and their grandchildren had lived, today Europe would not have any demographic problems. The European Union does not simply think in the way I am describing, but it declares it. If we read the European documents carefully, it is clear that the aim is to supersede the nation. It is true that they have a strange way of writing and saying this, stating that nation states must be superseded, while some small trace of them remains. But the point is that, after all, powers and sovereignty should be transferred from the nation states to Brussels. This is the logic behind every major measure. In their minds, the nation is a historical or transitional creation, born of the 18th and 19th centuries – and as it arrived, so may it depart. For them, the western half of Europe is already post-national. This is not only a politically different situation, but what I am trying to talk about here is that this is a new mental space. If you do not look at the world from the point of view of nation states, a completely different reality opens up before you. Herein lies the problem, the reason that the countries in the western eastern halves of Europe do not understand one another, the reason we cannot pull together.

If we project all of this onto the United States, this is the real battle that is going on over there. What should the United States be? Should it become a nation state again, or should it continue its march towards a post-national state? President Donald Trump’s precise goal is to bring the American people back from the post-national liberal state, to drag them back, to force them back, to raise them back to the nation state. This is why the stakes in the US election are so enormous. This is why we are seeing things that we have never seen before. This is why they want to prevent Donald Trump from running in the election. This is why they want to put him in jail. This is why they want to take away his assets. And if that does not work, this is why they want to kill him. And let there be no doubt that what happened may not be the last attempt in this campaign.

In parenthesis, I spoke to the President yesterday and he asked me how I was doing. I said that I was great, because I am here in a geographical entity called Transylvania. Explaining this is not so easy, especially in English, and especially to President Trump. But I said that I was here in Transylvania at a free university where I was going to give a presentation on the state of the world. And he said that I must pass on his personal heartfelt greetings to the attendees at the camp and those at the free university.

Now, if we try to understand how this Western thinking – which for the sake of simplicity we should call “post-national” thinking and condition – came about, then we have to go back to the grand illusion of the 1960s. The grand illusion of the 1960s took two forms: the first was the sexual revolution, and the second was student rebellion. In fact, it was an expression of the belief that the individual would be freer and greater if he or she were freed from any kind of collective. More than sixty years later it has since become clear that, on the contrary, the individual can only become great through and in a community, that when alone he or she can never be free, but always lonely and doomed to be shrunken. In the West bonds have been successively discarded: the metaphysical bonds that are God; the national bonds that are the homeland; and family bonds – discarding the family. I am referring again to the opening of the Paris Olympics. Now that they have managed to get rid of all that, expecting the individual to become greater, they find that they feel a sense of emptiness. They have not become great, but have become small. For in the West they no longer desire either great ideals or great, inspiring shared goals.

Here we must talk about the secret of greatness. What is the secret of greatness? The secret of greatness is to be able to serve something greater than yourself. To do this, you first have to acknowledge that in the world there is something or some things that are greater than you, and then you must dedicate yourself to serving those greater things. There are not many of these. You have your God, your country and your family. But if you do not do that, but instead you focus on your own greatness, thinking that you are smarter, more beautiful, more talented than most people, if you expend your energy on that, on communicating all that to others, then what you get is not greatness, but grandiosity. And this is why today, whenever we are in talks with Western Europeans, in every gesture we feel grandiosity instead of greatness. I have to say that a situation has developed that we can call emptiness, and the feeling of superfluity that goes with it gives rise to aggression. Hence the emergence of the “aggressive dwarf” as a new type of person.

To sum up, what I want to say to you is that when we talk about Central Europe and Western Europe, we are not talking about differences of opinion, but about two different worldviews, two mentalities, two instincts, and hence two different arguments. We have a nation state, which forces us towards strategic realism. They have post-nationalist dreams that are inert to national sovereignty, do not recognise national greatness, and have no shared national goals. This is the reality we have to face.

And finally, the last element of reality is that this post-national condition that we see in the West has a serious – and I would say dramatic – political consequence that is convulsing democracy. Because within societies there is growing resistance to migration, to gender, to war and to globalism. And this creates the political problem of the elite and the people – of elitism and populism. This is the defining phenomenon of Western politics today. If you read the texts, you do not need to understand them, and they do not always make sense anyway; but if you read the words, the following are the expressions you will find most often. They indicate that the elites are condemning the people for drifting towards the Right. The feelings and ideas of the people are labelled as xenophobia, homophobia and nationalism. In response, the people accuse the elite of not caring about what is important to them, but of sinking into some kind of deranged globalism. Consequently the elites and the people cannot agree with each other on the question of cooperation. I could mention many countries. But if the people and the elites cannot agree on cooperation, how can this produce representative democracy? Because we have an elite that does not want to represent the people, and is proud of not wanting to represent them; and we have the people, who are not represented. In fact in the Western world we are faced with a situation in which the masses of people appearing with college degrees no longer form less than 10 per cent of the population, but 30 to 40 per cent. And because of their views these people do not respect those who are less educated – who are typically working people, people who live from their labour. For the elites, only the values of graduates are acceptable, only they are legitimate. This is the viewpoint from which the results of the European Parliament elections can be understood. The European People’s Party garnered the votes of “plebeians” on the Right who wanted change, then took those votes to the Left and made a deal with the left-wing elites who have an interest in maintaining the status quo. This has consequences for the European Union. The consequence is that Brussels remains under the occupation of a liberal oligarchy. This oligarchy has it in its grip. This left-liberal elite is in fact organising a transatlantic elite: not European, but global; not based on the nation state, but federal; and not democratic, but oligarchic. This also has consequences for us, because in Brussels the “3 Ps” are back: “prohibited, permitted and promoted”. We belong to the prohibited category. The Patriots for Europe have therefore been prohibited from receiving any positions. We live in the world of the permitted political community. Meanwhile our domestic opponents – especially the newcomers to the European People’s Party – are in the strongly promoted category.

And perhaps one last, tenth point, is about how Western values – which were the essence of so-called “soft power” – have become a boomerang. It has turned out that these Western values, which were thought to be universal, are demonstratively unacceptable and rejected in ever more countries around the world. It has turned out that modernity, modern development, is not Western, or at least not exclusively Western – because China is modern, India is becoming increasingly modern, and the Arabs and Turks are modernising; and they are not becoming a modern world on the basis of Western values at all. And in the meantime Western soft power has been replaced by Russian soft power, because now the key to the propagation of Western values is LGBTQ. Anyone who does not accept this is now in the “backward” category as far as the Western world is concerned. I do not know if you have been watching, but I think it is remarkable that in the last six months pro-LGBTQ laws have been passed by countries such as Ukraine, Taiwan and Japan. But the world does not agree. Consequently, today Putin’s strongest tactical weapon is the Western imposition of LGBTQ and resistance to it, opposition to it. This has become Russia’s strongest international attraction; thus what used to be Western soft power has now been transformed into Russian soft power – like a boomerang.

All in all, Ladies and Gentlemen, I can say that the war has helped us to understand the real state of power in the world. It is a sign that in its mission the West has shot itself in the foot, and is therefore accelerating the changes that are transforming the world. My first presentation is over. Now comes the second.

What comes next? It needs to be shorter, Zsolt Németh says. So the second presentation is about what follows from this. First, intellectual courage is needed here. So you have to work with broad brushstrokes, because I am convinced that the fate of the Hungarians depends on whether they understand what is happening in the world, and whether we Hungarians understand what the world will be like after the war. In my opinion a new world is coming. We cannot be accused of having a narrow imagination or of intellectual inertia, but even we – and I personally, when I have spoken here in recent years – have underestimated the scale of the change that is happening and that we are living through.

Dear Friends, Dear Summer Camp,

We are in a change, a change is coming, that has not been seen for five hundred years. This has not been apparent to us because in the last 150 years there have been great changes in and around us, but in these changes the dominant world power has always been in the West. And our starting point is that the changes we are seeing now are likely to follow this Western logic. By contrast, this is a new situation. In the past, change was Western: the Habsburgs rose and then fell; Spain was up, and it became the centre of power; it fell, and the English rose; the First World War finished off the monarchies; The British were replaced by the Americans as world leaders; then the Russo–American Cold War was won by the Americans. But all these developments remained within our Western logic. This is not the case now, however, and this is what we must face up to; because the Western world is not challenged from within the Western world, and so the logic of change has been disrupted. What I am talking about, and what we are facing, is actually a global system change. And this is a process that is coming from Asia. To put it succinctly and primitively, for the next many decades – or perhaps centuries, because the previous world system was in place for five hundred years – the dominant centre of the world will be in Asia: China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and I could go on. They have already created their forms, their platforms, there is this BRICS formation in which they are already present. And there is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, in which these countries are building the new world economy. I think that this is an inevitable process, because Asia has the demographic advantage, it has the technological advantage in ever more areas, it has the capital advantage, and it is bringing its military power up to equilibrium with that of the West. Asia will have – or perhaps already has – the most money, the largest financial funds, the largest companies in the world, the best universities, the best research institutes, and the largest stock exchanges. It will have – or already has – the most advanced space research and the most advanced medical science. In addition, we in the West – even the Russians – have been well shepherded into this new entity that is taking shape. The question is whether or not the process is reversible – and if not, when it became irreversible. I think it happened in 2001, when we in the West decided to invite China to join the World Trade Organisation – better known as the WTO. Since then this process has been almost unstoppable and irreversible.

President Trump is working on finding the American response to this situation. In fact, Donald Trump’s attempt is probably the last chance for the US to retain its world supremacy. We could say that four years is not enough, but if you look at who he has chosen as Vice President, a young and very strong man, if Donald Trump wins now, in four years his Vice President will run. He can serve two terms, and that will total twelve years. And in twelve years a national strategy can be implemented. I am convinced that many people think that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Americans will want to retain their world supremacy by maintaining their position in the world. I think that this is wrong. Of course, no one gives up positions of their own accord, but that will not be the most important goal. On the contrary, the priority will be to rebuild and strengthen North America. This means not only the US, but also Canada and Mexico, because together they form an economic area. And America’s place in the world will be less important. You have to take what the President says seriously: “America First, everything here, everything will come home!” This is why the capacity to raise capital from everywhere is being developed. We are already suffering as a result: the big European companies are not investing in Europe, but are investing in America, because the ability to attract capital seems to be on the horizon. They are going to squeeze the price of everything out of everyone. I do not know whether you have read what the President said. For example, they are not an insurance company, and if Taiwan wants security, it should pay. They will make us Europeans, NATO and China pay the price of security; and they will also achieve a trade balance with China through negotiations, and change it in favour of the US. They will trigger massive US infrastructure development, military research, and innovation. They will achieve – or perhaps have already achieved – energy self-sufficiency and raw material self-sufficiency; and finally they will improve ideologically, giving up on the export of democracy. America First. The export of democracy is at an end. This is the essence of the experiment America is conducting in response to the situation described here.

What is the European response to global system change? We have two options. The first is what we call “the open-air museum”. This is what we have now. We are moving towards it. Europe, absorbed by the US, will be left in an underdeveloped role. It will be a continent that the world marvels at, but one which no longer has within it the dynamic for development. The second option, announced by President Macron, is strategic autonomy. In other words, we must enter the competition of global system change. After all, this is what the USA does, according to its own logic. And we are indeed talking about 400 million people. It is possible to recreate Europe’s capacity to attract capital, and it is possible to bring capital back from America. It is possible to make major infrastructure developments, especially in Central Europe – the Budapest–Bucharest TGV and the Warsaw–Budapest TGV, to mention what we are involved in. We need a European military alliance with a strong European defence industry, research and innovation. We need European energy self-sufficiency, which will not be possible without nuclear energy. And after the war we need a new reconciliation with Russia. This means that the European Union must surrender its ambitions as a political project, the Union must strengthen itself as an economic project, and the Union must create itself as a defence project. In both cases – the open-air museum or if we join the competition – what will happen is that we must be prepared for the fact that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO or the European Union, because we Europeans do not have enough money for that. Ukraine will return to the position of a buffer state. If it is lucky, this will come with international security guarantees, which will be enshrined in a US–Russia agreement, in which we Europeans may be able to participate. The Polish experiment will fail, because they do not have the resources: they will have to return to Central Europe and the V4. So let us wait for the Polish brothers and sisters to return. The second presentation is over. There is only one left. This is about Hungary.

What should Hungary do in this situation? First of all, let us record the sad fact that five hundred years ago, at the time of the last global system change, Europe was the winner and Hungary the loser. It was a time when, thanks to geographical discoveries, a new economic space opened up in the western half of Europe – one in which we were completely unable to participate. Unfortunately for us, at the same time a civilisational conflict also kicked down our door, with Islamic conquest arriving in Hungary, making us a war zone for many years. This resulted in a huge loss of population, leading to resettlement – the consequences of which we can see today. And unfortunately we did not have the capacity to break out of this situation on our own. We could not liberate ourselves by our own efforts, and so for several centuries we had to be annexed to a Germanic Habsburg world.

Let us also remind ourselves that five hundred years ago the Hungarian elite fully understood what was happening. They understood the nature of the change, but they did not have the means that would have enabled them to prepare the country for that change. This was the reason for the failure of the attempts to expand the space – the political, economic and military space – and to avoid trouble: the attempts to cut our way out of the situation. Such an attempt was made by King Matthias, who – following Sigismund’s example – sought to become Holy Roman Emperor, and thus involve Hungary in the global system change. This failed. But I would also include here the attempt to have Tamás Bakócz appointed as Pope, which would have given us another opportunity to become a winner in this global system change. But these attempts did not succeed. Therefore the Hungarian symbol of this era, the symbol of Hungarian failure, is [military defeat at] Mohács. In other words, the beginning of the West’s world power dominance coincided with the decline of Hungary.

This is important, because now we must clarify our relationship to the new global system change. We have two possibilities: Is this now a threat for Hungary, or an opportunity for Hungary? If it is a threat, then we must pursue a policy of protecting the status quo: we must swim along with the United States and the European Union, and we must identify our national interests with one or both branches of the West. If we see this not as a threat but as an opportunity, we need to chart our own development path, make changes and take the initiative. In other words, it will be worth pursuing a nationally-oriented policy. I believe in the latter, I belong to the latter school: the current global system change is not a threat, not primarily a threat, but rather an opportunity.

If, however, we want to pursue our independent national policy, the question is whether we have the necessary boundary conditions. In other words, would we be in danger of being trodden on – or, rather, being trampled on. So the question is whether or not we have the boundary conditions for our own path in our relations with the USA, the European Union and Asia.

In short, I can only say that developments in the US are moving in our favour. I do not believe that we will get an economic and political offer from the United States that will create a better opportunity for us than membership of the European Union. If we do get one, we should consider it. Of course the Polish trap is to be avoided: they have bet a lot on one card, but there was a Democratic government in America; they have been helped in their strategic Polish national goals, but the Poles are subject to the imposition of a policy of democracy export, LGBTQ, migration and internal social transformation which actually risks the loss of their national identity. So if there is an offer from America, we need to consider it carefully.

If we look at Asia and China, we have to say that there the boundary conditions exist – because we have received an offer from China. We have received the maximum offer possible, and we will not get a better one. This can be summarised as follows: China is very far away, and for them Hungary’s membership of the European Union is an asset. This is unlike the Americans, who are always telling us that perhaps we should get out. The Chinese think that we are in a good place here – even though EU membership is a constraint, because we cannot pursue an independent trade policy, as EU membership comes with a common trade policy. To this the Chinese say that this being the case, we should participate in each other’s modernisation. Of course, when lions offer an invitation to a mouse, one must always be alert, because after all reality and relative sizes do matter. But this Chinese offer to participate in each other’s modernisation – announced during the Chinese president’s visit in May – means that they are willing to invest a large proportion of their resources and development funds in Hungary, and that they are willing to offer us opportunities to participate in the Chinese market.

What is the consequence for EU–Hungary relations if we consider our membership of the EU as a boundary condition? As I see it, the western part of the European Union is no longer on course to return to the nation state model. Therefore they will continue to navigate in what to us are unfamiliar waters. The eastern part of the Union – in other words us – can defend our condition as nation states. That is something we are capable of. The Union has lost the current war. The US will abandon it. Europe cannot finance the war, it cannot finance the reconstruction of Ukraine, and it cannot finance the running of Ukraine.

In parenthesis, while Ukraine is asking us for more loans, negotiations are underway to write off the loans it has previously taken out. Today the creditors and Ukraine are arguing over whether it should repay 20 per cent or 60 per cent of the debt it has taken on. This is the reality of the situation. In other words, the European Union has to pay the price of this military adventure. This price will be high, and it will affect us adversely. As a boundary condition, the consequence for us – for Europe – is that the European Union will acknowledge that the Central European countries will remain in the European Union, while remaining on nation-state foundations and pursuing their own foreign policy objectives. They may not like it, but they will have to put up with it – especially as the number of such countries will increase.

All in all, therefore, I can say that the boundary conditions exist for independent nationally-oriented policy towards America, Asia and Europe. These will define the limits of our room for manoeuvre. This space is wide – wider than it has been at any time in the last five hundred years. The next question is what we need to do to use this space to our advantage. If there is a global system change, then we need a strategy that is worthy of it.

If there is a global system change, then we need a grand strategy for Hungary. Here the order of words is important: we do not need a strategy for a grand Hungary, but a grand strategy for Hungary. This means that up to now we have had small strategies, usually with a 2030 time horizon. These are action plans, they are policy programmes, and they have been intended to take what we started in 2010 – what we call national course building – and simply finish it. They have to be followed through. But in a time of global system change this is not enough. For that we need a grand strategy, a longer timeframe – especially if we assume that this global system change will lead to a stable long-term state of affairs that will last for centuries. Whether this will be the case will, of course, be for our grandchildren to say at Tusnád/Tușnad in 2050.

How do we stand with Hungary’s grand strategy? Is there a grand strategy for Hungary in our drawer? There would be, and in fact there is. This is the answer. Because over the past two years the war has spurred us on. Here some things have happened that we have decided to do in order to create a grand strategy – even if we have not talked about them in this context. We immediately started working on such a grand strategy after the 2022 election. Unusually, the Hungarian government has a political director whose job is actually to put together this grand strategy. We have entered the programme-writing system of President Donald Trump’s team, and we have deep involvement there. For some time researchers at the Magyar Nemzeti Bank [Hungarian National Bank] have been taking part in strategy workshops in Asia – particularly in China. And to turn our disadvantage into an advantage, after we were forced into a ministerial change, we brought into the Government not a technocrat but a strategic thinker, and we created a separate European Union ministry with János Bóka. And so in Brussels we are not passive, but we have set up shop there: we are not moving out, but moving in. And there are a number of such soft power institutions associated with the Hungarian government – think tanks, research institutes, universities – which have been operating at full throttle over the past two years.

So there is a grand strategy for Hungary. What condition is it in? I can say that it is not yet in a good condition. It is not in a good condition because the language being used is too intellectual. And our political and competitive advantage comes precisely from the fact that we are able to create a unity with the people in which everyone can understand exactly what we are doing and why. This is the foundation for our ability to act together. Because people will only defend a plan if they understand it and see that it is good for them. Otherwise, if founded on Brusselian blah-blah, it will not work. Unfortunately, what we have now – the grand strategy for Hungary – is not yet digestible and widely comprehensible. It will take a good six months to get to that stage. Currently it is raw and coarse – I could even say that it was not written with a fountain pen, but with a chisel, and that we need to get through a lot more sandpaper to make it comprehensible. But for now, I will briefly present what there is.

So the essence of the grand strategy for Hungary – and now I will use intellectual language – is connectivity. This means that we will not allow ourselves to be locked into only one of either of the two emerging hemispheres in the world economy. The world economy will not be exclusively Western or Eastern. We have to be in both, in the Western and in the Eastern. This will come with consequences. The first. We will not get involved in the war against the East. We will not join in the formation of a technological bloc opposing the East, and we will not join in the formation of a trade bloc opposing the East. We are gathering friends and partners, not economic or ideological enemies. We are not taking the intellectually much easier path of latching on to someone, but we are going our own way. This is difficult – but then there is a reason that politics is described as an art.

The second chapter in the grand strategy is about spiritual foundations. At the core of this is the defence of sovereignty. I have already said enough about foreign policy, but this strategy also describes the economic basis of national sovereignty. In recent years we have been building a pyramid. At the top of it are the “national champions”. Below them are the internationally competitive medium-sized companies, below which are companies producing for the domestic market. At the bottom are small companies and sole traders. This is the Hungarian economy that can provide the basis for sovereignty. We have national champions in banking, energy, food, the production of basic agricultural goods, IT, telecommunications, media, civil engineering, building construction, real estate development, pharmaceuticals, defence, logistics, and – to some extent, through the universities – knowledge industries. And these are our national champions. They are not just champions at home, but they are all out there in the international arena and they have proven themselves competitive. Below these come our medium-sized companies. I would like to inform you that today Hungary has fifteen thousand medium-sized companies that are internationally active and competitive. When we came to power in 2010, the number was three thousand. Today we have fifteen thousand. And of course we need to broaden the base of small enterprises and sole traders. If by 2025 we can draw up a peace budget and not a war budget, we will launch an extensive programme for small and medium-sized enterprises. The economic basis for sovereignty also means that we must strengthen our financial independence. We need to bring our debt down not to 50 or 60 per cent, but close to 30 per cent; and we need to emerge as a regional creditor. Today we are already making attempts to do this, and Hungary is providing state loans to friendly countries in our region that are in some way important to Hungary. It is important that, according to the strategy, we must remain a production hub: we must not switch to a service-oriented economy. The service sector is important, but we must retain the character of Hungary as a production hub, because only in this way can there be full employment in the domestic labour market. We must not repeat the West’s mistake of using guest workers to do certain production work, because over there members of host populations already consider certain types of work to be beneath them. If this were to happen in Hungary, it would induce a process of social dissolution that would be difficult to halt. And, for the defence of sovereignty, this chapter also includes the building of university and innovation centres.

The third chapter identifies the body of the grand strategy: the Hungarian society that we are talking about. If we are to be winners, this Hungarian society must be solid and resilient. It must have a solid and resilient social structure. The first prerequisite for this is halting demographic decline. We started well, but now we have stalled. A new impetus is needed. By 2035 Hungary must be demographically self-sustaining. There can be no question of population decline being compensated for by migration. The Western experience is that if there are more guests than hosts, then home is no longer home. This is a risk that must not be taken. Therefore, if after the end of the war we can draw up a peace budget, then to regain the momentum of demographic improvement the tax credit for families with children will probably need to be doubled in 2025 – in two steps not one, but within one year. “Sluice gates” must control the inflow from Western Europe of those who want to live in a Christian national country. The number of such people will continue to grow. Nothing will be automatic, and we will be selective. Up until now they have been selective, but now we are the ones who will be selective. For society to be stable and resilient it must be based on a middle-class: families must have their own wealth and financial independence. Full employment must be preserved, and the key to this will be to maintain the current relationship between work and the Roma population. There will be work, and you cannot live without work. This is the deal and this is the essence of what is on offer. Also linked to this is the system of Hungarian villages, which is a special asset in Hungarian history, and not a symbol of backwardness. The Hungarian village system must be preserved. An urban level of services also needs to be provided by us in villages. The financial burden of this must be borne by towns and cities. We will not create megacities, we will not create big cities, but we want to create towns and rural areas around towns, while preserving the historical heritage of the Hungarian village.

And finally there is the crucial element of sovereignty, with which we have arrived here on the banks of the River Olt. We have reduced this to a minimum, fearing that otherwise Zsolt might take the microphone from us. This is the essence of the protection of sovereignty, which is the protection of national distinctiveness. This is not assimilation, not integration, not blending in, but the maintenance of our own particular national character. This is the cultural basis of the defence of sovereignty: language preservation, and avoiding a state of “zero religion”. Zero religion is a state in which faith has long disappeared, but there has also been the loss of the capacity for Christian tradition to provide us with cultural and moral rules of behaviour that govern our relationship to work, money, family, sexual relations, and the order of priorities in how we relate to one another. This is what Westerners have lost. I think that this state of zero religion comes about when same-sex marriage is recognised as an institution with a status equal to that of marriage between men and women. That is a state of zero religion, in which Christianity no longer provides a moral compass and guidance. This must be avoided at all costs. And so when we fight for the family, we are not just fighting for the honour of the family, but for the maintenance of a state in which Christianity at least still provides moral guidance for our community.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

And finally, this Hungarian grand strategy must not start from “Little Hungary”. This grand strategy for Hungary must be based on national foundations, it must include all areas inhabited by Hungarians, and it must embrace all Hungarians living anywhere in the world. Little Hungary alone – Little Hungary as the sole framework – will be insufficient. For this reason I dare not give a date, because we would have to stick to it. But within the foreseeable future all the support that serves the stability and resilience of Hungarian society – such as the family support system – must be extended in its entirety to areas inhabited by Hungarians outside the country’s borders. This is not going in a bad direction, because if I look back at the amounts spent on these areas by the Hungarian state since 2010, I can say that we have spent an average of 100 billion forints a year. By way of comparison, I can say that during the [Socialist] government of Ferenc Gyurcsány, the annual expenditure on this was 9 billion forints. Now we are spending 100 billion a year. So that’s a more than tenfold increase.

And then the only question is this: When the grand strategy for Hungary is in place, what kind of policy can be used to make it a success? First of all, for a grand strategy to succeed, we need to know ourselves very well. Because the policy we want to use to make a strategy a success must be suited to our national character. To this, of course, we can say that we are diverse. This is particularly true for Hungarians. But there are nevertheless shared essential features, and this is what the strategy must target and fix on. And if we understand this, then we do not need compromises or consolidation, but we need to take a firm stand. I believe that, in addition to diversity, the essence – the shared essence that we must grasp and on which we must build the Hungarian grand strategy – is the freedom which must also be built inwards: we must not only build the freedom of the nation, but we must also aim for the personal freedom of Hungarians. Because we are not a militarised country like the Russians or the Ukrainians. Nor are we hyper-disciplined like the Chinese. Unlike the Germans, we do not enjoy hierarchy. We do not enjoy upheaval, revolution and blasphemy like the French. Nor do we believe that we can survive without our state, our own state, as the Italians tend to think. For Hungarians order is not a value in itself, but a condition necessary for freedom, in which we can live undisturbed lives. The closest thing to the Hungarian sense and meaning of freedom is the expression summing up an undisturbed life: “My house, my home, my castle, my life, and I will decide what makes me feel comfortable in my own skin.” This is an anthropological, genetic and cultural characteristic of Hungarians, and the strategy must adapt to it. In other words, it must also be the starting point for politicians who want to carry the grand strategy to victory.

This process we are talking about – this global system change – will not take place in a year or two, but has already begun and will take another twenty to twenty-five years, and therefore during these twenty to twenty-five years it will be the subject of constant debate. Our opponents will constantly attack it. They will say that the process is reversible. They will say that we need integration instead of a separate national grand strategy. So they will constantly attack it and work on diverting it. They will constantly question not only the content of the grand strategy, but also the need for it. This is a fight that must now be committed to, but here one problem is the timeframe. Because if this is a process spanning twenty to twenty-five years, we have to admit that as we are not getting any younger, we will not be among those who finish it. The implementation of this grand strategy – especially the final phase – will certainly not be done by us, but mostly by young people who are now in their twenties and thirties. And when we think about politics, about how to implement such a strategy in political terms, we have to realise that in future generations there will essentially be only two positions – just as there are in our generation: there will be liberals and there will be nationalists. And I have to say that there will be liberal, slim-fit, avocado-latte, allergen-free, self-satisfied politicians on one side, and on the other side there will be streetwise young people of nationalist sympathies, with both feet firmly on the ground. Therefore we need to start recruiting young people – now, and for us. The opposition is constantly being organised and deployed to the battlefield by the liberal Zeitgeist. They have no need for recruitment efforts, because recruitment happens automatically. But our camp is different: the national camp will only come out at the sound of a trumpet, and can only rally under a flag that has been raised high. This is also true of young people. Therefore we need to find courageous young fighters with nationalist sentiments. We are looking for courageous young fighters with a national spirit.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Welcome to all new subscribers who found their way here via , who kindly recommended this Substack after my short piece about the whole Churchill blowout.

In this essay, I go into more detail on some of the philosophical points made there about our relationship with history — something that should be of interest to new and long-time readers alike.

Basically, what the Churchill debate and the screeching reactions show is that the political right needs to come to terms with where the historical consciousness is at in our age: we can’t go back to the ancient or medieval ways of dealing with history, because the experience of the scientific age makes this impossible. We want our myths to be provably true. But since history is not science, this can’t really be done, as the postmodernists understood. In the end, as I’ll argue, the only serious criterion for the quality of a historical story, a particular take, is the quality and level of the mind looking at history. Hence what kind of myth, what kind of story about our past we should tell, is not just relative to the power of this or that group enforcing it; there are better and worse stories. Good takes on history can only be brought forward by a mind coming at it with all it’s got: its experience and understanding of the deepest aspects of the human condition, paired with knowledge of every possible field and realm, looking at history from the inside, the world of thought and inner experience driving historical events. And since our minds exist in history themselves, it also needs to understand itself as part of history, conscious of how its own thinking came about historically. A good take produced by such a mind can only be recognized as such by another mind that has achieved a similar level of development. But there’s more to say about all that, as you’ll see, which may shine a new light on some of our political-historical controversies.

I took much inspiration from R.G. Collingwood’s work here. A few parts even follow his arguments quite closely. Check out his “The Idea of History” if you are interested in this sort of thing.

Don’t forget to subscribe or to upgrade to a paid subscription if you want to help me keep the lights on and continue this work. Thank you all.

“History does not presuppose mind; it is the life of mind itself, which is not mind except so far as it both lives in historical process and knows itself as so living.”

— R.G. Collingwood1

I.

The history of ideas can teach us a great deal about the world we inhabit and ourselves. By studying it, bare threads of thought running over long time stretches come to our attention, illuminating pathways that jump-start areas of our minds having laid dormant before. We make ourselves available to the great becoming of history itself: a version of which having always been there in potential; a version whose trajectory playing itself out is a necessary feature of the cosmos.

To trace the history of thought is to strengthen what makes us truly human: our capacity to step out of our minds, taking the position of an observer looking at our own thought processes. Such a jump-start can kick us out of the parthogenetic sauce our brains are habitually cooking up, enabling us to watch it, study it: notably its disastrous entanglement with an unconscious logic playing itself out mercilessly. For to a large degree, we are the product of our thoughts — so what could be more useful than discovering them, understanding them in their wider historical context, so that we may work with them instead of being worked by them?

One of those threads running through recent history is the decline, if not outright destruction, of our long tradition of valuing what we might call the art of truthful reasoning. It is the art of developing and cultivating a beautiful and sharp mind, one that cuts through the jungle in front of our mental eyes, able to conquer new lands in the vast expanse of wider reality; a mind that takes in the deeper fabric of the thoughtscape in stride, a fabric built of logical connections across time and space, therefore transcending what we moderns like to think of as material reality. This thought-structure underwriting reality can be discerned via a wholesome form of reason, a perception rooted not in empiricism, but in Experience unfolding over time, in time, as Being.

True thought, beautiful reasoning, is not aimed at stating true facts that you discover once and hammer in stone. What you gain isn’t a thing, a material price. Results of thought are just fossilized artifacts; you might hang them on the wall if you like, but try to take them as timeless truths from which to build a worldview, and you end up with a monster made of dead parts: twitch it will, perhaps, but not live. And like ideologies, which are just such monsters, it will eventually haunt you and everyone it touches.

True thought is a movement, a process. It’s a bold charge, fueled by the dialogue between soul, mind and the hidden nonverbal mindspace from whence our experience ultimately flows. While it expresses truth, its truth is only valuable in the very act of thinking or rethinking it. Hence the fruits of true thought are never the last word, but an achievement in a certain direction. Such thought, when told or written down, and when read or listened to, may open a connection to the ground of all truth for all who are equipped to do so. With each connection so established, the next connection may become easier. True thought breeds more true thought.

To understand the decline of this form of beautiful and truthful reasoning and how it relates to history, we must look at how the ideas have formed that got us there: ideas that are part of a thought complex playing out its inner logic in a sort of background program running in the collective mind. Such background programs can arrest our development in history towards self-awareness, towards mind understanding itself in an ongoing act of illuminating the wider thoughtscape.

II.

There is a long-standing battle in philosophy between the schools of realism and idealism. Realists, who (re)gained ground in the late 19th century particularly in Oxford and Cambridge and later went on to dominate Anglo philosophy entirely, emphasized the outside world, the reality that we see. In this picture, our mind’s purpose is to faithfully reproduce what’s out there, and it mostly does a decent job of it, to the point that we can safely ignore philosophical mind games for the most part. If this view seems to be entirely self-evident to you, this is because it is close to how science looks at the world, and as we know, we are in the near-total grip of a science-worshiping age: in fact, a big part of the realists’ motivation was to get rid of traditional philosophy as a competing sense-making framework and strengthen the scientific world view. This had been an ongoing process ever since Descartes and the dawn of the scientific age, fully actualizing itself in the positivist spirit of the 19th century. Figures like Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and later the logical positivists sought to inoculate the high priests of the scientific age against those pesky philosophers threatening to undermine their grand ambitions to know the secrets of the universe using empirical facts and the scientific method alone. (A corollary to this program was their rejection of the traditional idea that ethics should be about helping people build character; instead, they proclaimed morality to be just another object of scientific study: let’s figure out how morality works, why humans behave morally or not, but let’s not be fooled by outdated notions such as that studying ethics can actually make us better men.)

But this downplaying of mind hadn’t been the standard view before. Difficult as it is to imagine these days, people at different times took the primacy of mind for granted. Their deepest background assumptions, their absolute presuppositions, formed a different constellation, as R.G. Collingwood put it. How exactly they went about it varies from recognizing a divine plan behind it all to assuming an inner logic not just to movements of objects, but to thoughts as well, this inner logic coming from a place more fundamental than the material world. Others assumed the world to be alive right down to the smallest part, not drawing the hard line between mind and nature that we take for granted these days.

The idealists came at it from many angles, ascribing to mind various roles in the process of knowing, understanding and perceiving the world that are very different from simply reproducing external reality. While we are somewhat used to thinking of our minds at least as a sort of “filter,” like colored glasses that may warp what’s really out there, the idealist tradition goes far beyond that. For Kant and Schopenhauer, for example, while reality most certainly exists (we don’t just make it up in our minds willy-nilly), what we actually experience is to a large degree conditioned by the make-up of our minds. Not just in the sense of those colored glasses, but much more deeply: even such fundamental categories as time, space and causality for those thinkers are not “out there” in the physical world, but are imposed on our perception by mind, thereby creating the world of appearances we experience. While this still implies a certain mind-matter duality, other approaches went beyond that and sought to give up such dualistic thinking entirely by looking at our experience more holistically, refusing the sharp distinction between life on the one side and dead matter on the other. But even such an approach tends to be misunderstood these days because of our scientific presuppositions: a philosophy centered on life that assumes the cosmos to be alive right down to the smallest material stuff invites us to think biologically about the world, and therefore ultimately scientifically, again losing sight of the role of thought and its place. You don’t have to diminish the intellectual achievements born of the scientific mindset that focuses on “nature out there” to ask the question: isn’t it weird to exclude thought itself as an object of study — not via experiment but, well, via thought?

You might say the battle between philosophical idealism and realism is pretty far-out stuff; and it’s easy to get lost in all those different positions and arguments. But the important thing to understand here is whether consciously or not, we all adhere to this or that philosophical school, the habitual way of thinking of our age. This creates sort of a hidden program running in the back of our minds, through which much of our perception of the world is directed. And since realism, and the connected thought complex of the materialist-reductionist program, has won the day not only in academia, but in the wider collective consciousness as the founding myth of the scientific age, it forms our standard assumption — the story we all “know” somehow, without us even noticing it. One of the implications of the realist mindset is that our attention is magnetically drawn to bottom-up materialist explanations and a view that treats everything, including history, as a sort of spectacle best viewed from the outside. In this light, it’s no wonder that we tend to forget about thought proper, as experienced from the inside, in our inquiries: our background assumptions, unnoticed by us, push us away from such an endeavor. This is especially relevant when it comes to our relationship with history.

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Famous anarchist theorist, revolutionary and a renowned explorer of Siberia, Peter Kropotkin’s memoirs were published in 1898, written in Russian but originally printed in English in The Atlantic Monthly. They were later slightly revised and expanded, and this final version is what we currently have and which I have just read.

It is a very clearly and, I think, objectively written book. Kropotkin begins with his privileged childhood.  He was born into the house of Prince Kropotkin, one of the most influential aristocrats, close to the emperor, living in a palace in Saint Petersburg. Kropotkin tends to underplay the privileged environment into which he was born, but he does not deny it. The book then moves chronologically: his years at the elite page academy of the Court, decision not to go into the expected military service but to move to Siberia which he explored and about which he wrote several seminal geological and geographical treatises; and then onto the political activity, prison in Russia, escape to western Europe, forty years of life in exile… Since the book ends much before the October Revolution and even before the split between social-democratic and communist wings, these issues are obviously not treated. But the schism between the Marx-dominated faction of the First International and Bakunin’s anarchist faction is discussed. And attacks on state socialism, propagated by Engels and Marx (this was written before the codification of Marxism, so the two famous names are written in an unusual order) are sustained and frequent.  

Kropotkin returned to Russia after the October revolution. The role of anarchists in the Revolution was not negligible but their later fate was not pleasant. Kropotkin however was too old, and died in Moscow in 1921, just days before the Kronstadt rebellion. He was buried in Moscow and it was the last time that anarchists’ black flags were freely unfurled in the Soviet Union. Today, one of Moscow’s metro stations bears Kropotkin’s name.

Politically, the most interesting period treated in The Memoirs is the one after the Crimean War and emancipation of serfs in 1861. He writes about the contradictory nature of Alexander II who oscillated between being the Tsar—liberator and the Tsar—reactionary, and whose very death at the hands of Russian revolutionaries exhibited the conflicting strivings of his soul. Alexander was killed when, after the initial assassination attempt failed, he, alone among all, jumped out of his car to help the injured guard; that provided an easy target for the second assassin, and he did not miss.

Kropotkin’s descriptions of the revolutionary life in the Russia of the 1860s are hyper-realistic. But to the reader today, the entire Russian existence seems to be that of a land of wonders. The relationship between political offenses and punishments meted out is not only a product of arbitrariness (for which a nice Russian word proizvol’ exists) but the outcome of an almost infinite randomness.

To visualize it, assume that your political sin (emancipation of labor, printing of non-authorized literature, attendance of anti-government rallies, violent attacks on police, assassination of the dignitaries) is written on a piece of paper which is then put into an enormous machine that produces the sentence. The machine is geared to produce harsh sentences; sentences that are often written before the crime is committed. Next, let this piece of paper with your crime move to a second, attached, machine which is managed by a capricious God. That second machine revises the sentence; the sentence of exile can become one of being hanged, or, differently, of immediate freedom; it can lead you to a decade in jail or to be released and feted by liberal intelligentsia today. The first machine was described by Kafka in his Penal Colony (inspired by Dostoyevsky); the second is from Borges’ short story in which every individual passes through all possible positions in life, from a ruler to a homeless, entirety at the will of capricious gambling chance. Thus, the Russia of the 1860s, and perhaps the one of today, appears as a blend of Kafka and Borges. 

For a rational mind, it is very difficult to see not only how such punishments help the government, but not to notice that the capriciousness, randomness, and indeed sloppiness  with which punishments are executed become entirely counterproductive from the point of view of the rulers’ own interests.

Take Kropotkin’s case. He was followed by the secret police for “going to the people”, i.e., organizing lectures on socialism and anarchism among workers in St. Petersburg and several other cities in Russia. He would move from his home (probably dressed in the fineries), change into mud-stained boots, short coat (that we learn distinguished the workers from the rich), rough shirt, and move through dark St Petersburg alleyways until he reached a badly-lit warehouse where twenty or thirty workers and a couple of young intellectuals (camouflaged like Kropotkin in people’s attire) would meet to discuss George Berkeley, David Hume, Chernyshevsky, Jesus Christ and human freedom in general. Kropotkin was eventually arrested—but even that arrest had several unusual moments, including being foretold to the potential prey which led Kropotkin to hide and destroy all incriminating evidence; and where the arrest, perhaps because of his family background, needed a clearance from the top powers. Kropotkin is thrown into the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress, in a tiny cell (whose sketch is provided in the memoirs) where he is held for a year in solitary confinement: able to make eight paces only and to see a tiny piece of St Petersburg translucent Nordic-blue or entirely dark sky. But in such a room, he is, after a while, allowed to have his family send him food daily and is visited by the Grand Duke (the brother of the Emperor) who, according to Kropotkin, tries, through apparent amicability, to extract confession from him.

Kropotkin is afterwards, because of his loss of weight and general weakness, sent to a prison hospital that is so poorly guarded that he is able to plot his daring escape with a dozen of revolutionaries, some of whom are also in jail and others free. The plans are made and remade almost daily as if the plotters had access to the modern internet and were totally free to write and then revise various escape scenarios. Finally, in a rocambolesque way, Kropotkin escapes, and while the Klondike-like police chases him, he and his accomplices decide to spend the evening in the plushest restaurant of St Petersburg where police does not do razzias.

What was the crime for which he and his comrades, among whom women played an extraordinary important and brave role (as Kropotkin repeatedly mentions), were accused of? Creating a cultural revolution in the Russian countryside by telling the liberated but indebted peasants that they are no different from the nobles, that they have the right to a free life, and that they should rebel, burn the aristocratic estates and disobey the Emperor. The young educated people of St Petersburg and Moscow who went “to the people” (similar to those sent by Mao into the peasant communes a century later) numbered, according to Kropotkin, only some 3,000 individuals. They gave up all comforts of their previous lives. Many moved to villages, working there as ordinary journeymen or toiling the land, with the goal of bringing Russian peasants out of their millennial turpitude and teaching them how to be free. They, and again particularly so the women, did it with an unbelievable self-abnegation, dedication, courage and seriousness.  

They did not shy of “direct action”. While Kropotkin does not explicitly endorse assassinations, he underlines the reasons that lead to them. The line between the tyrannicide and terrorism was always thin. Kropotkin approves of the assassination of his own relative who was governor of Kharkov and enacted some harsh measures against the revolutionaries.

The West European part of the memoirs is interesting even if less exciting. It takes place after the suppression of the Paris Commune, in an atmosphere of police persecution, hangings, semi-legal printing presses, contraband of revolutionary tracts from Switzerland into France.  Kropotkin is most of the time, living (like Lenin later) in Switzerland, working on political agitation with the famous Association des Horlogers Jurassiens. He criticizes state socialism of German social-democrats whom he accuses of  aiming only at political power while disregarding moral transformation, indeed the cultural revolution, needed to save humankind.

Kropotkin’s ideas regarding the societal organization that would be built in concentric circles from the lowest to the highest level, would abolish the state, and organize production among the publicly-owned cooperatives that would not compete with each other but labor in free association and self-help looks irremediably naïve. It is not surprising that Marxists, and later Leninists, thought it was a fairy tale.

But perhaps that humans, at times, need visionaries, the selfless individuals who produce fairy tales and reading Kropotkin may be a way to try, at least for a moment, to believe in them. A young friend to whom I mentioned reading Kropotkin’s memoirs, and not expecting she would know of him, immediately replied: “We are reading him now to fight climate change and to help self-organization of society.”

Below Kanab Creek, Grand Canyon, 2003

A quick editorial note — lately, I’ve been referring to my work as ‘structural memetics’ — with the intent of expanding a concept of knowledge generation with memes along the same line as genetics — laying out general principles to follow about how humans generate knowledge. Much of this material has already been created on this blog, but I wanted to consolidate and summarize it in one place.

Bored, and seeking the never-ending references, I Googled up Melvin Conway, whose famous law serves as the backbone for most of my developed insights. Turns out he’s still alive — and on Twitter. So.. I tweeted back at him. And he responded, saying he’d take a look at my work.

Short version of a longer story — I hurried up with this post so he wouldn’t have to dig. I think it’s pretty complete. So, Mel — this one’s for you. Thanks for the origination thought. There’s a lot here. Check out the Topics Grouping/Readers Guide for the full extent of all of this. But these are the bones.

What is Structural Memetics? And Why Does it Matter?

As a scholar, I’ve spent my life studying things. Directly or indirectly, my profession (and the need to be a better teacher and designer – I’m a design engineering prof.) has fed my interest in reading all sorts of different types of information, or rather, knowledge. Internet resources like Wikipedia have made it possible as well for anyone to peruse any subject area. I love Wikipedia. Nowhere else on the Internet can you move so quickly between connected subject areas – or areas you might think are connected – with just a click.

But one of the interesting things I’ve noticed as I’ve gone about my escapades on Wikipedia, following philosophers, fighter aircraft, and military campaigns across the Asian steppes, is that there is precious little discussion on knowledge, or rather, the structure of knowledge, in any or all of it. There are isolated blips of understanding – things like Bloom’s Taxonomy are often used, for example, in educational work. People will allude to culture, literature, art, math or science.

It all sounds good enough – we’ve been raised to think in those terms, they satisfy, so we move on. But science, or culture, is a pretty big thing. None of it tells you how or whether you should believe it to be true. No one would argue that knowledge is created by groups of humans, though usually one gets the credit. But largely, most knowledge has no origin story that we’re aware of. We’re told someone is supposed to believe something because of ‘science’. Let’s stop a moment – I am a scientist, and I support the scientific method (whatever that is) in the face of a backdrop of blind faith. But with replicability crises happening across many different scientific enterprises – I’ve been immersed in the nutrition research lately, since I lost a lot of weight and been attempting to figure out how I got fat in the first place – it’s time to take a pause and realize that we have a very poor understanding of what knowledge is in the first place. Or what level of truth it actually represents.

People have more recently attempted to think of knowledge in terms of ‘memes’ – small fragments of information, typically with viral characteristics. There’s a relatively short, unhappy literature associated with the concept. Richard Dawkins is noted for coining the term, mapping it as an analog to a gene. And then he started using it to condemn religion for infectious, unaware acceptance of a veritable litany of concepts. The book Virus of the Mind, written by Richard Brodie, the inventor of Microsoft Word, and world champion poker player, maps the idea of memetics to ideas as infections. The idea of thoughts “going viral” has entered the vernacular of everyone with access to the Internet.

Not a very prosocial, nor hopeful understanding of how we think. Big thoughts get sidelined as anti-memetic and outside any understandable brain coding. Instead, the focus is on the pernicious exploitation of our lack of awareness. And if you ask most people what a meme is, they’ll likely tell you it’s a picture of Kermit the Frog, or a velociraptor, dressed up as a Philosoraptor, puzzling over life’s larger questions in some pithy text written on top of their face. Even one of the founders of meme-ology (for lack of a better term) Susan Blackmore, settled on defining a meme in the smallest unit of replicable information. If you were really mapping understanding to genes, why wouldn’t you want to understand the deeper patterns present in human, or generalized sentience? It’s more than a metaphor — information is information is information. There has to be larger patterns.

There have been exceptions to the ‘meme as a smallest unit of information’ club. Don Beck, of Spiral Dynamics fame, created the term ‘v-Meme’ to characterize value sets associated with different levels of societal development, which in turn map to social structures. But outside of this, work on memetics has essentially vanished. We’re left with Kermit the Frog, longing for a beer in the rain.

Why would such a promising idea – the idea that knowledge has replicable structure, with affinities vanish so quickly? The real problem is that we have no generalizable notion of how knowledge is created in the first place. The deeper reason below that level is what I’d characterize as a patently false belief — that we implicitly believe that knowledge is created by experts, and enshrined by culture – two things that we have little or no ability to challenge. And, for some reason, if the experts – people like Dawkins, and Blackmore, and a couple of others – say it’s game over, then we believe them. Give Don Beck credit – he knew better.

But there are problems when stringing more complex thoughts together. Namely, replicability problems, especially when all humans are considered to have the same neural hardware. We have convenient distinctions for how humans know. Most of these are involved with our educational system, granting degrees, and culture – all things outside an individual’s independent assessment. Others teach you – you don’t get to make decisions on truth yourself. Life experience, and the assimilation and synthesis of that experience into usable knowledge is only grudgingly accepted.

Enter Conway’s Law

One of the largest breakthrough thoughts on how humans construct knowledge came from a software pioneers – Melvin Conway. Conway is the inventor of many different types of software innovations, but his law is the thing relevant here. That is:

“organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

What Conway stated was that design of a system (he was thinking about software) would map to the social system that created it. This idea has been empirically validated for software in a number of studies. But what is a design except an observable realization of knowledge? That led me to the notion of what I named the Intermediate Corollary.

Social Structure <=> Knowledge Structure <=> Design Structure

This fundamental principle opens up the door to a larger understanding of how we produce knowledge. And, as we’ll see, when combined with two things – Don Beck’s set of social structures, along with a deeper understanding of how people communicate, and importantly connect inside those knowledge structures – the synergy creates a new field that directly addresses the holes in memetics. We can now understand how knowledge itself is structured, in a transcultural fashion.

Let’s fill out the first category – Social Structure – first. Beck’s and Graves’ work on a generalized theory of human development, called Spiral Dynamics, outlined a set of eight social structures, relating to societal evolution, that are what we call a canonical set. A canonical set in this context is a set of social structures, each unique, with increasing complexity. Each of these individual social structures corresponds to what Beck originally called a value set. These value sets would cover the social dynamics inside a given social structure. For example, in an Authoritarian value set, the primary values in the value set would promote power and control. Status inside the pyramid would be the foremost driver of behaviors, and what the individuals in the stack would believe would directly be controlled by the individual above them in the pyramid. Legalistic hierarchies would, for example, be an evolution of an Authoritarian power structure, where rules would apply to individuals across the social system. The rules would vary dependent on rank or level, but the overall effect would be to remove the arbitrary nature of judgment of the individual that was above another in the hierarchical stack. Beck’s social structures are given by the diagram below.

One interesting point that needs to be made is to understand that for a given social structure, at a certain stage of evolution, lower value set social structures can be incorporated in a larger structure. A Tribe can have Survival bands affiliated inside it. An Authority-driven empire can be made up of tribes. And so on.

From Conway’s Law comes Knowledge Structures – “As we relate, so we think.”

Once we have a generic set of social structures, and understand the value sets inherent in creating these, we can map these to known knowledge structures humans historically have used. These are characterized by the dominant relational modes in each social structure, that sets the stage for the type of knowledge each must have mastery of to execute social function. As with the above social structures, as knowledge structures build, they incorporate lower level structures into higher level structures.

These are:

• Survival Band -> fragmented knowledge pieces, both temporally and spatially ephemeral.
• Tribal Order -> long-term origination myths that create shared identity.
• Authoritarian/Exploitative Empire -> knowledge fragments, whose truth is established by the authority of the person above another in the pyramid.
• Hierarchical Authority Structure/Legalistic Hierarchy -> rules and algorithms, coupled with the ability to feed information into rules and obtained transformed values.
• Strategic Enterprise/Performance-Goal-Based Organizations -> heuristics, incorporating lower-level knowledge structures, that rely on the independent decision-making ability of individuals (agency) to create coordination to reach goals.
• Communitarian/Social Network/People Driven Systems -> multiple, combined heuristics from different data sources, blended to recognize appropriate differences, along with maintaining larger system coherence.
• Systemic Flow/Process Oriented Second Tier Systems -> the first of what are known as ‘Second Tier’ systems, consisting of a larger leap of self-awareness, knowledge structures at this level and above consist of pruned heuristics, sculpted for balance of larger combined goals, with an awareness of individual bias in desired outcomes.
• Holistic Organism/Global Holistic Social Structures ->larger complex systems of combined heuristics, integrated with the surrounding ecosystem, giving rise to emergent, complex, and likely fractal knowledge systems.

The Role of Empathy in Social Structures, Leading to Synergy in Knowledge Structures

The role of evolving empathy is poorly understood in the dynamics of societal evolution, and as a consequence, its effects on complexity of knowledge. In fact, the very existence, outside this blog and a handful of other like-minded souls, seems to be ignored or discounted entirely.

Why this is so is likely due to the fact that the organizations we have tasked with creating greater understanding – our modern academic systems – are organized largely around low-empathy, authority-driven hierarchies. In an authority-driven hierarchy, it really doesn’t matter much who you are, or what you contribute. What matters is what you are, or rather your position in the hierarchical stack. You will be treated as your function demands you be treated, with little accommodation on how you might feel about that treatment. And these systems, by their very nature, create highly fragmented, disconnected understandings of most phenomena. The emphasis is typically on smaller and smaller fragmented units – be it units of matter, or subdivisions of ethnic classes.

Connection to your emotions, or your thoughts themselves is irrelevant. The dark insight that comes from this is that academics studying empathy are about the same as colorblind people studying color. They just can’t see what the big deal is – especially the connecting, synergizing nature of this deeply sentient phenomenon.

There are signs that the neuroscience is slowly waking up to this fact. In Prof. Matt Lieberman’s book, Social,(Lieberman is a professor of social neuroscience at UCLA) he says “In essence, our brains are built to think about the social world and our place in it.” This means that empathy, or more exactly, the level of development of empathy as the primary connecting function of our brains, actually creates the social structures, which are realizations of patterns of different level of human connection. As well as how we think about everything else. Our social relations, structured by our empathetic development, lay down the core memetic patterns in our brains, which then happen to get used for how we think about everything else.

As we move up the social structures, necessarily we also have to move up the empathy scale. Frans de Waal, the famous primate behavioralist, has split empathy up into levels, bottom to top, that map onto the three primary areas of the brain – the basal ganglia/automatic function part, the limbic/emotional part, and the prefrontal cortex/thinking and detailed processing part. Using simple language, that means empathy contains physiological, emotional, and cognitive functions. And similar (or rather, self-similar) to social structures, as well as knowledge structures, these empathetic functions incorporate lower level functions into higher level ones.

These empathetic functions also, to the degree they are developed, also calibrate time scales and spatial scales inside the brain. Automatic, physiological responses of empathy, like direct mirroring, are instantaneous. Emotional empathy and connecting to others’ joys and sorrows takes a little longer, and finally developed cognitive empathy allows more complex processing of consequences, as well as dramatically increased time and spatial scales.

These map into knowledge structures, with little overlap. Most importantly, when it comes to structural memetics, empathy is the primary factor in how fragmented, as well as coherent and synergistic, the knowledge produced by a given social structure is. The greater the empathy any given set of individuals possess, the more opportunity and dynamic to mix the individual knowledge of two people attempting to come to an agreement.

Practicing empathy is also dictated by a given social structure. If you’re the boss in an Authoritarian system, reading someone’s face as a data stream doesn’t mean much unless you’re trying to figure out if they’re going to kill you, and they damn well better do what you tell them anyway. But for a Communitarian, you’re likely attempting to achieve group harmony amongst a diverse range of individuals. You’d better pay attention to all those different facial gestures. So just as personal empathetic development matters, so also does the social structure that a pair of individuals are plopped into. You can take two highly evolved individuals and place them in a low empathy social structure, and while they’ll likely do better than people who haven’t climbed the ladder, the odds are that they may never even meet each other — because that’s just the way the social system works!

These two empathetic factors – personal development, as well as social structure — bleed over into the knowledge structures, making them more and more data- and independent circumstance-dependent as one moves up the ladder. At the Survival level, your data structures are where the watering hole is, or who brought donuts to the office. Mirroring behaviors of your co-workers as they drool might be all you need to know you want some of that sugary goodness. But higher level knowledge structures require more practice of empathy, and its twin, self-empathy. How can you choose paths in a given design heuristic if you don’t believe that an individual has a right to choose?

All this leads to a master diagram, which knits together the basic principles of structural memetics. Here it is below:

and then the final step, mapping the Value Set levels to Knowledge Structures, is below.

Implications

Social structures and personal development of empathy essentially create the brain that is receptive to more complex knowledge structures. This allows us to move our understanding of memes solely out of the world of Kermit the Frog longing for a cold one, and into an understanding of how communities of people can transmit complex knowledge from one person to another relatively quickly. There is no cultural hook required. Donald Trump and Kim Jung Oon merely have to be participating in a duplicate version of the same social structure to “grok” the other’s understandings. Because just like genes, memes can lock in complex sequences.

This leads us to the beginnings of a new field – structural memetics. And while there is much room for development, the beginnings are here. Because as we relate, so we think. And that means, with a combination of insights from Conway’s Law, social neuroscience, and Spiral Dynamics, we can directly lift the structural memetic patterns of knowledge from the social structures and networks sitting in front of us. No microscope required.

INTRODUCTION

            Reading perhaps Russia’s greatest thinker, Nikolai Berdyaev, during the horrors of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war, I thought it might be of some interest to examine Berdyaev’s views on war, Russia, and Ukraine. Berdyaev was born near Kiev, in Obukhov, Kiev Oblast’, lived in Kiev and its environs, and attended a series of educational institutions in Kiev, including Kiev University. However, like many born in Ukraine over the centuries, he identified exclusively as a Russian, having no Ukrainian but rather noble Russian, noble French, as well as Polish and Tatar ancestry.

Living in the Russian Empire, he was caught up in many of its intellectual trends and political events. Drawn to Marxism in his university days and exiled to Vologda in 1897 for anti-Tsarist activity, Berdyaev soon abandoned such thought in favor of a moderate conservatism and revival of his Orthodox faith. He was very much opposed to the atheistic communist Bolshevik regime, and was arrested and interrogated by Cheka chief Felix Dzerzhinskii and deported from Soviet Russia along with hundreds of other philosophers and conservative intelligents in 1922. Berdyaev remained loyal but critical both of the Tsarist regime and Orthodox Church. As a thinker, he produced a free religious, historical, and political philosophy, with his greatest contributions being made to philosophy of history, so popular among the Russian intelligentsia both in his and our time. His thought reflected many of the elements extant in Russian culture and thought during the late 19th century, as I have analysed in my Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History and Politics (Europe Books, 2022) and my working paper “Russian Historical Tselostnost’” (https://gordonhahn.com/2023/04/13/working-paper-russian-historical-tselostnost-parts-1-3-conclusion/, 13 April 2023), including: monism, universalism, communalism, solidarism, messianism, historicism, transcendentalism and anti-bourgeoisism.

Berdyaev’s monism, like that of most of Russian religious and philosophical thought, held that God was present in the world and the Heavenly Kingdom and Divine were interconnected with the material world, humankind, and individual persons’ lives. Humankind’s purpose should be to prepare for the full unity of the universe and the Heavenly Kingdom, between spirit and matter, God and humankind. Berdyaev’s very Russian belief in or aspiration to unity or wholeness or tselostnost’ enveloped other types of tselostnost’: universalism, communalism, solidarism, and historical unity (Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’, pp. 138-42, 380-2, 567-8, 725-6, and “Russian Historical Tselostnost’”). As an Orthodox Christian, Berdyaev believed in the ultimate unity of all humankind in Christ—putting his Russian univeralist and monist tselostnost’ in brief (Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’, pp. 138-42, 380-2).

Similarly, Berdyaev shared the Russian aspiration to and belief in the propriety of communalism—the priority of the group’s interest over individual interests and the benefits of this to individuals and humankind (Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’, pp. 567-8). Although he was critical of Slavophiles, he saw their belief and that the Russian agrarian socialists in the advantages and moral superiority of the village commune as a reflection fo Russians’ preference for a communalist rather than individualist culture. He also endorsed Slavophile Aleksei Khomyakov’s views of spiritual communalism or sobornost’ – ‘communitarianism’ or ‘conciliarism’ – under the protective divine wing of Christian love in the community of Orthodox believers and the Church (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Slavyanskaya ideya,” in Nikolai Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2016, pp. pp. 161-70, at p 162. )].

The Russian preference for political, social, cultural, and ontological (identitarian) unity or solidarism is also present in Berdyaev’s work as an aspiration, since he was well aware of the great schisms that plagued Russia historically and in his own time. As I discuss below, these foundational elements of Russian tselostnost’ in Berdyaev’s thinking accompany his equally Russian messianism, historical tselostnost’, his vision of Ukraine, and his views on war. 

Berdyaev, Russia, and its Fate

Berdyaev was neither a revolutionary nor a reactionary. He was, rather, a Russian patriot, Orthodox believer, a moderately conservative for his time and place, but he was critical of the Russian elite, intelligentsia, people, and orthodox Church. Presaging Soviet culturologist Yurii Lotman’s work on Russian duality, he was particularly struck by and quite penetrating and eloquent in describing the stark contradictions in the Russian character—its abundant antinomies: “In other countries one can find all these contradictions, but only in Russia does the thesis turn into its antithesis, the bureaucratic state is born from anarchism, slavery is born from freedom, and extreme nationalism from supra-nationalism” (universalism) [Nikolai Berdyaev, “Sud”ba Rossii,” republished in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii), pp. 11-44, at p. 29]. He points to other antinomies. Russian nationalism also coexists, it not produces Russian universalism: “Supra-nationalism, universalism” is “an essential trait of the Russian national spirit… The national in Russia is precisely supra-nationalism and its freedom from nationalism; in this Russia distinctive and unlike any other country in the world. Russia is called upon to be the liberator of nations” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 20). In this last phase we see one way in which one particular trait generates Russian messianism, a belief in a special global mission for Russia in shaping world history. In another antinomy, “(t)he other side of Russian humility is an unusual Russian self-opinion. The humblest Russian is the greatest, most powerful, and uniquely called” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 21). Here again, another essential trait leads, in Berdyaev’s thinking, to Russian messianism. In order to attain its proper status in the world and have its say in History’s course and outcome, it needed to overcome the negative sides of these antinomies.

Being a Russian patriot and imbued by Russian monist Christian, teleological historicism, Berdyaev, much like Fyodor Dostoevskii, developed a faith that Orthodox Russia would overcome its shortcomings and play an important role in leading humankind to Christian unification at the end of History. He certainly saw Russia as properly a “great Empire” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 276) and was supportive of Russia’s colonial advancement of less developed peoples and of Russia’s “heroic” army in World War I (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 100). At times, he wrote as if Russia was destined to overcome its insufficiencies and play a pivotal or leading role in history, but at other times he was urging changes to achieve this, thus implying an element of uncertainty in his own mind. For example, in his article “Spirit and Machine,” Berdyaev wrote: “If Russia wants to be a great Empire and play a role in history, then this lays on it the obligation to start on the path of material-techonological development. Without this decision, Russia will fall into a situation without exit. The soul of Russia will be freed and its depths disclosed only on this path (of material development)” (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Dukh and mashina,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 266-76, at p. 276).

Berdyaev’s own nationalism and messianism were reflected in his belief in a special historical role of the Slavs—his “Slavic idea.” He was no enemy of the West but was highly critical of its bourgeois materialism, which he blamed for the outbreak of World War (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 207, 217-18). “Russia is the most non-bourgeois country in the world,” lacking the “despotism” of the bourgeois family life and concerns Berdyaev averred. He conterposed to this Western ‘bourgeoisism’ the transcendence of the world exemplified by Russians: “The Russian person with ease of the sul overcomes any bourgeoisness and departs from any custom and from any normed life. The wanderer (strannik) type is so characteristic of Russia and so wonderful. The wanderer is the freest person on earth. …The greatness of the Russian people and the calling of it to a higher life are concentrated in the strannik type. … Russia is a fantastic country of spiritual drunkenness. … The Russian spirit cannot sit in place, it is not )of) the shopkeepers’ soul, not a local soul. In Russia, in the soul of (its) people there is a kind of endless searching, a searching for the invisible city of Kitezh, and unseen home. … Before the Russian soul open great exapanses, and there is no marked horizon before its spiritual eyes. The Russian spirit borns in a fiery pursuit of the truth, absolute, divine truth and salvation for the whole world and the universal resurrection to a new life” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 24-6). Here, in Berdyaev’s perspective, is a classic Russian vision of the Russian soul, replete with its monist, universalist, transcendental, and messianic expanse. Berdyaev was himself typically Russian in his tendency towards transcendentalism and wholeness, preferred over the everyday mundanity of Western bourgeois life and understanding. Berdyaev’s very Russian transcendentalism, symbolized by and reflected in the strannik, is evidenced by his own belief in and aspiration to wholeness in its various forms as well as by his messianic hopes for Russia (see Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History and Politics).

Oddly enough Berdyaev did not view Russia’s main opponent in World War I, Germany, as having been soiled by its very bourgeois life and even denied it had a fundamentally materialist culture. German culture and messianism derived from a far deeper cause, its own peculiar idealism. German bourgeoisism, industrial-techological advancement were the consequence of the German spirit. “The German is a metaphysician” (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Religiya Germanizma,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 195-204, especially p. 197). In contrast to Russian idealism’s humility, however, German culture, in Berdyaev’s view, is imbued with an egocentric nationalism and aspiration to instill rationality, organization, and order in the world. While Russian messianism and universalism accepted chaos as the nature of human history before salvation, German messianism and universalism pursued humankind’s salvation through the willful elimination of chaos, and only Germany, Germans thought, can accomplish this task (Berdyaev, “Religiya Germanizma,” pp. 195-204, especially p. 200). In this way, like Russian nationalism, German nationalism contained and indeed nurtured the germ of universalism, however different a species of universalism it might be, not to mention imperialism.

Despite its own sprituality, Germany had chosen the path of “prideful” nationalism and the machine in excess and thus was in conflict with Russia and potentially could be better opposed by the Slavic idea, Slavic unity, and Slavic messianism. In his earlier writings, which have been the focus herein so far, Berdyaev adhered to some pan-Slavist tendencies and even proposed Slavic unity and messianism as an antidote and counterforce against German militaristic messianism. For example, in his article, “The Slavic Idea” (“Slavyanskaya ideya”), he emphasized that two of the 19th century Slavophiles’ and pan-Slavists’ shortcomings was to ignore or underestimate as well as a failure to address divisions between the various Slavic peoples and to harbor an inappropriate disdain for Poland because of its Catholicism, leaving the “Slavic idea” in a “sad condition” (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Slavyanskaya ideya,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 161-70, at pp. 162 and 163-5). Instead, Russia ought endeavor to unify the Slavs under the “Slavic idea” against the threatening danger of Germanism”, should emphasize ethnicity over religion in order to unify Slavdom, particularly its two greatest states, against Berlin (Berdyaev, “Slavyanskaya ideya,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 161 and 168). Indeed, Russia must, according to Berdyaev, “redeem its historical guilt” before the Polish people (Berdyaev, “Slavyanskaya ideya,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 165). “The idea of Slavic unification, first of all Russian-Polish unification, should not be external-political, utilitarian-statist” but rather “spiritual and focuses on internal life” in the Slavic world, which presumably means a concentration on overcoming religious schism, cultural differences, and historical grievances (Berdyaev, “Slavyanskaya ideya,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 170).    

One cannot help but be struck by the analogous configuration of the contradiction and conflict between Berdyaev’s view of world affairs, World War I, the idealistic orgins of German militarism in the aspiration to organize and order humankind, and the Slavic idea he counterposed to German imperialism, on the one hand, and Russia’s perception of American hegemony, Washington’s rules-based new world order, and Russian neo-Eurasiainism and Sino-Russian-led, Greater Eurasian-centered alternative multi-civilizational model for the international system, on the other hand,   reflected by BRICS+, the One Belt One Road Initiative, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Indeed, Berdyaev perhaps presaged Eurasianism in writing that “Russia should be demonstrate types of eastern-western cultures and overcome the one-sidedness of Western European culture with its positivism and materialism and the self-satisfaction of limited horizons. … We should move out into the worldly expanse. And in this expanse the ancient wellsprings of culture should be visible. The East should become of equal value to the West again” (Berdyaev, “Slavyanskaya ideya,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 159).  

Berdyaev’s endearment to the “Slavic idea” centered on a Russo-Polish rapprochement and alliance and his disdain for Germany’s imperialism and war machine suggest that similarly he would have rejected American positivism, materialism, and hegemony, NATO expansion, and its splintering of Slavic peoples away from Russia and if alive today would accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to block NATO expansion even at the cost of war in Ukraine. It is reasonable to conclude, in fact, that Berdyaev’s views of Ukraine, if held in comparably relative form today, might have facilitated not just his acceptance, nut perhaps even support for Russia’s ‘special military operation’ against Kiev.

Berdyaev, Ukraine, and Russia

As noted above, Berdyaev was born and lived his youth and young adult years in Ukraine, indeed even attending university in Kiev. So he could have succumbed to ideas of Ukrainian nationalism which intensified at the time or rejected them based on his essentially Russian ethnicity and identity as well as his later adult life’s deep imbeddedness in the life and culture of Russia in its imperial centers, St. Petersburg and Moscow. Initially, he dabbled in Marxism as much of his generation did but then turned to a religious idealism rooted in Russian Orthodoxy. The issue of Ukrainian nationalism and separatism was already a burning issue in the Russian Empire by World War I and was intentionally aggravated before and during by Vienna, and Berdyaev did not shy away from blaming St. Petersburg’s policy for damaging Russia’s prestige and strengthening separatism in Galicia (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Natsionalizm i Imperializm,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 132-40, at p. 139).

Berdyaev’s preference for and perhaps belief in Slavic unity would naturally have been predisposed him to oppose Ukrainian separatism. At the same time, in discussing the divisions in the Slavic world, he noted the tendency of ethnically close or related peoples to be less able to understand each other and so to more easily reject each other than peoples culturally and linguistically more distant from each other. (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Rossiya i polskaya dusha,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 187-95, at p. 188). This dynamic can be seen in stark relief nowhere better than in Russo-Ukrainian relations, though, to be sure, much of the antagonism has been seeded by Russia’s foes, seeking to sow separatism for centuries there—not to mention Poland’s and Austro-Hungaria’s own colonial relations with Ukraine. Therefore, Berdyaev was and would be today keenly attuned to the complexities of the Russian-Ukrainian relationship – compounded after his writing on the subject by the Soviet experience in a myriad of ways – and its role in fomenting the crisis that led to the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war.

Consistent with his pan-Slavist idea, Berdyaev fully rejected in his time the idea of a separation of Russia and ‘Malorossiya’ (Little Russia) or Ukraine. In his 1918 article “Russia and Great Russia” Berdyaev denied both the Great Russians and “Little Russians” any status as separate nations or peoples. Just as there is no separate Ukrainian nationality, he aasserted, so too there is no separate Great Russian nationality; there is only a single, united Russian nation, with “tribal differences” between Russians and Ukrainians (N. A. Berdyaev, “Rossiya i Velikorossiya,” Nakanune, No. 3, April 1918 republished in A. Yu. Minakov, ed., Ukrainskii Vopros: V russkoi patritiocheskoi mysli (Moscow: Knizhnyi mir, 2016), pp. 413-19, at pp. 413-14.). In other words, he perceived solidarist tselostnost’ and supported solidarism of the Russian nation as a united ethno-cultural entity, noting its centuries’ long continuity until 1917. He did so in the unique way of denying the Great Russians any national status separate from its union with Ukraine and other traditional territories and even Russia’s colonized peoples. Berdyaev was prepared to sacrifice even the well-being of each of the eastern Slavic nations for the sake of a unified Russia. “A suffering, sick, misfit Russia would be better than well-off and self-satisfied states of Great Russia, Little Russia, Belorussia, and other regions, thinking themselves independent wholes” ( Berdyaev, “Rossiya i Velikorossiya,” p. 418). For him, “(i)t is not possible to think of Great Russia without the south and without its riches. And it is impossible not to see a terrible betrayal and terrible crime in the destruction of the entire cause of Russian history which carried out the idea of Russia” (Berdyaev, “Rossiya i Velikorossiya,” p. 419). Assuming Berdyaev would not have acquiesced to constructivist arguments regarding nations, his pan-Slavism would have inclined him to refuse to recognize the formation of a separate Ukrainian identity and the idea of a separate Ukrainian nation and state. Moreover, Berdyaev asserted that annexations can be historically useful and condemned Europe for failing to help the Christians of the Ottoman Empire and wrote of Russia’s historical “calling” in his discussion (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Dvizhenie i nepodvizhnost’ v zhizni narodov,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 227-33, at pp. 229-32). Given his pan-Slavism, one can suspect that he had in mind any future Russian attempt during the war to help Turkey’s Slavic Christian peoples breakaway from Constantinople. Although whether Berdyaev, if he was alive today, would have or would not have backed Russia’s ‘special military operation’ into Ukraine is a considerably different matter, by all appearances he could very well have accepted it and the annexations of Ukrainian territory both in 2014 and 2022.

Berdyaev on War

In numerous articles written during World War I and before the fall of the Romanov dynasty and Imperial regime, Berdyaev discussed nationalism, imperialism, universalism, messianism, the role of words in politics and society, war, and Russia’s relations to all these elements (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii). The theme of war was directly related to the time in which he was writing, during World War I, when Russia was in the midst of a mammoth struggle of competing imperialisms of which Russia’s was but one and hardly focused on Europe proper. Berdyaev’s monist tselostnost’ was reflected in his belief that war was a reflection not just of humankind’s inner, spiritual world but of the divine world (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 205-18). War is material reflection of spiritual world, a symptom of internal disease in humankind, a reflection not cause of evil. In this way, all were to blame and responsible for and participates one way or another in the ‘Great War’ (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 205-7, 210-11). But most of all, it seems, materialism in its most concentrated social form – bourgeois life and values – was responsible for the outbreak of WW I. Here, Berdyaev’s very typical Russian transcendentalism emerges to indict non-spiritual, bourgeoisie life, which, he argued, kills human spirituality (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 207).

But on the grander scale of things, war is inevitable, an integral part of tragic nature of human history, which Berdyaev emphasized in his monist philosophy of history and historicism (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 217). His religiosity availed him to parse differing attitudes towards war he perceived in Russians and perhaps others between materialists and positivists. Berdyaev asserted that materialists’ greater fear of death more contributed to their greater fear of war and therefore their pacifism. Consistent with his monism, Christians (such as he himself), he argued, see war more deeply as a symptomatic expression of “spiritual violence”, which all inflict on others (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 208). There is a “dark irrational source” in the depths of humankind from which comes “the deepest tragic contradictions.” Evil in humankind was gaining full reign in the absence or insufficient ubiquity of the Divine. Yet war is a mix of good and evil. In terms of the latter, it involved violence and death inflicted by man against man. A truly Christian war (and state) were impossible for Berdyaev.  In terms of the good, war moved the tragedy of history forward towards its apocalyptic apotheosis of all humankind and the advent of the ultimate triumph of “Christ’s sword”, the Second Coming, and Heavenly Kingdom (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 209). Thus, Berdyaev’s views on war are based on his Christian philosophy of history and historicism intermixed with his Orthodox monism and universalism.  

Later, Berdyaev would develop a sophisticated religious philosophy of history in which he elaborated on the connection between the worldly and spiritual worlds’ struggle between good and evil and its relationship to world history and its ultimate apocalyptic, yet Christian outcome with the second coming of Christ and the advent of the Heavenly Kingdom to the material world. Here was a mix of beliefs in monism and historical unity. A hint of his subsequently more deeply developed Christian eschatology and teleology of History’s ultimate outcome and the following salvation can be seen in a religiously and metaphysically philosophical passage on war:

The responsibilityof man (for the war) should be broadened and deepened. Truly, man is violent and a murderer more often than he suspects and than (others) suspect about him. It is impossible to see violence and murder only in war. All our earthly life rests on violence and murder. Even before the beginning of today’s world war we were violent and murdered in the very depths of life more than during the war. The war manifested on the material plane our old violence and murder, our hatred and antagonism. In the depths of life there is a dark, irrational wellspring. The most profound tragic contradictions are born from it. And humankind, not enlightened within itself divine light because of this dark ancient element, inevitably is passing through the baptismal horror and death of war. There is an inherent redemption of ancient guilt in war. There is something foolish in the abstract wishes of pacifism to avoid war, leaving humankind in its previous condition. This is the wish to remove responsibility from oneself. War is intrinsic punishment and intrinsic redemption. In war, hatred is remolded into love, and love into hatred. In war the furthest extremes touch, and the devilish dark intersects with divine light. War is the material manifestation of the ancient contradictions of being and the revelation of the life’s irrationality. Pacifism is the rationalistic negation of the irrational dark in life. And it is impossible to believe in an eternally rational world. It is not for nothing that Apocalypse prophecies about wars. And Christianity does not foresee a peaceful and painless end of world history. Below is reflected that which is above, and on earth it is at it is in Heaven. And above, in Heaven, God’s angels fight with Satan’s angels. In all spheres of the cosmos there is fiery and furious elements, and war is conducted. And on earth Christ brings not peace but the sword. The deep antinomy of Christianity is in this: Christianity cannot answer evil with evil, resist evil with violence, and Christianity is war, the division of the world and its outgrowth until the end of the redemption of the cross in dark and evil (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Mysli o prirode voiny,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 205-13, at pp. 208-9).

The above exegesis is not only Berdyaev’s metaphysical analysis of the meaning of World War I and war in general. It is Berdyaev’s recommendation to Russians on how they should interpret the apocryphal events they were witnessing.

Indeed, Berdyaev argued that Russians’ failure to adopt such a religious-metaphysical attitude towards the war that recognizes the “(c)reative historical tasks” related to the war led to a need for self-justification for Russia’s involvement. Self-justification was achieved by placing themselves above the Germans, who were portrayed as morally inferior. Russia’s “hasty justifications for the war or, more precisely, our self-justifications came to one conclusion: we are better than the Germans, moral right is on our side, we are defending ourselves and others” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 220). He continued: “For some (Russians) the German people were acknowledged as the bearer of militarism and reaction, and that is why it is necessary to fight with them—it is a progressive cause. Even anarchists such as Kropotkin stood for this point of view. For many the German people seemed the bearer of the anti-Christian principles and a false spiritual culture, and that is why war with them is a holy war” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 221). Berdyaev would likely see this less the less than humble and sufficiently arrogant and self-righteous today in both the Western and much of Russia’s perceptions, proclamations, and propaganda surrounding the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war.

There was no shying away from criticism of Russians’ behavior at the outbreak of the war, on Berdyaev’s part. He castigated the bloodthirsty nationalism that swept through Russia at the time as it did throughout Europe: “The orgy of chemical instincts and the ugly profiting and speculation in the days of the great war and the great trials for Russia are ourgreat shame and a black stain on national life” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 99). He saw this as a consequence of Russia’s weak moral education, lack of a civil society and civic honesty and honor, and one alternative side of Russian smirenie: susceptibility to the “temptation of easy gains,” which he saw elevated by in Russia’s bourgeois-philistine layer” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 99-100). Thus, he today would be dismayed by similar war mongering and the like coming from the ultra-patriotic wing of Russia’s political spectrum as well as from more ‘bourgeios-philistine’ elements such as Russian Security Council Secretary, Chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission, and former Russian president Dmitrii Medvedev.

Finally, Berdyaev placed the war in another larger context of the struggle between peoples for a “dignified national existence” that was part of the development of the world’s historical tragedy in which no nation had a monopoly on morality in war. “Тhe historical struggle is a struggle for being and not for forthright justice, and it is implemented by the comprehensive spiritual forces of nations. (The historical struggle) is a struggle for national being and not a utilitarian struggle, and it is always a struggle for values, for creative strength and not for the elementary fact of life and not for simple interests. One can say that the struggle among nations for historical being has deep moral and religious meaing, and it is necessary for the higher goals of world process. But it is impossible to say that in this struggle one people wholly represents the good, and another people wholly represents evil. One people only can be more right than another relatively speaking. The struggle for historical existence of each people has an internal justification” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 223).

CONCLUSION

Berdyaev’s thought on Russia, Ukraine, and war are a clear function of his Russianness and Orthodoxy filtered through his own personal struggle to understand the visible and invisible world and cosmos around him. In Berdyaev’s Christian eschatology, teleology, and soteriology dictated an even-handed treatment of the relative good and evil of the world’s peoples in the making of humankind’s tragic history, which was to end in apocalypse ushering in Christ’s second coming and the Heavenly Kingdom. This even-handedness is reflected in Berdyaev’s harsh criticisms of Russia alongside his attribution of a special mission. It is also evident in Berdyaev’s refusal to support Russian chauvinist positions in relation to Ukraine as well as Poland and even Germany. Great and Little Russians are co-equals in the Russian nation, in Berdyaev’s view. Finally, all are responsible and participate in the human evils of hate, violence, and war through which humankind must suffer to attain a divinely determined, not any man-made worldly and metaphysically historical outcome on earth as in Heaven.

[The following is a chapter from Dr. Julie Ponesse’s book, Our Last Innocent Moment.]

The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

My experience has been that one of the most heart-wrenching things in life is to watch someone make decisions that lead to their own destruction. It’s not just watching a person suffer that is hard but watching them make the very choices that create their suffering. And, maybe even worse, realizing that we do this ourselves.

Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex, puts this phenomenon on the stage. It tells the story of Oedipus, a man prophesied from birth to murder his father and marry his mother despite his sincerest attempts to avoid doing either. Sophocles shows us that it is precisely because of these attempts that Oedipus is propelled towards his unfortunate end. At the end of the play, Oedipus realizes that his suffering is due to his own choices but, by that point, it is too late to change his course. So ashamed of what he has done, he blinds himself and flees into exile.

In the last essay, I considered whether our civilization is on the verge of collapse. That idea may have struck you as a bit extreme, but even just a cursory look at how we are faring, individually and collectively, suggests that the threads that hold us together are unraveling at a rate outpacing our ability to restitch them. In public and in private, online and in real life, our civil and moral deterioration is affecting how we view persons, how we raise and educate children, to what degree we are willing to sacrifice each other, and how inclined we are even to rewrite history.

In September, 2022, Trish Wood published a disturbingly diagnostic article called, “We Are Living the Fall of Rome (and it’s being forced on us as a virtue)” in which she describes us as “a doomed culture pretending not to see its own demise.” Wood cites “the normalization of abhorrent behaviour, the race-baiting and censorship, the cruelty and banishment of anyone who objects to the bizarre carnival unfolding in our streets” as evidence of our self-destructive behaviour. Our greed, our collectivism, our relativism, and our nihilism have created fault lines across every facet of life. And Covid seemed only to punctuate our destruction, leaving us with the deep wounds of “pandemic trauma.”

Wood isn’t wrong. Well beyond anything Covid did to us, or made salient, our society seems to be at a tipping point and it isn’t clear that we could shift back to where we were even if we tried. We are a broken people who seem to be breaking a little more every day. 

Here, I want to take the thesis of the last essay a step further and explore what might be causing our collapse. Is it a coincidence that we are suffering in so many different areas of life right now? Is it a little misstep on an otherwise progressive path? If we are on the verge of collapse, is it part of the arc of all great civilizations? Or, like Oedipus, do we suffer from some tragic flaw — a collective destructive character trait that we all share — that is responsible for bringing us to this place at this moment in history? 

What Ails Us?

All tragedies, classical and modern, follow a very specific pattern. There is some central character, the tragic hero, who is reasonably like us but who suffers terribly because of his tragic flaw, the internal imperfection that causes him to damage himself or others. Oedipus’ flaw is his excessive pride (or hubris) in thinking not only that he could escape his fate but that he alone can save Thebes from the plague placed upon it. It’s his pride that drives him to flee his adoptive parents and his pride that causes him to get angry enough to unknowingly kill the man (who turns out to be his father) at the crossroads who will not let him pass. His story moves us because, as Sigmund Freud wrote, “It might have been ours.”

One risk of searching for a (collective) tragic flaw to explain our destruction is that it presumes that we are protagonists living out a drama instead of people living in the real world. But our words aren’t crafted by playwrights, and our movements aren’t staged by directors. We envision our own futures, make our own choices, and act on those choices (or so it seems). And so a question is whether real people, and not just literary characters, can have tragic flaws. 

An interesting place to look for an answer is past moments of crisis in which we saw ourselves as, or made ourselves into, protagonists. WWII Britain is a good example, in part because it is relatively recent, and in part because it shares many of the experiences — of fear, social isolation, and an uncertain future — that we are experiencing now. When you read about how the British people rallied together, you can clearly see a sense of agency and moral purpose, and how some of the language used to describe this coming together straddled reality and fiction. A good example is a comment made by John Martin, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, to describe how the British people transformed themselves from victims to protagonists: “Brits came to see themselves as protagonists on a vaster scene and as champions of a high and invincible cause, for which the stars in their courses were fighting.”

It is also helpful to remember why the Ancient Greeks wrote tragedies in the first place. In the 5th century BC, the Athenians were reeling from decades of war and a deadly plague that killed one quarter of their population. Their lives were framed with uncertainty, loss, and grief, and the magnitude of the realization that life is fragile and largely beyond our control. The tragic playwrights — Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus — dramatized the experiences of war and death in order to make some sense of the chaos they caused, to create a semblance of order and reason. Tragic characters were not so much literary inventions as they were reflections of the actual experience of suffering that was all too common in the ancient world. And so, even though the fantastical battles between superhuman and the Olympian gods might seem a long leap from our more mundane lives, the lessons contained within the tragedies might still offer us something relevant and useful.

So I take it as a live and interesting question; are we suffering from a collective tragic flaw? And if so, what could it be? Taking a cue from the tragic playwrights — the Greeks, Shakespeare and even Arthur Miller — the candidates include hubris or excessive pride (Oedipus, Achilles, and The Crucible’s John Proctor), greed (Macbeth), jealousy (Othello), willful blindness (Gloucester in King Lear), and even extreme hesitancy (Hamlet).

In a way, I think we are suffering from all of these, from a complex web of tragic flaws. Our scientism predisposes us to unchecked ambition, our greed makes us excessively self-focused, and our blindness makes us numb to the suffering of others. But when I consider what might be the nexus at which all these flaws intersect, nothing seems to define us at this point in history more than our arrogance; arrogance in thinking we can write perfect essays and curate perfect homes; arrogance in thinking we can eradicate disease and malfunction, and even escape death; arrogance in thinking we can go to the limits of outer space and the depths of the sea without incident. 

But our arrogance is precise. It’s not just that we think we are better than others, or better than we have ever been. We think we can be superhuman. We think we can become perfect. 

The Perfect Storm

In an earlier essay, I argued that scientism has captured all sectors of society, powerfully shaping our response to Covid and, quite likely, to future crises. But why did we become doting followers of scientism in the first place?

As a starting point, let’s take a look at what was going on in academia in the years leading up to 2020. 

For a long time, the implicitly accepted value theories in medical ethics were hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure) and eudaimonism (the pursuit of flourishing via a life of virtue). But, at some point, these theories gradually began to be supplanted by a third contender: moral perfectionism.  

You are undoubtedly familiar with perfectionism as a character trait, the pursuit of excessively high personal standards of performance. But moral perfectionism adds the normative component that, to attain the good life, humans ought to become perfect in these ways. (Implied is the assumption that it is possible to do so.) 

Moral perfectionism is hardly new. In the 4th century BC, Aristotle’s moral perfectionism took the form of a virtue theory, claiming that humans have a telos (a purpose or goal), which is to attain a state of flourishing or well-being (eudaemonia). In simple terms, we need first to develop virtues like courage, justice, and generosity if we are to be capable of living well. Moral perfectionism took on a slightly different form in the 19th century with the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill for whom a fulfilled, virtuous life is cultivated by developing what he called “higher pleasures” (mental pleasures versus pleasures of the body). 

But, by the time we got to the 21st century, moral perfectionism had morphed so completely it became unrecognizable. Originally meaning that we could actualize our potential by improving our natures, perfectionism now sets the unattainable goal of literally becoming free of defects. The perfectionism of today is the inhuman expectation that our lives are picture-perfect and reel-ready, that we must be superhuman in our physiology, our psychology, our immunity, and even our morality. We curate and style. We prescribe, vaccinate, shame, blame and surgically alter. And we expect as much, or more, from others.

One reason I think our culture was so keen to embrace mass Covid vaccination is that medical intervention, more generally, has taken on an odd sort of social currency. We rack up specialist visits, prescriptions, and surgeries like desirable partners on a dance card. This is a reflection, I think, of the influence of scientism and perfectionism in our lives; it means we are ‘on board’ with the idea of rooting out and eliminating every last personal flaw and using the latest technology to do so.

This is reflected, I think, in the lack of patience and grace we seem to have for those who choose to forgo whatever medical intervention is deemed able to ‘fix’ what ails them. I know of a woman who has suffered from depression for as long as anyone can remember. She refuses to take medication or even get a diagnosis. Most of her immediate family has diminishing grace for her simply because they believe she isn’t taking advantage of the proposed solutions. She won’t do the protocol, so she can “suffer the consequences.” 

The same intolerance exists for those who resist Covid vaccination. The common response from the devout pro-vaxxers is that we should refuse medical care to those who won’t take advantage of the solution offered to them. They won’t do the protocol, so they can “suffer the consequences.” (“Let them die,” as Canada’s largest national newspaper recommended.) 

It’s all so simple. Or is it? 

Perfectionism, when it comes to addressing our physical or mental infirmities, is the presumption that leaves no room for questions, nuance, individual differences, reflection, apology, or revision. And it didn’t emerge ex nihilo in 2020; it started to gain traction decades earlier, as it needed to if it was to mold our Covid response. 

Punctuated Perfectionism

There is evidence that this literal and extreme form of perfectionism started to settle into our personalities over 40 years ago. According to a 2019 study, unprecedented numbers of people began to experience self-oriented perfectionism (setting excessively high expectations for oneself), other-oriented perfectionism (doing the same for others), and socially-prescribed perfectionism (believing that one is held to extremely high standards by society) as early as the 1980s. In 2012, the UK Association for Physician Health found that perfectionism is a growing trait among doctors, in particular, who tend to be overly critical of their behaviour, leading to deleterious mental and physical effects.    

In his recent book, _The Perfection Trap,_ Thomas Curran writes that a perfect storm of globalization and wider environmental factors, including the increased presence of social media in our lives, created favourable conditions for socially-prescribed perfectionism. He writes, 

I found that our world has become increasingly globalised over the last 25 years, with the opening up of borders to trade and employment, and much higher levels of travel,… In the past we were judged more on a local scale, but with the opening of economies what we are seeing is that people are being exposed to these additional global ideals of perfection.

While we might have expected globalization to increase our awareness of others, and therefore our tolerance for diversity, it also provides greater opportunities for comparison. Whether you are making dinner or building a stock portfolio, globalism widened the lens of comparison at a dizzying rate, creating endless opportunities to be made aware of our flaws.

The highly edited and curated aspect of social media exacerbates this effect. Images of strangers at carefully selected moments of their lives distorts our perceptions of what real life is and what it can be. The ability to take 50 photos of a single moment and then delete all but the best creates a false impression of what life is really like. And the very idea of curation — the process of editing our lives as though they are to be part of a museum exhibit — angles us towards perfectionism.

Political Perfectionism

Another unfortunate effect of perfectionism is that it lends itself to a certain kind of political organization in which the state has substantial centralized control over people’s lives: statism. 

The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant presciently argued that a perfectionist society requires government to regulate human coexistence. This, I suspect, is precisely why we saw so little resistance to the increasingly rigid Covid regulations which framed every part of our lives. During Covid, there was no thought that humans could be left to conscientiously manage their own interactions, or even that individual physicians could responsibly guide them. Free choice is irreducibly individualistic, and therefore messy. It allows that different people with different values will make different, and therefore non-perfecting, choices. And so free choice was among the first things to be sacrificed as perfectionism gained ground in early 2020.

Perfectionism is precisely the value theory one would expect to predominate in a culture captured by scientism, and it is the one we find framing every facet of our lives today. Willingly and with pride, we laid informed consent on the altar of perfectionism not to protect ourselves, but to perfect ourselves. Individual freedom became the naive idea that we thought 21st century civilization had matured beyond.

If our tragic flaw is perfectionism, it would explain a lot. It would explain our comfort with conformity and compliance, since perfectionism requires us to eliminate the anomalies that detract from the goal of self-perfection. It would explain our obsession with Artificial Intelligence, pharmaceutical enhancement, cryogenics, and MAID, and with the general desire to transcend our limitations. It would explain why we thought Zero-Covid — the perfect eradication of the virus — was possible. It would explain our interest in curation and our intolerance of the weak, messy parts of life. And it would explain why we favour closure and judgment and the desire to cut people out of our lives with surgical precision rather than working through the tricky parts of a relationship. For better or worse (far worse, I think), our myopic obsession with perfectionism became the monotheism of the 21st century.

Perfectionism and Pandemic Psychology

So, how did the rise of perfectionism in society, generally, culminate in our hyper-perfectionist tendencies during COVID? 

A recent study explored the effect of perfectionism on our psychological states during Covid. It showed that perfectionism increased not only the likelihood of experiencing Covid-related stress but also the tendency to conceal health problems in order to be seen by others as perfect. For perfectionists, the possibility of getting sick can be interpreted as an obstacle to achieving flawlessness in various domains of life such as physical appearance, work, or parenting. For the “self-critical perfectionist” and the “narcissist,” in particular, personal value is determined largely by external validation, and so virtue-signaling became unsurprisingly prominent during Covid. Covid pushed so unrelentingly on our perfectionist buttons that we tragically drove ourselves into a state of social and personal destruction. 

And herein lies the problem. Perfectionism is not just vain or misguided ambition. It reflects a false perception of who we are, a failure to properly “know thyself.” It shows that we give ourselves — our strengths and our weaknesses — as little attention as we give others. In setting our sights on perfection, we forget that we aren’t capable of it and, more importantly, that the beauty in life doesn’t consist of it.  

This is one of the greatest lessons the Greek tragedies teach us: that we must accept, and ultimately embrace, the basic uncertainties and imperfections of life. The contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum draws on lessons from the Greek play Hecuba to make this point:

The condition of being good is that it should always be possible for you to be morally destroyed by something you couldn’t prevent. To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the human condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from its fragility.

For Nussbaum, and no doubt for Hecuba herself, the paradox of life is that, while our imperfections are what expose us to suffering, the worst tragedy of all is to try to safeguard ourselves to the point that we can no longer live as the beings we are. 

So much of our perfectionism is tied up with hyper-confidence in technology and its ability to suppress the contingencies of life that cause us pain and suffering. Two thousand years ago we invented ploughs, bridles, and hammers to gain some control over the untamed wilderness around us; today, we invent passwords, security systems, and vaccines. But we forget that using technology to improve our lives requires more than mere technical accomplishment; it requires the practical wisdom needed to keep it working for us rather than us becoming enslaved to it.

The very possibility of relationships exposes us to risk. It requires that we trust and accept promises from other people, and even just that they continue living in a state of good health. The other day, I ran into a woman from our local grocery store with whom I have come to be friendly. I remarked on how I hadn’t seen her in a while. She said her sister passed away unexpectedly, 2 months after a cancer diagnosis. She also said that, in the midst of mourning this loss, she was also trying to figure out who she was without a sister, without her best friend, navigating a chaotic world as a new and lonely person.

The response to these losses is often to recoil to protect ourselves. When people die, break promises, or in other ways become unreliable, it’s natural to want to retreat into the thought “I’ll just live on my own, for myself.” You see this everywhere today: people severing relationships that become a bit too burdensome, diving into a world of screens in which the characters are more reliable, even if ultimately less fulfilling.

On top of turning away from relationships, we use certainty as an extra layer of protection from risk and uncertainty. The novelist Iris Murdoch hypothesizes that we deal with the uncomfortable uncertainty of life by feigning surety and confidence. Unwilling to fully live into what we are — anxious and uncertain creatures, tender and terrified and fragile throughout so much of life — we train ourselves into being consumed in false certitudes. 

Isn’t this what we are doing today? We feign certainty about the origins of Covid, the true causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the intentions of global political actors. But, when we decide to live this way — perfectly certain and full of pride — we aren’t just losing the value that relationships bring to life; we’re making a choice to live less humanly since these are the things that make life meaningful.

What it is to have a tragic flaw is not just to make poor life choices. Oedipus didn’t just choose poorly; instead, every particular thing he decided to do was ironically and essentially linked to his downfall. It was the self-righteous thought that he was single-handedly ridding Thebes of the source of its plague that propelled him towards his own destruction. Seeing himself as its saviour made him its destroyer. 

In a similar way, I believe our obsession with perfectionism is ironically and essentially tied to the fateful choices we made with respect to Covid-19 and in so many other areas of our lives. We are not, it seems, so unlike the tragic characters of literature. By using technology unguided by wisdom to try to control the world around us, we are becoming its slaves. By cancelling others, we are making it impossible to live well, ourselves. And it is our pretence of unity — “We’re all in this together,” “Do your part” — that is dividing us more than ever. Our tragic flaw, it seems, is ironically and powerfully creating our own destruction. 

Catharsis

How do we cure ourselves of this tragic flaw? 

In literature, tragic flaws get worked out by a specific process called catharsis, a process of cleansing or purification in which the tragic emotions — pity and fear — are aroused and then eliminated from the reader’s (or viewer’s) psyche. Catharsis gets worked out in the theatre much like therapy does in real life; by giving the audience an opportunity to vicariously work through intense emotions and their tragic consequences in the lives of literary characters, emerging somehow rebalanced.

It is not by coincidence that the experience of catharsis is visceral in the way that a good cry takes it out of you, physically. And the origins of the term certainly reflect its connection with physical purgation.

Aristotle typically used catharsis in a medical sense, referring to the evacuation of katamenia — menstrual fluid — from the body. The Greek word “Kathairein” appears even earlier than this, in the works of Homer who used the Semitic word “Qatar” (for “fumigate”) to refer to purification rituals. And, of course, the Greeks had the idea of miasma, or “blood guilt,” which could only be cured by spiritually purifying acts. (The classical example is Orestes whose soul is purified when Apollo douses him with the blood of a suckling pig.) In the Christian tradition, the ritual of drinking Christ’s symbolic blood during the communion sacrament helps us to remember his sacrificial death which cleansed us of unrighteousness. The general idea is that our emotions can be whipped up and then released just as we might hydrate, fast, and sweat to purge ourselves of physical toxins.

Catharsis is an integral part of the healing process. Its purpose is to create an awakening, a process of seeing what you have done, who you are, and how your choices impact yourself and others. That awakening is often painful, like the first moments of opening your eyes in the morning or like the prisoners who are blinded by the light as they emerge from Plato’s metaphorical cave. 

It is not a coincidence, I think, that so many people describe their falling away from the Covid narrative as a kind of “waking up.” It’s a matter of seeing things in a new light, seeing ducks where you once only saw rabbits. There is a discomfort to it. But there is also eventual relief in that discomfort as the truth starts to come into view.

If we have a tragic flaw, and if it is perfectionism, then what sort of catharsis might cure us of it? What underlying emotions are involved and how can we whip them up so we can purge ourselves of them?

A good place to start is to think about how collectives — groups of people — tend to respond to emergency or trauma events. September 11 comes easily to mind. Though it was over 20 years ago now, I remember the days following 9/11 with crystal clarity. I especially remember the way it arrested and solidified us, socially. I was standing in line at a coffee shop on my way to class when I first heard the news. Well before the era of smartphones, everyone stopped to gather in the corner of the shop around a television set that was covering the event. You could hear people breathing, it was so still and quiet. People were looking for some explanation in each other’s eyes. Some held each other, most cried. 

I was a graduate student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario at the time and I remember everyone talking about it when I got to campus. Classes were cancelled, “Closed” signs appeared in store windows. It became the topic of seminars for weeks to come. News coverage overtook regularly scheduled programming for days. I was riveted but exhausted. The media images — of soot-covered firefighters, personal items protruding from the rubble, waves of dust billowing through the streets, stories of children whose parents would never come home and, of course, the searing image of Father Mychal Judge’s body being carried out of the rubble. 

These images, the ongoing media coverage, the endless conversations and tears and hugs all exhausted us. We were talked out, hugged out, and cried out. In the days, weeks and even months afterwards, I remember feeling physically weak from it all. Maybe we did more than we needed to do but all the sharing was our cathartic release. It was painful but it somehow cleansed us and drew us together.

We engaged in what psychologists call “social sharing” — the tendency to recount and share emotional experiences with others — and it was powerfully cathartic. Psychologist Bernard Rimé found that 80-95% of emotional episodes are shared and that we typically socially share negative emotions after a tragic event in order to understand, to vent, to bond, to seek meaning, or to combat feelings of loneliness. 

Sociologist Émile Durkheim explains that it is through sharing that we achieve a reciprocal stimulation of emotions which leads to the strengthening of beliefs, a renewal of trust, strength, and self-confidence, and even increased social integration. It’s in sharing that we build a community of those experiencing the same trauma. Research shows that sharing not just the facts of our experiences, but our feelings about them, improves recovery after traumatic events. A 1986 study assigned participants to one of four groups, including a “trauma-combo group,” in which participants wrote about not just the facts of their trauma but the emotions surrounding them. Those in the trauma-combo group showed the most emotional healing but also the greatest objective health improvements, including reduction in illness-related doctor’s visits. 

Now that we’ve gained some distance from the intensity of the Covid crisis, I am realizing just how radically different our collective response was compared with what I remember about 9/11. 

As a traumatic event, shouldn’t we have expected a similar pattern of sharing? Where was the deluge of conversations, the emotional meltdowns, the personal stories? Where were all the public hugs and tears? 

None of this happened during Covid. We shared the facts but not the experiences. We focused on the statistics, not the stories. There was no Covid “trauma-combo group,” no sharing of what it felt like to be terrified of the virus or the government response to it, no coming together over the grief of loved ones dying alone, no sorrow over what it was like to be hated by your fellow citizens or cast out of meaningful social interactions. 

In comparison to 9/11, our natural trauma response to Covid was stunted by our deep culture of silence, censorship, and cancellation. The sharing happened in small, isolated groups, and the media coverage was fringe and outlying. But the acknowledged, shared experiences of people living through a global, traumatic event were absent… or silenced.

The fact that we didn’t do the emotional work needed for trauma recovery in the natural course of things means we are still saddled with pent-up, tragic emotions. And they aren’t likely to dissolve by the mere passage of time. The work will still need to be done, whether it is by us now, or by our children or grandchildren at some point in the future. 

So, what do we need to do now? We need families and friends to talk about how the last three years changed them. We need sisters to share their pain and uncertainties. We need Substacks and op-eds and feature articles on the totality of the costs — physical, emotional, economic, and existential — of the pandemic and the pandemic response. We need testimonies and interviews and books of poetry and history to flood the Amazon and New York Times bestseller lists. We need all of this to help us make sense of what happened to us. Stories are a balm to our wounds. We need them for our recovery as much as to create an accurate historical record. And until we have them, our emotions will fester a little more each day, with us floating in a kind of Covid purgatory.

Last Thoughts

It’s hard to imagine that we are a civilization on the verge of collapse and perhaps even harder still to imagine that we could be the cause of our own destruction. But it’s useful to remember that civilizations are not as invincible as we might think. According to British scholar Sir John Bagot Glubb, the average lifespan of civilizations is a mere 336 years. By this measure, we have done quite well, our civilization — with roots in Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire — having lasted much longer than most. It’s a sobering fact that every civilization but our own has collapsed. And, for better or for worse, it was the destruction of every prior civilization that allowed for the creation of our own. 

But what perplexes me so much about our potential collapse is that we seem to have all the resources to resist it. We have a robust written historical record to show us how perverted leaders, greed, civil war, and the loss of culture and communication destroy us. We are more literate (in a sense) and more technologically advanced than ever, which should have insulated us from some of the common causes of destruction: disease, economic collapse, and global war. You would think that the lessons of history, alone, would have helped us to swerve to avoid our destruction. And yet here we are.

All these resources, yes, but we have little character, little practical wisdom with which to manage them. In the end, we are here because of a tragic flaw that makes us believe in the possibility of living perfectly rather than living well, all the while making us blind to the paradox at the heart of the idea.

Is there an author to our Covid experience, and to our more general destruction? I don’t know and I don’t think it ultimately matters. 

What matters is how we, as individuals, respond. What matters is how much attention we give ourselves and others, whether we ask ourselves the hard questions and root out the character flaws lurking in the darkest corners of our souls. What matters is not that we are characters but that we have characters, that we are able to accept responsibility for lives and the choices we make.

It’s interesting to me that, even amidst the ‘We-don’t-need-history’ arrogance of the 21st century, the tragic stories of Shakespeare and of Ancient Greece have managed to survive. That, in itself, should give us reason to pause and pay attention. I wonder, why have their themes stood the test of time? Why do they resonate so profoundly? And, most importantly, what are we attempting to teach ourselves through the telling and retelling? 

Tragedies are not just stories that help us to make sense of the chaos of the world around us; they are also warnings for the future generations. They are scratchings on the walls of the caves and letters from the past to teach us how to avoid future self-destruction.  

Unfortunately, history shows us that we aren’t very good at heeding these warnings. It’s as though our tragic flaw is standing in the way of seeing the truth about ourselves. We are still lurking in the shadow of Oedipus. And, like Oedipus, it’s the things we do to try to avoid our destruction that fate us to play it out. Perhaps we think we are special, or somehow immune. Perhaps we believe we have evolved past the tragic flaws of our ancestors; but we don’t see that we are just as weak and willfully blind. Like Oedipus, we are refusing to see and will one day no longer be able to look at ourselves.

I hope I haven’t given the impression that working our tragic flaw out of ourselves will be easy or that it will make all of our troubles dissolve in a moment. There’s a reason why so many choose willful blindness; it’s not sticky. You can go through your day, even a whole life, without raising eyebrows or ringing any socially alarming bells. But confronting our mistakes and working through them is the only possible way forward.

Our lives are framed largely by the stories we tell ourselves. And perfectionism is the story we are currently telling. But it’s a dangerous and destructive story because it creates “blind spots” that make us unable to see the harm we do. If it’s destroying us, then shouldn’t we try to write a different story?

A story in which our lives are messy, the future uncertain, and our lives finite. 

A story in which we are imperfect beings who listen to each others’ stories and offer grace for each other’s imperfections. 

A story we need to learn to write with new characters we need to learn to be. 

A story in which the things that destroy us in one moment can teach and heal us in the next. 

In every tragedy, just before climax, there is an eerie calm. The calm of Fall 2023 is deafening. People aren’t speaking. Stories aren’t being shared. Self-adulation and revisionism abound. 

I can’t help but wonder, are we experiencing the “falling action” after the climax of our story, or is it still to come? How would we know? Does the tragic hero ever know? The falling action in a play usually includes the character’s reaction to the climax, how he copes with the obstacles that brought him to that point, and how he plans to carry on. 

How do we plan to carry on? Will we look our mistakes in the face or will we continue to feed the beast that is our obsession with perfectionism? Will we start telling our stories? Will we listen to the stories of others? And, maybe most importantly, will future generations heed our warnings?

Time will tell us. Or, as the tragic playwright Euripides advised, “Time will explain it all.”

Sometimes it takes our bodies to return us to our souls. And our little pains to remind us of the indescribable pain of the savage killing and dismemberment of innocent children and adults in Gaza and many other places by U.S. weapons produced in clean factories by people just doing their jobs and collecting their pay at “defense” contractors Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, etc. Abstraction is the name of the game as human bodies are torn to pieces “over there” and the obscene profits are transferred at the computer terminals day and night.

Living in a technological world of the internet divorces us from real life as it passes into inert, abstract, and dead screen existence. It should not be surprising that people grow sick and tired of the steady streams of “news” that fills their days and nights. So much of the news is grotesque; propaganda abounds. Stories twisted right and left to tie minds into knots. After a while, as Macbeth tells us, life seems like “a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets its hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Being sick and out of it for a while allows one a different perspective on the world. This is especially true for those of us who often write about politics and propaganda. A recent illness has forced me to step away from my usual routine of following political events closely. Fleeting headlines have been all I’ve noted for the past two weeks. While lying around waiting for the illness to leave, I would drift in and out of reveries and memories that would float to semi-consciousness. Feeling miserable prevented any focus or logical thinking, but not, I emphasize, thinking in a deeper, physical sense. But it also gave me a reprieve from noting the repetitive and atomizing nature of internet postings, as if one needs to be hammered over the head again and again to understand the world whose realities are much simpler than the endless scribblers and politicians are willing to admit.

Jonathan Crary, in a scathing critique of the digital world in Scorched Earth, puts it thus:

For the elites, the priority remains: keep people enclosed within the augmented unrealities of the internet complex, where experience is fragmented into a kaleidoscope of fleeting claims of importance, of never-ending admonitions on how to conduct our lives, manage our bodies, what to buy and who to admire or to fear.

I agree with Crary. During my sickness, I did manage to read a few brief pieces, an essay, a short story, and a poem. Serendipitously, each confirmed the trend of my thinking over recent years as well as what my bodily discomfit was teaching me.

The first was an essay by the art critic John Berger about the abstract expressionist, avant-garde painter Jackson Pollock, titled “A Kind of Sharing.” It struck me as very true. Pollock came to prominence in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was described as an “action” painter who poured paint on large canvases to create abstract designs that were lauded by the New York art world. Some have sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. The description of Pollock as an untalented pourer, Berger says, is false, for Pollock was a very precise master of his art who was aware of how he was putting paint to canvas and of the effects of his abstractions. His work made no references to the outside world since such painting at that time was considered illustrative. Berger says that Pollock’s paintings were violent in that “The body, the flesh, had been rejected and they were the consequence of this rejection.” He argues that Pollock, who died in a drunken car crash in Easthampton, Long Island on August 11, 1956, was committing art suicide with his abstract paintings because he had rejected the ancient assumption of painting that the visible contained hidden secrets, that behind appearances there were presences. For Pollock, there was nothing beyond the surfaces of his canvases. This was because he was painting the nothingness he felt and wished to convey. A nihilism that was both personal and abroad in the society.

Pollock’s story is a sad one, for he was praised and used by forces far more powerful than he. Nelson Rockefeller, who was president of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) that his mother had cofounded, called Pollock’s work “free enterprise paintings,” and the CIA, through its Congress for Cultural Freedom, secretly promoted it as a Cold War weapon against the Soviet Union’s socialist realism art, even as right-wing congressmen ripped Pollock as a perverse artist. So in the name of openness, the CIA secretly promoted Pollock’s avant-gardism as real America art in a campaign of propaganda, while the right-wing bashed him as a perverted leftist. This sick double game became a template for future mind-control operations that are widespread today.

As was his habit, Berger brilliantly places Pollock’s work within social and political history, a description of a time very similar to today when the word “freedom” was bandied about. Then it was the freedom of the Voice of America extolling the Cold War tale of freedom of the “Free World”; freedom for artists to be free of rhetoric, history, the past, and to jettison the tyranny of the object; freedom of the market amidst a strident yet incoherent sense of loss. He writes:

At this moment, what was happening in the outside world? For a cultural climate is never separate from events. The United States had emerged from the war as the most powerful nation in the world. The first atom bomb had been dropped. The apocalypse of the Cold War had been placed on the agenda. McCarthy was inventing his traitors. The mood in the country that had suffered least from the war was defiant, violent, haunted. The play most apt to the period would have been Macbeth, and the ghosts were from Hiroshima.

Today’s ghosts are still from Hiroshima and Macbeth is still apposite, and the ghosts of all the many millions killed since then haunt us now if we can see them. Although their bodies have disappeared out the back door of the years – and continue to do so daily – true art is to realize their presence, to hear their cries and conjure up their images. While the word freedom is still bandied about in this new Cold War era where the sense of social lostness is even more intense than in Pollock’s time, it often comes from a nihilistic despondency similar to Pollock’s and those who used atomic weapons, a belief that appearances and surfaces are all and behind them there is nothing. Nada, nada, nada. A society that Roberto Calasso calls “an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.” Berger concludes:

Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times that nourished him, to refuse this act of faith [that painting reveals a presence behind an appearance]: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us. This simple, terrible reversal, born of an individualism that was frenetic, constituted the suicide.

This short essay by Berger about Pollock’s denial of the human body struck me as my own body was temporarily failing me. It seemed to contain lessons for the augmented realities of the internet and the new Cold War being waged for the control of our minds and hearts today. Inducements to get lost in abstractions.

Then one day I picked up another book from the shelf to try to distract myself from my physical misery. It was a collection of stories by John Fowles. I read the opening novella – “The Ebony Tower” – haltingly over days. It was brilliant and eerily led me to a place similar to that of Berger’s thoughts about Pollock. Fowles explores art and the body against a dreamy background of a manor house in the French countryside. As I read it lying on a couch, I fell in and out of oneiric reveries and sleep, induced by my body’s revolt against my mind. Trying to distract myself from my aches and pains, I again found myself ambushed by writing about corporality. Both Berger and Fowles sensed the same thing: that modernity was conspiring to deny the body’s reality in favor of visual abstractions. That in doing so our essential humanity was being lost and the slaughters of innocent people were becoming abstractions. Then the Internet came along to at first offer hope only to become an illusion of freedom increasingly controlled by media in the service of deep-state forces. Soon the only way to write and distribute the truth will be retro – on paper and exchanged hand to hand. This no doubt sounds outlandish to those who have swallowed the digital mind games, but they will be surprised once they fully wake up.

Fowles’s story is about David, an art historian who goes to visit a famous, cranky old painter named Henry Breasely. The younger man is writing about the older and thinks it would be interesting to meet him, even though he thinks it isn’t necessary to write the article he has already composed in his mind. The art historian, like many of his ilk, lives in his mind, in academic abstractions. He is in a sense “pure mind,” in many ways a replica of T.S. Eliot’s neurotic J. Alfred Prufrock. The old painter lives in the physical world, where sex and the body and nature enclose his world, where paint is used to illuminate the physical reality of life, its sensuousness, not abstractions, where physical life and death infuse his work, including political realities. Obviously not new to William Butler Yeats’ discovery as expressed in the conclusion to his poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

The old man fiercely defends the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” against all abstractions and academic bullshit, which are the young man’s métier. He accuses the young critic of being afraid of the human body. When the critic responds, “Perhaps more interested in the mind than the genitals,” the caustic and funny painter says, “God help your bloody wife then.” He accuses the younger man of being in the game of destruction and castration, of supporting abstractions at the expense of flesh and blood life. “There are worse destroyers around than nonrepresentational art,” the critic says in his defense. To which the painter roars, “You’d better tell that to Hiroshima. Or to someone who’s been napalmed.”

Back and forth they go, as a nubile art student, who is there to help the elderly artist, acts as a sort of interlocutor. Her presence adds a sexual frisson throughout the story, a temptation to the milk-toast critic’s life of sad complacency. The wild old man’s rants – he calls Jackson Pollock Jackson Bollock – are continually paraphrased by the girl. She says, “Art is a form of speech. Speech must be based on human needs, not abstract theories of grammar. Or anything but the spoken word. The real word. . . . Ideas are inherently dangerous because they deny human facts. The only answer to fascism is the human fact.”

The old painter’s uncensored tongue brought tears of laughter to my eyes and a bit of relief to my aches and pains. I was primarily taken aback by the weirdness of haphazardly reading a second piece that coincided with my deepest thoughts that had been intensified by my body’s revolt. The narrator’s words struck me as especially true to our current situation:

What the old man still had was an umbilical chord to the past; a step back, he stood by Pisanello’s side. In spirit, anyway. While David was encapsulated in book knowledge, art as social institution, science, subject, matter for grants and committee discussion. That was the real kernel of his wildness. David and his generation, and all those to come, could only look back, through bars, like caged animals, born in captivity, at the old green freedom. That described exactly the experience of those last two days: the laboratory monkey allowed a glimpse of his lost true self.

The Internet life has made caged monkeys of us all. We seem to think we are seeing the real world through its connectivity bars, but these cells that enclose us are controlled by our zoo keepers and they are not our friends. Their control of our cages keeps increasing; we just fail to see the multiplying bars. They have created a world of illusions and abstractions serving the interests of global capitalism. Insurgent voices still come through, but less and less as the elites expand their control. As internet access has expanded, the world’s suffering has increased and economic inequality heightened. That is an unacknowledged fact, and facts count.

Toward the end of my two-week stay in the land of sickness, I read this poem by the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in Gaza by an IDF airstrike on December 6, 2023 along with his brother, nephew, sister, and three of her children. My sickness turned to rage.

Zionism is the state ideology of Israel. Why do Jews believe they are the chosen people? What is the significance of the Jewish diaspora as a Jewish tradition? Why is Zionism, on one hand, a continuation of Judaism and, on the other, its refutation?

Like any religion, Judaism has many dimensions. Speaking about it simplistically, either in praise or condemnation, is primitive.

Judaism is tied to the belief that Jews are the chosen people (primarily in a religious sense). Their goal is to await the Messiah, who will be the King of Israel. Thus, their religion is associated with the anticipation of the Messiah.

According to Judaism, at the beginning of the first millennium, Jews went into the diaspora. The Second Temple was destroyed, marking the start of a two-thousand-year history of their dispersion. This era is part of the Jewish tradition. The purpose is to atone for Israel’s sins accumulated during previous historical periods. If this atonement is genuine and the repentance profound, then according to Jewish tradition, the Messiah will appear, signifying the blessing of the chosen people. In this case, the return of Jews to Israel, the establishment of an independent statehood, and the creation of the Third Temple will ensue.

This is the structure of the Jewish culture of anticipation. The most consistent representatives of this approach are the fundamentalists from the Neturei Karta movement. They say that the Jewish God commanded to endure the hardships of exile, so one must wait for the end and atone for sins. And when the Messiah comes, one can return to the Promised Land.

Zionism is Jewish Satanism, Satanism within Judaism, overturning all its foundations.

How did it happen that the state has already been established and prohibitions have been violated? To understand why modern Israel is in complete contradiction with the Jewish religion, one needs to go back to the seventeenth century, to the era of the pseudo-Messiah Shabbtai Tzvi, the herald of Zionism. He claimed he was the Messiah, and therefore Jews could return to Israel. The fate of Shabbtai Tzvi is sorrowful. When he arrived at the Ottoman sultan with claims to Palestine, he was given a choice: either be beheaded or convert to Islam. Then something strange happened: Shabbtai Tzvi converted to Islam. At that time, this was a major disappointment for Jewish communities.

However, followers of Shabbtai Tzvi (Sabbateanism) appeared – especially his teachings spread among Ashkenazi and Eastern European Jews. The Hasidic movement developed in parallel, which had no eschatological or messianic orientation but disseminated Kabbalistic teachings among ordinary people.

In some Sabbatean sects (particularly among the Frankists in Poland), a theology arose: supposedly, Shabbtai Tzvi was the real Messiah and made the transition to Islam deliberately; thus, he committed a ‘sacred betrayal’ (he betrayed Judaism to hasten the coming of the Messiah).

By such logic, one can easily convert to other religions. Jacob Frank, for instance, first converted to Islam, then to Catholicism, arguing that Jews consume Christian infants. He completely violated all forms of Talmudism and betrayed his faith – but Frank’s secret doctrine suggested that after the seventeenth century, the very notion of the Messiah changed. Now, the Jews themselves became the Messiah – there is no need to wait for him, so even if you betray your religion, you are holy – you are God.

Thus, an intellectual environment for Zionism was created. Zionism is Jewish Satanism, Satanism within Judaism, overturning all its foundations. If in Judaism one must await the coming of the Messiah, then in Zionism, a Jew is already God. This is followed by violations of the Talmudic commandments.

This leads to specific relations between Zionism and Judaism. On the one hand, Zionism is a continuation of Judaism; on the other, it is its refutation. Zionists say there is nothing left to repent for; they have suffered enough, and they are God.

This explains the peculiarity of the modern Zionist state, which relies not just on Israel but also on secular Jews, Jewish liberals, Jewish communists, Jewish capitalists, Jewish Christians, Jewish Muslims, Jewish Hindus, etc., all of whom represent the network of Frankism – each of them can comfortably commit a sacred betrayal, build a state, assert global dominance, and establish a ban on criticising Zionism (in some American states, criticising the state of Israel is equated to anti-Semitism).

The only step left for them is to blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque and begin the construction of the Third Temple. Incidentally, funds for the investigation of the Temple Mount have already been allocated by the Knesset – everything is moving in this direction.

How can one quell a conflict with such deep metaphysical roots through appeals to the UN, with phrases like ‘let’s reconcile’ or ‘let’s observe human rights’? In the Palestinian conflict, they have long disregarded these human rights. Moreover, we hear increasingly absurd statements from them – for instance, accusing people of anti-Semitism who are actually defending the Semitic Palestinians.

If we step beyond the hypnosis, the fog of nonsense, and the postmodernist defragmentation of consciousness, we shall see a very intriguing and terrifying picture of what is happening in the Middle East.

More than 500 Jewish activists were arrested in the US for taking over one of the Capitol buildings. This was announced by the organisation “Jewish Voice for Peace” - initiator of the protest in the American capital, which made a lot of noise last week.

On 18 October, activists protesting against the bombing of Gaza stormed the Cannon Building, the oldest US Congress building. They were dressed in T-shirts that read “Not in our name”. Many of them wore Jewish religious attributes: talits, kippahs and tefillin - boxes with Torah texts tied to their foreheads and hands.

Formally, the seizure of a Congress building and the protest march of 10,000 people had a secular basis. The protest was against the oppression of Palestine. But it was Jews who were protesting. It would seem that it was only leftists.

Leftists all over the world have traditionally supported Palestine. “Jewish Voice of the World” is an organisation that makes no secret of its “left-wing” political orientation, with philosopher Noam Chomsky among its founders. Why shouldn’t Jewish socialists and internationalists support an oppressed people?

But these left-wing Jews wear the kippah, the organization is based on the principle of Jewish ethnicity and has a board of directors composed of rabbis, most of whom are interested or involved in Kabbalah. So, it is a bit more complicated than that.

However, there is a Kabbalistic code phrase that explains what it is all about: “tikkun olam” - “collection of the world”.

These two words have become a kind of watchword for left-wing pro-Palestinian American Jewry. They also explain the deep foundations of Zionism, against which the Jewish Voice of the World protests. And they are also what many of the Orthodox Jews who, like their left-wing brethren, do not accept the State of Israel turn to.

Light gatherers

In the mid-16th century, the Kabbalist Isaac Luria developed an original metaphysical concept.

In it, the creation of the world was explained by the “compression” of God. In the resulting vacuum, the “vessels” of the ten Kabbalistic sefirot are formed and filled with divine light. However, the vessels cannot withstand the light and break. Light pours into the divinely forsaken world of the “shells”.

To gather the light, the Shechina, the divine presence, i.e. the Jewish people, is sent into this world of demonic entities and nations (goyim). His task from now on is to gather the light and restore the world to its pristine paradisiacal state - “tikkun olam”.

Then the end of the world will come, the Shechina will return to its place (sefira Malkut – “Kingdom”) and the promised king to Israel, the Mashiach, will arrive.

Thus, in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria the expulsion of the Jewish people from Palestine receives a new and elevated significance. The Jews are expelled from their home not only to repent before God, as the Talmud said, and passively await the messiah. They are called to gather the divine light dispersed in the world. It was worth waiting and enduring.

Some, however, could not wait.

In the second half of the 17th century, a Jew from Izmir, Shbtai Zvai, declared himself Mashiach and led a movement of thousands of Jews in the Levant and Europe. Shabtai Zvi promised that the Turkish sultan would give him Palestine, from where he, the Mashiach, would rule the world. Instead of Palestine, Zvi was sent to prison, after which he converted to Islam under threat of death. Shabtai was not the first Jewish false Messiah, but his actions were the first to be justified in the light of the Lurianic Kabbalah.

According to the Kabbalist Nathan of Gaza, Shabtai Zvi committed a “holy sin” and decided to descend into hell to become the king of demons and collect the divine light from the depths of creation. “Tikkun olam”.

Other followers of the false Messiah believed that the actions of Shabtai Zvi should be repeated.

The light should be gathered among Muslims and Christians, go to them, while committing the “holy sin”, so that then with its holiness (and a Jew is always holy) and the fullness of the light gathered to destroy kingdoms and faiths and bring about the coming of Mashiach.

This was the opinion, for example, of Jacob Frank, a representative of the European branch of Sabbatism, who in 1759 converted to Catholicism in the Austrian city of Lemberg. The newly-baptised man later declared: “I came to Poland to destroy all religions, all laws”.

As the famous researcher of Jewish tradition Gershom Sholem shows, the Frankists went from words to deeds rather quickly: they took an active part in revolutionary events in Europe and also influenced the Jewish Enlightenment - Haskalah and the formation of Liberal Judaism - Reform.

Two tendencies manifested themselves vividly in Sabbatism. The first is the justification of descent to the underworld, to the “goyim”, to gather light (mystical power, knowledge, values), to restore the world to its heavenly proportions, to build paradise on earth. The second is the idea that if the Mashiach does not come, the Jews themselves must become the Mashiach or prepare a place for him, the wait for the messiah can be active.

The Jewish mystics who founded the religious movement of Chassidism in the first half of the 18th century in Podolia took a different path.

For them too Isaac Luria was an authority, but they understood the gathering of divine light differently, as an inner, mystical process in which the figure of a spiritual master and at the same time the pole of divine presence in the world - the tzadik - plays a special role.

The “Tikkun olam” in religious Zionism

In the 20th century, the concept of “tikkun olam” - “restoration of peace” - moved from Kabbalah to politics in an open form.

First and foremost, Zionism.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate of Israel in the 1920s, stated that the restoration of the Jewish state was for the purpose of “tikkun olam”.

Rebbe Kook interpreted the Lurianic Kabbalah in this way: the essence of Judaism is the dialogue between man and God that stems from Jewish monotheism. This dialogue takes place on two levels: the level of the individual and the level of the nation. Judaism developed the idea of dialogue between God and the people before the destruction of the Second Temple. Christianity and Islam developed the idea of dialogue between man and God. The sparks of the Jewish light - monotheism - were scattered throughout humanity and Jews were scattered throughout the world.

The creation of the State of Israel is the gathering of these sparks and the restoration, the healing of the world - “tikkun olam” - first at the level of restoring the full dialogue of the people of Israel with God, with the State and with the Temple, and then at the level of gathering the other nations around Israel.

After that, according to the logic of Jewish doctrine, the end of the world should come.

The most radical branches of religious Zionism today are the organizations that advocate the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem, destroyed by the Romans 2000 years ago. They believe that the Temple is necessary for a complete dialogue between Israel and God.

The Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosques, venerated by Muslims, stand on this site today. They must therefore be demolished. And to begin with, to clear the site of filth.

For this purpose, it is necessary to sacrifice “a red heifer without blemish, [and] on which there was no yoke” (Book of Numbers 1-10). Heifers have already been bred with the help of radical American Protestants from Nebraska and Texas. They believe that they will bring about the end of the world, when Muslims, Jews and Russians will fight in the Holy Land and Americans will ascend into heaven (Rapture).

The “restoration of the world” on the left

The “tikkun olam” has been interpreted differently by liberal Jews in America.

During the Second World War, Jewish educator Alexander Dushkin identified the idea with “social service” and the promotion of the ideals of democracy. The “Tikkun olam”, he said, placed the Jew “as a child of God and a partner of the Almighty” before the ongoing task of reordering the world.

In 1949, the representative of American liberal Judaism, Rebbe Abraham Feldman, defined it even more definitively: “the establishment of the kingdom of God”, “social justice, the reign of God on earth”.

According to Rebbe Feldman, God”s reign on earth was facilitated by the establishment of Israel.

But the more radical “enlightened” Jews disagreed with him. In the 1980s, representatives of the left-wing Jewish movement in the United States founded the New Jewish Agenda, whose platform stated: “We are Jews who firmly believe that authentic Judaism can only be complete with serious and consistent attention to tikkun olam (the right ordering of human relations and the physical-spiritual world).

The right ordering of human relations requires the establishment of a Palestinian state, the protection of the environment, the defense of the rights of sexual minorities, etc. One of the most influential representatives of this current is Rabbi Michael Lerner, close to the US Democratic Party, who publishes the magazine Tikkun.

Both left-wing liberals and religious Zionists, although at odds with each other, have much in common. They believe, as the Sabbatians once did, that the expectation of Mashiach must be active, that the Jewish people themselves must transform the world - in fact, act as a collective Mashiach, to make “tikkun olam”.

The main disagreement is only about what counts as divine light and where to gather it - among Jews alone or among all nations, and what the messiah’s kingdom will be - a global left-liberal kingdom of “justice” or a Jewish nation-state that will arise among other nations.

The orthodox answer

Among Jewish believers, however, there are those who are convinced that both are in a hurry.

These tend to be the ultra-Orthodox Jews. Technically, they are now in the same ranks protesting against Israel as the liberals. However, their reasons are different.

For example, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish organization Naturei Karta (Guardians of the City) opposes Israel as such, whether it is “fair” to the Palestinians or not. There should be no Israel, because the Zionists have committed the same sin as the heretic Shabtai Zvi: the sin of pride and self-righteousness, equating themselves with God, deciding that it is possible to return to the Holy Land before the coming of Mashiach, to “hasten God”.

But it is not Mashiach that will come to these people, but the wrath of God.

According to the leaders of “Naturei Karta”, the Zionists have violated three Talmudic commandments: not to rebel against the peoples of the world, not to approach the end of the world and, finally, not to return together to the Land of Israel.

Another religious community, much more numerous than the “Naturei Karta”, although less often mentioned, the Satmar Hasidim (named after the city of Satu Mare, in present-day Romania), hold similar views. They number over 100,000 and are the largest Chassidic community in the world. By comparison, the most famous, the Lubavitch chassidim, number 20,000.

The Satmar Hasidim live mainly in the United States and are engaged in the diamond trade. And this largest and richest community in Chassidism considers the State of Israel illegal.

At the beginning of the last century, the founder of the community, Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum, ruled that the Zionists were violating the commandments of the Talmud by rebelling against non-Jewish authorities and trying to conquer the land of Israel by force. Therefore, the Satmar, even when living in Israel, refuse to deal with this state. For example, they do not take the shekels into their hands. And the most radical are sure that only the destruction of Israel will pave the way for the true Mashiach,

Even for this part of the Jewish people, Lurianic Kabbalah and “tikkun olam” are important, but as inner work, not as politics. However, Isaac Luria taught that until all the sparks of divine light are brought together, Mashiach will not come.

***

The protests of part of the Jewish community against Israel’s policies and even against Israel’s existence as such demonstrate that there is no monolithic “world Jewry”, regardless of what anti-Semites may think.

The divergence is not just at the level of specific policies, but of metaphysics, of the very meaning of the Jewish people’s existence.

All are certain that they have a special mission in this world, somehow linked to the idea of the fulfilment of world history and the establishment of a special messianic era, but there is no agreement on what exactly this mission should express, where and how to look for the lost light of the Sfirot.

In such a rift, paradoxically, lies the strength of the Jewish people.

One hundred years ago, the stars of world geopolitics aligned in such a way that, thanks to the support of first the British and then the American empire, a group of Jews - the Zionists - rose to prominence.

However, even if Israel disappears from the world map with the decline of the United States, the Jews will remain. Moreover, many of them, some with a hat and a lapserdak and others with a hippie yarmulke and a rainbow flag, will say with satisfaction, “Well, we warned you!”

57 years ago my mother gave birth to her first and only child. As is typical of folks in my family going back generations, my parents have always been generous with their love of children, holding exaggerated ideas of their talents and good nature. My arrival upon this planet through a Cesarean Section was befitting in their view. Why should an Emperor be subject to the trauma of “labor” and birth canals?

When I was older my mother let me know that there was something mysterious about me from the jump. How could her four foot eleven inch frame produced a nearly nine pound infant? Why did her baby nearly never cry? Why was it content to simply sit there and not crawl? Why didn’t it say anything more than “Ma” for nearly two years?

To her profound relief, her happy baby finally stood and started to walk, completely bypassing the whole crawling phase. One day, unprompted, it uttered the word “Thomas”, the name of their next door neighbor. And once infant grew into toddler, the tears started to roll…

My parents are alive, competent and still not completely objective when it comes to their son.

It’s my birthday, and I thought it would be an appropriate time to revisit my first publication on this platform when I had a whopping twelve subscribers. It’s a contemplative piece that examines the mystery of inhaled anesthetic agents which are the oldest class of medications still in use in modern medicine. The mystery is that we still do not know how they work. Why?

A True Story

Twenty years ago I had been in practice for barely a year when a nurse at my facility requested that I care for her friend who was scheduled for a gynecological operation later that week. I was flattered that she wanted me to attend to her and not my partners who had decades more experience.

On the day of surgery, I interviewed her friend who was a medicine woman of a tribe of indigenous peoples from the Finger Lakes region of southern NY. She was accompanied by three other elderly women, adorned in traditional garb. After assessing her medical history and answering questions she asked me for a favor:

“If during the operation you notice anything odd, like smoke leaving my body, would you please notify my sisters immediately?”

I said I would, but why? One of the elders spoke:

“It is a sign that our sister’s spirit is leaving her physical body. We will perform the necessary rituals to see that she returns.”

I promised that I would.

Thirty minutes into an otherwise uneventful operation, the operating room became extremely humid. Condensation appeared on my glasses and on the monitors. We called out to the control room to have someone check the ventilation and filtration systems. The surgeon hastened to finish the procedure. True to my word, I asked that the patient’s friends be notified of what was going on and that their sister was otherwise stable.

The patient woke up at the end of the operation and recovered normally. Her friends thanked me for keeping my promise which, they assured me, saved her life. We shut down that OR for the rest of the day until things could get checked out. We never found out what happened.

Of course things like this do occur rarely, but why did it happen under these circumstances? Was it just a coincidence?

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Coming To

I wasn’t entirely aware of it at the time but I believe that singular experience subtly opened my mind to a more mystical way of regarding the world.

Looking at things openly, why would anyone discount the possibility that the medicine women could know more about spirit and the essence of life than I, an anesthesiologist, who still cannot explain how the anesthetic agent he was using, worked?

Anesthesia, in my view, probes the boundary between the concrete and ineffable, between the physical and metaphysical. Examining what can be known openly leads to the biggest questions about who we are and what happens after we die.

Right now innocent lives are being taken. Though we may profess there is an afterlife in our churches, temples, mosques and synagogues, that is not how we regard the end of life in our world. We view death as an absolute termination of a person’s existence. The loss of innocent lives is tragic, and it is understandable why some would justify the sacrifice of more lives now to prevent the loss of others in the future. Is this sensible?

Before responding I would invite you to consider what follows. Here is the first essay I penned on An Insult to Intuition:

There’s an aphorism in anesthesiology that is often offered to young residents early in their training:

“It takes an internist three days to kill a patient. It takes a surgeon three hours. It only takes an anesthesiologist three minutes…”

Although it may sound like a morbid indictment of physicians’ intentions, it is actually meant as a reminder to the trainee of how easily irreparable harm can ensue if a doctor isn’t paying attention to their own biases in their assessment of a patient’s condition.

How soon will a doctor realize that their choice of therapy is actually doing more harm than good? It depends on the kind of medicine that is being practiced. It can take a few days for a patient’s deteriorating condition to be attributed to poor medical therapy. A patient in a surgeon’s care may bleed to death if the surgeon chooses to delay an operation or cannot find the “bleeder” in the operating room.

Anesthesiologists, on the other hand, are trained to restore oxygenation to the brain and body in times where a person’s airway is compromised or when they are rendered incapable of independent respiration through anesthetics themselves. Three minutes. That’s how long the delicate neurons in our brains can survive without oxygen.

I remember being asked by my mentors to hold my breath until I successfully placed a breathing tube through the larynx of an unconscious patient who was unable to breathe for themselves. This kind of exercise was meant to remind me of how quickly sixty seconds go by when performing a delicate maneuver with full attention. How long was I willing to struggle before looking for other options or making adjustments? The answer becomes quite clear in about a minute or so.

I have often wondered if this kind of training has made me more facile in adapting to circumstances that are rapidly changing or whether it has caused me to second guess myself more often than is necessary.

We have other aphorisms too. Sometimes patients ask us what we charge for “putting them to sleep”. You can bet that most of us will respond the same way: “No charge! We only bill you for the waking up part…”

This isn't our way of casually deflecting a reasonable question. It is meant to serve as a gentle reminder to both parties regarding the importance of “coming to.” If we couldn't regain consciousness what would be the point in having the surgery in the first place? Nobody wants to experience pain and fear if it can be avoided. If the only way to avoid the pain of an operation is to temporarily be rendered unconscious, most people will readily and willingly consent to that, as long as we can return to our natural state of being alert and interactive with the world around us. We are awake and aware and that--rather than any particular conception of health--is our most precious gift.

From my point of view, we really shouldn’t charge for “putting someone to sleep”. It’s too easy. With today’s medications, putting someone to sleep, or in more correct terms, inducing general anesthesia, is straightforward. Two hundred milligrams of this and fifty milligrams of that and viola : you have rendered a person completely unconscious and incapable of even breathing independently.

Some of the medications we administer at induction are similar to the lethal injections executioners use. Unlike executioners, we then intervene to reestablish their breathing and compensate for any large changes in blood pressure, and the patient thereby survives until consciousness miraculously returns sometime later.

The Mystery and History of Anesthesia

In addition, those in my field have to contend with the actuality that we really don’t know what we are doing. More precisely, we have very little, if any, understanding of how anesthetic gasses render a person unconscious. After 20 years of practicing anesthesiology I still find the whole process nothing short of pure magic. You see, the exact mechanism of how these agents work is, at present, unknown. Once you understand how a trick works, the magic disappears. With regard to inhaled anesthetic agents, magic abounds.

In 1846 a dentist named William T.G. Morton used ether to allow Dr. Henry J. Bigelow to partially remove a tumor from the neck of a 24 year old patient safely with no outward signs of pain. The surgery took place at Massachusetts General Hospital in front of dozens of physicians. When the patient regained consciousness with no recollection of the event it is said that many of the surgeons in attendance, their careers spent hardening themselves to the agonizing screams of their patients while operating without modern anesthesia, wept openly after witnessing this feat.

At the time no one knew how ether worked. We still don’t. Over the last 174 years, dozens of different anesthetic gasses have been developed, and they all have three basic things in common: they are inhaled, they are all very, very tiny molecules by biological standards and… we don’t know how any of them work.

If you closely consider how our bodies do what they do (move, breathe, grow, pee, reproduce, etc.) the answers may be astounding. It is obvious that the energy required to power biological systems comes from food and air. But how do they use them to do everything? How does it all get coordinated?

These are the fundamental questions that have been asked for millennia, by ancient medicine men to modern pharmaceutical companies. It turns out that the answers are different depending on what sort of perspective and tools we begin with.

In the West, our predecessors in medicine were anatomists. Armed with scalpels, the human form was first subdivided into organ systems. Our knives and eyes improved with the development of microtomes and microscopes giving rise to the field of Histology (the study of tissue). Our path of relentless deconstruction eventually gave rise to Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.

This is where Western medicine stands today. We define “understanding” as a complete description of how the very molecules that comprise our bodies interact with one another. This method and model has served us well. We have designed powerful antibiotics, identified neurotransmitters and mapped our own genome. Why then have we not been able to figure out how a gas like ether works? The answer is two-fold.

First, although we have been able to demonstrate some of the biological processes and structures that are altered by an inhaled anesthetic gas, we cannot pinpoint which ones are responsible for altering levels of awareness because inhaled anesthetic agents affect so many seemingly unrelated things at the same time. It is impossible to identify which are directly related to the “awake” state. It is also entirely possible that all of them are, and if that were the case consciousness would be the single most complex function attributed to a living organism by a very large margin.

The second difficulty we have is even more unwieldy and requires some contemplation. As explained above, western medicine has not been able to isolate which molecular interaction is responsible for a gas like ether’s’ effect on our awareness. It’s reasonable to approach the puzzle from the opposite end and ask instead, “Where is the source of our awareness in our bodies?” and go from there.

We do know that certain neural pathways in the brain are only active in people who are awake, but if we attribute consciousness to those specific pathways then we are necessarily identifying them as the “things” that are awake. To find the source of their “awakeness” we must then look closer at them. With the tools we have and the paradigm we have chosen we will inevitably find more molecules interacting with other molecules. When you go looking for molecules that is all you will find.

Our paradigm has dictated what the nature of the answer would be if we ever found one. Does it seem plausible to think we will find an “awareness molecule” and attribute our vivid, multisensorial experience to the presence of it? If such a molecule existed how would our deconstructive approach ever explain why that molecule was the source of our awareness? Can consciousness ever be represented materially?

I don’t think it can. This is why I believe a more sensible approach would be to consider the activity of these structures in the brains of conscious individuals as evidence of consciousness, not the source of it. In my view, our long search for the mechanism of ether and other inhaled agents has brought us to the boundary where the physical world ends and metaphysics begins.

The mechanistic nature of our model is well suited to most biological processes. However with regard to consciousness, the model not only lends little understanding of what is happening, it also gives rise to a paradigm that is widely and tightly held but in actuality cannot be applied to the full breadth of human experience. We commonly believe that a properly functioning physical body is required for us to be aware. Although this may seem initially incontrovertible, upon closer examination it becomes quite clear that this belief is actually an assumption that has massive implications.

To be more precise, how do we know that consciousness does not continue uninterrupted and only animate our physical bodies intermittently rather than the other way around where the body intermittently gives rise to the awake state? At first this hypothesis may seem absurd, irrelevant and unprovable. Putting absurdity and lack of relevance aside, there isn’t any scientific proof that our consciousness terminates with the death of our bodies either.

We are left with two different paradigms, neither which can be proven by the standards we have available. However the paradigm to which we subscribe is far from irrelevant. Let’s now take a closer look at what we can observe when people have a brush with death or actually “die” by our standards. Is nature providing us any hints?

How do we know a patient is “asleep”?

Patients under anesthesia offer a unique look at the question because they are rendered inanimate, unconscious and as close to death as is possible before they are returned to their normal state.

Let us first consider how anesthetists measure anesthetic depth in the operating room. They continually measure the amount of agent that is circulating in a patient’s system, but as described earlier, there is no measurable “conscious” molecule that can be found. They must assess the behavior of their patients to make that determination. Do they reply to verbal commands? Do they require a tap on the shoulder or a painful stimulus to respond? Do they respond verbally or do they merely shudder or fling an arm into the air? Perhaps they do not even move when the very fibers of their body are literally being dissected.

Here’s where things get interesting. There are many situations when a person will interact normally for a period of time while under the influence of a sedative with amnestic properties and then have absolutely no recollection of that period of time. As far as they know, that period of time never existed. Indeed, this reproducible phenomenon requires a relatively small dose of drug in the benzodiazepine class (e.g. Valium or Xanax).

A patient may have no idea that they were lying on an operating room table for 45 minutes talking about their recent vacation while their surgeon performs a minor procedure with local anesthesia on their wrist, for example. Sometime later they find themselves in the recovery room when to their profound disbelief they notice a neatly placed surgical dressing on their hand. More than once a patient in my care asked me to remove the dressing so that they could see the stitches with their own eyes.

How should we characterize their level of consciousness during the operation? By our own standards they were completely awake. However, because they have no memory of being awake during the experience, they would recount the experience more or less the same way a patient who was rendered completely unresponsive would. This phenomenon is common and easily reproducible. Moreover, it invites us to consider the possibility that awareness continually exists without interruption but we are not always able to access our experiences retrospectively. We then commonly but inaccurately describe these events as “losses of consciousness”.

During some procedures when a surgeon is operating very close to the spinal cord anesthetists will infuse a combination of drugs that render the patient unconscious but allow all of the neural pathways between the brain and the body to continue to function normally so that they can be monitored for their integrity. In other words, the physiology required to feel or move remains intact, yet the patient apparently has no experience of any stimuli, surgical or otherwise, during the operation.

How are we to reconcile the fact that we have a patient with a functioning body but has no ability to experience it? It would not be so wrong to say that that which experiences is not part of the physical body. This raises another philosophical question: Who exactly is the patient in this situation?

Near Death Experiences (NDEs)

If we broadened our examination of human experience to consider more extreme situations, another wrinkle appears in the paradigm. Near Death Experiences (NDEs) are all characterized by lucid awareness that remains continuous during a period of time while outside observers assume the person is unconscious or dead. Sometimes patients who have experienced an NDE in the operating room can accurately recount what was said and done by people attending to them during their state of clinical death. They are able to accurately describe the event from an observer’s perspective, often viewing their own body and those around it from above.

Interestingly, people describe their NDEs in a universally positive way. “Survival” was an option that they were free to choose. Death of their body could be clearly seen as a transcending event in their continuing awareness and not as the termination of their existence. Very often the rest of their lives are profoundly transformed by the experience. No longer living with the fear of mortality, life subsequently opens up into a more vibrant and meaningful experience that can be cherished far more deeply than was possible prior to their brush with death. Those who have had an NDE would have no problem adopting the idea that their awareness exists independently of their body, functioning or not. Fear and anxiety would still probably arise in their life from time to time, but it is the rest of us who carry the seemingly inescapable load of a belief system that ties our existence to a body that will perish. How does this belief serve us?

If you believe that your very existence is tied to a functioning body you would surely live your life differently than if you were certain that whoever you were would continue to exist uninjured after the death of your body. If you believed that your existence ended with your death, how would you live? Hoarding things and experiences and maximizing pleasure would be the most logical thing to do. How likely is it that you will be ever completely satisfied if you knew you only had a limited amount of time to live?

Many schools of religious thought profess the existence of a transcendent soul or spirit that lives after the death of the body, but what kind of world are we living in today? Which paradigm are we actually subscribing to?

When the anesthetic gas is eliminated from the body consciousness returns on its own. Waking someone up simply requires enough space and time for it to occur spontaneously. There is no reversal agent available to speed the return of consciousness. The time required to emerge from anesthesia is directly related to the amount of time the patient has been exposed to the anesthetic. At some point the patient will open their eyes when a threshold has been crossed. Depending on how long the patient has been anesthetized, complete elimination of the agent from the body may not happen until a long while after the patient has “woke”.

By the time the patient arrives in the recovery room, they are safely on a path to their baseline state of awareness. Getting back to a normal state of awareness may take hours or even days. In some cases patients may never get their wits back completely. Neurocognitive testing has demonstrated that repeated exposure to general anesthesia can sometimes have long-lasting or even irreversible effects on the awake state. It may occur for everyone. Perhaps it is a matter of how closely we look.

Is fear keeping us “Anesthetized”?

Interestingly, it is well known that the long term effects of anesthetic exposure are more profound in individuals who have already been demonstrating elements of cognitive decline in their daily life. Indeed, this population of patients require significantly less anesthetic to reach the same depth of unconsciousness during an operation. This poses an intriguing question. Is our understanding of being awake also too simplistic? Is there a continuum of “awakeness” in everyday life just as there is one of unconsciousness when anesthetized? If so, how would we measure it?

Modern psychiatry has been rigorous in defining and categorizing dysfunction. Although there has been recent interest in pushing our understanding of what may be interpreted as a “super-functioning” psyche, western systems are still in their infancy with regard to this idea. In eastern schools of thought, however, this concept has been central for centuries.

In some schools of Eastern philosophy the idea of attaining a “super functioning” awake state is seen as something that also occurs spontaneously when intention and practice are oriented correctly. Ancient yogic scriptures specifically describe super abilities, or Siddhis, that are attained through dedicated practice. These Siddhis include fantastical abilities like levitation, telekinesis, dematerialization, remote-viewing and others. It is admittedly difficult for the Western mind to accept that a human being could ever do such things. We believe that a truly rational person would never entertain such fanciful ideas.

Being able to fly through the air or move material objects with thought aren’t the most potent of abilities available to the true adept in those traditions. In fact, these traditions regard these gifts (if they do exist) as very dangerous because they can easily distract the earnest seeker away from a greater potential. In these schools of thought the most advanced “superpowers” are those that allow a person to remain continuously in a state of joy and fearlessness, ideas that we are interestingly much more likely to accept as possible.

Are we too quick to assume that it is easier to be fearless than to “teleport” at will? Why would those traditions ascribe the most importance to fearlessness? Perhaps it has to do with the challenge of remaining in that state and the benefits of doing so. Note that If such a state were possible, it would be incompatible with the kind of absolute, psychological identification most of us have with our mortal bodies. It may be of no surprise that Eastern medicine subscribes to an entirely different perspective of the body and uses different tools to examine it.

Fear has served our ancestors well, helping us to avoid snakes and lions, but how much fear is necessary these days? Could fear be the barrier that separates us from our highest potential in the awake state just as an anesthetic gas prevents us from waking in the operating room? It is not possible to remain fearless while continuing to identify with a body that is prone to disease and death. Even if one were to drop the assumption that the source of our existence is a finite body, how long would it take to be free from the effects of a lifetime of fearful thinking before an individual outwardly manifests changes that reflect a shift in this paradigm? Is it possible that by continuing to leave this model unchallenged we never feel what it is like to be truly awake?

Putting fantastical abilities aside, can we predict what our world would look like if everyone lived joyfully and fearlessly without the desperate need to maximize pleasure and time? We can postulate that it would be better.

Our failure to identify the mechanism of anesthetic gasses may be a clue that we have been entirely misconceiving who we really are. Moreover, we have testimony from those who have actually died (by our clinical standards) and returned to tell us that we are worrying about the wrong things. Recall that some who have had Near Death Experiences were not simply having a vivid dream borne of random electrical impulses in a brain in the last throes of life; they were able to recount the details of the “failed” resuscitative efforts of those around them. It seems only logical to accept the paradigm that we are more than our bodies and enjoy the individual and societal benefits of this shift. Why are we so reluctant to adopt this perspective? Are we _biased_and if so, why?

The Possibility and Implications of Reincarnation

NDEs are not the only wrinkle in our paradigm of life, death and awareness. NDEs suggest that there could be a small part of us that transcends an event which we all call death, an undeniable and terminal event of a physical existence. In that sense, our physical bodies should be more aptly considered a small and temporary part of our real, transcendent nature. If that were the case, where then do “we” go after our bodies die? The answer may not be as faith-based or speculative as you think.

Let us, for a moment, take a step back from religious doctrine and agnosticism. These two perspectives represent a stark contrast in their approach to the question. One proclaims that the answer is unambiguously dictated in associated “scripture”. The other insists that the answer can not be known, at least for the moment.

Is there physical evidence that points to a different answer? There is not. We are dealing with a potential aspect of reality that transcends materialism, the philosophical doctrine that nothing exists outside matter and its actions upon itself. We may not have the evidence our scientific system demands, but just as with NDEs, there is an awful lot of anecdotal evidence that may not be getting the attention it deserves.

Dr. Ian Stevenson was a physician and professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine for 50 years. He served as the Chair of Psychiatry for ten of them. He is best known for his research into the study of reincarnation. During the course of his career he assiduously compiled over three thousand case studies of individuals who reported living on this planet as a different person prior to their current life.

What is fascinating about these cases is that the subjects are not adults that claim they were Pharaohs or Knights that served King Arthur in a “past” life. The subjects are children who caught the attention of their families when they were very young. They would insist that they had lived rather average lives before, had families of their own and recalled their previous name, details and location of their previous home and occasionally, the circumstances around their death. Often they would go ignored for some time but their dogged refusal to recant their peculiar tales was a matter of some curiosity to their families.

The fascinating part of every case in Stevenson’s data is that the child’s parents or others familiar with their story eventually stumbled across convincing evidence that the person the child claimed to have “embodied” in a previous life actually lived and died before their birth. Dr. Stevenson would attempt to authenticate the child’s account through interviews with the surviving members of the family of the deceased person the child claimed to have been. Sometimes extremely specific details of the previous life were confirmed, such as secrets that were kept between their old self and their spouse or physical details of their previous home that would only be known to those who lived there. When the child was “reunited” with the family of the deceased they could identify many of those in their old family, and pick out the imposters that Stevenson had planted to test the specificity of their recall.

Dr. Stevenson was an author of nearly three hundred papers and 14 books on reincarnation. In 1997 he authored a two volume tome of over two thousand pages titled Reincarnation in Biology that documented the stories of a subset 225 subjects that not only had specific recall of their past identities that matched those of real, deceased individuals but also had birthmarks or physical anomalies that corresponded to the manner of death of their previous “selves”.

For example, a child who recalled dying from a gunshot wound in a previous life was born with birthmarks that corresponded to the entry and exit wound of the bullet that purportedly killed that person. If accepted, this phenomenon can be considered more indirect evidence suggesting that our consciousness, which represents our transcendent nature, gives rise to our physical form and not the other way around. This fits nicely with our observations of patients under anesthesia while confirming that our consciousness is the product of a functioning body is no more than an assumption.

Let us take one of Dr. Stevenson’s more well known cases, that of Swarnlata Mishra who was born in India in 1948. At the age of three she began telling her parents of her previous life as a wife and mother of two in a different town in the same part of India. Her father was curious and accepting of these tales and began to take notes on everything her daughter uttered about her “past life” lived by a woman named Biya Pathak.

She recalled that her family owned an automobile which was quite rare at the time. She remembered the name of the doctor that treated her for what proved to be the cause of her death. She was also able to describe the details and relative location of the house in which she lived, as well as odd details like the fact that she had a few gold teeth. When she was ten, her story caught the attention of a researcher of paranormal studies in the area, professor Sri H.S. Banerjee, who was a colleague of Dr. Stevenson. He was able to locate the family of the girl’s previous life using the notes her father had taken and confirmed the details Swarnlata gave of Biya Pathak.

Swarnlata’s alleged previous family finally came to visit her. The two families did not know each other. She was able to easily identify her family members and detect the imposter that posed as one of her sons. She convinced her husband that she was once married to him by recounting an incident when she discovered he had taken a sum of money from a box that she kept. No other soul was aware of this secret.

Stevenson’s work has been criticized by some who felt his approach to validating these accounts were not rigorous and regarded his work as biased and unscientific. Others in the scientific community have defended his methodology and conclusions. Internationally recognized physicist Dr. Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf has stated that based on his findings it is reasonable to conclude that there is an overwhelming possibility that reincarnation is in fact occurring. His work has been covered by Scientific American[2] and The Washington Post[3].

Why would some scientists dismiss his “evidence” and others defend it? This is where we must be very careful in our own analysis. It is very easy to conclude that because someone has taken issue with his methodology we can shrug our shoulders and dismiss all of his findings en bloc and move on. If we choose to do that, are we being objective or are we protecting a belief system that we refuse to surrender?

It is also just as easy to proclaim there is finally proof of an idea that we hold dear. For the agnostics among us, this controversy is more evidence that the answer is beyond our grasp. Is it possible to be objective about this? Perhaps not. We are dealing with anecdotal evidence, not hard physical proof.

The point here is that it is wiser to acknowledge that certainty is clearly out of reach. Moreover, there is ample anecdotal evidence of exceptions to the tenet that our properly functioning physical bodies are solely responsible for consciousness. We should be able to agree that a rule with exceptions is only a partial explanation of what is really going on.

Will we ever find the Proof we are looking for?

Dr. Stevenson continued to admit that until a mechanism by which reincarnation can be explained could be identified it would remain a matter of speculation. That is a sentiment of a researcher that acknowledges the uncertainty behind his conclusions. Yet it also invites us to ask what sort of mechanism would we be able to identify to explain a phenomenon that transcends materialism. Are we ever going to be able to “prove” that reincarnation is taking place? If not, what are the implications of plodding along assuming that it isn’t?

The discussion of patients under anesthesia does not prove that our consciousness remains intact and continuous (though inaccessible retrospectively), however it does point out that this matter is far from resolved. Specifically it introduces the inescapable fact that we are not going to find the proof we are looking for in places we are looking for it.

Consciousness seems to transcend molecules, the very things we examine when looking for proof.

What are we to make of the results of Dr. Stevenson’s lifetime of investigation? Reincarnation, if it were happening, further supports the theory that death is not “the end”. More importantly it should give us another reason to pause. Not only would it force us to reconsider our understanding of death, it also invites us to once again reassess how we should be living.

Would we change our behavior if we knew we were coming back to this planet for another go at it? What kind of choices would we make if we knew we would suffer the consequences or enjoy the benefits of our decisions made today in another lifetime? What kinds of decisions would we make collectively if we all subscribed to the idea that our actions in this lifetime were tied to the fate of our planet and species long after we “perished”? Given the fact that there is uncertainty surrounding this possible phenomenon, is it wiser to assume that he is wrong or right?

Are we biased?

We are now considering a real dilemma, not one based in hypotheticals or history where “the truth” has been dictated to us or revealed over the years. We basically have two paradigms to choose from. On the one hand there is no proof that our existence doesn’t continue after the death of our bodies. There also is ample indirect evidence that there is more to this life than this material body. We have the accounts of hundreds of people who have died, by our own standards of death, and returned to tell us we have been wrong about the whole thing.

Furthermore the idea that there are others who have died and have been reborn on this planet may not just be a fringe belief or part of Eastern religious doctrines. The evidence, if we were to accept it as such, is not being proclaimed by religious leaders or established scientific institutions. It’s coming “from the mouths of babes” from all over the world.

On the other hand, we are living in a world where just about everybody behaves in a manner that supports the belief that we each have a limited and finite existence. It is true that many humans believe in an after-life, or at least profess that they do, however that is not the way they behave. The point here is that even if you do believe you are a “transcendent” being, how feasible is it to act in that manner while interacting with a society full of people who are trying to out maneuver you for a bigger piece of the pie? From a purely practical standpoint it is more sensible to play their game and protect and maximize what you have today so that you won’t be left with little tomorrow. In this sense, we really don’t have much of a choice in the matter as individuals. We are instead being pressured to assume a competitive posture because of our collective behavior as a society and a species.

Bias, if it does exist in our minds, will emerge when we instead answer the question, “Are we as individuals and a society exaggerating a self-serving and fear-based narrative?”. This line of inquiry leads us to assess the nature of the information we receive on a regular basis. Are we commonly exposed to stories of cooperation, moderation and tolerance? Or are we more often exposed to tragedy, fear and the stories of those whose successes are measured in wealth, fame and youthfulness? How does our media characterize those who eschew the pursuit of material things for internal balance and harmony? Granted, the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders have garnered international recognition for this kind of attitude, but how does that compare to the attention we give to people who have outwitted their fellow human beings and ended up with more?

Before we indict the media and the entertainment industry we would be better served by asking ourselves why we are more interested in these narratives to begin with. After all, if we weren’t intrigued by these kinds of stories there would be little incentive for them to create content along these lines.

I contend that our fascination with this kind of entertainment and news is inextricably tied to our level of understanding of the nature of who we really are. More importantly, the stories we are drawn to reinforce the belief that we have only one shot at happiness and a “winner take all” attitude is not just excusable but necessary. In this sense the adversarial relationship we have with each other as individuals or societies gets perpetuated and simultaneously attributed to immutable “human nature”.

Is this truly our nature or are we missing something very big about ourselves? Moreover, are we constructing this idea of reality ourselves or are we being “nurtured” into doing so? Are we forcibly but insidiously being kept in a different kind of Dark Age? If so, what would be the motive in constructing that kind of reality and who would benefit from this? These are the questions I hope to address in further posts here

When looking at history to understand its lessons and discern where we are coming from, there are, broadly speaking, two competing schools of thought: one sees history as the product of mind, that is, what people thought and were up to. This is called idealism, and it is decisively out of fashion.

The other sees history as the result of material pressures, such as economic developments or natural and other external conditions. It is called materialism, and it is what we are all conditioned to believe in these days.

To claim that material conditions play no role in human affairs — and therefore history — would be absurd, obviously. But ever since sociology, Marx, and the so-called “social sciences” came on the scene in the 19th century, we have forgotten that at the end of the day, humans do stuff because, well, they think about doing it first; they find reasons to do so based on their world views, priorities, and ways of thinking.

You might argue that sometimes, people have no choice: before they starve due to famine, for example, or when threatened with death-by-flood, they will inevitably migrate. But these are limit cases, and claiming that this means history just churns along on autopilot, and that human behavior is simply caused by external circumstances, would be to commit what I have called the limit case fallacy: taking an extreme case where complexity collapses into a single dimension, abstracting some law from it, and then slapping the law back on the 99% of other cases that are not limit cases. This is left brain hemisphere nonsense on steroids.

Besides, humans arguably always have a choice. People have been known to override even their sense of survival and accept certain death in the name of a higher ideal. If someone strongly believes that cannibalism is worse than death, he will rather die than eat his fellow men. And if he believes that leaving his land would be a sin against his soul, he might take his chances with flood and famine rather than migrating.

Most cases are not that extreme, though. It’s easy to claim, for instance, that the industrialization drew peasants to the cities because of better wages. But the fact is, not all did that. And to understand why those who did decided to do so, we need to know about their thinking, their reasons: what did they value? Why did they have those values, and how did they develop them? Why didn’t they see a future living on the land anymore? What were they looking for? What happened to their culture before then? Who were the movers and shakers of the zeitgeist at the time, and what were their motivations?

While we are at it: who decided that industrialization was a good idea to begin with? You can’t separate it from the radical shift away from traditional religious ideas and towards worship of science and technology in the 18th and 19th centuries, to name just one aspect. And you can’t separate that from earlier developments in the history of ideas, such as the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and knowledge. And even that is not straight-forward: reason and knowledge could have ushered in a flourishing of non-materialist cosmologies and studies that go beyond both religious and empiricist dogma, which indeed was a huge driving force during Enlightenment times, as I’ve talked about before. But alas, it went differently. That the industrialization happened, and happened the way it did, is dependent on a whole slew of developments in people’s outlook, what R.G. Collingwood called absolute presuppositions (see my essay about it here).

Also notice that a predecessor to the steam engine, the aeolipile, had been around long before the industrialization in Ancient Greece, but nobody had apparently thought about developing it further to power factories or vehicles. One wonders why, since from our perspective, this idea seems as straightforward as it gets. Perhaps this is the problem: from our perspective. People in the past simply had a very different perspective. And so, although nobody seems to know much about all that, it seems that the ancient Greeks just saw the steam device as a temple wonder, or a party trick. (Similarly, perhaps one day people will look back at our time and wonder why we didn’t develop telepathy to the society-altering powerhouse of communication those future generations might take for granted, and why instead we chose to see it as a mere party trick.)

Our sacred progressivism is too narrow a lens to capture what’s going on here: history is not some natural progression from primitive people towards our glorious age of technology. It is the history of people having different ideas, leading to entirely different lives and outcomes.

And even the industrialization could have gone much differently if people—including the elites at the time—had come up with different ideas, different visions. It’s all fine and dandy to look for certain patterns in the past, but history simply does not run on autopilot, whether it be a Marxian dialectic, Spenglerian cycles, or “evolutionary pressures” playing themselves out as if our ideas, our beliefs, and our daily thoughts had nothing to do with anything.

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It is so much more complex than people being simply driven by some economic or social “law” that says “if X happens, then Y happens.” And even in the cases where such a law seemingly applies, the really interesting questions are obscured by the proclaimed causality between two end points: what we really want to know are the details between and surrounding these points. Hence Collingwood realized that every “historical fact” is connected to the entirety of the human experience, to the entire cosmos. As I’ve put it before: take any fact, drill down deep enough, and you end up with an infinite depth from which there is no escape.

In that sense, “social science” is an oxymoron: by “science” we usually mean something vaguely modelled after physics. But the whole point of physics is to artificially generate limit cases by means of controlled experiment, so that certain mathematical relations become visible that are otherwise obscured by the sheer complexity of what’s going on. But you can’t do that with history or societies. The exception, perhaps, are experiments in social psychology, such as the Milgram experiment. But to the degree that social psychology works, we are still left with figuring out what those experiments mean in terms of internal reasoning and motivations. (The endless debates around these experiments and their interpretations are a testament to that.) We can then use these insights to help us understand people in the past and present, and why they thought what they thought and did what they did. But the point remains: it’s about understanding people, not about postulating laws.

The Collapse Will Be Mental

Again, nobody in their right mind would claim that external pressures, economic shortages or migration streams have nothing to do with how things go. The problem, however, is that in our modern day and age, we seem to have emphasized these factors so much that we have lost the ability to discern how thoughts shape reality.

This can easily be demonstrated by the fact that economists, technologists, and so-called scientists have become our go-to high priests for figuring out where we’re headed, replacing not only the oracle of Delphi or the wise men of old, but even the classical humanists: nobody seems to be interested in what historians think anymore, or those philosophers who have developed some actual wisdom, or the classically educated. (Of course, those are an endangered species anyway, so there’s that.) Never mind actual priests and theologians.

I don’t know about you, but except perhaps for the true (and few) old school scientists who combine their science with a profound interest and therefore education in a wide range of fields, including history and the history of ideas, I’d take Delphi any day over most of those dimwit “experts” when it comes to inspiring a way forward. (Not to mention that silly class of grifters called “futurologists.”) Because you see, if we are to avoid further collapse and degradation, we need to change the way we think.

You can see the truth of that in history, too. While there are endless debates as to why the Roman Empire fell, for instance, it is clear that the proverbial degeneracy of the late empire was caused neither by invading barbarians nor comets nor “economic laws.” The fact is, people (including the elites) went bonkers before all that, whatever it was.

To the religious mind, the reason for this dynamic is straight-forward: if a society as a whole develops what used to be diagnosed as “moral insanity,” eventually God will give it a good spanking and escalate from there — be it in the form of war and pestilence, floods and comets, or just a series of bad luck, which can be enough to wipe a civilization off the face of the earth.

But even the non-religious mind can understand this idea: a society that has gone off the deep end, where people cannot think straight anymore, will be vulnerable to all kinds of shocks. In a Roman society where everybody is just out to secure some petty benefit for himself, where the classical virtues have just become a half-hearted show nobody believes in, where all kinds of perversions have become the mainstream way of life, and where everybody knows that the once-proud Legions are nothing but groups of mercenaries protecting corrupt oligarchs, what do you think will happen when a bunch of barbarians shows up? Or just a disruption of the complex logistical networks? Or even just a few bad harvests? Again, we need to understand how people thought, what their motivations were, their dreams and aspirations, their highest values, individually and as a society. Only then do we understand how and why they behaved the way they did, and how that produced history.

Yes, tough times beget strong men, who beget prosperous times, which makes men weak, which leads to tough times. But even if we take this as expressing a deep truth, it is vague and malleable. The devil is in the details — or rather, in people’s minds and souls. It is there that we have to look, and where solutions emerge.

The Solution Will Be Mental

If, at the end of the day, history is downstream from mind, then so will be the solutions to our problems.

To those who say that whatever historical cycles they have identified are inevitable, I can only repeat myself: we can always choose differently. Which renders the idea of “historical laws,” understood as akin to the laws of science, moot. If anything, they are better understood as thinking habits playing themselves out based on lack of wisdom and knowledge.

The fact is, if we chose today to think differently, everything would change.

Sure, there are biological and physical constraints to what we can do. We can’t change a man into a woman; we can’t decide that giving up food is the solution; we can’t pretend that resources are infinite, and so on. But because reductionism — biological, physical, or otherwise — is false, there is no reason whatever that we cannot radically change our entire outlook on the world, therefore our entire way of life, therefore history.

I have talked elsewhere about the metaphysical nexus we find ourselves at. We are called upon to transform our presuppositions, our internalized beliefs about the world, our place in it, and how it all fits together. No fiddling with what

Paul Kingsnorth

calls “the machine” will do. Because our world is not a “system” running its course according to a bunch of parameters, we can’t change its parameters to alter the course of history. We have to change our minds.

This is the good news. The bad news is that I can’t see how enough people will be able to pull off this kind of transformation. Which means God’s spanking session might still be around the corner.

But so what. The thing is, if you change your outlook, your entire experience changes.

For example, from a more spiritual perspective, if you learn how to see the unseen and develop trust in the higher reality, you will know that the Higher will lend you a hand if you do your part. You won’t be terrified of the future and take bad decisions as a consequence, but instead you’ll know in your heart that you will end up exactly where you are supposed to. That there will be subtle guidance, and in the end, All Will Be Alright.

We seem to have completely lost this idea.

It is astonishing how much we have been conditioned to believe in materialism, nihilism, and a cold, pitiless universe for so long. You can only slowly realize this by working your way through all the contradictions and absurdities this materialist mindset entails, and also by studying how people in the (distant) past have looked at the world — how utterly different it was. And this is not about embracing some half-baked religious mindset as a sort of cope. This doesn't fly, because even if you develop trust in the Higher, this doesn't mean you can just be lazy and not care about the real world. On the contrary, it requires hard work, even harder than anything else. But it's a different kind of work, coming to be as a consequence of an entirely different view of the world. It can be comforting too: just knowing in your heart that you don't need to figure out and understand everything — because nobody can. If you keep walking the path, learning and growing in the process, the cosmos will pull you along in the right direction.

This means that you might well be alright even if things go to crap. It also means that individuals can have more impact than they think: our efforts are scalable on a spiritual level; we can leverage the Cosmic Logos. (Ugh!)

Perhaps not everybody has to — or can — be part of this transformation. But individuals have been known to change the course of history, as have small groups who seed a new way of thinking, a new mindset.

From a new way of thinking, a new world shall arise. One in harmony with the cosmic order: whole as opposed to fragmented in its thought, oriented towards the High instead of the Low, embodying universal order instead of chaos: in communion with the cosmic purpose, the final telos of unity and Truth for those who freely choose it.

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There’s one good counter-point to all that: we know that people tend to rationalize their behavior. That is, they might come up with elaborate stories about why they do things, when in fact they’re simply following their lower biological instincts.

But first, while this is true, it is certainly not true for all people, all thoughts, and all actions. This alone counters the argument, because even if just one person in a hundred is able to really think (at least sometimes) as opposed to build narratives around urges, history cannot be seen as a mere product of material or biological pressures anymore.

Second, even when people do rationalize urges, this is still thought. And they still act based on this thought. The debate then really is about how much free will we have in terms of what we think.