A few years ago a group of researchers in Scotland studying learning in apes did some experiments (involving opening boxes to get a piece of candy inside) that showed that chimpanzees learn in a variety of “flexibly adaptive” ways, and that 3 year old children being presented with a similar task most often did it in ways that appear to be less intelligent than the apes. They “suggest that the difference in performance of chimpanzees and children may be due to a greater susceptibility of children to cultural conventions.” (Horner and Whiten, 2005; Whiten, et al., 2004).

In my newsletter on puberty, I described some of the effects of foods and hormones on intelligence. Here, I want to consider the effects of culture on the way people learn and think. Culture, it seems, starts to make us stupid long before the metabolic problems appear.

For many years I described culture as the perceived limits of possibility, but people usually prefer to think of it as the learned rules of conduct in a society. In the late 1950s I was talking with a psychologist about the nature of “mental maps,” and I said that I found my way around campus by reference to mental pictures of the locations of things, and he said that his method was to follow a series of rules, “go out the front door and turn left, turn left at the first corner, walk three blocks and turn right, ....up the stairs, turn right, fourth office on the left.” He had been studying mental processes for about 40 years, so his claim made an impression on me.

I thought this style of thinking might have something to do with the growing technological preference for digital, rather than analog, devices. The complexity and continuity of the real world is made to seem more precise and concrete by turning it into rules and numbers.

Around the same time, I found that some people dream in vivid images, while others describe dreams as “listening to someone tell a story.”

Several years later, a graduate student of “language philosophy” from MIT told me that I was just confused if I believed that I had mental images that I could use in thinking. His attitude was that language, in its forms and in the ways it could convey meaning, was governed by rules. He was part of an effort to define consciousness in terms of rules that could be manipulated formally. This was just a new variation on the doctrine of an “ideal language” that has concerned many philosophers since Leibniz, but now its main use is to convince people that cultural conventions and authority are rooted in the nature of our minds, rather than in particular things that people experience and the ways in which they are treated.

George Orwell, whose novels showed some of the ways language is used to control people, believed that language should be like a clear window between minds, but knew that it was habitually used to distort, mislead, and control. Scientific and medical practices often follow the authority of culture and indoctrination, instead of intelligently confronting the meaning of the evidence, the way chimpanzees are able to do.

Not so many years ago, people believed that traits were “determined by genes,” and that the development of an organism was the result of--was caused by--the sequential expression of genes in the nucleus of the fertilized egg. When B.F. Skinner in the 1970s said “a gestating baby isn't influenced by what happens to its mother,” he was expressing a deeply rooted bio-medical dogma. Physicians insisted that a baby couldn't be harmed by its mother's malnutrition, as long as she lived to give birth. People could be quite vicious when their dogma was challenged, but their actions were systematically vicious when they weren't challenged.

An ovum doesn't just grow from an oocyte according to instructions in its genes, it is constructed, with surrounding nurse cells adding substances to its cytoplasm. Analogously, the fertilized egg doesn't just grow into a human being, it is constructed, by interactions with the mother's physiology. At birth, the environment continues to influence the ways in which cells develop and interact with each other.

Even during adulthood, the ways in which our cells--in the brain, immune system, and other organs--develop and interact are shaped by the environment. When Skinner was writing, many biologists still believed that each synapse of a nerve was directed by a gene, and couldn't be influenced by experience.

Our brain grows into our culture, and the culture lives in our nervous system. If a person grows up without hearing people speak, he will have grown a special kind of brain, making it difficult to learn to speak. (Genie, wolf boy, Kaspar Hauser, for example.)

When we ask a question and find an answer, we are changed. Thinking with learning is a developmental process. But many people learn at an early age not to question. This changes the nature of subsequent learning and brain development.

In the 1960s, many textbooks were published that claimed to use scientific language theory to improve the instruction of English, from grade school level to college level. They didn't work, and at the time they were being published they appeared fraudulent to people who didn't subscribe to the incipient cults of “Generative Grammar” and “Artificial Intelligence” that later developed into “Cognitive Science.”

At the time that Artificial Intelligence was coming to the attention of investors and academicians, Neodarwinism had already cleansed the university biology departments of its opponents who advocated more holistic views, and the idea of a brain that was “hard-wired” according to genetic instructions had entered both neurology and psychology. The field concept was disappearing from developmental biology, as Gestalt psychology was disappearing from the universities and journals.

In the humanities and social sciences, a fad appeared in the 1960s, in which a theory of grammar advocated by Noam Chomsky of MIT was said to explain human thinking and behavior, and specialists in anthropology, psychology, literature, rhetoric, sociology, and other academic fields, claimed that it informed their work in an essential way. The rapid spread of a doctrine for which there was essentially no evidence suggests that it was filling a need for many people in our culture. This doctrine was filling some of the gaps left by the failure of genetic determinism that was starting to be recognized. It gave new support to the doctrine of inborn capacities and limitations, in which formulaic indoctrination can be justified by the brain's natural structure.

Chomsky was committed to an idealistic, “rationalist” doctrine of innate ideas, and to argue for that doctrine, which held that there are transcendent forms (or “deep structures”) that control mind, he disposed of the opposing “empiricist” approach to mind by claiming that children simply learn language so rapidly that it would be impossible to explain on the basis of learning from experience. Separating vocabulary from grammar, he acknowledged that each language is different, and can be learned as easily by the children of immigrants of different ethnicity as by children whose ancestors spoke it, but that all humans have a genetically encoded “universal grammar,” a “language organ.” It is this “inborn grammar” that allows children to learn what he said would be inconceivable to learn so quickly from experience.

The abstract, computational nature of the “inborn” functions of the “language organ” would make a nice program for a translating machine, and the absence of such a useful program, after more than 50 years of trying to devise one, argues against the possibility of such a thing.

Since Plato's time, some people have believed that, behind the changing irregularities of real languages, there is a timeless, context-free language. In the late 1950s, when I was studying language and the “ideal languages” of the philosophers, I realized that George Santayana was right when he pointed out that each time an artificial language is used by real people in real situations, it is altered by the experience that accrues to each component, from the context in which it is used. If real language were the model for mathematics, then the values of numbers would change a little with every calculation.

Adults are usually slower than children at learning a new language, but they can make the process much quicker by memorizing paradigms. With those models, they can begin speaking intelligible sentences when they know only a few words. These basics of grammar are often outlined in just a few pages, but listing irregularities and exceptions can become very detailed and complex. The grammar that children use isn't as subtle as the grammar some adults use, and college freshmen are seldom masters of the grammar of their native language.

There have been various studies that have investigated the number of words understood by children at different ages.

The Virginia Polytechnic Institute website says that

By age 4 a person probably knows 5,600 words

By age 5 a person probably knows 9,600 words

By age 6 a person probably knows 14,700 words

By age 7 a person probably knows 21,200 words

By age 8 a person probably knows 26,300 words

By age 9 a person probably knows 29,300 words

By age 10 a person probably knows 34,300 words

By age 20 a college sophomore probably knows 120,000 words

A dictionary with 14,000 words is a substantial book. The grammar used by a 6 year old person isn't very complex, because at that age a person isn't likely to know all of the subtleties of their language. There is no reason to assume that a mind that can learn thousands of words and concepts in a year can't learn the grammatical patterns of a language--a much smaller number of patterns and relationships--in a few years.

Idioms and clichés are clusters of words that are frequently used together in the same pattern to express a stereotyped meaning. There are thousands of them in English, and some of them have existed for centuries, while others are regional and generational. It is possible to speak or write almost completely in clichés, and they are such an important part of language that their acquisition along with the basic vocabulary deserves more attention than linguists have given it. A mind that can learn so many clichés can certainly learn the relatively few stereotypical rules of phrasing that make up the grammar of a language. In fact, a grammar in some ways resembles a complex cliché.

Recognition of patterns, first of things that are present, then of meaningful sequences, is what we call awareness or consciousness. There is biological evidence, from the level of single cells through many types of organism, both plant and animal, that pattern recognition is a basic biological function. An organism that isn't oriented in space and time isn't an adapted, adapting, organism. Environments change, and the organization of life necessarily has some flexibility.

A traveling bird or dog can see a pattern once, and later, going in the opposite direction, can recognize and find specific places and objects. An ant or bee can see a pattern once, and communicate it to others.

If dogs and birds lived in colonies or cities, as bees and ants do, and carried food home from remote locations, they might have a need to communicate their knowledge. The fact that birds and dogs use their vocal organs and brains to communicate in ways that people have seldom cared to study doesn't imply that their brains differ radically from human brains in lacking a “language organ.”

People whose ideology says that “animals use instinct rather than intelligence,” and that they lack “the language instinct,” refuse to perceive animals that are demonstrating their ability to generalize or to understand language.

Organisms have genes, so a person could say that pattern recognition is genetically determined, but it would be a foolish and empty thing to say. (Nevertheless, people do say it.) The people who believe that there are “genes for grammar” believe that these mind-controlling genes give us the ability to generalize, and therefore say that animals aren't able to generalize, though their “instinctive behaviors” might sometimes seem to involve generalization.

In language, patterns are represented symbolically by patterned sounds, and some of those symbolically represented patterns are made up of other patterns. Different languages have different ways of representing different kinds of patterns.

“Things” are recognizable when they are far or near, moving or still, bright or dark, or upside down, because the recognition of a pattern is an integration involving both spatial and temporal components. The recognition of an object involves both generalization and concreteness.

Things that are very complex are likely to take longer to recognize, but the nature of any pattern is that it is a complex of parts and properties.

A name for “a thing” is a name for a pattern, a set of relationships.

The method of naming or identifying a relationship can make use of any way of patterning sound that can be recognized as making distinctions. Concepts and grammar aren't separable things, “semantics” and “syntax” are just aspects of a particular language's way of handling meaning.

As a child interacts with more and more things, and learns things about them, the patterns of familiar things are compared to the patterns of new things, and differences and similarities are noticed and used to understand relationships. The comparison of patterns is a process of making analogies, or metaphors. Similarities perceived become generalizations, and distinctions allow things to be grouped into categories.

When things are explored analogically, the exploration may first identify objects, and then explore the factors that make up the larger pattern that was first identified, in a kind of analysis, but this analysis is a sort of expansion inward, in which the discovered complexity has the extra meaning of the larger context in which it is found.

When something new is noticed, it excites the brain, and causes attention to be focused, in the “orienting reflex.” The various senses participate in examining the thing, in a physiological way of asking a question. Perception of new patterns and the formation of generalizations expands the ways in which questions are asked. When words are available, questions may be verbalized. The way in which questions are answered verbally may be useful, but it often diverts the questioning process, and provides rules and arbitrary generalizations that may take the place of the normal analogical processes of intelligence. The vocabulary of patterns no longer expands spontaneously, but tends to come to rest in a system of accepted opinions.

A few patterns, formulated in language, are substituted for the processes of exploration through metaphorical thinking. In the first stages of learning, the process is expansive and metaphorical. If a question is closed by an answer in the form of a rule that must be followed, subsequent learning can only be analytical and deductive.

Learning of this sort is always a system of closed compartments, though one system might occasionally be exchanged for another, in a “conversion experience.”

The exploratory analogical mind is able to form broad generalizations and to make deductions from those, but the validity of the generalization is always in a process of being tested. Both the deduction and the generalization are constantly open to revision in accordance with the available evidence.

If there were infallible authorities who set down general rules, language and knowledge could be idealized and made mathematically precise. In their absence, intelligence is necessary, but the authorities who would be infallible devise ways to confine and control intelligence, so that, with the mastery of a language, the growth of intelligence usually stops.

In the 1940s and '50s, W.J.J. Gordon organized a group called Synectics, to investigate the creative process, and to devise ways to teach people to solve problems effectively. It involved several methods for helping people to think analogically and metaphorically, and to avoid stereotyped interpretations. It was a way of teaching people to recover the style of thinking of young children, or of chimps, or other intelligent animals.

When the acquisition of language is burdened by the acceptance of clichés, producing the conventionalism mentioned by Horner and Whiten, with the substitution of deductive reasoning for metaphorical-analogical thinking, the natural pleasures of mental exploration and creation are lost, and a new kind of personality and character has come into existence.

Bob Altemeyer spent his career studying the authoritarian personality, and has identified its defining traits as conventionalism, submission to authority, and aggression, as sanctioned by the authorities. His last book, The Authoritarians (2006) is available on the internet.

Altemeyer found that people who scored high on his scale of authoritarianism tended to have faulty reasoning, with compartmentalized thinking, making it possible to hold contradictory beliefs, and to be dogmatic, hypocritical, and hostile.

Since he is looking at a spectrum, focusing on differences, I think he is likely to have underestimated the degree to which these traits exist in the mainstream, and in groups such as scientists, that have a professional commitment to clear reasoning and objectivity. With careful training, and in a culture that doesn't value creative metaphorical thinking, authoritarianism might be a preferred trait.

Konrad Lorenz (who with Niko Tinbergen got the Nobel Prize in 1973) believed that specific innate structures explained animal communication, and that natural selection had created those structures. Chomsky, who said that our genes create an innate “Language Acquisition Device,” distanced himself slightly from Lorenz's view by saying that it wasn't certain that natural selection was responsible for it. However, despite slightly different names for the hypothetical innate “devices,” their views were extremely similar.

Both Lorenz and Chomsky, and their doctrine of innate rule-based consciousness, have been popular and influential among university professors. When Lorenz wrote a book on degeneration, which was little more than a revised version of the articles he had written for the Nazi party's Office for Race Policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, advocating the extermination of racial “mongrels” such as jews and gypsies, most biologists in the US praised it. Lorenz identified National Socialism with evolution as an agent of racial purification. His lifelong beliefs and activities--the loyalty to a strong leader, advocating the killing of the weak--identified Lorenz as an extreme authoritarian.

When a famous professor went on a lecture tour popularizing and affirming the scientific truth and importance of those publications, and asserting that all human actions and knowledge, language, work, art, and belief, are specified and determined by genes, he and his audience (which, at the University of Oregon, included members of the National Academy of Sciences and Jewish professors who had been refugees from Nazism, who listened approvingly) were outraged when a student mentioned the Nazi origin and intention of the original publications.

They said “you can't say that a man's work has anything to do with his life and political beliefs,” but in fact the lecturer had just finished saying that everything a person does is integral to that person's deepest nature, just as Lorenz said that a goose with a pot belly and odd beak, or a person with non-nordic physical features and behavior and cultural preferences--should be eliminated for the improvement of the species. Not a single professor in the audience questioned the science that had justified Hitler's racial policies, and some of them showed great hostility toward the critic.

In the 1960s, a professor compared graduate students' scores on the Miller Analogies Test, which is a widely used test of analogical thinking ability, to their academic grades. She found that the students who scored close to the average on the test had the highest grades and the greatest academic success, and those who deviated the most from the average on that test, in either direction, had the worst academic grades. If the ability to think analogically is inversely associated with authoritarianism, then her results would indicate that graduate schools select for authoritarianism. (If not, then they simply select for mediocrity.)

Although Bob Altemeyer's scale mainly identified right-wing, conservative authoritarians, he indicated that there could be left-wing authoritarians, too. Noam Chomsky is identified with left-wing political views, but his views of genetic determinism and a “nativist” view of language learning, and his anti-empiricist identification of himself as a philosophical Rationalist, have a great correspondence to the authoritarian character. The “nativist” rule-based nature of “Cognitive Science” is just the modern form of an authoritarian tradition that has been influential since Plato's time.

The first thing a person is likely to notice when looking at Chomsky's work in linguistics is that he offers no evidence to support his extreme assertions. In fact, the main role evidence plays in his basic scheme is negative, that is, his doctrine of “Poverty of the Stimulus” asserts that children aren't exposed to enough examples of language for them to be able to learn grammar--therefore, grammar must be inborn.

I think Chomsky discovered long ago that the people around him were sufficiently authoritarian to accept assertions without evidence if they were presented in a form that looked complexly technical. Several people have published their correspondence with him, showing him to be authoritarian and arrogant, even rude and insulting, if the person questioned his handling of evidence, or the lack of evidence.

For example, people have argued with him about the JFK assassination, US policy in the Vietnam war, the HIV-AIDS issue, and the 9/11 investigation. In each case, he accepts the official position of the government, and insults those who question, for example, the adequacy of the Warren Commission report, or who believe that the pharmaceutical industry would manipulate the evidence regarding AIDS, or who doubt the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission investigation.

He says that investigation of such issues is “diverting people from serious issues,” as if those aren't serious issues. And “even if it's true” that the government was involved in the 9/11 terrorism, “who cares? I mean, it doesn't have any significance. I mean it's a little bit like the huge amount of energy that's put out on trying to figure out who killed John F. Kennedy. I mean, who knows, and who cares…plenty of people get killed all the time. Why does it matter that one of them happens to be John F. Kennedy?"

"If there was some reason to believe that there was a high level conspiracy" in the JFK assassination, "it might be interesting, but the evidence against that is just overwhelming." "And after that it's just a matter of, uh, if it's a jealous husband or the mafia or someone else, what difference does it make?" "It's just taking energy away from serious issues onto ones that don't matter. And I think the same is true here," regarding the events of 9/11. These reactions seem especially significant, considering his reputation as America's leading dissenter.

The speed with which Chomskyism spread through universities in the US in the 1960s convinced me that I was right in viewing the instruction of the humanities and social sciences as indoctrination, rather than objective treatment of knowledge. The reception of the authoritarian ideas of Lorenz and his apologists in biology departments offered me a new perspective on the motivations involved in the uniformity of the orthodox views of biology and medicine.

In being introduced into a profession, any lingering tendency toward analogical-metaphoric thinking is suppressed. I have known perceptive, imaginative people who, after a year or two in medical school, had become rigid rule-followers.

One of the perennial questions people have asked when they learn of the suppression of a therapy, is “if the doctors are doing it to defend the profitable old methods, how can they refuse to use the better method even for themselves and their own family?” The answer seems to be that their minds have been radically affected by their vocational training.

For many years, cancer and inflammation have been known to be closely associated, even to be aspects of a single process. This was obvious to “analog minded” people, but seemed utterly improbable to the essentialist mentality, because of the indoctrination that inflammation is a good thing, that couldn't coexist with a bad thing like cancer.

The philosophy of language might seem remote from politics and practical problems, but Kings and advertisers have understood that words and ideas are powerfully influential in maintaining relationships of power.

Theories of mind and language that justify arbitrary power, power that can't justify itself in terms of evidence, are more dangerous than merely mistaken scientific theories, because any theory that bases its arguments on evidence is capable of being disproved.

In the middle ages, the Divine Right of Kings was derived from certain kinds of theological reasoning. It has been replaced by newer ideologies, based on deductions from beliefs about the nature of mind and matter, words and genes, “Computational Grammar,” or numbers and quantized energy, but behind the ideology is the reality of the authoritarian personality.

I think if we understand more about the nature of language and its acquisition we will have a clearer picture of what is happening in our cultures, especially in the culture of science.

REFERENCES

New Yorker, April 16, 2007, “The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?” by John Colapinto. “Dan Everett believes that Pirahã undermines Noam Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar.”

Language & Communication Volume 23, Issue 1, January 2003, Pages 1-43. “Remarks on the origins of morphophonemics in American structuralist linguistics,” E. F. K. Koerner. Chomsky has led the public to believe that he originated things which he borrowed from earlier linguists.

Science. 2008 Feb 1;319(5863):569; author reply 569. Comparing social skills of children and apes. De Waal FB, Boesch C, Horner V, Whiten A. Letter

Curr Biol. 2007 Jun 19;17(12):1038-43. Epub 2007 Jun 7. Transmission of multiple traditions within and between chimpanzee groups. Whiten A, Spiteri A, Horner V, Bonnie KE, Lambeth SP, Schapiro SJ, de Waal FB. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution and Scottish Primate Research Group, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9JP, United Kingdom. A.whiten@st-andrews.ac.uk Field reports provide increasing evidence for local behavioral traditions among fish, birds, and mammals. These findings are significant for evolutionary biology because social learning affords faster adaptation than genetic change and has generated new (cultural) forms of evolution. Orangutan and chimpanzee field studies suggest that like humans, these apes are distinctive among animals in each exhibiting over 30 local traditions. However, direct evidence is lacking in apes and, with the exception of vocal dialects, in animals generally for the intergroup transmission that would allow innovations to spread widely and become evolutionarily significant phenomena. Here, we provide robust experimental evidence that alternative foraging techniques seeded in different groups of chimpanzees spread differentially not only within groups but serially across two further groups with substantial fidelity. Combining these results with those from recent social-diffusion studies in two larger groups offers the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman species can sustain unique local cultures, each constituted by multiple traditions. The convergence of these results with those from the wild implies a richness in chimpanzees' capacity for culture, a richness that parsimony suggests was shared with our common ancestor.

J Comp Psychol. 2007 Feb;121(1):12-21. Learning from others' mistakes? limits on understanding a trap-tube task by young chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Horner V, Whiten A. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, UK. Vhorner@rmy.emory.edu A trap-tube task was used to determine whether chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens) who observed a model's errors and successes could master the task in fewer trials than those who saw only successes. Two- to 7-year-old chimpanzees and 3- to 4-year-old children did not benefit from observing errors and found the task difficult. Two of the 6 chimpanzees developed a successful anticipatory strategy but showed no evidence of representing the core causal relations involved in trapping. Three- to 4-year-old children showed a similar limitation and tended to copy the actions of the demonstrator, irrespective of their causal relevance. Five- to 6-year-old children were able to master the task but did not appear to be influenced by social learning or benefit from observing errors.

Proc Biol Sci. 2007 Feb 7;274(1608):367-72. Spread of arbitrary conventions among chimpanzees: a controlled experiment. Bonnie KE, Horner V, Whiten A, de Waal FB. Living Links, Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Atlanta, GA 30329, USA. Kebonni@emory.edu Wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have a rich cultural repertoire--traditions common in some communities are not present in others. The majority of reports describe functional, material traditions, such as tool use. Arbitrary conventions have received far less attention. In the same way that observations of material culture in wild apes led to experiments to confirm social transmission and identify underlying learning mechanisms, experiments investigating how arbitrary habits or conventions arise and spread within a group are also required. The few relevant experimental studies reported thus far have relied on cross-species (i.e. human-ape) interaction offering limited ecological validity, and no study has successfully generated a tradition not involving tool use in an established group. We seeded one of two rewarded alternative endpoints to a complex sequence of behaviour in each of two chimpanzee groups. Each sequence spread in the group in which it was seeded, with many individuals unambiguously adopting the sequence demonstrated by a group member. In one group, the alternative sequence was discovered by a low ranking female, but was not learned by others. Since the action-sequences lacked meaning before the experiment and had no logical connection with reward, chimpanzees must have extracted both the form and benefits of these sequences through observation of others.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 Sep 12;103(37):13878-83. Faithful replication of foraging techniques along cultural transmission chains by chimpanzees and children. Horner V, Whiten A, Flynn E, de Waal FB. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, Fife KY16 9JP, United Kingdom. Observational studies of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have revealed population-specific differences in behavior, thought to represent cultural variation. Field studies have also reported behaviors indicative of cultural learning, such as close observation of adult skills by infants, and the use of similar foraging techniques within a population over many generations. Although experimental studies have shown that chimpanzees are able to learn complex behaviors by observation, it is unclear how closely these studies simulate the learning environment found in the wild. In the present study we have used a diffusion chain paradigm, whereby a behavior is passed from one individual to the next in a linear sequence in an attempt to simulate intergenerational transmission of a foraging skill. Using a powerful three-group, two-action methodology, we found that alternative methods used to obtain food from a foraging device ("lift door" versus "slide door") were accurately transmitted along two chains of six and five chimpanzees, respectively, such that the last chimpanzee in the chain used the same method as the original trained model. The fidelity of transmission within each chain is remarkable given that several individuals in the no-model control group were able to discover either method by individual exploration. A comparative study with human children revealed similar results. This study is the first to experimentally demonstrate the linear transmission of alternative foraging techniques by non-human primates. Our results show that chimpanzees have a capacity to sustain local traditions across multiple simulated generations.

Nature. 2005 Sep 29;437(7059):737-40. Conformity to cultural norms of tool use in chimpanzees. Whiten A, Horner V, de Waal FB. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9JP, UK. A.whiten@st-and.ac.uk Rich circumstantial evidence suggests that the extensive behavioural diversity recorded in wild great apes reflects a complexity of cultural variation unmatched by species other than our own. However, the capacity for cultural transmission assumed by this interpretation has remained difficult to test rigorously in the field, where the scope for controlled experimentation is limited. Here we show that experimentally introduced technologies will spread within different ape communities. Unobserved by group mates, we first trained a high-ranking female from each of two groups of captive chimpanzees to adopt one of two different tool-use techniques for obtaining food from the same 'Pan-pipe' apparatus, then re-introduced each female to her respective group. All but two of 32 chimpanzees mastered the new technique under the influence of their local expert, whereas none did so in a third population lacking an expert. Most chimpanzees adopted the method seeded in their group, and these traditions continued to diverge over time. A subset of chimpanzees that discovered the alternative method nevertheless went on to match the predominant approach of their companions, showing a conformity bias that is regarded as a hallmark of human culture.

Anim Cogn. 2005 Jul;8(3):164-81. Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Horner V, Whiten A. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, KY16 9JU, UK. Vkh1@st-andrews.ac.uk This study explored whether the tendency of chimpanzees and children to use emulation or imitation to solve a tool-using task was a response to the availability of causal information. Young wild-born chimpanzees from an African sanctuary and 3- to 4-year-old children observed a human demonstrator use a tool to retrieve a reward from a puzzle-box. The demonstration involved both causally relevant and irrelevant actions, and the box was presented in each of two conditions: opaque and clear. In the opaque condition, causal information about the effect of the tool inside the box was not available, and hence it was impossible to differentiate between the relevant and irrelevant parts of the demonstration. However, in the clear condition causal information was available, and subjects could potentially determine which actions were necessary. When chimpanzees were presented with the opaque box, they reproduced both the relevant and irrelevant actions, thus imitating the overall structure of the task. When the box was presented in the clear condition they instead ignored the irrelevant actions in favour of a more efficient, emulative technique. These results suggest that emulation is the favoured strategy of chimpanzees when sufficient causal information is available. However, if such information is not available, chimpanzees are prone to employ a more comprehensive copy of an observed action. In contrast to the chimpanzees, children employed imitation to solve the task in both conditions, at the expense of efficiency. We suggest that the difference in performance of chimpanzees and children may be due to a greater susceptibility of children to cultural conventions, perhaps combined with a differential focus on the results, actions and goals of the demonstrator.

Learn Behav. 2004 Feb;32(1):36-52. How do apes ape? Whiten A, Horner V, Litchfield CA, Marshall-Pescini S. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, Scottish Primate Research Group, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland. A.whiten@st-and.ac.uk In the wake of telling critiques of the foundations on which earlier conclusions were based, the last 15 years have witnessed a renaissance in the study of social learning in apes. As a result, we are able to review 31 experimental studies from this period in which social learning in chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans has been investigated. The principal question framed at the beginning of this era, Do apes ape? has been answered in the affirmative, at least in certain conditions. The more interesting question now is, thus, How do apes ape? Answering this question has engendered richer taxonomies of the range of social-learning processes at work and new methodologies to uncover them. Together, these studies suggest that apes ape by employing a portfolio of alternative social-learning processes in flexibly adaptive ways, in conjunction with nonsocial learning. We conclude by sketching the kind of decision tree that appears to underlie the deployment of these alternatives.

http://www.ucc.vt.edu/stdysk/vocabula.html

© Ray Peat Ph.D. 2009. All Rights Reserved. www.RayPeat.com

Platypus interview on The Destiny of Civilization

The destiny of civilization: An interview with Michael Hudson
On July 15, 2022, Platypus Affiliated Society member D. L. Jacobs interviewed Michael Hudson to discuss his new book, The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism (2022). An edited transcript follows.

D. L. Jacobs: Can tell us about your background regarding Marxism and how you came to political economy?
Michael Hudson: Well, I grew up in a Marxist household. My father was a political prisoner, one of the Minneapolis 17.1 Minneapolis was the only city in the world that was a Trotskyist city, and my parents worked with Trotsky in Mexico. So, I grew up not having any intention of going into economics. I wanted to be a musician, and when I was 21, I began writing a history of the connection between music, art, drama theory, and the Renaissance in the 19th century. But then I went to New York and went to work on Wall Street just to get a job. I met the translator of Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, Terence McCarthy, who convinced me that economics was more interesting than anything else that was happening. He became my mentor, I took a PhD in economics, and that’s it.

DLJ: You begin The Destiny of Civilization by talking about how it was the historical task of both industrial capitalism and classical political economy to emancipate the economy from feudal rentiership. How was classical political economy revolutionary?

MH: Marx said that the role of industrial capitalism was to cut costs of production in order to compete with industrial capitalists in other countries. There are two ways of reducing the costs if you are a capitalist. One is to simply lower wages, but if you lower wages, you don’t get high productivity labor. The Americans, by the 19th century, realized that the higher the wage was, the higher the labor productivity, because productive labor was well-educated. well-fed, healthy labor. The idea of capitalism was, number one, to reduce the costs of production that were unnecessary. Namely, what did labor have to pay just to live that wasn’t really necessary. The biggest cost of labor was land rent — this paid for high food prices if there was agricultural protectionism, as in London, England until 1846 — and housing rent. The idea was that socialism would replace all landlords as rent recipients by either taxing away the land rent or nationalizing the land.

The state would be the landlord and that would be its source of fiscal funding. It didn’t have to tax labor, but would tax landlords. The other way that capitalism would reduce labor’s living costs was working to prevent monopolies, to prevent all forms of economic rent. That was revolutionary because feudalism was based on a hereditary landlord class: the heirs of the warlords, the Normans, who had conquered France, England, and the rest of the earth. The monopolies that had been privatized and created were largely by governments running into war debts. The bank of England was a monopoly created with £1.2 million to be paid and government debt. Many British trading companies and monopolies, like The South Sea Company of the South Sea Bubble, were created this way in order to finance their war debts.

Capitalism wanted to get rid of all of the economic overhead and to be a more efficient society. Instead of having private monopolies produce basic needs like health care, it will have public health care. Instead of monopolies providing communications, transportation, or telephone services, the government would have these basic needs provided either freely or subsidized so that labor wouldn’t require a high salary from its industrial employers to pay for its own education, health care, or the other basic needs. In the late-19th century, everybody thought that industrial capitalism was evolving into socialism of one kind or another: not only Marx, but a proliferation of socialists and books on socialism, e.g., John Stuart Mill, Christian socialists, libertarian socialists. The question was, what kind of socialism would everyone take? That made capitalism revolutionary, until the point that World War I broke out and changed the whole direction.

DLJ: You begin Chapter 5 of Destiny with, “[t]he 19th century’s fight to tax away land rents, nearly succeeded, but lost momentum after World War I.”2 Can you elaborate on this?

MH: In the late 1890’s, the rentiers began to fight back. In academia the real-estate interests and the banks got together and denied that there was any such thing as economic rent. Capitalism is revolutionary, because it wanted to bring market prices in line with the actual cost of production; economic rent was the excess of price over the intrinsic cost value. The idea was that economic rent was a free lunch. and that because it was an empty price, it was a price without a corresponding cost-value. In the U.S., John Bates Clark was saying, there’s no such thing as economic rent. The landlord actually provides a public service in deciding who to rent to and the banks provide a public service in deciding to whom they will make loans. Everybody deserves whatever they can make. This concept underlies today’s Gross National Product (GNP) accounting. If you look at America’s GNP accounting, you have a rent and interest included as a profit — not only interest, but bank penalties and fees.

A few years ago, I called up the Commerce Department that makes the national income and product accounts, and I said, “where do bank and credit card companies’ penalties and late fees occur?” I’d read that banks make even more money on late fees and penalties than they do on the enormous interest charges on their credit cards. And they said, “that’s financial services.” I asked, “how is that a financial service?” And they said, “that’s what banks do: they provide the service, and what they charged was the value of the service.” That’s not what the classical economists would have said. They would have said that what banks charge is an economic rent for the service, and this should be a subtraction from the national income and product accounts, not in addition to it.

I’m working with Dirk Bezemer and others on an article where we calculate how much of the GNP, the reported product, is actually overhead. In other words, what is Gross Domestic Product (GDP) without the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate)? A strict classical economist would say, let’s take out the monopolist rent. How much of American industry’s reported profits, e.g., in healthcare, are really monopoly rent? The idea of industrial development today is to carve out a monopoly where there’s no competition and get super profits. This is a concept that has been dropped, really, ever since World War One, about a century ago. There’s no distinction between productive and unproductive labor, between wealth and overhead. John Bates Clark said that if somebody’s wealthy, they earned the wealth; there’s no such thing as unearned wealth. Today wealth is mainly achieved by asset-price inflation; by capital gains. You won’t find a single wealthy family that made money simply by saving up what they earned. They make money by increasing the price of their stocks and bonds and real estate holdings, not by saving up their earnings. Yet, capital gains, i.e., asset-price inflation, are left out of the statistics of almost every country. So it is very hard to explain how wealth is achieved, and yet that was the purpose of economics in the 19th century and centuries before. But suddenly the idea of wealth has been suppressed as sex was in the day of Sigmund Freud.

DLJ: In Destiny and your articles, you note how the classical conception of the free market has been inverted.3 I.e., it used to be freedom from rentiership, and now it is the freedom of rents. You made reference to GDP, and this goes back to Adam Smith and Ricardo’s distinction of productive and unproductive labor, or net revenue and gross revenue. But Smith also described the government officials as unproductive in that sense, and you can find it in Smith’s translators and Marx.4 In Destiny, you bring up Simon Patten talking about the “fourth factor of production.”5 How does that fourth factor relate to what Smith and Ricardo talk about regarding value? They would say the government officials are not productive labor, yet you’re discussing how they reduce costs by providing public infrastructure.

MH: From Antiquity up through Adam Smith’s time, the main government expense was war, e.g., ancient Rome. Almost all of the public budget was war-making and police, which Smith sees as the same thing. Government had not begun to provide many public needs by the late-19th century. Things that change there were basically from 1815 when the Napoleonic Wars ended outbreak of war in 1914. They call, that was almost a people. Call it a war free Century, despite the Crimean War, and the Civil War, but basically, there wasn’t a World War at that time. Increasingly more of the government budget was spent on public utilities as they were introducing the new industrial, transportation, and health technology.

After the Civil War, American students interested in economics mainly went to Germany to study, and they came back to the U.S. with an idea of Bismarckian state socialism. The chair of the first business school at Wharton School of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania was Simon Patten, who said that land, labor, and capital all receive the respective forms of income, but there is a fourth factor of production: public infrastructure. Public infrastructure differs in that it’s not trying to make a profit or an economic rent. It sells at less than the cost of production, because it’s trying to subsidize the economy, and its productivity should be measured in principle by the degree to which it lowers the economy’s overall cost of production by providing subsidized or free public services.

That concept is antithetical to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who began privatizing these public utilities. The difference is that a privatized, public utility is going to use borrowed money usually — so you have interest charges — and it must make a profit — so you have profits added on the price. In fact, public utilities are natural monopolies, which is why they’re public in the first place. You have economic rent added on, along with other privatized costs that have to be covered. Government doesn’t have to cover the cost: that’s what the taxes are for. If the taxes are a public collection of rent, a rent tax, they’re not only preventing economic rent and lowering the whole economies close to production, but they’re funding public infrastructure to further lower the cost of production. That’s what helped the U.S. undersell Europe, especially England, and become the leading industrial power — by staying out of WWI, except to act as a creditor — emerging from WWI as by far the world’s major intergovernmental predator, to such an extent that it brought on the Great Depression and WWII to resolve the reparations and inter-allied debt problem from WWI.

DLJ: You mentioned Bismarck, and I think of the famous painting of the Battle of Sedan6 where he’s sitting with Louis Bonaparte, the other Bonaparte — to use this language in Europe at the time. Right after the 1848 revolutions, Louis Bonaparte invested in railroads and a lot of investment in Paris, and Marx refers to this as “Imperialist Socialism.”7 The state is stepping in but doing so in order to quell the class struggle. How do you see that then related to this question of government intervention? On the one hand we could say yes, lowering the cost, but on the other hand, isn’t it preserving the conditions that are giving rise to capitalist exploitation and production?

MH: The question is who’s going to control the state? Is the state going to be run by leaders who are engaged in long-term planning as to how to make the economy more productive and raise living standards, or is the state going to be taken over by a financial oligarchy that wants to increase the cost and deindustrialize?

Already 2,500 years ago, Aristotle said that many economies and constitutions that are thought of as being democracies are really oligarchies. That certainly is the case today. Oligarchies call themselves democracies. President Biden says, the world is dividing into two right now: democracy versus autocracy. The autocracy is in the U.S. That’s the oligarchy. Democracy is a confusing word. Political democracy has not been effective in checking economic oligarchy, because, as Aristotle said, democracies tend to evolve into oligarchies and they make themselves into hereditary aristocracies.

The only counter example in early history of what America calls autocracy or Karl Wittfogel called “Oriental Despotism” was the Near-East take off. Every Near-East, Mesopotamian, Egyptian ruler would begin their reign with a debt cancellation, a clean slate. They would free the indentured servants, cancel the debts, and return land that was forfeited to the former holders to prevent an oligarchy developing. Civilization in the 3rd–1st centuries BC — all non-Western cultures, going all the way to India and China — try to prevent a mercantile and financial oligarchy from developing.

The West didn’t do that. They had no tradition of royal clean slates, and when they did have their own revolutions in Greece, you had the so-called tyrants. I.e., reformers, who overthrew the closed aristocracy, canceled the debts and redistributed the land. They did just exactly what the Near East did and they catalyzed democracy in Greece. There was infrastructure spending in ancient Greece in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. By the 3rd and 2nd century BC the Greeks were saying that when the oligarchy had taken over, a reformer was someone seeking tyranny. That’s when tyranny took on a bad connotation, like “socialism” today.

The same thing happened in Rome. Rome began with kings trying to make Rome grow in a mosquito-laden, hilly area near the Tiber River. Rome began by offering land rights to fugitives fleeing debt bondage, and the neighboring towns of central Italy. The kings were overthrown in 509 BC, the oligarchy took over, and there were five centuries of revolts by the Romans: the secession of the plebs in the 490s BC, the second secession after 450, and then the many fights. The oligarchy accused any reformers urging alleviation, urging more equal distribution of “seeking kingship.” because there can’t be any state strong enough to check their ability to impose land rent and other forms of economic rent.

When President Biden juxtaposes democracy to autocracy, he wants America to fight against any country — Russia, China — that does not privatize its public domain like Thatcher and Reagan were doing. Biden defines an autocracy as a country that does not privatize and make a free market for the rentiers to take over. The ideal of American neoliberalism is what the Americans did to Russia under Boris Yeltsin: take all of the public assets, the nickel mines, oil, gas, and the land and give it to the managers to register in their own name. The result was that Russia lost more of its population as a result of neoliberal privatization than it had lost during WWII, as President Putin likes to say. This is the whole framework of Destiny, where I am trying to clarify, what is democracy, and what is autocracy, and what is socialism?

DLJ: You write that this is something Western civilization has never dealt with8 — even the political economy has shown it to be unproductive. Marx frequently makes reference to the debtor and creditor struggles in ancient Rome and he usually quotes Simone de Sismondi, who will say that whereas the ancient proletariat lived at the expense of society, modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.9 Likewise, Smith in Wealth of Nations says that the modern representative institutions were unknown in ancient Rome.10 While there have been examples of debt cancellations today, wouldn’t one say that they also had a different organization of society, when a king would cancel debts in ancient traditional societies? To some degree, yes, we can do it today, but there are different institutions, and the bourgeois revolution might complicate the cancellation of debts, at least, creating a kind of political problem unknown in ancient Greece.

MH: They’re different kinds of debts, and canceling them requires different kinds of institutions. E.g., what’s most in the news these days is student loan debt and that it could be canceled by just an act of President Biden, which he won’t do, because he’s the person that sponsored the bankruptcy law.11 That law made it impossible to cancel student debts by bankruptcy laws. It could be done by a congressional law. The government has all sorts of regulatory agencies to handle corporate debt write-downs. Corporate write-downs in bankruptcy proceedings are a normal course, taking place almost continually, and we’re going to see that again. There are real estate debts.

When the junk mortgage frauds peaked in 2008, President Obama ran by promising to write-down the junk mortgage debts to the actual market value of the homes bought by the victims of bank fraud and to bring the mortgage payments in line with the current rent. As soon as he was elected, Obama invited the bankers to the White House and said, “don’t worry. I’m the only guy standing between you and the pitchforks. That was just to get elected. I’m on your side.” He proceeded to evict seven or eight million American families.

Not only did Obama not write-down the debts, but he started quantitative easing that has given nine trillion dollars to support the real estate market, the stock market, and the bond market, so that the banks and the wealthy rentier 10% of the American economy would not lose any money.

The result was that American home ownership rates have fallen from 69% and plunged into the 50s. America is being turned from a middle-class home ownership economy into a landlord economy. We’re regressing back towards the 19th century, including its legacy of feudalism. That’s what we’re moving toward, as official government policy. We still have a strong government, but the role of the government is now to enforce the debts, not to write them down, and the most serious debts in the news are actually international debts. And of course, international debts cannot be settled by one nation. What is the vehicle to cancel the debts of global South countries like Argentina, that is now in yet another crisis with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Argentinian crisis, Sri Lanka — all this will characterize the Global South by this fall as a result of rising energy prices for oil and gas, rising food prices, and capital flight to the U.S. as it raises its interest rate.

If countries have to pay more for food and energy, how can they afford to pay their foreign debts? It’s necessary to have a new international organization to sponsor this. That’s what both President Putin and President Xi have said: we’re going to create a BRICS12 bank as an alternative to the World Bank and the IMF and this will have to accompany a new world court. We are going to provide a different philosophy of operations for this bank: the principle is that no country should be obliged to lower its living standards, bankrupt itself, and privatize its public domain in order to pay foreign debts. If a country can’t pay its debt, it’s a bad loan, and just as individuals and corporations are allowed to declare bankruptcy, countries should be able to declare bankruptcy.

These are mainly dollarized debts. Even though they’re not owed to the U.S., they’re often owed to their own oligarchies. Most dollar debts in Brazil are owned by Brazilians. Most dollar debts of Argentina are owned by wealthy Argentines because no one else is going to take a risk that they won’t pay. But the Brazilians say, we run the presidency, the central banks, and most of all, we run the police: if someone wants to cancel the debts, we’ll just kill them.

Violence has always been hand-and-hand with a high finance ever since Rome, through the Spanish, English, and French empires. The advocates of debt cancellation, from Catiline to Julius Caesar, were assassinated. There were five centuries of assassinations of Roman senators and reformers wanting to alleviate the debt. The U.S. is engaged in similar practices today. So you are right to put the debt in the political context. What is the vehicle to oversee debt cancellation, when in almost every Western economy, the oligarchies — often creditor oligarchies — have taken control of the government, as in the U.S. via election funding and dominating policy. This is unique in Western Civilization.

There’s always been empires consolidated by extortion of colonies. Today, we don’t say that America is involved in colonialism; we say America is a leader of globalization, which is a euphemism for colonialism, specifically, financial colonialism that indebts other countries, using that as a lever to privatize their public domain, utilities, national resources, and their commanding heights.

DLJ: Returning to the 1890s, this is the period leading up to 1914, which is, as you put it, the turning point for the dollar creditocracy: the 1890s as the imperialist era, in the Second International and going into the Third International. I was thinking about Lenin’s view of the growth of finance and of how you had banks that were taking over different companies, that were maybe even competing with each other and/or different sectors. He saw this as an opportunity for socialism. In your text, you mention how finance capitalism has diverted from socialism, or inhibited or blocked that opportunity.13 I was thinking of Lenin’s famous line, “[w]ithout big banks socialism would be impossible.”14 This doesn’t mean that J. P. Morgan and Bank of America are socialist, but rather that they created the institutional apparatus that could be the transformation into a socialized society.

MH: In terms of how economies allocated their resources and how they were planned, this forward-planning was coordinated largely by banks, often in conjunction with the government. This occurred most clearly in Germany where the German government worked with the Reichsbahn and heavy industry, especially in the military field, to build warships and armaments. The idea was state capitalism in Germany: a three-way linkage between government, industry, and finance. In the U.S., these were separated: finance took the form of the mother of trusts. The Wall Street banks would create a steel trust, a copper trust, and they would integrate all the different companies in the field to create a monopoly. In this case they were the former planners trying to create monopolies, but there was the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and Teddy Roosevelt coming on as a trust-buster. Roosevelt tried to prevent finance acting as a promoter of the rentier class, as the monopoly class, to prevent industrial capitalism from being turned into monopoly capitalism. All of this momentum ended in the wake of WWI.

But there was this question of what kind of socialism are we going to have? What kind of government are we going to have? Are we going to have a government that is in charge of steering prosperity and raising living standards or a government by the 1%, the elite, who will impoverished societies? Two things happened in 1913 in the U.S.: first, income tax that only fell on the wealthiest 1% of Americans, mainly on monopoly rent and real estate. The other event of 1913, at the very end of the year, was the Federal Reserve was created to replace the Treasury and to take over the Treasury’s function, shift financial policy, moving away from Washington to Wall Street, and other financial centers, such as Philadelphia and Boston. This was the explicit aim.

The National Monetary Commission published a series after the 1906–07 crash: a wonderful set of volumes about reviewing the global financial situation all over the world. David Kinley wrote a book on the U.S Treasury, showing that essentially the Treasury was performing all of the functions that we now think of as part of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve has 12 districts, the Treasury had sub-Treasuries all over the country that were in charge of local development. All of this was privatized under the leadership of J.P. Morgan, who organized the Fed and sponsored President Wilson, who also got the country into war. The Democrats were, from the very beginning, the party of the rentiers, the anti-Labor party, as they are today. They were the sponsors of Wall Street as opposed to the Republicans, who until the 1970s and 80s, had represented industrial capitalism protecting itself from the rentiers.

Looking at the turn of the 20th century, you see the different roads that could have been taken, and you realize that there were many alternatives and that there’s nothing natural in the way that today’s economy is structured. Economists say this is the result of Darwinian struggle for existence, and that’s what the free market is, and there is no alternative as Thatcher said. But there were plenty of alternatives back in the 1890s, when the world seemed to be moving towards socialism of one form or another, especially the Marxian socialism dominated by the wage-earning class which was going to be democratic socialism.

Instead we have oligarchic socialism in the U.S. and oligarchic state capitalism really isn’t state capitalism. Think of America’s policy as state neo-feudalism, because the purpose of the state is to protect the rents of finance, real-estate, oil, mining, and natural resources. The idea of the Biden Administration — really of both the Republican and Democratic Parties — is that since America has moved its industry and manufacturing to Asia in order to lower the wages here, how can Americans continue to get high-living standards, if it doesn’t produce raw materials or manufacturers? How can it be a post-industrial society, getting rich on economic rents and interest on and profits paid by foreign countries? How can America get rich by being a parasite? That was a problem that the Roman Empire had, and we know what happened to the Roman Empire. It was a problem that the British Empire had, and we know what happened to that: it can’t be done.

This attempt to make America into a post-industrial society means a rent-seeking, neo-feudal society, treating the rest of the world as a colony under globalization. How can that work? Well, It’s not working. Biden’s war, the NATO war, against Russia in the Ukraine is the catalyst dividing the world into two. That’s why Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that the Ukraine war is part of a process that will go on for at least two decades, because it takes time for the world to split away into a neo-feudal West and a productive, basically socialistic Asia, or industrial capitalist and socialist Asia, and Eurasia, along with much of the global South.

DLJ: You have an interesting history about Georgists, socialists, and the debates between them regarding the rent question, or the emphasis on capital and labor. Is the neo-feudalism or the new rentiership of the West bound up with a failure of socialism in some way? I.e., you discuss the manner in which mainstream socialists forgot the rent question or subordinated it to capital and labor.15

MH: Henry George was one of the first investigative reporters that exposed the inequity of rent-seekers. His first book was a wonderful exposé of how the railroads got land grants in order to develop the land, using the land grants to become highly exploitative landlords throughout the western states. This was impoverishing the farmers by siphoning farm income off in the form of land rent and railroad charges. George became popular in the large cities that were largely Irish — New York, and Boston — by writing a wonderful book on the Irish land question. His writings inspired a generation of journalists in the 1870s–90s, such as Ida B. Wells and Upton Sinclair. Many of these reformers had originally been supporters of George. When there was a New York City election, the socialists and the labor parties selected George to run as mayor, as a celebrity-candidate, because he had written Progress and Poverty (1879). It’s not a very good book, but it was very popular at the time.

George said he could only run if he could get rid of everything that the socialists had wanted; everything that the working-class had wanted. He said, “I have a panacea, it’ll solve everything: just tax the land. You don’t need control of landlords, you don’t need to make them have decent housing. All you need is land-rent.” The socialists said, “There’s much more to the economy than taxing the landlord; there’s a labor problem. There’s a financial problem. The banks seem to be running everything.” George said, “the enemy is big government.” The socialists replied, “you need a strong enough government to check the landlords, who are the strongest class in New York City which is largely a rental city?” So, George formed his own political party, expelling any socialists and he defended the banks.

Many bankers supported him because he called for the banks to remain in private hands. He said, “I can’t figure out a way to tax a bank interest, like you can tax land-rent.” He was criticized for that, the party didn’t go anywhere, and he ended up expelling his strongest supporters, who had joined him thinking that taxing the land was part of an overall social restructuring. The word panacea, sort of developed specifically because it went hand-in-hand with the name of the Georgists. George’s followers became libertarians and anti-socialist.

Followers of George and the socialists went all around the U.S., having debates, most of which were transcribed and published by Charles H. Kerr & Co., the socialist collective that published Marx’s Capital in English. The common theme of the debate was that society is going to go in one direction or another: either socialist or middle-class. The problem is that taxing the land rent doesn’t solve the labor problem. It doesn’t solve the tension between wage-earners and employers as to working conditions that they have. It doesn’t have anything to do with economic planning. George had actually become libertarian and anti-socialist, and his followers became so anti-socialist that in Europe they were the among the earliest supporters of the Nazis. In the U.S. they were noted Nazi sympathizers. Many of the leading Georgists were known for their anti-Semitism. When I went to the Henry George School Library in New York, I was amazed at all the anti-semitic books in their library. I knew a number of teachers there, and they said that because the school was supporting Germany early in WWII, most of the attendants were FBI agents. The head of the School told me that the number two guy at the Henry George School was part of the Nazi intelligence operation in the U.S. before escaping back to Germany.

I realized that a government strong enough to check the landlords has to be a socialist government. You can’t say, I’m a libertarian, I’m against strong government, and then hope that the landlords are going to end up being taxed. That’s an oxymoron.

DLJ: You write:
[i]t always should be borne in mind that solving the problem of finance capitalism and the rentier legacy of feudalism would still leave the class conflict of industrial capitalism in place. Freeing the economy from rentier overhead charges would not solve the problem of exploitation of labor by its employers. But taking the intermediate step of creating a classical economy free of rentier claims is a precondition before the labor/capital conflict can become the focal point of political reform, having finally freed capitalism from the rentier legacy of feudalism.16

It seems the socialists should have paid heed to this question of rentiership and that this was an opportunity missed at the turn of the 20th century. You’re saying that today financialization is a more immediate barrier rather than subordinating finance to the capital-labor relationship.

MH: This shows the role of personalities in history. The Georgists were so anti-socialist that the socialists left the rent issue to followers of George. That’s why it was Marxists and socialists who wrote about finance capitalism, whereas most of the society treated finance as if it were part of the industrial system, not extraneous to the industrial system.

So you’re right. The socialists after WWI didn’t focus highly on finance, but things changed quite a bit after WWII. The CIA put money into supporting progressive literary and cultural figures as leaders of the socialist movement, focussing on what the CIA called, “the mighty Wurlitzer,” to control public opinion concerning the socialist parties. This results in the British Labour Party having Tony Blair, who was to the Right of Thatcher, who identified Blair as her greatest legacy, in privatizing Britain’s railroads. The social democratic parties in Europe jumped on the neoliberal bandwagon largely because of the U.S. meddling in foreign politics, which pushed neoliberals and socialists to stop talking about economic issues.

In the U.S., there is identity politics, but the one kind of identity you don’t have is the identity of wage earners. That’s been stripped away from the socialist parties of the United States and Europe, and so the socialist parties are no longer socialist. The irony is that what people thought of as being a socialist in a sense of a more efficient economy, free of bad statism and free of war — the Republicans in the U.S. and the nationalists in France and Germany are against the war in Ukraine, the NATO War. The socialists, Bernie Sanders and AOC, voted for giving money to Ukraine. So the word socialism has changed quite a bit into the opposite. Almost the whole economic vocabulary that is used today is the opposite of what it meant a century ago, and that’s what my book, J is For Junk Economics is all about.17 That’s what I talk about when I’m in China.

DLJ: Do you see China as realizing the ideals of classical political economy better than the West? That might be a provocative statement because, for a lot of Americans, China means communism, and so it would mean the opposite of Adam Smith — at least that’s what we’ve been taught since the 20th century by something like the Adam Smith Institute, a neoliberal think-tank.

MH: The Adam Smith Institute hates everything that Adam Smith stood for. That’s why it’s called the Adam Smith Institute: to confuse people! Smith wanted to tax land-rent. The Adam Smith Institute wants to glorify the landlords, privatize public housing, and create a rentier and financial utopia for the 1%. There’s a reason why the economics curriculum in the U.S. no longer has the history of economic thought, because if you study the history of economic thought, which they taught when I was in school 60 years ago, you would know that when people talk about Adam Smith and free markets, it’s the exact opposite of the kind of free market that Smith talked about. What Marx described was capitalism. That’s why he called his book Capital, not Socialism.

What the Chinese government is trying to follow has been called a “state-capitalist society” or a “communist society”: the focus is on productive labor and productive investment. The most important feature of China is that it kept the banking sector and money creation in the public domain. In the West, commercial banks create credit against assets that are already in place. Mortgage loans are made against real estate in place. Corporate takeover loans are made to corporations in place. Government control of money, as it was in Germany in the late 19th century, created new means of production, especially public infrastructure.

China does not have its banks make loans for corporate takeovers, or for mergers and acquisitions. China makes them increase the means of production. In that sense they are following the industrial capitalist policy that evolves naturally into socialism, which is why they call themselves a socialist economy, and rightly so, because they’re not running the economy on behalf of the 1%. Obviously, by letting a hundred flowers bloom, they realized that the state cannot act as the Stalinist state did as a central planner. They need innovation, they need individual innovators to create market opportunities and new products and that’s been best done by letting market forces take place. But when somebody achieves such a hyper-billionaire level, as did Jack Ma with his phone payments company, they coordinate the private wealth that is created to serve the long-term public interest. That’s why there is a strong state.

The Communist Party of China is delegated to administer economic democracy, something that political democracy has not been able to do in the Western countries. You need a state to act as the agent of social planning, so that it’s not the banks and the rentier sector that does it, as occurred in the U.S. and Western Europe. Europe. China is doing what most of the world was doing before Western civilization took off and in an oligarchic form.

DLJ: Do you think the U.S. could do that? In many ways, China’s extraordinary growth, especially post-Deng Xiaoping reform era has presupposed the U.S.’s current account deficit; these “twin deficits” where the U.S. is this large importer from China. I’m thinking to what degree there’s also a mutual character to it as well. Maybe that has been in crisis. When Trump came to office – I’m not saying whether or not he was correct – he was expressing to some degree a process of deindustrialization in the U.S. that has turned the U.S. into a consumer nation without having any production. When I think of two nations having industrial production, I also think back to the end of the 19th century, what Karl Kautsky called the fall of the Manchester School: once one country begins to have state intervention, it encourages other nations to have state intervention. How do you see this working out, besides the more violent past? What do you think would be a more positive way of this working out?

MH: Technologically, of course, the U.S. could redevelop; it has developed before. But it can’t do so, because politically it’s controlled by the anti-labor party. Both Democrats and Republicans are controlled by the rentier interests that seek to increase corporate profits by looking around the world for the cheapest labor, which is not in the U.S.

An even more serious problem is that the rulings in the Supreme Court have turned America into a failed state, e.g., how the Supreme Court ruled that the existing anti-pollution laws, the environmental protection laws by the EPA were unconstitutional, because the government has no power over the states. Or when they say “we on the Supreme Court know that the Constitution was written by slave owners who wanted state power to be in the states, not the federal government, because they feared that if there were a federal government and the northern population wanted to abolish slavery, we could abolish it. Every state gets to go their own way.”

America is an evolved slave-owning state, even though there’s no more slavery, the fight against federal power has been adopted by rentier class. It’s literally a neo-feudalism class. If you cannot have the government, either Congress or the president impose basic environmental, social, educational, or any other social regulation, and if everything is deregulated state-by-state, you have a dissolution of the government and a paralysis. The U.S. now is in a state of political paralysis locking itself into the current status quo, which means that the U.S. cannot have any kind of an industrial recovery, because that requires a federal policy to check the overhead of the banking system, the real estate sector, and the insurance sector. You can’t have a Supreme Court that would prevent any kind of a public health system, a single-payer public health system, and yet 18% of America’s GDP is for medical care. America has priced its labor and its industry out of world markets by having to pay so much debt service, so much insurance for medical care, home insurance, and real estate rents. As long as this revenue is paid out in the form of rent, you’re not going to develop.

DLJ: It almost sounds like you’re pointing to the need for a political revolution. If the potential for development in the U.S. is checked by a rentier class, it is an infringement upon the people, from the perspective of classical bourgeois political theory.

MH: If other countries in the past had a problem like the U.S. now has with the Supreme Court, they would have had a revolution. A European prime minister would invite the court into the office and say, “I’m sorry but I’ve got to make a choice: either you resign or I’m going to have to either execute you or let the mob outside come in and lynch you.” Wouldn’t you rather resign? It would be settled by some kind of revolt like you’re seeing with the Yellow Vests in France or like you saw in the 1848 Revolutions throughout Europe. That’s not likely in America because there’s no real consciousness that there is an alternative.

There’s no group in America, no political party, that is offering an alternative to the current political and economic system in America. The fact that you have two parties in America that are really the same party, means that there’s no room for a new party to come and, as it would in Europe, get represented in Congress. In Europe, you can have any number of parties, and they would be represented in Parliament in proportion to their votes. A third party would be kept off the ballots in the U.S., and that’s why Bernie Sanders and others decided not to run as a third party; there’s no way we can meet the court challenges by the Republicans and the Democrats together. Sanders had to pretend to run as a Democrat. But we’ve seen that the Democrats don’t want any part of anything progressive. There’s an illusion that somehow the Democrats can be progressive because they have people who can’t find any alternative, who are running as a Democrat. Whereas in Europe, they are running as nationalists, as third parties, e.g., Alternative für Deutschland.

I just don’t see the political development in the U.S. that would be a precondition for an economic restructuring to get back on the pre-WWI track. There was anti-monopoly legislation that would be hard to impose. Biden talks as if he’s against monopolies. but he’s supporting the monopolies, e.g., for Pfizer with regard to the vaccines: the government does the research and gives it to Pfizer who makes huge monopoly rents protected by the Biden Administration. Large companies are able to buy control of the politicians by paying for their election contributions under the Citizen’s United Supreme Court ruling, and they do. They control the mainstream media. People just don’t have an idea that there is an economic alternative, which would not be the socialism that is represented by people who call themselves socialist, but are actually enable neoliberals.

DLJ: I’m trying to think about Destiny and its purpose. How could it raise consciousness in the U.S.? You mentioned going back to pre-WWI conditions. In the Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx and Engels speak of reactionary reformers who want to turn back the wheel.18 I.e., for Marx and Engels, it was always a question of how opportunities develop out of the present, rather than trying to clean the slate. The financialization in the United States, for them, poses the question of developing this neo-feudalism into socialism. In other words, we can’t go back to pre-1914. How does one find the opportunities in the present to even point towards alternatives within the U.S.?

MH: I have not found an alternative for the U.S., and so I can’t come up with a panacea. I remember Max Schachtman gave a speech in the late 1960s, where he asked, “what’s happened to all my old socialist friends? What happened to the socialists?” He said, they all went out West; they all withdrew. They thought, “we can just have community development,” and there were all sorts of ideas and utopian communities founded throughout the U.S.. There were French followers of Saint Simon attempting to make utopian communities, followers of Henry George, making utopian land-tax communities. They’re all middle-class bourgeois communities today. All the socialist communities were all very artsy: they’ve all become arts and crafts centers today. The last thing they want is a land tax that prevents their housing prices from going up.

I don’t see how things can be fixed in the U.S., which is why I’ve spent most of my time analyzing what’s happening in Asia and working primarily with countries from Asia and elsewhere, which seems to be where most of the flexibility and innovation resides. My idea is that if people see that what Asia is doing is quite simply what America could be doing and isn’t, it would be the only way to show them that there is an alternative. You can’t just draw an alternative and apply it as an idealistic application. You have to show that it’s working somewhere. I’m trying to explain why China was able to make its economy grow and raise the living, educational, and health standards for its population, and that the West hasn’t. And that is the path on which the West would have to develop, but it has not been able to check oligarchies.

Non-Western countries are able to do that, and that’s what the fight of global South reform is going to be by this fall when the grace of the debt crisis, really is the trigger for a restructure.

DLJ: Economies are interdependent. I.e., it would still be a question of the Chinese working class and the American working class building bonds across nations.

MH: The Democratic Party has produced such an anti-Asian, hate-filled racism, that I don’t think that can be. The Democratic Party has done everything it could to spur an ethnic war between the black and Asian populations. You see that here in New York by the attacks on the subways, on the street, mainly by blacks against Asians. The Democratic Party, by pushing this ethnic identity, has pushed ethnic hatred.

That’s why the Democrats are surprised that the Hispanics and Asians are moving towards the Republicans. The Hispanics and Asians realize that the Democrats have a race-hatred policy, much like the Nazis. I don’t believe that any political progress can be made in the U.S. until the Democratic Party, certainly the current leadership, is swept away. There cannot be any progress in America today led by the Democratic Party, which is today the ideologically Right-wing party that has turned what should be an economic problem into an ethnic and non-economic problem. It’s like the old industrial capitalist was supposed to have said, “if I can get half the working class fighting against the rest of the working class, then we have won.” That’s the Democratic Party. They asked, “how do we do it?” We divide the working class into ethnicities, ethnic identity, gender identity.

DLJ: You can have the working class cancel each other.

MH: Yes.

_Image by Elias from Pixabay_

Footnotes

1. Carlos Hudson. See Michael Hudson, “Dad’s Many Proverbs” (June 17, 2017), available online at https://michael-hudson.com/2017/06/dads-many-proverbs/;.
2. Michael Hudson, The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism (Glashütte: ISLET-Verlag, 2022), 85.
3. Hudson, Destiny, 165: “Reversing the tradition of classical value, price and rent theory, neoliberal economics teaches that all income is earned, and that all forms of economic rent are not merely transfer payments but contribute to output, as measured by neoliberal formulations and redefinition of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This inversion of classical logic is so far-reaching and censorial that it has influenced Chinese and Russian planning as well as that in the Western economies.”
4. See Karl Marx, “Theories of Productive and Unproductive Labor,” in Theories of Surplus Values (1863), available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch04.htm;.
5. Hudson, Destiny, 120: “China has invested in a vast public infrastructure network to facilitate its industrial production by minimizing the cost of living and doing business. This has saved employers from having to pay higher wages for labor to afford privatized education, health care, transportation and other essential services. These basic needs are provided by public infrastructure, which Simon Patten called a ‘fourth factor of production.’”
6. Wilhelm Camphausen, “Napoleon III and Bismarck, on the morning after the Battle of Sedan” (1878).
7. Karl Marx, “The French Crédit Mobilier,” The People’s Paper 214, June 7, 1856, available in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 15, and online at http://marxengels.public-archive.net/en/ME0978en.html;.
8. Hudson, Destiny, 270: “These redistributive and fiscal principles are the basis of modern socialism but not of Western economies. Ever since classical Greece and Rome stopped the Near Eastern practice of Clean Slates, Western economies have not been able to save themselves from polarizing between creditors and debtors, landlords and tenants, patrons and clients. Today, the neoliberal reaction against social democracy has ensured such polarization, first by letting debts grow faster than the ability to be paid and hence concentrating wealth in the hands of creditors, and second by advocating that basic public utilities be privatized and run by financial managers, not provided as a human right.”
9. Karl Marx, Preface to the Second Edition (1869), in The Eighteenth Brumair of Louis Bonaparte (1852), available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/preface.htm;: “Lastly, I hope that my work . . . will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi’s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat. With so complete a difference between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the political figures produced by them can likewise have no more in common with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High Priest Samuel.”
10. Adam Smith, “Book IV: On the Advantages which Europe has derived from the Discovery of America, and from that of a Passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope,” in Wealth of Nations (1776), available online at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book04/ch07c-2.htm;: “The idea of representation was unknown in ancient times. When the people of one state were admitted to the right of citizenship in another, they had no other means of exercising that right but by coming in a body to vote and deliberate with the people of that other state. The admission of the greater part of the inhabitants of Italy to the privileges of Roman citizens completely ruined the Roman republic. It was no longer possible to distinguish between who was and who was not a Roman citizen. No tribe could know its own members. A rabble of any kind could be introduced into the assemblies of the people, could drive out the real citizens, and decide upon the affairs of the republic as if they themselves had been such. But though America were to send fifty or sixty new representatives to Parliament, the doorkeeper of the House of Commons could not find any great difficulty in distinguishing between who was and who was not a member. Though the Roman constitution, therefore, was necessarily ruined by the union of Rome with the allied states of Italy, there is not the least probability that the British constitution would be hurt by the union of Great Britain with her colonies. That constitution, on the contrary, would be completed by it, and seems to be imperfect without it. The assembly which deliberates and decides concerning the affairs of every part of the empire, in order to be properly informed, ought certainly to have representatives from every part of it That this union, however, could be easily effectuated, or that difficulties and great difficulties might not occur in the execution, I do not pretend. I have yet heard of none, however, which appear insurmountable. The principal perhaps arise, not from the nature of things, but from the prejudices and opinions of the people both on this and on the other side of the Atlantic.”
11. Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.
12. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
13. Hudson, Destiny, 42: “Finance capitalism aims to avoid what Marx and indeed the majority of his contemporaries expected: that industrial capitalism would evolve towards socialism, peacefully or otherwise. By finding its main source of exploitation to be rent-seeking, not only from land and natural resources but increasingly from privatizing public investment in infrastructure and creating new monopolies, finance capitalism renders economies high cost. That prevents industrialists from underselling competitors in less rent-and- debt-strapped economies…That is why it seemed a century ago that the destiny of industrial capitalism was to evolve into socialism. Public education, health care, roads and basic infrastructure and pensions were coming to be provided by government at subsidized administered prices or freely. Industrial capital backed this policy as a means of shifting as many ‘external’ costs as possible onto the public sector. But that is not the way matters have turned out. And today’s victorious finance capitalism, centered in the United States, is trying to prevent its takeover of industrial economies from being rolled back. That means preventing such a rollback from occurring in other countries. It also requires overcoming other countries’ resistance to finance capital’s takeover of their economies.”
14. V. I. Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? (October 1, 1917), available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/01.htm;: “Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers’ societies, and office employees’ unions. Without big banks socialism would be impossible. The big banks are the ‘state apparatus’ which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism; our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. Quantity will be transformed into quality. A single State Bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus. This will be country wide book-keeping, country-wide accounting of the production and distribution of goods, this will be, so to speak, some thing in the nature of the skeleton of socialist society. We can ‘lay hold of’ and ‘set in motion’ this ‘state apparatus’ (which is not fully a state apparatus under capitalism, but which will be so with us, under socialism) at one stroke, by a single decree, because the actual work of book-keeping, control, registering, accounting and counting is performed by employees, the majority of whom themselves lead a proletarian or semi-proletarian existence.”
15. Hudson, Destiny, 162: “One of the most fateful byproducts of George’s defense of capital was to so repel socialists that they left the issue of land taxation to his followers — and in so doing, socialists drifted away from rent theory. The socialist mainstream treated classical land and rentier problems as subordinated to problems between labor and industrial capital.”
16. Hudson, Destiny, 103–04.
17. Michael Hudson, J is For Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception (Glashütte: ISLET-Verlag, 2017).
18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels “Part 1: Bourgeois and Proletarians,” in The Communist Manifesto (1848), available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm.;

One of the patterns you observe at every level in nature is that there are niches: Roles to play in an ecosystem that allow you to survive for an extended period of time. As you enter a niche and begin to dominate it, your environment will polish you like a raw gem, until eventually you perform your role in an optimal manner.

There’s this example, of Fortune 500 multinational corporations, which signal the pride flag in Western nations, but not in the Middle East or Africa. Institutions don’t really hold beliefs. Rather, they attempt to fit into their local niche through mutation. In the West that means the Catholic church for example will pretend to be OK with homosexuality. Corporations can go a step further, unbound by tradition they can proclaim they’re all in favor of all sorts of stuff.

Natural selection operates on institutions along with organisms. The Catholic church has survived for 2000 years, because it always sought to maintain appeal to wide sections of society. And so although it technically teaches you can go to hell for masturbation, it can simultaneously uphold an impression of having no real qualms with homosexuality anymore. The truth is that it will teach whatever its environment requires it to teach.

Religions are like viruses that infect the mind, they can be benign or virulent, depending on the environment they find themselves in. They also compete for hosts. Virulent versions like Salafism or Mormon fundamentalism can destroy lives, as patriarchs will end up marrying teenage girls and raping their own sons. These religions suffer from interference however. A more benign version like Hinduism, Buddhism, Evangelical Christianity or Catholicism will prevent such a highly virulent version from finding a host for itself.

As the population’s immune system develops, as people begin to recognize the damage caused to their society by virulent expressions of a religion, it becomes forced to evolve towards more benign forms, as its alternative is extinction through aggressive rejection. The Catholic church became more tolerant over time, as its alternative was to go extinct. Dutch priests who spend their days bemoaning unmarried couples living together, or homosexuality, or emphasizing other such doctrines tend to alienate what little flock they have left. Survival thus only happens insofar as the system purges more virulent variants of itself.

Once a religion becomes too benign however, once it ceases to control its followers lives, it risks moving towards extinction. If it’s benign enough to tolerate birth control, it becomes harder to produce new adherents. If it’s benign enough to cease warning people of hell, it’s benign enough for people to stop bothering with proselytizing. If a society’s immune system has grown sufficiently intolerant of the religion, it can drive it into extinction, but its myopic focus on its target can lead it to be blindsided by more virulent primitive versions that move into its host.

LGBTQI+ can be thought of as a competing religion that the immune system doesn’t recognize as a danger. It has its own theological doctrines reminiscent of neoplatonism, with people who have pre-existent “male” or “female” essences, that can be born into the “wrong body”, which can be solved through surgical and hormonal alterations to produce the “right body”, congruent with the pre-existing “gender identity”. It’s a religion shrouded in mystery that takes hold in societies that have eliminated competing religions.

Organisms tend to manipulate their environment to favor their own proliferation. If you have lactic acid bacteria and yeast in dough, they create the kind of PH and other environmental conditions that make it impossible for other organisms to conquer the bread. Similarly, religions try to create the kind of environment in which they can sustain themselves. For Catholicism this means abortion is eliminated, along with Internet porn. This then leads people to seek out sex with others, which leads to pregnancy, often unplanned, which then forces young people into the nuclear family framework that is compatible with Christian culture.

LGBTQI+ similarly creates an environment compatible with its own proliferation. You bombard social media with beautiful girls, so that the other girls start feeling insecure, they dissociate from their gender, feel unattractive to men and consider lesbianism or “non-binary” gender and associated solutions to their situation. Similarly, proliferation of Internet porn creates perverse sexual fetishes in men, which also helps proliferate the religion. Islam does similar things: By encouraging polygamy, the religion creates a deficit of women that men can have marital relations with. Those men are then encouraged to go out and conquer other communities.

This is basically the mob principle. You have different mobs to which you can pay protection money. The benign mob shatters your store’s window, the more virulent variants leave a horse’s head in your bed. If you pay the benign mob, it will help you avoid having to deal with the virulent mob, as they don’t wish to lose their milk cow.

But if you zoom in deep enough, at the level of self-replicating genetic material, you also encounter this principle. Before SARS-COV-2, there were four known corona viruses that regularly occupy our body. Those viruses are a product of natural selection. Their ancestors would have been relatively virulent, they would have injured or killed quite a few people they infected.

People who were infected with virulent variants of these viruses, would develop immunity that is relatively long-lasting and aggressive. People who were infected with more benign variants on the other hand, would develop less aggressive immunity. This would open them up to tolerance of the virus, or it would enable reinfection. Over time, the population would develop immunity against epitopes associated with virulence. And thus over time the four corona viruses known to infect our species became relatively benign, as is generally the case for all respiratory viruses capable of reinfection.

You don’t need the whole population to have immunity against every single epitope associated with virulence. In fact, a homogeneous immune response against anything is quite dangerous. Rather, you just need to make sure that every epitope associated with virulence, invokes a sufficiently aggressive immune response in a portion of the population, that more benign alternative varieties end up with a fitness advantage. When one in every ten shopkeepers shoots a mob guy who threatens him with a gun, variations of the mob that simply break your window will have a selective advantage.

The four known hCov viruses need to be thought of as benign domesticated versions of religion. You could think of a version of LGBTQIA+ that ceased believing in making fake penises out of forearm skin but now simply encourages girls to have boyish haircuts, or a version of Mormonism that ceased believing in polygamy. Through interference, these benign versions prohibit more virulent versions from spreading themselves. When you create a vacuum on the other hand, when you leave the niche unoccupied, it’s conquered by whatever shows up first, which tends to be something that aggressively replicated itself without consideration for its host.

The hCov viruses are capable of causing asymptomatic SARS-COV-2 infections, or preventing infection altogether. They are benign versions of the mob, that prevent SARS-COV-2 from spreading itself. Other viruses like rhinovirus also show such an effect. The social distancing experiment could be thought of as an attempt at State Atheism, that basically sought to ban all religions. Then once the experiment ended, Salafist extremism rapidly became the new form of Islam.

Rather than eliminating SARS-COV-2 through its social distancing experiments, Germany appears to have succeeded at almost eliminating the hCov viruses. The social distancing experiments would have caused a genetic bottleneck for these viruses. Whatever versions then survived were no match for the rapidly expanding genetic diversity and increasing ACE2 affinity of novel SARS-COV-2 variants. Just as the hCov’s interfere with SARS-COV-2, SARS-COV-2 interferes with its four cousins. And so the result could be a virological state shift: Just as a jellyfish dominated ocean creates the kind of conditions in which fish can’t replenish themselves, SARS-COV-2 can prevent the hCov’s from reestablishing themselves.

And so now you’re dealing with a situation where you chased the old mob out of town, only to be met with a new mob that is far more cruel. And when it comes to the process of viral domestication, people have been far too optimistic. You can go back a year and see how everyone hailed the arrival of Omicron as the end of the pandemic, yet today your excess mortality in the EU is higher than it was in 2021 and 2020 for the same period. The virus became less virulent but better capable of spreading itself. It is now readily returning to higher levels of virulence, as there is simply no proper discrimination against virulence-associated factors yet due to the mass vaccination program.

Medieval Europeans had wolf bounties, you could be paid for exterminating wolves, as they were recognized as dangerous animals that kill people and livestock. This is how wolves were exterminated in multiple countries. The same thing was done to bears, people received bounties for killing bears, which drove Norwegian bears into near extinction by the 1920’s. To such people, the idea that we would eventually regret extermination bears or wolves, that we would come to recognize them as vital elements of our ecosystem, would have been unthinkable.

In a similar manner, I’m quite convinced that as the global SARS-COV-2 experiment continues, along with the LGBTQI+ experiment, people will eventually start to look for ways to reign in the effect that these virulent viruses have on our population. There is a live vaccine against SARS-COV-2, that naturally spreads through populations. It’s called an hCov virus. How much genetic diversity of these viruses have we already lost? There may be rare variants out there, now lost to time, that would have infected people who were now infected with SARS-COV-2.

With every new virus that infects a population, it remains to be seen whether it is capable of losing its virulent characteristics. We’ve seen with Islam numerous times throughout history that virulent forms resurface. We’re biased by the anthropic principle: Viruses that don’t lose virulence would have wiped us out, so we wouldn’t be around to observe them today.

It could be that LGBTQI+ can’t lose its virulence, that installing fake penises on insecure teenage girls or making surgical wounds in porn-addicted nerds is a kind of fundamental pillar of this religion that no mutation can eliminate. LGBdroptheT was an attempt at producing a less virulent version of the religion, but it doesn’t get far.

Similarly, there’s no strict guarantee that SARS-COV-2 can lose its virulence. We fundamentally just don’t know. If virulence enables reinfection by killing or damaging T-cells, or if the virulence is tied to the furin cleavage site and losing that site creates a massive transmission disadvantage, then it’s possible to see a scenario in which this is just a permanent burden on our population that reduces life expectancy and accelerates the aging process for the rest of human history.

In that case, your best option may be something akin to rewilding of European nature. Rather than continuing the catastrophic social distancing experiments which attempt to artificially maintain a vacuum, you could become witness to intentional seeding of the hCov viruses. For those viruses to receive a helping hand in their natural role of functioning as a benign version of the mob against more cruel corona viruses that jump into our species from other animals could then enable them to move SARS-COV-2 towards extinction, aided by our own buildup of immunity against virulence associated epitopes over time.

Does this sound strange to you? Well then I would ask you: What do you think the polio virus vaccines are? They are an attempt to reduce the health impact of polio, by spreading more benign versions of the polio virus. Instead of 5000 cases of paralysis per million infections, these benign versions cause 3 cases per million. And similarly, the hCov’s are benign corona viruses that have withstood the test of time: We know they won’t spontaneously revert to some malignant form.

Attempts to eliminate the benign respiratory viruses need to be thought of as the insistence that the left has to kill off the vestiges of religion in the West. More virulent forms will just invade the niche: Salafism, LGBTQ, tradcats etc.

And just as the benign respiratory viruses train and strengthen the body so that it can deal with more malignant viruses, the benign religions train and strengthen the mind, so that it learns to be critical of authority. The absurdities and cruelties that happen within the religious system teaches you that all power has to be examined skeptically, even when it appeals to absolute unquestionable truths.

Without this kind of provoked immune response against authority, people stand no real chance when they are faced with a far more a malignant form, like a wealthy surgeon who proclaims in the name of “Science” that their LGBTQIA+ adhering daughter should have her breasts amputated.

And so perhaps we shouldn’t just be seeding the hCov’s. Perhaps we should start seeding the old religions again too.

Twice in the late winter and early spring of 2018, I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the Fisher Fine Arts Library, a Venetian-Gothic jewel box designed by Frank Furness as the main library of the University of Pennsylvania’s West Philadelphia campus in 1890. It had been years since I’d been inside the building whose open stacks of books I haunted in the early 1990s as a graduate student in the historic preservation program. It is there, for better or worse, that I learned about decoding symbols and interpreting diverse landscapes of industrialization and predatory finance.

I hold a crisp memory of my thesis advisor, a striking German woman with long white hair tucked into a tidy bun originally from the Palatinate who relocated to Oley, PA. We were walking down Walnut Street when she paused to look at me, put her hand on my shoulder, and tell me that one day I would see it; that my family would be protected because I could see it. Thirty years later the ability to sense worrisome artifacts lurking behind consensus reality is a burden I’d like to abandon, but I can’t. I’m still waiting for the upside. I don’t feel protected at all, and my family doesn’t understand me.

The account that follows isn’t about placing blame. I recognize we’re all caught in a terrible machine. Some of us are enmeshed more deeply than others. Some of us are more vulnerable than others. My ability to keep a roof over my head is intimately intertwined with the fate of Philadelphia’s largest private employer. If you believe the press releases, it is one of the best big employers in the nation. I am doing my best to complicate their contrived narratives. My lot is being a gad fly for Ben Franklin’s big project, the University of Pennsylvania.

I consider myself fortunate to have the stability to witness and tell the stories I tell. I harbor some guilt, because many people I care about don’t have that luxury. Still, there is nothing to do but forge ahead honing our skills, learning from our missteps, being human. Hanging back because we are afraid to fail is not an option. So, I choose to chip away at the foundation upon which my world rests with stories and felt dolls and dandelions. This anti-life egregore is nothing you can disarm by military force. Fritz Kunz and Piritim Sorokin were searching for the power of eros, the creative force of the universe. I’ll settle for a tonic of philia, affectionate love, appropriate to Philadelphia.

My significant other regularly points out this institution, one from which we both hold degrees, is not a monolithic presence. Rather it is more like a fractious collection of feuding fiefdoms. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, which is exactly how systems of power like it. University culture is a civilizing force that rewards deep, narrow, often polarizing inquiry. Academic pecking orders are determined by books published, conference papers given, grants secured, patents filed, the robustness of one’s network. Virtuosos of cultivated ignorance are lauded; plausible deniability abounds. Behind ivy-covered walls chosen ones are conditioned to look to experts to define the contours of their character even as the system guts them and hollows their minds to make room for infusions of submission coding.

Look everywhere but inside your heart where you might unearth your moral compass. Ignore the elephants in the room as the acrid odor of dung fills your nostrils. The war on consciousness and natural life is well underway, but few retain sufficient clarity of thought or a firm enough backbone to call a spade a spade. Their boning knives are so sharp, and the cuts so deft, many victims never realize they’ve been gutted. That was me for decades – the good student, the good mom, the good co-worker, plowing ahead until a lattice of fine cracks began to widen revealing socially conditioned “goodness” to be a flimsy veneer under which a deep psychic wound festered.

And it wasn’t one wound, but many wounds. It was a pervasive network of woundedness, riddled with rot, and papered over with progressive social policy. The prognosis is not good. There’s not yet a cure for chronic domination disorder though symptoms may temporarily be alleviated through superficial social justice performances enacted even as most participants know deep inside nothing is actually meant to change. Cycles of harm run on repeat with increasing intensity, a perpetual gas-lit charade.

On that day, February 20, 2018, Neil Kleiman, NYU professor of “what works” government would be presenting on “A New City O/S.” At the time I was new to Twitter, and I distinctly remember tweeting the question, who decided to put behaviorists in charge of our cities? Who had ordered up this new operating system, which I now understand will be blockchain vending machine e-government tied to digital ID and smart sensor networks?

I grabbed a chair up front to record the presentation and got several pointed questions in at the end about social impact finance. As usual, the self-proclaimed experts seemed to know nothing about what was actually going on, upholding the ruse for an audience who would leave thinking they’d learned something when they were simply being managed through fanciful stories.

A lot more ...

I feel I’ve provided a pretty good tour of the University of Pennsylvania. I hope you have gained an understanding of how I see things – cagey financiers, delusional do-gooders, crafty policy makers, ambitious scientists, and digital storytellers each of whom is living their own drama where they hope to be the hero. So why have I taken you down this winding path? Well, I wanted to let you know that Zane Griffith Talley Cooper is the reason I chose to separate myself from Silicon Icarus.

I’d had some communication failures with Raul the previous month, and when I saw his story highlighting Cooper’s work in Greenland my heart dropped. Not because it wasn’t a well written piece or that rare earth mineral mining wasn’t a concern, but I knew that the Annenberg School of Communication, created by Sir Walter Nixon’s ambassador to England and heir to the Daily Racing Form / TV Guide fortune, was a mouthpiece for social impact propaganda. I’d written about it in 2018, including their push for blockchain media and sham social justice outlets. I’d sent Raul the link to, “Don’t Let the Impact Investors Capture the Non-Profit Activist Media,” a week or so prior to his article coming out.

I asked if we could have a conversation about Cooper, because the nature of his inclusion in the piece didn’t make sense to me. Nor did the shout-out given to him on Twitter. It was not the way Raul normally operated, and I pretty much read and uplifted every piece he’d written over the course of the year. I’m not one to let things fester. You may say I’m blunt or direct or even rude. I’ll own that. But I don’t play games, and people know where I stand.

I never got that conversation. The door was closed, a brief message exchange abruptly ended, and at that point I said I felt we were on different paths and it was probably appropriate to remove me as a contributor. Raul never opened the message I sent saying I hoped our paths would cross again, and that I wish him open pathways on his journey. I’m sure he will continue to do important work. I’d love to think impact finance will be a part of it, but it’s not the first time people I thought understood ended up pulling back and repositioning. As I said in the beginning of this post, this is not about assigning blame. I’m in this machine as deeply as anyone. I even have empathy for Zane Talley Griffith Cooper. It can’t be easy on the soul getting paid to study Web 3 while being expected to be an anti-imperialist in your academic circles. But he did do Beckett naked, so I suspect he’ll probably make it through.

https://www.zanegriffintalleycooper.com/pastzane/when-i-used-to-do-commercials-and-make-movies-sometimes

I stepped away from Silicon Icarus not because Raul interviewed Zane or wrote a piece I felt pulled punches, but because my request to talk about it was rejected. I didn’t have ten pages of thoughts when I made that ask, but there were things on my mind – serious things. To my way of thinking friends, real friends, should have enough trust and respect in one another to do the hard work of being human, which can be messy. Two years of support deserved better than ghosting, but we never know what it’s like to walk in another person’s shoes. I know he’s facing challenges. I don’t regret making that ask, because I wouldn’t be me if I hadn’t. The hardest part is not knowing if we ever were really friends, and that is the sickness of the Internet folks. It can be a real mind fuck.

But if the past few years have taught me anything, the universe operates according to purposeful if mysterious plans. I’ve had people arrive in my life to teach me and then abruptly leave. Still, we are all connected and so I will end with this passage from Louise Erdrich that I read this past week about waves. The waves are the key – periodicity, cycles, harmony. Edward Dewey knew some things. This paragraph is from “Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country,” page 64.

“Waves – On our way to visit the island and Eternal Sands we experience a confluence of shifting winds and waves. Tobasonakwut shows me how the waves are creating underwaves and counterwaves. The rough swells from the southeast are bouncing against the rocky shores, which he avoids. The wooded lands and shores will absorb the force of the waves and not send them back out to create confusion. Heading towards open water, we travel behind the farthest island, a wave cutter. We slice right into the waves when possible. But we are dealing with yesterday’s wind and a strong north wind and swells underneath the waves now proceeding from the wind that shifted, fresh, to the south. I think if what Tobasonakwut’s father said, “The creator is the lake and we are the waves on the lake.” The images of complexity and shifting mutability of human nature is very clear today.“

Perfect Louise.

Your words touch my heart.

I wish a wave cutter island for everyone who needs it right now – each and every one.

Hug your people.

You never know what tomorrow will bring.

Eugyppius is the pseudonymous author of Eugyppius: A Plague Chronicle, the foremost publication on all things Covid and beyond where he masterfully details what not one single well-funded, well-staffed, well-networked mainstream outlet was able to get right about the last 2 years of unprecedented change. This has probably been my favorite interview so far and it’s made me much more interested in interviewing other pseudonymous writers in the future, and as you read along you’ll see why. There’s maybe something about pseudonymity that frees individuals from the everyday incentives we face to conform and seek status, things you’re bound to do or at least consider when you’re visible since, if you do conform publicly, you’ll get good-boy points from the internet in the form of likes and retweets and followers, and, if you don’t conform, you’ll present a legible attack surface for other status-hungry conformists—nothing signals obedience and ostensible decency like bashing deviations from popular opinion! At any rate, pseudonymity allows the open-airing of truth and that’s exactly what we get here, and if you’re truly concerned with the truth and it’s expression as much as I am, Over the last 6 years or so I’ve seen a kind of (as of yet) unidentified sclerosis creep into widely used online infrastructure; the internet as I knew it became less responsive to my questions and interests, more prone to elevating mainstream sources to satisfy query inputs, less likely to guide me to the individuals actually concerned with whatever problems I was facing. The usual channels for learning more about niche experiences like Google and YouTube became virtually useless, and I began to spend more of my time looking to people on Twitter or rustic web forums for answers, most of whom were anonymous like yourself. But this phenomenon seemed intuitively backward—random internet denizens were somehow producing more insightful commentary on pretty much every matter than highly credentialed experts and capital-heavy institutions. My question to you is: how is this possible? You’ve basically been more right about covid than any mainstream news source I’ve seen, and there is a significant trend online of part-time sleuths predicting world events or describing complex subjects with higher-fidelity than “persons of authority.” But what makes anons and everyday people so much better here than our ostensible betters?

Thanks for your kind words about my work. It's an interesting question, and one I've written about now and then. One of the main things, is that these curated, establishment discourses promoted by the algorithms and sustained by mainstream media organs, are always trying to do something in addition to being right. They're trying to sell advertisements at the very least, but most of them are also running interference for progressive political programs, and striving to manage public opinion. This is also broadly true of academics and most of the experts who are brought to your attention on news programs.

Twitter anons aren't trying to do any of that, so we can speak a lot more freely and grasp problems much more directly than they can. This isn't to say that we're not political, but for me (and I suspect for most others in this sphere), the political commitments are secondary to the empirical project, and arise from it. To that comes the fact that the barriers to entry are a lot lower for us, and competition is much more ruthless. So we cast a wider net for ideas and promote the good ones much more relentlessly.

In addition to just being right, I'm often impressed with how much more agile and sophisticated all of the anons I interact with are, than the participants in expert, establishment discourses. The Twitter blue checks come across as very slack-jawed and narrow-minded by comparison. All the signs of a confident, dynamic discourse are with us – the sly, ironic humour; the openness to critique; resilience in the face of censorship and algorithmic deboosting; the inordinate interest we attract from adversaries.

I want to focus for a second on the progressive political program you’ve mentioned: there’s a trend of revolutionary posturing sweeping through authority and status-minting institutions in the West that’s come with a deeply polarizing affect; shifting, ultimatum-laden demands for (leftwing) ideological commitment have torn apart families, friendships, workplaces, universities, and entire cities in the US have even suffered millions in damage from those demands being taken to their extreme. Social trust has eroded and centers of power have become addled. A number of theories have been advanced to explain what we’re seeing, a few being that unprecedented consensus-generation (virality) from the rise of social media has an over-socializing quality that inspires shock, incredulity, and disgust at dissent; that the rise of secularism has left a God-sized hole that needed filling; that the decline of hobbies has seen the means for deriving positive approval change from doing something and signaling what we’ve done to believing something and signaling our beliefs; and that progressivism is a form of memetic warfare seeded by non-western state actors, which I’m more inclined to believe these days considering that Covid hysteria seems like part of the same thing, with China producing videos of collapsing bystanders at the start of the pandemic to seemingly bait western powers into overreaction. What do you attribute to the rise of the ideology we’re seeing?

All these are very good explanations for the rise of wokery, and they clearly all play a part. Not just social media, but the expansion of the technological apparatus in general, has had a destabilising effect on western culture. We are all of us increasingly withdrawn from natural conditions, we spend most of our time in artificial environments. Our experience of the world is mediated by technology, and so we see corresponding cultural and social tendencies to deny our biological essence. This is important, because most of leftist wokery is about overcoming our animal and physical natures – whether it is denying sex differences, the influence of genes on behaviour, unequally distributed cognitive capacity, and so on.

Beyond that, I think there's another component of social media that we understand only imperfectly, and that is the degree to which it is used deliberately to influence our ideas and behaviour. Social media platforms want universal participation and an advertiser-friendly experience, and they have coincided with the rise of a woke ideology that is pathologically inclusive and that seeks to suppress certain human emotions (hate, anger) which are not conducive to consumption. You propose that "progressivism" might be "a form of memetic warfare seeded by non-western state actors," and I think theories in this direction should be taken very seriously, especially if we expand the idea a little, to include also western actors in the major technological enterprises like Google. These people are notoriously pozzed, they have amassed a wealth of data on all of our habits and how we respond to content on their platforms. The result is a massive and increasingly sophisticated effort to manipulate the opinions and beliefs of billions of people across the globe. There is a good chance that the trangender craze arises from algorithmic manipulation, and I really, really want someone to explore the extent to which big tech was involved in pushing lockdowns and containment policies. A lot of these ideas seem to have first emerged in Bay Area tech circles.

It looks pretty bleak, but one reason for hope is that progressive wokery is at root a disease of affluence. It is not a normal, self-sustaining cultural tradition, and sooner or later it will end, whenever the money runs out, if not before.

Has wokery affected your personal life living in Germany? Various political polls here in the US have seen self-censorship and cancellation become the new norm where unorthodox thinking was once the rule and where personal views simply didn’t matter, and just anecdotally a startling number of people I know have experienced both a compulsion to lie publicly about personal views to maintain social-standing and livelihoods, and the loss of relationships and opportunities when non-mainstream views have been discovered or aired. What has your experience been so far here and what differences do you see between European and US manifestations of wokeness?

This is an interesting question, because the answer is that wokery has affected my life here in Germany far, far less than it did when I was living in the United States. This is not to say that there is no wokery in Germany, but it's far more limited, particularly in the south. One theory would be that we're just behind America, perhaps by 20 years or so, and in some ways this seems plausible. For example, the primary woke-adjacent political concerns are classic feminist issues of the kind that would strike an American as quaint, such as equal career opportunities for women, and (huge in Germany right now) gender-neutral language. But it's more than that too, I think. There is the fact that Germany has its own quite separate original historical sin, namely the Holocaust, and so aggressive woke doctrines about white oppressor classes are superfluous here. To some unknown degree, and in a way I can't even articulate all that well, I would also posit that wokery and the English language are closely related, and that as a political religion, wokery has trouble operating outside the Anglophone world. Thus wokery is more current in Scandinavia than Germany, and actually quite crazy in Scandinavian schools (where the language of instruction is generally English); it's worse in the north than in the south, it's worse in cities than in the countryside, it's promoted primarily by our very Anglo-centric mass media. Finally, Germany (and Europe in general) is much more racially homogeneous than the United States, so wokery beyond feminist topics lacks an organic constituency; and I don't teach students anymore, and students and the student-focussed administration were, in my prior life as a professor in the US, the main way that wokery made itself felt in my everyday routine.

When it comes to feminism and equality among the sexes, I don't really obfuscate my views. This irritates some people, but surprisingly fewer than you'd think. There just isn't any of the toxic hysteria here, that there is in America, the UK and Canada. On some topics (including Corona) I do obfuscate my views, because I'm not in a position to change anything.

Can you go a bit further into the English language being conducive to wokeism? This is probably one of the most interesting perspectives where meme-development and propagation is concerned but I’ve only had cursory exposure to ideas related, like for example I’ve heard that German with all its precision and granularity is the language most hospitable to philosophy, so I’m wondering if there’s more there: Do certain languages act as hedges against certain ideas or as fecund ground for their development and spread?

Well, these are just half-formed intuitions, but I’m happy to expand. Just observationally, wokery in German is almost always accompanied by a deluge of English vocabulary, and again is associated with those regions and social sectors closest to the Anglophone world. Why might that be?

There is in the strictest sense what you’re alluding to, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - the idea that languages or linguistic categories determine or guide thought. While I’m sceptical of the work I’ve read in this area, a few small points do come to mind. One is that the gender deconstructionists will probably have a harder time in languages with grammatical gender. When everything, from inanimate objects to animals to abstract ideas, has gendered articles and pronouns, special pronoun tricks become more challenging and less plausible. And staying with pronouns for a moment, I think the deeper goal of leftist word games like this is to introduce grammatical awkwardness, and to make plain speech difficult. Different languages offer different paths to achieving this. Thus, parallel to pronoun insanity in English, German leftists have engaged in a long-running (and equally absurd) attempt to introduce gender-neutral speaking habits, which is substantially more difficult and awkward in German than English. Wokery isn’t all about word games, of course, so this can’t be a full explanation, but it’s maybe a start, and perhaps there are deeper and less obvious ways in which language works here too.

But I also think wokery is native to and embedded in a tradition of critical theory, which has its deepest roots in postmodern critical theory. The earliest layers here (Frankfurt School) were obviously German, but the more direct foundations are French writers like Foucault and Baudrillard, and then English-language theorists like Judith Butler and the lamentable Kimberlé Crenshaw and so on. It’s hard to disentangle all the cause and effect going on here. On the one hand, these are arguments embedded in what you might call a broader intellectual operating system that, despite pervasive translation, exists only incompletely and without much cultural resonance outside the English language. On the other hand, these woke theorists are appealing to the interests of certain constituencies or political factions that, for historical and demographic reasons, don’t really exist outside of America and perhaps the UK. Intersectionality, for example, has something to do with the fact that affirmative action in the United States brought a lot of black women into white-collar jobs and universities, but very few black men. Black women thus needed a theoretical construct to maintain their position atop the victim hierarchy. These are social constellations that don’t exist outside the post-colonial Anglophone world. Which raises another point, the fact that wokery has a clear post-colonial political role, which will resonate far less in countries outside the Anglosphere that don’t have a very significant colonising past.

A final point would probably be that the Anglosphere has this tradition of often private residential universities, which I think are crucial for fostering a certain kind of leftist activism. Here my thoughts are even less well-formed than about English as the native language of wokeness, but in continental Europe, the university system is overwhelmingly public, with comparatively much smaller administrations, less well-defined campuses, relatively few student services, and so on. It’s much harder for schools to incubate these extremist left-wing cultures of permanent racial offence and protest. This isn’t to say there’s no leftist activism at European Unis - there is no end of it - but it’s generally much more integrated with the world beyond the university and the broader political environment, which mitigates certain kinds of extremism (but not others).

This is all reminding me of something I’ve wondered in the past 24 hours: One facet of the language angle of wokeism is that it maybe signals the acme of what Fukuyama considered a core feature of liberal democracies: the sort of simulation of war, the impulse for conquest acted out as upward advancement in academic, governmental, or private sector bureaucracies, now expressed as conquest over the language governing the procedures of our bureaucracies. Now new procedures with a new language are used by individuals unwilling or unable to play competence games to seize new territory in the academic landscape, by governments to seize new powers over the will of their people, by corporations to seize new standards for themselves beyond those of safety and quality or, for platforms, new standards beyond adherence to laws that may have constrained them to protection of privacy and the guarantee of freedom of expression. A new form of soft-power has been realized in the West which can bludgeon seemingly anyone into submission or achieve previously inaccessible goals. Countries like the United States and Canada seem smug in its deployment, confident that nothing can overcome its ability to guilt, shame, dehumanize, or transform the order of the world. But the incident happening now between Russia and Ukraine has maybe shown another way, an old way which may have defied Pax Americana, a way that shouts loudly that strength and ambition don’t need to be bound by procedural norms or obfuscated by compassionate misdirection! For the first time perhaps since the end of the Cold War the genteel cornerstone of liberalism—the idea that governance by procedure (and now by changes to procedural language) can exist without challenge—has proven itself assailable. How do you view US hegemony in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what are your predictions for the state of the world order if liberal democracy loses face?

(Eugyppius here takes a brief break before answering. I harassed him a lot, the interview was too 🔥🔥🔥 to stop now)

In a way, I‘m almost grateful my answer comes at such delay, after the West imposed its unprecedented sanctions regime on Russia. This extends even to the withdrawal of American television news operations; the western propaganda of CNN will no longer be broadcast to Russians, and this is supposed to punish them somehow. If this continues for very long, it will lead to the development of a Russo-Chinese financial, industrial, perhaps even metacultural sphere, a multipolar world and an alternative to the West. On the one hand, I think this is the result of a lot of undirected, systemic processes premised on corporate virtue signalling and pandering to blue check outrage mob on Twitter. It helps to remember that a lot of the people making these decisions are incredibly parochial; they live in bubbles where everybody has the same views, and this leads to strange extremism, like these Munich doctors refusing to treat Russian patients. On the other hand, though, in a broader metaphorical or even spiritual sense, perhaps it means the abandonment of western universalist claims. A world in which the West has to develop a particularist conception of itself as something other than these abstract platitudes about democracy and freedom and so on, could only be an improvement on what we have right now.

In the near term, of course, I think the humiliation of the West is very dangerous. Not only the political leadership, but also many of the urban upper middle-class sub-elites, live in a state of profound isolation from reality, including geopolitical reality. While I think the nature of the post-political West is to prefer cultural and economic assimilation to military solutions, they also have a lot of munitions and they command substantial armies, and it‘s conceivable they misjudge the situation and do something really stupid, like escalate to direct military confrontation with Russia.

Despite all that we’re seeing happen in the world now, are we gonna make it?

Yes, I think we will make it. I’m not sure any of us will live long enough to see the end of this period of decline, and I’m even more pessimistic that anything can be done to reverse it. But beyond that, there are are reasons for optimism: Firstly, as things unravel, and the globalist vampire squid loses its monolithic hold, there will be more opportunities for some of us, here and there, to create alternative communities or even small-scale political orders that provide some relief from the decline and allow us to realise some of our vision. Secondly, it is the broader globalist machine that is artificial and requires enormous effort and resources to stay running. We represent nothing but older, more traditional, much more stable ways of living and conceiving of the world, which are rooted in our nature and biology and can‘t really be abolished. We can‘t ever be defeated, just sidelined for a time, and the corollary to this is that our enemies can never win, they can just dominate for a time.

To find more from Eugyppius follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his Substack today!

I recently spoke at a gathering for medical freedom advocates in a little community center in the Hudson River Valley. I cherish this group of activists: they had steadfastly continued to gather throughout the depths of the “lockdown,” that evil time in history — an evil time not yet behind us — and they kept on gathering in human spaces, undaunted. And by joining their relaxed pot-luck dinners around unidentifiable but delicious salads and chewy homemade breads, I was able to continue to remember what it meant to be part of a sane human community.

Children played — as normal — frolicking around, and speaking and laughing and breathing freely; not suffocating in masks like little zombies, or warned by terrified adults to keep from touching other human children. Dogs were petted. Neighbors spoke to one another at normal ranges, without fear or phobias. Bands played much-loved folk songs or cool little indie rock numbers they had written themselves, and no one, graceful or awkward, feared dancing. People sat on the house’s steps shoulder to shoulder, in human warmth, and chatted over glasses of wine or homemade cider. No one asked anyone personal medical questions.

(While I believe that all decisions about how you live your life vis a vis an infectious disease are intensely personal, and I would never recommend to others to assume any specific level of risk or to pursue any specific strategy of risk reduction; I think it’s worth noting, by the way, that to my knowledge, they had gone through the last two years without having lost a soul to COVID.)

Meanwhile, what had been human community outside of that little group, and outside other isolated normal communities — and outside of a handful of normal states in America — became more and more surreal, terrifying and unrecognizable.

The rest of the world, at least on the progressive side in the United States, became increasingly cult-like and insular in its thinking, since March of 2020. As the months passed, friends and colleagues of mine who were highly educated, and who had been lifelong critical thinkers, journalists, editors, researchers, doctors, philanthropists, teachers, psychologists — all began to repeat only talking points from MSNBC and CNN, and soon overtly refused to look at any sources - even peer-reviewed sources in medical journals — even CDC data — that contradicted those talking points. These people literally said to me, “I don’t want to see that; don’t show it to me.” It became clear soon enough that if they absorbed information contradictory to “the narrative” that was consolidating, they risked losing social status, maybe even jobs; doors would close, opportunities would be lost. One well-educated woman told me she did not want to see any unsanctioned information because she was afraid of being disinvited from her bridge group. Hence the refrain: “I don’t want to see that; don’t show it to me.”

Friends and colleagues of mine who had been skeptical their whole adult lives of Big Agriculture — who only shopped at Whole Foods, who would never let their kids eat sugar or processed meat, or ingest a hint of Red Dye No 2 in candy, or eat candy itself for that matter in some cases — these same people lined up to inject into their bodies, and then offered up the bodies of their dependent minor children for the same purpose, an MRNA gene-therapy injection whose trials would not end for two more years. These parents announced on social media proudly that they had done this with their children. When I pointed out gently that the trials would not end til 2023, they yelled at me.

The progressive, right-on part of the ideological world — my people, my tribe, my whole life — became more and more uncritical, less and less able to reason. Friends and colleagues who were wellness-oriented, and who their whole adult lives had known the dangers of Big Pharma — and who would only use Burt’s Bees on their babies’ bottoms and sunscreen with no PABAs on themselves— lined up to take an experimental gene therapy; why not? And worse, it seemed, they crowded around, like the stone throwers in Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” to lash out at and to shun anyone who raised the most basic questions about Big Pharma and its highly compensated spokesmodels. Their critical thinking, but worse, their entire knowledge base about that industry, seemed to have evaporated magically into the ether.

Whole belief systems were abandoned painlessly and overnight as if it these communities were in the grip of a collective hallucination, like the witch craze of the 15th to 17th centuries in Northern Europe. Intelligent, informed people suddenly saw things that were not there and were unable to see things that were incontrovertibly before their faces.

Feminist health activists, who surely knew perfectly well the histories of how the pharmaceutical and medical industries had experimented ad nauseam on the bodies of women with disastrous results, lined up to take an injection that by March of 2021 women were reporting was wreaking painful havoc on their menstrual cycles. These same feminist health activists had spoken out earlier, as they should have, about Big Pharma’s and Big Medicine’s colonization of women’s reproductive health processes, and had spoken out about issues ranging from women’s access to safe contraception to abortion rights, to the rights of mothers to a midwifery delivery or to a birthing room, or to the right to labour or the right to store milk at work or the right to breastfeed in public.

But these formerly reliable custodians of well-informed medical skepticism and of women’s health rights, were silent, silent, as such voices as former HHS official Dr Paul Alexander warned that spike protein from MRNA vaccines may accumulate in the ovaries (and testes), https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/news/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-delivers-less-long-term-protection-from-hospitalization-after-four-months/, and as vaccinated women reported hemorrhagic menses — double digit percentages in a Norwegian study reported heavier bleeding (https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2021/menstrual-changes-following-covid-19-vaccination/). Many women also reported blood clotting, and women even reported post-menopausal bleeding — and mothers reported their vaccinated twelve year olds suddenly getting their periods; but it was two periods a month some girls endured.

Almost no one out of the luminaries of feminist health activism who had spent decades speaking out on behalf of women’s health and women’s bodies, raised a peep above the parapet. Those two or three of us who did were very visibly smeared, in some cases threatened, and in many ways silenced.

When I broke this story of menstrual dysregulation post-vaccination on Twitter in Spring of 2021, I was suspended. Matt Gertz works at CNN and Media Matters. The former is a channel on which I had appeared for decades; the latter, a group whose leadership members I’ve known for years, and in one instance, with whom I’ve worked.

In spite of both of his employers having sought out professional association with me, Matt Gertz publicly and repeatedly called me a “pandemic conspiracy theorist” upon my first having reported on menstrual dysregulation, and elsewhere accused me of “crack-pottery” https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-keeps-hosting-pandemic-conspiracy-theorist-naomi-wolf.

Shame on me for doing journalism. I broke the post-vaccination menstrual dysregulation story by doing what I always do: by using the same methodology that I used in writing The Beauty Myth (about eating disorders) and Misconceptions (about obstetrics), and Vagina (about female sexual health): I listened to women, that radical act.

The New York Times just re-broke my story of menstrual dysregulation, ten months later, January 2022, in a different year, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/health/covid-vaccine-menstrual-cycles.html, after perhaps millions of women readers may have been physically harmed by their lack of decent reporting and their uncritical acceptance of soundbites from captured regulatory authorities. There has been no retraction or apology from Mr Gertz, from The New York Times, or from other news outlets such as DailyMail.co.uk, who all then called me crazy but are now reporting my story as if it is their own — now that it’s clear that, once again, sadly, I was right.

Feminist health advocates who know about routine hysterectomies at menopause, about vaginal mesh that has to be removed, about silicone breasts implants that leaked or burst and had to be recalled or replaced, about Mirena that had to be removed, about Thalidomide that deformed babies’ limbs in utero, about birth control pills at hormonal doses that heightened heart attack risks and stroke risks and that lowered the female libido; about routine c-sections to speed up turnover at hospitals, about the sterilization of low income women and girls and women and girls of color without informed consent — were silent about the unproven nature of MRNA vaccines, and about coercive policies that violated the Nuremberg code and other laws, as a whole generation of young women who have not yet had their babies, was forced to take an MRNA vaccine (and sometimes second vaccine, and booster) with unproven effects on reproductive health, in order simply to return to campus or to get or to keep a job. The Our Bodies Ourselves collective? Nothing on vaccine risks and women’s health as a subject category: https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/book-excerpts/. NARAL? Where were they? Crickets. Where were all the responsible feminist health activists, in the face of this global, unconsenting, uninforming, illegal experimentation on women’s bodies, and now on children, and soon, on babies?

People who had been up in arms for decades about eating disorders or about the coercive social standards that led to — horrors — leg shaving, were silent about an untested injection that was minting billions for Big Pharma; an injection that entered, according to Moderna’s own press material, every cell in the body, which would thus include involving uterus, ovaries, endometrium.

The sudden amnesia extended to feminist legal theory. Feminist jurists such as Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagan debated President Biden’s vaccine mandates on January 7 — as if they had never heard of the legal claims for Roe v Wade: privacy law. As Politico reported of Justice Kagan, “The Supreme Court’s ruling on privacy rights served as a basis for its later decision, Roe v Wade” and as former Sen. Barbara Boxer had stated, “I have no reason to think anything else except that [Kagan] would be a very strong supporter of privacy rights because everyone she worked for held that view.” https://www.politico.com/story/2010/06/kagan-must-explain-abortion-stance-039096.

Except…now they seemingly don’t, and now Justice Kagan magically doesn’t. With medical mandates, there are no privacy rights for anyone ever.

But Justice Kagan seemed suddenly, after decades of this view, not to see a contradiction. Her career-long philosophical foundation that resulted in a consistent view, when it came to abortion rights, that citizens had a right to physical privacy in medical decision-making — “My body, my choice” — “It is between a woman and her doctor” — vanished, along with her expensive education and all of her knowledge of the Constitution.

Justice Sotomayor, for her part, said, in an article reported on Dec 10 2021, that it was “madness” that the state of Texas wanted to “substantially suspend[ed] a constitutional guarantee: a pregnant woman’s right to control her own body.” Her tone was, rightly, one of high dudgeon at the thought that anyone might override this right. But when it came to Justice Sotomayor’s discussion on Jan 7 2022, less than four weeks later, of President Biden’s vaccine mandates, that clear Constitutional right was now nowhere to be seen; it too had vanished into the ether. A part of Justice Sotomayor’s brain seems to have simply shut down at the word “vaccines” — though it was the same woman in the same Court, with the same Constitution before her, the Justice could no longer manage the Kantian imperative of consistent reasoning. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/10/supreme-court-abortion-ruling-texas-ban

Lifelong activists for justice and inclusion, for the Constitution and human rights and the rule of law — friends and colleagues of mine who are LGBTQ rights activists; the ACLU itself; activists for racial inclusion and equality; Constitutional lawyers who teach at all the major universities and run the law reviews; activists who argue against excluding anyone from any profession or access based on gender; almost all of them, at least on the progressive side of the spectrum (almost all: hello, Glenn Greenwald) — were silent; as a comprehensive, systematic, cruel, Titanic discrimination society was erected in a matter of months in such cities as New York City, formerly the great melting pot, the great equalizer; and as whole states such as California adopted a system pretty much like the apartheid systems based on other physical characteristics, in regimes that these same proud advocates for equality and inclusion had boycotted in college.

And yet now these former heroes for human rights and for equal justice under law, stood by calmly or even enthusiastically as the massive edifice of discrimination was constructed. And then they colluded. Without even a fight or a murmur.

And they had their “vaccinated-only” parties, and their segregated fashion galas, and their nonprofit-hosted discussions in nice medically-segregated New York City midtown hotels over expensive lunches served by staffers in masks — lunches celebrating luminaries of the civil rights movement or of the LGBTQ rights movement or the immigrants’ rights movement, or the movement to help girls in Afghanistan get access to schools which they had been prevented from attending— invitations which I received, but of which I could not make use, because — because I was prevented from attending.

And these elite justice advocates enjoyed the celebrations of their virtues and of their values, and did not seem to notice that they had become — in less than a year — exactly what they had spent their adult lives professing most to hate.

I could go on and on.

The bottom line, though, is that this infection of the soul, this abandonment of classical Liberalism’s — really, it’s not even partisan; modern civilization’s — most cherished postwar ideals, this sudden dropping of post-Enlightenment norms of critical thinking, this dilution even of parents’ sense of protectiveness over the bodies and futures of their helpless minor children, this acceptance of a world in which people can’t gather to worship, these suddenly-manifested structures themselves that erected this demonic world in less than two years and imposed it on everyone else, these heads of state and heads of the AMA and heads of school boards and these teachers; these heads of unions and these national leaders and the state level leaders and the town hall level functionaries all the way down to the men or woman who disinvite a relative from Thanksgiving due to social pressure, because of a medical status which is no one’s business and which affects no one — this edifice of evil is too massive, too quickly erected, too complex and really, too elegant, to assign to just human awfulness and human inventiveness.

Months before, I had asked a renowned medical freedom activist how he stayed strong in his mission as his name was besmirched and he faced career attacks and social ostracism. He replied with Ephesians 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians%206%3A12&version=KJV

I had thought of that a lot in the intervening time. It made more and more sense to me as the days passed.

I confessed at that gathering in the woods with the health freedom community, that I had started to pray again. This was after many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, and certainly very personal, almost embarrassingly so, and thus it was not something I should mention in public.

I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly, because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training and faculties; and that it was so elaborate in its construction, so comprehensive, and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, flamboyant, baroque imagination made out of the essence of cruelty itself — that I could not see that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.

I felt around us, in the majestic nature of the awfulness of the evil around us, the presence of “principalities and powers” — almost awe-inspiring levels of darkness and of inhuman, anti-human forces. In the policies unfolding around us I saw again and again anti-human outcomes being generated: policies aimed at killing children’s joy; at literally suffocating children, restricting their breath, speech and laughter; at killing school; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the President’s own bully pulpit, demands for people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbors and loved ones and friends.

I have seen bad politics all of my life and this drama unfolding around us goes beyond bad politics, which is silly and manageable and not that scary. This — this is scary, metaphysically scary. In contrast to hapless human mismanagement, this darkness has the tinge of the pure, elemental evil that underlay and gave such hideous beauty to the theatrics of Nazism; it is the same nasty glamour that surrounds Leni Riefenstahl films.

In short, I don’t think humans are smart or powerful enough to have come up with this horror all alone.

So I told the group in the woods, that the very impressiveness of evil all around us in all of its new majesty, was leading me to believe in a newly literal and immediate way in the presence, the possibility, the necessity of a countervailing force — that of a God. It was almost a negative proof: an evil this large must mean that there is a God at which it is aiming its malevolence.

And that is a huge leap for me to take, as a classical Liberal writer in a postwar world, — to say these things out loud.

Grounded postmodern intellectuals are not supposed to talk about or believe in spiritual matters — at least not in public. We are supposed to be shy about referencing God Himself, and are certainly are not supposed to talk about evil or the forces of darkness.

As a Jew I come from a tradition in which Hell (or “Gehenom”) is not the Miltonic Hell of the later Western imagination, but rather a quieter interim spiritual place (https://jel.jewish-languages.org/words/183). “The Satan” exists in our literature (in Job for example) but neither is this the Miltonic Satan, that rock star, but a figure more modestly known as “the accuser.”

We who are Jews, though, do have a history and literature that lets us talk about spiritual battle between the forces of God and negative forces that debase, that profane, that seek to ensnare our souls. We have seen this drama before, and not that long ago; about eighty years ago.

Other faith traditions of course also have ways to discuss and understand spiritual battle taking place through humans, and through human leaders, and here on earth.

It was not always the case that Western intellectuals were supposed to keep quiet in public about spiritual wrestling, fears and questions. Indeed in the West, poets and musicians, dramatists and essayists and philosophers, talked about God, and even about evil, for millennia, as being at the core of their understanding of the world and as forming the basis of their art forms and of their intellectual missions. This was the case right through the nineteenth century and into the first quarter of the 20th, a period when some of our greatest intellectuals — from Darwin to Freud to Jung — wrestled often and in public with questions of how the Divine, or its counterpart, manifested in the subjects they examined.

It was not until after World War Two and then the rise of Existentialism — the glorification of a world view in which the true intellectual showed his or her mettle by facing the absence of God and our essential aloneness — that smart people were expected to shut up in public about God.

So - it’s not wacky or eccentric, if you know intellectual history, for intellectuals to talk in public about God, and even about God’s adversary, and to worry about the fate of human souls. Mind and soul are not in fact at odds; and the body is not in fact at odds with either of these. And this acceptance of our three-part, integrated nature is part of our Western heritage. This is a truth only recently obscured or forgotten; a memory of our integrity as human beings that had been, only for the last seventy years or so, under attack.

So — I am going to start talking about God, when I need to do so, and about my spiritual questions in this dark time, along with continuing all of the other reporting and nonfiction analysis I always do. Because I have always told my readers the truth of what I felt and saw. This may be why they have come with me on a journey now of almost forty-three years, and why they keep seeking me out — though I have in the last couple of years — after I wrote a book that described how 19th century pandemics were exploited by the British State to take away everyone’s liberty, hm — been pulped, deplatformed, cancelled, re-cancelled, deplatformed again, and called insane by dozens of the same news outlets that had commissioned me religiously for decades.

It is time to start talking about spiritual combat again, I personally believe. Because I think that that is what we are in, and the forces of darkness are so big that we need help. Our goal? Perhaps just to keep the light somehow alive - a light of true classical humane values, of reason, of democracy, inclusion, kindness - in this dark time.

What is the object of this spiritual battle?

It seems to be for nothing short of the human soul.

One side seems to be wrestling for the human soul by targeting the human body that houses it; a body made in God’s likeness, so they say; the temple of God.

I am not confident. I don’t have enough faith. Truth is, I am scared to death. I just don’t think just humans alone can solve this one, or can win this one on their own.

I do think we need to call, as Milton did, as Shakespeare did, as Emily Dickinson did, on help from elsewhere; on what could be called angels and archangels, if you will; on higher powers, whatever they may be; on better principalities, on whatever intercessors may hear us, on Divine Providence — whatever you want to call whomever it is you can hope for and imagine. As I often say, I’ll take any faith tradition. I’ll talk to God in any language — I don’t think forms really matter. I think intention is everything.

I can’t say for sure that God and God’s helpers exist; I can’t. Who can?

But I do think we are at an unheard-of moment in human history — globally — in which I personally believe we have no other choice but to ask for assistance from beings — or a Being — better armed to fight true darkness, than ourselves alone. We’ll find out if they exist, if He or She exists, perhaps, if we ask for God’s help.

At least that’s my hope.

Which I guess is a kind of a prayer.

_ [This was an answer to the 2013 edge.org question, What should we be worried about? That link is the official page. And this is an archive.org capture of that page, What should be worried about?

Scroll down about a third, and right between Naughton and Scheiner, the archive has answer by mathematician Steven Strogatz, which is missing from the newest version, even though the count at the top still says there are 155 responses. This is the missing response in full.] _

In every realm where we exist as a collective -- in society, in the global economy, on the Internet -- we are blithely increasing the coupling between us, with no idea what that might entail.

"Coupling" refers to the ability of one part of a complex system to influence another. If I put a hundred metronomes on the floor and set them ticking, they'll each do their own thing, swinging at their own rhythm. In this condition, they're not yet coupled. Because the floor is rigid, the metronomes can't feel each other's vibrations, at least not enough to make a difference. But now place them all on a movable platform like the seat of a child's swing. The metronomes will start to feel each other's jiggling. The swing will start to sway, imperceptibly at first, but enough to disturb each metronome and alter its rhythm. Eventually the whole system will synchronize, with all the metronomes ticking in unison. By allowing the metronomes to impose themselves on each other through the vibrations they impart to the movable platform, we have coupled the system and changed its dynamics radically.

In all sorts of complex systems, this is the general trend: increasing the coupling between the parts seems harmless enough at first. But then, abruptly, when the coupling crosses a critical value, everything changes. The exact nature of the altered state isn't easy to foretell. It depends on the system's details. But it's always something qualitatively different from what came before. Sometimes desirable, sometimes deadly.

I worry that we're playing the coupling game with ourselves, collectively. With our cell phones and GPS trackers and social media, with globalization, with the coming Internet of things, we're becoming more tightly connected than ever. Of course, maybe that's good. Greater coupling means faster and easier communication and sharing. We can often do more together than apart.

But the math suggests that increasing coupling is a siren's song. Too much makes a complex system brittle. In economics and business, the wisdom of the crowd works only if the individuals within it are independent, or nearly so. Loosely coupled crowds are the only wise ones.

The human brain is the most exquisitely coupled system we know of, but the coupling between different brain areas has been honed by evolution to allow for the subtleties of attention, memory, perception, and consciousness. Too much coupling produces pathological synchrony: the rhythmic convulsions and loss of consciousness associated with epileptic seizures.

Propagating malware, worldwide pandemics, flash crashes -- all symptoms of too much coupling. Unfortunately it's hard to predict how much coupling is too much. We only know that we want more, and that more is better... until it isn't.

What follows is a long essay I wrote almost a year ago, in October 2020, on another platform. I had almost no audience at the time, but many people told me they enjoyed it, and I am happy to provide this edited, shortened and slightly updated version for many new readers.

In reading it now, I find that it is more heavily focused on lockdowns and mass containment than it would be if I wrote it today, but I think even these passages are still important. Lockdowns will be kept around, initially as selective “lock-outs” to repress and punish the unvaccinated; from there it will be trivial to impose closures on whole populations once again, as case statistics deteriorate in the winter.

Beyond all of the politics and hysteria and right-thinking, there is a real virus beneath it all. Its name is Sars-Cov-2. This virus is not to be confused with Covid-19, which is the illness that the virus causes. The distinction, like that between HIV and AIDS, is medically useful, and it invites us to make other, analogous distinctions, in service of cleaning up our thought.

Illness is as much a social matter as a biological one, and for most of us, the vastly more significant distinction is not that between virus and disease, but between the biological reality of the virus-disease, and the political and social perceptions of this virus-disease. Words help us think, and so here I propose to call the former biological virus-disease Sars2; and the latter, socio-political virus-disease, Covid.

Sars2 is only one of the players responsible for the social construction of Covid, and not even the most important one. It is best to think of Covid as a committee project, with a lot of creative talent. Politicians, epidemiologists, virologists, public health experts, computer models, public health institutes, journalists, Chinese bureaucrats, and yes, among them all, Sars2—they all get some say in constructing Covid. Sometimes Sars2 disagrees with their construct, and sometimes his fellow committee members listen to him. But sometimes he disagrees and gets overruled. He’s only one voice at the table, after all. When a Twitter blue-check or a scientist or your professor lectures you about the substance of scientific consensus, they are just delivering articles of faith about the social construct of Covid, as the committee has defined it.

When we say that something is a social construct, we don’t mean that it isn’t real. We just mean that it could be conceived of in a much different way; and that a big part of what we take for granted about the constructed thing is malleable. Clearly political and scientific authorities could have constructed a massively different version of Covid if they wanted to. If you doubt this, look at China. They have basically eradicated Covid by constructing it out of existence.

In the West, Covid has acquired a variety of features that demand constant and heavy-handed technocratic intervention. This is not the case everywhere, but in the West, where technocratic bureaucracies dominate, this is what Covid has become. The technocrats have had a huge hand in building Covid, and they have constructed the perfect nail for their hammer.

Above all, they have constructed Covid to be an intractable problem, because our bureaucracies derive much of their authority and legitimacy from permanent, intractable problems. This was not the only path. We very nearly embarked upon a quite different one. Before the permanent bureaucracy recognised that Sars2 provided fodder for another eternal project, they had taken substantial steps towards building a very different disease out of Sars2—a disease that nobody needed to worry about very much, that was not very different from other respiratory illnesses, and that would probably go away in the end, or that we could at least overlook if we didn’t think about it too carefully or test for it all that widely.

That changed very quickly. By March, western Covid committees had begun building a very different disease. One of its most important features, is its omnipresence and invisibility.

Covid Is A Hidden, Lurking Menace

Central to our image of Covid is its appearance out of nowhere. A wet market deep in China, or some bio-lab—official discourse is agnostic. The earliest images to reach the West depicted apparently healthy Chinese people suddenly collapsing in convulsions, as if struck by God. Efforts to quarantine the earliest Covid patients in Europe totally failed, as the disease turned out to be circulating broadly among the population first in Lombardy, then in northern Europe, and finally in the United States. This early impression of Covid as omnipresent and invisible remains with us to this day. It is not enough to stay home if you are sick. Healthy people, who never develop symptoms of Covid, nevertheless spread the disease. Aerosolised transmission is the subject of much discussion; Covid menaces through the air. Interestingly, the aerosol aspect only took off after establishment scientists decided that transmission via surfaces was at best infrequent. Yet the menace of contaminated surfaces has persisted in our consciousness, alongside the contaminated air, and the contaminated healthy people, and the visibly contaminated sick.

In the ancient world, it was held that certain life-forms, such as fish, were generated spontaneously by the environment. If you kept a barrel of water around long enough, theory held you’d soon find little minnows swimming around in it. This is, functionally, how we behave with Covid. Two healthy people conversing in an unventilated room will probably yield Covid in one of them. In fact Covid can arise from any instance of social proximity. People fear objects that many others have touched. People fear friends or relatives who are perceived to socialise or travel too much.

Now, Covid does not lurk absolutely everywhere. It favours above all those spaces subject to the direct control of government bureaucracies. Schools, therefore, are especially feared. Public transit is considered another terrifying locus of infection. Covid is especially pervasive in hospitals; a lot of people avoid them now at all costs. In the first wave, it was common to close parks and playgrounds, even though we know the risk of transmission outdoors is minimal. Bureaucrats control public parks.

As you move away from bureaucratic oversight, the threat of Covid recedes. Bars and clubs, in most countries subject to substantial regulation but essentially private enterprises, are a kind of middle ground: Dangerous certainly, and the subject of much moral expostulation, but not quite the unmitigated danger of schools. Things like restaurants and chamber music concerts at private venues take a further step away from bureaucratic oversight, and Covid recedes accordingly. Private offices are managed by bureaucrats hardly at all, so we don't read that much about infection at work. The exception is government bureaucrats themselves, who hear a lot about how dangerous it is for them to go to the office. That space furthest removed from bureaucratic supervision, the home, is a safe haven from Covid, although it is the one place you’re most likely to contract Sars2.

The presence of Covid, which is invisible and potentially everywhere, can only be ascertained via special tests. While you can give yourself an antigen test at home, the results are far less authoritative than antigen tests administered by authorised agents of the bureaucracy, and these in turn are still less significant than PCR tests, administered by medical professions and processed in a lab.

Mere symptoms do not mean you are infected; you could have something else. On the other hand, perfect health does not mean you are Covid-free. I don’t think enough people have recognised how bizarre this situation is. Consider all those people these past months who have recovered from a respiratory illness, with fever and cough, without ever being tested. When they suggest that perhaps they had Covid, it is routine to doubt them. Certainly nobody would exempt them from vaccines on that basis. Compare them to all the people who have no symptoms at all, but test positive, and are widely considered to have a disease. The voluminous and eager literature on the asymptomatics is extremely telling. They are 20% of all cases, or 80%; they are responsible for 2% of infections, or 40%. They are tallied in the statistics, undifferentiated from the truly ill.

Central to the definition of Covid, is that mass testing programs be the only means of defining the extent of the disease, assessing the success of the technocratic response, and the virtue of the compliant population. Covid is not like other communicable diseases, which are diagnosed mostly in private, according to likely symptoms.

Covid as a hidden, lurking menace has had by far the worst consequences for children. Sars2, everybody knows, is not a danger to them. The virus himself has been very clear about this and it has not been possible for the disease bureaucrats to overrule him. It is easy to imagine a parallel universe, one where we are relieved at the near-total safety of our children in the face of this disease, one where we spare them the effects of public health interventions, because they are not at risk.

That is not our world. Government bureaucracies are heavily involved in the lives of children, particularly through schools. Thus public health authorities and, most unnaturally, many women, have come to fear children as a vector of infection. Some people even believe children are the main drivers of the pandemic. Covid lurks, a deadly silent threat, inside them, wherever they gather to play, wherever they gather in school. Classrooms and childcare centres have become places of intense microbial hysteria, silly simulacra of hospitals, with odd Plexiglas barriers, hand sanitiser around every corner, and constant, constant testing. In this world Covid creates its own reality vortex. You find infections where you swab the most. Every time schools are opened, intense surveillance uncovers a new flood of cases, which cements the image of children as dangerous and contaminated, a mortal threat to their grandparents.

If you say to a person of orthodox political alignments that this is a bizarre approach to any disease, to surround precisely those people at least risk with so many precautions, harmful in themselves; and at the same time to leave those most at-risk to their own devices with vague advice to self-isolate, they will say a great many things to you. One of the first things they say will be this: Covid is a totally new virus. It poses an unknown and wholly unprecedented threat to our society. There are no low-risk populations, and there is no way way to protect the vulnerable from this pervasive invisible pathogen. All we can do is disrupt hidden transmission among the invulnerable carriers.

Covid Is A Novel, Extra-Natural Disease

As with the hidden menace, the foundations for this aspect of Covid were laid early on. In the beginning Covid was held to be a zoonotic virus, brought upon humans by exotic Chinese dietary practices. Now many admit that it is likely a laboratory invention, unleashed with some sinister purpose or by accident. However that may be, Covid is totally new to humans; it is unlike any disease we have ever faced before. It is beyond nature and we have no natural defences against it. In the discourse surrounding Covid there has always been the tendency to push this extra-natural facet to the extremes, nearly to the supernatural. The early paranoia about surfaces comes to mind yet again, with those old stories of mail-room employees picking up Covid from packages sent from far-off, plague-ridden lands. Covid can perfuse the air for hours after a fateful cough. There is no general unified Covid with a limited set of properties. Attempts to fix its characteristics dissolve in a pool of contradictory evidence. Note the widely differing characteristics of Covid in neighbouring, broadly similar countries. The better part of this variation arises from different national medical bureaucracies, which have lent Covid different properties according to their capacities and proclivities. But of course the variation is not understood in that way; it is rather put down to some magical aspect of the virus itself. Extranatural virions do one thing in Sweden, and another thing in Germany, and another thing in Italy.

Because Covid is an extra-natural disease, our natural immune systems are not up to fighting it. This is why the prospect of Covid reinfection has been a matter of obsession from the very beginning. The first rumours of reinfection arose in China, where reinfected were said to suffer devastating symptoms, such as heart attacks. Similar cases were never observed in the West and so everyone stopped talking about that. Later on, South Korean health officials began reporting various cases of reinfection, but then it emerged that this was an artefact of the manic Korean testing regime. Recovering Covid patients issued multiple tests may come up negative one day and positive the next, as their body sheds the virus. Though they had been proven wrong twice, reinfection theories persisted. Minor victory came when some serological studies failed to find antibodies in some confirmed Covid patients. Later they had the holy grail, namely several confirmed genuine reinfections.

You could say, perhaps, that the reinfectionists on the Covid committee forced a compromise with Sars2 on this point. Reinfection aligns neatly with established doctrine about the inadequacy of our natural defences. Only broad-scale social and political countermeasures have any chance of success against Covid. Think of it as a substitute, artificial, social immune system: Lockdowns, curfews, quarantines, travel bans, mass testing, masks, school closures, personal distance, interior ventilation, hand sanitiser, contact tracing apps, home office, and more. This is what a society of immune-compromised people looks like. Just as our bodily immune response is responsible for many of the symptoms we associate with illness, so too is the social immune response responsible for the majority of negative effects from Covid. We have made our whole society sick, in a vain effort to keep some people healthy.

The body’s immune system can overreact to the point that it poses a greater danger than the infection itself. In a related way, our social response to Sars2 has entered an inflammatory phase, a spiral of disease hysteria demanding mass testing and contact tracing leading to the discovery of more cases causing more stringent anti-Covid social measures that just make our nations and our societies vastly sicker and more dysfunctional than we were before. Remember that this all started with "two weeks to crush the curve," and consider how far we have come, and how far we might go still. It goes without saying that all these negative effects are taken as further proof of the unusual threat that Covid poses.

Beyond the extra-natural social defences, we have placed all of our hopes in an extra-natural vaccine. Here the discourse devolves into awkward contradiction. To begin with, vaccines, while indeed extra-natural, merely stimulate natural immunity. If we may hope for a vaccine, it is unclear why we cannot let some of our natural immune systems join the fight. What is more, despite unprecedented mass testing programs and enormous scientific interest and the bias of our perspective, Covid reinfection is not yet a pervasive phenomenon. Those with natural immunity are well protected indeed. From the very beginning, the developers of extra-natural vaccines have been warning for a long time that their products will provide only partial protection against Sars2. Yet their products were marketed, until recently, as more protective than infection, and to this moment, even as the vaccines fail, politicians everywhere insist that mass vaccination is the only answer.

Fundamental to this paradox, is the axiom that extra-natural Covid poses an unknowable yet grave risk to everyone. Reinfection is only the beginning of it. All those people who have recovered without lingering effects may well develop brain lesions next year. The health of their internal organs has yet to be confirmed and there are dark suppositions that no few harbour hidden heart or liver or kidney damage. A lot of people might never smell again. Many recover only to relapse several weeks later, and perhaps again several weeks after that. There is now an enormous body of literature about Long Covid, a chronic syndrome marked by every symptom you could imagine: Ongoing fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, joint pain, cartilage degeneration, insomnia, depression—on and on.

Before you get into the weeds of the journal literature on Long Covid or permanent organ damage from Sars2, consider this: Officially, the virus has infected over 220 million people across the world. That is a great river, wide and deep, for our Covid committee to trawl for stories of unusual complications, debilitating symptoms and incomplete convalescences, from now until forever. The question is not, what odd horrible things lurk in that river; but how many of them there are, relative to the ordinary pedestrian things. What are you most likely to find? Long Covid and relapsed Covid and heart attack Covid? Or low-grade grade fever Covid, mild-cough Covid, over-in-five-days-without-a-second-thought Covid? I think we can all answer that question for ourselves. That we let the rare and the unusual dominate our construction of Covid, rather than the mild and the pedestrian, is partly down to publication bias. The banal almost never makes it into print; the strange and unusual invariably find an audience.

But that is not the only reason we must constantly hear about the grave unknown risks of this extra-natural disease. There are others too, and the biggest is simply this: The bureaucracies responsible for constructing Covid have decided that infections must be minimised above all else. That is the Sisyphean task they have set themselves. As the costs of their containment measures increase and society gets sicker, they must tell ever grimmer stories about why it is unacceptable for anyone, ever, to contract Sars2.

Covid Is Universal

Covid is the great sin of globalism, and globalism has brought it everywhere. Not even Antarctica remains Covid-free. Covid can infect animals as well as humans, and the prospect of reinfection has been leveraged to dispel the idea that anyone might become immune from Covid. In this way, the disease applies always and everywhere to everyone. (The opposite and far better-documented phenomenon, that a lot of people who have never had Sars2 have some partial immunity—presumably from prior non-Sars2 coronavirus infections—is contrary to Universal Covid and so it is excluded from official Covid doctrine.)

Because Covid is everywhere, and everybody is subject to it, containment policies must also be general, and vaccination policies must be too. For the disease bureaucrats, Universal Covid is a central doctrine, eagerly defended. The myth of Universal Covid is reinforced by the infection statistics we hear about every day. The only thing that ever makes headlines is how many positive tests there were today, as opposed to yesterday or last week; and which regions have the most infections right now. Since the Lombardy outbreak, everybody grasps that Sars2 infections have a regional particularism about them, but this is never presented as a challenge to Covid’s universality. Regional “hot-spots” are universally applicable examples of what will happen to your region, too, if Covid is not suppressed there and everywhere. Positive swabs might also be broken down into age cohorts, and these function much the same way. If your region has many new cases, but nobody really seems to be sick or dying, this is because the pandemic is currently concentrated among young people. Old people are next, if everybody does not comply with suppression measures. The effect is to make grim statistics a problem, even in the total absence of anybody actually suffering or dying.

Beyond these crude numbers, you don’t know anything about all those positive tests or the processes that generated them at all. It is very hard to figure out, for example, how many of them represent people who tested positive last week, and now have submitted a second test to see if they’ve cleared the virus and can leave their apartment again. Crucial for the interpretation of any such statistics, is to know how many of them emerge from contact-tracing operations, from the kinds of routine tests administered to people like doctors, teachers, and school children; and how many of them reflect actual patients seeking medical treatment. Equally central, if you want to make sense of these numbers, is how many of these people are actually sick, which is another question that many testing regimes leave wholly or mostly unanswered.

Western nations instituted mass testing programs, a universal solution to Universal Covid, after the example of South Korea. In the early days, it was thought that the Koreans had avoided a serious outbreak, without locking down, by testing and tracing everybody. So now we’re doing that too. The theory was that the technocrats would find the positives, shut them away, and allow the rest of us to go about our lives. In practice, it has been pretty much the opposite. Mass testing and tracing, far from replacing mass containment, merely provide the data to justify its enforcement. It is the same with vaccines, now that many regimes are struggling to vaccinate their way out of lockdowns. All that testing and tracing ought to make vaccines less important. Are they not identifying and quarantining the sick? Alas, you can never test and trace your way out of the Universal Covid we have constructed. That would only work for a Local Covid or an Endemic Covid, which we have not built—a Covid that afflicts certain people and not others. So the contact tracers do their thing, but the statistics that their activities generate are used to assess the state of the Covid outbreak for absolutely everybody and general, universal solutions are deployed in response to them. More lockdowns, more vaccines.

The German government is highly federalised, even more so than the United States. Much of the governing actually happens at the level of individual federal states, or Bundesländer. Each of the states could, in theory, manage its own response, according to local circumstances and sensibilities. You’d think this would be an advantage, because the instance of Sars2 infections varies vastly across Germany, and people in different states have different opinions about how to deal with it. If different states had gone their different ways, we would now have very direct insight into the effectiveness of competing containment policies. Of course, nobody in government sees it that way. Instead, Angela Merkel has spent every minute fighting against a federal approach and demanding a unified response. Newspapers have deplored our traditional federalism.

A final expression of Universal Covid lies in the universal mathematical formulae that were once widely held to predict its future progress. In March 2020, the population of the entire world received instruction in the basics of exponential functions. It was thought, as the first wave advanced, that Covid could be plotted on a graph, with time as the x axis and new cases as the y axis. Wherever Covid was spreading, this exercise yielded a curve sloping upwards to the right. Predicting the future course of Covid became a simple matter of plotting that same exponential function into future x-axis time. A lot of commentators, including many scientists, portrayed the resulting projections as mathematical certainties. This was important because raw infection numbers differed everywhere: Lombardy had the worst statistics, and so it was in the lead. Behind it were France and Spain, where Lombardy had been the previous week. Further back was Germany, which needed still three or four more weeks to reach a catastrophe of Lombardic scale. But the math assured all of us that the same thing would happen everywhere, eventually. I will confess that I found all of this powerfully convincing at the time. The flat edifice of Universal Covid seemed to brook no contradictions. But typing it all out now, it is easy to see how foolish it was. Covid did not work the same everywhere, and the curves themselves were never forever and always exponential. Germany never caught up to Lombardy. It never even came close.

Those graphs have receded from our conceptions of Covid. That is not only because they were wrong, but because they ended up drawing attention to how much all of the national outbreaks differed from each other. They were a direct shot across the bow of Universal Covid, and in April and May you could read very long essays by deeply mystified people, pondering how this was possible and what was going on. Many of the authors behind these think pieces were presumably familiar with things like seasonal flu epidemics, which in Europe often differ drastically across regions, even though a similar mixture of flu viruses are typically implicated every season. Influenza, however, isn’t constructed to be a universal affliction, so its various impacts have never bothered anybody.

Covid is a Vice of the Young and the Healthy Against the Old and the Sick

We come to the fourth obtrusive feature of our socially-constructed Covid. By nautical miles, it is the most egregious and appalling one of all, and so I regret that I have the least to say about it. Stupid cruelty does not admit of much analysis.

Sars2 is no threat to the young, we said that already. What is more, disease bureaucracies have not been able to convince the young that they, personally, should worry about Sars2. The only way to enforce the one-size-fits-all measures that Universal Covid demands, is via an ugly moral blackmail.

What began as an appeal in early days to the conscience of the youth, to consider the health of their grandparents, has become an all-out war on everything that young, healthy and fit people do. Here is insight into the withered souls of many scientists and bureaucrats, who see in the casual joy, effortless strength and unthinking beauty of our youth a great indictment of themselves. Many of them have long disliked young people and what they get up to, and now they have been given the power to vent their spleens about it.

The social life of young people irks them most of all. Parties are scorned. Contact tracers routinely identify private celebrations as outbreak epicentres, and from the press reports, you’d think whole districts are rising up in rage against the kids who dared to gather in somebody’s friend’s garage. German police spent a lot of time the past few springs citing teenagers who, after weeks of isolation, dared to get a few beers with friends in the park. It was truly strange to behold: Patrol cars sporting loudspeakers driving slowly along footpaths, between the trees, past benches, reciting the corona distancing rules.

It’s safe to complain about parties, because some people stupidly assume they aren’t essential, or that they’re irresponsible or excessive. But behind the scenes, these ageing meddlers were busy attacking everything else. They have closed gyms for months. When they allowed them to reopen, the conditions were so onerous and counterproductive that it was hard to doubt malicious intent. A whole cloud of official opprobrium descended upon every sort of recreational travel, and remains there. Early disease clusters were traced to skiers, and a batch of young people who’d had the misfortune to visit Ischgl at the wrong time were handed responsibility for several national outbreaks. (Chinese travellers, responsible for the entire European pandemic, remained beyond criticism, even as Italy and Germany had a brief spat over who introduced the virus to whom.) In Bavaria, open-air playgrounds were closed for weeks and weeks, longer than hair salons, in case you thought any of this was about the risk of infection.

When anonymous bureaucrats of this sort are given their way, secure in the knowledge that nobody will hold them accountable for their egregious decisions, and that every mild critique of their policies will be suppressed, they spiral into extremism. In the midst of the lockdown, they began to complain that people were shopping for groceries too frequently and spending too much time in supermarkets. After mask requirements were issued for public transit and indoor spaces, newspapers ran very strange articles lecturing their readers about proper mask procedures. Readers were told never to put on a mask until they’d thoroughly washed and sanitised their hands. Then they were told never to touch the mask again at all. Should they touch it the mask would become hopelessly contaminated, and their hands too, so they'd need to sterilise them all over again and start over with a new mask. Runners and walkers were still allowed outside, for purposes of exercise, and this made the disease bureaucrats very nervous indeed. Pundits complained that parks were too full. Schoolmarms posing as experts began telling runners that their heavy breathing was a danger to everyone within three or four metres of them.

Covid the socially constructed virus-disease exploits the health and beauty of youth to reach the old, but this is not how Sars2 actually works. Sars2 prefers to do most of its killing in institutional settings. It is at base a disease of healthcare institutions, like MERS and SARS; it thrives in nursing homes and in hospital wings. This in Spring 2020 it was ironically the most alarmist regions, those that had imposed the strictest lockdowns nominally for the safety of the elderly, which ended up killing more elderly than anybody else, due to over-hospitalisation, criminal mistreatment of many Sars2 patients and poor, paranoid management of elderly cases.

Undeniably, Sars2—like many other viruses—exploits the social activity of humans. Until now, the Covid bureaucrats have responded with rolling seasonal embargoes on all human social activity that is not mediated by electronics. People who violate these restrictions are behaving irresponsibly and endangering all of society. Consider how much this stance differs from their approach to other viruses. Were gay men, at any point, ever exhorted to abstain from anal sex in the interests of defeating HIV? Was the gay community ever blamed for the AIDS epidemic and scolded by public health bureaucrats for worsening statistics? Were gay bars and bath houses ever targeted for closure or curfews or—imagine!—contact tracing, to flatten the curve? No, they weren’t; and if any of that had happened, we’d be reading to this day what a grave injustice all of it was. HIV is undeniably much harder on those it infects than Sars2, and I submit that, in the hierarchy of human needs, quotidian social interaction ranks well above anal sex.

Some Deconstruction

The question of how we ended up with this miserable social construction of Covid, and not with some other more manageable social construction of Covid, is well worth pondering. The most obvious answer is simply this: Our disease bureaucrats, a bunch of socially promoted charlatans and degree connoisseurs who play scientists on television, got spooked by Sars2. They had a lot of credentials but no real ideas, and so they borrowed their public health response from China.

Before January 2020, lockdowns were totally foreign to the public health establishment. None of our governments or epidemiologists or disease-control agencies had ever before contemplated containing a pandemic by placing everybody under house arrest and freezing the better part of economic and social life. Lockdowns as a measure against Covid are, top to bottom, an invention not of a fabled “scientific consensus,” but of anonymous authoritarian Chinese bureaucrats whose motives and intent are largely opaque to us. Italian disease bureaucrats copied this measure from the Chinese bureaucrats, the rest of our disease bureaucrats copied from the Italians, and since then they have all continued the senseless copying of containment policies among themselves down to this very moment. If you are an incompetent pseudo-intellectual devoid of ideas, following others is your only option; and if you can get everyone else to follow in the same way, you might even escape blame.

Covid, the socially constructed virus-disease, was fashioned in the midst of the lockdowns, to justify them. This scary construct also works well as a justification for coercive, universal vaccination programs, and so it continues to be propagated. It is a monument to the cognitive dissonance of our intelligentsia, who lobbied hard for a catastrophic policy on the strength of dire predictions that, save in a few much publicised cases, were never realised. Almost everything that has become “scientific consensus” about Covid is a retroactive justification of our failed and plainly foolish containment measures: Covid lurks everywhere, and it is invisible, so we must hide from it in our homes. Covid is a totally novel disease, full of indeterminate properties and unknowable risks, so nobody can be exposed. Covid endangers everyone, and so everyone must stay inside. Even if young people are all but invulnerable to Covid, they too must lock down, to save the old. And of course, for all of these reasons, absolutely everyone must be vaccinated—however dangerous the vaccines, however low-risk the person.

That is the simplest, most straightforward answer to the question of how we got this Covid, and not some other Covid. It is equivalent to the wet-market theory of the origins of Sars2. We got Covid from the stupidity and incompetence of our elites, desperate to justify the economic destruction they wrought via their plagiarised containment measures. Relatedly, in the wet-market theory of Sars2, the virus found its way to humans via the unhygienic dietary practices of the Chinese, and was spread everywhere by the unrelenting globalism of our short-sighted elites.

But just as the vastly more plausible theory of Sars2 is that it represents the product of gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, so too there is another, much more compelling way of thinking about the deepest origins of our Covid construct. Cast your mind back to January, as the Chinese implemented their own lockdown of Hubei. Consider those bizarre videos that appeared on social media, showing Covid patients convulsing in streets, collapsing on stairs—succumbing, or so it seemed, to instant viral death. Some of this footage recalled scenes from Hollywood films, particularly Contagion. At the time, the framing was this: The Chinese were keeping a tight lid on the Wuhan outbreak, but here and there the magic of social media could defeat the evil communist censors and provide some glimpse of what was really going on. Clips of Chinese news coverage circulated, where the screen briefly flashed mortality figures orders of magnitude higher than the official numbers. This was the journalists trying to alert the rest of the world, or it was grim reality crying out from the ground, or something. All kinds of strange news items, about mass mobile account cancellations in China and industrial-scale cremation in Wuhan, were put about to show that the Chinese were dying in the millions. Everyone in the world watched blurry video of some Chinese guys welding a door shut. Online news outfits declared that the Chinese were literally sealing people in their apartments. That’s how bad Covid was. In the weeks before conditions deteriorated in Lombardy, a whole host of social media accounts began advocating lockdowns as a western containment measure. It has now emerged that many of these were operated by people in China.

Sophisticated propaganda and disinformation campaigns involve more than Russians buying Facebook ads. One tactic, is to take the idea you want to plant, cut it up into a bunch of different pieces, and release these to the world via various proxies and intermediaries. These little bits and piece might take the form of accidental leaks or hacked data or surreptitious photos or whatever. People gather these pieces and put them together, find that they all contribute to the same, ominous picture, and believe that they have discovered a hidden truth. This gives the lie an organic, authentic feel. It becomes a personal thesis and nobody realises that they have been led down the garden path. All of that early nonsense from China has entirely this feel about it. None of it was true, nobody really knows where it came from, but it all supported the same false hysteria.

So a deeper, more conspiratorial but also more plausible answer to the origins of our socially constructed disease, might be this: Covid is the ideological construct our disease bureaucrats used to justify their failed lockdowns; but at root, this construct was probably not of their making. They merely recycled the selfsame propaganda by which shadowy actors had sold them on lockdowns in the first place. It looks like some people very much wanted western governments to implement lockdowns. This led to a remarkable realignment of opinion, whereby the elite leftist establishment, which had sought to minimise the virus as much as possible, totally reversed their position by early March 2020 and began advocating a maximal approach. The Covid that we have now is all downstream from that, and there is no changing it.

*

How things started, of course, is no indication of how they will end. The optimistic scenario was that the vaccine roll-out in Spring 2021 would defeat Sars2 and that all of this would go away. That was never very plausible, and as it now becomes clear to everyone that the vaccines do not work very well, optimism is no longer on the menu. Perhaps it never was. Covid has given a lot of terrible, petty, mediocre people a great deal of power, and they won’t be willing to give that up, ever, however often they fail.

The most likely scenario, the one which is already playing out, is that Covid devolves into an eternal nuisance after the pattern of climate change, but more intrusive. The vaccines have come, but mass testing and various containment policies remain in place. There will be some attempt to maintain regular boosters, first for the elderly, then for everyone. But this path is one of diminishing returns. Each new round of injections will inspire less compliance, and will also prove less effective.

Over the next several years, most countries will probably fight their disease bureaucrats towards some minimally acceptable long-term compromise. Home office will be normalised. The media hysteria will never totally fade. Full lockdowns, contrary to the interests of many industries, will probably be phased out in the coming years, but in the meantime we will see increasingly inhumane restrictions on the unvaccinated. Other obnoxious interventions will likely return every year in time for Christmas, a holiday that will be increasingly celebrated with a few close relatives, in private. The campaigns against shaking hands, standing too close, or having too many people over for dinner will probably not end for a long time. Contact tracers will come to be loathed as much as city parking enforcers. In the longer run, Covid policy will probably be redirected towards pharmaceutical boondoggles and hygiene legislation that creates markets for a new world of garbage consumer products. The vaccines are probably an early preview of all of the false hope, graft and absurdity the coming world of market solutions will bring. Should Sars2 become especially rare, then other seasonal respiratory illnesses, like the flu, will likely be pressed into service. In many countries, it is likely that a whole generation of kids will grow up wearing crayola-branded dinosaur masks in school.

Still more pessimistic scenarios are possible, but they would probably resolve themselves sooner or later. It is hard to see how any western democracy could endure the economic destruction of biannual lockdowns, or other similarly drastic interventions, for many more years, without destabilising itself politically.

Campaigns to impose regular boosters on entire populations will stir up more and more opposition to mandatory vaccination regimes and, if the gods are merciful, make repression of the unvaccinated increasingly unworkable. We must also remember that the disease bureaucrats are not omnipotent. They have seized power, at first on temporary terms, from other political players, who will sooner or later try to get it back. Intemperate Covid policies have also inspired a wide array of opposition throughout academia and government, even if you don’t always see it. Now that the vaccines have failed and there is no obvious end, it is likely these people will begin to form opposition movements from within bureaucratic ranks. In some countries they might even win, and in the breakdown of international consensus there will be some small hope.

It is probably prudent to start with a clear affirmation that the pandemic is real, that COVID-19 has taken many lives, and that public health measures have been necessary to try to limit the devastation of the disease. No denying here.

But it is also evident that the messaging by health authorities has often been confusing, and that has undermined their own credibility: for example, in the shift from initial advice against wearing masks to the current (if inconsistent) mandate to do so. If the science on a particular question is not fully settled, it might be better for the authorities to be honest about that indeterminacy rather than to lay claim to an infallibility they cannot maintain. That clarity, however, would mean a willingness to trust the public to think on its own and to act in the spirit of individual responsibility, instead of issuing orders and vilifying critics.

Communication concerning COVID-19 was exacerbated in the United States by the context, as the pandemic erupted onto a highly polarized political landscape just prior to a national election. As a result, every coronavirus policy immediately turned into a target of partisan crossfire, whether at the federal, the state, or the local levels. When governors and mayors were caught disobeying their own ordinances, public doubt could only grow. Similarly, the remarks by then vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris that she would not take a vaccine developed under the Trump administration has likely contributed to anti-vax sentiment in minority communities. And the ups and downs of fatality rates under Democratic and Republican governors are given more or less prominence in the press, depending on the partisan orientation of the respective newspaper. No wonder the expectations about objective journalism are so low.

Yet the coronavirus debate is not only an American phenomenon. Overseas, notably in France, the Netherlands, and especially Germany, there have been robust and often polemical debates—although never as clearly party-political as in the United States—concerning the character of the restrictions imposed on society in the name of slowing the spread of the disease or “flattening the curve.” There have been plenty of different strategies, and, in the future, there will be ample room for political scientists, civil rights advocates, and epidemiologists to review data in order to ask which country got it right: too much or too little lockdown of the economy, too severe or insufficient the suspension of education, religious services, or other public gatherings, and so forth. In earlier texts published here, we have seen German philosopher Otfried Höffe prioritize liberty over excessive restrictions, while novelist Thomas Brussig controversially proposed “more dictatorship.” Clearly the pandemic required some policy response, but we are still a long way away from a nonpartisan evaluation of the different sorts of strategies and their effectiveness. That necessary discussion is still pending. We are likely to be able to determine, sometime in the future, that some leaders got it all terribly wrong.

German historian and author Gérard Bökenkamp, in an essay translated here, approaches the problem from a different angle. He sheds important light on what we have been living through, including the heated polemics around coronavirus policies—but he links it all to the phenomena of climate politics as well. Yet instead of asking which policies were effective and which failed, he reflects on a widespread (but surely not uniform) willingness of the public to embrace them. Why has so much of the public willingly submitted to restrictions on their freedoms, and why have they responded with such animated hostility toward the minority of opponents to the coronavirus prevention regime or to climate policies? In other words, his argument is not an attack on the scientific legitimacy of the public health measures adopted, about which he maintains a distanced agnosticism here. Nor does he cast doubt on the claims about climate change. He does not even present an argument about the dramatic power grab by political authorities, their utilization of the crises to introduce new strategies of societal control. Instead Bökenkamp proposes a hypothesis concerning the motivation underlying the willing and often eager public acceptance of restrictive orders: not why this or that policy was right or wrong but why the German public largely acquiesced. What makes obedience so attractive?

Drawing on the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas and the scholar of religions Walter Burkert, Bökenkamp argues that the public’s proactive embrace of the various strictures associated with policies linked to the pandemic (e.g., mandatory social distancing) and climate change (reduced energy consumption) repeats some recognizable patterns that he associates with certain religious phenomena. These include expectations of sacrifice, in the form of self-denial or self-punishment; the prioritizing of moralistic arguments (pandemic or floods as punishments for wrongful behavior); rhetorics of denunciation targeting heretics (anti-vaxxers and climate deniers); and the emergence of prominent figures who, in Bökenkamp’s view, play the roles of saints or priests. The participation in coronavirus and climate policies, he argues, involves the repetition of atavistic behavior patterns otherwise familiar from traditional religions but now, in a largely secular society, played out under the aegis of scientific authority. Hence his suggestion that science has been operating as a substitute religion.

Bökenkamp provides a convincing description of the phenomena, the rapid willingness of much of the public to accept limitations on their exercise of freedoms previously assumed to be unquestionable. Presumably some of this participation might, of course, be reasonably attributed to the assumed credibility of science: rightly or wrongly, the public “believes” in science. Some of it might also be explained in terms of an inclination to obedience, in the sense of a noncontroversial willingness to respect the law, whatever it is. With those alternative explanations in mind, one can ask whether Bökenkamp’s insistence on an analogy between aspects of public behavior and anthropological aspects of religion is credible and whether it suffices to prove that a religious substance is at play.

There are no doubt some apparent similarities between, on the one hand, public behavior facing the crises, COVID and climate, and, on the other, aspects of traditional religion—sacrifice, guilt, and the denunciation of heretics are Bökenkamp’s main points. Yet other parts of religion, perhaps the most vital parts, seem to be absent: the centrality of numinous or holy experiences, the role of miracles (which would of course be at odds with the priority of science), and the absence of any possibility of transcendence. The simulacrum of religion at stake in the embrace of crisis politics is at best an impoverished religion or the eviscerated substitute for religion in a largely secular culture. With that limitation, Bökenkamp is surely on to something important.

In any case, Bökenkamp does describe convincingly the emergence of a repressive conformism, legitimated in the name of public health crises—whether or not one can describe this adequately as a form of religion is almost secondary. While his examples draw on the specific German example, the account rings true for the United States as well, where, however, the twin crises of COVID and climate have been compounded by the cultural moment around BLM and the emergence of cancel culture censorship. Actually Bökenkamp’s religion thesis might find supporting evidence in parts of the American experience, especially the pseudo-religious liturgical moments: the taking the knee ritual at athletic events and the insistence on reciting the names of the dead. Germany and other European countries also have had their versions of American neo-anti-racism, but it was rarely as overwrought as in the United States, from which ultimately it was imported. (Indeed the dissemination of this American discourse can be viewed as a new form of American soft power in the present, even as it purports to be critical of the U.S. past.) Whatever the particular religious dimension of this current development—and this depends a lot on how one evaluates religion as such—Bökenkamp is certainly right to point out this new wave of repressive conformism as a culturally distinct event, with transatlantic common denominators despite some specific national distinctions.

The net effect of these three arenas—public health responses to the pandemic, new regulations associated with global warming, and the various formulations of cancel culture—has been an acceleration of the management of public opinion: from above, through media and employer mandates, and from below, through social pressure, including threats of violence. How so? In the end, we are facing greater monitoring of mobility in the interest of contact tracing, heightened security at various buildings (greater frequency of the need to swipe into buildings that were previously open to the public), a generalized kind of biopolitical surveillance through extensive testing, social ostracism directed at dissenters, and especially the pervasive prospect of censorship on social media. Merely by calling out censorship or doubting the infallibility of government scientists, this text may by endangered. Read it while you can.

How to explain this transformation? The space of unmonitored freedom has been reduced considerably. Yet the public responds with a gleeful renunciation of its previous lifestyle, a willingness to accept policing (even as police forces are to be defunded!), and a particular fanaticism in the denunciation of heterodox viewpoints. We have long ago lost the expectation of a space of public debate in which one could claim to disagree with an opponent on the basis of reason and evidence: at stake now is the vilification of antagonists in order to silence them. Voltaire’s promise to defend the right of one’s opponent to speak has been abandoned.

The steps taken to respond to real crises, like the pandemic, are increasingly a matter of prohibitions and mandates, with little value placed on individual responsibility. That distinction however may help understand what is going on. Modern societies are undergoing a quantum leap increase in social control. Bökenkamp’s concluding explanation—leaving the religion question aside—is alarmingly credible. We have been living in societies with deficient social cohesion. The social-political disciplining that ensued from the Cold War ended decades ago. Traditional cultural ties that can bind and that may have existed in the past are gone, and this structural disruption has surely been amplified by the experiences of globalization, as well as the protest against it, populism. The new forms of social control, legitimated by pandemic and climate change, should be understood as a response to that instability: manage opinion and monitor behavior in order to limit dissent. Meanwhile the new technologies and their transformation of the public sphere provide the infrastructure for surveillance and censorship. The social system has been able to take advantage of the genuine challenges to public health, whether from the virus or from climate change, in order to impose a new regime of control. The crises have been turned into opportunities that are not going to be wasted. Welcome to the new panopticon.

The following essay first appeared in Achgut.com on September 18, 2021, and appears here with the permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.

From the very start of the pandemic, corona and climate change have always been mentioned in the same breath. Indeed, the parallels are unmistakable. In both cases it is a matter of invisible threats from natural phenomena. In both cases, the discussion is shaped by scientists with data and modelings that are difficult to follow, as they demonstrate the need to limit personal freedoms. In both cases, large parts of the population submit to these prohibitions and limitations on freedom. In both cases, we have seen radical movements emerge, like Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and Zero-Covid, that demand even more extreme measures, reminiscent of charismatic conversion cults and chiliastic sects. In both cases, “deniers” and “skeptics” are denounced as dangers who stand in the way of preventing a catastrophe. After the COVID lockdown, a climate lockdown will take place, with the one transitioning into the other seamlessly.

Niklas Luhmann distinguished between system and environment. The social system “society” only includes what is communicated inside the social system. “Climate” and “corona” are in themselves not part of society, but the communication about them certainly is. The manner in which they are discussed tells us as much about the society that addresses them as do the communications concerning natural phenomena. The communication about climate and corona displays religious elements. In the climate and corona politics we find four classical figures from the history of religion:

• moral guilt
• religious sacrifice
• the distinction between pure and impure
• divine revelation

Corona and Climate Change in the Service of Morality

Corona and climate have found such a strong resonance because they fill the vacuum that classical religions have left behind. The Bible already named catastrophes and plagues as punishments for moral failings, most prominently the ten plagues that God imposed on the Egyptians to punish them for enslaving the Israelites. This ancient narrative has lost none of its epic strength. When the rivers in the Rhineland overflow their banks or the pandemic infection numbers rise, the explanation is sought in moral failings

Inattention to the wearing of the obligatory mask or not maintaining social distancing, as well as unnecessary long-distance air travel for recreation and leisure or excessive electricity consumption, or in general our “false living” in the West—it is all wrong because of the inherent enjoyment of life, the “materialism” and the consumption that characterize it. In addition, there is heresy, the falling off from the “true belief” by “skeptics and “deniers,” who undermine the grand moral purification through their doubts. For this we are punished by God, i.e., in the pantheistic understanding of our time, by “nature,” that sends us viruses and diseases, floods and droughts.

Because corona and climate are treated as divine punishments for sin, these problems cannot be approached pragmatically or practically. It is pointless to try to avoid corona fatalities or to avert the climate catastrophe without simultaneously extirpating the “sin.” Morality is not at the service of the fight against corona and climate change, but on the contrary, corona and climate change serve morality. Pragmatic initiatives, such as protecting at-risk groups with tests in nursing homes or the expansion of a carbon credit system or the development of nuclear energy might reduce the fatalities and carbon dioxide emissions; but they do not contribute to reaching the real goal: the moral purification of society—and for this reason, such practical steps are largely ignored in Germany.

Simple Solutions are Immoral

Obligatory masks outdoors, the speed limit on the Autobahn, and the surfeit of prohibitions and climate regulations are, in comparison, relatively ineffective, but they serve the genuine purpose: forcing the individual to repent. To put it bluntly: simple solutions are immoral solutions. For a solution to be regarded as a moral one, every individual must bear a burden and participate in the suffering. The only possible rescue from certain destruction—so that we do not face divine punishment, as did Sodom and Gomorrah, and that we are not forced into the long march through the wilderness of the desert, as were the people of Israel after the dance around golden calf—the only path is submission to the societal injunction, the subordination of individual desires and needs to the interest of the community, the path of renunciation and repentance.

The politicians’ call for willing sacrifice, exertion, denial, and subordination falls on psychologically fertile ground in the face of the catastrophe. For there is a universal phenomenon of humans who, in the face of a threat, respond by imposing limitations on themselves and inflicting themselves with pain. This ritualized masochism can take various forms: the flagellation processions of the Middle Ages in response to the Black Plague or the so-called finger sacrifices, in which people underwent amputations to ward off catastrophe. To use a mask to deny oneself fresh air outside, to avoid human contact, and to put oneself under house arrest, cut off from social life—these all meet the criteria of a religious sacrifice.

The Same Behavioral Patterns as Our Ancestors

The positive response to the lockdown in large parts of the populations is indicative of the fact that in our secular, post-heroic society there is an unfulfilled desire to offer sacrifices because sacrifice is simultaneously a form of self-exaltation and revaluation. This primitive religious-psychological mechanism is operating in Western societies. No matter how we try to convince ourselves that our civilization rests on the rational foundation of the Enlightenment, the political practice and social behavior of broad sectors of our society prove otherwise. We are caught up in the same atavistic behavioral patterns as our ancestors; we have just given them a somewhat different form.

The scholar of religions Walter Burkert even claims that the widespread character of these rituals of penitence plausibly points to a sociobiological basis. Humans have an inner need for renunciation, limitation, and self-punishment, all the way to physical and psychic mutilation, that becomes active when we face danger, be it real or invented. The corona restrictions and climate politics are not supported by such a majority of the population despite their limitations on normal life but rather precisely because they do limit it. They thereby satisfy the deep-seated spiritual need for “sacrifice,” “repentance” and “submission.”

Absolute, No Longer Questionable Truths

These genuine causes of the catastrophes, the moral failings and the transgressions against divine commandments, are, as Burkert puts it, apprehended by the “knowing” mediators with a transcendent diagnosis. They in turn provide the rationale for the religious rituals. These “knowing mediators” are, for example, saints, prophets, and priests. We find these archetypical figures again today. There is the “pure virgin” in the form of the saintly Greta Thunberg; the world-renouncing ascetic Karl Lauterbach; and the priesthood represented by Christian Drosten and Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber.[1] Instead of appealing to divine revelation, they invoke science, which however practically fulfills the same function. Franz Werfel’s novel about the prophet Jeremiah bears the title Hearken Unto the Voice.[2] For Greta Thunberg this turns into “listen to the science.” The religious echoes are evident.

That science today is viewed as the source for the justification of existing morality and not as a tool for the pursuit of disinterested knowledge is shown by the fact that its results are only widely accepted when they legitimate existing political and moral convictions, not however when they call them into question. When Thilo Sarrazin, for example, based his theses on the hereditability of intelligence on current scientific research—even submitting it for review by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which in turn confirmed that he had described the science correctly—he could not have his claims accepted; on the contrary, the science was called into question.[3] “Science” will always be invoked as an authority when its results support the hegemonic discourse, not however when it challenges it.

Politics and the public do not expect “science” to provide new knowledge nor to examine existing assumptions—and certainly not to overturn them—but rather to confirm existing views and norms. The “scientist” in the corona and climate crises is not playing the role of a researcher, reporting results in a value-free manner, following Hume’s dictum that the ought should not be derived from the is, i.e., that ethical norms should not be derived from scientific knowledge. Instead the “scientist” has become the herald, the warner, and the voice of conscience, that is, those functions that in another age were carried out by priests. “Science” in the Western world has become a substitute religion. Climate and corona models, as the ultimate justification for the rules of social order, lay claim to the role of divine revelation, the source of absolute, unquestionable truths.

Dividing the World into Pure and Impure

In addition to the search for “moral guilt” and religious sacrifice, climate and corona politics include a third universal psychological mechanism, the separation between “pure” and “impure.” In 1966, the British anthroplogist Mary Douglas (1921–2007) published her famous book Purity and Danger. Douglas believes that the “imaginations of separation, cleaning, limiting and punishing transgressions had the function above all of systematizing an un-ordered experience.” The separation of the world into pure and impure produces order in a disordered world. It is typical that this separation of pure and impure refers to invisible dangers. The threat comes from an imperceptible world that reaches into the world of visible phenomena.

The parallels to the predominant corona and climate angst are clear. Both COVID-19 and CO2 are invisible phenomena, associated with the ideas of pollution and contamination. In place of spirits and demons, we now have viruses and greenhouse gases. As in archaic societies, the answer involves purification rituals for the whole society. The separation of the vaccinated from the unvaccinated is a matter of separating the pure from the impure. The same holds for the differentiation between the “clean energy” of the wind and the sun and, on the other hand, fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Similarly vegan diets, separating types of trash, disinfections, and masks all belong to today’s omnipresent purification rituals.

The corona crisis and climate change are enabling new forms of social disciplining and the imposition of the priorities of the collective over and against the individual, including ostracism, exclusion, punishment, and the marginalization of all those who resist this social disciplining. Western societies are no longer held together through kinship relationships as in traditional tribal societies, nor are they based on coherence via the identification with an ethnic-national collective. The legitimacy of social rules no longer involves reference to a classic religion. Corona and climate policy together represent the ambitious effort to provide the de-nationalized and increasingly atomistic global society with a new goal, direction, and order on the basis of an expectation of salvation and apocalyptic versions of the end of times, all with a pseudoscientific grounding.

Notes

1) Greta Thunberg is the Swedish environmentalist activist, born 2003, who has been especially influential in Germany through the “Fridays for Future” movement. Karl Lauterbach, since 2005 a member of the Bundestag from the Social Democratic Party, is an epidemiologist who often advocated against loosening the steps taken to prevent the spread of the pandemic. Christian Drosten is a prominent German virologist whom the Guardian called Germany’s “face of the coronavirus crisis.” Hans-Joachim Schnellnhuber, a German climatologist, is the former chair of the German Advisory Council on Global Change.

2) Franz Werfel was an Austrian novelist, born 1890 in Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and died in exile, in 1945 in Beverly Hills. Höret die Stimme or Jeremias appeared in 1937.

3) Thilo Sarrazin is a German politician, formerly a member of the Social Democratic Party and until 2010 a member of the Executive Board of the Bundesbank, became a controversial figure with the publication of his book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Abolishes Itself), critical of immigration policies and multiculturalism.

Excerpt from the book Jason Louv. "John Dee and the Empire of Angels. Enochian Magic and Occult Roots of Modern World." Rochester; Toronto: Inner Traditions, 2018.

As of the twenty-first century, Drake’s Bay lies thirty miles northwest of the hyperreal technological mecca of San Francisco, California, a short drive across the Golden Gate Bridge through the low, mist-covered hills and forest of Marin County. The bay stretches along eight miles of coast, and centers at Drake’s Beach, a small cove that looks out onto the Pacific, surrounded by sandstone hills and ice plant.

Here, in 1579, a privateer named Francis Drake landed after circumnavigating the tip of South America in a clandestine mission, proving that it could be done for the first time. He named the coast he had alighted upon Nova Albion. The man who had masterminded Drake’s mission was John Dee.

While Dee’s previous work had been theoretical, in the 1570s he involved himself in Elizabeth’s geopolitical planning, laying the ideological framework for building a new world empire. This empire—which would spread the new ideals of the Reformation and lead to the birth of America—would soon grow to compete with the Spanish Catholic efforts at colonization. It was to be a cold war for a New World.

An omen of this war came seven years earlier, in 1572, when a new star appeared in the heavens, remaining visible night and day for seventeen months—we now designate it SN 1572, a Type Ia supernova that occurred in the constellation Cassiopeia.1 Dee, who rushed to make observational measurements of the supernova, thought that it confirmed that the final restoration of the world—the eschaton—was at hand.2 The astronomer, alchemist, and astrologer Tycho Brahe, for whom the supernova is now named, believed that it was the first new star to appear in the sky since the birth of Christ. Five years later, in 1577, a great comet arrived above England, also observed by Brahe—confirming for the populace that the end of the world was nigh, fears upon which Dee was called to consult by Elizabeth.3

Indeed, it was the end of the world. By Dee’s time, Luther’s Reformation had initiated sea changes in Europe that broke a centuries-long status quo. Inheriting a tiny and vulnerable country, Elizabeth had pursued a strategy of avoiding war with the Catholic powers. To do so, she had kept France and Spain out of conflict by offering to increase support for whatever country was threatened by the other; both religion and Elizabeth’s own marital status were drawn into this delicate political maneuvering. Yet the gambit could only last so long before war did break out, dragging England into the fray.4 Concurrently, the Netherlands had erupted into open revolt against the Roman Catholic King Philip II of Spain, which would result in the formation of the Protestant Dutch Republic by 1581.

England was also economically insecure, besieged by desperation, homelessness, and plague. As England still grew its own food, it was vulnerable to famine if a wheat crop failed. Although the country’s food supply never ran out, famines would later make the 1580s and ’90s miserable for many, with the poorest potentially resorting to eating bark and grass; French peasants from the same time period are recorded as feeding on unripe grain, roots, and the intestines and blood left over from animals slaughtered for those that could afford them.5 One of the primary reasons for England’s failing economy was the massive amount of silver that Spain was extracting from its New World colonies, massively tipping the balance of economic power toward Spain. By contrast, England relied on textile exports, the manufacture of which had kept its population employed, and Continental demand was now minimal, leaving much of the country out of work. Trade with Russia, the Mediterranean, and Guinea had brought in some funds, but the real prize would be wresting at least partial control of the New World from Spain.6

Fig. 1. Francis Drake. Portrait by Crispijn van de Passe the Elder, 1598.

It is in this context that Dee gave the world the concept of a “British Empire,” a phrase he coined. After Columbus’s discovery of the New World, Pope Alexander VI had divided the Americas between Portugal and Spain in the Treaty of Tordesillas, handing them dominion over the Atlantic. Dee, with his back pocket full of superior knowledge of geography, navigation, and optics, would soon suggest Elizabeth contest this, and expand into the New World not just to rival Catholic domination, but for economic growth. Dee’s knowledge of optics, as well as the geographic and cartographic information he had absorbed under Mercator and his other mentors, at a time when accurate cartographic information was largely confined to the Continent, made him invaluable in not only conceptualizing but actualizing this plan. Yet for Dee himself, exploration of the New World had little to do with mercantile or even political goals. His fascination with imperialism pertained more to his occult calculations. It was clear to Dee, if no one else, that America had been colonized by King Arthur—even that still-existing Arthurian colonies might be found in the Northwest Passage. If this was the case, England had just as much spiritual claim to America as Rome did.7

The Muscovy Company, however, was already engaged in making real profits from trading with the tsar in Russia, and wasn’t seeking to take further risks on exploring west. Martin Frobisher got Elizabeth to lean on the company, and they in turn granted Frobisher a license with the proviso that he accept a company man, Michael Lok, as his treasurer. Dee was brought in to minimize risk by examining the plans for the voyage and imparting his knowledge of geometry, cosmography, and navigational instruments to the expedition leaders; Dee had spent fifteen years planning logistics for just such a voyage.8 Lok quickly warmed to Dee after realizing Dee wasn’t interested in competing with him. Since Lok had outfitted the expedition with expensive new navigational technology, he also had to make sure that Dee explained to his men how to use it without breaking it. Two ships were next commissioned—the Gabriel and Michael, named after the archangels that Dee would later record extensive traffic with during the angelic conversations.

Despite mishaps along the way, the Michael being forced back to port, and the near loss of the Gabriel (it was only heroics by Frobisher himself that saved the ship, nearly killing him) the voyage found land—the cyclopean ice walls of what Frobisher called Meta Incognita, the Unknown Limit, which we now know as Baffin Island in Canada. While exploring the coastline, Frobisher’s expedition came into conflict with Inuits, capturing and marooning one individual on a rock. An exploratory mission of Frobisher’s men went missing shortly thereafter. After taking an Inuit as a hostage with a boat hook, Frobisher abandoned hope for the return of his men and reversed course to England. The Inuit captive would be recorded as an object of great wonder and fascination for the English, before vanishing into the annals of history and a probably unpleasant fate.9

Fig. 2. Later map of Meta Incognita by Sir Robert Dudley and Antonio Francesco Lucini, c. 1647.

Even more interesting to the Crown was a sample of black ore that Frobisher had found in Meta Incognita, and that English alchemists claimed to have found gold in. For Dee, this discovery validated that the 1572 supernova foretold the discovery of the philosopher’s stone. For the English government, it was a galvanizing reason to return to Meta Incognita for more, under the cover of secrecy, to avoid claim jumping. Funding was no longer an issue—even the cash-poor Dee, seeing the potential for return, invested £25 (about £6,000 or $7,700 in 2017 terms).10

A crew of 140 was raised, including several prisoners who were to again board the Michael and Gabriel, along with a third ship entitled the Aid, and then to be left in the New World to try and win the “good will” of the locals, in much the same way that America and Australia would later be colonized. After six weeks, the expedition reached what is now known as Frobisher’s Strait and moored in what they named Jackman’s Sound, which Frobisher claimed for England in the country’s first act of colonial conquest of the New World. Setting out to search for more of the gold ore, the crew found nothing but a dead narwhal, which they called a “sea unicorn.” Immediately thereafter, the sailors found more of the black ore, which they began loading into the ship, all while fighting off violent attacks from the now-incensed Inuits.11

In all, Frobisher hauled over 140 tons of the ore back to England, presenting news of his find to Elizabeth, along with the narwhal’s horn. The ore was put under lock, key, and security detail, and tests on it commenced, whereupon only minute quantities of gold and silver were extracted, to Frobisher’s dismay.12

Despite the low yield of precious metals, a third voyage was sent back to Canada to claim what profits could still be salvaged. The crew returned with 1,150 tons, but by this time Lok’s Cathay Company was severely over budget; as a result of the expeditions, Lok declared bankruptcy and was thrown into debtor’s prison. After countless salvage attempts, the final extracted yield from the black ore was one single pinhead of silver.13

To Dee, however, the political value of the English voyages to Newfoundland and Baffin Island was immense—and not only because they were gathering data in the search for the Northwest Passage.14 In November 1577, Dee presented a new imperial plan to Elizabeth, suggesting that England wrest control of the New World from Spain—General and Rare Memorials, a set of documents laying out plans and technical guidelines for a new era of English colonization.

The Memorials continued the occult inquiry Dee began in the Propaedeumata aphoristica and Monas hieroglyphica; as with those books, Dee thought the Memorials divinely inspired (also by the angel Michael, in the case of the Monas). For Dee, the Memorials were a revelation from the angels, divine guidance on the creating of a British Empire, through a Royal Navy that would hold the world in its sway.15

In the text, Dee argued that Britain had the greatest need of any country for a continually operational navy, and that it also had the world’s greatest supply of timber, shipbuilders, willing volunteers for shipyard labor and staffing ships, and even suitable harbors. Establishing such a navy would make Britain nigh-on invincible (it did), and expansion of the British Navy and colonization of the New World not only had historical precedent but would surely raise vast riches for the Crown (it did).16 Such a plan would establish Elizabeth as the world ruler before the end times arrived; the money raised for the naval effort, Dee later added, could also be used to help build a new alchemical institute to produce the philosopher’s stone—the final perfection of which would reestablish the empire in full.17 In his partially lost 1577 manuscript “Famous and Rich Discoveries,” Dee speaks of how he would ascend above the heavens, to look down upon the earth and divine the Northwest Passage.

The cover of the Memorials depicts Elizabeth helming a ship representing British imperialism, with the angel Michael flying before her with sword and shield in hand and the Tetragrammaton above her, the ship being drawn forth by “Lady Occasion” toward freshly conquered territories. Following this are several pages rebuking Dee’s reputation as a sorcerer—Murphyn and Prestall’s attacks had been so successful that Dee was forced to address their slander upfront.

The four volumes of Dee’s imperial magnum opus were as follows:

1. General and Rare Memorials, completed and still extant. This addressed raising funds for and constructing a Petty Navy Royal of sixty 120-ton to 200-ton “tall ships” and twenty small warships weighing between twenty and fifty tons each, staffed by 6,600 well-paid men, the funds to be raised through taxation, as the wealth gained by imperial expansion would trickle down to the English people. This navy, Dee thought, would be the “Master Key” that would solidify English dominance, a “war machine”10 to guard England against its enemies. Although Dee was not originally concerned with state affairs, court politics would later force Dee to rewrite the Memorials to encourage the support of Holland and Zealand. The combination of the Dutch and English militaries would solidify control over the Narrow Seas in the wake of Spain’s withdrawal from the Low Countries. Also disgusted by the state of the Thames (upon which Mortlake was situated), Dee added an ecological broadside against the improper use of nets to fish the river.18

   

   Fig. 3. Cover of Dee’s General and Rare Memorials, 1577.

2. A set of navigational tables, calculated using Dee’s paradoxical compass, which would have been larger than the English Bible. This was unpublished and is presumed lost. (Dee’s paradoxical compass could have been used along with these tables to keep navigation precise; unfortunately, the newly drafted sailors found it too complex, and resisted training in its use.)19

3. A volume so secret that Dee stated it “should be utterly suppressed or delivered to Vulcan’s custody” (i.e., burned).20 Also lost, this manuscript may well have dealt with angelic magic or other occult or astrological calculations relating to imperial expansion. It may also have had to do with Rome or the Spanish, which would have necessitated even greater secrecy than occult material.

4. Of Famous and Rich Discoveries, which survived, albeit in a partly fire-destroyed form. Here Dee set forth the case for English expansion and territorial claims, and suggested exploratory voyages.21

Following the exploration of Newfoundland, Dee became concerned with discovering if America was a separate continent from Asia. Abraham Ortelius had suggested that a “Strait of Anian” connected the Northwest Passage to the Pacific; however, North America was suspected to be so large that anybody who tried to discover this passage by entering Newfoundland where Frobisher had and continuing to sail west would run out of supplies and freeze to death long before hitting the Pacific. Yet if one were to sail south, rounding the tip of South America, conditions would be far more favorable to continued sailing, and an expedition could look for the outlet of the Northwest Passage on the other side of North America. In the pages of Of Famous and Rich Discoveries, Dee made a compelling case that England should do exactly that.22

To undertake this perilous voyage, Dee and Elizabeth looked to an unlikely candidate: the privateer and slave trader Francis Drake. Drake undertook the mission between 1577 and 1580, taking a fleet of six ships, including his own Pelican. The voyage was beset by storms, loss of personnel, mutiny, and ship rot—by the time Drake reached the Pacific, only the Pelican remained, which he rechristened the Golden Hind. Drake proceeded up the coast of South America, attacking Spanish settlements and capturing ships as he went, looting treasure, wine, and maps in the process. Had Drake been commanding an official English fleet, this would have been an act of war, but his privateer status lent England plausible deniability, making Drake’s raids a form of naval black ops. In June 1579, he landed at what is now called Drake’s Bay, north of San Francisco, before reversing course, and returning to England by way of the Cape of Good Hope and the Sierra Leone. Upon his arrival, the logs of the expedition, and therefore the route Drake had discovered, were immediately ordered classified.23 Drake returned to England a celebrity, and was knighted soon thereafter.

As soon as Drake returned, plans for another voyage began to coalesce. In September 1580, Humphrey Gilbert and Dee drew up a plan that, should Gilbert gain control of the northern New World, Dee would receive everything above the fiftieth parallel—granting him Alaska and the majority of Canada.24 Two years later, Dee still suspected that a Northwest Passage existed across the top of North America, and drew a map for Gilbert depicting it, in which he placed the West Coast of North America only 140 degrees west of England.25

Meanwhile, on February 5, 1578, Dee had married Jane Fromoundes. Supported by Elizabeth, he had proposed only a few months after the death of his first wife, Kathryn Constable, in March 1575. Jane was a member of court, a gentlewoman servant to Lady Katherine Howard, Elizabeth’s best friend. Fromoundes’s Catholic family hardly approved of the “arch-conjuror”; her father, Bartholomew Fromoundes, died of a stroke the day after John and Jane Dee’s son Arthur was born.26 Dee may have had one eye on securing a better position for himself by marrying into court. Unfortunately, to Dee’s lifelong disadvantage, there was no patronage for scientists during Elizabeth’s reign—unlike the Continent—explaining Dee’s quest for patronage abroad. The best Dee could hope for in England was an academic or Church position, and even these he was regularly frustrated in attaining.27

In the meantime, sectarian conflict was only intensifying. Over the previous decade, the Protestant Low Countries had exploded into open revolt against Spain’s Catholic rule, which would soon result in the formation of an independent Dutch Republic, and suggest strategic alliances with England. This added to the backdrop of war between the Protestant and Catholic spheres. Dee was soon called upon to defend Elizabeth from Catholic magical attack yet again, when wax images of Elizabeth and members of the Privy Council were discovered in a dunghill—as the dunghill melted the wax, by the logic of sympathetic magic, so would Elizabeth and her council come to harm.

Though the Council was as alarmed by Dee’s countermagic as they were by the original sorceric attack, Dee found himself well positioned: Dudley needed him to dig up as much evidence as possible on Catholic magical attacks, as this would assist Dudley against his Catholic rivals at court. Those captured thanks to Dee’s detections were held and tortured.28 Among those arrested on Dee’s cue was John Prestall, who was tied to a suspected Catholic conspiracy to magically attack the queen. Elizabeth was indeed ailing, but the cause was probably poor dental hygiene, not the occult. Prestall—whom Dee may have had arrested at least partially out of desire for revenge—was tortured for over a month, but no information on any conspiracy was forthcoming. The Council subsequently fetched Prestall’s cosaboteur Vincent Murphyn for interrogation.29

While Dee was sent to seek a cure for Elizabeth’s ailment from the German alchemist Leonhard Thurneysser, Dudley whipped up a propaganda war against Catholic sorcery, which could be lurking around any corner. But Dee and Dudley’s occult pogrom collapsed when it was revealed that the magician Thomas Elkes had made the wax dolls as part of a love spell for a client. Dee was revealed to have been wrong the entire time.30

After long decades of theoretical work, Dee was now turning his attention to actual operative magic—he had embarked on a series of alchemical experiments with an assistant named Roger Cook, as well as attempts at angelic contact with Humphrey Gilbert’s brother Adrian.31 The court, perhaps impressed with any magic Dee had performed to alleviate perceived attacks against the queen, also furnished Dee with a new scryer, Bartholomew Hickman.32

In the meantime, Dee’s enemies were plotting their revenge against the “arch-conjuror.” Prestall was now locked in the Tower under a death sentence, where he would stay until 1588; this left Murphyn to counteraccuse Dee of being a Catholic conspirator who was himself working magic against the queen. Dee’s occult experiments at Mortlake would furnish Murphyn with new ammunition. Dee sued in response.33

So alarmed was Elizabeth with Dee’s absence from court that on September 17, 1580, she traveled to Mortlake to roust him from his studies herself, riding by coach and appearing in his garden; as Dee recorded in his diary, “She beckoned her hand for me. I came to her coach side: she very speedily pulled off her glove and gave me her hand to kiss: and to be short, willed me to resort to her Court.”34 Two weeks later, Dee arrived at court to hand deliver a new manuscript, the Brytanici imperii limites or “Limits of the British Empire.”

Addressed solely to Elizabeth and her Privy Council, the Limits sought to establish a spiritual mandate not only for giving Elizabeth control of both the Low Countries and America, but for establishing her as the sovereign of a new global order. Dee now privately elaborated the occult and esoteric dimensions of the Memorials that he had wisely withheld from the general public.35 Just as he believed the Memorials to have been divinely inspired by angels, Dee thought he had been moved to write the Limits by the Holy Trinity itself. The same angelic idea that had inspired him, he believed, had inspired Edgar I’s naval expansion in the tenth century.36

Dee argued that during his reign King Arthur had held dominion not only of America, but of thirty countries.37 If this was indeed the case, then England had at least as much of a spiritual claim to world power as Rome, and all Elizabeth had to do was assume his mantle and become the Arthurian world empress. Even Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, whose court circle Dee had connections with during his time at Louvain, had long seen Arthur as the model on which the future world ruler would be based. After the Dutch Revolt, it was hoped that Elizabeth would claim Dutch sovereignty—and that she, and not a Habsburg, would become the Arthurian world emperor, uniting the globe under the banner of a reformed Christendom.38

Mercator himself had written to Dee that King Arthur had sent an expedition of four thousand men into the seas near the North Pole, and that some of the members of the team had survived, with their descendants appearing at court in Norway in 1364. Also of interest was the Welsh legend of Madoc, a prince who supposedly explored the New World in 1170; Dee not only feverishly sought to discover evidence of Madoc’s existence in Spanish records of America, but believed that he was descended from the prince. Claims by Dee that Arthur had ruled over “Hollandia” only added to the case for Elizabeth becoming the world emperor of Christendom. Maps drawn up by Dee on the foundation of the Arthurian claim to the New World sprawled from Florida to Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean.39

Save the Arthurian angle, this was not a new idea—the hope for a last world emperor had long been part of Catholic eschatology, with the long-expected monarch reestablishing a new Roman Empire with dominion over the entire globe, as a bulwark against the Antichrist. This final emperor had been predicted in the widely known seventh-century Syriac text Apocalypse by Pseudo-Methodius, a product of Eastern Christianity, which prophesied that Christendom would be savaged by Muslim invaders as God’s retribution for widespread sexual licentiousness, including homosexuality and even transgenderism. This onslaught would be overcome by the final Roman emperor, who would push back the forces of the Antichrist to come, who would be born in the village of Chorazin.*11

An earlier individual who had connected this apocalyptic prophecy with European exploration of the New World was none other than Christopher Columbus. After the completion of his voyages, Columbus composed a religious text entitled El libro de las profecias, the “Book of Prophecies,” which suggested (following Joachim of Fiore) that four critical events were necessary to prompting the Second Coming. These were the Christianization of the planet, the discovery of the physical Garden of Eden, a final Crusade to recover Jerusalem from Islam, and, ultimately, the election of a last world emperor to ensure the crushing of Islam, the retaking of the Holy Land, and the return of Christ to the world.40

While Columbus had held out for Ferdinand and Isabella to assume this world emperor role, Dee’s plan marked a radical departure by suggesting that the world emperor should be Protestant, not Catholic—Elizabeth. Where the Catholic and Protestant vanguards of exploration differed was not in their goals, but in jockeying for control. As a result, Dee set to work building a case for Elizabeth-as-emperor, using the Arthurian claim to the New World.

Dee was further encouraged in his belief that Elizabeth should assume world power by Trithemius,41 whose De septem secundeis concerns itself not with terrestrial empires but rather with the course of history. For Trithemius, history was ruled by seven angels corresponding to the seven planets, each of which held regency over a period of 354 years and 4 months, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation. Trithemius’s scheme held a deep appeal for Dee, who nevertheless recalculated the senior initiate’s math, assigning the Elizabethan period to the angel Anael, Venus, on account of the great number of female leaders in Europe, as well as the 1572 supernova. And though Elizabeth’s regency was currently guaranteed by the angel of Venus, a shift to the age of Jupiter was imminent. Dee felt it his sacred duty to initiate British expansion before Jupiter arrived and the window passed.42

Like Dee’s later Monas, De septem secundeis had been addressed to the Holy Roman emperor—in this case Maximilian I, not II; Trithemius’s introduction to the work suggests that he was delivering it to the emperor not as his own work but as an emissary of a body of initiates who concurred that, indeed, seven spirits corresponding to the seven planets, proceeding from the first Intellect, ruled the world in successive periods. This concept was not unique to Trithemius—some early Gnostics held to a doctrine of seven Archons, or evil “rulers” of reality, who were arguably related to the seven planets.[43][43] In the nineteenth century, the dispensationalist evangelical John Nelson Darby would propose that there were seven distinct periods or dispensations of world history, beginning with the Fall and culminating with the Second Coming, a belief system now adhered to by the majority of American evangelical Christians.

Just as with the similar Hindu system of Yugas,44 Trithemius’s scheme outlines rising and falling curves in the quality of the overall consciousness in humanity, with debased periods marked by witchcraft, the worship of multiple gods, and even the worship of princes and rulers as gods. The great drama of history, for Trithemius, hinges on celestial events as well as terrestrial political shifts, with comets and other events in the skies marking the progress of history—like (as Dee did not fail to note) the supernova of 1572 and the Great Comet of 1577.

Remarkably, De septem secundeis, composed in 1508, predicts “the institution of some new Religion,” that “a strong sect of Religion shall arise, and be the overthrow of the Ancient Religion. It’s to be feared least the fourth beast lose one head.”45 The fourth beast is the fourth beast of Apocalypse from Daniel, a world kingdom that devours the earth. As Trithemius was writing the Septem, Martin Luther had only just been ordained a priest. It was not until 1517 that he would post the Ninety-Five Theses and spark the Reformation. Even if Trithemius was extrapolating future events from pre-Luther European sentiment, his prescience was outstanding. And thanks to Dee, a world kingdom was indeed about to arise to devour the world.

If Dee’s calculations were correct—and Elizabeth had both a legal mandate for imperialism, following Arthur, and an astrological one, following Trithemius—then this opened the way for the true apocalyptic goal of establishing an evangelical British Empire: converting the entire world to Christianity, and thereby assuring that the souls of the world’s inhabitants were accounted for prior to the Second Coming. While the new empire would be a Protestant one, Dee was not exclusively Protestant in his imperial scheme, suggesting that Elizabeth convert the American Indians partly to Protestantism, partly to Catholicism. The idea that Elizabeth would convert the world to Christianity and lead it into the eschaton as its reigning sovereign was not unique to Dee; it was broadly circulating in English society at this time, with the end of the world predicted for 1588 by the author and translator James Sandford.46

As payment for his intellectual contribution, Dee requested free reign in the dominions under Elizabeth’s absolute protection, to fulfill unspoken services for the empire—not for Elizabeth, but under the direction of God himself.47 This would have meant the expansion (or recovery) of the now-named British Empire, including America. Dee’s use of the term British Empire long predated the use of the word British to mean the British Isles; it referred instead to Arthur’s legendary Britain, reaching to North America.48

Though Dee’s occult expansionism captivated the Privy Council, including Dudley and Philip Sidney, Cecil was underwhelmed. Despite the grandiose patriotism of Dee’s plan, Cecil scoffed at Dee’s claims of Elizabeth’s Arthurian genealogy, and, most of all, the foreign policy disaster that overtly pushing Elizabeth as the world sovereign would create. Part of the reason Cecil may have soured on Dee was that shortly before their meeting he had entertained Vincent Murphyn, and heard the cunning man’s concocted story of Dee’s Catholic plotting. Whether he believed Murphyn or not, enough of a germ of suspicion was raised that Cecil decided he was unable to take even the slightest security risk. Patiently sitting through Dee’s arguments, Cecil grew irritated and finally stonewalled Dee altogether.49

Dee, now fifty-three, had offered up the fruit of his youth and of his Great Work; the Memorials and Limits had been the culminating achievement of his laborious studies, his burning patriotism, his far travels, and even the tortures he had endured for staying loyal to England. He had given everything to advance the cause of his country. Despite little to no recognition or recompense, Dee had continued toiling in Elizabeth’s service for decades, producing the imperial plan that would save his nation from poverty and conquest, for which Dee regarded himself a “Christian Aristotle.”50 Yet the response from Elizabeth’s court in general, and Cecil in particular, had been to say “thank you very much,” take his work, and show him the door. Dee must have been heartbroken.

Returning to Mortlake in defeat, Dee found his mother seriously ill. She died soon thereafter, compounding the sorrow of one of Dee’s darkest hours. Elizabeth visited him personally the same day to console him, telling him that all was not lost, and that she would study his plan in greater detail—even that Cecil had been impressed by his historical reasoning. Cecil later sent Dee a joint of venison—small payment for the gift of an empire. Yet no reversal of Cecil’s (apparent) decision to shut Dee and his plan out would be forthcoming, and Dee, who shrank in fear from Cecil, would find himself progressively estranged from court. Shifting European politics would make Dee’s apocalyptic imperial thinking less relevant, and further voyages to the New World would fail to turn up any evidence of Arthurian settlements, undermining Dee’s claims. In the midst of this, Murphyn attacked Dee yet again, although Dee now had an ally in Elizabeth, as Murphyn was later brought up on charges for slandering the queen.

While Dee himself was shut out of Elizabethan geopolitical strategizing, his plan itself would soon be enacted. England would develop great naval might, take the New World, triumph over the Spanish, and establish a British Empire. But Dee, the initiating magus, would enjoy no part of it, not even as a commercial partner; Dee’s place in the “Fellowship of New Navigations Atlantical and Septentional” would be taken by the younger Sir Walter Raleigh.51 History itself would forget Dee’s role in establishing the empire, passing over his legacy in favor of that of Richard Hakluyt, Francis Drake, and Raleigh—despite the fact that Dee was far more central to planning.52 Dee’s contribution was providing the justification and story behind why expansion was important, christening the nascent British Empire and giving his child a life script and ideology.53

In time, this single idea of a British Empire, dreamed up by an eccentric English academic—or given to him by the archangel Michael, as Dee believed—would come to dominate the planet. Following World War I, the “Empire on which the sun never sets” claimed over 458 million subjects, somewhere between one-fifth and one-fourth of the world’s population,54 and covered a full fourth of the land on Earth as well as most of the world’s oceans.55 What had once been a tiny nation that would today be considered developing—wracked by poverty, hunger, religious terrorism, and fearful superstition—now dwarfed the achievements of Alexander, Caesar, or the Khans. During its time, the empire controlled Canada, the eastern colonies in America, parts of the Indies and British Guiana, a large swathe of Africa, much of the Middle East including Palestine and Iraq, India, Burma, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Antarctica, and many more territories around the world.

If we are to consider the American empire to be the logical successor of the British one, to which global power was transferred when its progenitor began to collapse due to financial overextension, then we must also hold John Dee as the great-grandparent of the modern world. This Anglo-American world order is ruled not by a single world sovereign but by a bureaucratic centralization of power, united not under the banner of Protestantism but under that of its crowned and conquering child, the single world religion of global capitalism, yet with the exact same Protestant eschatology operating in the background.

And if all of this can be said to stem from revelations given to Dee by Michael, it fires the imagination to consider that the Islamic world stems from the utterance of Michael’s companion Gabriel, who gave Muhammad the Quran, and would also be present at Dee’s later angelic conversations. It is also Gabriel who told Mary of the coming birth of Christ. Angels guided Abraham and were present at the delivery of the Law to Moses, creating Judaism; Michael is said to safeguard the state of Israel. Yet if all of these things were indeed created by the same beings, why do they consistently come into conflict with each other?

If geopolitics are a “grand chessboard,”56 as former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously said, then the players are the angels, and they play multiple sides. God works, we are told, in mysterious ways, though God’s workers should look to store up for themselves “treasures in heaven,”57 rather than this world, if Dee’s payment with a single haunch of meat is any indicator.

Can all of this be said to serve a greater good? It depends on whether one accepts a teleological view of history. If, like Teilhard de Chardin or John Dee, you believe that time is moving toward an Omega Point or eschaton—the Second Coming of Christ—it all comes into focus.58 After all, the angels who exiled mankind east of Eden also, through the British occupation of Palestine, laid the groundwork for the modern state of Israel east of the Mediterranean, upon which both Judaic and evangelical Christian eschatology, and the final redemption of mankind, thereby hangs.

As to the empire itself—how to even begin assessing the effects of Dee’s creation on the world?

The archly conservative English historian Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was the best of all possible empires; it was considered a leading light in the world, the “global policeman” before America inherited the mantle, and by comparison, its rival empires—the French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, and others—were even more monstrous. Indeed, Ferguson argues, the British Empire was a liberal one, built on the principles of Edmund Burke, with occupied territories expected to come to self-governance.59

But the empire was not without its atrocities. Among them were the ongoing rape of India under the Raj and tens of millions of continual starvation deaths, including the 1760s Bengal famine in which one-third of the Bengali population died (with some victims resorting to cannibalism) while England grew fat on the spoils,60 and the nineteenth-century policies that resulted in the hunger deaths of twenty-nine million Indians.61 There were the massacres of the indigenous peoples of the Americas by British colonists, including the use of smallpox blankets as biological warfare during the Siege of Fort Pitt—an estimated two to eighteen million Native Americans died during European colonization of North America, in part thanks to English settlers.62 In the Oceania region, Tasmanians and Australian aborigines were genocided by the English en masse.

Then there was the role of the slave trade in building the empire—until the 1807 British abolition of slavery, the English transported over 3.5 million Africans to the Americas to be used in forced labor, one-third of the total transatlantic slave traffic.63 Once colonies were established, British efforts toward crushing rebellions were severe, as in the Sudan, Ceylon (where 1 percent of the population was killed in a single retribution), Jamaica, Burma, the detainment of almost the entire Kenyan population in camps (in which thousands were beaten to death or died from disease, including almost all of the children),64 South Africa (where one-sixth of the Boer population died in English concentration camps, primarily children), Afghanistan, and Iraq.

These are, of course, only some of the crimes we know about. Many of the archived records detailing the abuses committed during the final years of the empire were intentionally and illegally destroyed by the Foreign Office before they could be moved into the public domain, allegedly including records of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents; the massacre of unarmed Malayan villagers by the Scots Guard; records of a secret torture center in Aden, Yemen; and all of the sensitive records pertaining to British Guiana.65 While the empire spread across the globe, racism, cruelty, and genocide followed in its shadow.

Perhaps the nineteenth-century British politician Lord Salisbury summarized the empire best when he quipped, “If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British Empire would not have been made.”66

[43]: #0xx0oA “On the Origin of the World, Nag Hammadi Codex 2, 5, in Barnstone and Meyer, The Gnostic Bible, 416–37."

As the pandemic rolled into its second year, I became concerned that the psychosocial fallout of the pandemic, and especially the response at the global and local levels, could represent an existential threat to permaculture and kindred movements. At one level, this threat is the same as that to families, workplaces, networks and organisations more generally, where a sense of urgency to implement the official response, especially lockdowns and mass vaccination, is producing a huge gulf between an ever more certain majority and a smaller minority questioning or challenging the official response.

My aim in this essay is to focus on the critical importance of using all our physical, emotional and intellectual resources towards maintaining connections across what could be a widening gulf of frustration and distrust within our movement, reflecting society at large. I want to explore how permaculture ethics and design principles can help us empathetically bridge that gulf without needing to censor our truth or simply avoid the issues.

While the pandemic and the responses to it will pass in time, I believe the future will be characterised by similar issues that test our ability to tolerate uncertainty and diversity and to thus exercise solidarity within kin, collegiate and network communities of practise.

International Permaculture Day May 2013 Daylesford Community Garden

Future Scenarios and the Brown Tech future

The positive grounded thinking that characterises permaculture has always been informed by a dark view of the state of the world and long-term emerging threats. Future Scenarios is my 2008 exploration of four near-future ‘energy descent’ scenarios driven by the variable rates of oil and resource depletion on the one hand and rate of onset of serious climate change on the other. Six years later, I wrote the essay ‘Crash on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future’ where I ‘called’ Brown Tech as being the already emergent scenario.

In the longer version of this ‘Pandemic brooding’ essay, I review and reinterpret this work in light of the pandemic and responses to it.

Permaculture pluralism

Anyone involved in permaculture knows that permies can come to quite different conclusions about what is the most ethical and practical solution to the same problem. For example faced with marauding wildlife, some will go to considerable expense (and resource consumption) building elaborate fences, anti-aviaries and other deterrents to separate wildlife from food. Others will treat the wildlife as another abundance of the system to be harvested. Various permaculture principles, as well as the fundamental ethic of Care of Earth, might be invoked to support both approaches.

Likewise, many permies believe taxation is essential to redistribute resources from places of abundance to those of scarcity and as an expression of solidarity essential to any functioning, let alone ethical, society. Others see almost all the expenditure by governments of tax revenues as representing rape of Mother Earth’s abundance and theft from Indigenous peoples, and further as either downright evil or at best a bandaid covering festering wounds. An ethical response is to minimise taxpaying (by reducing income and consumption). Again, design principles and ethics can be invoked to support either position.

From my perspective, grappling with the ethical and systemic issue is more important than the notion that there might be a correct answer, and therefore a wrong answer, to the challenge. In the past, there have been heated debates, and agreements to disagree, but rarely would participants in permaculture design courses, convergences or networks see the answers of others as reasons to reject permaculture. Many celebrate personal actions as small-scale experiments with their good, bad and interesting outcomes informing other experiments, especially the next generation’s, as we muddle through energy descent to hopefully more benign, or at least less-bad, futures.

Pandemic flavoured Brown Tech

I believe the pandemic and the responses to it represent a major turning point in crystalising the Brown Tech future. It ticks so many boxes:

• a nature-driven crisis which has been long predicted, and to some extent, planned for
• rolling uncertainty that progressively breaks down past expectations
• a crisis which, like a war, requires the suspension of normal economic activity, personal rights and governance processes
• a demand for strong action by government for the common good informed by science
• a revival of Keynesian policies including a massive increase in government debt
• an enemy (the virus) that can be easily demonised without there being too many defenders to ignore or silence
• strong censorship of broadcast media and novel efforts to censor social media to sideline debate that could undermine the rapidly emergent and evolving program.

If the crisis is not solved, then demonisation progressively shifts to those resisting the plan.

This situation is creating the fork in the road where some permies will find themselves (perhaps surprisingly) following the program, while others will have become certain that they will at least quietly resist complying to some degree or other, right up to a radicalised public resistance, whether that be through resigning from work, street protest or satirical art.

We can learn and gain, individually and collectively, from these increasingly divergent paths – but the learnings could be painful. Let’s consider the benefits that might have led permies down one or another path, perhaps unwittingly, to increasingly polarised positions.

The mainstream plan

Although there are differences of emphasis and policies around the government responses to the pandemic, these debates are around the margins, even if they are at times heated. Most fundamentally, the mainstream plan, informed by the scientific and medical establishment, takes the following as self-evident:

• The virus is an existential threat to society that must be contained and disarmed if not eliminated before an establishment of some hoped-for, tolerable new normal.
• Social distancing, disinfectant cleaning, testing, contact tracing, masks and various levels of quarantine, border controls and lockdowns are the only mechanisms available to prevent collapse of the health system and deaths escalating to horrific levels in the short term.
• Novel vaccine technology is the only real hope for a tolerable new normal.
• To achieve effective herd immunity and minimise death, some great majority of the adult population and probably children need to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
• The adverse effects of these provisionally approved vaccines are minor and/or rare and much less than the risk of the disease.
• Preventative and early treatments are at best of marginal value, or more likely based on false hope and fraud.
• The suspension of normal civil liberties is a necessary, albeit temporary, measure to achieve the plan in a timely fashion and reduce the suffering both from the virus and the plan itself.
• People who actively resist the plan need stronger social, economic and, where necessary, legal sanctions to ensure their actions don’t prevent the plan from working for the common good.
• Apart from debate around the margins about how best to respond to these givens, debate and questioning at the level of science, logistics, economics, law, politics, media and social media is not just unnecessary, but an existential threat to the plan and society at large, so must be prevented by unprecedented means.
• It is the responsibility of every citizen to play a part in the plan, be bold in convincing those who are hesitant, and challenging those not following the plan, especially those actively resisting it.

Permies following the plan are likely to see themselves as being part of a society-wide collective effort to minimise pain and suffering in the aged, the disadvantaged and those in poor health; a choice in favour of collective and longer-term gain at the cost of individual and short-term sacrifice. For many of us, this is a perfect metaphor for what is needed to address the climate emergency. By accepting what appears to be a broad consensus of global, national and local medical and scientific experts, we avoid the protracted debate and lack of a technical consensus that has stymied governments in initiating strong action to address the climate emergency.

For permies in despair about the waste and dysfunction of the consumer economy, the closure, albeit temporary, of many discretionary services and businesses is a taste for how we might need to decide what is important; maximum consumer choice for the affluent versus the provision of basic needs for all. The personal sacrifice and adaptation to difficulties, including stay-at-home lockdown, have been opportunities to focus more on the important things in life and get a taste of what social solidarity feels like.

Reports of contrarian views seem to mostly come from sources contaminated by association with climate denial and other views we categorically reject. The resisters’ outrage looks to many like just more selfish, science denying and ignorant right-wing rednecks, trying to prevent collective wisdom and social solidarity from working. Familiar powerful bad players in global corporations or nation states have been replaced by much more immediate angry undesirables, who without much power or vision, could wreck the hard work of the collective to create a workable new normal.

The dissident view

It is more difficult to generalise about those who question or reject the program. A great diversity of views, explanations, feelings and actions flourish in an environment of unprecedented censorship. While there is great sensitivity about the term ‘censorship’, let alone ‘propaganda’ by those supporting the plan, for those on the other side, it is astonishing how rapidly the axe has fallen on enquiry, and debate, in the mainstream media, social media, workplaces and families, let alone in defence of what – until very recently – most of us took as our inalienable rights.

For many permies, the pandemic seems another example of hyped threat like the ‘war on weeds’, ‘war on drugs’, ‘war on terror’ used to manipulate the population to comply with some version of disaster capitalist1Disaster capitalism feeds off natural (climate change) and other disasters to provide recovery and reconstruction services funded by the public that typically benefit the corporate providers and contribute to ongoing dependencies. The term was used by Naomi Klein to describe the evolution of late stage capitalism over recent decades. solutions. Most sceptics acknowledge the virus as real, but not as dangerous as the cure in lockdowns and other draconian measures. The ‘war on the virus’ seems just as futile or misguided as all the other wars on nature, substances and concepts. So much for trying to have nuanced discussions about viruses as an essential and largely symbiotic mechanism for the exchange of genetic material and mediation of evolution!

While the closure and loss of cafés, gyms and hairdressers might not be a great loss, except to those directly affected, many of us have noticed that the official response to the pandemic tends to follow a pattern of support and strengthening of dominant corporations while leading to the weakening and likely collapse of small business and community self-organised activities.

During the first lockdown, ‘stay at home in your household’ was celebrated as a great plus for people getting the RetroSuburbia message. More recently, the messaging about the problem of shared and multi-generation households being suspect has been building, especially in the working-class western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne where many of essential and less well paid workers live. We have shifted from a joke about ‘which permie created the pandemic?’ to a gritted teeth recognition that the response to the pandemic is working to vacuum people into another level of dependence on techno-industrial systems.

Many permies have taken advantage of the shift online to network more effectively around the country and the world, but we are deeply troubled by our increasing dependence on mediated experiences and what seems like draconian regulation of informal engagement with people and nature. The concerns for what this is doing to children are far more serious than the loss of the regulated version of social interaction that children get at school.

For many of us, it is completely natural to be sceptical about one big fast answer provided by the giants of the pharma industry, while they have been granted legal immunity for the consequences of their novel products. Many have made the rational assessment that the very low risks of the virus (for most of us at least) seem better than the unknown of a novel technology approved and pushed on a frustrated and frightened population in record time. Some in this camp were sceptical about vaccines in general but most have been influenced by the largely censored views from some leading global experts, that these vaccines are in a totally different risk category to all previous vaccines.

While waiting and seeing what happens next may look selfish to the majority, the difficulty in getting access to data and unbiased interpretation drives many to rely on their gut feelings. One or more examples of spin and manipulation of data by officials, and especially the media, leads to a general collapse in trust about any, and even all, aspects of the official story. For instance:

• Many of us have seen evidence that existing low cost and low risk treatments are available and used effectively in some countries resisting the ‘no available treatment’ orthodoxy.
• Most understand that while the vaccines seemed to give some protection from more severe effects at least in the early stages, they do not appear to stop transmission, at least of the latest variant.
• Many wonder why the build-up of natural immunity from prior exposure to the virus is not considered as part of the solution that should at least be discussed before vaccine passports are implemented.

Concerns about more serious adverse effects of the vaccines, as predicted by some experts, have developed into alarm, anger and resistance as both the evidence increases and efforts at cover up and spin become worse. Extreme consequences that many of us dismissed early on as highly unlikely are now showing up in hard-to-read scientific papers, clinical reports and official records and databases.

A similar process has happened with the official responses. For example vaccine passports are now widely discussed and debated as part of the attempt to get as many people vaccinated as possible, as the efficacy of vaccines falls and concerns about adverse effects lock in resistance by a minority. At the start of the pandemic this possibility was decried as paranoid conspiracy theory.

France has been leading the charge to impose vaccine passports for many public and work spaces including hospitals. It’s hard to assess how large the resistance will be in different countries and circumstances but there are already signs that whole industries will lose a significant part of their workforce as some substantial minority of the population withdraw their work, consumption and investment in the system rather than getting the vaccine. Whether by design, policy stupidity or the unexplained viral power of censored scientists and vaccine doubters to overcome the largest public health education/public relations/propaganda effort in history, it is conceivable that the result could be economic contraction on a much larger scale than has occurred as a result of lockdowns so far.2 I can’t help but see what is unfolding as a bizarre version of my ‘Crash on Demand’ scenario

Economic contraction could mostly be in the discretionary economy, but how would the health system cope with a loss of staff, especially if some combination of ineffective vaccines against new strains and antibody-enhanced disease lead to medically informed people losing faith before the general public? Part of the solution might be doctors and nurses from overseas,3In the week since I wrote this sentence, doctors from overseas are now part of the plan for Australia or the adoption of treatment options for Covid currently being used with success in countries like Mexico and India.

Australia and New Zealand seem to be something of a test bed for the most authoritarian regulations in an attempt to keep Covid as close to zero as possible (and failing). Large numbers of people in other countries see us as a police state and wonder why there hasn’t been more resistance Down Under.

Some of us have noted plans promoted by the World Economic Forum for a Global Reset that will require a command economy to respond to the climate emergency, and that the pandemic is an opportunity to implement some of the structures and processes needed to create what some fear is a global new world order.

For many people, the trajectory from trust to mistrust often leads to either deep depression or an energised anger, mostly focused on the authorities but often expressed to friends and family at great cost to all concerned.

Although I have some of those thoughts and feelings, I mostly feel a great tension between a deep and somewhat detached fascination with the big picture and the sense of urgency I habitually feel in spring to get fully cranking with the seasonal garden and generally keeping our home at Melliodora shipshape. I feel like I finally have a box seat to watch the train of techno-industrial civilization hitting the Limits to Growth stone wall and breaking apart, all in slow motion.

The rapidly evolving situation and all its psychological, sociological and economic dimensions suggest an expanding field of possibilities. These could include:

• a cyber pandemic that crashes the global financial system,
• a short war between China and the USA4Part of my ‘A History from the Future’ story happening in 2022
• rapid reduction in consumption of oil and other critical resources and consequently greenhouse gas emissions as a result of the virus,
• plus of course accelerating climate disasters.

In different scenarios, concern about the virus and the ability to implement the plan could become ever more intense, or alternatively, be shunted offstage or metastasised into dealing with the next crisis. Consequently, the details of what worked, what didn’t, who takes the credit and who gets the blame, would probably all be lost in the swirling muddy waters of compounding crises.

A personal view of the pandemic

Up until this point, I have not indicated my personal interpretation of either the virus or the response because I wanted to focus on the bigger systemic drivers without getting muddied in the good/bad, right/wrong, us/them polarities. However we all have to face what life throws in our path with whatever internal and collective resources we have at hand. As is my lifelong habit, I have done my own ‘due diligence’ to understand and guide my personal decisions. In the past I have always been open about my conclusions and decisions, whether around the campfire or on the most public of forums. I have often joked about the comfort I feel in being a dissident about most things including being beaten up at primary school in the early days of the Vietnam war for being a ‘commie traitor’ to being ostracised in the 1990s for opposing the ‘war on weeds’ orthodoxy of the environmental mainstream. But today being a dissident is no joking matter. Unfortunately the psychosocial environment has now become so toxic that the pressures to self-censor have become much more complex and powerful. Much more is at stake than personal emotions, ego, reputation or opportunities and penalties.

Following my instinct for transparency, I will state my position, which has been evolving since I first started to consider whether the novel virus in Wuhan might lead to a repeat of the 1919 flu pandemic or even something on the scale of the Black Death. I can summarise my current position and beliefs as follows:

• The virus is real, novel and kills mostly aged, ill and obese people with symptoms both similar to and different from related corona viruses.
• It most likely is a result of ‘Gain of Function’ research at Wuhan Institute of Virology in China supported by funding from the US government.
• Escape rather than release was the more likely start of the pandemic.
• Vaccines in use in western world countries are based on novel technology developed over many years, but without resulting in effective or safe vaccines previously.
• The fear about the virus generated by the official response and media propaganda is out of proportion to the impact of the disease.
• Effective treatment protocols for Covid-19 exist and if those are implemented early in the disease, then hospitalisation and deaths can be greatly reduced, as achieved in some countries that faced severe impacts (especially Mexico and India).
• The socioeconomic and psychosocial impacts of the response will cause more deaths than the virus has so far, especially in poor countries.
• The efficacy of vaccines is falling while reported adverse effects are now much greater proportionally than for previous vaccines.
• The under-reporting of adverse events is also much higher than for previous vaccines, although this is still an open question.
• The possibility of antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) leading to higher morbidity and death in the future is a serious concern and could be unfolding already in countries such as Israel where early and high rates of vaccination have occurred.

Given the toxic nature of views already expressed about (and by) people I know and respect, I am not going to engage in an extensive collating of evidence, referencing who I think are reliable experts and intermediaries who can interpret the virus, the vaccine or any of the related parts of the puzzle. Outsourcing personal responsibility for due diligence to authorities is a risky strategy at the best of times; in times of challenge and rapid change the risks escalate. I do not want to convince anyone to not have the vaccine, but I do want to provide solidarity with those struggling (often alone and isolated) to find answers, so the following are two starting points that I think could be helpful:

• For those trying to understand the vaccines, their efficacy and risks, ‘This interview could save your life: a conversation with Dr Peter McCulloch’ provides a good overview with full reference to official data, scientific papers and clinical experience.
• For those focused on treatment options, the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCA) physicians are a good source on this rapidly emerging field of clinical practise.

As a healthy 66-year-old I am not personally afraid of the virus, but if greater virulence and death rate do emerge with new variants, I might consider the preventative regimen recommended by the FLCCA doctors. There is no way I will be getting any of the current vaccines in the foreseeable future, no matter what the sanctions and demonisation of my position on this matter.

At this point there may be readers who decide to ignore anything and everything I have written as obviously deluded. These are the costs of transparency.

Valuing the Marginal

Tolerance, let alone celebration of diversity, is not the easy permaculture principle many of us assume. Valuing the marginal can be even harder, especially if we study the darker periods of human history.

Over most of history, minority ethnicities and subcultures lived in ambiguous complementarity with dominant majorities. For hundreds, if not a thousand, years my Jewish ancestors made valuable contributions to European culture while managing to maintain their own culture to an extraordinary extent. They lived in ghettos not just for protection from the eruptions of intolerance in the dominant Christian communities but to ensure their language and culture wasn’t swamped by that of the majority. While the Jews carried the elitist belief that they were God’s Chosen People, they didn’t attempt to gain converts and were naturally respectful to the majority Christians. They survived through all but the worst of antisemitic pogroms by not antagonising the majority, largely accepting the restrictions placed on them by society. What else could they do?

Similar dynamics could emerge from the virus and the vaccine, where a subculture of home birth, home education, home food production and alternative health brings together people of previously diverse subcultures, including permies, who are excluded from society. That exclusion will seem self-inflicted to the majority, but for those excluded it will feel critical to both survival and identity.

Is it sensible to plead for tolerance in line with sensitivities to the rights of other minorities? Or is that just an invitation to be stoned to death, if not literally then virtually, on social media?

Unfortunately one of the weaknesses of western culture, which shows up in both Christian and Muslim traditions, is the idea that if a particular path is the correct one, then everyone should follow it. From the perspective of east Asian philosophy and many Indigenous traditions, harmonious balance is more important than the right way. The yin yang symbol showing each polarity containing the seed of its opposite encapsulates this critically important antidote to the recurring western theme about the triumph of good over evil. In The Patterning Instinct Jeremy Lent explores how these different world views have shaped history and that any emergent ecological world view will foreground the importance of harmonious balance.

The wisdom of the collective

I want to lead by example in trying to understand and articulate why it is good that the majority of the population appears to be strongly behind the official plan and that maybe it is even good that a majority of my permaculture colleagues might be lining up to get vaccinated, when I have no intention of doing so.

Firstly, I acknowledge the obvious reason that if the official story is right, the majority getting vaccinated will combine with naturally acquired immunity and control the worst effects of the virus without the need to get every last dissenter vaccinated.

Secondly, given the pressure to push the vaccination rate in every way possible, encouraging some extra hesitators to resist will only increase the pressure and possibly lead to harsher sanctions as well as more broken family relationships, reputations, pain and suffering, which could be worse than potential adverse effects of the virus, or the vaccine, on those people.

Thirdly, because so many people I respect as intelligent and ethical are following the plan, I won’t fall into the trap of losing respect for who they are, what they have done and what else they might do in the future. And if it turns out this is the start of a more permanent hard fascist command state, then we need people of good values on the inside to keep open whatever channels of communication remain possible.

As systems unravel, the stories that make sense of the world also fall apart and in the desperate search for mental lifeboats, different stories come to the fore. The mainstream story around the pandemic is one such mental lifeboat that allows people to maintain faith and function. Without the renewed source of faith and order from rational science guiding technological wizardry, the psychosocial shock from a pandemic could be enough to create social, economic and political chaos on a historically unprecedented scale, at least in long-affluent countries like Australia.

Whatever the nature of the next crisis, I think it will require citizens to by and large accept that the behaviours, rights and freedoms we took for granted are artifacts of a vanishing world. Further, it will provide a harsh reality check on how dependent most of us are on systems we have no control over, so most will find they have little choice but to accept the new state of affairs.

While I might resent what I see as unnecessary sanctions on those resisting, I accept than in the early stage of Brown Tech energy descent, harsh and by some perspectives, arbitrary, controls on behaviour will be part of our reality and are arguably necessary to maintain some sort of social order (even if short-sighted or not sustainable in the long run). My aim is to focus on how we ameliorate the adverse effects of a predicament that humanity cannot escape.

More philosophically, the virus and the response to it could be seen as a meditation practise showing us how no one is an island separated from the whole of life. To break down the toxic notion that we are free agents to do as we choose without consideration of consequences, especially for future generations and the wider community of life, is something permaculture teaching has tried to bring to daily life. How we do this in meaningful ways is a constant challenge.

Sympathy for the devil

Having at least had a go at seeing the good in the mainstream plan, I now want to articulate quite passionately why the majority should at least tolerate and not seek to further punish the minority for their resistance. To advocate for this within the permaculture movement, I appeal to our pluralism in celebrating the diversity of action. This is especially where permies take the risk of being the unvaccinated guinea pigs, who can at least be a control group in this grand experiment on the human family. Beyond that, I hope our colleagues inside the tent will see the need to express solidarity with our right to chart our own course and not feel they have to be silent for fear of being cast out of the tent.

While I respect the younger permaculture folk following the plan for the common good, I still believe the most creative deep adaptations to the Brown Tech world will be crafted at the geographic and conceptual fringes by younger risk takers coming together in new communities of hope. While the paths to the armoured centre and the feral fringes both have their risks, those on the inside, especially older people, should accept that the young risk takers on the fringes might create pathways though the evolutionary bottleneck of energy descent more effectively than the best resourced and rationally devised plans from within the system of thinking that has created the civilisation crises.

Whether or not the pandemic will lead to the flowering of creative light-footed models for adaptation, the larger energy descent crisis for which permaculture was originally designed (that most permies recognise as the ‘Climate Emergency’) needs these responses at the margins. If the permaculture movement cannot digest this basic truth and at least defend the right of people to craft their own pathways in response to collapse of all certainties, then our movement will have failed the first great test of its relevance in a world of energy descent.

Some permie dissidents will double down in their focus on preparation to survive and thrive in spite of the sanctions, while others will be energised by non-violent direct action to resist what they see as draconian and counterproductive collective punishment. In doing so they may draw on past experience, or inspiration, from the frontlines of anti-war, environmental defence and free communication resistance.

In the past, more apolitical permies trying to introduce permaculture to socially conservative punters could still acknowledge, at least privately, the element of truth in the quip ‘permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening’. In today’s climate, can permies inside the tent accept and appreciate their colleagues on the frontlines of a new resistance movement that might moderate the extremes of how society navigates the larger climate emergency? Or will they flip and decide permaculture was, after all, mostly hippy nonsense now further contaminated with toxic right wing conspiracy madness, so must be dumped as unfit for purpose in our new world?

In saying this, I’m not suggesting we should all follow suit, let alone belittle or demonise those who don’t take the walk on the wild side. That would also be a contradiction of permaculture ethics and design principles. As we have always taught, ethics and design principles are universal but rarely lead to clear and conclusive solutions. Strategies and techniques vary with the context; wonderful elegant design solutions for one context can be hopeless white elephants, or worse, in another. Context is everything and as colleague Dan Palmer has so effectively applied in his Living Design Process, the people context is as complex, subtle and diverse as that of the land and nature.

The sovereignty of persons to choose freely how they grapple with the tension between autonomy and the needs of the commonwealth is not just an ideal from western Enlightenment civilisation working out how to apply the gift of fossil fuel wealth. It is a fundamental expression of how the ecology of context is constantly shifting, and that all systems simultaneously express life through bottom-up autonomy of action and top-down guidance of collective wisdom.

In times of great stability, the distilled wisdom of the collective, embodied in institutions, carries human culture for the long run. Sometimes the sanctions on the individuals who rejected the rules of the collective were harsh and, according to modern thinking, arbitrary but over long periods of relative stability, those rules kept society working. In times of challenge and change it is, ironically, dissidents at the fringes who salvage and conserve some of the truths of the dying culture into the unknown future to craft new patterns of recombinant culture.

What we call ‘science’ had its origins in what Pythagoras salvaged, almost single handedly, from the decadent and corrupt theocracies of ancient Egypt of which he was an initiate, before he walked away from the centre to the margins of civilisation. Major failures in the application of so-called trusted science have been a feature of our lived experience. Tragically, science could be one of the casualties as humanity passes through the cultural evolution bottleneck of climate chaos and energy descent. Permaculture was one attempt to craft a holistic applied design science grounded in observation and interaction, taking personal responsibility and accepting (negative) feedback, designing from patterns to details, and creatively using and responding to change. I still believe that salvaged and retrofitted versions of practical science crafted at the margins will serve humanity better than rigid faith in the priests of arcane specialised knowledge maintained by an empire of extraction and exploitation. Can we be sure what the father of science and mathematics would do in this time of turmoil?

Whatever the historical significance of these times, maintaining connections across differences of understanding and action within permaculture and kindred networks will strengthen us all in dealing with the unfolding challenges and opportunities of the energy descent future.

David Holmgren
Melliodora
September 2021

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. (Lev Tolstoy, "War and Peace")

Excuse me if I return to the Afghanistan story. I don't claim to be an expert in international politics, but if what happened is the result of the actions of "experts", then it is safe to say that it is better to ignore them and look for our own explanations.

So, I proposed an interpretation of the Afghan disaster in a recent post of mine, together with a report on the story of how the oil reserves of the region of the Caspian Sea were enormously overestimated starting with the 1980s. Some people understood my views as meaning that I proposed that crude oil was the cause of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. No, I didn't mean that. Not any more than the story of the "butterfly effect" means that a butterfly can actually cause a hurricane -- of course it would make no sense.

What I am saying is a completely different concept: a butterfly (or dreams of immense oil reserves) are just triggers for events that have a certain potential to happen. Take a temperature difference between the water surface and the air and a hurricane can happen: it is a thermodynamic potential. Take a military industry that makes money on war, and a war can take place: it is a financial potential. A hurricane and a military lobby are not so different in terms of being complex adaptive systems.

So, let me summarize my opinion on the Afghanistan conflict. I think that these 20 years of madness have been the result of a meme gone viral in the mid-1980s that triggered an event that happened because there were the conditions to make it happen: the invasion of Afghanistan.

It all started in the mid-1980s, when an American geologist, Harry Cook, came back from Kazakhstan with a wildly exaggerated estimate of the oil reserves of the Caspian area. He probably understood the uncertainty of his numbers, but statistical thinking is not a characteristic of American politicians. Cook's numbers were taken at face value and further inflated to give rise to the "New Saudi Arabia" meme: resources so abundant that they would have led to a new era of oil prosperity. At this point, the question became about how to get the (hypothetical) Caspian bonanza.

Even before the presence of these reserves was proven (or disproved), in the mid-1990s negotiations started for a pipeline going from the oil fields of Kazakhstan to the Indian Ocean, going through Afghanistan. That involved negotiating with the Taleban and with a Saudi Arabian oil tycoon named Osama Bin Laden. Something went wrong and the negotiations collapsed in 1998. Then, there came the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan. It was only in the mid-2000s that actual drilling in the Caspian area laid to rest the myth of the New Saudi Arabia. But the occupation of Afghanistan was already a fact.

Does this story explain 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan at a cost of 2 trillion dollars and the humiliating defeat we see now? No, if you think in terms of cause and effect. Yes, if you think of it in terms of a diffuse meme in the minds of the decision-makers. I can't imagine that there ever was someone masterminding the whole folly. But there was this meme about those immense oil reserves north of Afghanistan that influenced all the decisions made at all levels. Memes are an incredibly powerful force.

To explain my point better, I can cite Lev Tolstoy's description of what led millions of Western Europeans to invade Russia in 1812, a decision as foolish as that of invading Afghanistan in 2001. Tolstoy says that "it happened because it had to happen."

Tolstoy means that it was the result of a series of macro- and micro-decisions taken by all the actors in the story, including the simple soldiers who decided to enlist with Napoleon. But there was no plan, no grand strategy, no clear objectives directing the invasion. Even Napoleon himself was just one of the cogs of the immense machine that generated the disaster. "A king is history's slave," says Tolstoy.

Tolstoy's had an incredibly advanced way of thinking: what he wrote could have been written by a modern system scientist. You see it in nearly every paragraph of this excerpt from "War and Peace." An amazing insight on the reason for the folly of human actions at the level of what Tolstoy calls the "hive," that today we would call the "memesphere."

From "War and Peace" - Lev Tolstoy Book 9, chapter 1

On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? The historians tell us with naive assurance that its causes were the wrongs inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental System, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the mistakes of the diplomatists, and so on. Consequently, it would only have been necessary for Metternich, Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and an evening party, to have taken proper pains and written a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to have written to Alexander: ‘My respected Brother, I consent to restore the duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg’- and there would have been no war.

We can understand that the matter seemed like that to contemporaries. It naturally seemed to Napoleon that the war was caused by England’s intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). It naturally seemed to members of the English Parliament that the cause of the war was Napoleon’s ambition; to the Duke of Oldenburg, that the cause of the war was the violence done to him; to businessmen that the cause of the way was the Continental System which was ruining Europe; to the generals and old soldiers that the chief reason for the war was the necessity of giving them employment; to the legitimists of that day that it was the need of re-establishing les bons principes, and to the diplomatists of that time that it all resulted from the fact that the alliance between Russia and Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed from Napoleon, and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178.

It is natural that these and a countless and infinite quantity of other reasons, the number depending on the endless diversity of points of view, presented themselves to the men of that day; but to us, to posterity who view the thing that happened in all its magnitude and perceive its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient. To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.

To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the events, and by its impotence- apart from the cooperation of all the other coincident causes- to occasion the event. To us, the wish or objection of this or that French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon’s refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, and had a second, a third, and a thousandth corporal and private also refused, there would have been so many less men in Napoleon’s army and the war could not have occurred.

Had Napoleon not taken offense at the demand that he should withdraw beyond the Vistula, and not ordered his troops to advance, there would have been no war; but had all his sergeants objected to serving a second term then also there could have been no war. Nor could there have been a war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of Oldenburg, and had Alexander not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic government in Russia, or a Revolution in France and a subsequent dictatorship and Empire, or all the things that produced the French Revolution, and so on. Without each of these causes nothing could have happened. So all these causes- myriads of causes- coincided to bring it about. And so there was no one cause for that occurrence, but it had to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west, slaying their fellows.

The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power- the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns- should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes. We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance. There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him. Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.

‘The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord.’
A king is history’s slave.

History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes. Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that it depended on him, verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peuples*- as Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him- he had never been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which compelled him, while thinking that he was acting on his own volition, to perform for the hive life- that is to say, for history- whatever had to be performed.

The people of the west moved eastwards to slay their fellow men, and by the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in and co-ordinated to produce that movement and war: reproaches for the nonobservance of the Continental System, the Duke of Oldenburg’s wrongs, the movement of troops into Prussia- undertaken (as it seemed to Napoleon) only for the purpose of securing an armed peace, the French Emperor’s love and habit of war coinciding with his people’s inclinations, allurement by the grandeur of the preparations, and the expenditure on those preparations and the need of obtaining advantages to compensate for that expenditure, the intoxicating honors he received in Dresden, the diplomatic negotiations which, in the opinion of contemporaries, were carried on with a sincere desire to attain peace, but which only wounded the self-love of both sides, and millions and millions of other causes that adapted themselves to the event that was happening or coincided with it.

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.

Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.

*"To shed (or not to shed) the blood of his peoples.’

Diamonds still cut glass regardless of your word for “diamond,” and “cut,” and “glass.”~Ken Wilber

Truth matters. Words matter. What is objectively the case matters. And insofar as our words and concepts can be about the objective world at all, then the shared set of words and meanings that we collectively use and are permitted to use to describe, navigate, and refer to that objective world matters. Such is the case for any society worth defending. The growing rash of instances of threats, intimidation, social cancelling, and violence in the name of creeping gender ideology within academia and beyond drastically threatens this shared set of goods and values and marks the beginning of what will be a steep and rapid descent into institutionalized tyranny if left unopposed.

At first glance, this appears to be quite a hyperbolic and even alarmist claim. After all, what is wrong with referring to “Stephen” as “Stephanie” if that is his prerogative? On the surface, such linguistic accommodations appear to be perfectly reasonable and minimally costly to most language users. This surface question of proper names, however, dramatically obscures the underlying conceptual tensions, moral values, and metaphysical commitments fundamentally at stake. Indeed, as claims of “misgendering” have swelled from being regarded as instances of impoliteness, to disrespect, to phobia, to hate, to intentional harassment, to threats, to actual violence, to warranting official legal penalty, to “human rights” violations (language previously reserved for exclusive use in reference to torture, genocide, atrocity, and crimes against humanity), the moral and metaphysical landscape and the linguistic and social institutions presumably about that landscape have been run over roughshod in public discourse with alarming speed and scarce pause for serious philosophical reflection.

This article therefore sets out to make better philosophical sense of the concepts of “gender,” “transgender,” and “transgender rights.” Contra arguments espoused by gender ideology advocates, I argue that, by the starting premises of their own argumentation, the notions of both “gender” and “transgender” are either incoherent or vacuous and therefore cannot be the conceptual grounds by which persons derive actual positive or negative rights claims. On the contrary, such false “rights” claims actually amount to severe rights violations of the vast majority of everyday language-users and citizens and cause irreparable damage to the set of shared social and linguistic practices necessary for coordinating the basic public goods of a free, flourishing, and truth-preserving society.

The social and political consequence of allowing such false rights claims to swell unopposed to the level of positive rights claims, eventually codifying into actual state-compelled law (as is already the case with Canada’s Bill C-16 and soon to be with America’s Equality Act) will be nothing less than the legal sanctioning of a new priest class of magical people who speak all of reality into existence, and then the rest of society who must simply obey. Consequently, I argue that such passive-aggressive tyranny warrants strong and vocal public rejection and opposition by American lawmakers, politicians, academics, and citizens alike with the greatest of urgency.

Truth

For at least 3,000 years now, philosophers, theologians, and scholars alike have debated the nature of truth. Bracketing contemporary theories of truth such as Paul Horwich’s deflationary theory of truth and Michael Lynch’s plural theory of truth, and bracketing pragmatist theories of truth espoused by folks like James, Dewey, and Pierce, theories of truth largely fall into two main camps; the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory of truth.

The correspondence theory of truth posits that a sentence or proposition is true if and only if it shares some sort of correspondence relationship with the mind-independent, objective world. Hence, the proposition that “the cat is on the mat” is true if and only if the cat is indeed on the mat. If the cat is not on the mat, then the proposition “the cat is on the mat” is false. Put another way, the proposition “the cat is on the mat” is made true by the truth-maker and state of affairs of the cat actually being on the mat. All true propositions we refer to as facts. Alternatively, the coherence theory of truth posits that truth is fundamentally a relationship of maximal coherence and internal consistency between and among a web of other propositions (i.e., truth-bearers) and not a relationship between truth-bearers reaching out to make contact with mind-independent, objective truth-makers (i.e., the contours of the objective world).

Another important distinction within discourse on truth is Kant’s famous analytic/synthetic distinction. An analytic proposition, such as “a bachelor is an unmarried man” or “a male is a creature with an XY chromosome pair,” is one whose truth depends wholly upon the meanings of its constituent terms. Conversely, a synthetic proposition, such as “John is a bachelor” or “John is a man” is true in virtue of some feature of the observable objective world. Put another way, we can know the truth of analytic propositions merely by knowing the meanings of their constituent terms, whereas for synthetic propositions we have to look out into the objective world in order to determine whether or not they are true.

Meaning

Another indispensable contribution to discourse on truth is that made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. In his now famous “private language argument,” Wittgenstein entertained the conceptual possibility of a completely private language. Since definitions within any language, like rules within a game, require fixity in order for the game to hang together at all, and since a wholly private language would have no such checks and balances to keep definitions fixed and stable (the private language user could just amend definitions in perpetuity with no restrictions), Wittgenstein concluded that a wholly private language was conceptually impossible and that for terms and definitions to have any fixed meaning at all required checks and balances provided by other language users. Later expanding on this insight, Hilary Putnam, in his essay “The Meaning of Meaning,” advanced his theory of meaning known as semantic externalism, famously concluding that “meaning ain’t in the head.”

To this day, the vast majority of contemporary philosophers accept this account of how meaning and language fundamentally operates. Put another way, meaning and language is fundamentally public. What’s more, language and meaning (and indeed the collective knowledge passed between generations via language) is not merely public with respect to just present persons but is also constituted by the deep, rich, and networked storehouse of meanings passed on from one generation of language-users to the next. As Gottlob Frege noted in his essay “Sense and Reference,” “For it cannot well be denied that mankind possesses a common treasure of thoughts which is transmitted from generation to generation.”

And while proper names such as “Bruce” or “Caitlyn” do technically fall within the purview of private determination and personal prerogative, indexicals within a language, such as “he” or “she” indirectly connote and refer to fixed meanings deep within our overall shared network of public meanings and are not similarly revisable according to individual personal preference. Insofar as our collective meanings are about our shared storehouse of collective human knowledge and/or about the objective world in some sense, such indexical terms are effectively “load-bearing” terms that do not or simply cannot be moved or amended so easily without logically entailing a complete and total overhaul of the entire network of meaning, every proposition within that network, and every referent in the objective world that each term ostensibly refers to.

Accordingly, indexical terms like “he” and “she,” or generic terms like “male” and “female” for that matter, are held relatively fixed within our shared network of nested meanings either in virtue of the restraints of logic, conceptual consistency, and interrelatedness (on a coherence theory of truth), the contours and joints of objective reality (on a correspondence theory of truth), or some combination of the two. Hence, when it comes to truth claims about nearly anything and everything under the sun, big and small, like it or not, logic has a say in the matter, other language users have a say in the matter, language itself has a say in the matter, and the objective world itself has a say in the matter.

Rights and duties

Another important set of concepts within the present gender debate is the notion of rights and duties. Scholars often cash out the notion of rights and duties as two sides of the same conceptual coin. To say that I have a “right to X” is conceptually equivalent to saying that someone else has a corresponding duty to me as it pertains to X. Scholars make the further distinction between negative rights and duties and positive rights and duties. Negative rights, sometimes referred to as liberties, are freedoms from something. Freedom from slavery, freedom from censorship, and freedom from religious persecution are all canonical examples of negative rights. They engender for others corresponding negative duties of inaction and non-interference.

Positive rights, on the other hand, sometimes referred to as entitlements, are freedoms to something. Freedom to healthcare, freedom to easy rescue, and freedom to education are all examples of positive rights claims. These positive rights claims engender corresponding positive duties of action upon others. Since many positive duties arguably cannot be discharged individually but only collectively, so the argument goes, the state is therefore required as the institutional proxy to ensure, through law and threat of coercion, that citizens discharge their many individual positive duties to one another (most often in the form of taxes). While liberals and conservatives generally agree over negative rights and duties, there has been long and heated debate between both sides as to the scope and content of persons’ actual positive rights and duties and how those duties ought to be best discharged.

Another near universal notion within ethics, philosophy, and law is the claim that “ought implies can.” In other words, if one tells me that I have a duty or an obligation to do X, then the implication is that it is physically or at the very least logically possible for me to do X. Put another way, it makes no logical or conceptual sense to say that I have impossible duties. I do not have a duty to walk to the moon, because I physically cannot. I do not have a duty to conceive of a three-sided square, because I logically cannot. Conceptual conceivability is therefore a prerequisite for any legitimate rights claim or corresponding duty claim.

The incoherence of special transgender “rights” claims

Given this basic understanding of positive and negative rights and duties as well as the assumption that “ought implies can,” and given our understanding about theories of truth as well as the fundamentally public nature of terms like “male” and “female” and “he” and “she” within our shared network of public meanings, let us now investigate the coherence, intelligibility, and content of so-called “transgender rights” claims.

To understand the coherence and moral import of transgender rights claims, we must first define what it is that we mean by “transgender.” To understand its meaning, however, we must first discern what exactly we mean by “gender” proper. The Stanford Encyclopedia for Philosophy entry on “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender,” for instance, captures the conceptual distinction between “sex” and “gender” as follows:

Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

Judith Butler, in her famous Gender Trouble echoes this distinction writing that, “Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”

And lastly, the World Health Organization re-articulates this conceptual distinction between “sex” and “gender” making the further distinction between “gender” and “gender identity.” They write:

Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time … Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs. Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.

Given these definitions, the first source of confusion within the present transgender debate comes from scholars frequently conflating (biologically-determined) “sex,” (socially-determined) “gender,” (privately-determined) “gender identity,” sexual preference, and biological instances of intersex (such as Klinefelter’s and Turner syndrome) all under the same canopy term “gender.”

The second source and primary culprit of confusion within the present transgender debate, however, is the notion of “gender identity.” This is so since “gender identity,” on the gender theorist’s own account, is defined entirely by one’s own wholly subjective determination. Much like Wittgenstein’s hypothetical private language, this wholly subjective and internal pointing to some referent accessible only to the speaker, fundamentally severs the connection of the linguistic term (i.e., “he”) from both its publicly agreed upon analytic meaning (i.e., “a male” is, by definition, “a living organism with an XY chromosome pair”) as well as its publicly agreed upon synthetic definition out there in the world (i.e., “that particular guy over there is a man,” “that particular cluster of things under the microscope is an XY chromosome pair”). In so doing, this wholly subjective turn renders the meaning of the speaker’s utterance (i.e., “he”) completely meaningless, in terms of its analytic and synthetic definition, or, alternatively, completely vacuous.

Catholic political commentator, Matt Walsh, captures the confusion well stating the following:

The Left tells us that “gender” is a social construct. They reject the idea that women must necessarily have any particular feeling, or thought, or taste, or preference. If “gender” is an artificial construct and our physical features have no bearing on our identity as man or woman, then what the hell is a “woman” anyway? A “woman,” in that case, would not be defined by her feelings, her thoughts, her ideas, her preferences, her body, her reproductive organs, her DNA, her chromosomes. Well what is she defined by? What is she? When a man says that he is a woman, he now makes it that that phrase means nothing, and it doesn’t mean anything to be a woman. He might as well say that he is a whos-a-whats-it or a thing-a-ma-doodle.”

This re-defining of publicly shared meanings like “male” and “female” solely in terms of a speaker’s own subjective feelings generates a host of internal contradictions, intractable questions, and system-wide confusion.

• It is a grave wrong to not first ask for a person’s personal pronouns. It also is a grave wrong to ask for a person’s personal pronouns because it is too personal and invasive.
• What do the indexicals “Ze” and “Zir” even connote or refer to?
• If one can be trans-gender then why can’t one be trans-racial, trans-age, trans-height, trans-species, or trans-Napoleon?
• If gender identity has nothing to do with biological sex whatsoever, then, similarly, why can’t one’s gender identity simply be Latino, 6’3’’, a giraffe, or 87 years old?
• What does it mean for a speaker to report subjectively feeling “like a man” when the stipulated definition of the term “man” is determined wholly by the speaker?
• If gender identity is wholly determined by the speaker’s subjective determination, then why would cosmetic surgery or arbitrary levels of hormone treatment have any bearing whatsoever on affecting or changing that person’s gender identity?
• If gender identity is wholly determined by each person’s subjective state, then how can parents get to decide that their child is “non-binary” or “gender-fluid”?
• If gender identity is wholly subjective and inaccessible to others’ knowledge, then how can so-called “trans” people know that they are actually standing in solidarity with real trans persons versus fake trans persons?
• If a woman stipulates that she has transitioned from a woman to a man, and we are therefore obligated to retroactively change all records of the past to report that she was always a man, then if she was always a man, what did she transition from?
• Furthermore, if this very same woman who claims to be a man was therefore always a man, and this person is a US citizen, does that mean she/he has failed to sign up for selective service all these years and can be retroactively charged as a felon?
• If gender identity is wholly subjectively determined, then how can an individual ever be said to be mistaken about his or her own wholly privately and internally stipulated definitions as in reports of persons being so-called “ex trans” or “former trans”?
• And if such persons themselves can be so fundamentally mistaken about their own internally-stipulated gender identity, then how on Earth can we possibly have laws and legal penalties that require everyone else to know such a thing and to adjust their behavior accordingly, moment by moment by moment?

This confusion culminates in the simple question that each and every one of us can pose to the gender theorist: “what do you mean by male?” And it is here where they will not be able to give either a substantive analytic or synthetic definition of the term without risking their claim’s truth conditions being evaluable under some set of public criteria. All they will ever be able to say is that “it is the thing that I feel that I am.” Which is to say nothing at all.

For claims or propositions to be true or false at all, they must first be “truth-apt” and therefore must rise to a level of basic intelligibility in order for us to be capable of evaluating them as true or false. Accordingly, claims about special transgender rights do not get off the ground to begin with, because claims about “gender identity” don’t get off the ground to begin with, since such claims fail to rise to the level of being truth-apt or minimally coherent. Claims about transgender rights are therefore as intelligible and truth-apt as claims about “flipl-flopl” rights, or “Jabberwocky” rights, or “schmerkle” rights. And just because someone happens to utter the noise “rights” after a particular word or set of words, doesn’t mean that such claims actually grip the moral or metaphysical joints of the world. Consequently, if ought implies can, and we cannot conceptually make basic sense of the concept of “gender identity,” then such blatant conceptual incoherence cannot be the proper grounding of our actual rights or duties.

To be clear, this isn’t to make light of or to suggest that persons suffering from actual mental disorders in this arena are lying, pretending, or acting in bad faith. Indeed, there are many medical reports of persons suffering from gender dysphoria who report the sense of “being in the wrong body” or not feeling like their internal sense of self was in alignment with the social behavioral norms of their biological sex. This felt sense of something being perpetually “off” has, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, led to over 40 percent of gender dysphoric men and women in the US having attempted to take their own life, nearly 10 times the national average. What’s more, according to the most thorough follow-up study of post sex-reassignment surgeries to date, extending over 30 years in Sweden, the suicide rate of persons who had undergone such surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers. I do not therefore deny or question the internal mental anguish such persons suffering from these very real mental disorders are facing. Rather, the point that I am driving at here is not one concerning persons with actual, diagnosable gender dysphoria, but instead a critique of the necessary and possible metaphysical commitments and moral demandingness present-day gender ideology seems to entail. And as we have seen here, nothing less than system-wide incoherence and a radical breakdown in public meaning seems to result from persons indexing the definition of “gender identity” to their own moment by moment, wholly private subjectivity.

Political, social, and legal implications

As we have noted, language and meaning are deeply networked, deeply public, and held in place by things like history, collective knowledge, linguistic precedent, logical consistency, and the contours of the objective world (i.e., truth). To claim total control over one proposition within such a network is therefore to control them all. For the state to attempt to grant monopolistic control over both the analytic and synthetic definitions of terms like “he” and “she,” to a privileged and exclusive class of language-users, terms perhaps no more fundamental to the human condition, would be, in essence, to attempt to grant control over truth itself.

The logical implications of the passing of the US Equality Act would therefore constitute nothing less than the legal canonization of a new priest class of magical persons who speak all of reality into existence and a subordinate class of everyday citizens held hostage by state compulsion to be unwilling stage-actors in their never-ending, incoherent game of pretend. What is at stake here is therefore not simply one of politeness and etiquette having to do with proper names. Rather, what is fundamentally at stake are the very reasons we ought to regard claims about reality as being true or false at all.

There is perhaps no greater evidence of this newly emerging priest class than in the recent case of actress, Elliot Page. For Elliot, she merely stipulates that she is a biological male and we must regard her as a biological male in all respects. Record of the past must be amended to reflect that she was always a biological male. All historical records, biomedical records, biomedical theory, all notions of health, social institutions, etiquette, law, public meanings, and objective reality itself must be gerrymandered around the fixed pivot point of her moment-by-moment subjective prerogative. That is, until she changes her mind. Then, at such a point, the frantic process of revising each and every proposition under the sun, past and present, must begin anew for us proles lest we offend. But for that young man in Georgia who must sign up for selective service the moment he turns 18, biological essentialism suddenly and strictly applies to him. Such are the metaphysics of this brave new world.

Such a legal canonization of a protected class of magical “trans” people would actually constitute a severe violation of the actual rights of everyone else not fortunate enough to be let into this new exclusive club. Indeed, the logical implications of such wrong-headed legislation would be totalizing in scope, affecting nearly every law, institution, social practice, linguistic practice, area of knowledge, custom, record, word, concept, and thought that directly or indirectly related to the concepts of “he” and “she,” “male” and “female.” In other words, it would affect nearly all of our shared propositions about reality.

In biology, we would have to change the definition of “human,” “male,” and “female,” as well as amend our taxonomy for all sexed organisms. In medicine, we would have to overhaul all theories and practices of what constituted “health” and “function” for human males and females, boys and girls. In law we would have to adjust all legislation that specifically referenced men and women. In language, we would have to overhaul or abolish all languages, to include all romance languages, that had gendered conjugations. With respect to freedom of religion, all religions, especially Abrahamic religions, would have to subordinate or abandon their theological commitments concerning man and woman’s special and divinely created nature. With respect to freedom of association, all previously-exclusive men and women’s groups would have to open their membership to such new magic persons. With respect to women’s sports, biological males would now have to be allowed to compete if they simply believed themselves to be female, effectively ending all women’s sports.

With respect to feminism, all legal and social progress ostensibly made by and exclusively for women (i.e., protective laws, exclusive spaces, business loans, scholarships, educational opportunities, etc.) would all effectively have to be undone. With respect to penitentiary assignments, men could simply declare themselves to be women and would have to be moved to female jails or, alternatively, have their own personal jails built for them on account of the unique gender. With respect to the military draft, all men of fighting age could opt out of selective service simply by deciding that they are a woman on their 18th birthday. With respect to the nuclear family, the language of “father,” “mother,” “daughter,” “son,” “sister,” “brother,” “uncle,” “aunt,” “grandfather,” “grandmother,” would have to be phased out since they connote offensive biological essentialist categories. And with respect to all recorded history and all social knowledge, any and all truth claims that directly or indirectly reference males or females would have to be placed in a perpetual state of indetermination, contingent exclusively upon the final say the special “trans” speakers.

The coup de grace of such madness of course, of legally sanctioning this special caste of persons who can enter and exit all social and legal groups at will, is when they themselves slam shut the door of entry in the faces of the uninitiated, announcing stridently, “we can tell, you aren’t really trans!” It is here where the loop of the metaphysical encirclement fully closes and The Party now gets to tell us commoners both the contents of our outer world in its entirety and the contents of the private inner world of our own heads as well.

The above claims are neither hyperbole nor slippery slope alarmism, nor hypothetical conjecture. Indeed, in just the past few years we have already begun to see the tragic and unjust fallout of such conceptual incoherence playing out under the illogic baked into Canada’s Bill C-16. From a BC man being held in jail for objecting to his teenage daughter’s gender transition, to a “transgender” female inmate sexually assaulting other inmates at an all-female penitentiary, to “trans” female, Jessica Yaniv, taking more than a dozen esthetician businesses to a Human Rights Tribunal for refusing to Brazilian wax his scrotum, the madness of this incoherent ideology is only just beginning.

Rest assured, under the logical implications of Bill C-16, the cinching of the rainbow police state will only tighten and the situation in Canada for the average citizens will only worsen in the coming years. And so will be the case in the United States if the Equality Act passes. In essence, the legal implications of such a bill will be nothing less than making it illegal for one to say true things, consistent things, logical things, or even to attempt. Conversely it will make use of hard state power to compel persons to say or believe things that are patently false, incoherent, or conceptually impossible. It will be political correctness on steroids, on a fast road to communist dystopia. To quote Theodore Dalrymple:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

This is how you subvert a nation and a people.

Conclusion

A single line of code, buried within millions or even billions of lines of code, can turn any computer program, no matter how sophisticated, completely inoperable or completely upside down. Such is the case with the present discussion and legislation surrounding so-called “transgender rights.” As we have noted here, despite the utterance of the sound “rights,” it turns out that no matter how much one subjectively feels that he or she is being disrespected, attacked, or oppressed, one simply does not have a legitimate rights claim that the objective world is what he or she says it is. Rather, it turns out that the objective world just pushes back.

If we are to understand transgender rights claims to be meaningful utterances at all, capable of being true or false, then on the most charitable of interpretations we should regard such claims to be at most nothing more than linguistic short-hand for the negative right of freedom of expression and freedom of religion already protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Accordingly, we should regard such ideological expressions as a kind of secular religion reserved exclusively to the private sphere; not something publicly imposed, in all domains of human activity, by state compulsion and threat of force. Otherwise, we should treat such claims as evidence of conceptual confusion, dishonesty, pretending, or a genuine case of gender dysphoria warranting proper medical treatment and counseling.

Or, perhaps I am totally wrong here and there is a huge error and blind spot in my argumentation that I have completely overlooked. I challenge and encourage any advocate of gender ideology to explain to me where exactly I’ve made an error in my argumentation and I look forward to future debate and discourse on the matter. If I’m wrong, then show me where I’m wrong. Regardless, even if I am wrong and mistaken in my reasoning, I and every other citizen in this country should be allowed the freedom to make such mistakes openly; to strive to know truth, to seek truth, and to speak truth, in earnest, however clumsily and however imperfectly.

That being said, this pernicious and deeply wrong-headed ideology will not suddenly stop on its own if people remain silent and complicit. This can only be achieved if people find the courage to speak out publicly, to keep speaking, and to remember, above all, that they are not alone. For there has never been a time in human history when Traditional Catholics, to Protestants, to Muslims, to Jews, to Black Panthers, to Libertarians, to 3rd Wave Feminists have found such common agreement over something so obvious, and when stating the obvious was so very simple. For if freedom is to mean anything at all, it is the ability to worship freely, to live freely, and to speak freely. It is the ability to openly say, without fear, that 2+2=4, that there are only two sexes, that “gender” is a nonsensical concept, that The Party is mistaken, and that the Emperor indeed has no clothes.

Dr. Michael Robillard is an independent scholar, philosopher, and US Army veteran. He has held prior academic appointments at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Oxford, and the US Naval Academy. His past writings have focused on issues concerning free speech in academia, civil/military relations, veterans issues, and the ethics of automated technology. For more information, visit his personal website, follow him on Twitter @Dr_M_Robillard, and read his Substack.

by Naresh Jotwani for the Saker Blog

Washington Post recently ran an article with headline which contained the two phrases “civilized nations” and “deter Beijing and Moscow” (see a review here). Use of the latter phrase in the headline shows clearly that the phrase “civilized nations” here has undisguised, in-your-face geopolitical motivation.

But “civilized” and “deter” is in fact a very strange combination of words, tempting and encouraging us to dig deeper into the matter.

One must assume that, in geopolitics, it is “just another day at the office” for one power to attempt to deter another. If two powers are in a state of unstable equilibrium, but not yet openly at war, attempts to deter one another would go on. Such is life. Certain lines – red or otherwise! – must not be crossed, weighty pronouncements must be made, and “swords must be banged against shields”. All this is standard stuff which foreign office trainees must learn, and upon which their “superiors” must base their upward mobility.

Clearly physical power is the one deterrent we all know about, starting from our experiences in school. But what has “being civilized” got to do with all that? Makes you wonder.

Surely I would be deterred by a big guy carrying a big stick – regardless of whether or not he seems to be “civilized”. In the same way, I am also deterred by a growling dog – regardless of whether or not it is fed and groomed by a rich owner! Chengiz Khan attacked other countries with brutal physical force, without any claims of possessing “higher civilization”. Before the sack of Rome, Alaric behaved far more sensibly than the “civilized” ruling elite of Rome.

Around the same time, another article also appeared, this one on the subject of Russian history and civilization (a review here). This article was an honest attempt to educate others, but there was no sign of any attempt to deter anyone. Indeed a resplendent, vibrant, creative civilization attracts others, does not deter them. If a “civilization” is aiming to deter others, then what happens to all the talk of “civilizational values” and “soft power”?

We know that power flows through the barrel of a gun, but today do culture and civilization also flow through the barrel of a gun? Something is surely wrong here! Historically, have the “civilized” always won wars? How do we explain the very recent history of Afghanistan? Which “civilization” has been gaining the upper hand there? What did the “civilized nations” achieve there? Whom did they manage to deter? For how long?

What follows is a brief history of how we have got to where we now find ourselves. This is not a work of “academic scholarship” – but rather it connects various “dots” discovered by scholars. The connections are based on the play of human nature we see all around us today.

The word “civilize” derives from the Latin root “civis”, meaning “citizen”, and in this way it is predicated on the idea of a “city”. Nomadic tribes of a period earlier than, say, 10,000 years BC would not have such a word in their language, even while the concept of “fellow tribesman” would be internalized very well.

The earliest cities were in fact trading centres for the surplus primary produce of nearby hamlets and villages. Trading – that is, eminently sensible economic exchanges – happened long before the invention of writing and of money. People were smart even then.

Trade generated surplus wealth. Thus people in cities – that is, traders of one sort or another – were free to explore aspects of life other than the hard work of primary production. Philosophy, religion, politics, law, “higher” arts and literature … all these flourished. Individuals in the city cultivated themselves, while their fellow human beings “out there” cultivated the land. Paeans and hymns were dutifully sung to the glory of the city and her various “gods”.

It was not long before the cultivated ones thought of themselves as “superior” to the others. In any one-on-one interaction with a simpler human being, they could easily run circles around the latter – and probably also justify charging a fee for the privilege!

Aided by writing and money, political power of cities grew rapidly, and it soon reached a point at which cities deemed themselves to be “proud city states”. Thence arose class differentiation between “civilized” city dwellers and the rustic population outside, which was by then economically and politically dependent on the cities. City states eventually grew into empires, following the all-too-familiar dynamic of unlimited human greed and brutality.

The simpler rustic folk were divided into “subjects”, “serfs”, “slaves” … and so on; but when the rustic folk got into friction or warfare with the “civilized” ones, they were dubbed “barbarians”. The preferred words nowadays are “deplorable”, “backward”, “lower caste” et cetera.

This phenomenon has played out repeatedly in recorded history. The phenomenon is grounded in economic motivations, and therefore it also has huge economic consequences.

Before “civilizations” came into being – and therefore before the invention of money and writing – the relationships between primary producers and traders were simple and direct, as depicted below.

Even huge geographical distances could not block trade, since ships and caravans could be used. Traders were brave and ingenious. For probably a couple of millennia, mankind experienced a “golden age of trading”, during which benefits of trade accrued but without onerous economic exploitation, slavery, human trafficking, and so on.

Things changed after the emergence of money, writing and “civilizations”. Multiple layers of political, social, financial, legal and other services emerged, giving opportunity to every “citizen” to climb the hierarchy of choice, depending on his or her aptitude and talent. Of course the two most useful talents would be greed and cunning – but clearly any other talent could be put to use, for example physical beauty, or the ability to declaim in public.

Ever since then, members of the “civilized elite” of most “civilizations” have wanted to get into the act and take their cut. The main goal of such “civilized elite” is to grab every opportunity for easy money, with the view: “After me, the deluge!”

The situation thus evolved to what is shown below, in what is projected as “progress” or the “unstoppable march of human advancement”. Men and women high up in the “pecking order” of a “civilization”, puffed up with their own social position and self-importance, feel free to make profound pronouncements about “the masses” or “the common people”.

[Incidentally, how “civilized” can a society be in which we use the phrase “pecking order”? The verb “peck” applies to poultry birds, and is also seen in the phrase “hen-pecked husband”.]

So much for “civilized”, the word wrongly used in the Washington Post article.

Surprisingly, this discussion brings us close to Saker’s recent decision to write and share with us short vignettes about the teachings of Jesus Christ. How so?

Jesus Christ lived through a period of great turmoil in the region, as the ruthless might of the Roman empire came into contact with independent minded Hebrews. His message was of love and charity, rather than greed. He promised deliverance to his followers, mostly poor folk.

When does a poor person cry out for deliverance? For the many poor people that I know, a bit of poverty is alright if only they are allowed to live on in peace. None of them demands perfect economic equality. Many earn their livelihood working for richer people. “I am alright, Jack. Let me be!”, they say – as they adapt, cope and share.

But turmoil most definitely does occur when even the otherwise forbearing poor are in unbearable distress; that possibility can never be ruled out.

Turmoil did occur in the period when Jesus lived and taught. Therefore, his teachings include useful, practical sayings addressing the daily economic and political reality of the poor people who were his followers. We may consider just three of his many profound sayings:

Man shall not live by bread alone …

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.

Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s …

By the way, these themes are not readily found in Gautam Buddha’s teachings. Why? Buddha lived in pre-Alexander India. Specific instances of suffering which moved him, when he was a young prince, were disease, old age, death … All of which is really kid stuff compared to what the Romans and other people of the time did on a regular basis.

Gautam Buddha traced the roots of suffering to desire, whereas the followers of Jesus Christ suffered from extreme deprivation and cruelty. It would be inhuman to say that desire was at the root of their suffering, when in fact they desired only deliverance from extreme deprivation and cruelty. Buddha and Jesus Christ addressed two totally different audiences, separated greatly in time, space and economic/political conditions.

It’s time to turn our attention back to some economic and political realities.

It is much easier to make money otherwise than by being a primary producer, and typically every human being seeks the easier path rather than the harder one. Primary producers are therefore left further and further behind in the headlong societal rush towards material well-being. However, no self-respecting community or country should accept such a dire economic fate for a significant fraction of its hard-working members.

Political and economic measures must therefore address this issue in a fair manner, and also provide avenues open to all members to benefit from training, education and economic mobility. Any ideology – “capitalism”, “neo-liberalism” or whatever else – which violates this fairness criterion will enrich a very few but also doom the society. Any talk of “trickle down wealth” is no more than false propaganda; “trickle down” just does not happen.

The attitude of “civilizational upper-hand” displayed in the Washington Post headline leads to a bargaining tactic which goes something like this:

Hey, you! Every time we engage in any transaction, negotiation, discussion or collaboration, do keep in mind that – since I am more “civilized” – I am by definition superior to you. Is it not enough for you that I even deign to sit and talk with you?

As against this, realistic bargaining between parties must proceed only on the basis of specific strong and weak points of each party. Any presumed and self-proclaimed – but meaningless! – “civilizational superiority” has nothing to do with any real-life negotiation. Why introduce such a red herring of into “real-politik”? In today’s intellectually multi-polar, competitive world, the adversary easily sees through all such false pretences anyway.

The reality of being “civilized” – if indeed there is such reality! – must not depend on haughty self-proclamation. The word “civilized” must be defined in terms which are universal.

Our only “city” now is the entire Planet Earth. There are no outsiders, and therefore the word “civilized” has to have meaning not limited by this or that so-called great city of the past or present – whether that be Rome, Athens, Washington, Beijing, Jerusalem or Varanasi.

In that spirit, a simple test is proposed here for the reader’s consideration:

Regardless of how highly accomplished an individual may be – in music, literature, politics, law, science, wealth, beauty or any combination thereof – does the person “get it” and accept that the most deprived individual is also a human being deserving of dignity and respect?

Note that the word “charity” does not even occur here. Acknowledgement of the other person’s humanity is far more fundamental that any outward act of “charity”. It follows that laughing at deprived individuals or pouring scorn over them is not civilized behaviour.

Only if the above test is satisfied should a person today be considered “civilized”. Loud, self-serving proclamations do not count. This is a matter not of “politics” or “ideology”, but of humanity. Nobody need fly off at the handle shrieking “Buddha”, “Jesus Christ”, “capitalism”, “communism” or “socialism”! Humanity does not dwell in a person’s brain, wealth or loquacity, but deep inside the heart – or perhaps not even there.

Lest anybody misunderstand, none of the above is a justification for what does or does not happen in my own country. Wherever there are human beings, certain behaviour patterns are bound to be seen. Most of what is described here has gone on blatantly in India for many centuries, and at present there is an intense internal struggle in progress.

The point here is that any “civilization” worth its name should help temper economic injustice rather than exacerbate it. In times of huge diversity and change, an attitude amongst people of “us” versus “them” is inevitable. The key questions ask must be such as these:

What are the terms under which societal injustices and resentments are resolved? How exploitative are these terms? How is extreme deprivation avoided?

No society can be strong if brutal economic exploitation runs rampant amongst its people. The following paradox is too glaring to be missed:

“Leaders” who declaim the loudest about being “civilized”, and try to impose their “civilizational values” on others, represent the very same societies which are going through relatively rapid exacerbation of internal fissures. A recent extensive survey carried out in the UK reported that, according to most younger respondents, the number one priority of the government should be to protect the poorest, weakest and the most vulnerable. An overwhelming majority said “F**k them all” about their own political leaders. (A summary of the survey can be found here.)

Much should be expected from anyone claiming to be “civilized” today.

Adolescence is the phase of conflict par excellence with parents. Many blahblahgists attribute this critical phase to youth hardships, to media education, and instead the reason is much more prosaic. The adolescent, actually a man (or woman) in all respects, enters into competition with the parents who at that moment become rivals. This settles down as parents age, drop hormonally and become, as it were, children of their children.

The son is not spoilt or something else. Adolescence is a product of civilization which, as such, projects forward a life path that, conversely, would see man become a father at fourteen and die at thirty-five-forty. To push the so-called problematic teenager is his testosterone which places him in conflict with his parents. Who, on the other hand, have total responsibility for his person and are obliged to put a stop to him.

The young man would already like to copulate with the nymphet he met on the street, the young woman would already like to be penetrated by the hypertrophic bull she met in the discos, both would like money, motorcycles, travel, benefits but father and mother institutionally represent the brake that prevents them from living fully their own sexuality, their own well-being. Things that in a jungle they would be gained through conflict with other congeners but that in civilization they are limited by the laws.

If the adolescent is in a position to take care of himself, he can safely leave his father's home. But since this is never the case, the abandonment of father and mother is a whim that, especially if taken to the extreme (as unfortunately in the sad cases of patricide that the news shows us) is paid dearly. The other side of freedom is responsibility. When you no longer have a father and a mother, you are not only free to do what you want, you are also at the mercy of any storm that life throws in front of us.

The relationship between man and God is something similar. The “core business” of every religion is to provide the human being with an illusion that makes more bearable the sad fate that awaits him. A guide. Support. A father, a mother. It is not by chance that God is called as Father. And Our Lady, it goes without saying, mother. As our fathers and mothers age and die and are human, therefore fallible, we realize that, not for this reason, we stop being children. Those who have the misfortune of being an orphan and of not being a believer thus find themselves in a situation of very serious inner crisis, dictated by the awareness of their own fragility. If he/she goes through a moment of economic difficulty or, worse still, is unable to support himself or herself because he/she is too young or because of a job crisis, he/she gets a terrible blow from the loss of parents, realizing at that moment how stupid teenage riots were.

Similarly, those who are unable to keep their soul upright realize that God's death is not the so-hoped-for “free lair”. For centuries, Man has tried to kill God, to free himself from that inner restraint constituted by the presence of robust and pervasive rules which, even if they were to be based on a fantasy, still constituted a foundation, a guide. Man in adolescent crisis, with blows of progress, democracy, egalitarianism, has killed God. But he did this deicide before being able to find his own spiritual independence, his ability to know how to accept his own destiny, characteristic of every true layman, just like the reckless one of Pietro Maso [1], killed his parents to pocket the family inheritance and delude himself to lead a life based solely on the narcissistic cult of his own person.

Above all, one thing happens to every orphan and every atheist. Often it is crossed by many profiteers, ready to illegally occupy that role. The orphan is forced to identify in each future partner a father or a surrogate mother, not realizing that, however much he/she may take on appearance, he/she is not and will never be a father or a mother.

The atheist believes in magicians, witches, ideologies, including that of a paternal State, which takes care of all.

Behind many wrong marriages there is just this, behind the belief that a magician can succeed where a good doctor has failed, behind political tyrannies: despair, fear of physical and spiritual loneliness, the inability to know how to take care not only of our body but also of our spirit. Thus, what Chesterton said is fulfilled:

“Whoever does not believe in God is not that he or she no longer believes in anything, from that moment on he or she believes in everything.

By killing God without really becoming adults, with all the burden of suffering that this entails, we realized that we are not free, we are simply poor. We are rafts wandering aimlessly in the ocean, with forces that are about to run out and that will soon be swept away by the waves. And all this I say as a non-believer. As an orphan, in every sense.

In short, with respect speaking, I am, we're, in a bad patch.

Those who feel excluded from this speech and are tempted to insult me, know that instead they have my most sincere congratulations: I would like to be filled with insults if this meant a happier mankind.

[1] Italian patricide. With the help of three friends of him, In 1991 he killed both his parents.

Original column by Franco Marino:

http://www.ildetonatore.it/2021/06/12/uccidendo-dio-lumanita-non-e-diventata-libera-e-diventata-orfana-franco-marino/

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo

On June 24, 1717, representatives of English Masonic lodges established the Grand Lodge of England. From this day on they use to trace the history of modern Freemasonry.

It should be noted that the corporation of masons (“Freemason”, «le maçon» in French means "stonecraft worker", “builder”) were known in the Middle Ages, as well as representatives of other professions, united in closed corporations - the workshops. These corporations were secret and could be reached only by passing a special initiation.

In addition to the masons themselves, there were secret lodges of shoemakers, painters, casters, wine-makers, glassblowers, and even scavengers and beggars. They were sometimes called by generic term “companionship”, “le compagnonage”.

Each profession had its own rituals and symbols, most often traced back to biblical history, but often in its apocryphal version. In addition, pre-Christian symbolism could easily be found everywhere.

They main feature of Masons and companions was their belongness to the Third Estate. Priests and aristocracy had their own special orders and secret unions. At the same time, medieval corporations of artisans, living mostly in cities, differed also from peasant communities, which in this period also sometimes united in mystical groups with their legends, symbols, rites and doctrines.

On June 24, 1717, the ancient Freemasonry, previously called “operative masonry”, that is, associated with a particular profession - the construction of temples, castles and palaces - was reformed. Now it became “speculative”. And it could be joined by representatives of any class - all the rites were henceforth considered allegories, and the secrets of craftsmanship - mystical metaphors. But even in this state Freemasonry retained the main thing - orientation on the Third Estate, the Tiers -État.

Thus it became the vanguard of the new capitalist class, rushing to power. Among the Masonic lodges were both moderate and quite radical. For example, the Bavarian Illuminati or the French Masonic lodges responsible for the great French revolution and the bloody terror associated with it.

This radical revolutionary Freemasonry rejected God and became the main ideological and political enemy of the whole traditional order in Europe. The Third Estate under the Masonic leadership and guidance destroyed the Church, overthrew the Monarchy and still more enslaved the peasants. The materialistic science of the Encyclopedists all directly connected with Masonry and inspired by it replaced sublime idealism of the Christian Middle Ages.

True Europe fought a desperate battle in the Vendée, where the priesthood, the aristocracy loyal to the monarch, and the peasantry – all three classical functions of Indo-European society (according to G.Dumezil) united against bloody Masonic terrorism, the vanguard of liberal-capitalist materialist civilization, which was advancing on Europe. And, in the end, conquered it.

The modern West has followed the Masonic path of development.

In the 20th century, almost all the plans of speculative Freemasonry came to fruition. The lodges themselves, with their archaic rituals, moralism and symbolism, became from now on obsolete. But the Masonic ideology of progress, evolution, human rights, materialistic science, the secular State, and civil society have become principles and norms for virtually all of humanity.

Ideas that originally originated in secret Masonic ateliers are now openly inculcated in the minds of schoolchildren and define the agenda of science and culture policy.

And it is no accident that almost all U.S. presidents, starting from the first - George Washington, were activists of Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry and held leadership positions in it.

Today, those who call themselves Freemasons (and there are some) are either atavistic rudiments or clowns. They have no reason more to exist. Their historical program is accomplished on the planetary scale:

All of humanity has gradually become one Masonic lodge.

It's just a matter of time before the last step of the Masonic program will become the reality: the establishment of a worldwide dictatorship of the World Government.

But we see certain obstacles along the way. And I hope you know what I mean.

We are this obstacle. You and I.

The new coming race – the race of Awakening.

Ordo Pluriversalis: The End of Pax Americana & the Rise of Multipolarity, by Leonid Savin, Translated by Jafe Arnold, Black House Publishing, London, 2020.

This book is significant not only because of its detailed examination of globalisation, unipolarity, multipolarity, and associated themes such as foreign policies, superpower rivalries, geopolitics and diverse branches such as the meaning of nationalism, and ethnos, but because it provides an insight into an important school of thought in Russia and further afield.

Leonid Savin is a member of the Military Science Committee of the Russian Ministry of Defence, has served on the faculty of sociology at Moscow State University, is editor of Geopolitica.ru, editor of the Journal of Eurasian Affairs, director of the Foundation for Monitoring and Forecasting Development for Cultural-Territorial Spaces, and lectures within Russia and outside. He is an organiser of the Eurasian Movement, and a leading advocate of the Fourth Political Theory. Of the latter, the primary theorist is Dr Alexander Dugin, whose influence as an adviser and scholar extends over military, academic, political, and governmental agencies in Russia, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Eurasianism sees Russia as pivotal in forming a new geopolitical and civilisational bloc, halting the process of globalisation driven by an Anglo-American axis that seeks world hegemony. In the new multipolar world envisaged by The Fourth Political Theory ‘vectors’ replace both pretty nationalism and globalism.

Traditional Russian Outlook on Western Positivism and Universalism

Given that there is much about Putin’s foreign policies that show influences from the Eruasian doctrine, Ordo Pluriversalis reveals aspects of the ideological background that often informs official Russian attitudes. Indeed, Dugin has advised a range of personalities, including Putin, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, and flamboyant ‘ultra-nationalist’, Zhirinovsky.

Savin dedicates his book to the 100th anniversary of the publication of Europe & Mankind, by Nikolay Trubetzkoy (1890-1938). In 1920 Prince Trubetzkoy identified ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a façade for ‘Romano-Germanic [‘Western’] chauvinism’. (N. Trubetzkoy, Europe & Mankind, English translation by Alexandr Trubetzkoy, online: https://sashamaps.net/docs/writings/europe-and-mankind/ ). What Trubetzkoy saw in 1920 in cosmopolitanism as a façade for international domination by ‘the West’, is analogous to the present epoch of Atlanticism, or U.S. world hegemony in the name of liberalism and globalisation. Trubetzkoy states what is very close to what Eurasianists such as Dugin and Savin are reiterating:

‘So the spreading of so-called European cosmopolitanism among non-Romano-Germanic peoples is purely a misunderstanding. Those who succumbed to the propaganda of Romano-Germanic chauvinists were misled by the words “mankind”, “humanity”, “universal”, “civilization”, “world progress”, and so on. All these words were understood literally, whereas in reality they concealed very specific and rather narrow ethnographic concepts’. (Trubetzkoy, ibid., chapter: The Hypnotic Power of Cosmopolitism).

‘“Mankind”, “humanity”, “universal”, “civilization”, “world progress”; these are the same slogans we hear today whenever globalisation is imposed on a ‘rogue state’, whether by military invasion, financial credits, aid, trade, or ‘colour revolution’.

So we see that the first critique of globalisation was based on ‘cosmopolitanism’, as Trubetzkoy referred to it, insofar as globalisation requires the levelling of all cultures and peoples in the name of the world shopping mall and the world factory. ‘Liberalism’ still uses the same slogans of ‘Mankind’, ‘humanity’, ‘world progress’, that provide the moral rationalisation for bombing a state into submission where commerce and moral rot cannot sufficiently penetrate.

Rise of Post-Cold War Multipolarity

Savin examines a variety of advocates of unipolartity, and the unipolar world that appeared after the implosion of the Soviet bloc. The end of the Cold War era was supposed to usher the ‘new American century’, as one influential neocon think tank was called. Various think tanks began looking at a number of scenarios, after it became apparent that U.S. global hegemony was not going to go unchallenged even with the demise of the USSR. In 2012 the U.S. National in Intelligence Council issued Global Trends 2030 which considered emerging conflicts in Asia, causing world economic dislocations, the possibility of a convergence of China with the USA and Europe; a fractured world where nation-states were supplanted by NGOs and world-cities as power centres.

The scenerios are not new. During the Nixon years there was a de facto agreement between the USA and China vis-à-vis their common enemy, the USSR, and a Sino-U.S. pact had been assiduously promoted for decades by Rockefeller and other plutocrats, as an adjunct to the Trilateralist doctrine (USA-Europe-Japan).

Problem of Populism for Unilateralists

However while the rise of China, the resistance of Islam, and the sundry ‘rogue states’ confronted unipolarity after the Soviet collapse, with Russia promptly overcoming the Yeltsin aberration, in some globalist quarters the chief challenge to unipolarity comes from within the USA. The danger of a breach between the foreign policies of the governing classes and the mass public – the danger of ‘populism’ – haunts the oligarchy.

Robert Kagan, prominent among neocons, writing in The Jungle Grows Back (2018) welcomes a fear of China as providing the necessary unifying focus that had been lacking since the end of the Cold War, but worries that peoples (plural) are reverting back to traditions, a process he blames on Trump. Another veteran neocon, Charles Krauthammer, wrote in 1990 in The Unipolar Moment that U.S. hegemony would be achieved, yet predicted that it would only last a generation. He frankly stated that U.S. actions in the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere were undertaken behind the façade of ‘multilateral clothing’, giving the appearance of international legitimacy, but that the world order would collapse. While Krauthammer refers to the USA creating ‘world stability’, and of ‘remaking the international system’ based on ‘domestic civil society’, Savin questions this with the long record of American global adventurism. Krauthammer calls his ‘new unilateralism’ ‘realism’ but also sees the main danger as being the USA’s return to ‘Fortress America’, or to ‘multilateral institutions’.

It is ‘America first’ non-interventionism that became resurgent, to a degree, with the Trump interregnum. What was so horrendous about Trump’s foreign policy, that aligned neocons with street rioting Leftists, is that it returned to the doctrine urged by George Washington in his ‘Farewell Address’ (1796) : that the USA cultivate neither friends or foes abroad. One of Trump’s last speeches was to cadets at West Point, where he said that the USA should refrain from trying to police the world. ‘The job of the American soldier is not to rebuild foreign nations, but defend, and defend strongly, our nation from foreign enemies. We are ending the era of endless wars’. (Donald Trump Tells West Point Cadets, We are not the Policeman of the World, Telegraph, June 13 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/13/donald-trump-tells-west-point-cadets-not-policeman-world/ ).

So amidst the chaos of what some commentators have long called the ‘new world disorder’, Savin states that the task of those who reject globalisation is to ensure a ‘stable multipolarity’. (p. 44).

The implosion of the Warsaw Pact caused a crisis in international relations. The Cold War between two great powers assured that the USA would be restrained. In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, such restraint was gone. The USA could act unilaterally. The USA expanded its influence into the former Warsaw Pact states and Russian territory with the use of ‘colour revolutions’, whose supposed ‘spontaneity’ was well-planned and lavishly funded by Open Society, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and many other parts of the so-called global ‘civil society’, which Russia was to blacklist and expel.

China’s Contribution to Multiplurality

Of the post-Cold War epoch, Savin sees several significant responses favouring multiplurality.

He sees antecedents in Chinese foreign policy, including the 1954 treaty with India, where territorial integrity, non-interference and co-existence were prescribed. Chinese scholars opined that the world would see one super power and many strong powers. China indicated that it would assist Europe in becoming a ‘pole’. China sees itself as playing a role in Europe’s economy and security.

It might be asked, conversely: How far can China’s economy be said to complement that of Europe, and will the E.U. become reliant on China as a ‘pole’? Does China see multipolarity as a phase in globalisation with itself as leader, rather than as a bulwark against globalisation?

The joint declaration with Russia in 1997 on a ‘Multipolar World and the Establishment of a New International Order’ places China at the forefront of the multipolar project alongside Russia. This seeks a world system based on recognition of diverse paths for development, in contrast to the hegemonic and unilateral doctrine of neo-liberalism. It was a response to the invasion of Iraq.

Russian Policy

In 2000 Russian foreign policy documents were referring to a ‘multipolar system’. In 2013 there was reference to a ‘polycentric system’ and international relations based on a regionalism of diverse interests, with regional currencies and trade pacts. That year a presidential decree referred to Russia as becoming ‘one of the influential centres of a multipolar world’.

Despite frequent references in Russia declarations and studies to the projected ‘new international order’ continuing to work within the system of the U.N., Russia had no intention of subsuming itself to any such globalist enterprise. Rather, Russia insists on its interests in Europe, Middle East, Transcausia, Central Asia, and the Asia-Pacific region. It might be asked whether China and Russia will, rather, conflict in such regions?

Significance of India

India rightly plays a pivotal role in such a new dispensation. She is seen and sees herself as playing the role of a power in the Indian Ocean that might conflict or co-exist with China and the USA. Savin refers to the territorial and civilizational disputes between China and India, but also considers that multipolarity might provide a new context for co-operation, especially if there are common interests in restraining a U.S. presence. One might expect the USA to try and confound any such Sino-Indian relationship, as it has unsuccessfully in regard to Russo-Indian friendship.

Iran as a Geopolitical Pole

Iran emerges as a geopolitical pole given its position between Central Asia and the Middle East, and its being the centre of Shi’ite Islam. Iran’s position of leadership has been impelled by its conflict with U.S. interests seeking to expand in the region. Iran’s consciousness of its position was indicated by President Khatami in 1999 in declaring 2001 ‘The Year of Dialogue Among Civilisations’ as the counter to the unipolar doctrine of ‘the clash of civilisations’. Under the following presidency of Ahmadinejad Iran pursued friendship with Latin America, Russia, Africa and China; the latter sponsoring Iran’s pursuit of membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. (Savin, p. 112).

‘The Latin American Pivot’

Given that since the Monroe Doctrine the USA has considered Latin America its ‘backyard’, resistance to ‘American imperialism’ has a long pedigree. This has taken the form of both far-left guerrilla movements and the rise of populists. Chavez was particularly important is assuming leadership of this trend, which ideologically rests on a ‘new socialism’ that incorporates indigenous cultural identities intrinsically opposed to globalisation processes. A proponent of ‘Bolivarianism’, the doctrine of a South American bloc, this has manifested in institutions such as the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), Community of Latin American & Caribbean States, and the initiative by Chavez and Castro in 2004: Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA).

Of particular importance is that in 2011 Uruguayan president Pepe Mujica iterated the need to avoid ideological dogma, and transcend left, right, and centre. What was Péron, for example, who remains such a pervasive influence, Chavez having called himself a Péroninst? What of Vargas in Brazil, whose supposedly ‘right-wing dictatorship’ is still remembered for its reforms among the industrial workers and peasantry? Both were advocates of a geopolitical bloc, as was Ibanez in Chile, although Vargas was stifled by internal opposition in pursuing this goal. Other pacts were signed by Péron with Ecuador and Nicaragua, but also stymied by internal opposition. Péron side-tracked the opposition from within by initiating a justicialist-syndicalist pan-American labour union, ATLAS, banned in 1955, after his ouster. (Bolton, Péron & Péronism, London, 2014, pp. 182-188).

Polycentricity and Pluriversality

Mulitpolarity is synonymous with polycentricity, or many centres of polity, which will comprise a pluriverse of ‘interests, perspectives, values’, where there are going to be at least several ethnic or religious groups within the same space.

While Savin traces the concept back especially to Americans such as William James, it is to South American thinkers that we return. It is here that Western universalism attempted to impose itself on sundry indigenes, first as imperialism, then as globalisation. Here there is much discussion in academia about ‘many worlds’, ways of being and of ‘reality’. Here spirituality remains a legitimate means of critique, beyond the positivism of the West. Savin cites academics referring to the continuing connexion with the spirit world, where the ‘natural, religious, spiritual, political, and social are not separate’. (Savin, p. 138).

Savin shows by the example of Carl Schmitt, the German legal philosopher, that elements of the West are as relevant to the ushering of a new dispensation as any other remnant of tradition. Schmitt is quoted from a 1927 work that ‘there is always a Pluriverse of different peoples and states’. The world is a ‘pluriverse, not a universe’. Rejecting the possibility of a world state and ‘one humanity’ he saw such concepts as facades for imposing ‘economic imperialism’.

A Matter of Time

Inherent in the globalist vision is the Late Western perception of time being linear, with a focus on the present. The obsession with ‘progress’, while thinking only of the moment, has major impacts on ecology, economy and society. Here we see a gamut of ideas inherited from the Enlightenment; positivism, Darwinism, utilitarianism.

The global managerial elite has adopted Late Western time and space perceptions, where the cliché holds good that time equals money, while to the Russian time is eternity, while India has a sense of timelessness, reflected in the vastness of the yugas of the Vedic literature, and China thinks in long durations. Savin points out the commonality of Marxism and capitalism: the lineal ascent from ‘primitive to modern’, with a focus on the present, and detachment from the past.

Citing the Weimar era revolutionary-conservative Arthur Moeller van der Bruck, epochs unfold as part of a chain of past, present and future which unlike the Late West, expresses a chain of continuity and ‘social holism’. This is why conservativism ‘creates value’, while the Late Western fixation with the present creates exploitation (Savin, p. 177); why ecological devastation in quest of instant profit is normal and necessary.

Savin poses the question as to the position of the West in a future pluriverse. Can the West be saved; ‘reset’? Alternatives he lists are: (1) Non-West, (2) Anti-West, (3) New West, and (4) East (and North and South), as a ‘spatial, ideological concept’.

Because the Fourth Political Theory is a conservative alternative, what Savin shows is that the left critique is flawed because the left itself derives from the same zeitgeist. Oswald Spengler said something similar a century ago when he stated that there is no so-called ‘proletarian’ movement that does not operate in the interests of money, in his essay/lecture on ‘Prussian socialism’ (1919), in The Decline of The West, and in The Hour of Decision.

Enlightenment Spectre

From the notion of time as lineal and therefore suggesting ‘progress’ emerged the notion that some races are ‘primitive’ and some advanced. Here the Western concept of ‘race’ emerged, again from the Enlightenment. This notion of ‘progress’ heralded the doctrine of the ‘civilising mission’ of the West, a notion that the USA assumed after Britain’s imperial decay, and rationalised colonialism; the precursor of today’s globalisation. Enlightenment philosophers such as Adam Smith and Kant had written of racial hierarchies, and the ‘necessity of development’.

We might recall that Rousseau held such notions, as did the liberal-democrat, pro-Jacobin, slave-owning Francophile faction of the USA’s Founding Fathers led by Thomas Jefferson. As did Karl Marx, whose dialectical materialism required the imposition of industrialisation on ‘primitives’ such as Indians, writing that ‘whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history…’ (Marx, The British Rule in India, NY Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853). Without ‘the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia’, there could be no process leading to socialism. (Marx, The Future Results of British Rule in India, NY Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853).

Character of Laws

Globalism and unipolarity, or American hegemony, receives legal sanction by contrived notions of ‘international law’. With Savin’s chapter on ‘law and justice’ (p. 187) we come to the utilitarian methodology of imposing and expanding that hegemony. International law is expressed through institutions such as The Hague Tribunal and the London Court of Arbitration. Francis Fukuyama suggests an international network of institutions to enforce international law.

‘International law’ justifies global interference including military invasion. The manner by which this serves vested interests might be seen by such examples as U.S. support for Kosovan independence, while rejecting the Crimean desire to return to Russia. The criteria for support or opposition rests with what serves globalist economics and geopolitics. Savin points out the manner by which the USA buys votes in the U.N. Security Council and General Assembly with offers of aid and loans, including support or otherwise for IMF loans.

Again, ‘international law’ proceeds from Enlightenment doctrine, including the social contract theory of Locke, Rousseau and Kant. What we are seeing is the replacing of organic world-views, whether in regard to time or law, with the inorganic and utilitarian. Savin mentions that the process was already emerging during the 16th Century, where mercantile expansion was the forerunner of globalisation: he alludes to Catholic theologian Francisco de Vittorio objecting that there is ‘no universal civil jurisdiction’. Subsequent conservative critics in the West such as Joseph de Maistre, and more recently Carl Schmitt, raised similar objections to universalism, contending that there are a multiplicity of localised world-views, from which emerge laws according to unique circumstance.

What has arisen over centuries of global mercantile expansion, once justified with religious morality, and now with international judicial concepts, has cynically in the name of ‘human rights’, become a universal levelling process.

Security and Sovereignty – Shifting Definitions

The intrusion of ‘international law’ serves Pax Americana. From ‘international law’ one proceeds to justifications for embargoes, sanctions and outright military invasion. The concepts of security and sovereignty are no longer defined according to local traditions, customs, and the ecological and historical experiences that go to form tribes, peoples, cultures, nations, and states. They are levelled to serve unilateral agendas.

Because language is manipulated, Savin often uses etymology to discover the root of concepts. Hence, ‘security’ has meant to the Greeks, ‘to knock down’, to the Romans, ‘without worry’, to the Russians, ‘careful oversight’, or vigil. We now have in the lexicon of statehood, ‘failed states,’ ‘fragile states’, ‘fractured states’, ‘restricted sovereignty’. To the modern epoch ‘collective security’ means what might be delivered to a ‘rogue state’ or a ‘failed state’ by NATO bombs, especially if that state includes a resource-rich region, such as Kosovo. U.S. backing for the 2014 coup in the Ukraine is regarded as a matter of ‘self-determination’, while Russia’s support for Crimea is called ‘expansionism’.

Other systems are at play, such as cyberwarfare, and the intrusion of transnational corporations, NGOs, venture funds and rating agencies; the power of ‘Big Pharma’ and Monsanto, regional alignments, the role of the U.S. dollar , and the granting or withholding of World Bank loans. Stewart Patrick suggests in Sovereign Wars (2017) that the extension of global links will provide new opportunities for globalisation. Indeed, it is readily ascertainable how NGOs and ‘civil society’ have acted in tandem with the U.S. State Department, USAID, NED, cyber-giants, and many others to intrude on sovereignty. This has enabled the USA to become a ‘hyper-sovereign power’ that extends an outreach globally, unrestrained by traditional concepts of security according to proximity. Savin also mentions Israel as ‘hyper-sovereign’ in its occupation of territories from neighbouring states, and the ‘pseudo-sovereignty’ of Palestine. One might also add the ‘hyper-sovereignty’ of Israel’s world-wide network that encompasses Diaspora Jewry, and sundry lobbies such as AIPAC.

Russia and Hungary acted to remove this ‘civil society’ due to its service to U.S. interests. While whole regions, state after state, have been brought into the orbit of Pax Americana U.S. officialdom alleges that Russia interferes in U.S. politics. Savin states that Russia has sought to defend herself from this onslaught by establishing in 2017 the Temporary Commission for the Protection of State Sovereignty & the Prevention of Interference in the Domestic Affairs of the Russian Federation.

Economics & Religion

These two premise sovereignty and security. As one might expect they are studied as separate entities today, where there has long been in Western academia and further afield a lack of coherence in studies, and overspecialisation that does not allow for a holistic education. But religion reflects the character of a people-culture-nation-state, and economics is also as much diverse among the peoples of the world as religion.

Again the theme is that there is no universal – ‘one size fits all’ – categorisation for the nebulous construct called ‘humanity’.

Savin returns to etymology in seeking for the nature of the subject: economy = home(stead) + rule. (Savin, p. 252). Economics expresses locality; although under globalisation, the locality becomes universal. What remains of traditional religion conflicts with modern economics.

For the West Protestantism had a primary impact on economy, and its predicate the Medieval social ethos; i.e. Catholic. Savin states that Catholicism introduced a rationalistic element into Medieval thought which allowed for the entry of capitalism. However Gothic Europe had for centuries lived according to an ethos that eschewed not only usury as sin, but mercantile competition. The economy was profoundly non-capitalist. In 325 A.D. the Council of Nicea banned usury – interpreted as any profit from money – among clerics. Under Charlemagne the ban was extended to laymen. In 1139 the Second Lateran Council called usury theft. In 1311 the Council of Vienne declared usury a heresy. However, the Church often allowed Jews to practice usury, as did the Muslims, and prohibitions started to wax and wane. (K. R. Bolton, Opposing the Money Lenders, London, 2016, pp. 2-3).

The Jewish role is considered in detail by Savin, drawing on the sociologist Werner Sombart (The Jews & Modern Capitalism, 1911), and sundry Jewish historians. More consideration could be given to the decisive Protestant role, although Savin does cite Max Weber, (The Protestant Ethics & the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905). Although the Church was still in the 16th century resistant enough to try (unsuccessfully) to ban Molinaeus’ book Treatise on Contracts & Usury, Henry VIII established a legal rate of usury, and the old prohibitions gradually went. Holland became the centre of modern banking, from whence the Bank of England learnt its trade. The primary utilitarian philosophers Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill defended usury as legitimate contract. (Bolton, Opposing the Money Lenders, op. cit., p. 4).

Judaism, Catholicism, Islam

Savin states out that Judaism, unlike Christianity and Islam, is based around legalistic contracts with God. (Savin, p. 256). Their continuing nomadism made them an international people that were ideally situated to be the middle men of commerce across boundaries. This was the premise that Menasseh ben Israel, head of the Jewish community in Amsterdam, used in trying to persuade Oliver Cromwell to allow Jews readmittance to England. (Menasseh ben Israel to Cromwell, 1655, in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jahuda Reinharz, The Jews in the Modern World, Oxford, 1980, pp. 9-12).

Savin sees Catholicism as lacking in its response to the rise of international capitalism. However he does accord credit to the encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum) and Pius XI (Quadragesimo anno) which offered an alternative to capitalism and socialism, both seen as godless. Savin accords even less cogency to the position of Russian Orthodoxy to the problem, other than vague principles relating to commerce.

Islam has had a robust outlook in condemning usury (riba) as sin and proclaiming the need for social justice in trade, but here too there are flaws. Savin cites B. Koehler’s Early Islam & the Birth of Capitalism, (London, 2014).

Economics has an inherently global character which Savin sees as only being avoidable by a totally closed economy such as the North Korean. He also avers to the problem of surplus production that has yet to be resolved, which Marx pointed out was an impelling factor that would internationalise trade beyond the boundaries of empires. An alternative that was found by Schumacher of ‘small is beautiful’ fame was from ‘Buddhist economics’, which is also called the ‘middle way’; a sustainable economy, rather than a growth economy.

The question is one that stands at the crux of opposition to globalisation, but one that both Right and Left fail to address: the sovereign prerogative of the state to issue its own credit and currency, according to the productive capacity and needs of its people, without recourse to global financial speculators. That this can be done without any wizardry or miraculous intervention was shown during the 1930s by this reviewer’s country of residence. (K. R. Bolton, State Credit & Reconstruction: The First New Zealand Labour Government, International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 38, no. 1, January 2011, pp. 39-49). That the present New Zealand Labour Government does not have the foggiest idea of how to deal with the housing crisis is indicative of the woeful lack of today’s economic understanding, which one might suspect is deliberate obfuscation cultivated by those who fund such institutions as the London School of Economics.

However, the Russian Orthodox Church has made recent declarations on usury. Moreover there is a local currency called the kolion that could provide a Russian example of what can be done on national and regional scales. (Bolton, Kolionovo vs . Usury: A Lesson for the World, Geopolitica.ru, 19 May 2016, https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/kolionovo-v-usury-lesson-world ).

Power & State

Economy, sovereignty and religion are intrinsic to notions of state and power. In defining the many forms Savin refers to Plato’s types of power which reflect the cyclical descent of a state from health to decay: from monarchy and aristocracy, to the tyranny of oligarchs and mobs. Latin rex had legalistic implications, Persian Shahan sha (king of kings) reflected the divine nexus typical of traditional societies, while to the Rus leadership derived from one who initiates a beginning (Savin, p. 287).

Max Weber described three types of power in the modern epoch: rational/legalistic, traditional, charismatic. To the conservative French thinker Joseph de Maistre, power is predicated on something transcendent, whether religious or juridical. Heidegger, in referencing Nietzsche, saw power as mastering over something, including oneself. Acclaimed Persian Sunni scholar al-Ghazali (1058-1111) presented a similar outlook of self-mastery [the inner jihad of Muslim theology].

The constant lesson from Savin is that globalisation means shifting definitions, and an attempt to set a universal standard. Hence the ‘citizen’, the subject of state and power, becomes the mobile and cosmopolitan consumer, rootless, as befits concomitant shifts in notions of territory and locality. Savin refers to the ‘mall-state’, (Savin, p. 303).

The past epoch of imperialism saw the imposition of borders regardless of ethnicity. Savin refers to the fracture of the Kurds across several states, and to the Durand Line between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Middle Eastern states are composed of a colossal mess of map design by the Anglo-French that so disturbed T. E. Lawrence. The Versailles Treaty subjected Sudeten Germans to Czechs and provided Hitler with the justification for expansion eastward. The demands for a Greater Albania were the means by which Kovoso was detached from Serbia. Many other inorganic and a-historic borders provide propagandistic justifications for U.S./NATO/UNO intervention.

Ethnoi, Peoples, Nations

The natures of ethnoi, peoples, and nations are being redefined with the goal of obliteration into a vortex of monoculture, where a mass of drones is administered by a managerial class.

Concepts of nationality include the German ‘volk’, and the ‘Deusches volkthum’ of Friedrich Jan (1815) defining individuals united into an idenitity. Jacobinism and liberalism played an important role in defining nationalism and ‘people’ as a means of rebellion against the traditional dynastic and imperial orders, uniting individuals by means of social contract and constitutions rather than through the nexus of divine rulership. For Herder nations are born from time and place, and each nation has its own character. The Romantic Movement referred to a common spirit of ‘past, present and future’.

Max Weber saw the nation as ‘a specific sentiment of solidarity in the face of other groups’, and he wrote of a people’s ‘values’. (Weber Economics & Society, Vol. 2, p. 922). There were and remain theories that both affirm and reject the necessity of attaching nation to state. For Margaret Canovan nationhood reflects ‘solidarity’ and ‘feeling’ (Nationhood & Political Theory, 1996, p. 69).

Savin traces the Russian school of ethnology to Sergey Shiro Kogorov, who defined an ethnos as ‘a group of people who speaks the same language, recognises their common origin, and has a set of customs and lifestyles which are preserved and sanctified by traditions which differ from the customs of other groups’. (Savin, p. 323). During the Soviet era ethnos was defined by Yulian Bromley as ‘a stable group in a definite territory, with common and stable particularities of language, culture and psyche’, conscious of their unity and difference from others. He stated that language and religion were not definitive criteria for an ethnos.

Savin alludes to Russian Eurasianists as referring to ‘multi-ethnic nationalism’, based on ‘historic destiny’, rather than ethnicity, language or religion. (Savin, p. 343). Savin sees the denial of ethnic differences as part of modernism and post-modernism. He alludes to ‘constructivism’ as the post-modern contention that ethnos is a creation of power elites (Savin, p. 328).

Professor Alexander Wolfheze sees modern nations as ‘bio-cultural residues’ from the overthrown traditional order, where the bourgeois replaces the dynastic rulers. (The Sword of Tradition & the Origin of the Great War, 2018, p. 271). As Marx predicted, this bourgeois ruling class would become ‘international’. K. Leontiev in the 19th century saw modern nationalism as a means of ‘cosmopolitan democratisation’. (National Policy as a Tool of World Revolution). There arose a chauvinistic aggressive nationalism that provided ideological impetus for imperialism and colonialism, in pursuit of markets and resources; the forerunner of globalisation.

Beyond Western concepts, Savin examines the Arab, where ‘nation’ has been defined as a ‘community of people, bound together by a commonality of race, language, homeland, and laws’ (Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi). Ibn Khaldan referred to the ‘spirit of solidarity’ (asabiyyah), where language played the predominant role. In our time, the Grand Mufti of Moscow, R. Gaynetdin defines ‘nation’ as a ‘spiritual kinship’ with language and territorial bonds. (Savin, p. 346).

Indian nationalism was not constituted until the 19th century as a doctrine. Ghandi equated nation with self-governance. A. Ghose saw nationalism as ‘a divine force’, as ‘god manifesting himself’. D. Savarkar was influenced by 19th century Western Indology, referring to communalism, territory, blood (Aryan), Sanskrit, and Hinduism.

Strategic Cultures & Civilisations

While nations have fixed territories, a people (singular) does not. National borders frequently do not correspond with ethnic divisions. There might be successful sub-nations existing within a supra-nation, or imperial edifice where the monarch is the unifying factor, confederations, or state imposed edifices. Savin uses the example of the Quechua Indians spread over a large number of states in Latin America.

The term ‘strategic cultures’ was coined by Jack Snyder in 1977 to analyse the impact of cultures on international relations and military conflicts. However the antecedents go back to Sun Tzu, and Thucydides (Savin, p. 358). During the 19th century concepts such as ‘folk psyche’ and ‘folk spirit’ anticipated ethnopsychology. Savin gives a recent example of Ruth Benedict’s study on Japanese ethnopsychology produced during World War II, The Chrysanthemum & the Sword. Benedict and other social scientists, despite their generally leftist persuasion, played a major role during the Cold War is supplying ethnographic studies for the USA, including the CIA. Through the Asia Foundation, for example, the CIA created ‘part of a widespread pattern linking hundreds of anthropologists and other regional specialists with Cold War intelligence agencies’. (Katherine Verdery, The CIA is Not a Trope, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2016), Vol. 6, No. 2, p. 447).

Options

The social scientists employed by the CIA, working in tandem with Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and other oligarchic funds, analyse and categorise peoples and cultures according to how they might be subsumed by globalisation. Scholars from outside the West assert the recognition rather than the obliteration of diversity. Muslim scholars assert a dichotomy: there is Islam, and there is the West and its ‘surrogates’ in which money predominates.Abdul Rahman states that there can be no ‘dialogue of civilisations’, because of the hegemonic nature of the West, but states that there needs to be dialogue that maintains a balance of power of different civilizational blocs.(Savin, p. 379).

Russian Eurasianists in emigration, such as K. Chkheidze, criticising the flawed character of the League of Nations, seen as trying to implement a universal state, advocated ‘continental states’, which took account of racial psyche, cultural heritage, and a common recognition of historical tasks. These geopolitical blocs might include Pan-Islam, Pan-Europe, Pan-America, Pan-Asia, and Russia-Eurasia. These ideas probably influenced Karl Haushofer, the German geopolitical theorist, whose doctrine in turn has influenced current Russian thinkers. (Savin, p. 390).

Samuel Huntington politicised the concept of ‘civilisation’ in Clash of Civilizations: Remaking a World Order (1996). Here we see civilisation blocs in intrinsic conflict as they pursue or resist hegemony. Globalist hegemony receives coherent opposition perhaps most of all from Shi’ite Islam and Russia. However, Dugin offers an ideology and implicit strategies intended to be broad enough to be adapted across the world: a type of global anti-globalisation. Dugin in The Theory of the Multipolar World (2012) credits Huntington with coming closest to conceptualising the ‘pole’ as the basis for a pluriversal system of international relations.

While Dugin is the most widely known and influential of the present Eurasianists, he is part of a geopolitical tradition in Russia, the ‘founding father’ being Petr Savitsky whose concept of mestortazvitie (‘place-development’) refers to the emergence of blocs as totalities comprising geographic, ethnic, economic, historical, and other factors. (Savin, p. 392). Ethnography has been an important factor. Lev Gumilev with his Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of the Earth (2012), has provided a fascinating hypothesis on the emergence of ethnoi and the role of geography. From Germany the geopolitical theorist Carl Schmitt (‘large spaces’) provided important input.

In concluding his consideration of ‘civilisation’ Savin states that etymologically it implies a ‘process’. He refers to Norbert Elias (The Civilising Process, Basel, 1939) in stating that globalisation is one such ‘civilisational process’.

Alternatives

‘International politics’ is seen as a Western invention, which draws significant support from Westernised elites from the former colonies. One can point to organisations such as the African-American Institute as having selected and trained political, technocratic and managerial classes to assume leadership of the former African colonies, replacing the departing colonial civil servants with the new servants of U.S. neo-imperialism and the World Bank. Savin draws on anti-colonialist thinkers such as Franz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks) but given the rootlessness of the managerial and technocratic classes being shaped by globalisation into what G. Pascal Zachary has approvingly called The Global Me perhaps maintaining reference to a ‘white’ ruling class’ is passé and obscures the depth of globalisation as a coagulating process of all ethnicities and cultures? We might also note that Black and Brown cultures that have been reshaped by postmodernism into subcultures such as Hip Hop are used as a means of co-opting youth in the process of globalisation, as shown in the Rivkin memorandum (Charles Rivkin, Minority Engagement Report, U.S. Embassy, Paris, 2010).

However, there are scholars within Western academia who provide depth critiques of globalisation and its Enlightenment origins, including its implications for ethno-cultural identity. John Gray in Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics & Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (1995) perceives both liberalism and Marxism as belonging to ‘secularist, rationalist, and humanist’ ‘world historical failure’ (Gray, p. 98; Savin, 400).

The implications of ecology are also identity-based: what are nations and geopolitical blocs other than the eco-systems of ethnoi from whence they are birthed, developed and sustained? Savin cites Jacob von Uexküll, founder of ecology, as stating that ‘a unitary world does not exist’. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben asserts, ‘every environment is a closed unity’ (The Open: Man & Animal, 2003, pp. 40-41; Savin, p. 401), a direct philosophical challenge to the ‘open society of Karl Popper and his protégé George Soros.; but a challenge that does not seem to deter ‘Green’ politics from embracing globalist agendas.

Chinese Model

In tracing the origins of a non-Western approach to international relations, Savin cites the publication of the paper by A. Acharya and B. Buzan in 2010, ‘Non-Western International Relations Theory’, in Perspectives on and beyond Asia. Savin gives first place for such perspectives to the ‘Chinese school’. However, he also cites Yazing Qin who contends that there is no ‘Chinese school’. The main ideas have been taken from the West, and remain premised on the ancient ‘Tributary System’, which subordinates others to the Chinese pole. (Qing, Why is there no Chinese International Relations Theory?, in Non-Western International Relations Theory, 2010, pp. 29-31; Savin, p. 410).

Savin contends that the Chinese school is based on the 3G model: Great Learning, Global Vision, Grand Harmony, premised on Confucian doctrine.

Hindu & Muslim

Acharya (op. cit.) advocates for an Indian approach to international relations based on religious tradition. Savin mentions Swaraj (self-government) and Swadeshi (self-sufficiency) as principles still widely employed in India. (Savin, p. 413). India remains pivotal to any resistance to globalisation in this reviewer’s opinion. (Bolton, Geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific, 2013).

Islamic theory is based on a dichotomy of Muslim and non-Muslim states. (Savin, p. 414). This religious dichotomy is portrayed by globalist propagandists in asserting the inevitability of the ‘clash of civilisations’. However, history has shown both epochs of conflict and of accord between Islam and the West. The situation is dialectically exploited by the USA’s support for Wahhabist states, while duplicitously claiming to lead a ‘war on terrorism’ as a primary method of imposing Pax Americana. (Bolton, Zionism, Islam & the West, 2014).

Sustainability

The Fourth Political Theory attempts to provide a coherent philosophy on which to premise alternatives to globalisation and the Pax Americana that is premised on what us seen as passé liberal-Enlightenment dogmas from the Late West. The Fourth Political Theory is intrinsically conservative, defined as being cognisant of the importance of traditions and therefore of differences. It also inherently rejects the notion of positivism and the lineal approach to history as ‘progress’.

This conservative rejection of positivism and the concomitant industrialism that was applauded as much by Marx as by the Manchester School, has brought us to treadmill economics that has encroached upon most of the world; i.e. globalisation and what Marx predicted (approvingly) as the internationalising tendency of capitalist production. To this Savin posits ‘sustainable development’. While this is an aim of the U.N. the institution is itself a product of positivist, Enlightenment notions of ‘humanity’. The nations that comprise much of the U.N.O. are still firmly embedded in various stages of capitalism, including those that are described a socialist. Certain Muslim and Latin-socialist states, such as Cuba and Iran, are exceptions. Few function outside the orbit of the World Bank for example. Hence the neglect of environment (Savin, p. 420), and lack of an ecological perspective, that includes human cultures as constituents of unique eco-systems.

Dasein

In looking for antecedents to the Fourth Political Theory, Professor Martin Heidegger plays an important role. (Savin, p. 421).

The Heideggerian concept, Dasein, can be seen as in accord with khudi and its analogous concepts in East and West. Here Dasein means a state of authentic being, where one exists between past and present, the underlying notion of the eternal, and the nexus between man and divinity.

Alexander Dugin asks, ‘can one speak of a specific Russian Dasein?’ (Savin p. 425). Every civilisation has its own concept of Dasein. For Russia it is centred on Orthodox Christianity and Eurasianism: tradition, and the coming-into-being. Savin quotes Heidegger on an ‘historical people’s’ metaphysics manifesting as metapolitics. Dasein requires a process of re-discovering for those living within post-modernism.

Savin gives examples of the influence of Heidegger, throughout Latin America, among Muslim scholars, Japanese (Kyoto School), the Buddhist equivalence of Dasein (‘true being’), and Korea. Heidegger is a bridge between East and West, between ‘abstract contemplation’ and ‘rigid rationalism’. (Savin, p. 427).

Multipolar Praxis

There is increasing discussion on multipolar principles implicit in ‘multilogue’ and ‘polylogue’, where even Western scholars and diplomats are searching for alternatives to unipolarity. New alliances are being considered at different levels.

Mohammed Samir Hassain, University of Pune, sees a commonality between Germany and India in opposing unipolarity. In Germany, scholarly and diplomatic quarters are discussing the concept of ‘anchor countries’ (German Development Institute, 2004; Savin, p. 433), the equivalent to Dugin’s ‘poles’, around which regional blocs might form. The European Union has potential for what high level thinkers are calling ‘strategic autonomy’. (D. Fiott, Strategic Autonomy towards European Sovereignty in Defence?, EU Institute for Security Studies, November 2018; Savin, p. 437). In particular doctrines on European continental defence, such as the European Defence Fund, are forming outside NATO.

Savin suggests that the E.U. might become ‘another West’, while there is discussion on the E.U. becoming another ‘pole’ in a multipolar world. (Savin, p. 438). Russia stands between East and West. Russia’s role with that of Germany is being widely recognised as such among strategists in both Russia and the E.U. Although Savin has discounted Spengler, like Moeller and other Weimar era conservatives, Spengler saw Germany’s future being aligned with that of Russia as the successor to the West on the world stage. (Spengler, The Two Faces of Russia & Germany’s Eastern Problems, 1922, in Prussian Socialism & Other Essays, London, 2018, pp. 111-125).

Against Colossi

What structural forms might a multipolar world take? With talk of geopolitical and regional blocs, the impression might easily be of cumbersome bureaucratic entities obliterating local identities and imposing downward structures. However, the raison d’etre of the Eurasianist doctrine is to offer an alternative to the global uniformity; to maintain or restore every authentic identity.

Fourth Political Theory suggests geopolitical blocs as confederations of small entities. This is contrary to the Late West’s conception of ‘the banality of multiculturalism’ (Savin, p. 449), which serves to fracture and re-integrate national and cultural entities around a money nexus.

What Eurasianism suggests is along the model of the Swiss confederation, where 22 regions form an organic totality. Savin draws on the works of German thinker Leopold Kohr, who rejected the nebulousness of ‘humanity’ in favour of identities that would replace the artificial borders of nation-states (modernist liberal constructs, yet so beloved by the nationalist-right); the ‘bourgeois spirit’ as Savin calls it (Savin, p. 446).

The goal is, Savin concludes, ‘A pluriversal, harmonious order of a complex of polycentric system of systems…’

multipolarity

Leonid Savin

Polycentricity

4th political theory

Related links

The End of Pax Americana and the Rise of Multipolarity

The world is going to multipolarity

Iraq: A Multipolar Restart

The ultimate goal of every totalitarian system is to establish complete control over society and every individual within it in order to achieve ideological uniformity and eliminate any and all deviation from it. This goal can never be achieved, of course, but it is the raison d’être of all totalitarian systems, regardless of what forms they take and ideologies they espouse. You can dress totalitarianism up in Hugo Boss-designed Nazi uniforms, Mao suits, or medical-looking face masks, its core desire remains the same: to remake the world in its paranoid image … to replace reality with its own “reality.”

We are right in the middle of this process currently, which is why everything feels so batshit crazy. The global capitalist ruling classes are implementing a new official ideology, in other words, a new “reality.” That’s what an official ideology is. It’s more than just a set of beliefs. Anyone can have any beliefs they want. Your personal beliefs do not constitute “reality.” In order to make your beliefs “reality,” you need to have the power to impose them on society. You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific “experts,” academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine.

There is nothing subtle about this process. Decommissioning one “reality” and replacing it with another is a brutal business. Societies grow accustomed to their “realities.” We do not surrender them willingly or easily. Normally, what’s required to get us to do so is a crisis, a war, a state of emergency, or … you know, a deadly global pandemic.

During the changeover from the old “reality” to the new “reality,” the society is torn apart. The old “reality” is being disassembled and the new one has not yet taken its place. It feels like madness, and, in a way, it is. For a time, the society is split in two, as the two “realities” battle it out for dominance. “Reality” being what it is (i.e., monolithic), this is a fight to the death. In the end, only one “reality” can prevail.

This is the crucial period for the totalitarian movement. It needs to negate the old “reality” in order to implement the new one, and it cannot do that with reason and facts, so it has to do it with fear and brute force. It needs to terrorize the majority of society into a state of mindless mass hysteria that can be turned against those resisting the new “reality.” It is not a matter of persuading or convincing people to accept the new “reality.” It’s more like how you drive a herd of cattle. You scare them enough to get them moving, then you steer them wherever you want them to go. The cattle do not know or understand where they are going. They are simply reacting to a physical stimulus. Facts and reason have nothing to do with it.

And this is what has been so incredibly frustrating for those of us opposing the roll-out of the “New Normal,” whether debunking the official Covid-19 narrative, or “Russiagate,” or the “Storming of the US Capitol,” or any other element of the new official ideology. (And, yes, it is all one ideology, not “communism,” or “fascism,” or any other nostalgia, but the ideology of the system that actually rules us, supranational global capitalism. We’re living in the first truly global-hegemonic ideological system in human history. We have been for the last 30 years. If you are touchy about the term “global capitalism,” go ahead and call it “globalism,” or “crony capitalism,” or “corporatism,” or whatever other name you need to. Whatever you call it, it became the unrivaled globally-hegemonic ideological system when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. Yes, there are pockets of internal resistance, but it has no external adversaries, so its progression toward a more openly totalitarian structure is logical and entirely predictable.)

Anyway, what has been so incredibly frustrating is that many of us have been operating under the illusion that we are engaged in a rational argument over facts (e.g., the facts of Russiagate, Literal-Hitlergate, 9/11, Saddam’s WMDs, Douma, the January 6 “insurrection,” the official Covid narrative, etc.) This is not at all what is happening. Facts mean absolutely nothing to the adherents of totalitarian systems.

You can show the New Normals the facts all you like. You can show them the fake photos of people dead in the streets in China in March of 2020. You can show them the fake projected death rates. You can explain how the fake PCR tests work, how healthy people were deemed medical “cases.” You can show them all the studies on the ineffectiveness of masks. You can explain the fake “hospitalization” and “death” figures, send them articles about the unused “emergency hospitals,” the unremarkable age-and-population-adjusted death rates, cite the survival rates for people under 70, the dangers and pointlessness of “vaccinating” children. None of this will make the slightest difference.

Or, if you’ve bought the Covid-19 narrative, but haven’t completely abandoned your critical faculties, you can do what Glenn Greenwald has been doing recently. You can demonstrate how the corporate media have intentionally lied, again and again, to whip up mass hysteria over “domestic terrorism.” You can show people videos of the “violent domestic terrorists” calmly walking into the Capitol Building in single file, like a high-school tour group, having been let in by members of Capitol Security. You can debunk the infamous “fire-extinguisher murder” of Brian Sicknik that never really happened. You can point out that the belief that a few hundred unarmed people running around in the Capitol qualifies as an “insurrection,” or an “attempted coup,” or “domestic terrorism,” is delusional to the point of being literally insane. This will also not make the slightest difference.

I could go on, and I’m sure I will as the “New Normal” ideology becomes our new “reality” over the course of the next several years. My point, at the moment, is … this isn’t an argument. The global-capitalist ruling classes, government leaders, the corporate media, and the New Normal masses they have instrumentalized are not debating with us. They know the facts. They know the facts contradict their narratives. They do not care. They do not have to. Because this isn’t about facts. It’s about power.

I’m not saying that facts don’t matter. Of course they matter. They matter to us. I’m saying, let’s recognize what this is. It isn’t a debate or a search for the truth. The New Normals are disassembling one “reality” and replacing it with a new “reality.” (Yes, I know that reality exists in some fundamental ontological sense, but that isn’t the “reality” I’m talking about here, so please do not send me angry emails railing against Foucault and postmodernism.)

The pressure to conform to the new “reality” is already intense and it’s going to get worse as vaccination passes, public mask-wearing, periodic lockdowns, etc., become normalized. Those who don’t conform will be systematically demonized, socially and/or professionally ostracized, segregated, and otherwise punished. Our opinions will be censored. We will be “canceled,” deplatformed, demonitized, and otherwise silenced. Our views will be labeled “potentially harmful.” We will be accused of spreading “misinformation,” of being “far-right extremists,” “racists,” “anti-Semites,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “anti-global-capitalist violent domestic terrorists,” or just garden variety “sexual harassers,” or whatever they believe will damage us the most.

This will happen in both the public and personal spheres. Not just governments, the media, and corporations, but your colleagues, friends, and family will do this. Strangers in shops and restaurants will do this. Most of them will not do it consciously. They will do it because your non-conformity represents an existential threat to them … a negation of their new “reality” and a reminder of the reality they surrendered in order to remain a “normal” person and avoid the punishments described above.

This is nothing new, of course. It is how “reality” is manufactured, not only in totalitarian systems, but in every organized social system. Those in power instrumentalize the masses to enforce conformity with their official ideology. Totalitarianism is just its most extreme and most dangerously paranoid and fanatical form.

So, sure, keep posting and sharing the facts, assuming you can get them past the censors, but let’s not kid ourselves about what we’re up against. We’re not going to wake the New Normals up with facts. If we could, we would have done so already. This is not a civilized debate about facts. This is a fight. Act accordingly.

Almost every adult believes that he or she is rational, because he or she can easily cite many simple but important examples of personal rational behaviour in daily life. Selecting one from several packs of cereal in a store, for example, or making sure that a child is properly dressed and equipped to go to school. Any civilized society in the world rests on the foundation of uncountable such acts of rational behaviour.

But, as we well know, no system of reasoning can be built without underlying premises. The underlying premises in the two examples cited here are self-preservation and nurture, both perfectly valid premises in a civilised society. In a society at peace with itself, the underlying premises – “self-evident truths” – are understood, appreciated and not questioned.

In a time of crisis, of course, the premises of a civilised society begin to crack. Neglect, brutality, deception, mistrust and misery reign. An individual is no longer sure about what he or she should believe – and what strange thoughts the next individual may be carrying in his or her head. This leads to insecure individuals forming smaller clans or groups. Such paranoid clans and groups invariably fear and mistrust each other. Two overlapping groups – “politicians” and “scamsters” – are masters at exploiting mistrust, since “not adding to others’ misery” is not a basic premise in their version of rational behaviour.

[An even sicker, sociopathic group has as its premise “adding consciously to others’ misery”; the author prefers to skirt around the consequences of that sick premise!]

It seems clear that a person is defined by the premises – “self-evident truths” – that he or she lives by. A devoted mother, for example, lives by her self-evident truths of preservation and nurture of the family; similarly a soldier, a teacher … and so on. A scamster has no dictum other than “feeding the insatiable self”, although one does hear, at least in romantic fiction, about some who do care for other individuals.

Given that many different variants of “civilised society” exist around the world, a fascinating topic of interest for any reflective mind becomes the “self-evident truths” binding a society together – or, conversely, the absence of “self-evident truths” leading to disunity.

Let us consider an example.

A certain gentleman once said: “Suffering is a noble truth”. He meant thereby that this particular truth was existential; it holds in any human society. This truth was clearly “self-evident” to the gentleman himself at the time when he asserted it; but of course we must examine it afresh from our own special vantage point.

The name and other historical antecedents of the gentleman do not concern us at all here, since we are considering only this one utterance as a possible premise. Indeed his name and the antecedents may well throw our logical discussion off track.

That suffering is an existential reality should – one would humbly submit – be evident to all but children and the imbecile. If anything, the variants of suffering around the world have grown rather profusely over the last few centuries, as technology has produced almost incredible means to tamper with human life and the planetary ecosystems.

However, in the specific assertion cited, doubt does arise about the word “noble”. How can suffering be called a “noble” truth, given that we so desperately wish to be rid of it?

However, the very fact that we desperately wish to be rid of suffering should give us pause, since we know from experience that desperation leads to irrational behaviour. Desperation to shake off suffering – somehow, anyhow, find a way! – can therefore diminish one’s ability to remain rational and address the real issue.

We agree that, even in the most civilised of societies, one cannot teach philosophy to a hungry man. At least a simple snack, which should not be beyond reach in a civilised society, should be arranged before the philosophy lecture starts. Otherwise, pangs of hunger will interfere adversely in the rational and wholesome process of learning philosophy.

So then how can suffering of any kind – hunger, pain, stress, jealousy, depression … or whatever else! – be called “noble”? Surely that adjective is out of place here? Indeed, at first glance, suffering seems to be a rather “ignoble” aspect of existential reality. The gentleman who made that statement could have made a mistake, after all.

How do we solve this apparent riddle?

Let us agree that “suffering” is any aspect or element of existential reality that we find painful, or at least very unpleasant. A fundamental question then is this: With what attitude do we face and accept this painful or very unpleasant element of existential reality?

Surely a scowl or howl of disgust will not help us in any way. A calm mind might actually come up with a way to lessen the pain. Might “nobility” in this instance be construed to mean that the unpleasant or painful reality compels us to remain calm – to think of a way to deal with it, to alleviate it? “Nobility” in this case would lie in facing the challenge; and any serious challenge does demand a high degree of nobility in facing up to it.

Indeed, the idea of “paradise”, “promised land” or “shining city on the hill”, arises precisely when an individual fails to recognize and face up to this challenge. Such an individual may dream grandly of a “final victory” over suffering – for his or her clan or group, naturally! – and push ahead on that premise, blind to reality. One may even suggest that much of human history has been shaped by a mistaken understanding of the existential reality of suffering, against which there can be no “final victory”, but only a constant struggle.

If suffering is an existential reality, does it really matter whether or not we dub it as “noble”? Of course not! That word, after all, is only an adjective. Use of that word reflects not upon the reality itself but upon our response to it; adjectives are only in our mind.

Consider the worst crimes committed by humans against other humans. When we say suffering is “noble”, we do not imply that the crimes are not ugly, or that the criminals must not be punished. Of course criminals must be punished, and victims must be helped. But we do imply that the reflective person – the philosopher – must examine the whole scene with a clear eye, avoiding both “pie in the sky” non-solutions and political gimmicks.

We may therefore imagine a vantage point from which the question of suffering can be examined with a cool mind, which requires gaining at least some respite from suffering. A doctor must treat patients with a calm, focussed mind – not with pique or desperation.

A discussion about the premises underlying rational behaviour can be compared to two friends sparring at chess. Their aim is not to “win a big prize”, but to explore the various possibilities the game provides to them for creative, logical thinking. While no “prize” is at stake, both players will surely become better at chess as a result of the sparring.

Exactly in that spirit, one can explore the effects on people’s behaviour of the premises they live by – sometimes with happy results, and sometimes with tragic ones.

Two examples:

1. At present, the people and the so-called leaders of a certain “superpower” seem rather at a loss about their fundamental beliefs. Money, sense pleasures and fame seem high on their agenda – but these are the premises one admits to only in private. These must be disguised in fake verbosity, for them to have even a pretence of value. Therefore various self-serving concepts are being tried out, but only to worsen matters. Even those who see themselves as “enlightened” are chasing money, sense pleasures and fame. Insincerity and lack of clarity are running rampant; greed, prejudice and political exigencies are determining actions.

2. In my own country – a large and raucous democracy – debate is intense at present, essentially about which set of premises will determine our political processes in the coming years and decades. Our constitution provides very sound guidelines, but it also comes under the strain of fiercely competing premises. One hopes that our “core values” and democratic processes will eventually resolve matters – in spite of the many so-called “foreign elites” who come hawking their gobbledegook wares.

The key point seems to be this. The premises – “core values”, “self-evident truths” – that a society lives by, or fails to live by, determine its path going forward. Often these core values are bruised or buried by political chicanery and bombast, or by economic pressures; even then, however, the longer term evolution of a society is crucially dependent on them.

If there is truth in this conclusion, then another conclusion also follows. What goes by the fashionable name of “ideology” is only a “smoke and mirror” show of verbosity to disguise the true premises of a clever, vociferous, insistent and insatiable group.