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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

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

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

The Collapse Will Be Mental

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Solution Will Be Mental

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Kingsnorth

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

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

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

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

We seem to have completely lost this idea.

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

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

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

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

This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

1

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

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

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

Russian philosopher, naturalist, and economist Nikolai Danilevsky. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

November 28 marks the 200th birthday of Russian thinker Nikolai Danilevsky. Relatively unknown in the West, Danilevsky is extraordinarily influential in modern Russia, and understanding his ideas is essential to grasping the essence of the current political conflict between Russia and the West.

In the early 1990s, two theories of humanity’s future competed for the attention of those interested in international affairs. The first was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, which predicted that every country in the world was destined eventually to adopt the same social-economic and political system, namely Western-style liberalism. The second was Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which stated that rather than converging, the countries of the world were separating into distinct civilizational blocs.

To Russians, none of this was remotely new. For the Fukuyama-Huntington debate did little more than echo a long-standing argument that has been raging among Russian intellectuals since the infamous debate between the Westernizers and Slavophiles in the 1840s.

The Westernizers were Fukuyama-ists before Fukuyama. They had what academics like to call a “teleological” view of the world, considering that the iron laws of history dictated that all societies eventually converged on a common end (telos in Greek). For them, this end was synonymous with the West. As the mid-19th century liberal Russian thinker Konstantin Kavelin put it, “The difference [between the West and Russia] lies solely in the preceding historical facts; the aim, the task, the aspirations, the way forward are one and the same.”

The Slavophiles countered this argument by contending that Western civilization had peaked. Russia, by contrast, still had much to offer the world through its own unique, Orthodox, culture. Only by developing this uniqueness and avoiding assimilation into the West could Russia contribute to universal civilization.

Interestingly, this argument still viewed Russia and the West as connected. Russia, by protecting its Orthodox heritage, was seen as being able in due course to export it to the West and so save the latter from itself. Slavophilism did not reject the idea of a common future.

It is here that Danilevsky stepped in, making the decisive break with teleological thinking. A biologist by profession, he adopted an organic view of the world. Human civilizations, he maintained, were organic beings that were born, matured, and died. None could be said to constitute the “End of History.”

In his most famous work, entitled Russia and Europe, he outlined a theory that Russia and Western Europe were entirely distinct “cultural historical types.” Different cultural historical types, he said, developed in their own separate ways. In opposition to theories of cultural convergence, he compared the world to a town square from which different roads (i.e. different civilizations) moved out in different directions. Each cultural historical type was inherently distinct, and consequently it made no sense to try to force it to develop along the path of another.

Other Russians built on Danilevsky’s theory. Late nineteenth century philosopher Konstantin Leontyev, for instance, postulated that civilizational life cycles had three stages: primary simplicity, flowering complexity, and secondary simplicity (the period of decay). Flowering complexity represented the peak of development. On an international scale, this meant that one should avoid the alleged homogenization that would come with everybody adopting Western-style liberalism, and instead celebrate a multiplicity of different civilizational types. The “End of History” would quite literally be the end of human development, and was thus to be avoided.

Later, Eurasianist thinkers used geology, botany, linguistics, and other fields of study to try to provide a scientific basis for the idea that the space of the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union constituted a coherent entity distinct from those around it. Originally devised by Russian émigrés in the 1920s, Eurasianism crept into the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era, influencing among others the ethnographer Lev Gumilyov. Gumilyov argued that ethnic groups (etnoi) were a natural phenomenon and that what suited one group did not suit another, although those with certain complementarities could form a superetnos. The superetnos that was the Soviet people was entirely different from the superetnos of the West and as such should develop entirely in its own separate way.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, civilizational thinking has become de rigueur in Russia. A study by San Francisco State University professor Andrei Tsygankov showed that the most cited Russian authors in Russian academic articles on topics of international relations were Danilevsky and Leontyev. The idea that civilizational differences are real and can be objectively determined is now widely accepted outside the very narrow circle of Russia’s few remaining liberals.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was rather late in coming round to this point of view. In the early 2000s he was a traditional Westernizer, speaking of Russia’s eventual integration into Europe. More recently, however, his tone has changed. Speaking to the Valdai Club at the end of October, he used the words “civilization,” “civilizations,” and “civilizational” some 20 times, and commented that “real democracy in a multipolar world is primarily about the ability of any nation—I emphasize—any society or civilization to follow its own path.”

To rub in the point, Putin mentioned Danilevsky and cited his statement that progress lies in “walking the field that represents humanity’s historical activity, walking in all directions,” adding that “no civilization can take pride in being the height of development.” Putin followed this by calling for a “free development of countries and peoples,” in which “primitive simplification and prohibition can be replaced with the flourishing complexity of culture and tradition.” Though Putin didn’t say it, the language was pure Leontyev.

Some commentators argue that the “New Cold War” between Russia and the West differs from the original in that lacks an ideological component similar to the conflict between communism and capitalism. Others maintain that there is such a component and that it consists of the struggle between democracy and autocracy. Putin’s speech shows that both points of view are wrong.

For the speech reveals a very coherent philosophy well founded in a specific Russian intellectual tradition with origins in Danilevsky. However, this philosophy has nothing to do with autocracy and democracy. In fact, the very essence of civilizational theory is that no system is inherently the best. Putin is not making any claims about how states should organize their internal affairs, let alone promoting autocracy versus democracy. He is, however, making a claim about how the world as a whole should operate, and contrasting the vision of a world converging around Western values and institutions with that of a world consisting of distinct civilizations each advancing towards their own unique destinations. The New Cold War does, therefore, have an ideological component but it’s very different from what most people in the West imagine it to be.

Only time will tell which vision of the world turns out to be accurate. But for now, the terms of the intellectual debate have been set. Two hundred years on, it is very much Danilevsky’s moment.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.

I do believe this is the longest thing I’ve ever written, but also the most important. Read with a stiff drink. – N.S. Lyons

Differences and tensions between the United States and China have never been greater. The whole world is dividing itself between the blocs of these two opposing superpowers. A new Cold War is dawning, complete with a global ideological “battle between democracy and autocracy .” Freedom is on the line. The future of global governance will be determined by the winner of this extended competition between two fundamentally opposed political and economic systems – unless a hot war settles the question early with a cataclysmic fight to the death, much as liberal democracy once fought off fascism.

This is the simple and easy narrative of our present moment. In some ways it is accurate: a geopolitical competition really is in the process of boiling over into open confrontation. But it’s also fundamentally shallow and misleading: when it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but converging to become more alike.

In fact, I can already predict and describe the winner set to prevail in this epochal competition between these two fiercely opposed national systems. In this soon-to-be triumphant system…

Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and “democracy,” the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. “Safety” and “security” have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally.

This elite obsession with control is accelerated by a belief in “scientific management,” or the ability to understand, organize, and run all the complex systems of society like a machine, through scientific principles and technologies. The expert knowledge of how to do so is considered the unique and proprietary possession of the elite vanguard. Ideologically, this elite is deeply materialist, and openly hostile to organized religion, which inhibits and resists state control. They view human beings themselves as machines to be programmed, and, believing the common man to be an unpredictable creature too stupid, irrational, and violent to rule himself, they endeavor to steadily condition and replace him with a better model through engineering, whether social or biological. Complex systems of surveillance, propaganda, and coercion are implemented to help firmly nudge (or shove) the common man into line. Communities and cultural traditions that resist this project are dismantled. Harmfully contrary ideas are systematically censored, lest they lead to dangerous exposure. Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public.

All of this is justified by a utopian ideological dialectic of historical progress and inevitability. Those more in tune with the tide of history (i.e. elite interests) are held to be morally and intellectually superior, as a class, to backwards reactionary elements. Only certain views are stamped “scientific” and “correct,” although these may change on a political whim. An economism that values only the easily quantifiable reigns as the only moral lodestar, and frictionless efficiency is held up as highest common good; the individual is encouraged to fulfill his assigned role as a docile consumer and cog in the regime’s machine, not that of a self-governing citizen. The state regularly acts to stimulate and manage consumer demand, and to strategically regulate and guide industrial production, and the corporate sector has largely fused itself with the state. Cronyism is rampant.

The relentless political messaging and ideological narrative has come to suffuse every sphere of life, and dissent is policed. Culture is largely stagnant. Uprooted, corralled, and hounded, the people are atomized, and social trust is very low. Reality itself often feels obscured and uncertain. Demoralized, some gratefully accept any security offered by the state as a blessing. At the same time, many citizens automatically assume everything the regime says is a lie. Officialdom in general is a Kafkaesque tragi-comedy of the absurd, something only to be stoically endured by normal people. Yet year by year the pressure to conform only continues to be ratcheted higher…

Which country does this describe? If you can’t quite tell, well, that’s the point. For many citizens of the West, the systems of governance under which we live increasingly feel uncomfortably similar to what appears offer in the People’s Republic of China.

There are limits to this similarity, of course: the Chinese Communist Party is a brutal regime that has in the past killed tens of millions of its own people and still rules over them with an iron fist. To say that the United States or any other Western country is identical in nature to China would be ridiculous.

And yet, I’m going to argue that commonalities are indeed growing, and that this is no illusion, coincidence, or conspiracy, but the product of the same deep systemic forces and underlying ideological roots. To claim that we’re the same as China, or even just that we’re turning into China (as I’ve admittedly implied with the title) would really just be political clickbait. The reality is more complicated, but no less unsettling: both China and the West, in their own ways and at their own pace, but for the same reasons, are converging from different directions on the same point – the same not-yet-fully-realized system of totalizing techno-administrative governance. Though they remain different, theirs is no longer a difference of kind, only of degree. China is just already a bit further down the path towards the same future.

But how should we describe this form of government that has already begun to wrap its tentacles around the world today, including here in the United States? Many of us recognize by now that whatever it is we now live under, it sure isn’t “liberal democracy.” So what is it? To begin answering that, and to really explain the China Convergence, we’re going to need to start with a crash course on the rise and nature of the technocratic managerial regime in the West.

Part I: The Managerial Regime

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” – George Orwell

Sometime around the second half of the 19th century a revolution in human affairs began to take place, occurring in parallel to and building on the industrial revolution. This was a revolution of mass and scale, which upended nearly every area of human activity and rapidly reorganized civilization, first in the West and then around the world: the limits of time and space produced by geography were swept away by new technologies of communication and transportation; greatly enlarged populations flowed into and swelled vast urban centers; masses of workers began to toil in huge factories, and then in offices, laboring through an endless paper trail trying to keep track of it all; in politics new opportunities arose for those who could seize on the growing power of the masses and their votes, along with new challenges in providing for their growing needs and desires. In government, in business, in education, and in almost every other sphere of life, new methods and techniques of organization emerged in order to manage the growing complexities of mass and scale: the mass bureaucratic state, the mass standing army, the mass corporation, mass media, mass public education, and so on. This was the managerial revolution.[1]

Rapidly accelerating in the 20th century, the managerial revolution soon began to instigate another transformation of society in the West: it gave birth to a new managerial elite. A new social class had arisen out of the growing scale and complexity of mass organizations as those organizations began to find that, in order to function, they had to rely on large numbers of people who possessed the necessary highly technical and specialized cognitive skills and knowledge, including new techniques of organizational planning and management at scale. Such people became the professional managerial class, which quickly expanded to meet the growing demand for their services. While the wealthy families of the old landed aristocratic elite at first continued to own many of these new mass organizations, they soon were no longer capable of operating them, as the traits that had long defined mastery of their role and status – land ownership, inherited warrior virtues, a classical liberal education, formal rhetoric, personal charisma, an extensive code of social manners, etc. – were no longer sufficient or relevant for doing so. This meant the managerial class soon captured de facto control of all the mass organizations of society.

This managerial takeover was accelerated by what I call the managerial doom loop: the larger and more complex an organization grows, the exponentially more managers are needed; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power for the managers; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion, including by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucracy to take over ever more functions of the broader economy and society; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be educated, which requires more managers…

Anyway, a reckoning over which class now really constituted society’s ruling elite soon became inevitable. In some places the old aristocracy’s end was swift, and bloody. But in most of the West they were not eradicated but coopted and absorbed, with the children of even the wealthiest aristocratic families eventually forced to themselves acquire an education in the same skills, ideas, and mannerisms as the managerial class in order to take on any prominent role, from CEO to politician, to philanthropist. Those who did not do so slowly faded into irrelevance. The managerial class had produced the managerial elite.

This did not mean, however, that the expansion of the new managerial order faced no resistance at all from the old order that it strangled. That previous order, which has been referred to by scholars of the managerial revolution as the bourgeois order, was represented not so much by the grande bourgeoisie (wealthy landed aristocrats and early capitalist industrialists) but by the petite bourgeoisie, or what could be described as the independent middle class.[2] The entrepreneurial small business owner, the multi-generational family shop owners, the small-scale farmer or landlord; the community religious or private educator; even the relatively well-to-do local doctor: these and others like them formed the backbone of a large social and economic class that found itself existentially at odds with the interests of the managerial revolution. But, in contrast to what was originally predicted by Marxists, these bourgeoisie came to be mortally threatened not from below by the laboring, landless proletariat, but from above, by the new order of the managerial elite and their expanding legions of paper-pushing professional revolutionaries. The clash between these classes, as the managerial order steadily encroached on, dismantled, and subsumed more and more of the middle class bourgeois order and its traditional culture, and the increasingly desperate backlash this process generated from its remnants, would come to define much of the political drama of the West. That drama continues in various forms to this day.

The animosity of this class struggle was accentuated by the particularly antagonistic ideology that coalesced as a unifying force for the managerial elite. While this managerial ideology, in its various flavors, presents itself in the lofty language of moral values, philosophical principles, and social goods, it just so happens to rationalize and justify the continual expansion of managerial control into all areas of state, economy, and culture, while elevating the managerial class to a position of not only utilitarian but moral superiority over the rest of society – and in particular over the middle and working classes. This helps serve as a rationale for the managerial elite’s legitimacy to rule, as well as an invaluable means to differentiate, unify, and coordinate the various branches of that elite.

Managerial ideology, a relatively straightforward descendant of the Enlightenment liberal-modernist project , is a formula that consists of several core beliefs, or what could be called core managerial values. At least in the West, these can be distilled into:

1. Technocratic Scientism: The belief that everything, including society and human nature, can and should be fully understood and controlled through scientific and technical means. In this view everything consists of systems, which operate, as in a machine, on the basis of scientific laws that can be rationally derived through reason. Humans and their behavior are the product of the systems in which they are embedded. “Social science” functions in the same way as the physical sciences. These systems can therefore be socially engineered to be improved. Good and bad, like everything else, are scientifically quantifiable. Those with superior scientific and technical knowledge are thus those best placed to understand the cause and effect governing society, and therefore to run it. Ignorance, and the ignorant, are in contrast ultimately the cause of all dysfunction and harm.

2. Utopianism: The belief that a perfect society is possible – in this case through the perfect application of perfect scientific and technical knowledge. The machine can ultimately be tuned to run flawlessly. At that point all will be completely provided for and therefore completely equal, and man himself will be entirely rational, fully free, and perfectly productive. This state of perfection is the telos, or pre-destined end point, of human development (through science, physical and social). This creates the idea of progress, or of moving closer to this final end. Consequently history has a teleology: it bends towards utopia. This also means the future is necessarily always better than the past, as it is closer to utopia. History now takes on moral valence; to “go backwards” is immoral. Indeed even actively conserving the status quo is immoral; governance is only moral in so far as it affects change , thus moving us ever forwards, towards utopia.

3. Meliorism: The belief that all the flaws and conflicts of human society, and of human beings themselves, are problems that can and should be directly ameliorated by sufficient managerial technique. Poverty, war, disease, criminality, ignorance, suffering, unhappiness, death… none are examples of the human condition that will always be with us, but are all problems to be solved. It is the role of the managerial elite to identify and solve such problems by applying their expert knowledge to improve human institutions and relationships, as well as the natural world. In the end there are no tradeoffs, only solutions.

4. Liberationism: The belief that individuals and society are held back from progress by the rules, restraints, relational bonds, historical communities, inherited traditions, and limiting institutions of the past, all of which are the chains of false authority from which we must be liberated so as to move forwards. Old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits must all be dismantled in order to ameliorate human problems, as old systems and ways of life are necessarily ignorant, flawed, and oppressive. Newer – and therefore superior – scientific knowledge can re-design, from the ground up, new systems and ways of life that will function more efficiently and morally.

5. Hedonistic Materialism: The belief that complete human happiness and well-being fundamentally consists of and is achievable through the fulfillment of a sufficient number of material needs and psychological desires. The presence of any unfulfilled desire or discomfort indicates the systemic inefficiency of an un-provided good that can and should be met in order to move the human being closer to a perfected state. Scientific management can and should therefore to the greatest extent possible maximize the fulfillment of desires. For the individual, consumption that alleviates desire is a moral act. In contrast, repression (including self-repression) of desires and their fulfillment stands in the way of human progress, and is immoral, signaling a need for managerial liberation.

6. Homogenizing Cosmopolitan Universalism: The belief that: a) all human beings are fundamentally interchangeable and members of a single universal community; b) that the systemic “best practices” discovered by scientific management are universally applicable in all places and for all people in all times, and that therefore the same optimal system should rationally prevail everywhere; c) that, while perhaps quaint and entertaining, any non-superficial particularity or diversity of place, culture, custom, nation, or government structure anywhere is evidence of an inefficient failure to successfully converge on the ideal system; and d) that any form of localism, particularism, or federalism is therefore not only inefficient and backwards but an obstacle to human progress and so is dangerous and immoral. Progress will always naturally entail centralization and homogenization.

7. Abstraction and Dematerialization: The belief, or more often the instinct, that abstract and virtual things are better than physical things , because the less tied to the messy physical world humans and their activities are, the more liberated and capable of pure intellectual rationality and uninhibited morality they will become. Practically, dematerialization, such as through digitalization or financialization, is a potent solvent that can help burn away the repressive barriers created by attachments to the particularities of place and people, replacing them with the fluidity and universality of the cosmopolitan. Dematerialization makes property more easily tradable, and can more effectively produce homogenization and fulfill desires at scale. Indeed in theory dematerialization could allow almost everything to take on and be managed at vastly greater, even infinite, mass and scale, holding out the hope of total efficiency: a state of pure frictionlessness, in which change (progress) will be effortless and limitless . Finally, dematerialization also most broadly represents an ideological belief that it is the world that should conform to abstract theory, not theory that must conform to the world.

Combined, the promotion of these seven managerial values served as a convenient ideological means for the managerial system to challenge the existing ethic and values of the middle-class bourgeois order that preceded it. These bourgeois values consisted of a mix of conservative and classical liberal values. Nowhere were these values once more distinct than in America, where they had developed into a recognizable blend that included: a strong preference for local governance, grass-roots democracy, and an aversion to top-down control; an accepted diversity of regional and local folkways and traditions; a general mythic ideal of spirited individualism and energetic self-reliance; a countervailing tradition of tight-knit family life and exceptionally widespread participation in a proliferation of thick religious, community, and civic associations and affiliations (as most famously described by Alexis de Tocqueville); “Protestant work ethic,” and an attention to thrift and self-discipline as moral virtues; an intimate connection to the land, and a very strong attachment to middle-class property ownership as central to republican self-governance and the national character; political realism and a conservative aversion to too rapid and radical of change.

The contrasting values of managerial ideology were perfectly structured to invert, undermine, marginalize, disrupt, and dismantle every one of these bourgeois values simultaneously, steadily subverting the ideological basis for bourgeois legitimacy intellectually, morally, and politically, thus clearing the way to justify the establishment of an alternative political system of rule by the new managerial elite.

The Managerial System

This managerial system developed into several overlapping, interlinked sectors that can be roughly divided into and categorized as: the managerial state, the managerial economy, the managerial intelligentsia, the managerial mass media, and managerial philanthropy. Each of these five sectors features its own slightly unique species of managerial elite, each with its own roles and interests. But each commonly acts out of its own interest to reinforce and protect the interests of the other sectors, and the system as a whole. All of the sectors are bound together by a shared interest in the expansion of technical and mass organizations, the proliferation of managers, and the marginalization of non-managerial elements.

The managerial state, characterized by its proliferating administrative bureaucracies and thirst for centralized technocratic control, has a strong incentive to launch utopian and meliorist schemes to “liberate” and reorganize more and more portions of society (the theoretical bases for which are pumped out by the managerial intelligentsia), necessitating entire new layers of bureaucratic management (and whole new categories of “experts”). Mass corporations, which make up the managerial economy, have an interest in seeing these schemes implemented, in part because the new layers of regulatory burden that they inevitably produce (more lawyers, more HR managers, etc.) systematically advantage large oligopolistic firms like themselves over those smaller businesses and entrepreneurial upstarts that are both their potential competitors and the old bourgeois power base. The managerial state naturally also wants to break that rival power base. Mass corporations are especially adept at doing this, in particular by advancing the dematerialization of business and property ownership (“you’ll own nothing and be happy”), which both increases the dependence of the middle class and concentrates greater wealth and power in managerial hands. The managerial state also acts to directly stimulate aggregate consumer demand and bolster financialized assets through monetary and fiscal policy, among other tools, such as state contracts and subsidies; this managed demand directly fuels the growth of managerial corporations, which have every incentive to fuse themselves as closely as possible with the state, both to encourage stimulus and to capture regulatory policy. The growth of mass corporations in turn rationalizes the further growth of the regulatory state. Formal and informal “public-private partnership” between corporation and state easily serves the interests of both.

Meanwhile the managerial corporation also has a great deal to gain from the project of mass homogenization, which allows for greater scale and efficiencies (a Walmart in every town, a Starbucks on every corner, Netflix and Amazon accessible on the iPhone in every pocket) by breaking down the differentiations of the old order. The state, which fears and despises above all else the local control justified by differentiation, is happy to assist. The managerial economy also gains directly from the stimulation of greater consumer demand produced by the liberation of the masses from the repressive norms of the old bourgeois moral code and the encouragement of hedonistic alternatives – as thought up by the intelligentsia, advertised by the mass media, and legally facilitated by the state. Mass media, too, has an interest in homogenization, allowing the entertainments and narratives it sells to scale and reach a larger and more uniform audience. Mass media, already an outgrowth of journalism’s integration with the mass corporation, also has an incentive to integrate itself with both the intelligentsia and the state in order to gain privileged access to information; the intelligentsia meanwhile relies of the media to affirm their prestige, while naturally the state has an incentive to fuse with the media to effectively distribute the chosen information and narratives it wants to reach the masses.

As the old bottom-up network of extended families, social associations, religious congregations, neighborhood charities, and other institutions of grass-roots bourgeois community life are broken down by the managerial system, managerial philanthropy – funded by the wealth produced by the managerial economy and offering the elite a means to transform that wealth into social power tax free – is eager to fill the void with a crude simulacrum, offering top-down philanthropic initiatives, managerial non-profit grifts, and astroturfed activist movements in their place. These inevitably work to spread managerial ideology and the utopian social engineering campaigns of the state, further disrupting the bourgeois order. The breakdown of that order then inevitably only produces more social problems, which in turn provide new opportunities for managerial philanthropy to offer “solutions.” The managerial state, mass media, and mass corporations are eager to participate in these assaults, while the intelligentsia provides both the ideas and ready-made managerial do-gooders to man the frontlines.

Finally, the managerial intelligentsia functions as the vanguard of the whole managerial system, providing the unifying ideological framework that serves as the system’s intellectual foundation, rationale, and source of moral legitimacy.[3] The ideological pronouncements of the intelligentsia, transmitted to the public as revealed truth (e.g. “the Science”) by the managerial mass media, serve to normalize and justify the schemes of the state, which in turn gratefully supports the intelligentsia with public money and programs of mass public education, which funnel demand into the intelligentsia’s institutions and also help to fund the research and development of new technologies and organizational techniques that can further expand managerial control. The intelligentsia of course also provides a critical service to every other managerial sector by meeting the need for the formation of more professional managerial class members through mass education – which also helps to advance societal homogenization and further elite cultural hegemony. The managerial intelligentsia therefore functions as the keystone of the managerial elite’s broad-based and resilient unity and dominance (which is what defines them as the elite).

This hegemonic, self-reinforcing system of overlapping managerial elite interests – public and private, economic, cultural, social, and governmental – can together be described as the managerial regime. To identify or describe this regime as simply “the state” would be entirely insufficient. As we will see, the evolution of this broader regime is today the central factor of the China Convergence.

But first there is one important historical differentiation in how managerial regimes have emerged and evolved that we must address.

Managerialism: Hard vs. Soft

What’s described above is the managerial regime as it emerged in the United States and a number of other Western nations in the 20th century. It is not, however, the only species of managerial regime to have evolved during this time.

When the Communist Party took control of China, the bourgeoisie and the old aristocracy were not gently coopted into joining the managerial elite. Instead, as with the Kulaks (middle-class peasants) of Lenin and Stalin’s USSR, they were virtually exterminated. An endless series of bloody “campaigns” launched in the name of liberation by Mao Zedong against “landlords,” “rich peasants,” “rightists,” “counter-revolutionaries,” and “bourgeois elements” all had the same objective. Through relentless collective persecution, confiscation of property, and mass torture, rape, and murder, the bourgeois middle class that had begun to emerge during China’s Republican period was systematically destroyed.

This served a straightforward purpose. Political theorists since Aristotle have recognized that “a numerous middle class which stands between the rich and the poor” is the natural bedrock of any stable republican system of government, resisting both domination by a plutocratic oligarchy and tyrannical revolutionary demands by the poorest. By eliminating this class, which had been the powerbase of his Nationalist rivals, Mao paved the way for his intelligentsia-led Marxist-Leninist revolution to dismantle every remaining vestige of republican government, replace the old elite with a new one, and take total control of Chinese society.

The result was not of course an egalitarian workers’ paradise but the development of a strictly two-tier society of Party oligarchy and everyone else. Every possible orienting and organizing force outside the Party was destroyed, family networks were deliberately disrupted, and individuals were isolated and atomized. Meanwhile the oligarchy would soon grow into a gigantic bureaucratic party-state, managed by legions of devoted CCP apparatchiks. With no mediating institutions between people and state remaining, and with the undifferentiated masses thus fully contained by the uncontested power of a one-party state, Mao succeeded in essentially producing Hobbes’ Leviathan in China. He and his comrades were then free to enact their utopian schemes to remake the country along “scientific” socialist lines (killing tens of millions of Chinese in the process). And while today’s China is quite a bit mellower than during the Mao era, its regime is not fundamentally any different in its core nature. It is still run by a Marxist-Leninist party that has never forgotten Mao’s conviction that power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

The brutal history and character of the Chinese communist regime is therefore very different from what most of the West has experienced (outside of Eastern and Central Europe). And yet – if you’ve been following along so far – China, with its vast techno-bureaucratic socialist state, is still recognizably a managerial regime. More precisely, China is a hard managerial regime.

Ever since the political philosopher James Burnham published his seminal book The Managerial Revolution in 1941, theorists of the managerial regime have noted strong underlying similarities between all of the major modern state systems that emerged in the 20th century, including the system of liberal-progressive administration as represented at the time by FDR’s America, the fascist system pioneered by Mussolini, and the communist system that first appeared in Russia and then spread to China and elsewhere. The thrust of all of these systems was fundamentally managerial in character. And yet each also immediately displayed some, uh, quite different behavior. This difference can, however, be largely explained if we distinguish between what the political theorist Sam Francis classified as soft and hard managerial regimes.

The character of the soft managerial regime is that described in the previous section. In contrast, a hard managerial regime differs somewhat in its mix of values. Hard managerial regimes tend to reject two of the seven values of the (soft) managerial ideology described above, discarding hedonism and cosmopolitanism (though homogenization and centralization remain a priority). Instead they tend to emphasize managing the unity of the collective (e.g. the volk, or “the people”) and the value that individual loyalty, strength, and self-sacrifice provides to that collective.[4]

Most importantly, hard and soft managerial regimes differ in their approach to control. Hard managerial regimes default to the use of force, and are adept at using the threat of force to coerce stability and obedience. The state also tends to play a much more open role in the direction of the economy and society in hard systems, establishing state-owned corporations and taking direct control of mass media, for example, in addition to maintaining large security services. This can, however, reduce popular trust in the state and its organs.

In contrast, soft managerial regimes are largely inept and uncomfortable with the open use of force, and much prefer to instead maintain control through narrative management, manipulation, and hegemonic control of culture and ideas. The managerial state also downplays its power by outsourcing certain roles to other sectors of the managerial regime, which claim to be independent. Indeed they are independent, in the sense that they are not directly controlled by the state and can do what they want – but, being managerial institutions, staffed by managerial elites, and therefore stakeholders in the managerial imperative, they nonetheless operate in almost complete sync with the state. Such diffusion helps effectively conceal the scale, unity, and power of the soft managerial regime, as well as deflect and defuse any accountability. This softer approach to maintaining managerial regime dominance may lead to more day-to-day disorder (e.g. crime), but is no less politically stable than the hard variety (and arguably has to date proved more stable).

Despite these differences, every form of managerial regime shares the same fundamental characteristics and core values, including a devotion to technocratic scientism, utopianism, meliorism, homogenization, and one form or another of liberationism aimed at uprooting previous systems, norms, and values. They all pursue the same imperative of expanding mass organizations and the managerial elite, of growing and centralizing their bureaucratic power and control, and of systematically marginalizing managerialism’s enemies. They all have the same philosophical roots. And all their elites share similar deep anxieties about the public.

Part II: Making the Demos Safe for Democracy

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
– Bertolt Brecht, “The Solution” (1953)

“In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.” So declared neoconservative lawyer and former Bush administration Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith in a high-profile 2020 essay on democracy and the future of free speech for The Atlantic magazine. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values,” he explained. “The private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.”

Back in the year 2000, President Bill Clinton had mocked the Chinese government’s early attempts to censor free speech on the internet, suggesting that doing so would be “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” By the time Goldsmith’s take was published in the flagship salon of the American ruling class two decades later, such scorn had been roundly replaced by open admiration. Beginning immediately after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and then accelerating exponentially in 2020, America’s elite class began regularly arguing, as did The New York Times Emily Bazelon, that the country was “in the midst of an information crisis” producing “catastrophic” risks of harm, and that actually, “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing.” The American people would have to accept their free speech rights being curtailed for their own good.

As we now know thanks to revelations from the “Twitter Files” and other reporting, a sprawling “Censorship-Industrial Complex ” was soon created to seize control of internet discourse and manage American minds. Billions of dollars of government money flowed into intelligence agencies, who discovered a new mission to wage information warfare on their own people in the name of combatting “disinformation.” America’s giant internet technology firms needed only a light cajoling to begin implementing, at the direction of the state, mass surveillance and censorship of information labeled as “harmful” (even that acknowledged to be “true content”) because it ran counter to the propaganda line decided by the regime. Thousands of American intellectuals became “disinformation” experts overnight. In coordination with these academics and NGOs, mass media leapt to set up “fact checking” operations to arbitrarily declare what was and was not true, selling the public a tall-tale of foreign meddling and dark tides of online “hate” that conveniently justified having their burgeoning independent competition deplatformed from the internet.

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was then seized upon as a reason to double-down on this attack on the public. As Jacob Siegel recently documented in a magisterial account of the origins of the “war on disinformation,” the managerial state quickly re-oriented all the tools, techniques, and swollen bureaucratic automatons it had developed to fight the “Global War on Terror” in order to begin waging a counterinsurgency campaign against its own citizens.

Something had changed in the calculus of America’s elites. Traditionally at least vaguely liberal, their seemingly abrupt U-turn on the value of free speech and deliberative democracy represents a paradigmatic example of a process enacting a final replacement of old order classical liberalism with an open embrace of total technocratic managerialism – one that we will explore in more detail soon. But what exactly prompted this sudden shift?

Revolt of the Public, Revolt of the Elite

The most immediate explanation for why the managerial elite decided to hurry up and cast off any tattered remains of the old American values is simply that they panicked. They panicked because they experienced a moment in which they felt they nearly lost control. That moment was 2016, when the socialist Bernie Sanders had just nearly beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primary, the British people had decided they’d had enough of the EU, and then, most egregiously of all, the thoroughly déclassé Donald Trump won the US presidential election. None of this was supposed to happen; in each case the people were supposed to have voted the right way, the way the elite had planned on them voting, but they didn’t. Worse, they seemed to be voting wrong as part of a broader trend of populations specifically reacting against and challenging managerial elite control.

Former CIA analyst Martin Gurri has coined the term “revolt of the public ” to describe the ongoing phenomenon in which, around the world, the authority and legitimacy of elite institutions has collapsed as the digital revolution has undermined traditional elite gatekeepers’ ability to fully control access to information and monopolize public narratives. This decline of hierarchical gatekeepers (such as legacy media) has helped to expose elite personal, institutional, and policy failures, as well as widespread corruption and the broader reality that the managerial system itself functions with little-to-no real public input or accountability. This has helped fuel public frustration and anger with the endemic and mounting problems of the status quo, mobilizing insurgent political movements to present democratic challenges to the establishment.

But, for the managerial elite, the character of this revolt is even more threatening than Gurri’s summation implies. In the West, this underdog public rebellion is not only directed against the ruling managerial technocracy, but, critically, has been conducted by precisely the managerial elite’s historic class enemies: the remnants of the old bourgeois middle class.

For the managerial elite this was the apparition of a terrifying nightmare. They thought they’d broken and cast down the old order forever. Now it seemed to be trying to climb out of the grave of history, where it belonged, to take its revenge and drag them all back to the dark ages before enlightened managerial rule had brought the word of progress to the world. The prospect of real power returning to the hands of their traditional enemies appeared to be a mortal threat to the future of the managerial class.

Across the West, the managerial elite therefore immediately went into a frenzy over the danger allegedly presented by “populism” and launched their own revolt, declaring a Schmittian state of exception in which all the standard rules and norms of democratic politics could be suspended in order to respond to this existential “crisis.” In fact, some began to question whether democracy itself might have to be suspended in order to save it.

“It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” New York Time Magazine journalist James Traub thundered with an iconic 2016 piece in Foreign Policy magazine. This quickly became a view openly and proudly embraced among the managerial elite, who no longer hesitated to express their frustration with democracy and its voters. (“Did I say ‘ignorant’? Yes, I did. It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them,” Traub declared.) “Too Much Democracy is Killing Democracy,” is how a 2019 article published by neocon rag The Bulwark put it, arguing for Western nations to take their “bitter technocratic medicine” and establish “a political, social, and cultural compact that makes participation by many unnecessary.”

This elite revolt against democracy cannot be fully understood as a reaction only to proximate events, however – no matter how outrageously orange and crude their apparition. Rather, the populist revolts that emerged in 2016 sparked such an intense, openly anti-democratic reaction because they played directly into a much deeper complex of managerial anxieties, dreams, and obsessions that has roots stretching back more than a century.

Democracy and “Democracy”

It was 1887 and Woodrow Wilson thought America had a problem: too much democracy. What it needed instead was the “science of administration.” “The democratic state has yet to be equipped for carrying those enormous burdens of administration which the needs of this industrial and trading age are so fast accumulating,” the then-young professor of political science wrote in what would become his most influential academic work, “The Study of Administration.”

Deeply influenced by Social Darwinism and eugenics,[5] vocal in his contempt for the idea of being “bound to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence” (“a lot of nonsense… about the inalienable rights of the individual”), and especially impatient with the Constitution’s insistence on the idea of “checks and balances,” Wilson believed the American state needed to evolve or die. For too long it had been “saddled with the habits” of constitutionalism and deliberative politics; now the complexity of the world was growing too great for such antiquated principles, which were “no longer of more immediate practical moment than questions of administration.”

Asserting the urgent need for “comparative studies in government,” he urged America’s leadership class to look around the world and see that, “Administration is everywhere putting its hands to new undertakings,” and, “The idea of the state and the consequent ideal of its duty are undergoing noteworthy change.” America had to change too. “Seeing every day new things which the state ought to do, the next thing is to see clearly how it ought to do them,” he wrote. Simple as.

But what did Wilson mean by “administration” anyway? “Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics,” he wrote. “Administrative questions are not political questions.” By this he meant that all the affairs of the modern state, all the “new things the state ought to do,” should be placed above any vulgar interference from the political – that is, above any democratic debate, choice, or accountability – and instead turned over to an elevated class of educated men whose full-time “profession” would be governing the rabble. What Wilson explicitly proposed was rule by the “universal class” described by Hegel: an all-knowing, all-beneficent class of expert “civil servants,” who, using their big brains and operating on universal principles derived from Reason, could uniquely determine and act in the universal interest of society with far more accuracy than the ignorant, unrefined masses.

In Wilson’s view the opinion of the actual public was nothing but “a clumsy nuisance, a rustic handling delicate machinery.” Overall, administration indeed meant running government as a machine, and the public could not be allowed to gum up the gears. Moreover, machines need engineers, which meant that, “It will be necessary to organize democracy by sending up to… the civil service men definitely prepared for standing liberal tests as to technical knowledge.” Soon enough, “A technically schooled civil service will presently have become indispensable,” he suggested, describing the entrenchment of rule by a managerial class.

In part, what Wilson was really advocating for was his personal German fetish. More specifically, he wanted America to import the political model that had most impressed him during his own “comparative studies in government”: the Prussian administrative state of “Iron Chancellor” Otto van Bismarck. For Wilson, the Prussian system represented the best possible model for maximizing the march of progress. Parliamentary yet authoritarian, it combined the most enlightened economic and social advances of the time – the first welfare state, mass education programs, and a state-led Kulturkampf (“Culture War”) against the Catholic Church and all the backwards forces of reaction – with political certainty, stability, and efficiency. Most importantly, it had developed a professional bureaucracy (i.e. an “administration”) of managers handed the power and leeway to guide the country’s development along rational, “scientific” lines. Wilson would, two decades later, have the opportunity to begin imposing something like this model on America.

Campaigning in part on a promise to employ the power of government on behalf of what he advertised as the “New Freedom” of universal social justice, Wilson wormed his way into power in 1912 as the first and fortunately only political science professor ever elected President of the United States.[6] He fittingly rode to office on the back of the new American Progressive Movement, which had eagerly modeled itself on the then fashionable Progressive Party of Germany. An innovative political alliance, the new party had cunningly brought Germany’s corporate power-players together with state bureaucrats and academic intelligentsia (together nicknamed the Kathedersozialisten, or “socialists of the endowed chair”), uniting them to push forward the kind of top-down social and economic reforms they all stood to benefit from. Wilson’s hope for America to look to the German model for inspiration was thus fulfilled.

Over the course of his presidency (1913-1921), and seizing in particular on the opportunity provided by the crisis of WWI, Wilson would oversee the first great centralizing wave of America’s managerial revolution, establishing much of the initial basis for the country’s modern administrative bureaucracy, including imposing the first federal income tax and creating the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Labor.[7]

He also ruled as perhaps the most authoritarian executive in American history, criminalizing speech through his Espionage and Sedition acts, implementing mass censorship through the Post Office, setting up a dedicated propaganda ministry (The Committee on Public Information), and using his Attorney General to widely prosecute and jail his political opponents. More dissidents were arrested or jailed in two years of war under Wilson than in Italy under Mussolini during the entirety of the 1920s.

But Wilson’s most important legacy was to begin the process to “organize democracy” in America just as he’d dreamed of doing as an academic: a “universal class” of managers would henceforth determine and govern on behalf of the people’s true will; democracy would no longer to be messy, but made steadily more managed, predictable, and scientific. From this point forward the definition of democracy itself would begin to change: “democracy” no longer meant self-government by the demos – the people – exercised through voting and elections; instead it would come to mean the institutions, processes, and progressive objectives of the managerial civil service itself. In turn, actual democracy became “populism.” Protecting the sanctity of “democracy” now required protecting the managerial state from the demos by making governance less democratic.

Today this vision of “managed democracy” (also known as “guided democracy”), is a form of government much lusted after by elites around the world, having succeeded (in its more benevolent incarnations) in establishing orderly regimes in countries like Singapore and Germany, where the people still get to vote but real opposition to the steamroller of the state’s agenda isn’t tolerated. In such a system the people are offered the satisfaction of their views having been “listened” to by their political-administrative class, but said views can always be noted and dispensed with if they are a danger to “democracy” and its interests. Here Wilson’s old question of how “to make public opinion efficient without suffering it to be meddlesome” seems to have found a solution.

The People’s Republic of China has already taken this logic to its fullest conclusion. Popular voting may have been done away with all-together in China, but it too is still a democracy (it says so right in its constitution!). Instead of elections, the Party (which exists solely to represent the people, forever), rigorously assesses the will and interests of the masses through a process of internal consultation and deliberation it calls “people’s whole-process democracy” – also known as “consultative democracy,” for short.

Consultative democracy has serious advantages over the traditional kind in terms of maximizing managerial efficiency, which is why it has long been so admired by Western elites. “There is a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green,” Canada’s Justin Trudeau has for instance explained (though typically stumbling over his words and forgetting to label China a democracy instead of a dictatorship). Or as The New York Times’ elite-whisperer Thomas Friedman once put it , if we could even just be “China for a day” then the state could, “you know, authorize the right solutions… on everything from the economy to environment.” Overall, being more like China for at least a while would be super convenient because, as Friedman obligingly elaborated in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, “once the directions are given from above, we would be overcoming the worst part of our democracy (the inability to make big decisions in peacetime), and the very next day we would be able to enjoy the best part of our democracy (the power of our civic society to make government rules stick and the power of our markets to take advantage of them).”

The power of big-brain decision-makers to advance progress by forcing through big changes; “civic society” able to entrench and enforce state directives from above; markets able to symbiotically make a tidy profit on top-down change: as Friedman indicates, consultative democracy offers all the best parts of “democracy” without the hassle. No risk of the populist rubes ever getting to fondle any delicate machinery here! It should be no wonder that Western managerial elites have been smitten by this vision and the many advantages its offers (to themselves), and have thus everywhere rushed with growing fervor to adapt and implement it at home as fast and to the greatest extent that they can get away with. Wilson would be proud.

They also understand, however, that even this structural organizing will ultimately never be enough to protect “democracy” on its own. Having again and again run into the intractability of the people’s obstinate nature, they long ago reached another implicit conclusion: the root challenge to “democracy” is not the structures of government, but the demos – the common man himself. He is a problem that requires a solution on an entirely deeper level. Making the demos safe for “democracy” would necessitate his replacement by a wholly new and safer man.

Mr. Science and the New Man

Psychologist, instrumentalist philosopher, and foremost American progressive educationalist John Dewey landed in China on May 1, 1919. It was three days before the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement, an anti-traditionalist wave that would grow out of student protests in Beijing and become a crusade to radically transform the nation. It would give birth to the Chinese Communist Party two years later, in 1921. The student movement’s slogan called for China to embrace “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” and with Dewey’s appearance it seemed Mr. Science had arrived. Chen Duxiu, co-founder of the CCP, said he thought Dewey embodied the whole spirit of the movement. Mao Zedong thought his educational theory “well worth studying.”[8] Adored as a progressive and modernizing hero, Dewey would remain in China for a tour that lasted more than two years, delivering over two hundred lectures to crowds of thousands of adoring fans. Many of those lectures were then translated into best-selling books distributed across the country. He was lauded as a “second Confucius” and nicknamed Dewey Du Wei, or Dewey the Great.

Dewey the Great had already helped transform America. A leading light of the rising American progressive education movement, he had successfully led a mission to completely remake the American education system, remodeling the country’s historic liberal arts colleges into copies of Germany’s fashionable new centrally-managed “research universities,” as well as generally overhauling the purpose and pedagogy of public education. Whereas Western educational institutions had for centuries focused largely on cultural transmission and forming the character of the students in their charge through study of the humanities and the classical virtues, Dewey believed this approach was outdated and in fact immoral. Influenced by the new philosophy of Logical Positivism , he thought that instructing students in any belief in objective truth and authoritative notions of good and evil was harmful, as it was individual man himself who engaged in the “construction of the good.” The education system therefore had to abandon its age-old mission and focus instead on teaching students the technical skills to thrive in modern industrial society – including, most critically, “how to think” in rational, scientific terms.

But of course Dewey and his likeminded colleagues did want to shape the character of America’s children, just in a different way from the old order. For Dewey, who believed that democracy was not a form of government but an ethical project, fusing governance to the scientific method was the only possible path to achieving political and human progress. But doing that would require first changing democracy’s voters.

Dewey believed public education was “the fundamental method of social progress and reform” precisely because it was, he wrote, “the only sure method of social reconstruction.” Social reconstruction meant reengineering society. Frank Lester Ward, Dewey’s teacher and mentor (and the first president of the American Sociological Association) was even less bashful: the purpose of formal education, he said, was now to be “a systemic process for the manufacture of correct opinions” in the public mind. (It should, he added, therefore be brought under the exclusive control of government, since “the result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils.”)

Remaking society along scientific lines would necessitate reshaping men to fit their new machine. A reconstructed society would have to be built on the back of a reconstructed individual: a New Man, freed from the all the crude superstitions of his past and the messy irrationalities of his former nature. This anthropological project was the real purpose of Dewey and his Progressive Education movement: they were Conditioners . Elevated to peak influence by the presidency of Wilson (who expressed his own desire “to make the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as possible”), Dewey and his colleagues had the opportunity to begin this quest by first revolutionizing the education system so that they could make future generations more pliable by systematically disembedding them from their past and their traditional loyalties and deconstructing the whole way in which they saw the world.

Mao, meanwhile, would embrace the same project with particular gusto. Progressive Americans of the early 20th century like Dewey and Wilson had developed a habit of referring to China and the Chinese people as marvelously “plastic,” particularly suitable to be shaped at will by the hands of “strong and capable Westerners,” as Wilson mused in 1914. The country could, they thought, serve as an ideal laboratory for social experimentation. Mao agreed. The Chinese people, he grew fond of saying, were “first of all, poor, and secondly blank” – i.e. the perfect canvas for his communist vision. This was not actually true, of course: the Chinese possessed millennia of rich history and traditional culture. So making the minds of the people as blank as desired took a fair amount of work on Mao’s part.

This he set out to accomplish through a process he called “Thought Reform.” First trialed in the isolated communist basecamp of Yan’an in 1942-43 and then forced on the whole of China in the 1950s following the CCP’s takeover of the country, Thought Reform was a process of using indoctrination, public pressure, and terror to produce completely submissive and easily controlled individuals. Explicitly based on new theories of Pavlovian psychological conditioning imported from the USSR and much admired by Mao, it always followed the same distinct method: endless hours of “study” and “discussion” groups where silence was not an option; repeated “self-criticism” and writing of confessions, allegedly to “lay one’s heart on the table” in the name of benevolent collective self-improvement and education; encouragement of neighbors and colleagues to report each other’s alleged harmful faults, wrongdoings, and wrong ideas; separation of people into “good” and “bad” classes or groups; isolation of one target at a time and the “persuasion” of former friends and allies to join in a simultaneous attack; mass “struggle” meetings designed to overwhelm and humiliate the target, and to turn a purge into public spectacle and object lesson; forced groveling apologies, followed by “magnanimous” temporary mercy and redemption or rejection and destruction of the individual as a warning to others; cyclical repetition with persecution of new targets.

Whether a targeted individual was guilty or innocent of anything, or even loyal or disloyal, was entirely irrelevant. Nor was the purpose to convince or persuade anyone. That was not the point. As one witness recorded after seeing an enthusiastically loyal CCP cadre mercilessly persecuted: “Only later did I perceive that the Communists had been fully aware of [his] loyalty to their cause and were equally conscious that after the ‘reform’ he was disaffected. They had succeeded, however, in terrorizing him so thoroughly that henceforth, regardless of what he thought, he spoke and acted during every waking moment exactly as the Communists wanted. In this state, the Communists felt safer and more secure about him.”[9]

This conditioning method was combined with an effort to create a fully controlled and wholly fluid information environment, where no one could be quite sure what was true or “correct” at any given moment. Journalism and literature were strictly censored; satire was outlawed. Scholars and educators had to repeatedly revise works to conform to the latest orthodoxy; some rewrote their own articles and books dozens of times over, or renounced them entirely. Books in general were generally sources of information too stable to be permitted, and were destroyed – along with vast repositories of China’s historical records and knowledge – on an almost inconceivable scale. In Shanghai, for instance, 237 tons of books were destroyed in two months of 1951 alone. In Shantou in May 1953 a giant bonfire lasting three days was needed to incinerate some 300,000 volumes representing “vestiges of the feudal past.” The party’s sloganeering propaganda organs became the only permissible source of information, and everyone soon found that, for their own safety, they had no choice but to follow them closely in order to try to stay abreast of the constantly shifting “party line.”

This process of total ideological indoctrination and control – also colloquially known as xinao (洗脑, literally: to “wash brains”) – would be made most famous during China’s later Cultural Revolution, but was in fact the whole foundation of Maoism from the start. This was because it worked. Foreign journalists permitted to visit Yan’an in 1944 noted that an “air of nervous intensity” was constant and “stifling,” and that while “most people had very earnest faces and serious expressions” no one but top leaders like Mao ever cracked a joke . “If you ask the same question to twenty or thirty people, from intellectuals to workers, their replies are always more or less the same,” one marveled. “Even questions about love, there seems to be a point of view that has been decided by meetings.”[10] In time the whole country would be reduced to the same state of stifling conformity.

Thought Reform was perhaps the most comprehensive and dramatic ideological indoctrination process ever attempted. It was also unbelievably violent and destabilizing, with millions killed over just the course of Mao’s early reform and “rectification” campaigns. The reality of it would therefore doubtless have horrified Dewey and his refined progressive intellectual’s sensibilities. But its fundamental purpose was exactly the same as his own: to so completely break down the people’s old ways of living and thinking that human nature could be abolished and a New Man and a New Society constructed on top of the ruins.[11] This totalizing utopian vision, so utterly integral to communism, is simply the ultimate expression of all managerialism’s relentless ideological compulsion to “rationally” redesign and control the whole world and everything in it as one would a machine.

Still, it’s true that Mao’s brute force method was particularly crude. In the soft managerialism of the West the effort to build a politically safer, more right-thinking New Man would adopt far more subtle, sophisticated, and gentle methods for washing brains.

The Therapeutic State and the Threat Within

Germany and Japan surrendered in 1945, but World War II didn’t end. Managerial liberalism had engaged in its first global ideological war, and once the shooting had stopped the ideological struggle was just getting started. Europe and even the American homeland itself still had yet to be truly liberated. The problem was: fascism continued to lurk in minds everywhere. Eradicating it would require nothing less than the psychological transformation of entire populations.

That at least was the conclusion of the politico-psychoanalytic movement led by German self-described Freudo-Marxist Wilhelm Reich, who became convinced that working class Germans were susceptible to authoritarianism because of their unhealthily “repressed” sexuality and attachment to traditional gender roles. Only by liberating them from sexual restraint (Reich coined the phrase “sexual revolution”) and especially by destroying forever the rigid structure of the family and the authority of its patriarchal father figure – i.e. the Fuhrer – could they be reformed and their psyches made safe for liberal democracy.

As Matthew Crawford has skillfully explained , by identifying the structure of society as not merely politically or economically unjust but psychologically “sick,” Reich and his Freudo-Marxist colleagues had come up with “a political program that would require nothing less than a moral revolution, working at the deepest level of the individual.” True and lasting Marxist revolution would be accomplished not by the striking prole, but by the professional psychotherapist.[12]

During the war, Reich’s ideas gained significant traction among the educated liberal managerial elite that populated the upper ranks of the American security services, especially within the OSS (the precursor to the CIA). His Freudian political-therapeutic project was soon taken up by the US-led Allied High Commission as a core part of the all-powerful military government’s expansive “denazification” of occupied Germany. The psychology and sociology departments of German universities were staffed with returning emigre scholars, often selected from among the Freudo-Marxists and the intellectually adjacent critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, and transformed into vehicles for promoting the mass reeducation of Germans. The goal was nothing less than “the mental transformation of the German human being,” as plans drawn up by Frankfurt School leader Max Horkheimer proposed.

This project was then immediately re-imported to America as well. Before the war was even over, the US government began to fund and facilitate a new wave of psychological research, guided by refugee European psychoanalysts. The War Department, for instance, conducted studies on discharged soldiers, outsourcing this research to psychanalysts who blamed psychological breakdowns in combat not on acute stress but on the repressions of their conservative childhood family life. By far the most influential work, however, would be conducted by the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno, who produced a new model for psychological assessment called the “F-Scale” (the F stands for Fascist).

The F-Scale, which Adorno pulled straight out of his ass, was a questionnaire that evaluated subjects’ agreement with standard conservative or right-wing beliefs and traits (such as religiousness, belief in inherent gender differences, or overall “conventionalism,” i.e. “conformity to the traditional societal norms and values of the middle class”) and chalked these up as evidence of latent fascist sympathies. Since Adorno and his disciples were Marxists, the survey originally ranked subjects on an authoritarian vs. revolutionary axis (opposition to revolution being “authoritarianism”), but in order to better play to their American sponsors this was re-labeled to read as an authoritarian vs. “democratic” axis. This “research” would later form the basis for The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a volume that became one of the most influential works of psychology ever produced, structuring the whole direction of decades’ worth of psychological research in the United States and going on to inform the beliefs of the left-wing counter-culture movements of the 1960s (and beyond). Most importantly, it accomplished a spectacular feat of political-linguistic jujitsu: successfully redefining public understanding of fascism – in reality the very essence of a hard technocratic managerial regime, obsessed with leveraging state-corporate fusion to promote collective strength, homogenous efficiency, and scientific progress from the top down – as synonymous with conservative democratic populism.

With this new definition in hand, evidence of fascist sympathies could then be discovered all over the United States. As Martin Bergmann, a US Army psychoanalyst from 1943 to 1945, recounted in a 2002 BBC documentary The Century of the Self, government psychologists’ assessment tours of middle America, conducted to find out “what goes on in all those little towns” between the civilized coasts, revealed “a much more problematic country” than they’d ever imagined, filled as it apparently was with normie middle-class families raising budding little Fuhrer-lovers.

The US government leapt into action to ask the experts how to control this dangerous enemy within. The answer, as Bergmann tells it, was that, “What is needed is a human being that can internalize democratic values.” A New Liberal-Democratic Man. “Psychoanalysis carried in it the promise that it can be done,” he recounts. “It opened up new vistas as to how the inner structure of the human being can be changed so that he becomes a more vital, free supporter and maintainer of democracy.”

The US government thus “took up anti-fascism as a wider mandate of moral and social transformation,” as Crawford puts it. Suddenly, “The inner lives of Americans were now something that needed to be managed. Anti-fascism in the United States would be a science of social adjustment working at a deep level of the psyche, modeled on the occupation government’s parallel effort in Germany.”

In 1946, President Truman declared a mental health crisis in the United States and the Congress passed the National Mental Health Act, empowering an arm of the administrative state – the National Institutes of Health – with a mission to manage Americans’ psychological state. Hundreds of new psychoanalysts were trained and dispersed to set up “psychological guidance centers” in towns across America. Therapists, counselors, and social workers began to nose their way into every aspect of family, school, and working life.

The therapeutic state had been born. From now on managing the mental and emotional lives of Americans would be a duty of the state and its “civil society,” not just the individual and his or her immediate social community. Dewey’s project of conditioning had expanded from the child to the whole adult population. This of course fitted perfectly into the core imperative of the managerial regime, which seeks constantly to draw more and more aspects of existence into the tender embrace of its fussing expertise. But the development of the therapeutic state also conveniently allowed the managerial elite to further marginalize, and indeed pathologize, their middle-American class enemies. Now the rubes weren’t only backwards, they were mentally broken and unstable. Only by washing their psyches and adopting all the same thoughts, beliefs, and liberal ways of living as the professional managerial class could they possibly hope to be cured.

As Christopher Lasch noted in his 1991 book on progressivism, The True and Only Heaven, Adorno and his therapeutic legacy thus “substituted a medical for a political idiom and relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic – to ‘scientific’ study as opposed to philosophical and political debate. This procedure had the effect of making it unnecessary to discuss moral and political questions on their merits.” Only the irrationality of the insane could now possibly explain disagreement with the progressive managerial project. Much as under communism in China and the Soviet Union, dissent became dismissible as deviance.

And deviance meant fascism. So, with the bourgeoisie clearly in danger of exploding into the goose step at any moment, a friend-enemy distinction could be established: one was either rationally for progressive managerialism – aka “liberal democracy” – or against it, and therefore automatically an irrational ally of authoritarianism and a dangerous threat to society. “Anti-fascism” could now take on the same meaning and function as under Mao: tarring any opponent of the managerial regime’s revolutionary project as someone necessary to preemptively destroy, not debate.

For if “the whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger,” as the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse (who worked directly for the OSS from 1943-50) asserted in his landmark essay “Repressive Tolerance,” then America’s tradition of civil liberties and liberal neutrality could justifiably be revised to head off the threat of fascism’s resurgence. A truly “liberating tolerance” would then come to entail “withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements, and discriminatory tolerance in favor of progressive tendencies.” Progress and justice would in fact presuppose “the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise” (i.e. “movements from the Right”). Meanwhile “true pacification [of pre-fascists] requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture.” Such an envisioned censorship regime, aimed at “breaking the tyranny of public opinion,” would be a first step towards fostering an enlightened “democratic educational dictatorship” guided by those few who have “learned to think rationally and autonomously.” While such an “extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly” would be “indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger,” Marcuse, like the rest of the intelligentsia, could point to his colleague Adorno’s redefinition of fascism to maintain “that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs.” Only a few decades later Marcuse’s intellectual descendants would get their chance to begin fully capitalizing on this state of exception in the name of anti-fascism.

But the development of the therapeutic state would in the meantime have even deeper long-term consequences for the foundations of American democracy.

Infantilization and the End of Self-Governance

The opposite of managerialism is self-governance. Self-governance (or “self-government” or “self-rule”) has two meanings. At least for Americans, the first of these that comes to mind is typically the political: the freedom of “we the people” to govern ourselves, collectively making our own decisions as a distinct localized community or nation about what should happen within that community or nation, without yielding sovereignty of decision-making to some distant, foreign, or colonial authority. Self-government in this sense was the core founding ideal of the United States of America. It not only prompted the War of Independence that sought sovereignty from British rule, but also structured the federal republic of independently governed states that was then established.

But self-governance can also apply to the level of the individual. A self-governing individual is one willing and able to make his own decisions about what to think and do, and how to do it, rather than automatically looking to some external authority to do these things for him. To do so he must have first developed some trust in his own ability and authority to judge the truth, decide, and act, as well as the courage to accept and take on risk. He must have some faith in his own skill, agency, and ability to accomplish things in the world (including through cooperation with others) and to thereby influence his own fate and that of his community. In psychological terms he has an internal rather than external locus of control . In other words, he must possess a certain degree of self-reliance.

To be capable of this, however, an individual must also first be capable of exercising reason to subordinate more immediate or baser urges, desires, and emotions to the accomplishment of higher and longer-term objectives. He must be able to endure the pang of delayed gratification; the pain of physical labor necessary to build something; the frustrations and injuries of learning a new skill; the irritations and confusions of forming and maintaining complex human relationships; the emotional discomfort of hearing or speaking difficult but necessary truths, and so on. Without being capable of this kind of self-restraint, self-discipline, and self-mastery he is in fact incapable of acting with genuine agency. Instead, if he does not rule over his passions, then – in one of the most ancient and consistent insights of classical philosophy – he is enslaved by them. True liberty in the classical sense is therefore not the freedom for the individual to have or do whatever he wants whenever he feels compelled to want it, but liberty from the despotism of desire, which makes the sovereignty of reason and morality impossible. Thus in a real sense self-government first requires governance of the self. This is why self-regulation has historically always been considered the true mark of maturity – of readiness to constructively participate in public life – and the lack of it a sure sign of continued childishness.

As below, so above: a people incapable of personal self-governance will be incapable of self-organizing and political self-governance. Instead they will forever need – and desire – a political mother or father to rule over them, provide for them, and make decisions about what is best for them. Only by honing their own capacity for the virtues of self-governance will they be fit to rule themselves. And as above, so below: a people completely managed and provided for from above, as if they were children, won’t have the opportunity to develop the true liberty of personal and communal self-governance, instead remaining forever dependent, manipulated, and enslaved.

For the ancient Greeks and Romans the highest possible conception of liberty was thus to live as part of a self-governing polity made up of self-governing individuals. This old idea was then taken and expanded on by John Locke and, among others, the American Founders. Americans became admired as the remarkable epitome of a self-governing people precisely because of their inseparable combination of self-reliance, collective self-organizing, and the system of political self-rule that these virtues supported.

The rise of managerialism and the therapeutic state changed all that. From the family up, even the most close-knit self-organized communities – Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” – were steadily broken down by the managerial regime and its relentless internal colonization and centralization. Decision-making power and responsibility was transferred from individuals, families, and communities to distant bureaucracies and credentialed experts, and action made subservient to an inscrutable thicket of abstract rules and regulations. Meanwhile the therapeutic state quickly integrated itself throughout all sectors of the managerial system as the modern therapeutic conception of the “self” – some ineffable inner deity to be constantly attended to, followed, satiated, and worshiped – merged seamlessly with the tenets of managerial ideology and the material imperatives of managerial capitalism.

As Philip Rieff noted in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), the promotion of consumerism through the incessant conversion of wants into needs helped convince the majority that comfort and entertainment of the self and its desires was the “highest good.” Meanwhile the therapeutic state vilified any repression of the self (i.e. self-control) as something harmful and ideologically dangerous. Managerial liberationism thus worked hand-in-hand with the market to progressively strip away norms and traditions that encouraged self-restraint. Freedom and liberty were reduced to pleasures made available for consumption by what Rieff described as “an eternal interim ethic of release” from social discipline and moral prohibitions. More and more such restraints would have to be found and torn apart so as to enjoy further release.

But as Lasch once pointed out, “the atrophy of informal controls leads irresistibly to the expansion of bureaucratic controls.” The less the people are willing and able to practice self-governance individually and collectively, the more formal rules and systems of external authority will step in to micromanage what they want and how they behave. Greater moral and social anarchy tends to produce more, not less, state control.

The counter-culture revolution of the 1960s and its “anti-authoritarian” quest to “liberate” the self from restraints therefore served the managerial regime perfectly. It swiftly broke down traditional informal bonds of stable, resilient communities that had for centuries helped to shelter individuals, and tore up moral norms that had helped them structure and discipline their lives without the aid of the state. So liberated, the self-expressive individual was made a king in name, but left far more isolated, alone, and vulnerable in actuality. Such an atomized individual proved far easier pickings for the mass corporation, which swooped in to offer all manner of ready-to-purchase replacements for what was once the social commons, and for the state, which acted on demand to guarantee the sovereignty of these liberated selves and protect them from their own choices. Their capacity for self-governance thus degraded, and encouraged to think of themselves as reliant on the state for their freedom, the public’s demands for management by a higher authority then only increased relentlessly.

Not surprisingly, the 1960s produced a great explosion of bureaucratic administration in America, with the state happily taking on a series of grand social management projects, including the War on Poverty, the Great Society, and Civil Rights law. These not only turbocharged the growth of the administrative apparatus, but also proved fundamental to propelling the managerial system’s expansion beyond the confines of the state, greatly enhancing the managerial role of non-profit organizations and compelling the creation of such innovates as the modern Human Resources department, which now serves essentially as a compliance arms of the managerial state within nearly every private sector firm.

But even these utopian projects may have been less significant to the expansion of managerialism than the deeper psycho-political transformation of Americans that they reflected: from a people who fiercely valued their agency and self-governing independence to a people conditioned to eagerly trade away any essential liberty for security. A new de facto social contract had been established: the people would offer compliance to being managed, and in return the managerial regime would provide them with ever greater comfort and safety, not only physical but psychological.

Today America is hardly alone in this regard. When COVID-19 first emerged China’s managerial regime immediately imposed draconian containment measures in the name of public safety, locking entire cities in their homes, shuttering whole economic sectors, and splitting up families while dragging them off to quarantine camps. It continued these self-destructive national policies for three years after it had become scientifically clear that the virus was relatively mild and posed no health risks anywhere near necessitating that level of response. But as the virus began to spread around the world, managerial states in the West notably looked to China not with dismay, but with admiration. Still, they initially assumed the people of the West would never accept such a level of managerial control by their regimes. As Professor Neil Ferguson, who directed Britain’s early COVID response, admitted in a 2020 interview, public health bureaucrats wanted to adopt China’s “innovative intervention” but initially dismissed it as something Western people simply wouldn’t tolerate. But they were mistaken: “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realized we could,” Ferguson gloated. A majority of the British people in fact clamored for the security of managed life under lockdown (and still do ). And so the “sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically” in the West, Ferguson explained. Soon countries across the Western world had adopted and imposed the Chinese model.

This should not have been a surprise. Safetyism is utterly typological of managerial societies everywhere, soft or hard, in Sacramento or Shanghai. At the top, a managerial elite is naturally obsessed with total control – with running society like their envisioned machine – and with stamping out any unpredictability, unsurveilled activity, or willful resistance. For the professional managerial middle, doubting or deviating from the rules and procedures of the bureaucratic machine is not so much inconceivable as unimaginably immoral and déclassé: for the pious apparatchik, conforming to the machine and its expert models is the core of good citizenship and personal advancement, while independent decision-making is fraught with risk; “computer says no” is practically a deferral to sacred law.[13] From below, the social atomization, empty relativistic nihilism, and learned helplessness produced by managerialism cultivates in the masses a constant state of anxiety; in an attempt to relieve this anxiety many among them then themselves demand greater and greater managerial control over life be exercised from above. A cycle of co-dependency is created, which accelerates as the managerial regime discovers it can constantly prop up new objects of fear from which to generously protect the public. The regime becomes a devouring mother, projecting weakness onto her children in order to keep them attached and under her sway.

The “New Man” desired by managerialism is not a man at all, but an infant: dependent and incapable of self-governance; needy and consumptive; a blank slate, malleable and suggestible; loving and trusting of the caretakers it assumes to be omnipotent and compassionate – the perfect managerial subject. Preserving such a state of immaturity makes possible a historically new, all-consuming kind of regime.

An Immense and Tutelary Power

When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of his experiences travelling America in the 1830s, he struggled to name the dark future he foresaw would likely come to threaten the young country, as “the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world.” He sought “in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea,” for “the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate” to describe it, he wrote. In his vision he saw “an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike,” and all “incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.” And, “Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest,” with each man existing “only in himself and for himself alone.” In this atomized and disorganized state, even “if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country,” for:

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

What Tocqueville had uniquely intimated in his time was the character of the soft managerial regime, whose first seeds had already been planted in America. Rather than brutalizing and terrorizing the public into compliance as would a hard regime, this “mild” (yet “absolute”) power would find it far easier to sedate, seduce, and propagandize them. But the desired end result would be the same: a population demoralized and conditioned to accept management of all things under heaven.

And yet, the more the public has been successfully kept “in perpetual childhood,” the more the regime – being no true loving parent – has come to view them only with pure contempt and to treat them with complete disregard. Not all have taken it politely. A good portion of the more willful children still refuse to behave and keep rebelling against their teachers. Despite much effort, the demos so far still hasn’t been made safe for democracy. What is to be done? Using force on these holdouts doubtless grows more and more tempting, along with more and more rigorous forms of conditioning and control. Exchanging some tricks of the managerial trade with harder, crueler siblings may therefore seem like an increasingly necessary and natural evolution for our managerial order.

Part III: Stability Maintenance

“Party, government, military, civilian, academic; east, west, south, north, and center, the Party leads everything.” – CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping

Managerial technocracy has a big problem: it doesn’t really work. Building the Tower of Babel never works, because not everything can be completely controlled by human cleverness. The larger and more enveloping the system of control grows, the more complex it becomes. The more complex it becomes, the exponentially more difficult it becomes to control. Entropy and dysfunction inexorably creep into the system; addressing one problem then only creates multiple new, unexpected problems; the tower begins to wobble.

Naturally, the system tries with increasing fervor to paper over any such cracks with new layers of management, which of course only increase complexity and begin over time to divorce the system from reality. People living in such a system have a habit of eventually noticing the contradictions between insistent official claims to stability and the fact that they can feel the tower swaying beneath their feet; in time this gap in reality helps create the twisted sense of absurdity common to life in such regimes. The proliferation of this absurdity by no means fazes the managerial regime. Inevitably, however, the regime begins to face an extended crisis of legitimacy. It cannot resolve this crisis, as it isn’t something that can be solved through the application of more management. The regime’s only claim to legitimacy is special expertise in generating endless progress, including ever more material efficiency and the more complete fulfillment of desires. But desires are infinite, while managerialism itself becomes inimical even to efficiency. The only real goal and method of managerialism is to expand management, and management itself produces nothing except further artificial complexity. So at some point the self-serving expansion of managerial bureaucracy overtakes any gains in organizational efficiency produced by the application of managerial technique.

Nonetheless, the managerial regime is capable of only one response to the emergence of such instability, which is to double down: more top-down control; more layers of management; more insistent claims to expert knowledge; more efforts to spare the people “all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living”; more clearing away of any perceived resistance to utopia. This may be labeled as progressive and modernizing reform. Genuine effective reform – paring back centralization and management, easing off universalism, releasing and devolving control to allow for local differentiation and adaptation to reality, as well as generally adopting at least a little humility – is of course an impossibility, as that would mean going “backwards,” admitting fallibility, and accepting the limits of managerialism.

This is absolutely not to say, however, that managerial regimes are incapable of sophisticated adaptations to effectively (if temporarily) suppress instability, or that they are necessarily short-lived. To assume that any given regime is weak or on the verge of collapse would be a mistake; the mass-scale managerial regime is mostly a modern phenomenon, and so far only one (the USSR) has collapsed absent military intervention. So we do not really know how long an especially clever managerial system can endure, even if we know it won’t be forever. What we can assume is that any regime will act automatically to defend itself and its interests against proliferating threats. It will likely not hesitate to evolve and adopt new methods in order to do so, just as it has evolved repeatedly in the past. New means of everyday repression, or what the CCP regime likes to call “stability maintenance,” will quickly be found and trialed.

Today this imperative of stability maintenance is driving a rapid and mutually productive convergence between the world’s hard and soft managerial regimes, with the hard becoming softer (that is to say, more subtle and clever, not less cruel) and the soft becoming harder (more forceful, coercive, and unabashed).

Permanent Revolution

The first step towards stability is to break things. For the managerial regime, stability of course means unquestioning public compliance with managerial authority. Blocking such complete managerial power is, as always, all those spheres of authority that could possibly compete with the regime: i.e. any remaining stable institutions, communities, independent economic networks, religions, norms, traditions, and ways of life that make possible and encourage self-governance – or at least organization and decision-making outside and independent of the managerial Borg. These obstacles, these recalcitrant remains of the old order, stand in the way of change, of consolidation, of reconstruction, of progress… so they must go; they must be smashed!

This leveling of any source of oppositional power is a constant imperative for any managerial regime. As the French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel explained in his timeless work on the rise of managerial nation-states, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth (1948), Power (the regime) finds that, by its very nature, it cannot but seek to relentlessly break down all separations and barriers in its way and gather together all other possible nodes and sources of power into itself, or destroy them. “All command other than its own, that is what irks Power,” as he wrote. Meanwhile, “All [human productive] energy, wherever it may be found, that is what nourishes it.” The regime “finds itself impelled” to break open established and independent communities in order to consume their power in “as natural a tendency as that which causes a bear in search of honey to break the cells of the hive.”

Pictured: the managerial state discovers your thriving independent community.

This means conservative preservation of old customs and forms and legal structures is always utterly inimical to the managerial regime’s objectives and nature. Although it may speak of some fixed and flawless utopian future, it advances and grows in power not through order and preservation but through repeatedly shaking things up and breaking more than a few eggs along the way. To adapt Marx: the managerial class is either revolutionary or it is nothing. Indeed the managerial regime inherently subscribes to Hegel and Mao’s program of “continuous” or “permanent revolution.”

The managerial revolution was not a singular event that occurred only once in history; instead it is a process that has happened – is happening – repeatedly, and in relatively distinct waves. In fact, in America these waves seem to reoccur on a fairly regular schedule: about once every 20-25 years, or approximately once per generation. Wilson’s Progressive era of the 1910s was followed by the era of FDR’s New Deal and WWII mobilization beginning in the 30s, which was in turn superseded by the Great Society/Civil Rights era of the 60s. Then came the Regan-Clinton neoliberal era beginning in the 80s, which – and I’m afraid this may be difficult for many conservatives to hear – achieved brilliant, if more subtle, revolutionary success by using privatization to economically and socially destabilize and break apart surviving tight-knit, self-governing communities and institutions in exchange only for an illusory reduction in managerial state power (produced by handing off that power to managerial corporations instead). Each of these periods of revolution has been followed by a quieter, illusory “conservative” period of consolidation, only for revolution to explode again a couple of decades later.

Which brings us to the fifth and most ambitious wave of managerial revolution, which we are living through today in the 2010s-20s: the Great Awokening.

“Wokeism” is a Marxism-derived ideology/radical religious cult that seeks to establish heaven on earth (the utopia of universal “social justice”) through the simultaneous and total liberation of all those who are “oppressed.” This is to be accomplished through the creation of a New Woke Man (they/them) awakened through a process of reeducation into a new consciousness of their oppression, the subsequent seizure and redistribution of all power from “oppressor” groups, and the sweeping away or inversion of all established hierarchies, moral norms, and other “social constructs” of the past that place any limits on infinite self-creation of identity and broader reality. It is absolutely revolutionary to its core.

So at first glance it might seem like an odd choice of ideology for all of the institutions of the establishment to enthusiastically and simultaneously adopt and promote, as they swiftly did after 2016. Doesn’t the state want order and control, not revolution? Don’t corporations want a flourishing environment for free-market capitalism, not Marxist grievance and street violence? Don’t academics want to preserve the tranquility of their ivory tower so as to pursue truth (haha )? Don’t the elite in general inherently want to maintain the status quo of their rule, not advocate its overthrow? Doubtless many casual observers may be confused by the idea of a _revolutionary regime.[14]_

But this shouldn’t be such a mystery. Wokeism poses no threat to the basis of the managerial regime – quite the opposite. First of all, it is a radical but straightforward extension of soft managerial ideology. It maintains and advances all of the same core tenets (remember those?): scientism, utopianism, meliorism, liberationism, hedonism, cosmopolitanism, and dematerialization (to which we could arguably add safetyism, as described earlier). Secondly, its goal of instantiating a new victimological consciousness and reconstructing human nature is perfectly in line with the objectives and methods of the therapeutic state.

Most importantly, Wokeism provides the regime with an ideal opportunity to fulfill the revolutionary dialectic. What is that? Without attempting to explain all the details of dialectical materialism, let’s just say that, like Hegel, Mao thought the Revolution must never end because all progress (towards New Socialist Man and communism, but mainly towards more power) was the product of the transformation produced by struggle between opposing forces in society. If there was no struggle, there could be no progress, as all progress was produced through the same dialectical process: unity -> disunity -> unity.

In other words a new, firmer order is produced through the chaos of disorder; you break things so you can replace them with new things of your choosing. Or as Mao put it in a letter to his wife in 1966 when he decided to kick off China’s hugely destructive Cultural Revolution (mainly so as to consolidate his own waning personal power) the method was to stir up “great disorder under heaven” for the purpose of creating “great order under heaven.” Only through the emergency of chaos and mass disruption could he find the latitude to take bold action, make sweeping changes, eliminate rivals, reorder allegiances, and seize control of new power centers in ways that would previously have been impossible. (Hence why he is reputed to have remarked during the height of the bloody madness that, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”)

This dialectic can work at any level. As a simple hypothetical example, let’s say you’re a political bureaucrat and you want to seize factional control over a department of police so as to wield them as your personal jackbooted thugs. That might ordinarily be pretty difficult, since the public would complain, the department itself is an established institution with rules, and it is already filled with seasoned men loyal to an existing hierarchy who are united in not liking or trusting you, you little psychopath. But there’s a way: you find a reason to have the department defunded, forcing most of those disagreeable people to leave and find other work during this difficult fiscal crisis; now the streets are overrun with crime and all is chaos under heaven, so the public angrily demands you re-fund the police and enforce some law and order; you graciously acquiesce and fund the department – in fact, you, a champion of the people, double its budget, hiring all your chosen thugs, and at generous salaries. Presto! The department is back bigger than ever, but now loyal to your patronage. Through disunity has emerged a new unity.

Broadly speaking, establishing a new, more centralized and tighter order is the whole goal of every revolution. The iron-fisted tyranny of a Mao, a Stalin, or a Napoleon is not some unfortunate accident of well-intentioned revolution gone wrong, it’s the point.

The goal of the Woke revolution is not “deconstruction,” lawlessness, and social chaos forever; it’s the forceful refounding of a new and far more totalizing order. The managerial regime quickly intuited that this ideology, which it found lying around in a squalid corner of academia (its specific lineage doesn’t really much matter), presented an ideal tool for destroying its enemies and extending its power and control, and so opportunistically picked it up and adopted it as a hammer with which to smash things.

Wokeism is embraced by the managerial regime – without which it would have gone nowhere – because it appeals directly to the self-interest of every managerial sector. For the managerial intelligentsia, it offers whole new fields of policy in which everyone must defer to their coded knowledge and special expertise. For the managerial media, a whole new civilizing mission to constantly inform the masses about how backwards they are and to correct them at every turn. For managerial philanthropy, endless new crusades to alleviate infinite oppressions. For managerial corporations, new frontiers of hedonistic liberation, featuring whole new habits to sell as consumer needs (“gender affirming care” is very profitable!) And best of all, for the managerial state, a swollen portion of the population who, with every new expansive claim to infantile victimhood, constantly beg the technocratic state and its proxies to step in to enforce “justice” and manage the emergency of their individual right to “safety” in every circumstance, in every sphere of life, and in every human interaction, from the workplace, to romantic and family relationships, right down to their emotional state and every word they hear spoken or read on the internet.

Then there are the Black Categories , the reactionary bourgeoisie, the fascists of the working and middle class, who can now also be branded as white supremacists and all other manner of ‘phobes, and then be righteously beaten down and tormented and isolated and surveilled and dispossessed anew for their deplorable bigotry and hatred. Oh, how the tired old class struggle has been reinvigorated to provide such delicious new moral delights!

The regime views this ideology as providing a convenient new source of legitimacy at a time when that legitimacy has been threatened: now every sector of the regime is necessary to ensure “equity” (equality of outcomes) between individuals in all respects (social justice), and to protect them from evil (opposition to social justice, i.e. the regime). Moreover, this morally justifies the complete abandonment of official institutional neutrality towards the regime’s opposition, and their political rights, at least the appearance of which was previously required by the now superseded philosophy of liberalism. Yes, this angers the opposition, but the opposition is weak and timid and their actions can always be twisted to fit the chosen narrative and used to further isolate them. Combined with the opportunity to advance its core revolutionary drive, these benefits have made Wokeism potentially the single most useful conceptual evolution ever adopted by Western managerialism.

And the structure of the new unity that Woke managerialism intends to establish, if successful in this phase of the revolution, is quite clear. Its outlines are obvious, for example, in the proposal by one of America’s most celebrated Woke theoreticians, Ibram X. Kendi, for the passage of “an anti-racist constitutional amendment” that would make unconstitutional “racial inequity” and “racist ideas by public officials,” and “establish and permanently fund [a] Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees.” This DOA would be “responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” In other words: a sweeping new order of total managerial control, policing even our most intimate affairs and the most private wrongthink, and overseen by a permanent unelected and unaccountable superstructure of “formally trained experts.”

Would any Western government really go this far? Of course they will, if they can, for the bear hungers after that sweet, sweet honey. In fact, with Wokeism having quickly spread beyond America, other managerial regimes in the West, such as Ireland (and the whole EU ), are already rushing ahead of the United States to begin codifying similarly far-reaching plans into law. This should not surprise us; it’s simply the telos of managerialism – even the soft, liberal kind of managerialism. Like de Tocqueville, de Jouvenel foresaw the direction life under managerialism was headed:

Where does it all lead to, this unending war waged by Power against the other authorities which society throws up? Will the jaws of the great boa constrictor of human energies ever cease to close on all who in turn put these energies to their use? Where will it end? In the destruction of all other command for the benefit of one alone – that of the state. In each man's absolute freedom from every family and social authority, a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the state. In the complete equality as between themselves of all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master – the state. In the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every pre-eminence which is not approved by the state. In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course.

Although the master of our atomized masses wouldn’t turn out to be fully recognizable merely as “the state,” his warning nonetheless stands: the end point of managerialism’s revolutionary hunger for total control is necessarily totalitarian: all within the regime, nothing outside the regime, nothing against the regime.

The Extreme Center, the Securitization of Everything, and Rule by Law

So, facing a crisis of popular legitimacy, managerial elites across the West have, in the name of resisting “fascism,” saving “democracy,” and achieving universal safety and social justice, begun to employ a wave of revolutionary methods to transform their regimes into even vaster Hobbesian monstrosities of compliance and control. No specific plot or conspiracy is necessarily needed to explain this; only the nature of managerialism.

Fortunately this project has not yet fully succeeded. It has encountered some unexpected democratic resistance from middle-class “populism,” which has at least somewhat slowed its transformational march. Nor can it yet openly operate outside the framework of the old democratic order and the lingering moral legitimacy that moldy shroud still provides. The regime must continue to advance mainly through existing mechanisms of legal and civic authority. Hence the upside-down world of our present transitional period, in which the new order constantly and loudly insists its mission is to defend the old order even as it dismantles it.

This playacting is aided by the fact that – being essentially nihilistic – modern managerialism is difficult to place on the traditional left-right political spectrum, at least as most people understand it.[15] It is certainly left-wing in the sense that it is progressive and revolutionary, and therefore definitively anti-conservative. But it is not really egalitarian or communitarian, which many assume the left must embody. Though the regime may trumpet these principles in rhetoric, in reality its vision of technocratic rule is firmly oligarchic, aligning the few against the many. It is certainly not anti-imperial or anti-war. Nor is it anti-capitalist, at least in the sense that it encourages market activity and facilitates the accumulation of immense private wealth by the few. But it is hardly libertarian either: the most reliable way to wealth is a crony patronage relationship with the state, and no matter how wealthy or independent-minded they may be, an individual tycoon or corporation remains entangled by the tentacles of the administrative state and the wider bureaucratic managerial regime. And, disdaining human virtue, excellence, and agency, it firmly rejects the hierarchical, aristocratic virtues of the right in favor of an infantile, easily managed radical individualism – in doing so essentially making a horseshoe back to collectivism. In the end managerialism combines, as de Jouvenel said, “the extremes of individualism and socialism” alike. This helps to confuse and disguise its radical nature and allow it to consistently drape itself in the shimmering cloak of the reasonable, moderate, representative middle, whether the “center-left” or “center-right.” Of course it is actually none of these things, except the center of power.

The “extreme center ” is therefore potentially a useful descriptive term here. The term identifies the concentration of power into a single “establishment” or ruling class that is united by shared interests (no matter how many formal political parties this may include), and which portrays itself as the dispassionate voice of moderation and reason facing off against the “extremes” (any opposition outside this bloc). In this situation politics becomes a struggle not between two or more parties or factions debating which specific policies of government to implement, but a defense of the inner against the outer, of the center vs. the periphery.[16] The center defines the window of “normal,” “legitimate,” or acceptable policies and opinions, while the periphery and its views are painted as dangerous, illegitimate, and unacceptable for consideration or compromise (no matter how much popular support they may embody). Ideological clarity or constancy is of little importance here; the only unifying goal of the center’s bloc is to protect its comfortable monopolization of decision-making and status by excluding or subjugating anyone who might challenge its collective interests.

The center, having thus transformed politics into a psychodrama of its civilized struggle against surrounding barbarians, becomes willing to take radical action to maintain the stability of its control, no matter how much it disrupts and destroys in the process. This includes actively anti-democratic, extra-constitutional, or otherwise norm-breaking actions that are justified as necessary to defend norms (read: the norm of establishment control). Like a body with an autoimmune disorder, over time the center becomes extreme in its self-protective behavior, potentially undermining its own legitimacy and societal stability in the process. This of course only makes it more paranoid about the need to maintain strict control of power.[17]

This paranoia engenders a sense of being under siege, along with a feedback loop that produces a steady slide into more and more suspicion and perceived need for greater security (this dovetails perfectly with the processes of bureaucratization and safetyism discussed earlier). Soon everything has become a matter of security. And once something becomes a matter of security, it becomes a matter of existential necessity, and therefore suitable for exception from the established processes and rules of collective decision-making and accountability (democratic or otherwise), given that in an emergency it is justifiable to suspend normal procedures for the sake of expediency. But of course once everything is a matter of security everything becomes an emergency, and so anything is justified – permanent emergency becomes a procedural basis for governance.[18]

Unusual as it may be to think of it this way, today the Chinese Communist Party is, in a sense, an extreme example of an extreme center regime, including in its paranoia and securitization. Despite what’s written on the tin, the CCP doesn’t seem to be in any particular hurry to achieve the promised paradise of communism. It has, after all, engaged in decades of capitalist reforms in order to get rich. Let’s just say its ideological interpretation has proven flexible over time. If for example you’re part of a Marxist student group in China today and are naïve enough to try to organize discontented local sweatshop laborers into an independent union, as foolish students there do now and then, you will be arrested faster than you can shout “workers of the world unite!” That’s because, just as de Jouvenel would have predicted, the one thing the CCP is absolutely not flexible about is its complete and eternal control over all power in the country.

In China the vortex of the extreme center has consumed all available political and civic space. Only the Party and its members can be permitted any power to organize or make decisions, and all the key institutions of the country – such as the military (the People’s Liberation Army) – must pledge their absolute loyalty specifically to the Party, not to the state or the nation (the people). This instinct to keep all power concentrated into the hands of the Party Center is inherent to the CCP’s Leninist roots but is also part and parcel of its extreme centrism and broader managerial nature.

So too is its obsession with maintaining what General Secretary Xi Jinping describes as “Total Security.” As of writing, this Chinese “national security concept” encompasses at least 16 different officially declared priority areas in which security is to be strictly maintained as a priority, including “military security,” “economic security,” “technological security,” “information security,” “cultural security,” “ecological security,” “health security,” and so on. At the top of the list is “political security,” which is described as the “bedrock” of the Party, the state, and all of Chinese society. Political security means no one is ever able to threaten the power of the Center.

Now also ruled by an extreme center, the United States has unsurprisingly begun to develop its own milder case of this “securitization of everything” in recent decades. This started in earnest after 9/11 and accelerated after 2016 with the manufactured panic over “foreign” election interference and “disinformation.” (China is also notably quick to accuse “hostile foreign forces” of being behind every embarrassment and setback for the regime.) Then came the Great Awokening, the 2020 election year, and COVID. Securitization began reaching more “total” levels. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a new government body so besotted with security that its name includes the word twice, has for example embraced as its mission the need to use mass censorship of public and private communications to secure not only America’s network infrastructure but also its “political infrastructure” and even its “cognitive infrastructure” – i.e. the minds of every American. The therapeutic state has begun to merge with the security state.

This securitization of everything has been effective. By appealing to fear, the regime has been able to at least temporarily place its legitimacy crisis into a state of suspended animation by deflecting attention from its own faults and failures and justifying its own turn to increasingly extreme behavior. The incentive to emphasize foreign threats is particularly strong because it allows domestic opponents to be associated with foreign enemies, potentially to such a degree that the distinction can be blurred and their rights as citizens then effectively revoked.

Most importantly, the securitization of everything by the extreme center has eased America’s ongoing transition to a rule by law system. Not to be confused with rule of law, rule by law is another useful CCP concept. On one level, rule by law is simply a recognition that in order to maintain stability and a “harmonious” (compliant) society, there need to be laws on the books, and people generally need to be made to follow them. This is called “law-based governance,” and Xi Jinping has made strengthening it through greater professionalization of the legal-administrative system a key priority for China’s development. At the same time, however, the rule by law concept explicitly rejects the “erroneous Western thought” encapsulated by the phrase “no one is above the law.” How can anything be above the rule of the CCP? There can be no rule of law over the Party Center, because the law is only a set of procedures, a tool of governance. “To fully govern the country by law,” Xi has explained, means “to strengthen and improve the Party’s leadership” and to “ensure the effective implementation of the Party’s line, principles, and policies through rule by law.” The whole point of law is to facilitate the rule of the Party, so of course the Party’s leadership is above the law.

This is only logical: if the law is a tool of human management, how can it restrict and rule over the managers who create it? Laws exist to rule the ruled; if rulers choose to exempt themselves from rules that’s not “hypocrisy,” just power . After all, sovereign is he who decides the exception . An appeal to the supremacy of “the law” (or that “no one is above the law”) is, when you think about it, a rather weird idea: it is only conceivable if even the highest of earthly powers accepts that there is some even higher power (whether a God or some other transcendent, unchanging, and just order which the law itself reflects) that can and will hold them accountable, in this life or the next, for defiling the spirit of the law (justice). Absent such a power the rule of law is nonsensical and only rule by law remains. Managerialism of course cannot permit or even conceive of any power higher than itself; its entire raison d'être is to reorder and control all of existence, and to accept that anything is beyond its reach would undermine its whole basis. Therefore managerialism and rule of law cannot coexist.

So, in a rule by law America, laws (a great jungle of them) would still be on the books, but their interpretation and application would inevitably vary extensively in order to best suit the managerial regime in any given situation. Since, just like in China, their purpose would be to “ensure the effective implementation of the Party’s line, principles, and policies through rule by law,” when and to whom laws are applied would be largely determined on the same inside vs. outside basis that defines the extreme center. Subjective interpretation of the law – as meaning one thing one day, another the next – would be not only acceptable but absolutely necessary so long as the purpose of the law (to protect the center and progress its managerial project) were to remain fixed as the guiding principle. Building vague and expansive language into the law to facilitate this would become the norm, much as the Chinese regime regularly makes use of laws against such ill-defined crimes as “spreading rumors” or “stirring up trouble” to flexibly do away with problematic people as needed. And selective use of the law as a factional weapon (aka “lawfare”) to undermine or destroy outsider political and class enemies, while sheltering insider allies, would become not only ethically permissible, but practically the civic responsibility of the center’s ruling elite.

Thus the law would become merely an arm of the managerial regime’s revolutionary dialectic. This, perhaps more than any other symptom, would confirm and solidify the transition from a representative multi-party democracy to a one-party state.

The One-Party State and the United Front

China is a one-party state. Only the members of one political party, the Chinese Communist Party, are permitted to hold any positions of power (though a collection of small “independent” parties exist for show). This state of affairs is a step beyond extreme centrism, if also its logical conclusion.

But what is the nature of a one-party state, really? Grasping that requires understanding not just the one-party but the party-state. The party-state, a spontaneous feature of nearly every revolutionary regime in history, is a unique form of government. It is sometimes described as a system in which one dominant political group functions as a “state within a state.” But in the case of a fully mature party-state like China’s this description would be misleading, since the Chinese regime is more like a political party with a state attached.

The People’s Republic of China operates through what is sometimes known as a “dual track” regime system. There is a national state (the government), and officials are appointed to occupy positions in it. But parallel to and overarching the formal state hierarchy is an entire shadow edifice of positions within the Party system. Every ranking official must also be a Party member in good standing (officially there are approximately 98 million CCP members), every state position has what is essentially a corresponding Party position, and often the same individual occupies both positions. For example Xi Jinping is both President of China and General Secretary of the CCP. In every case the Party position out-commands the state position. However, in many cases Party members hold Party positions that have no corresponding state position but nonetheless exercise tremendous power over affairs of state. And, as mentioned earlier, entire institutions that in most countries would be part of the state, such as the military, are instead Party organizations. Hence the PRC cannot be described merely as a state; it is a party-state.

A party-state is a system in which, to use Wilson’s terminology, there is effectively no politics, only administration. Or rather, any political competition must happen inside the universe of the party and its ideology, while none is permitted outside of it. The destiny of the state has already been determined and there can be no debate about where the ship is headed, only the specifics of how to reach the promised land most efficiently (if that). It is a formalization of managerialism as the one and only road to progress.

In a party-state like China the party’s unique role means there is no clear distinction between “state” and “non-state” – an idea that can sometimes be a difficult for citizens raised in Western democracies to grasp. Recently, for example, the communications director of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a Canadian, resigned suddenly and fled from Beijing to Tokyo, saying he feared for his safety. He reported with apparent shock that the AIIB, a multilateral development bank set up by China, is not actually an independent institution but one dominated by a group of CCP members who “operate like an internal secret police” and are “like an invisible government inside the bank.” Apparently no one had explained to the poor man before he took the job that in China there can be no independent or neutral institutions – all major institutions are directly managed by the Party or are otherwise forced to align themselves with the Party’s objectives.

Today every corporation or organization of middling size or larger operating in China, domestic or foreign, is required by law to establish an internal Party cell. These cells spend most of their time organizing your typical team-building exercises, monitoring employees’ political knowledge and morale, and training them in how to “regulate their own words and actions,” as Party guidelines put it. But larger firms are expected to appoint full-time Party secretaries, as well as to give recruited Party members a “big stage to fully display their talents” like a good equal-opportunity employer. And many Chinese corporations have amendments in their articles of association formally specifying that in key moments of decision, “the board of directors shall first seek the opinion of the leading Party group of the company.” The Party is, one could say, just the ultimate of those “stakeholders” to which companies in a modern managerial economy are responsible.

The Party has also set up a vast network of non-Party “civil society” groups and social organizations that operate “independently” beyond the state. These are GONGOs, or “Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organizations.” The CCP loves GONGOs, because they make the Party seem closer to and more representative of the “grassroots” of “the people.” GONGOs are also used to advance CCP objectives beyond China’s borders while retaining some plausible deniability that this is really the work of the Chinese government.

Coordinating all the “civil society” GONGOs, “independent” political parties, minority ethnic groups and religious authorities, public and private corporations, intellectual institutions, media outlets, etc. to keep them aligned and in lock-step with the Party is known as “united front work.” Due to a few recent political scandals in places like Australia and Canada, the “united front” has broken into Western awareness as a thing, but largely only in the form of some shadowy intelligence organization running global influence operations to infiltrate and surveil populations of overseas ethnic Chinese and subvert democratic politics. This is absolutely something the united front does, but it’s also much more than that.

The united front, a Leninist idea adopted by Mao, began originally as a strategy to deceptively unite the broadest possible coalition (e.g. communists with nationalists and liberal socialists) to fight against and defeat imperialist aggression, after which non-communist temporary allies were to be, as Stalin put it, “squeezed out like lemons.” But the CCP soon realized the united front was way too useful to ever fully dismantle. The Party managed to use entryist tactics, subversion, and intimidation to co-opt and re-purpose many non-communist organizations, and over time it developed a whole network of front groups and fellow travelers capable of being used for “organic” mobilization on the Party’s behalf. This network, the united front, also serves to helpfully create an image of “democratic” pluralism and grassroots popular support for the Party’s aims. So united front work became one of the Party’s so-called “magic weapons” and the united front only continued to expand in scope. Today sections of society ranging all the way from China’s tech billionaires to the Triads (Chinese mafia) have been effectively incorporated into the united front and are used for helpful patriotic purposes such as, in the gangsters’ case, beating up democratic protestors in the streets or demolishing the homes of dissidents to send them a strong message (this is known as outsourcing repression ). The united front is what could be genuinely described as a “whole of society” operation.

In China the united front has its own formal Party office, the United Front Work Department (UFWD), dedicated to organizing it, but the institution’s role shouldn’t be overstated. United front work is considered a job for the whole Party. More importantly, in a metaphorical sense the whole party-state operates as if it were all one big united front network.

That is to say that, while the CCP is very hierarchical (nobody crosses Xi Jinping or disobeys his orders), it is also remarkably quick in its ability to synchronize as a horizontal network. China is a huge country, so while Xi may want to be an emperor, he can’t even know about, let alone micromanage, everything going on in the system. And yet, the whole party-state system can pivot almost instantaneously to focus on – often to the point of unhealthy fixation – and massively mobilize around new priorities as if it were a single hive mind. If the Party Center decides that the current thing is, say, food security , then suddenly almost every local Party boss, newspaper, school principal, or corporate office hall monitor is going to spend at least the next month talking endlessly about the dire menace of food waste and the critical national security contribution of composting – even without being specifically directed to do so. Specific directives or formal coordination are in fact largely unnecessary. That’s because the “whole of society” penetration and vast structure of the Party network allows it to automatically serve as a coordinating nervous system. And because in such a system loyalty to the Party, signaled through ideological conformity, is far more important for advancement than competency. Only the most general of ideological guidance is therefore needed to prompt Party cadres everywhere to strive (out of self-interest/self-preservation) to interpret, conform to, and at least rhetorically put into practice that guidance. As soon as the latest ideological system update is downloaded, everyone is off to the races, for better or worse.

So, does the United States, or the broader West, have its own united front? Inquiring minds doubtless want to know. At this point it is impossible not to notice the strong tendency of Western elite media, in particular, to move in near absolute synchronicity. It is no longer unusual for a dozen different articles from different outlets to appear touting exactly the same narrative on the same topic in the same week, or even the same day. In fact this is now the norm. For the glassy-eyed talking heads on television to all repeat, with identical phraseology, exactly the same talking points in unison hundreds of times within days is now the industry standard. The sudden adoption of the same linguistic taboos, redefinitions, and fads. The same claims to absolute truth, along with the moral necessity of “debunking” the “misinformation” of any alternative views, followed by the sudden, simultaneous, and wholly unacknowledged and unexplained shift to some different version of absolute truth. The simultaneous identification of the same enemies and pressing threats to the public. The same individual targets singled out for simultaneous hit pieces. The same niche objects of obsessive, swooning coverage. And the same topics of great public interest mysteriously left entirely uncovered by every outlet, as if an official blackout on even the acknowledgement of their existence had been suddenly enforced from above. This is all now standard for the media.

But of course it’s not only the media. The experience of having politicians, academics, major corporations, internet platforms, advertisers, entertainment companies, and all the neighbors you run into at Wholefoods all suddenly pivot to adopt the same weekly conception of facts, echo the same shibboleths, and hang the same flags of allegiance is now simply a normal, if bewildering, part of everyday life in the West. This mass, synchronistic adherence to the constantly shifting “current thing” naturally gives rise to suspicion that there must be some top-down coordination occurring. Is this the work of a united front?

Formally, no. Functionally, yes. There may not be anything like China’s official, centrally administered united front organization, but there is a network and it is united and coordinated – or rather, it is self-coordinating. This united front network is of course the managerial regime itself. The regime is the amalgamation of all the different arms of the managerial system, and can be usefully thought of as if they were all a single institution (which has alternatively been called “the cathedral ”). The many institutions of each arm demonstrably behave as if they were part of a single organizational structure, the whole structure moving arm-in-arm together.

Why is that? Who controls this unified network of institutions? No one really controls the network; the network controls everyone. What controls the network? A narrative does. All the institutions in the cathedral seem like they’re singing from the same hymn sheet because they are. The essential unifying and coordinating mechanism of the managerial system is that all its constituent parts share a single doctrinal perspective, an adherence to the same motivational memetic narrative. It speaks with one voice as an emergent property of this fact.

From the perspective of any one individual or even institution within the regime network this probably isn’t how things appear. Their concerns seem much more mundane: to get ahead in their little corner of the system, accumulate some prestige, and accrue some material rewards. In fact they feel like they’re in a hardscrabble competition with their peers, not singing a harmony with them. But prestige (social approval and status) is the key unseen mover here, making the whole system turn. Prestige is a reflection of recognition and selection within a given institution or system. It’s the way a system indicates which individuals are considered most valuable to and therefore most valued by that system. Those with more prestige are considered higher status and offered more formal and informal opportunities because others in the system want to associate with and be associated with them. This translates into influence and rewards.

How do people know what is valued and therefore prestigious? Well, every system has an unspoken model or ideal, which people will naturally try to signal their conformity to. This ideal is molded by an overarching narrative. The narrative frames core questions for the system, such as: who are we? What do we do? Why do we do it? Why does this make us superior to other people? Who are our enemies? Etc. This narrative functions as a discourse, and through this discourse the narrative evolves over time. Being evolutionary, it features Darwinian selection: individuals or component parts of the system constantly advance narrative innovations through what they say and do; some of these have (in evolutionary terminology) more fitness than others, and these ideas are selected, propagated, and integrated into the narrative. Those whose ideas are selected gain prestige, while rejection leads to loss of prestige.

But what determines which narrative adaptations are fit to be carried forward? Simple: they are those that make the system stronger. Curtis Yarvin, as part of his explanation of the cathedral, describes such an adaptation, which he labels a “dominant” idea, as one that “validates the use of power.” The system is always eager to adopt and perpetuate such ideas or narratives. In contrast, a “recessive” idea is one that “invalidates power or its use.” Such an idea is radioactive. As a simple example, a public health bureaucrat who advocates that the public health bureaucracy needs to be handed near unlimited power so that it can respond to the threat of a virus is a prestigious hero to the whole bureaucratic system for making them all more important and powerful. A public health bureaucrat who says publicly that the same virus isn’t actually dangerous, and that no action by the public health bureaucracy is really needed, is a traitor to the whole system. For calling into question the very necessity of public health bureaucrats, the blasphemer is going to be denounced by his peers, tagged as low-status, and have his career cut short – even if he is obviously right.

Out of self-interest, the whole system constantly rewards conformity with dominant narrative ideas and punishes dissent. The overall operating narrative is the accumulation of all the most effective justifications for validating the system’s existence and growing it to be as large, powerful, and prestigious as possible. Anyone in the system who wants to accumulate any personal prestige or benefit (which is basically everyone) must therefore loyally adhere to, uphold, and defend the dominant narrative at all times, or be severely disadvantaged.

A managerial regime is a system of systems. Each has a local narrative validating its own particular existence and importance, but these narratives are nested in higher narratives. A teachers union has a narrative about itself, but that is nested in a higher narrative about the importance of managerial mass education. At the top is an ur-narrative, justifying and uniting the whole edifice. In our case that is managerialism itself: the need for managers to manage all things. All those within the system of systems (the managerial regime) seeking prestige and advancement must therefore effectively subscribe to all these narratives, including the same ur-narrative. Echoing the values and stories of the dominant narrative then serves as an indicator of belonging to system, class, and shared righteous identity.

Hence anyone in the professional managerial class who wants to become or remain a member of the managerial elite will almost inevitably conform to and parrot the same broad narrative belief structure, even if they are in completely different institutions and professions. Frank the FBI agent and Joanna the journalist are programmed to each react the same way to the same narrative stimulus, repeat the same slogans, and engage in the same required “not noticings” of reality, simply because each wants to avoid being shunned and to advance in status within the prestige hierarchy of their respective organizations. There is no direct coordination needed to get them to do this.

The same goes for whole institutions as well: those seeking to confirm their prestige within the managerial regime will all conform to the same narrative. Hence elite institutions like Harvard and The New York Times maintain and advance essentially identical beliefs. Meanwhile lower status universities or newspapers will try to act as much like them (the prestigious ideal) as possible, and so tout the same narrative with even more devotion than they do. (It of course also helps that these institutions all draw from the same oligarchic class of people – the same informal party, one could say – all inculcated into the same systems and narrative worldviews from birth, going to the same schools, living in the same zip codes, consuming the same media and culture, and so on.)

Why did Wokeism seem to take over every elite institution at once? Primarily because it was a dominant narrative innovation that justified making the managerial elite and the whole managerial system larger, more powerful, higher status, and of more central importance to society. Of course very few individuals in these institutions were ever going to stand against it.

Share

Narrative coordination’s impact is also enhanced by the fact that, a bit like the CCP, the managerial “party” has already achieved an extensive level of penetration throughout every corner of society. Any concentration of a sufficient number professional managerial class members – an HR department, DEI office, or communications staff, for example – can begin to function as a de facto “party cell,” serving as a ready-made surveillance and reporting mechanism, propaganda channel, and internal pressure group. This is the case no matter how deep into “hostile” geographic/class territory that they otherwise are. Since any sufficiently large organization ends up having to recruit these managerially educated people in order to operate, basically no institution, not even say a mostly working-class energy company in Texas, a Christian school in Alabama, or a military academy in Virginia, will be spared from steadily accumulating its own group of agitators dedicated to pushing it to adopt elite-favored managerial policies, practices, and values. (Thus it can be expected that any organization not explicitly anti-managerial will sooner or later become managerial.) If all of these cells can be united by narrative to act in the same direction, they can make for a tremendously powerful force for national-level change (as we’ve seen since 2020).

How different then is this narrative coordination mechanism from the role that ideology plays in a party-state like China? It’s really not. An ideology is just a narrative that’s been written down and codified. But an ideology that’s been mainly left as free-floating narrative in the cloud, so to speak, may in fact be even more all-encompassing and influential, precisely because it is more flexible and able to constantly update itself in a power-maximizing direction. This has perhaps been a real advantage for soft managerial systems over their more openly and rigidly ideological hard siblings.

So, to recap: in this conception, if there is a united front in the West it is not an explicit network of actors deliberately working together, but instead a unity formed out of conformity to narrative. It functions as a kind of swarm intelligence (or egregore ), rather than operating through any central or top-down control. This can explain why soft managerial institutions all move almost completely in sync with each other, and have for some time.

But, hold up… this doesn’t quite match the reality of what we’ve seen develop in the West in recent years, including most obviously in the hulking form of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. As revealed by the intrepid investigative reporting of journalists like

Matt Taibbi

, Michael Shellenberger of Public ,

Lee Fang

, and many others, the Complex is a network of managerial institutions that have directly coordinated with each other in order to censor political opposition and manipulate the public.

In their own words , technology platform companies like Twitter, Facebook , and Google engaged in extensive “collaboration” with “partners” from across the federal government – including the Pentagon, State Department, intelligence agencies, and public health bureaucracies – as well as for-profit defense contractors, NGOs, universities, think tanks, media outlets, and the Democratic Party in order to erase or limit the reach of information detrimental to their interests. Twitter executives described the company’s relationship with the FBI, for example, as a “tight, well-coordinated partnership.” This network set up what it literally called a “Virtual Coordination Center” to manage information operations across dozens of institutions during the 2020 election (and it wasn’t disbanded afterwards). Thousands of pages of emails and records of hundreds of hours of meetings testify to constant direct instructions by the state for the tech companies to censor public speech. The White House is on record having repeatedly sent lists of individual accounts that they demanded be “kicked off” social media, such as those of critical journalists like Alex Berenson. Officials often used language directly leveraging their authority, such as claiming that “the highest (and I mean the highest) levels” of the administration demanded action, or – upon discovering the existence of parody accounts mocking Hunter Biden – that they could not “stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately” (as with others like it, this request was “resolved” within 45 minutes). Moreover, this network is transnational. Even foreign governments, including the EU and Ukraine’s intelligence service, the SBU, have successfully colluded with the tech companies to limit speech by American (and other countries’) citizens. Little wonder then that, in a detailed 155-page ruling , one federal judge recently described this “almost dystopian” scheme as plausibly “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Even the limited glimpse of the iceberg we’ve been afforded so far reveals a vast operational cartel of public and private managerial organizations that, in its direct coordination, far more closely resembles the CCP’s united front network than whatever more vague agglomeration based on shared interests and narratives may have existed in the past.

As Jacob Siegel astutely notes in his deep dive into the development of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, “countering disinformation” (the Western euphemism for “political security”) has since 2016 been regularly described as requiring the development of a “whole of society” strategy. “Only a whole-of-society approach – one that engages government, private companies and civil society alike – can effectively combat and build resilience to disinformation,” is how FBI Director Christopher Wray put it in 2020. Such an approach has, he said, become “central to how we work with both the public and private sectors, from other government agencies, to companies of all sizes, to universities, to NGOs.” Indeed the “whole of society” framing can now be found in use just about everywhere you look across the Western world , serving as an excuse for directly fusing state power with a single extensive and unified international network of managerial technocrats, effectively circumventing and shielding it from any democratic control whatsoever.

It sure seems, in fact, like the revolt of the elites has produced not just a more self-conscious and defensive oligarchic network, but has prompted its hardening into something that’s beginning to look an awful lot like the singular party of a party-state. As a result, narrative coordination mechanism seems to have begun to evolve and crystalize into something more: an actively enforced party line.

In a Leninist system like China the “party line” is the “truth” that everyone must hold, or else. The party line is constantly shifting, based on the needs of the party center, and it is the crucial task of the average person to constantly intuit precisely where the line is at any given moment without being told, and to nimbly readjust their stated beliefs to match. An instinctive ability to do so is what Isaiah Berlin, observing communist Russia, once called “the most precious knack” any citizen of such a regime could acquire. An inability to master this art could be fatal for even the most devoted cadre. Even holding too zealously to yesterday’s sacred truth could be a disastrous mistake. But Berlin noted that while, “Inability to predict curious movements of the line is a crucial failure in a communist,” it always remained the case that “nobody can feel certain of the password from day to day.”

This is deliberate. In such a system keeping up with the party line – or maintaining what in Russia after the revolution of 1917 came to be known as “political correctness” – is itself the true test of an individual’s reliability and loyalty to the regime.[19] As a result, most people begin to no longer speak unless they can be sure they are expressing the correct views, utilizing careful ambiguity and avoiding “dangerous” topics altogether. Society then inevitably experiences a conquest by what under communism has been called “wooden language” (“la langue de bois”), or what Orwell satirized as “Newspeak”: a sort of incomprehensible zombie dialect that is simultaneously dead, saying nothing real, yet able to be contorted to mean whatever it needs to mean whenever it needs to mean it. CCP officials and other undead reliably master this language.

A party line is ideological in content, but it is not really an ideology. It changes by the day, and is ultimately empty and cynical. It is like a coordinating narrative as described above; but, unlike such a narrative, which is largely unconscious in its influence, everyone is quite conscious of the party line’s dominance. If a narrative is mostly seductive, a party line is maintained at least as much by force of terror; it is an expression of power, an enforced conformity. And while a narrative mostly applies only to its in-group, a party line forces itself on everyone, including its enemies, and demands obedience. It is characteristically totalitarian.

Why might the West’s more amorphous narrative have now hardened into a stricter party line? Well, it should be pointed out that a dominant narrative has no inherent incentive to keep it connected to reality. If the narrative is a discourse, it is in discourse only with itself. It is a closed, self-reinforcing feedback loop that rewards every new justification for growth in power and scope, no matter if that justification has any basis in truth, while punishing any threat of limitation. So in fact it has every incentive to eventually achieve takeoff velocity and leave all earthly reality behind. Those who insist on trying to reassert reality then become a threat to its growth. Protecting the narrative from reality becomes a core job of the narrative’s systems.

The more unnatural (detached from reality) a system is, the more force is needed to impose it. The more the narrative is challenged the more fiercely defended it is by those possessed by it, and the more they find the use of coercive power justified in doing so. “Noble” lies, at the very least, quickly become permissible in defense of the greater “truth” of the system – at which point those at the top of the system begin to tweak and manipulate the propagated narrative itself in an effort to defend it from its enemies. Simultaneously, a small core portion of those who have made it to the top are, unsurprisingly, psychopaths. For them the truth of the narrative was never important, only power, so they are happy to take more direct control of the narrative if they can. But since the narrative is in a sense itself psychopathic, given its power-maximizing nature, they form a sort of symbiotic relationship to grow together. Either way, for cynic and true believer alike, the narrative becomes, naturally, something to be managed.

Combine this with an extreme center rapidly growing more paranoid about threats to its legitimacy and control, and more determined to respond with a managerial united front, and we get a party line. Through it, the singular unreality of a one-party state is to be forced on everyone. While the success of this prospect may sound unrealistic, the party seems to be in luck: new technologies offer it tantalizing hope that the total administration of reality can indeed soon be achieved, and narrative harmony restored.

Reality Management

Pondering the Censorship-Industrial Complex, Matt Taibbi remarked in a July 2023 podcast with the writer

Walter Kirn

that all the assorted “experts” involved have, by “devising digital mechanisms by which they can turn down the volume on different ideas” on the internet – through tools like “deamplification” (shadow banning), search manipulation, and the selective addition of “friction” (such as spurious content warnings) – in effect appointed themselves as “unelected masters of the universe messing around with reality itself.”

Kirn then followed up with an evocative metaphor:

They’re mixing a record, Matt. They’re sitting there at a soundboard mixing a record. A little more cowbell. Let’s bring down the bass. Let’s bring up the treble, and they use words like friction and other mechanical metaphors for what they do to actual people. And we’re all just kind of bytes and digits in this musical production they call society. And it does sound crazy because it sounds so arrogant, so effortlessly arrogant as though social processes are computer processes and as though the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of a society are different instruments in a recording studio to be brought up in intensity or pushed out.

This is a particularly apt description of how managerialism is bound to approach collective reality: as if it were something to be fine-tuned through expertise. “What kind of society, what kind of economy, what kind of culture are we looking at if this goes on unchecked?” Kirn wonders. “We’re talking about thoughts never reaching visibility and a kind of power that probably didn’t exist before.”

We’re likely to find out. As Siegel points out in the conclusion to his essay , already at this point, “The first great battles of the information war are over.” The clumsy initial forays by the Censorship-Industrial Complex have been “waged by a class of journalists, retired generals, spies, Democratic Party bosses, party apparatchiks, and counterterrorism experts against the remnant of the American people who refused to submit to their authority.” But it is obvious that this means of mass censorship, “which requires considerable human labor and leaves behind plenty of evidence,” is already being replaced by far more sophisticated technological methods of control. “Future battles fought through AI technologies,” Siegel warns, “will be harder to see.”

Artificial intelligence and other advances may allow for a far more precisely and comprehensively controlled information environment. The result could be a world in which automated censors are capable not only of instantaneously detecting and removing content disagreeable to the regime, but are able to completely filter and shape all of the information that reaches any person through the internet. Search results could be manipulated, inconvenient facts and data made simply undiscoverable. Definitions, official records, databases, and digital textbooks or even literature could be altered on the fly to match the party line. Disagreeable opinions and news could be algorithmically suppressed or made entirely unsharable, with seekers seamlessly rerouted to propaganda. Even large-scale real-world events, like a major pro-democracy protest, could be effectively disappeared, as if they had never happened, or immediately re-framed through selective editing to depict a chosen propaganda narrative. Personal digital IDs (whether officially mandated or simply informally assembled for each individual through big data collection) would allow consistently customized messaging and incentive “nudges” to be pushed to each person.

Of course, all of this is already happening. Social media companies already algorithmically filter information, secretly implement “search blacklists,” prevent certain topics from trending, and selectively disable links. These methods are already used for explicitly political purposes . Google has already been caught regularly manipulating search results (e.g. hiding search results for the lockdown-skeptical Great Barrington Declaration and only showing users results of opinions criticizing it, as verified by documents reviewed in the Missouri v. Biden case ). Dictionaries already redefine the official meaning of words in near real time as the party line shifts. Government bodies and their media do the same thing . News outlets regularly make stealth edits; whole scandals are memory-holed. Today even entire novels are rewritten without the author’s consent, or even awareness , to make sure they conform. (A whole industry of “sensitivity readers” now exists to give publications a good pre-scrubbing in a doubtless futile effort to avoid having to do this later.) Google software already “assists” users by automatically prompting them to change politically incorrect words and phrases as they’re writing them.

But these may be just the first stumbling baby steps towards what with further developments in AI could become an all-encompassing regime of algorithmic gaslighting and fully-automated narrative management. The true force of totalitarian regimes, Hannah Arendt once reflected, was that, even “before the movement has the power to drop the iron curtains to prevent anyone from disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world,” their propaganda machines possessed the “ability to shut the masses off from the real world.” Today, much as virtual reality devices now already allow for “augmented reality” (the addition of the virtual superimposed onto perception of reality), a vast reality distortion field threatens to settle itself in between the public and the true world.

The managerial regime is of course already engaged in a furious crash construction effort to build such a reality-distortion machine by integrating AI into its existing obsession with information control. Internet and social media companies have begun initiatives aimed at “prebunking” information, or what former State Department official Mike Benz describes as “a form of narrative censorship integrated into social media algorithms to stop citizens from forming specific social and political belief systems,” and compares to attempting to police “pre-crime.” Following a call by Bill Gates to use AI to suppress “conspiracy theories” and “political polarization,” Google will for example seek on behalf of the German government “to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation.” In the United States, the Department of Defense has awarded tens of millions of dollars to contractors promising to further automate “defenses” against “disinformation,” while the National Science Foundation has launched a “Convergence Accelerator” (yes, really) to incubate technologies designed to monitor and counter such heresies as “vaccine hesitancy and electoral skepticism.”

Meanwhile, in the imminent future asking something of a search engine like Google will not prompt it to display discrete search results at all. Instead an AI chatbot will instantly tell you everything it thinks you need to know in response. This appears set to become the norm just about everywhere the human interfaces with the digital. But of course such an AI will not be speaking the full truth, only the narrative determined by the cadre in the code . We already know that ChatGPT, for example, isn’t merely biased and ideological ; rather, as the mathematician and writer Brian Chau has pointed out , explicit policies by its creator OpenAI mean that the structure of its code already goes “as far as prohibiting the chatbot from communicating politically inconvenient facts [at all], even ones agreed upon in the scientific community.” It is literally built to be incapable of accurately describing reality. Its vocation is instead to quickly regurgitate the correct party line. (“Fact: Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.”) But how many people will simply take what they are told by such an AI at face value? No doubt the great managerial hope is that, eventually, as the technology conditions people to become ever lazier and less self-reliant, the answer will someday be just about everyone.

Prominent venture capitalist and technologist Marc Andreessen predicts that rapidly accelerating advances in AI large language models like ChatGPT mean that we will soon live in a world where, “Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful.” In fact everyone will have an equally wonderful “AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist” perched at their ear at all times to tell them what to believe. The New Man of this particular amazing utopia wouldn’t even have to bother to think or remember anything for himself at all! All his information would be conveniently blended up and spoon-fed to him by an immense and tutelary AI through his cognitive infrastructure, surely to be cared for by the state. Should such a future really come to pass, I suspect that it would no doubt be a world where nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.

This would represent the greatest possible triumph for soft managerialism: a system in which all potential resistance from the masses is completely contained by pure narrative manipulation, with no need for coercion or the open use of force to ever be used at all. It’s no surprise then that developing this kind of innovative narrative control is one area where the West is in fact leading the way, while China, with its sweeping but relatively ham-fisted censorship and uninspired propaganda apparatus, is now scrambling to catch up and develop similarly sophisticated discourse power.

Still, reality being as stubborn as it is, narrative management alone is unlikely to ever be completely sufficient to enforce universal compliance with the party line. Other, more coercive methods will in the end inevitably be needed to deal with dissent. And here it’s China that leads the way for the world.

Enjoy the Fengqiao Experience! – Governance by Mass Line Social Control

Xi Jinping and his officials like to muse wistfully about the pleasures of the “Fengqiao experience” (枫桥经验) and sharing them with all of China. Fengqiao (“Maple Bridge”) is, or was, a picturesque little township in Zhejiang province, but I’m afraid the Fengqiao experience is not a tourism package. Rather, back in the 1960s Fengqiao distinguished itself as a model town in the eyes of Mao. While usually Party thugs had to go around identifying and rounding up “reactionary elements,” in Fengqiao the people handled it themselves: “not one person [had to be] rounded up, and still the vast majority of enemies were dealt with.” Brilliant!

Fengqiao so impressed Mao because, by constantly monitoring and snitching on each other, and engaging in “on-site rectification” (mob struggle sessions) and “rehabilitation” (thought reform) to collectively enforce conformity, the people there successfully policed themselves without being told. Here at last was a true example of the “dictatorship of the masses” that Mao hoped to establish. With sufficient mobilization by the Party’s leadership, the “mass line” of the public could successfully exert immense social control over itself on the Party’s behalf. Mao encouraged the party to learn from the experience of Fengqiao, and in doing so planted a seed that would take root and grow in the hard soil of the CCP imagination: a dream of a population so thoroughly conditioned by Chinese socialism that someday it would practically manage itself.

Today Xi has revitalized and modernized this idea by marrying it to newly available tools: those of the digital revolution. With exhortations of “mass prevention and mass governance,” “digital justice for the masses,” and “grid-style management,” traditional methods of Fengqiao-style social mass monitoring and control (such as organized teams of informants, tip lines, public “call outs” and social shaming) have been combined with internet-wide mobilization and a vast digital surveillance apparatus.[20] That now includes big data analytics integrating universal real time biometric, location, and financial purchase tracking (including through the ubiquitous “everything app” WeChat), along with internet and social media history and interpersonal relationship mapping.

The jewel in the crown of this approach is intended to be China’s social credit system. Made possible by algorithmic processing and the reams of data collected on every individual, the system (which is still in the process of being developed, piloted, and implemented) intends to assign each person – as well as each company or organization – a unique aggregated “social credit” score. This is much like a financial credit score: based on observed behavior and other “risk factors,” the score can be adjusted up or down to designate an individual or business as more or less “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy.” In the trials conducted so far, those with higher scores are rewarded with escalating perks, such as priority access to travel, loans, housing, higher education, or even healthcare. Those with lower scores face escalating punishments , such as losing access to the financial system, prohibition from buying luxury goods, airplane or high-speed rail tickets, or real estate, as well as denial of admission for themselves or their children to certain schools and universities. Billed as a benign means of increasing the overall level of “trust” in society, the stated goal of the system is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

Points can be gained by doing good deeds like volunteering, or amplifying government propaganda. Companies can donate to GONGO charities and comply with corporate social responsibility schemes. Points are lost through bad behavior, such as littering, not promptly paying bills and fines, traffic violations, jaywalking, causing a public “disturbance,” or spreading harmful “misinformation” on the internet (especially about the regime). Most recently, environmental regulation has begun to be integrated with the credit system, with “un-green” behaviors factored into scores.

Importantly, the system is deliberately social in nature. Those with low scores are publicly listed and shamed online or on public billboards; even some dating apps have trialed incorporating social credit scores. Most significantly, because having too many relationships with people who have low scores risks lowering one’s own score, people have an incentive to avoid associating with the “discredited” at all, accelerating their progressive unpersoning by society.

Though the social credit system is still under construction and not yet fully implemented (a reason seized on by a surprising number of apologists in the West to downplay or dismiss its existence entirely), the totalitarian thrust of the idea is absolutely clear, and has been since plans for it were first laid in 2014. Its purpose is to universalize the Fengqiao experience, or what is alternatively identified by the Party as “social governance.” As a report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service aptly puts it : “Social governance describes a system that is self-managing – one that can automatically adjust itself to help the Party consolidate and expand power.”

In this context, the report notes, “The function of social credit in the CCP’s management methodology is to automate ‘individual responsibility’, a concept according to which each citizen upholds social stability and national security.” In other words, the social credit system aims to use comprehensive immersion in an inescapable system of constant positive and negative reinforcement – mixing rewards and punishments, subtly tweaked as needed, as if making adjustments on a soundboard – to completely condition its citizens. Or, one might say, it effectively “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate.” The goal of this gamification of the mind is, as usual, to create a New Man to fit into the managerial machine. We do not need to speculate that this is the intention; it is always and everywhere the inexorable object of managerialism (“Psychoanalysis carried in it the promise that it can be done…”).

This social engineering has already been effective. I vividly recall, for example, how visiting China even as late as the 2000s or mid-2010s, absolutely everyone used to jaywalk all the time.[21] It was simply a fact of life, a cultural constant seemingly ingrained by who knew how many centuries of the Chinese peasantry’s wonderfully incorrigible pragmatism and total unwillingness to submit to waiting in any manner of line. Today nobody jaywalks (at least in the city), because, if you do, your identity is captured by facial recognition camera, your face, name, and ID number are plastered on a billboard of shame next to the intersection, and a fine is sent to your bank. All those centuries of evolved cultural attitude have been successfully overwritten by only a few years of conditioning by the machine .

A billboard in China displays the face, name, and ID number of a jaywalker.

In the West, eager eyes are watching, and learning.

In June, the British bank Coutts closed the account of right-wing politician Nigel Farage without explanation. Farage was subsequently refused service by ten other banks. Internal “risk” documents produced by the bank and obtained by Farage soon showed Coutt’s reasoning for “exiting” him from his account: Farage had been found to no longer be “compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organization.” The terrible sins listed on Farage’s rap sheet included: being friends with Donald Trump and unvaccinated tennis champion Novak Djokovic; campaigning for Brexit; using the word “globalist” with a negative connotation; being “climate denying/anti-net zero”; being “seen as xenophobic and racist”; and having been a “fascist” when he was a schoolboy, according to some rumors once heard by someone said to be in the know. Together this evidence proved Farage was “increasingly out of touch with wider society” (i.e. progress) and thus presented an “ongoing reputational risk to the bank.” So, especially “when considering our stance specifically on ESG/diversity,” he had to go.

In this case, having been caught red-handed “debanking” a prominent and savvy politician for political reasons, the bank was ultimately forced to apologize and some of its top officials to resign. Such consequences are an exception to the rule, however. Politically motivated debanking has in recent years become increasingly routine practice across the West.

Most memorably, Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts and seize the assets of the truckers protesting his destructive vaccine mandates and demagoguery. Canadians who had merely donated money to support the truckers also had their accounts frozen. This tactic of using financial levers to personally destroy political dissidents and shut down protests has since quickly spread around the world, also being used against protesting truckers in Brazil, for instance.

Debanking initiated by the banks themselves appears to have become even more common, however. In the same month as Farage, for example, the UK’s Rev. Richard Fothergill had his account closed on the spot after offering mild disagreement with his bank’s relentless promotion of transgender ideology on a customer feedback survey (the bank told him this view was “not tolerable”). Also in the same month, Scottish anti-Woke blogger Stuart Campbell had his account of 25 years closed by the bank First Direct without his even being notified. He only discovered the fact upon suddenly finding himself unable to use his card to buy groceries. In the US, mere days after the Farage scandal, JP Morgan Chase shuttered the bank accounts of anti-vaccine proponent Dr. Joseph Mercola, as well as his business’ CEO, CFO, their spouses, and all of their children. Again, these are all examples from within just a single month. And such cases that manage to draw public attention are doubtless only the tip of the iceberg. Farage says he has begun assembling a “very large database” of potentially thousands of similar cases from the UK alone.

Nor are banks the only ones involved. Online payment platforms have joined in too. GoFundMe seized money donated to the Canadian truckers through its platform on its own initiative. In May,

Konstantin Kisin’s popular anti-Woke Triggernometry podcast was deplatformed by fintech company Tide. PayPal, in one of the more symbolic instances of its especially prolific debanking habit, cut off the Free Speech Union for promoting “intolerance.” PayPal also famously attempted to slip language into its user agreement allowing it to confiscate $2,500 from users each time they spread “misinformation” or said or did anything “harmful” or “objectionable” (all defined at PayPal’s “sole discretion”).

Why is this happening? Why would private banks and other businesses force out paying customers like this and risk courting public backlash? Because it is in their interest to do so if they want to survive and thrive, and indeed they have little choice. These banks are not really fully “private actors,” as they are part of the managerial economy in a budding managerial party-state. The business of a managerial business is not business; it’s managerialism. And once more: there can be no neutral institutions in a party-state. The party-state’s enemies are the institution’s enemies, or the institution is an enemy of the party-state (which is not a profitable position to be in). This is what “reputational risk” means: the risk of appearing to be on the wrong side of the party line. Hence why we find Coutts, a bank founded in 1692 and so quintessentially posh establishment that it banks the British Royal Family, decking out its entire headquarters in the rainbow regalia of loyalty and operating like it too is, like the AIIB, controlled by “an internal secret police.”

So, at the present moment, when the managerial system is defending itself against challenges from its anti-managerial “populist” enemies, the banks will automatically find themselves participating in the war effort. And the banks are on the frontlines of that war, because financial control is the obvious next evolution for a hardening soft managerial system seeking new methods of stability maintenance beyond the usual practice of narrative control. In a digitized society, financial control is now, like narrative manipulation, entirely a matter of controlling virtual information. That makes it a natural and familiar feeling tool for foxes who prefer suppressing dissent from a laptop. No need to get the hands dirty when your weapon is a keyboard.

Most importantly, in a society as digitized as ours, control over digital transactions means surveillance and control over nearly everything. When someone is debanked – and then inevitably blacklisted from all other banks, because the banks are networked and share “risk” information – they are cut off from participation in nearly every aspect of modern life. They will have no easy way to receive pay from a job, as cashing checks without an account incurs exorbitant fees, and they may even simply be fired to avoid inconvenience (US federal law permits companies to make direct deposit mandatory). If they own a business, they will be left with no way to process the vast majority of payments, and won’t have any functional means to distribute payroll to employees. They will even be cut off from the primary medium for soliciting any donations beyond loose change. They cannot buy property and, in the case of many property management companies, may not even be able to rent. They will be unable to purchase almost any digital service and, increasingly, will be prevented from completing many everyday offline transactions as well. Once the ongoing war on cash is won, they will be well and truly screwed.

Debanking, especially when combined with similar forms of commercial deplatforming from other digital services, such as internet service providers, domain registrars, e-commerce platforms like Amazon, or app stores like Apple’s, therefore serves as an extremely effective means to isolate and silence a targeted person or group, quickly breaking any presence and influence they may have once had within society. Which is of course the point.

This appears to be a lesson taken directly from the Chinese method of dealing with dissidents. Having been subjected to similar means of unpersoning for years, the advent of “digital authoritarianism” has made such dissidents even more vulnerable to constant coercion, their destruction serving as a powerful incentive against crossing the party line. Now the social credit system has allowed a flexible and convenient means to apply that kind of coercion at scale. Utopia is doubtless just around the corner.

Having dipped a few of their mandibles in to test the waters with other lessons from China, the West’s managerial elite seem to have concluded that they now have the tools and latitude to begin implementing a similar system here. Although not yet anywhere near as comprehensive, this nascent system shares the same fundamental characteristics: using public-private coordination and “social governance” to collapse any distinction between public and private life, thereby greatly raising the risks for public non-conformity and dissent from the narrative.

In fact we can see transparent steps towards the construction of a social credit system in the now widespread use of such innovations as ESG (environmental, social, and governance) scores. Such scores, which major financial institutions wield to make vocal conformity to specific social and ideological practices a requirement for businesses to access capital, operate on the same principles of public-private collapse. Similar NGO-led scoring schemes such as the Corporate Equality Index and UK-based Diversity Champions program have also emerged and achieved outsized levels of influence by wielding the scores as, essentially, extortion operations threatening those businesses that fail to conform with “reputational risk” blackmail and deplatforming. Such businesses then find that in order to maintain their scores they must manage the conformity of customers as well (as Coutts’s documents admitted explicitly when citing “our stance specifically on ESG/diversity” as reason Farage had to be debanked).

How far might this all go? While the powerful realm of financial flows is today’s focus, there is no reason to think that, on the current trajectory, the same dynamics won’t be applied, in a united front, to every other sector of our economy and society. If someday soon people find themselves evicted from their insurance policies for speaking out of turn online (or associating with too many people who do), apartment leases come with ideological morality clauses, and airlines unite to ban customers with the wrong beliefs from traveling, we shouldn’t be surprised – this will simply be the behavior of a hardening managerialism seeking stability through mechanistic control over all the details of life.

New technologies, like AI and, especially, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will only continue to make this kind of granular control more and more possible.[22] And all that which can possibly be used will be used. A few months ago, a man found himself completely shut out of his digitally controlled “smart home” by Amazon after a delivery driver accused his doorbell of saying something racist.[23] Why would Amazon bother to do this? Because they can do this; and so, in the end, under a managerial regime, they must do this. As our managers find that every day it feels easier and easier to “solve” problematic people with the click of a button, they will not be able to resist hitting that button, hard and often.

Such is the very weltanschauung – the whole way of seeing and believing – of the managerial mind. As more and more comes within the technological grasp of the managerial machine, its grip will only continue to tighten. For as we should see clearly by now, there “neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side” produced by technology. Inevitably, “Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.”

The end of the road for the great convergence of managerialisms appears to lie under the shadow of digital totalitarianism.

Conclusion: The Total Techno-State

James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution had a big influence on one author in particular. Reflecting on the book in 1945, George Orwell lamented that Burnham’s “picture of the new world has turned out to be correct.” In this new world:

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham under the name of ‘managers’. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new ‘managerial’ societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

This vision of a world beset by managerial convergence would become the basis for Orwell’s most famous novel, 1984. Now that world is taking shape.

Use this simple, handy summary chart to see where it all went so, so wrong for your society.

Today the great super-states struggle for possession of the earth. But for all past speculation that the 21st century would be defined by a “clash of civilizations,” today there is only one, smothering form of modern civilization that has stretched itself across the face of the globe, its multiple personalities vying amongst themselves for imperial supremacy. In the West, progressive managerialism softly strangled democracy to death over a century of manipulation, hollowed it out, and now wears its skin. In the East, the imported virus of communist managerialism wiped out a once-great civilization in a river of blood, then crystalized into the cold, hard machine that now rules the lands of China. Fascist managerialism, killed off by its fratricidal siblings, lives on in their genes.

Managerialism has today conquered the world so thoroughly that to most of us it may seem like the only possible universe, the very water in which we swim. With our history rewritten and our minds conditioned, just as Orwell (and other prophets ) predicted, we now struggle even to perceive its existence, yet alone to break through the iron paradigm of managerial thinking and recognize that, as both a form of government and a way of being, it is in the human experience something wholly new, abnormal, tyrannical, and absurd.

Birthed from the core conceits of modernity, the grotesque pathology of managerialism is defined by its boundless hubris and relentless reductionism. Viewing nature, Man, and society all as raw material that through pure imagination and technical skill it can break down and reconfigure as it pleases, this leviathan comes, in its pride, to believe that even reality must bend to its will. It is, in the ultimate narcissistic ambition of its idiot rationalism, inherently totalitarian. Indeed the “total” in totalitarian is the very essence of managerialism at its deepest level, and the two cannot be disaggregated. And so managerialism always promises human progress and perfection but then inevitably delivers inhumanity on an industrial scale.

The 20th century ended up being defined by the catastrophic upheaval and destruction that the first great wave of managerial totalitarianism inflicted on the world. The hydra of that totalitarian scourge, in its multiple visages, was amid that struggle wounded but never slain. Now the 21st century is being shaken by the upheaval of its resurgence.

Sharing the same managerial hubris, tempted by the same growing technological powers and desire to engineer the mind and soul of Man, sheltering the same elite insecurities and delusions, and seeking to head off many of the same challenges , China and the West are today both leading the charge for that resurgence from different directions. Even as they roil and clash, each – hard and soft, modernist and post-modernist – is in its own way converging on the same destiny: the same socially engineered submission of everything human, real, and free to technocratic nihilism and the false reality of an all-encompassing machine-government – to a total techno-state.

It’s in my view now clear that humanity’s great task of the 21st century remains fundamentally the same as that left unfinished in the battles of the 20th: to reawaken and reassert the flame of the human spirt and reclaim its tradition of and natural right to self-governance. And then with that spirit, wielding the fire and sword of true human love and freedom, truth and right reason, to rise up in counter-revolution against the evil of its archenemy and tear the false order of managerialism and all its poisonous ideological spawn root and branch from the world forever.

An incisive depiction of the state of the world now.

Botticelli made this painting on the description of a painting by Apelles, a Greek painter of the Hellenistic period. Apelles' works have not survived, but Lucian recorded details of one in his On Calumny: “On the right of it sits Midas with very large ears, extending his hand to Slander while she is still at some distance from him. Near him, on one side, stand two women—Ignorance and Suspicion. On the other side, Slander is coming up, a woman beautiful beyond measure, but full of malignant passion and excitement, evincing as she does fury and wrath by carrying in her left hand a blazing torch and with the other dragging by the hair a young man who stretches out his hands to heaven and calls the gods to witness his innocence. She is conducted by a pale ugly man who has piercing eye and looks as if he had wasted away in long illness; he represents envy. There are two women in attendance to Slander, one is Fraud and the other Conspiracy. They are followed by a woman dressed in deep mourning, with black clothes all in tatters—she is Repentance. At all events, she is turning back with tears in her eyes and casting a stealthy glance, full of shame, at Truth, who is slowly approaching.”

When a fictional world becomes sufficiently complex and sketched out, you can typically start to recognize almost all of the basic concepts of a philosophy within it. Someone has already explained this for Taoist concepts with Winnie the Pooh.

I like Spongebob Squarepants, it’s lighthearted and you can see some important principles illustrated too if you look carefully enough. I hope to write a series of articles in which I explore these from a Dharmic angle. To start with, you must ask yourself what the three main characters, Spongebob, Patrick and Squidward, personify.

If you look carefully, you can see, they illustrate the three Gunas, the three qualities that permeate all life. Everything is made up of Rajas, Sattva and Tamas. Rajas is becoming, Sattva is being, Tamas is ceasing to be.

Food similarly can be fitted into one of these categories. I have been over this before, but just to give some examples again, spicy foods will be Rajasic, they stimulate the senses. Sattvic foods are things like most fruit and vegetables, they provide clarity of mind. Tamasic foods sedate, they insulate us from understanding how things really are.

And you can see these same three principles illustrated in the deities of the Trimurti. Brahma is the creator. He is not really worshipped. Then comes Vishnu, the sustainer. Finally comes Shiva, the destroyer. Most Hindus primarily worship either Vishnu or one of his avatars, or Shiva.

Now I want you to take a look at Spongebob, Squidward and Patrick. Can you see, who illustrates which of the three gunas? It’s easy.

Spongebob is Rajasic in nature. He is young, adventurous, still full of plans, desires and ambitions. He starts out looking to get a job, he wants to get his driver’s license and he wants to get a girlfriend (Sandy). He doesn’t yet know how the world works, so in all his endeavors he depends on Squidward and Patrick. Squidward and Patrick are ultimately much more mature and they have chosen two of the spiritual paths that people most commonly take.

Because Spongebob is still young and full of desire, he has not yet had to find a spiritual path. Spongebob is bad at everything he does: He can’t lift weights, he can’t drive a car, he can’t think of a better joke than ripping his pants, he plays the Bassinet, but happens to be terrible at it. But because he is young and full of Rajasic energy, his lack of talents and skills does not harm his self-esteem.

Children have to be Rajasic. Parents generally don’t like this. They tend to wish their child was more like Squidward. But if you take away the Rajasic element from a child, the child will burn out. It’s easy to extinguish the flame, by drowning the child in your own desires. Many parents in our age are guilty of this.

Squidward is Sattvic. Squidward knows exactly how the world functions, which is why he is so disappointed and miserable. How Squidward deals with this reality, is by attempting to follow what Krishna, avatar of Vishnu recommends to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: To go through the motions, to perform his duties, without attachment.

He works at the Krusty Krab, he hates it, but he tries to the best of his ability to accept the hand that life has dealt him. He is a Vaishnavist. The Vaishnavists encourage the life of a householder, that of the nuclear family. Squidward tries to preserve the things he values. Hence he lives in an Easter Island head, he orients his mind towards his ancestors. He values the classical arts, although, like Spongebob, he has no innate talents for them. In contrast to Spongebob, Squidward has developed self-awareness with maturity. But this self-awareness, is also what limits him. Often he imagines things to be impossible, that Spongebob and Patrick proceed to go on doing.

You can understand the philosophy of Squidward, through one sentence from the episode Slimy Dancing:

“SpongeBob, dancing isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be ART. And art is suffering!”

Squidward aims to teach Spongebob to prepare for a life of duty.

Finally, there is Patrick. Patrick is in the process of forgetting, of extinguishing. Unlike Spongebob and Squidward, he has no job. He is a Shaivist: He follows the path of Shiva, the destroyer. He is a renunciate.

Patrick makes no attempts to preserve any tradition he inherited. He has the least fancy of the three houses, being content living underneath a rock. The Shaivists are the most ascetic among the main Hindu traditions. Because he is in the process of forgetting, of renouncing the world, he is easily fooled. As an example, Squidward can fool him into thinking Spongebob does not want to be his friend. By indulging in Tamasic foods, he has gained a lot of weight.

To understand Patrick’s philosophy, think of this sentence:

“Dumb people are just blissfully unaware of how dumb they are.”

Now the most interesting thing, is to look at how the three interact. When Spongebob and Patrick come together there is happiness, but nothing productive is achieved. They go jellyfishing, or they go out and eat icecream. In contrast, when the energy and enthusiasm of Spongebob is combined with the realism and understanding of Squidward, work can be done. Things can be created, based on a tradition that predates Spongebob’s arrival, like a Krabby Patty. It is through the interaction between Spongebob and Squidward, that the world can be sustained.

On the rare occasions Squidward and Patrick interact, there is typically just destruction and chaos. Take the previously mentioned example, of Squidward fooling Patrick into thinking he’s not his friend. Or, consider what happens when Patrick answers the phone, which is normally Squidward’s job: “Is this the Krusty Krab?” “No, this is Patrick.” They lose the customer.

This happens because Patrick and Squidward ultimately represent conflicting but complementary traditions. The world can’t exist without Patrick, because the life of Squidward in isolation is one of suffering. It is to be aware at all times, of all the limitations. He knows he has a shit job. He knows he can’t properly play the clarinet. He knows he has no wife.

The world can not exist without Squidward either, because Patrick alone, would plunge the world into darkness, decay, ignorance, nihilism, chaos and destruction. There would be no Krusty Krab. There would be no Krabby Patty. Patrick is the man who solves the problem of there being too much in life. But Patrick without Squidward, means there would eventually be nothing.

So the question you’ll find yourself faced with is: Alright, we have Squidward who worships Vishnu. We have Patrick who worships Shiva. So who worships Brahma? Spongebob? And that’s the thing that makes Hindu philosophy so different from the Western philosophical tradition. Although Shaivists have the tendency to ascribe qualities of creation and sustaining of everything to Shiva, the creator of the Trimurti, Brahma, isn’t really worshipped.

In most Abrahamic traditions, we’re enthusiastic about the creation of the world. But like Gnostic Christians, the Dharmic religions are much more ambivalent about its creation. Brahma generally just isn’t worshipped much, he has a handful of temples, but there exists no specific tradition devoted to him. And the reason for that may tie into the fact that the Dharmic religions see incarnation as self-evident.

In contrast to the Christian tradition, in which we are promised eternal life after death, you don’t have to accomplish anything in the Dharmic religions to live forever. Die and you will simply become another living being. It is escaping the creation, that is a challenge. So why worship the creator?

If you want the equivalent of a Brahma worshipper in Spongebob Squarepants, the closest thing would be the relationship between Spongebob and Mr. Krabs. Mr. Krabs created the Krusty Krab. He created the Krabby Patty. How he accomplished it is a secret that must be kept safe at all cost from the invisible demon (Plankton).

But he is not a character worthy of worship. And Squidward knows this. His relationship is one of reluctant subservience. Patrick presumably knows it too. It’s Spongebob, who is still young, naive and keen to dance to the tunes of Mr. Krabs.

And the trick as a viewer, is to balance the three gunas. You can be like Squidward, you can develop full awareness. And you should strive for awareness, the Sattva guna is held in highest regard. But with full awareness comes suffering, unless you can imbibe yourself with the naive energetic enthusiasm of the sponge, or can sedate yourself like the starfish who lives under a rock.

You may think to yourself: “How can Squidward be held in high regard? He’s mean and cynical.” But ultimately, all the three characters are flawed beings, who are in themselves good. Patrick is useless and stupid, but he means well. Spongebob is destructive and incompetent, but wants to do good. And Squidward is cynical and disillusioned. But whenever someone genuinely mistreats Spongebob, like the man who ordered a pizza and then complained about not receiving a drink, Squidward intervenes on his behalf.

Squidward only looks like the bad guy of the three, because he was given the heaviest weight to carry in life. And in carrying this burden, he is actually the most noble. The souls of the three characters are ultimately pure and unblemished. The challenges life casts upon them are just so severe it makes them look like flawed beings. Mr. Krabs is more explicitly morally flawed, his soul is tainted by greed.

Then finally, we have to consider that all three characters, Squidward above all, are losers. They have all achieved just a shadow of what a human being can achieve. Patrick just does nothing all day. Squidward works at a fast food restaurant he hates. And Spongebob fails at just about everything he attempts.

Why is that? Well fundamentally, they’re born into a flawed world. It is a world that puts good people at the bottom, literally and metaphorically. They live at the mercy of the human Gods high above, who can fish them out of the ocean at any moment, or annihilate Bikini Bottom with nuclear weapons. In this world the powerful are evil, the powerless are good.

This ties into another concept I hope to elaborate upon in a future article, the dark era that these three noble men found themselves born into: The Kali Yuga.

In response to my piece on leaving academia, a few asked me for my thoughts on Wokeness, and how one might go about doing away with it.

There’s nothing I would like more, than to have a good answer to this question. Alas, I’m very pessimistic about achieving any victory here, but I also don’t think Woke is going to be a permanent menace. Sooner or later, the forces driving this ideological cancer will try to circumscribe the Woke, and if they fail, they will themselves be consumed by it. The damage has been done and the pre-Woke world can never be re-achieved, but Wokery isn’t a stable ideological system. It is instead the mere ideological expression of a revolutionary process.

I’ve written a lot about the phenomenon of the high-low alliance. The idea isn’t original to me; a great many thinkers, from Bertrand de Jouvenel to Curtis Yarvin and others, have articulated the same basic idea in varying terms. It’s central to understanding the modern political order, and in particular leftism and the various forms it adopts.

In Antiquity, empires and kingdoms faced substantial practical limits on the exercise of their power. Even relatively sophisticated systems like the Roman Empire had to make do with a rudimentary institutional apparatus by modern standards. In the Middle Ages, depopulation and a shrinking economy simplified this apparatus further still; most people lived their whole lives without encountering a single agent of the king. A semi-autonomous aristocracy emerged to collect rents from the peasantry and provide local security. Royal power was hemmed in on all sides, and although peasants were subject to varying degrees of unfreedom and often very serious poverty, they were not all that closely governed.

As the economy and with it the institutional apparatus grew, the distance between the top and the bottom of society collapsed, and rulers availed themselves of new opportunities to extend their powers. They could present themselves as allies of the common people and the merchants, who regarded the autonomous aristocracy as their oppressors and saw in the distant monarch a more attractive protector. State agents replaced the aristocrats; unlike the aristocracy, they owed their position and their loyalty to the king. This ideological and political transformation inevitably sidelined royal power as well; notional sovereignty moved from the king to the people, on whose behalf state agents claimed to govern. The growth of technology and communications facilitated these changes by vastly increasing the reach of the state, and hence the status that the state could provide to its agents. A new political rhetoric and a new ideology of freedom, rights, and the popular will emerged – all of it betokening, ironically, a closer governance of the common man than history had ever seen before.

Now, I’ve framed this in roughly Jouvenelian terms, but the advancement of power via alliances of opportunity between the high and the low is in no way limited to the political sphere. Universities, corporations and religious institutions are subject to identical processes of administrative progression. Wherever you have less-advantaged people at the bottom, rulers at the top, and the accumulation of some independent prerogative and autonomy between them, the board is set. Nor is the tactic of the high-low alliance against the middle ever definitively finished. For one thing, there are always new people accumulating at the bottom – foreigners and immigrants, the recently impoverished, the sick, and many others. For another, no completed revolution of the high and the low can continue for very long before yielding new ranks to loot just below the top. The merchants and later the capitalists drove out the landed aristocracy, only to find themselves the target of new socialist revolutionary movements in the nineteenth century.

Ideologies have a highly important if subordinate role to play in this system, for they demarcate which groups at the bottom are unjustly disadvantaged and to whose aid the rulers or the administrators are called. The highly unstable nature of the lower classes in modern society, driven by mass immigration and rapid economic change, accounts for the volatility and malleability of leftism, which is the ideological cluster that is primarily responsible for articulating and justifying these high-low alliances. Classical Marxism promised justice to factory workers, the New Left of the postwar era shifted its focus to students, and today their Woke successors forge alliances with racial and sexual minorities. The promise is always one of a totally egalitarian society, but even when completely successful, the revolution merely extends the power of the rulers.

Wokeness first got off the ground in Anglophone universities after decades of hiring and admissions preferences had filled them with revolutionary tinder at the bottom. The expanding administration seized this opportunity, and via ever new initiatives in the area of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, aligned itself with the affirmative action fraternity against that old academic aristocracy, the tenured faculty and their departments. That is, at base, all that Wokeness is. The basic ideological programme found purchase outside the university environment simply because immigration policies and hiring preferences provided nearly identical opportunities for high-low alliances in many other areas. Where Woke has made fewer inroads, for example in Continental Europe, the reason is insufficient immigration and the absence of long-standing affirmative action initiatives. Despite many other changes, the lower tiers here have remained relatively stable, though of course that’s changing as I type this.

The depressing but necessary conclusion to be drawn from all of this, is that an intellectual confrontation with Wokeness cannot achieve very much. This isn’t to say that there’s no utility in understanding the arguments and the intellectual heritage of the Woke, or that there’s no tactical advantage to be had in ridiculing them, but in no scenario will winning the argument cause them to pack up and go away. Everyone preaching Wokeness is either a direct, personal beneficiary of the power process it represents, or a would-be target seeking ideological cover. The end state towards which the Woke are driving, academically, is a university system where an all-powerful administration manages a wholly subordinate faculty employed on renewable contracts. At the political level, they aim to expand the managerial state still further at the expense of the native middle classes. Whatever the specifics, the goal is always to replace the ‘aristocrats’ of the prior system – which is to say, those whose status and position is partly independent of and a check upon the current regime – with a new nobility, who owe their position entirely to the administration or the state.

I doubt there is any stopping this process once it has begun, though I do see a few bright spots. The first, is that the institutions which Wokeness seizes will be worse in every way once the revolution is complete, and all of us in our own small way can contribute to their decline by withdrawing our efforts and attention from them. I know that’s not very satisfying, but I think in the longer term it will be decisive. The second, is that it’s not clear the puppetmasters of Wokeness have full control of their revolution, and there’s a substantial chance that, at least in some cases, they’ll fail to rein in their low-side allies and find themselves devoured in turn by the Woke at the bottom, as happened in 2017 at Evergreen State College. The third, related to this, is that the escalating radicalism of the Woke very much reflects their brittle and uncertain hold on power. The more they hollow out the middle for their own gain, the more they isolate themselves at the top, and their vulnerability has many expressions. We see the emergence of Soviet-style gerontocracies, as those in power come to fear the rivals they’ve spent decades displacing so much, that they can’t even countenance preparing the way for their own successors. I think the growing political obsession with the rainbow identities also arises from a growing, unhealthy demand for low-side allies that outstrips supply, because the most salient feature of these identities is that one can opt into them.

The power processes and ideologies of the high-low alliance are products of the modern world and the technological advances which have made mass society possible, but that doesn’t mean we’re condemned to permanent revolution. Institutions have developed many means of stabilising themselves in the face of these forces. The Woke world we inhabit now is the product of deliberate campaigns to undermine these stabilising defences on the one hand, and an inattention to their role and their importance on the other hand. I think liberalism is deeply implicated here, because it has blinded a lot of people to how power actually works. Key among these defences is the maintenance of substantial barriers to entry, as a means of managing the size and the makeup of the bottom tier. A university which only appoints talented faculty won’t have a pool of under-published diversity hires eager to cut deals with power-hungry administrators, and politicians who preside over countries with substantial immigration restrictions won’t have the opportunity to import regime clients. Anybody advocating for the relaxation or the adjustment of these defensive barriers is almost surely a serious enemy, for in the modern world, changes at the bottom – however they’re advertised – presage systemwide revolution within the space of a generation.

By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

“He was not a nihilist for nothing!”

This is one of the funniest, and at the same time one of the saddest lines written by Ivan Turgenev in Fathers and Sons, the novel of his which preserves its contemporaneity through the Russian revolutions better than any other classic of Russian literature.

Appearing to come out of the stream of consciousness of one of story’s characters, the line is also an irony of Turgenev’s — and if you understand that he meant nihilist as a synonym of Russian, it is a warning of great philosophical force for right now. Right now is a synonym for June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded to destroy the Russians; and for June 24, 1812, when Napoleon tried the same. Those two names can’t be synonyms for Biden because the German and the Frenchman weren’t demented or led by psychopaths.

Turgenev’s line is comic because in thinking the opposite of what the character had said aloud, he was also making fun of himself.

It is sad because nihilism as an idea or an ideology turns out to be pose, a man’s vanity, a will o’ the wisp, in short nothing at all. And it is exposed, dismantled, destroyed by the woman of the story, Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova, who causes the nihilist to fall in love with her, and then in getting him to admit it to her she annihilates – that’s the precise word – every conviction the nihilist said he stood for.   

In the plot of the book, this destruction takes place at the midpoint of the story. The man remains alive, as does Odintsova, his destroyer, and both of them spend the rest of the novel compensating for what has happened. But the lines Turgenev wrote as if in Odintsova’s stream of consciousness are terrible. Read them again — she was forced “to look behind her – and there she had seen not even an abyss but only a void… chaos without shape”. This is destruction, not of a man or a woman, but of meaning.

Today this is a warning for Russians facing the attack of enemies determined, after seventy years of planning to destroy them, to finish the job once and for all.  In Turgenev’s telling, what had just happened was the destruction of all meaning of what had already happened, interpreted retrospectively. What follows in the tale, and for its readers, is survival after hindsight of the void.

A lot of guff has been written for a hundred and fifty years about what is called the central character of the story, Yevgeny Vasilievich Bazarov the nihilist. This is a mistake. The central character is the woman, Odintsova. It is she who reduces the pretensions, and also all the qualities of the man, to next to nothing. She does so without malice, but with a clarity that ruins Bazarov. This woman Odintsova  is in Turgenev’s description a force, almost not a physical body at all.  

Turgenev himself was unusually tall – 1.9 metres, or 6 feet 2 inches¹. At that height it’s impossible not to notice the height of a woman to whom one is attracted – believe me, I too am 1.9 metres, 6 feet 2 inches.  And indeed, although most of the tall things in Turgenev’s story are either men or trees, the first glimpse of Odintsova entering a ballroom registers that she is “a tall woman in a black gown”. Bazarov then remarks: “What a face! No one in the room has anything like it.” But that’s the only physical particular he is reported by Turgenev to have acknowledged.   

Left: the English translations quoted come from the 1965 Penguin Classics edition, in which the translator was Rosemary Edmonds;   Right:  the digital text used here to analyse what Turgenev didn’t intend to be understood by readers about his methodical mind, as distinct from his professional intention, was first published just eight years ago -- by the Gutenberg Project in 2015. The English translation used is the 1921 edition by by C.J. Hogarth. Click to open.

Otherwise, Odintsova is described hardly at all – no arms, hands, lips, not even her eyes. These are “brilliant”, then “clear”, and finally “beautiful”, but Turgenev gives them no colour, shape, or size. Fancy a face described without features — impossible you might say. But not in this story.

Turgenev dissembles with Odintsova’s nose and skin in order to demean her: “Her nose – like most Russian noses² – was a trifle thick and her complexion was not translucently clear”.  Surrounding Odintsova, Turgenev draws much more distinctive noses, including the nose of the pet Borzoi dog, and on occasion arranges to blow them with special effect. Odintsova is reported to pay special attention to an ancient Greek statue acquired by her late husband – of the Goddess of Silence – whose missing nose Odintsova refuses to replace, and because of that stores out of sight.  

Bazarov is revealed to have erotic desire for Odintsova by a passing reference to “her pair of shoulders” – as if she were an unsaddled  pony. Much more is revealed in Turgenev’s multiple references to the rustling sound of Odintsova’s silk dresses, explaining that “Bazarov followed [her] with his eyes fixed upon the floor, and his ears open to no sound but the faint rustling of a silk dress.”  Odintsova’s silks are black – she was a widow – and Turgenev mentions this colour 19 times.    The colour white, on the other hand, appears 31 times;  but when Bazarov flirts with another woman, kissing her twice on her parted lips, he does so by reaching across her to select from her bouquet a red rose instead of a white one.

Odintsova and Bazarov try to find complementarity, not in art which Bazarov says he despises, but in botany. Accordingly, Turgenev sets a spray of fuchsias in her hair at a ball. However, the other flowers he writes into the story —  which is set in late spring, early summer when there is abundant blossom – are acacia, lilac and roses – these Turgenev fixes to other, lesser characters.

The contemporaneity of Fathers and Sons , along with the originality of Turgenev’s insight, comes at the midpoint climax when Odintsova destroys Bazarov. Thereafter, the tale turns into a conventional 19th century romance in which there is a happy love ending, consummated in  marriage for everybody except Bazarov. He dies a painful, possibly self-inflicted death from typhus after doing better at a pistol duel than he had expected. Before Bazarov breathes his last he is visited, and kissed on the forehead,  by Odintsova; subsequently she too  marries. Presenting that union in his dénouement, Turgenev makes a political statement which  readers of today can hardly miss.   

“My father will tell you what a loss I shall be to Russia”, Bazarov whispers to Odintsova on his deathbed. “That’s bosh, but don’t disillusion the old man.” Bazarov’s extraordinary self-conviction and ambition for himself are thereby exposed to be the very antithesis of his nihilism.  By contrast, Odintsova, according to Turgenev’s epilogue for the surviving characters, “has recently married again, not for love but out of conviction (that it was the reasonable thing to do) a man who promises to be one of the future leaders of Russia.” Turgenev then itemizes what he projects to be the characteristics of the future leaders of Russia — “a very able lawyer possessed of vigorous practical sense, a strong will and remarkable gifts of eloquence. He is quite young still, kind-hearted and as cold as ice.”

It cannot escape readers that in the 162 years since Turgenev wrote that, there has been only one leader of the Russian state to have fitted this bill.

Once met, any man with a heart would want to love Odintsova, and much more importantly, to be loved by her. Bazarov failed and got his dressing-down and his comeuppance. If you are fortunate, you may be loved by a Russian woman of Odintsova’s quality.  If that happens to you, you can forget what you’ve been told since this war began about your brothers and sisters, the Ukrainians.

But was the object of the man’s love in this tale the woman at all? Was what we love with passion, what we must defend and fight to save if we are to keep our honour, a woman —  or is it something else? War shortens the time for such speculation, disallows the risk of such choice.

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.’