We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile. This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on screens and digital media where words and images flow away like water in a rapidly moving stream. The late sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, updating Marx’s famous quote “all that is solid melts into thin air,” called this “liquid modernity.”

Welcome to Operation Pandemonium

See, these experts purport to say: What we tell you is true, but it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions. You must drink the waters of uncertainty forever lest you become a conspiracy nut. But if you don’t want to be so labelled, accept the simplest explanation for matters that disturb you – Occam’s razor, that the truest answer is the simplest – which is always the official explanation.  If this sounds contradictory, that is because it is. It is meant to be. We induce schizophrenia.

And it is, these experts suggest, because we live in a world where all knowledge is relative, and you, the individual, like Kafka’s country bumpkin, who in his parable “Before the Law,” tries to get past the doorkeeper to enter the inner sanctum of the Law but is never allowed to pass; you, the individual, must accept the futility of your efforts and accede to this dictum that declares that all knowledge is relative, which is ironically an absolute dictum. It is the Law. The Law of contradictions declared from on high.

Many writers, journalists, and filmmakers, while allegedly revealing truths about the U.S. and its allies’ criminal operations at home and abroad, have for decades slyly conveyed the message that in the end “we will never know the truth,” the real facts – that convincing evidence is lacking.

This refusal to come to conclusions is a sly tactic that keeps many careers safe while besmirching, intentionally or not, the names of serious researchers who reach conclusions based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence (the basis for most murder convictions) and detailed, sourced facts, often using the words of the guilty parties themselves, but are dismissed with the CIA weaponized term “conspiracy theorists.”

This often escapes the average person who does not read footnotes and sources, if they even read books. They read screens and the mainstream media, which should now be understood to include much of the “alternative” media. And they watch all sorts of films.

But this “we will never know” meme, this false mystery, is shrewdly and often implicitly joined to another: That we do know because the official explanation of events is true and only nut cases would believe otherwise. Propaganda by paradox.  Operation chaos.

The JFK Assassination and the Release of Files

There are so many examples of this, with that of President Kennedy’s assassination being a foundational one. In this case, as with the current phony Trump release of more JFK assassination files, the ongoing “mystery” is always reinforced with the implicit or explicit presupposition that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, but yet implying that there are more mysteries to explore forever because “people” are paranoid. (Trump’s position, as he recently told interviewer Clay Travis, is that he has always believed Oswald assassinated Kennedy, but he wonders if he may have had help.) They are paranoid not because of government and media lies, but because “popular culture” (not highbrow) has created paranoia. To spice this up, there is often the suggestion that President Kennedy was assassinated on the orders of the Mob, LBJ, Cuba, or Israel, when the facts overwhelmingly confirm it was organized and carried out by the CIA. A. O. Scott’s recent front page article in The New York Times in response to the JFK files release – “J. F. K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?” (the title appropriately taken from a very fast-paced Billy Joel song and video) – is a perfect example of such legerdemain.

Thus the ruse to keep debating the assassination, get the latest documents, etc. to satisfy “people’s” insatiable paranoia. To pull out CIA fallback stories 2, 3, or even 4 when all else fails. Dr. Martin Schotz, the JFK researcher, rightly compares this to George Orwell’s definition of Crimestop:

‘Crimestop’ means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the powers that be]… and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ‘Crimestop’, in short, means protective stupidity.

It’s the crazy people’s fault, not Scott’s or those who back him up at The Times, a newspaper that has been lying about the JFK assassination from day one. The same goes for the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, et al., and so many key events in U.S. history. It is a game of creating mental chaos by claiming we do know because the official explanation is correct but we don’t know because people have been infected with paranoia. If only people were not so paranoid! Unlike us at The Times, goes the implicit message.

The Epistemological Games of Certain Filmmakers

It is well known that people today are watching far more streaming film series and movies than they are reading books. That someone would lucubrate with pen in hand over a footnoted book on an important issue is now as rare as someone without a cell phone. The optical-electronic eye-ear screen connection rules most lives, mental and sensory. Marshall McLuhan, if a bit premature while referring in 1962 to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest – wrote sixty-three years ago in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. [my emphasis] So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

Four years ago this month, I wrote an article – “You Know We’ll Never Know, Don’t You?” – about a new BBC documentary film series by the acclaimed British filmmaker, Adam Curtis, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.”

The series is a pastiche film filled with seven plus hours of fleeting, fragmented, and fascinating archived video images from the BBC archives where Curtis has worked for decades, accompanied by Curtis’s skeptical commentary about “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere.” These historical images jump from one seemingly disconnected subject to another to reinforce his point. He says it is “pointless to try to understand the meaning of why things happen.” He claims that we are all living as if we are “on an acid trip.”

While not on an acid trip which I have never taken, I was reminded of this recently as I watched a new documentary – Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) – by the equally famous U.S. documentary filmmaker, Erroll Morris, a film about the CIA’s mind control operation, MKULTRA, and its use of LSD. As everyone knows, the CIA is that way-out hippie organization from Virginia that is always intent on spreading peace, love, and good vibes.

While the content of their films differs, Curtis’s wide-ranging and Morris’s focused on Manson and the book by Tom O’Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, I was struck by both filmmakers tendency to obfuscate while titillating their audience with footage and information that belies their conclusions about not knowing. In this regard, Curtis is the most overt and extreme.

Morris does not use Curtis’s language, but he makes it explicit at Chaos’s end that he doesn’t believe Tom O’Neill’s argument in his well-researched book that Charles Manson was part of a CIA mind-control experiment led by the psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Jolyon “Jolly” West. West worked in 1967 for the CIA on MKULTRA brainwashing projects in a Haight Ashbury clinic during the summer of love, using LSD and hypnosis, when Manson lived there and was often in the clinic with his followers.

On April 26, 1964, West also just “happened” to visit the imprisoned Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department, and when West emerged from the meeting, he immediately declared that in the preceding 48 hours Ruby had become “positively insane” with no chance that this “unshakeable” and “fixed” lunacy could be reversed. What happened between the two men we do not know – for there were no witnesses – but one might assume West used his hypnotic skills and armamentarium of drugs that were integral to MKULTRA’s methods.

MKULTRA

MKULTRA was a sinister and secret CIA mind-control project, officially started in 1953 but preceded by Operation Bluebird, which was renamed Operation Artichoke. These operations started right after WW II when U.S. intelligence worked with Nazi doctors to torture Russians and others to reveal secrets. They were brutal. MKULTRA was run by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and was even worse. He was known as the “Black Sorcerer.” With the formula for LSD, the CIA had an unlimited amount of the drug to use widely, which it did. It figured prominently in MKULTRA mind control experiments along with hypnosis. Tom O’Neill sums it up thus:

The agency hoped to produce couriers who could imbed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins. . . . MKULTRA scientists flouted this code [the Nuremberg Code that emerged from the Nuremberg trials of Nazis] constantly, remorselessly – and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to ‘induced pain’ and ‘psychosis.’ They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields. [my emphasis]

In 1973 during the Watergate scandal, CIA Director William Helms ordered all MKULTRA documents destroyed. Most were, but some were forgotten, and in the next few years, Seymour Hersh reported about it and the Senate Church Committee went further. They discovered records that implicated forty-four universities and colleges in the experiments, eighty institutions, and 185 researchers, Louis West among them. The evil cat and its large litter were out of the bag.

MKULTRA allegedly ended in 1973. But only the most naïve would think it did not continue under a different form. In 1964, McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message.” The new medium that was developed in the decades since has been effectively pointed straight at the brain as you watch the screens. And the message?

Tom O’Neill’s Powerful Case

While admitting that he has not conclusively proven his thesis because he has never been able to confirm Manson and West being together, O’Neill amasses a tremendous amount of convincing circumstantial evidence in his book that makes his case very strong that they were, and that Manson’s ability to get his followers to kill for him was the result of MKULTRA mind control and the use of LSD, which he used extensively and which was introduced by the CIA and used by West. Both men had an inexhaustible amount of the mind-altering drug to use on their victims.

This is the subject of Morris’s film, wherein he interviews O’Neill on camera, who explains the extraordinary fact that Manson was able to mesmerize his followers to kill for him without remorse or shame. They “couldn’t get him out of their heads,” even many years later. This was, of course, the goal of MKULTRA – through the use of brainwashing and drugs – to create “Manchurian Candidates.” This case has much wider ramifications than the sensational 1969 Hollywood murders for which Manson and his followers were convicted; for clearly Mansion’s “family” that carried out the murders on his orders appeared in every way to be under hypnotic control. How did a two-bit, ex-con, pipsqueak, minor hanger-on musician learn to accomplish exactly what MKULTRA spent so many years working on?

Yet at the end of his film, Morris makes a concluding comment without even a nod to the possibility that O’Neill is correct. He says he doesn’t believe O’Neill. I found it very odd, jarring, as though O’Neill had been set up for this denouement, which I think he had. But at the same time I recognized it as Morris’s method of setting up and then undermining the narrative protagonists in his films that are ostensibly about getting to factual truths but never do; they are stories about how all we ever have are endless interpretations and the unknowable, confounded by human fallibility. Everything is lost in the fog of Morris’s method, which is no accident.

Frank Olson

I then found an interview that O’Neill did in 2021 in which he said he pulled out of Morris’s film proposal because Morris wanted to make a film that combined the Frank Olson story (a CIA biologist) with his about Manson. In the interview, O’Neill said he knew Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, who has spent a lifetime proving that the CIA murdered his father in 1953, but he didn’t explain why he pulled out of the project. However, he appears extensively throughout Chaos, being interviewed on camera by Morris, only to be undermined at the end. Why he eventually agreed to be part of the project I do not know.

I am certain he has seen Wormwood (2017), Morris’s acclaimed (they are all acclaimed) Netflix film series about the biologist/ CIA agent Frank Olson and his son, Eric Olson’s heroic lifelong quest to prove that the CIA murdered his father because he had a crisis of conscience about the agency’s use of torture, brainwashing, LSD, and U.S. biological weapons use in Korea, much of it in association with Nazis. The evidence is overwhelming that Frank Olson did not jump from a NYC hotel window in 1953 but was drugged with LSD to induce hallucinations and paranoia, smashed in the head, and thrown out by the CIA. [Read this and view [this]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTQe_TskIo) Despite such powerful evidence available to him before making Wormwood, in another example of Morris’s method, he disagrees with Eric Olson’s decades of conclusive research that his father was murdered.

Conclusion

Filmmakers like Adam Curtis and Erroll Morris are examples of a much larger and dangerous phenomenon. Their emphases on the impossibility of knowing – this seeming void in the human mind, an endless acid trip down a road of kaleidoscopic interpretations – is much larger than them. It is deeply imbedded in today’s society. One of the few areas in which we are said to be able to know anything for certain is in the area of partisan politics. Here knowingness is the rule and the other side is always wrong. Fight, fight, fight for the home team! Here the nostalgia for “knowledge” is encouraged, as if we don’t live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

With the arrival of the electronic digital life, “knowledge” is now screening. If you don’t want to confirm McLuhan’s prediction – “as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside” – it behooves everyone to step back into the lamplight to read and study books. And take a walk in nature without your machine. You might hear a little bird call to you.

A dear friend reached out to me today, an esteemed elder in the Way of Council, to ask how I was doing. I told her I have the sensation of watching a slow-motion car crash, yet feeling an odd sense of serenity as the catastrophe unfolds. Because, the time of pleading with the drivers to turn the wheel and hit the brakes is over. We did that for a long time, but they accelerated instead, and now the long-foreseen collision is inevitable. In fact it is already happening.

Someday everyone, drivers and passengers and onlookers, will step out from the wreckage and dust, sober, eyes blinking, to tend the injured and grieve the dead and ask what they shall create together in their new-found freedom.

Who knows when that day will come. In one timeline, it is about three years. That timeline depends on our collective willingness to accept and integrate information that profoundly violates the old consensus reality. This information will feed a new human drama, if we so choose.

Predictions of a new chapter in the human story starting (fill in the date: 2028, or was it 2012, or perhaps the Harmonic Convergence in 1987) are not actually predictions, but prophecies. A prediction is objective. It denies the agency of the participant. When I predict the winner of a football game (that’s my side gig), I assume that I have no way to influence the result. I am not a player. A prophecy, on the other hand, becomes true only if people align their choices with the possibility it invokes.

I used to believe that collapse would save us; that we would stop destroying nature, each other, and our own bodies because we would have to stop. I no longer believe that, any more than hitting bottom can rescue an addict. “Bottom” is the moment when the addict makes a different choice. The collapse of first one, then another, then another dimension of his life—his work, his marriage, his family, his health, his freedom—offers him a series of invitations. These are moments when a choice is available, when the momentum pauses and he is asked whether he is ready to take a different path. What is bottom for one addict is, for another, just a way-station on the road to hell.

Our society is approaching just such a moment, just such a choice point.

Of our many collective and individual addictions, the one I will speak of now is the addiction to the habits of war.

War mentality isn’t a thirst for violence nor a lust for fighting. War mentality is a pattern of thinking and a habit of seeing. It organizes the world into us and them, friend and foe, hero and villain. It poses solutions in terms of victory and success in terms of winning. It traffics in punishment and blame, deterrence and justification, right and wrong. It is addictive, because when it fails to solve a problem, the solution is to up the dose. It escalates to new enemies and new battles. If there is no obvious foe to blame for the worsening situation, it looks harder to find one, or creates one instead.

The solution that war mentality offers for every problem is to find the bad thing and eradicate it. That solution applies to diverse areas of human activity: agriculture (kill the pests); medicine (find a pathogen); speech (censor bad ideas); political conflict (kill the terrorists); public safety (lock up the criminals). Complex problems, such as mass fentanyl addiction in America or industrial decline, collapse into simple but futile solutions as soon as someone can be found on which to pin the blame. The Chinese! The Mexican cartels! There is a kind of relief in this formula, even though it rarely succeeds.

The disastrous public health response to Covid drew on war mentality. After decades of declining health and rising chronic disease, for which no single external culprit could be identified, finally here was a threat that could be identified and controlled. So, all of the public’s anxiety was projected onto the new scary bad guy. The habit of find-the-enemy thinking is what made the public so susceptible to policies that ranged from the foolish to the absurd to the tyrannical.

Our leaders construct a narrative that locates evil in a certain person, nation, or group, and the habit of war thinking does the rest. Soon the public is ready to support war, censorship, lockdown, suspension of civil liberties and the rule of law, and crimes against humanity.

The same basic pattern of thought also drives conspiracy narratives. If we can locate the cause of the world’s injustices and horrors on a discrete set of bad actors, a psychopathic cabal, then in theory our problems are easy to solve.1 Just as, if a disease is caused by a pathogen, killing the germ cures the disease, so also can we cure society’s malady by removing the pathocrats from power.

Even in cases where a pathogen is the direct cause, we still have to ask what conditions make the organism vulnerable to that pathogen. Some of my readers think me naive for understating the influence of a satanic cabal within the power elite orchestrating world events. For me though, the most important question isn’t whether such a cabal exists. It is the psychosocial patterning that allows it to maintain control whether it exists or not.

That patterning is, again, war mentality. It is us-versus-them thinking. It is dehumanization and othering, the division of the world into the full human and the subhuman. The latter category can adopt the form of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth, or just simple contempt for an opposing opinion tribe.

Once two sides are locked into war thinking, it escalates like an addiction until all else is consumed.

Hate and contempt have spiraled out of control in American politics. Trigger warning: it is impossible to write about this while remaining faithful to the narrative of either side. If you are fully convinced either (1) that Trump represents a fascist oligarchic takeover of democracy drawing on the worst racist, misogynistic, xenophobic elements of the American psyche to destroy everything good and humane about America, or (2) that the MAGA revolution will restore freedom and sanity to a system that had been taken over by a deep state that used environmentalism and social justice as excuses to implement a totalitarian control system, or (3) any other narrative that cleaves the world into Team Good and Team Evil, then, well, you will shake your head in consternation that Eisenstein has taken leave of his senses. You will feel frustration, even rage, that I’m making any argument that does not include a full-throated denunciation of the bad guys. When you face pure evil, no response is valid except to fight it by any means necessary.

How simple things would be then. How easy to be the hero of the story.

The paramount goal in war is, of course, to defeat the opponent. The difference between war and games, sports, market competition, and, in normal times, politics, is that in the these latter arenas both sides hold something higher than winning; namely, the rules of the game. Football teams normally do not attempt to poison their opponents. The game itself is more sacred to them than winning it. In a functioning democracy in which all parties believe in a constitution or in a set of norms and values, there are certain taboos they will not violate for victory’s sake. Politics in the United States and many other countries is veering closer and closer to war—inevitable when each side sees the other as the embodiment of evil. Today in my country, both left and right are quite certain that the other side is a “threat to democracy itself.”

In that certainty, each becomes exactly what the other fears. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The old political elite and the Trumpian usurpers are locked in a vicious spiral. If either side stints in its all-out pursuit of power, curtailing its ruthlessness out of respect for democratic principles, the other side will exploit this as a weakness. Once one side dispenses with scruples, all sides must. When one team in a football match cheats, the other can win only if it cheats too.

When you are fighting evil, all means are justified. You might need to destroy democracy in order to save it, suppress free speech in order to preserve free speech, cancel elections in order to defend elections. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. It is no longer enough merely to defeat one’s opponents in an election; they must be imprisoned as well. The United States, Turkey, France, Brazil, and Romania have all prosecuted opposition politicians during the last year on specious charges, signalling a reversion to the historical mean.

In the United States the opposition politician, Donald Trump, survived the lawfare and won the election. The question is, is that a victory for democracy, or is it just a victory for Donald Trump? Will he end the political weaponization of federal agencies like the Justice Department, the IRS, the State Department, CISA, the CIA, and the FBI, or will he merely direct them at new targets? Will he restore free speech and civil liberties, or will he apply the tools of censorship and surveillance to new enemies?

Will Donald Trump throw the Ring of Power into the cracks of doom? Or has the Ring merely changed hands, even as technology further magnifies its powers (censorship, propaganda, surveillance, debanking)?

I’m sorry, but it isn’t looking good. To take one example, “antisemitism” (defined as any criticism of the state of Israel) has replaced “combating misinformation” as the pretext for violating freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures (surveillance) and the right to due process. The arrests of Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil for “supporting Hamas” (i.e. opposing Israel’s slaughter, starvation, and ethnic cleansing of Gaza), and the pressure on universities to shut down student protests, set a chilling precedent.

Meanwhile, although Trump is, thank goodness, turning the country away from the warpath with Russia, he is not turning the country away from war’s path. War mentality suffuses the upper echelons of his administration. Instead of Russia, the warpath leads now to Iran and China.

War mentality always requires an enemy. If no enemy presents itself, war mentality creates one. The hero nation requires a villain. The winner requires a loser. If I expect you are seeking to profit at my expense, and treat you accordingly, then you will probably fulfil my expectation. See a world full of enemies, and legions of enemies will appear.

To be fair, Donald Trump is by no means an aberration in believing that everyone is trying to get the best deal. That’s a basic principle of classical economics, even of evolutionary biology, in which our genes program us to maximize reproductive self-interest. Those paradigms, however, are long obsolete. The discrete-and-separate self is a prism that reveals one wavelength of the rainbow of life, but obscures what we urgently need to recognize today.

Because the world is so much more than a collection of separate competing entities, but is interconnected and interdependent, policies that draw on us-versus-them thinking will inevitably harm “us” as well as “them.” War abroad brings tyranny at home. Domestic violence arises to mirror foreign violence. Environmental degradation engenders human illness. And any economic policy that ignores the interconnectedness of the modern economy will backfire on its creator.

Permit a brief digression into economics and Trump’s tariffs. There is actually some virtue in their conception. Carefully targeted tariffs, implemented at a pace that allows business to adapt to them, could contribute to positive goals: revitalizing local and bioregional economies, reversing the financialization of the national economy, and ending free trade’s global “race to the bottom” that pits workers around the world against each other. Unfortunately, Trump’s abrupt across-the-board tariffs are neither carefully targeted nor paced. They are likely to destroy hundreds of thousands of businesses and impoverish millions of families, both in the U.S. and abroad. The tariffs will introduce acute dislocation in the short term and massive inefficiencies in the long term. There are further complexities here about which I will write separately; what’s relevant for present purposes is that the error in the tariff policy stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of economic interdependence, a misunderstanding that occurs naturally to anyone locked into us-versus-them thinking.

From what I have observed through my friends and acquaintances on the “inside,” Trump’s team genuinely believe themselves to be upholding the rule of law, prosecuting their political opponents for real criminality, and defunding corrupt NGOs (that also happen to be run by their political opponents). Indeed, incumbent institutions are profuse with criminality. The agencies that Trump is destroying, like USAID, the NED, and the USIP, were instrumental in maintaining the neoliberal world order and applying the neoconservative program of full spectrum dominance. Trump’s team see themselves as reformers restoring honor and prosperity to the nation. “Drain the swamp” and “Make America Great Again” are not cynical slogans.

Intoxicated with heady ideals, Team Trump cannot see that their program equally fits another description: seizing power.

Confronted with that assessment, some in Trump’s circle would probably agree with it. They might respond: “What choice do we have, faced with a ruthless and corrupt deep state?” Similarly, his opponents might, in a moment of honesty, admit that yes, they did weaponize the courts, the FBI, etc. against Trump and his allies, and engage in various kinds of cheating, but what choice did they have, when a neo-fascist movement was about to take over the country?

What both sides believe is that the other side lusts for power more than it values democracy. But for the game to function and not devolve into war, each side must believe the other holds the game itself (fair elections, the Constitution) more important than winning the game. If you are convinced the other side will cheat, you must cheat too.

No doubt many on each side believe these are temporary “extraordinary measures”; that when they have finally triumphed over the anti-democratic forces on the other side, they will cede power back to the people. That is never how it works. Each side believes, with good reason, that victory by the other side will be permanent. Thus, the escalating fight-to-the-death, the vicious spiral, the inevitable car crash.

What has alarmed me the most in my last decade of pleading for peace is not the actions and attitudes of politicians, but the infiltration of war mentality into the general public, the rising level of ambient hate. That is the energy that feeds the most psychopathic elements of the oligarchy. It is its lifeblood. It is its power source. It is how it rules—by turning their subjects against each other. (I say “it” [the oligarchy] and not “they” [the oligarchs], because the latter are puppets of system dynamics that are independent of the individuals who occupy their roles.) The key trick in its toolbox of psychopolitical legerdemain is to redirect the primal anger of the dispossessed toward a false target; essentially, to transmute anger into hate. Paradoxically, even when the elites themselves are the objects of the hate, the system that elevates them still flourishes. One elite can be switched out for another, new wine in an old skin.

In preparing this essay, I sought some personal stories of the impact of the DOGE cuts to illuminate and humanize the damage. A friend introduced me to some small farmers in a certain left-leaning back-to-the-land region. They were unwilling to speak with me. One of them, a queer person, expressed fear that they would be put in danger (I assume by my frothing transphobic MAGA audience). Another, who described herself as being on the autism spectrum, was concerned by my association with people who promote deranged theories that vaccines have a causal link to autism. I assured them that no harm would come to them, even if someone might read my essay who harbors fear and hatred toward queer people, since I had no reason to identify them by name or mention their gender identity when discussing the impact of funding freezes on regenerative farmers. As for the vaccine issue, well, OK, I do actually believe that the childhood vaccines are partly to blame for the explosion in autism and childhood chronic disease. But that is no reason to shame the autistic or other neurodivergent people. On the contrary: these people carry gifts that are crucial for the metamorphosis of our society.

But I digress. What was really going on here was that my associations and opinions on certain politicized topics marked me as a member of the opposing side, the bad side, the untouchable side. In a sense, it is “unsafe” to associate with me. I have cooties, you see, and anyone who associates with me might catch them. During the McCarthy era, merely to be seen in the company of a communist could devastate your career. To associate with Jews under Hitler was to risk imprisonment or worse yourself. For a Caucasian to be friendly with dark-skinned people in the Jim Crow era South was to risk ostracism or even lynching. It is scary, to associate with the socially unacceptable, because that status is contagious. The fact that my intention was to showcase some stories that might wake people up from Trump Adulation Syndrome (the mirror-image of Trump Derangement Syndrome), doubtless a worthy goal in the eyes of my correspondents, was insufficient to overcome the taboo of associating with a socially unacceptable person.

This widening gulf within our society also tends to feed on itself. Once it gains enough momentum, it proceeds inexorably toward civil war or genocide. I have pleaded with the drivers of these vehicles for many years to steer in a different direction. Now I am done pleading. The drama will play itself out. Why am I done? A feeling of futility and weariness. Well, I guess I am not quite done—I’m writing about it right now. And I can already anticipate the hate I will generate by violating the narrative of both sides, my “failure to consider X,” my “white privilege blinding me to Y,” my “unwillingness to accept the reality of evil,” or that I have fallen for Trump, or wimped out and betrayed him, or am a cowardly fence-sitter, or indulging the luxury of both-sides-ism… It isn’t so much that I take personal offense at these accusations, but they are an alarming sign of the times. If I, a peace evangelist, am so easily cast into the ranks of the untouchable, what hope is there for understanding or reconciliation among society’s warring factions?

Yet I do not feel hopeless. Last week I consulted a wise man, one of my spiritual guides. I won’t reveal his name, so as not to infect him with my cooties. I’ll just say he is of African descent, and a high initiate in south and west African wisdom lineages as well as the Western hermetic tradition. His fixed me with a penetrating, kind gaze, and told me that my adrenal and blood sugar issues are because my public work has made me a projection figure. The attacks land on my body, he said. I asked him what can I do when society seems to have gone mad. He said, “Wait.”

That injunction, “Wait,” is not a call to passivity. It is to recognize when it is time to act, and when action is futile or counterproductive. It is to recognize as well that there are powers operating in the world far beyond our own. And it is to accept that certain dramas must play out to their conclusion before a new act can begin. Now is perhaps not the time, at least for me, to urge warring parties to reconcile. The urging falls on deaf ears. Each side sees the peace proponent as a traitor to the cause, since to humanize the other side or acknowledge that it too has a sincere worldview based on its own set of experiences, dampens war fever. Hate is a necessary tool of war—and of politics too, when politics becomes war.

What is futile quickly becomes exhausting, Maybe only when the warring parties have exhausted themselves too, with the drama of us-versus-them, might a new drama, of forgiveness, remorse, and reconciliation, unfold.

That is a heartbreaking proposition, because the human cost is enormous. The kind of violence suffered in places like Palestine, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the DRC, Iraq, Yemen, Uganda, Cambodia, or Vietnam has long spared my homeland, but we are not immune. Something primal and terrifying lurks behind civilization’s thin veneer. It does not take much for murderous impulses to erupt. They bubble already in social media. We are not a different species from the perpetrators of past or current genocides. I am not saying it is certain to happen in my country, but it is far from certain not to happen.

In a sense it has long been underway in covert form. How many millions have died or suffered interminably from incarceration, violence, domestic abuse, child abuse, addiction, depression, and chronic disease? Through long and tortuous pathways, all of these originate in the same root cause as overt war and genocide. They source from the reduction of human beings to something less than sacred. Yet all of them proceed under a facade of normalcy. That facade will drop over the next three years.

The disintegration of normalcy is ultimately a good thing. When the dust clears, we will stand amid the wreckage of our prison, full of new questions.

Then we may see that cleaving the world into us and them, and the blame diagnostic that accompanies that cleavage, has failed. We will see that war has failed to bring peace, hate has failed to bring justice, domination has failed to bring security, and control has failed to bring freedom. Those failures of purpose will mirror a deeper failure, a failure of understanding. The ways we made sense of the world will no longer make sense. Will we have the fortitude to abide in bewilderment long enough for new understanding to grow? Or will we jump fearfully into a new variation on an old story, substituting a new set of villains for the old, a new us and a new them, to enact the same drama once more?

In 1955, the editor of a Michigan high school newspaper wrote to E.E. Cummings, asking his advice for students who wanted to follow in his footsteps. He sent this reply:

A Poet’s Advice to Students

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

(From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, Oct. 26, 1955.)

February 4, 2025February 3, 2025 | Literature · Society

In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.

That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.

In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentence in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves. For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.

With that in mind, what follows are some summations.

• With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.

• The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.

• Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East. Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.

• There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.

• The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.

• The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.

• The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.

• Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.

• The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.

• The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.

• Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”

But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.

So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:

We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on

Bad advice.

There is a peculiar comfort in believing that things simply happen by accident. That the powerful don’t conspire, that institutions don’t coordinate, that the crumbling pillars of society represent mere happenstance rather than design. I’ve come to call these people “accidentalists” – those who find refuge in randomness, who dismiss patterns as paranoia.

The Cost of Seeing

Like the red pill in The Matrix, recognizing patterns changes everything. Many choose comfortable illusions over uncomfortable truths. As Hannah Arendt observed, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.”

For the professional class – academics, journalists, corporate managers – acknowledging these patterns means confronting their own complicity. Their success, their status, their sense of self – all are built on supporting rather than questioning power structures.

The accidentalist mindset offers refuge from this self-examination. Better to dismiss than face one’s role in the machinery.

The Death of Coincidence

It requires impressive mental gymnastics to believe that those with power – who achieved it through careful planning and coordination – suddenly stop planning and coordinating once they obtain it. That they abandon the very tools that brought them success. That they become, somehow, passive observers of their own decline.

When confronted with evidence of coordination – be it documented government censorship, institutional narrative control, or coordinated media campaigns – the accidentalist draws an arbitrary line. “Well, that’s different,” they say. “That’s not a conspiracy, that’s just…” And here they trail off, unable to articulate why some coordinated actions by the powerful count as conspiracies while others are merely business as usual.

The Weaponization of Skepticism and Manufacturing Outcasts

The term “conspiracy theory” itself reveals institutional manipulation. The CIA’s 1967 dispatch (Document 1035-960) explicitly directed media assets to use this label to discredit Warren Commission critics. They transformed skepticism into pathology – making the very act of questioning power seem delusional.

This weaponization of language worked brilliantly. Today, pattern recognition itself becomes suspect. In 2022, the New York Times published perhaps the most revealing example of institutional arrogance – an essay warning citizens against “doing their own research,” suggesting they weren’t competent to question expert conclusions. The message was clear: leave the thinking to us. Trust the experts. Stay in your lane.

That this patronizing directive came from a publication with its own history of spreading misinformation speaks volumes. The accidentalist, naturally, sees no problem with experts telling people not to think for themselves. They miss the deeper implication: when institutions actively discourage independent investigation, they reveal their fear of informed scrutiny.

The pattern is unmistakable: identify skeptics, discredit them, make examples of them. The accidentalist never asks why questioning power triggers such coordinated attacks.

Today’s Denials, Tomorrow’s Headlines

Consider a revealing moment: In 2021, several of my friends eagerly recommended Dopesick, (“I think you would especially like this”), condemning the Sacklers’ manipulation of medicine for profit. Yet these same friends mocked me for questioning pharmaceutical companies today – despite their status as the most heavily criminally fined industry in human history. Those who recognized similar patterns were labeled ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘threats to public health.’ Scientists suggesting lab origins became ‘conspiracy theorists.’ The pattern repeats: identify skeptics, discredit them, make examples of them.

Let’s examine three cases where “conspiracy theories” transformed into acknowledged history:

• The Sugar Deception: In the 1960s, the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to blame heart disease on fat instead of sugar. These industry-funded studies shaped dietary guidelines for decades, creating a massive public health crisis through “low-fat” but sugar-laden foods. The accidentalist views this as an isolated historical incident rather than a template for corporate manipulation of science.

• The Tobacco Playbook: For decades, tobacco companies buried evidence linking smoking to cancer while funding research to create doubt. Their infamous internal memo stated, “Doubt is our product.” The accidentalist sees this as a unique case rather than recognizing the same tactics in current corporate practices.

• The Vioxx Cover-up: Merck concealed evidence that their blockbuster drug caused heart attacks, leading to an estimated 60,000 deaths. Internal documents revealed executives strategizing to “neutralize” critics. The accidentalist treats this as an aberration rather than standard operating procedure.

The Pattern Repeats

Consider the timing: A 342-page Patriot Act appeared weeks after 9/11. Operation Lock Step described pandemic measures in 2010. Event 201 simulated responses in October 2019 – the same day as the Wuhan Military Games. Months later, these exact measures were implemented globally. What are the odds?

The patterns of control repeat at every scale:

• Globally: WHO/WEF coordination
• Nationally: Regulatory capture
• Corporate: Internal suppression of dissent
• Local: Community pressure to conform

Power’s fingerprints are everywhere. Once you see them, they can’t be unseen.

The Corporate Convergence

Here’s where the accidentalist worldview truly fails: These weren’t separate conspiracies but a single system perfecting its methods. The tobacco giants that knowingly addicted millions didn’t disappear – they bought food companies (RJR Nabisco) and continued manipulating public health. Those same food conglomerates now merge with pharmaceutical corporations (Monsanto/Bayer), putting the same scientists who engineered addictive cigarettes and processed foods in charge of our medicine.

These corporations don’t just share ownership – they share methods. The same tactics used to addict smokers were applied to processed foods. The same research manipulation that hid tobacco dangers now obscures pharmaceutical risks. The same media control that sold cigarettes as healthy now promotes untested medical interventions.

The Reality Merchants

Consider the current media response to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s nomination as HHS Secretary. The coordinated messaging is impossible to miss – talking heads across networks uniformly label him a “conspiracy theorist” and “danger to public health,” never addressing his actual positions. These are the same voices that championed destructive pandemic policies, now attempting to discredit someone who questioned their wisdom.

Or examine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – a Stanford professor whose expertise was unquestioned until he challenged lockdown policies. Despite eventual vindication, the institutional response was swift: coordinated media attacks, academic ostracism, and algorithmic suppression. The pattern is clear: expertise is respected only when it aligns with institutional interests.

Engineering Compliance

The template begins with manufactured scarcity and enforced dependency. But understanding the mechanics of fiat systems is just the beginning. The real revelation is recognizing how this architecture extends beyond money into every domain of human existence.

Covid-19 didn’t create new systems of control – it revealed existing ones. The infrastructure for rights suspension, narrative enforcement, and dissent silencing was already in place. The “Great Reset” wasn’t conceived in 2020. The surveillance architecture wasn’t built overnight. The ability to coordinate global policy, control information flow, and reshape human behavior wasn’t developed in response to a crisis – it was waiting for one.

Moreover, the selective enforcement of truth reveals power’s preferences. Regardless of what one thinks about Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook statements, his $900 million fine stands in stark contrast to the total impunity enjoyed by the New York Times and other media outlets whose WMD lies led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. This reveals how power protects its own while punishing outsiders, even when institutional lies cause far greater harm.

The Psychology of Disbelief

“That can’t be true” becomes the mind’s defense mechanism against pattern recognition. This isn’t natural skepticism – it’s programmed rejection (as detailed in “How the Information Factory Evolved”). The larger the pattern, the stronger the denial. They’ve weaponized skepticism against itself, creating a population that reflexively defends authority while attacking any challenge to it.

We’re watching the early stages of converging control systems, with clear signs of what’s coming:

• Digital IDs linked to health records
• CBDCs enabling programmable money
• Social credit systems disguised as ESG metrics
• Surveillance capitalism merging with state control
• Artificial scarcity through controlled supply chains

These aren’t predictions – they’re systems actively being built and tested across the globe, from China’s social credit system to Nigeria’s CBDC rollout.

Understanding the Impossible

“But how could they pull this off without anyone knowing?” the accidentalist asks. The answer is simple: compartmentalization. Like the Manhattan Project, most people in global institutions are unaware of the larger plan they’re working on. Even in tech companies, the Gmail team has no idea what YouTube’s content moderators or Google Earth’s mapping division are doing. Each department serves its function without seeing the whole. Professionals across academia, corporate America, and media unknowingly serve a broader agenda, often believing they’re working for noble causes.

The truth isn’t hidden – it’s protected by its own audacity. As Marshall McLuhan observed, “Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.” This explains why major revelations often hide in plain sight: the scale of coordinated deception exceeds what most people can psychologically accept as possible.

Breaking the Spell

The ultimate revelation isn’t how powerful they are – it’s how fragile their control really is. Their greatest strength – total integration – is also their greatest weakness. Complex systems have more failure points. The more systems are interconnected, the more a disruption in one area can cascade through the whole.

The solution isn’t fighting their systems directly – it’s building parallel structures that make them irrelevant:

• Local food systems over global supply chains
• Peer-to-peer networks over controlled platforms
• Direct exchange over surveillance currency
• Natural immunity over subscription immunity
• Real communities over virtual spaces

The Choice

The question isn’t whether power conspires – it’s why we’re so resistant to seeing it. What comfort do we find in believing in accidents? What fear do we harbor of seeing design?

Perhaps it’s simpler to believe in chaos than to confront order. Perhaps it’s easier to dismiss than to engage. Perhaps the accidentalist position isn’t about truth at all – it’s about maintaining the comfort of ignorance in a world that increasingly demands awareness.

Because once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. Once you understand that power coordinates, plans, and conspires by its very nature, the only wacky conspiracy theory becomes believing it doesn’t.

The awakening isn’t something that happens to us – it’s something we choose. And that choice, multiplied across millions of individuals, will determine whether humanity enters a new dark age or experiences its greatest renaissance.

The question isn’t whether you see it. The question is: what will you do once you can’t unsee it?

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

Author

Joshua Stylman has been an entrepreneur and investor for over 30 years. For two decades, he focused on building and growing companies in the digital economy, co-founding and successfully exiting three businesses while investing in and mentoring dozens of technology startups. In 2014, seeking to create a meaningful impact in his local community, Stylman founded Threes Brewing, a craft brewery and hospitality company that became a beloved NYC institution. He served as CEO until 2022, stepping down after receiving backlash for speaking out against the city's vaccine mandates. Today, Stylman lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and children, where he balances family life with various business ventures and community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no evil in the whole novel.

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

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

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

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

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

As a rule, no American election means as much as the shouting immediately afterward might lead you to think. Every four years, with a regularity that clockwork rarely matches, the supporters of the winning party pile all their daydreams of Utopia onto their candidate, while the partisans of the losing side howl that this time the jackboots and armbands will show up for certain. Then the new president is inaugurated, and something close to business as usual resumes.

These have been getting plenty of use since November 5.

This time, granted, the yelling is unusually loud. Some of that is an unintended byproduct of the losing side’s demonizing rhetoric during the last weeks of the campaign. Having convinced themselves (if no one else) that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, many Democrats are quaking in their shoes, sure that he must now act out the role they assigned him and throw them all into camps. Those camps have featured so relentlessly in recent rhetoric that I’m starting to think that the people who babble about them actually want to be flung into some such institution, where Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, will personally spank them with a riding crop or something. The return of the repressed really can take strange forms.

Then there’s the Twitter campaign now under way to encourage Democrats never to use Donald Trump’s name in speech or print. In one sense that’s a reflection of just how terrified they are of our next president—am I the only one who remembers how the cowardly characters in the Harry Potter novels were afraid to speak Voldemort’s name aloud?—but it’s also revealing in a deeper sense. It speaks of the Democratic establishment’s desperate longing to return to the world before 2015, before the working classes found ways to speak up for their own needs and interests, in place of those it was convenient for wealthy liberals to put in their mouths.

For a majority of Americans, on the other hand, November 5 was a very good day.

I’m beginning to wonder, though, if the current example may be the exception that proves the rule.  Get past the giddy excitement of the winners, the fainting fits and dismayed shrieks of the losers, whatever dubious longings might be shaping our national rhetoric around those vividly imagined camps, and the rest of it, and what remains is a sense that something may have shifted on a deep level in American life with Donald Trump’s comeback election. Partly, of course, he confounded the stereotypes by taking a commanding majority of the popular vote as well as a huge lead in the Electoral College.  Partly Trump and his inner circle are promising sweeping changes in some of the core policies of the bipartisan consensus that, in recent decades, has done so much to run this country into the ground.

To my mind, though, the most striking aspect of it all is the curious fact that Kamala Harris did everything she was supposed to do, according to the playbook of early 21st-century American politics, and still crashed and burned. She had armies of pundits and talking heads on her side. She had a glittering list of celebrities eager to shill for her.  She raised three times the money the Trump campaign did, and spent it so freely that her campaign ended the election millions of dollars in debt.  Nearly all the big corporate media venues bent over backwards to promote her campaign, to the extent of suppressing news stories that might reflect badly on her while flogging every available story that could be used to assail Trump. She had all these things lined up on her side, and yet she got a world-class drubbing once voters went to the polls.

And of course then there was that laugh.

Some of that, it has to be said, was the candidate herself.  I’ve never met Harris and have no idea what she’s like as a person, but the kindest label that can be applied to her political career is “undistinguished,” and she has an odd inability to speak coherently in public without a teleprompter telling her what to say. That might just be stage fright, but it does not give the rest of us any confidence in her ability to handle the pressures of one of the world’s most stressful jobs. Like him or not, Trump thrived in the high-pressure world of commercial real estate and handled his previous stint in the White House without undue signs of stress. At a time when the US is caught up in two intractable proxy wars and faces a rising tide of challenges around the globe, that in itself may have been enough to settle the matter for many voters.

Here again, though, I think there was more going on than this. All the way through the campaign, it felt as though the Harris campaign was off in a corner somewhere, talking to a small coterie of privileged liberals about issues that don’t matter to most other people, while the issues that do matter to most other people never entered the discussion  When people tried to bring up those issues in Democratic venues, furthermore, they got ignored, shouted down, or told to their faces that things they themselves had experienced weren’t real and they should believe what they were told by the Democrats and their media allies instead.  Meanwhile the Trump campaign was hammering night and day on the issues Harris’s people wouldn’t address.

According to Oswald Spengler, it’s always dissident plutocrats like Julius Caesar who lead the revolt against a dysfunctional kleptocracy. Behold our Orange Julius!

It’s heartening to note that some Democrats have grasped this.  Since the election, in fact, there have been a certain number of essays and talks in mainstream venues talking about why the Democrats lost, and bringing up some of the points just made. Social historian David Kaiser, in a post that ran through a litany of standard accusations against Trump, still took the time to notice that his rise was made possible because both parties had given up addressing the concerns of ordinary Americans in a time of increasingly serious crises. His was far from the only such sign of dawning insight among Harris supporters in the wake of her ignominious defeat.

Yet it’s the pushback fielded by such obviously sensible efforts that is, to my mind, the most revealing thing about our current political life. Nearly all that pushback has focused on finding something to blame for Harris’s failure other than the obvious fact that she never got around to addressing the issues that most Americans care about. Some of it has been predictably petty—I’m thinking here especially of the attempts by Harris allies to blame Joe Biden for what happened, and the corresponding efforts by Biden allies to push the blame back on Harris.

On a much higher level of discourse is this article by Michael Tomasky, which appeared in The New Republic on November 8. I encourage my readers to take the time to read it carefully before proceeding. As you’d expect from an essay in one of the premier liberal magazines in the country, it’s cogent, logical, and clearly written. It’s also stunningly obtuse. As with most examples of really high-grade cluelessness, its weakness lies not in itself but in the unstated preconceptions that underlie it, and the fact that Tomasky doesn’t appear to have questioned or even noticed these preconceptions is far and away the most fascinating thing about them.

The equivalent image in an Asian idiom.  Millions of people in east and south Asia have bought these, and burn incense to Trump’s image to make their businesses, families, etc. great again.

Tomasky argues that the real cause of Trump’s rise and Harris’s fall was the ascendancy of right wing media over the last few decades.  It was only when media venues began to slip free of the grip of the liberal consensus, he insists, that it was possible for a candidate like Donald Trump to attract any attention at all, much less the passionate mass support that saw him easily brush aside Republican rivals in two primary campaigns and spread his appeal widely enough to win the narrow victory of 2016 and the much more robust triumph of 2024.  It’s plausible at first glance. Like so many examples of catastrophic cognitive failure these days, however, it suffers from a peculiar defect:  it fails to ask the next obvious question.

How was it, after all, that the media venues that Tomasky lambastes as spreaders of right-wing misinformation clawed their way in from the fringes to become wildly popular among ordinary Americans? What caused people to listen to these insurgent voices? That’s not a question Tomasky addresses.  The right-wing media appeared, and hey presto!  All of a sudden, for no reason at all, people just started believing them.

There are good reasons why this attitude has become common in recent years.

The unnoticed ironies in Tomasky’s essay get an edge sharp enough to shave with when he proposes that back in the days when Edward R. Murrow was the most respected figure in broadcast news media, the rise of a figure like Donald Trump would have been unthinkable.  Here again, let’s ask the next obvious question.  Why was Murrow accorded the kind of respect that today’s media figures can only dream of having?  Two key factors come to mind. The first was the fact that in those days all broadcast media in the United States was subject to the Fairness Doctrine—the rule, imposed on them as a condition of being licensed to use a share of the broadcast spectrum, that they had to present both sides of politically controversial news stories. The second was that Murrow himself was known as a man of integrity who wouldn’t distort news stories to fit a preconceived agenda.

The Fairness Doctrine went whistling down the wind long ago, however, and so did the standards of journalistic ethics that gave Murrow the reputation he had. It’s a source of bleak amusement that some of the journalists who have been quickest to scream “misinformation!” have been involved in spreading and covering up misinformation on the grand scale. Do you recall, dear reader, when Barack Obama insisted that if Obamacare was passed, you would be able to keep your physician, and your health insurance premiums would go down?  Do you recall when Joe Biden insisted that once you got the Covid vaccine, you would not catch Covid?  Both those statements were false; both of them misled and harmed millions of people.

Sometimes it takes a long time for the obvious to sink in.

If Edward R. Murrow had still been around when those statements were made and disproved, he’d have asked all the hard questions our media avoided, followed up the story no matter what pressures he faced, and crucified the government officials responsible on a cross made of newsprint and radio airtime. He was not the kind of man who would cover up a scandal just because it might hurt the party he favored. His epigones in today’s corporate media, by contrast, lack the ethics and the backbone that earned Murrow his reputation.  They’ve earned a different sort of reputation, for which the phrase “partisan hack” will do as well as any.

Mind you, I freely grant there’s no shortage of partisan hacks in conservative media as well; the absence of the Fairness Doctrine and the collapse of journalistic ethics cuts both ways. Here again, though, we need to go deeper. Over the decades just past, conservative media venues have seen their viewership climb steeply upward, while liberal media venues have had their viewership plunge just as steeply downward. Tomasky never gets around to explaining why this happened. It’s as though he thinks that the mere appearance of right-wing media was all that it took to get voters to turn their backs on the wise and trusted pundits of the mainstream media and flock mindlessly to Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and ultimately Donald Trump.

Notice what’s being left out here. Nowhere in his essay does Tomasky appear to consider the possibility that ordinary people might have taken an active role in this process.  Nowhere does he wonder whether maybe, just maybe, voters compared the mainstream media to the alternatives and came to the conclusion that they had reason to choose the latter.  The idea that American voters might have agency is apparently alien to him. In fact, he ignores one of the most crucial details of the 2016 election in order to avoid dealing with the agency of the ordinary individual.

That first campaign — the First Meme War, as it’s called these days — has earned a legendary status in certain circles. “For a short while, Kek walked among us,” memed one participant. “And it was glorious.”

His article claims that the torrent of dank memes that sent the Democratic party reeling in 2016 came from the right-wing media. This is inaccurate.  Those memes were created by a loose and sprawling network of alienated young men linked by online imageboards, of which 4chan is the most infamous. It was there, in the crawlspaces of the internet, that enthusiasm for Trump’s brash antics built a raffish subculture that embraced Pepe the Frog as its mascot, the Euro-pop song “Shadilay” for its anthem, and Kek the Frog God for its half-serious deity.  This subculture flooded the internet with memes supporting Trump’s campaign and gave him a crucial boost. The rise of the “chans” was one of the most astonishing twists of recent political history—and it is quite literally unthinkable to people who share Tomasky’s views.

Here the bottom drops away and we plunge into very deep waters.

Back in 2002, the BBC aired a documentary titled The Century of the Self, which focused on one of the more dubious offshoots of Freudian psychotherapy.  Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the central focus of the documentary, was the man who launched public relations as an industry. He insisted, based on his uncle’s theories, that human beings would respond like automatons if stimulated by the right words and imagery, and he claimed to be able to make this happen for his corporate and political clients.

Edward Bernays. He was always his most important product, and his self-marketing was no more honest than any other PR campaign.

I discussed that documentary in a post here a little more than two years ago. As I noted then, the most interesting thing about it is that the documentary never challenged Bernays’ claims. Rather, it took them at face value, despite the fact that the campaigns Bernays carried out were by no means as invincible as he claimed. (To cite only one of many examples, though Bernays was hired by Herbert Hoover’s reelection campaign in 1932, this did nothing to keep Hoover from suffering a thumping defeat.) I argued that the program was aimed, like most highbrow BBC documentaries, at members of the managerial class, and that it was an exercise in reassurance, meant to keep doubters believing that the corporate-bureaucratic system they served really did have the power to tell the restless masses what to think and how to feel.

Deficient as it was as an account of history, in other words, The Century of the Self accurately reflected the consciousness of the Western world’s privileged classes just when the corporate-bureaucratic system and its reigning ideology—call it “corporate liberalism”—were beginning their long slide down from the zenith of power.  It’s indicative that the same attitude was expressed at nearly the same time by a Washington bureaucrat (persistent rumors insist that the speaker was Karl Rove) who famously told reporter Ron Suskind, “When we act, we create our own reality. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

It’s one of the supreme ironies of our time that the heirs of the 1960s have turned into the establishment they once fought, and conservative populists are the new, hip, youthful counterculture.

Does this remind you, dear reader, of the ideas splashed across the mental landscape of our time by Rhonda Byrne’s pseudospiritual bestseller The Secret, or by thousands of less efficiently marketed New Age speakers and writers?  It should.  Across the whole sweep of elite culture in the Western industrial nations, and above all in the United States, a set of beliefs took root that treated the individual member of the Western world’s comfortable classes as the measure of all reality, and assigned to everything and everyone else in the cosmos the roles of painted marionettes jerked around by strings to play parts in some childish melodrama.

It’s far from inaccurate to label the era over which this ideology reigned the Century of the Self, because the ideas that gave Byrne, Rove, and her many equivalents their fifteen minutes of tawdry fame did in fact get their foothold a little over a century ago, as the subtler and more reasonable teachings of what was then called New Thought got simplified, distorted, and marketed to a fare-thee-well by figures such as Napoleon Hill.  The idea that we each create our own reality was a central theme in this ideology of the imperial ego, but inevitably it turned in practice into ideas like those marketed by Edward Bernays and his many heirs, in which the privileged call the tune and everyone else has no choice but to dance mechanically in step.

All along, there were alternatives to those empty slogans.

You can see the same thing reflected in the way that, during the Century of the Self, people in the privileged classes assumed as a matter of course that their peculiar subculture, with all its beliefs and prejudices and odd obsessions, was the natural goal of human cultural evolution, and that every person of good will would of course gravitate toward it once they were shown the error of their dissenting ways.  That’s the attitude that put classes in queer theory in universities in Afghanistan during the American occupation of that country, to cite only one tone-deaf absurdity among many, and it also explains the frantic hatred and rage flung against those who fail to fall into line. The ideology of corporate liberalism is so obviously superior to the alternatives, the logic goes, that only the deliberate embrace of evil can explain anybody’s refusal to buy into it. That, in turn, was the attitude that led Kamala Harris and her prodigiously funded campaign straight to electoral disaster.

Thus the change that we’ve just passed through can be described easily enough.  The Century of the Self is over, and the Century of the Other has begun.

All around the world, people who reject the values of the Western world’s privileged classes are in the ascendant. Russia, which shrugged off Western sanctions with aplomb and is nearing victory in the Ukraine war, is returning to its roots in Orthodox Christianity; across the Middle East and North Africa, traditionalist Islam is resurgent; further east, the ancient civilizations of China and India are rising to reclaim the preeminent role in the global system they had before the age of European world conquest. In Africa and elsewhere in the global South, one nation after another is throwing off neocolonial arrangements and establishing social and political forms relevant to their cultures and needs rather than those the liberal elite wants to assign them.

This is how corporate liberals liked to imagine the world — but that delusion has passed its pull date once and for all.

Around the globe, as a result, the Western elites who like to think of themselves as history’s sole actors now face intransigent Others who refuse to accept a role as bit players in someone else’s melodrama. Our would-be lords and masters are confronted by hostile and increasingly confident rivals who reject the values that corporate liberalism considers self-evident, and embrace visions of destiny that are antithetical to everything that corporate liberalism stands for.  The monolithic future imagined by the Western world’s privileged classes has thus shattered into a thousand glittering shards. What is rising in its place is a kaleidoscope of possibility in which the dreams of Harris and her allies are only one option among many.

In much the same way, Donald Trump united a wildly diverse coalition of supporters, embracing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, midwestern factory workers, Amish farmers, Muslim immigrants, and much more, to bring about his victory. What drew these disparate interests together, more than anything else, was their rejection of the claim by the liberal elite that the reality it likes to imagine is the only one that counts. Harris’s campaign insisted that sky-high grocery prices and mass migration across the southern border didn’t matter, because it was inconvenient to her that these things should matter. To the voters, on the other hand, they mattered a great deal.

Thus the Century of the Other has dawned in the United States as well. The flailings of Democrat pundits as they try to respond to Trump’s election may actually be a hopeful sign, for these might mark the first step in the process of coming to terms with that reality. A principled liberalism of the kind Edward R. Murrow exemplified, one that can explain and defend its viewpoint in the public arena instead of shrieking abuse at those who won’t conform to its fantasies, has an important place in American public life.  Too many of today’s liberals have a long and difficult road to walk if they want to return to that standard, but I hope they make the attempt.

I’ve written a number of times now about the unreality with which the West habitually approaches the continuing crisis in and around Ukraine, and the almost clinical dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and its actions. Yet as the situation deteriorates and Russian forces move forward everywhere, there is no real sign that the West is becoming more reality-based in its understanding, and every probability that it will learn nothing, and continue to live in its constructed alternative reality until it is dragged out forcibly.

True, some daring leading-edge thinkers in the West are starting to wonder about the need for negotiations, even if they are on the West’s terms. They have begun to accept that perhaps some of Ukraine’s 1991 territory will have to be considered lost, if only in the short term. Perhaps, they muse, there will be a Korean-style DMZ in place, guaranteed by neutral troops, until such time as Ukraine can be rebuilt to take the offensive again. And then they look at the map of Russian advances, and they look at the size and power of the two armies, and they look at the size and readiness of NATO forces and they fall into despair.

But actually, no: scrub that last sentence. They don’t look, and if they did, they wouldn’t really be able to understand what they were seeing anyway. The “debate” (if you can call it that) in the West largely excludes real life factors. It takes place at a high normative level, where certain facts and truths are simply assumed. Why that is so, and what its consequences are, is the subject of first part of this essay, and then because these subjects are inherently complex, I go on to set out how to understand them as straightforwardly as possible.

We’ll start with some practical considerations of political sociology and psychology. The first is that politics is the classic example of the Sunk Costs phenomenon in action. The longer you continue with a course of action, no matter how stupid, the less willing you are to change it. Changing it will be interpreted as acknowledging error, and acknowledging error is the first stage in losing power. In this case the old defence (“personally I always had doubts…”) is just not going to wash, give the gratuitously psychopathic terms in which western leaders have expressed themselves about Russia.

The second is the absence of any articulated alternative. (“So, Prime Minister, what do you think we should do instead then?) The very fact of not understanding the dynamics of a crisis means that you are helpless to propose a sensible solution to it. It’s better to stay with a sinking ship in the hope of rescue than to jump blindly into the water. Maybe a miracle will happen.

The third is to do with group dynamics, in this case the dynamics of nations. In a situation of fear and uncertainty like the present, solidarity comes to be seen as an end in itself, and nobody wants to be accused of “weakening the West” or “strengthening Russia.” If you have to be wrong, best be wrong in the company of as many others as possible. There are enormous disincentives to being the first to suggest that maybe things are looking pretty bleak, and in any event what are you going to propose instead? The chances of thirty-odd nations being able to agree on a different approach to the present one are effectively zero, not helped by the fact that the United States, which might otherwise give a lead, is politically paralysed until perhaps the spring of next year.

The fourth is to do with isolation and groupthink. Everybody in your own government, everybody you speak to in other governments, every journalist and pundit that you come across says the same thing: Putin can’t win, Russia is taking massive casualties, we must rebuild Ukraine, Putin is scared of NATO blah blah. Everywhere you turn, you get the same messages, and your staff write the same messages for you to deliver to others. How could you not wind up assuming all this is true?

These are what we might call Permanently Operating Factors in politics, common to any crisis. But there are also a number of special factors operating in this particular crisis which seem obvious to me, but which I haven’t seen much discussion of. So let’s look at a few.

To begin with, the current generation of western politicians is especially incapable of understanding and managing high-level crises of any kind. The modern western political class—the Party as I call it—resembles more and more the ruling party in a one-party state. That is to say, the skills that lead to success are those of advancement in the Party apparatus itself: climbing the greasy pole and backstabbing rivals. Even managing a purely national crisis—as we saw during Brexit, or as we are seeing now in France and Germany—is actually beyond their abilities, except perhaps the ability to turn a crisis to their own personal political advantage. The result is that they are utterly overwhelmed by the Ukraine crisis, which is of a scale and a type that occurs perhaps once every couple of generations. The fact that it’s also a multilateral crisis means that it ideally requires advanced skills of political management just to ensure that things don’t fall apart, and they don’t even have those. In turn, the ever-increasing reliance on “advisers” linked to the personal fortunes of the politician concerned means both that professional advice is increasingly excluded, and also that professional advisers are often selected and promoted because they are willing to give the advice that politicians want.

So far, so generic. But we are also confronted here with a security crisis, and our political classes and their parasites are completely ignorant of how to deal with such crises, or even how to understand them. During the Cold War, governments were forced to confront security issues regularly: often, they were also domestic political issues. Security issues were also objectively important, as East and West glared at each other across a militarised border, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation never very far away. None of that is true now. NATO summits still happen of course, but until recently they have been concerned with peacekeeping deployments, counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and the endless succession of new members and partnership initiatives. No fundamental security decisions of any kind have been needed in the political lifetime of any current head of a NATO (or EU) country, until now.

This is the more unfortunate because a security crisis is a highly complex thing, and involves a whole series of levels from the political down to the military/tactical. And a security crisis is just about impossible to manage multilaterally: the only remotely comparable example I can think off is the 1999 Kosovo crisis, when a much smaller NATO effectively stopped working after the first week, and came quite close to breaking down completely.

I’ve pointed out before that NATO has no strategy for Ukraine, and no real operational plan. It just has a series of ad hoc initiatives, glued together by vague aspirations unrelated to real life, and by the hope that something will turn up. In turn, this is because no individual NATO nation is in a better state: our current western political leadership has never had to develop these skills. But it’s actually worse than that: not having developed these skills, not having advisers who have developed these skills, they cannot actually understand what the Russians are doing and how and why they are doing it. Western leaders are like spectators who do not know the rules of Chess or Go trying to work out who is winning.

Now, western leaders are not themselves expected to be military experts. It’s common to sneer at Defence Ministers with no military background, but this is to misunderstand how defence works in a democracy, and for that matter how a democracy itself works. Let me put on my lecturer’s hat for a moment, and explain that.

Governments have policies at different levels. One of those policies will be a national security policy, which in turn is the basis for more detailed policies in subordinate areas: in this case, defence. Conventionally, these policies are managed by Ministries, headed by political figures or appointees, who have advisers, and in most cases operational organisations to turn policy into actual activity on the ground. In the case of the Education Ministry, the operational units are schools and universities. In the case of the Defence Ministry, they are the armed forces and the specialist defence establishments. You would no more expect a defence minister to be a former soldier than you would an education minister to be a former teacher or, for that matter, a transport minister to be a former train driver. The responsibility of a Minister is to make and apply policy within the larger government strategic framework, and to manage the budget and programme of their area.

So it’s the responsibility of the political leadership—normally including the head of state or government—to say what the strategic purpose of any military operation actually is, and to set out  a situation (the “end-state”) where this purpose will have been realised. If this is not done, military planning and operations are pointless, no matter how good your forces and how destructive your weaponry is, because you won’t actually know what you are trying to do, and so you won’t’ be able to tell whether you’ve done it. This, not lack of military knowledge, is the fundamental problem of western political leaderships today. Indeed, it would be better to call them “managerships,” because they have no aspiration to lead. They are just MBA-trained fiddlers and bodgers, for who the concept of a strategic goal in the true sense of the term is basically meaningless. Instead of actual strategic objectives, they have slogans and fantasy outcomes. It is, after all, obvious that the strategic objectives government sets have to be actually realisable, or there is no point in pursuing them. They must also be clear enough that they can be passed to the military for the military to make an operational plan to deliver the “end-state.” And in addition, the political leadership has to set out constraints and requirements within which the military have to work. Because western leaders and their advisers do not know how to do this, they cannot understand what the Russians are doing, either.

After that, of course, you need a politico-military layer that is capable of doing operational planning, and so answering a series of questions like: what military outcomes will deliver the political end-state? how do we get there? what forces will we need? how should they be structured and equipped? how do we cope with political imperatives and limitations? Whilst these questions are generic, and it can be argued that they apply even to peacekeeping operations, they obviously apply with more and more force as operations become larger and more demanding.

And this is the essential problem. The war in Ukraine involves forces which are an order of magnitude larger than those sent on operations by any western nation since 1945. Indeed, it can be argued that the only time that forces of comparable size have been deployed in Europe is between 1915 and 1918, and again in 1944-45. European armies certainly studied these campaigns at one time, but with the passing of time they became historical examples, not things to learn applicable lessons from. And the planning from about 1950 to 1990 was for a short, defensive war which would probably go nuclear. It’s questionable whether there is actually anything at all in recent western military history that would help today’s commanders really understand what they are seeing.

Nor do they have the recent professional experience. It’s become fashionable also to sneer at western military commanders, but in many ways that’s unfair. In peacetime, the role of senior military leaders is only partially to prepare for war. There are also a thousand other issues to do with budgets, programmes, personnel questions, contracts, the future size and shape of the military, and many others. Senior military figures need of be capable of understanding all these issues and dealing with political leaders, diplomats, civil servants and their opposite numbers in other governments, as well as with parliament and the media. It is obvious that in peacetime you are not going to select a Chief of the Army just for putative war-fighting skills, if that person is an abrasive individual who is always arguing with the Minister.

This is why it is almost universally the case that military commanders are replaced wholesale at the start of a war. Some commanders may turn out to be natural war-fighters and others will not. Widespread personnel changes are therefore common because the task is very different: we have seen this with the Russian Army since 2022. Likewise, a peacetime army as a whole takes time to adjust to being a war-fighting one. The problem western experts have is that they are watching this process from a distance, without going through it themselves. Armies that still only know peacetime modes of operation are trying to understand the activities of armies that have completely transitioned to war-fighting.

Finally, western military specialists are limited by their own experiences. Imagine you are the Chief of Operations in a medium-sized western country. You joined the military in the 1990s, when the last senior officers who had known the Cold War were retiring. Your actual experience has been on peacekeeping operations and a couple of deployments in Afghanistan. The largest unit you have ever commanded on operations is a Battalion (say 5-600 personnel) and the last time you actually came under fire, you were a Company commander. How can you be reasonably expected to grasp the mechanics and complexities of manoeuvring armies hundreds of thousands strong, along lines of contact hundreds of kilometres long, and understand what the commanders involved are doing, and how they think? You will unconsciously focus on the things you can understand, at the scale that you can understand them. You will inevitably concentrate on the detail—some tanks destroyed here, a new variant of artillery deployed there—rather than the big picture.

All this seems to me to explain several things, including the curiously episodic nature of Ukrainian initiatives. Some of these were clearly suggested by the West, others by a political class in Ukraine which is highly westernised and thinks in western terms. (Ironically, the Army is probably more realistic and more able to grasp the wider picture.) But there has been very little sense of any long-term strategy, or even thinking. Take the attacks on the bridge to Crimea, for example. What were they supposed to achieve exactly? Now replies like “sending a message to Putin” or “complicating Russian logistics” or “improving morale at home” are not allowed. What I would want to know is, what is expected to follow, in concrete terms?  What are the tangible results of this “message” supposed to be? Can you guarantee that it will be understood? Have you gamed out possible Russian reactions and what will you do then? Supposing, again, that you complicate Russian logistics? What will be the direct result, and how easy will it be for the Russians to get round the problem. (Answer, fairly.)

Western political and military leaders have no answer to these questions, because they have no strategy, and do not really understand what a strategy is. What they have is a consistent habit of coming up with clever, publicity-generating ideas that are disconnected from each other, but all sound good at the time. Broadly, they reflect the following “logic.”

• do something that humiliates Russia.

• miracle happens.

• change of government in Moscow and end of war.

And I’m not exaggerating. This is all the “strategic planning” that the West is capable of, and all it ever has been capable of. I’ve stressed before the necessity of separating aspirations from strategy. For a good twenty years, important constituent parts of western governments have had the aspiration of removing Putin from power, and somehow creating a “pro-western” government in Moscow. From time to time they have come up with disconnected initiatives—sanctions, for example—which they believed might move events in that direction. But mostly it’s just hope, manured with the belief that no “anti-western” leader can ever be representative of his or her people, and so will not last very long anyway. But this approach ignores the most fundamental issues of strategy: what is the clearly-defined end-state you are seeking, how precisely will you achieve it and is it, in fact, achievable? Because if you can’t answer those questions, then any amount of “strategic” planning is pointless. As regards the last question, any military expert will tell you that although the military can create the conditions for political developments to take place, they can’t make them happen. The actual relationship between the two is very complex. Recall that in 1918, the German Army, badly hurt by the Allies’ attrition strategy, was in full retreat but still on Allied soil, and that the Allied armies advancing from the Balkans were still well outside German territory. What ended the War earlier than expected was a nervous breakdown in the German High Command.

And the West cannot answer those questions. The end-state is vaguely defined as “Putin gone,” the mechanism is “pressure” of an ill-defined nature, and the idea that a “pro-western” government will emerge is just an article of faith. So even if a “strategy” could somehow be constructed from these fragments, it would stand no chance of working. Thus the essentially reactive nature of western actions. I’ve talked before about the Boyd Cycle, of Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action. Whoever can go round this circle faster, and “get inside” the Boyd Cycle of the enemy, controls the development of the battle, or the crisis. This is essentially what the Russians (who understand such things) have been doing since the start of the crisis, well before 2022.

Conversely, the West, confusing vague aspirations with an actual strategy, has not understood what the Russians are trying to do, and has treated every Russian setback, or presumed setback, as a step on the road to victory without looking at the bigger picture. Take one simple example. From the beginning of the war, the Russian strategy was to bring about specified political changes in Ukraine by degrading and destroying Ukrainian forces, and so removing Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian political demands. Once the West became involved, this strategy, whilst the same overall, was nuanced to include the destruction of western-supplied equipment and, to a degree, western-trained units. (Though the latter without the former were not so much of a threat.) Two things followed from this.

The first was that the reduction of Ukrainian fighting capability on terms favourable to the Russians was independent of the larger ebb and flow of battle. Destroying stored equipment was if anything better than destroying that equipment in combat. Destroying stored ammunition was better than destroying it once it was deployed in units. Now generally, defenders in a military conflict have fewer casualties than attackers. If your objective is to destroy your enemy’s fighting power, especially if you know that it will be difficult and expensive for them to replace it, then it makes more sense to let the enemy attack you, where they will lose more resources than you. If you have a functioning defence industry and ample reserves of manpower and equipment, this is unarguably the best strategy, and was practised by the Russians in 2022-23. But the West seems incapable of understanding this, and massively over-interpreted Russian strategic withdrawals as crushing defeats which would soon “bring Putin down.”

The second is that, to the extent that Russia has territorial objectives, it is better to degrade Ukrainian forces to the point where they cannot defend territory and have to withdraw either preemptively or after a cursory defence, than it is to stage deliberate attacks to seize territory. The Russians have a whole series of technologies which enable them to attrit Ukrainian forcers from a position a long way behind the contact line. They can thus progressively destroy the Ukrainian ability to hold ground without needing to risk their own troops and equipment in direct attacks. Over the last few months, we have seen that this stage has effectively been reached, and that the Russians are advancing quite quickly in certain key areas. But the West, which is obsessed with the control of terrain as an index of success, cannot understand this, having forgotten how the War in the West ended in 1918, when Allied territorial gains were still quite modest.

To be fair (assuming that one wants to be fair), these issues are very complex: not more complex, perhaps, than neurosurgery or the taxation of multinational companies, but not any less complex either. They require years of study and experience, and a willingness to master strange and sometimes counter-intuitive concepts. The western Liberal mind has never wanted to do this: its ideology of radical individualism is incompatible with discipline and organisation, and its search for instant gratification is incompatible with any long-term planning and careful implementation. In retaliation, it likes to dismiss the military as stupid and war-mongering. When Liberalism was constrained by other religious or political forces all this was less obvious, but with the emancipation of Liberalism from all controls over the last generation, and its dominance of political and intellectual life, western societies have now pretty much lost the ability to understand conflict and the military. It is striking, indeed, that most western military personnel are still recruited from the more conservative and traditional elements of society where Liberalism has made less of an impact, and not from Liberal urban elites.

Since the nineteenth century, and especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, the Liberal mind has oscillated between dislike and disdain for the military in normal times, and panicked demands for their use in periods of crisis, or when Liberal norms need to be enforced somewhere. The spread of the Liberal mindset to countries like France, which has historically been proud of its military, has produced a European political and media class largely unable to understand military issues. American Liberals, so far as I can see, themselves oscillate between fear of the military and endless citation of the warnings by Eisenhower’s speechwriter about the Military-Industrial Complex, and demands for the use of the military to enforce their norms. (Eisenhower’s remarks were, of course, a cliché of the time: there was nothing original in them.)

The result is a decision-taking and influencing class that has no real idea about strategy and conflict at all, and just repeats words and phrases it has heard somewhere, as magical incantations. One minute “F16s” (whatever they are precisely) will save the day, the next, “deep strikes” are going to bring Putin down.

So for example, it is impossible for a society brought up on just-in-time delivery and impulse purchases on Amazon to understand the importance of logistics and the nature of the attrition war the Russians are fighting. If you look at a map and try to understand it (I know!) you can see the the Ukrainian forces are fighting at the end of very long supply lines, especially for western equipment and ammunition, whereas the Russians are only a few hundred kilometres, at most, from their borders. The fuel consumption of heavy armoured vehicles is measured in gallons per mile, and even if they can be delivered to the area of operations by train or transporter (which has its own problems) they consume frightening amounts of fuel, all of which has to be brought, dangerously and expensively, into the operational area. They also break down, require new tracks and new engines and an endless supply of ammunition, all of which has to be brought forward. So Leopard tanks are not just teleported into the battle area, and when they are damaged they have to be sent back to Poland for repairs. And just about every aspect of military operations requires electrical power: yes, even drone operations.

The Russians of course know this, and have been targeting power generation and distribution systems, bridges and railway junctions, ammunition and logistic storage sites and troop concentrations and training areas. But they are not capturing large amounts of territory with daring armoured thrusts, so the Ukrainians must be winning, mustn’t they? Yet tanks without fuel or ammunition, or whose engines have broken down, are useless, and once Ukrainian forces are operationally isolated from their supply lines it’s only a question of time before they lose their combat capability and have to surrender or make a run for it. This is what appears to be happening now around Kursk. And if you are fighting an attrition war, and your stocks and replenishment capabilities are greater than your enemy’s, you want your enemy to use up those stocks as quickly as possible. So why not send, for example, large numbers of cheap drones that can be replaced, to soak up large numbers of defensive missiles that can’t? But this is too much for most alleged western experts to wrap their neurones around.

Of course the logic applies both ways. It defies belief that anyone with a functioning brain-cell would ever have thought that the Russians planned to “occupy Ukraine,” let alone in a matter of days. Insofar as the idea had anything real behind it at all, it was a folk memory of the rapid advance of US forces to Baghdad in 2003, against no opposition and with complete air supremacy. A simple practical example: a NATO Mechanised Division (in the days when NATO had them), advancing against no opposition, would take up some 200km of road, and take several days just to organise, leave, arrive and deploy into combat formations. And that’s just one Division. The idea of doing this against a battle-hardened Army two to three times the size of the attacking force, and beating them in a few days at that, is beyond ridiculous. Again, look at the map. And while you are at it, think about the current hysterical cries that “Putin wants to invade NATO.” Everything I’ve said about the difficulty of NATO going Eastward applies to the Russians going Westwards, should they be insane enough to consider the idea.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Russians chose Kursk as a jumping-off point, then it’s about 2000 kilometres to Berlin, which is the first remotely plausible objective I can think of. (Oh, they would have to go to Poland to get there.) Just to give you an idea, in the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s Group of Forces in Germany was about 350,000 strong, supplemented by recalled reservists in an emergency. They would have attacked NATO forces in Germany, but they were only the first echelon, and were expected to be wiped out. Two more echelons would therefore follow them. The total distance needing to be travelled was a couple of hundred kilometres. As far as we know, subduing and occupying Western Europe alone would have required perhaps a million men in combat units, never mind the western flanks and countries like Turkey. This was in the context of an existential struggle, probably involving nuclear weapons, which a victorious Russia would take a generation to recover from. We are a little way from that at the moment.

I think that what we are seeing, as well as culpable deliberate ignorance, is the beginning of a gnawing realisation that NATO is not strong but weak, that NATO equipment is mediocre, that talk of “escalation” is meaningless in the absence of something to escalate with, and that if the Russians felt so inclined they could do a lot of damage to the West. But even there, western pundits are stuck in narratives of armoured warfare and territorial conquest. The Russians don’t need to do that, of course. With their missile technology, which the West has consistently ignored and downplayed, they can make a mess of any city in the western world, and no western state is in a position to respond. Of course the Russians, who understand these things, realise that they don’t need to actually use these missiles: the psychological leverage they have from just possessing them will do quite nicely. Ironically, I think the Ukrainians do understand these things, better than their supposed NATO mentors. Their Soviet heritage and the large Army they retained gave them an awareness of how large-scale operations are conducted at the political and strategic levels even if, since then, they have been got at by NATO

The French historian and Resistance martyr Marc Bloch, who fought in the Battle of France in 1940, wrote a book about it, only published posthumously, after the war, called L’Étrange défaite, or The Strange Defeat, in which he tried to explain what had happened. His central conclusion was that the failure was intellectual, organisational and political: the Germans employed a more modern style of war that the French were not expecting and could not cope with. Time has nuanced that conclusion: the German tactics were certainly innovative, involving fast-moving, deep penetration armoured units and close cooperation with aircraft, but they were also extremely risky and required a lot of luck to pull off successfully. But Bloch was right that the Germans had developed a style of warfare, dictated by the need to avoid long wars, to which there was no counter at the time, and which posed unexpected and, for a period insoluble, problems for the defender.

There’s something about the dazed incomprehension of the French political and military class and the people themselves, in the summer of 1940 that seems very relevant today. The defeat of the West—not yet even recognised as such—is at once intellectual, organisational and political. The ruling classes of the West seem to have no idea at all what has happened to them and why, nor what is likely to follow.

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

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

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

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

Freya India

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

GIRLS
Girlhood in the Modern World
By Freya India

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank Furedi

covered it excellently in the early 2000s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In just thirteen minutes, four Kalashnikov rifles, knives, and plastic bottles of gasoline,   discharged by four men,  were not enough to kill and injure so many people as have been accounted for to date in the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow.

More than half those examined so far in post-mortems “died as a result of the fire from exposure to high temperature and combustion products”, according to Alexander Bastrykin, the chief investigator in his public report to President Vladimir Putin on Monday night.  Post-mortems have yet to be reported for one-third of the 139 dead counted by Bastrykin; no analysis of the cause of injuries to 182 of the surviving casualties has been reported yet; 93 of them remain in hospital.  

Bastrykin also reported “two AK-74 assault rifles, over 500 rounds of ammunition, 28 magazines with ammunition, and bottles with remaining gasoline were found and seized at the scene.” A NATO military expert explains: “They didn’t strike me as well-trained, so they lost time changing magazines and their fire wasn’t all that accurate. These data tell me the majority of victims died from some other cause than gunshot.”

Yevgeny Krutikov, a writer with military intelligence sources, reported in Vzglyad: “It can be assumed that the weapons were stored in the terrorists’ cache for a long time and not too carefully – the machine guns sparkled during the shooting. This indicates damage to the barrel or breech (dirt got inside the barrel).”

Recruitment of the shooters; pre-placement of weapons and ammunition; accommodation and advance payment to the gunmen;  purchase of the car they used; communications and coordination; exit undetected in the crowds escaping the building;  and the escape route to the Ukraine border through Bryansk region – the evidence of these details prepared over weeks and months indicate a much larger organization than the four shooters formed with seven others  already arrested and under interrogation.

What they know and will tell is likely to reveal a sophisticated command-and-control system which knew how vulnerable the target was, how to maximize the killing in the shortest possible duration, and at the same time allow escape for the attackers – which is almost unprecedented in the recent history of mass terrorist attacks in Russia. .

That’s to say, the command knew — the shooters and their accomplices didn’t. There was advance reconnoiter of the Crocus City Hall so that the shooters knew the route they followed inside the building and then out under cover of fire and smoke, which erupted faster than they were able to shoot almost half of their ammunition which they left behind.   

Did the command also know that Crocus City Hall and the surrounding mall were operating without adequate fire alarms, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, sprinklers, and emergency ventilation, none of which has been reported by eyewitnesses?  Was the building targeted because the command knew it was constructed without fire-resistant structural supports, allowing ceilings and roof to cave in, choking or crushing those beneath to death?

“Most of the victims in Crocus died not at the hands of terrorists, but from the criminal negligence of the owners and regulatory authorities,” reported Mikhail Delyagin, chairman of the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, on Sunday evening.  “It is known that many people suffocated with carbon monoxide inside the building. There are already more victims of this kind than those killed by terrorist shooting. Nothing like this could happen in a certified building built according to modern standards for such objects. Why? Because all such buildings are equipped with an automatic ventilation system. These are windows or hatches that fire off automatically if the detector detects an increased level of carbon monoxide inside. Holes open in the roof – and the life-threatening gas goes into the sky. This system works, by the way, without electricity, on compressed air.”

“The way the Crocus burned down shows that cheap Chinese materials (glass wool, plastics, cable braid, etc.) were used in its decoration, which are prohibited for use in public buildings. The reason for the ban? Combustibility. In Europe, non-burning glass wool, plastics, etc. have been used for a long time. They are, of course, twice or three times more expensive than the Chinese equivalent. But they have one advantage: they do not burn in case of fire. And they don’t kill those who are inside.”

Delyagin has publicly accused Aras Agalarov, the wealthy founder of the Crocus shopping and development group, and his son Emin of failing “to formally commission this particular concert hall. As it became known, it is not listed as a properly designed capital construction object on the cadastral map of the Federal Register. Apparently, the amount of bribes needed to receive such a dangerous object exceeded all reasonable limits, and for Agalarov, taking into account the above-mentioned monstrous violations of standards, it was cheaper to extend the status of a building under construction than to put it into operation.”  

Bastrykin has announced “the investigation is checking the possibility of violation of safety requirements and the fire extinguishing system in the Crocus City Hall concert hall.  For this purpose, remote controls, electronic components and control devices for the fire protection system of the concert hall were seized. They are aimed at researching and extracting information about the operating mode of fire safety systems at the time of the terrorist attack. The contents of the fire protection system server are being studied with the participation of experts. To establish the operability and timely operation of all fire safety systems, a fire technical examination has been appointed.”  

Emin Agalarov has issued a press statement claiming he arrived shortly after the gunmen had left. He said he “entered the building 40 minutes after the first shots were fired. He noted that the fire safety system was working and the doors were unlocked…The sprinkler fire extinguishing system was also operating normally. The building collapsed only six hours after the start of the terrible fire. Some rooms remained intact and did not burn down.”  

“If we focus too hard on the minute details which are being patched together, this might clear up some details of assault,” comments a retired senior intelligence source in a position to know, “we might learn something more but not the fundamentals.  These [the four shooters] are no ISIS-K. . The harder New York Times, BBC and The Guardian try to prove they are, the less we have to believe it. They are no jihadists. Just murderers. Mercenaries brought in a month ago.

They are not suicide killers. There are no reports of this ISIS outfit operating away from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Certainly not in Tajikistan. However there are mercenaries at a dime a dozen there who have fought all over. Including in ISIS.”

“At Ukraine entry, they would certainly have been killed, removing all the evidence. The investigation will show they were hired, paid for. A Tajikistan blogger news service reported raids in [Tajik] villages, but then removed it. I am sure their families and friends will be picked up and all connections to jihadists or contractors will be established. They are not migrants, do not speak Russian, and thus cannot claim any ethnic discrimination vendetta [against Russians].”

President Putin claimed in his meeting with the security services on Monday:  “We know that the crime was perpetrated by radical Islamists. The Islamic world itself has been fighting this ideology for centuries. But we are also seeing how the United States is using different channels to try and convince its satellites and other countries of the world that, according to its intelligence, there is supposedly no sign of Kiev’s involvement in the Moscow terrorist attack, that the deadly terrorist attack was perpetrated by followers of Islam, members of ISIS, an organisation banned in Russia. We know whose hands were used to commit this atrocity against Russia and its people. We want to know who ordered it.”  

What Putin meant by “radical Islamists” is unclear; the public evidence of the four individuals who have been charged has yet to confirm a record of their religiosity or any ideological conviction.  

The officials at the Kremlin meeting on Monday: Prosecutor-General Igor Krasnov, Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Anton Vaino, First Deputy Chief of the Presidential Executive Office Sergei Kiriyenko, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, Presidential aide Maxim Oreshkin, Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev, Emergencies Minister Alexander Kurenkov, Minister of Labour and Social Protection Anton Kotyakov, Healthcare Minister Mikhail Murashko, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, Director of the Federal Security Service Alexander Bortnikov, Commander of the National Guard Troops Viktor Zolotov, Chairman of the Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin, Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobiev, and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Source: [http://en.kremlin.ru/](http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/73732)

For the time being, the only evidence connecting the four shooters to the Ukraine is the direction they were taking when their vehicle was stopped by the security forces. In a shootout the car overturned, and three of the gunmen fled into the forest beside the road, leaving one man injured in the car.

The head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Alexander Khinshtein, is the source for press reporting on the site of the interception. That was on Highway E101 about seven kilometres south of the P-120 intersection east of Bryansk city.    From Bastrykin’s report, and from an award ceremony in Bryansk on Monday for the forces who made the capture – Federal Security Service (FSB), Interior Ministry, National Guard, and border forces of the Defense Ministry   — the getaway was being tracked for some time before it reached the P-120 intersection. At that point, if the four men planned to head for Belarus, they would have turned right, followed the south circular road around Bryansk, and then turned left on to the A-240 towards the Belarus border, about 100 kms to the southwest.

Instead, the men drove due south and on the highway near Khatsun, they were about 100 kms from the Ukraine border. There have been reports they were expecting to make a rendezvous with accomplices they believed would guide them to safety over the Ukraine border, and to payday.  Or, as Moscow sources speculate, to their execution by the Ukrainians.

Above: [Google map of the roads and villages](https://t.me/voenacher/63117), including Khatsun, east of Bryansk city.  Below: the view in daylight of the point on Highway E-101 where the gunmen were intercepted about five minutes after they passed the Belarus turnoff, confirming to the security forces tracking the car that they were heading to the Ukraine.   

Speculation, however, including analysis of the cui bono, who gains type, the sequence of statements from Washington, and the history of association between the US, British and Ukrainian secret services and  Tajik mercenaries, creates a balance of probabilities, but not an explanation beyond reasonable doubt.

“Of course, we must also answer the question of why the terrorists, after committing their crime, attempted to flee specifically to Ukraine,” the president said at his meeting with security officials on Monday. “Who was waiting for them there? It is clear that those supporting the Kiev regime do not wish to be implicated in acts of terrorism and be seen as sponsors of terrorism. But there are indeed numerous questions.”  

Public comments to reporters on Tuesday by the FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov  and Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev  have answered with emphasis on the Ukrainians, backed by the US and UK.

Source: [https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin](https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin)  March 26 – 15:34.

Boris Rozhin (Colonel Cassad) has followed their remarks with a detailed statement of the history of the intelligence service operations before the Crocus attack, and a circumstantial detail of Ukrainian border drone operations in the area and on the night the getaway car was headed through Bryansk region. Click to read   – March 26, Min 22: 23.

What is evident so far, including from the line of Tajik accomplices now making formal appearances in a Moscow court, is the absence of ideology or religiosity of the radical Islamic type; and ignorance of  where their orders and money were coming from, and why. This non-evidence points to the Ukraine as strongly as the road the four shooters were taking when they were caught.  

Their subsequent demeanour in brief videoclips after capture, in hospital, and in court confirms what the military blogger Boris Rozhin calls “dumb hysteria…behaviour [that is]  typical in a situation where the actions of terrorists do not have a deep ideological basis. This is the case of the Crocus gunmen, where the sole motivation is only money. Already in the moment of flight, the criminals realized what they had committed and, since the terrorist attack was not supported by ideology, the militants were seized with animal fear for their own lives. Therefore, during the interrogation, they are ready to tell everything, cry and so on, just to stay alive.”  

The Russian intelligence agency investigations now under way, according to Krutikov, are tracing the “Telegram accounts through which the terrorists received instructions, including during their departure from the crime scene. Most likely, it is this branch which directly links the investigation with the Ukrainian direction due to the indication of a specific square at the border crossing.”  

The public recriminations against the Agalarov family are not supported by Alexander Kurenkov, the Emergencies Minister, who told the Kremlin meeting on Monday in a brief, ambiguous report: “The building was equipped with an automatic fire alarm system. This system responded to the fire as expected. There was also a set of four robotized fire-fighting hoses and a software control system, which worked in conjunction with other fire protection systems. They were activated during the terrorist attack, but the arson involved the use of flammable substances. According to experts, the system failed to extinguish the fire due to its wide spread.  This is what I wanted to say. We managed to totally extinguish the fire on wall panels, given the materials they were made of, only at 6.40 pm today [March 25]. The search and rescue operations continue. They are expected to be completed by 5 pm tomorrow [March 26]. This concludes my report.”  

An Emergencies Ministry (MChS) expert has released data indicating the fire covered 12,900 square metres and more than 900 cubic metres of collapsed structures were removed.  In the videoclip the roofless exterior wall can be seen, and the destruction of the  inner auditorium.

Source: [https://www.kommersant.ru](https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6594893?from=top_main_1)

A local fire brigade source comments: “this was a Category-5 fire — Class 5 is an extreme fire hazard —  and the services did an extraordinarily professional job to contain and extinguish a fire of such intensity.” He said the roof “may have collapsed between 2:30 am and 3:30 am.” This corroborates Emin Agalarov’s report of the timing.

The fire expert explained: “If lots of fuel was spilled in the auditorium among the chairs with synthetic fabric and plastic elements, then even low-inflammable things could start burning. They are resistant to high temperatures, but not to extremely high ones. In this case the sprinkler system can be useless.”

The Moscow region governor, Andrei Vorobiev (Vorobyov), was at the site half an hour after the gang had left. “An operational headquarters has been established. All the details will come later.” At 10:39 on Saturday evening [March 23] he reported by video that the roof was still ablaze and that firefighters were pouring water on it from extension ladders.  

Governor Vorobiev is at lower left. Source: [https://t.me/vorobiev_live/6164](https://t.me/vorobiev_live/6164) 

Six hours later, at 04:43, Vorobiev posted a new video clip from inside the building in which he confirmed with firemen that the roof had fallen in. “The collapse of structures continues now,” Vorobiev reported. “There are still some pockets of fire, but most of the fire has been eliminated. Rescuers were able to enter the auditorium, where the temperature had been high for a long time and where, apparently, the epicentre of the fire was. The roof over the auditorium has collapsed, and the debris is still being dismantled.”

Source: [https://t.me/vorobiev_live/6170](https://t.me/vorobiev_live/6170) 

Delyagin was asked to say if he wished to correct his initial report and modify his allegations against the Agalarovs; he has not answered.  

The political repercussions of the attack have been amplified in the Moscow media. But at a meeting of the Prosecutor-General’s Office Board on Tuesday, Putin played down his claim about “radical Islamists” of the day before. “As you know,” he said, “the perpetrators responsible for this mass murder have been arrested, and our law enforcement agencies are diligently investigating the circumstances surrounding this barbaric crime. They are piecing together the details of the attack, determining the roles and culpability of each individual involved, and analyzing the findings provided by criminalists and experts. The Federal Security Service [FSB], alongside other intelligence services, is actively addressing pertinent issues in coordination with the National Anti-Terrorism Committee.”  

The president added: “I trust that the prosecutors, within the scope of their authority, will ensure that justice is served when charging the accused and during the legal proceedings.” This appears to be a response to western media reports that the four gunmen were beaten up and tortured after their capture.

Prosecutor-General Igor Krasnov said to Putin:  “These atrocities have a common goal – to intimidate people, to destroy the unity of our people. Their performers, customers and curators will inevitably be punished. That is why the most important task for Russia remains to achieve the goals of a special military operation.”  Putin had said the same thing the day before: “Their goal, as I mentioned, is to sow panic in our society while demonstrating to their own people that not all hope is lost for the Kiev regime. All they need to do is follow the orders of their Western patrons, fight until the last Ukrainian, obey Washington’s commands, endorse the new mobilization law, and form something resembling a new version of the Hitler Youth. To comply with all of this, they will seek new weapons and additional funds, much of which will likely be embezzled and, as is customary in Ukraine today, put into their own pockets.”  

As more time has elapsed and the interrogations of the attack group have produced no new official evidence, the Russian media have been publishing angry calls to restrict migration into Russia, both legal and illegal;  attacks on ethnic communities like the Tajiks; and on the corruption of Russian officials providing them with entry, residence,  and work permits. The Kremlin has responded with a brief communiqué of a telephone call between Putin and the Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon: “During the conversation, Vladimir Putin and Emomali Rahmon noted that the security services of Russia and Tajikistan were working closely together to counter terrorism and that they would build up their cooperation.”  

Konstantin Malofeev (Malofeyev), owner of the Tsargrad media group in Moscow, has published several policy calls under the slogan, “the internal threat has turned out to be no less serious than the external one”. “There should be no xenophobia towards Ukrainians, Jews, and Muslims,” according to Malofeev. “We are a multinational country. That’s the only reason she became an Empire. Because she is not only strong, but also kind. And xenophobia is the lot of the weak. The strong are not afraid. But a competent migration policy, of course, must be carried out. There should be no migration enclaves. There should be no diasporas which try to replace the government, whom the government consults and fears. Members of these diasporas should not be above the law. If they come to Russia, then the main thing for them should be the law.”

“Imagine what three million ‘hardworking’ migrants would do in Moscow, for example, if they all came out at once… It’s not a bell anymore – it’s a bell ringing, a rumble. It’s time to take up migration legislation. Only in this case will we be able to protect ourselves. Fortunately, I have evidence that the people in power who are responsible for migration have heard this ringing. I hope this will affect our streets and our safety. I hope that we will no longer have to catch Tajiks a hundred kilometres from the Ukrainian border who cannot speak Russian, but at the same time live freely in Russia.”  

Home page of _Tsargrad_ illustrated with a collage of armed Tajik fighters appearing to pose in front of the Kremlin; Konstantin Malofeev is pictured at upper [right](https://tsargrad.tv/articles/vsegda-ulybalis-terroristy-iz-krokusa-okazalis-ne-prosto-migrantami-ubivali-uzhe-sograzhdan_977563).  For more on how Malofeev made his first fortune,  click to read [this](https://johnhelmer.net/the-window-of-opportunity-vtb-accuses-itself-of-ripoff-and-is-told-by-the-uk-courts-to-take-its-case-to-the-russian-prosecutor/)  and the [archive](https://johnhelmer.net/?s=malofeev).  

Putin responded swiftly in his speech to prosecutors on Tuesday; the State Duma followed. “[Prosecutors should] consider implementing a system of additional preventive and anti-crime measures,” the president said, “including supervision of compliance with migration legislation. The situation in this area, which is very important and of great concern to millions of people, must be closely monitored.”  The same day, Vyacheslav Volodin, the Duma Speaker, told a parliamentary session that he is appointing a multi-party working group “that will analyze the entire range of legislation that is relevant to the challenges of today, and legislation in the field of migration.”

Pro-US reporters in Moscow reverse the direction of the crackdown Malofeev and his supporters advocate. “Russians will likely face the security crackdown that, ironically [sic], they have largely avoided over two years of war in Ukraine. That would mean a further tightening of the screws on speech and make it much harder to use public transportation or gather in large groups. Communities of migrant workers will likely face a real crackdown… the tactics once adopted to deal with terrorists became quickly accepted as a new norm to treat political dissent. Thus the torture the Russian security services used against four suspects might be used against all sort of people in the country. This is the most direct consequence of the attack.”  

Malofeev and the Tsargrad group are not alone in saying the Crocus City Hall attack should lead to intensification of the military operations in the Ukraine. “They struck at us, at our civilians” Malofeev has written, “in the very center of our Homeland. This is an act of war. It needs to be answered as we have said many times. It must finally be answered with the massive real use of weapons that will allow us to win this war. We must give the civilian population [in the Ukraine] 48 hours to leave the cities and then strike with all our might. Then the war will end quickly, which means that the sponsorship of terrorist attacks will stop. No Americans and British, without the Armed Forces of Ukraine, without Kiev, without the current war, will sponsor terrorist attacks on the territory of Russia.”

For the time being, there has been no impact of the Crocus attack and the Moscow media debate on the operational or strategic plans under way in the Ukraine. The intensification of the General Staff’s offensive along the line of contact in the Donbass; in the electric war against Kharkov and other cities east of the Dnieper River; and in the missile attacks on targets from Kiev to Lvov – reported here   — commenced before the Moscow events; they are continuing as planned.

“Those in political command who have been favouring an outcome to the war that falls short of regime change in Kiev and extension of demilitarization to the Polish border,” observes a Moscow political source, “have lost their voice since Saturday night.”

Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state, visited Israel in February 2024, a few months after leaving office. He came to show his solidarity with Israel during its war with Hamas and Hezbollah, and to praise its rescue of two hostages from Gaza. He also met with senior Israeli officials and military commanders to discuss the security situation and the US-backed plan to annex parts of the West Bank

Pompeo is a staunch supporter of Israel and its right to defend itself. He played a key role in the Trump administration’s policies that recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and rejected the notion that the settlements in the West Bank are illegal. He also helped broker four Arab-Israeli peace deals known as the Abraham Accords.

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

The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Ails Us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Perfect Storm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all so simple. Or is it? 

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

Punctuated Perfectionism

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

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

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

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

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

Political Perfectionism

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

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

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

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

Perfectionism and Pandemic Psychology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catharsis

How do we cure ourselves of this tragic flaw? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the transcript of our film “Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition“.

Written, narrated and audio editing by Bernhard Guenther.
Visuals and video editing by Humberto Braga.

Youtube Link

“Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition” has been selected as the #1 film 2011-2012 of the “Top 100 Global Development Movies”.”The best positive, inspirational, thought-provoking movie of our times.”

– RYB TV

Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition – Transcript

By Bernhard Guenther, October 2011

It is true, all we need is love. But do we really know what love is? Love is a word that is sung about in songs, written in poems, talked about a lot and it is something many people long for one way or the other, mostly in the form of a partner. We hear it a lot these days: “Be heart-centered” and “Be love”, “Love is the answer, because love always wins!”, “Send Love and Light!” and so on. People use it casually in conversations in their every day lives. It is seen as the solution to all the world problems. All you need is Love!

If that’s so easy, how come nothing has changed fundamentally on planet earth despite the obvious technological progress? ?We still see genocide, oppression and wars happening. Hundreds of thousands of children and civilians have died in the Middle East and around the world because of the war machine under the control of psychopathic leaders who couldn’t care less about anyone who holds up a peace sign with a proclamation of love as the force for change. ?Looking at it more closely we can see that “Love” is one of the most abused and misunderstood words.

We mistake things like gratification, sentimentality, obligation, duty, passion, desire, and other superficial emotions, ideas and conditioned concepts as “Love” in order fill something that is ultimately lacking within us. These distortions are also used mostly unconsciously as buffers to avoid facing reality as it is by looking at the world with rose-colored glasses on, instead of seeing oneself and the world more objectively beyond appearances.

“For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”

– Niccolo Machiavelli

There is personal love between humans, motherly love, love of family and community, love for oneself, love for something greater than the self, love for god and even love for man-made ideologies and concepts such as for a nation and country.? So what is love? How can we describe or define such a powerful force? Words are very limiting and can only point to it, but are not it. Maybe we can start by examining what love is not.

When it comes to interpersonal relationships we often see control games, jealousy, and envy which is obviously not love, but expressions and behaviors based on fear and need. ??Love is related to emotions and feelings, but they can be merely based on chemical reactions in the brain that result in a “high”, where people feed off each other which is also be the basis for psychic vampirism. Many relationships are based on this feeding mechanism, which has nothing to do with love, but is a parasitic need resulting in co-dependance. Sexual attraction is also mistaken for love at times. Many people get into relationships for the wrong reasons, be it to escape their loneliness, to fill a hole in their lives or feed off another person. For the most part this happens unconsciously and so people tend to lie to themselves about love and their relationships in many ways, not seeing the other person as he/she is and not even seeing themselves clearly as they are.

“People convince themselves of their own lies, becoming victims of their own inventions as they begin to direct their lives by standards of behavior, ideas, feelings, or instincts which do not correspond to their inner reality. What is truly serious in this matter is that the individual loses all points of reference regarding what comprises truth, and what comprises lies. He becomes used to considering as true only that which is convenient for his personal interests; everything that is in opposition to his self-esteem or in conflict with already established prejudices, he considers false.”

– John Baines

To truly love another person we need to see the other as he/she is without trying to change that person. That is the basis for unconditional love, but for that to happen we also need to know ourselves and see us as we truly are , so we don’t fall into the trap of illusory projections which only result in disappointment and hurt once the romantic phase is over. It’s about acceptance and consideration, being able to give and receive, to be externally considerate and not expect anything.?? But beyond personal relationships, the idea of love has also been distorted and used superficially as slogans. It is equated with being positive, open, friendly, not saying or focusing on anything “bad” or “negative”, to be always cheerful and have a smile on ones face. Of course there is nothing wrong with kindness and friendliness as well as positivity, but it must be based on truth and reality, not lies, self-calming rationalizations or avoidance, including political correctness which only leads to complacency and ignorance.

Some people say we need to be more heart-centered, loving and compassionate. Yes, obviously we all need to connect more to our heart, show empathy and compassion, especially extending it the whole world, beyond our close friends and family. ??But what does that really mean? Many people seem to associate love with emotions and feelings or niceness, but is it not more than that, like a higher state of consciousness and being??? We seem to mistake many things for “love” and even judge the intellect as “bad”, mistaking it for the monkey/predator mind, hence many suggest that we should “think” with our heart and do what we “feel” like doing, which mostly results in mere self-deception and lack of critical thinking. It’s about aligning the heart with the intellect, intuition with logic, mysticism with science.

Many people seem to force themselves into this artificial and superficial state of love through contrived affirmations and “feel good” spirituality, ignoring anything that may be a threat to their “positive” life view. ??Ultimately this results in suppression and armor that is manifested by denying the shadow part of themselves and the world as they ignore objective reality. On the surface they don’t even think that anything is “wrong” with them. It’s very much a blissful ignorant state, trying to stay high on artificial emotional projections, avoiding anything that may give them a downer and living in a subjective tunnel vision with blinders on.

One can see this kind of attitude in many self-proclaimed “aware” and “conscious” people who follow shallow New Age teachings and pop psychology resulting in self-calming but lacking deeper healing, growth and essentially real love.

“We’ve all met people who seem too sticky and gooey. They are “too nice” and sickeningly sweet. We sense that they are somehow being fake when we are around them and we feel we never really know them. They are, as the saying goes, “too good to be true.” These people are barricaded behind their mask or persona. They will deliberately avoid any kind of negative reaction or emotion. They refuse to be real and suffer the acceptance of their own dark side and this can be a dangerous thing.”

– Rebeca Eigen

“The Shadow describes the part of the psyche that an individual would rather not acknowledge. It contains the denied parts of the self. Since the self contains these aspects, they surface in one way or another. Bringing Shadow material into consciousness drains its dark power, and can even recover valuable resources from it. The greatest power, however, comes from having accepted your shadow parts and integrated them as components of your Self. Everyone carries a Shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

– Carl G. Jung

Love is not merely an emotional state, but a state of consciousness. Just like there are different levels of consciousness, there are also different levels of love one can access on the spectrum of consciousness based on ones level of being and awareness. ?There is carnal love based on the sexual center and animal part in man which is the biological drive to procreate, ensuring that organic life on earth continues. This drive is mechanical tied to the esoteric meaning of the General Law and waking sleep state homo sapiens is under.

“As a cell of humanity, man forms part of organic life on Earth. This life in its ensemble represents a very sensitive organ of our planet, playing an important role in the economy of the solar system. As a cell of this organ, man finds himself under the influence of the General Law, which keeps him in his place. In fact, this law leaves him a certain margin or tolerance. It allows him some free movement within the limits it sets. Within these boundaries, which are very limited objectively although subjectively they appear vast, man can give free rein to his fantasies and his ambitions.

Without going too far into the definition of these limits and detailed description of the components of this General Law, we can say as an example that one of those factors is hunger: the servitude of working to assure our subsistence. The chain: sexual instinct; procreation; and the care of parents for their children, is another factor. The esoteric maxim that applies to this aspect of life is conceived thus: carnal love is necessary for the general good.”

– Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis

Then there is courtly love based on the higher centers, which is a higher state of being that can only be accessed through sincere self-work, not giving in to mechanical driven behaviors and choices. Essentially for true love between two people to manifest there needs to be a connection and matching on all centers: physical, sexual, emotional, intellectual and spiritual.

We need to continually work on ourselves to bring the centers into balance, so no one feeds of the other, but both compliment each other. Love, in its truest sense means to see the world, oneself, and others more objectively. From an esoteric perspective it’s about evolving towards this objective love. In other words, the more we are objective with ourselves and the world, raising awareness and see things as they are, the higher the degree of love we can access. It is based on knowledge, being and understanding, not merely emotional states and “happy thoughts”.

Subjective love is attached to one’s own idea of the other or to what can be gained or obtained from the other. People call the most various desires love. These can have to do with social status, addiction to power over or domination of another, sexual interest and so forth. The emotion fluctuates between satisfaction of getting and fear of losing and is generally centered on the self. Subjective love seeks to somehow forcibly appropriate another into one’s extended self. One example of this is showing off what a clever or good-looking partner or child one has in order to somehow increase oneself. Any games of domination or co-dependence which often involve the term love fall in this category.

However, by doing the work towards objective love one shouldn’t ignore or suppress anything that doesn’t live up to the ideal of higher love beyond the self. Everyone is on a different level of being with different lessons to learn and integrate. ?It seems to happen very often in spiritual and esoteric circles that people claim attributes to themselves and inflate their being above the actual state of where they are and what they need to learn and confront in order to grow and evolve. ??Objective love is not a detached unemotional state of existence. It simply means to act from one’s true self beyond conditioning, programming and projections, but with a “clean” emotional center, not one that is shut down.

Our emotions are the gateway to love, but they are not love. It’s about opening up to vulnerability and not suppressing negative emotions such as anger, sadness, jealousy, grief, but work through them which leads to compassion and empathy, not only for oneself or close friends and family but for the world and humanity at large. ??This also means to experience and feel emotions so we can let them go without suppressing them or projecting them on someone else. There are many ways to do this. Art, music, journaling as well as breathwork, bodywork and other healing modalities can help in the process of transmuting the shadow into light through emotional cleansing. It’s a delicate and deep process that doesn’t happen over night.

In that sense relationships are also lessons in love and not an end in itself, but can help us to learn more about ourselves. People and friends who are also engaged in sincere self-work can show us valuable lessons as they serve as mirrors and can help to expose parts of ourselves we wouldn’t be able to see since we all have subjective blind spots. A mirror generally is perceived as shocking or socially disagreeable. This comes from the fact that if the mirror is any good, it will conflict with the subjective filters of perception most people maintain concerning themselves. In other words, people’s self image is more or less based on lies to self and in the degree the mirror reaches its intended truthfulness, it will challenge these lies.

“According to the Great Work, a friend is one in which you support and encourage the others expansion in either the mind or the spirit.Otherwise they are people you are sentimentally attached to it because they would eat cinnamon bun with you. And they will say ‘hee, hee, hee’ aren’t we having fun”. Drug addicts do the same thing. Drug addicts want to be around people who will support them and be away from real friends. Do you know why? Because it feels good. To be a member of a mystery school can be catastrophic to the ego and to the ego’s habits and to the propensity for mediocrity. No one ever cried striving for excellence. They only cried when their mediocrity was taken away from them and pointed out to them.”

– Jerhoam

The more lessons are learned, the more knowledge gained, understood and applied, the more we purify our emotions, the more one’s being and awareness raises as the higher centers are activated and the more we can “see the unseen”. However, this is a process that is different for each depending on many factors.

Psychopaths on the other hand (about 6% of humanity) have no capability to experience anything close to love, compassion and empathy by birth. It’s not a psychological disposition but a genetic one. That is another topic which is very misunderstood and ignored, especially since most psychopaths can appear as “normal” through their “mask of sanity“. They are not necessarily criminals in prisons, but can be CEO’s, politicians, spiritual leaders, a husband, wife, child or the neighbor next door. They can tell you exactly what you want to hear, appear compassionate, empathetic and understanding without meaning or feeling it one bit.

To assume that we are all the same and that everyone has access to this higher love (or any form of love) is self-deceiving at best and we can see those kind of assumptions in the oversimplified idea of “we are all one!”. You cannot BE what you’re not, nor can you give what you don’t have.

We are all one, but we are not all the same. There seems to be some major blind spot and oversimplification about the idea of “we”. This has nothing to do about “us vs. them”, but understanding how complex humanity actually is, what we choose to believe and wish for and what we avoid to look at and confront, within and without.

“Too many people hold the idea that psychopaths are essentially killers or convicts. The general public hasn’t been educated to see beyond the social stereotypes to understand that psychopaths can be entrepreneurs, politicians, CEOs and other successful individuals who may never see the inside of a prison.”

– Dr. Robert Hare

“It feels more democratic and less condemnatory (and somehow less alarming) to believe that everyone is a little shady than to accept a few human beings live in a permanent nighttime. To admit that some people literally have no conscience is not technically saying that some human beings are evil, but it is disturbingly close. And good people want very much not to believe in the personification of evil.”

– Dr. Martha Stout

If one looks into the accounts of Near-Death experiences (NDE) and what some people have seen or realized, there is a common theme:? This profound experience of objective Love, which is not related to the Love as the human personality experiences it. It is for example, as one person who had a NDE said, not a sentimental, get a tear, ‘feel someone’s pain’ feeling, not an emotion. It is beyond sentiment or feeling someone else in this form, but relates more to an all expansive, knowing and understanding.

“The problem is not the term “love”, the problem is the interpretation of the term. Those on third density have a tendency to confuse the issue horribly. After all, they confuse many things as love. When the actual definition of love as you know it is not correct either. It is not necessarily a feeling that one has that can also be interpreted as an emotion, but rather, as we have told you before, the essence of light which is knowledge is love, and this has been corrupted when it is said that love leads to illumination. Love is Light is Knowledge. Love makes no sense when common definitions are used as they are in your environment.? To love you must know.? And to know is to have light.? And to have light is to love. ?And to have knowledge is to love.”

– from the Cassiopaean sessions??

Ultimately there is no love where there is no truth and knowledge. Love entails seeing the world as it is- not as we like, want it or assume it to be. Hence, true love is essentially linked to how much one can access objective reality.

“You know the consciousness movement has let us in to create a kind of a hybrid spirituality that is mixed with a very toxic degree of narcissism and we need to look at that . It has made us very hyper sensitive and not very strong. I would say to you what has it made us conscious of because if it made us that conscious of the world we wouldn’t be in this state we’re in. If it made us that conscious of the world, we wouldn’t have dropped the ball on the management of freedom and the bill of rights, but we did. We’ve lost our civil rights. We dropped the ball. We dropped the ball on the management of the earth’s creatures and we got a hundred and fifty chimps left.

What have we become conscious of these last fifty years? Where have we been? We’ve been processing wounds. I know people who say I’m working to become conscious but I won’t look at the TV and I won’t read the news. Then what are you becoming conscious of? Myself. Now I have to tell you something, that’s exactly the formula through which you cannot heal. You cannot heal. Do you… Can you understand that? That kind of narcissism is the classic formula for fueling your own rage. Your own rage. Narcissism and it’s about me, it’s about me, it’s about my time, my space, my needs, my this, my wounds, my this. I have to tell you, that the ungenerous heart and the narcissist go to the hospital and get your meds, because you cannot, it is not possible to find yourself healing from the serious disorders that require an emergence into a cosmic level of consciousness.”

– Caroline Myss

In order for love to be the agent of change towards a better world and to bring about positive change we also need to acknowledge the darker side of life and the world we live in, the things and issues many people look away from, believing that by simply focusing on the “good” and “positive” there will be a shift in consciousness. This kind of thinking is the blind spot in many New Age teachings these days, which actually results in the opposite of what is intended for the unacknowledged shadow grows bigger and stronger, manifesting itself unconsciously through our collective. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

“An Ideal is merely an escape, an avoidance of what is, a contradiction of what is. An ideal prevents direct action upon what is. To have peace, we will have to love, we will have to begin not to live an ideal life but to see things as they are and act upon them, transform them.”

– J. Krishnamurti

The many ideas of just focusing on love and how people interpret that, or sending love to the world leaders and humanity or even to the planet are not acts of real love, but merely emotional projections which are self-deceiving and put man more into sleep, believing he’s actually doing something and bringing about positive change. True love respects free will and one cannot give or send love to someone who didn’t ask for it.

One has to wonder when people talk about world peace and love, but still vote for Obama and believe the lies we’re being told by our governments, be it about 9/11, the war on terror or anything else that has been clearly used for social control. One can have as many positive/loving/nice thoughts and emotional highs as one like, but if one still believes in lies, follows teachings based on lies, there will be no raise in consciousness nor access to a higher love that can actually be a true agent of healing and awareness. On the contrary, believing in lies feeds entropy, no matter how well-meaning the intent.

Love is beyond words and no change is going to happen if people simply repeat that “love is the answer” or “all you need is love” while still clinging to illusions and not engaging in sincere self-work. Without a deep understanding and knowledge of what love truly is and entails, we just keep going in circles as history is repeating itself. If we really want a shift in consciousness then we need to take a look into the mirror and also do the work to see the world as it is without ignoring things that may not look that “pretty”. There is still much we have to confront before we can enter a new world based on love, peace and truth.

“Love is not a behavior, an attitude, a mannerism. It is not etiquette. It is not convention. Love may express itself in many different ways—softly or forcibly. Love can appear meek. Love can appear strong. Love can challenge you. Love can criticize you. Love can expose your illusions, your fantasies and your self-deception. Love is not what people really mean when they talk about love, in nearly all circumstances. Real love emanates from Knowledge. It, in essence, is the expression of Knowledge. Only Knowledge can take you there. Knowledge can bring two people from opposite ends of the world together for a greater purpose. That is the power of the Great Love. And the Great Love is what the world needs now.”

– Marshall Vian Summers

There also seems much confusion about what is supposedly positive or negative, subjective or objective. Some people claim that there is nothing like objectivity and all is subjective. Everything depends on how we look at things and quantum mechanics, so they say, shows us that there is no objective reality or truth, but there is only “my” or “your” truth and we create our own reality by the thoughts we have, what we like to see and what we focus on. But is that really so?

It seems that the science of quantum mechanics has been oversimplified into sales-bits in the new age arena and movies like The Secret. This doesn’t mean throwing out the baby with the bath water, as our perception does seem to have an influence on reality, but maybe it’s not as simple as we have been made to believe by many bestselling “self-help” gurus these days.

“For the record: Quantum mechanics does not deny the existence of objective reality. Nor does it imply that mere thoughts can change external events. Effects still require causes, so if you want to change the universe, you need to act on it.”

– Lawrence M. Krauss, professor of physics

The question about the existence of an objective truth is a tricky one to answer. Philosophical views on truth and criteria for knowing it vary with the old dispute between rationalism and empiricism.

However, beyond philosophical or scientific discussion, there usually seems to be one element that is barely questioned in more depth: the state of being/awareness of a person which relates to how much objective reality he/she can actually access. In our current state of being and existence we cannot perceive objective reality fully, however we can work towards objectivity and expand our understanding of reality and ourselves accordingly. A “shift in consciousness” and “awakening” implies a higher state of awareness, which means to become more aware or it all, which implies again to see the world and oneself more objectively, without blinders on. This doesn’t happen by itself, but requires sincere effort and work to separate truth from lies, within and without. That is the basis of esoteric work which relates to gaining self-knowledge in order to raise awareness and consciousness to a higher level of Being.

“To search means, first, I need Being, Truth; second, I do not know where to find it; and third, an action takes place that is not based on fantasies of certainty— while at the same time a waiting takes place that is rooted not in wishful thinking but in a deep sense of urgency.”

– Jacob Needleman

Subjectivity is the preference to rather consider one’s favorite beliefs than the external world. Such a tendency is generally backed by a strong emotional attachment to these beliefs. Wishful thinking, assumptions and opinions based on reactive behavior directly relate to it. Objectivity is the ability to see things as they are, not as we envision them to be, like them or want them to be. The ability to perceive objective reality depends upon one’s ability to clearly receive . To reach a higher state of objective awareness, one must first see themselves clearly and that entails to work through one’s lies, illusions, buffers and self-deceptions.

“The survival of the ego is established pretty early in life by our parental and societal programming as to what IS or is NOT possible; what we are “allowed” to believe in order to be accepted. We learn this first by learning what pleases our parents and then later we modify our belief based on what pleases our society – our peers – to believe.?[…]?One of the first things we might observe is that everyone has a different set of beliefs based upon their social and familial conditioning, and that these beliefs determine how much of the OBJECTIVE reality anyone is able to access.

Suffice it to say that, under ordinary conditions of reality, we almost never perceive reality as it truly IS. There are thousands of different little “hypnotic suggestions” that have taken hold of us from infancy on, that determine, in any given moment, what we believe or think or think we believe or believe we think.”

– Laura Knight-Jadczyk

It’s easy to over-philosophize the idea of objectivity vs. subjectivity without considering some very practical applications. For example, regardless of what one believes to be “one’s truth” or what one is thinking about and visualizing, if you walk off a cliff, won’t gravity pull you down? Isn’t one plus one two, and not three? Is the world round or flat?

And in regards to global issues: Is the official 9/11 story true or have we been lied to? Was it a false flag attack? Are we losing our basic rights for our protection from the so-called “terrorists” or is there a different reason? Is Obama telling the truth or is he lying? These question can be answered objectively if proper research is done.

However, the truth may not necessarily agree with one’s preferred beliefs, opinions or assumptions. So it is important not to fall into denial or avoidance when some of our core beliefs are being challenged, especially if one is emotionally attached to them and the ego tries to (unconsciously) defend the lies in order to be “right” as the truth may open up a can of worms one is not ready to handle.

Moreover, no matter how much one tries to close oneself off from the “outside world”, believing that nothing will affect them as long as one focuses on “positive” thoughts and what one “likes” to experience, the bigger issues of the world still have an effect on us all, precisely because we are all one and everything is connected. No man is an island and no one’s reality is isolated from the Whole.

A fatuous paradigm that is currently running amok though the New Age community for quite a while is better known as You Create Your Own Reality (YCYOR) and is deliberately creating a lot of confusion. YCYOR is a very misleading and tentative paradigm with a certain half-truth in it, that is never expressed in this way in the Esoteric Traditions. Michael Topper brings some common sense to this issue:

“What makes the YCYOR (You Create Your Own Reality) evangelist fatuous is precisely the fact that all such personal decreeing, positive thinking and confident imagining takes place in an inevitable context. There are implications! There are repercussions! No one decrees in a personal or private, solipsistic vacuum. There is a variegated World of myriad “pulls” and “claims” coexisting along with the private desires and designs of the given ego-subject.

But “so what?” we hear the die-hard “reality-creator” claim “don’t we remain untouched by those ‘co-existents’ as long as we keep secure in the confidence of our own private deservedness, our own authoritative affirmations and specific commissions of positive thought-re-inforcement?”

No. Man does not live by “commission” alone. This is why you do not create your own reality, but merely generate reality-hypotheses or scenarios which are continuously reflected and tested against the Whole; and the Whole, being inseparable from the Potential of your own innate-global Being, is constituted by the explicit and implicit alike, by that which is produced through active or positive commission and that which results from the gaps, blind-spots and vacuums of interpretive omission. All the lines, potential and actual, exist within one’s being and are inevitably calculated into the total account! This is what it means when we say there’s a context in which all our desire-formulation and “decreeing” takes place.

This is a Deity-centered reality, not an ego-centered reality. Only the totality of the soul-nature is in touch with the Totality of Spirit-being. Anything else necessarily involves a partial perspective, a conceptual self-estimation producing inevitable blindspots.

What you have selectively omitted from “your reality”, is manifested as well! We can of course say the “victim” still deserves his fate or has drawn his fate to himself by a quality of callousness embedded in his characteristic thought-formulae; and occasionally this interpretation may touch on some real factor involved in the negative effect. But neither the simple presence of some attitude toward elements of the ultimate negative resultant, nor explanations of residual “karma” (or anything of the kind) may adequately account for all cases in the same category.

It is just simply not true that every rape victim somehow “invited” the experience as a personal form of “commission”.

The converse implication of this, of course, is that only in alignment and integral consonance with the Whole-value of Being may Reality be accurately manifested through the medium of “personal expression” for then there is no discrepancy between “personal” and Universal, the perspectival “part” and the indeterminate Whole. It is under this condition that the “impossible” can be manifested (i.e. that which is self-evidently beyond the power of anyone to “personally” manipulate or control).

For, understood in this way (and only in this way) it may be seen that unimaginable effectiveness results when the expression of one’s “personal” will is not different than or removed from the Spirit of Divine Will, i.e. the Will to reveal Spirit as the Truth and authentic character of everyone’s illimitable Being. This means that, in terms of “personal will”, only the Spirit of the Teaching Function remains. There is no will remaining in the repertoire of “personal will” except that which expresses perfect alignment, integration and identity with Divine Will.

Contrary to unwarranted popular opinion, such initiated alignment with the Will of Absolute Spirit-being does not result in “working one’s will unopposed”. On the contrary, the very presence of the Awakened Truth in the form of the Spiritual adept has always generated immediate opposition; it has always “awakened” a corresponding reaction from the collective ego’s self-protective slumber.

Initiated alignment of will with the creative Whole doesn’t guarantee “smooth personal circumstances”; on the contrary, look at the story of every adept, examine the events surrounding the Masters known to history. Rather it ensures that such events will possess the character of an authentic teaching-demonstration, to all who have the Soul to see. It ensures the Will of the Whole is always done, regardless the partiality and prejudice by which that Whole may be perceived in any given case.”

– Michael Topper

There is an objective truth outside the context of what our little “I” perceives. It seems a tendency in certain Conscious Movements to overgeneralize and distort spiritual “higher” truths and quantum physics with an oversimplification of: All Truth is relative! ?Hence some people unconsciously (or consciously) use this explanation as an excuse and justification for the atrocities in the world or for whatever one may want to believe in one’s own little subjective world, no matter how illusory, false and based on pure wishful thinking or emotional projections it may be; even to the point of declaring that it is all just about “my” or “your” truth and there is no objective truth.

Obviously we all have our own personal lessons to learn and talents to develop, which could be interpreted as one’s “personal truth”, however that doesn’t exclude oneself from the collective lessons we all “need” to look at if we want to evolve consciously as ONE.?? Simply acknowledging that we are all one, separation is illusion and seeing everything as “Light” while focusing on what one believes to be “positive” and ignoring what one perceives as “negative” does not result in change for the better.?? Conversely, by insisting on what one would like to see, as opposed to seeing the world as it is, is coming into conflict with creation, which then results in entropy and MORE suffering on a global scale, not less.

A deeper insight into this gives the Event Enhanced Quantum Theory developed by physicists Ark Jadczyk and Philip Blanchard. Its conclusion in a nutshell:

“Everyone who “believes” in an attempt to “create reality” that is different from what IS, adds to the increase of chaos and entropy. If your beliefs are orthogonal to the truth, no matter how strongly you believe them, you are essentially coming into conflict with how the Universe views itself and I can assure you, you ain’t gonna win that contest. You are inviting destruction upon yourself and all who engage in this “staring down the universe” exercise with you.

On the other hand, if you are able to view the Universe as it views itself, objectively, without blinking, and with acceptance of the reality and appropriate responses to how things really are, you then become more “aligned” with the Creative energy of the universe and your very consciousness becomes a transducer of order energy, and your actions are consonant with what is. Your energy of observation, given unconditionally, matched by the appropriate actions, can bring order to chaos, can create out of infinite potential.”

– from “The Secret History of the World” by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Some people seem to mistake objectivity for negativity and wishful thinking for positivity. Most of what people see as negative or positive are their subjective projections and opinions that don’t really reflect the world as it is. Without Truth and Objectivity there won’t be a change for the “better”, nor a raise in consciousness, within and without.

In that sense, many well-meaning and good-hearted folks who want a better world actually do more harm than any good by ignoring and denying aspects of our reality that may not fit into their subjective “positive” world view; instead believing that by shutting the so-called “negative” out and just seeing everything as “One” and “Light”, visualizing, meditating on world peace and projecting “love and light”, it will create peace and harmony. Nothing could be further from the truth and that is actually exactly what certain forces, who do not wish humanity to awaken for their own interests, want us to do and believe. It ties in with how religious and spiritual values have been corrupted.

In other words, the ones exposing the lies and atrocities in the world, the ones looking at the world as it is with all the different “faces of god” including the unpleasant ones which many people perceive as “negative” and hence like to ignore, are actually doing LIGHT WORK in the true meaning of the word: Making the darkness conscious, raising awareness and shining Light into it. Light is information and knowledge, not just making things “light” in the sense of being “nice” or “kind” and “loving” without saying anything “bad” or “heavy”.

“When we talk about compassion we talk in terms of being kind. But compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative [enough] to wake a person up.”

– Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoch

“Real compassion kicks butt and takes names and is not pleasant on certain days. If you are not ready for this FIRE, then find a new-age, sweetness and light, perpetually smiling teacher and learn to relabel your ego with spiritual sounding terms. But, stay away from those who practice REAL COMPASSION, because they will fry your ass, my friend.”

– Ken Wilber

This contrived “niceness” seems also very common in today’s conscious movements, where people don’t want to say anything “negative”, in their subjective understanding of it of course. In general, some folks hide behind a social etiquette and mask without wanting to say anything bad or touching on any taboo subjects. They speak around issues in order to be spiritually or politically correct so as to “not step on anyone’s toes”.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that one should be mean, aggressive and rude or push information on someone who didn’t ask for it. It simply means to be sincere and honest with conscience and awareness. There is a time to speak up and a time to be silent. And sometimes you have to be direct, call a spade a spade and give the lie what it deserves: the truth, regardless of what others may think, even if it doesn’t sound “nice” and it doesn’t conform to what someone “likes” to hear. You can be considerate and still speak the truth, even if others see it as “negative” from their conditioned point of view.

“Cowardice asks the question: “Is it safe”?? Expediency asks the question: “Is it politic”?? Vanity asks the question: “Is it popular?”?But conscience asks the question: “Is it right?”?And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular?but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one what is right.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are many so-called conscious festivals these days with music, art, workshops and lectures. Lots of pretty people in hip clothes, feathers, furry hats and much eye candy, supposedly representing the “counter-culture” of aware people. There is nothing wrong with dressing up, partying and having a good time, however, when looking at the program of talks and workshops of some of these festivals something seems to be missing, mainly the topics we need to become aware of as a species if we want to make the right turn.

At any festival that claims to be “conscious” and “spiritual” and is supposedly the reflection of the “counter-culture”, one must ask why are there no workshops or lectures about the genocide in Palestine, the crimes by the US government aka Military Industrial Complex, the idea that psychopaths without conscience seem to rule our world and institutions, that 9/11 is a lie that has cost oppression and misery all over the world based on a fake war on terror, that Obama is a corporate puppet just as the old “boss”, that UFOs may not be signs of our “space brothers” coming to help us but that we are actually “food” in many ways, or that we are not “one big human family”, but that there may be souled and soulless humans and many other issues? ……all these topics are part of being aware and conscious, are they not?

It seems that conscious festivals like that are becoming more and more a hip thing rather than using it to truly help people become aware of the shadow that needs to be made conscious of and shined light into. It’s not just about doing yoga, eating raw food and knowing permaculture, nor is it simply about being “positive” for the sake of being positive or learning about how to manifest your desired income.

“We’re very much grounded within the counter culture of the 1960s of which this festival is indeed a legacy and an extension historically, and talk to you about some of… I don’t really want to talk to you about the similarities because you know what the similarities are…the similarities are mainly cosmetic.
And there are some other philosophical similarities which I’ll discuss but one of the things that I’d like to talk with you about are some of the differences. In the 1960s, the counter cultural movement had at its core, we have the music yes, we had the drugs which was not in all ways a high side of it.

There was the music, there was a definite sense of counter culture, there was a definite repudiation of certain values which people deemed to be obsolete and unsustainable. But it bears noting that there was also at it’s core the repudiation of a war and ultimately the ending of a war, which means that the counter culture at that time was making a serious stand against something new on the planet; something horrible on the planet called “American military domination of anything it cared to dominate”. And that gave a moral authority to the counter culture of the 1960s, and I would hope that a festival like this does not- in a heart that brings us here, the consciousness that brings us here- I’m reminded of a line in “A Course in Miracles” where it says, “You cannot bring the light to the darkness you must bring the darkness to the light“.

Dream and I were having an interesting conversation… we were talking about this festival and she said people just wanted to be in the light for a few days…But I say to you as your sister, as your spiritual companion, embedded in the principles of “A Course in Miracles” and in my own spiritual search, but I know that there is only one truth spoken in many different ways…There is a difference between transcendence and denial…and if the consciousness that brings you to a festival like this, is one in which we feel- as Americans, as men, as women, as citizens of the planet- that we can be here, that this can be anything with true gravitas or moral authority and we are forgetting the fact that our country has turned into a permanent war machine, then there is something very sad about this festival rather than happy for me.

Now we were talking about, earlier, we were talking about the fact that men in…about the feminine power…and the divine feminine…and it was another I heard someone say that the men here are holding the space for the feminine ,which is very beautiful, it’s a very beautiful thing the, the mix of, you know- obviously there are men and women here, and both for the women who want to hold the space for the divine feminine, and as well for the men who want are holding the space for the divine feminine, thank you so much.

I’d to talk to you for a moment about the divine feminine because the divine feminine has a fierce aspect. The divine feminine is not just dressing up, the divine feminine it’s not just getting pretty in whatever pretty of the day is, whether it’s big boobs or feathers. It’s all just cosmetic… hello… The divine feminine cares about the fact that 17,000 babies die on this planet everyday of hunger. The divine feminine cries, the divine feminine shrieks when she has to. You know if you… there is an interesting anthropological characteristic of every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives; and that is the fierce behavior of the adult female of that species when she senses that there is a threat to her cubs that whether it’s the mama bear or the tiger or a lion. Did you know that even among the hyenas the adult female hyenas encircle their babies, encircle the cubs while they’re feeding and will not let the adult males of that species anywhere near the food until the cubs have been fed.

Surely the women of America could do better than the hyenas. And the fact that collectively, not in terms of our hearts, our hearts are good, and I know that the heart that draws us to a place like this today is good, but we have to ask ourselves at what point, whether you’re in therapy or your at a festival like this, at what point do you stand in that place which is not comfortable, do you stand in that place which is not comfortable and not turn away? Because if a counter cultural movement, such as this at least externally represents here today, is one, I asked earlier, I said “Hmm. Is there anything political going on here today?” and I was told “No, these are just people who are ready to transcend.” And let be very clear once again about that difference between transcendence and denial because if the counter cultural movement in 2011 is one in which it is deemed for whatever reason acceptable to look away from the fact that tremendous amounts of unnecessary human suffering occur on this planet and in this country for no other reason than that so a relatively few people on this planet and in this country can have all the money they want. That is not service, it is NOT counter cultural, it is the the epitome of being co-opted by the very culture that we seek to counter.

Now you might say to me “What do you want us to do?” I don’t know what your supposed to do… None of my business what your supposed to do. But I’m asking you as Jesus said to the disciples the night before the crucification in the garden of Gethsemane, “Please do not go to sleep. Do not go to sleep in the hour of my agony. Remain awake!”… That’s what they do to you. They put you to sleep! The system would love this festival! The system would love this festival because its not saying “Fuck you!” to anybody. And there’s a sense that that is somehow spiritual. There’s a sense that that is somehow spiritual, and I believe deeply that, as “The Course in Miracles” says, “Look at the crucification but do not dwell on it.” I’m not saying let’s dwell on what’s bad, because if you dwell on what’s bad then it’s true, that is you just focus on it and make more of it. But to not look at it at all… to not look at it at all, there’s not the divine feminine about that.

The divine feminine… if there was a starving child here…somebody tell me…if there was a child here or if anyone- god forbid- let’s just talk about our deep humanity… Let’s say right here right now- god forbid- somebody, uh, had a heart attack or something. Well the fact that I’m speaking up here would be irrelevant. Somebody would yell out say, “Is there a doctor here?” We would all get deeply human very quickly wouldn’t we? Are you with me? Now this is an interesting thing about our country, if you look and see, I always say that if I’m if I’m on an airplane somewhere, anywhere in the world… I love to sit next to an American …I… characterologically we’re cool people and we care. We’re not, you know… We’re human beings and there’s a spunkiness and it’s a coolness. But our collective capacity for denial and grandiosity is frightening and perilous….”

– Marianne Williamson

In the end most people are only afraid of the unknown and what they don’t understand. Once we make the effort to deprogram ourselves from our conditioning and gain knowledge and understanding within AND without, shining “LIGHT” into darkness, our awareness/consciousness rises and we start to SEE in alignment with who we truly are, beyond preference, wishful thinking or denial and then can act in alignment with our Higher Self and the Universe.

If we truly love life, the world we live in and want positive change, then this also implies to look at the issues and injustices in the world so many of us like to ignore or deny. This is not being “negative”, but the work to be done during this Time of Transition

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. ”

– Martin Luther King Jr.

Seeking truth and making the darkness conscious needs to happen within AND without, not just one or the other. Activism and spiritual self-work go hand in hand. It’s not separated but interrelated.

The problem that comes with truth seekers and activists who only focus on the outside is that they can easily fall into the trap of disinformation or they resonate with lies because their “Reading Instrument”, the Self, is not “tuned” correctly through sincere self work which would help their critical thinking abilities. It becomes harder to separate truth from lies and one may even spread disinformation unknowingly because one is less likely to see the “unseen” or the “devil in the details” so to speak, resulting in oversimplifications, assumptions, and misconceptions. In other words, I need to understand my “machine”, my habitual way of thinking and how my emotional reactions and attachments can distort things, how I take in information and how my own bias and conditioned beliefs filter information which can result in cognitive dissonance.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.“

– Frantz Fanon

“In order to understand the interrelation of truth and falsehood in life, a man must understand falsehood in himself, the constant incessant lies he tells himself.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff

According to the mystic and spiritual teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, the human organism is constituted by two fundamental functions: essence and personality. Essence is what we are born with, the raw material of one’s being. It includes the physical body, genetic make-up, energy metabolism, the inborn capacity for emotions and sensations. There are also external influences that affect us, such as planetary vibrations, present in the immediate environment at conception, during the fetal stage, and at birth. An astrological birth chart can give some insight into that.

As we grow, our essence is molded by cultural influences. It can mature along the lines of its inherent nature and potential, or it can become blocked in its maturation and hence form something that works against its inborn potential. Essence would evolve in societies where essential practices and values predominate, such as sincerity, love, truth, compassion, knowledge, and so on. Obviously we live in a world where such values have become distorted and ponerized, meaning that our society at large has taken on pathological values that are seen as normal and people can no longer make the distinction between healthy and pathological thought processes and logic. One is no longer able to draw a line between correct thinking and deviate thinking. The influence of higher density beings and forces may also have an effect on us in that regard as explored in UFOs, Aliens, and The Question of Contact.

Personality is the mask we carry over our essence. The vehicle for essence to work through so to speak. Our personality is conditioned and programmed through upbringing in a society that is built on lies, and the stronger the programming, the harder it is for essence to come through. Hence, de-programming and facing the lies of one’s personality is key so it becomes a direct reflection and expression of essence, which ultimately leads to conscious actions based on one’s inherent potential. In a mature person, essence and personality form one continuous “I”, which is to say that the person is unified.

“People are always infused with all kinds of fantastic ideas about themselves, the world, people, love, idealism, society, etc. Led by his eagerness to evade a disagreeable reality, man gives free rein to his imagination and is inclined to believe the first agreeable lie he encounters along the way. The individual projects his personal illusions onto a cold and immutable reality, and thus deceiving himself, he endeavors to contemplate reality through rose-colored glasses. “Disillusion” is a painful process and can be prolonged, depending on how much time the individual takes to realize he is living artificially and that this condition is a product of his internal dreams. Great courage is required to face reality and to destroy the mirage of a pleasant dream.”

– John Baines

On the other hand, many spiritually inclined people only focus on the self, believing that will change the outside eventually, without making the effort to look at the world more objectively and acting upon it. Gandhi’s call to “be the change you want to see in the world” has also been misunderstood that way. First of all the “kind of change” people want to see is different for each based on one’s subjective understanding of it, which can be very distorted, especially if one is avoiding seeing the world as it is, believing in lies and just projecting one’s desires and hopes that are based on the conditioned personality, resulting in wishful thinking. For example, just being “nice” because I want to see a “nice” world does not automatically make the world so, especially since some humans are “wired” differently.

Another issue is that many people try to explain everything through one system or teaching and do not see its limitations or even distort it to mold it into their belief system. For example, not everything “negative” in the world is a manifestation of our shadow material, nor is everything that happens to us our karma, nor do we attract everything with our thoughts. Sure there is truth to the idea of karma, but using that explanation to justify all the atrocities in the world is short-sighted and misses the point as we still have to act and learn our lessons, not just “turn the other cheek” or stand by and keep silent, saying “oh it’s just your/their/my karma”.

We are not the peak of God’s creation and so special and holy that nothing other than ourselves would harm, control or manipulate us. It’s actually quite arrogant and anthropocentric to think that way. We don’t do everything to ourselves. It’s not about blaming, but getting out of our self-centered view of reality and the universe. There are other forces acting on us, just as we influence, consume and to a certain extent control lower life forms such as plants and animals. As above, so below.

“There are a thousand things which prevent a man from awakening, which keep him in the power of his dreams. In order to act consciously with the intention of awakening, it is necessary to know the nature of the forces which keep man in a state of sleep. First of all it must be realized that the sleep in which man exists is not normal but hypnotic sleep. Man is hypnotized and this hypnotic state is continually maintained and strengthened in him. One would think that there are forces for whom it is useful and profitable to keep man in a hypnotic state and prevent him from seeing the truth and understanding his position.”

– G. I. Gurdjieff

The learning never stops and humanity still has much to confront and learn about that may require a whole new understanding of reality, just like there are different or expanded views now in science compared to what Einstein and Newton had discovered.

There is always more to learn and find out that requires an adjustment and new understanding, expanding our view and understanding of reality. It is what raising consciousness implies. People who are stuck in one idea or teaching and try to explain everything through it are building their own limited reality box. This also relates to psychology, astrology, philosophy, the healing arts, spiritual practices or any religion (east and west) where many “experts” in any of these systems are looking through one lens (many of them distorted/false to begin with), not realizing that this approach can easily lead to distortion and a tunnel vision. It can also become an egotistical point of pride preventing that person to admit to him/herself that there is maybe more to the story which one hasn’t considered before, especially when they have written books about it, their career depends on it and they have an image to sell/live up to.

One can see these fallacies with many popular spiritual teachers, researchers, visionaries, therapists and self-help gurus, where career and image seem to take precedence over truth and reality. There are many topics that affect us more than many of them are aware of, be it the idea of hyperdimensional manipulation, genetic psychopathy or soulless humans. But instead of being more open to such topics and looking into them sincerely and unbiased, these seemingly intelligent and aware individuals ignore or debunk them right off-hand exposing their own lack of critical thinking.

Awareness and study of the aforementioned topics and also looking into the “taboo” subject of conspiracies would actually help and expand their knowledge and ability to truly help others and society at large.

Many people tend to laugh at the term “conspiracy theories” and even use it with a negative, condescending tone. The social reality that they are taboo solidifies this also deeper into people’s minds, subconsciously. Nobody wants to be called a “conspiracy theorist.” It’s like calling somebody a “wacko” and commonly used as an ad hominem attack that lacks critical thinking. Most people don’t have a true understanding of what the word “conspiracy” actually means. Historian Richard M. Dolan brings some common sense to this issue:

“From a historical point of view, the only reality is that of conspiracy. Secrecy, wealth and independence add up to power. Deception is the key element of warfare, (the tool of the power elites), and when winning is all that matters, the conventional morality held by ordinary people becomes an impediment. Secrecy stems from a pervasive and fundamental element of life in our world, that those who are at the top of the heap will always take whatever steps are necessary to maintain the status quo.?[…]? The very label ‘conspiracy’ serves as an automatic dismissal, as though no one ever acts in secret. Let us bring some perspective and common sense to this issue. The United States comprises large organizations – corporations, bureaucracies, ‘interest groups,’ and the like – which are conspiratorial by nature. That is, they are hierarchical, their important decisions are made in secret by a few key decision-makers, and they are not above lying about their activities. Such is the nature of organizational behavior. ‘Conspiracy’, in this key sense, is a way of life around the globe.“

– Richard Dolan

“Do I believe in conspiracies? Naah! Do I believe that powerful people would get together and plan for certain outcomes? Naah! Do I believe that powerful interests would operate outside the law and maybe even kill people? Naah! Do I believe secret government agencies might feel the need to assassinate a person and cover it up? Naah! I think everything in America is open and clean and above board and powerful people always play by the rules.”

I think the system contracts and expands as it wants to. It accommodates these changes. I think the civil rights movement was an accommodation on the part of those who own the country. I think they see where their self-interest lies. They see a certain amount of freedom seems good, an illusion of liberty. Give these people…give these people a voting day every year so that they’ll have the illusion of meaningless choice… meaningless choice that we go like slaves and say, “Yeah, I voted.”

The limits of debate in this country are established before the debate even begins and everyone else is marginalized and made to seem either to be communists or some sort of disloyal person, a “kook”- there’s a word- and now it’s “conspiracy”, see? They’ve made that something that should not even be entertained for a minute; that powerful people might get together and have a plan. Doesn’t happen, you’re a kook, you’re a conspiracy buff!

– George Carlin

Our views on life and existence, science and religion, spirituality and evolution, consciousness and psychology as well as reality as we know it would take on a whole new understanding when looking deeper into the topics we dismiss so easily simply because we don’t “believe” them to be true. Let’s not forget, not too long ago we believed that the earth is flat.

“Consciousness means, literally, “knowing-together.” A development of consciousness would therefore mean knowing “more together,” and so it would bring about a new relationship to everything previously known. For to know more always means to see things differently.”

– Maurice Nicoll

We’re being lied to in virtually all areas of our lives and our attention is being vectored away from the truth. The corruption of science plays a big part in it as well. As a matter of fact, those who get too close to the truth are often attacked and ridiculed. Truth is no good for business in a ponerized society with psychopaths in power, steering the ship where pathological traits have become the accepted norm in our official culture.

The work to seek truth within and without is not for everyone, nor can everyone engage in it since people are different inside, some lacking the “seed” so to speak. Not everyone is a Warrior (as coined by Carlos Castaneda) and everyone has different lessons to learn and talents to develop with a different “inner wiring”. Nobody is better or worse, it’s just what it is in this evolutionary cycle we’re in. For that reason there also won’t be a collective awakening where everyone is all of a sudden “enlightened” or “aware”. Many folks who are waiting for 2012 for that to happen will be greatly disappointed. Awakening implies evolving consciously. Now is an opportunity (not a guarantee), a “window” to move up a level so to speak, but it doesn’t happen by itself. Conscious effort and work are needed to counter the forces of entropy for there is a way up and down as the Hopi Indians said about this Time of Transition.

“What is difficult to understand is that without conscious effort, nothing is possible. Conscious effort is related to higher nature. My lower nature cannot lead me to consciousness. It is blind. But when I wake up and I feel that I belong to a higher world, this is only part of conscious effort. I become truly conscious only when I open to all my possibilities, higher and lower. There is value only in conscious effort.”

– Jeanne De Salzmann

Many are called, few are chosen [or choose to answer the call]. Now is the time for the ones who feel “called” to ask themselves, what am I doing with my life, where is my attention and focus? Am I doing the best I can to help in this time of transition in terms on working on myself and seeking truth? Conscious Reality Creation happens when we are connected with our true self/higher self and we become a vessel for higher energies to work through us which are in alignment with the universe and one’s soul’s purpose, not the desires, wants and needs of the conditioned personality. If our actions and beliefs are in alignment with what IS, we become transducers of energies that not only benefit us individually but the world at large, bringing order out of chaos.

It is important that the ones who are sincerely engaged in seeking truth connect with others who are like-minded, so we become collinear and act as alarm clocks for each other, keeping each other awake and help in the process of separating truth from lies. A nucleus of truly conscious people, acting as conscious transducers of higher energies and seeing the universe as it sees it self, working towards objectivity, can provide the qualitative frequency resonance vibration that will create the template for the new world. The more people do this work consciously the better, but it is about quality over quantity.

There are countless distractions, temptations and deceptions that keep the seeker away from Truth and Awakening in this Matrix Control System with various forces acting on humanity to keep us asleep. It comes down to discernment and without inner work in order to see the unseen we cannot raise our Being to truly BE the change we want to SEE according to our higher nature and not our conditioned personality. At the same time Being the change entails facing reality and see things as they are, not as we hope, wish or want them to be. It’s a holistic approach. Just as we need to cleanse and detoxify our body and give it the proper nutrition, we also need to detoxify the world “out there” by separating truth (nutrition) from lies (toxins).

This has also nothing to do with trying to “save the world”, but simply engaging in the process of conscious evolution, nor is it about “controlling external reality”, but acting in alignment with the universe. And we only become truly aligned if we engage in the work to see the universe as it sees itself. Being entails seeing the world as it IS. That is the path towards healing, wholeness, conscious reality creation and essentially true Love. It’s a process that is different for each as we all have our own lessons to learn, karma to work out and talents to develop in this time of transition.

In that sense everyone also has unique skills which he/she can contribute to the whole, so we can support each other, moving from Service to Self and competition towards Service to Others and sharing. It’s about working together creating synergy, but also respecting each others individuality and process at the same time. What may work for one, may not work for another. But to know this, we need to know our true self and also make the effort to see the world as it is, so our actions have real impact and power beyond self-gratification or senseless rioting.

“Every man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion.
He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over God’s depths into an infinite sea.
This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which a general soul incarnates in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him, and good when it is done, but which no other man can do.
He has no rival.
For the more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other. When he is true and faithful, his ambition is exactly proportional to his powers. By doing his work he makes the need felt which only he can supply.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more we are collinear and SEE the world as it is and act as ONE, the “easier” the transition to a better world for all of us. We do create our reality and our consciousness has an effect on the outside world, but we need to be in alignment with the Universe, otherwise we will increase entropy and chaos, which also manifests in earth and climate changes, as we can see already happening. Increased awareness combined with action based on truth could mitigate any upcoming cataclysms that seem to be right over the horizon. It’s up to each one of us and all of us together.

“With the approach of the era of the Holy Spirit, everything must be gradually brought to the light of day, not only the secrets of the laboratory but the deepest meanings of esotericism. The same must happen with illusions, errors and lies, which must also be revealed so that they can later be rectified.

The world is suffering from a lack of harmony which gets deeper on every plane, and this is a serious danger to the moral and spiritual recovery of humanity. It also involves a serious risk of failure in the last stage of this Time of Transition that we are now entering, If this risk is not overcome, the Deluge of Fire awaits us. We will have to make an immense effort to ward off this fate, and we have very little time in which to do it.

Man has only himself to blame for the greatness of the effort needed: this is a result of his obstinate refusal to heed the warnings that have been addressed to him time and again by the Divine Voice, just as he continues today to blind himself to the fact that the Deluge of Fire is being made ready.”

– Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Light gatherers

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

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

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

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

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

Some, however, could not wait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “Tikkun olam” in religious Zionism

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

First and foremost, Zionism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “restoration of the world” on the left

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The orthodox answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A True Story

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

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

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

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

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

I promised that I would.

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

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

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

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Coming To

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mystery and History of Anesthesia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do we know a patient is “asleep”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Near Death Experiences (NDEs)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is fear keeping us “Anesthetized”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Possibility and Implications of Reincarnation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will we ever find the Proof we are looking for?

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

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

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

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

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

Are we biased?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

“Shark tank” was the way I have been describing the recent Congressional subcommittee hearing I attended, in disguise, as support to RFK, Jr., as well as in my capacity as an extraterrestrial anthropologist learning about the ritualistic practices of the natives. I hope that doesn’t sound superior or judgmental. It’s my way of describing the feeling of entering a reality quite different from what I’m used to.

My “disguise” consisted of the traditional garb of the natives when entering the public arena of ritual verbal combat. It includes an unnecessary outer garment called a “sports jacket” in the local dialect. I’m not sure what it has to do with sports, though I suspect it may have health benefits by inducing sweating in the absence of vigorous physical activity. The other notable item of ceremonial regalia is known as a “necktie,” a kind of thin, silk kerchief tied around the neck of males only. The semiotics of this accessory are ambiguous. It seems to signal dominance (the lower-status photographers did not wear one). However, it also suggests submission to a tacit social code, or possibly a yoke of servitude. To show up at such a hearing in a T-shirt would be a high-status play, not a low-status play.

Anyway, at first I felt a little bad about calling the hearing a shark tank, because I don’t like to perpetuate negative stereotypes about sharks by equating the behavior of these magnificent animals to what transpired at the hearing. The sharks might not appreciate being compared to Congresspeople. Ooh, that was mean joke. I must be getting infected by the sensibilities of the shark tank.

The social dynamics I witnessed at the hearing were all too human. My study of Rene Girard was useful in understanding what took place.

Girard was a philosopher and theologian famous for two main ideas: mimetic desire, and sacrificial violence. The latter, he said, originated from the original social problem: retributive violence. Cycles of vengeance would escalate, embroiling more and more people into blood feuds in which eventually everyone took sides. These would arise especially in times of social stress, which could be entirely external in origin (bad weather, crop failures, plagues, etc.).

Lest this internecine strife tear society apart, people arrived at a rather irrational but effective solution — in an act of unifying violence, both sides would turn on a convenient victim or group of victims, preferably from a dehumanized subclass, people who were not full members of society and whose deaths, therefore, would be less likely to provoke a new cycle of vengeance. Once murdered, once the blood lust was discharged and the need to act was met, peace would reign once again. Since the problem was solved by killing the victim, people concluded, with typical perverse human logic, that the victim must have been the cause of the problem. The victims were thus memorialized in myth and legend as villains and monsters.

Many, if not most, ancient cultures institutionalized these killings and used them preemptively by murdering sacrificial victims to maintain social harmony. This, as I have argued elsewhere, was the origin of capital punishment as well as festival kings.

The legacy of this practice is that humans are exquisitely attuned to who is acceptable and who is not, who’s in the in-group and who’s in the out-group, who are the popular kids and who are the weird kids. A primal social reflex operates in the schoolyard as it does in the halls of Congress. Anyone who is seen playing with the weird kid takes on the taint of weirdness themselves. This kind of guilt-by-association is the hallmark of sacrificial dynamics. Even to join in the jeering with insufficient enthusiasm casts a person under shadow of suspicion. The safest course is to join in and outdo everyone else in the ferocity of your denunciations of the weird kid. Or the witches, the Jews, the Communists, the anti-vaxxers, the conspiracy theorists, or whomever is subject to the current designation. I call this mob morality. “Good” means conforming to the prevailing designation, joining in its execution, and displaying the symbols, uttering the catchwords, and holding the opinions of the in-group.

In the McCarthy era, merely having been present at a meeting attended by members of the Communist Party was enough to ruin one’s career. One needn’t have been an actual Communist. It was enough to be labeled a “fellow traveler,” a “com-simp” (Communist sympathizer), or “pinko.” The power of the accusation did not depend on any objective fact. Once the cloud of suspicion was raised, any prudent person would hasten to distance themselves from the accused, just to be sure.

In the Congressional hearing I attended, the Democrats on the committee deployed this tactic by calling Bobby Kennedy an anti-Semite, and through various chains of association, linking him to White supremacy, replacement theory, synagogue massacres, and racial violence. It did not matter that the man is obviously no anti-Semite. He is one of the most ardently pro-Israel politicians around. (I don’t agree with him on this issue—if I’m on any “side” of it at all, it is the side of the Israeli and Palestinian peace activists.) However, mob dynamics do not require that the victim is actually guilty of any crime.

Even if the victim is guilty of a crime, he or she is not guilty of what the dehumanization accuses, which is to be less than fully human. Everyone is innocent of that. That’s why a primal indignation wells up in most people as they watch mob dynamics in action. It is the original injustice.

Most of the comments I heard afterwards expressed this indignation. The dehumanizing tactics seem not to be working, whether in the hearing or in the broader media landscape. If such tactics begin to fail more generally, the future is bright, because these are how elites turn popular political energy against itself.

A certain personality type is adept at harnessing mob morality and riding it to power. Such people are aware that the crowd is always looking for someone to signal who the next untouchables are. The ringleader of the cool girls on the playground says, “Sarah has cooties!” and everyone else knows what to do. It matters not at all whether Sarah actually has cooties (originally the word meant “lice,” but when I was in grade school no one knew that. All we knew was that the term signaled ostracism.)

In the grown-up world, instead of having cooties we are accused of being White supremacists, racists, transphobes, conspiracy theorists, New Agers, anti-vaxxers, sexual predators, and so forth. There is no defense against such accusations; in fact, attempting to rebut them only further establishes the association. Because remember, it is the accusation itself that signals who is untouchable. Disputing its veracity doesn’t help.

The supreme irony of our time is that many of the above-listed epithets used to dehumanize opponents are themselves descriptions of dehumanization. Racism, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism see certain others as less than fully human. Using them to dehumanize opponents feeds the cultural and psychic field that is responsible for racism etc. to begin with.

Today, the sacrificial victims of mob morality are not literally lynched, murdered, or burnt at the stake. Yet these metaphors from an earlier era indeed convey what is happening. The dynamics are the same, and the result is likewise a removal from the social, if not the physical, world, through deplatforming, canceling, and silencing. Once the signal has been sent, the resulting hysteria does indeed resemble a shark feeding frenzy, as each member of the mob hastens to grab a bite of in-group acceptance by piling onto the victim.

Mob dynamics normally have a life cycle. Once the victims have been sacrificed, social harmony reigns again. That can happen, however, only when the victim subclass is too small and powerless to effectively resist. Today we have two large social factions attempting to use mob tactics against each other. The subtext of current controversies in the digital public square is, “Those people on the other side are inexcusable, horrible, deplorable… subhuman.” Both sides reinforce the same basic agreement that has so often led, historically, to paroxysms of violence.

We can reverse the pattern. The antidote to mob morality is to establish and spread the understanding of the full and equal humanity of each human being. It is to refrain from convenient disparaging caricatures and stereotypes that reduce people to labels. It is to hold, instead, a story of each other that makes room for the highest expression of our humanity. It requires a kind of unrelenting courtesy, an insistence on generosity of interpretation, and a willingness to put something else above victory.

The tactics of dehumanization are powerful, universally used in wars—and in politics. It is counterintuitive in the political realm to put anything higher than victory. Everyone is convinced that they are on the side of good. Therefore, victory for themselves means victory for good. But that is a delusion. No one is fundamentally more good than anyone else, and none of us are made of better stuff than the rest.

What else shall we place on the altar, if not victory? I won’t try to answer that question for you. That’s between you and God. All I can say is that for me, remembrance of and devotion to what I hold sacred is what forestalls my reflex to dehumanize the other, to make the other an other, and to perpetuate the age-old war of man against man. The reflex is strong. It feels safe to accuse in concert with those around me. But I think we are ready to be done with that. Any victory worth having must come through different means.

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.