The data are now almost definitive and, as you probably already know, it was a historical triumph for the right-wing parties, and in particular for the "Fratelli d'Italia" coalition led by Giorgia Meloni. 

The triumph of the right may make people outside Italy worried, but there is no reason. Elections in the West are now mainly for show. The Italian government has almost zero power, it is all in the hands of the European Commission, in turn controlled by the global powers. To say nothing about the pervasive corruption that affects the West as a whole. No decision can be taken without satisfying the various lobbies and mafias engaged in the feeding frenzy on what is left of the Italian economy. 

In any case, the left-wing parties in power up to now have made such strongly right-wing choices that I doubt that the "real" right can be more rightish than them! 

So, don't worry too much about who is the theoretical leader of the Italian government. Ms. Meloni is, in my opinion, not a bad person, but she can't do much more than rubber-stamp decisions taken elsewhere. Changes are going to come, but not as a result of elections. Right now, it is difficult to divine what's going to happen in the difficult winter that's coming, but something is going to happen. Something big.

Incidentally, the left played the game hard by using the "Putin card," that is, telling Italians not to vote for Putin's friends. Instead, Italians flocked to vote exactly for them. I leave to you the task of interpreting this interesting fact. 

"Do not vote for Putin's friends." La Repubblica, Sep 23, 2022

An interpretation of Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes, Celts who lived in Britain at the time of the Roman invasion (Image by Kate Spitzmiller). She lived at the same time as the more commonly remembered Queen Boudica, who fought the Romans. Cartimandua, instead, was what we would call today a "collaborationist". You might also call her a traitoress of her people, but so goes history. Can we learn something from the way the Romans subdued the Britons and incorporated them into their empire? As usual, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes a lot. 

Martys' Mac argues in a recent post that the American Empire had some special characteristics that make it different from other empires, especially the Soviet one. According to him, the US has been more benign, more open, more willing to let its client states develop independently, both economically and culturally.

Marty's Mac is a sharp observer but, in this case, I think he missed some basic points. Empires (and states, as well) are all very similar to each other, and the US and the USSR are not exceptions, as noted for instance by Dmitry Orlov. Not that I pretend to know more than anyone else about the old Soviet Union, but I suggest caution when discussing such wide-ranging issues. The Soviet Union was a complex reality that, in the West, remained largely unknown, shadowed by a barrier of language and propaganda. And we must be careful about falling into the trap of thinking that anything real looks in any significant way like the portrait that propaganda paints of it. 

This said, let's discuss Marty Mac's position. He starts with: 

A traditional empire does not seek to enter into mutually beneficial economic arrangements with its neighbors, but to suck up neighboring resources for its own benefit.

Which is, by all means, true. But it describes not just empires, but also states and kingdoms. There is a general law called "the rich get richer" that creates a centralization phenomenon. In all states, resources move from the periphery to the center. Think about France, which is not an Empire, but where the size of the capital, Paris, is so much larger than any other French city that it is outside the normally used statistical models. To the point that a specific term has been invented for it, "The Dragon King."

The argument Marty Mac's makes is mostly based on a comparison between the Marshall plan that the US enacted after WW2 was over, with the equivalent for the Soviet Union, the less well-known Molotov plan. 

The Soviet Union imposed severe reparations on its conquered territories. Romania was obligated to pay $300 million (in 1938 dollars, i.e., prior to war inflation) to its new Soviet masters; Hungary was also obligated to pay $300 million (200 to the USSR and 100 to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia). The on-paper equivalent of the Marshall Plan within the Soviet sphere was the Molotov Plan, which officially offered aid to conquered Eastern European nations. However, this assistance was meager at best (nations like Romania and Hungary still suffered under their war debts), and could reasonably be understood as a public relations effort at countering the Marshall Plan.

It is true that the Soviet Union was considerably more stingy toward its client states than the United States with theirs. But why did the two empires behave so differently? We could argue that it was because of some ideological differences, but also, more simply, structural ones. The Soviet Union was a rival of the American Empire, but it was also smaller and poorer. The population of the Warsaw Pact countries (Soviet Union+allies) was around 400 million, that of the NATO alliance (US+allies) was over 600 million. Then, in terms of GDP and expenses, I wrote in a previous post that, 

...in order to survive, the Soviet Empire had to match the rival Western Empire in military terms. But the Soviet economy was much smaller: we can roughly estimate that it always was no more than about 40% of the US economy, alone. To match the huge Western economic and military machine, the Soviet Union needed to dedicate a large fraction of its economic output into the military system. Measuring this fraction has never been easy, but we can say that in absolute terms the Soviet military expenses nearly matched those of the US, although still remaining well below those of the NATO block. Another rough estimate is that during the cold war the Soviet Union spent about 20% of its gross domestic product on its military. Compare with the US: after WW2, military spending went gradually down from about 10% to the current value of about 2.4%. In relative terms, during the cold war, the USSR would normally spend at least four times more than the US for its military. 

In short, the Soviet Union just could not afford costs equivalent to the Marshall plan. So, the behavior of the US empire was, and remains, dictated by practical factors rather than ideological ones. When the US had a considerable surplus, it could afford an extravaganza such as the Marshall plan. Not just an extravaganza, though. It was also a good investment since the European states were a much better barrier against a possible Soviet attack if they were economically strong. Note also that the economic aid of the Marshall plan didn't come without strings attached. To have the money, the Western European states had to cut all ties with the Soviet Union and with the states of the Warsaw Pact. And the local communist parties, at that time still relatively strong, were to be kept outside government coalitions. 

Now, of course, things have changed a lot. In the grip of a terrible crisis, probably in its last gasps, the US empire can't even remotely conceive a new Marshall plan. On the contrary, it is behaving like the old Soviet Empire. The whole West is turning into a police state, where the government controls all the media and criminalizes dissent. Then, it is not surprising that the imperial center is extracting resources from its client states in Western Europe to the point of beggaring them. 

The discussion could be long and detailed, and Marty's Mac post is much more detailed than the few concepts I have reported here. But I think that, as usual, we can find much food for thought in the behavior of past empires. In particular, I think that a good illustration of the behavior of empires is given by how the Romans dealt with the Britons during the period that goes from the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD. We see how the annexation of the Britons was only in part obtained by a military invasion. Mostly, it was a question of assimilation. The Romans "romanized" the Britons, making them appreciate such things as Roman money and the luxury items that money could buy. Then, they tricked them into borrowing money from Rome and, finally, when they could not repay the debt, they used that as an excuse to seize their assets and their lands. The similarities between the behavior of the US empire with Western Europe are evident. First, they offered money to the Europeans to rebuild their economy, and now they are squeezing Europe dry. 

It is the typical way of Empires: they work like pushers. First, they offer you cheap drugs, then if you don't pay for more doses, they may beat the pants off you, or kill you. In this, they are helped by the traitors that they can place at the top of the states they want to incorporate. Also here, we have an example in the story of Britannia, with Queen Cartimandua as a symmetric equivalent of Queen Boudicca. Whereas Boudicca is seen as a heroine who rebelled against the Romans, Cartimandua allied herself with them. History, as usual, rhymes. A modern incarnation of the collaborationist (or traitoress) Queen Cartimandua could be found in Ursula Von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. 

Below, a post that I published about Queen Boudica that illustrates the mechanism of corruption and assimilation that the Romans used to incorporate Britannia into their Empire.

The Queen and the Philosopher: War, Money, and Metals in Roman Britain

We know very little about _Queen Boudica of the Iceni (20 AD (?) - 61 AD) and most of what we know is probably deformed by Roman propaganda. But we may still be able to put together the main elements of her story and how it was that she almost threw the mighty Roman Legions out of Britain. Above, a fantasy interpretation of the Celtic Queen from "galleryhip.com" (This post was inspired by a note from Mireille Martini)_

You probably know the story of Queen Boudica. Tall, strong, and terrible, she was the embodiment of the fierce warrioress who fought - bravely but unsuccessfully - to defend her people from the oppression of an evil empire, that the Romans. It all happened during the reign of Emperor Nero, 1st century AD. 

The passage of time has turned these events into legends, deformed by the lens of propaganda. But maybe we can still discern the reasons for Boudica's rebellion and learn something relevant for our times. As it often happens in history, to understand why something happens, you only need to follow the money.  In this particular case, it is curious that the money that triggered the war may have been provided by no one else than Lucius Annaeus Seneca, yes, the Stoic philosopher. But it is a story that needs to be told from the beginning.

First of all, why were the Romans in Britain at the time of Queen Boudica? Simple: because of the British mineral resources. Britain had a long story of mining that went back to the Bronze Age and to even earlier times. The British mines could provide copper, tin, iron, lead, and even precious metals: gold and silver. These were all vital resources for the Roman Empire which used precious metals for coinage and all sort of metals for its various technologies.

The Romans already set foot in Britain at the time of Julius Caesar, in 55 BC. They set up a full-fledged invasion only in AD 43 under Emperor Claudius. But even before invading, according to  Strabo's Geography, there was a brisk commercial network that connected Rome to Britain. The Britons exported metals and imported luxury goods of all sorts, silk, olive oil, food, slaves, and more.

It was all part of the way the Romans managed their empire. Their expansion was not simply a question of a blitzkrieg war machine. Invading a foreign kingdom was preceded by a long period of cultural and commercial assimilation and it was attempted only when it could provide a financial return. That required a certain degree of economic development of the regions being assimilated. It didn't work with the Germans, who had no mines and only a relatively primitive economy. And they were also a tough military force, able to defeat even the mighty Roman war machine - they did that at Teutoburg, in 9 AD. So, the Romans shifted their attention to the wealthier and metal-rich Britain. It worked: the invasion of 43 AD was relatively easy in military terms. Afterward, the mines increased their production by means of Roman technology, commerce boomed, new Roman settlements were built, and Britain started being romanized.

But something went badly wrong in 60 AD, when the Romans suddenly faced a major rebellion of the Iceni people living in Eastern England, led by their redoubtable queen, Boudica. At the end of this post, you can read the details of the story as we know it, told by Jason Porath in a light-hearted style. Summarizing, when Boudica's husband, King Prasotagus, died, the Romans intervened, seized his lands, had his widow flogged, and his daughters raped. The queen was not amused and the rebellion started with all the associated atrocities. Eventually, the Romans managed to get the upper hand and Boudica killed herself.

But what made the Romans behave in a way that was nearly sure to spark a rebellion? Maybe it was just their lust for power, but there is a detail told by Dio Cassius (vol VIII, Cassius Dio, Roman History, 62.2) that can help us understand what happened. Cassius says that Seneca (yes, he was a philosopher, but also a rich man) had lent to the Iceni a large sum of money and that the Iceni were unable to return it. That suggests that the key to the story was money.
According to Dio Cassius, we are talking of 40 million sesterces. What kind of money is that? It is not so easy for us to visualize this sum, but we know that in those times a Roman legionary was paid nine hundred sestertii per annum. So, 40 million sesterces could pay some 50 thousand troops for a year - a large military force for the time. From this and other data, we could say - very roughly - that the value of a sesterce was of the order of 50 dollars. So, 40 million sesterces could be compared to some two billion dollars today. Clearly, we are discussing of a large sum for a small economy such as that of the Iceni tribe had to be.

We don't know what King Prasotagus had in mind to do with that money, but we know that something went wrong. Dio Cassius faults Seneca himself for having precipitated the rebellion by insisting to have his money back. That Seneca did that out of personal greed seems to be unlikely, as discussed by Grimal. Cassius was writing more than a century after the events and he may have wanted to cast Seneca in a bad light for ideological reasons. But that's just a detail,  what matters is that the Iceni (or, better said, the Iceni elite) defaulted on a large debt they had with the Romans.

In ancient times, defaulting on one's debt was a serious crime, so much that the early Roman laws punished it by having the debtor drawn and quartered. In Imperial times, there were considerably more lenient laws - but these laws very valid only for Roman citizens and Boudica was not one. In this light, flogging doesn't sound like an exaggerated punishment for defaulting on a large debt (2 billion dollars!). Even the rape of her daughters was not something unusual as a punishment for non-Roman citizens in those times. In any case, it is likely that the Romans didn't do what they did because they enjoyed torturing and raping women -- they used the default as an excuse to seize the Iceni kingdom. We can't even exclude that the loan was engineered from the beginning with the idea of annexing the kingdom to the Roman Empire.

Be it as it may, at this point, the Iceni elite had little choice: either lose everything or rebel against the largest military power of their time. Neither looked like a good choice, but they chose the one that turned out to be truly disastrous.

All that happened afterward was already written in the book of destiny - the archeological records tell us of cities burned to the ground, confirming the reports of initial Iceni victories told to us by Roman historians. Standard propaganda techniques probably caused the Romans to exaggerate the atrocities performed by the Iceni, just as the number of their fighters in order to highlight their own military prowess. Even Boudica herself was portrayed as a larger-than-life warrioress, but we can't even be completely sure that she actually existed. In any case, the revolt was bound to fail, and it did. In a few centuries, Boudica was forgotten by her own people: we have no mentions of her in the records from Celtic Britain. The Roman Empire faded, but the Roman influence on British customs and language remains visible to this day (and the ghost of the old queen may be pleased by the Brexit!).

What's most interesting in this story is the light it sheds on the inner workings of Empires. We tend to think that Empires exist because of their mighty armies - which is true, in part - but armies are not everything and in any case, the soldiers must be paid. Empires exist because they can control money, (or capital if you prefer). That's the real tool that builds empires: No money - no empire! 

And that takes us to the current empire, the one we call the "American Empire" or "the "Western Empire." It does have mighty armies but, really, the grip it has on the world is all based on money. Without the mighty dollar, it is hard to think that the large military and commercial network we call "globalization" could exist.

So, can we think of a modern equivalent of the Iceni rebellion? Surely we can: think of the end of the Soviet Union. It was brought down in 1991 not by military means but by financial ones. The debt the Soviet Union had with the West is estimated at US$ 70 billion, in relative terms probably not far from the 40 million sesterces the Iceni owed to the Romans. Unable to repay this debt, the Soviet elites had only two choices: dissolve or fight. They made an attempt to fight with the "August Putsch" in 1991, but it rapidly fizzled out. There was no chance for the Soviet Communists to make a mistake similar to the one Queen Boudica made, that is starting a full-fledged military rebellion against a much more powerful enemy. That was good for everybody on this planet since the Soviet Union had nuclear warheads which might have been used in desperation. Fortunately, history doesn't always repeat itself!

But, if history doesn't repeat itself, at least it rhymes and the ability of the Western Empire to use financial means to bring countries into submission is well documented. Another, more recent, case, is that of Greece: again a nation that couldn't give back the money it owed to the imperial powers. For a short moment, in 2015, it looked like the Greeks had decided to rebel against the empire but, in the end, the Greek elites chose to submit. The punishment for the Greek citizens has been harsh but, at least, their country was not bombed and destroyed, as it happens rather often nowadays when the Imperial Powers that Be become angry.

But for how long will the Western Empire remain powerful? Just like for the Roman Empire, its destiny seems to be a cycle of growth and decline - and the decline may have already started as shown by the failure of the attempt of bankrupting the heir of the Soviet Union, Russia (again, fortunately for everybody, because Russia has nuclear weapons). The globalized empire seems to be getting weaker and weaker every day. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, only time will tell.

Meeting the Goddess Gaia in a Supermarket, Italy. Frankly, as a mystical experience, it left much to be desired.

On September 13, 258, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was imprisoned on the orders of the new proconsul, Galerius Maximus. The public examination of Cyprian has been preserved.

Galerius Maximus: "Are you Thascius Cyprianus?"
Cyprian: "I am."
Galerius: "The most sacred Emperors have commanded you to conform to the Roman rites."
Cyprian: "I refuse."
Galerius: "Take heed for yourself."
Cyprian: "Do as you are bid; in so clear a case I may not take heed."

Galerius, after briefly conferring with his judicial council, with much reluctance pronounced the following sentence: "You have long lived an irreligious life, and have drawn together a number of men bound by an unlawful association, and professed yourself an open enemy to the gods and the religion of Rome; and the pious, most sacred and august Emperors ... have endeavoured in vain to bring you back to conformity with their religious observances; whereas therefore you have been apprehended as principal and ringleader in these infamous crimes, you shall be made an example to those whom you have wickedly associated with you; the authority of law shall be ratified in your blood." He then read the sentence of the court from a written tablet: "It is the sentence of this court that Thascius Cyprianus be executed with the sword."

Cyprian: "Thanks be to God.”

There are plenty of documents about martyrs from early Christianity that look to us as naive and exaggerated. But this one, no. This is so stark, so dramatic, so evident. You can see in your mind these two men, the Imperial procurer Galerius Maximus and the Bishop of Carthage, Thascius Cyprian, facing each other in anger, a clash that reminds to us the story of the aircraft carrier that tried to order a lighthouse to move away. It was an unstoppable force, the carrier, meeting an unmovable object, the lighthouse. It is the kind of clash that leads to human lives blown away like fallen leaves in the wind.

Galerius plays the role of the carrier, bristling with weapons, power, and movement. He is not evil. He does what he has to do. For him, just as for most Romans of the time, performing the "sacred rituals" was a simple way to show that one was part of society, willing to do one's duty. It implied little more than small offerings to the deities that would bring luck and prosperity to everyone. Doing that was the basis of the virtue carried "pietas," a virtue that later Christians would call "Caritas" and that in our terminology we might call "empathy." Why would anyone refuse to do such a simple thing? He had to be truly evil, wicked, and a criminal.

But Galerius must also see that he has a force in front of him that he cannot overcome. The lighthouse doesn't move. It cannot be moved. A man like Cyprianus, alone, was worth more than a Roman Legion. It was worth more than all the Roman Legions. A few decades later, the Empire would be ruled by a Christian Emperor, Constantine. More decades in the future, the Empire would collapse and be replaced by Christianity to start the flowering of that delicate and sophisticated civilization we call the "Middle Ages" in Europe.

In the end, the essence of the conflict that put Galerius and Cyprianus in front of each other was about the role of a totalitarian state. By the 3rd century AD, when this story took place, the Roman Empire had been a prototypical totalitarian state for at least three centuries. It means that the state recognizes nothing but itself as a source of law: there is nothing, strictly nothing, that can stop the state from doing what the state wants to do. In the Roman laws, there was no such thing as "human rights," and nothing like a "Constitution." The law was the law, and it had to be obeyed.

It was only much later that the Roman Emperors started understanding that the laws that they cherished so much had been turned into a tool of oppression and mistreatment of the poor and the weak. It was Empress Galla Placidia the first to say that "That the Emperor profess to be bound by the laws is a sentiment worthy of the ruler's majesty, so much is our power dependent on the power of law and indeed that the imperial office be subject to the laws is more important than the imperial power itself."

Nowadays, we tend to see religion as a set of various superstitions, something that gives people some delusionary belief on the after-death world, maybe some philosophic reasoning on how to live a virtuous life. But if you think about the clash between Galerius and Cyprianus, you see what it was about. Religion was a tool to keep people free from the arbitrary laws of the totalitarian state. Christianity established the basic dignity of every human being, and gave people an alternative social structure that they could use to fight back. The holy books were the "Constitution" of the Christian state.

Over the years, this concept of what it means to be a Christian in a secular state has been gradually lost. The last time when Christianity and the State clashed against each other was with the "Controversy of Valladolid," when the Christian Church tried to prevent the European States from enslaving and exterminating the Native Americans. It was a victory for the Church that led to its disappearance as an independent force in the Europe we call "modern." Under the onslaught of the state propaganda that completely inverted the roles in the common perception, we thought that we needed different structures to defend the people from oppression. That the totalitarianism of the state could be kept at bay using popular parties, constitutional laws, statements about human rights, and the like.

It didn't work, Today, we find ourselves in exactly the same situation as when Emperor Decius imposed on every Roman Citizen to demonstrate his/her pietas by performing sacrifices to the sacred deity that, in our case, is called "science." But, unlike the times of Decius, we have nothing to oppose to the totalitarian machine of the state that is marching on to crush all of us.

I have been thinking a lot about the Gaian religion, fashionable among Western intellectuals. Would anyone follow the example of Cyprianus and offer his life for his Gaian faith? Right now, obviously not. Gaians had a good occasion with the Covid story to take an independent position about an issue that the ordinary Christian religion was not equipped to take. Facing an epidemic, Christianity could only say that it was the result of the wrath of God because someone had sinned heavily. Gaianism has much more powerful intellectual tools that could have been used. Gaians could have told people that they were damaging their health just while trying to save themselves. That their immune system is a gift from Gaia herself that they must keep strong by keeping it in contact with the external environment. Exactly the opposite of trying to isolate themselves by wearing masks, disinfecting everything, and keeping social distance.

Unfortunately, right now Gaianism is little more than a vaporous set of good feelings. But it is shallow, lightweight, and easily blown out by the first serious gust of wind created by the state machine. And yet we desperately need something that will save us from being crushed by these monstrous machines we call states that are destroying everything. Will Gaia ever gain the strength of Christianity? I am doubtful, but also not without some hope. Things always change, sometimes so fast.

Here is a reflection on Gaianism that I published two years ago on my "Chimeras" blog when the situation was not yet as dramatic as it is today.

Gaia, the Return of the Earth Goddess

House founded by An, praised by Enlil, given an oracle by mother Nintud! A house, at its upper end a mountain, at its lower end a spring! A house, at its upper end threefold indeed. Whose well-founded storehouse is established as a household, whose terrace is supported by Lahama deities; whose princely great wall, the shrine of Urim! (the Kesh temple hymn, ca. 2600 BCE)

Not long ago, I found myself involved in a debate on Gaian religion convened by Erik Assadourian. For me, it was a little strange. For the people of my generation, religion is supposed to be a relic of the past, the opium of the people, a mishmash of superstitions, something for old women mumbling ejaculatory prayers, things like that. But, here, a group of people who weren't religious in the traditional sense of the word, and who included at least two professional researchers in physics, were seriously discussing how to best worship the Goddess of Earth, the mighty, the powerful, the divine, the (sometimes) benevolent Gaia, She who keeps the Earth alive.

It was not just unsettling, it was a deep rethinking of many things I had been thinking. I had been building models of how Gaia could function in terms of the physics and the biology we know. But here, no, it was not Gaia the holobiont, not Gaia the superorganism, not Gaia the homeostatic system. It was Gaia the Goddess.

And here I am, trying to explain to myself why I found this matter worth discussing. And trying to explain it to you, readers. After all, this is being written in a blog titled "Chimeras" -- and the ancient Chimera was a myth about a creature that, once, must have been a sky goddess. And I have been keeping this blog for several years, see? There is something in religion that remains interesting even for us, moderns. But, then, what is it, exactly?

I mulled over the question for a while and I came to the conclusion that, yes, Erik Assadourian and the others are onto something: it may be time for religion to return in some form. And if religion returns, it may well be in the form of some kind of cult of the Goddess Gaia. But let me try to explain

What is this thing called "religion," anyway?

Just as many other things in history that go in cycles, religion does that too. It is because religion serves a purpose, otherwise it wouldn't have existed and been so common in the past. So what is religion? It is a long story but let me start from the beginning -- the very beginning, when, as the Sumerians used to say "Bread was baked for the first time in the ovens".

A constant of all ancient religions is that they tell us that whatever humans learned to do -- from fishing to having kings -- it was taught to them by some God who took the trouble to land down from heaven (or from wherever Gods come from) just for that purpose. Think of when the Sumerian Sea-God called Aun (also Oannes in later times) emerged out of the Abzu (that today we call the abyss) to teach people all the arts of civilization. It was in those ancient times that the Gods taught humans the arts and the skills that the ancient Sumerians called "me," a bewildering variety of concepts, from "music" to "rejoicing of the heart." Or, in more recent lore, how Prometheus defied the gods by stealing fire and giving it to humankind. This story has a twist of trickery, but it is the same concept: human civilization is a gift from the gods. Now, surely our ancestors were not so naive that they believed in these silly legends, right? Did people really need a Fish-God to emerge out of the Persian Gulf to teach them how to make fish hooks and fishnets? But, as usual, what looks absurd hides the meaning of complex questions.

The people who described how the me came from the Gods were not naive, not at all. They had understood the essence of civilization, which is sharing. Nothing can be done without sharing something with others, not even rejoicing in your heart. Think of "music," one of the Sumerian me: can you play music by yourself and alone? Makes no sense, of course. Music is a skill that needs to be learned. You need teachers, you need people who can make instruments, you need a public to listen to you and appreciate your music. And the same is for fishing, one of the skills that Aun taught to humans. Of course, you could fish by yourself and for your family only. Sure, and, in this way, you ensure that you all will die of starvation as soon as you hit a bad period of low catches. Fishing provides abundant food in good times, but fish spoils easily and those who live by fishing can survive only if they share their catch with those who live by cultivating grains. You can't live on fish alone, it is something that I and my colleague Ilaria Perissi describe in our book, "The Empty Sea." Those who tried, such as the Vikings of Greenland during the Middle Ages, were mercilessly wiped out of history.

Sharing is the essence of civilization, but it is not trivial: who shares what with whom? How do you ensure that everyone gets a fair share? How do you take care of tricksters, thieves, and parasites? It is a fascinating story that goes back to the very beginning of civilization, those times that the Sumerians were fond to tell with the beautiful image of "when bread was baked for the first time in the ovens," This is where religion came in, with temples, priest, Gods, and all the related stuff.

Let's make a practical example: suppose you are on an errand, it is a hot day, and you want a mug of beer. Today, you go to a pub, pay a few dollars for your pint, you drink it, and that's it. Now, move yourself to Sumerian times. The Sumerians had plenty of beer, even a specific goddess related to it, called Ninkasi (which means, as you may guess, "the lady of the beer"). But there were no pubs selling beer for the simple reason that you couldn't pay for it. Money hadn't been invented, yet. Could you barter for it? With what? What could you carry around that would be worth just one beer? No, there was a much better solution: the temple of the local God or Goddess.

We have beautiful descriptions of the Sumerian temples in the works of the priestess Enheduanna, among other things the first named author in history. From her and from other sources, we can understand how in Sumerian times, and for millennia afterward, temples were large storehouses of goods. They were markets, schools, libraries, manufacturing centers, and offered all sorts of services, including that of the hierodules (karkid in Sumerian), girls who were not especially holy, but who would engage in a very ancient profession that didn't always have the bad reputation it has today. If you were so inclined, you could also meet male prostitutes in the temple, probably called "kurgarra" in Sumerian. That's one task in which temples have been engaging for a long time, even though that looks a little weird to us. Incidentally, the Church of England still managed prostitution in Medieval times.

So, you go to the temple and you make an offer to the local God or Goddess. We may assume that this offer would be proportional to both your needs and your means. It could be a goat that we know was roughly proportional to the services of a high-rank hierodule. But, if all you wanted was a beer, then you could have limited your offer to something less valuable: depending on your job you could have offered fish, wheat, wool, metal, or whatever. Then, the God would be pleased and, as a reward, the alewives of the temple would give you all the beer you could drink. Seen as a restaurant, the temple worked on the basis of what we call today an "all you can eat" menu (or "the bottomless cup of coffee," as many refills as you want).

Note how the process of offering something to God was called sacrifice. The term comes from "sacred" which means "separated." The sacrifice is about separation. You separate from something that you perceived as yours which then becomes an offer to the local God or to the community -- most often the same thing. The offerings to the temple could be something very simple: as you see in the images we have from Sumerian times, it didn't always involve the formal procedure of killing a live animal. People were just bringing the goods they had to the temple. When animals were sacrificed to God(s) in the sense that they were ritually killed, they were normally eaten afterward. Only in rare cases (probably not in Sumeria) the sacrificed entity was burnt to ashes. It was the "burnt sacrifice called korban Olah in the Jewish tradition. In that case, the sacrifice was shared with God alone -- but it was more of an exception than the rule.

In any case, God was the supreme arbiter who insured that your sacrifice was appreciated -- actually, not all sacrifices were appreciated. Some people might try to trick by offering low-quality goods, but God is not easy to fool. In some cases, he didn't appreciate someone's sacrifices at all: do you remember the story of Cain and Abel? God rejected Cain's sacrifice, although we are not told exactly why. In any case, the sacrifice was a way to attribute a certain "price" to the sacrificed goods.

This method of commerce is not very different than the one we use today, it is just not so exactly quantified as when we use money to attach a value to everything. The ancient method works more closely to the principle that the Marxists had unsuccessfully tried to implement "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." But don't think that the ancient Sumerians were communists, it is just that the lack of a method of quantification of the commercial transaction generated a certain leeway that could allow the needy access to the surplus available, when it was available. This idea is still embedded in modern religions, think of how the Holy Quran commands the believers to share the water of their wells with the needy, once they have satisfied their needs and those of their animals. Or the importance that the Christian tradition gives to gleaning as a redistribution of the products of the fields. Do you remember the story of Ruth the Moabite in the Bible? That important, indeed.

But there is more. In the case of burnt sacrifices, the value attributed to the goods was "infinite" -- the goods consumed by the flames just couldn't be used again by human beings. It is the concept of Taboo used in Pacific cultures for something that cannot be touched, eaten, or used. We have no equivalent thing in the "market," where we instead suppose that everything has a price.

And then, there came money (the triumph of evil)

The world of the temples of the first 2-3 millennia of human civilizations in the Near East was in some ways alien to ours, and in others perfectly equivalent. But things keep changing and the temples were soon to face competition in a new method of attributing value to goods: money. Coinage is a relatively modern invention, it goes back to mid 1st millennium BCE. But in very ancient times, people did exchange metals by weight -- mainly gold and silver. And these exchanges were normally carried out in temples -- the local God(s) ensured honest weighing. In more than one sense, in ancient times temples were banks and it is no coincidence that our modern banks look like temples. They are temples to a God called "money." By the way, you surely read in the Gospels how Jesus chased the money changers -- the trapezitai -- out of the temple of Jerusalem. Everyone knows that story, but what were the money changers doing in the temple? They were in the traditional place where they were expected to be, where they had been from when bread was baked in ovens for the first time.

So, religion and money evolved in parallel -- sometimes complementing each other, sometimes in competition with each other. But, in the long run, the temples seem to have been the losers in the competition. As currency became more and more commonplace, people started thinking that they didn't really need the cumbersome apparatus of religion, with its temples, priests, and hierodules (the last ones were still appreciated, but now were paid in cash). A coin is a coin is a coin, it is guaranteed by the gold it is made of -- gold is gold is gold. And if you want a good beer, you don't need to make an offer to some weird God or Goddess. Just pay a few coppers for it, and that's done.

The Roman state was among the first in history to be based nearly 100% on money. With the Romans, temples and priests had mainly a decorative role, let's say that they had to find a new market for their services. Temples couldn't be commercial centers any longer, so they reinvented themselves as lofty places for the celebration of the greatness of the Roman empires. There remained also a diffuse kind of religion in the countryside that had to do with fertility rites, curing sickness, and occasional cursing on one's enemies. That was the "pagan" religion, with the name "pagan" meaning, basically, "peasant."

Paganism would acquire a bad fame in Christian times, but already in Roman times, peasant rites were seen with suspicion. The Romans had one deity: money. An evil deity, perhaps, but it surely brought mighty power to the Romans, but their doom as well, as it is traditional for evil deities. Roman money was in the form of precious metals and when they ran out of gold and silver from their mines, the state just couldn't exist anymore: it vanished. No gold, no empire. It was as simple as that.

The disappearance of the Roman state saw a return of religion, this time in the form of Christianity. It is a long story that would need a lot of space to be written. Let's just say that the Middle Ages in Europe saw the rise of monasteries to play a role similar to that of temples in Sumerian times. Monasteries were storehouses, manufacturing centers, schools, libraries, and more -- they even had something to do with hierodules. During certain periods, Christian nuns did seem to have played that role, although this is a controversial point. Commercial exchanging and sharing of goods again took a religious aspect, with the Catholic Church in Western Europe playing the role of a bank by guaranteeing that, for instance, ancient relics were authentic. In part, relics played the role that money had played during the Roman Empire, although they couldn't be exchanged for other kinds of goods. The miracle of the Middle Ages in Europe was that this arrangement worked, and worked very well. That is, until someone started excavating silver from mines in Eastern Europe and another imperial cycle started. It is not over to this date, although it is clearly declining.

So, where do we stand now? Religion has clearly abandoned the role it had during medieval times and has re-invented itself as a support for the national state, just as the pagan temples had done in Roman times. One of the most tragic events of Western history is when in 1914, for some mysterious reasons, young Europeans found themselves killing each other by the millions while staying in humid trenches. On both sides of the trenches, Christian priests were blessing the soldiers of "their" side, exhorting them to kill those of the other side. How Christianity could reduce itself to such a low level is one of the mysteries of the Universe, but there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. And it is here that we stand. Money rules the world and that's it.

The Problem With Money

Our society is perhaps the most monetized in history -- money pervades every aspect of life for everyone. The US is perhaps the most monetized society ever: for Europeans, it is a shock to discover that many American families pay their children for doing household chores. For a European, it is like if your spouse were asking you to pay for his/her sexual services. But different epochs have different uses and surely it would be shocking for a Sumerian to see that we can get a beer at the pub by just giving the alewives a curious flat object, a "card," that they then give back to us. Surely that card is a powerful amulet from a high-ranking God.

So, everything may be well in the best of worlds, notoriously represented by the Western version of liberal democracy. Powerful market forces, operated by the God (or perhaps Goddess) called Money or, sometimes, "the almighty dollar," ensure that exchanges are efficient, that scarce resources are optimally allocated, and that everyone has a chance in the search for maximizing his/her utility function.

Maybe. But it may also be that something is rotten in the Great Columned Temple of Washington D.C. What's rotten, exactly? Why can't this wonderful deity we call "money" work the way we would it like to, now that we even managed to decouple it from the precious metals it was made of in ancient times?

Well, there is a problem. A big problem. A gigantic problem. It is simply that money is evil. This is another complex story, but let's just say that the problem with evil and good is that evil knows no limits, while good does. In other words, evil is equivalent to chaos, good to order. It has something to do with the definition of "obscenity." There is nothing wrong in human sex, but an excess of sex in some forms becomes obscene. Money can become obscene for exactly this reason: too much of it overwhelms everything else. Nothing is so expensive that it cannot be bought; that's the result of the simple fact that you can attribute a price to everything.

Instead, God is good because She has limits: She is benevolent and merciful. You could see that as a limitation and theologians might discuss why a being that's all-powerful and all-encompassing cannot be also wicked and cruel. But there cannot be any good without an order of things. And order implies limits of some kind. God can do everything but He cannot do evil. That's a no-no. God cannot be evil. Period.

And here is why money is evil: it has no limits, it keeps accumulating. You know that accumulated money is called "capital," and it seems that many people realize that there is something wrong with that idea because "capitalism" is supposed to be something bad. Which may be but, really, capital is one of those polymorphic words that can describe many things, not all of them necessarily bad. In itself, capital is simply the accumulation of resources for future use -- and that has limits, of course. You can't accumulate more things than the things you have. But once you give a monetary value to this accumulated capital, things change. If money has no limits, capital doesn't, either.

Call it capital or call it money, it is shapeless, limitless, a blob that keeps growing and never shrinks. Especially nowadays that money has been decoupled from material goods (at least in part, you might argue that money is linked to crude oil). You could say that money is a disease: it affects everything. Everything can be associated with a number, and that makes that thing part of the entity we call the "market". If destroying that thing can raise that number, somewhere, that thing will be destroyed. Think of a tree: for a modern economist, it has no monetary value until it is felled and the wood sold on the market. And that accumulates more money, somewhere. Monetary capital actually destroys natural capital. You may have heard of "Natural Capitalism" that's supposed to solve the problem by giving a price to trees even before they are felled. It could be a good idea, but it is still based on money, so it may be the wrong tool to use even though for a good purpose.

The accumulation of money in the form of monetary capital has created something enormously different than something that was once supposed to help you get a good beer at a pub. Money is not evil just in a metaphysical sense. Money is destroying everything. It is destroying the very thing that makes humankind survive: the Earth's ecosystem. We call it "overexploitation," but it means simply killing and destroying everything as long as that can bring a monetary profit to someone.

Re-Sacralizing The Ecosystem (why some goods must have infinite prices)

There have been several proposals on how to reform the monetary system, from "local money" to "expiring money," and some have proposed simply getting rid of it. None of these schemes has worked, so far, and getting rid of money seems to be simply impossible in a society that's as complex as ours: how do you pay the hierodules if money does not exist? But from what I have been discussing so far, we could avoid the disaster that the evil deity called money is bring to us simply by putting a limit to it. It is, after all, what the Almighty did with the devil: She didn't kill him, but confined him in a specific area that we call "Hell" -- maybe there is a need for hell to exist, we don't know. For sure, we don't want hell to grow and expand everywhere.

What does it mean limits to money? It means that some things must be placed outside the monetary realm -- outside the market. If you want to use a metaphor-based definition, some goods must be declared to have an "infinite" monetary price -- nobody can buy them, not billionaires, not even trillionaires, or any even more obscene levels of monetary accumulation. If you prefer, you may use the old Hawai'ian word: Taboo. Or, simply, you decide that some things are sacred, holy, they are beloved by the Goddess, and even thinking of touching them is evil.

Once something is sacred, it cannot be destroyed in the name of profit. That could mean setting aside some areas of the planet, declaring them not open for human exploitation. Or setting limits to the exploitation, not with the idea of maximizing the output of the system for human use, but with the idea to optimize the biodiversity of the area. These ideas are not farfetched. As an example, some areas of the sea have been declared "whale sanctuaries" -- places where whales cannot be hunted. That's not necessarily an all/zero choice. Some sanctuaries might allow human presence and moderate exploitation of the resources of the system. The point is that as long as we monetize the exploitation, then we are back to monetary capitalism and the resource will be destroyed.

Do we need a religion to do that? Maybe there are other ways but, surely, we know that it is a task that religion is especially suitable for. Religion is a form of communication that uses rituals as speech. Rituals are all about sacralization: they define what's sacred by means of sacrifice. These concepts form the backbone of all religions, everything is neatly arranged under to concept of "sacredness" -- what's sacred is nobody's property. We know that it works. It has worked in the past. It still works today. You may be a trillionaire, but you are not allowed to do everything you want just because you can pay for it. You can't buy the right of killing people, for instance. Nor to destroy humankind's heritage. (So far, at least).

Then, do we need a new religion for that purpose? A Gaian religion?

Possibly yes, taking into account that Gaia is not "God" in the theological sense. Gaia is not all-powerful, she didn't create the world, she is mortal. She is akin to the Demiurgoi, the Daimonoi, the Djinn, and similar figures that play a role in the Christian, Islamic and Indian mythologies. The point is that you don't necessarily need the intervention of the Almighty to sacralize something. Even just a lowly priest can do that, and surely it is possible for one of Her Daimonoi, and Gaia is one.

Supposing we could do something like that, then we would have the intellectual and cultural tools needed to re-sacralize the Earth. Then, whatever is declared sacred or taboo is spared by the destruction wrecked by the money-based process: forests, lands, seas, creatures large and small. We could see this as a new alliance between humans and Gaia: All the Earth is sacred to Gaia, and some parts of it are especially sacred and cannot be touched by money. And not just the Earth, the poor, the weak, and the dispossessed among humans, they are just as sacred and must be respected.

All that is not just a question of "saving the Earth" -- it is a homage to the power of the Holy Creation that belongs to the Almighty, and to the power of maintenance of the Holy Creation that belongs to the Almighty's faithful servant, the holy Gaia, mistress of the ecosystem. And humans, as the ancient Sumerians had already understood, are left with the task of respecting, admiring and appreciating what God has created. We do not worship Gaia, that would silly, besides being blasphemous. But through her, we worship the higher power of God.

Is it possible? If history tells us something is that money tends to beat religion when conflict arises. Gaia is powerful, sure, but can she slay the money dragon in single combat? Difficult, yes, but we should remember that some 2000 years ago in Europe, a group of madmen fought and won against an evil empire in the name of an idea that most thought not just subversive at that time, but even beyond the thinkable. And they believed so much in that idea that they accepted to die for it

In the end, there is more to religion than just fixing a broken economic system. There is a fundamental reason why people do what they do: sometimes we call it with the anodyne name of "communication," sometimes we use the more sophisticated term "empathy," but when we really understand what we are talking about we may not afraid to use the word "love" which, according to our Medieval ancestors, was the ultimate force that moves the universe. And when we deal with Gaia the Goddess, we may have this feeling of communication, empathy, and love. She may be defined as a planetary homeostatic system, but she is way more than that: it is a power of love that has no equals on this planet. But there are things that mere words cannot express.

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

The hands of an elderly member of the Japanese mafia (the "Yakuza"). In addition to the tattoos, note the amputation of the little finger. It is one of the many forms of ritual mutilation practiced in human society. The idea is that the suffering involved proves the will of the sufferer to belong to a specific group.

Translated from Italian and slightly modified from "Effetto Seneca"

Until recently, there existed a criminal organization in Japan whose members went by the name of Yakuza. It was similar to the Italian mafia, so much that it is often called the "Japanese mafia." The Yakuza practiced various forms of ritual mutilation, one was the amputation of the last phalanx of the little finger. Fosco Maraini describes it in his "Meeting with Japan" (1958), telling us that he himself cut his little finger as a protest against the Japanese government during WW2.

Cutting off a phalanx of the little finger is a good example of a ritual mutilation. As an impairment, it is minor, but it is visible, painful, and a test of courage for those who do it. Thus, it is a testimony of belonging to a certain group - in this case the Yakuza. Today, they have almost disappeared in Japan and with them the hands with the amputated little finger. But ritual mutilation in other forms is common in other regions of the world.

In the western part of Eurasia, there are two types of widespread ritual mutilations: male circumcision and infibulation in its various forms of female genital mutilation. For both, there is talk of possible health benefits, but there is no definite evidence for that. They are, rather, evidence of belonging to a social or religious group. As we know, circumcision is mandatory for Jews, it is common, but not mandatory, among Muslims although, it is less common but not rare among Christians. In Europe, about 20% of the males are circumcised, a percentage that rises to about 80% in the United States.

All in all, circumcision does not have great effects on the body of the circumcised, but as far as infibulation is concerned, we are talking about a real mutilation that heavily affects the sexuality of the woman who undergoes the practice. It is condemned by the Christian religion, it is not part of the Jewish tradition, and has been the subject of Islamic Fatwas that prohibit it. In many states, it is explicitly prohibited by law.

Yet, infibulation in its various forms tenaciously resists in certain areas of the world where it is an ancient tradition, especially in Africa. It is difficult for us Westerners to realize why women in these regions do not see it as an imposition, but as a source of pride, a proof of maturity, and of belonging to the society in which they live. In these societies, the non-infibulated woman is considered an outcast, an enemy to be isolated and demonized. It is a perverse mechanism that persists despite many attempts to eradicate the practice.

There are, and were in the past, many other ritual mutilation practices that affect both men and women. It is said that in ancient times the Amazons amputated one of their breasts to shoot better with the bow. It is almost certainly a legend. Even if it were true, it's unlikely it would have improved their ability to skewer enemies with arrows. If the Amazons (assuming they ever existed) did that, it was for the same reason that led the Yakuza to sever a phalanx of their little finger: publicly showing that they belonged to the group.

In China, the binding of girls' feet was practiced until recently. It was a form of mutilation: a real daily torture with consequences that lasted for a lifetime. As adults, these women were unable to walk alone. Fortunately, today it is no longer practiced, but some elderly Chinese women who underwent this practice in their youth are still alive.

In the West, the prevalence of the Christian vision starting from Paul of Tarsus tended to reject any irreversible intervention on the human body. Nonetheless, minor forms of mutilation remained common, such as piercing the earlobes for earrings.

More often than not, in recent times, mutilations were performed with the support of "Science." One example was the removal of children's tonsils, as it was fashionable to do in the 1970s. An operation that probably did not cause much harm, but whose usefulness is at least questionable. It is still performed nowadays.

Much worse is the case of radical mastectomy for the treatment of breast cancer. As Siddhartha Mukherjee describes in his book. "The Emperor of All Maladies" (2010), it was an invasive therapy that in some cases involved "the complete excision of all breast tissue, axillary contents, removal of the latissimus dorsi, major pectoral muscles and minor and internal mammary lymph node dissection". And all this without a real medical reason to justify it. The result was a radical and irreversible mutilation that turned the woman into an invalid for the rest of her life.

In our society, theoretically rational, we might think that we have freed ourselves from these customs that we consider superstitions or at least errors of evaluation of a still imperfect science. But the "suffering-based proof of belonging" mechanism is deeply ingrained in our thinking and tends to pop up in one way or another, with or without medical justifications.

Let's just think about the use of tattoos, considered primitive and barbaric in the West until a few decades ago, today widespread among young people. Getting a tattoo is painful and therefore a test of courage for those who do it. It is also irreversible so that it is proof of definitive belonging to a certain social group. So it is not surprising that it has spread so quickly in a society that gives to the young little or nothing, apart from beatings, real or virtual.

It is impossible to deny that, under a smattering of rationality, our mentality is still that of much older times. And when we are under social stress, obsessive and punitive tendencies come out easily and are impossible to stop. Thankfully, women today don't have to cut their breasts for better accuracy with the bow (for now), and men don't have to slice off their little fingers to show their courage (for now).

But society changes in unpredictable ways and today it would be possible to use new ways to prove that someone willingly underwent some kind of painful ritual in order to belong to a certain group. No need to show actual scars, a digital certificate will be enough. Whether this will actually take place is left to the reader to ponder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are two versions of the Sphinx: male and female, most commonly found in ancient Egypt and Greece. The male (Egyptian) sphinx is stately and solemn, not very sexy. The female (Greek) one, instead, has a sex appeal that you can't ignore. Which other half-human creature in mythology is so often associated with naked breasts? Mermaids, harpies, medusas, chimeras, sirens-- they are all females and, occasionally, they are shown sporting human breasts (and, in the case of Hollywood mermaids, bras as well). But the image that we normally have in mind of the Sphinx is clear and consistent: she has these prominent female breasts and, almost always, no bra.

Where does this busty image of the Sphinx come from? For an answer, we must examine the origins of a myth that has been with us for a long time; millennia. Ancient images of winged lions are common all over the Mediterranean and, sometimes, the lion is associated with a Goddess riding it. When the lion’s head is human, we call the creature a sphinx. Sometimes we can recognize the creature as a male sphinx, and sometimes as a female one. But, even in the latter case, we don’t normally see human breasts in these very ancient images.

From Minoan times, back to the 2nd Millennium BC, all the way to classical Greece, we have plenty of paintings or sculptures of sphinxes of all shapes and sizes. Breasts, however, just aren’t there. As an example, on the right we see a Greek sphinx from the Delphi museum (6th Century BC). The same we can say for ancient text sources; we have several mentions of the Sphinx, from Hesiod, (probably 9th Century BC) to Sophocles (5th Century BC) and onwards. It is often said that the creature is female but breasts are never mentioned.

Apparently, however, the image of the Sphinx evolved in time. During the classical Greek, and later Roman, period, breasts started to appear, associated with sphinxes. In some images, we see rows of breasts under the belly, as proper for a lioness, as we see in the image on the left - found on the web (unfortunately without a source attribution), is an example. It is a curious image, almost a comic book one. As befits a Sphinx, this one is literate, she is reading something. She has several breasts a row, but they go all the way to the front of the chest, in a position where no four-legged creature has breasts. And these breasts are plump and nearly spherical, not like animal breasts; more like human female breasts.

In time, it seems that the Classical image of the sphinx evolved in a form that showed just a couple of human-sized breasts. Here, we see a Sphinx (ca. 400 BC) said to have belonged to the private collection of Sigmund Freud himself.

With the decline of the classical world, the Sphinx theme declined from the visual arts, although it never disappeared. Medieval artists loved fantastic beasts, but they didn't seem to be especially interested in sphinxes. However, with the late Renaissance, the classical world burst out again on the art scene and, with it, breasted sphinxes came back with a vengeance. This image on the left, by the Italian mannerist painter Perino del Vaga (ca. 1500-1547) gives us some idea of how things had changed. This sphinx is almost aerodynamic; it almost looks like one of those Detroit cars of the 1960s, (maybe those prominent car bumpers of the time had a sexual meaning!) And, considering the frontal weight, one wonders whether this creature would be able to walk without falling on her… er… face.

With the late Renaissance and early post-Renaissance, there also came a wave of erotic interest in female breasts that had been unknown before. In the 17th Century, women started wearing corsets, to sport deep décolletages, and to flaunt their cleavages to men. Nobody seem to know for sure what caused this change in fashion and in attitudes, but sphinxes seem to have been affected by this evolution, too. From then on, no artist would think to draw or paint a breastless Sphinx.

During the “Neoclassical period”, from late 17th Century onward, female sphinxes became a commonplace decorative element in gardens all over Europe and were referred to as the “French Sphinx”. Sometimes, these creatures don’t look very sensual, at least to our modern eyes. Their body is heavy, more like that of a cow than that of a beast of prey. Their posture is solemn, and their hairdo often a funny mix of what may have been the fashion of the time and what the artist thought it should have been in ancient Greece or in Egypt. But their breasts carry a message: no more the virginal breasts of later Greek art, but full breasts of a mature woman.

Garden Sphinxes. From left: Tivoli Gardens, Roma. Belvedere Gardens, Vienna, Chickwick gardens, London.

The eroticism of the Sphinx in art went up of a couple of notches with the 1800's. The first to start pushing things in this direction was the French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Ingres painted three images of Oedipus and the Sphinx, the last one in 1864. The one on the left was painted in 1825. In all these images, the Sphinx is half-hidden in shadows, but her human breasts are in full light. Note Oedipus’s posture, the height of his face, the position of his hand and finger. All these elements emphasize the Sphinx’s breasts as the central theme of the whole painting.

In the 19th century, the Sphinx, became a favorite theme of the Symbolist school. The Symbolists tended to eroticize everything classical, and the sensual side of the Sphinx – her breasts – was something that they didn’t miss. Their attitude may have had something to do with the moral attitudes of the time. Many Symbolists were English and they lived in Victorian England. So, they tended to react as they could to the official prudery of their times: they couldn't paint naked women, but they could explore the anatomical features of a non-human creature and eroticize them at will. Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) was one of the Symbolists who explored the Sphinx theme in detail. His sphinxes are always shown as human-breasted and strongly sensual.

Some of Moreau’s Sphinxes

In time, the sensuality of the Sphinx literally exploded on the canvas of the artists. On the right, you an see an interpretation by the Belgian symbolist Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) in a 1896 painting that he entitled “Caresses”. Here, we see how sensual a Sphinx can be, even without prominent human breasts. She is a leopardess, tenderly embracing an ephebic Oedipus. Their expression, their posture, are all details that convey the impression of a seductress, happy with her conquest.

But it was Franz Von Stuck (1863-1928) who best captured the Sphinx's sensuality with this 1895 painting. No trace of lions or leopards, here, no wings and no serpent’s tail. Yet, Von Stuck had no need to write “Sphinx” on the top of his painting to tell us what he was showing. It is perfectly clear that we are looking at the Sphinx, divine seductress. She has gone full cycle, from lioness to woman. She has large eyes, a sensual mouth, well rounded buttocks and, of course, well formed breasts. She is relaxed, dominant, self-assured, and in full flower. Under the Sphinx, we see the parable of human life. In this composition, the Sphinx takes on her proper role of Goddess, dominating the creatures of the Earth.

The fascination of the symbolists with the Sphinx’s myth lasted for about a century and gave us many splendid images. In time, the theme was explored and re-interpreted over and over. In our times, the number of images of the Sphinx is prodigious and the number of variations is beyond all possible attempts of classification. One thing that didn't change, however, was the idea of the “lioness with human breasts.” Sometimes breasts are shown in full, sometimes just hinted at, but they are always there. Here are some examples.

From left: Mark Ellis, Salvador Dali, Selina Fenech, Darren Davy.

At this point, we may ask ourselves what is the whole idea about. Why is the Sphinx always endowed with these prominent frontal objects? Surely, they are not to be intended as overdeveloped flying muscles (as Roy D. Pounds suggested). Several generations of artists couldn’t just have been involved with a mere decorative element, a detail of no significance. These breasts must mean something and the artists who have shown them so often seem to have been able to catch an aspect of the myth that may difficult or impossible to express in words.

From the early studies of Desmond Morris (“the naked ape”, 1967), anthropologists have noted that the shape of human breasts is much different from that of four-legged animals. The idea that has been proposed is that human breasts carry a visual meaning immediate for creatures like us, who interact with each other by standing in front of one another. It may be that prominent breasts signify the health of a woman, her sexual status, her ability of raising children, or something else. In any case, they may be a sexual message aimed at males.

This attitude has genetic origins, but it is surely mediated by cultural factors. We know that the modern Western erotic interest in female breasts is not necessarily shared by other cultures, ancient of contemporary. But our attitude is not unique in human history. For instance, in the sophisticated and complex Minoan art of the second millennium BC, women are shown with exposed, pear-shaped breasts. These Minoan ladies wouldn’t be out of place on the pages of the modern “Playboy” magazine. (Image on the right, from J. Campbell’s “The Masks of God”).

However, the attitude of the Classical world toward female breasts was completely different. In Greek, and in later Roman art, naked female breasts are not uncommon, but they don’t seem to carry a strong sexual message. Breasts appear mainly when there was a logical reason for a woman to be shown naked. That was the case of amazons and athletes, for instance. In other cases, a woman could be caught fully undressed while bathing, but these images were not centered on breasts as an erotic element. Or, an exposed breast could be a sign of distress. This seems to be the case of the piece of statuary known as the “Barberini Suppliant,” that may represent the rape of Cassandra after the fall of Troy. There are other examples of this kind.

A literary glimpse of ancient attitudes towards breasts comes from Pseudo-Lucian’s “Amores” (probably 2nd Century AD). Here, two friends discuss the relative merits of straight and gay love as they pause to admire the statue of Venus in Cnidos. Many facets of human sexuality are explored in considerable detail in this ancient text, but women’s breasts are never mentioned as an object of erotic interest. Even the one of the two characters who expounds straight sex doesn’t seem to find the naked breasts of the goddess particularly exciting. When breasts are mentioned, the sense is much different. So, we are told (41) that women would wear,

“.. thin veils that pass for clothes so as to excuse their apparent nakedness. But everything inside these can be distinguished more clearly than their faces except for their hideously prominent breasts, which they always carry about bound like prisoners.”

Yet, we can say that the ancient Greeks were not indifferent to female breasts, they just saw them differently. We may find a hint of what was their attitude in one of the few surviving fragments of the “Little Iliad” (written a couple of centuries after Homer’s Iliad). Here we read that, after the fall of Troy, Menelaus was ready to kill his wife, Helen, out of revenge. But he cast away his sword when he caught "a glimpse of her breasts, unclad". In our modern view, we would see a woman unveiling herself as passing a sexual message. But we saw that breasts didn’t have a strong erotic meaning for ancient Greeks. So, in showing to Menelaus her breasts, Helen was sending him a quite different message; a message of intimacy. In Euripides (5th Century BC), we hear Helen, captive in Egypt, fondly remembering Menelaus “caressing her breasts”. Breasts that a Greek woman would normally keep “bound like prisoners, ” but that she couldn’t keep hiding while in bed with her husband. So, what Helen was saying to Menelaus with her gesture was, “know who I am: I am your wife.”

In the Iliad, Menelaus was arriving in front of Helen with his sword still dirty of the blood of Deiphobos, Helen’s second Trojan husband. In the myth of the Sphinx, Oedipus was arriving in front of the Sphinx with his sword still dirty of the blood of his father, Laius. These two scenes are eerily similar and, by showing her breasts, the Sphinx was passing to Oedipus the same message that Helen was passing to Menelaus, “know who I am”. When a woman unveils her breasts, she is revealing an intimate part of herself; she is showing herself for what she is.

The Sphinx was opening herself to Oedipus, showing him her intimate essence. What this essence was, can be understood from the riddle she asked him, “what is it that walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs during the day, and on three legs in the evening?” We all know that the standard answer is “man”. But this is a silly answer to a riddle which is not a silly one. Think of a different answer: why not “woman”?

This is not just a question of political correctness: think how the life of a woman is naturally divided into three periods: virgin, mother, and crone. It is a much sharper subdivision than anything that we can relate to a man. And this simple reversal of roles opens up a whole universe. If the riddle hints at the ages of a woman, what the Sphinx was showing to Oedipus was a vision of the triple essence of the Moon Goddess. The moon can be waxing, full, and waning. The Sphinx herself, being of divine nature, had a triple shape: woman, bird, and lioness. These three shapes are the three elements of the female essence: the lion (the strength of a virgin), breasts (motherhood of a mature woman) and wings (the link with the sky: the wisdom of an old woman). (Image on the right, front cover of R. Graves’s “The White Goddess”)

So, Oedipus was presented with a vision of the Female Deity. The Sphinx was offering him nothing less than a sacred initiation to the Goddess’s mystery. As a characteristic of initiations, he would be symbolically “devoured” by the Sphinx, and he would experience death and rebirth. But Oedipus couldn’t understand what was being offered to him. He gave a silly answer, refusing the Sphinx’s offer. Later in the story, Oedipus’s curse was to become blind, but he had started out blind. Blind to the beauty and the power of the triple goddess. Some say that Oedipus actually killed the Sphinx, some that he didn’t touch her, she killed herself. It doesn’t matter; Oedipus’s blindness gave him the power of destroying everything and everyone he came in contact with. When meeting the Sphinx, he had already killed his father and, later on, he would cause the death of Jocasta, his mother and bride. Later still, the death of his daughter Antigone and of his sons was, again indirectly, caused by Oedipus’s actions.

Men are cursed with the power of giving death. Women, instead, have the power of giving life. This is the ultimate meaning of the Sphinx’s breasts. It doesn’t matter if breasts are seen as erotic objects (as they are to us) or as tokens of intimacy between husband and wife (as they were for ancients Greeks). Breasts remain the source of life’s nourishment, the awesome power of the Goddess: Inanna the moon goddess, Tiamat the dragoness, Eurynome, who created the whole universe with her dance.

In our times, the myth of the Sphinx is emerging from the depth of the past millennia to confront us again with Oedipus’s dilemma. The Sphinx is bringing to us a message that goes to the heart of what means to be human, to our relation with everything which is alive around us on this planet. As a Goddess, she is carrying with herself the power of creation and of destruction at the same time. Creation and destruction are the laws of the universe, which will eventually devour us all, no matter what silly answers, in our blindness, we think we can give to its riddles.

"In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy. On the northern shore of the lake, right under the precipitous cliffs on which the modern village of Nemi is perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, or Diana of the Wood. .. In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier."

From "The Golden Bough" - by James G. Frazer

Post by "Mon Seul Desir"

Hello Ugo

You once asked, what was the meaning of Trump, it crossed my mind that without anybody’s planning or intentions, Trump became an immense collective scapegoating ritual where all the sins and impurities of the tribe are placed upon the king, who is then ceremonially driven out to purify the tribe. Since the 1960s this seems to have increasingly become the function of the American Presidency superseding its previous role which it has held since the days of George Washington, that of a near omnipotent God-Emperor who incarnates American collective power. It’s certainly corresponds to the sacred geometry of Washington DC, enclosed by its pomerium, the sacred regalias on display, the Temples to the Divine Emperors, the Axis Mundi rising through the centre of the Capitol’s rotunda. I personally visited the place a decade ago and was absolutely struck by the mystical religious layout of the place. It was effectively the centre of a secular City of God, destined to extend to, and redeem the entire world. I would say that Americanism is in fact the world’s dominant religious system, erecting its theocracy over the ruins of the British World Empire just as the theocracy of Diocletian Jovius was erected over the ruins of the Roman-Hellenistic Mediterranean Empire.

Now I must point to the Ancients warnings against hubris and the prophecies of Christian mystics that the reign of God can only come with the return of Christ. When one pushes too hard against the Cosmos, it pushes back. Alexander declared himself greater than Hercules, he was assassinated, his family exterminated and Ptolemy Soter was one of the few of his Companions who lived to found a dynasty and die in his bed.

I think that when the history of the USA over the past century is written several generations from now, it will describe not the March of Progress towards the future, the description will be of an ever increasing surrender to hubris culminating in overreach and collapse.

This is the consequence of giving the powers of an advanced culture to an archaic one, they see what they can do with the new powers, not what they shouldn’t do. The social structure is overwhelmed by the new powers, the effect is that of Dr Erskine’s Supersoldier Serum, what is good becomes better, what is bad, worse.

Homeric society started out as heroic warrior communities ruled by chiefs and freemen’s councils, their cosmology was of Primordial Chaos forged into Order by the Will of the Gods, the earthly rulers were shades of the Gods, ordering the human community as the Gods ordered the Cosmos. As their knowledge advanced, they studied the Order imposed by the Gods, the regularities they shaped, the ordered structures, from this they developed basic mechanics, observations of nature and the skills to create ordered organizations of their own, the concepts of objective law and disciplined organizations led to basic state bureaucracy and when merged with the fury of the Iron Age warrior led to the Greek Phalanx and the Roman Legion. The Homeric kings who in the past had commanded a few thousands warriors who were the freemen of his kingdom became massively powerful monarchs who had armies of tens to hundreds of thousands supported by workshops and officials who could undertake campaigns for years and where bound to absolute obedience. They became the Incredible Hulk’s of the Ancient World capable of smashing through everything in their paths, the humanistic ethic of the original Homeric world was overwhelmed by a power system stronger than it, the exercise of power became increasingly arbitrary, society turned into a regime of slavery and terror, the lacks of ancient culture became evident, the lack of a deep sense of ethics, no real work ethic, the absence of culturally integrated large scale structures, even the rulers enjoyed no security, any courtier could be a possible assassin, simply eating lunch was a terrifying adventure, their own relatives couldn’t be trusted, the guards who protected them one day could butcher them the next...

One sees this in Seneca who discussed the ethics of committing suicide under a despotism, of Boudicca who revolted and was massacred after she and her daughters were tortured by petty officials who had the power of life and death over even provincial aristocrats, the Gospels can be read as the testimony of common people living under the arbitrary will of the powerful. Boudicca could torture and kill any commoner under her power, imperial officials could do the same to her, the officials could be ordered by the Emperor to kill themselves on a whim and the Emperor themselves had to watch everyone... The Homeric values of personal freedom and dignity had lost any meaning and increasingly it became impossible to do science under the constraints of Hesiod’s metaphysics, the whole concept of a civilization ordered under its own collective will was dying.

Ultimately this became unsustainable, the reaction came, the Christians stated power comes only from God, the Cosmos is not ordered by the Emperor or any God he represents, it was created by God as an intrinsically ordered structure, there no law of Man, only the law of God which Man can only discover and interpret, all this apparatus of temporal power is just the product of ambition and greed, there is no divine purpose here, a counterfeit of the true City of God. The theology of the Glory of Rome died, abandoned by a people that could not bear its weight anymore and just wanted to breathe freely. Deprived of the faith that sustained it, Rome collapsed under its weight its ruins to become spolia to its heirs who had turned to the City of God.

Now Medieval Man stepped into the world with the certainty that it was God’s and that he had to live by His rules. Everything moved by His eternal laws, that could be understood and applied to both the human and natural realms. Rulers were as completely under God’s law as the beggar, a new institution was born, Medieval Kingship and Feudalism organized with the support of God’s Church, a massive body of law and customs was created to modulate, contain and control power, lord and vassal relationships, knighthood, the Estates, the Guilds, the Communes, ultimately reaching its fullest development in the great Medieval Courts like Versailles, war was codified into the sport of Kings instead of the genocidal total wars of the late Classical world. The much ridiculed Versailles functioned as a containment structure for power, the King could reign without ruling, he didn’t need to constantly torture and kill people to show he was in charge, he simply distributed perks and honours, he had great fringe benefits compared to a Classical ruler, greater personal comforts, minimal risks of assassination, eating his meals in peace, no worries about his guards, outside the palace a massive array of autonomous institutions ran the whole society without royal intervention, the king’s subjects lived in security and prosperity, the much maligned costs of Versailles were insignificant compared to the costs of despotism. The so-called Enlightenment pseudo philosophers could never have survived in Ancient Rome, they would have been lion food, in a 20th century tyranny it would have been concentration camps and bullets in the back of the head, they were in fact free because the containment structures of the Versailles system protected them, they thought France could be made into a better country if it was ruled by a Caesar, they got Napoleon who used up the wealth and manpower of France the way Alexander used up Macedon, people don’t realize what they have until they lose it...

Now armed with the concept of God’s law, the development of philosophy took new directions first under the scholastics and then under the natural philosophers taking the development of science well beyond that of ancient world, a new Christian work ethic fostered the Guilds of free craftsman who took technology beyond that the classical era with the clock, navigation skills, new architecture and art and eventually an Italian named Volta but together the first electric battery, opening a new unsuspected realm to science, knowledge that would overturn the Medieval metaphysics and lead to the Quantum Realm and the world of Relativity.

By the 19th century the world saw the emergence of a new form of organization, Technocracy, to manage the new railways and telegraph system, the first components that would grow into the Technosphere and a schizophrenic type of Man, Medieval Man in family and public life and Technospheric Man at the railway station, telegraph office and engineering and science lab.

The concept of regularity and intrinsic order in Homeric society lead to technologies and forms of organization that overwhelmed its ethics and social structure, the Roman Empire was a supersized Homeric chiefdom with the bureaucracy and military of King Philippe the Second but without the customs and institutions that restrained and stabilized his regime, before the power system Homeric society was completely helpless, only the replacement of its values by Medieval ones, accompanied by the collapse of the Roman system allowed the people to become free.

Today Technospheric Man has carried out a similar revolution, Technocracy, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, it’s technology, it’s conception of Man as taught by Freud and Jung, its achievements that have obliterated the old sense of limits, the Atomic bombs that can level mountains in minutes, the contraceptives that have removed immemorial fundamentals of the relations between the sexes, the medical advances, the communication systems and so much more. Today’s Western system is simply a collection of decayed Medieval courts surrounded by the modern equivalent of the Fuggers and Medecis in the corporate lobbyists attempting to use structures taken from Black Panther’s Wakanda and Doom’s Latveria to create some sort of City of God on Earth, they’re as completely overwhelmed as the Classical rulers were, they wanted absolute power, they have it and everything that goes with it, they’re afraid of each other and of the people they rule, they’re quickly finding that absolute power burns the hands that attempt to wield it. But do they even truly understand what they’re attempting to wield? Does their Medieval mentalities even contains the concepts and cognitive patterns that would allow them to understand?

That the problems the world is facing are problems in managing the Technosphere, they’re not political and the accepted techniques of financial and legal manipulation don’t work, traditional assumptions are obsolete, essentially what is required is Apollo Mission Control style technocratic management. Do these skills even exist in the current elites? Or they will simply persist in enforcing superstitious rituals of purity and redemption?

Today I point out the Internet, consider what the printing press did to the power of the Medieval Church, the first printed books came in 1455, 62 years later in 1517 Martin Luther posted his 95 theses and the rest is history. The Internet is the printing press on gamma rays, it’s Big, Mean and Green, consider that the properties of any substance is dependent on the nature of its bonding patterns whether its chemical or social bonds, the current system is dependent on vertical bonds converging on small groups of people, the Internet allows the creation of very large numbers of horizontal bonds across this structure, eventually sufficient to overwhelm the vertical structure and cause it to collapse. I don’t think their pathetic attempts at censorship will work anymore than burning printed tracts and heretics worked for the Church. Can the current governments even survive into the age of the Internet?

Now this was a long one Ugo, when I start writing I’m never sure how it’s going to come out!

One of the Soviet propaganda posters promoting the collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s. On the lower right, you can see a small man opposing the line of the marching peasants, He is recognizable as a "Kulak," one of the local independent farmers who were dispossessed and partly exterminated to leave space for collectivized farms, considered more efficient. There exist several similarities between the fall of the Kulaki and the current "Great Reset" that sees the destruction of a number of economic activities, such as retail commerce, seen as inefficient in comparison to modern electronic commerce.

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union carried out the "dekulakization" (раскулачивание) of Ukraine. It was the term given to the removal of the relatively wealthy, independent farmers ("kulaki"), to be replaced by collective farms. Their properties were confiscated, many of them were relocated to remote regions, and some were exterminated. We don't know the exact numbers, but surely we are in the range of a few million people. The transition to collectivized farms may have been one of the causes of the great Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, known as the "Holodomor,"

The reasons for the dekulakization are several. In part, they were related to the belief that large-scale, centrally planned enterprises were the most efficient way to organize production. Then, the Kulaki were seen as a potential enemy for the Soviet Government, while the region they occupied was a strategic asset in terms of food production in an age when famines were an effective war weapon.

But these considerations are not enough to explain why the Kulaki were so ruthlessly destroyed in just a few years. It was, rather, just a simple power game: the Soviet Government aimed at controlling all the means of production of the state. It couldn't tolerate that an important section of the economy, food production in Ukraine, was independently managed. And so it intervened with all the might that the state apparatus could muster.

The most interesting part of this story is how the removal/extermination was not just a result of the military might of the Soviet Government. It was an early example of a successful propaganda-based demonization campaign. The Kulaki were consistently portrayed in the media as inefficient and unreliable "enemies of the people." Once it was established that an independent farmer was an enemy of the people, then any attempt to defend the Kulaki would automatically turn defenders into enemies of the people. So, the Kulaki were completely overwhelmed, unable to organize any kind of collective resistance. The best they could do was some degree of passive resistance, for instance by hiding food rather than delivering it to the Soviet authorities. Of course, propaganda exploited that to reinforce the message that they were, indeed, enemies of the people. This is the way propaganda works.

At this point, I guess you understand the point I am making: the similarity of the current situation with the dekulakization of nearly a century ago. Also this time, an entire sector of the economy (actually more than one) is being crushed to leave space for different economic entities, believed to be more efficient with providing the same services: mainly the "new economy" of the Silicon Valley companies. This shift is sometimes called "The Great Reset." An appropriate name that could also be applied to the dekulakization.

The first victim of the Great Reset has been retail commerce. Mom and pop shops everywhere are the modern Kulaki, replaced by the onward marching militias of virtual commerce under the Amazon banner. But also franchises and shopping malls have been badly hit. It is impressive how nobody in the field dared to oppose the destruction of the source of their livelihood -- they were overwhelmed just like the Kulaki.

Other victims are waiting for the axe: Universities and schools are going to be defunded, obsolete against the onrush of e-learning. Public transport has become nearly useless with the triumph of virtual work and the fear of boarding a crowded bus: it will be replaced by the smart cars and using AI software. Mass tourism and mass air travel are already relics of the past, resources that can be saved and used for other purposes. And the pervasive control of everyone is advancing: now just as at the time of the Soviet Union, those who control the message control everything. In comparison with Soviet times, the modern propaganda effort is similar. Most propaganda is based on demonizing someone and, today, the targets are labeled as "deniers" (once "enemies of the people").

All that doesn't mean that the Great Reset was planned in advance, nor that the virus was manufactured on purpose. It simply means that the various actors in the economic arena saw how they could gain an advantage by acting in a certain way, and they did. These large organizations do not really plan in advance, they have no "brain," but -- like amoebas -- they move in the direction of the food they need.

Of course, the Silicon Valley Companies of our times are not the same thing as the Soviet Government of the 1930s. But there are similarities. Those companies that dominate the management of information on the Web operate very much Soviet-style: they are large, pyramidal organizations, often dominated by a charismatic leader (Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, etc.). In terms of size and planning style, they are not different from the People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Народный комиссариат земледелия) (Narkomzem), established in 1917, the entity that carried out the dekulakization. And they reason mainly in terms of power balance: they don't like and they don't tolerate competition.

The difference is that the Narkomzem was part of the state, whereas the Silicon Valley companies are not. They do control large swats of the American government but, on the whole, they are best seen as feudal lords. You can call them "Web Barons."

The current situation looks not unlike when King John of England signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215, forced to do so by England's Barons. Right now, the US government seems to be overwhelmed by the Barons of the Web, not unlike King John of England was. At least, when you hear that Twitter can cancel the account of the President of the United States, then you understand who is the boss.

And here we stand: we are seeing a classic situation in history: a central government being challenged by feudal lords. It is typical of when a state starts its downward path toward collapse, it is what's happening with the Western Empire. So, what's going to happen, now? Can history serve as a guide for us?

History, we know, always rhymes, but never repeats itself. In the 1930s, the Kulaki were destroyed by superior powers and that was the end of the story. Today, the situation is much more fluid.

For one thing, there is not a single, monolithic entity involved. We have several Barons who temporarily found a common goal, but which are potentially in conflict with each other. Then, the US government is not so weak yet. It still controls (and is controlled by) the military, and that's the crucial element that may change many things.

It is not clear what the military think of the current situation. Probably they don't have special objections about the elimination of retail commerce and other obsolete economic activities. But they also understand who is paying them: they get their money not from the Web Barons, but from the Government. And they may decide to do something to avoid going the same way as mom and pop shops. A few tanks in front of the Capitol Building would send a much clearer message to the Web Barons than that conveyed by a half-naked, horned shaman.

If the government is backed by a credible military force, then it would be possible to reduce the power of the monopolies of the Web: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and the others could be nationalized and/or broken down into less powerful entities. On the other hand, nothing prevents the Web Barons from building up their own military forces. Fluid situation, indeed.

The only sure thing is that the decline of the West is ongoing. There is little that can be done about that.

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Jake Angeli, high priest of the growing cult of Emperor Donald Trump, dressed as the horned God Cernunnos. The deification of Emperor Trump in Washington, yesterday, didn't go so well, but we are moving along a path that the Romans already followed during the decline of their empire, including the deification of emperors, starting with Caligula. So, comparing Roman history to our current conditions may tell us something about the future.

I already speculated on what kind of Roman Emperor Donald Trump could have been and I concluded that he might have been the equivalent of Hadrian. The comparison turned out to be not very appropriate. Clearly, Trump was no Hadrian (a successful emperor, by all means). But, after four years, and after the recent events in Washington, I think Trump may be seen as a reasonably good equivalent of Caligula, or Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, who also reigned for 4 years, from 37 to 41 AD.

Caligula was the prototypical mad emperor -- you probably heard that he nominated his horse consul. And he was not just mad, he was said to be a cruel, homicidal psychopath, and a sexual pervert to boot. In addition, he tried to present himself as a living god and pretended to be worshipped. He even claimed to have waged a war against the Sea God Poseidon, and having won it!

But, really, we know little about Caligula's reign, and most of it from people who had plenty of reasons to slander his memory, including our old friend Lucius Annaeus Seneca (he of the "Seneca Effect") who was a contemporary of Caligula and who seriously risked being killed by him. The Romans knew and practiced the same rules of propaganda we use today. And one typical way to slander an emperor was to accuse him to be a sexual pervert.

But it really doesn't matter so much if Caligula really was so bad as we are told he was. The point is that there is a certain logic in his actions. In Rome, just as in almost every ancient empire in history, Emperors were far from being warmongers. And that was for perfectly good reasons: imagine you are the emperor: you are the richest person in the world, you can have everything you want, you may order people to do whatever you want to do, and if they refuse you can have them killed. You can even force people to worship you like a God and many will do that without any need of forcing them. Then, why should you risk all that for the mere pleasure of slaughtering a bunch of bad-smelling barbarians?

That put emperors in a quandary: their power was based on military might, but the soldiers needed to be paid. And in order to pay them, military adventures needed to be undertaken. But military adventures, then as now, are risky and you never know who will win a war unless you fight it. This problem was the reason why many Roman emperors didn't end their careers in their death bed. Either they were reckless and then defeated, or too prudent, and they were killed by their own troops. The latter was the destiny of Caligula, who refused to engage in the invasion of Britannia. No invasion meant no booty and no bonus for the troops. And the troops were not happy. In the end, Caligula was killed by officers of the Praetorian Guard, a military corps that was supposed to protect him.

At this point, I think you can see how Trump's rule can be seen as similar to that of Caligula. Of course, Trump never made senator a horse, but he surely had stormy relations with the US congress -- as you saw in the recent events in Washington. As for considering himself a God, well, Trump may not have gone as far as Caligula, but surely he tended to aggrandize himself more than a little! The apparition of Trump's follower, Jake Angeli, dressed as the horned God Cernunnos, even gave a certain theological meaning to the occupation of the Capitol building in 2021.

The main point in the similarity, then, is that both Caligula and Trump did their best to avoid major wars and succeeded, at least in part. Trump had to compromise with the military, providing huge financing for the military apparatus. We don't know if Caligula did the same, but his fake campaign against Britannia may have been an attempt to appease the military without risking a real invasion. Whatever the case, Caligula was eliminated and replaced with an older and more pliant Emperor, Claudius.

Something similar occurred with Donald Trump, replaced by an older and more pliant emperor because he clearly showed that he did not plan any major military campaigns. Unlike Caligula, and luckily for him, Trump was not physically eliminated (so far). But the trend is clear: The Washingtonian Emperors are desperately trying to acquire more and more powers in order to try to control an increasingly divided society. "Deification" - turning the leader into a God - may be a good strategy in this sense and it is likely that we'll see more and more US presidents using it in the future

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This being how things stand, can we use the Trump-Caligula analogy to conceive future scenarios? The future is always difficult to predict, but it is also a lot of fun to try. So, let's tell first the story of the Roman Empire after the death of Caligula, then we'll see to create a narrative for what the modern Global Empire after the removal of Donald Trump.

Caligula's successor, Claudius, was a relatively weak emperor who couldn't oppose the military adventure in Britannia that nearly brought the Roman Empire to its doom. Initially, the invasion was successful but, later on, the Romans seriously risked losing everything when Queen Boudicca led a revolt against them in 60 AD, nearly succeeding in throwing back the invaders into the sea. Eventually, the Romans managed to quell the revolt, but it was a close call.

The problem was not so much Britannia, but the fact that the Empire had seriously overstretched itself. While Boudicca's army scoured Britain, torturing and killing Roman citizens, on the opposite side of the Empire, in Palestine, a revolt was brewing. It exploded with tremendous fury in 66 AD and, this time, the Romans failed to quell it immediately. It took nearly eight years of hard fighting to reestablish the Roman domain in the region. During this period, the survival of the Empire itself was at serious risk.

We may imagine that if the Romans hadn't needed to garrison Britain, they could have had more resources to defeat the Jewish insurrection. As it was, instead, the effort of having to control two unruly regions at the same time and at the two opposite extremes of the Roman dominion led to financial problems and to turmoil all over the Empire. Emperor Nero lost control of his generals and was forced to kill himself. For a year, four different generals fought each other for the imperial throne. Eventually, Vespasian, a general who had fought both in Britain and in Palestine, restored order in 69 AD. But the situation remained difficult. One indication of the financial problems of the time is that in modern Romance languages, urinals are named after Vespasian, probably because for the first time he placed a tax on their use.

In time, the Roman state managed to recover a certain balance and the deep state scored a major victory when they placed a career soldier at the top, Trajan (53-117). Trajan may have seen himself as the successor of Alexander the Great and he maintained his promise to expand the Empire. In 101 AD, he engaged in a successful military campaign against Dacia (more or less modern Romania). Then, in 113 AD he embarked in an ambitious campaign destined to get rid once for all of the competitor Parthian Empire, in the East. It was nothing less than an attempt of world domination.

At the beginning, Trajan obtained some major victories, but he was not Alexander the Great. The Romans conquered the region that we call Iraq today, but further advances were simply unthinkable and the Romans had overstretched their domains to an extremely dangerous level. In order to finance his campaigns, Trajan had devaluated the Roman currency and a new civil war could have shattered the Empire. Fortunately for the Romans, Trajan died before he could truly wreck the Empire's finances. His successor, Hadrian, stopped the wars of conquest and reorganized the Empire within militarily sustainable borders. Of course, the Roman empire was doomed anyway, but at least Hadrian avoided that it would collapse already during the 2nd century AD:

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Now, let's start from these ancient events to create a scenario for our times. Joe Biden is clearly no Trajan, but he has something in common with the weak and old Claudius. As such, Biden may well fail to stop the military from engaging the US Empire in one or more risky military adventures, for instance attacking Iran, or maybe Syria.

The military strength of the US is so large that it is hard to think that this kind of relatively minor campaigns could be unsuccessful, but they would seriously weaken the Empire and generate internal frictions. The attack on the Capitol building already gave us a taste of what the results could look like.

After Biden will be gone, it may be possible to see the Global Empire in the hands an aggressive military leader. Such a leader might decide to do what Trajan did. She might engage in an all-out effort to destroy the rival empire, the Parthians for the Romans, the Chinese for the current Global Empire. (why did I say "she"? You know that!)

Could a warlike Empress succeed in bringing the US Empire to global dominance? Unlikely. Just like Trajan nearly wrecked the Roman finances in his attempt, our Empress may well wreck the Western economy -- or the whole world's economy -- forever, with the additional result of wrecking the whole ecosystem as well. But history seems to reason in its own terms that was unavoidable from the beginning. For one thing, in our times things seem to happen much faster than in Roman times and the fall of Washington to a Barbarian army doesn't seem to be so unthinkable as it was just a few days ago.

China: Oct 1st, 2020, celebrations of the national day. From this and other pictures, it is clear that the Chinese are not too much worried about getting close together, even without wearing face masks (source)

The text below is the translation of a post I published in Italian on the Facebook site "Pills of Optimism" on Oct 26th. There are still many things we have to understand about how China managed to control the COVID-19 epidemic. But one thing is certain: it was controlled and it is still under control.

In China, stopping the infection required little more than a regional lockdown that interested a small fraction of the Chinese territory: the Hubei province, about 4% of the total population of China. Coupled with aggressive tracking and isolating, it was enough to get rid of the virus. There have been no COVID-related deaths in China since March 2020. The Chinese economic machine is in motion, people move, travel, shop, walk around, often without face masks. In short, life is normal. And it has been normal during the past six months, at least.

In comparison, the epidemic in the West has been so badly mismanaged that one feels like crying of rage. A threat that never was overwhelming was magnified to the point that it risks destroying the very fabric of the Western economic machine. How could it happen?

Within some limits, the collapse of the Western economy was unavoidable for reasons related to the decline of the availability of natural resources. But that it happened so fast is bewildering. So surprising that some people maintain that it was a conspiracy against the West concocted by China or even a plot by the evil Western elite to get rid of their useless Untermenschen.

Maybe, but it is more likely that, simply, the West lost control of its governance system that went on by itself like an individual immune system that suddenly attacks its host.

What can we learn from this story? Mainly, that we can't afford to be dominated by the waves of self-reinforcing hysteria that go through the media and the social networks. How can we manage that? Well, good question. Imitating China would mean giving most of the power to the Communist party, and that doesn't sound so viable, nowadays, in the West. But, seriously, we must rethink our governance system, otherwise the next serious crisis will truly destroy us. (supposing that we survive the current one)

[China: the epidemic is over. How did they manage that](http:// https://www.facebook.com/pillolediottimismo/posts/191724999234646)?

Di Ugo Bardi, University of Florence, Italy (1) - 26 Oct 2020

(translation slightly readapted for an international readership).

💊💊💊 From the data arriving from China, it seems that things are going very well with the COVID epidemic. In China, as well as in all of East Asia, mortality was much lower than in Europe and no deaths have been reported since March. There are still many things to clarify in this story, but China can teach us that it is possible to stop the spread of the virus without harming the economy. 💊💊💊

Do you remember when, in January, the Chinese (or those who looked like Chinese) were insulted in the street in Italy by people who believed they were spreading the plague? Things have changed quite a bit and today it is the Chinese who believe that we Italians are the plague spreaders. In China, there have been no deaths from COVID-19 since about mid-March. As for positive cases, there have been only occasional outbreaks of a few dozen cases, almost all of them imported (2). The Chinese economy has restarted to move and is now running at full capacity.

From what we can read in the international media and from what colleagues who live and work in China tell me, the country is completely open. All commercial and industrial activities are in operation. The shops and restaurants are open and there are no restrictions on internal travel. Wearing face masks is optional and many people don't wear them. From the photos that come from China, we see that people do not pay much attention to the gatherings of people without masks. (below, celebrations of the National Day in Wuhan, Oct 1st)

Of course, the authorities are still on their guard and they intervene as soon as small outbreaks emerge. For example, the authorities of the city of Qingdao recently discovered an outbreak that, according to the international media, may be related to a batch of imported frozen cod on which someone would have observed viruses still whole. True or not, hard to say, but in any case, the local government is committed to testing all the 9 million inhabitants of the city! (3).

But, overall, it is clear that in China and elsewhere in Asia the epidemic is under control without the need for a lockdown or other harsh measures of containment. Not only does the epidemic seem to have disappeared in China. It also created very little damage, at least according to the government data. The total number of victims is reported to have been about 4,600 out of almost one and a half billion people. That means 3 deaths per million against about 600 in Italy and other Western countries. Even if we only consider the European regions where the virus has hit the hardest, we find that the province of Hubei still did better. (4)

How is such a thing possible? We often read on social media and on the media that the Chinese cheated us and that they are continuing to cheat us. Since China is a dictatorship, it is said, it follows that everything the Chinese government tells us is false by definition - including the fact that the epidemic is gone. Could it be that people are still dying of the COVID in China, but the government doesn't tell us?

Governments are not known to be reliable sources of information. We saw in a previous post how at least one European country, Belarus, may have partially falsified the data on the epidemic (5). As for China, there are previous cases of falsified data. For example, an analysis of fisheries data arriving from China in the 1990s indicated obvious falsifications to hide the depletion of stocks (6), (7)). But an epidemic is a far more serious and more extensive business than a fraud in a specific commercial sector. It would also be very difficult for the Chinese government to hide it if there was one in progress.

So, if we want to believe that the Chinese are telling us lies about the epidemic we must bring some evidence on this. Remaining with the example of the fishery data, one of the reasons that led to mistrust the validity of the Chinese data were the anomalies that were noticed when comparing with data from other similar regions. Can we find any such anomaly for the pandemic? Apparently not: the data on the spread of COVID-19 in China are comparable to data from other neighboring Asian countries which, in general, have had minimal or no mortality.

For example, Taiwan did even better than mainland China with a total of 7 deaths per 23 million inhabitants (less than one death per million). Other countries did a little worse but still remained at very low mortality levels. Singapore reports 5 deaths per million, Hong Kong 13. Neighboring Japan also suffered only 13 deaths per million. Then, both Mongolia and Macao even report zero deaths. Sure, one might say that Mongolia doesn't count because it's a country of camel drivers living in tents in the middle of the desert. But, of course, that's not the case. The capital of Mongolia, Ulan Bator, is a metropolis with over one million inhabitants. Macau, then, is a city of 700,000 inhabitants with a very high population density, perhaps the highest in the world. And the epidemic went through both Ulan Bator and Macau without leaving a single victim! It is hardly credible that all these governments have agreed to hide an ongoing epidemic from the rest of the world.

But why are things so much better in Asia than here? Did the Chinese have used particularly effective containment measures? In some ways, this year's Chinese lockdown may have been more drastic than the Western one, but it didn't last longer than in Europe. It is not even possible to say that it was more timely if, as the Chinese themselves say, the virus was already circulating in December. The lockdown was established in Wuhan only on January 23 and a few days later for the entire province of Hubei.

In terms of "social distancing," we all know that in Asia there is a tendency to avoid physical contact between people. But it is also true that if you have ever taken the subway in an eastern city (for example in Tokyo (8)) you will have a very specific idea of ​​the meaning of the expression "squeezed like sardines". If you never had this experience, take a look at this link to an impressive video of the Beijing metro (9). Eastern metropolises are extremely crowded and, under certain conditions, it is simply impossible to avoid physical contact.

Could it be then that the trick was in contact tracking and isolating? From what we can read, it seems that Asian countries have been very aggressive in tracking and isolating people who have been in contact with people affected by the virus (10). This is an interesting explanation, but tracking and isolating was done in Europe, too. Maybe we haven't done it well enough? It is possible, but we have no quantitative comparisons that can tell us if this is the only explanation for the whole story.

There is also another possible interpretation that has nothing to do with what governments have done or not done. It may be that the Chinese have been exposed to the virus for longer than we in the West and therefore approached herd immunity first. You probably heard of Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who first noticed cases of abnormal pneumonia in December and who later died of contracting the infection himself. Initially, he was not believed, but today he is considered a hero in China.

Li had begun to sound the alarm towards the end of December 2019, but nothing prevents us from thinking that the virus had already existed in China for some time, perhaps even in slightly different forms from the one that then hit Europe. It was just that those affected were diagnosed as normal cases of pneumonia. Is it possible that the Chinese population had been exposed to the virus long before the declaration of the emergency? There is a fact that could give us a strong indication in this regard: excess mortality. If the epidemic already existed in November-December 2019, or even earlier, we should see an abnormally high mortality in China, compared to the average for that period.

Good idea, but with a problem: nowhere on the Web we can find data on the additional mortality in China during the COVID pandemic. Note that this does not mean that the Chinese government is hiding anything from us. Hardly any government in the world disseminates these data in an easily accessible form. Europe is an exception with a database on excess mortality called "Euromomo" managed by a network headed by WHO, but there is no such thing for East Asia. So, for the moment, the idea of ​​an early start of the epidemic in China remains a hypothesis.

There are other factors we could look at but this virus has accustomed us to the fact that predictions and interpretations always turn out to be wrong. Even in a recent article in Nature (11), the authors frankly said that "we are not yet able to provide a generalized explanation for the observed quantitative mortality differences between countries". Thus, we must content ourselves with saying that the epidemic has done much less damage in Asia than it did for us for some reason that, at the moment, we cannot identify with certainty.

But let's stick with what we know, which is that at the moment things are going very well in China and in the whole East Asia, just while the West is experiencing a "second wave." At least, we can conclude that we are not facing an invincible enemy. It is possible to beat the Sars-Cov-2 without necessarily having to destroy the economy with prolonged and generalized lockdowns. Of course, we are in a very difficult moment here, in Europe, but there is no reason to think that we will have to continue living in terror for centuries to come.

The author thanks Chandran Nair for his comments on the situation in China.

1. https://ugobardihomepage.blogspot.com/2016/04/ugo-bardis-personal-home-page.html

2. http://www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/yqtb/202010/2fbce5a9836d4b09a89a0d85a2e05ac2.shtml

3. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1203836.shtml

4. https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=176464484012617&id=111172767208456

5. https://ugobardi.blogspot.com/2020/10/pandemia-e-possibile-che-qualcuno-ci.html

6. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11734851/

7. http://www.fao.org/3/Y3354M/Y3354M00.htm

8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ

9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ulY7N3dZ9k

10. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-25/these-elite-contact-tracers-show-the-world-how-to-beat-covid-19

11. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1112-0

Every book by Ursula Le Guin is by definition the best book by Ursula Le Guin. And there is no book by Ursula Le Guin that's not the best book by Ursula Le Guin. But this one, "The Word for World is Forest" may be even better than that!

I read "The Word for World is Forest" maybe 30 years ago, but when I took it up again, every word in it was familiar to me, as I had dropped it in a drawer just one week before. Each word of it carried the rumble of thunder and the force of a hurricane, the same effect on me of a presentation by Anastassia Makarieva on the same subject, the forest.

Anastassia Makarieva is a scientist, Ursula Le Guin was a novelist. It doesn't matter. There is a thread, there is a narration, there is a story that pervades humankind's consciousness. I can't remember who said that trees are the pillars that hold the sky, but I am discovering it is true. Not single trees, the forest, it is the biotic pump, an incredible machine that works pumping water from the air above the oceans and distributes it for free to every living creature. The ultimate gift of life.

I can't understand how Ursula Le Guin could grasp these concepts by pure intuition nearly 50 years ago, but she did. Reread many years later, this book is a pure hit to the stomach. It leaves you breathless, but in a state of mind as if you wanted to be punched again and again, for the pure pleasure of the action, the movement, the sensation.

In 1972, something about this subject was already known and the destruction of the Vietnamese forests using the infamous "agent orange" reverberates all over the book. The basis of the story is the Vietnam war, retold in a science fiction setting, with the Aliens in the role of the Vietnamese and the Terrans of the Americans. The Terrans want to destroy the forest to turn it into plantations, the Aliens want to save it. In fact, it is the same story as that of the "Avatar" movie, it is just that Cameron's debt to Ursula Le Guin is not acknowledged.

But the book is not just a political statement, it is much more than that. Read this passage ("Selver" is the alien leader of the story):

"Sometimes a god comes," Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is.

The meaning of this passage may be evident to you, or you may need to mull it over for a while in your mind. But it is one of the deepest statements I've ever read on the predicament we find ourselves in. The beauty of it is that so much hope is embedded in these words: the world changes, ideas evolve, sometimes taking the form of Gods or god-like entities. It is in this way that the world is changed: when dreams become reality. And some dreams are truly beautiful and full of hope, like this one by Anastassia Makarieva

You see, there is a succession process for forest recovery. We first have shrub grasses after some disturbance like fire, then it takes time for that to be replaced by trees. So if we are lucky our grand grandchildren will be walking in such forest, so this dimension should also be stressed. We are working for the future we are not just securing for ourselves some two dozens years of better comfort. Rather, we send a message through centuries such that people will remember us and walking into this forest along the brookes and rivers they will remember us with gratitude for our consciousness and dedication. (Anastassia Makarieva (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ1UtHRBcG4 - min 30:05))

The more the current world drama unfolds, the more I am amazed by how closely we are following the path that the ancient Roman Empire followed toward its final collapse. Dmitry Orlov, another student of civilization collapse, seem to think in the same way. In a post on his blog, he notes how Julian Assange could be the first martyr for truth of modern times, he calls him "St. Julian." Says Orlov:

If all goes well, he (Julian Assange) will be released and reestablish himself as a media personality of great stature. And if everything goes badly and the Americans do get their hands on him and torture him to death, he will die as a martyr and live in public memory forever.

I don’t know whether Assange has been baptized, but a proper choice of saint for him would be St. Julian of Antioch, who was martyred during Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians between 303 and 313 AD. Julian was stuffed into a sack filled with sand, vipers and scorpions and dumped in the sea. Diocletian’s initiative was a failure: the son of one of his lieutenants, Constantine, not only canceled the persecution of Christians but made Christianity into Roman Empire’s state religion. He then moved its capital to New Rome (Constantinople), abandoning Old Rome to languish in the Dark Ages while his New Rome went on for a thousand glorious years.

Should Julian Assange end up martyred by the Americans, we can expect a vaguely similar result: future generations of Americans will say: “There once was a great journalist by the name of Julian. He died as a martyr for the truth. It was a long time ago, and we don’t know what’s been happening to us since then, because all we have been hearing ever since have been nothing but lies…”

I think this post by Orlov goes to the heart of the matter. A civilization collapse is, in the end, a collapse of trust. An empire, a state, a family, any social structure, can be rich or poor, powerful or weak, new or old, happy or sad, but if there is no trust keeping it together it cannot exist for long, it is like a solid turning into a gas when the chemical bonds keeping the atoms together are not strong enough. It is what happened to the Roman Empire, it is what's happening to us. As Matthew says, "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand" (12:25).

Ultimately, trust is based on truth. Without truth, there cannot be trust. In Roman times, the fight of Christianity against the Empire of Lies was more than everything else a fight to rebuild trust by establishing a new truth, the revealed one. I wrote in a previous post that:

Augustine and other early Christian fathers were engaged, first of all, in an epistemological revolution. Paulus of Tarsus had already understood this point when he had written: "now we see as in a mirror, darkly, then we'll see face to face." It was the problem of truth; how to see it? How to determine it? In the traditional view, truth was reported by a witness who could be trusted. The Christian epistemology started from that, to build up the concept of truth as the result divine revelation. The Christians were calling God himself as witness.

In the name of truth, the Christian martyrs (a Greek term meaning "witness") were willing to give their life, to die vilified and tortured in the most gruesome manners. It was the courage of the early martyrs that eventually brought down the zombie creature that the once great Roman Empire had become.

And now? We are rapidly entering a phase when the lies told to us by our governments and our elites are so huge, so pervasive, so blatant to qualify as diabolical. But in the great confusion of our times even the good among us are confused, they can't discern the truth anymore. And the time may have come when we need a new generation of Martyrs for truth is needed.

When giving an example of an exponentially growing production curve, I used to cite cement production. Look at the data up to 2013: a beautiful growing curve with a doubling time of -- very roughly -- 10 years. Then, if we assume that the current concrete covered area in the world is about 2% (an average of the data by Schneider et al., 2009 and the Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project, 2004) then we would get to Trantor -- bowling ball planet -- in some 50 years.

Of course that wasn't possible, but it was still a surprise to discover how abrupt the change has been: here are the most recent data (the value for 2018 is still an estimate from cemnet.com)

Impressive, right? Steve Rocco, smart as usual, had already noticed this trend in 2017, but now it is clearer. It looks like a peak, it has the shape of a peak, it gives the impression of a peak. Most likely it is a peak -- actually, it could be the start of an irreversible decline in the global cement production.

Now, what caused the decline? If you look at the disaggregated data, it is clear that the slowdown was mainly created by China, but not just by China. Several countries in the world are going down in terms of cement production -- in Italy, the decline started in 2010.

My impression -- that I share with the one proposed by Rocco -- is that this is not a blip in the curve, nor a special case among the various mineral commodities produced nowadays. It is a symptom of a general problem: it may be the clearest manifestation of the concept of "peak civilization" that the 1972 "Limits to Growth" study had placed for some moment during the 1st or 2nd decades of the 21st century.

Peak Cement is not alone another major peak was detected by Antonio Turiel for diesel fuel in 2015. And, of course, we know that another major commodity went through a global peak in 2014: coal. (data from bp.com)

So, are we really facing "peak civilization"? It is hard to say. On a time scale of a few years, many things could change and, in any case, you don't expect peaking to take place at the same time for all mineral commodities, everywhere. A strong indication that the whole world system is peaking would come from the behavior of the global GDP. Rocco had proposed that also the GDP had peaked in 2015, but the data available at present are insufficient to prove that.

In any case, it has been said that we would see the great peak "in the rear mirror"and this may well be what we are seeing. Whatever is happening it will be clearer in the future but, if it is really "the peak", expect the Seneca cliff to open up in front of us in the coming years. And maybe it won't be such a bad thing: did we really want to turn the Earth into a bowling ball?

Over nearly a half-century, since the time of Richard Nixon, American presidents have proclaimed the need for "energy independence" for the US, without ever succeeding in attaining it. During the past few years, it has become fashionable to say that the US has, in fact, become energy independent, even though it is not true. And, doubling down on this concept, there came the idea of "energy dominance," introduced by the Trump administration in June 2017. It is now used at all levels in the press and in the political debate.

No doubt, the US has good reasons to be bullish on oil production. Of the three major world producers, it is the only one growing: it has overtaken Saudi Arabia and it seems to be poised to overtake Russia in a few years. graphic source.

This rebound in the US production after the decline that started in the early 1970s is nearly miraculous. And the miracle as a name: shale oil. A great success, sure, but, if you think about it, the whole story looks weird: the US is trying to gain this "dominance" by means of resources which, once burned, will be forever gone. It is like people competing at who is burning their own house faster. What sense does it make?

Art Berman keeps telling us that shale oil is an expensive resource that could be produced at a profit only for market conditions that are unrealistic to expect. So far, much more money has been poured into shale oil production than it has returned from the sales of shale oil. "Energy dominance" seems to be just an elaborate way to lose money and resources. Again, what sense does that make?

But there is a logic in the term "energy dominance." It has to do with the way slogans are used in politics: a slogan is not just a compact way of expressing a certain political concept, it is often a coded message that hides much more than it says. So, we know that "bringing democracy" to a foreign country means to bomb it to smithereens. "Make America great again" means subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. "The Indispensable Country" means, "The American Empire." And more.

There is nothing wrong in using coded slogans: you only have to know how to decode them. So, "energy dominance" has to be decoded and turned into "military dominance." Then, things start making sense.

After one year of Trump presidency, America looks more and more the same as Italy was when Berlusconi ruled it. I am not going to list the similarities between Berlusconi and Trump: it has already been done and everyone knows about the sex scandals, the outrageous behavior, the offensive way of speaking, all that.

For Silvio Berlusconi, this kind of behavior led him to be prime minister for a total of 9 years, over more than 20 years in which he strongly influenced Italian politics. Today, it looks perfectly possible that, at 81, he may become prime minister again with the coming national elections, in March, replacing the fading star of his heir, Matteo Renzi (aka "Berlusconi 2.0").

Donald Trump uses the same methods developed by Berlusconi and he seems to be attaining a remarkable political staying power. Fighting him, the American Left is making the same mistakes that the Italian left made with Berlusconi: demonizing him while aping his political choices. Actually, the American Left is doing even worse: at least the Italian Left never accused voters to be so dumb that they could be easily swayed by the propaganda tricks of a foreign power. A surefire way to win the next elections: first you tell them they are idiots, nay, traitors, then you ask for their vote.

But there is a method to this madness. The Left is making the mistakes it makes because it operates on the basis of an obsolete political paradigm. Most of the political struggle up to recent times has been based on a principle discovered first by Harold Hotelling in the 1920s (it is called the Hotelling-Downs model): he who controls the center, wins (it works also in economics and with chess).

There is a problem with this model: it works only if there is a political center. As I described in a previous post, that's not true anymore: today there are two centers and the way to win elections is to occupy one of the two, as Donald Trump perfectly understood. Hillary Clinton didn't and her defeat was unavoidable.

The great “pulse” of mass exterminations that occurred during the 20th century (graph created by Rummel). According to this chart, 262 million people were exterminated during the last century, mainly by governments in a series of actions that Rummel defines as “democides”. The question is, could something similar occur in the future? It turns out that mass exterminations are like earthquakes, their occurrence cannot be predicted exactly; but we can estimate the probability of an event of a certain size to occur. And the more time passes, the more likely a new pulse of mass exterminations becomes.

In this sobering exclusive analysis for INSURGE, Professor Ugo Bardi dissects historical statistics on war to unpick the patterns of violence of the past and uncover what this says about the present — and our coming future. He warns that statistical data suggests we are on the brink of heading into another round of major wars resulting, potentially, in mass deaths on a scale that could rival what we have seen in the early 20th century. Far from mere doom-mongering, Bardi’s warning is based on a careful assessment of statistical patterns in the data.Such a future, however, may not be set in stone — given that for the first time we are able to assess our past to discern these patterns, in a way we could not do before. Perhaps, then, the path to freedom from the patterns of the past remains open. The question is: what are we going to do with this information?

At this point, the Romans really went crazy. Yes, they went nuts, bananas, watermelons, whatever you like to call that condition. They started looking for a culprit, a scapegoat, someone to blame. Now, you remember that Emperor Honorius had accused his general Flavius Stilicho of treason; that is, of being colluded with the Barbarians. That was already an effect of rampaging paranoia. But, in the besieged Rome, paranoia went up of a few notches. Someone noticed that Stilicho's widow, Serena, was in Rome. If her husband had been a traitor, well, she had to be a traitoress. Serena was the cousin of Emperor Honorius, a noblewoman of high rank. But when paranoia becomes the rule, it generates pure evil. Serena was accused of treason, sentenced to death by the Senate, and executed by strangling.

It is at this point that we have the first appearance of Galla Placidia in history as an adult, she was around 20 years old at that time. We are told by the chronicler Zosimus that the execution of Serena was done "with Galla Placidia's consent."

In a previous post,  I discussed the RethinkX report by James Arbib and Tony Seba on the future of transportation. The report discusses a technological revolution that would bring about a new concept: "Transportation as a Service" (TaaS) that will people to move mainly by using publicly available, driverless cars. Many took the report (and my comments on it) as just another technofix aimed at keeping things as they are; business as usual. Indeed, the report, framed the "TaaS" concept in terms of economic growth. Nothing else is acceptable in the public debate, today.

So, it seems that few people realized what kind of sacred cow Arbib and Seba are planning to slaughter and serve as well cooked burgers. It is nothing less than the private car, the pivotal element of the American way of life (yes, exactly what George Bush 1st said "is not negotiable"). This idea is as far from business as usual as I can imagine, one of the most disruptive and revolutionary ideas that I came across in recent times. So, I think I can go more in depth into this subject and explain why it is so disruptive and revolutionary.