Month: January 2024

In my archetypal table, I assign Intellect to the Orphan phase of life and Will to the Adult phase as follows:-

	Physical	Exoteric	Esoteric
Child	Pre-puberty	N/A	Imagination
Orphan	Puberty	Student, apprentice	Intellect
Adult	Maturity	Economic, political, sexual maturity	Will
Elder	Old Age (menopause)	Mentor, Elder, (Retired)	Soul

The young aristocrats are Orphans because they have no official responsibilities in the clan. That is why they must petition the clan leader to get something done. They have correctly used their Intellect to figure out that there is corruption going on. What they don’t realise is that knowing something to be true is a very different thing from proving it and a different thing again from ensuring justice gets served.

Even in the modern world with our egalitarian ethic and the nominally equal access that everybody has to the courts, there is incredible naivete around how the justice system works. The justice system does not guarantee justice. It only guarantees the chance at justice. The pursuit of justice belongs more to the realm Will than to the Intellect. Going through a court case takes time, energy and especially money. Knowing something is true intellectually is a different thing to standing in court and asserting that truth, especially since others will stand and assert that you are wrong. In short, the pursuit of justice rests far more on Will than Intellect. The young aristocrats begin the movie with the mindset that many naïve people still have in our time that just because they are right means that justice will be served.

Throughout Kurosawa’s movie, various traps and deceptions are laid by the bad guys, the superintendent and his accomplices. Their goal is to lure their opponents into situations where they can either frame them for made up crimes or just kill them outright. The naïve aristocrats fall for the bait every single time and it is only because they have samurai to help them that they escape.

What does the samurai have that they do not? We could sum it up in a word whose modern meaning has taken on a negative connotation, cunning. In Old English, the word cunning used to mean simply “to know”. It was one of a pair of words that most other European languages have but which has disappeared in modern English. In modern German, there is still the difference between kennen and wissen. Cunning comes from the same root word as German kennen.

Although the semantic difference is not clean, the difference between wissen and kennen is that between abstract knowledge and practical knowledge. What I am calling Intellect is about abstract knowledge and therefore maps to German wissen. Kennen, and English cunning, are about practical knowledge. Because practical knowledge comes from lived experience, and because lived experience is based more on Will than on Intellect, cunning is the kind of knowledge that comes from Will-fully acting in the world.

Part of Will-fully acting in the world is coming to understand that the world does not run on Intellect and its abstractions. Many a philosopher throughout history has come to the conclusion that the world should run on Intellect and the way to do that is precisely to remove the element of Will from the equation. It’s a nice idea, but, as the movie Sanjuro shows, it can get you killed, especially in the domain of politics. To operate in the real world, you need cunning. That is what the naïve aristocrats completely lack.

But, the distinction between Will and Intellect, cunning and knowing, holds even outside of political gamesmanship.

The consequences of any enterprise of reasonable complexity cannot be calculated in advance. To refuse to act until you have attempted to calculate all possible effects leads to analysis paralysis. This is before we even get into the various paradoxes of Intellect which call into question the possibility that Intellect can generate valid outputs in the first place.

The question of determinism has been around for millennia, but the late 19^th century saw a particularly strong form of determinism take shape fuelled by the enthusiasm surrounding the progress of science. It was genuinely believed by certain thinkers and scientists that the Intellect would soon solve all problems and we could know pretty much everything there was to know. We could then predict the outcome of any action with complete certainly. Put into our terminology, it was the belief in the infinite power of the Intellect. Of course, it fell apart in multiple ways including from within the scientific paradigm itself.

We can frame the problem in the terms of system theory by simply saying that action in the real world requires dealing with irreducible complexity and therefore the results cannot be calculated in advance. To act knowing that the consequences cannot be known in advance requires the use of Will. It follows that action according to Will requires an understanding of the limits of Intellect.

Part of the reason why Kurosawa’s Sanjuro is such a great movie is because it makes clear what is the difference between acting in the world according to Intellect and according to Will. The samurai and the bad guys are acting according to Will. The naïve young aristocrats are acting according to Intellect. What does this mean in practice?

Well, one of the main differences is that both the samurai and his opponents are inherently distrustful of information. More precisely, they judge information only once they know its source. There’s a great scene towards the end of the movie where Sanjuro is attempting to lure the troops of the superintendent to a specific location. When the fake news is reported to the superintendent, his first question is “who is this samurai?” He doesn’t take the information on face value. He wants to know who is providing it. He wants to know the intention, the Will, behind the information.

By contrast, time and again, the naïve aristocrats take whatever they hear at face value as if it’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They have no concept of Will and therefore no concept of deception. The idea of deception might sound obvious to those of us who live in the real world where lies are commonplace, but for cloistered aristocrats who live in ivory towers, it can be a real shock.

Some philosophers and theologians have gotten around the problem of the potential corruption of the Intellect by stating that the world we live in is inherently corrupt and we should not expect to find truth here at all. Maybe they’re right. But there is another strand of thought in modern Western culture which has explored the idea that maybe Will is more fundamental than Intellect (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and others).

In his own way, Kurosawa also explores this idea in the attitude that the aristocrats have towards the samurai. There’s a scene where one of them calls the samurai a “monster”. Another says that he can’t be trusted. This happens quite late in the movie after the samurai has saved their lives several times. How could the aristocrats fail to trust a man who has saved their lives repeatedly?

Whatever else you want to say about this, one of the effects of such a practice is to take decision making out of the hands of Intellect and place it in the domain of Will. Reading oracles is an inherently irrational process. It meant that the decision could not be judged by Intellect.

Why would you want a decision not to be judged by Intellect? Because of our aforementioned point: the consequences of any enterprise of complexity cannot be known in advance. But that doesn’t stop the Intellect from judging those consequences after the fact. One of the ways this manifests is in the phenomenon of preachers thundering away in pulpits about how everything that goes wrong in the world is evidence that God is punishing us. We see the exact same thing in the modern world where various ideologues will judge actions after the fact with the implication that if we only followed their ideology none of it would have happened.

All this is born out of the same error of not understanding the limits to Intellect. Does the preacher or ideologue have a broadband connection directly to the central server of heaven? Do they know (Intellectually) what God knows? If so, why didn’t they enlighten us all before the action rather than wait for the consequences to manifest? The reason is because they couldn’t have known in advance. All they can do is judge after the fact. But this is an invalid use of Intellect and the result is fake knowledge. Of course, this problem is not limited to preachers and ideologues. We all have a tendency to fall into this trap through the misuse of Intellect.

One could argue that the ancients took the idea of Will too far and ended up in the realm of fatalism where life was just a long process of being thrown this way and that by the Will of the gods and all you could do was accept it. This explains the extreme stagnation that set in during the Roman Empire where scarcely any attempt was made to change things for the better. Why bother when it was just the Will of the gods? The same was true for Egypt and, seemingly, for most civilisations of that era.

Kurosawa’s movie shows us a more mundane version of the same dynamic. It is about how those who operate according to Intellect alone (the aristocrats) misjudge those who operate according to Will (the samurai).

But the reverse is also true. The samurai must learn how to deal with the aristocrats. He is used to operating by Will alone and not having to worry about making his Will comprehensible by others. That’s part of the reason the aristocrats don’t trust him. He doesn’t explain his strategy to them in terms they can understand. Eventually, at the end of the film, he figures it out. How does he solve the problem? By giving them explicit, binary instructions. When this, do that. Otherwise, do nothing. Finally, they are able to follow along and his plan comes to fruition.

The moral of the story is that those who would lead must translate their Will into terms their followers, using Intellect, can understand. Here we have the origins of bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is an organisational structure that runs on rules like a machine. Since the Intellect is good at comprehending rules, a bureaucracy is the natural place for people like the aristocrats in Sanjuro.

It is noteworthy in this respect that bureaucracy was created in Asia while the ancient Greeks and Romans had almost no bureaucracy until very late in the Roman Empire, and even then only a minimal one. The ancients had solved the same problem in a different way. Consulting the oracle was a way to take the matter completely out of the hands of Intellect and therefore get alignment based on a shared agreement to the “Will of the gods”.

In our times, we see both of these “solutions” present. On the one hand, we have an enormous bureaucracy. But it’s one of the ironies of our time that “science” has largely come to take the place of the oracles used by the ancients. Since the average person assumes in advance that they cannot understand science, Intellect is removed from the equation. The pronouncements of modern science have thus become equivalent to the pronouncements of the ancient oracles and, as the corona debacle showed, they are often just as irrational.

Last year I happened to catch the interview which Tucker Carlson did on Twitter with Hunter Biden’s “business partner”, Devon Archer. The interview didn’t reveal any great surprises from my point of view. I think Archer mentioned the word “strategic” about a thousand times. Much like the joke about how any scholarly discipline that has the word “science” in the title isn’t a real science, we could make a similar joke about how job titles with “strategy” in them have nothing to do with the subject. A “strategic adviser” is a person who facilitates deals in the murky domain at the intersection between government, capital and the private sector. That’s why Archer was “in business” with Hunter Biden.

What I did find surprising about the interview was Tucker Carlson’s attitude to Devon Archer. After insinuating and even outright stating that the business with Hunter Biden was corrupt since it was predicated on insider dealings with a government official, Carlson nevertheless praised Archer. I think at one point he even said something like “well done, that’s good business”. In Tucker Carlson’s world, Devon Archer is a “good businessman” and Joe Biden a “corrupt politician”. It’s a bit like congratulating the drug dealer while throwing the drug user in jail.

How could Tucker Carlson on the one hand claim to be super concerned about government corruption while on the other hand have a nice friendly interview with a man whose job it was to facilitate that corruption? And how could Devon Archer willingly confess to doing that job and sit there with a big smile on his face as though he’d done nothing wrong?

The reason relates back to the point I made in last week’s about the three metaphysical pillars of the modern West: democracy, capitalism and science. The case of Devon Archer and the Biden family is the perfect illustration of how capitalism corrupts democracy. But capitalism can’t be called into question since it’s an article of faith. That’s why Carlson can praise Archer as a businessman while criticising Joe Biden as a public official.

The truth, of course, is that capitalism is subverting democracy and not just in the case of the Biden family. Capitalism is also subverting science as we saw during the corona debacle. That’s what happens when you encourage people like Devon Archer to chase money to the exclusion of anything else. What the USA and the rest of the West desperately needs to reclaim both democracy and science from the clutches of money but the right side of politics has framed the issue such that any criticism of capitalism makes you a “communist”.

We should remember that both capitalism and communism are products of the Western mind and they have a lot in common. In order to see these commonalities, we need a point of comparison and, as usual, the Roman Empire provides the ideal example since in this, as in most things, it is opposite of the modern West.

Some historians have trawled through Roman history trying to find evidence that the Romans must have had something resembling our capitalism, as if all civilisation must somehow be based on the exact same values as the modern West. The truth is there is no evidence for capitalism in ancient Rome and quite lot of evidence against it. But we can go a step further and get closer to the core of the issue by making the broader point which is the one that the historian Spengler also made: the Romans had almost nothing that we would give the general label of organisation.

This doesn’t mean the Romans were disorganised. Clearly, they had a disciplined military, a legal code, a governance structure, a justice system and other things required for a peaceful and orderly society. What they didn’t have were bureaucracies, corporations, armies of lawyers or enormous public services. And they sure as hell didn’t have “strategic advisers”, “diversity officers” and human resource managers.

It’s incredible to think that, in the golden age of the Roman Empire, the Caesars ruled with almost no bureaucracy at all. The basis for Rome’s power was the army. But this was more than just an accidental occurrence. The army represented the basic ethic of Rome which we can sum up in the phrase might is right. Roman aristocrats earned their honour and status through public service and the highest form of public service was military service. They would have considered it deeply dishonourable to get involved in business dealings.

Of course, business dealings did happen in ancient Rome and many of the aristocracy became incredibly rich as a result. But they were not actively involved in business. They just accrued the money which they often spent on public works. This is another reason that Rome had a tiny government. The tax take for most of Roman history was a paltry 1% and when the government is only taking 1% in tax, it can’t afford to hire bureaucrats or public servants.

That was one reason why the government and bureaucracy was so small. Another was the simple and informal nature of Roman law. Rome never had general public education. As a result, most Romans were illiterate. Accordingly, there was no possibility of reading or signing complicated contracts. The law reflected this by allowing most arrangements to be made verbally. A classic example is marriage. A Roman man and woman could enter into marriage simply by announcing their intention to do so and then moving in together. They could break up the marriage just as easily. No lawyers were required. No government bureaucrats needed to be notified.

Related to the relative simplicity of their legal system is the fact that the Romans had no police force. What force did exist was very similar to the form taken in early modern Europe where there was a “watch” made up of ordinary citizens. In general, Roman citizens were expected to enforce the law themselves. This was literally true in the early days of the republic. If somebody committed a crime against you, you had to arrest them and drag them before the courts yourself. If the judge found in your favour and sentenced the other party to some kind of corporal punishment, you were the one who carried out the punishment.

Of course, why would you bother to go through the courts when you could just mete out the punishment directly and that’s what often happened. By our standards, Rome was a relatively lawless society. But, again, the ethic was might is right. That was true at an everyday level and it was true at the highest levels of government. The Roman system required and rewarded strongmen. That’s just how they operated, as did most societies of that era.

In summary, outside of the army, the Romans had essentially no large organisations at all. They had no corporations, bureaucracies, banks, police forces, unions, chambers of commerce, NGOs, law firms, legal societies, football clubs, political parties, United Nations, World Banks, World Health Organisations or International Monetary Funds.

Romans looked down their noses at trade, banking and commerce. The reason the Romans did not pursue organisation in these spheres was not because they didn’t have the intelligence or capability but because they did not value such things. Accordingly, the institutions which existed were rudimentary. When emergencies happened, the Romans solved the problem not through organisation but through force.

Incidentally, this was also true in the early days of modern Europe. Kings needed bankers to fund wars. Once the war was over, the kings would often refuse to pay their debts and the banker was left to foot the bill. If he had a problem with it, he could take it up with the king’s army. That was also how Rome worked. Might was right.

We can see, therefore, that one of the main differences between our society and the Romans is the scale of our organisations. How did we get so good at organisation?

There is, of course, no single answer to that question but we can state for sure that trade and commerce played a very important role and this where capitalism comes into the picture.

The British East India Company is arguably the proto-corporation of the modern world. For many years it was the largest corporation in the world and may even have been the largest in history (it’s probable that the Chinese or Indians had something larger through sheer population size). In any case, the British East India Company was orders of magnitude larger than any Roman organisation.

How did the British East India Company come about? Well, Francis Drake is sometimes called an “explorer” or a “privateer”. We could more accurately call him a pirate since the original purpose of the voyage which made him famous was to sail to South America and steal gold from the Spanish. He achieved that aim and then, while sailing back to England, landed in what is now Indonesia. He traded some of the gold he had stolen from the Spanish for spices, apparently not realising their enormous value in Europe at that time. When he got back to England, he was a hero. More importantly, those who had invested in his voyage became fabulously wealthy. Thereafter, other “privateers” decided to try their luck on the open seas and the rest, as they say, is history.

There’s much that could be said about this story but notice one crucial aspect: all of this activity was not instigated by the crown or the state but by private citizens. The East India Company had what we would now call a CEO, it had a board of directors, it went through all the legal hoops required for its creation. Already by the year 1600, most of the organisational and legal pre-requisites that we recognise as “trade and commerce” were already in effect in Britain. The reason we are all so familiar with them is because it was that “trade and commerce” which would become the basis for the British Empire. It took over the world quite literally.

By the time of the creation of the United State of America, trade and commerce had become more than a way to get rich by stealing Spanish gold. It had become an article of faith. In Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, arguably the founding document of the USA, we find the idea of trade and commerce as a way to gain freedom from the “tyranny” of kings such of King George III.

It’s worth noting again that all this is the inversion of the Roman paradigm. The Romans would never have dreamed of elevating trade and commerce above the Caesar, but the British and the Americans did. This is why capitalism really is an article of faith for Americans and has been from the beginning of that nation.

There’s another way in which the paradigm of the British and American empires is different from Rome. The Romans led with military might. Trade was a secondary benefit. The British and Americans have led with trade with military power reserved for situations that threatened trade (of course, military power has also been used for other reasons too).

Some people on the right of politics in the US have criticised the recent bombings of Houthi targets in Yemen. This reveals a surprising naivete about how the world works. The US and British are bombing the Houthis because the Houthis had managed to shut down shipping in the Red Sea thereby causing major disruption to transportation networks. That is not a new policy. It’s quite literally as old as America itself.

The conflict with the Houthis is an almost exact replica of the Barbary Wars fought at the beginning of the 19^th century under the presidency of none other than Thomas Jefferson. What was at stake then, as now, is the freedom of navigation required to enable trade. America and Britain have always been prepared to go to war when trade and commerce were threatened. All of the shenanigans in the Middle East in the 20th century have been predicated on maintaining the most important trade of all; petrolem.

The rise of trade and commerce has, from the beginning, been accompanied by the enormous growth in the law, especially commercial law. In modern America, being involved in public life at all let alone in business requires a team of lawyers working round the clock to manage your affairs. Law is what enables our enormous organisations to be created. Thus, we can say that law is also a cornerstone of the modern Western paradigm.

As international trade became a huge boon for Britain, it incorporated mercantile law into its common law. As Lord Mansfield put it at the time – “Mercantile law is not the law of a particular country but the law of all nations”. It’s fair to say that Lord Mansfield did not ask other nations whether they agreed with this statement. It’s also fair to say that many nations, from the Barbary states of the 19^th century through to the Houthis today, did not and do not agree with this statement. Nevertheless, the success of Britain and America has meant that other nations have had to abide by mercantile law whether they wanted to or not and so mercantile law has ended up becoming international.

It is these mercantile laws that form the basis for the incredible complexity of the modern global economy. When we enter into a contract, we know that it will be enforced and we can rely on the outcome being delivered. How many different contracts must exist in order for an iPhone to be created? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of independently organised contracts have to be signed that coordinate the producers of minerals, plastics and electronic components with transportation companies, intermediaries and retailers from around the globe.  It’s a stunningly complex system that runs on laws.

Laws are the great strength of the system. But, increasingly, the costs of the system are outweighing the benefits and that is, I believe, what is behind the religious crisis that is affecting us today. We are the victims of our own success.

Consider this. The word “contract” comes from the Latin contractus which originally had the meaning of “to draw in, to shrink”. A business contract is a metaphorical extension of the original meaning. This makes some sense when you consider that to enter a contract is to limit yourself by binding yourself into an agreement with somebody else. The more contracts you enter into, the more you are binding yourself and reducing your ability to do other things. The Roman and Greek aristocrats’ distaste for trade and commerce was precisely because they saw it as a form of slavery; of being bound.

In the modern West, we have come to think that it’s the other way around since the contacts we enter into as consumers result in some benefit to us. But everything in life has diminishing returns. There probably was a time where the benefits of signing a contract outweighed the cost. That is clearly no longer true. The average person now enters into a huge number of contracts but, increasingly, they must go into debt in order to so. For the average person over the last 30 or so years, contracts have become little more than a chain around their neck; a form of debt bondage. That’s one huge problem that we face right now.

There’s a second and related problem. The enormous complexity of our society is facilitated through laws, rules and contracts. Increasingly, it is corporations and bureaucracies who control and operate those rules in a way that is not visible to the general public.

Consider the corona debacle. At the beginning of corona, I received pamphlet in my mailbox. The pamphlet was printed on the letterhead of my local council (local government organisation in Australia). It contained information about a supposedly new disease called “covid” whose symptoms were indistinguishable from the common cold/flu. In the fine print at the bottom of the page was stated that the information had been provided by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

What chain of command had to exist in order for that pamphlet to get delivered to my house? There is the Australian postal service which delivers the mail. There is an administration assistant, a graphic designer, and whoever else is employed by my local council to produce pamphlets. There is a printing facility to print them. The council gets its instructions from the state public health bureaucracy who gets its instructions from the national health bureaucracy who get their instructions from the bureaucrats at the WHO.

All of this chain of command exists because the Australian government is a signatory to a contract with the WHO. That contract requires the Australian government to do things when the WHO tells them to. In order to do those things, the Australian government funds the bureaucracies which operate according to strict rules.

The general public thinks that those bureaucracies are “intelligent”, that the people who work for them are highly educated and that their job it is to know things. In fact, the people who work in bureaucracies are only required to know that which enables them to follow the rules. That is what bureaucracies are good at. It might be the only thing bureaucracies are good at.

What has happened in the post war years with the massive expansion of bureaucracy both in the public service and in the private sector is to create a machine-like system that runs on rules and contracts, not on thinking. The corona debacle represented the complete absence of thinking. It’s exactly what you would expect if you put bureaucrats in charge of the world.

The corona debacle was made possible by a system where people mindlessly follow the rules. Why were so many people tested at hospitals early on, even people who had no symptoms of respiratory illness? Because that’s what the rules said had to happen. Hospitals were contractually required to carry out testing. Of course, hospitals were also incentivised by the fact that they received thousands of dollars per “covid patient”.

In one sense, the corona debacle was stunningly well-organised. Think of all the contracts, invoices, bookkeeping, information systems, laboratory reports etc that were needed to make it possible. But what corona proves is that we are no longer driving the machine. The machine is driving us.

Remember the double meaning of the word contract. It’s now the case that, with every new contract, we contract. Every new contract now contracts individual liberty and humanity in general. There can be no starker example of that than the corona lockdowns. Of course, the average person had no idea they had entered into the corona contract. Their governments did it on their behalf. An entire bureaucratic machine was built that nobody knew about.

Quite a number of people have recently had idea that modern society is possessed by Satan or some other force outside ourselves. That force is the machine. We created the machine and now the machine controls us. The great strength of the modern West has been organisation. But we now have too much organisation.

That’s how every great tragedy plays out. The hero’s greatest strengths become the flaws that lead to doom. Macbeth and the Othello were the great warriors who kept fighting when they should have sheathed their swords. King Lear was the ruler who could not retire. Romeo and Juliet were the passionate youths who could not control their emotions. Western civilisation has been the great organiser. But our solution to every problem is now one more rule, one more law, one more contract, one more bureaucracy, one more vaccine, one more technology. Every time we add one more of these, we bind ourselves tighter to the machine.