Month: July 2024

A number of years ago, I was trying to choose an area to live in and around Melbourne. Since I worked in the CBD, I wanted to keep my commute reasonable. I also wanted a reasonable-sized yard in which to grow fruit and vegetables. The Australian property market was already batshit crazy at that point (it has since advanced to certifiably insane), so any chance of buying in the inner suburbs was out of the question. That left the outer suburbs or surrounding hinterland as options.

Since fruit and vegetable growing was on my list of priorities, I was conscious of things like annual rainfall and quality of soil when evaluating alternative locations to live.

One of the things that happens in proximity to those mountains is that you can get hailstorms. While researching the area to the north-east of Melbourne as a potential place to live, I noted that a major hail storm seemed to happen about once a decade there. We’re talking golf ball-sized hail that can cause damage to houses and cars, but also fruit and vegetable gardens. Since that area is a food-producing region, growers must reckon with the fact that they will lose an entire crop about once a decade.

As it turns out, I have some experience with those kinds of hailstorms. I grew up in an area that is far enough north that a couple of times every summer a big storm blows down from the subtropics. Sometimes those storms are hail storms. Our house had a metal roof and I distinctly remember one hail storm that caused such a cacophony that we had to shout into each other’s ears just to be heard inside the house.

Although the question of hail was not a deciding factor, I ended up moving to the area to the west of Melbourne’s diagonal rain line. It doesn’t rain as much here. That’s unfortunate. On the positive side, the threat of major hail damage is minute.

Some years ago, a colleague of mine moved into the exact area in the north-east of Melbourne that I had earlier been investigating as a place to live. I knew he wasn’t into gardening, since he used to complain about it. He’s one of those people who resent having to even mow a lawn but who find themselves in Australian suburbia with the annoyance of having to maintain a garden that they don’t really care about and probably wish wasn’t there.  

It was shortly after my colleague had moved into his new house in the north east that a hail storm came through. In my part of Melbourne, there was some tiny little hail about the size of sunflower seeds which survived a matter of seconds upon making contact with the ground. In the eastern suburbs, the hail was slightly bigger but still nothing to write home about. It was definitely not one of those once-in-a-decade golf ball-sized hail storms.

Nevertheless, I saw a social media post from my colleague with a photo of the hail on his back lawn. He had captioned the photo with something like “Hail in December. Tell me that climate change isn’t real!”

This colleague of mine works in the IT industry. One of the good things about working with computers is that they are machines that do whatever you instruct them to do. However, because the mechanics of the computer are hidden away beneath layers of abstractions, it is easy to get lost in those abstractions, especially when trying to locate a bug (the recent Crowdstrike global outage provides a topical example of the problem). Thus, a lot of the technical work with computers involves wading through abstractions only to realise that the computer had done exactly what you told it to do. The problem was not the computer. The problem was you.

For this reason, working with computers involves the constant confrontation with your mental models of the world. More specifically, the realisation that your mental model is very often wrong. You thought you were telling the computer to do one thing. Actually, you were telling it something different. This realisation can lead to what we might call epistemological humility on the part of the people who work with computers.

I had believed my colleague to be in that camp, so it was strange to hear him make such an unqualified and categorical statement about climate change from a single observation. Of course, I also knew that the observation was wrong in a factual sense.

The implication of the phrase “hail in December” is that my colleague had assumed that hail is only supposed to happen in winter. In fact, December (the beginning of summer in Melbourne) is exactly the time when hail storms hit since the phenomenon is correlated with weather patterns that blow storms down from the tropical north during the rainy season. If you check the statistics on major hail storms in Victoria, they almost always happen from December to March.

My colleague was clearly unaware of these basic realities. In fact, his area is probably overdue for a major hail storm, the kind that causes property damage. When that does happen, he might have something real to complain about.

I began thinking about how an intelligent person who in their professional life knows the dangers of making unqualified blanket statements could make such a blunder. An obvious point was the simple fact that my colleague had not researched the meteorology of the area before moving to it. Unlike myself, he had no interest in growing fruit and vegetables and therefore had no reason to be concerned. Thus, the difference here is one of perspective based on personal interest.

But then I began wondering whether this seemingly trivial distinction doesn’t end up becoming a very large distinction, perhaps even a different worldview. I knew that my colleague was born and raised in a modern city where clean water comes out of the tap on command and food comes pre-packaged at the supermarket. I doubt it had ever occurred to him to grow his own food. What is the attitude of such a person towards weather in general?

Since being outdoors is synonymous with either commuting or leisure activities for such a person, rain is always an annoyance. I can’t think of a single leisure activity that requires rain, but I can think of plenty that get cancelled because of it, including sports matches, picnics, bushwalking etc. For a professional city person, there’s a kind of zero sum attitude to rain. It’s always correlated with a negative outcome and never with a positive one.

A gardener has a completely different attitude to rain. In most of Australia, water is the limiting factor on fertility. Therefore, rain is almost always welcome. If, like me, you capture the rainwater in tanks, rain has the additional benefit of filling the tanks and creating a resource that is of tangible value. Simply by doing gardening, your perspective on rain changes. Rain is no longer a zero sum equation.

What’s more, a gardener becomes far more attuned to variations in the weather since it directly affects the outcomes you are looking for i.e. fruit and vegetables from the garden. To garden successfully, you must have a more in-depth understanding of the climate. That’s the reason why I knew that my colleague was living in hail-prone area while he did not.     

In short, a gardener has a non zero sum attitude to weather. If it rains, I might be annoyed if I have to cancel some activity I wanted to do, but I’m also happy that my garden is receiving water and my water tanks are filling up.

This non-zero sum mindset is actually necessary for successful gardening, especially if you are growing food crops. The experienced gardener learns that, through some combination of weather variations, pests or other more complex causes, you might lose a whole crop of a particular fruit or vegetable. You can get around this by spending all your time and energy protecting a few crops or you can get around it by diversifying. If you plant a variety of different crops, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll lose them all to a single cause (a severe hailstorm is actually one of the few things that can take out an entire garden’s worth of plants).

As long as you can be flexible, you can avoid the zero sum mindset. Maybe you’ll have a bad year for tomatoes but a bumper year for kale. The bad news is almost always offset by some good news.

Now, perhaps I am drawing a long bow, but is it too much of a stretch to see this lack of flexibility in the modern world and is it also possible that it is this which is causing the increasingly zero sum quality of our politics and public discourse? Think of how many different issues are presented as an extreme case of the zero sum mentality. We must switch to renewables OR the world will come to an end. You must take this vaccine OR you and your loved ones will die. You must have your teenage child undergo trans surgery OR they will commit suicide.

I used to think this kind of messaging was the by-product of modern democratic political stalemate where only the most extreme narrative can frighten people into action. That implies a lack of flexibility in the political system. But that of flexibility is everywhere now. The average voter is a now a city person who has the zero sum mindset as a lived reality.

The irony is that the city has traditionally been seen as the place of freedom and opportunity, contrasted against the zero sum mentality of rural communities. At a surface level, that is true. Having grown up in small towns, I know about the zero sum mentality that exists there. But maybe the only real difference is that country folk don’t hide it. Maybe all that happens in the city is that the zero sum mentality gets sublimated and channeled into apocalyptic mythological grand narratives like “climate change” and “pandemic”.

It reminds me of a point made by Nassim Taleb in relation to war. Europe was almost constantly at war for most of its modern history, but those wars were mostly small scale affairs where the damage done to society was quite minimal. The 19^th century, by contrast, was a time of relative peace and intelligent people convinced themselves that war was a thing of the past. WW1 and WW2 put an end to that delusion. Taleb concluded that it was preferable to have a lot of small wars rather than save it all up for one big war.

The same dynamic holds for our relationships. You can have small and frequent disagreements with your spouse, your work colleagues and your friends or you can save up all the frustration, let it mature and age into bitterness and rage, and then have it all explode out in one big outburst that could quite likely destroy the relationships altogether.

Maybe the same is true of the zero sum mindset. We pretend it doesn’t exist but it just builds up quietly in the background taking shape in grand apocalyptic mythologies which hand over more and more political power to the modern priests who rail on like medieval bishops about eternal damnation. It’s the most zero sum message imaginable: do exactly what I say or the entire world will come to an end. Everything gradually settles down into one giant zero sum game where the State wields complete power over everything and the “freedom” and “opportunity” of the city morphs into the most extreme form of bondage imaginable.  

In my book, The Devouring Mother, I noted that one of the main properties of that archetype is what is called enabling. Enabling is the tacit or active encouragement of behaviours that are destructive to the individual being enabled. Enabling can only be carried out by a person in a position of authority, such as a parent, because the assumption is that the authority should be preventing said behaviour, not encouraging it. A classic example is drug use. A parent who either directly facilitates or tacitly allows drug use by their child is engaging in enabling behaviour. Most people would agree they are harming the child they should be caring for.

We can extrapolate the Devouring Mother archetype to the societal level precisely because every society has groups of people who are in positions of authority relative to the general public. We even sometimes call those groups “the authorities.” Just like with parents, we expect the authorities to act in the interests of the general public and not to encourage the general public to engage in harmful behaviour.

Modern western society has a peculiar blind spot in this respect because, even though we have a dazzling array of authorities, far more than any other society in history, we also have democracy, and we tell ourselves that this gives us freedom. However, even if we believe that democracy removes us from government authority, it’s still a fact that many of the authorities that exist today are outside of government control in a practical sense. Their authority over us exists above and beyond politics.

The scientific establishment is a classic example. In theory, the government can regulate science and technology. In practice, the government doffs its cap and tugs the forelock to institutional science. How many times have you heard a politician say, “I’m just following the science”.

What this means is that institutional science has authority. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that science, and especially medicine, have become major practitioners of enabling behaviour at the societal level and key planks in the overall archetypal dynamic that I have been calling the Devouring Mother.

But authority is only one of the prerequisites for enabling behaviour. In fact, there are three pillars of enabling behaviour at the societal level in the modern West.

Pillar 1 is the one just discussed: the authority of one individual or group over others.

Pillar 2 is the aforementioned notion of “freedom” that has become the foundational myth of the modern West since the United States became hegemon. This is the freedom of the individual from the authority of government.

Pillar 3 also arrived with US hegemony: consumer capitalism.

Now that we know what the three pillars are, let’s look at some examples of the societal-level enabling that is going on these days.

Example 1: the encouragement of addiction

Remember that enabling is about encouraging behaviour that is harmful to the person doing it. We know that most things in life are harmful when carried out in excess. We also know that there are certain activities that are more likely to be carried out to excess because they are addictive. Among these are pornography, drugs, alcohol, and gambling. To encourage people to partake of these activities is therefore a form of enabling behaviour.

But this is precisely what most western societies have done in recent decades. We live in a time of unlimited porn, instantaneous online gambling, and the increasing legalisation or decriminalisation of drugs. All of this is indicative of enabling behaviour, and if we drill down further, we see that the three pillars outlined above are all present.

Pillar 3, consumer capitalism, is the most obvious since somebody is making a lot of money out of selling online porn, gambling and drugs. The government itself takes a cut of that money via tax and so the government is arguably also included in Pillar 3.

Pillar 2 is about freedom. When it comes to porn, gambling, and drugs, it is always the libertarians who are ready to jump out of the bushes and tell you that people should be “free” to do these things since they don’t hurt anybody else. That may be true, but enabling is about the damage done to the person being enabled. Thus, the question resolves down to whether we think society should allow individuals to harm themselves through addiction.

Everybody will have different opinions on this, but I think it should be uncontroversial that some individuals do, in fact, harm themselves with drugs and gambling at least (the consequences of porn are less obvious). I personally know several people in that category, and I’m sure most readers would too.

Does the allowing of porn, gamling and drugs count as enabling behaviour or is it just the necessary price of “freedom” as the libertarians would say?

To my mind, the libertarian position was valid three hundred years ago precisely because modern consumer capitalism did not exist at that time. Wanna smoke pot in 1750? You’ll have to grow it yourself or find a friend who does. Wanna gamble or watch porn? You’ll have to take the time, trouble, and risk of going to a place of ill repute. In a world without consumer capitalism, it was really difficult for the average person to consume things to excess. That’s why most of the stories of debauchery from that era come from the aristocracy, who had the time and money to spare.

Modern consumer capitalism has elevated society in general to a level of wealth where we can now also destroy ourselves through excess. In fact, consumer capitalism makes it really, really easy to do so. Once you make porn, gambling, and drugs legal, companies will compete against each other to make those things as easy as possible to consume. The most successful companies will be the ones who make it the easiest. In fact, it is in those companies’ interest to create addicts.

Thus, in relation to porn, gambling, and drugs, it’s the combination of libertarian politics (Pillar 2) and consumer capitalism (Pillar 3) that creates enabling behaviour at the societal level. All that is required is for the government to relinquish its authority (Pillar 1) in favour of the free market. This is a passive form of enabling.

Note that passive enabling is predicated on allowing predatory behaviour to occur. If a drug dealer is hanging around a drug addict all the time, asking if they want to buy drugs, that doesn’t count as enabling behaviour because the drug dealer has no authority over or duty of care towards the addict (at least not legally). The drug dealer is engaging in predatory behaviour. However, the person who has a duty of care but allows predatory behaviour to occur is an enabler. One could argue that the government has become a passive enabler by allowing corporations to engage in predatory behaviour towards the general public.

Example 2: human trafficking

The same assertion can be made about a second form of enabling behaviour going on these days: the massive movement of people into western nations. This is especially stark in the United States with the huge influx of illegal immigrants that is going on. This form of enabling fits better with the Devouring Mother archetype since it comes under the guise of care and/or safety. The people arriving in the US must claim asylum, meaning they ask to be taken into the care of the US government.

Governments have authority over and a duty of care to their citizens. The idea that governments also have a duty of care to non-citizens was born out of the abuses of governments towards non-citizens that happened in the 20^th century in Europe. This gives us Pillar 2 of enabling since everybody now has the “freedom” to claim asylum in a neutral country.

Pillar 3 is also clearly present. You don’t have to scratch the surface too much to see that enormous amounts of money are changing hands in relation to the movements of people that are going on. Much of that money is, in fact, coming from governments themselves, either directly or indirectly. But there are certainly a great many “entrepreneurs” who are earning that money by facilitating the trade.

Once again, the pattern we see is that the official authority of government (Pillar 1) is being bypassed or relinquished in the name of the freedom (Pillar 2) of people to claim asylum, with a great deal of money (Pillar 3) changing hands. All three elements of enabling behaviour are present.

On the surface, this might not seem like enabling behaviour since asylum seekers are being “protected” rather than harmed. But it is surely the case that at least some of the people being trafficked are being harmed by the incredibly risky journey they must take at the end of which they receive zero certainty about their status in the country they arrive in. Given that their journey is predicated on the deliberate removal of government authority, they must face the constant threat of deportation if the political winds change in the future and Pillar 1 is re-established.

Example 3: the medical-pharma industries

There are other examples of enabling behaviour we could go into, but the one I want to spend the rest of the post on is the one that got me thinking about this issue again, and that’s the enabling behaviour specific to the modern medical industry. Here, once again, we have the classic form of Devouring Mother enabling done under the guise of “protection” and “care”, which means authority (Pillar 1). We also know that enormous amounts of money are made in the modern medical industry (Pillar 3). Less obvious, and therefore most interesting, is the role that Pillar 2 (freedom) plays. As we will see, modern medical enabling is done in the name of freedom.

Now, I’m not quite old enough to have experienced the AIDS hysteria in full flight, but I did grow up in the world that followed that hysteria. I’d never questioned the official narrative until the COVID debacle made me realise how weak the science of virology is, and that got me looking back to AIDS, which was, in most respects, a practice run for COVID.

Bear in mind that Duesberg was himself a virologist, and his initial argument against the HIV-causes-AIDS hypothesis was a technical one aimed at his colleagues. What began as the honest questioning of the science around the HIV virus ended up with Duesberg’s career being systematically destroyed by the virology establishment. That’s why the story of Duesberg is a perfect example of the corruption of institutional science these days.

What Duesberg had realised was that the so-called disease of “AIDS” never behaved as if it were caused by a virus. One of the main pieces of evidence for that was that over 90% of AIDS patients were men. As Duesberg looked into it more, he realised that it wasn’t just that AIDS sufferers were men; they were a very specific demographic of men, namely, homosexual men.

Nowadays, we are used to the idea of homosexual couples living in the suburbs and holding down respectable careers. But in the late 70s and 80s, the homosexual culture was dominated by a lifestyle that could only be called sex, drugs, and disco. Much like rock’n’roll, it was a lifestyle that could only ever be lived by young men because any other demographic would be physiologically incapable of continuing it for any length of time. Imagine taking multiple different drugs, spending an entire night drinking, dancing and having sex with multiple strangers, taking more drugs to be able to go to sleep, and then getting up and doing it again the next day and the day after that.

What Duesberg realised was that the disease profile for “AIDS” did not match the pattern that would be expected for a viral disease but absolutely did match the profile for a lifestyle disease based around endless partying, casual sex, and heavy drug use. (He also made a number of technical arguments outlining problems with the specific association of the HIV virus with “AIDS”.)

Pillar 3 of enabling is about money. Well, hundreds of billions of dollars have been pumped into the virology and medical industries to combat the AIDS “crisis”. To put that into context, about as much has been spent on AIDS as on the Apollo space program. The big difference, of course, is that the Apollo space program actually achieved its mission, while the AIDS program was a complete failure. This explains why Duesberg was targeted. He was threatening to kill the goose that laid the golden egg and he was pointing out quite specifically why the AIDS program was failing: it wasn’t addressing the actual problem.

We can also see with AIDS that the authority of the government (Pillar 1) was once again handed over, this time to the authority of the “experts.” Then, as now, the scientific and medical establishments were blindly trusted by the general public, even despite the obvious failure of the AIDS program. Because of this, politicians faced no political consequences for continuing to fork over taxpayer money and leave the “experts” to take care of it.

That gives us Pillars 1 and 3. But it’s arguably Pillar 2 (freedom) that is the most interesting here because what Duesberg’s theory about the real cause of AIDS highlighted was that it was a lifestyle problem. But it was a lifestyle that was the direct result of the freedom movement of the 60s. That freedom movement had already given rise to sex, drugs, rock’n’roll. The homosexual lifestyle of the 70s and 80s was arguably just a more extreme version of what the hippies had already dabbled with.

Because the freedom to be homosexual was tied up with the more general freedom movement of the time, nobody wanted to admit that “AIDS” could be the result of that freedom. Especially in the United States, to acknowledge that would have provided ample political ammunition for the Christian conservatives. Having fought so hard for freedom, nobody wanted to admit that it could have downsides. Almost certainly, this played a major role in why nobody wanted to hear Duesberg’s arguments.

When we put all this together, what we see with the AIDS hysteria is that the scientific and medical establishments had actually become part of an enabling dynamic that encouraged a harmful lifestyle choice. This enabling went beyond purely passive forms. As Duesberg noted, doctors were providing antibiotics to gay men under the table. Many gay men were taking antibiotics on a daily basis to fend off the bacterial diseases arising from their sexual practices.

When used for short periods of time, antibiotics help to eliminate a specific pathogen. However, they also kill healthy bacteria, and so long-term daily use is harmful because it throws out the balance of the microbiome. Thus, the prescription of antibiotics by the medical industry was harmful in itself and also indirectly harmful by enabling a destructive lifestyle. That’s true even before we get into the sordid story of the prescription of AZT and other harmful pharmaceuticals prescribed as treatment for so-called “AIDS”.

When we stand back from all this, what we can see is that the medical industry was implicitly promising to “protect” the men who were engaging in a destructive lifestyle. We might go further and say they were trying to protect those men from the consequences of their actions. That is a fake kind of “freedom” (Pillar 2) that involves putting your trust in an authority (Pillar 1) which is financially incentivised (Pillar 3) to keep you dependent. Nobody sees it, of course, because the government is not involved and, in the United States, freedom is always freedom from government.

AIDS might have been the first example of this pattern of enabling, but it has not been the last. We saw a repetition with the COVID hysteria. We also see it in the trans issue as it has evolved in recent years. Just as homosexual men had to be “free” to live as they wanted, now we are told that children and teenagers must be “free” to choose their own sex. The extreme homosexual lifestyle was only ever possible with a variety of licit and illicit drugs. The same is true of the trans lifestyle choice which is fundamentally predicated on surgical and pharmaceutical interventions. Once more, we can see that this ticks all the boxes for enabling behaviour.

Pillar 1 is about authority, and here we see not just the authority of the scientific and medical industries but also the authority of teachers and other school staff who are pushing the trans ideology. Since this authority is in direct conflict with the authority of parents, the trans battle increasingly revolves around who has the right of authority over the child.

Pillar 3 of enabling—money—is also present in the trans issue, not just in the medical industry revenue from the various surgical interventions, not just in the pharmaceutical industry revenue from puberty blockers and hormonal treatments, but perhaps more importantly, in the army of teachers, administrative, and psychological workers whose jobs rely on their being something to counsel children and teenagers about. We shouldn’t underestimate the lengths people will go to ensure they have a reason to justify their paycheque.

Finally, we have Pillar 2: freedom.

With the AIDS issue, the freedom was that of consenting adults to have sex with whoever they chose. Since homosexuality has been around since time immemorial, this request is something with a long and understandable history to it. The freedom proposed by trans ideology, however, is a very different thing that has perhaps no historical precedent. It is a “freedom” entirely predicated on the ability of modern science and medicine to surgically and pharmaceutically manipulate sex characteristics. Therefore, it is a freedom that could never have been offered before. It’s also a freedom that can only ever be offered by “experts” with the authority implied by the title.

All of which is to say that the trans issue is a classic case of enabling behaviour with the same cluster of elements that gave us the AIDS and Corona hysterias.

Conclusion

What’s particularly interesting is how all three pillars of enabling map to different default political ideologies. The second pillar of “freedom” is primarily associated with libertarianism. The third pillar, capitalism, is supported by the right side of modern politics. The first pillar, the authority of the state, is mostly associated with the left wing.

Thus enabling, and the Devouring Mother phenomenon more generally, do not fit neatly into any modern political category. That’s why no political party has an answer to it. The right wing is coming closest, but its obsession with the “free market” and money (Pillar 3) means that it can’t object too hard. Meanwhile, left wingers will eagerly jump on board issues that earn enormous sums of money for multi-national corporations as long as “freedom” is promised in return.

Enabling is, in fact, a manifestation of the status quo of the modern West. That status quo combines the free market, individual freedom, and administrative and scientific authority. All of this is predicated on the refutation of the authority of government. Enabling requires the deliberate deprecation of (national democratic) governmental authority in favour of the market, the bureaucracy and the various globalist institutions. The winners, at least from a financial and political point of view, are the capitalists, the bureaucrats and the experts. The losers are pretty much everybody else.

Note: after the attempted shooting today, I considered removing this post as it may seem to be in poor taste given the seriousness of what has occurred. I’ve decided to leave it up but want to add the disclaimer that I had already made within the post which is that the narrative heuristic is just that, a heuristic: a fallible and partial model of reality.

Mostly on this blog I tend to talk about historical matters rather than current ones. But the recent US presidential debate and its aftermath reminded me of an idea I’ve mentioned before but have never fully fleshed out. It’s the notion that the Trump presidency, when viewed as a narrative or Hero’s Journey, is a comedy. That was true of Trump’s original victory and now it seems to be happening again, albeit with an interesting variation. In this post, I’ll sketch out what that means.

The big qualifier we should begin with here is simply to note that analysing events as a narrative, story or Hero’s Journey is only one perspective on the world. We can call it the narrative heuristic. A heuristic differs from a “solution” in that it is a potentially fallible way to get to an answer. Multiple heuristics can lead to the same answer or they can contradict each other. Heuristics are not right/wrong but useful/not useful. Thus, I am not suggesting that the narrative heuristic leads to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but is just one way of understanding. Having said that, it is quite fascinating how many things in life do seem to fall neatly in narrative form as if they were so determined. Stories might be much more important and fundamental than we think.

Stories almost always feature a hero (the protagonist) and a villain (the antagonist). Thus, we can extend the definition of Comedy to say that it is a story in which the hero defeats the villain. This encompasses stories where the villain is just as capable as the hero. Think of Sherlock Holmes vs Moriarty, Batman vs the Joker or Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader. Those stories are not funny, but they are technically Comedies because the hero wins.

Since Comedy is any story where the hero wins, we need another word for stories which are funny. Let’s use Humour to denote a story designed to provoke mirth. Humour is a subset of Comedy, since the hero also wins in a Humour story. What differentiates Humour from Comedy is that the hero in a Comedy is supposed to win while the hero of a Humour story is not supposed to win. It is precisely this which generates the laughs.

This leads to another important property that separates a Comedy story from a Humour story and that is the archetype of the hero. In a Comedy, the hero can be any archetype. Sherlock Holmes is the Sage, Batman is the Warrior and Luke Skywalker is a combination of the two. As long as the hero wins, it doesn’t matter what archetype they manifest. What’s more, the hero of a Comedy wins because they are really good at what they do. Sherlock Holmes wins by his intellect. Batman wins by his determination. The hero of a comedy is victorious through virtue.

(Note: technically, every hero is always partly a Fool since every Hero’s Journey requires a step into the unknown and we are, by definition, ignorant of the unknown).

So, we know that the hero of a Humour story is a Fool and we know that the story requires the hero to defeat a villain. This sets up one of the main tropes of a Humour story: because the hero is a Fool, the villain is the one who should win. Every Humour story must find a way to resolve the problem of how the Fool defeats somebody superior to them.

One of the main ways to do it is to make the villain just as incompetent and dumb as the Fool. This is the tactic of one of my favourite genres which is the stoner comedy. The original stoner comedy is Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke. The heroes of the story are two dropouts who spend the entire movie either getting high or trying to get high. These are not people who should win on a logical or rational level (whether they should win in a moral sense depends on your own worldview).

There’s one other way to resolve the problem of how the Fool wins in a Humour story and it’s worth mentioning since it more closely resembles the Trump narrative arc.

In P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves series of books, the hero of the story is Bertie Wooster who is an English aristocrat from around the beginning of the 20^th century. Bertie belongs to what was arguably the most privileged demographic in the world at that time. He should, therefore, be a winner. The problem is that Bertie is a moron (note that the Fool archetype is very often represented literally). If it was just Bertie by himself, he would lose. But Bertie has his trusty butler, Jeeves, to help him. Jeeves finds a way not just to ensure that Bertie wins but, more importantly, to make Bertie believe he has won through his own actions.

From the viewpoint of Bertie Wooster, however, the story is a Humour since Bertie is a Fool who blunders his way to victory in much the same fashion that Don Quixote and Cheech and Chong do. Once again, we see that the difference between Comedy and Humour depends on the archetype of the hero.

Okay. Now we know the difference between the two story types. How does all of this apply to the story of the Trump presidency? Well, as it turns out, the combination of Comedy and Humour that Wodehouse achieved with the Jeeves stories is directly applicable to the Trump presidency. The difference rests on whether you think Trump is Jeeves or whether he’s Bertie. Is he a Fool or a capable and clever player?

Since Trump became president by winning an election campaign, the story is a Comedy in the technical sense of the term. It’s interesting to note that democracy provides us with a Comedy in a way that other systems of government do not. This follows from the simple fact that democracy provides a way for somebody to win and somebody to lose. You don’t win a kingship, you are born into it. That’s why stories about kings and queens revolve around the concepts of tragedy and fate. By contrast, democracy is inherently Fool-ish, and that’s how most traditionalists view it.

The modern party system has, nevertheless, removed most Fool-ishness from democracy and created a level of predictability based on certain unspoken rules of the game. Remember that a Comedy features a competent hero who should win. For all of the presidents prior to Trump, at least in recent memory, their victories were all standard Comedies featuring people who went through the normal process. Even if you didn’t like the politics or personality of Obama, Bush or Clinton, you probably still accepted that they were competent at the game of politics and their victory made sense at that level.

This was never true for Trump and the main reason is because Trump never belonged to the party system. His victory could never be a standard Comedy because that would have required him to be a proven capable player of the game. Trump did not fulfil the archetype of the Politician. Rather, his archetype was the Businessman.

A mismatch between archetypes does not belong to the Comedy story but it most definitely belongs to the Humour story. A big part of what makes the Fool a fool is that he or she is trying to take on an archetypal role to which they don’t belong. Don Quixote is a middle-aged member of the lower nobility who decides to go off and become a knight. He is trying to change archetypes and become the Warrior.

Since Trump was trying to make the change from Businessman to Politician archetype, the story of his presidency was a Humour story from the very beginning. Rather than deny that fact, Trump embraced it. He came out and said one outrageous thing after another and generally refused to behave in a way that is appropriate for a modern Politician archetype. Thus, Trump embraced the Humour story reading. He owned the fact that he was playing the Fool.

Where the story takes a funny twist is that everybody else was happy to characterise Trump as a Fool too. Why wouldn’t they? Trump was auditioning for what is supposed to be the most powerful role in the world – the US President. There’s no way a Fool should be able to get that role. If the story was a Comedy, Trump would have to lose. But the story was a Humour story and the whole point of the Humour story is that the hero will win even though they are not supposed to.

Trump’s opponents then became the villains in a Humour story. They were supposed to win. They had all of the experience, institutional connections and archetypal resonance on their side and they were up against a guy who didn’t even pretend to play the game as it should be played. They were supposed to win, but they didn’t. That’s how Humour stories work.

Remember, again, that a common trope in the Humour story is that the villains are just as dumb as the hero and it’s their bumbling which allows the hero to win. It’s this trope that got me thinking about Trump again in recent weeks because the fallout from the recent presidential debate is evidence that the arc of the story is yet again turning back to Humor. Trump’s opponents are yet again blundering in ways that help Trump to win.

The way Trump won the presidency the first time around was by making sure that every single bit of attention was focused on himself. His outrageous behaviour ensured that the media had to cover him pretty much every day of the week. In addition, he used social media, Twitter in particular, to great effect. He continued to use these tactics during his presidency.

It took his opponents about five years to figure out his secret and to change their tactics to try and shut him up. With defeat in 2020, Trump was no longer going to be president anymore and he could easily be cut off from official channels. But there was still the problem of social media. They solved that by having him kicked off all the social media platforms. The powers-that-be seemed to have won the day and wrestled back control of the narrative from the man who had stolen it from them.

Fast forward to the recent presidential debate against Biden. Everything in the debate had been rigged against Trump, including the ability for the moderators to mute his microphone thus ensuring he couldn’t do his usual trick of hijacking the narrative. So blatant was the rigging that a number of pro-Trump commentators were saying Trump was a fool (there’s that word again) to accept the conditions. He should have refused to attend, they said. That makes logical sense, but remember that a Humour story does not need to make logical or rational sense. In fact, it works better if it doesn’t make logical sense.

We know what happened next. With Trump’s microphone muted, there was nobody to turn the whole thing into a shouting match. This meant that Joe Biden needed to be able to speak clearly, coherently and confidently all by himself. And that’s exactly what he failed do. A debate which had been rigged to negate Trump’s “strengths” had in fact revealed Biden’s weaknesses. This inversion of expectations is exactly what makes a Humour story funny. The media had finally won back control of the narrative from Trump but their carefully constructed story fell apart before our very eyes.

So it seems we’re seeing a re-run of the Humour story that played out during the first Trump presidency only now the details of the story are almost completely inverted. The first time around, Trump won by ensuring that all the attention was on himself. This time, Trump doesn’t have to do a single thing. He can just sit back and watch his opponents implode. All of this looks like a beat-perfect Humour story where the hero’s opponents hold all of the cards and yet somehow still lose through their own incompetence.

This raises the question: is Trump doing it on purpose? Did he accept what looked to be a rigged debate against him knowing that Biden was likely to fail? It’s possible and this brings us back to the difference between a Comedy reading and a Humour reading.

The Humour reading tells us that Trump is a Fool who somehow keeps blundering his way into becoming the president of the United States. The Comedy reading tells us that Trump is playing “4D chess” as he skilfully manipulates his opponents on the way to victory. He wins not because of luck but because of competency. Not that these two readings can both be partially true and, in any case, there’s always an element of the Fool in any genuine Hero’s Journey.

Another advantage of the narrative heuristic is that it allows us to think about the other side of the story: the villains. Trump may or may not be a Fool, but what does it say about his opponents that they keep losing despite having all the advantages on their side?

The US political system, and the political systems of most western nations, have removed all Fool-ishness in line with the globalist agenda to subvert democracy. Since democracy is a Comedy, it implies Fool-ishness .The globalists, and their supporters among the general public, think of themselves as being above all that. Democracy is for idiots. Ergo, Trump is an idiot and so are his supporters. It’s precisely that attitude that turns the story from Comedy into Humour.

It’s an interesting fact of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels that they were written at a time when the British Empire and the aristocracy who represented it had become decadent. Bertie Wooster was the outward representative of that empire, but it was Jeeves, the behind-the-scenes man, who kept the show running. That’s actually a very good representation of how the British system worked. It was very much the mandarins that held it together.

It’s arguable that the US empire has worked on much the same dynamic. I would argue, however, that the US empire has been run far more on propaganda than the British Empire ever was. That’s the reason why there is such an obsession with narratives. It’s also why Trump frightened the hell out of the powers-that-be since he smashed up their carefully-constructed stories. The British Empire was run by Jeeves-like mandarins. The US Empire has been run by propagandists.

That’s why the recent presidential debate was so catastrophic since it imploded the story that had been constructed by the propagandists. Previously, they had been able to blame Trump for such destruction. This time, there was nobody to blame but themselves and they’ve been arguing amongst themselves ever since. The puppet masters have become entangled in their own webs. Sometimes in a Comedy, all you need is a hero who’s either brave or stupid enough to poke the dragon for the façade of power to crumble. That seems to be where we are at right now.

There’s one more concept of Wilber’s that I’d like to discuss in this series of posts, and it’s one that was central to the analysis in my book, The Universal State of America. In that book, I’d characterised the modern European (Faustian) civilisation as being Esoteric in nature as opposed to the Exoteric civilisation of the Classical world. Within Wilber’s four quadrants, this maps to the difference between Interior and Exterior and, since we are talking about collectives, to the lower-left and lower-right quadrants.

Wilber seems to have come across the same idea as I did. He distinguished between social holons, which are always tied to a geographic location, and cultural holons, which transcend geography. To say that modern European civilisation is Esoteric is to say that it is primarily a cultural holon. To say that the Classical civilisation was Exoteric is to say that it was primarily a social holon. The modern transcends geography and the classical was tied to it.

In practice, of course, all societies and cultures have both an interior and an exterior aspect and, thus, the social and cultural aspects are two sides of the same coin. The distinction here is one of degree. The Classical civilisation was an outwardly focused civilisation but it still had its interior dimensions. Meanwhile, the modern European is an inward-focused civilisation that still has an outward dimension. Since we are living through the mature phase of modern European civilisation, an understanding of it as a cultural holon can tell us a lot about the world we live in.

For most of human history, a culture was always tied to a locality for the simple reason that very few people ever travelled outside of the area in which they were born. What’s more, given that the social holon was tied directly to its geography, local conditions such as climate and availability of food would have had a major impact on society and culture. In these cases, we would say that the Esoteric and Exoteric were unified. The cultural holon and the social holon were one and the same.

For the majority of human history, it must have been the case that there were no cultural holons that were not tied to a social holon. The arrival of civilisation seems to have changed that. In fact, we may say that civilisation is the state of affairs where a cultural holon emerges and transcends the social holons from which it was born.

If we look back at the Classical civilisation, we see that even the Greeks took it for granted that culture was always fixed in a specific place. To be ostracised (kicked out of your local community) was seen as a fate worse than death. Socrates could easily have fled Athens after being sentenced to death. In fact, his friends had already organised it for him. The authorities at that time barely even bothered to stop somebody from running away, presumably because being outside the geographical area of the polis was the same as being dead from a political and cultural point of view.

It seems highly probable that the reason the Romans were able to form an empire whereas the Greeks were not was because the Romans were more willing to make the political and cultural sacrifices necessary to transcend the geographical boundaries of the polis. Nevertheless, we also know that the Romans had great respect for local customs and encouraged the peoples they conquered to continue to practice those customs. Once again, the assumption was that culture was specific to a location, and to break that connection would bring calamity.

Despite this background, however, we also know that there was a great deal of intercultural communication in the ancient world. Pythagoras, to take just one example, was said to have studied in Egypt. Meanwhile, there is clear evidence of the influence of the Levant and the Middle East on Greek thought. It seems, then, that the Greek intellectual tradition was at least partly a cultural holon which incorporated ideas from outside the geographical and cultural spheres of the Greek social holons.

The idea that civilisation is synonymous with cultural holons that grow out of social ones is essentially the same distinction that the historian, Spengler, made between culture and civilisation. For Spengler, the cycle of civilisation began in a geographical area and then expanded out into cultural holons that were no longer tied to a place. Nevertheless, Spengler insisted that the cultural holon that emerged later was fundamentally tied to the initial social holon and he believed that the geographical conditions of the initial social holon dictated the development of the culture by shaping its core ideas.

The main problem with Spengler’s analysis, however, is that it doesn’t match the facts of the civilisation he was most concerned with, i.e., the West (Faustian). In fact, modern western civilisation was born as a cultural holon created by the Catholic Church. From the very beginning, it had already transcended geography.

The reason Spengler all but ignores the influence of the Church on the nascent Faustian civilisation has much to do with the political and cultural turmoil that had taken hold in Germany in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. It is not a coincidence that this turmoil followed the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, the exact structure that had been erected by the Church in partnership with the warlords of northern Europe a millennia earlier.

In response to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, the German-speaking lands were trying (and failing) to unify themselves into a modern nation-state for most of the 19th century and it took until 1871 to get the job done. The political crisis that was taking shape went hand-in-hand with a religious and cultural crisis as the elites of Europe increasingly rejected Christianity.

The French Revolution had already attempted to install a new political structure based on the Enlightenment principles of reason. Since this had ended in a dismal failure, European elites went off looking for other ways to ground a new politics. Marxist thought was one of these and it aligned itself with the notions of reason, science, and progress. In opposition to it, there arose a movement that turned to mythology, specifically ancient Norse and Germanic mythology. This fitted with the desire to find a spirituality that wasn’t based in Christianity. What’s more, since the mythologies were local to a specific geography (more or less), they were a natural match for the nationalist political movements that were springing up.

A big part of the reason why Spengler became an intellectual celebrity in Germany in the 1920s was because his work managed to straddle the priorities of both nationalists and imperialists. Spengler asserted that culture was always tied to a location. This pleased the nationalists who were attempting to align German culture with a new German nation-state. Meanwhile, Spengler’s analysis showed that Europe was in the civilisation part of the cycle and that the thing to do was to start an empire. This appealed to those with imperial ambitions. Thus, nationalism and imperialism came together.

In order to make his argument, however, Spengler had to completely ignore the influence of the Catholic Church in the formation of modern European civilisation. Since almost everybody – the Marxists, the nationalists and the imperialists – wanted the Church out of the way, this was not a problem from a propaganda point of view. However, it is a big problem from a factual point of view.

The truth is that modern European civilisation is unthinkable without the influence of the Catholic Church. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Catholic Church created modern European civilisation and it did so in ways that contradict Spengler’s claim that a civilisation is always born out of a particular geography, since it was clear that the Catholic Church was not “native” to the geography of northern Europe. It was an institution born out of the combination of Roman law and Jewish religion. The Church created a caliphate of Europe with the Pope as the head of what amounted to a federal system that existed alongside the local, geographically-specific political systems (kingdoms). In short, the Church had created a cultural holon—a holon that superseded geography.

Neither was the Church shy about defending, protecting and expanding its cultural holon. It actively fought against the social holons that it ruled over. There were battles against the various kings and nobility. There were also propaganda and ideological battles against the lay public and the folk religions that still had influence in various locations.

The history of modern Europe can, in fact, be seen as the effort on the part of the social holons to wrest power back from the cultural holon of the Church. The Reformation was very much motivated by just such political, economic, and cultural concerns. This battle was won earliest in the Protestant lands, especially Britain and the Netherlands. However, France and Germany were still trying to disintermediate the Church all the way into the late 19^th century. Thus, the political and ideological battles alluded to earlier were very much about trying to get the Church out of the way so that the State, whether capitalist, communist or fascist, could reign supreme.

None of this would have been necessary, of course, if the Church hadn’t been so dominant for so long. The fact that the battle needed to be fought at all is evidence enough that Faustian civilisation was from the very beginning a cultural holon, a transnational grouping based not around shared geography but shared ideology. 19th century nationalism was, therefore, an attempt to re-establish the primacy of social holons.

If cultural holons are not held together by geography, what are they held together by? The answer is stories, myth and ideology. The Bible was the foundational mythic text of the West. The power of this myth was evident right from the beginning. During the Crusades, peasants from northern Europe willingly and voluntarily signed up to walk thousands of miles to fight a war in a place they had never seen and had no direct political interest in. Such an undertaking would have been unthinkable to the average citizen of an ancient Greek polis. That is the power of a cultural holon.

We see more evidence for the power of myth centuries after the crusades. As literacy became more widespread and people were able to read the Bible for themselves in the aftermath of the Reformation, many Puritans and Protestants in Britain and then the United States came to believe that they were the direct descendants of the tribes of Israel.

We know this is not literally true. But there is a metaphorical reading in which it is true. A cultural holon transcends geography and biology. If you belong to the same cultural holon as the tribes of Israel, as evidenced by your reading of the same holy book, then you are a member of that holon and you are a descendant of former members. The absence of a geographical and biological connection does not preclude the possibility of membership in a cultural holon.

It is because modern European civilisation was a cultural holon right from the beginning that its influence could eventually spread to cover the entire globe. We tend to explain that expansiveness in materialist terms: technology and military capability. Yet, we know for a fact that the Chinese had just as much technological advantage and maritime capability centuries earlier than Europe and that the Chinese had made forays into foreign waters. Why didn’t they take up the opportunity to expand overseas?

Almost certainly, one of the main reasons was the connection to their home geography. Chinese culture was first and foremost a social holon, just as the Romans had been and just as most cultures throughout history have been. It was because European culture was a cultural holon that it could expand to all corners of the globe.

It may very well be that the ability to retain a cultural holon across enormous distances was made possible by the new technology of the printing press and the increasing rates of literacy among the population. (Another coincidence here: the Chinese had invented the printing press centuries prior to Europe but it had not become popular there while, in Europe, it was instrumental in the cultural and political revolution that was the Reformation).

It was thus that the pilgrims in America and the other settlers in the New World carried their King James Bible and their copies of Shakespeare as permanent reminders of their identity. They also received news and information in written form. This facilitated the transmission and renewal of a cultural holon that transcended geographical boundaries.

Although the printing press undoubtedly made a huge difference, the key point is that all this was an extension of the same dynamic which had existed right from the beginning of modern Europe in the institution of the Church. The Church had created a cultural holon, and even as the influence of the Church waned, the form of the cultural holon remained.

Thus, the political battles of the 19^th century were just as much cultural battles over control of the cultural holon. (The culture wars are not new). The intellectuals, scholars and artists had stepped into the roles previously inhabited by popes, bishops and priests.

Viewed this way, a number of aspects of modern Western culture come into sharp focus. For example, Nietzsche’s famous assertion that God is dead really amounts to saying that the cultural holon that had tied together modern Europe from the beginning (the Catholic Church) was failing. That cultural holon was based on belief in God, but it had also been the foundation of a political structure that had existed for a millennium. That’s why there was a simultaneous political and cultural crisis in Germany once the Holy Roman Empire dissolved, and that’s why Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, and many others were furiously trying to piece together a new ideology to fill the vacuum.

What was happening was an attempt to replace one cultural holon with another. The battle ended up boiling down to a three-way contest between communism, capitalism, and fascism (nationalism), each with their own respective ideologies. We should remember that many intellectuals at this time swapped freely between these alternatives. Mussolini is perhaps the most famous. He was originally a communist who later changed teams to fascism/nationalism.

It is not a coincidence, either, that Mussolini was a journalist and newspaper editor. Hitler was an author and orator. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were primarily intellectuals. In a cultural holon, the mastery and control of the flow of ideas are as important to political power as the control of the army was to the Caesars of Rome.

Thus, the battle for political power in the mature modern European civilisation has been far more a battle of ideas than a battle of physical strength. Perhaps the causative factor in the rise of modern communication technology is not actually the scientific breakthroughs that made such technology possible but rather the imperatives that follow from the battle for control of cultural holons.

If the modern West has always been primarily a cultural holon, and if cultural holons are predicated on communication across geographical boundaries, then the evolutionary struggle resolves to those who can communicate farther and faster. The internet then appears as the logical endpoint—the ultimate technology that enables the cultural holon to truly encompass the globe. It’s no surprise that the battle of modern politics increasingly takes place online, which is to say that it really takes place in the mind.