Month: August 2024

In its current configuration, this website is about five years old, dating back to late 2019 when I decided to write my first novel. At that time, I had no books to my name and only a handful of blog posts. I had no intention of writing a regular blog. The site was primarily meant to be a showcase for any novels that I happened to write. Of course, at that time, I had plans for only one novel and hadn’t even finished that one. For that reason, I didn’t spent much time or energy on the website. It was something I threw together in an afternoon and it’s remained in that format ever since.

No doubt everybody had a different experience of the corona lockdowns. Here in Melbourne, we had lockdowns all the way until late 2021. With rather a lot of time on my hands, what began as an idea for one novel turned into four and I then managed to squeeze in two non-fiction books (The Plague Story and The Devouring Mother) before the lockdowns ended. None of that had been planned and none of it would have happened if it wasn’t for the “pandemic”.

Through all these unexpected developments, the format of this website, thrown together in an afternoon, has remain the same. Since my last three books have now been in the non-fiction category, and since most of my ideas for future work is also non-fiction, it feels like a good time for a site refresh to better reflect the direction of my work.

Another reason why it’s a good time to refactor the site is because I would like to lay out an overview of my Archetypal Calculus concept. Long-term readers would know that this is something I have been working through in an ad hoc fashion over the last few years. It feels like a good time to go back to the start and lay out the concept in a logical and orderly manner.

Since I would like to present that overview in a fixed, static format, I won’t be writing it as the usual wordpress posts that appear on the blog feed. Rather, I’ll be creating a new page dedicated to the Archetypal Calculus and adding material to it as I go.

While I’m doing that work, there won’t any new blog posts on the site. There will, however, be new content as I sketch out the overview for the Archetypal Calculus. If you’re interested to read that, I recommend checking back on the site whenever is convenient. I anticipate I’ll be making updates to the site whenever is convenient rather than on the usual weekly timeline.

I’m not exactly sure how long this will all take. Maybe only a couple of weeks (although I’ve said that before and been wrong). In any case, once the website refresh and Archetypal Calculus overview is done to my satisfaction, I aim to return to the usual weekly blog post format. Let’s see how it goes!

During the week, I happened to stumble across this post by Elon Musk:

Since a very great deal of my writing over the past few years has been about stories (of the literature and film variety), it’s fair to say that Musk’s post struck a chord. But there’s much more to it than that.

Two of the films that Musk mentioned, The Matrix and Star Wars, were at the core of my analysis in my most recent book, The Universal State of America. In turn, those two films belong to the larger pattern I have called the Orphan Story, which is the archetypal narrative about the Orphan phase of life, the time when we must leave childhood behind and establish our adult identity.

In fact, all five of the movies that Musk mentioned are archetypal Orphan Stories featuring a hero who must come of age. But they are also a very special type of Orphan Story because they all take place against a backdrop of authoritarian politics. What sets these Orphan Stories apart is that the hero is coming of age in a dystopian society. In each case, the Orphan hero joins the “resistance” and rejects the dystopia offered to them.

It is usually the Tyrannical Father archetype who is at the head of a dystopia. Star Wars has perhaps the most famous example of this dynamic in recent memory since Darth Vader is both the socio-political Tyrannical Father and also the personal Tyrannical Father to the Orphan hero of the story, Luke Skywalker. As I explained in The Universal State of America, The Matrix provides us with the unusual pattern of a dystopia led by the Devouring Mother archetype (a tyranny without a tyrant).

Now, I don’t suppose that Elon Musk has read any of my books or any of the posts on this blog, so what are the chances that he would select five stories that are Orphan Stories? After all, he could have cited any number of dystopian books or films that are not Orphan Stories. 1984 is a popular one these days. There’s Brave New World, or Blade Runner, or The Machine Stops, or any number of others. Instead, Musk chose all Orphan Stories.

What’s even weirder about that is that Musk has recently aligned himself with the Trump presidential campaign. His post was clearly meant to associate Trump with the “resistance”. Since he used Orphan Stories to make that point, he was also associating Trump supporters with archetypal Orphans.

Although I still broadly agree with this framing of what is going on, it also has to be said that the Orphan Story-Dystopia paradigm is used by both sides of politics in the United States.

In short, both sides of politics are using the exact same story about struggling against an authoritarian political system. This gives us the weird spectacle of people voting in a democratic (non-authoritarian) system who are fully convinced that authoritarianism will take over if the other team wins.

From a propaganda point of view, it’s not surprising to find both sides of politics using the same underlying story, since narrative structures provide ready-made slots into which you can insert the good guys and bad guys of your choice. But what I realised after thinking about it a little more is that there is one sense in which the Orphan Story – Dystopia pattern is actually symbolically representative of democracy in general and the US presidential election more specifically. To understand why this works, we need to go over the underlying pattern that is at play.

Not surprisingly, every Hero’s Journey features a hero. What is less obvious but equally true is that every Hero’s Journey also takes place against a socio-political backdrop. This is true even in mythology, where the interactions of the gods imply a socio-political structure that is recognisable in the culture to which the story belongs.

We can carry out the exact same analysis with the “seasons” of the human lifecycle. Thus, childhood and adolescence (the Child and Orphan archetypes) map to spring, early adulthood to summer, late adulthood to autumn, and old age to winter.

With this framework in mind, we can see that the Orphan Story-Dystopia pattern involves a hero in the springtime of their own life living through a socio-political epoch that represents the winter phase of the civilisational cycle. Dystopia has its mythological grounding in the winter phase of Frye’s cycle.

In mythology, however, winter was just the prelude to spring. Just like the seasons of the year, the cycle does not stop but keeps turning. Thus, the “winter” phase usually denoted a death-rebirth motif. The god or goddess dies in winter and is reborn in spring, signalling the beginning of a new cycle.

We can see, therefore, that Hero’s Journeys are mini-cycles which take place against the implied larger cycles of the human lifespan and the rise and fall of civilisations.

Ok, but what does all this have to do with democracy? Well, democracy is also a cycle. In the USA, the presidential cycle runs for four years. At the end of that cycle, a president “dies” and is “reborn” after an election, just like the mythological gods of old. It follows that the period leading up to an election is the winter phase of the cycle. The old president is dying and needs to be replaced by new life (with the advanced age of modern presidents, this is quite literally true!).

Thus, the Orphan Story-Dystopia pattern is actually a perfect symbolic representation of the end of a presidency. The Dystopia refers to the dying world of the incumbent presidency. It is the socio-political backdrop to the Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey is an Orphan Story featuring the candidates who are vying to become the newly risen president who will usher in a new era. One of those candidates will “come of age” as the new president.

In this way, the apocalyptic tone that seems to arise in the lead up to every American presidential election is at least partly driven by the imposition of this ancient mythological frame onto proceedings. For every election, a great many people are convinced that if their hero (presidential candidate) doesn’t win, the entire world will come to an end. That belief is irrational, but it resonates because of the mythological framework that is invoked.

Note that this mytho-apocalyptic lens only seems to appear for presidential elections and not for midterm election. The obvious reason for this is because presidential elections have a hero figure and this triggers the Hero’s Journey archetype. Every Hero’s Journey needs a hero. The president gets cast as the mythological hero of old.

It’s worth remembering that the US is rather unique among modern western democracies in allowing the public to vote for the head of state and therefore to elect a new hero every four years. In other nations, even nominal figureheads do not fulfill the hero archetype.

Here in Australia, for example, it’s common for Prime Ministers to get knifed by internal factional maneuverings. They are usually replaced by lunchtime the next day. It’s an efficient, rational system, but certainly not heroic, and therefore not worthy of the grand mythologies that surround the US presidential race.

Long-term readers would know that I’ve made great use of the distinction between the Exoteric and the Esoteric over the past few years. The Exoteric refers to the aspects of life that are outwardly visible. From the human point of view, that includes our bodies, clothing, and costumes (which denote socio-political status), as well as our participation in ceremonial activities, etc. The Esoteric refers to the inner, invisible aspects of our lives, including our emotions, our thoughts, and our worldview.

It seems to be a natural part of human life to try and keep the Exoteric and Esoteric synchronised, to have our external lives correspond to our inner thoughts and emotions. Tolstoy once wrote, “If you’re not enjoying your work, you should either change your attitude or change your job.” Your attitude belongs to the Esoteric. Your job belongs to the Exoteric. The goal of changing either is to bring the Exoteric into balance with the Esoteric.

We can see, then, that work has both an Esoteric and an Exoteric aspect to it. So do the other aspects of our identity, and Tolstoy’s advice works just as well for those.

There are four main aspects to our adult identity that seem to hold across all cultures: political, economic, sexual, and religious. For each of these, we can enquire into the Exoteric and Esoteric aspects.

In short, although there is always the possibility of having both Exoteric and Esoteric dimensions to our lives and our identities, there is no necessity for this to happen. Much depends on ourselves and the time in which we live. The more common scenario is to have the Exoteric without the Esoteric. In that case, we are just going through the motions of life, fulfilling the Exoteric requirements of work, church, state, etc., without experiencing any substantial Esoteric component.

The reason this is more common is because society is always primarily concerned with the Exoteric aspects of life. The Exoteric institutions of society are demand that you show up and do what is required. Your specific thoughts and feelings about what is going on are less important and therefore nobody is really concerned to find out about them.

The same is true of our own interactions with people outside of our friendship and family groups. When you engage a plumber to come around and fix your kitchen tap, you’re probably not looking for a deep exchange on an emotional or theoretical level.

In short, society has an Exoteric bias and probably always has if we consider that the origins of human language evolved out of the need to warn of Exoteric threats like predators in the vicinity or Exoteric opportunities like coordinating to take down a game animal for dinner. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, to find that the general culture is lacking in Esoteric understanding. There was a great example of this during Corona that was personally relevant for me.

Prior to Corona, nobody ever talked about the subjective experience of having a cold or flu. A cough, excessive sneezing or blocked nose, and other Exoteric symptoms were the usual properties attributed to the illness, and that was enough evidence to conclude that somebody had a cold or flu. Since “covid” was a supposedly new disease (albeit one caused by the exact same family of viruses that cause colds and flus), it suddenly became not just acceptable but desirable to share one’s experiences about being sick.

Because I always get fever dreams with the flu, I assumed that everybody else got them too, and it wasn’t until corona that I realised this wasn’t the case. It turns out that just 10% of the population has them, and scientists still have no idea what differentiates us fever dreamers from the other 90%. Reading between the lines, it seems what happened to some people during the Corona hysteria was that they got their first fever dream and then freaked out because they thought “covid” was driving them insane. Doctors were even prescribing antipsychotic medications to such people.

What was lacking was general cultural knowledge about the existence of fever dreams. That’s not surprising given that we have already noted that society in general is not concerned about the Esoteric. It’s also possible that, because “covid” was a supposedly new disease, people became more fixated on the Esoteric states of the illness. It might even be true that the same people would not have noticed or cared about their fever dreams if their illness had been classified as “just the flu.”

We noted above that our identity can be demarcated into four broad areas – political, economic, sexual, and religious. The subject of fever dreams doesn’t fit anywhere on this list. It’s perhaps for that reason that nobody ever talks about it. There might be all kinds of other weird Esoteric experiences each of us have that we assume everybody else also has. We don’t know because it never gets discussed.

In theory, we could turn any of these Esoteric experiences into a part of our Exoteric identity. If I went around telling everybody who would listen about my fever dreams and doing it over and over again, people might start thinking of me as that annoying fever dream guy. If enough other fever dreamers followed suit, we could start a movement. Hey, with 10% of the population, we could even form a political party. The Fever Dream Party: make fever-based hallucinations great again.

Of course, this is never going to happen, and yet it’s not a million miles away from some of the other identity politics that are going on these days. If identity always requires an Esoteric and Exoteric aspect, one way to formalise it is to create an Exoteric dimension for it. Another way is to problematise the Esoteric. We see exactly this going on with the trans and gender issues, which blew up again recently at the Olympics with the women’s boxing controversy.

At the heart of this issue is the desire to allow people to choose their own identity. In relation to the trans children/teenager debate, the mantra that seems to have sprung up around this issue goes something like this: when our children tell us who they are, we should listen to them. In other words, we should allow our children to create their own gender identity.

We know that identity has both an Esoteric and an Exoteric aspect to it. In relation to the gender issue, the Exoteric aspects have historically been considered very straightforward since they have a firm biological basis. On top of that biological basis, however, there has always been a significant amount of socio-political content. Thus, we can divide the Exoteric aspects of gender into biological and socio-political.

Men and women have historically dressed differently, taken on different social roles, etc. Because of that, it’s always been possible to adopt the Exoteric appearance of the other gender and most cultures will have at least a sub-culture around this notion.

For most of history, you could take on the Exoteric appearance of the other gender by adopting the fashion, makeup, hairstyling, and other standard social tropes. That would give you a socio-political simulation of gender.

These days, thanks to the wonders of modern science, you can get surgical and pharmaceutical interventions to obtain the secondary sex characteristics of the other gender. As far as I’m aware, there is not yet a way to obtain the full primary sex characteristics, although there are some rather Frankensteinian attempts in that direction. In short, we can now significantly alter your gender-related biology too.

Both of these, the biological and socio-political, belong to the Exoteric aspect of gender. What seems to be almost completely missing from the trans debate is the Esoteric dimension. The Esoteric dimension of gender would amount to an answer to the question: what does it feel like to be a man/woman? This is a very simple question that is very difficult to answer.

We have already noted that society does not like to talk about the Esoteric and so it’s not that much of a surprise to find that the question of what it feels like to be a man/woman has been all but completely ignored when it comes to the trans issue. It is simply taken for granted that anybody wanting to transition must already “feel like a man/woman”. Is that actually true?

I recall reading an account from a biological female who had undergone testosterone treatment as part of her “conversion”. She claimed to have been surprised at the feelings of aggression and thoughts of violence that she suddenly started to get. The fact that she was surprised shows that she had not previously felt like a man and only began to do so after the testosterone injections.

When it comes to the primary aspects of our identity—economic, political, sexual, and religious—the Exoteric and Esoteric aspects form a very tight circuit. As with all circular logic, trying to find the “starting point” is difficult, if not impossible. The starting point might be in the Esoteric – I feel like a woman even though I’m in a man’s body—or it might be in the Exoteric – I dressed like a woman and liked the way it felt, therefore I want to be a woman.

What makes things even more difficult is that, in the real world, there is no clear demarcation between the four aspects of identity. Although we’d like to think that “gender” was some distinct object of study, the reality is that it is influenced by the other aspects of our identity. Thus, there is a politics of gender, an economics of gender, and even a theology of gender. The same goes for the politics of work, the economics of work, the theology of work, and so on for all the other combinations.

Because our identity also includes the political, once the gender issue became politicised, the political part became more important. It shouldn’t be a surprise to find that the political also has an Exoteric and an Esoteric dimension and that the focus here has once again been almost entirely on the Exoteric aspects of the debate.

Thus, it is at least a part of the story that what is going on is the political drive to be able to force society to accept the identity that individuals decide for themselves. That drive has now become both a legal and moral norm in many western nations backed up by the Exoteric power of institutions like the International Olympic Committee.

But that political drive also has an Esoteric aspect. Although it’s not exactly what Nietzsche meant, we can call it the will-to-power. Included in this is the larger cultural will-to-power implied by the goal of being able to control our own biology.

The ability to enforce an identity on your own biology is a form of power. The ability to have society recognise your chosen identity is also a form of power. Since both of these are very new forms of power, it seems likely to me that the people who are experimenting with them aren’t even aware that a part of what is really driving them is, in fact, the feeling of power as an end in itself (will-to-power). As with any complex social issue, that is not all that is going on, but it is surely a very important part.

If I were to think of a historical era that can shed a lot of light on what is going on in the world today, WW1 is the one that instantly comes to mind. There are a number of interesting direct parallels to talk about. But it’s also true that the world in which we live was very largely created by WW1. Some people think we are in an inflection point that could signify the unwinding of the system that was largely created by that war. Others think we might be moving into a more extreme version of the post-war world (think 1984 and Brave New World). In any case, it’s a useful time to talk about the changes that the Great War brought into being.

What got me thinking about this recently was a story that overseas readers will probably not have heard about but which is rather important to those of us living on the east coast of Australia. Australia is the third largest exporter of natural gas in the world. Nevertheless, the state government where I live, Victoria, recently announced it was banning the installation of gas in new homes. Meanwhile, the price of gas has been steadily climbing in recent years and there’s been talk of gas shortfalls just around the corner.

How does that work? How can a country be a huge exporter of a commodity while not being able to provide its own citizens with that commodity? Well, it turns out Australia has been in this position at least once before and that takes us back to WW1.

Like all combatant nations in that war, Britain’s tactics were as much about what was happening off the battlefield as on it. To fight modern wars on an industrial scale requires resources as inputs into your economy. If you can prevent the enemy from obtaining those inputs, you can prevent them from fighting. Thus, the blockading of shipping routes became a major tactic for all combatants in WW1. Since a lot of food was also getting shipped, this tactic amounted to cutting the food supplies of entire nations.

Because of Britain’s geographical location and its network of foreign allies such as Australia, it was far better placed than the continental powers to ensure its food supply. Nevertheless, the German U-Boats were highly effective at disrupting supply lines and managed to take out thousands of ships. Still, the Germans ended up losing the supply battle and Germany suffered much more from food shortages than Britain. A big part of Germany’s decision to invade the USSR in WW2 was because they feared that the same food shortages would occur if Stalin decided to join the war on the allied side.

In line with British policy about cutting off the supply of food, Australia agreed to stop exporting foodstuffs to neutral countries to prevent those countries from on-selling to the axis powers. This would have resulted in a loss of revenue for Australian exporters and so the Australian government convinced the British to agree to buy whatever food Australia produced. However, Britain also had access to foodstuffs from Canada and the US. Since it was cheaper to ship from those locations, Britain preferred to get its food from the Americas.

The parallels with the current situation with Australian gas are quite obvious. Here we have another commodity which Australia has ample supplies of. Once again it is being denied to Australians in favour of overseas interests. Once again, you would think there is an easy common sense solution to the problem and yet the Australian government refuses to do anything about it, instead citing “sovereign risk” as an excuse. Apparently governments taking the interests of their citizens into account is now a sovereign risk, a novel extension of a concept that originally only related to currency defaults.

Of course, the gas restrictions are not being sold to the public in Australia as fulfilling some abstract economic principle. Rather, the move away from gas is being justified on the grounds that it is addressing climate change. This brings us to another parallel between our time and WW1 which is the extensive deployment of propaganda to convince the public to accept a policy it would not otherwise support.

It has to be said that one of the weird things about WW1 was the spontaneous and almost universal support there was for it in the early days. It was, in fact, almost identical to the beginning of corona in that something that had been unthinkable just weeks and months earlier (war, lockdowns) was quickly treated as if it was completely normal.

Nevertheless, as the war dragged on, public support began to wane, especially once the food shortages kicked in. Governments turned increasingly to propaganda as a way to keep the public on side. This propaganda was not just needed in its own right but also as a counterforce to the propaganda being generated by the union movement and their political affiliates. This included much of the feminist movement. Here in Australia, the largest riot over food shortages occurred in Melbourne and came after a mass protest that had been organised by feminist groups.

Capitalists get things done by forming companies. Civilians get things done by forming associations and unions. Governments get things done by creating bureaucracies. If the government was going to get into the propaganda game, it needed to create a bureaucracy for that purpose. In the US, it was Woodrow Wilson who created the harmless-sounding Committee on Public Information. No coincidence that this bureaucracy was formed immediately after Wilson announced the US was joining the war.

But government bureaucracies don’t just pay for themselves. Alongside all the other expenses of the war, the propaganda departments needed to be funded via increased taxation. Here is yet another parallel between our time and WW1.

It is currently the time of year here in Australia when we all need to file our income tax returns. Some people might be surprised to know that federal income tax is just under 110 years old. It was introduced in 1915 to – you guessed it – pay for the war.

If we look at the size of the tax take in Australia during the 20th century, (it’s the same story for all other western nations) there are two big jumps that occur at the start of both WW1 and WW2. Prior to WW1, the tax-to-GDP ratio was about 5%. It rose sharply during the war before the really big jump up to 25% at the start of WW2. It has remained that high ever since and currently sits at around 30%. A fair share of that 30% still goes towards government propaganda (aka advertising and public relations).

So, we can see that many of the things we take for granted nowadays came into being during WW1. The historically huge tax take by government used to fund an equally enormous public bureaucracy is one thing. The use of government propaganda is a second. There is a third thing which brings us back to the starting point of this essay.

During WW1, Australians were denied access to food that was rotting away in storage because of the geopolitical requirement to uphold international agreements. That’s exactly what’s going on with the current gas situation. These days, it is not the British government which owns the resource but multi-national corporations. The rules of the game have changed but the form is the same. Australia was a Dominion nation during WW1, meaning much of our foreign and economic policy was set in London. We are now a member of the “liberal world order” or whatever else you want to call it, whose policy is set from Washington, D.C.

The propaganda has also changed to reflect these new realities. With the fall of the USSR, there is no longer a direct enemy to propagandise against and so we now have a string of new, invisible “enemies” such a climate change, global warming, viruses and the like. It is not a coincidence that these are all “global threats” to which there can only be “global solutions”, a neat trick that gives governments the excuse to sacrifice national interest for the greater good, just as the Australian government had to sacrifice for the interests of the British Empire during WW1.

It’s curious to think that the reason for all this might just be because of the inertia of the system itself. Decommissioning armies is a challenging exercise. Dismantling systems might be even more difficult. Maybe the reason we are stuck with the old war system is because nobody knows how to replace it.

Of course, in the aftermath of WW2, there was justification to keep the system going as a counter to the Soviet threat. This then morphed into the Cold War, which was largely a fight between bureaucratic behemoths. There were other reasons to keep it in place, too, not the least of which was to ward off the persistent unemployment that had been a feature of the years prior to WW2.

Still, with the collapse of the USSR in the 90s, the system really did cease to have a reason to exist. This could actually be a surprisingly large driver of why things have become increasingly crazy in the decades since the collapse of the Soviets. We continue along with a system that was born to fight two enormous global conflicts. The world has changed but the system remains.

It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that a system built during war continues to find “enemies” to fight against. As it has run out of real enemies, it has started to create more esoteric enemies to do battle with: the war on drugs, the war on AIDS, the wartime measures for “covid”. This is perhaps also a big part of the reason for the continued obsession with Hitler and the Nazis. It was the last time the system had a real enemy to fight.