Month: January 2025

Recently, I’ve been pondering the continued effects of what is known as the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP) on modern culture. The WEMP is at the heart of a number of cultural practices we take for granted nowadays. For example, the ability to choose a marriage partner, the high level of independence a married couple has from their family, and the expectation that the young couple will largely finance themselves—these are all centuries-old cultural practices quite specific to northern and western Europe.

The evidence suggests that the WEMP began even in medieval times, but it certainly kicked up a notch around the time of the Reformation, which makes a lot of sense since that was the era when the economic, political, and general cultural power shifted from southern Europe to the north.

The WEMP was actually born out of the relative poverty of northern Europe. It was because parents did not have the money to pay a dowry to their children that the children had to go off to work to finance themselves. Crucially, this was true even for women. Thus, the typical age of marriage for a young woman was much later than in other cultures and was usually in the late teens or 20s.

Another interesting side effect of this was that the age discrepancy between brides and grooms was much smaller than elsewhere. It seems that the norm across cultures and throughout history is that women marry shortly after puberty, while men are expected to establish themselves first and so marry later. Thus, the groom is usually quite a bit older than the bride, often much older.

The WEMP has been seen as a significant reason why capitalism took off so strongly in northern Europe, even though the city-states of Italy had already invented it. Since it was already part of the culture for young people to take paid employment before marriage, there was a ready-made workforce for capitalists to tap into.

It’s easy to see how this pattern transitioned effortlessly into the early days of industrial capitalism. But, ultimately, it was the industrial revolution that would cause major problems. Those problems began to show up towards the end of the 19^th century. Ironically, one of the main signals that things were starting to crack at the seams was something that we tell ourselves was a source of “progress”, namely, the rollout of the modern education system.

The official narrative is that education was needed because factory work was somehow more advanced and required smarter workers. In fact, what was really going on was that the number of available jobs was falling. Industrialisation started to create large surpluses. Removing young people from the labour market was a way to ensure wages remained relatively high. But that created a lot of young people hanging around with nothing to do. Many of them turned to crime and other antisocial behaviour. School was a way to keep them off the streets.

In addition, school was part of the ideological battle going on at the time between the state and the church. The church had been a provider of education for centuries. Secular reformers wanted to break its stranglehold. Thus, public schools ended up becoming tied in closely with the increasingly secular nation-state.

While times were good, none of this fundamentally challenged the WEMP. It was still the case among the general public that teenagers would go off to work and save money in order to get married. However, the problem of oversupply created by industrial capitalism created the massive boom and bust cycles, of which the Great Depression is the most notable. You had 33% unemployment in modern Western nations at that time.

When you have an economic bust that lasts several years, what that means is that a whole generation of people looking for work can’t find it. As a 15-year-old, you might be trying to get a trade. But you don’t get one until you are 18 or 19. The beginning of your adult life has not only been pushed back several years; there is now a background of uncertainty around your economic future.

If we think about it that way, then we see that what was really at stake was the way in which western nations initiated their young people. The default social script for centuries had been that you went off to work. But now you couldn’t be sure that the work would be there.

Governments tried to address this problem in a number of different ways, but the continued rollout of education was one of the main ones, since it took large numbers of young people out of the labour pool. Education really took off in the post-war years. The government was able to finance it because of the massively increased tax take that the public had been conditioned to accept during the wars.

For a while, the main effect of this on the WEMP was simply to push back the age of marriage. Once upon a time, you’d begin working in your early to mid-teens. Now, many people were finishing high school and not working until their late teens. Then university became widespread, meaning that people didn’t begin working until their early 20s. In lockstep with the rollout of mass education, the average age of marriage crept upwards. Not coincidentally, the immediate postwar years were the exception since the economic boom of that time meant everybody could find work, and people married younger, hence the baby boom.

The WEMP was still in place during this time; it had just been pushed back as people began their working lives later. The state had helped to solve the problem of oversupply by providing more and more education. This seemed like a pretty reasonable compromise, and it created the cruisy and enjoyable teenage years that most of us would have grown up with.

While the education provided by the state was free or as good as free, none of this burdened young people, and the system was relatively stable. But, of course, that changed when university had to be paid for, and then paid for some more, and then paid for even more. Fast forward to today, and we have one third of the young people going to university and accruing large debts that need to be paid off afterwards.

So, we went from a system where you’d start working in your teens and begin saving money straight away to where you don’t start working till your early 20s, and then you have to spend years and years paying off the debts accrued from a degree that you never really needed in the first place and which is really only there because of the economic oversupply problem that still exists in the background, meaning there aren’t enough jobs available. That would be grotesque enough, but especially in the United States, you now graduate into a completely toxic corporate environment where all kinds of ideological nonsense is used to again gloss over the fact that there aren’t enough jobs.

Now, of course, there’s never any single reason that explains complex social phenomena, but I think one of the main drivers for all of this is the WEMP, which is tied in with the fact that the way we initiate young people into society is through work. That system has been in place for many centuries; it created the modern world through industrial capitalism; it is the source of our success. That’s why nobody wants to get rid of it, and why we are twisting ourselves into absurd knots trying to keep it all going.

As it happens, I’ve seen the zombification process several times in my work career. Let me tell the story of one of the more memorable examples and how it’s related to a lack of leadership.  

I’ll avoid names to protect the guilty, but let’s just say this was one of Australia’s largest companies. Like most corporations here, it has a quasi-monopoly on the market, which means it doesn’t have to really care what customers think. That’s an important caveat because the major political parties in western nations also have a monopoly on “the market.” Sure, they might lose an election, but they still get to sit on the opposition benches and earn a pay cheque.

This creates an environment where there is no real pressure to respond to the real world, and so the institutions gradually slide into senility. It’s not a coincidence that our elites these days behave as if they have dementia, lashing out at the public the way a dementia patient acts towards family members and carers.

Anyway, to return to the story, I’d heard rumours about how the IT department of this corporation was not a good place to work, so I was sceptical about taking the job. However, the people who interviewed me told me they were trying to reshape the way they operated and that my experience was a good fit. In addition, it was a six-month contract role, and the money was very good. So, I decided to give it a go. I was hired and placed on a new project that was just about to start.

It took me about three weeks to realise that the project was a total sham. Most of that time was me being in denial about what I was learning. I kept telling myself I must be missing something. The actual deliverables for the project were trivial, especially considering that a team of thirty people was supposed to build it. That would have been bad enough. But the truly incredible part was that most of the software had already been written in a past project. This project was about completing that work.

To take an analogy, imagine you’re a builder and you get hired to build a house. You rock up to the building site on day one to find that the house is already mostly built, there’s only some trivial bits and pieces to finish it off. Now imagine that there’s a team of thirty builders on site who are all doing something. What they are doing is mostly turning up to meetings and talking. In between meetings, they do some odd jobs that make it look like they are doing work.

Now, this could never really happen on a small construction site since any idiot can tell if a house is already built. But on a software project where everything is intangible, it’s much less obvious. Anybody with basic coding skills can figure it out, but software projects often have a lot of people without coding skills (including the coders!), and, most importantly, management very often does not have coding skills.

This last fact is the crucial one because it links us back to modern politics. California governor, Gavin Newsom, has been in the news this week for obvious reasons. There was a particularly revealing interview where he was standing on the street with a house burning down behind him and the reporter asked why the fire hydrants had no water. Newsom tried to avoid the blame saying it was the fault of the local authorities.

Now, if that’s true and Newsom is not responsible for the problem, why doesn’t he find the person who is responsible and make them explain themselves to the public? But that wouldn’t seem fair because fire hydrants were only one part of the problem. The fire was also caused by the state authorities who drained water reservoirs, the mayor who cut fire department funding, the environmentalist lunatics who stop forest management authorities from preventing the build-up of fuel on the forest floor, and a number of other factors.

The fact that all that is true only reveals why Newsom’s attempt to avoid responsibility is disingenuous. It’s the job of a leader to oversee all those independent developments and to realise that this combination of factors is going to lead to disaster. Otherwise, what is the point of having a leader in the first place? Gavin Newsom doesn’t get to pretend he’s a leader when things are going well and then not be one when disaster strikes. But, of course, he’s not alone. All our so-called leaders do this these days.

The same dynamic holds in a corporation. A software project has numerous different groups of experts working on it. The job of a leader is to make sure they are working together properly to produce an outcome. It is also the job of the leader to ensure the outcome is meaningful in the first place. But corporations rarely have leaders. They have managers.

Thus, the software project I was working on had nobody monitoring from above. This is a very common thing in large corporations. Management is always somewhere else. Just like politicians, they show up occasionally to make speeches.

As it turned out, there was a particularly memorable speech by a manager on the project I was working on. Just at the time when I had realised the whole project was complete bullshit, we had the official kickoff meeting. Some high-level manager showed up to give the introductory pep talk during which he uttered a line I’ll never forget: “We can move the economy with this project.”

This is such a beautifully crafted piece of bullshit you almost have to admire it. It is simultaneously meaningless while also sounding grandiose. It’s a classic thought-stopper. Of course, it was completely at odds with the reality on the ground. The “economy” is about the sale of goods and services. Our project was not going to produce any good or service. Again, I have to reassure readers that I am not exaggerating for effect here. This project was not going to deliver any good or service. There was no there there.

But that didn’t stop the appearance of a project from taking place. After our kickoff meeting, we got to “work.” In most IT teams these days, there are two common practices. One is to have a daily “standup” meeting in the morning where you say what you are working on. The other is to show that work is written on a small card that is placed on a board that tracks progress. This system exists in order to make clear who is working on what.

Now, I have said that this project was not going to produce a good or service. But there was something that very much looked like one as long as you didn’t ask any silly questions like, “Why would anybody want this?” or “What actual value is being created here?” It was the illusion of a product. It turns out that corporate projects can function just as well with the illusion of a product as with the real thing.

Those familiar with the Bible story of the golden calf will recognise the group psychology that was on display. At the start of each workday, we gathered around and worshipped our illusion. As if to make up for the fact that the work was completely pointless, there seemed to be enormous amounts of it. Our work board was filled with cards, and the standup meeting took more than 30 minutes to complete. Everybody was apparently very busy doing things. What they were doing and why they were doing it were never discussed. To ask such a simple question as “Why do we need that?” could have brought the whole house of cards crashing down.

Most of the work of leading is to remind people about the meaning and values that bind them together. If you’re a political leader, you have to reinforce the values of the nation. If you’re leading an IT project in a corporation, you have to reinforce the value of the product being created. Meaningless phrases like “We can move the economy,” are the opposite of leadership.

When viewed this way, we can see that there is a complete leadership vacuum across the entire West right now, which is why the zombies are out in force. Consider these unrelated news stories from just the last week:-

• Newsom avoided responsibility for the Los Angeles fires (Australian readers will remember when our then PM, Scott Morrison, pulled the exact same trick five years ago – “I don’t hold a hose, mate”).
• Mark Zuckerberg admitted that he censored Facebook posts about covid because the government told him to. He’s trying to weasel out of responsibility now that it is politically safe to do so, proof that he completely failed to lead when it mattered.
• There was talk of Biden giving a preemptive pardon to Fauci, thereby ensuring that he doesn’t have to even face the possibility of taking responsibility for his actions during covid
• Keir Starmer refused to hold an enquiry into the rape gangs, ensuring that he doesn’t have to even face the possibility of taking responsibility

This is, of course, the modus operandi of all our so-called elites these days. We don’t have leaders; we have managers. And so we end up worshipping golden calves, quite literally, since the only thing we stand for now is gold (money). The message couldn’t really be clearer at this point: either we find ourselves some leaders, or we’ll end up like Los Angeles.

Some readers might have been following the online furore over the British rape gang story in the last several days. Like many, it was an episode I had vaguely heard about but didn’t know the details. So, I was as shocked as anybody to read some of the paragraphs from the official report that have been circulating. The crimes themselves are heinous enough, but what’s even harder to swallow is the fact that multiple British authorities in multiple different locations systematically covered it all up. This was not a one-off bit of corruption; it was nation-wide.

The systematic corruption part of it reminded me strongly of corona. Obviously, all western nations went insane at that time, but the thing that I remember about Britain was that a number of high-profile establishment figures got caught breaking their own covid rules. The most ludicrous one was Neil Ferguson, whose bullshit models had been used to justify the lockdowns. He got caught visiting the home of his mistress, a married woman no less.

The correlation between the rape gangs and corona was strengthened in my mind, however, by the fact that a number of well-known public figures have come out defending the actions of the authorities in covering-up the rapes. Their justification? The story needed to be kept quiet because it could inflame racial tensions. Suddenly, it occurred to me that both the rape gangs and covid followed a deeper pattern. This is not a bug but a feature of the way we are governed.

Let’s start with the less controversial question of vaccines, of which covid became one example since the vaccines were supposed to save us.

Imagine you’re an important person in the establishment. You might be a government minister or high-ranking bureaucrat. News comes to you of deaths or severe injury resulting from people after taking a vaccine. You look into the numbers and realise it’s happening to only a small percentage of people, but the numbers are still quite high because everybody gets vaccines. Let’s just pretend the number of injured is 10,000.

Within the utilitarian mindset that still predominates in our culture, you weigh up that 10,000 against the supposedly millions of lives saved by vaccines, and you conclude that the damage is worth it. But you can’t admit in public that 10,000 people were injured because that could scare people into not taking vaccines. Therefore, you ensure that the vaccine injury figures never make it into the news. This is not that hard to do because you can destroy any reporter who goes near the story by labelling them an “anti-vaxxer” who is risking the lives of millions by reducing confidence in vaccines.

In our society, the majority of people would be perfectly okay with this approach. The lie and the cover-up are necessary for the “greater good”. What’s more, the “greater good” has been conclusively shown by science. Case closed.

But the “greater good” was exactly the argument made by those seeking to justify the rape gang coverup. The lie and coverup were needed in this case in order to protect public order and defend multiculturalism.

Here is the big difference between the rape gang story and the vaccine one. Advocates for multiculturalism can argue that it brings benefits. But those benefits are not based in science, they are just a moral view of what kind of society is good. What’s more, unlike vaccines, nobody’s life is being saved by multiculturalism. The utilitarian “greater good” argument simply doesn’t work in this case, especially because thousands of girls were gang raped, and what possible benefit can outweigh that?

Setting aside the actual issues, however, we can see that the pattern is the same in both cases. It is, in fact, the same pattern that is followed in questions around climate change, renewable energy, and seemingly every other issue of politics these days.

The pattern is that the establishment, which includes the politicians, the compliant media, and even the justice system, all coordinate themselves based on the party line. The party line may be nominally justified by science as in the case of vaccines and climate change, or it may just be a straightforward political position as in the case of multiculturalism. What the establishment will do in every case is to defend the party line.

But defending the party line no longer means rigorously debating the issues in public. Instead, it means stifling any and all information that contradicts the party line. What the rape gang story proves, however, is that the establishment now simply tows the party line no matter what. Towing the party line has become an end in itself.

In the case of vaccines, even people like me who think the whole thing is BS can still see why a majority of the public would believe it and why the politicians would want to pander to them. That was also true during covid. Although even during covid, it seemed obvious to me that the thing dragged on well beyond the point at which it could have been wrapped up. It seemed to me that something far more malicious was going on.

The rape gang scandal proves that this is true. It simply doesn’t get much more malicious than covering up for the organised, systematic, and repeated gang rape of some of the most vulnerable members of society. The details of what happened are so bad that it’s genuinely hard to think of worse crimes. Nevertheless, the establishment did what it always does now: it towed the party line.

All of that is bad enough, but what we have seen the last few days is that there are public figures, people with reputations to uphold, who willingly justify the cover-up. Not only that, they came out calling anybody talking about the issue racists, in just the way that any sceptics were called anti-vaxxers and covid deniers during the corona debacle.

The fact that these people are willing to do that over systematic gang rape tells you that the system is fundamentally broken. Clearly, it is now run by people who are 100% ideologues, lacking even the most basic of human empathy. Their only mission in life is to protect their precious belief system, even if it means allowing and facilitating horrific crimes.

Which reminds me of the quip that was made during covid: if you want to know what it was like to live in Nazi Germany, now you know.

I once caught an interview with the inventor of the earthship concept, Michael Reynolds, where he talked about his method of learning by maximising the number of iterations you go through. This is not as easy as it sounds. Apart from the practical issues of trying to design iterations so that you can learn something from them, there seems to be a natural human inclination to think that working through things in our minds is the same as testing them in the real world.  

This natural tendency is probably exacerbated when the thing you are working on is an intellectual artefact. Still, intellectual artefacts count as iterations if done correctly. You produce the artefact, observe what worked and what didn’t work, and then incorporate that into the new iteration.

I’ve been iterating on my archetype framework for about a year and a half now, although I must admit I probably haven’t correctly followed Reynolds’ idea of maximising the number of iterations. The first iteration was an entire book, The Universal State of America. At that time, I was calling the model the archetypal calculus.

While writing that book, I had the idea of splitting it out into four separate, smaller books. In hindsight, I should have done it that way. Most of the problems I had writing the Universal State were how to make the ideas work together, and, in reality, I probably rushed the explanation of the main concepts as a result.

One of the reasons to keep iterations small is because most of the learning comes between iterations when you have the time and space to reflect on the work. While I was spending a year writing the Universal State, I never got round to asking what the model really was about. What really was an archetypal calculus?

So, it wasn’t until I’d finished writing the book that I had the time and space to ask that question, and I realised I still didn’t have a good answer. I decided to do another iteration. It would be a series of posts on Substack under a new name: the archetypal human.

The question arose, What was should be the theme of the Substack? Since I’d just been reading Northrop Frye, and I could see the correspondences between my model and his archetypal literary criticism, I decided to take that angle. The archetypal human would be a model for understanding stories (literature, history, film).

Thus iteration 2 was born. It would be a Substack focused on how to analyse stories using archetypes.

It’s only because I had decided to focus on stories that the subject of Wagner’s opera Parsifal came into consideration. I’m not a huge Wagner fan, but I’ve seen several of his operas. The main reason I decided to even look at Parsifal was because it is notoriously difficult to understand. Many people believe it has no story at all and needs to be understood symbolically (whatever that means). Roger Scruton once wrote a book giving his interpretation of the opera. I’ve never read the book, but the summary didn’t strike me as particularly insightful.

Given this background of Parsifal‘s inscrutability, I was quite excited to find that my archetypal human model worked a treat in deciphering the meaning of the opera. What I found is that the plot is actually a complete inversion of what I call the Orphan Story, the archetypal story that features an Orphan hero whose mission is to find their place in the world. As a result, I decided to include a discussion of Parsifal in my new substack series.

But here’s where things took a crucial twist. Ever since university, I’ve been interested in the philosopher, Nietzsche. I’ve read pretty much everything Nietzsche wrote, mostly more than once. I knew that Wagner had played a big role in Nietzsche’s life, but I’d never bothered to find out more about their relationship, and Nietzsche’s writings about Wagner had always been of little interest to me. Nevertheless, I did remember that Nietzsche had particularly hated Parsifal and that it had been central to the falling out between the two men.

Out of interest, I decided to revisit Nietzsche’s objections to Parsifal. Here was the first big revelation because I realised that Nietzsche had come to almost the same conclusion that I had. Although he wasn’t using any kind of archetypal analysis, Nietzsche diagnosed Parsifal as an inversion. He considered two possibilities. The first was that the opera was meant as a satire (comedic inversion). The second was that Wagner had become senile and decadent in his old age. Nietzsche ended up concluding that the latter explanation was correct, and all of his later writings refer to Wagner as a decadent.

But that explanation did not fit the facts. Wagner had become no more decadent in old age than he had been earlier in life. To the end, he was writing operas, trying to steal other men’s wives, being in debt up to his eyeballs, and doing all the Wagnerian things. I decided to dig into the problem a bit more. This led to the second big revelation.

I realised that Nietzsche and Wagner had themselves been in an Orphan Story. Wagner was the Elder to Nietzsche’s Orphan. The more I looked into it, the more I realised that it really was a beat-perfect Orphan Story that follows all the same themes you can find in fictional Orphan Stories such as Star Wars and The Matrix. But there was one big twist at the end, and that’s the twist that caused the falling out between Nietzsche and Wagner.

I realised I had hit pay dirt twice. Not only did the archetypal model account for Parsifal, a notoriously difficult opera to understand, it also accounted for the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship, which has been the subject of numerous books and theories. It was the latter of these that was more important. Only hardcore Wagnerians care about Parsifal these days. But Nietzsche is still one of the most important philosophers of our time. It turns out that his break with Wagner is a huge reason why, and that break is the result of the Elder-Orphan relationship between the two.

In terms of my archetypal model, this new breakthrough was even more important because it proved that the model has something to say about real people, and not just fictional ones. In the case of Nietzsche, I believe the model unlocks a new perspective on the philosopher’s life that nobody else has noticed. I’ve since reviewed all the major Nietzsche biographies and can’t find any evidence that others have understood the core meaning of the break with Wagner.

I realised that my focus on fictional stories was doing the archetypal model an injustice. It’s about real life. More specifically, it is a model of human nature and development that has a lot in common with the works of Maslow, Piaget, Freud, Sartre, Darwinism, and others.

With this new vision of what the model could be, I started to think of a new name for it. The word “archetypology” popped into my head. I decided to see whether anybody else had thought of that name.

Apart from a few random social media accounts that have taken the name, there was only one relevant search result I could find on the internet. It was from a meeting of something called the Eranos Foundation, which was a multidisciplinary group that met in Switzerland in the middle of the 20^th century and that included luminaries of the calibre of Erwin Schrödinger. The quote from a publication summarising one of the group’s meetings begins as follows:-

There is no such word as archetypology, nor is there any one discipline which could fittingly be so named. But we might invent the word to cover all those very various studies which, in very different ways, contribute to our understanding of what the analytical psychologists call archetypes…

That this name should have arisen at that time and place is not surprising. We have to remember that European scholars were taking important steps towards integral and holistic ways of thinking in the first half of the 20^th century. Jung’s well-known collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli is one of the better-known examples. Meanwhile, you had the work of Gebser, Toynbee, Spengler, van Gennep, Campbell, Smuts, and others all pointing in the same multi-disciplinary direction. All of it quickly disappeared from sight after WW2 as academia got taken over by Marxists, Foucaudians, and the like.

Since most of those writers are the ones that inspired my archetypal model in the first place, since the Eranos Foundation was dedicated to multi-disciplinary inquiry, and since nobody else seems to have done anything with the name, archetypology would seem to be perfect as the name for iteration 3 of the model.

So, that is what I am going to call it. Archetypology will be a model of human development which places the archetypes at the centre of analysis. It will be a unified model of the humanities, the study of what it is to be human.

It is this latter fact which should set it apart from the work of Ken Wilber, who is, as far as I know, the only major thinker in recent decades who has meaningfully added to the integral and holistic movement that began in the early 20^th century. But Wilber has focused mostly on questions around the development of collective consciousness. Archetypology, by contrast, places the human individual at the centre of analysis, and works outwards from there.

With this new name and direction, a number of book ideas come to mind. I’m thinking I will write them as a series of volumes under the same title. Here’s the initial list:-

Archetypology Volume 1: Introduction to the Archetypal Study of Human Nature
Archetypology Volume 2: The Initiation of Nietzsche
Archetypology Volume 3: An Archetypal Analysis of Shakespeare
Archetypology Volume 4: An Archetypal Analysis of The Brothers Karamazov
Archetypology Volume 5: An Archetypal Analysis of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Archetypology Volume 6: History and Myth
Archetypology Volume 7: The Age of the Orphan, an Archetypal Analysis of the Modern West

That is the current plan, and even if it turns out to be not quite right, at least it is an iterative approach that should maximise learning. It should also keep me busy in 2025!