Month: September 2025

In last week’s post, I referred to what I call the Dogma of Money as one of the three main drivers of modern Western civilisation and its reign of quantity (as Rene Guenon termed it). It’s worth expanding on this idea somewhat because many of the enormous problems facing society at the moment revolve around it. The neoliberal agenda elevated the Dogma of Money to the central role it now plays in governing our lives and those chickens are coming home to roost as we speak.

If the modern economy could be summarised in a single rule, it would be this: monetise everything. That’s why we have the obsession with GDP, which is a measurement of monetisation. Frederic Bastiat pointed out the limitations of this approach 150 years ago. When you focus entirely on quantitative results to the exclusion of lived reality, you end up where we are now with all kinds of obviously toxic things going on and a governing class that couldn’t care less because they see their job as solely about making the numbers go higher (which is also what happens when you elect managers instead of leaders).

Like so much of our world these days, this focus on quantitative measurement began in earnest during the world wars. The use of GDP and similar metrics made sense in that scenario because the whole economy had been turned towards the war effort. You didn’t need to qualitatively investigate what was being produced because you already knew it was the food, uniforms, and weapons needed by the troops. The vast bureaucratic apparatus that we now take for granted was created in that environment, and, it has to be said, bureaucracies do a good job when you give them a repetitive task to do over and again. They are organisational machines.

The use of quantitative methods was not only justified because the whole economy was on a war footing; it was valid because the wars were a contest to see whose economy could produce more stuff. If memory serves me correctly, it was Ernst Jünger who said that WW1 could be divided into two parts. The first half was relatively tame and civilised. The second half became a battle of volume. As war production hit its stride, both sides began launching enormous quantities of bombs against each other. In the end, Germany’s loss was mostly economic in nature. It couldn’t outproduce the Allies once the United States joined the fray.

The same dynamic held in WW2, and it was once again the United States which tilted the scales by ramping up its economic production and distributing the goods not just to Britain but, perhaps more importantly, to the USSR. In any case, it was once quantity which won the wars and that’s why quantitative metrics like GDP were perfectly valid.

It’s fitting that GDP only measures monetised production because war is always facilitated by money. Professional soldiers have always needed to be paid. But even modern conscript armies need money. Napoleon’s conscripts were given a wage, as were the soldiers in the world wars. In addition, modern warfare also requires vast payments to the companies producing the things needed to prosecute the war. Therefore, because the entire economies of the combatant nations were turned to the war effort, the two world wars represented an unprecedented monetisation of society in general.

Because we live in the aftermath of that, it’s hard for us to imagine that for most of history “the economy” revolved around non-monetary transactions, including all the economic activity that takes place in the household. At least here in Australia, prior to the wars, anybody that had access to land would use it to grow vegetables. If there was enough space, you’d have backyard chickens. There’d invariably be a lemon tree in the corner of the yard too. People expected to make and mend some of their own clothing, cook their own meals, and generally produce things for themselves. This kind of home production is non-monetary in nature.

It was this informal economy that was elbowed aside during the wars as every last resource was siphoned into the war effort, all of which was facilitated by monetary transactions. Because Australia was far away from the actual fighting, one of the side effects of this was to create a mini-boom in wages, which led to things like a spike in public drunkenness as people splurged their newfound wealth. Some politicians here complained that the public were not saving enough of their earnings and thereby reinvesting into the war effort.

In any case, we can see that the paradigm for the post-war economy was created during the worlds wars. The original purpose of growing the monetised economy had been to defeat the enemy. But what would be its purpose once the enemy was defeated? What happened was that “the economy”, which now referred exclusively to monetised transactions, became an end in itself. The purpose of growth was more growth. The GDP went from being a fairly useful measure of wartime production to a quasi-religious indicator of economic virtue.

While the Cold War was ongoing, this fixation on the economy still had some element of higher purpose in the fight against communism. But the collapse of the USSR put an end to that. With nobody left to fight, we elevated the economy to the rank of demigod through the neoliberal agenda. The last vestiges of the notion that the economy should serve some higher purpose were dismissed. It would now be society which was subordinate to the economy.

Of course, the financialisation process had begun well before then. The neoliberal agenda simply elevated it to the official state religion; well, the globalist religion. The result is a system that runs on the very simple rule that we mentioned at the beginning of this post: monetise everything. Finance has now been allowed to intervene in every aspect of life. Nothing happens anymore without money changing hands.

Perhaps the easiest way to see that is to look at all the activities that would once have belonged inextricably to the non-monetary economy of the household. Nobody even has the idea of growing their own food anymore. Making or mending clothes is a forgotten skill. The raising of children has been outsourced to schools and childcare centres. Even the preparation and cooking of food has been handed over to the market, if the prevalence of food delivery drivers on scooters is any indication. The household is now a place of consumption, not production. It, too, has been monetised.

So complete has the financialisation process been in the last few decades that, at this point, you’d have to say that we are running out of things to monetise. Perhaps the next step will be to start charging people for the privilege of existing. How about a fixed rate of $1.95 for every hour you’re alive. We’ll call it the Life Tax. Or maybe $0.01 per breath taken: the Oxygen Tax. Wim Hof could adapt his deep breathing technique to help lower the amount of tax us useless breathers need to pay to the bankers and bureaucrats.

Jokes aside, it really does seem that we have now entered a period where there is nothing left to monetise and the financial system is metabolising society instead. We need to get back to the idea that the economy should serve us, not the other way around. In order to get there, however, we’ll have to figure out some value system other than the Dogma of Money.

The current status of Western civilisation is that we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing, but we’re certain that we must do more of it, and faster. You almost get the impression that the lust for speed is there to prevent a moment of reflection occurring in which the question “why?” was answered by nothing more than silence.

In any case, the reign of quantity is held together by at least three intertwining dogmas:-

1.     The dogma of progress
2.     The dogma of science
3.     The dogma of money

The dogma of progress can be summarised by the belief that anything new must be better than anything old. This ensures that any new idea will be received with, if not enthusiasm, then at least the passive acceptance that the experts have done it again.

As we can see, the dogma of progress is tightly related to the dogma of science. Anybody can plant a tree, but it takes a scientist to design a “liquid tree” and then to do the necessary calculations about how much pollution it can absorb. The new things embraced by the dogma of progress are always those designed by some expert or other, and so it’s tempting to think that the dogma of progress is identical to the dogma of science.

I think they are best kept separate, however, and one reason is because the dogma of science is often wheeled out to justify some of the “failures” of the dogma of progress. We saw a classic example of that during the corona debacle. The mRNA vaccines were “new”, and, in accordance with the dogma of progress, that makes them not just good, but better than anything that’s come before. Thus, we had world leaders tripping over themselves to proclaim that the new medical intervention would stop the “pandemic”. I recall the then German chancellor Merkel saying with a straight face that every person in the world would have to take the new vaccine. That’s the dogma of progress in its purest form as blind faith in new technology.

Of course, it became instantly clear that these wild claims for the efficacy of the new treatment were not valid, and that’s where the dogma of science was wheeled out to explain the situation. Science is about adapting to new information, we were told. It was not a failure to accept that the vaccine was not as effective as first believed; it was “science”. This appeal to the dogma of science gave people permission not to notice that the promises of the dogma of progress had been clearly and obviously wrong. A neat trick.

If progress is synonymous with “science”, then it is also true in the post-war years that science is always institutional science. This brings us to the third dogma of money. Gone are the days of the scientist as a gentleman of leisure or an enthusiastic amateur. In the old world, Darwin could arrange for the publication of the Origin of Species to occur after his death so that he didn’t have to be troubled with the controversy that he knew would ensue. Such a thing would be unthinkable nowadays. Science is funded by money and money always needs to generate more money.

Thus, the new things that are created by progress and science are always those that can be monetised in one way or another. In particular, speculative capital is always looking for ideas that might pay off big if they come to fruition. Note, that speculative ideas are, by definition, new. Therefore, the dogma of money tightly aligns with the dogma of progress. Since any new breakthrough must come with the prestige of science and engineering behind it, the dogma of science is included by default.

If the dogma of progress is the engine and the dogma of science is the wheels, the dogma of money is the fuel which makes it all go. Where is this metaphorical vehicle going? Well, that’s the thing; nobody knows. We don’t even try to understand it in a qualitative sense, only in a quantitative one.

Money is both the fuel which drives the engine and also the metric by which we measure its performance. Every year, the RPM of the engine goes higher. We call that GDP. But, as Frederic Bastiat pointed out about 150 years ago, measuring the economy in this quantitative fashion tells us nothing about the quality of the output. It’s entirely possible to continue to make GDP go up while having an economy that produces no value or even negative value. The car’s engine may be going faster, but the car itself may be headed straight over a cliff.

The fact that economics takes a purely quantitative approach to the matter is quite in keeping with the dogma of science. Although there is no inherent reason why science can’t concern itself with quality, it is simply the case that it has always struggled to even define quality, let alone measure it. This is true even in the hard sciences.

The result has been to focus almost entirely on quantitative methods. Corona provides yet another useful example because, in recent decades, virology has come to rely on mathematical analysis of genetic codes to define “new” viruses. The determination of what is a “new” virus is now quantitative in nature, just like the determination of whether a new product is successful is also quantitative, even if the success only comes because governments agree to purchase the product en masse (hello, mRNA vaccines).

The dogma of progress says that anything new is “better”. The word “better” normally entails a qualitative judgement, but because of our obsession with quantity, we have set up systems that equate “better” with “more”. We have reduced questions of quality to ones of quantity.

The theory of capitalism states that quality is inherent in the purchases made by individuals because individuals will only pay for that which they value. That’s true enough as far as it goes, and, as long as the post-war economic gains were shared with the general public, it worked tolerably well. However, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s have shifted the balance away from the general public and towards the corporations, investment funds, billionaires, and governments. The result is a closed loop where winners are picked in advance according to ideological parameters, not according to quality and value.

Whenever the public happens to notice that these new developments don’t represent a qualitative improvement on what came before, some propaganda will be wheeled out to correct the perception. That propaganda inevitably bases itself upon the three dogmas of progress, science, and money.

It’s ironic that, for a society that is supposed to be secular, non-religious, and “scientific”, we have ended up becoming more doctrinaire than the average religious observer. Moreover, as we saw during the corona debacle, the exponents of the three dogmas are just as fanatical as any true believer.

I’d never seen any of Charlie Kirk’s work prior to this week, but, I suspect like many people, I decided to check it out following his assassination. So, I did a search for Kirk’s name in YouTube and scrolled through the list of videos. It won’t surprise long-term readers to learn that the one which caught my eye was this one on the subject of the “toxic feminine”, featuring a debate between Kirk and the head of the Oxford Union debating club, a man called George Abaraonye.

I thought the debate was revealing for a number of reasons, but the part that particularly grabbed my attention began at around the two-minute mark. Kirk makes the correct observation that, while the notion of toxic masculinity is prevalent in our culture and is even taught in schools, toxic femininity is almost never discussed. He asks Abaraonye to comment on this, and the latter states that he thinks the reason is because there is a “double standard” at play. That is, toxic masculinity and toxic femininity do not come from the same source. Abaraonye goes on to claim that toxic masculinity comes from “a level of misogyny”, while toxic femininity is a response to that misogyny.

What was notable about that was that it won a round of applause from a majority of the audience, the only time they clapped during the debate. Clearly, Abaraonye had expressed a popular opinion. The only problem with it is that it is obviously wrong.

Let’s start with toxic masculinity, which, according to Abaraonye and those who applauded him, is always grounded in misogyny. If that were true, then we would expect the toxic masculine to always be directed against women. In fact, almost the opposite is the case. If we consider what is probably the main aspect of toxic masculinity that everybody would agree upon, hyper-aggression leading to unjustified violence, it is obvious that the main target of male violence is other men. In the most extreme case of murder, men are ten times more likely to kill another man than they are a woman. Even more telling, men kill women at far lower rates than women kill men. None of this could be true if toxic masculinity were grounded in misogyny.

What about toxic femininity? Abaraonye claims that this pattern of female behaviour is always a response to misogyny. Again, this is clearly wrong. Anybody who’s been to a co-ed high school knows that a clique of girls is perfectly capable of spontaneously manifesting the toxic feminine and that the main targets are invariably other girls. Just as boys predominantly use violence against other boys, girls use toxic femininity against girls (there’s even a stock phrase for it in the culture: mean girls). Therefore, toxic femininity is not simply a response to misogyny, unless we want to say that women are also misogynists (although, I seem to recall that Germaine Greer made that exact claim in her book The Female Eunuch).

Thus, it’s clear that Abaraonye’s argument doesn’t hold water in an empirical sense. However, the fact that both he and the esteemed audience at Oxford University clearly believe what he said is important because what he expressed is not actually an empirical claim but a dogma. Once we understand that, we have an answer to the question that Charlie Kirk posed at the start of the discussion. He asked, Why does the toxic feminine never get discussed?

The answer is found in Abaraonye’s framing of the issue. He said that the toxic feminine is a reaction against “oppression”, while the toxic masculine is “oppression”. Therefore, the toxic feminine is always morally justified. We don’t blame women for it. Our job is to go looking for the men who caused it in the first place or to blame it on the “system of oppression”. In practice, this means we don’t ever discuss the toxic feminine, and, even more importantly, we don’t even recognise it when it is right before our eyes. That is the power of dogma.

It is one of the defining features of the modern West that we are unconscious about our dogmas. In fact, we tell ourselves that we don’t have any. We don’t do dogma, philosophy or theology. We’re about “science” and responding to new data when it appears. All this sounds good in theory, but it’s complete BS. People and cultures always have dogmas. The only question is whether they are aware of them or not. In the modern West, we are simply not aware of the dogma that prevents us from recognising or discussing the toxic feminine.

The reason why Abaraonye got a round of applause from the Oxford audience was because he expressed one of the core beliefs that’s been present in modern Western culture for at least two hundred years and which has become particularly pronounced starting in the 1960s. The dogma states that there are the oppressors and the oppressed. One of the implications of the dogma is that the oppressed have the right to fight back against “the system”. Because that fight is just, they are absolved from any responsibility for their actions. Only oppressors can be held responsible.

When applied to the question of the toxic feminine, the oppressor-oppressed dogma says that women belong to the category of the oppressed and therefore cannot be held responsible for their bad behaviour. That is why, even though the toxic feminine is highly prevalent in modern society (what I call the Devouring Mother), and even though many women are in direct positions of power, we do not recognise or talk about the toxic feminine. The same goes for any group that is said to belong to the “oppressed” category. Their bad behaviour is always excused, tolerated, and often never even recognised at all.

I think one of the things that makes the killing of Charlie Kirk a watershed moment is that it placed in the starkest possible relief the consequences of the oppressor-oppressed dogma. The spontaneous but collective expressions of schadenfreude that came in the aftermath of the assassination were the natural consequence of a dogma which has been instilled into several generations of university students. Those students have been encouraged to see themselves as the oppressed fighting against the system. The result has been that their own bad behaviour has been tacitly encouraged. That’s why so many took to social media to openly and explicitly express their support for a murder. These people have never been held to account for their behaviour because they have always been able to use the excuse of standing up to oppression. That’s why they invariably applied the usual cliched labels of oppression to Kirk to justify his murder.

How fitting then that one of the higher profile people who did that was the man who Charlie Kirk debated in the video about the toxic feminine, George Abaraonye. In the aftermath of the shooting, Abaraonye took to social media and wrote, “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f***ing go”. What makes that comment especially contemptible is that Abaraonye had met Kirk in person and had a perfectly respectable and civilised debate with him. For him, Kirk wasn’t just some abstract image on a computer screen but in somebody he’s met in real life. If you can’t feel some baseline amount of humanity for somebody who debated you in a civilised fashion, something is very wrong.

To top it all off, when Abaraonye’s callous posts went viral, the Oxford Union debating club not only defended him but even tried to characterise him as the victim because of some reportedly racist comments that he received. In other words, they fell back onto the same old oppressor-oppressed dogma, according to which Abaraonye cannot be held responsible for his actions because he is oppressed.

Of course, it’s absurd that the president of the debating club at one of the most prestigious universities in the world should consider himself oppressed, but that is testament to how strongly the oppressor-oppressed dogma has taken hold of some of the top institutions of our society. People far wealthier and more powerful than Abaraonye regularly play to this dogma. Once you understand that, you also understand why our governing classes never take responsibility for anything. In that respect, George Abaraonye is indeed receiving a first-class education at Oxford, one that will set him up for a bright future, where he can pretend to be fighting the system while being in charge of the system.

The toxicity of the oppressor-oppressed dogma when applied to politics is that it creates a positive feedback loop. Any bad decisions made by those in power which earn them criticism can be written off as the result of “oppression”, either against themselves or some marginal group that is somehow implicated. We had this exact dynamic appear in just the last week here in Australia, where criticism of our ridiculous immigration program was written off as racism against “Indian Australians”. This victim card has been so successful for so long that our entire political class uses it as the default reaction against every criticism. The result is that they never take responsibility for anything.

It’s also worth observing that the oppressor-oppressed dogma provides the philosophical underpinning for what has usefully been called The Grievance Industry. The mass hypocrisy on display hides the enormous sums of money that are at stake. Much of that money comes from government programs and NGOs and is used to fund patronage networks that are built around helping the oppressed. Because the oppressor-oppressed dogma has been allowed to determine who are the good people and who are the bad people, it also determines who should be the recipients of this largesse. No wonder that elites are tripping over themselves to be seen as champions of the oppressed.

In short, the oppressor-oppressed dogma is used to justify the exercise of power by people who claim to be fighting against power. That is why the people who genuinely believe the dogma have zero self-awareness. If they did, they would have to acknowledge that their position is absurd.

If, as seems likely, Charlie Kirk’s death has laid bare the absurdity and toxicity of this dogma to the general public, the ramifications for politics in western society in the years and decades ahead could be huge.

Life intervened this week, and I haven’t had time to write the post I thought I was going to write. Instead, I thought I would jot down some brief thoughts about the three Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity, which is in line with the New Testament theme I’ve been exploring the past couple of weeks.

Let’s start with charity, which is sometimes used interchangeably with the concept of love but also has meanings related to the English words ‘mercy’, ‘compassion’, and ‘empathy’.

Charity in the sense of giving to the poor is clearly not a Christian concept since plenty of non-Christian societies have this notion. The trouble with this kind of charity is that, almost by definition, it costs the giver little. A rich person may throw a few coins here and there with no real sacrifice required.

Then there is the problem of hypocrisy. This occurs when charity becomes a status marker. Not only is this kind of charity cheap, what is being purchased is not the welfare of the poor but the ego of the wealthy. Jesus talks about this in the Bible when he says:

“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honoured by others.” Matthew 6:2

A third issue with charity is that, much of the time, it falls under the umbrella of justice. To give somebody what is due to them is just. To not give them their due is unjust. Where it is a social expectation for the rich to give to the poor, it is not really a matter of charity at all. Both the giving and the receiving then become mechanical and devoid of any good intentions. The modern welfare state works this way.

Christian charity has nothing to do with these lesser forms of charity. In fact, in its highest manifestation, it’s not even really about good intentions or any other feel-good qualities. Christian charity is a paradox that involves giving somebody what they do not deserve. Forgiveness is a prime example. Christian charity asks not that you forgive when it is easy to do so; it asks that you forgive the unforgivable.

The same idea applies to the concept of hope. The highest form of hope can only take place when the situation is genuinely hopeless, when you are so far sunk into despair that you can see no way out. The same goes for faith. Only when you are mired in sin can true faith arise.

If follows from these considerations that the Christian virtues are irrational, esoteric and personal in nature. Christian charity, for example, is not a social event, but a private one. Under the terms of justice, the unforgivable act must be punished. Charity is a matter of the heart.

The crucial thing about the Christian virtues is that they don’t negate or replace the Greek ones (assuming the Greeks here to be the most eloquent exponents of what we might as well call paganism). Rather, the Christian virtues are built on top of the Greek. Thus, the Christian virtues imply what we might call a state change. First you must be in sin, then you can have faith. First you must find yourself in a hopeless situation, then you can feel hope. First, something unforgivable must have happened. Then you can exercise charity as forgiveness.

As a result of this dynamic, there is a shallow and fake kind of Christian virtue which pretends you can have faith, hope, and charity without first going through the sinful, hopeless, and unforgivable. This is especially prevalent in the modern world with the concept of charity as compassion. We are drowning in a fake and phony compassion which excuses everything. Since this fake compassion also destroys the Greek virtues, it is nothing more than barbarism.

Christian charity is not about making excuses for the inexcusable. It requires that you first fully confront the inexcusable and that you accept that it is unforgivable. Only from that state can true charity arise. True charity take place in the heart, not the mind. The easiest way to spot fake charity is that it is full of reasons and excuses. The heart has no need of these.

This is a paradox that sits at the heart of the Christian virtues. They are irrational, but not as a negation of rationality, rather as a transcendence of it. First you must face the situation with full consciousness. Then you can transcend it. A person who is in a state of sin but isn’t conscious of it cannot attain faith. A person who is not aware they are in a hopeless situation has no need of hope. A person who does not feel that something unforgivable has been done cannot practice charity.

Since consciousness implies logic and rationality, the Christian virtues are often written off as nonsense. By definition, a hopeless situation is hopeless. Logically and rationally speaking, there is no way out. The same goes for an unforgivable act. A sin once committed cannot be undone. For the ancient Greeks, it took enormous courage and fortitude to face such things with full consciousness. That was the highest virtue for them, and there was nothing beyond it.

Thus, the Greek position can be described as pessimistic, while the Christian is optimistic. Another way to think about it is that the Greek is concerned with the exoteric aspects of reality and the Christian with the esoteric. Faith, hope, and charity are first and foremost interior states of an individual. For the Greeks and Romans, such interior states were valueless. What mattered was action.

From the viewpoint of reason, the Christian virtues are written off as a form of dissociation, a cowardly refusal to face reality. In fact, the Christian virtues begin with action. First there is the sinful or unforgivable act. First there is the situation that is hopeless. These are things that happen in the real world. Faith, hope, and charity are the esoteric response against these exoteric realities.

Does that esoteric response matter? The Greeks and Romans would have said no. But, in fact, the Greek virtues are the gateway to the Christian ones. Firstly, you must be conscious of sin, the unforgivable act, and the state of hopelessness. Only then can you take the leap into faith, hope, and charity. The Greeks already knew how rare it was to face the world with full consciousness. The Christian virtues are rarer still.

As Jesus put it: many are called, but few are chosen.

It is one of the seeming paradoxes of modern Western culture that never before have there been so many stories told, and never before have we taken stories less seriously. Of course, in some sense, the economic law of supply and demand explains this. When supply increases but demand stays fixed, the price goes down. The more stories told, the less value they have. To change the metaphor, it’s like the nutritional content of food were to drop the more you ate. You would keep eating, trying to sate your hunger, only to make it worse. Eventually, you would starve to death despite having a full belly.

Alongside these quantitative problems, we also have a big qualitative problem around stories these days. On the one hand, there are an essentially infinite number of fictional stories created, which are products of imagination. On the other hand, we have “news stories” that are nominally based in reality but which are distorted by the fact that the news is always subject to political pressures which inevitably turn it into propaganda. Of the infinite number of stories to choose from, we can decide between those which are imaginary and those which are fake.

The division between fact and fiction that we take for granted is in very large part the product of attitudes towards the Bible. For the best part of a millennium, the Bible in general and the gospel story in particular provided stories that Westerners had faith in irrespective of concerns around factual truth. What began to happen, however, was that the story was interpreted according to the factual point of view. That is, scholars realised that the Bible was not simply mythical (faith-based) in nature but recounted events that actually occurred. The emphasis of understanding changed from one that required faith to one that required intellect. This change occurred firstly among the educated elites of society.

From there, the intellectual approach put all the parts of the story that didn’t make sense into a bucket called “myth” and kept the rest as “fact”. That schism is now embedded in Western culture, and we unconsciously take it for granted that anything “mythical” is somehow not real. Furthermore, this intellectualised understanding negates any initiatory value that the stories might have. The task is not to become like the great figures of history, to imitate them, but to understand them intellectually.

There are actually very good reasons why this came to happen in relation to the Christian faith in the modern West. We’ll look at those in next week’s post. This post will address the schism between fact and fiction as it relates to the story of Jesus. What we will see is that the life of Jesus follows the exact pattern of the Orphan Story template that we outlined in last week’s post. It’s not a question of there being a difference between fact and fiction, reality and myth. The myth is based in fact. The story actually happened that way (for the most part).

The first thing we need to be clear about is the order of events. The gospel story was originally communicated orally. It was a story told by the disciples of Jesus in the aftermath of his death based on their firsthand experience. Only after several decades was the story first written down, and it took centuries for the New Testament to be gradually compiled into the unified text that we now know.

The more crucial point to make is that the core events related in the New Testament really did happen. We can argue about the miracles that Jesus performed, the resurrection, or the theological interpretation of it all, but there is solid historical evidence to prove that the main points of the story are factually grounded. There was a man called Jesus who began preaching and calling himself the Christ or Messiah. A number of disciples followed Jesus in these beliefs. After Jesus’ death, the same disciples continued his teachings. This is the exact pattern that we associated with the Orphan Story in last week’s post. It is about the transmission of culture from an Elder to an Orphan, from one generation to the next. Viewed anthropologically, the New Testament tells us the story of how a new belief system came into being and was transmitted.

Of course, that belief system did not come out of nowhere. On the contrary, the gospel story places Jesus and the disciples firmly within the Jewish tradition. Thus, the book of Matthew begins by listing the generations going all the way back to Abraham and showing where Jesus fits into that history. Meanwhile, regular reference is made in the story to how the life of Jesus fulfils various prophecies outlined by the prophets of the Old Testament. The story of Jesus takes place in a very well-defined and understood socio-cultural context.

What is implied in the story, although never really made overt, is that the Jewish community into which Jesus was born was under significant stress. Jewish society was under the thumb of the Roman imperial state, which had been turning the screw in a political and economic sense for several decades. This had created a number of schisms. There were various groups that wanted to take up arms against the Romans. There were collaborators such as Herod who curried favour with the imperial power. Meanwhile, there were groups such as the Essenes who wanted to forget about it all and retreat into mysticism.

Remembering back to last week’s post, we saw that exactly this kind of socio-cultural battle is implied by the structure of the Orphan Story and manifests in the difference between the Elder and the Shadow Elder. What the New Testament gives us is the story of the arrival of a new kind of Elder (Jesus) who goes into battle against the Shadow Elders of the status quo, which include the Pharisees and Sadducees as well as the Roman imperial state. The disciples are therefore the archetypal Orphans who are not just receiving initiation into a belief structure but are placing themselves in opposition to the status quo, just as Jesus is.

But that leads to the realisation that, although the gospel story is primarily concerned with Jesus, the New Testament as a whole is really about the disciples and their journey through initiation as they take up the battle against the Shadow Elders of the status quo. This actually makes perfect sense because it was not Jesus who wrote the story. He never wrote anything down. It was the disciples who told the story. Therefore, the story is told from their point of view, and since they were in the position of the Orphan receiving initiation from the Elder, it follows logically that they would write an Orphan Story.

Let’s recall the structure of the Orphan Story from last week. These are the primary elements:-

1.     The hero is separated from his parents (becoming an archetypal Orphan)
2.     The hero hears news of the Elder or the institution to which the Elder is associated
3.     The hero meets the Elder, who offers them initiation
4.     Initiation commences, including induction into the institution led by the Elder
5.     A Shadow Elder tries to subvert the initiation
6.     There is a struggle between the hero, the Elder and the Shadow Elder
7.     The Elder dies or goes missing (usually sacrificing themselves for the hero)
8.     The hero faces the Shadow Elder alone

We can now walk through each of these elements one-by-one as they relate to the New Testament. Remember, we are now placing the disciples in the role of “hero” because the New Testament as a whole is about them.

• Step 1 – The hero is separated from his parents: we don’t see any direct mention of this in the gospel, but we can easily infer it from the fact that the disciples are already adults who have jobs such as fishermen and tax collectors. Therefore, they must have become independent of their parents.
• Step 2 – The hero hears news of the Elder: the beginning of the gospels sets up the origin story of Jesus and his initial miracle work. Jesus became a controversial figure in the region, and the disciples would almost certainly have known about him before meeting him in person.
• Step 3 – The hero meets the Elder, who offers initiation:The gospels show us this directly. For example, in Matthew 4:19, “Come, follow me…and I will make you fishers of men.”
• Step 4 – Initiation commences: The very next thing that happens is that we get the first round of teachings in the form of the parables. Shortly thereafter, we see that Jesus chooses the twelve primary apostles, presumably the foremost students among a larger group. It was these twelve that would receive the most intensive form of initiation.
• Step 5 – A Shadow Elder tries to subvert the initiation: Herod and Caiaphas are the primary Shadow Elders from the Jewish religious and political establishment. Pontius Pilate is the Shadow Elder of the Roman imperial state.
• Step 6 – There is a struggle between the hero, the Elder and the Shadow Elder: the gospel story is full of the challenges raised against Jesus by the Pharisees and Sadducees. There are various attempts to discredit him on theological issues. There is famous flipping of the tables in the temple, etc.
• Step 7 – The Elder dies or goes missing (usually sacrificing themselves for the hero): this is, of course, the most important part of the story, and the subsequent theology of Christianity is based on the idea that Jesus sacrificed himself not just for his followers but for all of humanity.
• Step 8 – The hero faces the Shadow Elder alone: the gospel story finishes with Jesus addressing the disciples and giving them instructions to continue the movement. The Book of Acts then describes the activities of the disciples as they fulfil their mission and become leaders. It also famously includes Paul’s Road-to-Damascus moment. The disciples continue the struggle against the combination of the Jewish religious authorities and the Roman imperial ones, with Paul facing an almost identical demise to Jesus in that he is accused of blasphemy and handed over to the Romans.

In summary, the New Testament is an Orphan Story which begins with Jesus’ offer of initiation, shows us the initiation, and then shows us the graduation of the disciples after the death of the Elder. But to reiterate the key point, nobody wrote this story. Nobody made it up. All of the elements just listed are as good as historical facts. That means the events unfolded in the form of the Orphan Story pattern. If nobody had ever told that story, it still would have existed in that form.

Jesus was an Elder who initiated a number of disciples into a belief system which they continued to observe after he died. That belief system involved challenging the Jewish religious authorities and the Roman imperial ones. This was not an intellectual exercise. Jesus had led by example, and the disciples followed that example. The evidence suggests that most of the disciples followed directly in his footsteps, meeting their death at the hands of the same authorities that had killed the master. The persecution of the Christians played no small role in the eventual rise of the religion. 

Of course, the story of Jesus is itself the primary vehicle by which Christianity has been able to win converts, and it seems no coincidence that this is because it was written as an Orphan Story from the point of view of the people who really were the Orphans in real life. The Orphan Stories of any culture are there to facilitate the initiation of the Orphans of society. In almost all cases, the stories exist alongside a ritual and educational framework. That is how Jesus taught the disciples. He didn’t just give them some theory to study; he had them walk alongside him on the path, and he also sent them off to begin their own work of spreading the faith. This kind of initiation operates via observation and imitation, just like a plumber learns the trade by observing their mentor at work.

Stories facilitate imitation by presenting an image to be copied. It’s clear that people carry out this kind of imitation quite unconsciously and without any kind of prompting. Think about any popular modern movie or TV show, and then think about how people mimic famous lines and scenes in real life. Stories present us with what we nowadays call “memes”, and it’s also clear from the internet that memes are used effortlessly and unconsciously by people to make sense of the world. That’s why so much money is poured into propaganda, since if you can implant a meme in somebody’s mind, you can get them to think in a way that benefits your cause.

This brings us back to the problem we mentioned at the start of the post, which is that we have gotten so used to this kind of manipulation that we have grown cynical about stories as vehicles for truth. A similar kind of cynicism began primarily in the 19th century around the New Testament, and a big part of the reason for that comes back to the concept of imitation. Jesus asked his disciples to imitate him. For perhaps centuries after his death, the nascent Christian church also initiated new members based on imitation. But it was at exactly the moment when the church was incorporated into the Roman state that the story began to contradict reality and imitation became selective.

What had begun as a factual account of real events started to get warped by political requirements. That was true in Roman times and became even more true with the ascent of the Catholic Church in the medieval period. The problem is one of imitation and its relationship to initiation. To say it again, Jesus had initiated the disciples by having them imitate him. But what could it mean for a medieval European peasant to imitate Jesus? And in the absence of imitation, what sort of initiation could really occur? That’s the problem we’ll talk about in next week’s post.