Month: December 2025

The word ’empathy’ has become very popular in recent times and has somehow come to get itself associated with a whole host of different political issues. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the concept has become tarnished with the usual sanctimony and hypocrisy that pervades political discourse. However, even this hypocrisy is revealing because it shows that empathy is accepted as a virtue.

So pervasive has this notion become that it would surprise many people to know that it was only in the middle of the 19th century that empathy, compassion, and kindness appeared on the scene. Prior to that, nobody much cared about being empathetic. Life was tough, and other virtues such as discipline and stoicism were more necessary.

As is so often the case, the arrival of a concept in the broader culture had a direct antecedent in the intellectual realm, which raises the unanswerable question of whether ideas create the world or whether the world accepts those ideas for which it has become ready. In any case, the concept of empathy was not originally born out of humanitarian concerns but out of the completely unrelated scholarly discipline of aesthetics.

Now, there’s a whole backstory here which I might flesh out in more detail in a future post. The very short version is that the focus on emotions and feelings began in the German philosophical tradition with the philosopher Herder (one of Kant’s best students). For reasons that date back to the ancient Greeks, traditional philosophy had been entirely preoccupied with logic and reason. Herder and others realised that this meant that some core human faculties had gone all but unexplored.

The result was an avalanche of new thinking that came to be called the romantic movement due to its focus on emotions. Art was central to that movement, and that is why the concept of aesthetics comes into the picture. It was Rudolf Lotze who coined the term referring to the feeling of immersion we might experience when in the presence of a great work of art. This immersion was holistic in nature and included any emotions felt by the observer.

With this very brief background in mind, it’s not surprising that one of the first people to explicitly incorporate the concept of empathy into a work of art was a German. In fact, it was none other than the arch-romantic himself, Richard Wagner. All of Wagner’s mature operas encourage empathy in the audience by creating an immersive experience that he called the Gesamtkunstwerk. But it was his final opera, Parsifal, which showed the concept of empathy directly by presenting a hero who undergoes the process.

In actual fact, Parsifal is a deeply personal story. It was Wagner’s apology to the man who knew his operas better than anybody, and who he had betrayed, the philosopher Nietzsche. Anybody interested in that should check out my book on the subject (it really does require an entire book to explain).

The insertion of personal themes was nothing new for Wagner. All of his operas contain them. But these don’t detract from the larger meanings at play. When we take Parsifal at face value, we can see that Wagner’s representation of empathy was unique and certainly very different from the dominant connotation that the word has come to have in our time. For that reason, it’s worth exploring how he approached the subject in his final opera. That’s what we’ll do in this post.

If we think about all the words that are similar in meaning to empathy, such as compassion, sympathy, and pity, what is noteworthy is that all of them have the connotation of suffering. This is a curious fact because the Greek word “pathos” has the mostly neutral meaning of “feeling” or “emotion”. Clearly, we can experience positive as well as negative emotions. Equally clearly, we can share positive emotions. Walk into a room where people are having a good time, and chances are your own spirits will be lifted. Nevertheless, the words we use to denote shared emotion all imply that the emotion is a negative.

As far as I’m aware, there is no word in English that has the meaning of sharing joy or happiness. The closest we get are words like celebrate, congratulate, or rejoice. Interestingly, the Germans do have a word for this (but, then again, the Germans have a word for everything): Mitfreude. It’s like Schadenfreude, only instead of taking pleasure in another’s pain, you take pleasure in their pleasure. 

In relation to art, there are well-defined genres that are concerned with “sharing” the experience of pleasure or pain. Tragedy is primarily about the representation of negative emotions, while comedy is about the positive. This brings us back to Wagner. Most of his operas were tragedies, with the exception of Die Meistersinger, which is a comedy. Parsifal, on the other hand, breaks the rules. Wagner leads us to believe we are watching a tragedy, but it ends as a comedy. That’s just one of several fascinating inversions in the story, which originally got me interested in analysing it at a deeper level and which eventually led to me writing my latest book.

Just as Wagner blurred the lines between tragedy and comedy in Parsifal, he also took a novel approach to the representation of empathy. In a normal story, we are invited to empathise primarily with the hero and to view events through their lens. Wagner expands that by having the hero empathise with another character. This is unique not just because it is a direct representation of empathy as a lived experience in the hero but also because of the nature of the character the hero empathises with.

To understand that, we need to know a little about the two characters. First, we have the hero, Parsifal, who is a classic child of nature in the romantic tradition. Pretty much all of Wagner’s operas feature this kind of character. Parsifal was raised alone in the forest by his mother. At the start of the opera, he accidentally stumbles into the seat of the Holy Grail and is invited to watch the ceremony that is about to take place.

This leads us to our second character: the injured king, Amfortas. He is the star performer in the ceremony and will uncover the Grail. Parsifal does not understand the meaning of the ceremony or the king the first time around, but he will later empathise with it in the sense that he will viscerally re-experience it. That is, he will feel the same things that the wounded king Amfortas felt, both good and bad. We as the audience are also invited to empathise with Amfortas through Parsifal.

There’s much that could be said about that, but the thing to focus on here is the highly unusual nature of the character of a wounded king, especially when the hero of the story is a young man looking for somebody to emulate. If we think of the classic Ruler archetype as presented in great literature and art, we find three main types. There are fallen Rulers such as King Lear and Oedipus, wise Rulers like King Arthur and Aragorn, and villainous Rulers like Darth Vader and Richard III. What Wagner creates with Amfortas is, as far as I’m aware, a brand new type of Ruler, one who is neither fallen, wise, nor villainous.

The ceremony that Parsifal watches near the beginning of the opera makes this clear. Amfortas is wounded, but the time has come for the annual uncovering of the Grail. That is his responsibility. Around him are all the knights of the Grail, who are waiting to receive the sacred bread and wine. Because the ceremony causes him enormous pain, Amfortas begs to be spared the task. But the knights of the Grail demand that he carry it out. He does what is asked, and the knights take the bread and wine. Afterwards, Amfortas collapses from the exertion and is carried out on a stretcher. We know from earlier dialogue that this has been happening for many years. Amfortas has a wound that will not heal but which does not kill him.

Although this all sounds very bleak, we also see that Amfortas rises above his pain during the uncovering of the grail. In fact, he is in a kind of ecstasy. This is important because it shows that he also gets something out of the ceremony. Moreover, as the audience, we are being asked to empathise with both the positive and negative emotions on display. We might wonder what it means to feel such ecstasy, especially as a respite from pain. We also might understand that the delight that Amfortas receives comes partly from the adoration heaped on him by the knights of the Grail. They are in a symbiotic relationship rather than one based in coercion.

If we compare Amfortas to any other famous Ruler character in literature, film, and art, we can see how unusual he is. The typical Ruler leads his people to victory or fails to do so and is brought undone. The just Ruler earns the respect and devotion of his followers. The villainous Ruler earns their contempt and rebellion. In both cases, the Ruler is assumed to be the responsible party. What Wagner shows us is something very different. He makes it clear that the knights of the Grail are driving Amfortas on. They are demanding that the king perform.

Let’s think back to the point made earlier about the meanings of the words empathy, compassion, and sympathy. We noted that these all have a default connotation of sharing in another’s pain. Since we are in a weakened state when we feel pain, there is an implied element of pity in this dynamic. But this pity only exists when we believe that the individual is not responsible for their predicament. We typically don’t feel pity so easily when the person has brought misfortune on themselves.

The flipside of this is that the rich and powerful are assumed not to deserve sympathy because they have the agency required to avoid the most common types of misery in life. In fact, the Ruler has the power to inflict misery on others. The main question is whether their use of power is just or unjust. For these reasons, the Ruler is somebody to be feared or respected, not to be empathised with.

Therein lies the brilliant innovation that Wagner makes in Parsifal because he is not asking us to empathise with the usual suspects (the poor and downtrodden); he is asking us to empathise with a king. However, the king he shows us is not the usual all-powerful type. Amfortas does have the power to uncover the Grail. That is his unique strength and that is why the others need him. However, this power also causes him pain. A strong argument can be made that the knights of the Grail are responsible for that pain. Thus, Wagner has inverted the usual pattern of the Ruler archetype.

We are so used to thinking of Rulers as all-powerful and all-knowing heroes that this portrayal is initially confusing. This is one of the reasons why most audiences and commentators have not understood the meaning of Parsifal. It also doesn’t help that the dynamic is presented in the form of a medieval myth. To make it easier to understand what Wagner is trying to say, let’s transpose the situation into something more modern.

Instead of a king, let’s imagine that Amfortas is the CEO of a corporation. And let’s swap the knights of the Grail for those people who have an association with the corporation, i.e., the employees who work for it, its customers, its suppliers, the governments who earn tax from it; etc.

Imagine that Amfortas gets up at a press conference and says that, because sales are down, profit forecasts will need to be cut, wages will have to be lowered, and some creditors may not have their bills paid. Would we expect anybody to empathise with the CEO in this case? Would employees happily accept a cut in wages? Would shareholders tolerate a reduced dividend payment? Would suppliers accept the cancellation of invoices? Would any of these people have sympathy for the efforts that Amfortas has made or the trials and tribulations that led to this moment in time?

The answer is obviously no. Everybody would demand that Amfortas resign or be sacked. That is the way things work in the real world, and that is exactly what Wagner shows us in Parsifal. The knights of the Grail do not care a jot for the fact that Amfortas is wounded and in pain. They simply demand that he produce the goods. The same thing would happen if he was a modern CEO or political leader. In short, nobody has empathy for leaders. It is so far from our default assumptions about the world that the very idea of it is hard to fathom. That’s why Parsifal is notoriously difficult to understand.

Of course, there’s a very obvious reason why people struggle to empathise with leaders, and that’s because most people never become one themselves. It is much easier to empathise with what we know from direct experience. The reason why the words empathy, sympathy, and compassion all have default connotations of pain is because we all have times in life where we suffer, whether it be a physical malady, a general misfortune, or the death of a loved one. Everybody can empathise with these states because they know them firsthand.

By contrast, very few have direct experience of leadership, especially leadership of important institutions. Therefore, almost nobody really understands the specific difficulties faced by the leaders of such institutions. Among other things, being a leader involves taking responsibility for decisions where you know some people will be adversely affected. It involves causing pain in others.

What Wagner shows us is a leader who feels the pain of that responsibility. But he also shows the alienation and loneliness experienced by a leader who nobody else understands because they don’t care about the leader as an individual, they just care about what they get out of him. One of the brilliant twists in the story is that the hero, Parsifal, will become the only one who really understands Amfortas, the only one who empathises deeply with what it means to be a leader. Wagner was no doubt hoping that some of his audience would also get the message, but the general lack of understanding of Parsifal shows that this is still not the case even today. (Nietzsche, of course, did understand, as he always did).

Apparently, we’re still not ready to empathise with leaders. We can see this by comparing Parsifal with what is superficially a very similar story: Star Wars (Grail knights vs Jedi knights). The heroes are almost identical. Luke Skywalker is a naïve young farm boy. Parsifal is a naïve young boy raised in the forest. Both are called on to become a knight.

Luke will receive instruction from Obi-Wan, who we know is the good guy. He has no character flaws. Everything he does is in the interests of truth and justice. He’s 100% good. By contrast, Vader is 100% bad. Luke must choose between these two examples, but he is never asked to empathise with them, and we as the audience are not asked to either.

As a result, we have no real understanding why Obi-Wan is good or Vader is bad. Even when Vader redeems himself at the end of Return of the Jedi, it is not through any real change of character. He simply stops being a villain and starts being a good guy. What inner process drove him to this change is not something we are asked to consider. Star Wars does not require us to be empathetic.

Wagner’s opera requires empathy not just from the hero but from the audience. Using that as a tool, he shows an infinitely more subtle and nuanced view of what leadership is. For him, leadership requires both “good” and “bad” behaviour. A real leader must be both Obi-Wan and Darth Vader. They must be capable of evil as well as good. That is what is shown to Parsifal, who understands that if he wants to become a leader himself, he must accept the same deal. By contrast, Luke Skywalker never has to deal with the problem of evil. His job is to kill the evil people. In doing so, he remains good and pure, just like Obi-Wan.

The other main point that Wagner makes is the one we have already touched on, i.e., that a leader must meet the demands of his followers if he wants to retain their allegiance. Contrast this with Star Wars, where the dopey stormtroopers exist entirely to do whatever Vader tells them. That is not how things work in the real world. In the real world, followers want things too. In truth, that means the followers should also accept responsibility for what happens. However, the myth of the all-powerful leader allows followers to avoid that responsibility. Just like Luke Skywalker, they remain good and pure.

It is a tribute to how deep-seated the myth of the all-powerful leader is that Parsifal is the least understood of Wagner’s operas. All kinds of weird and wacky interpretations have been put forward to explain its meaning because the idea of (really) empathising with a king is just too far-fetched. But, of course, this same belief structure is applied to the real world in which we live. How we (mis)interpret art is how we (mis)interpret reality.

The myth of the all-powerful leader remains dominant in our time. This allows us to believe that leaders are responsible for everything and we are responsible for nothing. If we were to take Wagner’s invitation and empathise with our leaders, we would have to take responsibility for our part in the relationship. That is what nobody wants to do. Thus, the real lack of empathy is not in the leaders but in the followers. That is what Wagner shows us in Parsifal.

Last week there was an article on the Compact website which went viral online. It details the systematic employment discrimination that has been going on for more than a decade against white males in the United States. I’ve seen several interesting responses to the article, but I haven’t seen anybody exploring the fact that this behaviour has emerged from a specific type of organisational structure, one that only came to dominate quite recently in the West. Since this also relates to the theme of capitalism that I’ve been writing about in recent weeks, it gives me an opportunity to join some historical dots and sketch out the larger arc at play.

We’ll begin with what might seem like a completely unrelated issue: the politics of Eastern courts throughout history. By “Eastern court”, I mean the political structure that predominated mostly in the Orient, where there is an all-powerful ruler, whether it be an emperor, khan, sultan, caliph, mogul, rajah, etc., and some kind of bureaucratic structure through which the ruler operates. We can contrast this with the Western model, which has often had all-powerful rulers but only recently acquired a bureaucracy. The Roman Empire, for example, had almost no bureaucracy and only got one later on when power shifted to the East. In feudal times, the Catholic Church carried out rudimentary bureaucratic functions independently of kings.

As a result, the bureaucracy has never been a threat to rulers in the Western tradition. This was not the case in the East, and that is why history shows Eastern rulers needing to take defensive measures against bureaucrats.

One of the most famous practices was hiring eunuchs to work in the immediate circle around the emperor, the theory being that castrated men are less ambitious. By contrast, a Roman Caesar’s main threat always came from the army and praetorian guard, and it wasn’t much use castrating them since they were the cornerstone of the empire’s power.

Why all this is relevant to the situation in which we find ourselves these days is because we too have now rolled out massive bureaucracies, and it is through these bureaucracies that political power is exercised both in the private and public sectors. What is not well understood, however, is that it was via contact with the East that bureaucracy first came to the attention of Western intellectuals. In particular, 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire were attracted to bureaucracy as a way to combat the nepotism of the European aristocracy and disintermediate the church.

Once again, we see here an important divide between the Anglo and continental traditions. Voltaire and other intellectuals believed that a wise monarch accompanied by philosopher-bureaucrats was the ideal form of government. Frederick the Great of Prussia not only manifested the wise monarch archetype, he was also the first to build out a sizeable bureaucracy. Of course, the intellectuals who favoured this situation had a vested interest in the issue since the creation of a bureaucracy opened up job opportunities for them. It is no surprise that such thinkers didn’t have much time for democracy, which they saw as irrational and disorderly.

The Anglo realm had a proto-form of modern democracy in the form of parliament. This was not paired with bureaucracy, however, but with a different kind of organisation structure that had shown startling results: the joint stock company. Although France and Germany (the Holy Roman Empire) had a similar organisational form, conditions in Britain were much more favourable to corporations, especially once business interests figured out how to use parliament to pass laws to their benefit.

To understand how corporations became so dominant, we have to expand our picture of them. The modern conception of a corporation as being strictly about “business” is a constriction that has only been placed on them recently (by bureaucrats!). The original corporations had a much larger scope of action. From around the middle of the 17th century, the British crown gave corporations the legal right to raise their own armies, mint their own currencies, charge taxes, pass laws, and even have their own flags.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that corporations were microcosms of nation states. It’s for this reason that the corporate model was vital in the formation of the United States in particular and, to a lesser extent, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. A number of American colonies were originally founded as corporations, including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and others. Even here in Australia, the states of South and West Australia were originally corporations.

Once we understand this, we understand how it was possible for another corporation, the British East India Company, to eventually govern almost the entire nation of India. The story of how it did that is worth telling, not just because it’s fascinating in itself, but because the end of the East India Company also marks the curtailment of corporations by the intellectuals who favoured bureaucracy. Without further ado, then, let’s delve into a brief history of how a corporation took over the subcontinent.

Because of the revisionist bias of modern mainstream historians, it is not well remembered that India had already fallen under an old-fashioned kind of imperialism when European traders such as the British and Dutch East India Companies first arrived. The Mughals had invaded the subcontinent from the north. Some of them were apparently the descendants of Genghis Khan, which should give you some idea of their demeanour.

Although they were Muslims, the Mughals had little interest in imposing religious ideology on the local population. In fact, the form of imperialism they practiced was very similar to the old Roman Empire. As long as the tribute was paid and the rules followed, they were happy to leave the locals in peace.

The Mughals also resembled the ancient Romans in another aspect: cruelty. As has been the case for most of history, Mughal imperialism had zero tolerance for political opposition. Consider the fate of the Sikh leader who fought for independence and lost, Banda Singh Bahadur.

Thousands of Singh’s soldiers were paraded through the streets of Delhi before having their heads removed and stuck on spikes for public display. As for Singh himself, he was hauled in front of a baying mob and offered a reprieve if he converted to Islam. When he declined, his four-year-old son was sat on his lap, and he was ordered to kill him. When he declined again, he was made to watch while the executioner did the job. Then his eyes were gouged out, his limbs were cut off one by one, and his flesh was burned with hot irons. What skin he still had left was then removed altogether. Only after such incredible torture was he finally put to death. Even the Romans might have felt a little queasy at such a display.

This was the imperial milieu into which Europeans traders set foot. The Portuguese were first on the scene, and they tried the old-fashioned approach of taking land via military conquest and then setting up a trading post. They had some success but were mostly outgunned. Decades later, the Dutch and the British showed up. However, it was not soldiers who came ashore but representatives of corporations, what we would now call CEOs. These men did not attempt to militarily overthrow local rulers. Rather, they asked them for trade deals.

Now, if we think about the way that trade normally gets carried out in an imperial situation we see that it traditionally follows military conquest. That is, an army conquers a territory and provides the political and military stability in which trade can occur. However, traditional imperial leaders are military men who would consider involvement in trade to be deeply shameful. Traders have traditionally been near the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Because of the massive power imbalance between rulers and traders, rulers set the terms of trade and change them at their pleasure. The classic Darth Vader line, “I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further,” pretty much sums it up.

If a ruler came to the conclusion that traders and bankers were taking too many profits, or if they just needed some extra cash to finance a war or buy a new ivory backscratcher, they could take the wealth of traders either directly or indirectly via taxes and tariffs. That is exactly what happened to the British East India Company after they had established themselves on the subcontinent. But here we see the first signs that something very different from the historical norm was taking place.

Obviously, the British military was not on the ground in India to protect the traders. In fact, for the most part, the military barely secured the shipping lanes used by the East India Company. Therefore, the Company had to defend itself. Because of the cutthroat nature of seaborne trade in that era, they got a lot of practice and became pretty good at combat. Combine that with rapidly improving military technology, and the European traders who landed on the subcontinent were a very different beast from the traditional archetype.

Thus, in 1686, when a Mughal governor tried to pull a Darth Vader and alter the deal, the Company put up a spirited military resistance. This came to be called the first Anglo-Mughal war. The Company lost. However, they lived to fight another day, and over the next two centuries, their military capability grew steadily along with their trade revenues. 

But we shouldn’t think that the rise of the Company was predicated solely on old-fashioned military might. In fact, the most important event that raised them to the position of dominant trader on the subcontinent was not about fighting but healing.

The Mughal emperor who had ordered the aforementioned Sikh leader, Singh, to be tortured to death was called Farrukhsiyar. In 1715, Farrukhsiyar came down with two separate life-threatening medical conditions within the space of months. He almost certainly would have died, but there was a surgeon nearby who worked for the British East India Company named William Hamilton.

Hamilton had already proven his worth by providing life-saving medical care for several local rulers. When Farrukhsiyar fell ill, he was called in to help. On both occasions, Hamilton saved the emperor’s life. Farrukhsiyar was so grateful that he showered the surgeon with money, diamonds, gold, and, of course, the obligatory elephant.

All of that was no doubt very gratifying for Hamilton individually. However, the far more important result was that the Scotsman was able to use his newfound friendship with the emperor to negotiate a breakthrough trade deal for the East India Company. The Company made a number of new requests. All of them were granted. Included in the new deal was permission to consolidate and grow the factory in Calcutta (in fact, it was now an entire settlement).

In the years that followed, trade grew substantially. The Company became the dominant European player in India, and Calcutta became a very wealthy city. Once again, a local ruler tried to alter the deal. But, this time the Company had both more money and more experience. In 1757, it fought off the Nawab’s attack and reclaimed Calcutta. From that point onwards, the military dominance of the Company only grew as the Mughal Empire disintegrated.

What had occurred in India was something that almost certainly that has no precedent in history. An old-fashioned empire died off, and a joint stock corporation became the dominant power. This is a complete inversion of the historical norm where, across numerous different cultures, traders are counted at the bottom of the social hierarchy. In the Roman Empire, traders were not far above slaves in the pecking order (many traders were slaves). If you’d told a Roman citizen that a trader could take over from Caesar, they would have split their sides laughing. Yet, that’s what happened in India.

Of course, modern European traders were nothing like the ancient ones, and that’s the whole point. Moreover, the trading class had been rising in Europe for centuries and had reached a particular state of advancement in Britain and the Netherlands. All of the legal and institutional structures were in place by the start of the 17th century when the British East India Company came into existence. It was this form of organisation that made Britain the dominant power in Europe and then the world.

There’s one final point to make about that. The men (yes, they were all men) who spearheaded these developments were not educated aristocrats. They were not the Voltaires of the world. In many cases, they had no formal education at all. Many of them were autodidacts, which was only possible because of the rise of the printing press and the fact that they had been taught to read by their mothers. What had occurred in Europe was the unlocking of talented individuals who, in any other society, would have been trapped at the bottom of the social ladder with no chance of realising their higher potential.

That’s the positive side of it. The negative side is that some less salubrious individuals were also let loose. Many of the men who ran off to join the East India Company and similar organisations were little better than pirates. In fact, large quantities of them ended up becoming actual pirates. The vices of such men are obvious. There was greed, corruption, boorishness, etc. But they also had their virtues: ingenuity, adaptation, improvisation, and a surprising discipline. It was these qualities which enabled them to outsmart and outmanoeuvre sultans, moguls, and other rulers in the various places around the world where they landed.

Now that we have sketched out the rise of the corporation, we are ready to understand who it was that curtailed its activities. We said earlier that the rollout of bureaucracies in Europe was inspired by the Chinese model. That is not a metaphorical claim. It was actually how the proponents of bureaucracy talked about it. In a report to the British parliament in 1853, the then chancellor of the exchequer, Stafford Northcote, referenced the Chinese when recommending a number of changes to the civil service. Identical changes were made in the decades following in other Anglo countries, including the United States.

Can it be a coincidence that the same set of politicians took the opportunity presented by the Indian Rebellion of 1857 to liquidate the British East India Company? Not at all. In truth, these political opponents had already pushed through a number of laws injurious to the Company in the decades prior. Its weakened position absolutely contributed to the rebellion of 1857 which then gave opponents the chance to strike.

When the East India Company was liquidated, the British didn’t pull out of India. On the contrary, this was the beginning of the British Raj, a small army of bureaucrats organised according to the exact same model that had been presented to the British parliament just years earlier. One of the cornerstones of the change was that all the top-ranking bureaucrats needed to have university degrees. If that sounds familiar, it’s because this was the beginning of the system which dominates to this day.

Thus, the arrival of bureaucracy in Western society was no accident. It came out of the concerted efforts of a determined group of politically active individuals. That group has only gone from strength to strength ever since. That is why the bureaucracy has become the dominant organisational form in our time. Even modern corporations are now bureaucracies. The bureaucrats remoulded corporations according to their own ideology.

This leads us back the purge of white men from modern corporations which has been picking up steam in the last decade. These corporations are now first and foremost bureaucracies, and one of the problems with bureaucracy is that there are always more potential candidates for leadership positions than there are places available. This creates a zero-sum dynamic that only gets worse the more aggressive and impatient subordinates become. We can hypothesise that the appearance of eunuchs in Eastern societies was not just about removing threats to the king but also about reducing internal competition within the bureaucracy. The discrimination against white men that has been happening in recent times is exactly the kind of thing that we would expect the zero-sum mentality of a bureaucracy to produce.

However, there is an even more direct reason why white men have been targeted: because they embody the archetype of the old form of capitalism, the kind practiced by the British East India Company, the kind which founded the USA. Thus, the battle that is going on now is the same one that began with the liquidation of the East India Company: it’s the bureaucrats vs the capitalists.

Of course, nobody talks about it in these terms. Instead, the whole debate gets translated into the form it took in continental Europe: fascists vs communists. That is the wrong way to think about it. The bureaucrat class arose independently within the Anglo tradition, and it quite explicitly went into battle against the capitalists. The purge of white males in the last decade is the latest round in the fight. The election of Trump (the arch-capitalist) was the counterpunch.

Since the subject of Karl Marx has come up in the last couple of posts, I thought I would share a personal story of how I first came to learn his theories. Unsurprisingly, it happened when I went to university. Since I decided to do first year sociology, hearing about Marx was not surprising. What was surprising was a certain revelation that came from our tutor, who was a self-declared Marxist.

While introducing himself in the very first class of the semester, the tutor told the class he only worked part-time at the university. His second job involved stacking shelves at one of Australia’s largest supermarket chains. He wasn’t doing it for the money, he told us. Rather, he was bringing down the system from within by stealing from the supermarket at every opportunity. This declaration of criminal activity earned a snigger from several students in the class, even though it wasn’t meant as a joke. It did sound kind of lame coming from a middle-aged man who was supposed to be in a position of authority.

Later in the semester, we finally got round to learning some Marxist theory, which our tutor delivered with great passion. By then, I’d realised that I was the odd one out in the class because I had actually done several working-class jobs before entering university. Although I couldn’t be sure, because I never asked him, I would wager that our shoplifting tutor had never worked a factory job. Meanwhile, the other students that I got to know seemed to largely be from wealthier demographics.

I’d had five years’ experience as a member of the “proletariat” by the time I started uni. Mostly, that was through my father’s small manufacturing business where I’d been working during school holidays ever since I was 13. As part of that work, I’d also seen the inside of several large manufacturing sites including with the giant Australian mining company BHP, and I’d taken a couple of other summer jobs to earn some cash.

The result of all this was that I had an unusually large amount of empirical knowledge to draw on when trying to understand Marx. I realised quickly that Marxist theory seemed to have very little to do with my lived experience of being a worker. This is not surprising when you consider that Marx himself never worked in a factory. He was an intellectual. The same was true of most of the big-name socialists: Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin, Lenin, Stalin etc. One notable exception, who we’ll return to later, is Robert Owen.

Of course, it has to be said that the conditions I faced as a worker were far superior to those which obtained when Marx was writing in the 19th century. Especially in Australia, the modern working class enjoys decent wages and conditions, generous overtime provisions, and all the other benefits that have been fought for over the last two centuries. Nevertheless, the core of Marxist theory is not about these details, and the ongoing attraction of Marx is largely theoretical and ideological in nature. Marx did get some things right, but it was the things he got wrong that stood out to me even as an 18 year old.

One of those is the concept of the alienation of labour. Marx believed that the ability to produce was what separated man from the animals. Therefore, production should be an expression of individuality. We can contrast this position with the ancient Greek philosophers for whom it was the ability to think that separated man from the beasts. Nevertheless, according to Marx, workers were alienated from their work because they didn’t get to choose what to produce. Their individuality was stifled, and their lives lacked meaning as a result.

Although I think there is a kernel of truth in this idea, what stood out to me at the time was how little alienation there had been in my lived experience of work. Marxist theory predicted that I should have been alienated, yet that wasn’t true, and I didn’t believe it to be true of most of the people I had worked with. Now that I have a lot more experience in the matter, I can confidently state that the most alienating and meaningless jobs tend to be those in the professional realm and not traditional working class employment.

Work can be physically exhausting, dirty, and dangerous, but if it’s meaningful, you don’t feel alienation. On the other hand, a high-paying, high-status job is alienating if it is meaningless. The work I had been doing in the factory was dirty, difficult, and dangerous. But it was meaningful because it produced things that were actually of value. We could see the results of the work and we knew to what purpose they would be put. That’s why nobody there was alienated.

Another reason why the factory job was not alienating was because of the camaraderie among the workers. It was this aspect that was arguably the most valuable to me at the time. The factory was an all-male affair and it gave me what amounted to an initiation into the world of manhood. I was now part of a team and I was expected to contribute. If I screwed up my part of the job, I would let everybody else down and create extra work. I had been given a small measure of responsibility and I was directly accountable to others.

That dynamic creates a tight-knit group that’s very similar to a sports team. Unlike (amateur) sports, however, if you screw up in a work setting, you become a burden to others, a fact that they will remind you about ad nauseum. Keep screwing up and you’ll lose your job. Because there are real consequences on the line, this raises the tension, but it also raises the feeling of achievement you get from successfully carrying out your part of the work. That satisfaction increases as you improve your skills and win the respect of your workmates.

Although it’s politically incorrect to speak about it these days, there’s an aspect of masculinity that is revealed in such settings. Throw a group of men together to carry out a task, and they effortlessly, unconsciously, and automatically arrange themselves into a meritocratic hierarchy. Something like this has been happening ever since the first group of men decided to get together and hunt animals, i.e., for pretty much all of human history.

I’ve never been part of a hunting party, but I’m pretty sure a small-scale factory setting bears a lot of resemblance. When you work together as a team, you learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses. As a result, everybody knows who is the strongest guy in the factory, who can fix motors or electrical devices, and who can perform this or that skill to the highest level. None of this ever gets said explicitly. To the extent that it ever gets discussed, it is always via jokes and jibes which allow room for the development of the less practical but no less important skill of taking-the-piss.

For these reasons, my initiation into the working class was not alienating at all. It was about teamwork leading to friendship, the satisfaction of building skills and knowledge which I still use to this day, and also of earning reasonable money, which was certainly a welcome bonus for a teenage boy. Although I certainly had no idea about it at the time, I now realise it was a kind of male initiation ritual, very similar to that which young men have been going through since time immemorial.

This way of viewing it also brings into doubt Marx’s theoretical opposition between capitalist and worker. If we assume that men automatically form hierarchies, then the fact that there is a manger is not surprising. In fact, there are very good practical reasons why there has to be a “boss”. There’s a reason why hunting parties, military platoons, sports teams, or manufacturing businesses all have leaders. A hierarchy is adhered to because everybody intuits that it is required to get the job done.

The problems come when somebody challenges the hierarchy, usually implying a disagreement with the implied or overt leader. It’s always astounded me how groups can form themselves so easily and work together with no explicit coordination for long periods of time and then instantly fall apart over the most trivial disagreement. We seem to have an instinct that lets us get along in groups but no instinct about how to handle conflict. 

The British liberal tradition solved this problem by making work into a contract which either party could terminate. Thus, if you disagree with your boss, you can just quit. When we look back at 19th-century capitalism, however, the clear problem was that workers had no real option to quit because they had no wealth or unemployment benefits. But the more important problem was that the power dynamic between capitalists and workers massively favoured the former. Many capitalists abused that power, as most humans do when they find themselves in such a situation. That’s not a problem of capitalism, it’s a problem of human nature.

One way to address that would be to enact policies that tilt the scales in favour of the workers. If you make labour scarce, you create conditions where capitalists have to compete by offering better pay and conditions. That’s what ended up happening through unionisation and the democratic process.

However, the incremental progress of democracy did not appeal to Marx and the other socialists. They wanted to rearrange the entire political structure through a dictatorship of the proletariat, which invariably ended up becoming a dictatorship of a dictator, as the 20th century showed in great detail.  In this respect, it’s worth comparing Marx and his intellectual colleagues against another prominent 19th-century socialist, Robert Owen.

Whereas Marx, Engels, and most other socialists were intellectuals, Robert Owen was born into a working-class family and received very little formal education. At the tender age of 10, he started an apprenticeship as a draper. By his late teens, he had become an entrepreneur, investing in new enterprises. By his late 20s, he owned and ran a large-scale fabric-manufacturing business.

Several things differentiate Owen from the average socialist intellectual. Firstly, he worked his way up from the bottom, doing the hard work of learning a trade and then rising through the ranks to positions of management. Owen started as a worker and then became a capitalist. His empathy for workers came from direct experience, not theoretical considerations.

Secondly, Owen’s intellectual activity was an outgrowth of this real-world experience. It was not divorced from practical concerns. Thirdly, and most importantly, Owen put his ideas into practice by changing the way he ran his company. This enabled him to try things and judge the results. Later, he would take what he had learned and launch various experiments, such as the establishment of co-operatives and intentional communities.

Because Owen was empirically testing his ideas, and because he was implementing them on a relatively small scale, he was able to judge the results with more precision and clarity. Most of his projects failed, often in very quick order. One of his associates on one project quipped that all they had done was to reproduce the French Revolution on a smaller scale. Just like the French Revolution, the projects started with grand ideals but quickly got punched in the face by reality. Meanwhile, the one area where Owen had long-term success was in the management of the business that he himself owned and was directly involved in.

Here is where the link back to Marx and Engels becomes important. One of the main overarching differences between the continental and Anglo societies of this period was that the Anglo societies, including and especially the USA, were empirical and entrepreneurial in nature. They were full of men like Owen who put theory into action and learned the pain of failure first hand. By contrast, the continental tradition was full of academics like Marx and Engels who had no practical experience in trade or organisational management but who had a lot of wonderful ideas about changing the world through political action.

Marx and Engels were the precursors to the middle-class intellectuals that have come to dominate in our time. They were born into relative wealth and were educated prior to having any real-world experience. Even though they claimed to speak on behalf of the working class, their most devoted followers were other middle and upper class people. While the working class had genuine reason to want to change the system, the middle and upper classes were actually the beneficiaries of it. Why, then, were they interested in the theories of Marx and Engels?

That is a question that probably requires a book to answer. The deeply weird kind of self-loathing that exists in our time among educated Westerners is not a new thing. It goes back at least to the start of the 19th century. One of the outcomes is that this class of people convinced themselves that it was permissible to break the established rules in the name of ideology, for example by stealing stuff from supermarkets. This was seen to be necessary in order to bring about the leap into the socialist utopia. It was in opposition to the incremental and iterative approach of capitalism and democracy.

Thus, Marx and Engels actually criticised Owen for the fact that he was a “capitalist”. It’s not hard to see that his pragmatic approach was kind of a bummer because it seemed to show that the grand theories were not all they were cracked up to be. In terms of broader social dynamics, it’s still true in our time that the leisured classes prefer to be swept up in grand ideologies rather than deal with the difficult work of organisation.

We shouldn’t neglect the romantic appeal of it all. Engels was a handsome young man who swanned about Europe speaking passionately about revolution. In the process, he enchanted more than his fair share of young ladies. He was very similar to Byron, Wagner, and the other romantic poets, philosophers, and artists of the era.

The bourgeoisie were dedicated, disciplined, and hard-working, but also mostly invisible. They had a full-time job keeping their organisations running and had little time left over for political activity.  By contrast, the intellectuals were dramatic, exciting, and inspiring, and they had nothing better to do than organise political rebellion.

The contrast between these two archetypes of the romantic intellectual and the hard-nosed capitalist still sits at the heart of many current issues, although the reality is that the intellectuals have been dominant ever since WW2. One of the obvious ways in which that is true is that about a third of the public now attends university. In the post-war years, we have set about creating a society not of the bourgeoisie but of intellectuals in the vein of Marx and Engels.

The result has been predictable: ideology over pragmatism. Communist utopias are no longer fashionable, but it’s not hard to see that climate change, renewable energy, saving the world from pandemics and many other issues fit the bill. The yawning chasm between the practicalities involved and the promises of the ideology is of no concern to the intellectuals who push such schemes. Vague utopian visions with no definable criteria for success are a feature, not a bug. Political activity is the end in itself. It is the way in which dominance is exercised.

By contrast, when we look at the Robert Owenses, Thomas Edisons, or Henry Fords of the world, we find men who received almost no formal education. They were autodidacts who started life very poor, got a trade or other working-class job, and then worked their way upwards. Their skills at organisation came from practical experience, not intellectual reasoning.

Even though it was this latter demographic which built the modern world in which we live, it should be obvious that it is the ideologues who have taken over. How that happened probably also needs a whole book to answer. But there’s one unappreciated point to make.

The weird self-loathing of the intellectual class has been matched by an equally strange inferiority complex on the part of the bourgeoisie. They genuinely thought that the philosophers and intellectuals had access to a kind of knowledge that they themselves lacked. Possibly this was the result of their lack of formal schooling. As Chesterton once quipped, the point of education is to learn not to take educated people seriously. Many of the most successful bourgeoisie never had the chance to learn that lesson, and still to this day the working class happily send their children off to university to learn how to shoplift.

My writing over the last few years has centred around a pattern that I picked up from the works of a number of scholars in seemingly unrelated fields. The anthropologist, Arnold van Gennep, called it the rites of passage. The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell, called it the hero’s journey. Comparative historians such as Toynbee and Spengler called it the cycle of history. In addition to these, I noticed the same pattern implied in various theological and psychological works.

When I realised that all these different thinkers were using the same pattern, I set out to try and identify it at a more abstract level. As part of that, I also tried to give it a name. It turned out to be a difficult task. One option I have used is the Cycle-Ending-in-Transcendence. In my most recent book on the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, I used the Journey into the Sacred. We could also combine the two and call it a Sacred Cycle.

The cycle begins in a state of holiness (wholeness), which is characterised by equilibrium, consciousness, and equanimity. We understand the world in which we exist and are at ease with our position in it.

Then something arrives which breaks us out of equilibrium. We transition into the state of sacredness (un-wholeness). We are thrust into a world we do not understand and forced back into a more fundamental mode of being that we might call instinct or will. The sacred state is irrational in nature. Our desire to enter it is also irrational. It requires a leap of faith.

It is because we must transition from the state of holiness to the state of sacredness that the beginning of the cycle is marked by a sacrifice. One way to think about it is that we sacrifice our old identity in order to attain a new one (where identity includes both external and internal dimensions). The most important turning points in life – puberty, marriage/childbirth, retirement, and death – all require a sacrifice of identity. Therefore, they are all Journeys into the Sacred.

From these brief considerations, we can see that the sacred cycle is about transformation, transcendence, and evolution. It is the process by which we incorporate something new into ourselves, a reconfiguration of our identity.

Although the sacred cycle is easiest to understand in relation to the life of the individual, one of the great insights of the comparative scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries was that it also seems to apply to collectives. I mentioned Leopold von Ranke a few posts ago. He believed each historical epoch to be guided by the divine, which is another way to say that each epoch is a Journey into the Sacred. His insight was taken to its logical conclusion later by Spengler and Toynbee.

But there’s a more famous example of a collective cycle that is obvious in hindsight but which I only realised after writing last week’s post. The work of Karl Marx also implies the sacred cycle, not just in relation to capitalism itself but the larger historical arc which Marx believed would end in communism.

It was the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter who fully explicated the cyclical nature of capitalism. He described it with the phrase creative destruction. But creative destruction is exactly what happens in a Journey into the Sacred. Destruction = sacrifice. Creativity = transformation. Therefore, capitalism is also a Cycle-Ending-in-Transcendence.

To show why that’s true, we can expand on the thought experiment I used in last week’s post, which is taken from the actual history of capitalism when England set about breaking the monopoly that Belgium and the Netherlands had on clothing manufacturing in the 16th century.

Every Journey into the Sacred begins in the state of holiness or equilibrium. Since clothing is a staple necessity of life, the market for it is relatively fixed. However, back in medieval times, there was an extra reason for the stability of the clothing industry. The market was dominated by guilds of craftsmen who regulated everything and were able to dictate the price by controlling supply. Enormous wealth accrued to those guilds which had cornered the market for luxury clothing, especially silk and high-grade wool. Venice, Florence, Bruges, and similar cities were built upon the profits of these monopolies.

The guilds were part of the network of social, political, and economic relationships that we call feudalism. That system had been in a stable (holy) state for centuries. At the time, it couldn’t have been known that the battle over clothing would eventually spiral into the destruction of the entire paradigm.

This leads to another crucial insight about the sacred cycle, which is that it is fractal in nature. There are cycles within cycles. Accordingly, there are sacrifices within sacrifices. The sacrifice of the clothing monopoly ended up leading to the sacrifice of the feudal system altogether. All that was also tied in with the religious shift from Catholicism to Protestantism, which was not just a theological change but also a financial one because the Catholic Church had been sucking money out of Northern European economies (it had also been abusing its monopoly position).

Within these larger abstract cycles, we can identify more fine-grained ones affecting various demographics. For example, the sacrifice made by the early entrepreneurs who challenged the authority of the guilds was to become social pariahs and to face whatever consequences were inflicted upon them by the authorities that were loyal to the status quo. Eventually, those entrepreneurs got the upper hand, at which point the guild workers had to sacrifice their livelihoods.

These different cycles were all related to the larger cycle that was forming. However, they were distributed unevenly over time and place. England and the Netherlands moved to democratic capitalism earliest, while other nations such as Germany and Italy waited until the 19th century.

The transition into capitalism was itself a Journey into the Sacred that involved a reconfiguration of societal relationships. As Max Weber pointed out, that reconfiguration was predicated on a new understanding of the sacred embodied in Protestant doctrines. More importantly from our point of view, however, we can see that capitalism is itself predicated on the sacred cycle. It follows the same pattern.

The starting state for the capitalist cycle is an equilibrium where monopolists extract profits and build wealth. This accumulation of wealth gives entrepreneurs the incentive to innovate. It is the innovation of the entrepreneur which breaks the equilibrium and ushers in the sacred part of the cycle. Note that this is the same pattern we see in the mythical stories of the dragon slayer. The monopolist is the dragon guarding his hoard. The entrepreneur is the hero.

The people who work for the monopolist will face unemployment as a result of the innovation that begins the cycle. Therefore, they also form part of the sacrifice. Each of them is thrust into their own Journey into the Sacred because their economic identity is lost. The consequences will depend on the individual but can span an arc from the mild inconvenience of looking for a new job through to long-term unemployment, marriage breakdown, alcoholism, crime, etc. The cycle is only sacred to the extent that catastrophic failure is a real possibility. The sacrifice must be real.

When viewed in this way, we might ask the question why anybody would willingly enter into the cycle. Why not just remain in holy state forever and take it easy? Ultimately, that is a theological question. Seemingly all religions promise that there does exist an eternal holy state which can be attained. The Christian tradition relegates the holy state until after death. While we are still down here on earth, we are sinners, meaning that we are liable to be thrust into the sacred at any time.

Another way to say the same thing is that we may always be called on to sacrifice everything to go through a process of transformation. There is no rest for the wicked. We must continually evolve. We have learned in the modern world to focus more on this positive side of the equation. The sacred cycle is dangerous, but it also has its rewards. The dragon slayer risks his life but, in the end, he gets the gold.

Looking back on the liquidation of the medieval guilds, it might be argued that the guild workers had the most to lose. However, when we take a broader viewpoint, we see that things did improve over time. Guild members worked very hard. The average medieval farm peasant worked between 30 and 40 hours a week. Guild members worked almost double that. It would take all the way till the 19th century for tradesmen to get the same hours of work via the 8-hour workday.

This comparison between guild workers and peasants shows an important fact about capitalist monopolies. Feudal lords had monopolies over their lands. However, they were not able to extract profit. Therefore, they had no incentive to try and get the peasantry to work longer hours. By contrast, clothing, and especially luxury clothing, was a profitable business. That is why many of the guilds, and the cities in which they were located, became fabulously wealthy.

It wasn’t really until the 18th century that agricultural produce started to become a profitable market due to increasing urbanisation and the consolidation of land holdings. Once the profit arrived, so too did the technological innovation. Capitalism expanded into the agricultural sector.

Marx and his followers emphasised that the profits were won at the expense of workers, and therefore it would be preferable to be a medieval peasant safely ensconced in a locality where a monopolist could not extract wealth. Perhaps that’s true. But there are at least two arguments in favour of the capitalist paradigm.

The first is the one we have already made: that, for manufacturing workers, hours of work did decline over time and conditions did eventually improve. However, the far more important point is the transformative nature of capitalism. It is this that really sits at the heart of the modern Western worldview.

The Journey into the Sacred is about change, adaptation, and transcendence. There can be no question that capitalism turbocharged this attribute of the sacred cycle. That was especially true in the 19th century as capitalism became dominant. While there have been many people who have objected to the destructive and extractive nature of the paradigm, there have been just as many who supported it on the basis of its dynamism and vigour.

In truth, both of these are properties of the overall cycle. The sacred cycle is destructive. It requires a real sacrifice. Those who prefer to stay in holiness and equilibrium resent being forced into the sacrifice. On the other hand, those who do not align with the equilibrium position see the cycle as an opportunity to break free. Capitalism has always favoured the latter group, and that is why the modern concept of “freedom” is very much related to the destruction of the status quo.

The secret to the success of capitalism was its ability to destroy existing monopolies and unlock wealth. What happens, however, when a majority of the population find their interests aligned with the status quo? What Marx and Schumpeter believed was that eventually capitalism would come to an end when monopolies become so powerful that they could prevent any competition from displacing them. Once that happened, the extractive power of these giant monopolies would create a state of affairs so intolerable that the only recourse would be to have the state take over as the über-monopolist.

We’re not quite there yet, but this is a pretty exact description of what has happened in the years after WW2. In every Western nation, the state retained most of the monopoly position it had exercised during the wars. Arguably, neoliberalism was about breaking those monopolies, but all that has happened instead is that the banks and multinational corporations have become monopolists extracting enormous wealth at a global scale. These monopolies are backed by the ultimate monopoly of the United States as the global superpower. In fact, the imperial system of the USA is predicated on monopoly control of global banking and multinational corporations.

The irony is that the USA was born out of a rebellion against the most powerful monopolist of the 18th century: the British East India Company. Still, that’s why capitalism is cyclical. The entrepreneur at the start of the cycle becomes the monopolist at the end. St George grows old and turns into a dragon. It’s not inevitable, but it does seem to be the most likely outcome.

The question before us now is whether the overall cycle of capitalism really is coming to a close as Marx and Schumpeter predicted. It’s telling that even so-called capitalists like Elon Musk are predicting that money and work will be a thing of the past soon and a utopia of leisure awaits us as robots and AI take over all the work. This is exactly what the Marxists were predicting in the late 19th century.

It’s also telling that so-called AI is a technology predicated on the extractive mentality of the monopolist. It sucks into itself all the innovations of all the entrepreneurs of history. But, of course, there’s nothing to stop it vacuuming up all future innovations. It would then become the exact kind of über monopolist that Marx said would usher in communism.

Of course, the so-called capitalists who are pushing it tell us that AI will somehow become an entrepreneur whose innovative power will supercede that of humans. Either way, capitalism comes to an end with a monopoly that cannot be broken, a dragon that cannot be slain.

These utopian fantasies theoretically portend a return to the holy state that ends the sacred cycle. Once we have passed through the uncertainty and confusion of the sacred phase, we once again return to equilibrium.

Does that sound like an accurate description of the world we live in? I don’t think so. On the contrary, our current state of affairs seems like it could collapse at any moment. History has not come to an end. There will be more Journeys into the Sacred tom come. Will they be capitalist in nature? Will Marx have the last laugh as capitalism collapses into communism? Or will some new paradigm take over? My money’s on the third option, but time will tell.