Month: August 2026

In the last week or so there has been a veritable media frenzy here in Australia about an incident involving members of a football team, some professional strippers, and an undisclosed amount of Columbian marching powder. Apparently, the team decided to celebrate an important win by ordering strippers and blow to be delivered to their hotel room, which, I presume, is about as easy these days as ordering Uber Eats. Not only did the media get in on the story, both the prime minster and governor general of the country saw fit to comment.

Nothing could seem more remote from this incident than a treatise on political economy written two and a half thousand years ago in India. But stick with me and I’ll explain how the two are intimately related.

In his book, Kautilya asks the question, put very poetically in the English translation, “Should a woman be allowed to profit from her beauty?” In other words, should prostitution and similar activities be legal? Kautilya answers in the affirmative, but it’s his reasons for doing so that are relevant to our time.

As a quick bit of background context, Kautilya is the ultimate political pragmatist. Very much like Machiavelli two millennia later, he has no concern whatsoever whether a thing be true, righteous, or beautiful. He is concerned with one thing only: power. No surprise, then, that his main justification for the legalisation of prostitution is that it will allow the activity to be taxed, increasing state revenue. That is easy to understand. His other reasons are more subtle, and more interesting.

The first of those is that the regulation of an industry creates jobs – not jobs in the private sector, but government jobs. If you want to increase the power of the state, having more people on the payroll is an important way to do so. Lots of people on the state payroll means lots of latent support for the government. But it’s the kind of employee Kautilya was talking about that is important because what he had in mind were bureaucrats.

Here we must note another crucial piece of context. Northern India at the time Kautilya was writing (around 450 B.C.) had possibly the most sophisticated state bureaucracy in the world. At the very least, it was a strong rival for China. For that reason, Kautilya sees the growth of the bureaucracy as synonymous with increasing the power of the state. When you legalise prostitution, you create jobs for bureaucrats who have to regulate the industry. It is those bureaucrats who form the backbone of political support for the government.

The second reason why Kautilya recommends legalisation is that a prostitution industry under state control can be used for both espionage and blackmail. Ladies of the night may overhear valuable information about nefarious activities. Meanwhile, respectable citizens who value their reputation can be politically neutralised via honey traps. In both respects, the state gets more levers of power over private citizens. All of this implies the equivalent of modern intelligence agencies who belong to the state-controlled bureaucracy, which is exactly what existed at the time in India.

What has all this got to do with the modern West? Well, this is a topic I’ve covered in past posts, but I think it’s worth reiterating because it is not well understood that the kind of bureaucracy we now take for granted is a very recent arrival in Western society. It really only began to form in the middle of the 19th century, and its political domination only started at the end of WW2. Perhaps more importantly, its power has been accelerating in recent decades.

What is new for us is not new for India and China. Both nations already had complex bureaucracies at the time when Kautilya was writing. By contrast, the Western tradition has always been predicated on the Greek and Roman examples, neither of which had bureaucracy in any form we would recognise. It is true that the late Roman Empire from Diocletian onwards started to dabble with bureaucracy. But the centre of power had already shifted to the east by that time and the western empire collapsed shortly thereafter.

The Greek and Roman models were predicated on an independent citizenry and patronage networks based around military service. That was the way it worked in the ancient world and it was the same model that was adopted during the Middle Ages. Even proto-democracy in Britain and its colonial offshoots still operated mostly via patronage networks. It was taken for granted that whoever won office would reward their supporters with government jobs and contracts. Thus, even the democratic and capitalist revolutions had almost nothing to do with bureaucracy, which was a concept that was foreign to Western culture.

The foreignness of bureaucracy is demonstrated by the fact that the idea only came into the West via contact with China at the time of the Enlightenment. Thinkers such as Voltaire loved the idea. It’s no coincidence that those same thinkers were against democracy and capitalism. What they wanted was a political system almost identical to the one that Kautilya lived in, i.e., a king leading a large bureaucracy. Naturally, it would be the intellectuals who would work in the bureaucracy. The reason Kautilya is relevant to our time is because his vision for society is very similar to our modern “elites”. Just like him, their first and foremost concern is increasing state power, i.e. the power of the bureaucracy.

And this brings us back to the issue of the legalisation of prostitution. Kautilya recommended this measure as a way to increase taxation, expand the size of the bureaucracy, and keep powerful private citizens and groups in check. Here in the state of Victoria, the legalisation of both prostitution and other adult entertainment was carried out in 1994 via the Sex Work Act, which implemented licensing and registration requirements, all of which created jobs within the bureaucracy. In addition, money which used to flow entirely within the private sector could now be taxed thereby increasing government revenue. All of this is exactly what Kautilya would have recommended.

But it’s the other measure of control that most directly relates to the furore that erupted this week over the football players. With the legalisation of the adult industry, it is now the easiest thing in the world to call up some strippers and have them come over to your hotel room on a Sunday evening. It’s exactly the kind of trap you would expect foolish, overpaid young men with too much time on their hands to fall into.

All of this is a form of social control exactly as Kautilya envisaged two and a half millennia ago. Australian football enjoys enormous grassroots popularity, which gives it a great deal of power, both economic and political. That makes it a political threat. Incidents like the one that happened this week show the footballers who’s boss. It works, too. The executives at the Australian football league trip over themselves to demonstrate their fealty to the latest thing. It doesn’t matter how absurd the latest thing is. On the contrary, the greater the absurdity, the more fealty is displayed. That is how you kiss the ring of power in our modern bureaucrat-controlled society. Kautilya would approve.

This week I happened to stumble across a video, which is apparently a few years old, of Jeff Bezos talking about there being a trillion humans living on various colonies somewhere out in space. The claim Bezos made was that this would somehow give rise to a 1,000 Mozarts, as if the production of genius was some fixed statistical proportion of the total population and all you had to do to get more geniuses was to increase the number of people.

There have been many attempts to try and theoretically deduce how to produce human excellence. However, by now, we also have a great deal of empirical evidence that could be used to try and arrive at the answer inductively. I haven’t thought about this issue anywhere near enough to provide any answers. But, as a fun exercise, I decided to do a very quick bit of research. I took a list of geniuses and looked up the places where they grew up as children and then where they flourished as adults. Rather than do any kind of qualitative analysis, I decided to choose the single metric of population. Here is a table of the results with the populations of the various cities at the time the genius lived there:-

	Childhood and Adolescence	Adulthood
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Pericles, Sophocles etc.	Athens: 150,000 (30k citizens)	Athens: 150,000 (30k citizens)
Bacon	Rural England	Paris: 150,000
Aquinas	Rural Italy, Naples 40,000	Paris: 150,000
Michelangelo	Florence: 50,000	Rome: 55,000
Raphael	Urbino and Florence	Rome: 55,000
Da Vinci	Rural Italy	Florence: 55,000
Galileo	Florence: 75,000	Venice: 110,000
Shakespeare	Stratford: 2,000	London: 150,000
Newton	Rural England	Cambridge: 6,000
Descartes	Rural France	Amsterdam: 100,000
Goethe	Frankfurt: 36,000	Weimar: 9,000
Mozart	Salzburg: 16,000	Vienna: 200,000
Beethoven	Bonn: 10,000	Vienna: 250,000
Einstein	Munich: 250,000	Zurich: 150,000

Fun fact: when Newton moved to London later in life, it had a population of half a million. Newton spent three decades there and made no further advances on his work. Same thing happened when Einstein moved to the US.

Other notable numbers: Berlin had a population of 200,000 when Hegel and other luminaries were there. Königsberg had a population of 50,000 when Kant was there. Freiburg had a population of 110,000 when Heidegger was there. Leipzig had a population of about 40,000 when Wagner and Nietzsche were there.

It is strange how these numbers seems to coalesce. The pattern for genius seems to be that you are born in a smaller region where you cut your teeth and then move to the dominant city of the time to flourish. But the dominant city’s population is always in the region of 100,000, give or take. It’s also notable that almost all the cities in the list were undergoing rapid economic expansion at the time the genius was there, which I suppose provides the resources to nurture greatness. However, it’s clear that economic resources are not enough. Otherwise, the modern world would be swimming in geniuses. Of course, our dominant cities have populations in the millions.

In short, if Jeff Bezos wants a thousand Mozarts, simply increasing the population is not going to be enough.

I recently had one of those juxtapositions of experience which led to an epiphany, albeit an epiphany that I have been working towards for some time. Long-term readers would know that a large part of my writing and thinking over the last many years has been on the subject of “stories”. In fact, my first non-fiction book was called “The Plague Story” and featured my analysis of the covid hysteria as coalescing around a narrative about viral outbreaks that had been created by Hollywood. For the last half dozen years, I have been thinking actively about stories and discovering all kinds of new insights along the way.

My most recent book was on the stories of Shakespeare and included a chapter on Macbeth. I have probably read Macbeth more times than any other work of the Bard’s. Nevertheless, while I was having drinks at the pub with some friends recently, the subject of Macbeth came up, and, after about thirty minutes of intense discussion, I came to realise a new perspective on the story that I had missed. Despite all of my thinking about that particular story, I still had more to learn.

The juxtaposition came the very next day when I stumbled across a short clip of the famous conductor Leonard Bernstein talking about Beethoven. I won’t explain what Bernstein said, except to say that it was, in my humble opinion, bullshit. It reminded me of another video I once saw of Bernstein where he was trying to explain music theory in terms of Chomskyan linguistic theory. This idea was also, in my humble opinion, bullshit.

Bernstein’s tenuous ideas about music reminded me of a quote attributed to John Lennon which reads, “Writing about music is like talking about f**king”. A more polite version of the same idea goes “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. The underlying meaning is the same: there is nothing to be learned by writing or thinking about music. Leonard Bernstein’s vacuous ramblings about Beethoven are prima facie evidence for that. But the Macbeth revelation that I had experienced in the pub showed that the same was not true for stories. It seems that writing and thinking about stories is different from writing and thinking about music.

This led me to the following hypothesis: of all the art forms, only stories require thinking. To say it more precisely, thinking can enhance our understanding of art forms involving stories. For all other art forms, thinking detracts from our understanding and appreciation. John Lennon’s assertion that it is worthless to think about music applies equally to painting, sculpture, dance, architecture, etc., but it doesn’t apply to stories. The question is: why?

Let’s go back to basics. A work of art is always experienced in the first instance. While we are experiencing it, we are not thinking about it. Thinking comes later. Thus, the kind of thinking that we are talking about is reflective in nature. This is different from mathematical or logical thinking, which is not applied to experience. The kind of thinking we do about art has much more in common with the scientific method in that it begins with observation and experience and then afterwards tries to make sense of it.

Listening to Beethoven or John Lennon is an experience. The question is, can thinking enhance our understanding and appreciation of that experience? You can test this idea for yourself. Have you ever heard a piece of music, thought about it for a while, and then gone back to listen to it again, and felt as though you appreciated it more? Lennon’s point was that this doesn’t happen. Therefore, all writing and thinking about music is worthless.

Here we must be careful to distinguish between a related way we attune ourselves to music. When you hear a piece that you really like, you want to listen to it again. The next time you listen, you remember something of what you heard the first time. After repeated listens, you come to know which parts are your favourite, and you look forward to them. If we agree that this amounts to an enhancement of appreciation of the artwork, we can also agree that it comes not from thinking but from memory. It’s the same kind of memory that we may use to determine what sort of food we like to eat or what climate we enjoy. It is not an exploratory kind of thinking like science.

There is another kind of thinking about music we can do which is exploratory in nature. It’s the kind that Leonard Bernstein was doing in his interview about Beethoven. He referred to the technical aspects of Beethoven’s work, specifically the use of melody and harmony. This is the most common kind of thinking that is done about works of art. It relates to the technical aspects of the art form. Thus, we can think about Van Gogh’s brush technique, the use of the chorus in Greek tragedy, or Michelangelo’s methods for choosing the right marble.

However, this kind of thinking is still not what we are looking for because it does not enhance our understanding of the artwork itself. Thinking about the technical aspects of art may enhance our understanding and appreciation of the artist, but not the artwork. The same is even more true for the more abstract kind of thinking embodied in Bernstein’s conjecture about how the “music faculty” is related to the linguistic. Even if that were true, a knowledge of it in no way enhances our understanding and appreciation of Beethoven’s 9th symphony.

The same goes for all of the philosophical, sociological, psychological, economic, political, or other thinking that gets applied to art. Whatever the validity of these in and of themselves, they make no difference to our appreciation of art. In fact, they may actively harm that appreciation if we find ourselves no longer even experiencing the artwork anymore but only thinking about it.

Thus, I agree with John Lennon. Listening to music is an experience, and that experience cannot be enhanced via thinking. I argue that the same is true of poetry, dancing, painting, sculpture, etc. As far as I can tell, the only kinds of art which require thinking are those which feature stories. This includes literature, film, theatre, and opera. But I would go one step further. Not only does thinking and discussing a story enhance our appreciation of it, for the truly great storytellers like Shakespeare, it is the only way to understand the deeper meanings.

The reason for this relates to the nature of stories themselves. A story is about the transformation of the hero and their world. The transformation includes potentially all aspects of what it is to be human. Therefore, to understand a story, we must understand what it is to be human. The problem is, we don’t really know what it is to be human. The behaviour of other people and even ourselves is a constant source of confusion and misunderstanding. How do we resolve that confusion? By thinking and talking about it.

Well, the exact same thing holds for a fictional story. It holds all the more for the greatest of stories because the truly great storytellers push the boundaries of our understanding. They force us to think. The kind of thinking they force us into is about what it means to be human.

Now, in relation to an understanding of story-as-art, there is a subtle but crucial point to understand. The thinking we do about a story enhances and deepens our understanding of the artwork itself. You read Macbeth and then reflect on what it means. This thinking feeds back into the next reading, where you notice things you missed the first time. New problems arise which lead to more thinking. Each of these iterations reveals to us more about the story itself. That’s what I mean when I say that thinking enhances our understanding. That is the big difference between thinking about stories and thinking about any other art form.

If we agree that thinking about stories is necessary to reveal the deeper meanings contained therein, it is nevertheless true that the kind of thinking done about stories by the intellectual classes of society has almost entirely fallen into the same traps mentioned above. It has concerned itself with either the technical aspects of the art form or with extrapolating to larger socio-cultural issues. Therefore, most of the intellectual thinking that has been done has not enhanced an understanding of the artwork itself. This was the realisation I came to when researching my recent book on Shakespeare.

Intellectuals have only ever been interested in stories as a quarry for various ideological agendas. They haven’t been concerned with stories in themselves. Therefore, their thinking about stories has been almost as worthless as thinking about music. The irony is that the average person who doesn’t think too hard about stories at all has a better understanding than the intellectual because the average person sees in a story what is really the core of it, namely, human being and transformation. To use a popular modern concept, the average person empathises with the hero of a story.

Nevertheless, it is true that the intellectual approach is not entirely without merit. The problem occurs when the intellect imposes itself on a story rather than following from an empathetic appreciation. The kind of thinking that is required to enhance our understanding of stories is empathy in the widest sense. We need not just feel with the hero for the story but think with them too. What problems do they face? What challenges? What opportunities excite them? The intellectual approach must begin as a kind of intellectual empathy.

Thinking about stories is synonymous with thinking about human nature. It must be holistic and integral in nature rather than the fractured approach of modern scholarship. It must also be iterative because only by repetition can we work our way from partial and incomplete understanding towards holistic and integral. First and foremost, though, it must stay focused on the story itself, and that means on the journey of transformation that the characters go through.

Quite by accident, I have been building my way towards a methodology of story interpretation over the last many years. In recent months, I have been trying to think of a name to give and the title Existential Hermeneutics popped into my head. Hermeneutics is the study of the interpretation of texts and existential is a reference to the existentialist movement in philosophy, which foregrounds human nature and experience. Thus, Existential Hermeneutics is a way to think about stories that begins with the human and only extrapolates from there to larger questions.

The next question I have been asking is how best to present these ideas. Earlier this year, I ran a couple of online study groups on King Lear and Hamlet, and I really enjoyed those. In addition, I have also participated in a couple of study groups run by others, which were also very rewarding. I found real-time discussion to be more lively and energising than the asynchronous nature of blog posts. Of course, it’s also the case that we now live in a world where blog posts are prime candidates for the industrial-scale IP theft ushered in by LLMs. Any new ideas placed in blog posts are only going to be stolen by big tech.

For these reasons and more, what I would like to do is to try another online study group to introduce the core ideas of Existential Hermeneutics, the study of how to think about stories. The basic concepts are as follows:-

• Story as transformation
• Transformation as a qualitative structure of time
• A basic model of identity
• Archetypes as stereotypical identity
• Archetypal identity change over time
• Identity of microcosm (hero) and macrocosm (world).

If all that sounds very abstract, fear not. I want to take a practical approach to the study group, introducing the concepts through exercises rather than theoretical reasoning. To facilitate that, we’ll engage with the concepts through the study of a story, but this time I’ll use something much simpler than Shakespeare, probably a Grimm fairy tale.

With that said, I would like to extend an invitation to all readers to participate in the inaugural short course on Existential Hermeneutics. It will run for six weeks. Each week there will be a short exercise to carry out and a brief theoretical overview for context. We’ll hold the discussion via a group text-based chat on Discord. I’d also very much like to try and organise one or more videoconference sessions to discuss the ideas in real-time, but these will be completely optional. Because I’m still learning how best to structure the material, there will be no payment required.

So, if you’d like to enhance your thinking about stories, you can register your interest here. I’ll follow up by email to organise the logistics.

One of the paradoxes of modern Western civilisation is that we are simultaneously the richest and most powerful civilisation ever to have existed while also being in a perpetual state of anxiety and discontent. This seeming paradox is resolved once we understand our strange orientation to time.

Let’s begin with the three dimensions of time: past, present, and future. The modern West has a radical preference for the future, which is usually captured in the concept of “progress”. Importantly, even our so-called “conservatives” worship at the altar of progress because industrial capitalism is also oriented to the future. The pollution, inequity, and poverty that industrial capitalism introduced to 19th-century Britain were justified by the argument that it would all pay off in the long run. In some sense, it did. That’s a big part of the reason why we got used to believing that things would always be better in the future.

Let’s forget about politics for a second and ask the question: how do we attune ourselves to the past, present, and future in everyday life? There are two important ways that are relevant for this discussion.

The first is what happens when we lose something in the present. It disappears from the here and now and exists only in the past. The most important example of this is the death of a loved one. Lesser examples include the loss of a job, a home, a romantic relationship or a friendship. In all these cases, we feel grief. Grief is the loss (in the present) of what we love and care about.

The second way we attune ourselves to time relates to the future. This is necessarily much more light-hearted because the future hasn’t happened yet and any idea we have about it is just that: an idea. Ideas may come and go like clouds drifting across the sky. They have far less weight.

There is an important edge case to mention here because, especially in the modern world, we are always chasing the future and we sometimes put significant time and energy towards ideas that never come to fruition. In that case, we may feel grief when the idea fails, but this grief is still predicated on having lived the ideal for a time. It’s because it became part of our lives in the present that we grieve its loss.

Let’s now consider how these two orientations to time play out in the modern West. On the one hand, both progressivism and capitalism are perpetually liquidating the status quo in service to the future. This involves the loss of the present in terms of institutions of society, technological change, and even our understanding of the world. When we lose something in the present and thereby relegate it to the past, this should trigger a grieving process.  But that’s only true if we had actually loved whatever it is that has gone away. Sometimes, it’s not obvious that we did love it and we have to come to terms with our real feelings.

The reason why we call it a “grieving process” is because it takes time to understand what we loved and why we loved it and then to reorient ourselves to its loss. Modern society prevents the grieving process in two main ways. First of all, there are entire industries whose purpose is to produce propaganda to convince us that what has been lost was not worthy of love in the first place and therefore should not be grieved. In its most absurd manifestation, this dynamic promotes the idea that the West itself is fundamentally evil and should be replaced. If you’ve been taught to hate something, it follows that you won’t grieve for its loss.

The second way we prevent the grieving process from occurring is the frantic pace of modern life which marches ever onwards towards the glorious future. This also takes the form of the endless propaganda that promulgates new ideas about this or that technological breakthrough. While we focus on dreams of the future, we are not concerned with the present or the past.

Still, it may well be that these problems are not unique to the modern West. The grieving process is fragile and uncertain. It is also very much dependent on the individual. Shakespeare knew that because it’s one of the main themes he explores in the story of Hamlet. The young prince is grieving while everybody has already got on with life. There can be no question of a lack of time because there has been a one-month mourning period for the dead king. Nevertheless, even Hamlet’s own mother has failed to grieve. Shakespeare strongly hints that this is not due to a lack of love but a simple desire to avoid the pain. True grief is painful, and there is a natural tendency to avoid it.

So, perhaps the modern world is not fundamentally different to earlier times except in the sense that we have so much more to grieve because the frenetic pace of change is constantly sacrificing the present to the future, and thereby constantly relegating to the past things which we care about.

That’s the thing about grief: you can try to ignore it, but it sits at the back door like a hungry puppy dog scratching to come inside. That hungry puppy is the ever-present discontent that accompanies modern life.