Author: Simon Sheridan

Spoiler Alert: I give away some details of the plot of Voss in this post. I don’t believe this will impact anybody’s enjoyment of the book as the literal aspects of the plot are not central to the meaning of the work, but people planning to read the book should be aware.

Now that I’ve read White, I can certainly see why he might get lumped in with the dreaded genre of modern literature. His prose is often overwrought. But I suspect that the writers he inspired were just mimicking him. They knew his writing was great but didn’t know why and, in the absence of that understanding, tried to achieve greatness themselves by copying the form but not the content. It’s the same error made by people who noticed that most of the great Irish writers were alcoholics and concluded that the thing to do to become a great writer was to drink a bottle of whisky for breakfast every day. As Jimi Hendrix once said, I’ve been plagiarised so much, I’ve even heard people copy my mistakes. What would be flaws in a lesser artist become charming quirks in an artist of greatness. Even technical errors look like they were done on purpose.

Given this background, I approached White with caution. I decided to dip my toe in with one of his lesser (and shorter) works and began reading Fringe of Leaves, which is based on the true story of Eliza Fraser whose boat got shipwrecked in 1836 on the island that now bears her name, Fraser Island, near Brisbane in Queensland. Here I discovered the other of White’s main flaws as a writer which is his habit of telling instead of showing. Rather than have his characters reveal themselves to us through their words and actions, White frequently gives us his interpretation of them. That would be bad enough but he delivers his interpretation in a cryptic, quasi-psychological fashion that, much like his unnecessarily convoluted sentence structures, makes the reader do the work. And far too often the payoff is not worth the effort invested. The good news, I quickly realised, was that the reader can simply skim over these sections without missing anything of importance.

The real life Leichhardt was a man of science and won several awards for his work. But science, at least as we would think of it nowadays, plays no role in the story of Voss. What Voss is, is a work of Faustian culture, in my opinion one of the greatest works of modern Faustian culture incorporating the ideas of two of the greatest exponents of that culture in recent times: Nietzsche and Jung. Being set in Australia, Voss is also a critique of Australian culture from within the Faustian paradigm. The protagonist is a German who is going to “discover Australia”. He is supported in his task by the Anglo-materialist bourgeois culture of Sydney in the mid-19^th century with its Victorian era moral pretences and staid social rituals.

White himself was appalled by the modern version of that bourgeois society which still dominated 100 years later when he returned to Australia from continental Europe in the 1950s. Thus, Voss can be seen as White’s attempt to show Australians where the problem lies and also the solution; namely, to balance out the yin of Anglo materialism with the yang of what I would call the spiritual Faustian exemplified by the continental tradition. If Voss as a work is completely unconcerned with the everyday life of its characters, it is because White wants to counter a lack of spirituality in modern culture with an extra hard dose of it in literary form.

The result is that there is no drama in Voss. We never learn why the characters are doing what they are doing or even why they think they are doing what they doing. This is true even of the titular character. Why does Voss want to go on this journey? What does he hope to achieve? Why was he selected by whoever did the selecting? What do they want out it? None of this is ever dealt with. Even at the start of the book where we are introduced to the characters, there is little about the details. White gives us small glimpses into everyday life by having secondary characters give their impression of Voss and Laura, the two protagonists. But these are just to show that the other characters do not understand precisely because they are lacking the spiritual Faustian.   

This approach gives the book an inevitable pretentiousness. The two central characters, Voss and Laura Trevelyan are given some lines that could be straight out of Nietzsche. We hear, for example, about the will and fate and rising above baseness. It reminds me of the comedy sketch “Shit Nietzsche Says”, which admittedly is not that funny, but does capture the awkwardness of what happens when you speak philosophical ideas in an everyday setting where they do not belong. Voss and Laura are a bit like that in the book. This would be a problem if it wasn’t clear that White was doing it on purpose. Such ideas are not made to be comfortable. They are made to shake people out of the drowsiness caused by excessive comfort. In White, they become a direct challenge to Anglo Australia and its materialist mediocrity.

Because of the lack of drama in the story and because we know the plot in advance, the novel has an epic tone that is firmly within the romantic tradition. We know from the start that Voss is doomed. He is the loner, misunderstood by society, destined to die like we all are but willing to face that death honestly unlike the bourgeois society with its big houses, its garden parties and its fancy clothes all of which seem like an elaborate scheme to hide the truth away so it doesn’t spoil one’s appetite before dinner.

It’s that bourgeois world that we enter at the start of the book as Voss visits his main financial sponsor, Mr Bonner, at Bonner’s estate to take care of some business about his expedition to Western Australia. It’s Sunday morning and everybody is at church except Laura Trevelyan, Bonner’s niece (coincidentally, Voss is not at church either). White gives us the prototypical beginning to a love story which could be straight out of Jane Austen. An odd couple meeting in an aristocratic house. She the niece of good, morally upstanding citizens. He an outsider not well versed in the manners of polite society. Later, there is a scene at a small dinner party where Laura goes into the garden for some air. Is she going outside in the hope that Voss will follow her and they can be alone? Does he take the hint and join her in the garden? That would be what happens in a typical love story but, as already noted, in Voss everyday emotions and desires play no role especially for the two protagonists.

So lacking in the normal dynamic of a romantic love affair are these initial encounters that it comes as a shock when Voss, just before starting his journey from the Darling Downs, sends a letter to Laura telling her he plans to ask her uncle for her hand in marriage. She is just as surprised as we are because, not only has there been no hint of romantic love prior to that, there is no indication that Voss would or could settle down and become a proper husband assuming that he even makes it back from his treacherous journey. Laura writes back neither confirming nor denying her acceptance of Voss’s proposal. It’s the last communication between them in the book and it marks the beginning of act two of the story and the signal that we are entering the psychological and spiritual world that characterises the main body of the novel. Voss goes wandering in the desert in true biblical fashion. Laura is going to become the Virgin Mary. The love story was just a ruse. We are now in a symbolic realm whose correspondence with Jungian psychology is so precise that I cannot believe it is accidental.

Many people have heard of the anima and animus. These are the archetypes that represent the opposite sex in our minds. They initially belong to the unconscious part of the mind and a big part of our growth as individuals is the extent to which we can integrate them into our psyche and bring them to consciousness. The anima is the unconscious part of a man’s psyche that represents the feminine qualities and the animus is the unconscious part of a woman’s psyche that represents the masculine. The integration of the anima or animus determines, among other things, what we can perceive in members of the opposite sex. We’ve all heard the criticism that men objectify women and this is a true fact of male psychology which is only overcome by the man integrating his anima. Conversely, a woman who has not fully integrated her animus sees in men little more than a physical presence, hence the truism that women love a man in uniform (White represents this in the novel by the character of Belle Bonner, who marries a Lieutenant).

The integration of anima and animus begins in earnest with the development of sexuality at puberty and is therefore integral to sexual and romantic love. But it also drives the higher integration of  the psyche in those who are ready. This is why Jung referred to the integration of the shadow as the apprenticework while the integration of the anima/animus was the masterwork. It’s also why great religious symbolism contains both the masculine and the feminine; Christ and Mary, for example.

The relationship between Voss and Laura quite literally takes place outside the physical plane as they are not co-located for most of the book nor in contact. Rather, they exist in each other’s minds. What is being represented is nothing more or less than the Jungian individuation process in action. Laura is Voss’s anima. And Voss is Laura’s animus. The story does not show us any romantic love between Voss and Laura because they have already skipped what we might call the first stage of the Jungian journey. That’s how we find them at the start of the book. Voss is the of man action ready to undertake a great mission. Laura is insightful and intelligent but not virtuous. She tells us so herself. They both need each other to begin the process of ascending to the higher plane. They are each other’s instigator for the male and female individuation process.

This takes place in the second act of the story. Voss transcends the man of action to become a spiritual guide for both Laura and the men he is leading in the desert. He rides ahead of them on his horse, aloof and abstract. He barely interacts with them but he shows them the way. Meanwhile, Laura attains virtue. She transitions into the Virgin Mary symbolised by her adoption of an orphan girl who she names Mercy. By the end of the second act, Voss has ascended to the highest plane. He is a messenger of meaning sent from the Gods, a prophet, symbolised by White in the presence of a comet in the night sky. His death leads to Laura’s final transcendence. She becomes Sophia, wisdom, and can finally see Voss for what he really is whereas earlier she had wondered “are you just a myth?” Before he dies, Voss also see Laura for all that she is, no longer a mere object.

These Jungian themes are reinforced in the third act where Voss is equated with Christ: the fully integrated Self capable of good and evil and inevitably having manifested both as a result of being human. This is contrasted with the bourgeois society which cannot accept evil and must pretend that everything is for the best. Laura is still a part of that society but she has left the house of her aunt and uncle. The question of Voss is in the air but as little more than gossip. “What happened to that German?” Laura is the only one who really understands the meaning of his journey. In biblical terms, she is Mary Magdalene; the true witness to the death of Voss in the way the biblical character was to Christ.

If the relationship between Laura and Voss is symbolic of Jungian integration at the personal level, White brilliantly extrapolates this further in a way that is consonant with both Jung and occult theory. As above, so below. If individuals can individuate, so can societies. The relationship between Voss and Laura becomes a synecdoche for Australian society and culture. Laura is the Anglo inheritance, brought to the country in trying circumstances to find a colony mired in materialism. Voss is a German representing what I earlier called the spiritual Faustian. Crucially, Laura is not the daughter of Anglo materialism (that role goes to Belle Bonner) but its dissatisfied niece. She represents the Australia that is looking for something more. That something more is the spiritual Faustian represented in the Germanic tradition – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Jung – and embodied by Voss.

The question of Australia is raised at the start of the book where Voss mentions that, though a foreigner, he hopes to find the “real Australia”. It is to this question that White returns in the third act of the book. Voss is dead. He has played his symbolic role of bringing Faustian spirituality to Australia, but he is just the messenger of the gods. It is up to Laura, now in her psychological and symbolic role as Sophia (Wisdom) and representing Australian culture, to interpret and transmit the meaning of Voss. Fittingly, she is now a school teacher. She will teach the next generation, including her adopted native born daughter, the meaning of Voss; which is to say, the meaning of Faustian culture.

In the final scene, Laura morphs into an 18^th century French salonnières, holding court with her artists, thinkers and geniuses. An Englishman makes a wisecrack at the expense of Australian culture to which she responds. “We…will humbly attempt to rise in your opinion if you will stay long enough.” How long is enough, asks the man. For those strive for perfection, an eternity, answers Laura.

“The eternal feminine draws us on high,” wrote Goethe at the end of Faust. White finishes his book on the same note.

And that’s what Voss is, of course. It’s the Australian Faust. Note that the word “Voss” is phonetically almost identical to the word “Faust” (White pulls a similar trick in the book by giving the Judas character the name “Judd”). What Voss is, is a classically Faustian story updated to incorporate the ideas of Nietzsche and Jung and translated into the Australian landscape. It is neither more nor less than the attempt to uplift Australian culture from its mindless materialism. If this task sounds absurdly, even arrogantly, grand, White actually pulls it off. Voss is a masterpiece of Faustian literature, not just Australian literature.

I’ll finish with a few brief points.

Because Voss is set in Australia and was written at a time when Australian cultural identity was still trying to break free of the “cultural cringe”, it has inevitably been bound up with questions of Australian culture. It’s clear that White meant it as a clarion call to Australians. But the problem it addresses, the languishing in mindless materialism, has become pervasive across all Faustian culture (the West) in the aftermath of WW2. The Anglosphere “won” the wars and Anglo materialism has come to dominate everywhere. But the loss of the Germans was more than just a military one. The resources of the spiritual Faustian were put to work in service of the Nazis, most famously in their absurd invocation of Nietzsche who had himself predicted and warned about the looming threat of the bloodthirsty nationalism that was taking hold in Germany. Jung, Spengler and Heidegger also got dragged into the maelstrom. The Nazis ensured that the spiritual Faustian became tarnished by association with a great horror; an association it has retained to this day.

The obsession of the Anglosphere with the Nazis has many elements, but I suspect one of the main ones is this: the spiritual Faustian was the yin to the yang of Anglo materialism. Without the spiritual element, Faustian culture has been out of balance; malfunctioning. That was true in Australia in 1848 when Leichhardt started his voyage. It was true in 1957 when Voss was published. It’s even more true today.

We are missing our yin, our Faust, our Voss, not just in Australia but everywhere in the western world. White doesn’t seem to have appreciated that fact but perhaps he was blinded by the fact that Australia simply was more mindless than Europe at that time. Bertolt Brecht had a similar response when he moved to California. But rather than Australia and America rise to the spiritual Faustian, what has happened in the post war years is that the home of the Faustian, Europe, has descended to the material. That is what the “victory” of the Anglosphere has brought. Voss should have been a wake-up call to all Faustian culture in general, but by being written in Australia, it has become merely a work of Australian literature.

Of course, the book is not understood in Australia anyway. I’ve read numerous reviews of it now, including by people who are paid to be serious commentators of Australian literature. There is nothing, not a single review, not a single sentence of a single review, which indicates that anybody has any idea what White achieved with Voss. I’ve seen it referred to as a “romance” or, even worse, a “psychological thriller”. I guess this makes sense. You have to know the Bible, Goethe, Nietzsche and Jung as a bare minimum to understand the references in Voss. Maybe you have to have actually lived, like Patrick White did, in the Faustian heartland and absorbed its symbols. It’s precisely because the spiritual Faustian is lacking its basic elements that nobody could see what Voss really was.

Because of this, Voss takes on a meta meaning. It is autobiographical. Like its main character, the book is prophetic. But Voss needs his Laura Trevelyan to understand and interpret him and that is what is completely missing here in Australia. People know Voss is a work of greatness but they don’t know why. Spengler had already identified this problem. Australian culture is a Faustian pseudomorphosis. White intuited that. Voss is his attempt to create a true Faustian culture but nobody understood. And people wonder why White was notoriously grumpy!

And so one of the great works of Faustian culture was written in Sydney, Australia and nobody knew. To this day, I doubt anybody knows because Voss is treated like mere literature; even worse, Australian literature.

This is the final point I will make: you can’t understand Voss if you treat it as just literature.

This follows from an idea that emerged within Faustian culture, I think around the time of Nietzsche. If God is dead and religion moribund, who will interpret and propagate the symbols of the culture? The answer was: the artists. It was art which would fill the vacuum. Art would become the forum and the medium of interpreting and disseminating the symbols which constituted the culture. Art would be what would keep the symbols vibrant and alive and lift the culture out of mindless materialism.

It’s this role and this vision of art which White aims for and attains with Voss. To treat Voss as mere literature, let alone Australian literature, is to miss the point entirely, especially since literature itself has degraded to the point where it is now nothing more than a hobby of the upper middle class; exactly the thing that White was railing against.

It would be more accurate to treat Voss as a spiritual text. It is, to use another Nietzschean phrase, a re-evaluation of all values. It takes the symbols of Faustian culture and updates them for the modern world. It sets a challenge, not just for Australia, but all Faustian culture. It’s the kind of book that could make you believe in Faustian culture once more and yet, as I have already alluded to, it fell on deaf ears.

Maybe that’s the way it has to be. I’m sure White had read Nietzsche and Jung, but I’m guessing he hadn’t read Spengler. Voss looks set to become one of those late works of genius that comes during the civilisational phase, before the barbarians are at the gates, but when there is nobody left inside the gates who can understand.

That is what is at stake when talk about “culture”. Without Laura Trevelyan in her highest manifestation as understanding, Voss is reduced to a mere historical fact. He is Ludwig Leichhardt, the German explorer who went into the desert and never came back. It is only in the minds of a people and a culture that knows how to interpret symbols that he becomes all he can be. He becomes the son of God. He becomes Voss.

All posts in this series:

Patrick White’s “Voss”
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 1
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 2
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 3
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 4
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Final

I mentioned in my recent Devouring Mother update post that every now and again, amongst the cavalcade of nonsensical jabbering that constitutes western public discourse these days, it’s as if the fog clears and we are being spoken to directly by The Devouring Mother herself. This week saw one such occasion. This time it was the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, embodying the archetype to perfection. Here’s what Johnson said:

“If Putin was a woman, which he obviously isn’t, if he were, I really don’t think he would have embarked on a crazy, macho war of invasion and violence in the way that he has. If you want a perfect example of toxic masculinity, it’s what he is doing in Ukraine.”

I have studiously avoided the question of masculinity so far in my Devouring Mother analysis, preferring to focus on the archetype itself. But, of course, the dominance of a feminine archetype implies the subordination of the masculine and Johnson’s ridiculous statement has brought the matter to the fore.

So, it’s time to finally fill in some of the blanks in relation to the issue of masculinity in western societies, how that relates to the Devouring Mother, how Vladimir Putin had already come to represent the masculine in Western culture prior to the Ukraine War and why I believe the Ukraine War symbolises the re-establishment of the “masculine” at the geopolitical level. The bipolar world we are entering now could very well be the devouring feminine against the toxic masculine, although probably only in the fever dreams of the West. But before we get to all that, though, let’s do a little history lesson.

The phrase “toxic masculinity” has become part of western culture in recent times where it has come to stand for everything that is wrong with men. It is no small irony, then, that the phrase itself comes from within a movement known as the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement, a self-help group that ran in the United States in the 1980s and 90s that was aimed at addressing the problems of modern masculinity. Readers who followed my Age of the Orphan series might recognise the names of Stephen Jenkinson and Jungian psychologist, James Hillman. They were both involved in the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and, in fact, Jenkinson tells the story in one of his books how he saw Hillman at one of the gatherings but didn’t know it was him as he didn’t know what Hillman looked like at the time.

As the name and the presence of people like James Hillman indicates, the movement had a strong Jungian bent. Typically masculine archetypes like the Warrior and the Ruler would have been discussed as would The Hero’s Journey as a guide to life. Real world problems like the break-up of families leading to the absence of a father role in the life of young men were highlighted. The capitalist economic paradigm which pits men against each other in the factory and the office was critiqued. Modern western masculinity had become split into either an excessive femininity (soy boys) or an over the top hyper-masculinity. What modern men needed was to reconnect with the deep masculine. This was not a conscious, rational process because an overemphasis on reason, logic and intellect is part of the problem. It was about reconnecting with the body (and, in one sense, the body is the subconscious).

Now, you might think that groups of men off in the bush listening to poetry and music and trying to help each other grow and develop as human beings wouldn’t be skin off anybody’s nose and might even be encouraged by society. But, we live in the world of The Devouring Mother. The Mythopoetic Men’s Movement became a target in the gender wars and that is how the phrase toxic masculinity got into the general discourse.

Within the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement, the phrase toxic masculinity was opposed to deep masculinity. Translated into the language I used in the Age of the Orphan series, it’s the difference between an uninitiated male and an initiated one. The whole point of the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement was to try and combat toxic masculinity by initiating modern men, helping them to reconnect with deep masculinity and turning them into fully integrated adult males. When it became a target in the gender wars, the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement was then accused of promoting the very thing it was trying to address!

Of course, all this fits The Devouring Mother archetype to a tee. The Devouring Mother does not want men to initiate and to connect with their masculinity. Thus, the slandering of the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and the misuse of the phrase toxic masculinity is actually a very important part of the story of The Devouring Mother in the modern West. The Devouring Mother wants toxic masculinity. She wants immature men who can be controlled, not ones who are fully grown and in contact with the deep masculine. And, of course, the gender wars serve to divide the public and keep them from uniting against the elites. When western politicians invoke the phrase toxic masculinity, that is what is really going on.

Now that we have very briefly filled in the historical background, we can start to unpack Boris Johnson’s accusation that Putin represents the toxic masculine.

So, Johnson is just doing his job of character assassinating the enemy – Putin. But it’s the form of that character assassination that is revealing. Putin is not an animal, a barbarian, a Russki. He’s an exemplar of toxic masculinity. But we are told that toxic masculinity is endemic in the West too. So, this kind of propaganda is highly unusual. Wartime propaganda normally portrays the enemy as The Other while uniting the public in opposition. By using the phrase toxic masculinity, Johnson is putting Putin in the same group as many men in the West (from a propagandist and therefore, subconscious, point of view). You might say this was just a mistake on Johnson’s part and his rhetoric was accidental. But, actually, this reveals what is really going on at both the geopolitical level and the internal politics of the West.

Arnold Toynbee called this the internal and external proletariat. There are those on the outside who are excluded from the benefits of empire and also those on the inside. The internal proletariat found their identity with Trump and Brexit. They are the deplorables or, in archetypal terms, the rebellious children. With the Ukraine War, the external proletariat, aka the Global South, may be about to find its identity too. Johnson is, thus, correct to put them all in the same basket. But there’s the key: Putin is not one of the rebellious children. He is their leader. He is the missing father figure, the absent husband of The Devouring Mother. As we will see shortly, the West’s own propaganda had already revealed this.

Obviously, the Ukraine War is a geopolitical conflict. In realpolitk terms, it was surprising that Putin attacked not because he hadn’t been provoked but because it didn’t seem like a strong move. But as things are developing now, I think there’s something more important going on. Whether he intended it or not, Putin is leading the rise of the Eurasian bloc against the West. But, as I noted in a previous post, the West is The Devouring Mother in geopolitical terms. It exercises its power mostly through financial instruments which very much do devour their victims. The same financialisation that funnels wealth to the empire from the periphery has also created victims internally in the US. Just ask anybody who lost their shirt during the GFC. Thus, the rebellious children are both the internal and external proletariat; the ones who have been losing at the hands of the US empire. In this way, it makes symbolic sense to tar them both with the same brush of toxic masculinity as that has become a catchall phrase for everything that’s wrong with the world in western public discourse.

It also fits archetypally. Well before the Ukraine War, Putin had become something of a mythical manhood figure in western discourse.

Where things get more important, for both archetypal and geopolitical purposes, has been the fact that the Democrats in the US have been blaming Putin for everything that hasn’t gone their way ever since Trump got nominated as the Republican candidate way back in 2015. To take just the most prominent moments. Trump was accused by Hillary Clinton of being “Putin’s puppet” during one of the election debates. When Clinton lost, we were told it was because Putin had ordered the Russians to interfere in the election. We then had the whole Russiagate nonsense. Then we had “Putin’s inflation” and now we finally have Putin’s toxic masculinity. All of this is for the internal consumption of the acquiescent children. Boris Johnson’s comment this week was the latest but certainly won’t be the last.

But here is the paradox. Within this mythical, subconscious framing, Putin is given godlike powers. He must be all powerful. How else could he rig the US elections? How else can he have Trump wrapped around his finger? How else could he cause inflation and empty supermarket shelves? But if Putin is all powerful, it follows that we, the West, must be powerless. That is, of course, how The Devouring Mother wants us to feel. She has been drilling powerlessness into the acquiescent children for decades. Having Putin as the absent, evil father figure works to keep the archetypal parade going internally in the West but at the expense of making him seem incredibly strong.

There is a key fact to bear in mind about the subconscious: it believes whatever you tell it. That’s the reason why even the most absurd propaganda works. The subconscious takes it at face value. This is why it’s dangerous to consume propaganda even if your conscious mind knows full well that it is propaganda. The subconscious mind does not deal in logic. It cannot process negations. If you tell the subconscious mind that you are powerless while the enemy is all powerful, it will believe you. You can use this property of the subconscious to empower yourself (affirmations are a good example) or you can use it to disempower yourself. For example, it’s a very common habit for people to tell themselves they can’t do something and accidentally prime their subconscious to ensure they really can’t do it.

The West has been using its propaganda machine to spread the message that Putin is powerful. People in the West believe it. But so will people in the rest of the world. They will start to see Putin as all powerful too. This is all happening at the exact same time that Putin and the Eurasian bloc are explicitly setting up an alternative to Western hegemony. That alternative will only succeed if enough countries are persuaded to use it and right now the West is doing its level best to encourage that outcome not just by our own stupidity and greed but through the subconscious communication of our propaganda. That propaganda will work to keep the acquiescent children in line. But it could very well persuade the Global South to become the rebellious children. In fact, I think that’s exactly what it will do.

Bearing in mind that all models are wrong but some are useful, here is what the archetypal model says will happen next. Putin wins the war in Ukraine cementing the perception of his powerfulness. In geopolitical terms, the Global South are the rebellious children. They will take up the new deal being offered by Eurasia due in large part to the confidence in that system that Putin can generate (part of the confidence will be that the Russian military will be the stick to go along with whatever carrots the system might offer). I hope I’m wrong, but it looks like the West will continue the spiral of depression, loss of confidence and mental illness that’s been gradually getting worse in recent years. Having told ourselves that Putin was all powerful while we are powerless, we will watch on helplessly as he goes from victory to victory. Our elites will promote this in order to hold onto the reins of power as long as they can.

The irony, of course, is that Putin has all the hallmarks of a “real man”. He is the embodiment of the Ruler archetype. Meanwhile, Trump was an actual manifestation of what the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement meant when it used the phrase toxic masculinity. He is the hyper-masculine. “Grab ‘em by the pu**y” is perhaps the ultimate catchphrase for uninitiated, immature masculinity. Because our culture has actively suppressed an understanding of deep masculinity, we can no longer tell the difference between the two.

There is an open question whether out of all of this the West can reclaim masculinity. I believe the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement was correct that this must be done from the ground up. But as much as we might like to will it into existence, it will probably follow from material conditions. If things go as badly for the West as I expect in the decades ahead, the conditions will be right and we will need masculinity once again, not as a moral imperative but as a practical one.

It occurred to me after writing last week’s post that it’s worth exploring the deregulation of the Australian electricity market in a little more detail as it’s quite indicative of the larger transformation that happened in society in 1990s. It’s that transformation that is unravelling as we speak. These are themes I’ve touched on before but they bear repeating to make sense of what’s happening in the world these days.

To recap, in 1993, Australia had about the lowest electricity prices in the developed world, which made perfect sense when you consider we had enormous coal reserves and a tightly integrated electricity grid designed around baseload power.

The market was then deregulated. The official reason given by the government was that deregulation would drive down prices, a strange claim given that prices were already dirt cheap and electricity generation is a natural monopoly and not amenable to a free market. We could discuss the theory of why this was a bad idea, but the data can do the talking.

Things really started to go off the rails at around the time of the GFC but this was also the period during which solar and wind began to be added to the grid. These two facts are not unrelated because the push for renewables in the last couple of decades is all about the profits of financial interests and, despite what the propaganda will tell you, has nothing to do with “the environment”. We’ll come back to this point later.

To see how absurd the discourse around the Australian electricity market has been, check out this article which is about a report by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). It was written in 2014. We can see from the above graph that electricity prices had spiked by this time. Nevertheless, the article tells us that the market had an “oversupply” problem. We had too much electricity.

Economics 101 says that, when you have an oversupply, the price will go down. However, the exact opposite happened in the Australian electricity market. The expert from AEMO explained why in the article.

“The prices have been rising because of the other parts of the cost of electricity, which is the cost of getting it from the boundary of the power station through the meters of all the individual consumers,” Mr Sadler said.

And that’s considerably more than half of the total cost of the total electricity that’s supplied to households or small businesses.”

Why was the cost of transmission suddenly going up? Because of all the new renewables being hooked up to the grid that needed new connections. That’s the part that is conveniently left out of the article. This is the point I made last week. Because connection costs make up more than half the price, if you add solar and wind to the mix, even though they are cheaper to generate, the system level price goes up because of the extra cost of transmission. This is why the Australian government just announced a lazy $20bn to build new transmission lines. Where is the $20bn coming from? Debt. We’ll get to that shortly, too.

The system was over-generating in 2014 because companies are paid to generate electricity. Because solar and wind are cheaper to generate (but not to deliver) they “outcompete” fossil fuels leading to things like gas plants being shut down, the exact gas plants our “experts” now tell us need to get built to stabilise the system because apparently we don’t have an oversupply problem anymore. (Note that “oversupply” really means redundancy and redundancy is what you want in a system to keep it stable. Apparently, our “experts” don’t know that).

Let’s go back to 1993 and summarise the sequence of events. The government imposed a “free market” on the natural monopoly of electricity generation. It then proceeded to rig the market against fossil fuels and in favour of renewables encouraging extra generating capacity without the necessary transmission infrastructure. The fact that prices went up while supply increased tells you the market was already broken back in 2008, well before it was officially suspended a few weeks ago.

The only reason this shambles of a system is still running is because of the massive redundancy in the system at the start and the fact that renewables still make up a small fraction of the total energy mix.

Clearly the de-regulation started in 1993 has not achieved its stated objective of reducing prices but that should have been obvious. The truth was those measures were part of a larger historical movement sometimes referred to as “neoliberalism”. It would have been possible to introduce neoliberalism in other areas of the economy while leaving the energy system alone but the neoliberalism of the 1990s was rabidly ideological partly fuelled by the misplaced optimism that came with the collapse of the USSR. The West was the “winner” now and for ever. It was the end of history and all that crap. (The truth was the West was suffering from the same underlying problems as the USSR. We just had a little more fat built into the system.)

Neoliberalism, in part, was about going back to the laissez-faire free market days which held prior to the wars, a strange thing to do given that the free market gave us the economic crises of the 1890s and then The Great Depression. No surprise then that the same system took only about 20 years to give us another economic crisis this time around. We called it the GFC.

All that was forgotten in the 90s, however. In order to go back to the “golden days”, we first had to dismantle the existing paradigm which we can call social democracy. Social democracy was the system that was put in place after the wars and it involved doing things like having government own and run the state utilities. Thus, the de-regulation of the electricity sector can be seen as mostly an ideological move, a strong signal to everybody that the days of social democracy were done.

There are two other important factors to consider in relation to neoliberalism. The new neoliberal free market would include China who were accepted into the WTO in 2000. Then we had the Kyoto Protocol and its former and subsequent manifestations whose stated purpose was to reign in carbon emissions. Those agreements left out China and other “developing” countries meaning those countries were free to emit. And that’s exactly what they proceeded to do, fuelled in large part by Western corporations moving their manufacturing to Asia. This was another nail in the coffin of social democracy whose pesky unions demanded little luxuries like good working conditions and wages for workers (if you want to know why the unions these days are completely useless, it’s cos they sold their soul to the devil back in the 90s).

The combination of these facts meant that the system was perfectly set up to export all carbon emissions to China and the third world and that’s exactly what happened. Thus, we see that almost all growth in carbon emissions since 2000 have come from China and Asia while overall emissions have increased.

China accounted for 10% of world emissions in 2000. Today it accounts for 30%. Of course, emissions are directly related to energy production which is directly related to economic growth so all of this was perfectly predictable to anybody in the 1990s when all this was being worked out. If we had really wanted to reduce global carbon emissions back in the 1990s, we couldn’t have come up with a worse way to do it. Of course, it was clear to anybody that neoliberalism didn’t give a damn for the environment as could be seen by the complete lack of environmental standards in the various treaties of the time. Rather, neoliberalism was partly about getting around whatever environmental regulations still existed in the West by exporting the problem elsewhere.

Arguably, the social democracy paradigm was already falling apart in the 70s and so the bad decisions of the 90s were the continuation of a failure to address the underlying problem. Thus, another way to think of the 90s was that they were kicking the can down the road; a way to extract a little bit more life out of a moribund system.

It looks like the can can’t be kicked much longer. For starters, all western nations now have unpayable debts.

Meanwhile, the neoliberal reforms created huge inflation in the west. For the last two decades that inflation was mostly hidden but it’s now crawling out of the cupboard like the monster in some cheesy horror film.

It is no small irony that it’s China and Russia who are now forcing these issues to a head. With the fall of the USSR in the 90s, the West believed we could do no wrong. The attitude towards Russia was unbelievably arrogant. Russia could have easily been incorporated into Europe in the 90s. That would have been in everybody’s interests, especially western Europe’s. Instead, Russia was treated like dirt and the completely avoidable war in the Ukraine is the end game for that trend.

I can’t help but finish with a reference to The Devouring Mother archetype.

If the US empire is The Devouring Mother, the Global South are now the geopolitical rebellious children who aren’t gonna take it anymore. Putin looks set to become the Father Figure who will provide them with both a military and economic alternative to the status quo. The Global South can only improve their relative position from here while the West can really only go backwards. The sooner we admit the reasons why, the sooner we can start to think about how we are going to live in the new world that is taking shape. Until then, however, we can expect the West to be exactly what’s it’s been the last two years and more: a madhouse.

Addendum: in news this week, the company which owns Elon Musk’s big battery in South Australia got fined for not providing power to the grid when it was needed. And the circus rolls on – https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-28/sa-agl-wind-farms-tesla-battery-fined-over-breaches/101190674

To know where you’re going, it helps to know where you’ve been. So what better time to do a quick review of electricity generation in Australia and see what it might tell us about the future.

Electricity first came to Australia in the ultra-optimistic years of the 1880s. This was the time when it was believed Australia would become the next USA with a huge population and thriving economy. It was before the economic crises of the 1890s and the subsequent return to British imperialist fervour that characterised the couple of decades leading into the wars.

At that time, Australia was working towards the federal constitution that came into effect in 1901. But the constitution had no provision for electricity supply. Neither were the State governments on the ball enough to see the potential for electricity. And so the early electricity generation took place at the local municipal level and was mostly privately funded.

One of the earliest power stations was the hydroelectric project in Launceston in 1895. The first large scale deployment of electricity in the form of street lights occurred not in the big cities, however, but in the towns of Tamworth and Young in 1888 and 1889 respectively. More such installations were rolled out in the following decades. The State governments eventually took control of the electricity supply with the rollout of high voltage transmission lines, a task that was overseen by the various state electricity commissions created for the purpose. It was these same commissions which oversaw the much larger build out of the grid in the post war years and all the way into the 1990s.

That build out was based almost exclusively on coal power with the Tasmanian and Snowy hydro schemes also in the mix. Australia had, and still has, enormous coal reserves with NSW and Queensland having predominantly black coal and Victoria having brown. To this day, coal is a huge export earner for the country as well as providing about 75% of our baseload electricity generation (with gas a further 16% on average).

Here in Victoria, the Latrobe Valley coal deposits have an estimated 35 billion (yep, that’s billion with a ‘B’) tonnes of economically retrievable brown coal. At current generation rates, that coal would provide electricity to the state for 500 years. Moreover, the power plants in the valley were built right next to the coal mines and so the transportation of the coal to the power plant is essentially free. It’s hard to imagine a more secure electricity generating system in a geologically, meteorologically and politically stable region. Nevertheless, we’re in the process of shutting it all down.

The build out of mostly coal and gas fired electricity happened around Australia all the way up until the 1990s . At that time, Australia enjoyed about the lowest electricity generation costs in the developed world coming in at about half the price of German electricity and a third the price of Japanese. We also still had a viable manufacturing industry back then; a not unrelated fact.

Despite having enormous reserves of coal and gas which provided dirt cheap electricity, the federal government’s “competition policy” saw the privatisation of almost all of Australia’s generation and transmission infrastructure in the 1990s all in the name of cutting prices. The result was quite brutal, especially in places like the Latrobe Valley where thousands of workers were sacrificed on the altar of neoliberal economics. Fast forward to today and foreign companies own most of Australia’s electricity grid in one form of another and the country is left open to the whims of international finance and “the free market” who have decided that coal and gas must be phased out in favour of renewables. (Ironically, it’s the same people who think capitalism is evil who are most likely to trust that these bankers have the planet’s best interests at heart and not their own bottom line when they decide to invest in renewables).

A key feature of our electricity grid is that it was designed to have 99.9% uptime. In other words, the power should always be on. Without knowing any of the details, we can deduce from this fact that the grid had enormous redundancy built into it. That’s the only way you can get 99.9% uptime. This redundancy was easy to achieve with coal as the baseload power because the system was simple and the storage and transport costs minimal. What we have proceeded to do, starting in the 90s all the way up to til today, was make the system more complex and less redundant.

Firstly, the privatisation of the system increased its complexity in terms of ownership and governance. Some of the new owners took advantage of ambiguity in the system to start gold plating their transmission network. Basically, they were building power lines that didn’t need to be built because the rules allowed them to pass more than the cost price onto the consumer thereby making a profit by spending on unnecessary infrastructure. A charming example of the free market at work.

But the real complexity started to come into the system with the renewables push. There are two primary problems with renewables. Firstly, they are not baseload power, meaning they cannot be relied upon to provide electricity 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Secondly, the power they generate cannot be economically stored for use when the sun is not shining and the wind not blowing. The best we can do is battery but that is very expensive. If you swap out let’s say 5k MW of coal generation for solar generation, the maximum generation capacity of the system is the same. But it’s the minimum generation of the system that is more important because that is a proxy for redundancy. When the sun doesn’t shine, your minimum capacity has fallen by 5k MW. Swapping coal for solar reduces the redundancy in the system directly and also by adding complexity.

It’s only because our electricity grid already had such a huge amount of redundancy built-in that we have been able to get away with adding solar and wind and shutting down coal plants while pretending that everything is fine. But, just like in a trading market, the crunch always comes at the margins. The system breaks at its weakest link: at night in the middle of winter when a couple of baseload generators go down. Essentially, what we saw a couple of weeks ago on the eastern seaboard of Australia.

Now that the problems of the new system are starting to bite, one of the chief designers of it, Alan Finkel, was in the media this week assuring us that the transition to renewables was never meant to be easy but we can still do it. His statements are very revealing.

Finkel acknowledges that the system breaks at the weakest link and the weakest link in relation to renewables is storage. More interesting is Finkel’s admission that the current market provides no payment for storage, only for generation. His solution is to have the system pay for storage but he admits there currently are no viable storage options for renewables. The only “storage” options, he says, are coal and gas. He rules coal out as a matter of course and suggests we should do gas only because we will later be able to transition the gas-fired plants to hydrogen (his big assumption is that hydrogen will one day become technically and financially viable, something that seems to me very unlikely).

One of the things which made coal and gas so attractive for electricity generation in the first place is that you get the storage for free. Coal will happily sit there in the ground forever and wait for you to come and get it. Same with gas. With renewables, you have to spin up whole new sub-systems to create the storage. This makes an already more complex system even more complex and that has a cost in terms of energy and money.

If you have two energy systems and one is twice as complex as the other, the more complex system will need to generate more gross power to match the less complex system assuming the levels of redundancy are the same. It’s in this way that even if wind and solar are cheaper per kilowatt to generate, they may end up being more expensive than coal because of the system-level complexity costs.

This is pretty obvious when you consider that here in Victoria the plan is to swap a simple system of a few coal plants running on locally-mined coal for Finkel’s new system that is a mix of solar, wind and hydrogen. The solar panels and wind turbines must get shipped in from China as presumably would all the transmission lines. The generating capacity would likely be off in the desert somewhere meaning you’ll need heaps of extra transmission lines to bring it back to the cities. You’ll need a facility to convert the solar to hydrogen. That facility will need its own infrastructure and maintenance spending. It will have its own inputs including the chemicals used to convert the electricity to hydrogen. Then you’d have to transport the hydrogen back to the re-jigged gas generation plants. That’s just the start of the extra complexity, and therefore fragility, in the system that Mr Finkel wants us to move towards.

Note that all this complexity now has an extra geopolitical risk factor built in. Can we actually rely on China to provide the solar panels and other things needed to even run such a complex system? What happens if covid part 2 happens? What happens if a war breaks out over Taiwan? We’d be up hydrogen creek without a turbine.

Are our leaders dumb or reckless enough to take us down that path? Maybe. But reading between the lines of Finkel’s argument, I think I can see another way things may go from here. Without any viable storage options, we will simply label gas and maybe even coal as “storage” in our brand new “net zero” market. We’ll be promised that these “storage” options will be swapped out for hydrogen or nuclear just as soon as that’s possible. That will allow the political charade to continue while having a technically viable system.

But here’s the kicker: the costs of that “storage” have not been factored into the current market. That means the current price does not reflect the actual price once “storage” is included. In other words, we can expect the price of electricity to go up in the years ahead as we must pay for storage in the system. How much it will go up depends entirely on what the “complexity surcharge” for our new super complex electricity system is. Whatever it is, it’s going to be painful.

But there will be another bitter pill to swallow.

We have run down the redundancy of the system over the last two decades while making the system far more complex. Nobody is going to want to pay the price to put that redundancy back into the system. Thus, we can expect the 99.9% uptime figure to start falling. Where it ends up is anybody’s guess. The good news is that the cost curve is exponential and thus dropping back even to something like 99% would be a big saving. But even at that figure, blackouts will become a regular thing.

In short, we’re going to be paying more for a lower quality service. That’s the price of complexity.

Finally, there’s the business of all that coal in the Latrobe Valley and other places around Australia. Will things get bad enough that we build another coal plant? Will we have the money to do so even if we wanted to? It may be that that coal stays in the ground. Depending on what happens with sea levels, it might be there for a million years just waiting for some future civilisation to fire up a power plant and party like it’s 1993.

Ever noticed how everything is an “emergency” now? Last week on the east coast of Australia there were threats of electricity blackouts for a few days due to a couple of coal-fired power stations going offline in conjunction with some cold weather. By the way media responded, you’d think the world was coming to an end. It was, we were told, an “energy crisis”. The crisis, of course, was mostly a political one, heightened by the prominence of the climate/renewables issue in the recent federal election. For the purposes of this post, we’re going to differentiate between political emergencies and real emergencies. The two have become ever more conflated in recent decades and, as we are likely to have a lot more of both in the years ahead, it’s worth understanding the differences.

The political emergency that hit Australia last week was no surprise to anybody with some understanding of our recent political history around energy generation. The Australian electricity market is the kind of clusterf**k that can only be created by decades of bad ideas, failed policy and political grandstanding.

It all began back in the 80s and 90s where the ideology of de-regulation and privatisation was all the rage. Governments sold off what were then public assets in order to let the wonders of the free market work its magic in the utilities sector. In relation to electricity, there was a split into a wholesale market where, in theory, providers compete to supply electricity to the grid and a retail market which handles customer connections. I have seen the inside of the latter as I’ve worked on a couple of IT projects trying to get a slice of the juicy connection fee that is claimable when you hook a consumer up to the system.

To get a feel for what the retail electricity market is like in Australia, imagine a physical market full of sellers who are all selling the exact same type of shoe for which the wholesale price is the same. Imagine 10 stalls lined up next to each other with an identical white sneaker selling for $50 RRP. How would the stall holders attract customers given they are selling the same product? One way to do it is to try and hide the real price. You could offer the shoe at $40 with a $1 a month rental price. That might attract a few suckers. Maybe you could dress up in bright clothing, play loud music and do some interpretive dance about the sneaker. Maybe you could bribe customers with a gift if they buy the shoe or package the shoe together with a pair of socks for a special price.

Whatever you and the other sellers would do, the result would look less like a well-ordered market for selling goods and more like a circus. And that’s exactly what the Australian electricity market is: a circus.

Well, the circus broke down last week in what economists like to call a “market failure”. The government had to suspend the wholesale market in order to keep the power on. In the grand scheme of things, this wasn’t a real emergency. In a real emergency, the public is required to do something. For example, if there’s a bushfire bearing down on your house, you either get out or stay and defend. Hopefully, you are prepared for such an eventuality and the local emergency services may also lend a hand. In a political emergency, there is no need for the public to do anything but there is the need to appear to do something and that’s where politicians come into their element.

The irrationality of the guidance given by politicians is a key part of a political emergency. It is a feature, not a bug. Who can forget the early days of corona when we were all told to wash our hands for 30 seconds after the slightest exposure to the outside world. How about people in the US who were spraying and scrubbing groceries. All this for a virus transmitted through the air. Later we were told to wear masks which made slightly more sense but only if you ignored the fact that not a single study has shown them to be of any use in protecting against respiratory viruses. Finally, we got to the vaccine, an injectable “solution” which immunologists were fully aware could never protect from infection (the interested reader can check out Australian immunologist, Robert Clancy, explaining why the corona vaccines were never going to work).

The primary purpose of the guidance given to the public during a political emergency is to give people the illusion of control. If a politician were to tell everybody to hop on one leg for 5 minutes a day, we can be quite sure a large number of people would follow along and we’d see thousands of TikTok videos suddenly appear featuring the coolest way to do it. The psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, outlined the reasons for this behaviour in a debate with Nassim Taleb where he pointed out that people will comply even if they know the advice is not of any practical benefit. There is a need, it seems, for people to do something, anything, in a time of uncertainty.

In addition to the personal psychological drivers, there is also an important socio-political element to the public advice given during a political emergency. It creates a moral-normative framework that invokes herd psychology. Immediately, an in-group and an out-group are formed. The former believes the advice given, the latter does not. The former is, by definition, aligned with the government giving the advice, the latter is not. In this way, the advice does beautifully to turn the public against itself and prevent it from uniting against the government. This is why it helps the government if the advice is really dumb, because that means some people are going to reject it and become part of the out-group.

Thus, if you point out that duck-and-cover is a dumb idea that won’t make a jot of difference in the event of a nuclear bomb going off in the vicinity, you must be a pinko-commie traitor. Don’t wanna wash your hands or wear a mask when there’s no evidence that these will work? You’re an anti-science conspiracy theorist. Don’t wanna take a vaccine that was never going to work according to the first principles of immunology? You’re an anti-vaxxer. The labels change, the pattern is the same.

The moral-normative framework creates scapegoats and every politician needs a good scapegoat in a time of emergency because, if there are no scapegoats, then the politician will become the scapegoat.

There is, of course, no practical need for a Prime Minister to take an active role in a bushfire emergency. If the emergency services are well funded and properly organised, they will take care of it. That’s the whole reason why they exist. Nevertheless, politicians are expected to be there to show moral support. If they don’t, they will suffer politically and one of the ways that happens is that they get blamed for the whole thing. It’s unfair, but that’s herd psychology for you. That’s what happened to Morrison. It was an exact replica of what happened to George W Bush who was on holiday when Hurricane Katrina hit and took too long (politically-speaking) to act.

It is because every large-scale real emergency always also becomes a political emergency that the two are conflated. The problem with hurricanes and bushfires is that it’s all but impossible to know in advance when one will become an issue of national importance. That makes the political calculus difficult and it’s easy to understand why politicians would prefer not to break a holiday until it’s absolutely (politically) necessary.

With the advent of instantaneous communication and the 24 hour news cycle, politicians are now required to show up to every emergency and look like they are in charge. This gives the viewer of the 6 o’clock news the impression that nothing happens in the world unless a politician says so which creates a positive feedback loop where politicians have to pretend even harder that they are doing something because that’s how people think the world works. This makes political emergencies more common and that is a big part of the reason why everything is an “emergency” these days.

Fact is, in a real emergency, no politician is going to save you. They couldn’t even if they wanted to. You’ll have to save yourself and the best way to do that is to be prepared and know how things work in the real world. By contrast, political emergencies aren’t to be taken seriously, which is to say, literally. Rather, you should look for the underlying reasons why the problem appeared in the first place.

In recent times, the pattern of most political emergencies is the same. The public demands things that cannot be delivered, politicians promise the impossible, and private enterprises happily accept enormous sums of public money to feed the illusion. Want to transition a power grid designed for burning fossil fuels to renewables without any loss of service or increase in price? Sure thing. We’ll just have to transfer billions to these renewable energy conglomerates while reducing the amount of redundancy in the system (leading inevitably to blackouts). Want a vaccine that stops you catching a respiratory virus? No worries. Just a sec while we throw money at Big Pharma while removing their legal liability and quality standards. What could go wrong?

That dynamic is going to give us a whole lot more political emergencies in the years ahead and, eventually, some real ones too.