Author: Simon Sheridan

All kinds of chickens are coming home to roost in western societies these days. We’re seeing systemic failure in a number of different domains, one of which is the education system. The average person on the street no doubt still believes that this is all just the result of corona or the Ukraine war and everything will eventually settle back down to normal soon enough. I doubt it. But, then again, I wouldn’t mourn the loss of the school system in its current form. Like most institutions in modern society, schools primarily serve their internal purposes and the purposes of the state. The needs of the student are a secondary concern. This raises the question of what learning might look like if it was student focused. To get an understanding of this we need simply look at how we learn when we do it for ourselves rather than for others. Let me give an example of self-education from my own life.

I started learning music in my late teens. I’m not sure why I didn’t start sooner as a I had been a major music nerd from about twelve years of age and had an extensive music collection by that time. In any case, I decided to learn electric bass guitar as I had always found myself listening to the bass in music and seemed to have a penchant for styles of music with interesting bass parts. I went out and picked up a cheap bass, a small amplifier and a beginner’s bass instruction book and got to work.

One of the advantages of self-learning is that you tend to take a practical approach where you are throwing yourself in the deep end and trying to “solve problems” from day one. For a music learner, one of the problems to be solved is how to play some of your favourite songs. Another problem might be how to turn a song idea into a reality. The achievement of these goals is the standard by which you judge your progress. They also provide built-in motivation. The day you learn to play one of your favourite songs is the day you realise that you too might be able to become as good as one of your favourite players.

When you approach learning in this holistic, throw-yourself-in-the-deep-end manner, you quickly learn where your strengths and weaknesses lie. Although I wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time, I was already really good at rhythm when I started playing music, which was presumably why I was drawn to the bass; a rhythmic instrument. I was always able to work out new time signatures, accents and feels based on intuition alone. I got that for free.

On the other hand, I was woeful at pitch recognition and particularly melody. It was here that I had to spend the most amount of time developing my skills. The drawback of self-learning is that you often are only somewhat conscious of your weaknesses and you don’t know what’s the best way to address them. In hindsight, what I needed to do was use either a piano or guitar for pitch and melody training as trying to translate a melody down two octaves to the bass range is itself a more difficult task that only exacerbated my difficulties. I eventually figured this all out but wasted quite a lot of time before I did.

If you go to music school, they break down these kinds of skills into classes. There will be a unit on rhythm, a unit on pitch recognition, a unit on composition and so on. One of the problems with this is that your inherent strengths and weaknesses are not factored in. If you happen to be good at rhythm already, you’ll have to sit through that class bored out of your brain. Meanwhile, pitch recognition class might go too fast for you and you’ll fall behind and get demoralised. Wouldn’t it be better if you could just skip rhythm class and devote the time to pitch recognition?

It would be quite simple (although politically unfeasible) to adapt the current education system to account for this fact. One way to do it would be that you sit the final exam at the start of the semester. If you get above a certain grade, you get a credit for that class without having to show up to the lessons. If you get below a certain grade, you have to go to class and improve. Such a system would not only be better for students, it would also provide feedback on the quality of teaching. If students got an average 60% grade at the start of the semester but only a 63% at the end, it’s pretty clear the teacher isn’t doing a very good job.

But who cares about grades? These are another relic that serves the system and not the student. When you’re learning something for its own sake, you care about results, not about grades. I was learning music to be able to play music. Success was measured in terms of how well I could do that and learning abstract concepts was only helpful to the extent that it got me to that result faster.

In the real world, nobody cares about your grades either. The other members of the band don’t give a damn that you were top of your Pitch Recognition 101 class. They care that you can easily pick up a new piece of music by ear so that band rehearsals don’t take forever. In a society that cared about producing actual goods and services or just having educated people, we also wouldn’t care about grades. Clearly we are not that society.

Instead, we are a very well educated society; the most educated society ever. And while correlation is not causation, the correlation between education and societal outcomes looks to be inverse. We’re barely able to keep the power on these days, to touch on just one of the many problems confronting us. As circumstances in the world change, the highly educated are far less likely to be able to adjust their mental models to adapt. That seems to be another side effect of our education system. By contrast, if your learning was based on problem-solving from the beginning, you are by definition going to be better at solving problems and more able to adapt.

This is true even in the more abstract realms of mathematics and computer programming. You teach the student a basic conceptual framework and then give them a problem to solve within that framework. The student will have to solve it “the hard way”. Then, in the next lesson, you give them another concept which directly relates to the problem they have just solved. The student should realise that this concept lets them solve the problem quicker but now they understand the underlying conceptual domain much better because they have spent time working in it. What happens in most maths and computer programming education is that students are taught the high-level abstract concepts without any grounding in the underlying domain. When that higher level concept fails them for some reason, they cannot debug the error because they don’t have the foundation in doing it the hard way.

The other good thing about the problem-solving approach to learning is that it introduces the student to the idea of isomorphism or, to put it colloquially, the understanding that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Good engineers don’t talk about right and wrong ways to do something, only better or worse ways given a context. Bob Dylan’s pitch recognition abilities, at least in relation to his singing, are lacking but in the context of his music that’s not a problem because it’s the poetic nature of his lyrics that sets Dylan apart. Similarly, Mick Jagger is not a pitch perfect singer. But what would sound dreadful in a barbershop quartet can be chalked up to “personality” and “flair” in a loud rock band. There’s more than one way to strangle a cat (and make millions of dollars doing so).

When you take a pragmatic, practical approach to learning, you are focused on outcomes and not abstractions. Every abstraction is valuable or not to the extent that it helps you to an outcome or expands the scope of your work. This fosters an experimental approach where you tend to try something first to see if it works rather than deduce your way to the right answer. Fail fast is the mantra for this way of approaching things. You’re more likely to come up with some novel way of solving a problem where you have inadvertently relaxed some constraint that people who have learned all the rules would never try.

You also don’t lose track of the qualitative nature of the pursuit. To return to the musical example, if your goal is to make beautiful music, any new abstraction you learn on the way is evaluated according to whether it helps fulfil that goal. By contrast, our education system sets up a series of proximate goals which are only tangentially related to the thing anybody cares about. According to the concept of Goal Displacement, we would predict that those proximate goals become ends in themselves and that is exactly what happens. Everybody obsesses about grades even though in the “real world” grades are completely irrelevant. If a pilot crashes a plane, it’s no consolation to anybody that he came first in pilot class.

Thus, we get the hamster wheel of modern education. In one of my first year university classes, the professor sternly admonished several students for putting their own ideas into their essays. Your job is to learn the literature, he instructed. You can come up with your own ideas if you make it to a PhD. That’s our education system in a nutshell. For 15 years you learn nothing more than how to regurgitate abstractions. Then we tell you you’re now free to be creative and come up with your own ideas. Unsurprisingly, the creativity almost never comes.

The truth is that almost everybody that makes it through such a system has had the creativity sucked out of them by that time. That’s a big part of the reason why our society no longer produces any genuine innovations. The time the average person spends in education has been steadily advancing for decades while the levels of innovation have been steadily declining. This makes perfect sense when you look at how the system works.

To paraphrase an old Chinese saying, the best time to dismantle the education system was 50 years ago. The second best time is today.

It’s more than 50 years since Ivan Illich wrote Deschooling Society. Like many of the best ideas of the 70s, it would have been nice to put those ideas into practice in a conscious and thoughtful way. Instead, it looks like we’ll get to the same result in a more disorderly fashion. The education system is falling apart all by itself. People are going to have to go back to real learning again because we’re going to start needing to get actual results again. Those results are not going to come from the overeducated people running the show these days. They’re going to come from people who can adapt their mental models to a rapidly changing world. In other words, people who know how to learn.

It occurred to me after writing last week’s post that building on the schematic diagram allows a potential synthesis of the works of Spengler, Jung and probably even Guenon (with a tip of the hat to the Kabbalah as well). Here’s how it would look:-

During what Spengler called the “culture” phase of the cycle, we descend down through the levels starting in the supra-human or spiritual. It is the supra-human which gives birth to the metaphysical elements that define the culture. These are initially channeled through the religious leaders, prophets etc. who at this stage of the cycle hold more power than kings. The great cultural achievements follow and the age of conquest follows that. To the extent that archetypes are manifested in this part of the cycle, we would expect them to be in their positive form i.e. the great rulers, warriors, prophets embodying the spirit of the culture. What we are referring to here is a general trend rather than a categorical requirement, so there can be mad emperors, crooked bishops and other bumps along the way too.

The whole thing bottoms out in the physical realm and we begin the ascent back upwards. The ascent is the age of the secular, materialist bourgeois mentality, what Spengler called the civilisational phase. The driver of this phase is the physical and biological realms and their interface with the societal realm. Economic growth is possible for some time but eventually leads to ecological overshoot where the population is too great for its resource base. There is also a kind of cultural saturation where new technology and artistic ideas dry up. All of this creates a pressure which works its way into the archetypal realm where it can manifest in several ways.

It can manifest as The Warrior leading to war. War alleviates the ecological pressure by reducing the population while also increasing the access to resources for the victorious society. Furthermore, war often results in technological advancement that can open up new economic opportunities during peace time. In short, war entails the catabolism that can enable periods of anabolism to occur within an overall catabolic trend.

If war is not possible, another possibility is Spengler’s second religiosity. If you have a population stuck in economic contraction, there are no possibilities for advancement available in the material/socio-economic realm. Instead, you offer people the compensation of an afterlife with rules and ceremonies that allow its attainment. This keeps the citizenry from revolting and allows de-growth to occur in a more or less orderly fashion.

What if you live in a time like ours; what Jung called the time of the Anti-Christ. One of the effects of nuclear armament is that direct war between nuclear powers is incredibly dangerous and therefore avoided. Thus, The Warrior archetype cannot manifest. Meanwhile, due to the extremist materialist philosophy, a second religiousness is also difficult to achieve. The two traditional forms of alleviating ecological overshoot are not available but we still have the problems of ecological overshoot to deal with.

Well, it seems that what happens is that you get The Devouring Mother: society as domestic melodrama complete with petty bickering, psychological abuse and mental illness. This creates the rebellious children who these days now actively call for the establishment of a parallel society in order to escape. Meanwhile, the acquiescent children are stuck in a shadow form of childhood; an abusive relationship with the state.

The driver of this dynamic is “bottom-up”, which is to say that ecological factors feed into emotional states (mass formation psychosis) and the collective subconscious (archetypal takeover). Eventually, these even overtake political economy and we see normally pragmatic politicians and business leaders also embodying the archetype c.f. the last two years of corona hysteria and the “go woke, go broke” phenomenon in business. Even the Pope and other religious leaders get on board symbolising the complete inversion of the paradigm.

These are cycles within cycles with an overall trend line like waves crashing on the beach but gradually rising and falling with the tide. The outer cycle comes to a close to give birth to the new cycle starting again from the spiritual and descending back down through the dimensions to ground out again in matter. Of course, it’s hard to know exactly where we are. I’d guess somewhere around here.

The concept of Mass Formation Psychosis has become well known in the last year or so as an explanation for the corona event, particularly after Robert Malone and other dissenting voices began talking about it. I thought it might be worthwhile to sketch out the differences between that explanation and the Jungian archetypal explanation I have outlined in previous posts.

The mass formation psychosis explanation applies a systems theory understanding to society and makes use in particular of the concept of emergence. Emergence is when a “high level” phenomena occurs which is unexpected or novel in relation to our understanding of the “low level” laws or facts which ground it. The Jungian paradigm is amenable to this way of thinking and in this post we’ll sketch out how it can (in my humble opinion) enhance the mass formation explanation.

For our purposes here, we’ll use the following schematic to describe the levels or elements of the system we are calling society:

Starting at the top, we have the idea of a conspiracy which is really nothing more than a deliberate plan of action to achieve a political outcome. The word conspiracy comes from the Latin ‘con’ meaning “with”, and ‘spirare’ meaning “breathe”. The latter is related to “spirit”, which is translated better into modern English as “soul”.  Conspirators breathe together or, more metaphorically, share a soul. In simple terms, they form a group and the group has an explicit shared purpose. In the modern meaning, conspiracy contains the negative connotation that the group acts against the public interest, usually by hiding their intentions. But this distinction can get muddy. The American Declaration of Independence and related political and military actions, for example, were a conspiracy against the British government of the time. The British weren’t happy about it but modern Americans are okay with the idea (well, some of them).

In contrast to conspiracy, day-to-day politics runs on narratives. There is no explicit agreement to follow a narrative, it happens automatically that members of a party or organisation will follow the “party line”. If they don’t, they’ll be removed in short order. Political groups coalesce around a narrative provided by the leaders of the group. My favourite recent example of this, which I’ve mentioned several times on this blog, is the Victorian government in 2020 running a narrative whereby nobody made the decision which led to Melbourne’s months-long lockdown. There would have been no explicit agreement to follow this narrative. Rather, the leader of the party spread it and everybody else fell into line. Members of the press or the public were free to believe it or not.

Both the small group of conspirators and the larger groups of party politics are members of the even larger group called society and societies have culture. Culture mostly runs on narratives too. The Plague Story is one such narrative and the specific form of that narrative in modern western culture came to guide the unfolding of the corona event in the early days. The narratives of culture are far less available to consciousness than the narratives of politics. They sit in the background and form the boundaries within which political discourse takes place.

With the move to culture, we are moving further away from the conscious mind and into the subconscious. The next level down is the subconscious itself. Here we find disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive science and psychology which examine more schematic patterns that structure language and psychic phenomena. The assumption of both modern linguistics and (Jungian) psychology is that these are universals and therefore transcend all cultural groupings. Therefore, they apply to humanity in general. The emotional and other psychic states are also universals but it’s worth differentiating these into a different level as this will be important in explaining the difference between mass formation psychosis and archetypal analysis.

With these preliminaries in mind, let me briefly summarise my understanding of the mass formation psychosis as explicated by Matthias Desmet.

We are studying society as a system and, as per systems theory, the ideal scenario is to have a “closed system” where we control all variables and states of the system. Even for very simple systems, it’s arguable that there is no such thing as a closed system but we can usually get close enough to get stable results and these form the backbone of our scientific understanding of the world. For something like society, we are much further from a closed system and we need to accept that and understand the limitations on the analysis. One of the main limitations is how we can know whether we are missing a vital law or fact which is crucial to a true understanding. For example, in our schematic, we have left out the physical and biological worlds. One could argue that the loneliness, anomie and angst felt by so many people in modern society is caused by a lack of connection with nature (the biological world). If so, this diagram is leaving out an important element. Unfortunately, with systems analysis, there are no easy and conclusive ways to prove one way or another whether a variable is important. We just always have to keep in mind that we may be missing something.

The mass formation psychosis is what’s known in systems theory as an emergent phenomenon. This is an occurrence which is novel, random or unexpected given what we know of the underlying elements of the system (if these criteria sound highly subjective, that’s because they are). The phenomenon known as mass formation involves the spontaneous creation of a group of people within a society who are singularly focused on a specific issue. Thus, during corona there were people for whom the virus was the only thing that mattered and every other consideration was irrelevant. Desmet claims that the main drivers of this phenomenon are the emotional states of the citizens of society. Specifically, due to the breaking of social bonds, many people are stuck in the chronic emotional states of free floating anxiety, loneliness, anomie and anger. When the elements of the system (i.e. the citizens) are in such a state, the conditions are ripe for a trigger event which leads to the mass formation. The “followers” will then coalesce around a leader who is running the narrative and providing the focal point for the mass formation in the same way a hypnotist does for his or her subjects.

We can map this explanation onto our schematic diagram as follows:-

I have drawn the line from underlying emotional states to the border between explicit political conspiracy and explicit narrative agreement as either of these could, theoretically, be relevant. That is, a cunning leader could create a narrative with the express intention to create a mass formation. Modern party politics is arguably a form of group behaviour that is only different in degree from a true mass formation psychosis (the behaviour of the “true believers” in party politics lends much evidence to this claim). However, it’s also true that the narrative driving a mass formation can arise by “accident”. We will discuss this issue shortly.

To reiterate, we are studying the system known as society and trying to account for the emergent phenomenon that is the corona hysteria by looking at the underlying elements and dynamics of the lower levels of the system. I haven’t had time to read up on Desmet so I don’t know if this is 100% true of his position, but the version of mass formation psychosis that has become popular only invokes the emotional states of citizens as explanatory variables. This has the benefit of being sufficiently abstract to account for a wide variety of mass formation phenomena. Thus, the mass formation explanation could also account for cults or other groups of people pursuing a narrative with singular, hypnotic focus as well as formations restricted to a specific time and place such as a stampede.

Perhaps this account is good enough. But it seems lacking in specificity. If the emotional states were the only thing involved, wouldn’t we expect to see mass formations over anything at all? Wouldn’t we expect to see a group devoted to worshipping the giant cosmic mushrooms that run the universe. Wouldn’t that group be opposed to another group who say it’s the pixies who tend the mushrooms who must be worshipped? Does free floating anxiety attach itself to any group at all as long as the group provides the necessary social connection that the individual desires?

At this point we can introduce culture into our system analysis because it is culture that delimits the scope of mass formations by setting the parameters of available narratives and behaviours. This is exactly what I was aiming at with my analysis of The Plague Story. The trigger event for the mass psychosis was not an arbitrary thing but a pre-existing story in the culture. If we plug that in to the diagram, we get the following:-

The cultural narrative is the modern plague story. The political dimensions are derived directly from that story. It is because we tell ourselves the story that there can be a deadly pandemic at any time that we fund the WHO. The WHO duly hires “experts” and gives them the job to look for a deadly new pandemic. Meanwhile, the public health bureaucracies in each country create jobs for mandarins to interface with the WHO. It is these people who will (inadvertently) become the “leaders” of the mass formation. They are not doing it on purpose. If you give somebody a job to raise the alarm about possible pandemics, that is what that person will do. If you then have a hyper-networked society where information about a pandemic alarm can circle the globe in seconds, you have created a trigger for a mass formation psychosis.

When we include culture in the variables of our system analysis, we see that mass formation psychoses often involve pre-existing cultural narratives. Thus, war is also often correlated with mass formations and WW1 and 2 were arguably the two most recent examples of mass formation psychoses on a global scale prior to corona.

So, I think the mass formation explanation works better when we include culture in our system variables. But, as I have already foreshadowed in the schematic diagram, I think we also need to add the collective subconscious into the mix. The anxiety, alienation and anomie felt by people as dominant emotional states are not there by accident. We can place the cause in “random” societal changes such as industrialisation, late capitalism and the information revolution and that may be true to some extent. But even if that is true, it doesn’t negate the fact that there is an archetypal element at play and it won’t surprise anybody if I claim that this is The Devouring Mother and The Orphan.

It is because we live in a society where The Orphan is present that we have so much anomie and alienation. It is because our society is dominated by The Devouring Mother that the alienation is allowed to continue. In fact, it is encouraged by the powers that be in order to further their own will to power. A society where the majority of people had gone through a proper initiation/individuation/coming of age process would be one where there was very little anomie and alienation. Therefore, we would not see the expression of those emotional states and the mass formation could not occur.

Note that this explanation makes very different claims to Desmet about how to “fix” the problems we are in. Part of Desmet’s suggested way forward was that we need to come up with a “better new normal” than the one being talked about by the corona cultists. His reason? Because the people who feel alienated cannot accept the return to the old normal and we must provide a new focus for their emotional states or else we will simply see a new mass formation psychosis break out. This seems to me to be treating the symptoms and not the underlying problem. The Jungian perspective would be at least to treat the psychic elements with psychotherapy, although, as Jung was well aware, we may have to look beyond psychic states and see that this is really a “spiritual” problem. One of the elements missing from our schematic is the “supra-human” or spiritual. If that turns out to be the real problem then our systems analysis is missing its most crucial element.

That would seem to take us beyond science and beyond systems theory. And, yet, systems theory includes a concept that might be amenable to such an explanation. The analysis we have worked through here is an example of what is known in systems theory as “weak emergence”. It’s notable that Jung believed the archetypes to be acausal and his idea of archetypal takeover implied a “top down” relation whereby the archetype itself is responsible for (I don’t want to say “caused”) events. This idea corresponds fairly closely to what is called “strong emergence” in systems theory. In the next post, we’ll work through the distinction between weak and strong emergence in more detail and explore the metaphysical ramifications.

As Faustian culture moves further along the path of civilisation, Spengler predicted that we should start to see a dynamic he called Caesarism in politics. By this he meant the rise of populist demagogues representing the interests of the public against the capitalists and their allies in the public bureaucracy. In the last post, I noted the ascendancy of law over honour in modern society. One of the drivers for this is the benefit that capitalists derive from excessive laws which both further their interests directly if the law is written in their favour and indirectly by creating a large administrative (and therefore financial) barrier to entry which prevents competition in the marketplace. An excess of laws is to the advantage of the capitalist class and the mandarins who administer the laws. This alliance between capitalists and the public bureaucracy is called the “elites” in modern parlance. Thus, the WEF meeting taking place in Davos at the moment includes billionaires, politicians and bureaucrats from various countries.

Caesarism breaks this dynamic. It sees the rise of charismatic rulers who win support from the public by counteracting the power of the elites. The Caesar achieves this by appealing to something higher than law and financial interest. It’s the promise of a return to an honour-based system but not one that has grown up organically in the culture phase of the cycle. Rather, it’s a facsimile of real culture. Trump and his Make America Great Again is a paradigm example of Caesarism. So, in its own way, was the Brexit vote in Britain.

For all kinds of reasons, the appearance of Caesarism in Australia seemed incredibly unlikely prior to corona. And yet corona, probably quite by accident, ended up looking an awful lot like Caesarism. One of the weirder things that I heard right at the start of corona was the phrase “the virus is real but the economy is not.” Setting aside the truth of this statement, it reveals something that is a cornerstone of the drive to Caesarism; namely the denigration of the bourgeois status quo. The economy is not real. This represents a desire: I want society to stand for something more than money. That is what the Caesar promises and he doesn’t mind how he goes about getting it. In Australia during corona, we saw police brutality, radical government intervention in civil society and a complete disregard of the financial ramifications of the measures. This was arguably a textbook example of Caesarism with Victoria’s “Dictator” Dan Andrews leading the way.

It’s one of those ironies of history that corona was a blow to Trump’s populism in the US while in Australia it manifested as exactly the kind of authoritarianism that Trump’s opponents had warned the orange man would enact on the US public. Prior to corona, Australia seemed like the last place you’d expect Caesarism to manifest. Australian politics had been a snoozefest for decades. The only interesting things to happen have been Prime Ministers getting stabbed in the back by their party. Australians are cynical of politicians and this is part of an overall cultural aversion to high achievers known as Tall Poppies Syndrome. The Australian economy also lacks the dynamism of the US which means that the capitalists here have little internal competition and therefore less need to pursue political agendas against each other. The last time we saw the capitalists directly intervene in democracy was when the Gillard government attempted to levy a mining tax. Meanwhile, Australia’s place in the inner circle of the US empire has given a stability to our foreign affairs with just the occasional need to send a small number of soldiers to futile wars overseas. All of these factors mitigate against the need for Caesarism and made the corona response such a surprise.

Now that Caesarism seems back on the agenda in Australia, especially with the prospect of economic upheavels ahead, it’s worth looking at other examples of Caesarism within Australian political history to see if these might give us some clue of how it might manifest here in the years and decades ahead.

The Great Depression was obviously a time of stress on the political system. Australia was still working out its new federal arrangements internally while also being tied to the British Empire financially and politically. Thus, when Britain dropped the gold standard this had a huge deflationary effect on the Australian currency and politicians here had to also drop the gold standard to depreciate the Australian dollar and get exports to rise. Meanwhile, the individual states held significant power which reduced the ability of the federal government to mount a coordinated strategy to deal with the economic problems. To give an idea of how little coordination there was, different states still used different railway gauges at the time meaning trains had to stop at the borders and everybody would get off and walk across to get on a different train to continue the journey.

The then Prime Minister, Stanley Bruce, set out to deal with these issues and one of the outcomes of The Great Depression was greater centralisation of power in the federal government. This process of centralisation has continued ever since and is part of the reason why corona came as such a shock. Australians woke to realise that, not only did state governments still exist, but they could do things like shut the border and prevent you from seeing your family or stop you from travelling more than 5kms from your house. Who knew?

Back in The Depression, states had far more power than they do now and that power meant the ability to challenge the federal government. That’s exactly what New South Wales Premier, Jack Lang, was happy to do and this culminated in a constitutional crisis that saw him eventually removed by the Governor of the State in 1932. In terms of Caesarism, it should be noted that Lang was not challenging the capitalist system. Far from it. In fact, he was advocating for Keynesianism at a time when that was not the dominant economic ideology. Although he would lose the battle at the time, his kind of economic policies would later become the standard way of dealing with economic downturns. We saw this most recently with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s helicopter money during the GFC. Corona represents another example. Although we are nearing the end of the Keynesian paradigm now that debt is at levels that are clearly never going to be repaid.

What was relevant about Lang was the extent to which he was prepared to go to achieve his aims. This included using the machinery of state government to defy the federal. At one point, he even withdraw all state money from government bank accounts and stored the cash at the Trades Hall, thereby ensuring the federal government could not get access to it (this is a strategy individuals would do well to consider in the time ahead). After his removal from power, it was noted by government insiders that Lang had even considered placing the Governor under arrest. This could likely have resulted in the Australian army being sent in to take over the state of New South Wales.

It’s this transition from law to brute force, or at least the threat of force, that is a hallmark of Caesarism because the Caesar represents a return of The Warrior archetype against the capitalist. The use of force brings to mind another episode from state politics, one which is relevant to recent global events.

Joh Bjelke-Peterson, aka The Hillbilly Dictator, was certainly a proto-Caesar. In 1971, the South African rugby team was touring Australia at the height of the anti-apartheid protests here. Bjelke-Peterson decided to declare a month-long state of emergency for the sole purpose of quelling the expected protests. That’s right. Justin Trudeau is not the first to think of that tactic. Of course, Bjelke-Peterson’s politics were the opposite of Trudeau’s. The point is not the ends but the means that are available to a potential Caesar and one of them is declaring states of emergency where none exists (of course, there are far more famous and historically important examples of this idea).

Bjelke-Peterson also practiced a tactic of Caesarism that was adopted by the Victorian State Premier during corona i.e. the daily press conference. Bjelke-Peterson referred to it as “feeding the chooks”. The media needs stories and a politician is in a position to give them something easy to write about. Trump did something similar during his presidential run by hijacking the media to ensure that he was the main focus of the daily news, although that was less like feeding the chooks and more like feeding the spawn of Satan.

Bjelke-Peterson was the opponent of another charismatic leader who pushed the boundaries of what the constitution would allow, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam won an election and then convinced the Governor-General to break with convention and swear him and his deputy leader in before the full count of the election had been completed. There followed a two week period called the “duumvirate” where the government consisted of just two men. During this time, Whitlam put into action a host of measures that didn’t require parliamentary approval, thereby acting in a quasi-authoritarian fashion. This was just the beginning of the troubles and he would later join Jack Lang as the only two leaders to be removed by Governors-General in the short history of Australian politics.

The Bjelke-Peterson/Whitlam rivalry was another round in the ongoing battle between the states and the federal government. Whitlam was in favour of radical constitutional reform that would concentrate more power at the federal level while Bjelke-Peterson explicitly campaigned for state rights against the “communism” of federal Labor. Other examples of this were the fact that Western Australia actually voted to secede from the federation in 1933. The only reason the secession didn’t go ahead was because the British government refused to push the matter stating it did not have the legal right to do so. Meanwhile, the issue of secession has arisen several times in Tasmanian politics too.

Mostly the feds have won such battles and usurped power at the hands of the states and yet that trend was reversed during the Scott Morrison Prime Ministership in a fashion that is still very strange and might be Morrison’s most lasting legacy. For both the bushfire emergency and corona, Morrison let the states run the show. On the one hand, this makes sense as the states have responsibility for most of the emergency services response. Yet, during corona, Morrison gave states responsibility for quarantine which was legally a federal duty as well as letting the state Premiers walk all over him at the national cabinet. Morrison could have used those crises in the same way past federal leaders had to increase the powers of the federal government and yet he refused to do so. This cost him politically while also allowing the rise of mini-Caesars at the state level. All of a sudden, state politics is relevant again when for decades it had been the B-grade movie of Australian political life.

This very brief survey gives us an outline of how Caesarism could manifest in the Australian context. It might occur at the state or federal level and, in fact, one may lead to the other. At one point, Bjelke-Peterson was considering a run for Prime Minister. Until now, the constitution has held any would-be Ceasars in check. But it’s not hard to imagine it faltering under more extreme circumstances. There is also the question of constitutional change which is back on the agenda now with a new government. That could open up the system to new vulnerabilities. In short, there is nothing about the Australian system of government that is likely to inhibit Caesarism any more than other countries.

The big question for Caesarism in the Australian context is what values a would-be populist demagogue can invoke to garner support. Trump and Brexit both ran on anti-globalist nationalism which makes sense in both of those countries. It makes far less sense in Australia for a number of reasons. Firstly, we have been among the most eager proponents of globalisation and, unlike the middle classes of Britain and the US, our middle class has benefitted from globalisation (or at least didn’t go backward). Secondly, our geographic position does not lend itself to national rivalries with other countries in the way that Britain has with other European nations, for example. Thirdly, nationalism is problematic in Australia due to its historical roots in the White Australia policy. It’s worth pointing out that the White Australia policy was supported mostly by the Labor Party as a way to guarantee the earnings and conditions of the working class. The abandonment of the working class by Labor in the 90s was partly a capitulation to the multi-national corporations and institutions who run globalist capitalism. For these reasons and more, neither major political party in Australia is the natural breeding ground of a Caesar in the sense of fighting back against global capital.

In Spenglerian terms, Australia was founded during the civilisational period of the Faustian culture. Thus, the Langs, the Bjelke-Petersons and the Whitlams were all working on variations of the bourgeois project. The age of Caesarism is when that project gets torn up and replaced by an appeal to “higher” values. One way this might play out in Europe is a resumption of military conflict. But this is highly unlikely to be relevant to Australia unless China turns belligerent.

So, it’s still very difficult to see how Caesarism could come to Australia. Much depends on how fast the bottom falls out of the US empire and what the ramifications are for global trade. If things turn out well and trade with Asia continues, it may very well be that Australia’s mineral and agricultural wealth enables the continuation of a bourgeois society here long after Europe and the US have moved into the phase of Caesarism. Australia might remain a relic of times past; a weird little European outpost in the south pacific upholding a tradition that has gone extinct. If things go less well, it could be that Australia will have an existential crisis to go alongside an economic one.