Category: Ideas

As part of the research for my upcoming book, The Initiation of Nietzsche, I’ve been revisiting the works of the philosopher and the broader cultural background of the 19th century in which they emerged. It’s something that we take for granted nowadays, but one of the big cultural shifts that occurred at that time was, in Nietzschean language, the freedom of interpretation, especially in relation to the Bible.

This trend had begun with the Reformation but we have to remember that the main instigators of that movement were all university scholars. Their rebellion against the Catholic Church was born out of their ability to read the Bible and especially their belief that the Church’s official translation, the Vulgate, was incorrect. It must be remembered that, at that time, the average person in Europe was illiterate and there were no vernacular translations of the Bible anyway. Thus, the average person was not free to make their own interpretation even if they wanted to. One of the main achievements of the Reformation was to make the Bible available to the general public in their own language.

But just having Bibles in vernacular translation was not enough. People needed to be literate in order to read them. In Protestant lands in the aftermath of the Reformation, there was a massive push for literacy among the general public so that people could read the Bible for themselves. Teaching literacy was mostly carried out by the various Protestant churches. As a result, literacy in the Protestant lands was much higher on average than in Catholic ones, although the Reformation also sparked a Catholic response which resulted in more emphasis on education.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see what would happen once everybody was able to form their own opinions on the holy book. Luther himself had spent hundreds and hundreds of pages discussing the finer points of scripture with Erasmus. If you’ve ever seen a long internet thread where two people are arguing past each other and never coming to an agreement, you have some idea of what the correspondence between Luther and Erasmus is like. It’s no surprise, then, that Protestantism gave rise to thousands of different sects all claiming a slightly different interpretation of the holy book.

At that time, most people saw the Bible as being infallible and any misunderstandings were the fault of the reader. However, the inconsistencies in the text perhaps inevitably gave rise to a new idea that took root among scholars and philosophers. The Protestants had noticed problems with the text, but they had blamed the Church for its sloppy scholarship. They never doubted that the text itself came from God. The scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries, however, eventually got round to the notion that the text itself was not the direct word of God. That opened the way for a whole new set of interpretations.

Eventually, we get to philosophers and scholars such as Feuerbach or Renan, who no longer interpreted the Bible as the word of God or Jesus as the son of God but rather treated it all as the work of man. Feuerbach claimed that all theology was really just a projection of human psychology. Meanwhile, Renan claimed that Jesus was a teacher and reformer, rather than the son of God.

This was all fine and there was some interesting work done by these thinkers. Nevertheless, there was a big a problem with their analysis, one that was intolerable to Nietzsche. Now, because Nietzsche framed his critique in terms of logic and science, he has been placed in the same camp as modern atheists who come from the positivist or similar schools of thought. In fact, Nietzsche couldn’t abide the scholarly approach to the subject precisely because he could see the power behind the religious viewpoint. The lukewarm approach of the scholars watered down both the logical and religious viewpoints into a paltry compromise.

Nietzsche set out to highlight the tension that existed between the logical and religious viewopints by engaging in a new method of interpretation. He no longer reserves the right to reinterpret the gospels according to a different overarching framework of understanding; he proclaims the right also to call the authors of the text into question. Thus, in The Antichrist, Nietzsche, in his usual bombastic and belligerent fashion, proclaims the writers of the gospels as bigots and madmen. From there it follows that the actual text itself cannot be taken at face value and this gives Nietzsche the licence to reverse engineer the story. Jesus becomes an “idiot”. His unwillingness to fight back against crucifixion follows from this fact. The whole rest of the gospel is just a fiction born out of the desire of the disciples to turn a farce into a heroic quest with a happy ending.

This extreme degree of reinterpretation follows from genuine problems in how we understand the text. For example, nobody these days can believe the parts of the gospel where Jesus miraculously heals the sick, brings a woman back from the dead with the touch of his hand, or walks on water. But if we simply ignore or reinterpret those parts of the story, then how do we argue against others who might want to ignore another section of the text? If everybody is ignoring different parts of the text, then everybody will actually be telling a different story and we’re no longer even talking about the same thing. The grounds for a shared interpretation then break down.

Moreover, if we can’t believe in the miracle cure part of the story, then we can’t just ignore it. We need an explanation for why it was put in. That explanation has to come back to the writers and their audience. Did they really believe it? Were they just following the literary convention associated with stories about prophets? Either way, we’re no longer worried about the story itself but the writers and broader cultural context in which it was written. Nietzsche’s seemingly ad hominem analysis is correct in principle, even if we disagree with his deliberately inflammatory opinion.

One of the larger points that Nietzsche was making was that once you allow for freedom of interpretation, you also open the way for radically divergent takes on a story. In Nietzsche’s analysis, Jesus goes from being a hero to being an idiot. Such inversions are something we have to live with in our time. For example, some people think Trump is going to save the USA, others think he’s going to destroy it. It’s the same man. Only the interpretations differ. But interpretations are how we make sense of the world. Therefore, in some sense, we’re not even living in the same world when we can’t agree on the basic facts of reality.

Nietzsche foresaw these problems, and that’s why later in his life he came to see the Reformation as a disaster. While the sacred text was in the safe hands of the church leaders, all the little inconsistencies could be quietly left out of the discussion. This is a variation of what Socrates called the noble lie. It might sound like a good idea to open the discussion of “truth” to everybody, but then you just get endless bickering.

It should be clear that this process of simply leaving out the inconsistencies in order to create a sensible narrative is exactly what governments do all the time. We all just lived through possibly one of the most extreme examples of that in history with the corona debacle, which was so absurd that the only way to deal with it is to never speak of it again and pretend it never happened. But that’s the point that Nietzsche was making with his re-interpretation of the gospel. An idiot and a group of madmen came up with a story that was a complete fabrication. Nevertheless, that story changed the world. From a cause and effect point of view, it makes no sense. We need another way to understand it.

The other way that Nietzsche laid the groundwork for and which Freud and Jung refined was psychological. Even if the gospels are complete fabrications, they still constitute one of the greatest stories ever told. The fact that the story has all kinds of logical contradictions is only a problem if you think the world runs on logic. And that ended up being one of the central points that came out of the whole episode. What if the world doesn’t run on logic? Or, what if “nature” runs on logic but there is a higher force that is beyond logic? The illogicality of the story then becomes a feature, not a bug.

Perhaps ironically, the situation we face now is very similar to that in the Levant during the time of Jesus, where there was a seemingly endless string of saviours and prophets all competing for attention while the Jewish religious authorities struggled to maintain control of the narrative. The fact that John the Baptist and Jesus were both put to death is evidence for how threatened those authorities were. Socrates met the same fate in large part due to the tumult in Athens in the 4th century. It seems hard to believe, but the current ferment is exactly the kind of milieu that could give rise to a new messiah in our time.

It’s rather a strange coincidence that both Canada and Australia had elections in the last week. It provides a nice excuse to talk about the numerous parallels between the two countries, which apparently led to almost identical election results, with unexpected wins to the left-leaning parties. (The victory to Labor in Australia was not unexpected, although the magnitude of it certainly was).

Canada and Australia appear to be in some kind of competition to see who can blow the most insane real estate bubble. Those bubbles are in turn fuelled by unsustainable immigration, and yet the elites of both countries have zero intention of reducing the intake, with the entire subject of immigration rendered verboten in the public discourse. Both countries have hollowed-out manufacturing sectors and a heavy reliance on commodity exports to fund a decreasing standard of living. In short, both countries are on a road to nowhere and just had an election where neither party offered anything except more of the same.

To understand the current situation that Australia and Canada find themselves in, we need to zoom out. Let’s zoom all the way out to the 16th century, and let’s talk about the country that would eventually give rise to both Canada and Australia: England. At the start of the 16th century, England was a backwater whose economy was predicated on the commodity export of wool, which it traded primarily with the Benelux countries, whose wealth came from turning that wool into clothing.

The ruling class of England wanted a piece of the action and set about a long-term plan to develop their own clothing industry. This is what is known in the business world as vertical integration. Since the English owned the raw materials, they could cut out the middleman by developing the ability to manufacture the final product. That’s exactly what they eventually did. Once their domestic clothing industry was up and running, the English cut exports of wool to the Benelux countries.

This was an early example of using protectionism and other trade and economic measures to grow domestic industry. Since the technological improvements that came with the manufacturing of clothing led directly to the industrial revolution, it’s hard to understate how important this was to the later success of Britain and its evolution into an imperial power. Britain’s initial imperial success came from being an exporting powerhouse predicated on the innovations that came with a vibrant domestic manufacturing industry that had been deliberately nurtured into existence.

Fast forward to the 19th century, and there was a big policy shift in Britain towards what some historians have called the “imperialism of free trade”. Britain threw off its protectionism and ran an imperial policy based on control of trade and financial markets. At the same time that Britain decided to pursue free trade, there were two primary rivals emerging: the USA and Germany. Both of the latter countries had learned from Britain’s example and were using protectionist measures to provide a safe haven in which domestic industry could grow. In some sense, Britain was the beneficiary of that since its consumers received cheaper goods. But the tradeoff was the loss of domestic industry.

If all this is sounding very familiar, well, yes, it’s the same pattern the US has gone through in recent decades. But there’s one more parallel which is directly relevant to our time. Once the deleterious effects of free trade on domestic industry became impossible to ignore, some elites in Britain started to realise that a reversion back to the old paradigm was needed. Thus, by the early 1930s, Britain was once again pursuing protectionist policies alongside its two rivals, Germany and the USA.

However, the key point to understand is that the protectionism was not carried out at the national level but within three primary trading blocs. There was the British Empire. There was the German-dominated trading zone of central Europe. And there was the American zone that included South America and also Japan, the Philippines, etc.

Although Australia and Canada were nominally independent nations at that time, the reality is that we were very much a part of the British Empire, and trade and foreign policy were set in London for the most part. Thus, despite its proximity to the USA, Canada’s main trading partner at the start of WW2 was still Britain.

Heading into the war, the GDP of each of the three trading blocs was almost identical. If we think about it purely in terms of economics, let’s pretend Britain and the US stayed out of the fight. Germany would have united continental Europe into a trading bloc that very closely resembles the current EU. Setting aside the moral and political issues, that might have been a somewhat stable equilibrium, but there was a wild card in the pack.

Russia had made significant advances in industrial production in the 1930s. By the end of the decade it was, at least in terms of raw industrial output, comparable to the other three trading blocs. Germany’s breaking of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a game changer for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it opened the possibility that not only would Europe be unified but that it would also incorporate Russia. That would have easily been the largest trading bloc in the world.

In summary, by the start of WW2, there were four primary economic blocs: the British Empire, the German Empire, the USSR, and the USA. Britain and Germany went to war, followed shortly thereafter by the USSR. The USA got to stay out of the fray. That was its first big advantage. Its second big advantage was that the British Empire was not what it used to be. All that free trade and hollowing out of domestic industry had left the British with reduced capacity to compete with the Germans in war production. The Americans agreed to supply the British firstly via the Cash and Carry mechanism and then, when all British gold had been transferred to Washington, via the Lend Lease program.

The result was that the British Empire was bankrupt by the end of the war. The German Empire was also finished. That just left the USSR, which had also accumulated large debts to the USA via Lend Lease but which decided simply to default on those and gobble up land in Eastern Europe, thereby ushering in the Cold War.

The upshot of all this is that both the British and German economic blocs were merged with the US bloc after the war, with the USSR creating its own bloc in eastern Europe while also attempting to expand into Asia. Since Canada and Australia were both members of the British Empire, our allegiance was transferred to the US by default. It’s important to understand that, even though this period was nominally a “decolonising” and “anti-imperial” time, in actual fact the USA had inherited the mechanism of imperialism that Britain had created, which is to say, domination through control of trade, financial networks and military alliances. For Australia and Canada, the transfer of power from Britain to the US was so subtle that few even noticed, although the arrival of Coca-Cola billboards and Hollywood films should have provided a clue.

In the decades immediately after WW2, most nations in the now US-led western trading bloc were allowed to run relatively protectionist economic policies, and these facilitated domestic industrial production during the post-war boom. That was all thrown away, however, with the collapse of the USSR and the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 90s, with markets opened up and manufacturing exported to China.

The whole thing looks a hell of a lot like the same blunder that Britain made back in the 19th century with its “imperialism of free trade”. Manufacturing in every western nation has been hollowed out in exchange for a “services-based economy”. The US Empire now runs almost exclusively on control of financial networks rather than on the production of goods and services. For its part, China has pursued exactly the same strategy that Britain, Germany, and the US once followed of nurturing domestic manufacturing through protectionist measures.

From the point of view of Australia and Canada, we’ve been through all this before. In the 1890s, there were enormous asset bubbles caused by British free trade and monetary policy. In the 1980s, the same thing happened under a similar set of policies pursued by the US. Logic says that the same thing should be about to happen, and Australia and Canada are in their familiar position of being pawns in a game over which we have little real control.

And that brings us back to the recent elections. On the surface of it, it’s quite incredible that the general public of Canada and Australia should so eagerly vote for more of the same given how fast our standard of living has slipped in recent years. But the reality is that the governments in our countries are not in control of the levers that could actually change the economic situation. The big decisions are now made in Washington D.C and Beijing.

Despite these similarities, there are several interesting differences between the status of Canada and Australia. Firstly, Canada’s economy is now completely dominated by the US. About 3/4 of Canadian trade is with its southern neighbour. By contrast, Australia trades little with the US, and we are relatively diversified compared to Canada, with China, Japan, and South Korea being large trading partners.

A second big difference is that Canada is being weaponised by China in its trade fight against the US, not to mention being used as a trading post for fentanyl distribution. Canada is kind of like that character who wanders in between the hero and the villain in a movie shoot-out.

Australia certainly benefits from our geographic distance. But we’ve been given much the same role as Canada in the imperial arrangements. Our job is to supply commodities and raw materials. The result is a hollowed-out economy that is apparently now entirely predicated on immigration, for which we simply cannot produce the housing stock, leading to a truly insane housing bubble that, if it were to crash, would make the 1890s look like a picnic.

Against this background, I suppose the recent election results in both countries make some sense. Neither party was promising any change to the status quo because neither country is in a position to make such a change. Both Canada and Australia are pawns in the larger power game going on between the US and China. In that sense, voting for the fluffy-cuddly leftist parties is the best bet since they are the ones who promise to keep you “safe” and “protected”, which in this case is code for protected against the economic machinations of global powers.

Let’s begin another post with our table that maps the levels of being against the exoteric-esoteric aspects of existence:- 

Exoteric	Esoteric
Higher esoteric	Higher esoteric
Socio-cultural	Socio-cultural
Biological	Biological

In past posts, we have focused on how these categories can be used to analyse our identities as individuals. But no individual is an island unto themselves. We are born into a society, and certainly in the first decades of life, we get our identity from that society. That’s why we can use this same set of categories to define the institutions of culture (the ones which bestow our identity on us). For each level of being, we can ask the question: which institution of society represents this?

For the biological domain, the answer is: the family. The family is concerned with the preparation of meals, the provision of shelter, and most of our other basic biological needs. But the family is also an institution predicated on biological relationships of genetic inheritance. While there can be families where the members are not biologically related (e.g., adoption), this is the exception which proves the rule. This doesn’t mean that the family doesn’t have other functions, including economic, political, and even religious, just that the biological ones are fundamental.

Moving to the socio-cultural level, there are three related institutions at play: the political, the economic, and the military. How formal and distinct such institutions are is usually a function of the size and complexity of the society. The bigger and more complex the society, the more we find that the sub-specialities operate relatively independently of each other. This is in contrast with smaller societies where at least the political and military functions are usually combined (think King Arthur and the knights of the round table).

This leaves the higher esoteric. What institution is responsible for the guardianship and propagation of the highest beliefs of a culture? In most societies, this is a straightforward question to answer, but it has become highly problematic for us in the modern West, and this is a big part of the reason why we now hear things like how science or politics has become religion. Religion, of course, would be the simple answer to the question. But at the same time we’re told that science has become religion, we’re also told that religion is on the decline. Thus, in order to answer the question, we need to dig into the history of religion and the twists and turns it has taken in Western culture.

If we think about this issue anthropologically, a question we might ask at a broad level is, how does a culture initiate members into its primary belief structure? There are two main forms of initiation: rites of passage and myths/stories. While there can be all kinds of rites and stories used in everyday life, every culture has its primary rites and stories that communicate its highest beliefs. A tribal initiate goes through a variety of ceremonies and rites whose purpose is not just to test their skills but to teach them the beliefs of the tribe. Such rites are reinforced by the main stories of the culture, which are almost always about past heroes who went through the same thing.

This may sound rather exotic, and yet it is exactly the same thing we see with the Catholic Church. Every Catholic rite of passage, such as Mass, Communion, Confirmation, etc., has its meaning tightly integrated with the story of Jesus and the Bible more broadly. Consider the rite of the Eucharist, where the initiate receives the body of Christ in the form of bread and wine. The meaning of this is directly related to the Bible passage: “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” (John 6:54). This is in turn related to the idea of salvation and redemption through Christ. The symbolism of the rite of passage and the story that goes along with it are tightly interwoven. That’s the way it is in most cultures.

It follows from this that to find the core beliefs of any culture, you can look for both the main rites of passage and the main myths, especially where these are combined. If we take ancient Rome as an example, we find that one of the main myths was related to the founding brothers, Romulus and Remus, both sons of the god Mars and the virgin Rhea Silvia, and both raised by a she-wolf. The brothers wanted to found a city but couldn’t agree on the location. In the ensuing argument, Romulus killed Remus and chose the site of what is still Rome. That is the mythical aspect.

That myth is then reinforced by the rites of passage, including temples, holidays (holy days), and feasts dedicated to Romulus. In early Rome, religion was quite decentralised and so it wouldn’t have a universal thing to pay homage to Romulus. Later, during the imperial period, things changed. The cult of Caesar had a very similar form to the cult of Romulus, but it was far more widely recognised. Caesar largely wrote his own mythology, claiming descent from Venus. He was deified after his death, and a number of temples were built with various rituals and ceremonies. His birthday was also marked as a holiday.

We can see from this example that the Romans freely mixed religion and politics. However, that is merely our modern Western bias on the matter. The reality is that most cultures make no hard distinction between these domains. This division of ours began in the medieval era when the Catholic Church managed to unite the various barbarian groups of Europe into a unified entity under the Pope in Rome. Right from the beginning, there was a rather weird and also very fuzzy split between the religious and political. The Catholic Church had its origins in Roman culture but with a heavy dose of monastic theology thrown in for good measure. It couldn’t really decide whether it was a political or a religious entity. But that was a question that never would have occurred to the earlier Romans, who recognised no distinction between politics and religion.

In any case, what we see from the medieval period onwards is a kind of separation of church and state via the truce between the church and the kings of Europe known as the divine right of kings. In theory, the church would concern itself with spiritual affairs, and the kings would take care of politics. Julius Caesar could declare himself a god. But the kings of medieval Europe had to make do with having the Pope give them God’s blessing. In practice, the Pope and the kings were often at loggerheads, but the uneasy partnership held firm all the way until the Reformation when the Protestants realised that the church had strayed from what they believed was its purely spiritual mission and demanded that there really should be a separation of the church and state. The kings of Europe saw their opportunity to ride the wave of popular resentment to get what they had always wanted: more power. Eventually, the separation of church and state became a kind of official doctrine in northern Europe, but not until a great deal of blood had been spilled.

But, to say it again, the separation was already there from the start, as can be seen in the fact that there were separate rites of passage and separate myths for the political and religious domains. A peasant swore allegiance to the local lord, and that was their initiation in an economic, political, and military sense. Meanwhile, the religious rites of passage were run through the church. In theory, these were separate, but then things like the crusades or the church’s function as a propagandist on behalf of the kings muddied the waters. Ultimately, the divine right of kings was the unifying concept that linked the political and religious realms together.

Then we get to the Reformation.

Now, the first thing to note here is that the Protestants wanted to all but get rid of the rites of passage as methods of religious initiation. That was related to the idea of deprecating the role of priest, bishop, and pope. All that was, in turn, predicated on the notion that a believer should aim to have a direct connection with the divine. That direct connection was tied with an increased emphasis on the Bible. Since the Bible contains what we are calling the primary myths of the religion, what the Protestants were doing was tilting the focus of initiation towards the mythology and away from the rites of passage.

Closely tied to this was the desire to get rid of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy and all its pomp and ceremony. That is what led to much of the violence that followed the Reformation, including the English Civil War. In England, Henry VIII had liquidated the monasteries and established the Church of England. But that was really just his own personal version of the Catholic Church, one that would do whatever he wanted. It was a harbinger of the fact that the kings of Europe were slowly getting the upper hand over the church in Rome.

The Puritan reformers later objected to this, not because the church had become a servant of the state, but because it still had the old Catholic hierarchy with too much of a focus on rites of passage, etc. Cromwell and his men gutted the church only for the Restoration to bring the inevitable backlash. A number of thinkers, such as John Locke, started to wonder out loud whether it wouldn’t be better if politics and religion really should just be kept separate. As with so many of Locke’s ideas, this one was eagerly adopted by the American colonists who added it to their constitution. In Britain, there was more of a pragmatic truce which amounted to the Church of England becoming a kind of moral policeman on behalf of the state. In reality, true religious belief was already waning and being replaced by Enlightenment theories of reason.

The upshot of all this was that religion became a mostly private matter in accordance with the Protestant idea of a direct connection with the divine. By allowing direct access to the Bible and therefore opening up its interpretation, the Reformation eventually gave birth to numerous Protestant denominations, each with a slightly different take on the holy book. Religion had ended up transitioning away from the exoteric world of deeds and actions and into the esoteric world of ideology.

Now, if we think back again to Rome, the Romans were almost the inversion of the Protestants in that they emphasised the rites of passage as the markers of religious identity. Literacy rates in Roman times were in single digit percentages, so reading a holy book was not an option for most people anyway. A Roman solidified their religious identity by carrying out the rites of passage required of them. Romans couldn’t care less what you thought about the rites, only that you did them. Thus, the marker of religious identity in Roman times was exoteric, based on external actions. By contrast, the marker of religious identity in the modern West after the Reformation came to be ideologically based. It mattered not that you carried out the rites of the church but that you believed such and such an interpretation of the Bible, or at least professed to believe it.

And this has come to be true of politics too. Modern political parties are made up of factions of people unified not by any rite of passage or formal criteria but by professed allegiance to a set of ideological positions. The same is true for our economic identities too. When we join a new company as employees, there are some things that might loosely be called rites of passage that take place, but largely our membership is based on the fact that we will contribute to the professed mission of the company.

The initial shift towards esoteric forms of religious identity has now given birth to a world where ideology is main marker of identity more generally. That is true of us as individuals and it is true of the institutions of society. Now we’re ready to join the dots and see why politics and science have become religion. We’ll explore that more in next week’s post.

Let’s begin by recalling our table that maps the esoteric-exoteric distinction against the levels of being:

Exoteric	Esoteric
Higher esoteric	Higher esoteric
Socio-cultural	Socio-cultural
Biological	Biological

Each of these distinctions can be thought of as a component of our identity. That is, our identity has an exoteric, outward-facing aspect and an esoteric, inward-facing aspect. We can think about identity creation as a continuous feedback loop that not only moves back and forth between the rows but can also jump up to other levels of being. Driven by some inner desire, we act in the world, and then the consequences of those actions may trigger new esoteric states.

For example, let’s say there’s a person who is addicted to eating but who knows they have a problem. They feel the need to eat (not because of hunger, but addiction) and then eat to excess. This makes them feel ashamed and having yet again been unable to control themselves. If that loop repeats itself enough, shame may turn into despair, and despair may motivate more extreme actions in the outer world. (This is less likely with food addictions but definitely relevant to more dangerous addictions).

When we model identity creation in this fashion as a set of relationships between different aspects of our character, some important insights become apparent. For example, consider each row in the table and then ask the question, Which scholarly discipline is dedicated to it? For the biological row, this is straightforward. Biology is the discipline in question. But note that biology is only concerned with the exoteric side of the equation. It studies what can be known from outward appearance. It is not concerned with the subjective experience of biological processes like hunger, thirst, cold, etc. The inner aspects our biological identity have been left out of scope of the discipline of biology.

The same is true of our socio-cultural identity, which includes the disciplines of economics, political science, anthropology, and sociology. But all of these are concerned with outward behaviours and not with inward states. An economist wants to know how resources are allocated and tries to measure economic variables such as production, inflation, and unemployment. The other disciplines in question are also concerned with what can be measured and, therefore, with the exoteric column and not the esoteric.

Modern economics is particularly interesting in this respect since it not only ignores the esoteric aspect; it builds a theoretical framework based on an assumption about the esoteric that makes no sense. Economics recognises that economic activity is driven by human needs and wants (esoteric), and yet it assumes those needs and wants are infinite. But human life is finite. How can we have infinite wants in a finite life? The economic doctrine of scarcity is born out of this assumption, since if wants are infinite, there can never be enough time or money to satisfy them. Modern economics also fails to recognise the hierarchy of wants implied by the levels of being and therefore does not account for the fact that the desire for self-actualisation may require no resources at all and therefore be infinitely attainable. It requires no resources to fall in love, for example.

But economics is not alone in this ignorance of the esoteric dimension of existence. We see the exact same problem in political science, anthropology, and sociology. All of these pay no attention to the esoteric side of the equation since that would make their discipline subjective, and science is supposed to be objective. As a result, there is no science of the esoteric aspects of our biological, economic, political, or even military identities. These are ruled out a priori by the assumptions of modern science.

As a result, in modern Western culture, the esoteric parts of existence have been left to the artists, writers, and philosophers to deal with. Since biology has not been a traditional subject matter of the arts, we have almost no representation of inner biological states in either science or art. This includes things like hunger and thirst but, more interestingly, feelings of ill health.

There are all kinds of interesting questions to ask here. What does it feel like to be sick? What symptoms are common across illnesses? Is there any difference in the severity or quality of those symptoms? Another relatively unexplored area is the nature of sensation. How do the tastes of things differ, or the smells of them? What are the qualities of vision or hearing? What differences exist in the sensory experience of touch? Within our schema, all of these belong to the esoteric aspect of the biological level of being.

Although the biological has been ignored, the esoteric aspects of the socio-cultural level of being have been a primary subject matter for art, literature, and philosophy since these equate to important matters of politics, economics, and war. But even then, there is a huge split between the exoteric and esoteric investigations. Historians, economists, and political scientists focus on objective representations of external events. Such-and-such a war happened. Such-and-such a battle swung the war this way or that. Such-and-such a ruler was defeated and removed from power. These all belong to the exoteric side of the equation.

The esoteric side of the equation is left to the artists and writers, who explore the motivations behind war and other political disputes. Why did the war start in the first place? What were the motivations of the rulers? Why were the public so enthusiastic about it, or why did they not want to fight? These are questions that could be asked and yet never really get answered. Political disputes are treated much like illness in that their subjective aspects are presumed to be not amenable to explanation. Is that actually true, or has nobody ever tried?

We might expect more attention to be paid to the esoteric motivations of the ruling class, since they play a disproportionate role in political matters and are easier to study. Shakespeare explores such themes numerous times in his plays, especially in Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Richard III. Richard III is the true psychopath that will do whatever it takes to gain power and feels not the slightest remorse. Hamlet is almost his opposite. He is a young man who should take power but lacks the decisiveness to do so. Othello applies the logic of power to his marriage, and it ends up destroying both himself and Desdemona. Macbeth is perhaps the most interesting because he has honourably served his king Duncan, but cannot resist the temptation to take power when the opportunity presents itself. Nevertheless, Shakespeare shows us that Macbeth is hesitant before the act and then suffers afterwards.

As magnificent as Shakespeare’s plays are as an exploration of the attainment of power, they don’t really explore the interaction between the esoteric and exoteric aspects of politics or war. The plots of his stories don’t revolve around any specific political issues. Thus, there is no real connection between the exoteric and the esoteric in his stories. They are first and foremost psychological investigations.

Thus, we have ended up in a situation where science explores the exoteric side of life, while art and literature explores the esoteric side, and never the twain shall meet. We don’t have a model of the feedback loop that occurs between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of human existence.

But, more broadly, there is still a big imbalance between the exoteric and esoteric. Science is still the dominant source of “truth” and science is focused on the exoteric. There were signs in the 19th and 20th centuries that this imbalance might begin to be corrected. The arrival of psychoanalysis was one. In my opinion, Freud and Jung’s more speculative work in anthropology (Freud) and even theology (Jung) was their most interesting. Although he drank way too much of the Wagnerian kool-aid, Spengler’s work provided an example of esoteric historical scholarship. There was Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, which was interested in some of the issues we discussed earlier, such as the subjective feelings of illness. Meanwhile, anthropology and sociology toyed with what was called “qualitative analysis,” which, in our terms, meant esoteric investigation.

All of these were positive developments that occurred prior to WW2 and then were snuffed out afterwards. Even psychoanalysis, which started off so positively, has turned into modern psychology, which now models every mental issue as a bio-chemical problem to be addressed by the administration of medication. All that esoteric stuff took too long, so now we just jab people with needles to get the result we want more quickly.

We see much the same pattern in the recent developments around the trans debate, especially as it relates to the surgical and pharmaceutical interventions required for people to change gender. Using our exoteric-esoteric distinction, we can see that the gender change concept is all about the exoteric side of the equation. This includes innocuous things like the application of make-up and hairstyling, but has more recently incorporated interventions such as implants, injections, and other surgical procedures. Together with the correct application of socio-cultural identity markers like clothing, these enable a change of gender in the exoteric sense.

But much like modern economists write off the esoteric side of their discipline by simply assuming that humans have infinite wants, so too is the esoteric side of the trans issue almost completely ignored. The assertion is that an individual simply feels like a man or a woman, and that is enough justification to have medical professionals running for the scalpel and the syringe. The question that never gets addressed is, “What does it actually feel like to be a man/woman?”

There’s a song whose title indicates it might provide an answer to exactly this question. It’s called “Man, I feel like a woman,” and was a big hit for Shania Twain about twenty years ago. Could we find an answer here to the question of what it feels like to be a woman? Well, not really.

The best thing about bein’ a woman
Is the prerogative to have a little fun and
Oh, oh, oh, go totally crazy, forget I’m a lady
Men’s shirts, short skirts
Oh, oh, oh, really go wild, yeah, doin’ it in style
Oh, oh, oh, get in the action, feel the attraction
Color my hair, do what I dare
Oh, oh, oh, I wanna be free, yeah, to feel the way I feel
Man, I feel like a woman (hey!)

Now, we shouldn’t expect much from a pop song, but the absence of even a single definitive esoteric quality of womanhood in the lyrics is indicative of a larger problem. How could we know what it feels like to be a woman, or a man for that matter? If we can’t answer that question, how could we ever verify when somebody says that they feel like one or the other? How could anybody know for themselves what they feel like?

The reality is, we are living in a culture which simply doesn’t care about the esoteric side of life. The economist states that gender surgery is just another of the infinite number of humans needs that contributes to the GDP. The medical professional is more concerned with performing the operation correctly than whether its esoteric motivation is justified. There’s a giant black hole where the esoteric aspects of existence should be. To make things even worse, the existential consequences of this absence of esoteric understanding are then weaponised by politicians who pretend to care. That’s why we end up with identity politics and all the variations on wokeness, which has increasingly amounted to nothing more than the insistence that anybody should get whatever they want just because they want it.

This is the unholy alliance between capitalism and liberalism that has dominated our culture in the post-war years, and which has reached new heights of absurdity in the last few decades. Both have ended up in a position of assuming infinite wants which are qualitatively indistinguishable. Economics assumes it because it enables things to be measured monetarily. A dollar spent on one thing is the same as a dollar spent on any other thing. Liberalism assumes infinite wants because for somebody to assert that there really are qualitative differences would be “authoritarianism”. Both of these are predicated on a wilful ignorance of the esoteric side of life.

Now, still we haven’t really addressed the topic which motivated this series of posts in the first place, which is why economics and politics have become a religion. But this post has started to hint at the answer. It lies in the disconnection between the esoteric and exoteric aspects of existence. Whatever one wants to say about Christianity, it had an explicit model that accounted for both body and soul. Thomas Aquinas, for example, emphasised the harmonious relation between the esoteric and exoteric. The decline in Christianity as an active force in the culture has left science in charge. But science has no integral or holistic approach to the esoteric-exoteric distinction. In fact, as we have seen, science all but ignores the esoteric. Without any notion of esoteric truth, the esoteric side of our culture has become increasingly hysterical.

We’ll explore these themes more in next week’s post.

At the end of last week’s post, we combined the esoteric-exoteric distinction and mapped it against the three levels of being to end up with the following table:- 

Exoteric	Esoteric
Higher esoteric	Higher esoteric
Socio-cultural	Socio-cultural
Biological	Biological

What this means is that every level of being has both an inner-facing (esoteric) and an outer-facing (exoteric) aspect. Another way to think about it is that the esoteric aspect is what we know subjectively, and the exoteric aspect is what we know objectively.

For those familiar with Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, our right-hand column maps almost exactly onto the hierarchy. We can represent that as follows:-

Exoteric	Esoteric (Maslow’s needs)
Higher esoteric	Self-Actualisation
Socio-cultural	Intimate relationships, friendships, accomplishment, prestige
Biological	Food, warmth, water, rest

However, the way I prefer to think about these matters is not in terms of needs, but in terms of identity. Our identity consists of both the esoteric and exoteric aspects of our lives. Furthermore, the concept of identity allows for a more positive, creative form of interpretation. We don’t just satisfy our biological need for food by eating anything. We choose to eat certain foods. These are part of our identity, not through capriciousness or vanity (although those can be factors), but because our preferences are expressions of our individuality.

Society offers us a set of default scripts that we follow. Some of these suit us and some don’t. Learning to understand and express our true needs, even basic biological ones, is actually a form of self-actualisation. We want to eat this kind of food and live in this kind of house. We need this kind of rest cycle to be at our peak performance. These are expressions of identity, not just needs.

The same goes for relationships, friendships, jobs, clubs, and other social aspects of our lives. When we are young, we take whatever we can get. It’s better to be friends with anyone than to be alone. It’s better to have some kind of love and affection than none at all. These can fulfil our basic needs, but the expression of identity implies that we have some kind of choice in the matter. We don’t just hang around with anyone; we hang around with our people. We aren’t just in a romantic relationship for the sake of it, but because we actually care for the other person. We don’t just take any job, but one that we have some interest in.

Interestingly, it seems that one of the best ways to transcend the needs-frame and step into the identity-frame is to deliberately go without the fulfilment of needs. The negation of needs seems to facilitate a proper understanding of them. Are you really hungry, or are you just eating because you always eat at this time of day? One way to find out is to fast. Those who have tried fasting know that what happens is that you get beyond the period when you thought you needed food (i.e., you were hungry), and then there’s a long period when you are not hungry at all. In fact, it can happen that you feel much better—lighter, more energetic, tense, and wired in a good way; ready for action. On the other side of what you thought was a need is something very different than you expected.

The same idea can be used in relation to social companionship. Do we really need to be around others all the time? Is it dangerous to be alone? One way to find out is to do the equivalent of a social fast and just be alone for a long period of time and see what happens. Chances are you’ll learn a lot about yourself that you didn’t know. You might learn that many of the thoughts in your head are not your own thoughts at all but just those of the people you hang around with. Maybe those thoughts will start to seem a lot less real once you’ve sat with them alone for a while.

This experimental negation of needs is a core feature of religious practices from a variety of different cultures. We might hypothesise that the way to get to self-actualisation is to negate needs and thereby to turn them into identity. Often this can happen to us by accident as we are forced by circumstances to negate our needs, but the various religious practices are about consciously pursuing the same idea.

That accounts for the esoteric side of the equation. The exoteric side is more commonly associated with the concept of identity because our outward appearance is what really signals our place in the world and hence our identity.

One exoteric aspect of our biological existence is our phenotype. It includes our body type, our eye, hair, and skin colour, the way we walk, the way we talk, and other physical attributes. Meanwhile, an exoteric aspect of our socio-cultural identity includes everything that represents our place in society. Our style of speaking and accent are strong markers that we belong to a particular class or geographical grouping. Our choice of clothing is another big factor here, which signals socio-cultural group membership. Where we live, where we work, and who we hang around with—these are all exoteric socio-cultural markers of identity.

Because humans are social animals, a big part of our identity comes from our membership in social institutions. Almost by definition, institutions belong to the exoteric side of life, but they are also an expression of the esoteric. We can call the institutions whose purpose is to satisfy the biological requirements for food and shelter economic. The economy is how we satisfy our need for food, water, warmth, shelter, etc. It is the work we do to provide those things and the organisations we belong to in order to carry out that work.

For most of history, people satisfied most of their biological needs themselves. The organisation that carried out the work was the family or kinship groups. In fact, the word economy comes from the Greek oikonomia, which meant “household management”. In this case, we might say that the family is the institution for the provision of biological needs. In ancient Rome, the meaning of the word domus (household) included the servants and slaves who did much of the work of production (the word dominate comes from the same meaning).

For the Greeks and Romans, the public sphere was sharply distinguished from the economic sphere of the household. The public sphere was the domain of politics in the broadest sense. In Greek, polites meant citizen, and polis meant city. Since citizenship was synonymous with military service, the institutions of public life were political and military in nature, including the educational institutions that prepared young men (it was only men) for citizenship. Thus, we would say that the socio-cultural domain was primarily about political and military institutions.

In the modern West, of course, we have removed and continue to remove economic production out of the household and into the social sphere. Thus, our economic identity now revolves around the institutions outside of the home where we work. In doing so, we have very much blurred the line between economy and politics, to the extent that it’s impossible to know where one ends and the other begins. This is true in the very straightforward sense that politicians and public servants freely move between the nominally public and private spheres.

Despite all this, we still have the exoteric side of our identity tied up in the economic, political, military, and all the other associations we may enter into. We may be a professional who works for a corporation, is a Labour Party member, an army reservist, a supporter of such-and-such a football team etc etc.

However, one of the biggest social changes in the post-war years has been the radical reduction in the importance of membership of formal institutions for our identity. Take religion as an example. Once upon a time, it was a big deal whether you were an Irish Catholic, a Roman Catholic, or some denomination of Protestant. Young boys (and sometimes grown men) used to fight each other in the streets over the issue. Your career prospects and choice of marriage partners were not unrelated to your religion. Similarly, you probably worked for the same company for decades, if not your whole life. You were probably a member of the same political party for life.

The big change in the post-war years has been the loss of importance of exoteric membership of institutions as a marker of identity. This has been true across the board. We may work for whichever company we like. We may vote for whichever party we like. We may choose whichever religion we like. If our older choices no longer suits us, we just change institutions. With the declining mportance of exoteric considerations, our identity is now far more determined by the esoteric side of the equation.

These trends didn’t just come out of nowhere, of course. In fact, the shift to the esoteric really began with the Reformation and its rejection of what at the time must have seemed like the exoteric institution par excellence: the Catholic Church. The Protestants rejected not just the corruption of the church but the validity of exoteric membership in general. They claimed that the connection with the divine could only come through a direct, esoteric connection with God.

The shift we have seen in the post-war years has taken a secular form that is very similar to the Protestant theology. It says that we should now be free to create our identity in whichever way we please. We no longer receive our identity from membership in the exoteric institutions of society, we will tell those institutions what our identity is and they must oblige us.

Now that we understand the general cultural backdrop against which these changes have taken place, we are ready to connect the dots and come back to the question of why science and politics have become “religion”, especially in recent decades. That’s the question we’ll turn to next week.