Category: Ideas

Now that my upcoming introductory book on archetypology is in the last stages of preparation for release (thank god!), I thought it might be worth spending a post or three outlining some of the main elements of the model. To a large extent, the model is the refinement of the ideas I’ve been developing over the past several years. One of the main motivations for that work has been to account for the dominance of psychology in modern politics, especially public political discourse. Another way to look at the same dynamic is the idea that politics and science have become “religions”.

Of course, the question we never ask about statements like “politics has become a religion” is why we think that politics and religion should be independent in the first place. If we look at anthropological and historical studies, we find that very few societies have the idea that politics and religion should be separate. For example, in pre-Reformation Europe, the Catholic Church had its own army, levied taxes, and passed laws. Many of its functions were those we would now associate with the bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state. For centuries, nobody had a problem with that, and nobody had a problem with it in ancient Rome where the Church had its origins.

This raises the question: what is the difference between the medieval Catholic Church and the modern bureaucratic state? We like to say that one of the big differences is that religion plays no role in the modern bureaucratic state. But is that really true? Doesn’t the modern bureaucratic state have its own set of ideals that it works by? And isn’t the modern bureaucratic state fully prepared to coerce those who don’t agree with those ideals (cough, cough, covid, cough, cough) just like the Catholic Church did? At an abstract level, is there any difference between the set of ideals and beliefs of the modern bureaucratic state and those of the Catholic Church or any other religion?

To answer that question, we need a conceptual model that can compare and contrast between these two systems. The discipline of anthropology would be the natural place to start, but we would also need a model that can incorporate the psychological aspects. This is especially relevant to modern Western culture where psychology dominates politics. There is a reason why psychoanalysis and modern psychology had to be invented in the West. Our turn away from the formal aspects of politics and religion, which began with the Reformation, has pushed the underlying issues more and more into the psychological realm.

To begin building our model, we take two concepts that relate directly to this distinction between the psychological and anthropological ways of looking at the world. The first concept is called the esoteric. Esoteric comes from the ancient Greek, where it simply means “within” or “inner”. By esoteric, we denote all the properties of human existence that are concerned with inner states. This includes things like emotions, feelings, and thoughts, since these are inner phenomena that are not directly visible to the outside world. The esoteric also includes beliefs and mental models about the world, including political and religious beliefs. Thus, the broad category of esoteric incorporates the disciplines of psychology alongside philosophy and theology.

The second concept we need is another Greek word that means the opposite of esoteric. Exoteric means “outer” or “external”. The exoteric aspects of human life are all those things that can be seen by a third-party observer. This includes our physical appearance, such as hair, eye and skin colour, body type, height, and weight. It also includes the markers of our social status, such as the clothes we wear, our accent and vocabulary, where we live, etc. In relation to our beliefs about the world, the exoteric markers of those beliefs include the rites and ceremonies that we partake in and any symbolic markers on our body or our possessions.

By itself, the esoteric-exoteric distinction is a useful analytical tool when applied to both individuals and cultures. A person who keeps to themselves and has a rich inner life can be described as esoteric (introverted) as opposed to those social butterflies who live exoterically (extroverts). We can characterise cultures in the same way. Ancient Greece and Rome were exoteric in nature. The Romans in particular were very tolerant of the religions of other cultures, but only if those religions was practiced exoterically, as Roman religion was. The one thing the Romans did not like was secretive (esoteric) religious practices, and they tended to clamp down on those. Similarly, Roman and Greek politics was exoteric in nature. Democratic voting in ancient Greece, for example, was conducted by a public show of hands rather than a secret ballot in most cases.

By contrast, modern Western culture has become progressively more esoteric. In the religious sphere, this originally manifested in the Protestant rejection of the exoteric rites and ceremonies of the Catholic Church in favour of a direct esoteric connection with the divine. Meanwhile, pre-democratic European politics was mostly conducted behind closed doors, and even in the democratic era we find the need for concepts like the “deep state” or the “shadow government” to explain how politics actually works.

Although the esoteric-exoteric distinction is useful in and of itself, it does tend to coagulate a great many other concepts that we would normally want to keep separate. For example, we would normally want to analyse a philosophy or underlying belief structure separately from emotions such as sadness, joy, or anxiety, even though all these technically belong to the esoteric realm of human existence. If we want to answer the question that we began this post with (“Why has politics and science become religion?”), we need to be able to distinguish different aspects of our exoteric and esoteric existence so that we can identify the relationships that exist within and across these broad categories. To do that, we will need a second set of concepts.

Now, I’ve been trying to find good names for these categories for the best part of two years. What I’ve been hoping to do is to create labels that don’t have a lot of ideological baggage around them. That is possible, but it’s easy to swing to the other extreme of having labels that are either overly vague or trivial. Anyway, what I’ve ended up with is a three-part distinction based on the levels of being (or great chain of being) concept that goes back to antiquity. This gives us the three categories of biological, socio-cultural, and higher esoteric. Importantly, each of these has an exoteric and an esoteric aspect. This gives us six combinations as follows:-

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

The astute reader may have noted that the top-right term is a pleonasm—the higher esoteric is already esoteric. That is true, but I’ve come to think of this as a feature, not a bug, of the classification system. What is the higher esoteric? It is both “above” and “inner”. It is the most important domain of our esoteric existence. Therein lies a value judgement, of course, which says that the higher esoteric (whatever that is) is superior to the biological and socio-cultural esoteric.

We won’t attempt to justify that position in this post. We simply note that what the levels of the being concept adds to our classification system is that there are differences between the esoteric states that are related to the biological sphere (hunger, thirst, cold), those related to the socio-cultural sphere (shame, guilt, happiness), and those related to the higher-esoteric (spiritual ecstasy and terror). The same goes for the exoteric domain too. In next week’s post, we’ll flesh out these distinctions in more detail, and then we’ll be ready to apply them to the problem of why modern Western culture has taken a big jump into the esoteric.

I haven’t had time to write a post this week as I’ve been focusing on the final edit of my upcoming book Archetypology, Volume 1: The Archetypal Study of Human Nature (note: it better be the “final” edit or I’m going to cry!) For those who are interested, this is the front cover:-

Also, I’ve decided to try X (formerly twitter) again. I haven’t had the time to post or do much of anything yet, but will be rectifying that when the book is done. For any X users, this is my account – https://x.com/SimonJSheridan

See youse next week!

Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, or should I say, better than fiction, more entertaining, and more full of meaningful symbolism and crazy coincidences. What are the odds that the main mechanism for laundering money from the US government would be called USAID? It’s just asking to have an “s” added to the end, which is exactly what some wags on the internet did as the story blew up in the last couple of weeks thanks to Elon Musk and his team of computer nerds cutting off the money supply. I doubt that the jokesters know just how accurate the USAIDS moniker is. So, let’s tell a story. It’s a true one, too.

So, there’s this scientist called Kary Mullis who, I must admit, is exactly my kind of guy: an iconoclastic, fun-loving truth seeker. If I was going to write a science fiction novel with a comedic twist, I’d make somebody like Kary Mullis the hero. In between surfing, experimenting with drugs, and picking up chicks, he’d uncover the secrets of the universe.

Eventually, Mullis wound up in the biomedical industry and saw a lot of the shenanigans (read “fraud”) with his own eyes. While working at one of those companies, he invented the Polymerase Chain Procedure (PCR). He later won the Nobel Prize for his troubles. The PCR was never designed as a diagnostic tool for viral disease, but since Mullis invented the thing, he was hired in the 80s to use the PCR to research how HIV caused AIDS. At the time, Mullis was not an “AIDS denier” (or a climate denier, anti-vaxxer, transphobe, conspiracy theorist, anti-whatever-phobe-denier-theorist). No doubt he took the gig because it paid well, and who wouldn’t want to work on what was then one of the biggest issues of the day?

So, Mullis gets to work, but his employment is covered by grant money from the US government which requires some kind of regular progress reports. At the beginning of a report, Mullis writes the statement “HIV causes AIDS” but, as a good professional scientist, he knows that he needs to cite a reference for such a statement. He goes looking for the scientific paper that is the gold standard which definitely proves that HIV causes AIDS. He can’t find it. This is all happening in the days before the internet, and so Mullis takes the old-fashioned route of calling up people he knows in the virology field and asking them where to find the paper. None of them know. Eventually, Mullis personally meets with the virologists who have publicly claimed that HIV causes AIDS and asks them for the reference to the paper. Not only do they not know, but they are also clearly uncomfortable with the question. Mullis never finds the paper that proves that HIV causes AIDS, because it doesn’t exist. Apparently, he was the only “scientist” who had a problem with that.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There was at least one other scientist who also had a problem with it, and if this whole story really was a fictional comedy, he and Mullis would be a perfect odd-couple pairing. Mullis is the quintessential American scientist in the mould of Richard Feynman: iconoclastic, fun-loving, sociable, good with the ladies.

Duesberg starts to realise that the whole HIV causes AIDS theory doesn’t make sense, and the more he digs into it, the less sense it makes. At the beginning, Duesberg’s contribution is limited to just asking some simple, straightforward questions of the theory. He gets brushed off in the same manner that Mullis did. But Duesberg is a virologist himself, and so he has many more opportunities to ask questions of the right people, including at scholarly conferences. The gentle brushing-off response starts to be replaced by something more aggressive. Duesberg doesn’t like that. He’s also noticed that a lot of these American scientists seem to be very wealthy. The ones who are speaking loudly on the subject just happen to have various copyrights and patents on the technology that is now being purchased with the government money that is being thrown at the “AIDS problem”. A lot of people and corporations are making out like bandits. What’s more, the whole thing is a boon for virology in general, which is now swimming in government grants. Even the virologists who are not actively involved don’t appreciate Duesberg threatening to kill the golden goose.

Most people at this point would have gotten the message and just dropped the whole thing. But Duesberg’s got that really annoying habit of preferring truth over money. This is back in the 80s, when the US mainstream media was not as in the pocket of monied interests as it is now. Duesberg gets himself interviewed on some pretty well-known media outlets. At that point he has crossed the line and openly challenged the virological powers-that-be. To cut a long story short, they proceed to destroy his career and reputation. Bear in mind, the very same people who were controlling the government purse strings were the ones who were pocketing a lot of the money, either directly or indirectly.

Sound familiar? It should. AIDS was very much the template for USAIDS, a heady mix of corrupt science and greedy capitalism. But most importantly, the whole thing was government-funded, squillions of dollars just waiting to be released like water out of a dam spillway. All you needed to do was convince the politicians and bureaucrats to open the gate. How do you do that? By creating public hysteria. Convince the public that they’re literally going to die and allow the politicians and scientists to become the heroes who are going to save the day.

In one respect, Mullis and Duesberg were wrong. (US)AIDS is a disease. It’s also not inaccurate to call it a viral disease. It’s not a disease of the body, however, but of the body politic. One of its main symptoms is when real scientists get their careers and reputations destroyed for speaking the truth.

It occurred to me during the week that it’s pretty much exactly five years since the Covid madness took hold. That in turn was about five years after Trump announced what would eventually become his successful presidential campaign. And now, of course, he’s back. It’s a fascinating collection of five-year blocks:-

2015: Trump begins presidential campaign
2020: Covid “pandemic”
2025: Trump admin part 2

Reminds me of the initial Star Wars trilogy:

Star Wars: A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi

This time around, Trump has actually assembled a team that seems to be a threat to the empire. What’s more, they seem to know what they are doing. Maybe they really can find and destroy the Death Star’s main reactor.

What has particularly interested me about Trump Mark 2 is the implications for the collection of societal forces that I have labelled the Devouring Mother. At the head of the list would be the effect on the Munchausen-by-Proxy-as-a-Service “health industry”. Trump has once again withdrawn US funding for the WHO and seems to be intent on cutting off a lot of other money streams to the various “NGOs”. If he follows through with that, that’ll be a hell of a lot less money for interests aligned to the “health industry”. Extra bad news for Big Pharma would be if RFK Junior gets his position at the head of the Department of Health. Some readers might remember that RFK was one of the few mainstream voices that spoke out against the Covid debacle from the start. That’s poetic justice in my book.

There was an even more telling exchange just yesterday that might seem trivial and yet goes right to the heart of the Devouring Mother phenomenon. Some journalist dug up a couple of inappropriate social media posts by one of the young men who is working with DOGE to find all the dodgy payments that have been getting made by various government departments, including this one to fund a Fauci exhibit at the NIH museum. More poetic justice!

Anyway, the DOGE employee was fired but then promptly rehired, which prompted this tweet exchange between JD Vance and a member of Congress:

What’s crucial about Vance’s post is that it’s as close to a direct repudiation as you can get to what has been the main tactic the Devouring Mother used for years, if not decades, to not just shut down public debate but destroy political opposition. Won’t somebody think of the children? If Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy, then Appeal to the Children is the Devouring Mother’s raison d’etre.

Vance’s reply calls out the behaviour exactly as it is. “Emotional blackmail pretending to be concern” is the perfect description of the Devouring Mother’s modus operandi. When applied to her actual children, the point of this blackmail is to win compliance. The emotional blackmail angle works because it paints the Devouring Mother herself as the precious petal who will wilt and die if the children don’t do exactly what she wants. It’s the same deal in the political realm. Weaponised empathy is used to get others to give you what you want just so they can appear to be good people by not being cruel to a less powerful person (which is why everybody wants to be a victim nowadays. Nobody wants to be seen to hurt somebody who’s already a victim).

If that was all there was, Vance’s tweet would already have been a watershed. But he backed it up with a further point about the idea of children making mistakes and growing as a result. That also goes to the heart of the issue because the Devouring Mother does not want her children to grow. She wants to keep them dependent. Turning petty incidents into a matter for shame and punishment is one of the main ways to do that. It prevents the child from taking risks and thereby learning and growing. This is especially poignant because right now a lot of Americans are learning just how corrupt their government is.

It’s hard to imagine a more concise repudiation of the Devouring Mother tactics than Vance’s post. Given the amount of discussion it generated, it may turn out to be just another little sign that the zeitgeist really is changing fast. Could this be the end of the Devouring Mother?

On a related note, I’ve been pondering the idea that was pushed way back at the start of Covid that natural immunity didn’t apply to the “new” virus. Again, this is a classic Munchausen-by-Proxy tactic since it makes you think that you’ll always be sick and always in need of mummy to help you. Of course, it was never explained why all of a sudden natural immunity didn’t exist. But then again, nothing was ever explained satisfactorily with Covid. It was just asserted by hysterical people trying to shut down debate.

It’s occurred to me that maybe the people who pushed that line really do believe their own bullshit. There’s good reasons why they should. Denying natural immunity is equivalent to denying that life evolves, which is a comforting thought if, deep down, you’re really worried that the cookie jar is going to get taken away.

If you’re a Big Pharma marketing guru trying to convince parents that their children really do need 437 vaccine shots before their first birthday, then you want it to be true that natural immunity doesn’t exist. More metaphorically, if you’re a propagandist with the MSM whose job is to control the minds of the populace according to whatever the government wants this week, you really hope that there’s no such thing as immunity to propaganda.

But I suspect these kinds of people do know that natural immunity is a real thing and that people’s immune systems do eventually catch up with the mind viruses that have been used against them. Could it be that we are approaching herd immunity to the Devouring Mother? It’s early days, but it certainly feels a lot like convalescence to me.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how the government here in Australia is addicted to inflation since it is using something called “value capture” to finance infrastructure projects. That, of course, is just one example of the trickery that’s going on. We’ve been in a period of hidden inflation for several decades now, which finally spilled over into official inflation as a result of the covid debacle. The government’s response here has been to use public money to artificially reduce the official inflation statistics.

If I’m understanding the strategy correctly, we’re going into debt to reduce official inflation so that interest rates will go down so the interest on the increased debt will go down. This doesn’t sound like a winning strategy. In fact, it sounds like the strategy of the drug addict. It occurred to me that the analogy with drug addiction is actually more precise than I thought, and it’s worth sketching out the full cycle of addiction to know how we ended up where we are.

Now, obviously, different drugs have different effects. But the general principle that applies is that drugs increase dopamine in the body. Most people know dopamine is the feel-good neurotransmitter. It is a messenger molecule, and we can think of the exchange of dopamine as a transaction just like an economic transaction that involves the exchange of money.

Taking a drug causes a spike in the level of dopamine, which is why it feels good. In essence, though, you didn’t deserve that dopamine. The pleasant feelings didn’t come from activities that are beneficial, like finding and eating food, having sex, or achieving something. You just took a chemical. One of the problems with drugs is that they replace a positive sequence of events Do Something Good –> Feel Good with what is at best a neutral sequence Take Chemical –> Feel Good.

But the main problem with drugs is that they almost never remain neutral because the drug itself causes the entire system to change. The dopamine receptors in the brain are calibrated to the “natural” settings, meaning that they expect normal amounts of dopamine. The high from any drug comes from the extra amount of dopamine introduced into the system as a function of time. It’s the sudden spike that causes the problem.

Natural systems are incredibly adaptive, and the human body is a prime example. If the human body was not adaptive, you could just keep taking the drug and receiving the same high every time. You’d still get into trouble, however, because the cells of the body cannot handle the amounts of dopamine you’re throwing at them, and so they’ll just cease to function at some point. That’s why the system recalibrates to protect itself. It adapts to expect sudden spikes of dopamine.

This has two main effects. Firstly, the high that comes from the drug is reduced. Secondly, and more importantly, because the system has recalibrated itself to be less receptive to dopamine, everyday dopamine levels no longer do their job of mood regulation, meaning that the drug user’s general mood worsens. This combination can set off a positive feedback loop that leads to addiction if the user tries to make up for feeling bad by taking the drug to feel better. The system keeps recalibrating to desensitise itself, meaning you need more of the drug to get less of the high.

When we look at how money works in the economy, its function is incredibly similar to dopamine, and the same dynamic holds as with drug use. Let’s say you have an economy that’s in good shape and the money supply is 100 million. Out of nowhere, you pump in 10 million. Traditionally, this was done through discoveries of gold, such as the Spanish in South America. Nowadays, it’s done through a variety of measures that all amount to an increase in fiat currency. Part of the problem with that is that it happens invisibly like the junkie hiding away in the darkened room to get their fix.

The result of the extra 10 million is the same as the dopamine hit you get from a drug. It’s great the first time because the system is still calibrated to the natural state of the economy with its 100 million unit money supply. Whoever has possession of the extra 10 million can go out and buy lots of stuff, and they feel good. After they’ve spent the 10 million, however, the system recalibrates since there are now 110 million units of currency sloshing around but no extra supply of goods and services. Just like the dopamine receptors of the drug user’s body become less sensitive to the same amount of dopamine, the monetary receptors in the economy become less sensitive to the same amount of currency.

Once the initial high has worn off, the overall economic mood is depressed since the same amount of money now buys less. In response to that general depression, the leaders of society may be tempted to do what the drug user does and go back for a second hit of free money to solve the problem. If that becomes a habit, you get an economic downward spiral that’s almost identical to a drug addict.

And it’s that downward spiral that most western nations are nearing the end of right now. The actions of the Australian government are not really any different than most other countries. They are the final desperate scramblings of the drug addict who will do anything for one more fix. Which is why, to say it again, we are governed by junkies/zombies.