Category: Ideas

A couple of weeks ago, I put out an invitation for readers to partake in a short online study group about how to interpret stories, using Shakespeare’s classic King Lear as the text. This was an idea that had been in the back of my mind for some time, but I hadn’t fleshed it out in any great detail. So, I decided I should actually sit down and put some structure to it.

As part of that exercise, I thought I should check to see if somebody else has already thought of something similar. Given the ubiquity of stories in our lives, especially the stories of Shakespeare, which are taught in every high school, somebody must have written a useful guide on interpretation. I spent more than an hour searching online and was quite stunned by the poor quality of what is available. Even well-known literary critics like Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye miss some themes that to me are very obvious. The question is, why are there no good guides on understanding stories, even for the works of Shakespeare?

I’d already half-guessed the answer to this by realising that there is no academic discipline dedicated to the study of stories, but I hadn’t fully grasped the reason for this. Now, I think I’ve finally got it.

The first thing to note is that telling stories is an everyday activity. Everybody does it without even thinking. This seems to be a universal of human culture and must be innate in the same way as language itself. We need no formal instruction to acquire our native tongue, and we need no education on telling stories. We just do it.

However, scholarly disciplines such as literature and literary criticism have not concerned themselves with this everyday kind of storytelling. Rather, they have focused their attention on the stories told by novelists, poets, playwrights, etc. In short, they study art. Art is concerned with fictional stories, while the everyday stories that all of us tell are almost always real things that happened. Stories can be factual or fictional, but theoretical approaches have always focused on the latter category.

The foundational text, which is still worth reading to get some understanding of how stories work, is Aristotle’s Poetics. But the word “poetica” in Greek simply meant “to make”. There’s a difference between telling a story based on what actually happened and making one up. The latter is a deliberate, skilled activity. The former is instinctual and automatic.

Aristotle was was concerned with made up stories. More specifically, however, he was interested in Greek theatre performances, and those were not just stories. They included music, acting, stage design, etc. The philosopher grasped that the stories being told had structure to them, but he saw the story as just one aspect of the overall artistic creation.

And that’s the way it has been ever since. The intellectual disciplines that have given some attention to stories have seen the story aspect as one part of the analysis, and not even the most important part. That’s why even modern disciplines like literature are not primarily concerned with stories, and that’s why there is no discipline that concerns itself solely with stories as the object of study.

In summary, if we look at the history of how we have understood stories in Western culture, we find that everyday storytelling has received no attention at all, works of art have been studied in order to understand how they function, and, in general, philosophers, scientists, and other logical thinkers have seen stories as either pleasant diversions or outright fabrications, not as vehicles for truth. To the extent that it has been acknowledged that stories can convey truth, it’s always the result of some kind of quasi-mystical, religious gift ascribed to the artist.

What if we set aside these millennia of biases? What if we start with the proposition that stories have a structure and discrete set of properties that hold regardless of whether the story is a true account or a fictional creation? If this were true, then a story told by Shakespeare would have the same form as one told by a beer drinker down the pub on a Friday evening. The quality would be very different, but the form would be the same.

This realisation of why nobody has bothered to study stories in themselves has unblocked some difficulties I’ve been struggling with over the last several months in relation to my next book project. I now have the premise of the book sorted. It will entail a full description of what a story is and then the application of that definition to Shakespeare’s greatest works. The working title is “The Journey into the Sacred: Shakespeare and the Story of Life”.

Now that the concept is unblocked, I’d like to strike while the iron is hot and concentrate on writing the book. As a result, I’ll be taking a month away from blogging. All going well, I’ll be back in the middle of February.

Meanwhile, I’m pleased to say that we seem to have the numbers for the first study group on King Lear. I’m now extra motivated for that since it should give me some real-time feedback on whether my definition of a story makes sense. For those who have already put their name down, I’ll be in touch in the next week to get things moving. There’s still space for anybody else who wants to join in. You can find the overview of the idea here and the sign-up form here.

Otherwise, see you in mid-February.

Before beginning this week’s post, a quick reminder about my invitation to participate in an online study group about how to understand stories at a deep level, using Shakespeare’s King Lear as a case study. Details can be found here. You can register your interest here. If you’re looking for something new and (hopefully) exciting to start the new year, this could be it!

With that said, let’s get into the post.

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It’s been quite the week in international affairs, and I couldn’t help but notice that two of the issues that popped up are directly related to the theme I’ve been exploring in posts over the last month or so, namely, the tension between capitalism and bureaucracy. On the one hand, we had the abduction of Venezuela’s Maduro, which critics instantly seized on as a violation of “international law”. On the other hand, we saw the violation of US law in the Somali childcare fraud story, which has direct correlations with what is going on here in Australia with the huge levels of fraud around the NDIS program.

Of course, these cases of fraud are just the tip of the iceberg. Look everywhere around the Western world right now, and you find fraud across so many different areas. A lot of that fraud is not even technically illegal. It is the weaponisation of “the system” by a variety of bad actors. But the real problem is that most of the bad actors belong to the system. That is the part of the Somali childcare story that didn’t get a lot of attention and which needs more exploration.

As I pointed out in recent posts, the transition from capitalism to what we can generally call technocracy began in the middle of the 19th century but really picked up steam in the early 20th century. A very practical way to understand what changed is to look at the way businesses used to be run. Prior to the 20th century, almost any business that was not a large corporation (joint stock company) was a sole proprietorship or a partnership in which there was no legal distinction between the business and the owner. The profits of the business belonged to the owners, and so did the losses.

A second important point to make about this time is that there was very little taxation of individuals, including their business activities. This was not due to any kind of benevolence on the part of the government. It was born out of the fact that it was very hard to collect tax and the costs outweighed the revenues. Government preferred to focus its efforts on areas where money could be profitably extracted, such as import duties at ports and taxes on real estate.

As a result, it was incredibly easy to start a small business prior to the 20th century. All you had to do was offer your goods or services for sale and hope to find somebody who would pay for them. No paperwork was needed. No government agency needed to be notified. No regulations needed to be adhered to. As long as you kept your customers and creditors happy, the government would not be involved.

Many immigrants to Australia and the USA in the 19th century took advantage of this state of affairs and started businesses when they arrived. If childcare had been viable at that time, there would have been nothing stopping newly arrived entrepreneurs from going into that line of work. In fact, many of those who immigrated did go into business as private educators, governesses, and the like.

And this brings us back to the Somali childcare issue. On the surface of it, the story sounded like a repeat of those from the 19th century, namely, hard-working immigrants moving to America and going into business for themselves. That is certainly how the apologists would have wanted to present it to the public. It’s a testament to how far gone the corruption has become that they were not even able to create the mirage of a legitimate business.

If an immigrant to Australia or the US in the 19th century had put up such a sign in front of their premises, they would have received precisely zero customers. For the mostly Protestant communities of that era, being able to spell properly was literally a religious matter. Enormous amounts of blood had been shed in order to allow people to read the Bible for themselves. That’s why literacy rates were higher than any other society in history. To start an education business with the name “Quality Learing Center” would have been like starting a pub with no beer; guaranteed to fail.

In that respect, it’s not surprising that the “Quality Learing Center” had no customers. But businesses that don’t have customers are supposed to go broke. That’s what would have happened in the 19th century. Between then and now, something has changed. In the 21st century, customers have apparently become an optional extra.

But the strangeness of the story doesn’t end there. The whole idea of Somalians in Minnesota is weird. Let’s take tens of thousands of people from one of the hottest nations on earth and dump them in one of the coldest states of America. Let’s take people from one of the poorest nations and have them run businesses. Let’s take people from a culture where childcare is a family responsibility and put them in a culture where childcare is a service to be purchased on the free market. Everything about the story is the opposite of what would make sense.

These kinds of inversions are what we find regularly in some of our greatest literature. Oedipus and King Lear begin their stories as powerful kings and end them as destitute beggars. Macbeth begins as a brave and noble general and ends up being hunted to death for his crimes. We see the same thing in nature. Day gives way to night, summer to winter. The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, called this process “enantiodromia”. A more modern term for a related phenomenon is “goal displacement”.

The Somali childcare story is the latest in a long line of inversions that show that the era of the technocracy is reaching its ultimate inversion. The system has turned into its opposite. To understand that, let’s go back to where it started.

We have already seen that there were almost no taxes levied on individuals and their small businesses in the middle of the 19th century for the simple reason that there was no cost-effective way to do so. It is no coincidence that the rise of the bureaucracy went hand-in-hand with the advent of income tax and similar measures. All of the idealistic virtues put forward by proponents of bureaucracy were well and good, but, ultimately, things need to pay for themselves. The reason why governments were happy to embrace bureaucracy in the early days was because they enabled what James C. Scott called “legibility”, which primarily means “taxability”. Bureaucracies earned money for the government.

In relation to business, this process evolved gradually with new legal structures around limited liability companies and the new accounting practices that went with them. This leads us to another crucial part of the dynamic because the profession known as accounting also arose during this era. Accountants became the middlemen between government and the private sector. They ensured that the rules created by the bureaucracy were followed. The government was now able to tax individuals in a cost-effective manner.

In fairness, there were also benefits to individuals and businesses. The introduction of limited liability companies meant that entrepreneurs didn’t have to go to jail just because their business was going through a rough patch. People who are not in jail are still able to contribute to society, whether starting a new business or working for one as an employee. As a result of all these changes, business activity increased overall. Government could then use some of the increased tax receipts to invest in infrastructure that helped businesses. It was a positive feedback loop that benefitted almost everybody involved.

This new dynamic was predicated on two new groups that had emerged, bureaucrats and professionals. We can call them the technocracy. In relation to taxation, the technocracy consists of the tax office and professional accountants who mediate between it and the private sector.

It’s important to stress that this new system really was of benefit to almost everybody in the early days. However, as is always the case in human affairs, a pattern which works well in the first instance inevitably gets applied to domains where it is of less value. Eventually, it gets applied even where it is of negative value. That is where the technocracy has ended up in our time.

The technocratic pattern has now come to cover pretty much any activity you can think of. There’s a government department for every damn thing and a gaggle of university-trained “experts” just dying to implement the latest theories. Meanwhile, the taxation code has grown exponentially, and armies of bureaucrats and accountants are required to administer it.

All of this has only been made possible by the massive expansion of business activity that arose out of the advent of technocracy. But it’s here that we see enantiodromia at work. At the point of greatest seeming success, the system begins to turn into its opposite. The growth in the tax code no longer serves the purpose of increasing the tax take of government. On the contrary, it becomes a way to spend the tax on the ever-growing wage bill of the bureaucracy. The means becomes the ends.

Let’s return to the Somali childcare issue. In the mid-19th century, an immigrant could get off the boat in New York, hire out a premises and begin trading. The government was barely involved. There was no bureaucracy or professional class to worry about. Business was almost entirely a relationship between owners and customers.

Let’s consider the same business in 2026. First, you need to create the company as a legal entity. Only then can you open the necessary bank account to run the business. Only then can you rent out premises for the business. The childcare industry in particular is regulated to the hilt. All kinds of medical training and equipment are needed. Character assessments must be carried out. Records must be kept of every little detail. Regular inspections will need to occur.  There’s the fire code. The health and safety regulations. There are the various utility connections that require contracts to be entered into. Of course, there is no way to run a business without a professional accountant to do the books.

All of these things are needed before a single customer walks through the door. And therein lies the whole problem. The technocracy, which benefitted all parties in the early days, now benefits almost nobody. The original benefit to government was increased tax. Now, governments are up to their eyeballs in debt. The original benefit to individuals was lower risk. Now, individuals have to pay through the nose for every one-in-a-million chance event that might happen.

The only two groups who still benefit from the system are the technocrats themselves, the bureaucrats and the professionals. Note that the money they receive for their services must be paid irrespective. The “Quality Learing Center” may have no paying customers, but it still needs an accountant to do the books. Bureaucrats need to disperse the government grants that keep the business afloat. All of the other services required in order to run a business still get paid. The technocrats still earn their living, but the system itself is no longer producing value.

In truth, the technocracy has been a drain on the system for several decades. Ideally, its growth would have been checked long ago. But what Heraclitus had realised way back in ancient Greece was that it doesn’t work that way in the real world. In the real world, things must turn into their opposite. Oedipus and King Lear must become beggars. The “Quality Learning Center” must become the “Quality Learing Center”. Things must become parodies of what they once were.

In truth, the Somalians are just the patsies. They are needed because the average American could not run such a business precisely because the average American still believes in business. An American who told their family and friends that they were opening a childcare company could count on receiving praise and support. No doubt, the family and friends would want to visit the new premises to see how it was going. They’d show up and see the sign and the empty factory, and they’d know immediately it was a scam. Only people from a completely foreign culture could participate in the technocratic racket that creates companies like the “Quality Learing Center”.

That’s also how we can know with some certainty that the whole thing is in its last phases. When you have to fly in patsies from the other side of the world, the gig is almost up. The irony is that one of the main selling points made in favour of bureaucracy in the early 19th century was that capitalist interests were corrupt and a bureaucracy based on rules would solve the problem. Well, to borrow the well-known phrase, it is power that corrupts, and it turns out that technocrats are no different from capitalists, kings, and popes in that respect. Which is to say, they’re just humans.

The word ’empathy’ has become very popular in recent times and has somehow come to get itself associated with a whole host of different political issues. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the concept has become tarnished with the usual sanctimony and hypocrisy that pervades political discourse. However, even this hypocrisy is revealing because it shows that empathy is accepted as a virtue.

So pervasive has this notion become that it would surprise many people to know that it was only in the middle of the 19th century that empathy, compassion, and kindness appeared on the scene. Prior to that, nobody much cared about being empathetic. Life was tough, and other virtues such as discipline and stoicism were more necessary.

As is so often the case, the arrival of a concept in the broader culture had a direct antecedent in the intellectual realm, which raises the unanswerable question of whether ideas create the world or whether the world accepts those ideas for which it has become ready. In any case, the concept of empathy was not originally born out of humanitarian concerns but out of the completely unrelated scholarly discipline of aesthetics.

In actual fact, Parsifal is a deeply personal story. It was Wagner’s apology to the man who knew his operas better than anybody, and who he had betrayed, the philosopher Nietzsche. Anybody interested in that should check out my book on the subject (it really does require an entire book to explain).

The insertion of personal themes was nothing new for Wagner. All of his operas contain them. But these don’t detract from the larger meanings at play. When we take Parsifal at face value, we can see that Wagner’s representation of empathy was unique and certainly very different from the dominant connotation that the word has come to have in our time. For that reason, it’s worth exploring how he approached the subject in his final opera. That’s what we’ll do in this post.

If we think about all the words that are similar in meaning to empathy, such as compassion, sympathy, and pity, what is noteworthy is that all of them have the connotation of suffering. This is a curious fact because the Greek word “pathos” has the mostly neutral meaning of “feeling” or “emotion”. Clearly, we can experience positive as well as negative emotions. Equally clearly, we can share positive emotions. Walk into a room where people are having a good time, and chances are your own spirits will be lifted. Nevertheless, the words we use to denote shared emotion all imply that the emotion is a negative.

As far as I’m aware, there is no word in English that has the meaning of sharing joy or happiness. The closest we get are words like celebrate, congratulate, or rejoice. Interestingly, the Germans do have a word for this (but, then again, the Germans have a word for everything): Mitfreude. It’s like Schadenfreude, only instead of taking pleasure in another’s pain, you take pleasure in their pleasure. 

In relation to art, there are well-defined genres that are concerned with “sharing” the experience of pleasure or pain. Tragedy is primarily about the representation of negative emotions, while comedy is about the positive. This brings us back to Wagner. Most of his operas were tragedies, with the exception of Die Meistersinger, which is a comedy. Parsifal, on the other hand, breaks the rules. Wagner leads us to believe we are watching a tragedy, but it ends as a comedy. That’s just one of several fascinating inversions in the story, which originally got me interested in analysing it at a deeper level and which eventually led to me writing my latest book.

Just as Wagner blurred the lines between tragedy and comedy in Parsifal, he also took a novel approach to the representation of empathy. In a normal story, we are invited to empathise primarily with the hero and to view events through their lens. Wagner expands that by having the hero empathise with another character. This is unique not just because it is a direct representation of empathy as a lived experience in the hero but also because of the nature of the character the hero empathises with.

To understand that, we need to know a little about the two characters. First, we have the hero, Parsifal, who is a classic child of nature in the romantic tradition. Pretty much all of Wagner’s operas feature this kind of character. Parsifal was raised alone in the forest by his mother. At the start of the opera, he accidentally stumbles into the seat of the Holy Grail and is invited to watch the ceremony that is about to take place.

This leads us to our second character: the injured king, Amfortas. He is the star performer in the ceremony and will uncover the Grail. Parsifal does not understand the meaning of the ceremony or the king the first time around, but he will later empathise with it in the sense that he will viscerally re-experience it. That is, he will feel the same things that the wounded king Amfortas felt, both good and bad. We as the audience are also invited to empathise with Amfortas through Parsifal.

There’s much that could be said about that, but the thing to focus on here is the highly unusual nature of the character of a wounded king, especially when the hero of the story is a young man looking for somebody to emulate. If we think of the classic Ruler archetype as presented in great literature and art, we find three main types. There are fallen Rulers such as King Lear and Oedipus, wise Rulers like King Arthur and Aragorn, and villainous Rulers like Darth Vader and Richard III. What Wagner creates with Amfortas is, as far as I’m aware, a brand new type of Ruler, one who is neither fallen, wise, nor villainous.

The ceremony that Parsifal watches near the beginning of the opera makes this clear. Amfortas is wounded, but the time has come for the annual uncovering of the Grail. That is his responsibility. Around him are all the knights of the Grail, who are waiting to receive the sacred bread and wine. Because the ceremony causes him enormous pain, Amfortas begs to be spared the task. But the knights of the Grail demand that he carry it out. He does what is asked, and the knights take the bread and wine. Afterwards, Amfortas collapses from the exertion and is carried out on a stretcher. We know from earlier dialogue that this has been happening for many years. Amfortas has a wound that will not heal but which does not kill him.

Although this all sounds very bleak, we also see that Amfortas rises above his pain during the uncovering of the grail. In fact, he is in a kind of ecstasy. This is important because it shows that he also gets something out of the ceremony. Moreover, as the audience, we are being asked to empathise with both the positive and negative emotions on display. We might wonder what it means to feel such ecstasy, especially as a respite from pain. We also might understand that the delight that Amfortas receives comes partly from the adoration heaped on him by the knights of the Grail. They are in a symbiotic relationship rather than one based in coercion.

If we compare Amfortas to any other famous Ruler character in literature, film, and art, we can see how unusual he is. The typical Ruler leads his people to victory or fails to do so and is brought undone. The just Ruler earns the respect and devotion of his followers. The villainous Ruler earns their contempt and rebellion. In both cases, the Ruler is assumed to be the responsible party. What Wagner shows us is something very different. He makes it clear that the knights of the Grail are driving Amfortas on. They are demanding that the king perform.

Let’s think back to the point made earlier about the meanings of the words empathy, compassion, and sympathy. We noted that these all have a default connotation of sharing in another’s pain. Since we are in a weakened state when we feel pain, there is an implied element of pity in this dynamic. But this pity only exists when we believe that the individual is not responsible for their predicament. We typically don’t feel pity so easily when the person has brought misfortune on themselves.

The flipside of this is that the rich and powerful are assumed not to deserve sympathy because they have the agency required to avoid the most common types of misery in life. In fact, the Ruler has the power to inflict misery on others. The main question is whether their use of power is just or unjust. For these reasons, the Ruler is somebody to be feared or respected, not to be empathised with.

Therein lies the brilliant innovation that Wagner makes in Parsifal because he is not asking us to empathise with the usual suspects (the poor and downtrodden); he is asking us to empathise with a king. However, the king he shows us is not the usual all-powerful type. Amfortas does have the power to uncover the Grail. That is his unique strength and that is why the others need him. However, this power also causes him pain. A strong argument can be made that the knights of the Grail are responsible for that pain. Thus, Wagner has inverted the usual pattern of the Ruler archetype.

We are so used to thinking of Rulers as all-powerful and all-knowing heroes that this portrayal is initially confusing. This is one of the reasons why most audiences and commentators have not understood the meaning of Parsifal. It also doesn’t help that the dynamic is presented in the form of a medieval myth. To make it easier to understand what Wagner is trying to say, let’s transpose the situation into something more modern.

Instead of a king, let’s imagine that Amfortas is the CEO of a corporation. And let’s swap the knights of the Grail for those people who have an association with the corporation, i.e., the employees who work for it, its customers, its suppliers, the governments who earn tax from it; etc.

Imagine that Amfortas gets up at a press conference and says that, because sales are down, profit forecasts will need to be cut, wages will have to be lowered, and some creditors may not have their bills paid. Would we expect anybody to empathise with the CEO in this case? Would employees happily accept a cut in wages? Would shareholders tolerate a reduced dividend payment? Would suppliers accept the cancellation of invoices? Would any of these people have sympathy for the efforts that Amfortas has made or the trials and tribulations that led to this moment in time?

The answer is obviously no. Everybody would demand that Amfortas resign or be sacked. That is the way things work in the real world, and that is exactly what Wagner shows us in Parsifal. The knights of the Grail do not care a jot for the fact that Amfortas is wounded and in pain. They simply demand that he produce the goods. The same thing would happen if he was a modern CEO or political leader. In short, nobody has empathy for leaders. It is so far from our default assumptions about the world that the very idea of it is hard to fathom. That’s why Parsifal is notoriously difficult to understand.

Of course, there’s a very obvious reason why people struggle to empathise with leaders, and that’s because most people never become one themselves. It is much easier to empathise with what we know from direct experience. The reason why the words empathy, sympathy, and compassion all have default connotations of pain is because we all have times in life where we suffer, whether it be a physical malady, a general misfortune, or the death of a loved one. Everybody can empathise with these states because they know them firsthand.

By contrast, very few have direct experience of leadership, especially leadership of important institutions. Therefore, almost nobody really understands the specific difficulties faced by the leaders of such institutions. Among other things, being a leader involves taking responsibility for decisions where you know some people will be adversely affected. It involves causing pain in others.

What Wagner shows us is a leader who feels the pain of that responsibility. But he also shows the alienation and loneliness experienced by a leader who nobody else understands because they don’t care about the leader as an individual, they just care about what they get out of him. One of the brilliant twists in the story is that the hero, Parsifal, will become the only one who really understands Amfortas, the only one who empathises deeply with what it means to be a leader. Wagner was no doubt hoping that some of his audience would also get the message, but the general lack of understanding of Parsifal shows that this is still not the case even today. (Nietzsche, of course, did understand, as he always did).

Apparently, we’re still not ready to empathise with leaders. We can see this by comparing Parsifal with what is superficially a very similar story: Star Wars (Grail knights vs Jedi knights). The heroes are almost identical. Luke Skywalker is a naïve young farm boy. Parsifal is a naïve young boy raised in the forest. Both are called on to become a knight.

Luke will receive instruction from Obi-Wan, who we know is the good guy. He has no character flaws. Everything he does is in the interests of truth and justice. He’s 100% good. By contrast, Vader is 100% bad. Luke must choose between these two examples, but he is never asked to empathise with them, and we as the audience are not asked to either.

As a result, we have no real understanding why Obi-Wan is good or Vader is bad. Even when Vader redeems himself at the end of Return of the Jedi, it is not through any real change of character. He simply stops being a villain and starts being a good guy. What inner process drove him to this change is not something we are asked to consider. Star Wars does not require us to be empathetic.

Wagner’s opera requires empathy not just from the hero but from the audience. Using that as a tool, he shows an infinitely more subtle and nuanced view of what leadership is. For him, leadership requires both “good” and “bad” behaviour. A real leader must be both Obi-Wan and Darth Vader. They must be capable of evil as well as good. That is what is shown to Parsifal, who understands that if he wants to become a leader himself, he must accept the same deal. By contrast, Luke Skywalker never has to deal with the problem of evil. His job is to kill the evil people. In doing so, he remains good and pure, just like Obi-Wan.

The other main point that Wagner makes is the one we have already touched on, i.e., that a leader must meet the demands of his followers if he wants to retain their allegiance. Contrast this with Star Wars, where the dopey stormtroopers exist entirely to do whatever Vader tells them. That is not how things work in the real world. In the real world, followers want things too. In truth, that means the followers should also accept responsibility for what happens. However, the myth of the all-powerful leader allows followers to avoid that responsibility. Just like Luke Skywalker, they remain good and pure.

It is a tribute to how deep-seated the myth of the all-powerful leader is that Parsifal is the least understood of Wagner’s operas. All kinds of weird and wacky interpretations have been put forward to explain its meaning because the idea of (really) empathising with a king is just too far-fetched. But, of course, this same belief structure is applied to the real world in which we live. How we (mis)interpret art is how we (mis)interpret reality.

The myth of the all-powerful leader remains dominant in our time. This allows us to believe that leaders are responsible for everything and we are responsible for nothing. If we were to take Wagner’s invitation and empathise with our leaders, we would have to take responsibility for our part in the relationship. That is what nobody wants to do. Thus, the real lack of empathy is not in the leaders but in the followers. That is what Wagner shows us in Parsifal.

Last week there was an article on the Compact website which went viral online. It details the systematic employment discrimination that has been going on for more than a decade against white males in the United States. I’ve seen several interesting responses to the article, but I haven’t seen anybody exploring the fact that this behaviour has emerged from a specific type of organisational structure, one that only came to dominate quite recently in the West. Since this also relates to the theme of capitalism that I’ve been writing about in recent weeks, it gives me an opportunity to join some historical dots and sketch out the larger arc at play.

We’ll begin with what might seem like a completely unrelated issue: the politics of Eastern courts throughout history. By “Eastern court”, I mean the political structure that predominated mostly in the Orient, where there is an all-powerful ruler, whether it be an emperor, khan, sultan, caliph, mogul, rajah, etc., and some kind of bureaucratic structure through which the ruler operates. We can contrast this with the Western model, which has often had all-powerful rulers but only recently acquired a bureaucracy. The Roman Empire, for example, had almost no bureaucracy and only got one later on when power shifted to the East. In feudal times, the Catholic Church carried out rudimentary bureaucratic functions independently of kings.

As a result, the bureaucracy has never been a threat to rulers in the Western tradition. This was not the case in the East, and that is why history shows Eastern rulers needing to take defensive measures against bureaucrats.

Once again, we see here an important divide between the Anglo and continental traditions. Voltaire and other intellectuals believed that a wise monarch accompanied by philosopher-bureaucrats was the ideal form of government. Frederick the Great of Prussia not only manifested the wise monarch archetype, he was also the first to build out a sizeable bureaucracy. Of course, the intellectuals who favoured this situation had a vested interest in the issue since the creation of a bureaucracy opened up job opportunities for them. It is no surprise that such thinkers didn’t have much time for democracy, which they saw as irrational and disorderly.

The Anglo realm had a proto-form of modern democracy in the form of parliament. This was not paired with bureaucracy, however, but with a different kind of organisation structure that had shown startling results: the joint stock company. Although France and Germany (the Holy Roman Empire) had a similar organisational form, conditions in Britain were much more favourable to corporations, especially once business interests figured out how to use parliament to pass laws to their benefit.

To understand how corporations became so dominant, we have to expand our picture of them. The modern conception of a corporation as being strictly about “business” is a constriction that has only been placed on them recently (by bureaucrats!). The original corporations had a much larger scope of action. From around the middle of the 17th century, the British crown gave corporations the legal right to raise their own armies, mint their own currencies, charge taxes, pass laws, and even have their own flags.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that corporations were microcosms of nation states. It’s for this reason that the corporate model was vital in the formation of the United States in particular and, to a lesser extent, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. A number of American colonies were originally founded as corporations, including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and others. Even here in Australia, the states of South and West Australia were originally corporations.

Because of the revisionist bias of modern mainstream historians, it is not well remembered that India had already fallen under an old-fashioned kind of imperialism when European traders such as the British and Dutch East India Companies first arrived. The Mughals had invaded the subcontinent from the north. Some of them were apparently the descendants of Genghis Khan, which should give you some idea of their demeanour.

Although they were Muslims, the Mughals had little interest in imposing religious ideology on the local population. In fact, the form of imperialism they practiced was very similar to the old Roman Empire. As long as the tribute was paid and the rules followed, they were happy to leave the locals in peace.

Thousands of Singh’s soldiers were paraded through the streets of Delhi before having their heads removed and stuck on spikes for public display. As for Singh himself, he was hauled in front of a baying mob and offered a reprieve if he converted to Islam. When he declined, his four-year-old son was sat on his lap, and he was ordered to kill him. When he declined again, he was made to watch while the executioner did the job. Then his eyes were gouged out, his limbs were cut off one by one, and his flesh was burned with hot irons. What skin he still had left was then removed altogether. Only after such incredible torture was he finally put to death. Even the Romans might have felt a little queasy at such a display.

This was the imperial milieu into which Europeans traders set foot. The Portuguese were first on the scene, and they tried the old-fashioned approach of taking land via military conquest and then setting up a trading post. They had some success but were mostly outgunned. Decades later, the Dutch and the British showed up. However, it was not soldiers who came ashore but representatives of corporations, what we would now call CEOs. These men did not attempt to militarily overthrow local rulers. Rather, they asked them for trade deals.

Now, if we think about the way that trade normally gets carried out in an imperial situation we see that it traditionally follows military conquest. That is, an army conquers a territory and provides the political and military stability in which trade can occur. However, traditional imperial leaders are military men who would consider involvement in trade to be deeply shameful. Traders have traditionally been near the bottom of the social hierarchy.

If a ruler came to the conclusion that traders and bankers were taking too many profits, or if they just needed some extra cash to finance a war or buy a new ivory backscratcher, they could take the wealth of traders either directly or indirectly via taxes and tariffs. That is exactly what happened to the British East India Company after they had established themselves on the subcontinent. But here we see the first signs that something very different from the historical norm was taking place.

Obviously, the British military was not on the ground in India to protect the traders. In fact, for the most part, the military barely secured the shipping lanes used by the East India Company. Therefore, the Company had to defend itself. Because of the cutthroat nature of seaborne trade in that era, they got a lot of practice and became pretty good at combat. Combine that with rapidly improving military technology, and the European traders who landed on the subcontinent were a very different beast from the traditional archetype.

Thus, in 1686, when a Mughal governor tried to pull a Darth Vader and alter the deal, the Company put up a spirited military resistance. This came to be called the first Anglo-Mughal war. The Company lost. However, they lived to fight another day, and over the next two centuries, their military capability grew steadily along with their trade revenues. 

But we shouldn’t think that the rise of the Company was predicated solely on old-fashioned military might. In fact, the most important event that raised them to the position of dominant trader on the subcontinent was not about fighting but healing.

Hamilton had already proven his worth by providing life-saving medical care for several local rulers. When Farrukhsiyar fell ill, he was called in to help. On both occasions, Hamilton saved the emperor’s life. Farrukhsiyar was so grateful that he showered the surgeon with money, diamonds, gold, and, of course, the obligatory elephant.

All of that was no doubt very gratifying for Hamilton individually. However, the far more important result was that the Scotsman was able to use his newfound friendship with the emperor to negotiate a breakthrough trade deal for the East India Company. The Company made a number of new requests. All of them were granted. Included in the new deal was permission to consolidate and grow the factory in Calcutta (in fact, it was now an entire settlement).

In the years that followed, trade grew substantially. The Company became the dominant European player in India, and Calcutta became a very wealthy city. Once again, a local ruler tried to alter the deal. But, this time the Company had both more money and more experience. In 1757, it fought off the Nawab’s attack and reclaimed Calcutta. From that point onwards, the military dominance of the Company only grew as the Mughal Empire disintegrated.

What had occurred in India was something that almost certainly that has no precedent in history. An old-fashioned empire died off, and a joint stock corporation became the dominant power. This is a complete inversion of the historical norm where, across numerous different cultures, traders are counted at the bottom of the social hierarchy. In the Roman Empire, traders were not far above slaves in the pecking order (many traders were slaves). If you’d told a Roman citizen that a trader could take over from Caesar, they would have split their sides laughing. Yet, that’s what happened in India.

Of course, modern European traders were nothing like the ancient ones, and that’s the whole point. Moreover, the trading class had been rising in Europe for centuries and had reached a particular state of advancement in Britain and the Netherlands. All of the legal and institutional structures were in place by the start of the 17th century when the British East India Company came into existence. It was this form of organisation that made Britain the dominant power in Europe and then the world.

There’s one final point to make about that. The men (yes, they were all men) who spearheaded these developments were not educated aristocrats. They were not the Voltaires of the world. In many cases, they had no formal education at all. Many of them were autodidacts, which was only possible because of the rise of the printing press and the fact that they had been taught to read by their mothers. What had occurred in Europe was the unlocking of talented individuals who, in any other society, would have been trapped at the bottom of the social ladder with no chance of realising their higher potential.

That’s the positive side of it. The negative side is that some less salubrious individuals were also let loose. Many of the men who ran off to join the East India Company and similar organisations were little better than pirates. In fact, large quantities of them ended up becoming actual pirates. The vices of such men are obvious. There was greed, corruption, boorishness, etc. But they also had their virtues: ingenuity, adaptation, improvisation, and a surprising discipline. It was these qualities which enabled them to outsmart and outmanoeuvre sultans, moguls, and other rulers in the various places around the world where they landed.

Now that we have sketched out the rise of the corporation, we are ready to understand who it was that curtailed its activities. We said earlier that the rollout of bureaucracies in Europe was inspired by the Chinese model. That is not a metaphorical claim. It was actually how the proponents of bureaucracy talked about it. In a report to the British parliament in 1853, the then chancellor of the exchequer, Stafford Northcote, referenced the Chinese when recommending a number of changes to the civil service. Identical changes were made in the decades following in other Anglo countries, including the United States.

Can it be a coincidence that the same set of politicians took the opportunity presented by the Indian Rebellion of 1857 to liquidate the British East India Company? Not at all. In truth, these political opponents had already pushed through a number of laws injurious to the Company in the decades prior. Its weakened position absolutely contributed to the rebellion of 1857 which then gave opponents the chance to strike.

When the East India Company was liquidated, the British didn’t pull out of India. On the contrary, this was the beginning of the British Raj, a small army of bureaucrats organised according to the exact same model that had been presented to the British parliament just years earlier. One of the cornerstones of the change was that all the top-ranking bureaucrats needed to have university degrees. If that sounds familiar, it’s because this was the beginning of the system which dominates to this day.

Thus, the arrival of bureaucracy in Western society was no accident. It came out of the concerted efforts of a determined group of politically active individuals. That group has only gone from strength to strength ever since. That is why the bureaucracy has become the dominant organisational form in our time. Even modern corporations are now bureaucracies. The bureaucrats remoulded corporations according to their own ideology.

This leads us back the purge of white men from modern corporations which has been picking up steam in the last decade. These corporations are now first and foremost bureaucracies, and one of the problems with bureaucracy is that there are always more potential candidates for leadership positions than there are places available. This creates a zero-sum dynamic that only gets worse the more aggressive and impatient subordinates become. We can hypothesise that the appearance of eunuchs in Eastern societies was not just about removing threats to the king but also about reducing internal competition within the bureaucracy. The discrimination against white men that has been happening in recent times is exactly the kind of thing that we would expect the zero-sum mentality of a bureaucracy to produce.

However, there is an even more direct reason why white men have been targeted: because they embody the archetype of the old form of capitalism, the kind practiced by the British East India Company, the kind which founded the USA. Thus, the battle that is going on now is the same one that began with the liquidation of the East India Company: it’s the bureaucrats vs the capitalists.

Of course, nobody talks about it in these terms. Instead, the whole debate gets translated into the form it took in continental Europe: fascists vs communists. That is the wrong way to think about it. The bureaucrat class arose independently within the Anglo tradition, and it quite explicitly went into battle against the capitalists. The purge of white males in the last decade is the latest round in the fight. The election of Trump (the arch-capitalist) was the counterpunch.

Since the subject of Karl Marx has come up in the last couple of posts, I thought I would share a personal story of how I first came to learn his theories. Unsurprisingly, it happened when I went to university. Since I decided to do first year sociology, hearing about Marx was not surprising. What was surprising was a certain revelation that came from our tutor, who was a self-declared Marxist.

While introducing himself in the very first class of the semester, the tutor told the class he only worked part-time at the university. His second job involved stacking shelves at one of Australia’s largest supermarket chains. He wasn’t doing it for the money, he told us. Rather, he was bringing down the system from within by stealing from the supermarket at every opportunity. This declaration of criminal activity earned a snigger from several students in the class, even though it wasn’t meant as a joke. It did sound kind of lame coming from a middle-aged man who was supposed to be in a position of authority.

Later in the semester, we finally got round to learning some Marxist theory, which our tutor delivered with great passion. By then, I’d realised that I was the odd one out in the class because I had actually done several working-class jobs before entering university. Although I couldn’t be sure, because I never asked him, I would wager that our shoplifting tutor had never worked a factory job. Meanwhile, the other students that I got to know seemed to largely be from wealthier demographics.

I’d had five years’ experience as a member of the “proletariat” by the time I started uni. Mostly, that was through my father’s small manufacturing business where I’d been working during school holidays ever since I was 13. As part of that work, I’d also seen the inside of several large manufacturing sites including with the giant Australian mining company BHP, and I’d taken a couple of other summer jobs to earn some cash.

The result of all this was that I had an unusually large amount of empirical knowledge to draw on when trying to understand Marx. I realised quickly that Marxist theory seemed to have very little to do with my lived experience of being a worker. This is not surprising when you consider that Marx himself never worked in a factory. He was an intellectual. The same was true of most of the big-name socialists: Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin, Lenin, Stalin etc. One notable exception, who we’ll return to later, is Robert Owen.

Of course, it has to be said that the conditions I faced as a worker were far superior to those which obtained when Marx was writing in the 19th century. Especially in Australia, the modern working class enjoys decent wages and conditions, generous overtime provisions, and all the other benefits that have been fought for over the last two centuries. Nevertheless, the core of Marxist theory is not about these details, and the ongoing attraction of Marx is largely theoretical and ideological in nature. Marx did get some things right, but it was the things he got wrong that stood out to me even as an 18 year old.

One of those is the concept of the alienation of labour. Marx believed that the ability to produce was what separated man from the animals. Therefore, production should be an expression of individuality. We can contrast this position with the ancient Greek philosophers for whom it was the ability to think that separated man from the beasts. Nevertheless, according to Marx, workers were alienated from their work because they didn’t get to choose what to produce. Their individuality was stifled, and their lives lacked meaning as a result.

Although I think there is a kernel of truth in this idea, what stood out to me at the time was how little alienation there had been in my lived experience of work. Marxist theory predicted that I should have been alienated, yet that wasn’t true, and I didn’t believe it to be true of most of the people I had worked with. Now that I have a lot more experience in the matter, I can confidently state that the most alienating and meaningless jobs tend to be those in the professional realm and not traditional working class employment.

Work can be physically exhausting, dirty, and dangerous, but if it’s meaningful, you don’t feel alienation. On the other hand, a high-paying, high-status job is alienating if it is meaningless. The work I had been doing in the factory was dirty, difficult, and dangerous. But it was meaningful because it produced things that were actually of value. We could see the results of the work and we knew to what purpose they would be put. That’s why nobody there was alienated.

Another reason why the factory job was not alienating was because of the camaraderie among the workers. It was this aspect that was arguably the most valuable to me at the time. The factory was an all-male affair and it gave me what amounted to an initiation into the world of manhood. I was now part of a team and I was expected to contribute. If I screwed up my part of the job, I would let everybody else down and create extra work. I had been given a small measure of responsibility and I was directly accountable to others.

That dynamic creates a tight-knit group that’s very similar to a sports team. Unlike (amateur) sports, however, if you screw up in a work setting, you become a burden to others, a fact that they will remind you about ad nauseum. Keep screwing up and you’ll lose your job. Because there are real consequences on the line, this raises the tension, but it also raises the feeling of achievement you get from successfully carrying out your part of the work. That satisfaction increases as you improve your skills and win the respect of your workmates.

Although it’s politically incorrect to speak about it these days, there’s an aspect of masculinity that is revealed in such settings. Throw a group of men together to carry out a task, and they effortlessly, unconsciously, and automatically arrange themselves into a meritocratic hierarchy. Something like this has been happening ever since the first group of men decided to get together and hunt animals, i.e., for pretty much all of human history.

I’ve never been part of a hunting party, but I’m pretty sure a small-scale factory setting bears a lot of resemblance. When you work together as a team, you learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses. As a result, everybody knows who is the strongest guy in the factory, who can fix motors or electrical devices, and who can perform this or that skill to the highest level. None of this ever gets said explicitly. To the extent that it ever gets discussed, it is always via jokes and jibes which allow room for the development of the less practical but no less important skill of taking-the-piss.

For these reasons, my initiation into the working class was not alienating at all. It was about teamwork leading to friendship, the satisfaction of building skills and knowledge which I still use to this day, and also of earning reasonable money, which was certainly a welcome bonus for a teenage boy. Although I certainly had no idea about it at the time, I now realise it was a kind of male initiation ritual, very similar to that which young men have been going through since time immemorial.

This way of viewing it also brings into doubt Marx’s theoretical opposition between capitalist and worker. If we assume that men automatically form hierarchies, then the fact that there is a manger is not surprising. In fact, there are very good practical reasons why there has to be a “boss”. There’s a reason why hunting parties, military platoons, sports teams, or manufacturing businesses all have leaders. A hierarchy is adhered to because everybody intuits that it is required to get the job done.

The problems come when somebody challenges the hierarchy, usually implying a disagreement with the implied or overt leader. It’s always astounded me how groups can form themselves so easily and work together with no explicit coordination for long periods of time and then instantly fall apart over the most trivial disagreement. We seem to have an instinct that lets us get along in groups but no instinct about how to handle conflict. 

The British liberal tradition solved this problem by making work into a contract which either party could terminate. Thus, if you disagree with your boss, you can just quit. When we look back at 19th-century capitalism, however, the clear problem was that workers had no real option to quit because they had no wealth or unemployment benefits. But the more important problem was that the power dynamic between capitalists and workers massively favoured the former. Many capitalists abused that power, as most humans do when they find themselves in such a situation. That’s not a problem of capitalism, it’s a problem of human nature.

One way to address that would be to enact policies that tilt the scales in favour of the workers. If you make labour scarce, you create conditions where capitalists have to compete by offering better pay and conditions. That’s what ended up happening through unionisation and the democratic process.

However, the incremental progress of democracy did not appeal to Marx and the other socialists. They wanted to rearrange the entire political structure through a dictatorship of the proletariat, which invariably ended up becoming a dictatorship of a dictator, as the 20th century showed in great detail.  In this respect, it’s worth comparing Marx and his intellectual colleagues against another prominent 19th-century socialist, Robert Owen.

Whereas Marx, Engels, and most other socialists were intellectuals, Robert Owen was born into a working-class family and received very little formal education. At the tender age of 10, he started an apprenticeship as a draper. By his late teens, he had become an entrepreneur, investing in new enterprises. By his late 20s, he owned and ran a large-scale fabric-manufacturing business.

Several things differentiate Owen from the average socialist intellectual. Firstly, he worked his way up from the bottom, doing the hard work of learning a trade and then rising through the ranks to positions of management. Owen started as a worker and then became a capitalist. His empathy for workers came from direct experience, not theoretical considerations.

Secondly, Owen’s intellectual activity was an outgrowth of this real-world experience. It was not divorced from practical concerns. Thirdly, and most importantly, Owen put his ideas into practice by changing the way he ran his company. This enabled him to try things and judge the results. Later, he would take what he had learned and launch various experiments, such as the establishment of co-operatives and intentional communities.

Because Owen was empirically testing his ideas, and because he was implementing them on a relatively small scale, he was able to judge the results with more precision and clarity. Most of his projects failed, often in very quick order. One of his associates on one project quipped that all they had done was to reproduce the French Revolution on a smaller scale. Just like the French Revolution, the projects started with grand ideals but quickly got punched in the face by reality. Meanwhile, the one area where Owen had long-term success was in the management of the business that he himself owned and was directly involved in.

Here is where the link back to Marx and Engels becomes important. One of the main overarching differences between the continental and Anglo societies of this period was that the Anglo societies, including and especially the USA, were empirical and entrepreneurial in nature. They were full of men like Owen who put theory into action and learned the pain of failure first hand. By contrast, the continental tradition was full of academics like Marx and Engels who had no practical experience in trade or organisational management but who had a lot of wonderful ideas about changing the world through political action.

Marx and Engels were the precursors to the middle-class intellectuals that have come to dominate in our time. They were born into relative wealth and were educated prior to having any real-world experience. Even though they claimed to speak on behalf of the working class, their most devoted followers were other middle and upper class people. While the working class had genuine reason to want to change the system, the middle and upper classes were actually the beneficiaries of it. Why, then, were they interested in the theories of Marx and Engels?

That is a question that probably requires a book to answer. The deeply weird kind of self-loathing that exists in our time among educated Westerners is not a new thing. It goes back at least to the start of the 19th century. One of the outcomes is that this class of people convinced themselves that it was permissible to break the established rules in the name of ideology, for example by stealing stuff from supermarkets. This was seen to be necessary in order to bring about the leap into the socialist utopia. It was in opposition to the incremental and iterative approach of capitalism and democracy.

Thus, Marx and Engels actually criticised Owen for the fact that he was a “capitalist”. It’s not hard to see that his pragmatic approach was kind of a bummer because it seemed to show that the grand theories were not all they were cracked up to be. In terms of broader social dynamics, it’s still true in our time that the leisured classes prefer to be swept up in grand ideologies rather than deal with the difficult work of organisation.

We shouldn’t neglect the romantic appeal of it all. Engels was a handsome young man who swanned about Europe speaking passionately about revolution. In the process, he enchanted more than his fair share of young ladies. He was very similar to Byron, Wagner, and the other romantic poets, philosophers, and artists of the era.

The bourgeoisie were dedicated, disciplined, and hard-working, but also mostly invisible. They had a full-time job keeping their organisations running and had little time left over for political activity.  By contrast, the intellectuals were dramatic, exciting, and inspiring, and they had nothing better to do than organise political rebellion.

The contrast between these two archetypes of the romantic intellectual and the hard-nosed capitalist still sits at the heart of many current issues, although the reality is that the intellectuals have been dominant ever since WW2. One of the obvious ways in which that is true is that about a third of the public now attends university. In the post-war years, we have set about creating a society not of the bourgeoisie but of intellectuals in the vein of Marx and Engels.

The result has been predictable: ideology over pragmatism. Communist utopias are no longer fashionable, but it’s not hard to see that climate change, renewable energy, saving the world from pandemics and many other issues fit the bill. The yawning chasm between the practicalities involved and the promises of the ideology is of no concern to the intellectuals who push such schemes. Vague utopian visions with no definable criteria for success are a feature, not a bug. Political activity is the end in itself. It is the way in which dominance is exercised.

By contrast, when we look at the Robert Owenses, Thomas Edisons, or Henry Fords of the world, we find men who received almost no formal education. They were autodidacts who started life very poor, got a trade or other working-class job, and then worked their way upwards. Their skills at organisation came from practical experience, not intellectual reasoning.

Even though it was this latter demographic which built the modern world in which we live, it should be obvious that it is the ideologues who have taken over. How that happened probably also needs a whole book to answer. But there’s one unappreciated point to make.

The weird self-loathing of the intellectual class has been matched by an equally strange inferiority complex on the part of the bourgeoisie. They genuinely thought that the philosophers and intellectuals had access to a kind of knowledge that they themselves lacked. Possibly this was the result of their lack of formal schooling. As Chesterton once quipped, the point of education is to learn not to take educated people seriously. Many of the most successful bourgeoisie never had the chance to learn that lesson, and still to this day the working class happily send their children off to university to learn how to shoplift.