Category: Ideas

To balance out last week’s post about the political background to our current situation in the West, I thought it would be a good idea to look at the other side of the civilisational coin and talk about religion. Arguably, our current predicament is far more of a religious problem than a political one, although, as we saw last week, the two have always been intertwined in Faustian civilisation as they are in every society.

It’s precisely because we live at a time when the founding religion of Faustian civilisation, Christianity, is but a pale shadow of its former self that our understanding of spiritual matters is pretty much non-existent. Take the words “sacred” and “holy”. To the extent that we use these words at all, they mean something like “good” or even “nice”. The New Age crowd uses terms like “sacred masculinity” or “sacred femininity” and this mostly constitutes a laundry list of things which are good about each sex. The sacred feminine is nurturing and the sacred masculine is strong etc. The truth is that the sacred is almost the opposite of the good.

The word sacred comes from the Latin where it has a variety of meanings. One of them is “to make holy”. The word holy is related to the word whole and the word health. So, we can also say that sacred means “to make whole” and “to make healthy”. But this implies that the thing in question is not whole or not healthy. That leads to another implication: what is sacred may not be interfered with in a way that threatens its holiness, its wholeness, its health. If you do mess with the sacred, you can expect punishment. The sacred is, therefore, also powerful and dangerous. It must be respected.

All these various meanings are present in the Bible. But just as Christianity has now been watered down to the point where all the sacredness has gone out of it, so too we now think of Jesus as some kind of peace-loving hippie. Really? Consider this passage from Matthew 10:34-36:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.”

Does that sound like a peace-loving hippie? Truth is, Jesus was dangerous. That’s why they had him killed. In doing so, they made him one of the most sacred figures in history.

We can get a better appreciation of the meaning of sacredness by sidestepping the millennia of cultural baggage inherited from Christianity and taking a wider, non-European view. This will also give us a useful point of comparison to better understand the revolution that Christianity brought.

Let’s start with an example that is completely foreign to us in our jet-setting world of global travel and tourism: the stranger. For most societies throughout history, strangers were sacred. Which is to say, strangers were dangerous. The arrival of a stranger at your home or in your village was a big deal.

The anthropological literature shows two predominant responses to the arrival of a stranger. The first is to either kill them, drive them away or run away yourself. This strategy allows you to avoid the danger.

The second option is far more nuanced and introduces the idea of sacred rites. Rites and ceremonies are ways of navigating through the danger posed by the sacred. The anthropologist, Arnold van Gennep, noted that sacred rites have a three-part structure: separation – transition – incorporation. The arrival of a stranger constitutes a separation from the normal world. The community is no longer in profane (normal) status but switches into sacred status. In order to get back to the profane, the community invokes sacred rites of transition and incorporation.

The goal is to get back to the profane (normality). But the rites do more than that. They incorporate the sacred. Remembering that the sacred is dangerous and powerful but also potentially impure and diseased, sacred rites have a protective function. But they also integrate the stranger at a physical, social, political and metaphysical level. This incorporation can take forms that those of us with a Christian heritage would find very strange; in particular, one of the more common rites of incorporation: sex.

Strangers are sacred and the sacred has power. When you incorporate a stranger into your community, you incorporate his power. The power can be material as in money or goods for trade. But there is also a metaphysical power; something like mana or chi. A stranger is assumed to have mana and the woman who sleeps with him incorporates that mana. That’s why the Chinese villagers were happy to have their young women sleep with travellers from Europe in Marco Polo’s day.

If all this sounds far-fetched, bear in mind that modern pick-up artists have recaptured the same dynamic. The one thing you cannot be as a pick-up artist is a “nice guy”. Nice guys do not have mana. Pick-up artists have rediscovered the sacred power of the stranger.

Sex as an incorporation rite can be used wherever such a rite makes sense. One such context is negotiation. In Australian aboriginal culture, when two tribes were carrying out a negotiation, women from one tribe would come to the place of negotiation with the men. Once the negotiation was finished, the men from that tribe would return to camp while the women would wait a short distance away from the negotiation area. The men from the other tribe would stay to discuss their decision. If they decided to go ahead with the deal, they would go and find the women and have sex with them. If there was no deal, they would return to their own camp.

We can see such practices at play in the modern world. Back when I worked at a lawyer’s office, one of our most interesting cases was a professional man who was suing his company for wrongful dismissal. His company asserted that he had behaved inappropriately on a business trip to Hong Kong by sleeping with a prostitute paid for by a client. His counterargument was that this was the way business was conducted there and therefore he had done what was necessary to close the deal.

Years later, I would experience something very similar myself on a trip to Chengdu where I inadvertently ended up in a private karaoke room full of high-end Chinese call-girls. But that’s a story best told after a few beers. (Don’t worry, I showed my repressed Catholic heritage and politely declined their services).

Sacred rites facilitate the navigation of situations which are dangerous or powerful. Prior to a negotiation, the relationship between the two parties is in a profane state; an equilibrium or stasis. That stasis is broken when one party changes the relationship by suggesting a new deal. At that point, both parties enter the sacred state which must be navigated to ensure a return to the profane. Failure to do so can lead to negative outcomes. The war in Ukraine is a reminder of that.

Although it would never occur to us with our secular mindset, a business deal is a sacred rite. A business lunch is a communal meal. A handshake is a rite of incorporation. A suit and tie is the sacred outfit worn for the occasion. In some parts of the world, it is natural to include a sex rite in a negotiation. There is nothing remarkable about this from an anthropological point of view. In fact, it’s arguable that nations with a Christian heritage are the weird ones with our strange views towards sex.

Of course, the anthropological literature is full of other practices that we would consider not just strange but horrendous. Bestiality, cannibalism and paedophilia have been practiced widely including in Ancient Greece and Rome. Given the obsession of Faustian culture with the Classical world, why were such things unknown? The answer is that they were airbrushed out of history by the Church. And here we come to the point: the influence of the Christian church on Faustian notions of sacredness.

I mentioned last week that the Christian Church largely created Faustian society beginning around the year 1000 A.D. We can now be more specific about one aspect of that dynamic. The Church created a shared zone of spiritual understanding. It defined the sacred rites and practices for the people under its influence. It did so by systematically repressing folk religions. Each region in Europe would have had their own versions of sacred rites defined by local custom. The Church got rid of all that and replaced it with the Church’s sacred rites.

The prevailing notion these days is that all this was achieved through violence and coercion. No doubt there was some of that. But there is a more fundamental reason why the Church was able to unite disparate communities in Europe and then later around the world.

In the 19^th century, European anthropologists and linguists had access to the global reach of European civilisation and were able to sift through the languages, customs and sacred rites from cultures all around the world. They realised that, while there was enormous variety, there was also what appeared to be universal elements of human language and culture. The argument between what is universal and what is not is still ongoing to this day.

Whatever the theory says, it is simply a fact that the Christian church had a number of sacred rites that are found across a wide variety of cultures. Baptism, the use of water in rites of purification and incorporation, is almost a universal of human culture. The Last Supper is an example of a communal feast; another universal. Jesus healing the sick is a universal sacred rite because sacredness is linked with disease and impurity. Jesus’ 40 days in the desert is a prime example of an initiation rite. It has direct equivalents in the Australian aboriginal walkabout and the Native American vision quest to take just two examples from unrelated cultures.

But perhaps what was most important about Christianity was that it brought in a level of abstraction. Let’s take one of the most important Christian rites – the Eucharist.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.” (John 6:53–55)

The people Jesus is addressing in this Bible passage take his words literally and think that Jesus is telling them to eat his body. But Jesus was speaking in a parable. His meaning would later be captured in the rite of the Eucharist where bread and the wine are ceremonially transformed into the flesh and blood of Christ and then consumed by members of the congregation.

When Christian missionaries arrived in Australia and began explaining the Christian rites to Australian aboriginals, the aboriginals recognised some of the rites as being similar to their own tradition. One of those rites was ritual cannibalism. Close family members would eat the flesh and drink the blood of the deceased. They did so for exactly the reason stated by Jesus in the quote above; namely, it was believed that the flesh contained power, spirit or “life”. It was sacred. Ritual cannibalism is an incorporation rite that aims to integrate the power of the sacred.

The Eucharist replaces ritual cannibalism with a symbol, an abstraction, that means the same thing. It is precisely because ritual cannibalism was practiced in a number of different cultures, not just Australian aboriginal culture, that such a rite could resonate. This is how the Christian message was able to spread in vastly different cultures from the one it originated in. It was also what allowed the church to unite the disparate peoples of Europe under a single religion and create the Faustian culture in the first place.

That unification began to break down with the Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion. If Catholicism was already an abstraction away from localised rites, Protestantism went one step further and created what Kierkegaard later called the single individual before God. To a large extent, Protestantism removed the social nature of sacred rites. Everybody was now answerable directly to the most sacred being of all: God. But remember that sacredness is danger and power. Protestantism had left people alone to face what they believed to be the highest power in the world.

This is not a theory. It was a lived experience. Many protestant priests complained that members of their congregation came to them with crippling anxiety. Protestantism created what Kierkegaard called the sickness unto death (remember, sickness is one of the meanings of sacred). To live every moment of your life in front of God is a matter for saints. It means there is no let up. There is no transition into or out of the profane but just a never-ending (eternal) sacredness. While Catholicism retained the social element of sacred rites with a social hierarchy of spiritual expectation, Protestantism left people alone in the face of the sacred.

Protestantism had demanded of its followers something that most people were not ready to achieve. As a result, the Protestant message began to be watered down to make it palatable. It ended up morphing into bourgeois materialism. By Kierkegaard’s time, all the sacredness, all the power and all the danger had already gone out of Protestantism. Most people were just going through the motions. It was the beginning of the mass hypocrisy which is still with us to this day.

With Protestantism no longer sacred, people began looking elsewhere for meaning. The aforementioned bourgeois materialism was one such avenue. Another was nation-state politics. There was the rise of nationalism, communism and anarchism. Meanwhile, another -ism, industrial capitalism, radically altered and de-sacralised society.

When nationalism blew itself up (literally) in the world wars, we were left with capitalism and its stepchild “science and technology” as the sole remaining sacred forces of our society. Economists and experts became the high priests and we had a decades-long fossil-fuel driven party. The abstract, spiritual power of the sacred had been replaced by the entirely material power of machines.

The sacred is power. It is energy. It is dangerous. The negotiation of the sacred gives a rhythm to life as people navigate through the dangers involved. These dangers give meaning and excitement to life. A life without the sacred is boring and monotonous; a perfect description of post-war suburbia.

A life without the sacred, even in the presence of historically unprecedented material prosperity, also leads to anxiety. The sacred rites are a journey through danger. They are a mental test and to pass the test and come out the other side is to build character or, to say the same thing with different metaphysics, to incorporate the power of the sacred into yourself. Without such experiences, one is permanently anxious and permanently in need of reassurance that one is “safe”.

That’s where we are today. A society obsessed with “safety” because we have run out of sacred rites completely. We tried to fill the void left by the absence of sacred Christianity with the nation state, science and technology and economics. Corona represents the defeat of economics. The decision to lockdown, with the inevitable economic repercussions which we are only just beginning to see, were a changing of the guard. The economists have been turfed out of their sacramental role. Our Dominant Minority knows that they can no longer deliver economic growth and they are desperately trying to create new sacramental rites to replace the economic ones that have been the mainstay of the postwar years.

Where are they turning for those rites? One area is the medical profession. This is not that surprising when you think about it. Birth and death are the two most important sacred rites in any society. For most humans throughout history, birth and death occurred in the home or in a sacred place set aside for the purpose. In the modern West, we are born and we die almost exclusively in hospital. Ergo, the hospital has become the most sacred place in our society. This actually makes perfect sense because holiness and healthiness are both elements of the sacred and many sacred rites in pre-scientific societies are aimed at protection from illness.

The huge problem, of course, is that medical professionals are not trained in the sacred and don’t consider themselves to be doing sacred work. Nevertheless, we have increasingly come to rely on the medical industry as a proxy for the sacred. Medical spending in the post wars years has increased in inverse proportion to church attendance. That is not a coincidence.

This has two effects. Firstly, the medical industry is treating people who have nothing physically wrong with them but rather have a “spiritual” problem. Naturally, such treatments do not work because they are not addressing the underlying problem. Because any medical intervention has side effects, the cost of the side effects outweighs the benefits and the medical industry is becoming a net cause of illness rather than its cure.

Secondly, the increasing demand for medical services has massively increased the price; a price we can no longer afford and are running up huge debts to pay for. Without the necessary money, the medical system is increasingly failing to maintain even a basic standard of care and what should be the sacred rites of birth, death and illness are increasingly morphing into the kind of outright inhumanity that only an underfunded bureaucracy can produce.

We have looked everywhere for the sacred except the one place which can actually deliver it: religion. But what we are starting to see now is a reversion to pre-Christian forms of sacred rites; albeit in the guise of “science”, “medicine” and “progress” and this is where we re-connect to politics because these new “sacred rites” are being promulgated by the Dominant Minority; the global “elites”.

Consider the stories of Silicon Valley billionaires using blood transfusions from the young to “live forever”. This is nothing more than a high-tech version of drinking blood; a classic incorporation rite.

The gender surgeries and associated medications for young people fit clearly into the category of bodily mutilation rites that are almost a universal in the anthropological literature. Van Gennep says of this rite:

“The mutilated individual is removed from the common mass of humanity by a rite of separation…which automatically incorporates him into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable traces, the incorporation is permanent.”

The trans craze has created new sacred groupings with associated mutilation practices consonant with initiation rites given to adolescents in many societies throughout history. The increasing number of vaccinations given to young people also fits into this category of sacred rites during childhood.

Another childhood rite is teaching about sex. Van Gennep notes that the arrival of the second set of teeth is the marker for the beginning of sex education in many cultures which would put the age of sex education at 7 years old. The recent craze in exposing young children to sexually explicit material fits this category as do moves by globalist bodies to reduce the age of consent which would revert back to non-European historical norms (the northern European paradigm is anthropologically unusual for the late age of both consent and marriage).

Here in Australia, we have the Welcome to Country ceremonies which refer back to the sacred rites performed on the traveller in non-European culture. We see similar concepts in New Zealand, Canada and the US with land acknowledgements.

Corona is, of course, the big one; possibly the first ever global sacrament. Before corona, each of was profane: pure, un-diseased, not dangerous. In the early days of 2020, we all became sacred: impure, diseased and dangerous. It didn’t matter that you had no symptoms. Having no symptoms just meant you were asymptomatic. Everybody was now sacred.

Having moved everybody into the sacred category, we needed a purification rite to get them back to the profane. That was the vaccine; your ticket back to “normality”.

Corona was a perfect example of the structure that Van Gennep identified. Every sacred rite of passage has three stages: separation, transition and incorporation. The lockdowns were the separation phase. The incorporation phase was the vaccines. In the transition phase, we were told we were entering a new normal and that is totally fitting because the whole point of a rite of passage is to transition out of an old world and into a new one.

The problem with every one of these new “sacred” rites is that they are not really intended to bring us back to the profane. On the contrary, they seem custom designed to keep us in an eternal sacred state. The never-ending new covid variants and the never-ending booster shots to go with them (the word “booster” implies energy and power and, therefore, sacredness).

This makes perfect sense when you consider that all this is driven by the Dominant Minority of Faustian culture. From the Dominant Minority’s point of view, the general public really is sacred; it is dangerous and impure. That is why all of these new rites have suddenly appeared in the wake of the Trump and Brexit votes which were markers of the power of the public. Ironically, this eternal “sacredness” that never lets up is just Protestantism re-packaged for the modern world.

Once again, the Faustian represents the inversion of the Classical. The Dominant Minority in Ancient Rome governed by pushing exoteric rites that no longer had any esoteric content. The esoteric was re-created from the Proletariat in the form of Christianity. In the modern West, it is the Proletariat who still believes in the exoteric institutions and morality of society while the Dominant Minority undermines those institutions esoterically. The Dominant Minority of Rome was trying to keep its population unified. The Dominant Minority of the West rules by divide and conquer.

What has changed in the last 30 years is that the esoteric activities of the Dominant Minority are no longer productive but destructive. That’s the sign that we are moving out of the Universal State and into what Toynbee called the Interregnum. According to Toynbee, we should now see a new religion arise from the Proletariat.

Both Toynbee and Spengler, and also Jung in a more roundabout way, predicted that it would be Christianity that would rise again to form that new religion. Although that seems incredibly unlikely looking at the current state of the church, I think they are right. Once the lights start going out and the internet is unavailable, people will have to turn somewhere for sacred guidance and, as much as we deny it, our culture is still predicated to an enormous extent on Christian assumptions. It won’t take much to rediscover those assumptions. It may very well be that the second coming of Christ really is at hand.  

I’ve been very much enjoying Tucker Carlson’s new series of videos on Twitter. Episode 4 dropped on Friday Australian time and this was one that I was particularly interested in since it touches on several issues I’ve been writing about here for the past year. For those who haven’t seen it, you can watch here.

The video is an extended joke pretending that Joe Biden isn’t behaving exactly like a dictator even though he’s having his political opponents arrested, is enriching himself and his family at the public expense and doing other things that are very dictator-like. The question which Tucker almost poses but never quite gets to is this: why does nobody see it? How can the United States of all places not see a dictator in action? After all, the country was founded on the rejection of absolute power.

The answer lies in the distinction I’ve used many times over the last year or so: exoteric vs esoteric.

The exoteric is the overt, official and explicitly recognised. In the political sphere, the exoteric tells us that Joe Biden is a democratically elected president. It also tells us he is a frail old man with a habit of falling over and a tendency to speak gibberish. Biden wears a suit, not a military outfit. In all these ways, the exoteric tells us that Joe Biden is not a dictator.

The esoteric is the hidden and secret. Psychologically, the esoteric is the things which have been pushed out of consciousness and into the unconscious. In relation to Biden, these are all the things which Tucker Carlson raises in his video: Biden’s crackhead son, his dodgy brother, numerous shady business deals with foreign nations etc. These are all matters that have been swept under the rug, pushed into the unconscious and made esoteric.

The distinction between the exoteric and esoteric does not have to relate to grand matters of politics and religion. I described an example last week with the concept of shadow work. People who commute to their workplace are doing work. But our society does not recognise that work. That lack of recognition is all it takes to push something into the esoteric. But just because we refuse to recognise something, does not mean it isn’t there.

Important matters which are pushed out of the exoteric (consciousness) and into the unconscious generate esoteric energy and that energy finds outlets that are unrelated to the original problem. That is exactly what Freud and Jung realised was happening with their early psychiatric patients. Those patients displayed neuroses that were unrelated to the underlying problem. The psychiatrist’s job is to get to the root cause of the problem and bring it to consciousness; make it exoteric.

It turns out the same thing works in the public domain. The journalist’s job is to bring the esoteric into consciousness. The propagandist’s job is to push things out of the exoteric and into the unconscious. When propaganda replaces journalism, we can expect exactly the psychological problems that Freud and Jung discovered only at the societal level. That is the reason why we are seeing obvious neuroses in our society right now. The MSM no longer does journalism. It does propaganda. The result is a tidal wave of esoteric energy looking for something to grab onto.

That’s why Tucker Carlson got booted out of the MSM and also why his new Twitter series is getting seriously interesting. However, he got it wrong by implying that Joe Biden is a dictator. The Biden presidency is the equivalent to having Grandpa Simpson in the White House. And Grandpa Simpson is not a dictator.

Similarly, we know how dictators come to power. They do so at the head of a large military force such as Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. At the very least, we expect some people to get killed as in the Night of the Long Knives. These are the exoteric signals people associate with dictatorship.

Joe Biden does not look like a dictator, therefore he is not a dictator. No more thought goes into it than that. People take things on face value. They trust the exoteric. It’s this blind trust in the exoteric that forms the core battleground of modern democratic politics. Whoever defines the exoteric, official version of events wins. That’s why billions of dollars are spent manipulating the media.

One of the main tactics in that battle is to simply leave out the things you don’t want to become exoteric. Even on the internet, this technique is all pervasive. How many times have you seen a short snippet of video which gives you one interpretation of an event and then later saw an unedited version of the same video which leads you to draw a completely different conclusion? The MSM works on the same principle. It’s not technically a lie. It’s an “omission”. Whoops, we forgot about that bit. We’ll do better next time. We promise.

In dictatorships, the media is tightly controlled and promotes a single message. But Joe Biden does not send around the military or a group of toughs to rough up journalists who step out of line. Instead, as the Twitter Files showed, this is all done through the deep state and its connections with large corporations. The process by which dictatorial power is wielded in modern America is not through a single leader but a network of shady, secretive departments and their corporate allies: the deep state.

The United States is a nominally democratic system. But this exoteric form of government does not match its esoteric behaviour. This is not an accident. In fact, it follows a long tradition within Faustian (European) civilisation.

The USA has ended up becoming what Toynbee called the Universal State of Faustian civilisation. It is to the Faustian what the Roman Empire was to the Classical. But, as with everything Faustian, it is an inversion of the Classical. Everybody knew the Roman Empire was an empire. But the United States is an empire pretending not to be an empire. It is a dictatorship without a dictator.

Right from the start, Faustian culture has been run on the esoteric. It is for this reason that Oswald Spengler is arguably the greatest historian of the Faustian because his entire work was based on his discovery that the only way to understand the real Faustian was to look beneath the exoteric surface. That’s true in politics, religion and the general culture.

Since we are talking about politics, however, let’s take some prime examples from history to show how the exoteric has never matched the estoeric in Faustian culture and why the United States represents the culmination of that tradition.

Example 1: The Christian Caliphate

The Faustian was constructed by the Christian Church which knitted together a network of European warlords into what amounted to a caliphate. This was an extension of the paradigm established in the dying days of the Roman Empire when Christianity became the state religion. The combination of Roman church and state was used as the inspiration for the new Faustian civilisation. More specifically, the Faustian borrowed the exoteric forms of the Roman Empire. But it overlaid them on what was a completely different political structure and culture. Hence, right from the start, the exoteric and esoteric were out of alignment.

The church in Europe starting around the year 1000 A.D. raised taxes and waged wars. What kind of church goes to war? A Faustian church. In fact, the early church behaved far more like a government. Exoterically, the church was a church. Esoterically, it was a government.

Various European kings came to resent the church precisely because they realised it was a politically entity that limited their power. They proceeded to wage war. The church put up a decent fight but ultimately lost at which point there was a negotiated settlement where the church and the nobility shared governmental responsibility. The church retained significant political power and the ability to extract money from the public. It took until Luther for somebody to finally demand that the church align its exoteric function (indulgences for payment) with its esoteric meaning (repentance of sin).

Example 2: The Holy Roman Empire

The history of the Holy Roman Empire begins with the Carolingian Empire where the Pope crowned Charlemagne as “Roman Emperor”. From that time on, the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire claimed their authority directly from the ancient Roman emperors. When Napoleon declared himself emperor, he too claimed authority directly from ancient Rome. As always, the Faustian constructed an exoteric veneer that did not match the underlying reality.

The word emperor comes from the Latin imperator. The imperator title was originally given to a general of the Roman army who was elected to that role by his soldiers. When Julius Caesar became dictator, the senate conferred on him the title of Imperator. Later, the same offer was made to Octavian who refused it. Instead, Julius Caesar’s surname became a proxy title for emperor and was used by Octavian and others emperors down to Hadrian. The German word for emperor, Kaiser, and the Russian equivalent, Tsar, are both derived from “Caesar”.

Thus, when the Pope crowned Charlemagne as emperor, he was in fact using an exoteric title that was originally based on a democratic vote within the Roman army. The same title was later bestowed on a dictator by the Roman senate. And now it was bestowed on a northern European warlord by a Pope. Make sense?

The exoteric structure of the Holy Roman Empire was a facade. The real governance model which lay beneath had nothing to do with the Roman system. Nevertheless, for more than a millennia, people kept referring back to Rome. This is why Spengler was at pains to point out time and time again that the real Faustian was completely different from the Classical. Educated scholars, many of whom still believed that Aristotle was the fount of all knowledge, completely failed to grasp that the exoteric did not match the esoteric.

Example 3: The British Empire

Our third example of the exoteric not matching the esoteric is the one directly relevant to the current situation in the United States since it is, in fact, the precursor to the US Empire.  

Britain declared itself an empire in 1533 in all of the chaos surrounding Henry VIII’s break with the church in Rome. Because European power must always be tied back to the ancient world, Henry had his historians make up a story about how his new power was derived from the Fall of Troy. Full marks for creativity.

The new political structure in England was declared an empire mostly for marketing purposes. The decision was made not to call the King an emperor, although Henry insisted on being addressed as “Your Majesty” to copy the then emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

Centuries later, George III also declined the title of Emperor in 1801 at a time when Britain clearly was running an empire. Partly this was because Britain had already gone through a civil war over the issue of absolute power and parliament would not have been happy with a king declaring himself emperor. Partly, it was because George was also an elector in the Holy Roman Empire and it would have been weird to have an emperor electing another emperor (even one who wasn’t really an emperor!).

But the real reason was because the British Empire really was different from historical empires and it therefore did not need to have anyone in the exoteric role of emperor. One of the main differences was that foreign vassal states such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand were considered not subordinate but equal to the home country. Of course, this was not really true but if there’s one lesson from European political history it’s that truth is not just unnecessary but actively harmful to the system.

Nevertheless, the functioning of the British Empire really was different to historical examples and so, once again, the official exoteric structure hid the underlying reality which became esoteric.

Most empires historically work on the tribute system whereby vassal states are required to pay a tax in much the same way that the subjects of a king are required to pay. This system is exoteric. There are formal agreements. Everybody is clear on who is the emperor and who is the vassal state. If the vassal state breaks the agreement, they can count on a visit from the emperor’s army in short order. The history of the Roman Empire is full of such “visits”.

The British Empire earned its money via trade and finance. That’s why it was able to pretend that its vassal states were really “friends” and also why it didn’t need an emperor. What it did need was a distributed network of mercantile interests, diplomats and bureaucrats; in other words, a deep state.

It’s for these reasons that some historians refer to the British Empire as an “informal empire”. But that’s just another way of saying an empire which does not manifest the external, exoteric forms. The real operation of power is pushed beneath the surface and becomes esoteric. The average person does not see the empire at work because they are judging reality by external apperances.

When the exoteric archetype is not fulfilled, the matter gets pushed down into the esoteric. Psychically speaking, it lives in the unconscious. That is why I would also say that the British Empire was the first Unconscious Empire.

The Battle Between the Exoteric and the Esoteric

Taking all this into account, the battle between the British and Napoleon was really a battle between an exoteric and an esoteric empire. Napoleon was the arch-emperor. Like every dictator throughout history, he wasn’t shy about showing who was boss. At his coronation, he had two crowns made, one which matched the Roman crown and one which matched Charlemagne’s crown. Again, the Faustian justifies itself by appeal to history. Napoleon also announced that his imperial system was to be based on the Roman model. In Napoleon, you had an attempt to create an old-fashioned, exoteric imperial system.

Ultimately, he was defeated and the esoteric, Unconscious Empire of Britain came to dominate the world. That domination lasted all the way until WW2 when Hitler and the Nazis made another attempt to set up an exoteric Empire – the Third Reich. Of course, this was also a lie since the Nazis were technically still governing under the constitution of the Weimar Republic.

The pattern which runs throughout Faustian culture in general is that the exoteric is a façade, a mask, a veneer. Faustian culture has always been run behind the scenes. It is an esoteric culture. It is, therefore, fitting that the British Empire, which had no emperor and no vassal states, would win against its exoteric competitors. But the coup de grace is the way in which that empire was silently, effortlessly and invisibly transferred to the United States in the wake of WW2.

Example 4: The US Empire

History tells us that great events are done out in the open, on the battlefield, in palaces and churches. History tells us to trust the exoteric. In the exoteric world, empires are defeated in battle. Everybody knows who won and who lost.

Once again, Faustian civilisation turned history on its head. Britain was technically on the winning side in WW2 and yet it lost its empire in the process. Conversely, the USA did not win its prize from its defeated opponents, Germany and Japan, because those defeated opponents never held the prize in the first place. It won the prize from its “ally”.

The prize which the USA won was the British Empire. In truth, it had already been won due to the enormous debts Britain had accrued to the US to pay for its war effort.

The handover of the British Empire to the United States did not happen at a political or military level. The British did not sign a document of surrender. There was no exoteric occasion to mark the transfer of power. Rather, the transfer happened behind closed doors at the Bretton Woods Conference. It was done by men in suits, not by men in military uniform. It was facilitated by technocrats, not by political leaders. Britain’s Empire was based on control of trade and finance. It was that control which was transferred to the USA at Bretton Woods.

The USA then became the second Unconscious Empire and, more importantly, the Universal State of the Faustian civilisation. There are no more exoteric challengers to that role. It’s fitting that the transfer of power also happened esoterically. To this day, most Americans are unaware that their country is an empire at all even as the requirements of maintaining that empire starkly conflict with the needs of the American public and even as the official version of events is now so far misaligned with reality that the entire public discourse in the US is complete and utter nonsense; a total fabrication.

Conclusion

This brings us back to Tucker Carlson. Tucker is wrong to imply that Biden is a dictator. Most dictators are good at being dictators. It’s not a job that rewards incompetence. Biden can barely finish a sentence. He is the antithesis of a Julius Caesar or a Napoleon.

And that’s the whole point. The US empire runs the same way the British did: behind closed doors. The British Empire did not need an emperor and neither does the US Empire. In fact, an emperor represents an existential threat to the system. That’s why they need to destroy Trump.

As Tucker Carlson correctly pointed out, the unforgiveable sin that Trump made during his presidential campaign was to directly challenge the US role as Universal State and suggest that the US step back from that role. That is why the whole system turned against him and not just the system in the USA but the entire global system whose interests align with the Universal State. That’s why the official narrative in Germany, Britain, Japan and Australia religiously mimics the party line from the US deep state.

We’re all in this together.

What is absolutely fascinating right now is that the deep state is having to come out of the shadows to take out Trump. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson is exposing the system for what it is. He is only able to do that because Elon Musk bought Twitter and put an end to the censorship. Will any of this make a difference? What happens to an Unconscious Empire when it is brought into the light? Does it shrink and die like Dracula? We may be about to find out.

One of the most popular claims made by people who want to insist that the world is still making “progress” is to cite the number of people in China who have been pulled out of “poverty” in the last few decades. This is the same claim that the Chinese government itself makes for its own internal political purposes. But the more truthful statement is that the Chinese government has pulled millions of people out of “subsistence”. That is a different thing and the difference is worth thinking about.

The word “poverty” is derived from the Latin pauper which means “not wealthy”. It is related to paucity, a lack of. The Christian vow of poverty is the deliberate decision to lack property and there are many quotes in the New Testament where Jesus advocates for such a position. Most religious creeds have similar notions. Yet our default definition of poverty implies an involuntary state into which someone has fallen and must lifted out of.  

Poverty is a relative concept. It is defined by convention and always has specific cultural assumptions built in. When used in political context, it is subject to the standard distortions that come with spin doctoring. I first came across the relativity of the concept of poverty back when I was at university. But I didn’t learn it in sociology class.

Back then, I was paying my way by working part-time at a dingy hotel in the CBD. It was Melbourne’s answer to Fawlty Towers. The guy who owned and ran the place was an unusual character who didn’t mind leaning into the grey area of illegality to make a dollar.

The hotel was the cheapest in the CBD and its customer base reflected this. Colourful regulars included a middle-aged guy who was diddling his secretary. He had a regular booking for Friday after lunch. The bed sheets in the room were duly changed before the evening customers arrived (thankfully, not my responsibility). That’s the kind of place it was.

In hindsight, it was a good job to have since it was the kind of place where you can learn some valuable life lessons. The other advantage of the job was that there were long periods where there was nothing to do (I was on the reception desk) and I was able to get some of my university work done on the job.

On one particularly slow day at the hotel, I was leafing through the newspaper and there was an article on poverty which included calculations on how to measure your own situation. I ran through the calculations and realised I was living 1/3^rd below the poverty line.

That was news to me. At the time I was living in a share house that had a swimming pool in the backyard. I owned a (cheap) car. I did karate training three times a week, played in a band and was probably the fittest I have ever been in my life. From memory, I was even able to save a little money each week. Nevertheless, according to the newspaper article, I was living in abject poverty.

Poverty is relative. A healthy, single young man who stays active is obviously going to need far less than an elderly person for whom regular medical bills might be a fact of life and who may need to pay for additional help to get daily tasks done. A generic measurement of the “poverty line” necessarily averages out over such demographic differences.

But poverty is also relative between cultures and societies. When Europeans first came to Australia, they saw the aboriginals and assumed they lived in extreme poverty. There was no question the aboriginals lacked the physical goods that any European of the time would have considered basic to survival. And, yet, the aboriginals had been living in Australia for upwards of 60,000 years.

This brings us to our second concept: subsistence. In Latin, it means to stand firm, to be on solid ground. Subsistence also used to have the connotation of independence because the person who stands on solid ground is not in need of assistance. In the early history of modern Australia, the British sometimes offered aboriginals various objects like cooking utensils or blankets only later to find that they had been discarded in the bush. The aboriginals did not need such goods. They were independent.

The same thing occurred at the geopolitical level when the Japanese and Chinese refused to trade with Western nations and even tried to close their borders to westerners. They didn’t need what the West was offering.

It was the West that needed to trade because it had started down the path of industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism creates a surplus of goods and poverty (a lack) of people to sell them to. Over time, it also leads to a poverty of the natural resources needed to create the goods. Thus, nations running industrial capitalist economies have always lacked markets for the their products and natural resources for their factories.

Industrial capitalism swapped subsistence for poverty, often quite literally. The enclosure acts in England and the highland clearances in Scotland forcibly removed populations who were living in subsistence i.e. who knew how to take care of themselves. This was the continuation of the wars of religion which had also displaced enormous numbers of people and removed them from their subsistence.

What has been happening in China in the last couple of decades is exactly this process of removing people from subsistence. Upwards of 100 million people have been moved from the land, sometimes forcibly, and relocated to the cities where they are housed in new high rise apartment buildings. There are well-known terms for this process in Chinese called “exchanging homestead for apartment” and “exchanging land for security”. The “security” in this case is the social security net including basic healthcare, pensions etc.

It has been said that China has done in a few decades what it took the West centuries to achieve. That was only possible because the Chinese have had the benefit of letting the West make all the mistakes. Industrial capitalism requires a social security net in order to function. That is something that had to be learned the hard way in the West. The boom and bust cycles must also be smoothed out. That is another thing we learned the hard way. That and other lessons were available to the Chinese alongside all the technical know-how to build railways, bridges, tunnels and high-rise buildings.

What is forgotten in all this apparent material prosperity is the alienation that comes with industrial capitalism. The nihilist, pessimist and existentialist movements of the 19^th and 20^th century in Europe were the direct result of people losing their subsistence. In China, we would expect the hundreds of millions who have been removed from their subsistence and placed in apartment blocks to be suffering from the same alienation of modernity that we in the West have adapted to over centuries.

I don’t think it’s too hard to see that the corona hysteria and lockdowns in China were driven by exactly those psychic forces. In this respect, the first SARS hysteria was the obvious precursor to the corona event and the details of the two match almost exactly including a purported origin in exotic animal species.

On my work trips to China, one thing that surprised me was the palpable feelings of nihilism and pessimism of the Chinese colleagues I dealt with. These were intelligent, university-educated people who had high-status jobs. Without any prompting on my part, they were happy to express their hatred of the Chinese government.

But the problem clearly went beyond politics. One of my colleagues summed it up best in a saying that he said was in common use in China and which captures the nihilist sentiment. I can’t remember the exact names of Chinese dynasties he referred to, so I’ll just use placeholders here:

The Japanese inherited the culture of the Tang dynasty, the Koreans inherited the culture of the Ming dynasty, and the modern Chinese inherited nothing.

The emotional undertone of such a statement reminds me a lot of the tone of late 19^th century German intellectuals. The break with tradition was felt hardest in Germany because, just like modern China, it was enforced on the people by the government (Bismarck) rather than evolving organically as it had in Britain.

What lift people out of poverty really means is to remove them from subsistence and place them in a system where they are graded according to the amount of riches they possess. This activates the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses psychology but also makes the individual dependent on the State thereby triggering the Devouring Mother-Orphan archetypal dynamic.

Welfare states are inevitably introduced in the declining phase of civilisation. They are part of what Toynbee called the Universal State. Thus, the Devouring Mother-Orphan dynamic is, in fact, a psychological description of conditions in the late stage of civilisation where the general public are Orphans in need of subsistence from the State. I’ll be exploring this more in my upcoming book on the Orphan.

The modern West, however, has taken this dynamic to an extreme never before seen and now most of the population of China is being pulled into it as well. In fact, the Chinese government has provided perhaps the ultimate version of the Faustian Universal State (Benevolent Totalitarianism) and that is why many western “elites” openly express their admiration for China and why we copied China’s covid response.

In Toynbee’ s model, when the Universal State fails, the Universal Church takes its place. The conditions for this are already building and could very well include China too. Could we see a genuinely global religion arise and what would such a religion look like? Whatever it is, I suspect a vow of poverty might be at its heart.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by an ex-colleague who was looking for a new job. Her reason? The company she is currently working for are requiring staff to come back to the office three days a week. This has been happening across the IT and broader office-based industries for some time. Now that the corona “pandemic” is officially over, the justification for working-from-home has also disappeared.

Way back at the start of the “pandemic”, there were the calls for a new normal. Those calls invariably came from the salary class. The salary class, of course, were the ones working from home while the working class were either furloughed or, if they were deemed essential, required to show up to work as normal. If ever there was a case of class discrimination, it was that.

But we don’t talk about class anymore and a big part of the reason is that the political parties who used to represent the working class sold their souls to neoliberal economics back in the 80s. It might seem hard to believe now, but once upon a time there used to be an actual two-party system in most western nations. The left wing represented the interests of the workers while the right wing represented the interests of capital and small business. The result was a public discourse that revolved around real issues related to the real differing interests of workers and capital.

One of the more useful concepts from the left side of politics back in those days was one which can help shed light on the issue now facing office workers who are being dragged back to the office kicking and screaming: shadow work.

Shadow work is the unpaid work you have to do in order to carry out paid work. A classic example is commuting. A worker is not paid to commute to their place of employment. They are only paid from the time they arrive til the time they leave. Commuting is the unpaid work you need to do in order carry out the paid work of your job. It’s shadow work.

The phrase shadow work has a nice Jungian ring to it. To use terminology I’ve become very fond of in the last year, paid work is exoteric. It is officially recognised. It appears on your pay slip and in your bank account. Shadow work is esoteric; secret. It’s the work that has been pushed into the individual and collective unconscious.

Back when there was a real left wing party that represented the interests of the workers, the question of shadow work was a real issue that was up for negotiation in pay disputes and the wider public discourse. Now that we don’t have any real left wing parties left, shadow work itself has been relegated to the shadows. That’s a big problem because shadow work has been on the rise in the last few decades.

Here in Melbourne and other Australian cities, population growth has outstripped infrastructure capacity during that time. Australian governments have inverted the old saw – build it and they will come – to something like let them come and then build it (based on the money they bring).

The result has been a steady decline in the quality of all forms of commuting (with the exception of cycling). Commuting now takes longer and is more stressful. Because commuting belongs to the domain of shadow work, a reduction in the quality of commuting increases the burden of that work. That burden is borne silently by employees.

Prior to corona, the commuting problem here in Melbourne had been getting ridiculous. The system was well beyond capacity and people would regularly show up late to work complaining that they simply couldn’t get on a train or tram. If you were lucky enough to get on, you were squeezed in like a sardine.

What happened with the corona lockdowns was that the pressure was released. That was what was behind the strange feeling of exhilaration that came from the salary class during the lockdowns. All of a sudden, the burden of shadow work had been lifted from their shoulders.

That burden is not insignificant. For most office employees, their commute here in Melbourne would be somewhere between 5-10 hours per week. If you consider that the total work time is usually 37.5 hours per week, shadow work makes up a large percentage of overall work done and that percentage had increased in the years before corona.

None of this was recognised by employers, government or the public discourse. It was pushed into the shadows just like many other real economic issues. Psychically speaking, it then becomes part of the esoteric. In Jungian terms, it is the shadow esoteric. The more shadow work, the more negative psychic energy builds up and looks for an outlet.

It’s tempting to say that all this is just politicians trying to avoid accountability. But there is another dynamic to this which has also been building for a number of decades. Modern politics increasingly operates in the psychic domain. The manipulation of psychic energy is increasingly done by governments to achieve political goals.

Cynical politicians throughout the ages have always used religion to help them govern. But at least religion is exoteric and out in the open. The manipulation of esoteric psychic energy by both corporate and government interests in recent decades is itself esoteric; hidden.

The result is a shadow government – aka the deep state. This shadow government has arguably more power than the exoteric government which it nominally serves. It has that power precisely because there is so much free-floating psychic energy looking for something, anything, to latch onto.

This has created a positive feedback loop. Politicians get elected by manipulating psychic energy. The decisions they make increasingly unleash more psychic energy which gives them more power to manipulate the public.

Positive feedback loops are inherently unstable. Eventually something breaks. At the rate we are going, we are headed for a collective psychic breakdown on a mass scale. Corona was one of the first psychic earthquakes but it almost certainly won’t be the last.    

Just over two years ago, I purchased four chickens for my household. We had chickens when I was a kid and I remember being made to pluck some of them in preparation for dinner; I had an old-fashioned childhood in that respect. But I’ve never owned chickens or any other animals as an adult as I’ve moved around a lot and mostly lived in apartments and flats.

My reason for getting chickens was entirely pragmatic. With the corona lockdowns, I had increased the amount of vegetable gardening I was doing and that requires fertiliser. I reasoned that the chickens would provide manure for the vegetable garden and eggs for the kitchen table. Plus, I had a small shed sitting on the property that could easily be turned into a chicken coop. It had a concrete floor and tightly constructed corrugated iron walls, perfect for keeping out predators.

The question arose whether to have a coop-and-run set up or let the chickens free range in the backyard. For a variety of reasons, I chose the latter option. I set up a feeder and water. It was going to be a nice system. 

About two weeks after I brought the new chickens home, Melbourne went back into lockdown and we would spend much of the rest of the year in lockdown. I could never have known it at the time, but these seemingly trivial and unrelated factors – the decision to buy chickens, the decision to let them free range in the garden, the fact that I was at home most of the year due to lockdown and the fact that I was spending a lot of time in the backyard – would eventually lead me down a path that I have only come to fully understand in the last few painful weeks.

***

Not long after getting my four new chickens as pullets, I was given two older chooks from a friend who was moving interstate, bringing the total to six. Things were going well. The new chickens had quickly integrated into a flock and I had worked through all the bugs in my set up. Then, one of the four pullets, who I had named Blue (cos she was a Blue Australorp), started showing signs that something was wrong.

I rang my father who, apart from having tended to our chickens when I was young, had also worked for a couple of years on a chicken farm early in his life. I explained Blue’s symptoms and asked his advice. This was the first but not the last time in this story that I was told something very important that I didn’t understand. When chickens get sick, they don’t get better, he said. But Blue didn’t look sick. She was still eating as normal and was hanging around with the others doing the usual chicken things.

Melbourne was now back in lockdown. I can’t remember whether veterinary clinics were open at that time. Even if they were, it would have been an Orwellian nightmare to visit one. So, I ruled that option out and did as my father suggested which was to feed Blue some softer foods like fruits and try feeding her food with olive oil added to help with digestion since that seemed to be where the problem lay.

About two weeks later, Blue stopped eating.

As anybody who’s owned chickens knows, it’s the passion with which they attack their food that is a big part of their charm. Every day is like the first day and every meal is like a gourmet delight. Sometimes they’ll catch a skink or other small reptile or rodent and the chicken who has found the unlucky creature but cannot swallow it straight away gets chased around the yard by all the other chickens looking to steal the bounty.

So, when a chicken stops eating, you know you have a problem. And when the chicken has already shown signs of illness such as Blue had, the matter becomes urgent. Even as an inexperienced chicken owner, I knew that much. But we were still in lockdown and a trip to the vet was still going to be a nightmare. I tried various tricks to get Blue eating again and to my delight these seemed to work. She bounced back and began eating with the other chickens again. A few days later, she stopped eating a second time.

I called my father again only to receive the advice that I knew he was going to give. The chicken is dying. I asked him about euthanising her since I assumed the death could be painful. Again, I knew what he would say before he said it. No, let it die naturally. 

***

This word natural is a dangerous word. Do chickens die naturally in nature? The question sounds absurd.  In nature, we might say, a sick and weakened chicken would be killed by a predator since predators always go for the weakest looking member of the flock.

Most of the time when we use the word natural, what we really mean is normal. Do chickens normally die from predators in nature? That question makes sense. And the answer may very well be yes. That leads to another question. Is a suburban backyard nature? The answer is either yes because all the world is nature or no and then the question of a natural death becomes irrelevant.

I was not ready to deal with these issues. A dying chicken had not been part of the plan and I did not expect it to happen so soon with a chicken that was still young. I had been thrown in the deep end, required to make a decision I wasn’t prepared to make based on a situation I didn’t really understand.

Because we were yet again in lockdown, I was going to be at home all day every day for the foreseeable future. I resolved to proceed as follows: I would follow my father’s advice and let the chicken die naturally but if there was any indication that the chicken was in pain, I would end its life.

I prepared an appropriate block of wood from an old tree stump lying around in the back yard and confirmed that the axe was in the shed where I remembered it. I resolved to check on the chicken every hour or two and make sure it was not suffering.

My plan makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s rationally airtight with a perfect either/or logic to it. I didn’t realise what it really meant. It meant I was going to have to watch a chicken die.

***

Euthanasia is one of those issues I have never paid much attention to. We live in a society where euthanasia is becoming more and more common. It wouldn’t surprise me if before too long there will be voluntary euthanasia even for people without a valid medical reason to do so. Apparently, euthanasia enjoys a large majority of public support.

I have written before about the author Stephen Jenkinson. His book Come of Age: A Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble was a big inspiration for my Age of the Orphan series of posts and will feature in my upcoming book of the same name. Jenkinson’s message is not born out of ideology. It is born out of his lived experience as a grief counsellor where he realised the extent to which our culture is terrified of death.

The confrontation with death, like most important things in life, is not amenable to reason. To the extent that cultures construct “rules” around death, these are developed over long periods of time through trial and error. Such practices are irrational and our society encourages intellectuals to tear them to logical shreds and replace them with rationally airtight theories. We think of this as progress.

Jenkinson saw first-hand that the result is that we now have a culture where people stand naked in the face of death. Counterintuitively, the problem is usually felt more acutely not by the person dying but by the loved ones who have to watch. All our social debates around death – abortion, euthanasia, not letting granny die from a respiratory virus – betray this terror and this nakedness that our culture has in the face of death.

I had been called to face the issue of euthanasia not as an ideological argument but as a lived experience. I had a dying chicken and I had made a promise that I would relieve its suffering if necessary. Nevertheless, I did what most of us do and turned to the internet for guidance.

Among the hysterical shrieking on either side of the debate, I came across this article which seemed well-balanced. More importantly, it helped me to frame what was really going on with me and my chicken. The article asks the question whether it is better to let a “wild animal” die by starvation/dehydration. My chicken had stopped eating. If I did nothing, it was going to die by starvation/dehydration. My choice was between that or euthanasia.

The article addresses the issue not from a veterinary point of view but from a human one. It turns out that voluntary death by starvation/dehydration (VSED) is something that has been tried many times in the human realm and we have better data about that domain since we can ask the person dying how they are feeling.

On first reading the article, a couple of points stood out to me. Firstly, nurses rated VSED positively in that it was almost painless and also peaceful. Secondly, the negative first-hand accounts in the article, the ones arguing against VSED, seemed to contain more ideological arguments while the pro-VSED accounts were based on the experience of the person who was dying. Also, the negative arguments included people who had to watch a loved one go through VSED. That is a different issue and one which I’ve come to appreciate more than I ever knew I would. The experience of dying and the experience of watching the dying are very different things and should be treated separately. Jenkinson knew that.

The article gave me some clarity but no firm answers. I decided to stick to my original plan of euthanising Blue only if she was in pain.

***

I named Diogena after the cynic philosopher, Diogenes, because it seemed like she was at the bottom of the pecking order but really she was at the top. I realised this about a month after I brought the chickens home when she simply took the top roosting bar from the other chickens who had until then ruled the roost.

In ancient Greek, the word cynic meant to live like a dog. One of the things the cynics did was renounce all creature comforts including houses. Most cynics slept outside. Imagine my surprise when Diogena decided that she was also going to renounce the comfort of the coop and sleep outside. She really was a cynic.

She originally tried to roost on a PVC pipe that runs from one of the gutters on the house to a water tank. PVC pipes are very slippery but that didn’t seem to bother Diogena. Comfort and practicality were clearly not her thing. Nevertheless, the PVC pipe was out in the open and when it rained Diogena would get wet. Rather than let her find out the hard way, I blocked off the pathway she had taken to jump up on the pipe.

Did Diogena go back to roosting in the coop? No way. She hunted around the back yard and found a tree which had been planted very close to the fence and had developed an unusual growth habit where the branches stretched out horizontally; perfect for chickens and also with protection from the rain by the tree canopy above. Diogena had found her new roost.

I wasn’t sold on the idea. Roosting outside carries a risk of predator attack. But how could I say no? I had named Diogena after the cynics and now she was living up to the name.

Diogena roosted in that tree every day until about four weeks ago when she fell ill.

***

I have only in the last couple of weeks realised that the deal I made back when Blue became sick was the deal to walk the path of death with her. When my father said let it die naturally, he meant leave it alone, let nature take its course. But when I decided to observe Blue so that I could be sure she was not in pain, I was not leaving her alone.

I had taken on the role of observer. But I had also agreed to change roles if necessary and move into what we might call the role of helper. I was going to help Blue end her life early if she was in pain.

In our society, we outsource the role of helper to experts; nurses and doctors in the human domain and vets in the animal domain. That leaves us as family members and loved ones in the role of observer. I wonder whether our severance of these two roles doesn’t cause us extra distress. Often in life, we show our love through our actions. When we are forbidden from helping sick and dying loved ones, when we are relegated to observing, we lose one of the main ways to communicate our love. 

I suspect this is why VSED is so traumatic for observers because the help would be so easy to give. You just have to provide food and water.

With my chickens, I had inadvertently chosen the role of observer to VSED. In hindsight, I wonder if my idea about euthanising the chicken was not born out of the distress of this role. The distress is not for the one dying but for the one watching the dying. How much of that distress gets projected onto our social debates about death? I think we saw the answer to that in the last three years.

***

I have now learned how VSED progresses in relation to chickens. I have seen it four times.

Firstly, the chicken stops eating. As a good chicken owner, you do your best to get them eating again. You offer them their favourite treats like bananas or meat. They eat it and seem to get their strength back. They go back to eating the regular chicken food and you feel good that you have solved the problem and life will go back to normal now.

A few days later or maybe a week or two, the chicken stops eating for a second time. All your efforts to get them to eat again fail. The food that they once so joyfully and greedily gobbled down is no longer of interest to them.

The first two days after the chicken stops eating are the hardest because there is still hope. The chicken has relatively high energy levels and will occasionally run around and look perfectly healthy. This can lead to you to believe that it’s not going to die. But there are contrary signals. The main one is that it separates itself from the other chickens and spends its time alone in a corner or under a tree.

Sometimes, when the other chickens are feeding, it will run over to where the food is and seem to eat. You get your hopes up. But the chicken is not really eating. It takes a half-hearted peck and then turns away.

It’s this up and down nature that makes the first two days so difficult for the observer–helper. It’s an alternation between hope and despair.

The speed of the decline makes things harder to take. Just three or four days earlier, you had a seemingly healthy chicken and now you have a chicken that is deteriorating in front of your eyes. I had made the deal far more difficult for myself by taking responsibility for the euthanasia option if the chicken was feeling pain. But the truth is I never saw any visible sign of pain or even discomfort. On the contrary, once the first two days are over, the chicken changes into a state that can only be described as peaceful.

The chicken has now weakened to the point where movement is slow and limited. Gone are the sudden bursts of energy which you can mistake as signs of a return to health. The chicken spends its time resting. It finds a comfortable spot where it sits for long periods with its eyes closed. Breathing is calm and dozing off is interspersed with periods of alertness that can last hours.

In an image I will never forget, one of the ISA Brown chickens my friend had given me, which was the third one to die, had placed herself in a sunny spot beneath an olive tree. It was late winter and the weather was cool and sunny. She was facing directly at the sun. Her eyes were closed but her head was not pointed downwards in the dozing off position but upwards towards the sun. It’s impossible to know what a chicken is feeling, but all external appearance suggested to me that she had gone beyond peaceful and into blissful.

Among the positive accounts of death by starvation/dehydration in the VSED article are these two:

“Instead of feeling pain, the patient experienced the sense of euphoria that accompanies a complete lack of food and water”.

“After a few days without food, chemicals known as ketones build up in the blood. These chemicals cause a mild euphoria that serves as an anaesthetic. The weakening brain also releases a surge of feel-good hormones called endorphins—the same chemical that prompts the so-called “runner’s high.”

What I have seen in my chickens who have died of VSED matches these accounts.

When you walk the path of death with another creature, you really do live it with them. When the chicken is alternating between the will to live and a kind of resignation, you match them. And when the chicken becomes peaceful and equanimous, you do too. That’s why the third and fourth days are the easiest for the observer-helper. There is no question of pain and neither is recovery an option any more. You and the chicken are on the last leg of the journey.

The peace is broken on the last day. The chicken no longer has enough energy to sit properly and keep its head up. There is no more lucidity or alertness. The battle now is between consciousness and unconsciousness. The chicken’s head is down. It is no longer sitting but lying on the ground.

Once again the question of euthanasia arises. As a helper, I am plunged back into my original responsibility – should I end it now?

But there is still no sign of pain or suffering. The VSED accounts say that most human patients go into a coma at this stage and that is also what I saw in my chickens. There is no tension in the body. No pain. No struggle. The final stage of the journey is from unconsciousness to death.

***

The first time I noticed something wrong with Diogena was the Sunday morning. I saw that the vent area on her behind was soiled and that she had diarrhea. I didn’t think much of it as she seemed otherwise normal and appeared to be eating well.

But I wasn’t in observer mode anymore. Melbourne was no longer in lockdown. Tuesday was a public holiday and that meant a long weekend. From the Sunday morning til the Tuesday evening, I was barely at home. It wasn’t until the Wednesday morning that I knew for sure that something was wrong. Diogena had stopped eating.

Now I was worried. I had seen this pattern before. But something was different this time. The sickness and death of the other three chickens had been expected due to illness or old age (ISA Brown chickens have a short life span). But Diogena had been a picture of health the whole two and a bit years she had been with me. She was now a mature chicken in the prime of her life. Why had she suddenly become sick?

I called my father who couldn’t talk for long as he was about to go into a meeting. The symptoms I had noticed were too vague: diarrhea and loss of appetite could be any number of things. My father suggested coccidiosis as one possible cause. As there is a medication for this that can be bought off the shelf, I went to the pet store and got some. This was a big mistake. I had jumped to conclusions. But the worst part was that I now had to wait for the medication to work which prevented me from exploring other reasons why Diogena could have been sick.

In the meantime, I did what I had done with the other chickens and tried to hand feed Diogena to keep her energy up. Again, something was different. She was being very fussy about what she ate and was not eating her favourite treats but only weird things like oats and small bits of bread neither of which I would normally offer to chickens but I was trying anything by this time. Still, her condition seemed to improve and this gave me the false idea that the medication was working.

Circumstances change in life but we stick to our old scripts until reality forces our hand. It wasn’t until Saturday morning that I had time to think about Diogena’s problem more. I turned to the internet to get some ideas and the notion of an impacted crop came up. The crop is the first organ in the digestive process of a chicken located on their breast. It was instantly clear even to a novice like myself that this was the real problem. I hadn’t noticed before because I didn’t know what to look for.

There are only about half a dozen or so vet clinics in Melbourne that service chickens. I called them all up but they were booked solid. One vet offered an emergency service. I made an appointment for Sunday morning.

***

I purchased Diogena, Blue and the other two chickens from a guy I found online. He had a very cool setup at the back of a factory just north of where I live with lots of cages and about 30 hens and roosters of different breeds. The cages he kept the chickens in were only about 2 metres by 2 metres in dimension. He told me he’d been selling chickens for many years. He clearly knew what he was doing.

He got Blue and the other two chickens into cardboard boxes easily. The fourth was Diogena. She was the smallest of the lot and, it turned out, the nimblest. I stood back smiling while he clambered around the cage. It took about 30 seconds for him to catch her but no sooner had he got her into the cardboard box than she sprang out again and the whole sequence started over. It took him six tries to get her into a box and close the lid. Panting and red-faced, he handed me the box. I tried to hide my smile. Diogena was special from the start.

As I gave him the cash for the chickens, I casually asked how long they live for. That depends, he said, on whether you’re a pet person or a food person. I had no idea how important this sentence would turn out to be. I’ve only learned it in the last few weeks.

The economics of backyard chickens only works if you kill the chicken at the end of its productive laying period and you use the chicken’s manure to fertilise a garden that produces food. If you don’t do both of these things, the cost of the chicken feed outweighs the value of the chicken in dollar terms. That’s what the chicken dealer meant when he was referring to a food person. He meant that you were keeping chickens for food/financial reasons.

If you’re a pet person, you don’t care about that since pets are not kept for financial reasons. You expect to pay for pets not for pets to pay for themselves.

The story I told myself at the start of this journey was that I was a food person. I was buying chickens for eggs and manure. That story changed almost immediately after I got the chickens home. The Melbourne lockdowns meant that I spent a much larger amount of time in the back garden and I got to know the chickens far more intimately than I expected. The thing about chickens is that they are individuals. They have as much personality as dogs and cats. Diogena had an extra-large dose of personality (I would call it spirit).

I had become a pet person, but I didn’t know it.

***

The vet who saw Diogena on the Sunday morning told me there was a stick in her crop and the only way to get it out was surgery. She then told me the cost of the surgery. All of a sudden, my confusion about being a pet person took on a very real dimension. For a pet person, surgery is a no brainer. For a food person, it’s a no go. Like Buridan’s Donkey, my rational mind jammed up. I was confused but I didn’t know the source of my confusion. Meanwhile, the vet was looking at me strangely. She assumed I was a pet person.

I decided to go ahead with the surgery but in my confusion forgot to ask all the questions I should have asked. How likely was success? Would Diogena recover fully? How long would that take? In hindsight, I would argue the vet should have seen my confusion and told me these things anyway. But the vet clinic was busy and there were other people waiting.

The vet called me the next day after the surgery and said that Diogena had not swallowed a stick. The hard lump on her breast was actually scar tissue. The vet asked me how Diogena got the scar tissue and I had no idea. It’s possible she had fallen off something and injured herself. It would be in fitting with Diogena’s character. That might have been the cause of the problem, but we will never know for sure.

The vet told me there had been more food in Diogena’s crop than she had ever seen before and the crop had stretched significantly. This was the first of several hints she gave me about Diogena’s real condition but I didn’t understand at the time. I was navigating in a world of half-truths, false assumptions and incomplete information and confusion was the order of the day.

The confusion wasn’t helped by another surprise I received when I went to pick Diogena up after the surgery. There was a week’s worth of medication to administer. Chickens don’t know what medication is and they won’t eat it voluntarily. You literally have to jam it down their throat. The vet showed me the correct technique to open the beak and administer the medication and then sent me on my way.

Diogena, the wild chicken, the chicken who would not even sleep in a coop, was now a house chicken and I had become her nurse. These were not roles that either of us asked for and I’m not sure that I understood much better than Diogena what was happening. One thing we both agreed on: it sucked.

At the end of the week, we went back to the vet for a checkup. The crop was not right. The vet prescribed two extra types of medication for another week. More work for the nurse. More aggravation for the patient.

Diogena was still only eating a very select few things. She refused anything larger than an oat and I was mainly feeding her on seeds, crushed up chick feed, mince meat and banana. This seemed like a worrying sign but I carried out the chores of giving her the medication twice daily in a soldierly fashion. I still had the rest of my life to worry about.

The second check-up was two weeks after the surgery. The crop had not improved. The vet prescribed another week of medication and casually slipped into the conversation that if the problem persisted we would be looking at three months of medication. The penny dropped. I finally realised what she had been hinting at.

***

The vet must have known immediately after the surgery that Diogena’s crop had become too stretched to recover. Why didn’t she tell me the truth? Why did she only drop hints and ultimately force me to raise the issue? It’s tempting to say that she and the vet clinic benefited financially from doing so, but I don’t believe that was the main issue.

Most people love their pets. But this love is not properly recognised in our society. Sometimes we assume that people are trying to fill a void that is missing elsewhere in their life. Maybe that is true in some cases. But love is love. And the flipside of love is grief. What you love, you will one day lose.

A vet is trained in biology, physiology and anatomy. They are not trained in theology or its bastard child, psychiatry. They are not trained to inform people how to walk the path of death and to lay that out as an option that should be considered.

The decision I faced and that many other pet owners must face every day touches on the core issues that our culture does not know how to deal with: death, love, grief and conscience. The vet has no necessary authority on these. So, they stick to what they know. They offer two paths: medication or euthanasia. Increasingly, our medical system offers these same two paths. The third path is rarely discussed. If I had not accidentally walked the path of death with three chickens prior to Diogena, I may not have even known that path existed. Our culture systematically avoids it.

Dostoevsky noted with his Grand Inquisitor that most people want somebody to outsource their conscience to. Stephen Jenkinson noted that most people want somebody to outsource their grief to. These issues both come together in the medical and veterinary industries. If ever there was a place for theology, psychology or philosophy, it is here. But there are no priests, philosophers or psychiatrists to be found in a vet clinic.

What is behind our desperate desire to trust the experts is that we want to outsource our conscience and our grief. We got rid of the one institution that at least attempted to deal with these matters (the church) and replaced it with consumer capitalism. Our experts churn out solutions to things that are not even problems. A lot of money gets made. And people are left to flounder in confusion and despair.

***

For the first three of my chickens who died, I had voluntarily taken on the role of observer-helper. I had set the terms of those roles. With Diogena, terms were imposed on me and through me on her. Diogena’s life was in my hands. I was not choosing her mode of death but between life and death. The life that I had to choose on her behalf was to have medication forced down her throat twice a day. How could I do that to Diogena, the wild chicken, the chicken who did not even want to sleep in a coop?

In truth, I was no longer in the role of helper, but enforcer. The vet had assigned me the role of enforcer, literally forcing medication down Diogena’s throat. Much of modern medicine has this dynamic built-in, but it is never discussed openly. As a patient, your job is to submit. It’s a role we have all gotten used to without knowing.

Now that I have had time to process all this, I can present it as if it makes sense. But it wasn’t making any sense to me at the time. I didn’t know I was a pet person. I didn’t know I had been a helper. I didn’t know I had become an enforcer.

I spent the whole week trying to work through these issues rationally and got nowhere. Ultimately, I had to go by gut feeling. I decided to stop the medication. I would let Diogena back into the yard and give her a chance to adapt back to her old life.  

***

I was not prepared for how fast the whole thing fell apart. It was clear immediately when I let Diogena back into the yard that she was not as strong as she looked in the coop. Now that she was back in her normal environment, I could also see that she was acting strangely. She didn’t interact with the other chickens. I told myself this was to be expected. She had been three weeks by herself in what amounted to solitary confinement. She had reason to be disoriented.

But the part that destroyed my plans entirely was that she stopped eating. My plan had failed. But, more importantly, I knew what this meant. This was something I could be absolutely sure about because I had seen this pattern three times before. Diogena was walking the path of death. My new decision, which I did not understand, was whether to switch back to being an enforcer. I could yank her off the path. She would go back to the coop and back to her medication.

These are terrible questions to have to deal with and none of it was helped by the fact that I could not rationally process what was going on. The fact is, there is no right answer and you can’t be objective because you have a responsibility to bear. I had given Diogena a home. I had taken her to the vet. I had forced the medication down her throat.

There was one simple fact I had failed to understand and have only understood in the aftermath of all this. Whatever my choices and my decisions were, Diogena had already made her decision. She was the one who had stopped eating. She did that immediately after being returned to her natural (there’s that word again) environment; the place where she could make decisions.

She chose to walk the path of death in exactly the same way that Blue and the other two chickens had before her. With the other chickens, I had accepted their decision and been content to play the role of helper. The difference this time was that I had refused to accept Diogena’s decision or even to recognise that she had made it. I was still stuck in enforcer mode.

Among all this confusion was the ultimate realisation. I had come to love Diogena. Yes, I had come to love a chicken. I don’t know how that happened. It just did. I was a pet person after all. I loved Diogena and I did not want her to die.

This is the great wisdom of Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. Responsibility is the flipside of love. We become responsible when we love. It’s not a scientific, cause-and-effect kind of responsibility. Neither is it a legal or even a moral one. The case won’t be tried in a court of law. It will be tried in your own heart and the verdict will be: guilty. That’s what sin means. It’s a weight of responsibility you feel in your heart. And that’s why all you can do is weep and ask for forgiveness.

***

Diogena died on the sixth night after she stopped eating. She went through the same cycle as the three chickens before her. The first two days were up and down as her energy waxed and waned. On the third day, she entered the peaceful state that precedes death. The weather in Melbourne had been miserable. But it now cleared and we had three straight days of late autumn sunshine with little wind and mild temperatures. It could make me believe in divine intervention.

On the morning of the third day, Diogena slowly and unsteadily placed herself down on the grass under a tree. The sun, which is low in the sky at this time of year, shone down on her face as she alternated between dozing and long stretches of lucidity where she was able to take in her surroundings. On the fourth and fifth days, she was too weak to walk, so I carried her to the same spot in the morning where she could enjoy the sun. That was my job as her helper.

Then something happened that I’m not ashamed to say brought tears to my eyes. The other chickens, who had been avoiding Diogena since her re-entry into the garden, came and sat down beside her. They sat for several hours together in the sun and Diogena spent the last hours of her life in their company.

On the fifth evening, I could see that Diogena was entering the final phase where consciousness slips away for good. Just like the other chickens, she died during the night. Just like the others, there was no sign of struggle or pain on her face or in her body the next morning. The weather had turned bad again and I buried her in a secluded spot in the yard just a couple of hours before the rain set in.

Goodbye, Diogena. I will miss you.