Category: Ideas

One of the big questions ever since it became clear that the corona vaccines were not going to provide the miracle that was promised has been how we would handle the fallout of what is undoubtedly the biggest peacetime public policy failure in modern history.

Here in Melbourne, Australia, we had what ended up being the longest lockdown of any city in the world. As a result, we have accrued, if not the largest government debt of any city in the world, at least the largest of any state in Australia. The bill for this debt is now coming due.

Late last year there was a state election where the opposition party suggested cuts to planned spending to address the budget problem. Our Devouring-Mother-in-Chief, Dan Andrews, scoffed at such suggestions and said there was no need for spending cuts. We could have it all, he said. He was duly re-elected.

Just six months later, the state budget is due to be delivered this week and will feature huge spending cuts including one major infrastructure project. It turns out we couldn’t have it all. The Premier must have known that prior to the election last year. Even by the gutter standards of modern politics, that’s some premium political cynicism.

Now that the bill for the lockdowns is due to be paid, it’s no surprise that politicians are trying to weasel out of responsibility. But even I was taken aback by the recent statement from the Victorian Health Minister. In relation to corona, she said: “We did what we were advised to do.” (The interested reader can see the statement at the 1 minute 25 second mark of this video).

Anybody can see that this is an almost exact reproduction of the Nuremberg Defence. But there’s an important difference here and one that says much about what is really going on with our current political shambles.

In the Westminster system of government which Australia inherited from Britain, the Minister IS responsible. That is the whole point of having ministers. The buck stops with the minister. It used to be a common occurrence that ministers would resign from their positions when things went wrong, even in situations where there could be no proof of a wrong decision on their part. The point of this practice was to uphold the ideal of the system: the minister is responsible and doesn’t get to blame anybody else.

The Victorian Health Minister wasn’t technically pulling a Nuremberg Defence because that defence states that a subordinate can escape responsibility by following orders from a superior. This was an already established principle in military law prior to WW2. It makes sense in a military setting where disobeying orders has severe ramifications for military personnel including potential court martial.

What made the Nuremberg Trials unique was that some non-military leaders of Germany were included in proceedings. That is, political and economic leaders were charged alongside military commanders. There was much debate before the trial about whether this was appropriate but that’s what ended up happening.

The reason that the non-military leaders of Germany could invoke the Nuremberg Defence was because of the Führerprinzip enacted by the Nazis which specified that every person was required to obey the orders of Hitler even where those orders contradicted one’s immediate superior, the constitution, the law, or anything else. That’s why the Nuremberg Defence has ended up becoming a far more general principle and for the first time brought the issue of following orders outside of a military context.

In a post last year, I explained in detail Hannah Arendt’s great insight that what the Führerprinzip unleashed was a new form of organisation called Totalitarianism. It allowed even military lines of command to be bypassed. Organisation now became predicated on ideology. The same pattern played out in Stalin’s Russia. Our historical misunderstanding of the situation is caused by the surface appearance of tyrannical political structure which both Hitler and Stalin portrayed and was further reinforced by the fact that the defendants at Nuremberg all tried to blame either Hitler or other senior Nazi leaders for their actions.

If we reinterpret the Nuremberg Defence using Arendt’s insight, what it really amounted to was a blind fealty not to a leader but to an ideology. It was the Nazi ideology which united both the military, political and economic leaders of the nation. The nation state was supposed to represent the general will. In the Enlightenment ideal, the will would be tempered by reason and logic. But reason and logic went out the window in WW1 and were replaced by ideology and propaganda.

These developments were related to creation of Total War where modern military force is predicated on the functioning of an industrial economy. It was Napoleon who can be credited with laying the foundations for Total War. Before Napoleon, soldiers were expected to source their own food from the local area where they were stationed. But Napoleon introduced the concept of supply lines which tied military operations back to the national economy.

As an aside, this is why sanctions against Russia have formed part of the war in Ukraine. If war is an extension of politics by other means, so too is economics and finance nowadays.

Totalitarianism, then, was a decentralised system of government held together by a shared commitment to ideology. That was Arendt’s great insight. And this brings us to the Victorian Health Minister’s statement which I’m going to call the Nuremberg Defence Mark 2:

“We did what we were advised to do.” In other words: “we followed the ideology”.

To reiterate, this is the opposite to how the Westminster system of government is supposed to work. Say it with me: the Minister IS responsible. The minister takes advice. But, ultimately, they make the decision. There is no higher authority than the minister.

Part of the problem here is the falling standard of government that has been going on for decades. Ministers used to resign when things went wrong because that was in the spirit of a system where the minister must be responsible even if they are technically not. At some point, ministers realised they could blame “the advice” they received and use that as an excuse not to resign. Fast forward to today and blatant corruption now goes unchecked and ministers regularly avoid responsibility on the flimsiest pretexts.

But corona was something different. When the minister talks of “the advice” she might as well be referring to “the science”. Where did that science and that advice come from? There is no clear answer to that. We might say it was the WHO but I recall the WHO recommending against lockdowns in late 2020 and the Victorian government then proceeded with several more lockdowns. We also know as a matter of political fact that decisions around curfew here in Melbourne came direct from the Premier’s office not “the advice”.

In a sense, corona facilitated our own version of the Führerprinzip. A handful of tinpot dictators got to pretend that they were all-powerful and all-knowing. It’s worth remembering that the Westminster system of government allowed Britain to avoid becoming a military dictatorship at the time when much of Europe, not just Germany, was falling into that mode of government. If we appreciated our history better, we would not take such things for granted and ministers of government would not get away with being able to blame “the advice”.

But there is something more than just general corruption going on here. “The advice” is ideology and, despite what many conspiracy theorists believe, the ideology has become decentralised. What the Premier of Victoria and his Health Minister were really following was “the ideology”. That ideology may be enforced by powerful actors in the network, but the mechanism of distribution of the ideology is now global and decentralised.

If Totalitarianism is a decentralised form of government held together by allegiance to an ideology, then corona fits the bill perfectly. The reason the average person can’t accept this is because they are told corona was based on “science” or “advice”. And because so many scientists now earn their living from government and corporate money, they are unwilling to set the record straight. Plus, setting the record straight would require an independent news media but news media are also now reliant on government and corporate funding.

All this raises the question: is this just a temporary state of corruption or are we sleepwalking into totalitarianism? The current system is held together by one thing: money. Compliance is bought and sold. That is a fundamental difference from Nazi Germany. The Führerprinzip was not an invention of the Nazis (the Nazis created very little). It was a belief in the power of the superior individual. This was a common theme in the German-speaking lands in the late 19th and early 20th century. Spengler’s concept of Caesarism and the Nazi’s bastardisation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch concept were just two examples of this idea.

Corona gave all kinds of tin pot dictators their chance to pretend they were Caesars. Can that continue outside of the realm of a purported emergency? This will depend on whether Arendt was right. Can totalitarianism work without the equivalent of a Führerprinzip? I think the answer is a qualified ‘yes’. In place of physical coercion, we have substituted money as the stick which keeps people in line.

Money has always been able to invisibly subvert democratic political institutions. It is arguably the greatest weakness of democracy and has been used against modern democracies almost from their inception. But the system only works as long as the financial system holds together and our system appears on the verge of breakdown. If it does breakdown and get replaced by a functional CBDC system, then we are in deep trouble as that would enable the invisible coercion to continue indefinitely. I don’t believe a functional CBDC-based financial system is possible but it won’t stop the powers-that-be from trying.

The Westminster system of government and its offshoots defeated both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. Whether it can defeat the new attempt at globalist totalitarianism is the number one question before us right now.

Book update: as I mentioned in my last post, I’m in the process of writing my next book The Age of the Orphan: An Archetypal Analysis of Modern Western Civilisation. My dream of knocking it into shape in two weeks did turn out to be rather optimistic. I think it’s going to be more like two months until the book is ready.

For this week’s post, though, I want to touch on a current issue that fits into the Orphan archetypal analysis.

We are now in the post-corona world according to the people who get to decide such things. But it should be pretty clear to everybody that the underlying archetypal machinations that brought us corona have not stopped. One such issue that has stepped in to fill the void is the trans “debate”. It’s a sign of how fast things are moving that the trans issue was barely even on the radar at the time that I wrote The Devouring Mother just two years ago. From memory, I didn’t even mention it in the book.

From a political point of view, the transgender issue is structurally identical to corona. It is being pushed from the top-down via government agencies, government funding of private agencies, NGOs, globalist institutions and the MSM. Through a combination of shaming, character assassination and censorship, there is the attempt to create the appearance of consensus where those who disagree must be “extremists”.  In this respect, it is identical to corona, vaccines, climate change, renewables, the Voice (here in Australia), eating bugs or any of the other wonderful ideas cooked up by our “elites”.

I should point out that I’m not denying that some individuals have difficulties with gender and sexual identity. In fact, one of my best friends from high school now identifies as a woman and has had surgery to mark the change. But that happened well before the trans issue became an apparently urgent matter of public discourse.

Clearly some people have issues with gender and sexuality. Equally clearly, some people catch colds and flus and some of those (mostly the elderly) will die as a result. We can accept these facts while still admitting that the way in which corona and transgenderism have become socio-psychological lightning rods is deeply weird. It was possible to construct a seemingly logical argument to account for corona but even the most hardened “conspiracy theorist” is struggling for a logical account of the transgender debate. Nevertheless, the issue makes perfect sense within the Devouring Mother archetype.

When my friend underwent surgery to mark his change of gender, he was a fully-grown adult in his 20s. As an adult, he was free to make his own decision and his parents would not have been involved at all (most likely they would tried to talk him out of it). It’s worth noting that the related issue of eunuchs throughout history almost always involved consenting adults. In many cases, men would even self-castrate in order to qualify for jobs in the royal court because the lucrative benefits involved in such a position were only available if you were a eunuch. It’s a testimony to how much humans desire power that people have taken a knife to their own genitalia to achieve that outcome.

What we are seeing now with the transgender issue is a focus on pre-pubescent children whose parents are actively involved in the matter (we are also seeing the State take on the role as quasi-parent to override the wishes of the real parents where necessary, but this also fits within the Devouring Mother archetype with State as “parent”).

Forcing gender roles onto pre-pubescent children is, by definition, unnecessary since puberty is the time when we all must deal with the complex issues around gender and sexuality not as an abstract ideological argument but as a lived experience. The biological transformation of puberty forces these matters on us whether we like it or not. And therein lies one of the key points that is behind the trans issue. Puberty is fate. Death is fate. Just like we freaked out about death during corona we are now freaking out about puberty. In both cases, it’s the denial of biological fate.

Here is a diagram I used in my Age of the Orphan series to elucidate how the Orphan archetype fits into the human lifecycle:

The Orphan archetype sits between the Innocent and the Adult. As the name suggests, the Innocent represents the time we associate with childhood in all its innocence. The Orphan represents the time of puberty and the transition to adulthood. In traditional societies, the onset of puberty was the trigger for the social transition into adulthood via ceremonies and initiation. For example, the Native American vision quest and the Australian aboriginal walkabout happened around the onset of puberty.

In modern western society, we have decoupled adulthood from puberty to a large extent. We have no formal initiation ceremonies or markers. Little is required to be done to earn the status of adulthood. Rather, it is attained by default through proxy markers such as the voting age, the drinking age, the driving age and the age of consent. Thus, we have gradually erased the Orphan transition into adulthood. We have removed any exoteric rituals and left each individual to go it alone. We tell ourselves that this is “freedom” but it’s a bit like the freedom to drive a car without having learned to do so first. To change metaphors, we throw you in the deep end and let you sink or swim.

What happens in practice is that most people will look for something to keep them “afloat”. They become dependent and this is where the Devouring Mother comes in. Becoming dependent on the Devouring Mother prevents the Orphan from completing the transition into adulthood. Note that dependence is the natural state of the Innocent. Childhood is the age where we all really are dependent on our parents and there is nothing problematic in that dependence.

Thus, another way to frame the Devouring Mother dynamic is that the mother wishes to keep the child in perpetual Innocence by preventing the Orphan transformation. She can then claim that she needs to “protect” the child since that is the natural relationship between the parent and the Innocent. Thus, the language used around the transgender issue is identical to corona. It’s all about keeping people “safe”.

With corona and the transgender issue, these archetypal dynamics are now manifesting in the physical world. What were mandatory vaccines except “mummy” (the Nanny State) getting us to “take our medicine” like good little boys and girl. Similarly, we now see surgical and pharmaceutical intervention of pre-pubescent children with the goal of “delaying” puberty. In reality, it is the denial of puberty and is therefore about keeping the children in a biological state of “innocence”.

We can represent this by reference to another concept from my Age of the Orphan series which was levels of being:

Level of Being	Orphan Transformation to Adulthood
Spiritual	Esoteric
Psychological	Individuation
Social	Work, marriage, citizenship, church
Physical	Puberty

In most societies, the biological transformation of puberty is accompanied by the social transformations of work, marriage, citizenship and church (or whatever cultural specific exoteric institutions map to these). The combination of the biological and social change results in a psychological process called Individuation and, at the highest level, the formation of the Jungian Self. Both of these latter transformations can form a life’s work but it is at puberty where they are begun in earnest.

What we have seen over the last centuries in the West is the progressive removal of the Orphan transition to adulthood at the “higher” levels. In the post war years, the breakdown moved into the Social dimension. Thus, we saw a massive increase in divorce rates, falls in church attendance, an increasingly fake democracy and the rise of bullshit jobs.

Both corona and the transgender issue represent the ultimate manifestation of that process as it now arrives in the Physical plane with surgical and medical interventions that prevent the biological transformation into adulthood.

Of course, this is not the way our ideology represents these matters. Our ideology says that this is “freedom”. Everybody shall have the freedom to choose a gender, a job, a life partner, a religious denomination and even which country to live in. This “freedom” is central to the post war ideology of the West. In archetypal terms, however, this is a false freedom.

The Orphan’s challenge as so beautifully portrayed in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is to face the ultimate lack of freedom which is death. To face death and come out the other side with your childlike sense of wonder, optimism and faith intact is what Dostoevsky considered the highest task in life. But one must face death. That is the Orphan’s challenge. To revert to the Innocent without going through the initiation of the Orphan is the denial of that challenge and a false pathway.

We can represent this using the Jungian concept of the Shadow as follows with the shadow forms at the bottom of the table:-

Level of Being	Orphan Transformation to Adulthood
Spiritual	Esoteric
Psychological	Individuation (the Self)
Social	Work, marriage, citizenship, church
Physical	Puberty
Physical	Denial of puberty
Social	Breakdown of marriage, church, state, bullshit jobs
Psychological	Denial of Self
Spiritual	Satan (demonic)

This fits with Jung’s idea that the task of the modern world was to incorporate Satan. For him, what is happening right now is the integration of the Shadow at the societal level.

It also represents the end of the Antichrist phase of history. Both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche analysed the historical figure of Christ as the Innocent. Whether that’s historically true or not, there can be no doubt that the modern West was founded on such a concept as we see in the ubiquitous Virgin and Christ Child paintings.

If the Virgin and Christ Child was the founding archetype of the Faustian, we have now arrived at its inversion: Devouring Mother and Child in Shadow form.

The other day I had what seems like a fairly obvious idea in hindsight: an inversion of the famous Maslow Hierarchy of Needs. A quick internet search reveals that this idea has occurred to others although I didn’t find a version that fits the way I was thinking about it.

My idea was that the Maslow hierarchy needed a Jungian shadow or inverted segment. I was pondering this in relation to Kierkegaard’s idea that “the door to happiness opens outward”. That is, you cannot “push” your way to happiness. You cannot read Maslow’s hierarchy and try to follow the steps. (Disclaimer: I haven’t actually read Maslow, so I may be doing his ideas an injustice here).

Anyway, here is my version of the Maslow hierarchy with a Jungian shadow below mirroring the pyramid that everybody will be familiar with. It seemed fitting to draw it in doomy grey.

The idea is that the inverted segments below the mid-line are the “shadow” side of the positive segments that we all know. Thus, the shadow of Physiological Needs is Addiction. The shadow of Safety Needs is Fear. The shadow of the need for Belonging and Love is Clinginess and the projection of your own insecurities onto the other person. The shadow form of Esteem is Egotism and Narcissism. Finally, the shadow form of Self-actualisation is the denial of Self. Ultimately, all the shadow forms are an attachment to the ego which prevents the transcendence to the Jungian Self.

I also mapped Jung’s anima/animus progression on the left as this matches to Maslow’s concept in the sense that Jung believed one progresses through the different levels. The basic physiological needs Jung considered to be the base level anima/animus as represented archetypally by Adam and Eve. Belongingness, love and esteem maps to the second tier anima/animus as the man of action or accomplished woman. This is the person who has found a place in society where they feel they belong.

Jung had two extra tiers of anima/animus that map to the Self-Actualisation phase of Maslow and this is where things get interesting because Jung’s individuation concept seems to imply that you have to first manifest the shadow forms in order to get to individuation. In other words, Maslow was missing half the story because he implies that you can “ascend” the hierarchy in a purely “positive” fashion whereas Jung believed you have to first descend down to “hell”. You have to manifest the shadow before you can integrate it.

Kierkegaard had a similar idea. He would have called the “self negation” tab at the bottom of the hierarchy “despair” and he implied that one could not self-actualise without first going through despair. This fits with Jung’s concept of enantiodromia. There is a sudden reversal from despair to self-actualisation/individuation but it is not something you can plan for. The door to self-actualisation/individuation must open for you, you cannot push it open.

Just as despair has many forms, so too does the positive side of the equation and thus the last two anima/animus steps to go from Maslow’s esteem needs to self-actualisation. Thus, in relation to the anima, Mary is the 3rd tier and Sophia the top. Both of these would be sub-levels within Maslow’s self-actualisation phase. The poet, Robert Graves, had a similar idea although he a triad of anima figures with Mary, the White Goddess and the Black Goddess as Sophia. This is probably where the correspondence with Maslow breaks down since it doesn’t feel right to call these “potential”.

That’s why so many famous religious figures were actually successful people in earlier life but renounced their success to pursue something higher. It may very well be that you need to renounce all the other needs in order to pursue Self-Actualisation at all; hence poverty, celibacy and living away from society. Whether that renunciation is the equivalent of manifesting the shadow forms in a Jungian sense is an interesting question. I think Kierkegaard would have said one needs to be a sinner first. Avoiding sin altogether is also avoiding despair.

Both Jung and Kierkegaard believed that most people will avoid despair. Within this model, that would prevent them from attaining self-actualisation. Because we live in a time where physiological needs are taken care of, this would mean that we would expect most people to get stuck at egotism and narcissism, unwilling (or perhaps uninvited is a better word) to take the final leap into despair necessary to transcend the ego and integrate the Self. Sounds like a pretty good description of modern society to me.

The reference to Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in last week’s post reminded me of a hypothesis that occurred to me some time ago as a way to explain part of the current state of public debate in western countries. Dr King saw the civil rights movement as having two stages for success. The first was equality before the law and King was quite clear of the limitations that the legal approach entailed. You cannot legislate for everybody to love each other, he said, but you can legislate so that people do not hurt each other.

The second part of the civil rights movement included reference to the spiritual teaching that could at least strive to have everybody love each other. But it also aimed to address historic economic inequality through training, education and employment opportunities. Dr King called this economic justice. The idea was that poverty, ignorance, social isolation and economic deprivation would all be fixed by creating employment for all.

To this day, we think of these two approaches as intrinsically related. There are still attempts to address various inequalities through legislation and other attempts to address it through what we might give the generic title of social programs. However, these two approaches are qualitatively vastly different.

Legislation presents us with a crystal clear outcome. You either have the right to vote or you don’t. There is either a law for equal pay for equal work or there is not. Because the outcome is binary, when the outcome is achieved you can throw a big party and celebrate because you and everybody else know that you succeeded in your mission.

Viewed this way, the main legislative goals of the civil rights and feminist movements had been achieved by the late 60s or early 70s at the latest in most western nations. That led into the second stage of the program; namely, programs to address poverty, ignorance, social isolation and economic deprivation.

There’s a lot that can be said about all that but I want to focus on a single point which is that the second stage of the program involves a shift from legislation to systems. We can use a computer programming analogy to elucidate this.

Legislation is the equivalent of computer code. You either have code or you do not. But the fact that you have it does not mean that the code will run. For that to happen you need a system. This includes a computer, the computer’s operating system, the runtime environment including all the other programs that the program you wrote relies on and whatever peripheral objects interact with the computer such as mouse and keyboards.

The same is true with legislation. Governments might pass laws but those laws are only put into action through the bureaucracy including the courts, lawyers, judges, police, administrators and all the people who implement the law. Thus, even though you have the legal right for something, that right only matters if the system decides to uphold it. Over the last three years, all kinds of legal rights were thrown out the window because the system decided it was going to ignore them. Arnold Schwarzenegger summed it up best by going on television and saying in his inimitable vocal style “screw your rights”. 

Legislation requires a system to enforce it just like a computer program requires a system to run it. However, the passing of legislation is a simple fact with no ambiguity. But the goal of fixing poverty, ignorance, isolation and economic deprivation is far less clear because these are not the laws that generate the system but measurements of the system. Poverty is the outcome of a system. In order to talk about it, we must first agree on its meaning and the reality is that there are no objective meanings for concepts like poverty, ignorance and inequality.

Let’s take two pertinent examples from recent history. Assuming the existence of a disease-causing virus, what number of cases and what Case Fatality Rate (CFR) are required before we declare a “pandemic”? There is no objective answer to this question. Some people will say 0.1% CFR. Some will say 1%. Some might say 5%. Some might say that a single fatality is unacceptable and the whole world must be shut down until such time as scientists figure out how to prevent anybody from dying.

The same goes for vaccines. There was a time when a handful of deaths from a new vaccine would stop the rollout. Now we declare a vaccine safe and effective and give it official approval with orders of magnitude more fatalities and side effects. One of the reasons this can happen is because there is no objective measurement. Some people will say that no fatalities and side effects is the definition of safe and effective. Others will accept different numbers of fatalities and side effects.

Thus, even when we attempt to define specific measurements to nail down the definition of seemingly simple concepts such as “poverty”, “inequality” or “pandemic”, we have the inherent problem of subjectivity to deal with. That’s the problem with trying to measure systems. But that’s just the beginning of the fun.

How accurate is the Case Fatality Rate, for example? Well, first we have to understand that this statistic combines two separate measurements: the case measurement and the fatality measurement. So, we need to know the error rate from the PCR test which defines a case and the error rate of cause of death analysis. In relation to the latter, blind autopsy tests have shown that the cause of death written on a death certificate is wrong about 1/3 of the time.  Assuming a 10% error rate in the PCR test, you’ve got 10% error multiplied by a 33% error and that’s before you get into errors caused by other parts of the system such as when hospitals are incentivised to find “cases” and causes of death because they get extra money for doing so.

Your nation’s economy is not growing according to the latest GDP statistics. How are you going to kickstart it into action? One way is to break windows. Pay a mob $50 each to go around throwing bricks through plane glass. Not only will the mob’s income go up, but window repairers in the nation will see a boom in business. Voila! You have now increased GDP. But only a fool would believe that the economy got better. That is the problem with relying on only a single metric. Metrics can be useful but you have to know what your metric does and does not measure.

Taking the last two points we can formulate an iron-rule of politics: the measurement of systems can and will be gamed if the incentives are in place to do so. And the gaming will include the choice of measurements, the definition of them and the way in which they are gathered. Let’s take another example from economics to explore just the first concept in the list.

The losers are the companies in your country that manufacture things. They’ll get screwed. On the upside, you’ll get cheap imports from other nations who are running a trade surplus. The banks and financiers will win because your nation has the reserve currency and somebody has to facilitate all the trading of financial tokens. Thus, banking and other “service” jobs will rise at the expense of working class jobs. There are a number of other side effects, but these are the main ones and we can clearly see that this is exactly what has happened in the US since the early 70s.

(As a side note, when Trump said he was going to bring manufacturing jobs back to America, that could happen but it would reduce the trade deficit and would almost certainly require the US to give up its reserve currency status. Whether Trump knew that is anybody’s guess but it certainly explains the utter terror he struck into the hearts of all the people who benefit from the status quo).

Keynes noted that persistent trade deficits will lead to internal political strife and eventually crash the economy if allowed to go on. He wasn’t just basing this on theory but on real world evidence from prior to WW2. If he was right, then a persistent trade deficit is a grave danger to a nation. We don’t hear about any of this, of course, because the people who benefit from the system use some of their profits to ensure the trade deficit metric and associated consequences never makes the news. That’s one way to game the system with metrics.

This leads to a final point. It’s tempting to say that those people are corrupt and are using the system for their own gain at the expense of others. But for really complex systems, few people are willing and able to see beyond their perspective. (In more philosophical/theological language, we might say that only God can see all perspectives).

We can put the same idea into more neutral language and say that everybody has a different perspective on the system. This relates back to the earlier point about there being no objective measurements of systems, only subjective ones.

In relation to corona, for example, it was clear to me from the earliest statistics that the virus wasn’t a risk for myself. But, if I was thirty years older, overweight and had diabetes, then the story would have been very different. That alternative me would have been looking at the same set of measurements, the same system, but would have drawn very different conclusions.

Same with the trade deficit measurement. If you’re a manufacturing business or somebody trained to work in a manufacturing business, the trade deficit figure is a disaster. If you’re a banker or a consumer, it’s good news since it means lots of profit for the former and cheap consumer items for the latter. Same system, different perspectives.

Now, we might argue that it is the job of government to weigh up all these different perspectives and do what is right for the country but even here there is a problem because who gets to decide what is right when there are multiple incompatible viewpoints?

Let’s take the trade deficit issue. Although history shows that persistent trade deficits inevitably lead to bad outcomes, this is not a logical necessity. If one country wants to run a persistent trade deficit and other countries are happy to run a corresponding persistent trade surplus, they may do so indefinitely. What inevitably upsets the apple cart is politics and so governments are always tempted to simply suppress the perspectives that go against current policy. In fact, that’s what always happens and what always has happened.

Putting all this together we can see that dealing with systems is far more complex and challenging than dealing with legislation. Wherever there is complexity and ambiguity, there are people with questionable motives who are willing to use it to their advantage. But even people with good intentions suffer from the fact that complexity usually means that the relation between cause and effect is not clear. There is an inevitable temptation for those who make their living from the system to tell little white lies which over time become bigger and bigger lies.

This brief survey gives us an insight into why the second half of the civil rights and feminist programs have gotten stuck in the mud. What was implied by those programs was perhaps something that has never been achieved before. For most of history, humans have developed systems in a receptive fashion. We found ourselves in an environment and we found a way to make the most of it. Through trial-and-error, we developed what we call culture, which is a set of adaptations to an environment.

To try and create or change a system in an active fashion is incredibly difficult. Every new business venture is an attempt to create a new system and we know that very few business ventures survive for any significant period of time. What is true of business ventures is just as true of government programs but the latter is part of the system of politics and therefore subject to the rule cited above that all measurements will be gamed if there is incentive to do so.

Quantum physics found that you cannot remove the observer from the measurement. If that’s true in physics, its ten times more true in the far more subjective world of politics. Systems are complicated enough by themselves. Once you add humans emotions and politics into the mix, they become exponentially harder and when you scale the system up to the size of a modern society, well, you find yourself in a hall of mirrors. Which is pretty much where we are right now.

The world sure is a strange place these days. Gaslighting is the order of the day and the perennial question is “are they doing it on purpose?” I made the mistake recently of taking something on face value, a big no-no, and ended up going down an interesting rabbit hole.

I admit, I haven’t been following the debate around the issue very closely and so I decided recently to go and read the document called the Uluru Statement from the Heart which was written by delegates to the same convention which proposed The Voice. The interested reader can view it here.

Naively, I expected a statement from the heart to contain, well, a statement from the heart. Now, I’ve never read a statement from the heart before, so I had no point of reference. But I anticipated some kind of poetic language or, at the very least, the everyday language of real people. Given the subject matter of the issue, perhaps it would even be written in indigenous languages with an English translation.

What I found instead was a document written in mild legalese. It actually contains the words thereto, therefrom and thither. I suspect 99.99% of Australians of any background have never used thither in their life. If they know the word at all, it would only be from their high school readings of Shakespeare. How did such arcane language make it into an indigenous “statement from the heart”? What is really going on here?

It’s probably my background in linguistics, but I did recognise the style of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. It belongs to a genre that has a tradition going back centuries. And here is where we go down the rabbit hole because the genre in question is declarations of independence.

Declarations of Independence

What marked the Act of Abjuration as unusual, and made it arguably the first exemplar of modern declarations of independence, was that it featured a long preamble outlining the ideological commitments of the newly independent nation. That ideology was inspired by various anti-monarchical ideas that had roots in Calvinism. In the same way, the US Declaration of Independence would later be strongly influenced by the political theory of John Locke. Both documents can only be understood in light of the breakdown of the divine right of kings ushered in by the Reformation. I talked about this issue in detail in a recent post.

The purpose of the preamble was, therefore, to provide an ideological basis for sovereignty that replaced the old divine right of kings. On this basis, a new political structure would be formed. We might call declarations of independence propaganda tools in the old-fashioned, non-pejorative sense of the word since they were designed to unify a group of people behind an idea. Written propaganda was especially suited to protestant nations since literacy rates were high due to the desire to be able to read the bible for oneself. All of this cultural context is necessary to understand why declarations of independence came into being.

The formation of the United States provides a useful case study here because it’s not well remembered that war was not originally waged for independence. In fact, when war broke out in 1775, most colonists were not thinking of independence. Thomas Paine published Common Sense in early 1776 and his book became the lightning rod which sparked the idea of independence. When the Declaration of Independence was written later that year, its purpose was to give coherence to the ideology of the new movement and, just like the Dutch had done earlier, to point out how the monarch they were declaring independence from had failed to fulfil his obligations to the people.

Thus, modern declarations of independence contain three core elements: 1) the ideological basis of the claim to sovereignty; 2) a list of grievances against the old ruler justifying his removal; 3) details of the new political entity which would replace the old.

It’s important to understand that all this is highly context-specific. There may have been declarations of independence in other cultures or throughout history, but the written form which would become the pattern for the modern world originated in post-Reformation Europe with the United States as the poster child for the idea.

Within the context of protestant culture, it can be said that declarations of independence come “from the heart” because of the special place of the bible as the foundational text of that culture. Paine’s Common Sense drew heavily on biblical references as did much of the political propaganda of the time. This mixing of religion and politics was very old. The Magna Carta, for example, was read out in churches across England back in the day. Europeans were used to the idea that written texts could not just be heartfelt but the actual word of God. It was, in some sense, the word of God that the declarers of independence were claiming to have access to. Hence, “all men are endowed by their creator”.

In the aftermath of the war of independence, numerous other declarations of independence were written as various nations were inspired by the US example to throw off the yoke of “tyranny”. Almost all of the South American nations made declarations of independence during the revolutionary period of the early 19^th century as they broke free from Spanish and Portuguese rule. The Mexican declaration is of particular interest to the current Australian debate as it contains the concept of a “voice”:

The Mexican Nation, which for three hundred years had neither had its own will, nor free use of its voice, leaves today the oppression in which it has lived.

The document also contains obvious references to the US declaration of independence.

Restored then this part of the North to the exercise of all the rights given by the Author of Nature and recognized as unalienable and sacred by the civilized nations of the Earth, in liberty to constitute itself in the manner which best suits its happiness and through representatives who can manifest its will and plans,

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness granted by the “author of nature”. The other core concept used is that of will and here we see the influence of Enlightenment ideas which proclaimed that the will of the people was paramount and based in natural law which “tyrants” may not supercede.

The British model provided inspiration for the US model and it has worked out fine for both of those countries as well as for Australia, New Zealand and Canada which were culturally tied to Britain anyway. Did it work elsewhere? Arguably not. It was a disaster in France and a worse disaster in Germany later on.

Constitutions and declarations of independence are just the tip of the Burkean iceberg. They are predicated on a vast base of shared beliefs and cultural traditions that make the whole thing possible in the first place. In the absence of such a base, they become little more than cargo cults.

New Zealand as Case Study

And this bring us to an example close to home that can shed light on the current Australian debate.

Recall the three elements in a modern declaration of independence: 1) statement of sovereignty (based in ideology); 2) list of grievances against the incumbent; 3) declaration of the new political form which will replace the old.

Some Maori chiefs on the north island of New Zealand made a declaration of independence in 1835. The problem was that there was nobody to declare independence from since New Zealand was not unified as a country and the chiefs themselves were the leaders, at least of their own tribes. So what was really going on?

All 3 of the elements of a declaration of independence were formally present in the document. The chiefs began by claiming sovereignty. The basis of that sovereignty was “mana from the land”.

Step 2 is the list of grievances but the the Maori chiefs’ grievances were not against an incumbent but against their political rivals in the south who were invited to drop their “animosity” and join the northerners.

Then, in the final section which is supposed to outline the new form of government, we see a request to the King of England who is asked to “continue to be the parent of their infant State, and that he will become its Protector from all attempts upon its independence.” The chiefs did not desire independence but protection. So, what was the point in writing a declaration of independence?

The answer to that can be found in an occurrence that happened some years later; namely, the Treaty of Waitangi. International law requires that treaties can be made only by sovereign nations. But New Zealand had not been a unified country with a sovereign government in the form required to make a treaty with the British. Thus, the declaration of independence in this case was in fact used to assert the sovereignty of the Maori chiefs of the north island for the purposes of signing the treaty. That’s why the document makes an explicit request for recognition by the British crown.

Why did the Maori chiefs want to sign a treaty? Here we see some of the major differences which distinguished European contact with the Maori from European contact with indigenous Australians.

Both missionaries and traders had set up relations with the Maori well before both the declaration of independence and the subsequent Treaty of Waitangi. This had allowed cultural and economic exchange to take place resulting in the development of an understanding between the Maori and the pakeha. For example, the Maori had adopted a written script for their language, something they previously did not have. Certain Maori chiefs had even fought alongside the British in battle.

What happened in New Zealand was a more reciprocal arrangement based on trade and the Treaty of Waitangi was there to facilitate and enhance that state of affairs. We shouldn’t sugar coat it, of course. The British were experts at divide and conquer by this time and it seems certain that they were playing exactly that game in New Zealand.

And things didn’t go smoothly after the signing of the treaty. It turned out the Maori understanding of the word “sovereign” differed from the British. As is always the case, things that make sense in theory turn out rather different in practice. A treaty is one thing but the everyday business of government is another. The disagreements about political decision-making eventually ended in armed conflict.

Why none of that happened in Australia is one of those eternal debates for which there is no absolute answer. But we can see some of the reasons in the comparison with New Zealand. There is the obvious problem of size. Australia is geographically far larger than New Zealand. The Maori language was spoken in the whole of New Zealand while Australian aboriginals had about 300 distinct languages at the time of white settlement with many more distinct political groupings. Even if every aboriginal tribe had wanted a treaty with the British, negotiating one at the national level was as good as impossible on logistical, political and linguistic grounds. For that and many other reasons, no treaty was made.

The Voice

And this brings us to the current issue at hand in Australia. What the New Zealand example showed was how formal declarations of independence can be, errr, adapted for other purposes. In that case it was a treaty which at least a segment of the Maori population was in favour of. Alongside the declaration of independence, the Maori also developed a flag and a form of government that could uphold the treaty obligations. We might summarise this formula thusly: declaration of independence + flag + form of government = treaty.

As I noted earlier, the Uluru Statement from the Heart is in the form of a declaration of independence. It meets the 3 critieria.

Firstly, there is a claim to sovereignty: “This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature…” [Note the similarity to the Maori “manna from the land”].

Secondly, there is a list of grievances: “Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet.”

The third element would be a declaration of the new political entity to come into being and that’s exactly what we see: “We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution…”.

Following the Maori example, we have a declaration of independence/sovereignty and a form of governance (The Voice). What we would then need is a flag and that would pave the way for a treaty. By coincidence, the Australian government purchased the aboriginal flag just a few years ago. Does that mean we can expect a treaty? The statement from the heart puts it this way:

“We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations…”

Surely this “agreement-making” is code for treaty.

If the point of all this is to sign a treaty, why not just say so. Why not call the Statement from the Heart a Declaration of Independence, The Voice a sovereign government and the Makarrata Commission a Treaty Commission?

There’s numerous reasons why this can’t happen but the most obvious is that it would be a direct challenge to the existing sovereignty of Australia. So, instead we get all the exact forms of a declaration of sovereignty but we change the names and pretend they are something else. It’s not hard to see why some people are convinced the whole thing is a trick.

Why the need for any of this and why the need for a big bang treaty at the national level at all since there are already numerous local treaties across Australia that have been negotiated with individual aboriginal nations?

Here we come to the final piece of the puzzle.

Equal but Different

In 2007, the UN General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). Curiously, only four nations voted No: Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. Then, almost simultaneously, those same countries changed their mind in 2009 and supported the declaration. Canada has subsequently passed a bill through their parliament in 2021 to adopt UNDRIP into Canadian law. It’s pretty clear that The Voice is the Australian version of the same idea.

Have any other nations adopted UNDRIP into law? The answer seems to be no. So why is it that this is an issue only in Anglo countries and why did those same countries seemingly change their position in unison after initial objections? Seems like a very big coincidence to me. Could it be that the Anglo model of governance which achieved hegemony in the post-war years is being targeted directly?

One of the things that model of governance achieved was equality before the law in the 1960s through the civil rights movement. The most famous exponent of that movement was Martin Luther King and the future he envisioned was one of integration of all races within the democratic system of government.

King’s belief was that you started with equality before the law and then you supplemented that with various social programs to address economic inequality since it was previous discrimination which had led to things like high crime rates. As King stated:

If there are lagging standards in the Negro community, and there certainly are, they lag because of segregation and discrimination.  Criminal responses are environmental and not racial. Poverty, ignorance, social isolation, economic deprivation, breed crime whatever the racial group may be and it is a torturous logic to use the tragic results of segregation as an argument for the continuation of it.

If there is any country that should understand that message it should be Australia since the country was established as a penal colony for white European criminals. As my surname suggests, my ancestry is mostly Irish. The Irish were not criminals through choice or because of race. They were criminals because they had been ground under the wheels of British imperialism. Per Dr King, you need to solve the discrimination problem in order to solve the crime problem. That was the idea inherent in the civil rights movement. It could best be summed up by a word that King used a lot – integration.

If democratic integration and equality before the law were the guiding principles of the civil rights movement, what is the guiding principle behind UNDRIP? The second paragraph of UNDRIP states:

Affirming that indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples, while recognizing the right of all peoples to be different, to consider themselves different, and to be respected as such,

It goes on to say that indigenous people should be free to exercise their “right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests… which derive from their political, economic and social structures and from their cultures, spiritual traditions, histories and philosophies, especially their rights to their lands, territories and resources”.

The whole historical problem with nation states was that there was an underlying assumption that Edmund Burke was prescient enough to understand. That assumption was an indigenous populace with a relatively homogeneous shared interest, social structure, culture, spiritual tradition etc. As we saw earlier, the whole business around declarations of independence was the product of the shared heritage of Protestant Europe. It came out of a specific cultural milieu. When the same idea was transplanted into a different milieu, as in New Zealand, it caused problems due to cultural misunderstandings.

UNDRIP takes the starting assumption of the nation state and applies it to “indigenous people” who are also assumed to be perfectly homogenous in relation to shared interest, social structure etc. It then requires that such a people be free to pursue their shared interest within existing nation states. Viewed this way, UNDRIP aims to create nation states within nation states. We see this idea in the language of the Uluru Statement from the Heart:

They (indigenous children) will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

Again, isn’t “world” here just a euphemism for “nation”? The Voice will create two “worlds” within Australia: one for the indigenous and one for the rest of us. What this amounts to is the segregation and separation that Dr King railed against. He went so far as to say that “if democracy is to live, segregation must die”. And yet here we are about to reintroduce separation and, in fact, to put it in the constitution of the country.

Which us brings us back to the original question: are “they” doing it on purpose? Depends who you mean by “they”. There is the they which wants a national treaty in Australia and a they which even wants full sovereignty for aboriginal Australians. It has been suggested in the past, for example, to turn the Northern Territory into a separate sovereign nation just for aboriginals.

On the other hand, there are the unelected and unaccountable “experts” who writes things like UNDRIP and the bureaucrats in the Australian government who make their living managing the results. Then there are the politicians who love heroic gestures that will see their names etched in the history books. Finally, there are the smart political operatives who understand how power works and can see that the indigenous question is an easy way to keep the public divided.

Note that this constellation of interests is very similar to the one which brought us corona. There are the unaccountable global institutions (UN, WHO), the opaque globalist NGOs with mysterious funding models who handle the propaganda activities, the government bureaucrats who earn their living from the issue, the egomaniac politicians living out their dreams of exercising power and the vested interests who stand to make significant financial gain.

If The Voice does get up, I expect it will work out about as well as corona. I suspect Dr King was right. You can’t have segregation and democracy. But maybe that’s the whole point. The central problem of democracy was always how to prevent a tyranny of the majority. A little appreciated fact of the Anglo tradition was that it avoided a tyranny of the majority while both France and Germany fell into that trap. In our highly networked society, it’s fair to say our “elites” are more terrified than ever of demagogues and mob rule.

So, perhaps the degradation of democracy is a feature and not a bug of the new proposal. Once upon a time, such matters were handled quietly behind closed doors. Now they are handled by gaslighting, fabrications and outright lies. As I pointed out a couple of posts ago, this politics of division allows the government to leverage the minority rule to their advantage. The “elites” have always had an interest in ensuring that the will of the majority can be subverted where necesary.