Category: Ideas

While reading the book I got an answer to a question I had been pondering for several years ever since I did some experimentation with the practice of divination. Divination did not work for me and von Franz has provided me with an explanation why.

For those who don’t know, divination is the practice of trying to guide one’s actions or the actions of others through an interpretation of what we might call random stimuli. Numbers can be used for this purpose and that was why the subject came up in von Franz’s book. Tarot cards are another option and it was tarot divination that I began playing around with in 2019. What I came to realise was that divination clashed with an existing practice I had developed purely by accident. Therein lies a story.

The story behind the story is that I’ve moved around quite a lot in life. Several times in my adult life I have packed up and moved somewhere new. This was a continuation of my childhood where our family relocated several times. I changed schools six times during my primary and secondary years.

This fact is important to the story I am going to tell because the story is about one of the times I relocated in my adult life. The details of the move are not important. I took up a new job in a city in a different state of Australia. It’s because this was not the first time I had done this that what happened next cannot be explained as an emotional or psychological reaction to a novel experience. If I had only ever lived in one place my whole life, it’s not hard to imagine that a move to a new place would trigger elevated emotional states, anxiety or even depression. But I was used to moving around and so I knew what to expect.

Well, I thought I knew what to expect. But then something strange happened. Almost immediately after arriving in what I thought was going to be my new home, I had the “feeling” that the move was wrong. What was the nature of this “feeling”?

As I have mentioned, it was not emotional. The move had gone exactly as I had imagined it would. Nothing unusual or aggravating had happened. In our age of modern information technology, it’s possible to do extensive research about a new place before you arrive. In a sense, this actually negates some of the feeling of excitement about a move since you can plan your arrival in great detail including looking for places where you might like to live etc. My new home had thrown up no surprises that triggered a strong emotional reaction on my part.

If the “feeling” I had was not based in emotions, neither was it based on rational grounds. My new job turned out more or less how I had anticipated it would. There were no big surprises there either. And, in any case, the “feeling” had begun before I started work.

If I was to give a name to this “feeling”, I would call it gut feel. My gut was telling me this was a wrong move. I have had these kind of gut feelings as long as I can remember so, in and of itself, this was also not surprising or new. But what made this situation different was that for the first time my gut was telling me to do something that was explicitly irrational in nature.

Think about it, you move interstate to take up what you hope will be an interesting and rewarding job. There’s the possibility to make new friends, meet new people, broaden your horizons etc. Logic and reason say that, even if things don’t work out exactly as you imagine at the start, you should give it a chance. You should wait at least a few months so you can make a proper judgement based on experience rather than jumping to conclusions.

The trouble was, I wasn’t jumping to conclusions. That would imply that I was over-thinking things. But I wasn’t thinking at all. All I had was this incongruous feeling in my gut. It was kind of stuck there droning away like an off-key singer in a choir.

Although I didn’t know it at the time as I hadn’t read Fear and Trembling yet, my experience with the gut feeling raised a similar problem. Imagine if I followed my gut, quit my new job after just a few days and returned to where I came from. My friends and family would naturally ask me what went wrong. If I told them the truth, that nothing had gone wrong but I had quit because my gut told me to, this would not be a socially acceptable answer and people might begin to question my mental state. That comes on top of the moral issue of quitting a job without giving it a real chance, something that would be an inconvenience and expense to my employer that they could quite rightly hold against me.

In our rational society, irrational answers are not acceptable. Thus, what I found myself doing at the time was trying to find logical reasons to do what the feeling in my gut was telling me. But it seemed very obvious to me at the time that I was just in denial. I was looking for excuses to do what I knew that I had to do anyway. If I was honest, this gut feeling was irrational and why should I pretend otherwise.

To cut to the end of the story, I did end up quitting the job after a few months and I went back to where I came from. Things worked out well after that despite the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do next. The lesson I took from the experience was to listen to my gut and not to waste time trying to rationalise the irrational.

In the last few years, as I have been reading Jung more extensively, I have learned that Jung defined gut feeling as Intuition and explicitly categorised it as an irrational function of the psyche. He called Intuition “perception via the unconscious”. When a person acts via Intuition such as I did in quitting my job, that’s called extroverted intuition. Extroverted intuition is perceived by society as irrational and often immoral. The biblical story of Abraham and Isaac takes the problems of extroverted Intuition and turns them up to 11.

With that background, I’m ready to tell the second part of the story and we return to my experimentation with divination in 2019. The date here is crucial because, although I had no idea about it at the time, my experiment with divination would prove hugely important. Once again, the issue would revolve around a change of residence and job, although this time I was moving within Melbourne.

When you’re beginning with divination, it’s recommended to start with small and seemingly insignificant questions so that you can get practice before moving on to more important matters. I had been trying the beginner divination exercises that for about six months and produced results that can best be described as “meh”. Feeling a little frustrated with the situation, I decided towards the end of 2019 to do a tarot divination on a decision of weight. Again, the details are not important. Let’s just call the two options A and B where the main issue was a decision about where to live.

My gut feel, my intuition, was telling me strongly that Option A was the right decision but I decided to do a tarot reading anyway. The tarot cards seemed to tell me equally clearly that Option B was correct. This was a problem. I was hoping the tarot reading would agree with my Intuition. I mulled over it for a few days and then did a second tarot reading. Again, the reading seemed unambiguously to favour Option B. I decided that it was time to put this tarot business to the test and so I went against my Intuition and chose Option B.

The results of the test came back almost immediately but at the time I had no idea that they would become even more meaningful later. In the short term, Option B caused me to lose a small but not insignificant amount of money and endure a couple of months of frustration and mucking around. I’ll skip the details. Let’s just say it was very clear that Option B had been the wrong decision and that my reading of the tarot cards must also have been wrong.

Then the story took a twist. By a fluke, I got another chance at Option A. This time I didn’t bother with a tarot reading. My Intuition was still saying that this was the right decision, so I went for it. By now it was November 2019. I moved house into the suburban setting that I mentioned in my recent post on accidental ornithology.

We all know what happened next. Melbourne ended up having the longest lockdown in the world and I ended up spending it in a relatively pleasant suburban garden. Option B would have seen me climbing the walls of an inner-city apartment. I know a several people who had to endure that and they looked visibly the worse for wear when I saw them after the lockdown. So, yes, Option A really was the right decision. My Intuition was well and truly right and my tarot divination well and truly wrong.

But here was the theoretical problem: divination is supposed to use Intuition. How could the Intuition I had developed naturally over the years have been contradictory with the tarot reading? I must have been doing something wrong. Von Franz’s book, Number and Time, has given me the answer.

Von Franz notes that archetypes and the unconscious only become visible when consciousness is “dimmed”. But this “dimming” is relative to the charge that is present in the unconscious which we can call “psychic energy”. Thus, the archetypes can be said to become visible when there is either a breakdown of the conscious-ego or a heightening of psychic energy in the unconscious. I would further add that the breakdown of the conscious-ego can’t be a traumatic one because that would trigger an emotional reaction and the emotional reaction would serve to cloud any perception of the archetypes.

This explains my gut feeling experience in my initial story. A change of job and location provides exactly the circumstances where we would expect “psychic energy” to be elevated. It was precisely because nothing else went wrong and I was not affected emotionally that I had access to the unconscious via Intuition.

Von Franz make the same point in relation to divination. She says it should not be conducted in a spirit of frivolity and that “the greater the psychic tension the more probable and to the point the result.” This explains my poor results with the beginner tarot divination exercises because they were rather frivolous and there was no psychic energy behind them. Both natural Intuition and divination seem to require that there is actually something at stake; something that elevates the energy in the unconscious without triggering the distracting energy of the emotions.

This still leaves open the problem of why my divination was so wrong in late 2019 because there definitely was psychic energy behind that decision. Von Franz has the answer to that question too; namely, I was using my conscious-ego when doing the divination readings.

I had learned over the years to “listen” to Intuition. For me, Intuition was a receptive mode of the psyche. Most of the time, Intuition had nothing to say and this makes sense because most of the time there is no elevated psychic energy to kick it into action. In modern civilisation, we spend most of our time in psychic homeostasis. It’s only when things “go wrong” or we try something different that the psychic tension rises enough to trigger the Unconscious into action.

Thus, when I did the tarot divination exercise, I was in conscious-ego mode and not in Intuition mode. Accordingly, I approached each tarot reading as a problem to be solved. Von Franz notes that scientific exploration is founded in the rational-ego while divination is based on randomness.

“In (scientific) experimentation the observer’s conscious ego cuts a particular system out of the realm of wholeness. But in the oracle one allows chance to make the cut and only subsequently tries to read a result from it.”

The problem I had with the tarot exercise was that I treated it more like scientific enquiry. The question I was asking the cards was the hypothesis that framed the situation. It cut the hole in reality to use von Franz’s metaphor. Thus, I ended up too much “in my head” when the whole point of Intuition, as I had previously learned, is that it lays outside the rational mind. It must be “felt”.

This seems to me to be a problem with the beginner divination exercises. On the one hand, you can’t expect new practitioners to make important decisions based on tarot readings. On the other hand, the triviality of the reading ensures there is no psychic energy at work and therefore nothing to trigger the Intuition.

This raises a larger question around divination. If divination is really a proxy for Intuition and is only going to work when there is psychic tension, and if psychic tension is generated by real-world events anyway, why not let the events themselves play the role of the “chance” which makes a “cut in wholeness”? Then, Intuition would be free to respond to events when necessary i.e. when psychic tension is heightened. In short, what is the point of the divination cards or numbers?

Three possible answers to this question come to mind.

Firstly, divination can be thought of as a training exercise for Intuition. Jung believed that we are each born with specific psychic predispositions. Intuitive types will already have access to the Intuition and may not need any training to activate it. But those for whom Intuition does not come naturally can try to develop it through divination exercises.  

Secondly, the symbols used in divination provide an extra level of randomness that can expand the scope of Intuition. Intuition is by definition vague and interpretations of its meaning may be more or less accurate. The arbitrary symbolism of a divination reading prompts the practitioner to consider the broader implications and context.

The third point relates back to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Divination provides an external, visible representation to the Intuition. Psychologically, it is a projection. If you remove the projection, you allow that the individual can just do whatever they like whenever they like. The divination exercise could therefore be seen as a kind of psychic protection against ego inflation.

To the extent that a society accepts divination as an valid means of decision making, divination provides the same safeguards at the social level. Since any significant political decision will be accompanied by a heightened psychic tension, divination makes sense from a psychological point of view while also providing a central point of reference to ensure the socio-psychological dynamic does not go off the rails.

Of course, we live in a society that does not believe in divination or the irrational at all. As religion has continued to fade as a social force, we have simply replaced its irrationality with the facade of rationality provided by “science”. Corona provided a paradigm example of this delusion.

We are living through a time of heightened psychic energy which points to significant movements in the collective unconscious. It should be clear by now that corona was not the end of the story and the psychic machinations have not finished with us yet. Because our society has no way to understand this dynamic, we pretend that everything is “scientific” and “rational” and we have no problem committing acts equally as irrational in the name of science as Abraham did in the name of God. Unlike us, Abraham was honest about the irrationality of his behaviour.

Interestingly, this error seems related to the one that I committed with my tarot reading in late 2019. I used my conscious-ego where it was not appropriate. And just like my tarot reading was 100% wrong, so too has the “science” been 100% wrong for the last three years.

Because modern society has no means to recognise the irrational except as “mental illness”, it cannot process the world that we find ourselves in now. We continue to invoke the conscious-ego via “science” and “reason” in the most ridiculously illogical ways. Even Kierkegaard, the absurdist par excellence, would be shaking his head.

But we are also proving Kierkegaard’s point and it was one that Nietzsche and the other existentialists also made: reason and science are based in the Irrational because the rational-ego is born out of the Irrational. Failure to accept the irrational basis of reality will eventually lead to the destruction of reason.

Towards the end of his life, Carl Jung became interested in trying to use the concept of archetypes to bridge the gap between the psyche and the physical world. This included a collaboration with physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, and also the qualitative study of number. Jung came to think of number as a primitive form of spirit. He also gave emphasis to the number 4 and in his book, Aion, made the argument that the task of the modern world was to integrate matter, the feminine and the devil into the trinity thus forming a quaternity. (If this sounds like a strange grouping, consider that the linguist George Lakoff has provided some cross-cultural evidence for this categorisation in his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things).

In my recent series of posts on Spengler, I covered the theory of the cycle of civilisation as described by both Spengler and Toynbee and earlier by the French historian Charles Rollin. This raises the question: is the cycle of civilisation an archetype? It seems to me that it could be since, as Toynbee pointed out, it’s not a logical necessity that the cycle should be followed and nevertheless it seems the cycle does get followed as if determined by something like an archetype.  

One of the core processes that Spengler and Toynbee identified in the latter stages of a civilisation was proletarianisation. This is the homogenisation of the population; the switch from quality to quantity. It recently occurred to me that we are still in the grip of this proletarianisation but it is manifesting now in a different form than previously. The underlying archetype – late stage civilisation – is the same but its temporal expression has changed.

To explain this, we can use one of Nassim Taleb’s most insightful ideas: the Minority Rule. I’m not sure whether Taleb has read either Spengler or Toynbee. From the way he described his discovery of the Minority Rule, it seems to have been an independent insight on his part. Nevertheless, it fits into the proletarianisation of late civilisation and it does so in a mathematical kind of way that Jung would have found compelling.

Let’s say you have a neighbourhood in a city in the USA where the Jewish community increases to about 5% (this is the threshold where Taleb believes the Minority Rule kicks in). Local supermarkets will have been stocking both kosher and non-kosher food up until this point. This comes at a cost since it takes extra shelf space to stock two types of the same food.

If the Jewish community in the area continues to grow, at some point the cost of stocking both kosher and non-kosher food will be noticeable to supermarket management and they will look for ways around this cost. One thing management can do is to sell only kosher food. This can work if the rest of the population in the area, the Majority, does not care if food is kosher or not.

There are three core elements to the Minority Rule’s structure: the indifferent Majority, the intolerant Minority and a leadership group (management) that seeks power (profits). When these three conditions hold, the Minority can be said to determine the behaviour of the Majority through the leadership group and everybody in the neighbourhood will end up eating kosher food.

Taleb’s use of the kosher food example to describe the Minority Rule is useful because it opens up historical parallels that allow us to see the historical paradigm shift that activates the Minority Rule. The Minority Rule works in modern America but it could not have worked in old Europe because the Jews at that time lived in ghettos. The Jewish population was physically and culturally distinguished from the general population. This created parallel economies for Jews and gentiles.

What changed between old Europe and modern America? The Enlightenment. The specific Enlightenment ideal that is relevant here is the idea of equality under the law where the law represents the general will of the people expressed through parliament. We take this idea completely for granted these days but it did not exist in old Europe.

Hannah Arendt and other thinkers later analysed the “liberation” of European Jewry as the cause of a crisis in European Jewish identity. Herein lies the problem with the concepts of general will and equality before the law. Equality requires the sacrifice of ancient, immutable and non-transferrable identities. The doctrine of equality aims to stop the injustice of equal people being treated unequally. But it creates the opposite injustice where people who are not equal are treated the same.

Equality also turned out to be a byword for conformity. The general will became tied up with increasingly shrill demands for such conformity and the Jews became central to this dynamic because, even though their identity was arguably more under threat than anybody else’s, they still retained the last vestiges of the old world where identity was more important than equality.

In psychological terms, the Germans, French, Russians and most other European populations projected onto the Jews their own psychological trauma; the feeling of loss of identity that came with proletarianisation. The Nazis would eventually represent the final collapse into proletarianisation. They actively persecuted all minority groups, not just the Jews.

When we analyse this final collapse into proletarianisation, we find the same archetypal elements that Taleb identified in his Minority Rule. There is a homogenous Majority implied by the Nation concept, one or more Minorities and a Leadership group i.e. the State. Put it all together and you get the Nation State which struggled with the concept of minorities right from the start.

Utilising Taleb’s language, we can call the dynamic that arose in the Nation States following the French Revolution – Majority Rule. The Majority Rule archetype is invoked when an Intolerant Majority determines the behaviour of the Minority. In the days of old Europe prior to the Nation State, the Majority Rule did not apply because the homogenisation process had not yet taken place. The Jews were confined to ghettos. But for the most part they had some protection to practice their religion and live as they saw fit. The Majority did not seek to determine their behaviour.

That the Majority Rule should follow the Enlightenment fits with certain historical analyses which saw the Enlightenment concepts of the general will and equality before the law as giving rise to the Tyranny of the Majority. Although the Nazis are the most famous historical example, many European countries of that time were running a Tyranny of the Majority featuring a tyrannical leader claiming to represent a homogenous Majority in the persecution of Minorities.

Naturally, in the post-war years there has been a concerted effort not to allow a repetition of the Tyranny of the Majority and this is where we come to the current state of our politics. The Trump and Brexit votes threatened a return of the Tyranny of the Majority. At least, that’s what we were told. One thing they certainly threatened to do was to upend the political status quo that has been built after the wars.

The post-war years saw the disempowerment of the Nation State in favour of internationalisation. This went hand-in-hand with the rise of multi-national corporations and the consumer society. As long as the economy was growing, everybody was happy to go along with this state of affairs. Everything has been done to ensure its continuation through the various crises that have threatened it. The incorporation of China into the WTO may have been the last hurrah for the consumer economy. We stretched it out for another two decades on the back of cheap Chinese labour. But it’s now threatened on multiple fronts, not the least of which is the Chinese government.

In response to these threats and specifically the domestic threat posed by the Trump and Brexit votes, our “elites”, who govern more now through the Deep State than the State, have ramped up a dynamic that I’m going to call the Tyranny of the Minority. The Tyranny of the Minority is the invocation of Taleb’s Minority Rule in the political sphere.

Recall once again the three components of the archetype: the Majority, one or more Minorities and the Leaders. In the Tyranny of the Majority, you have an Intolerant Majority determining the behaviour of Minorities through the State. In the Tyranny of the Minority, you have an Intolerant Minority determining the behaviour of the Majority through the Deep State.

Examples of this from recent politics include the climate debate, although “success” there has been limited. Corona was a prime example as the Branch Covidian Intolerant Minority and the Deep State determined the behaviour of the Majority. The transgender issue is the latest and perhaps most obvious example since it has the least basis in reason and logic. Here in Australia, and I believe also in NZ and Canada, the indigenous debate is also increasingly taking the form of a Tyranny of the Minority. Australia will even vote later this year to enshrine it into the Constitution.

The Tyranny of the Minority is now actively encouraged by the highest political offices in western nations. Just as the politicians of early 20th century Europe leveraged nationalism and socialism to create a Tyranny of the Majority, our politicians leverage the various ideologies listed above to create a Tyranny of the Minority. It is the mechanism by which political power is wielded.

Recall that Taleb’s Minority Rule holds when an indifferent Majority comes up against an Intolerant Minority. It might be argued that the Majority is not indifferent on the topics I listed above. Again, the trans issue is very illuminating here since there are now many women who are speaking out on the subject and hence are not indifferent. Those women have simply been smeared as Nazis, fascists or “hard right” extremists. It’s the same smear used against the Canadian truckers, the Querdenker in Germany and pretty much any group now who speaks out against the current thing.

Logically speaking, such accusations are irrational and contrary to historical fact. But that’s precisely why we must turn to an archetypal explanation. Jung was quite clear about this. It’s when the rational mind breaks down that the archetypes become active. It’s quite clear the collective rational mind of the West has now broken down and the archetypes are coming out to play.

To understand what is going on archetypally, we must interpret these matters symbolically, not logically. When we do so, we can see that the Nazi/fascist smear is archetypally related to the historical Tyranny of the Majority. Since our current “elites” are facilitating a Tyranny of the Minority and since this is actually an inversion of the Tyranny of the Majority, there is some archetypal logic to what is going on. You can have a Tyranny of the Minority or a Tyranny of the Majority. You can’t have both.

The more cogent of the modern “elites” fully believe that the Trump/Brexit votes were the foreshadowing of a return to the Tyranny of the Majority. That is, at least, their excuse. The problem is that they have a vested interest in the status quo and the status quo is built on a Tyranny of the Minority.

In any case, the objection works from a propaganda point of view. A Tyranny of the Minority requires a compliant Majority in order to work and the Nazi/Hitler smears are there to ensure that the Majority stays compliant. Of course, at the rate we are going, everybody will have been called a Nazi before too long. When even feminists are getting called Nazis, you know you’re reaching the end game.

In summary, western “elites” have weaponised the Minority Rule and turned it into a Tyranny of the Minority. That is the mechanism of domestic political power.

The Tyranny of the Majority found expression through an actual tyrant (Napoleon, Hitler) while the Tyranny of the Minority fits the pattern I have previously identified as Benevolent Totalitarianism. It works in a decentralised fashion based around ideology. The Tyranny of the Majority requires the Tyrannical Father archetype. The Tyranny of the Minority requires The Devouring Mother.

One of the discombobulating factors in public discourse in recent years is the seeming absence of any reason, logic or even self-interest behind the surface cacophony. Politics as practiced until recently was based on self-serving lies. We knew politicians lied. The important thing was why they lied. The main question to ask was what outcome was the lie in service of. I used to know why politicians were lying. But not anymore. Some people believe they can discern a cunning masterplan behind the politics of the last few years. It looks to me more like chaos (which manifests as unconscious archetypal machinations).

So, when a story comes along that features some good old-fashioned naked self-interest masquerading as moral rectitude, it’s almost a relief. One such story caught my eye as it’s been doing the rounds in Australian media recently. The story is that we’re about to introduce a 4-day work week. This will be, according to a recent media article penned by a professor at UTS Sydney, a “great leap forward”. I can’t figure out if this is an ironic or a deliberate reference to Chairman Mao’s disastrous reform program.

Fear not, though, the 4-day work week has the full backing of “science”. A team of “experts” at several universities has been working through the details over the last several years. The headline of the article notes that the trials have been labelled “a resounding success”. Of course, the exact same headline was written about the corona vaccines. But I’m sure the experts will get this one right. Right?

The experts in question produced a “global” report that backs the plan. Great. So, they must have tried it out in numerous countries around the world, right?

Actually, no. Only 6 countries were trialled.

But the 6 countries were a representative sample of all nations, weren’t they?

Actually, no. The 6 countries who took part were all the Anglo countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Ok. But they must have taken a representative sample of occupations to prove the idea is capable of being rolled out to all jobs?

Nah. Only professional office jobs were included in the study.

If this sounds like less than rigorous research, consider that the basic premise of the idea is that productivity can remain the same when employees work 20% less. This is an idea which stands common sense, logic and history on its head. Anybody defending it should be expected to go out of their way to prove its veracity and yet here we have a study with holes big enough to drive a truck through.

We see here a repeat of the corona vaccine pattern. Massive claims were made for the vaccine that had no basis in science, logic or history. In a functioning society, the emphasis should be on people making extraordinary claims to provide extraordinary evidence to back them. Clearly we don’t live in that kind of society.

Suffice to say that this research is, pardon my French, complete bullshit. But at least we can see whose interest the bullshit serves. The salaried professional class here in Australia will get to trial the new scheme. These brave innovators, who have only recently had to go through the trauma of returning to the office after working from their couches for the last three years, will lead the way into the new golden epoch.

Of course, it’s only in office jobs that it’s possible to pretend that taking a day off a week can lead to productivity improvements. Tell the foreman in a factory or the manager in a supermarket that you can increase productivity by having everybody take Fridays off and you’ll be laughed out of the building. Common sense is not a strong point of our modern “elites”.

The professor’s article attempts to link the 4-day work week concept with the historical industrial relations disputes which led to the original 40-hour work week. This is yet another obvious error of reasoning. But the difference between the two examples is revealing of a larger pattern that differentiates society now from society back then.

The 40-hour work week was born out of a grassroots movement which saw workers joining together into unions and using strikes and other industrial action to force employers and governments to grant not just a 40-hour work week but other things we now take for granted such as holiday and sick pay. All of this was achieved over a period of decades which allowed society to slowly adapt and correct course as necessary. It was iterative and based in the “real world”.

Since the comparison with the corona vaccines is relevant here, we should also note that the history of vaccines was also iterative and based in the real world. Most people know the story of Edward Jenner and the smallpox inoculation which arose out of real world observation, no high-tech laboratories required. Similarly, Pasteur’s discovery of the attenuated vaccine took many years and ultimately resulted from a laboratory error. Iteration. Observation. Trial and Error. These are the primary factors involved both in early industrial action and vaccine development.

By contrast, the 4-day work week and the corona vaccines were cooked up by academics in ivory towers. The ways things work these days is that such ideas are fed into the propaganda channels of the media. To compete in those channels, the ideas must be accompanied by grand announcements about the wonderful changes they will bring about. You’ve got to sex it up if you want to play in the world of public relations. Completely absent from this dynamic are the aforementioned concepts of iteration, observation, trial and error and that pesky thing called “the real world”.

All these new ideas sound nice as long as you don’t think about them for more than 5 seconds. For example, it may very well be that respiratory viruses, and viruses in general, perform a necessary function that we don’t know about. In the unlikely event that we can come up with a 100% “safe and effective” vaccine that eliminates respiratory viruses, this may cause a set of unforeseeable side effects. The treatment may turn out to be worse than the disease as so often happens in modern medicine.

What about the 4-day work week? Sounds nice. Except that we know that unemployment is linked with all kinds of negative outcomes including depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse etc. What if what people really need is meaning. For better or worse, paid employment is one of the main ways we find meaning in our culture. Cutting work hours is not going to help people find meaning, at least, not any meaning that has a larger societal aspect. The whole point of work is that it is communal and exoteric. It is your way of contributing to society. To the extent that humans are social animals that need to feel they contribute to society, reducing work will reduce the meaning people find in their lives.

And this brings us to the crux of the problem that I think really underlies the 4-day work week concept: the lack of meaning in modern work. The 4-day work week denotes a crisis of confidence that is taking place among exactly the demographic that the study focused on: the professionals in Western, and especially Anglo, countries.  

This is not a new development. In fact we saw it appear early on in corona with the use of the deeply weird phrase “the new normal”. Corona might have been the first pandemic in history where, instead of fearing for their lives or grieving over lost loved ones, people actually saw an opportunity for a brighter future. But, of course, the people who were talking of the new normal were the very same elites who are now hoping to get a 4-day work week.  

Just as calling for a new normal during a “pandemic” is delusional and self-centred, so is wishing for a 4-day work week in the current socio-economic conditions. Right now in Australia we have historically low unemployment and historically high inflation. The rental vacancy rate is the lowest on record while Australia is currently importing the highest number of immigrants on record. Where are all these people going to live? Not in new homes if the recent announcement of the bankruptcy of a new home builder is any indication. This comes on the back of several state bailouts of builders last year. The bankruptcy was apparently caused by labour shortages, inflation and supply chain problems.

Meanwhile, the Victorian Premier jetted off on a trip to China that apparently had something to do with higher education. The Chinese government recently dropped a ban on students travelling overseas to study which means Australia could see tens of thousands of them showing up soon. Presumably, the Premier is trying to get them to come back to Melbourne.

So, we are trying import workers and students to make up for the employment problem, except we don’t have anywhere to house them. Meanwhile, the money they bring will only add to inflation. Cool plan, bro.

This is all the attempted continuation of what I call the immigration-education-real estate axis of evil that has been the cornerstone of Australian economic policy for a good two decades. This policy was already causing problems before corona and those problems are only becoming more acute. The one thing the plan has been good for is to prop up real estate values for investors. And which class is doing the investing? You guessed it – the salary class.

In the middle of all these issues, the same salary class wants to work four days a week. That’s what’s called in the vernacular taking the piss. If the studies are in fact correct and salaried professionals can be more productive by working less, maybe those same professionals could do society a favour and take a 4-day work week in exchange for 4 days of wages. The productivity boost would sure help inflation. They could then go one step further and use that extra free day to work in one of the industries that is crying out for employees at the moment. Maybe they could help build new houses to ease the shortage.

Of course, the productivity gains of the 4-day work week are illusory because in order to increase productivity you must create something of value in the first place. I talked in the last post about the ex-Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, who led the neoliberal economic reforms back in the 80s and 90s. Keating admitted that those reforms hollowed out the manufacturing sector in Australia but, he claimed, those manufacturing jobs were replaced by “service jobs” which paid more and which were more “skilled” because they apparently required university degrees to perform. (The same universities that produce garbage research about 4-day work weeks?)

If we rename Keating’s “service job” to David Graeber’s “bullshit job”, we start to see the problem. I went into detail about bullshit jobs in one of my coronapocalypse posts, so I won’t repeat myself here. The key point to understand is that this wasn’t just some pejorative term that Graeber invented because he didn’t like service jobs. He gave it that title because the people who do those jobs believe that the jobs have no meaning. And if your job has no meaning to you, it follows quite naturally that you will want to do less of it. Doing less of it won’t solve the problem but it will temporarily relieve some of the emotional issues that come from the feeling of meaninglessness.

Much of what is going on with dumb ideas like the 4-day work week and the new normal and the other madness we see in modern society stems from the fact that our “elites” are in an existential crisis and, rather than face the crisis head on, they have sublimated it. This crisis of meaning began with the collapse of the USSR. Our elites were suddenly without a viable external enemy that could keep their worst excesses in check. Maanwhile, the neoliberal reforms shipped all the real jobs overseas leaving western elites with mostly meaningless jobs. This has led to a subsequent breakdown of logic, reason and common sense because we created a society where those things are not required.

All that is about to change, of course. The corona event has precipitated a rapid change in the geopolitical situation. The rest of the world isn’t buying our bullshit anymore. We’re going have to figure out how to start producing things that matter again.

Keating was always about the big picture. So much so that he often came across to the average Australian as an elitist. He liked to wear expensive Italian suits and shoes and to buy beautiful antiques and listen to classical music. In those respects he was the opposite of the Prime Minister he displaced, Bob Hawke. And yet it was Hawke who went to university (Oxford, to be precise, on a Rhodes Scholarship) while Keating was a high school dropout raised in a fibro home in the working class western suburbs of Sydney who worked his way up through the Labor Party from the bottom.

Whatever his sophisticated tastes in clothing and works of art, Keating was a junkyard dog kind of politician. His supporters would hate the comparison, but he has a lot in common with Trump. Both of them are political brawlers and the differences between their style of brawling are partly the differences between Australian and American culture.

To take just one point of comparison, Trump became adept at pinning his chosen epithets on his opponents: Crooked Hilary, Sleepy Joe. Keating had previously anointed John Howard as “the desiccated coconut” and John Hewson as “the feral abacus”. His best line, however, was the description of ex-Treasurer Peter Costello as “all tip and no iceberg”. Much like Trump’s epithets, these work not just because they are clever but because they are true. (The interested reader can find a collection of Keating’s best insults here.)

Keating has not been in the public eye much since his retirement from politics in the mid-90s. His post-politics career followed the usual pattern of sitting on boards of companies, banks or various institutions. What drew him back to the public limelight was his criticism of the recent AUKUS deal whereby Australia agreed to pay enormous sums of money to buy nuclear submarines from the United States.

Keating had criticised this deal when it was originally rolled out by the then Morrison government but, perhaps more surprisingly, reserved his “bazooka” for the newly-minted Albanese government’s formal acceptance of the deal. Surprising because Keating has always been a rabid Labor Party man. For Keating to criticise the party in such a public way is a sure sign he really thinks this deal is bad for the country.  

Keating has been speaking on Australia’s geopolitical interests for many years with a specific focus on China. We can summarise the core elements of his outlook as follows:

• China already has a bigger economy than the US and it’s only going to get bigger. He expects it to end up at least twice as big as the US in aggregate terms
• The US has never had a coherent “pacific strategy” and when Obama announced the “pivot to Asia” this was a containment strategy for China which made little sense since China aims to expand inland by building up Eurasia
• The US strategy should be to allow China its sphere of influence where it’s going to get it anyway (Eurasia)
• The US should then shore up its sphere of influence around the Atlantic which would include Russia’s integration into Europe (note: Keating had been saying this long before the Ukraine War)
• The US would then be able to play the role of arbiter in the Pacific to balance China’s growing power in the region

This overall vision for the world hasn’t changed much since Keating was Prime Minister back in the early 1990s. Australia has done a pretty good job of balancing its relationships with both China and the US all the way up until the Morrison government where it seems a decision was made, or maybe an ultimatum given, that we were going to have to pick a side. We chose the United States. The AUKUS agreement reflects that development and, not coincidentally, comes on the back of corona where Australia played the role of propagandistic attack dog against China on the US’s behalf. China duly punished us with various trade restrictions.

Given Keating’s pre-existing analysis of the geopolitical chessboard, his criticism of the AUKUS deal makes perfect sense. The deal is not in Australia’s strategic interests because it amounts to tying our military to the US. This is not a new development, of course. In the Vietnam War, the then Prime Minister, Harold Holt, promulgated the phrase “all the way with LBJ” (referring to the then US president Johnson) to signal Australia’s commitment to our major ally. The Pentagon Papers subsequently showed that one of the main drivers for the Vietnam War was to contain China.

It seems history is repeating and Australia is lining up to play its usual role as lapdog to empire. But the world is very different now and the empire in question is no longer in the ascendant as the US still was in the 60s. The situation now is far more like that of the world wars with the US in the role of Britain and China in the role of Germany. The difference from Australia’s point of view is that Britain was both our main ally and our main trading partner back then just as the US was in the 60s. This time, our main ally is the US and our main trading partner is China. It’s this key strategic problem which Keating felt the need to remind the country of last week.

Keating’s dream of an Asia-Pacific where China is the main player while the US exerts a balancing influence where necessary is, therefore, the ideal scenario for Australia. His problem with the AUKUS deal is that we did not even bother to stand up for our own interests. We apparently did not even try to tell a story that would help our cause. Rather, we rolled over and gave the Americans whatever they wanted.

Whether Australia could do anything to change American minds is highly doubtful. But speaking out would at least have the benefit of defining a genuinely Australian position on international affairs. We would have defined to ourselves what our own interests are. Our unwillingness to do so points to a lack of confidence. This is a subject that Keating has been talking about for decades: our lack of confidence in our own identity and specifically one that can stand apart from Britain and the US.

One of Keating’s best moments in parliament was his cultural cringe speech. It’s a fantastic piece of oratory that also reveals much of his underlying philosophy which might be summed up as “economics and progress”. He spends most of the speech talking about how various economic metrics have improved over the decades. That was the kind of dry, technocrat talk that used to bore the public but at the end he shows some fire in the belly and ties the growth in the economy explicitly to the desire to become an independent nation.

For Keating, Australia becomes more independent, and therefore creates a unique identity, to the extent that we remove ourselves from our British past. Our trade links with Asia were a core element in making that happen. Keating’s economic reforms were designed to turn Australia’s economy more to Asia which was the fastest growing region at the time and still is. The Liberal Party might have desired to retain the old links to Britain but their economic policy was practically identical to Keating’s. In fact, it was more Keating than Keating.

The rhetorical turn to the more “cultural” issues in the lead up to the 1993 election was motivated more by political necessity than anything else. He might have been up against the feral abacus, Hewson, but the reality was there was little difference between Keating and Hewson in outlook. Both were true believers in neoliberal economic policy. To the extent that those policies were going to turn Australia even more towards Asia, they were a large driver of our supposed new identity and the only question was whether you cheered it on like Keating or felt uneasy about it like the Liberals. Nothing much has changed since then. Keating is still cheering it on. The Liberals still feel uneasy.

During the 1993 election cycle, the public was also not sure about the matter given that Australia’s economy was in the worst shape it had been in since the Great Depression. Keating was very unpopular and would certainly have been turfed out except that the Liberal Party, in its infinite wisdom, decided to run a candidate that was even more of a neoliberal religious zealot and who managed to make himself even more unpopular than Keating.

Fast forward to today and China has grown to become by far and away our main trading partner (Japan held that title back in the 90s). Keating would no doubt point to the last two decades of growth in the Australian economy as proof that he was right. And if he was right about that, maybe he’s also right about China now.

Was he right? Yes, we’ve had decades of low inflation growth, although at the rate things are going it looks like we’re going to get all the inflation back in the next few years. In the meantime, we’ve also had massive asset bubbles most notably in real estate. Back when Keating was PM, a family on an average wage could afford a quarter acre block in outer suburbia. Now, the rising generation looks like they might never own real estate at all.

As if to highlight where the problem lay, here in Melbourne over the last decade or so many real estate signs in the inner city started to be printed in two languages: English and Chinese. People watched as Chinese buyers showed up to auctions and outbid everybody. Meanwhile, our government even gave the green light for Chinese companies to fly in their workers to do specific jobs on Australian soil.

It turns out there is a relationship between economics and identity. Owning a home used to be a core part of what it meant to be Australian. Now that’s going away. Was this inevitable? Was it just the iron laws of economics? Or was it, in fact, caused by neoliberalism. There were plenty of dissenters back in the 90s who predicted this would happen. The economy should work for the country, not the other way around, they said.

Then there’s the subject of leadership and confidence. The neoliberal agenda was explicitly about removing government from the equation. The market should be left to work its magic. Keating and his neoliberal technocrat advisers spent the whole time in the leadup to the 1993 election resisting the demands of the public that the government do something, anything, to get the economy going again. The public wanted the government to show leadership. The government told the public that the market would take care of the problem in due course. That’s what the neoliberals believed. The government should not lead. It should get out of the way. Any “leadership” was a suboptimal allocation of scarce resources.

I have mentioned in past posts that capitalism was always at odds with the nation state because the former requires inter-dependence and the latter presupposes independence. The neoliberal agenda was in large part a victory of capitalism over the nation state. It was the removal of the nation state in favour of the market. Who managed the market? The technocrats; the new economic priesthood.

Neoliberalism gave Australia a fundamental economic attachment to China. The system was supposed to work by nation states agreeing not to intervene in the market, thereby taking politics out of the equation. China never agreed to that deal but the theory was that, as China grew, its new middle class would demand political freedom. They would assert themselves against the centralised Chinese government.

The exact opposite has happened. The Chinese government has become even more authoritarian. China has devolved more and more into a techno-dystopian authoritarian state with its social credit scores and mass surveillance and the like. It apparently has no intention of providing more freedom for its citizens. I’ve been fortunate to travel to China several times and I’ve worked with some of those members of its middle class. The level of animosity towards the government is palpable. And that was before corona.

For Keating to pop up and say that the Chinese government has been the best in the world over the last three decades simply ignores all these troubles. He sounds a lot like Mr Emergency Act himself, Justin Trudeau, who praised the “basic dictatorship” of China because it could get things done. I’m sure politicians look to China with a measure of jealousy. If you don’t have to give a damn what your citizens want and treat them like disposable pawns, then you can get a lot of stuff done. China has proven that.

Not only do our politicians speak highly of China, they are starting to copy it. That’s exactly what happened in the last 3 years. Our wonderful leaders and their “experts” decided to abandon the established pandemic response procedures and copy the Chinese government. We all got to experience a little taste of what it’s like to live in China.

And this reveals something about Keating which transcends political party allegiance. Keating might not have gone to university but as a politician he surrounded himself with those who had. It was the generation where even union leaders had PhDs in economics. These were “the experts”. The economics experts were the high priests of neoliberalism. The market was their God. Technocracy and authoritarianism fit together nicely. What China has built in the last few decades is a giant testament to technocracy and it could only have been done with an authoritarian government.

So, maybe all this isn’t coincidental. Maybe economics and identity are not separate things after all. We let China into the world economic system telling ourselves that China would become more like us and instead we have become more like China. Whether we want to continue to become more like China should be a serious question for debate.

None of this makes the AUKUS deal a good one, necessarily. Do we really think we’re going to get into a military confrontation with our major trading partner? If that ever happens, we’d be in a world of pain. On the other hand, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to show we’re not going to be steamrolled over. It would be nice if we could do that in the way that Keating suggests, by actually having a separate voice that can tell our own story. But maybe that’s too much to ask and who would listen anyway? As Keating says, we’re entering a time of big power politics and Australia is not a big power.

The Eurasian bloc with newly integrated Russia is likely to become the leading power in the world in the years and decades ahead. The US should never have allowed that to happen. But now that it has, we can’t ignore it. Australia’s problem is that we don’t belong to it culturally but we are tied to it economically. Keating believed the latter would solve for the former. That was almost certainly wrong. The tension between our identity and the geopolitical realities won’t get resolved any time soon.

In Decline of the West, Spengler stated that a great statesman should be like a gardener tending to his country with a view to ensuring its “plants” grew up healthy and strong. Sounds quaint and harmless, doesn’t it? But by the time he wrote The Hour of Decision, Spengler was referring to his fellow citizens as “human vermin” and “human insects”.  What does a statesman-gardener do with the pests spoiling his garden? The 20^th century gave us a detailed answer to this question.

Unbeknownst to Mao, sparrows eat grasshoppers. So, when you get rid of the sparrows you increase the population of grasshoppers. It’s theorised that the main cause of a locust swarm is overpopulation. Whether that’s true or not, it happened in China in the years following 1958. Locust plagues immediately followed the sparrow cull and led to a subsequent famine that killed tens of millions of people. Realising his mistake, Mao took the sparrows off the list of the Four Pests and replaced them with bed bugs. Apparently the list needed to be four items long. The sparrows had probably never really been a problem at all except in the mind of a mad dictator who believed his own propaganda.

But it wasn’t just Mao who believed the propaganda. The only reason so many sparrows could be killed was because many other people believed it too. Nowadays we are familiar with ideas “going viral”. The concept of contagion also reappeared just this week in the context of the financial markets. Apparently, the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank posed a “contagion risk” for the whole banking sector. Just like grasshoppers can state change into locusts and destroy crops, financial institutions and individual account holders can state change into panic-mode and destroy a bank. Perhaps our finance technocrats have not been tending their garden properly.

It’s not just among humans that “information” can go viral. I have a story about “information contagion” that’s based on real-life gardening. Since I like to tell a good gardening yarn, let me share it with you.

The tree is a Josephine de Malines cultivar, apparently named after the wife of the guy who first cultivated it. I picked it up as a seedling almost ten years ago. I was browsing through a nursery a few days before Christmas and noticed that it was half price. The reason for the discount was probably because planting a tree at that time of year is not ideal as the plant doesn’t have time to root properly which limits its ability to take up water. A few days in a row above 40 degrees, rare but not out of the question in the Melbourne high summer, can kill off a newly planted tree. I took the gamble and it paid off. The tree has grown strongly and now produces hundreds of pears in a good season.

The Josephine had its first really big fruiting season in the autumn of 2020. We all know what else happened that autumn. From mid-March, I began working from home prior to the official corona lockdown. As a result, I spent my day overlooking the pear tree. It was from this position that I was about to do some accidental ornithological research.

We tend to think of animals as acting entirely by instinct. But even birds have to learn what they can and can’t eat through trial and error. The first time I tried to give tomatoes to my backyard chickens, they turned up their beaks and walked away. But now that they’ve learned how tasty tomatoes are, they will squabble over who gets first bite.  

The same goes for blackbirds which, like chickens, are opportunistic eaters. Blackbirds form monogamous pair bonds and the male will usually defend an area of territory. For that reason, in a suburban setting you normally only see a few blackbirds around: the male, the female and any children they are still taking care of. At about one year of age, the younger blackbirds will fly off to start their own family somewhere else. Because of these behavioural patterns and because they have a short lifespan of about 2 years on average, anything a blackbird learns about what is and is not edible is not going to get transmitted to other blackbirds. Information doesn’t “go viral” in the blackbird world.

I suspect it’s for these reasons that, prior to 2020, the couple of blackbirds that were hanging around my yard had shown no interest in the pear tree. Then two things changed. Firstly, the pear tree had a bumper crop in 2020. Secondly, I started free-ranging chickens in the backyard. All fruit trees will normally drop some fruit on the ground before it is ripe. Prior to 2020, I would have picked up any dropped pears and put them in the compost. But now the chickens were around, so I let them eat the fallen pears.

Initially, I wasn’t too bothered about the blackbirds eating the fruit on the ground. But, unlike chickens, blackbirds can fly and that means they can fly up into the tree and eat the fruit that was still ripening. I wondered how long it would take the blackbirds to look above their heads and realise that the fruit in the tree was the same as the fruit on the ground.

Surprisingly, it took them a full 3 weeks to figure it out. By now we were into the first week of April which is exactly when the Josephine pears start to be ripe for picking. Because I hadn’t had any trouble with pests prior to this, I didn’t own any bird netting. And because it was lockdown, getting a hold of some netting was not going to be easy. What to do?

Fortunately, blackbirds are easily scared. In fact, they’re more chicken than chickens. I realised that by giving just a single loud clap of my hands I could scare them away from the pear tree. This is not a pest deterrent method I would recommend but I had nothing better to do at the time given we were in lockdown. I decided to turn the whole thing into an experiment. Could I “teach” the blackbirds to stop trying to get pears? After all, if a blackbird keeps flying into the tree but gets scared away before it can eat anything, you would think that after a while it would just give up.

The answer to this particular ornithological experiment was that, no, the blackbirds did not give up. I was unable to “teach” them and so I spent the whole month of April and early May shooing them away from the tree. Fortunately, this was not such a big effort because there were only three blackbirds and the whole thing was a welcome diversion from the madness of the world at that time. Plus, it meant I got to eat most of the pears on the tree. Yum!

Ironically, the blackbirds had become almost as singled-minded as we humans. They had become obsessed with the pears. Such behaviour is not uncommon in birds. Even chickens, who are normally very passive and easy going, can pursue a goal with determination and vigour once they set their mind on it. We humans are no different, of course. How do you know when is the right time to give up on a goal? Normally, it’s when the pain has been greater than the pleasure for a long enough time period. But there was no pain for the blackbird in my experiment, only frustrated ambition. Meanwhile, those juicy pears were just sitting there on the tree unprotected. So, the blackbird kept trying.

Obviously, it’s impossible to know exactly what goes on in a blackbird’s head. But I suspect blackbirds operate almost entirely on instinct. They hear a loud clap and they fly away. What they don’t seem to do is form an idea about the intent of the human who is doing the clapping. In this respect, they are not as smart as chickens. Chickens can learn to read whether you’re in a good mood and likely to give them some tasty kitchen scraps or whether the fact that they’ve just dug up half your veggie garden looking for worms might have put you in a bad mood. They have an understanding of human intent.

As I mentioned above, there’s only ever a few blackbirds in a given area because the male blackbird will chase away others who happen to stray onto his turf. Information cannot “go viral” among blackbirds for this reason. What’s more, even if I had let the three blackbirds in my backyard eat as many pears off the tree as they wanted, I still would have got some pears for myself because fruit is just one food source for a blackbird and, from my subsequent observations, they only eat about one pear per day if given free rein to do so. Thus, I never had to fear “contagion” on the part of the blackbirds.

What all this means is that information can “go viral” among the lorikeet population. A backyard pear tree becomes the hit of the week and even a tree that produces hundreds of fruit can be totally stripped in a day by a pack of lorikeets that have flown from many kilometres away to have a giant pear party. What’s more, lorikeets live up to 20 years on average and they remember where food is which means that, once they’ve found a fruit tree, they will return the following year and the year after that. By contrast, because of its short life span, the blackbird is likely to have died by the next fruiting season and taken its knowledge about how to eat pears with it.

Are humans more like blackbirds or more like lorikeets? It seems that we can be either. The Chinese and Japanese behaved more like blackbirds when they closed off their borders to foreigners in the 17th century. The ancient Greeks had a similar insular mentality. But these days we live in a lorikeet world where information can travel over long distances and is readily shared. The result is that we behave more like lorikeets. So, it’s not a surprise that our politician-gardeners are terrified of contagion.