Category: Ideas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reminds me of the initial Star Wars trilogy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first story in the trilogy, called Oedipus Rex, is the famous one. Oedipus is a noble king who is trying to figure out why a plague has struck his land. His investigation leads him to the horrendous discovery that he had earlier in life inadvertently killed his father and then married his mother, who subsequently bore him two daughters. The central idea that is made clear by the chorus at the end of the play is that even the most virtuous man can be brought undone by the vicissitudes of fate.

It had been a long time since I’d read the second play in the trilogy, Oedipus at Colonus, and I didn’t really remember much about it. So, I decided to read that upon discovering the book in my cupboard. As is often the case when re-reading great works of literature, the meaning of that play came through much clearer to me this time around, and in this post I want to discuss one of the themes that occurred to me.

In the first play, Oedipus begins the story as the paragon of virtue. The action of the play describes his fall from grace. At the start of Oedipus at Colonus, however, Oedipus has somehow fallen even further than his position at the end of the first story. He is now an old, blind, and destitute man wandering away from his home led by his faithful daughter Antigone.

In fact, when we meet him at the start of the play, Oedipus is, to all outward appearances, the inversion of virtue. He is the opposite of what a Greek would have taken for the ideal man. This meaning is reinforced by the fact that he has been banished from his hometown of Thebes. That is why he and his daughter have ended up at Colonus, which is in the neighbourhood of Athens.

This last point is crucial to understand. For an ancient Greek, banishment was worse than death. Socrates could easily have run away from Athens after being sentenced to death, but he chose to drink the hemlock instead. Why? Because it was better to die than to be separated from one’s own city-state. Banishment amounted to being made less of a person and something more like an animal.

Thus, Oedipus really is almost no longer a person when we meet him at the start of the second play. He is more like a ghost, or an archetype. Unlike a typical Greek hero, he is no longer capable of any meaningful action, but, as he himself tells us, he still has his voice, and he can still speak truth.

Oedipus and Antigone find themselves in Colonus, which is midway between Athens and Thebes. Sophocles then introduces the leaders of both of those cities, Theseus from Athens and Creon from Thebes. We have met Creon before. He is Oedipus’ brother-in-law/uncle (remember, he married his mother), who featured in the first story of the trilogy.

Creon became ruler of Thebes after Oedipus’ fall from grace. We learn that he has ill-treated Oedipus, firstly by refusing to banish him when Oedipus wanted that and then by actually banishing him once Oedipus had gotten over the worst and settled down into some kind of peace. Creon continues his mistreatment by showing up at Colonus pretending to care about Oedipus’ welfare by inviting him back to Thebes. Actually, he wants to use Oedipus for his own purposes.

Theseus has never met Oedipus before and owes him nothing. That is why his reaction to the appearance of the old, blind man is most telling. Despite the fact that Oedipus is now the outward inversion of Greek virtue, the Athenian king can still see that he is a great man. He understands that it is fate that has brought Oedipus undone rather than any failings in his own character.

The fact that all this takes place in the midpoint between Athens and Thebes and features the rulers of those two cities means that Sophocles is setting up a very clear dichotomy between Theseus and Creon. The latter does not care about virtue at all. All he sees in Oedipus is a weak old man whom he can do with as he pleases. Theseus is an even more powerful ruler than Creon, since Athens is stronger than Thebes. He could also do as he pleases with Oedipus, but Theseus chooses instead to respect and honour the old man’s inherent virtue.

In Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles is making a political point that a society which forgets virtue and worships only power (as Creon does) will come undone. That point is clear. But there is a much deeper meaning at play here, one that has direct relevance to our times.

To a large extent, we live in an anti-heroic culture. I’m not talking about Hollywood movies; I’m talking about the way we actually run our society. We don’t have leaders because we don’t want heroes. What we have is a managerial class of technocrats whose claim is that they act for the “greater good”. Of course, that exact phrase is rarely used. But “we’re all in this together,” “diversity is our strength,” “keeping the community safe,” and similar phrases all amount to the same thing.

We did not get to this state of affairs by accident. It’s the result of a battle of ideas that’s been going on for centuries. One of the easier ways to understand that battle is competing attitudes towards history.

Most cultures have some variation of what is called the great man theory of history, which implies that history is created by virtuous and powerful individuals who bend the course of events to their will. The West used to have this idea of history too, but it got superseded in the 19th century by the idea of history as a set of impersonal forces. In this way of looking at things, leaders are just a vehicle through which larger forces play out. It doesn’t really matter who is in charge; the result will be the same because it is determined by external forces not individual character.

As is often the case in human affairs, an idea that captures a certain truth about the world gets taken way too far and leads to awful outcomes. Somehow, the idea of history as determined by social forces morphed into a denial of the individual. Not just the leaders but all members of society became nothing more than vehicles for the “greater good”. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this led to mass murder. The Nazis murdered those who were not contributing to the greater good of creating a master race. The communists murdered those who were not contributing to the greater good of a communist utopia. Other examples could be found of the same pattern, but these are the two most notable. 

One of the truths that the idea of history-as-a-set-of-impersonal-forces captures is that heroism is not enough. The great man theory of history had the problem that it airbrushed out all of the people who tried and failed. For every great leader who seemed to change the course of history, there were a thousand who got crushed. Viewed this way, it really does seem that the conditions matter more than the individual.

We can use the metaphor of a seed to explain this. In the best-case scenario, a seed germinates and grows into a healthy plant. But there are any number of things that can prevent that outcome. Maybe the seed gets eaten by a bird before it germinates. Maybe it germinates only to get trodden on by an animal. Maybe there’s not enough rain, or the soil has become degraded. The conditions must be right for the seed to grow. The study of history-as-a-set-of-impersonal-forces pays attention to the conditions in which the seeds grow. That is valid.

But as any gardener will tell you, if you plant ten seeds into the same growing medium, you get ten very different seedlings. It’s all well and good to pay attention to the conditions in which the seeds grow, but you have to also accept that seeds have an individuality to them.

The problem which took hold in the 19th century was the combination of the history-as-a-set-of-impersonal-forces idea with the blank slate philosophy of human development. The blank slate theory equates to the assumption that all seeds are the same and the only difference between them is the growing medium. It tells you to spend all your time worrying about the external conditions and no time worrying about the individual.

Translated into human political terms, the belief became that we should only worry about improving social conditions and not about individual virtue. From that position, it is a very short jump to the belief that the individual has no inherent value at all and that, given a choice between the greater good and the individual, the latter must be sacrificed.

But that is exactly what Sophocles had already shown us two millennia earlier in Oedipus at Colonus. Creon is the ruler of Thebes, and he is not just screwing with Oedipus out of spite; he wants to use Oedipus for the good of his city. He tries to shame Oedipus into doing what he wants by telling him that it’s for the good of his countrymen and it’s his duty to do what he is told. Creon uses the greater good argument. (Incidentally, it’s the same one we all heard during covid when we were told to get the vaccines and wear the masks).

Oedipus rejects this, but we can get a better understanding of the importance of his response by comparing it with an almost identical story from the Bible, the Book of Job.

Both Job and Oedipus are formerly successful men who are brought undone. Oedipus is being screwed with by Creon in much the same way that Job is being manipulated by Yahweh. In the Bible story, Job complains about his treatment, but his friends tell him to fall into line. For a long time, he refuses to do so, however, the story ends by him giving in. Yahweh rewards him for his obedience by giving him back the things he has lost. The moral of the story is that obedience and submission are good.

Creon is offering Oedipus almost the exact same deal: Do what I say, and I’ll give you back your old life. Oedipus could easily have been overwhelmed by feelings of despair. Pragmatically, he has the welfare of his daughters to think of. There are all kinds of reasons why Oedipus might want to accept the deal. But it never even occurs to him to do so, and his thundering denunciation of Creon is one of the most powerful things ever written as a result.

But we can be even more specific about the meaning here. The 19th century realised that virtue is no guarantee of success, and it concluded that the thing to do was to pursue the greater good. Sophocles starts from the exact same truth but draws a very different conclusion.

Oedipus is the very embodiment of the idea that virtue does not equal success. He is a good man who has been undone through no fault of his own. If anybody has reason to resent the world and to renounce the concepts of virtue and justice, it should be Oedipus. And yet he never once considers this. He still believes in virtue. When Creon shows up and offers him a grubby little deal, Oedipus gives him both barrels of the only weapon he has left, his ability to speak the truth. 

What Sophocles is saying, I think, is that virtue must be upheld even and especially by those who have been brought down by fate. That is why tragedy is the most affirming of all genres and why the appearance of tragedy is such a landmark event. It acknowledges the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but does not give in to resentment or to submission to power. That message is reinforced in the third book of the trilogy, where Antigone shows that she is truly her father’s daughter by also refusing to yield to unjust commands.

It is because Creon has turned away from virtue that he will bring his kingdom undone. Meanwhile, Theseus is the ruler who can understand that Oedipus is still a great man even though circumstances have brought him low. His reverence for Oedipus is a reverence for virtue itself. By contrast, Creon is like the modern technocrat who cares not for the individual but only for the “greater good”.

What had disappeared by the 19th century, and which is still missing in action in our time, is the idea contained in tragedy that virtue does not guarantee success, but that we must cherish it anyway. The childish notion that virtue = success must be gotten rid of, but we mustn’t then swing to the opposite childish notion that virtue plays no role. Sophocles’ Theban trilogy, arguably the greatest of all Greek tragedies, does this by honouring a man and his daughter, both of whom are virtuous but fail in worldy affairs. It is the reverence for the spirit with which that failure is borne which sets tragedy apart.

Put into philosophical terms, we can say that heroism and virtue are necessary but not sufficient conditions for success. Once we convince ourselves that they are no longer even necessary, we ensure that success can never happen, and that quickly leads to destruction. Sophocles had already warned us about that, and the tens of millions of deaths from the 20th century should have been enough to ram home the message. Nevertheless, we continue to blunder on in the name of the “greater good”. We do so because we have lost the tragic view of life.

Recently, I’ve been pondering the continued effects of what is known as the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP) on modern culture. The WEMP is at the heart of a number of cultural practices we take for granted nowadays. For example, the ability to choose a marriage partner, the high level of independence a married couple has from their family, and the expectation that the young couple will largely finance themselves—these are all centuries-old cultural practices quite specific to northern and western Europe.

The evidence suggests that the WEMP began even in medieval times, but it certainly kicked up a notch around the time of the Reformation, which makes a lot of sense since that was the era when the economic, political, and general cultural power shifted from southern Europe to the north.

The WEMP was actually born out of the relative poverty of northern Europe. It was because parents did not have the money to pay a dowry to their children that the children had to go off to work to finance themselves. Crucially, this was true even for women. Thus, the typical age of marriage for a young woman was much later than in other cultures and was usually in the late teens or 20s.

Another interesting side effect of this was that the age discrepancy between brides and grooms was much smaller than elsewhere. It seems that the norm across cultures and throughout history is that women marry shortly after puberty, while men are expected to establish themselves first and so marry later. Thus, the groom is usually quite a bit older than the bride, often much older.

The WEMP has been seen as a significant reason why capitalism took off so strongly in northern Europe, even though the city-states of Italy had already invented it. Since it was already part of the culture for young people to take paid employment before marriage, there was a ready-made workforce for capitalists to tap into.

It’s easy to see how this pattern transitioned effortlessly into the early days of industrial capitalism. But, ultimately, it was the industrial revolution that would cause major problems. Those problems began to show up towards the end of the 19^th century. Ironically, one of the main signals that things were starting to crack at the seams was something that we tell ourselves was a source of “progress”, namely, the rollout of the modern education system.

The official narrative is that education was needed because factory work was somehow more advanced and required smarter workers. In fact, what was really going on was that the number of available jobs was falling. Industrialisation started to create large surpluses. Removing young people from the labour market was a way to ensure wages remained relatively high. But that created a lot of young people hanging around with nothing to do. Many of them turned to crime and other antisocial behaviour. School was a way to keep them off the streets.

In addition, school was part of the ideological battle going on at the time between the state and the church. The church had been a provider of education for centuries. Secular reformers wanted to break its stranglehold. Thus, public schools ended up becoming tied in closely with the increasingly secular nation-state.

While times were good, none of this fundamentally challenged the WEMP. It was still the case among the general public that teenagers would go off to work and save money in order to get married. However, the problem of oversupply created by industrial capitalism created the massive boom and bust cycles, of which the Great Depression is the most notable. You had 33% unemployment in modern Western nations at that time.

When you have an economic bust that lasts several years, what that means is that a whole generation of people looking for work can’t find it. As a 15-year-old, you might be trying to get a trade. But you don’t get one until you are 18 or 19. The beginning of your adult life has not only been pushed back several years; there is now a background of uncertainty around your economic future.

If we think about it that way, then we see that what was really at stake was the way in which western nations initiated their young people. The default social script for centuries had been that you went off to work. But now you couldn’t be sure that the work would be there.

Governments tried to address this problem in a number of different ways, but the continued rollout of education was one of the main ones, since it took large numbers of young people out of the labour pool. Education really took off in the post-war years. The government was able to finance it because of the massively increased tax take that the public had been conditioned to accept during the wars.

For a while, the main effect of this on the WEMP was simply to push back the age of marriage. Once upon a time, you’d begin working in your early to mid-teens. Now, many people were finishing high school and not working until their late teens. Then university became widespread, meaning that people didn’t begin working until their early 20s. In lockstep with the rollout of mass education, the average age of marriage crept upwards. Not coincidentally, the immediate postwar years were the exception since the economic boom of that time meant everybody could find work, and people married younger, hence the baby boom.

The WEMP was still in place during this time; it had just been pushed back as people began their working lives later. The state had helped to solve the problem of oversupply by providing more and more education. This seemed like a pretty reasonable compromise, and it created the cruisy and enjoyable teenage years that most of us would have grown up with.

While the education provided by the state was free or as good as free, none of this burdened young people, and the system was relatively stable. But, of course, that changed when university had to be paid for, and then paid for some more, and then paid for even more. Fast forward to today, and we have one third of the young people going to university and accruing large debts that need to be paid off afterwards.

So, we went from a system where you’d start working in your teens and begin saving money straight away to where you don’t start working till your early 20s, and then you have to spend years and years paying off the debts accrued from a degree that you never really needed in the first place and which is really only there because of the economic oversupply problem that still exists in the background, meaning there aren’t enough jobs available. That would be grotesque enough, but especially in the United States, you now graduate into a completely toxic corporate environment where all kinds of ideological nonsense is used to again gloss over the fact that there aren’t enough jobs.

Now, of course, there’s never any single reason that explains complex social phenomena, but I think one of the main drivers for all of this is the WEMP, which is tied in with the fact that the way we initiate young people into society is through work. That system has been in place for many centuries; it created the modern world through industrial capitalism; it is the source of our success. That’s why nobody wants to get rid of it, and why we are twisting ourselves into absurd knots trying to keep it all going.