Category: Ideas

As I have mentioned before on this blog, my life feels like one big synchronicity lately. It seems like no sooner do I write a blog post than the universe answers it. Last week’s post was answered by none other than Kanye West who went viral the day after I hit publish. If you’d told somebody a year ago that “Kanye West will go on Alex Jones wearing a full face mask and say he loves Nazis” they would have thought you were crazy. But, in case you haven’t noticed, everything’s been crazy lately and it shows no signs of slowing down.

We can usefully call the mass collective irrationality of our society towards the erstwhile leader of the Nazis the Hitler Complex. Jung and Freud pioneered our understanding of psychological complexes. A complex is cluster of psychic properties that threaten the stability of the self when challenged. When I say that the West has a Hitler Complex, I am saying that Hitler functions as an archetype that triggers irrational responses from the collective culture but I’m also suggesting that those irrational responses reveal something of our collective identity. Something, perhaps, we would rather not have revealed.

(Note: psychological complexes have an origin in something that actually happened. Freud and Jung almost always found that a complex was based in some trauma that happened in childhood. It is self evident that Hitler committed some of the worst atrocities in history so it’s not in the least bit surprising that the horrors of WW2 would have given rise to psychological complexes. Part of the reason to try and disentangle a complex is to allow a proper evaluation of its root causes).

Kanye triggered the Hitler Complex last Friday and, like clockwork, everybody lost their minds. Imagine, for comparison, that Kanye had gone on Alex Jones and said that he loved Stalin and that he thought communism had done some good things for the world. People would have thought it was weird. We would have heard the usual lectures from Republicans about the evils of communism and how so many millions had died under its rule etc etc. In other words, it would have been a mostly rational response.

What we saw instead was a completely irrational response and the number one accusation levelled was that Kanye had gone “crazy”. That’s what’s known as projection. It was not Kanye who had gone crazy. Kanye was putting on a show. That’s what he does. The show involved him committing the number one heresy of western culture by denying that Hitler and the Nazis were 100% evil, spawn of Satan, completely responsible for all the evils of the word.

This is not just an American problem. Here in Victoria, our wonderful Premier, Dan Andrews, accused his opponents of supporting Nazis in the recent election campaign. Meanwhile, in Canada, the enquiry into Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act suggested that a lone person waving a Nazi flag, who was duly used by the media and politicians to smear all the other peace-loving people at the rally, was a government plant. Can it be a coincidence that Trudeau and Andrews both authorised state violence against unarmed citizens during the last two years?

To unravel the Hitler Complex, we must do what Jung and Freud did and investigate the history of it. That’s what we’ll be doing in this and in following posts.

So, with a tip of the hat to Kanye West for the inspiration, let’s do a bit of military history.

Unconditional Surrender

Melos was a small and inconsequential island with a population of about three thousand people. The Athenians were almost at the peak of their power when in 416 BC, during a time of peace, they showed up one day and demanded an Unconditional Surrender from the Melians. What an Unconditional Surrender means is that there will be no negotiation of peace terms. The winning party gets to do whatever it likes and the losers have to suck it up.

Even in the violent world of Ancient Greece, just showing up and demanding an Unconditional Surrender from a peaceful country was against the rules. The Melians tell the Athenians exactly that and use a number of other arguments to try and shame them out of their unjust actions. But the Athenians reject all pretence of civility. They tell the Melians that might is right. They are more powerful and that is all there is to it. They give the Melians an ultimatum: surrender or die.

The Melians refused to surrender and the Athenians laid siege to the island and forced a surrender through starvation. That would have been bad enough. But it’s what happened next that offended even the ancient world. After the surrender, the Athenians executed all the Melian men in cold blood and sold the women and children into slavery. They then populated the island with settlers. This was a genocide right in the middle of what is considered to be the golden age of Athens, one of the greatest civilisations ever to exist.

Demands for Unconditional Surrender are rare in the history of war. The normal outcome of war is a peace treaty which comes after an armistice (an agreement to stop fighting). Because the fighting ends by agreement, the losing side is not completely defeated and this gives them some leverage in the peace treaty. The winning side accepts the armistice so that they don’t lose any more soldiers, weapons and money. This all follows from the idea that war is an extension of politics. Peace is achieved when the winning side has achieved enough of their (political) war aims to call it a day and the losing side is willing to accept its loses.

Was the behaviour of the US towards Germany and Japan a replay of what the Athenians did to Melos? Was this simply a might is right play where the Americans used their superior force to destroy an enemy? That was a big moral question at the time but it’s been completely forgotten about now. Or, we could use more proper psychological terminology and say it’s been sublimated; made unconscious.

Everybody thinks of Hitler as a megalomaniac. But didn’t the US also behave as a megalomaniac by demanding Unconditional Surrender? Hitler is rightly condemned for killing civilians. But the US and its allies also killed civilians in the war. Doesn’t that make us as bad as him?

These complex moral issues were not the result of simple arrogance or megalomania (at least, not entirely). They arose due to a change in the nature of warfare with the arrival of what came to be known as Total War.

Total War

Total War is all about scale. Napoleon’s Grand Armee was arguably the first army that conducted Total War. At its peak, it numbered a million men and the number of troops sent to fight in Russia was said to be 600,000. Such a huge number of soldiers needs an equally enormous support apparatus. The soldiers need to be clothed, fed and have their injuries attended to. Another way to think about it is that the army could not function without the support apparatus.

With the advent of Total War, there came a plausible way to defeat the enemy by destroying their military support apparatus, but that involves potentially killing civilians. The Geneva Convention written in the post war years would set out to address this problem but by then millions of civilians had been killed as war turned into Total War.

This ideological aspect of Total War was also present in Napoleon who attracted a lot of support from many different countries by providing a new vision for what Europe could be. A century or so later, Hitler had a different vision but it was also ideological in nature and an attempt to unify Europe. Thus, Total War really does concern itself with the whole of society including politics, economy and even culture. Hitler did not invent those things. He was following a pattern that had started long before his time.

But things had evolved even further by Hitler’s time. The question of what sort of society to live in had grown beyond just individual nation states and even continents. It now encompassed the whole globe. We can frame that as a moral issue but in reality it was the natural outcome of the industrial revolution and the advent of fossil fuels which meant that military power could now be projected practically anywhere on the globe. Any country with an industrial economy was now a potential player in a new battle for power.

The ramifications of the change to Total War are enormous but there is one aspect that is important for our story as it deals with a specific problem that Roosevelt was grappling with as WW2 came to an end. That problem is the fact that, because Total War is at least as much about ideology as about military capability, when military defeat comes there is still the lingering problem of ideology. This was no academic matter. It was central to the rise of Hitler.

Hitler was just one of many German soldiers who fought in WW1 who thought they were betrayed. The betrayal was assumed mostly to have come from the political leadership but it also tapped into latent anti-Semitism and the Jews were sometimes accused of subverting the war effort from the front lines. Was this just the crazy delusions of an evil, racist madman? Well, anti-Semitism nd racism were rife everywhere at the time, including in the US. As for the betrayal by the German leadership, there were a lot of very good reasons why Hitler and others drew this conclusion. It was not just paranoid delusions.

The problem with Total War is primarily a problem of scale and one of the main problems that comes with scale is communication. Anybody who’s had to deal with a huge, incompetent bureaucracy knows what that’s like. You can’t get a straight answer to anything. Nobody seems to know what is going on. Well, the same thing happens when you’re a soldier in an enormous army fighting along a massive front such as happened in WW1. An enormous bureaucracy is required to make such a war possible and that bureaucracy suffers from all the usual problems of bureaucracy.

Put yourself in the shoes of Hitler or any of the other soldiers on the front line in WW1. One day, a bureaucratic order is issued which says the war is over. As an enthusiastic soldier in the trenches, does this order make sense to you? Not really. You have your guns. You have your ammunition. The enemy is still there across the way. As far as you’re concerned, you can continue fighting and nobody can give you a straight answer why you should not continue fighting. You just have to follow orders. For Hitler and many like him, that was a betrayal and they spent the years after the war looking for scapegoats to explain that betrayal.

To understand this better, we need to take a quick dip into the psychology that existed in the pre-war years and then we can finally join the dots and start to see why the concepts of betrayal, humiliation and shame became a defining feature of Total War and were crucial to decisions taken at the end of WW2.

The Warrior Archetype

We can usefully summarise the psychology of pre-war European culture by using the archetype of The Warrior. If The Warrior were a cheesy TV show character, his catchphrase would be Death Before Dishonour. That is actually what the Melians chose when they refused to capitulate to the Athenians. They chose to die rather than live in what they considered to be disgrace.

The advent of Total War actually caused a diminution of the Warrior’s honour code. Part of the reason was because war became no longer honourable. It was no longer a test of valour as soldiers pitted themselves against each other. By the time of WW1, it had become little more than a meat grinder (although some, such as Ernst Jünger, still managed to find valour there). This change happened gradually in Europe so that nobody really noticed. But history has provided us with a perfect example of what happens when the old Warrior honour code came into contact with the new industrial warfare.

Japan had been a closed society but it was forced open at the barrel of a gun. The humiliation and resentment this caused led directly to the fighting in WW2 because it turns out that people really hate having decisions dictated to them by foreigners (the Melians had shown that a couple of thousand years earlier).

The problem with Total War is that it inevitably creates humiliation and resentment and those emotions can drive the losing country to respond in ways that become a problem in future. The Japanese responded to the American aggression by modernising and preparing for war. In a very short period of time, the Japanese set up an industrial economy and the associated military that came with it. They did this initially in order to be able to defend themselves from the US but it also led to possibilities for conquest in Asia which led to some horrific run-ins with the Chinese that are still the cause of hatred of the Japanese in China.

500 samurai rode into battle against 30,000 troops armed with western rifles and cannons. The reason why that scene resonates so strongly is because it shows very clearly the cultural clash between the old-fashioned Warrior mentality with its honour code and the new war mentality of conscripted, unskilled soldiery.

So this is not just Hollywood nonsense. Warriors down through history have chosen death before dishonour and that would have been the attitude of the soldiers on the battlefields of WW1. The sense of betrayal they felt was the betrayal of the Warrior at the hands of the bureaucrats and financiers – aka the elites.

This sense of betrayal and shame was not just a German problem. The French felt it after the Franco-Prussian War and it is still a live issue even in the United States whenever the confederate flag is flown. With the onset of Total War, any peace treaty amounted to letting the ideology of the “enemy” remain in place. Thus, Napoleon was able to return to France from exile and raise an army immediately. The people who believed in him were still ready to fight even after numerous losses.

The demand for Unconditional Surrender was a way to try and solve this problem by enforcing what we might as well call Total Defeat on the enemy. It wasn’t enough to beat them militarily, they must be beaten ideologically, economically, culturally and, dare I say it, psychologically.

This explains the sense of betrayal felt on the ground by German soldiers at the of WW1. But, there were actual grounds for the charge of betrayal at the highest levels and the story of how that came about is another aspect of the problem of scale as it relates to Total War.

The Treaty of Versailles

Remember that it was humiliation and resentment that drove the Japanese to modernise their society and which arguably fuelled Japanese imperialism up until the end of WW2. The same humiliation and resentment was a problem leading into the end of WW1. The French still had a chip on their shoulder after their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. This led to them insist on inserting provisions into the Treaty of Versailles that were explicitly designed to humiliate the Germans as payback. Let’s do a lightning history of how it went down.

The then US President Woodrow Wilson took the initiative to formulate the peace negotiations of WW1 by outlining his 14 Points. Most of these were territorial issues about who would end up with what land. The first five points, however, related quite clearly to US political and economic interests such as freedom of navigation and trade policy. This was fine as any peace treaty is supposed to represent the interests of the parties involved and the 14 Points aimed to do that.  

The 14 Points were presented to Germany its allies and this led the Germans to believe they would be the basis of the subsequent peace treaty. The Armistice was called but the Germans were explicitly excluded from taking part in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Versailles. Truth be told, most countries were excluded. Three nations drew up most of the Treaty: the US, Britain and France. Other victor nations were given some room to input their wishes but in a far less involved way.

The French used their prime position to insist on what became the two most controversial points: reparations and the assignment of blame to Germany. Reparations were not unknown in peace treaties. For example, after the final defeat of Napoleon, France was levied with a hefty bill in the peace negotiations.

Sadly, such noble ideas were absent at Versailles. The French delegation demanded not just extensive reparations but that there be a clause stating that the Germans were solely responsible for the war and that high-ranking officials could be charged afterwards with war crimes. This was an absurd claim and the British and the Americans argued against it. There was even dissent within the French ranks. French Marshal Ferdinand Foch summed it up perfectly by saying it was not a peace treaty at all but a 20 year armistice. He couldn’t have been more right but the French negotiators were adamant and the clauses were inserted into the Treaty.

Because the treaty was written behind closed doors without German involvement, the first the Germans saw of it was when the treaty was presented to them for signing. They immediately asked for the clauses to be removed. The problem for the allies was that they had spent so long negotiating amongst themselves to ensure every country got something that it wanted that any attempt at re-negotiation threatened to drag on indefinitely. Plus, the debate had already been lost against the implacable French. Therefore, instead of considering the perfectly reasonable objections of the Germans, they gave them an ultimatum: sign or we’ll invade within 24 hours.

This amounted to a demand of Unconditional Surrender but the Germans had only agreed to the Armistice on the assumption that they would be engaging in peace negotiations based on Wilson’s 14 Points. Thus, the Treaty of Versailles amounted to a violation of the terms of the Armistice. It seems to me that this violation was not intentional. It was yet another outcome of Total War where the scale and complexity of the peace treaty negotiations becomes too much to manage.

The Germans were rightly infuriated. The newly elected head of government, Philipp Sheidemann, resigned rather than sign the Treaty. His successor asked the head of the armed forces, von Hindenburg, whether the military was in a position to recommence fighting. Von Hindenburg answered in the negative. The Germans had been forced into the equivalent of an Unconditional Surrender with all the humiliation and shame that comes with that. The Treaty was universally despised in Germany, including by a guy named Adolf. The rest, as they say, is history.

It was partly the desire to avoid a repeat of this clusterf**k that Roosevelt demanded Unconditional Surrender in WW2. This made some sense because any peace treaty at that time would likely have been even more complicated than it had been at the end of WW1. However, this policy led the US into a moral transgression of arguably even greater magnitude than the Athenians committed at Melos.

In the next post, we’ll investigate that more and see how this led to the psychic sublimation that created the Unconscious Empire.

All posts in this series:-

Philosopher Kings vs Networks
The Unconscious Empire
The Unconscious Empire Pt 2: The Hitler Complex
The Unconscious Empire Pt 3: A Prison for your Mind
The Unconscious Empire Pt 4: Becoming the Other
The Unconscious Empire Final: Benevolent Totalitarianism

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

The caverns are measureless and therefore not amenable to reason. We are later told they are savage, haunted and enchanted while the “shadow of the pleasure dome floated midway on the waves”. Readers of Jung will note the use of the “shadow” here and Coleridge was clearly referring to the unconscious in his poem although, like most of the romantic poets, he embodied this in the concept of nature. Nature is savage and enchanted. It is the inverse of civilisation embodied in the great work of architecture – the pleasure dome – built by a great ruler. The shadow lurks there as a threat to the ruler and reminds us of another work of a great romantic poet, Shelley’s Ozymandias:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Coleridge invokes the dichotomy between order and disorder, civilisation and barbarism, society and nature, conscious and unconscious. The great Kubla Khan is the carrier of the former but tragically fated to yield to the latter just like Ozymandias.

In last week’s post, I talked about the concept of the Philosopher Kings who, like Ozymandias and Kubla Khan, represent the exoteric structure, the collective consciousness of society. I contrasted this with what I called networks referring to the organisational structure of early Christianity which I said was esoteric in nature and also unconscious. Coleridge assumes what most thinkers down through the ages have also believed which is that the esoteric and the unconscious are a threat to order and must be kept in check or, if necessary, destroyed.

The current global hegemony of the “globalists” runs on networks and those networks are destructive of the exoteric order of the nation states who facilitate their activity. In that sense, Coleridge was right. And yet the overarching empire is those networks. That implies that the empire of the globalists is an esoteric empire and therefore also belongs to the unconscious.

History does not repeat, it rhymes. Can it rhyme over millennia? Apparently so. Let’s look at one of the rhymes most relevant to what we have gone through in the last three years.

Almost the first thing Decius did on becoming emperor is what he subsequently became famous for largely because it triggered what became a pattern of persecution of the Christians for the next century or so. As far as we can tell, Decius did not intend to persecute the Christians. What he was trying to do was the hold the Empire together and he did it by way of an edict that required every inhabitant of the Empire to sacrifice to the Emperor before their local magistrate. The magistrate would witness the sacrifice and provide an official certificate to say the person had done their duty. Anybody who failed to perform the sacrifice by a fixed date faced torture and death.

As I mentioned in last week’s post, the exoteric rites required by the Roman Empire had been hollowed out well before Decius’ time. Decius seems to have understood that but his brute force attempt to try and spark some life back into the rites accidentally caused a persecution of the Christians of the empire who were forbidden by their faith from sacrificing to the Roman Gods. As a historical irony, the Jewish population of the Empire were not required to perform the sacrifice due to a longstanding religious exemption going back to Marcus Aurelius. Many high profile Christians were put to death for refusing to perform the sacrifice, others fled and many more simply acquiesced rather than face punishment.

If that’s not enough of a coincidence for you, consider the two other main events that happened during Decius’ short reign (not quite 2 years). Firstly, there was a plague which started at exactly the same time that Decius’ sacrifice edict went out from Rome. This was a genuine old-school plague, the kind where somebody in every household could be expected to die. As with plagues in that day, it duly caused a famine. And just to round out the Four Horsemen motif of Decius’ reign, the event which brought an end to that reign was a war against the Goths.

Both Decius and his son, who had been co-emperor, were killed. Decius became the first Roman emperor ever to die in battle against the barbarians. The Roman position was so weak after the defeat that the next emperor had to sign peace conditions where the Goths got to keep the booty they stole, an added humiliation for a once great Empire.

What Decius did in 249 A.D. was to require an explicit, conscious, exoteric commitment to the Roman Empire by the people who lived in it. He didn’t require you to believe in the sacrifice because, like all Roman authorities, what he wanted primarily was a visible display of allegiance. When the Christians objected, it was because they did believe. They believed in something different and that esoteric belief prevented them from taking part in the exoteric, just as Jesus had failed to do standing before Pontius Pilate.

Most people who took the corona vaccine were people who really believed. They would say they believed there was a pandemic and that the vaccine would protect them from it. When I claim that it was really a test of allegiance, I am positing an explanation from the unconscious. In order to understand that we need to acknowledge that the US Empire itself is unconscious. The Roman Empire was a Conscious Empire. Its tests of allegiance were overt and exoteric. The US Empire is an Unconscious Empire. Its tests of allegiance are (mostly) covert and esoteric.

There are a number of historical reasons why the US Empire is an Unconscious Empire. Let’s just take the few most important ones.

Firstly, right from the start of US imperialist operations in the late 19^th century, there was significant anti-imperialist political opposition inside the US itself. Sometimes this opposition got the upper hand and actively curtailed imperial activity as, for example, between WW1 and WW2. Mostly it was overcome through politics. But the underlying anti-imperialist ethos always had strong resonance among the US public. For this reason, ever since the conquest of the Philippines, the US has always conducted its overt imperialist operations under false pretences. We’ve all heard those false pretences so many times that most people could recite them in their sleep. Something something bringing democracy to somewhere.  

It’s important to understand how unusual this is historically. Almost all empires have been about conquest of land and the conquerors were not shy at all about making their intentions clear beforehand and gloating about victory afterwards. Decius was not trying to bring democracy or civilisation to the savage tribes of the Balkans. He was telling them to stay on their side of the Danube, or else. Romans were interested in land. Almost all empires have been. Even Hitler, who was trying to build a thousand year Reich (empire), was worried about lebensraum; land.  

This brings us to the second historical reason why the US empire is unusual. From the start, it was not about land but about trade. The reason was because the US industrial economy produced a surplus of goods. It needed markets for those goods and it needed raw materials in exchange. Why occupy somebody else’s land with all the administrative and military cost that entails when you can just have a friendly regime do business with your businesses? This model is far cheaper than the older models of empire but it is also invisible, subliminal. It looks cooperative on the surface. To know what is really happening requires you to look beneath the surface (to the unconscious).

The US could already rely on compliance from many countries who wanted access to US products and for whom such a trade relationship was beneficial. For those to whom it wasn’t beneficial, the CIA was there to ensure that the right politicians were inserted into positions of power. Note that this is an explicitly clandestine way to run an empire. By its very nature it is secretive, subconscious. It also requires an amount of gaslighting. Newspapers report that such-and-such a leader had a “heart attack”. A new leader is found who just happens to be willing to open up local markets on terms favourable to the empire. In this model of empire, the exoteric, official, conscious explanation is wrong. To understand what is really going on, you need to be able to question the official narrative.

The third reason the US empire is an Unconscious Empire is tied up in the age of European imperialism that led to the world wars. What was really going on in those wars was that Germany was attempting to dethrone the British Empire from world domination. In the post-war world, we’re so used to the false pretences under which the US empire operates that we forget that once upon a time empires were not at all shy about their intentions. When Hitler dreamed of a thousand year Reich, this was not some new idea, it was a deliberate throwback not just to the Roman empire but also to the Holy Roman Empire which had lasted almost as long.

This brings us to the fourth and final point. Hitler explicitly wanted to usurp the British Empire. He attempted to do so in the time-honoured tradition of military conquest. That’s the way the battle for empire had been conducted since time immemorial. But the US ended up usurping the British Empire not by fighting against it but by ostensibly helping it out.

The US had been supporting the British empire and its allies throughout both wars with its enormous industrial and agricultural output. There was also substantial financial aid which meant that Britain and France were in debt to the US. By the end of WW2, Britain and the other European countries were exhausted, materially flattened and massively indebted to the US. It might have been one of the easiest transfers of empire in history and it all happened behind the scenes through meetings and accords and other seemingly cooperative activities. This was not the normal exoteric, overt, conscious way empires are won and lost. It was invisible and, therefore, unconscious.

For all of these reasons and more, the US empire, especially in the post-war years has been an Unconscious Empire almost entirely lacking the usual exoteric markers of imperialism. It utilises networks to achieve its aims; primarily financial networks but also the ideological networks of NGOs and globalist institutions. These all have tie-ins with global media outlets who manage the propaganda. We’ve all been exposed to that propaganda: democracy, free trade, science, progress. The US Empire achieves economic coordination through markets and political coordination through ideology. The leaders of the vassal states of the empire are those who can parrot the ideology and implement the implied agenda.

The ideology of the US Empire is kind of like the software that runs the imperial machine. The leaders of each country are computer programmers who need to know how to interpret the software and customise it to local conditions. It’s that software that facilitates economic exchange but also drives ideological coordination through the propaganda networks. If you noticed during corona how leaders in very different countries were all using the same words and phrases as if they were copying each other, that’s because they were. There was no central planning required and no overt coordination. The whole thing runs on imitation. It all happens automatically, unconsciously.

It can’t be a coincidence that the US empire was just taking off at almost the exact time that Freud and Jung were making their great breakthroughs into the Unconscious. The Empire has made use of that knowledge in the advertising and marketing of consumer products but, as I have pointed out in the past, those techniques and tactics also gradually seeped into the political discourse itself. It’s no exaggeration at the moment to say that the propaganda of the Empire is quite literally a psychic battle. If you feel like your sanity is under attack these days, it’s because it is. More specifically, the Empire now directly targets the subconscious and its propaganda works almost entirely subliminally.

Which brings us back around to Decius. By modern standards, his edict requiring citizens to make a sacrifice to the empire looks rather unsophisticated. But it was in line with the story of Moses I talked about last week. That was the way rulers and empires functioned at that time: simple and clear rules with simple and clear (and usually really painful) punishments for those who didn’t follow them. All of this is overt and exoteric.

The Unconscious Empire is far more sophisticated. It achieves compliance through ideology while punishments are vague, arbitrary and unpredictable (eg. de-platforming with no reason given). People now voluntarily create accounts on social media or use search engines all of which are provided free of charge. But as the saying goes, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. The product is obedience and compliance through ideology.

For those who want to continue to be part of the US empire and have access to its benefits, we can expect more obedience requirements in the years ahead with CBDCs and associated “products”. That is what they would like to do. Whether they can technically pull it off is another question.

There is a final important correspondence between our time and the time of Decius. Decius was an Emperor in the final phase of the Roman Empire. His actions were indicative of that Empire’s impending fall. Decius kicked off a century of overt persecution of the Christians. This was another sign of decline. The Empire needed a scapegoat to blame its failures on. But that scapegoat was inside its borders. It was its own citizens.

This pattern is what Toynbee called the internal and external proletariat. For the Romans, the external proletariat were the barbarians and they had been around for ever. The Christians became, apparently quite accidentally, the internal proletariat starting with the reign of Decius. With the Trump and Brexit votes, the US Empire found its own internal proletariat and with the Ukraine War it has rediscovered the external enemy that has been with it ever since its early days: Russia.

This is why the Unconscious Empire has been pulling out every weapon in its arsenal over the last three years including an empire-wide test of allegiance in the form of vaccine mandates. Just like for Decius, the internal proletariat is now a problem that the Empire needs to directly deal with but the Unconscious Empire doesn’t do so by clumsy exoteric means but by psychological manipulation, gaslighting and ideology.

For that reason, the number one task for the years ahead is simply to retain your sanity in an empire that is at psychic war not just with its enemies but with its own citizens.  

All posts in this series:-

Philosopher Kings vs Networks
The Unconscious Empire
The Unconscious Empire Pt 2: The Hitler Complex
The Unconscious Empire Pt 3: A Prison for your Mind
The Unconscious Empire Pt 4: Becoming the Other
The Unconscious Empire Final: Benevolent Totalitarianism

One of the things I’ve always found amusing about our modern atheists is their penchant for trying to discredit the entire Bible by quoting something, inevitably one of the many laws written in Leviticus, that seems silliest to us today or jars against modern sensibilities. That morality and law has changed over thousands of years is not surprising. Trying to discredit the whole book on that basis is also just plain dumb because the Bible presents us with numerous universal themes that are just as relevant today as they were back then, even for secular readers. One of them is organisational form and that’s what I want to talk about in this post as we track the changes that occurred from the time of Moses to the time of Jesus and beyond.

In the establishment of the priesthood and the laws listed in Leviticus we see a development that occurred in many other civilisations around the same time, for example, the Law Book of Manu (Manusmriti) and the Arthashastra in India or the legalist tradition in China. The formulation of laws was no doubt a big step forward in the project of civilisation. But laws come with drawbacks and the weaknesses of the legal approach led to a subsequent revolt or critique not just among the Jewish people but also in India and China too.

The Old Testament story of Moses provides us with one of the clearest case studies of the problems with the legalist development especially when it revolves around a single ruler. Moses is undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest lawgivers as can be seen in the simple fact that, about three millennia after his time, millions, if not billions, of people around the world could cite at least a couple of the ten commandments. Despite the memorability of the commandments, what we see in the Old Testament is the repeated failure on the part of the Israelites to follow the laws. Moses has but to turn his back for 5 minutes and the people will stray.

Seemingly through boredom, the people approach Aaron and demand that he help them to make some idols, a clear violation of the second commandment. Aaron is Moses’ brother and has been his right-hand-man through the whole journey out of Egypt. Aaron and his sons have been inducted by Moses into the priesthood. If anybody should know that this is a bad idea, it should be Aaron. And yet, apparently without giving it a second thought, he acquiesces and gets to work helping the people melt down the gold to make the golden calf.

Moses comes back down to see what is happening. He goes up to Aaron and, translating into modern English, says something like “bro, what the hell are you doing?” Aaron shrugs and says, “it’s not my fault, dude. It’s the people. They forced me into it.”

In fairness to Aaron, he was probably right. In this story and the larger story of Moses, we see the whole problem of the Lawgiver and Ruler. Even a genius like Moses, who has formulated the most memorable set of laws ever written, is trapped in a system which is reliant on his own leadership. The people might remember the laws, but they only follow them to the extent that they expect punishment. Moses provides that punishment multiple times throughout the Old Testament. But, when Moses is gone, the threat of the punishment goes with him and the people stray. We see the pattern repeated after the golden calf incident where Moses instructs the Levites to put the people to the sword and we are told that three thousand were killed as punishment for the transgression.

The tragedy of Moses is that he knows the problem with this system. Just before his death, as he is re-iterating the laws and appointing his successor, he tells the Israelites that they will inevitably stray from the path for they are a stiff-necked and rebellious people. His prediction turns out to be true. Moses was unable to create a system that was self-sustaining. It is a poetic note that God allows him to view the promised land from the mountain top before he dies. What he is viewing is the future, a future in which there will be more rebellion and straying from the laws but also the emergence of something that transcends the laws.

The arrival of Jesus represents that new movement but it’s worth noting that a similar progression happened in India with Buddha and in China with Confucius. In fact, this quote by Confucius perfectly summarises the problem with the law-based system.

“If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame. If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of the shame, and moreover will become good.”

Jesus’ critique in the New Testament is similar to this but the social context among the Jewish people had changed from the time of Moses. There were no philosopher kings on the scene when Jesus arrives. Rather, it was the priests – the scribes and Pharisees – who lead the various communities in the Jewish diaspora. Jesus rails against them and calls them hypocrites.

Jesus mentions this kind of hypocrisy in the New Testament but he is more concerned with another type of hypocrisy; that which comes from following the rules too well. He criticises the scribes and Pharisees for making a big song and dance when giving alms to the poor or loudly complaining about how hungry they are while fasting in order to draw attention to themselves. He is accusing them of following the laws not because they really believe in them but simply in order to gain social benefits. If this sounds familiar, it’s exactly what we see today in the concept of virtue signalling. Jesus was way ahead of the curve on that one.

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: ² “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. ³ So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. ⁴ They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.⁵ Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries^[a] wide and the tassels on their garments long; ⁶ they love the place of honour at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; ⁷ they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others. Matthew 23:1-7

Although the context between Jesus and Confucius (and also Buddha) is very different, the underlying idea is roughly the same: individual people must internalise the law. In Confucius, this is done through shame and striving for virtue. In the Christian tradition, it is about faith and spirit.

What is involved here is the distinction between the exoteric and the esoteric. The exoteric is the public structure that includes the laws and the rules. In its most extreme form, the exoteric involves nothing more than mechanical obedience devoid of any internal feeling. You show up to the ceremony on time, you wear the right clothes and you say the right things. It is irrelevant whether you believe what you say, only that you do what is required.

It was not without irony that the subsequent Christian church built by the apostles had to formulate its own (exoteric) rules. Thus, we see the disputes between Paul and the others over whether Gentiles may be part of the faith and whether or not they must be made to follow the Mosaic code (Moses’ laws) including the most controversial requirement of circumcision. Nevertheless, the early Christian church was very informal and for a couple of centuries the Roman authorities didn’t even consider it a religion but, rather, a superstitio.

In any case, Paul won the argument and the Gentiles were allowed to become Christians. This was revolutionary because it unlocked the network effects that were already present in the Jewish communities around the Mediterranean and Middle East. In the early days, the Christians were mostly converting Jewish people via baptisms, which were an existing practice in Judaism at the time. Once Paul won the argument about allowing Gentiles into the faith, anybody and everybody could be converted and the network could grow and expand indefinitely. Apostles (messengers) were sent out to new geographic areas where they established new nodes in the network. With each new node, the network became stronger. It was possibly the world’s first viral marketing campaign.

All this was happening from within the political structure of the Roman empire. The empire had a very tolerant attitude to religion. As new areas were conquered, the local religions, rites and customs were allowed to be practiced as long as the people followed the Roman exoteric rites required of them which signalled allegiance to Rome.

Herein lay the problem because, even in Rome itself, the exoteric rites had been hollowed out. They no longer had esoteric resonance. What is esoteric resonance? In a word: energy. It’s the extent to which people actually believe in what they are doing from their own conviction and their own belief (spirit) rather than just going through the motions. Jesus’ argument against the scribes and Pharisees could just as well have been levelled against the average Roman citizen.

Thus, we see a stark contrast between the Roman civic religion which becomes more and more exoteric and devoid of esoteric energy as the empire grows and the insurgent Christian religion which is filled with esoteric energy spreading as a decentralised network. One advantage of such a network is that you can lose some nodes and the network survives. The network of the early Christian church survived even the loss of its two biggest names, Peter and Paul, both put to death by Roman authorities.

The Roman authorities sensed that the esoteric religious practices taking place, of which Christianity was just one, were a threat to the established order and there were various crackdowns mostly by local governors and eventually from Rome itself. As everybody knows, the Christians ultimately won the day and Christianity became the official religion of Rome some centuries later. But if you’d asked a Roman in, say, 50 A.D. whether the Christians were a threat, they would have said “what Christians?”

Esoteric networks are less visible than exoteric structures, which makes sense since the power of the network is in the number of nodes and the relationships between them while the power of exoteric structures is precisely in their visibility and authority. A giant billboard advertisement is exoteric. It signifies the power and stability of the company which can afford to pay the high price for such marketing. Word of mouth is esoteric. It takes place node to node. It is, by definition, not visible to the general public. Networks can grow and change without drawing attention to themselves; making the governance of such networks far more difficult and costly.

Moses is the ultimate visible lawgiver. Yet I doubt even practicing Christians could name all 12 apostles. We can only remember so much exoteric content before we hit cognitive limitations. On the other hand, Moses’ rule ceased to work the moment he was not visible to his people. The Christian Church’s power and scope continued to grow despite losing Peter and Paul in the early days. It had energy behind it.

I’m not sure if this is absolutely true, but I would hypothesise that esoteric “energy” can only scale through networks. It cannot scale through hierarchical organisational forms. Hierarchical organisation forms are exoteric and hollowed out. They can still exist for a long time even though devoid of esoteric energy. A network runs on esoteric energy but, if the energy goes, the network ceases to exist. Thus, esoteric networks are more transient, something which would also reduce their visibility, especially in a context when many networks are springing up and disappearing.

The archetypes of the authoritarian lawgiver and the esoteric network are still with us today. For example, the Moses archetype can be seen in small businesses which revolve around a single owner. A primary difficulty that such owners have is to find and train people to take over the business. Training people (esoterically) requires a different set of skills than actually carrying out the work of managing a business. Moses was unable to esoterically train somebody to replace him and most small business owners fall into the same trap.

Corona provided us with a prime example of authoritarian leadership as political leaders around the world did their best impersonation of Moses, only instead of claiming God as their source of authority they claimed “science” instead. Who can forget New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern’s, quip, “we will be your single source of truth“; reminiscent of the 1st commandment: I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt not have strange Gods before me. Part of what made Ardern’s statement so ridiculous was the fact that we live in a world with an essentially infinite numbers of sources of truth. If government wants to compete, it must show itself more trustworthy and accurate, something which governments failed to do throughout corona (at least on a logical/rational analysis).

Or government can just lock everybody in their houses and assert their “truth” by force. What we saw in practice during corona was a more or less arbitrary set of rules imposed on the public as if they were written in stone tablets. Thou shalt take this safe and effective vaccine. Clearly, we are not ruled by philosopher kings, but they did their best to pretend.

In fairness to the politicians, I think corona revealed another important difference between networks and authoritarian hierarchies which is that only networks can deal with complexity. An authoritarian hierarchy is able to scale and it can impose its will on its environment through its size. What it does in practice is to simplify its environment down so that it can deal with it. Whatever else can be said about lockdowns, they do simplify society. But the whole point of modern society is that it is complex. Decentralised networks allow scale without simplification. A network can handle complexity. The price you pay is that there can no longer be a leader who can be a single source of truth. Networks are kryptonite to Philosopher Kings.

We have built modern society on networks and they facilitate the enormous complexity of the modern world. But that complexity is a source of anxiety and uncertainty. Networks change and adapt quickly but also with far less visibility than exoteric structures. Think of the pomp and ceremony of the Queen’s funeral vs the collapse of FTX. One is out there in public for all the see and to comprehend. The other is supremely murky and requires extensive investigation to be able to understand because one needs to tease out the network of connections that were at play. The reason why white collar criminals get away with it so often is not just because of entrenched class favouritism but because their crimes are more complex and harder to prove.

FTX was a node in multiple networks. It was part of the WEF network. It must have been a part of some financial networks to get its initial capital. It had network connections with major MSM outlets and with famous politicians and celebrities. We even heard how FTX had financial connections related to corona propaganda.

The globalism of the last 30 years has been built on networks. Unlike the network of the early Christians, these are networks of the elites. It’s actually an inverse of the story of Jesus and the Apostles. Rather than the public disrupting the elite power structures from the bottom up, the networked global elites have disrupted the exoteric power structures of the nation states. They have done so using the relative invisibility that networks provide. Just like the early Christians, the network holds together based on ideology. Although, unlike the early Christians, there is a big dose of greed thrown in for good measure.

There is no rule that says the esoteric energy flowing through a network has to be “good” energy. I wonder if what we are seeing in the modern world is a saturation of networks. We have learned how to unleash the power of networks to facilitate complexity. But these networks cause destruction to the existing exoteric structure of society. That was true in biblical times and it’s still true. The corona hysteria was caused by network effects and so are the economic dislocations of globalisation. What we are left with is a society that has very little in the way of exoteric structure while the esoteric energy is dissipated through a variety of networks in a way that becomes increasingly meaningless and random.

The cry for philosopher kings to take charge during corona was partly the desire for some structure, any structure, to hold onto in a world of too rapid change. The fact that the philosophers didn’t deliver the goods has not negated the underlying desire and has arguably only strengthened it.

Perhaps the lesson is that neither the exoteric or the esoteric is good enough on its own. We need a balance of both; perhaps some philosopher kings ruling over networks. Sounds a bit like what Elon Musk is doing with twitter.

All posts in this series:-

Philosopher Kings vs Networks
The Unconscious Empire
The Unconscious Empire Pt 2: The Hitler Complex
The Unconscious Empire Pt 3: A Prison for your Mind
The Unconscious Empire Pt 4: Becoming the Other
The Unconscious Empire Final: Benevolent Totalitarianism

The thing that confuses me about Musk’s Twitter acquisition is that I don’t see any way for him to “win” but I see a whole lot of ways for him to lose. It looks to me like a lot of downside risk for very little potential upside gain. Aside from the money, the main loss he would suffer would be reputational damage. Given the value of his reputation and the very public nature of his Twitter takeover, I’m surprised he would gamble it in such an open fashion. If this were a poker game, Musk seems to have gone all in but it’s not clear what is in the pot or even what the rules are by which Musk can win.

Twitter seems to me a useful microcosm for the whole internet. Can Twitter actually be profitable? Can the internet be profitable? Is the internet profitable? Most people would assume the answer is ‘yes’, but it’s not at all clear that it is and the reason is because the arrival of the internet in the form we know it coincided with increasing manipulation of the financial markets. Almost all countries have been printing money in recent years including and especially the USA.

The way the system works is that newly printed money is given to financiers who invest it in the “real economy”. In the normal course of events, they would only invest in things that will actually generate a return. However, once financiers came to understand that the government was going to keep the money tap open indefinitely, they no longer needed to care about long-term returns. They started looking for short term pump-and-dump vehicles where they cash out and move onto the next thing.  The IT industry is one of the main outlets for this kind of manoeuvre in the form of start-ups, which is how Twitter started its life.

From the point of view of investors, a start-up is like a pig that you’re fattening up for market. Ideally, this would involve building an actual viable business that has things like positive cash flow and maybe even, heaven forbid, runs a profit. But if the system can find a way to simply create the illusion of a viable business and sell it to a bunch of suckers (institutional investors like pension and superannuation funds) then nobody really cares and, as long as the central bank money tap stays turned on, the market always goes up even if the companies that constitute the market are not really viable businesses.

We can see how dependent the IT industry has become on the central bank money tap because right now there’s a bloodbath going on with layoffs galore, especially in the start-up space. This is due to the tightening of credit market conditions and the rising of interest rates. We may be entering the end game of the current status quo because the money printing of the last decade and more is finally showing up as real-world inflation rather than asset price inflation (of course, asset price inflation is very real if you’re trying to buy a house).

The internet as we know it has become fundamentally tied to overarching political and economic conditions in which endless money printing has become the norm. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this money printing is now the cause of geopolitical conflict. A big part of the reason for the war in Ukraine was Russia saying enough is enough. Putin has openly stated that one of his goals is to bring an end to US dollar hegemony because he is sick of having revenue earned in US dollars inflated away. It’s fair to say that many other countries agree with him and will willingly move to an alternative once they think the time is right. When that happens, all bets are off and it’s not at all clear how much of the internet will be left in the aftermath.

Whether Twitter will be a viable company in that new world is anybody’s guess. The entire calculus of the poker game we call the modern economy is set to change drastically in the years ahead but it’s impossible to know when and how that will play out. Within the current calculus, Musk has shown himself to be a highly competent player; the best, if you go by net worth. So, the question then becomes: within the parameters of the game as it currently stands, what would success look like for Musk in relation to Twitter?

With Twitter, it’s the other way around: the technical problems are easy but the success criteria are obscure.

The original Twitter platform ran on a technology called Ruby-on-Rails and, within that technology, Twitter was dead easy to build. In fact, it was a standard training exercise you would give to an intermediate programmer to write their own version of Twitter. Of course, Twitter is a global website with enormous amounts of traffic. But, the technology to handle that traffic comes almost out of the box these days. If I was to guess, I’d say building and maintaining Twitter is an order of magnitude easier as an engineering challenge than building and maintaining a Tesla car or a SpaceX re-usable rocket. Therefore, I’d expect Musk to have no problem handling the engineering side of the Twitter equation.

It’s on the “customer experience” side of things that Twitter gets weird. If you buy a Tesla, you will be happy if the product performs as expected. And everybody is happy when a SpaceX rocket does something cool like land on a platform in the middle of the ocean.

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

A better description of Twitter could scarcely be written. But it was not always so.

I was a relatively early user of Twitter and in the early days it was almost devoid of animosity and trolling. Many of the early users of Twitter were scientists, artists, writers and thinkers including quite a lot of famous names. It was not uncommon to be able to read an interesting, real-time conversation on some subject and then have a very well-known expert in the field join in spontaneously. In those days, I used Twitter almost like an RSS feed with the links to blog posts or other interesting material being the main drawcard.

The tide turned once the politicians and propagandists got involved. But it was Trump who really turned Twitter into the 2 minutes hate with his presidential campaign. I remember that time well. I was following a couple of hundred people including a handful of friends, a larger handful of colleagues, some well-known names in my profession and a variety of other interesting individuals. It was extraordinary to watch people I personally knew turn instantly into frothy-mouthed loons who became so obsessed with Trump that their entire Twitter output became an endless diatribe of hatred. It was like watching somebody get sucked up into a vortex. Years later I saw the same dynamic, only worse, kick into action at the start of corona and I called it quits and I closed my account.

Why Twitter and social media in general suffers from this phenomenon is an interesting question. I suspect that it’s related to the basic dynamics of herd psychology. History matches Orwell’s 1984 description and shows how easily a mob can be roused to anger. You just need to provide a scapegoat. Twitter has an endless supply of scapegoats in the form of other users, some of whom are anonymous and some of whom are famous. Those scapegoats, like in 1984, are projected onto a screen (a computer/mobile phone screen) with the inherent de-humanisation entailed by that fact. Thus, social media combines the psychology of the 2 minutes of hate with the psychology of the old-fashioned public square hangings with the mob as judge, jury and executioner. Twitter accidentally provided political actors and propagandists with a tool to effortlessly form and manipulate mobs.

Musk seems to understand this on some level. One of his first tweets after buying the company was something like “let’s make Twitter maximum fun.” It’s a nice idea. But it seems to me that many of his users are very happy being miserable. Misery loves company and Twitter provides a global network of people to be miserable with. Amusingly, one of the leading hashtags over the last few days is about how people are leaving Twitter or Twitter is “dead”. People are using Twitter to dance on the presumptive imaginary grave that would be caused by them not using Twitter. That might just be Peak Internet.

It’s fitting that one of the big questions right now is whether Musk will let Trump back onto the platform. This one decision is symptomatic of the whole tangled mess that Musk has gotten himself into. Musk has now taken personal and public responsibility for a decision that is going to piss off a large group of his users whatever he does. He has all but guaranteed that he will become the scapegoat for a two minutes of hate that will last at least up until the next presidential election with either pro-Trump accounts bleating that it’s unfair that he’s banned or anti-Trump accounts bleating that it’s unfair that he’s back.

This doesn’t even get into the financial problems facing Twitter. How can Musk balance the demands of advertisers for a level of certainty in relation to ad placement against the demands of users not to have their user experience excessively manipulated. His experiment with charging users a fee for a premium version of Twitter speaks to this tension. Twitter might be viable if everybody paid a small fee for the service but in the internet world where people expect everything for free and have already been using the site for free for years, there’s no way such a move is possible. That should mean Musk will have to cave to the demands of the advertisers in order to generate revenue which is exactly what the previous management had already done. (Although note that, due to the financial conditions mentioned at the top of the post, it’s not clear that Musk needs to make Twitter turn a profit).

It’s noteworthy that Musk is on record as saying that he is on the autism spectrum. Autistic people are really good at solving engineering problems like car and rocket design. Those problems require discipline and focused attention over long periods of time. Modern Twitter is the exact opposite. It’s a steaming dung heap of emotional-ideological waste products swirling around a fetid cesspool of political doublespeak. Musk needed industrial-strength gumboots to wade into that mess. It looks to me like he only brought sneakers.

Whether Musk will drain the swamp, get dragged into it or somehow cut his losses and run is going to be fascinating to watch. I give him full respect for saying upfront that he’s going to try a heap of different things and see what works. He’s clearly not afraid to fail, even in public view, which is the true entrepreneur’s spirit.

Update: Trump’s back. Let the 2 minutes hate begin! – https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1594131768298315777

My life feels like one synchronicity after another these days. Just last week I wrote a post making the claim that works of fiction can and do say something about the real world. At that time, the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange was just hitting the news. It took me a couple of days to look into it but immediately my synchronicity meter started going off because it turns out that the shenanigans of Mr Bankman-Fried and his comrades is awfully similar to the plotline of my very first novel, Once Upon a Time in Tittybong.

The inspiration for that novel came from my love of names which match the properties of the thing they refer to.  For example, I once worked in a lawyer’s office and we received a letter from a debt collector in relation to one of our clients. The debt collector’s name was Mr Quick – as in, you better pay quick or I’ll send some boys around for a visit. These kind of names always make me chuckle.

So, when I first heard the name Tittybong (a real place name here in Australia), the first thought that came into my head was that it would be a great location for a stoner comedy. I’ll spare you the boring details of how the plot came about, but the super short version is that Australia was going through a banking scandal at the time. There was a Royal Commission that was uncovering some very shady practices. So, I combined this with the Tittybong concept to give me the basic antagonism “small town stoners vs dodgy local banker”. A comedic novel was born.

The main antagonist is the local bank manager in Tittybong. I called him Mr Gier (gier means greed in German). I pitted Mr Gier against a group of stoner high school students with the motivation that one of their parents had been screwed over by the banker in just the same way that some Australians had been screwed over by the banking industry (or for that matter in the GFC which wasn’t that long past when I was writing the story).

For the character of Mr Gier, I used the template of a Mafia boss. Mafia bosses are criminals and I suppose you could call them greedy. But it’s also true that Mafia bosses need to be smart. If you’re running a neighbourhood protection racket and you set the price too high, all the businesses will go broke. Successful Mafia bosses need to know something about their “customers” in order to make sure they don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. They have a vested interest in understanding and maintaining “the system”.

Idealists look at systems in a different way. They see corruption, any corruption, and think that it needs to be stamped out. Of course, it would be nice to have no corruption. But in real world systems there is a price to getting rid of corruption and that price becomes higher the more you try to achieve no corruption. In systems talk, this is called optimising for one variable. But real world systems need to be resilient and resilience is only achieved when there is redundancy across all variables. For this reason, all real world systems that have been around a long time have some amount of corruption built in. It’s not that people want the corruption. It’s that if you try to get rid of it, you either fail or you destroy the system in the process.

The heroes of my story are idealists. They know Mr Gier is corrupt and they want to get him. They have a crazy idea to take him out by competing against his bank with a local currency. The comedy unfolds as they manage to get their crazy idea funded by the local Mayor. They go into battle against Mr Gier who, like any good Mafia boss, doesn’t mind playing dirty when necessary.

Which brings us to FTX. Now, recall that the bad guy in my novel is a banker with a German surname. The FTX story features a guy whose actual surname is Bankman followed by a German surname (Fried). That’s weird coincidence one. Weird coincidence two is that Bankman-Fried was portrayed by the media in the exact same role as the good guys in my story. He was supposed to be a young idealist fighting corruption in the finance sector. Except it turned out he was the corrupt one, exactly like the banker with the German name in my story. So, the FTX story is almost identical to my novel with FTX and Bankman-Fried playing the role of both the good guys and the bad guys simultaneously. Weird.

The media tried to pass Bankman-Fried off as a heroic crypto bro. I know a thing or two about crypto bros because I based the main character in my novel on exactly that archetype. But I also know several crypto bros in real life; mostly people who I’ve worked with in the past. I even know a couple that have the ultimate crypto bro story of woe: they bought Bitcoin right at the start but sold too soon. They could be millionaires now but they cashed out too early in the game. That’s life in the cryptocurrency casino.

The first thing that struck me about Bankman-Fried was his name. A crypto bro named Bankman? It’s too perfect. I may just use that in a future novel. But then there’s the second part of his surname. Fried is a German name but has a literal meaning in English. I originally read it as Bankman Fryed as in let’s deep fry some bankers. Sounds like a George Carlin skit.

When I started to look into the story of Bankman-Fried, it seemed very clear that this was an almost identical set up to the backstory of Greta Thunberg. Like Thunberg, Bankman-Fried is presented as a young, idealistic insurgent coming up from the streets with purely altruistic intentions. Also like Thunberg, the real story is that he is a child of elites who used his connections in the media, government and other elite circles to catapult to fame. Thunberg and Bankman-Fried are both manufactured.

Some others who have seen through the FTX story have concluded that the whole thing is a false flag designed to give government an excuse to regulate cryptocurrency or even destroy it to make way for a central bank digital currency. This is the same argument that was made for the corona lockdowns i.e. they benefitted the elites by transferring wealth to the 1% while also giving governments an authoritarian precedent to implement unpopular policies in the years ahead.

In the case of FTX, this explanation seems to me obviously wrong. Enormous amounts of money have been lost and people’s lives ruined. If there is any justice left in the US court system, the people involved should see jail time. Big names such a Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and others all put their names and faces to what is clearly a scam. To suppose that they all did so in service of some larger conspiracy is drawing a very long bow.

There is a more simple explanation and one that makes sense to me as somebody who has seen the inside of the IT startup world, the dodgy way things get financed, the suckers who get fleeced, the people who milk the system for personal gain etc. I’ve also seen how easily even intelligent, technically capable people get caught up in the hype of ideology and propaganda from within the IT industry. It looks to me like everybody involved in FTX was a True Believer.

The old-school crypto bros do not come from the establishment. Many of them are tied up with anarchist and libertarian ideas that are popular among hardcore IT geeks. They see crypto in exactly the way I portrayed them in my novel: a way to stick it to the man and to overcome the obvious corruption of the US financial and political systems.

Bankman-Fried and his comrades are not genuine crypto bros. In fact, they couldn’t be more establishment if they tried. Check out this long twitter thread which simply lists all the people related to Bankman-Fried or FTX. It’s a who’s who of the US “elites”. They went to the best universities. They’ve worked for establishment companies. They know people at hedge funds and major banks. They have deep connections with the Democratic Party.

What we have in FTX is the establishment pretending to be the insurgents. It’s the same scam they pulled with Greta Thunberg. It’s a way to win political support from clueless young people by promising to Save The Planet. Note that Bankman-Fried was going to “give all his money away” and he was all about effective altruism. He was saying that all while stealing the money of real people to try and prop up his scam. It’s hard to think of a more perfect example of the current state of modern western society; propaganda as a cover for criminal stupidity and negligence.

In a broader sense, FTX looks to me like a concerted effort on the part of left-leaning “elites” in the US to take over the crypto space. The fact that it involves ties with government is not surprising at all since all major corporations in the United States spend enormous money lobbying government to rig the system in their favour. That’s just business as usual these days. FTX was trying to create a leading crypto exchange using fraudulent money to create the illusion of a genuine market while simultaneously trying to attain regulatory capture in the background. The whole thing is completely nuts, which is why many can’t believe it is real. I disagree. It looks to me like an idea that simply got out of control.

It got out of control in the same way that corona got out of control or the sub-prime loan scam got out of control; social contagion. What’s fascinating in that twitter list of relations to Bankman-Fried is how often connections to pandemic or climate emergency NGOs pop up. Bankman-Fried’s own brother is the founder of something called “Guarding Against Pandemics”.

What a coincidence then that FTX looks of a hell of lot like the corona vaccine debacle: a bunch of idiots running around like chooks with their heads chopped off implementing something that could never work; the same thing we see with renewable energy. The level of cluelessness on display here is truly extraordinary. It’s world historical.

And this brings us back to the idea of the Mafia boss. Mafia bosses who are clueless do not stay in business very long. A good Mafia boss must know how to run a proper conspiracy, one that delivers the goods. They know when something needs to be handled quietly in the background to keep the system up and running. Bankman-Fried was spilling his guts on social media about everything, including his amphetamine use!

This is yet another weird correspondence with my story. In the novel, I made the young rebels dope smokers who are fighting against the uptight bank manager. In the crazy real world story of FTX, Bankman-Fried and his fellow “elites” were openly tweeting about taking amphetamines. Check out the videos with Bankman-Fried and you can see that he taps his foot incessantly and he’s shaking all the time. Excitement? Nerves? Maybe. But if somebody tells you they’re on amphetamines, why not believe them. (Another coincidence: the word fried is slang for being wasted on drugs).

Why did Trump get elected? Because he is a Mafia boss. He said something like this: “I am not a nice guy. I am a gangster. I know how the system works. I will keep the system going.” Note also that Trump is a teetotaller. That’s the price that the true Mafia boss must pay. Keeping systems afloat takes extraordinary discipline. You can’t be drunk at the wheel. (At the risk of violating Godwin’s Law, I might add that there was another famous world leader who failed miserably and was a heavy amphetamine user).

Financial systems are some of the most complex systems in existence. Thinking that you can capture the market by building one from scratch if you just hire a bunch of eggheads with university degrees is the same as thinking you can eliminate a respiratory virus with an untested pharmaceutical product. It’s completely mad. But it’s the prototypical insanity of our modern “elites”. I think FTX is probably the perfect story to show just how dumb these people are.

Just as corona was a massive own goal that has probably shortened the period of western hegemony by decades, FTX was a massive own goal for everybody involved, some of whom should end up in jail. There is no grand conspiracy theory here. No geniuses. Klaus Schwab is not a Mafia boss. He’s just one of the bigger nodes in a giant network of utter stupidity.

Our modern “elites” no longer even have an instinct of self-interest or self-preservation. It would actually be preferable to be ruled by Mafia gangsters because at least they would keep the system going. Our current elites will not keep the system going. They are too arrogant and ignorant not to kill the goose which is laying golden eggs for them.

The best way to think about the modern “elites” is that they are members of a religious cult. They really do think they are Saving The Planet. Just like members of a cult, they will self-destruct rather than change their ideology.

How many more of these kinds of stories will we have to experience before some kind of sanity prevails? That’s very hard to know but the time between stupid decisions being made and their consequences being felt seems to be getting shorter. Even a Mafia boss like Trump can’t really do much because the entire establishment is filled with True Believers and even the best mob boss needs trustworthy associates who can actually get things done. If somebody can’t come in and steady the wheel, the US might eventually end up with somebody far more gangster than Trump, and not in a good way.

If all that sounds depressing, don’t worry. It’ll work itself out one way or another. Best to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm. And, hey, I’ve got a great comedy novel that is guaranteed to cheer you up in the meantime!

I might add that the novel is also an exploration of the concept of local currencies. When I wrote it, I had no idea about central bank digital currencies or any of the other loony ideas our elites have cooked up over the last few years. So, I think the plotline of the novel is even more relevant now.

If you’re interested, Once Upon a Time in Tittybong is available at Book Depository, Bookshop (US/UK), Amazon and most other online retailers.