Category: Ideas

In last week’s post I noted how similar the Grand Inquisitor passage in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov was to my Devouring Mother archetypal analysis of modern society. The Inquisitor perpetuates the childlike happiness of the majority and is happy to lie (gaslight), blackmail and deceive in order to maintain that happiness. This attitude betrays the Inquisitor’s own psychology by which he is prepared to burn even Jesus at the stake to uphold the status quo; a status quo in which the Inquisitor, coincidentally, has all the power.

There is a hidden assumption in the Inquisitor’s position which is that the people would follow Jesus if left to their own devices. Therefore, the Inquisitor must intervene to keep them in the childlike state which he believes makes them the most happy. It’s a strange paradox. If people really do prefer earthly happiness over the “freedom” which Jesus offers, why wouldn’t the people reject Jesus by themselves? There is an implied lack of faith by the Inquisitor in his own position which matches the Devouring Mother’s psychological need to retain control by preventing her children from becoming independent (“free” in the Inquisitor’s language). For these reasons, I think the Grand Inquisitor’s psychology is almost identical to the Devouring Mother.

The novel Karamazov is primarily about the other side of the Devouring Mother dynamic; namely, the Orphans. In the Grand Inquisitor passage, the “children” are the archetypal Orphans and Jesus is their “elder” calling them to initiation/individuation. That’s why the Inquisitor must intervene. Like the Devouring Mother, he must ensure the individuation process does not occur so that his “children” remain in a state of dependence.

In my series of posts called the Age of the Orphan, I sketched out the archetypal structure of the Orphan Story. Well, it turns out The Brothers Karamazov fits the archetype perfectly. The brothers in the novel are almost literally orphans. Their mothers died at a young age and their father, Fyodor Pavlovich, abandoned them to be raised by other people. That’s the microcosmic perspective. But Dostoevsky clearly intended to draw parallels between it and the macrocosmic. He was trying to say something about the state of society.

So, I was about 140 years too late. Dostoevsky had already intuited the core dynamic of the modern world and represented it beautifully in The Brothers Karamazov. My thesis in the Age of the Orphan series was that we are living during the time of the Devouring Mother (Grand Inquisitor). We are archetypal Orphans stuck in a culture which no longer has initiation rites because we no longer have a live culture to initiate people into. Because we lack those initiation rites, we do not make the (psychological/spiritual) leap from adolescence into adulthood and remain trapped in a state of dependence.

(Note: it may very well be that the Devouring Mother-Orphan dynamic goes beyond the modern world. Dostoevsky seems to suggest it is more fundamental and is possibly inherent in civilisation itself. Alternatively, it could be just an ever present force competing with other forces and is dominant due to the present state of our culture).

The Brothers Karamazov gives us the archetypal Orphan Story in the form of the main character of the book, the youngest brother, Alyosha. His story is contrasted against the parallel stories of his two brothers, Ivan and Dmitri. But Ivan and Dmitri’s stories are not Orphan Stories. That is, they do not show a “successful” initiation/individuation process. Dostoevsky clearly made this contrast on purpose and if we drill down more into the characters we can see that each represents a type which is still valid in the modern world.

Dmitri is the Byron-esque romantic character. Passionate to a fault, he’s the guy who goes into the bar and shouts everybody a drink just for the hell of it. He’s always head over heels in love with a woman, and maybe more than one. He’s the one whose emotions run so hot that he is capable of murder, even of his own father. In the post war years, Dmitri would be the singer of a rock band travelling from one town to the next and one party to the other, getting into fights, throwing TV sets out of hotel windows, getting arrested and all the other amusements of that lifestyle.

In Dmitri, we see the self-destructiveness of the pleasure seeker. It’s all fun and games until the money runs out. What happens then? Well, you take on debt to keep the party going. But with debt comes shame, resentment and, if you’re Dmitri, threats to murder people.

Is it too much of a stretch to see this dynamic in the modern consumer economy? It was fun for a while but then the money ran out. So, we took on debt. And now we’re up to our eyeballs in debt and, like Dmitri, frantically running around trying to figure out how to keep the party going.  

So, Dmitri is still with us in the modern world. What about Ivan?

Ivan represents the intellectual Orphan. He’s the one that went to university and who formulates new ideas such as if God is dead, everything is permitted. Even though the content of these ideas are deadly serious (quite literally in the plot of Karamazov), Ivan presents them as if they were half jokes. When questioned on them he laughs off the objections. That’s the luxury that comes with armchair philosophy. It also represents the lightness and joviality of the Enlightenment; what Kenneth Clark called “the smile of reason”.

The problem, which Dostoevsky clearly knew, is that it’s all well and good to sit back in your armchair and come up with new ideas. When you let those ideas into the world, even if you’re half joking, they have consequences but far too often the generators of the ideas are nowhere to be found when the proverbial hits the fan. We’ve seen a great example of this dynamic in the last two and a half years. “What? No. We never said the vaccines would prevent infection. Huh? We did? Well, so what? Science is about adapting to new information. Stop living in the past, bro. Lol.”

How many “experts” and so-called “leaders” from the last two and a half years are on record stating things that turned out to be 100% wrong? How much damage was caused by their errors? And how many of them have faced any consequences? But the problem is more widespread. With all our wonderful modern education we are drowning in “new ideas” generated by our university-educated elites most of which turn out to be a complete flop as soon as they are tested against reality.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the elites tested the ideas on themselves first and bore the brunt of any failure. But, no, we the general public get to be the guinea pigs while the elites get to wash their hands of any responsibility. None of the so-called experts who were wrong in the last two years have suffered any repercussions whatsoever.

That was the danger in the new ideas that Dostoevsky foresaw and he shows it in the novel by making Ivan confront the consequences of his ideas. Ivan is tested and found wanting. For all his intellect, he is unable to prevent an act of evil. But more than that, he knows deep down that when the time came he was unable to do what was right. All the philosophising in the world cannot reason away an ethical problem that is right in front of your face. Our “elites” only get away with it because they are removed from the consequences of their decisions.

The dangers of the disconnected intellect are everywhere to see in the modern world and 20^th century Russia had already provided us with a preview. During the Soviet times, the wonderful brand new ideas were channelled through a giant bureaucracy featuring “experts” who were detached from the consequences of their actions and beliefs. The results, explained in great detail in a book I’ve referred to many times, Scott’s Seeing like a State, were the death by starvation of millions of people. Dostoevsky was right and yet we continue to make the same mistakes.

So, we can clearly see that both Dmitri and Ivan are with us to this day. In fact, they have become even more dominant through the pop culture consumer society (Dmitri’s pleasure seeking) and the rise of education, news media and social media allowing “new ideas” completely untethered to reality to spread around the world instantly. If Dostoevsky was right about all that, maybe he was also right about the antidote as exemplified by the hero of The Brothers Karamazov: Alyosha.

Alyosha is the only one of the three orphan Karamazov brothers to go through an initiation and thereby fulfil the archetypal Orphan story. This initiation takes place in the local monastery under the tutelage of the elder, Zosima (Zosima is literally called an Elder in the book and there is apparently an old tradition of Elders in the Eastern Orthodox Church).

In the archetypal Orphan story, it is the Elder who will guide the Orphan through the initiation process that leads them to adulthood/selfhood. Dmitri got his “initiation” in the army. Ivan got his at university. But these are not archetypal initiations because they lack esoteric spiritual content. Alyosha, by contrast, is initiated through an esoteric sub-sect of the church, albeit one that is belittled by the exoteric-minded priests who are trying to do away with it.

The core of Zosima’s teaching to Alyosha could be summarised as follows: everybody is responsible for the whole world and for every individual within it. This understanding leads to infinite, universal, inexhaustible love.

This sounds very mystical and yet it is an interpretation on the basic Christian teaching. Jesus died on the cross for the sins of man. He was “responsible”. To follow the teachings of Jesus is to assume the same responsibility. This is not responsibility in any legal or scientific sense (Dostoevsky goes into great detail to make this point by contrasting Alyosha’s experience with the legal trial of Dmitri) . Rather, it is concerned with developing what you might call a universal conscience. It is the description of Alyosha’s attainment of that universal conscience which Dostoevsky so beautifully describes at the midpoint of the book in one of the great passages in literature.

Alyosha’s initiation comes to its completion with the death of Zosima which forms the final test of faith. This is almost identical to Luke Skywalker’s initiation in Return of the Jedi which reaches its finale with the death of Yoda. But unlike Hollywood versions of the Orphan Story which inevitably represent the Orphan’s “victory” as a heroic conquest over somebody else, Alyosha’s final transcendence takes place alone under the vault of the heavens. It is the fusing of the self with God or the cosmos or whatever you want to call it; not as a logical, objective, scientific occurrence but a personal and inherently subjective one.

It is here that we see the key difference that distinguishes Dostoevksy’s version of the Orphan Story. Alyosha’s transformation is decoupled from any exoteric element and, uniquely, doesn’t represent any meaningful change in Alyosha’s character. This is evident from the fact that the other characters in the story do not treat Alyosha any differently afterwards or, in fact, notice anything different about him.

In the normal Orphan Story, the hero takes on a new exoteric form after the initiation. Thus, even in a primarily psychological work such as Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, the apprentice Ged becomes a true wizard at the end of the book. He has metamorphised into an adult archetype: the sage/mage. The same is true of Luke Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi or Neo at the end of The Matrix. But it is not true of Alyosha in Karamazov.

In archetypal terms, Alyosha has not graduated from Orphanhood into any of the archetypes we traditionally associate with an adult. He does not become a warrior, a sage, a lover, a fool or a ruler. Instead, he remains a Child archetype, specifically the Innocent. The Innocent’s primary traits are faith, optimism and simplicity. Alyosha had these before Zosima’s death. They are severely tested by Zosima’s death. But Alyosha passes the test and retains his faith, optimism and simplicity on the other side.

In terms of normal human psychology, this is unique because the normal pattern of an adult manifesting the Child archetype is that they are in the shadow form of the Child precisely because they have failed the archetypal mission of initiation/individuation. This is what is called arrested development and it results in exactly the kind of shadow childishness that the Grand Inquisitor (aka The Devouring Mother) encourages: obliviousness, dependence, denial, naivete; in short, dissociation.

What we see in the story of Alyosha is the idea that the challenge of initiation for all of us in the modern world is to face the destruction inherent in the world, seen in its purest form in death, and not to dissociate; not to lose the positive forms of our inner Child. To fail this test is to lapse into the shadow forms of the child and fall under the power of the Grand Inquisitor/Devouring Mother. When the Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus that most people are not up to the task, it is this task that he was talking about. But even though the other Karamazovs, and other characters in the novel, fail the task, they still understand what it is and aim for it. They still have a conscience.

This idea of the fully initiated Innocent was presented for the first time in Dostoevsky’s earlier work The Idiot. The Prince Myshkin character in that book is very similar to Alyosha. As the name of that book suggests, the fully initiated adult Innocent is easily mistaken for a fool or a coward by wider society. We see this in Karamazov in the scene where Rakitin accuses Alyosha of being a chicken (a coward) to which Grushenka replies that Rakitin only thinks that because he has no conscience.

Alyosha is not a hero in the sense usually found in film and literature. Nevertheless, he is heroic in his anti-heroism. He represents the voice of the inner child who has come face-to-face with the realities of the world but has refused to be corrupted. Alyosha’s test, his archetypal Orphan mission, is to face death without giving in to cynicism, nihilism or despair like Ivan or to seek oblivion in drinking and pleasure like Dmitri.

To face the pain and agony of the world (to really face them without dissociation) without losing your inner child was what Dostoevsky considered the highest and most difficult task. To not shy away from that task was Dostoevsky’s answer to cynicism, nihilism and despair. It’s a task that is once again showing itself to us in the modern world. What we are increasingly seeing now is a return to nihilism and despair (Ivan). It’s no coincidence that this is happening now that Dmitri’s bill for the sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and consumerism of the post war years needs to be paid.

In the final scenes of Karamazov, we see Alyosha helping a group of young boys face the impending death of their classmate. He does so not from a position of authority as some kind of father figure or priest but as if he was one of them. And, archetypally, he is one of them; the eternal Innocent. His advice to them is to keep at least one moment of true goodness and honesty in your heart and think of that as “home”. In other words, don’t let the world destroy your inner sense of what is good and right. Don’t lose your conscience.

Last week I posted on Dostoevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov which I finally got around to reading recently. There was one passage from the book that I had read before and it’s one that is known even by some who haven’t read the whole novel. I’m talking, of course, about The Grand Inquisitor, which takes up a whole chapter towards the beginning of the book.

While reading over the chapter again, what struck me was how well it worked as a socio-psychological description of what has happened over the past three years during corona. Of more personal interest was how closely it aligned with my Devouring Mother analysis. The Grand Inquisitor uses different language but, to paraphrase Gregory Bateson, hearing the same thing from within a different ontology can add to our knowledge. With that in mind, let’s see how the Grand Inquisitor’s description of human psychology explains corona.

Within the novel, the Grand Inquisitor is a story told by the middle Karamazov brother, Ivan, to his younger brother, Alyosha. Ivan is the chief rationalist in the book and also represents the modern atheism which was taking hold in Europe at the time. The well-known phrase “If God does not exist, everything is permissible” is his idea.

The story of the Grand Inquisitor is set at the time of the Inquisition in Seville, Spain. The local cardinal is in a good mood, having burned a hundred heretics at the stake the day before. While riding past the cathedral, he notices a man performing miracles and realises that it’s Jesus returned to earth. Now, you might think a cardinal would welcome this turn of events as the fulfilment of the religion he claims to represent. Nope. He has Jesus arrested and thrown in a dungeon. Inquisitors gonna Inquisit.

Later that evening, he goes alone to the cell where Jesus is being held. A dialogue between the two follows. Well, it’s not really a dialogue. Jesus doesn’t say a word. The Inquisitor does all the talking and his purpose is to explain to Jesus the reasons why his presence is no longer required on earth, why he will therefore be burned at the stake the following day and why the townsfolk will gladly stack up the firewood and stoke the fire with their own hands even though they know the one they are burning is Jesus himself.

There are a number of ways to interpret the story. For example, a distinction between earthly and heavenly power and how the historical Church had, almost from its inception, come to serve the former at the expense of the latter. In a Jungian sense, I would argue that the story is Ivan’s rational mind (Ego), represented by the Inquisitor, arguing against his conscience (or his Jungian Self), represented by Jesus. If so, this would prefigure a later scene where Ivan faces the devil; his Shadow.

To the extent that Ivan represents the ascent of reason in the modern world, the Grand Inquisitor story is also historically accurate. The Inquisitor tells Jesus that he’s not wanted here anymore because things on earth have now been properly ordered and everybody is “happy”. The word happiness is used explicitly here and is contrasted with freedom.

The Inquisitor accuses Jesus of offering mankind a freedom which the majority of people were not able to attain. Only the great and the strong could follow Jesus’ teaching. Most people, however, are weak, vicious, worthless, rebellious, sinful and ignoble. The Christian faith is too much for them and they would perish by it. Thus, the Inquisitor and the other priests stepped in to fill the void. They provided a structure by which the majority of mankind could live.

That structure is designed to meet the 3 primary desires of mankind, according to the Inquisitor: 1) to have someone to worship; 2) to have someone to keep one’s conscience; 3) to have someone to create unity. These are taken from the Bible story of the Temptation of Christ where Jesus explicitly rejected fulfilling these needs in favour of “freedom”. But men, says the Inquisitor, fear freedom.

“Didst thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?”

It’s clear that what we saw in the last 3 years in relation to the lockdowns and then the vaccines was the removal of free choice. Nobody would deny that. The denial of choice was cloaked up in the garb of “science”, of course. But anybody with a passing understanding of the science could see that this was a charade.  

According to the psychology of the Grand Inquisitor, what was really going on was that people wanted to have their choice (freedom) taken away. They wanted somebody else to make the choice for them and that somebody else were those modern day cardinals – the “experts”.

The information about the relative risks of the virus and the risks of the vaccine was freely available to anybody. That’s one thing that the internet has given us, for better or worse. But most people chose not to consider that information. I suspect part of the reason was the inherent uncertainty that pertains to the discipline of virology and especially to the field of medicine. So, people traded uncertainty (in the Inquisitor’s language: freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil), for “peace”.

All of this falls under the first of the Inquisitor’s basic human needs: the need to worship something. In modern society, the object of worship is “science” itself; ironic because science quite explicitly set itself up in opposition to the old object of worship of which the past Inquisitors were representatives.

What is worshipped in “science” is happiness and material gain. That is what the average person thinks of science and technology. They do not think of Einstein, relativity or Quantum Mechanics for these are more like philosophy in that they don’t hold much practical value and are inclined to make one doubt what one knows. The science that holds in the mind of the general public is science as the provider of happiness; bread and circuses (and vaccines). According to the Inquisitor, we will worship what brings us happiness. But that happiness is a trap, as we will see shortly.

The second fundamental need of the majority of people is to want somebody to keep their conscience i.e. somebody to take responsibility for the difficult decisions; somebody to do the things which an individual would not want to do because it would give them a bad conscience. Why do we elect politicians who continually and openly lie and deceive? Not because they are paragons of virtue but precisely because they are not. They are paragons of vice. They will do the dirty work so that we may keep our consciences clean. Of course, this leads to hypocrisy on a grand scale but perhaps that is the price for earthly happiness.

The Inquisitor posits 3 ways in which the conscience of people can be captured: miracle, mystery and authority.

“Man seeks not God but the miraculous”.

In the case of corona, the miracle was the vaccines. Again, anybody with an understanding of the science could see that it required an actual miracle for them to work. And, of course, they didn’t. But that hasn’t stopped a whole lot of people from believing in them anyway. This comes back to the idea I talked about a couple of posts ago. Heroic materialism (modern science and technology) is the provider of miracles and has been for two and a half centuries. The miracles it has provided include bridges, tunnels, airplanes and vaccines.

The reference to the Inquisitor here is very fitting because it was when the then Pope turned the real historical Inquisitor onto Galileo that he, as Galileo himself predicted, ensured that the emergent science of the time would come to an end in Italy and the Catholic south while the Protestant north would become ascendant. That’s exactly what happened and that’s why Heroic Materialism took off in England primarily with Holland and America not far behind. Heroic Materialism out-miracled the Church. The rest is history.

Alongside miracles there must be mystery. The vaccine is a mystery to the extent that the average person has apparently no idea, and less interest, in how the vaccine works or indeed how viruses and microbiology in general work. Again, there is no excuse for this ignorance in the modern world. All the information is available at the click of a computer mouse. We might be tempted to say it’s a failure of education or that people don’t have time to find out for themselves. But the Inquisitor would say that it’s the desire for mystery and that desire drives ignorance because to know is to take away the mystery and with it the miracles.

Finally, there is authority and this one needs no further explanation in relation to corona as we saw the exercise of authority in the most blatant fashion. Put the three together and you get miracle, mystery and authority; all fulfilling the underlying need of people to avoid their own conscience.

The vaccine could have been offered to those who wanted it and everybody else could have been allowed to get on with their life. But that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because that freedom of choice would have placed the burden of decision onto the individual. Everybody would have had to weigh up the decision of whether to take the vaccine with their own conscience. But that, per the Inquisitor, is precisely what people want to avoid. So, we got the completely irrational vaccine mandates which served to take the choice away and clear people’s consciences.

This brings us to the Inquisitor’s 3^rd human need: the desire for unity.

“…the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men.”

It was this section which resonated most strongly with me in light of my Devouring Mother analysis because the Inquisitor uses the child metaphor numerous times here and this equates in my analysis to the Orphan archetype.

“We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all.

The desire for somebody to create unity is the desire for somebody to be the political parent to the societal children; somebody to sort out the petty squabbles, to provide food (bread), to be the voice of authority even if it means lying (the noble lie), to be responsible and to be the object of worship in the way that a child worships its parents and believes whatever they say. The happiness on offer is the archetypal childlike happiness of obliviousness (ignorance) with a side order of bullying and victimhood.

All of this adds up to obedience. People trade freedom of conscience, which is a burden, for bread and circuses (and vaccine mandates). The trap inherent in this deal is that, having become obedient, you become dependent:

“Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep, grateful and obedient, through forever trembling, lest Thou withhold Thy hand and deny them Thy bread.”

Of course, we saw exactly that during corona. The rebellious children were denied their bread, most famously the Canadian truckers with their frozen bank accounts. Here in Australia, numerous people lost their jobs for refusing to acquiesce to an experimental pharmaceutical product.

All of this was in the service of unity. Remember the catchphrase from the start of corona: “we’re all in this together”. You couldn’t ask for a more succinct summary of the Inquisitor’s 3rd human need. But unity doesn’t just happen. Somebody must enforce it. We’re all in this together (or else!)

The modern Inquisitor is the “expert”. We swapped the cardinal’s robe for a white lab coat. People don’t get hauled off to dungeons as much anymore. They just have their social media account deleted and their bank account frozen. It amounts to much the same thing.

What makes the story of the Grand Inquisitor so powerful is that it doesn’t propose that these things are done against the public interest but rather in the public interest i.e. in the psychological interest of the majority. No doubt some, and perhaps the majority, of our “elites” would agree wholeheartedly with this ethic.

The alternative is the “freedom” of which the Inquisitor ascribes to the teachings of Jesus. The Brothers Karamazov as a work of art is the explication of that freedom; that is, the freedom of the individual to live by their own conscience. This freedom is not happiness. In fact, one could argue that it is the opposite of happiness. In the next post, I’ll go into more detail about what that looks like from a Dostoevskyan point of view.

Last time I read Dostoevsky, I was at uni. One of my main recollections was that I found his works somewhat melodramatic. I still do. The Brothers Karamazov is an unrelenting melodrama. But it’s not melodrama for its own sake and it’s certainly not the soppy melodrama of a television soap opera. Rather, purpose of the melodrama in Karamazov is to convey an intensity of emotion that couldn’t be achieved otherwise. Furthermore, the melodrama is contrasted against a backdrop of religion in the first half of the story and criminal justice in the second half while the hero of the story, the youngest Karamazov brother, Alyosha, provides the calm, virtuous and loving anchor around which it all swirls. He is the ground and frame for the drama of the story.

Having said that, the plot of Karamazov does seem exaggerated.

A wanton wretch of a father who seeks nothing in life but money and pleasure, had all but abandoned his three sons from the day they were born. The sons, born to two different mothers who died when they were young, were raised by other people. Now all in their 20s, they have returned to the small town where the father still lives.

But the old man has not changed his ways. On the contrary, he is trying to steal the mistress of his profligate eldest son, Dmitri, while also short changing him on his inheritance. The hot-headed Dmitri knows what his father is up to and has threatened to kill him over the matter. Meanwhile, the girl they are pursuing is having a great time stringing them both along and delighting in watching them fight over her. To top it all off, the middle son, Ivan, is in love with the woman who Dmitri is engaged to. That’s just the basics of the story!

All of this sounds like the kind of thing you might see on one of those American talk shows where the father and sons spend the whole time screaming at each other and end up coming to blows while the audience cheers. This comparison might seem flippant and yet it captures, I think, a crucial point about the novel and what it says about modern western society.

The characters in Karamazov would never in a million years take their personal issues onto a television show for the whole world to see. That would be a punishment worse than death for them and the reason is a concept which has become almost wholly foreign to us in the modern West: shame. The modern West is, in a technical sense, shameless and this is no accident. It’s a result of ideas that were taking hold when Dostoevsky wrote his masterpiece and which he introduces as one of the main themes of the book.

Dostoevsky shows us an old-fashioned kind of shamelessness in the character of the father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. He represents a character that occurs a lot in 19^th century literature but which I used to think didn’t exist in the modern world; namely, the man who spills his guts to all and sundry and blurts out the most intimate details of his mind to complete strangers. I say I used to think that because the last time I read Dostoevsky social media was in its infancy.  But social media has shown that the psychology of Fyodor Karamazov is still with us.

It’s a daily occurrence on social media to see people still blurt out whatever is on their mind for all the world to see. Often what’s on their mind is some rather vile thoughts about some person or group; the kind of thing that would be much better kept to yourself. Such posts quickly get deleted, but it’s normally too late by then. Some troll has already taken a screenshot of the offending post and happily re-posted it to the internet to remind the world.

What’s behind all this is the concept of shame. People delete a social media post because it revealed something about themselves that they didn’t want revealed. Even in our shameless culture, there are still some boundaries left. We’re tempted to say that the novelty of social media has tricked people into such dumb behaviour; that it’s made it too easy to type in anything and press send. But Dostoevsky shows us the psychology in great detail in The Brothers Karamazov which is full of characters blurting out things that are not in their interest or their conception of self.

The novel takes place in a second tier town in a second tier province at a time before even local newspapers. As a result, everybody in town knows everybody else’s business. But more than that, for the main characters in the novel, the town is their world.

From our vantage point at a time of instantaneous global communication, we might think of this as limiting or even suffocating. But Dostoevsky doesn’t. On the contrary, he repeatedly pokes fun at the several characters in the novel who make a pretence of being wise and learned simply because they’ve read the latest stories in the Moscow or Petersburg press or, even worse, the latest ideas from Paris or Berlin. Such characters want to come across as learned, rational and objective. But that is just pride. And it’s an inferior kind of pride than that which leads to interpersonal conflict because sitting in armchair and reading a newspaper or some sociological treatise cannot activate the conscience and therefore cannot be a (real) provocation to ethics and self-knowledge.  

Dostoevsky would not have been surprised at the posturing and preening and the virtue signalling which is endemic on social media. It is just a more extreme form of the psychology that was already there in the late 19^th century. It’s a way to escape “the real world” i.e. the flesh and blood world of family relations, friendships, messy love affairs and all the other “melodrama” that makes up real life. In small towns of the past like the one in Karamazov there was no way to escape that except by moving to the big city. But, nowadays, it’s possible anywhere. You can escape without leaving the comfort of your own home.

Our public discourse provides the pretence of objectivity and rationality. But as we’ve seen in the last two and half years, when the pressure is on, the veil is lifted and we see that what sits just beneath the surface is the same human emotions and feelings. For most people, the public discourse is nothing more than a screen on which to project their own issues. Dostoevsky already knew that in 1880 and he captured it most clearly in the character of Rakitin in the novel. Even the wretched Fyodor Karamazov is superior to a Rakitin because the old man makes no attempt to cloak his real self (his will, emotions, feelings) in “objectivity” and “modern ideas”.

I use the word cloak here deliberately because the etymology of the word shame is related to the idea of covering up. We want to “hide our shame” because shame is a revealing (an uncloaking) to the world of something about ourselves that we do not want the world to see. The drama in Karamazov revolves around pride, honour and shame and the misunderstandings and misinterpretations of people’s motives as they inevitably read their own biases and prejudices into others. All of these misunderstandings cause their own trouble in turn. That’s what happens in a small town. When you misinterpret somebody, you hurt their reputation. That has consequences for them and for you. Unlike exchanging the latest acceptable opinions on social media, everybody has skin in the game.

The source of the shame for the characters in Karamazov, however, is not vanity and this is a crucial point to make. All of the main characters, even the old drunken letch, Fyodor Karamazov, have a conscience. Their shame comes from this internal sense of right and wrong and, even though they are often driven by vanity or other base emotions, they ultimately stand before their conscience.

To will, to desire, to strive and to act are revealing. Obviously, by acting we reveal ourselves to the world. But what’s less obvious is that we also reveal ourselves to ourselves. “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say,” said E.M. Forster. That is what is going on throughout Karamazov. The characters are ashamed for their behaviour in front of others but they are also ashamed in front of themselves, in front of their own conscience.

Pride, honour and shame are the exoteric, public-facing, dimensions of right and wrong. To defend one’s honour is to defend an ethical conception of the good. Even in vanity, there is still an ethical claim. I claim this thing is good and that I am an exemplar of it. If you prove that I am not and bring shame on me, we still agree on what is good. In this way, even vanity can lead to the good as long as it is tied to conscience.

Conscience is the esoteric, inner-facing dimension. Note that the word conscience is very similar to the word consciousness. In fact, they both have their origin in the Latin word conscientia meaning to know thoroughly (the word “science” is related).

This is, I think, Dostoevsky’s point. So-called objective, rational knowledge that does not have an esoteric, personal component is almost valueless. Only through direct knowledge, gnosis, can you bring your conscience to bear and only then can you know in the fullest way possible. This is why know thyself is the basis of all knowledge.

How do you know who you are until you see what you do? To challenge oneself is exactly to put yourself in a situation where you don’t know what you will do. Will you crumble? Will you bring shame on yourself?

The main characters in the novel, Fyodor and Dmitri Karamazov, are driven onwards by passions they can barely control. This leads them to do things that are disgraceful, dumb and completely against any pragmatic self-interest they might have. What redeems them (moreso for Dmitri than his father) is their conscience i.e. that they have not lost sight of the good. Though they might slip back into vanity and pride, they do not lose the higher conception. That is the primary difference between them and the characters who are purveyors of modern ideas, including the middle brother, Ivan. These have swapped passion, emotion and feeling for a lukewarm objectivity that in the lesser characters is nothing more than a cover for pride and self-interest and, in its purest form in Ivan, unleashes evil.

If this interpretation is right, Dostoevsky counts among the writers of the later 19^th century who foresaw the tidal wave of evil that was threatening to be unleashed by the new ideas. Of more relevance to the post war years, he also foresaw the vacuous, comfortable bourgeois ethic which reaches its apotheosis in social media. One no longer even needs to leave the house to propagate the latest thing, the new ideas, the acceptable opinions. All of this is the flimsiest cloak for petty and shallow moral grandstanding.

That cloak doesn’t hide shame for there is nothing to be ashamed of. The fact that there is nothing to be ashamed of is the whole problem because it implies there is no esoteric content involved; no heart, will, passion, desire or emotion. Accordingly, there is no chance to activate one’s conscience. It’s all a hollowed out, empty shell of reason that will crack and disintegrate with the merest touch of emotional and intellectual honesty.

I suspect many people know that at some level. The hysteria we see on social media and in modern public discourse in general is also present in Karamazov but it is reserved for the times when people are desperately trying to cover themselves up. Jung and Dostoevsky would be in agreement on this: people really, really hate to self-reflect and will go to great lengths to avoid the task. In Karamazov, that might mean getting drunk in a tavern and starting a brawl, fainting on the couch or perjuring oneself in court. Nowadays, you can simply distract yourself with social media or an infinite number of other electronic diversions.

Ultimately, though, these are all short term measures and in the long run you will have to face the music. Karamazov shows that in the form of a court case representing the exoteric “conscience” at work. But the highest judge in Dostoevsky is one’s own conscience. That is also the highest form of truth. If he’s right, then our modern world, which systematically denies the conscience as the arbiter of truth, is missing something fundamental.

Clark’s assumption was that great art provides the truest form of expression of a civilisation because it is not caught up in the triviality of fashion, the hysterics of day-to-day politics or the dogmatic belligerence of religious dispute. Great artistic movements also transcend national boundaries and so provide an object of study that corresponds to the level of civilisation, which is almost always supra-national.

Recently, I went back to the final episode of Clark’s series to find a reference and realised something I hadn’t fully grasped the first time around. Clark called the final episode Heroic Materialism and it is the one episode in the series where he expressly forgoes an analysis of art for something different. That something different is the railways, bridges and skyscrapers that we all take for granted in the modern world but which originated in England in the 19^th century. The building of these enormous objects required genuinely heroic effort and they also implied a worship of mammon. Put the two together and you get Heroic Materialism.

Clark differentiated engineering from science because this was also the time when science, through Einstein and quantum physics, had begun to detach itself from everyday life and had even, both metaphorically and literally through the atomic bomb, become a threat to life.

Now you might say to yourself that a rail bridge is built for practical, utilitarian reasons and that is exactly how the government here sold them to the public. But I can tell you from direct experience that this is not true. The reason I had time to sit in my car and peruse the giant chunks of concrete across the road was that, despite the newly built rail bridge, the traffic at the intersection where I was sitting has only gotten worse in recent years. As far as I can tell, the rail bridge has made no noticeable difference to traffic flows and, in fact, the changes in the local roads that were made in order to build the bridge have made my general commute around the neighbourhood worse. By utilitarian criteria, the bridges are a failure.

What if we don’t really judge such bridges by utilitarian criteria at all? What if the bridges are built precisely because they are the expression of our deepest values, of Heroic Materialism itself? Here in Melbourne, we have spent tens of billions of dollars on rail bridges in recent years and have increased the state’s debt in order to do so. The official reason was to save people time driving in their cars. But any time that might have been saved by the bridges was quickly eaten up by the increases in population which means more cars on the road and more time sitting at traffic lights. If we actually cared about making people spend less time in cars, a cheaper and more effective way would be to have smaller cities but smaller cities contradict the bigger is better ethos that underlies Heroic Materialism.

The truth is that Clark was right, the bridges are built because they are an expression of our values. The State Premier here in Victoria, the man who became world famous during corona for telling people not to watch the sunset, has enjoyed great popularity in recent years and looks set to win an election again this year despite having given Melbourne the longest lockdown in the world. How is this possible? Because he gives the public what they want and what the public wants are large, public demonstrations of power in the form of rail bridges, rail loops, huge underground tunnels and skyscrapers.

The link here to corona is not accidental. The lockdowns and vaccines were also Heroic Materialism in action. They were Heroic Materialism applied to a domain where it doesn’t belong and doesn’t work but, again, that was not the point. The point is the expression of values. In that way, it was fitting that Melbourne had the longest lockdown in the world. That was only ever possible because people here really believe in the underlying ethic.

The modern environmental debate now revolves around which ginormous technological solution will save us. On the right side of the political spectrum are those who say we should stick to coal and gas and on the left are those who think wind farms and solar panels will do it. Underlying it all is the assumption that heroic feats of engineering must be deployed.

One of the side effects of Heroic Materialism is the feeling of powerlessness at the individual level. Heroic Materialism dictates that we formulate problems of such enormous scope that there simply isn’t anything a single person or even a small community can do about them. So, we must leave it to “the experts”. Gigantic projects also require gigantic injections of capital and thus behind the scenes are Mr Burns and his friends who fund the whole shebang and from whose point of view bigger really is better because their cut is directly proportional to the size of the transaction.

It’s the bankers and technocrats who run Heroic Materialism and always have. The de-humanising aspect of the ethic has always been its scale which seems expressly designed to make the individual feel as small and insignificant as possible. Just a cog in a machine. I noted with interest that the new Italian Prime Minister said almost exactly that during the recent election campaign in Italy. She spoke of “identity” and not being a “consumer slave” beholden to financial interests.

Those with a knowledge of history will recognise the tone of those words. Last time we tried to combat the problems of Heroic Materialism through politics it turned into an even worse version of Heroic Materialism much like the environmental movement has since it sold out in the 1980s.

And this is where we come back around to Kenneth Clark and to art. Art has always been concerned with the individual. Art took a backseat in the 20^th century because the 20^th century was the turning away from the individual and towards the mass, the crowd, the aggregate. As Heroic Materialism continues to falter around us every day, one of the silver linings for those of us who care about art is that we may see an artistic revival and along with it a return to the human and the humane.

The group stops overnight at a hotel in a small town where the Prussian officer who is in charge demands to spend a night with the prostitute. Being a patriotic woman, she refuses to sleep with the enemy. The officer seems to take it well. He doesn’t resort to violence or intimidation. But he does inform the group he will not let them leave the hotel until his desire has been satisfied.

After a couple of days of sitting around bored, the elites get sick of the situation and form a conspiracy (Maupassant’s word, not mine) to convince the prostitute to do as the Prussian officer wishes so they can leave the hotel and reach their destination. One-by-one they try to talk her into doing what is desired using a variety of arguments including appeal to religion, to self-interest and also to the fact that what the officer is asking is simply for the woman to practice her profession. It’s not like she can object on moral grounds. So, what’s the big deal? Just do your job and let us be on our way.

It occurred to me while reading the story how well it describes the situation we are still in to this day. Maupassant had forseen the modern world; a world in which the supra-national elites have more in common with each other than the people of their own country.

But there’s a more specific correspondence. Our modern elites are the equivalent to the French elites in the story. They use a variety of tactics to get the public to acquiesce. Behind that facade, even though we don’t talk about it, is the raw politics of the situation. We don’t have Prussian soldiers in our hotels and towns but we do have an invisible empire, the US Empire – aka the “liberal world order”, to whom our elites are bound.

The elites in Maupassant’s story simply have different priorities to the common folk and one of those priorities is not patriotism. This makes logical sense.  When a foreign power dictates the rules to your country, anybody who is a genuine patriot is not going to last long at the top and wouldn’t want the job anyway as they would have to be aware that the rules are not in the interests of the country. Almost by definition, the elites must be conspirators, although it is quite likely that they are not consciously aware that this is the case.  

Let’s call Maupassant’s story, and those like it, the Conspiracy Story (yes, I’m following the same form of analysis as I used in my book The Plague Story).

There are a couple of important facets to the conspiracy story. Firstly, the bad guys are out in the open for all to see as is the injustice they are perpetrating. Because of this, the Conspiracy Story implies the possibility that justice may be served at a later time. The conspirators are obviously in the wrong and they can be captured and held to account.

Another important facet of the Conspiracy Story is that there must be a power imbalance. This power imbalance means that a moral imperative has also been breached alongside any legal one. The “elites” are stronger and they use their superior strength to gain at the expense of the less powerful.

So, we can sum up the Conspiracy Story as follows: a small group of conspirators unite to use their position of strength to gain at the expense of a less powerful group or person.

If corona were a fictional story or movie, Klaus Schwab could never happen because he is too cheesy even for Hollywood. You can imagine the conversation in the writer’s room as the screenplay was being developed:

Head Writer: Ok, folks, we need a villain for the story. Gimme some ideas.

Junior Writer: I’ve got it! How about an old, bald man who talks with a thick German accent and who wears glasses that look like monocles. He plots world domination from a chalet in the Swiss Alps. Oh yeah, and his ancestors were Nazis!

Other Writer (sarcastically): Whaddya gonna call him? Hans Gruber?

Junior Writer (proudly): We’ll call him Klaus Schwab.

One of the defining features of postmodern literature is its use of irony. Well, clearly we live in a postmodern world. It’s a world where Klaus Schwab ironically (and unironically) exists. And it’s true. It’s true that there is a conspiracy going on right before our eyes. It’s true that the conspiracy is not in the interests of the common folk. It’s true that our so-called elites fly up to Davos for the privilege of taking part in the action. All the elements of the Conspiracy Story are right there out in the open.

But just to be even more postmodern, the Conspiracy Story is given the name Conspiracy Theory and thereby neutered. You’re now a crank for pointing out what’s exactly in front of everybody’s eyes. “So, there’s this guy who wants to take over the world, huh? And he’s German too. Wow. Cool story, bro (eye roll).” That’s multi-dimensional irony. Welcome to postmodernism.

In the spirit of postmodernism, where just because one thing is true doesn’t mean there aren’t other equally valid truths, I’d like to introduce another kind of story that is prominent in the modern world: the Horror Story.

We can summarise the Horror Story as follows: a powerful force is out there. You know it’s there but you can’t really identify it. It doesn’t care about you. You can’t communicate with it. You can’t reason with it. And it might kill you.

Immediately we can see that there are strong parallels between the Horror Story and the Conspiracy Story. From the point of view of the less powerful, the elites are a powerful force. They don’t care about you. You have very little ability to communicate and reason with them and, in extreme cases, they may kill you.

The main difference between the Conspiracy Story and the Horror Story are the properties of identity, agency and control. In a Conspiracy Story, the elites might be screwing you over but you know who they are and how they are doing it. In the Horror Story, you don’t know what the force is or how it is working. You just know it’s out to get you. We can plot the Horror Story and Conspiracy Story on a continuum as follows:

In psychological terms, the Conspiracy Story belongs to consciousness while the Horror Story belongs to the subconscious. The primary emotion of the Conspiracy Story is anger at injustice while the primary emotion of the Horror Story is fear caused by an absence of knowledge and understanding.

It is no coincidence that pandemics are prime examples of the Horror Story with viruses playing the role of the amorphous, indifferent force that might kill you. What the conscious mind wants more than anything in a Horror Story is to remove fear and doubt. Thus, the protagonists in such stories spend their time trying to identify what is afflicting them.

I think a big part of the reason why covid tests remain so popular is that they (claim to) identify the invisible enemy who would otherwise be lurking in the cellular shadows. The tests and the vaccines are the attempt to bring to consciousness what would otherwise remain in the subconscious. They fulfil this psychological need independently of any technical or scientific value they might have.

Identity, agency and control. These are what is missing in the Horror Story and their absence drives fear. We tend to think the fear is caused by the Horror Story. But what if the causality is the other way around? What if it’s underlying fear which makes Horror Stories popular?

If this is true, we can surmise that the increasing popularity of the Horror Story is because of an increase in fear caused by a perceived lack of identity, agency and control in the lives of many people. We can then go back one step further and ask what has caused people to feel that their identity, agency and control was slipping away.

The first thing to note is that this problem has been around since the start of the industrial revolution and has only been getting more pronounced since then. The speed of change in modern society means that people can never feel that they are standing on solid ground. This dynamic has been given the name anomie and it has been around for a couple of centuries.

With the neoliberal reforms of the 1990’s, the level of anomie has gone into overdrive. Thus, it’s fair to say that “forces of globalisation” have been driving the rise in the popularity of the Horror Story via increased anomie in the population. This makes sense. The “market forces” of the global economy don’t care about you, you can’t reason with them, and they might cause you to lose your job and break up your family. That sounds like a Horror Story to me and it has been a real life Horror Story for a great many people in the last thirty years.

And here we come back around to the Conspiracy Story. The neoliberal agenda was implemented by the supra-national elites who convinced the voting public in each country to go along with it. In that sense, it was a Conspiracy Story. Neoliberalism was quite clearly in the interests of the US Empire because, among other things, it financialised the public assets of most countries thereby increasing the amount of dollars flowing back to the US. The elites in those other countries, including here in Australia, dutifully got on board the program and sold the idea to the public as being all about free markets, competition, globalisation and the liberal world order. In other words: ideology.

In Maupassant’s story, the ideology used to convince the reluctant prostitute took the form of religion. As Napoleon once said, religion was the only thing preventing the common people from stringing the elites up from lampposts. We don’t have religion anymore and so the elites need new kind of ideology which is dutifully churned out by modern universities and think tanks (another term dripping with postmodern irony).

But, unlike Christianity, the new ideology has no basis in what was once a vibrant religion and its associated symbolism. The ideology produced by the modern university is untethered from history and from reality in general. This is a feature, not a bug, because it means that the ideology cannot be reasoned with. It is specifically designed not to be thought about.

Thus, the modern ideology is a Horror Story in and of itself. To make matters worse, that ideology is then promulgated through a propaganda apparatus the size and scope of which the Church could never have dreamed of. The underlying purpose of that propaganda apparatus, however, is still the same. It is there to convince the common folk to acquiesce. These days it does so more through bewilderment than anything. But that bewilderment is ambiguity and amorphousness; the properties of the Horror Story.

As I have noted in recent posts, the modern propaganda apparatus also no longer focuses exclusively on ideology but directly targets the subconscious. This is the big change that has occurred in the Conspiracy Story since Maupassant’s time. The combination of meaningless ideology and Magic means that the propaganda of the elites is no longer understandable by the conscious mind, even the conscious mind of the elites themselves. Therefore, it exists purely in the subconscious causing the Conspiracy Story to become a Horror Story.

Prior to the neoliberal reforms of the 90s, the two main political parties in most western countries represented labour and capital. You knew what they stood for. You knew whose interests they served. Identity, agency and control were well defined and plain to see. This system was then dismantled from within and the labour parties were convinced to sell out; the same betrayal we see in Maupassant’s story.

This absence of identity, agency and control leads to fear and explains the popularity of the Horror Story in the modern climate debate as well as the various apocalypse fantasies of which corona was the most extreme example. What we saw from the start of corona was a deep-seated desire on the part of a large section of the public for politicians to take charge, to be identifiably in control and to show that they had agency. It didn’t matter that what the politicians were being asked to do (“control” a respiratory virus) was impossible. The psychological desire was the end in itself.

Viewed in this way, there may actually be a deep-seated wisdom at play here. It seems almost certain that corona has brought neoliberalism to an end and probably also signifies the end of the “liberal world order”. To the extent that the liberal world order had morphed into a Horror Story, corona could be seen to represent a demand for a return to identity, agency and control. It’s the demand for real human beings as leaders who don’t hide behind ideology, who govern over things that they do actually control and therefore must take responsibility for.

We’re not there yet, of course. There will be a whole lot of ducking and weaving, a lot of propaganda aimed at keeping the ship afloat as long as possible. But we are looking at a reset. I very much doubt it will be the one that Herr Schwab wants. Instead of increasing de-humanisation, I expect we’ll see the opposite. For better or worse, it will be a return to humanity which is to say identity, agency and a less hallucinogenic and far more humble level of control.