Category: Ideas

Ask the average person in a western nation what it means to cure a disease and what will they answer? Chances are they think a cure means a solution. You get sick with something, you take a treatment, then you’re no longer sick. Ask the same person how many diseases have been cured in the last century or so and they’ll probably think there were quite a lot. And yet, by the definition of cure just given, there have been very few actual cures developed.

Here’s a good example of the schizophrenic nature of our cultural understanding of what it means to cure. The headline reads “12 Deadly Diseases Cured in the 20^th Century”. The average person would interpret this to mean that once upon a time there were 12  deadly diseases in the world and then the 20^th century came along and now those diseases don’t exist. But the very first disease listed in the article is chickenpox and the article specifically states that chickenpox is not a deadly disease, is not cured, and is, in fact, a rite of passage for most people.

This kind of disconnect between the headline and the actual content of an article is extremely common these days and, once you get an eye for it, you can start to discover some interesting things about our culture. The pattern is as follows: the headline refers to the deep-seated cultural script while the body shows the “reality”. Many people would call such articles propaganda. But even if it is propaganda, it’s very subtle propaganda that works by reinforcing a cultural script that is perfectly familiar to the average reader. In this case, the cultural script is that we have cured lots of diseases through the wonders of modern medicine. If we dig a little deeper into that script, we find that it revolves around the word cure.

Fittingly, the word cure has its etymology in religion. To cure is to make healthy and healthy is related to holy. In French, curé still means priest or chaplain. In Latin, curare means “to take care of”. In the original meaning, you cured a person and you did that by taking care of them i.e. nursing them back to health (which could also have meant spiritual health).

Whether you think that medical “cures” are largely about returning a person to wholeness (and holiness) through healing or whether you think a cure is the medical equivalent of carpet bombing the invisible enemy into oblivion will in large part predict your reaction to corona. As a member of the former group, I was horrified. But most people in our society follow the latter cultural script according to which the Dr Faucis of the world are the great generals leading us into scientific battle and we must play the role of obedient soldiers.

How does the leader of the free world say that with a straight face, especially given that he himself is vaccinated up the wazoo and still got covid? Well, that’s between Biden and his curé (his priest) and I hope he’s got a good one. But, in fairness, Biden probably believes what he’s saying and so do a great many people in western nations. What’s going here, despite how absurd it might look to those of us who are apostates from this strange religion, is not actually anything new but a basic element of human psychology.

The phenomenon of disregarding what looks to non-believers as overwhelming evidence permeates even the domain of science. As the saying goes, science progresses one funeral at a time. Even some of the greatest scientists have gone to their graves denying what later became standard theories of how the world works. Gerald Weinberg gave this phenomenon the name The Law of the Conservation of Laws:  

“When the facts contradict the law, reject the facts or change the definitions, but never throw away the law”.

That’s not the way science is supposed to work, but it’s the way science does work because it’s the way humans work. A vaccine is a cure and cures are safe and effective. That is the cultural script or law that must be preserved in our culture and it will be preserved until it can no longer be preserved. If this means disregarding obvious facts and changing the definitions of words, then that’s exactly what will happen and it’s exactly what has happened in the last decade in order to get more “cures” onto the market.

Many dissenters analyse corona as a one-off mass formation psychosis where people were so traumatised that they continue to behave irrationally. This line of thinking puts corona in a box with a nice bow around it and places it in the crazy basket alongside historical episodes like the Dutch tulip craze or the South Sea Bubble.

But that’s not correct. Corona follows the Law of the Conservation of Laws. We acted according to some of our most deep-seated cultural scripts and, though they were a complete failure, we have not thrown away those scripts and we continue to act by them. I would add to Weinberg’s law the qualifier that the more blatant the disregard for the facts, the more fundamental must be the law that is being protected. Right now, so many deep-seated beliefs of western culture are under threat that our entire public discourse is completely dissociated from reality. That’s not a state of affairs that can continue for much longer.

I tried to unpack the main cultural scripts related to corona in my book The Plague Story. It’s because the modern west thinks of itself as undogmatic (part of our ongoing rebellion against religion) that we are unable to see that we are just as dogmatic as any other society, perhaps even more so because we are unaware of our dogma. Because we never hold our dogma up to critical review, it doesn’t change. Thus, when faced with such an obvious failure as the corona vaccines, the modern west not only doesn’t acknowledge the failure but doubles down on it. That’s what Biden’s recent announcement amounts to.

There was one other thing that Biden shouted in his speech that I thought was telling as it relates to another core cultural script of the modern west. He said an mRNA vaccine for cancer “could be used to stop cancer cells when they first arise”. You know what else stops cancer cells when they first arise?: our immune system.

It’s worth remembering that the scientific discipline of immunology is very young. Almost everything we know about the immune system at a technical, analytical level has been learned in the post war years (although we had a tacit understanding of the principles of immune response well before that). We now know that the immune system is constantly on the lookout for cancer cells which it will destroy. This is the normal state of affairs. The abnormal state is when the cancer cells evade the immune system and the chances of this happening increase with age as the immune system begins to degrade along with the other systems of the body.

From a systems thinking point of view, the immune system belongs to the category of medium number systems i.e. those systems which display organised complexity. Biden is calling his cancer-cure push the Cancer Moonshot. But this analogy is a category error. The moonshot, sending a rocket to the moon, belonged to the domain of classical physics and is therefore in the organised simplicity category. A cure for cancer, whatever that means, must come from the domain of organised complexity.

But this implied definition of “science” is just another of our most deep-seated cultural scripts. “Science” means reductionist science. It’s true that reductionist science gave us the moonshot of which we are so proud. But reductionist science does not work in the domains of organised complexity of which medicine and biology are two prime examples. We can see another example of this category error in the executive order Biden released a couple of days ago in relation to the cancer moonshot. Here is an excerpt:

We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers; unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence; and advance the science of scale‑up production while reducing the obstacles for commercialization so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.

Huh? Write circuity for cells? Program biology like a computer? As somebody who works in the IT industry, I don’t whether to laugh or cry at this statement. I will say this, I wouldn’t let a computer programmer anywhere near the “circuitry” of my cells. In these metaphors we see the same old category error. Electrical circuits and computer code belong to the domain of organised simplicity. Biology belongs to the domain of organised complexity.

Let me give an alternative metaphor which I think better captures what is going on with “cures” for diseases.

The body is a system and the immune system is a sub-system. Both systems interact with the larger systems that are the “real world”. The domain of study most relevant is ecology, which investigates the relationship between livings beings and their environment.

When we treat somebody with a “cure”, we are bringing a new element into the ecosystem of the body. It is assumed that the ecosystem is out of equilibrium (in a state of disease). We hope that the new element will trigger a process that brings the ecosystem back into equilibrium. mRNA vaccines are a novel element we have now introduced into the ecosystem of individual human bodies as well as the population of human bodies. Unlike programming software or wiring an electrical circuit, such an introduction of a novel element can, in fact almost certainly will, have unforeseen effects.

Sounds like a good idea. What could go wrong? Well, it turns out cane toads will eat not just insects but pretty much anything (including snakes!). This fact, combined with a lack of any natural predator to keep the population in check, meant that cane toad numbers exploded and are an ongoing problem to this day in the tropical north of Australia.

Now it must be said that there were many other species introduced to Australia that didn’t backfire as spectacularly as rabbits and cane toads. Nevertheless, the lesson holds. The use of any new kind of medication is broadly equivalent to introducing a novel species to an ecosystem. The metaphor breaks down somewhat in that most medications will exit the “ecosystem” by natural excretory processes; although the mRNA concept was always more dangerous in this sense because the process by which it would exit the system was less obvious. Nobody predicted the cane toad population would explode in Australia and cause huge problems because such things are not predicable. 

This is the main difference between the domains of organised simplicity and organised complexity. The science of organised simplicity eg. classical physics, produces predictable results. That’s the whole point of it. Reductionist science always aims for an “if A, then B” formulation. That works fine in the domain of organised simplicity. It does not work in the domain of organised complexity. In the domain of organised complexity there is always the risk of a cane toad-like phenomenon. In relation to medication, we mitigate that risk by testing extensively before releasing the medication “into the wild”. Well, we used to. Now we rush medication through testing and next thing you know it’s curing cancer. Even Jesus would be like “dude, that’s totally a miracle.”

Immunology and medicine are not like flying to the moon or writing computer code or wiring up electrical circuitry. They are qualitatively different disciplines. But the people running our society do not understand this. Until we acknowledge this fact, we are going to keep repeating the same errors of the last two and a half years. And that’s exactly what we are doing and will continue to do because of the Law of the Conservation of Laws.

If science progresses on funeral at a time, then at the generational level it progresses as the generations pass. The generation running society at the moment will continue making the same errors. As the consequences of those errors mount, they will continue to try and use their political power to silence dissenting voices. But eventually all that will pass. It will be the upcoming generations who are not blind to the abject failures of their leaders who will finally start asking the right questions and finding the right answers. Well, it better be, or we’re in real trouble.

Cogito ergo sum is undoubtedly one of the most well-known phrases from philosophy. Just like other popular memes such as e=mc², the catchy phrasing hides a wealth of complexity. The “I think” part is problematic enough. What is this “I”? And what does “think” mean? English grammar implies that the “I” is causing the thinking to occur and yet that’s clearly not always true. In fact, the opposite might be far more common. What if thinking happens to us? Anybody who’s tried meditation exercises knows that experience and if you’re lying awake at night unable to sleep cos there’s a million thoughts going through your head, you certainly don’t feel like the causative agent in the process.

In his meditations, Descartes was carrying out an example of what is sometimes called directed thinking. He intentionally set out to doubt everything and then realised that the one thing he could not doubt was that he was doubting. Other famous examples of directed thinking from history include Archimedes jumping out of his bathtub with the answer he was seeking, Newton or Kepler pouring over the mathematical patterns of the solar system, or a Socratic dialogue. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Space Program are classic examples from the field of engineering. These all fit into what I have been calling, following Gebser, the Mental Consciousness.

Does Rousseau’s experience count as “thinking”? It certainly wasn’t an example of directed thinking and yet there are religions and philosophies in the world (mostly eastern) that argue that this kind of experience gives access to the true nature of reality. They might say “I don’t think, therefore I am”, as if thinking somehow got in the way of perceiving what is real.

With the changes brought about by Rousseau and the romantic movement in general, the seemingly simple phrase “I think” had become rather complex by the beginning of the 20^th century.  Edmund Husserl founded the discipline of phenomenology which examined mental phenomena in great detail and found that “directed thinking” was just one among many types of cognitive activity. Meanwhile, Freud and Jung found that the “I” was made up of many parts. Jung further found that consciousness had both an unconscious and a collective aspect i.e. the collective unconscious, while the broader historical investigations of the 19^th century placed thinking/consciousness in a historical context. Descartes’ original certainty has become far less certain, but arguably also more interesting.

Recently, I’ve been pondering the issue of consciousness from the point of view of “energy”. The turn towards energy in physics had its precursors in the 18^th and 19^th century but reached a new peak with Einstein and Quantum Mechanics. But the focus on energy was not just limited to scientific investigations. Through the industrial revolution, the harnessing of energy changed society. Fast forward to today and we have a society that runs on energy, something we have come to take for granted but are going to have to re-learn the hard way in the years ahead.

As I’ve intimated in the last several posts, some of that newfound energy was turned turned into psychic energy – aka Magic – in the form of propaganda, advertising, marketing and public relations and it is here where it makes sense to model psychological phenomena in terms of energy. To do so, we can use a couple of concepts from Nietzsche.

In Latin, a stimulus is a stick or pointy object and so the modern meaning is a metaphorical extension from a physical cause i.e. getting poked with a pointy object, to anything that causes a mental or emotional response. Let’s take the everyday example of bullying. While bullying can and does take physical form, the majority of bullying occurs at the psychological level. The bully provides a stimulus that they hope will achieve a response from the victim: fear. The ability not to show the bully that you are scared, even if you are, is where the strength comes in. In the Nietzschean sense, that’s the ability not to respond to the stimulus. We see the exact same thing with internet trolling where the goal is simply to elicit a response of anger or outrage. As the saying goes, don’t feed the trolls. Don’t respond to the stimulus.

What we are talking about here is scepticism. It’s indicative of our culture that scepticism has a bad connotation similar to cynicism. But just like the original cynics were mostly concerned with freedom, the original sceptics were concerned with investigation, exploration and discovery. They saw the premature assertion of “truth” as a limiting act. Having worked in the science and technology fields my whole adult life, Nietzsche’s implication that scepticism requires strength seems to me to be true. It’s hard to be sceptical. It’s difficult to withhold judgement and keep an open mind. That’s true of individual psychology and it becomes even more true when social and political pressures enter the picture.

If we translate this into energy terms, we can put it this way: it takes more energy to be sceptical. It takes more energy to keep an open mind, to do one more test, to consider one more alternative hypothesis. To the extent that society punishes scepticism, it takes strength to withstand social pressures and hold onto your own mind.

Tying these threads together, we get a view of the human psyche as follows. It is a complex entity composed of parts. It is capable of multiple kinds of cognition of which directed thinking is only one. Its mental or psychic state is heavily influenced by external factors, mostly socio-cultural in nature. The “energy” that impacts the psyche can come from within in the form of desires, drives, instinctual reactions and will or it can come from without in the form of political hierarchy, peer pressure and cultural norms. Another way to think of the Nietzschean definition is that mental strength is the ability not to allow these energy flows, whether internal or external, to overwhelm the mind. In a more specific philosophic and scientific sense, it’s to be able to continue to think logically, rationally and sceptically despite pressure not to do so.

I’ve talked about this in relation to advertising and propaganda in the last few posts. In those cases, the stimuli in question is the images, sounds and words transmitted though newspaper, radio, television and now the internet. While all of these mediums can be enjoyable and educational, there is also no doubt that they now comprise the most extensive propaganda machine the world has ever seen.

But what is propaganda if not stimuli designed to elicit a psychic response? And that is the other main difference. Not only is there more stimuli, it is stimuli designed to achieve an outcome. It achieves that outcome by treating the individual as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. Such stimuli is de-humanising but it is this stimuli which has grown exponentially in the post war years. The de-humanising effects have been hidden by the fact that most of this has taken place via the feelgood mechanism of the consumer society. But now that consumer capitalism is starting to fail, we are catching a glimpse of the horror behind the curtain.

Modern capitalism has been increasingly employing such stimuli in order to sell products. Processed food might lure us in with the promise of convenience, but it is largely the sugar, salt and spice content that does the job of creating a regular customer often at the expense of the physical health of the individual and community (as the soaring rates of diabetes and other lifestyle diseases evidence). Computer games, pop music (check out the theory behind K-pop), internet marketing funnels and all kinds of other products are now designed with stimulus-response mechanisms in mind.

Now, it might be argued that what’s the harm in adding a little sugar and spice if it gets people to buy products that work. There’s at least two problems with that. Firstly, it’s a very small shift from hijacking people’s subconscious to get them to buy products that work to getting them to buy products that don’t work. In fact, this would make economic sense because you don’t have to waste all that money on research, development and testing (hello corona “vaccines”). You just churn out any old crap and let the marketing and advertising people sell it.

The second problem is that, even with the best intentions, the overall amount of stimuli will increase to the point where it overwhelms the psyche. If strength is the ability not to respond to a stimulus, we can also surmise that nobody is infinitely strong and through sheer volume of stimuli the psyche will get overwhelmed. This seems like a good description of modern society.

However, natural systems are not static. They adapt to stimuli. A good example of this can be found in recreational drug use. Recreational drugs change the chemistry of body and usually involve a large release of dopamine. The dopamine receptors in the brain are calibrated for natural amounts of dopamine. When the body starts producing unnaturally high amounts of dopamine due to a drug stimulus, those receptors recalibrate. They desensitise themselves as a protective measure. What that means for the drug user is that, over time, the same stimulus no longer has the same effect. Many users will increase the dosage to compensate and this all too frequently ends in overdose.

This seems to me to be a good analogy to modern society. The amount of stimuli the average person is exposed to has grown rapidly in the post war years and this has caused a subsequent desensitisation process to occur to protect the psyche. What this process feels like is meaninglessness. Nothing really seems to matter. Furthermore, the effect of any new stimulus is dulled by the already over-stimulated state of the system. More and more stimuli are then added to try and compensate in the same way the drug user increases the dosage.

The current state of western society to me can best be summed up by the adjective catatonic. In the aftermath of corona, arguably the greatest propagandistic stimulus in history, the psychic and political body of western society is completely moribund, zonked out on the floor like an opium addict, unable to respond to any stimulus at all. Coincidentally, the same is true in the economic sphere. Trillions of dollars are now pumped into the economy as a matter of course and all we get is inflation.

Science, philosophy and the Mental Consciousness in general have always been predicated on an absence of distracting stimuli. Kepler and Newton poured over their equations alone in their studies. Archimedes was (presumably) bathing alone when he had his eureka moment. Nietzsche lived alone in the Swiss alps and had his greatest thoughts while mountain walking. Einstein worked by day in the sensory deprivation tank of a patent office. All else being equal, we would expect an increase in stimulation at the societal level to lead to a reduced functioning of the Mental Consciousness and that does seem to be a fact of modern society.

If there’s a silver lining to be found, it may be this: as the amount of energy available starts to fall in the years ahead, that will mean less external stimuli to deal with. Is it too optimistic to hope that this will create conditions in which thinking can once again take place? It’s also true that longer-term adaptations can take place which open the possibility of increasing strength over time. Could that be a re-discovery of scepticism, withholding judgement for longer and integrating more? In short: the Integral Consciousness. Scepticism takes more time and within the current economic paradigm where time is money, it costs too much to be sceptical. If that economic paradigm disappears, maybe we’ll be able to afford to think again.

One of the primary divisions within the peak oil/doomer scene is the question of fast vs slow collapse. The former group expects a cascading series of crises that creates a positive feedback loop leading to the sudden end of modern civilisation. The underlying concept is the same used by climate change activists who argue that there will come a tipping point beyond which irreversible climate change will come too quickly for society to adapt.

The slow collapse notion posits that natural systems have negative feedback loops and these will kick in and provide a counterbalance when things start to get hairy. This won’t stop the overall trend of decline. In the case of resource depletion, it won’t make more resources available. But it will prevent a quick seizing up of supply and allow time for society to adapt, thereby preventing a sudden collapse.

Until a couple of years ago, I would have counted myself in the slow collapse group. I assumed that, yes, we were pushing a bunch of dumb policies that weren’t going to work. Yes, these were mostly a combination of ambitious politicians promising what they couldn’t deliver, idealistic voters wanting what they couldn’t get and greedy capitalists profiting off that combination. Yes, it was all pie-in-the-sky fantasies that were only ever possible due to the enormous economic surplus enjoyed by modern western societies. But when the proverbial hit the fan, the people who actually understood how things worked in the “real world” would come to the fore. We would stop listening to shysters and charlatans and fall back to the things that worked.

In this sense, the Ukraine War is not unrelated to corona. Some pro-Russian commentators have pointed out that the behaviour of the West in relation to Russia since the fall of the USSR has been stunningly dumb. Russia could easily have been integrated into the European economy. It’s what everybody expected to happen. It’s what most people in Russia wanted at the time. And it happened anyway, despite efforts to prevent it. That’s why there’s an energy crisis facing Europe at the moment.

If Russia had been properly integrated into Europe, the West could have completely encircled China and prevented its economic rise from translating into political and military might. With just a modicum of common sense, pragmatism and realpolitik, the unchallenged hegemony of the West that began in the 1990s could have been kept going indefinitely, at least until other problems intervened. But we had other ideas; brand new ideas with no basis in history or reality.

Up until corona, it was possible to argue that such stupidities were allowed to happen because the damage was done in far flung countries where the western voting public didn’t notice or care. But with corona and the Ukraine War, the damage is now being done at home and is going to be felt at home for a long time to come. It is no longer possible to avoid the consequences of the mindset that led to these decisions. Will this fact prompt us to change course?

There are some signs of the Caesar phenomenon in the Trump and Brexit elections but no real evidence of a Second Religiosity yet. Church attendance continues to spiral downwards. However, it’s not hard to imagine that a couple of winters sitting in the cold and dark might incentivise people to seek meaning somewhere other than material progress in the years ahead.

All of this may happen. I’m certainly not going to say that Spengler is wrong as his theory makes a lot of sense and, in any case, time will prove it one way or another. But even if it does happen, it will do nothing more than get us off the fast collapse path and onto the slow collapse one. Caesarism and a Second Religiosity will not return us to the heyday of civilisation but merely to its decadent form which I described in the last post as the deficient Mental Consciousness. The West will still disappear but it will do so slowly and gradually like civilisations past.

If this sounds pessimistic, that is to be expected. Within the framework I have presented in the last few posts, Spengler’s theory fits within the Mythical Consciousness. The Mythical is all about cycles; life and death, night and day, the turning of the seasons, the progression through various life stages; in short, “nature”. Spengler quite explicitly chose a biological metaphor to guide his historical analysis and so these correspondences make perfect sense. Civilisations have a lifespan in the same way as people or animals do and when your time is up there’s nothing much you can do about it.

This kind of pessimism (some might call it realism) is a cornerstone of the Mythical Consciousness. We see a prime example of it in the Book of Job. Job is ruined by God in a completely unjust way. When he objects to this treatment, his interlocutors do not sympathise with him. They don’t even try to address his arguments about justice or morality. They simply point out that God is all powerful and that’s all there is to it. If God wants to destroy you, there’s nothing to be done. Stop whining and accept your fate like the rest of us. We see a similar pessimism at the end of the Iliad where the mortally wounded Hector bitterly tells Achilles that he too will soon die as had been prophesied. The fate of man was to die. The gods and the heavens were superior as they were immortal and eternal.

Against this background, we can start to see why Christian theology was so radical because it posited a God who manifested in human form. But God was eternal, timeless and perfect while humans were finite, mortal and sinful. The idea that a God would swap one for the other was simply absurd. It was like saying black was white and bad was good. Why would a God willingly submit himself to death? The further explanation that this was done to redeem man was equally outrageous. Although Yahweh takes a peculiar interest in man in the Old Testament, he shows no sign of empathy or compassion. On the contrary, his only goal at the end of the Book of Job is to win acquiescence and thereby re-establish the proper cosmic order where Gods are superior and men know their place.

This individuation corresponds to the transition from the Mythical Consciousness to the Mental Consciousness of which Christianity was a core element, at least in Europe. To the extent that this broke down the old Mythical distinction between God and man, it also provided a way to overcome the pessimism of the Mythical.

In our time, we are so used to attacks on Christianity that most people would not take this line of argument seriously. In fact, one of the forms of attack on Christianity has been precisely that it is outrageous and delusional. It’s overcoming of the Mythical with promises of eternal life were nothing more than empty platitudes meant to console the weak. We would all be better off returning to the mentality of the heroes who were able to face death square on.

As the influence of Christianity has continued to wane in the post war years, it seems that we have begun to embrace exactly this kind of ethic and this brings us back to the current predicament of the West. With the fall of the USSR, the West started behaving very much like the God of the Old Testament. Will to power. Might is right.

What they do care about is a source of much speculation. Some think they are trying to usher in a new world order or a great reset. A couple of posts ago, I posited that they were possessed by their own Magic. I still think that’s true. But maybe that is just a symptom. If so, what is the disease?

I see no meaningful difference between Karl Rove’s idea that we “create our own reality” and the notion that became popular in early 2020 that we could eliminate a respiratory virus. These are examples of megalomania pure and simple. And the results of that megalomania have been identical: total failure. The difference now is that while the damage caused by the neocons was mostly suffered by people somewhere else, the damage caused by corona and the Ukraine War is being felt right here at home. Our megalomania is now actively causing damage to ourselves. I say our megalomania because, although it’s clear that western elites suffer the worst from this malady, they also enjoy much support in the general culture.

What does all this mean? It seems almost certain now that western hegemony is finished and there is going to be an extended period dealing with the consequences of the last several decades of megalomaniacal madness. Of course, this is going to have material ramifications. But it will also have psychological and, dare I say it, spiritual consequences. In our materialist culture, we don’t take psychology or spirituality seriously. These are personal issues to be worked through with your shrink or priest. But what seems up for grabs now is not just some psychological symptom but an entire worldview. What comes after megalomania?

Perhaps Jung gave us the answer. The individuation process we may be about to undergo could be similar to the one described in Answer to Job. Of course, this time it won’t be God who is individuating but human beings. As Jung pointed out, humans tend to do anything to avoid psychological introspection and suffering. One of the most common ways to avoid introspection is to find something to blame outside ourselves. That is where Spengler re-enters the picture.

Viewed from this perspective, Caesarism and a Second Religiosity would both be examples of finding blame elsewhere. Caesarism implies a reversion to nationalism which would externalise personal pride onto the nation and then assign blame to other nations i.e. Putin or China or whoever. A Second Religiosity would externalise onto God. We might then expect to hear how all the bad things happening are punishment for our sins. Both of these would fulfil the psychological need to process the failures of the last few decades by blaming external factors.

What if that does not happen? What if we either can’t or won’t find anybody else to blame? This would make sense. Yahweh had nobody else to blame. He was an all-powerful God. The megalomania of our culture puts us in a similar position, at least psychologically. If we are all-powerful, if we create our own reality, then how can Putin or China be the cause of our problems? Like Yahweh, we must be the cause. Is it possible that it’s precisely the megalomania of the West that opens up the possibility for individuation to occur?

In some respects, corona represents an ideal possibility for that to happen. I’ve been fascinated to see that in just the last few weeks the powers that be have begun to float the idea that lockdowns were a mistake and maybe, just maybe, the vaccines were too. For reasons that I don’t really understand, perhaps raw political survival instinct, the politicians seem to be getting ready to throw the “experts” under the bus. Leaving aside why and how this might happen, what would it mean if it does?

The lockdowns and the vaccine had majority public approval. Many people were vociferously in favour of both and not just in an abstract, idealistic sense but in a real, emotional sense. A sizeable portion of the public really thought we were going to stop a respiratory virus. This wouldn’t be the usual business of somebody supporting a political party and then the party not delivering. This would be a real, tangible error made by individuals.

The fact is that the lockdowns and vaccine mandates were not enforceable by the authorities for logistical reasons. If enough people had refused to comply, they would never have happened. Therefore, they only happened because people assented to them. Nobody was forced at gunpoint to take the vaccine. Yes, there were consequences like potentially losing a job but history shows us that people have made far greater sacrifices than that when they truly believe in something. Thus, it was an individual decision to take the vaccine or acquiesce to the lockdowns.

It is these individual decisions and the individual psychological processes that led to them which may be, just maybe, about to get called into question in the West both because the political winds are starting to blow that way and also because the ramifications of the last several decades of dumb decisions are coming home to roost on a daily basis now. As an isolated incident, this might have been be able to be brushed off. But can it be brushed off when inflation is running rampant, the economy is tanking, the lights won’t turn on and the supermarket shelves are half empty? The West could and should have gone down the slow collapse route and all this would have taken place over decades or even centuries. Instead, we have brought it on ourselves in a condensed fashion where it cannot be ignored.

Spengler predicts people will deal with the cognitive dissonance by looking for external things to blame but there is good reason to think that we may not be able to find anybody to blame but ourselves. What Jung implies in Answer to Job is that this might be the time of the Holy Spirit. As the Holy Spirit is in everyone, this amount to a personal individuation process. Of course, this is a Christian interpretation that most people in the West would not take seriously anymore but it also seems to fit the psychological context.

Furthermore, just as the transition from the Old Testament to the New marked the emergence of the Mental Consciousness and the decline of the Mythical, this development may also signal the emergence of the Integral Consciousness. Even geopolitical developments point in that direction. If we do indeed see the end of Western hegemony and the emergence of a multi-polar world order, that is broadly in line with the Integral. And if that happens, it will have been the West which gave rise to it. Not the conscious mind of the West, but the unconscious mind.

Just as it was Yahweh’s unconscious which gave rise to Christianity, so it could be the western unconscious which gives rise to the Integral. Thus, the decisions of the last few decades, which look to the conscious mind (the Mental Consciousness) as rank stupidity, may be symbolic of something coming from the unconscious. It is precisely because of the bias of the Mental Consciousness against the unconscious that we are apt to see this in negative terms. The unconscious was for centuries associated with Satan by the Church.

It seems to me that one of the central points of the Integral Consciousness is to transcend this bias against the unconscious and perhaps even to transcend the whole conscious-unconscious dichotomy. Megalomania can be seen as the complete identification with the Ego-conscious mind. The belief that nothing else matters; that we create our own reality.

What if the unconscious is simply what is not currently elevated to focus. In that case, what is currently elevated to focus has no necessary superiority. It is not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but simply one perspective among many. The imperative then becomes to ensure that other perspectives are integrated too. To understand that is to overcome megalomania and also to begin to see the Integral.

In the last couple of posts I’ve talked a lot about the rise of the Magical and its contribution to the craziness afflicting the modern West. The nudge units, spin doctors, psy-ops and other shenanigans all fit into the category of applied Magic, as does the modern propaganda machine consisting of what’s left of the mainstream media plus the various attempts to influence public opinion through the manipulation of social media.

After writing last week’s post, it became clear to me that I needed a separate post to address what I think is the other primary contributor to the modern madness which we can call the deficient Mental Consciousness. The Mental Consciousness arose with the emergence of logic and dialectic in Ancient Greece, Christianity and especially the activities of the Church in Europe, the scientific method and the patriarchy. It is this Consciousness which is breaking down right before our eyes and thus it’s no coincidence that science, logic, law and gender issues are at the forefront of that breakdown.

Recall that calculus is all about little bits; increments of different degrees of smallness. The way my high school maths teacher explained it was by reference to the “minute”. The word minute comes from Latin minutus which means “small”. Minuta had already been in use in geometry to describe small degrees of a circle. It then got applied to time with the appearance of the now familiar circular clock face. The word “second” was originally secunda minuta which means the second order of smallness. Since then, we’ve added milliseconds which is derived from the Latin mille meaning “thousand”. The point is that these are all different degrees of smallness.

To return to beginner’s calculus, we start with the simple equation:

y = x²

Then we add the differential:

y + dy = (x +dx)²

When we expand this, we get :

y + dy = x² + 2x * dx + (dx)²

At this point the teacher informs us that we don’t need to worry about that (dx)² on the end because it is a second order smallness. It’s too small to matter. So, we can just cross it out. The same goes for equations like y = x⁵ where we get to leave out the second and third order differential. So, we solve some equations leaving out the smaller derivatives and eventually the teacher shows us that we can apply a short cut for solving such equations, which is nx^(n-1).

Now, as a high school maths students who’s already sick of solving equations, this is music to your ears. You eagerly embrace the short cut, whizz through your homework and go and play computer games or upload a video of yourself dancing to TikTok. But that shortcut is based on having excluded the higher order parts of the equation. Strictly speaking, all of the answers given by the shortcut are a little bit wrong. But your maths textbook doesn’t reflect that and your final grade for the subject doesn’t require you to know it. No doubt most students forget it instantly. But it always bugged me. When, some years later, I read Gerald Weinberg’s Introduction to General Systems Thinking, I realised that this trick of leaving things out was more fundamental than I had realised.

Excluding things that were too small to matter was how Newton arrived at his law of universal gravitation: F = G(Mm/r²). Firstly, Newton deliberately ignored all the other celestial bodies in the solar system and focused on just the seven planets. Next, he assumed that because the sun is so huge relative to the planets only the pairwise relation between each planet and the sun was relevant. This allowed him to rule out all other combinations and reduce the number of calculations required. In essence, he did the same thing that we see in the calculus, he simplified things down by excluding elements that were assumed to be too small to matter. Just like in calculus, the simplifications free up our time and cognitive resources to solve more difficult problems. It’s only in this way that we are able to calculate anything because when there are too many variables the number of calculations grows astronomically (see the Three Body Problem as an example of that).

This use of simplifications is the secret to what is now known as classical mechanics. Recently, I randomly stumbled across a thread on an online physics forum. Somebody posted a question in relation to a university level physics problem which went something like this: “Are we supposed to leave out this part of the equation?” There followed a long conversation where people tried to remember why that part was left out but ultimately nobody could remember the reason. The resolution of the thread was that it should be left out but nobody could remember why. So, we see that this business is simplifying and excluding things that don’t matter is still a core part of the way physics is done.

Simplifying things is not a problem but it becomes a problem when we forget that we have simplified. Newton and others at that time knew the simplifying assumptions he had made. But sometime between then and now this knowledge seems to have been lost and science became reified into the quasi-religion that we see nowadays. Models which are descriptions of the behaviour of objects have come to be seen as if they are the word of God himself; as if they are reality itself. But the map is not the territory.

One way to think about the territory is that it is the testing part of the process. There are simplifying assumptions built into the theoretical models. Then there is the testing of those models and this introduces further difficulties. Newton worked out his theory of gravitation in relation to the massive bodies of the planets of the solar system. Down here on Earth, the force of gravitation is much weaker and this makes testing a problem because the equipment we have lacks sensitivity. This means that the empirical evidence is not conclusive that the law of universal gravitation holds for objects smaller than a human body. There’s no evidence that it doesn’t. But we just don’t know.

Here we see the first element of the deficient Mental Consciousness. It’s the hubris of supposing that physics held the keys to the universe and that we would soon be able to calculate everything. The second element is related to the first and came to be known as physics envy. We took the methods of classical mechanics and began using them in other scientific domains including the life sciences. This led to an attempt to measure anything and everything, including things which could not and should not be measured. But the more damaging problem was related to the simplification trick.

In maths class, nobody’s life depends on us ignoring the second order differential. And in physics class, the other celestial bodies in the solar system are not going to get upset if we don’t include them in the law of universal gravitation. But if we are testing a new medication, let’s say a brand new type of vaccine, simplifying assumptions become a matter of life and death. If I told you the “safety calculation” was that the vaccine was 99.999% safe, that seems pretty good. A 0.001% fatality rate sounds pretty small. Is it “too small to matter”? Well, if we are going to give the medication just to people are who are on death’s door, it probably is too small to matter. But if we are going to give it to “everybody on Earth” including healthy people, then even a fatality rate of 0.001% mean tens of thousands of people will die. Who gets to decide that this is “too small to matter”? Who gets to the decide that any other injuries caused by the vaccine are too small to matter? Context matters and simplifying assumptions become questions of politics and morality.

This is a familiar pattern in science. A new theory comes on the scene, addresses some well entrenched problems that weren’t previously able to be solved and opens up new horizons. There’s a period of excitement and “progress”. Then the theory is pushed into new areas where it doesn’t work so well. It starts to accumulate “debt” and the beautiful simplicity of the original formulation gets lost as explanatory additions are tacked on to try and explain the parts of reality that just don’t seem to work. Eventually a new theory comes along and the process starts over.

One of the things it entailed was a new understanding of Earth vis a vis the heavens. When Newton compared the moon to an apple, he was implying that the same laws applied to both. But for millennia the heavens had been seen as more perfect than the Earth. This idea has strong religious and cosmological roots (e.g. The Fall) and also had a basis in theory as the movement of planets was seen to be more geometrically ideal than movement on Earth. The revolution Newton, Galileo and others brought was that the movement of the heavenly bodies and the movement of objects on Earth were subject to the same laws. The heavens were, at least in this respect, not more perfect than Earth, just different (frictionless).

These days we have divorced science from theology, cosmology and philosophy (another aspect of deficient Mental Consciousness). Thus nobody cares about these kinds of issue any more and they don’t get taught about them in school. As a result, few people can recognise that the Newtonian revolution looks incredibly similar to a pattern implied by the emergence of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. That is, there are technical and mathematical advances but those advances imply an entirely new world view. The change of worldview implied by relativity and quantum mechanics could be as revolutionary as the change that happened around the time of Newton. But this time it is not the Church that is working to prevent the emergence of the new worldview but the scientific establishment itself which is married to the materialist view of the universe. History has a sense of irony.

We can summarise the arrival of the deficient Mental Consciousness as follows.

Firstly, the success of classical mechanics went to people’s heads. We forgot about the simplifying assumptions and came to believe that physics was reality and not just a more or less approximate description of reality. Through the phenomenon of physics envy, the model of physics was used in other sciences where it did not belong. Applying simplifying assumptions to inanimate objects isn’t going to cause any problems. When you apply simplifying assumptions to domains involving living beings, especially human beings, you are treading into very dangerous territory not just from a technical but also from a moral point of view. It is no coincidence that early medical experiments and procedures were carried out on marginalised people i.e. those who were deemed “not to matter” (in the same way that people injured by or who refused to take the corona vaccine have been made to feel that they don’t matter).

On top of these problems there is the fact that science is now a career-path and most of the people who call themselves scientists earn their living from the system. It is said that science progresses one funeral at a time and this points to the fact that human beings really don’t like changing their mind, especially about deep elements of their worldview. But when you earn a living from the scientific establishment, you are even less likely to change your mind as this will likely hurt your career prospects, especially when the money that is paying your salary comes from sources that have a vested interest in certain outcomes.

Money, prestige and power now infest science. As we saw in the last two years, the number of scientists and “experts” willing to challenge the system that pays their salaries is small. Such dissenters were “too small to matter”. They were easily character assassinated by the propaganda machine, kicked off social media and relegated to the sidelines.

It all starts to look a hell of a lot like history repeating and the last two years have a lot in common with the psychology of The Inquisition. It is the view of Gebser and others that quantum mechanics and relativity are part of a larger change of worldview known as the Integral Consciousness. It is this which is trying to emerge but because it is such a threat to the existing worldview it is being fought tooth and nail. If this comparison is true, the change awaiting us could be as fundamental as the Earth no longer being the centre of the universe.

Viewed this way, it looks as if there is a quite specific dynamic in modern society that has developed as a way to prevent the Integral Consciousness (or something like it) from manifesting. On the one hand, we have postmodernism. There are some good ideas in postmodernism that fit with the broader concept of the Integral Consciousness but these are buried beneath a set of theories whose only reason for existing seems to be to sow division among the public (always a useful tool for politicians looking to divide and conquer).

Meanwhile, the idea of science based on the principles of classical mechanics as eternal and infallible truth about reality continues to hold sway in the general culture. This idea is, of course, promoted by all the practitioners of science who wish to partake of the prestige and power that comes with it and all the business interests who earn money from the system promote the idea through their propaganda efforts while beating into submission anybody who dares challenge the dogma. It’s not hard to see that such a system serves financial and political interests. But what is less obvious is that it also serves to uphold the worldview of western culture. That worldview is the deficient Mental Consciousness. It had metastasised so much that when it was challenged in early 2020 it had to respond with all the hubris and cluelessness that we have seen in the last two years.

The general culture no longer understands how science (classical mechanics) worked, has reified science into a religion, and is willfully blind to the fact that science no longer produces the goods. With corona, all of these elements came to the fore in the most spectacular fashion and the result has been a dismal, comprehensive failure of nearly all the institutions of society at the same time. All done in the name of “science”. Although many people are still in denial, you couldn’t hope for a more comprehensive defeat of the worldview of modern Western culture. For that reason, I think that corona represents a major turning point. In the next post, I’ll finally get round to explaining what I think that is.

In last week’s post, I presented an interpretation of Freudian psychology as the re-discovery of the Magical Consciousness in the West. Freud said all societies are based on the repression of instincts and drives. But if those instincts and drives represent primal energy, when that energy is channeled into the structures of society it becomes Magic because Magic is, by definition, the channeling of energy. When society channels Magic energy, it is called exoteric. When the individual channels energy, it is called esoteric.

For most of human history, the Magical energy available to any society was limited by the lack of “connectivity”. One way to view the Church in Europe (and prior to that in the Roman empire), was as a network which spanned across geographical and political boundaries and channelled Magic energy. That would explain why the Church used that network to actively suppress folk magic. It didn’t want the competition. The Church’s Magical power was allied with political power up until the 19th century. Some materialist cynics might say the Church was the propaganda arm of the State. To paraphrase Napoleon, religion was the only thing stopping the public from defenestrating the 1%.  

So, we end up at the start of the 20^th century with two Magico-political power bases in Labour and Capital. This dynamic began to dissolve after WW2. Partly this was because labour had won a number of concessions from capital that eased the pressure (energy) in the political sphere. But there were a couple of other important trends.

The consumer economy and its associated marketing Magic further reduced the Magical energetic base of the labour movement. The appearance of Blair, Clinton and Keating as leaders of the labour parties in the 90s was actually the official symbol that it was all over. Those supposedly labour leaders promptly implemented the neoliberal economic agenda. It took about 20 years, a very short time in historical terms, for the blowback to manifest as Trump and Brexit. But by then it was too late.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this was also the era of “spin” in politics. Not that politics had been a bastion of moral purity before that, but that there was a noticeable, shall we say, loosening of moral restrictions at this time. But spin is just the use of the same applied Magic that had already been shown to work in the consumer economy in the realm of politics. Some have called this the “post-truth” era of politics. But in our terminology, it’s the Magical era. Combined with the already high levels of Magic practiced in the market economy, this extra dose of Magic into the public discourse seems to have come mostly at the expense of rational discussion. Then came the next development really changed the equation: the internet.

In some ways, the internet follows the other development in the post war era that we can analyse using the Magical lens; namely, the rise of pop culture; aka sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. This was a bottom-up, grassroots Magical movement that allowed four working class lads from Liverpool to become the Beatles and a talented but disorganised dropout from America to become Jimi Hendrix. Although not many people would have thought about it this way, the movement was predicated on the same kind of esoteric spirituality that had become popular in the 19^th century. It was a kind of personal magic. As Frank Zappa noted, the record company capitalists had no idea what was going on but they were happy to let it happen as it earned them small fortunes. They owned the infrastructure. The energy, the Magic, came from the people on the scene. This same pattern would later be reproduced on the internet especially in rise of social media.

From a Magical point of view, what happened was the dissipation of energy. The old record label system channeled the energy coming up from the grassroots music scene. When that system fell apart, the energy was dispersed and the power disappeared. The same thing happened to any other domain that was predicated on the exchange of information. The one that has had perhaps the most profound effect on the public discourse was the disappearance of the news media as the (genuine) fourth estate. Again, this was due to a collapsing business model caused by the loss of monopoly on supply but, in magical terms, we think of it as a dispersal of energy.

Beginning in earnest in the early 90s, the bottom-up movement that had manifested as post war pop culture was channelled into the internet. Steve Jobs is the best representative of that development because the early internet and computer practitioners were tied up quite closely with other esoteric, bottom up movements that were taking place. Jobs was hanging around with the hippies in northern California talking about systems thinking and open source software.

He went on to develop the iPhone and become a squillionaire. Did he sell out? Did he open the door to a tidal wave of narcissism? Maybe. But is Jobs really to blame? You can do all kinds of things with your iPhone. You can use it to watch porn or post videos of yourself dancing half naked on TikTok, or you can use it to dictate the next War and Peace. The fact that most people use it for the former and not the latter is not really Jobs’ fault. One thing the internet and iPhone did achieve was to network together billions of people around the world and that has had massive Magical ramifications.

With the Magical collapse of labour that became official in the early 90s, the political situation in all western countries was that there was no longer a single difference between the two major parties. Most countries became essentially one party states. Meanwhile, the public was no longer divided but had become a single mass of consumers. The Magical techniques that had worked so well in selling products now became ubiquitous in the political sphere. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, what all this amounted to was an enormous amount of power (Magical energy) suddenly concentrated in the hands of the western “elites”. To say that the power went to their heads is an understatement.

A key point to bear in mind is that the elites have been practising a form of Magic that had been accidentally discovered through Freudian psychology. But they don’t call it Magic. They call is marketing or public relations or spin or nudge units or whatever. The typical conspiracy theorist explanation is that they are all psychopaths who are using manipulative tactics to confuse and deceive the public. No doubt some of them are psychopaths. But if we think about this in Magical terms and we assume none of them know what they are doing when it comes to Magic, then another possibility opens up: they are possessed by their own Magic.

The robotic hypnosis of a Justin Trudeau with his ever-perfect, so serious, speech intonation or a Jacinda Ardern with her automatic “smile” or here in Victoria with our very own political terminator, Dictator Dan Andrews, betray all the hallmarks of Magical possession. Modern politics has become based almost entirely on Magic to the exclusion of reason and logic. Why else would politicians continually back projects that have no chance of working (like stopping a respiratory virus with an experimental vaccine). This would make them not just psychopaths, but imbeciles too.

[Edit: since writing this I’ve realised I need to distinguish between two definitions of “psychopath”. The one I used in the above paragraph is the standard definition in our culture: the calculating but morally reprehensible person who feels no empathy. The second definition is the one I am implying in this article in general: a person overtaken by magic and therefore not operating either at the level of soul (psyche+pathology) or reason (Mental Consciousness). I probably should have called this post “Redefining Psychopathy” as that would fit with the redefinition of psychology].

Politics is now nothing more than a power game and Magic is power. But when you practice politics as nothing more than a power game, when you are willing to say anything, absolutely anything, to hold onto power, you must give up any last vestige of the Mental Consciousness, which is to say any last grasp you might have on reason, logic and law. That seems to me to be a pretty good description of where the leaders of most western nations are right now.

Thus, we have one form of Magic which is the top-down Magic of the elites channelled mostly through the mainstream media which is now owned by the state, the corporations and the billionaires, the only entities in society who still pay for its services. The other primary form of Magic rests with the public via the internet. This is the personal, esoteric Magic that began in earnest with post war pop culture. The way in which this energy is channelled is the same as the old recording industry model. The capitalists own just the infrastructure i.e. the social media platforms, the search engines and the server farms. The energy comes from the ground up. This energy is mostly dissipated in narcissism but the networking effects of the internet allow for new, uncoordinated, decentralised blow ups.

These blows up look a lot like the kind of positive feedback loops we saw in the boom-bust cycles of 19th century capitalism. From the point of view of Mental Consciousness, they look crazy and irrational and that’s because cause and effect goes out the window. Nobody could have predicted that The Beatles would become The Beatles or that James Marshall would become Jimi Hendrix or that Apple Computers would become the biggest company in the world. Similarly, nobody could have predicted that Trump would become President or that a supposedly new cold virus discovered in China would lead to the entire global economy being turned on its head.

None of these can be analysed logically, rationally and causally. But the Magical doesn’t care about logic and reason. It just cares about energy and how it is channeled. The internet is the new medium through which that channeling occurs. Trump could never have won without the internet and corona could never have occurred without the internet. It took network effects, the random conglomeration of individual energy into a giant snowball of energy channeled through the internet, for these things to happen.

In the Trump presidency, we saw the bottom-up magical forces of the internet defeat the top-down magical forces of the elites and this is why the elites proceeded to have a total freak out and be reduced to blubbering incoherency. Corona also had all the features of a bottom-up Magical event again driven through the internet where daily case counts and videos of people supposedly collapsing on the street in China or whatever else. It’s not hard to see that Trump’s opponents saw what could be done with the situation early on and started pouring petrol of the fire. The role of the Church once was, theoretically, to be the fire brigade to try and control such magical energetic outbursts. But there is nobody to do that nowadays.

Where will things go from here? Is the west going to devolve completely into the Magical Consciousness? Perhaps. The problem is that you can’t run an advanced industrial economy that way. You need at least a modicum of Mental Consciousness for that to work. But the advanced industrial economy underpins modern society, including the internet. If it goes away, so does the Magic. We’ll discuss that more in the next post.