Category: Ideas

As it happens, I’ve seen the zombification process several times in my work career. Let me tell the story of one of the more memorable examples and how it’s related to a lack of leadership.  

I’ll avoid names to protect the guilty, but let’s just say this was one of Australia’s largest companies. Like most corporations here, it has a quasi-monopoly on the market, which means it doesn’t have to really care what customers think. That’s an important caveat because the major political parties in western nations also have a monopoly on “the market.” Sure, they might lose an election, but they still get to sit on the opposition benches and earn a pay cheque.

This creates an environment where there is no real pressure to respond to the real world, and so the institutions gradually slide into senility. It’s not a coincidence that our elites these days behave as if they have dementia, lashing out at the public the way a dementia patient acts towards family members and carers.

Anyway, to return to the story, I’d heard rumours about how the IT department of this corporation was not a good place to work, so I was sceptical about taking the job. However, the people who interviewed me told me they were trying to reshape the way they operated and that my experience was a good fit. In addition, it was a six-month contract role, and the money was very good. So, I decided to give it a go. I was hired and placed on a new project that was just about to start.

It took me about three weeks to realise that the project was a total sham. Most of that time was me being in denial about what I was learning. I kept telling myself I must be missing something. The actual deliverables for the project were trivial, especially considering that a team of thirty people was supposed to build it. That would have been bad enough. But the truly incredible part was that most of the software had already been written in a past project. This project was about completing that work.

To take an analogy, imagine you’re a builder and you get hired to build a house. You rock up to the building site on day one to find that the house is already mostly built, there’s only some trivial bits and pieces to finish it off. Now imagine that there’s a team of thirty builders on site who are all doing something. What they are doing is mostly turning up to meetings and talking. In between meetings, they do some odd jobs that make it look like they are doing work.

Now, this could never really happen on a small construction site since any idiot can tell if a house is already built. But on a software project where everything is intangible, it’s much less obvious. Anybody with basic coding skills can figure it out, but software projects often have a lot of people without coding skills (including the coders!), and, most importantly, management very often does not have coding skills.

This last fact is the crucial one because it links us back to modern politics. California governor, Gavin Newsom, has been in the news this week for obvious reasons. There was a particularly revealing interview where he was standing on the street with a house burning down behind him and the reporter asked why the fire hydrants had no water. Newsom tried to avoid the blame saying it was the fault of the local authorities.

Now, if that’s true and Newsom is not responsible for the problem, why doesn’t he find the person who is responsible and make them explain themselves to the public? But that wouldn’t seem fair because fire hydrants were only one part of the problem. The fire was also caused by the state authorities who drained water reservoirs, the mayor who cut fire department funding, the environmentalist lunatics who stop forest management authorities from preventing the build-up of fuel on the forest floor, and a number of other factors.

The fact that all that is true only reveals why Newsom’s attempt to avoid responsibility is disingenuous. It’s the job of a leader to oversee all those independent developments and to realise that this combination of factors is going to lead to disaster. Otherwise, what is the point of having a leader in the first place? Gavin Newsom doesn’t get to pretend he’s a leader when things are going well and then not be one when disaster strikes. But, of course, he’s not alone. All our so-called leaders do this these days.

The same dynamic holds in a corporation. A software project has numerous different groups of experts working on it. The job of a leader is to make sure they are working together properly to produce an outcome. It is also the job of the leader to ensure the outcome is meaningful in the first place. But corporations rarely have leaders. They have managers.

Thus, the software project I was working on had nobody monitoring from above. This is a very common thing in large corporations. Management is always somewhere else. Just like politicians, they show up occasionally to make speeches.

As it turned out, there was a particularly memorable speech by a manager on the project I was working on. Just at the time when I had realised the whole project was complete bullshit, we had the official kickoff meeting. Some high-level manager showed up to give the introductory pep talk during which he uttered a line I’ll never forget: “We can move the economy with this project.”

This is such a beautifully crafted piece of bullshit you almost have to admire it. It is simultaneously meaningless while also sounding grandiose. It’s a classic thought-stopper. Of course, it was completely at odds with the reality on the ground. The “economy” is about the sale of goods and services. Our project was not going to produce any good or service. Again, I have to reassure readers that I am not exaggerating for effect here. This project was not going to deliver any good or service. There was no there there.

But that didn’t stop the appearance of a project from taking place. After our kickoff meeting, we got to “work.” In most IT teams these days, there are two common practices. One is to have a daily “standup” meeting in the morning where you say what you are working on. The other is to show that work is written on a small card that is placed on a board that tracks progress. This system exists in order to make clear who is working on what.

Now, I have said that this project was not going to produce a good or service. But there was something that very much looked like one as long as you didn’t ask any silly questions like, “Why would anybody want this?” or “What actual value is being created here?” It was the illusion of a product. It turns out that corporate projects can function just as well with the illusion of a product as with the real thing.

Those familiar with the Bible story of the golden calf will recognise the group psychology that was on display. At the start of each workday, we gathered around and worshipped our illusion. As if to make up for the fact that the work was completely pointless, there seemed to be enormous amounts of it. Our work board was filled with cards, and the standup meeting took more than 30 minutes to complete. Everybody was apparently very busy doing things. What they were doing and why they were doing it were never discussed. To ask such a simple question as “Why do we need that?” could have brought the whole house of cards crashing down.

Most of the work of leading is to remind people about the meaning and values that bind them together. If you’re a political leader, you have to reinforce the values of the nation. If you’re leading an IT project in a corporation, you have to reinforce the value of the product being created. Meaningless phrases like “We can move the economy,” are the opposite of leadership.

When viewed this way, we can see that there is a complete leadership vacuum across the entire West right now, which is why the zombies are out in force. Consider these unrelated news stories from just the last week:-

• Newsom avoided responsibility for the Los Angeles fires (Australian readers will remember when our then PM, Scott Morrison, pulled the exact same trick five years ago – “I don’t hold a hose, mate”).
• Mark Zuckerberg admitted that he censored Facebook posts about covid because the government told him to. He’s trying to weasel out of responsibility now that it is politically safe to do so, proof that he completely failed to lead when it mattered.
• There was talk of Biden giving a preemptive pardon to Fauci, thereby ensuring that he doesn’t have to even face the possibility of taking responsibility for his actions during covid
• Keir Starmer refused to hold an enquiry into the rape gangs, ensuring that he doesn’t have to even face the possibility of taking responsibility

This is, of course, the modus operandi of all our so-called elites these days. We don’t have leaders; we have managers. And so we end up worshipping golden calves, quite literally, since the only thing we stand for now is gold (money). The message couldn’t really be clearer at this point: either we find ourselves some leaders, or we’ll end up like Los Angeles.

Some readers might have been following the online furore over the British rape gang story in the last several days. Like many, it was an episode I had vaguely heard about but didn’t know the details. So, I was as shocked as anybody to read some of the paragraphs from the official report that have been circulating. The crimes themselves are heinous enough, but what’s even harder to swallow is the fact that multiple British authorities in multiple different locations systematically covered it all up. This was not a one-off bit of corruption; it was nation-wide.

The systematic corruption part of it reminded me strongly of corona. Obviously, all western nations went insane at that time, but the thing that I remember about Britain was that a number of high-profile establishment figures got caught breaking their own covid rules. The most ludicrous one was Neil Ferguson, whose bullshit models had been used to justify the lockdowns. He got caught visiting the home of his mistress, a married woman no less.

The correlation between the rape gangs and corona was strengthened in my mind, however, by the fact that a number of well-known public figures have come out defending the actions of the authorities in covering-up the rapes. Their justification? The story needed to be kept quiet because it could inflame racial tensions. Suddenly, it occurred to me that both the rape gangs and covid followed a deeper pattern. This is not a bug but a feature of the way we are governed.

Let’s start with the less controversial question of vaccines, of which covid became one example since the vaccines were supposed to save us.

Imagine you’re an important person in the establishment. You might be a government minister or high-ranking bureaucrat. News comes to you of deaths or severe injury resulting from people after taking a vaccine. You look into the numbers and realise it’s happening to only a small percentage of people, but the numbers are still quite high because everybody gets vaccines. Let’s just pretend the number of injured is 10,000.

Within the utilitarian mindset that still predominates in our culture, you weigh up that 10,000 against the supposedly millions of lives saved by vaccines, and you conclude that the damage is worth it. But you can’t admit in public that 10,000 people were injured because that could scare people into not taking vaccines. Therefore, you ensure that the vaccine injury figures never make it into the news. This is not that hard to do because you can destroy any reporter who goes near the story by labelling them an “anti-vaxxer” who is risking the lives of millions by reducing confidence in vaccines.

In our society, the majority of people would be perfectly okay with this approach. The lie and the cover-up are necessary for the “greater good”. What’s more, the “greater good” has been conclusively shown by science. Case closed.

But the “greater good” was exactly the argument made by those seeking to justify the rape gang coverup. The lie and coverup were needed in this case in order to protect public order and defend multiculturalism.

Here is the big difference between the rape gang story and the vaccine one. Advocates for multiculturalism can argue that it brings benefits. But those benefits are not based in science, they are just a moral view of what kind of society is good. What’s more, unlike vaccines, nobody’s life is being saved by multiculturalism. The utilitarian “greater good” argument simply doesn’t work in this case, especially because thousands of girls were gang raped, and what possible benefit can outweigh that?

Setting aside the actual issues, however, we can see that the pattern is the same in both cases. It is, in fact, the same pattern that is followed in questions around climate change, renewable energy, and seemingly every other issue of politics these days.

The pattern is that the establishment, which includes the politicians, the compliant media, and even the justice system, all coordinate themselves based on the party line. The party line may be nominally justified by science as in the case of vaccines and climate change, or it may just be a straightforward political position as in the case of multiculturalism. What the establishment will do in every case is to defend the party line.

But defending the party line no longer means rigorously debating the issues in public. Instead, it means stifling any and all information that contradicts the party line. What the rape gang story proves, however, is that the establishment now simply tows the party line no matter what. Towing the party line has become an end in itself.

In the case of vaccines, even people like me who think the whole thing is BS can still see why a majority of the public would believe it and why the politicians would want to pander to them. That was also true during covid. Although even during covid, it seemed obvious to me that the thing dragged on well beyond the point at which it could have been wrapped up. It seemed to me that something far more malicious was going on.

The rape gang scandal proves that this is true. It simply doesn’t get much more malicious than covering up for the organised, systematic, and repeated gang rape of some of the most vulnerable members of society. The details of what happened are so bad that it’s genuinely hard to think of worse crimes. Nevertheless, the establishment did what it always does now: it towed the party line.

All of that is bad enough, but what we have seen the last few days is that there are public figures, people with reputations to uphold, who willingly justify the cover-up. Not only that, they came out calling anybody talking about the issue racists, in just the way that any sceptics were called anti-vaxxers and covid deniers during the corona debacle.

The fact that these people are willing to do that over systematic gang rape tells you that the system is fundamentally broken. Clearly, it is now run by people who are 100% ideologues, lacking even the most basic of human empathy. Their only mission in life is to protect their precious belief system, even if it means allowing and facilitating horrific crimes.

Which reminds me of the quip that was made during covid: if you want to know what it was like to live in Nazi Germany, now you know.

I once caught an interview with the inventor of the earthship concept, Michael Reynolds, where he talked about his method of learning by maximising the number of iterations you go through. This is not as easy as it sounds. Apart from the practical issues of trying to design iterations so that you can learn something from them, there seems to be a natural human inclination to think that working through things in our minds is the same as testing them in the real world.  

This natural tendency is probably exacerbated when the thing you are working on is an intellectual artefact. Still, intellectual artefacts count as iterations if done correctly. You produce the artefact, observe what worked and what didn’t work, and then incorporate that into the new iteration.

I’ve been iterating on my archetype framework for about a year and a half now, although I must admit I probably haven’t correctly followed Reynolds’ idea of maximising the number of iterations. The first iteration was an entire book, The Universal State of America. At that time, I was calling the model the archetypal calculus.

While writing that book, I had the idea of splitting it out into four separate, smaller books. In hindsight, I should have done it that way. Most of the problems I had writing the Universal State were how to make the ideas work together, and, in reality, I probably rushed the explanation of the main concepts as a result.

One of the reasons to keep iterations small is because most of the learning comes between iterations when you have the time and space to reflect on the work. While I was spending a year writing the Universal State, I never got round to asking what the model really was about. What really was an archetypal calculus?

So, it wasn’t until I’d finished writing the book that I had the time and space to ask that question, and I realised I still didn’t have a good answer. I decided to do another iteration. It would be a series of posts on Substack under a new name: the archetypal human.

The question arose, What was should be the theme of the Substack? Since I’d just been reading Northrop Frye, and I could see the correspondences between my model and his archetypal literary criticism, I decided to take that angle. The archetypal human would be a model for understanding stories (literature, history, film).

Thus iteration 2 was born. It would be a Substack focused on how to analyse stories using archetypes.

It’s only because I had decided to focus on stories that the subject of Wagner’s opera Parsifal came into consideration. I’m not a huge Wagner fan, but I’ve seen several of his operas. The main reason I decided to even look at Parsifal was because it is notoriously difficult to understand. Many people believe it has no story at all and needs to be understood symbolically (whatever that means). Roger Scruton once wrote a book giving his interpretation of the opera. I’ve never read the book, but the summary didn’t strike me as particularly insightful.

Given this background of Parsifal‘s inscrutability, I was quite excited to find that my archetypal human model worked a treat in deciphering the meaning of the opera. What I found is that the plot is actually a complete inversion of what I call the Orphan Story, the archetypal story that features an Orphan hero whose mission is to find their place in the world. As a result, I decided to include a discussion of Parsifal in my new substack series.

But here’s where things took a crucial twist. Ever since university, I’ve been interested in the philosopher, Nietzsche. I’ve read pretty much everything Nietzsche wrote, mostly more than once. I knew that Wagner had played a big role in Nietzsche’s life, but I’d never bothered to find out more about their relationship, and Nietzsche’s writings about Wagner had always been of little interest to me. Nevertheless, I did remember that Nietzsche had particularly hated Parsifal and that it had been central to the falling out between the two men.

Out of interest, I decided to revisit Nietzsche’s objections to Parsifal. Here was the first big revelation because I realised that Nietzsche had come to almost the same conclusion that I had. Although he wasn’t using any kind of archetypal analysis, Nietzsche diagnosed Parsifal as an inversion. He considered two possibilities. The first was that the opera was meant as a satire (comedic inversion). The second was that Wagner had become senile and decadent in his old age. Nietzsche ended up concluding that the latter explanation was correct, and all of his later writings refer to Wagner as a decadent.

But that explanation did not fit the facts. Wagner had become no more decadent in old age than he had been earlier in life. To the end, he was writing operas, trying to steal other men’s wives, being in debt up to his eyeballs, and doing all the Wagnerian things. I decided to dig into the problem a bit more. This led to the second big revelation.

I realised that Nietzsche and Wagner had themselves been in an Orphan Story. Wagner was the Elder to Nietzsche’s Orphan. The more I looked into it, the more I realised that it really was a beat-perfect Orphan Story that follows all the same themes you can find in fictional Orphan Stories such as Star Wars and The Matrix. But there was one big twist at the end, and that’s the twist that caused the falling out between Nietzsche and Wagner.

I realised I had hit pay dirt twice. Not only did the archetypal model account for Parsifal, a notoriously difficult opera to understand, it also accounted for the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship, which has been the subject of numerous books and theories. It was the latter of these that was more important. Only hardcore Wagnerians care about Parsifal these days. But Nietzsche is still one of the most important philosophers of our time. It turns out that his break with Wagner is a huge reason why, and that break is the result of the Elder-Orphan relationship between the two.

In terms of my archetypal model, this new breakthrough was even more important because it proved that the model has something to say about real people, and not just fictional ones. In the case of Nietzsche, I believe the model unlocks a new perspective on the philosopher’s life that nobody else has noticed. I’ve since reviewed all the major Nietzsche biographies and can’t find any evidence that others have understood the core meaning of the break with Wagner.

I realised that my focus on fictional stories was doing the archetypal model an injustice. It’s about real life. More specifically, it is a model of human nature and development that has a lot in common with the works of Maslow, Piaget, Freud, Sartre, Darwinism, and others.

With this new vision of what the model could be, I started to think of a new name for it. The word “archetypology” popped into my head. I decided to see whether anybody else had thought of that name.

Apart from a few random social media accounts that have taken the name, there was only one relevant search result I could find on the internet. It was from a meeting of something called the Eranos Foundation, which was a multidisciplinary group that met in Switzerland in the middle of the 20^th century and that included luminaries of the calibre of Erwin Schrödinger. The quote from a publication summarising one of the group’s meetings begins as follows:-

There is no such word as archetypology, nor is there any one discipline which could fittingly be so named. But we might invent the word to cover all those very various studies which, in very different ways, contribute to our understanding of what the analytical psychologists call archetypes…

That this name should have arisen at that time and place is not surprising. We have to remember that European scholars were taking important steps towards integral and holistic ways of thinking in the first half of the 20^th century. Jung’s well-known collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli is one of the better-known examples. Meanwhile, you had the work of Gebser, Toynbee, Spengler, van Gennep, Campbell, Smuts, and others all pointing in the same multi-disciplinary direction. All of it quickly disappeared from sight after WW2 as academia got taken over by Marxists, Foucaudians, and the like.

Since most of those writers are the ones that inspired my archetypal model in the first place, since the Eranos Foundation was dedicated to multi-disciplinary inquiry, and since nobody else seems to have done anything with the name, archetypology would seem to be perfect as the name for iteration 3 of the model.

So, that is what I am going to call it. Archetypology will be a model of human development which places the archetypes at the centre of analysis. It will be a unified model of the humanities, the study of what it is to be human.

It is this latter fact which should set it apart from the work of Ken Wilber, who is, as far as I know, the only major thinker in recent decades who has meaningfully added to the integral and holistic movement that began in the early 20^th century. But Wilber has focused mostly on questions around the development of collective consciousness. Archetypology, by contrast, places the human individual at the centre of analysis, and works outwards from there.

With this new name and direction, a number of book ideas come to mind. I’m thinking I will write them as a series of volumes under the same title. Here’s the initial list:-

Archetypology Volume 1: Introduction to the Archetypal Study of Human Nature
Archetypology Volume 2: The Initiation of Nietzsche
Archetypology Volume 3: An Archetypal Analysis of Shakespeare
Archetypology Volume 4: An Archetypal Analysis of The Brothers Karamazov
Archetypology Volume 5: An Archetypal Analysis of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Archetypology Volume 6: History and Myth
Archetypology Volume 7: The Age of the Orphan, an Archetypal Analysis of the Modern West

That is the current plan, and even if it turns out to be not quite right, at least it is an iterative approach that should maximise learning. It should also keep me busy in 2025!

In a post a few days ago, we used the archetypes defined by Eric Berne to analyse the role reversal that had occurred in the story of Lilly Phillips. While generic archetypes such as the Child, Parent, and Adult are valid at a more abstract level of analysis, there also exist culturally-specific archetypes that play an important role in more localised stories. That is what we are going to talk about in this post since Raygun’s story has taken a culturally-specific turn here in Australia in the last few weeks.

Thus, the popularity of Raygun for international audiences was a kind of Australian-themed visual humour that required no extra storyline to make it work.

Things were different here in Australia, of course. Raygun had become a celebrity and people wanted to know what her story was. A narrative built up around Raygun that took on a very culturally-specific form. To understand that story, we need three archetypes that are integral to Australian culture: Tall Poppy Syndrome, the Aussie Battler and the Larrikin.

For a variety of reasons, early Australian culture developed an adverse attitude towards the pretences of the imported British aristocracy. It’s not hard to see why. About 1/3 of the convicts transported to Australia in the early days were Irish or Scottish, who had more than a few bones to pick with their English overlords. Meanwhile, the English convicts were not exactly on good terms with their elites, who were, after all, banishing them to the other side of the world.

It’s not hard to imagine how a resentment towards the “upper class” evolved in early Australian society. It solidified into what is called Tall Poppy Syndrome, which is the desire to remind those who reach the upper echelons of society that they aren’t all that special.  

Related to the Tall Poppy Syndrome is the Australian identification with the average man. The early settlers here had an awfully hard time trying to make European agricultural practices work in poor Australian soils with all the vagaries of a climate that had nothing to do with northern Europe. The average person who strove hard against the odds came to be embodied in the Aussie Battler archetype. Both the Battler and the Tall Poppy would later be easily transplanted into the class struggle that arose between capitalist and worker in the industrial factories of the big cities.

Nowadays, with overt class animosity removed from public discourse, it is the sports field where the Aussie Battler archetype often manifests. Australians will enthusiastically support a player who is clearly never going to be the best but who works hard and tries with all their might.

Of course, that’s an almost exact description of Raygun’s performance at the Olympics. She was not good at breakdancing, but she gave 110%. Because she was performing an American cultural tradition that no Australian has any understanding of, Australians viewed her performance as the embodiment of the Aussie Battler archetype, and that’s exactly how commentators here began to frame the larger story around her.

The Larrikin is related to both the Tall Poppy Syndrome and the Battler in that its historical origins were tied up in bringing the elites down to size. Since the Olympics is all about being elite, it is a natural target for the Larrikin. That’s why some people thought that Raygun’s performance was deliberately designed to take the piss out of the Olympics. They created a story where she was cast in the role of the Larrikin archetype.

These were the two main threads of the story that grew up around Raygun here in Australia. She was part-Battler and part-Larrikin. Now, it has to be said that Raygun went out of her way not to encourage this story. After her Olympics performance, she deliberately stayed out of the spotlight. Perhaps she did that because she could see that the archetypes were not a good fit for who she is as a person.

Raygun’s real name is Rachael Gunn. She has a PhD in Cultural Studies and is a full-time academic at Macquarie University. Based on her social position alone, irrespective of her personal qualities, she is exactly the kind of person that the Larrikin would want to take the piss out of and that the Aussie Battler would resent.

Nevertheless, while the primary material of the story of Raygun was her whacky dance moves at the Olympics, the stories told about her worked and the archetypes of Battler and Larrikin were valid. That’s almost certainly how things would have remained, but recent events have thrown a spanner in the works.

Ironically, what forced the overturning of the official narrative was that somebody else wanted to tell a version of Raygun’s story. An enterprising comedian here in Australia decided to try and capitalise on the Raygun craze by creating, of all things, a musical about her. The inaugural performance was due to take place a couple of weeks ago at a comedy club in Sydney, with all proceeds apparently going to charity.

Given that this was just a local performance in a small venue, by itself this wouldn’t have changed the mainstream narrative. There would have been a performance or two, and then it would have all been over. The rest of Australia would have been completely oblivious. But here’s where the power of archetypes shows itself yet again.

Because Raygun had been cast into the role of Larrikin, many people had assumed that she had organised the comedy show herself. This makes perfect sense. Writing a musical about yourself is a very Larrikin thing to do.

In the real world, Rachael Gunn did not want people to think that she was associated with the show. Rather than simply dissociate herself from it with a public statement, she called in some lawyers to force the venue to cancel it.

Here is where the story takes an ironic twist. Raygun became famous by badly performing American-style dancing. Now Rachael Gunn went for the classic American move of calling in the lawyers. That might work in New York City, but it absolutely doesn’t fly in Australia.

The combination of the Aussie Battler, the Larrikin, and the Tall Poppy’s Syndrome gives Australian culture a large part of its distinctive quality. Americans love winners, and Americans expect and encourage their winners to partake in public displays of power and aggression. In Australia, our public figures are simply not allowed to take themselves too seriously. Australian public figures must be able to take a joke made at their expense. It’s part of the job description.

Raygun had inadvertently become a public figure due to her Olympics performance. Since, she had also been cast in the roles of Aussie Battler and Larrikin, any Australian would have expected that she should have no problem with a comedy show about her. Calling lawyers to shut the show down is the complete opposite of the behaviour expected of her. In one fell swoop, she had punctured the archetypes that had been assigned to her.

That would have been bad enough. But in just the last few days a new twist in the story has hit the news. It turns out that Raygun’s lawyers have demanded that the venue pay for her legal fees in the matter to the tune of $10,000. The venue is a small local comedy club. It’s not a huge corporation; it’s an owner-run business in a very tough industry. Incredibly, the owner of this comedy club fits exactly the two archetypes that had previously been assigned to Raygun: Battler and Larrikin.

Rachael Gunn has managed to flip the entire story that had built up around Raygun. She has become the Tall Poppy who is going out of her way to destroy the Battler and Larrikin. Accordingly, there has been a flurry of comment over the past few days denouncing her. She’s gone from being a quintessential Aussie hero to a quintessential villain.

All of which goes to show, stories and archetypes are not just fiction. They are very real.

Some readers will have seen the story swirling around the internet in the last week or so about the young woman named Lilly Phillips who had sex with a hundred men in one go. I normally wouldn’t bother to comment on such a story. After all, we live in the world where such debaucheries are an everyday affair. However, this story has taken an interesting twist, one that is actually worth commenting on. It’s worth commenting on from my personal point of view because it is unusually and clearly amenable to archetypal analysis.

The crucial fact in this case is that what has prompted the flurry of public discussion is not the original sex act. That apparently happened back in October. As far as I can tell, it got little to no attention. What did get attention was an interview with Phillips that was released on YouTube about a week ago. The part of the interview that was most poignant was when Phillips broke down crying.

It was the sight of a young woman in distress which triggered commentators to claim that it was actually men who were responsible for the situation. There was even apparently an op-ed in a newspaper claiming that the men involved should be jailed over the matter. This led to a flurry of counter-comment claiming that this was all typical of modern feminism, where women get to have the freedom to do what they like but get to blame men when it all goes wrong.

The Child represents our basic drives, desires, and dreams. The Parent represents authority in the broadest sense i.e. things that should be done because they are morally right. The Adult represents the workaday world of getting things done. It is concerned with outcomes and how to get to them most efficiently.

Berne’s key insight is that the transactions we go through in real life are structured around these roles. Where it gets particularly interesting, however, is when we switch between roles. We might begin our interaction as two Adults who are taking care of some business. Things can get awkward fast when one participant transitions to the Child role.

This happens fairly often in most places of work, where the expectation is that we are Adults, but where somebody suddenly slips into the Child role. Ricky Gervais built his entire TV series The Office on the premise of having a boss, who should be playing the role of Adult, or at least Parent, but instead is a Child.

Berne was concerned with interactions between individuals. However, we can easily abstract his model to public discourse in general. There are repeated patterns, or games, that public discourse falls into just as we fall into patterns with the people we interact with on a regular basis. The Lilly Phillips story fits exactly such a pattern, one that is very common in the modern West.

Using the Bernian analysis, the big question is this: Which role is Phillips playing? Is she a Child, an Adult, or a Parent?

Like many young women these days, Phillips makes money from the OnlyFans website. OnlyFans is a business venture that generates about $5 billion per year in revenue. Since this is all business, we could place Phillips in the role of Adult. She is a tech-savvy young woman making use of an opportunity to make money.

But, of course, there is more and more competition on OnlyFans these days, and so we can also guess that the sex-act was a way for Phillips to win the battle for attention. Remember that the Adult archetype is concerned with getting results. Since Phillips achieved her goal of winning attention, which will presumably translate into money, we can still claim that she is playing the Adult, and doing it smartly.

If Phillips was originally playing the role of Adult, it was the release of the YouTube interview a week ago that changed her role. The interview showed her human side, which really means it showed her in the role of Child. More importantly, because it showed her breaking down crying, she was a Child in need of protection.

Like clockwork, this triggered the Parent response from a number of commentators. What is the role of the Parent: to protect the Child. Who did Phillips need to be protected from? Well, it must be the other party to the sex act, the men.

It was this targeting of men which duly brought another set of commentators out of the woodwork to point out that Phillips’ needed to take responsibility for her actions. These commentators were denying the validity of casting Phillips into the role of Child. For them, she was and should be an Adult.

Suddenly, the story had changed and we see the moves in a game that everybody knows because it takes place in practically every family at one time or another. This is the game where the Child plays the Parents off against each other. The most common form of this is to run to Mother to avoid discipline from Father. That is what we see in the story of Phillips as it unfolded this week. Those who want to portray her as the Child are playing the role of Mother. Those who want her to take responsibility for her actions are playing the role of Father.

As if to emphasise this new reading, there was a new twist in the story just a few days ago when Phillips announced that she was going to do it all again, this time with even more men. At this point, we are definitely in exactly the kind of game that Berne analysed. Ostensibly, the roles in the game are Protective Mother, Tyrannical Father and Innocent Child. Innocent Child runs to Protective Mother who blames Tyrannical Father.

In actual fact, however, the real roles of the game are Devouring Mother, Impotent Father and Naughty Child. One of the primary properties of the Devouring Mother is that she engages in enabling behaviour. Enabling allows the Child to harm themselves so that the Mother can offer “protection” and “care”. It keeps the Child dependent on the Mother.  Implied in this game is that Father is either absent or impotent.

Once the Child has learned how to play the game, the steps become clear: Naughty Behaviour -> Protective Mother -> Blame Father -> Naughty Behaviour -> Protective Mother -> Blame Father -> Naughty Behaviour -> Protective Mother -> Blame Father -> Naughty Behaviour -> Protective Mother -> Blame Father. This game is very common in the public discourse of the modern West, and has become even more prevalent in recent decades.

Ultimately, it is the Child who suffers most from this game, and that is the overwhelmingly most likely outcome in the story of Phillips. However, we can also extrapolate from this individual case to the broader pattern of modern society.

Absent Father is really the Adult. He’s too busy keeping industrial capitalism running to have time left over for family. Since industrial capitalism runs on money, that’s his only concern. Sites like OnlyFans make money, and that’s enough for him.

Meanwhile, Devouring Mother likes money too, so she won’t stop the game from being played, especially because it lets her indulge in her main addiction: performative compassion.

With Absent Father and Devouring Mother as parents, is it any wonder that the collective Child of the modern West is in trouble?