Category: Ideas

Back when I was doing my linguistics degree there was an exchange between one of our lecturers and the students in the class that I still remember to this day. The lecturer asked the class a question which was answered correctly by the student but the lecturer told him it was the wrong answer. She was looking for a single word answer, the name of one of the concepts we had been learning. The student objected that he had explained the concept correctly and so his answer was not wrong. The lecturer informed him that part of what he was learning was a scholarly language and his inability to remember the right word made his answer incorrect.

Linguistics has a technical term for what the professor was referring to. It’s called a Speech Community. Being a student of linguistics is partly about entering the speech community of Linguistics which has its own vocabulary (which the student hadn’t learned properly), preferred syntax patterns, hierarchy of speakers etc. From a socio-linguistic point of view, the professor rebuking the student for language use was no different to a group of teenagers making fun of a friend for who doesn’t understand the meaning of some fashionable slang term. The context is very different but the mechanism the same.

Speech communities develop naturally because humans are social creatures. But speech communities come with a number of weaknesses that must be mitigated. The student in the above story was correct to state that it was more important to know the concept than to know the right word that denoted it. The opposite of this is to know the right word without understanding the concept. This happens all the time. It’s possible to learn the right words through mimicry and social cues alone. Formal speech communities such as educational, professional and technical institutions have a duty to guarantee a minimum level of competence in their members part of which means ensuring members can walk the walk as well as talk the talk. Our education system relies on written testing in the form of essays and exams which is arguably the worst way to deal with the issue in that these forms of testing are nothing more than regurgitation exercises that are easily gamed. A well-functioning speech community enforces rigorous standards to ensure its members understand the concepts and not just the words. A decadent speech community does not.

A related problem with speech communities is that they can stagnate. A community sets up an in-group and an out-group by definition. Like any other organism, there must be just the right amount of interfacing with the environment for the speech community to remain healthy. It must be able to accept new members so that it can bolster its stocks of energy and enthusiasm but the inflow cannot be too quick or too great otherwise the internal structures get overwhelmed. On the other hand, if there is no inflow at all, the speech community atrophies and loses contact with the outside world.

The great physicist, Richard Feynman, proposed two rules in relation to science that are also relevant for all speech communities. Firstly, he said science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. In other words, just because somebody is a member of a speech community and knows the right words to use does not mean they necessarily know what they are talking about. As a member of the general public, any given speech community is a black box to us. We cannot know without investigation whether it is decadent or not. Because nothing is pure in this world, we can assume that there is always some level of decadence involved. Therefore, we must bring a measure of scepticism to every interaction with a speech community and its members. We should trust but verify. Often this verification amounts to nothing more than asking questions so that we understand what is being said. In the public discourse, this asking of questions is outsourced to journalists whose role is to translate the position of a particular speech community into terms that can be understood by the general public.

The second point that Feynman made was directed to scientists specifically. He said that if you cannot explain your work in terms a twelve year old can understand, you do not understand it yourself. A member of a speech community must be able to translate the internal language into general language and common sense. The scientist must do this for themselves because otherwise their own language and thinking becomes so byzantine and obscure that even they don’t understand it any more. They must also do it to the extent that the general public needs to understand their work. This rule doesn’t necessarily apply to a private organisation that does not want to interface with the community at all. It does apply to other speech communities especially the ones that have any kind of power in public life. This is true in politics, in medicine, in science, in religion and any other domain.

If we join these two considerations together we get guidelines about the correct interface between the speech community and the general public. The general public must ask questions of the speech community to facilitate their own understanding. The members of the speech community must explain to the general community in terms the community can understand i.e. everyday language and common sense. That is what a healthy relationship looks like.

What happens when this does not happen? What happens when a speech community has power but is not expected to translate its internal language into language that the average person can understand? We need only look at the history of the church to find out. European peoples spent the best part of two millennia listening to the word of God in a language they didn’t understand. A large part of The Reformation and the subsequent upheaval was about making the Bible available in national languages. This process continued until finally even the Catholic Mass was conducted in the vernacular following the reforms of Vatican II in the middle of the 20^th century. As a counterweight to these increasingly liberal reforms, there were the various inquisitions which were also mostly about language use. Who could say what? Who had access to information? Who was allowed to challenge and question the speech community of the church? It turned out the Church didn’t want to explain itself and didn’t mind using some very un-Christian methods when challenged to do so.

The aims of science may be different from those of religion but science is still a speech community and therefore subject to the exact same dynamics as any other speech community. “Science” as an institution now holds arguably more power than the church ever did. But the interface with the institution of science is no longer healthy. One outcome of this is a growing distrust and resentment on the part of the general public. But the complete opposite attitude also emerges: reverence, awe, adulation and hero worship. This is the attitude of a person who has no desire ever to understand but simply to submit. We can see this dynamic very clearly in the climate change debate. On the one side are people who dismiss it entirely saying the institutions are corrupt and on the other are those who believe it entirely and without question as if it’s the word of God handed down on a stone tablet. Both of these positions are caused by a malfunctioning discourse.

The religious worship of science is all the more weird because science itself is based on the exact opposite predilection: curiosity, iconoclasm, rejection of appeals to authority. But this is another phenomenon we see throughout history. The Church for most of its history behaved in a way that had little to do with real Christian teaching. In any case, it doesn’t matter what the institution is or what it proclaims to believe. The problem is generic to all speech communities and all power structures.

Recently on an online forum I saw the following exchange:

Person 1: “If the government told Australians to stand in front of an oncoming bus, they would.”

Person 2: “If science said that standing in front of a bus would potentially save my life and the lives of others, I would.”

This kind of exchange is not unusual these days but this particular formation caught my eye because it’s absurd in a way that is almost identical to the moral problem posed by Soren Kierkegaard in his great work Fear and Trembling. In that book, Kierkegaard explores the issue of what happens if God gives you a command that goes against all reason, logic and morality such as what happened when God told Abraham to kill his son. Claiming that you would stand in front of a bus if “science” told you to is analogous to this.

Who or what is the “science” this person is talking about? The trust that he proclaims in “science” is the exact trust that Abraham had in the biblical story. It’s the trust to believe the “word of science” even though it goes against all your instincts and common sense. It is, as Kierkegaard knew, an absurd trust. Kierkegaard argued that this kind of trust (a leap of faith) is foundational to the religious teaching of Christianity. That may be true but it is absolutely not foundational to science and most people who proclaim to believe in science would ridicule the story of Abraham. Why would such an attitude of mindless reverence towards “science” start to prevail now?

At least part of the reason is because science as a speech community now finds itself in a very similar situation that the church once did. Science has a history of producing “miracles” but it has devolved into a closed speech community which no longer feels the need to explain itself to the public. Neither does a large section of the public expect that science should explain itself. The dynamic is almost identical to what a medieval peasant might have felt looking up to the ceiling of a great gothic cathedral while listening to mass in a language he doesn’t understand. Moreover, he believes he will never understand these things and just admires them, perhaps even feels awe towards them. This is the attitude of many people towards “science” now. Meanwhile, the language of science now resembles the word of God of the Old Testament. It is often arbitrary and even vengeful. It is not the voice of reason but of authority.

Why does a large section of the general public accept, even revel in, this state of affairs? I believe the decline in common sense is a big part of the picture. The medieval peasant might have sat in awe of a gothic cathedral but he still had to grow his own food and take care of his own survival. He still had to have common sense. He might have listened to the priest on arcane spiritual matters but if the priest started telling him how to grow his crops there would have been a problem.

The common sense of the peasant doesn’t exist anymore for the simple reason that there is no need for it in modern society. For the average person, the changing of the seasons is no longer a crucial element that needs to be understood for the growing of crops, it is an inconvenience to be ameliorated by air conditioners and heaters. Similarly, observations of nature once required to plant seeds at the correct time, protect crops from pests or to secure fertilisers for the best results are no longer required. All of this common sense of the peasant was grounded in day-to-day empiricism. The peasant used abstractions as a tool and if the abstractions didn’t work they were quickly cast aside for ones that did. If they were not, starvation would quickly ensue. By contrast, the average person now goes to school for twelve years where they learn nothing but abstractions. Often those abstractions go directly against common sense.

That the earth is round goes against our everyday common sense experience. As soon as we teach children to believe that, we are teaching them to trust something that goes against common sense. Of course, a proper education teaches the child how to reach the conclusion for themselves so they understand the concept and not just parrot the right words. This was another rule that Feynman proposed for science: you should always reproduce other people’s work. Our education system fails to do this. Because the student does not understand how to get to the conclusion for themselves, the words become abstract and meaningless; something to be trusted rather than proven.

The result is a person with no grounding either in common sense or with the methods of science. Such a person carries around a set of abstractions in their head that they have never tested against reality. That’s how you get people who claim they would step in front of a bus if “science” told them it was a good idea. It’s also how you get people who will take an experimental medication without asking the most basic questions about it because “science” told them to. You get a society where Kierkegaard’s absurd thought experiment is an everyday reality.

Of course, the “church of science” has also taken from the average person the area of life that used to be governed by common sense. “Science” grows the food now and tends the livestock and even cooks the meals. Science predicts the weather and even promises to be able to change it if only the lowly peasant will do what they are told.

It is not a coincidence that it took a group of truckers to finally draw a line in the sand against this dynamic. What they have is common sense. Common sense almost always gives the person the self assurance required to demand that science (and the politicians who claim to be following it) explain itself in terms the average person can understand. That is the correct way to mediate between the speech community of experts and the general public. It’s particularly telling that corona should have involved the subject of medicine because a doctor’s office used to be the ideal example of how this process should work. It is a one-on-one interaction where the doctor as expert translates the science directly for the individual patient according to his or her understanding of the world. A robust civil society with a professional class that translates for the average person has been a feature of western societies for a long time but it has been hollowed out and replaced by huge corporations and vested interests which provide the exact opposite of the one-on-one consultation. Like the decadent church of the past, they are too big to do the job properly.

The dysfunctional relationship between the public and “science” leads more and more members of the public to become cynical due to having their legitimate grievances ignored. Meanwhile, the true believers become hardened into a position of religious fundamentalism that is encouraged by the institutions of science who have a natural interest in preserving their reputation and power. There is no longer any attempt to explain the science in terms the public can understand. Instead, truths are handed down in stone tablets dutifully worshipped by the faithful.

In truth, the whole thing no longer has anything to do with science just as the Church at various times never had anything to do with Christianity. It is now a naked exercise in political power. We saw this with the Australian government throwing out Novak Djokovic for no reason or on the streets of Paris last weekend or with Trudeau’s declaration of a state of emergency or countless other incidents over the last two years. Just like the church once betrayed its principles to obtain power, so science now betrays its own principles in order to reign over a bewildered public grasping for a certainty which common sense should provide except it is now missing in action too.

We need a Reformation. Part of it will be a demand that science once again explains itself to the public. Part of it must be a return to common sense as a grounding against institutional power. Part of it must be an educational system that actually teaches proper science. Will it happen or will the Inquisitions continue as they have for the last two years?

In a recent post, I talked about how we have a meritocratic assumption about the dominance hierarchies in our societies in that we assume that the people at the top got there by merit. While this holds in some domains such as sports, it doesn’t generally hold in corporations for reasons described variously by the Peter Principle, the Dilbert Principle and the Gervais Principle.

We have a similar meritocratic idea about products in the marketplace; namely, the best product is the most successful. Alongside this is a story about how such products come to be. A classic example of that story is Apple computers. Jobs and Wozniak (mostly Wozniak)  developed a product called the Apple I. They received investment funding to get that product to market and then they used the money from the sales of that product to invest in an improved version, Apple II, and so on. Facebook, Google and Amazon all share a similar story where initial success in the marketplace is rewarded and the resources of that success are reinvested to get more rewards until next thing you know you’re some of the most valuable companies in the world.

This is the ideal story of product development. It’s the one everybody wants to be a part of just like every lawyer dreams of having the ideal case where their client is completely innocent and they must pull out all the stops to save them from the powerful forces that want to destroy them. However, for every ideal story there are a hundred “variations”. Jobs and Wozniak got investment money and used it to produce an actual product that was sold in market. Less scrupulous players might try to get access to that investment money without producing a product that goes to market, aka take the money and run. Incompetent players take the investment money and are simply unable to produce a product. This latter dynamic gave rise to the concept of Vaporware in the IT industry. Vaporware was a product that was always about to get built but never did. Self-driving cars would be a nice example of Vaporware. I remember it was about five years ago when everybody where I worked seemed convinced that self-driving cars were just around the corner. People were already discussing the supposed social and cultural changes that were about to be wrought by this wonderful technological breakthrough. Years later, not only are there no self-driving cars on the road but I haven’t heard anybody even talking about them anymore. That’s what happens with Vaporware. It is nothing more or less than the story that gets told about it.

A related concept to Vaporware is the solution-looking-for-a-problem. As the name suggests, this is a situation where you have some technology that does something but you haven’t yet figured out what that something is good for. Possibly the ultimate solution-looking-for-a-problem is the blockchain. The blockchain solves a theoretical problem known as the Byzantine Generals Problem. In that sense, it is a solution and it has been looking for a real world problem to solve for more than a decade. Countless words have been written in the media and countless pitches sold to investors and corporations trying to find a use for blockchain but, unless I missed the memo, the blockchain has not solved a single real world problem. The closest it has come is Bitcoin which arguably solves one part of the problem caused by central banks printing enormous sums of money since the GFC. Ironically, it is the same central bank money printing which has caused an explosion in the number of solutions-looking-for-problems as we will see shortly.

Let’s contrast the dynamic of the solution-looking-for-a-problem against the ideal story of product development using Apple computers as the example. The original Apple I was a kit computer. It did not have a keyboard, monitor or mouse. You had to buy those yourself. As a kit computer, the market for Apple I was limited to enthusiasts known as “early adopters” in marketing jargon. Although, it sold well enough to keep Apple in business, the Apple I would not have looked successful to an outside observer early on. In fact, it was well behind Commodore and other competitors in the market. Thus, there was nothing about Apple at that time that would have allowed anybody to predict that it would become one of the most valuable companies of all time. That’s why co-founder Ronald Wayne sold his share of the company to Jobs and Wozniak in 1976 in what is, in hindsight, one of the worst decisions ever made from a financial point of view. However, as Wayne has pointed out, he made the best decision at the time on the information available to him. Most of us would have made the same decision. It was simply impossible to predict what Apple would become.

Apple Computers didn’t look like much in the early days, but at least it had a product in market. By contrast, solutions-looking-for-problems are usually not products themselves. Rather, they are ideas and always ideas that are going to “change the world”. Sometimes, as in the case of blockchain, there is an underlying technology that can be used to build things like Bitcoin. Other times, as with self-driving cars, the underlying technological problems haven’t even been solved yet. The shared element in both cases is that the story being told about the technology dwarfs the real world results that have been achieved. In many cases, you have whole companies who don’t even have a product in market. They are funded not by revenue from sales but by investment money and this is where central bank money printing enters the picture because it drastically increases the amount of money available for speculative investment.

In the classic story of product development, investment capital might be required early on but it is always there to fund the sale of a product in market. It gets the ball rolling. Assuming investment money to be relatively scarce, investors will prefer a company that at least has enough competence to develop a product over one that does not. Any idiot can come up with an idea but it takes at least a modicum of know-how to turn the idea into a product. What happens when you massively increase the amount of investment money in the ecosystem by having central banks print enormous amounts of cash? One of the things that happens is that investors become far less picky and will happily fund anything. Another is that investors learn to make their money not by funding products in market but through stock market shenanigans involving IPOs. On the other side of the equation, ambitious people who want to get their hands on money turn away from the consumer market and focus on the investment market as an end in itself. Rather than compete in the consumer marketplace, they start competing in the investment marketplace. Because investors cash out based on the stock price, that becomes the marker of success not sales of a product. And because the stock price is more determined by central bank money printing than sales of products, the whole thing becomes a closed loop divorced from the real world.

If you are an “entrepreneur” competing for investment money, what you are selling is not a product but a story. There are all kinds of other players in the investment ecosystem who also have a vested interest in that story. Thus, the hype around blockchain was fuelled not just by “entrepreneurs” trying to access investment money but also IT firms looking to sell a “solution” to a client. In between are all the marketers and hype merchants who are paid to whip the whole thing into a frenzy. From the investor’s point of view, they cash out not when a product sells in the consumer market, but when a stock price is inflated so they also benefit from the hype machine which they hope will lure in suckers and drive up the stock price. Thus, investors are more likely to invest in the “product” that has hype behind it than one that does not. Over time, the whole investment ecosystem comes to run on stories and not reality and this is where the solution-looking-for-a-problem comes into the picture. It is just a story. It could work in theory but nobody knows, or cares, whether it works in reality. As long as the investment money keeps flowing, everybody’s happy.

As the volume of investment money grows, the story being told needs to grow too. It would be hard to justify an investment of $1bn for the development of a new type of screwdriver or coffee cup, for example. But $1bn for a technology that’s going to “change the world” can be justified. As the investment market grows and the hype grows, it attracts more ambitious people. A young Steve Jobs in 2022 wouldn’t bother with whatever the modern equivalent of a hobby computer kit is, he would get involved with blockchain, or AI, or machine learning, or whatever is the order of the day. The poster child of this modern dynamic is not Steve Jobs and Apple but Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. The whole system is a fraud, of course. Enormous amounts of money go into creating very few products and the ones that do get created are mostly as worthless as a Theranos blood test.

Like Theranos, companies can trade on this dynamic for many, many years and thus it’s quite common these days to see companies that have been “in business” for years and even decades even though they have never released a single product to market. One such company was Moderna and, of course, the mRNA gene therapy technology is a prime example of a solution-looking-for-a-problem. Moderna struck it lucky in 2020 and was able to release a product to market for the first time in its ten year history albeit under “emergency use authorisation”. Whitney Webb has written an incredible long-read history of Moderna for those who are interested but the main themes sketched here are all present. For most of its history, the major threats to Moderna were from the media because the “success” of such companies relies solely on the story. If the story starts to go wrong, the investment money stops flowing and it’s game over. Thus, top management spends most of their time worrying about the “story” and the reputation of the company. They spend large sums ensuring the media stays on side. This leads to the subsequent corruption of the media not to mention the regulatory agencies and pretty much anybody else in the game who can be bought out. The more investment money that is available due to central bank money printing, the more everybody can be bought out and the more corrupt the system becomes.

The use of mRNA gene therapies as vaccines is an example of a solution-looking-for-a-problem. So, for that matter, is the PCR test. In both cases you have a technology developed for a completely different purpose and later adapted to serve a different purpose. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Indeed, the history of the PCR is that it got used as a test for viral disease not because it’s perfect but because it has certain benefits over the older methods. Like any technology, as long as you know the pros and cons of it you can derive some use out of it. The pros and cons of the PCR test had been debated in the microbiological field for many years and people working in that field would know them. With corona, however, we jumped into the mass use of the PCR test and I doubt one in a thousand people, including the leaders of our countries, has any idea how they work let alone the potential problems involved with them. It’s even worse for the mRNA vaccines. At least the PCR has been in use for decades. The mRNA vaccine is as good as completely novel. Even the Health Minister of Australia admits we are in the middle of a giant experiment. We have no idea what the pros and cons are but, so far, the experiment looks to be a complete failure.

When we look back on it, it will be the failure pattern of the solution-looking-for-a-problem. It’s the same failure pattern we see with self-driving cars, with blockchain, with the internet of things and many others. It is the failure pattern of fraudulent late-capitalist marketing bullshit telling stories that have no correspondence to reality. The religious aspects of it occurs because we have lost touch with reality. We can no longer get results in the real world whether those results be a return on investment, the delivery of a product to market or the discovery of scientific innovations. In the absence of real world results, we turn instead to grand narratives and the grandest narrative of all: that we will conquer a respiratory virus. It’s quite likely that most of the people involved in that system have no idea how delusional they are. They were born into that world and it’s all they know. The fact that their narrative doesn’t correspond to reality is of no concern to them because it hasn’t mattered in the rest of their lives. The narrative is an end in itself and it won’t be until the real world intervenes that they will stop believing.

Just one month ago, Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty on charges of fraud. It took about four years to go through the courts. Maybe in four or five years’ time we’ll see some similar court cases around corona. I’m not holding my breath but you never know.

I’ve been trying to get away from posting about The Devouring Mother, if for no other reason than to avoid sounding like a broken record. Last week’s Djokovic fiasco, however, was too perfect to avoid, especially as I live in Melbourne. This week has provided another topic that I want to address as it’s one of themes I decided to leave out of my book on the subject. But, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s central to the dynamic with particular reference to the acquiescent children aka The Orphan archetype.

The idea occurred to me on seeing this video which has been doing the rounds on the internet the last few days. It shows a couple of children, perhaps twelve years old, on some television show in Canada encouraging setting the police onto the unvaccinated and, in the words of the young girl, pressuring the unvaccinated until they “submit”. The presenters of the show and the audience appear delighted with the children, one even referring to them as “future politicians”.

The video felt to me like another one of those microcosm-macrocosm symbolic moments that have occurred so much in the last two years. What the children are advocating for in the video is bullying. Of course, the bullying of the unvaccinated is precisely what has been happening for about the last six months and it’s been intensifying recently. These young children picked up on the zeitgeist and knew what the adults in the room wanted to hear. Look at the big smiles as they get rewarded by the adults.

The quip about the children being “future politicians” is kind of fitting. Bullying is part of the job description of a politician. Most of the time, the politicians are bullying each other or some hapless public servant and that’s all part of the game. What has happened in the last six months is that we have had the spectacle of politicians bullying the public, specifically the unvaccinated. That’s problematic because in a democratic society a politician is supposed to be a public servant. We pay their salaries and last time I checked we weren’t paying for the service of being gaslit, scapegoated and pilloried. The unvaccinated are still required to pay full taxes despite being banned from a number of public services. There’s even been talk of banning them from health care. None of that makes sense on a logical level. But, we know that what is going on is not logical but archetypal. Bullying is a core trait of The Devouring Mother. That is why our politicians have been bullying the public and that is what the youngsters of Canadian television intuited. It’s open season on bullying the unvaccinated. Step right up, folks, and take a turn.

The sight of young children joining in the scapegoating would be distasteful enough at the best of times. But what makes it symbolically poignant for corona is the fact that bullying has become a hot button issue in the last decade or so. Like the idea of “hate” and the entire subject of biological gender, bullying is a taboo subject. The Victorian department of education and training has a whole website on bullying where it says that bullying is “never okay”. Really? The Premier of the State of Victoria has been giving us a daily masterclass in bullying for almost two years now. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration, in fact, to say that corona has been the greatest display of bullying in history. Certainly it’s the greatest display of bullying of supposedly democratic leaders towards the public. I’m sure none of the people who work in the education bureaucracy have noticed, though, because taboo subjects, of which bullying is now one, inevitably give rise to psychological complexes and that in turn leads to projecting the shadow. A stereotypical case is the raging homophobe who is really a closet homosexual. But it’s the same psychology that leads the people who rail against “hate” to behave the most hatefully and the people who rail against bullying to be the biggest bullies. It’s all just projecting the shadow. In the case our political leaders, they are projecting the shadow which is The Devouring Mother; the societal shadow. That is why they have been behaving as the opposite of public servants.

Bullying is at the heart of The Devouring Mother concept. With all bullying, there is a bully and a victim. Where the mother is the bully, the victim is the acquiescent child aka The Orphan archetype. The rebellious children have learned to deal with the mother’s bullying, almost always by removing themselves from the relationship. Thus, the subject of bullying turns out to be a core dynamic at the heart of the archetype and has something interesting to tell us in particular about the rise of The Orphan archetype.   

To return to the Victorian government’s website, they state that bullying is “not a normal part of growing up.” This is, pardon my French, complete bullshit. Practically everybody experiences bullying when going through school. Almost every story or movie in the coming-of-age genre features bullying as a major theme. Let’s take just one example: the movie Back to the Future and its sequels. The hero of the story, Marty McFly, must learn to deal with the school bully, Biff Tannen. The dynamic between the two is literally the core of the story and drove the movie to be one of the most popular of the 80s. The reason it was so popular is because the theme of bullying is as good as a universal of society.

The universality of bullying extends beyond humans to almost every animal species with a dominance hierarchy. That’s why chickens have a pecking order. The pecking is the bullying. Same goes for dogs, gorillas or what have you. Another coincidence here is that it was Jordan Peterson who introduced the dominance hierarchy to our modern discourse. In doing so, he did nothing more than state the obvious but stating the obvious is necessary these days when you have governments proclaiming blatant falsehoods. Of course, Peterson is a leader of the rebellious children and he became the bete noire of the kinds of people who run the Victorian education bureaucracy who want to insist that bullying is “not natural”.

Another way to think about bullying is that it’s part of the process of forming dominance hierarchies. Justin Trudeau, or Victorian Premier, Dan Andrews are at the top of their respective dominance hierarchies. So, they are really good at bullying. Just ask any of their colleagues, although they’ll probably use a less polite word to describe them than “bully”. The movie Back to the Future explores the correspondence between bullying and dominance hierarchies in great detail because it shows alternative timelines. In one timeline, we see what happens when McFly doesn’t learn to deal with the bully. He ends up in a crappy job with low self-esteem. In the other timeline, McFly gets it right and becomes successful, confident and rich. He even has Biff working for him.

In nature, the dominance hierarchy forms mostly around physical superiority but even then there is room for non-physical factors. Ask any chicken owner and they will tell you the top chook is not necessarily the largest. Even with chickens, the concept of “spirit” plays a role. You could say the most spirited chicken is at the top rather than the physically largest. In Back to the Future, Biff is physically bigger than McFly, but that doesn’t stop McFly from rising higher than him in the hierarchy as long as he learns how to deal with the bully.

The reason bullying features in practically all coming-of-age stories is because learning how to deal with the dominance hierarchy is a core feature of becoming an adult. But learning how to deal with bullying also seems to function as a nexus of a number of important psychological lessons too. The age old advice that you should “stand up to a bully” really means that you must not be intimidated by the bully. Because bullying is part of our animal nature, becoming intimidated is natural when we are confronted with somebody who is or appears stronger. By learning to overcome that natural reaction, you are learning to control your emotions through exercising you will power. You learn to control your instincts rather than have them control you. You subordinate your unconscious to your will. That is a powerful lesson to learn.

You also learn something about the appearance of strength versus the underlying reality. This is another trick used by animals. A male duck or chicken, for example, will put on a show of aggression even to a much larger animal like a human but immediately back down when challenged. Their bark is worse than their bite, as the saying goes. Same with bullies. Almost all bullies back down when challenged. By standing up for yourself you learn that lesson too. In doing so, you learn something about bullying as a phenomena; namely, that is almost always a cover for insecurity. It is precisely the people who lack self-esteem who engage in bullying as a way to compensate. (Note: this is also the underlying driver of The Devouring Mother’s bullying behaviour. She is terrified of her children becoming independent).

So, by learning not to be intimidated by a bully you condense a number of important life lessons into one. You learn how to control your emotions, how to exercise your will power, how to navigate a dominance hierarchy and something about the psychology of the bully.

If all this is true, what can we make of the “war on bullying” that is currently taking place in schools in the West? This is where we have to again differentiate between the ostensible concerns and the unconscious drivers. The ostensible concerns are obvious. Bullying can result in violence and can be traumatic for those who fail to learn how to deal with it. We want to avoid those outcomes wherever possible. The change in “philosophy” that has occurred, however, is the move away from tough love. Tough love knows full well the difficulties involved in confronting a bully but allows it to happen anyway on the understanding that it’s better in the long run. Behind this is the understanding that one way to reduce bullying is to let kids learn how to deal with it. Once enough kids learn to stand up to a bully, the bullying goes away because there’s nobody left to prey on. If the goal is to reduce bullying, letting kids deal with it themselves is a viable, in fact the best, strategy.

Note that this process is almost identical to respiratory viral infection. Learning to deal with bullying is like becoming naturally immune to a virus. That doesn’t mean it goes away entirely. It doesn’t mean you won’t have to deal with bullying ever again. Bullying, like cold and flu viruses, is a natural fact of life. Any place where there is a dominance hierarchy of human beings, there is a potential for bullying. By learning to deal with bullying, you learn to recognise it and also recognise your own response to it. Those of us who haven’t completely lost our minds in the last two years have seen as clear as day the bullying behaviour by our leaders and have been better able to formulate a response. We also know that bullying behaviour comes from weakness. The outbreak of bullying reveals the underlying weakness of our society in spiritual-psychological, political and economic terms.

What if we had never learned how to deal with bullying?

This is the outcome that is being pursued at the moment in our education system. The goal is not to expose children to bullying at all on the assumption that is it “not natural” and “never okay”. But the child who has not learned how to deal with bullying has no “natural immunity”. In addition, we can infer that they have missed out on the other lessons to be learned from bullying i.e. how to control their emotions, how to exercise their willpower, how to deal with a dominance hierarchy. This sounds like a very good description of the millennial generation. It’s also a very good description of The Orphan archetype whose primary trait exactly is that they missed out on stages of development; stages of development like learning how to deal with a bully.

Viewed in this way, the desire not to expose children to bullying is the desire to prevent them learning the developmental lessons involved. But stifling development of the child is exactly what The Devouring Mother does. The archetype that results is The Orphan.

None of the bureaucrats in the education department would be conscious of the fact that the system they are running is set up precisely to produce archetypal Orphans. Our modern school system doesn’t consciously produce any type of person and the whole idea that it should is anathema to it. This is very unusual by historical standards and formed one of the critiques of the modern education system by thinkers as far back as G.K. Chesterton. The old British public school system, for example, was deftly configured to produce the type of the English gentleman. The educators in that system were accutely aware that that was what they were doing. The education provided was about producing a type of person. As such, it was as much about learning manners and dress sense as about book learning. You had to learn how to behave as a gentleman. The same idea held for Catholic schools and even the old trade schools although they were producing a different type of person.

Our modern schools aim to produce no specific type of person and yet they clearly are producing a psychological type: The Orphan.

This reminds me of another line from Chesterton who said that the problem with the person who stops believing in God is not that they believe nothing but that they believe anything. I think we can translate this into psychological terms as follows: if you don’t act consciously, you will act unconsciously. It’s not that the you will believe anything, it’s that whatever your profess to believe is irrelevant because your psyche is now being run by the subconscious. That is, of course, what is going on right now in western society and especially in Australia and Canada. It’s for that reason that the behaviour in the last two years has been so incredibly uniform and has coalesced around the archetypes of The Devouring Mother and The Orphan.

If that’s true, then the number one task to redress the problem is to return to consciousness and to ask the question: who are we and what are we doing? There’s going to need to be an awful lot of soul searching in the years ahead.

Whatever the truth is in its truthness – perhaps an attunement to the ground on which the revealing of a concealing manifests as the disclosing of an unfolding (sorry, just channelling my inner Heidegger) – there is an inevitable socio-political aspect to truth. One of my favourite examples of this, which I have mentioned on this blog before, is a study done where they invited test subjects into a room to complete a number of very easy tasks. The subjects came into the room with about twenty others who they were led to believe were also subjects in the experiment but who were in fact paid actors whose job it was to give an incorrect answer to a very simple question “which line is the shortest” in relation to three lines that had been drawn on the board at the front of the room. The lengths of the lines were such that nobody with functional eyesight could fail to see that the one on top was longest and the one at the bottom was the shortest. The correct answer was thus C. The trick was that the paid actors would all be called on first to give their answer while the test subject went last. Put yourself in the test subject’s shoes. You’re in a room full of strangers who all answer that Line B is the shortest even though you know for sure that the correct answer is Line C. Nineteen people go before you and answer B. Your turn comes around and you are asked to answer verbally for all to hear. Do you speak the truth and say Line C or do you just copy the others and say Line B is the shortest? It turns out that a majority of people will copy others rather than speak the truth.

Now you might argue that this is a trivial experiment in which the test subject doesn’t have any skin in the game and is just giving the easiest answer. But that’s the whole point. The extent to which truth is spoken is not just a function of truth. Other factors play a role. This is an uncontroversial statement. People lie when it suits their interests just as they stay silent or follow the group when it suits their interests too. But it gives rise to a field of study which I have seen called the Epidemiology of Truth: the study in how the truth, or lack thereof, spreads through society. One of the factors governing the spread of truth or lies is socio-political and that is what the line length experiment reveals.

This is no mere academic indulgence, however. It is of real-world importance. I recall an example from my working life where the truth should have mattered. I was working on a project where tens of millions of dollars were being spent by a corporation. Several high-ranking managers in the organisation were directly involved in the project. On most projects I have worked on, the high-level managers show up at the beginning to give a pep talk and aren’t seen again until the party at the end. This was the first time in my career I had worked in the same room with such people.

There’s always a period at the start of a new project where things don’t make a lot of sense because you lack the context for understanding. In my experience, it takes about two to four weeks for the fog of confusion to lift. Thus, it was at about the fourth week of this project where I first suspected that one particular high-level manager we were working with was a complete moron. It took me a further month or so to confirm my hypothesis. This particular person would speak nonsense. Not complete nonsense, mind you. It was clear the words coming out of their mouth were elements of more or less grammatical sentences of the English language. Scam artists use this trick all the time. They make the language sound legit but at the end of it you don’t understand what was said and this is where it gets interesting because your decision on where to look for the cause of the misunderstanding is partly determined by the socio-political context. In the context in which I was in, there was a senior manager of a large and successful corporation. That is to say, a powerful person. Somebody who could, if they had wanted, have me fired. Humans are social animals and we arrange ourselves into dominance hierarchies. This happens by default. There is also a meritocracy assumption that we bring to the table. We assume that the people at the top of dominance hierarchies got there by merit. Therefore, we assume a senior manager in a successful company is not a complete moron and when we receive evidence that they are a complete moron we discount that evidence in favour of some other explanation. The most common explanation is “I don’t understand”. In other words, the problem lies with me.

Consider an alternative situation. You could transcribe the exact words of the senior manager and have them read out by a shabbily dressed drunk on the street or an ultra-sleazy used car salesman. In those cases, you wouldn’t assume that “I didn’t understand”. You would assume the drunk was drunk and that the used car salesman was trying to baffle you with nonsense as a sales tactic. Same words, different socio-political context. With the drunk or the salesman, you just walk away. What do you do when you have to work with the senior manager? Again, socio-politics determines the course of action. Let’s say you’re in a meeting and the senior manager is talking nonsense. One thing you can do is ask for clarification perhaps using language that you do understand to try and lead the meeting away from the coral reefs of hogwash and towards the calm seas of meaningful discourse. You ask a question. The answer makes no sense. Can you ask again for clarification? Maybe you can get away with a second attempt. But three times and you’re out of luck. Three times and it is you who is starting to sound like the problem. Why? Because nobody else in the meeting is asking questions. Like the test subject in the room calling Line B the shortest, they just go with the flow. Most people elect to call Line B the shortest and most people in meetings do not ask questions even if they have no idea what is going on. The dominance hierarchy dictates this when dealing with a senior manager. Politeness dictates it when dealing with a colleague. Either way, there are barriers in the way to speaking the truth.

These socio-political issues tie in with individual psychology. At a certain age, young children will believe whatever they are told by somebody higher in the dominance hierarchy than they are i.e. any adult. This normally starts to change in the teenage years when children first start to realise that their parents and teachers are not right about everything which can often turn into the idea that because they are not right about everything they must be wrong about everything. Young people might be disillusioned about their parents but as they join the workforce they still hold the meritocracy assumption. I remember getting a summer job as a teenager in a small manufacturing company. On my first morning, the boss was busy so he told me to go and help another worker, who we’ll call Bill. Bill was a middle-aged man who seemed to know what he was doing. I went over and started to copy him. That was alright until after lunch when the boss came over to check up on me and noticed that we had been doing it wrong all morning. Turned out that Bill didn’t know what he was doing either. It was the blind leading the blind. I remember being very surprised that such a thing could happen but it happens all the time. Of course, nobody is perfect; even the boss. At some point in your career you get enough experience and enough self-confidence to contradict the boss. That works well in functional organisations and it’s the sign of a well-run company when the boss not only allows themselves to be contradicted but wants to be contradicted as long as the contradiction is done with good intention and as long as the truth is revealed by doing so. In my experience, this is almost always the case in smaller companies and almost never the case in larger ones. To return to the senior manager moron from earlier, you did not contradict this person. They had that combination of narcissism and stupidity that is very dangerous for those lower in the pecking order; the kind of person who cannot be reasoned with. The more informal the pecking order, as in smaller groups, the less this kind of person is a problem.

The interesting thing is that many people who work in such large organisations are not even aware that their manager is dumber than a second coat of paint. The reason comes back to the default assumption about dominance hierarchies being meritocracies. That is an assumption we must learn to overcome just as we must learn that our parents are not infallible. But many do not overcome it. For many people, those higher in the pecking order are right and, when there is a miscommunication, it is their fault. They say “I don’t understand” and not “The boss doesn’t understand”. The primary antidote to this is to work in a technical field where things must be made to work. In such fields, bad ideas lead to bad outcomes. The same is not true in corporations where tens of millions of dollars can be spent on some big complex project which achieves no result but nobody knows or cares because it’s not their money. Complexity protects the managers in such corporations. There are too many moving parts to know what the true cause of failure is and most of the time failure is simply swept under the rug and forgotten about. What made the project I was working on interesting was that it was small and self-contained enough to realise who the problem was. It was the senior manager.

The low-level jobs in such corporations are usually bullshit jobs where you spend most of your time trying to deal with the failings of the organisation structure itself. Such failings are almost always communication problems caused by the fact that somebody didn’t tell somebody else what needed to be done which then caused somebody else to screw up. In bullshit jobs, the problem is rarely if ever a technical problem and therefore something with an objective solution. It’s almost always a people-problem and thus a political problem. The cool thing about technical problems is that you can talk about them objectively without anybody getting upset. The same is not true of people-problems. This is one of the reasons that bullshit jobs are psychologically traumatic.

The other cool thing about technical problems is that you realise that nobody has a monopoly on truth and that in order for technical problems to be solved at all there must be an absence of our ingrained dominance hierarchy assumption that just because somebody is higher in the pecking order they must be right. For this reason, the more experienced people at the top of technical dominance hierarchies are usually very humble and happy to be corrected when they are in error. Outside of technical domains, dominance hierarchies become an end in themselves and those who fight their way to the top are often not the best at all. In fact, a combination of narcissism and stupidity can often be a bonus in such situations since it keeps potential rivals and subordinates off balance and once nonsense has been accepted for any length of time it becomes a political impossibility to overturn it. Easier to let the fool rise through the ranks c.f. The Peter Principle and The Dilbert Principle.

What all this boils down to is that truth by itself is not enough. One must encourage the conditions in which truth can prosper. At the societal level, all else being equal, a society of smaller organisations where people work in technical jobs producing things that “work” would be far more likely to be able to deal with truth than a society of large corporations filled with bullshit jobs. The former would feature people who are aware that nobody has a monopoly on truth and that true meritocracies are ones in which it is acknowledged that anybody can contribute to the truth as long as they have the right intentions and good will. The latter would feature people who think truth is whatever those in power say it is and that the cool thing about climbing the ranks is so that you get to be the one to say how it is for a little while. I’ll leave it to the reader to answer the question which of these best describes our society at the moment.

Recently, I was visiting a friend’s house when a Michael Jackson song came on the radio and my friend said something interesting that I hadn’t really thought about before. He noted that, at the peak of Jackson’s fame, the releasing of one of his albums was a global event with a coordinated marketing campaign which meant that pretty much everybody in the western world and many parts of the non-western world would have known when a Michael Jackson album was released whether they liked his music or not. This is something the young people these days wouldn’t comprehend as they each have their own social media influencer or Youtube celebrity or whatever that they follow in much smaller sub-cultures than before. Even the most popular pop stars of today are only known to a subset of the population never the whole population like Jackson was. This observation got me thinking about a subject that I have been pondering for a while which is the impact of the internet on our culture. It seems to me this impact is not really discussed much anymore even though it is directly contributing to our current woes. One of the main changes wrought by the internet is the shattering of “grand narratives”. A Michael Jackson album release is one. But the pattern extends into other areas of the public discourse where its effects are far more important such as the narratives that hold countries together. As the corona event drags on interminably, there are those in the dissenter camp who still think the “narrative is about to crack” any day now and the “truth” will be revealed. This mindset from the old, pre-internet world is no longer valid in the world we live. There is no unifying narrative any more that is going to crack and be replaced by a better, more truthful narrative. Rather, there are now just a seemingly infinite number of sub-narratives with a dominant narrative imposed on top of the them. The dominant narrative is not necessarily truthful, just dominant. The emergence of the “conspiracy theory” label alongside the daily censorship that now happens on social media platforms are among a number of tactics that are now used to try and subdue alternative narratives in the hope of allowing a centralised narrative to form. But it never does for the simple reason that you cannot coerce people into believing a narrative. Narratives must evolve organically with a feedback loop between top-down and bottom-up. The increasing use of censorious tactics in the last couple of years reveals the underlying weakness of the dominant narrative. The powers that be have gone all out in attempting to hold together a narrative that itself doesn’t make sense as it is changed willy-nilly according to purely political considerations. It’s tempting to think the politicians are doing it on purpose with some larger objective in mind. But what if there is no larger objective? What if these tactics are simply what is required now to create any type of dominant narrative at all? What if these tactics are now the price you pay to create a narrative? If so, that price has gone through the roof. We can usefully call this narrative inflation. If you increase the supply of money, you get monetary inflation. If you increase the supply of narratives, you get narrative inflation. The price to create a dominant narrative has gone up for a number of reasons but one is that the internet opened the floodgates on the flow of information and allowed multiple alternative narratives to be created. This has created its own dynamic independent of the political and economic considerations that are also driving the trend. It may turn out that one of the consequences of allowing free and instant information is to destroy centralised narratives. There are good sociological and psychological reasons why this would be the case.

Eyewitness testimony has long been problematic for police trying to investigate an incident or crime. Even for something relatively straightforward like a car accident, where the eyewitnesses themselves have no personal stake in the story, accounts can diverge radically. Ten people witnessing a car accident can give you ten different stories of the crash. These problems are greatly exacerbated when the individuals involved have a vested interest in the case as often happens in criminal investigations. This eternal problem has been dealt with in numerous fiction and non-fiction works. The best non-fiction work I have seen about the subject is the documentary “Capturing the Friedmans” in which a school teacher is found to have child pornography in his home which leads to a series of events including him pleading guilty to sexually abusing some of his students. The documentary follows the motivations of those involved as rumour of the crime spreads in the local community creating its own dynamic as gossip and innuendo put enormous pressure of the family at the centre of the case. By the end of the documentary, we don’t know whether any of the official story is true as the lies and deceits create second and third order effects that distort the whole picture. This real-life account mirrors one of the best fictional representation of the problem, Akira Kurosawa’s movie “Rashomon”, in which a murder occurs in the forest but we hear radically different versions of the event told by the people involved (including, dramatically, the deceased). The philosophical question raised by both films is whether or not there can be found an objective standard of truth. This is a problem philosophers have wrestled with for millennia but it becomes a practical problem in cases involving crime where we want to see justice served and yet we have multiple, irreconcilable accounts about reality and seemingly no way to choose between them. At the end of the process, the system gives a verdict of guilty-not guilty and this is taken as the “truth” but is it really the truth?

With the internet, we have seen the same psychology applied to the public discourse and this has created practical problems for politics. Politicians love to divide the public where it suits their interest but it’s also true that they need to appeal to a foundation which unites the public. The process is similar to the justice system. Although there is disagreement and competition within the system, everybody must agree to play by the rules. The system itself is the thing people believe in. The public discourse which existed prior to the internet was facilitated through a system in which the media was known as the “fourth estate”. Its job was to hold government to account. Of course, this was not a perfect system but, as the saying goes, it seems it was better than all the others. It was certainly better than the system we have now where the media does not hold government to account at all and is little more than a public relations branch of the government. Recently in the New Zealand parliament, Jacinda Ardern was questioned about $55 million her government gave to media with certain conditions attached about what could be reported on. In Australia, the government waived the usual licence fee for the mainstream media channels back in March 2020. This amounted to around $44 million in subsidies. The theory was that this was needed because covid was expected to reduce advertising revenue, a strange claim given that the whole population was about to be locked at home with every incentive to watch the news. That measure came after the Australian government famously held Facebook and other big tech players to ransom and forced them to pay money to Australian media companies for content. Whatever the ethical dimensions of these issues, what lies beneath is the fact that the media companies are no longer viable businesses capable of existing without government support. Because they are now reliant on government money, their function as the fourth estate that holds government to account has also all but disappeared. That’s a problem for them but it’s also a problem for the government. The “official narrative” is transmitted through the legacy media. If the legacy media goes away, so does the narrative. Governments know that if the media disappeared, so would a large chunk of their power. The government needs the media as much as the media needs the government.

I would argue that the public also needs the media. It needs the media to act as its representative. That was the whole point of the Fourth Estate arrangement. The public paid for the media and that meant the media had an incentive to represents the readership’s interests. But that is all gone now. Some people think the public doesn’t really need the media. For almost any event, we are able to watch live video online now. Once upon a time we needed the newspaper to tell us the facts, but we simply don’t need that anymore. You might think that’s a good thing. We remove the middle man and allow the public to see events for themselves. But that introduces the same problem you have with eyewitness accounts which is that you get as many versions of the “truth” as there are people. The discourse becomes fragmented and the checks and balances that once held disappear. It’s a bit like having a crime investigation without a detective. “The system” can no longer control the discourse the way it previously could. This is not a trivial matter. It leads us back to one of Plato’s most dangerous ideas which is the Noble Lie. The idea goes that society cannot exist and justice cannot be served unless there are a number of lies which bind society together. Lie is, of course, a very strong word. We could soften it by calling them myths or ideals but the effect is the same. The myths and ideals are the glue that holds things together and, according to Plato, without them society will disintegrate.

Our post-internet public discourse provides some evidence for this assertion. It has become completely detached from reality or, to put it another way, it represents only one version of reality: the one that comes from the top-down. This process is especially advanced in the US. It hit a fever pitch with the Trump presidency and has not relaxed since. There are now at least two mutually incompatible narratives going on in the US meaning that agreement about the fundamentals which hold society together is called into question on an almost daily basis. It’s quite common to hear somebody on either side of the debate label somebody on the other side as “crazy” or “insane” and that is one manifestation of the problem. Within this new world, the idea that the “narrative is about to crack” doesn’t make sense. The dominant narrative is held in place by power, not by truth. By definition, the only thing that can “crack” it is another source of power. This was Trump’s genius. He hijacked the entire machinery that generates the narrative and turned it to his own purposes. But I think Trump was the end of the road. They got rid of him but in doing so they removed any last pretence that the narrative was “fair” or “truthful”. You can’t just delete the sitting President and then go back to normal as if nothing happened. As a result, a large proportion of the population no longer has any faith whatsoever in the system. That holds true no matter who is in power. The dominant narrative is now nothing more than the story told by those in power.

In Australia and much of Europe and Canada, we are just now catching up with the US. Here in Melbourne, more than a hundred thousand people marched against the government last weekend. The Premier’s response was to write them off as “thugs” and “extremists”. It reminded me an awful lot of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” moment. When politicians no longer feel like they need to accommodate the interests and opinions of a substantial proportion of the population you know the narrative is already fractured. Andrews may or may not get away with that politically for now but the protestors represent a new group in Australian public life; the ones excluded from the narrative. The same goes for the demonstrators in Europe who are simply ignored by the mainstream media. Because the public discourse no longer pretends to reflect reality, nobody really believes in it including the people who nominally go along with it. Deep down they also must know that it is fake. We are entering a time when even the idea of a centralised narrative is no longer believed in. If Plato was right, this fact alone is an existential threat to the state and it is understandable that the state would strive to fix the problem. But it’s almost certainly too late. All of the censorship and victimisation in the world won’t put humpty dumpty together again. Going forward I expect we’ll still have an “official narrative” but nobody will really believe it. That’s what is implied by the falling revenue numbers of the mainstream media channels. Will that lead to the disintegration of the state? Plato would have said yes. We may be about to test that theory.