Category: Ideas

Stephen Jenkinson is an author that’s been on my to-read list for a while. Until last week, I didn’t know anything about him other than he wrote extensively on the subject of the death phobia of modern western culture. As my reading list is long and getting longer and as the subject came up last week, I decided to check out this interview with Jenkinson where he speaks at length on the problem of death in the west. I had touched on this problem myself back at the start of the coronapocalypse series of posts and so it was fascinating to hear those themes talked about in more detail from somebody with real world experience (Jenkinson’s take on the subject comes from years of work as a grief counsellor). But Jenkinson also touched many of the other themes I explored in my two books on corona. After watching the video I decided to check out his website. Its title? Orphan Wisdom. But The Orphan is one element of the Devouring Mother – Orphan archetype that I stumbled across earlier this year. Synchronicity much? Clearly I’m going to have to spend a lot more time exploring Jenksinson’s ideas. From quick reading of his site, it seems that his approach is that we need to accept our orphanhood and find a way to build something on it. This seems like a promising idea. In a Jungian sense, we are currently manifesting the shadow side of The Orphan. We need to find the positive side. That idea warrants some future posts. For now, I just wanted to post my main notes from watching the Jenkinson video.

The denial of death as heroism

Jenkinson tells a story from his experience about a woman dying of a terminal illness who had only months to live but said she “didn’t let it be a big part of her life”. This was a pattern he had seen time and again when somebody was facing imminent death. Our culture views this attitude as a kind of heroism. That is, it is seen to be heroic to deny death; to not let it get you down even when you are staring it in the face. That same faux-heroism drives our desire to eliminate death (through medicine, vaccines, lockdowns) and, when all else is lost, to allow ourselves the easy way out that is euthanasia. We must die on our own terms even if that means simply ignoring our death as it approaches. To do otherwise is to “fail” and failure is not heroic.

I mentioned in one of my coronapocalypse posts the weird use of the heroism concept as a propaganda tool during corona. I can now see from Jenkinson’s story why this resonates with the public. It is heroic to do whatever you can to avoid death. But this follows from our phobia of death and our fear of not being in control. For those of us who do not share these phobias, the behaviour looks psychotic and dissociative. Of course, needless death should be avoided where we have the means to do so. But the ultimate judge of those means are whether they work and it is clear by now that lockdowns, masks and corona vaccines do not work. However, the true believers are not looking for something that works. They are acting a part required by our culture; the part of “heroism”. It is for this reason that leaders during corona have needed to be seen to do everything to “fight death” even when it means trashing all the other institutions of society. Of course, those institutions are all subject to the same cultural expectation and acquiesced in the same way. That’s why every single institution now has a “covid safe” plan. All this is demanded by the general culture and it’s for this reason that the corona measures still enjoy general public support. The couching of the whole issue in terms of “heroism” e.g. clapping for the NHS at a certain time of the day, is part of the hero-culture that is really just a denial of death.

Elders, parents and culture

It’s not just that we don’t respect our elders anymore, it’s that we don’t have any elders. It’s not hard to see why. Elders acquire their position through the vague and ambiguous machinations of culture. There is a process to go through to become an elder. I touched on this when explaining the rise of Jordan Peterson, who became an elder in an organic fashion. Our modern faith in “experts” is in some sense the opposite of elderhood. Wisdom is not required for expertise, only knowledge. Elders must be wise but there is no way to attain wisdom through education.

Although not synonymous, grandparents were once well placed to become elders, at least to their grandchildren. However, in the post-WW2 period, we have progressively loaded parents with the whole responsibility of raising children (although, I would argue that parents also desired that responsibility). The relationship of the child with its grandparents is now mediated through the parents and the grandparents have very little say on the raising of the children. In fact, it is a very common source of family argument when grandparents try to intervene and are put in their place by the parents. Having removed grandparents from the “elder” role, there was nobody else to fill the gap. The breakdown of this familial arrangement went side by side with the breakdown of the traditional neighbourhood structure where elders from outside the family might have arisen. The result: we are without elders.

What role have elders played traditionally in society? According to Jenkinson it’s “to ensure cultural sanity”. Given the current state of our culture, this diagnosis seems spot on. We got rid of elders and cultural insanity followed. This ties back to Jung’s point about the destruction of tradition. Elders are there to pass on tradition but we explicitly scorn tradition nowadays. Having foregrounded the parent role at the expense of the grandparent/elder role, it’s no surprise that The Devouring Mother archetype has ascended. She is a parent archetype who represents, among other things, the complete control parents now have over the development of their children independent of elders and any wider cultural network. In practice, this means we have loaded up the parent role with all kinds of expectations and obligations that the average parent cannot fulfil and it’s quite likely that the increasing divorce rates in western countries are at least partly a result of this. In any case, the child’s development is now entirely at the parents’ instigation and management. Will to power. The Devouring Mother’s desire to control everything.

In the meantime, what do we do with grandparents? Having removed their traditional role in family life, they have no economic or social place left when they hit retirement. We send them away to nursing homes. Out of sight, out of mind. The desire to “save them” during corona is part guilt at our complicity in this state of affairs and part control trip.

The Tyranny of Hope

Around this time last year I remember seeing the then Health Minister in Britain, Matt Hancock, give a speech to parliament announcing the government was looking forward to “injecting hope” into the arms of Britons. He was referring, of course, to the vaccine. I involuntarily interpreted his metaphor as one of drug addiction. Who is this drug pusher wanting to inject people? And who are the people who wanted to be injected with hope? Are we addicted to hopium in modern society?

Jenkinson calls hope “tyrannical”. Hope is dissociative. It requires you to ignore the present circumstances which are, by definition, bad, and look forward to an improvement later. Sometimes hope is warranted. If you are trapped in the mountains with a broken leg and have reason to believe a search party is looking for you, you can hope that they find you. But hope in general is debilitating and often comes out of a failure to face facts. We see this deception everywhere in modern society. “They’ll think of something,” we say about how to get out of our energy and pollution predicaments. “Just listen to the experts” is just another way of having hope that the experts will make everything right.

What has led to this state of affairs is not just political and economic trends but our death phobia. If we can deceive ourselves into ignoring even our own imminent death, we can deceive ourselves about anything. The addiction to hope means also the constant dissociation from reality and we have no shortage of that in the modern world through endless entertainment, 24/7 news broadcasts, Netflix, computer games, alcohol, drugs, porn. The list goes on. What if all of this is not the cause but the effect? What if the real cause is cultural: our fear of death. If we can’t face the most fundamental fact of life, how can we face the less fundamental ones?

Grieving as the flipside of Loving

It is often said of modern society that it has no heart. Nevertheless, a great deal of our public discourse is supposedly about caring about the feelings of others. Jenkinson notes that this falls out from our control junkie culture. Death couldn’t give a damn about our feelings. Thus, its presence is an insult to our ethic of control. It also challenges our feelings. We don’t want to hurt the feelings of others because we don’t want our feelings hurt. What is implied is that we do not know how to control our feelings and any unleashing of those feelings threatens our psychic equilibrium. This also implies a psyche that is out of balance and weak. The emotions are a great servant but a terrible master. One should not bottle up the emotions but one also should never let the emotions dictate one’s state of being. But that is where we are as a culture. Everything must be “personal” and few things are more personal than your feelings. This also explains our need to dissociate from death because the torrent of feelings that might be unleashed threatens to overwhelm not just ourselves but our family and friends. We grit through it to protect them too. If nobody can process emotions properly, it’s safer to dissociate altogether and “not let it dominate you”.

Grief is not a feeling. Grief should not be mistaken for despair or depression and, unlike feelings, grief is not transitory in nature. Grief is an exercise. One becomes a practitioner of grief or, in our society, one does not become a practitioner of grief because we have forgotten how to grieve. There is a flipside to this problem according to Jenkinson: “If you’re in love, grief will be part of the deal”. Grief and love are two sides of the same coin. “Grief is a way of loving that which has slipped from view” and “love is a way of grieving that which has not yet slipped from view.” It follows that if one cannot grieve, one cannot love in the fullest sense of the word where that love includes the recognition that the thing that is loved is temporary. And that brings us back to death because death is the ultimate recognition of the temporal nature of things. Death, love and grief are all related. A death-phobic culture cannot grieve but it also cannot love in the truest sense and this is why modern society has no heart.

In one of Neil Oliver’s best editorials on corona he noted that he realised that he was grieving for a way of life that has now gone. That implies that he loved that way of life and so did some of the rest of us. But it’s equally true that many did not. The ease with which we tossed into the bin all of those principles we thought were fundamental to our society implies a lack of love towards that society. That it was done in the name of desperately avoiding death is not a coincidence. We avoid death so that we don’t have to grieve so that we don’t have to acknowledge that we don’t love. There is a giant void at the centre of it all.

This brings me to a point I have been pondering recently and which is touched upon in Jenkinson’s idea of Orphan Wisdom. If many people have no love for the current state of the world, perhaps corona can usher in a new era where there is something to love. I admit this seems extraordinarily unlikely. The Great Reset and the totalitarian direction that we are now lurching towards is the opposite of anything that could be loved. But if corona can have any positive effect it would be this: that a society or a way of life could emerge that is worth loving. This need not involve throwing away everything and starting again. It may be that we must rediscover what was worth loving about our society in the first place. Such a love would only be one part of the story, however. It would have to come alongside learning how to grieve and it seems to me that this is where Jenkinson’s ideas could have found their time. We need to become practitioners of grieving and in doing so we would have to face our death phobia. All that would need to be achieved in the face of powerful forces who are using our fear of death for their own purposes (hello, Devouring Mother). If that fear of death was confronted, it would lose its power. What sort of leader, people or movements that could make that happen is something to watch out for. Aren’t we due for the second coming of a guy who taught about love?

Recently I was watching this interesting speech by Ernst Wolff titled The Fourth Industrial Revolution. (Thanks to Roland for the link). The video is in German and is well worth watching for those who speak the language. Wolff outlines the political dimensions of our current woes with a focus on how our would-be globalist overlords see the world. Several things occurred to me while watching the video and I’ll be unpacking those in the next few posts. I think the concept is the fourth industrial revolution is flawed and it’s flawed in exactly the same way the modern Plague Story is flawed in that it takes a historical reality that is foundational to modern life and then tacks on a fairy tale ending which has no basis in reality. This kind of thing has been a hallmark of academic elites since time immemorial and seems to have a particular attraction to left-leaning elites hence the ongoing power of Marxism which followed the pattern to a tee. But there is a dynamic going on with the globalist elites that I think is new, at least in modern history. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is related to the concept of the Great Reset about which there is a book in print and regular forums where those ideas are discussed. And yet, in public discourse when somebody raises ideas about the Great Reset, it’s very common to hear the idea written off as a “conspiracy”. How can that be? How can a concept which is right out there in the open be thought of as a conspiracy theory by the average person on the street?

To answer this question, we must acknowledge a couple of things. Firstly, there is the fact that most people most of the time think in literal terms or what I called left brain thinking or L-mode in a previous post. That is, people think in terms of the dictionary meaning of a word rather than the concept that the word represents. To take a current example, most people think the corona “vaccine” will stop the spread of covid because that’s what vaccines do. The fact that this vaccine does not do that simply doesn’t register even though it is now an acknowledged fact by the most mainstream corona “experts” and politicians that the vaccine doesn’t prevent infection or transmission of the virus. The average person thinks it does because that’s what the word “vaccine” implies. Thus, there was a case recently where a gym owner in Sydney was astonished that fifteen clients in his facility tested positive to covid even though only vaccinated people were allowed into the gym. According to his understanding of the word “vaccine”, that shouldn’t have been possible.

The second thing to bear in mind is that the word “conspiracy theorist” has been weaponised in recent times by the propaganda machine. With dreary regularity you can bet that anybody who questions the narrative will be labelled a conspiracy theorist or a “far right agitator” or what have you. But it’s here that the modern “conspiracy” gets interesting. Let’s say you question the narrative and point out that the things that are happening are exactly what the global elites have been saying in their books and at their conferences. You get labelled a conspiracy theorist often by an average person who is not in any way linked to the propaganda machine. The reason for this is that the meaning of the word conspiracy is that there is a secret agreement and the label conspiracy theorist in the modern world means that you are attributing the course of events to actors pursuing their own interests through such a secret agreement. The Great Reset, however, is not a secret. It is right out there in the open. By definition, it cannot be a conspiracy and because the average person thinks in definitional terms they believe it is not a conspiracy. It’s also true that the average person never hears their national politicians and media talk about The Great Reset or any of the other ideas that get discussed in the globalist forums. Therefore, they don’t believe that those ideas are being pursued in their country. That is factually incorrect in the same way that it’s factually incorrect to say that the corona vaccines prevent infection.

Why the average person has it so wrong is due to a dynamic that has arisen in the last few decades as we transitioned into the modern version of globalism. I’m just old enough to remember the time before that change. It was a time when politicians in Australia actually had a vision for the country that they were able to articulate to the public. Even as a young teenager, I knew more or less which direction the Hawke-Keating government was trying to steer the nation. These days, I have no idea what the vision of our government is for the country. As far as I can tell, there is no vision and there hasn’t been one since the Hawke-Keating years. If I’m reading other countries’ politics correctly, the same seems to be true in most western countries. That lack of vision coincides with the onset of modern globalisation. The globalists, of course, do have a vision for the future and The Great Reset is part of that. Thus, in the last few decades, the ideas and visions for the future in the west no longer occur at the nation state level but at the globalist level. Those ideas, however, are never communicated back to the public directly. The nation state politicians have become the conduit for those ideas; nothing more than second-hand car salesmen whose job it is to dress up notions that would be radically unpopular if presented to the voting public in their original form. I think of this dynamic as follows:-

At the top are the various globalists institutions which include both government and non-government organisations and the various forums they run. In the middle is the national government apparatus whose interaction with the globalist institutions has greatly increased in the recent decades. This apparatus no longer interacts with its own public like it used to and no longer presents a vision for the nation. Rather, it has become a conduit for the ideas that circulate in the globalist forums. Whichever of those ideas that might be palatable to the general public flow through but most don’t because they are not palatable. Try winning an election on “you will own nothing and you will be happy” or telling people they must swap their steaks and sausages for bug salad. It’s for that reason that the average person on the street in Australia or Canada or Europe has never heard of the Great Reset. The whole book reads like a dystopian sci-fi novel and no politician in their right mind would present it to the public. Nevertheless, some of those globalist ideas do flow through. When they do, they tend to be stunningly unpopular. In Australia, one recent government was toppled largely due to legislation ostensibly aimed at tackling climate change. For those who believe in such summits and the global institutions that host them, this has been incredibly frustrating and the propaganda machine has gone into overdrive trying, through fear, to convince the general public of various nation states to acquiesce to the globalist agenda.

This leads us into 2020 when something finally got done. What got done, of course, had already been discussed at the globalist meetings. There was one in 2019, in fact, which even simulated a coronavirus outbreak. Just like the other globalist meetings, the general public had no idea what was being discussed at that meeting but we found out in March 2020. A big part of the shellshock that we are still in is because of the unprecedented and unthinkable nature of what has happened. Most of the ideas that are discussed at the globalist shindigs are never presented to the national publics because politicians know that they would have almost no support. If the government had come out in 2019 and declared a pandemic policy that consisted of what Australia did in the last year and a half there would have been mass protests against the idea. Yet, it did happen. It took the threat of a global pandemic for the globalists to finally achieve their goal of getting national governments to take action and they have not hidden their delight at this fact. We have heard how corona has opened a “window of opportunity” to make other things happen. Having finally got national governments to override the will of the public, the globalists now want to continue the trend and ram a bunch of other unpopular measures through. You will own nothing and you’ll eat bug salads instead of steaks. Sound good? That’s what they have in mind.

This dynamic has been in play now for a couple of decades and the fear and hysteria has been ramping up in recent years. Partly this is because of the lack of results and partly because globalisation is falling apart of its own momentum and the people involved are getting desperate. At the national level, the effect of all this has been dire. Our national political leaders have no vision for our countries because they are serving two masters. Their unenviable position is as mediator between the globalists and the national public. As a result, the public discourse has become dissociated from everyday reality. The world that the globalists envisage is anathema to the average citizen of western society. Without any way to sell those ideas to the pubic in a form that would win support, they have fallen back to the only tool that gets any traction: fear. In 2020, the fear levels were turned up to 11. It worked. Sort of. But I doubt it will work again. Organic systems tend to recalibrate to protect themselves from outward attack. It’s also the case that the political field in any western nation is wide open to any politician who can articulate a meaningful vision for the country. That’s what Trump did and that’s what Brexit also represented. Logically, such politicians should win easily in the years ahead. But it’s also true that the globalists aren’t going away in the short term, unless the whole system collapses. They will continue to function like an evil spirit spreading doom and fear. It’s for that reason that there is a new spectre haunting Europe (and the rest of the West). The spectre of failing globalism.

Recently I’ve had a Kafka story stuck in my head. Not the one that everybody knows – the Metamorphosis – even though that it is, in a sense, highly relevant to our current predicament.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an unvaccinated, right-wing conspiracy theorist.

No, the Kafka story that I’ve had in mind is the one that I’ve always found the most memorable of his works: In the Penal Colony (spoiler alert: I’m going to give away the end of the story here so stop reading now if you don’t want to know).

Published in 1919, In the Penal Colony is located on a subtropical island in the colonial period. There is a garrison on the island and the protagonist of the story, a traveller from the mother country, gets roped into witnessing the punishment of a native which is to take place on a giant mechanical contraption that is maintained by the army officer who is the antagonist of the story. The machine is designed to kill its subject in a lengthy and highly technical manner. The officer is extremely proud of the complex and intricate technology of which he is the expert but the traveller finds the whole thing horrendous. There’s a lot of different themes going on in the story but the one which the one which has been on my mind lately is the technological angle. Here is a machine transported from the European culture to a place where it doesn’t belong. The officer believes in the machine as an end in itself. He has lost sight of the fact that the machine should just be the means to the end of justice. At the end to the story, the officer is killed by the machine in a semi-voluntary fashion. He would rather die than admit fault with his contraption. Technically, the story is a tragedy although, in the way that is usual for Kafka, it feels more like a horror.

Western society has been obsessed with machines for a number of centuries. Our modern world runs on machines. The machines are not just the obvious ones made out of nuts and bolts. A bureaucracy is a machine. It runs on rules. Kafka was one of the first to see that a purely “rational” organisation that runs on rules can produce horrific outcomes. The Terminator movies are about a robot becoming more like a human. But Kafka’s stories are about humans behaving like robots and the consequences that follow. That’s a far more horrific proposition.

Back in early April of 2020, I received a pamphlet from my local council in the letterbox. It had information about “covid-19”. It was stated on the pamphlet that the information was from the WHO. Somebody, probably the administrative assistant at the council, had been given the job of taking the information from the WHO and putting it on council stationery. Was the council responsible for the veracity of that information, I wondered? Do they have trained virologists or medical experts checking its accuracy? The answer, of course, is no. The information would have been passed verbatim down through the bureaucratic machine that ran through the state government, back through the federal government and all the way back to the WHO. The system, the machine, had already been set up to run in just such a scenario. All the WHO had to do was kick it into gear. There are legal agreements between governments and the WHO.  Bureaucrats are given jobs to liaise with the WHO and other bureaucrats ensure that the communication was passed along the line until eventually it reached my local council and then my letterbox; a big bureaucratic machine that spans the western nations and much of the rest of the world too.

I know how big bureaucratic machines work first hand and I have experienced the Kafkaesque nightmare that can happen when people just follow rules. I’ve seen the gentle and then not-so-gentle pressure exerted on those who question the rules. It’s especially a problem for newcomers who haven’t yet been conditioned not to use that part of the mind that is so active in young children; the part that likes to ask “why?” Fortunately for bureaucracies, the education system has normally weeded out those who like to ask why by the time they begin work. Young children go in one end of the system asking why? all the time and come out the other end never asking why? That’s a shame for them but not for the bureaucracies who need people to be efficient cogs in the machine.

Modern society is built on science and science is all about asking questions. Yet we have a society that actively discourages people from asking questions.

You’re not a doctor. Trust the experts.

People seem to think of science itself like some machine; a machine which spits out “truth” the same way another machine might pour a coffee or vacuum the carpet. In the horrific corona quarantine hotels here in Australia there were robots patrolling the corridors with little cameras attached to them in case any of the inmates got it into their head to break the rules. Meanwhile, the Premier of Victoria at one point said he had a supercomputer running the numbers and used that to justify his lockdown measures. All of this is laughable to those of us who work in science and technology but clearly a majority of the population believes it. We love our machines the way the officer in the Kafka story loved his machine. But with any machine the question has to be asked: are you controlling the machine or is the machine in controlling you? In Kafka’s story the answer was the latter and I fear that’s true of us too.

In last week’s post I talked about the difference between positive and negative freedoms, how this maps onto the left/right distinction in politics and how that distinction explains the difference in attitudes to the corona measures between Australia and the US. There is another aspect to the difference that I think explains a lot of the current political and cultural malaise that the West finds itself in. Recall that negative freedom is freedom from interference, especially by the state. Negative freedoms are simple. They are simple to encode in law and anybody can understand when they have been violated (although it’s not necessarily simple to achieve redress when they have been violated). From a political point of view, it’s also easy to know when a movement to attain negative freedom has been achieved. Three important historical examples are the civil rights movement, the suffragettes and the equal pay laws. All three were about equality before the law or, to say it another way, the granting of negative freedom to a part of the public that didn’t have it beforehand. Because negative freedom is a binary, a political movement to attain negative freedoms has a fixed goal and it is plain to see when that goal has been attained. In short, negative freedoms have an inherent objectivity. One can disagree about the application of them but not whether the law states that people have them.

The same is not true of positive freedoms. Positive freedoms are inherently more subjective. This makes it harder to get agreement on whether positive freedom exists and to what extent it exists. A useful way to draw this distinction is to compare the equal pay laws to the modern equivalent of the “gender pay gap”. The equal pay law states simply that a man and a woman must be paid the same amount for the same job. In any specific example, it’s easy to tell whether this was done. You just check the pay slips of the people involved. But the gender pay gap is different as it deals with populations of people and averages. The gender pay gap says that women earn less than men on average. As anybody who’s done Statistics 101 would know, an average calculation hides as much as it shows. To properly understand an average you first need to know whether we are talking about the mean or the median. You need to know the standard deviation around the average and you need to know whether outlier values are skewing the average. It may be, for example, that 99.95% of men and woman earn the “same pay” but a small minority of bazillionaires, who just happen to be men, throw out the calculations. Until you know that, any method to address the imbalance risks being misguided.

That’s just the start of the difficulties, however. The hidden assumption in the gender pay gap issue is that women have less positive freedom than men because they get paid less on average. Is that true? The average pay figure is the result of countless personal choices made by real people in the economy. The economy is a system so complex that an entire profession dedicated to studying it still can’t make accurate predictions about how it will behave. To paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, the purpose of economics is to make astrology look good. A person’s gross earnings are the result of all kinds of individual decisions including which field to go into, how hard they work at their job, whether they know the market value of their work and how to negotiate for their salary etc etc. Without in-depth analysis, you can’t draw any firm conclusions about why one person gets paid less than another. We can, of course, make some hypotheses. When it comes to the differences between the genders, it seems highly likely that time taken off from work to raise children is going to be the main variable that accounts for why women earn less on average. One might argue that woman are choosing to take that time off work because they value raising children more than working. A counter argument could be that woman only do that because child care is too expensive and it doesn’t make financial sense to do so. Either is plausible. We’d need more research to find out for sure and we’d probably find that both of these things are true. Some women would raise their children themselves no matter how cheap childcare was and some women would prefer to work. These kinds of issues are intrinsic to systems and, by extension, to debates about positive freedoms. The only way to understand a system is to turn it around and look at it from multiple perspectives. As positive freedom is almost always about systems, it follows that issues around positive freedom require such analysis. Simply reducing a whole system down to a single calculation is naïve at best.

Of course, issues like the gender pay gap get forced onto the procrustean bed of politics where catchy slogans and simplistic solutions are all that can fit into the limited bandwidth of public discourse. No doubt the limitations of political debate do play a role in the oversimplification of complex issues but the problem is deeper than that. I have spoken a number of times about systems in other blog posts with particular reference to the systems thinking and cybernetics movements of the 20^th century. The fact is that humans are really bad at understanding systems and even worse at building them. The systems that we rely on in day-to-day life were not designed and then implemented by wise philosopher kings. Rather, they are the results of centuries or even millennia of trial and error. Look at the history of any successful company (a company is also a system) and it’s almost guaranteed that the company also went through a period of experimentation in its early days. The founders thought they had a great idea in market A but accidentally stumbled onto a goldmine in market B. I have worked in building IT systems from scratch for more than a decade now. I can say from experience that most people have no idea what they are doing and most things that get produced are of no value. This isn’t an indictment of the people involved. Building systems is hard. The failures are also not necessarily a problem if you assume that each project is itself just an experiment which you can learn from. The problem is that learning very rarely does take place. Rather, corporations and government shovel money into various projects and hope that something good results. Politicians and upper managers in corporations are expert at taking credit for things that look to be working and backing away from things that are visibly failing. The organisational structures of bureaucracy and the public service are set up to ensure that nobody must take responsibility. Most projects are structured in such a way that nobody knows how to understand the outcome because there are no criteria to do so. I’ve been in some funny meetings where the question of “defining success” was talked about and nobody knew or wanted to know how to define it. If you define success, then you also define failure and that is what everybody is trying to avoid more than anything. Accordingly, in large corporations and political parties, trying to determine whether a change to a system produced any tangible benefit is nigh on impossible. Systems are already hard enough to understand but when you add in human psychological and political considerations the task becomes insurmountable.

Which brings us back to positive freedoms which inevitably require changes to systems. Even assuming you have a grasp on an issue in a multi-dimensional manner, you are altering a system and so you need to know whether your changes had a benefit and what, if any, unforeseen side effects were caused by the change. The testing of the system is often as much work as the changes to the system itself. One of the key insights of the systems thinking pioneers was that natural, inherently complex systems cannot be understood by reductionist science. Rather, they can only be understood by applying multiple perspectives in a heuristic fashion. Heuristics are fallible, incomplete but useful ways to view a system. The problem from both a scientific and political point of view is who gets to decide which heuristics really are valuable and which are not? If you aim to consciously change a system and then measure the results, you can apply your own heuristics to gauge the effect or you can open channels for feedback. The former option risks missing important types of data about the system and the latter usually sees you receiving a barrage of unintelligible information; noise. At this point we get into the problems of information and testability which are a big driver of why we don’t test the changes made to systems. Testing costs time and resources. The choice to only measure one or two things is a psychological, economic and political one. All these drivers lead to oversimplification and, therefore, misunderstanding of the system. A political movement to enhance positive freedom faces all these challenges in amplified form because politics is as much about being seen to do something good as actually doing something good. Furthermore, changes to systems often have side effects and the side effects might just be voters who resent the fact that they have been disadvantaged by a change. What this boils down to is that the work required to enhance positive freedom is far more complex than the work required to enhance negative freedom and the results of such work are going to be far more ambiguous, which is itself a political problem.

The way to approach systems is to construct cross functional teams, start small, make iterative changes and ensure you set up feedback loops with the real world. You need to set aside time and resources to learn. This means you will need periods of evaluating what has been done rather than doing more. You need to be prepared to admit failure but also able to change tack if an opportunity arises that was not foreseen at the beginning. These are all things that corporations and governments are incapable of doing. The feedback loops they adhere to are the long and imprecise ones of opinion polls, elections, profit and loss reports and annual general meetings. Governments get thrown out of office and companies declare bankruptcy while the systemic effects of decisions made along the way are never known. In the domain of politics, movements to enhance positive freedom mostly fail or at least aren’t seen to be successes. This in itself causes frustration especially given our culture’s innate desire to “progress”. That frustration itself builds pressure to do more. Accordingly, positive freedom has morphed into authoritarianism as the bureaucracy does the only thing it knows how which is to force changes onto the world rather than set up a symbiotic relationship where learning and adaptation is possible. In recent decades, we have run into the problems of systems and we still don’t have the culture or the organisational structures in places to deal with systems properly. Who would increase positive freedom must first learn how to work with systems.

Addendum: Just came across this fascinating post on the supply chain problems in the US. It’s indicative of where we are as a society that a real systemic problem, which I would have thought is an existential threat if allowed to continue, goes unsolved while the news is full of faux-moral issues.

In recent months a number of high-profile Republicans and right-leaning media in the US have been using the ongoing corona repression in Australia to try to advance their domestic political agenda. The trend hit an interesting inflection point last week when Texas Senator Ted Cruz picked up on an announcement by the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory that certain workers needed to get vaccinated or they would be forbidden from working. Such a scheme had already been rolled out in other states of Australia. The reason behind it was that a national committee had made a decision that 80% of adults in Australia had to be vaccinated before the state governments would relinquish their iron grip on life in this country and we could open borders and return to some kind of normality. That agreement was made back in the middle of the year when it was still possible to pretend that the vaccines might end things. The problem was that there was no way Australia was going to get to an 80% vax rate voluntarily and so state governments had to turn to coercion. In the Northern Territory, for logistical and cultural reasons, I suspect there was going to be extra difficulty in achieving the 80% number and so the leaders saw fit to go beyond the coercion of threatening to destroy people’s livelihoods and added fines to the mix. As a publicity stunt, it worked a treat and even became global news, hence the Ted Cruz tweet. The Chief Minister of NT, no doubt delighted to have received his fifteen minutes of international fame, decided to answer Ted Cruz’s tweet by pointing out how nobody had died of covid in NT while some tens of thousands had died in Cruz’s home state of Texas. I have noted in past posts on corona that pride goeth before a fall. I would not be surprised to see the Chief Minister eating his words once the borders of the Northern Territory open. However, there was another aspect of the exchange that was interesting; the age-old issue of freedom. Cruz chastised Australia for not standing up for freedom but he was implying a specific type of freedom, the one that is dominant in the US but not in Australia. This difference existed prior to corona but has now been thrown into sharp relief and it’s worth exploring that difference in more detail.

The first thing that needs to be said is that Australia is not what most Americans think it is. Ted Cruz said in his tweet that we are the “Texas of the Pacific” and are known for our “rugged independence”. As I pointed out in an earlier post, this is simply not true. It is nothing more than a stereotype that Americans have of Australians; the Crocodile Dundee trope. It was no coincidence that at the recent AUKUS announcement there was a big picture of Crocodile Dundee sitting behind Joe Biden. That’s still what Americans think of when they think of Australia. This caricature is popular in America not because it represents Australia but because it represents America. The lone rider, the rugged individualist is an American myth. The closest we have in Australia is Ned Kelly. It’s true that Ned Kelly was a rugged individualist. It’s also true that we hanged him. You can see why that story wouldn’t resonate in America. Australia is culturally more collectivist than the US and this collectivism places us politically far to the left of America. We’re more California than California. As the subject of “freedom” is one of the main differences between right and left in political theory, it’s no surprise that Australia has a different default position on freedom than the US. Australia’s covid response is what it is because our notion of freedom is different from Ted Cruz’s.

A useful way to understand this difference is the one outlined by political philosopher Isaiah Berlin: negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is the one Americans believe in. It is hard-coded into US history and culture. It is freedom from external interference especially interference by government. This is the kind of freedom most often associated with libertarianism, liberalism or the right of politics. Positive freedom is more complicated but can be thought of as freedom to do something. It’s the freedom to become your best self. Positive freedom has both a more psychological and social dimension. It’s not enough just to be left alone to do what you want. Positive freedom is about having the means to achieve something worthwhile. The person left alone to drink themselves to death in a gutter has negative freedom but an advocate for positive freedom would say it would be better if somebody intervened and put that person on the right track. That works ok in extreme cases like alcoholism but can be taken too far. One of the problems the Marxists always had was that there was a group of proles who just couldn’t be made to see the “truth”. This gave rise to the phrase “false consciousness”; the consciousness of a person who cannot see what is right for them and therefore needs to be taught. This in turn gave rise to the phrase re-education at which point positive freedom crossed the line into positive authoritarianism.

Using these broad concepts of positive and negative freedom, we can say that Americans’ default version of freedom is negative freedom and Australians’ default version of freedom is positive freedom. The difference here is really quite stark. Bernie Sanders, for example, would be considered a right wing politician in Australia. Thus, in some sense, corona is forcing Americans to see Australia for what it really is; not filtered through the lens of some Hollywood movie. It’s no surprise that Republicans would have a particular problem with this because corona represents a big shift to the left in US society. The vaccine mandates are run under the banner of positive freedom and supported most enthusiastically by the left. The problem for Republicans is that the corona event is as much caused by the faults of negative freedom as positive. It was the laissez faire policies of the Republicans in the 1980s among other things which have led to the current situation. To understand why, we need to take one example of positive freedom which is the protection of the commons the flip side of which is the well-known concept the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons occurs when individuals pursue their own self interest in a way that negatively impacts the collective. One example could be somebody starting a business selling fish. Without any restriction on their activity, they might fish a particular species of fish to extinction or exhaust a local fishing ground. That person has made short term profit from the fish but in doing so destroyed the underlying source of wealth meaning that other members of the community present and future have no access to it. Even the most hardened advocate for negative freedom would allow that the individual’s freedom should be curtailed in such an example. The commons need to be protected; a job usually, but not necessarily, given over to government.

Modern American society is, in my opinion, rife with examples of the commons not being protected. One of the ways this manifests is in the presence of various economic rackets of which big pharma is a prime example. Other examples are the higher education racket which is tied in with the student loan racket. Big Tech is increasingly a racket too. Rackets are what happens when the free market (a commons) is not protected and monopolistic players are allowed to obtain enormous power which they then use to serve their own interests and not the interests of society in general. Such rackets are everywhere in modern US society and it is the outsized influence of Big Pharma which has led directly to the corona event. That would normally be a problem of what you might call excessive negative freedom but, interestingly, corona represents a peculiar combined form of the worst elements of negative and positive freedom which has become dominant in the US in the last couple of decades. In the economic sphere, corporations are given the negative freedom to do as they please by lobbying the government for legislation that benefits themselves at the expense of the general good. Meanwhile, those same corporations, in league with the media and the universities, run a version of ideological warfare under the guise of positive freedom. The vaccine mandates are the most extreme form of this dynamic we have seen so far. They are so extreme because they don’t even deliver the ostensible positive freedom benefit of protection from disease while the suppression of alternative therapeutics can only be explained by the entrenched graft in the medical industry. No surprise, of course, that this should happen during the Trump presidency. Whatever else you can say about Trump, his platform was squarely aimed at combating this status quo dynamic. Thus, he was as much a threat to the Republican party as the Democrat. He took aim at both the excessive negative economic freedom given to corporations as well as the ostensible positive freedom pursued by the elite institutions.

Meanwhile, Australia has experienced the same lurch to the left of all western nations during corona. The problem is, we were already so far left that this lurch has landed us smack bang in the middle of good old-fashioned authoritarianism with the crushing of dissent, conformity and group think that this always entails. This tendency is always there wherever there is a bias for positive freedom and has always been a problem in Australian culture. The reason that Australians have not pushed back to the authoritarianism is partly because we believe in positive freedom by default. To the average person, corona represents a straightforward extension of positive freedom with the vaccines protecting the commons. It’s also true that the positive freedom bias has worked for Australia for some time. Australian society is far more stable than American society. There is far less poverty, less inequality and less crime. There is also far less political corruption. The blatant hypocrisy which is par for the course in American politics doesn’t exist here and thus, while Australians pretend to be cynical about politics, we have a trust in government that Americans simply don’t have. That trust may be about to be severely tested. Corona has revealed the weakness of the positive freedom bias. It turns out that you can protect the commons so much that you destroy the commons. Our response to corona has done enormous damage, most of which is not yet visible. The question is what happens when it becomes visible. Already, we are trying to act like the whole thing is a big success. This self-congratulatory tendency is also very strong in our culture. David Horne criticised it directly in his book The Lucky Country. Unless things get really bad, I expect that politicians will do whatever it takes to protect that idea. If so, we would chalk it up to the success of positive freedom. The commons were protected, lives were saved. That’s exactly what the Chief Minister of NT said in his response to Ted Cruz. We’re not like you, he said to Cruz. He’s right about that.