Category: Ideas

In my book, The Devouring Mother, I noted that one of the main properties of that archetype is what is called enabling. Enabling is the tacit or active encouragement of behaviours that are destructive to the individual being enabled. Enabling can only be carried out by a person in a position of authority, such as a parent, because the assumption is that the authority should be preventing said behaviour, not encouraging it. A classic example is drug use. A parent who either directly facilitates or tacitly allows drug use by their child is engaging in enabling behaviour. Most people would agree they are harming the child they should be caring for.

We can extrapolate the Devouring Mother archetype to the societal level precisely because every society has groups of people who are in positions of authority relative to the general public. We even sometimes call those groups “the authorities.” Just like with parents, we expect the authorities to act in the interests of the general public and not to encourage the general public to engage in harmful behaviour.

Modern western society has a peculiar blind spot in this respect because, even though we have a dazzling array of authorities, far more than any other society in history, we also have democracy, and we tell ourselves that this gives us freedom. However, even if we believe that democracy removes us from government authority, it’s still a fact that many of the authorities that exist today are outside of government control in a practical sense. Their authority over us exists above and beyond politics.

The scientific establishment is a classic example. In theory, the government can regulate science and technology. In practice, the government doffs its cap and tugs the forelock to institutional science. How many times have you heard a politician say, “I’m just following the science”.

What this means is that institutional science has authority. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that science, and especially medicine, have become major practitioners of enabling behaviour at the societal level and key planks in the overall archetypal dynamic that I have been calling the Devouring Mother.

But authority is only one of the prerequisites for enabling behaviour. In fact, there are three pillars of enabling behaviour at the societal level in the modern West.

Pillar 1 is the one just discussed: the authority of one individual or group over others.

Pillar 2 is the aforementioned notion of “freedom” that has become the foundational myth of the modern West since the United States became hegemon. This is the freedom of the individual from the authority of government.

Pillar 3 also arrived with US hegemony: consumer capitalism.

Now that we know what the three pillars are, let’s look at some examples of the societal-level enabling that is going on these days.

Example 1: the encouragement of addiction

Remember that enabling is about encouraging behaviour that is harmful to the person doing it. We know that most things in life are harmful when carried out in excess. We also know that there are certain activities that are more likely to be carried out to excess because they are addictive. Among these are pornography, drugs, alcohol, and gambling. To encourage people to partake of these activities is therefore a form of enabling behaviour.

But this is precisely what most western societies have done in recent decades. We live in a time of unlimited porn, instantaneous online gambling, and the increasing legalisation or decriminalisation of drugs. All of this is indicative of enabling behaviour, and if we drill down further, we see that the three pillars outlined above are all present.

Pillar 3, consumer capitalism, is the most obvious since somebody is making a lot of money out of selling online porn, gambling and drugs. The government itself takes a cut of that money via tax and so the government is arguably also included in Pillar 3.

Pillar 2 is about freedom. When it comes to porn, gambling, and drugs, it is always the libertarians who are ready to jump out of the bushes and tell you that people should be “free” to do these things since they don’t hurt anybody else. That may be true, but enabling is about the damage done to the person being enabled. Thus, the question resolves down to whether we think society should allow individuals to harm themselves through addiction.

Everybody will have different opinions on this, but I think it should be uncontroversial that some individuals do, in fact, harm themselves with drugs and gambling at least (the consequences of porn are less obvious). I personally know several people in that category, and I’m sure most readers would too.

Does the allowing of porn, gamling and drugs count as enabling behaviour or is it just the necessary price of “freedom” as the libertarians would say?

To my mind, the libertarian position was valid three hundred years ago precisely because modern consumer capitalism did not exist at that time. Wanna smoke pot in 1750? You’ll have to grow it yourself or find a friend who does. Wanna gamble or watch porn? You’ll have to take the time, trouble, and risk of going to a place of ill repute. In a world without consumer capitalism, it was really difficult for the average person to consume things to excess. That’s why most of the stories of debauchery from that era come from the aristocracy, who had the time and money to spare.

Modern consumer capitalism has elevated society in general to a level of wealth where we can now also destroy ourselves through excess. In fact, consumer capitalism makes it really, really easy to do so. Once you make porn, gambling, and drugs legal, companies will compete against each other to make those things as easy as possible to consume. The most successful companies will be the ones who make it the easiest. In fact, it is in those companies’ interest to create addicts.

Thus, in relation to porn, gambling, and drugs, it’s the combination of libertarian politics (Pillar 2) and consumer capitalism (Pillar 3) that creates enabling behaviour at the societal level. All that is required is for the government to relinquish its authority (Pillar 1) in favour of the free market. This is a passive form of enabling.

Note that passive enabling is predicated on allowing predatory behaviour to occur. If a drug dealer is hanging around a drug addict all the time, asking if they want to buy drugs, that doesn’t count as enabling behaviour because the drug dealer has no authority over or duty of care towards the addict (at least not legally). The drug dealer is engaging in predatory behaviour. However, the person who has a duty of care but allows predatory behaviour to occur is an enabler. One could argue that the government has become a passive enabler by allowing corporations to engage in predatory behaviour towards the general public.

Example 2: human trafficking

The same assertion can be made about a second form of enabling behaviour going on these days: the massive movement of people into western nations. This is especially stark in the United States with the huge influx of illegal immigrants that is going on. This form of enabling fits better with the Devouring Mother archetype since it comes under the guise of care and/or safety. The people arriving in the US must claim asylum, meaning they ask to be taken into the care of the US government.

Governments have authority over and a duty of care to their citizens. The idea that governments also have a duty of care to non-citizens was born out of the abuses of governments towards non-citizens that happened in the 20^th century in Europe. This gives us Pillar 2 of enabling since everybody now has the “freedom” to claim asylum in a neutral country.

Pillar 3 is also clearly present. You don’t have to scratch the surface too much to see that enormous amounts of money are changing hands in relation to the movements of people that are going on. Much of that money is, in fact, coming from governments themselves, either directly or indirectly. But there are certainly a great many “entrepreneurs” who are earning that money by facilitating the trade.

Once again, the pattern we see is that the official authority of government (Pillar 1) is being bypassed or relinquished in the name of the freedom (Pillar 2) of people to claim asylum, with a great deal of money (Pillar 3) changing hands. All three elements of enabling behaviour are present.

On the surface, this might not seem like enabling behaviour since asylum seekers are being “protected” rather than harmed. But it is surely the case that at least some of the people being trafficked are being harmed by the incredibly risky journey they must take at the end of which they receive zero certainty about their status in the country they arrive in. Given that their journey is predicated on the deliberate removal of government authority, they must face the constant threat of deportation if the political winds change in the future and Pillar 1 is re-established.

Example 3: the medical-pharma industries

There are other examples of enabling behaviour we could go into, but the one I want to spend the rest of the post on is the one that got me thinking about this issue again, and that’s the enabling behaviour specific to the modern medical industry. Here, once again, we have the classic form of Devouring Mother enabling done under the guise of “protection” and “care”, which means authority (Pillar 1). We also know that enormous amounts of money are made in the modern medical industry (Pillar 3). Less obvious, and therefore most interesting, is the role that Pillar 2 (freedom) plays. As we will see, modern medical enabling is done in the name of freedom.

Now, I’m not quite old enough to have experienced the AIDS hysteria in full flight, but I did grow up in the world that followed that hysteria. I’d never questioned the official narrative until the COVID debacle made me realise how weak the science of virology is, and that got me looking back to AIDS, which was, in most respects, a practice run for COVID.

Bear in mind that Duesberg was himself a virologist, and his initial argument against the HIV-causes-AIDS hypothesis was a technical one aimed at his colleagues. What began as the honest questioning of the science around the HIV virus ended up with Duesberg’s career being systematically destroyed by the virology establishment. That’s why the story of Duesberg is a perfect example of the corruption of institutional science these days.

What Duesberg had realised was that the so-called disease of “AIDS” never behaved as if it were caused by a virus. One of the main pieces of evidence for that was that over 90% of AIDS patients were men. As Duesberg looked into it more, he realised that it wasn’t just that AIDS sufferers were men; they were a very specific demographic of men, namely, homosexual men.

Nowadays, we are used to the idea of homosexual couples living in the suburbs and holding down respectable careers. But in the late 70s and 80s, the homosexual culture was dominated by a lifestyle that could only be called sex, drugs, and disco. Much like rock’n’roll, it was a lifestyle that could only ever be lived by young men because any other demographic would be physiologically incapable of continuing it for any length of time. Imagine taking multiple different drugs, spending an entire night drinking, dancing and having sex with multiple strangers, taking more drugs to be able to go to sleep, and then getting up and doing it again the next day and the day after that.

What Duesberg realised was that the disease profile for “AIDS” did not match the pattern that would be expected for a viral disease but absolutely did match the profile for a lifestyle disease based around endless partying, casual sex, and heavy drug use. (He also made a number of technical arguments outlining problems with the specific association of the HIV virus with “AIDS”.)

Pillar 3 of enabling is about money. Well, hundreds of billions of dollars have been pumped into the virology and medical industries to combat the AIDS “crisis”. To put that into context, about as much has been spent on AIDS as on the Apollo space program. The big difference, of course, is that the Apollo space program actually achieved its mission, while the AIDS program was a complete failure. This explains why Duesberg was targeted. He was threatening to kill the goose that laid the golden egg and he was pointing out quite specifically why the AIDS program was failing: it wasn’t addressing the actual problem.

We can also see with AIDS that the authority of the government (Pillar 1) was once again handed over, this time to the authority of the “experts.” Then, as now, the scientific and medical establishments were blindly trusted by the general public, even despite the obvious failure of the AIDS program. Because of this, politicians faced no political consequences for continuing to fork over taxpayer money and leave the “experts” to take care of it.

That gives us Pillars 1 and 3. But it’s arguably Pillar 2 (freedom) that is the most interesting here because what Duesberg’s theory about the real cause of AIDS highlighted was that it was a lifestyle problem. But it was a lifestyle that was the direct result of the freedom movement of the 60s. That freedom movement had already given rise to sex, drugs, rock’n’roll. The homosexual lifestyle of the 70s and 80s was arguably just a more extreme version of what the hippies had already dabbled with.

Because the freedom to be homosexual was tied up with the more general freedom movement of the time, nobody wanted to admit that “AIDS” could be the result of that freedom. Especially in the United States, to acknowledge that would have provided ample political ammunition for the Christian conservatives. Having fought so hard for freedom, nobody wanted to admit that it could have downsides. Almost certainly, this played a major role in why nobody wanted to hear Duesberg’s arguments.

When we put all this together, what we see with the AIDS hysteria is that the scientific and medical establishments had actually become part of an enabling dynamic that encouraged a harmful lifestyle choice. This enabling went beyond purely passive forms. As Duesberg noted, doctors were providing antibiotics to gay men under the table. Many gay men were taking antibiotics on a daily basis to fend off the bacterial diseases arising from their sexual practices.

When used for short periods of time, antibiotics help to eliminate a specific pathogen. However, they also kill healthy bacteria, and so long-term daily use is harmful because it throws out the balance of the microbiome. Thus, the prescription of antibiotics by the medical industry was harmful in itself and also indirectly harmful by enabling a destructive lifestyle. That’s true even before we get into the sordid story of the prescription of AZT and other harmful pharmaceuticals prescribed as treatment for so-called “AIDS”.

When we stand back from all this, what we can see is that the medical industry was implicitly promising to “protect” the men who were engaging in a destructive lifestyle. We might go further and say they were trying to protect those men from the consequences of their actions. That is a fake kind of “freedom” (Pillar 2) that involves putting your trust in an authority (Pillar 1) which is financially incentivised (Pillar 3) to keep you dependent. Nobody sees it, of course, because the government is not involved and, in the United States, freedom is always freedom from government.

AIDS might have been the first example of this pattern of enabling, but it has not been the last. We saw a repetition with the COVID hysteria. We also see it in the trans issue as it has evolved in recent years. Just as homosexual men had to be “free” to live as they wanted, now we are told that children and teenagers must be “free” to choose their own sex. The extreme homosexual lifestyle was only ever possible with a variety of licit and illicit drugs. The same is true of the trans lifestyle choice which is fundamentally predicated on surgical and pharmaceutical interventions. Once more, we can see that this ticks all the boxes for enabling behaviour.

Pillar 1 is about authority, and here we see not just the authority of the scientific and medical industries but also the authority of teachers and other school staff who are pushing the trans ideology. Since this authority is in direct conflict with the authority of parents, the trans battle increasingly revolves around who has the right of authority over the child.

Pillar 3 of enabling—money—is also present in the trans issue, not just in the medical industry revenue from the various surgical interventions, not just in the pharmaceutical industry revenue from puberty blockers and hormonal treatments, but perhaps more importantly, in the army of teachers, administrative, and psychological workers whose jobs rely on their being something to counsel children and teenagers about. We shouldn’t underestimate the lengths people will go to ensure they have a reason to justify their paycheque.

Finally, we have Pillar 2: freedom.

With the AIDS issue, the freedom was that of consenting adults to have sex with whoever they chose. Since homosexuality has been around since time immemorial, this request is something with a long and understandable history to it. The freedom proposed by trans ideology, however, is a very different thing that has perhaps no historical precedent. It is a “freedom” entirely predicated on the ability of modern science and medicine to surgically and pharmaceutically manipulate sex characteristics. Therefore, it is a freedom that could never have been offered before. It’s also a freedom that can only ever be offered by “experts” with the authority implied by the title.

All of which is to say that the trans issue is a classic case of enabling behaviour with the same cluster of elements that gave us the AIDS and Corona hysterias.

Conclusion

What’s particularly interesting is how all three pillars of enabling map to different default political ideologies. The second pillar of “freedom” is primarily associated with libertarianism. The third pillar, capitalism, is supported by the right side of modern politics. The first pillar, the authority of the state, is mostly associated with the left wing.

Thus enabling, and the Devouring Mother phenomenon more generally, do not fit neatly into any modern political category. That’s why no political party has an answer to it. The right wing is coming closest, but its obsession with the “free market” and money (Pillar 3) means that it can’t object too hard. Meanwhile, left wingers will eagerly jump on board issues that earn enormous sums of money for multi-national corporations as long as “freedom” is promised in return.

Enabling is, in fact, a manifestation of the status quo of the modern West. That status quo combines the free market, individual freedom, and administrative and scientific authority. All of this is predicated on the refutation of the authority of government. Enabling requires the deliberate deprecation of (national democratic) governmental authority in favour of the market, the bureaucracy and the various globalist institutions. The winners, at least from a financial and political point of view, are the capitalists, the bureaucrats and the experts. The losers are pretty much everybody else.

Note: after the attempted shooting today, I considered removing this post as it may seem to be in poor taste given the seriousness of what has occurred. I’ve decided to leave it up but want to add the disclaimer that I had already made within the post which is that the narrative heuristic is just that, a heuristic: a fallible and partial model of reality.

Mostly on this blog I tend to talk about historical matters rather than current ones. But the recent US presidential debate and its aftermath reminded me of an idea I’ve mentioned before but have never fully fleshed out. It’s the notion that the Trump presidency, when viewed as a narrative or Hero’s Journey, is a comedy. That was true of Trump’s original victory and now it seems to be happening again, albeit with an interesting variation. In this post, I’ll sketch out what that means.

The big qualifier we should begin with here is simply to note that analysing events as a narrative, story or Hero’s Journey is only one perspective on the world. We can call it the narrative heuristic. A heuristic differs from a “solution” in that it is a potentially fallible way to get to an answer. Multiple heuristics can lead to the same answer or they can contradict each other. Heuristics are not right/wrong but useful/not useful. Thus, I am not suggesting that the narrative heuristic leads to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but is just one way of understanding. Having said that, it is quite fascinating how many things in life do seem to fall neatly in narrative form as if they were so determined. Stories might be much more important and fundamental than we think.

Stories almost always feature a hero (the protagonist) and a villain (the antagonist). Thus, we can extend the definition of Comedy to say that it is a story in which the hero defeats the villain. This encompasses stories where the villain is just as capable as the hero. Think of Sherlock Holmes vs Moriarty, Batman vs the Joker or Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader. Those stories are not funny, but they are technically Comedies because the hero wins.

Since Comedy is any story where the hero wins, we need another word for stories which are funny. Let’s use Humour to denote a story designed to provoke mirth. Humour is a subset of Comedy, since the hero also wins in a Humour story. What differentiates Humour from Comedy is that the hero in a Comedy is supposed to win while the hero of a Humour story is not supposed to win. It is precisely this which generates the laughs.

This leads to another important property that separates a Comedy story from a Humour story and that is the archetype of the hero. In a Comedy, the hero can be any archetype. Sherlock Holmes is the Sage, Batman is the Warrior and Luke Skywalker is a combination of the two. As long as the hero wins, it doesn’t matter what archetype they manifest. What’s more, the hero of a Comedy wins because they are really good at what they do. Sherlock Holmes wins by his intellect. Batman wins by his determination. The hero of a comedy is victorious through virtue.

(Note: technically, every hero is always partly a Fool since every Hero’s Journey requires a step into the unknown and we are, by definition, ignorant of the unknown).

So, we know that the hero of a Humour story is a Fool and we know that the story requires the hero to defeat a villain. This sets up one of the main tropes of a Humour story: because the hero is a Fool, the villain is the one who should win. Every Humour story must find a way to resolve the problem of how the Fool defeats somebody superior to them.

One of the main ways to do it is to make the villain just as incompetent and dumb as the Fool. This is the tactic of one of my favourite genres which is the stoner comedy. The original stoner comedy is Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke. The heroes of the story are two dropouts who spend the entire movie either getting high or trying to get high. These are not people who should win on a logical or rational level (whether they should win in a moral sense depends on your own worldview).

There’s one other way to resolve the problem of how the Fool wins in a Humour story and it’s worth mentioning since it more closely resembles the Trump narrative arc.

In P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves series of books, the hero of the story is Bertie Wooster who is an English aristocrat from around the beginning of the 20^th century. Bertie belongs to what was arguably the most privileged demographic in the world at that time. He should, therefore, be a winner. The problem is that Bertie is a moron (note that the Fool archetype is very often represented literally). If it was just Bertie by himself, he would lose. But Bertie has his trusty butler, Jeeves, to help him. Jeeves finds a way not just to ensure that Bertie wins but, more importantly, to make Bertie believe he has won through his own actions.

From the viewpoint of Bertie Wooster, however, the story is a Humour since Bertie is a Fool who blunders his way to victory in much the same fashion that Don Quixote and Cheech and Chong do. Once again, we see that the difference between Comedy and Humour depends on the archetype of the hero.

Okay. Now we know the difference between the two story types. How does all of this apply to the story of the Trump presidency? Well, as it turns out, the combination of Comedy and Humour that Wodehouse achieved with the Jeeves stories is directly applicable to the Trump presidency. The difference rests on whether you think Trump is Jeeves or whether he’s Bertie. Is he a Fool or a capable and clever player?

Since Trump became president by winning an election campaign, the story is a Comedy in the technical sense of the term. It’s interesting to note that democracy provides us with a Comedy in a way that other systems of government do not. This follows from the simple fact that democracy provides a way for somebody to win and somebody to lose. You don’t win a kingship, you are born into it. That’s why stories about kings and queens revolve around the concepts of tragedy and fate. By contrast, democracy is inherently Fool-ish, and that’s how most traditionalists view it.

The modern party system has, nevertheless, removed most Fool-ishness from democracy and created a level of predictability based on certain unspoken rules of the game. Remember that a Comedy features a competent hero who should win. For all of the presidents prior to Trump, at least in recent memory, their victories were all standard Comedies featuring people who went through the normal process. Even if you didn’t like the politics or personality of Obama, Bush or Clinton, you probably still accepted that they were competent at the game of politics and their victory made sense at that level.

This was never true for Trump and the main reason is because Trump never belonged to the party system. His victory could never be a standard Comedy because that would have required him to be a proven capable player of the game. Trump did not fulfil the archetype of the Politician. Rather, his archetype was the Businessman.

A mismatch between archetypes does not belong to the Comedy story but it most definitely belongs to the Humour story. A big part of what makes the Fool a fool is that he or she is trying to take on an archetypal role to which they don’t belong. Don Quixote is a middle-aged member of the lower nobility who decides to go off and become a knight. He is trying to change archetypes and become the Warrior.

Since Trump was trying to make the change from Businessman to Politician archetype, the story of his presidency was a Humour story from the very beginning. Rather than deny that fact, Trump embraced it. He came out and said one outrageous thing after another and generally refused to behave in a way that is appropriate for a modern Politician archetype. Thus, Trump embraced the Humour story reading. He owned the fact that he was playing the Fool.

Where the story takes a funny twist is that everybody else was happy to characterise Trump as a Fool too. Why wouldn’t they? Trump was auditioning for what is supposed to be the most powerful role in the world – the US President. There’s no way a Fool should be able to get that role. If the story was a Comedy, Trump would have to lose. But the story was a Humour story and the whole point of the Humour story is that the hero will win even though they are not supposed to.

Trump’s opponents then became the villains in a Humour story. They were supposed to win. They had all of the experience, institutional connections and archetypal resonance on their side and they were up against a guy who didn’t even pretend to play the game as it should be played. They were supposed to win, but they didn’t. That’s how Humour stories work.

Remember, again, that a common trope in the Humour story is that the villains are just as dumb as the hero and it’s their bumbling which allows the hero to win. It’s this trope that got me thinking about Trump again in recent weeks because the fallout from the recent presidential debate is evidence that the arc of the story is yet again turning back to Humor. Trump’s opponents are yet again blundering in ways that help Trump to win.

The way Trump won the presidency the first time around was by making sure that every single bit of attention was focused on himself. His outrageous behaviour ensured that the media had to cover him pretty much every day of the week. In addition, he used social media, Twitter in particular, to great effect. He continued to use these tactics during his presidency.

It took his opponents about five years to figure out his secret and to change their tactics to try and shut him up. With defeat in 2020, Trump was no longer going to be president anymore and he could easily be cut off from official channels. But there was still the problem of social media. They solved that by having him kicked off all the social media platforms. The powers-that-be seemed to have won the day and wrestled back control of the narrative from the man who had stolen it from them.

Fast forward to the recent presidential debate against Biden. Everything in the debate had been rigged against Trump, including the ability for the moderators to mute his microphone thus ensuring he couldn’t do his usual trick of hijacking the narrative. So blatant was the rigging that a number of pro-Trump commentators were saying Trump was a fool (there’s that word again) to accept the conditions. He should have refused to attend, they said. That makes logical sense, but remember that a Humour story does not need to make logical or rational sense. In fact, it works better if it doesn’t make logical sense.

We know what happened next. With Trump’s microphone muted, there was nobody to turn the whole thing into a shouting match. This meant that Joe Biden needed to be able to speak clearly, coherently and confidently all by himself. And that’s exactly what he failed do. A debate which had been rigged to negate Trump’s “strengths” had in fact revealed Biden’s weaknesses. This inversion of expectations is exactly what makes a Humour story funny. The media had finally won back control of the narrative from Trump but their carefully constructed story fell apart before our very eyes.

So it seems we’re seeing a re-run of the Humour story that played out during the first Trump presidency only now the details of the story are almost completely inverted. The first time around, Trump won by ensuring that all the attention was on himself. This time, Trump doesn’t have to do a single thing. He can just sit back and watch his opponents implode. All of this looks like a beat-perfect Humour story where the hero’s opponents hold all of the cards and yet somehow still lose through their own incompetence.

This raises the question: is Trump doing it on purpose? Did he accept what looked to be a rigged debate against him knowing that Biden was likely to fail? It’s possible and this brings us back to the difference between a Comedy reading and a Humour reading.

The Humour reading tells us that Trump is a Fool who somehow keeps blundering his way into becoming the president of the United States. The Comedy reading tells us that Trump is playing “4D chess” as he skilfully manipulates his opponents on the way to victory. He wins not because of luck but because of competency. Not that these two readings can both be partially true and, in any case, there’s always an element of the Fool in any genuine Hero’s Journey.

Another advantage of the narrative heuristic is that it allows us to think about the other side of the story: the villains. Trump may or may not be a Fool, but what does it say about his opponents that they keep losing despite having all the advantages on their side?

The US political system, and the political systems of most western nations, have removed all Fool-ishness in line with the globalist agenda to subvert democracy. Since democracy is a Comedy, it implies Fool-ishness .The globalists, and their supporters among the general public, think of themselves as being above all that. Democracy is for idiots. Ergo, Trump is an idiot and so are his supporters. It’s precisely that attitude that turns the story from Comedy into Humour.

It’s an interesting fact of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels that they were written at a time when the British Empire and the aristocracy who represented it had become decadent. Bertie Wooster was the outward representative of that empire, but it was Jeeves, the behind-the-scenes man, who kept the show running. That’s actually a very good representation of how the British system worked. It was very much the mandarins that held it together.

It’s arguable that the US empire has worked on much the same dynamic. I would argue, however, that the US empire has been run far more on propaganda than the British Empire ever was. That’s the reason why there is such an obsession with narratives. It’s also why Trump frightened the hell out of the powers-that-be since he smashed up their carefully-constructed stories. The British Empire was run by Jeeves-like mandarins. The US Empire has been run by propagandists.

That’s why the recent presidential debate was so catastrophic since it imploded the story that had been constructed by the propagandists. Previously, they had been able to blame Trump for such destruction. This time, there was nobody to blame but themselves and they’ve been arguing amongst themselves ever since. The puppet masters have become entangled in their own webs. Sometimes in a Comedy, all you need is a hero who’s either brave or stupid enough to poke the dragon for the façade of power to crumble. That seems to be where we are at right now.

There’s one more concept of Wilber’s that I’d like to discuss in this series of posts, and it’s one that was central to the analysis in my book, The Universal State of America. In that book, I’d characterised the modern European (Faustian) civilisation as being Esoteric in nature as opposed to the Exoteric civilisation of the Classical world. Within Wilber’s four quadrants, this maps to the difference between Interior and Exterior and, since we are talking about collectives, to the lower-left and lower-right quadrants.

Wilber seems to have come across the same idea as I did. He distinguished between social holons, which are always tied to a geographic location, and cultural holons, which transcend geography. To say that modern European civilisation is Esoteric is to say that it is primarily a cultural holon. To say that the Classical civilisation was Exoteric is to say that it was primarily a social holon. The modern transcends geography and the classical was tied to it.

In practice, of course, all societies and cultures have both an interior and an exterior aspect and, thus, the social and cultural aspects are two sides of the same coin. The distinction here is one of degree. The Classical civilisation was an outwardly focused civilisation but it still had its interior dimensions. Meanwhile, the modern European is an inward-focused civilisation that still has an outward dimension. Since we are living through the mature phase of modern European civilisation, an understanding of it as a cultural holon can tell us a lot about the world we live in.

For most of human history, a culture was always tied to a locality for the simple reason that very few people ever travelled outside of the area in which they were born. What’s more, given that the social holon was tied directly to its geography, local conditions such as climate and availability of food would have had a major impact on society and culture. In these cases, we would say that the Esoteric and Exoteric were unified. The cultural holon and the social holon were one and the same.

For the majority of human history, it must have been the case that there were no cultural holons that were not tied to a social holon. The arrival of civilisation seems to have changed that. In fact, we may say that civilisation is the state of affairs where a cultural holon emerges and transcends the social holons from which it was born.

If we look back at the Classical civilisation, we see that even the Greeks took it for granted that culture was always fixed in a specific place. To be ostracised (kicked out of your local community) was seen as a fate worse than death. Socrates could easily have fled Athens after being sentenced to death. In fact, his friends had already organised it for him. The authorities at that time barely even bothered to stop somebody from running away, presumably because being outside the geographical area of the polis was the same as being dead from a political and cultural point of view.

It seems highly probable that the reason the Romans were able to form an empire whereas the Greeks were not was because the Romans were more willing to make the political and cultural sacrifices necessary to transcend the geographical boundaries of the polis. Nevertheless, we also know that the Romans had great respect for local customs and encouraged the peoples they conquered to continue to practice those customs. Once again, the assumption was that culture was specific to a location, and to break that connection would bring calamity.

Despite this background, however, we also know that there was a great deal of intercultural communication in the ancient world. Pythagoras, to take just one example, was said to have studied in Egypt. Meanwhile, there is clear evidence of the influence of the Levant and the Middle East on Greek thought. It seems, then, that the Greek intellectual tradition was at least partly a cultural holon which incorporated ideas from outside the geographical and cultural spheres of the Greek social holons.

The idea that civilisation is synonymous with cultural holons that grow out of social ones is essentially the same distinction that the historian, Spengler, made between culture and civilisation. For Spengler, the cycle of civilisation began in a geographical area and then expanded out into cultural holons that were no longer tied to a place. Nevertheless, Spengler insisted that the cultural holon that emerged later was fundamentally tied to the initial social holon and he believed that the geographical conditions of the initial social holon dictated the development of the culture by shaping its core ideas.

The main problem with Spengler’s analysis, however, is that it doesn’t match the facts of the civilisation he was most concerned with, i.e., the West (Faustian). In fact, modern western civilisation was born as a cultural holon created by the Catholic Church. From the very beginning, it had already transcended geography.

The reason Spengler all but ignores the influence of the Church on the nascent Faustian civilisation has much to do with the political and cultural turmoil that had taken hold in Germany in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. It is not a coincidence that this turmoil followed the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, the exact structure that had been erected by the Church in partnership with the warlords of northern Europe a millennia earlier.

In response to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, the German-speaking lands were trying (and failing) to unify themselves into a modern nation-state for most of the 19th century and it took until 1871 to get the job done. The political crisis that was taking shape went hand-in-hand with a religious and cultural crisis as the elites of Europe increasingly rejected Christianity.

The French Revolution had already attempted to install a new political structure based on the Enlightenment principles of reason. Since this had ended in a dismal failure, European elites went off looking for other ways to ground a new politics. Marxist thought was one of these and it aligned itself with the notions of reason, science, and progress. In opposition to it, there arose a movement that turned to mythology, specifically ancient Norse and Germanic mythology. This fitted with the desire to find a spirituality that wasn’t based in Christianity. What’s more, since the mythologies were local to a specific geography (more or less), they were a natural match for the nationalist political movements that were springing up.

A big part of the reason why Spengler became an intellectual celebrity in Germany in the 1920s was because his work managed to straddle the priorities of both nationalists and imperialists. Spengler asserted that culture was always tied to a location. This pleased the nationalists who were attempting to align German culture with a new German nation-state. Meanwhile, Spengler’s analysis showed that Europe was in the civilisation part of the cycle and that the thing to do was to start an empire. This appealed to those with imperial ambitions. Thus, nationalism and imperialism came together.

In order to make his argument, however, Spengler had to completely ignore the influence of the Catholic Church in the formation of modern European civilisation. Since almost everybody – the Marxists, the nationalists and the imperialists – wanted the Church out of the way, this was not a problem from a propaganda point of view. However, it is a big problem from a factual point of view.

The truth is that modern European civilisation is unthinkable without the influence of the Catholic Church. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Catholic Church created modern European civilisation and it did so in ways that contradict Spengler’s claim that a civilisation is always born out of a particular geography, since it was clear that the Catholic Church was not “native” to the geography of northern Europe. It was an institution born out of the combination of Roman law and Jewish religion. The Church created a caliphate of Europe with the Pope as the head of what amounted to a federal system that existed alongside the local, geographically-specific political systems (kingdoms). In short, the Church had created a cultural holon—a holon that superseded geography.

Neither was the Church shy about defending, protecting and expanding its cultural holon. It actively fought against the social holons that it ruled over. There were battles against the various kings and nobility. There were also propaganda and ideological battles against the lay public and the folk religions that still had influence in various locations.

The history of modern Europe can, in fact, be seen as the effort on the part of the social holons to wrest power back from the cultural holon of the Church. The Reformation was very much motivated by just such political, economic, and cultural concerns. This battle was won earliest in the Protestant lands, especially Britain and the Netherlands. However, France and Germany were still trying to disintermediate the Church all the way into the late 19^th century. Thus, the political and ideological battles alluded to earlier were very much about trying to get the Church out of the way so that the State, whether capitalist, communist or fascist, could reign supreme.

None of this would have been necessary, of course, if the Church hadn’t been so dominant for so long. The fact that the battle needed to be fought at all is evidence enough that Faustian civilisation was from the very beginning a cultural holon, a transnational grouping based not around shared geography but shared ideology. 19th century nationalism was, therefore, an attempt to re-establish the primacy of social holons.

If cultural holons are not held together by geography, what are they held together by? The answer is stories, myth and ideology. The Bible was the foundational mythic text of the West. The power of this myth was evident right from the beginning. During the Crusades, peasants from northern Europe willingly and voluntarily signed up to walk thousands of miles to fight a war in a place they had never seen and had no direct political interest in. Such an undertaking would have been unthinkable to the average citizen of an ancient Greek polis. That is the power of a cultural holon.

We see more evidence for the power of myth centuries after the crusades. As literacy became more widespread and people were able to read the Bible for themselves in the aftermath of the Reformation, many Puritans and Protestants in Britain and then the United States came to believe that they were the direct descendants of the tribes of Israel.

We know this is not literally true. But there is a metaphorical reading in which it is true. A cultural holon transcends geography and biology. If you belong to the same cultural holon as the tribes of Israel, as evidenced by your reading of the same holy book, then you are a member of that holon and you are a descendant of former members. The absence of a geographical and biological connection does not preclude the possibility of membership in a cultural holon.

It is because modern European civilisation was a cultural holon right from the beginning that its influence could eventually spread to cover the entire globe. We tend to explain that expansiveness in materialist terms: technology and military capability. Yet, we know for a fact that the Chinese had just as much technological advantage and maritime capability centuries earlier than Europe and that the Chinese had made forays into foreign waters. Why didn’t they take up the opportunity to expand overseas?

Almost certainly, one of the main reasons was the connection to their home geography. Chinese culture was first and foremost a social holon, just as the Romans had been and just as most cultures throughout history have been. It was because European culture was a cultural holon that it could expand to all corners of the globe.

It may very well be that the ability to retain a cultural holon across enormous distances was made possible by the new technology of the printing press and the increasing rates of literacy among the population. (Another coincidence here: the Chinese had invented the printing press centuries prior to Europe but it had not become popular there while, in Europe, it was instrumental in the cultural and political revolution that was the Reformation).

It was thus that the pilgrims in America and the other settlers in the New World carried their King James Bible and their copies of Shakespeare as permanent reminders of their identity. They also received news and information in written form. This facilitated the transmission and renewal of a cultural holon that transcended geographical boundaries.

Although the printing press undoubtedly made a huge difference, the key point is that all this was an extension of the same dynamic which had existed right from the beginning of modern Europe in the institution of the Church. The Church had created a cultural holon, and even as the influence of the Church waned, the form of the cultural holon remained.

Thus, the political battles of the 19^th century were just as much cultural battles over control of the cultural holon. (The culture wars are not new). The intellectuals, scholars and artists had stepped into the roles previously inhabited by popes, bishops and priests.

Viewed this way, a number of aspects of modern Western culture come into sharp focus. For example, Nietzsche’s famous assertion that God is dead really amounts to saying that the cultural holon that had tied together modern Europe from the beginning (the Catholic Church) was failing. That cultural holon was based on belief in God, but it had also been the foundation of a political structure that had existed for a millennium. That’s why there was a simultaneous political and cultural crisis in Germany once the Holy Roman Empire dissolved, and that’s why Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, and many others were furiously trying to piece together a new ideology to fill the vacuum.

What was happening was an attempt to replace one cultural holon with another. The battle ended up boiling down to a three-way contest between communism, capitalism, and fascism (nationalism), each with their own respective ideologies. We should remember that many intellectuals at this time swapped freely between these alternatives. Mussolini is perhaps the most famous. He was originally a communist who later changed teams to fascism/nationalism.

It is not a coincidence, either, that Mussolini was a journalist and newspaper editor. Hitler was an author and orator. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were primarily intellectuals. In a cultural holon, the mastery and control of the flow of ideas are as important to political power as the control of the army was to the Caesars of Rome.

Thus, the battle for political power in the mature modern European civilisation has been far more a battle of ideas than a battle of physical strength. Perhaps the causative factor in the rise of modern communication technology is not actually the scientific breakthroughs that made such technology possible but rather the imperatives that follow from the battle for control of cultural holons.

If the modern West has always been primarily a cultural holon, and if cultural holons are predicated on communication across geographical boundaries, then the evolutionary struggle resolves to those who can communicate farther and faster. The internet then appears as the logical endpoint—the ultimate technology that enables the cultural holon to truly encompass the globe. It’s no surprise that the battle of modern politics increasingly takes place online, which is to say that it really takes place in the mind.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had realised that my analysis of the corona event, collated in my book, The Plague Story, fitted quite nicely onto Wilber’s quadrant template. In my book, I had attempted to survey what was going on during corona from a holistic or integral point of view by incorporating a number of different perspectives. In this post, we’ll map those perspectives onto the quadrants with the aim of showing how the quadrants can be used to analyse real-world issues and not just abstract conceptions around wholeness and evolution.

With that in mind, let’s draw up a map of the “pandemic”. To refresh our memories, here are Wilber’s quadrants:-

We’ll now take each quadrant one at a time starting with the upper-right.

The upper-right quadrant: exterior perspective of the individual

Recall that the upper-right quadrant is concerned with holons (Wholes) in their exterior and individual perspective. From a scientific point of view, this equates to the categorisation and classification of objects for study. A classic example from biology is the grouping of various plants and animals into taxonomies based, for the most part, on external characteristics. Since we are talking about pandemics in this post, we are concerned with the field of microbiology and how it identifies its objects of study – microorganisms.

It took another two hundred years for other scientists to find the connection between bacteria and disease. Thus, a new category of pathogenic bacteria was created and the germ theory of disease was born. After decades of locating all kinds of pathogenic bacteria, scientists realised that there seemed to be diseases caused by things that could not be seen under a regular microscope. Since the name virus was already being used to mean something like “cause of disease”, this presumed category was called viruses. (The word virus comes originally from the Latin meaning “poison”).

Given that viruses were too small to see under a microscope, we had no real ability to identify them from an exterior perspective and thus their existence from a UR quadrant perspective was still speculative. That all changed with the advent of the x-ray and then the electron microscope. These allowed the creation of images and therefore the identification of viruses from an exterior, objective perspective.

Because we use the same word (microscope) for all of these technologies, the layperson may think that the identification of viruses was a simple extension of the method used to identify bacteria. There are a number of reasons why this is not the case.

Firstly, to paraphrase the meme, one does not simply do electron microscopy. You or I may purchase a cheap microscope, take a sample of something, stick it under the microscope and look at live bacteria with our own eyes. The same is not true for electron microscopes. Not only are electron microscopes seriously expensive, any sample needs extensive preparation before it is ready to be “seen” under such a microscope. Sample preparation requires a large amount of training as do the skills to calibrate the microscope itself. What’s more, the processing of the sample kills off anything that might have been alive in the sample. Electron microscopy can only show us things that are not alive.

A second big difference is that normal microscopes work off our everyday visual faculties including the rules of gestalt psychology which determine how we identify objects and patterns in the world. The same is not true for electron microscopes where the “image” must is constructed based on rules for how electrons bounce off the things they are fired at. A translation must be made back into the “language” of our everyday visual faculties.

There is one word which sums up these differences: abstraction.

Electron microscopy is far more abstract than regular microscopy. This abstraction manifests in much greater time for the preparation of samples, specialised skills in how to calibrate the microscope and different types of microscope. All of this creates more room for error to creep in. Furthermore, the technology itself requires specialists with significant experience in interpreting what they are seeing. Electron microscopy has become a full-time job in its own right. This is a far cry from the days when a tailor like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek could dabble in microbiology in his spare time.

In recent decades, virologists have begun using even more abstract technologies in their work. These take the problem of abstraction to a new level since they no longer even revolve around identifying objects from an exterior perspective but use genetic analysis instead.

The PCR is a classic example. Virologists attempt to identify a virus by finding genetic code in a sample. This is not the full genetic code of the virus but only a segment. How do we know this segment can uniquely identify the virus? Well, virologists need to figure it out. They do so according to agreed rules. Those rules have been changed three times in the last several decades, hardly a sign of stable and settled science.

Just like electron microscopes, the PCR is a complex piece of technology that requires extensive sample preparation and instrument calibration in order to produce reliable results. All of this introduces new layers of abstraction and more steps in the process where errors can be introduced.

There are two key points to make about all this. Unlike bacteria, which was originally discovered by a lay person (van Leeuwenhoek), viruses can only be “seen” by a select group of insiders – the experts. Unless you have millions of dollars lying around to buy the equipment and the time and money to learn how to use it, you will never be able to verify the results for yourself. That is true for us as laypeople and it is also true for scientists in related disciplines outside of virology including epidemiologists and doctors, both of whom must simply take whatever virologists say at face value.

The second point relates to the virologists themselves. Modern virology relies on the concatenation of evidence from numerous already abstract sources. Electron microscopy, PCR, cell culture experiments and other techniques are all abstractions in themselves, each prone to error and each requiring an understanding of rules of the abstraction in order to weigh up the evidence.

What inevitably happens in such circumstances, and I see this in my own line of work, is that the basics of the discipline get forgotten as the abstractions becomes ends in themselves. It is very easy for the basic method of science – formulating a hypothesis and devising ways to test it – to get forgotten.

When you combine this with the fact that virology is a closed shop that never gets criticised from outside, it’s a recipe for groupthink and delusion. As mentioned in last week’s post, this delusion is actually a form of dissociation and that is why intellectuals can often manifest symptoms that are indistinguishable from mental illness. The reason the average person doesn’t see it is because intellectuals talk in their usual calm and authoritative voice rather than rambling incoherently like your average mental patient. G.K. Chesterton summarised the dynamic with his usual incisive wit: the point of education is to learn not to take educated people seriously.

Should we take virology seriously? It is trapped in the fogs of abstraction like so much of other science these days. It doesn’t see any objects directly but only through its hyper-complex technologies. The basic object of study in virology is an abstraction. Take away the technology and the object disappears with it.

Abstractions are not inherently a problem, as long as they make accurate predictions about the world. But the record on virology is almost embarrassing in this respect. From the swine flu false alarm of 1976, to the AIDS hysteria, to SARS-1 and then covid, modern virology has an almost perfect record of being wrong and that is a strong sign that its abstractions aren’t real. It seems probable that there’s no there there.

For these reasons, we’ll list the technologies that lead us to believe there is such a thing as a virus in the UR quadrant as follows:-

Let’s move on to what might appear to be another categorisation problem relevant to a “pandemic” and that is the identification of disease. Disease, however, is actually a relationship between two objects. It belongs to what Smuts called a Field and what Wilber calls the “collective”. Therefore, it belongs in the lower-right quadrant and that’s where we now turn to carry out our analysis.

The lower-right quadrant: exterior objective perspective of the collective

The lower-right quadrant relates to systems viewed from their exterior interactions. Here we must make a very important distinction between what we’ll call sickness and disease. Sickness is the subjective feeling of illness and belongs in the upper-left quadrant. Disease refers to those aspects that are viewable from an exterior perspective. We you go to the doctor, you probably complain of symptoms and you talk about the subjective aspects of those symptoms. That’s sickness. The doctor then tries to match those up to externally visible signs of disease.

The human body is a system that aims to keep itself within an equilibrium as regards to vital functions. Disease is what happens when the equilibrium is breached and the functions no longer work as they should. Even well before the advent of modern medicine, it was obvious that the environment often played a key role in disease. As noted earlier, the word virus referred to poison in Latin and poison is source of disease i.e. it throws the body out of equilibrium. This gives us the recipe: system + poison = disease.

The germ theory of disease created a similarly simple formula: system + pathogen = disease. But even from the very beginning there was a problem with this because, for some people, adding a pathogen did not make them diseased. Nowadays, we know about the immune system and its role in the larger system of the human body. But we also know that bacteria and viruses are ever present and “infection” appears to be the normal state of affairs. Thus, the formula system + pathogen is redundant. The system itself already includes all kinds of bacteria and viruses which have been given the name microbiome and microvirome.

It turns out that “infection” is itself an equilibrium position. The question then becomes: what causes bacteria and viruses to get out of equilibrium? The emphasis shifts away from the simple presence of a pathogen and towards factors related to overall system health. These include diet, general environmental conditions and exercise.

As the germ theory of disease became the latest scientific craze, scientists attributed many diseases to the system + pathogen paradigm which turned to be caused by general system health. Scurvy, beriberi and pellagra were all originally thought to be caused by microorganisms but turned out to be caused by an absence of vitamins in the diet.

What is true at the individual level is true at the collective. History shows a very close correlation between malnutrition and pandemic. The Spanish Flu came at the end of WW2. It is a little-remembered fact that the combatant nations of Europe tried to starve each other into submission during that war. As a result, many Europeans were significantly malnourished by the end of the war, having endured years of food rationing. Years of chronic stress from war and malnutrition certainly would have caused a population-level reduction of general health, opening the way for a pandemic.

The whole-of-system view allows us to account for another problem with the naïve germ theory of disease which is that some diseases have multiple “causes”. Pneumonia is a classic example since it appears opportunistically when the immune system is supressed, which is why it often shows up in patients suffering from other maladies and also in the elderly. In a very narrow sense, we might say that pneumonia is “caused” by a microorganism. But the true determining factor is overall system health.

Taking a holistic approach allows us to see disease in a more accurate light. For most of human history, malnourishment would have been a major source of disease. In the modern world, we have swung to the other extreme where over-nourishment is a problem leading to lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure. These also work to weaken the immune system and allow microorganisms to cause trouble.

There are other lifestyle issues in the modern world that affect general health. As Peter Duesberg pointed out in relation to AIDS sufferers, the massive increase in recreational and pharmaceutical drug use in the post-war years is the equivalent of poisoning the body. Occasional usage of drugs does not lead to long term effects unless the drug is severely poisonous (thalidomide, AZT). But long-term drug use is a very different story.

The vast majority of AIDS suffers were chronic drug users who imbibed multiple legal and illegal substances on a regular basis. Meanwhile, long-term drug use of both recreational and pharmaceutical drugs has become normal for a large section of the population in the post-war years. It’s obvious that such practices reduce general health.

The irony is that, having learned the benefits of sanitation, nutrition and how to avert the worst pollutants from industry, the post war years have provided possibly some of the most beneficial environmental conditions that humans have ever lived under. That’s why life expectancy climbed relentlessly and infectious disease all but disappeared. What did humans do when faced with such beneficial conditions? We started poisoning ourselves. Given that the word virus originally meant “poison”, blaming the resulting disease on virus is true, but only in the old meaning of the word!

We can summarise these considerations on our diagram by describing two approaches to disease: the germ theory and the holistic theory.

It is clear that the public health and biomedical bureaucracies in the modern West all favour the germ theory with its focus on pathogens and pay almost no attention to holistic factors. This is the number one reason why health outcomes and life expectancy are now in decline in many nations.

The lower-left quadrant: interior perspective of the collective

The lower-left quadrant is what we generally call culture. My initial analysis of corona identified two main concepts in this quadrant. First was what I called the Plague Story which was the way in which Hollywood had taken the traditional plague story that is one of the oldest known to man and adapted it to the modern world by portraying the scientists as heroes who would save the day in the event of a pandemic.

This portrayal of scientists as heroes in mythic narrative is highly ironic since many modern scientists think of themselves as the puncturers of mythology. It turns out that scientists are quite happy to be the heroes in stories told about themselves.

Since mythic narrative has been central to most religious traditions, it is also rather coincidental that modern science has become far less like the golden age of science and far more like the cloistered religious institutions of bygone eras. The heroic narratives created for scientists have evoked the same kind of awe once reserved for religion.

Against this backdrop, the abstractions of virology then become a feature and not a bug of the system. Just as religions often created fabulously complex theories that the lay person would never understand, science has now arrived at the same place. Modern science addresses its “congregation” in exactly the same way that the Catholic Church once did i.e. in a language that nobody understands an that is meant to be not understood. In short, science has taken on many of the aspects of religion in its relation with the public.

We can add these factors to our diagram as follows:-

The upper-right quadrant: interior perspective of the individual

The UR quadrant is about the subjective view of reality felt by each of us. There are as many of these perspectives as there are people. Nevertheless, we can identify certain patterns of reaction related to the “pandemic” and most of these are the time-honoured responses that all people have felt throughout history when a public hysteria takes hold. Among these are fear, anxiety and panic. Equally natural in such times are the desire for leaders who can explain the situation and promise to have everything under control.

Since all of us lived through corona and could see the various reactions for ourselves, there’s no reason to spend much time on this quadrant. There is, however, one less obvious reaction that caught my attention and which formed a chapter in The Plague Story, which was the genuine excitement that a section of the public felt during the lockdowns. It was clear that for some people corona was a thrilling experience that gave them the sense of living through something momentous. Such people really were living through a Hero’s Journey where the scientists were saving the day.  

My speculation is that this is related to the point made earlier about how the post-war years have delivered a period of stability and prosperity that is unmatched throughout history. For a non-negligible section of the population, this stability has translated into boredom. Recreational drug use is one “solution” to that problem. Hollywood movies are another.

So, funnily enough, is politics. Demanding radical change from leaders as a solution to boredom seems to me behind many of the “big issues” of our time. Politics itself has become part of the bread-and-circuses dynamic of the US empire.

Once more on the lower-right

With this we have covered the major points in all four quadrants. There are a number of smaller issues we could explore but there’s perhaps only one more worth touching on in this post.

The lower-right quadrant includes not just our interactions with the microbial world and the environment more generally, but also with our society. Thus, it encompasses political and economic systems. When we take that perspective, we find that enormous sums of government money have been made available to the biomedical and public health establishment in the post-war years and that these sums of money go up every time there is a public health scare.

That’s what happened with the swine flu false alarm in 1976, the AIDS hysteria of the 80s and then with corona. In each case, it’s not just the direct money given by government but also the fact that many top scientists have patents on the various technologies and therapeutics that are employed. Think of how much money got spent on PCR tests during and corona and then understand that somebody was earning a commission for each test not to mention the profits of the manufacturers and all the middlemen involved in the supply chain. Medicine and “science” now accounts for a sizeable portion of GDP in developed nations.

Karl Marx noted how the ideology of a society seemed to mirror its economic system. In the case of virology and public health, given the lock tight correspondence between public health scares and the amount of money earned, all the “scientists” involved in that system have a vested interest in the falling in line behind the narrative. This is even more true when the narrative is set from the mandarins at the top (Fauci) who have total control over funding, media access, awards etc.

The case of Peter Duesberg is crucial here since his career was destroyed due to his pointing out the obvious problems with the “science” around AIDS. Institutional science now treats dissenters the way the Catholic Church used to treat heretics. Science is not just failing due to abstractions and expensive technologies, it’s failing because the real scientists are given a choice between falling into line or having their career ended.

Once again, a comparison to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is useful here. He can rightfully claim to be one of the founding fathers of microbiology. But he was a businessman in his normal life who was also heavily involved in civic activity in his home town. In fact, he never even attempted to become recognised as a scientist and only shared his discoveries with the Royal Society in London when convinced to do so by friends. Like so many of the great scientists, van Leeuwenhoek was driven not by money but by simple curiosity. Meanwhile, modern machine science is driven by money. Exactly as Marx would have predicted, that money has a significant influence on the ideology.    

Of course, for the corona hysteria, there was an extra special geopolitical dimension as the secretive, closed-shop of virology interfaced with the secretive, closed-shop of the Chinese communist party and the US deep state to create a microorganismic Frankenstein via gain-of-function research. Was this inscrutable abstraction an actual danger in the “real world”? The early data out of China suggested the answer was no, but who could trust that when the CCP had just locked down an entire province and, more to the point, who trusts the CCP?

Conclusion

We have seen in this post that the arrival of the germ theory of disease brought about a change in the meaning of the word virus from a generic cause of disease (a poison) to a specific object identified only by the abstractions. As Peter Duesberg showed in his book, Inventing The AIDS Virus, this shift of meaning saw virologists completely ignoring the obvious fact that almost all AIDS sufferers were long-term, heavy drug users, a fact which leads one to posit that AIDS was caused by poisoning. Instead of looking for that common sense answer, virologists were off in abstraction-land with their electron microscopes, their PCR tests and their computer models.

At the height of the AIDS hysteria, there were 1.25 researchers to every confirmed AIDS patient in the United States. It would have been possible to have each scientist study each patient directly. If they had done so, it would have been obvious that the disease was caused by a lifestyle centred around heavy drug use. Instead, the researchers were all tucked away in their laboratories churning out peer-reviewed papers, attending well-catered conferences at beach resorts, and receiving scientific awards. The result was the tens of billions of dollars were spent to achieve no tangible results; a failure that would be repeated during the corona debacle where perhaps trillions of dollars were flushed down the toilet for no benefit.

There’s a more general point to be made about the move away from the meaning of virus as “poison”, however. For most of human history, most people didn’t have enough in the way of food and nutrition. Read any history of Rome, for example, and count the number of times the words “famine” and “plague” appear in the same sentence. As a general rule, people at any time in history could have done with more food and not less.

This shared history seems to have blinded us to an obvious but little-known fact of biology which is that too much of something is just as bad, just as poisonous, as too little. That’s true of recreational and pharmaceutical drugs, it’s true of food and drink, it’s true of almost anything. Even water can kill you if consumed to excess. Over-consumption is just as bad as under-consumption.

Note, however, that this means that nothing is inherently poisonous, or inherently good for that matter. Something that seems inherently good, like water or food, may become poisonous. The only way you can know when something shifts from good to poisonous is to pay attention to the bigger picture. That is what holism and integral theory are about.

“May God us keep
From Single vision
and Newton’s sleep.”

William Blake

There’s a peculiar type of reaction we get to reading somebody else’s thoughts in written form, which can only ever occur, I think, when we’ve been wrestling with the same problems as the author for a period of time. One of the great benefits of reading is being able to change our perspectives on the world for a short time by looking at it through the lens of somebody else. Sometimes, the value in that comes just from the change of mental scenery as we get out of our own heads for a while. In such cases, we may enjoy the work in a passive fashion and then get back to our own thoughts.

But it’s a very different thing when the writer has captured something important to us, whether we have been pursuing that something consciously or whether it has been bubbling away in our unconscious. In that case, reading can be genuinely exciting. I’ve had that experience several times over the last few years with books such as Patrick White’s Voss, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, and, of course, recently with the authors whose work we have been reviewing in this series of posts: Jan Smuts and Ken Wilber.

In relation to Wilber, I’m happy to admit that his quadrant analysis is simply a better version of a model I’ve been trying to put together over the last few years. I had been thinking about the difference between materialism and esotericism, for example, using the levels of being concept. What Wilber added was a second dimension: an x-axis to go with the y-axis. Thus, the quadrant map can be used to analyse holons at the various levels of being, from quarks all the way to humans and whatever entities we can imagine above humans.

Wilber’s quadrants also make clearer a point that I have made using the levels of being concept and that is what Wilber calls quadrant fundamentalism. Quadrant fundamentalism is where one quadrant is assumed to hold the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to the exclusion of all other quadrants. In this post, we’ll look at three types of quadrant fundamentalism that, not coincidentally, arose in chronological order in modern western history: scientific materialism, historical materialism (Marx), and irrationalism (Nietzsche, Spengler).

To refresh our memory about each quadrant, recall that the upper right (UR) refers to the perspective of objective reality consisting of objects viewed externally. Meanwhile, the lower right (LR) refers to systems of objects, again viewed from the exterior. The upper row is the view of the individual, and the lower row is the collective.

Modern materialist science is a combination of these. Newton derived his law of gravitation by examining the solar system i.e. the interactions between the sun and the planets. Meanwhile, Ludwig Boltzmann and James Clerk Maxwell provided a systemic account of the movement of gas in a container.

Beginning in the 19^th century, materialism began to turn its attention to ever more complex systems, including economies, societies, and ecologies. This created two problems. One was that the systems under study were no longer able to be simplified to the point where calculation could be made. To this day, there are still people who think this problem can be solved by throwing more computing power at the issue, hence pipe dreams like quantum computing.

The second problem has nothing to do with calculation, but rather the question of freedom. When it comes to societies and ecosystems, the holons being accounted for (animals and humans) have far more of an interior component to them, and trying to explain their behaviour from a purely exterior perspective glosses over this fact. If that interior, esoteric component really is a kind of “freedom”, then no amount of computing power will be able to account for it.

I’ve mentioned that it’s a weird synchronicity that I happened to read Patrick White’s novel The Vivisector right before Smuts and Wilber because it turns out that the vivisectors provide the perfect example to highlight the problem of scientific materialism, one that requires no technical understanding.

Thus, our first example of quadrant fundamentalism is scientific materialism and we can see that this ideology was not limited to the scientific domain but had broader social and political ramifications. We should acknowledge, of course, that scientific materialism led to some incredible breakthroughs and insights which very largely created the world we live in. This just shows that over-enthusiasm may be as strong a factor in quadrant fundamentalism as more negative traits.

While scientific materialism dealt only with atoms, molecules, and other inanimate objects, it did little harm. The harm came from believing that it could account for everything, even in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary. This leads into our second example of quadrant fundamentalism, which also belongs to the materialist camp since we can call it historical materialism following the work of Karl Marx.

Marx was primarily concerned with economies as viewed from their exterior systemic perspective i.e. the lower right (LR) quadrant. One of the main insights of historical materialism was how the economic system (the “base” in Marxist theory) seems to align with the ideologies that justify it. For Marx, ideology was just a symbol that pointed back to the economic base from which it was derived. Thus, feudal economies, capitalist economies, and socialist ones all have a certain type of ideological structure that goes with them. The base determines the ideology. Taken to an extreme, this notion proposes that our individual beliefs (UL) and our cultural beliefs (LL) are nothing more than stories that justify the economic system in the LR quadrant.

Historical materialism captures a very important truth about individuals and societies. You might have heard the saying, it’s hard to make somebody understand something when their salary requires that they don’t understand it. How we earn our living does affect our thinking. We are naturally predisposed to have a favourable opinion of the institutions from which we receive our daily bread. Even people who hate their job and constantly complain about it prove Marx’s point, which is that the job determines the ideology. A lot of the self-loathing we see in the modern West is due to the rise of bullshit jobs. Marx realised that the ideologies circulating in the public sphere are often there to justify a particular economic state of affairs. This all happens automatically and unconsciously.

It’s true to say that the LR quadrant has a strong effect on the UR and LL quadrants, especially as those relate to moral and political ideology. That insight is not just valid but crucial to an understanding of human affairs. The problem, once again, begins when we come to think that this explanation accounts for everything in the world. In the case of historical materialism, it means that all other quadrants are reduced to the LR. Any interior states whatsoever are now viewed as nothing more than reflections of the economic system. Ironically, this gives the historical materialist an excuse to exercise power at the ideological level instead of the material, which is now the main form of political power exercised in western nations.

Lukacs’ treatment of Nietzsche is particularly grievous. I’ve read pretty much all of Nietzsche’s work. If I were to write a list of the top 10 themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy, socialism, economics, and imperialism would not be on that list. These topics probably wouldn’t even be on a top 20 list for the simple reason that Nietzsche wasn’t primarily concerned with them. Yet Lukacs argues that Nietzsche’s philosophy was motivated by the imperialist politics that Germany ended up taking. He even chastises Nietzsche for not understanding either socialism or economics in general.

Well, yes, Nietzsche didn’t understand socialism or economics because he was not primarily concerned with either subject. Why would he be? He was a professor of philology. He was, in fact, a genius at philology, and his philosophical writings reflect his background. Having himself made the claim that Nietzsche’s writings were related to socialism and imperialism, Lukacs then posthumously criticised Nietzsche for not knowing anything about socialism or imperialism.

What makes Lukacs’ analysis even worse is that it’s not hard to find passages in Nietzsche where he was explicitly warning about the emerging imperialism in Germany at that time. In fact, Nietzsche seems to have foreseen the calamity of the world wars and we have to remember that he was almost a lone voice in that respect since most respectable thinkers of the time believed war was a thing of the past.

In short, Lukacs was imposing his own ideology on Nietzsche. Having already decided that philosophy (UL quadrant) must always be a flimsy excuse for economic materialism (LR quadrant), he simply stated that Nietzsche’s philosophy must be an example of exactly that, even when Nietzsche’s philosophy directly and explicitly contradicts this reading.

We can now start to get a sense of what quadrant fundamentalism is using the examples of scientific materialism and now historical materialism (Marxism). Quadrant fundamentalism is what happens when you attempt to “reduce” one quadrant to the terms of another. But it goes a step further by denying the other quadrants altogether. Sometimes this is done explicitly. Most of the time, it is done unconsciously.

The vivisectors (scientific materialists) denied the UL quadrant (the pain and suffering) in the animals that they were cutting up. For them, animals were simply machines that had no souls and therefore could not feel pain. In truth, the vivisectors had denied their own UL quadrant. They ignored the evidence right in front of their eyes. Thus, quadrant fundamentalism is a form of dissociation. The vivisectors had dissected their own psyche.

Historical materialism is a more sophisticated version of the same dynamic. Rather than completely ignoring another quadrants, it views the phenomena of those quadrants as nothing more than symbols that point back to the LR quadrant i.e. economic interest. Thus, Lukacs can claim that the entire output of two of the great philosophers, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, was little more than a cover for imperialist interests. This requires him to ignore what both of those philosophers have to say about their own positions because whatever they say is a priori just a cover for economic interests.

The irony is that it is exactly this denial of the interior states of reality that motivated Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the other existentialist thinkers. They were railing against the de-spiritualisation and de-humanisation that came with materialist dogma. So, too, was another thinker that I’ve written about a lot over the past few years: Oswald Spengler. Spengler was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, but just like Lukacs took the work of Marx too far, so did Spengler take Nietzsche too far and end up with his own form of quadrant fundamentalism.

Spengler’s quadrant fundamentalism was the mirror image of the historical materialists in that he wished to reduce all other quadrants down to the LL i.e. culture. Whereas Lukacs saw ideology as a symbol pointing to economic interest (LR), Spengler saw everything, including science and even mathematics, as a symbol pointing back to culture. Culture was the fundamental reality of the world, and all thought, architecture, art, and other human activities were to be explained as a working out of the core themes of a culture that came into being at the birth of that culture.

Once again, it has to be said that there is much truth in the basic idea that culture influences the other quadrants. To take just one example, there is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has a lot of supporting evidence from linguistics and cognitive science and says that our native language influences not just our conscious thoughts about the world but our real-time interpretations of it. That is, what we perceive in the world is influenced by the ontological commitments baked into the language we speak. The same is true for other aspects of the culture to which we belong. Clearly, the LL quadrant affects the others.

However, just like the scientific and historical materialists, Spengler takes a truth about the world and amplifies it to the point of fundamentalism. In fairness, he doesn’t try to hide his position. Towards the end of the first volume of Decline of the West, he openly states that the individual is nothing and culture and society are everything. For him, the UL quadrant, subjective reality, is nothing more than a set of symbols that get their meaning from the LL. This is a form of reductionism that is identical to materialism only in the other direction.

The irony of the whole thing is that the validity of Spengler’s analysis comes from an appeal to a kind of cultural “intuition,” which really amounts to nothing more than Spengler’s own interpretation of the world. Thus, Decline of the West is almost entirely a book of Spengler’s own subjective interpretation of the world. In a book of more than a thousand pages, Spengler barely cites any other thinkers or scholars in support of his analysis. He doesn’t need to, because the assumption is that he has a direct line of communication with the culture via instinct or intuition.

It’s for this reason that when Spengler gets something obviously wrong, it calls into question his entire framework because it makes us doubt his intuition. I mentioned in a post about a year ago a grievous error in Spengler’s interpretation of Dostoevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov. The details of the error are not important except to say that Spengler ignored all the most basic facts of the novel to come up with an interpretation whereby the character Ivan represents the “Russian soul.” Since Spengler relies almost entirely on Dostoevsky to justify the existence of his purported “Russian soul”, this error almost entirely collapses the whole argument.

Here we see that Spengler had done to Dostoevsky what Lukacs did to Nietzsche, namely, to read his own ideological bias into the other’s work. We can see, therefore, that quadrant fundamentalism implies a lack of empathy. There is an unwillingness to understand other people and other quadrants on their own terms. What is peculiar in these cases is the extreme lack of empathy on display.

The vivisectors had to completely ignore the cries of pain from the animals they were cutting up. Lukacs had to completely ignore what Nietzsche himself says in his own philosophy. Spengler had to completely ignore the reality of the characters in The Brothers Karamazov as well as the basic facts of the plot and the larger themes of the novel, which Dostoevsky was clearly exploring. This unwillingness to understand others on their own terms before imposing an ideological interpretation on them is at the heart of quadrant fundamentalism.

This brings us to the final twist in the story because what Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche were all about was re-instating the dignity and importance of the individual in the face of these de-humanising ideologies. It could be argued that they, too, went overboard and committed their own version of quadrant fundamentalism. All could be charged with a kind of radical subjectivism that locates the source of truth entirely in the individual. For example, Dostoevsky’s Alyosha character has precisely no interest in science, politics, and certainly not economics, while Nietzsche’s superman is the one who can create their own values free of the vagaries of the mob.

I don’t think this is actually true of any of these thinkers, and it’s precisely for that reason that I rate them all much higher than Spengler and Lukacs, both of whom definitely did descend into quadrant fundamentalism. In fact, all three have much in common with Smuts in that they did not deny the other quadrants but asserted that individualism was a late arrival on the scene and represented the forefront of evolution. This also seems to be Wilber’s position. It’s not about solipsistic individualism, but integrated individualism.

Even though I don’t believe Nietzsche, Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky fell into quadrant fundamentalism, it seems that our society is committing exactly this error as we speak. Especially in the last few decades, we find the belief emerging that individuals may declare a self-identity and society must fall into line. The trans debate is the ultimate manifestation of that dynamic. Thus, as a society we have now slipped into a fourth version of quadrant fundamentalism in which individuals (the UL quadrant) are encouraged to deny all scientific, cultural and social realities i.e. all the other quadrants.

The good news is that this is the last form of quadrant fundamentalism that has not yet been tried. I think it’s safe to say that we have now reached Bingo. Maybe we are now ready for a truly integral approach.