Category: Ideas

I think I’m now about halfway through White’s bibliography and, at this point, I have no hesitation in declaring him my favourite writer of the 20^th century. Admittedly, there are some big names from that time period that I haven’t read. I haven’t read Nabokov or Faulkner or Beckett, for example. For many of those names, however, I almost don’t need to read them since I’ve read enough of the literary modernists to know that I won’t like them. Literary modernism seems to me to be about breaking rules for its own sake. Sometimes, as in the case of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the rules are broken only to be replaced by a gimmick that exactly matches the rule itself. How clever of Joyce to make the last sentence of the book lead back to the first sentence thereby capturing the cyclical nature of reality. Right? Except the Hero’s Journey is already cyclical and, what’s more, it incorporates the idea of transcendence too. What Joyce had really done was to remove transcendence from the story.

This was not an accident, of course, and the trend also occurred outside of literature. To take just one example, one of the main differences between the comparative historians Toynbee and Spengler is that the former allowed for transcendence while the latter argued for the kind of circularity implied by Joyce. In Spengler’s case, this was particularly weird since he had identified the striving towards infinity as the core feature of Faustian culture and yet his circular notion of history is almost a perfect contradiction of this.

What I like about Patrick White is that he does not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because he follows the rules most of the time, when he does break them, he makes a point by doing so. That is an interesting feature of human culture that seems to also be a core property of “mind” in the broader sense of the term defined by Gregory Bateson. Rules set up expectations. It’s as if some energy is powering a network of cultural assumptions (collateral energy is one of Bateson’s criteria for “mind”). The failure to meet an expectation is amplified by the collateral energy and this creates meaning. Thus, meaning can be created as much by what you didn’t do as by what you did. But the ability to create such meaning only works if the system of rules is upheld. The whole problem with literary modernism is that it denies the entire system and therefore saws off the branch on which it is sitting. The result is turgid, long-winded and frankly boring; adjectives which are sadly all too true for much of 20th century literature. Thankfully, none of this is true of White’s novels.

Of course, it’s also true that White resonates with me for other reasons. What a synchronicity that I had just finished writing my own book which focuses, among other things, on the archetypal phases of the human lifecycle, and then it turns out that The Vivisector is a story that covers the entire lifespan of the hero: Hurtle Duffield. What’s more, White divides (vivisects!) the story into phases that map almost exactly to the archetypes that I have been using extensively for the past couple of years. The book proceeds in sections, each of which focuses on an archetypal phase of Hurtle’s life. We can summarise the sections as follows:-

	Hurtle Duffield’s Life
Child	Born into a poor family
Orphan	Adopted by a rich family and given an education
Early Adult	Struggling artist
Mature Adult	Successful artist
Elder	Mentoring a protege
Death	Meeting with God

I can now add The Vivisector to my list of literary works that ground my analysis of the archetypal Orphan, especially because White shows his protagonist as an Orphan earlier in the book and then as an Elder to an Orphan towards the end. More than that, Hurtle’s orphanhood is explicitly symbolised by a dramatic separation from his biological parents. Hurtle’s artistic and intellectual talents are recognised by a rich couple, the Courtneys, who literally buy him from his poor parents who already have too many children anyway and can certainly do with the money they are offered.

It is fitting that the Courtneys are an aristocratic couple since we might metaphorically say that each of us are “adopted” by our society through the auspices of education. Our biological parents must hand us over to the institutions of that society and there is an implied financial element to that since we are expected to take up an economic role in society. Thus, The Vivisector captures all the main archetypal themes that I sketched out in my most recent book and, just as White had done with his earlier novel, Voss, hardwires them into the structure of the story.

Another correspondence with my writing of the last few years is the presence of the Jungian anima character. I noted in my review of White’s Voss that the brilliant trick he played in that story was to make Laura Trevelyan the real hero and thus the book was really about Voss’ anima. In The Vivisector, there are not one but many anima characters. What’s more, these characters all map quite directly to the archetypal progression of the story. There is one anima character for each archetypal phase.

For those unfamiliar with the anima concept, Jung characterised the anima as the soul of a man (it was the male animus in women) with four archetypal phases that each man may potentially go through as follows:-

Anima Symbol	Meaning
Eve	Nourishment, love, desire
Helen	External talents and accomplishments
Mary	Paragon of virtue
Sophia	Ability to perceive negative as well as positive qualities. Wisdom.

Patrick White utilises these anima categories in The Vivisector as follows.

Hurtle Duffield’s Life	Anima Figure	Anima Type
Child	Mother (Mrs Duffield)	Mother (Mary)
Orphan	“Mother” (Mrs Courtney)	Mother (Mary)
Early Adult	Nance	Eve
Mature Adult	Hero Pavloussi	Eve
Elder	Kathy Volkov	Helen
Death	Rhoda Courtney	Sophia

Unlike in Voss, which showed a much more direct correspondence of the anima progression in the person of Laura Trevelyan, The Vivisector is more complex as the above table shows. The book begins in the years prior to WW1 with Hurtle living at home with his biological parents. Hurtle is born into a very poor family. His father has no skills and no job. He makes a living collecting bottles in the street. His mother works as a washerwoman in the households of various aristocratic women, which is what brings the young boy to the attention of Mrs Courtney, who later buys (adopts) him.

We can see from this beginning a pattern which holds throughout the book which is that none of the characters represents an inherently positive version of the archetype. We begin with a mother who is prepared to sell her child for money. Not very Mary-like. Meanwhile, the surrogate mother, Mrs Courtney, is prepared to buy a child in order to keep up appearances. Hurtle’s first love is a prostitute. He has affairs with married women and there is even the implication that he sleeps with his protégé later in the book. White uses the archetypes as much in their shadow form as in their positive.

It’s also true that the drama of all this is highly abstract, and this is due to White’s aforementioned habit of breaking conventions and leaving things out. What he leaves out of the story are all of the major turning points in Hurtle Duffield’s life. This absence is all the more telling because the life of Hurtle reads like an over-the-top Dostoevskyan melodrama. We could summarise it as follows.

A precocious boy is born into an impoverished family. He has no prospects in life, but his genius is recognised by a wealthy aristocratic couple who adopt him into their house and provide him the best education money can buy including the development of his artistic talents. In his late teens, he rebels against his adoptive parents and runs off to join the army. He fights in WW1. After the war, he spends several years living in poverty in Europe as a Picasso-like avant-garde artiste. He becomes an artistic genius. He returns to Australia and has a tumultuous love affair with a prostitute while also becoming a successful and well-known painter. His fame brings fortune and access to the upper echelons of society including numerous dinner parties with various luminaries, affairs with exotic women, overseas holidays, worldwide notoriety, awards, meetings with the Prime Minister etc etc.

Any of these plotlines could be a dramatic novel in itself and yet White systematically refuses to detail any of them in his story. They are all referred to only in passing. We learn that Hurtle’s father has died through a letter received from his sister. The whole subject receives about three sentences and then we move on to the next part of the story. The same is true of the death of Hurtle’s first love, Nance. White spends pages and pages describing the intimate details of perfectly banal interactions where “nothing happens” and gives barely a few paragraphs to Nance’s death and the aftermath of it. Again, this is the inversion of the “rules” of storytelling. What in any other book would have been a dramatic turning point in the story is relegated to just another thing that happens almost as if it was no more important than a dreary meeting with one’s agent on a Wednesday afternoon.

Although White does not describe these dramatic events, he nevertheless demarcates the novel based on them. The death of Hurtle’s father, even though barely mentioned, comes at the end of the Orphan phase of life. After that, we fast-forward in time to find Hurtle as a young adult. Meanwhile, the death of Nance, his first love, also comes at the end of the section of the book where he is an impoverished artist. Shortly after, we jump forward into the mature phase of Hurtle’s adulthood where he is now a wealthy and famous artist. White builds the archetypal turning points into the structure of the book. He is not denying their importance, he is implying it. This is the same trick he used in Voss.

Because the archetypal turning points are not highlighted in The Vivisector, some might say it’s a book where “nothing happens”. Nevertheless, it’s the “nothing” which provides the inspiration for Hurtle’s art. Several times we see Hurtle rushing back home to turn the inspiration he has received from some fairly banal everyday interaction into a work of art. Hurtle is an artist who is concerned with everyday life rather than excessively dramatic events. (So, too, is Patrick White).

Here we come to the main theme of the novel. The Vivisector is a book about what it means to be an artist and White makes a connection with the practice of vivisection not just in the title but several times throughout the book.

Vivisection was a medical research technique that became quite widespread in the 19^th century. The word comes from the Latin vivus meaning “alive” and so vivisection involved the cutting open of live animals. The anti-vivisection movement was led by the same women who were running the suffragette movement and they did much to put an end to the practice. Hurtle’s second mother in the book, Mrs Courtney is, in fact, an anti-vivisectionist and comes from the aristocratic class of women who led that movement. This aspect of the book is historically accurate. Practically all of the vivisectionists were men and practically all of the opponents of the practice were women, there is an implied gender asymmetry here which maps to Jung’s anima-animus distinction in an interesting way.

What White is saying is that being an artist is like being a vivisector in that it involves severing life into sections by turning it into works of art. Doesn’t one thereby kill the subject just as occurred in vivisection? That is the big question which White explores through the life of Hurtle Duffield. Viewed this way, the lack of attention in the novel to any of the major turning points in Hurtle’s life can be read as a commentary on what it means to be an artist. The artist is so self-absorbed that even the death of loved ones has little impact on him, just as the vivisector needed to be able to detach himself from the live animal he was dissecting. The artist (and possibly also a scientist and a philosopher too, since both of those involve vivisection) is necessarily removed from experiencing everyday life in its fullness. The events of life are either the inspiration for a work of art (or science) or they are nothing.

Whether this is a good or a bad thing is one of the main themes of the novel. On the one hand, we might argue that the artist is selfish, self-absorbed, introspective and not fully present even among those he cares most about. On the other hand, there is the thrill and satisfaction that comes from the creation of one’s own reality through art. This raises a deep metaphysical question: is there ever a reality that we can simply receive and be part of in a passive sense or are we always creating our own reality. If the latter, then the artist is the one who does not shy away from the responsibility. He takes creation seriously. Is that selfishness or is it courage, since the act of self-creation is necessarily isolating and leaves one vulnerable and exposed.

Patrick White knew a thing or two about the subject since he was an artist in the broadest sense of the term. The Vivisector is clearly autobiographical. Patrick White himself spent much time in Europe honing his artistic craft before returning to Australia and starting from scratch. He, too, fought in the war. He, too, took a trip to Greece with a Greek lover just as Hurtle does in the story. White would have have attended many an expensive dinner party thrown by the beautiful and wealthy people of the Sydney north shore. He also received many awards and accolades and even an invitation to meet the Prime Minister. All of these things happen to Hurtle in the story and so it’s quite clear that Hurtle is very much a self-portrait on White’s part.

It’s not a surprise, therefore, that, while White does not hide shy away from the dark sides of artistry, he ultimately comes down on the side of the artist. He does so in a way that ties in with the idea of the artist as prophet or religious practitioner. In the context of the book, this is the idea, possibly blasphemous in some denominations, that God is also a vivisector. What do we read at the beginning of the book of Genesis: God created the heavens and the Earth and all the things in the world. He partitioned the world into parts. To take on the role of artist is to be the microcosm to the macrocosm of God. It is to partition the world into parts in an act of creation.

White hints at this theme throughout the book and then makes it explicit by ending his story in a way that is identical to Goethe’s Faust. Like Faust, Hurtle Duffield goes on creating his reality until the very end. Like Faust, Hurtle reunites with his anima in death. But, unlike Goethe’s story, it is not the Virgin Mary who is there at the end but Hurtle’s hunchback sister, Rhoda.

The Vivisector can thus be read as a gentle satire on not just Faust but also Goethe’s other main work Wilhelm Meister and, indeed, on the romantic movement in general. White removes all the grand symbolic gestures that had become synonymous with romanticism. In doing so, he implies that true artistry involves finding the beauty in the everyday moments of life rather than in romantic escape into abstractions.

The romantic hero had died on the battlefields of the two wars. White knew that from first-hand experience. He also knew that romanticism had been used during the wars as a propaganda tool to bewitch the public. Whatever was left of the romantic movement in art had to be found elsewhere and White suggests we must find it again in the everyday reality in which we live.

In this way, there is a kind of mini-heroism in White’s refusal to throw the baby out with the bathwater as did the other modernists. He carries the torch for true art. It is a muted torch, but it may still the light way where there would otherwise be darkness or, even worse, literary modernism.

Given that I’ve spent much of the last three years writing about the Devouring Mother, I didn’t expect that I had much left to say on the subject, and yet, just this past week, I realised I had missed a key part of the dynamic, one that is incredibly obvious in hindsight. My realisation was triggered by this story that went viral from the recent university protests in the US. A spokesperson for the protesting students at Columbia demanded the university not prevent food and water, which she referred to as “humanitarian aid”, from being given to the students. When questioned, she admitted there had been nobody stopping the students from getting food and water. On the contrary, it turned out the university had offered the students $80 food vouchers as part of the “negotiations” around the protest.

Bribing children with junk food to get them to comply is a standard practice among parents, and so, in and of itself, these kinds of offers are indicative of the infantilisation of the public by the government and evidence of the Devouring Mother at work. But there is a more symbolic aspect to the university side of the story that I only just realised.

The idea that students would be the ones demanding things from their alma mater is already an inversion of the whole dynamic and one that never would have been accepted in the early days of the university. It’s fitting that the modern alma mater, who offers very little in the way of spiritual and intellectual nourishment, should turn to offers of actual nourishment (food) to keep her “children” placated.

It’s not a coincidence that the whole notion of student protest belongs to the post-war years, since that time represents a radical change in the nature of the university and one that ties directly in with the larger societal trends that I have captured under the archetypes of the Devouring Mother and the Orphan. We can get a better appreciation of that change by doing a lightning survey of the history of the university. The story is worth telling because the university is a unique institution that appeared simultaneously with the birth of modern Europe in the 11^th century.

The very first university was the University of Bologna, which was established in 1088 and bore the name of alma mater. Specifically, it was Alma Mater Studiorum—the mother who nourishes studies. A unique feature of the universities from the beginning was the concept of academic freedom. In those days, this referred to the freedom of travel. Students and their teachers were able to move around Europe, attending whichever university they preferred. Tied in with the Catholic Church’s pan-European reach, the university was a key feature in the unification of Europe and really was a foundational pillar of modern western civilisation by allowing the exchange of ideas across borders.

From the beginning all the way up until the 19^th century, the curriculum of the university was founded on the seven “liberal arts” of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. It’s important to understand that the meaning of the word “art” in those days would have been translated into modern usage by the word “skill”. Grammar, logic, rhetoric, and the other disciplines were seen as skilled activities. There were rules to follow, and you were graded on how well you followed them. Universities were not there to foster creativity or critical thinking in the modern sense of those terms, they were there to churn out skilled practitioners who would then be ready to tackle the highest subjects of law, medicine, and theology. Those students who were not gifted enough to become lawyers, doctors, and theologians could still count on getting jobs as clerks and scribes in royal courts or ecclesiastical institutions.

The seven liberal arts had all been taken over directly from antiquity. In fact, Plato had talked about the subjects in his famous work, The Republic. This fits the general pattern of the early Faustian as being heavily influenced by the ancient world, and the university was no exception to the rule. The first major change came during the Renaissance with the addition of what would now be called the humanities. The seven liberal arts were all highly abstract. Even music was not studied as a performative or compositional skill but as a branch of mathematics. This made education incredibly dry. Students were rewarded for precision, not inspiration. The idea of the humanities was to put some life back into education and have students consider what it meant to be a human.

In practice, this added history and literature as major new subjects to the core curriculum. Although a seemingly small change, this was actually quite monumental since neither history nor literature are skills in the way that arithmetic and rhetoric are. An element of subjectivity had been introduced into the equation. This tied in with broader changes in the culture away from the ideals of truth and towards the acceptance of belief. The inherently subjective element in literature and history was more about belief than about truth in a mathematical sense.

Again, this might seem like a small change, but this little crack in the dam wall turned into a flood with the Protestant Reformation and has arguably reached an apotheosis in our time. The ability to choose one’s own gender represents the final ascension of belief over truth. We have gone from a concern with absolute, eternal, and abstract truths to an insistence on subjective belief, which changes with the seasons. It should be no coincidence that the incubator for all this is the schools and universities.

The role of the university in these changes cannot be overstated even though they are the exact opposite of the foundational principles of that institution. The universities had always been separate from the local populations where they were located. In fact, the local population was often hostile to the university because the church made them pay for the university’s upkeep. A famous example is a riot at the University of Oxford in 1209 after a student killed a local. The townsfolk captured and hanged several students who were believed to be involved. Many of the other students and teachers fled the area and went off to form the University of Cambridge. The Pope issued a punishment to the local people that included, funnily enough, the provision of meals to students and staff at Oxford.

Not only were the universities independent of their communities, over time they also gained a level of independence from the church too. This may have been a grave error on the part of the Pope since it appears to have opened the way for the rebellion that followed. All of the major players in that Reformation were university men. Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Foxe, Tyndale, and others had been educated at university, with Bible study at the forefront of their work. Since the Bible was supposed to be the word of God, how could there be any errors in it? The discovery of errors in translation from the ancient Greek texts became a major issue, and the blame was placed on the church, not just for using an incorrect translation (the Vulgate) but for misrepresenting the teachings of the Bible to the congregation.

The Church had inherited a version of truth from the ancient world, which was that what was true was absolutely true. There were no shades of grey. No probability entered the equation. The seven liberal arts were founded on the same assumption. They were about eternal truths. The development of the humanities and the emergence of Biblical interpretation and translation from within the universities allowed for subjective truths, which came to undermine the authority of the Church. Since the Pope had proven himself fallible in his interpretation of the Bible, he was no longer the source of authority. Nominally, the source of authority became the Bible itself, but this was always problematic since the original Protestants were themselves doing the translation and asserting that theirs was superior to the Church’s. They could not justify this logically, so they appealed to notions of “grace” and being “chosen by God”. Eventually, this would open out into the world in which we now live, in which belief trumps truth.

All of these monumental changes were incubated in the universities, and so it’s a strange fact that the influence of the universities actually declined in the centuries following the Reformation. The religious sensitivities that had been opened up saw the universities stagnate around the original seven liberal arts, with a smattering of humanities thrown in for good measure.

Universities had been nurtured into existence by the Church. But the various scientific societies and academies were the product of private money, which came partly from allied members of the aristocracy and partly from the nouveau riche of the emerging bourgeoisie. Fittingly, the precursor to the Royal Society was called the Invisible College since the whole idea of doing experimental science was politically dangerous and needed to be carried out in private. Remember that the truths of the Church and the original university were eternal and absolute, which meant they were not proved or disproved by evidence but by reason and logic. The Invisible College needed to be secretive because it still jarred against mainstream religious and theological beliefs.

One of the key features of the new scientific societies was their relative openness to the general public. The Royal Society held a public lecture each Friday evening on a hot scientific topic of the day. It was none other than Michael Faraday, who had not attended university at all but done an apprenticeship as a bookbinder, who attended a series of lectures on chemistry at the Royal Society as a member of the general public. Faraday’s note-taking impressed the lecturer so much that he offered him a position as a laboratory assistant. The rest, as they say, is history. What we see during this period is a glimpse at the kind of meritocratic system that the university offered in the early days of modern European civilisation.

It took until the 19^th century for the universities to finally break free of the religious ideology that prevented their acceptance of the new science. It was in Prussia that a new paradigm was introduced, not just in the university sector but in the general education of the public, and it’s worth remembering that the Prussian model was an especially strong influence on the US education system. The focus was once again on academic freedom, and it is certainly for this reason that there was a mini-golden age of scholarship, especially in the German-speaking lands.

Nevertheless, it’s also true that much of the great scientific and intellectual work happened outside the university. Alfred Russell Wallace was an autodidact who self-funded his expeditions. Tesla was a university dropout. Darwin, Lavoisier, Marx, and Freud were gentlemen of independent means. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Goethe all did their main work outside of the university. Gregor Mendel was a monk.

Putting all this together, we can ask the question of what has been the importance of the university throughout the history of the modern West. There can be no doubt that the institution was crucial at the beginning. It was the way in which knowledge from the ancient world was imported. The university was the birthplace of Faustian intellectual culture. But if we consider science to be the crowning achievement of that culture, it’s pretty clear that the university was a hindrance and not a help to its emergence.

This brings us to the 20^th century, specifically the post-war years, where we have seen an explosion in the size and scale of the university. Has this explosion been accompanied by a golden age of scholarship, innovation, and knowledge? If it has, I must have missed the memo. But the lack of results is arguably not the main problem. The main problem is political and it is this which seems to be coming to a head now.

When resources were scarce, universities were very strict about grading because society could not afford to waste money training people who were not up to the job. Thus, the system was designed so that only the best of the best graduated and went on to study the highest disciplines of law, medicine, and theology.

A rich society has no such concern. In a rich society, just like in a rich household, the challenge is to find things for people to do. This has always been an especial problem for industrial capitalism. The unemployment rates of the Great Depression were the logical outcome of the massive oversupply created by the system, which drove the damaging boom and bust cycles. The rollout of mass education was one of the main ways in which the state stepped in to try and fix the problem of oversupply.

The university sector employs a huge number of people, both directly and indirectly. It also removes a segment of the population from the workforce. In most modern western nations, one third of the population will now go to university, up from single digits in the first half of the 20^th century. That’s a whole lot of people who are not looking for work. In all these ways, the modern university helps to smooth out the problem of unemployment.

All of this worked tolerably well in the aftermath of WW2, but there are several trends that have turned the dynamic noticeably toxic in the last few decades. Firstly, a university education has become the pre-requisite for entry into corporate and government work. It is a mandatory stepping stone on the way to most of the high-status positions in society. The university now attracts those looking for status, not those looking for knowledge.

Secondly, corporate and government bureaucracies are zero-sum institutions with a pyramidal organisational structure. While the number of bureaucracies expands, the number of high-status positions grows, and university graduates can take up those positions. What happens when the bureaucracy ceases to grow? You get a classic zero-sum dynamic where competition increases for the scarce resources at the top of the pyramid. This explains the increasingly ideological nature of the university in recent decades. It’s no longer about knowledge but about allegiance to the ever-changing dogma that is used to solve the cutthroat internal politics of zero sum bureaucracies.

It is this combination that gives us the third, and arguably the biggest, problem. The post-war years have seen a huge increase in the number of university students. Clearly, there have been no supply-side constraints on this growth. In a functioning market, we might expect the price of university tuition to actually fall since when there are a greater number of people paying for a service, the fixed cost ratio goes down. Instead, tuition fees have massively outstripped general inflation. Why? Because what is being sold by universities is no longer knowledge but access to high-status jobs. Since the demand for high-status jobs exceeds the supply, the price of tuition has skyrocketed. Here in Australia, we run a similar racket for international students where the product for sale is a permanent residency visa.

All of this has been going on while the internet has all but undermined the historical role of university as a repository of knowledge. The knowledge traditionally imparted by university is now freely available online. This is the same old problem of oversupply that has been happening for more than a century. In a functioning market, the value of a university as the transmitter of knowledge would be almost zero and the price of tuition should reflect that. By definition, the university market is a racket and it is the students who are being forced to pay for that racket in the form of increasingly absurd student loans.

The alma mater is supposed to nourish her children in preparation for the day they will become adults. What do we say about an alma mater who burdens her children with enormous debts? That is not an alma mater at all; that is an edax mater – the Devouring Mother. In fact, it is university students who now “nourish” their alma mater financially through debt obligations while also being bound to the mother through ideological allegiance. This is an inversion of the way it should be.

In short, we’re right back to where we were in the old days when the Church played the role of Devouring Mother to the medieval societies of pre-Reformation Europe. Coincidentally, the decadence of our elites mirrors that of the popes of the 16^th century. The time is right for a Reformation. Will the university survive as an institution in the aftermath and what institutions(s) might replace it? Those are interesting questions to ponder.

In late 2019, I made a fateful decision, albeit one that didn’t seem particularly important at the time. I decided to take several months away from work to write my first novel, a stoner comedy called Once Upon a Time in Tittybong. I had no particular plan or prospects for the book and figured that I would self-publish it. It was one of those ideas that seemed right at the time and for which the stars aligned as several unrelated events led me down that pathway. So, I quit my job and made the other necessary arrangements before getting down to writing.

I’d all but finished the book when Corona kicked off. Even if I had wanted to go back to work, the lockdowns removed any chance of finding a new job. Given that the lockdowns here in Melbourne lasted most of the rest of 2020, I found myself with plenty of time on my hands, during which I wrote two more comedic novels, both published in 2020. If I ever have grandchildren and they ask me the cliched question, “grandpa, what did you do during the corona pandemic?” I guess I’ll have to answer that I spent the whole time writing comedy.

Of course, alongside writing comedy I also had the time and space to try and figure out what the hell was going on in the world. That’s when I started writing my Coronapocalypse series of posts to try and make sense of the “pandemic”. Prior to that, I had blogged very infrequently, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a single comment on any of my posts prior to 2020. I had never intended to write regular blog. The whole point of having this website was as a vehicle for my fiction writing. To this day, the home page has the short author bio that I wrote back in late 2019. It’s now out of date and in need of an edit.

The Coronapocalypse posts gave me the material for my first two non-fiction books, The Plague Story and The Devouring Mother, and both of these formed the foundation for my latest The Universal State of America. It’s too early to say what will happen with the latest book, but the first two continue to sell the occasional copy, although I certainly won’t be quitting my day job any time soon. Putting it all together, my personal story arc for the last four years has been that I set out to write a comedy novel and ended up writing an “archetypal history” of western civilisation. That’s almost the premise for a comedy in itself. If I was Frederico Fellini or Charlie Kaufmann, I’d turn it into a movie.

In relation to stories, there has been a crucial meta-lesson for me over the last four years. While in the middle of writing fictional stories, I came to realise how important stories are in “the real world”. The story of “covid-19” has actually turned out exactly as the dissenting epidemiologists said it would way back in early 2020. The case fatality rate of the virus is now indistinguishable from the flu, having dropped an order magnitude from the early days. Even Fauci had predicted this outcome in a co-authored paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in early 2020.

Of course, it was not this story which “won” in the public imagination. The story we chose was what I call the Plague Story – more specifically, the modern version of the Plague Story told by Hollywood, where scientists and experts save us all from Armageddon. For a seeming majority of the public, that story will be the one that they tell their grandkids when the subject of covid-19 comes up and no doubt some variation of that will go down in the official history. As the saying goes: if the news is fake, imagine how fake history is.

For myself, and I’m assuming for most readers of this blog, our story of the “pandemic” will be very different. For me, it has involved a re-evaluation of the society I thought I lived in. The funny thing is that the lessons have all been pointed out by some of my favourite writers from the past. Kierkegaard comes to mind. Society is always insane, he said, the trick is to find your own happiness. Or Nietzsche: insanity in the individual is rare; in society it is the norm. It’s one thing to read that in the abstract and another thing to realise its truth in a tangible sense.

While society may be irrational at base, most of the time we are able to create a pretense of reason and logic. That’s actually the basis of all comedy: to poke holes in the flimsy narratives of rationality created to keep up appearances. What distinguishes the time in which we live is that our society can no longer even create a pretense of rationality. Corona seemed to open the floodgates in that respect and it’s hard to see when or how “reason” and “logic” will be re-established. It’s for this reason that even many erstwhile rational people are looking elsewhere for meaning.

Putting it all together, 2020 was quite literally the worst time to start writing comedy, since comedy requires the veneer of reason and logic in order to work. In that respect, my efforts at writing fiction turned out to be misguided. Nevertheless, it’s also true that knowing how stories work at a technical level has proven to be crucial to my non-fiction books and, in fact, a great deal of my most recent book is based on literary analysis. Although society may be mad (irrational), there is a method to the madness. That’s the whole point of the Hero’s Journey: learning to navigate the Unconscious/irrational parts of reality without allowing them to destroy you.

From a personal point of view, the completion of The Universal State of America feels like the ending of the Hero’s Journey that began in early 2020. The descent into the Unconscious is over and the treasure brought back from the belly of the beast. For that reason, and also because I’d like to take some time away from the keyboard after what’s been an intense period of concentrated effort over the last year, it’s a good time for me to take a break. Thus, I won’t be writing any posts for rest of April.

I will be checking comments, however, and would be especially delighted to hear feedback from those who have read the Universal State of America.

Otherwise, see you in May.

(P.S. for reasons that I don’t understand, most Australian online book websites add at least 25% and sometimes up to 75% mark up on paperback books. Amazon is currently selling the Universal State of America for $55 which is ridiculous given that it’s selling in the US for $19. By my calculations, I can send the book via AusPost for $25. If there’s anybody in Australia wanting a paperback copy for that price, get in touch and we might be able to work something out.)

Everything that I’ve written in the last few posts is broadly compatible with the analysis of Spengler in Decline of the West, and so it’s probably worth spending a post on the comparisons between my analysis and his, since this will also allow me to present what I think is my final answer to a puzzle that I’ve been trying to sort through for more than a year. The puzzle relates to Spengler’s concept of pseudomorphosis.

To describe pseudomorphosis, I like to use my levels of being concept. Mostly, I’ve been using a three-part distinction between Physical, Exoteric and Esoteric, but since we’re talking about Spengler, it’s useful to further divide the Esoteric into upper and lower. While we’re dividing, I’ll also divide the Physical into alive and inanimate. Here’s how that looks:-

Level of Being	Scientific domain
Physical – inanimate	Physics, chemistry
Physical – alive	Biology
Exoteric	Sociology, politics, anthropology
Esoteric – lower	Psychology
Esoteric – upper	Theology, philosophy

The Exoteric level of being includes all the outward forms of a society, including the political, economic, and religious institutions as well as cultural practices embodied in symbolic form in rites of passage. A wedding ceremony, for example, has an Exoteric form in the ceremonial actions carried out by the various actors, the special clothing, the sacred location (e.g. Church building) etc. A wedding ceremony also resonates at the Esoteric level. It gets its meaning at the highest level of the Esoteric, while also having a psychological resonance in all of the emotions, excitements, and dramas that accompany the event. In real life, of course, we experience the levels of being simultaneously and don’t differentiate between them.

It is because Spengler speaks in the high falutin’ language of German romanticism that reading him can make us lose sight of the fact that these concepts belong to everyday life in society. Nevertheless, it is true that Spengler is mostly concerned with what we have defined as the upper Esoteric, which are the core concepts that unify a culture and which, almost by definition, require an extensive education to come to grips with. Therefore, they are usually understood in the fullest terms only by a small minority. An educated priest should be able to explain how the layout of the church maps to the concepts of Christian theology, but two people getting married in a church don’t need to know any of that Esoteric stuff. They simply need to perform their prescribed Exoteric roles.

The assumption is that it is the Esoteric level of being that determines the Exoteric, and this is the main reason why I prefer these abstract names. Esoteric simply means “hidden”, while Exoteric means “visible”. By calling it the Esoteric, we abstract away from theological and philosophical debates and avoid getting bogged down in metaphysics. As a result, the term Esoteric works equally well whether we think the highest meanings of our lives come from God or whether, like Spengler, we assume they come from some kind of cultural instinct derived from geography.

Now that we know the difference between the Esoteric and Exoteric in broad terms, we are ready to understand the concept of pseudomorphosis, which is one way in which the two levels of being get out of alignment. Since Spengler was concerned with entire societies, that’s where his focus lies but, again, we should note that this is a very common occurrence in our own lives. Ever had a job that you used to like but then got bored with? That means your Esoteric level of being (emotions, goals, desires) no longer matched your Exoteric level of being (the job). The same can happen in marriage or romantic relationships, in church, in your political affiliation or even in banal things like what you normally eat for breakfast. Life is the process of trying to find an equilibrium between the Esoteric and Exoteric levels of being so that the outward expressions of our lives match the inner.

Sometimes, the equilibrium between Esoteric and Exoteric is thrown out of balance by factors external to us. That can also happen at the societal level. It is the latter which Spengler was concerned with when he talks about pseudomorphosis. Specifically, he was referring to a general pattern that occurs where the Exoteric institutions of a dominant society are imposed on a subordinate one. Implied in his definition is that we are talking about a situation where one culture is defeated militarily and is now under the domination of another. A classic example from our time would be the nations conquered by the United States, which then had parliamentary democracies installed in them. Parliamentary democracy is an Exoteric institution born in western Europe and is, therefore, not “native” to those nations.

What happens in pseudomorphosis is that the Esoteric spirit of the subordinate culture finds itself mismatched with the Exoteric forms that have been imposed on it. Spengler assumes that this will give rise to the emotion of hatred on the part of the subjugated people, who will come to despise the culture that dominates it. For Spengler, this hatred is not just born out of the obvious resentment that comes from military defeat but is inherent in the mismatch between the Esoteric and Exoteric.

The issue I have been puzzling over in relation to the concept of pseudomorphosis is that it seemed certain to me that Faustian (modern European) civilisation was itself born out of a pseudomorphosis of the Classical civilisation (ancient Greece and Rome) in that it was created from the Exoteric institution of the Catholic Church, which was itself the product of the Classical civilisation. The problem was that there was no emotion of hatred involved and also no implied real-time political and military domination since the Classical civilisation had ceased to exist by that time. Since Spengler had defined pseudomorphosis to require both of these properties, it didn’t strictly fit his definition, but, if we allow the definition to be expanded, we can account for two phenomena that Spengler and many other thinkers have puzzled over for centuries and which are crucial to understanding Faustian civilisation.

The first is what happened in the late Roman Empire. In one sense, this was a classic pseudomorphosis in exactly the way that Spengler defined it with the Classical civilisation being the dominant one and the Magian (located mostly in what we would now call the Middle East) being the subordinate. We all know this story intimately since it’s the civilisational background of the New Testament. Moreover, we even see exactly the forms of hatred and resentment that Spengler talked about, for example, in the various Jewish revolts against the Romans. We can represent that pseudomorphosis in table form as follows:-

Level of Being	Classical	Magian
Exoteric	Classical	Classical
Esoteric – lower	Classical	Magian
Esoteric – upper	Classical	Magian

The Magian civilisation is under a pseudomorphosis to the Classical at the Exoteric level of being but retains its Esoteric identity. This is a perfect example of the concept exactly as Spengler defined it. But then something happened that has puzzled scholars all the way up until our time: Christianity became the state religion of Rome. Since Christianity belongs to the Magian civilisation, this implies that the Magian had somehow taken over the Classical even though it was under a pseudomorphosis of the Classical. That’s weird, but it actually fits within both Spengler and Toynbee’s model of history.

Rome represented what Toynbee called the Universal State of the Classical civilisation. The Universal State is the dominant political structure that ushers in a long period of peace and material prosperity. Its arrivals marks the final phase of the cycle of civilisation and the reason is because the Esoteric level of being becomes moribund. We find that life loses its meaning (upper Esoteric) and stagnates in general (lower Esoteric). That’s why the Romans needed circuses to go with their bread. They were bored and needed to be distracted. We can capture this dynamic in our table as follows:-

Level of Being	Classical	Magian
Exoteric	Classical	Classical
Esoteric – lower	N/A	Magian
Esoteric – upper	N/A	Magian

The dominance of the Universal State over foreign nations continues and, in general, the Exoteric structures of society remain. They can remain in this petrified state for a very, very long time. Ancient Egypt is the prime example of that. Rome itself lasted many centuries in unchanged form. But life in the Universal State has lost its spark and the civilisation has lost its ability to come up with something new. Therefore, we say that the Esoteric level of being has become moribund, especially the upper Esoteric.

What happened in the case of the Roman Empire, however, was very unusual and perhaps unprecedented. There was, using Spengler’s terminology, a reverse pseudomorphosis, or, we might call it, an Esoteric pseudomorphosis. Spengler describes the situation in almost exactly those terms although, because he had given a specific definition to the concept of pseudomorphosis, he didn’t apply that concept to what had occured. When Christianity became the state church of Rome, we can say that the Classical civilisation was now under an Esoteric pseudomorphosis to the Magian. Note that this is exactly the same analysis that Nietzsche and Gibbon made, although they obviously didn’t use this terminology.

This gives us the following table:-

Level of Being	Classical	Magian
Exoteric	Classical	Classical
Esoteric – lower	Magian	Magian
Esoteric – upper	Magian	Magian

The Classical Exoteric forms remain, but now under an Esoteric pseudomorphosis to the Magian.

There are specific developments that made this possible, the most important of which is that St Paul won the argument within the nascent Christian movement to allow gentiles to join the faith. That’s the only reason Romans could become Christians in the first place. A different but symbolically and archetypally important fact is the one I noted a couple of posts ago where the Christian faith explicitly built the Father archetype into its theology, and this seems to match exactly what was going on in the Classical civilisation with a desire for the Father emerging in the cult of Caesar and other developments.

If the dual pseudomorphosis that took place in the late Roman Empire was already unusual, what happened next was even weirder because it was that dual pseudomorphosis that gave birth to Faustian civilisation through the auspices of the Catholic Church that was carried over from late Rome. The symbolism around the Father was now extended to the highest levels of the Exoteric in the person of the Pope, whose title comes from papa, meaning “father” and who is still referred to as the “holy father”.  But that symbolism is a direct match with the upper Esoteric in the form of the holy trinity: Father – Son – Holy Spirit. Thus, we have a template that presents a unified structure at the Exoteric and Esoteric levels of being:-

Level of Being	Faustian
Exoteric	Classical-Magian Father
Esoteric – lower	Classical-Magian Father
Esoteric – upper	Classical-Magian Father

The Faustian was then born out of a dual pseudomorphosis at both the Exoteric and Esoteric levels of being. This gave rise to a truly uncanny relationship between the Faustian and Classical-Magian which was something that Spengler touched on time and again. In one place, he describes it this way:

“The freedom and power of Classical research are always hindered…by a certain almost religious awe. In all history there is no analogous case of one Culture making a passionate cult of the memory of another.”

But this is the whole point. It was not “almost” a religious awe; it was an actual religious awe that comes from the fact that the Faustian was created by the Classical-Magian synthesis. The parental metaphor here is perfectly apt. The Faustian civilisation was born as a “child” to the “father” of the Classical-Magian dual pseudomorphosis. That would have already been weird enough but what are the odds that the Father-Son relationship would be baked into the very theology itself and which was also represented in the Exoteric forms of the culture through the office of Pope (papa, father)?

We have to remember that theologians used to debate the issue of the trinity furiously, and the trinity is still denied by certain Christian sects, such as the Unitarians. The formulation of these theological concepts into archetypal terms of Father and Son is already a big move psychologically because most conceptions of God talk in abstract terms of a “supreme being” or a deity, or any other term which does not have archetypal resonance in the way that “Father” inevitably does. Can it be a coincidence that this civilisation that was obsessed with the Father would later give rise to the Oedipus Complex?

Freud noted that the son may come to hate the father. Why? Because the father is the dominant power in the household and he prevents the son’s attainment of what he wants (the Esoteric level of being). But that is the exact same relationship that Spengler identified in the hatred of the subordinate culture to the dominant one in pseudomorphosis. It is clear that there is a more general principle which holds both at the individual and collective levels, which makes perfect sense since the collective is made up of individuals. We come to resent and maybe even hate those who stifle our growth and throw our Esoteric and our Exoteric out of balance. That is true of individual people and it is true of entire societies.

But there is another psychology at play, one that Freud also built into the Oedipus Complex. The son may worship and idolise the father. But this is exactly the attitude of the Faustian towards the Classical. Thus, as late as Nietzsche, we find Faustian thinkers who are convinced the Classical civilisation was the greatest thing ever and the thing to do was to try and go back to the glory of Rome.

In truth, both of these Oedipal responses are present throughout the history of the Faustian civilisation. We see equal parts idolisation and rebellion. It’s this exact psychology that Dostoevsky captured so beautifully in many of his novels. We can love and hate somebody at almost the same time. What’s more, the “dominance” they have over us need not be physical in nature. Somebody who is virtuous can be admired for that fact and then hated by the exact same person because their virtue makes that person look bad.  The Faustian has always measured itself against the Classical. It idolised it as an ideal to live up to and then rebelled against it when it failed to do so.

Curiously, we see a similar psychology in modern America’s relationship to Europe. Americans will alternately ridicule Europe as an unproductive backwater while also proudly announcing their European heritage. “I’m half Spanish, half Dutch.” “Oh yeah, well I’m half Swedish, half German.” I saw a classic example of this a couple of months ago in a video of a speech by Tucker Carlson, who referred to the Swedish as “my people”. Apparently, he sees no contradiction between such a statement and the fact that he is “America first”. It is these logical paradoxes that are a hallmark of psychology.

And that’s why we must include the psychological point of view when understanding Faustian civilisation. It’s not a coincidence that psychoanalysis would be born of the Faustian. It was the civilisation which needed it – the civilisation of daddy issues which, these days, are turning into mommy issues.

Let’s begin this post with some definitions that we have already either implied or openly stated so far in this series:-

• The collective unconscious: Jung’s term for the collection of shared mental concepts that we use to make sense of the world. Included in this are the primal archetypes of Father, Mother, Child, Ruler, Warrior, Sage etc.
• The societal unconscious: the things which have been pushed out of the collective conscious mind. This can include things that are verboten for moral, psychological and ideological reasons and, perhaps more interestingly, those things which have not yet entered consciousness since society has not yet come to terms with them.
• The collective consciousness: The things which society is concerned with and collectively discusses and thinks about.

To these concepts, we can add the theory, which has a level of empirical support from cognitive science and which seems intuitively correct, that the unconscious parts of the mind are deeper and stronger than the conscious parts. Moreover, it takes more “processing power” to use the conscious mind than the unconscious. Thus, we fall back to the unconscious during times of stress or when we, for some other reason, have neither the time nor energy to activate the conscious mind. As an extension of this, we can hypothesise that the societal unconscious is just the collective desire of a majority of society not to bring to consciousness certain issues which cause stress in the broadest sense of the word. This is sometimes called cognitive dissonance.

All else being equal, the larger the group involved, the more that “collective thinking” will revert to the unconscious since there is limited bandwidth available in mass communication and only the most basic and fundamental concepts are able to be communicated. Thus, the larger the audience, the more likely the communication will take the form of the broad and easy-to-process concepts of the collective unconscious i.e. the archetypes. Note that this would account for a point we made in the last post: Roman society coalesced around the Father archetype in its Empire phase as society became centralised and homogenised in the cities. We can further add as evidence for this claim that when Christianity eventually became dominant, its seat of power was the cities (the enemies of the Christians were the pagans and the word pagan comes from the Latin where it meant something like “country bumpkin”).

With these ideas, we are ready to make sense of the paradox of the United States of America, possibly the first empire in history which is pretending not to be an empire. The reason the USA is pretending it’s not an empire is because the nation was founded on the idea of rebellion from what I call the Tyrannical Father archetype. Now, we know from the above discussion that the Tyrannical Father belongs to the collective unconscious, and the collective unconscious is a more deep and stable part of the psyche. When we believe something to be true at the unconscious level, it is very hard to change that belief, and, in fact, cognitive scientists have shown that even when we consciously know something to be false, it still resonates in the unconscious since it is the upper brain which forms the negation of the underlying image which lives in the unconscious mind. That is why, for example, you can say of somebody, “he is not a paedophile,” and the statement is still dangerous because the unconscious mind forms the image of the person as a paedophile before the conscious mind negates it. (This is why politicians are told to avoid denying things, since it gives credence to the underlying idea). 

When we go back to the foundation of the United States, what we find is that the disputes were almost entirely between the American colonists and the British parliament. These were arguments over trade and taxation, and the colonists had already successfully won concessions from the British parliament by engaging in various tactics that we would now call trade wars or economic warfare. The Boston Tea Party took the whole thing to a new level because it was an act of outright commercial sabotage. The debate that happened in the British Parliament afterwards centred around the fact that the British had to respond to this escalation because it undermined the authority of Parliament (not, you will note, of the King). The retaliation was what became known as the Intolerable Acts.

Note that King George III had little to do with any of this. What was already in place in Britain was what we now take for granted, which is parliament as a kind of clearing house for the regulation and management of commercial enterprise. The East India Company had lobbied Parliament for a monopoly on the supply of tea. It got what it wanted, but the result was a market failure since the price of tea went up (which almost always happens in a monopoly) and the British public realised they could get cheaper tea from the Netherlands. The British Parliament tried to solve the market failure by dumping tea into the colonies, and the rest is history.

Thus, the American colonists were in a commercial and trade war with Britain long before the war turned military in nature. Even in the years leading up to the actual fighting, there was a covert war being fought since both the French and the Spanish supplied the American colonists. How did they do that without getting busted by the British? By setting up pretend commercial enterprises and shipping weapons to America under the cover of legitimate trade (just like America is now shipping weapons to Ukraine, although that’s happening overtly).

What’s more, even when the war of independence broke out, the battle over trade did not stop. Thus, the British occupied US ports to prevent both imports and exports from taking place. The American colonists tried to put an embargo on trade with the British on the continent, and even the French sugar plantations in the Caribbean were targeted once the French joined the war. Already, with the US war of independence, we see the origins of Total War, since war was no longer just about soldiers lining up on a field and battling it out until somebody surrendered. War now included what historian Jeremy Black later came to call Informal Empire. It was as much about sabotaging the economy of your enemy as about fighting them directly on the battlefield.

All of this belongs to the above-mentioned category of the societal unconscious i.e. the things that are not consciously understood and talked about. We know that’s true because historians needed to come up with new names for these things, like Total War and Informal Empire. But that is not how the general public understands them, and this comes back to a point about the differences between the conscious and the unconscious. Why did the general public of the United States come to see the war of independence as a rebellion against the Tyrannical Father of George III? The answer is because this was part of the trend which began with the Reformation and which was tied in with the twin archetypal Fathers of Pope and King. The archetypal meanings around the US war of independence were very largely created by Thomas Paine in his book Common Sense. This quote is highly relevant:-

“And a man hath good reason to believe that there is as much of king-craft, as priest-craft, in withholding the scripture from the public in Popish countries. For monarchy in every instance is the Popery of government.”

Paine was arguing against the divine right of kings, which, again, was the pairing of the twin archetypal Fathers of Pope and King. The Pope had already been rejected in Protestant nations, and the King was next on the chopping block. Just ask Charles I and Louis XVI.  At the level of the collective unconscious, what resonated with the general public was that the war of independence was the rejection of the Tyrannical Father and that is why King George III got blamed for a whole bunch of things that had far more to do with the operation of parliament and commercial interests that he was not directly involved in.

Now, it’s important to point out that it’s not a matter of one or the other perspective being “correct” but rather that both were true. At the archetypal level, the deeper level of the psyche, the war of independence was a rejection of the Tyrannical Father because the British had placed the archetypal Father back on the throne when Cromwell died. Thus, King George III really was the archetypal Father. Possibly, he had become even more archetypal to the extent that he was less involved in daily affairs and was therefore primarily a symbolic figure. In this respect, the American colonists were doing what the British had been unable to do, which was to throw off the Father altogether, and it’s noteworthy that all of continental Europe and even Russia and China in the early 20^th century would eventually throw off the Father either symbolically or in reality. Just ask Nicholas II and Puyi.

Therefore, the founding myth of the US is “true” at the archetypal level, which is where myth is true. And this is where the feedback loops between the unconscious and conscious minds and the “real world” get interesting. We have to remember that the US was founded with the historical consciousness of Faustian civilisation. The founding fathers were very well aware, like most European intellectuals, that history showed that civilisations end up in tyranny, and that following the tyranny the civilisation tends to collapse. That is what the historical record shows. Thus, at a conscious level in the minds of the intellectuals of the time, Europe was already heading back down a pathway to tyranny, which signified, for them, the end stages of civilisation. Ironically, this had actually been enabled by the Reformation which allowed the kings of northern Europe to disintermediate the Catholic Church and make the state far more dominant than it ever had been.

In any case, the US was founded on the assumption that the great threat was the Tyrannical Father, not just because he is bad in himself but because the arrival of the tyrant signals the end of civilisation. Out of this comes the idea of American exceptionalism and this is present even in Thomas Paine who saw the US as a new start for humanity. Thus, the collective consciousness around the formation of the US was predicated on the historical consciousness of European civilisation and the desire to avoid the fate which history seemed to have prescribed for Europe i.e. tyranny leading to downfall.

We can see, therefore, that there is a match between the unconscious and conscious minds in this respect. At the collective unconscious level is the Tyrannical Father. At the conscious level is the understanding that tyrants destroy civilisation, which is borne out by the historical record. Selling the idea to the public that George III was responsible made sense.

But perhaps the crucial discordance that was at play and is still at play in our day was the attitude to trade and commerce that prevailed among the American colonists. Again, we can use Thomas Paine in this respect, since he was a populist who captured the general mood. The idea was that trade meant freedom from tyranny. Thus, in the conscious mind, trade was a way to escape from the exercise of political dominance. The problem with that is the one we have already discussed: the European powers and the American colonists had already started to weaponise trade to achieve political outcomes. The new paradigm which was forming was trade war, which later evolved into financial war. Trade war became the main game, with military hostilities reserved as a last resort. Thus, to say it again, the US war of independence was a trade war long before it was a military one. In the foundation of the United States was the paradigm that has become dominant in our time. Trade and politics were already synonymous.

But all of this still makes sense because the ascendance of trade was predicated on the rebellion against the Tyrannical Father. The merchant class emerged as the dominant force in direct proportion as the Pope and King were pushed aside. The United States was founded by merchants who saw their rebellion as being against King George III. It’s quite likely that many of them really believed that and were simply unaware (unconscious) that trade could be weaponised for political purposes. Using our earlier terminology, we say that the weaponization of trade and commerce had been relegated to the societal unconscious.

And the truly strange part is that it is still there. At the time of writing, the US is in a trade war with Russia, Iran and probably a number of other countries that we don’t know about. Its imperial power is predicated on control of the international financial system. The deep state is currently trying to take out a presidential candidate using the exact tactics of commercial, financial, and legal sabotage that have been the cornerstone of Informal Empire right from the beginning of the United States. All of this belongs to the societal unconscious. Any discussion of it is quickly covered over with propaganda, and propaganda is always an appeal to the Unconscious mind.

And this leads to a final point, which is implied by Jung’s idea of individuation. Perhaps the way civilisation works is something like this. Over time, we add to our stock of concepts in the Unconscious. These are all the things that are deep and solid. By definition, they must have existed for a long time before they condense into the bedrock of the psyche. Things that are “new”, like Total War and Informal Empire, have not yet had enough time to become part of the unconscious mind. We can process them consciously, but that takes a lot of mental effort and the truth is, the contents of the conscious mind are always flimsy and unstable relative to the Unconscious. Moreover, the attempt to process these things consciously is bound to fail since public discourse cannot handle the bandwidth required for such a discussion. Only over extended periods of time, with much repetition and a shared experience on the part of a large proportion of the population, can something become dense and solid enough to take up a place in the Unconscious. We’re not there yet.