Category: Ideas

To say that the Classical civilisation of Greece and Rome was a massive influence on modern European civilisation is a statement of the obvious. It’s when we try to be more specific about the nature of that influence that differing perspectives appear. Many historians think that the modern European is a simple linear progression of the Classical interspersed by the dramatic period of the dark ages where the light of civilisation was almost snuffed out for good. It is because such a view was so common that Oswald Spengler repeatedly insisted, and provided ample evidence to back up his claim, that the modern European (Faustian) was, in fact, a completely different civilisation to the Classical and needed to be understood as such. In between these two extremes was the position of Toynbee who called the Classical the “parent” of the modern European thereby allowing for both an independent existence for the modern while also acknowledging the influence of the ancient.

Where things get rather meta, however, is that it seems that the desire for an archetypal Father figure was itself a major change that occurred in the Classical civilisation and that specifically arose at the time when Rome made the change from republic to military dictatorship. The Caesars became the societal Fathers of Rome. This was true in both symbolic and more practical forms.

Prior to this development, Rome was a genuine, old-school patriarchy at the microcosmic level. The father was head of the household and had complete legal and moral authority over the members of the household not just including slaves and servants but wives and children too. When Rome changed into a military dictatorship, one way to think about that change was that the macrocosmic structure of the state was being brought into line with the microcosmic structure of the family. Just like the fathers of Roman households, the Caesars became the primary breadwinner, the protector and also the religious leaders of Rome.

One piece of evidence for this claim is that, beginning with Julius, the Caesars were endowed with the title pater patriae which means father of the fatherland. This was tied in with the emergence of the cult of Caesar which appeared to be a genuine grassroots movement, a collective religious and psychological cult of the Father. If this is true, then the ascendance of Christianity to the state religion of Rome actually makes a great deal of sense since the Father – Son relationship is built into its theology. Curiously, it was at this same time that bishops started to be referred to as popes. The word pope is rendered in Greek and Latin as papa meaning father. Prior to that, the term pontiff was used, which did not have the paternal connotation. Thus, beginning with the cult of Caesar and picking up steam as the centuries progressed, the Roman Empire became based around the Father archetype.

It was the remaining organisational structure of the western Roman Empire that would then be carried over into the nascent Faustian civilisation. Early modern Europe was created by the popes who were archetypal Fathers promulgating a theology where the archetypal Father was supreme. Although the psychology of this is important, we should understand that this was baked into the institutional structures of society at that time and therefore had a variety of real world effects that go beyond the merely psychological.

If the Classical was the Father and the Faustian was the Son, do we find any evidence for an Oedipal nature to the civilisational relationship? The Oedipus Complex involves at least two responses on the part of the son. On the one hand, he will idolise the Father as an all-powerful god. On the other hand, he will rebel against the Father. These two normally occur one after the other. Thus, young boys will tend to idolise their Father and then rebel against him later when they are trying to assert their own independence. Ideally, the process works itself through and sons come to see their fathers as human beings with faults and virtues like anybody else, but this is not always the case. What is the case is that we see exactly this Oedipal pattern in the Faustian civilisation’s attitude towards its civilisational Father, the Classical.

As late the 20^th century, we see Spengler lamenting the fact that many scholars of his day were still in thrall to Classical concepts. The whole reason Spengler had to insist that the Faustian was unique was because people still believed it was not. The idolisation of the Classical was still present in the culture. If we think about some of the major characters in Faustian history, a central motif in their life is the relationship with the Classical. Thus, Martin Luther’s war against the Pope began with his trip to Rome. Goethe’s trip to Italy was a major turning point in his own life and a big inspiration on Spengler’s later work. Even as Faustian a philosopher of Nietzsche has the relationship with the Classical as a central theme in his work. He constantly laments the meekness of the modern European in contrast to the health and vigor of the ancients. There is the fact that Napoleon had a Roman crown made for himself when he became emperor or that Mussolini promised the Italians a return to the glory of Rome. The list could go on and on.

All of this is indicative of the Oedipal idolisation of the Father. What we see with the Reformation is the beginning of the rebellion against the Father and it is impossibly coincidental that this should come during the teenage years of the Faustian and would be led by a man who rebelled against his own father: Martin Luther. Luther was the microcosm to the macrocosm. He was the Faustian son rebelling against the Classical Father. It really was a rebellion, too. The Protestants went around smashing up churches. The patriarchs of Europe responded with a display of fatherly discipline that resulted in the deaths of several hundred thousand people.

The kings of northern Europe had supported the Reformation for solid political reasons, most notably because the Catholic Church had been sucking money out of northern economies and sending it back to Rome. No sooner was the power of the church broken than the political and economic power shifted to the north. The problem for the kings was that by breaking ties with the Pope, they had sawn off the symbolic branch that supported their own power and had done so ever since Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans by Leo III. It turns out that symbolism is important after all.

The pact which had been created between the Popes and rulers of Europe came to be called the divine right of kings and it was this which Robert Filmer referred to in trying to defend the old order in 1680. Of course, it was too late for that. Charles I had already had his head chopped off. The divine right of kings was finished and with it the blind obedience due to the Father. In rejecting the holy Father of the Pope, the kings of Europe had undermined their own patriarchal claim inherited from the Classical civilisation.

To cut a long story short, the Faustian came into its mature phase in the lands which had rebelled against the Father i.e. the Protestant North. The British had thrown off the Pope and then decapitated Charles I. They went on to create the most powerful empire the world had ever known. But it was the nation that Britain gave birth to which would exceed its empire in power and reach and it can be no coincidence that a defining feature of that nation is that it was born out of rebellion. In the next post, we’ll see that the United States of America went even further than Britain in its rejection of the Father.  

It is one of the strange paradoxes of our time, and might be unprecedented in history, that the USA is running an empire even though a large share of the public in that country, and in most other countries, believe that it is not. In the aftermath of the WW2, Britain and other European nations all dismantled the remaining formal, Exoteric structures of their own empires and we were told we now lived in a post-colonial and, hence, post-imperial world.

Now, we might say that the reason everybody is pretending the US is not an empire is because the empire works better that way or that it’s not polite to admit it. Even if that were true, it would be very weird by historical standards. All past empires have had no problem letting everybody know that they were the boss. In fact, they went out of their way to do so because empire was largely based on the projection of power and it was in the interests of the emperor to seem as strong and domineering as possible. Even the British were happy to proclaim that they had an empire. Rule Britannia! and all that.

I’m going to argue that the denial of American imperialism runs much deeper and involves an inherent psychological dimension which is a big part of the reason for the psychological dimension of US dominance. Americans are not just pretending they aren’t running an empire for pragmatic reasons. They’re doing it for psychological reasons, ones that have been embedded in the culture from the beginning.

What that psychology amounts to is a rejection of the Father archetype. That development is not unique to America. In fact, it began in Europe with the Reformation. But America was born out of a group of people who were fleeing from the Tyrannical Fathers of Europe and so it received an extra strong dose of the psychology.

Of course, what is going on is not only psychological. The rejection of the Father was a rejection of a specific form of power; the masculine form of power which has been what we traditionally associate with imperialism. By rejecting the Father, the Americans were rejecting imperialism. That’s what they thought and that’s what they still think. But in the political aspects of that rejection lay the seeds of a new form of power which eventually gave rise to a new form of imperialism. It is that new form of power that has been relegated to the unconscious mind. More specifically, it was always unconscious, at least in the mind of the general public.

It’s going to take several posts to lay the analytical foundation by which the above analysis will make sense. The first assumption that we need to make clear is the unity of the microcosm and macrocosm. Now, the microcosm and macrocosm are concepts usually discussed in theology and philosophy to make the claim that the human individual is of the same structure, or type, or material, as God, the cosmos, the universe or similar holistic concepts. In this series of posts, we’re going to use the microcosm-macrocosm concept in a more limited fashion. The microcosm is still the human individual. The macrocosm is civilisation.

Civilisation is one of those concepts that we all take for granted and yet, when you start to question it, the definition begins to slip through your fingers. Let’s avoid that and break all the rules of philosophy to engage in a piece of circular reasoning. We have said that civilisation is the macrocosm to the microcosm of the human individual. It follows that, whatever civilisation is, it’s the same kind of thing as a human individual. Since we know what humans are, we can use ourselves as a template to define civilisation.

What led me to this idea in the first place was Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious which followed from the work he and Freud did around the personal unconscious. The personal unconscious consists of the things that have been pushed out of the conscious mind, usually as a result of some kind of trauma. What Freud and Jung realised was that the “energy” pushed into the unconscious had a habit of bubbling back up into consciousness in all kinds of weird ways and the psychoanalyst’s job was to try and untangle the mess and get to the root of the problem.

In some way, that’s exactly what we’ll be doing in this series of posts, only it won’t be a person laying on our psychologist’s couch but western civilisation in general, and America in particular.

Although Jung’s collective unconscious idea was born out of the work he did on the personal unconscious, he ended framing it quite differently, which is unfortunate since it’s the perfect term for the concept we need. So, let’s change the phrase slightly and call it the societal unconscious. The societal unconscious then becomes all the things which have been pushed out of the collective mind of a society and into the unconscious.

If this sounds a bit whacky, consider any group of people you have ever belonged to: a family, a sports team, a music group, a volunteer organisation, a small business, a corporation or a government department. Didn’t that group have a specific set of things that it consciously and collectively thought about? Didn’t that group also have a specific set of things that were not to be spoken about? Most of us have had the experience of raising something in a group and being gently, or not so gently, informed that the topic is verboten. That is the societal unconscious and we can contrast it with the societal conscious. Together, we get a collective mind that mirrors the individual in its structure.

Jung believed the contents of the collective unconscious to be universals of human psychology. But we can adapt his idea and, again, limit it to a particular civilisation. When we do so, we get very close to the work of the comparative historian, Oswald Spengler, who investigated the shared set of underlying ideas that seem to unify civilisations. Jung was concerned with the universal concepts of the collective unconscious. Spengler was concerned with the specific concepts that grounded specific cultures.

All of this is prima facie evidence for a correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm at the mental or psychological level. What about the physical or biological level? Each of us requires a quantum of energy in order to survive and go about our day. The same is true of civilisations. All the people who show up to work at a giant corporation each day need to get there somehow. There needs to be physical transport infrastructure and a source of energy to make that happen just as we all need a source of energy to do our daily work. Civilisations seem to have a metabolism just like other organisms; another correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm.

It was the comparative historians, Spengler and also Toynbee, who posited the microcosm-macrocosm idea we have been talking about and they did so by noticing another very important correspondence between the two. What they noticed was that the cycle of civilisation seemed to correspond to the human lifecycle. Spengler, in accordance with the materialist philosophy that had become dominant in the 19^th century, used an explicit biological metaphor to describe civilisation and, in particular, to account for why civilisations die. They simply “run out of energy”, he said. They lose their vigour just as do elderly humans or other animals and plants.

Toynbee disagreed with Spengler on this point but then he needed to come up with his own reason why civilisations die. “Suicide” was his answer, which is a strange thing to say since suicide is a conscious and deliberate act and it seems clear that civilisations don’t deliberately kill themselves. A much better explanation would be to say that civilisations unconsciously kill themselves i.e. it is things which civilisations push down into the unconscious and, therefore, fail to deal with that end up doing them in.

This whole debate goes away if we invoke our definition of the microcosm and macrocosm. We have said that civilisation is the same kind of thing as a human being. We agree with Spengler that there is a biological component and we agree with Toynbee that there is a psychological and even a spiritual component. It’s not a question of either/or, it’s both.

What I came to realise as I was working through the concept for my upcoming book was that both Toynbee and Spengler had identified in the macrocosm of civilisation an identical idea to one that I had been using to describe the human lifecycle. I’m referring to the archetypes.

The archetypes are the segments of our lives. They are the common patterns that we each go through. Of relevance to the above discussion, the archetypes have both a biological and a psychological (and almost certainly also a spiritual) aspect. We can map the archetypes on to the human lifecycle as follows:-

There is a certain amount of subjectivity in how we divide up the lifecycle but the two archetypes everybody would agree on are Child and Adult and these are true universals of human culture. In my opinion, the Orphan and Elder are almost equally well-attested on both biological and anthropological grounds.

What is important is that both Spengler and Toynbee also divided up the cycle of civilisation into archetypes. Spengler posited a two-part distinction he called culture and civilisation. Toynbee posited four: Genesis, Growth, Breakdown and Disintegration. We can map these onto the cycle of civilisation in exactly the same way as we map the archetypes of the human lifecycle.

Here, then, is the hypothesis or thought experiment we will be following in this series of posts. If the microcosm and macrocosm really do share the same underlying structure, then we would expect the archetypes of the macrocosm to follow the same pattern as the archetypes of the microcosm. Just as each one of us goes through puberty, for example, and just as our experience of puberty has common factors that we all experience while also having personal ones that are unique to ourselves, so too do civilisations go through the same kinds of growing pains. The growing pains that occur during the Genesis phase of the cycle have shared properties that occur across all civilisations. That is the basis for all comparative history.

What our definition of the microcosm-macrocosm implies is that the archetypes really are the same. We can make that explicit by renaming Toynbee’s third and fourth archetypes using more neutral terms. When we do that, we get something like this:-

Microcosm	Macrocosm
Child	Genesis
Orphan	Growth
Adult	Maturity
Elder	Old Age

Although there are plenty of avenues to explore within this analytical framework, our focus in this series of posts is going to be the psychological. It cannot be a coincidence that western civilisation gave rise to the Freudian psychology. We have said that America was predicated on a rejection of the Father. But the more general point is that western civilisation has had daddy issues right from the get go. We’ll be talking about that more in the next post.

Long term readers may remember that it was almost a year ago where I announced I had had a eureka moment in relation to my next book project and was going to take two weeks away from the blog to write it up. That’s right, I sincerely believed I could write the whole book in two weeks. Now, in fairness to myself, this estimate was based on the assumption that I already had most of the material written and, at least as far as I understood the concept for the book at that time, this was true. Of course, I didn’t (fully) understand the concept. I only thought I did.

Well, it’s now almost a year later and it’s fair to say that the writing gods have duly punished me for my hubris. I am not exaggerating when I say I have thrown away half a million words to arrive at a book that is less than one hundred thousand words long. The goods news is my punishment is over. As I began yet another editing review at the start of this week I finally had that feeling that I recognised from past books. The it’s done feeling. At time of writing, I’m about halfway through what should be the final edit. After that, it’ll just need a proof read to pick up any lingering spelling and grammatical errors.

Trying to figure out what genre the book belongs to has been a very difficult task and I still don’t have a good answer. What I would like to call it is “archetypal history” – history analysed through the lens of archetypes – but that genre doesn’t exist. The reason why archetypal history works is because the inspiration came from me asking a seemingly simple question after the publication of my book The Devouring Mother. The question was: when did the Devouring Mother become the dominant archetype of the modern West? That is a question of history. It’s a strange, but not unprecedented, way of thinking about history. Both Freud’s Totem and Taboo and Jung’s Answer to Job are in the same vein although both of those works were primarily about other matters.

The short answer to the question of when the Devouring Mother became dominant in the modern West is with the founding of the United States of America. Unbeknownst to me when I began writing the book, Jung had already described it from a psychological point of view. Americans, he once wrote, “as a result of the extreme detachment from the father, are characterised by a most enormous mother complex…” Thus, the Devouring Mother has become dominant to the extent that the United States has become dominant.

Putting this claim together with the notion of archetypal history has eventually given me the title of the book: The Universal State of America: An Archetypal Calculus of Western Civilisation.

Anyway, that’s a very long-winded way of saying that I won’t be writing a post this week as I’ve deliberately cleared out my week in order to get the final edit of the book done. Starting next week, I’ll take a few posts to give an outline of the main thesis of the book and, if the stars align, the book will be available by the end.

See youse next week.

I must say I had hearty chuckle at a couple of news items from the last few days in relation to “AI” chatbots. Actually, the whole subject of AI has been cause for mirth for a number of years now. Who can forget when Microsoft released a chatbot only to have it turned into a Hitler-lover within twenty four hours by mischievous Twitter users . Google had a similar chatbot debacle a few days ago, albeit with a very different set of political biases, ones that exactly mirror the current ideological groupthink of corporate America. Coincidence? I think not.

There was another interesting piece of “AI” news from the last few days which was the story that Google have apparently agreed to pay Reddit $60 million dollars for data to train Google’s chatbot. I don’t know about you, but Reddit is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of intelligent inputs to train AI with. As Microsoft learned with its Twitter experiment, a chatbot is only as smart, dumb, or racist as the data it is exposed to.

This raises the question: if you wanted to make artificial intelligence, well, intelligent, wouldn’t you want to feed it with smart stuff. Why isn’t Google shoveling the collected wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Newton and Einstein into its bot’s brain? If you’re going to make a machine intelligent, then surely you have to give it intelligent inputs?

Actually, the whole idea that intelligence is based on such “training” presupposes the philosophical position that sits at the heart not just of AI as a technology but also of its political uses. The “AI” used in chatbots is technically called machine learning. Machine learning involves feeding “correct” data into the computer and then having it pattern match new data based on the models it forms. It’s the digital equivalent of the philosophical idea of tabula rasa, or the blank slate concept.

The way computers are trained using machine learning is practically identical to the educational revolution inspired by blank slate philosophers like Locke and Rousseau a few hundred years ago. These days we assume that the hysterical overemphasis of our society on educational attainment is simply a way for parents to ensure that their children get onto the conveyor belt that connects the modern education system to the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder. That’s certainly true. But the original motivator for education was the new idea that the way a child would turn out was very largely dependent on how they were raised. There’s a whole story behind that which would need its own post but its closely related to the rise of Protestantism and the loss of authority which guaranteed the truths of old.

With the loss of the old form of authority came a new style of education. Rousseau called it the invisible hand. Rather than have an authority figure dictate the truth, the child must be allowed to believe that it was finding its own way to the truth. The teacher would act “invisibly” by controlling what information the child was exposed to in such a way that they would get to the outcome themselves.

Microsoft’s failed chatbot experiment is exactly the fear that many parents who implicitly believe some version of the blank slate theory have. They believe that all it will take is for their child to be exposed to the wrong “data” (the wrong group of people) and they will become corrupted. That’s the negative side of the theory. The positive side is that the child can theoretically become anything if only they get the right education. In any case, it’s all up to the parents. Modern helicopter parenting is the blank slate philosophy taken to its logical (and hysterical) conclusion.

As seems to always be the case, the parental philosophy of a society maps to the way in which the elites of society govern the general public. Back in ancient Rome, the father of the household had complete legal control over his wife and children. It’s no surprise, then, that the Caesars became the parens patriae of the whole society. As above, so below.

Thus, in our time, our elites govern us the same way our parents raise us; according to the blank slate philosophy. We are allowed to think we found our own way to the conclusion when in fact there is a Rousseauean invisible hand guiding us to a predefined outcome. The Google chatbot episode revealed the political agenda behind the rise of chatbots.

Why do we even need these chatbots in the first place and why would they need to be trained on Reddit data? The answer to the second question is because they need to be able to “speak the language” of the average Reddit user, which is a pretty good subset of the average internet user.

Why they need to sound like a real internet user is because it’s clear that the plan for these chatbots is to become “educators” of the general public in the Locke and Rousseau sense of the word. They will be used to generate content that is in accordance with the ideology that the elites want to promulgate. Rather than dictate to the public what to believe, the blank slate approach works by controlling the information that the public is exposed to and then letting them draw “their own” conclusions. This is not a new idea. The method has been going on for at least a century, and certainly longer if you include newspapers in the equation.

I mentioned in last week’s post Woodrow Wilson’s Committee for Public Information. That was a bureaucracy designed to gain the public’s compliance for America’s entry into WW1. One of its main methods was to hire volunteers to publicly advocate for the war. Cinemas were becoming very popular in those days. The volunteers would get up before the movie and give a short speech advocating for the war. That volunteer was just an “average person” who spoke and looked like an average person but who happened to believe the exact message the government wanted to have broadcast. Robert Cialdini called this tactic social proof and it’s been widely used in advertising and public relations since the beginning of the 20^th century.

That’s clearly the reason behind Google’s need to purchase Reddit data. It wants its chatbot to sound like an average internet user so that any content generated seems natural. Once that’s achieved, the bot can be tweaked to provide enough bias to skew the agenda towards the approved message but not so much that we’ll see a repeat of the disaster from a few days ago.

Thus, a technology that’s predicated on the blank slate hypothesis is going to be used for purposes defined by the blank slate hypothesis i.e. to tip the balance of public opinion by biasing what information the public is exposed to. Alongside the new “disinformation” bills, it will give the powers-that-be the narrative control they require to ensure another Brexit or Trump can’t happen. At least, that’s what they think.

Like many people, I watched the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin a week or so ago. Perhaps it was just because the build-up to it was intense that I found the interview itself a bit of a let-down. The most interesting thing that happened was right at the start. Carlson started with a very simple question to Putin: why did you start the war in Ukraine? Putin then went into a 30 minute overview of Russian history starting literally from the beginning (sometime in the 800s) and, eventually ending up in our time.

Now, as long term readers would know, I am something of a history buff. In fact, almost all of my posts contain some element of history in them. Some of them, like this one, are entirely about history. But Putin’s little history lesson reminded me of an excruciatingly boring high school history class on a Friday afternoon in late summer with the teacher up at the front of the room blathering on about names and dates.

There were, however, a couple of interesting things in Putin’s history lesson. Firstly, he referenced the fact that the current borders of Ukraine were created by Lenin. This is actually a very important point because it shows that the Bolsheviks did to eastern Europe what the British and other Europeans had been doing for a long time; namely, drawing relatively arbitrary borders on maps. The problems that caused are ongoing in many places but it’s not well remembered how much trouble it brought to Europe itself.

For example, when Napoleon shattered the hollow shell that was the Holy Roman Empire, he set in chain the long and painful sequence of events by which Germany and Italy became nation states. We all know how that ended up. Then, when the same thing happened to the Austro-Hungarian empire in the aftermath of WW1, there was a similar period where eastern European borders needed to be redrawn. Ukraine’s border was drawn by Lenin in 1922 and then again by Stalin after WW2.

One of the effects of the shattering of the two great empires was that identity became predicated on national boundaries that were often brand new and arbitrarily drawn. Many national identities were stitched together by little more than common language. There was now a nation for people who spoke German and a nation for people who spoke Italian etc. This might have worked in some cases but was particularly problematic in central and eastern Europe where all kinds of languages were mixed together. None of this had mattered under the various empires since they were multi-lingual and multi-national by definition, but it very much did matter to the governments of the new nation states which, apart from anything else, were eager to prove their legitimacy.

By the way, the origin of concentration camps is bound up with these developments. When WW1 broke out, anybody who happened to have a different national identity became untrustworthy. Pretty much all combatant nations in the war took to locking up “foreigners” in concentration camps. The same thing happened after the war. With all these new borders, there were countless people who suddenly became stateless. Many were placed in concentration camps until governments figured out what to do with them.

This is also why, when Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, his official justification that he was bringing German speaking peoples under the protection of their rightful motherland was not considered unusual. As Putin touched on in his interview with Tucker Carlson, Poland and other nations in that area also took that opportunity to claim land that “their people” were on.

We can see, therefore, that the Ukraine conflict is a continuation of the problems left over from the 20^th century. A more or less arbitrary border was drawn up by Lenin which included predominantly Russian-speaking people in the east. Russia now claims to be coming to their rescue. The parallels with Hitler and the Sudetenland are obvious as is the suspicion of ulterior motives which are certainly not helped by the fact that Russia is running a huge trade surplus while investing heavily in munitions, something the Nazis also did.

But there is another historical parallel that is arguably more important in relation to the Ukraine War. Why does the American public have such a strong non-interventionist ethic? This goes right back to the founding fathers and George Washington in particular. In his farewell address, Washington urged his fellow citizens to make use of America’s geographically isolated position to stay out of foreign engagements. America should trade freely with the world but be neither excessively friendly nor excessively belligerent to others since both options would create relationships of dependence. The whole point of America was that it was independent, especially of the problems of old Europe.

In order to win the support of a sceptical public, Wilson formed the very dry-sounding “Committee on Public Information” which produced films, wrote books and pamphlets, took out newspaper advertising, recruited celebrities and otherwise did all the things that have become part and parcel of the brainwashing that US and other western governments have relied on ever since when they need to get the public to support something they wouldn’t otherwise agree with. The methods of state-sponsored propaganda have become increasingly sophisticated since then.

Whether the US actually needed to get involved in the wars is the big question and this comes back to a paradox that was built-in to the very foundations of the US. The political independence of the US was supposed to be guaranteed by a policy of “free trade”. The problem is that relationships of trade also create dependence. It’s just a different, less obvious, form of dependence.

If your economy relies on trade, then you are dependent on those who buy your goods which means they can harm you by refusing to buy. That doesn’t include other threats to trade like piracy or withdrawal of access for transportation. Once you’ve gone to war once or twice to protect your trade interests, where do you draw the line from going to war all the time to protect your trade interests? It is this paradox which sits at the heart of America’s current psycho-political battle and it’s been there from the start. “Free trade” is not some magic wand that keeps you out of politics.

But there’s another paradox built-in to the foundation of the United States and this one correlates directly with the Ukraine War. Back when the founding fathers were debating about war against the British, they knew that they could not win the war without external support. They had to ask for help. Most of that help ended up coming from the French with a decent amount also from the Spanish. How did the French support their American friends? In exactly the same way that America is now supporting Ukraine: by sending materiel to support the war effort.

But the parallels do not end there. The French and Spanish had been covertly sending materiel to the Americans for two years before they joined the war officially. As Putin noted in his interview with Carlson, that is exactly what the current US government was doing in Ukraine for many years prior to the current war. The US had attempted to keep the dealings in Ukraine covert just as the French had in the US War of Independence.

Here’s yet another parallel. Benjamin Franklin was sent to France to win French diplomatic support and extra military aid in 1776. At the time, the French aristocracy had a soft spot for the “children of nature” which they believed the American colonists to be.

The American colonists were fully well aware that, in pursuing the support of the French king, they were in danger of substituting one “tyranny” with another. They were aware that the French help came with strings attached. They managed to stay free of excessive French influence after the war by negotiating a secret peace treaty with the British. That very much soured diplomatic relations with the French and might have caused significant blowback except for one little fact: France was bankrupt.

Let’s flip the perspective around. Why were the French interested in supporting the Americans? Well, there was an ideological element involved. There was a revolutionary movement that had been growing in France that was inspired by much the same set of ideas that the Americans were pursuing. America was setting an example that at least a subset of the French wanted to copy.

And here, of course, is yet another parallel with our time. Why is the US in the Ukraine? At least partly, it’s because of trade. As Putin mentioned, Ukraine has had very close trading relations with Russia. America wanted a slice of the action but the trade deal they wanted with Ukraine could not be accepted by the Russians since there was a free trade zone between Russia and Ukraine. Was America simply oblivious to Russian concerns or are they  doing exactly what France was doing in 1776: trying to strengthen their trading position at the expense of a rival.

If the historical parallels are accurate, does this mean the US is getting itself into a similar financial meltdown? Possibly. The strength that the US has is that it can export the cost of the Ukraine War onto the rest of the world since it controls the financial system that underpins the global trading system. That’s why inflation is running rampant pretty much everywhere. Whether the Ukraine War will collapse the system is anybody’s guess.

It’s worth remembering that the reason the French couldn’t really afford to support the American colonists back in the day was because of their shaky financial position held over from the Seven Years War. The Ukraine War comes directly after the corona debacle during which time the system had already racked up war-like debt and inflation.

The real history lesson that Putin needed to give Tucker Carlson if he really wanted to mess with American heads was not a boring 9^th grade history lesson about Russia but a real-time history lesson on America. The US is now displaying the exact kind of tyranny it had fought against at its inception. The US government is a combination of Louis XVI and George III.

The reason this is still not understood is because, unlike the old imperialism that was based on a tyrannical leader, US imperialism is almost entirely of the covert sort that the French were only experimenting with a couple of hundred years ago. It is that form of covert imperialism that became the main game in the 20^th century. It’s the same covert imperialism that Wilson and Roosevelt engaged in when they dragged the American people into war using industrial quantities of propaganda. Much like the drug addict needs to increase the dosage of the drug in order to get the same high over time, the strength of the propaganda fed to the US public has now turned into outright psychological warfare.

Therein lies the answer to Tucker Carlson’s question to Putin of whether there is a demonic force at play in the world. In medieval Christian terms, yes, there is. That’s how Luther saw the corruption of the Church. The corruption of the United States government is almost identical to that of the Catholic Church in Luther’s time. It professes one thing while doing something completely different behind the scenes. It betrays the ideals that many of its own citizens believe it is supposed to stand for.

In modern psychological terms, what is going on is that US imperialism is all done covertly which means it is pushed down into the Unconscious mind. The reason why the US currently resembles a deranged mental patient is because, as Freud and Jung both discovered, when you push things down into the Unconscious, they re-emerge as completely unrelated psychoses. The psychoanalyst’s job is to unpack the psychoses and try to get to the root source of the problem.

The root source of America’s problem is that it is a nation founded on a rejection on tyranny and imperialism and yet it has become an imperialist itself. It was surreptitiously led into that position by its own elites who now add fuel to the psychological fire by engaging in 24/7 gaslighting of their own population. Until that root problem is solved, the US can expect all kinds of goblins to continue bubbling up from the collective Unconscious.