Thoughts on How to Travel with a Salmon and Five Moral Pieces

I recently read two short books of talks, columns, and essays by Umberto Eco, and their differences could not be greater. One is largely satirical or personal, and the other full of critical analysis of society. They do have in common Eco’s extraordinary erudition and wisdom and a consistent theme of advocating logic. Explosive flashes of epigrammatic brilliance smolder from the lines as they blister the pretensions and vacuities of modern life. Many of these columns were written from the 70’s up through the early 90’s, and likewise, the moral pieces were composed mostly before new millennium – though most of the insights and commentary remain timeless. For decades, Eco wrote columns for newspapers and the news magazine L’Espresso, and the first book is a collection of selected columns.

While his novels are often witty and satirical, like Foucault’s Pendulum, they are not often funny in the manner of provoking laughter. But reading excerpted columns from How to Travel with a Salmon[1] I laughed out loud, by myself, several times. I was, in fact, shocked at how funny some of them were. These columns are mostly on the topic of, or somehow related to, travel – and most of them are making vicious fun of bureaucracies. He also tackles common, even stereotypical, topics of travel gripes, like airplane food. Though this particular comedy cliché may remind the reader of the Seinfeldian-style of observational comedy (often stylized as “What’s the deal with airplane peanuts?”), his take is original and humorous. Many of these stories are autobiographical fictionalizations of Eco’s own extensive travel for his academic work, though some are pure fiction without the pretense of reality.

A Cellini salt cellar, I had to look it up, beautiful- uploaded to Wikipedia by user Jononmac46

Here is one that is so good, entitled “How to Go Through Customs,” I want to include the entire opening paragraph:

The other night, after an amorous tryst with one of my numerous mistresses, I did away with my partner, bludgeoning her to death with a rare Cellini saltcellar. I was inspired not only by the strict moral code instilled in me since childhood, according to which a woman who indulges in the pleasures of the senses is unworthy of mercy, but also by an esthetic motive: namely, to experience the thrill of the perfect crime. I waited, listening to a CD of English baroque water music, until the corpse was cold and the blood had congealed; then, with an electric saw, I began dismembering the body, trying at the same time to adhere to certain fundamental anatomical principles, thus paying a tribute to our culture, without which refinement and the social contract would not exist. Finally, I packed the pieces in two suitcases of oryx hide, put on a gray suit, and caught the wagon-lit for Paris. Once I had handed over my passport and a scrupulous customs declaration to the conductor, listing the few hundred francs I was carrying on my person, I slept like a log, for nothing encourages repose more than the sense of having performed one’s duty. Nor did customs venture to disturb a traveler who, merely by purchasing a private berth in first class, asserted ipso facto his membership in the hegemonic class and thus his status as a person above suspicion. (pg. 23)

There is even a column that is in the form of an epistolary sci-fi story which satirizes our foolish tribalism and nationalism, and of course, government bureaucracy. Through these columns you really get a sense of his exasperation toward the everyday foibles of Italy, while also receiving his wariness of Italian political extremism (and the vacuity of Italian politics). Eco’s character pokes through the writing: at base he was an incessant intellectual laborer. Yet for all his relentless learning, Eco remains grounded in the mundane sorrows and strivings and joys of his life and retains self-awareness. Eco pokes fun at himself and his own voluminous learning in columns like “How to Take Intelligent Vacations” where he produces a “summer vacation reading list” that includes obscure medieval treatises on subjects like optics, and makes fun of his own status as literary celebrity and public intellectual in pieces like “Editorial Revision”:

On the other hand, after I ended a novel of mine with the verse of Bernard de Morlay beginning, “Stat rosa pristina nomine,” I was informed by some philologists that certain other extant manuscripts read, on the contrary, “Stat Roma,” which, for that matter, would make more sense because the preceding verses refer to the disappearance of Babylon. What would have happened if I had in consequence entitled my novel The Name of Rome? I would have had a preface by John Paul II, who no doubt would have made me a Papal Count. Or someone would have made a movie with Sean Connery in a toga. (pg. 178)

It is interesting to see what has changed and what hasn’t. Travel has changed in significant cultural manners, if not in substance, and the most notable change is probably in the culture of train travel. In America at least, train travel is almost exclusively used in commuting now, not a method of popular travel outside of inner-city movement. This is the context in which reading Eco now resembles looking into the past. Though more significant cultural changes can be detected in how he speaks about the people of the “Third World” and the “lower classes.” Eco does not self-censor, saying what he means to say, even if it would often be considered indelicate now. He seems to disdain political correctness for having the form, but lacking the substance, of acceptance and non-discrimination.

Eco was also a keen observer of the impacts of media and technology on society, particularly in the impact of television and the press on how we view the world, often noting how these mediums have disconnected us from reality. Eco is forever concerned that we stay within the confines of the real and corporeal – the human body is ever-present in his writing and is the touchstone of his ethics and fears.

Personification of the virtue of Prudence – the ability to govern oneself by use of reason (according to Merriam-Webster) – etching from the Met by Abraham Bosse, 1636

In contrast to these columns are his serious reflections on serious topics in Five Moral Pieces[2], revealing a profound sense of fairness and an ethics grounded in those same deep-seated values of realism and inquiry.

The five moral pieces are: “Reflections on War” – written during the Gulf War, “When the Other Appears on the Scene” – Eco’s side of an epistolary debate where he defends a secular morality against a Cardinal, “On the Press” – a speech on the nature and characteristics of the modern press and its relationship with politics and television, the famous “Ur-Fascism” – a (now-famous) examination of the fundamental characteristics of Fascism, and “Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable” – an agglomeration of meditations about discrimination and fundamentalism. Eco sparkles when discussing the impacts of communications technology on the world, and on how we view the world. Fascism and war in Eco’s youth were not abstractions, but formative experiences, revealing the depth of illogic and inhumanity of which we are capable. Ethics, therefore, is no abstraction, but a tangible necessity of Eco’s conception of the life of the intellectual. And it is the life of the intellectual which is the core of all of Eco’s commitments. The embrace of rationality leads to wherever it may lead for Eco, but he is dedicated to this as the first principle of humanitarianism.

Eco’s commentary on the Gulf War acknowledges the changing nature of war in an era of global communications, and the changes in the perception and commentary on war those changes have themselves engendered. He maintains a steadfast opposition to war, no matter its perceived righteousness, as an intellectual imperative of humanity. War is now, by definition, all-encompassing in nature because of modern communications and transportation technology – it negatively impacts everyone across the entire earth, involved or not, opposed or allied to one side or the other, says Eco.

The complexity and interconnection of both modern war and the modern world ensures that clear goals can never be attained, and that, instead of war being a continuation of politics, politics is now a continuation of war. It is interesting that he should see this shift from Clausewitz’s “war as a continuation of politics” to “politics as a continuation of war” as a positive development, insisting that the morality of the Cold War, though full of its violence and injustices, was much preferable to the horrors of a hot war. This argument underscores his dedication to following the logic of his positions, and for maintaining a consistency in his anti-war view, despite the circumstances and nature of any particular war.

I cannot say that all of the essay holds up well, it is a certain reflection of the place and time of its writing and he grapples with the new realities of war appearing for the first time at scale in the Gulf War. Eco would probably be dismayed (maybe he was) by the de facto censorship in American media of the grim images of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A large part of his description of modern war here involves the media being everywhere and not capable of being censored. In America the last 20 years, censorship (if not official) did exist, but perhaps more importantly, as a whole, the American people didn’t care about the wars, and they did not impact the “peaceful” economy. Burnout, which he says is the inevitable outcome of using new technology in his essay on the press later in this volume, impacted Americans in a way he did not anticipate. On the uncertainties of war, he is definitely correct, as recent events in Ukraine can attest.

The second essay, a letter to a Cardinal on the subject of the possibility of morality in a state of atheism, Eco explicitly draws a universal ethics out of universal principles that do not involve the supernatural. All global ethics can be derived, Eco argues, from merely understanding what causes pain for ourselves and our own bodies, and in the case of remorse, in our own minds. Freedom for ourselves, literal physical freedom from confinement, freedom to evacuate our waste and other basic, fundamental imperatives of being a living organism can inform how humans should act toward one another. This offers an almost mathematical axiom on the order of Euclid for human morality that perhaps a Christian would recognize: “what causes pain or discomfort to me must also cause pain and discomfort to other creatures like me.” A topic evolved in the humanism of the Renaissance, the focus on the human body, even with its unpleasant grotesqueries, is placed at the forefront of our lives and minds. This a stance almost like Rabelais, with the heightened focus on corporeality serving as a counterweight to the abstraction of the complex symbolism of modern societies. As a matter of fact, this argument could possibly be made in much the same way in a Rabelaisian voice of the early 16^th century as it is here with the Cardinal. I’m not sure a civil debate involving the advocation of atheism would’ve been a cause for celebration to Martin Luther or Pope Paul III, but the form of the argument could be translated without difference. Eco’s argument is completely from logical precepts extending into a moral function, it does not require any knowledge of modernity or modern science. This has the value of displaying to us the power and force of logic, which does not need any props from scientific advances.

In Eco’s commentary on the press he delineates the impact that television has had on the newspapers, and, in turn, the impact the change in the focus of politicians to the medium of television has had on society. Television’s fight for the attention of the citizen and its tendency to be self-referential leads to more and more extreme divisions and a devaluation of intellectual discourse. The press is used as a tool of politicians instead of a tool of the citizens holding politicians to account. Any claim made by a politician gets repeated ad infinitum, until the actual substance and context is lost and the full control of content and opinion is in their hands. The delirious hunt for content and its incessant elevation of trivialities into scandals creates distrust in the reader and systematically destroys the authority of the press.

The loss of “authority” has initiated some of the most noticeable and drastic phenomenon of the internet age. If we don’t trust the news, and we don’t trust the government, and we don’t trust Church or school, where are we to find the organizing principles of mass society? Some would argue that we don’t need organizing principles, or that they can be localized, I would point to the forms of spontaneous organization swirling around us and disagree. We have to live in the context of our era, and the institution of the nation-state will not just dissolve, it will change, but it won’t disappear tomorrow. As long as we have any point of singular control (or overwhelming influence) for law, policy, wealth distribution, and the military as we do with our national governments, we will fight over the organization of society and form larger groups to achieve larger aims. Media in all its forms continues to influence social organization.

It is notable that the ever-increasing volume of printed media and television programming started to undermine authority before the internet was ubiquitous, according to Eco. As part of a natural process involving the specific types of competition that newspaper and television engaged in, the natural consequences led to devaluation of intellectual discourse and increased self-reference. At the end of this piece, after noting all these phenomena, which I think have generally held-up well, he does consider the future impact of the internet. Perhaps in this the complexity of the current situation was far too great to make predictions, but I think he makes a generally good point when mentioning the fact of information overload and how that could lead to a kind of renewal of gatekeeping by “educated elites” through the mechanism he calls the “censorship of excess.” This may be correct, except it doesn’t appear to be the “educated elites” who are curating the news so much as the complexity has created multiple, uneven centers of new authority.

Fasces, symbol of strength in unity, justice, and authority in Ancient Rome – created by user Viseslav on Wikipedia

“Ur-Fascism” is probably Eco’s most internationally famous work of non-fiction. In this piece he lays out what he considers to be the defining features of Fascism, the general rules of the functioning of the Fascistic society. He begins by recounting his childhood in Fascist Italy and defining Mussolini’s version of Fascism. Right in the second paragraph Eco states that “…freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric” (pg 66). Later on in the essay, it becomes clear that what he means is that the fundamental lack of meaning contained in the constant rhetoric of Fascism, with Mussolini’s version as an exemplar, is restrictive of the free and open discourse which characterizes a democratic society. If words don’t represent ideas or reality, they confuse and stultify their hearers. This foreshadows his groupings of the features of the Platonic form of Fascism, which all involve the suppression of reason. Eco says that any single item on his list can be used as a basis to form a Fascist political group, but that the presence of any of these features does not mean a political movement is Fascist. I will list them briefly here, because who doesn’t love a good list?[3]

The Cult of Tradition
Rejection of Modernism
The Cult of Action for Action’s Sake
Disdain of Critical Analysis
Exploitation of the Natural Fear of Difference
Direct Emotional Appeals to a Frustrated Middle Class
Obsession with a Plot/Group of Plotters
Viewing the Plotters as Simultaneously Powerful and Weak
Pacificism as Weakness/Life as Eternal Warfare
Contempt of the Weak Combined with Popular Elitism (the common adherent is viewed as a member of the elite of society, regardless of their commonality)
The Cult of the Hero/Cult of Death for a Heroic Cause
Selective Populism (holding a minority of adherents to be the Vox Populi and acting as if they were the majority)
Reliance on Newspeak (without a complex vocabulary, people cannot discuss complex ideas) (pgs. 78-86)

As the list lengthens, the natures of the features grow more interconnected despite Eco’s caveat that any of the ideas can be a source of Fascism. Starting with the cult of tradition, the heart of these ideas is that knowledge and rationality should be rejected in favor of the basic impulses of humanity. The idea of the cult of tradition that there is a profound and hidden ancient wisdom that exists and therefore there can be no new knowledge, flows logically to the next ideas of syncretic culture (since no new wisdom can be imagined), rejection of modernism (because the Enlightenment produced moral failure), the cult of action (because thinking is a product of rational enlightenment), and disdain of critical analysis (because that threatens the cult of tradition, since it is an illogical belief). The first four items, then, are all derived from the rejection of coherent ideology. Traditionalism is used to mask the fact that there is no intellectual content in the belief system, papered over instead by an uncritical syncretism which combines various aspects of previous ideologies despite any contradictions.

Exploitation of the natural fear of difference allows for the theme which connects the next few points. Amongst humans’ most primitive instincts is distrust of those not connected to their immediate social group. Education and complex ideas and institutions are necessary to allay this fear and allow broad cooperation, but it is always lurking deep in all of our minds. This primordial instinct can be used by those seeking power by appealing to a specific audience, enunciated in point 6, where Eco writes: “Ur-Fascism springs from individual or social frustration…” (pg. 81). It is a fearful middle class that is under economic distress or perceived disenfranchisement that wants to protect itself from those above and below in the social hierarchy. This is the nexus where conspiratorial thinking becomes the connecting principle between several of these points. The plotters and amorphous groups which are a threat to the adherents of the Fascistic political movement are forever hidden and resilient, unable to be clearly defined or destroyed, they serve as a perpetual tool to describe and animate the political movement and its supporters. Conspiracy theories are not falsifiable by nature (evidence against the conspiracy existing is taken as proof of a coverup or some other aspect of the conspiracy) and innuendo and association serve the purposes of evidence, and therefore can be used to justify anything, including the delusion of a minority being the majority, or that a person can be heroic fighting against a non-existent enemy.

Instead of a guide to the explicit nature of Fascism which it is often presented as, it can be read as a type of warning of the kind of features which an intellectually-degraded society exhibits. A Fascistic society is one in which logic has failed and the moral weight of the society has sunk to the level of the meanest individuals. Force and emotion have overcome reason. As in all things with Eco, one cannot escape the topic of semiotics, and this is perhaps one of his best examples in non-fiction where he incorporates this framework. Eco believes that cultural phenomenon are also signs, and therefore social and political movements can be understood through the functions of signs and the encoding of symbols. In the Fascistic society the symbols of politics and social organization are altered from a well-functioning, tolerant society by various types of cognitive distortions, by ruptures in logic. So rather than say, “these are fundamental aspects of Fascism,” I would say that a feature of anti-democratic and intolerant political movements is that their intellectual underpinnings are hollow. When you dig there is nothing there besides rhetoric.

There is something like the tendency of medical students to diagnose themselves with illnesses in the nature of the description of Fascism here. It is easy to point to almost any political movement and observe at least some of these principles, or even many of them. I think it is almost trivial at this point to equate Trump’s MAGA movement with these principles, since it conforms to almost every entry. This essay was popularly used to point this out at the time Trump entered the public consciousness as a serious political entity (look up Ur-Fascism on Google and at least half of the early results are articles using it to diagnose Trump/MAGA as Fascistic). I will not bother with that now but would point out that the list of ideological or rhetorical features are common around the world, in dictatorships and free societies. This is not to be dismissive, because in fact, it is fearsome. The endless appeal of conspiratorial thinking is its ability to form order from chaos and to relieve the believer of responsibility for their lives. As a political tool the appeal to irrational beliefs finds success in Brazil just as it does in Thailand, and has worked when it flowed from the pen of Marat in the late 18^th century as it works in the production of video segments by Alex Jones in the early 21^st.

Ur-Fascism packs a lot of explanations of organized human behavior in a small space. While it is sometimes abused to point beyond its intentions (and misquoted), it is right that it is so celebrated and reproduced. It also serves as yet another defense of intellectualism and science extending to morality, this time in the political realm.

In keeping with the theme of the dangers associated with politics in the previous two pieces, he focuses on the vicious impacts of intolerance on society, and the ultimate moral duty of the intellectual to frame our decisions using logic, instead of in animalistic tribalism and violence. First, he distinguishes between immigration and migration, with immigration being a controlled process that involves assimilation and migration being an uncontrolled process where entire groupings of humans move and bring their culture with them. Intolerance is easy in a society that controls immigration, as immigrants can be confined to ghettos, but intolerance becomes an ineffective stance when dealing with the overwhelming nature of migration. And, he warns with prescience, that migration is coming to Europe whether people like it or not, and that it will probably lead to violence. After the dislocations of the Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War, when migration from Africa and the Middle East caused severe social and political disruptions in the nations of Europe (and the tragedies of exploitation, internment, and the numerous instances of mass drownings visited on the migrants themselves), it is easy to place this essay in context of actual, historical events. It is no abstraction or idle musing of moral philosophy: intolerance is pervasive and harmful. Eco writes that intolerance itself can take numerous forms, and it is dangerous when it becomes a doctrine, a form of fundamentalism that will not allow dissent, and disables a logical appraisal of situations and circumstances. Combatting this intolerance with education is his solution, and also with laws where appropriate, but he warns that the expansion of intolerance into doctrine can become a political problem. No doubt the reference made here to a regime of fundamentalism in intolerance, where he says the wealthy theorize and the poor put into practice, is again referring to the danger of Fascism. Intellectuals must combat intolerance before the praxis of fundamentalism takes hold, because then it is too late.

Through Eco’s compendium of knowledge, we can almost see the ascent of humanity from ignorance and poverty to knowledge and wealth – and the errors that attended that transformation. We are still venal, and tribal, and vicious. In that aspect of humanity Eco, though an academic, is not naïve. He manages to say profound and piercing statements in every other sentence when taking up the mantle of a moralist as part of his duty as a public intellectual. In the form of the observational comedian he produces a mirror to reflect to us the absurdities and arbitrary roles and rules we’ve inflicted upon ourselves. What these pieces reveal about Eco himself is the strength of his powers of observation. His ability to distill the aspects of a thorny problem, or a feature of modern life, or a change in political communication to its most basic nature is extraordinary. Not quantitative, but based in empiricism nonetheless, these columns and essays attempt to define the boundaries of the definitions of cruel, ignorant, and foolish behaviors and actions and to place the living and breathing human in the abstract debate over the nature ethics and forms of government. While attempting these definitions there is also an exhortation to accept the incompleteness of any definition, to accept the irreducibility of the complexities of reality. There is an implicit proclamation to stop trying to systematize and categorize unnatural concepts and forcefully impose a meaning on the events and attitudes of the world. For this simple yet difficult-to-accept injunction alone it is worth reading these works.

[1] Eco, Umberto, and William Weaver. How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays. Trans. William Weaver. First edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994. Print.

[2] Eco, Umberto. Five Moral Pieces. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Harcourt, 2001. Print.

[3] Eco was obsessed by lists and their power to be greater than the sum of their parts (that would be a different post altogether) and organized this just as I have here, though with explanations of each item. I have changed some of the wording to make it simpler and clearer.

A Tale of Two Moralities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Everybody knows the first part, but nobody finishes the paragraph.[1] We are living in another such period of extremes, and importantly, perceived extremes (if, in fact, there was ever a time in which we did not live within and amongst the extremities of experience), one of profound promise for the future and of deep pessimism as our knowledge and social systems develop at a breakneck pace with changes in technology. This is overwhelming and forces us to decode and integrate all this new information into our value systems. Some things have not changed in 300,000 years, like the survival of our species always prodded into our conscious and unconscious minds by the promises and fears of pleasure and pain. Much of our group and individual behaviors derive from those two places, urging us to productive, procreative behavior. They are universals, and mutual experiences of pain and joy tie us together in communities, friendships, and families. The Covid-19 pandemic, while causing massive amounts of suffering throughout the world, has promoted political and social disunity in the United States – I offer no metrics, but I don’t believe this is a controversial statement. I don’t think people shared the same experiences regarding lockdowns, wealth accumulation, raising children, or personal grief. How could we when the nature of the shock, placing a tax on physical contact, necessarily impacted people of different economic statuses differently? During this most recent period of disruption and dislocation, technological innovations and the primacy of “social distancing” highlighted and enhanced our involvement and dependency on the internet. Communities of increasing sophistication developed by computer science experts and populated with regular citizens are prominent and a gateway to disintermediation and civic and economic democratization and decentralization. While over the last few decades, the physical state of the people of the world has improved in material ways – as it has almost continuously since the Renaissance – an ugly inequality the pandemic highlighted was the depressing increase in so-called “deaths of despair,” deaths caused by suicide, alcoholism, or drug use and addiction. One of the reasons why there was an increase in these deaths is that changing social circumstances and technological advances leave us unhappy in many ways, and I think this is almost always the paradox of progress.

Contradiction walks with humanity through any development, in any era. Our present age of contradictions is both personal and social. As technology becomes more specialized, intricate, and complex, the more the majority of people must rely on automated processes or expertise to harness the technologies. At the same time this is happening, trust in those processes and expertise is waning. We are: more free and more controlled, more educated and more ignorant, more contented and more unhappy. What is more, as these gulfs open up between us, and often within us, our sense of morality changes as well. Communities attached to moral changes fade and bloom, sometimes with stunning speed. With unlimited information decreasing centralized control and certainty about the future, these groups sometimes grow more certain in their beliefs. As former moral imperatives are rendered obsolete, the moral conviction of the new groups may grow. As apathy and ignorance grows, political and social conviction grows as well. As individual expression is unshackled, people seek familiar spaces in which to fit their views.

Online communication is intensely public, always curated, and responses can be thought about before they’re distributed. Social pressure is never far away from us, since we are in the digital panopticon when participating in the new public square. At the same time as our division seems to grow more heated even as the underlying principles lack depth, the punishment for deviation from the new principles is more severe, since deviations can rarely escape notice and social censure.

As new issues which are unaddressed by old moral commitments increase in salience, new patterns emerge. A rise in the spread of “misinformation” raises questions of the costs which the collective must pay to allow such openness. Increased understanding of the complexity of dynamic systems and psychology reveals formerly hidden inequalities tied to race, and other ethnic or social features which provoke bias. Globalization promotes prosperity in the world, but what of its economic harm at home? Many of these questions lead to fundamental political policy disagreements, but so much of our conflict skirts the edges of these issues. Both the word “moral” and “ethic” derive from concepts related to appropriate conduct in public society (a favorite pastime is looking up the etymology of words, it can be wonderfully revealing about the connotations of words, and how we think). This etymology provides us with an intuition that morals change when the mass of people shift their beliefs. Community morals are habitual, they are a learned behavior, not an innate one.

Over time we have come to expect an unrestrained freedom of speech, for example. This has caused a conflict involving the spread of so-called misinformation as I mentioned above. The term “free speech” is a kind of anachronism. We are using a term from the 1700’s to mean something entirely different than what “freedom of speech” meant to those who framed the idea in our Constitution. We are accustomed to a wild license the Founding Fathers never would have recognized. Freedom of speech, in the way we mean it now, means: being able to express almost any idea that is not specifically criminal without being subjected to public censure and “deplatforming,” much less legal sanction!

An ironic process occurred whereby the ability to debate the scope of regulation of speech for the good of the community was curtailed by formal legal sanction which made static our modern sense of free speech. Judges stifled debate, disallowing fundamental discussions about the nature of free speech. That is not to say our current definition of free speech is bad, just that even such deeply held values as this are changeable over time, and even those values are subject to larger frameworks of universal understanding.

All of these frameworks and their structures of value come from the organization of our communities. Our old tribal identities are failing, so we create new ones, especially ones that are mutually intelligible over the internet, where ethnicity, race, religion, and nationality are less important markers and where people can maintain multiple identities at once. Ambiguity, decentralization, and information-overload feeds common linkages by allowing people to pluck a sense of certainty out of “too much information” by finding evidence that conforms to almost any group view.

As all these traditional links of community are shorn away, people revert to more primitive expressions of group solidarity, namely: collective suffering. Much of this suffering forms from oppression, or a sense of victimhood, which can have social benefits.

I think we are going through a period of moral illegibility and changed communication patterns which compel the creation of new communities.

A visual display of a Twitter network, showing people crossing between different clusters – different communities

Our associations grow smaller and more local by the day, but the broader social groups that remain are the fumes evaporated from more substantial ideas. The Church’s creed of “Love Thy Neighbor and Thy Enemy” replaced by the creed of prosperity gospel and anti-abortion politics, the capitalist injunction to serve the greater good through individual prosperity and industry replaced by “number go up,” the principles of a restrained government which protects citizens from subjective reasons for imprisonment, dispossession of property, and execution reduced to the freedom to not wear a mask.

Emancipation from the ages-old oppressions of arbitrary government – government which obtains its authority on the principles of birth, force, or the supernatural – and poverty, vacates the vitality of our broad communal associations, and masses of information inhibit the growth of new, broader ideals. This social anarchy is anathema to our biology and to governments. As the chaos from the base of the social pyramid grows, the more force will be applied from the apex. I don’t think it is random that we’re seeing a rise in autocracy around the globe. This dual movement, one of simultaneous freeing and constricting social influences, accompanies improvements in communications technology.

The invention of moveable type in Europe helped enable the Reformation, as Luther’s ideas spread throughout Europe – provoking rebellion, and in turn, enormous forces of repression. French Revolutionary ideals were distributed through innumerable pamphlets, newspapers, and even in letters from an increasingly literate populace to one another, while that same literary explosion contributed to the social uniformity and contagious fear that permitted the atrocious War in the Vendée and the Reign of Terror. Radio helped to create a society with flourishing national entertainments and an outlet for bold and imaginative artistry and dissemination of knowledge of current events, while allowing the development of monoculture and proving an invaluable aid to government propaganda. Social media helps oppressed citizens organize an Arab Spring, and enforces rigid social controls. With each successive, more immediate, more immersive, more personal advance in communications technology comes a stronger direct linkage to broad social and public affairs for each individual. Crime in San Francisco makes an emotional impact on a person in rural Vermont, or a law in Texas is reviled by a person in Los Angeles. Or the experience of a person in Australia is widely shared in the United States as evidence of dangerous COVID policy, and a racist incident in Wales gets a magazine story in the US. It makes sense that such a broadening of perspective would generalize emotional reactions.

Never have so many people been so free to invent and live in their own moral codes, or to live by the fruits of their own intellectual labor, but few people are able to stand entirely in their own view of the world. People will seek out community, even if it is not an apparent motivation to themselves at all. Our social interactions are always ambiguous and layered. The confident newcomer enters a group and boldly greets others, making conversation and telling people about themself. Everyone knows that this is both a genuine attempt to learn about and introduce oneself to others while simultaneously being an act, a method of securing social support from others. People exist on different levels: the person we see, the person we believe we are based on our own internal psychology, and the person we don’t know. We contain multitudes, the endless pathways of our mind unfurling into dark territory – virgin terrain even to ourselves.

And even as the world becomes connected in more complex ways, with identities not limited to one group or another, a paradox exists wherein our perception of there being fewer dominant ideologies increases.

Americans are now convinced that we are polarized (and of course, politically, we are), but this perception is more important than an actual fact, if it is indeed true. People may not even know themselves, let alone others, and most of us are far too complicated to be crammed into one of two social-political groupings, and far too uncaring or ignorant to have coherent political ideologies. Popular pundits and politicians reinforce this view by taking individual actions or beliefs of individual people and forcing them to be representative of a supposedly coherent whole – part of the cherry-picking process enabled by endless flows of information. Social media and the internet exacerbates some of these dynamics whereby hidden communities, with loosely held beliefs which are broadly applicable and do not preclude participation in other communities, are created and strengthened.

Seeking out “independent” centers of thought to combat mainstream orthodoxy hides the development of new communities with their own orthodoxy. For instance, in combating the groupthink of the “liberal mainstream media,” there is a covert community of “conservative” morality and analysis of climate change. There is a robust and widespread “contrarian consensus” about the harm caused by restricting the use of fossil fuels. Take the rising popularity of the “Doomberg” account on Twitter and Substack, who explains in clear, imaginative terms this contrarian consensus view of climate-change influenced fossil fuel policies.[2] The same can be said of the intelligence and law-enforcement apparatuses of the United States’ government. When Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi focus their efforts on elevating conservative-grievance-politics talking-points (e.g. that the riot at the Capitol was not a big deal), they are feeding a view of the world which girds a community that often transcends our two political parties. Many of the arguments are true, or at least true in parts, but leave out reasonable counters. Commentators often grow upset about big tech censorship of conservatives, but almost every single day the top pages shared on Facebook are dominated by conservative pundits. This may not prove anything at all, but it is just as fit a data point as any made by an “independent.” These “independent” positions are nothing of the sort. They are not iconoclastic, they are, in fact, the stable views of a large community often based around grievances toward “elites” and crimping of personal freedoms.

New moral groupings can be found in almost any community touched by or reliant on the internet. Take a financial market-focused community on Reddit, whose popularity has skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic, r/wallstreetbets. I would argue that it is bound together as much by posting screenshots of losses (they even have a term: “loss porn”) than by the huge gains. A perusal through other new financial subreddits (ones focused on meme-stocks AMC or GME for instance) reveals a lot about the not-immediately-apparent glue of these communities. Noticeable there, again, is the focus on group suffering and persecution. Reading or listening to more traditional financial groups, like value investors, also yields the same focus on suffering and group-wide value judgments.

People talk a lot about fear and greed, and behavioral errors, and the madness of crowds, but I see a lot of moral judgments in markets.

It is immoral for Tesla to get bid up (go to zero).

It is immoral for people to short (ape in to) AMC and GME.

It is immoral for people to claim that BTC is going to zero ($100K).

It is immoral for commodity prices to increase (decline) exponentially.

Two of the top posts on subreddit r/WallStreetBets, highlighting focused persecution as important to the group

In the broad culture and political strife which we perceive manifesting in political polarization, morality and suffering are prominent. Though I submit that this strife is still not apparent as being more about community rather than policy issues.

What we are witnessing in the fear of critical race theory, or the conviction of white Americans that they’re being discriminated against, or anti-vaccine hyperbolics claiming there is a coming genocide is not idiocy or irrational fear, it is a set of intertwined signals of common persecution and suffering based on a specific moral code (one based around ideals of autonomy) which enhances group cohesion. On the “liberal” side we see a similar set of signals of group suffering, based around moral ideals of equality, wherein you see the conviction that racism is at all-time highs, that minorities and low-income workers are being especially economically oppressed, and that global warming is going to drive of us to the edge of extinction because of capitalist greed.

Again, these ideas of moral purity attained through suffering and bonding through persecution are not new, they are ancient, as old as human beings. The development of new moralities is a perilous endeavor, however. There is great danger in periods of such social anarchy. George Orwell reviewed Hitler’s tome, Mein Kampf, in 1940, offering a valuable and prescient insight (highlights mine):

Also [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

There is so much moral virtue and camaraderie in suffering, it is so powerful that it can be irresistible. The abstractions of the internet have created a possibly new way for suffering and persecution to be manufactured. We don’t have to look far to see the emotional and moral appeal of the new American conservatism of Donald Trump[3], from his inaugural address (highlights mine):

For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government, while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs, and while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. That all changes, starting right here and right now, because this moment is your moment — it belongs to you…
…The forgotten men and women of our country, will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before. At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction, that a nation exists to serve its citizens. Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public, but for too many of our citizens a different reality exists. Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
We are one nation and their pain is our pain…

A Trump Rally in Mesa Arizona, notice the sign: Jobs vs. Mobs

Of course, there is truth here just like there is truth in the critiques of the independent journalists and the financial communities. There are people who are struggling, who are deprived, who are robbed of their potential. But the basis of the group identity he is claiming as the base of his sovereignty is shared suffering on a massive scale, the group he’s speaking to, the MAGA crowd, is being singled out as being burdened especially by the persecution of “elites.” Despite Trump’s brutal ignorance and depraved vulgarity, he repeated this effective message over and over in his campaign rallies, the mere content of which was too often ignored in favor of his buffoonish and risible statements regarding his many personal enemies. The value of this in the era of information overload is that anyone can claim they are part of the oppressed grouping, MAGA could be accepted by anyone, anyone can be a victim in one of these areas if they choose to identify themselves as such. And then it can be backed with barrages of statistics, or infinite cherry-picked examples. It is impossible to pin down the suffering of the group exactly, it is a feeling, a perception. It is amorphous and non-dependent on any outward marker of group-affiliation, like age or race.

As for the group based around the morality of equality, here is a quote from antiracism activist Ibram X. Kendi, in response to the question (paraphrased), what does a version of America look like where a person’s character matters more than their race? (again, highlights mine):

Well, what it looks like for me as a black American is that people do not view me as dangerous and thereby make my existence dangerous. It allows me to walk around this country and to not believe that people are going to fear me because of the color my skin. It allows me to believe, you know what, I didn’t get that job because I could have done better on my interview, not because of the color of my skin. It allows me to — a country where there’s racial equity, a country where there’s racial justice, you know, a country where there’s shared opportunity, a country where African American culture and Native American culture and the cultures of Mexican Americans and Korean Americans are all valued equally, that no one is being asked to assimilate into white American culture. There’s no such thing as standard professional wear. There’s no such thing as, well, you need to learn how to speak English in order to be an American. And we would truly not only have equity and justice for all but we would somehow have found a way to appreciate difference, to appreciate all of the human ethnic and cultural difference that exists in the United States. This is what could make this country great, in which we literally become a country where you could literally travel around this country and learn about cultures from all over the world and appreciate those cultures, and understand even your own culture from what other people are doing. There’s so much beauty here amid all this pain and I just want to peel away and remove away all of those scabs of racist policies so that people can heal and so that we can see true beauty.

This is a radical redefinition of what it means to be American (or perhaps, what it meant in the past), far away from dictates of the Constitution, or the primacy of democracy and capitalism. These new tribes, based primarily around suffering, are not anything like our old tribes, despite using such an ancient point of communalism. What is interesting about Kendi’s take here on his ideal community is that, even though it is centered around both the equality and autonomy of different racial groupings, it is an attitude that literally anyone can adopt: one of antiracism. So like MAGA’s tribe of persecution, antiracism’s tribe of equality is available to anyone who wishes to adopt it. Also, due to the appeals to structural and systemic racism, almost any policy or circumstance can be claimed to be racist, even if there is scant evidence. It is a completely inclusive group of choice, united solely by its conviction that the current government and policies of the country, and the beliefs of citizens, are inflicting pain and suffering on minority groups and the non-wealthy.

These new moralities competing with one another are both so broad and distant from more rigorous versions of their pure ideological ancestors and actual considerations of specific allocations of scarce resources that they promise complete inclusiveness. How easy is it to say online (or in a text, for that matter) “We have to stand up to the elites to prevent people from suffering?” That sentence could be used by both the autonomy and equality groupings to signal support of moral virtue, a commonality of suffering, and inclusion in an ideological tribe. What’s more, the generalities and distance of these communities from the actual, specific policy decisions that their moralities imply allows people to exist in other more focused or local groups, since there is no necessary exclusivity.

BLM protest in Stockholm, Sweden, highlighting the multiethnic nature of the movement

As seems to happen so often with large disruptive events, the unexpected tragedy of the pandemic hit our collective society at its most vulnerable points. It strained trust in governing institutions, projected wealth inequality in harsh relief, and disrupted the flow of goods and services in the global economy. There is no guarantee of quick relief from the pandemic, and there is no “normal” to which we can go back. And change is not going to decelerate. Every time communications technology improves, it becomes more intimate, it enables more individuality, setting us at opposition with our own selves and our innate, incontrovertible, inextinguishable yearning for a place in a community. There is opportunity here, as in so many other technological disruptions, for the creation of new morals and new morality which are precipitated by new social or political challenges. Reimagining our communities in new constructs of morality allowed for the destruction of slavery, the condemnation and curtailment of genocide, the alleviation of poverty, the right to education and so many wonderful innovations that were not innate in novel technology itself. New moralities also aided Totalitarianism, Imperialism, global conflict, and other evils of societies and government over the centuries.

I think, when political ideology and policy preference are understood, most often, as moral signaling centered around group suffering, our bitter cultural disputes become more rational. Instead of imputing irrationality to people, or stupidity, or malevolence, we can understand how our conflicts are often driven by the simple, persistent need to alleviate the anxiety and loneliness of social and moral homelessness in a time when mass amounts of communication is conducted in a virtual setting.

It is astonishing and poignant that, through all our advances, our unavoidable frailty and pain and willingness to sacrifice and suffer for one another remains such a powerful binding agent, giving purpose and meaning to our lives. As the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities are famous, so are the closing ones, relating a character’s thoughts about his own impending sacrifice of his life for the betterment of others:

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

[1] Not a bad metaphor for our contextless information society, eh?

[2] An excellent read by the way, I recommend it heartily: @doombergT on Twitter, https://doomberg.substack.com/

[3] My juxtaposition here is not meant to compare Donald Trump with Hitler, just to show the appeal and bond which suffering creates

We Are All NFTs Now

A digital image, inscribed in specific code on a blockchain, sold for over $69 million. There was a great deal of outrage, shock, mocking, amusement, and consternation over this price for something that appeared to be the equivalent of any shareable image on the internet. This was the first widely-known public eruption of part of a spending spree and gold rush in cryptographic assets, including cryptocurrencies and the images that I described (known as NFT’s – Non-Fungible Tokens). A NFT is a digital marker referencing an object placed on a blockchain which acts as a signature identifying the object as unique. NFTs of NBA highlights are trading in the thousands of dollars every day. While those may seem extravagant examples of conspicuous consumption, the hysteria and moralism surrounding the sale and purchase of NFTs (along with other examples of so-called “tokenization” – the creation of a digital asset representing a real or intellectual property) conceal some revolutionary changes occurring in the world of finance and our broad understanding of capitalism[1], along with how we organize and structure society itself.

The Internet, the greatest social innovation of the 30-year boom of technological innovation, has continued to shift the world in a way that is both subtle and extreme. Personal and public matters are irrevocably altered. We set our alarm clocks by talking to an electronic device, our friendships exist in multiple planes of communication, our employment is more impersonal. You pick-up a to-go order in a restaurant, ordered and paid-for online, not a word spoken to a waiter or host. A discreet, digital-only connection between a dictator’s secret police and a criminal organization leads to a targeted hack of a rival nation’s nationalized oil company. Big and small – everything is changing, though often hidden from our sight. Our present doesn’t look like the imagined future because we were thinking of physical changes: 5000-story skyscrapers, ubiquitous humanoid robots, flying cars and other visual immensities and oddities. Instead, the revolution animates an alternate world confined to invisible space and we are now a society looking down and inward (and constantly toward one another) instead of up and outward toward those still-fictitious colossal skyscrapers. Communications flow ceaselessly through wires and wi-fi disconnecting us from long generations of undisturbed face-to-face human contact while strengthening the bonds we share that are purely emotional and intellectual. Meanwhile, many of our most extraordinary technological innovations have discovered things that are so physically small, they are invisible to all except the most sensitive methods of detection. An example of this being the revelations presented from the particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider, experiments from which confirmed the existence of a previously unknown particle, long after mathematical models hinted at its existence. In the mundane and tangible world, the force drawing our gaze inward is most often a smartphone. That communications-device may be the superlative tool representing the irony of humanity’s advancement: we are freeing ourselves from the natural restrictions of nature while binding ourselves closer to each other and our own impulses. As a particle accelerator reveals the hidden structure of physics when it collides particles, rapid, decentralized mass-communications reveal the most basic human psychological machinery.

Our interconnectivity, on an individual level between people, has fragmented the world and revolutionized capitalism in a way that may be intertwined with financial bubbles, but shouldn’t be confused solely for the bubbles themselves. Laws of governments, the constraints of supply and demand, and the conception of social equity have not necessarily changed all that much, just our relationships to those institutions and concepts. The changing relationships between person and power has devalued traditional authority, accelerating the rise in a peer-to-peer economy of individuals – a model now coming under threat from the traditional and centralizing forces of civil society, commerce, and government. There is a struggle between platforms and people, with immense rewards available to those who are able to extract more value from the centralized platforms than the platforms can extract from them. OnlyFans, NFTs, a politician’s social media presence, blogging, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, the effusion of podcasts, the cloistered chambers of Telegram groups and Discords – all are part of the same phenomenon of commoditizing the individual in digital space. We are all NFTs now – if we so choose.

Photo by Ru016bdolfs Klintsons on Pexels.com – Things like Dogecoin show the power of media and technology while concealing more basic changes.

Our public discourse and policy thinking is stuck in the past along with our major government institutions and the frameworks of civil society. Born of the 20^th century when technological advances allowed singular forces to monopolize modes of communication, our perceptions of the threat of centralized power are skewed by the extremities of that calamitous 100 years. The internet, for the most part, is resistant to the broad forces of centralization that allowed Totalitarianism to flourish in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. It is more difficult for a nation to completely control all media and all communication in the Information Age (China is doing its best, though). Destruction of traditional media gatekeepers launches us to the past even as it compels us into unknown territories. Modern independent journalists and media analysts are reminiscent of the effervescent pamphleteering and journalism of the 18th and 19th centuries. These tabloids and polemics were resistant, but not immune, to government and corporate centralization by the mere fact of the difficulty of communication. These realities often made persuasion and propaganda more valuable to those who wished to control a citizenry than suppression. Internet-based dissemination of information may be resistant to centralization simply because of their profusion. Floods of data are the greatest natural constraint now for human endeavors, mirroring the troublesome deluge of abundance in other arenas. People themselves, our base needs and desires unchanged by plenty, are not immune from methods of control and influence.

Novelty and innovation vastly outran regulation and control in the last 30 years, leaving governments lagging in reasserting authority over people inhabiting virgin digital terrain. Innovation also outstripped our ability to consider the consequences resulting from our world-building. I imagine that in the future it will be clear that this was an era of peak freedom and anarchy in the Digital World, maybe only comparable to other periods of leap-frogging technological advancement. Pre-modern society was characterized by repressive hierarchical social, governmental, and economic systems, where the oppressed would revolt with sudden violence from time-to-time. The methods and severity of control have changed and moderated, but they still exist. No people, in any society, have ever had complete freedom and autonomy, of course. An individual’s freedom is always constrained by the forces of social pressure[2], and by inherently human biological and communal vulnerabilities. Now, these vulnerabilities are ruthlessly exploited by corporations, governments, and, most-of-all, social media platforms.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com – The Matrix was pretty prescient…

There are three important features of social media: the first is addictiveness, the second is enabling virality, and the third is, of course, facilitating networks for people. Addictiveness keeps people coming back, allowing algorithms to refine the most engaging content for them to interact with, and to project more and more advertisements to meet their eyes. Virality is a natural consequence of the ability to rapidly share popular, digestible content. A feature of virality is that something small: a brand, a movement, a political ideology, can become something very large. Virality is further enabled by the creation of social networks. Tribalism is the salient quality of human social networks: a consequence of allowing people to self-sort, especially in blank spaces where people will create social structures out of chaos. Tribalism is important in our world because it perpetuates rivalries and cultism. To these three volatile ingredients there is one more additive which makes an explosive solution – we had, have, and always will have, the only thing for which there is endless demand and never enough supply: the desire to be entertained.

Back when Trump was first running for President and rabid fan-groups appeared online on places like the social media site Reddit (the now-banned message board community r/The_Donald being the obvious example) I referred to them as a “grassroots cult of personality.” I think I had that partly right. I was using the outdated model referring to the aberrational centralization of the 20^th century and I discounted the forces of entertainment in Trump’s digital popularity. This phenomenon became clear as being merely one example of an eruption of digital tribes. These digital tribes can become dangerous mobs which threaten to hijack public discourse and policy every time a critical mass is reached and a catalyst triggers a riot. Trump’s rise is an excellent example of those four ingredients I mentioned and the incredible force they can create, but not of the commoditization of the individual – another politician is an even better example of that phenomenon.

Every day, or almost every day, for a period of months toward the end of 2020, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was seen on the “front-page” of Reddit. Almost always as a screenshot of a Tweet moralistically ripping on GOP or neoliberal policies. In a way, AOC is now a commoditized symbol, instead of just an elected official. Her tweets and viral moments speaking in the House are her intellectual property – generating value for her brand. I haven’t done any formal study, but it appears that attention afforded to her has fallen sharply after Trump was booted from Twitter and left office. I believe this gives some indication that her popularity is tied to a broadcasted battle played out through traditional and social media.

Addiction. Virality. Tribalism. Entertainment. Those four ingredients combined with the revolution in the production of digital assets create feedback loops and form resilient social groupings which can have real power in the real world. Any individual who has the ability and desire can use these new social groupings to attain money, influence, and power – and now and in the future – especially money because of tokenization.

NFTs selling for seemingly outrageous sums of money and AOC’s domination of Reddit’s front page in her digital war with the GOP are two sides of the same coin. Everything is being commoditized, including our digital personas. Monetization of intellectual labor is going to be a key fact of the world from now on. This is not just a world of direct-to-consumer products and psychologically-savvy corporations, it’s a world of each individual and their intellectual output as a potential brand and business to a degree that was impossible even a few years ago.

Changes in technology and social structure are a Pandora’s Box. This is a good development for society in that it can advance individual freedom, broaden prosperity and the reach of justice, and accelerate innovations. This is a bad development for society in that it can precipitate physical and digital riots, allow small groups of bad actors, or even single individuals, to cause grave harm to large numbers of people, and foster new and harmful addictions in millions of people. I think addiction deserves special attention, and is most likely to present the greatest sustained cost to society-at-large as a side-effect of our advancement.

One of the most painful problems with addiction is that it often takes an extreme adverse event or events to pull people out of their delusion that they can continue to feed their compulsion without consequences. As people are addicted to social media, and that addiction is reinforced in a multitude of ways, these new communities act as enablers, shielding addicts from reality and the harm they may be causing themselves or others. Addiction is a massively harmful, intractable problem, and I’m afraid it is increasing everywhere.

Wild freedom and the darkest oppressions are both freely available to people now: every person a potential brand and every person part of a potential mob.

[1] I don’t like using the word capitalism as it has been both politicized, decontextualized, and made overbroad and non-specific – here, I use it to refer to the general system of property rights and the relatively free flow of goods and services between different entities – perhaps close to its basic definition.

[2] You think “cancel culture” and “social justice” are out of control now? Imagine being an atheist in 1100 AD in Europe, or questioning why Serfdom was hereditary.

Creating the World

The Conversion of St. Paul (second version), oil on canvas by Caravaggio, 1601
(Source: SCALA/Art Resource, New York)

Creating the World

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” – John 1:1, KJV

^“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.” – Revelation 1:8, KJV

Creation myths all spring the universe into existence ex nihilo (even the Big Bang Theory, ultimately, after all, everything must have a beginning). From nothing comes something, thereby producing an orderly certainty in the unknowable and random. These myths present stories which serve as explanations for the existence of all things and mark the basic scope and confines of reality. In the first verse of the Book of John in the New Testament, Christ is associated with the omniscient force in the universe, one which spoke the world into existence. In the Book of Revelation God is associated with the creation and destruction if the Universe, using the beginning and ending letters of the Greek alphabet as a metaphor. These examples display the importance of telling stories to create the intellectual structures which support Belief.

As old myths and religions crumble in the face of ineffectiveness, and of new technologies and modes of communication, the whole world struggles to find new tribes to assuage their existential anxiety. Overwhelmed with complexity, with randomness, and with uncertainty, people need a fixed point around which a narrative of an orderly world can be created. The creation of these new narratives center in non-state-sanctioned social centers of belief: cults. A cult, as I am using the word, means an ideological system which includes moral and spiritual rules considered to be unerringly true, and constituting a minority of members of a general population who ascribe to those tenets. Further, all cults are tribes, but not all tribes are cults (but I will sometimes use the terms interchangeably). A tribal affiliation can grow to any size and may not have an object of veneration, while a cult is outside the mainstream of society and contains objects of Fetish-Worship. A cult can become a “religion” when it begins to imbed itself in society using coercive structures of organized force and attains legitimacy for its version of the Truth and becomes ubiquitous in ordering commerce and association in commonplace society.

The path of Christianity, from a small cult of Jews to the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, is an example of the one of the most successful and impactful journeys on which any association of individuals embarked. An important feature of Christianity compared to Roman Paganism was that it offered equality and certainty in the future, even (and especially) beyond the bounds of our mortal lives. Ancient society was dominated by an elite aristocracy, and most people were slaves or otherwise shut-off from paths to self-determination by the social structures which permeated all Classical societies. The Ancient Roman Empire, in the first several centuries AD, may have had up to 15% of the total population as slaves (the numbers are understandably difficult to discern, but it is relatively certain that it was a significant amount of the population). Populist movements, through their nature of championing the prerogatives of average people, tend toward challenging hierarchies of all sorts. Justice and certainty are amply provided to new believers though new avenues – Christianity was once a tiny religion in an obscure part of the world, and it became Archimedes’ lever which moved the Earth. The early Apostles, prophets, saints, and missionaries of Christianity reveal much about its history and appeal in their extensive writings, where they both establish a story, the object of Truth, and codify the laws of the nascent religion.

Another dramatic and history-turning social upheaval is the French Revolution. It is plausible that the French Revolution marked the beginning of mass society (as much as any line of demarcation can be pinned to one event, or series of events). Medieval hierarchies and notions of privilege and fixed caste were directly challenged and overthrown by a revolt of a mass of people. The Catholic Church, as an adjacent feature of the state, was severely damaged by the Revolution, and the cult-turned-religion of Eternal Salvation was replaced by a new cult of Reason and Science.

“Observe, however, that of man’s whole terrestrial possessions and attainments, unspeakably the noblest are his Symbols, divine or divine-seeming; under which he marches and fights, with victorious assurance, in this life-battle: what we can call his Realised Ideals. Of which realised ideals, omitting the rest, consider only these two: his Church, or spiritual Guidance; his Kingship, or temporal one. The Church: what a word was there; richer than Golconda and the treasures of the world! In the heart of the remotest mountains rises the little Kirk; the Dead all slumbering round it, under their white memorial-stones, ‘in hope of a happy resurrection:’—dull wert thou, O Reader, if never in any hour (say of moaning midnight, when such Kirk hung spectral in the sky, and Being was as if swallowed up of Darkness) it spoke to thee—things unspeakable, that went into thy soul’s soul. Strong was he that had a Church, what we can call a Church: he stood thereby, though ‘in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities,’ yet manlike towards God and man; the vague shoreless Universe had become for him a firm city, and dwelling which he knew. Such virtue was in Belief; in these words, well spoken: I believe. Well might men prize their Credo, and raise stateliest Temples for it, and reverend Hierarchies, and give it the tithe of their substance; it was worth living for and dying for.” (Chapter 1.1.II, Realised Ideals)

The above quote is from an early chapter in Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, a history of that seminal event. Carlyle (who lived in the mid-19^th century) was a Scottish polymath and writer of beautiful prose-poetry, and translator of German transcendental literature. There are three notable things about this work: first, it is a rigorous history, carefully employing sources to back its recitation of events; second, it is written in an astonishing style, one that borders on poetry; third, it is a narrative told in the present tense, as if we were following the various principle characters as they lived day to day as if they were characters in a novel (for reference, “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote comes to mind as a rough analogue – very rough). Carlyle is also well-known for positing “The Great Man Theory” of history, which determines that mythologized, dynamic men influence the outcomes of history by channeling the popular currents of society. Such a view of history places individuals as the inevitable catalysts for movements, providing a sense of certainty and justifying “cults of personality.”

Carlyle’s history is not the most rigorous or up-to-date work on the French Revolution and is generally forgotten except amongst historians of the period or fans of 19^th century literature. But Carlyle knows things which many of us do not remember. And in an era of unrest, uneasiness, and uncertainty, what could be more valuable than remembering things forgotten?

Now, amid the Communications and Information Revolution, where we face the proliferation of voices and demands on humanity, expressed largely through digital means of communication, we have a profusion of new cults, not the least of them being Bitcoin, a new form of money (There is much debate about “what” Bitcoin actually is, some may dispute its function as a currency, but that is not my concern here). The pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, left his own thoughts on the technical and social aspects of Bitcoin in blog posts, on forums, and in emails. The impetus for its creation and founding beliefs can be derived directly from those posts and subsequent commentary.

Secular regimes lose credibility when they suffer through economic crises. Periods of economic recession often act as vectors for claims of moral decline and create targets for assaults on the legitimacy of social institutions. Economic decline features a prominent role in the fall of the French Monarchy. Unpayable debts piled-up as taxation and economic innovation lagged. And in Ancient Rome, a period of one hundred years of currency debasement and disruption of commerce coincided with the rise of Christianity. Bitcoin was invented after the GFC. Economics, once largely concerned with issues of starvation, is now associated with issues of access to employment and personal debt. But regardless of the scale, economic failures create doubt in the continuing benefit of maintaining the current social structures. All is relative, of course. The privation faced by the worst-off groups in Ancient Rome was unconscionable compared to those disenfranchised groups in Revolutionary France, and the hardships faced by the worst-off groups in Revolutionary France are appalling compared to those of oppressed communities in present-day Europe and America.

The narratives, the explanations, the causality, all follow from a fixed point which serves as the reference for all belief for those inducted into the mysteries of a cult. Whether your affiliation is Bitcoin, AOC’s Squad, or MAGA – the encompassing theme is present mystery, hope for the future, and rigid certainty. This certainty is fixed, and all other justifications for belief are formalities. There is no replacement of Fiat Currency, there is only King Price. There is no concern over Stolen Elections, there is only The Tribe of the Common Man. There is no Green New Deal, there is only Social Utopia. Those stated causes I just mentioned do exist, but they are mere justifications for membership, rather than the impetus for the formation of those groupings.

What we watch every day on social media is a new society being spoken into existence. QAnon started as posts on 4Chan and now has supporters marching in the streets. Incel terrorists started by being “blackpilled” on message boards, the world watched horrified (and, tellingly, titillated) as well-produced videos of people being murdered were posted by ISIS. Belief and faith will find new outlets if their old passages are blocked. We see it in young men’s shooting rampages who, in their deranged self-styled “manifestos,” proclaim their fears of economic collapse and immigration and “white replacement.” We see it in Bitcoin maximalists who trumpet “the end is nigh!” on their digital street-corners. We see it in Extinction Rebellion, who stop-up commerce to desperately prevent the imminent doom of all human life.

As a principle, the longer the time-period without reform, the more violent the upheaval. Traditionally, conservatism (in the sense of preserving existing social norms and institutions) is the general political condition of the world. It has often taken long periods of stagnation and ignoring problems to make new and disruptive ideas popular. Many of the so-called “Revolutions” are closer to regime change where the underlying social order is not significantly disturbed. A true Revolution overturns the bases of society.

An oft-forgotten idea in the time of the internet-eating-the-world is the effectiveness of violence in ordering behavior. This is still a key factor in political and social life. As much as the internet allows the creation of mobs, the organization of cults of choice, as much as online communities creep into reality, they cannot compete with violence and death in the moment of the imposition of that ultimate power of physical coercion. Risk is what ties us all to reality, regardless of any other beliefs we may hold. Violence and mortal fear are a refiner of perception. No matter how deeply our distortions of the world are held when they are egged-on by online communities, few can pass the test of withstanding violence. Christianity withstood the tests of violence and conquered the world.

Estates-General, by Charles-Emmanuel Patas

(Source: Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris)

Certainty and Corruption

Some cults have changed the world by growing into something massive and all-encompassing. Christianity is one such cult – and Christianity grew into such a formidable social force (and eventually a political and economic one) because of its ability to provide people with certainty and with a new community. What began as, perhaps, a movement against Roman occupation, or with more certainty, one of many Jewish sects in modern-day Israel, spread throughout the whole world and became the dominating social feature of all of Europe. Christianity was an innovation of thought. As an entirely new belief system it was invented and then spread by believers in order to gain adherents. The Conversion of Paul is a good place to begin the secular history of the Christianity. Paul’s conversion was the origin of the first great Christian missionary, and had the impact of reinforcing the divine nature of Christ to potential followers. The emphasis on the Truth of events and the exhortation to have Belief, to hold a non-falsifiable idea as being irrevocably true, was the beginning of the Cult of Christianity and a movement away from the contextual, secular history of the events in the life of the historical Jesus Christ. Christianity’s belief contained the object of eternal bliss at its center, containing the promise of justice, fairness, and equality for the mass of people – something sadly elusive on Earth. In the time it originated, in a deeply oppressive and unequal society and culture, it had broad appeal. A cult creates tomorrow’s history today in adherents by producing the craved certainties they lack and generating hope for justice and happiness in the future.

We derive much knowledge of early Christian theology through the letters of Paul, his epistles to satellite churches across the Mediterranean (some of which he himself founded). In these Epistles, Paul explains the basis of the beliefs of Christianity. In Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, for instance, he encourages belief in Christ as justified by faith alone and the current wickedness and decay of the moral and institutional world. Starting at Romans 1:18 Paul states that the people of Pagan religions have caused the world to be corrupted as punishment for not acknowledging the one, true God. Moral decline is a theme in these letters, as well as veneration of the Resurrection of Christ as the focus of worship. In another one of his letters, First Corinthians, Paul vigorously defends the Resurrection as the object of worship, the mystical font of certainty which promises justice at the end of life, and treats the spiritual nature of the death and resurrection of Christ as a literal fact (1 Corinthians 15). This creates a miracle, a mysterious myth, out of factual history. Making an event into a myth and then treating that myth as the Truth is a method whereby future hopes and certain outcomes can be attached to the mythologized object or event.

A series of political and economic crises gripped Rome in the 200’s AD. This background of turmoil gave Christianity an impetus to spread – as people lost their ability to believe in their institutions, the cult of Christianity filled the void. The standard recitation of the story is that the Roman Empire stopped expanding and thereby stopped receiving plunder from its conquests and was unable to tax efficiently enough to maintain its armies which fought in endless Civil and Frontier Wars. The Roman Empire therefore resorted to currency debasement. The Roman State went bankrupt, and famines and other evils attended this collapse. Coinciding with this was the rapid spread of Christian faith. After Paul’s seeding of Christian communities himself, it continued to spread in urban centers around the fringes of the Roman Empire.

Presently, almost all the most vital movements in the world are driven by cults and their cultist’s non-malleable beliefs. The implacability of faith and certainty attract potential members and build press and social media coverage. The internet has allowed people to communicate and congregate in any cult (or tribe) they choose, and those online identities are spilling into real life. Much the same thing happened in France on the eve of the Revolution: new ideas, new associations, salons, clubs, and pamphleteers stoked thoughts of change, of a complete rejection of the old world.

France had long had a centralized government that was increasingly oppressive in its laws and which created ever-swelling financial crises. Also observed in this was the perceived destruction of morals, where France was overrun with lying and cheating and fraud, perpetrated by a burgeoning middle class and the aristocracy. New ideas from philosophers and writers like Voltaire and Rousseau promised to create a fair and just world for the people of France. Rousseau wrote about populism and the non-divinity of Kings and about wealth inequality. He wrote about the lack of morality pervading France (in reference to past scientific and cultural advances which brought other societies the collapse of their virtues): “It is thus that the dissolution of morals, the necessary consequence of luxury, brings with it in its turn the corruption of taste.” Voltaire was particularly incensed by the Catholic Church and what he considered their corruption and argued against treating Christian miracles as reported fact (undoing Paul’s work in his Epistles). He was a fierce opponent of the Eucharist, the object that was to become the focus of Fetish-Worship in the matured Catholic Church:

“They say that as almost all popular opinions are built upon ambiguities and abuse of words, so the system of the Roman Catholics concerning the Eucharist and transubstantiation is founded solely on an ambiguity; that they have interpreted literally what could only have been meant figuratively; and that for the sake of mere verbal contests, for absolute misconceptions, the world has for six hundred years been drenched in blood.”

Taking literally what was meant figuratively was the flaw that undid the Catholic Church’s understanding of the Christian Faith according to Voltaire. He argued that the construction of the tenets of Catholicism was the creation of a story, a fiction which led to repression and violence. Voltaire’s critique was one, along with other Enlightenment philosophers, which engendered hostility to the French Church and undermined belief in the story of Christianity. Decay of belief in Christianity in places which had resisted the spread of Protestantism during the Reformation was an ominous indication that the foundational institutions of the secular State were at risk.

These cultural and philosophical changes were important, and the Revolutionary movement needed leaders, apostles, martyrs, and missionaries to do its work. But truly, the old faith was crushed by the Ancien Régime’s (a term for France’s government before the Revolution) inability to change, its sclerotic body unable (or unwilling) to work on behalf of the will of the people. A succession of ministers tried to reform and fund the State, but found no traction, and argued and schemed amongst themselves to the neglect of their objectives. In the more “mundane” causes of the French Revolution, financial collapse figures prominently. Attempts by a series of ministers to stem State spending and to broaden the tax base were refuted when they attempted to tax the nobility. Attempts by at least four different Finance Ministers to reform taxation in the 1780’s (The French Revolution “began” in 1789 but an acute preceding crisis lasted for about five years before) did not work.

“Alas, yes! a whole world to remake, if she could see it; work for another than she! For all is wrong, and gone out of joint; the inward spiritual, and the outward economical; head or heart, there is no soundness in it. As indeed, evils of all sorts are more or less of kin, and do usually go together: especially it is an old truth, that wherever huge physical evil is, there, as the parent and origin of it, has moral evil to a proportionate extent been. Before those five-and-twenty labouring Millions, for instance, could get that haggardness of face, which old Mirabeau now looks on, in a Nation calling itself Christian, and calling man the brother of man,–what unspeakable, nigh infinite Dishonesty (of seeming and not being) in all manner of Rulers, and appointed Watchers, spiritual and temporal, must there not, through long ages, have gone on accumulating! It will accumulate: moreover, it will reach a head; for the first of all Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot endure for ever.” (Chapter 1.2.III, Questionable)

Carlyle frequently associates debt with corruption – the financial bankruptcy of France is tied directly to the moral bankruptcy of France. Here Carlyle is constructing a story, telling the reader what it is that led to the cataclysm of the French Revolution. Moral decay is an often-observed phenomenon by historians and political essayists, but it seems to be more of a feeling backed by cherry-picked examples. Subjective judgments such as this are easier to construct now with the exponential increase in decontextualized information.

Surrounding us on social media, and other modes of communication, are those constantly spreading their evangel and rooting-out heresy. Just as Paul reinforced specific narratives of Christianity in his letters chastising wayward Christians, we find MAGA-evangelists telling people who a “real” Republican is, or Bitcoiners telling us that “Altcoins” are false prophets, and there is no other way to salvation than through BTC.

At the moment of creation of the first “mined block” of Bitcoin, a message imbedded in it by the inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, noted that the British government was on the verge of a second bank bailout. As the bank failures of the Great Financial Crisis continued, the disappointments which increased to calls for regulation and sanction of the financial system grew. Bitcoin’s rise in popularity was directly connected to the Great Financial Crisis and the Euro crisis (and attending banking crises). The Great Financial Crisis spawned any number of political and social movements in the United States and around the world, as the financial crisis, stock market decline, and economic recession led people to remark and act on inequality, moral decline, and the illegitimacy of governments.

Again linking moral decline and financial decline, the online community of Bitcoiners revolves around a moral and political philosophy, particularly in attacking the banking system. Satoshi Nakamoto once wrote: “It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though.” The earliest mythology which grew around Bitcoin, promoted using the words of the half-mythic Satoshi, was that it appealed to a much larger group, a political group, than programmers. This is the beginning of creating a story which separates the historical Satoshi from the mythical one. Satoshi disappeared, he stopped posting or responding to emails in 2011. While speculative, he may have left because he was worried about criminal sanction from the government or a general desire for privacy. His reason for the disappearance being relatively unimportant, it allowed a mythology to be built around him without the person himself being there to refute any of it.

In our post-modern world, where spiritual belief is consumed and destroyed by science and replaced with ravenous consumption, the sins of excess are generalized. Grave sins of inequality were in a different context in the past, one where people owned other human beings as property as a matter of routine social convention. It is not the absolute but the relative that matters in most things, as it always has, but especially in the era of mass communications. It is the distance between oppressor and oppressed that is important for social cohesion. From a panoramic view of society, one that is cold and bloodless, it could be said that the object of social reform should be to break down the barriers created by class (or any other prominent social marker) as much as possible to maintain stability. This pinions the wings of the civilizational evils of war and revolution, which harm people as they initiate change.

La Liberté guidant le peuple, painting by Eugène Delacroix commemorating the July Revolution of 1830

(Source: Louvre Museum, Paris)

The Paper Age

What broke the French social system (Carlyle posits) is the lack of belief in the efficacy and justice of that social system. Inching into the ideologies of France came a creeping nihilism that seems so familiar to us now. It was not really the starvation, the taxation, the uncaring brutality of the regime that radicalized the people of France, it was the destruction of hope for the future and the simultaneous emergence of faith in new forms of hope for the future. This is not as easy to measure as many things, it is something hard to quantify, but the basic cause of the Revolution was the sins of the Ancien Régime, the moral collapse that continued until people lost faith in the leadership of the government. Many may see these same themes now in our lives, pervasive. In any story involving the great movements of the world it is axiomatic that, in an era of uncertainty and hope for the future, frauds and conmen surround the scene, becoming heroes for one forlorn group or another. Repeatedly, the concerns and condition of the great mass of people (25 million dispossessed people in the case of France, as Carlyle reminds us) were utterly ignored. Met with contempt or hangings, protests leading up to the convulsion were not enough to change the foundations of the government.

That author called this “The Paper Age” in France, the era proceeding the Revolution which was full of fraud and perfidy. Corruption of philosophy, of finances, and Christianity pervaded the state:

“For indeed it is of apoplexy, so to speak, and a plethoric lazy habit of body, that Churches, Kingships, Social Institutions, oftenest die. Sad, when such Institution plethorically says to itself, Take thy ease, thou hast goods laid up;–like the fool of the Gospel, to whom it was answered, Fool, this night thy life shall be required of thee!

Is it the healthy peace, or the ominous unhealthy, that rests on France, for these next Ten Years? Over which the Historian can pass lightly, without call to linger: for as yet events are not, much less performances. Time of sunniest stillness;–shall we call it, what all men thought it, the new Age of God? Call it at least, of Paper; which in many ways is the succedaneum of Gold. Bank-paper, wherewith you can still buy when there is no gold left; Book-paper, splendent with Theories, Philosophies, Sensibilities,–beautiful art, not only of revealing Thought, but also of so beautifully hiding from us the want of Thought! Paper is made from the rags of things that did once exist; there are endless excellences in Paper.–What wisest Philosophe, in this halcyon uneventful period, could prophesy that there was approaching, big with darkness and confusion, the event of events? Hope ushers in a Revolution,–as earthquakes are preceded by bright weather. On the Fifth of May, fifteen years hence, old Louis will not be sending for the Sacraments; but a new Louis, his grandson, with the whole pomp of astonished intoxicated France, will be opening the States-General.” (Chapter 1.2.I. The Paper Age)

As discontent increased, the clearly delineated objects of outrage disseminated by the pamphlet-writing evangelists fueled mob violence and the increasingly bold and public displays of antipathy toward the venerable institutions of the past. One of the prefiguring riots of the Revolution was an attack on a local factory-owner instigated by a mob’s misinterpretation of an essay he wrote about wages (Chapter 1.4.III. Grown Electric). A mob does not have an ideology, it cannot provide sustained belief, it burns out after it has expressed its rage, but the use of violence as a communal social act was an act foreshadowing the violence to come. What started as riots ended in Holy War. All of the organs of the state were ripped down one by one as false idols. In their place was founded a committee for the People, and a new national religion founded on science and rationality with the sovereign authority emanating from the “Will of the People” and not from God. An important figure in the early stages of the Revolution, Mirabeau, told a representative of the King at the meeting of the Estates General: “’Go, Monsieur, tell these who sent you that we are here by the will of the People, and that nothing shall send us hence but the force of bayonets!’” (Chapter 1.5.II, Mercury de Brézé).

The Storming of the Bastille (a fort and prison in Paris, a symbol of the oppressive Regime) marks the “official” beginning of the French Revolution on July 14, 1789. Direct, physical attacks would henceforth occur against the State, attacks that were not countered by important military and law enforcement arms of the State. Simultaneously attacked along with the symbols of the Monarchy was the Church in France. A church was attacked a few nights before the assault on the Bastille, the mob accused the Priests of hoarding food and destroyed and burned the building (Chapter 1.5.V, Give us Arms). Many such attacks occurred all over France from citizens inspired with Revolutionary fervor. A year to the day after that first attack on the Church (Saint-Lazare) the French National Assembly (the Revolutionary government that uneasily coexisted with the Monarchy before its destruction) promulgated the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” which stripped members of the Catholic Clergy of all their special and separate rights in France.

After the Fall of the Bastille, pamphleteer Claude Desmoulins (who personally incited mob-violence a few days before) wrote:

“The return of that liberty to the French people was reserved for our days. Yes, she has already been returned to us; she does not yet have a temple for the States General, like that of Delphos in Greece, for the assembly of the Amphictyons; or that of Concord in Rome, for the assembly of the Senate; but she is already adored in tones louder than a whisper, and the worship of her is public. For forty years philosophy has been undermining the foundations of despotism in all its parts; and, as Rome before Caesar was already enslaved by its vices, so France before Necker was already enfranchised by its intelligence.” (La France Libre, https://melkam.livejournal.com/693.html)

In this pamphlet the rot of the old regime and a search for an entirely new object of worship is stated plainly. All old things were dying, their deaths spurred by new ideologies and hopes which existed before the financial crises and calls for reform began under the French Finance Minister, Jacques Necker (his first term, his second term ending was the catalyst for violence of July 12, 1789). There was an attempt to sweep away all the vestigial limbs of past belief. Revolutionary government in France systematically dismantled the secular powers and wealth of the Catholic Church in France. The new French State created a calendar, the French Republican Calendar (with a “rational” ten-day week), to replace the Catholic one. Priests were placed under secular authority, the traditional role of the Church in maintaining records of births, deaths, and marriages was usurped, the wealth of the Church was seized, members of the clergy were executed and massacred, and aspects of public worship were banned. After several years, there were multiple attempts to establish a new state religion. Two of them were created and celebrated as official religions, the Cult of Reason, and Robespierre’s competing Cult of the Supreme Being. In a quite theatrical Revolution, the theatricality of the celebrations for the Revolutionary religious cults stands out. The Cult of Reason was a belief in the philosophical precepts of the Enlightenment, with an embrace of atheism. A Festival celebrating reason was conducted in none other than the Cathedral of Notre Dame, including symbolic representations of Liberty and Reason (Chapter 3.5.IV, Carmagnole complete). The famous Robespierre, leader of the political faction known as the Jacobins and the architect of the Reign of Terror, and for a time, the de facto dictator of Revolutionary France, thought the atheism of the Cult of Reason was destructive, and called for the veneration of a new religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being. Quoting Carlyle (again): “Catholicism being burned out, and Reason-worship guillotined, was there not need of one? Incorruptible Robespierre, not unlike the Ancients, as Legislator of a free people will now also be Priest and Prophet” (Chapter 3.6.IV, Mumbo-Jumbo). In this manner Robespierre tried to combine both secular and spiritual authority, but these new religions failed to take hold, unable to replace Christianity’s monopoly on belief.

The various councils and written works of Christians, starting with the Pauline Epistles and stretching to, say, the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 AD, established the “rules” of Christian belief. That process of codification and creation of the distinction between “Truth” and “heresy” allowed the Cult of Christianity to exist with a uniformity of message and institutional cohesion. The firming of a set of rules and the consequent knowledge that others believe the same things you believe potentiates the viability of conversion to non-believers. Irenaeus, a Christian who wrote a refutation of heresies and affirmation of the power and faith of the both the Early Church and the Truth of Paul’s and the Gospel’s interpretation of the life of Christ, was an early example (in the mid-100’s AD) of the firming of rules against direct spiritual revelation (generally known as Gnosticism). The Ecumenical Councils decided the books which would be included in the Bible, and the order in which they would appear and they decreed which beliefs were heretical and which were not, creating a centralized form of governance and belief for the Christian religion. After long and trying wars, famines, and economic strife, Christianity became to be seen by secular powers as a method of instilling social unity in the people of the Roman Empire. Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, ending almost 300 years of persecution of the cult by the State. Becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire also gave the decisions of the Church’s councils the force of law. This phase of codification and consolidation of Christianity strengthened its path toward the social dominance of a religion.

Bitcoin’s technological innovation of creating a chain of trust, backed by mathematical verification, is a tool and tools are merely instruments of the will of those who wield them. New modes of trust, faith, and belief are being created and tested, the arguments about them now reverberating through to consensus. Some arguments will win, others will lose. There is a burgeoning codification, but there does not exist a uniform belief system yet. The orientation of Bitcoin-believers is toward freedom from the failed financial system of the State and cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin are in the social phase of codification. There is a struggle to define what the meaning and place of these digital innovations are or what they will be; there is a struggle to create a narrative that will place them in society as a new institution. Acknowledgement of Bitcoin’s existence and rudimentary forms of regulation hastened Bitcoin’s adoption. A Federal Judge declared Bitcoin a “form of money” which could be then regulated by the government in 2013 and the period from 2012-2014 saw a host of companies declare that they would accept Bitcoin for payment. Its first great battle, and one it is still fighting, is the war against the idea that Bitcoin is used only by criminals and for criminal activity. The adoption of BTC’s use by corporations and some regulation of exchange provided a counter to this argument. BTC won the narrative battle to become something seen as acceptable to society, but it is still a fractured community, with other prominent crypto-currencies and “forks” in the blockchain serving as opposition.

(Source: Wikimedia Commons from user – Onov3056)

Rise and Fall – from Cult to Religion

“It is thus everywhere that foolish Rumour babbles not of what was done, but of what was misdone or undone; and foolish History (ever, more or less, the written epitomised synopsis of Rumour) knows so little that were not as well unknown. Attila Invasions, Walter-the-Penniless Crusades, Sicilian Vespers, Thirty-Years Wars: mere sin and misery; not work, but hindrance of work! For the Earth, all this while, was yearly green and yellow with her kind harvests; the hand of the craftsman, the mind of the thinker rested not: and so, after all, and in spite of all, we have this so glorious high-domed blossoming World; concerning which, poor History may well ask, with wonder, Whence it came? She knows so little of it, knows so much of what obstructed it, what would have rendered it impossible. Such, nevertheless, by necessity or foolish choice, is her rule and practice; whereby that paradox, ‘Happy the people whose annals are vacant,’ is not without its true side.” (Chapter 1.2.I, Astræa Redux)

Examination of basic cause and effect, or the imposition of a facsimile of cause and effect (for events do not travel in orderly fashion) to give us a sense of order and understanding of events is a basic feature of history. A conclusion which can be safely drawn from approximately 500 years of the process of scientific inquiry is that causality is hard to establish with any degree of certainty. Every major event or turning point in human history follows a path-dependent route with an almost infinite chain of causality.

Creation of a narrative – especially the mirroring of nature with a “rise and fall” narrative – is the goal of Carlyle’s writing. Placing the reader in the middle of a story provides a structure where they can observe what the author thinks is important. This is ironic because we know these narratives are always untrue (if not useful); Carlyle is revealing the nature of faith and belief while advancing his own understanding of the world. Our lives are proscribed at inception, with no appeals accepted and no motions for relief granted. Of course, this is true of all things, every being, institution, and organization flashes into being and then slowly subsides. So when we tell stories about empires, or social movements, or wars, or lives there is an innate structure of rise and fall to which we are attracted and repelled. This narrative is a lie as the only certain things are beginnings and endings. Middles are messes. But, those beginnings and endings can be complex, too, often muffled and hazy – we cannot see them even though we know they exist. Birth and death, the points compassing our linear journey through life, are clouded and ineffable – inconceivable. And, like our lives, so are the beginning and endpoints of leaders and civilizations. One moment they existed and the next they did not, their forms never truly visible, but only existing in the collective minds of their participants. The seat of belief is not a trifling matter, if enough people believe the same thing, they will certainly exact change.

There is a pattern to the adoption of novel ideas. Believers swell their ranks with other believers, and collective action begins to impress an impact on the world outside of the confines of the cultists’ minds. There is no more powerful result of belief than the ascendancy of Bitcoin in terms of its price in United States Dollars. Price increase is a measurable sign of success, it is an idea around which one can build a story, any story – if it involves Bitcoin becoming the Reserve Currency, or a replacement for Gold, or a bet against hyper-inflation. The continuous rise in price recently spurred renewed interest from important financial institutions in Bitcoin – the narrative of price increases creating a direct line to adoption enabled by the secular State. Five reasons for Bitcoin’s surge in price are enumerated in this piece: (1) “For professional investors, there’s no longer career risk in buying bitcoin,” (2) which means “institutional money is starting to pour into bitcoin,” (3) “The U.S. government is flashing a green light [that Bitcoin will not be over-regulated], (4) “Bitcoin has a breakout new evangelist,” and (5) “A lot of people are nervous about the global monetary system — especially the dollar.” All five of those reasons are molded by sentiment based on price action and not by qualities inherent in Bitcoin, it’s part of another story being created at this instant.

As I noted, Carlyle’s history consciously attempts to tell the story of the French Revolution as if he were narrating an action in front us. Descending into the chamber of Louis XV to recite the actions of characters milling about as that King lay on his deathbed, as if the author were an omniscient, unseen observer, for example, brings to the reader an immediacy of emotion and feeling which is lacking in a dry recitation of facts. In this immediacy lies a truth about the French Revolution: the overthrow of the monarchy and Dechristianization were not enough to satisfy the mass of people, who were, first and foremost, hungry. Carlyle’s narration highlights the struggle of regular people (while ironically following the “Great Men” who turn belief into action), who were, for one of the first times in history, and only for a short time, the master of events. With nothing viable given to replace their former beliefs, the people, and therefore the national Revolutionary movement, descended into chaos with hundreds of factions and belief-systems vying for control of the nation (Chapter 3.3.I, Cause and Effect). It is secular power that was vital and disputed as a result of the absence of the unity of Belief, leading to the Reign of Terror and the ultimate collapse of the Revolutionary government in Napoleon’s coup. The horror of so many events in the Revolution given immediacy by Carlyle’s interpretation displays the powers unleashed (or kept in check) by Belief, especially when these Beliefs can harness violence which is used or condoned by the secular State.

Christianity was given a formal place in society by Constantine, but the Catholic Church did not have true secular power – it did not become the monumental edifice of the Middle Ages – until the “Donation of Pepin” in 756 AD. This was a grant of conquered territory by the secular French power to the Church, to control physically and rule over (what became known as the Papal States). After this point, the Catholic Church had the power to defend its own interests, beyond social and cultural impact. France became allied with the Catholic Church, intertwining their powers, though France was not yet what could be called a nation-state at this point. Give or take a hundred years, this time period marked the end of formation of Papal and spiritual authority in the cult of Christianity, and the beginning of the exercise of that authority as the Catholic Church. 700 years of increasing social, cultural, moral, and physical power ended in a catastrophe of corruption and conflict with incipient nation-states and the forces of populism unleashed by increased literacy and communications technology during the Reformation. The ability to impose law by physical force is the last marker of the transition from cult to religion. It was only through a grant of power by another regional force that finally secured the place of Christianity as a world power.

Creation of Adam, Fresco, by Michelangelo
(Source: Sistine Chapel)

The Past is not the Future

The relationship between the present world and the examination and construction of history is as a person walking forward and looking backwards. The only thing you can learn from history is what types of obstacles may be in your path after you’ve already passed them, but it does not predict when and how those obstacles will be encountered.

If modern tools can reveal to us the hidden worlds and movements of the past, can their use also conceal obvious truths? The matchless abundance of computational power which defines our modern world is also its most disorienting feature. In gathering enormous amounts of data, we are easily drowned instead of buoyantly uplifted. History was once clouded by lack of information, by an inability to see an entire scene or sequence, by limited records and facts. Now even recent history is clouded by an abundance of these same features. We must make peace with the fact that history is not the Truth, it is a story, as all human institutions and ideas are. They are stories-in-motion or they are dead and hollow. We cannot make sense of the immensity that is “everything” – we must simplify if we are to act and to attempt to understand how we got to where we are standing now. Is it all random? At times, yes, at others, no. Careful examination of data may sometimes find things that are deeper than the incorrect assumptions we often make about the world, but we may also conceal obvious truths. The three stories I just outlined (of the rise of Christianity, the convulsion of the French Revolution, and the rise of Bitcoin) are all narratives, wherein we take events and imbue them with meaning based on what happened following each action.

All cults exist as a refutation of state power, as a well-spring from which discontent flows toward the dominant social institutions. But not all cults succeed in becoming the new social institutions. There is always a tension between our knowledge of events and our knowledge of their causes and the past is not a blueprint which can be used to construct the future. A series of beliefs, held and acted on by enough people, can construct the future, however. The Catholic Church’s dominant grip over Europe eventually collapsed under the weight of its own corruption. Emperor Napoleon outlawed the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being, restoring Catholicism as the official religion of France. Bitcoin may be co-opted by the State, outlawed, fail completely, or become the international reserve currency. The future is not predetermined by the past.

If one wanted to make a rule out of these stories, it could be: (1) cults arise in eras of perceived moral and financial decline, which (2) cause people to lose faith in the primary institutions of the day, (3) the downfall of old orders are mythologized through stories of decay and the founding of the cult is mythologized by modified interpretations of the founder – who often is the object of worship, cults then go through a phase of (4) strengthening their message of salvation and certainty for the future through codification and elimination of heresies and spread as faith in present institutions continues to decline, and finally, (5) successful cults become religions intertwined with, or possessing on their own accord, the secular powers of the State and become part of the ruling institutions.

No two stories are alike, however, but processing the general paths of cults as they are born and then spread can restore clarity to the mass-mobilization of ideas. Ideas become actions and the link between those two points are the forge of social change. Dissemination of ideas becoming ever-more ubiquitous and rapid accelerates and decentralizes this process and causes an eruption of cults, each a possible source of foundational change. Everything told between birth and death, and as obscured as those two encompassing moments might be by myths – they are indisputable, is pure fiction. The fiction of the “rise and fall” has a tight hold on the imagination of people, and ultimately of their opinion. These stories, themselves, create the momentum of change by bending people’s beliefs.

Belief itself is sovereign. Near the end of the Gospel of John, there is a line that sums the purpose of the book and highlights the power of constructed belief, the object of worship, and of certainty and hope in the future:

“But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.” – John 20:31, KJV

[NOTE] There exist the lesser cults of celebrity worship, a facet of mass media being that anyone in front of a camera enough times will become globally known, regardless of their achievements or merits. Insult Beyonce or Kanye West online and you will feel the wrath of their supporters. Celebrity worship lacks the all-encompassing simplicity of “One Big Idea” which successful cults provide, and therefore does not generate the strength of belief that the other cults do. Celebrity-worship may be intense, but there must be an object of faith and certainty beyond mere admiration and reason to create the types of cults which may yet become religions. Other modern cults that will never become religions include QAnon, belief in which can be falsified by the mere passage of time, and Scientology, which is too exposed by media to become more successful (it’s founder, science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, supposedly once said “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.” h/t @valuestockgeek via Twitter).

Mobs and Riots

Reconstruction

Ulysses Grant, Union General and President of the United States, is more popular now than at any time since the 1880’s. After his death, he was long regarded as an inferior general, a poor President, and an unremarkable and flawed man. With a host of biographies and changing views on racism, his formerly withered reputation is blooming.

Grant’s military career and Presidency are an excellent example of the sandy foundations of the stories we tell ourselves about the past. The moral clarity of his Presidency will henceforth protect him, inasmuch as there is a public memory of him at all in our relentlessly forward-looking society. But in the focus on the shifting opinions of Grant’s career, the context of his moral-firmness is a revelation of vicious inhumanity and tribalism.

Reconstruction is (probably, though I’m sure there are other contenders) the most shameful period of American history.

After the Civil War ended and slavery abolished it became clear that the true driving force of Southern society’s defense of slavery was not its economics, or based in regional conservatism (in the sense of unchanging institutions), or competing views of Federal power – it was based on social tribalism.

Subjugation, the institutionalized inferiority of black people for no other benefit than maintaining a particular division of social standing, became the primary goal of radical Southern political movements.

And the history of that tribalism and those political movements is shockingly depraved and revolutionary.

There were:

Massacres of black people, in some cases hundreds at a time
Literal coups, where state government’s were overthrown by armed force
Widespread Terrorism across the former Confederate states
Massive Federal military intervention, including the suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus

By the end of Grant’s second term in office, Reconstruction was abandoned. And why did Reconstruction end without enforcing the rights of full citizenship of freed slaves? It was subsumed by national politics.

In the last three weeks, there were two nationally-known incidents (several others but these received the most attention) which intimately concerned race and policing.

The Destruction of Amy Cooper

A white woman used the police as an implicit threat on the physical health and safety of a black man. The reaction to the video of the incident being made public was animated by a modern mob, a digital one. Without passing judgment on her digital destruction, it is an example of the power of social media to amplify tribal signaling. Much of the backlash became about showing everyone else that “they were on the right side,” dare I call it virtue signaling?

The Murder of a Black Man

The murder of George Floyd was a clear example of the aggression and callousness of modern policing. But these protests, riots, and the reaction to them, have gone far beyond this initial outrage. Looting, arson, and people dissatisfied about other aspects of the social order have joined in, and muddied the focused protests over policing.

A Riot is a Signal

Mob violence is an expression of rage and tribalism. A mob, a riot, is a thing-in-itself, not connected to any particular ideology – in the post-Civil War south, riots were anti-black affairs. They were both political tools and a signal of dissatisfaction with the current social regime. We now judge this harshly, but it was, at its base, a signal to the occupying Federal forces, and enough northerners grew tired of constant intervention that they became effective political tools. And public perceptions of those riots became the currency of national politics, deeply influencing the course of political events.

One thing that people tend to forget when they’re caught-up in idealism or discussions on policy: organized violence is effective. It goes both ways, the violence of the mob can produce real change, the suppression of the mob through violence can stifle it.

These incidents now are also in the process of being subsumed by national politics. The construction of narratives in relation to these protests both destroys nuance and is necessary to try to resolve the deep unease generated by chaos.

If I were to exhort people toward one action it would be to resist, and resist deeply, the temptation to blame all of this on one of our two political tribes. These tribes will use this chaos to advance their fight over the throne, and not for reform.