Fascinating to consider the appeal of a world in which symbols and their manipulation is the ultimate expression of the Fox’s will to power. I wonder how resentment fits into that scheme. The change drive advertises itself mostly (not exclusively) in positive language: “Look what we can create!” But my intuition tells me this drive has deep roots in the frustration which the Fox feels at the intractable and tragic underlying reality of the material world. I think the change merchants’ success has increased and amplified the sense of resentment modern people feel over so many things.
"But my intuition tells me this drive has deep roots in the frustration which the Fox feels at the intractable and tragic underlying reality of the material world."
Resentment at physical reality plays no small part in the Fox's temperament, especially insofar as it intrudes upon social dynamics, which are mediated through language. N.S. mentioned nerds. What defines the nerd besides his dream of becoming a wizard? His resentment at jocks. Indeed, the 'dumb jock' stereotype was invented by resentful nerds; there is no negative correlation between athletic prowess and intelligence. Moreover, social dynamics almost always involve some level of interpersonal conflict. Foxes, when engaged in interpersonal conflict, are likely to avoid open confrontation and opt for more crafty strategems: psychological manipulation, reputation destruction, passive aggressive verbal abuse, etc. Combine this style with the nerd's inferior physical stature, and we have a decent profile of the average Fox. And people like this do exist. Indeed, there are quite a few of them. They're called women.
It is no coincidence that our Fox-ruled fiefdom coincides with the feminist revolution and the concomitant rise of the ladies' economic and cultural power. I won't venture to guess what this ultimately portends for our domestic situation, but in international affairs, our lack of Lions in government has proved disastrous. After a string of successful Fox-style color revolutions in Eastern Europe instigated by people like Hilary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Victoria Nuland, we are now in the Lion's lair, as it were, in Eastern Ukraine. And no one in Washington has any idea what to do, beyond reiterating that Putin is evil over and over, like some incantation that will make him go poof.
We can only hope that what Lions remain in the military retain some sense concerning this conflict. If not... I shudder to imagine.
I was wondering when someone would mention the chaos that ensues when women are put in charge of well…anything. There is a reason the creation story begins with a woman destroying paradise.
Ah, but I am just a right-wing misogynist…you say…I say, Islam (as the most change-proof and conservative of Abrahamic faiths) has it right when it comes to the woman’s place in the world.
Sadly it all boils down to male vs. female, as it does in every aspect of life.
As brilliant as Machiavelli and Pareto were, they were men of their times. Neither could have envisioned the Hell of mass democracy combined with the 19th amendment in which we currently live. If we could resurrect them to ask their advice, they would just shout at us in Italian, "You bloody fools, what have you done?!"
I read a lot on human psychology/behavior science and organizational theory. Also read a lot of history written from the perspective of the governing power contrasted with the people governed. My seek is to better understand why people think and behave the way they do, and to resolve related social-political-organizational trends that are fundamentally destructive. One book that was impactful to my thinking was Virginia Postrel’s “The Future and Its Enemies”. This piece from N.S. Lions just blew that away. It is perfectly written. Taking a fascinating new perspective of a current vexing, complex, and primary global phenomenon, a walking us through a well-designed theory of explanation. There is nothing to argue against here. Only gratitude for delivering something important that needs to go viral. Everyone should read this.
Our complex, global, economy of scale feeds all the lions, tigers and foxes extremely well. Politics is about this world - the material world; our physical wants, needs and desires. We should be happy, but man is an incorrigibly religious being. Only Truth alone can make man happy.
The great irony of this age is Anthropogenic Global Warming ideology. It's farcically untrue. There is nothing man can do, or not do, to consequentially effect earth's temperatures. But... There is a clear and present danger to the whole modern project. Massive Solar flares, aka, Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) happen with alarming frequency. Every 200 - 500 years trillions and trillions of tons of charged particles (plasma) are belched out of the Sun and head directly for Earth. In pre-modern times, ominous red auroras would appear for days or weeks in the tropics if a CME did a direct hit on Earth. And that was it.
If Earth takes a direct hit now, everything will be as it was before, except... All those trillions of tons of charged particles will be inducted as electric current by Earth’s magnetosphere into anything that conducts electricity.
All the transformers in our global electrical transmission and distribution network will get fried by surging rogue current. Nothing will work. No pumps to move water and fuel. The transformer factories will not be making replacement transformers. Our entire technological / industrial edifice will fall silent.
The 1859 Carrington Solar Flare Event burned down telegraph poles & sheds,. Electrocuted telegraph operators and blew up batteries. The Carrington event energized the conductor lines so the telegraph could operate without batteries. It was a global event.
I won't bore you with details. But just imagine our lives without electricity. Nobody works with their hands anymore. Everybody will after the Big One hits. The foxes will need to find digging sticks, lions too.
Ironically, we could harden the gird to protect grid assests. But nobody is doing that because it would be too expensive - or so we imagine.
So say your prayers and don't love this world too much. The world we know is passing way.
"The great irony of this age is Anthropogenic Global Warming ideology. It's farcically untrue. There is nothing man can do, or not do, to consequentially effect earth's temperatures. " Is this a fact, or an "isn't it obvious? It is to me!" a priori axiom plus cherry-picking rationalization?
Fascinating. Thinking about your virtuals / physicals distinction, I’ve come to believe that a battleground where these two ways of being in the world meet is Change, in the sense of big organisational restructures. Virtual PowerPoint decks and theories of how the world should work vs the actual crooked timber of the real thing, with poor middle managers stuck in between. This article adds another layer, never mind academia, most of business management and consulting is utterly built around change. That’s another front in the virtual vs. physical conflict: the manager or consultant that requires change to justify their position vs the fact that, as Robert Conquest put it, everyone is a conservative about what they know best.
Thank you for this, N.S.! Keen insight and details. What if the guiding spirit behind the “Machine / Technium / Virtuals / Change merchants / etc” is a lion using destabilization to introduce a fluidity it can fashion into a solid body — a community — after its own image?
Its image? The new archetypal human unrestrained by any reality other than that of its own making — in this case, such a one as to be worshipped, so great is its vision and power. Of course I am speaking of Antichrist, whose agenda is to have a community allied with it in hatred of that humanity made in the image of the true God, and to destroy it with diabolic force.
I'm sure you've read (or at least heard about) Iain McGilchrist's, The Matter With Things. He echoes the Lion / Fox problem in the terminology of left and right brained thinking and comes to a similar conclusion: the West has become almost schizophrenically left-brained (Foxey). We simply can no longer attend (his word) to anything that doesn't fit into a rationalist, nominalist box. (Anyone who doesn't know McGilchrist, here's 10 minutes on his earlier book: https://youtu.be/dFs9WO2B8uI )
Joseph Henrich's book, The WEIRDest People in the World, unintentionally backs up McGilchrist, pointing out the many ways that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Individualistic, Rich, Democratic) people think very differently than everyone else. In short we're not normal, either for our own time or for most of human history. That may be a good thing or a bad thing or both, but the reality of it is clear.
As to the question of where our wrong turn began, many people would say the 1960's and postmodernism. However I think it's more accurate to say that's when it became noticeable. Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed) believes the ingredients of our current conflict were baked in at the Enlightenment itself. Enlightenment liberalism desires to liberate people from unchosen constraints, which brings it into conflict with slavery, sex roles, family, church, male, female, human biology, and even reality itself. (Reality is, after all, the ultimate unchosen constraint.)
Brad Gregory wrote a book called The Unintended Reformation which argues that we came off the track at Martin Luther or even earlier at John Scotus and nominalism. I find this less convincing, but the Reformation did lead to the Enlightenment -- a individualist faith begat a individualist politics. It's worth noting that the Orthodox East has not experienced the highly individualist, left-brained thinking of the WEIRDs until very recently.
As a working theory, many centuries ago, a theological change (ala Gregory) brought about a gradual shift toward highly rationalist thinking (ala McGilchrist). That eventually produced a rationalist philosophy and politics in the Enlightenment, which stressed individual rights above the common good. Deneen is right, the seeds were planted in that philosophical change. This was supercharged by J.S. Mill's Harm Principle ("my rights only stop at your nose"), which asserts the supremacy of human desire, what I would call "maximal individual autonomy", over all other constraints. Once you deify human desire as your highest good, you've already dethroned "the common good", and it's only a matter of time before the battering ram of "my right to do what I want" will be used to demolish every institution that might stand in the way of that desire (which is all of them.) Unbeknownst to Locke, Jefferson, et al, the Enlightenment left a gaping philosophical hole left in the middle of Western Civilization. All the postmodernists did was drive a truck bomb into the hole and detonate it. We've been living with the philosophical and political carnage (what Zygmunt Bauman calls "liquid modernity") ever since.
When the deepest thinkers have been positing the same dichotomy for at least 500 years, they might be onto something basic about human nature. (Ignoring the postmodernists, who insist humans are infinitely malleable tabulae rasae and human nature is an illusion.)
Machiavelli certainly doesn't paint a promising picture of what happens next. Fortunately, as Adam Smith said, "there's a lot of ruin in a nation", which means we can likely coast on inertia for a while longer (maybe my kids whole lifetimes, but I doubt it). Eventually, the Foxes will cause a strategic defeat and we'll end up with a new crop of Lions in charge, if we're lucky by election, if we're not, by coup. But that may well be decades away. The Rome = America analogy is overused these days, but even those who use it get it wrong, I think. It's not 475 AD; it's BC 50. What's coming over the hill isn't barbarian hordes; it's Caesar's army. And Rome lasted another 500 years after that event.
I was scrolling through the comments to see if someone had picked up on the McGilchrist thing, and was pleased to see you comment! The congruence is quite apparent!
"Eventually, the Foxes will cause a strategic defeat and we'll end up with a new crop of Lions in charge, if we're lucky by election, if we're not, by coup. But that may well be decades away."
Unless something or someone reins them in, and soon, the neocons ("foxes") who engineered this proxy war with Russia over Ukraine may lead to the strategic defeat of the West.
Short of Armageddon (which is certainly plausible but still unlikely as John M says), the Ukraine / Russia war can not cause a strategic defeat in the West. It could cause a strategic defeat for Russia, which seems to be NATO's goal here.
Now if China were to decide to invade Taiwan right now, that could cause a strategic defeat of America. We have not the navy, the missiles, or the basic ammo to defend Taiwan and Ukraine simultaneously. Were China to do this, they would attempt to rapidly overwhelm the island (uncertain at best) and would likely instruct everyone else to stay away or be fired on. China has long-range anti-ship missiles which could take out an aircraft carrier battle group from a great distance (in theory -- they've never been combat tested against an onboard Patriot missile battery.)
Ukraine is a win-win for NATO: if Ukraine wins, Russia is defeated utterly and Putin probably meets his maker in a coup of some kind; if Russia wins we've bled the Russians for 2-3 years and left them incredibly weakened.
A China invasion of Taiwan would be reversed: if the US defends Taiwan, China could likely inflict serious damage on the US Navy and has the productive capacity and raw materials (via Russia) to outlast us; if the US doesn't defend Taiwan, China has called our bluff as a paper tiger and we're finished as a global empire.
Other strategic defeats would be the market for US T-bills suddenly drying up (like what happened to the BOE under Liz Truss, but writ large). Most likely, we'll just see a continued erosion of our ability to project power and make other people follow our wishes. From The Sun Also Rises:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
“What brought it on?”
“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends. False friends. Then I had creditors, too. Probably had more creditors than anybody in England.”
False friends and lots of creditors. What a great description of modern America.
The first casualty of war is the truth. Tons of propaganda from all sides. My read on Ukraine is the polar opposite of yours, and there is a high likelihood I have fallen for Russian propaganda. There is also a high likelihood that the State Department and their p.r. arm, the U.S. media, are hiding the truth if not outright lying.
Russia has continued to manufacture and stockpile their war materiel, the sanctions against them have failed and boomeranged on the West, and the U.S. cannot match the Russian manufacture of arms because the U.S. is almost completely dependent on China for critical parts and labor. The U.S. is prepared for a high tech war dependent on air supremacy. Russia is not fighting that war, and their cruise missiles have made the U.S. military machine pretty much obsolete.
This is a lose-lose for NATO (the U.S.) as they are losing this war of attrition, and Putin’s terms for a settlement are going to be much harsher than what he and Zelensky agreed to in March of 2022 until the Biden Admin. squashed it. On the other hand, if they take out Putin, the odds of a nuclear war go up dramatically once the hardliners get control.
The forever-war neocons (foxes) have painted the U.S. into a corner, and this may prove to be the biggest geopolitical strategic cluster***k in our history.
I just don't think Ukraine losing everything up to the Dnieper River constitutes a strategic defeat to NATO, unless our leaders are stupid enough to allow it to. And of course they're that stupid. They've declared this an existential threat to democracy (which really means liberalism) and gone all-in with a pair of deuces. When you go all in, you make something strategically important whehter it actually is or not. In some sense we've already lost; India and Africa (the two fastest growing population centers in the world) have both refused to play along with us.
Thanks for the Mearshimer link. Just read it. Very balanced and great summary of this disaster of a war. Some major quibbles:
1. He seems oblivious to the fact that it was Obama’s intelligence crew and his female brain trust--Rice, Nuland and Monaco--who launched the 2014 overthrow of the pro-Russian Ukraine government, which unleashed the furies of a thousand years of hatred between Ukraine and Russia.
2. The “frozen conflict” solution is a non-starter for Putin, and is a desperation pipe dream of Nuland/Blinken who stumbled into this lose-lose strategy in 2021/2022.
3. He left out the one politician who had the foresight to avoid poking the Russian bear and was scaling back NATO’s ambitions: Donald J. Trump.
Seems to me there is a great deal of over-thinking here about your imagined change agents, the academics, the media and so on. The engine that creates change at a continually accelerating pace in the modern world is market capitalism. How much impact do academics have in the real world, outside of their committee meetings? Market capitalism continually needs new products, new markets, new technologies, new customers and new narratives that encourage the desire for new products. I worked in the television industry for fifty years, and I am sure you understand the technological changes that happened during that time, change that always came faster with each new innovation in production or distribution.
All of this was driven not by some kind of elite manipulative mind control, or whatever it is you are trying to describe with your animal metaphors, but by the marketing departments of ever larger and conglomerating corporations. Most people in the media are liberals, it is true, but these media worker bees take their orders from the corporations that pay them, and the marketing departments that direct them. It is this desire for profit that have given us body and soul destroying products like pornography, the opioid crisis, the fossil fuel industries destruction of the atmosphere, and all the rest of it. What church can compete with the internet, with its avalanche of fast paced news stories or fashion stories or action stories or whatever? Who can hold onto a framework of traditional values, when the saturating desire for the new obliterates any reverence for the old? The formula is really fairly simple, capitalism needs consumers who desire new stuff, new ways of seeing stuff, new technologies to make new stuff and lots of people with education and creativity to dream up new stuff, new vacations, new surgically enhanced bodies, new modes of transportation and so on and so on. You don’t have to look so hard to find the agents of change.
I think we actually agree for once Robert! Marketization (capitalism) works hand in hand here with academia to promote this process. No one benefits more than corporations (but universities today are just corporations).
"The engine that creates change at a continually accelerating pace in the modern world is market capitalism...." Yes, exactly. There is a famous passage in the Communist Manifesto -- "All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned...." But I am sure I don't need to quote it. But I don't think the problem is change itself; as noted, people get tired of it and need a rest. The problem is the violence, the fraud, the repression which is now required because the ruling classes are addicted to change and destruction. We have to stop the violence somehow.
So, I take it that the rule of foxes comes at times of material security...where people can split action from consequence, at least for a bit.
I have thought that if you live in the US, the greatest privileged is not your sex or skin color, but your US citizenship, ability to speak English, and the fact that the US dollar is the world's reserve currency....and military might. PMC people are again and again oblivious to that because it's the water they swim, and others, swim in.
He argues, one significant faction of the precariat is essentially composed of educated surplus elites or “elite aspirants.” When the “wealth pump” directs more and more to the uber-rich (and away from everyone else), more and more people want to get in on that action. But there are only so many positions at the top. This is another key feature: elite overproduction.
Extreme competition does not lead to the selection of the best candidates, the candidates most suited for the positions. Rather, it corrodes the rules of the game, the social norms and institutions that govern how society works in a functional way. It destroys cooperation.
Very interesting observation about the mind-over-matter view of postmodernism: it reveals how it's the mirror image of the traditional viewpoint, which is also mind-over-matter, but taken in a diametrically opposite direction.
Yes, all this crap is destined to implode, but still, some useful things have been learned: the traditions were rejected for a reason. A traditional restoration will have to incorporate some of the viewpoint of Progress.
Correct argument Carlos. Yes, much has improved, but I think you’ve got the wrong scale; this is religious belief and likely not amenable to simple course correct. Of course maybe I’m an alarmist. But I think it’s bigger than you suggest.
In the foxes world change is good and necessary. Some change is good, some change is bad. To be published and peer reviewed one must stay close to the current narrative or you are ostracized. Is there a Fox King who determines the direction of change? Or do the change merchants just throw crap on the wall and if something sticks they run with that?
SR Wilson- Your “fox king” question is answered by the inimitable Curtis Yarvin in his “brief explanation of the cathedral”. If you care (big if) it is an essential understanding.
He argues, persuasively, that the selective advantage of dominant ideas and the concomitant inability of recessive ideas to compete is the distorting mechanism of human affairs and inquiry, the intersection of ambition and practical considerations.
Sounds fancy but it is understandable and once you get it, it becomes an invaluable lens of interpretation. It is so omnipresent it should be taught in all school courses (all) as a safety measure, as a way to help surface an inescapable and dangerous human tendency. It’s that fundamental. So your question is a very good one.
"Is there a Fox King who determines the direction of change?" Doesn't have to be. The direction of change is converging the change merchants towards the path that leads to more and faster change: capitalism, bringing down of prior structures and beliefs, modernism, post-modernism, transhumanism, and so on.
Postmodern man hasn’t in any way built his house on a rock. Rocks are hard. We don’t like hard things. Hard truths? We change the truth. Or, as someone said, we exchange the truth for a lie. So we build the house on shifting sand, so fabulously fluid, and when the floodwaters engulf us or a CME happens, we all know the end of the story — great was the fall of that house. Yet we persist and press on.
So "Lion-like men on horseback" will replace the managerial class. But a large proportion of the managerial class, the foxes are women, 70% in HR. I don't know how this effects Machiavelli's or Pareto's analysis. But I'm pretty sure it does.
I have no idea how AI works and how much it can be controlled/manipulated. But since it's certain to replace the change merchants and not the people who actually do things, perhaps it can just squash our predilection to change our labels and pronouns on a weekly basis.
Thanks for another interesting essay! Although it has already been pointed out by Brian Villanueva above, I will chime in with the observation that the fox/lion categories overlap more than a little with Iain McGilchrist’s left/right hemisphere modes of thinking.
In his magnum opus The Matter With Things McGilchrist meticulously argues that the left hemisphere has taken over the modern world in general and the western one in particular.
”Manipulating, categorizing, and interpreting symbolic information and narrative” is precisely the left hemisphere’s domain and while useful - indeed essential - should be subservient to the right hemisphere’s more grounded and holistic take on the universe. The emissary has become the master, in other words, and the terrible consequences are engraved all over our broken world.
Fascinating to consider the appeal of a world in which symbols and their manipulation is the ultimate expression of the Fox’s will to power. I wonder how resentment fits into that scheme. The change drive advertises itself mostly (not exclusively) in positive language: “Look what we can create!” But my intuition tells me this drive has deep roots in the frustration which the Fox feels at the intractable and tragic underlying reality of the material world. I think the change merchants’ success has increased and amplified the sense of resentment modern people feel over so many things.
Great point!
"But my intuition tells me this drive has deep roots in the frustration which the Fox feels at the intractable and tragic underlying reality of the material world."
Resentment at physical reality plays no small part in the Fox's temperament, especially insofar as it intrudes upon social dynamics, which are mediated through language. N.S. mentioned nerds. What defines the nerd besides his dream of becoming a wizard? His resentment at jocks. Indeed, the 'dumb jock' stereotype was invented by resentful nerds; there is no negative correlation between athletic prowess and intelligence. Moreover, social dynamics almost always involve some level of interpersonal conflict. Foxes, when engaged in interpersonal conflict, are likely to avoid open confrontation and opt for more crafty strategems: psychological manipulation, reputation destruction, passive aggressive verbal abuse, etc. Combine this style with the nerd's inferior physical stature, and we have a decent profile of the average Fox. And people like this do exist. Indeed, there are quite a few of them. They're called women.
It is no coincidence that our Fox-ruled fiefdom coincides with the feminist revolution and the concomitant rise of the ladies' economic and cultural power. I won't venture to guess what this ultimately portends for our domestic situation, but in international affairs, our lack of Lions in government has proved disastrous. After a string of successful Fox-style color revolutions in Eastern Europe instigated by people like Hilary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Victoria Nuland, we are now in the Lion's lair, as it were, in Eastern Ukraine. And no one in Washington has any idea what to do, beyond reiterating that Putin is evil over and over, like some incantation that will make him go poof.
We can only hope that what Lions remain in the military retain some sense concerning this conflict. If not... I shudder to imagine.
I was wondering when someone would mention the chaos that ensues when women are put in charge of well…anything. There is a reason the creation story begins with a woman destroying paradise.
Ah, but I am just a right-wing misogynist…you say…I say, Islam (as the most change-proof and conservative of Abrahamic faiths) has it right when it comes to the woman’s place in the world.
Sadly it all boils down to male vs. female, as it does in every aspect of life.
"but I am just a right-wing misogynist..."
Hey, better than being a left-wing misogynist.
As brilliant as Machiavelli and Pareto were, they were men of their times. Neither could have envisioned the Hell of mass democracy combined with the 19th amendment in which we currently live. If we could resurrect them to ask their advice, they would just shout at us in Italian, "You bloody fools, what have you done?!"
Well judged Chris Nathan
I read a lot on human psychology/behavior science and organizational theory. Also read a lot of history written from the perspective of the governing power contrasted with the people governed. My seek is to better understand why people think and behave the way they do, and to resolve related social-political-organizational trends that are fundamentally destructive. One book that was impactful to my thinking was Virginia Postrel’s “The Future and Its Enemies”. This piece from N.S. Lions just blew that away. It is perfectly written. Taking a fascinating new perspective of a current vexing, complex, and primary global phenomenon, a walking us through a well-designed theory of explanation. There is nothing to argue against here. Only gratitude for delivering something important that needs to go viral. Everyone should read this.
Thank you Frank!
You are a gem! You deserve a great big audience.
Our complex, global, economy of scale feeds all the lions, tigers and foxes extremely well. Politics is about this world - the material world; our physical wants, needs and desires. We should be happy, but man is an incorrigibly religious being. Only Truth alone can make man happy.
The great irony of this age is Anthropogenic Global Warming ideology. It's farcically untrue. There is nothing man can do, or not do, to consequentially effect earth's temperatures. But... There is a clear and present danger to the whole modern project. Massive Solar flares, aka, Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) happen with alarming frequency. Every 200 - 500 years trillions and trillions of tons of charged particles (plasma) are belched out of the Sun and head directly for Earth. In pre-modern times, ominous red auroras would appear for days or weeks in the tropics if a CME did a direct hit on Earth. And that was it.
If Earth takes a direct hit now, everything will be as it was before, except... All those trillions of tons of charged particles will be inducted as electric current by Earth’s magnetosphere into anything that conducts electricity.
All the transformers in our global electrical transmission and distribution network will get fried by surging rogue current. Nothing will work. No pumps to move water and fuel. The transformer factories will not be making replacement transformers. Our entire technological / industrial edifice will fall silent.
The 1859 Carrington Solar Flare Event burned down telegraph poles & sheds,. Electrocuted telegraph operators and blew up batteries. The Carrington event energized the conductor lines so the telegraph could operate without batteries. It was a global event.
I won't bore you with details. But just imagine our lives without electricity. Nobody works with their hands anymore. Everybody will after the Big One hits. The foxes will need to find digging sticks, lions too.
Ironically, we could harden the gird to protect grid assests. But nobody is doing that because it would be too expensive - or so we imagine.
So say your prayers and don't love this world too much. The world we know is passing way.
I remember Bret Weinstein writing an interesting speculative piece about this once: https://unherd.com/2021/07/how-the-sun-could-wipe-us-out/
Here's something to think about, Congress has held hearing into the matter: https://www.congress.gov/event/113th-congress/house-event/LC25001/text?s=1&r=389
It's not a secret. You know it could be a lot bigger than even Weinstein imagined. We don't know
Larry Burkett wrote a novel almost thirty years ago called, "Solar Flare.". Same idea
Yep, one little CME is all it would take. Then we'll all be living in the stone age.
It's unlikely we will all make the transition
"The great irony of this age is Anthropogenic Global Warming ideology. It's farcically untrue. There is nothing man can do, or not do, to consequentially effect earth's temperatures. " Is this a fact, or an "isn't it obvious? It is to me!" a priori axiom plus cherry-picking rationalization?
The solar and geothermal (seismic) forcing overwhelm CO2 light scatter.
So it's fact. Whatever facts are.
The GHG climate models have no skill. That's a fact also.
Solar flares are equally factual and without human effect.
Fascinating. Thinking about your virtuals / physicals distinction, I’ve come to believe that a battleground where these two ways of being in the world meet is Change, in the sense of big organisational restructures. Virtual PowerPoint decks and theories of how the world should work vs the actual crooked timber of the real thing, with poor middle managers stuck in between. This article adds another layer, never mind academia, most of business management and consulting is utterly built around change. That’s another front in the virtual vs. physical conflict: the manager or consultant that requires change to justify their position vs the fact that, as Robert Conquest put it, everyone is a conservative about what they know best.
Brilliant piece, thank you.
I would still like my refrigerator to last longer.
Thank you for this, N.S.! Keen insight and details. What if the guiding spirit behind the “Machine / Technium / Virtuals / Change merchants / etc” is a lion using destabilization to introduce a fluidity it can fashion into a solid body — a community — after its own image?
Its image? The new archetypal human unrestrained by any reality other than that of its own making — in this case, such a one as to be worshipped, so great is its vision and power. Of course I am speaking of Antichrist, whose agenda is to have a community allied with it in hatred of that humanity made in the image of the true God, and to destroy it with diabolic force.
Steve R asks Yeats’ question: “And what rough beast, it’s hour come around at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I'm sure you've read (or at least heard about) Iain McGilchrist's, The Matter With Things. He echoes the Lion / Fox problem in the terminology of left and right brained thinking and comes to a similar conclusion: the West has become almost schizophrenically left-brained (Foxey). We simply can no longer attend (his word) to anything that doesn't fit into a rationalist, nominalist box. (Anyone who doesn't know McGilchrist, here's 10 minutes on his earlier book: https://youtu.be/dFs9WO2B8uI )
Joseph Henrich's book, The WEIRDest People in the World, unintentionally backs up McGilchrist, pointing out the many ways that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Individualistic, Rich, Democratic) people think very differently than everyone else. In short we're not normal, either for our own time or for most of human history. That may be a good thing or a bad thing or both, but the reality of it is clear.
As to the question of where our wrong turn began, many people would say the 1960's and postmodernism. However I think it's more accurate to say that's when it became noticeable. Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed) believes the ingredients of our current conflict were baked in at the Enlightenment itself. Enlightenment liberalism desires to liberate people from unchosen constraints, which brings it into conflict with slavery, sex roles, family, church, male, female, human biology, and even reality itself. (Reality is, after all, the ultimate unchosen constraint.)
Brad Gregory wrote a book called The Unintended Reformation which argues that we came off the track at Martin Luther or even earlier at John Scotus and nominalism. I find this less convincing, but the Reformation did lead to the Enlightenment -- a individualist faith begat a individualist politics. It's worth noting that the Orthodox East has not experienced the highly individualist, left-brained thinking of the WEIRDs until very recently.
As a working theory, many centuries ago, a theological change (ala Gregory) brought about a gradual shift toward highly rationalist thinking (ala McGilchrist). That eventually produced a rationalist philosophy and politics in the Enlightenment, which stressed individual rights above the common good. Deneen is right, the seeds were planted in that philosophical change. This was supercharged by J.S. Mill's Harm Principle ("my rights only stop at your nose"), which asserts the supremacy of human desire, what I would call "maximal individual autonomy", over all other constraints. Once you deify human desire as your highest good, you've already dethroned "the common good", and it's only a matter of time before the battering ram of "my right to do what I want" will be used to demolish every institution that might stand in the way of that desire (which is all of them.) Unbeknownst to Locke, Jefferson, et al, the Enlightenment left a gaping philosophical hole left in the middle of Western Civilization. All the postmodernists did was drive a truck bomb into the hole and detonate it. We've been living with the philosophical and political carnage (what Zygmunt Bauman calls "liquid modernity") ever since.
When the deepest thinkers have been positing the same dichotomy for at least 500 years, they might be onto something basic about human nature. (Ignoring the postmodernists, who insist humans are infinitely malleable tabulae rasae and human nature is an illusion.)
Machiavelli certainly doesn't paint a promising picture of what happens next. Fortunately, as Adam Smith said, "there's a lot of ruin in a nation", which means we can likely coast on inertia for a while longer (maybe my kids whole lifetimes, but I doubt it). Eventually, the Foxes will cause a strategic defeat and we'll end up with a new crop of Lions in charge, if we're lucky by election, if we're not, by coup. But that may well be decades away. The Rome = America analogy is overused these days, but even those who use it get it wrong, I think. It's not 475 AD; it's BC 50. What's coming over the hill isn't barbarian hordes; it's Caesar's army. And Rome lasted another 500 years after that event.
I was scrolling through the comments to see if someone had picked up on the McGilchrist thing, and was pleased to see you comment! The congruence is quite apparent!
"Eventually, the Foxes will cause a strategic defeat and we'll end up with a new crop of Lions in charge, if we're lucky by election, if we're not, by coup. But that may well be decades away."
Unless something or someone reins them in, and soon, the neocons ("foxes") who engineered this proxy war with Russia over Ukraine may lead to the strategic defeat of the West.
Short of Armageddon (which is certainly plausible but still unlikely as John M says), the Ukraine / Russia war can not cause a strategic defeat in the West. It could cause a strategic defeat for Russia, which seems to be NATO's goal here.
Now if China were to decide to invade Taiwan right now, that could cause a strategic defeat of America. We have not the navy, the missiles, or the basic ammo to defend Taiwan and Ukraine simultaneously. Were China to do this, they would attempt to rapidly overwhelm the island (uncertain at best) and would likely instruct everyone else to stay away or be fired on. China has long-range anti-ship missiles which could take out an aircraft carrier battle group from a great distance (in theory -- they've never been combat tested against an onboard Patriot missile battery.)
Ukraine is a win-win for NATO: if Ukraine wins, Russia is defeated utterly and Putin probably meets his maker in a coup of some kind; if Russia wins we've bled the Russians for 2-3 years and left them incredibly weakened.
A China invasion of Taiwan would be reversed: if the US defends Taiwan, China could likely inflict serious damage on the US Navy and has the productive capacity and raw materials (via Russia) to outlast us; if the US doesn't defend Taiwan, China has called our bluff as a paper tiger and we're finished as a global empire.
Other strategic defeats would be the market for US T-bills suddenly drying up (like what happened to the BOE under Liz Truss, but writ large). Most likely, we'll just see a continued erosion of our ability to project power and make other people follow our wishes. From The Sun Also Rises:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
“What brought it on?”
“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends. False friends. Then I had creditors, too. Probably had more creditors than anybody in England.”
False friends and lots of creditors. What a great description of modern America.
The first casualty of war is the truth. Tons of propaganda from all sides. My read on Ukraine is the polar opposite of yours, and there is a high likelihood I have fallen for Russian propaganda. There is also a high likelihood that the State Department and their p.r. arm, the U.S. media, are hiding the truth if not outright lying.
Russia has continued to manufacture and stockpile their war materiel, the sanctions against them have failed and boomeranged on the West, and the U.S. cannot match the Russian manufacture of arms because the U.S. is almost completely dependent on China for critical parts and labor. The U.S. is prepared for a high tech war dependent on air supremacy. Russia is not fighting that war, and their cruise missiles have made the U.S. military machine pretty much obsolete.
This is a lose-lose for NATO (the U.S.) as they are losing this war of attrition, and Putin’s terms for a settlement are going to be much harsher than what he and Zelensky agreed to in March of 2022 until the Biden Admin. squashed it. On the other hand, if they take out Putin, the odds of a nuclear war go up dramatically once the hardliners get control.
The forever-war neocons (foxes) have painted the U.S. into a corner, and this may prove to be the biggest geopolitical strategic cluster***k in our history.
I agree with all of that actually. Having read your comments and Rod's linked article from yesterday, I'm a lot less confident in my predictions.
https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/the-darkness-ahead-where-the-ukraine
I just don't think Ukraine losing everything up to the Dnieper River constitutes a strategic defeat to NATO, unless our leaders are stupid enough to allow it to. And of course they're that stupid. They've declared this an existential threat to democracy (which really means liberalism) and gone all-in with a pair of deuces. When you go all in, you make something strategically important whehter it actually is or not. In some sense we've already lost; India and Africa (the two fastest growing population centers in the world) have both refused to play along with us.
Thanks for the Mearshimer link. Just read it. Very balanced and great summary of this disaster of a war. Some major quibbles:
1. He seems oblivious to the fact that it was Obama’s intelligence crew and his female brain trust--Rice, Nuland and Monaco--who launched the 2014 overthrow of the pro-Russian Ukraine government, which unleashed the furies of a thousand years of hatred between Ukraine and Russia.
2. The “frozen conflict” solution is a non-starter for Putin, and is a desperation pipe dream of Nuland/Blinken who stumbled into this lose-lose strategy in 2021/2022.
3. He left out the one politician who had the foresight to avoid poking the Russian bear and was scaling back NATO’s ambitions: Donald J. Trump.
What a mess.
Seems to me there is a great deal of over-thinking here about your imagined change agents, the academics, the media and so on. The engine that creates change at a continually accelerating pace in the modern world is market capitalism. How much impact do academics have in the real world, outside of their committee meetings? Market capitalism continually needs new products, new markets, new technologies, new customers and new narratives that encourage the desire for new products. I worked in the television industry for fifty years, and I am sure you understand the technological changes that happened during that time, change that always came faster with each new innovation in production or distribution.
All of this was driven not by some kind of elite manipulative mind control, or whatever it is you are trying to describe with your animal metaphors, but by the marketing departments of ever larger and conglomerating corporations. Most people in the media are liberals, it is true, but these media worker bees take their orders from the corporations that pay them, and the marketing departments that direct them. It is this desire for profit that have given us body and soul destroying products like pornography, the opioid crisis, the fossil fuel industries destruction of the atmosphere, and all the rest of it. What church can compete with the internet, with its avalanche of fast paced news stories or fashion stories or action stories or whatever? Who can hold onto a framework of traditional values, when the saturating desire for the new obliterates any reverence for the old? The formula is really fairly simple, capitalism needs consumers who desire new stuff, new ways of seeing stuff, new technologies to make new stuff and lots of people with education and creativity to dream up new stuff, new vacations, new surgically enhanced bodies, new modes of transportation and so on and so on. You don’t have to look so hard to find the agents of change.
I think we actually agree for once Robert! Marketization (capitalism) works hand in hand here with academia to promote this process. No one benefits more than corporations (but universities today are just corporations).
Thanks. Great minds think alike...
"The engine that creates change at a continually accelerating pace in the modern world is market capitalism...." Yes, exactly. There is a famous passage in the Communist Manifesto -- "All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned...." But I am sure I don't need to quote it. But I don't think the problem is change itself; as noted, people get tired of it and need a rest. The problem is the violence, the fraud, the repression which is now required because the ruling classes are addicted to change and destruction. We have to stop the violence somehow.
So, I take it that the rule of foxes comes at times of material security...where people can split action from consequence, at least for a bit.
I have thought that if you live in the US, the greatest privileged is not your sex or skin color, but your US citizenship, ability to speak English, and the fact that the US dollar is the world's reserve currency....and military might. PMC people are again and again oblivious to that because it's the water they swim, and others, swim in.
I think this article, https://ponerology.substack.com/p/in-the-margins-the-rise-of-the-precariat ties in very well with what you are writing about here, as we get more and more "virtuals".
He argues, one significant faction of the precariat is essentially composed of educated surplus elites or “elite aspirants.” When the “wealth pump” directs more and more to the uber-rich (and away from everyone else), more and more people want to get in on that action. But there are only so many positions at the top. This is another key feature: elite overproduction.
Extreme competition does not lead to the selection of the best candidates, the candidates most suited for the positions. Rather, it corrodes the rules of the game, the social norms and institutions that govern how society works in a functional way. It destroys cooperation.
Very interesting observation about the mind-over-matter view of postmodernism: it reveals how it's the mirror image of the traditional viewpoint, which is also mind-over-matter, but taken in a diametrically opposite direction.
Yes, all this crap is destined to implode, but still, some useful things have been learned: the traditions were rejected for a reason. A traditional restoration will have to incorporate some of the viewpoint of Progress.
Correct argument Carlos. Yes, much has improved, but I think you’ve got the wrong scale; this is religious belief and likely not amenable to simple course correct. Of course maybe I’m an alarmist. But I think it’s bigger than you suggest.
In the foxes world change is good and necessary. Some change is good, some change is bad. To be published and peer reviewed one must stay close to the current narrative or you are ostracized. Is there a Fox King who determines the direction of change? Or do the change merchants just throw crap on the wall and if something sticks they run with that?
This all makes my head hurt!
SR Wilson- Your “fox king” question is answered by the inimitable Curtis Yarvin in his “brief explanation of the cathedral”. If you care (big if) it is an essential understanding.
He argues, persuasively, that the selective advantage of dominant ideas and the concomitant inability of recessive ideas to compete is the distorting mechanism of human affairs and inquiry, the intersection of ambition and practical considerations.
Sounds fancy but it is understandable and once you get it, it becomes an invaluable lens of interpretation. It is so omnipresent it should be taught in all school courses (all) as a safety measure, as a way to help surface an inescapable and dangerous human tendency. It’s that fundamental. So your question is a very good one.
"Is there a Fox King who determines the direction of change?" Doesn't have to be. The direction of change is converging the change merchants towards the path that leads to more and faster change: capitalism, bringing down of prior structures and beliefs, modernism, post-modernism, transhumanism, and so on.
SR — thank you for that! There is a Fox King, who is a devouring lion.
Postmodern man hasn’t in any way built his house on a rock. Rocks are hard. We don’t like hard things. Hard truths? We change the truth. Or, as someone said, we exchange the truth for a lie. So we build the house on shifting sand, so fabulously fluid, and when the floodwaters engulf us or a CME happens, we all know the end of the story — great was the fall of that house. Yet we persist and press on.
1 Peter 5:8
I see what you did there...
So "Lion-like men on horseback" will replace the managerial class. But a large proportion of the managerial class, the foxes are women, 70% in HR. I don't know how this effects Machiavelli's or Pareto's analysis. But I'm pretty sure it does.
The need for constant change, constant stimulation is the sign of a shallow intellect. Some verities are eternal.
I have no idea how AI works and how much it can be controlled/manipulated. But since it's certain to replace the change merchants and not the people who actually do things, perhaps it can just squash our predilection to change our labels and pronouns on a weekly basis.
Thanks for another interesting essay! Although it has already been pointed out by Brian Villanueva above, I will chime in with the observation that the fox/lion categories overlap more than a little with Iain McGilchrist’s left/right hemisphere modes of thinking.
In his magnum opus The Matter With Things McGilchrist meticulously argues that the left hemisphere has taken over the modern world in general and the western one in particular.
”Manipulating, categorizing, and interpreting symbolic information and narrative” is precisely the left hemisphere’s domain and while useful - indeed essential - should be subservient to the right hemisphere’s more grounded and holistic take on the universe. The emissary has become the master, in other words, and the terrible consequences are engraved all over our broken world.