Togetherness

Twenty years ago, on this day—26 November 2005—I posted the first essay on this blog. Today's post is the 647th essay (and the first one not posted on a Friday). Jayarava's Raves amounts to some millions of words. If you had told me twenty years ago that I would go on to write well over 600 essays, I would not have found that plausible. And yet, here we are.

These essays reflect my self-education not only in Buddhism, but in all the allied disciplines and fields that are required to understand religion, religieux, and religious phenomena, including: history, philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, axiology), general linguistics, socio-linguistics, translation theory, sociology, and social psychology (none of which were included in my formal education). I've also maintained an interest in science and written about that from time to time. I've been trying to make sense of Buddhism in rational terms. 

Perhaps the most profound thought I have come across in the last 20 years is that we are not only social animals, but each individual is also a community of cells. And our surfaces—inside and out—are coated with numerous symbiotic microorganisms that make a significant contribution to processes such as digestion and immunity to pathogens. Moreover, our eukaryote cells are themselves symbiotic communities of what used to be separate organisms.

Whether we know it or not, every one of us is a community of communities. And if we go up the taxonomic hierarchy, we find humans in dependent relationships within ecosystems at every turn. Ultimately, all ecosystems contribute collectively to Gaia, the Earth's biosphere conceived of as a single (if complex) self-organising and self-regulating system.

Everywhere we look in nature, at whatever scale we choose, we see communities, cooperation, symbiosis, interdependence, and co-evolution. I find this thought both profound and beautiful. Yes, there is some conflict and competition, but Darwinian approaches to evolution massively over-emphasise conflict and almost completely ignore cooperation.

In this essay, I want to dwell on togetherness. It is, ironically, something I have seldom experienced for myself, and less and less as years go by. Nonetheless, I recognise it as the acme of human existence.

Social Animals are Moral Animals

What do you think of this slogan? Does this sound evil to you? Is this a recipe for tyranny?

All for one, and one for all;
United we stand, divided we fall.

What about these?

• There's no 'I' in team.
• A problem shared is a problem halved.
• It takes a village to raise a child.
• No one gets left behind.—US Military
• Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.—Helen Keller
• Even the weak become strong when they are united.—Friedrich von Schiller
• We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.—Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.—Henry Ford
• "Monks," said the Bhagavan, "you have no mother and no father to care for you. If you don't care for each other, then who will care for you? If you would care for me, then tend to the sick."—Vin I 301

In The Road to Serfdom (1944), Friedrich Hayek argued that all forms of collectivism inevitably lead to tyranny. Only robust individualism, especially in commerce, can save us from tyranny and deliver us to an individualist liberal utopia. If Hayek was right, then these collectivist slogans that emphasise cooperation, community, and togetherness ought to be seen as a threat.

To me, this attitude is almost incomprehensible, but Hayek is probably the most influential intellectual of the last century. Along with other prominent neoliberals—like Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman—Hayek's views have shaped every capitalist society on the planet. Virtually all modern politicians and businessmen are neoliberals. Revolutions around the world in the late 1970s and early 1980s aimed to implement Hayek's utopian (neo)liberal view of a society of self-sufficient individuals engaged in commerce. While these men were promoting self-interest to intellectuals and economists, mad old Ayn Rand became the patron saint of self-interest amongst technologists (thus validating the neurodivergence that made them somewhat alienated from society). Alan Greenspan, who was a central figure in US monetary policy ca. 1974 to 2006, was a personal disciple of Rand. Making Rand one of the most influential intellectuals of all time.

Of course, the anti-collectivists were helped by the horrific excesses carried out in the name of Karl Marx in the USSR and China. Stalin and Mao were undoubtedly brutal tyrants. But in terms of socialism, Hayek and company seem to ignore all of the democratic socialist nations and the very high standard of living and freedom they attained. Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, and even post-War Britain all had democratic socialist governments and free people.

The fact is that humans are social; we live in societies. Our sociology determines our psychology, not the other way around (sociology is more fundamental than psychology). And ideological individualism is a pathology for a social animal.

Some birds and most mammals have adopted a social lifestyle. I won't comment here on social insects since they work on different principles. The social lifestyle is one of the most successful evolutionary strategies in the 3.5 billion-year history of life on Earth. Certainly, the success of humans as a species is directly related to our ability to work together in large numbers for a common cause. We actually enjoy working together.

Amish men raising a barn together.

By the way, I don't cite animal examples to drag us down: "we're no better than animals". I cite animal examples to emphasise the universality of these observations about morality and togetherness. I also want to emphasise that no supernatural explanation of morality is needed. 

As the late, great, Frans de Waal pointed out, a social lifestyle minimally requires two capacities: empathy and reciprocity.

Empathy is the capacity to use physical cues to internally model how other people are feeling. Which means we don't just know what others feel, we also feel it in our own bodies. This is why emotions are contagious. As social animals, we monitor how the group is disposed, i.e. who is feeling what towards whom. This allows us to accurately judge the potential and actual impacts of our actions on others, and to moderate our behaviour accordingly. This is morality in a nutshell. But we don't just respond in the moment. We also keep track of and respond to how people have acted towards us, which requires the capacity for reciprocity.

Reciprocity is the capacity to form relationships of mutual obligation. It is keeping track of these obligations that creates a limit on the size of groups. The famous "Dunbar Number"—150—was derived by comparing primate group sizes with the volume of their neocortex. Robin Dunbar showed there is a strong correlation between these. Humans can keep track of the history of how members of the group interact in groups up to around 150, though there is considerable individual variation. Beyond 150, we can still form groups, but the sense of mutual obligation is more tenuous as the group size increases. With strangers, we typically do not feel a sense of obligation, except where it is imposed on us by nature: for example, the culture of hospitality common to many desert-dwelling societies.

However, reciprocity only holds a group together if there is some tendency for generosity. Someone has to start sharing, or no one would share. Social animals have to be prosocial, or sociality per se doesn't work. At the very least, mammalian mothers have to be willing to care for newborn infants, or they don't survive.

Anyone who reneges on the obligations of reciprocity has created an unfair situation. De Waal and other animal ethologists showed that social mammals are keenly aware of fairness (see especially his TED Talk). We intuitively understand that unequal rewards are unfair. We know it, and we also feel it deeply. Since the survival of the group relies on maintaining the integrity of the network of mutual obligations, we are highly motivated to be fair and to re-establish fairness when it breaks down. We call the latter "justice".

So our concepts of morality, fairness, and justice all emerge naturally from our having evolved social lifestyles and large brains. The rudiments are all visible, at least to some extent, in all social animals, suggesting universality. What may be unusual in humans is ethics, understood as abstract principles on which more concrete moral rules can be based. It is abstract ethics that allows us to adapt moral rules to new situations, for example (note that Buddhism lacks any ethical discourse, so Buddhists generally take a conservative view—no new rules—or they draw on the ethics of the surrounding culture for making ad hoc rules).

Being a member of a social species is not the only form of biological interconnection that we participate in. Let's now look at some others. 

Evolution and Exosymbiosis

I have long been a fan of Lynn Margulis (1938 – 2011). Margulis got a few things spectacularly wrong, especially later in life (notably her views on HIV were badly wrong). But her overall contribution to biology was pivotal for modern science and for my own views.

Notably, Margulis discovered endosymbiosis in 1966, which I will deal with in the next section. Margulis also advocated, in scientific and popular publications, for much greater awareness of the role of symbiosis in biology and evolution.

Margulis, Lynn. (1998). The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Basic Books.

When I first studied biology, over 40 years ago, symbiosis was presented as something rather rare and unusual. Some organisms, such as lichens, enter into very close relationships in which two or more species rely on each other to survive. Lichens are the classic example. Lichens are a distinctive form of organism, but they are actually made of at least one fungus and one bacterium. Some species of lichens include both a filamentous (or hyphae-forming) fungus and a single-celled fungus (or yeast).

From quite early on, Margulis argued that symbiosis was much more common than allowed by traditional biology. Indeed, Margulis was critical of Darwin's (and the Darwinian) focus on competition and violence amongst animals (a view that Frans de Waal also rebelled against early in his academic career). 

According to Margulis, this jaundiced view was heavily influenced by the preoccupations of Victorian ruling-class men, i.e. patriarchy and imperialism. That is to say, representing nature as "red in tooth and claw" suited the ruling class men of Europe—of which Darwin was a member—because they were busy trying to conquer, appropriate, and exploit the entire world. Darwin was able to spend 20 years developing his ideas on natural selection because he was never burdened by having to work for a living. Nor did he have to accept patronage. Having inherited enough wealth to live on, he could simply focus on his gentlemanly pursuit of science and volunteer work for learned societies. And this was the norm at the time. There were no working-class scientists.

Nor was this the end of the trend. Richard Dawkins, arguably the most prominent biologist of the twentieth century, applied Hayek's neoliberal worldview to biology to come up with the "selfish gene". Cooperation, communities, symbiosis and all that were simply explained away as being "motivated by self-interest". The conclusion is too obviously ideological rather than objective. Later in life, Dawkins is famous for two things: (1) apologetics for his own unreasonable views and (2) unreasonably picking fights with religious people using arguments that are guaranteed not to change anyone's mind. Dawkins, the biologist, never even tried to understand the phenomenon of "belief".

From the time of Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679), liberals have seen humans not as prosocial, empathetic, and reciprocating but as vicious loners, forced by circumstances to live together, creating endless conflict and violence. Note that Hayek is clearly Hobbesian in outlook, and it is no coincidence that both of these ruling-class men lived through periods of all-out war and political chaos in Europe. They both attributed the violence of their own class and gender to the common people and argued that their own class provided stability. In psychological projection, a person projects alienated aspects of their own personality out into the world, in order to try to come into relationship with themselves. 

Liberals see competition as the great winnower of species and individuals (social Darwinism has always been part of the liberal schtick). Competition takes on a moral character in which succeeding in competition equates to moral goodness. Hence, liberals expect "winners" in any competition to be moral role models. 

According to liberalism, the apotheosis of competition means that we naturally adopt a kill-or-be-killed attitude. However, liberals also believe in Hobbes' Leviathan. This is linked to the Christian idea that God placed the ruling class in a superior position to other people, i.e. that of gamekeeper or farmer. The ruling class are the only ones who can impose order on the common people, who are otherwise nasty, brutish, and violent, but also lazy.

These views are all too obviously ideas that the ruling class of imperial Britain used to justify imperialist brutality towards societies, including their own. When a society routinely commits genocide in order to steal resources, it has to have some discourse that legitimises this. And liberalism was one of these. 

In fact, symbiosis turns out to be ubiquitous in nature, with humans themselves providing one of the most striking examples.

The "human gut microbiome" is now a household concept. We all know that many beneficial bacteria, fungi, and protists live in our gut. They very obviously contribute to digestion, for example, by breaking down cellulose, which we cannot do without them.

We now know, for example, that when a baby mammal suckles milk from its mother, it is also swallowing bacteria that will become its gut microflora. And that this is vital for the normal development of the gut and the immune system.

I suspect that part of the reason that so many modern people have "allergies" and "sensitivities" is the trend since the 1960s to bottle-feed newborns. Of course, sometimes there is no choice, so demonising bottle-feeding is counterproductive. But there must be a way to introduce bottle-fed newborns to "good bacteria", some other way, rather than leaving it to chance. I suspect that the massive rise in morbid obesity may be related to aberrant gut microflora as well, although eating to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system (and thus reduce physiological arousal) is a huge factor. That is to say, we eat to calm down because we are hyperstimulated most of the time and have not learned any better ways. 

So beneficial are our gut symbionts that one can now receive a "faecal transplant" in which faecal matter from a healthy person—said to contain "good bacteria"—is introduced to the bowel of an unhealthy person, with a view to restoring their health. Apparently, this can work. Various foods with "good bacteria" are also popular, though whether these survive passing through the stomach is moot. Stomach acids kill the vast majority of microorganisms. 

Another very striking example of ubiquitous symbiosis is the mycorrhizal fungi that grow in and around tree roots. The fungal filaments (hyphae) live partly in the tree roots and partly in the soil. They break down the soil and transport nutrients into the roots, thus nourishing the tree. 

There is some suggestion that mycorrhizal fungi form underground networks in forests that link trees together and allow them to share resources. From what I've read, the full-on clickbait version of this story is to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, we can say that symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi are very important to the thriving of many plants.

All animals have extensive symbiotic relations with gut bacteria. But our outer surfaces are also an ecosystem. Not only are we constantly covered in microorganisms, but we also play host to organisms such as eyebrow mites that live in hair follicles. We are an ecosystem for such critters. 

Margulis also notes that bacteria evolve rapidly. They have generations of about 20 minutes. Every bacterial cell can, at least in principle, share genetic material with any other bacteria, regardless of species. Indeed, Margulis sometimes argued that one can take this to mean that bacteria are all one species. In any case, bacteria are highly promiscuous and routinely swap genes. This is how a trait like antibiotic resistance can spread rapidly in a population of bacteria.

Another feature of evolution that the Darwinists downplay is hybridisation. Again, when I was studying biology, hybridisation was presented as an exception. Fast forward 50 years, and it turns out that all humans are the result of the hybridisation of more than one human species. Most Homo sapiens carry some genes from one or more of Homo neanderthalensis, Homo naledi, Homo longi (aka Denisovans), and/or Homo floresiensis. Possibly others as well.

Margulis pointed out that where organisms fertilise eggs externally, hybridisation is very common. Some 20% of plants and 10% of fish routinely hybridise.

Finally, we can point to many examples of coevolution in which two species evolve a dependence on each other. The most obvious examples are plants and their pollinators. Some of these relationships are so specific that only one species of insect is capable of fertilising a particular flower. The plant puts considerable resources into attracting appropriate pollinators, and pollinators expend considerable resources collecting and distributing pollen. Each benefits more or less equally from the relationship, and they come to rely on each other to survive. This is surely the very opposite of competition. If the dynamic here were competitive, one of the partners would lose out. It would become a form of commensalism or parasitism.

Even parasitism is considerably more complex than it seems. For example, there is a widespread belief, backed up by robust evidence, that eradicating common human parasites in the modern world has led to the immune system being poorly calibrated, which contributes to the rise in autoimmune diseases and "allergies" in modern times. This is sometimes called the "hygiene hypothesis". We evolved to deal with common parasites and, ironically, not having them, which would intuitively be seen as wholly good, is actually a disruption of the normal order of things and leaves us maladapted. Just as faecal transplants are a thing, some doctors have tried infecting patients with relatively harmless roundworm parasites as a way of correcting an immune system imbalance. The jury is still out, but the idea is not completely mad.

While competition is certainly a factor in evolution, it is far from being the only one. Lynn Margulis convinced me that cooperation, communities, symbiosis, hybridisation, and co-evolutionary dependencies are every bit as important to evolution. Species not only diverge, but they also converge, creating evolutionary leaps. Margulis also alerted me to the ideological nature of some scientific conclusions regarding nature and evolution, especially the influence of patriarchy and neoliberalism. The story of how important symbiosis is to evolution is brought into focus by Margulis's 1967 breakthrough article.

Endosymbiosis

In the mid-1960s (around the time I was born), an early career scientist, then known as Lynn Sagan (married to celebrity scientist Carl Sagan), sent a novel paper to a series of science journals. After many rejections, the paper was eventually published as

Sagan. L. (1967). "On the origin of mitosing cells." Journal of Theoretical Biology. 14(3):255-74. Available online in numerous places.

Part of the abstract reads:

By hypothesis, three fundamental organelles: the mitochondria, the photosynthetic plastids and the (9+2) basal bodies of flagella were themselves once free-living (prokaryotic) cells. The evolution of photosynthesis under the anaerobic conditions of the early atmosphere to form anaerobic bacteria, photosynthetic bacteria and eventually blue-green algae (and protoplastids) is described. The subsequent evolution of aerobic metabolism in prokaryotes to form aerobic bacteria (protoflagella and protomitochondria) presumably occurred during the transition to the oxidizing atmosphere.

This hypothesis was subsequently tested and found to be accurate. This process, in which one single-celled organism ends up permanently and dependently living inside another, is now called endosymbiosis. In the meantime, Sagan remarried and changed her name again to Lynn Margulis, which is how I refer to her throughout.

In 1967, endosymbiosis was a radical theory, though some precedents in Russian microbiology were largely ignored in greater Europe because it was the height of the Cold War. Sixty years later, and this idea that organelles within eukaryote cells were once "free-living" is normative. This radical discovery is now such a commonplace that many modern discussions of endosymbiosis do not even mention Margulis or her role in it. Nick Lane, for example, who is at the forefront of abiogenesis research, has repeatedly downplayed the contributions of Margulis. 

It's fair to say that Margulis thought radically differently from most other people and that she was outspoken about her views. For a woman in the 1960s and 1970s, being outspoken (especially towards men) was seen as a serious character flaw. Many men were (and are) intimidated by a strong, intelligent woman. And, unfortunately, Margulis wasn't always right. However, she was right about endosymbiosis, and this is one of the most profound discoveries in the history of science. It is every bit as important as discovering DNA in terms of understanding how life and evolution work.

The prokaryotes are largely represented by bacteria and archaea (previously known as "extremophile bacteria"). Prokaryote cells have no nucleus and little internal structure. Their nuclear material is in a loop rather than a linear chromosome. 

The eukaryotes are fungi, plants, and animals. Eukaryote cells have a nucleus, with chromosomes, and many other internal structures, such as mitochondria.

Prokaryote organisms are far more numerous in biomass and variety. Animals are relatively unimportant to life on Earth; if we all disappeared, the prokaryotes would hardly notice, except those that specialise in living in/on us. Some plants rely on animals for reproduction. But not all, by any means. 

We can diagram the process by which combinations of prokaryotes led to the various eukaryote "kingdoms".

In the standard, neoDarwinian account of evolution, separated populations of a species subjected to differing environmental pressures will slowly diverge over time and become two distinct species. This has now been observed both in the lab and in nature. Evolution, per se, is a fact. Evolutionary theory is our explanation of this fact. Evolutionary theory is taught as a monoculture, at least up to undergraduate level. 

Darwin himself diagrammed the process of evolution as a branching tree, i.e. as a series of splits. This is still by far the most common way of representing evolution. I wrote a critique of this view in an essay titled: Evolution: Trees and Braids (27 December 2013). My suggestion that that we needed to represent evolution as a braided stream, since this allows for convergence and recombination.

I've already commented above on the ubiquity of exosymbiosis and hybridisation in nature. What I want to emphasise here is that endosymbiosis doesn't fit the neoDarwinian view of evolution at all because it is evolution by addition and recombination, rather than an accumulation of mutations. This alone tells us that the Darwinian view is incomplete.

In terms of my view of the world, the fact that our very cells began as small communities of cells within cells is a profound confirmation of the importance of communities and cooperation in nature at every level.

Similarly, our genome can be seen as a community of cooperating genes. The idea of individual genes, let alone "selfish" individual genes, makes little sense. Genes are always part of a genome. Even when bacteria swap genes, they incorporate new genes into their genome. We can talk theoretically and abstractly about individual genes, and we methodologically identify the corresponding function of the gene. But this is an abstract concept. In reality, genes only occur in genomes. A gene simply cannot function outside of a genome and the associated infrastructure.

The concept of the "selfish gene" is nonsensical, even as a metaphor.

So far, I've been delving down the taxonomic hierarchy into the microscopic. This is all too familiar in a reductionist environment and might have passed without comment. However, I am very critical of ideological reductionism. I believe that structure is also real and that structure anti-reductionism is a necessary counterpart to substance reductionism.

In the last section of this essay, therefore, I want to look up.

Gaia

I've already noted that social animals almost invariably live in family-oriented communities (with occasional solitary outliers). But we can also observe that each extended family exists in a network of inter-familial relations, often linked by intermarriage. 

Every human community is part of a network of communities embedded in an environment. We are also part of the local ecosystem. And the local ecosystem is part of the global ecosystem, also called the biosphere or more poetically, Gaia.

The Gaia hypothesis was first proposed by chemist James Lovelock (1919 – 2022) in 1975, with help from none other than Lynn Margulis. The classic statement of the idea appeared in book form in 1979.

Lovelock J (1979). Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press.

The Gaia hypothesis says that the biosphere as a whole is a complex feedback mechanism that "works" to keep the surface of the earth suitable for life, i.e. at maintaining homeostasis. Lovelock introduced the idea of "daisy world" as a simple cybernetic model of how life might achieve homeostasis on a planetary scale.

Interestingly, the Gaia hypothesis emerged after Lovelock was commissioned by NASA to help them figure out how to detect extraterrestrial life. Gaia maintains surface conditions that definitely could not occur in the absence of life. For example, high levels of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere require constant replenishment by living things. So any planet with high oxygen is a candidate for harbouring life.  

Life causes our planet to exist in a state that is very far from the (chemical) equilibrium that we see on planets with no life, like Mars or Venus.

In order to understand life, we have to take a holistic view. Rather than reducing everything to its base substance and calling that "reality", we have to see that reality includes structure. Everything we can see with human eyes is a complex object with numerous layers of structure, lending it many structural properties (sometimes vaguely referred to as "emergent properties"). To say that complex objects are "not real" or "just illusions" is not helpful (or true).

When it comes to life, every structure is embedded in larger structures, up to Gaia, which is the ultimate living structure for life on Earth. Reality is substantial, but it's also structural and systematic.

From the lowest level of description to the highest, life is structures made of structures and systems within systems. Nothing living ever exists as a standalone or independent entity. Everything is dependent on everything else. The Hobbesian, lone-wolf version of humanity really only applies to sociopaths and psychopaths (who seem to be over-represented in the ruling/commercial class). 

Biologists are generally in a better position to see this than physicists. A biologist may well dissect (or even vivisect) an organism to see what it's made of. They may well quantify what elements are found in an organism. We're mainly carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen. But clearly, elements like iron and magnesium play essential roles in our metabolism, as well as being potential toxins. I grew up in a region that was low in cobalt, and this meant that farmed animals would not thrive on our pastures without cobalt supplements. 

However, if a biologist wants to really understand some organism, they have to observe how it interacts with its physical and social environment. That is to say, how an organism reacts to physical stimulus, how it relates to others of its own species, and how it interacts with other species. And since the local environment is a product of the bulk environment, in the long run, we have to see all life on Earth in terms of its contribution to Gaia.

A common misconception about life is that it breaks the second law of thermodynamics. This law states that in a closed system, physical entropy always increases. The misconception stems from ignoring the words "closed system". A cell is not a closed system, since molecules are constantly entering and leaving. An organism is not a closed system. Gaia is not a closed system.

However, even if we stipulate that the second law might apply, the overall effect of Earth having a biosphere is a local increase in entropy. Visible and UV photons from the sun impact the Earth, where they are absorbed by rocks, water, and living things. Eventually, the incoming energy is radiated back out into space as infrared photons. And for every visible-UV photon arriving on Earth, twenty infrared photons are radiated back into space, with a net increase in entropy for Earth and its environment. So, if the second law applies (doubtful), then it is not broken by life. 

However, simple cybernetic feedback does not give us a complete explanation of life. For this, we have to change up a gear.

The Free Energy Principle

It's apparent, for example, that if the brain operated purely on homeostatic feedback, it would not be able to respond at the speed that it does. For this, we need to introduce the idea of allostasis. And allostasis leads us into the final big idea that is essential for understanding life: the Free Energy Principle. 

The idea of allostasis is that the brain constantly predicts what will happen next based on the present inputs and past experience. And if the expected input does not match the actual input, then the brain has two options: (1) change the prediction, i.e. update the expectation based on the new input; or (2) change the input, i.e. make some change in the world. And this enables a faster, more adaptable response.

Anyone familiar with the concept of Bayesian statistics should already recognise this paradigm. Bayesian statistics is a mathematical formalism that allows a statistician to quantify how their expectations change as new information comes in, as part of an iterative process. And this, in turn, has strong connections to information theory.

Enter Karl Friston, who primarily works on making information gleaned from medical scans into meaningful images. This involves expertise in statistical analysis and information theory.

Making these connections led Friston to propose the free energy principle. There is, as yet, no popular account of the free energy principle and the explanations that are available all rely on background knowledge of statistics and information theory that I don't have. 

See, for example:

Friston, K., et al. (2023) "The free energy principle made simpler but not too simple." Physics Reports 1024: Pages 1-29.

It is not "simple" at all unless you have the appropriate background knowledge.

This is something I'm still trying to understand, and I'm hoping to write an essay on it in the near future. But my intuition tells me that this idea is hugely important. Listening to Friston talk about it, I feel that I glimpse something significant. It's important enough to try to offer some impressionistic notes and encourage readers to follow up.

The free energy principle says that any self-organising system—living or non-living—that has a permeable boundary separating it from the general environment and that persists over time, will appear to take actions that can be mathematically described in terms of Bayesian statistics or in terms of "free energy" (a concept from information theory). Friston has shown these to be mathematically equivalent.

Where a prediction fails to match an input, Friston calls this "surprise". This is mathematically related to the informational property "free energy". Hence, "the free energy principle". It turns out that minimising surprise with respect to predictions is mathematically equivalent to minimising free energy (I suppose we might also relate this to the idea of the "path of least action" from classical physics, but I need to look into this). 

Rather than describing life as simply reacting to the environment, we can now describe all living things as iteratively predicting the future and testing predictions and optimising their responses to minimise surprise, resulting in changing predictions or changing inputs (external actions). Living systems involve both homeostasis and allostasis. 

In a sense, all the brain does is receive millions of input signals, process them in ways that are not fully understood, and generate millions of output signals, most of which are internal and only affect expectations. In her book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman-Barrett notes that 90% of the incoming connections to the visual cortex are from other parts of the brain, rather than from the eyes. 

This principle turns out to be an incredibly useful way of modelling and thus understanding living systems. It can be used to explain how even simple bacterial cells are apparently able to act intelligently (i.e. move towards food, move away from waste, or join up to form a colony). Whether there is some abstract "intelligence" behind this intelligent action is moot, but it's not an obvious conclusion, and it's not required by the free energy principle. 

I have never been a fan of panpsychism, which says that all matter is "conscious" (by degrees). It's such obvious nonsense that I find it hard to imagine why anyone takes it seriously. The free energy principle makes some broad claims, but it doesn't commit to metaphysical nonsense. The fact is that all living organisms do have a range of behaviours that they employ intelligently, without any evidence of being "conscious" or "intelligent". Intelligent behaviour is universal in living things. Being conscious of the world or self (or both) is rare. And, prior to the advent of the free energy principle, we were at a loss to explain this. This left huge gaps for "gods-of-the-gaps" style arguments for the supernatural. The free energy principle appears to plug those holes. 

I believe that, in the long run, the free energy principle will stand alongside the concepts of natural selection, symbiosis, and Gaia in terms of the history of understanding life. It offers a powerful, but also deflationary, account of the mechanisms that underpin life and mind.

Conclusion

The idea that "there is no society, there are only individuals and families" is arse-about-face. Rather, there are no individuals; there are only societies (and a family is a microcosm of a society). The individual is a mythological figure. We can talk about them in theory, but we rarely meet them in person. As Oscar Wilde said,

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Me too, for the most part, but I do at least try to give credit where it is due. 

We are social animals. We evolved to live in social groups. Which means we evolved the capacity for empathy and the capacity for reciprocity. We evolved to be prosocial and moral. We evolved a sense of fairness and justice. Assuming we have not completely suppressed these capacities, we don't need anyone to tell us how to be moral. 

Competition is certainly a feature of life, but we have massively over-emphasised it for ideological reasons (patriarchy and imperialism). Consider the case of collectively making music. Music-making is not a competition, and turning it into one does not enhance it in any way. Making music actually requires selfless cooperation and is at its best when the egos of the players are not evident at all. And playing music, in an appropriate non-competitive context, brings out the best in people. It is no surprise, then, that in capitalist societies, the collective elements of music get reduced to passive consumption. And competition is enforced on musicians in ways that only detract from the music. 

Sociology is more fundamental than psychology, in the sense that we may be born with an individual temperament and/or personality that is relatively unchanging, but we develop in response to the environment we find ourselves in. We learn to be a member of the local social group in more or less the same way that we learn the language of the group we find ourselves in. 

Looking down the taxonomic hierarchy, our cells—our very genomes—are tiny, symbiotic, cooperative communities in which every component member prospers together. Looking up, we always live in families embedded within communities, embedded in societies, embedded in ecosystems, embedded in the biosphere as a whole, or Gaia.

At every level, living things are generally collectivist. And, left to their own devices, humans are naturally collectivist. Nothing could be more normal than socialism. Every group of friends I've ever been part of was leaderless. We just organised ourselves without much effort. 

I do not deny that individuals and species compete with each other, sometimes violently. However, I emphatically believe that the incidence and importance of competition has been grossly overstated by scientists with ideological—reductive, patriarchal, and imperialist—views.

We might even say the togetherness is what gives human lives meaning and purpose. The many modern people who say that they lack meaning and purpose are inevitably disconnected or alienated from society. What we all need (except for psychopaths) is a sense of connection. And it is precisely this connectedness that modern political discourse—neoliberalism and capitalism—seeks to replace with the ideas of ownership, control, and competition. This is aberrant and abhorrent in a social species. 

We are social.
We are social.
We are social.

~~Φ~~

Mars Hype

For a change of pace, I want to address another common misperception on Quora. These days there's a lot of hype about "going to Mars". A large fortune is being spent on this project. A certain prominent technologist-plutocrat is committing a good deal of his extraordinary hoard of wealth to "making humanity multiplanetary". Many people seem to imagine that colonizing Mars will be relatively easy.

We need to be clear that Mars is an extremely hostile environment; far less hospitable to life than Antarctica in winter. I think it's likely that a human will walk on mars in the medium term (say ~25 years), though I'm no longer sure I'll live to see this. It's very unlikely that humans will successfully colonise Mars and I'm sure no human will ever be born on Mars. 

There are three questions to consider when thinking about the project to "colonise Mars":

1. Was there ever life on Mars?
2. Is there life on Mars now?
3. Is there any prospect of Mars sustaining life in the future?

The answers (with come caveats) are probably no, no, and no. Let's look at why.

Past Life.

Mars’ geological (Areological?) history is divided into three main periods:

• Noachian (~4.1–3.7 billion years ago): Heavy bombardment, abundant surface water, widespread clay-rich sediments.
• Hesperian (~3.7–3.0 billion years ago): Declining water activity, formation of extensive volcanic plains, some outflow channels.
• Amazonian (~3.0 billion years ago–present): Cold, dry, low erosion rates, mostly wind-driven surface processes.

While we don't know exactly how life began on Earth, the highest likelihood is Michael Russell's theory that it got started around warm alkaline hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor (see The Rocky Origins of Life 15 April 2016). This process relies on plate tectonics and oceans.

Mars has no plate tectonics and probably never had any. The crust is not made up of mobile plates that converge and diverge creating volcanic and earthquake zones. The crust of Mars is all one big slab of rock although it still has some local deformations and fractures. 

Furthermore, Mars hasn't had liquid surface water for at least 3 billion years. So the processes that most likely drove the emergence of life on Earth are absent from Mars. While we cannot definitively rule out past life on Mars, we can confidently say that it is extremely unlikely. 

This also means that fossils on the surface will be extremely rare. Fossils are formed in layers of sediment. Mars is known to have some very old sedimentary rocks, generally older than 3 billion years (while Mars had water). For reference, the chalk bedrock under Cambridge (where I live) is only around 100 million years old. On earth, evidence for life in 3 billion year old rocks is rare and often ambiguous, partly because at that time life was bacterial and left few physical traces.

There is some limited geological activity on Mars that creates some localised faulting. Craters and erosion can expose lower layers of rock. The Curiosity rover, for example, has been exploring Hesperian-era sedimentary rocks in the Gale Crater (~3.8 to 3.0 billion years old).

However, once exposed, fossils on Mars would be subject to a variety of powerful degrading processes: including solar and cosmic radiation, chemical oxidation, temperature extremes, and erosion (by dust storms). Microbial fossils are extremely delicate. A fossil on the surface might survive for millions of years, but not billions.

The surface of Mars has been dry, frozen, irradiated, and dusty since the end of the Hesperian, around 3 billion years ago. If life ever existed on Mars, it must have died out at that time. And it will have left few if any traces on the surface.

Present Life

The prospects for present life are considerably less optimistic. Life, as least as we know it, requires favourable conditions. And conditions on Mars have been decidedly unfavourable for at least 3 billion years.

The state of the mantle and core mean that Mars lost its magnetic field about 4 billion years ago (ya). This means that the surface of Mars has been subject to unfiltered cosmic and solar radiation for 4 billion years. Radiation levels on Mars today are ~200 times greater than those on Earth. 

This might not be immediately fatal to life, but for Earth-based living things it would cause very high levels of mutations, most of which would be deleterious.

Mars has almost no atmosphere and, thus, no greenhouse effect to speak of. The average surface pressure is 0.006 atmospheres (i.e. 0.6% of Earth standard). Mars' atmosphere is composed of 95% CO₂ and contains less than 1% oxygen, and less than 0.1% water vapour. All life that we know of requires liquid water to survive. While it is true that some tardigrades have survived brief exposure to vacuum, they cannot remain active in those circumstances, they cannot move around, feed, or reproduce in space or on Mars. Surviving is not thriving. 

The absence of greenhouse effect and distance from Sol means the average surface temp of Mars is around -65 °C, compared to the Earth average of +15 °C. The average temperature in the interior of Antarctica is -43.5 °C. While some lichens survive in coastal regions of Antarctica, nothing grows in the interior. No life as we know it can survive at -65 °C or below. 

There is no liquid water anywhere on Mars and has not been for billions of years. The minimal amounts of water that exist at the Martian poles are solid and have been for billions of years.

What kind of life can survive 3 billion years of extreme radiation and extreme cold, without air or water, and under harsh chemical conditions? None that we know of. None that I can conceive of. And even NASA do not expect to find life anymore. They are looking for fossils. 

These are non-trivial barriers to the existence of life on Mars in the present. No one should expect to find life—or fossils of past life—on Mars. Not after 3 billion years of the present conditions. The fact is that the surface of Mars is inimical to life. Which already raises doubts about trying to live on Mars. 

Future Life

Despite the very dim prospects of finding life or even signs of past life, plutocrats and their technologist lackeys seem enamoured of the idea that humans can "colonise" Mars or even can "terraform" it. Indeed, this is presented as an imperative (since capitalists are apparently not planning to stop destroying the Earth's biosphere before it ceases to be able to sustain human life).

The European practice of colonising, privatising, and exploiting resources has given rise to a history of brutality and extreme avarice. I grew up in a British colony and my strongest association with "colonisation" is violence. Invoking the trope of colonisation ought to ring alarm bells. No good ever came from the urge to colonise. 

The problem for human colonisation of Mars ought to be obvious by now: the surface of Mars is totally inimical to life as we know it. A human exposed to the surface conditions on Mars would die more or less instantly. So the main task on Mars would be to prevent any such exposure. This would mean permanently living inside, probably underground. 

Being exposed to the high levels of ionising radiation on Mars would cause very high rates of DNA damage, leading to many deleterious mutations. As much as anything it is radiation that would force humans underground on Mars. 

The low gravity would prevent normal development of fetuses and infants. Problems like muscle atrophy, bone demineralisation, reduced blood volume, and impaired balance (low g syndrome) would affect everyone. And if your bones never mineralise properly they cannot support your mass. This raises another problem.

A trip to Mars is going to take 6-9 months and 99.9% of that time will be spent in free-fall (microgravity). Which means astronauts travelling to Mars will suffer moderate-to-severe low g syndrome. By the time they get to Mars and 0.38 g, they’ll be seriously ill. Even with an ISS-style exercise regime (+2 hours of exercise daily) they will be severely impaired and liable to broken bones and other health problems. What's more it is not clear that 0.38 g would enough to halt this problem, let alone reverse it. We have zero data on humans living in 0.38 g. And at present, we have no way to get any data short of actually going to Mars. 

Nothing we can actually do by way of "terraforming" will address any of these problems.

Terraforming is a science-fiction idea. For example, we see colonisation enthusiasts saying that all we need to do is "drop some comets on Mars" to replace the air and water lost billions of years ago. The obvious problem with this is that the impact of comet-sized objects would throw vast amounts of Martian dust into the thin atmosphere and the low gravity would mean that it took a long time to settle. We have no idea what it would do the Martian crust. 

It's all very well casually talking about "dropping comets" but it's another thing being able to accelerate trillions of kgs of ice so that it impacts on Mars. We can just about lob 100,000 kgs into orbit. How are we going to handle a load that's at least a billion times more massive?

The fact is that we have no way to alter the trajectory of a comet such that it would precisely impact on Mars. It's not just that it's too expensive (which it would be). It's not that we fall just short of the technology required. Even if we could spare the trillions of dollars it would cost, there's no way we can change the trajectory of any comet. As a rule of thumb, the rocket fuel required to substantially change the orbit of a comet would have the same order of magnitude of mass as the comet. 

If we tried to use nukes, the water we delivered would be highly radioactive.

In practice, there's no way to do it; and even if there was, we couldn't afford it.

People talk about seeding Mars with genetically engineered superbugs that will somehow flood the atmosphere with Oxygen. But even if Frankenstein's algae could convert all the Martian CO₂, it would take a very long time because of the cold, and it would still only amount to a partial pressure of ~0.0000013 atmospheres of oxygen. Which is effectively zero and still instant death for a human trying to breath on the surface. 

Worse, there's nothing on Mars that would make the expenditure of trillions of dollars worthwhile. There is nothing on Mars that we could not obtain on Earth for a fraction of the cost. Or from robotic mining of asteroids. Those trillions of dollars would go a long way to solving the existential threats we face on Earth that plutocrats are currently in denial about.

Conclusion

The conditions on the surface of Mars—low g, high radiation, near-zero air and water—are inimical to life and have been for around 3 billion years. Dating back to the time of the last universal common ancestor of life on earth. 

The geological processes that gave rise to life on Earth are conspicuously absent from Mars. Because of the lack of plate tectonics, the surface we see on Mars is billions of years old. 

There's little or no reason to believe that Mars ever supported life. And even if we stipulate that it might have existed, there's little or no reason to believe we will find fossils of past microbial life since these are either deeply buried or severely degraded.  

The idea of terraforming is quite entertaining in speculative fiction and, at a stretch we might allow that it is possible. In practice, terraforming is not remotely technologically or economically feasible. 

I can imagine visitors to Mars. I'd love to live to see this. But I cannot imagine colonies on Mars ever being viable. The problems involved are fatal and practically insurmountable. 

Earth is unique in being the only planet we know of that supports life. There is no planet B. 

Capitalists appear to think that they can shit where they eat with impunity. They appear to believe that destroying the Earth is a fair price to pay so that a few men can be pampered as though they were gods.  They seem to believe that they can simply go and live in space once the earth is destroyed. But these fantasies are not remotely realistic. Without Earth, we are all dead. 

Here's a radical idea: 

Let's not destroy the only planet that we know can sustain life. 

~~Φ~~

Philosophical Detritus III: Reality.

This is the third in a series of essays about abstractions in philosophy. Here, I continue the critique and extend it to another abstract concept that seems to trip many people up: reality.

Reality is one of the most common abstract metaphysical concepts used by both amateur and professional philosophers. We all like to say things like "In reality,..." We love to cite reality as the ultimate authority. "In reality..." is treated as a killer argument. And we try to ground our ideas of truth in reality.

However, these informal or common-sense uses of the term belie a deep and pervasive malaise in professional philosophy (the world over). After millennia of argument—across human cultures—there is no consensus on what "reality" is. Nor is there any consensus on what "truth" means (I'll come back to this). Metaphysics keeps promising insight into these problems, yet it never produces anything testable or even conceptually stable. New ways to approach reality keep emerging, but none of them ever manages to solve the problems it promises to solve.

And yet, at the same time, we all feel confident we know what reality is, or that we would know it when we see it.

When a problem has been argued over by clever people for a century without any consensus emerging, we may begin to suspect that we have framed the problem poorly. However, when we have argued for millennia and failed to reach any satisfactory conclusion, it calls the whole enterprise of philosophy, or at least metaphysics, into question.

Metaphysics is bunk. But why is it bunk?

Reality and Epistemic Privilege

Questions about reality are the principal topic of metaphysics.

• What is real?
• What does it mean for something to be real?
• What is the nature of reality?

Reality is such a basic concept that you might expect there to be a long-standing consensus about it. After all, given how most of us use the term "reality", it ought to define itself. And as noted, we all seem to have a "common sense" view of reality. However, there is no general consensus on reality amongst philosophers, and there never has been. On the contrary, reality is one of the most disputed concepts in philosophy. As with many problems I've written about in recent years, there is not only an existing discordant dissensus, but it is growing all the time as new propositions are floated that try (and usually fail) to take the discussion in different directions.

We need to be clear about the implications of this dispute over "reality". If philosophers cannot even agree on what reality is, they cannot agree on anything else. There is a structural failure in the field of philosophy, an impasse that has existed for thousands of years. Lacking agreement on “reality,” philosophy fragments into self-contained silos with no common reference point. Nonetheless, this ambiguous and disputed concept continues to play an essential role in philosophy and daily life.

The problem with all these abstract metaphysical concepts is that we only have experience and imagination to go on. No one has privileged access to reality, so no one actually knows anything about reality. There is no epistemic privilege with respect to reality.

Everyone’s access to reality is mediated by factors such as perception, cognition, language, theory, and culture. There is no way around this mediation; no way to get unmediated access to reality, whatever it is. In my "nominalist" view, reality is an abstract concept; an idea. And, thus, the idea that we could have direct access to reality is quite bizarre.

Still, the idea that some amongst us do have epistemic privilege is widespread, especially in relation to religions. People are constantly stepping up to confidently tell us that they alone have privileged access to reality and can tell us what it is. It is very noticeable amongst Buddhists who like to invoke reality.

“We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.”--Kalu Rinpoche

"the development of insight into the ultimate nature of reality." --Dalai Lama

“To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.”--Thich Nhat Hanh

Closer to home, for me, the founder of the Triratna Order, Sangharakshita (1925 – 2018), argued that imagination was our "reality sense". This idea was inspired by English Romantic poets rather than Indian Buddhists. No word in the canonical languages of Buddhism means "imagination". It's not a concept Buddhists made use of prior to contact with Europe. Moreover, the "reality" imagined by Sangharakshita and his followers is distinctly magical, vitalistic, and teleological (all of which seem unreal to me).

Buddhists are not exceptional in seeking to leverage the dissensus on reality to stake a claim to privileged metaphysical knowledge. Nor are Buddhists the only ones who meditate. Hindus also have a long history of meditation, and they have arrived at radically different conclusions about the significance of meditative states. So too with the Sāṃkhya philosophy, which most people now encounter in the context of haṭha yoga.

There is no "reality sensing faculty" and no way to know reality directly. I do not doubt that some people experience altered states in meditation, though I would say these largely arise in the context of sensory deprivation. Whatever those states are, after 13 years of intensively editing, translating, and studying Prajñāpāramitā texts, I no longer find it plausible that altered states in meditation reflect reality (or that "reality", in any European sense, was an important concept in Buddhism prior to European contact).

Obviously, if we cannot get information about reality directly, then we cannot know reality in any conventional sense. In other words, the big problem with metaphysics is epistemic.

To be more precise, there is no epistemic justification for any metaphysics. We don't know reality. And we cannot know reality. All traditional metaphysics arises from speculating about experience.

This is not a new observation. David Hume (1711–1776) came to similar conclusions. He famously noted that we never see a separate event that we could label "causation". What we call "causation" is merely a regular sequence of events. If event B is always seen to be preceded by event A, then we say that A caused B. And this generalised to metaphysics. Hume argued that all knowledge is either sensory experience or ideas about sensory experience. And experience is not reality.

I have encountered many people, mostly Buddhists, over the years who professed to believe the opposite of this, i.e. that experience is reality. The corollary is that we all have our own reality. This is solipsistic and egocentric. We can show why this is false by coming back to the main argument.

Half a century earlier, Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) was able to formulate relatively simple expressions using calculus that made accurate predictions about the motions of objects.

(where F = force, v = velocity, p = momentum)

And since, for any event we can witness on earth, these expressions predict future motion with considerable accuracy and precision, they surely reflect some kind of knowledge about reality. We can confirm this by using the same equations to retrodict past events that have already been observed, so we know the outcome of the process in advance. Newton's laws of motion are a very robust description of motion as it could be observed in the 18th century. In the course of my formal education, I personally demonstrated the efficacy of all these laws of motion.

At the very least, this is objective knowledge.

Thus, there is a tension between Hume's observation that we cannot know reality and Newton's observations that appear to describe reality very well.

Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) attempted to resolve this tension by redefining "metaphysics" as a critical inquiry into the conditions that make knowledge and experience possible, rather than as speculative knowledge of things beyond experience. In his view, metaphysical ideas like causation, space, and time are a priori forms unconsciously imposed on experience by our minds. In other words, "space" and "time" are not part of reality and don't exist independently of an experiencing mind. Similarly, causation is how we explain sequences of experiences, not an aspect of reality. This means metaphysics cannot reveal things as they are in themselves, but only the necessary structures of how we must experience them.

The problem with Kant is that his view still requires a metaphysics, since he tacitly assumes that all humans experience the world in exactly the same way. This is a speculative view about human nature and requires something both universal and beyond experience. And I don't think it works because this is not something that Kant could know (even now). Worse, this is not my experience of other people. Exposed to a range of people, one of the most striking things we notice is that we do not all experience the world in the same way. Some aspects of experience are unequivocally not shared; they are subjective.

Kant might have gotten around this by emphasising that empiricism is more than just observing nature; it also crucially involves comparing notes about experience with other people. But he did not. It is precisely comparing notes about experience, noting the similarities and differences, that allows us to parse the commonalities in experience.

Kant doesn't really account for Newton's objective knowledge. Rather than positing that every human being sees the world in exactly the same way, it makes more sense to me to say that objective knowledge of this type is independent of the observer. From observations like Newton's laws of motion, we can infer that there is an objective world, which does have its own structures and systems. Still, this world can only be appreciated via mediated experience. At the very least, we may say that our ideas of space and time, for example, must be analogous to something objective, or we could not use them to predict the future in the way that we do.

Similar dissatisfaction with Kant drove the emergence of phenomenology. Husserl, for instance, wanted to suspend all assumptions about “reality itself” and focus instead on experience as it presents itself. Note that, despite the many successes of phenomenology, we all still rely on metaphysical frameworks to structure our understanding of the world. But this retreat from objectivity is also hamstrung by the fact that we can make valid inferences and predict the future.

However, despite the emergence of phenomenology, speculative metaphysics continues to dominate philosophy. Arguments about "reality" are ongoing and diversifying as time goes on.

Rescuing the Concept of Reality through Pragmatism

As far as I can see, some form of realism is inescapable. Realist explanations do the best job of predicting the future. Newton's laws of motion are still in daily use by scientists, engineers, and technologists precisely because they accurately predict the future. All the attempts to deprecate realism have ended in failure: specifically, failure to predict the future as realist explanations do.

Newton's laws of motion are objective facts. They are apparent to any observer. The laws have limits, and there are situations in which they fail to be accurate or precise enough. Still, within the well-known and accepted limits, the laws of motion apply.

And at the same time, we still only have experience to go on. Which means that realism has to have a pragmatic character. We can infer objective facts—such as Newton's laws of motion—and these allow us to predict the future. Being able to predict the future, and thus reduce the burden of uncertainty (without ever eliminating it), is nontrivial. Of course, such a pragmatic approach can never provide the kind of certainty that metaphysics promises, but then metaphysics has never delivered on such promises either.

I come back to a crucial point already made above: comparing notes. When we compare notes, especially in small groups, we immediately see that some aspects of our experience are shared and some are not. By painstaking observation and comparing notes, we can infer which things appear the same (or at least similar) to everyone and which are only apparent to ourselves.

Take the example of the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of the Earth. It doesn't matter who observes this or what method they use; it always turns out to be ~9.81 ± 0.15 ms^-2. It doesn't even matter which units we use. We could measure it in fathoms per century squared, as long as we know how to convert one unit to another.

So the acceleration due to gravitation is more or less the same for everyone. And we can account for the variations with factors like elevation and the density of the underlying bedrock. We can say, therefore, that gravitation is independent of the observer. Another way of saying this is that gravitation is objective. And having inferred this, we can imagine many ways to test this with a view to falsifying it. An inference that both makes accurate and precise predictions (and retrodictions) and also survives rigorous attempts at falsification can be considered an accurate indicator of reality.

But we don't just compare notes on individual phenomena. Gravitation is a particular phenomenon, and we can compare this to other forces and how they operate. For example, we might look at gravitation in the light of observations of other kinds of motion. If we had a theory of gravitation that predicted motion that disagreed with our theory of motion, then we would be at an impasse. But this is not the case. When we investigate nature, we find that our inferences support and reinforce each other.

Newton's law of gravitation is consistent with his laws of motion. And they are both consistent with other formal regularities in the universe. And we now have explanations that go beyond the limits of Newton but which show that Newton's laws are special cases under certain limits.

Note that values obtained in this way should always include some measure of uncertainty. We aim to measure things with a high degree of accuracy and precision, but there is always some measurement error. And our inferences often rely on assumptions that may introduce inaccuracy or imprecision.

The physical sciences are inherently pragmatic. We aim to arrive at valid inferences that allow us to predict the future to a desired level of accuracy and precision. Doing this allows us to compile useful and robust inferences into a system of inferred knowledge that is highly reliable. Newton's laws are paradigmatic of such knowledge.

And when this is the case, we don't need to know what cannot be known. What we can and do infer is enough to be getting on with. We can step back from speculating about unobservable metaphysics and focus on what can be observed.

Note that this is not the same as the instrumentalism that afflicts quantum mechanics. Quantum theory was developed in a milieu profoundly influenced by logical positivism. Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, and others collectively resisted any attempt at a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics, arguing that since we could not observe the nano-scale (in the 1920-30s), we could not know it. They rejected both Schrödinger's realistic interpretation and both his and Einstein's critique of non-realist approaches. Schrödinger's cat was intended as a refutation of the Copenhagen view, but ended with Copenhagen adopting the cat as their mascot. The modern, Von Neumann-Dirac, formalism still resists realist interpretations. The majority of physicists simply accept that no realist interpretation of nanoscale physics is possible, even though we now have images of individual atoms, which allows us to affirm that atoms are objective phenomena.

While principled arguments exist for idealist or other non-realist views, such approaches have never allowed us to predict the future in the way that realism does. There is no idealist equivalent of Newton's laws of motion, let alone the systematic accumulation of useful knowledge that characterises science. To my knowledge, idealists have made no contribution to understanding the world.

Pragmatism allows for pluralism. Of course, most people do not want pluralism. They want answers. They want certainty. I sympathise. I want answers too. But after a lifetime of seeking answers, this is as close as I have come to a satisfactory solution.

Conclusion

"Reality" seems to be paradoxical. It is both intimately familiar and foundational to our worldviews and, at the same time, forever beyond our perception and understanding.

Thousands of years of argumentation over reality and the nature of reality have not resulted in a consensus; rather, it is the source of a growing dissensus.

Very many people reify reality, i.e. treat the abstract concept of reality as a thing in itself.

Since reality is an abstract concept, the nature of reality is abstract.

No one has epistemic privilege with respect to reality. No one knows. And the people who claim to know—including religious gurus—are misleading us or have themselves been misled. Sincerity is no guarantor of accuracy or precision. Belief is a feeling about an idea.

The emergence of phenomenology was not the end of metaphysics.

We can rescue this ambiguous and paradoxical abstract concept via pragmatism.

It has been apparent for some centuries that we don't have to rely on speculative metaphysics. We can and do infer objective facts about the world.

There are patterns and regularities in experience that only make sense in a realist framework. At the very least, experience must be analogous to reality, or we'd get lost and bump into things all the time. The precision and accuracy with which we can describe patterns and regularities in experience, and use these to predict the future, also argue pragmatically for adopting realism.

The most obvious of these descriptions and predictions come from physics, but we get them from all kinds of sciences, including social sciences.

Pragmatic objectivity is something we can aspire to and, at our best, approach. It's not the same as certainty, but it is good enough to be getting on with.

However, my sense is that promises of certain knowledge will always be attractive to some people. And this leaves those people open to manipulation and economic exploitation.

~~Φ~~

Philosophical Detritus II: Consciousness

In the previous essay in this series, I made some fairly banal comments about abstractions from something like a nominalist point of view. Nominalism is usually couched in metaphysical terms, but my approach is epistemic and heuristic. I don't say "abstractions don't exist", I say "abstractions are ideas". 

Ideas are ontologically subjective. We can have objective knowledge about ideas, it's just a different kind of knowledge than we can have about objects. As John Searle puts it:

The ontological subjectivity of the domain [of consciousness] does not prevent us from having an epistemically objective science of that domain.

For example, ideas do not have properties such as location, extension, or orientation in space or time. Still, ideas are knowable. Counting systems and numbers are abstract and thus ontologically subjective, but 2 + 2 = 4 is an epistemically objective fact about numbers.

At the same time, we can treat ideas as metaphorically located, extended, and orientated. An apt example would be "the ideas in my head". Metaphorically, IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. With this mapping from objects to ideas in place, we can now make statements in which qualities of objects and verbs that apply to manipulating objects are applied to ideas. 

Unfortunately, this opens up the possibility of (1) treating the abstract as real (reification) and (2) treating the abstract as independent of concrete examples (hypostatisation). There is a third problem, which has no widely-accepted name, but which we can call animation, which is treating ideas as if they have their own agency (compare Freud's psychoanalytic theory which gives emotions their own agency). That is to say, without care we may conclude that ideas are real, independent, and autonomous agents.

The point of taking this approach to abstractions is pragmatic. Over the years I have participated in and witnessed many philosophical discussions. Not a few of these have concerned the nebulous abstraction consciousness. And on the vast majority of occasions the discussion is plagued by unacknowledged reification, hypostatization, and animation. In other words, the abstraction "consciousness" is routinely treated as a real, independent, and autonomous agent. For example, these are some actual questions recently asked on Quora.

• If we did not have a consciousness, would we have thought of the idea of consciousness?
• If science was able to clone an exact copy of me, including my consciousness, would it be me?
• How can we upload human consciousness via AI?
• Is there any scientific evidence that we are all one consciousness?
• Is it possible to transfer consciousness to another body like a clone or machine?
• Is it scientifically possible to transfer self consciousness from one body to another?
• What is the real nature of consciousness? Can it be engineered or exported by humans, or does it exist beyond us?
• Is consciousness a fundamental property of the universe, or is it an emergent phenomenon of complex biological systems?
• How likely is it that humans will eventually be able to fully explain consciousness?

These kinds of questions are asked again and again with minor differences in emphasis. They are also answered over and over again. It appears that having many available answers does not reduce the desire to ask the question. I think part of the problem is that answers are wildly inconsistent. Asked a yes/no question, Quora answers often say "yes", "no", and "maybe" with equal confidence and authority.

In this essay, I will attempt to apply my heuristic to cut through some of the bullshit and bring some order to one the most confused topics in philosophy: consciousness. This is not as difficult as it sounds. 

Meaning is Use

Observing how people use this term "consciousness", my sense is that that vast majority of people use "consciousness" as a synonym for "soul". That is to say they treat "consciousness" as a nonphysical entity that is both independent of their physical body (including their brain) and, at the same time, integral to their identity and/or personality. For the majority, it seems, consciousness is a kind of secularised soul, stripped of the supernatural significance given to it by christians, but still a real, independent, autonomous agent. 

Being independent of the body means that "consciousness" is able to survive death. It is hypostatized consciousness, for example, that allows for techno-utopian ideas such as "uploading consciousness", "transferring consciousness" from one body to another (including the wildly incoherent concept of the "brain transplant"), as well as various kinds of disembodied consciousness (including post-mortem consciousness).

In these examples, "consciousness" is something that is not causally tied to a body and, as such, it can exist without a body or be moved between bodies, including non-human bodies. Like the soul, the uploaded consciousness is disembodied and effectively immortal (which explains some of the ongoing appeal of the fallacious idea). "Uploading consciousness" is an analog of the christian narrative of resurrection or the buddhist narrative of rebirth. It's an afterlife theory. In my book Karma and Rebirth Reconsidered, I argued that all religious afterlife theories are incoherent because they all contradict each other. 

A particular mistake that almost always goes with consciousness qua soul, is vitalism. This is the idea that what distinguishes living matter from non-living matter is some kind of animating principle or élan vital. In antiquity, this principle was almost always associated with breath (see, e.g. my essay on spirit as breath). In Judeo-Christian mythology, Yahweh breathes life into Adam, animating him. The word animate derives from a root meaning "breathe". Similarly, psykhē (Greek) and spīritus (Latin) originally meant "breath".

As anyone who has experienced the corpse of a loved one knows, its intuitive to think that something animated them and that their corpse is the body minus that animating principle. For example, I vividly recall seeing my father's corpse in 1990 and having this reaction.

Actually, what's missing in the experience of see the corpse of a loved one is our emotional response to them. There is a neurological condition known as Capgras Syndrome, in which localised brain damage can leave a person able to recognise familiar faces, but unable to experience emotional responses to them. They frequently arrive at the bizarre conclusion that the people they know have been replaced by doppelgangers.

My father's corpse was like an exact replica of him, that wasn't moving or responding. All the personality was gone. Like many people my first intuition was that my father's life and personality had gone somewhere. Which is to say, that they still existed apart from the body. With a lot more life experience and learning under my belt, I can now see that, while the difference between living and dead is stark, it's our own lack of emotional response to corpses that we are trying to explain.

As a teenager, I remember going to the funeral of my best friend's father who died quite young. My friend and his nuclear family were all disconcertingly smiling and happy. They were not overtly religious in the conventional sense of being members of a religious community. Nevertheless, for them, the deceased man was still a very strong presence. They felt him still there with them. They were not sad, at the time, because in their minds, the father was not gone wholly gone or inaccessible.

I get the attraction to and plausibility of vitalism. I just don't believe it. Vitalism was discredited when we discovered how to synthesise organic compounds in the late 19th century. We don't have to add any "vital principle" or "life force" to account for animate matter.

Despite being secularised and stripped of significance, the idea of a consciousness qua autonomous entity that survives death still has a religious flavour. Witness the people who assume that "consciousness" is an entity then go around seeking evidence that supports this view. 

By contrast, a rational approach would begin with concrete evidence. If we were to start over, and re-examine the evidence, no one would propose the concept of a soul.

The abstract concept “consciousness” has become a dead end.

• All statements that treat “consciousness” as a concrete or real thing or entity are false.
• All statements that treat “consciousness” as a separate or disembodied thing are false.
• All statements that treat “consciousness” as an autonomous agent are false.

And from what I can see, very little of what remains is useful. Some metaphorical uses of "consciousness" are common:

• A stream of consciousness.
• The fabric of consciousness.
• A field of awareness.
• A thread of awareness
• The tapestry of the mind
• A vessel of thought
• The machinery of the mind.
• A lens of perception.

However, all of these uses are prone to hypostatisation, reification, and animation. 

Intentionality

One way around the mistakes people make is to acknowledge Dan Dennett's observation that consciousness is (almost) always intentional. We can say that consciousness (almost) always has an object or condition. Heuristically, we can say that consciousness is always consciousness of something. If we always follow "consciousness" with "of _____" and fill in the blank, we are much less likely to go wrong. For example:

• Concrete: “I am conscious of feeling cold.” ✓
• Abstract: “There is consciousness of feeling cold.” ✓
• Reified:
• “There is a consciousness.” X
• “My consciousness...” X
• “Consciousness is…” X
• “Consciousness does…” X

Unfortunately, even true abstract statements about experience are likely to be misinterpreted in ways that falsify them.

The exception to conscious states being intentional is the state of "contentless awareness" sometimes experienced in sleep or meditation. See for example the discussion: "Can you be aware of nothing?" in The Conversation.

For Buddhists, note, that I now distinguish "contentless awareness" from "cessation". Following cessation there is no awareness. The state of śūnyatā (also an abstract noun) is not a conscious state. It is an unconscious state, though seemingly distinct from sleep or anaesthesia.

Contentless awareness probably corresponds to the higher āyatana stages, for example "the stage of nothingness" (ākiñcaññāyatana) or "the stage of no awareness or unawareness"(nevasaññānāsañña). Prajñāpāramitā texts make it clear that having any kind of experience or memories of experience is inconsistent with śūnyatā.

To sum up

"Consciousness" is an abstract concept. An idea. Ideas are not real, independent, and autonomous agents. Ideas are ideas. Ideas are subjective; though we can have objective knowledge about them.

Talking about consciousness as a soul is a dead loss. But, then, there is very little talk about consciousness that is not a dead loss. And this includes most of "philosophy". 

Consciousness as a abstract concept is intentional. This can be reflected in statements that include what we are conscious of.

~~Φ~~

Philosophical Detritus I: Abstractions

I've taken to spending some time each morning answering questions on Quora as a writing and brain warm-up. Over time, it has become apparent that certain philosophical questions are asked over and over. The existing answers don't seem to register with the people who ask the questions, nor do the answers change how often the question is asked. 

Many of these repetitive questions involve legacy abstract concepts, like consciousness, reality, truth, and free will. 

We've been discussing these issues for centuries without any resolution. As a rule of thumb, we may say that if an issue is unresolved after a century of effort to understand it, we are likely framing the problem incorrectly. If that same issue is unresolved after a millennium, then something is fundamentally wrong with philosophy. 

In this and some subsequent essays, I'm going to explore how, and perhaps why, these legacy metaphysical concepts are so poorly understood and unhelpful. 

I will begin, in this post, with some general comments about abstractions. My approach to this is broadly speaking nominalist. The Wikipedia article defines nominalism as "the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels." 

I'm extremely doubtful about this metaphysical nominalism. My argument is not about the existence or non-existence of "abstract objects". I see the problem as epistemic. There is a difference in what we can know about objects and ideas. We approach them via different sensory modalities. For example, I can physically touch an object, but I cannot touch an idea (especially someone else's ideas). 

The basic argument is that abstractions are ideas rather than objects. In my mind, this means that metaphysical concepts like existent/non-existent, which are so relevant to objects, are not very relevant here. I'll get into my serious doubts about the whole project of metaphysics in the next essay. 

 Let's now unpack the basic argument and see where it takes us. 

What is an abstraction?

We can say, first, what an abstraction is not. An abstraction is not a thing. In other words, abstractions are not objects or entities. Abstractions are not objective. Abstractions have no location, extension, or orientation in space or time. They have no causal potential. One cannot observe an abstraction in nature or observe what someone else is thinking. We can see why a nominalist with an interest in metaphysics might conclude that abstractions are "not real", but in my view, this is a category error: the descriptor "real" doesn't apply to ideas because they are ontologically subjective. 

So what is an abstraction? Fundamentally, an abstraction is an idea about things. Ideas are subjective. Some people are attracted to the idea that because abstractions are subjective, they are illusions. I find this incredibly unhelpful. 

More specifically, an abstraction is an idea about properties that various things are perceived to share (e.g. the greenness of plants). While "greenness" as an idea is comprehensible, it's not the kind of quality that can be observed separately from concrete examples of green objects. "Green" isn't something in its own right. Moreover, what we perceive as "green" is affected by external factors such as the frequency range of ambient light and the colour of adjacent objects. Many well-known illusions leverage such facts. 

Abstractions are usually ideas about objects in the aggregate or collectively, and often take the form of generalisations. Categories and taxonomies are abstractions. And, for example, since basic colour terms are categories, colours are also abstractions. Similarly, quantities and numbers are abstract.

Abstract concepts are useful precisely because they allow us to ignore certain details and generalise about experience. And this allows us to develop heuristics (or "rules of thumb") to deal more efficiently with repetitive situations.  

There are two basic mistakes we (all) make when dealing with abstractions:

1. Hypostatization: treating an abstraction as independent.
2. Reification: treating an abstraction as an entity, especially a physical entity.

What we need to keep clear is that abstractions are ideas about things. As such, they are not independent either of objects or of minds. So it is always a mistake to treat an abstraction as standing alone. Abstractions are derived from experience. 

Notably, an abstraction cannot ever be "fundamental" precisely because it's an idea about something, and that something is always more fundamental than ideas about it. So, for example, "consciousness" cannot be a substance or a fundamental aspect of the universe, because consciousness is an abstraction based on the experience of conscious states. A conscious state is more fundamental than consciousness. 

The hypostatisation and reification of abstractions is ubiquitous on Quora and beyond. I see them everywhere. I see them every day. 

Metaphors

I've discussed George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's approach to metaphor many times (as always, phrases in small caps are metaphors). They make the point that abstract thought is generally metaphorical. 

In using metaphor with abstractions, we map an abstract concept onto a concrete domain. For example, a common metaphor is: IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. This allows us to linguistically treat an abstract idea as if it were an object. And this then allows us to discuss the idea using adjectives and verbs drawn from the target domain. For example:

• Shelve that concept.
• Polish this proposal.
• Grasp the theory.
• Unpack that idea.
• A multifaceted argument.

One cannot literally or concretely shelve a concept. But the metaphor works, and no one needs to have it explained. We intuitively know that a concept is not an object that sits on a physical shelf. 

This is completely normal and seldom leads to confusion in daily life. 

Problems arise when we forget or overlook that the "object" is abstract and the language metaphorical. Discussions of metaphysics often seem mired in such problems. 

For example, some people treat consciousness as a metaphorical agent and some as a causal agent. Agents are objects that are capable of behaviour beyond that which is dictated by ambient conditions and physical laws. Water has no agency; it always runs downhill. Agents can choose to spend energy to go uphill. 

Abstract consciousness cannot, by definition, be an agent since it is an idea. We may act on our ideas, but the ideas themselves are not causal agents. I'll go into more detail on this topic in the next instalment. 

Now, I think philosophers are likely aware of this kind of distinction and work with it intelligently. But the general public is not generally aware of such distinctions. While we often talk about game-changing philosophers as though they changed all of society, the coverage is actually limited to intellectuals. The fact is that most people never read philosophy, and the knowledge that reaches the common people is often partial, fragmented, and garbled. 

The next instalment will help to ground this discussion by exploring the example of "consciousness" in more depth. 

~~Φ~~

Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist: "the spirit of the times". First used in 1835. The general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate that characterises an era.

"We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm. Some of us are on super-yachts. Some have just the one oar."—Damian Barr.

This long essay is now also available as a pdf. 

In the twenty years since I started this blog, as a newly-ordained member of the Triratna Buddhist Order, I have explored many themes, but I have generally steered clear of commenting on contemporary political issues. However, the global political situation seems perilous and worsening. The mainstream commentary—both professional and amateur—that I see on a daily basis seems confused about what's going on.

Be warned, this is a long post (around 14,000 words. I'm going to do a pdf once the blog is finished).

The headline is that fascism is now the dominant political ideology on the planet. Fascists govern the USA, Russia, India, Israel, and much of Eastern Europe. Fascism is growing in strength in Europe and the UK (where I live). I believe that fascism is a perverse ideology. I also believe that fascists are in denial about the existential threats that humanity now faces, particularly:

• Climate change and extreme weather.
• Sea-level rise and coastal inundation.
• Pollution (i.e. the poisoning of air, water, and land).
• Ecosystem destruction and mass extinction.
• Pandemics.

Although I think of myself as a historian, I make no pretence of doing this as an academic exercise. I have not read all the relevant literature. The sources I discuss below are only the ones that gave me moments of clarity, moments in which I was able to see a larger pattern at work. There are gaps. I haven't read Hannah Arendt, for example, though from what I know, her contributions are invaluable in understanding how fascism operates.

I'm not neutral on this topic. This essay is polemical. Spoiler alert: I am opposed to imperialism, capitalism, and liberalism (which, as I will show, are all ways of viewing the same phenomenon). I'm also profoundly pessimistic about the future. I don't think it will be possible to turn things around in the short term. As far as I can see, things are going to get considerably worse in the coming years until the systems that sustain us break down under the strain. Food production is particularly vulnerable. The resulting chaos will likely result in billions of people dying in a short space of time.

Another caveat is that this essay will not be a buddhist hot take. I look at the politics of nominally buddhist countries, and I don't see anything I'd want to emulate. Nominally theravāda countries have some of the most oppressive political situations on the planet. Moreover, buddhist converts in the European imperial sphere are a tiny minority, and they conspicuously avoid and performatively condemn politics, and thus play no role at all in national governance.

I do propose some rational solutions, in contrast to the irrationality I see daily in the media, but my sense is that my solutions will be unpopular, since they conflict with ideas that progressives and "liberals" cherish. I don't believe in any kind of utopia. We cannot get everything we want, especially if that means denying others. I think we have to be pragmatic. I think we will have to compromise, but I can also see that, right now, no one is willing to compromise.

Like George Monbiot, I will cheerfully acknowledge that this is a story about a conspiracy, i.e. a conspiracy theory. This is fine, since there is a well-documented conspiracy amongst the ruling classes in this case. This story is not a conspiracy fantasy; it's a description of an actual conspiracy.

My method is to begin with a broad historical overview and then drill down to some specific, illustrative examples of how the zeitgeist manifests, guided by the works cited.

Background.

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber (anthropologist) and David Wengrow (archaeologist) argue that evidence from the past shows that humans previously had a wide variety of lifestyles with a greater variety of political systems than are available to us today. They also argue that change from one political system to another was much more common in the past. While the book was intended to address the issue of inequality, the practicalities involved forced the authors to dwell on the question of how our political options came to be so drastically narrowed in the twenty-first century.

My sources agree that the story of the zeitgeist begins about 600 years ago, as feudalism and agrarianism were beginning to give way to plutocracy/capitalism and mechanisation. At the same time as these internal changes were taking place, Europeans began to construct ocean-going ships and expand out into the world. This was partly an act of imperialism, which involved conquering people, capturing their land, commodifying their resources, and exploiting them to exhaustion. And it was partly an act of colonisation and expansion of European states, resulting in the permanent erasure of indigenous cultures and replacement with European culture.

The "industrial revolution" would more aptly be called the capitalist revolution. Industrialisation didn't really happen until the 19th century, and steam engines, long after the changes that defined the period had happened. Industrialisation was wholly reliant on the wealth generated by imperialism and colonialism.

Jason W. Moore has called our current age the Capitalocene. In other words, the defining feature of the revolution was not industrialisation per se, which didn't occur until the 19th century; it was the new forms of wealth and wealth-generation that appeared and the new "class" of people it created: the capitalists.

I'm going to use the two terms—plutocracy and capitalism—as synonyms with slightly different emphases. Plutocracy (rule by the wealthy) is based on plutolatry (worship of wealth). Capitalism is an ideology that equates wealth with moral virtue and political power. In practice, plutocracy and capitalism amount to the same thing: rule by the wealthy, for the wealthy.

I draw a distinction between wealth and money. Money is—fundamentally—a representation of an obligation, especially a debt. Using money diminishes how much you have available to settle your debts. Wealth, by contrast, consists of income-generating assets, i.e. assets that generate more money for no effort. Land is the quintessential "asset". Money is how we meet certain social obligations. Wealth entails no social obligations.

A rich person has a lot of money. One can get rich by winning a lottery, but lottery winners don't always become wealthy; many of them simply spend the money until it is gone. A wealthy person is someone whose income mainly derives from owning things (their "capital").

The idea of gaining income without effort is sometimes called "rent seeking". By charging a fee for access to shared resources that have been privatised—especially land—the wealthy make money without making any effort. Rent seeking is a characteristic of capitalism. It's the polar opposite of "working hard".

We need to begin by addressing the origins and broad outlines of the history of capitalism. As we do this, we have to keep in mind that commerce—including international commerce—has existed for thousands of years. Capitalism is a relatively new development that coincides with, and is intimately linked to, the origins of European imperialism and colonialism. Note, for this essay, I treat European colonies as European. This includes almost all the Americas (including the USA) and my home nation, Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Imperialism, colonialism, plutocracy, capitalism, and fascism are not separate ideas; they are all aspects of a longstanding pattern of behaviour amongst the ruling classes in Europe. The task ahead is to tease out and highlight how these ideas fit together and interact.

Jason Moore (2010, 2011) has proposed the island of Madeira as a good candidate for the emergence of the capitalist model. In the 1540s, the Portuguese settled the Atlantic island of Madeira (Portuguese: "wood"), which was previously uninhabited. After a brief period of general farming, they hit on the idea of growing sugar. Settlers borrowed money from wealthy merchants in Genoa and Flanders, imported slaves from Africa, and set about becoming the main source of sugar for all of Europe. Making several fortunes in the process.

Making 1 kg of sugar required burning 60 kg of wood, so the forests that gave Madeira its name were soon being cleared. More sugar was planted, and slaves had to go further to find wood. Gradually, the soils were depleted by intensive cropping, the forests shrank to remnants, and the island ecology collapsed, taking the economy with it.

That might have been the end of the story, except that making sugar was so very lucrative. Having exhausted Madeira, the nascent capitalists moved their operation to the island of São Tomé and repeated the process: colonising and privatising, exploiting, exhausting, and moving on. When São Tomé was exhausted, the Portuguese shifted their operations to Brazil which has yet to be exhausted but is definitely worse for wear. São Tomé continued to be a staging post for the Atlantic slave trade. Across "the new world", the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British began to set up competing businesses on the same "boom, bust, quit" model (including slave labour).

Thus, Monbiot and Hutchinson (2025) define capitalism like this:

Capitalism is an economic system founded on colonial looting. It operates on a constantly shifting and self-consuming frontier, on which both state and powerful private interests use their laws, backed by the threat of violence, to turn shared resources into exclusive property, and to transform natural wealth, labour, and money into commodities that can be accumulated.

At least part of the rationale of European imperialist expansion in the 16th-19th centuries was the search for new natural resources to exploit. And they were always exploited for short-term gains, with no concern for consequences.

The great problem that nascent capitalism faced was that Europe was fully occupied and armed to the teeth. Natural resources were jealously guarded. Europeans have been constantly fighting wars amongst themselves over territory and access to resources since the end of the Roman Empire. The development of ocean-going ships meant that expanding out of Europe was easier than fighting a war inside Europe. Although war continued to be a feature of European life since the appetites of the ruling classes were insatiable.

However, the world that Europeans expanded into was also largely occupied by people. Truly uninhabited places that could be inhabited—like Madeira and São Tomé—were already rare in the 1500s. For example, Polynesians had settled all of the habitable Pacific islands centuries before Europeans ever ventured into the Pacific Ocean.

Australia was first peopled some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago and was home to hundreds of distinct societies (each with its own language). However, the Aboriginals maintained a foraging lifestyle and did not practice farming. As far as European capitalists were concerned, this meant that they were "not using the land" and thus it was unilaterally declared Terra Nullius, i.e. uninhabited.

In essence, capitalists insisted that any land that was not being used for capitalism was not being used at all. In which case, they unilaterally declared that it was available for the taking by anyone who would put it to use for capitalism. All it took was having a minion ritually plant a spade in it.

Indigenous resistance to colonization was met with overwhelming, technologically enhanced violence. Genocide was normalised. Jason W. Moore has described capitalism as "the marriage of commerce with warfare."

Conceptually negating and physically eliminating the existing occupants, Europeans claimed ownership of the whole of the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific; most of Africa and the Middle East, and most of India. China was one of the few places that managed to resist European imperialism, but it suffered greatly for it. Europeans used their capacity and propensity for violence to suppress all local resistance. They also spread diseases, which hit the New World like a nuclear bomb. And they weaponised this, for example, by distributing blankets infected with smallpox to native Americans.

Everywhere they went, Europeans stole and privatised all the shared natural resources and exploited them to exhaustion, offering only murder and disease in compensation.

The British Empire, for example, was every bit as evil as the Nazi Third Reich. Any crime that the Nazis committed in Europe, the British had already done tenfold in their empire: genocide, murder, and other forms of brutality were their stock in trade. The difference is only that the British Empire was outside of Europe, while the Germans, coming late to the imperialist party, decided they would have an empire within Europe. This proved to be unpopular with the other European ruling classes.

In Britain, the flood of wealth from the burgeoning Empire made a new class of people: the plutoi or capitalists. Monarchs ruled by divine right, with support from established churches. The plutoi used their new wealth to buy influence in the political realm and support from the churches. This established the pattern of corruption that characterises plutocracy. Plutolaters (those who worship wealth) began to edge out the more traditional hereditary aristocrats in politics. Monarchism and feudalism gradually gave way to plutocracy and capitalism.

As Britain was being industrialised as part of the capitalist program, the vast majority of British people still lived in rural settings and did agrarian work. But the "dark satanic mills" needed vast numbers of workers. Initially, work in mills was long, arduous, and dangerous: 14-hour days, 6-day working weeks, and child labour were the norm. At the same time, farming was also industrialised, meaning considerably less work for rural people. So people flooded into the new cities seeking work and ended up working in mills and living in slums.

However, working people could never work hard enough or long enough to satisfy the plutocrats. The same theorists who justified brutal imperialism had perverse ideas about people. Thomas Hobbes, for example, characterised people as fundamentally selfish and chaotic. His big idea was that we need a tyrant (the eponymous Leviathan of his best-known book) to keep us in line and enforce social norms. This reflects his experience of decades of war in Europe and Britain, and the biases of his class.

As described by David Spencer (2013), the consensus of imperialist intellectuals was that workers were lazy. Early plutocrats developed the utility of poverty doctrine to counter this laziness. This doctrine says that, since workers are fundamentally unwilling to work, forcing them to live in poverty will give them the necessary motivation. Hence, wages were often paid at subsistence level or below. This attitude has never gone away. This is why "welfare" is a dirty word, but phrases like "business subsidy" or "government contract" are not.

Established churches colluded with the plutocrats and financially benefited from capitalism.

An agrarian lifestyle has periods of intense labour (planting, harvest) and periods of relaxation (winter). Far from being idle, rural people used their free time for life-enhancing activities such as socialising, playing music, dancing, and practising crafts like knitting and weaving. They would also grow their own food and graze an animal or two on common land. And all this was anathema to capitalism because it could not be monetized (at the time), so it was taken away by force.

Under capitalism, communal behaviours like singing, dancing, and storytelling, which used to involve the whole community, were re-imagined as individual skills and subjected to competition. With the result that these communal behaviours have become "spectator sports" in which most people are merely passive observers who cannot compete and thus can only win vicariously. Spectators don't get the benefits of participation. Sport itself went from being a source of communal fun to being a circus in which the morbidly obese watch absurdly overdeveloped and overpaid individuals chasing balls and/or running very fast. Patrick Mahomes, the star quarterback, has a 10-year contract worth US$500 million. He's an extraordinary athlete, but all he does is throw footballs. Meanwhile, something like 40 million Americans live in poverty.

In Britain "common land" gave rural people a way to escape from the mills. So it was all confiscated and placed in private ownership by act of Parliament. The newly privatised land was all gifted to existing plutocrats. This process of "enclosure" of common lands was also predicated on the idea that if land was not being used for capitalism, it was not being used at all. Much the same happened to the vast region of wetlands called "the fens" in Eastern England. The fens had supported a foraging lifestyle for millennia, but they were declared "unproductive", privatised, drained, and turned into farmland for the plutocrats. Of course, the entire USA was already in private ownership once the original occupiers were eliminated. Different starting point, same endpoint.

When I first encountered the ideology of "privatisation" in the 1980s, I had no idea that this was business as usual for capitalism. I grew up in that post-war blip during which socialists often held power and improved the lives of workers. With a broader view, it's clear that privatisation of shared resources, backed by state violence, was a built-in feature of capitalism from the outset.

Also, from the outset, plutocrats were thinking about human beings as a natural resource to be exploited. The first capitalists relied on slave labour. The Atlantic slave trade was merely an extension of the capitalist mindset. It's easy to forget that the slave trade carried on for 400 years before being abolished in the 19th century. The European slave trade was not some passing fad. The commodification of people, to the point of enslaving them, was foundational to the capitalist mindset and integral to the imperialist/colonialist program.

Liberalism

See also my essay On Liberty and Liberalism (3 May 2019).

The ideology that justified imperialism and colonialism is called liberalism. Liberalism is a syncretistic ideology combining ideas about individualism, liberty, competition, secularism, utilitarianism, and commerce. Liberalism and capitalism substantially overlap. In many ways, liberalism provides the theoretical justification of capitalism.

In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow suggest that Europeans first learned of the concept of liberty from Americans (i.e. indigenous Americans). In particular, from the records that French Jesuits published of their encounters with the Algonquin people in what is now eastern Canada.

Graeber and Wengrow point out that 600 years ago, no one in Europe was free or even talking about freedom as a concept. At that time, all Europeans served two masters: state and Church. Even kings notionally served the mythical figure of Yahweh/Jehovah (via his priests).

At the same time, however, the power vested in a king was always subject to support from other aristoi. The Magna Carta (1215 CE) was all about curbing the power of a king over his barons. The concessions in the Magna Carta were granted because the combined military power of the barons outstripped that of the king. At this time, ordinary Europeans were subjects of their local lord and bound, by violence and threats of violence, to follow his orders. The Magna Carta was all about liberating and enabling the aristoi, leaving serfs as serfs. And so it went.

The Jesuits happened to contact Americans who were actually free in the way that modern Europeans living in America can only dream of. Every adult Algonquin person was sovereign, within the general limits of their culture. Unlike European leaders who commanded obedience through violence, American leaders had to persuade people to follow them. And the people were free to not follow them. At the same time, no member of an Algonquin tribe would ever let another go hungry, let alone live in poverty and squalor over the long term. They looked after each other.

Moreover, the Jesuits recorded that the Algonquins saw Europeans as obnoxious, avaricious, violent, and cruel to each other (they saw them accurately, in other words). The Algonquins were completely unimpressed by European "civilisation". And they had little or no interest in having Yahweh/Jehovah or Europeans as their masters. They bowed to no one. As free people, the Algonquin resisted conversion to christianity because conversion meant loss of freedom.

These ideas filtered through the Jesuit publications into the new salons of Paris, where they were discussed and were eventually taken up by romantic intellectuals like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788). Liberalism also owes a great deal to the romanticism of the ruling classes.

However, European liberalism was not like indigenous American freedom. The problem was that the intellectual class were of the ruling class or were their enthusiastic servants. Liberals were, on the whole, fully behind imperialism and colonialism. European liberals sought to ensure the liberty of the plutoi, leaving the working people untouched. As Bertrand Russell put it:

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

The founding fathers of the US republic were profoundly influenced by liberalism and romanticism. But at heart, they were capitalists/plutocrats. Many of the men who asserted "all men were created equal" owned slaves. They certainly didn't include Africans or native Americans under the rubric of "all men". They also excluded all women from "all men". At the time, they also excluded men who didn't own land. All men were created equal, it's just that wealthy, land-owning European men were more equal in the sense that only they got to vote in the USA. And that is "classical liberalism" in a nutshell.

It's worth citing the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on nineteenth-century liberalism, since it perfectly summarises the endpoint of classical liberalism and laissez-faire capitalism. Britannica is famed for taking a neutral point of view.

The Britannica editors note that the catastrophic effects of classical liberalism were apparent by the end of the nineteenth century. The concentration of vast wealth in the hands of a few plutocrats had three detrimental effects.

1. The majority failed to benefit from the wealth flowing from factories and instead lived in poverty in vast slums. With all the attendant social problems that poverty and slums cause.
2. The economic model of capitalism created cycles of boom and bust.
3. The wealthy corrupted the political system, using their wealth to buy political influence and favours. They ended up controlling the government, manipulating an inchoate electorate, limiting competition, and obstructing substantive social reform.

What the Britannica editors do not say is that this was not accidental. As we have seen, capitalism is based on the cycle of boom, bust, and quit. We've also seen that capitalists despised workers and subscribed to the utility of poverty doctrine. Plutocrats wanted a political system to support their exploitative mindset and lifestyle, and to justify and facilitate their commodification of people. Since neither the aristocracy nor the working class wanted capitalists to have political power, they obtained it by using their wealth to subvert politics.

Classical liberalism ended with the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. These catastrophes were a searing indictment of the failures of capitalism. To be fair, post-war governments put measures in place to prevent a recurrence. However, by the end of the 1980s, all such measures had been decried for holding capitalism back and repealed.

Somewhat ironically, the collapse of classical liberalism led to an expansion of the franchise and civil rights. Women got the vote. The Civil Rights movement was born. Environmentalism was born. Anticipating the end of this story, one important aspect of neoliberalism was to undermine this expansion of rights where it impinged on profits. Gay marriage does not subtract from the bottom line, hence it is allowed (despite the objections of the powerful christian lobby in the US). Environmentalism, by contrast, does seek to limit the activities of capitalists; it does subtract from the bottom line, and so it is constantly under attack by capitalists.

Nonetheless, the liberal ideology continued to hold sway amongst the plutoi and their allies, the technologists, or technoi.

We sometimes call technologists "technocrats". This is problematic since the -crat part means "ruler". Just as the aristoi no longer rule, so it makes no sense to continue speaking of "aristocrats" or "the aristocracy"; the technoi are not technocrats. They do, however, make common cause with plutocrats. However, as Elon Muck amply demonstrated during his brief tenure in the Trump administration, the technoi are not team players, they cannot handle compromise, and they don't understand politics. The technoi rule their tech companies just as feudal lords ruled their fiefs. And since WWII and the Manhattan Project, they draw heavily on public funds for research (see Is Physics a Scam?).

The contribution of the technoi to capitalism has been: (1) opening up new frontiers for the plutoi to exploit, (2) minimising the workforce by replacing humans with machines, and (3) inventing news ways for people to kill each other (especially weapons of mass-destruction).

The industrialisation of Europe was born from the symbiosis of capital and technology. This is similar to the relationship that existed between the lords and priests prior to capitalism.

A major terminological problem occurs with "liberal" in the 21st century. As capitalism took hold and societies changed to accommodate it, certain (often religious) liberals were appalled by the effects of poverty, corruption, and instability. This did not shake their faith in capitalism, but it did prompt them to practice a kind of charity.

Liberals strongly believe in individualism and competition (i.e. setting people against each other). As such, they tend to deny the existence of systemic problems and see all problems as individual problems, which can be solved through competition. As Thatcher once said, "There is no such thing as society". Thus liberals see systemic poverty—a built-in feature of capitalism—and they blame individual poor people for their condition ("the poor are lazy and feckless"). This is an example of the bias that social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error.

Liberal charity is aimed at individuals. And it aims to help the poor to help themselves to become "productive". That is to say, when someone falls out of the capitalist system, for whatever reason, the bleeding heart liberal aims to stuff them back in.

Something similar happened with climate change. Rather than address systemic problems at the systemic level, the responsibility has been foisted on individuals with stupid ideas like "personal carbon footprint". Thus, people are falling over themselves to recycle plastic, while supermarkets increasingly sell plastic crap and cover every product with layers of plastic packaging.

Worse, "plastic recycling" often amounts to merely exporting plastic waste to the developing world. Personal recycling cannot solve the systemic problems we have with the overproduction and overuse of plastics. I can remember a world in which no food came wrapped in plastic. So I know that using plastic in this way is not necessary. It's a choice made anonymously within very large corporations for which the bottom line is the only thing they care about.

This form of liberalism, which acknowledges systemic problems but tries to solve them with individual acts of charity, is sometimes called "social liberalism". I call it "bleeding heart liberalism", a pejorative term that was common when I was a kid but has generally gone out of use. To be fair, if it wasn't for bleeding heart liberal christians, I'd be homeless (another reason this isn't a "buddhist hot take").

Systemic problems cannot be solved individually or by individual acts of charity that leave the system untouched. Systemic problems have to be addressed systematically.

Following the Great Depression, classical liberalism disappeared from the world. However, the term "liberal" remained in use for bleeding-heart liberals. Especially in the USA, "liberalism" became synonymous with acts of charity and the government equivalent, i.e. "welfare". Since it expresses concern for the poor and aims to solve problems through individual acts of charity, this remnant of liberalism came to be considered "left-wing" despite the ongoing support for capitalism amongst bleeding heart liberals. Since capitalism is the "right-wing" of politics, anyone who thinks capitalism is a good idea is, ipso facto, on the right of politics. There is no substantial left-wing in the US but they still use the terms "left" and "right" in their own way.

Classical liberalism failed on a massive scale and was discredited. Liberals faded from view and were, by and large, absorbed into conservative political parties. As a result, the label "liberal" came to be exclusively associated with bleeding heart liberalism (capitalism plus charity). And yet the ideology of liberalism continued to obsess capitalists. Behind the scenes, liberalism mutated into what liberals themselves initially called neoliberalism. Before diving into that topic, we need to look at another change that capitalists made to society.

Capitalism and Class

We have seen that capitalism is based on colonial looting. That is to say, the privatisation, commodification, and exploitation of shared resources (including people) until they are exhausted. Boom, bust, quit; repeat.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, concerted resistance to capitalism began to emerge. Notably, labour unions and the labour movement emerged as a political force in Europe, before being killed off in the neoliberal revolution a century later.

The most famous critic of capitalism is, of course, Karl Marx (we almost always forget about his writing partner Friedrich Engels). I don't want to dwell too much on Marx. He was a pioneer, but in my view, while he was right about capitalism, he was wrong about history and communism. At the same time, we cannot simply ignore Marx.

Marx's criticisms were rooted in the European conception of society stratified into relatively fixed classes of people that Marx called the bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. In ancient Rome, according to the traditional division of the state, the proletarius was one of the propertyless people, exempted from taxes and military service, who served the state only by having children (Latin proles is cognate with prolific). According to Marx, capitalists saw physical labour as the only contribution of the working class to society.

In the UK, the most common terms for the three classes were upper, middle, and lower. The hierarchy is more explicit in the vernacular. The "upper class" rule, "the middle class" administer and conduct commerce, and the "lower class" (aka "the working class") physically labour in service to the upper class.

The European class system is predicated on the idea that the wealthy deserve to be pampered, while the poor deserve to be deprived. And the middle class arrange for both.

We can generalise that the upper classes accumulate assets, the middle classes accumulate goods, and the lower classes accumulate problems.

Quite obviously, these divisions are not new but have their roots in feudalism: kings, barons, merchants, and serfs.

Marx, rather naïvely and idealistically, saw the move from feudalism to capitalism as (natural) progress towards a communist utopia. In fact, capitalism maintains aristocratic class distinctions and simply changes the criteria for membership. Newly wealthy capitalists could simply buy political and social influence. The aristoi scorned them as nouveau riche "new money". But imperialism generated vast fortunes, and the capitalists used their new money to dominate politics, side-stepping and then relegating the aristocracy. This, in turn, allowed the plutoi to use the apparatus of the state to serve their interests. The word we use for buying influence is "corruption". A capitalist state is fundamentally corrupt in this sense.

In the 1980s, alongside many other radical changes, the European class system was redefined with just two classes: producers (i.e. capitalists) and consumers. And this doctrine was called consumerism.

One of the most striking aspects of this change was a total redefinition of the value of work. Prior to the 20th century, both church and state had passionately advocated for the moral benefits of hard work. And early economists had allowed that labour added value to resources that contributed to profits.

In the ideology of consumerism, work was downgraded from a source of value to a cost of doing business. Labour became an overhead. And every business seeks to minimise overheads. This means that work now has a negative value in capitalism. If anything, capitalists' resentment towards humanity has only grown, which is why they seek to replace us with machines at every turn.

Now, capitalists are apt to point out that capitalism and consumerism have raised millions of people out of poverty (for some definitions of "poverty"). Setting aside rampant problems like sweatshops and child labour that characterise capitalism in such places, what has really happened to those people?

It's true that many people in so-called "developing countries" now earn more money. However, they are still relatively poor and can only afford inferior products that do not last and do not work well. Moreover, capitalists use their control of mass media to saturate the environment with advertising and brainwash people into buying a load of worthless crap they do not need. They also exploit the lack of regulation in "developing countries" to sell harmful products like tobacco. So more money doesn't necessarily mean "a better life".

Modern advertising uses sophisticated psychological manipulation and propaganda techniques to stimulate desire and discontent. In his film The Century of the Self (2002), BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis talks about how Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud's nephew) used Freud's ideas on the subconscious to sell stuff and influence opinion in the 1920s. His great "success" was convincing women to overcome social convention and take up smoking cigarettes... resulting in millions of unnecessary deaths.

As malignant as this accumulation of crap is, the real evil genius of consumerism is that it pits us against each other. We not only accumulate worthless crap, but we also compete with our neighbours over who has more or better crap. Identity no longer comes from work itself, but is tied up with the crap we accumulate.

At the same time, as David Graeber (2018) pointed out, many people in the modern world do work that makes nothing and contributes nothing to society. He called this phenomenon "bullshit jobs". Most people these days are merely "flunkies, goons, duct-tapers, box-tickers, or task-masters." It's still the case that professionals identify with their job, but for people with bullshit jobs, there's nothing for workers to identify with. They don't do anything of value for society. And these are the people whose jobs are at most risk of being replaced by machines.

So, sure, some previously impoverished people have more money on paper. This doesn't make up for having a job that is completely pointless and a lifestyle that revolves around competitive accumulation of useless crap, which breaks almost immediately and then becomes an eternal source of toxic chemicals in the environment.

We should also note that capitalism has now so adulterated our food and distorted our minds that almost half of the people in wealthy countries are obese and a quarter suffer from mental disorders.

One might ask, at this point, if plutocracy is so awful, how has it lasted for 600 years? Which brings us to the authoritarian dynamic.

The Authoritarian Dynamic

I was never able to study history at school, but I suspect it wouldn't have helped. High school history in the 1970s and early 1980s was all about glorifying the imperialism of the past and the capitalist hegemony of the present.

My first inkling of the importance of history came with the revisionist histories of Aotearoa that began to appear in the mid-late 1980s (after my formal education in the sciences was finished). I had grown up with stories of the glory of Empire. Māori who resisted European colonisation were presented as terrorists rather than the freedom fighters they were. While the Māori were hardly saints, it was the Europeans who brought terror to the "Land of the Long White Cloud". It was the British who were murderous, acquisitive, covetous, underhanded, and savage. The Māori defended themselves vigorously enough that the British government had to send an army of 10,000 men equipped with cannons to subdue them. And notably, under the leadership of christian converts like Te Whiti-o-Rongomai, the Māori pioneered the use of passive and nonviolent resistance. Te Whiti was imprisoned by an act of Parliament. "Perfidious Albion" indeed.

One of the historical questions that my generation were still asking ourselves at the height of the Cold War was how the intelligent and cultured German people could have let the Nazis take over. And yet, this is one of the most studied phenomena in history. Academics from across the social sciences studied the situation, the people, and the history, and produced a range of insights. But almost none of this knowledge reached me until I was middle-aged, and only after the revolt of the elite. Then, as now I suspect, most people understood history through the lens of popular dramas. WWII films were still very popular in my youth.

Perhaps the most striking amongst all my sources for this essay is the long article, simply titled "Authoritarianism", by Karen Stenner for Hope Not Hate magazine in 2020. From this essay, we get a succinct and brilliant summary of why people follow authoritarian leaders.

In her article, Stenner summarises her research into what she calls the authoritarian dynamic. About one-third of the population has the authoritarian personality type. Personality is roughly half nature and half nurture. Those born with this personality are affected by upbringing, peers, education, and culture, but there remains a core of attraction to authoritarianism.

The personality type is associated with low scores on the Big-5 trait of openness to new experiences and low scores on intelligence tests. This correlates with struggling to cope mentally and emotionally with complexity and novelty. Cognitive dissonance that cannot be resolved often results in feelings of aversion.

The result is that people with this personality type favour situations characterised by physical similarity and shared values between group members (group conformity) and by strict adherence to group norms (group authority). Stenner calls this the need for sameness and oneness.

Note that the authoritarian need for sameness is not necessarily sameness over time. For example, traditional conservatives are primarily opposed to change over time. Authoritarians are troubled by physical differences or change over space. An authoritarian will happily support sweeping changes over time, even revolutions, if the goal is sameness and oneness.

Deprived of sameness and oneness, people with the authoritarian personality type feel under threat, and they turn to authoritarian leaders who promise to restore order. Many authoritarians find democracy difficult and puzzling.

It seems to me that authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders have very different personality types. Stenner illuminates the former. For the latter, I turn to Jason Stanley, more on this shortly. Let's stay with followers for now.

Stenner's overview of her own work succinctly explains why many ordinary Germans supported Hitler, why Russians support Putin, why Indians support Modi, and why Americans support Trump. Not only is the support for authoritarianism understandable, it is entirely predictable. The rise of authoritarianism is always preceded by a perceived threat to the normative order that authoritarians crave.

Stenner explains that authoritarianism is not personal. One person losing their house is not a normative threat, while an event like the global financial crisis is a normative threat. And one that many people have not recovered from.

It's tricky, but I think we have to disentangle the authoritarian personality (and the demands it makes on people) from ideologies like racism.

"Race" is an imperialist concept. The idea is that superficial characteristics—especially skin colour—can be used to create a hierarchy with Europeans at the top and Africans at the bottom. Keep in mind the class hierarchy that I've already described and how it was used by capitalists to justify exploiting the poor. Race is also a capitalist discourse. In this case, it is used to justify exploiting people with dark skin, notably the enslavement of millions of Africans over 400 years. The first capitalist ventures, such as Madeira, relied entirely on slave labour from Africa.

While there are smoke screens, the basic concept of race is that the European ruling classes see themselves as the masters and everyone else as their servants. The masters deserve to be pampered, and the servants exist to do the pampering. Race is one of the ugliest, most delusional ideas ever conceived by humans. Racism is a delusion of grandeur amongst the most selfish and violent people in history. The intellectuals who promoted race theory did so to provide legitimation for inhuman behaviours.

Now, I know that there are genuine, ideological racists in the world. But there are a great many people who simply find cultural diversity confusing and uncomfortable without having any ideological commitment to the race delusion. They crave group conformity and find non-conformity threatening. To my mind, this is not racism. It's not ideological. It stems from feelings rather than ideas.

On the other hand, if we simply label all people who resist diversity initiatives as "racists", this is also an ideological position.

I remember the world before political correctness. One of the main insult terms kids in my milieu used was "spastic", which started out as a medical term for cerebral palsy. However, the pejorative use took over. It soon became embarrassing for doctors to refer to someone as "a spastic". So also with the term "cripple", as in "The Crippled Children's Society". "Moron" and "idiot" were also once medical terms and are now only used as insults.

The whole drift of political correctness began as an effort to stop the fortunate from cruelly mocking the unfortunate for their misfortunes using medical terminology. Cruel mockery is an integral part of European imperialism. A "put down" is inherently hierarchical. A great example of this is two of my neighbours who are close friends. But one of them only ever says mean things about the other. If I'm around, that one just continually points out the other's fault to me, while he is standing right there. Relentless mockery and put downs is a common feature of male friendships in Britain and her colonies.

The point is that people with the authoritarian personality type cannot change their personality. So, for example, it's not simply a matter of presenting them with facts as so many liberals believe. Parading examples of diversity before them and shouting "ISN'T THIS GREAT?" won't change their minds. Celebrations of diversity are anathema to someone who craves sameness.

Here's an analogy. I don't like raw tomatoes. There is no fact you could tell me that would change this. No amount of watching other people enjoy eating raw tomatoes will change my view. No amount of mocking or shaming me will make me like tomatoes. Forcing me to eat tomatoes or threatening me with violence if I do not eat them will not help. I have been subjected to all of these measures with respect to tomatoes, and I still find the texture and taste utterly repulsive. At the end of the day, I don't like tomatoes unless they are thoroughly cooked, heavily seasoned, and pureed. Tomato soup is fine, and tomato sauce (aka "ketchup") is excellent.

De gustibus non est disputandum ("There is no arguing with taste") and all that.

So also for authoritarians who do not like diversity and individualism. The methods we currently use to try to force them to change—including coercion, shame, and mockery—don't work and won't work. The harder we try these methods, the more they see us as a threat, and the more they look for an authoritarian leader to "restore order".

While Stenner's perspective is fresh and sums up the situation succinctly, we've known a lot of this for decades. Many scholars studied the Nazis with a view to avoiding this situation. But capitalists and technologists are not interested in history. So they are creating the conditions for fascism all over again. This time, amongst the "allies".

The Recapitulation of Fascism for the Modern World.

The Neoliberals

Following the Great Depression and WWII, Europe and the USA went through periods of prosperity, though they took significantly different forms.

In the UK, the Labour movement saw socialists gaining political power and founding institutions to help workers. Universal, government-funded healthcare was one of the great achievements of this period.

In Western Europe, post-war rebuilding aimed to create a more united Europe that would not go to war on that scale ever again. And international commerce was seen as essential to this process. The idea would eventually manifest as the European Union, a partially federalised Europe envisaged by capitalists for capitalists, and dedicated to the free movement of capital, goods, services, and people.

Eastern Europe fell under the sway of Stalin's monstrous totalitarian regime. This only helped capitalists by providing them with a stick with which to beat socialists.

WWII was fought in Europe and Asia. Apart from Pearl Harbour, there were no attacks on American soil. The US government commandeered most of the industrial capacity of the US for the war effort. After the war, the factories went right back to making cars and fridges without a gap. There was no rebuilding of whole cities that had been carpet-bombed or nuked. The USA began to expand rapidly. On the whole, work was plentiful and workers were paid enough to live on.

The future looked to be progressive on both sides of the Atlantic. We honestly believed that things would only get better. But something dark was brewing.

In 1938, amongst the many Viennese intellectuals fleeing Nazism, were Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. The pair had attended the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, which aimed to revive interest in liberalism, while at the same time distancing themselves from the abject failures of classical liberalism, also known as laissez-faire capitalism. They called themselves "neoliberals".

Friedrich Hayek, like Hobbes before him, based his worldview on having lived through a terrible period of war across Europe and having emerged from it with a dismal view of humanity. Hobbes argued that a tyrant was necessary to impose order on an unruly humanity. Hayek was more concerned with avoiding tyranny. He took the rather perverse view that any capitulation to the group inevitably leads to citizens becoming enslaved by a tyrant. Hayek's book propounding this theory—The Road to Serfdom—was a bestseller. Von Mises' book Bureaucracy made much the same argument.

One has to admire the hutzpah of a European intellectual who can completely ignore the long history of class-ridden, imperialist and colonialist Europe and blame "collectivism" for European tyranny.

The Road to Serfdom is the core text of the neoliberal movement. It is still widely read, or at least talked about, by neoliberals. The neoliberals advocated for radical individualism amongst the world's wealthy and powerful. The idea that government should not "interfere" in matters of commerce was especially important.

Hayek and his wealthy backers formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. This became a model for hundreds of neoliberal think tanks, with seemingly endless funds, churning out neoliberal propaganda for the mass media and "lobbying" (i.e. threatening and bribing) politicians.

Having initially called themselves "neoliberals", the neoliberals consciously dropped this term or any label for their views. Part of their strategy was to present their ideological program as being free of ideology. Monbiot and Hutchinson call it the "invisible doctrine". The opening lines of their book are

Imagine that the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of Communism. That's more or less where we find ourselves today. The dominant ideology of our times--that affects nearly every aspect of our lives--for most of us has no name.

However, the lack of a clear term for these ideas was no impediment. By the late 1970s, the mainstream of politics was convinced by neoliberalism and was presenting it as necessary and inevitable. Thatcher was elected in 1979 and declared that there was "no alternative"to but sweeping social and economic reforms in line with neoliberal ideology. Many people still accept that there was and is no alternative.

As with the classical liberal catastrophe at the end of the 19th century, neoliberalism has resulted in the concentration of wealth amongst a tiny group of people. It has led to increasing inequality and declining standards of living for most. Political corruption—in the sense of using wealth to buy influence—now completely dominates the political scene in the USA and is a major problem everywhere. Economic instability is increasing, with massive adverse effects like the global financial crisis.

That is to say, the problems caused by neoliberalism are more or less identical to the problems caused by classical liberalism. Only now the liberal grip on power is much stronger. Society is increasingly atomised. People are increasingly alienated. Most people do jobs that contribute nothing to their community. Standards of living are declining.

In the neoliberal revolution, shared resources (often developed using taxes) were unilaterally privatised to benefit the wealthy. Governments legislated to curb the power of unions. Post-war rules to prevent another Great Depression were deprecated, and the finance industry massively expanded (consumer credit became a new source of rent seeking).

At the same time, bleeding heart liberals have taken up the cause of promoting diversity, and freedom of movement has seen more and more people eager to migrate to rich countries.

People with the authoritarian personality type experience this as a perfect storm. The need for sameness and oneness is not being met. They are confronting multiple normative threats: diversity, economic decline, and immigration. So they are now supporting authoritarian leaders.

I have no defence against the charge that this is a "conspiracy theory". But lest we think this is all "leftist" sour grapes, I will now give an outline of a key document from the other side of the argument.

Free Enterprise and Propaganda

We get an early view of the neoliberal mindset in the form of a memo titled Attack on American Free Enterprise System, written to the US Chamber of Commerce by (future Supreme Court Associate Judge) Lewis Powell (1971). Powell saw socialism as an obvious threat, but he's quick to point out that US socialist groups are tiny and have little influence. Rather, he notes...

The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.

As we noted above, fascists target intellectuals because they are the canaries down the mine. Intellectuals are often the first to notice fascism and call it out. They have also led calls to prevent the poisoning and destruction of the natural environment (which particularly annoyed Powell).

Powell identifies Ralph Nader as the archetype of the liberal intellectual who poses the greatest threat to the business community. Nader's "attacks" consisted of such nefarious activities as lobbying for US car manufacturers to include safety features in cars to prevent deaths. As the Britannica article on Nader notes, "[General Motors] went to exceptional lengths to discredit Nader, including hiring a private detective to follow him."

But Powell is also dismayed by the "apathy" and passivity of the business community in the face of such "attacks". And he mentions General Motors by name in this context. The fact that GM did include safety features in their cars is portrayed as a capitulation to those who would ruin America.

Powell continues the theme of being "under attack" by repeated use of war metaphors:

"businessmen have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it."

And portrays the situation as a fight to the death:

The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival — survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.

Having established the idea of the wealthy and powerful being "under attack" and "fighting for survival", most of the memo is an outline of a comprehensive program for conservative businessmen (i.e. fascists) to take control of the USA and impose their values on the nation. Powell sees the Chamber of Commerce itself as having a leading role in coordinating the war effort.

Powell returns to the university campus as a particularly problematic arena. He allows that "Liberal" ideas are essential for a balanced point of view. Still, "a priority task of business — and organizations such as the Chamber — is to address the campus origin of this hostility".

Powell's solution is for businessmen to take a more active role on campus. The Chamber of Commerce should seek to appoint sympathetic academics (to provide "balance"). They should have a roster of business-oriented public speakers and an agency to promote them. Such speakers should demand equal time (to socialists and liberals). Moreover, they should actively seek to control what textbooks say. In classic Orwellian doublespeak, he says:

"In a democratic society, this [censorship] can be a constructive process and should be regarded as an aid to genuine academic freedom and not as an intrusion upon it."

Which is to say... "censorship is freedom". Moreover, businessmen should take their message to the people:

"The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance."

Businessmen should be thinking of flooding the airwaves with pro-business propaganda. Through TV, radio, the press, scholarly journals, books, pamphlets, and advertising. He suggests that businessmen devote 10% of annual advertising budgets to propaganda.

In a classic fascist move, Powell plays the victim:

Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders.

This was never true in the USA, let alone in the 1960s. As well as urging concerted political activism, Powell suggests making more use of the courts to protect business interests. He notes that "Labor unions, civil rights groups and now the public interest law firms are extremely active in the judicial arena." And their successes were "detrimental to business".

Powell proposes radicalising shareholders:

The question which merits the most thorough examination is how can the weight and influence of stockholders — 20 million voters — be mobilized to support (i) an educational program and (ii) a political action program.

At the same time as denigrating labour unions, Powell suggests that shareholders "form a union" so that their collective power can be more effectively mobilised on behalf of business. As if the Chamber of Commerce was not already playing that role.

While Powell constantly invokes the idea of "balance", his desire for power cannot be disguised.

There should be no hesitation to attack the Naders, the Marcuses and others who openly seek destruction of the system. There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.

The irony ought to be apparent. We now take safety features in motor vehicles, like seat belts, for granted. But more than this, safety features not only saved lives, but they proved to be incredibly popular, to the point where they are now a major selling point.

Powell acknowledges that his proposed war on environmentalism and consumer protection would require a massive expansion of the staff and budget of the Chamber of Commerce. So much for small government.

Right at the end, Powell pivots away from the threat being against "free enterprise" and seeks to make it seem more fundamental.

The threat to the enterprise system is not merely a matter of economics. It also is a threat to individual freedom.

In his view, government regulation of business—such as mandated safety features in cars to prevent deaths, or banning smoking as a public health measure—threatens individual freedom. He is obviously invoking Hayek's conclusion in The Road to Serfdom at this point. He's unironically saying that people can only be free under capitalism: the ideology that almost entirely wiped out indigenous Americans and enslaved millions of Africans for over 400 years.

The irony here is that the USA has always been an authoritarian state. When Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom, the American South still operated an apartheid system which unconstitutionally used state laws to remove Constitutional rights from US citizens based solely on skin colour.

And yet, despite the neoliberal revolution, which saw businessmen take full control of the US government, the USA has still ended up as an authoritarian state. As Bertrand Russell said:

"Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate."

The Powell Memo does two things. (1) It shows that the seeds of the neoliberal revolution substantially predate Reagan and Thatcher. And (2), it shows that the agenda of US businessmen was always an expression of a fascist mindset. We now need to explore fascism in more detail.

How Fascism Works

Jason Stanley has spent his academic career studying fascism. His book for the popular market, How Fascism Works, outlines ten (overlapping) strategies that fascist leaders follow. Stanley recently announced that he is so concerned about the rise of fascism in the USA that he is emigrating to Canada (to take up a long-standing job offer). Two of his colleagues at Yale are following suit.

I find Stanley very helpful in his own right, but I also reinterpret his ideas in the light of Karen Stenner's. So, for example, I would say that fascist leaders leverage existing threats to the normative order, or manufacture them, in a calculated bid to activate the authoritarian response and gain the support of people with the authoritarian personality. They may not frame it in these terms, but this is what happens.

Each of Stanley's ten standard operating principles is illustrated with examples from recent political history. Contemporary fascists such as Trump, Putin, Modi, Bolsonaro, and Orban feature prominently. However, for my purposes, we can condense this to just three headings:

• The Mythic Past and Victimhood
• They Are Not Like Us
• Active Measures

The term fascism comes from the Italian fascio, literally "a bundle", but figuratively any group or association, and especially "a brotherhood". The Italian fascists, led by Mussolini, became the prototype for the category. But we should not think that the fascist mindset was invented in 1930s Italy. In 2025, fascism is used as a general term that applies to anyone with that same mindset, including past instances that predate the Italian Fascist Party, such as the British Empire.

Broadly speaking, Stanley associates fascism with "the politics of them and us". Others define fascism as a combination of features such as nationalism, racism, and violence. Fascism requires that citizens serve the state, not the other way around. This makes more sense in the light of Stenner's observation that authoritarians crave sameness and oneness.

The Mythic Past and Victimhood

The first step for a fascist leader is to construct an idealized and romanticized narrative (or myth) about the past greatness of the nation. In Stenner's terms, this grandiose mythic past must include the idea that we had greater oneness and sameness in the past.

The fascist leader also identifies a cause for the decline, i.e. a scapegoat. The scapegoat is always a minority group of people living within the nation. As Stanley says, fascism is "the politics of us and them". Where "they" are the enemy within; they represent a threat to sameness and oneness; they divide us; they dilute us; they reduce us. In Stenner's terms, they undermine our sameness and oneness. And this rhetoric is one that very much appeals to authoritarians since they value sameness and oneness. Any kind of difference can become a threat to the normative order.

Since the scapegoat group are portrayed as the agents of decline, this puts the society itself in the passive role, i.e. victims of the scapegoat group. They are ruining it for us. We encountered this in the Lewis Powell memo, which characterises the most wealthy and powerful men on the planet as powerless and under attack from malevolent people like Ralph Nader and Greta Thunberg.

Trump perfectly exemplifies this. He spent the years 2020-2024 complaining that the election he lost was actually stolen by the Democrats. He was a victim of the nefarious "deep state". He was a victim of the courts. He was a victim of "never-Trumpers". He was a victim of the Washington elite. He was a victim first of the liberal media, then the Murdoch media. And so on. Always a victim.

Yet, at the same time, Trump presents himself as a winner, a strong man, a smart man, a rich man, a successful man. For such a man, self-identifying as a victim might seem counterintuitive. And he routinely portrayed Biden (who won the 2020 election) as ineffectual, weak, stupid, and unsuccessful. The contradiction seems not to bother his followers.

Remember that Trump's audience have suffered declining living standards and substantial changes in social mores for at least two generations. Notably, many of the social changes involve highlighting differences and individualism rather than sameness and oneness.

So Trump was saying, "I'm one of you. I'm a victim of the same nefarious forces that have ruined your lives. It's personal for me too. And, if you vote for me, I'll be in a position to stop those forces and make America great again." And this obviously struck a chord with tens of millions of Americans.

Part of the point of this self-identification as a victim is to foster a "cult of the leader" in which people identify the leader with the nation. The idea on offer is that we're all in the same boat; therefore, what's good for Trump is good for America. Allegiance to the USA becomes allegiance to Trump, and all of his many crimes are forgiven.

In the case of the USA, we also have to factor in evangelical christians and their radicalization by Ronald Reagan and the televangelists. Stanley, who is Jewish, tends to downplay the role of christianity in US fascism.

American christians have their own version of the "once great people" myth. The early colonists were certainly religious fanatics, and they are often portrayed as fleeing religious persecution (which is partly true). Early colonial rhetoric was full of biblical imagery: a city on a hill, a covenant people, and so on. This romantic view of America as "the promised land" and Americans as Jehovah's chosen people persists. In evangelical circles, however, America is increasingly seen as having fallen from covenant nation to corrupt empire. In this view, the US once had divine favour (like biblical Israel), but has become decadent, idolatrous, sexually immoral, and militarily oppressive (like biblical Babylon), and so now it faces divine judgment.

Apparently, some American christians see Trump as playing the role of Cyrus the Great, who founded the Achaemenid Empire. In their mythology (as distinct from Persian history and archaeology), Cyrus was the king who conquered Babylon and freed the Jews from captivity, allowing them to return to Jerusalem and build a new temple on the site of the old Temple of Solomon (destroyed by the Babylonians ca 586 BCE). Of course, other christians see him as antichrist (more on this below).

The irony of such religious narratives is that, in fascist India, it is the "hindus" that are the "chosen people" and it was European christians who (along with Indian muslims) led India into decadence and decline. Their view is that, only by purging the outside influences and restoring "hindu purity" can the nation flourish. Classic fascism.

They Are Not Like Us

As we saw above, authoritarians like to draw a hard and fast distinction between "them" and "us" and to prioritise "us" (oneness/group authority). Blaming "them" for all our problems. Fascist leaders take this one step further by making a horizontal distinction between us and them into a vertical, hierarchical distinction.

We are not simply different from them; we are better than them. Compare this delusion to the racist delusion described above. Humans, like all other social mammals, naturally form hierarchical groups. People have different capacities, and these lead us to have different roles in our community. Fascists weaponize such differences.

Stanley, rather laboriously, draws out this theme over at least three chapters:

• We are law-abiding, they are criminals (Chp 7);
• We are normal, they are perverts (Chp 8);
• We are the salt of the earth and come from the rural heartland, they are urban libertines and hedonists" (Chp 9).

To this list, we need to add something that Stanley left off:

• We are believers, god's chosen people; they are apostates, heretics, idolaters, and heathens.

European ideas about race and class encapsulate the weaponization of difference. The basic idea of race is that Europeans with their pale skin (aka "the white race") are naturally superior to people with brown skin ("the black race"). This is, on the face of it, a very stupid idea. It runs counter to the many cultural warnings we have against such superficiality:

• Don't judge a book by its cover
• Beauty is skin deep.
• All that glitters is not gold.
• Appearances can be deceiving.
• All fur coat and no knickers
• Still waters run deep.
• The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

The fact that we have so many ways of making this point is indicative of how important we think it is. And yet "race" is literally skin-deep.

The subversion of natural hierarchy allows fascists to invoke social Darwinism (which sometimes takes the form of eugenics). Our "natural superiority" ostensibly justifies the violent suppression and oppression we seek to impose on them. And (in this view) if they die, it's no great loss to us; indeed, it makes it easier for us to take their land and resources for ourselves.

Conspiracy theories are aimed at exactly these kinds of narratives: e.g. Obama was born in Africa, the Democratic party is a secret network of paedophiles, etc. The point of conspiracy theories is not to tell the truth, but to make authoritarians perceive a normative threat from them (whoever they happen to be).

Stanley's final chapter is titled Arbeit Macht Frei "Work makes you free", which was the slogan emblazoned above the gates to the Auschwitz death camp. This chapter largely rehearses the "them and us" message of earlier chapters with more focus on Nazi attitudes to the Jews. It doesn't actually talk much about work. Instead, it's about how fascist ideology glorifies a mythologized version of "hard work" to stigmatize and exclude groups deemed lazy, parasitic, or undeserving (e.g. minorities, immigrants, welfare recipients). The function of this rhetoric is to reinforce nationalist and racial hierarchies, not to promote a genuine work ethic. And as we have seen, the ruling classes of Europe have seen working people as lazy and undeserving for at least 600 years.

Active Measures

Having created the romanticized myth of past greatness, identified a scapegoat group within society to blame for the decline, identified the leader as a personal victim of the scapegoat group, and highlighted how they are not like us, fascists then go into action.

"Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language." (p.36)

As above, this is drawn out over several chapters, e.g. 2 Propaganda, 3 Anti-intellectual, 4 Unreality.

All governments employ propaganda. We all go from cradle to grave saturated in it. Most of us never notice.

Fascist propaganda is less about persuading people to adopt fascism and more about distorting reality and confusing public discourse. This serves two purposes: demonising the scapegoat (emphasising the us/them dichotomy) and undermining resistance.

While the gold standard of propaganda has long been the Nazi regime, the emergence of Putin in Russia was marked by a new extreme form of propaganda. Putin's propaganda chief, Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov, studied theatre direction before going into the advertising business and then politics.

Surkov set out to undermine the very idea of truth. More than anyone, it was his ideas that led us to the present "post-truth era". He did this, for example, by creating and funding fake opposition groups that he later exposed.

A key tactic was to have the Russian state media present wildly contradictory statements about events. For example, when Russia was annexing Crimea in 2014, Russian news both denied that any Russian troops were in Ukraine and, at the same time, celebrated the bravery of Russian soldiers in Ukraine. Surkov also said things like "Ukraine doesn't exist". More recently, we witnessed Russian fascists claiming to be protecting ethnic Russians in Ukraine from Ukrainian fascists.

An example from the USA is Trump's ongoing claim not to have lost the 2016 Presidential election.

As the very concept of truth is degraded and no one can tell what the facts are, it becomes impossible to have a proper public debate. After decades of this, we find ourselves in the "post-truth world".

These days, many Americans and Europeans are confused. They constantly fall prey to spammers, scammers, and sock-puppets. Experts who love to tell us what to think, say, and eat seem to constantly change their minds and contradict their own advice. Priests turn out to be paedophiles. Technologists replace humans with robots. Plutocrat politicians routinely lie, prevaricate, and talk like automatons. No one knows who to trust because no one in public life is trustworthy.

The first line of defence against fascism is intellectuals like the authors I am considering in this essay. Intellectuals are usually the first to notice what is happening and speak out against it. They can cut through the fog of propaganda to expose what is really going on.

Fascist leaders foster distrust of intellectuals for this reason. These efforts are supported by those who benefit from fascism. For example, Shell and other large oil companies clearly knew in the 1970s that burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming and climate change. However, they continued to fund anti-climate change propaganda, which has helped to undermine efforts to get governments to respond to the threat. Many other examples could be cited. They result is paralysis in the face of impending disaster.

Stanley's book uses many examples to illustrate how authoritarian leaders manipulate people, events, and images to mobilise authoritarian followers. Either they intuit how to do this, or they understand people in the same way that Stenner does. Because we can see them working to create the impression of a threat to the normative order and the fascist leader as just the man to restore it.

There is another problem that is specific to religious countries, like the USA. In the USA, the fundamentalist christians have their own peculiar authoritarian agenda related to Biblical prophecy. In evangelical christianity, “the Apocalypse” usually refers to the end-times scenario drawn mainly from the Book of Revelation. It is framed as Jehovah’s final intervention in history, where:

• The world undergoes escalating turmoil (wars, disasters, the rise of the antichrist).
• Jesus returns (the second coming) in glory to defeat evil and establish God’s kingdom.
• There is a final judgment, separating the saved from the damned.

The problem is literalism. Many American evangelicals treat the Bible as the literal "word of Jehovah". The prophecy is not just symbolic; it literally spells out future events. And some christians take it one step further by intervening to make prophecy come true in order to speed things along. As well as making common cause with Jewish Zionists in Palestine and supporting the genocide of the Palestinians, they are also indifferent to systemic problems like climate change. If Jesus is poised to come and defeat evil, one need not bother to do anything about it. One might even choose to vote for the antichrist, since his rise is necessary to fulfil prophecy. At least some of the evangelicals who voted for Trump are actively trying to initiate the prophesied apocalypse.

There is no doubt that fascism is now a powerful force in global politics. Brazil voted Bolsonaro out, but Putin, Modi, Orban, and Trump are all still in place. Fascist political movements are distorting politics right across the European Union and the UK. The religiously inspired fascism of the USA is particularly troubling because the goal of evangelicals is nothing less than the end of the world.

Summary

The roots of the zeitgeist are to be found in the history of European imperialism. In particular,

• The capitalist revolution (16th-18th century), industrialisation (19th century) and the neoliberal revolution or revolt of the elite (20th-21st century).
• European imperialism and the violent quest to capture and exploit the resources of other people.
• Slavery and racism.
• Hobbesian and mercantilist cynicism about humanity and the value of work.
• Liberalism and the liberal elite's fetishization of individualism, diversity, competition, secularism, utilitarianism, and commerce.
• The authoritarian dynamic: followers desperately seeking sameness and oneness, and wealthy demagogues who promise to provide it (at the cost of abandoning democracy and liberty).

The reality is that European feudalism and religion gave way to plutocracy and technology, not to democracy and liberty. What passes for democracy is nothing more than a fig-leaf for the military-industrial complex. What we have is not rule "by the people for the people", it is rule by the wealthy for the wealthy. We exchanged lords and priests for plutocrats and technologists. And in this world, everyone is expected to work for capitalism.

We are ruled by a cabal of wealthy men who despise and resent us and replace us with machines whenever possible. The makers of machines, the technoi, don't seem to care who funds their research or what is done with it. And yes, it is a conspiracy. Lewis Powell makes this abundantly clear.

Capitalism requires ever-expanding frontiers to exploit. Technologists have helped to expand what counts as a resource, and they have found ways to further commodify human beings via "social media". We are now running into the limits of expansion and close to exhausting the capacity of the Earth to sustain us. The promise of social media bringing us together has been buried in the avalanche of intrusive advertising, which uses our personal information to better target us for manipulation (a process known as enshittification).

Moreover, as Jason Moore says, capitalism marries capitalism and warfare. The main job of the US military is to protect the commercial interests of the USA. The US have toppled more democratically elected governments than they have held presidential elections. They emphatically do not "spread democracy", the USA spreads tyranny.

A sizeable minority (~ ⅓) of the population craves sameness (group conformity) and oneness (group authority) and cannot change this. Authoritarians view diversity and individualism as inconvenient at best and pathological at worst. They prefer sameness and oneness to democracy and liberty. Fascists understand how to mobilise this minority.

Confronted with difference and individualism, authoritarians experience cognitive dissonance and aversion. This is not an opinion, it's more like an instinct. They are born that way and cannot "change their minds" about it. They do not see increasing diversity as progress; they see it as decline.

Denied sameness and oneness, people with the authoritarian personality type or disposition look to authoritarian leaders who promise to restore order.

The capitalism-technology axis is almost guaranteed to lead to fascism, since it aims to atomise society and to disempower and alienate individuals. And this is an existential threat to sameness and oneness.

Now What?

This story began with the capitalist revolution in Europe. With Madeira, sugar, and slavery. With imperialism and colonialism. Capitalism is not a separate story. Capitalism only makes sense in the context of European imperialism. Liberalism is the intellectual side of capitalism: the justification for individualism, utilitarianism, and overemphasis on competition. It's all tied up with the contrary notions of inherent European superiority and the need to legitimise the vicious habits of the ruling classes: i.e. war, genocide, wholesale theft, and so on.

Capitalism, liberalism, imperialism, and colonialism are all aspects of the same complex phenomenon. Fascism is not something new or separate from this complex. Fascism is a natural and very much expected outcome of capitalism. The very same capitalist nations that opposed fascism in the 20th century now embrace it in the 21st. Former "communist" countries now also embrace fascism, with even China now allowing hoards of personal wealth (which can only be a slippery slope).

Authoritarians support fascism as a means of restoring sameness and oneness. Fascism achieves this by subordinating citizens to the state and subordinating the state to the leader. Minority communities and intellectuals become targets under fascism.

This is not a romantic story. There is no happy ending. Fascism is now the dominant political ideology on Earth. We live in a plutocratic technological dystopia. Humanity is not only facing a whole series of existential threats, but they are threats that capitalism created and which capitalists are determined to prevent us from solving. Because, as Lewis Powell makes clear, solving our environmental problems would impinge on profit-making, and capitalists see this as "an attack" on their way of life. Their response was to wage a war on environmentalists and consumer advocates.

To be honest, I don't see a practical way forward that would fundamentally change things. We are considering an ideology that has risen to the level of world domination. I'm not like those liberals who believe that "pointing out the facts" changes anything. I know that belief is a feeling about an idea. And I know that facts don't generally change how people feel about ideas. I'm also not like those liberals and hippies who see the solution in atomised individual responses to problems. I do not agree with the platitude "before you can change the world, you have you change yourself." Systemic problems cannot be changed by individuals.

However, I think we can at least resist, especially if we make common cause with other people who think as we do. Which is, after all, how the capitalists took over the world.

I see two main ways to resist.

• Collectivity
• Compromise

Collectivity

To my mind, it's important to emphasise that humans are an obligately social species. Humans evolved, over millions of years, to live in communities. A few of us prefer solitude, but I suspect that there is always a reason for this: very often, traumatic experiences. The bottom line is that humans are a social species.

All social mammals are prosocial. We all have the same capacity for empathy and reciprocity that enable us to live in groups characterised by mutual obligations. These capacities and obligations form the basis of morality (including notions of fairness and justice). Belonging is fundamental to humanity.

The most powerful tool that humans have is our ability to cooperate in large groups of unrelated individuals.

With all due respect to my old friend Will Buckingham, xenophilia—the love of strangers—is relatively rare. Authoritarians are xenophobic in the true sense that they fear strangeness; they find difference and individualism taxing, confusing, and annoying.

This suggests that we need to rethink the liberal fetishisation of individualism. Evolutionarily, individualism is a pathology. Ideological individualism leads to the atomisation of society and to the alienation and disempowerment of individuals. Moreover, for authoritarians, individualism is anathema, since it conflicts with their need for oneness.

One idea that seems like it might be fruitful is to de-emphasise individualism and emphasise collectivism. Which of course immediately alienates all capitalists everywhere. But hear me out.

For example, as well as talking about rights (especially the right to be different), we could talk more in terms of mutual obligations. Rights are what others are obliged to grant us. But rights should be balanced by duties, our obligations to other people.

A simple example is that we have legal rights and we are also obliged to follow the law (even if we don't know it!). Although the law is now often so complex that it's difficult to know what it is.

So we might want to discuss and perhaps specify some basic obligations and be prepared to hold people to them.

I think we would do well to curb triumphalism. There's being a good loser, but there's also being a gracious winner. Winners have won, there is no need to then show off or taunt "losers". I think it would help if we rehabilitated values like humility, modesty, and fair play (what we used to call "good sportsmanship").

The whole idea that everything is a zero-sum competition is counterproductive. Rather than rewarding people who can compete well, we should reward people who can cooperate well. But of course, capitalists are never going to approve of this. What they fear is that if we learn to cooperate, we will overthrow them. I agree that this is a possibility. And of course, one that I would love to see become a reality. But I think it's unlikely to happen. Zero-sum competition is integral to capitalism.

It's all very well to have record-breaking athletes, but as professional athletes have pushed the envelope of human capacities, the general population has become obese. Competition doesn't lead to general improvement. Grand spectacles are no substitute for being able to afford to house and feed one's family. Watching professional athletes on TV does nothing to improve one's life. It's a distraction, at best.

The problem with making everything into a competition is that only one person or team can win. The majority are always going to lose. Winners are singular. In a world characterised by zero-sum competitions, almost everyone is a loser.

It's only through collectivism and large-scale cooperation that we are going to solve the many existential crises we presently face. While individualism is normalised, we won't be able to cooperate on a large enough scale.

Compromise

In addition to emphasising cooperation over zero-sum competition, we also need to emphasise compromise as a way to get to a win-win situation.

If people with the authoritarian personality type are, more or less, born that way, then it is unreasonable to expect them to change. Of course, this is precisely the liberal argument about issues like homosexuality. The principle of political correctness is that we should not mock the less fortunate, the afflicted, or the different. I'm saying that some people are afflicted with the authoritarian personality type.

The liberal approach to diversity is to rub the noses of authoritarians in it. To cite ostensibly value-free facts. To keep flaunting it, being triumphalist about progress, and mocking those who resist. We need to be clear that this won't work. All this approach achieves is conflict.

People who cannot change will not change. And expecting or requiring them to change is disastrously stupid. I'm certainly not saying that, say, a Pride Parade is a bad thing. But it's never going to be a thing that everyone gets behind. There are always going to be a sizeable minority who experience such displays as threatening.

This leaves the burden of compromise on those people who are capable of change. It's up to us to propose ways forward. We should not expect the authoritarians to come up with a better plan. Unless we offer them what they consider a good deal, their plan is to support a demagogue. History provides many salutary lessons about ignoring the needs of the people.

One of the major problems with individualism is that we neglect to consider the consequences of our actions on other people. Individualism fosters a sense of entitlement: "It's my right". All of our decisions have impacts on other people that we do need to take into account: if only at the level of the Golden Rule. Contrary to popular opinion, how we treat other people and what they think of us is important.

Moreover, there are no universal values. And if there were, those universal values would not be the elitist values of the liberal/capitalist hegemony. So trying to enforce that particular set of values is nonsensical.

We could relatively easily give authoritarians enough of the sameness and oneness that they need, so that they will rub along with us. But it would not be a progressive solution.

Many people have ideas about how to create a stable and sustainable economy. But the main thing is that we ensure that people who work can support their families. The utility of poverty doctrine breeds fascists.

Coda

Unfortunately, these ideas will likely fall on deaf ears. The hegemonic powers—the military-industrial complex, plutocrats and technologists—are resolutely uninterested in changing the system. They are only interested in profit and conquest. And they have been operating this way for 600 years. Old habits die hard. So rather than turning things around, I fully expect things to continue getting worse. Fascism fosters nationalism, xenophobia, and violence. Fascism almost inevitably leads to war, famine, and plague. Humanity has set a test for itself. And it seems likely to fail catastrophically.

I think the only real hope now is that the coming environmental crisis will finally discredit capitalism and force us to confront our folly. Since this will likely involve the end of civilisation, billions of people dying, and a mass-extinction event, I find it difficult to feel enthusiastic about it.

The great lesson of history is that no one ever learns the lessons of history.

~~Φ~~

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———. (2011). "Madeira, Sugar, & the Conquest of Nature in the ‘First’ Sixteenth Century, Part II: From Local Crisis to Commodity Frontier, 1506-1530." Review 33(1), 1-24.

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