El Uruguay a través de un siglo.

Climbing That Hill

nivtricLeave a comment

Everything I had once believed in suddenly seemed a lie. That was also true for my religion. Losing faith was a gradual process that took several years. I didn’t give up on it on a whim. I had friends in the Christian student club Alpha, and I could discuss the issue with them. In those years, Losing My Religion by REM became a number-one hit. I turned atheist but not hostile to religion. Some people hate religion because of trauma. But no one had forced me. I had chosen to be religious myself. My mother complained that I didn’t take care of myself. She kept telling me I was too skinny and looked like Jesus. And there was a lot to ponder. What is truth? And can we know it? Can we be sure about anything? Nearly every day, I went to the forest near the campus to ponder these questions. For several months, there was no end to doubt. Logic was the last line of defence.

I had been a simple guy, not aware of much. A******* had reproached me for being naive. It seemed imperative to fix that to fix my life. I followed the metaphysics course to learn what it was. It is about the nature of reality. The lecturer discussed ancient Greek philosophers. Some believed that earth, water, air, and fire were the building blocks of nature. Others addressed the nature of truth and what we can know. Then, the lecturer came up with something interesting. If truth doesn’t exist, then that must be true, so truth must exist. The non-existence of truth is logically impossible. At the time, it seemed the discovery of my lifetime. The truth is out there, somewhere, lurking, and it might one day take us all by surprise, which was somehow comforting rather than unnerving.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates sought the truth in his famous dialogues. The sophists were his opponents, the lecturer told us. Using clever tricks, these people made false suggestions. He had an example. A sophist would say to a peasant that he could prove that an empty glass equals a full glass. The peasant wouldn’t believe him. The sophist then challenged him to make a bet. He would ‘prove’ it as follows:

Sophist: ‘A glass half-full is the same as a glass half-empty. Do you agree?’
Peasant: ‘Yes.’
Sophist: ‘If two volumes are equal, and you multiply them both by two, they must still be equal. Do you agree?
Peasant: ‘Yes.’
Sophist: ‘If you multiply half-full by two, you have full, and if you multiply half-empty by two, you have empty, so a full glass is the same as an empty glass.

And so, the peasant lost his money. This sophist lived off defrauding people. The sophists weren’t popular with the general public, the lecturer said. More generally, they were relativists who didn’t believe in absolute truth. They thought the truth merely depends on perspective. Socrates opposed that kind of thinking. The truth is out there. It has always been there, is still there, and will be there. So, what I believed was fickle and could change. If I did my best, I could come closer to the truth. My doubts receded, but the comfortable feeling of certainty was gone forever. Something could always pop up, overthrowing everything I had learned so far. It had happened once. It could happen again.

Socrates believed that investigating matters with an open mind can bring us closer to the truth, and that greater knowledge is progress. In that sense, we have progressed. We can invent things, but forgetting inventions is much harder. That might require measures like burning books and murdering scientists. And we cannot undo our deeds. You can’t return to ignorance or inexperience once you have crossed a line into knowledge or experience. You might call that progress. Somehow, we think we are progressing. But are we? If it all ends in a nuclear Armageddon, it would all be pointless. So,

Making a career before the bomb falls
Working on my future before the bomb falls
I’m running around my schedule before the bomb falls
Safe in the health insurance fund before the bomb falls

And when the bomb falls
I’ll be lying in my suit, diplomas and my cheques in my pocket
My insurance policy and my vocabulary, aww
Under the apartment buildings in the city next to you

Just drop it then, it’ll happen anyway
It doesn’t matter if you run
I never knew you. I want to know who you are
I want to know who you are

Doe Maar, The Bomb

In the second-hand bookstore De Slegte in Enschede, I stumbled upon a booklet about Hegelian dialectic. The cover promised that it would be about progress using arguments. It began by stating that progress arises from a thesis (the current situation), an antithesis (a challenge), and a synthesis (a resolution), so that looked very promising indeed, and that was the reason for buying it. Once I started reading it, and to my great disappointment, it soon turned political. It was about framing questions with particular wording so that the solution would present itself, the book argued.

It looked like a textbook on propaganda, and a communist seemed to have written it. By using words, you define reality. It was also how the sophists operated, so it didn’t seem an honest quest for truth, because the facts don’t depend on the wording. But the question remains: what are the facts? Let’s illustrate the issue with a few examples. You can apply the tactic to the estate tax, like so:

  • You can call it a death tax, thereby implying that governments profit from the death of people, suggesting it is a bad tax, or that the tax is evil.
  • You can call it a parasite tax, thereby implying that the recipients haven’t earned it and suggesting that it is a good tax, or that not having the tax is evil.

People who have worked and saved have already paid taxes on their labour, and if there are wealth taxes, also on their estate. In that sense, it is unfair. Those who receive an inheritance usually haven’t worked for it. In that sense, it is fair. That is the problem with many issues. The opposing sides may seem equally reasonable. And there are practical consequences. Inheritance taxes can ruin family businesses, while not having them can lead to a class of billionaire oligarchs ruling society.

Framing can be misleading. Climate activists label tax breaks that corporations receive on fossil fuels as subsidies. These weren’t subsidies but lower taxes. These tax breaks exist because of competition. Corporations elsewhere don’t pay these taxes either, so a corporation would go bankrupt if it had to pay them. Production would move elsewhere, and nothing would change for the better. Climate is one of the most pressing global issues. The reason to mischaracterise the situation in this manner may be to fire people up by making them angry and inspiring them to take action, but it won’t help.

Hegel’s idea of a hidden truth behind seemingly irreconcilable views greatly helped me. There is a higher truth, and instead of taking a side, you can investigate opposing views and try to resolve them. A resolution is a more profound insight rather than a compromise. It is a brutal process as I have experienced firsthand. We don’t depart from our views unless we have no choice, so we usually do so only after failing utterly and being cornered with no options left but to admit that we are wrong. It is often also unclear who is right, so you can stick to your opinions until you fail. Hegel’s idea is that a competition of ideas drives history, so superior ideas replace inferior ones, and that this may require revolution and warfare. That would be progress, but there can be no progress without a goal.

Hegel envisioned that God’s plan worked like so. We would end up in God’s paradise through progress. That was the goal. In doing so, he laid out the scheme for a dialectical struggle between progressivism and conservatism, leading to achievements such as the end of slavery, workers’ rights, universal suffrage, equality between men and women, equality among races, LGBTQ rights, and the like. That progress came with activism and sometimes with warfare, such as the American Civil War. Marxists and the communists built on Hegel’s scheme and replaced ‘God’s plan’ with ‘historical necessity’, claiming that we would end in a workers’ paradise rather than God’s paradise.

Both sides of an argument represent different realities that can be equally true. One side’s reasoning may appear stupid to the other, and the right choice depends on the weight of the arguments. Hegel was far more important than I realised at the time. His philosophy is a foundational pillar of Western civilisation, and perhaps the only way in which Western civilisation might be universal, as it promises a path towards a world civilisation. At the time, all that eluded me. Still, the idea that opposing arguments both reflect an underlying truth put my mind at ease. I couldn’t live with the idea that there is no truth and only perspective. My previous ideas hadn’t become worthless overnight. They were as true or false as before, and so were my new views. Nothing had changed, except my perspective. The truth exists, and my beliefs are irrelevant. My doubts faded,

You say the hill’s too steep to climb
Chiding
You say you’d like to see me try
Climbing
You pick the place, and I’ll choose the time
And I’ll climb
The hill in my own way
Just wait a while, for the right day
And as I rise above the treeline and the clouds
I look down, hearing the sound of the things you said today

Pink Floyd, Fearless

I came to relate this song to the challenge A******* had given me and conveniently ignored a second part that didn’t seem to fit into the picture,

Fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd, smiling
Merciless, the magistrate turns ’round, frowning
And who’s the fool who wears the crown
Go down in your own way
And every day is the right day
And as you rise above the fear lines in his brown
You look down
Hear the sound of the faces in the crowd

Pink Floyd, Fearless

For nearly a year, thoughts filled my mind. If I had done this or that differently, then things would have turned out differently. After initially being kind, A******* turned hateful within a few weeks. Having been hated all my life and not knowing any better, I accepted it. Yet, the dormitory felt like the place where I belonged. It was Paradise. Only, I didn’t fit in, and that was because of what my life had been like. Living there made me realise that it didn’t have to be that way. My childhood could have been different. At the time, I blamed my parents, but they had done their best. And that was the past, and the past was gone forever, so there was no point in dwelling on that. The future might be better if I changed my ways.

There were notable differences in backgrounds between A******* and me, and somehow they proved an unbridgeable gap. A******* appeared progressive and had lived a cosmopolitan life, while I was conservative and rural, and had not seen much of the world. Nijverdal was a rural area. Art and literature didn’t interest me. The incident foreshadowed a conflict that you can see today in several Western societies. There is a growing disconnect between leftist city people in intellectual jobs and rural people, like farmers, who lead an entirely different life. And so, came to see these cultural differences as a major contributing cause to the most epic disaster of my lifetime.

Until then, culture had seemed a vague concept debated by academics. Suddenly, it became very real to me, making me feel an urgent need to understand people who were different. I had to adapt and fit into various environments. It didn’t come naturally to me. Years later, I found out that I was autistic. And so, studying culture and human conduct became a conscious effort. My intuition had failed me, so I learned to understand differences and cultures by seeing the relationships between what people said and what they did, and by identifying patterns. People with similar backgrounds or properties display identical behaviour. Over time, it made me as good as, if not better than, others at understanding and predicting behaviour. After a few years, that began to show itself.

After finishing her education, my sister had difficulty finding a job. Yet my first application succeeded, and to a great extent, that was due to my understanding of the company’s culture, which allowed me to provide answers that made it appear as if I fit perfectly within the new corporate vision. That was not the case, but I had succeeded in making it seem that way. Despite applying for dozens of positions and being talented in fashion sales, my sister received no job interviews. My mother then asked me to review one of her application letters. The letter was boastful and without substance. For instance, it claimed that she had excellent commercial skills without any evidence to back it up, followed by more bluster without proof. And so, I asked my sister, ‘Where did you get this letter from?’ It came from a friend who had applied to the Dutch telecommunications company KPN. They hired her as a manager.

That made sense. KPN’s recruitment advertisements suggested they were hiring arrogant, boastful people without substance for management positions, which explained why they hired her friend. Most people would reject unsubstantiated bragging. After all, it was the Netherlands, not the United States. It might have worked in Amsterdam, where the cheeky people lived, but not in Arnhem, where my sister was. I told my sister that she could say she had good commercial skills, but should back it up with evidence. She had done an internship, and the company was very pleased with her, so I said, ‘Mention that to back it up, and tell what your job role was and tell about a few things you did.’ She then revised her letter, got interviews, and was hired soon afterwards. And you can see the consequences of not understanding culture. KPN was in a different league because it wanted to shed its dusty government image and play with the big boys in telecom. That didn’t end well, but that is another story.

Dutch public television featured human interest programmes about people living far away. You could learn about how people lived on the Mongolian steppe and their thoughts and beliefs. Minorities like Muslims and Hindus had airtime on Dutch public television, so that you could learn about them as well. Once at the Utrecht Centraal train station, a few Hindus handed me a book containing some of their Vedas. I had never encountered such a hazy prate, except, perhaps, Hans van Mierlo’s, making me quit reading after a few pages. When discussing what had happened at the dormitory with my best friend Arjen, he said, ‘You do not mince words. You say what you think.’ It is a quality that doesn’t help you in life. It can annoy people. Since then, I spoke my mind less often.

Featured image: El Uruguay a través de un siglo. Carlos M Maeso (1910). Public Domain.

The Unnatural State of Paradise

nivtricLeave a comment

A paradise of peace and harmony is an unnatural state and impossible in the real world. As Isaiah once prophesied (Isaiah 11:6-9),

The wolf will live with the lamb.
The leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together.
And a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the cobra’s den.
And the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all of my holy mountain.
For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

The wolf will never let the lamb in peace, nor will the cow and the bear share a meal. It is not in their nature to do so. Despite our efforts to achieve a utopian society, it still eludes us. We have the means to give everyone an acceptable standard of living, but somehow we keep on fighting and fail to make Paradise a reality. It is in our nature.

The struggle for life in nature is brutal and chaotic. In nature, cells cooperate in organisms to compete with other cells. Organisms, as you might know, are plants and animals, and humans are animals. And they cooperate with others to compete with other groups of organisms. As organisms compete, the strongest or most well-adapted survive.

There is a balance in nature, as there is in a market. If the fox preys on the rabbit, the fastest rabbits and the smartest foxes survive. When there is a surplus of rabbits, foxes can catch them and eat them; foxes multiply and eat more rabbits, and the surplus turns into a deficit, and foxes die off.

It is a brutal process in which rabbits get eaten, and foxes starve. The introduction of a new species, such as a viral disease that kills off rabbits, can change the balance. That indeed happened with the help of human interventions. The foxes, being smart animals, adapted and sought other sources of food, often not as speedy as the rabbit.

In this way, the rabbit’s demise sealed the fate of other animals, such as the Nijverdal grouse, which went extinct. It would have been possible to preserve the grouse by shooting foxes. That would create a paradise for the grouse, an unnatural order, so a park rather than nature. Indeed, a Paradise is like a park rather than nature unhinged.

Foreign species can disrupt the balance of nature. Many die off, but some thrive, replacing native species and becoming pests. Humans are the most disruptive species, murdering countless animals and plants to create living space for themselves.

It is a matter of competitive advantage. Humans took over because they could, and their genes, rather than some command in the Bible, drove them to exploit their environments and multiply their numbers. The spread of humans resembles the spread of pests.

When Europeans gained a competitive advantage over others, their genes multiplied and they spread across the world, thereby usurping others’ land. Later, after they had created a paradise for themselves, others came to their lands. While Westerners were busy maximising their utility, the immigrants’ genes took advantage of the situation.

Westerners require spacious housing and perfect spouses and may forego having children to lead a good life, causing their numbers dwindle. Immigrants may settle for small spaces and simple lifestyles, have arranged marriages or don’t marry at all and just have sex and babies. In this way, descendants of immigrants gradually replace the native population.

In both cases, relative advantages and disadvantages disturb the balance. You can compare both situations to the development of a pest. In both cases, it promotes unease among the disadvantaged group, making them feel overrun. The competition between genes drives these feelings. Nature doesn’t care who lives in your country in the future.

We imagine orders and base them on myths. Within these orders, institutions such as laws, police, and courts regulate our affairs peacefully. These orders compete with each other, so the Law of the Jungle still applies. Orders change over time. If they don’t adapt to changing circumstances, they will crumble.

Paradise, in the Hegelian sense, is that social justice causes have run their course, and that everyone is fundamentally equal. It is a world without bigotry, including racism, misogyny and hatred of LGBTQ people. We are xenophobic creatures, so it goes against our inner nature, but culture can go a long way in overcoming our inner urges.

Permanent peace is possible if everyone lives under a single order, shares a common set of values, norms, and rules, and agrees to a social contract to end the competition. It must be a stable situation as if time has stopped. That only happens in fairy tales. Isaiah already said so, ‘For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord.’

Pim Fortuyn on 4 May 2002, two days before his assassination

Troubles in the Multicultural Society

nivtricLeave a comment

Crossroads of civilisation

In several ways, the Netherlands has been ahead of the rest of the world, such as in liberal reforms like gay marriage and the right to decide about ending one’s own life. It was the result of the political manoeuvring of the left-wing liberal party D66 and, most notably, its leader, Hans van Mierlo, who had schemed to make it happen. The Christian Democrats, who had always been in the government, had long blocked progressive reforms. In 1994, after the Christian Democrats had lost the election, D66 forged the purple coalition with the social democrats of the PvdA and the right-wing liberals of the VVD. These parties set aside their differences and focused on their shared progressive values to implement amendments. A large section of the Christian Democrat electorate supported these changes, including most Roman Catholics, so they remained uncontested afterwards.

The Netherlands is one of the least nationalist countries. In their preparedness to die for their country, the Dutch score particularly low, according to a Reddit survey. It is most closely tied to both the continental European and Anglo-Saxon worlds. Together with Great Britain, the Netherlands is oriented toward the United States. It may explain why the Dutch provided more NATO heads than any other country. If geographical distance indicates cultural distance, it is worth noting that the Netherlands lies between Great Britain, Germany, and France. Being close to Scandinavia, it was also one of the least corrupt countries.

The Netherlands long ranked highly in sexual liberty. Prostitution is legal and performed openly in red light districts. It was not all good. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, paedophiles could operate in the open until the focus returned to the damage they do to children. On the work floor, equality is the norm, as the Dutch balance work and private life, which is uncommon in most countries. In many ways, the Netherlands has progressed the furthest. The Netherlands doesn’t lead on all fronts. For example, the country lags in the number of women on boards and in parliament.

On top of that, the border between the Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds runs through the Netherlands. And so, it became the crossroads of Western civilisation, and with more minorities coming in, the crossroads of world civilisation. That wasn’t on my mind at the time, but in hindsight, there is more to it. The Netherlands means ‘the Low Countries’ because half of it lies below sea level. The word ‘Nederland’ almost translates to ‘humble country’. The most unpretentious part of it might be Twente, the region I came from.

The Dutch are known for their tolerance, which is close to indifference. There had long been parallel societies with Protestants, Catholics and socialists living separate lives, so it was mind your own business. For long, Protestantism had been the official religion and Catholicism was illegal, but Catholics could hold masses in secret. That was tolerance. Today, smoking weed is not a problem. The Netherlands was also a haven for Jews until the German occupation during World War II. That same tolerance was the stance towards immigrants for a long time. In that sense, the Netherlands didn’t differ from several other Western European countries.

It was a fairy-tale society, with Van Kooten and De Bie seeking the nuance. Their characters represented the so-called conservative, ignorant and xenophobic undercurrent in the Dutch culture, and of course, hustlers, such as Jacobse and Van Es, infiltrating politics with their corrupt schemes and dubious deals. The undercurrent didn’t go away. Instead, it grew stronger. Immigrants continued to arrive, causing a growing unease. The progressive values many Dutch cherished didn’t agree with the conservative worldview of many immigrants, most notably Muslims. These feelings only needed a catalyst, like the Germans needed Hitler, to give the anger and discontent a voice.

Fortuyn supporters overran the IEX message board with their vile and racist comments. When someone created a new account on IEX, started posting, while suggesting he was a Turkish restaurant owner with some money to invest, to test the mood, others viciously attacked him. Fortuyn was openly gay, and his objection to Islam was that it didn’t agree with Western liberal values. He further pointed out crimes committed by immigrant youth, especially those of Moroccan descent. Racists and bigots jumped on his bandwagon. However, and that was where leftists like me got it wrong, the movement was more than bigotry and racism. It is unwise to allow immigrants into the country if they have trouble adapting. People from different cultures differ in their conduct and can harm one another, leading to a struggle over societal rules. A liberal society can be open to everyone as long as everyone lives by its values. And so, having separate tribes within a country is as problematic as the existence of nation-states.

Balls on the ground

Fortuyn had terminated the fairy tale of the multicultural society. I had believed in it or wanted to believe in it, for if there will ever be world peace, the world must unite and become one multicultural society. Living with people from different cultures isn’t easy. I should have known that, given what happened to me as a student. Culture can be an unbridgeable gap. Some Fortuyn supporters seemed to anticipate civil war and hoped that it would start sooner rather than later, when the authentic white Dutch were still a majority. The atmosphere quickly turned grim. Under the guise of free speech, the sewers opened, and the rivers of hatred flooded freely into the open. Fortuyn’s rise made headlines in the international press because it represented a clear break with the past, occurring in what many believed was the world’s most liberal country.

Fortuyn supporters overran the IEX message board with their vile and racist comments. When someone created a new account on IEX, started posting, while suggesting he was a Turkish restaurant owner with some money to invest, to test the mood, others viciously attacked him. Fortuyn was openly gay, and his objection to Islam was that it didn’t agree with Western liberal values. He further pointed out crimes committed by immigrant youth, especially those of Moroccan descent. Racists and bigots jumped on his bandwagon. However, and that was where leftists got it wrong, the movement was more than bigotry and racism. Tribal identities are obstacles to unity, not only internationally, but also within countries. People from different cultures differ in their conduct and can harm one another, leading to a struggle over societal rules. A liberal society can be open to everyone as long as everyone lives by its values. And so, having tribalism within a country can be as problematic as the existence of nation-states.

A leftist poster with the avatar Kingie started a new website, BeursKings (MarketKings), with the help of. Danger Money. A small group left IEX and joined the new message board. I was among them. Had BeursKings not started, I would have remained on IEX, and I was accustomed to hostility, so it was not really a case of fleeing. BeursKings remained in operation for several years. Kingie once posted several photographs of himself on the website. That was a shock. He looked like my double. In hindsight, that is remarkable because of his avatar name. Others who remained on IEX also joined the BeursKings message board. I was part of the so-called Leftist Church and had tried to rein in the bigotry. One of the IEX posters once called me ‘vicar’ for my moralising.

This particular individual believed that he was a genius. A spectacular profit he had made on a semiconductor stock might have reinforced that belief. He was not the only one. The Dot-Com bubble had made more people believe they were geniuses, beating investment gurus like Warren Buffett. My investment returns have never justified such ideas, but I could write stories that people liked. This guy was a physicist working in a laboratory, or so he once wrote, not Dutch, but a Czech, and a relative of Franz Kafka, he once wrote. He thought that investment results came from ‘observing the herd and anticipating where it would go next’ rather than from luck in picking a winning stock. He sometimes made negative comments about me, but later praised me for identifying interest charges on money and debts as a root cause of many evils ruining this world. The reason remains unclear, but he seemed like a fascist to me, and the struggle against international finance and usury is part of the Nazi ideology.

Shortly before the 2002 elections, a left-wing loner assassinated Fortuyn. Fortuyn had already hinted at it. If something were to happen to him, he claimed, it would be because establishment politicians had demonised him. The socialist-in-name-only Marcel van Dam, who lived in a luxurious mansion far away from multicultural neighbourhoods, and who had always been eager to take the moral high ground, once called Fortuyn an ‘exceptionally inferior human.’ And so, you may ask yourself, who of the two was the most superb Nazi? Fortuyn gave a presentable at-your-service salute that might do well in some fascist circles, but his ‘inferior human’ remark gave Van Dam the edge.

Others called Fortuyn ‘extreme’ or ‘demolishing society’ because he was stirring up public sentiment. Fortuyn was a man of theatre, hyping the wrongs others did to him while being a jerk himself. The Netherlands is not a violent country. It was the first political assassination in 400 years, so no one saw it coming. The civil war didn’t arrive, but death threats to politicians have become common. The attitudes toward immigrants and Islam have also changed. Fifteen years later, the United States saw the rise of a similar leader.

Fortuyn’s assassin, Volkert van der Graaf, was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. He was someone like me. To him, Fortuyn may have been a new Hitler on the rise. He feared Fortuyn would tear down Dutch society so that the weak, such as the poor and refugees, would suffer, and also animals, as he had been an animal rights activist. Van der Graaf drew a logical conclusion from the facts, or so he believed. The problem with this kind of thinking is that we don’t know the future. Mass immigration can destabilise a country. Van der Graaf had good intentions, but Fortuyn also believed he was serving the Netherlands. Yet, there was something evil about Fortuyn. I am not a trained psychologist, but Fortuyn was someone who wanted to be the centre of attention and wield power, and didn’t care about the consequences of his actions, much like Donald Trump.

Harry Mens, a Dutch real estate tycoon whom you might call the Dutch Donald Trump, had promoted Fortuyn on his television show, Business Class. So, like Trump, Mens had a television show. Fortuyn’s appearance on his show foreshadowed a new type of politics, common in the United States but not in the Netherlands, in which wealthy money men run puppet politicians. I found Mr Mens to be a questionable character, boasting and flaunting his wealth. At the time, I didn’t think of Trump, but there are parallels. His programme was about investments with people in suits and dresses promoting their investment services. A few advertisers on his show turned out to be frauds, such as Palm Invest.

I think of Pim Fortuyn and Donald Trump as narcissistic psychopaths. These are not official diagnoses, but personal impressions. However, some psychoanalysts concluded that Fortuyn was a narcissist, possibly because of feelings of inferiority that he needed to compensate for with praise. It was all about him, and other people were just utensils. His neurotic disturbances and unresolved personality flaws made Pim Fortuyn such a powerful force. One psychoanalyst said, ‘Imagine if he had to go on a state visit to US President Bush. He would exhibit Sun King-like behaviour.’1 To Fortuyn, the US President would have been a mere extra in the Pim Fortuyn show. Even though the psychoanalysts didn’t raise that particular issue, Pim Fortuyn seemed to enjoy hurting other people’s feelings, so I suppose he was a psychopath as well.

If you consider the characteristics of narcissistic psychopaths, you might discover they are the opposite of Asperger’s syndrome. I name a few: (1) thriving on chaos versus thriving in order, (2) desiring to be the centre of attention versus not wanting attention or praise, (3) manipulative and lying versus honest and forthright and (4) charming versus impolite. At first glance, Fortuyn and Trump seemed impolite rather than charming. That needs further explanation. First, you don’t have to check all the boxes to be autistic or a psychopath. And second, the impoliteness of the autistic person comes from being honest. By being rude, Fortuyn and Trump catered to the fear and anger of their supporters. They told them what they wanted to hear. What can make psychopaths successful as leaders is that they are willing to hurt people, which may be required to do what is necessary. With these words, I conclude my psychoanalysis session.

Life went on

Beurkings attracted a few posters who remained on IEX. One of them, Xzorro, didn’t believe the 9/11 conspiracy theories and thought that the success of the attacks was due to the incompetence of the American authorities. Yet, he believed the allegations that a high-ranking Dutch Prosecution official, Joris Demmink, had had sex with underage male prostitutes and that there was a conspiracy within the Dutch government to cover it up. An investigative journalist and conspiracy theorist, Micha Kat, had pursued the matter relentlessly for many years. In the 1990s, there had been a police investigation into possible child abuse by four high-ranking government officials.

The investigation had collapsed after someone had leaked information. During raids, the police found no evidence on the suspects. Fred Teeven, who had led the investigation, later stated that Demmink had not been a person of interest. The Dutch newspaper AD claimed that Demmink had contact in the 1980s with a pimp of underage boys. Kat was onto something, but he was a nutter. Kat later claimed that children buried in a Bodegraven cemetery were the victims of Satanic child abusers, which was nonsense and easy to disprove. And Kat had a conviction for making death threats to a fellow journalist.

Another poster on BeursKings, Gung Ho, who lived in the Dutch countryside, favoured traditional US conservatism and posted lengthy pieces copied from American websites, including some claiming that US Neoconservatives were Leninist agitators. He enthusiastically promoted a penny stock, Clifton Mining, and believed that colloidal silver was a cure against many diseases. That made him the subject of mockery, most notably by Amoricano, an American of Dutch origin who long had been on IEX. Gung Ho might have been in the military and had friends in the American military, or so his sparse remarks about his personal life suggested.

Gung Ho regularly posted comments about the Neoconservatives being chicken hawks, so cowards who send others to war while having done no military service themselves. His use of language was odd. He didn’t express himself as most people would. That made his lengthy texts amusing. The connection between Neoconservatism and Leninism seemed obscure. Like the Leninists, the Neoconservatives use Hegel’s dialectic to promote social progress via revolutions and wars. The conflict between the West and Islam was their latest project, founded on the clash-of-civilisations ideology, and the Iraq War was one of its consequences. Traditional conservatives like Gung Ho opposed these methods. Fortuyn adhered to the neoconservative clash-of-civilisations ideology as well.

There was also a psychiatrist on BeursKings. He had quit his job and tried to make a living by day trading. He posted under the name Kindval, a soccer player from the 1970s. He didn’t seem to like me. When someone attacked me personally or for my political views, he upvoted these comments. The day trading probably didn’t go well. Once, Gung Ho went loose on him by suggesting he had psychological issues. I upvoted that comment. It was a rare occasion for me to upvote a negative comment. Kindval became agitated about Gung Ho’s comment, but even more about my upvote. It made me think that he was, as Gung Ho implied, on his way to a nervous breakdown.

No gain without pain

Fortuyn’s rise had made me curious about the troubles in the multicultural society. The fallout of my student years of not fitting in had made me interested in cultural differences, thinking that the multicultural society had to work because the existence of nation-states and tribes causes warfare. So, what stands in the way of success? Is the gap between Islamic and Western culture unbridgeable? It made me interested in Muslims and their beliefs. In 2004, I joined the message board Maroc.nl for people with a Moroccan background. They are a disregarded minority. Most notably, young Moroccan men cause trouble. Some other minority groups have similar issues, but Moroccans get the most negative attention. They have a serious likeability problem. When the nationalist politician Geert Wilders singled out one minority for deportation, he chose the Moroccans in his infamous ‘fewer Moroccans’ quote, ‘Fewer Moroccans. Let us take care of that.’

The issues Moroccans in the Netherlands face, and how they relate to society, compare to those of blacks in the United States. The message board was open. Everyone could join. It featured discussions about religion and social issues. Various people shared their opinions and discussed them with one another. People came and went on the message board over the years. Occasionally, there were heated exchanges, with Moroccans complaining about the racism of the Dutch and Dutch complaining about the misconduct of the Moroccans. What they call racism is often discrimination. Cultural groups favour each other, which makes the issue harder to solve, except by reducing differences, so that people mix more easily. Muslims generally do not mix well with non-Muslims.

A Dutchman sometimes asked why Moroccans don’t openly distance themselves from fellow Moroccans who misbehave. A Moroccan would argue that he is not responsible for the conduct of others, and there is no reason to make excuses for what others do. He also doesn’t ask the Dutch to excuse themselves for the misconduct of fellow Dutch. It is a fair point, but that attitude causes problems. Pride and honour mean little to the Dutch, which makes Dutch culture different from Moroccan culture. If you are a bit self-critical, others will like you much better already. The Dutch VOC may have been the world’s first multinational corporation, and a prime example of Dutch greatness during the Golden Age, but they were a bunch of gangsters, and everyone knows it.

There were a few agitators from both sides, but overall, the discussions were insightful, thanks to the diversity of posters expressing their opinions. On the board, the Dutch were discriminated against and received bans for lighter offences than Moroccans did, so, as far as discrimination goes, Moroccans are no better than the Dutch, but it was an open message board nonetheless. Likely, the message board had received a grant and was obliged to keep it a safe space for a variety of opinions. There were Christians, Jews, Muslims, former Fortuyn supporters, and leftists. There were also gays seeking to counter the hatred of LGBTQ people because of street violence against LGBTQ people.

Some posters on the message board have argued that native Dutch commit more hate crimes against LGBTQ people, which is correct because there are far more native Dutch. It is how you can twist the numbers, as the sophists did in ancient Greece. For problem-solving, this tactic isn’t helpful, as this is not the correct way to look at statistics. And if you do that, you make people angry. The sophists were also very unpopular, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if angry peasants had hanged a few. There was a diversity of opinions and an exchange of views. People argue over who is right and who is wrong. You could learn from others by watching them dispute and considering the merits of their opinions.

Some Dutch have complained about annoying individuals who demand respect up front before they accept you, whereas you normally take a neutral stance toward new people you meet and give respect when you think someone deserves it. One poster acted like a complete jerk to me, and for no obvious reason, until I upvoted one of his comments. From then on, he saw me as his best friend. To be fair, I have had a fair share of people acting like jerks to me for no reason, but unlike this particular fellow, they weren’t looking for respect. A psychologist might argue for an inferiority complex. He may have presupposed that I didn’t respect him based on the assumption that every Dutchman hates him, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if that belief leads him to act like a jerk.

Traditional Muslims are strict on religion, much like conservative Christians. They have more in common with each other than with liberals. So, why many liberals like Muslims, and conservative Christians dislike them, is quite an enigma if you reason from their beliefs. Terrorists usually are young men who seek meaning in life and find it in Islam, and then fall prey to extremist preachers. There aren’t that many, but a few hundred can already be a serious threat. During the first year, there was uproar over the Dutch publicist Theo van Gogh, who was indeed kin to the famous Dutch painter. Under the guise of freedom of speech, he called Muslims ‘goat fuckers’ and Muhammad ‘a pimp’. The people on the message board didn’t care much about being called ‘goat fuckers,’ but insulting Muhammad was a red line that genuinely upset them.

Several posters also expressed fury about the Somali lady Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had left Islam for a liberal lifestyle, and had, together with Van Gogh, made the short film Submission about the suppression and mistreatment of women by Muslims. To Muslims, the film was blasphemous as it showed the bodies of abused women with Quran verses on them that the filmmakers claimed Muslims use to justify mistreating women. Hirsi Ali also had called Muhammad a ‘pervert.’ She faced death threats. The anti-immigration and anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders also faced death threats and requires security to this day.

Hirsi Ali had escaped an arranged marriage. The Dutch police prevented her family from abducting her from an asylum seeker centre in Almelo. She later moved to the United States to work for the neoconservative think tank. Van Gogh paid for his Islam-insulting binge with his life. A youngster of Moroccan descent slit his throat, precisely 911 days after the Fortuyn assassination. That was on 2 November, which refers to the European emergency services telephone number 112, the European equivalent of 911. So, in the first year, the atmosphere on the message board was tense.

Western interventions in the Middle East and Western support for Israel also angered quite a few people. Israel illegally occupied Palestinian land, and Palestinians kept on committing acts of terrorism. It has proven to be an irresolvable conflict. Several posters on the message board viewed the West, including the Netherlands, as anti-Islamic. Some Dutch argued that they are ungrateful, as the Netherlands provided them with a good life and freedom of religion. If it was so bad over here, why wouldn’t they move to an Islamic country where life is better? I tried not to offend people with my opinions. At first, I was making up my mind anyhow. It is a conflict between two worldviews, each with its own logic. There is an underlying truth, whatever that may be. In the first years, the American gangster heist called the Iraq War was still in progress. For me, the Iraq War became an unexpected mental dip. The Americans had tricked me into believing that Saddam Hussein had a stash of WMDs, so that I hadn’t opposed that war.

Once I saw live on CNN how the bombs fell on Baghdad and how gung-ho Americans ran over the country’s defences, and murdered the defenceless Iraqis, with the Iraqi Information Minister vehemently claiming until the very end that there were no Americans in Baghdad, and that all American forces had been obliterated, my mood suddenly swung to dim. And then there were no WMDs. That was the year before I joined the message board. They had bombed a country into ruins and killed thousands for no good reason. The Americans had bombed a country into ruins and killed thousands for no good reason.

The Netherlands has been a major contributor to the American war effort in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. The Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende had praised the Dutch VOC mentality of the former Dutch colonial enterprise that had invaded and looted the Indies under the guise of trade. The United States had merely copied that proud Dutch tradition of the looting oligarchic merchant republic of the Netherlands. The United States now has the true VOC mentality. Shell was a Dutch company, so the Dutch had to be in on the action, or so Mr Balkenende may have reasoned.

That, and Dutch liberal values, explain, to some extent, the negative views about the West and the Netherlands among the Moroccans on the message board. Some may have used these issues as an excuse for their misconduct and crimes that they would have committed anyway. Some could get angry at you simply for being Dutch because they think they know what you think. Some Dutch came to the message board only to lecture the Moroccans about the backwardness of Islam or the misconduct of Moroccan youngsters. That didn’t work out so well. You also wouldn’t change your mind when someone you have never met before came out of the blue to tell you how stupid your religion is and that your community is a bunch of criminals. As for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some Dutch would say that Palestinians keep on committing acts of terrorism, thereby challenging a much stronger adversary, and then whine about losing the fight. There was also a private messaging system. Over the years, two ladies contacted me as they preferred a Dutch husband and hoped that I was a Muslim.

Three posters once wrote that they had been in prison. One even posted from jail, so he had access to the Internet or a smartphone. They were discussing the Dutch police. Some were racist, they claimed, but others were professional. There had been hundreds of posters on that message board over the years, so that says little, but it is illustrative of the prejudices many Dutch have. If, as the statistics suggest, crime levels in their community are three times those of native Dutch, their community stands out negatively. Some have argued that you bear no blame for other people’s faults, which is what the law says. Still, if a group’s culture contributes to these issues, the group itself becomes a problem.

The Dutch dislike Moroccans more than any other ethnic minority. As the most-hated child of the entire school, I have been there. It was not entirely my fault, but I was part of the problem, and the only one I could fix was myself, not the others. Some other minorities face similar issues, but Moroccans, more than other minorities, seem to have an attitude problem of not acknowledging their own faults and blaming Dutch society. There is a lot of negative sentiment festering among the population that the mainstream media hardly reports on. Negativity can make matters worse for those who do well, but it is hard to change the Dutch opinions as long as the problem persists.

The majority of Moroccans do all right, but the minority that causes trouble is large and problematic enough to drag down the group’s image. That well-known guy with a tainted skin on a scooter, who regularly features as a suspect in crime reports, ranging from street intimidation, robbery, and harassing women, often comes from that particular ethnic group. The most notorious ‘Dutch’ criminal, Ridouan T, is of Moroccan descent. And the pimps luring or forcing vulnerable girls into prostitution are also often of Moroccan or Turkish descent. That is not due to neglect of Dutch society. As a result of investments made in opportunities for minorities, some of the best Dutch schools are Islamic. There is not much more that the Dutch government could have done to help them.

Another issue causing upheaval in the Dutch multicultural society was the tradition of Saint Nicholas, in which a long-bearded, centuries-old white man from Spain arrived with a group of black servants to deliver presents to children. For long, that didn’t cause trouble as it was an old tradition and there had not been slavery of blacks in the Low Countries itself, so the Dutch didn’t associate the helpers with enslavement of blacks. As a child, I believed their faces were black because they went down chimneys to deliver the presents. Americans who saw it were appalled as the tradition involved blackfacing. An American woman working at the United Nations raised the issue, and a group of activists in the Netherlands began protesting. The issue remained contentious for over a decade.

The compromise gradually became the soot-stain helper, a helper with soot-stain marks from going into chimneys. For the remainder, nothing changed. Yet a significant group of Dutch didn’t like black people telling them to change the tradition, which they claimed was part of Dutch cultural heritage. There had been some agitated encounters with the activists. The black activists had a point, but it was mainly a pissing contest between white egos and black egos. Whites could have accepted that the tradition had racist elements and that the soot-stain helper didn’t meaningfully change it, while the black activists could have understood that it was a quaint relic of the past, and that altering it wouldn’t change the lives of blacks in the Netherlands. And there are far more serious, some apocalyptical even, so the conflict resembled a fight on the deck of the sinking Titanic.

Finally, there is the question of allegiance. Moroccans can’t renounce their nationality, nor can their children born in the Netherlands. Morocco is firmly in the Western camp, so the consequences so far have been limited, with a few instances of Moroccans spying for their country, but we don’t know what the future brings. The same goes for Turks, with many taking their orders from the fascist Erdogan, who called the Netherlands a fascist country after the Dutch government had prevented a Turkish minister from politically campaigning in the Netherlands for a referendum in Turkey to give more power to Erdogan.

Some ethnic groups cause more trouble than others. The underlying issue is usually cultural differences. The multicultural troubles weren’t constantly on my mind, but I couldn’t let the issue go. I remained on the Maroc.nl message board for two decades. In 2024, after twenty years, shortly after the Gaza War had started, the message board went offline permanently after being filled with anti-Israel messages. That was very suspicious indeed if you believe that the Jews are running this world. By then, I had arrived at some conclusions. People aren’t willing to change. They always have their reasons. Moroccan malcontents may believe that they have it bad in the Netherlands and that they are not to blame for their misconduct. But few places in the world are better, including Morocco itself. As for discrimination, it only stops once we have become one people. And so, there will be no gain without pain, which I had experienced firsthand as a student. For those who cause trouble and don’t change their ways, the consequences will be brutal.

Latest revision: 9 April 2026

Featured image: Pim Fortuyn on 4 May 2002, two days before his assassination. Roy Beusker (2002). CC BY 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.

1. Een heel vervelend geval. Joris van Casteren (2002). Groene Amsterdammer.

Cyclists. By FaceMePLS from The Hague, The Netherlands - Buitenleven / Country Life. Wikmedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

Something Went Wrong Somewhere

nivtricLeave a comment

The bullshit economy

Today, few people produce all that we need. The remainder have found bullshit jobs in the bullshit economy. In several advanced economies, 1-3% of the population works in agriculture. In the past, that was over 90%. They produced barely enough for their own needs. Now these few per cent make the food for everyone, and more people suffer from obesity than famine, while the world’s population has increased from less than one billion to over eight billion. The efficiency increase is astounding. But if a few people do all that we need, then the rest are transforming energy and resources into waste and pollution by producing non-essential goods and services.

These activities make sense because they generate profits for investors or serve some common good. In the current political economy, some are essential, so you can’t simply terminate all these activities. The economic system is a system. Actions have consequences, many of which we can’t foresee. Still, we could manage without gadgets, social media, air travel, and many other things. It is hard to say precisely what the bullshit economy is, but most of it concentrates on the following areas:

  • law and consultancy;
  • communication, information and media;
  • policy making and bureaucracy;
  • management;
  • entertainment and tourism;
  • finance and trade;
  • technology, computers and software.

Usually, most of the attention goes to the government, so policy making, bureaucracy, and also welfare. That blinds us from what happens in the private sector. In ‘advanced’ economies, bullshit probably generates more than 50% of GDP, and it might be as much as 75%. And so a banker once noted,

A cyclist is a disaster for the country’s economy. He doesn’t buy cars and doesn’t borrow money to buy. He doesn’t pay for insurance policies. He doesn’t buy fuel or pay for maintenance and repairs. He doesn’t use paid parking. He doesn’t require multi-lane highways. He doesn’t get fat. Healthy people are neither needed nor beneficial for the economy. They don’t buy medicine. They don’t go to hospitals or doctors. Nothing gets added to the country’s gross domestic product. On the contrary, every new McDonald’s restaurant creates at least 30 jobs: 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 dietitians and nutritionists, and, obviously, people who work at the restaurant itself.

Now you get the picture. The bullshit economy is about making money, not providing needs. Returns in agriculture are meagre compared to those of tech giants. And we could survive without tech giants, but not without food. To illustrate the money-generating power of the bullshit economy, you can compare the returns on an investment in the Chinese stock markets versus the US stock markets. If you had invested $1,000 in the MSCI China in 2011, in a real economy that produces things, you would have had $1,670 by November 2025.

Had you instead put your money in the S&P 500, in a bullshit economy of social media, lawsuits, unaffordable healthcare, Hollywood, finance, vampire capital scams, marketing and sales, you would have had $6,700. And that was the timeframe during which China caught up to, or even overtook, the United States. At least, the rich are doing fine. The latest hype is artificial intelligence. Soon, capitalists may no longer need workers. That vision of a coming capitalist paradise may have kept the stock market going.

Social networks, retail and financial services depend on physical infrastructure, such as roads and electricity grids. Without concrete, copper and fibre optics, there would be no data centres, no electricity, no internet, and no parcel deliveries. The bullshit economy depends on physical labour and infrastructure. But the money is not in physical labour and infrastructure. A few mega corporations, such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon, reap the benefits, while nothing they do is something anyone needed fifty years ago. Bullshit is where the money is. In this sense, the US economy has become the most ‘advanced’. It helped that the US has always been a nation of salespeople.

And so, yet another Wall Street wiz kid developed the Degenerate Economy Index, which tracks companies enabling gambling, day trading, and memecoin speculation. By October 2025, it had returned 130% since its inception in May 2023. The index includes 13 public companies providing computing power, mobile devices, cloud services, and social networks, as well as Bitcoin. The 130% return over 18 months occurred during a period of market uncertainty, rising interest rates, the collapse of regional banks, and the flailing commercial real estate market. The growth came from bullshit.1

In the Financial Times, a fellow named Tek Parikh claimed that fifty years ago, the assets held by the top 500 US companies were mainly tangible, such as factories, equipment, and inventory. Today, most of their assets are intangible, including intellectual property, brand value, and marketing networks. In the US, spending on intangible assets surpassed tangible investments as a share of GDP in the late 1990s. The gap has widened ever since. These intangibles drive US productivity growth. Parikh excitedly asserts that this transformation helps to explain the high concentration, exceptionalism and bubble-like valuations in the US stock market.

Information technology unlocks value, which is a marketing term for selling more bullshit or intensifying the competition. Buying a widget for €10 and selling it for €20 because you own a brand generates more wealth than labouring to make it for €8 and selling it for €10. A brand is capital that makes dirt look like gold to people willing to pay the price of gold for it, so it is something intangible, not a factory. Coca-Cola sells the same soda for five times the price to suckers who buy a ‘Coca-Cola feeling.’ The owners of the brands make producers compete, so producers have low margins, and their employees toil for low salaries in sweatshops. They hire a celebrity to tout the brand’s exclusiveness, and then they rake in the money. It costs a few euros to make a Gucci bag that sells for €2,500.

Social networks, retail and financial services depend on physical infrastructure, such as roads and electricity grids. Without concrete, copper and fibre optics, there would be no data centres, no electricity, no internet, and no parcel deliveries. The bullshit economy depends on physical labour and infrastructure. But the money is not in physical labour and infrastructure. A few mega corporations, such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon, reap the benefits, while nothing they do is something anyone needed fifty years ago. Bullshit is where the money is. In this sense, the US economy has become one of the most ‘advanced,’ leaving Europe to bite the dust.

Yet another Wall Street wiz kid developed the Degenerate Economy Index, which tracks companies enabling gambling, day trading, and memecoin speculation. By October 2025, it had returned 130% since its inception in May 2023. The index includes 13 public companies providing computing power, mobile devices, cloud services, and social networks, as well as Bitcoin. The 130% return over 18 months occurred during a period of market uncertainty, rising interest rates, the collapse of regional banks, and the flailing commercial real estate market.

The current economic organisation squeezes producers of necessities to employ more people in the bullshit economy to make money for investors from transforming natural resources and energy into waste and pollution. Economists call it efficient and wealth creation. Genetic engineering may increase crop yields. That may benefit farmers, but competition in farming keeps average returns low. Most profits go to the corporations that engineered the crops. In a typical bullshit economy, migrants do the hard labour at low wages, as the native population occupies itself with value-creating activities in the bullshit economy because that is where the money is.

No limits to our desires

Humans don’t lack ambition and desires. The Bible tells that Eve and Adam wished to acquire the knowledge of the gods. There are no limits to our imagination. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have lived in someone’s personal fantasy world. When we have enough, we want more. It could be a larger home, a sports car, or an adventurous trip. Had that not been the case, we could have worked a few hours daily, had all we needed, and been content with what we had. Instead of living happily in Paradise, we work hard to make Earth a wasteland by turning energy and raw materials into waste and pollution until we can’t keep up, and robots and artificial intelligence will replace us.

More material wealth and new inventions haven’t made us happier, yet we still hope they will. Between 1970 and 2024, income per person in the US rose a whopping 265%.2 Still, about 40% of Americans can’t make ends meet. Many feel more miserable than their grandparents did fifty years ago. It is also a lifestyle problem that economic growth can’t fix. What was once a luxury or didn’t even exist has become a necessity. But it is not only that. The gains mostly went into the pockets of the rich, and many poor people are hardly better off. It is not the first time that humans sacrificed quality of life for growth.

Our distant forbears switched from hunter-gathering to growing crops and herding cattle. It increased food production. They thought that if they worked harder, they would have more food and a better life. More children survived, so they remained on the brink of famine. Even worse, they had less varied diets, hence poorer health. They lived in unhygienic settlements where they contracted more infectious diseases. They suffered more from violence as farmers had to defend their crops and animals against thieves. Peasants were more miserable than hunter-gatherers who lived before them.3

Since time immemorial, most people had barely enough, so frugality was a virtue and wastefulness a vice. Parents taught their children to be satisfied with what they had, which was not much. Few scraps remained unused. When my father wished for a toy, he would take a branch from a tree and turn it into a toy himself, at least when he had time to play and didn’t have to do chores at the farm. He didn’t know better and was quite satisfied with whatever toy he could create from a tree branch. His mother didn’t throw away food. And if his trousers had a hole, she would mend them. They were poor, but had enough.

Our virtues have evolved. Capitalism is the new religion. The economy must grow, so the excess production needs willing consumers to gobble it all up. Otherwise, investors lose money. To prevent this catastrophe, a new ethic appeared: consumerism. Businesses now use psychology, advertisements, and the media to convince us to indulge ourselves and make more purchases. It is our moral duty to buy more stuff. That is what we want to hear. Today, many children have mountains of toys they never play with. So, here is your bribe, your thirty pieces of silver for which you have betrayed Jesus.

As an ancient Persian story goes, the inventor of chess once presented the game to the king. The king, much impressed by it, offered the inventor any reward he desired. If there were ever to be a top three stupidest promises in the history of humankind, any reward someone wants will surely make it on that list. The inventor asked for a single grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard. Then, two grains for the second, four for the third, until the last square. The king, baffled by this seemingly small price, agreed. His treasurer later made the calculation and regretfully informed the king that it was impossible to pay the inventor. There wasn’t enough rice in the world. The king then did the only sensible thing and ordered the execution of this man for his greed.

Growth is exponential. Increases come on top of previous ones. Economic growth works like that. It is unsustainable. Economists may argue that efficiency improvements reduce resource and energy consumption, but they have been promising that for quite a while now. In reality, the opposite happens due to a secret they don’t tell you about, the Jevons Paradox. Efficiency improvements make products more affordable, allowing more people to purchase them. To add insult to injury, innovation brings new products to the market that we don’t need. In other words, the problem is the combination of efficiency improvements and innovation with our unlimited desires.

An extreme case is information technology. Since the 1970s, computers have become over a million times as powerful. Their capacity and numbers grew far more, perhaps over a trillion times, so computers consume over a million times more energy and resources than they did in the 1970s. And what for? We don’t need computers. Otherwise, people in the 1960s would have died horrible deaths from a lack of information technology. Okay, you may think you will die when TikTok and Snapchat go blank, but if you had studied history, you could have known that countless generations have survived without these apps. And here is where the economic growth nowadays comes from. Somehow, they create a productivity miracle by allowing influencers to sell us more stuff.

Our inner drives

Since the Industrial Revolution, schedules and appointments have determined people’s lives. We work at designated intervals. Trains must be on time. We save time by travelling faster, taking ready-to-eat meals, utilising cleaning services, and buying new items instead of mending them. And we still hurry because of schedules, appointments, and long working hours. As more nations are becoming ‘developed’, more people join the treadmill and become cogs in a system that is a force of its own, over which we have no control.

A 2025 report from Microsoft claims that employees are experiencing an ‘infinite workday’ of constant emails, meetings and notifications. They check their emails as early as 6 AM, juggle meetings through the afternoon and stay online well into the night. According to Microsoft’s data, employees are interrupted every 2 minutes by meetings, emails, or messages, and receive an average of 117 emails and 153 Teams messages each workday. As a result, people are feeling overwhelmed.4

Why can’t we have four workdays of six hours each weekly? Only, the Netherlands comes close with a 32-hour workweek. It must be possible. What is the point of working hard to turn the planet into a wasteland so that artificial intelligence will replace us? What is the point of what we are doing? And why the hurry? Time is money, so we live by the clock. A high standard of living requires capital, thus profits for its owners. Everyone must be present during working hours. A business is only profitable when operations run smoothly. Corporations lose money if raw materials, workers, or repair crews arrive late, and the competition will put them out of business.

Trade and finance drive the system. Economists tell us that trade and finance make products cheaper and provide us with more choices. There are shampoos for every hair type, from several brands. But we work harder or risk losing our jobs to provide better service at a lower cost. Traders buy where it is cheapest, and bankers move their money to where it yields the highest returns, resulting in a competition of everyone against everyone. It is also why several Western countries deindustrialised and became service economies, moving from producing to adding value, which is another term for bullshit.

We work so efficiently that a few people produce everything we need, leaving a surplus of labour in need of employment. Many of us work in bullshit jobs. We may work hard, but we waste resources and energy performing these jobs. Modern societies have become complex, so these jobs make economic sense. And so, you can make money without being useful. You can become an influencer or trade crypto. Free-market proponents say that value is subjective and that the market is the ultimate judge of usefulness, which is also subjective, so nothing more than opinion. It is a fatal mistake. If it is profitable to terminate us, free markets will ensure it will happen.

The system hooks into our inner drives, most notably our natural desires for security, comfort, and status. Squirrels gather and store nuts to get them through the winter. They pile up more nuts than needed. But they aren’t nuts. You can’t be sure what the winter will bring. A few more nuts can make the difference between perishing and survival. We save for a rainy day, retirement, or to give our children a good start in life. Our desire to pile up assets stems from our survival instinct. As you grow older and approach your destined appointment with that scythe-wielding fellow, that urge dissipates.

As a child, I had amassed over a thousand marbles. My gains came at the expense of the other children at school. Yet, I sought to win more. But what was the point? Why wasn’t I content with 60? I never thought of that. The more marbles, the better. Marbles are utterly useless, except that I could marvel at them like Scrooge McDuck could spend time looking at his money in his warehouse. Other children ended up without marbles. And so, I am not that different from a greedy billionaire. And unlike most, I haven’t lost my marbles. Now, that is not a coincidence. Like gold coins, they don’t take that much space.

We are social animals, and we compare ourselves to others. If you want to belong to a group, you often need the things others have or the things they do. If you are a fan of FC Barcelona, you buy items from the fan shop and attend soccer matches. Many of us seek status. For men, status gives mating opportunities. No matter how old, annoying or ugly a billionaire may be, he attracts good-looking fashion models. Those who can afford it buy Gucci bags, Ferrari cars, and Rolex watches, only to show others that they can. These items are as useless as marbles. But it would be a waste to give money to the poor, as that would make them lazy. I also didn’t hand out marbles to those who had lost them.

Our capitalist religion teaches us that we deserve a reward for our excellence in ruining God’s creation. After all, it is hard work. And if we buy these luxuries, some of that wealth will trickle down to the children working in the sweatshops that produce them. It is an inefficient way to end poverty and requires more resources than are available. Humanity’s current lifestyle already requires more than two Earths to sustain. And if everyone lived like the affluent, 80% of the people would have to die. But humans are not creatures of logic. We are social animals who cooperate based on fairy tales.

Ideally, you can achieve a higher status by being helpful to others or contributing to society. That motivates us to help and contribute. And we are thankful to those who bring food to the table. It is the businesspeople who pay for our groceries. You wouldn’t have anything to eat if they weren’t busy squeezing money out of something, even when we could do without that something, and even if it is slowly poisoning us. We would be starving in the capitalist economy if we didn’t make and trade all that useless stuff. And not everyone is fit to run a business. It is why we value entrepreneurs so much.

Tell me true, tell me why, was Jesus crucified?
Was it for this that Daddy died?
Was it you? Was it me?
Did I watch too much TV?
Is that a hint of accusation in your eyes?
If it wasn’t for the Nips
Being so good at building ships
The yards would still be open on the Clyde
And it can’t be much fun for them
Beneath the rising sun
With all their kids committing suicide
What have we done?

Pink Floyd, The Post War Dream

The Japanese have worked hard to get ahead, putting the British shipyards out of business, only to see their kids committing suicide. The Chinese are following suit. Why can’t we be happy? It is not that the Japanese didn’t have enough. When you have enough, you don’t need more. Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. The phrase ‘you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’ appeals to our deepest fears of a dismal future in which we starve while being fed propaganda. We prefer a fatal excess of material goods to the bliss of the needy North Koreans. Somehow, we think that the choice is between capitalism and socialism. Can’t there be something better?

Economic growth in the European Union has lagged behind that of the United States in recent decades. And due to its stellar growth, China has overtaken Europe. Europeans work fewer hours and retire earlier than Americans. Europe doesn’t innovate as much because Europeans are more risk-averse than Americans. Europe has fewer billionaire venture capitalists willing to take risks with their excess capital on new ideas that are usually products or services no one needs, but generate money for investors.

Europe has more regulations and fragmented markets. It lacks tech corporations like Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Still, without the products of the Dutch corporation ASML, there would be no Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. And also no NVIDIA. The most crucial tech industry is still in Europe. Europeans have fewer children, so the population is ageing and close to declining. European worker productivity lags as Europe has fewer money-generating bullshit activities. European and US manufacturing output have fared similarly since 2000. And if you correct for purchasing power, European countries do better. Life in the US is more expensive, which boosts GDP.

Some say Europe is becoming an open-air museum, a place to visit for those who want to see how life was in the past. Still, Western Europe has less poverty than the US, and Europeans live longer. Europe looks more like Paradise than the United States or China. Are Europeans happier? The World Happiness Report puts eight European nations in the top ten. Only happiness is hard to measure. Finland is number one on the list, but it also has high alcoholism and suicide rates. Like Americans, Europeans increasingly fear the future and vote for fascist parties and leaders.

Will we never be satisfied, no matter how rich we are? Or do the statistics not reflect real life? Or is it perception because we live by stories rather than facts? Or do people sense that things are heading in the wrong direction? Discussing statistics is tricky. Talking about open-air museums. The Old Order Amish are happy people. They don’t need much to live in Paradise. And they don’t have statistics. Only a Paradise can’t do without a strong protector, thus an 800-pound gorilla who scares the hell out of potential invaders. Europe and the Pennsylvania Dutch could count on the protection of the US Army. But who will keep God’s Paradise safe? Captain Obvious has the answer.

Modernisation

You can only say that things are heading in the wrong direction if you expect disaster or when you have a vision of how things should be. Otherwise, there is no right or wrong direction. The ecological apocalypse may kill billions, and technological development could end humanity, but are these terrible things? It depends on whether you think humanity is precious, which is merely an opinion. Modernisation has had its critics. They weren’t that stupid, except for believing we have a choice and can change the system. We might if we are all on the same page, but that requires a miracle.

Mahatma Gandhi believed industrialisation wouldn’t solve the problems plaguing the Indian poor. He urged Indian villagers to remain self-sufficient in food, make their clothes, and avoid the temptation of mass-produced consumption goods. When Gandhi lived, most Indians were hardly better off than their forebears had been before British colonisation. Today, poverty in India has declined dramatically. The Unabomber claimed in his manifesto that the Industrial Revolution had initiated a process that would eventually destroy humanity through technology and end freedom by forcing us to adapt to machinery.

We shouldn’t romanticise the past. Billions are still poor, but poverty has declined. The Industrial Revolution created an engine of permanent change, driven by competition, economies of scale, and innovation. We have become cogs in a system over which we have no control. Communities disappeared, giving way to societies. And the competition never ends. Humans emerged as winners in a contest between species known as the struggle for survival. They then turned into the destroyers of other life on Earth.

Humans innovate faster than other species. We have eliminated the competition, taken over the planet and killed many of the plants and animals that once lived there. The remaining wildlife lives in a few reservations. Artificial intelligence will soon outcompete us. The driver of competition is trade. Without trade, two countries can’t compete, not even two villages, for that matter. And that is our ultimate challenge. The prospect of continued competition is mass destruction. So it would be better to stifle all innovation with red tape than to let things continue as they do. It is a matter of life and death.

Why things are getting more evil

What we see as good benefits something, and what we see as evil harms something. So what you think is good or evil depends on the something you have in mind, what you believe is beneficial and harmful, whether you believe intent matters, and what you think the consequences of choices are. And so there is room for debate. Intent is an interesting issue. You can make the same choice, such as euthanasia, out of compassion, out of cruelty, or based on a principle you believe in. Consequences may also matter. Evil intent can have favourable outcomes, while good intent can bring disaster. That has been an argument in defence of capitalism. The capitalism-socialism debate originates in divergent views on law and morality within the Western tradition.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, with the Common Law, individuals are sovereign, and ethical philosophy is pragmatic. It means that moral rules are a social agreement, so good and evil depend on popular sentiment; freedom is the ability to do as you please, and outcomes matter more than intent. In continental Europe, with Civil Law, the lawmaker is sovereign, thus the king or the people in a democracy, and idealism dominates ethical philosophy, most notably in Germany. It means that good and evil are absolute, freedom means liberating yourself from your lower urges, thus becoming rational and morally upright, and intent matters more than outcomes. Adam Smith was a pragmatist from Great Britain, while Karl Marx was an idealist from Germany.

Adam Smith, the founder of modern capitalist thought, argued in his book ‘The Wealth of Nations’ that self-interest in a market economy promotes overall economic well-being, as ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ In other words, self-interest rather than benevolence fills our stomachs. Conversely, socialist systems, despite being invented with good intentions, led to poverty and famine, so they are evil. Traditional moral systems regarded self-interest as evil and benevolence as good. Capitalism thus comes with an inversion of that morality, and it ultimately became greed is good. It reflects pragmatic moralism rather than an idealistic or absolutist take on ethics.

Capitalism rewards individuals for their ability to generate money by transforming natural resources and energy into waste and pollution, by producing things we don’t need in a competition that will end in disaster. Whatever intentions the greedy may have, their efforts bring about an apocalyptic catastrophe that some major religions have long predicted. We can be pragmatic and judge the greedy not by their intent but by the outcomes. And we can be idealistic or absolutist, arguing that markets have no morals. Individual market participants may possess moral values, but markets never do. There are always people willing to do the trade. When there is demand, there will be supply. The trader’s ethic is no ethics at all. Money corrupts everything, including the government, and that is why things are getting more evil.

Karl Marx wrote in his famous book that capital is dead labour that, like a vampire, only lives by sucking living labour. In capitalism, the dead eat the living, which eventually leads to a zombie apocalypse as predicted by ancient Christian prophets. The specifics of the events do not precisely match those in the Book of Revelation, and somehow they never do, despite the frantic efforts of religious people to prove otherwise. But every sizeable inheritance or successful launch of a new corporation that gets us hooked on things we don’t need is the birth of a new zombie.

And the innovation never stops. Vampire capital, or private equity, is the latest brainchild of capital owners to suck more money out of us. The giants, such as Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, and the Carlyle Group, control $8 trillion in assets. Over 18,000 private funds operate in the US, mainly investing in medium-sized companies. The figure grew by more than 50% in the last five years. According to McKinsey consultants, global private equity assets reached $13 trillion in 2023.5

Here comes just one example. There are countless others. About 70% of nursing homes in the United States are for-profit. They have increasingly merged into larger chains, often owned by private equity firms. Two-thirds of the nursing homes’ cash flow comes from Medicaid. The company Manor Care had 25,000 beds and was the second-largest nursing home chain in the country by 2017. A private equity firm, The Carlyle Group, acquired it in 2007 through a leveraged buyout.

Carlyle sold the land on which the nursing homes stood to a company specialising in providing real estate to healthcare providers. Carlyle pocketed the proceeds from the land sale and used them to pay off the debt incurred in acquiring Manor Care. Manor Care then had to pay rent using its Medicaid revenues, while Carlyle took the operating profits. With this new rent burden, Manor Care’s margins contracted. Carlyle then insisted on cutting positions and wages.5

The quality of care deteriorated as the chain struggled financially and laid off staff. In the wake of the private equity purchase of Manor Care, nurse staffing fell, and resident deaths increased by 11%. Bills, mainly to Medicare, increased by 8%.6 Code violations soared. Lawsuits from relatives spiralled, and Manor Care went bankrupt in 2018. That was a lot of money for lawyers, also. There are plenty of examples. When a private equity firm acquires a doctor’s practice, it starts employing profit-boosting strategies, including surprise billing. Private equity firms remove doctors from insurers’ networks, allowing them to bill patients for far more than insurers would pay.

Then there is Big Pharma. Pharmaceutical corporations pay doctors for prescribing their drugs. Their marketing efforts contributed to the opioid crisis in the United States. An example is Purdue Pharma, which developed, manufactured, and aggressively marketed opioids for decades, causing addiction and overdose deaths. After the settlement, the Sackler family, who long owned the corporation, walked away with billions. Many Americans don’t trust their healthcare system, nor do they trust pharmaceutical corporations. These feelings, the COVID-19 vaccine scare and conspiracy theories led to an estimated 200,000 fatalities in the US because of not taking these vaccines.7

Big Pharma funds healthcare research, so there is reason to be sceptical, or even distrustful. On the other hand, many ‘independent research’ and ‘independent magazines’ are a business model for quacks and snake-oil salespeople, who sell alternative treatments and sensational stories. Quackery is even more lethal and driven by that same profit motive. And the death toll of not taking the vaccines likely vastly outstripped the number of people who died from them. It is a sign of something more troubling. Money has corrupted US healthcare, along with the rest of US society, to the point that not only is trust in healthcare collapsing, but trust in society itself is as well. And with good reason. Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else, while they hardly live longer than Cubans, a destitute people suffering under a failed communist experiment.

We live by stories

Most of us wouldn’t be so depraved as to do what the private equity firms do. If you are rich already, how can you be so evil that you want to make money out of denying the elderly their care or defrauding unsuspecting patients? That is because markets have no morals, and the merchant’s ethics are no ethics at all. There is money in it, and it is legal, so it happens, because money is our highest value rather than caring for patients and the elderly. But it is profoundly evil. Jesus said that you can’t serve both God and money. The Dutch call this issue ‘the merchant and the vicar.’ You are either on the side of good or on the side of money. There is no compromise. So far, money always wins. In that sense, and some other ways as well, Marxism is Christianity without God. And that is no coincidence.

To change our course, we need a new foundation for our culture, values, and way of life, but that requires a new world religion. Traditional peoples saw nature as sacred. Likewise, we can see God’s creation as sacred. We are here to keep it rather than to destroy it. In 1854, the Native American Chief Seattle gave a speech when the US government wanted to buy their land. A redacted version of his oration became a rallying cry within the environmentalist movement. In that version, Seattle reportedly said,

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. We are part of the earth, and it is part of us. The white man does not understand our ways.

One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. He leaves his father’s grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care.

We might understand if we knew what the white man dreams, what hopes he describes to his children on long winter nights, and what visions he burns into their minds so they will wish for tomorrow. But we are savages. The white man’s dreams remain hidden from us.

Chief Seattle and his people had lived simple lives in their own Eden. He saw that the white man was on a road to nowhere. He dreams, not much unlike the poor sobs who invented agriculture 10,000 years ago, that if he works hard, his life will be better. Today, nearly everyone else follows the white man’s path and many work even harder than the white man. Poverty is declining worldwide, but the Earth can’t sustain our lifestyles. And artificial intelligence may soon make us obsolete. Will we ride towards our destruction, or can we be content with having enough? And how do we get there? That is not merely an economic question. It begins with our values and the dreams we live by.

Featured image: Bicyclists. By FaceMePLS from The Hague, The Netherlands – Buitenleven / Country Life. Wikmedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

1. Investor Insanity? The Degenerate Economy Index Up 130%. Boaz Sobrado (2025). Forbes.
2. Real gross domestic product per capita in chained 2017 dollars (A939RX0Q048SBEA). Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
3. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.
4. American workers are stuck in an ‘infinite workday,’ according to Microsoft report: ‘People are feeling very burnt out’ Sophie Caldwell (2025). CNBC.com.
5. Private equity: vampire capital. Michael Roberts blog (2024).
6. Private equity: health care’s vampire. Steffie Woolhandler, David U. Himmelstein, Elizabeth Schrier, and Hope Schwartz (2024). Statnews.com.
7. Estimated preventable COVID-19-associated deaths due to non-vaccination in the United States. National Library of Medicine. Katherine M Jia, William P Hanage, Marc Lipsitch, Amelia G Johnson, Avnika B Amin, Akilah R Ali, Heather M Scobie, and David L Swerdlow.

College Noetsele

School Newspaper

nivtricLeave a comment

When I was sixteen, the school newspaper retired. The editors lacked inspiration. It had become an infrequent occurrence, filled with political activism over cruise missiles, with little to do with the school itself. My experience with the funny newspaper made me figure that I could be a newspaper editor. My friend Arjen found it a good idea. Arjen contacted Erik to join the editorial board. Arjen believed Erik was a popular guy, which could help the newspaper. And even though I didn’t like him, I accepted him on the editorial board. Erik was a bully, and we had fought once. He proved to have good writing skills, and his editorials filled the first page.

We figured we could write six pages every three weeks instead of 100 pages once or twice a year. We named the paper Ikzwetsia after a humorous paper that circulated among the fifth-graders a few years earlier. Another guy in our class, Hendrik, added a few drawings. We filled the rag with juicy gossip about teachers and fabricated stories to make it more amusing. To give you a better insight into what our rag was like, I list a few gossip items,

Mr. Van den Brink’s lessons from economics are not particularly interesting. Remarks from pupils, such as, ‘The snow goes more up than down,’ make this clear.

During a heated discussion, the truth came out. ‘We teachers are not people,’ said Mr. Blaak from mathematics. We had always thought this, but never dared to publish it.

At the school’s back entrance, a garbage container has been defaced with the inscription ‘new janitors’. So far, no one has dared to open this container.

Mr. Nauta from business accounting recently walked to the emergency building 400 without glasses, while he was supposed to be in the main building. He explained this coincidence with the strange statement, ‘You can only see from the inside if someone is crazy.’ Mr. Nauta forgot to mention that this can also be noticed in someone’s words.

There were also some rude jokes, like,

There is a particularly great interest in Mr. W in Hollywood. This interest has been the case since it became known that the ET doll is broken.

Some teachers were in a difficult spot. If we were aware of that, we didn’t make jokes about them, or we complimented them in disguise,

Mr. Kamps, from religion, does not believe in paranormal phenomena. So, we have at least one normal teacher walking around the school.

Mr Kamps had lost his son. These news items were facts mixed with fiction. There had never been any interest in Mr W in Hollywood, but somebody had written ‘new janitors’ on a garbage container. The part about no one daring to open it was a joke. Mr Kamps definitely said he didn’t believe in paranormal phenomena. Finally, Mr Nauta likely had forgotten his glasses while ending up in the wrong building and did explain the coincidence with that bizarre remark, but I wasn’t there when it happened.

There was a film section. A group of film enthusiasts who considered themselves cultured organised film evenings at school. Their film selection centred on artistic content. Not all of these films proved suitable for a conservative Protestant school. One of them, Narayama, featured a scene in which a man had sex with a dog. It generated a lot of ado, or, as Erik put it, the suspense became too much for some people. Art must shock people for some reason. Otherwise, there needs to be a deeper meaning.

Geraldine wrote some of the film commentaries. She was a girl in my class with a striking hairdo, was a bit alternative, dressed outspokenly, and flaunted her interest in art and literature. She had written a particularly lengthy commentary about the classic All About Eve. To fit the page, I shortened it a bit, which offended her, probably because she believed the editing violated her artistic integrity. I didn’t see my writing as art, so it had to fit the available space, but she did, and she believed the space had to adapt to her writing. Marilyn Monroe, who was building her career, played a small part in the film All About Eve.

I indulged myself in writing an imaginary story about the school, a crime detective series with the Cultural Council, which had, amongst its tasks, overseeing the school newspaper. It had a secret service stealing the newspaper’s secrets. The editors were the police detectives solving the crime. It was a loony story featuring a teacher disguised as a standing twilight lamp, a preparation for a theatrical play that looked like a love affair between two teachers, a wild-west-style shoot-out and a dangerous-looking Basset hound with a degree in psychology. And it contained witticisms like, ‘He lay there as lifeless as a soccer match in Enter.’ Some children came from Enter, a village near Rijssen, and the guys were fanatic supporters of the local soccer club Enter Vooruit (Enter Forwards). So, apart from them, everyone had a good laugh.

Ikzwetsia became popular very fast and was a headache for the school board. Children brought copies home. Some parents complained, while other parents enjoyed reading the rag. We presumed the name Ikzwetsia would be telling enough, as it referred to the Dutch word for talking nonsense. But some people took it seriously nonetheless, so we added a cautionary note on the front page, saying, ‘Whoever takes this rag seriously is not taken seriously.’ Unlike the previous school paper, we didn’t need money from the school board because I had prepared a budget. We covered the expenses with subscription fees.

Featured image: College Noetsele by Historische Kring Hellendoorn-Nijverdal, from MijnStadMijnDorp, CC-BY 4.0