Author: nivtric

1919 Cover of The Natural Economic Order

Discovery of Interest-Free Money

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In September 2008, the banking crisis was getting out of hand. Things were falling apart. It seemed as if the financial system could collapse at any moment and that civilisation, as we know it, would end. Today, the 2008 financial crisis is a distant memory, but at the time, not only did the financial press worry. Panic was setting in. It was like 1929. I had long feared an apocalyptic financial collapse and believed that usury, or charging interest on money and debts, would be the underlying cause. On the surface, the cause may appear irresponsible lending, but interest is a reward for the risk of default. Without interest charges on debts, there would be no irresponsible lending.

The events prompted me to watch the animated picture ‘Money as Debt’ on YouTube and reflect once again on Silvio Gesell’s ideas about charging a holding fee on money and using it to eliminate interest charges. I penned down my thoughts about interest-free money with a holding fee, and tried to make an ordered, coherent whole of them. The idea had never seemed workable. Why should you lend out money interest-free if you can receive interest elsewhere? It is why economists didn’t look into it more seriously and why interest-free money remained a fringe idea, mainly attracting eccentrics like me.

Then, in the first days of October, I made a startling discovery. Banning interest promotes financial stability by preventing usurious lending, irresponsible lending, and unproductive financial schemes. That would improve the economy. Think of it like so. When credit card debt and payday lending at high interest rates disappear, people will have more disposable income, and you will have no usurers living off the work of others. That would be more efficient. It also reduces the need for government and central bank interventions to manage the interest-bearing debt. Usury requires government deficits and the creation of money by central banks.

That is because most of our money is debt. If you go to a bank and take out a loan, the bank creates money out of thin air, but you must pay back the loan with interest. You repay the loan with money borrowed by someone else. And the money you need to pay the interest doesn’t exist. Someone else must borrow that as well. On a larger scale, due to interest charges, we need to add extra debt to pay off existing debts with interest. To prevent the usury scheme from collapsing, governments run deficits and central banks print money, which leads to inflation. The inflation rate is often higher than the interest rate you get on a bank account. The profits are for the bankers, who receive huge bonuses.

Now comes the explosive discovery. The economy would do better without usury. If the economy performs better, the yield on investments would be higher, so an investor would receive better returns with negative interest rates. The difference comes from inflation. Without interest charges, there is no need for government deficits and money printing. The economy can thrive without more debt, so there would be no inflation. During the Great Depression, the Austrian town of Wörgl issued a currency with a holding fee. Those holding the money had to pay a 1% monthly fee to keep the money valid, so they would spend it rather than save it. And so, the money kept circulating, and Wörgl’s economy boomed while Austria suffered from the depression.

And so I figured that if the money is interest-free, the currency’s value rises more than the interest you would receive on an interest-bearing currency. Think of it like so. You can have 2% interest with 5% inflation or -2% interest with 0% inflation. The latter would be a better deal. The question then becomes, why lend out money with interest when interest-free money offers better returns? If the idea is that good, and the ‘Miracle of Wörgl’ suggests so, investors would bring their money to the interest-free economy, and the usury economy would collapse. If this became more widely known, the idea would spread and terminate the usury financial system forever.

Until then, I had always believed that interest-free money was sound in theory, but impossible in reality, because rather than good intentions, efficiency drives changes in this world, which is also the reason why we are doomed. The only constant in history is the strong killing the weak. But this money could be the terminator of usury, and a better future for humankind suddenly seemed possible. An incredible power seemed to lurk behind it. And making this knowledge public, I speculated, could unleash an unspeakable force. The Austrian central bank banned the Wörgl money, so we don’t know how it would have ended if it had continued. Perhaps, we would have lived in an entirely different world. A similar type of money lasted for over a thousand years in ancient Egypt. Had I discovered the secret that explains these successes?

That gave me serious doubts. How could the experts have missed it? I was an amateur. And amateurs who think they know better than the experts have become a plague recently. ‘Think for yourself and do your own research,’ has become the motto of a growing squad of nutters that the Dutch would call Wappies. ‘If it snows, that proves climate change is a hoax.’ You know the type. Everyone can gather random posts and articles from the Internet and create their own version of the truth out of thin air. I was anxious about getting it wrong, which made me doubt the greatness of the discovery. It might be a good idea, but it can’t be that good. And that is correct, a decade of research later confirmed, but it is possible nonetheless. And the proof also came as we have seen negative interest rates in the next decade.

Then, on a website promoting Gesell’s ideas, I found the following quotes,

‘The creation of money that cannot be hoarded will lead to a different and more real kind of property.’

– Albert Einstein

‘Gesell’s name will be a leading name in history once it has been disentangled.’

– H.G. Wells

‘The application of Gesell’s principle of circulation of money will lead the nation out of the depression within two to three weeks. I am a humble student of this German-Argentine businessman.’

– Irving Fisher

‘The future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx.’

– John Maynard Keynes

‘Gesell’s work will initiate a new epoch in the history of mankind.’

– Prof. Dr. B. Uhlemayr

‘Gesell’s discoveries and proposals are of the greatest importance for centuries to come.’

– Dr. Theophil Christen

These brilliant minds agreed that something epic lay beneath the surface and that it could change the future forever. John Maynard Keynes and Irving Fisher were among the greatest economists of their time. If Keynes believed Gesell would make us forget Marx, I might have found out why. And so, the Miracle of Wörgl and the grain money in ancient Egypt may not have been freak accidents but a sign of something more. Ending usury, the scourge that had haunted humankind for thousands of years, seemed within reach. While considering the implications, the following song played on the radio,

Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last
Wake me up when September ends
Like my father’s come to pass
Twenty years have gone so fast
Wake me up when September ends

– Green Day, Wake me up when September ends

September had just ended. Silvio Gesell first proposed money with a holding fee in his book ‘Natural Economic Order,’ which he first published in German in 1916 as ‘Natürliche Wirtschaftsordnung.’ I figured that its abbreviation could be NWO, which stands for New World Order, not knowing that the German ‘Wirtschaftsordnung’ was, unlike in English and Dutch, one word. So, was my discovery meant to happen? Was it part of something bigger? These thoughts arose, ironically, because I didn’t see ‘Wirtschaftsordnung’ as a single word. It made me feel small and insignificant. Paranoia was creeping in.

What is less known, but definitely worth noting, is that the German Nazis also aimed to abolish interest and contemplated Gesell’s ideas. Gesell himself was not a Nazi, but a liberal and an internationalist. Adolf Hitler was more impressed by the ideas of Gottfried Feder, who had the same kind of moustache Hitler had. Feder had written ‘The Manifesto for the Abolition of Interest-Slavery’ around the same time Gesell wrote ‘The Natural Economic Order’ and proposed nationalising all banks and abolishing interest. Gesell argued for charging a holding fee on currency and not interfering with markets and banks.

I named the discovery Natural Money as a reference to the Natural Economic Order. Strange things began to happen. When I woke up at night, the clock always showed times like 2:22, 4:44 or 5:55, with no exception. That was creepy. Something seemed seriously off with reality. Then, my wife told me she was seeing those time prompts as well. Until then, I hadn’t told her that I was seeing them. Once you enter the Twilight Zone, it begins to affect you. Meaningful coincidences started to occur, making me open to suggestions. What happened around me and in the world seemed to interact with my thoughts. Even the covers and titles of the books in the bookshop at the train station in Leeuwarden radiated a sense of spookiness, with references to my situation. They call it synchronicity.

The animated picture Money as Debt started with a list of assassinated US Presidents who supposedly opposed the banking system, suggesting evil bankers were behind these assassinations, making me fear death under suspicious circumstances if Natural Money would get serious attention. Still, if a repetition of the miracle of Wörgl were to occur, the news would spread fast, and if it were that good, it would be impossible to stop. Killing me wouldn’t help. The Secret Service would be too late. Of course, I had worried far too much. I posted the idea on several message boards. Most people didn’t get it. I mailed the findings to 200 Dutch economic researchers. None of them was interested.

Natural Money had a more favourable reception on the message board of Opednews.com. It generated some discussion as some visitors saw the potential. Still, it didn’t lead to a further propagation of the idea. I also went to Strohalm’s office in Utrecht. They had been working on interest-free currencies for decades. The people of Strohalm received me politely, but they had other priorities. They had a promising project in Uruguay. Doubt crept in again. I didn’t know enough about monetary economics and the financial system to see whether it was an idea worth pursuing. And even if I was right, no one would listen, so I planned to give up and resume my life.

It was disappointing, but not as bad as being evicted from the dormitory by A* nineteen years earlier. To remind myself of that and make me feel better, I played the Sleepwalking album by Gerry Rafferty, the album I had come to associate with the events at the dormitory because of the lyrics of the first song, ‘Sleepwalking.’ And then I wondered whether A* had something to do with the discovery of Natural Money. Over the years, several incidents had occurred, suggesting that She was still interfering with my life. It didn’t take long before clues came up. There is a thin line between paranoia and psychosis. The lyrics of the fourth song of the album ‘On The Way’ were noteworthy,

Drifting along with the wind, telling yourself you can’t win
It’s over, and now we begin, oh yeah, we are on the way
…
Only one woman, one man, just doing the best that we can
There’s so much we don’t understand,
Oh yeah, but we’re on the way
Light shining down from the east,
bringing a love that won’t cease

– Gerry Raffery, On The Way

In my bed, I was imagining again. By giving up, I had just told myself I couldn’t win. Was this just the beginning? The beginning of what? What did I not understand? What was this love that won’t cease? Was my destiny connected with that of A*? I had loved Her in secret all that time, but never thought, or even hoped, that we could be together. The distinction between my make-believe world and reality, which had been there since I was a child, began to blur. The lyric wasn’t specific, so the suggestion came from me linking the album to the events in the dormitory. And I might still have ignored it if it weren’t for the fifth song,

People come and people go, friends, they disappear
There’s only one thing that I wanna know, tell me where do we go from here
Everybody’s on the make, everybody’s trying to get ahead
In a world like this, you just exist to feed the walking dead.
…
Lookin’ out on a world gone crazy, waitin’ for the fun to begin
The race is on, yeah, they’re gettin’ ready, Jesus, what a state we’re in
Meanwhile, down in my backyard, I’m sitting doing solitary
Now that I’ve milked the sacred cow, I just worry ’bout the military.
…
Get ready
Get ready

– Gerry Raffery, Sleepwalking

It is a strange lyric, and it made me think. Is the world about to go crazy, and is something about to start? We exist to feed the walking dead, which could be the defunct banking system, I reasoned. The phrase probably refers to what Karl Marx once wrote, ‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ I didn’t know that, so I made up my own interpretation. The sacred cow made me think of Joseph explaining the Pharaoh’s dreams, which is also not so obvious. Now, the story originates from a holy book, and one of the Pharaoh’s dreams involved cows, so that was the connection. Joseph introduced the granaries in Egypt, the story goes. Grain stored in these granaries became the basis of the Egyptian grain money, which, like Natural Money, had a holding fee to cover the storage costs.

These are some incredible leaps of thought that you wouldn’t make if you aren’t psychotic, so by then, I had crossed that line. Sleepwalking was the only album Gerry Rafferty had recorded outside the United Kingdom, and it was in the Netherlands, where I was living at the time. That was not a coincidence, I supposed, and I was right about that at least as it turned out. I had grown open to suggestions. Natural Money could change the world, some of the most brilliant minds had agreed on, and it was something epic, and it had to do with A*. And so, I was well on my way towards the shadow world where I was about to meet A* again after nineteen years. That evening, I felt A * trying to do a mind melt with me, like the Vulcans do in Star Trek, once again. This time, I didn’t resist. And there She was, on the other side. It seemed like a telepathic connection. By then, it was 11 November 2008.

Latest revision: 25 September 2025

Featured image: 1919 Cover of The Natural Economic Order. Wikimedia Commons.

Kombuisflat in Lewenborg.

Under the Bridge

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In 1993, I moved to Groningen and rented a small apartment at Kraaienest in Lewenborg, a multicultural neighbourhood on the outskirts of town. The quarter featured a few large apartment blocks mixed with family homes. When I told others that I lived there, some of them felt sorry for me. The area had a questionable reputation, but that was grossly exaggerated, mainly by those who didn’t live there. I had lived there for four years and never felt unsafe. But if you look for ‘Kraaienest Groningen’ in a search engine, you will find that someone died there in 2014 as a result of a ‘violent incident.’

There was drug dealing going on in the area, or so I had heard. I wandered around quite often, but never noticed it, probably because I didn’t know where to go. For the most part, it was an ordinary neighbourhood. I only knew my next-door neighbours vaguely. You could raise your children there, and there were families with children, but if you had better options, you would go somewhere else.

A group of about thirty black males with dreadlocks often hung out near the shopping mall, in what the Dutch call a coffee shop, but which was, despite the name, a place to buy and smoke cannabis. At first glance, they seemed intimidating because there were so many, but as far as I could see, they did nothing more than hang around and smoke weed. If you passed by, they were friendly. ‘Live and let live,’ was the Dutch stance on cannabis, which was officially banned, but no enforcement of that ban was the official policy of ‘tolerance’ concerning the less harmful soft drugs.

As a teenager, I had imagined there would one day be a giant Rasta party in Nijverdal, likely because the river passing through Nijverdal is named Regge, which sounds like reggae. The party would be on the banks of the river, and the Rastafari from all over the world would come to Nijverdal. In hindsight, this is a coincidence worth noting. Rasta(fari) is an Abrahamic messianic religion like Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Rastafarians see Haile Selassie I, the former Emperor of Ethiopia, as a reincarnation of Jesus. Significant dates in the Rastafarian religion are 11 September (9/11 American notation), the Ethiopian New Year and 2 November (11/2 American notation), referring to emergency services numbers of the United States and the European Union. And there, they were hanging around in droves, near my home.

I had a job and, more importantly, a place of my own, so I wasn’t very particular about the place where I lived. Life had turned for the better. It was not marvellous, but then again, not as bad as it had been for a long time. And if your life turns from miserable to not-so-great, you can be content. I went out often alone, secretly hoping for the love that might come while dancing all night to rock music,

Sometimes I feel
Like I don’t have a partner
Sometimes I feel
Like my only friend
Is the city I live in
…
I don’t ever want to feel
Like I did that day

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Under The Bridge

The day was 13 October 1989 when I left the dormitory. The city was Groningen, where I lived alone and without a partner. I started collecting Garfield comics, about a cat well-known for its fatness and cynicism. Garfield’s owner, Jon Arbuckle, was an out-of-style country guy like me who had ended up in a city without a love life. Jon Arbuckle. That was the kind of guy I could relate to. And I didn’t even have a cat.

Women have become economically independent, and men, on average, crave women more, or perhaps sex, than women desire men, so more men than women end up involuntarily single. And women can be more picky because they don’t need a man to provide for them. Feminism solved a few problems but also created new ones. And men don’t talk about their problems, so women’s issues get the most attention.

Once, I met a lady in Groningen. She had travelled a lot and seen much of the world, whereas I hadn’t. She immediately concluded, and these were her exact words, ‘I hadn’t much to offer her.’ I was a provincial, and there was no point in getting to know me. Women often had long lists of requirements a man should meet. Men also have their wishes. They want hot supermodels, even if they’re not rich or good-looking.

Some of my friends never found a wife. They would have made good husbands, better than the jerks many women select. But they weren’t particularly adventurous or glamorous. Every market has winners and losers, as does the market for spouses. Once, in a pub, an Asian woman approached me out of the blue. She asked me if I was willing to die for her. My reply was frank, ‘No.’ I wasn’t that desperate. And so, she moved on. In hindsight, the incident was yet another noteworthy coincidence.

It turned me off. What was wrong with women? Did they think that men merely exist to please them? Of course, not all women were like that, but those still on the market often were so due to their excessive requirement lists. And women had only brought me misery with nothing good to show for it. Women weren’t worth the effort. Let’s face it. I was gradually giving up on them, and apathy was setting in.

A friend from my student years came over to Groningen. We went to a pub with a dance floor. A short but muscular man suddenly demanded that I leave. He seemed angry. In hindsight, I probably hit his face with my elbow while dancing as he was close behind me, but I was unaware of that and didn’t know there was a problem. I also didn’t recognise him as the pub’s bouncer, so I continued dancing. He then gave me a terrible beating and threw me out of the pub, severely injuring me so that I couldn’t work for two weeks. I filed a report with the police. I didn’t hear from them, so after a week, I called.

The police officer responsible for the case wasn’t in, so the police asked me to call again later. That happened a few times until, after a month, I managed to get hold of him. They weren’t going to do anything. It was a low-priority matter. And he began lecturing about police priorities. Justice was served nonetheless. About six months later, a local newspaper mentioned that the police had apprehended the guy for beating up an immigrant for no reason. It became treated as a case of racism, and at the time, racism had a high priority with the police.

Princess had moved to London in the United Kingdom and came to Groningen to visit me. She came by bus to the central station. I showed her Groningen, and we went out to the pubs. We also went by train to Amsterdam. On our way back, she expressed her disappointment that we hadn’t visited the world-famous red light district, which foreigners seem to want to see for some reason. It hadn’t occurred to me that she wanted to go there. Groningen also had such an area, and the lights there were as red, so Princess didn’t have to miss out on the action. When we walked down that particular street everyone in Groningen knew about, she said, ‘Look! That hooker is cursing me because I walk here with you!’ I didn’t notice it, but that is what Princess supposedly saw.

We also visited Nijverdal. I had hoped to surprise my mother, but she wasn’t at home. From there, we went to Enschede. I showed Princess the university campus. We also went to the German border close to Enschede at Glanerbrug. At the frontier, Princess attracted the attention of some locals in a pub. When Princess went to the toilet, one of them came after her and offered her money for sex. It was at least one hundred guilders, as Princess described his offer as a pile of banknotes with a one-hundred-guilder note on top. And the guy became pushy, even though not threatening. He offered to bring us to Enschede, or wherever we wanted to go, in his car several times. We had come to Enschede by train and, from there, by bus to Glanerbrug.

Princess didn’t see any problem with stepping into his car. She was sturdy enough to handle the guy, but I smelled trouble and insisted on taking the next bus out. She was genuinely surprised. On the bus back to Enschede, she asked me, ‘Why do you allow me to chat with guys in the pubs in Groningen but don’t allow him to bring us back?’ Princess seemed to think I was possessive. I said to her, ‘He is an asshole.’ Then she suddenly turned thankful for me being protective. And it dawned upon her that the whole situation wasn’t quite right. That showed the conditions of the ghetto where she had grown up. She later married a German guy. We later changed addresses and lost contact by 1997. Around 2013, she found me on LinkedIn and contacted me again. She worked for the US Army in Germany and was still married to him. They had a son together.

In 1994, I received an invitation to a singles party on a boat in Amsterdam. They had invited me because I had put in a personal advertisement the year before. On my way there on the train, I accidentally bumped into two guys from Almelo who were also going there. Nijverdal is close to Almelo, so we came from the same region, Twente. That created a bond and a mutual understanding. The guys from Almelo were discussing the disappointment they were about to get. One of them said, ‘The great thing about these events is the anticipation.’

After a decade of disappointments, there was hardly any anticipation on my part. And the previous five years had counted as twenty. When I moved to the university campus, I was twenty but immature, like a fifteen-year-old boy. Five years later, I had grown mature like a thirty-five-year-old. The intense memories still hung over me like a shadow. A clear division had emerged between life before and life after meeting A******* in the dormitory. These were two entirely different lives. When in Enschede, I sometimes returned to the campus to take a walk in the nearby forest and think about all that had happened.

Featured image: Kombuisflat in Lewenborg. H. de Vegt (2005). CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.

Before the Dawn of Reality

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It was March 2018. My wife, Ingrid, woke me up in the middle of the night, saying, ‘Wake up. The bathroom door is locked, and our son Rob is sleeping in his bed.’ You could only lock the door from the inside. The lock requires force. It couldn’t close itself by accident. How can that be? Ingrid feared that a burglar might be hiding inside. I took a knife from the kitchen to unlock the door. Ingrid was standing behind me, holding a heavy object, the so-called Bobby beater, a pounder from a pharmacy, to smash into the head of the burglar. She originally had kept it to use it on a Romanian guy named Bobby in case he caused trouble, hence the name. Only, I never believed that a burglar was hiding inside. I had become too accustomed to God’s pranks to consider that it might be something else. The unusual had become normal. Even the laws of physics had gone out the window a few times. And I was right. No burglar was hiding in the bathroom. Ingrid was baffled.

It was the last seriously peculiar incident ending the Decade of Strangeness. Remarkable coincidences continued to occur from time to time, but the laws of nature remained intact, so that was at least something. The number of unusual events that have taken place is truly remarkable. Most occurred between 2008 and 2018. Ingrid and Rob also noticed the spooky incidents. When something mysterious happened, we hummed the theme from Midsomer Murders, a British crime drama series. It radiated an atmosphere of mystery and eeriness, much like the theme music of The Twilight Zone.

Candles had popped out from their stands, travelling eye-popping distances on several occasions, leaving Ingrid with the question, ‘Are there any ghosts out there doing this?’ Once, Ingrid decided to test the supposed spooks dwelling in our house by saying, ‘If you are here, pull this card from the refrigerator.’ The card had been there for a long time. A magnet attached it to the fridge. And then she waited, but nothing happened. Yet the next day, the card lay on the ground, a notable distance away from its original location. Something seemed to have shaken the refrigerator. The toothpaste on top of it had also fallen. It is not proof of ghosts, but it is a remarkable coincidence.

When something happened that defied the laws of nature, and we couldn’t think of a naturalistic explanation, or was in other ways highly peculiar, thus a noteworthy coincidence, I just put up my Sneek accent, and said, ‘Het is gewoon behekst juh.’ It’s just haunted, man. In other words, nothing to worry about. Ingrid isn’t that into logic and science. Otherwise, she might have shared my conclusion that this world is fake. When I raised the issue, she would roll her eyes or become angry. Making these jokes would avoid that. You could always have fun with her. Or I would say, ‘There is more between heaven and Earth, Horatio.’ She would agree. She had seen plenty of evidence.

Already before the Autumn of 2008, something was slightly off. I accepted it without questioning. There had been incidents suggesting A******* was interfering with my life from a distance, but there were too few to become suspicious. There was no reason to suspect a connection with the other incidents either. There was no obvious link. The events of the Autumn of 2008 made me take notice. From then on, there was no turning back. Since then, I knew we live in a scripted reality. And once you know, you cannot unknow. That is the problem with knowledge. Related remarkable coincidences are doubly strange. Something weird happens, and then something equally strange happens with a meaningful relation to the previous peculiar event. The world-famous Dutch soccer player Johan Cruyff, who was also a proficient philosopher, once said, ‘You only see it once you get it.’ As the following example demonstrates, we usually don’t notice.

At the office, our team, the Green Team, worked on twelve Java services. They all had names that were acronyms like GAS, CIQR, CBBOX, or OGWS. One was named KISS, and another was named CUS, which sounds like the Dutch word for kiss. On 27 January 2025, I completed a release for CUS, and the release number became 3.45.0. I informed the other team members. Then Patrick, who was one of our team members, said, ‘That is strange. I just released that same version 3.45.0 for KISS.’ Releasing two services with the same release number on the same day is remarkable already. But the names of the services made the coincidence truly astounding. And so, I alerted the other team members and stressed how much planning would have gone into making this happen if it were intentional. The others didn’t appreciate it as much. They didn’t get it because they didn’t see it. And I thought, ‘Welcome to the Matrix.’ Seconds later, another team, the Yellow Team, on the opposite side of the aisle, began discussing a matrix they had built inside one of their Java services.

So, unusual events already transpired before 2008. On 1 March 2006, my father had worked for forty years for his employer, Roelofs, a road constructor. His employer threw a party for that occasion, but an exceptional snowstorm blocked the roads. Several guests were unable to attend. Some people, not guests, have slept in their cars on roads blocked by snow. It was in the news. As far as I know, that didn’t even happen during the epic winter of 1979, when parked cars were covered in snow. But it was March by then, and it had been a regular winter that year. In the Netherlands, the winters are mild. In hindsight, the roadblocks that occurred on the same day my father had a party, after he had worked for 40 years at a road construction company, are a noteworthy coincidence. Only, it didn’t suggest that anything out of the ordinary was afoot.

In 2006, Ingrid went to a psychic fair. A medium asked the audience, ‘Did someone drop a plate today?’ She had dropped a plate that morning. Then the medium continued, ‘I see trains and railroads.’ We live next to the railway station. She asked, ‘Does anyone recognise this?’ Ingrid remained silent. She didn’t want to go on stage. Then the medium said something Ingrid couldn’t relate to. After that, the medium said, ‘I see a sensitive boy who could benefit from swimming.’ Ingrid believed it referred to Rob. A year later, I started swimming to cope with repetitive strain injury, and have been doing so ever since.

In 2007, Ingrid’s mother had passed away during the night. In the morning, we didn’t know that yet. I woke up Rob because he had to go to school. After that, I closed the door of his room. A few minutes later, Rob couldn’t get out. The door lock malfunctioned. It was impossible to open it. I had to use an axe to free Rob. By then, it was too late for Rob to go to school. The bus had already left. Then the phone rang. Rob’s grandmother had passed away. And so, Rob could come with us to see her lying body. The funeral was in the Catholic church of Sneek. The outside of the church was not impressive, but I saw its interior for the first time. It was the most appealing church interior, somehow perfectly aligned with my taste. I had seen other churches and cathedrals. At the time, it didn’t seem as if anyone had designed it with my taste in mind, or, conversely, that someone had tailored my taste to fall in love with this particular church interior.

We then cleaned up Ingrid’s mother’s apartment. Most of her belongings went to a second-hand shop. There was a lot of stuff, including a doll that had always been on her bed. A few months later, Ingrid returned to her mother’s apartment to fetch her late mother’s mail. A new tenant had moved in. That same doll, wearing the same clothes, sat on the bed in her mother’s bedroom again. A decade later, Ingrid returned, and the same woman still lived there, so Ingrid discussed the doll with her. And then the truth came out. It was not the same doll, but another one of the same type.

On 1 January 2008, an epic fog covered the Netherlands. It was the densest fog ever seen, enhanced by powder fumes from the fireworks. Car drivers couldn’t see the road before them. Pedestrians walked in front of cars, pointing the way. We were staying with my brother-in-law to celebrate the New Year. I didn’t dare drive back home, so we walked. At the end of 1988, I had walked through a dense fog, thinking it mirrored my view of the future as I planned to look for a room in 1989. That was the year A******* crossed my path. My vision of the future was similar in 2008, even though it didn’t cross my mind at the time, and A******* would be involved once again.

In January 2008, the lottery jackpots of the two major Dutch lotteries fell in my hometown of Sneek within two days.1 It is a small town, so it is not so likely to occur, but also not so unlikely that you would call it a miracle. But what was about to happen to me that year was a statistical miracle, probably less likely than winning the lottery jackpot twice.


In the summer of 2008, a good-looking woman sat by the side of the swimming pool. She was watching me. The following week, she was there again, watching me. It had been quite a while since a good-looking woman had shown interest in me. That gave me the jolly feeling of still being attractive. Yet, I kept a distance. It went on for a few months. I wasn’t willing to cheat on Ingrid. Apart from that, I had a family and a responsibility. It couldn’t go on. So one day, I walked out when she came in. She understood the hint and didn’t return. I realised that I would never become unfaithful to Ingrid. It was just weeks before that idea went out of the window. As for my family and responsibility, they both extended beyond my wildest imagination. Things were about to go wild,

She says, ‘Ooh, my storybook lover
You have underestimated my power, as you shortly will discover’

Paul Simon, She Moves On

Latest revision: 10 February 2026

Featured image: dense fog, somewhere in the Netherlands on 1 January 2008

1. Jackpot valt weer in geluksstad Sneek. Leeuwarder Courant (11 January 2008).

Doomsday Machine

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Forces of nature

How did we get where we are today? Nature’s driving forces are competition and cooperation. This perspective provides a great deal of insight into what happened. Plants and animals cooperate and compete for resources. Cooperation and competition are everywhere. Cooperation increases the available resources. Plants generate the oxygen animals need, while animals produce the carbon dioxide plants need. Still, the available resources are limited. There is only room for one tree on that spot. And so, there is a competition called the struggle for life, where the fittest survive.

Plants and animals are opportunistic, taking advantage of opportunities whenever possible, with the help of both competition and cooperation. Plants and animals have a blueprint, their genes. These genes have the urge to make copies of themselves. It is why we exist and the basis of our will to live and our sexual desires. And so, the biological purpose of plants and animals, including humans, is to spread their genes. That is indeed a most peculiar purpose. The copying of genes is prone to errors. And so changes occur, resulting in variation within species. It is why people vary in appearance and character.

Some changes make individual plants and animals better adapted to their environment, thereby increasing their chances of survival and reproduction, resulting in a rising number of individuals with these features. Environments allow for several species to coexist, most notably when they don’t compete for the same resources. It is why ants and monkeys can live in the same area. The balance in nature is always precarious, as changes in circumstances can favour different species. And so, introducing foreign species in places where they have no natural predators can lead to pests.

Like other social animals, humans operate in groups. Social animals benefit from group cooperation, which enhances their chances of survival. Within the group, competition can arise, resulting in rankings and struggles among members. Cooperating in groups also helps us to compete with other groups, usually in warfare. And groups can form coalitions to compete with coalitions of different groups. Stories enable humans to work together in groups of any size, which then further increases the competition between these groups.

Meet our closest relatives

Chimpanzees are our closest kin. Studying these apes provides us with insights into our nature. Chimpanzees live in small troops of a few dozen individuals. They form friendships, work with reliable group members, and avoid those who are unreliable. Chimpanzees have rules, may cheat on them, and can feel guilty when they do. Within the group, the members have ranks. When there is food available, the highest-status animals eat first. Ranks and rules regulate competition within the troop, reducing conflicts and enabling its members to collaborate more effectively.

Like human leaders, chimpanzee alpha males acquire their status by building coalitions and gaining support. Others show their submission to the alpha male. Like a government, the alpha male strives to maintain social harmony within his group. He takes sought-after pieces of food like a government collects taxes. Within a chimpanzee band, there are subgroups and coalitions. There are close friendships and more distant relationships. They unite as a single fighting force in the event of an external threat.

Coalition members in a chimpanzee band build and maintain close ties through intimate daily contact such as hugging and kissing, and doing each other favours. For the band to function effectively, its members must be aware of what others will do in critical situations. For that, they need to know each other through personal experiences. Unlike humans, chimpanzees have no language to share social information. That limits the size of the group in which chimpanzees can live and work together to about thirty individuals.

Chimpanzees also commit violence in groups. Like humans, they are among the species that commit genocide on their congeners. Humans and chimpanzees are not alone in this. Chickens are known to fight racial wars when they face a lack of food. Groups of chickens may start to kill those with different colours from themselves. And so, racism could be a natural behaviour caused by competition between genes.

The human advantage

Humans have become the dominant species on Earth. We can collaborate flexibly in large numbers. We have mastered fire, which enhances our power and allows us to eat foods we couldn’t otherwise. It allowed us to become the top predator. We use tools and clothing, allowing us to do things other animals can’t and live in inhospitable environments. Compared to other animals, humans employ a rich language. That enables us to express countless meanings and describe situations in precise terms.

We pass on social information, such as who is fit for a particular job. We get information about others in our group without needing personal experience. If someone cheats, you don’t need to learn it the hard way like chimpanzees must, but someone can tell you. That allows us to cooperate more effectively. Most human communication is social information or gossip. We need the group to survive, so we must understand what is happening within our group and the decisions our group needs to make.

Human politics is about cooperating and competing. We must agree on what we should do as a group and on how we divide the spoils of our cooperation. Within the group, we may compete to cooperate. Leadership contests benefit the group when the outcome is better leadership. That isn’t always the case, and infighting can weaken the group. We also cooperate to compete. We organise ourselves in groups to compete with other groups, such as defeating them in warfare.

Early humans lived in bands of up to 150 individuals. The number of individuals with whom we can closely collaborate is one of our natural limitations. We overcame the limit of our natural group size by cooperating based on shared imaginings, such as religions, laws, money, and nation-states. That competitive advantage over other species allowed us to take over this planet and become the ‘killer bug’ that has completely upended nature and has terminated more species than any other species.

Unlike other animals and plants, which adapt to their environment, we have altered our environment to suit us. We have created societies and civilisations and have become immensely powerful collectives to compete with other collectives. However, our civilisations also shield us from the forces of nature, turning us into weak individuals. We have become integrated into the system, and many of us won’t survive a collapse of civilisation. It is crucial to understand that competition drives this process.

We imagine corporations, laws, money, and nation-states. We believe a law exists, and that is why the law works. It is also why religion works. These shared imaginations allow us to cooperate on any scale for any purpose. We are programmable, with our brains serving as the hardware and our imaginations serving as the software. And we can change the software overnight. During the French Revolution, the French stopped believing in the divine right of kings overnight and began to envision the sovereignty of the people.

Organising to compete

The forces of competition and population density drove humans to organise. There is a competition between groups of humans. Just as there is a competition between species in nature, there is also a competition between human groups. Groups that succeeded in adapting to new circumstances survived those that did not. We are rule-following animals. Once we start to cooperate on a larger scale, we need political institutions that embody the rules of a community or society.

Humans design political institutions while genetic mutations emerge by chance. Still, competition determines which designs survive and become copied. In general, under the pressure of competition, which mainly was warfare, human organisation advanced from bands to tribes to feudalism to states. The experts deem this explanation simplistic and flawed. Still, overall, that trend towards more advanced organisation occurred.

Hunter-gatherers lived in family groups of a few dozen individuals. They had few violent conflicts, probably because they had no property, and population density was low. Hunter-gatherers could move on if a stronger band invaded their territory. Small groups were egalitarian. They often had no permanent leader or hierarchy and decided on their leaders based on group consensus.

The Agricultural Revolution changed that. Farming allows more people to survive. Farmers invest heavily in their cattle and crops, so agricultural societies need property rights and defence forces. Agriculture promoted the transition from bands to tribes. Population density increased, leading to more frequent violent conflicts among people. Tribes are much larger than bands and can muster more men for war, so tribes replaced bands.

Tribes were usually egalitarian, but a separate warrior caste often emerged. The most basic form of political organisation was the lord and his armed vassals, known as feudalism. The lord and his vassals exchange favours. The loyalty of the vassals is crucial, and politics is about these loyalties and betrayals. Tribalism centres around kinship, but also includes feudalist, personal relationships of mutual reciprocity and personal ties.

States yield more power than tribes because they force people to cooperate, while tribes work with voluntary arrangements. As population density increased and people lived closer to each other, the need to regulate conflicts also grew, so some states also provided justice services. Leaders, with their family and friends, led these states. They worked with personal, feudal relationships, thus making deals and returning favours. And so, the transition from tribes to feudalism to states is not a straightforward process.

The first modern, rationally organised states with professional bureaucracies based on merit rather than personal relationships and favours appeared in China. The reason was a centuries-long cut-throat competition of warfare on an unprecedented scale, with states having armies of up to 500,000 men, in the period now known as the Warring States Era. Fielding these armies required professional tax collection, with records of people and their possessions, as well as the provisioning of soldiers in the field.

Once the state of Qin emerged victorious by 200 BC, China became unified, and the competition between the states ended, and China’s modernisation ground to a halt. Even so, China adhered to modern bureaucratic principles and remained the most modern state for 2,000 years, enabling its rulers to govern a vast empire. States remained the most competitive organisational form until Europeans invented capitalism and corporations, which would cause a radical new dynamic of permanent change driven by competition.

Capitalism and corporations

China had a strong centralised state that prevented the merchants from becoming the dominant force in society. In the Middle Ages, Europe had no strong states, so capitalism could gradually emerge in Europe. The rise of merchants and later corporations brought a new economic dynamic and wealth. Corporations are legal entities serving a specific purpose. Invented in Roman times, they included the state, municipalities, political groups, and guilds of artisans or traders.

From the Middle Ages onward, Europeans introduced commercial corporations with shares and stock markets such as the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC). The advent of corporations triggered a new phase in the competitive cycle, further increasing efficiency by specialising in specific tasks. The Europeans combined their entrepreneurship with inquisitiveness, so eventually the profit motive began to drive innovations as well.

The new dynamic intensified competition and innovation, causing permanent economic growth and disruptive change, a process that economists call creative destruction. Capitalism increases available resources via cooperation or the division of labour, but competition is the driving force. As long as that remains so, competition rather than our desires determines what our future will look like.

Currently, China may have the most competitive socio-economic model, potentially outcompeting those of the West. But it will not end well for them either. Artificial intelligence may soon outcompete humans. It may become a ‘killer bug’ that ends humanity. We can’t keep up with artificial intelligence. The future doesn’t need us. We aren’t sufficiently efficient and innovative. Competition is our first and foremost problem. It is our doomsday machine. Competition, insofar as we allow it, should be at the service of cooperation rather than the opposite. If we don’t do that, we are doomed.

Featured image: Tower of Babel by The Tower of Babel (1569). Public Domain.

College Noetsele

Secondary School

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Nijverdal had a secondary school, Noetsele College. It was a Protestant comprehensive school with 1,500 pupils. It was near my friend Marc’s home. The building impressed me. It was huge and three storeys high. Okay, this was Nijverdal, not Tokyo, remember that. It was one of the most extensive buildings in Nijverdal. My primary school had only 200 pupils and one floor. My mother once told me we had passed by that building bicycling, and I said decisively, ‘I want to go to this school.’ It was close to home, and perhaps I feared she would send me to Pope Pius X College in Almelo, a similar Catholic school where many Roman Catholics sent their children. That was eighteen kilometres from home, which meant bicycling that distance twice a day for years, no matter the weather.

In contrast to the liberal, loose, and left-leaning primary school, this school was right-leaning, disciplined, and conservative. Conservative Protestants had a significant influence. Nearby Nijverdal was Rijssen, a conservative Protestant village without a comprehensive secondary school. People from Rijssen thus sent their children to Nijverdal. About Rijssen, people said there were twenty-two different churches because of the various types of Protestantism that disagreed on a particular matter. Television was a device of Satan for many of them, so they didn’t have one or hid it in a sealable closet so the neighbours and the preacher couldn’t see it.

When we visited my grandparents on Sundays, we saw them attending church, the black-stockinged Protestants. The women wore hats. They didn’t observe the traffic, so my father had to stop the car when they crossed the street. Someone later told me that if they died in an accident, they considered it God’s will. To these conservative Protestants, Roman Catholics like me weren’t real Christians but idol worshippers of the Virgin Mary. Our days at school started with a lecture from the Bible and ended with prayer. Nijverdal was predominantly Protestant, but there were also Roman Catholics.

I did fit in much better there, so my former classmates didn’t give me a hero’s welcome at the secondary school reunion. Marc was my classmate during the first year, so I still had a friend. In the second year, they reshuffled the groups, and I ended up in a different group with a great atmosphere. That group included a few classmates from primary school, but Marc was no longer in it. On Ascension Day, we went out bicycling. We started early, at six AM. It was a local tradition in Twente called dew kicking. A few classmates, including me, continue that tradition to this day. After that, no major reshuffling of the classes occurred. I had a good time and hardly went out alone during breaks.

Instead of Marc, Patrick P. became my mate. He sat beside me. I knew him from primary school. He was a lively character with a vivid imagination, albeit a bit over the top. He made drawings of our business accounting teacher, Mr B*****, in various Superman outfits and then prodded me during the lessons to attract attention, ‘Look… look… SuperB*****.’ He had a small studio in an attic above a garage, where he could be a disc jockey. Patrick hoped to become a celebrity one day, which indeed happened, as he was on television and radio several times, even though not as a disc jockey, but as a traffic expert.

It was not all calm and peaceful. For all those six years, my math teacher was Mr. B****. We initially had a problematic relationship. When Mr. B**** entered the classroom the first time, I said sarcastically to Marc, who sat beside me, ‘Is he our mathematics teacher?’ Mr. B**** had an insignificant stature and a remarkable face. He had heard it, and ordered me to his desk, noted my name, and promised to ‘polish the sharp edges of my personality.’ To his very personal taste, I was a bit too feisty, so from then on, Mr. Blaak frequently punished me for insignificant offences everyone else got away with.

Nearly every week, I had to stay an extra hour, which was more time than all my classmates combined. I worked hard and had good grades. Still, Mr. B**** tried to catch me for not doing my homework. He meticulously inspected my notebook a few times. It was pointless. I always did my homework, and did it all. At some point, after being punished again for something everyone else got away with, I couldn’t take it anymore, and went into tears. That was nearly two years later. Mr. B**** had gone too far, and he knew. He stopped punishing me, but I didn’t stop making jokes about him. Once, I let my notebook go around the class with a fill-in exercise, allowing my classmates to use their imagination on ‘Mr. B**** is a … because he … while he ….’ My classmates came up with over twenty suggestions, some of which were rancid.

Once they were sixteen, many youngsters went to a bar named Lucky in Rijssen. I didn’t go at first. I lived on the road to Rijssen, so those who came from Nijverdal to visit Lucky passed by my home. One Saturday evening, a few classmates rang the bell at nine PM. They wanted me to go with them. Being already in my pyjamas, I put on my clothes and went to a bar for the first time. Going to bars and discotheques became a habit. I could dance, chat with friends, and hope for love to come. The encounters in Lucky were sometimes a bit physical. Some girls pulled me over to get a kiss. Others pinched me in the butt when I passed by. If I looked back to see who did it, these girls were grinning and pointing at each other. It always happened in the same spots. You could count on it. One of my friends later told me he had the same experience.

I became a member of the School Council, which advised the school board on some matters of lesser importance. This council comprised board members, teachers, parents, and three pupils. It wasn’t a popular job, so after showing a slight interest, I found myself a member. There, I witnessed firsthand how bureaucrats keep themselves busy at work. The school had a Financial Commission, which had overstepped its bounds by entering the domain of the Cultural Council. I don’t remember what the Financial Commission did wrong, but it caused a fuss. The discussions then focused on whether that had been inappropriate, thus a transgression, or inelegant, and therefore merely a matter of taste. It dragged on for several meetings because the head of the Financial Commission was also a member of the School Council. A member of the Cultural Council accused the Financial Commission of appropriating too much power and acting like the famous authoritarian French king Louis XIV, thereby creating, and these were his exact words, a ‘L’etat c’est moi’ situation, referring to something Louis XIV supposedly had said to stress that only he made the decisions. Louis XIV claimed to have the divine right of kings, thus unlimited authority, because God had appointed him.

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