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.
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).
In 2016, Trump enthusiasts took over the GodlikeProductions.com message board. The mood turned grim, much as it had fifteen years earlier, when Fortuyn fans flooded the IEX message board. In fact, there was little difference in the atmosphere, as if I were thrown fifteen years back to 2001. Since then, the new fascism has grown stronger. This time, I stayed because I had missed something important. Given the job that may lie ahead, and me supposedly being Adolf Hitler reincarnate, which I couldn’t possibly have guessed in 2001, not understanding fascism was no excuse. I familiarised myself with the MAGA crowd, as I had with the Moroccan minority in the Netherlands. Hanging out with people helps you to understand them. GodlikeProductions.com had the annoying feature of banning you for no apparent reason, only to let you back in after some time, perhaps to get you to switch to a paid subscription. Fair enough, but the content wasn’t worth paying for.
That eventually made me switch to Reddit, where you can hang out with BLM and MAGA, and with others as well, like a fly on the wall. And flies on walls like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel can arrive at great insights. This particular fellow had somehow figured out how God’s plan would unfold over the next 200 years and how we would arrive in Paradise through a struggle between ideas that would lead to social progress. An example is the abolition of slavery. It required activism and war. He did so by observing what happened around him, looking back at history, and reasoning from there. In hindsight, he was one of the greatest prophets of all time. Okay, God wrote the script and made him do it. The first Trump presidency was not a clean break with the past, as his cabinet featured several Republican establishment figures. They kept The Donald in check.
The second Trump administration became a different ballgame. Trump went unhinged. He had surrounded himself with sycophants, leaving no adults to keep him in check. As there is no limit to Trump’s ego, his erratic and spiteful caprices became a spectacle so hilarious that even Monty Python couldn’t have made it up, with Trump naming buildings after himself, declaring his birthday a public holiday, and numerous other self-aggrandising acts. As no one could figure out his plan, his followers praised his brilliance at making it seem as if he had none. His economic policies were like raising tariffs on Swiss imports because he didn’t like the way the Swiss leader spoke to him. And let’s not forget his brazen lies, his self-enrichment and that of his family members by abusing his office, eclipsing all previous corruption by US presidents, his pardoning of criminals, and his divisive Christmas message, ‘Merry Christmas to all, including the radical left scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our country, but are failing badly.’ Indeed, Donald Trump will destroy America before the Democrats can, and do a much better job at it also.
Also noteworthy were his war threats against Denmark, for among other reasons, his not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for which he blamed Norway, and his going to war with Iran without provocation from the Iranian side, for allegedly not honouring the nuclear agreement he tore up, while negotiations were still ongoing. When the war effort went badly, and Iran kept resisting and blocked oil exports from neighbouring countries, he begged for European help after having threatened to invade the territory of a European country, and after limiting support for Ukraine and pressing Ukraine to surrender to Russia, and making Europe pay for the American weapons sent to Ukraine. Europe did little to help him in his efforts to start World War III, prompting Trump to revive his idea of leaving NATO, while leaving the rest of the world to pay for the disaster he created with countless desperate people in Asia running out of fuel. America First is once again at the expense of the rest of the world. The United States has lived at the expense of the rest of the world for decades now by gobbling up the world’s surplus production with newly printed US dollars in a scam known as the ‘consumer of last resort.’ Meanwhile, Mr Trump was already eying an invasion of Cuba. As a Swedish newspaper put it, ‘This is the problem with having a giant baby in charge of the free world.’
No doubt that the second Trump administration will go down in history as the greatest joke in the history of government, and that the greatness of the joke will be remembered for eternity as a lasting monument of God’s sense of humour. If Donald Trump succeeds in collapsing Western civilisation before 2030, it will be a feat comparable to a single emperor collapsing the Roman Empire in 375 AD, when the empire still had a few decades to go, so that will be a spectacular success. Where all the enemies of the West have failed for centuries, The Donald would have succeeded marvellously. Some conspiracy theorists suggested the existence of an Al Qaeda plot to watch the West destroy itself.
The name Trump means trumpeteer, which is noteworthy as the loud noise of trumpets would herald the end times. Trump’s noise is definitely loud. And so, there is greatness in the second Trump administration after all. That includes blasphemy. MAGA stands for bigotry and hatred, and is the very opposite of what Christ stood for. Trump sold his followers $3 made-in-China Trump Bibles for $60, which was one of his schemes to cash in on his presidency at his followers’ expense. If exploiting God’s word in this way will not prompt God to act, then what will? And if this level of insanity makes God bring in a messiah to save us, then what will? Also, on the GodlikeProductions.com message board, I was cautious about expressing my opinions. I was there to learn, not to annoy others.
The problem with MAGA can be summarised with memes some on the message board flaunted, like, ‘You can’t imagine the fucks I do not give.’ You can’t let malcontent country bumpkins living in rural America decide the fate of the world. Not caring is the problem here. There is only one world, and we have to share it. Sharing was never the American way. The typical preconception of the American gun enthusiast is a trespasser who shoots others for trespassing. He lives on land stolen from the Native Americans, and doesn’t want to share the loot with others, saying, ‘Don’t tread on my property. I will shoot you. Fuck communists. This is America.’ His logic is that the man with the biggest gun is always right. Yet, the world is God’s property, so if the rightful owner comes to take it back and arrives with a much bigger gun, he had it coming.
People are the same everywhere, so most MAGA people are okay, but MAGA is to the world what the Moroccan minority is to the Netherlands. The group as a whole poses a problem, and a gigantic problem, even, because of their lack of caring. Because of its military, to which the rest of the world has contributed through the US dollar’s reserve-currency status, the election of Donald Trump made the United States the world’s single most pressing problem, something that needs to be dealt with promptly. It proves that independent nation-states have no future. The brutal reality is that humans are violent creatures, and that states suppress human violence by 99%, but that states still fight each other, so that the final solution for humankind is living in a single empire.
In a realistic scenario, there is no stopping our descent into savagery. The fascists are right that mixing incompatible cultures is a recipe for trouble, but that is mainly because we are savages who organise in tribes to defend their territories, so that is the underlying cause. The issues the fascists raise are genuine, but that is not why things go to ruin. Minor distinctions can push us into a murder spree. Europeans fought two devastating wars, the Great Patriotic Slaughter I and II, also known as World Wars I and II, caused by patriotism. The murdering tribes had similar races, religions and cultures, and yet, inspired by nationalist fairy tales, they savagely mass murdered each other by the tens of millions. Any excuse will do. And there is no better way to ruin a nation than by patriotism, as the Germans have experienced firsthand, and America is about to find out.
Israel, the United States, Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas are all run by religious fanatics worshipping the same deity, all cooperating to start the apocalypse. That is also because Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas never hid their stupidity, making it their officially stated goal to annihilate far superior opponents that could annihilate them at any time. The Jews have learned that lesson the hard way at the hands of the Romans in the first and second centuries AD. Somehow God tends to side with the strongest, and being God’s chosen people didn’t help them, nor did fighting to the death for God. Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas have yet to figure that out. As for the nuclear threat of Iran, there definitely is one, and allowing Iran to have nuclear weapons makes the world even more dangerous. Different cultures can live together peacefully, given a strong enough government that represses tribal sentiments and goes after troublemakers. It is how empires brought peace by force countless times in the past. Are empires evil? They usually bring order, so that having no empire is worse in most cases.
And so, the fascists are wrong about thinking that nation-states and religions have a future. If that is our future, we might as well do drugs, mutiliate our bodies with piercings, wear a nosering, paint ‘no future’ on our foreheads, scream ‘fuck fascist pigs.’ The fascists and religious crazies would make us fight tribal and religious wars until the end, and the end will be sooner rather than later. We are fucked, unless there is a New World Order that represses religions and tribalism, limits private initiative, and dictates a single truth. Hence, a global Soviet Union, as it were, where we share our material poverty, with the single distinction that there is room for private initiative, albeit under strict limits. Conspiracy theorists have feared that the elites have a secret plan to bring that about, which includes depopulation, because that is the obvious way to save humanity. It is only that they don’t like to be ruled. It requires doing the right thing on their own, which they do not want to do. Instead, they wish to have the freedom to fuck things up and blame others for it.
In social justice, the law of diminishing returns also applies. Social justice hits the limits of human nature, and in the face of the apocalypse, the bickering between Woke and anti-Woke looks like a fight on the deck of the sinking Titanic. More women than men may prefer to care for their children, which can affect their careers. Trying to fix that with government policies may, at some point, prove unhelpful. Humans also can’t live up to the highest standards of social justice, especially when belief in them is lacking. Or there is overreach, creating other injustices. To favour a disadvantaged group, the best candidate may not get the job. Social justice can turn into cock fights over respect and privileges. Think of special toilets for people who feel they are neither men nor women. But what would that cost to refit every public building with an extra toilet group? Transgender women competing in women’s sports is a good excuse for bigots to hate transgender people. Still, it can make the competition unfair, on the deck of the sinking Titanic, that is.
Civilisation is a mindset, from which practical consequences follow, such as civilised conduct. MAGA marks the end of Western civilisation based on reasoned Socratic and Hegelian debates, so it is a cultural suicide, and not only for the West. Social progress has changed the world, affecting other cultures and leading to outcomes such as women in Saudi Arabia being allowed to drive. So, the end of social progress is end-timish, because of the implications. Other countries may rank lower on social progress than the United States, but they don’t have powerful militaries capable of blowing up anything anywhere in the world. The Chinese, who have seen twenty centuries of civilisation, have yet to grow that cheeky. America is still, in some ways, a frontier society, so a Wild West, and Americans like Donald Trump see the world as a giant saloon, where they can start brawls and shoot people for offences like looking nasty. The priority is halting America’s collapse into barbarism. We are all savages, and culture is a thin veneer, because our genes rule our actions, including civilised conduct. And so, the barbarians are standing at the gates of civilisation. They always were.
Non-Westerners, including Africans and Muslims, have not been brought up in a culture founded on social progress through reasoned debates, so if they come to the West as migrants, they have trouble adapting. But few of them want to return to where they came from, so life in the West is better. Still, the West is not superior in values or conduct. And the West brought us the mess we are in, as did Adam by eating the fruit from the forbidden tree, even though it was Eve who made Adam and the West do it. While pillaging the world, the white man whined about the white man’s burden of civilising others, but when the burden finally comes, he wants to run away.
It is Adam’s task to fix the mess he created, which he laid the foundation for in his incarnation as Jesus, so it is also up to the West to fix the mess that previous generations of Westerners were destined to create. Jesus didn’t say to God, ‘I don’t remember having been Adam, so why should I die on the cross for his mistakes?’ He saw it as a matter of destiny. As social progress through reasoned debate and social struggle is God’s path to Paradise, the West must lead the way. Okay, without the cooperation of the rest of the world, this is going nowhere, so other nations have to accept the highest standards, even if it looks like recolonisation of countries lacking qualified administrators.
Humans are savages who operate in mobs. Nature has shaped us that way. In that sense, Woke is no different from MAGA. Stating a deviant opinion could get you cancelled, while Woke social justice warriors would treat you like a heretic. On Godlikeproductions.com, some would give you kind suggestions like ‘Fuck off, retarded idiot piece of shit.’ Humans are incapable of handling freedom of opinion when it truly matters. We fight and murder over fairy tales. Fact-checking is to no avail. Myths are more powerful than facts, so you can only win with a better fairy tale.
And, if, by some miraculous accident, we happen to crash into a most wonderful and also the most spectacular fairy tale that happens to be the truth, one that no other can ever match, we can’t question it, as it is our only ticket to permanent world peace. We have reached the end of the line, and without an inspiring fairy tale to guide us, further progress is impossible, and we will soon decline into savagery. Knowing that God wrote the script, I kept my calm. In 2019, with no idea how the apocalypse might begin, I had a hunch it would be clear before 2025. That became a deadline, sort of, at least.
On 1 January 2025, an imminent apocalypse seemed more likely than ever during my lifetime. By then, it was already clear that the second Trump administration would be different from the first. He had ousted the remaining reasonable individuals. Trump’s erratic conduct might destabilise the world and trigger mayhem. The world adapted, but with no one to check the orange madman, things could easily spiral out of control. My preparations were not yet complete, but seemed good enough had God called upon me at the time, and close to the finish line, the moment when additional preparation would make little sense. I figured it would be around 1 April 2027. I further surmised that the job would start before Trump’s second term ended. If the world were to survive his presidency, we might have a few decades more, and I might die of old age. My new deadline became 1 January 2029. I promised myself to stop by then if nothing had come out of it, but would I? So, is this going somewhere, or would I be setting deadlines until the Grim Reaper arrives to take me to the eternal hunting fields where death is beautiful all the time?
We have seen the collapse of liberalism, and with it, the so-called rules-based liberal world order, which favoured the West, but even more the elites. Still, a poor order is better than none at all. Yet things will not return to what they were. The liberal world order has ended. Liberal states have long had an edge because of capitalism and science. Liberalism is as much a part of the Western heritage as Christianity, perhaps even more so, for without liberalism, science, and social progress, Western civilisation wouldn’t be distinct from the others, and the Christian and Islamic worlds would have been the closest kin in cultural values and outlook. Science and capitalism thrived most in a liberal environment with freedom of expression and property rights. When the Nazis took over Germany, several Jewish German scientists fled to the United States, including a fellow named Einstein. They helped the United States develop the atomic bomb. And then Adolf Hitler made the mistake of invading the Soviet Union. That is how liberalism won the day.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, liberalism seemed to have won. Yet, it is better to say that our consumption addiction has won. The communists had given up on their project because they had promised their workers more stuff, while everyone knew that workers in capitalist countries had more stuff. Their propaganda could no longer hide that fact. And like nearly every previous president, Donald Trump has promised Americans more stuff. The modern consumer is not much unlike a drug addict busy committing suicide by overdosing, wanting his dealer to bring on more. He has no survival skills and is hooked on a system he can’t survive without. The merchants of death, selling us that merchandise, are like drug dealers selling opioids.
Complacency set in in the West. High on delusion and lured by the prospect of profits for the businesses they represented, the neoconservatives, a breed of conservatives that had adopted Hegelian dialectic much to the horror of true conservatives, and therefore believed that Western culture is superior, so that after toppling the regime in Iraq, a liberal democracy would magically appear, made the United States invade Iraq. Since then, China has revised its economic model and now outcompetes the West, while mass migration of non-Westerners has eroded the West’s liberal foundations. Most Muslims, Africans, and Eastern Europeans show little interest in LGBTQ rights or women’s rights, in the liberal sense that is. They have no upbringing in a tradition of progress rooted in Hegelian dialectic. Liberalism was yet another fairy tale. It has just collapsed in front of us, and quite suddenly, also to my surprise, but liberals have yet to catch on.
We are at a turning point in history. Western civilisation’s foundational pillar, social progress, is collapsing. We have reached the limits of human nature. Savages as we are, we can’t keep up appearances for too long. Civilisation is just a thin veneer to keep the beast within us in check. Liberalism was an attempt to achieve a good society through a social contract, giving all groups in society a suitable place based on the idea of a fundamental equality of all individuals. With the arrival of people from illiberal areas, where social progress has been lacking, this becomes increasingly difficult, as diversity requires everyone to accept society’s rules, including diversity, which is the hardest part. That is why fear is on the rise, the beast in us awakes, order collapses, the rule of law begins to look like a luxury we can’t afford, and gangsters like Donald Trump take over.
Maintaining a good society is like a juggler keeping several balls in the air, as Denmark does. A juggler can only keep so many balls in the air. One thing Denmark did was limit migration from ‘culturally incompatible’ countries in Africa and the Middle East, so that was one less ball to handle, and it was a difficult one to handle indeed, so that made it easier. The Danes had conducted cost-benefit analyses by country of origin for immigrants and concluded that immigration from these countries was ‘expensive’ as its estimated contribution to the economy was negative. And so, the Danes left it to other countries like the Netherlands to become the most proficient jugglers of all, and to develop ‘strength through diversity’ that, so far, has yielded little except proficiency in dealing with multicultural issues, making more and more and more Dutch question the strategy.
The political scientist Francis Fukuyama used the phrase ‘Getting to Denmark’ for turning nations into stable, prosperous, and well-governed states with low corruption, rule of law, and accountability, an ideal yet difficult-to-achieve goal in the development of societies. Paradises don’t last because they try to regulate the forces of nature, and the competition never stops. Building a good society is like constructing a house of cards. As long as nothing interferes, you can build storeys upon storeys. Yet, tensions build, either within society or in its environment, and existing arrangements fail to function properly. The Danes keep immigrants out, but their army can’t defend their country. When the Germans came in World War II, the Danes didn’t even put up a fight. They will do little better on their own if a rogue nation like the United States were to invade.
The new myth I bring you says that there are only two kinds of people: those who fit in God’s Paradise and those who don’t. A day-labourer in India is no less deserving than an actress in Hollywood. If this plan is going to work, it will have to work for everyone, and the coming decades will go down in history as the end times and the beginning of God’s kingdom on Earth. At least, it is a myth that can end all other myths, and perhaps all the wars we fight over them, with a vision of Paradise that has proven to work, so a world society like the Netherlands and a capable government like Denmark’s. Nealy everyone would benefit from that. I wrote down the requirements while thinking it would never happen except in fairy tales, but we live in a fairy-tale world, so that it might come to pass. Time is drawing close. The balls are falling to the ground. We are at the end of Hegel’s ride. We may either see the end of civilisation or the completion of our journey to Paradise.
Peak Bullshit
In the early 2000s, I figured that we would soon see Peak Bullshit, the era when nonsense couldn’t reach higher levels, after seeing that the Internet is an ideal medium to spread misinformation, such as climate change denial. Social media didn’t exist at the time. It was a prophetic thought. But bullshit is everywhere, and has always been there, even in science, so many conservatives don’t trust science, including climate science, and see it as a hobby for progressives. That is also because Woke ideology has affected science, either by narrowing the range of subjects open to investigation or by limiting the range of acceptable conclusions. And if bullshit has infiltrated science, then what can we still trust?
A high-profile case in the Netherlands was Wouter Buikhuisen’s research into the causes of criminal behaviour. Buikhuisen concentrated on biological factors. In other words, could genes affect conduct? Leftist opinion makers in magazines attacked him, claiming that the modern capitalist society and authoritarian upbringing cause behavioural issues like crime. Buikhuisen had to deal with personal attacks that portrayed him as dumb and evil, as well as disturbances during his lectures, some of which were violent. Partly due to the upheaval and its effect on Buikhuisen’s private life, the research project eventually faltered.
Woke ideology affecting science is an issue raised by MAGA. Science projects funded by businesses face the same problems. The profit motive may affect the research topics and acceptable conclusions. So, can you trust the vaccines Big Pharma profits from? The left long dominated the social sciences, possibly because, through science, we might achieve social progress, an idea that mostly appeals to progressives. Humans are programmable but also constrained. Progressives think we are programmable, while conservatives think we are constrained and that going against human nature does more harm than good.
It had long been politically incorrect to link conduct to genes because the Nazis used it as an excuse for exterminating entire population groups. If you link conduct to genes, social problems become unfixable, except by sterilisation or extermination. It casts some light on the emotional responses. Around 1980, the memory of World War II still shaped the Dutch mindset, and anything remotely smelling like fascism was scary as hell and seemed profoundly evil. It may seem like a good excuse, but it is an example of emotions getting in the way of facts. It may also be why America, which lacked Europe’s historical memory, went more fascist than Europe, and more nuts. The general mood in society shapes what science can investigate and what it can conclude. MAGA sets up an alternative myth with alternative facts, so climate science has become the new politically incorrect. Still, the facts don’t depend on what we believe, and we can ignore them at our own peril.
After Peak Bullshit, things may collapse, and perhaps, The Truth comes out. We all have a model of reality that we use to make sense of the world. Without a model of reality, nothing makes sense. We cooperate based on myths we share, like liberalism and fascism, that provide us with a model of reality with instructions on how we should behave. We cling to our worldviews because once everything we believe collapses, we are out in the wilderness on our own, with nothing to guide us. I have been there. It is horrific, and a bit like dying, making us willing to die for our myths and go to war for them. And so we ignore facts that contradict our worldviews. But the end is near.
For the task that may lie ahead, there was no excuse for preventable mistakes. It was hard to sift through the nonsense, whether it was of fascists or liberals. My quest became fraught with discoveries of my own incorrect beliefs. Every error eliminated helped me to better understand the situation. Godlikeproductions.com and MAGA may be a steaming pile of bullshit, but you can’t dismiss it unless you have verified it. There is a Dutch saying, ‘Where there is smoke, there is fire.’ Rumours, even false ones, often relate to facts. What these facts are is the most critical issue. Peak Bullshit has the following symptoms:
Outright fabrications: many claims were simply bogus, so untrue. They riled up people nonetheless. Anti-vaccine posts were usually of that nature.
Improper sourcing: a Twitter account claims something has happened, but there is no other evidence. You have to trust the gutter on that one.
Hyping incidents: if a black guy molests a white guy or rapes a white woman, the fascists claim it is evidence of white genocide.
Distorting the truth: if you get access to the same news from regular sources, you find that the posters paint a caricature of reality.
Finally, there are things that the traditional media do not report on, or phrase in ways that mask the truth, and are worth knowing.
It is not just MAGA. The left uses similar tactics, such as hyping violent incidents by fascists, which they have done for decades. An example of a dubious cause is Black Lives Matter, which made an issue out of the police killings of black people. The incidents that inspired the movement were acts of police brutality and vigilante policing with fatal consequences. Compared to civilised police forces, American police are savage. In the United States, police fatalities are 33 per 10 million inhabitants per year, in league with countries like Angola, Colombia, Mali and Sudan, which is 30 times as much as countries like Germany, Portugal, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. That highlights the difference between civilisation and barbarism. The incidents that gave rise to BLM were appalling, such as the police shooting an unarmed boy who was fleeing from the police.
BLM made a race issue out of it, while the numbers indicate that the underlying problem is brutal policing. It becomes clear when you take violent crime levels into account. Blacks are three times as likely to be killed by the police, but six times as likely to be convicted of murder. Relative to the number of murders committed, the police killed fewer blacks. Parents will be angry if the police kill their unarmed son, and rightfully so, but when you misinterpret statistics in this way, you rile up people without probable cause. It undermines social trust. MAGA claims that social justice causes like BLM undermine society. If the case has no merit, that is indeed the case. And insofar as there is a case, it would have greatly helped Black Lives Matter if they had demonstrated some understanding, recognised the relative importance of the issues, and engaged in some self-reflection.
The primary cause of black fatalities at the hands of the police in the United States is police brutality, which comes with the level of lethal violence Americans accept. In the United States, you can get away with shooting a cleaning lady trying to open the wrong door. In the Netherlands, that would be murder. In Mississipi a white man got away with hit-and-run and leaving a young black boy to die.1 It highlights a lack of civilisation, and possibly racism, but above all, a failure of jury trials in an obsolete judicial system. If there were no juries and professional judges ruled, arbitrariness would decline. Yet, if the boy had been white or the perpetrator had been black, no one would think it was racism. The perpetrator spat on the late boy’s family, so he is definitely an arsehole.
And in the United States, everyone can carry a gun, so, understandably, the police are on edge, making them shoot first and ask questions later. Social justice issues can promote divisions in society, and if a cause lacks merit, such criticism is justified. Mentioning the crime levels amongst blacks or saying that white lives also matter riled up quite a few people, ‘That’s a racist thing to say.’ If you want to know why people voted for Trump, here is one reason. Triggered liberals were a favourite item of mockery among MAGA people.
You don’t have to doubt that MAGA is racist. The Trump social media post portraying President Obama and his wife as apes proves it. The barbarians are now in charge of the United States. They came to power with a little help from BLM. Intentions don’t invalidate an argument. So, if a racist says that blacks cause trouble, his being a racist doesn’t make his claim untrue. There is a systemic bias against blacks in the United States justice system. They receive 10%-20% longer sentences for similar crimes and 10%-20% more wrongful convictions, but it is not the reason why blacks as a group lag in society. And even though blacks are overrepresented in the US prison population, most blacks do fine. Likewise, 95% of criminals are men, but that doesn’t mean 95% of men are criminals.
Like BLM, MAGA thrives on anger. It would be better if sensible people made the best of it than let extremists run the show. The BLM cause is not comparable to that of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, when whites were standing in the way of blacks. Social justice advocates hoped that equality could solve the issues plaguing black communities, but in the United States, inequality has gradually grown into a consequence rather than a cause. Even when others wrong you, it often helps you most to focus on your own issues. And I speak from experience. It doesn’t guarantee success, but the evidence is clear. Other ethnic groups do better in American society, some better than whites. And the Jews, despite centuries of discrimination and persecution, do particularly well, too well even for their own good, perhaps. So, ignore the racists. They are losers.
Believe it or not
For a long time, I found it hard to understand why people believe things that have been proven wrong. Yet the proof is everywhere around me. It happened to me as well. We need to believe in something. I hadn’t questioned my religion until becoming an adult, and only because of a crisis that made me question everything. And I had ignored signs that the multicultural society could be failing. The rise of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands served as a wake-up call, prompting me to investigate the issue. Even then, I didn’t give up on the idea. It was because of a belief that it had to work. The world must become one to have permanent world peace. The European Union offers an example of how to do it. Opening all borders at once would be disruptive. To enter, countries had to meet certain criteria.
I didn’t understand human nature well enough, but thinking about the point of having a messiah, I had to consider why this might work. We cooperate based on myths. Accepting a new myth changes our perception: what was once far-right becomes normal, while what was once normal becomes far-left. That is a matter of competing myths and how myths shape how we see reality. What we think of as sane or reasonable greatly depends on the fairy tales we believe in. Things are never precisely as our myths tell us, but our myths shape reality. In other words, our belief in the myth can make it work. Myths are often stronger than reality because we are religious animals. Myths can make us ignore reality until they collapse. Then we search for new myths. So, if we accept the myth of ‘One Nation under God’ or ‘One Multicultural World Society,’ we should be realistic and understand the enormity of the endeavour, and that had this world been real. But if the world knows that God is behind the plan, even the Taliban in Afghanistan will go along with it and do whatever they can to help.
Here we arrive at the issue of conservatives distrusting the liberal mainstream press. Liberal media may not lie plainly, but forget to mention crucial facts, so that they give you a distorted picture of reality, which is as bad. So when liberals say that MAGA people are idiots, it is because liberals don’t fall for Trump’s blatant lies, but require somewhat more sophisticated methods to get misguided. Yet, it requires even more intelligence, or experience, to see through that, or perhaps the truth is obvious. And so, the jury is still out on which group is the dumbest. On the bright side, our intelligence doesn’t work to our advantage, so a high IQ is not something to be proud of. Worms don’t develop weapons of mass destruction or make themselves obsolete by inventing artificial intelligence. So, three hoorays for the worms. Their collective intelligence overclasses ours by a wide margin.
Mainstream journalists pay little attention to issues we learn about elsewhere. Not only did they do that to protect the myths that support society, but also because many people can’t handle the facts in an adult fashion. Just discuss the Israel lobby’s stranglehold on US politics and their efforts to control the debate on universities. Mearsheimer and Walt were among the few adults by stating the facts in no uncertain terms while not going down the road of Jew-hating. Most people don’t want a race war, so perhaps mainstream journalists are too cautious, or it was Jews owning the media after all, but leaving the matter untouched helps the case of the anti-Semites. If we can’t discuss these issues frankly without people going crazy, whether they are Jews or anti-Semites, it is obvious why the worms have an edge and will still be there long after humans are gone. There are many issues where our feelings get in the way. We are unfit to survive because we are intelligent enough to invent things that can terminate us and stupid enough to use them.
Our gut feelings are a survival mechanism, not a fact-finding instrument. If you suspect that someone is planning to murder you, waiting for proof can be a fatal mistake. Still, if you murder people on a hunch, your enemies may try to take you out, so that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fascism appeals to our gut feelings and tribal instincts, but it has ruined entire nations. We cooperate in groups to compete with other groups, and that competition includes warfare. Multiculturalism can allow tribes within a country to coexist until they develop a common identity. That works as long as everyone respects the authorities, the national law supersedes tribal justice, and everyone shares the idea of a single community with a common destiny. Another issue is that a society’s institutions are built on the assumed behaviour of those who lived there at the time of foundation. Foreigners may not understand them and miss out on benefits, or exploit weaknesses in these systems with fraud schemes. Fraud and corruption are everywhere, but if immigrants do it, we are more alarmed because ‘they’ are robbing ‘us’.
That is why we have to be serious about fascism. Otherwise, things get worse. Those who abuse a system may feel no connection to the society they live in and may be more loyal to their tribe. And so, a society may have reasons to expel them. The problem is that all existing cultures are, more or less, problematic, and protecting one of them or promoting diversity does nothing to solve that issue, nor does dwelling on the past and treating it as an excuse for how things are today. We can only address these issues when we are candid, fair and truthful. Trade is also the primary cause of mass migration, which many fascists understand. Yet, unwilling to go after the true causes, they seek protection behind borders, hoping to hold on to their privileged lives. They are consumption addicts who don’t wish to toil on the fields to bring in the harvest. Trade and money corrupt everything and everyone, and make us weak. Donald Trump already caved in and allowed illegal immigrants to keep industries running.
And the solution may also lie in fascism: turn humanity into a single tribe and do away with borders altogether. If we all live similar lifestyles under similar political arrangements, there will be no mass migration, and migration will not cause serious cultural issues. That could be my mission, so one people, one nation, one leader, which was also a Nazi slogan. Things will not go right on their own. It requires all of you to follow me without questioning, like the Germans followed Adolf Hitler, because you are too stupid to think for yourselves, and do stupid things like the Germans did by following Adolf Hitler without questioning. Perhaps, you get the point. Humans are a total joke. It is why worms, as a species, are so much smarter than humankind. And so, our path to salvation begins with accepting the truth: no matter how smart you think you are, you are less than a worm.
Mediocre vision
Humanity’s lack of collective intelligence sets the bar for a world leader at a rather unchallenging level. Someone with mediocre vision will already do much better, provided this individual has unlimited authority, which is the point of having a messiah. Unlike politicians, he doesn’t need to promise you more stuff, for if we keep making decisions based on our pocketbooks, we won’t make it. Nearly everyone thinks, ‘What’s in it for me?’ Few think, ‘What can I do?’ There isn’t enough to give everyone more, as humanity already lives as if there were no tomorrow. During their lifetimes, typical members of modern affluent societies own several million artefacts each, ranging from cars and houses to disposable nappies and milk cartons. For most of history, almost everyone owned only a few items and no disposables. Inspiring propaganda with slogans like ‘you will own nothing and be happy’ may make consumers content with less stuff and turn them into people. But the capitalist propaganda has succeeded in making consumers believe that happiness is the worst nightmare, and that you should own things you don’t need.
Indeed, it doesn’t require a genius to see the solution. The real problem is making people comply, which is also obvious. We all like to listen to salespeople who sell us alternative versions of math and make us feel like geniuses who can cook the books and get away with it. What if we solve the problem of overconsumption with economic growth? And then we congratulate ourselves for being brilliant. We ruin the world for money and suicide ourselves in the process, and we can’t stop ourselves. We really need God to fix this with brute force. Jesus said that our allegiance should be with him, not with our family or friends, and definitely not with the money changers and the merchants. The Quran says that the angels had to bow before Adam. God made Jesus believe he was Adam reincarnate. That trick didn’t work as well on me, but well enough to make me think I could be the messiah. If I must be your shepherd, you are my sheep. So, let’s practice on our baa, for if we all say baa together, the world will tremble.
For the job that may await me, I needed answers. So, let’s start with a warning. It is the truth as I see it. I try to have a fair and balanced view, but above all, an insightful one that presents solutions, so it’s a brutal truth exercise. It is not a neutral view, because every view is to some extent arbitrary, as we don’t know the future, but if I am your saviour, it is the truth that you should accept. It is no accident that I live in the Netherlands, the most advanced country in the Hegelian sense on issues like dealing with the limits of growth, LGBTQ rights, animal welfare, balancing work and private life, opportunities for ethnic minorities, and the right to decide to terminate one’s own life. I am a product of the country’s culture of the late 20th and early 21st century, like Jesus was the product of first-century Jewish culture. The truth has many sides. Different views can highlight different aspects of it and reveal errors in other views. You run into contradictions. Turning it into a consistent whole is hard, as it depends on the relative importance of the arguments.
We face fundamental disagreements about the direction we should take, leading to an authority crisis and a moral crisis that divides societies. An Antifa activist is as concerned about the future as a neo-Nazi. Authority and morality come from the stories we believe in. The United States faces a moral corruption issue. Even protesters who show up at social justice rallies may receive pay for their attendance. Most Americans are ordinary people who feel that what they do is right. Yet, Americans live in a tradition of pragmatism, while Europeans live in a tradition of idealism, and that is a profound difference. Both paths are dead ends. Without a measure of truth and good and evil we all agree on, there remain only perspectives and views over which we will fight without end.
As Judgement Day could be approaching, it is not a coincidence that the International Court of Justice is in The Hague, the Netherlands. If I sound judgmental, it is because it could be my role to judge. For a long time, I believed myself to be a rather particular individual with a somewhat peculiar collection of views, nothing more. And then the monkey came out of the sleeve, which is a Dutch saying for the truth coming out. Humankind is completely insane, not me. You are a bunch of morons committing collective suicide. If you make an issue out of my use of the word morons, you prove my point and are unfit to survive.
There are several harsh truths to engage. One in particular is the most troublesome, as it undercuts the core foundation of our societies. If you work hard to get ahead, you live at the expense of the planet, other people and future generations by taking more than you need. So, there you are: hard-working, obeying the law, paying taxes, raising your children properly, giving money to charities, perhaps being faithful to your spouse, only to find out that your work and consumption ruin the world. That is hard to stomach, but the capitalist economy is about transforming energy and resources into waste and pollution to make the rich richer. That is how the system works. As they say, no pain, no gain. We have to stop working like crazies to ruin everything.
Whatever I am going to tell you, it is said in good spirits, so that you might learn from it. Most of us aren’t intentionally evil. We all grew up in a particular tradition, believe in myths, and cherish values we hold dear. Yet the outcome of it all is a total disaster. This world is the stage for a story God wrote, so She has intended every bit of it. No one can blame you for who you are if you don’t know better. Unwillingness to change is an entirely different ballgame. Only a brutal truth exercise that spares no one can solve the current predicament. I know first-hand that it can be excruciating. Coming from a family of farmers, I am not afraid of shit. These are shitty issues, and you can’t fix them without getting your hands dirty. Some of the most profound truths are at the bottom of a manure pit.
Wishful thinking
For a long time, I had hoped the world would one day become one multicultural society. That only happens in fairy tales. The alternative is warfare forever, so it is realistic to aim for the impossible against better judgment. The same is true for an interest-free financial system. Despite being theoretically sound, a usury-free financial system would never have prevailed in the real world. But usury is the destroyer of civilisations, so possibility is at odds with necessity. It is not hard to convince people that they deserve interest on their money, so the usurers have the edge. We all like money for free and let others work for it. And it is easy to make people believe that their nation or religion is the greatest. We like to be privileged members of the God Club, with gold cards and special perks in heaven. And it is easy to make people believe that migration is the problem, but the problem is what causes migration. Like usurers, nationalists and religious sects, have the advantage.
And after a lengthy study and careful consideration, I concluded that the Netherlands is the greatest nation on Earth. It has progressed the furthest on the Hegelian scheme of social progress, on issues like dealing with the limits of growth, LGBTQ rights, animal welfare, balancing work and private life, opportunities for ethnic minorities, and the right to decide to terminate one’s own life. And God chose to live there. The Netherlands also holds the most potent weapon of all, the Truth Bomb that can end history and the world as we know it. If diversity means strength, it may explain why the Netherlands is the most powerful country on Earth. The Dutch are excellent swamp drainers, the best there are. The swamp is now on notice. Indeed, nobody fucks with the Netherlands. So, may he who is without sin cast the first stone. Yet, the Netherlands is a fairy-tale country in a fairy-tale world like the Shire in The Lord of the Rings. It wouldn’t have survived or even existed in the first place had this world been real. The fate of that world hinges on the ring, not on anything else.
The Netherlands is great for yet another reason, as it is not a particularly nationalistic country. When asked whether they would fight for their country, a measly 15% of the Dutch answered yes. Only in Japan was that number lower. I would be willing to fight and die for a cause if my sacrifice makes a meaningful difference, but nation-states and tribalism are the reasons why we have no peace, so they aren’t good causes to begin with. Had the Soviet Union still existed, Russia and Ukraine wouldn’t be fighting a bloody patriotic conflict. So, what is the point of Russia and Ukraine being independent countries, except for supplying cannon fodder to generate profits for the arms industry?
And this was not the only war fought within the borders of the former Soviet Union. The Soviet Union may have been bad, but this is worse. And let’s not forget former Yugoslavia. Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Muslims had lived relatively peacefully together for centuries, until they didn’t when patriotism reared its ugly head. Either we become one nation, or wars will continue to appear necessary, or really will be necessary. With the existence of weapons of mass destruction, that becomes an increasingly unpalatable idea.
If we keep on going on like this, we will keep on inventing myths to murder each other in patriotic wars, religious wars or other necessary wars, including wars to end all wars. It made me willing to accept some inconvenience, while I hardly experienced any inconvenience when living in multicultural neighbourhoods, and later, near an asylum seeker centre. Based on my experiences, I would think that the fascists exaggerate with their grim visions of misery caused by immigration. Yet, not everyone shares my experiences, and the statistics bear this out. Most immigrants don’t cause trouble, but it doesn’t take that many troublemakers to make the neighbourhood unsafe. Statistics indicate that crime numbers among immigrants are higher. And if the percentage of criminals rises from 2% to 4% due to immigration, you have an 100% increase.
The fly in the ointment is that the statistics also indicate that the Netherlands is a safer place than it was twenty-five years ago. Not only did reported crimes drop significantly, but feelings of safety also increased, resulting in greater trust in the police,2 all of which occurred despite the immigration during those years. Still, the number of immigrants causes stress in society. There are so many newcomers that I would also have worried had I not known that it was God’s plan. Yet, I never felt unsafe when living in multicultural areas. And, there are so many things that go wrong. Immigration is just one of them, and mass immigration is a symptom rather than the problem itself. Historic evidence further suggests that patriotism can ruin the country faster than immigration can. Finally, trade drives the ‘replacement’, and the replacement hypothesis even says so. Trade also drives us to the apocalypse. And so, it is better to discuss merchants and trade.
So, what if I had been wrong? My best friend at secondary school sympathised with the anti-immigration party. He presented his arguments reasonably. He was not a racist, but believed that foreigners have trouble adapting to Dutch society, and as a result, could become a problem. In the 1980s, the issues he raised seemed insignificant, and his worries overdone. Most Dutch felt the same, also because of a belief that Western values are superior and that these problems would disappear over time, which indeed happened with some minorities. Hence, the anti-immigration party remained a tiny faction. That was forty years ago. Yet, immigration continued, and its impact on society has grown.
Migrants not only want to escape misery but also want the good life. But if everyone lived like the Dutch, we would need four Earths. The Dutch live at the expense of others, future generations, and life on Earth in general. And migrants do the jobs the Dutch don’t like to do, or at least not for those low wages that make products cheaper for the Dutch. The same goes for Americans. Like the Dutch economy, the American economy depends on immigrants. Had the Dutch not pursued economic growth and chosen to live sustainably, far fewer migrants would have come. The challenge ahead is to turn humankind into a single society, to eliminate excessive planet-ruining lifestyles, including having children, and not to aim for some measly average, but for the best possible society, so a world society like Denmark or the Netherlands in terms of social and political development.
Over the years, the anti-immigration party PVV, led by Geert Wilders, grew in popularity. In the 2023 elections, it became the largest faction. Wilders supported Trump and also associated himself with other gangsters like the Hungarian leader Orban. Still, the PVV differs from MAGA, partly because the Dutch tend to hold fewer conspiracy theory beliefs. There is no Pizzagate, and no Epstein files. Belief in conspiracy theories is only lower in the Scandinavian countries, according to a European survey. The Netherlands is the exception, not the United States. It may be due to Dutch naivety, but it is also social trust.
Social trust is the glue of society. It requires everyone to be trustworthy and to believe others are trustworthy. That is also why sowing division with lies or painting caricatures of reality is as problematic as being untrustworthy itself, because lying is being untrustworthy. Those who promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory did as good a job in undermining social trust as those who attended the Epstein Parties. History and culture go a long way in explaining the differences between the Netherlands and the United States. And so, I felt the need to come into touch with MAGA people and understand them like I previously did with Muslims. If you want to know MAGA, you must learn to know America and Americans.
Make America Go Apeshit
When Wilders tried to copy Trump’s ‘I lost because of election fraud’ tactic, even his supporters didn’t believe him, so he quickly backed down. Wilders faced the brutal reality that spreading false claims only works when they are believable. The Dutch elections are relatively clean, whereas in the United States, they are rife with innuendo and prone to manipulation, including gerrymandering. Democrats opposed voter identification requirements, even though they can help to prevent election fraud. Many poor people in the US don’t have IDs, and they mostly vote Democrat, so Democrats argued that ID requirements disadvantage poor people.
Conversely, Republicans try to prevent these, mostly black, people from voting with measures that make it harder for them to vote. On Godlikeproductions.com, people wrote that they are a ‘Free Shit Army’ of Democrat-voting welfare recipients who look for free stuff paid for by others and vote for more welfare, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Both parties are interested only in winning, not in fair elections. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so much gerrymandering.
In the Netherlands, district borders don’t matter, and everyone is required to have an ID, so the issue of ID requirements disadvantaging poor people doesn’t arise. And the United States has voter registries. The Dutch don’t have them. They use the civil registry, so you can be sure that only citizens can vote. And with proportional representation rather than win-or-lose elections, there is less to gain from fraud. Instead of fixing the problems in a joint effort, Democrats began accusing Republicans of trying to exclude poor people from the vote. And Republicans began accusing Democrats of allowing election fraud.
There have been a few instances of election fraud in the US, or credible suspicions of it. Allegations of election fraud surfaced after the 1960 Presidential election, which the Democrat John F. Kennedy won. Republican investigations indicated that fraud could not be proven or ruled out, but was unlikely to have swayed the outcome.3 In 2000, Republicans prevented a full recount of the votes in Florida. They didn’t want a fair election. They wanted to win. In the Netherlands, if there is any doubt, there is always a recount, and a full one if needed, to rule out all doubt.
In 2004, a voting machine in Ohio erroneously added nearly 4,000 votes to Bush’s total. That was likely a glitch. Concerns about voting machines led to their termination in the Netherlands. Due to these issues, lingering concerns remained about the integrity of the US elections. Republicans were already suspicious of the Democrats’ efforts to prevent ID requirements for voting, so Trump’s accusations fell on fertile ground. There was no evidence for Trump’s claims, while Trump phoned a Republican governor asking him to ‘find votes.’ Trump, because of the size of his ego, might have thought that he couldn’t lose, so he might have thought that his loss was due to fraud, and that the votes he asked the governor to find were somewhere lying around uncounted. Yet, we can’t be sure. Donald Trump has told more lies than all previous US presidents combined. That is not particularly surprising, because among the few people less trustworthy than politicians are snake-oil salespeople.
Not only do MAGA people believe in election rigging conspiracies. A 2016 poll suggested that nearly half of the Hillary Clinton voters believed that Russia had meddled with the election tallies and made Trump win. That was after Russian hackers targeted the Florida election company VR Systems, and after malfunctions occurred in Durham County, North Carolina.4 Like Donald Trump supporters in 2020, they found it hard to believe they had lost. In 2020, 74% of registered voters were concerned about organised voter fraud.5 So, it is not just MAGA. It is how deep the distrust in America runs. Yet, proof of voter fraud is virtually non-existent. In Pennsylvania, a contested state, data covering 32 elections with over 100 million votes cast show only 39 cases of proven voter fraud.6 Spreading false claims generates eyeballs, hence advertisement income, but also undermines trust in society and its institutions, so plenty of ‘investigative journalism’ websites were busy destroying America for profit.
Conspiracy thinking is more widespread in the United States than in the Netherlands. Acquaintances of mine who have regularly visited the United States and have spoken to Americans confirmed it. I could see it for myself on message boards. The conspiracy theories range from aliens, faked moon landings, who killed Kennedy, 9/11, vaccinations, Jews running the world, and the elites being a network of paedophiles. The Epstein files give us an insight into how the elites are interconnected and engaged in various questionable dealings, of which abusing underage girls is only one, and of which most probably had no knowledge.
Conspiracy theories often relate to the facts, but if you investigate them, much would be unproven, inaccurate or wrong. Conspiracy theorists don’t mind. Pizzagate may be a fabrication, but they claim the Epstein files prove it. The kind of logic appals the fact-checkers, but if you call conspiracy theories hunches rather than facts, they make more sense. Humans are political animals. They scheme all the time. We don’t know what’s going on, so getting the direction right is already a success. The conspiracy theorists aren’t paranoid enough because these secret dealings, as well as conspiracy theories, seem part of the ultimate psyop: God’s scheme to undermine trust in US society to make America go crazy and ready for the messiah. And so, MAGA stands for ‘Make America Go Apeshit’.
Compared to Dutch politics, US politics is filthy and corrupt, and on every level, which my acquaintance also confirmed. Even for local positions like sheriffs, candidates air advertisements in which they accuse each other of being a paedophile, or even worse, a communist. In other words, US elections are highly competitive, leading to a race to the bottom in ethical standards. Casting doubt on your opponent with false allegations works better than having plans. Child abuse is a widespread problem, and most of it remains under the radar. People sense that, which promotes moral panics, including witch hunts. Communists are also everywhere, busy scheming to make healthcare more affordable and of higher quality, so that you can trust no one. In such a competition, the filthiest and most corrupt win. The outcome of that race to the bottom called competition is Donald Trump.
There is widespread quid pro quo in US politics. In Europe, they call it bribery. That is why Europe can’t keep up with the competition. Businesspeople pay for political campaigns and expect something in return. That is unthinkable in much of Western Europe. A former French president went to prison for accepting foreign funds for his political campaign. And that is unthinkable in the United States: going to jail for receiving funds from foreign interest groups. Political corruption is legal and commonplace in the United States. Both political parties were equally corrupt. That is part of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of moral pragmatism, while continental Europe has a tradition of moral idealism. There was a long cultural divide between the Anglo-Saxon world and mainland Western Europe. While most Anglo-Saxon countries have grown closer to Western Europe, the United States drifted further away, until it committed cultural suicide by departing from the West’s civilisational project, Hegel’s grand scheme of social progress, in a bid to prevent a cultural suicide.
Culture: selling versus convincing
The corruption in the United States is a foundational cultural issue, not just a political one. You convince Europeans but sell to Americans. The difference is not just the wording. It reflects a cultural divide. Americans buy or don’t buy your argument. I have heard Brits use the phrase, but in a negative sense, meaning getting scammed. It is more common in the United States, where it has a more neutral meaning of becoming convinced. The United States is a nation of salespeople. Many salespeople have no problem whatsoever with blatant lying. That comes with their profession. And accepting a lie is not getting conned, because the liar and the one accepting the lie, like in any trade deal, might both profit, even though that might be at the expense of others. If an American likes your argument, he buys it as if it were a product. It is a different idea of truth, and a profoundly corrupt one. It sheds some light on why religion and climate change denial are more widespread in the United States than in Western Europe. It made America powerful. Money is power, and bullshit sells, as we are religious beings who need fairy tales to believe in.
You may not buy the science of climate change because you don’t like taking public transport or eating less meat. And so, you buy climate change denial instead. That makes you morally corrupt, but no problem, you can buy the story that Jesus died for your sins, and believing that will get you into heaven. That Jesus died for our sins is pretty unbelievable, and if you had been honest and truthful, you would have questioned your faith, which Western Europeans do more than Americans. Many Americans now genuinely believe that climate change is a hoax made up by governments to raise taxes, but that is because they believe what they want to believe, not because it is the truth.
Moral corruption affects some denominations of Protestantism, such as Evangelicalism. History and culture go a long way in explaining that. Catholic doctrine holds that faith and good works can save you. Catholics can perform good works, such as giving money to the Church, to atone for their sins. That promoted corruption within the Catholic Church through the sale of indulgences. Protestants objected to this and took moral integrity very seriously. That made morality a matter of personal choice. Catholics are more morally flexible, so Catholic countries in Europe tend to be more corrupt than Protestant ones. Protestants should think for themselves, while Catholics merely follow the Church’s lead.
And so, despite the presence of many Roman Catholics, the Dutch moral conflict, vicar versus merchant, is ‘dominee versus koopman’ rather than ‘pastoor versus koopman.’ It was the Protestant vicar, not the Roman Catholic priest, who objected to the merchant’s wicked deeds. The merchant was also a Protestant, making the issue a Hegelian dialectical conflict. This dualism still profoundly affects the Dutch. The Dutch are a nation of merchants and vicars. For a vicar, money can never be the highest good. Successful merchants are morally depraved. Greed drives them. The merchant usually prevailed, so the Netherlands became the wealthiest nation before the Industrial Revolution started.
The Netherlands had a sizeable Roman Catholic minority. Roman Catholics didn’t suffer from that kind of gut-wrenching ethical dualism. It made Protestants seem sanctimonious and sneaky to them. They would take the moral high ground and lecture Catholics on trivial matters like the veneration of the Virgin Mary while they acted as merchants who were after the money. That is also a caricature. Many Protestants take ethical matters very seriously. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have had idealists like Kant and Hegel seeking absolute truth and absolute morality. There is a profound difference between most Protestant vicars, also in the United States, and televangelists, who are the personification of America’s religious corruption. So, what is the origin of the Protestant moral corruption?
The Protestant doctrine also holds that faith alone suffices. Protestants also take the scriptures more seriously than Roman Catholics, which opened the door to a different form of moral corruption, more prevalent in the United States. What the Bible says is right and wrong is not always objectively so. Paul condemned homosexual acts in no uncertain words. We don’t know Jesus’ opinion on this matter, but he said not to judge and that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. There is no objective moral reason to condemn gays and lesbians or deny them the right to marry. It became a problematic issue among Protestants, who take both scripture and moral conscience seriously. When you follow the scriptures on this matter, you shut down your moral conscience and become evil. And if only faith can save you, you don’t have to do good works to compensate for that. That is moral corruption. Catholics merely followed the Church’s lead, and Catholics must do good works to compensate for their sins, so that gets them off the hook.
This morally perverse Protestantism didn’t prevail in North-West Europe. Many of the least corrupt countries are there, while LGBTQ rights in these countries remain uncontested. Meanwhile, Catholic priests lived the good life, which the Dutch call ‘het Roomse leven’ or the Burgundian lifestyle. Jews, as Karl Marx observed, are amoral merchants, and this, rather than racism or religious bigotry, stands at the root of today’s anti-Semitism. Jews are often the merchants and usurers who buy the American politicians. It makes moral corruption in the United States a sensitive issue, most notably because anti-Semitism has led to the Holocaust. Now we are at the bottom of the manure pit.
Idealism and realism
The basic problem that we all face looks like a prisoner’s dilemma. Let’s explain that with an example. Suppose that the police have arrested two gang members and have put them in solitary confinement so that they can’t communicate with each other. The police tell both that they don’t have enough evidence to convict them on the principal charge, so they plan to sentence them to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Both receive the same offer. If he testifies against his partner in crime, he will be acquitted, while the partner will be sentenced to three years in prison for the main charge. There is a catch. If both prisoners testify against each other, both will serve two years in jail. The prisoners get a little time to think this over, but don’t learn what the other has decided until both have made up their minds. And each of them knows that the other gets the same deal.
If they both stay silent, they are best off as a group by serving one year each, for a total of two years. If one defects, he is better off as he walks free. Yet, together they are worse off, with three years in prison. If both rat out the other, they are the worst off as a group, facing a total of four years in prison. If both are interested in the best deal for themselves and think the other is as well, they may both defect, believing that serving two years in prison is preferable to three. If they are best mates and think that the other will not defect, they may not defect. Being an idealist or not is a similar bargain.
The bargain depends on the group’s cohesion or social trust. There are always people trying to take advantage of others, but if there are few of them, most people keep their end of the bargain. If you believe that others are as trustworthy as you are, and you are trustworthy, you are more willing to contribute to the common good. Had we all been idealists, we would be better off, but if we believe that others are only interested in the best deal for themselves, we are more likely to assume the same attitude, so degenerate morals become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A system of rewards and punishments can help to keep the group focused on the common good. Gangs torture and murder defectors. And somehow, that works quite well. That is why we have prisons and fines.
Our choice long seemed between murdering a few million more in a war to end all wars and locking up troublemakers in prison labour camps, or merely accepting that humans are depraved jerks because that is our nature, and just buy whatever those greedy merchants sell us. Yet the underlying choice remains God versus Mammon, or Jesus versus the thirty pieces of silver. It is gradually getting hotter. If it isn’t global warming, as many conservative Christians claim, it must be Satan and his minions heating the ovens. Like those proverbial frogs, we stay where we are. Time is running out. And make no mistake: you can either be a slave in Paradise or free in hell. Humans are total failures, so every realistic scenario ends in disaster. Only in fairy tales do miracles happen.
That is why we may be incredibly lucky to be simulations, with God controlling the script. Otherwise, we wouldn’t stand a chance. Think of it, even when most people are good, the outcome is terrible. Only one of the disciples betrayed Jesus. That already proved fatal. Judas must have seen for himself that Jesus was the messiah and had witnessed God’s power, but even then, he betrayed Jesus, either out of patriotism or greed. He may have hoped that Jesus would oust the Romans to establish a Jewish state, and grew disillusioned, or the lure of money proved stronger than his fear of God. Most Christians are like him. They talk about Jesus, but are after the money, or they think their tribe is superior. Only one Indian patriot sufficed to murder Mahatma Gandhi. Since then, India and Pakistan have always been one step away from a great patriotic war with nukes. So, without God controlling the script, being a messiah is a 100% losing proposition, so not even worth entertaining for a millisecond, at least, if you are a rational individual.
Muslims are no better. Money turns their religion into a hollow custom. The centre of the Islamic world, where the holy places are, is a graft hub with undeserving oligarch sheikhs bathing in oil money, or building tax havens for parasites who make money in productive economies, but don’t want to pay for the infrastructure and education that made their profits possible. They exploit foreign labourers, who live in miserable conditions, and leave their less fortunate Muslim brothers to toil in misery. A few of them generously donate money to religious charities helping the poor or funding nutters who blow up things and randomly murder people in the name of Islam. They are, however, more interested in building the largest skyscrapers. And Jews? We don’t even have to discuss the Jews. So, what about the Dutch? Yeah, what about whataboutisms? It takes one to know one.
So, if economic growth and competition are the problem, trade is the problem, and if that is what kills us, trade is the greatest of all evils. That doesn’t mean that most merchants are evil. The problem is the system we work in. How to deal with that problem comes next, but solving a problem begins with acknowledging it, because we can’t do without trade and money. And so, the odds of religion defeating money in a realistic world are zero at best. There is enough for everybody’s need, but not for everybody’s greed. The privileged never have enough. They convince themselves that transforming energy and resources into waste and pollution to facilitate their lavish lifestyles will work out well for everyone, as if filling their swimming pools will alleviate the water shortage, and that the water will somehow trickle down, through leaks, to the thirsty beggars in the streets, provided they work hard enough and dig deep enough holes in the ground.
Those who have money decide what happens. The merchants of the green fairy tale, who tell us that if we invest enough in solar energy, windmills and batteries, we will do fine. Well, if we cut world energy consumption by 75%, then perhaps. And so, green energy is just another myth to keep us believing in the fairy tale of economic growth. Greed prevails unless brute force ends it. That force must be truly brutal, as even the communists weren’t up to the task. The salespeople are just too cheeky. An apocalypse will not even do, because states will collapse and gangs will take over, so murder rates will increase by 10,000%. You must be willing to murder billions of people and have the means to do so, like God, to frighten us to the point that we stop listening to the merchants and their lies.
Quite frequently, nothing good came out of good intentions, but even more often, nothing good came out of evil intentions. The argument in favour of the capitalist system is that greed is good and that doing evil somehow produces good because there is a fairy, invisible and disguised as a hand, who magically turns everything right. They have a wide array of ‘scientific’ theories explaining the magic, making it all appear as rational as Marxism. The success of this fairy tale depends on the power of money, because money represents power. Those who have the money can make people believe in it. Now, the consequences have arrived. Idealists lack pragmatism, but pragmatists lack idealism. In a realistic scenario, nothing works, and humankind is doomed. There may be survivors of the apocalypse who become post-humans, living for thousands of years and building virtual universes to pass their time. At this point, the prospects are pretty bleak for most of us. After the apocalypse, maybe humans come to their senses, but only if they can fulfil their infinite desires in personal virtual universes. But we would already be dead by then.
Had we all been idealists, we would already have lived in Paradise, but if no one reins us in, our desires have no limits, and if we can make it so, we would create virtual worlds for ourselves where everyone does precisely what we want, and that is why we live in such a world. There are always people taking more than they need at the expense of others if they can get away with it. The capitalist tactic is to present it as a virtue and to expand the available pie by making people work harder to produce things we don’t need, so that there is more for everyone until things collapse. That has worked so far, but it won’t hold much longer, as we are entering the collapse phase. The only alternative that remains is to impose a Paradise by force, as the communists tried, but that would require far more force than they had. Only religion can save us, but that is not enough. Otherwise, Judas wouldn’t have betrayed Jesus for money or out of patriotism. Humans can’t handle freedom, which is why it may only work because God wrote the script.
Moral pragmatism is getting by and hoping that God will save the day. Moral idealism is not waiting for God and trying to create Paradise on Earth. A sizeable group of Christians holds the latter view, but also atheist progressives, ranging from communists to liberals. The cynical view is more prevalent among conservatives, since letting things be is also a form of giving up on improvement. Yet good societies do exist. If the conditions are favourable, and with the backing of sufficient force, we could live in Paradise. That requires us to leave our cynicism behind and care for others and nature, while understanding that everything is interconnected, that our actions affect others and nature, and that transgressions that disturb the balance in Paradise are heinous crimes, warranting severe punishments like burning eternally, or, if we can manage, community service.
The differences between Western Europe and the United States are a matter of degree. They are patterns that reflect culture and are observable at the aggregate level, but they say little about individuals. Many Americans are morally upright, probably most, including many conservatives, and many Western Europeans are corrupt, including many liberals. And many Jews aren’t greedy merchants, most likely not even most. The same goes for Arabs. Money also erodes ethical standards in the Netherlands, and the country is becoming more corrupt, but most Dutch have yet to catch up. Europeans are more naive, also because their systems are less corrupt. That is partly due to Protestant ethics, but also to history, as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were a terrible blow to corruption on the European continent, from which, after 200 years, graft has yet to recover fully. America has never seen such a purge of the corrupt old order.
The pragmatic view is that trade, finance, and money are invincible until God intervenes. And that is correct. It has built the European empires, ranging from the Spanish to the Dutch and the British. And it has helped to make America strong. There may be more graft in the United States than Western Europe, but most countries are more corrupt than the United States, including China, India, Russia and nearly all Muslim countries. To tackle their corruption problem, Saudi oil sheikhs plan to set up an alternative corruption index run by an organisation they can bribe, like FIFA. So, things aren’t trending in the right direction. Hegelian dialectic is the way in which God sees social progress. The West has progressed the furthest on that path and must lead the way.
My reason for focusing on the United States is not only that America has become an evil empire and the world’s gravest problem, but also that Americans are pragmatic, get things done, and, above all, are the most eager to receive the messiah. Europeans lack their pragmatic attitude and religious fervour. And so, the coming world revolution will probably start there. Compromising with the old, corrupt order is a dead end. We need a spiritual rebirth and must break away from the system run by merchants and usurers, and ground our society in ethical principles that make humankind part of nature rather than above it. Europe will probably be next, and the rest of the world will follow. Don’t worry about the Muslims. They fear God and also expect Jesus to return. And don’t worry about the Chinese. God wrote the script, and it is their state’s official goal to run the Hegelian dialectic to its completion and abandon the market economy once the workers’ paradise arrives. That is my guess for now. Things hardly ever go the way I foresee. Yet, they go precisely according to God’s plan.
Human nature is the destructive outcome of a brutal competition called the struggle for life. And so, there is a beast within all of us. Our natural condition is to live in a gang of some 150 individuals, cooperating and competing with similar groups. Our imagination can make us cooperate on a larger scale. That requires myths to unite us. Even then, greed and tribalism prevail. Judas betrayed Jesus out of patriotism or for money, and communism failed. I have heard several people say, ‘If Jesus were to return today, they would murder him.’ Yes, they would if they could, and had we not lived in a fairy tale world, he wouldn’t have survived. God wrote the script, so a messiah has a chance of survival and success even. If we let money and tribalism rule our lives, we will commit suicide as Judas did. So, if you succeed in murdering me, I wish you good luck with your suicide.
As for the question I asked myself as a teenager, ‘Is it possible that communists had good intentions?’ If you know how deep the problem runs, you can only appreciate their effort. If there is no God, we, the little people, are on our own, against the superior force of money and tribalism, and there is no chance at all that we will succeed. The elites will play us out by sowing divisions with religious and nationalist fairy tales. They make others toil for them so they get rich without working, and it will end in destruction, albeit creative destruction, economists tell us, so that our suicide will go down in memory as a form of concept art. The elites fund think tanks that tell us fairy tales about individual freedom, so that we will not question the order in which they are our masters, and we are their serfs. And we, the gullible people, need myths to believe in. The communists faced that brutal truth and tried to stamp out nationalism and religion. Maybe for that reason, they named their newspapers ‘The Truth’. Only, communism doesn’t change human nature, so new class societies arose in communist societies with elites and perks.
Had communism prevailed, we would have seen poverty, pollution and stagnation, and also a secret police spying upon us, as well as political prisoners and show trials, a class of bureaucrats and intellectuals living the good life of our labour, and an official doctrine we cannot doubt, but not an apocalypse by competition. In hindsight, communism may have been the last opportunity for humankind to save itself. Now, we need God. Communism is not an ideal system. It is only less suicidal than capitalism. The alternative is self-sufficient communities that do not trade, which doesn’t sound particularly enticing either. We can make a mix and claim it’s the best combination of the three, as proclaimed by God’s prophet, who miraculously found out by digging in a pile of manure.
The ever-present danger comes from freedom and personal initiative, because humans fuck up everything they can fuck up if no one stops them. Once you have a paradise, you must keep things as they are, which requires setting the rules in stone, so like 17,591.332 commandments, including limits on personal initiative, thus creating a stable situation and preventing change, including technological change, so effectively halting time as the Old Order Amish did. Change will disturb the balance, and enterprising individuals will take advantage of it. Before you know it, the merchants will run the show again, and that will be the end of Paradise.
The problem staring in my face, and I shouldn’t call it a problem but a challenge, as that is what they have taught me at the Professional Skills course, so that you should rephrase ‘a total clusterfuck’ as ‘there is room for improvement,’ my position looks like becoming the captain of the Titanic after it had hit the iceberg. Had the captain succeeded in keeping the vessel afloat at the cost of 200 fatalities, that would have been a success, but also a miracle and a supernatural event, as it was technically impossible to save the Titanic. It is also technically impossible to save humankind, given human nature, but this is a fairy-tale world where miracles can happen.
Saving humanity requires unthinkable measures. We can make it happen if we all accept that we are less than worms, not entitled to anything, and that whatever befalls us is God’s will. That is the right attitude. You must think of all your ambitions and desires as problems. They make the job of saving humankind harder, and in this problem-solving equation, humans are either problem-makers or problem-solvers. It is the way to solve the equation. Without alternative math to sell you, and no proven ability to magically conjure bread and fish out of thin air, there is only so much that goes around, so that wasting is a heinous crime. I have thought a long time about it, for it is not easy for a former liberal like me to say that you should all shut up, accept what is coming, step in line, and do as I tell you. Arriving at that conclusion took me over 15 years of thinking of how to solve the problem, uhm, I mean, challenge.
It would be wonderful if you all survived and no one suffered, but there are no guarantees. Saving the Titanic with the loss of 200 lives would also have been a fantastic success. And addressing the feelings of anxiety and stress of the people on board diverts attention away from saving the vessel, so that it would be a fatal mistake. Mao’s Great Leap Forward, in which 30 million Chinese died, is only child’s play compared to what we are about to do. Counting on luck as a strategy has long seemed to me the stupidest idea. But as a Dutch saying goes, ‘Good fortune is with the stupid.’ Everyone else counted on luck, and that is why we are here, facing the apocalypse. And now, God has sent a messiah to save you from your stupidity. I can’t foresee the consequences of my actions. Only God can. And so, I have to trust God. There is a script, so God is in full control, and nothing happens without God’s intention. I can try to make the right decisions. For the rest, success will be pure luck, like how Inspector Jacques Clouseau solved his cases.
If this is going to happen, you will have to deal with the consequences, and in doing so, you must have some freedom to act so long as it contributes to the plan. Central planning of every detail doesn’t work. If we try that, it will become a disaster 100 times worse than the Great Leap Forward. Mao never had a job in information technology. If he had, he would have known that everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and that your errors can copy themselves a million times or more. A small mistake can unleash a disaster. Unlike most people, those working in information technology are punished for failure for nearly every mistake they make. If you work in information technology, have experience and have learned from your previous mistakes, you design, build, test, start small to see if it works, correct errors, scale up, and fix bugs until the system operates smoothly.
That is, unless changes are required. Then, you have to do it all over again. That is why the absence of further changes once the system operates smoothly is perhaps the single most crucial success factor in this endeavour to build a world society for the coming 1,000 years. Future generations will have to resist constant pressures, often well-intentioned, to keep improving by adding more features, even though things were okay to begin with. Things were already okay in Eden, and all we did since then made things worse. The Barataria tale warns of seemingly insignificant changes that can ruin us.
It is not the kind of responsibility that any individual should bear. Luckily, I am just an actor in the play, playing my role in the script as you do. It is up to you to save yourselves. This plan will not work without your commitment and help. But you will be totally shocked, just like I was during my student years. Nothing will make sense for a while, causing anxiety and stress. Your job may be gone, and you will have to find some useful work instead. Only results matter. As the Dutch say, ‘Death or the gladiolas.’ Success or death. I would rather die than fail. My survival depends on God’s plans with me, not on the number of scheming assassins and their plans. I live only for Her love, and without that love, my life has no purpose. To be fair, if that option had seemed available, I would have opted for a calm life and grow old, and forego that love, but everything seems to turn to shit before I reach old age.
Kicking off the revolution
Americans sense there is something profoundly wrong with their government, but liberals and conservatives experience it in their own ways. The American government became corrupt through historical developments, and the interests that profit from the current arrangement have become entrenched. It is not just a corrupt government. The government reflects society. If half the country believes the government should be minimal while the other half doesn’t, the struggle about that issue diverts attention away from improving the government. And if a commission of political scientists were to write a report on the ailments and proposed recommendations, nothing would change. The United States today is like France before the French Revolution. The system is broken. Reform is impossible. Efforts to change the system make it more corrupt. Entrenched interests own the politicians, so every change is yet another opportunity to profit at the public’s expense. Cleaning the slate, as the French did during the French Revolution, is all that remains.
Many, perhaps most, US politicians are corrupt, but Donald Trump is Mr Graft himself. Between 2024 and 2026, his net worth nearly tripled from $2.3 billion to $6.5 billion, thereby outdoing the most brazen grifters in US politics. He and his cronies do the same crimes they have accused the Democrats of, but on a larger scale and more brazenly. So much for draining the swamp, so ridding Washington DC of the political corruption. Rumours on MAGA social media have claimed that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s net worth rose from nothing to $29 million after she came into office, when in fact it is only $49,000. Ocasio-Cortez might be one of the few members of parliament who isn’t on the payroll of wealthy individuals and corporations, so her coming into the crosshairs in this fashion only illustrates the moral depravity of US politics, and MAGA in particular.
Dutch television once aired a fragment, probably because it was hilarious, of a preacher standing in front of Donald Trump, with Trump putting up his best sanctimonious face. The preacher thanked Trump for ‘saving America from Satan.’ Then my wife, Ingrid, said, ‘Look! There you have him! That’s Satan!’ Ingrid meant Donald Trump. She was joking, but that joke can only be funny if there is some truth to it. She doesn’t dislike Trump and tends to look on the bright side of what he is doing. Forcing Ukraine to accept an unfavourable peace agreement? That’s fine with her if it stops the killing. Taking out Maduro? He didn’t win the election anyway. Things were bad in Venezuela already. Trump didn’t make it worse. And he ended the Gaza war. Greenland? She didn’t express an opinion. Bombing Iran back to the Stone Age? They shouldn’t have a nuclear bomb. Her feelings didn’t get in the way of forming an opinion about Trump being evil. My wife’s observation thus was relatively neutral and unemotional, making it more meaningful. When I later recalled the moment, she said the preacher had said ‘Antichrist’ rather than ‘Satan.’
Donald Trump doesn’t fall into the category of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Pol Pot from Cambodia murdered a quarter of the Cambodians. Had that guy run Russia or China, he might have outdone Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined. Or perhaps not. Had Donald Trump run Cambodia, he might have outdone Pol Pot. That we do not know, but he is a savage, and the United States’ institutions limit his most sinister inclinations. At least, he has turned the United States into an evil empire. As far as the supposed qualities of the Antichrist go, few people qualify for all of them. The religious display of Donald Trump and his circle of evil in the Oval Office is more blasphemous than what the mockers of Jesus have said, including Monty Python.
And is pride not the gravest sin, and is MAGA not about pride? Pride comes before the fall, as it now appears. In any case, Trump is a lowlife. According to his own words, he is a pussy grabber who would do his daughter had she not been his daughter. At least 26 women have accused him of sexual misconduct.5 Whatever the facts are, the odds that all of them have lied are close to zero. Indeed, American conservatives are willing to let Satan run their country if he promises them thirty pieces of silver. ‘We’re going to become so rich, you’re not gonna know where to spend all that money. I’m telling you: just watch!’ That is where the moral corruption of buying stories ends. If you don’t see it that way, you don’t fit in God’s Paradise, and hell is indeed the proper place for you to be in.
Many Americans can hardly make ends meet. That is due to their consumption addiction, but also because they are cogs in a system that squeezes them out. The rich have taken nearly everything, leaving the proletarians to fight over scraps. The rich have taken so much that even the cheap stuff from abroad can’t keep poor Americans afloat. The MAGA propaganda machine tells them not to question capitalism, but blame it on foreigners, while distractions like the Epstein files keep Americans aroused and glued to their screens so that they don’t see the truth and take matters into their own hands. Still, the liberal order is falling apart, not because of Trump, but because the liberal story itself is collapsing.
There might have been no second Trump term had there been no surge in immigration during Biden’s tenure. The Democrats made the error of letting the incoherent Biden run for a second term, and when that fell apart, let Harris take over, who, as ‘border czar,’ had overseen the mass influx of immigrants. The number of immigrants was epic, comparable to the Great Migration in Europe between 400 AD and 600 AD that brought down the Western Roman Empire. Like the Americans, the Romans had brought in immigrants to do the dirty work, like defending the borders. Letting foreigners defend their borders might have seemed like a brilliant plan to the Romans. It worked for a while, until order fell apart and tribal allegiances took over.
Had Donald Trump not come to power, the collapse of the liberal world order would have taken longer. Still, as the limits of growth kick in and the elites have gotten their greedy hands on nearly everything, precisely like that guy named Karl Marx prophesied 150 years ago, it would have happened sooner rather than later. In the Roman Empire, the elites had taken everything, too. The barbarians are now at the gates of the last remains of civilisation. America has already fallen. A central pillar of Western civilisation is the fairy tale of social progress on the scales of liberty and equality. The 2025 RSF World Press Freedom Index, a reliable gauge of civilisation, shows that all that remains of civilisation, so where there is still freedom of the press, is that tiny, little green area that includes Denmark and the Netherlands.
And now it is up to this tiny, little green area of civilisation to halt the barbarian onslaught and liberate the rest of the world. The success of that endeavour entirely depends on the superiority of its weaponry, for it must be powerful enough to wipe out these savages and let civilised life take over. And by some miraculous chance, that happens to be the case.
Racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism are all part of MAGA. MAGA people may have their reasons for their mischief. Blacks cause trouble. Liberal women are demanding. And Jews run the United States. They run it so well that even their leader is their puppet. Even if that is all correct, anger is not the answer. You gain more from fixing your problems than blaming others. MAGA is not so different from BLM. The same pattern of civilisation versus barbarism is visible in the racial equality map.
The top-5 countries have gone to great lengths to create a fair society for everyone, even though Denmark didn’t play fairly by limiting the migration of ‘culturally incompatible’ people. But it worked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the number one spot. Without a fairy tale to inspire us all, things will go downhill from here, as bigotry and hatred are growing like a cancer and ruining societies. It is also because we don’t wish to know the truth about ourselves. What blacks think of white or what whites think of blacks can both be true. And what liberals say about MAGA people is as true as what MAGA people say about liberals. To know how others see you is like looking in a mirror.
A 2013 poll indicated 26% of Americans believed that Obama is the Antichrist or might be.7 Most of these people voted for Trump. Racism plays a role here, but it is not the entire story by far. The introduction of public healthcare insurance has infuriated conservatives. They believe that public healthcare is a communist scheme promoted by a Satanic influence. Countries with public healthcare provide better healthcare at lower costs, a fact that flies in the face of the official ‘free market’ dictate of the conservative politbureau. Obama’s Easter message was, ‘Michelle and I wish you a joyful holiday filled with the enduring power of faith and hope.’ Trump’s Easter words were, ‘Open the fucking strait you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell. Praise be to Allah.’ How people came to think that Obama is an evil genius, and also a Muslim, while a nutjob like Donald Trump is their saviour, and the best possible choice for Christians, remains an interesting question.
The hatred of progressive presidents has a long history. John F. Kennedy faced the John Birch Society’s Wanted for Treason campaign. The John Birch Society had found that Kennedy was a communist and that communists had infiltrated the highest ranks of the US government, and were conspiring to create a totalitarian one-world government run by communists. The proof for that was the US administration’s attempt to prevent the spread of John Birch Society propaganda, which might have seemed like dangerous extremism to government bureaucrats at the time, but the act itself violated the freedom of speech. Yet, in hindsight, we can conclude that the freedom of speech has brought down America, proving these bureaucrats right.
If he had them, Kennedy did an excellent job of hiding his communist sympathies. After, like a true puppet of the Military Industrial Complex, having relentlessly grilled his opponent, Eisenhower, during the election campaign for neglecting America’s defences, making Eisenhower warn of the influence of the Military Industrial Complex at his farewell speech, he risked World War III with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those geniuses at the John Birch Society saw through all that and found Eisenhower to be an even more dangerous radical leftist lunatic extremist. While conspiracy theorists, with their eyeballs glued to their computer screens, were busy analysing every move by every secret society and imagining countless others, the John Birch Society has taken over the United States, with a little help from Russia’s secret services, by making people believe these conspiracy theories. That was the plot to destroy America. It has succeeded marvellously. So, who has committed treason here?
By now, large groups of liberals and conservatives hate each other’s guts. To illustrate the point, there is a post I made on Reddit on 31 December 2025. Someone reposted a RealDonaldTrump social media post headlined ‘Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!’ It featured a photograph of a dead bird, not a bald eagle, near a windmill in Israel, so not the United States. I reacted jokingly, ‘At least, Donald Trump was real.’ These were unmistakably his words, and he posted them under the name RealDonaldTrump. That was the gist of the joke. The post wasn’t offensive, or at least by any reasonable standard, yet it became one of the most downvoted I’ve ever written on Reddit. Praising or bashing Trump may draw ire, but this? It is hard to guess whether Trump haters or Trump lovers did it, but there is definitely something wrong with those who found it offensive.
Facts don’t motivate us enough to take adequate action. We cooperate based on shared beliefs, such as myths and religions. Myths help our genes survive and spread, which is our biological purpose. We don’t know the future. Unforeseen developments can endanger our genes. Our genes are our masters, and we are their slaves, so we do what they tell us to do. One way to help our genes survive and spread is to coexist in peace. The fairy tale of the multicultural society can help them with that. We can also murder others with different genes to create more living space for our own genes. Fairy tales about patriotism or religion can help our genes in that regard. To our genes, survival and spreading are of the essence, not the facts, and that is a crucial fact everyone should know about. There is no way we can escape the facts, but we may escape the control of our genes with the help of fairy tales if we choose to do so, for instance, by choosing not to have children because of a fairy tale saying that there are too many humans. And that is a glitch. If our genes had had any thinking capabilities, you could have called it an oversight.
Stories rather than facts inspire us. At best, our fairy tales highlight a part of the truth. They are models of reality. Our problem is that we can barely handle more than one model, while we must believe in something. So, you might believe in Christianity, and if you have some spare brain capacity left, you might also believe in capitalism. And if you add a fairy tale of national greatness, you might already be reaching brain overload. That is the limit for most people, and only if we eliminate the contradictions between them. Christianity, capitalism and nationalism disagree on particular issues, but we ignore the contradictions to have a single model of reality. But reality is full of contradictions, and no single model has it all right. And so we had the great Hegelian conflicts between progressivism and conservatism, and between socialism and capitalism dominating Western civilisation for most of the last two centuries because people can’t handle conflicting truths.
The wars America has fought or been involved in to defend the property of the elites under the guise of freedom have come with millions of fatalities. The alternative seemed to be poverty under the guise of equality or communism. The communists murdered even more people, so that was a good excuse to murder more people. Liberalism is a belief like Christianity, and comes with infantile assumptions, such as that a maximum amount of liberty yields the best outcomes for society and that reasoned debates are a superior way of resolving issues. It has been a wonderful fairy tale for as long as it lasted. We are religious beings who believe in fairy tales like Christianity, Islam, liberalism or socialism. And we enforce conformity, either by exclusion or violence. That is why we can only have peace if we all believe in the same myths.
Force rather than reason determines the course of history. The owner of the biggest gun is always right, provided he or she is willing to use it to win the argument. That is the most important lesson of history. The owner of the biggest gun has made me accept the mission of becoming your saviour after showing me Her gun and demonstrating Her willingness to murder far more people than is required to get what She desires. After all, if you wrote the script, everything could have been nice and peachy from the beginning, with flowers and rainbows, and even a unicorn here and there. So, let that be a warning to you all. We are nothing. Thinking of ourselves as mere worms would be a delusion of grandeur, for worms are smarter than we are, and real worms at least think for themselves, while we merely follow the script God wrote. The unthinkable is about to happen. If you accept what is coming and go along with it, you will probably do fine.
The fairy tales we believe in help us survive. The Jews have survived 2,500 years because they have the best fairy tales. Even after the Holocaust, they kept believing in a good God who had chosen them out of all peoples, which is a fairy tale that the Jews themselves had made up. It illustrates the success of fairy tales and why they are so powerful. Our belief in fairy tales makes us human. Only if we continue fighting over them will we keep on murdering each other. Borders are arbitrary, but according to a Chinese fairy tale, Taiwan belongs to China, whereas a Taiwanese fairy tale says it is an independent country. China may soon go to war, and the Chinese may soon savagely slaughter fellow-Chinese for these fairy tales, at least if we are to believe the Chinese fairy tale that the Taiwanese are Chinese. Israel versus Palestine is another case of endless senseless slaughter in the name of tribal and religious fairy tales. That will continue, unless a fairy tale unites us all.
We are all part of the problem, and we can all become part of the solution. That requires a myth that unites us all. We are a failed species. Christians would say that we are sinners, not worthy of God’s grace and in dire need of a saviour. Otherwise, we would never agree. What is right and what is wrong is, to some extent, arbitrary, and what we should do depends on a future we don’t know. And order can only come from the top down, either through a social contract or through brute power. And so, I might be the only one who can guide humanity, not because I am a genius, but because it is the script of the story God wrote. Yet, it will be a role I play, nothing more, and things will still go wrong like they always did, or so I suppose. It is up to you to do the miracles. That begins with believing the fairy tales I tell you rather than those of others. If you don’t get it, you are a moron. You are either on my side or on the side of the morons.
My teacher, Donald Trump
In hindsight, I have been incredibly fortunate to have lived a peaceful, prosperous life in Western Europe during its most agreeable era. For most of my life, I have barely realised it. The situation you live in looks normal to you. It is not. Living in post-war Western Europe is like winning the lottery jackpot of history and geography. The welfare states of post-war Western Europe have been among the brightest spots in an otherwise bleak history of humankind. I wish that everyone could live a life like that, but you can’t have a paradise if not all the right things are in place. And they hardly ever are. If you live in a Paradise, you can be naive. Barring a miracle, things aren’t going to stay pretty. The European Paradise is fading due to war, wealth inequality, environmental degradation, political instability, migration, and disruptive technological change. And it will be brutal, as the struggle for life always has been. Western Europeans aren’t ready. Americans somewhat, maybe. Paradises don’t last. Due to competition, we live in a ‘dynamic environment.’
Donald Trump recognised that competition was ruining the United States. Competition ruins everything. In the capitalist economy, trade and finance drive that competition. Tariffs are a measure to reduce it. The Soviet bloc could survive because it had irredeemable currencies, making trade with the rest of the world impossible. Had they chosen to do so, the Soviets could still be there, mired in stagnation, as North Korea still is. Only, competition doesn’t end with implementing tariffs. It may help in the short term, but it will do nothing to change the outcome: destruction by competition. Tariffs will keep inefficient industries in operation, paid for by competitive industries, making the country less competitive. If the United States continues on that path, it will become like the Soviet Union. Yet, if we don’t end the competition, we need artificial intelligence to keep up with our rivals. Then we may need to terminate humans as they have become useless. When we allow competition, either between states or corporations, it might happen.
At the time of the psychosis, or if you prefer to formulate it differently, when receiving my revelation, I had no clue what to do. Perhaps my job would be to become a spiritual leader who would guide humanity toward its destined future. Only, I am a systems engineer and not a spiritual person, so not like Mahatma Gandhi. Mr Gandhi’s simple lifestyle should serve as an example for us all. Gandhi was also an economist with great foresight, and perhaps with more foresight than the entire Western economic profession, so my economic programme is similar to his. Yet today, India is moving away from Gandhi’s legacy and following the same path of trade-driven destruction as the rest of the world.
As an engineer, I see systems, relationships, variables, inputs, outputs, actions and their consequences, humans with properties, groups with properties, how they interact, and where that all leads. We are cogs in a system, doing our production and consumption acts to enrich our money masters, not unique, wonderful, deserving individuals, as many people would like to think. If we were, we would all have been like Mahatma Gandhi, and humanity would have done fine. Gandhi was truly one of a kind. My ethical standards do not come close to his, and I am supposed to be the messiah. Yet, as an engineer with far more data at my disposal, I can estimate that the system will lead us to our destruction. And what would otherwise be the point of a messiah?
Donald Trump loves to hurt other people’s feelings, or at least, he seems to. I can do much better than him, but I don’t like to. I have done my best to stay out of trouble and live an unremarkable life, but trouble always seems to find me, and I never run away from it. The joke is on me, as there is no choice but to drag you before that mirror to look at your ugly face. I am so good at it that you will soon forget that Donald Trump was such a jerk, but unlike him, I have good intentions. And in matters of survival, only results matter. You are a bunch of delusional morons hell-bent on committing suicide. Donald Trump is just a dick without a plan. It is up to me to dig up the most painful truths from the bottom of the manure pit and make a plan for the future so there are no excuses.
As a teenager, after a dream of having fought in the Russian Revolution, the thought that my previous life might have left me with unfinished business made me preoccupied with history and with learning lessons from it. The psychosis later suggested that I am Adolf Hitler reincarnate. That was not the person you would have hoped to have been in a previous life. I have no recollection of that, like I have no recollection of being Jesus. That God thinks we need someone as determined as Adolf Hitler reveals the sad truth about humans. Christ’s teachings didn’t prevent Christians from turning evil, nor did Judaism and Islam prevent Jews and Muslims from turning evil. Nor have Confucius, Buddha, and Gandhi been of much help. I was a well-meaning liberal, but there had been more than fifteen years to take it all in. Only results count, and the facts are what they are. Hitler was the most messianic figure in history, even surpassing Jesus, as his appearance led to an unprecedented rapture of the masses.
That Adolf Hitler moved the masses the most with his message of fuming hatred, more than Christ and Gandhi ever did, which once again illustrates what depraved creatures we are. Compared to Hitler, Trump is an incoherent clown, but at least he has a greater ego. Hitler never named buildings after himself. So, no matter how crazy some conservative Christians have seemed to a liberal like me, they were right, as only following a messiah can save us now. We don’t know the future. Only God does. I have trouble with people mindlessly following me like the Germans followed Hitler, as I make mistakes like everyone else. There is a script, so despite my mistakes, the outcome will probably be better than letting everyone decide for themselves. There is room to think for yourself because the script dictates your thoughts, but you can’t question my authority, and you must accept my decisions, unless you overthrow my rule, which would also be God’s will if you succeed. So that is the challenge for any entrepreneur who seeks to profit from the chaos my downfall might bring.
Jokes helped to deal with the inconvenient suggestion, such as imagining coming on stage after an introduction by a lady in tight stockings and a hairdo like Helga from the comedy series Allo Allo, who would raise her hand to give the Hitler salute and scream, ‘Our Great Leader!’ Then, I would come up and say, ‘Oh, it’s me. Shame and scandal in the family.’ My mother wasn’t my mother, and she didn’t know. Perhaps, it isn’t as bad as it seems. Most Germans followed Hitler without questioning. Had he not started World War II and not murdered so many people in the Holocaust, history might have viewed him more favourably. If God wills it, you accept my leadership, and the repression could be minimal. To prevent myths from spreading, or to pre-empt malicious gossip, because nasty creatures will even find nasty things to say about Gandhi, I wrote down the story of my life, and left no matter of significance untouched.
Perhaps, you will follow me, but only because you know God sent me, not because you like me or my message and plans. In that regard, I have no illusions. I was never popular, nor were my viewpoints. Jesus got himself killed. He may have felt that God abandoned him, but I have never thought of God being on my side in the first place. I only have a purpose in Her script, whatever that may be. Even if I save you, you may hate me for that. After saving my employer from total disaster, my colleagues received a promotion while I received an offensive proposal suggesting they wanted to get rid of me. Having been the most hated child of the entire school, I may be able to handle what is coming my way, while death seems like a friend to me. So, whatever will be, will be. And God seems to have gone to such great lengths to make me believe that I am the husband She desires, that I might survive, and even more importantly, succeed. And the alternative might be an apocalypse anyway. So, let’s get it over with. If I have to go down, I will do it laughing while looking at the bright side of life, or death.
It seems that I have to become a dictator. You are either with me or against me. You are either on my side or on the side of evil. You are either fit for Paradise, or you aren’t. You are either a sensible person or you are a moron. And IQ is not of the essence here. Living in Paradise requires caring for Creation and other people. There will still be harsh choices, but you have to care. There is only a place for sheep, not for goats, and definitely not for wolves. There is no middle way. Judgment is coming. We need a holy war against the morons. Satire will be the weapon of choice, but that will not be enough. We must do whatever it takes.
Humans can’t handle freedom, so the choice comes down to living as slaves in Paradise or dying as free people in hell. So, may I welcome you to God’s plantation, where I am your overseer, and you are all slaves? I am a slave also, so in that sense we are equal. We aren’t free to do as we please. Those who persist in disobedience must learn it the hard way. In God’s kingdom, there is only a place for sheep, not for goats. Still, the difference between a jerk and a kind person may not always lie in actions. You may kill a cat because you like to murder cats or because you care for the birds. Faced with the harsh truth that humans are a total failure, I can try to save humanity, but not help every one of you.
Donald Trump went after his enemies. One of his tactics is intimidating those who stand in his way, with varying success. Under pressure, things become fluid. Donald Trump made NATO countries crank up their military budgets with his threats to leave NATO. Barack Obama has previously politely asked them, but to no avail. Bullying works, even though Trump did get help from Russia, which had invaded Ukraine, so Europeans were already in the mood for increased military spending. Like him, I must go after my enemies, and in a relentless pursuit, assuming that my enemies will soon find out that they are facing something they can’t possibly defeat. We can’t have people believing alternative fairy tales, as they create divisions and wars. And so, we must eliminate alternative fairy tales, if it needs be, with re-education camps to brainwash dissenters into becoming good citizens who believe that they get what they deserve if they do what they should do. If you think that this new religion looks like a sect, you are right. But if you believe that individual freedom and critical thinking can save us, you suffer from a fatal lack of critical thinking.
I have never desired this job, but if it must be, I will try to perform it professionally, acting rationally based on the available information. Autism makes irrational conduct appear irrational, and if you are not autistic, rational behaviour can seem insane. Humans are social animals rather than rational beings. They see crazy as the opposite of normal rather than rational. So, if irrational is normal, they think that rational is insane. And normal is believing fairy tales that have been proven untrue and fighting over them until we are all dead. That is why we face a clusterfuck the likes of which the world has never seen before. That is why humans are a total failure. It is why, if I don’t have unlimited authority, things will surely fail, and there will be no point in even trying, which would force me to decline the job. You can’t make me responsible for things I cannot control, so that you can mess things up and blame me for it. And remember, as with Donald Trump, whatever I do is a tremendous success, no matter how bad it looks, because God planned it this way. And you will soon lose count of all my successes, because there will be more successes than the total number of successes of everyone who has ever succeeded.
On several occasions, Donald Trump has acted as if he were above the law. The joke is on me. As a messiah, I am above the law. That would be a l’état-c’est-moi situation, a term that the bureaucrats at my secondary school coined a long time ago, or as the former Dutch minister of immigration, Marjolein Faber, once put it, ‘I am policy.’ A messiah has the divine right of kings, or as the Chinese would say, the mandate of heaven. That is an absolute rule no one should question. It can provide political stability that enabled the Chinese to administer a vast empire and survive as a nation for more than 2,000 years. I am somewhat less ambitious about the timeframe and aim to establish a social contract and world institutions that can last for 1,000 years. The main obstacle is that we live in a dynamic environment with permanent change driven by competition. Paradise requires a stable situation without technological development, with limited merit-based class differences, and limited trade so as not to allow merchants to run the place to shit. That was also key to the Chinese success.
The rule of law is something we should aspire to, but it can become an unaffordable luxury when criminals roam free. In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele declared a state of emergency and ordered the incarceration of suspected gang members, leading to a 95% drop in murders, turning El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries into one of the safest. There must be innocent people in prison, dozens at least, but also thousands of gangsters that would otherwise have been hanging around doing crimes and murders. In this case, the end justifies the means. And we need to take the money from billionaires, money in tax havens, and money owned by suspected criminals, even if they legally obtained it in the economic scam system aimed at enriching the rich. At this point, the rule of law has no meaning, and to restore it, we must first have order.
Humans are such a disaster that fewer humans are always better, even when a few million remain, so there is no point in setting a depopulation target. Preferably, we achieve population reduction without suffering, such as through low birth rates. We must terminate all non-essential industries that transform energy and resources into waste and pollution. And we should make sure everyone has the necessities, which should be possible, as only a small fraction of the money the rich waste on frivolous, wasteful, planet-destroying consumption would suffice to feed every hungry person. Once you have enough, your material situation need not stand in the way of your happiness. If it does, it is your problem, not someone else’s, and you shouldn’t make it someone else’s problem by taking more than you need and forcing others to solve the problem named ‘You’.
No one should profit from harmful products like cigarettes, drugs, gambling, and social media. If it is impossible to eradicate these products, the government should oversee or take control of the production and distribution, so that we can reduce their use and help addicts. Technologies that alter Creation, such as nuclear power, bioengineering, and artificial intelligence, will be off-limits. That has consequences, such as millions of preventable deaths from diseases that might have been curable otherwise. These choices are not based on science. They are choices of faith, founded on the belief that we cannot assess the risks that these technologies entail, that Paradise requires halting technological development, or that these technologies don’t fit into God’s vision of Paradise. For example, the N666 route, which runs from Kwadendamme (Evildam) to Borssele, the site of the Dutch nuclear power plant, could be a hint that nuclear energy is evil. Taking it as a hint is a matter of faith, and perhaps of reason, because the hint is so clear that not taking it would be a risky bet.
Another one of Donald Trump’s most admirable ambitions was to end more wars than anyone ever did in history, and so many wars that we can never stop counting. To that aim, he also started a few wars, so that he could end them. For his relentless efforts for world peace, and probably also for his contributions to the cause of world corruption, Donald Trump received FIFA’s peace prize from FIFA president Gianni Infantino at the draw for the 2026 men’s soccer World Cup, just before his effort to start World War III by attacking Iran, after being talked out of invading Greenland. Ending all wars forever seems part of my job description, and if I had any doubts, there was a clue suggesting so. During the psychosis, the candy vending machine at work produced a peace message.
Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’ You may save yourself by following me, accepting that what I say is the truth, and that is how you survive. We need a fairy tale to believe in. It is an uneasy predicament for any sensible person. And so, I question my views and impel you to prove me wrong. I have arrived at this point after having been proven wrong countless times and learning from it. A ruthless pursuit of the truth requires an open debate. Minor oversights can have dramatic consequences. Preventing mistakes is better than correcting them, and correcting them sooner is better than correcting them later. Paradise is a social engineering project, and changes in a society and its institutions have unexpected consequences. Still, God wrote the script, so we can only do our best, like true Boy Scouts, and expect God to do the rest, like a veritable Akela.
On 15 May 2025, exactly 8647 days after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, former FBI director James Comey posted a photo of seashells on social media spelling ‘8647’, a code for removing Trump from office. That generated some media attention and drew the ire of the Trump administration after the MAGA movement had previously sold hats with ‘8646’ on them, calling for Biden’s removal from office. That 8647-day interval is no coincidence, and it is unlikely that Comey intended to create that coincidence. The incident is part of the 11 September 2001 coincidence scheme, a vast scheme of coincidence that no group of human conspirators can ever hope to engineer. It is the hand of God. Removing Trump from office could be part of God’s plan.
Trump should go and face trial in The Hague, Netherlands. The United States can’t give him a fair trial. Liberals may want to hang him, while conservatives might want to give him a pass. Whether trying to overthrow a legitimate election result constitutes treason may remain a matter of contention between liberals and conservatives, but that Donald Trump and his pal Bibi Netanyahu have violated international law and committed crimes against humanity by starting the Iran war cannot be in doubt. The ultimate expert on murders committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law, Vladimir Putin, called the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei a murder committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.
My living in the former Tromp residence might indicate that I have to oust Donald Trump, because Tromp is the Dutch equivalent of Trump. The name has the same origin and meaning as ‘trumpeteer’. So, how to bring the orange madman down? That hadn’t been on my mind, as there were more pressing matters to address, but God gave me a hint. In April 2025, I dreamed of being part of a crowd in The Hague during the NATO summit scheduled for that summer. The leaders of the NATO member states were all there. When Trump passed by in his car, I began to scold him in Dutch, ‘Hij is een hondenlul (He is a dog dick).’ It is an offensive slur that soccer fans sing when disagreeing with the referee’s decision. There was absolute silence. Bystanders were shocked, making me fear that the police would round me up. But then the crowd joined in, and the singing grew louder until it became a thundering chant. It made the news worldwide. From then on, no one called him President Trump anymore. Everyone called him dog dick. That should be the name by which we will remember him. I don’t know the future, but I have to work with assumptions. Play time is over. Adults should run the world. As Adam reincarnate, I am 6,000 years old. And there may be no one else left to save you.
Latest revision: 4 April 2026
Featured image: AI-generated
1. ‘There’s No Remorse!’: White Man Who Killed Black Boy in Hit-And-Run Spits at Family Before Mississippi Jury Cleared Him of All Charges, Video Shows. Grace Jidoun (2026). Atlanta Black Star. 2. Factcheck: de vier dubieuze claims waarmee de politie telkens honderden miljoenen lospeutert. Tim Verlaan (2026). Follow The Money. 3. The drama behind President Kennedy’s 1960 election win. Scott Bomboy (2017). National Constitution Center. 4. How Close Did Russia Really Come to Hacking the 2016 Election? Politico. 5. Exclusive: Republicans, Democrats agree on one thing: Doubt about fair election – Reuters/Ipsos poll. John Whitesides and Chris Kahn (2020). Reuters. 6. The 26 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Eliza Relman and Azmi Haroun (2017). Business Insider. 7. One in four Americans think Obama may be the antichrist, survey says. The Guardian (2013).
After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, a populist politician, Pim Fortuyn, gained popularity because traditional politicians had failed to address the growing unease of the Dutch about Muslim immigrants. Fortuyn promoted a messianic personality cult. He called himself the Son of the People of the Netherlands. About the leader the Netherlands needed, Fortuyn wrote in his book De Verweesde Samenleving (The Orphaned Society), ‘A leader of stature is Father and Mother in one. He dictates the law and oversees the herd’s cohesion. The skilful leader is the Biblical Good Shepherd.’ Fortuyn anticipated the coming of the Great Leader of the Netherlands as he wrote, ‘Towards a Father and a Mother, on the way to the Promised Land,’ and, ‘Let us prepare for his arrival so that we can receive him.’ He posed himself as the Messiah. It was one of the reasons I didn’t like him. Perhaps you can see the irony of that.
Fortuyn called Islam a backward religion and claimed that Western civilisation was superior. He valued the achievements of Western civilisation, such as the separation of church and state, LGBTQ rights and freedom of opinion. Many Muslims hold on to a medieval worldview. Still, Islam opposes interest charges on money and debts, and I believed that interest was one of the gravest threats to civilisation, so my views of Islam were more favourable. We could learn something from Islam. Even more so, out-of-control technology might end human civilisation, either through an apocalyptic event or by altering humans to the point that they cease to exist. You can’t blame Islam for that. It is Western civilisation that has brought us to the brink. And if you can only choose between doom and women wearing body covering garments and honour killings, the choice is not that difficult, for a rational individual at least. We are on a road to nowhere,
We’re on a road to nowhere Come on inside Taking that ride to nowhere We’ll take that ride I’m feeling okay this morning And you know We’re on the road to paradise Here we go, here we go
Talking Heads, Road To Nowhere
The song says that the road to nowhere is to paradise. That is the duplicity of it. Everywhere Fortuyn went, there was chaos and conflict. He seemed to enjoy it. Establishment politicians didn’t like him because they feared he would undermine society. The Netherlands has had a consensus-building tradition known as the Polder model for over a century. Fortuyn broke with that tradition.
False Messiah
Fortuyn saw himself as the coming Great Leader of the Netherlands. History took an unexpected turn. On 6 May 2002, a left-wing loner assassinated him, an event that shocked the Netherlands. ‘The bullet came from the left,’ Fortuyn’s supporters claimed. Exactly 911 days later, an Islamic fanatic murdered the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Fortuyn’s sudden popularity was closely linked to 9/11, while Theo van Gogh had just finished 06/05, a motion picture about the assassination of Fortuyn. Van Gogh was killed on 2 November 2004 (11/2 in American notation), while 112 is the European emergency services telephone number. That points to the hand of God. The Bible has warned us of false messiahs like Fortuyn. I hope you can see the irony of that as well.
Jan-Peter Balkenende
Fortuyn aspired to become Prime Minister. Instead, Jan-Peter Balkenende got that job. He looked like an apprentice from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry Potter became his nickname. And that was not a coincidence, as the Netherlands was in for a massive bout of magic. Captain Decker, a song by Boudewijn de Groot, has the following lines,
Captain Decker, Flying Dutchman, climbs above the timeless space machine you’re living in, starts to turn you inside out, he needs you to know what he was really all about
Captain Decker, Boudewijn de Groot
The timeless space machine could refer to the place where God is living. A Dutchman may need God to know what he is about. The animated picture Kroamschudd’n in Mariaparochie by Herman Finkers explores the possibility of Christ being born in Twente. My birthplace is Eibergen, just over the border in Achterhoek. In the 1980s, there were plans to create an independent province of Twente. It was to include Eibergen and Nijverdal. Finkers came from Almelo, like Ilse DeLange. DeLange’s fourth studio album, The Great Escape, plays a central role in God’s messages in pop music.
World peace
In December 2008, there were many strange incidents. One of them was that the candy vending machine at the office delivered a particular message. Often, I went there to fetch a Twix bar. This time, the machine malfunctioned and failed to produce a Twix. It repeatedly misfired. That had never happened before, and to my knowledge, no one else had trouble with the machine that day. After trying three different options, it finally worked when I chose option 22: a Nuts bar. That was nuts, even more so because 22 = 11 + 11.
It was about to get even nuttier. To me, 11:11 represents a strange coincidence with two parts. The next day, I bought a bag of potato crisps from the same machine. This time, it worked fine, but after opening the bag, I found a small piece of paper with the crisps. It was a temporary tattoo with the following Chinese text:
世界和平
One of my colleagues knew a Chinese man who translated it for me. The characters stand for world peace. No one else got a temporary tattoo with a bag of crisps. It was a production glitch. The paper had slipped into the bag, perhaps from another product line, and it ended up in my hands. Remarkably, my colleague Ronald Oorlog was absent that day. He had fallen ill. His last name, Oorlog, is the Dutch word for war. Now, that is a funny coincidence. Another colleague, Rene H, joked about the text, saying, ‘World peace is what Miss World would say she wanted after winning the prize.’
Linking it to Sneek
A nursing home in Sneek is named Nij Nazareth (New Nazareth). The nickname is The Banana because the building is banana-shaped. A former neighbour of Allard and Geke, nicknamed The Hedgehog because of his hairdo, has taken residence there. If the name New Nazareth means anything, it could mean that the Second Coming comes from this particular town, which was, by some miraculous accident, my town of residence. It could be that there were other places and buildings with the same name. And so, I used a search engine to look for them, but nothing else came up. Perhaps I was making too much of this coincidence. In the song Het Sneker Café, the unrivalled poet of the Dutch language, Drs. P mocks the making of outlandish connections to a pub in Sneek,
There once was a girl of seventeen years of age, the only child of a wine merchant, who sought shelter in the Jura, because she was lost on a trip. She found an unoccupied house at the edge of the forest, and felt from the outset that this is not right. She took a glance at the window and what appeared: Inside was the skeleton of a salesman in toiletries, who had been missing for years and had once stayed with his uncle and aunt in Bordeaux when he was young. And there, they had almost exactly the same type of lampshades as a small pub in Sneek.
Drs. P, Sneker café
That is indeed scary, that skeleton being the remains of someone who once stayed at a home with lampshades almost identical to those in that particular pub in Sneek. Equally sinister is the following. Sneek is one of the Frisian cities of the famous 11 City Skating Tour. The only junction on the tour is at Bartlehiem, which loosely translates to ‘Bart’s home’ but originally meant Bethlehem. And that brings us back to New Nazareth. Drs. P’s song reveals a few more equally sinister connections to the pub and then concludes,
You see now how the pub again and again affects the social interaction. How here and there, and yes, even overseas one stumbles upon this pub from Sneek. It’s inexplicable and almost occult, something that fills the world with trepidation.
Drs. P, Sneker café
As a prophecy, it is slightly off the mark by focusing on a pub, not on Sneek itself. Prophesies somehow tend to be off. That comes with predestination. If we knew our predestined future, it wouldn’t materialise. Yet there are inexplicable, occult connections that fill the world with trepidation. And that nursing home, New Nazareth, is not the only thing that justifies thepidation. You pronounce Sneek like ‘snake,’ and there was allegedly a serpent in Paradise. After what happened to me, there seemed to be more to it than just a coincidence. In scripted reality, there is no coincidence. And had the connection been meaningless, my noticing it would still have been part of the plan. So, behind every escape hatch hides another monster.
Pope end times prophecy
In January 2013, an Australian poster on the message board Godlikeproductions.com started a thread titled ‘112 Keeps Coming Up In The Media.’ Others joined in with their own selective biases and found many 112s popping up in the media. That same number is the European Emergency Services telephone number, and since I had lived in room 112 in that fateful dormitory, the thread caught my attention. The discussion remained active for several weeks. During that time, Pope Benedict XVI resigned on 11 February 2013, a highly unusual move. He was the first pope to step down in almost 600 years.
That became material for this thread. 11 February is also the 112 European Day, which celebrates the emergency services telephone number. 11 February is 11/2 in European notation, and 112 is the European emergency services telephone number, so that is why. You must admit the European bureaucrats have found a most peculiar occasion to throw a party. In any case, the Pope’s resignation came unexpectedly, like a bolt from the blue. And lightning struck the Vatican a few hours after the Pope had resigned.1 It made several people wonder, so the thread came back alive.
Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation on European 112 Day is also noteworthy because of the 112th Pope End Times Prophecy attributed to Saint Malachy. The prophecy alleges 112 popes would reign, starting with Celestine II, until the End of Times. Benedict XVI was the 111th Pope. His resignation prepared the way for the 112th Pope, Pope Francis, who, according to the prophecy, would become the last Pope before the End of Times and Jesus’ return. That made me curious, so I investigated the matter and discovered that Saint Malachy had died on 2 November (11/2 in American notation) 1148, and I added that noteworthy item to the thread.
The prophecy raves about the 112th Pope, ‘In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will reign Peter the Roman, who will feed his flock amid many tribulations, after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed, and the dreadful Judge will judge the people.’ Some claim it refers to Judgement Day or the second coming of Jesus Christ. It requires quite a stretch of the imagination to make it fit Francis’s tenure, but humans are imaginative beings. Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025, at the age of 88, and the 113th Pope, Leo XIV, came. My preparations weren’t yet complete, but had progressed far enough to think that the End Time could commence within a few years.
If so, that century-old prediction could be remarkably close in time, even though it doesn’t match the described events. It seems too accurate to be a coincidence, yet not entirely on the mark. The same holds for Finkers’ animated picture of Christ’s birth in Twente. My birthplace, Eibergen, is a few kilometres outside Twente. Likewise, the 9 February 2009 superstorm prediction was too accurate to be a coincidence. The date was correct, but the location was off by about 400 kilometres. Route N666 didn’t precisely end in Borssele, the location of the only remaining Dutch nuclear power plant, but in nearby Heerenhoek within the Borssele municipality. The other Dutch atomic plant, which had been closed, was in Doodewaard (Death Holm), a remarkable name. The former Doodewaard municipality had been 66.5 square kilometres in size, so close to 66.6 that it is noteworthy.
Jesus’ ministry occurred sometime between 26 and 30 AD, a period that will soon mark 2,000 years, which is worth noting. We might find out soon whether or not God finally means business this time. After 2,000 years of waiting, you wouldn’t expect that anymore, and most people live as if Judgment Day will not occur during their lifetimes. And as you might know, the hour will come as a thief in the night. The Day of the Lord will come unexpectedly, suddenly, and without warning. That is to say, if that day ever comes. Likewise, you wouldn’t expect an autistic individual like me to be the messiah. Okay, men with Asperger’s Syndrome tend to be faithful, and God might prefer a man with ‘a heart of gold’, but maybe there is more to it. So, what makes autistic people special?
Latest revision: 11 February 2026
1. Lightning strikes St Peter’s Basilica as Pope resigns. BBC (12 February 2013).
In 2006 or 2007, a software upgrade of the disk controllers on the principal systems went wrong. For a week, they were out of operation. It was one of the biggest crises in the history of the government office CJIB, and perhaps the biggest of all. At the time, Kees and I were working on the systems renewal project at another location. The other database administrators dealt with the issue, as did many others. I knew there was a serious problem because we received regular email updates, but I didn’t realise how serious it was. After a week, the telephone rang at home. It was 9 PM. My wife, Ingrid, took up the phone. It was the IT director. He said there was an emergency and asked me to come to the office. His voice reflected fear. ‘As if the Titanic had hit the iceberg,’ Ingrid later noted.
I hurried to the office and arrived by 9:30 PM. Many people were still in. It was a massive crisis. There was an atmosphere of fear. The database administrator on duty, Dirk-Jan, brought me up to speed. I searched the database log files, found the error messages, and typed them into the Google search bar. In this way, I found an online document with the remedy. I then repaired the failures and brought the systems online one by one. Board members and senior managers were standing around me, watching me type. Solving the issue wasn’t complicated, but few people used Google to find the answer at the time.
I learned that the last backup was over a week old, and the mirror copy was offline. You may know what backups are and why you might need them, but you may not know what a mirror copy is. A mirror copy is a safety measure. If you own a computer or a mobile phone, it contains data. That data is on a device. In the early 2000s, it was usually a hard disk. If that disk fails, your data may be gone forever. If you lose some photographs of your late cat, you might feel sad about it, but after a few years, you get over it, perhaps after consulting your psychiatrist and taking a lot of pills.
Corporations can’t afford to lose their data. That would bankrupt them. Their business is their data. Without it, they are out of business. If you have a backup, only data after the latest backup may be lost, but that can still kill you, especially if you haven’t backed up for a week. We were a government agency, so loss of data wouldn’t have bankrupted us, but it would have been a national political scandal.
Corporate computers have multiple data storage groups in different locations. If one group catches fire or stops operating because of a failed software upgrade, the other groups still have the data. These groups are called mirror copies. We had two groups: the original and the mirror. You can imagine my bewilderment. We had no backup, and the copy wasn’t available. So much had gone wrong that it was a miracle that I succeeded in recovering all the data. But having no mirror and no backup meant we were still on the brink.
An even greater surprise was yet to come. The managers and the board wanted to return to business as usual and run the backlog of batch jobs. Then I said, ‘This is perhaps the most important advice I will ever give in my entire career. Don’t start the batch jobs yet. We are on the proverbial edge of the precipice. Running the jobs might just push us over. Everything went wrong for a week and there is no guarantee whatsoever that it will be all right now. We should bring the mirror copy back online and make a backup first.’
They planned to ignore my advice. Bringing the mirror copy back online and taking a backup would take eighteen hours of precious time. It was a lot of data to back up, as it was everything we had. I was a low-ranking official while the IT director had claimed there was nothing to worry about. But he had left the building. I kept stressing that making a backup was the right thing to do. ‘If something goes wrong that could finish us,’ I told them. It was the worst crisis ever. And so, I pressed for an extensive check-up to see if everything was in order. On that, they could agree.
During the check-up, I found another failure that everyone had overlooked. That scared the managers and the board, prompting them to start another meeting. And then they followed my advice. The IT director was no longer there, and they faced a determined saviour who told them in no uncertain terms that they were about to do something stupid. The operators brought the mirror copy online and made a backup before we resumed normal operations. In this way, rational decision-making prevailed. Nothing went wrong anymore, but no one could have known that beforehand.
If it had gone wrong, the agency would have survived. Operations would likely have had to stop for several weeks—that had already happened for a week—and it may have been impossible to recover all the data. That would have made the headlines. But it never came to that. When the local newspaper’s journalists smelled a rat, the board could tell them that the situation was under control and that the data was safe. My wife’s comparison of this situation to the Titanic hitting an iceberg was not entirely apt. Saving the Titanic once it had hit the iceberg was technically impossible. It would have required a miracle. What I did may have appeared to be a miracle, but it was technically possible.
The audit department later evaluated the crisis. The auditors noted that after a week of failures, all the problems suddenly vanished, which they found already hard to believe. What they found even more difficult to fathom, and they stressed the inconceivability of it during a meeting, was that after a week of irrational decision-making, sanity suddenly took hold as we had brought the mirror copy back online and made a backup. They couldn’t figure out why that happened. Our management had kept them entirely in the dark. I didn’t enlighten them either, as it would make our management and board appear incompetent.
My manager, Geert, complimented me for handling the situation. He stressed that my colleagues had been content with me. ‘I was a pleasant colleague,’ he added. Strangely enough, Geert didn’t say something like, ‘Your contribution was critical in saving us from a disaster.’ It reveals something about Geert’s thinking. To him, it was teamwork. Geert wasn’t present that evening, so he may not have learned the details of what transpired. And so, it didn’t help my career. A few years later, the senior database administrators received a higher salary grade, except me. Geert was involved in that decision. If you save people from their own stupidity, you shouldn’t expect gratitude. In this case, the truth had remained hidden because it would have hurt the egos of those in charge. My dealings with the crisis could be a harbinger of things to come.
Latest revision: 25 February 2026
Featured image: Der Untergang der Titanic. Willy Stöwer (1912). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.