Everything I had once believed in suddenly seemed a lie. That was also true for my religion. Losing faith was a gradual process that took several years. I didn’t give up on it on a whim. I had friends in the Christian student club Alpha, and I could discuss the issue with them. In those years, Losing My Religion by REM became a number-one hit. I turned atheist but not hostile to religion. Some people hate religion because of trauma. But no one had forced me. I had chosen to be religious myself. My mother complained that I didn’t take care of myself. She kept telling me I was too skinny and looked like Jesus. And there was a lot to ponder. What is truth? And can we know it? Can we be sure about anything? Nearly every day, I went to the forest near the campus to ponder these questions. For several months, there was no end to doubt. Logic was the last line of defence.
I had been a simple guy, not aware of much. A******* had reproached me for being naive. It seemed imperative to fix that to fix my life. I followed the metaphysics course to learn what it was. It is about the nature of reality. The lecturer discussed ancient Greek philosophers. Some believed that earth, water, air, and fire were the building blocks of nature. Others addressed the nature of truth and what we can know. Then, the lecturer came up with something interesting. If truth doesn’t exist, then that must be true, so truth must exist. The non-existence of truth is logically impossible. At the time, it seemed the discovery of my lifetime. The truth is out there, somewhere, lurking, and it might one day take us all by surprise, which was somehow comforting rather than unnerving.
The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates sought the truth in his famous dialogues. The sophists were his opponents, the lecturer told us. Using clever tricks, these people made false suggestions. He had an example. A sophist would say to a peasant that he could prove that an empty glass equals a full glass. The peasant wouldn’t believe him. The sophist then challenged him to make a bet. He would ‘prove’ it as follows:
Sophist: ‘A glass half-full is the same as a glass half-empty. Do you agree?’ Peasant: ‘Yes.’ Sophist: ‘If two volumes are equal, and you multiply them both by two, they must still be equal. Do you agree? Peasant: ‘Yes.’ Sophist: ‘If you multiply half-full by two, you have full, and if you multiply half-empty by two, you have empty, so a full glass is the same as an empty glass.
And so, the peasant lost his money. This sophist lived off defrauding people. The sophists weren’t popular with the general public, the lecturer said. More generally, they were relativists who didn’t believe in absolute truth. They thought the truth merely depends on perspective. Socrates opposed that kind of thinking. The truth is out there. It has always been there, is still there, and will be there. So, what I believed was fickle and could change. If I did my best, I could come closer to the truth. My doubts receded, but the comfortable feeling of certainty was gone forever. Something could always pop up, overthrowing everything I had learned so far. It had happened once. It could happen again.
Socrates believed that investigating matters with an open mind can bring us closer to the truth, and that greater knowledge is progress. In that sense, we have progressed. We can invent things, but forgetting inventions is much harder. That might require measures like burning books and murdering scientists. And we cannot undo our deeds. You can’t return to ignorance or inexperience once you have crossed a line into knowledge or experience. You might call that progress. Somehow, we think we are progressing. But are we? If it all ends in a nuclear Armageddon, it would all be pointless. So,
Making a career before the bomb falls Working on my future before the bomb falls I’m running around my schedule before the bomb falls Safe in the health insurance fund before the bomb falls
And when the bomb falls I’ll be lying in my suit, diplomas and my cheques in my pocket My insurance policy and my vocabulary, aww Under the apartment buildings in the city next to you
Just drop it then, it’ll happen anyway It doesn’t matter if you run I never knew you. I want to know who you are I want to know who you are
Doe Maar, The Bomb
In the second-hand bookstore De Slegte in Enschede, I stumbled upon a booklet about Hegelian dialectic. The cover promised that it would be about progress using arguments. It began by stating that progress arises from a thesis (the current situation), an antithesis (a challenge), and a synthesis (a resolution), so that looked very promising indeed, and that was the reason for buying it. Once I started reading it, and to my great disappointment, it soon turned political. It was about framing questions with particular wording so that the solution would present itself, the book argued.
It looked like a textbook on propaganda, and a communist seemed to have written it. By using words, you define reality. It was also how the sophists operated, so it didn’t seem an honest quest for truth, because the facts don’t depend on the wording. But the question remains: what are the facts? Let’s illustrate the issue with a few examples. You can apply the tactic to the estate tax, like so:
You can call it a death tax, thereby implying that governments profit from the death of people, suggesting it is a bad tax, or that the tax is evil.
You can call it a parasite tax, thereby implying that the recipients haven’t earned it and suggesting that it is a good tax, or that not having the tax is evil.
People who have worked and saved have already paid taxes on their labour, and if there are wealth taxes, also on their estate. In that sense, it is unfair. Those who receive an inheritance usually haven’t worked for it. In that sense, it is fair. That is the problem with many issues. The opposing sides may seem equally reasonable. And there are practical consequences. Inheritance taxes can ruin family businesses, while not having them can lead to a class of billionaire oligarchs ruling society.
Framing can be misleading. Climate activists label tax breaks that corporations receive on fossil fuels as subsidies. These weren’t subsidies but lower taxes. These tax breaks exist because of competition. Corporations elsewhere don’t pay these taxes either, so a corporation would go bankrupt if it had to pay them. Production would move elsewhere, and nothing would change for the better. Climate is one of the most pressing global issues. The reason to mischaracterise the situation in this manner may be to fire people up by making them angry and inspiring them to take action, but it won’t help.
Hegel’s idea of a hidden truth behind seemingly irreconcilable views greatly helped me. There is a higher truth, and instead of taking a side, you can investigate opposing views and try to resolve them. A resolution is a more profound insight rather than a compromise. It is a brutal process as I have experienced firsthand. We don’t depart from our views unless we have no choice, so we usually do so only after failing utterly and being cornered with no options left but to admit that we are wrong. It is often also unclear who is right, so you can stick to your opinions until you fail. Hegel’s idea is that a competition of ideas drives history, so superior ideas replace inferior ones, and that this may require revolution and warfare. That would be progress, but there can be no progress without a goal.
Hegel envisioned that God’s plan worked like so. We would end up in God’s paradise through progress. That was the goal. In doing so, he laid out the scheme for a dialectical struggle between progressivism and conservatism, leading to achievements such as the end of slavery, workers’ rights, universal suffrage, equality between men and women, equality among races, LGBTQ rights, and the like. That progress came with activism and sometimes with warfare, such as the American Civil War. Marxists and the communists built on Hegel’s scheme and replaced ‘God’s plan’ with ‘historical necessity’, claiming that we would end in a workers’ paradise rather than God’s paradise.
Both sides of an argument represent different realities that can be equally true. One side’s reasoning may appear stupid to the other, and the right choice depends on the weight of the arguments. Hegel was far more important than I realised at the time. His philosophy is a foundational pillar of Western civilisation, and perhaps the only way in which Western civilisation might be universal, as it promises a path towards a world civilisation. At the time, all that eluded me. Still, the idea that opposing arguments both reflect an underlying truth put my mind at ease. I couldn’t live with the idea that there is no truth and only perspective. My previous ideas hadn’t become worthless overnight. They were as true or false as before, and so were my new views. Nothing had changed, except my perspective. The truth exists, and my beliefs are irrelevant. My doubts faded,
You say the hill’s too steep to climb Chiding You say you’d like to see me try Climbing You pick the place, and I’ll choose the time And I’ll climb The hill in my own way Just wait a while, for the right day And as I rise above the treeline and the clouds I look down, hearing the sound of the things you said today
Pink Floyd, Fearless
I came to relate this song to the challenge A******* had given me and conveniently ignored a second part that didn’t seem to fit into the picture,
Fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd, smiling Merciless, the magistrate turns ’round, frowning And who’s the fool who wears the crown Go down in your own way And every day is the right day And as you rise above the fear lines in his brown You look down Hear the sound of the faces in the crowd
Pink Floyd, Fearless
For nearly a year, thoughts filled my mind. If I had done this or that differently, then things would have turned out differently. After initially being kind, A******* turned hateful within a few weeks. Having been hated all my life and not knowing any better, I accepted it. Yet, the dormitory felt like the place where I belonged. It was Paradise. Only, I didn’t fit in, and that was because of what my life had been like. Living there made me realise that it didn’t have to be that way. My childhood could have been different. At the time, I blamed my parents, but they had done their best. And that was the past, and the past was gone forever, so there was no point in dwelling on that. The future might be better if I changed my ways.
There were notable differences in backgrounds between A******* and me, and somehow they proved an unbridgeable gap. A******* appeared progressive and had lived a cosmopolitan life, while I was conservative and rural, and had not seen much of the world. Nijverdal was a rural area. Art and literature didn’t interest me. The incident foreshadowed a conflict that you can see today in several Western societies. There is a growing disconnect between leftist city people in intellectual jobs and rural people, like farmers, who lead an entirely different life. And so, came to see these cultural differences as a major contributing cause to the most epic disaster of my lifetime.
Until then, culture had seemed a vague concept debated by academics. Suddenly, it became very real to me, making me feel an urgent need to understand people who were different. I had to adapt and fit into various environments. It didn’t come naturally to me. Years later, I found out that I was autistic. And so, studying culture and human conduct became a conscious effort. My intuition had failed me, so I learned to understand differences and cultures by seeing the relationships between what people said and what they did, and by identifying patterns. People with similar backgrounds or properties display identical behaviour. Over time, it made me as good as, if not better than, others at understanding and predicting behaviour. After a few years, that began to show itself.
After finishing her education, my sister had difficulty finding a job. Yet my first application succeeded, and to a great extent, that was due to my understanding of the company’s culture, which allowed me to provide answers that made it appear as if I fit perfectly within the new corporate vision. That was not the case, but I had succeeded in making it seem that way. Despite applying for dozens of positions and being talented in fashion sales, my sister received no job interviews. My mother then asked me to review one of her application letters. The letter was boastful and without substance. For instance, it claimed that she had excellent commercial skills without any evidence to back it up, followed by more bluster without proof. And so, I asked my sister, ‘Where did you get this letter from?’ It came from a friend who had applied to the Dutch telecommunications company KPN. They hired her as a manager.
That made sense. KPN’s recruitment advertisements suggested they were hiring arrogant, boastful people without substance for management positions, which explained why they hired her friend. Most people would reject unsubstantiated bragging. After all, it was the Netherlands, not the United States. It might have worked in Amsterdam, where the cheeky people lived, but not in Arnhem, where my sister was. I told my sister that she could say she had good commercial skills, but should back it up with evidence. She had done an internship, and the company was very pleased with her, so I said, ‘Mention that to back it up, and tell what your job role was and tell about a few things you did.’ She then revised her letter, got interviews, and was hired soon afterwards. And you can see the consequences of not understanding culture. KPN was in a different league because it wanted to shed its dusty government image and play with the big boys in telecom. That didn’t end well, but that is another story.
Dutch public television featured human interest programmes about people living far away. You could learn about how people lived on the Mongolian steppe and their thoughts and beliefs. Minorities like Muslims and Hindus had airtime on Dutch public television, so that you could learn about them as well. Once at the Utrecht Centraal train station, a few Hindus handed me a book containing some of their Vedas. I had never encountered such a hazy prate, except, perhaps, Hans van Mierlo’s, making me quit reading after a few pages. When discussing what had happened at the dormitory with my best friend Arjen, he said, ‘You do not mince words. You say what you think.’ It is a quality that doesn’t help you in life. It can annoy people. Since then, I spoke my mind less often.
Featured image: El Uruguay a través de un siglo. Carlos M Maeso (1910). Public Domain.
Before the Industrial Revolution began in England, European crafts and sciences had already advanced. During the Middle Ages, inventions such as gunpowder, eyeglasses, the compass, the printing press, the mechanical clock, the windmill, and the spinning wheel had reached Europe from China or the Middle East. What made Europe culturally different was its individualism. In the 14th and 15th centuries, a new spirit emerged in Italian merchant towns like Venice, Florence, and Genoa. It was the spirit of the merchant which subsequently spread throughout Europe.
And so, Europeans gradually abandoned their traditional Christian values and developed a capitalist spirit by pursuing worldly wealth and pleasure rather than modesty and bliss in the afterlife. There were merchants elsewhere, but the populace held them in low regard because of their depraved ethics, as greed was their core value. It was the pursuit of profit that drove European explorations and colonialism. Making money became the new moral virtue, alongside inquisitiveness, creating a dynamic that would change the world.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans explored the world and invented the microscope, the steam turbine, the telescope, and the steam pump. Modern science began when Nicolaus Copernicus calculated the trajectories of the planets by assuming that they revolved around the Sun. Isaac Newton later formulated the laws of motion. Europeans expanded their colonial empires, thereby increasing the size of their markets, a prerequisite for the mass production that industrialisation was to bring.
The British were the most successful. Supported by a strong navy, they built the largest colonial empire. They also invented modern banking, creating money out of thin air or financing capital by imagining future revenues. In 1689, the British had the Glorious Revolution, which, like many revolutions, was about taxation. Businesspeople then took over the government. Taxation henceforth required the consent of the taxed, thus, property owners. And the state became a venture of the propertied classes, like the Dutch Republic, the wealthiest nation at the time, already was.
The taxpayers didn’t like to pay for ineptitude and corruption, so the quality of the British state improved, and the state used its military to support the colonial business ventures of the propertied classes. Great Britain had easily accessible coal deposits and developed a large coal mining industry. Due to a lack of firewood, coal had become England’s primary heating source. As mine pits grew deeper, they became prone to flooding. With no transport costs, a coal-fired steam engine to pump water out of the mine became cheaper than manually pumping with buckets.
Ignition
Trade with the colonies promoted British industries, resulting in high living standards and wages in England. In England, coal was easily accessible, so energy was cheap. In Great Britain, the aristocracy had an entrepreneurial spirit and paid taxes, making the British government a reliable borrower. Banking innovations, most notably the creation of money, made British capital markets more efficient. And so, Great Britain had low interest rates, so a low price for capital. The first machines were clumsy and inefficient, but high wages, cheap capital and affordable energy made them profitable.
This combination of factors is why the Industrial Revolution started in England rather than elsewhere. Wages in France were lower, while the banking system was less developed. The rent-seeking French aristocracy didn’t pay taxes, making the French government an unreliable borrower. Thus, interest rates in France were higher. Once the first machines were in operation, inventing new ones or improving existing ones became profitable, so British engineers got busy enhancing the steam engine’s efficiency and inventing contraptions like the spinning jenny and the cotton gin.
The fuel consumption of steam engines dropped from 44 pounds of coal per horsepower-hour in 1727 to 3 pounds in 1847, making it economical to use the steam engine for other purposes, such as trains. The dramatically improved fuel efficiency, combined with other improvements, made it economical to mechanise production elsewhere where wages were lower, interest rates were higher, or energy was more expensive. That allowed the Industrial Revolution to spread to other countries.1
It was a watershed moment. Until then, inventions were rare. Scientists made them out of curiosity. However, from then on, the profit motive generated a permanent drive to pursue knowledge and new technologies and to invent new products. In this way, economising through innovation and scale became a constant, unstoppable process that economists call creative destruction. Factories needed scale to operate profitably, while inventions birthed new industries and made others obsolete.
Humans have started a fire in their midst that continues to grow. We can’t stop it. A classic book on the Industrial Revolution used at universities is David Landes’ The Unbound Prometheus. According to Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. The Greek supreme deity, Zeus, punished him for his act. The story parallels the biblical story of the Fall. The Industrial Revolution unleashed the unlimited fire of the gods that will devour us.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the general level of opulence has risen dramatically, though it was hardly noticeable at first. Industrialisation made craftspeople in the clothing industry destitute as they couldn’t compete with factories. Everyone else profited from cheaper cloth. Mechanisation made existing products like cloth more affordable, so people had money to spend on new products like light bulbs, making investing in new inventions profitable. Economists call it Say’s Law. More supply generates new demand.
Due to these innovations, production costs decreased, and industrialisation became profitable where wages were lower, energy was more expensive or interest rates were higher. Industrialisation first took off in Europe and North America, but not elsewhere. One reason is that Europeans had become innovation-minded and eagerly adopted new technologies like railroads and telegraphs. These first technologies were simple, thus easy to apply, but the Chinese and others remained reluctant to use them.2
Standard development recipe
Western Europe followed quickly, helped by the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte’s reforms. The French Revolution wiped out the corrupt old French regime and replaced it with a modernised, efficient bureaucracy. The aristocrats lost their power. The French introduced civil registries, rationalised the law code, standardised weights and measures by introducing the metric system with kilograms and metres, and made everyone drive on the right side of the road. Napoleon’s armies then spread these reforms over Europe. Napoleon did to Europe what the first Chinese emperor did to China 2,000 years earlier. Both reigned shortly but left a lasting legacy.
Countries Napoleon didn’t conquer, such as Great Britain, continued to drive on the wrong side of the road and use arcane measures like miles and ounces. And only in Great Britain do aristocrats still influence politics through the House of Lords. To catch up, Western Europe and the United States followed a standard recipe consisting of the following elements:
Creating a national market by eliminating internal tariffs and building railroads.
Developing domestic industries by using external tariffs.
Instituting banks to finance investments and stabilise the national currency.
Establishing a mass education system to upgrade the labour force.
These measures had enormous social consequences, which we now refer to as modernisation. Societies came to replace communities. It was the age of nationalism. With the help of mass education, everyone learned the national language, and local dialects disappeared. People learned to identify with their nation rather than their kin and village. The outcome was that modern humans rely on markets and the state more than on their family and community.
Other countries implemented the same recipe but with modifications due to local economic factors. Factory layouts that operated at a profit in Europe were loss-making elsewhere. If energy were expensive, the operation would become more cost-effective using fewer machines and more labour. Japan was the first non-Western country to follow. The Japanese had to deal with local circumstances. High interest rates made investment capital expensive, so Japanese factories held no stockpiles of raw materials and semi-finished products but let their suppliers make them when needed. So, when interest rates rose in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Western industries couldn’t compete with Japan.
There are varying views on why industrialisation succeeded in some countries but not in others. If you dare to generalise, you can make the following observations:
East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and later China modernised successfully. They had a sense of nation and experience with rational government administration. Their bureaucrats and businesspeople successfully implemented modernisation projects.
Latin American countries were less successful. They were former colonies lacking national identities. Their white elites neglected the education of indigenous people. There were a few large estates and hardly any small-scale farmers. Wealth inequality prevented the development of a middle class.
The Soviet Union modernised with the help of state planning. Industrialisation of heavy industries succeeded, allowing the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany. Agricultural reforms were a disaster, and consumer products were of poor quality. By the 1970s, it became clear the Soviet Union couldn’t keep up with the West.
Several countries in the Middle East modernised with dictators implementing socialist development models based on the experiences in the Soviet Union. Some Arab countries became wealthy from oil revenues. Few countries in the Middle East have developed industries that compete in international markets.
Africa lagged. African borders didn’t match the tribes living there, so there was no sense of nationhood. There have never been states in most of Africa. European colonisers ended traditional forms of government and property rights, contributing to poor governance and corruption. Africans started with a disadvantage.
Industrial politics
There are requirements for a modern economy, though a country doesn’t need to meet all of them. A capable government and an educated workforce can turn a situation around. Japan has few natural resources, but has become one of the most advanced countries in the world. It was the first non-Western country to industrialise. Japan was also lucky. After World War II, it had access to US markets because it was a close ally of the United States, which needed it to help it export its way into prosperity. Argentina had fertile land and was one of the wealthiest countries by 1900, but it has since then gone downhill. To successfully modernise, a country probably needs:
a capable government that understands economics and is business-friendly
an educated workforce as workers must read, write and use technology
businesspeople, investment capital, and sufficiently ensured property rights
a large enough market, thus a sizeable middle class
an industrial policy, thus picking industries to compete in international markets, helping to develop them, and supporting them with tariffs or subsidies
There are several kinds of industrial politics. Neo-liberal politics aim to pursue economic growth by promoting trade, lowering taxes, and reducing regulations. Unrestricted trade allows areas and people to specialise and compete to produce more and better products, enhancing overall opulence. It also promotes a race to the bottom at the expense of our future. Industries go where wages are lowest or where they can dump their waste and avoid paying for government services.
Making the economy sustainable and people-friendly also requires industrial policies, such as reducing competition and introducing regulations and controls. And it requires ending imports from countries that don’t adhere to the same ethical standards. A sustainable, people-friendly economy can only exist on a level playing field with other economies that adhere to the same standards. These measures increase costs and reduce living standards. An extreme case is the Old Order Amish. They choose to be self-sufficient and live simple lives. Their economic model resembles community economics.
Community economics aims to enable people in a community to help each other by buying and selling goods and services using local currencies. It never became a worldwide success because communities lack the scale for self-sufficiency. There is also a lack of commitment, which is something the Amish do have. Few people barter their labour or goods in their community if they can get better deals elsewhere. Commitment is vital. Without it, there will be black markets with merchants smuggling in illicit goods.
Featured image: Amish family, Lyndenville, New York. Public domain.
1. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Robert C. Allen (2014). Cambridge University Press. 2. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.
Mainland Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world, and most notably, the United States, are culturally related but have significant differences in views on law and morality that underpin their societies. These differences greatly influenced history, but their causes also lie in history. In the Middle Ages, individualism was already strong in Western Europe. While England developed its law system, the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church introduced Roman civil law on the continent. It had the following outcome:
Common law has become the basis of law in Great Britain and many of its former colonies, including the United States. Individuals are sovereign. Common law works bottom-up by generalising rules from judges’ verdicts in individual cases.
Civil law has become the basis of law in mainland Europe and most other countries. The lawmaker is sovereign, thus the king or the people as a collective via parliament. It works top-down by applying general rules to individual cases.
Common law resulted from the efforts of English kings to build a coherent law system based on local practices. In 1215, the Magna Carta limited the power of the English kings. England then had a strong state where the rule of law limited the king’s power. There also was individual liberty in Western Europe. There were few strong states while merchants ran independent cities. Still, the rule of law later came from the state’s power because of the differences in law foundations. These differences relate to views on ethics:
In Great Britain, philosophy, including ethical philosophy such as David Hume’s, is pragmatic. It says moral rules are an agreement in society, so good and evil depend on popular sentiments, freedom is being able to do as you please, and outcomes matter more than intent.
In continental Europe, idealism dominates philosophy, including ethical philosophy, such as that of Immanuel Kant. It says good and evil are absolute, freedom means liberating yourself from your lower urges, thus becoming rational and morally upright, and intent matters more than outcomes.
If ethical rules are relative, they emerge from popular sentiments, thus bottom-up, and if they are absolute, they come from principles and work top-down. The English philosopher John Locke imagined the state as a voluntary agreement of individuals to cooperate for mutual benefit. If you believe in individual sovereignty and moral relativism, that must be why there is a state. But it is incorrect. We will not voluntarily agree to a state if there is none but fight each other until there is one.
These differences later shaped the debate on the economic system, hence the intellectual battle between capitalism and socialism. Adam Smith wrote a practical recipe for running an economy in the British tradition. In continental Europe, the debate became fundamentalist and infused with moral sentiments. Frédéric Bastiat claimed socialism is an organised plunder of private property, while Karl Marx argued that capitalists steal the value workers create.
In the United States, with its moral pragmatism founded on individual freedom, the collectivist ideology of socialism never caught on. Still, progressives in the United States pursued reforms to rationalise the government according to modern bureaucratic principles, and there were unions. Great Britain became caught in the middle as Brits had a more favourable view of government than Americans and a strong socialist movement.
When, after World War II, the Soviet Union became an existential threat to the United States because the communists planned to overturn the capitalist order with violent revolutions and were building a large army, the defence of individual autonomy and moral pragmatism itself turned into an idealist moral crusade, also because the Soviets aimed to end religion and persecuted religious people. Most US citizens identified as Christians, so they came to see the Soviet Union as an evil, godless empire.
Hegelian Dialectic and Marxism
Around 1807, the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel devised a theory of how history would unfold according to God’s plan. It would occur by challenging the prevailing ideas and social order. The French Revolution had just swept away the old aristocratic French regime. The French adopted revolutionary new ideas from the European Enlightenment, modernised their government and introduced an army of conscripts, allowing Napoleon to conquer Europe and spread these ideas and reforms. Hegel was the proverbial fly on the wall, taking it all in. He was impressed. That was progress! Modern ideas wipe out old ones. A bureaucratic government with conscripts eliminated an aristocracy with mercenaries. The German Christian idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel, and later, atheists like Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, dedicated themselves to hard questions pragmatic people would never bother to spend a lifetime on.
As a profoundly religious man, Hegel thought that our knowledge and ideas progressed and that God’s plan worked like so. He believed humanity had a collective consciousness in which these ideas reside. He surmised we are progressing towards our final destination, God’s Paradise, by replacing our prevailing ideas with better ones. An example is our views on slavery. Slavery existed since time immemorial and was generally accepted, but most of us now see it as evil. These views we all share are what Hegel meant by collective consciousness. It evolves over time and thus progresses according to a stylised scheme called Hegelian dialectic. It works like this:
(1) there is a status quo (the thesis) (2) new ideas or conditions challenge the status quo (the antithesis) (3) from the challenge emerges a new status quo (the synthesis)
A synthesis is a more profound truth rather than a compromise. You can’t bargain on the truth. Hegelian dialectic is a ruthless pursuit of truth and accepting its consequences. Hegel is the philosopher of progress, not economic or scientific, but progress in society and its institutions. It is nearly impossible to overestimate his influence on politics in the centuries that followed as it often was about progressives versus conservatives, thus applying new ideas from philosophy and the sciences versus keeping things as they are. Not all new ideas are better, so the outcome can be that nothing changes. Ideally, the synthesis is the best solution that emerges from the challenge of the status quo. If the new ideas are superior, they wipe out the old ones. That requires revolution and violence, such as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
Being more pragmatic, the British reformed in smaller steps. The principal problem with Hegelian dialectic is that the scheme can have disastrous consequences if you don’t know everything. Your logic can be perfect, but if your assumptions are not, a small oversight can cause ruin, as in Barataria. Chaos theory says why. The leading conservative British thinker, Edmund Burke, aimed to improve the government, but only if necessary, because changes have unpredictable consequences. The British could do that because they already had a government open to reforms, while the French did not. A revolution was their only option to rid themselves of the corrupt old regime and clean the slate.
Karl Marx took the bait. We could achieve paradise ourselves here on Earth, he claimed. Scholars had already found out that much of the Bible was fiction, and Charles Darwin had just published On The Origin of Species with evidence indicating plants and animals emerged in a competition between species that has lasted millions of years rather than being created in six days 6,000 years ago. The sciences had proven religion wrong, so Marx thought religion keeps people dumb. Christians would wait for Jesus, who hadn’t shown up for over 1,800 years, and not take matters into their own hands. Marx also noted that Christians had betrayed their religion by adopting the ethics of the merchant. According to Acts, early Christians lived like communists.
Marx claimed capitalists profit by stealing some of the value workers create. He based his allegation on the labour theory of value, which economists of his time considered valid. The theory says that the price of an item equals the cost of labour required to make it, thus including the labour to produce the raw materials. If making a pair of shoes takes twice as much labour as making a pair of trousers, shoes cost twice as much as trousers. Marx then asked, ‘If that is correct, how can there be profits?’ It is because the theory is wrong. There is no objective measure of value. In a market economy, the price of an item depends on what people are willing to pay for it, not what it costs to make it. Otherwise, you could work a year on building a better mousetrap and sell it for € 50,000. Perhaps, after spending another € 50,000 on building a brand in a marketing campaign, you can sell it for € 200,000. That is how markets work.
Value is what we believe it is. Nothing is sacred. Everything is for sale, including the rainforests and even the Earth. The so-called owners think it is all theirs and can do with it as they please. In the market, a message becomes true if you can sell it. It works with advertisements or denying climate change. It is the evil in the ethics of the merchant, and because money represents power, we stare into the moral abyss. If you ever wonder why communists called their newspapers The Truth, that is why. But in a world without God, there is no truth, and communism is just another message on the marketplace. The communists appealed to the workers’ self-interest. And that was a poor sell because workers were worse off under communism. It is why communism was doomed to fail, not because it is impossible to live like communists. Early Christians did. Rather than concluding he had just proven the labour value theory wrong, Marx claimed capitalists stole from their employees.
Marx further said that producing for markets alienates us from what we make. Many workers experience this. It is why Dilbert comics are so successful. Marx claimed we could be free, creative beings, but the modern, technologically developed world dictates our lives. Marx believed ending the market mechanism and replacing it with democratic planning would liberate us. So if workers received what they owed and we replaced capitalism with democratic planning, we would live in a paradise where we can do the jobs we like and have everything we need. That is a silly idea. Many want to be a Hollywood star, but few want to be a cleaner. Immigrants do those jobs. Communes don’t attract farmers and construction workers but artists and reiki healers. We need food and homes, not art and quacks. Work is doing something useful, and if it isn’t useful, it isn’t work. And even if everyone contributes, planning will never do as well as markets. You could live with that if you have enough. You might want a pear, but you could settle for an apple. And you have heard of oranges but never tasted one.
Marx also claimed that capitalism causes misery as adding capital means doing more with fewer workers, which reduces the need for labour, pushing wages below the subsistence level and leaving workers to starve. At the time, most economists believed wages would remain close to the subsistence level. If wages increased, more people survived, expanding the labour supply. And so, wages would decrease, and more people would starve. The market would keep population levels in check. Marx argued that making more stuff with fewer people was impossible because the unemployed couldn’t buy it, and capitalism would bankrupt itself. It didn’t happen because of Say’s Law, as things became cheaper. And we can create money from thin air. When capitalists produce more, they must sell their merchandise, and you can make people borrow money, so the general level of opulence rises. Marx vastly underestimated human ingenuity in finance, marketing and job creation in the services sector and government, the so-called bullshit jobs in the bullshit economy. These jobs make sense because they solve problems in our complex society, but we could do without many of them when we live simpler lives.
Marx believed he was scientific and rational. He devised a theory of history using Hegel’s dialectic, arguing that power structures in society reflect economic conditions. To Marx, it was not new ideas challenging the status quo but economic conditions driving change in history. He would say that the status quo of serfdom in Europe ended because towns challenged it by providing alternative jobs for serfs. Lords had to compete with them for their labour. And so, employer-employee relationships replaced serfdom, which became the new status quo. Marx also believed nationalism was a temporary phase, as economic conditions imposed it on us. Industrialisation required larger markets, thus societies rather than communities. Nationalism allowed the elites to divide and rule the working class. And because capitalism would eventually bankrupt itself, Marx predicted, as if it was a logical certainty, communism would replace employer-employee relationships, and everyone would become free and equal. In reality, people aren’t free or equal under communism, and a new elite of party bureaucrats replaced the capitalists.
Marx’s plan for the future included violently overturning the existing capitalist order in revolutions like the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. Karl Marx became the prophet of the most successful cult in recent history. Despite the failure of communism, the capitalism-socialism debate continues because Marx raised pressing concerns that are still valid today:
Instead of saying capitalists steal value from workers, you can argue we work to make the rich richer. Despite stellar economic growth in the United States, many workers still can hardly get by. And that is not because they are all lazy or stupid.
Instead of saying the system alienates us from what we produce, you can argue we are part of a system over which we have no control. We can’t democratically decide on issues like implementing artificial intelligence.
Instead of saying capitalism causes misery, we can argue it improved billions of lives, but it probably ends in a total disaster. We may know for sure once the ecological or technological apocalypse materialises.
Instead of saying we will enter the communist paradise as a historical necessity, we may argue the script is that we are about to enter God’s Paradise, which could be a Hegelian synthesis of Marx’s challenge of the existing capitalist order.
The moral void
European moral idealism and American moral relativism have consequences you might not think of. German philosophers from the Frankfurt School, knowing our religion, if we have one, depends on our birthplace, that Jews invented the Abrahamic God and that much of the Bible is fiction, sought more absolute foundations of morality, such as equality or preventing harm to other people. They embrace LGBT rights like marriage, as there is no objective moral reason to deny them. Even if you think gay marriage is unnatural because a gay couple can’t produce offspring, there still is no objective moral reason to deny them these rights, no matter what the Bible says. Idealism also drove Germans to endanger their energy security by closing nuclear plants and betting on solar and wind.
American moral relativism drives conservative Christians to impose their views on others, as they don’t ask hard questions, ignore evidence contradicting the Bible, and think they can do as they please rather than act as a rational, morally upright person. Critical theory, thus cultural Marxism or Woke, comes from German philosophers daring to ask hard questions to seek the absolute foundation of morality. Critical theorists also indulge in speculation. Many of their theories lack solid evidence. Believing, like Marx, that their ideas are superior, the Woke use Hegelian dialectic to attack conservative Christianity and impose their views on society. That is why Woke people are so annoying. In recent years, that debate has escalated rather than synthesised. It has turned into a culture war.
Conservative Christians, most notably those in the United States, are a peculiar bunch. Humans are the most destructive species that ever roamed the Earth, and there are far too many of them, so it is evil to ban abortions. If there is a moral objective measure for preserving a life, it is its degree of sentience. A human newborn can only suck milk, and no one remembers being born, while cows, horses and pigs stand upright and walk after birth. A cow or a pig is more conscious than a ten-week-old fetus, yet we slaughter them by the millions after treating them horribly in conditions as miserable as concentration camps. It is a Holocaust. You can better be dead long before you are born. Christians corrupted Jesus’ teachings to take away women’s rights and claim trans people are evil after giving God a sex change. They harp about an alleged conspiracy of Satanic child molesters in government while electing a sex offender who regularly attended Epsteins parties.
Liberals might think many Christian conservatives are crazy to believe raving nutcases like Qanon, but we cooperate using shared imaginations, so it is perfectly normal human behaviour. How do you think religions survive despite the facts disproving them? And the only measure of success is success. Truth hardly ever is the reason why beliefs prevail. Even scientists have invisible imaginary friends like gravity. Believing that gravity exists makes you succeed in engineering. The foundations of liberalism and socialism are also incorrect, like human nature being inherently good. We like to think we are good, so these ideologies have been successful. And success breeds stupidity. If you fail, you might ask the correct questions, but when you are successful, you have no reason to. And so, rational government is an uphill battle against our inner nature, and real change is only possible after complete failure. Christianity is much closer to the truth. We are morally depraved, incapable of fixing ourselves, unworthy of God’s grace, and in need of a saviour.
Liberals are wrong and foolish because the evolution theory they believe in says the struggle for existence is brutal. They should have reasoned, like Friedrich Nietzsche, that God is dead and that the strong should rule the weak. Somehow, they couldn’t rid themselves of their Christian slave morality. The former right-wing Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn called them the Leftist Church. Without God, we get lost in the moral void, and it is pointless to try to achieve Paradise on Earth. After several wars to impose liberal Western values on countries like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we can say good intentions usually make things worse rather than better. Why send money and weapons to a corrupt country like Ukraine to let it fight against an even more corrupt country like Russia? And why do liberals support the corrupt establishment of big banks, big pharma, the mainstream media and the military-industrial complex they objected against in the past? But many Christian conservatives don’t even make a small effort to become slightly less evil, like skipping meat one day per week. Appeals to moral reason infuriate them. And now the crazies organise a witch hunt against science and the rule of law. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but being intentionally evil is a shortcut.
Suppose Jesus was human like us with the knowledge of his time, which non-religious biblical scholars would agree on, and someone else finds himself in his position today. What could he do? He could wait for God to tell him, but if God doesn’t, he might think, like Marx, that he has to figure it out himself. As far as we can infer from the scriptures, Jesus acted independently but according to God’s will. He was like an actor following a script. His successor has the benefit of today’s knowledge, including the simulation hypothesis and the sobering outcome of the communist experiment. He might grasp the greater picture. The Marxist challenge of the existing order could have been God’s way of showing us the choices we face, our alternatives, their consequences, and what the synthesis might look like. That makes Hegel one of the greatest prophets of modern history.
Most people in the West now believe there is no alternative to capitalism, even though we may need some socialism or government to contain its ills. That could make our economy less competitive, which could cause us to lose the competition. So, in the end, there is no alternative, not because we can’t live happily in another economic system but because other systems can’t compete. Other ethical systems can’t compete with the ethics of the merchant either, which says you can do as you please and take what you can. It is much easier to break a collective effort like combating climate change than to build it. Only one major country needs to step out. In competition, those with the most depraved ethics win. The Dutch would say the merchant always wins from the vicar.
Only there needs to be an alternative. The profit motive is the severest threat humanity has ever faced. It pushes for permanent innovation, a process of creative destruction over which we have no control. We have started a fire in our midst that grows until it consumes us. Our greed is its fuel, and we can’t stop it. We may soon destroy ourselves creatively. We can’t kill the beast, the system, and the beast within ourselves, our greed. Communism is oppressive, kills creativity, and promotes stagnation by eliminating the profit motive. That sounds awesome because that is precisely what we need.
It looks like a cure. If your disease is cancer, and the cure is chemotherapy, you take the poison, and you accept becoming sick and losing your hair. Otherwise, you die. You could visit a witch doctor or a quack, and you also die. Many fall for snake oil salespeople because science doesn’t always have the correct answers. But despite their limitations, the sciences and the evidence from history are our best knowledge. If capitalism and communism are the only options, a sensible person chooses communism. Communism has brought a lot of misery, and we haven’t seen the end of civilisation yet, so we can still believe it will work out fine as long as markets remain operational and bring together supply and demand. That is perhaps the biggest lie ever.
If you don’t get by now why the ethic of the merchant is the greatest evil of all times, you are a moron, and there is no point in trying to convince you. By electing Donald Trump, Americans demonstrated their willingness to let Satan run their country. If following Satan seems the lesser evil, then something must be profoundly wrong. The corrupt old order of the military-industrial complex, big pharma, big banks and other interest groups seeking to profit from the state has ended the legitimacy of the US government. The other candidate and the billionaires backing her believed they could buy the presidency by spending billions on her political campaign. And for the record, Donald Trump isn’t Satan, not even the Antichrist, but just a huckster with the most depraved moral values and the ultimate embodiment of the ethics of the merchant, the ultimate evil.
In a world without God, there is no justice. And we can’t halt our descent into the moral abyss. And we have the ultimate proof. Once the technology is there, some of us will become like gods, live for thousands of years, make virtual worlds in which they force everyone to comply with their wishes, and murder people for merely standing in the way or for any other arbitrary reason. It is why we exist. God is an individual from an advanced humanoid civilisation who wants to have some fun. You are nothing, even less than a worm, as a genuine worm decides for itself how to grovel and when. Let that be a warning. And you own nothing. Believing you are entitled to something is thinking you can steal from God. With these words, I conclude my sermon. Now, let us pray.
In a world without God, there is no justice. And we can’t halt our descent into the moral abyss. And we have the ultimate proof. Once the technology is there, some of us will become like gods, live for thousands of years, make virtual worlds in which they force everyone to comply with their wishes, and murder people for merely standing in the way or for any other arbitrary reason. It is why we exist. God is an individual from an advanced humanoid civilisation who wants to have some fun. You are nothing, even less than a worm, as a genuine worm decides for itself how to grovel and when. Let that be a warning. And you own nothing. Believing you are entitled to something is thinking you can steal from God. With these words, I conclude my sermon. Now, let us pray.
Third ways
There have been several attempts to come to a synthesis of capitalism and socialism, which is often called the Third Way. The challenge of Marxism, the antithesis of capitalism, fuelled a lively debate about economic systems in the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Silvio Gesell, who wrote Barataria, was one of the central figures in this debate, as was Henry George in the United States. Since the Cold War, the debate has narrowed down into a struggle of communism versus capitalism or individual freedom versus enforced collectivism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the discussion in the West ended with the conclusion that Marx may have had valid concerns, but we can’t fix them, and his solutions are counter-productive. The Chinese government, however, kept innovating and remained determined to make socialism work.
You can’t compromise with ultimate evil. That reasoning made the Soviets replace markets with state planning. And it made their repression so ruthless and bloody. Millions died of starvation, and millions more ended up in concentration camps. In the end, it is better to be a slave in Paradise than a free man in hell, except when hell looks like Paradise and Paradise is like hell. But profit and greed corrupt everything. Self-regulation under neoliberalism, thus allowing corporations to set and enforce their rules, demonstrated why corporations need a tight leash and operate for public benefit rather than private profit. So, the question remains whether a third way is possible at all. Or can we only make socialism work better and more agreeable?
Such a change requires the support of a large majority of the people. The Russians lost faith in the Soviet experiment as central planning produced poor outcomes. Still, the Chinese economy has baffled the proponents of capitalism. The Chinese allow the profit motive to exist as long as businesses conform to the Chinese Communist Party’s objectives. State ownership of enterprises further ensures that. Similarly, you can allow profit motive within society’s goals and place large corporations in sovereign wealth funds. To clarify the discussion, as there is confusion in terminology, it may be best to provide you with definitions of economic systems. Their differences centre around ownership of resources, capital, and labour.
resources
capital
labour
communism
state
state
state
socialism
state
public
private
third way / mixed
varies
varies
private
capitalism
varies
private
private
Under communism, the state owns everything, including your labour. You can’t even decide on the job you take. Under socialism, you can choose your occupation, but capital is public, thus owned by workers or the state, and the state owns the natural resources. In mixed economies, ownership of natural resources and capital varies. You may own the ground, but if oil is underneath, it may belong to the state. There may be state-operated corporations like railways alongside private corporations. And you are free to choose your occupation. Under capitalism, everything is private. There may be public services, but there are no public corporations. And few countries give their resources away for free, and governments nearly always want a piece of the action. Not even the United States is fully capitalist. Libertarians think that is the problem, so if we gut the government and make everything private, the invisible hand, thus greed and competition, will fix things as if being foolish doesn’t help, being more foolish might.
The same model still gives different outcomes under different circumstances. A crucial factor is the culture or spirit of the nation. There were substantial differences in living standards in the Soviet Block. Czechoslovakia did relatively well. Yugoslavia suffered from high unemployment, but the Slovenian unemployment rate never exceeded 5%, while Macedonia and Kosovo had rates of over 20%. These were extreme differences within one country and the same system. China has developed its economic model, a state-run socialist market economy, which now outcompetes the West. Its success depends on the Chinese people’s hard work and ingenuity, China’s long-standing tradition of a modern bureaucratic government, and Confucianist ethics, making the government work in the public interest. The Chinese had a modern bureaucratic government on rational principles 2,000 years before Europe. And so, this economy wouldn’t have emerged elsewhere.
Making idealism work still requires pragmatism because good intentions can give horrible outcomes. Americans are pragmatic and gung-ho, thus eager to get things done. So once they realise God’s vision for the future goes against some core principles of American society, like individual liberty and capitalism, they might reverse course and take up the challenge with zeal. Europeans are not like that. They have a wait-and-see attitude at best. The Germans will try to engineer an even better system. The Dutch will deliberate the proper procedure and hire consultants to write reports. The Italians will bumble. And the French will go on strike. Many Americans are also more religious and more willing to embark upon an outlandish plan if they believe it is the way forward.
Free Economy
There are other options than communism or socialism. They can be safe as long as the ethic of the merchant doesn’t reassert itself. As soon as you allow it, the moral depravity spreads like cancer and will destroy society, like in the tale about the imaginary island Barataria. Only communism and brute repression are 100% safe. Religion can inspire us to stay public-spirited and be content with what we have. So if God exists and sends a messiah, we could play it less safely because whatever happens is God’s will.
For a while, Barataria had an economy with free enterprise and private ownership of homes but without capitalists, bankers, and merchants. Barataria had no income taxes, but the lands were public, and farmers rented them, which paid for the small government. Because the Baratarians were public-spirited and helped each other, and most notably, because there were no merchants, they didn’t need much government. That might be as close to Paradise as we can get. But it will only work if we live simple lives.
Silvio Gesell believed in economic self-interest as a natural and healthy motive for satisfying our needs by being productive. He aimed for free and fair competition with equal chances for all. He proposed the end of legal and inherited privileges, so the most talented and productive rather than the most privileged would have the highest incomes without distortion by interest and rent charges.
After experiencing an economic depression in Argentina in the 1890s, Gesell found that economic returns sometimes didn’t meet investors’ minimum requirements. It caused investors to put their cash in a vault like Scrooge McDuck, emptying the money flows and collapsing the economy. A holding fee can keep the currency in circulation, as low returns are more attractive than paying that fee, which amounts to a negative interest rate. Gesell’s economic system was well-known in Germany as the free economy.
European Union
European economies are mixtures of capitalism and socialism. Many Brits found the union too socialist and bureaucratic, so they left. These sentiments relate to the age-old differences in law and morality. The European Union tries to tame the beast of capitalism with regulations, which may fail if the competition continues and intensifies, but many Europeans now live a good life. Well-being is hard to measure, but European societies are among the world’s most agreeable if you believe the rankings. And if every country kills innovation with legislation like the bureaucrats of the European Union, we wouldn’t need to fear artificial intelligence, genetic engineering or any other new technologies.
Europe has a collectivist tradition with Christian and socialist roots with worker and consumer protection laws. Europeans live longer than Americans, partly because the European Union has banned unhealthy foods available in the United States. At the same time, governments run the healthcare systems, so most healthcare is for the public interest rather than private profit. In Europe, it is harder for corporations to pass business-friendly legislation by bribing politicians. That is also because Europeans believe in the common good more than Americans do. Like the invisible hand, our imaginary invisible friend, the common good, has a few magical powers.
As in the United States, immigrants do much of the hard manual labour in Western Europe, often for lower wages, without these protections and crammed in poor housing. There is a profit in dodging regulations for shady merchants. Western Europeans may be lazy because they work 36 hours per week and have five weeks of holidays each year. Still, their lives are the closest to what life should be in Paradise, except that European energy and resource consumption require a drastic 75% cut to make their economies sustainable. But if we dismantle the wasteful bullshit economy and set the right priorities, we could work fewer hours than Europeans do today and still have an agreeable life.
Nazi Germany
The Nazis produced an economic miracle during the Great Depression. The success came from deficit spending for rearmament and limiting trade with the outside world, so the expenditures boosted the German economy while not causing trade deficits. It is similar to Keynesian economics. It worked like the miracle of Wörgl, except that the German government accrued a large debt while the council of Wörgl did not.
Factories were idle, and many people were unemployed, so the scheme didn’t result in high inflation. Price, wage and rent controls also helped keep inflation in check, but it hurt small farmers. The Nazi economy was a mixture of state planning and capitalism. Germany was rearming and preparing for war. It was a war economy. Countries organising for war take similar measures to mobilise their industries for warfare.
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia was socialist rather than communist. It combined state planning with markets and decentralised decision-making or worker self-management. The Yugoslav economy fared much better than that of fully communist countries. The country was more open, and living standards were higher. However, it began to suffer from mass unemployment, and the economy collapsed in the 1980s as it couldn’t compete with capitalist economies. Generous welfare spending further contributed to Yugoslavia’s economic demise.
The oil crisis of the 1970s magnified the economic problems, and foreign debt soared. The country implemented austerity measures like rationing fuel usage and limiting the imports of foreign-made consumption goods. Unlike the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia had been able to feed its people until then. From the 1970s onwards, the country became a net importer of farm products. Yugoslavs were free to travel to the West. Emigration helped the economy by reducing unemployment and bringing in foreign currencies as emigrants returned money home to support their families.
Its openness to foreign competition contributed to the collapse of the Yugoslav economy. Yugoslav consumer products were often inferior to Western products. To compete, businesses laid off workers to become more efficient. The Yugoslav economic system might have worked if all countries had operated their economies like Yugoslavia. Yugoslav products would have sufficed if there were no better alternatives. Mass unemployment might not have materialised in that case, and Yugoslavia could have managed, perhaps, with less generous welfare. That is a few maybes, but it is plausible.
China
The stories of Airbus and Boeing demonstrate that state ownership of large businesses can work better than private ownership. Boeing was the industry leader but ruined itself by focusing on shareholder profits. Reducing quality brought short-term cost savings, boosted the stock price, and generated management bonuses. That seemed all fine until the Boeing aeroplanes began dropping from the sky. The largest holders of Airbus stock are European states, allowing the corporation to focus on long-term goals. The state-owned aeroplane industry is one of the few areas where Europe is still at the top.
Traditional communism gave subpar results, but the Chinese managed to get it right. The Chinese socialist market economy (SME) has private, public and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). China is not capitalist, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) retains control over the country’s direction. It is a command state-market economy like Nazi Germany was. Unlike Nazi Germany, which aimed for maximum self-reliance and ran on military spending, the Chinese economy integrated into the world economy and ran on exports. It resembles other Asian Tigers, such as Japan and South Korea.
The CCP’s vision behind starting market reforms is that China was underdeveloped and that a fully developed socialist planned economy would emerge once the market economy fulfilled its historical role, as Marx prophesied. Thus, the CCP believes it has incorporated a market economy into the Chinese socialist system. Others call it state capitalism, as the SOEs that comprise a large portion of the economy operate like private-sector firms and retain their profits without returning them to the government.
China eliminated extreme poverty, which declined from over 90% in 1980 to less than 1% today. It also became the world’s leading manufacturing economy and the world’s leading producer of unnecessary items that end up in our landfills. Despite its leadership in renewable energy and electric cars, China has also become the world’s leader in pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. However, China’s status as an exporter distorts the picture. By importing from China, other economies appear to be less pollutant.
The Chinese economic model forces corporations to align with society’s goals and make profit secondary. At the same time, it achieves acceptable living standards. It is modern and outcompetes the US and European models. If our society’s goals change from growth to sustainability and happiness, the Chinese economic model can help align corporations with public policies. China is a dictatorship, but its economic model will also work in democracies. Airbus provides the evidence.
State control and ownership of businesses, like China’s, also seem to be the only viable way to pursue political goals such as protecting nature and reducing poverty. Business objectives like profit should be secondary to these political goals. With state ownership, you can ban products or subsidise others without harming or favouring private entrepreneurs, thereby removing the incentive for corruption. China is on the right track as political objectives precede profit. And so we have evidence. China’s economy produced spectacular results, so we can have confidence that it will bring us acceptable living standards while allowing us to live in harmony with nature and end poverty.
Jesus’ birth mother, Mary, plays a prominent role in Christianity. As the story goes, she was a virgin who birthed Jesus. She is the central figure in Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. She is the Mother of God, Church tradition holds, thereby implying Jesus was God and that God has a mother, which is indeed highly peculiar. Many Catholics pray to Mary rather than to Jesus or God. In this way, Mary is a proxy for God. The Quran consistently names Jesus the son of Mary rather than the Son of God. The images of Mary with the child resemble those of the Mother Goddess. They picture Jesus as the Son of God, the Mother. That is most noteworthy because Jesus believed he was Adam, the Son of Eve, the Son of God. How could this happen? Inquiring minds want to know. Now, there is the historical explanation, and there is the script that God wrote.
Isis with Horus. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In the early years of Christianity, there was probably no cult of the Virgin Mary. The earliest Christian paintings, made around 235 AD, depict Christ, Peter, and martyrs, but not Mary. The first solid evidence of devotion to the Virgin Mary dates back to the third century, but its origin remains unclear. Perhaps, early Christians prayed to Mary as they did to other saints. Possibly, Mary granted the most requests, which made her increasingly popular. In this sneaky manner, the Mother Goddess sneaked into the Church through a back door, via the cult of the Virgin Mary. The ability to give birth without the need of a man is the miracle of the Mother Goddess. Christians later created statues and icons of the Virgin with the child Jesus, looking like the Egyptian mother goddess Isis with her child Horus.
Saint Mary Bolnichka Icon.
So, what brought Mary to this elevated status? Mary is not only the mother of Jesus, but Christians and Muslims believe she was a virgin. Jesus’ birth from a virgin didn’t happen. That we can be sure of. Matthew and Luke mention Jesus’ virgin birth, but Mark and John don’t. Had it been common knowledge, all the Gospels would have mentioned it. And if it had happened, it would have been common knowledge. So, was it a myth that sprouted up in the Christian community? Or did the Church Fathers have a pressing cause to invent the story of Jesus’ virgin birth? There is reason to believe the latter.
And Jesus became a carpenter
The virgin birth of Jesus never happened. In Galatians, Paul writes that God sent His Son, who was born of a woman (Galatians 4:4). That was around 55 AD. Had he known about the virgin birth, that would have been an excellent opportunity to mention it, but somehow he forgot. Or the virgin birth hadn’t happened, which is more likely. A motive for inventing the virgin birth that immediately presents itself is that if God were Jesus’ Father, he couldn’t have a human father. It is not entirely satisfactory. If Jesus saw God as his Father, there is no pressing need for that. In that case, Jesus said ‘Father’ to God. That would be all there is to it, and there would be no reason to make this up.
And so, you might believe that the myth emerged within the Christian community to fill in the gap, as there was no narrative of Jesus’ birth. You wouldn’t think the Church’s leaders orchestrated it. There is reason to think otherwise, as we will see. Paul’s phrase ‘born of a woman’ also suggests so. And so, there must be more to it. That the virgin birth is an intentional falsification, you can infer by comparing Mark to Matthew. Mark dates from around 70 AD. Matthew came a few years later. Both are truthful to some extent. You can use one to detect the lie in the other. Mark tells that people in Jesus’ hometown called him ‘the carpenter’ and ‘Mary’s son’ (Mark 6:3),
Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?’
The Gospel of Mark doesn’t mention Joseph, who was Jesus’ human father. It does note that Jesus had brothers and sisters, of whom we learn only the names of the brothers. You would expect the townspeople to call him Joseph’s son. But they didn’t, and called him Mary’s son, as if the virgin birth had occurred, while Mark doesn’t mention that noteworthy incident that you would definitely report on if you knew it had happened. It could be an error, but the mistake is so specific that it seems intentional. That it could be an edit, you can find in Matthew (Matthew 13:55),
Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Aren’t all his sisters with us?
The Gospel of Matthew mentions both the virgin birth and that Jesus has a human father and explains them in the virgin birth story, where Joseph accepts Jesus as his son, rendering such an edit redundant. Mark came before Matthew, scholars agree, and it contains fewer fancies. Mark and Matthew both drew on the same source, which referred to Jesus as the carpenter’s son. Likely, Mark dates from shortly after the Church Fathers had decided to introduce the virgin birth. The clumsy editing makes it seem as if Jesus were a carpenter.
By the time Matthew wielded his pen, the Church Fathers had contrived a proper cover story so that they didn’t have to remain secretive about his human father anymore. Such an explanation presumes that the authors of Mark and Matthew were prominent people within the Church who had contact with its leadership. They wouldn’t have done so if it had not been a solution to a theological problem.
The author of Matthew also sought a prophecy in the scriptures that predicted Jesus’ virgin birth. Isaiah wrote that a young woman would give birth to a son as a sign that God would destroy Judah’s enemies (Isaiah 7:14). Isaiah addressed King Ahaz in the eighth century BC and didn’t foresee the coming of Jesus, who would arrive seven centuries later. The Greek translation of the Jewish Bible, available in the first century AD, translated a young woman as a virgin. The author of Matthew saw it as a prophecy of Jesus’ virgin birth. There was no prophecy of this event that never happened, and that is no coincidence.
The author was particularly preoccupied with proving that Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. To that aim, he fabricated a genealogy to demonstrate that Jesus descended from the House of David. And behold, he uncovered fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah, Jesus, which is so neat that it only happens in fairy tales. The prophet Micah prophesied that a ruler would come from Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). And somehow Matthew ‘discovered’ that it was the birthplace of Jesus. Mark and John don’t mention the virgin birth or Bethlehem. Jesus was probably born in Nazareth, had an ordinary childhood and joined the movement of John the Baptist.
Mary as the New Eve
If Jesus called God his Father, there is no reason to invent the virgin birth. You don’t need to prove that God is Jesus’ Father. If Jesus said so, that would be good enough. His having a human father wouldn’t change that. The answer to the mystery is that Jesus never called God ‘Father,’ but rather ‘Mother.’ Jesus was the Son of God because God, in the person of Mary Magdalene, convinced Jesus that he was Adam reincarnate, and that She was Eve reincarnate. And Eve didn’t come from Adam’s rib, but Adam was Eve’s son. The virgin birth of Jesus from Mary replaced the ‘virgin birth’ of Adam from Eve.
You can infer that from Christian theology. God announced there would be enmity between the offspring of the serpent and that of the woman (Genesis 3:15). Christians see it as a prophecy predicting the coming of Jesus. They believe the seed of the woman refers to the virgin birth of Jesus, while it was Adam’s. That made Mary the New Eve. In this manner, Mary became the replacement for Eve. It is, however, doubtful that those who invented the virgin birth also came up with this.
Eve being Adam’s mother and Jesus calling God his Mother contradicts the Jewish scriptures. You can’t have that, so you have to work on that fact to make it fit. So, why not say Jesus was born of a virgin instead? After all, Jesus was Adam, and Eve was a ‘virgin’ when she gave birth to Adam. And God’s name was Mary, just like Jesus’ mother, while God was Jesus’ Mother. That was very convenient indeed, a convenience provided by providence, no doubt. Mark and Matthew both name Jesus Mary’s son, perhaps because she played a prominent role during Jesus’ ministry and was present at the cross.
Cloak and dagger
The Virgin Mary appeared more frequently to people than Jesus and performed more miracles than any other saint. There is little or no evidence of many of these supposed miracles, but the Fatima Miracle had 40,000 witnesses, so there should be no doubt that something spectacular had happened there. God the Father doesn’t appear in this way. And there are no 40,000 witnesses who saw a miracle that the Father announced. That is because there never was a Father. Virgin Mary became such a potent figure because she is the cloak behind which God the Mother has hidden Herself so far. Now, we are at the cloak-and-dagger part: the Quran boasts a hidden secret.
In the Quran, Mary is the most prominent woman and the only woman mentioned by name. The Quran dedicates an entire chapter, chapter 19, to the Virgin Mary. The number 19 has great significance in Islam. Some Muslims indulge in arcane numerological explanations as to why that is so. The Quran refers to this number in the chapter named ‘The Hidden Secret.’ And so, the Quran may hold a hidden secret related to this number. The Quran also claims Mary was a virgin, thus confirming the miracle of the Mother Goddess. The Virgin Mary became the cloak behind which God hid Her identity.
The star and crescent became Islam’s symbol. It has a long history predating Islam, as it was associated with a Moon goddess. In the Bible, the moon refers to the woman and the star to the child (Genesis 37:9). Hence, the Islamic symbol represents the Madonna with the child Jesus or the relationship between Khadijah bint Khuwaylid and Muhammad. She was fifteen years older. A woman of Her age could have been his mother.
The St. Mary of Zion Church in Ethiopia is said to contain the Ark of the Covenant. Legend has it that the Ark came to Ethiopia with King Menelik after he visited his father, King Solomon. The Ark symbolises Mary of Zion. The Ark is supposed to be the residence of Yahweh, the God of Israel.2 That is remarkable, as God’s name was also Mary.
Statue storm
The Protestant Reformation was an attempt to return to Christianity’s roots by viewing Scripture as the sole source of Christian truth. The Protestants ended church traditions that lacked biblical grounds, including the veneration of the Virgin Mary. Nothing in the Bible justifies the cult of Mary. Protestants removed icons and statues from their Churches because one of the Ten Commandments prohibits making images for worship (Exodus 20:4-5). In the Netherlands, the Protestant Reformation caused a ‘statue storm’ where Protestant religious vigilantes ravaged Catholic Church interiors.
Protestantism developed in an era of emerging rationalism and naturalism. And so, Protestants also object to magic and superstition, deeming it Satan’s work, while Catholics love miracles like healings at Lourdes and weeping Mary statues. Miracles have always been part of the Catholic tradition.
The Protestants erased an essential part of Christianity’s original message of the Mother Goddess giving birth to Her son. Instead of getting closer to the truth, the Protestants wandered further from it. And it didn’t solve anything, but only generated more confusion. The Protestants soon began fighting among themselves over the interpretation of the scriptures. You can’t be wrong, because if you are, you end up frying eternally in Satan’s ovens. That was the reason Protestantism started in the first place. So, after the Protestant storm is over, we have over 45,000 branches of Christianity.
Latest revision: 9 December 2025
Featured image: Madonna and Child, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. Public Domain.
Other images: Isis with Horus. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain; Saint Mary Bolnichka Icon. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Adam is the Son of God (Luke 3:38) and Jesus the Firstborn of all Creation (Colossians 1:15). Was Jesus Adam reincarnated? And was Adam born? Firstborn means you are the family heir, so the Firstborn of All Creation means you inherited the world. That is the standard interpretation with which most scholars would likely agree. The Christian doctrine states that Jesus already existed with God before creation and thus was not Adam. That is not what the words say, nor is it what Jesus’ inner circle believed. Existence before creation is not the same as being born. And Adam was the Son of God. When Paul was busy writing Colossians, he was also working on Christian theology, and his thoughts were still in a state of flux. And so, there may be more to it than theologians can explain.
Theologians regurgitate a century-old, pre-chewed menu of previous generations of theologians. Do theologians ever come up with something new rather than yet another insight on a hair-splitting detail? Do they discuss the simulation argument? No! They occupy themselves with century-old controversies. Why would Jesus sacrifice himself for Adam’s transgression? It makes more sense if Jesus believed he was Adam, who had to redeem himself. That was an idea Paul entertained for a while, for Jesus thought he was Adam. Only that generated serious theological problems. How could the perfect sinless Jesus also be the sinner Adam? And so, his mind ground on. Eventually, Christians came to believe that Jesus existed before creation, as laid out in the Gospel of John.
Don’t blame theologians for not being sufficiently imaginative. You could easily go astray. That ireful cloud that led the Israelites out of Egypt in a 2,500-year-old Jewish fairy tale was Eve from an even older Iraqi fairy tale, who gave birth to Adam, which the surviving Jewish version of the Iraqi fairy tale doesn’t mention. And by the way, that cloud from the fairy tale was Judge Deborah, the first historical person in the Bible. She started the Jewish nation by slaying Israel’s enemies and claiming that a magical cloud named Yahweh did it. She later married Jesus as Mary Magdalene and Muhammad as Khadijah bint Khuwaylid. You can’t guess it unless God gives you the clue that unlocks the mystery.
The message of Jesus being Adam still features in Christian doctrine as a remnant of an original belief. Jesus is the New Adam, and his birth mother is the New Eve, which implies that Jesus married his mother in a previous life. And precisely that was the original message of Christianity. Paul compares Jesus to Adam. In Romans, he writes, ‘Just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.’ (Romans 5:19)
Paul didn’t blame Eve for the Fall. Later writers posing themselves as Paul cast the blame on Eve. But Paul, a god-fearing individual who still knew the truth, wasn’t that daring. In 1 Corinthians, Paul noted, ‘As in Adam all die, so in Christ, all will be made alive.’ Jesus thus became the redeemer for Adam’s Fall. Paul called Jesus the Last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45). Jesus being Adam’s reincarnation was an early Christian belief until the narrative changed to Christ’s existence before creation. And so, you only find the comparison in Paul’s letters, the earliest surviving documents of Christianity.
The Quran underpins the idea that Jesus is Adam. You have to read between the lines. Jesus was like Adam in the way he was created (Quran 3:59), and the Quran supports the Christian claim that Jesus was born of a virgin (Quran 3:47, 19:16-22). Hence, they are both ‘born of a virgin.’ Not really, of course, but people believed it. And several Quran verses state that God ordered the angels to prostrate before Adam (Quran 2:34, 7:11, 15:28-29, 17:61, 18:50, 20:116, 38:71-74). The Quran mentions it seven times, making it appear significant. And seven times, Jesus says ‘I am’ in the Gospel of John, stressing his supposed divinity.
The Epistle to the Hebrews claims that God made Jesus, the firstborn, into the world, superior to the angels and made the angels worship him (Hebrews 1:1-7). And if the Quran is a message from God, the presumed guy in the sky, who possesses superpowers but is not Superman, and also not a man, then Jesus could be Adam. The Quran also claims Jesus will return (Quran 43:61). If he were Adam, God’s firstborn, who had already returned once, he could. Otherwise, it all gets even odder than it already is.
The Plan For The Future 