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.
How did we get where we are today? Nature’s driving forces are competition and cooperation. This perspective provides a great deal of insight into what happened. Plants and animals cooperate and compete for resources. Cooperation and competition are everywhere. Cooperation increases the available resources. Plants generate the oxygen animals need, while animals produce the carbon dioxide plants need. Still, the available resources are limited. There is only room for one tree on that spot. And so, there is a competition called the struggle for life, where the fittest survive.
Plants and animals are opportunistic, taking advantage of opportunities whenever possible, with the help of both competition and cooperation. Plants and animals have a blueprint, their genes. These genes have the urge to make copies of themselves. It is why we exist and the basis of our will to live and our sexual desires. And so, the biological purpose of plants and animals, including humans, is to spread their genes. That is indeed a most peculiar purpose. The copying of genes is prone to errors. And so changes occur, resulting in variation within species. It is why people vary in appearance and character.
Some changes make individual plants and animals better adapted to their environment, thereby increasing their chances of survival and reproduction, resulting in a rising number of individuals with these features. Environments allow for several species to coexist, most notably when they don’t compete for the same resources. It is why ants and monkeys can live in the same area. The balance in nature is always precarious, as changes in circumstances can favour different species. And so, introducing foreign species in places where they have no natural predators can lead to pests.
Like other social animals, humans operate in groups. Social animals benefit from group cooperation, which enhances their chances of survival. Within the group, competition can arise, resulting in rankings and struggles among members. Cooperating in groups also helps us to compete with other groups, usually in warfare. And groups can form coalitions to compete with coalitions of different groups. Stories enable humans to work together in groups of any size, which then further increases the competition between these groups.
Meet our closest relatives
Chimpanzees are our closest kin. Studying these apes provides us with insights into our nature. Chimpanzees live in small troops of a few dozen individuals. They form friendships, work with reliable group members, and avoid those who are unreliable. Chimpanzees have rules, may cheat on them, and can feel guilty when they do. Within the group, the members have ranks. When there is food available, the highest-status animals eat first. Ranks and rules regulate competition within the troop, reducing conflicts and enabling its members to collaborate more effectively.
Like human leaders, chimpanzee alpha males acquire their status by building coalitions and gaining support. Others show their submission to the alpha male. Like a government, the alpha male strives to maintain social harmony within his group. He takes sought-after pieces of food like a government collects taxes. Within a chimpanzee band, there are subgroups and coalitions. There are close friendships and more distant relationships. They unite as a single fighting force in the event of an external threat.
Coalition members in a chimpanzee band build and maintain close ties through intimate daily contact such as hugging and kissing, and doing each other favours. For the band to function effectively, its members must be aware of what others will do in critical situations. For that, they need to know each other through personal experiences. Unlike humans, chimpanzees have no language to share social information. That limits the size of the group in which chimpanzees can live and work together to about thirty individuals.
Chimpanzees also commit violence in groups. Like humans, they are among the species that commit genocide on their congeners. Humans and chimpanzees are not alone in this. Chickens are known to fight racial wars when they face a lack of food. Groups of chickens may start to kill those with different colours from themselves. And so, racism could be a natural behaviour caused by competition between genes.
The human advantage
Humans have become the dominant species on Earth. We can collaborate flexibly in large numbers. We have mastered fire, which enhances our power and allows us to eat foods we couldn’t otherwise. It allowed us to become the top predator. We use tools and clothing, allowing us to do things other animals can’t and live in inhospitable environments. Compared to other animals, humans employ a rich language. That enables us to express countless meanings and describe situations in precise terms.
We pass on social information, such as who is fit for a particular job. We get information about others in our group without needing personal experience. If someone cheats, you don’t need to learn it the hard way like chimpanzees must, but someone can tell you. That allows us to cooperate more effectively. Most human communication is social information or gossip. We need the group to survive, so we must understand what is happening within our group and the decisions our group needs to make.
Human politics is about cooperating and competing. We must agree on what we should do as a group and on how we divide the spoils of our cooperation. Within the group, we may compete to cooperate. Leadership contests benefit the group when the outcome is better leadership. That isn’t always the case, and infighting can weaken the group. We also cooperate to compete. We organise ourselves in groups to compete with other groups, such as defeating them in warfare.
Early humans lived in bands of up to 150 individuals. The number of individuals with whom we can closely collaborate is one of our natural limitations. We overcame the limit of our natural group size by cooperating based on shared imaginings, such as religions, laws, money, and nation-states. That competitive advantage over other species allowed us to take over this planet and become the ‘killer bug’ that has completely upended nature and has terminated more species than any other species.
Unlike other animals and plants, which adapt to their environment, we have altered our environment to suit us. We have created societies and civilisations and have become immensely powerful collectives to compete with other collectives. However, our civilisations also shield us from the forces of nature, turning us into weak individuals. We have become integrated into the system, and many of us won’t survive a collapse of civilisation. It is crucial to understand that competition drives this process.
We imagine corporations, laws, money, and nation-states. We believe a law exists, and that is why the law works. It is also why religion works. These shared imaginations allow us to cooperate on any scale for any purpose. We are programmable, with our brains serving as the hardware and our imaginations serving as the software. And we can change the software overnight. During the French Revolution, the French stopped believing in the divine right of kings overnight and began to envision the sovereignty of the people.
Organising to compete
The forces of competition and population density drove humans to organise. There is a competition between groups of humans. Just as there is a competition between species in nature, there is also a competition between human groups. Groups that succeeded in adapting to new circumstances survived those that did not. We are rule-following animals. Once we start to cooperate on a larger scale, we need political institutions that embody the rules of a community or society.
Humans design political institutions while genetic mutations emerge by chance. Still, competition determines which designs survive and become copied. In general, under the pressure of competition, which mainly was warfare, human organisation advanced from bands to tribes to feudalism to states. The experts deem this explanation simplistic and flawed. Still, overall, that trend towards more advanced organisation occurred.
Hunter-gatherers lived in family groups of a few dozen individuals. They had few violent conflicts, probably because they had no property, and population density was low. Hunter-gatherers could move on if a stronger band invaded their territory. Small groups were egalitarian. They often had no permanent leader or hierarchy and decided on their leaders based on group consensus.
The Agricultural Revolution changed that. Farming allows more people to survive. Farmers invest heavily in their cattle and crops, so agricultural societies need property rights and defence forces. Agriculture promoted the transition from bands to tribes. Population density increased, leading to more frequent violent conflicts among people. Tribes are much larger than bands and can muster more men for war, so tribes replaced bands.
Tribes were usually egalitarian, but a separate warrior caste often emerged. The most basic form of political organisation was the lord and his armed vassals, known as feudalism. The lord and his vassals exchange favours. The loyalty of the vassals is crucial, and politics is about these loyalties and betrayals. Tribalism centres around kinship, but also includes feudalist, personal relationships of mutual reciprocity and personal ties.
States yield more power than tribes because they force people to cooperate, while tribes work with voluntary arrangements. As population density increased and people lived closer to each other, the need to regulate conflicts also grew, so some states also provided justice services. Leaders, with their family and friends, led these states. They worked with personal, feudal relationships, thus making deals and returning favours. And so, the transition from tribes to feudalism to states is not a straightforward process.
The first modern, rationally organised states with professional bureaucracies based on merit rather than personal relationships and favours appeared in China. The reason was a centuries-long cut-throat competition of warfare on an unprecedented scale, with states having armies of up to 500,000 men, in the period now known as the Warring States Era. Fielding these armies required professional tax collection, with records of people and their possessions, as well as the provisioning of soldiers in the field.
Once the state of Qin emerged victorious by 200 BC, China became unified, and the competition between the states ended, and China’s modernisation ground to a halt. Even so, China adhered to modern bureaucratic principles and remained the most modern state for 2,000 years, enabling its rulers to govern a vast empire. States remained the most competitive organisational form until Europeans invented capitalism and corporations, which would cause a radical new dynamic of permanent change driven by competition.
Capitalism and corporations
China had a strong centralised state that prevented the merchants from becoming the dominant force in society. In the Middle Ages, Europe had no strong states, so capitalism could gradually emerge in Europe. The rise of merchants and later corporations brought a new economic dynamic and wealth. Corporations are legal entities serving a specific purpose. Invented in Roman times, they included the state, municipalities, political groups, and guilds of artisans or traders.
From the Middle Ages onward, Europeans introduced commercial corporations with shares and stock markets such as the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC). The advent of corporations triggered a new phase in the competitive cycle, further increasing efficiency by specialising in specific tasks. The Europeans combined their entrepreneurship with inquisitiveness, so eventually the profit motive began to drive innovations as well.
The new dynamic intensified competition and innovation, causing permanent economic growth and disruptive change, a process that economists call creative destruction. Capitalism increases available resources via cooperation or the division of labour, but competition is the driving force. As long as that remains so, competition rather than our desires determines what our future will look like.
Currently, China may have the most competitive socio-economic model, potentially outcompeting those of the West. But it will not end well for them either. Artificial intelligence may soon outcompete humans. It may become a ‘killer bug’ that ends humanity. We can’t keep up with artificial intelligence. The future doesn’t need us. We aren’t sufficiently efficient and innovative. Competition is our first and foremost problem. It is our doomsday machine. Competition, insofar as we allow it, should be at the service of cooperation rather than the opposite. If we don’t do that, we are doomed.
Featured image: Tower of Babel by The Tower of Babel (1569). Public Domain.
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 crazies 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 had the capability to annihilate them at any time. It is nearly as stupid as challenging God for a life-and-death battle. So, if you want to get rid of me, that might be as stupid as it can get. 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 at all, nor did fighting to the death for God. Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas have yet to figure that out. 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. 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. There are so many newcomers that I would also have worried about the longer-term consequences, but I have never felt unsafe when living in multicultural areas. And, there are so many things that go wrong. Immigration is just one of them. And historic evidence suggests that patriotism will 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, we should discuss merchants and trade instead.
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 corruption 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. Rumours on MAGA social media claim 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, which 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 a joke like that 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? Iran? She didn’t express an opinion. So, her feelings didn’t get in the way of forming an objective opinion. But after yet another bizarre act suggesting Trump is unfit, Ingrid said, ‘Who is going to dispose of him?’ Maybe I had the answer. My wife’s observation 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 may be a lowlife, but he 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. We’re staring at a tuna while there are whales out there. Yet, had Donald Trump lived in Cambodia, he might have outdone Pol Pot. That, of course, we do not know, but he is a savage, and the United States’ institutions limit his evil 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 most of the mockers of Jesus have said, including Monty Python. It is indeed the greatest joke in the history of blasphemy.
And is pride not the gravest sin, and is MAGA not about pride? Pride comes before the fall, as it now appears. Trump is a lowlife nonetheless. 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, hell is indeed a 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 Others claimed that he was a Muslim. 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. Many conservatives 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. How people come to think that a reasonable person like Obama is an evil genius and a nutjob like Donald Trump is their saviour is an interesting question. Still, it comes down to the fairy tales we believe in, and if Obama had been as insane as Trump is, he would have had his apologists as well.
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 violated the freedom of speech.
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).
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.
The last 200 years have been an era of exceptional economic growth, unlike anything the world has ever seen. Like any exponential phenomenon in a limited room, that growth will end. The best comparison is cancer. If it goes untreated, the host dies. The end of growth, whether it is by death of the host or treatment, has implications for capital, which is addicted to positive returns made possible by squandering planetary reserves. For most of history, there was a shortage of capital. But for the first time, there is a massive excess invested in the bullshit economy, transforming energy and resources into waste and pollution to make money for investors by producing and marketing non-essential products and services in a competition that is about to make humans redundant.
For most of history, economic growth has been negligible. However, it averaged 1.5% over the last two centuries and will soon return to zero, or possibly even lower, perhaps much lower. That has implications for returns on investments, the financial system and interest rates. Investors have become hooked on positive returns, so there must be growth. Otherwise, they lose confidence. It is grow or die, but growth will kill us. And so, we face the prospect of an economic collapse and a collapse of civilisation. We are near a technological-ecological apocalypse. There is a dark force operating behind the scenes that makes us commit suicide. It is usury, or the charging of interest on debts. It makes capital addicted to growth.
The survivors may debate the precise cause of the collapse. I have already received a newsletter email from a pundit claiming that a lack of very cheap oil is leading to debt problems. Future generations may blame the planet for being finite, rather than seeing that human beings were so foolish as to build their civilisation on usury, so that it can only survive through economic growth. Before modern times, humans managed to live without economic growth, as there was hardly any capital and no interest-bearing debt. Past civilisations facing usury-induced economic collapses either disappeared, banned interest, or instituted debt cancellations.
The past 200 years have indeed been exceptional, and that miracle was primarily due to low interest rates. Efficient financial markets promoted growth by depressing interest rates, allowing economic growth to finance the interest. That has blinded us from the financial apocalypse that is upon us. Low interest rates have already brought us unprecedented wealth, albeit at the expense of the planet and future generations. When economic growth returns to sustainable levels, the interest on outstanding debt can collapse the world economy and bring down human civilisation. Luckily, a usury-free financial system for a future without growth already exists: Natural Money.
The nature of usury
Suppose Jesus’ mother had opened a retirement account for Jesus just after his birth in 1 AD at the Bank of the Money Changers next to the Temple in Jerusalem. Suppose she had put a small gold coin weighing three grammes in Jesus’ retirement account at 4% interest. Jesus never retired, but he promised to return. Suppose now that the bank held the money for this eventuality. How much gold would there be in the account in the year 2020? It would be an amount of gold weighing twelve million times the mass of the Earth. There isn’t enough gold to pay out Jesus if he returns.
And so the usurers hope he doesn’t come back, also for other reasons, of course. And for every lending, there is borrowing. The bank is merely an intermediary. There must be people in debt for an amount of gold weighing twelve million times the mass of the Earth. That would never happen. The scheme would have collapsed long before that, and the debtors would have become the serfs of the money lenders. That is why religions like Christianity and Islam forbade charging interest on money or debts.
The usurers have found a way around the issue. Our money isn’t gold anymore. Banks create money from thin air, so the nature of usury has changed. When you go to a bank and take out a loan, such as a car loan, you get a deposit and a debt, which the bank creates on the spot through two bookkeeping entries. You keep the debt, but the deposit becomes someone else’s money once you purchase the car. When you repay the loan, the deposit and the debt vanish into thin air. You must repay the loan with interest. If the interest rate is 5% and you have borrowed €100 for a year, you must return €105.
Nearly all the money we use is created from loans that borrowers must repay with interest. If our borrowing creates money, and we repay our debts with interest, then we may do so by borrowing the interest. That is also what happens in reality, and that is why debt levels continue to rise. So, where does the extra €5 come from? Here are the options:
Borrowers borrow more.
Depositors spend some of their balance.
Borrowers fail to repay their loans.
The government borrows more.
The central bank prints the money.
Problems arise when borrowers don’t borrow more, and depositors don’t spend their money. In that case, borrowers as a group are short of funds, and some of them are unable to repay their loans. If too many borrowers can’t pay at once, a financial crisis occurs. To prevent that from happening, the government borrows more, and the central bank prints money. They bring that money into the economy, allowing debtors to pay off their debts with interest. Interest compounds to infinity, and there is no limit to human imagination, so frivolous accounting schemes can go a long way before they collapse.
Necessity of interest
We take interest for granted, and economists believe that the economy needs it. Without lending and borrowing, a modern capitalist economy would have been impossible; without interest, loans would also be impossible. Money is to the economy what blood is to the body. If lending and borrowing halt, money stops flowing, and the economy comes to a standstill. That is like a cardiac arrest, which, if untreated, is fatal. And that is also why the financial press reads the lips of central bankers as if our lives depended on it. They manage the flow. Lenders have reasons to demand interest. These are:
When you lend out money, you can’t use it yourself. That is inconvenient. And so, you expect compensation for the use of your money.
The borrower may not repay the loan, so you desire compensation for that risk.
You can invest your money and earn a return. To lenders, the interest rate must be attractive relative to other investments.
That has been the case for a long time, and economists have gradually become quite good at explaining the past. Since then, we have seen financial innovations and are now facing the end of growth. Changes in the economy and the economic system may lead to the end of interest on money and debts. These are:
You can use the money in a bank account at any time. You can use the money you have lent as if it were cash. And a debit card is more convenient than cash.
Banks spread their risks, central banks help out banks when needed, and governments guarantee bank deposits, so bank deposits are as safe as cash.
There is a global savings glut. There are ample savings and limited investment options, which can make lending at negative interest rates attractive.
Negative interest rates are possible. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, the proof came when most of Europe entered negative interest-rate territory. The ECB was unable to set interest rates below -0.5%. Had it set interest rates even lower, account holders would have emptied their bank accounts and stuffed their mattresses with banknotes to avoid paying interest on their deposits, disrupting the circular flows.
As interest rates couldn’t go lower, the ECB took extraordinary measures, flooding the banking system with new money to boost the economy. Had there been a holding fee on cash, interest rates could have gone lower, and there would have been no need to print money. It has happened before. The Austrian town of Wörgl charged a holding fee on banknotes during the Great Depression, which led to an economic miracle by making existing banknotes circulate better rather than printing new money. Ancient Egypt had a similar payment system for over a thousand years during the time of the Pharaohs.
Miracle of Wörgl
In the midst of the Great Depression, the Austrian town of Wörgl was in dire straits and prepared to try anything. Of its population of 4,500, 1,500 people were jobless, and 200 families were penniless. Mayor Michael Unterguggenberger had a list of projects he wanted to accomplish, but there wasn’t enough money to fund them all. These projects included paving roads, installing street lights, extending water distribution throughout the town, and planting trees along the streets.1
Rather than spending the remaining 32,000 Austrian Schilling in the town’s coffers to start these projects, he deposited them in a local savings bank as a guarantee to back the issue of a currency known as stamp scrip. A crucial feature of this money was the holding fee. The Wörgl money required a monthly stamp on the circulating notes to keep them valid, amounting to 1% of the note’s value. The Argentine businessman Silvio Gesell first proposed this idea in his book The Natural Economic Order.2
Nobody wanted to pay for the monthly stamps, so everyone spent the notes they received. The 32,000 schilling deposit allowed anyone to exchange scrip for 98 per cent of its value in schillings. Few did this because the scrip was worth one Austrian schilling after buying a new stamp. But the townspeople didn’t keep more scrip than they needed. Only 5,000 schillings circulated. The stamp fees paid for a soup kitchen that fed 220 families.1
The municipality carried out the works, including the construction of houses, a reservoir, a ski jump, and a bridge. The key to this success was the circulation of scrip money within the local economy. It circulated fourteen times as often as the schilling. It increased trade and employment. Unemployment in Wörgl decreased while it rose in the rest of Austria. Six neighbouring villages successfully copied the idea. The French Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier, visited the town to witness the ‘miracle of Wörgl’ himself.1
In January 1933, the neighbouring city of Kitzbühel copied the idea. In June 1933, Mayor Unterguggenberger addressed a meeting with representatives from 170 Austrian towns and villages. Two hundred Austrian townships were interested in introducing scrip money. At this point, the central bank decided to ban scrip money.1 The depression returned, and in 1938, the Austrians turned to Hitler, as they voted to join Germany.
Since then, several local scrip monies have circulated, but none has been as successful as the one in Wörgl. In Wörgl, the payment of taxes in arrears generated additional revenue for the town council, which it then spent on public projects. Once the townspeople had paid their taxes, they would have run out of spending options and might have exchanged their scrip for schillings to avoid paying for the stamps. That never happened because the central bank halted the project.
The economy of Wörgl did well because the holding fee kept the existing money circulating. A negative interest rate encourages people to spend their money, eliminating the need to borrow and keeping the money circulating in the economy. It demonstrated that the economy required a negative interest rate. A holding fee makes negative interest rates possible, as lenders do not have to pay it after lending the money. The one who holds the money pays the charge. That can make lending money at an interest rate of -2% to a reliable borrower more attractive than paying 12% for the stamps.
Joseph in Egypt
In the time of the Pharaohs, the Egyptian state operated granaries for over 1,500 years. Wheat and barley were the primary food sources in Egypt. Whenever farmers brought their harvest to one of the granaries, state officials issued them receipts stating the amount of grain they had brought in. Egyptians held accounts at the granaries. They transferred grain to others as payment or withdrew grain after paying the storage cost.
The Egyptians thus used grain stored in their granaries for making payments. Everyone needed to eat, so grain stored in the granaries had value.1 Due to storage costs, the money gradually lost its value. With this kind of money, you might have interest-free loans. If you save grain money, you pay for storage. And so, lending the money interest-free to a trustworthy borrower can be attractive. There is no evidence that this happened.
The origin of these granaries remains unclear. Probably, the state collected a portion of the harvests as taxes and stored them in its facilities. The government storage proved convenient for farmers, as it relieved them of the work of storing and selling their produce. And it made sense to have a public grain reserve in case of harvest failures.
The Bible features a tale that supposedly explains the origin of these granaries. As the story goes, a Pharaoh once had a few dreams that his advisers couldn’t explain. He dreamed about seven lean cows eating seven fat cows and seven thin, blasted ears of grain devouring seven full ears of grain. A Jewish fellow named Joseph explained those dreams to the Pharaoh. He told the Pharaoh that seven years of good harvests would follow, followed by seven years of crop failures. Joseph advised the Egyptians to store food for meagre times. They followed his advice and built storehouses for grain. In this way, Egypt managed to survive seven years of scarcity.
The money gradually lost value to cover the storage cost of the grain. It works like buying stamps to keep the money valid, like in Wörgl. Both are holding fees. The grain money circulated for over 1,500 years until the Romans conquered Egypt around 40 BC. It did not end in a debt crisis, which suggests that a holding fee on money or negative interest rates can create a stable financial system that lasts forever.
Storing food makes sense today, even when it costs money. Harvests may become more unpredictable due to global warming and intensive farming. We only have enough food in storage to feed humanity for a few months as it is unprofitable to store more. Food storage ties up capital, so there is also interest cost. But you can’t eat money, so storing food to deal with harvest failures is as sensible now as it was in the time of the Pharaohs. It reveals the stupidity of our current thinking. Our survival needs to be financially viable. Just imagine how that will play out once artificial intelligence and robots can replace us.
Natural Money
The miracle of Wörgl suggests that a currency with a holding fee could have ended the Great Depression. A myth circulating in the interest-free currency movement is that had the Austrian central bank not banned the experiment, the Great Depression would have ended, Hitler wouldn’t have come to power, and World War II wouldn’t have happened. That is a tad imaginative, to say the least, but a holding fee could have allowed for negative interest rates, and they could have prevented the Great Depression from starting in the first place. That is a lot of maybes.
And such money can last. The grain money in ancient Egypt provided a stable financial system for over 1,000 years. The grain backing provided financial discipline. The holding fee prevented money hoarding that could have impeded the flow of money. The money, however, didn’t promote interest-free lending, so the Egyptian state regulated lending at interest to prevent debt slavery. Egyptian wisdom literature condemned greed and exploitative lending, encouraging empathy for vulnerable individuals.
A holding fee of 10-12% per year punishes cash users. If the interest rate on bank accounts is -2%, an interest rate of -3% on cash is sufficient to prevent people from withdrawing their money from the bank. That becomes possible once cash is a separate currency backed by the government, on which the interest rate on short-term government debt applies. Banknotes and coins thus become separate from the administrative currency. So, if the interest rate on the cash currency is -3%, one cash euro will be worth 0.97 administrative euros after one year. And now, we have a definition of Natural Money:
Cash is a separate currency backed by short-term government debt and has the negative interest rate of short-term government debt.
Natural Money administrative currencies carry a holding fee of 10-12% per year, allowing for negative interest rates.
Loans, including bank loans, have negative interest rates. Zero is the maximum interest rate on debts.
Consequences
Natural Money doesn’t fundamentally alter the nature of bank lending. Banks borrow from depositors at a lower rate to lend it at a higher rate. With Natural Money, banks may offer deposit interest rates of -2% to lend it at 0% instead of borrowing it at 2% to lend it at 4%. A maximum interest rate of zero, however, has a profound impact on lending volume, as it severely constrains it, most notably speculative lending and usurious consumer credit, and it favours equity financing over borrowing in business. The strict lending requirements affect business loans, leading to deleveraging.
Businesses still need to attract capital. To address the issue, Natural Money features a distinction between regular banks and investment banks. Regular banks can guarantee promised returns and have government backing because the payment system is a public service. Investment banks invest in businesses and take risks. They are comparable to Islamic banks. Investment banks don’t guarantee returns. Depositors take on risk to get better returns, but they might incur losses or temporarily have no access to their deposits.
While the maximum interest rate restricts lending, the holding fee provides a stimulus, thereby stabilising the financial system. When the economy slows down, interest rates decrease, and more money becomes available for lending as risk appetite increases, making lending at zero interest more attractive. Conversely, if the economy booms, interest rates increase, and the maximum interest rate curtails lending. Consequently, central banks don’t need to set interest rates and manage the money supply, and governments don’t need to manage aggregate demand with their spending.
Reasons to do research
Stamp scrip and other kinds of emergency money have helped communities in times of economic crisis. The economic miracle of Wörgl during the Great Depression of the 1930s, however, was exceptional. The payment of local taxes inflated the impact of the money. Many townspeople had been late on their taxes, but once the economy recovered, they had the money to pay them. Some even paid their taxes in advance to avoid paying the holding fee. It generated additional revenues for the town, which it could spend on the projects. It provided a boost that would have petered out once the villagers had paid their taxes.3 It was not a miracle. It was too good to be true. Still, there is more to it.
Once interest rates reach zero, the markets for money and capital cease to function as interest rates can’t go lower. Money is to an economy what blood is to a body, so it must flow. When the money stops flowing, the effect is like a cardiac arrest, and the economy is in dead waters. To keep the money circulating, those with a surplus must lend it to those with a deficit, and the interest rate should be where the supply and demand for money are equal. When that interest rate reaches zero, lenders stop lending because the return is not worth the risk, so they wait for interest rates to rise. Money then ends up on the sidelines, leading to cardiac arrest, which can be the start of an economic depression.
It happened during the Great Depression. If interest rates had been lower, the markets for money and capital could have remained in operation. We have seen negative interest rates in Europe for nearly a decade. They could have gone lower had there been a holding fee on cash, or even better, a negative interest rate that is just low enough to prevent people from hoarding it. Once interest rates can go lower, a usury-free global financial system may be possible. That gives rise to several questions. Is it possible? Under which circumstances? What are the benefits and the drawbacks? What are the implications for individuals, businesses and governments? And how does it affect the financial system?
There is no alternative
Several other monetary reform proposals do not view the financial system as a system, which it is, and that isn’t hard to guess because the term ‘financial system’ already implies this. You can’t attach the wings of a Boeing to an Airbus and expect the thing to fly. The financial system is a complex system with numerous relationships, many of which existing reform proposals overlook. For instance, if you end the central bank, the economy will crash immediately, even if it is flying smoothly. And that isn’t even hard to find out.
The payment system is a key public interest, so governments and central banks stand behind it. Most banks are private corporations driven by profit. They take risks that might bring down the economy. And so, governments and central banks make regulations and oversee the banks. And banks create money, from which they profit, and we all pay for it via inflation. That is not good, but replacing the system with something worse is worse, like the word ‘worse’ implies.
There is no lack of ill-conceived proposals. And most fail to address the primary underlying cause of the dysfunction of the financial system, which is charging interest on money and debts, commonly known as usury. An inflation-free, stable financial system is possible. It may not even need central banks. But a sound reform proposal sees the financial system as a complex system with intricate relationships that interact with one another.
And so, Natural Money comes with a systems approach that aims to uncover the relevant relationships in the financial system and the consequences of changing them. It means that Natural Money is a comprehensive design. The gravest error you can make is to pick only the elements you like. That design will never fly. Nor would an Airbus take off with Boeing wings. So, you either buy Airbus or Boeing. In the case of Natural Money, that is not an option. There is no alternative.
Latest revision: 1 November 2025
Featured image: Wörgl bank notes with stamps
1. The Future Of Money. Bernard Lietaer (2002). Cornerstone / Cornerstone Ras. 2. The Natural Economic Order. Silvio Gesell (1918). 3. A Free Money Miracle? Jonathan Goodwin (2013). Mises.org.
The Plan For The Future 