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 fans took over the GodlikeProductions.com message board. The atmosphere turned grim, much as it had fifteen years earlier, when Fortuyn supporters flooded the IEX message board. Since then, the new fascism has grown stronger. This time, I stayed because I had missed out on something important. And given the job that may lie ahead, and me supposedly being Adolf Hitler reincarnate, not understanding fascism was no excuse. And so, I familiarised myself with the MAGA crowd, as I had previously with the Moroccan minority in the Netherlands. Hanging out with people helps you to understand them. Only GodlikeProductions.com had that annoying feature of banning you for no apparent reason, probably to get you to switch to a paid subscription. Fair enough, but the content wasn’t that great, over 99% crap even, so not worth paying for.
That eventually made me switch to Reddit. There, you can hang out with BLM and MAGA, and with others as well, like a fly on the wall, so to speak. And as you might well know, or maybe not, flies on walls like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel can arrive at superior 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. He did so by observing what happened around him, looking at history, and reasoning from there. That is no small feat. 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, and there were no adults left to keep him in check. Trump had surrounded himself with sycophants. As there is no limit to Trump’s ego, his erratic and spiteful behaviour became a spectacle so hilarious that even Monty Python couldn’t have made it up, with Trump naming building after building after himself, declaring his birthday a public holiday, and numerous other self-aggrandising acts. 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 Christmas message, ‘Merry Christmas to all, including the radical left scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our country, but are failing badly.’ And after MAGA made such a noise about DEI hires, the Trump administration was stuffed with individuals whose only qualities were being white and not LGBTQ.
His war threats against Denmark, for among other reasons, his not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for which he blamed Norway, by the way, and his going to war with Iran for allegedly not honouring the nuclear agreement he tore up, were also noteworthy. When gas prices rose while mid-term elections were nearing, fearing the wrath of furious car drivers who might vote Democrat out of pure rage, Mr Trump began bullying other countries and, once again, threatening to end NATO if other countries weren’t willing to put the lives of their military at risk for an adventure that he wasn’t willing to risk American lives for. He did so after being unwilling to help Europe with the Ukrainian war effort and letting Europe pay for the American weapons. He did so after helping Russia by allowing Russian oil exports, thereby raising funds for Russia to pay for its war against Ukraine, but only after threatening countries with serious consequences for buying Russian oil. Meanwhile, Mr Trump was already eying an invasion of Cuba. As a Swedish newspaper once 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, so that there is some greatness in the second Trump administration after all. Trump sold his followers $3 made-in-China Trump Bibles for $60 and had several other 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 to end the depravity, then what will? And if this level of insanity is not forcing God’s hand to bring in the Messiah, then what will? Also, on the GodlikeProductions.com message board, I was cautious about expressing my opinions, which resulted in positive karma. I was there to learn, not to annoy others with my views. Many still believed that Obama was worse than any other president in American history. And arguing is pointless, for arguing with my father is also pointless, and he is more reasonable than they are.
There are people on the left as extreme as MAGA, but they don’t run the United States. The foundation of Western civilisation, and by extension world civilisation, is social progress through the Hegelian dialectic. MAGA marks the end of social progress, hence of Western civilisation, and civilisation in general. On the surface, MAGA may appear an orgy of hatred, nuttery and jerkism, but the end of social progress is a watershed moment, and one with apocalyptic potential. So, are the barbarians standing at the gates of civilisation? Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten has received threats every day for the past ten years because he is a homosexual. And that is in the Netherlands, perhaps the most civilised country in terms of social progress. So, it is not just Africa, even though on that continent, things are particularly uncivilised in these matters. It makes complaints about MAGA seem misdirected, for there are many less progressive places than the United States.
Still, civilisation is a mindset, from which practical consequences follow. Many Africans see witch doctors because they don’t trust science-based medicine, and some may believe things like having sex with virgins cures aids. However, many people in the West take their advice from influencers who peddle anything corporations wish to sell us, and some may believe that taking a deworming agent for horses protects them against the coronavirus. If there is anything significant that distinguishes us from the apes, it is culture, not genes. MAGA is switching off that mindset, and a return to gangsterism. It is the end of civilisation based on reasoned Socratic and Hegelian debates. African countries 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 many Americans tend to see the world as a giant saloon, where they can start brawls and shoot people for offences like looking nasty. The priority is thus halting America’s further decline 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.
The sad news is that, in any realistic scenario, there is likely no stopping our descent into savagery. Americans are just realistic, and Europeans are naive. The good news is that we live in a fairy-tale world running a script someone wrote. Social justice is the basis of civilisation. Yet in social justice, the law of diminishing returns also applies, and at some point, the net result becomes negative. Social justice hits the limits of human nature. More women than men may prefer to care for their children, which can affect their careers. Humans also can’t live up to high standards, especially when belief in them is lacking. Or there is overreach, thereby creating other injustices. To favour a disadvantaged group, the best candidate may not get the job.
On the other hand, the best candidate may not get the job because of being a member of that group. So, do these injustices cancel each other out, or do they add up? Social justice can turn into cock fights over respect and privileges. You can think of special toilets for people who feel they are neither men nor women. Think of what that would cost if you did it in every public building. People explode in rage over these things, deflecting attention from more serious issues. Trans women competing in women’s sports, despite it being an injustice, is not the most serious issue. And so, humans can’t fix themselves.
Non-Westerners, including Africans and Muslims, have not been brought up in a culture founded on social progress. There is no objective reason for Western culture, based on social progress, being superior. You could say that Western culture brought us to the mess we are in. Yet, social progress is God’s path towards Paradise. And so, they need an uplift. And it also follows that the West also doesn’t require a downlift like MAGA. Social justice advocates like to tell others what they should do, and would like us to use an Orwellian Newspeak in which words are blacklisted, including the word blacklisted, which does nothing to improve the lives of blacks. It is not only social justice advocates doing that. The abortion debate was another cock fight in which the hens had little say. Like the Woke, conservative Christians like to run other people’s lives. They want to breed even more planetary destroyers to ruin God’s creation because they believe that all life is precious.
Humans are savages, especially in groups. Nature has shaped us that way. In that sense, Woke is no different from MAGA. Stating a mere fact could get you cancelled, and furious Woke social justice warriors would treat you like a heretic from then on. We have reached the end of the line, and without an inspiring fairy tale to guide us, further progress is impossible, and we might 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, I figured that Trump’s erratic conduct might destabilise the world and trigger mayhem. That, at first, didn’t seem to happen as the world adapted, but with no one to check the orange madman, things could spiral out of control. My preparations were not yet complete, but good enough had God called upon me at the time, and close to the finish line, where additional preparation would make little sense. I figured that preparations would be complete around 1 April 2027, and further surmised that the job would start before Trump’s second term was over. And so, the new deadline became 1 July 2028. 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 was, of course, an order that favoured the West, but even more, the elites, which orders always do. Things will not return to what they were before. 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 error of invading the Soviet Union. That is how liberalism won the day.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, liberalism seemed to have won. Yet, it might be 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. And like nearly every previous president, Donald Trump has promised Americans more stuff. The modern consumer is not much unlike a drug addict who commits suicide by overdosing, and wants 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 all that merchandise, are like drug dealers selling opioids.
They made us believe in fairy tales of individual liberty and bribed us with a wide choice of products we could buy until the system breaks down and we die. The bribed suicidal ones would like to debate that claim, but it is insightful. As we are on our way to a collective suicide, the problem is not what is wrong with the critiques of capitalism, but rather what is right about them, as we live in a capitalist world. And so, I must take on the merchants and the salespeople, and make them look terrible. They are the greatest evil of all, even though most are ordinary people who care for their families. But so were most Nazis. Yet, as a group, they are a far more formidable danger to humanity than the Nazis ever were.
Complacency set in. 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. One of Western civilisation’s foundational pillars, 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, but more if no one makes his job more difficult.
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 civilisation is a bit like building a house of cards. As long as there are no serious headwinds, we build storeys upon storeys, but at some point, the winds come. After some time, tensions build, either inside society or in its environment, and existing arrangements stop functioning properly. Change may require gathering people around a new myth, starting a revolution, and going to war to spread it. The myth I bring you could be the final one, the one ending all other myths, and thereby all wars, and forever, and a vision of Paradise that is concrete and has proven to work, a society like Denmark. 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, even in science, so many conservatives don’t trust science, including climate science, and see it as a hobby for progressives. Woke ideology has affected science, either by narrowing the range of subjects open to investigation or by limiting the range of acceptable conclusions.
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, sometimes with violence. 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 mood, and anything remotely smelling like fascism was scary as hell and seemed profoundly evil. It is also a reason why America, which lacked this historical memory, went fascist at a faster pace. 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 or society’s mood, 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, worse than dying, maybe, making us willing to die for our myths and go to war for them. And so we ignore facts that contradict our worldviews. Peak Bullshit has the following symptoms:
Outright fabrications: many claims were simply bogus, so untrue. But 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 reporting of the alt-right paints a caricature of reality.
Finally, there are definitely things that the traditional media do not report on, and are worth knowing. You can think of what preceded the war in Ukraine.
It is not just MAGA. The left uses similar tactics. 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 European 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 it was 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 they 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. Fascists do the same by highlighting incidents where blacks molest or murder whites, making it appear that blacks are after whites, while blacks mostly molest and murder blacks. That is as divisive as what BLM did.
The primary cause of black fatalities at the hands of the police is not racism, but 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. And in the United States, everyone can carry a gun, so, understandably, the police are on edge, fearing for their lives, 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. Stressing that black lives matter, considering these numbers, gives others the impression that their lives matter less. 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, but they came to power with a little help from BLM. Intentions don’t invalidate an argument. So, if you are black and a racist says to you that blacks cause trouble, it would be better to let that person be, accept the facts, stay positive, and help your community improve. Whatever society does wrong, you gain more from fixing your own problems. There is a 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. 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.
MAGA also riles up people without probable cause. 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 1960s, when whites were standing in the way of blacks. Social justice advocates hoped that equality could solve the issues plaguing black communities, but that is not the most serious issue plaguing blacks in the United States today. So, 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. And again, I speak from experience. I have given up several times and accepted the miserable deal my life seemed to be. But the evidence is clear. Other ethnic groups do better in American society. Some do better than whites. And the Jews, despite centuries of discrimination and persecution, do particularly well, too well even for their own good.
Believe it or not
For a long time, I found it hard to understand how people can believe things that have been proven wrong. Yet the proof is everywhere around me. It happened to me as well. We want to believe in something. That makes myths powerful. 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, and even then, I didn’t give up on the idea. Myths control us like software controls computers. Our hardware may be wired to destroy other life on this planet at the fastest pace we can, but how we do it depends on myths. The capitalist myth helps us to optimise our performance by making creative destruction a goal in itself.
I didn’t understand human nature well enough, but thinking of the point of having a Messiah, I had to think about why this might work, even though only in fairy tales. We cooperate based on myths. 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. They can change 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 define how we see reality.
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 like BLM did, 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. It requires even more intelligence, or experience, to see through sophisticated propaganda, 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 because it is politically incorrect to do so. Not only is 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 in the argument 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. Fascism appeals to our gut feelings and tribal instincts. We cooperate in groups to compete with other groups, and that competition includes warfare. Multiculturalism allows 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 we all share the idea of 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. Newcomers may not understand them and may miss out on benefits or exploit weaknesses in these systems, for example, 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 only 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, society has reasons to expel them. If you are more loyal to your tribe, go home and live with them. We can only address these issues when we are candid, and if needed, politically incorrect, but also fair and truthful. The solution to the problem may also lie in fascism: turn humanity into a single tribe. That could be my mission, so one people, one nation, one leader, which was also a Nazi slogan by the way. And you must follow your leader without questioning, like the Germans followed Adolf Hitler, because we are too stupid to think for ourselves, and do stupid things like following Adolf Hitler without questioning. Perhaps, you get the point. Humans are a total joke. That is why worms, as a species, are so much smarter than humankind. And so, our path to salvation is accepting the truth: no matter how smart you think you are, you are less than a worm, even if you had been real.
Mediocre vision
Humanity’s lack of collective intelligence sets the bar for a prospective 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 in the world to give everyone more. 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 survived and was often happy, with less than 1% of that. And so, there is ample room to make people content with less stuff, and if we can make everyone believe that we don’t need more than enough and that enough is far less than spoiled people think it is, we might survive.
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 compliment ourselves for being brilliant. We ruin the world for money and suicide ourselves in the process, and we can’t stop ourselves, for what would otherwise be the point of a saviour? Jesus said that our allegiance should be with him, not with our family or friends. 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. 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, and the right to decide to terminate one’s own life. 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 challenging because 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. Think of it. 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. Money has corrupted everything. 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 seems to 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 that somehow only seemed to make sense to me, nothing more. But then the monkey came out of the sleeve, which is a Dutch saying for the truth coming out. And like my father, I am very good at telling people the truth they don’t like to hear, but should. Only, I don’t like to offend others or make them feel miserable, so I became quite proficient at keeping my opinions to myself. But now, standing with my back against the wall, while knowing that the wall is so strong that no one can attack me from behind, there is no choice. You are a bunch of morons busy optimising your performance on committing collective suicide. And you will undoubtedly make an issue out of my use of the word morons, which only proves my point. If you really think that my choice of words is the problem here, you are unfit to survive. So, try to view it as a problem description.
Remember that I am a systems engineer appointed to fix the biggest clusterfuck in the history of humankind. There are several harsh truths to engage. One is that if you work hard to get ahead, you may 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. As they say, no pain, no gain.
That is, by far, not the only issue. Whatever I am going to tell you, no matter how rude or harsh, 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. We all think that the others are the problem, not us. 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. It is the gravest crime. Only a brutal truth exercise that spares no one can solve the current predicament. I know first-hand that it can be excruciating. The most painful truth of all is that the truth doesn’t inspire us. We are religious beings who live by myths. And therefore, only a fairy tale that is far more powerful than all the others can save us. 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 happy multicultural society. In hindsight, that was wishful thinking, as that only happens in fairy tales. 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. It is not that 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, despite the problems that come with unification, religions and nation-states create even more problems. Yet it is easy to make people believe that their nation is the greatest and that they deserve perks for that, like elite membership in the God Club, so being the chosen ones with a gold card and special perks in heaven. Like usurers, nationalists and religious sects, have the advantage. Even I, after a lengthy study of history, concluded that the Netherlands is by far the greatest nation on Earth, as it has progressed the furthest on the Hegelian scheme of social progress, and God chose to live there. It must be God’s chosen country. And the Netherlands also holds the most potent weapon of all, the Truth Bomb, that will end the world as we know it forever. Indeed, nobody fucks with the Netherlands. So, may he who is without sin cast the first stone.
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 conflict. So, what is the point of Russia and Ukraine being independent countries, except for population reduction and generating 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 nationalism reared its ugly head.
Either we become one nation, or wars will continue to appear necessary, or really will be necessary. The United States and Israel attacked Iran, but experts generally agreed that the stated reasons for them to do so were dubious. There were no indications that Iran was close to making a nuclear bomb, but it had the intention to do so. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have produced 60% enriched uranium. Iran’s missiles were no threat to the United States, and the odds of a war leading to regime change were incalculable. The Iranian regime, however, brutally repressed its own population, supported terrorism, and had developed missiles that could reach Israel. It was up to no good, so for Israel and the United States, it was rational to try to take out the regime or ruin its military. Yet, the Trump regime decided to attack, quite suddenly, while negotiations were still ongoing. Indeed, the war was against international law, as was the murder of the Iranian leader. And so, 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. That also applies to much of what the Iranian regime did, so we are digging deeply into a pile of manure here. But then again, this is a shit-finding exercise.
Every regime is more or less evil, including the US regime and the Israeli regime. It is a choice between evils, and you choose the lesser evil, and also the strongest party, hoping that it will bring order. Most people want to live in peace. Iran has as much right as Israel to nuclear weapons, but Iran having these weapons is bad for peace, stability and order. The underlying problem is competition among states. We can only have peace in a single world order. Humans are violent animals, but states have reduced murders within their borders by over 99%. And so, for world peace, it would already have been better had the Iranian regime run the world, or the Israeli regime. And the problem with humans is that facts don’t inspire them. They must have fairy tales to believe in. Otherwise, they can’t have order. And so, your choice also depends on the myths you believe in.
So, do you believe in the Iranian or the Israeli myth? Is Israel a peaceful democracy threatened by evil regimes and terrorists, so that God has given them the right to take Palestinian land at will? Or is Israel built on land stolen from the Palestinians and a terrorist state that should disappear, and that same God had ordered all Muslims to help? Or is the existence of these myths the problem? For a hypothetical Martian without any stake in the conflict, either fairy tale might sound equally convincing. That Martian might eventually conclude that these competing myths are the problem, and that either one would have sufficed to bring peace and order if everyone had believed it. The Martian might then realise that only God can resolve that conflict, but only if this God is not just another of the mythical figures these humans have invented in the thousands. Otherwise, humans are doomed to fight until they are all dead.
There is no single world order, and with the existence of weapons of mass destruction, living under a global religious dictatorship like the Iranian one would already be better than allowing competing orders. We can do better, but in politics, might makes right, so we can only do better if a superior power makes it so. The US regime may be evil, but it is less oppressive than the Chinese or the Russian regimes. But it is evil nonetheless. Just before he ordered his troops to attack Iran, Mr Trump had threatened to invade Greenland, which is part of Denmark, and unlike Iran, a most peaceful country, and an ally of the United States, that would allow as many US troops on Greenland as the US deems necessary. So, there is no doubt that the United States, or at the very least, the Trump administration, is evil. And if you prefer the lesser evil, Denmark should invade the USA and take over its government. Denmark may be a better country than the United States, but that is also because the US has protected it with its military might for decades, allowing the Danes to build their house of cards of the best society the world has ever seen, but with a military that the Russians might be able to take out in a single day. The point is clear. Humans are the greatest disaster that has ever befallen this beautiful planet. You may have a different opinion, but that is why I am the Messiah, and you are not.
If we keep on going on like this, we will keep on inventing myths to murder each other in tribal wars, religious wars or other necessary wars, including wars to promote peace, and wars to end all wars. That made me willing to accept a considerable degree of inconvenience, while I hardly experienced any inconvenience when living in multicultural neighbourhoods, and later, near an asylum seeker centre. Taking personal experiences as a measure, I would think that the fascists exaggerate with their visions of hordes of barbarians overrunning the country. 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. And if the percentage of criminals rises from 2% to 4%, the number of criminals doubles, so you need twice as many police, prisons and the like. And there were so many newcomers that I would also have worried about the consequences had I not known that God had written the script.
So, what if I had been wrong? My best friend at secondary school sympathised with the anti-immigration party. I disagreed with him, but 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, so the anti-immigration party remained a tiny faction. That was forty years ago. Yet, immigration continued, and its impact on society has become more visible, so more people feel uneasy about it.
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, so that is impossible. The Dutch live at the expense of others, future generations, and life on Earth in general. And the migrants do the jobs the Dutch don’t like to do, or at least not for those low wages that make products cheaper, allowing the Dutch to buy more stuff. The same goes for Americans. Like the Dutch economy, the American economy depends on immigrants. Had the Dutch not pursued economic growth but lived sustainably, and had life in the countries these migrants come from been better, fewer would have come. That is not how the political economy operates. It is a struggle in which everyone tries to get the best deal for themselves at the expense of others and future generations. Had everyone lived like Mahatma Gandhi, migration wouldn’t be an issue. The challenge ahead is to turn humankind into a single society, to eliminate excessive planet-ruining lifestyles, which include having children, and not to aim for some measly average, but for the best possible society, so a world society like Denmark in terms of social and political development. Whatever problems may arise from that choice, the alternative is worse.
Over the years, the anti-immigration party PVV, led by Geert Wilders, gradually grew in popularity. In the 2023 elections, it became the largest faction. Wilders supported Trump and associated himself with gangsters like the Hungarian leader Orban. Still, the PVV differs from MAGA, partly because the Dutch tend to hold fewer conspiracy theory beliefs. And 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 about social trust. Social trust is the glue of a society. It requires everyone to be trustworthy and to believe others are trustworthy. That is why sowing division with lies or painting caricatures of reality is as destructive as being untrustworthy, because lying is being untrustworthy. Those who promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory were as destructive to society as those who attended the Epstein Parties. MAGA rose to power by undermining trust in society, thereby doing the work foreign secret services used to do. 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 clean and uncontested, 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 want more free stuff paid for by others and would vote for more welfare, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to vote. But isn’t democracy not voting for free shit others work for? The rich don’t want their fortunes taxed, so they vote to gut social security, so that they are the ones who do nothing and let others work for them by living off their capital. They only have to convince enough poor people to vote against their interests or bribe politicians into doing their bidding. 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. Allegations of election fraud surfaced after the 1960 Presidential election, which the Democrat John F. Kennedy won. Investigations by Republicans indicated that fraud could not be proven or ruled out, but that it was unlikely to have swayed the outcome.1 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 the only people less trustworthy than politicians are merchants and salespeople. The best thing you can do is ignore what the man says. Some of it is true, some of it is not, some of it is somewhat, and it takes too much effort to figure out, so it is a meaningless yada yada yada.
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.2 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.3 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.4 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 there are links between Epstein and the Israeli secret services that raise questions.
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 logic of that appals the fact-checkers, but if you call conspiracy theories hunches rather than facts, they make more sense. Humans are political animals, so 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 they are duped into believing they are so smart and everyone else is stupid, which is a mistake that only the greatest fools would make. Everyone is a pawn in the game, so hold on to your hats for the final disclosure. 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 to make the country ready for the Messiah. And so I figured that 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.
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 represents 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 corruption 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 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. The Dutch were a nation of merchants and vicars. This dualism still profoundly affects the Dutch. 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 issues 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 at its finest. 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, stands at the root of anti-Semitism. They are the merchants and usurers with the money to buy the politicians. It makes moral corruption in the United States a complex issue with countless sensitivities, which only brutally exposing the truth might solve. An unpalatable fact may be that Adolf Hitler helped to prevent Europe from tilting towards the direction of becoming a cesspool of corruption. It came at the cost of mass destruction and industrial-scale murder, so sensible people would not like to see that happen once again. Now we are definitely 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 due to global warming. Those who don’t believe in global warming, so it must be Satan and his minions heating the ovens, not realising that they are Satan’s minions by emitting greenhouse gases and releasing their brainfarts in the blogosphere. Like those proverbial frogs, we stay where we are. In any case, time is running out. And make no mistake: you can either be a slave in Paradise or free in hell. Humans are a failure. We are smart creatures, but we can’t control our urges, so every realistic scenario ends in a disaster.
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. Evil always wins in the end. 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, 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. And only one Indian patriot sufficed to murder Mahatma Gandhi. Since then, India and Pakistan are one step away from a great patriotic war with nukes.
Muslims are no better. We are all human. If they can get their hands on it, they will go for the money, and their religion will become 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, while exploiting foreign labourers who often live in miserable conditions, leaving their less fortunate Muslim brothers to toil in misery. A few of them might generously donate money to religious charities helping the poor or funding nutters who blow up things and randomly murder people. 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? As they say, it takes one to know one. Still, 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. How to deal with the problem comes next, but solving a problem begins with acknowledging it.
And so, the odds of religion defeating money in a realistic world are zero at best. There is enough for everybody’s need, but there isn’t enough for everybody’s greed. And the privileged never have enough. They will 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 to the thirsty beggars in the streets, provided they are hardworking and dig deep enough holes in the ground. And they have the money, so they decide what happens. Then there are 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, it is just another myth to keep us believing in the fairy tale of economic growth.
Not only do the production and disposal of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries create toxic waste, but they also do not produce enough energy, so reducing energy consumption is the main way to mitigate climate change and pollution. And so, humans will continue to take more from the planet, just as cancer cells grow at the expense of their hosts. Greed always prevails unless brute force ends it. In the case of cancer, it is the demise of the host. So the force to end the madness must be truly brutal, so brutal that it is unimaginable, as even the communists weren’t up to the task. The salespeople are just too cheeky. 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 will produce good. Well, you can keep that fairy tale running until the consequences arrive. And 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 the average individual. After the apocalypse, maybe humans come to their senses, but only if they can fulfil their infinite desires in personal virtual universes. You would probably 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 worlds for ourselves where everyone does precisely what we want, and that is why we live in such a world. There will always be people taking more than they need at the expense of others if they can get away with it. The capitalist tactic is to present this evil as a virtue and to expand the available pie by making people compete for money, so that there is more for everyone until things collapse. That has worked so far, but it won’t work much longer because we are now entering the collapse phase. The only alternative that remains is to impose a Paradise by force, as the communists tried, but with much more force than they ever did. Only religion can save us, but that is not enough. Otherwise, Judas wouldn’t have betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Humans cannot handle freedom, which is why it may only work in a fairy-tale world like this one, where God wrote the script, so that it cannot fail unless God wants it to.
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 helped to make America strong. America helped to save Europe from the Nazis and the communists. The United States may be more corrupt than Western Europe, but most countries are more corrupt than the United States, including China, India, Russia and nearly all Muslim countries. To tackle the corruption issue, Saudi oil sheikhs plan to set up an alternative corruption index run by an organisation they can bribe, like FIFA. Yet if we aim for the highest standards, Denmark should serve as a beacon for the rest of the world, not only in the fight against corruption.
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 to focus on the United States is that Americans may not only be the most willing to change but also get things done. Europeans lack their pragmatic attitude. And so, the coming world revolution could start there. That is why Americans should learn that the problem runs deep and what it takes to deal with it. Compromising with the old, corrupt order is a dead end. We need a spiritual rebirth and must build a separate economy that breaks away from the system run by merchants and usurers, based on ethical principles and where humankind is part of nature, not above it. I suspect that Europe will be next, and that the rest of the world will follow. Don’t worry about the Muslims. They fear God more than you do. 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. It 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 prevails. Otherwise, Judas wouldn’t have betrayed Jesus, and communism would have worked. I have heard several people say, ‘If Jesus were to return today, they would murder him.’ Yes, they would try, and had we not lived in a fairy tale world, any Messiah would have failed. But God wrote the script, so there is some chance of survival and even success. If we let money rule the world, we will commit suicide. There must be an alternative. Otherwise, we are doomed. That is a truth hidden at the bottom of the manure pit. It is hard to envision another world because communist countries are miserable places, but the Old Order Amish are a better example of what our life could look like in the future, even though they are overdoing it. Still, they are fundamentally right about the issue of stopping time and banning products that don’t fit the lifestyle we envision.
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 there is no chance at all that we will succeed. The elites will play us out by sowing divisions. 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 by money 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 religion. Maybe for that reason, they named their newspapers ‘The Truth’. 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 work, but not an apocalypse. In hindsight, communism may have been the last opportunity for humankind to save itself. Now, we need God. But communism is not an ideal system. It is only less suicidal than capitalism. The alternative is self-sufficient communities without trade, which also doesn’t sound particularly enticing. We can make a mix and then claim it’s the best combination of the three. The 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, 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. Before you know it, the merchants will run the show again, and that will be the end of Paradise.
The problem I face, and I know that 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. It has become technically impossible to save it. The only thing the captain can do is whatever it takes to keep the vessel afloat. If he succeeds at the expense of fewer than 2,000 fatalities, that would be 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, and we can only make it happen if we all accept that we are less than worms, which is a fact, not only because a single worm is already wiser than humankind, but also because real worms decide for themselves how to grovel and when, while we merely follow the script. We are not entitled to anything, and whatever befalls us is God’s will. Your ambitions and desires are problems, and in this problem-solving equation, I divide humans into problem-makers or problem-solvers, so people who pursue their personal ambitions are those who help make God’s plan a success. And I have thought a long time about it. It was a conclusion I arrived at in 2025, so after nearly 17 years of thinking of how to solve the problem, uhm, I mean, challenge.
I want to save every one of you, and would like to see no one suffer. Only, that is impossible. The only thing I can do is make the right decisions. Mao’s Great Leap Forward, in which 30 million Chinese died, is only child’s play compared to what we are about to do. If my decisions are as stupid as Mao’s were, a billion people might die. The only thing I can do is make good decisions. Still, you will have to deal with the consequences, and they will be unfathomable now, but I expect you to do what it takes to succeed and to help each other. There will be anxiety and stress. It is impossible to avoid. I must give you a chance at survival, which is up to you to take. In situations of survival, only results matter. As the Dutch say, ‘Death or the gladiolas.’ Success or death. I would rather die than fail. And my survival depends on God’s plans with me, not on what evil people are scheming. And I live only for Her love.
Kicking off the revolution
Americans sense there is something profoundly wrong in their society, 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. And it is not just a corrupt government. The government reflects society. And if someone wrote a report on the ailments and proposed recommendations, nothing would change. The situation in the United States today is comparable to that of France before the French Revolution. The system is broken, and reform is impossible. Efforts to change the system make it more corrupt. Entrenched interests own the politicians, so any 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 have it that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s net worth is $29 million, which would already be a pittance in comparison to the MAGA corruption, while it is, in fact, only $49,000, so Ocasio-Cortez might be one of the few clean members of parliament who isn’t on the payroll of wealthy individuals and corporations, which only illustrates the moral depravity of US politics. There is no moral integrity in MAGA whatsoever. Donald Trump is an evil individual. 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 there have been far more evil people who have murdered millions, such as 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. So, have a little bit of perspective. We’re staring at a tuna while there are whales out there. As far as the supposed qualities of the Antichrist go, few people qualify for all of them. Donald Trump qualifies as egocentric and deceptive, but not as a genius, even though The Donald himself and his followers have an entirely different view. At least, the religious display of Donald Trump and his circle of evil in the Oval Office is more blasphemous than most of what those who have mocked Jesus have said, including Monty Python. It is indeed the greatest joke in the history of government, funnier than Monty Python even.
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.7 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.
Trump is a jerk. That is also why people voted for him. It is natural human behaviour. When order falls apart, we revert to gangsterism and choose gangsters as our leaders. We believe that they will fight for us and rob and murder others for us. The United States had been murdering and robbing the world for decades via the US dollar reserve currency, so that America could get foreign goods and services for free because America owned the US dollar printing press. Donald Trump convinced Americans that it is not the elites, but the rest of the world that is scamming the United States, and that he will make foreign countries pay for the stuff they export to the United States, like he would make Mexico pay for the border wall. Americans are addicted to cheap stuff that the rest of the world pays for, and Trump promised them even more by making foreign countries pay for sending them that stuff. Some of them joined ICE, the MAGA Free Shit Army, to live off the government, so they can parade with guns and deport the working class. It heralds the end of the American Dream, built on the hard work of foreigners.
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 them 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. 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. And 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 already brought in immigrants to promote economic growth and do the dirty work, like defending the borders. Letting foreigners defend their borders might have seemed like a brilliant plan to the Romans, and it worked for a while, until order fell apart and tribal allegiances took over.
Had Donald Trump, like a true entrepreneur, not taken advantage of the epic migration, the collapse of the liberal world order would have taken longer, but 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 prophecised 150 years ago, it would have happened sooner rather than later. In the Roman Empire, the elites had taken everything there, 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 so, it is up to this tiny, little green area of civilisation to halt the onslaught from the barbarians and liberate the rest of the world. The success of that particular endeavour entirely depends on the superiority of our weaponry, for it must be powerful enough to wipe out these savages and let civilised life take over. And by some miraculous chance, that seems 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. And they run it so well that even their Great 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. It is easier said than done, because we need a catalyst to do it, so a fairy tale that inspires us.
Humans are a strange lot. What liberals say about MAGA people is at least as true as what MAGA people say about liberals. A 2013 poll indicated 26% of Americans believed that Obama is the Antichrist or might be.8 Others claimed that he was a Muslim. Most of these people voted for Trump. Racism plays a role here, as might anxiety about the fate of their beloved cats and dogs, because you never know what those black Haitian immigrants are up to, doing those factory jobs that Trump is bringing to America, but are jobs whites don’t like to do. The same applies to the Netherlands. Plenty of Dutch do bullshit jobs, while migrants do the work we need, like harvesting crops.
Racism is not the entire story by far. The introduction of public healthcare insurance has infuriated conservatives. How could Obama do such a thing? Every other modern country has public healthcare that provides better care at lower cost. That somehow eludes conservatives, who believe that public healthcare is a communist scheme promoted by a Satanic influence. The hatred of progressive presidents has a long history. John F. Kennedy faced the John Birch Society’s Wanted for Treason campaign.8 This particular society is the origin of the MAGA ideology. 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 help from Russia’s secret services, by making people believe these conspiracy theories. That was the true plot to destroy America. And 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. The fairy tales of patriotism or religion can help our genes with that. 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. 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 at best. 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 just ignore them. 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. 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.
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.
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 thus 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 smiling unicorn here and there, telling us that we are such wonderful creatures. 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, you will probably do fine.
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 one of the brightest spots in an overall 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 has always been brutal. The Western Europeans aren’t ready for it. Paradises don’t last. Due to competition, we live in a ‘dynamic environment.’
Donald Trump was right when he 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, busy stagnating. 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, 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, which painfully illustrates the deplorable state of humankind. Yet, as an engineer, which Gandhi wasn’t, and with much more data at my disposal, I am pretty sure that the system runs us to our destruction, insofar as you can be sure, for nothing is certain. Only, what would otherwise be the point of a Messiah?
Donald Trump, the jerk he is, loves to hurt other people’s feelings. I am much better at hurting feelings than he is, but I don’t like to. But the joke is on me, as there is no choice. I am so good at it that you might soon forget that Donald Trump was such a jerk. In matters of survival, only results matter, and you are a bunch of delusional morons hell-bent on committing suicide, so what else can I do? And if I make a mistake, I correct my error without excusing myself. Trump has no plan, so he can’t fail, and whatever he does is a spectacular success, even if the result is that we are all dead. He is just a dick, but I must dig up the most painful truths from the bottom of the manure pit, and then smear all that shit on you, so that you stop being such stupid morons. I never chose this job in the first place, and if I start making excuses, there would be no end to it.
The thought that my previous life might have left me with some unfinished business made me preoccupied with history and learning lessons from it. The psychosis later suggested that I am Adolf Hitler reincarnate. Now, that was not the person you would have hoped to have been in a previous life. It was a horrible suggestion, to put it mildly, and calling that an understatement would be an understatement. I have no recollection of that, like I have no recollection of being Jesus, either. Despite my being good at hurting your feelings, God is so much better at it that any comparison fails to do it justice. It also reveals the sad truth about humans. We are a complete failure. There had been more than fifteen years to take it all in, and only results count, so we should deal with the facts as 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, of all persons, moved the masses the most with his message of fuming hatred, so far more than Christ and Gandhi ever did, once again illustrates what depraved creatures humans are. 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 enterprising individual who seeks to profit from the chaos.
Jokes helped to deal with that inconvenient truth, 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. And to prevent myths from spreading, or to pre-empt any 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.
Still, I have to become a dictator. Okay, most of you might follow me, but only because you know God sent me, not because you like me or my plans. In that regard, I have no illusions. I was never popular, nor were my viewpoints. Jesus faced similar issues, and that got him killed. Still, there appears to be a script, and God seems to have gone to such great lengths to make me believe I am the husband She desires, so there is a chance that I survive, and more importantly, succeed. Otherwise, I could be sure that I would either become a laughing stock or, if there was any chance of success, be murdered, so that there would be no point in trying. And if I have to go down anyway, I will do it laughing while looking at the bright side of life, as everyone dies and every joke has an ending.
To help me with the pressing issue of learning how to become a dictator, God has sent Donald Trump to prepare the arrival of the Messiah, precisely as conservative Christians in the United States had guessed. He was the best teacher, the very best. Trump attempted to impose a new reality by replacing the liberal myth with the MAGA fairy tale and depicting liberals as far-left extremists busy ruining the United States, thereby deflecting attention away from his divisive politics, which were politics that most Americans would have considered extremist and insane only a decade ago. That is the way to do it, for what is insane is not merely a matter of opinion. Hence, everyone who disagrees with me is a total moron, batshit crazy, completely deranged and totally insane. There is no other choice: the New Religion is The Truth that you must accept. There is no point in compromising with truth-denying nutters, hell-bent on creating divisions, starting wars, and destroying God’s Creation for personal gain with false fairy tales of economic growth.
It is a matter of survival. You are either with me or against me. You are either on my side or on the side of the psychopaths running this system. You either fit in Paradise, or you don’t. Living in Paradise requires caring for Creation and other people. There will still be harsh choices because resources are limited. There is only a place for sheep, not for goats, and definitely not for wolves. Judgment is coming. We need a holy war against the morons, who don’t accept the truth and live by it. Satire will be the weapon of choice, but that may not be enough, and we must do whatever it takes. We can’t deal with 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 you will own nothing and be happy?
Donald Trump went after his enemies, including some brutal regimes, even though his successes in regime change have remained limited so far. One of his tactics is intimidating those who stand in his way, with varying success, but 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. So, bullying works, even though in the case of Europe’s military spending, Trump had received help from Russia, which had invaded Ukraine, putting Europeans in the mood for increased military spending. Like him, I must go after all my enemies, and in a relentless pursuit, using any leverage I might find. They might soon find out that they are facing something they can’t possibly defeat, and will surrender at such a pace that Hitler’s lightning war might look like a snail’s pace in comparison. But unlike Trump’s words, mine aren’t bluster, also because of my repeated use of might.
We can’t have people believing alternative myths because that creates divisions and wars. 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. I am only being honest with you, so that you know what you are signing up for if you follow me. But if you believe that individual freedom and critical thinking can save us, you suffer from a fatal lack of critical thinking.
I never desired this job, but if it must be, I will try to perform it professionally, so as someone who acts 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 are 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. And it is why, if I don’t have unlimited authority, things will surely fail, and there will be no point in even trying, forcing me to decline the job.
On several occasions, Donald Trump has acted as if he were above the law. The joke is on me. As the Messiah, I would be 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.’ The 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 aim to set up a social contract and world institutions that can last 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 and with limited merit-based class differences.
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 that everyone has the necessities, which must be possible as only a small fraction of the money the rich waste on frivolous, wasteful, planet-destroying consumption would already suffice. Once you have enough, your material situation need not stand in the way of your happiness. If it does, it is your problem, and not someone else’s, and you shouldn’t make it someone else’s problem by taking more than you need.
No one should profit from harmful products like cigarettes, drugs, gambling, and social media. It may be impossible to eradicate these products, like you can’t end prostitution. In that case, 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 route N666, which leads 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 of Donald Trump’s ambitions was to end more wars than anyone ever did in history, and so many wars that we can never stop counting. 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. Ending all wars forever seems part of my job description, and if I had any doubts, there had been a clue suggesting so. 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. And that is because we need a fairy tale to believe in. It is an uneasy predicament for me to be in, nonetheless, so I question my viewpoints and implore you to prove me wrong if you can. A ruthless pursuit of the truth requires an open debate. Minor oversights can have dramatic consequences. We must prevent mistakes when possible and correct our failures as soon as we can. Paradise is a social engineering project, and changes in a society and its institutions have unexpected consequences. Still, God wrote the script, so we might succeed.
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 must 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 high 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.
So, how to bring that orange guy down? That hadn’t been on my mind, as more pressing matters occupied my mind, 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, as he surely is a dick. I don’t know what will happen. The script has unexpected turns. Still, I have to work with assumptions. Play time is over. Adults should run the world. If I am Adam reincarnate, I am 6,000 years old. And there may be no one else left to save you.
Latest revision: 12 March 2026
Featured image: AI-generated
1. The drama behind President Kennedy’s 1960 election win. Scott Bomboy (2017). National Constitution Center. 2. How Close Did Russia Really Come to Hacking the 2016 Election? Politico. 3. Exclusive: Republicans, Democrats agree on one thing: Doubt about fair election – Reuters/Ipsos poll. John Whitesides and Chris Kahn (2020). Reuters. 4. The 26 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Eliza Relman and Azmi Haroun (2017). Business Insider. 5. One in four Americans think Obama may be the antichrist, survey says. The Guardian (2013). 6. Race Alone Doesn’t Explain Hatred Of Obama, But It’s Part Of The Mix. Alan Greenblatt (2014). NPR.org. 7. The 26 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Eliza Relman and Azmi Haroun (2017). Business Insider. 8. One in four Americans think Obama may be the antichrist, survey says. The Guardian (2013). 9. Race Alone Doesn’t Explain Hatred Of Obama, But It’s Part Of The Mix. Alan Greenblatt (2014). NPR.org.
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 