Tag: history

Amish family, Lyndenville, New York. Public domain.

Economic Development

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Before the Industrial Revolution

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.

Doomsday Machine

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Forces of nature

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

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

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

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

Meet our closest relatives

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

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

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

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

The human advantage

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organising to compete

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capitalism and corporations

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

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

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

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

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

The Twilight That Could Be Dawn

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The sudden collapse of liberalism

In 2016, Trump supporters took over the GodlikeProductions.com message board. The mood turned grim, much as it had fifteen years earlier, when Fortuyn fans flooded the IEX message board. It was like being thrown back 15 years to 2001. This time, I stayed as I had missed something important. Given the job that may lie ahead, not understanding fascism was no excuse. I familiarised myself with the MAGA crowd, as I had done with the Moroccan minority in the Netherlands. The new fascism is not just about racists hating foreigners. Living together with people of different cultures comes with real issues. And that begins with the myths we believe in. Hanging out with people helps you to understand them. GodlikeProductions.com had the annoying feature of banning you for no apparent reason, only to let you back in after some time. That made me switch to Reddit, where you can hang out with other groups as well, like a fly on the wall.

Flies on walls like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel can arrive at great insights. This particular fellow had somehow figured out how history would unfold over the next 200 years and how we would arrive in Paradise through a struggle between ideas that would lead to social progress. An example is the abolition of slavery. It required activism and warfare. Hegel guessed it. He did so by observing what happened around him, looking back at history, and reasoning from there. In hindsight, he was one of the greatest prophets of all time. And now, it might be up to me to figure out the way forward. Jesus already gave an answer. In God’s kingdom, there is only a place for sheep, and you have to separate those who fit in from those who don’t. 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 after he had surrounded himself with sycophants. As there is no limit to Trump’s ego, his erratic and spiteful caprices became a spectacle so hilarious that even Monty Python couldn’t have made it up, with Trump naming buildings after himself, declaring his birthday a public holiday, and numerous other self-aggrandising acts such as building a giant Arc de Trump. It was hard to see a plan behind his actions, so his followers praised his brilliance for not revealing his plans. His economic policies were like raising tariffs on Swiss imports because he didn’t like the way the Swiss leader spoke to him. And let’s not forget his brazen lies, his self-enrichment and that of his family members by abusing his office, eclipsing all previous corruption by US presidents, his pardoning of criminals, and his divisive Christmas message, ‘Merry Christmas to all, including the radical left scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our country, but are failing badly.’

Also noteworthy were his war threats against Denmark, for, among other reasons, his not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, which he blamed on Norway. Add to that his going to war with Iran. At the same time, negotiations were still ongoing for enriching uranium after he had torpedoed the nuclear agreement with Iran because Bibi Netanyahu told him it was a bad deal for Israel. When the war effort went badly, and Iran kept resisting and blocked oil exports from neighbouring countries, he begged for European help after having been hostile to Europe, which included threatening to invade Danish territory, pressing Ukraine to surrender to Russia, and making Europe pay for the American weapons sent to Ukraine. As Europe did little to help him in his efforts to start World War III, Trump revived his idea of leaving NATO, while leaving the rest of the world to pay for the disaster and many poor people without fuel to cook their meals. Meanwhile, Mr Trump was already eying an invasion of Cuba. As a Swedish newspaper put it, ‘This is the problem with having a giant baby in charge of the free world.’

No doubt that the second Trump administration will go down in history as the greatest joke in the history of government, and it will be remembered as a lasting monument of God’s sense of humour. The name Trump means trumpeteer, which is noteworthy as the loud noise of trumpets would herald the end times. MAGA defiled Jesus’ legacy more than any other blasphemers ever did, including Monty Python. Trump sold his followers $3 made-in-China Trump Bibles for $60, which was one of his schemes to cash in on his presidency at his followers’ expense. After the Pope criticised Trump for threatening to wipe out an entire civilisation, Trump lashed out at the Pope and then posted on social media an image portraying himself as Christ healing the sick. Also, on the GodlikeProductions.com message board, I was cautious about expressing my opinions. Despite the obvious lunacy, there was much to learn from Trump’s unconventional way of handling things.

By 1 January 2025, it was clear that the second Trump administration would be very different from the first. Trump had ousted the sensible people who might rein him in, so that his erratic conduct could destabilise the world. The world adapted, but with no one to check the orange madman, things could easily spiral out of control. My preparations were not yet complete, but seemed good enough had the time come, and close to the finish line, the moment when additional preparation would make little sense. I figured it would be around 1 April 2027. I further surmised that the job would start before Trump’s second term ended. My new deadline became 1 January 2029. I promised myself to stop by then if nothing had come out of it, but would I? So, is this going somewhere, or would I be setting deadlines until the Grim Reaper arrives?

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. When the Soviet Union collapsed, liberalism seemed to have won. Yet, it is better to say that our consumption addiction has won. The communists had given up on their project because they had promised their workers more stuff, while everyone knew that workers in capitalist countries had more stuff. And like nearly every previous president, Donald Trump has promised Americans more stuff. The modern consumer is not much unlike a drug addict busy committing suicide by overdosing, wanting his dealer to bring on more. He has no survival skills and is hooked on a system he can’t survive without. The merchants of death, selling us that merchandise, are like drug dealers selling opioids. Liberalism was yet another fairy tale. It has just collapsed in front of us, but liberals have yet to catch on.

We are at a turning point in history. Western civilisation’s foundational pillar, social progress, is collapsing. We have reached the limits of human nature. Savages as we are, we can’t keep up appearances for too long. Civilisation is just a thin veneer to keep the beast within us in check. Liberalism was an attempt to achieve a good society through a social contract, giving all groups in society a suitable place based on the idea of a fundamental equality of all individuals. That never happened in most places outside the West. With the arrival of people from these illiberal areas in the West, maintaining the liberal order became increasingly difficult. 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. The issue is not going to correct itself. 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.

Mediocre vision

Humanity’s lack of collective intelligence sets the bar for a world leader rather low. Someone with mediocre vision will already do better, provided this individual has unlimited authority like a messiah. Unlike politicians, he shouldn’t need to make promises to get elected. And what needs to be done requires trampling on the rights that people believe they have. For the job that may await me, I needed answers. I have to assume that the job comes with unlimited authority. Otherwise, it won’t work, and there is no point in trying. So, let’s start with a warning. It is the truth as I see it. Every view is to some extent arbitrary, 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 progressive country on issues like dealing with the limits of growth, LGBTQ rights, animal welfare, balancing work and private life, opportunities for ethnic minorities, and the right to decide to terminate one’s own life. The Dutch culture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries formed me, just as first-century Jewish culture shaped Jesus. Social progress has reached the end of the line. We face fundamental disagreements about the direction we should take, leading to an authority crisis and a moral crisis. As Judgement Day could be approaching, it seems not a coincidence that the International Court of Justice is in The Hague, the Netherlands.

If the world is to become one society, it will be multicultural. As cultural differences cause trouble, we should know what the future requires of us and define what is acceptable conduct and what is not. We have to deal with the people who don’t fit in. The problem is not only illiberal cultures, but also Western culture. And if you work hard to get ahead, you live at the expense of the planet, other people and future generations. Only a brutal truth exercise that spares no one can save us now. I know first-hand that it can be excruciating. Coming from a family of farmers, I am not afraid of shit. These are shitty issues, and you can’t fix them without getting your hands dirty.

Make America Go Apeshit

A 2013 poll indicated 26% of Americans believed that Obama is the Antichrist or might be.1 Most of these people voted for Trump. Racism plays a role here, but it is not the entire story by any means. The introduction of public healthcare insurance has infuriated conservatives. They believe that public healthcare is a communist scheme promoted by a Satanic influence. Countries with public healthcare provide better healthcare at lower costs. Obama’s Easter message was, ‘Michelle and I wish you a joyful holiday filled with the enduring power of faith and hope.’ Trump’s Easter words were, ‘Open the fucking strait you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell. Praise be to Allah.’ How people came to think that Obama is an evil genius, and a Muslim, while Donald Trump is the best possible choice for Christians, remains an interesting question.

The hatred of progressive presidents has a long history. John F. Kennedy faced the John Birch Society’s Wanted for Treason campaign. The John Birch Society had found that Kennedy was a communist and that communists had infiltrated the highest ranks of the US government, and were conspiring to create a totalitarian one-world government run by communists. The proof for that was the US administration’s attempt to prevent the spread of John Birch Society propaganda, which might have seemed like dangerous extremism to government bureaucrats at the time, but the act itself violated the freedom of speech.

Kennedy did an excellent job of hiding his communist sympathies. After, like a true puppet of the Military Industrial Complex, having relentlessly grilled his opponent, Eisenhower, during the election campaign for neglecting America’s defences, making Eisenhower warn of the influence of the Military Industrial Complex at his farewell speech, he risked World War III with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those geniuses at the John Birch Society saw through all that and found Eisenhower to be an even more dangerous radical leftist lunatic extremist. While conspiracy theorists, with their eyeballs glued to their computer screens, were busy analysing every move by every secret society and imagining countless others, the John Birch Society has taken over the United States, with a little help from Russia’s secret services, by making people believe these conspiracy theories. If that was the plot to destroy America, it has succeeded marvellously.

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.

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 most of those visiting these parties probably had no knowledge of that.

Conspiracy theories often relate to the facts, but if you investigate them, much would be unproven, inaccurate or wrong. Conspiracy theorists don’t mind. Pizzagate may be a fabrication, but they claim the Epstein files prove it. The kind of logic appals the fact-checkers, but if you call conspiracy theories hunches rather than facts, they make more sense. Humans are political animals. They scheme all the time. We gossip and fabricate stories to hurt our opponents. We don’t know what’s going on, so getting the direction right is already a success. Yet, the conspiracy theorists aren’t paranoid enough because these secret dealings, as well as conspiracy theories, seem part of the ultimate psyop: God’s scheme to undermine trust in US society to make America go crazy and ready for the messiah. And so, MAGA stands for ‘Make America Go Apeshit’.

Compared to Dutch politics, US politics is filthy and corrupt, and on every level, which my acquaintance also confirmed. Even for local positions like sheriffs, candidates air advertisements accusing each other of being a paedophile, or even worse, a communist. There is widespread quid pro quo in US politics, which is bribery. 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. It is part of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of moral pragmatism, while continental Europe has a tradition of moral idealism.

Culture: selling versus convincing

Corruption in the United States is a foundational cultural issue, not just a political one. It fits the American tradition of moral pragmatism, in contrast to Europe’s idealism. You convince Europeans but sell to Americans. The difference is not just in 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. If an American likes your argument, he buys it as if it were a product. It is a different idea of truth, and a profoundly corrupt one. It sheds some light on why religion and climate change denial are more widespread in the United States than in Western Europe. It made America powerful. Money is power, and bullshit sells, as we are religious beings who need fairy tales to believe in.

You may not buy the science of climate change because you don’t like taking public transport or eating less meat. And so, you buy climate change denial instead. That makes you morally corrupt, but no problem, you can buy the story that Jesus died for your sins, and believing that will get you into heaven. That Jesus died for our sins is pretty unbelievable, and if you had been honest and truthful, you would have questioned your faith, which Western Europeans do more than Americans. Many Americans now genuinely believe that climate change is a hoax made up by governments to raise taxes, but that is because they believe what they want to believe, not because it is the truth.

Moral corruption affects some denominations of Protestantism, such as Evangelicalism. History and culture go a long way in explaining that. Catholic doctrine holds that faith and good works can save you. Catholics can perform good works, such as giving money to the Church, to atone for their sins. That promoted corruption within the Catholic Church through the sale of indulgences. Protestants objected to this and took moral integrity very seriously. That made morality a matter of personal choice. Catholics are more morally flexible, so Catholic countries in Europe tend to be more corrupt than Protestant ones. Protestants should think for themselves, while Catholics merely follow the Church’s lead.

And so, despite the presence of a sizeable Roman Catholic minority, 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. This dualism still profoundly affects the Dutch, making the Netherlands a nation of merchants and vicars. For a vicar, money can never be the highest good, while successful merchants are morally depraved, as greed drives them. The merchant usually prevailed, so the Netherlands became the wealthiest nation before the Industrial Revolution started.

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 of the scripture while acting as greedy merchants. 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, which opened the door to a different form of moral corruption, more prevalent in the United States. What the Bible says is right and wrong is not always objectively so. Paul condemned homosexual acts in no uncertain words. We don’t know Jesus’ opinion on this matter, but he said not to judge and that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. There is no objective moral reason to condemn gays and lesbians or deny them the right to marry. It became a problematic issue among Protestants, who take both scripture and moral conscience seriously. When you follow the scriptures, you shut down your moral conscience. And if only faith can save you, you don’t have to do good works to compensate for that. You can just be evil.

This morally perverse Protestantism didn’t prevail in North-West Europe. Many of the least corrupt countries are there, while LGBTQ rights in these countries remain uncontested. Meanwhile, Catholic priests lived the good life, which the Dutch call ‘het Roomse leven’ or the Burgundian lifestyle. Jews, as Karl Marx observed, are amoral merchants, and this, rather than racism or religious bigotry, stands at the root of today’s anti-Semitism. Jews are often the merchants and usurers who buy the American politicians. It makes moral corruption in the United States a sensitive issue, most notably because Adolf Hitler was not wrong in fearing that the Jews could take over Germany, while anti-Semitism has also led to the Holocaust. Now we are at the bottom of the manure pit.

Idealism and realism

A society has rules, but to arrive at a good society, you need social trust. There are always people trying to take advantage of others, but if there are few of them, most people would keep their end of the bargain, and there is a high degree of social trust. 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. Yet, if we believe that others are only interested in the best deal for themselves or are untrustworthy, we are more likely to assume the same attitude, so that degenerate morals become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A system of rewards and punishments can help to make people obey the rules and keep the group focused on the common good. It is why we have prisons and fines. As we are nearing an apocalypse, we face a global collective action problem. We can only save humanity if we do it together.

That is why we may be incredibly lucky to be simulations, with God controlling the script. Otherwise, we wouldn’t stand a chance. Even when most people are good, the outcome is terrible, driving us toward the apocalypse. Only one of the disciples betrayed Jesus. That already proved fatal. Judas must have seen for himself that Jesus was the messiah and had witnessed God’s power, but even then, he betrayed Jesus, either out of patriotism or greed. He may have hoped that Jesus would oust the Romans to establish a Jewish state, and grew disillusioned, or the lure of money proved stronger than his fear of God. Most Christians talk about Jesus, but are after the money, or they think their tribe is superior. Only one Indian patriot sufficed to murder Mahatma Gandhi. Since then, India and Pakistan have been one step away from a great patriotic war with nukes. So, without God controlling the script, being a messiah is a losing proposition of 100% certainty, not worth entertaining for any rational individual.

Muslims are no better. Money also turns their religion into a hollow custom. Most of them are poor, but where the oil money flows, the rich flaunt their excessive lifestyles, outdoing the excessive consumption in places like the United States, while leaving their less fortunate Muslim brothers to toil in misery. A few generously donate money to religious charities helping the poor or funding nutters who blow up things and randomly murder people in the name of Islam. They are, however, more interested in building the largest skyscrapers. And Jews? We don’t even have to discuss the Jews. So, what about the Dutch? Yeah, what about whataboutisms? It takes one to know one. So, if economic growth and competition are the problem, trade is the problem, and if that is what brings us down, trade is the greatest of all evils.

It doesn’t mean most merchants are evil. It is the system we work in. How to deal with that problem comes next, but solving it begins with acknowledging the true cause. It seems we can’t do without trade and money, so the odds of religion defeating money in a realistic scenario are zero at best. There is enough for everybody’s need, but not for everybody’s greed. The privileged never have enough. And those who have the money decide what happens. Greed will prevail unless brute force ends it. That force must be truly brutal, as even the communists weren’t up to that 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.

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. Whether we try to prevent it or not, human nature makes the apocalypse a done deal. As Christianity points out, we are all sinners and need a saviour. Human nature is so depraved that a messiah wouldn’t be enough. God needs to control the script. That is indeed the case, so we can try to leave our cynicism behind and care for others and nature, while understanding that everything is interconnected do that our actions affect others and nature, and that transgressions like usury that disturb the balance in Paradise are the most heinous crimes.

Muslims are no better. Money also turns their religion into a hollow custom. Most of them are poor, but where the oil money flows, the rich flaunt their excessive lifestyles, outdoing the excessive consumption in places like the United States, while leaving their less fortunate Muslim brothers to toil in misery. A few generously donate money to religious charities helping the poor or funding nutters who blow up things and randomly murder people in the name of Islam. They are, however, more interested in building the largest skyscrapers. And Jews? We don’t even have to discuss the Jews. So, what about the Dutch? Yeah, what about whataboutisms? It takes one to know one. So, if economic growth and competition are the problem, trade is the problem, and if that is what brings us down, trade is the greatest of all evils.

It doesn’t mean most merchants are evil. It is the system we work in. How to deal with that problem comes next, but solving it begins with acknowledging the true cause. It seems we can’t do without trade and money, so the odds of religion defeating money in a realistic scenario are zero at best. There is enough for everybody’s need, but not for everybody’s greed. The privileged never have enough. And those who have the money decide what happens. Greed will prevail unless brute force ends it. That force must be truly brutal, as even the communists weren’t up to that 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.

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. Whether we try to prevent it or not, human nature makes the apocalypse a done deal. As Christianity points out, we are all sinners and need a saviour. Human nature is so depraved that a messiah wouldn’t be enough. God needs to control the script. That is indeed the case, so we can try to leave our cynicism behind and care for others and nature, while understanding that everything is interconnected do that our actions affect others and nature, and that transgressions like usury that disturb the balance in Paradise are the most heinous crimes.

The pragmatic view is that trade, finance, and money are invincible until God intervenes. And that is correct. It has built the European empires, ranging from the Spanish to the Dutch and the British. And it has made America strong. There may be more graft in the United States than in Western Europe, but most countries are more corrupt than the United States. And the Hegelian dialectic is the way God sees social progress. The West has progressed the furthest on that path and must lead the way. My reason for focusing on the United States is not only that America has become an evil empire and the world’s gravest problem, but also that Americans are more pragmatic, get things done, and, above all, are the most eager to receive the messiah.

Europeans lack their pragmatic attitude and religious fervour. And so, the coming world revolution will probably start there. Compromising with the old, corrupt order is a dead end. We need a spiritual rebirth and must break away from the system run by merchants and usurers, and ground our society in ethical principles and make humankind part of nature rather than above it. Europe will probably be next, and the rest of the world will follow. So, don’t worry about the Muslims. They fear God and also expect Jesus to return. And don’t worry about the Chinese. It is their state’s official goal to run the Hegelian dialectic to its completion and abandon the market economy once the workers’ paradise arrives. That is my guess for now. Things hardly ever go the way I foresee. Yet, they go precisely according to God’s plan.

As for the question I asked myself as a teenager, ‘Is it possible that communists had good intentions?’ If you know how deep the problem runs, you can only appreciate their effort. If there is no God, we, the little people, are on our own, against the superior force of money and tribalism, and there is no chance at all that we will succeed. The elites will play us out by sowing divisions with religious and nationalist fairy tales. They make others toil for them so they get rich without working, and it will end in destruction, albeit creative destruction, economists tell us, so that our suicide will go down in memory as a form of concept art. The elites fund think tanks that tell us fairy tales about individual freedom, so that we will not question the order in which they are our masters, and we are their serfs. And we, the gullible people, need myths to believe in. The communists faced that brutal truth and tried to stamp out nationalism and religion. Maybe for that reason, they named their newspapers ‘The Truth’. Only, communism doesn’t change human nature, so new class societies arose in communist societies with elites and perks.

If this happens, you will have to deal with the consequences. Central planning of every detail doesn’t work. If we try that, it will become a disaster 100 times worse than the Great Leap Forward. Software engineers who have learned from their mistakes design, build, test, start small to see if it works, correct errors, scale up, and fix bugs until the system operates smoothly. That is, unless changes are required. Then, you have to do it all over again. And small changes can have a dramatic, unexpected impact. It is why the absence of further changes is the single most crucial success factor in this endeavour to build a world society for the coming 1,000 years. Future generations will have to resist pressures to make improvements if things were okay to begin with. Things were okay in Eden, and all that happened since then made matters worse.

Kicking off the revolution

Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’ You may save yourself by following me, accepting that what I say is the truth, and that is how you survive. We need a fairy tale to believe in. It is the way to save humanity. Being the messiah is an uneasy predicament for any sensible person to be in. Was I mistaken? Perhaps, but it is impossible to know, so only time will tell. It also made me question my views. Progress comes from being proven wrong and learning from it. Minor oversights can have dramatic consequences. Preventing mistakes is better than correcting them afterwards, and correcting them sooner is better than correcting them later. Changes in society and its institutions have unexpected consequences. Still, God wrote the script, so we can only do our best, like true Boy Scouts, and expect God to do the rest, like a veritable Akela.

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. Unlike ordinary politicians who accept bribes to finance their campaigns, Trump and his entourage exploit their presidency for personal gain.6 It seems to include insider trading preceding Trump’s social media posts.7 So much for draining the swamp and ridding US politics of corruption. The United States today is like France before the French Revolution. The system is broken. Reform is impossible. Cleaning the slate is all that remains. 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!’

She meant Donald Trump. She was joking, but that joke can only be funny if there is some truth to it. She doesn’t dislike Trump and tends to look on the bright side of what he is doing. Forcing Ukraine to accept a bad deal? That’s fine with her if it stops the killing. Taking out Maduro? Things were bad in Venezuela already. And he ended the Gaza war. Invading Greenland? She didn’t express an opinion. Bombing Iran back to the Stone Age? They shouldn’t have a nuclear bomb. And so, my wife’s feelings didn’t getting in the way of forming that opinion. At the very least, the orange madman is impulsive, vindictive and unwilling to listen to people with wisdom and experience. When I later recalled the moment, she said the preacher had said ‘Antichrist’ rather than ‘Satan.’

Donald Trump doesn’t seem to fall into the category of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Pol Pot from Cambodia murdered a quarter of the Cambodians. Had he run Russia or China, he might have outdone Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Still, we shouldn’t be too sure. Trump is a savage constrained by the United States’ political and judicial institutions. Had he free rein, things would probably have been much worse. And as far as the supposed qualities of the Antichrist go, few people qualify for all of them. Still, his lambasting of the pope’s peace efforts, while portraying himself as Jesus, and the religious display of Donald Trump and his circle of evil in the Oval Office, make a great go at the title of Antichrist. And is pride not the gravest sin, and is MAGA all not about pride? Not to mention money and patriotism, the likely reasons for Judas betraying Jesus. And what to think of all the hatred, while Christianity is about love. MAGA is the opposite of what Christianity stands for.

According to his own words, Trump 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.8 It shows that American conservatives are willing to let Satan run their country if he promises them the proverbial 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. Trump being a jerk is why people voted for him. It is natural human behaviour. When order falls apart, we revert to gangsterism and choose gangsters as our leaders. There might have been no second Trump term had there been no immigration surge during Biden’s tenure. It became the issue that decided the election. The Democrats let Biden run for a second term, and when that fell apart, let Harris, who was part of Biden’s government, take over.

Cultural differences divide us, but none of today’s cultures is fit for the future. The outcome of all we do is a total disaster. We should define how we should live and seek those willing to go along with it. And because we can’t agree, we need a messiah to tell us. We will have to separate the good people from the bad people and try to rehabilitate troublemakers, and if necessary, in prison labour camps. It would be the end of human rights as we know it. And we cannot accept alternative myths because people fight and murder over them, so everyone needs to accept the same fairy tales, which would also be the end of freedom of opinion. That is a great leap for a former liberal like me, but I have to think ahead, for if I am indeed the messiah, I should aim to have a plan that will work for the coming 1,000 years. I can’t foresee what will happen. There is a script, so God is in full control, and whatever will happen is what God wishes.

We survive with the help of myths. The Jews are still there after 2,500 years because they have the best collection of fairy tales. They are so good that billions of Christians and Muslims also believe in them. Our belief in fairy tales makes us human. It is also why humans are unfit to survive. We would continue fighting over these myths and keep on murdering each other. Borders are arbitrary, but according to a Chinese fairy tale, Taiwan belongs to China, whereas a Taiwanese myth says it is an independent country. China may soon go to war to conquer that island, and the Chinese may soon savagely slaughter fellow-Chinese for these fairy tales, at least if we are to believe the Chinese myth that the Taiwanese are Chinese. Israel versus Palestine is another case of senseless slaughter in the name of tribal and religious fairy tales. We are all part of the problem, and we can all become part of the solution, but that requires a myth that unites us all.

Trump should go and face trial in The Hague, Netherlands. The United States can’t give him a fair trial. Liberals may want to hang him, while conservatives might want to give him a pass. Whether trying to overthrow a legitimate election result constitutes treason may remain a matter of contention between liberals and conservatives, but that Donald Trump and his pal Bibi Netanyahu have violated international law and committed crimes against humanity by starting the Iran war cannot be in doubt. The ultimate expert on murders committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law, Vladimir Putin, called the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei a murder committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.

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 that reveals God’s hand. And I live a house formerly owned by the Tromp family, which is the Dutch equivalent of trump. The meaning of the name is “trumpeteer,” and according to prophecies, trumpets would herald the end times. Removing Trump from office could be part of God’s plan for the End Times, and it could be up to me to take over his place. That is by no means certain, but it is the cryptic message that you see in these coincidences.

Trump should go and face trial in The Hague, Netherlands. The United States can’t give him a fair trial. Liberals may want to hang him, while conservatives might want to give him a pass. Whether trying to overthrow a legitimate election result constitutes treason may remain a matter of contention between liberals and conservatives, but that Donald Trump and his pal Bibi Netanyahu have violated international law and committed crimes against humanity by starting the Iran war cannot be in doubt. The ultimate expert on murders committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law, Vladimir Putin, called the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei a murder committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.

How to bring the orange madman down? That hadn’t been on my mind, but 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. I don’t know the future, but I have to work with assumptions. Play time is over. Adults should run the world. As Adam reincarnate, I am 6,000 years old. There may be no one else left to save you.

Latest revision: 23 April 2026

Featured image: AI-generated

1. One in four Americans think Obama may be the Antichrist, survey says. The Guardian (2013).

Visions of Paradise

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Law and moral sentiments

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.


resourcescapitallabour
communismstatestatestate
socialismstatepublicprivate
third way / mixedvariesvariesprivate
capitalismvariesprivateprivate

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.

Latest revision: 24 December 2024

Wörgl bank note with stamps. Public Domain.

Short Introduction

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End of growth

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.