The point is to consciously notice those gaps between the thoughts

I began to see that the important thing, actually, was to stop thinking. But that, I found, was a real challenge for me. My whole world was created through thinking. I thought all the time. It seemed as though I couldn’t stop thinking, in fact. I wanted to figure everything out, know about everything, have it all nicely analysed ― all the questions answered and all the problems solved ― and I felt very ill at ease with vagueness or any sense of uncertainty or doubt. The scriptures refer to the greed type, the hatred type, the doubting type, and the ignorant type. I could see that, ‘Well, I’m certainly greedy enough, and I certainly have enough hatred and anger, but doubt is an obsession of my mind.’ I am a sceptic and there is nothing I can do about it. I tried to believe in Christianity by willing myself to do it, but couldn’t.

In Zen they use the koan method as a way of nonplussing the thinking mind so that it stops in mid-air, so to speak. I started reading books on developing doubt and began to have moments when I actually recognized non-thinking as a reality; they were like gaps between the thoughts. Now, the nature of thought is such that one thought always connects to another. Thinking about thinking means you are still thinking. And thinking about not thinking is still thinking; it’s a catch-22 thing, so you can’t win on that level. All the planning you do to stop thinking ― and knowing that you should stop thinking ― is still thinking! So it is a question of recognizing rather than thinking, of getting to the point where your mind goes towards stillness; and making that a really conscious moment so that it isn’t just a flash that goes unnoticed. I had these Charles Luk books on the hwa-tou ― on asking questions like ‘Who am I?’ ― and I started developing that. I then began to recognize where the thinking mind stops.
When you ask yourself a question, there is a gap before the mind starts trying to answer it. The point is to consciously notice those gaps between the thoughts ― before they connect, before the thought process starts again.
I found that developing that was very helpful, and I had some success in recognizing how thinking arises and ceases in consciousness. Previously I had regarded consciousness and thinking as the same thing. It seemed that they were bound together so tightly that there was no differentiation. But in this recognition of the gaps between thoughts I realized I was conscious yet there was no thought. From here I began to notice the cosmic sound ― the background sound ― and to recognize more and more a very natural state of being. Then I had perspective on my ego and was able to see how I created myself with thoughts, how I identified the body and emotional habits as ‘myself’.
Over the years I have been developing this way of just seeing what the ego is. When I become ‘Ajahn Sumedho’ and operate from the ego, I am empowering something which is really not alive; it is just perceptions and habits that I have acquired. That is why, I think, as you get older the ego becomes boring. You get fed up with yourself.
You have lived with the ego for so long ― and it just says the same things all the time.
I see how easily I am upset on the ego level, how I can get really angry if somebody insults me, threatens me or criticizes something that is very sacred to me, something that I have invested a lot of interest in. I can feel outraged and upset by all kinds of things. People might say, ‘You don’t have to be a monk, you know. That’s the old fashioned way,’ and I could react to that. A combination of thinking and emotion can develop around the sense of oneself. And in monastic life where you are living with others all the time, you find very childish emotions coming up ― even when you are head of a community!

There is, however, this perspective on emptiness which does not depend on closing your eyes and shutting out the world. It is a natural state that we all have right now but maybe haven’t recognized and don’t know. Once that recognition comes about, however, then that to me is the path. And the rest is like they say ‘the kamma[1] ripening’.
**
So, in the who-am-I type of questioning, one is not trying to define oneself, but simply noticing the cessation of thought at that moment, just that nonplussed moment, that gap where thinking does not operate. More and more then there is this sense of stillness and silence in awareness.
*
But any question will stop the wandering mind. What is the answer to ‘Who am I?’ If you ask yourself something like that, there will be a gap, a space, where you are not thinking. So you deliberately ask yourself a question and then consciously note the absence of thought. I found this a very useful method because of my sceptical nature; I used the sceptical tendency within myself as a skilful means ― and began to recognize infinite space.

Space is around us all the time, just visually. But observe how you have to withdraw your attention from the things in the space in order to become aware of it. This was a discovery to me. I would think, ‘Of course there’s space!’ but never really allow myself to be fully spacious; I just took it for granted. Then I asked myself, ‘What if I get rid of everything? What if I get rid of the people in the room, then the room itself, then the house, the trees, the world, and . . ? But that is annihilation! Or is space that which allows everything to be?’ The space in this room is an important thing, isn’t it? We wouldn’t be able to use it if there were no space in it. One also begins to realize that by withdrawing one’s fascination for people and objects, space has no boundary. Where does space end in terms of now? And consciousness ― where does that end?

Consciousness is a big subject these days, and there are a lot of theories about it, but few people in the Western world seem to quite know what it is. We are, of course, all conscious at this moment; it is a natural state, not an artificial one, so we don’t create it. It isn’t male or female or anything other than consciousness. And it doesn’t have any boundaries to it. We do, however, create things in consciousness, like thoughts, and we attach to those thoughts and those emotions and create ourselves into ‘I am Ajahn Sumedho!’ That is a condition I create. Consciousness combined with ‘Ajahn Sumedho’ then results in the interpretation of experience from this person called ‘Ajahn Sumedho’ ― ‘my life, my things, my way, my opinions . . .’ Now, with awareness we notice that the ego (sakkayaditthi) depends on thinking and attachment to memory, names, ideas and views, and that if we stop thinking, consciousness is still here and that it is a state of intelligence. Consciousness without thinking is not a dull state; we do not go into a trance when we are aware but not thinking; we do not become zombies when in awareness. Awareness is very bright, in fact; consciousness is light and there is intelligence in it; and it doesn’t seem to have any boundary to it. Infinite consciousness, then, is ― ‘like this’, no-thing-ness.
*
So from zero things manifest. In experience we are conscious beings. We don’t create consciousness. When we are born, the experience of consciousness is natural to the state of birth, to having a body. We do, however, create many of the things in consciousness. Memories, passions, emotions and thoughts are acquired after birth; they are the habits and ways of thinking that we develop. But in emptiness you actually go back to pure consciousness before you create yourself as anything. There is this pure presence of knowing and consciousness. Try to recognize that. You can’t find it in a form to grasp, but you can trust it; you can trust being the awareness. When you see yourself as ‘somebody trying to become aware’, you are creating yourself again. What I am talking about is more a sense of relaxing, opening, receiving, than trying to attain. Pure consciousness is not an attainment; you can’t get it; you can only be it. Recognize ‘it is like this’. It is natural and being at ease. You feel relaxed and at home here. All the problems of being a separate person, a personality, drop away here. So, as you begin to explore and investigate this, you will find the way out of suffering.
*
But the whole Buddhist ethos is around this sense of awakening. The word ‘Buddha’ itself means ‘awakened’; and that is significant because it is not that difficult; it is not like developing psychic powers or special abilities. That attitude of ‘I am not awakened but will be if I practise’ is often the modus operandum that we start with, but if we don’t see beneath that ― if we don’t get behind that position ― then we are stuck with it, and no matter what technique we experience or great teacher we come across in our lives, if that basic delusion is never challenged, we will always be under its limitation ― even with the very best teacher or the best technique. So contemplate ‘I am’, just this sense of ‘I am somebody’, just the thought ‘I am’ before you apply any identity to it. We all have this sense of ‘I am here and now’, this presence. But then we add to that ― ‘I am Ajahn Sumedho’ ― and then the limitation is there. I am now a form, a person, a position. There is this sense of ‘I am this body’, and this is binding oneself into the identity and limitation of a particular body ― ‘I am a Buddhist monk’, ‘I am an American’, ‘I am . . .’ whatever, good or bad, high or low.
How do I put that way of thinking ― that sense of ‘I am’ with the limitation of ‘I am Ajahn Sumedho’ ― into the context of awareness? I have created a form, haven’t I? ‘I am Ajahn Sumedho’ is a creation; it is a thought-formation. Everybody says, ‘You are Ajahn Sumedho,’ and I generally refer to myself as Ajahn Sumedho ― so it is obviously right! And it works like that on a conventional level, in conventional society, in the formed world. But is it really true? Is that what I really am? To reflect in this way allows me to be aware of myself thinking this.

I have practised over many years just listening to myself saying ‘I am Ajahn Sumedho’ and seeing that this is a form I create, a habit-formation. So, on the intellectual level I can say it is all empty and I am not really Ajahn Sumedho; I can see that Ajahn Sumedho is a delusion and can go along with the theory of emptiness or non-self. But just going along with the theory is not liberating. The point of the teaching is to awaken to the reality of this moment. And the reality of thinking ‘I am Ajahn Sumedho’ is that it is a condition arising and ceasing in consciousness.

Consciousness, then, is not something I can claim. It transcends the forms that arise within it. Our emotions, habits, thoughts, memories, and the body itself, is the sensory world that we experience. Our experience is conscious, so we can recognize, we can name, and we can attach to various forms through consciousness. Consciousness therefore has no boundary, no form, but is a fact here and now. Trying to pinpoint consciousness and say what it is exactly ― trying to define it, describe it and show it to someone ― is impossible. We can, however, be aware that consciousness is ‘like this’. When I reflect in this way, my thinking is not defining consciousness or arguing about the nature of it in some abstract way; it is awakening me to the reality of consciousness and the form ‘I am Ajahn Sumedho’ that arises and ceases.

Visual space also I found a good reflection, just contemplating the space in this room. Can you say that the space in this room is somehow different from the space outside the room? The room itself is in space, isn’t it? The building is in space; the planet is in space; space includes everything and doesn’t have any preferences. Whether things are good, bad, right, wrong, beautiful or ugly ― whatever their quality ― space has no preferences; it is where whatever is formed can appear. Our attention, though, is culturally attuned to judging the forms in space. We also have other uses for the term like ‘I need space’ or ‘this is a good space’ or ‘that’s a bad space’. But actually space doesn’t have any quality to it except spaciousness; it is just that we project perceptions onto it. When we are not thinking but just present and aware, then space has no limit or boundary to it. We put up the boundaries with the walls in this room, don’t we? I say, ‘This space is just this big,’ and that is because the walls are all I am willing to notice. But where does space really end? Where are its limits? The fact is, it just goes on and on, and I can’t see its wholeness. I can recognize its infinity through this awareness, however. So this gives perspective on the forms.
*
Much of your personality is based on fear, and so in awareness where there is no personality belief or self-view, fear ceases. As a personality your happiness depends on whether you are liked or disliked and on conditions being a certain way.

Awareness, on the other hand, is not dependent on conditions being any way. Whatever the conditions are, awareness has the strength to carry them, to support them, and to allow them to be. And as the nature of conditions is to change and cease, there is no permanent condition.
*
I have met people who don’t have a very good self-image, and yet they know who they are ― ‘I’m a Buddhist; I’m a Theravadan.’ People take on identities and that gives them a sense of security. But when those identities fall away, then what are they? Their emotions are conditioned around becoming something, around happiness and suffering, so when they reach this point of emptiness ― or even just get near it ― emotionally it can be very frightening. They want to find a place where they can feel ‘Well, I know what I am now! I know who I am now!’
*
So, what is the reality of consciousness now ― not in terms of concepts, ideas, or doctrines; it isn’t a matter of looking for definitions ― but what is it as a reality right now? When we make God into a patriarchal figure, we get a white-bearded old man up in the sky, but if we don’t personify God or reality, if we don’t create forms but just open ourselves to this present moment and rest in awareness, there is formlessness; and formlessness has no boundary because boundaries are what forms are all about.

Personality, the self-view, always has a boundary, doesn’t it? My personality is a boundary by which I describe myself. My abilities or lack of them, my emotional character, the judgements of how good or bad I am, my identity with a culture, with conditioning , with education, with the things that I have done or haven’t done in my life, with the positions I am in, are all boundaries and forms that are part of my personality. But space and consciousness are not personal. You can’t claim emptiness and say ‘I am this!’ or ‘I am the sound of silence!’ If you do, you have missed the point. Once you claim it, you lose it. The personality ceases in awareness; it no longer operates. But there is still consciousness and there is wisdom, so then I have perspective on the conditions. ‘All conditions are impermanent’ is true; and I am not just going along with the Theravadan party line on this; this is a true statement.

Ajhan Sumedho 

The culture of the genius

 

The "corrupt" condition of the genius occurs in small modern communities (an obsessive theme in Kierkegaard's Journal), that is to say, in a socius which is not in the habit of meeting the out-of-the-ordinary, except in the form of power and in the more de-graded form of the event. In these conditions the out-of-the-ordinary which is hardest to bear, and is thus repressed, is the gen-ius, as he lacks both the immunity enjoyed by power and the air of normality which tradition has conferred on it.

Where there exists a tradition of the genius, as there was in Goethe's Germany, or in some of the Greek cities—"Other peoples have had saints or sages; the Greeks had geniuses," said Nietzsche— the genius becomes himself the "normal out-of-the-ordinary," who is needed by his contemporaries as the mediator between them-selves and a superior order. To have the "culture of the genius" means being able to recognize with joy one who is intangibly superior to you, accepting his appearance as an occasion to be raised above yourself, not discontented that someone else has got there first, but rejoicing that, together with him, you may get there too.

When this culture of the genius exists, when the genius lives not in martyrdom but in jubilation, like a domesticated god, his contemporaries experience a peaceful self-transcendence. What then can be more elevating, in this strict sense, than to be present in the train of Empedocles or at the dinner imagined by Mann in his Lotte in Weimar, where Goethe talks of the being of a mineral?

Marquez has an extraordinary story in which a winged angel (the symbol of the out-of-the-ordinary) falls, during a storm, into a peasant's yard. At first it is adored by the whole village, before becoming an object of curiosity (with the owner of the orchard charging an entry fee), and ending up, void of all content, among the hens in the yard, where in the peasant's mind it belongs on ornithological grounds.

THE PÄLTINIS DIARY
A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture
GABRIEL LIICEANU

Nocturnal Emissions

Cassian studies the interplay of body and morality via the male phenomenon of "noclumal emissions."177 The experience was part of the monk's physical environment, especially for the young, looming larger in significance (and perhaps occurring more frequently) for monks than for nonmonks because of a lack of other sexual release.178 Cassian wrote as a male primarily for other males, and it is no surprise that he took up a topic that was a commonplace of monastic literature.

He was not alone among monastic authors in addressing this issue; such experiences evidently caused anxiety for young monks unsure of their vocations and for older monks despairing of their progress toward perfect chastity.
The issue was not exclusively or originally a monastic one. Classical writers had pondered the moral implications of orgasmic dreams,179 and early Christian writers regularly commented on the question of whether nocturnal ejaculation barred one from receiving the eucharist.180 Writing as bishop, Athanasius sent a letter to a monastic superior urging him to reassure the scrupulous among his flock.181 The monastic writers, like Cassian, were typically interested in in assessing moral responsibility for dreams and emissions,182 while nonmonastic writers were typically more concerned with avoiding scrupulosity about worthiness for communion.183 Cassian goes beyond the usual discussion of whether or not erotic dreams and/or emissions are morally culpable. He uses them as a way into the subcon-scious and unconscious mind to measure the permeation of the grace of chastity.

He is less interested in the phenomenon of nocturnal orgasm itself than in the psychodynamics thought to lie behind it. These provide Cassian with yet another example of the hindrances to perfect intention he explores elsewhere with respect to waking thoughts, images in prayer, and misinterpretation of the Bible.

According to Cassian's teaching, the erotic dreams that are often associated with nocturnal emissions replay experiences and images from past and present encounters and therefore have a moral significance.184 In linking dreams to wak-ing experiences, Cassian is following classical and Christian predecessors;185 Evagrius had provided a typically acute analysis of dreams and their relationship to larger psychological and ascetical issues.186 Cassian notes that although sexually inexperienced monks have dreams of a "simpler" kind than those of monks who have experienced intercourse, such dreams are nonetheless disturbing (Conf.12.7.4). Even certain biblical texts can fuel the juniors' fantasies and are best avoided—a concern also voiced by other monastic writers.187 For more advanced monks, dreams can indicate a perdurance in the unconscious of passions that are no longer active when the monk is awake.188 The proof of real progress in purity, then, is the absence of "illicit images" even in sleep.189 In turn, the link between dreams and nocturnal emissions (for men and, surprisingly, for women) was a commonplace of ancient medical literature.190 Cassian admits that there is disagreement about the relationship between the "deceit of dreams" (fallacia somniorum) and nocturnal emissions. While positing that the actual emissions are typically prompted by dreams, he notes that the dreams themselves can be stimulated by the "abundance" of "humor" seeking release in ejaculation.191 Cassian reflects the divergence between, on the one side, Hippocratic and similar schools that claimed that the "humor" produces the dream, and, on the other side, the tendency of some authors to emphasize the role of somnolent fantasy.192 The ambiguity affects Cassian's use of the word inlusio, which means "illusion" when he applies it to fantasies and "trick" or "humiliation" when he refers to the emission itself.193 Cassian notes that the difference between "natural" and morally culpable emissions can become a point of contention, with some people prone to plead nature when it is actually their own negligence that is to blame for their frequent emissions (Conf. 12.8.2). Even what is "natural" from the standpoint of sinful human nature can be contrary to chastity (Inst. 5.14.3).194 Augustine had written in the Confessions about the ineradicable nature of sexual memories and their ability to compel consent and ejaculation in dreams.195 Cassian argues, however, that even these "ingrained habits" of memory can be lifted from the heart by God's grace. Thus, for the truly chaste, emissions will occur for purely physiological reasons, without the nocturnal fantasies that signalled unresolved passions.196 For them even the experience of penile erection, inevitable while one is asleep, cannot be attributed to concupiscence.197 One has left the scope of physical discipline far behind; only God, through grace, can stand the night watch in the heart (Conf. 12.9-10).
Later, in both Conference 22 and its companion, Conference 23 ("On Sinlessness"), Cassian tries to maintain his ideal of chastity while backing off from the potentially misleading picture of Conferences 12 and 13. The reason for this ac-commodation is probably the pastoral one of helping young monks prone to anxi-ety and despair. Physical, moral, and ascetical perspectives converge in Conference 22 as Cassian analyzes the trap of shame and guilt into which even a well-behaved monk can fall after an emission. The Conference was set up by Germanus' cri de coeur at the end of Conference 21 that ascetical discipline some-times seems to increase rather than decrease the frequency of emissions.198 Cassian invokes a traditional explanation for emissions and "illusions": the devil uses these physical and psychological experiences to discourage the zealous. Cassian attributes to "the Elders" the view that most emissions are attributable not to excessive consumption of food or lack of moral vigilance but to demonic decep-tion.199 He then suggests that the demons use "simple" emissions (i.e., those with-out erotic dreams) to make a monk believe that there was in fact complicity of the will and consequently that he is not worthy to approach the eucharist (Conf.22.6.4).200 The point made in Conference 1 about the diabolical origin of certain kinds of thoughts now gets connected to sexual behavior (Conf. 1.19.3).

The case study Cassian presents in Conference 22, of a zealous monk who has an emission on the eve of every Sunday's eucharist, becomes a parable of monastic transparency. The troubled monk presents his situation to his seniors for discernment, answers their questions fully, and is found morally blameless. When the diagnosis of demonic instigation is made and he returns to regular communion, the "attacks" cease (Conf. 22.6.1-4).

The story is interesting for its psychological tension between shame and reward, but for Cassian the point is twofold. There is the monk's obedience to discernment, especially notable in such a private and embarassing realm. Even more, there is his complete openness, for this monk illustrates the ideal Cassian had evoked in Conference 12:

He is found to be the same at night as in the day, the same in bed as at prayer, the same alone as when surrounded by a crowd of people, he sees nothing in himself in private that he would be embarassed for others to see, nor wants anything detected by the omnipresent Eye [of God] to be concealed from human sight. (Conf. 12.8.5)201

The night, formerly so fearsome, has become like day; God has so profoundly transformed both body and spirit that even the kidneys, identified by ancient writers as the source of sexual potency, have been "possessed" by God (Ps.138 [139]: 11—13).202 This condition, "beyond the natural condition" of human beings, can only be the work of grace (Conf. 12.8.6). Such integrity and consistency of life is another form of the ideal evoked in Conference 9, where Cassian notes that because prayer follows from what precedes it, we should strive for a unified life of virtue (Conf. 9.3.4).

Cassian the Monk
Columba Stewart

In the world of the mind, silence can have at least the following significances:

1. Dialogue, as a form of movement of the mind, is an alternation of speech and silence. Not knowing how to keep silence means, in these conditions, holding your mind in one place, maintaining a foolish monologue, revolving within the finite circle of your own mind. It means verbal hemorrhage, logorrhea.

2. Silence is, in another sense, an autodidactic principle, a necessary step in every Bildung or paidee. It is the period of "delivery of goods," of spiritual regeneration, recharging of batteries, and so on. In any cultural biography there must be moments when you do not produce, but only consume culture, when you must keep silence. Failing to keep silence in this case means tautologizing, beating time on the spot, dying from the inability to renew your own substance.

3. Silence can also appear either as a form of recognition of powerlessness in the face of the task of speaking the essential, or as a recognition of the fact that you have nothing essential to say. Heidegger writes: "Before speaking, man must listen again to the voice of Being, at the risk that under the sign of this demanding call he may have little, and seldom anything at all to say. Only in this way is the priceless character of its essence restored to the word, and to man a place to live in the truth of being." So failing to keep silence in this case means remaining on the surface of things, speaking superfluously, introducing inflation into the verbal space.

4. Silence can be a form of dignity of the mind, a form of protest. You go into silence when those around you are speaking too much and unworthily. Failing to keep silence in this case means participating in the spread of the immorality of the word.

5. Finally, "learning to keep silence" may be understood as a behavioral corrective based on negative experience of the effects of speech. Silence thus becomes the expression of acquired wisdom translated into prudence.

THE PÄLTINIS DIARY
A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture
GABRIEL LIICEANU

The Fall of Rome - W. H. AUDEN

 

The Roman Empire is an historical phenomenon towards which no Westerner can feel either indifferent or impartial. My distant ancestors were barbarians from Scandinavia, which was never under Roman rule. I was born in Britain where the Roman culture was not strong enough to survive the Anglo-saxon invasions, and which broke away from the Roman Church in the sixteenth century. It must be
significant, I think, that the countries which went Protestant at the Reformation were precisely those which had been least influenced by the culture of pagan Rome.

By heredity and temperament, I think of the Romans with distaste. The only classical latin poet I really like is Horace. I find their architecture, even in ruins, as oppressive and inhuman as the steel-and-glass buildings of to-day. I prefer ‘the rolling English road’ made by ‘the rolling English drunkard’ to the brutal straight line of the Roman road or the thru-way. One reason why I like Italy and the Italians so much is that, aside from their unfortunate addiction to rhetoric, I cannot imagine a people less like the Romans of antiquity.

We open a classical atlas and note that the Roman Empire stretched from the Scotch Border to the Euphrates. We tour Europe and look at the ruins of gigantic buildings, acqueducts, roads, fortifications. We read descriptions of Roman banquets. On the basis of such evidence, it is natural to imagine the Empire as a society like our own: highly affluent, humming with industry, and bustling with commerce. Such a picture, however, is false.

By modern standards, the population figures were small. In the early fourth century the population of Rome itself was between one half- and three-quarter million, that of Antioch, the third city in the Empire, about two hundred thousand. Though the Empire contained one or two industrial and trading cities, its economy was based on agriculture, and its agricultural techniques were primitive. The only technical advance made by the Romans was the application of dry-farming methods in North Africa. They possessed no plough capable of cultivating heavy clay soils, and no wheel-barrow. Rotation of crops had not been discovered, so that the fields had to lie fallow every other year. It would seem that some kind of reaping machine was invented, but it was hardly used; the standard harvesting tool was the sickle. Before the time of Augustus an efficient water-mill had been invented, but in most of the lands round the Mediterranean the water-supply was neither copious nor constant enough to permit of its use. In the Second century Rome ground its wheat by donkey-mills and it was not until the Fourth that these were replaced by water- mills supplied from the acqueducts. In the country wheat continued to be ground in hand querns. Techniques of manufacture were equally primitive; spinning was done on distaff and spindle, cloth woven on hand-looms, pottery moulded on the wheel, metal ham- mered out on the anvil.

The Empire possessed an excellent road net-work but, since the horse-collar had not been invented, goods could only be transported by ox-waggons moving at the speed of two miles an hour. Perishable goods, like fruit and vegetables, therefore, could not be transported at all, meat could only be transported salted or on the hoof, and transport costs were high; a journey of three hundred miles doubled the price of wheat. Nor was transport by sea much easier. The techniques of ship-building and navigation were such that the Mediterranean was closed to shipping from mid- November till mid-March, and for only two months in the year was sailing considered fairly safe. Under such conditions only the State could afford to transport necessities for any great distance; private trade was either in luxury goods or for a local market.

Under the Empire, wealth was probably more evenly distributed than it had been in the late days of the Republic when, according to Gibbon, ‘only two thousand citizens were in possession of any inde- pendent substance.’ There must have been a number of small landowners like Horace, whose Sabine farm was run by a foreman and eight slaves, and had five tenant farms attached to it. The disparity of wealth between the classes, however, remained very great.

Rome in the fourth century contained eighteen hundred family houses and forty-five thousand tenement buildings. There were a small number of immensely wealthy men, most of them senators, and a vast number of slaves, peasants, small tenant farmers, living near the subsistence level. The precarious situation of the small man was aggravated by the tax system. The financial needs of the Government were mostly met by a tax on land, levied at a fixed rate. A big landowner with estates scattered over the Empire could suffer a loss here through civil disturbance, a loss there through a bad harvest, and still be able to pay his taxes and show a'profit; a tenant farmer with a single piece of land, visited by similar misfortunes, could easily be ruined and forced to sell.

All of this meant that the Empire operated on a narrow margin of financial safety. The wars of the Republic had been wars of shameless aggression in which, as Gibbon says, ‘the perpetual violation of justice was maintained by the political virtues of prudence and courage’, but they had paid: money, slaves, plunder of all kinds, had poured into Italy. The stabilisation of the frontiers under the Emperors put an end to such adventures; henceforth the Roman army was maintained for the purposes of defence, and a defensive war, though normally more commendable than an offensive, is a dead financial loss.

So long as the barbarians outside the frontiers remained too weak or too afraid to attack, so long as no ambitious army commander started a civil war in a bid for power, so long as it suffered no natural catastrophe like an epidemic of plague, the Empire could just manage. But any prolonged war or serious catastrophe strained its resources to breaking-point.
* * *
Political stability depended upon the Emperor being approved of both by the senate and by the army. So long as he commanded the loyalty of the army, an emperor could, of course, ignore the wishes of the senate or cow it into submission, and some emperors did, but such a procedure was always risky. By tradition, senators of pretorian rank were put in command of all the legions except the one in Egypt, and senators of consular rank were appointed as governors of all the major frontier provinces, so that they were in a good position, if they found an emperor really intolerable, to start a military revolt; if that failed, senators were rich enough and influential enough to hire an assassin.

It was also highly desirable that an emperor should reign for a long time, on account of the custom of the donative. Upon his accession an emperor was expected to present every soldier in his army with a substantial sum in cash; consequently, a succession of short reigns meant a ruinous drain on the Treasury.

In every respect the age of the Antonines was lucky. The senate, who distrusted the hereditary principle, and the army, who tended to be loyal to the last emperor’s legitimate heir, were able to agree because the Antonine emperors were childless. Each was able to please the senate by nominating as his successor someone from among their members of proven ability and, by adopting him into his family, to secure the support of the army. Furthermore, most of them lived to a ripe old age. In the hundred-and-twenty-one years between the accession of Vespasian and the death of Marcus Aurelius, there were only eight emperors, the average length of a reign was fifteen years, and only one, Domitian, died a violent death.

Even during this period of peace and tranquility, however, there were signs that all was not well economically. Since the reign of Augustus, the State had kept down the expenses of administration by entrusting local government to city councils who served without pay, on the assumption that in every city there were enough persons of substance with the civic pride and patriotism to undertake the task willingly. The pride and patriotism were there alright, but there was less money than either the State or the cities imagined. The sums spent by the city councils, in jealous competition with each other, upon public buildings, water-works, free public entertainment, exceeded their resources and, by Trajan’s time, the State found it necessary to appoint auditors to keep a check on extravagance. The two campaigns, lasting less than a year each, in which Trajan conquered Dacia, were small-scale affairs, but to pay for them, he had to debase the coinage, a practice continued by his successors with the inevitable results.

Culturally, too, something was lacking. The Augustan settlement had put an end to an intolerable state of anarchy and, for two centuries at least, made it possible for a citizen to live what the Greeks would have called an ‘idiotic’ life, that is to say, a private life free from political cares, but the price paid for this tranquility was a general decline in intellectual curiosity and invention. In the field of technology, for example, the characteristic Roman contributions, the use in architecture of the arch, the vault and concrete, the use of pumps and archimedian screws for draining mines, the arts of surveying and road-making, the military techniques of the legion, the techniques of organising large disciplined bodies of men for labor or war, all of these ante-date the Empire.

During the five centuries that it lasted, the only new inventions we hear of are an improved siege-engine and the use of heavily-armed cavalry. In 370 an anonymous inventor of a portable pontoon bridge and a paddle-wheel war-ship driven by oxen offered his services to the State but was,
apparently, ignored.

Then, in the arts, where there can be no progress, only blossoming or sterility, the Imperial flowers, it must be admitted, are few. The poets, for example, who are still widely read with both admiration and pleasure are Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid. All of them grew up under the Republic, and the youngest of them, Ovid, is dead by A.D.17. After them, who is there? Seneca (d. 65), Martial (c. 104), Juvenal (c. 140); readable, but hectic, strained, and basically unpleasant. Then nobody for two hundred years. In the fourth and fifth centuries, a mysterious little masterpiece, the Pervigilium Veneris, and some poets, Pagan and Christian, like Prudentius, Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola, Claudian, who wrote one or two nice pieces, but are very minor figures. Finally, in the sixth century after the West has fallen, one really remarkable poet, Maximian. The list is not long.

Serious trouble began during the reign of Marcus Aurelius with a long campaign along the Danube and an outbreak of plague. After his death, disaster followed disaster. Invasion by Frank and Goth and Berber, peasant revolts in Gaul, frequent civil war, anarchy and galloping inflation. The picture drawn by St. Cyprian (200-258) is probably not much exaggerated.

The world to-day speaks for itself; by the evidence of its decay it announces its dissolution. The farmers are vanishing from the countryside, commerce from the sea, soldiers from the camps; all honesty in business, all justice in the courts, all solidarity in friendship, all skill in the arts, all standards in morals—all are disappearing.

For the next hundred years few of the emperors were even competent and none were nice. In the seventy-three years between the death of Severus and the accession of Diocletian there were twenty legitimate emperors, not counting their nominal co-regents, and a host of usurpers. The average length of a reign was two-and-a-half years. Claudius died of the plague, Valerian was taken prisoner by the Persians, Decius fell in battle against the Goths; all the rest, and almost every usurper, were assassinated or lynched or killed in civil war. Great areas of land went out of cultivation—they may have been of poor quality, but hitherto they had been found worth cultivating—, and the denarius sank to 0.5% of its value in the second century.

Diocletian, Constantine and his successors managed for a time to stop the anarchy, but at the cost of a wholesale regimentation and immobilisation of society under which any personal freedom ceased to exist, a rate of taxation which destroyed all private initiative and sense of civic responsibility, and forcible conscription of peasants, who were branded like cattle so as to make it easier to recognise deserters. The main victims of the inflation were the city governments whose income was derived from long-term mortgages and fixed rents, and govern- ment employees on salary. Diocletian increased the size of the army, but attempted to cut down expenses by paying it in kind. During the first two centuries, equipment and rations were issued to a soldier against stoppage of pay, yet he could still hope to save half of his pay, and requisitions of food or material from the cities were paid for.

Under Diocletian promotion in the army was rewarded by an increase not in pay but in rations, and requisitions were not paid for. Both the soldier and the civil servant were much worse off than they had been earlier, and the temptation to plunder and peculation became correspondingly greater. The time was long past when candidates eagerly stood for election to municipal office. Men had now to be compelled by law to serve, and edict after edict, threatening with fines and confiscations officials who evaded their responsibilities by hiding out in the country, show that this was in fact what was happening.

By 380 the Government had to forbid the construction of new city buildings until the old ones had been repaired; in 385 it had to undertake to pay a third of the cost of such repairs. Some idea of what it must have been like to be a citizen in the time of Theodosius can be gained from the following edicts.

Landowners found harboring persons who have left their legal domicile, or evaders of military service, shall be burned alive. (379)

Anyone who cuts down a vine or limits the productivity of fruit-trees with the intent of cheating the tax-assessors shall be subject to capital punishment, and his property shall be confiscated. (381)

Anyone who thrusts himself into a position to which he is not entitled shall be tried for sacrilege. (384)

By 404 the State had become impotent to maintain even elementary law and order, for an edict of that year authorises all persons to exercise with impunity the right of public vengeance against the common enemy ‘by exterminating malefactors, brigands, deserters, wherever they may be found.’ The partition of the Empire into an Eastern half and a Western half did not take place officially until after the death of Theodosius in 395, but from the time of Diocletian they had begun to go different ways, and, once they did so, the collapse of the West could only be a matter of time. The West was much poorer than the East, and its frontiers much longer and more difficult to defend. Invasion followed invasion. In 410 the Goths under Alaric entered and sacked Rome. In 476 a boy who bore the names of the founder of the Republic and the founder of the Empire, the emperor Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the barbarian king Odoacer and retired to a villa in Ravenna. Turnus was avenged at last.

* * *
The decline of the Roman Empire has been attributed to many causes: defects in the economy, a falling birth-rate, the dessication of the grasslands in Asia which set the barbarians in motion, Christianity, etc, and there is something to be said for them all. The question remains, however, whether there was not some radical defect in the fundamental principles upon which the Empire was originally based which in the long run were bound to bring it to disaster.

The Imperial civilisation derived its categories of thought, its concepts of Nature, Man and Society from Greek idealist philosophy. (Epicurean materialism of the Lucretian kind died an early death.)

Classical idealism postulates two co-eternal principles, Mind and primordial Matter. Matter-in-itself is an amorphous meaningless flux upon which Mind imposes forms or patterns, aside from which, Matter is nothing or all-but-nothing. The imposed forms which impart to Matter the nature of body do not in the process lose their formal character but remain timeless and immutable. Matter-in- motion, moreover, resists the imposition of forms, and can never furnish perfect copies. The material cosmos is a world of becoming which never quite becomes; it remains an inadequate reflection of the truly real and intelligible world. The latter, the divine and truly real, whether as Plato’s Ideas or as Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, is self-sufficient, without either knowledge of or concern for anything but itself. To account for the existence of form and order in the cosmos, Platonism postulates an intermediary demiurge, the World Soul, which looks upward to contemplate the archetypes and downward to impose them on Matter; Aristotelianism postulates an inherent wish for order in Matter. While ‘God has no need of friends, neither indeed can he have any’, all things are ‘in love’ with God and become as orderly as it is possible for things in motion to become, inanimate beings like the stars by making their movements regular, living beings by trying to live an existence in conformity to the species or type to which they belong. For man alone, by virtue of his reason, the divinely real can become an object of experience and through that experience the master of his destiny. To live according to reason is, however, immensely difficult and calls for a heroic effort by the ‘super-ego’. The ‘Id’, the energies of the body are hostile, and no help can be expected from the Divine. Knowledge of the true and the good, which are not apparent to the senses, presupposes a longing for it, and this longing is to be found only in a few individuals. Plato’s Philosopher and Aristotle’s Great-Souled-Man are both social freaks.

To classical idealism, motion, processes, change as such are misfortunes: the perfect does not move. The consequences of such a view for science, politics, art and history are serious. It permits the study of mathematics and logic, and the classification of biological and social types, but experimental investigation of nature must be a waste of time, since the real truth cannot be found in the imperfect copy. Corresponding to the antithetical pair Mind—Matter, in its cosmology, classical idealism sees history and politics as an interaction between timeless Virtue and mutable Fortune. To call the historical circumstances in which man finds himself Fortune, implies that, like primordial matter, they are unintelligible; to attempt to discover what has caused them to be what they are or to predict what may follow from them must be a waste of time. Then, since few men possess Virtue, the majority must be persuaded to lead a life they do not and cannot understand by habituating them to laws and telling them ‘noble lies’.

The peace and happiness of mankind depend upon a tiny élite. On them falls the task of discovering and maintaining the perfect form of State, of which there can be only one, under which human beings will lead the life proper to their species. All that is essential about an individual is the ‘type’ to which he belongs, and this type cannot change, only repeat itself. An individual can progress from ignorance
to knowledge, but communal or social development is ruled out. The goal of ‘creative’ politics is to conquer Fortune and so put an end to history, a task so formidable that only a superman can accomplish it.

Supermen the Roman Emperors tried to be. Cicero and others might make fine speeches about Natural Law before which all men were equal, but their words had very little to do with Roman reality. Roman Law may be a fascinating ‘subject of study for lawyers, and, since I know nothing about them, I am willing to believe that in certain sectors of Civil Law, like laws of contract and testament, the Romans made great advances. What I do know is that debtors were treated as criminals. In the two legal domains of most concern to the average man, Criminal Procedure and Administrative Law, that is to say, decrees concerning taxation, military service, the rights and limits of freedom of speech and movement, I cannot see that the Roman record is anything to boast about. Its criminal procedure was brutal and inefficient, relying largely upon informers and torture, and did not make the faintest pretence at equal treatment for all. If, in its later days, the Empire became legally more democratic, this was a democracy of slavery; the use of the lash was no longer confined to the lower orders.

As for Administrative Law, the citizen had no say whatsoever in its decrees, and no right of protest. Since the emperor was both the executive and the legislative head of the State, there was nothing, theoretically, to stop him issuing any decree he liked; ‘what is pleasing to the Prince’, says Ulpian, ‘has the force of law.’ Moreover, since he was regarded as a sacred being, any violation of his decrees could be interpreted as an act of treason or sacrilege, the one offence for which a member of the honestiores, or upper classes, could be tortured and executed; a number of emperors made use of this legal possibility.

Classical idealism cannot tolerate the arts as gratuitous activities; either they must be reduced to didactic instruments of some ethical or political purpose, or they must be suppressed. Plato had the intelligence to see this clearly; Aristotle in his Poetics merely betrays his utter misunderstanding of his subject.

Roman literature, both in verse and prose, was an aristocratic art addressed to a small highly sophisticated audience. This in itself was not a fault. Once the age of the bard reciting tribal lays in the hall of his chief is over, and until printing has been invented and literacy has become common, literature cannot be anything else. Indeed, a ‘courtly’ period is probably necessary if a language is to realise its full possibilities. In writing for a small critical circle, the classical Latin authors discovered what could be done with Latin, the wealth of its conjunctions and subordinate phrases, the flexibility of its tenses and word-order, which make it such a superb instrument for organising facts into a logical and co-herent whole. The defect of Latin literature was not its way of treating facts, but the extraordinar[il]y small number of facts it considered worth treating. It averts its face from all experience save that of the highly educated and the politically powerful. The literature of the middle-ages had an equally small audience, but readily drew its material from popular sources. The Canterbury Tales were written for a courtly audience, but its characters are neither courtiers nor figures of farce. As W. P. Ker has written:

Classical literature perished from a number of contributory ailments, but none of these was more desperate than the want of romance in the Roman Empire, and especially in the Latin Language. . . . ‘The Gothic mythology of fairies’, as Dr Johnson calls it, was no less the property of Italy than of the North. In any mountain village the poets might have found the great-great grandmothers of those story-tellers for whom Boccaccio in his Genealogy of the Gods offers a courteous defence. The elves and fays of Italy, Lamiae, as Boccaccio calls them, might have refreshed the poets. But the old wives and their fairy tales are left unnoticed, except by Apuleius.
And Apuleius, one must add, was only interested in their gruesome or grotesque elements. What was a limitation in the poets was quite fatal to the historians.

It is significant that history was regarded by the Romans, not as the matrix from which all literature is derived, but as a handmaid to literature. One may admire the Roman historians for their style, or enjoy their scandalous gossip, but for historical understanding one looks to them in vain. As Gibbon remarked: “They said what it would have been meritorious to omit, and omitted what it was essential to say.’ Conceiving of the human individual as a specimen embodying a type, in abstraction from all those concrete features and relations which give him an historical existence, they assumed that men are free to choose between arbitrary and abstract alternatives of ‘vice’ and ‘virtue’, that there is nothing to stop them, if they wish, from living the life of their great-grandfathers. Of their historical approach, Erich Auerbach says:

It does not see forces, it sees vices and virtues, successes and mistakes. Its formulation of problems is not concerned with historical developments, either intellectual or material, but with ethical judgements. It shows an aristocratic reluctance to become involved with growth processes in the depths, for these processes are felt to be both vulgar and orgiastically lawless . . . The ethical and even the political concepts of antiquity (aristocracy, democracy, etc) are
fixed aprioristic model concepts.

One symptom of this approach is the complete lack of interest shown by the classical historians in what people actually say, all the idiosyncracies of phrasing and vocabulary which reveal the personality of the speaker. Face-to-face dialogue goes unreported by them. When they do employ Direct Speech, it is a set piece of oratory written in the style of the historian himself.

One may like or dislike Christianity, but no one can deny that it was Christianity and the Bible which raised Western literature from the dead. A faith which held that the Son of God was born in a manger, associated himself with persons of humble station in an unimportant Province, and died a slave’s death, yet did this to redeem all men, rich and poor, freemen and slaves, citizens and barbarians, required a completely new way of looking at human beings; if all are children of God and equally capable of salvation, then all, irrespective of status or talent, vice or virtue, merit the serious attention of the poet, the novelist and the historian. St Jerome, trained in the classical rhetorical tradition, might find the Bible ‘uncouth’, but in his translation he made no attempt to ‘classicalise’ it. (Only the sixteenth century humanists were crazy enough to try that.) Old Testament stories, like Abraham and Isaac, or David and Absalom, New Testament stories like Peter’s denial, did not fit into any of the classical stylistic categories; to translate them called for a quite different vocabulary, even a different syntax.

* * *
Most of the writings which have survived from the third and fourth centuries are polemic theological journalism, Neo-platonists versus Christians, Christians with one interpretation of their faith against Christians with another. From being an obscure sect, disliked by the mob, as oddities always are, and suspected of horrid secret rites, but people no man of education would give a thought to, by the reign of Marcus Aurelius Christians had become numerous enough and influential enough to be taken seriously both by the authorities and by intellectuals. Persecution, hitherto sporadic and incoherent, became a deliberate planned policy under the more serious-minded emperors.

Intellectuals like Celsus and Porphyry felt that Christianity was a cultural threat serious enough to deserve attack, and, on the Christian side, there were now converts like Tertullian and Origen educated enough to explain and defend their beliefs. Reading their polemics today, one is more struck by the points upon which they agreed than by their differences.

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take, The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake:
Breasts more soft than a dove’s, that tremble with tenderer breath;
And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death.

So Swinburne. But his contrast between jolly, good-looking, sexy, extrovert Pagans on the one hand, and gloomy, emaciated, guilt-ridden, introvert Christians on the other is a romantic myth without any basis in historical fact. The writings of Christian and Pagan alike during this period seem to indicate that, as Joseph Bidez says;

Men were ceasing to observe the external world and to try to understand it, utilise it, or improve it. They were driven in on themselves. The idea of the beauty of the heavens and of the world went out of fashion and was replaced by that of the Infinite.

Such an attitude is consonant neither with orthodox Platonism nor with orthodox Christianity. Despite its latent dualism, orthodox Platonism held that the material universe was in some manner a manifestation of the Divine. The cosmos, says Plato in the aTimaeus, ‘is the image of the intelligible, a perceptible god, supreme in greatness and excellence and perfection’. For the orthodox Christian, God created the world ‘and saw that it was good’, and “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork.’ But in the third century, both among Pagans and among those who imagined themselves to be Christians, radical dualistic theories began to take hold. ‘Some held that the cosmos had been created by an evil spirit, or by an ignorant one, or by bodiless intelligences who had become bored with contemplating God and turned to the inferior; others concluded that it had somehow fallen into the power of star- demons.’ (E. R. Dodds) The incarnation of the human soul in a fleshly mortal, body was felt by many to be a curse and accounted for as being either a punishment for an earlier sin committed in heaven, or the result of a false choice made by the soul itself. Consequently, to an increasing number, the body became an object of disgust and resentment. Among some Christians there was a tendency to make a heretical substitution of Lust for Pride as the archetypal sin, and to see in violent mortification of the flesh, not a discipline, but the only road to salvation. A fascination with the occult, with astrology, spiritualism, magic, was wide-spread. Both Pagans and Christians took oracles and ‘belly-talkers’ seriously. Reading the Christian polemics of the third century, one gets the impression that the Church was in grave danger of going crackpot. Only one writer, Irenaeus, can be called orthodox, as orthodoxy was to be defined in the next two centuries. The fact that the Councils of Nicea and Chalcedeon were able to arrive at the credal definitions they did, suggests, however, that the most vociferous and articulate Christians were not typical of their third century brethren. Not all, not even the majority, can have been Gnostics who believed that Christ’s body was an optical illusion, or crypto-materialists like Tertullian, or crypto-idealists like Clement, or indulged in glossolalia like Montanus, or castrated themselves like Origen, or behaved like the Marcionite, who always washed his face in his spittle to avoid using water, the creation of the demiurge.
* * *

The fiasco of Julian’s attempt to establish his solar monotheism, and the ease with which his successors suppressed pagan worship—there were very few Pagan martyrs—suggests that, by the time of Constantine’s so-called conversion, Christianity as a faith had already won out over its competitors, Neo-platonism, Manicheeism and Mithraism. For this victory many explanations can be given;—the impression made by the courage of the martyrs, the refusal of the Church to limit its membership to a spiritual or intellectual élite, or to make mystical experience necessary to salvation, the opportunities it offered to any man of talent and character to rise to high office in its hierarchy, its superior ability to give its converts a sense of belonging to and being needed by a community, and its philosophical superiority. Credo ut intelligam is a maxim which applies to all experiences except that of physical pain, and the Christian creed made better sense of human experience than the others. Far from Constantine and his successors contributing to this victory, they very nearly ruined it. The greatest disasters which have befallen the Church, disasters for which we have not yet finished paying the price, were the adoption by Theodosius of Christianity as the official State religion, backed by the coercive powers of the State, and the mass, often forcible, conversions of the barbarians in the centuries that followed.

Constantine and Theodosius took up Christianity for a purely pagan reason; they hoped that the ‘Christian’ God would ensure them political and military success; a view neatly diagrammed by Blake in his re-translation of Dr Thornton’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer.

Our Father Augustus Caesar, who art in these thy Substantial Astronomical Telescopic Heavens, Holiness to thy Name or Title, a reverence to thy Shadow. Thy Kingship come upon Earth first & then in Heaven. Give us day by day our Real Taxed Substantial Money bought Bread; deliver from the Holy Ghost whatever cannot be Taxed; for all is debts & Taxes between Caesar & us & one another; lead us not to read the Bible, but let our Bible be Virgil & Shakespeare; & deliver us from Poverty in Jesus, that Evil One. For thine is the Kingship, or Allegoric Godship, & the Power, or War, & the Glory, or Law, Ages after Ages in thy descendants; for God is only an Allegory of Kings & nothing else. AMEN.

As Charles Cochrane has written:

To envisage the faith as a political principle was not so much to christianise civilisation as to ‘civilise’ Christianity; it was not to consecrate human institutions to the service of God but rather to identify God with the maintenance of human institutions, represented in this case by a tawdry and meritricious empire, a system which, originating in the pursuit of human and terrestrial aims, had so far degenerated as to deny to men the very values which had given it birth, and was now held together only by sheer and unmitigated force. So far from rejuvenating Romanitas, the attempted substitution of reli- gion for culture as a principle of cohesion served merely to add a final and decisive element to the forces making for the dissolution of the Roman order.

The eremitic movement, and the monastic movement which succeeded, it, were essentially movements of protest not against Paganism but against worldly Christianity. Before we condemn the desert hermits, as the humanists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century did, for refusing to accept their civic responsibilities, we must remember what, especially for the better educated and better off, who might have become magistrates or civil servants, taking such posts involved. A magistrate had to inflict torture; a bureaucrat could not live without taking bribes. Even what seems to us their most peculiar and repellant trait, their horror of washing, might be more under- standable if we knew more about how men and women behaved in the public city baths. To anyone who took his faith seriously, the urban life of the ‘Christian’ Empire must have seemed an appalling spectacle. It was now worldly advantage to be labelled a Christian, and there must have been a great multitude who, counting upon a death-bed repentance to cancel their sins, continued to enjoy gladiatorial shows, wild-beast fights, obscene mimes, etc. Cavafy’s description  of the reaction of the citizens of Antioch to a visit from the emperor Julian is probably not far from the truth.

Was it possible that they would ever deny
Their comely way of living; the variety
Of their daily recreations; their splendid
Theatre where they found the union of Art
With the erotic propensities of the flesh!

Immoral to a certain, probably to a considerable extent,
They were. But they had the satisfaction that their life
Was the much talked-of life of Antioch,
The delightful life, in absolutely good taste.

Were they to deny all this, to give their minds after all to what?

To his airy chatter about the false gods,
To his annoying chatter about himself;
To his childish fear of the theatre;
His graceless prudery; his ridiculous beard.

Most certainly they preferred the letter CHI, Most certainly they preferred the KAPPA—a hundred times.
(translated by John Mavrogordato)

Most people’s idea of the Desert Fathers is derived from what they have heard about Simeon Stylites, and this is unjust to them. To begin with, few of them were mendicants; most earned their modest keep by weaving palm-leaf baskets and mats. Lunatics and spiritual prima donnas were, it is true, to be found among them, but many anecdotes reveal that they were recognised for what they were by their saner and humbler brethren. At its best the movement produced characters of impressive integrity and wisdom, with great psychological understanding, charity and good-humor. Nor was excessive mortification ever encouraged by the Church authorities. An early canon condemns those who abstain from wine and meat on fast-days for ‘blasphemously inveighing against the creation.’ We owe the Desert Fathers more than we generally realise. The classical world knew many pleasures, but of one which means a great deal to us, it was totally ignorant until the hermits discovered it, the pleasure of being by oneself. Nothing could better illustrate the relentlessly public character of classical civilisation than an anecdote of Augustine’s, in which he tells of his utter astonishment when he saw a hermit reading to himself without pronouncing the words aloud: this was a new world. Again, they seem to have been the first people in history to appreciate the beauties of wild nature, and the first to make friends with wild animals instead of hunting them.

Though it did not reach its full development until after the collapse of the West, the monastic movement had already started. It began to be realised that, while solitary withdrawal could be valuable for certain exceptional persons and for certain periods in their lives, man was a social animal who normally needed to live with others. The problem was one of devising a kind of social organisation which would be neither totalitarian, based on collective egoism, nor competitive, based on the egoism and ambition of the individual. At its best, the monastic movement solved this problem better than any other social form before or since. Its drawback is of course that it has been limited so far, to the celibate. Perhaps it has to be: perhaps family life and communal life are incompatible, except under catastrophic conditions. But the matter deserves more attention than we give it.

* * *
‘Histories of the downfall of Kingdoms’, said Dr Johnson, ‘and revolutions of empires are read with great tranquility.’ I am not sure that to-day it would not be more accurate to say ‘with great excitement’. On the evidence of contemporary historical novels (a surprising number are concerned with the fall of Rome) and science fiction, it would seem that what really fascinates us to read about is a post-catastrophic society and landscape—abandoned ruins of once great cities, bad lands, roads overgrown with grass, individuals and small groups, which have been brought up in a civilised society, learning how to cope with life under barbaric conditions. It is noticeable, too, that there is a far greater public interest in neolithic or bronze-age archaeology than in Graeco-roman archaeology.

I can guess at various reasons for th

There was one man in our generation who stood above us all

"The second thing is this: you don't fight with just anyone. You need to choose your enemy. Who do you fight with? With a retired professor who has done nothing all his life? With a bunch of amateurs? If you must fight, then fight with gods, not valets. You cannot be the slave of your own bouillonnement, or you risk placing yourself indifferently on all sorts of battlefields.

"And thirdly: we are in a world in which you need to act in such a way that, while preserving your own dignity, you nevertheless do not need to arrive at your own invalidation. Don't invalidate the gift which carries you beyond yourself, into a vaster responsibility, for the sake of matters which turn out to be secondary in the end.

There was one man in our generation who stood above us all, by his reading, his fantasy, the grace of his intellect, his moral consciousness. He was called Mircea Vulcanescu. He died in prison in 1950. He had been sentenced to five years, and if he had not chosen to do what he did he would have survived the sentence and would have entered into the vaster responsibility which he had towards everyone else. Judge for yourselves whether or not I am right in what I argue.

"I found out a year ago why he died. At that time it was not permitted to speak in the cell. But in fact those imprisoned together used to set up little 'cultural universities': they learned languages, did history, philosophy, talked about their novels...One day the guard heard them talking and came into the cell: 'Who was talking?' They had all been talking. If they had all kept silent, if no one had accepted the blame, they would have received a collective punishment: staying on their feet for a few hours, or something like that. But seeing that no one spoke up, Vulcanescu took it all upon himself, and denounced himself alone. What followed? He was taken from the cell and put in the 'isolator.' It was winter; in the isolator water had been spilt on the floor and had turned to ice. In the first day of isolation you got nothing to eat and you were kept undressed. So he was undressed and taken to the isolator. There were another four or five prisoners inside. They were all clapping their hands and jumping, trying to keep going till evening. At a certain moment a young man of about twenty collapsed. Vulcanescu was fifty, and thought it was more important for the young man to live. So he lay down on his back on the floor and told the others to put the youth on top of him. It was a sublime gesture. The young man survived. Vulcanescu got pneumonia and died. Let me ask you: Was he right to do what he did? Would it not have been more deeply ethical to have thought of what he owed the others, of all the good he had to do for the whole community once he got out of prison? To have thought of all those with whom his extraordinary mind might have been shared? What I am preaching is not cowardice, or general moral ugliness, but ethics put in the service of something, not ethics for its own sake. For his first gesture, when he took the blame for everyone by saying that he had been talking, represents bare ethics, in the practice of which he made himself guilty, forgetting a larger responsibility. Vulcanescu carried with him a vaster mind, towards which he had deeper obligations. It is possible to preserve both your dignity and the consciousness of that larger responsibility.

"Public life is full of the traps which pure ethics lays for you.
Here we find the danger of falling into the intoxication of the 'fine gesture,' of ethical gesticulation, just as in every beautiful woman there is a seduction which provokes a false need for love in you. (...)

Constantin Noica

VULCANESCU, Mircea (1904-1952): Philosopher, sociologist, economist, a leading figure in the Criterion group, author of a work on The Romanian Dimension of Existence. As recounted by Noica in the Diary (8th May 1981), he died in prison.

The Science of Social Engineering

 

"We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” – Edward Bernays

Socialengineeringisthe intentional use of propaganda and other manipulative techniques to influence public attitudes and behavior on a mass scale with the goal of arriving at whatever outcomes have been specified by the social engineers.

Because technocracy originally labeled itself as the “science of social engineering,” we should not be surprised that today’s technocrats and their allies are still practicing this dark skill for the purpose of achieving their own ends.

During the pandemic, the world has been overtaken by these social engineers, who seem to slither out of the woodwork. Their carefully constructed propaganda, spewed nonstop all day, every day, has convinced many millions of frightened people to wear face masks, practice social distancing, stay locked in their homes, shut down their businesses, close schools, and, finally, obediently submit to being injected with FDA-un approved, experimental mRNA shots.

How could this have happened? Has the world gone mad? Let’s examine.

In the 1930s, early technocrat dreams of social engineering were emerging. Foundational research had already been conducted by Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), a Russian neurologist and physiologist who was determined to unravel the cause of human behavior. His experiments on dogs’ drooling response to the sight of food enabled him to develop his well-known theory of classical conditioning. He found that a dog can be conditioned to salivate upon simply seeing a food dish, even if there’s no food in it. Another of Pavlov’s experiments resulted in dogs drooling whenever their dog-feeder walked into the room.

Does the theory of classical conditioning apply to humans, too? Of course, and it works like this: If a dad always dons a certain ball cap just before taking his child to the park to play, eventually the child will anticipate playtime whenever Dad wears the same cap, no matter what the setting or circumstance.

American psychologist and behaviorist B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) came on the scene a bit later than Pavlov. Skinner promoted the idea that human nature is mostly a product of a person’s environment. But he also contended that human nature follows certain laws that, if discovered, could be used for the purpose of manipulation and control. In experiments using rats, he developed theories of positive and negative reinforcement, as well as outright punishment, to control behavior. Skinner’s theories about rodents jumped the track to humans when he realized that “the species of the organism has made surprisingly little difference.”[1] His 1948 book, Walden Two , described a utopia in which the free will of the human spirit or soul is rejected and systematic altering of environmental variables controls all human behavior.

Both Skinner and Pavlov held to a mechanistic[2] world view. They attempted to understand human behavior through a process of scientific study. Humans, they reasoned, are accidental beings that have progressed according to Darwin’s theories on the survival of the fittest. Their mechanistic philosophy fit perfectly with the mindset of early technocrats and ended up as a major theme of the Technocracy Study Course that was published in 1934.

The danger in this type of thinking is that it reduces humans to having no free will and no spirit or soul that will help them to make moral and ethical life choices. Instead, external conditions and stimuli are necessary to produce better behavior. Of course, technocrats reasoned that they could apply their “science of social engineering” to do just that.

Those early technocrats didn’t need to write long expositions about how to operate machines and factories or about how to build roads and cities. Taylorism[3] and systems theory[4] had already done that—and technocrats were steeped in both doctrines. What the technocrats couldn’t deal with, though, was human nature. They found people to be far less reliable than physical machines. Nevertheless, they were forced to depend upon unreliable, unpredictable humans in order to actually build the cities and roads and operate the machines and factories.

Can you see the technocrats’ dilemma?

Their only solution, as they saw it, was to recast humans in the image of machinery and manage them as such. In fact, people were the one big obstacle technocrats faced whenever they attempted to control anything and everything —which was all the time . Thus, it should be no surprise that when they dreamed up the definition of technocracy in 1937, their ability to control human behavior got top billing: “Technocracy is the science of social engineering.”[5]

We can see how the behavioral theories of both Pavlov and Skinner provided salvation to the early technocrats. For if humans can be controlled externally, like physical machines, and if that discipline can be recast as a “science,” then the “science of social engineering” is legitimately in the technocrats’ wheelhouse, isn’t it?

Yes, except for the simple fact that the science of engineering human behavior is not a real science. It’s a pseudoscience. People cannot be “engineered.” And even if they could be, the development of the principles of social engineering is a bastardization of the true scientific method that has always served authentic scientists so well, both in the past and in the present.

You may remember that at the end of Chapter 1 we called “scientism” a “speculative, metaphysical, upside-down worldview about the nature of the universe and man’s relation to it.” The fact that “upside-down” scientism plays such a huge role in technocracy reinforces the fact that social engineering is pseudoscientific—and should never be equated with the word “science.”

All efforts to create a utopia through social engineering (think Walden Two by Skinner) have failed miserably. Marxists, communists, and socialists have tried it and failed. So have fascists. Technocrats likewise have failed thus far and will fail in the end as well. However, in the meantime, society is damaged by the hubris of these self-selected social engineers, who practice a warped pseudoscience that will never work because it is . . . not scientific.

The eminent historian Richard G. Olson, author of Science and Scientism in the Nineteenth-Century Europe , notes in his Introduction the subtle shift in thinking that preceded the original technocrat movement:

I have persistently thought of those early thinkers who sought to bring insights, especially methodological insights, from the natural sciences into the human social domain as engaging in scientism – a term that I intended to indicate the transfer of ideas, practices, attitudes, and methodologies from the context of the study of the natural world (which was assumed to be independent of human needs and expectations) into the study of humans and their social institutions, without imposing any judgement on the legitimacy of such an appropriation .[6]

Scientism is still practiced by today’s technocrats, as attested to by the prominent presence of pseudoscience in every walk of life. Instead of improving society along the way, scientism invariably ends up making a bigger mess of everything it touches.

Turning back to the Technocracy Study Course , we can now see how the “science of social engineering” has influenced the technocrat mind—both then and now:

This gives us a clue to the most fundamental social control technique that exists. No other single item exerts more than a small percentage of the influence exerted by the immediate physical environment upon the activities of human beings. Leave the physical environment unaltered, or the industrial rates of operation unchanged, and any effort to alter the fundamental modes of behavior of human beings is doomed largely to failure; alter the immediate physical environment of human beings, and their modes of behavior change automatically.[7]

Ever since that study course was introduced in 1934, technocrats have been attempting to perfect reliable methods of social control. Below we will cite a few such methods.

Propaganda

The intellectual father of modern propaganda was Edward L. Bernays (1891–1995), nephew of Sigmund Freud. His seminal book, Propaganda , appeared in 1928, just in time for technocrats to integrate it into their science of social engineering toolkit. Bernays was always direct, as evidenced in the opening of his book’s Chapter I, Organizing Chaos:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.[8]

The last statement in his book was just as pointed:

Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.[9]

Productive ends? Order out of chaos? This is the stuff technocrat dreams are made of.

Everything between the first page and the last page of Propaganda served as a catalyst for what would become an immense industry designed to manipulate and control the masses. Today, the three intertwined but distinct parts of that industry are “public relations” (or publicity), “marketing,” and “advertising.” Their respective experts spin reality in various directions for the purpose of promoting products that fetch handsome profits. Without PR flacks and marketing gurus and ad copywriters, how would a brewer sell suds successfully? Who’d come up with the perfect scene: a pool party teeming with big-abs blokes and blondes in bikinis?

Bernays had a technocrat’s mind and was authoritatively described in those terms. An article in an MIT journal captured his persona perfectly:

Right up to the end of his life (Bernays died in 1995), he held fast to his belief that the masses needed leadership, and that leadership would come from an elite, technocratic few who would shape the masses’ reality and thus produce a better society.[10]

Propaganda became such an influential tool that academia adopted it and taught it in schools of journalism, social studies, political science, marketing, and other disciplines. Since Bernays’ seminal work, a bevy of books have been written examining every aspect of what makes propaganda, well, propaganda.

In 2020, I looked at several college textbooks that dealt with propaganda and was surprised to see remarkably similar lists of techniques in each. Below, I’ve summarized the most common propaganda techniques just to make a point of how the subject has become standardized:

Fear: The most powerful emotion, fear of loss or of physical harm, opens the mind to accept the solutions provided by the propagandist—solutions that would not otherwise have been accepted. The technique of fear has been the foundation of all pandemic-related propaganda.

The Bandwagon: A claim is made that, because everyone else is doing it, so should you. This assertion is often combined with other propaganda techniques. You’ll recognize this all-too-familiar bandwagon entreaty: “Everyone is taking the shot because it is safe and effective; you should take it, too.”

Card Stacking: This technique highlights all the “good” information and leaves out the “bad.” In other words, only the facts that support the propagandist’s agenda are presented, while everything else is intentionally suppressed. This blatant censorship is rampant in the mainstream media, social media, and search engines these days.

Plain Folks: The propagandist implies that he’s just an ordinary person like you, with the same dreams and desires, and therefore you should believe him.

The Testimonial: A person unrelated to a product testifies that the propaganda about the product is true and that you can trust his word. Often the ideal testifier is a likeable, credible celebrity. Other times the person giving the testimonial is a “nobody” who is chosen because he comes off as one of the “plain folks” described above.

Glittering Generalities: Propaganda is sometimes unquestioningly accepted simply because the sweeping statements it makes cannot be defined and often contain vague “virtue words.” Examples: “This anti-discrimination program will ensure equity for all” and “We will create millions of green jobs with this budget.”

Name-Calling/Deflection: Ad hominem attacks leveled by a propagandist can serve to deflect negative attention away from himself and toward someone else. For example, global warming scaremonger Al Gore once said threateningly, “Deniers deserved to be punished.” Today’s name-callers claim that America has a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and they target for ad hominem attacks whoever resists being jabbed.

Transfer: This technique transfers an organization’s prestige to the propagandist’s program or product—thus giving that program or product the same degree of prestige. This propaganda tactic takes advantage of an organization’s desire to maintain its reputation, to follow the crowd, to obey the rules, to acquiesce to authority. Look at what happened when public health officials and political leaders persuaded the pastors of many US churches to promote pandemic propaganda to their congregations. Of course, church members eagerly complied with whatever “protection measures” pastors urged them to take.

False Analogy: When two concepts are linked together despite having no actual cause-and-effect relationship, it is called a false analogy or false equivalence. Here’s an attempt to do just that: “People who question vaccines are anti-vaxxers. Mary does not want to take the COVID vaccine. Thus, Mary is an anti-vaxxer.”

Either/Or Fallacy: “Black-and-white” thinking offers only two choices, even though there might be other admissible answers. The either/or fallacy polarizes people and forces them to accept the outcome desired by the fallacy-promoter. Which of us wants to agree with “You are either for science or against it” when our understanding of “science” is antithetical to the propagandist’s?

Faulty Cause and Effect: This technique suggests that because A follows B, A must cause B. For example, (A) Joe supports gun ownership, and (B) murderers often use guns to kill people; therefore, Joe must be a murderer himself—or at least a fan of murderers.

Euphemisms: It isn’t uncommon for propagandists to use a word or phrase that pretends to communicate truth but in fact does the opposite. One rhetorical device they employ to that end is the euphemism, which “replaces accurate language that may be offensive with language that is more palatable, to instill a positive association,” as The Propwatch Project puts it. Thus, the propagandist’s euphemistic “alternative facts” really means “outright false or misleading claims.” Likewise, the propagandistic UN uses the euphemism “sustainable development” to hide its true technocratic intentions: “social engineering” of the masses.

Loaded Words: Related to name-calling, loaded words are what the propagandist uses to describe perfectly normal actions and completely ordinary circumstances. You may remember the egregious, extremist language the US government used when it labeled parents who rightfully protest at school board meetings “domestic terrorists” who commit “hate crimes.”

Scapegoat: Quite simply, the age-old scapegoat technique assigns blame to someone who is not a party to something. Two examples of scapegoating will suffice: (1) every presidential administration typically blames current economic woes on the previous administration; (2) after COVID vaccines were offered to the public, only the unvaccinated were blamed for the ongoing pandemic.

Logical Disconnect: The World Economic Forum is now famous for its ad campaign, “You will own nothing and be happy.” What a typical propagandist ploy, to say that happiness is the result of owning nothing, when everyone knows from experience that such a statement is totally illogical and untrue. A corollary to the WEF’s absurd claim might as well be: “Homeless people own nothing, therefore they must be happy.”[11]

At this point you might be thinking that whoever owns or influences the media would be smart to use these propaganda techniques in various combinations to achieve any conceivable end. You would be correct. The sad truth is, media owners and influencers are already employing this strategy. The sadder truth: It is the technocrats and their transhumanist twins who control Big Media—that is, all the legacy print media and television and radio stations plus all social media (think Facebook and Twitter and YouTube) in America.

Once we know the sources of propaganda and have examined the specific techniques, we can pinpoint the real objectives for promulgating the propaganda.

For instance, throughout 2020, 2021, and 2022, Big Media delivered a non-stop tsunami of propaganda urging everyone to get the COVID-19 mRNA injection to fight the virus. Before long it was discovered that the injections were ineffective and, in many cases, harmful. Turns out the goal of Big Pharma and the complicit captured agencies—in other words, their real objective—was not to prevent contagion but to introduce a new medical therapy. This therapy does something no vaccine ever did: It hacks the human immune system via genetic sequences that are engineered into the mRNA and in doing so ultimately edits the human genome. Not that the propagandists ever came out and said as much!

When we analyze the COVID “ vaccine” propaganda, it becomes clear that its source is the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, both of which are heavily influenced, if not dominated, by transhumanists and technocrats. It also becomes obvious that their promises have been at best disingenuous and at worst patently false. Many of its takers have suffered severely and become either permanently injured or a fatal statistic. The cause of their illness or death has been irrefutably determined to be one or more rounds of the COVID shot.

Is there a lesson we can take from this dangerous—often fatal—lie and apply it to our future run-ins with propaganda? Yes. Not just one lesson, but many lessons. One I propose we all heed is this: Whenever we detect propaganda at play, our knee-jerk reaction should always be to ask, “What is the product being sold to us by the propagandists?” and “What do those same propagandists say the product will do for us?” Invariably, the product is actually designed to do something far different from the propagandists’ plug—something far worse.

The Nudge

In 2008, Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago professor of behavioral economics, co-authored a book titled The Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. His “nudge theory” was quickly picked up by many governments, corporations, and non-governmental organizations, who began using it as an influential policy tool to manipulate the behavior of employees, customers, and citizens. Nine years later, Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on psychological biases in behavioral economics.[12]

Now let’s look—through the eyes of Henry Farrell, who teaches political science and international affairs at George Washington University—at the fallout from Thaler’s nudge theory, shall we? In a Vox article, Farrell provides a critical analysis of what has become known as “nudgeocracy,” or the practice of nudging. He writes:

Indeed, there are many circumstances under which nudges are a good idea. But the fad for nudgeocracy has hidden implications. Thaler and [co-author Cass] Sunstein describe the philosophy that underlies nudging as “libertarian paternalism” — libertarian because it lets people make the choices that they want to, paternalist because it provides them with a father’s guiding hand. Behind nudgeocracy lies the assumption that daddy knows best.

For Thaler and Sunstein, daddy is a “choice architect” — a skilled and intelligent technocrat who uses good data, good social science and his own intelligence to figure out what people would really want to do, if only they were as smart and well informed as the choice architect.”

Farrell concludes that nudging “amounts to a kind of technocracy, which assumes that experts will know which choices are in the interests of ordinary people better than those people know themselves. This may be true under some circumstances,” he continues, “but it will not be true all of the time, or even most of the time, if there are no good opportunities for those ordinary people to voice their preferences.”

Thaler and Sunstein apparently don’t believe that the “ordinary people” Farrell describes know how to “voice their preferences”—or that they even have the ability and the right to make their own choices. Hence:

Our goal, in short, is to help people make the choices that they would have made if they had paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive ability, and complete self-control.

A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.[13]

The nudging mechanism that controls people’s behavior is very subtle. As Thaler and Sunstein explain it, “nudge architects”—who fit my description of technocrats to a T—first determine what the most rational choice or decision should be in a given situation. Then they design a “nudge” to steer the target, without his conscious knowledge, to that outcome.

Fascinating, isn’t it, that Thaler and Sunstein believe they and their fellow practitioners always pay full attention, always possess complete information, always have unlimited cognitive ability and complete self-control. By contrast, they deem the rest of us perpetually deficient in attention, information, cognitive ability and self-control. Paternalism, indeed.

Similar to the standardized techniques of propaganda we listed above, nudging has developed its own behavior-influencing strategies—among them are social proof, numerical anchors, option restriction, and competition. It’s not necessary to know all the details of these nudging techniques, but it is important to recognize that nudging has become a highly developed discipline.

Much as I dislike referring to it, Google’s search engine provides a good example of nudging in action. When you type in a few letters to begin a new search, a tailored type-ahead list of choices is presented to you, offering one-click suggestions. Google’s nudge architects know you are much more likely to pick one of their completed suggestions than you are to type in your original search idea. What you may not realize is that Google very likely had already compiled information about your previous searches, preferences, purchases, etc. The autotype options it presents to you are nuanced by that data to trick you into selecting a certain destination of Google’s choosing. While your data can be used to sell you products, it can just as easily be used to nudge you to vote for certain political candidates.

In the hands of technocrats and their transhumanist twins, the practice of nudge theory has exploded since the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020. Nudging has caused people to dutifully accept public health policies such as wearing masks, social distancing, working from home, and, ultimately, submitting to experimental mRNA-based injections. In other cases, where nudging alone didn’t get the job done, outright mandates were put in place to force compliance.

One journal reported on the effect of nudging in Great Britain during 2020–2022:

This politics of behavior has given rise to a new form of technocratic governance. Then prime minister David Cameron gave this technocracy its most explicit form when he helped set up the Nudge Unit in 2010. This was charged with the task of developing policies that could shape people’s thoughts, choices and actions. As far as the nudgers were concerned, subliminal psychological techniques were preferable to democratic debate and argument.[14]

The article goes on to say:

A government that substitutes its own preferences in place of people’s free will is clearly one which does not take freedom seriously. In effect, nudging allows experts to try to colonize people’s internal life and attempt to make their decisions for them .[15]

When the cunning, crafty art of nudging and the devious, deceptive art of propaganda are employed together to achieve specific outcomes, they represent the height of technocracy’s “science of social engineering.” This is not to say that there are no other tools available, but the combination of nudging and propagandizing is a solid one-two knockout punch.

What, then, is the role of newly popularized “mass formation”?

Mass Formation

How many times in the past three years have you heard the question, “Why are people so gullible?” They usually go on to describe a driver who is alone in the car with the windows rolled up and a face mask on—for protection from a virus the mask cannot possibly protect against.

One man who has attempted to answer that question is Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and one of the world’s leading experts on totalitarianism and mass formation.

Desmet published his much-anticipated book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism , in June 2022. In it, he lays out his theory of mass formation, a subject he had been interviewed about and had written articles about—bringing him much attention—over the previous twenty-four months. According to Desmet, “mass formation is, in essence, a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individuals’ ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically.” He points out that today’s totalitarianism is led not by iconic dictators like Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler but by “dull bureaucrats and technocrats.”[16]

To his credit, Desmet accurately explains the “narrative of mechanistic science, in which man is reduced to a biological organism” and becomes an “insignificant by-product of mechanistic processes”[17] :

Man may not realize it, but his humanity does not really matter, it is nothing essential. His whole existence, his longing and his lust, his romantic lamentations and his most superficial needs, his joy and his sorrow, his doubt and his choices, his anger and unreasonableness, his pleasure and his suffering, his deepest aversion and his most lofty aesthetic appreciations, in short, the entire drama of his existence, can ultimately be reduced to elementary particles that interact according to the laws of mechanics.[18]

This is, of course, the essence of both technocracy and transhumanism.

Desmet believes there are four simultaneous conditions necessary for a group to form and fall into mass formation. All the individuals in that group must:

Experience a lack of social bonds and isolation 

See life as meaningless or senseless 

Have free-floating anxiety (be anxious but unable to pinpoint why) 

Have free-floating frustration and aggression [19] 

When these four conditions exist in an individual who is then presented with a narrative that identifies the object of his anxiety, frustration, and aggression, that individual is prone to falling into mass formation. Doing so enables him to regain both meaning in his life and social bonds with like-minded persons. This temporary psychological state satisfies him but is extremely dangerous, because he has forfeited his ability to think critically, independently.

Desmet’s theory of mass formation perfectly explains events like the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, where 909 followers were led by Peoples Temple cult leader Jim Jones to drink a poison-laced suicide concoction that sent them all to an instant and early death.

Where Desmet errs, however, is in his answer to the question he pointedly asks, “Should we consider mass formation the result of a conspiracy?” Desmet says no. Instead, he posits, authoritarian leaders are drawn into the mass formation themselves and they then solidify and perpetuate their condition. He further suggests:

As such, in a certain sense, conspiracy thinking — the thinking that reduces all world events to one big conspiracy — fulfills the same function as mass formation. As with mass formation, conspiracy theorizing fills humans with a kind of enthusiasm. The anxiety, anger, and discontent that are now associated with a few simple mental images transform a strongly negative state into a (symptomatic) positive one .[20]

Apparently Desmet has not considered: Who creates and distributes the narrative that causes the mass formation in the first place? Is it possible to use social engineering techniques to artificially create the four conditions that he says are necessary for spontaneous mass formation? Are the social engineers who actively set out to deceive and subjugate people more to blame than the victims whom they induce into the condition of mass formation?

As the co-author of two books on the globalist Trilateral Commission and the sole author of three books on the globalist technocratic movement (this book being the third), I have followed the process of globalization and the perpetrators of that process for the past forty-five years. In that time, I have observed that there are most definitely despotic figures who conspire together to lay out strategies that achieve certain ends—ends that inevitably and I dare say purposefully target many innocent victims.

When, for instance, United Nations executive Christiana Figueres stated that the UN intended to overthrow capitalism and free market economics, that it had created a timetable to achieve it, that it had the means to do so, and that it was taking immediate action to start the process—she was defining a classic conspiracy. Could Figueres be called a victim of mass formation? As an ideologue, yes. But as one of its hypnotized subjects, no, most certainly not. She was a witting fellow conspirator in a globalist plot, pure and simple.

I will concede that partial blame must be accepted by every adult who has fallen into mass formation. The hundreds of men and women who died in the Jonestown Massacre should never have entered the trap in the first place. (Of course the innocent children whose parents brought them into the cult are excused from all blame.) That said, I acknowledge that it was their cult leader alone who mixed the mass suicide cocktail and ordered them to drink it.

As a psychoanalyst and researcher, Desmet is able to conceive of the mechanics involved in creating and perpetuating mass formation. He is a cogent observer and explicator of the subject. His warnings against mass formation should be taken to heart.

Why? Because the creators and perpetuators of mass formation turn out to be technocrats and transhumanists—the very ones who have dedicated their entire careers to implementing and enforcing the science of social engineering. Thus, in this writer’s opinion, mass formation in the hands of today’s technocrats and transhumanists is as dangerous to civilization as the invention of the atomic bomb.

The evidence, especially since 2020, suggests that those technocrats and transhumanists are deploying the tools of social engineering against rest of the world to the fullest extent. They are conspiring to bring about the most dangerous period of mass formation in human history.

Footnotes

[1] B. F. Skinner, Cumulative Record (B. F. Skinner Foundation, 1999) p. 182.

[2] Britannica’s definition of mechanism: “In philosophy, mechanism is the predominant form of Materialism, which holds that natural phenomena can and should be explained by reference to matter and motion and their laws. It rejected the notion of organisms by reducing biological functions to physical and chemical processes, thus putting an end to spirit–body dualism.”

https://www.britannica.com/topic/mechanism-philosophy .

[3] Britannica’s definition of Taylorism: A “system of scientific management advocated by Fred W. Taylor. In Taylor’s view, the task of factory management was to determine the best way for the worker to do the job, to provide the proper tools and training, and to provide incentives for good performance.” https://www.britannica.com/science/Taylorism .

[4] Britannica’s definition of systems theory (also called social systems theory): “In social science, the study of society as a complex arrangement of elements, including individuals and their beliefs, as they relate to a whole (e.g., a country).” https://www.britannica.com/topic/systems-theory .

[5] “What is Technocracy,” The Technocrat , 1938.

[6] Richard C. Olson, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe , (University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 1.

[7] Op cit., p. 242–243.

[8] Edward Bernays, Propaganda (Horace Liveright, Inc., 1928), p. 8.

[9] Ibid., p. 159.

[10] Gehl, Robert and Lawson, Sean, “Masters of Crowds: The Rise of Mass Social Engineering,” The MIT Press Reader. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/masters-of-crowds-the-rise-of-mass-social-engineering .

[11] Wood, Patrick, “Exposing Propaganda: The Vaccine For Liberty, Truth And Reason,” Technocracy News & Trends, January 17, 2022. https://www.technocracy.news/exposing-propaganda-the-vaccine-for-liberty-truth-and-reason .

[12] Farrell, Henry, “This year’s economics Nobel winner invented a tool that’s both brilliant and undemocratic,” Vox , October 16, 2017. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/10/16/16481836/nudges-thaler-nobel-economics-prize-undemocratic-tool .

[13] Ibid., p. 9.

[14] Furedi, Frank, “’Nudge’ has no place in our democracy,” spiked , January 14, 2022. https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/01/14/nudge-has-no-place-in-our-democracy

[15] Ibid.

[16] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022), p. 2.

[17] Ibid., p. 17.

[18] Ibid., p. 17.

[19] Ibid., p. 94–96

[20] Ibid., p. 128.

The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism

Patrick Wood