Forces of habit - introduction

 THE PSYCHOACTIVE REVOLUTION

ON JULY 13 , 1926 , Anthony Colombo, a man of many habits, all of them bad, checked into the Philadelphia General Hospital. The staff assigned him to the drug ward—a good choice, considering that each day of his life he smoked a quarter-ounce of opium, puffed 80 cigarettes, drank two cups of coffee or tea, and downed a quart of whiskey. He got drunk nearly every day, he explained to an intern. He had begun smoking the opium to sober up.

But he didn’t use the hard stuff. No cocaine. No barbiturates. “No narcotics other than opium”—a lie betrayed by his upper arms and thighs, pitted with the scars of hypodermic abscesses. Or perhaps it was a white lie. Opium smokers looked down on needle users in those days. Colombo had his pride to consider.

He was, after all, a working man. Addiction to opium had affected neither his will power, he boasted, nor his ability to work. He was in the liquor business, he said—a striking admission from the citizen of a country that did not, in 1926, officially have a liquor business.

The opium habit did not affect his appetite, the intern noted. Just 33 years of age, Colombo tipped the scales at 275 pounds. “The chest is immense,” he wrote; “the abdomen is large and pendulous.” Considering Colombo’s weight, his “three to five meals daily,” his opium, his four score cigarettes, his coffee, his tea, and his whiskey, some form of gratification must have been passing through his mouth practically every waking moment. Indeed, Colombo led a life—probably not a long life—of such continuous and varied stimulation and psychoactive pleasure that no emperor, no despot, no potentate of the ancient world, however wealthy, determined, or decadent, could have matched it.1Yet Anthony Colombo was a lowly man, a petty bootlegger of modest means. It was his luck, or misfortune, to live in the twentieth century, in an industrial city in an industrial nation that had, in its brief history, managed to refine and mass-market an impressive array of psychoactive pleasures. By the time Colombo checked into the hospital, millions of ordinary people throughout the world could lead, in neurochemical terms, a life-style unimaginable for even the wealthiest five hundred years earlier.

I call this development the psychoactive revolution. People everywhere have acquired progressively more, and more potent, means of altering their ordinary waking consciousness. One of the signal events of world history, this development had its roots in the transoceanic commerce and empire building of the early modern period—that is, the years from about 1500 to 1789. Forces of Habit describes how early modern merchants, planters, and other imperial elites succeeded in bringing about the confluence of the world’s psychoactive resources and then explores why, despite enormous profits and tax revenues, their successors changed their minds and restricted or prohibited many—but not all—drugs.

The term “drugs” is an extremely problematic one, connoting such things as abuse and addiction. For all its baggage, the word has one great virtue. It is short. Indeed, one of the reasons its use persisted, over the objections of offended pharmacists, was that headline writers needed something pithier than “narcotic drugs.” In this book I use “drugs” as a convenient and neutral term of reference for a long list of psychoactive substances, licit or illicit, mild or potent, deployed for medical and nonmedical purposes. Alcoholic and caffeinated beverages, cannabis, coca, cocaine, opium, morphine, and tobacco are all drugs in this sense, as are heroin, methamphetamine, and many other semisynthetic and synthetic substances. None is inherently evil. All can be abused. All are sources of profit. All have become, or at least have the potential to become, global commodities. 2This might not be apparent from a casual inspection of drug histories. Most scholarship deals with particular drugs or types of drugs in a particular setting: tea in Japan, vodka in Russia, narcotics in America, and so on. I have tried to connect these scholarly dots, linking the many separate histories in a big-picture narrative of the discovery, interchange, and exploitation of the planet’s psychoactive resources. I aim to do for drugs what William McNeill did for diseases in Plagues and Peoples (1976), a world-historical study of the exchange of microorganisms and its impact on civilizations. Disease and drug exchanges have many close parallels. That imported alcohol, for example, acted as a deadly pathogen for indigenous peoples is more than a metaphor. But there are also important differences. McNeill’s story was largely one of tragic happenstance. Invisible germs spread by human contact had lethal but usually unintended consequences. The spread of drug cultivation and manufacturing, however, was anything but accidental. It depended on conscious human enterprise, and only secondarily on unconscious biological processes.

The book’s first section describes the confluence of the world’s principal psychoactive resources, concentrating on alcoholic and caffeinated beverages, tobacco, opiates, cannabis, coca, cocaine, and sugar—the last a key ingredient in many drug products. These substances, once geographically confined, all entered the stream of global commerce, though at different times and from different places. Coffee, for example, spread from Ethiopia, where the bush was indigenous, to Arabia, and then throughout the Islamic lands and Christian Europe. Europeans took the taste and the beans to the Americas, which produced 70 percent of the world’s coffee crop by the late nineteenth century. 3 European farmers and planters, employing indentured and slave labor, enjoyed great success cultivating drug crops in both hemispheres. Their collective efforts expanded world supply, drove down prices, and drew millions of less affluent purchasers into the market, democratizing drug consumption.

But not for all drugs. Embedded in the story of psychoactive commerce is a mystery, one that is often overlooked. A number of regionally popular plant drugs—kava, betel, qat, peyote—failed to become commodities in both hemispheres in the way that wine or opium did. Global drug commerce, propelled by European overseas expansion, was highly selective. For reasons that ranged from limited shelf life to cultural biases against their effects, Europeans chose to ignore or suppress many novel psychoactive plants. The ones they found useful and acceptable they traded and cultivated throughout the world, with social and environmental consequences that are still very much in evidence.

The second section, on drugs and commerce, deals with psychoactive substances as medical and recreational products. Drugs typically began their careers as expensive and rarefied medicines, touted for a variety of human and animal ailments. Once their pleasurable and consciousness-altering properties became known, they escaped the therapeutic realm and entered that of popular consumption. As they did so, their political status changed. Widespread nonmedical use of spirits, tobacco, amphetamines, and other psychoactive substances occasioned controversy, alarm, and official intervention. All large-scale societies differentiated in some way between the medical use and the nonmedical abuse of drugs, and eventually they made this distinction the moral and legal foundation for the international drug control system.

Such a system was necessary because drugs were at once dangerous and lucrative products. The opposite of “durable goods,” they were quickly consumed and had to be just as quickly replaced by those dependent on them. Regular users needed larger doses to experience the original effect, which meant that the volume of sales was likely to increase. Inventions such as improved stills, hypodermic syringes, and blended cigarettes made for more efficient, speedier, and more profitable ways to get refined chemicals into consumers’ brains. Competition sparked further innovation and widespread advertising, as manufacturers sought to cut their costs, increase market share, and enhance the appeal of their products. As drugs became cheaper and more seductive, they attracted millions of new users, generating profitable opportunities in enterprises ranging from addiction treatment to Zippo lighters. Drug commerce and its externalities were manifestations of mature capitalism’s limbic turn, its increasing focus on pleasure and emotional gratification, as opposed to consumers’ material needs. Drug commerce, to paraphrase the anthropologist Robert Ardrey, flourished in a world in which the hungry psyche was replacing the hungry belly. 4The third section, which concerns drugs and power, shows how psychoactive trade benefited mercantile and imperial elites in ways that went beyond ordinary commercial profits. These elites quickly discovered that they could use drugs to control manual laborers and exploit indigenes. Opium, for instance, kept Chinese laborers in a state of debt and dependency. Alcohol induced native peoples to trade their furs, sell their captives into slavery, and negotiate away their lands. Early modern political elites found drugs to be dependable sources of revenue. Though rulers were often initially hostile to novel drugs (tobacco struck them as an especially nasty foreign vice, provoking sanctions from royal denunciations to ritual executions), they bowed to the inevitable and imposed taxes or their equivalents, monopolies, on the expanding commerce. They prospered beyond their dreams. By 1885 taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and tea accounted for close to half of the British government’s gross income. Drug taxation was the fiscal cornerstone of the modern state, and the chief financial prop of European colonial empires. 5Political elites do not ordinarily kill the geese that lay their golden eggs. Yet, during the last hundred years, they have selectively abandoned a policy of taxed, legal commerce for one of greater restriction and prohibition, achieved by domestic legislation and international treaties. The final chapters explore the modernizing pressures, medical developments, and political maneuvers that prompted so many governments to reverse course, and why they did so for some drugs rather than others. The psychoactive counterrevolution was strikingly erratic. Its legacy is a world in which (for now) tobacco and liquor are easily and legally available, while drugs like cannabis or heroin are generally not.

Writing world history is like peering through a microscope with a low-powered lens. The observer can see a good deal of the specimen, but only by sacrificing detail. One way to avoid this problem, and the narrative monotony it entails, is to periodically zoom in on a particular episode or personality, and then back out to the larger picture. That, at any rate, is my narrative strategy. Generalizations culled from the historical, social scientific, and scientific literature are fleshed out with specific examples and—dialing up the power further—several case studies. Among these are the democratization of amphetamines, James Duke and the cigarette industry, alcohol taxation in India, and the failure of prohibition in the Soviet Union. Each of these cases serves as a kind of parable, illustrating principles important to drug history.

The subject and my approach to it require selectivity. I have concentrated on identifying and illustrating the most significant trends of the past 500 years, and have made no attempt to provide comprehensive histories of all psychoactive drugs. That task, rendered impossible by the weight of numbers, has been beyond the capability of any one person since Louis Lewin, the pioneering German psychopharmacologist, died in 1929. I should add that I have cited only a fraction of the voluminous literature on drugs. The reader will discover, however, that my documentation is not ungenerous, and will find in it many leads to the outstanding specialized scholarship on the role and impact of drugs in the modern world. 

(...)

A TRAP BAITED WITH PLEASURE

THE IDEA THAT MOST DRUGS are dangerous substances best used in limited amounts under medical supervision has become the official attitude about their appropriate social role. But it is not the only attitude. Merchants, capitalists, and the political elites who tax them have long appreciated that drugs are seductive products and lucrative sources of revenue. The clash between opportunities for profit and concerns about health forms the central moral and political conflict running through the history of psychoactive commerce. Monetary motives and concerns are as historically significant as medical ones, and for some drugs doubtless more so. The first question to consider, however, is what is it about drugs that generates so much demand? And why do some people, as Simon Paulli observed more than three centuries ago, sacrifice everything they possess to acquire them?

 

 The Evolutionary Paradox 

Drugs are poisons. Psychoactive plant alkaloids evolved as a defense mechanism against herbivores. Insects and animals who eat them become dizzy and disoriented, or experience hallucinations. Yet some persist in eating intoxicating plants and fermented fruit, even though they disrupt their repertoire of survival skills. In evolutionary terms, accidental intoxication may be valuable: it warns an organism not to go near the plant again. Seeking intoxication, let alone profiting from it, is paradoxical. It seemingly defies the logic of natural selection.

One possible explanation is that the consumption of intoxicants satisfies a basic need. All people, argues Andrew Weil, possess an innate drive to alter their normal consciousness. Children at play will whirl themselves into a vertiginous stupor; holy men and women lose themselves in meditation. The desire to vacate ego-centered consciousness is deep-seated. However, some means of achieving this end are more dangerous than others. Drugs are powerful chemical shortcuts to altered states of mind. They do not alone determine the final state, which is a product of their interaction with the user’s expectations (“set”) and physical and social environment (“setting”). But they are key ingredients. Anyone who uses them to satisfy the drive is trading off toxic effects for potency and rapidity of action. 1Although Weil’s postulated drive may be inborn, social circumstances have much to do with its strength. Bored, miserable creatures are more likely to seek altered consciousness than engaged, contented ones. Animals in captivity, for example, are much more likely to use intoxicants than those in the wild. And one could say that civilization itself represents a state of captivity. Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers in itinerant bands. After the Neolithic Revolution, most of them lived as peasants in crowded, oppressive, and disease-ridden societies. The misery and grinding poverty that were the lot of 90 percent of humanity in the early modern world go far toward explaining why tobacco and other novel drugs became objects of mass consumption. They were unexpected weapons against the human condition, newfound tools of escape from the mean prison of everyday existence. “There is no more profound way of understanding the course of history,” Nathan Kline wrote, “than in terms of this effort to escape from one’s own ‘sweating self ’ and to experience even temporary states of euphoria or relief of discomfort regardless of the cost.” 2Euphoria and relief are products of a molecular accident. Only a few toxic alkaloids have molecules that, if they succeed in entering the circulatory system and passing the blood-brain barrier, mimic or influence neurotransmitters in the brain’s reward and pain-control centers. Nature is parsimonious with pleasure. Euphoria-inducing neurotransmitters are ordinarily meted out frugally and for some accomplishment that enhances survival or reproduction. Drugs fool the system, temporarily increasing the level of these pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters.

Though scientific knowledge has accumulated rapidly in the last three decades, researchers still do not know all of the ways the brain responds to different psychoactive drugs. Some, particularly alcohol, are “messy” in that they affect several neural systems. But they do appear to have at least one common denominator. They affect—directly or indirectly, strongly or weakly—the mesolimbic dopamine system, a primitive neural substrate that serves as a key pathway for pleasure and means of providing motivation for the choices we make. Drugs stimulate this system, and perhaps others not yet identified, signaling “good choice” by way of good feelings. Even a relatively nonintoxicating drug like coffee markedly elevates mood. A carefully controlled study of coffee drinking among nurses showed that those who drank two to three cups daily committed suicide only about a third as often as abstainers. It is a fascinating finding, entirely consistent with the notion of drugs as a coping tool. 3Before refilling your mug, however, bear in mind that the repeated use of caffeine and other drugs also alters the brain’s natural chemistry in ways that are not healthful. Awash with external chemicals, the brain adjusts production of their internal equivalents or the number of receptors, becoming dependent on an outside supply. If that supply ceases, unpleasant consequences follow. Opiate withdrawal in particular triggers a cascade of symptoms: restlessness, sweating, extreme anxiety, depression, irritability, dysphoria, insomnia, fever, chills, retching and vomiting, explosive diarrhea, flu-like aches and pains. The cumulative misery has tempted many patients to suicide, as may be seen in the 1925 case history of Hermann Göring:

Cause of illness: abuse of Morphine and Eukodal; severe withdrawal symptoms . . . The patient holds a prominent place in the “Hitler party” in Germany, took part in the Hitler putsch, during which he was injured and hospitalized; says he escaped from there to Austria, was given morphine by the doctors at the hospital, after which he became addicted to morphine. Admitted to Aspuddens [Nursing Home], the patient manifested violent withdrawal symptoms (in spite of the nurse allowing him more morphine), during which he became threatening and so violent that he could no longer be kept there. Threatened to take his own life, wanted to “die like a man,” threatened to commit hara-kiri, and so on.

That Göring, winner of the Pour le Mérite (the “Blue Max”), should sink to such a state, or that he should continue to use opiates intermittently for the next twenty years, nodding off in Luftwaffe staff meetings, is a testament to the extraordinary hold this class of drugs can exert on the human system. “When the druggist sells me my daily box of Eukodol [sic] ampules he smirks like I had picked up the bait to a trap,” William S. Burroughs wrote Allen Ginsberg from Tangier in 1954. “Allen, I never had a habit like this before. Shooting every two hours. Maybe it is the Eukodol, which is semisynthetic. Trust the Germans to concoct some really evil shit.” 4Physical and psychological withdrawal symptoms can follow the regular use of any of the principal psychoactive commodities, including the less potent ones like caffeinated beverages. In 1989 doctors at London’s Hammersmith Hospital discovered that the headaches commonly experienced by postoperative patients had nothing to do with anesthesia. They were a consequence of abstaining from caffeinated beverages before and during surgery. Depression, fatigue, and lethargy are other common symptoms. Though withdrawal is not synonymous with addiction, researchers have nevertheless found unequivocal evidence of a “caffeine dependence syndrome.” This refers to patients who go to extremes to obtain caffeinated drinks, use them in dangerous or inappropriate situations, and continue drinking them despite adverse health consequences and warnings by their physicians. Honoré de Balzac, whose stubborn devotion to coffee hastened his death from heart disease, is the historical prototype. 5The notion of reversal of effects helps to explain the paradox of why people persist in manifestly unhealthful behavior. They have, as Burroughs put it, walked into a trap baited with pleasure. Having begun using the drug to feel good, they dare not stop for fear of feeling bad. If addiction is the hijacking of the body’s natural reinforcement mechanisms, withdrawal is the gun held to the head. Even addicts who detoxify completely—a process that can extend over many months for a drug like cocaine—are not the same afterwards. The brain remembers the chemical shortcuts to pleasure. Environmental cues such as a familiar tavern sign can trigger powerful cravings. Addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease.

 

 Why Exposure Matters 

The last sentence takes us into fiercely contested terrain. Before exploring the economic implications of addiction and the related phenomenon of tolerance, it is necessary to take a closer look at compulsive use. Is it fundamentally a problem of repeatedly exposing brain cells to drugs? Or is it a problem of individuals who happen to have the wrong genetic, psychological, social, cultural, and/or moral characteristics? This issue has enormous implications for both understanding the history of drugs and implementing policies for their intelligent control.

At one extreme of the debate is a figure like Nils Bejerot who views drugs as germ-like pathogens that can artificially induce destructive drives in anyone: “No disturbed personality and no underlying social problems are required for an individual to develop a drug dependence.” Exposure is the crucial variable. It explains why physicians in Germany, the United States, and other countries have historically had narcotic addiction rates up to 100 times that of the general population. “We almost never find a lawyer who plays around with the stuff,” Harry Anslinger once remarked, “and nobody can tell me that lawyers are more moral or less inclined to get into trouble than doctors or nurses. You can’t get away from it—if people lay their hands on the stuff, there are always a few who will try.” Salvation lay in supply control. 6At the other extreme is a figure like Stanton Peele who views addiction as a people problem, not a drug problem. Addiction has nothing to do with a drug or its chemical properties. Indeed, people can become addicted to activities like gambling or drug treatment itself. In this view, addicts are essentially inadequate or misguided personalities who return again and again to drugs (or their behavioral equivalents) for a “reassuring absorption into a consuming sensation which takes away all consciousness of life’s problems.” Personal values determine whether people use, persist in using, become addicted to, and quit using drugs. Cultural values in turn shape personal ones. Cultures that tolerate drunkenness and invest alcohol with the power to control behavior suffer worse alcohol problems than those that frown on drunkenness and hold the individual accountable. Hence alcoholism is more widespread in Ireland than in Italy, despite high levels of per capita consumption in both countries. Supply matters less than the personal and cultural values that modulate demand and comportment. 7My own view of the matter (and that of most drug producers, distributors, and advertisers) is that both of these seemingly contradictory positions are true, though exposure is the critical precondition. Addiction following the use of any drug is the exception, not the rule. Only about a third of the young people who experiment with cigarettes, one of the most powerful addictive products known, become dependent users. Many individuals have inborn characteristics that confer immunity. The philosopher Karl Popper became so allergic to cigarette smoke that he turned into a virtual recluse. The real reason Bill Clinton didn’t inhale marijuana is that he couldn’t tolerate smoke in his lungs, despite repeated efforts by his friends to instruct him in this essential Oxonian art. Anyone with a persistent, violent reaction to a drug is essentially addiction-proof. Those with strong superegos and religious scruples are similarly less prone to experiment. Their opposite numbers, thrill-seeking sociopaths, are far more likely to light up. Peele has a point: individual values matter. So do collective ones. A strong taboo against consuming (as opposed to exporting) opium helped the Turks avoid a major addiction problem. LSD never became popular in Chinese cultures that equated hallucination with mental illness. The indulgent Japanese attitude toward alcohol abuse, by contrast, diminished the protective effect of the flushing genes carried by half its population. 8Yet history furnishes equally dramatic lessons about the importance of exposure. Iranian opium production expanded rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century. The silk industry went into decline, and opium seemed an attractive export crop for which there was rising world demand. But with time the exports fell, and large numbers of Iranians took to obliterating their miseries with home-grown opium. An estimated 2.8 million of them were addicts when Reza Shah Pahlavi’s government attempted to eliminate production in the mid-1950s. The predictable result was fewer addicts, somewhere between a quarter and a half million in 1968, but more users of smuggled heroin. Heroin smuggled from neighboring countries also proved to be the bane of the Shah’s puritanical successors. Though they launched a crusade against narcotics, hanging dealers by the score, they could not stanch the flow of heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nor could they ease the severe unemployment that tempted Iranians to engage in drug use and trafficking. 9That Cubans once smoked 30 percent of all cigars made in Cuba, that Asian communities which grow and sell opium have consistently higher addiction rates than those which do not, that African transshipment points like Ghana or Nigeria have developed serious heroin and cocaine problems, that Kentuckians suffer exceptionally high rates of lung cancer—all of this strongly suggests that proximity, and hence familiarity and availability, matters. But how much? In 1973 Philip Baridon published the results of a unique global study in which he compiled officially reported addiction rates for 33 countries. He then compared these rates to twelve independent social, economic, and geographic variables (for example, urbanization, per capita income, proximity to opium- and coca-producing areas) in a multiple-regression analysis (a statistical technique for estimating relative causal weights). Proximity alone explained 45 percent of the variance, far more than any other variable. “The most fundamental fact about drug abuse is frequently overlooked in the welter of complicated psycho-social explanations,” Baridon concluded. “If the drug is not available, there will be no abuse of it.” 10This is why drug history is replete with giveaway promotions: bottles of Vin Mariani, cigarettes during rush week, smokeless tobacco at drag races, and surplus Brazilian coffee shipped gratis to Japan. The providers of the celebrated “free lunch” that accompanied the not-so-free beer in American workingmen’s saloons a century ago played a clever variation on this theme. One Chicago salesman confided to a fellow worker that “he had had to swear off the free lunch when he realized he was beginning to go to saloons more for the beer than for the food.” The idea behind all such schemes is to expose potential lifelong customers, particularly young ones whose consumption habits are still plastic. Young, single, undersocialized urban males who lack genetic or cultural protections and who are already using other drugs are on the A-list of susceptibility. They are most likely to experiment with and eventually become addicted to novel drugs, although, as Bejerot insisted, they are not the only types of people who become compulsive users. Given enough time and exposure, millions of others may join them. In 1915 American cigarette smokers were mostly confined to pool halls and street corners. In 1955 two-thirds of all American men between 25 and 64 smoked regularly, the vast majority of them cigarettes. 11 

Davit T. Courtwright

Bollyn on the criminal network behind 9/11

Paula Zahn: You hear this stuff, and it just makes you sick to your stomach! There is absolutely no evidence! That anybody other than al-Qaeda was involved with this attack!

Green: Absolutely no evidence!

Bollyn: Right! 

Green: So your challenge now. Israeli involvement in 9/11. Give me, let’s just do the top ten. You don’t have to get into all the details. People can watch your presentations and read your books, which they absolutely should! They should know, everybody should know this information. But, let’s go, ten bullet points of undisputed evidence. (...)

Michael Chertoff and other Top Connections

Green: What would you say is some more top connections?

Bollyn: Well, then you have the role of Michael Chertoff. In 1993 there was the first bombing of the World Trade Center, where a car bomb went off, in which the FBI was very much involved in the operation. That was like a sting operation. The FBI paid this Egyptian Colonel, Salem, a million dollars to testify against the, you know, motley crew he had collected around him, including the “blind Sheikh”. These people went to jail for like, five thousand years!

Michael Chertoff was a key person in the prosecution, from New Jersey. And, because the case had it’s roots, … The conspiracy apparently had it’s roots in New Jersey, according to the operation. Michael Chertoff, then, fast forward few years, is then the Assistant Attorney General of the United States, responsible for, … he was given the portfolio for investigating 9/11, the 9/11 crime. But rather than investigate it, he allowed the evidence to be destroyed.

Now Michael Chertoff, you have to understand, is a son of the Mossad. He’s an Israeli-American. His mother was an Israeli citizen, which makes him an Israeli citizen. His mother was one of the first Mossad agents in Israel.

Green: You write about that in your book. She worked for the airlines that brought all the people from, …

Bollyn: Right! From Yemen. “Operation Magic Carpet”, I think it was called. So, …

Green: And isn’t his dad a Talmudic scholar?

Bollyn: Was. Yes, yes, that’s right. Rabbi Chertoff. And so, Michael Chertoff plays a key role in the prosecution that didn’t happen! The investigation that was a non-investigation! That’s really important to understand, because if 9/11 had been investigated by any competent law enforcement in this country, the game would have been up!

So they had to make sure that there was no proper investigation! So what did they do? Instead of calling it a “crime”, they called it an “act of war”, already on September 11th! By calling it an act of war, it meant that the military would be the instrument used to deliver justice. So that there would be no investigation. So then, Michael Chertoff basically facilitated the cover-up by confiscating evidence in the form of video tapes, and steel, and engine parts, whatever.

Green: Detainees. Israeli spies, …

Bollyn: All that! And then facilitating the cover-up. So, and he’s a key person. The operation could not have gone ahead had they not made sure that they had absolute 100% security in the form of control of US law enforcement.

Green: And Michael Chertoff’s cousin was at “Popular Mechanics” working on “debunking” 9/11.

Bollyn: Right.

Green: And you were the one that called his mom and found that they were related, and she said, “Yes”. And it’s so funny, because you go to the debunking articles and they say:

“Well, Michael Chertoff wasn’t even at the Homeland Security until several years after that!”

So yeah, he wasn’t the head of Homeland Security, but what position was he on 9/11? Number two at the FBI?

Bollyn: Michael Chertoff?

Green: Yeah.

Bollyn: He was Assistant Attorney General, and he was in charge of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice. And he was the one that was given — John Ashcroft, who was Attorney General, gave the portfolio to Chertoff. Chertoff had the final say in all decisions regarding 9/11 investigation.

Then later, he became head of Homeland Security. The second one I think, and in that position he maintained his control over the evidence of 9/11.

The Cover-up and Destruction of Evidence

That’s very important, because the 9/11 crime, you have to look at the cover-up and the destruction of evidence. And there again you find that the network that destroyed the evidence, and the junkyards that were responsible for the destruction of evidence are, were, under control of Israeli zionists.

Green: Okay, so Michael Chertoff, all his connections, the junkyards, also Ptech, who’s Ptech?

Bollyn: Ptech was the little enterprise software company in Quincy, Massachusetts, who had their software running on all of the Federal computers on 9/11, military computers. And they had spent two years in the basement of the FAA with Mitre corporation. Checking to see the interoperability between the FAA and military, in the event of a catastrophe, just like this one. And the computer network and the computer system failed on 9/11, obviously.

Green: And the security company at the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and at the airports.

Bollyn: Yeah. There’s two different security companies. At the airports it was Huntley USA, which is an Israeli owned company, owned by ICTS in Holland. And that’s a Mossad LL security company from the beginning. And they controlled airport security, and passenger screening operations, at the airports involved in 9/11.

Then at the World Trade Center, the company that was responsible for security procedures was a company called “Kroll Associates”. Which is, again, owned by Jules Kroll, and involved Maurice Greenberg. These are again, high-level zionists. And the Israeli guys that tried to get the security contract for the World Trade Center, Avram Shalom Bendor, had gone to work for Kroll associates after 1993.

Green: So they still got it, even though they had it cancelled in ‘87?

Bollyn: Yeah, they got it through using an American trojan horse.

Green: And they finally got it and then pulled it off, shortly after.

Philip Zelikow and the “9/11 Commission Report”

Bollyn: It looks that way. Philip Zelikow is a very zionist guy, he had a lot of power in creating George Bush in the beginning, creating George Bush’s Presidency. But when they wanted to do 9/11, … you know, a year later, more than a year later, when they wanted to set up as 9/11 Commission to basically write the myth, they first went to Kissinger. But Kissinger didn’t want to reveal his client list, so then the second choice was Philip Zelikow.

And so Philip Zelikow became the executive director of the 9/11 Commission Report. And he came to the table, with a fully detailed outline of what the Commission report would say in the end, before the Commission even began meeting!

And Mr Philip Zelikow, he’s a jewish fellow from Texas, or from Southern California — both places he’s lived and studied. When he got his degree, I think his PhD. His PhD was on the “creation and maintenance of the public myth”. And that’s what he created with the 9/11 Commission Report.

So it’s like, when I wrapped up, when I concluded my “Solving 9/11” book, finally in 2011, I wanted to investigate how the deception was contained by the destruction of evidence, and the cover-up. And that’s really important. Like Nixon said:

“It’s not the crime you catch, it’s the cover-up!”

Because in the cover-up you see all of the key players. They have to reveal themselves. It’s the same thing with the media in this country. You know, the media has been complicit in the 9/11 cover-up! They can never come back, they can never redeem themselves to the American people! They have been part of the betrayal!

Green: That’s how I know 9/11 is a conspiracy, because you do the research, like we’re talking about zionists fingerprints all over it! Everywhere you look, from top to bottom, going back thirty years. And then you hear the media at CNN say:

“There’s absolutely no evidence!”

They’re obviously lying and not even being objective, even 1% objective!

Bollyn: Right.

Green: So you’re right. The cover-up is the biggest evidence of 9/11. Even more in your face than the buildings blowing up and coming down free fall, I believe.

Bollyn: Yes. Because you see, it’ll take some real investigation to find out who put the nano-thermite in the World Trade Center, where the nano-thermite was made, etc. You know, finding the fingerprints of the actual criminals involved in the crime, that’s harder to do! But the people who are involved in the cover-up, in the deception, and taking the country to war, based on the lie, that’s all very clear!

The Need for a Real Investigation of 9/11 and Cover-up

So what we really need is a huge investigation in this country, in which all of the people who are involved in the 9/11 crime and cover-up, are arrested, and charged, and investigated thoroughly!

Like Chertoff! To find out who was calling the shots, and connecting the network. And that requires something no less than a political revolution in this country. Because it would stand the entire power structure on it’s head!

That’s why I’m saying that, you know, we don’t have a lot of hope that within, … it’s like, we live in an occupied government right now, we live in a government that’s occupied! Our nation’s occupied! And trying to work within this occupied government for 9/11 truth, when the whole deck is stacked against you, is very difficult!

That’s why it’s going to take a real revolution of awareness, a popular revolution!

Green: When you Google 9/11 conspiracies, one of the first things that’s gonna come up is “Snopes”. And it’s gonna be an article saying that:

The 4,000 Israelis Who Didn’t Show Up on 9/11?

“It’s debunked. That conspiracy theorists believe that 4,000 Israelis didn’t show up to work that day.”

I’m sure you’ve heard about this. Where did that originate? Do you know?

Bollyn: Yeah, the story about the 4,000 Israelis who were thought to be at the World Trade Center, or at the Pentagon on 9/11, came from the Israeli Foreign Ministry itself. And it was reported by “Jerusalem Post” online. And the editor of the newspaper said later, that this has been, they were completely accurate in the reporting.

So 4,000 families in Israel contacted the foreign ministry asking about their loved ones, and that’s the source of that. It’s nothing Arabic about it! It comes straight from the Israeli government itself. And combine that with the Odigo instant messaging service, that had a warning that went out several hours before 9/11, that warned of an attack at the World Trade Center, and was precise to the minute! Those two facts together indicate that, that warning went out, was received, and many people escaped injury that day.

Green: So there is some truth to the 4,000 claim, or was that purposely put out to be disinfo, a red herring?

Bollyn: No! That’s completely true about the 4,000. I mean, as reported in the “Jerusalem Post”. It came from the, … the source is the Israeli Foreign Ministry itself.

Green: Okay. And it came from family members in Israel calling, …

Bollyn: Yeah!

Green: And finding out that:

“Oh! They didn’t go that day!”

Like they’re all like Silverstein?

Bollyn: Well, they were wondering, they were calling the Foreign Ministry to find out what was the status, if they had information about that person, one of those 4,000 people. And the instant messaging seems to have worked, in that many Israelis seem to have gotten a message to stay away from the World Trade Center that day.

Green: Only two people came forward as reported and, …

Bollyn: Two people in Israel got the message. The vice-president of the company said the warning was precise, to the minute. This was only reported in a few, Haaretz newspaper, and maybe in the New York Times once, or The Washington Post once, and never reported again. The whole story about the prior warning from Odigo, and the indication, the evidence, that Israelis were warned ahead of time, was never discussed again.

Green: But there’s no evidence!

Bollyn: No evidence, yeah! [being sarcastic]

CNN with Michael Gross Saying Jews are being Scapegoated

Paula Zahn: How upsetting is this to you?

Michael Gross: Look, we’ve been kicked around for 2,000 years! The face you’re looking at, it’s got a lot of anger in it, because of that! That’s not a way to live, wandering around the globe, never having a home! It’s pretty difficult, because every time there’s trouble, we’re scapegoated! We’re not the only ones that are scapegoated, but we’re scapegoated!

By people who are frightened! They don’t care! They are paranoid! You cannot debunk this theory! It is madness, as well as idiocy, to think that the jews brought down the World Trade Center on 9/11! But you cannot argue logic to someone who is mentally ill! What frightens me is that the whole nation is frightened, and that fear is being fueled by this administration, and by the media, …

Green: Who is this guy?

Bollyn: Michael Gross, a constitutional lawyer, it says.

Green: I’ve never seen him any other time, besides this.

Bollyn: No, I haven’t either.

Green: But it’s weird that he comes on and just, … first of all they’re on a panel with CNN. Everybody is against the conspiracy. Why don’t they have you in the studio to actually have a rebuttal to his arguments?

Bollyn: Right. Well if you look at this CNN piece, you see how they try to set me up. They asked me if I was anti-semitic. I said:

“No. This is what they say when you criticize Israeli policy.”

Then they cut and go to that woman from the ADL, who says:

“That’s what they all say!”

Paula Zahn: When you imply that somehow Israelis were involved in the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, people are gonna look at you, critics will say:

“You are an anti-semite!”

Are you?

Bollyn: No, I’m not an anti-semite! This is the main charge that’s leveled against me, and has been for years, even before 9/11, because I am a critic of zionist policies.

Deborah Lauter: That’s a very common technique among anti-semites, they will twist things.

“I’m not an anti-semite, I just believe XYZ!”

Bollyn: So it’s with video editing, that’s been done by CNN, this is a hit piece! And this piece aired on TV the night before I was supposed to go on trial.

Criticism of Israel and Jews involved in 9/11 is “Anti-semitic”!

Green: Elaborating on the whole “anti-semitic” thing. It’s like literally any criticism of Israel to them, or criticism of people behind 9/11, is anti-semitic. So according to them, they can’t do anything wrong, and there’s nothing, no legitimate criticisms. That’s literally what they, …

Bollyn: That’s not quite what they’re saying. What they’re saying though, is that you cannot criticize Israel, you cannot criticize Israeli crimes. You cannot criticize jewish crimes, or you cannot identify them as being Israeli, or jewish crimes. They’re protected! That’s what they’re saying.

They’re not saying that jews, or Israel doesn’t commit crimes. In my “Solving 9/11” book I have a quote from the former chief of staff of the Israeli military, who says:

“That if the truth ever comes out, …” he says “… you will see that Israel has been involved in crimes a thousand times worse than anything going on in Colombia!”

He’s talking about the Colombia drug trade. So it’s not like Israel doesn’t commit crimes. It’s that they want to make it so that it’s a crime to report them! It’s a crime to identify them as Israeli crimes. You know, I don’t write anything about jewish crimes, I’m writing about a crime that was committed by very evil people, who may happen to be Israeli nationals, like Netanyahu, or Michael Chertoff, but that’s as far as it goes.

Solving a Crime Means Going where the Evidence Leads

You know, when you investigate a crime, … the reason why I call my book “Solving 9/11”, is, because 9/11, I could see from the been to Austin twice. He’s been invited both times, and he has never responded.

Green: He’s completely abandoned 9/11 truth. He doesn’t talk about it anymore at all!

What About the Bible, and the “Synagogue of Satan”?

What do you think about, like the Bible, and talking about the “Synagogue of Satan”?

Bollyn: Oh well, that’s from book of Revelation. Yeah they talk about these imposters in the jewish faith who, you know, are not jews, but are the “Synagogue of Satan”. And, you know, Christ said the same thing when he talked about the Pharisees, and the Scribes, and said they were the “spawn of Satan”. You know, it’s very, very harsh words, but there’s a lot of truth in that. Because when you understand that the Talmud, the Rabbinical interpretation of the Torah, stands the Torah on it’s head, and negates the teachings of the Moses, Mosaic law, you know, that you’re dealing with the corruption of the religion! The corruption of the scripture!

As we see with the Scofield Bible for Christians. It’s like, when people change the scripture to suit their agenda, that’s pretty, it can be very evil.

And when they say that in the end times — I hope we’re not in the end times! But there are times of great deception and there will be false prophets, etc. We see this around us all the time, this is reality today. We live in a very, a very strange and uncomfortable reality where this is primarily, this is a religious, this is a spiritual war! But any war between truth and falsehood, and light and dark, is a spiritual battle. And when your country and your fellow citizens are so deceived, when your nation is deceived, that is a very evil thing!

And when you consider the evilness of 9/11, then the evilness of the deception, is just as bad as the crime of mass murder. So it’s a spiritual battle.

Your Letter to the Pope, Did He Respond?

Green: Speaking of spiritual battle, you wrote a letter to the Pope about 9/11 truth, and did they respond to that at all?

Bollyn: No! No, I wrote an open letter to the Pope and I sent him a hard copy of the letter. And I thought that the head of the Catholic Church should speak out about the deception that we’ve been under about 9/11! Because this deception has been used to take the nation, and the world, to war against another religion, against another faith, against Islam!

And so this is a very, very big thing! And it requires leadership from our religious leaders to quell the fire! To explain to people, to the faithful, that we’ve been deceived, and that these wars are not justified! That’s not a hard thing to do, but apparently there’s no interest in the religious community, in the academic community, or in our political establishment, to do any of that.

That gives you an idea of how deeply entrenched this deception is!

What is Hindering People from Speaking Out?

Green: It’s so easy for you and me, and so many people we know, to see the deception and want to be passionate and speak out about it. What do you think is hindering so many other people, blocking them from doing it?

Bollyn: Well, it’s a hard thing to do! I mean, just intellectually grappling with 9/11 truth and embracing it, means that you have to come to the conclusion that your government has been lying to you for 16 years! In the greatest democracy in the world? And that our media is hardly free, but our media is complicit in the 9/11 cover-up! These are very hard pills to swallow for an American. We grew up thinking that we live in a free country, and that we have a free media, and that the truth prevails!

And to see that none of that is true, and that we’re living in a very strange place where the government, the media, the institutions, that we believe in, can no longer be trusted. That shows that we’re on the verge of something new! We’re on the cusp of a new beginning! But it also means that it’s very hard for the average person to cope with, to accept!

Green: I hear the debunkers all the time say that:

“It’s more comforting for 9/11 conspiracy theorists to think that there’s a conspiracy behind everything, and that world view is more comforting to us.”

What do you say to that? Are you more comforted to know that 9/11 was it was an inside job, or would you wish, would it be better if you believed the official story?

Bollyn: Well, the official story is a conspiracy theory as well! So let’s put that to rest. It’s like what the government has said has never been proven, regarding Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I’m a investigator, an investigative journalist who has found, you know, leads and conclusions as to who’s behind the 9/11 crime.

It’s not a theory! It’s an investigation!

And it’s my attempt to solve the crime that changed our country.

But there’s nothing comfortable about, … There can be no comfort at all in believing a false narrative which we’ve been given. I think that it’s much more comforting to know the truth! To understand who is really behind 9/11! To understand who’s behind the “War on Terror”, because then you’ll realize that things aren’t nearly as bad as they make them out to be.

You know, we are not on the verge of a religious war with Islam. Islam is not trying to break down the doors and to destroy us as a civilization, or a nation. This has all been, this is all fear that’s been imposed on us.

And so, to be in deception, to be in fear, to be deceived, is a much worse place to be, than to have some truth. The truth is, like it says in the Bible:

“The truth will set you free!”

But to be deceived and to accept the deception, knowing that it’s a deception, is a very unenviable place to be.

Green: I got three more questions. Two of them are, … I’m just gonna kind of lead you into two of the things. These are two of the things from your book that were new to me, that I thought were very powerful pieces of information.

Shimon Perez Wanting to Frighten the West into Supporting Israel’s Aims

Number one is Shimon Perez and Moshe Shalit. There’s a quote in there about that Perez wants to frighten the West into supporting Israel’s aims! That is so incriminating! And to follow your whole thesis of what happened in the 70s, and right in the 80s, …

Bollyn: Right.

Green: Can you, …?

Bollyn: Yeah that was a quote by the Prime Minister of Israel at the time, Moshe Sharett. And Shimon Peres had had been one of the masterminds of a terrorist operation in Egypt against American and British targets, libraries, cultural institutions, in which they had put nitroglycerin bombs into these places. You know, in order to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood, and to drive a wedge between the United States, and Britain, and the Egyptian government at the time.

Shimon Peres was one of the masterminds, along with Pinhas Lavon and Moshe Dayan. And when the Prime Minister discovered this, he wrote in his journal what he said about about Shimon Peres wanting to frighten the West, just like Pinhas Lavon.

So this is in the early 1950s. So Israel was carrying out false flag terror operations in Egypt, in the early 1950s, in order to drive a wedge between the United States and the leading Arab country, Egypt. They haven’t changed that, you know, and Shimon Peres was the President and a high-ranking Israeli politician when 9/11 happened.

I think when 9/11 happened he was actually Foreign Minister. But in any case, that is his modus operandi, that’s how he has always functioned. That’s been the Israeli method ever since the creation of the State of Israel, to scare the West into supporting Israel’s aims. And that’s where we are today!

That’s where all this terrorism, fear of terrorism, fear of Islam, comes at us from the media, and the zionists. Because they want us to be afraid, and paralyzed, so that we will be willing to wage war against the Islamic world, and the Arab states, that they target.

Green: Yeah. Watch any clip of Netanyahu at the United Nations, or addressing Congress, and that’s all he talks about, is the fear of Iran, and the fear of al-Qaeda, the fear of Iraq, and how we need to act, because they’re all building bombs to kill us!

Bollyn: Right! Because the whole “War on Terror” construct only works if the public is afraid. And it’s like, that’s the point of my work, is to undeceive people, and to show them that this terrible monster that’s in the darkness, isn’t really there at all! It’s all an artificial construct! And when people realize that it’s like a Wizard of Oz play, it’s like somebody, you know, trying to scare you by waving something scary in front of your face. It’s not real! The reality is much less scary than the deception!

And that’s why my book “Solving 9/11”, I have the light coming over, because in the darkness, when people are in the darkness, you know, their fears manifest and scare them out of their wits! But when you’re dealing with reality, you know, it’s something that’s much easier for a person to cope with.

Who Were the Top Three People Involved in Planning 9/11?

Green: Can you name me like the top three people you think we’re involved with planning 9/11?

Bollyn: Well, the people at the top who planned 9/11, these would be people in Israeli military intelligence, whose names would not mean much to anybody. But at a political level, I would say that it would be Shimon Peres. I would think Benjamin Netanyahu, because he’s been the promoter of the “War on Terror” agenda since 1979. I would think Shaul Eisenberg, Mr. Big in China for the Israeli Mossad. I think Ehud Barak, not a Likudnik, but I think Ehud Barak played a key role. And I would say also Areil Sharon.

And then going back one generation, men who were still alive when 9/11 happened, or just recently deceased. Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. These would be the political players that, you know, except for Shaul Eisenberg, he’s not very well known, but the rest of them are people who Americans understand who these people were.

You know, these people were terrorists, absolute terrorists! They always use terrorism!

Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, they murdered the UN envoy to Palestine, Folke Bernadotte in 1948! They bombed the King David hotel in 1946! They massacred Palestinians in Deir Yassin and other villages. I mean, these are bonafide real terrorist leaders! In fact, Menachem Begin took the mantle of being the father of terrorism in the whole world!

So, when terrorism then happens, when their agenda goes through and their people commit terrorism, what’s the problem? Yeah! Why is it anti-semitic?

You know, I lived in Israel when Menachem Begin came to power. And it was a very sad day for people from the Labour Party, because they realized that the terrorists had taken power!

Menachem Begin, the Father of Terrorism

Green: There’s a quote in your book about, I think, it’s Ben Gurion, they say he’s the “king of terrorism”! And he goes “the king of terrorism in the world!” He corrected him, like they brag about their terrorism! It’s no secret, right?

Bollyn: Yeah!

Green: Of the history of terrorism, of the Mossad and the Irgun.

Bollyn: Yeah. That was Menachem Begin who said that, when he was asked. And he said:

“What is it like to be the father of terrorism in Middle East?”

And he said:

“In the Middle East?”

He said:

“In all the world!”

So, that’s the reason why zionist history is not taught in American schools! Because if American universities taught the history of zionism, you would know! You would understand the evilness, and the terrorist nature, of the zionist project! Because it, the State of Israel, was born in terrorism, and has survived with terrorism ever since!

Green: You touch in your book, the last chapter, a Muslim guy was writing it, right? Who wrote the last chapter?

Bollyn: It was the Nation of Islam research group.

Green: Research group. They talked about the significance of your work in history. And I’d like to ask you how often do you think about your place in history, and what will people write about you hundreds of years from now, if the truth is known about 9/11?

Bollyn: Well I don’t know. I don’t think about that, that often. It’s been 16 years I’ve been working on this, and it’s been a very, a very big effort, you know, it took a lot of time, and a lot of energy. And it’s cost, it’s had a lot of costs for me and my family.

So, I just hope that people will waken up and realize what’s happened to this country. And if my work contributes to that, to that awakening, if my work contributes to shortening the “War on Terror” by one day, if my work contributes to the prosecution and indictment of the people who carried out 9/11, that will be the best reward!

Green: A Pulitzer for a hundred years! So, there’s very bad guys who you’re exposing here. You’ve literally solved, you’ve uncovered the motive, the people behind it. Do you fear for your life when you go out in public and people are protesting? There very well could be somebody violent that wants to shut you up for exposing these crimes.

Bollyn: Yeah. Well I’m cautious and everything like that. I try to be as careful as possible. But to think that this, that the criminal network behind 9/11 is all powerful and able to reach anywhere, … yeah, they are criminal network, but they’re men like you and I, and their life goes on. Many of them have died. Many of them have moved on to other things. They have accomplished, they have gotten what they wanted!

They got the “War on Terror”! They got it all! The “War on Terror” in spades! They’ve got terrorism going on in Europe, and America! They’ve got the wars going on in half a dozen countries! They’ve destroyed Syria! They’ve destroyed Iraq! They’ve destroyed Afghanistan! They’ve destroyed Libya! They got what they wanted!

So, for me to be explaining, my side of this and explaining what the war on terrorism is all about, I guess they have nothing, no problem, with that. It’s like they’ve achieved their goal. They’ve achieved billions and billions of dollars. They’ve disrupted the Middle East! They’re redrawing the map of the Middle East! You know, nothing has stopped them!

And they’re destroying this country! That’s really important!

And anybody who has any patriotic feeling for the United States of America, should engage in 9/11 truth and demand an end of the “War on Terror”! And demand accountability from the people in the media and the government who have covered up this crime for 16 years. It’s just outrageous!

Green: It is outrageous! I agree. Every 9/11 truther needs to read these books. If you haven’t you’re completely uninformed! These are the best books about 9/11. I’ve read both of them several times. “Solving 9/11 the Deception that Changed the World” and the “War on Terror — the Plot to Rule the Middle East”. The “War on Terror” and “9/11” go hand in hand. They’re essentially the same crime.

Bollyn: Yeah.

Green: Chris has sacrificed a lot for this information. He’s a man of courage and integrity! I appreciate you so much for sitting down and taking the time with me.

Bollyn: Thank you very much.

Green: Thank you. And everybody needs to read these books and share the information with everybody you know. Any last words Chris?

Bollyn: Well thank you very much, and I couldn’t agree more on the need to understand that we’ve been deceived about 9/11. And we’ve been deceived for a reason. And the reason is to take us into this long open-ended criminal war in the Middle East, and elsewhere. And in order to end the deception, we need to increase awareness. And the more people who become aware of 9/11, and the lies of 9/11, will understand the lies of the “War on Terror”. That we’ve been deceived into war.

The war agenda will destroy this nation! It will impoverish this nation! It will destroy this nation! And it’s incumbent, it’s imperative that any patriotic American do their utmost to expose the deception and end the war!

Thank you very much.

Green: Thank you.

Entire conversation →

F. Roger Devlin on women, sex and motherhood

 If you have any familiarity with my work, you know I publish mainly in the dissident Right press in the United States. Sexual issues do not typically occupy a lot of attention in this milieu. Sometimes I have even encountered confusion as to the relevance of my writings on sex to the political tasks of the nationalist, or identitarian, movement. The proper response, of course, is that any nation or race must reproduce itself sexually. Our people must recover a healthy path to family formation as well as establish institutional incentives for keeping families together.

Our enemies certainly know this. Much of their activism consists in discouraging adaptive sexual behavior among us. This is obvious in the cases of the LGBTQ movement or the current transsexual madness in the United States, but is no less true of the long-established feminist movement promoting market competition in place of cooperation between the sexes. We need to start paying more attention to this, and not limit our work to political activism in the traditional sense. That is why I prefer to publish my writings on the subject with a nationalist outlet such as Logik Förlag. (...)

Some of the most disturbing reports about women and migrants have come from Sweden. A lot of older Swedish women without families of their own to care for apparently eagerly volunteer to host new arrivals from Africa and Asia. Some of these women are the sort you refer to as batikhäxor, I believe. And the young, fighting-age men arriving in Europe — supposedly as refugees — have a well-earned reputation for not being especially choosy where women are concerned. They do not require youth or beauty; a warm body is enough. Such men seem to arouse some weird combination of the sexual and the maternal instincts in the local spinsters who take them in. In effect, the Swedish government has been sponsoring a program to provide menopausal Swedish women with young boyfriends: women who should be baking cookies for their grandchildren rather than thinking about sex. To get a full sense of how bizarre the situation is, try to imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. Suppose that instead of importing fighting-aged men, the government were bringing in foreign girls between the ages of 17 and 22 and housing them with Swedish bachelors. What do you suppose would happen?

One thing that should not surprise us about this situation, however, is Swedish women’s relative lack of concern for their nation. In our environment of evolutionary adaptation, tribes fought over women, and the women went to the winners. It was not unusual for a woman to find herself subject to a foreign tribe with an unfamiliar language and customs. The women who passed on their genes were those who could best adapt themselves to this difficult situation. So we must not expect to find the most fanatical tribal loyalty in women. Men are expected to sacrifice everything for their nation, if required; women are under the primary control of the universal reproductive imperative instead. The only way to get a bit of tribal loyalty from women is to demand it, and Western men have obviously failed in this respect.

The best way to conclude a talk about sexual dysfunction would be to tell you how to cure it, but this is not easy. In America, as I mentioned, critics of the Sexual Revolution usually have nothing better to propose than a religious revival. But this is not likely to work in a country whose Church is governed by lesbian bishops. The most recent news story I read about Christianity in Sweden involved such a bishop calling for the removal of crosses from Christian churches so as not to offend Muslim immigrants.

I do not have a cure for the Sexual Revolution, but I can make an educated guess as to how it will play out. In the long run, maladaptive behavior always comes to an end because it is maladaptive. Those who postpone marriage for too long or devote themselves to sterile sexual practices will fail to pass on their genes. The future belongs to those who procreate and raise children. They will be the founders of the civilization that replaces today’s exhausted and decadent world.

I might even be inclined to look toward the future with confidence if it were not for the fact of demographic replacement. Adaptive sexuality will return one way or another, because that is nature’s way. But there are no guarantees that our own descendants will be the ones practicing it. And I don’t care very much what sexual or family practices prevail in a future Muslim Swedistan. My concern is with my own people and civilization, of which the Swedish people are a part.

Once again, we see that the sexual and political sides of our people’s struggle are intimately connected. I hope the publication of a Swedish edition of my writings by Logik Förlag will contribute to our common cause.

Thank you.
https://counter-currents.com/2023/06/sexual-utopia-in-stockholm/

The proportion of American women bearing five or more children over their lifetimes fell from 20 percent in 1976 to five percent by the early 1990s, but the figure has remained roughly constant since then: we may have discovered the irreducible fraction of women who cannot be led to conform to an anti-natalist social environment. This might even turn out to be an evolutionary selection event that will leave future American women more oriented toward family and motherhood than their ancestors—at least if the country is not destroyed through mass immigration before the process is complete.

So what do these women have in common? The clearest pattern is that all believed in and practiced some form of religion, and only one attached no religious significance to her childbearing. But it is not so obvious how religious influence operates. As the author puts it: “Each of our subjects had a story to tell about just how their religious experiences influenced the decision to have so many children. The path was never straightforward.” (...)

In part, religion offers community, and thus moral as well as practical support for struggling mothers. One woman put it this way:

I would say the vast majority of women that give birth in America don’t have adequate support, physically, emotionally, psychologically, and medically. In religious circles there’s more support. Childbirth is celebrated for us as a community. Women don’t feel valued when they have a baby in the secular world. You become invisible. Now you are no longer this productive member of our working culture. People want to feel valuable, like they’re contributing something important. And when the culture makes them feel that that’s not what they’re doing, it’s very painful.

But the significance of religion for many of Pakaluk’s subjects was even deeper and more personal. As mentioned above, most of these women understand their pregnancies as providential, and many refer to praying for divine guidance on the subject, or becoming “open” to receiving another child (as opposed to deciding for themselves to have one). One mother spoke of a shift in mental orientation from “fitting children into a narrative of the self” to “fitting oneself into a narrative of childbearing,” viz, the chain of generations. Such women consciously reject “an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle where children are fitted into our own plans for the future.” Another remarked that the very idea of family planning involved the illusion that we are in control of our lives. In reality, while we have freedom of choice, we are never “directing the play,” so to speak: no mere human being is. The most successful mothers are those who have been able to abandon control, or the illusion of it, and many experience a religious conversion or reversion along the way. They come to think the divine plan superior to their own narrow designs.

This abandonment of control affects even so worldly a matter as family finances. Said one mother: “We’re not family planning according to our finances. We’re not waiting to have that set and then have our children. Our finances don’t add up at all. If we were to try to make them add up, we wouldn’t even have one kid.” Such an attitude does appear to involve a certain leap of faith: if our ancestors had waited until all the financial risks of starting a family were resolved, none of us would be here. Many of Pakaluk’s subjects remarked that expenses turned out to be a lot smaller than they had imagined, as well as mentioning unexpected turns of fortune that had made paying for children easier after they had them.

Another expressed the limits of the human ability to plan as follows:

I think the key thing for us was that we stopped trying to act like we could implement the ideas we had before we started having kids in our marriage after we started having them. We had this idea like it was going to be fifty-fifty. We were going to prioritize my career. And then none of that worked. It’s just surprising how traditional things have turned out to be.

This lady discovered what is called “force of circumstance.” It is the reason traditional arrangements are traditional.

The general point that no human being can control his own life applies to men as well, of course, but men’s lives may be more shaped by intentional choice than women’s, e.g., by the need to choose a career path. In recent years, however, women’s lives have been deliberately reconfigured on this male model: “first secure a professional income, then secure a family. The path of schooling leads inexorably through the years when it would be easiest and most favorable to have children,” as Pakaluk explains. Professional training is not normally geared to the part-time tempo most practical for young mothers, and where such options do exist, “women often pass them up for fear of being relegated to ‘second class’ status.”

One of the author’s subjects was an MD who did not realize until doing her internship that she hated medical practice (“I really developed horrible anxiety”). Her first pregnancy came as a relief, and she planned to take a year off from medicine to care for her son. But motherhood turned out to be such a joy for her that she—probably not coincidentally—conceived a little girl just in time to postpone her return to professional work further. Gradually, motherhood became her profession: “We just sort of kept liking the kids that we were having and liking having kids,” she recalls. She ended up with seven, and never did go back to medical practice. Today she admits that in hindsight, she would not have bothered with her medical training. She is also grateful that she had her first child when still relatively young, pointing out that friends who have come to motherhood later have found the transition more difficult and experienced “a strong sense of betrayal.”

The author comments:

Women who have been encouraged to look at career-building single-mindedly suddenly find themselves up against a gut-wrenching quandary they don’t remember opting into—their desire for a home and children on the one hand, and the fruition of years of training on the other. Most of the time women split the difference, leaving neither incredibly fulfilled nor fulfilling. Mothering small children while working makes motherhood less enjoyable. And working while juggling family responsibilities taints the natural satisfactions of throwing oneself into a career.

In other words, women who try to live like men fail to achieve the characteristic satisfactions of either sex. As Pakaluk notes, subjective measures of women’s happiness have been declining since 1970, both absolutely and relative to men. Mainstream scholars refer to this as the “paradox” of female happiness, assuming women have made plenty of “progress” since that time. They have: towards unhappiness.

The women in Hannah’s Children found that the more children they had, the easier and more rewarding it became to go on having them:

Fixed costs, such as giving up a career or a second income, had already been borne. The variable costs, personal and lifestyle-related, became smaller. And the expected value to the family in terms of excitement, joy, and love seemed to grow larger with additional children. The added joys created a snowball effect.
At what point do the fixed costs give way to the variable costs? “Based on my interviews, it seemed to be somewhere after the second child and not later than the fourth.” The cost of starting a family must be “seen as an investment, or a down payment on a certain kind of growth that one had to value for its own sake.”

The burden of child raising is not additive, because the mother gains practical wisdom over time and because older siblings positively enjoy helping out. One interviewee surmised that taking care of younger siblings lets them feel useful, and protects them from becoming depressed, spoiled, or self-centered. Others predicted that their children’s pro-social virtues “would be a benefit to their future families, places of work, and communities.” Any loss of attention from the parents is more than made up for by the presence of brothers and sisters.

All Western populations are currently at below-replacement fertility, and many wonder whether any policy fix is available. Viktor Orbán’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary represent one well-publicized effort. But the track record of such experiments is not good: government policies have proven more effective at reducing birthrates than at raising them. Cash incentives (“baby bonuses”) seem to affect the timing of births rather than the total number: “women who intend to have children at some point rush to have children immediately to ‘grab’ the bonus.” Thus, in Australia such a program resulted in an extremely brief baby boom followed by a sinking of birth rates to levels lower than the previous. Hungary’s more aggressive policies have raised its fertility rate from 1.2 to 1.6; time will tell whether this is real progress or a “mirage of re-timing,” as Pakaluk suspects.

The difficulty of encouraging fertility politically becomes clear when we compare the incentives available to policymakers with the actual thought processes of women deciding upon (or “becoming open to”) further children:

Women make choices about having children based on “costs and benefits”—but not in the way we usually understand [i.e., not primarily in terms of monetary costs]. Rather, women compare the subjective personal value of having another child with the subjective personal value of what they will miss out on. Both sides include gains and losses. The choice to have a child is a value determination about the relative size of those gains and losses. The values will not usually be quantifiable for an individual woman or comparable across women.

The women in Hannah’s Children saw the “cost” of children in the things they would have to give up: “comforts, plans, hobbies, status, a clean house, sleeping through the night . . . and [everything] else a woman might wish to do with her time, talents, and money.” Pakaluk writes that part of a mother’s self has to die, to remain forever unrealized, for her to place herself at the service of new life.

As for the benefit side, these women spoke of “how their children had saved their lives, saved their marriages, saved their souls. By their own accounts they had been saved from immaturity, loneliness, selfishness, and uselessness.” Pakaluk heard “stories about babies who had fixed a family problem, cured a health issue [especially depression], or comforted a suffering person.”

They believe their personalities and capacities have expanded. This expansion, in turn, somehow opened them to receive gifts of love and sacrifice from their own ancestors, gifts whose meaning had remained inaccessible until unlocked by their own choice to participate with those ancestors in reaching toward the infinite.

One mother described her children as a “key to infinity,” referring to the endless succession of generations:

Everyone’s searching for identity. Tattoo yourself, pierce yourself, take on another religion. [But] everybody’s got ancestry. What a way to honor your legacy and your line. That to me is being a part of infinity, to continue a chain. So, what better a way to form an identity? No regrets. Not a one. This is way harder now than [life] was then, but I have inner peace in my life that I didn’t have then. I was searching. I’m not searching now.

When we compare such language with the incentives available to policymakers—subsidies, tax credits, lengthening of maternity leave—the incommensurability ought to be obvious. A vast cultural sea-change has taken women away from childbearing, preparing them from earliest childhood for lives patterned after those of men. And since children are an “experience good,” today’s women literally do not know what they are missing out on. Many do sense, however, that something is missing from their lives, if only when it is too late.

The family, as Aristotle knew, is logically and historically prior to political association, so in looking for political fixes for what ails it, we are using something weaker and more contingent to try to shore up something fundamental. The natural direction of causation dictates that our family life ought to have a positive influence on our social and political lives, not the other way around. Many of Pakaluk’s interviewees appear to understand this: they “believe that the sustained effect of living with needy young children for an extended period of life fosters other-regarding virtues necessary for civic friendship: empathy, generosity, solidarity, and self-denial.”

Considering the religious dimension childbearing has for most mothers, we are led to ask whether positive change might come from this direction. As our discussion already makes clear, this will not be primarily a matter of doctrine or church attendance. Nor is a religious revival the sort of thing that can be engineered from the outside, or merely for the sake of increasing fertility. However, just as policy can discourage fertility even where it cannot promote it, a closer look reveals that policy can stifle religion even where it cannot foster it—and such negative interference can be politically done away with.

Freedom of religion is not merely the right to spend an hour a week in church: the education of the young was formerly an essential aspect of nearly all religious traditions. As the author writes: “The massive system of ‘free’ public education—a government cartel designed to compete against religious schools—represents a drastic violation of religious liberty.” Fewer than seven percent of American children now attend religious schools, and their parents are forced to pay extra for the privilege. The author closes Hannah’s Children with a call for

emancipating religious institutions to collaborate with parents in the work of education. Religion isn’t truly free if it can’t effectively assist families in passing on faith and tradition to their children. Just as muscles atrophy with underuse and bones lose their density, religion boxed into a tiny corner of private worship, stripped of all its other traditional functions, is no true religion.

Counter-Currents readers will be able to think of other high ideals that might inform the education of our young once the monopoly of a hostile state is broken.

On a personal note, this author has sometimes been criticized for overemphasizing the negative traits of contemporary Western womanhood. Pakaluk’s approach of focusing instead on the women who are doing things right has much to commend it, and at least makes for a pleasant change. We can only hope that the proportion of such women will rise above five percent before our civilization collapses entirely.

https://counter-currents.com/2024/10/the-womens-resistance/

Celebrity worship is widely mocked and deplored, but usually without noting one of its more obvious features: it is almost entirely a female phenomenon. It was not really “people” who were fascinated with Liz and Dick or Cher and Gregg, it was women. Many seemed to take a greater interest in these celebrity couplings than in their own marriages.

The explanation is that the wealth and fame of the persons involved correspond to aspects of female sexual desire largely absent from its male counterpart. Men may find a beautiful actress or model attractive, but her wealth and fame do not help constitute that attractiveness; they are a mere effect of it. For women, it is different. Liz and Dick are interesting and attractive not merely because they happen to be good-looking, but precisely because they are rich and famous. The female celebrity worshipper thinks, “What do I and my stupid, mediocre husband matter in comparison with these glamorous people I can only worship from afar?” For women, the best romance and sex can only take place at the top of the hierarchy of wealth, fame, and status. Their own love lives are dull and uninteresting by comparison. Celebrity gossip, in short, is a kind of sexual fantasy for women, a partial equivalent of what pornography is for men—although it does not carry the same opprobrium.

Apart from this illusion created by the female sex instinct, of course, Liz and Dick are not really all that special, just a rather ordinary man and woman who happen to have become rich and famous working in the entertainment industry. But women’s sexuality prevents them from seeing what was obvious to this author as an eleven-year-old boy.

https://counter-currents.com/2025/04/sex-and-sex-talk-in-the-1970s-3/

Addiction By Design Machine Gambling in Las Vegas - some extracts

Addiction

The panic of the [addict] who has hit bottom is the panic of the man who thought he had control over a vehicle but suddenly finds that the vehicle can run away with him. Suddenly, pressure on what he knows is the brake seems to make the vehicle go faster. It is the panic of discovering that it (the system, self plus vehicle) is bigger than he is. … He has bankrupted the epistemology of “self-control.”

—Gregory Bateson

*

By day, she advises others on how they might best insure against future losses, yet one gets the sense that she does not quite believe in what she is selling; it is as if her awareness that the levels of risk assigned to lives and investments by the insurance industry are always more arbitrary than stated leads her to take greater personal financial risks. Her gambling both employs and rejects the actuarial logic of insurance and the monetary value that undergirds it. “In my life before gambling,” she tells me, “money was almost like a God, I had to have it. But with the gambling, money had no value, no significance, it was just this thing—just get me in the zone, that’s all. … You lose value, until there’s no value at all. Except the zone—the zone is your God.”

*

O. B. laughs and holds up his hands—one of them large and tan with light brown hair and a gold ring, the other small, hairless, and pink, only partially developed. “I know all about scars,” he says, placing the small hand back into the big hand and settling both into his lap, “so I told her go ahead and take it off.”

As a young bowling champion in Southern California, O. B.’s disability had earned him the nickname “Onearm Bandit,” O. B. for short. The irony that his eventual slot machine addiction lent to this moniker was not lost on him. Beyond this irony, he has discerned a connection between his bowling and his machine play. “Back then when I had problems I’d go to the alley, concentrate on my game, socialize with friends.  Today when I have problems, I come here—or to the gas station, or to the casino—to play video poker. I do it to forget, to get lost.” What he comes to forget is his profound loneliness, his tense relationship with his adult son, a drug addict, and the situation that awaits him at home, where he acts as sole caretaker for a bedridden friend who has succumbed to illness. “I could say that for me the machine is a lover, a friend, a date—but really it’s none of those things. It’s a vacuum cleaner that sucks the life out of me, and sucks me out of life.”

 SUSPENDING MONEY VALUE

At the same time that machine gambling alters the nature of exchange to a point where it becomes disconnected from relationships, it alters the nature of money’s role in the social world. Money typically serves to facilitate exchanges with others and establish a social identity, yet in the asocial, insulated encounter with the gambling machine money becomes a currency of disconnection from others and even oneself. Contrary to Clifford Geertz’s interpretation of gambling as a publicly staged conversion of money value into social status and worldly meaning, the solitary transaction of machine gambling converts money into a means for suspending collective forms of value.21 Although money’s conventional value is important initially as a means of entry into play, “once in a game, it becomes instantly devalued,” observes the gambling scholar Gerda Reith.22 “You put a twenty dollar bill in the machine and it’s no longer a twenty dollar bill, it has no value in that sense,” Julie tells me of bill acceptors in the mid-1990s. “It’s like a token, it excludes money value completely.” With credit play, says another, “money has no value, no significance, it’s just this thing—just get me in the zone, that’s all.” “In the zone state,” echoes Katrina, “there is no real money—there are only credits to be maintained.”

Attesting to the conversion of money value into zone value, Sharon admits that she would rather “play off ” a jackpot than cash it out, as this would mean halting her play to wait for the machine to drop her winnings, or, in the event that its hopper is low, for attendants to come pay her off. “It’s strange,” says Lola, “but winning can disappoint me, especially if I win right away.”23 As we have already seen, winning too much, too soon, or too often can interrupt the tempo of play and disturb the harmonious regularity of the zone. Julie explains: “If it’s a moderate day—win, lose, win, lose—you keep the same pace. But if you win big, it can prevent you from staying in the zone.” In gambling, Reith writes,  money is “prized not as an end in itself but for its ability to allow continued consumption in repeated play.”24 If in the everyday economy time is spent to earn money, within the economy of the zone money is spent to buy time. “You’re not playing for money,” says Julie, “you’re playing for credit—credit so you can sit there longer, which is the goal. It’s not about winning, it’s about continuing to play.”

Paradoxically, in order for money to lose its value as a means of acquisition, that value must be at stake in the gambling exchange. “The transaction must involve money,” Australian gambling researcher Charles Livingstone elaborates in a Marxian vein, “because money is the central signification of our age, the materialization of social relations and thus the bridge to everyone and everything that is to be had in modernity.”25 In other words, it is possible for a sense of monetary value to become suspended in machine gambling not because money is absent, but because the activity mobilizes it in such a way that it no longer works as it typically does. Money becomes the bridge away from everyone and everything, leading to a zone beyond value, with no social or economic significance. In the zone, instead of serving as a tool for self-determination, money becomes an instrument for “sustained indeterminacy,” as Livingstone puts it.

Peter Adams clarifies the nature of this indeterminacy by arguing that machine gamblers seek through play to transcend the limits of finitude: constraints of space and time, the gaze of intersubjectivity, and the bounds of personal mortality. The zone state, he argues, arises out of a delicate tension between finitude (embodied in the fact of a limited monetary budget) and the possibility of transcendence that comes with each spin or hand. The zone “is a fine balance,” Adams writes, “and [gambling machines] are the ideal instrument for achieving it.” Machines facilitate the “fine balance” of the zone by allowing gamblers to constantly recalibrate the rate and magnitude of their betting such that they may continue approaching the transcendence of personal, social, and financial limitations, without ever quite arriving at that transcendence.26 Julie breathlessly recounts the recalibrations that transpire over the course of a typical play session:

I got four aces four times, that’s 200 dollars a shot, 800 credits each time, that means I could have cashed out 800 dollars total. But each time I hit, I’d play it down to 200 credits from 800 credits and I’d say, “Well, I’ll just hit the aces again and then I’ll leave.” Then I’d get four of a kind and have  like 437 credits and I’d say “I’ll just go to 400 and leave,” and then at 400 I’d just push the button again and drop below 400, and I’d say, “Well now I’m down past 400 I’ll just get back up to 400 and then I’ll cash out.” And then I’d find myself closer to 300 and I’d say, “Once I get down to 300 I’ll go.” And then when I go below that I’d say “Well, I might as well keep going, I’ve already blown what I was gonna blow—I might as well try to get the aces again,” and it would continue …

Whenever Julie arrives at the ending point she has set, she resets it, thus never reaching a point of stopping and cashing out. No matter how high her credits become, their value as tokens for “time-on-device” holds sway over their market value—even as this value initially (and ultimately) serves as the condition for her play. “In the long run,” Livingstone notes, the zone’s “stream of indeterminacy is determined, but the [machine] gambler is concentrated in the immediate, and in the immediate moment of pushing the button, indeterminacy, as it were, rules.”27It is when credits get too low that money’s determinacy moves to the fore and begins to matter once again. “I get really tense if I only have twenty credits left,” says Lola, “the tension, the anxiousness, starts building in me; all I really want at that point is enough credits to just keeping playing.” “When you start losing,” Julie tells us, “the pace picks up—you’re running out of player credit, you’re running out of money, you begin to chase …”28 As the worldly value-charge of money intrudes upon the zone, it introduces tension where tensionlessness is sought and relationality where dissociation is sought. “In the back of my head I know it’s going to end, I know the transition is going to come—no longer the world according to the zone, but the real world. The things I escaped from start crowding back into my brain.”

Even as the world crowds back in, the moment that definitively fractures the zone always feels sudden; before the instant of total credit expenditure, there is still a chance, however small, of continuing. In the moment of its total loss, money returns to the scene as a tangible limit and a medium of dependency. “Money disappears in the zone,” writes Livingstone, “yet in the moment when the money’s gone, so too is ‘the zone.’”29 The value of money reasserts itself precisely because money in its conventional, real-world state remains the underlying means of access to the zone.

This is not to say that money’s real-world value remains unaffected by zone value. “Gambling changed my relationship to money,” notes Randall.  “I’d conserve gas so I’d have the money to gamble, and instead of going to the grocery store regularly, I’d wait to go to Walmart and do it all at one time—that way I wouldn’t have to waste the gas to go more than once. I economized.” In “machine life,” acts of everyday economizing—the responsible accounting behavior of the risk-managing self—are harnessed to the nonmaximizing, self-liquidating ends of the zone. “I pinch pennies at the store, skip a meal to save money, watch for sales or bargains, yet think nothing of dropping $100 into a slot machine and watching it go away in 10 minutes,” says Rocky. “Money became the means to gamble, that’s all it was to me,” Isabella remembers. “I’d pour out the milk so I had an excuse to go to the grocery store to gamble.” Caught between the zone and the ordinary world, gamblers “economize” in a register of value that has no clear reference point. Patsy tells me of the compulsive budgeting rituals she enacted in between her play sessions:

For me, getting the money together was part of the process. I’d go to the bank and get $1,000, $400, whatever amount. I had a weird thing where I could never just take out $20, or just spend $43—I had to spend in 100s. And other weird things too. … Like if I won, I could spend back to $500 but I would never keep $600; it would be okay to put back $800, but I had to keep another certain amount—there were lots of strange little rules that didn’t make any real sense, financially speaking.

After gambling, Patsy would sit and count her money, “over and over again, in my car, at stop lights in the dark, in my lap, hundreds of dollars—what was the use?” Money became fetishlike, unhinged from exchange value—a “weird thing,” as she calls it above, that served no clear purpose. “I spent a lot of time thinking about money, touching money, calling the bank to keep track of my money, to know the time frame of when checks cleared, counting it and counting it … but in fact, I wasn’t actually counting at all.” The year after Patsy stopped gambling she did her back taxes and was shocked to discover that over a six-month period of gambling, during which she had not been “counting,” her losses had exceeded $10,000.

“In a society such as ours,” asks the cultural historian Jackson Lears in his book on gambling in America, “where responsibility and choice are exalted, where capital accumulation is a duty and cash a sacred cow, what could be more subversive than the readiness to reduce money to mere counters in a game?”30 Because gamblers play with money rather than for it, he concludes that they pose a challenge to the maximizing  ethos of American culture.31 Yet as their “machine lives” show us, despite their seeming renunciation of money they continue to act, however perversely, within the mainstream monetary value system. This becomes readily apparent when one considers gamblers’ extensive know-how and use of everyday finance and banking practices. In The Chase, Lesieur describes with remarkable ethnographic detail gamblers’ expert techniques for acquiring the means to gamble—some of them thoroughly or partially illegal, yet many involving complicated arrangements with mainstream financial entities.32 Then as today, gamblers operate inside the financial system, juggling mortgages, credit cards, bank loans, and alimony payments.

21. Anthropologists and game scholars have found that online, virtual worlds can be rich social arenas replete with transactional commerce, governance, romance, vocations, shared meanings and values (Dibbell 2006; Malaby 2006; Taylor 2006; Boell storff 2008; Turkle 2011). The zone of machine play is not a parallel world of exchange, but rather a world in which conventional value fades away.

22. Reith 1999, 146. As Baudrillard has written, “the secret of gambling is that money does not exist as value” (1990, 86).

23. Participants in a qualitative study on slot machine play in Australia argued that “winning straight away is no good.” One said, “Heck, I don’t want to win, I want to keep playing!” (Livingstone and Woolley 2008, 107). For behavioral research on the way in which big wins disrupts the flow of machine play, see Dickerson et al. 1992, 246.

24. Reith 2007, 42. Kocurek (2012) argues that the phenomenon of coin-operated video arcade gaming of the 1970s and 80s reflected the rise of credit culture and the new spending practices it demanded.

25. Livingstone 2005, 533.

26. Adams n.d., 35.

27. Livingstone 2005, 530; see also Adams, n.d.

28. The “chase” is gamblers’ shorthand for “chasing losses,” an expression that describes the race to regain what has been lost through further wagering (the opposite of “cutting losses”). For an extended discussion of the gambler’s “chase” see Lesieur’s book of that title, in which he wrote: “It is the chase that provides the initial push for the spiral the gambler becomes committed to and that gives the spiral velocity” (1977, 2). Lesieur’s description of gamblers’ narrowing “spiral of options” evokes Devereux’s earlier phrase, “circle of despair.” Devereux wrote of the gambler: “He sees himself getting in deeper and deeper; yet if he quits now, all this is irretrievably lost. The only way to get it back is to keep on playing” (Devereux 1949, 729).

29. Livingstone 2005, 533.

30. Lears 2003, 8; see also Lears 2008.

31. “This peculiar form of consumption appears as the consumption of nothing at all,” writes Reith of gambling (2007, 51).

32. Contemporary machine gamblers are less involved in illegal money-acquisition schemes than the card and sports gamblers that Lesieur (1977) described, most likely because they are not part of a gambling social network or culture of book making. The day-to-day life of machine addicts is more isolated, and their methods for acquiring money are more integrated with legitimate systems of consumer banking and credit.

(...)

SUSPENDING CLOCK TIME

The element of time is another resource of calculative selfhood that gambling addicts manage to revalue through their machine play—again, by distilling its real-world value to the point where it assumes another value altogether. “Time is liquidated to become an essential currency of the problem gambler,” writes Livingstone. “It may well be the most important and significant currency. But time as such is elided during the term of the session. It ceases to exist in its socially recognizable form.”34 While gambling addicts may remain for seventeen hours or even whole weekends at machines, the “clock time” (as they call it) by which those long stretches are measured “stops mattering,” “sits still,” is “gone” or “lost.” “I would get off work in the afternoon, and I would plan to play just one roll [of quarters]—but I would go right into a complete daze and look down at my watch and see I had to be at work again in two hours,” Randall tells me. “I would have gambled almost in a blackout for hours.”

The time of the machine zone departs from the order of chronos—“the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject,” as Deleuze and Guattari describe it—to follow instead the “the indefinite time of the event,” a kind of time measured by “relative speeds and slownesses,” proceeding “independently of the chronometric or chronological values that time assumes in other modes.”35 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi similarly observes that time in flow activities seems to “adapt itself” to one’s experience rather than the other way around, such that “the objective, external duration we measure with reference to outside events like night and day, or the orderly progression of clocks, is rendered irrelevant by the rhythms dictated by the activity.” Flow activities mark their own pace, achieving “freedom from the tyranny  of time.”36 Commenting on the signature absence of clocks from casinos, Reith writes that “clocks are markers of a shared, objective temporal consensus, imposing order on the flux of human relations and their surroundings.” “In the timeless void of the casino,” she goes on, “the length (or rate of play) of a game becomes gamblers’ measure of time, constituting their own internal ‘clock.’”37 Like money, time in the zone becomes a kind of credit whose value shifts in line with the rhythms of machine play; gamblers speak of spending time, salvaging it, squandering it. Randall, noting a phenomenological kinship between his video poker play and his race car driving, comments that both activities make him feel he is “bending” time: “I go into a different time frame, like in slow motion … it’s a whole other time zone.”

Just as gamblers must maintain sufficient monetary credit to keep the “sustained indeterminacy” of the zone going, they must maintain sufficient temporal credit; too little time, and the real world will impinge upon the zone—work shifts to begin, doctors appointments to be kept, children to be picked up from school. When time begins to “run out,” players thus seek to extract more and more plays from it, as Julie describes in the passage below. In the same manner that she extends zone value by resetting her credit target every time it is reached, so she extends zone time by constantly resetting the endpoint of her play:

When the time comes to leave and the things I escaped from start crowding back into my brain, I find myself rationalizing, Well, I don’t really have to go today … and I ask an attendant to hold my machine while I run to the payphone to call and buy myself more time, and then back to continue, and now there’s three more hours. And when those three hours are up, I think, I’ll have to save money for the phone calls I’ll have to make to cancel all the appointments I am going to miss. … I’m thinking of how to arrange things so that I can stay there, how to economize.

In the intervals of tension that threaten the continuation of her play, Julie calculates in two registers of time at once—clock time and zone time. How can she parlay the former into the latter? Or, as she asks above, how to economize? At the edges of the zone, Julie must remain mindful of the coins she needs to “save” to cover the cost of phone calls that might free up clock time and thus buy her more zone time. (Again, we see that the zone never entirely loses its economic market metric, for real-world money is what buys the clock time that buys zone time.)

When she can buy herself no more time and real-world demands press upon her, Julie resorts to speed, as she does when her play credits are running dangerously low. “When I absolutely have to be somewhere, then I have to play as much as I can possibly play before leaving. I start chasing, I play faster and faster—Oh goodness, I only have fifteen more minutes, ten more minutes …” Like Randall, who feels that he can “bend time,” Julie’s conviction is that she can intensify her experience of gambling time by ramping up the “event frequency” of her play; less of a lag or hiatus between play events, she seems to reason, means that more can occur.38 In the zone, she experiences time as event driven rather than clock driven.

To understand event-driven time in its broader social-historical context, it is instructive to consider Walter Benjamin’s mid-twentieth-century analysis of manufacturing technologies, in the course of which he drew a comparison between the temporalities of assembly-line labor and that of gambling. Both activities involved a continuous series of repeating events, each having “no connection with the preceding operation for the very reason that it is its exact repetition.”39 “Each operation at the machine,” he wrote of factory work, “is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it. … Starting all over again is the regulative idea of the game, as it is of work for wages.” This “starting over again,” this constant beginning that is discontinuous with all previous beginnings, meant that each act of labor or play was experienced as a nonchronological event “out of time.” Even as industrial work depended on clocks so that time could be precisely measured and segmented, that very mode of measurement and segmentation erased time by “screening off” each of its moments from the others. Likewise, Benjamin argued, the isolation of each gambling “moment” from the rest—“the ivory ball which rolls into the next compartment, the next card which lies on top”—removed gamblers from the ordinary passage of time.

While Benjamin highlighted how gambling dechronologizes time by turning it into a disconnected series of events, Goffman’s later analysis focused on the temporality of gambling events themselves, in which action and outcome are compressed into a single moment: “The distinctive property of games and contests is that once the bet has been made, outcome is determined and payoff awarded all in the same breath of experience.”40 Present-day machine gambling further shrinks the time span of uncertainty, immediately resolving the event of the bet with the quick  press of a button. Its “rapid succession of events of anticipation and consummation,” as the Australian gambling scholar Jennifer Borrell writes, has the effect of continually collapsing an uncertain future into the present.41 Machine gamblers experience a time that has been technologically infused with a surplus of moments, allowing them to feel they can alter its course depending on how fast or slow they play.

The machine zone’s elasticization of time, like its elasticization of money, distills key elements of contemporary social and economic life. Clichés like “time is money,” “time is running out,” and “life moves fast” capture a phenomenon of which machine gambling is only one example—namely, that capitalism operates at increasingly high speeds. E. P. Thompson wrote of the new temporal relations that accompanied the transition to industrial society, in which working habits were restructured such that time was not something that passed, but something that was spent, as a sort of currency. He was concerned with “time-sense in its technological conditioning.”42 Since he wrote, the rise of digital information, communication, and transportation technologies has sped up production, travel, consumption, and financial transactions to a degree that previous eras would have considered astonishing. Digital technology has “compressed” time by packing ever-more moments into service-based and financial-sector work, media and entertainment, and private life.43 Under such conditions, the actuarial self must also be a time-maximizing self; she must either maintain a fast tempo or else fail to be the enterprising being she is supposed to be, falling “behind the times,” so to speak. One could say that the industry of machine gambling profits by issuing a perverse version of this imperative to gamblers, some of whom respond at the cost of acquiring an addiction. Whatever else they may be, intensive machine gamblers are individuals who embody the imperative to act at a continuous high velocity. As such, they reveal both the pervasiveness and the existential perils of the wider social valorization of speed.

If real-world temporal tendencies express themselves in the zone and in gamblers’ addiction to it, it is also the case that the technologically accelerated temporality of the machine zone enters into and saturates gamblers’ experience of real-world time. “Time in general, not just when I’m playing,” Sharon notes, “becomes very distorted. I feel like I can manipulate it very easily, salvage much more than I can from a small unit of it: go grocery shopping on the way to the casino, and while I’m there make a doctor’s appointment on the cellular phone, and then on the way home get the shoelaces I need. … Everything I do is relative to gambling time.”  As Lesieur wrote, “the process of getting even is all [a gambler] thinks about when he reflects on his total situation. Therefore he concentrates on each immediate situation and the next bet he will make. The time span is shortened to the short-term chase and the specific event he is in.”44“I’d be later and later and later to work,” Patsy recalls. “At break time, I’d ask my supervisor, Do you mind if I go to the bank?—and I’d already be out the door. My sense of time was totally out the door. I was just wound. I’d win a royal [flush] and I’d be ticked off because I’d have to wait for them to come pay me off. The other workers would look at the clock when I came back and I would think, What are you looking at the clock for? Mind your own business.” At every chance, Patsy attempts to escape clock time, such that she becomes almost like a clock herself: she is “wound”; she is “ticked off” as time ticks by during her wait for a jackpot payoff; when she returns to work, resentful co-workers look pointedly at the clock. “When I wasn’t playing,” she told us at the start of the chapter, “my whole being was directed to getting back into that zone. It was a machine life.”

Natasha Dow Schüll

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD