The question of the relationship between psychology and geopolitics is fascinating and I’m genuinely persuaded by your diagnosis of the PMC- or elite-centered issue. Anyone working a service or retail job in America right now, for example, understands that for a person to go corporate is to become not just vicious in deed but also diabolical in spirit. If one were to move up from the storefront to the corporate office, it is then simply a requirement of the job to change up how one thinks, feels, and acts towards one’s former coworkers in ways that harm them while enriching oneself. Even for a “good” person. Retail workers also understand that there is a broader social phenomenon involved, and that the same entities and social circles that require this transformation of a person also run the government. However, there is an analytic problem that the framework of class might typically pose as one of “consciousness,” which is simply that nobody agrees or is even able to articulate the problem in sufficient detail, much less communicate, cooperate, and do anything about it. At a basic social-emotional level, it’s still a war of all against all, and that is reinforced by design.
I wonder though, given your mentioning the problem of political Islam for the elite ideology/phenomenon in the West, and also given your use of Freud and considering the history of psychoanalysis re:Jung—how might an idea of spirit, or even just God, work analytically and practically to address this problem of scale, that is implicated in both the question of the relationship between psychology and geopolitics and the question of class relations in the West? Might finding God en masse be an effective approach—and is that any way to find God in the first place? Foucault, for one thing, was persuaded by the Iranian revolution that the West is missing an idea of spirit that political Islam, or at least Iran’s iteration of it, effectively engages. (For him, there were methodological considerations at stake, concerning the same basic problem of scale and granularity in social analysis.)
Since you mention Galitsyn, it is worth noting that the Western intelligence agencies who struggled with the dilemma he posed were led at least in part by literary types (e.g. James Angleton) and spiritualists (e.g. Jack Parsons). It seems that precisely those leaders of the West who yield the most effective control, and who most prize control, are those whom practical exigencies invariably force to abandon the vulgar rationalist ideology. Then spiritual anarchy and incoherence ensues, at best, or some kind of nihilism at worst. To this day, we have Peter Thiel (The Reptile) with his greasy public pronouncements about the Antichrist, running “deep” technologies of control. Palantir presents us with Alex Karp, a Frankfurt School PhD whose dissertation project, not for nothing, had been dropped by a liberal arch-rationalist—Habermas—and picked up by a psychoanalyst. Reductive materialism seems to have a ceiling.
The basic problem with monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes.
Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the gravitational center of every culture are ideals.
The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental. So a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgment, from which it fell. The light shining through the film, than the stories playing out on it.
Morality is not absolute, as it couldn't be transgressed, if it were. Like a temperature below absolute zero.
Morals are those qualities, like trust, honor, respect, integrity, honesty, responsibility, etc. that are the glues enabling and holding society together, not some divine code handed down from above.
To the Ancients, gods were as much metaphors and memes, as spirits. Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. In a world not yet sterilized by the formalisms, where even consciousness is open to question, the assumption that thoughts, ideas, concepts, events, phenomena, etc. were spirits made a lot of sense.
That divine father figure was always about authority. Ancient Israel was a monarchy. Constantine co-opted Christianity for the monotheism, as he was bringing the Empire back together. The Catholic Church served as the eschatological basis for European monarchy.
When the West went back to popular forms of government, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics, morality and law.
Stimulating essay, as per your usual style, insight, and verve. Following your reasoning (in short: we're stuck because our Superiors belong to a cult), and taking in consideration your view on the outcome of this situation (some unpleasant unraveling on a global scale), one inquiry that should be interesting is figuring out why and most of all why that particular cult has established itself so uniformly amongst the Olympians. Also, it is curious to observe that an "ethos" based on tolerance, openness (Popper anyone?), and the essential removal of all attachments supported by clever mindfulness and yoga mats has resulted in a very rigid, almost petrified, sense of self, sometimes reminiscent of 1600's Inquisition, with proper beliefs and all. How is that possible? Also, how is it that tolerance is leading us to a society that is more and more intolerant? It surely doesn't look as Popper's "being intolerant with the intolerants" because the latter seem now to represent quite a large portion of the population.
It is really beyond me to inquire into this, but somehow it sounds like some sort of Law of Contrappasso from Dante...
For instance, as mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so it is our experience of time that it is this narrative flow, from past to future, while the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
No time traveling around the fabric of spacetime, as it is more a tapestry being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.
Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
The present goes past to future, as the patterns generated go future to past, because energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, as the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.
As it is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, there does tend to be this cognitive focus on the patterns, the information, then trying to extract explanation from what is effect.
So reality is more thermodynamic feedback loops, than narrative flow.
While we tend to assume there is some static substrate to reality, be it matter, math, God, truth, even money, the fact is that structure is recursive, while energy is expansive.
Galaxies are structure coalescing in, as light radiates out.
So when we do try finding that basis to our world and its problems, by studying all those patterns, we end up circling into these echo chambers and rabbit holes, where each layer is built on the previous layer and we can never quite find that grain of sand at the center of the pearl.
Yet this dynamic is like a storm and its eye is an effect of that storm, not its cause. Like a center of gravity is an effect of the surrounding mass.
It is just that our minds and our cultures build on priors, like rings of a tree.
Though if those core premises are flawed, all the "shut up and calculate" is gigo.
So the node is synchronization. Everything on the same wavelength, functioning as one.
While the network is harmonization. All the energies traded around, creating overall equilibrium.
The light you see reflected off the surfaces around you are the frequencies not absorbed by them.
As multicellular organisms, it is our nervous system that coordinates all the cells and organs into one fairly coherent entity.
It is the circulation system that sustains harmony across this ecosystem of cells and organs.
In that states function as social super organisms, government, executive and regulatory, is the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system.
We have evolved enough to understand that as government has to serve the entire society, if only to prevent civil wars and revolutions, that it works best as a public utility. More referee than locus. Much as our mind is more referee of the desires and needs, than source.
We haven’t yet come to understand the same principle applies to banking.
When the medium enabling markets is a player and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers.
In a market economy, money is the medium. In a capitalist economy, money is the message. One is a tool, the other is a god.
As linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate. Consequently Econ 101 refers to money as both medium of exchange and store of value.
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but we would still be fighting over who has the biggest lots.
In your body, blood is the medium, fat is the store. Mix them up and you are dead. Try telling a doctor that medium and store are interchangeable and he will look at you like you are really stupid, but to an economist, it would be common knowledge. Consequently the entire financial accounting system of society has been turned into a giant casino.
So rather than resources being allocated where they would have the greatest benefit, much is siphoned off to feed large egos, leaving the rest to fight over the scraps. It would be like the heart telling the hands and feet to go suck dirt, as it is keeping the blood for itself.
As a medium, you own money like you own the section of road you are on, or the air and water flowing through your body. It doesn't have your picture on it, you don't hold the copyrights and, most importantly, are not directly responsible for its value, like a personal check.
While we might think of it as a commodity to mine from the economy, like we mine gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computer processing, it functions as a contract, between the holder and the rest of society.
As a contract, storing the asset side of the ledger requires a debt on the other side, so much economic, social and political activity is designed to generate debt, to store the illusion of wealth.
That the flunkies allowed in DC are best at running up debt and the financial sector needs this debt to grow metastatically is not coincidence. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
“The real money is in bonds.”
The banks are having their, "Let them eat cake." moment.
Thank you for this — as usual, you've put your finger on something important, and the essay is a genuinely useful map of a real terrain.
I want to push on one thing, though, and I hope you'll take it in the spirit of continuing the conversation rather than just objecting.
You've described the PMC's intellectual dysfunction with real precision — the institutional incest, the normative formation, the Ego Death mechanism, the apophenic tendencies. All of that rings true to anyone who's had to work around these people. But the explanation you offer is primarily psychological and sociological: people who grew up together, trained together, think together, and face career destruction if they deviate. That's real. It's not wrong.
But here's what keeps nagging at me. If the explanation is primarily psychological — individual formation, institutional reinforcement, the specific historical accident of the post-Cold War moment — then we'd expect some variance. Brownian movement, if you like. People formed in the same crucible who landed in different places. What we actually see is something much more uniform than individual psychology can produce. The same conclusions, across institutions, across national boundaries, across parties nominally opposed to each other, with a precision that a purely psychological explanation can't really account for.
When I see that kind of population-level uniformity — and I say this as someone whose professional habit is looking at distributions rather than individual cases — I start looking for a coordinating exposure rather than a psychological tendency. Something that the population shares that produces the uniformity. And the candidate that keeps presenting itself isn't the shared university experience or the shared generational formation. It's the funding structure: who finances the think-tanks, who endows the foundations, who sits on the university governing boards, who owns the media outlets, whose interests are served by the specific conclusions the PMC reliably produces and whose interests are threatened by the conclusions it reliably avoids.
Gabriel Rockhill has done a lot of work on this — the documented hand of specific institutional funding in shaping which intellectual currents got amplified and which got quietly defunded across the post-war decades. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's a funding audit. And what it shows is that the PMC's epistemic closure is not primarily an accident of socialization. It's a structural output of a knowledge production system whose material incentives are owned by the same interests the PMC's conclusions reliably protect.
You've written often and well about post-modernism and deconstruction and what happened when those currents passed through the American institutional filter. What I see in the current PMC is something related but different: not deconstruction but a kind of intellectual closure that offers no exit. The diagnosis you've written is accurate and valuable. What it doesn't quite do — and I wonder whether you'd agree — is ask whose interests the dysfunction serves. Because that question points somewhere specific. And the specific place it points is the one your essay, for all its acuity, doesn't quite reach.
I'm not saying the silence is intentional. You may well be right that some of this is simply the water the fish swims in — the present epistemic paradigm capturing even its most perceptive critics at the edges. But the professionals, as Gary Brecher used to say, don't talk cancel. They talk silence. And the silence in this particular essay — on class interest, on the material structure of knowledge production, on whose money built the institutions whose graduates populate the PMC — is the gap that the analysis needs to close before it can offer an actual resolution rather than a very accurate description of a closed room.
Worth a follow-up piece, I think. The psychological diagnosis is the beginning of the analysis, not its end.
As I commented, in that states function as social super organisms, government executive and regulatory, is the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system.
We have evolved enough to understand that as government has to serve the entire society, that it works best as a public utility.
We haven’t yet come to understand the same principle applies to banking.
When the medium enabling markets is a player and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers.
The West has been enthrall to the banks since the Napoleonic wars.
Though one could go back to the invention of money, that the "moneychangers" have been a thorn stuck in society.
The bank are having their, "Let them eat cake." moment.
1. "There’s the fascinating case of Anatoly Golitsyn, a KGB defector who managed to persuade many important people in the West that the Soviet Union was engaged in a vast deception operation, facilitated by agents at all levels in western governments, and that the Sino-Soviet split was a myth, the East German and Hungarian risings were false flag operations and the 1968 Prague crisis was a KGB deception operation. He warned publicly that the Soviet Union would pretend to be weaker and weaker, only to spring a trap at the last moment."
One could posit the counter-example of Andrei Amalrik, who in 1970 published "Will The Soviet Union Last Until 1984?". Enough to say that Amalrik's predictions proved strikingly prescient, even if he was off by a couple of years. Of course, Amalrik was treated like a leper in the West, especially by the professional anticommunist set, precisely because, in Amalrik's view, the USSR wasn't nearly as scary a boogeyman as the anticommunists needed at the time.
2. Western elites see Ukraine as a resounding success and are eager to escalate further.
bad for the reputations and careers, and even power and money, of those involved
are you sure? Could you make a list of managers or politicians fallen in disgrace? They pass from a political career to a managerial one and back. it doesn't matter how many times they fail, wealth is assured.
I agree people are strange , its very interesting to read all the effects of it , i think its normal that people are strange i say this because any person or persons i think are not strange would certainly be considered as strange by other people in the world , across the world people behave differently eat differently dress differently and have different ways of life but we all have the same ability to recognise injustice its one thing we see projected across the world we all know its bad and its wrong when we see that some people are harmed by it .
If every person on this planet had a vote every time a country or countries wanted to start a war there would never be another war alternative solutions would always be found and like all solutions you cannot please all the people all the time.
The private sector PMC (that I was once part) share many (or even all) of the values that you describe and is increasingly homogenous with the public sector. The lack of true diversity is an even bigger problem than the essay describes!
Your work here reminds me of an older, worthy attempt to finesse some of these issues. When John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosario came out with their book "How States Think", I immediately bought it and loved it. However, it has a problem, in that it starts off with the premise that states mostly are, or at least can be, "rational" (defined carefully!). While I agree with its analyses and case studies, some of them brilliant, in my view it methodologically suffers from two strategic faults: its premise in general terms might be viewed as falsified in reality; and, secondly, it forever teeters on the edge of begging the question. So arguably its explanatory power is somewhat limited!
The question of the relationship between psychology and geopolitics is fascinating and I’m genuinely persuaded by your diagnosis of the PMC- or elite-centered issue. Anyone working a service or retail job in America right now, for example, understands that for a person to go corporate is to become not just vicious in deed but also diabolical in spirit. If one were to move up from the storefront to the corporate office, it is then simply a requirement of the job to change up how one thinks, feels, and acts towards one’s former coworkers in ways that harm them while enriching oneself. Even for a “good” person. Retail workers also understand that there is a broader social phenomenon involved, and that the same entities and social circles that require this transformation of a person also run the government. However, there is an analytic problem that the framework of class might typically pose as one of “consciousness,” which is simply that nobody agrees or is even able to articulate the problem in sufficient detail, much less communicate, cooperate, and do anything about it. At a basic social-emotional level, it’s still a war of all against all, and that is reinforced by design.
I wonder though, given your mentioning the problem of political Islam for the elite ideology/phenomenon in the West, and also given your use of Freud and considering the history of psychoanalysis re:Jung—how might an idea of spirit, or even just God, work analytically and practically to address this problem of scale, that is implicated in both the question of the relationship between psychology and geopolitics and the question of class relations in the West? Might finding God en masse be an effective approach—and is that any way to find God in the first place? Foucault, for one thing, was persuaded by the Iranian revolution that the West is missing an idea of spirit that political Islam, or at least Iran’s iteration of it, effectively engages. (For him, there were methodological considerations at stake, concerning the same basic problem of scale and granularity in social analysis.)
Since you mention Galitsyn, it is worth noting that the Western intelligence agencies who struggled with the dilemma he posed were led at least in part by literary types (e.g. James Angleton) and spiritualists (e.g. Jack Parsons). It seems that precisely those leaders of the West who yield the most effective control, and who most prize control, are those whom practical exigencies invariably force to abandon the vulgar rationalist ideology. Then spiritual anarchy and incoherence ensues, at best, or some kind of nihilism at worst. To this day, we have Peter Thiel (The Reptile) with his greasy public pronouncements about the Antichrist, running “deep” technologies of control. Palantir presents us with Alex Karp, a Frankfurt School PhD whose dissertation project, not for nothing, had been dropped by a liberal arch-rationalist—Habermas—and picked up by a psychoanalyst. Reductive materialism seems to have a ceiling.
The basic problem with monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes.
Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the gravitational center of every culture are ideals.
The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental. So a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgment, from which it fell. The light shining through the film, than the stories playing out on it.
Morality is not absolute, as it couldn't be transgressed, if it were. Like a temperature below absolute zero.
Morals are those qualities, like trust, honor, respect, integrity, honesty, responsibility, etc. that are the glues enabling and holding society together, not some divine code handed down from above.
To the Ancients, gods were as much metaphors and memes, as spirits. Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. In a world not yet sterilized by the formalisms, where even consciousness is open to question, the assumption that thoughts, ideas, concepts, events, phenomena, etc. were spirits made a lot of sense.
That divine father figure was always about authority. Ancient Israel was a monarchy. Constantine co-opted Christianity for the monotheism, as he was bringing the Empire back together. The Catholic Church served as the eschatological basis for European monarchy.
When the West went back to popular forms of government, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics, morality and law.
Stimulating essay, as per your usual style, insight, and verve. Following your reasoning (in short: we're stuck because our Superiors belong to a cult), and taking in consideration your view on the outcome of this situation (some unpleasant unraveling on a global scale), one inquiry that should be interesting is figuring out why and most of all why that particular cult has established itself so uniformly amongst the Olympians. Also, it is curious to observe that an "ethos" based on tolerance, openness (Popper anyone?), and the essential removal of all attachments supported by clever mindfulness and yoga mats has resulted in a very rigid, almost petrified, sense of self, sometimes reminiscent of 1600's Inquisition, with proper beliefs and all. How is that possible? Also, how is it that tolerance is leading us to a society that is more and more intolerant? It surely doesn't look as Popper's "being intolerant with the intolerants" because the latter seem now to represent quite a large portion of the population.
It is really beyond me to inquire into this, but somehow it sounds like some sort of Law of Contrappasso from Dante...
The foundational premise of Western Civ is monotheism. The ideal as absolute.
When your ideals are absolute....
What if our basic premises are flawed?
For instance, as mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so it is our experience of time that it is this narrative flow, from past to future, while the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
No time traveling around the fabric of spacetime, as it is more a tapestry being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.
Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
The present goes past to future, as the patterns generated go future to past, because energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, as the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.
As it is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, there does tend to be this cognitive focus on the patterns, the information, then trying to extract explanation from what is effect.
So reality is more thermodynamic feedback loops, than narrative flow.
While we tend to assume there is some static substrate to reality, be it matter, math, God, truth, even money, the fact is that structure is recursive, while energy is expansive.
Galaxies are structure coalescing in, as light radiates out.
So when we do try finding that basis to our world and its problems, by studying all those patterns, we end up circling into these echo chambers and rabbit holes, where each layer is built on the previous layer and we can never quite find that grain of sand at the center of the pearl.
Yet this dynamic is like a storm and its eye is an effect of that storm, not its cause. Like a center of gravity is an effect of the surrounding mass.
It is just that our minds and our cultures build on priors, like rings of a tree.
Though if those core premises are flawed, all the "shut up and calculate" is gigo.
So the node is synchronization. Everything on the same wavelength, functioning as one.
While the network is harmonization. All the energies traded around, creating overall equilibrium.
The light you see reflected off the surfaces around you are the frequencies not absorbed by them.
As multicellular organisms, it is our nervous system that coordinates all the cells and organs into one fairly coherent entity.
It is the circulation system that sustains harmony across this ecosystem of cells and organs.
In that states function as social super organisms, government, executive and regulatory, is the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system.
We have evolved enough to understand that as government has to serve the entire society, if only to prevent civil wars and revolutions, that it works best as a public utility. More referee than locus. Much as our mind is more referee of the desires and needs, than source.
We haven’t yet come to understand the same principle applies to banking.
When the medium enabling markets is a player and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers.
In a market economy, money is the medium. In a capitalist economy, money is the message. One is a tool, the other is a god.
As linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate. Consequently Econ 101 refers to money as both medium of exchange and store of value.
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but we would still be fighting over who has the biggest lots.
In your body, blood is the medium, fat is the store. Mix them up and you are dead. Try telling a doctor that medium and store are interchangeable and he will look at you like you are really stupid, but to an economist, it would be common knowledge. Consequently the entire financial accounting system of society has been turned into a giant casino.
So rather than resources being allocated where they would have the greatest benefit, much is siphoned off to feed large egos, leaving the rest to fight over the scraps. It would be like the heart telling the hands and feet to go suck dirt, as it is keeping the blood for itself.
As a medium, you own money like you own the section of road you are on, or the air and water flowing through your body. It doesn't have your picture on it, you don't hold the copyrights and, most importantly, are not directly responsible for its value, like a personal check.
While we might think of it as a commodity to mine from the economy, like we mine gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computer processing, it functions as a contract, between the holder and the rest of society.
As a contract, storing the asset side of the ledger requires a debt on the other side, so much economic, social and political activity is designed to generate debt, to store the illusion of wealth.
That the flunkies allowed in DC are best at running up debt and the financial sector needs this debt to grow metastatically is not coincidence. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
“The real money is in bonds.”
The banks are having their, "Let them eat cake." moment.
Thank you for this — as usual, you've put your finger on something important, and the essay is a genuinely useful map of a real terrain.
I want to push on one thing, though, and I hope you'll take it in the spirit of continuing the conversation rather than just objecting.
You've described the PMC's intellectual dysfunction with real precision — the institutional incest, the normative formation, the Ego Death mechanism, the apophenic tendencies. All of that rings true to anyone who's had to work around these people. But the explanation you offer is primarily psychological and sociological: people who grew up together, trained together, think together, and face career destruction if they deviate. That's real. It's not wrong.
But here's what keeps nagging at me. If the explanation is primarily psychological — individual formation, institutional reinforcement, the specific historical accident of the post-Cold War moment — then we'd expect some variance. Brownian movement, if you like. People formed in the same crucible who landed in different places. What we actually see is something much more uniform than individual psychology can produce. The same conclusions, across institutions, across national boundaries, across parties nominally opposed to each other, with a precision that a purely psychological explanation can't really account for.
When I see that kind of population-level uniformity — and I say this as someone whose professional habit is looking at distributions rather than individual cases — I start looking for a coordinating exposure rather than a psychological tendency. Something that the population shares that produces the uniformity. And the candidate that keeps presenting itself isn't the shared university experience or the shared generational formation. It's the funding structure: who finances the think-tanks, who endows the foundations, who sits on the university governing boards, who owns the media outlets, whose interests are served by the specific conclusions the PMC reliably produces and whose interests are threatened by the conclusions it reliably avoids.
Gabriel Rockhill has done a lot of work on this — the documented hand of specific institutional funding in shaping which intellectual currents got amplified and which got quietly defunded across the post-war decades. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's a funding audit. And what it shows is that the PMC's epistemic closure is not primarily an accident of socialization. It's a structural output of a knowledge production system whose material incentives are owned by the same interests the PMC's conclusions reliably protect.
You've written often and well about post-modernism and deconstruction and what happened when those currents passed through the American institutional filter. What I see in the current PMC is something related but different: not deconstruction but a kind of intellectual closure that offers no exit. The diagnosis you've written is accurate and valuable. What it doesn't quite do — and I wonder whether you'd agree — is ask whose interests the dysfunction serves. Because that question points somewhere specific. And the specific place it points is the one your essay, for all its acuity, doesn't quite reach.
I'm not saying the silence is intentional. You may well be right that some of this is simply the water the fish swims in — the present epistemic paradigm capturing even its most perceptive critics at the edges. But the professionals, as Gary Brecher used to say, don't talk cancel. They talk silence. And the silence in this particular essay — on class interest, on the material structure of knowledge production, on whose money built the institutions whose graduates populate the PMC — is the gap that the analysis needs to close before it can offer an actual resolution rather than a very accurate description of a closed room.
Worth a follow-up piece, I think. The psychological diagnosis is the beginning of the analysis, not its end.
As I commented, in that states function as social super organisms, government executive and regulatory, is the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system.
We have evolved enough to understand that as government has to serve the entire society, that it works best as a public utility.
We haven’t yet come to understand the same principle applies to banking.
When the medium enabling markets is a player and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers.
The West has been enthrall to the banks since the Napoleonic wars.
Though one could go back to the invention of money, that the "moneychangers" have been a thorn stuck in society.
The bank are having their, "Let them eat cake." moment.
1. "There’s the fascinating case of Anatoly Golitsyn, a KGB defector who managed to persuade many important people in the West that the Soviet Union was engaged in a vast deception operation, facilitated by agents at all levels in western governments, and that the Sino-Soviet split was a myth, the East German and Hungarian risings were false flag operations and the 1968 Prague crisis was a KGB deception operation. He warned publicly that the Soviet Union would pretend to be weaker and weaker, only to spring a trap at the last moment."
One could posit the counter-example of Andrei Amalrik, who in 1970 published "Will The Soviet Union Last Until 1984?". Enough to say that Amalrik's predictions proved strikingly prescient, even if he was off by a couple of years. Of course, Amalrik was treated like a leper in the West, especially by the professional anticommunist set, precisely because, in Amalrik's view, the USSR wasn't nearly as scary a boogeyman as the anticommunists needed at the time.
2. Western elites see Ukraine as a resounding success and are eager to escalate further.
Great article thank you
Are International Humanitarian Law courses usually taught as part of the modern fiction curriculum?
bad for the reputations and careers, and even power and money, of those involved
are you sure? Could you make a list of managers or politicians fallen in disgrace? They pass from a political career to a managerial one and back. it doesn't matter how many times they fail, wealth is assured.
I agree people are strange , its very interesting to read all the effects of it , i think its normal that people are strange i say this because any person or persons i think are not strange would certainly be considered as strange by other people in the world , across the world people behave differently eat differently dress differently and have different ways of life but we all have the same ability to recognise injustice its one thing we see projected across the world we all know its bad and its wrong when we see that some people are harmed by it .
If every person on this planet had a vote every time a country or countries wanted to start a war there would never be another war alternative solutions would always be found and like all solutions you cannot please all the people all the time.
The private sector PMC (that I was once part) share many (or even all) of the values that you describe and is increasingly homogenous with the public sector. The lack of true diversity is an even bigger problem than the essay describes!
Thank you. I concur.
Your work here reminds me of an older, worthy attempt to finesse some of these issues. When John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosario came out with their book "How States Think", I immediately bought it and loved it. However, it has a problem, in that it starts off with the premise that states mostly are, or at least can be, "rational" (defined carefully!). While I agree with its analyses and case studies, some of them brilliant, in my view it methodologically suffers from two strategic faults: its premise in general terms might be viewed as falsified in reality; and, secondly, it forever teeters on the edge of begging the question. So arguably its explanatory power is somewhat limited!