The Normal Times

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  • Colin Woodard, 2011

    Ugh.

    So it was fun at first. If it had been fiction it would have been more than decent concerning world-building, but it was not intended to be fiction.

    I could buy into the book’s premise initially. That the U.S. has these regional cultures with different backgrounds, insecurities, and desires, and these elements often result in political conflict. His all-too-brief descriptions of major migrations also seem accurate enough.

    And that’s it. Everything else seems to be based on the author’s personal feelings about the different regions and their histories, or at least what he bothered to know about them. He takes broad stretches of land and singularly describes every person who would have lived there, like some localized hive mind. It’s a tone for long-form travel ads, not one that has any interest in analyses. The author clearly hates the South and obviously loves New England. Guess where this clown lives, then guess what kind of think tank he’s the director of.

    In spite of the author’s narrow-mindedness, the book manages to stay enjoyable for the first half or so. But if I ever re-read it, I would consider every chapter as “this former Politico editor’s idea of this region”. This likely won’t happen, because the book really went to shit in the second half, and for two reasons:

    1. By the time you get here, you realize how lazy this writer is. All pop and no real meat. He recycles chapter openers and reads like he followed the same beat formula over and over. So many quotes left uncited. It comes off like he dictated the book more than wrote it. And he has an annoying habit of putting his own little cutesy phrases in gimmicky quotations for no clear reason I can think of beyond the author being a coward who doesn’t want to take responsibility for his claims.
    2. It doesn’t get better. The last few chapters are presented as some thoughtful review of each region’s particular issues and what he thinks can be done to alleviate them. It could have been an interesting segment if the book was written by a good writer. It comes out to New England being just too nice and dreamy, maybe a little bossy, but they only mean well and know best. The South, on the other hand, is hellish and irredeemable and nothing will ever fix it. The same people who brought slaves rule the land like ghost kings, so everyone must die, disappear, or conform and allow northerners to take care of everything. For everywhere else, he seems to have forgotten what he was going to say because he just paraphrases the same shit from the first half of the book all over again. The fucking twerp.

    Any star out of five feels too generous. The book can have one because the map is neat enough for about two minutes. And it could have maybe been a decent book if someone else had written it, but it was made by this guy, who should be quarantined to r/politics with the rest of his kind for the remainder of his writing career.

  • House Silvia and House [REDACTED]

    More nuisances than intrigues this week, and I feel much more like a secretary than a mitigator. Between the devil and a pile of paperwork, I’ll give you two highlights.

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  • AN ANNOTATED READING OF BETWEEN TWO AGES, BY ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, 1970, PAGES 26-30

    Previous Entries: Chapter Four, Chapter Three, Chapter Two, Chapter One, Introduction

    This is the final chapter of the first part of Between Two Ages. The purpose of this section was to explore potential worldwide impacts of the transition of major powers from industrial-oriented societies to high-tech service-oriented societies. Reminder, Brzezinski was writing this theory in the late 1960s and attempting to forecast these impacts over roughly the course of the next five plus decades.

    To start, Brzezinski states that, on a global scale, the effects of the technetronic revolution are contradictory. The beginnings of this age are synonymous with the beginnings of a global community. A community of vast trade networks, of easier travel and therefore easier access to faraway lands, of expanding knowledge both shared and stolen. At the same time, Brzezinski predicts this age will be fragmenting and that it will come at the cost of an individual culture’s traditional moorings. The revolution will widen the spectrum of the quality of life attainable across the planet, while also intensifying the gulf in material conditions. Within a single nation, wealth disparities will widen. Globally, these gaps will be even greater.

    All societies evolved and adjusted in their own ways since the dawn of time. Obviously the Industrial Revolution accelerated these natural adjustments, maybe even corrupted them. Who really knows? That revolution also highlighted the contrasts between different societies starting with the urban and rural lives of any industrializing nation. Cities popped up like weeds, and they became more productive than ever before. While they still almost always kept their slums, these shady corners shrunk in size as unskilled labor found more and more opportunities with every factory that opened. At the same time, mental distress showed a marked increase (suicide spiked) and what sense of community existed was diminished. In rural areas, new technology made for more production in the agricultural sectors, but not without an exodus of unskilled labor and youth to manufacturing centers. Peasants had more options in life than ever before, but they paid for it with the loss of most of their folk-ways.

    Brzezinski notes that at the time of his writing, there were still nations living in circumstances that had barely progressed past the Middle Ages. That claim could still be made today to a certain degree. There are even more nations living in the earlier industrial stages, as well as those agra/industrial hybrids where one can access the internet via kiosk but still predominantly uses hand tools to harvest sugar cane. The Technetronic revolution may serve to sharpen these extreme and moderate disparities. The musings and thinkings of a super-Bluetoothed large language model landscape are very unlikely to be similar or reasonable to a chicken farm landscape in a remote village on the Steppes, regardless of whether said farmers have refurbished iPhones or not.

    The coexistence of agrarian, industrial, and new technetronic societies, each providing different perspectives on life, would make understanding more difficult at the very time it becomes more possible, and it would render the global acceptance of certain norms less likely even as it becomes more imperative.

    Fragmented Congestion

    Such a stark three-tiered reality is something Brzezinski believed could strain the weaker social fabrics of his era and lead to chaos both within nations and internationally. The best case scenario that he could foresee is pockets of isolated disruption. Like situations like the youth protests in Corsica a few years ago or the civil war in Myanmar (Burma) that started in 2021. Expressions of mass angst. The worst case scenario is instability in the under-developed nations drawing in more developed nations for the fun and profit of proxy warfare. He spent much of his adult life in Cold War years, and he knew the history what happened in the Balkans prior to World War I (short version: Ottomans collapse and shrink, Hapsburgs, Magyars, and Imperial Russia all feel entitled to their Balkan leavings, Balkaners toil to make the South Slav Kingdom a realized dream and the vultures hate them for it. Except Russia, kinda sorta.) Cold War frameworks are outdated in a lot of ways, but this isn’t so wrong, proxy wars were a thing long before that era.

    In the most advanced world the tension between “internal” and “external” man—between man preoccupied with his inner meaning and his relationship to the infinite, and man deeply involved in his environment and committed to shaping what he recognizes to be finite—prompts an acute crisis of philosophic, religious, and psychic identity; this crisis is aggravated by the fear that man’s malleability may permit what was previously considered immutable in man to be undermined. The explosion in scientific knowledge poses the danger of intellectual fragmentation, with uncertainty increasing in direct proportion to the expansion in what is known. The result, especially in the United States, is an accelerating search for new social and political forms.

    Would anyone bother to argue that there hasn’t been a massive and multi-faceted identity crisis in the United States since at least the 2010s? Have we not seen that being an honest hard worker doesn’t guarantee job security for an autoworker in Detroit or a data entry worker in Utah? In 2010, I would have said that if you must go to art school (I dropped out of one) you should go for graphic design or animation. In 2025, I am eating those words as graphic designers are made increasingly redundant by AI image generators. And would anyone dare argue that things like Occupy, the Tea Party, BLM, Bernie, Woke stuff and Great Again stuff aren’t products of an accelerated search for new social and political forms? We literally have a whole thought trend called “accelerationism”. We are well on our way down the highway to the tedious zone here. It’s been a gathering storm of fucked paper cuts for a few decades now.

    Brzezinski notes that the reality of the United States as the hegemon demonstrates the type of conflicting dynamics that will become sharper as we plod our way into the Technetronic era. The U.S. has spent a mountain of money and military effort on keeping trade channels safe places to pass a boat full of t-shirts and machine parts through, and on crushing oil tyrants who dare march armed forces into someone else’s principality, and on bombing the stew out of places like Serbia so that the West didn’t have to keep thinking about it. America’s social impact on the rest of the world is “unsettling, innovative, and creative,”. American influence makes people abroad hate America, but it also raises standards and expectations of what is possible in a nation. Heightened standards and expectations that many places couldn’t hope to achieve within a single century. Further, this sentiment of anti-Americanism can work to bond people in their attempts to resist its cultural influence.

    The impact of these dynamics play out differently from nation to nation, but in the less developed patches of the world, Brzezinski anticipated an intensification of social disruption and regional conflict. The most bare bones forms of mass communication and education access would be just enough to encourage expectations of a vaguely understood Western standards of material wealth that most of these societies would be unable to provide. At least, not for a very long time. In the meantime, political tension would grow and particularly between generations and the classic urban versus rural frictions. Traditional parochial attitudes butting up against the younger, cosmopolitan masses. Where the West deals with the annoyance of increasing political divisiveness, these places will increasingly see organized crime scaling up along with scattered decentralized incidents of violence and further reaching (though still toothlessly corrupted) security infrastructure.

    Pictured: toothlessness.

    Nationalism, which was still a very strong thought-influence in Brzezinski’s time, would also go to pieces under the pressurizing of a globalized world. Though he notes that nationalist sentiments, and the concept of nation-state, was still a determining factor in matters of military aggression and protectionist economics, as well as a main component of an individual’s self-identification, he sees it as crumbling under the perceived benefits of regional and continental cooperation. Likely he was looking at Europe while he was musing on this. By his time of writing the Common Market was in full swing and a couple of decades after he published this book it would be folded into the newly minted European Union.

    An individual in their individual nation-state was already feeling their way around an environment that every year felt more congested, more impersonal, more confusing in the 1960s. Brzezinski assumed this would go on, and the appeal to dig out a familiar, protected corner would become all the more alluring as the process marched on. Under globalism (I should say, Brzezinski doesn’t use this term, he uses more descriptive terms like “global village” “worldwide market”, but it means the same thing), anyway, under globalism nations may be tempted to a similar hidey-hole thought process. By the mid-20th century, new forms of cooperation and social integration were already emerging in the form of telecoms, TV, and radio. Brzezinski notes the potential of this getting turned up to 11 as the gargantuan, archaic computers and “cybernetics” he was familiar with improved over the years. He also saw the potential that national leaders will watch, perhaps, their culture eroding, and thus engage in frivolous economic protectionism over their ancient cheese recipes and fussy booze. Or, they could be looking more furtively over the erosion of their social support systems as travel and relocation becomes increasingly feasible, with working-age people leaving for greener pastures, and decide to import bulk batches of warm bodies in the hopes that they will earn taxable incomes, thus watering down their unique cultures and contributing to increasing civic dissociation.

    As a consequence, the Flemings and the Walloons in Belgium, the French and English Canadians in Canada, the Scots and the Welsh in the United Kingdom, the Basques in Spain, the Croats and the Slovenes in Yugoslavia, and the Czechs and Slovaks in Czechoslovakia are claiming—and some of the non­-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union and the various linguistic­-ethnic groups in India may soon claim—that their
    particular nation ­state no longer corresponds to historical need. On a higher plane it has been rendered superfluous by Europe, or some other regional (Common Market) arrangement, while on a lower plane a more intimate linguistic and religious community is required to overcome the impact of the implosion-­explosion characteristic of the global metropolis.

    Such developments as those described in the above quote could be called regionalism, or identitarian, but it won’t look anything like 19th century nationalism. It is born out of a recognition that a more personal, extra-national cooperation being seen as a necessity for the individual. A desire for a more defined sense of personality in an impersonal world. Nations could end up pursuing courses to resist the domination of an external hegemony, but likely such efforts would bring about a diplomatic slap fight over who gets to be the baby hegemon of their respective regions.

    But new nationalism won’t be so far off from old nationalism. Brzezinski thought this would be most apparent in the “new” nations. Places likely to emerge as the machine of eastern Socialism ceased to work. We did get “new” nations from such a fall out; the Czech Republic, Georgia, Pakistan, Slovenia, Croatia. Stuff like that. Reborn or re-defined nations where nationalism will still feel like a radical force, one that mobilizes a sense of community but can also easily slip into ethnic exclusions and conflicts. Even in further developed countries, where the nation state may yield its sovereignty bit-by-bit to international banks and multinational corporations whose pencils are pushing analytics lightyears removed from the concept of national boundaries, the psychological insistence of the national community may rise out of an overwhelming stew of contradictions just as it did after the fast times of 1848. Any attempt to establish a balance between the new internationalism and the demand for a more intimate national community may (and has) become a source of friction and fracture.

    The achievement of that equilibrium is being made more difficult by the scientific and technological innovations in weaponry. It is ironic to recall that in 1878 Friedrich Engels, commenting on the Franco­-Prussian War, proclaimed that “weapons used have reached such a stage of perfection that further progress which would have any revolutionizing influence is no longer, possible.” Not only have new weapons been developed but some of the basic concepts of geography and strategy have been fundamentally altered; space and weather control have replaced Suez or Gibraltar as key elements of strategy.

    If accurate prediction was an Olympic sport, Brzezinski would get a bronze medal for where he saw weapons going. Meaning that some of it gets too sci-fi, but the man deserves credit for foreseeing the Space Force. Most of his weapons tech assumptions were likely obvious conclusions based off the kickass kaboomy stuff the U.S. and others already had in the 1960s. Improved rocketry, more accurate programmed bombs and missiles, more chemical and bioweapons. Some of the rest reads as clownish for now; automated space warships, deep sea forts, death rays, adversarial weather manipulation (if I’m wrong and any of those are real, please correct me, I would love that). His main point seems to be that the one-sidedness of technological development will mean some countries, like the U.S., could come to expect easy, relatively inexpensive victories in most clashes that may come; that such a world could see proxy wars fought by “only a few humans or even by robots” (Drones! Ukraine!); or result in a world where peace breaks out because what is the point of war if the fat cat nation is going to roll in with their barely human operated, low-cost robot army.

    We come for your water.

    That’s all fun and games, but it gets creepy quick. Governments and big deal institutions may be able, and tempted, to exploit advances in research on brain function and human behavior.

    Gordon J. F. MacDonald, a geophysicist specializing in problems of warfare, has written that accurately timed, artificially excited electronic strokes “could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain regions of the earth. … In this way, one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period. . . . No matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.”

    Were heart attack guns ever proven real, or is that still a tin foil notion? Are microwaves still scary dangerous? High-capacity transport pylons zooming electricity through the backyards of the rundown parts of town? Joking aside, any creepy tech weapons relevant to social engineering that could come to exist would initially be the possession of the most advanced countries, according to Brzezinski, though once such technology exists it’s only a matter of time before the old models get replaced with new and trickle out through legit sales and black markets. So the underdeveloped world can eventually get their own nukes or laser guns or whatever. While it is unlikely that their powers-that-be would be suicidal enough to use these against a major power nation, there’s a reasonable concern that such weapons would be used for regional skirmishes, or by splinter cell militants against rival groups or government authorities. Something Brzezinski was concerned over was how such incidents would be interpreted by major powers, whether they would be viewed as a broader threat or as that piddly little country’s problem to sort out.

    Toward a Planetary Consciousness

    For all that nationalism talk, Brzezinski sees the atomized nation-state as an abnormal phase of history. Long before the intelligentsia ever started musing on the concept of nations, there was an essentially transnational European aristocracy of Hapsburgs, Bourbons, Tudors, Sforzas, Hohenzollerns, and oodles of princelings, dukes, earls and whatever else in between. All of them marrying their children off to this or that third cousin in whereverland. In addition to this were the centuries of a church so powerful and far-reaching in influence that it may as well have been another monarchy.

    After the dust of World War II settled, Brzezinski saw a new form of transnational elites emerging in the form of international businessmen, scholars, and other popular public figures. These elites were not confined by national boundaries or customs and their interests were more functional than national. As the decades unfolded it seemed inevitable that these social elites from the more advanced nations would be increasingly globalist in reach and outlook. Brzezinski wasn’t living in an online era, but foresaw some kind of “global information grid” coming down the line as computer science progressed. Some sort of electric web that would facilitate “almost continuous intellectual interaction and the pooling of knowledge,”. But a new kind of danger could arise between this neo-aristocracy and the masses that were by the mid-20th century much more literate and politically activated than the kings of old dealt with. Political leaders could find a success in an electoral strategy that cultivates nativist sentiments against such untethered cosmopolitan elites.

    Increasingly, the intellectual elites tend to think in terms of global problems. One significant aspect of this process is the way in which contemporary dilemmas are identified: the need to overcome technical backwardness, to eliminate poverty, to extend international cooperation in education and health, to prevent overpopulation,
    to develop effective peacekeeping machinery. These are all global issues. Only thirty years ago they were simply not in the forefront of public attention, which was riveted at the time on much more specific regional, national, or territorial conflicts.

    The Technetronic Revolution will increasingly create the means to make global responses to the above-mentioned issues and human suffering tangible. And the availability of such means will intensify the sense of obligation to Do Something about such turmoils. The elements of international competition will change. The old yardsticks of territorial expansion, population, claims of cultural or intellectual superiority, and general military power will gradually wane in favor of GDP numbers, per capita income numbers, market sizes and shares, educational opportunities, achievements in the arts and sciences, in research and development, in healthcare, and of course, who has penetrated furthest into outer space. That last suggestion is a product of Brzezinski’s Cold War times, but the rest are much closer to our 2020s reality.

    The new ideologies, whose creation Brzezinski viewed as inevitable in a world of mass communications and literacy, would be less simplistic than the old frameworks of social engineering represented in nationalism and socialism. He predicted that many of them would be grounded in preoccupations of ecology or demographics. On ecology, he noted that this had already begun by the 1960s with the rapid rise of environmentalist movements concerned with such things as air and water pollution, radiation, and climate. For demographic anxieties, there were already people fussing about over-population, the containment of disease, and the spread of illicit drug use. One element of the fading ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries would be the appeal of central planning. Modern computer and communication technology would make such planning so much more feasible than ever before. Not merely for the sake of fiddling around with economics and industry, but as a way to cope with perceived ecological threats and natural resource management.

    But it won’t be that easy, and it hasn’t been since this book was published. For every wonderful utopian fever dream that becomes realizable with tech advances, there will be whole nations and huddled masses that fear and hate it. There will be governments, corporations, and other associations of assholes who will find dystopian use cases in new tech, who will snoop, spam, scam and stalk. Even if all was good and pure, the amount of information and the immediacy of its access is spiritually overwhelming for many people. Para-nostalgia seems to increase with every major advance in communications technology. In distressed hindsight, the isolated and compartmentalized world of yore appears so much more cohesive, so much more harmonious than the volatility of a global reality. The deep-rooted cultures, the entrenched religions, the smallness of the individual’s world; it all seems like much firmer footing. In the midst of the whirlwind, it is difficult to see what the globalized world has replaced it with. Some cheap stuff, some amazing advancements in information access that seem mostly squandered in favor of algorithmic trend chasers. Some cool medical advancements, but increasingly creepy food. Satellites watch over us from the heavens, but we seem to only feel more insecure. Anomie and ennui seems more widespread than ever and too big to ever fix, whatever that would mean. All that can apparently be done about it is endless internet arguments within whatever bubble a person has slotted themselves into.

  • Author of Winesburg, Ohio, Marching Men, Poor White, Many Marriages, and Dark Laughter

    Born in an Ohio farm town of no significance to a Union vet father and probably exhausted mother of seven. The family started off stable enough, but soon began fleeing from small town to small town by Sherwood’s first birthday. His father’s family debt hounded them for years, and years more once dad picked up drinking to remedy his issues.

    Still in childhood, Sherwood started picking up odd jobs like newspaper slanging and shit shoveling before dropping out of school around age 14. Despite being a drop out, he still spent most of his free time reading, but then again, what else was there to actually do in the late 19th century hinterlands.

    The year he turned 18, it all went to hell. Mom died of consumption and dad started disappearing on benders for weeks at a time. Sherwood took a job at a stable that allowed him to sleep in the hayloft above the horses. By age 19 he gave up on the small town life and hoofed it to Chicago where his oldest brother was laughing his way through art school. There he started attending night classes on business math and poetry, but he cut out early to try his luck as a soldier in the Spanish-American War. As it happened, he didn’t end up needing any luck because everywhere his company got sent to had concluded what fighting was to be done months before their arrival. But, at least, he made a lot of friends due to his literacy, which allowed him to read dime novels to bored troops, and his charm, which allowed him to woo many women.

    After the war, he completed his education, graduating with top marks at the turn of the century. After, he returned to Chicago with a job offer in advertising, but he hated his boss and hated office life even more, so he left to write ad copy for a trade magazine that sold agricultural tools. It was here that he began writing creatively. After all, when God gives you lemons, you write a sardonic vignette about the ghoulish lemonade seller. Being junior level, Sherwood couldn’t just sit and go extra hard on whimsical ad copy all day. His job compelled him to wander the dirtways of Illinois and Ohio trying to drum up new clients to buy the magazine’s ad space. While on one of these jaunts, he met a wealthy heiress that would become his wife.

    On the Labor Day of his 30th year, an opportunity to run a mail-order catalogue was dropped into his lap. He moved his young family to their new happy home in Cleveland, Ohio; the city of burning rivers and rock & roll. But they wouldn’t stay happy, or at least, he wouldn’t. Part of his company’s gimmick was that Sherwood, being president, guaranteed full satisfaction on all the catalogue’s products. After one of the manufacturers under the umbrella sent out a large number of defective egg hatchers, Sherwood was flooded with a cavalcade of unending hate-mail, all of it addressed directly to him. It happened about a year after this wonderful opportunity had opened for him, and it ended with a nervous breakdown. The family left Cleveland for the two-horse town of Elyria.

    The Andersons bounced back quick enough. Sherwood spun up a new mail-order company selling some kind of magical paint, and his wife birthed a couple of healthy babies. The business hit a tipping point, and Sherwood bought up a bunch of smaller mail-order businesses. By the time he was 35 he had merged them all into one, the American Merchants Company, which he ran as a profit-sharing investment firm, a novelty structure that he called “Commercial Democracy”.

    Sherwood was objectively winning at life, but the glory days wouldn’t last long. In the next year, 1912, he may or may not have suffered the motherlode of all nervous breakdowns. The story has an odd bit of self-authoring.

    • The Secretary’s Account: Sherwood came to the office, started dictating a business letter to her, then spaced out. He mumbled, “I feel as though my feet were wet, and they keep getting wetter.” Then he walked out.
    • The Pharmacist’s Account: After disappearing for several days, Sherwood stumbled into a drug store all the way over in Cleveland and asked the pharmacist to help him figure out who he was. While Anderson babbled on the pharmacist managed to get his phone book out of his pocket and called someone from the front page. This ended up being a member of Elyria’s Chamber of Commerce, who came to the shop and recognized Sherwood immediately. This man scooped him up and handed him over to the hospital in downtown Cleveland. When Sherwood’s wife arrived, he didn’t recognize her.
    • Sherwood’s Account: In his memoir published in 1942 he claimed, “I wanted to leave, get away from business… I resorted to slickness, to craftiness… The thought occurred to me that if men thought me a little insane they would forgive me if I lit out…” Many were and are skeptical of his claims that he intentionally feigned temporary insanity because his justification was that his work and family would never accept his desire to write. His creative interests were no secret at the time. His wife, his secretary, and several business associates knew he dabbled in fiction projects both on and off the clock. Nonetheless, he came a hero to young mid-century men for escaping the humdrum life of materialism.

    Shortly after this episode, he divorced his wife and moved back to Chicago. She wouldn’t be the last. Right after ending this eight year marriage, he married a sculptor, who he would divorce eight years later. In that same year, he married the girl he would move to New Orleans with, and they also divorced after eight years. A year later he married another woman, and they didn’t divorce because he died about eight years after their marrying. The guy is a top tier candidate for a study of the seven-year itch.

    Anyway, after his divorce and move to Chicago he wrote three books in three years. The first two flopped like fish out of water, but the third Winesburg, Ohio, made him famous. The books that came after were also successful. Among the last few, Many Marriages and Dark Laughter celebrated the shiny new sexual freedom of the Roaring Twenties, which speaks to a fixation (do you know how hard it is to write a whole fucking book?) that makes these last couple of paragraphs make a whole lot more sense.

    In the mid-1920s he moved to New Orleans with Wife No. 3 and became an influential mentor figure in the young literati scene of the French Quarter. Faulkner was in awe of him while Hemingway wrote an entire satire about him (The Torrents of Spring). Sherwood didn’t write much of anything remarkable after these halcyon days. His own story came to an end while on a cruise down the South American coast with Wife No. 4 in 1941. Somehow he swallowed a whole toothpick while eating dinner and after several days of debilitating tummy aches he finally debarked in Panama. There he died of inflammation caused by the internal damage of destiny’s toothpick.

  • 1947 to 1991

    For those unfamiliar, there are probably a million and one better sources than me for learning the nitty gritties of the Cold War. For those who are unfamiliar and lazy, it was essentially an epic chess game between two nervous giants who absolutely hated each other1. During the game, both giants had a nuke dangling above their heads and a remote to detonate the one that hung over their opponent. Whenever one giant captured one of the other’s pieces, a bunch of blood sprayed all over the place2. The game lasted over four decades until one of the giants succumbed to exhaustion and died3.

    In those four and change decades every aspect of life – culture, counter-culture, foreign policy, education, tech development, childhood, media, mental health, law enforcement, cigars, fitness – all were touched, tinged, or traumatized by the great atomic chess game. It was a simpler time. Men were men and women were thin.

    Once it settled in as the New Normal, grand-scale tension pressurized the nation until it spit out crazy diamonds. The most beloved stars of Tinsel Town were defrocked and forced to explain their bullshit opinions to unsmiling fat men who glared down on them from high desks. America swung and missed what was likely its last chance to grab Cuba like a compulsive shoplifter. Important, iconic people were shot dead left and right by random schizoids, and everyone blamed the government every time. Rich kids yearning for enchantment fled the suburbs to grow their hair long and shake their boobies to some of the sloppiest music ever made, while acid burned up and down their spines. A drunk president was caught and publicly shamed for spying on his political opponents. While the price of gas doubled, some of the greatest movies in the history of film were made.

    It was crazy all the way to the end. Its final decade was the era of winners, those sharp angled cocaine days of the Reagan Revolution. Shoulders were padded, hairdos were huge, and you could reach out and touch the world with your fax machine. When the Red King came and wept tears of joy at the sight of so many, many popsicles, everyone knew it was over and America had won.

    And it’s all been bitchiness and anti-depressants ever since.

    1. During the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union engaged in a global competition for influence, often prioritizing controlling territory over economic or strategic gain, even though these conflicts resulted in significant loss of life and resources with little tangible return. This intense rivalry created a feedback loop where the perceived threat from ideological adversaries necessitated big military spending, which in turn created a powerful group with vested interests in the continuation of this big military investment, so it went on and on and on. ↩︎
    2. This tug-o-war didn’t typically involve very resource rich or strategically located places. Indonesia had some cash crops, and Greece had some valuable shipping lane access.
      – Greece (1943-49): 160,000 dead. Communist rebels versus Greece’s Western-oriented government.
      – South Korea (1948-49): 60,000 dead. Leftist rebels versus a Western-oriented government.
      – Korea (1950-53): 3,000,000 dead. Direct Western involvement on behalf of South Korea, and direct Chinese involvement on behalf of North Korea.
      – Vietnam (1959-75): 3,500,000 dead in Vietnam. Direct American involvement on behalf of the Vietnamese government against Communist rebels.
      – Guatemala (1960-96): 200,000 dead. Leftist rebels versus a U.S.-oriented government.
      – Indonesia (1965-66): 400,000 dead. A Western-oriented government massacred the leftist opposition.
      – Cambodia (1970-75): 600,000 dead. Direct American involvement on behalf of the Cambodian government against the Communist rebels.
      – Nicaragua (1972-79): 30,000 dead. Communist rebels versus U.S.-oriented government.
      – Philippines (from 1972): 43,000 dead. Communist rebels versus Western-oriented government.
      – Laos (to 1973): 62,000 dead. American assistance on behalf of the Laotian government against Communist rebels.
      – Mozambique (1975-92): 800,000 dead. Western-oriented rebels versus a Communist government.
      – Angola (1975-94): 500,000 dead. Direct Cuban involvement on behalf of the government against Western-oriented rebels.
      – Argentina (1976-83): 30,000 dead. A U.S.-oriented government oppressing the leftist opposition.
      – El Salvador (1979-92): 75,000 dead. Leftist rebels versus U.S.-oriented government.
      – Afghanistan: 1,500,000 dead. Direct Soviet involvement on behalf of the government against mujahideen rebels.
      – Nicaragua (1982-90): 30,000 dead. U.S.-oriented rebels versus a Communist government. ↩︎
    3. Even this is putting it too simply. The rise of China as a distinct power and the emergence of non-aligned nations (the “Third World”) contradicted the idea of a purely two-sided conflict. The world was not neatly split into two camps, there were nations pursuing their own interests and even disagreements arising within the communist bloc, as seen in the falling out between China and the Soviets, though the Soviet Union still demonstrated its willingness to use force to maintain control within its sphere of influence. ↩︎

  • Or, the Hateful stumble towards the first World War.

    The Balkan Wars took place in the Balkan states in 1912 and 1913. In the First Balkan War, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria declared war upon the Ottoman Empire and defeated it, leaving only Eastern Thrace under Ottoman control. In the Second Balkan War, Bulgaria fought against Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and what was left of the Ottomans. It also faced an attack from Romania from the north.

    For a few years after 1900 there was a kind of casual and quiet agreement as the world waited for Ottoman Empire’s death rattle to lead to the inevitable, conclusive end. Germany’s influence was coiling tighter around Constantinople. Macedonia troubled the Ottomans with a relentless revolutionary movement, and other Balkan states were bashfully beginning to play around with geopolitics in that troubled state. The Young Turks revolution came in as an accelerating explosion that turned everything upside down.

    “A constant focus was kept on Slav Europe; revolutionary changes there could lead to the Habsburg monarchy becoming the dominant power in the Danube Valley and Constantinople.”

    A History of Europe by J.M. Roberts

    Habsburg policy had turned away from its cautious stance in 1906, when a tariff war started with Serbia. The hardening of Habsburg policy with Serbia reflected the political weight of the Magyars at Vienna. The Magyars top priority was to assure that Habsburg foreign policy would oppose Slav national ambitions. In their half of the monarchy, the Magyars ruled over large populations of non-Magyars to whom they denied fair treatment. Serbia, a Russian satellite and client, was the inspiration of South Slavs who hoped for unification in an enlarged Serbia. The Magyars feared that their Slav subjects would respond to this and were eager to show them that they could hope for nothing from Serbia by demonstrating its powerlessness to effect change.

    Serbia still held hopes of acquiring Bosnia and Herzegovina, which would provide an outlet to the Adriatic if the Ottomans lost their legal sovereignty over them. Formal annexation by the Dual Monarchy would end these dreams; it would also tarnish Serbia’s prestige as the champion of South Slav hopes. Additionally, an annexation would enable the Habsburgs to start putting down the problem of terrorism that they suspected was being cultivated in Serbia, a paranoia that the Austrians especially would come to learn years later was very justified, (Franz Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip, the Shot Heard Around the World, etc).

    Russia was recovering from an embarrassing defeat by Japan in the Far East and was taking renewed interest in southeast Europe. In principle, Russia did not oppose Habsburg acquisition of Bosnia and Herzegovina; all she required was adequate compensation to balance with the Dual Monarchy’s gain. Russia asked for a strengthening of her position in the Straits with the support of the Dual Monarchy. What seemed to be an agreement turned into a diplomatic disaster. Austrian annexation took place on October 5, 1908, and Russia strongly protested once it became clear that the quid pro quo agreement would not be honored. To make it worse, a newly constructed and over-eager Germany butted into the Anglo-Russian convention, and gave its unconditional support to the Austrians. Like star-crossed lovers, these two nations seem like they’ve been tempting a romantic doom since Bismarck’s bullying statecraft, til they got the stuffing knocked out of them in the mid-20th century, at least. Anyway, Russia knew it could not fight Germany and the Habsburg empire together. The best they could do is have the Russian foreign minister advocate for a Balkan league to resist further encroachments.

    The new Balkan nations were dissatisfied and anguished. Serbians hated the Austrian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the lesser status of Slavs under Magyar rule. Romanians were incensed over their 3,000,000 countrymen who were annexed to the kingdom of Hungary by way of Transylvania. Macedonia, still under Ottoman rule and chronically disordered, was coveted by Bulgarians and Greeks, who were each hopeful at their chance to forge some bit of empire out of chaos.

    “In the end, the First Balkan War was started by Montenegro on 8 October 1912. Facing Montenegrins, Bulgars, Serbs and Greeks, the Turks hastily made peace with Italy by ceding territory in Africa. The Great Powers began to fear dangers nearer home.”

    A History of Europe by J.M. Roberts

    The Dual Monarchy didn’t want Serbia to have an Adriatic port, because Europe was just like that back then. At the same time, the Russians were worried that the Bulgars intended to fight their way to Constantinople and take the city for themselves. Ambassadors between the powers met, resulting in the creation of Albania. This was the last new nation carved out from the Ottoman Empire, and it was created to cut off Serbia from the sea. This ham-fisted invention of Albania caused the Second Balkan War.

    Serbia was attacked by Bulgaria in order to run the Serbs out of the part of Macedonia invaded by Serb forces. Romania chose to attack Bulgaria while she was preoccupied in Serbia, with the aim of taking Dobruja. When the great powers didn’t intervene, Bulgaria lost almost everything it had gained in the First Balkan War. By the end of this sequel, Serbia had gained 1,500,000 more inhabitants, but the thwarting of her Adriatic hopes embittered her against Austria. The seemingly bottomless well of Serbian hatred against this nation had reached its burning zenith. Meanwhile, Vienna’s paranoia over Serbian ambitions was further incensed. The Ottoman Empire lost the bulk of its territory in Europe, and the much enlarged Serbia pushed for union of the South Slavic peoples. The Bulgarians were left with new grudges to nurse against their neighbors and an unsupportive Russia.

    In the short time between the declared ending of the Second Balkan War and the beginning of the First World War there wasn’t much in the way of peace and quiet. No forgive nor forget. Culture, the nation-state, sovereignty, and the wars that come with those frictions are uglier in the Balkans than most other places. Almost constantly this region is poked and prodded from elsewhere nations seeking huge tracts of land, cheap money, and cheaper labor. It’s a land murderous thieves have treated like a deranged playground before skipping back to the safety of their home Vienna or Venice, while the natives who actually care die like stray dogs for no good reason.

  • In the 1840s, some God really hated Europe. Poverty, patchwork unemployment, and cultural distress spread sticky like an oil spill across the continent. By 1846, even the potatoes had forsaken those funny-talking wretches. And by 1847, people went to bed nervous and woke up broke. Naturally, they started rioting over bread.

    What happens when too many people get to feeling like everything sucks? Everything as in every thing; their house, their future, their job, their youth and all the years they had left to suffer through this pile of shit, their government and their meaninglessness in the face of it, their health, their lack of wealth and all that trash always blowing down the fucking street. In one person, it’s just a private hell. It’s a bad vacation, everything’s all sunshine and bromides and every one else seeming vaguely happy except you. Slowly degrading, it’s an almost terminal insanity caused by understanding that the one thing you want is not where you are.

    But once it’s everybody, or everybody enough, this becomes a true grievance, and it doesn’t matter one whiff how good or bad the argument is. It’s a profound and righteous gripe, a doomspeak, an info hazard. The pot boils over and suddenly there’s a faceless horde hungry for changes and hungrier for blood.

    One such time happened in Europe (actually, many such time; Europe’s a sad place) in 1848. That same year there were barely literate Americans dropping their lives and families like a bad habit and tearing ass to Californ-i-a with goldust clouding their eyes. Meanwhile, in Europe, they were sick of eating the same shitty old bread, and the potatoes were rotting in the ground. Then along comes a fat boy named Marx, who gives them an effort-post that agitates all their lost hopes and dreams like nothing before (unless you were Franch). The shit life of urban industrial society, all that dust and death and deadly dust, combined with all your friends also being pissed for all the same reasons, combined with Karl I-love-streudel Marx telling you all that you’re RIGHT to be pissy; all came together in a hellish boil that bred social violence and gave a new edge to radical movements everywhere. One disturbance set off another, and the outcome was a continent-wide explosion of revolution which for a time seemed to endanger the whole Vienna settlement.

    The revolutionaries of 1848 were provoked by very different situations, had many different aims, and followed divergent and confusing paths. What’s new?

    Symbolic Start

    The February Revolution in Paris. The year is 1848 (obviously), the dirty bastard is King Louis Phillippe d’Orleans, the so-called Citizen King. This is the son of Philippe Égalité, the guy who not only watched, but voted for his cousin (Louis XVI) to get thrown into a hell-tower along with the wife and kids to await a beheading that he had no idea was coming (he, XVI, really kinda didn’t, the dude loved wine and hot chocolate and was a bit of a simpleton who didn’t learn how to fuck until like a decade into his marriage with Antoinette), and Phillippe Égalité is the guy who sees all that and says, “This is a supercool time to start a populist gimmick, I will never regret this,” (He did, at least when his own head got took).

    Anyway, back to February, 1848. Louis Phillipe, Citizen King, son of the opportunistic cretin described above, this guy had lost his middle class support base mostly because of his ongoing opposition to the extension of suffrage. So he bails before a bunch of French lawyers could make a football out of his head too. And so the Second Republic of France was established, the dreams of thirty years’ worth of radical plots and conspiracies seemed realizable. In the rest of Europe, the mood grew tense as insidious whispers dumped kerosene on kindling flames. Heavyweight rumors flew about French armies once again marching to spread France’s funky new principles, (this ended up being an unfounded fear, by the way, the only military operations that France undertook was in defense of the pope against Roman revolutionaries, lol). A few old aristocrats probably cursed the name “Napoleon,” at the time, but if only they knew that a new fat boy was in town.

    Meanwhile…

    In most of Italy and Central Europe townsmen rebelled against governments thought to be illiberal and therefore oppressive. The common demand was for a constitution to guarantee essential freedoms. In their defense, Italy and Germany were frail as newborns at the time. They had barely been sewn together by then, and naturally there was plenty of unhappiness about some of the stitches. I guess that’s just what you get when you let Austrians do most of the tailoring. Some of these revolutions sought national independence rather than constitutionalism, though for a time this seemed to be a way towards independence because it weakened dynastic autocracy. Granted, it only took four or five – and really only one – ballsy Bosnian, to put that superfluous ruin in the ground for good. (No offense intended to any living Hapsburgs. I really want to be in the Illuminati, don’t let this deter you from granting me that gift).

    A revolution in Vienna strongly suggested5 the chancellor into exile and paralyzed the government throughout much of Central Europe, where the Holy (not) Roman (not) Empire (eh) had about as strong a network as a discount cellphone service provider. This opened up more opportunities for revolutions in Germany, as they no longer had to fear Austrian intervention. Ya know what they say, when the iron is hot…

    The King of Sardinia led a bundle of Italians against the Austrian armies in Lombardy and Venetia. A republic appeared in Rome once again, and the pope fled the city. I shouldn’t side track anymore, but if you don’t know, the career of Pope Pius IX is wild. He fled in 1848, he came back a couple years later, and then in twenty years he either was or melodramatically pretended to be, imprisoned in the Vatican after the Savoys led an army into Rome. AKA the beginning of the end of papal rule in Rome. There is a very sexy conspiracy around this and similar papal strifes that I once wrote about and intended to keep exploring, but now realize I forgot about entirely.

    Hungarians revolted in Budapest, it was to be expected. Dual Monarchy, you both go down together. Czechs revolted Prague, also to be expected, secretaries and janitors hit the dirt the same as the CEO when a big biz goes tits up in the glorious fires of fury.

    Lost Causes

    The German revolutions ultimately failed because the liberals realized that if the Slavs or Pan-Slavs achieved their national liberation, then states previously considered as German would be shorn of huge tracts of territory, due to the aforementioned shit needlework. Popular thinking was that if the German nation-state was going to stick, it required the preservation of German lands in the east, which required support of a strong Prussia, which would require the acceptance of Prussia’s terms for the future organization of Germany. I imagine some kind of chase music from Hanna-Barbera played throughout all Germany while this era went on.

    In Paris, an uprising which could have given the Revolution a further shove in the direction of democracy was crushed with the bloodshed of the June Days. Americans of cognizant age in the 1960s-80s will know this trend, as well as those who didn’t fall off the station wagon in one direction or another between 2015 and 2025. The bullshit nuisance, however dramatic or dull it actually was, annoyed enough people. This settled the French Republic as firmly fuck-you conservative.

    The Austrian army defeated the Sardinians in northern Italy. Score a measly one point for the establishment. The Sardinian army has been the only shield of the Italian revolutions, and after its defeat monarchs all over the peninsula went to pieces and came crawling back to the cold comfort of the Austrian under-boot. Germany did the same, but the boots were cuter and Prussian. Croatia and Hungary tried to maintain pressure against the Habsburgs, but they were always puny and of little consequence when they were the only bubble bursting. Besides that, Russia didn’t give a fig about Croats or Magyars, so the Russian army aided the Hapsburg dynasty in suppressing it.

    Nationalism

    Nationalism had been a trendy cause in 1848, but was too weak to sustain revolutionary governments. Too bad, so sad.

    In that year nationalism failed to stick because Nationalism was, for the masses, too abstract, too dang nerdy. Only a few pretentious and over-educated people cared much about it. There had been some truly popular uprisings in that year, ones energized by the desires of the populace. And those were where the party was at. Not in the ~salons~ of fucking nerds who take to long to say a single thing.

    In Italy it was in the towns rather than the countryside that nationalist ideas stirred the heart. In Lombardy the peasant cheered the Austrian army, seeing no good in a revolution led by aristocrats. This was the pride of the redneck, the urban versus rural. The I-Grow-the-Food crowd snubbing the I-Went-to-College crowd. Flannery O’Connor would understand this.

    In Germany it was also the country people that were disturbed. German peasants behaved as the French had in 1789, burning their landlords’ houses, both out of personal resentment and to destroy the records of rents, dues, and labor services. Such outbreaks frightened the pants off German liberals as much as the June Days frightened the middle classes in France. In Germany working class antics alarmed the better-offs because the leaders of revolutionary movements talked excitedly into the night about the fat boy’s socialism. Thing is, what they actually sought was a return to the past; the safe world of guilds and apprenticeships. This was driven by anxieties about all the new machinery, the smog-belching and deathly urban factories, the steamboats that put boatmen out of work, the dropping of gates long kept in trades – ultimately, the all-too-obvious signs of the onset of market society.

    In France, because the peasantry was mostly conservative, the government was assured the support of the provinces in crushing the Parisian poor who had given radicals a brief success. The rurals barely knew they were Franch, or about the idea of France. So nationalism crashed and burned quick here.

    And In the End…

    The revolutions of 1848 changed society the most in the countryside of eastern and central Europe. Liberal principles and fear of popular revolt forced concessions from the landlords; resulting in the abolition of peasant labor and bondage to the soil. By 1848’s end, these conditions only remained in Russia. This opened the way for the reconstruction of agricultural life on individualist and market lines in Germany and the Danube valley. With some lag here and there, the medieval economic order had in effect now come to a stumbling end. Mission accomplished?

  • Born in Chicago in December 1928, died in Santa Ana in March 1982.

    Philip Kindred Dick started his life six weeks early, along with a twin sister, who died six weeks later. After this, the Dick family left Chicago and spent several years moving around the West Coast following Father Dick’s job assignments with the Dept. of Agriculture. After five years, Mother Dick née Kindred got sick of all the moving and filed for divorce. Then she took little Philip with her to Washington, DC and stuck him in a Quaker school.

    After graduating, Philip returned to sunny California to start his studies at Berkeley. He never settled on a major, but did pick up a philosophy habit. Then he dropped out of school. He started writing at age 23 and spent the next ten years chronically broke and constantly rejected. His first big break was The Man in the High Castle, which won him a Hugo Award in 1962. But even with such an accolade, he could only get his work published in low-paying scifi rags. The grind of the pulp industry led to a decade of amphetamine abuse, during which he wrote twenty-one novels before burning out in 1970. Two years later, he tried to kill himself with a bottle of potassium bromide. He survived, but was much weirder for it.

    Over his lifetime Philip K. Dick married and divorced five times. Out of this came three children, all of them half-siblings.

    A Beam Pinkly

    “I don’t believe that the universe exists. I believe that the only thing that exists is God and he is more than the universe. The universe is an extension of God into space and time. That’s the premise I start from in my work, that so-called ‘reality’ is a mass delusion that we’ve all been required to believe for reasons totally obscure.”

    Philip K. Dick

    In 1974 a girl came to his house to deliver some drugs. She was wearing a Christian fish necklace and when it caught the sun, Philip K. Dick saw a pink beam emanate from it. He believed the beam was an intelligent force that imparted wisdom and clairvoyance. After his encounter with the beam girl, he experienced weeks of hallucinations that continued even without the drugs. Along with the pink beam, which he’d see again and again, he saw geometric patterns, flashes of Jesus, and scenes from ancient Rome. He came to believe he was living two lives, one as himself and one as a persecuted Christian in first-century Rome named Thomas. Later that year, Philip went a bit nuts over communism and wrote a letter to the FBI accusing various professors and writers of being communist agents sent to America to sway public opinion.

    Oddly enough, Carl Jung had a similar parallel lives experience in childhood. Dick was heavily influenced by Jungian concepts, particularly collective unconscious, mass hallucination, synchronicity, and personality theory. Recurring themes throughout all of his books focus on the uncertainty of reality and the fragility of personal identity.

    “What constitutes the authentic human being?”

    Philip K. Dick went through a lot of political phases, and even more mystical phases. In his young years, he went attended Communist Party meetings, but eventually turned into an anti-communist libertarian who sometimes described himself as a “religious anarchist.” He hated the U.S. government as much as he hated the Soviet Union, and dreamed of a government so decentralized that it was barely relevant. In 1968, he dabbled a bit in the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, pledging to pay no federal income tax as long as the Vietnam War was active. His passions waned after the IRS confiscated his car.

    In his early fifties, he suffered a pair of back to back strokes that left him brain dead. After a week, he was taken off life support. His father took his ashes to Colorado, where they were buried next to his twin sister’s. Four months later the first film adaptation of his work, Blade Runner, based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was released.

  • “Contrasts of wealth were, of course, not new. There had always been some who deplored or denounced them from the pulpit… Now, though, differences were becoming more noticeable, partly because such evils were concentrated very visibly in the new cities and in new and unfamiliar forms. One outcome was the emergence of a new ideology of social criticism, and new political terms.”

    A History of Europe, J.M. Roberts, pg. 401

    The term “socialism” first appeared in France around 1830 to describe theories and people opposed to a society run on market principles and to an economy operated on laissez-faire terms, of which the main beneficiaries, in their belief, were the wealthy. Most socialists agreed that economic and social egalitarianism is fundamental to socialist ideas. All socialists agree that there is nothing sacred about property, whose rights often buttressed injustice. Those who sought the complete abolition of property were called communists.

    What changed in the 19th century was that these and similar ideas seemed to become more dangerous and more widespread. One reason for this was the ambiguous success of liberal reforms. It seemed to some that civic and legal equality was not enough if that equality was dependent on other men’s economic power, or denatured by poverty and its accompanying ignorance. Another reason was because some thinkers had seen big discrepancies of wealth as irrationalities in a world which could and should be regulated to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Egalitarianism took its socialist slant when it began to grapple with the problems of a new era of economic and social change, especially those from industrialism.

    The changes caused in society by industrialization stood in so stark a contrast to traditional society that even the small beginnings of concentration in finance and manufacturing were easily noticed. One of the first to grasp the implications was French nobleman Claude Saint Simon, who would influence other egalitarian thinkers with his argument that technological and scientific advance not only made planned organization of the economy and society imperative, but also demanded the replacement of the traditional ruling classes, who were too aristocratic and rural in their social views, with elites representing new economic and intellectual forces.

    “This striking and encouraging message and his own combativeness, energy, and intellectual ascendancy gave Marx domination of the international socialist movement which emerged in the next 20 years.”

    A History of Europe, J.M. Roberts

    In the same year that Saint-Simon started gaining influence, a pamphlet was released that would become the most important document in the history of socialism. This was the Communist Manifesto, written by a young German named Karl Marx, who called for a complete break with the “utopian socialism” of his predecessors. It argued that utopian socialists attacked industrial capitalism because they thought it was unjust, but this was pointless because nothing could come from arguments to persuade people that change was morally desirable. This is because, to Marx, everything was dependent on the way history was actually going, towards the inevitable creation of a new working class by industrial society, the rootless wage-earners of industrial cities who Marx called the proletariat. Marx asserted that every society had its own system of property rights and class relationships, and that these elements shaped its political arrangements. Since politics were bound to express economic forces, they could change as the particular organization of society changed under the influence of economic developments, and therefore, the revolution would eventually sweep away capitalist society as capitalism had swept away feudal society.

    Marxism nearly became a mythology, resting on a view of history which said that men were bound by necessity because their institutions were determined by the evolving methods of production, and on a faith that the working class were the Chosen People who hardships and struggles would end in the triumphal establishment of a just society in which necessity’s iron law would cease to be. The new religion inspired working class mobilization; though some trades unions and cooperatives already existed in some places, the first international organization (The International) of working men appeared in 1863. Marx’s influence was paramount in the organization as Secretary, but it included many who did not subscribe to his beliefs. In the years after 1848 socialism captured the revolutionary tradition from the liberals, and with this a belief in this historical role of an industrial working class was tacked onto the tradition which held that revolution could not be wrong.

    “Marx quickly snapped up the drama and exaltation of the Paris Commune for socialism. He annexed it to his own theories, though it had been the product of many complicated and differing forces and had expressed in its actions very little in the way of egalitarianism, let alone ‘scientific’ socialism. It emerged, moreover, in a city which though huge, was not of the great manufacturing centers in which he predicted proletarian revolution would occur.”

    A History of Europe, J.M. Roberts

    Marx made the events of the Paris Commune central to socialist lore, despite the inherent contradictions. After the Commune, he transferred the first International to the United States as part of his struggles to keep it under his own control.

    The Second International was founded in 1889, without the centralized control of Marx, to unite socialist political parties and groups across Europe with trades unions and other working class organizations. Marxism had grown beyond Marx into a body of dogma drawn from Marx’s writings, and by the end of the century it was officially accepted by socialists almost everywhere. Confident assertions that history would inevitably generate the overthrow of capitalism and, in the end, inaugurate a rationally ordered society in which individuals could at last be truly free, became the heart of a new religion. The Second International benefitted from the growth in the previous thirty years of socialist political parties, and of trades unions. By 1900 socialism had no effective competition on the Left. Its success was strange, for though socialist leaders talked revolution, they increasingly used their power in the workplace or polling-booth to win advantages for their followers from capitalist society, and consequently helped to blunt the edge of the misery which could fuel revolution.

  • Born July 1875, died June 1961.

    Carl Jung was a Swiss shrink who founded the proverbial school of analytical psychology.

    He was born in the canton of Thurgau, the progeny of a forever broke rural pastor and a chronically depressed mother who believed she was being harassed by ghosts every night.

    Carl came out an odd kid, mostly because of his odd mother. The interesting bit is that his particular brand of weird seems to have inspired the first whiffs of what would become his famed theory of archetypes. His mother, when she wasn’t “abroad for a rest”, was said to be very normal during the daylight hours, with the wilder behavior only coming out at night. At least sub-consciously influenced by this eccentricity, young Carl came to believe he too had two personalities. The first was that of a typical 18th century school boy, which he was. The second was that of a dignified, authoritative, and influential grown man from some bygone era.

    Another one of his main theories was rooted in his childhood. This was the idea that there are universal symbols that are known to all through the collective conscious of dreams. He had carved a little figure into his ruler and hid it in the attic. Periodically he would visit with the figure and deliver it little messages written in a secret language he’d made up. As an adult he said this ritual, though he didn’t understand why he did it, gave him a sense of inner peace and security. He believed that this ritual was similar to what people in remoter lands practiced with totems, and there was something about the practice that was intrinsic to humanity.

    As a young man, Jung famously became friends with the older Sigmund Freud. Freud had a large influence on his formative years, but the two had a falling out while on a visit to the United States. The source of this conflict was a spat over the meaning of dreams, and each man thinking that the other was incapable of admitting when they were wrong about something. While he was still in the U.S. he met William James, who came to eclipse Freud’s influence on Jung, who had been intrigued by James’s interests in mysticism and psychical phenomena.

    Jung’s model of personality archetypes was used to develop the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, aka astrology shit for nerds. He is also considered the “godfather” of the mutual self-help movement, Alcoholics Anonymous.