Hey now. All you children
Leave your lights on
Better leave your lights on
‘Cause there’s a monster living under your bed”

~ Carlos Santana - Leave Your Lights On (Supernatural 1999)

James Spader as W.N. Bilbo in Lincoln (2012) (Steven Spielberg)

In the past few days, a truly dear friend of mine who apparently reads the NYT, thus creating a niche subset in my ecosystem of which I had not previously been aware, sent me a link to an Opion piece penned by David French with the title “This Is What’s Keeping Me Up at Night”. Of course amongst the many things that must keep progressive senior journalists living in New York and working for the Old Gray Lady up at night, it will surprise no-one that the Evil Orange Man from 5th and now Pennsylvania Avenue, is foremost. He is the perennial monster under every progressive bed, at home and abroad, best combatted by shining the light of truth into every corner of the room. It must have been David French and his ilk that the sainted Carlos was thinking of when writing his iconic song from the 1999 album Supernatural.

I have linked to the article above but it is behind a paywall, so, on the not unrealistic assumption that subscribers to Pitchfork Papers are not also subscribers to the NYT, if you want to read it you may have to employ subterfuge and use archive.today to get the full text. To save you the trouble, the root cause of Mr. French’s insomnia appears to be the, in his eyes, high probability of the Trump administration pulling all the stops out to steal the midterm elections as a prelude to stealing the next Presidential election in 2028. A practice run, as it were.

This apparently very real and sleep depriving threat is based on the precedent of President Trump’s (obviously not very successful) attempt to steal the 2020 election and his incontrovertibly linked incitement of the crowd to instigate the Jan 6th insurrection, another embarrassing failure in the overall history of insurrections. Mr. French is particularly worried that the tactical employment of the Federal Contested Elections Act, which allows a candidate (for Congress) who feels that he (or she) should have been elected instead of the other fellow (or gal) to appeal to Congress to adjudicate the matter. He cites

Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution says that “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” In plain English this means that the House and Senate make their own decisions regarding who belongs in each chamber of Congress, and those decisions are not reviewable by any other branch of government, including the courts.

Or, as the Supreme Court put it in a 1972 case called Roudebush v. Hartke, “Which candidate is entitled to be seated in the Senate is, to be sure, a nonjusticiable political question.”

The actual process for contesting an election to the House is governed by the Federal Contested Elections Act of 1969, a law that revised and updated previous legal procedures governing contested House elections. The law is detailed about process but largely silent about substance. The actual grounds for overturning an election are left to the discretion of the House (the Senate is governed by different rules).

The law gives a losing candidate, which it calls the “contestant,” 30 days after the certification of the election by state election officials to file a challenge with the House. The challenge is then referred to the Committee on House Administration, which investigates the contestant’s claims.

The contestant is supposed to bear the burden of proving that the election result should be reversed. But the matter is ultimately decided by a simple majority of the House, and the House can refuse to seat any member while the contestant’s challenge is pending.

The refusal to seat a member ought to happen only under exceptional circumstances, but those circumstances are up to the House, not the courts.

~ David French NYT 23.07.2026

Coupled with the appalling prospect that political candidates who feel that they have due cause for concern about the validity of the results in their electoral district might actually use established political procedural law to challenge that outcome, Mr. French notes that the personal integrity of the Speaker of the House - Mike Johnson - was such that he could not be counted on to uphold the law in favour of his own partisan preferences, contrasting him with Mike Pence in 2020, who could be and did. Apart from my confusion over the comparison with Pence’s role (he was VP and House Republican Conference Chair, a Congressional position a few notches below Johnson’s role today) and the fact that in 2020 Johnson’s role was held by that paragon of democratic and constitutional virtue, Nancy Pelosi, it seems, well, a little pot-calling-kettle-black-ish to impugn political actors on the other side of character flaws and guilt by projection and convict them in advance of a breach of trust sometime in the future. You know, just in case.

The same playbook is unfolding now, and I’m concerned, to put it mildly, that Mike Johnson is no Mike Pence. Johnson, in fact, filed a ludicrous brief at the Supreme Court in support of Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election outcomes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But far be it from me to criticise anyone’s right to invent whatever nightmares they wish to keep them from getting a good night’s kip.

Mr French goes on to cite several instances in US political history in which shenanigans of the sort disturbing his nightly peace had been in play.

We’re accustomed to voters having the final say, but America’s messy history indicates that this has not always been the case. In his paper, Jenkins found that there were 601 election contests in the House between 1789 and 2002, an average of around 5.6 per Congress.

Unsurprisingly, election contests increased in the late 19th century, as white Southern Democrats and Lincolnite Republicans battled for control in Congress, and dozens of those contests were successful. In many cases the contests were necessary, as white Southern Democrats tried to ruthlessly suppress Black representation in the postwar South.

In the spirit of fairness, he does cite cases in which in the past it was the Democrats - in those days an entirely different more conservative and reactionary party than today’s proto-socialist progressive platform - who were abusing due process to impede the “will of the people”, but he goes on to say that

If the Trump administration is good at anything, it’s good at resurrecting some of the worst ideas of the American past. Racist immigration policies, brutal federal violence, McCarthyite censorship of political opponents, destructive tariffs, fruitless foreign wars — the Trump administration is bringing it all back.

If one was being argumentative, which heaven forfend I would not dream of being, one might point out that, whilst that point may or may not be true, the Democrats are proving themselves exceedingly proficient at importing some of the worst ideas and policies from Europe of the present as well as having demonstrated admirably their own willingness to resort to “McCarthyite censorship of political opponents” along with “fruitless foreign wars”. As I have pointed out, pots and kettles and all that. Incontestable is the fact that we have definitely been here before:

Lincoln - (2012)

Whilst I enjoyed reading the Opinion piece with a critical eye and am grateful to my friend for sharing the text and his own concerns, my sense is that it doesn’t matter much. It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle you are currently sitting, it doesn’t matter whether the filter on your perspective is tinted Blue or Red and it doesn’t matter who is doing what and to what degree exactly. What matters is understanding the current state of the Union in the context of the larger arc of the socio-political cycle. Only then can you begin to make some sense of what it means or is likely to. And adjust your sleep propensity accordingly.

So here is my take: I suspect that everything Mr. French writes about the Trump administration and the shenanigans his election apparatus is and will continue to engage in, is true or at least not substantively wrong. I also believe that whatever dirty games have been/ are being / will be played are not at all limited to the Republicans and that the Democratic Party is just as tarred by the same brush of corruption, rigging, self-serving, warping of the judiciary etc and that the appalling level of manipulation, grift and cheating on an previously unheard of scale (although that is probably not true) is much more of a sign of where we find ourselves in both the social cycle as it is of the cycle of Empire itself.

The stakes are enormous, the polarisation and the (low) calibre of the politicians themselves at an extreme (though possibly not as extreme as it may yet become) and the power of the elite class of monied interests controlling the the political process for their own oligarchical advantage rarely surpassed. I feel Paul Mellon might take issue with that last statement, but a little hyperbole can be stylistically forgiven.

And the stakes get higher with each “election” as each party has to fear increasingly aggressive reprisals from the party replacing it - not just impeachment but jail time, confiscation of assets and persecution of their family and tribe. If anyone thinks this is just about one side being thuggish whilst the other side is playing cricket, they are probably missing the larger context. Readers of the NYT, The Guardian in the UK and SZ in Germany see themselves as moral gatekeepers of “our democracy” and all the other Liberal Democratic virtues, demonizing “wrong-thinking” plebs who have the temerity to react against and reject the outcomes of increasingly socialist policies which ALWAYS end badly. Accusations of dirty elections and political gerrymandering are fine arenas in which to take a few high horses out of the stables and parade around. They have the added benefit of distracting the crowd from the more conceptually difficult areas of public administration in which graft, incompetence, mismanagement and ideological capture impose breathtakingly high costs on the society whose taxes are, after all, funding the circus.

Eventually - at the end of the cycle or the beginning of the next - public disgust with the entire ruling class leads to either / or civil war, military dictatorship or at least the election of military presidents (Washington, Grant and Eisenhower being prominent examples) with the promise to restore order. The US has a magnificent history of this and has always emerged stronger from the process. David French refers to the Depression era corruption - which interestingly aligns neatly with the final phase of the previous socio-political era, itself brought to an end by a World War and at whose conclusion a (Democratic) President who decided that the country couldn’t do without him, awarding himself an unprecedented third term in office. Just saying. The terms of Washington and Grant similarly came at the end of their relevant saeculorum and oversaw bloody civil conflict on which it fell to them and their administrations to impose order and new institutions. The old ones never go quietly.

Personally I have no idea if Trump is a super wizard fighting a meta battle we may not understand (geo-politically there is a good deal of evidence to support that perspective) or an out-of-control oligarch who played the game well and found a diabolically clever way of communicating a populist message whilst enriching himself and his family shamelessly or a dedicated swampdrainer looking to disembowel the Praetorian Guard nested in the Deep State (CIA/FED/Military-Industrial complex) or a mixture of all three. I have no idea and am neither clever nor well-informed enough to judge it properly. Time will tell, but we may need to wait a very long time before a critical appraisal and fair evaluation is possible.

What I do know is that we are in the middle of an historical inflection point at which most of the stuff we normies complain about is irrelevant. As Thomas More says to the Duke of Norfolk in A Man For All Seasons

“If [Cardinal] Wolsely falls, the splash will be enough to swamp a few small boats like ours”.

We are in for a splash at least as big as that, much as we may wish it otherwise - the debt burden and its unfinanceability will see to that all by itself. But that is for another post.

Meanwhile, I fear for what may emerge from the pens of Mr French and his colleagues over the coming months as they battle with the burden of sleep deprivation.

This is a story with an ask at the end.

The Margin Shock

A decade ago I was tangentially involved in a study conducted as part of a master thesis by a researcher Magdalena Friedeberg née Pollok in the Dept. of Economics under one Prof. Dr. Ulrich Kuron, of Bremen University, Germany. The study was designed to investigate the economic returns of SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) in Germany using data that had become available through the legal requirement for all companies in Europe to publish their financial results (Balance Sheet, P&L and notes at least in a stripped down form) on official sites such as the Electronic Bundesanzeiger . The survey was the first of its kind anywhere using the publicly available data for SMEs (or KMUs in the German acronym). Whilst the data required substantial cleaning, once prepared for analysis, it provided some remarkable insights, insights that mapped entirely onto my own experience of SME companies everywhere, irrespective of geography, tax environment or local conditions. US or Germany - same game, same outcomes (more or less)*.

Here is the graph that highlighted the central finding of this massive data crunch:

The bars in gold represent the average net operating returns as measured by EBIT (Earnings before Interest and Taxes) as a percentage of Revenue of the entire dataset, segregated by industry code, whilst the blue bars showed the same performance of the top 10%.

So, for instance, the pair of bars under label 6209 show the average for that industry group having an EBIT margin of 2,3% against a performance of the best 10% of 34.3%. The best are almost 15x more profitable than the average (which includes the top ten percent). What is this industry class? Hilariously, it is that of management and business consultants - go figure.

In total the top 10% were producing EBIT margins of 17.1% compared to an average of 2.7% across the whole universe. This means of course that once you remove the 1.7% contribution of the top 10% from the average, that the total return contribution of the other 90% came to no more than 1%, which itself is accounted for entirely by the next 20% . In other words all of the economic returns created by SMBs are concentrated in the top 30% of producers and of that 63% (1.7/2.7) is accounted for by the top 10%. Think about that: 70% of small companies across all sectors of industry from Print to Logistics or Aggregates to Zoos are just washing their faces or losing money.

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

The researchers then asked the bottom 90% what they thought the top 10% were doing differently to account for their superior performance and success. Their response was as revealing as it was amusing: comparisons between them and the top performers in their industry segments - who they knew by name and reputation - were deemed to be “unfair, because they are more specialised”. Not one of them appeared to make the connection between the degree of focus/ specialisation and performance. In comparison, when the the top 10% were asked to what they attributed the “secret of their success”, the answers were tightly grouped around the same three causalities:

1. Relentless focus on a highly specified customer subset and specialisation on solving their problems at depth;

2. Highly intentional planning, targeting and management of financial performance; and

3. Obsessive and constant improvement of all aspects of the business through iteration and “whole company intelligence”.

Additional factors were professional integration of sales and marketing and consistent reinvestment in CapEx over and above replacement rates for both physical and human capital.

Reflecting constantly on these results led me to the conclusion a decade ago that in no sector of economic life are the returns to competence higher than in the world of the small and smallest businesses and that incremental increases in competence in the areas of finance and strategy (to which I would now add sales/marketing) yield oversized returns. In other words, just doing a few basic things a bit better over time has an oversized impact on the performance (and experience) of the business. This would probably qualify as a truism - ie: a statement of the bleedin’ obvious - were it not for the fact that it appears more honoured in the neglect and leads in many cases to the experience of business ownership as a constant life and energy sucking grind, in which, in Doug Tatum’s unbeaten terminology, entrapment in No Mans Land delivers an experience captured perfectly in the legends of Sysiphus and Tantalus: Grinding with no prospect of respite. The uncompromising subtitle of the book is “Where Growing Companies Fail.”

Financial Fluency in Service of Marginal Improvements to Competency

At the end of 2018 I was invited to give a talk to a forum of SMB owners which itself had sprung from a spontaneous response I had given in a different business conference breakout session the previous year outlining 7 things I would advise any business owner to focus on to build their intentional practice of their financial mastery. It was off-the-cuff, but I wrote the “program” down in a note afterwards. That note became an article when the editor of the magazine whose conference it was asked me to reproduce it in writing and that then led to the invitation to speak at the forum. (Bear with me, there is a point to all this). After the forum, I was asked by a noticeable handful of participants, all business owners themselves, if I could expand on the “financial intelligence for SMB owners” blueprint I had just presented and a few suggested a course might be a good way of doing that. So I did that, having a natural “if the ducks are quacking, feed them” mindset. First in German in the summer of 2019 and then again for a primarily US English speaking cohort at the end of that year and then again in 2020 and a few times in 2021/2022.

Each of those courses were live via Zoom for 10 weeks for about 90 minutes a session and attended by about 10 or 12 participants, mostly sourced through business partners running communities of /for SMB owners and entrepreneurs. After hosting the course a few times, I had three main insights

1. I loved the teaching process and found it invigorating;

2. The course itself was a maximalist dump of everything I ever wanted to communicate about finance in business and must have been like standing under a rock avalanche for my students and

3. Despite 2. it seemed to be very well received by the participants and helpful in creating an excellent frame of reference for them to understand finance in business and how it could help them substantially improve their performance, especially amongst students who were deeply antagonistic to the whole subject.

I did not then and have never had a social media presence to speak of so I had no channel actively to promote the course and frankly the effort involved in recruiting the next cohorts seemed both overwhelming and about as appealing to me as pulling teeth.

(click the image to see Sydney Sweeney and Brandon Sklenar (who cares about him?) in the iconic scene from The Housemaid)

This was about the time of the COVID inspired mania for online learning and the environment was one of relentless broadcasting, content creation, self-promotion and myriad other activities which appeared to demand significant marketing efforts none of which I felt either inclined or qualified to engage in. I realised then that although the barriers to entry in to the market for digital services were superficially low (anyone with a computer and an internet connection could participate) the real barrier to entry was tucked in just behind the front door and had the word “reach” painted on it. And a substantial barrier it was too, for all its intangible nature. It was around about that time that I learned the meaning of the US jargon word “crickets”, as in “get used to creating content and harvesting crickets, maybe for years”. Nothing - or a diet of crickets - is a hard response to fuel enthusiasm and gritty commitment at the best of times. Given my other commitments and more lucrative uses for my time, after about four attempts, I gave up investing any more effort in the financial fluency course, with regret, in 2022 and that was that. Or so I thought.

About two months ago (March 2026), I was reflecting on the question of whether the recent geometric improvements in AI capabilities and its rapid proliferation had killed the course delivery industry. My thinking was that if I could design a prompt architecture that told Claude to create a learning program with the specific goal of helping me improve my financial fluency (or whatever) and understanding of the numbers being produced by my business with exercises and practical examples, then, for the price of my Anthropic subscription and maybe a few extra tokens, I could replace a course entirely. In the odd (and slightly creepy) way that YouTube has of reading my mind or listening in on the conversations I am having, sure enough within the next hours a video addressing exactly that topic popped up im my feed explaining that whilst the dissemination of information only in a purely asynchronous delivery was dead in the water, the opportunity for teaching and curating a powerful student learning experience using a blend of asynchronous, in person and “student community” activities was more relevant and powerful than ever before especially given the supportive intelligence and processing power of the Agentic AI. That was an interesting perspective and warranted more exploration, with the upshot that my enthusiasm for resurrecting the financial fluency program has been rekindled.

This effort was both prompted, encouraged and substantially supported by my youngest daughter Georgina who joined our Good & Prosper team recently with the express function of integrating AI processes into our project and marketing work. At 23, she gets this at a speed and fluency that I cannot hope to replicate. The fact that her enthusiasm allows me to fulfil the Jerry Jones imperative of “working with your kids” about which I wrote last year is a not insignificant bonus.

Good Books Academy

I have a conviction synthesised from almost 40 years of experience in dealing with entrepreneurs large and small and in participation in business communities: There exists a significant section (don’t ask me to put an exact percentage on it, but somewhere between one third and one half) of individuals with business responsibility who find dealing with the numbers side of the commercial world even at the most basic level somewhere on a scale between overwhelming and confusing and who would agree with the description of having no natural aptitude for that side of things. The phrase I hear most often from those finding themselves in that state of overwhelm or antipathy is some variation of “my brain just fogs up when I have to deal with that stuff.”

I have another conviction that most experts and teachers of finance - of whom there are many outstanding ones - have little understanding of how weak the foundations are on which they attempt to construct their learning journey truly are. Not intellectually, but psychologically and viscerally. And that without a solid foundation of the simplest of concepts, all their teaching excellence simply ends up adding to the brain fog. As my daughter quipped to me “Anyone can learn to strip down and rebuild a motor. Just not if it is taught in Chinese.” (If you happen to be Chinese and don’t understand the point of this sentence then please substitute Chinese with Turkish or any other language you don’t understand a word of. For me it is your language. And Turkish).

The five or so iterations of the course I created and taught in the years 2019 to 2022 showed me that very clearly. It didn’t matter how clever the material was or how much enthusiasm I brought to the table, if I couldn’t find a way to create a stripped down, non-threatening, jargon free heuristic that explained the fundamental working and purpose of numbers in business, then it would be a waste of their and my time, and the experience of my programme for my students would just be another stone, albeit a more colourful one perhaps, chucked on the pile of attempts to figure this stuff out somehow and add to their frustration. On the other hand I had enough opportunities to experience the teaching equivalent of crack cocaine. That moment when you see the light bulb go in the students head and their realisation that they have truly “got it”. The moment after which they will never be able to see things the way they had spent their entire lives seeing it and now can’t go back to that previous state of confusion. Whilst for full disclosure I have absolutely no practical experience of crack cocaine, there must be some, probably short-lived, moment of ecstasy, which makes life and the trouble of procurement worth it. For me, that moment of realisation, of the clearing of the fog to reveal a picture that makes finally makes sense is that moment. And I have missed working for it over the past years.

I also happen to think that better equipped entrepreneurs who feel comfortable engaging with their numbers and can speak the language of business well enough to hear the story their own numbers are telling them are much better equipped to create value and valuable businesses with all the positive benefits for themselves, their teams, their customers, their suppliers, their families and their own sense of agency that that entails. That in Maslow’s words

The difference between the great and good societies and the regressing, deteriorating societies is largely in terms of the entrepreneurial opportunity and the number of such people in the society. I think everyone would agree that the most valuable 100 people to bring into a deteriorating society would not be 100 chemists, or politicians, or professors, or engineers, but rather 100 entrepreneurs.“

~ Abraham Maslow (from Maslow on Management)

To which I would add “100 entrepreneurs fluent in the language of commerce”. But you get the point.

To this end and to give my team and I the opportunity to experience that “crack cocaine moment” at scale, we are revitalising the financial fluency teaching program in a new company called the Good Books Academy whose purpose is to enrich the lives of entrepreneurs, business owners, solopreneurs and anyone interested in becoming truly fluent in the language of business by offering transformative learning journeys along with community, resources and technology to support them. Our vision is that alongside our core three stage curriculum (Foundation, Practitioner and Master) we will attract specific experts many of whom I have known for years and whose perspectives on core aspects of business strategy and finance are exceptional to share their knowledge in similar formats, building a library of ongoing business relevant learning that supports the curious student in expanding the knowledge, confidence and expertise that they once believed would always elude them.

Our Ask

We want to do this properly and ensure that we are genuinely addressing the real needs of those engaged in (or planning to engage in) business activities who find themselves somewhere on the “overwhelmed to confused” continuum. To that end we have created a survey which we are sharing with friends from our business communities and from which we hope to harvest some personal, raw and incisive insights. If any of the above resonates with you and if you are interested in helping us figure out how to best create the learning journey we believe is so important, then please follow the link and share your perspectives with us. We will be publishing the results, our insights and conclusions on the website which will go live once we have completed this first step.

I am very much looking forward to hearing from you and so excited finally to be doing this.

*Doug Tatum, Chairman of Newport Board Group and author of “No Mans Land” the best book on the growth challenges of SMEs, shared an interesting reflection on this survey with me, suggesting that the gap between the best and the rest would, at least in the US be partially explained by the best’s vastly improved access to growth capital on favourable terms. His central thesis is that capital needs predictability and financial performance which de-risks the engagement and punishes less well run businesses by denying them access to risk capital at all.

As of next Friday, I will be walking the path of one of my all-time favourite pieces of travel writing, “Travels With a Donkey” by Robert Louis Stevenson. And travel writing, next to walking, is one of my favourite pastimes. I don’t want to say at the end of my life, as Rousseau did, in the Confessions a little further on from the sentence at the top of this piece, that I wish I had journaled more and captured my impressions and thoughts on my walks (or at all) in writing.

“La chose que je regrette le plus dans les détails de ma vie dont j’ai perdu la mémoire, est de n’avoir pas fait des journaux de mes voyages. Jamais je n’ai tant pensé, tant existé, tant vécu, tant été moi, si j’ose ainsi dire, que dans ceux que j’ai faits seul et à pied.”
~ Les Confessions Book IV - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I first wrote about Stevenson and Modestine in the summer of 2020, in one of my early Pitchfork Papers newsletters (see link below), drawing a somewhat irreverent parallel between getting a donkey moving and getting inflation up to speed. With the GR70 exactly a week away, I revisited it and thought it deserved a home here too.

I have been dreaming of walking this route — the fabled Chemin de Stevenson — myself ever since, yet despite my fervour, the realisation has remained elusive. No excuses, just time and a full schedule putting each year on fast forward to Christmas and the chance of carving out the two or three weeks that a 300km+ hike deserves evaporating like early morning mountain mist in summer. No big secret this, but the only way one has a cat in hell’s chance of making a walk like this (or anything of note I suppose) is to put it in the diary and ensuring that all and sundry know that you are going to be away then. May 2027 is already fully blocked off for precisely that reason.

My plan this time was to book my first night’s accommodation in Le-Puy and then wing it from there, booking a bed in a gite, B&B or hotel, whatever was available, whenever I set the next waypoint that itself would depend on weather, energy levels and terrain to be crossed. However, as my research last weekend quickly flagged to me, I am walking in May in France and “spontaneous” only works when you have a tent as a home. I am travelling light this time so my tent is staying chez moi, leaving me dependent on there being a room at the inn available. Finding accommodation with less than 10 days notice in a month which seems to consist of nothing but holidays interspersed with a few working days (presumably to water the plants and make sure the coffee machine is still functioning) is - has been - challenging. Any hopes I might have had of winging it were cruelly dashed, so my trip is now mapped out and scheduled like an Everest climb, weather, energy levels and terrain be damned. This video should explain the situation to those of you unfamiliar with May in France (or Germany, but France especially):

(if you haven’t come across Honestly Ange on YouTube before, then subscribe - she is magnificent).

In preparation for the walk, we (the team behind Pitchfork Papers who do the really important work) have resurrected the site I created years ago to hold the previous three long distance trail hike journals entitled “A Walk in the Woods” . I don’t remember ever having mentioned the site here before, but it is now tidied up, re-organised and will be my main focus over the coming weeks as I make way to France and then walk the trail before returning home at the end of the month. I invite you to join me there, although I will be reposting to Pitchfork Papers and you should, if you are paying attention, see my regular notes linking to the daily upload (connectivity permitting, which I am forewarned is pretty dodgy in the Forêt de Cévennes).

For those of you interested, I will also be sharing a daily trail file in .gpx format (uploadable onto any GPS device) and once back home a spliced full version of the trail from Le-Puy to Alés with embedded waypoints and notes. This last promise is entirely dependent on my being able to figuring out how my new upgraded Garmin Montana 710i deviceworks. On the off chance that you were following any of my previous walks in the Wales, Ireland or Italy many moons ago, you will remember that I have a love-hate relationship with Garmin as their navigation devices are simultaneously the best and the most frustrating devices on the planet. Their software interface is designed to frustrate and drive to madness people with a much higher level of technical competence as well as technology pain threshold than mine. Thank goodness for Claude AI as it displayed endless patience with my attempts to get my iPhone talking to my new Montana and required five ( I kid you not) separate app installations and three separate ransom notes subscriptions to work. Together we figured it out, but it cost me all Saturday afternoon and evening during which time I came close to hurling into the forest on several occasions.

Furthermore I will be adding a literary and a technical section to the “Walk in the Woods” side to store thoughts on pack lists, equipment and kit that I have found useful and of good quality, as well as book lists covering both trail specific literature and general “joy of walking” books and trail collections (such as the magnificent “100 Hikes of a Lifetime” by Kate Siber or Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust - A History of Walking). Coming soon.

I should note that I will not be taking a donkey. Modestine’s role will be played this time by a backpack stuffed with cables, batteries, a Garmin and enough technology to write and publish from the middle of the Cévennes. Whether the technology proves more cooperative than Modestine remains to be seen.

Pitchfork Papers

How to Make a Donkey Move Faster 🐴

News Bulletin #20 - 14th August 2020…

Read more

6 years ago · Pitchfork Papers

Oddly, the piece, published on the 14th August 2020, was written only a few weeks before OpenAi released there first version of ChatGPT and, with the benefit of hindsight, seems remarkably prescient, if somewhat naïf six years on.

I hope you will join me next week on my adventure.

I have been reflecting this week on a provocative essay by Daniel Homola, “Your Bridge to Wealth Is Being Pulled Up,” which was shared with me by a client over the weekend. Homola’s central thesis is that artificial intelligence and robotics are severing the historical path to wealth creation for the “intelligent without capital” — that the premium traditionally commanded by skilled knowledge work is eroding, and will continue to erode, far more rapidly than most business owners appreciate.

I think his core prediction is correct. But I believe he misses the critical issue for those of us running or advising professional services businesses. I want to share my thinking with you, because it has direct and urgent implications for every knowledge-intensive business I work with.

The AI-Skill Arbitrage

Those who take advantage of the AI-skill arbitrage over the next seven to ten years will end up with capitalised skills and valuable real estate in the perception of their clients. They will be on the right side of the divide. Those who do not will find themselves in a fight for survival they cannot win.

Here is the mechanism. As early adopters integrate AI into their deep domain knowledge, they will initially enjoy significant margin improvement. But competitive logic is relentless: those cost savings will quickly translate into competitive pricing, which in turn erodes the premium for skilled knowledge work more broadly. The early adopters themselves will be the agents of destruction — driving the premium down through their own evolving business models and the need to secure volume. Consequently, only those who move early can hope to benefit from the arbitrage long enough to build a durable competitive advantage. Latecomers will be fighting for survival in an environment of rapidly eroding margins and prices, without the bandwidth — financial or personal — to make the necessary investments.

It was ever thus. But rarely at this speed, and rarely across so many industries simultaneously.

Crossing the Chasm — With a Devastating Variation

I have long been an admirer of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm model, which describes the marketing error that technology companies make when assuming that the Early Majority responds to the same arguments as the Early Adopters. Moore argued insightfully that Early Adopters are driven by a desire to gain competitive advantages and require no peer group validation, whereas the Early Majority are seeking marginal productivity gains and are driven heavily by institutional and peer group endorsement.

Applied to AI adoption in professional services, the model carries a simple but devastating variation: the chasm will not merely delay the majority — it will destroy them. From the perspective of knowledge-work premium degradation, the chasm will incrementally widen over the coming years. Only the Early Adopters who have rebuilt their businesses around AI capabilities and locked down the positioning real estate in the minds of their clients will remain in the market at all. All other things being equal, the entire Majority — to say nothing of the Laggards — will simply not exist in a world in which they come late to the party through caution and a lack of seasoned peer group validation.

Figure 1: The Chasm in AI adoption widens — only Early Adopters survive.

The Lesson from Two Hundred Years of Agriculture

We have been here before. The transformation now beginning in professional services has a remarkably close historical parallel in the mechanisation of American agriculture.

In 1800, approximately 75 per cent of the American labour force worked on the land. By 1900, that figure had fallen to 41 per cent; by 1930, to 21 per cent; by 1970, to 4 per cent. Today it stands below 2 per cent. Over the same period, output has moved in precisely the opposite direction. The USDA’s index of total factor productivity for American agriculture is four times higher today than it was in 1929. Between 1948 and 2021, farm output grew by 190 per cent — while aggregate inputs, including land and labour, actually declined. Corn yields have risen from 43 to 168 bushels per acre since 1948. Total production of staple commodities has increased by 400 per cent since 1929, whilst cropland has decreased by 9 per cent.

Figure 2: US agricultural employment collapsed whilst output soared — the template for professional services.

The lesson is unmistakable: fewer people, dramatically more output, and a total restructuring of who captures value in the industry. The small family farm did not merely struggle — it was replaced by a fundamentally different economic model.

Where Professional Services Stands Today

The professional and business services sector in the United States now employs approximately 23 million people directly. Management, professional, and related occupations account for some 42 per cent of the entire US workforce — roughly 72 million workers. The core white-collar sectors — finance, insurance, information, and professional services — contribute more than 40 per cent of US GDP.

The early signals are already visible. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the lowest rate of job openings in professional services since 2013 at the start of 2025 — a 20 per cent year-on-year decline. More strikingly, the core white-collar sectors have cut jobs on a net basis over the past three years, despite solid GDP growth. This is not a cyclical downturn. It is the beginning of a structural transformation.

Now in past technological transformations, the productivity increases were found in manufacturing businesses. As a society we got better and better at making things and those improvements led relatively quickly to new jobs in the service and manufacturing support industries. Economists refer to the destruction of labor through technological advance the “displacement cycle” and to the phenomenon of newly emerging higher skilled jobs as “task reinstatement”.

The Ghost Economy and Credit Convexity

Paul Kedrosky has this to say about the task reinstatement element of this wave of technological innovation in his essay “AI and the Rise of the Ghost Economy”

This is a key structural fact about the U.S. economy: The top quintile of households accounts for roughly half % of consumption.

And those households disproportionately work in the sectors most exposed to AI:

• Software

• Finance

• Consulting

• Legal

• Media

• Research

In earlier automation waves, displacement hit manufacturing and lower-income labor first. Consumption held up because higher-income households were unaffected.

AI potentially flips that structure. If high-income knowledge workers see wage compression or employment declines, the demand shock propagates quickly through the economy.

He goes on to point out that if this time around, the productivity enhancing technology wave does result in a break or at least long lag in task reinstatement, then the consequences will be almost immediate and felt most strongly in the credit markets. He argues

Mortgage obligations are nonlinear with respect to income changes. Debt service is fixed in nominal terms, so even modest income declines can push borrowers toward default. Once debt-service coverage ratios approach one, default probabilities rise sharply.

That matters because the households most exposed to AI-driven wage compression are also those with the largest mortgage balances and financial leverage. If income declines concentrate among high-income knowledge workers, the resulting credit stress would not resemble a typical cyclical downturn. It might look more like GFC-lite, waves of defaultsm first appeaing in prime borrowers and high-cost metropolitan housing markets where leverage is largest.

In other words, the macro signal of a ghost economy might not initially appear in GDP or employment data, but in credit performance and housing markets.

He adds - somewhat disingenuously - that his rumination are not a prediction simply a “stress test”, but he seems to have a high degree of entirely plausible certainty.

What This Means for Our Businesses

The task of the entrepreneur in this rapidly evolving environment is threefold: to stake and secure valuable virtual real estate by capitalising deep domain knowledge and establishing primacy. In practical terms, this means building the business around what Jeff Bezos calls the fundamentals — the things that do not change; focusing full attention on creating an extraordinary experience for the client; and paying relentless attention to the rapidly evolving economics of your own business model. The business services firm of tomorrow will have far fewer employees. The task is thriving and surviving, not job retention.

This is not, I should stress, a challenge confined to pure-play professional services firms. Every business today has a knowledge and service component embedded in its value creation stack — whether it is a capital goods manufacturer, a real estate developer, a logistics operator, or a retailer. Sales and marketing, customer service, finance, legal, HR, and the knowledge layers within every operating division of the enterprise are all being disrupted. McKinsey’s research estimates that generative AI and related technologies have the potential to automate activities absorbing 60 to 70 per cent of employees’ time today, with the greatest impact falling on knowledge work involving decision-making and collaboration — precisely the functions that exist in every business, not merely those we traditionally call “services.” Goldman Sachs projects that AI, once fully integrated, could raise labour productivity in developed markets by 15 per cent and add $7 trillion to global GDP. The delivery of individual outcomes within these functions is being radically redesigned under AI. To fail to recognise this within one’s own organisation is effectively to hand medium-term productivity advantages to the competition and to subsidise roles that have already become, or will very soon become, functionally irrelevant.

Valid Objections

Whilst I am personally witnessing the transformative power of AI and the speed with which it is effecting those transformations in business after business, I am aware that as far as the speculative surge of both capital and enthusiasm for the new technology goes it is likely generating three standard deviations of hyperbole on both sides of the truth curve. I would argue that whereas manufacturing businesses have lived with real and constant pressure from technology and rising labour costs to permanently increase productivity since the beginning of the industrial revolution, white collar knowledge and administrative work has not, to anywhere near the same extent. Consequently the service sector is getting its first - albeit brutal - ice cold hosing and by the sound of the screaming, it doesn’t like it very much.

Much of public discourse and opinion is of course formed by the members of the very professions now most under threat from agentic AI (see above) and there is good reason to be sceptical of the apocalyptic predictions currently making the rounds.

Intelligent observers express doubt about AI’s current utility in complex fields and question the scale of the projected economic consequences.

• Reliability and Judgment. Thoughtful observers with long memories and tenures are “utterly skeptical” of AI outcomes, arguing that the technology is unreliable in financial analysis and “thoroughly incapable of adding anything to the necessary judgment” required for professional services.

• Economic Claims: Furthermore we can be doubtful about the $7 trillion global GDP consequences often cited and do not have to agree with all the “perceived consequences as they are heralded by many”. As Kedrosky argues the current trajectory in AI related infrastructure spending is masking declines in consumption but eventually that will taper off and the productivity benefits will begin to flow back.

• Human Motivation: Let’s face it, not all pursuits are aimed at securing a place on the “bridge to wealth,” and we can point to enduring careers in areas like music, cooking, and art which are AI indifferent if not entirely resistant. There are plenty of other trades and professions of which the same can be said.

The Emerging Scarce Asset and Systemic Constraints Senior Investment Bankers with whom I have discussed the challenge of AI suggest that the primary bottleneck will quickly shift from AI capability to the human element required to deploy it responsibly. They identify

• Scarcity of Trust and point out that the scarce asset is moving from skill to permission—what clients, regulators, and institutions are willing to let AI do. The new constraint is the trust infrastructure (governance, judgment, and reputational capital) necessary to handle machine output.

• Second Chasm on Demand They predict a “second chasm” on the demand side, where client psychology lags machine speed. This gap may allow firms to preserve pricing power by acting as fiduciaries of machine output and translating AI outcomes into confidence and accountability.

• Recursive System: The agricultural analogy, they argue, misses the fact that finance is a recursive system where AI changes behaviour, reallocates capital, and reshapes the market. This makes the feedback loop faster and more volatile, suggesting that adaptability itself could be a moat. This makes sense to me.

The Human and Social Cost of Transformation. Other intelligent observers focus on the long-term impact on professional development and the broader economic stability.

• Loss of Training: Core white-collar tasks provide the necessary training to become a top decision-maker. One correspondent questioned how one gains the “wisdom and Fingerspitzengefühl“ (intuition/tact) required for top-level work without the years of lower-level experience that AI will eliminate. So all those law partnerships and auditing firms who are rubbing their hands in glee that they now no longer have to worry about underpaying their entry level trainees and midnight candle burning grunts because they won’t need them any more, might pause to ask where then the managing and senior partners of the next decades are going to come from?

• Social Volatility: The erosion of a vast section of the creative and administrative middle and the resulting secular downward mobility for millions of highly educated people could be “very dangerous” given their role in consumption and tax revenue, potentially leading to political reforms or revolutions. If the effects on advanced societies is as powerful as is being predicted then those most affected are not going to take their degraded social and economic status lying down or quietly, so that the “hyperscalers” can stuff their pockets even more egregiously on the arbitrage. Elections will become even more, how shall we say, interesting.

• Human Ingenuity: One friend noted that AI output is confined to existing data sets, lacking human ingenuity. He questions how the loss of defined tasks will affect human motivation and the need to contribute value to society by leveraging that ingenuity.

The agricultural revolution took the better part of two centuries. The professional services revolution will not afford us that luxury. The window for building advantage is open now, and it is closing but it is not at all clear what will become of us in the process.

My original intention on picking up my metaphorical pen to start this essay was to set out my perspective that in a month in which years are happening - from the US Presidential Nobel Peace Prize aspirant deciding that starting one war might improve his chances of said prize more than (apparently) ending seven, to the miserable spectacle of a human fox hunt as the erstwhile Duke of York is run to ground and slowly savaged by a global media pack, a savaging which to this observer appears only assuageable through an ultimate blood sacrifice - and in which everyone is expected (and permitted) to have at least two entirely contradictory opinions on Iran, Israel, Ukraine, Gold, Inflation, the US-Dollar, the mid term elections, the end of Europe, the rise of China, BRICs, Russia, the shadow banking system, and whether or not America has enough ammunition or Germany enough liquid gas to make it to Easter. My perspective, to which I was fully intending to devote an entire essay, was, actually is, that none of these things matter. What matters — imho, OK not so ho - I surmise, is the intensity with which events, dear boy, are happening and what that intensity tells us about the point in our history at which we now find ourselves. In our urge to make sense of the noise - an impossible task guaranteed to absorb every cell of our frontal cortex - we are apt to forget that the sounds themselves are far less important than decibels and the intensity of the cacophony they combine to produce. The cacophony, in other words, is the message.

So, I was in the frame of mind to look for apposite literary covering fire for my hypothesis and my mind, as it is won’t to do, went straight to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Satan’s speech to his luciferian troops assembled in Chaos, readying them for the epic battle with God and the Angels. Something along the lines of

“My sentence is for open war: of wiles
More inexpert, I boast not: them let those
Contrive who need, or when they need, not now.
For while they sit contriving, shall the rest,
Millions that stand in arms, and longing wit
The signal to ascend, sit lingering here
heaven’s fugitives, and for their dwelling-place
Accept this dark opprobrious den of shame,
The prison of his tyranny who reigns
By our delay? No! let us rather choose,
Arm’d with Hell flames and fury, all at once
O’er Heaven’s high towers to force resistless way,
Turning our tortures into horrid arms
Against the Torturer; when to meet the noise
Of his almighty engine he shall hear
Infernal thunder, and for lightning see
Black fire and horror shot with equal rage
Among his Angels…”

Paradise Lost Book I ~ John Milton

Stirring stuff and terrifying if you happen to be on the other side of it. I have a sense that the self-evident decay of the system under which many, probably most of us have grown up is now too obvious for even the most intransigent to ignore. Weak men (and women - looking at you specifically Frau von der Leyen and Ms Kallas) making bad times which are now ineluctably upon us. Satan’s host feels very much as if it is on the march already. Consequently, I don’t think it helps us much to opine on whether the US will achieve its objectives in Iran (remind me again, what are they?) or whether they have ever achieved any of their foreign policy objectives since the Marshall Plan or what this means for Russia or whether Mr. Epstein was indeed the Grandmaster of the Illuminati or just their private banker or any of the other questions which increasingly occupy the overpopulated and certainly intellectually overtaxed talking heads: we are moving into the denouement phase of post war socialism sold to us as liberal democracy and to the breakage of a system built on rotten money, whose ultimate objective was always its own absolute degradation. We have bigger fish to fry. The noises of war, distraction, corruption, accompanied by the creaking elicited from the erosion of bourgeois standards of normative behaviour and morals, managed by incompetents and ideologues whose only instinct is strip mine the trust and infrastructure built by previous generations are the easily extrapolatable outcomes we now witness. Not problems to be solved - it’s too late for that - but falling masonry to be avoided, preferably from a hill top in the distance.

That is what I was going to write about.

However when I pulled out my 1991 copy of the Folio Society’s “Paradise Lost” with its beautiful William Blake illustrations, I didn’t get much further than the Introduction, a magnificent piece of writing by the Miltonian fan boy, Professor John Wain taken from his essay “Strength and Isolation” (1960) where it served as the opening contribution in a 1960 book titled The Living Milton: Essays by Various Hands, edited by the eminent literary critic Sir Frank Kermode.

John Barrington Wain (1925–1994) was a prominent English poet, novelist, and literary critic. He is heavily associated with “The Movement,” a group of 1950s British writers—including Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis—who favored a straightforward, anti-romantic, and formally disciplined approach to literature over the modernist experimentation of previous decades. I could explain what arcane aspects of literary philosophy those various terms refer to, but your life will not be substantially enriched by the information. The magnificently named John Wain is famous for his 1953 comic novel Hurry on Down (which often gets him grouped with the “Angry Young Men” generation of British novelists), he was equally respected as a formidable academic. He was an Oxford graduate who taught at the University of Reading and later held the highly prestigious post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, as a fellow of Brasenose College from 1973 to 1978. The Folio Society “Paradise Lost”, of which I have an excellent copy, brought this otherwise obscure but brilliantly articulate academic to a broader public just before his passing three years later.

Instead of a long diatribe on the pointlessness of trying to figure out “the truth” of our current world in turmoil, I figured that you would be infinitely better served by reading an extract from Professor Wain’s truly wonderful essay in which he sets out his reasoning for his Christian faith and his belief in the Divine. His perspective is essentially mine, but better articulated and with more lightness of spirit and generosity of intellect that I could muster. William Blake once wrote “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans.”, as clear a call for having the intellectual courage to go figure stuff out for yourself as it is possible to articulate. This Truth is far more consequential than any other narrative truth that you might be otherwise grappling with. I do hope you enjoy it.

From the Introduction to Paradise Lost - John Milton (Folio Society - 1991 and reprinted in 2004) - Professor John Wain

“In our time, to say that Paradise Lost is an explicitly religious poem will probably be to lose readers for it, where once it would have been to win them. So be it. Are we to conclude, then, that nothing is to be taken seriously in our world that is based on anything other than the rationalising intellect? Are we really determined to concern ourselves exclusively with what we can see and touch and measure? Are we to conclude that not just Christianity, but all the religions of the world, are to be swept aside as a tissue of mistakes or, worse, deceptions?

Some undoubtedly think so. They believe that everything can be satisfactorily explained—or, in cases where it can’t, that the limitation is merely in our knowledge; we shall understand them when ‘science’ has caught up and filled the remaining gaps. All phenomena, mental and physical, have assignable reasons and most of those reasons can be found in chemistry, including the chemistry of genetics and of neural reactions. A writer like Milton, who accepts a religious belief and puts his energies into presenting that belief with the maximum of sweep, drama, colour, magnificence of language, and impact generally, is wasting his time. He is dressing up a fairy-story better left in the nursery.

It seems to me that the best way through this difficulty is to be quite personal about it. I find on looking into my own mind that I don’t belong to this type. There must be, in me, some nugget or nucleus of belief in the Divine— that is, in some sense, a belief in God. I am not given to speculation about fundamentals, least of all those of a metaphysical nature, believing them to be mainly opaque to the human intellect and therefore, to my simple pragmatic way of thinking, a waste of time. But my nugget of religious belief surfaces whenever I consider a matter in which values are involved. Take, as one example out of many, the issue of man’s relationship with the other inhabitants of the planet. In recent centuries, but at an accelerating pace in our own, we have driven countless species into extinction by destruction of habitat, ruthless hunting and exploitation, and in general the assumption that all the other creatures are our property, to be treated as we feel inclined to treat them, including destroying them. Many of the thousands of species we obliterate are too inconspicuous for the ordinary person to notice, but some of them— the large marine mammals, for instance—are familiar at least in general outline to every human being.

It sometimes happens to me, as it does to everyone, that I meet a person who says,“You say we are slaughtering the great whales and soon there will be none left. So what? I don’t care. It will make no difference to me; I never see a great whale, nor do most of the world’s population; if the few that are left can be used as a source of materials before we go on to some other source, so be it.’ I never argue nowadays with this kind of person, but I do sometimes reflect on why I don’t share their attitude and can’t imagine myself sharing it. To be indifferent to the fate of species like the right whale, or the rhinoceros, or even the humble English sand lizard, seems to me wrong; but wrong in what way? Intellectually wrong? It depends on what premises you start out from. If your opening position is that the material welfare of the human race is all that matters, and if you can prove that it will not be affected by the disappearance of every other species except those we actually batten on, then no intellectual error is involved. How is it wrong then? Because, my impulse is to answer, it is an offence against ... against what? If I say lamely, ‘The natural order’, what is this natural order that it should not be offended against? Where does its authority come from? Perhaps I might reply, Evolution happened in a certain way, and produces at any given time a certain balance of creatures, with a food-chain and a distribution of resources, and that order ought not to be tampered with.’ The answer comes back, ‘Why not, if we have the power and it suits us?’ I try to follow the argument into its ramifications, but they prove to contain too many unanswerable questions. What happened to the dinosaurs? Was that somebody’s fault? Or did they simply die out in the ‘natural’ order of events? And if the large reptiles could die out over a period of fifty million years, why not the large marine mammals over a period of one hundred?

To drive a species to extinction and simply not care about it seems to me an act of disobedience to the law of nature; by which, in the last analysis, I mean the law of God. The same applies to a blatant disregard of the natural bond of brotherhood and sisterhood between human beings. When a government, for instance, allows to suppress political dissent by force of arms, resources that would have fed and cared for its people, that is an offence against the law of natural kinship, by which in the last analysis I mean the law of God. I cannot prove the second proposition, any more than the first, by simple rationality. On the contrary: if the individual members of the government survive the famine, and if their military offensive against the opposition is successful, it may be ‘better’, from their point of view (i.e. more advantageous), that the resources should be devoted to fighting rather than allaying hunger. The Hitlers and Stalins of the world certainly go on this assumption; and, though Hitler raised up military enemies for himself who ultimately brought him down, Stalin, after a much longer and equally hideous reign, died in his bed. There is no argument, purely so considered, by which the actions of these men can be shown as wrong. They are condemned, rather, by a voice deep inside every normally decent human being, every human being less cruel and treacherous than they. But “decent’ is a word that contains an ethical judgement, and ethical judgements cannot be upheld, finally, without the sanction of religious belief.

Believing that — not particularly rushing forward to believe it, but driven step by step to believe it, for lack of any alternative — I have to say that Paradise Lost is about something important in my scheme of things. In its first sentence the poem tells me that ‘all our woe was brought into the world by ‘Man’s first disobedience’. And once again I have to admit that I think the same. Evil and suffering are caused by man’s disobedience to the law of what is obviously right—to reverence for life, to the brotherhood of humanity, to the obvious duties of compassion and unselfishness. The world would be a very pleasant and happy place if human beings were—not perfect, there is no need for that, but - reasonably decent, anything short of the total unmitigated swine we actually are. Individually we may be fairly all right, but collectively, as a species, we are contemptible in our greed, cruelty and short-sightedness.

How, then, could any subject be more important than that

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe?

It is true that Milton’s choice of an actual concrete vehicle for conveying this situation, this failure of man t o live up to the will of God, has taken a form that to many people seems unattractive. Granted that it is hardly likely that a seventeenth-century Englishman, or European of any kind, would conceive and construct a religious poem in any other terms and in any other framework than the Christian, there are readers, and have been for at least two centuries, who openly voiced dissatisfaction with the whole Christian mythos of a God who, incensed at an initial act of disobedience, condemns his entire human creation to suffer in hell, and then (whatever notion of subsequentiality we imagine by ‘then’) sends down his ‘only begotten Son’, who in some way dark and difficult to understand is a manifestation of his own personality, to expiate the collective sin of mankind b y dying an agonising death in a human body. Speaking for myself I must say that I find the doctrine o f the Atonement not only very difficult to grasp intellectually, but repulsive n its postulating of a God who could be so vengeful in the first place. This was evidently T. S. Eliot’s attitude; in a celebrated essay of 1936 he remarked bluntly:

So far as I perceive anything (i.e. o f the poem’s content as distinct from its style), it is a glimpse of a theology that I find in large part repellent, expressed through a mythology which would better have been left in the Book of Genesis, upon which Milton has not improved.

On the other hand, I think it is important to recognise that the unattractive features of the subject are incidental features. In essence the subject— man’s relationship with God, and his obedience or disobedience to the Divine Will—is as important now as it was in Milton’s day —or Dante’s, or Plato’s, for that matter, It does not go out of date. Different metaphors may be found for it, different narratives may be found to dramatise it, but the essential diagram remains. What is right, what is wrong? What is the nature of God? What does he want us to do? What are the laws we have to obey? Where do we find them conveyed? Are they in the rainbow over the Ark, or in the thunder from Mount Sinai, or on stone tablets? Or are they in the natural world we see green and growing around us? Or in the laws of nature as painstakingly decoded by science? How can we know them, and when we know them how can we best follow them? Religion is like money —still in use after all the attempts to abolish it.”

~ Professor John Wain, Oxford (FS Paradise Lost, 1991)

Doomberg (23:00) : And if there’s a grand bargain between Trump, Putin and Xi, and I don’t think there is, but you can’t rule it out yet.

Grant Williams (24:02): No, but let’s game it out anyway because it’s worth doing.

Doomberg: The arc of that grand bargain is Putin gets Ukraine, Xi gets Taiwan and the US gets the Western Hemisphere basically. And that leaves the giant gaping question of Brazil, which we’ll come back to. But in a world where the Western Hemisphere gets its act together, and slowly but surely that incremental 10 million barrels a day of oil comes online, there’s less and less need for the Middle East, and China has a desperate need for the Middle East. And so, one could imagine the US ultimately washing its hands of the Middle East, although Trump’s seeming obsession with regime change in Iran would run counter to that, which makes us wonder whether a deal was struck. But if such a deal was struck or the US has unilaterally decided to go in that direction, both are consistent with the observable news flow, it’s bad news for Europe, terrible news for Europe, disastrous news for Europe, which has painted itself in an impossible corner of having a volatile and a relationship that is in perpetual conflict between Russia and China and the US all at the same time and mix in India while you’re at it.

I don’t know what the European Union’s overarching strategical objectives are, but that they’ve certainly picked every large enemy on the planet all at once, which we find amazing. And I’m sure we’ll talk about Greenland here soon, but what does that mean for Ukraine? Not bullish for Ukraine. What does that mean for Taiwan? It means that the Beijing aligned wing of the Taiwanese political scene, which is actually quite large, will rise in prominence and likely the outcome would be a Hong Kong style reconciliation between Taiwan and China, the mainland, without any shots being fired at all, which I think if you put truth serum into Xi Jinping would be his desired outcome. And so in that world, the true multipolar world, the US flexes its muscle in the Western Hemisphere, which includes Greenland and leaves Canada surrounded, and Europe is on an island politically and energetically floating along some giant ocean without an oar to steer itself.

And I think if the situation in Ukraine continues to devolve at the pace at which it currently is, that is going to be disastrous for the current slate of European leaders, Micron, Starmer, von der Leyen, Merz, Tusk, they’ll all be wiped out of power. And then who replaces them will decide the future of Europe, which is a whole other third dimension to all of this.”

‘The Week in Doom” podcast ~ Grant Williams (Episode 25 The World’s Gone Caracas! PUBLISHED: JANUARY 22, 2026 [Emphasis mine, although Doomberg was also quite emphatic, it has to be said}.

The Bear, the Snake, the Eagle and the Ostrich - a Fable

The key question raised here, is I think, the one of strategy and downstream of that the evaluation of the quality of critical strategic thinking in Europe. I have often held that in a business in crisis, the most important factor determining the ability to act appropriately is the admission that the crisis exists at all. Once leadership has articulated the words “we are in a crisis” if only in the boardroom, then the paradigm shifts and the way is opened for priorities to be set and actions to be executed that would be unthinkable in the non-crisis paradigm. European leadership in the last twenty years especially has seemed to me stuck in a paradigm which effectively denies that other countries, especially powerful ones have strategies and that those strategies will necessarily act - for good or, more likely for bad - on their own constraints, rooms of manoeuvre and optionalities. Denying that your competitive partners on the international stage have strategies at all and dismissing the mere talk of them as conspiratorial nonsense, is at best willfully naïf and at worst deeply irresponsible and dangerous. As ostriches throughout evolution have found, sticking ones head in the sand in the hope that danger will pass, does not help much (Actually they don’t and is fake news, but Pliny the Elder first pointed this out in Naturalis Historia in 78 AD and he was an expert, so science..).

Fourscore years of having the USA and to a lesser extent the UK look after the security interests of Europe both at home and on the high seas have led to a dangerously blithe unwillingness to engage in the sort of hard, trade-off based strategic thinking necessary to protect national and supra-national particular interests and, as a natural consequence, to neglect critical defence infrastructure. European nations and the EU in particular have convinced themselves after decades of skipping strategy classes, coz boring and irrelevant are just starting to wake up to the fact that their default position of lecturing the rest of the world’s powers from a position of supposed moral superiority is - as I would argue it always has been - indefensible and irresponsible. European states, especially Germany and the whole dishonest project of the EU is currently being exposed for what it is - in Doomberg’s words - “politically and energetically floating along some giant ocean without an oar to steer itself.”

I would be wrong in stating that the EU has not been directed by an overarching strategic imperative, one baked into its DNA by its founding intellectual architects. It certainly has. The strategy of the EU, which it was allowed to execute without much if any resistance until recently was to undermine and then ultimately replace the individual nation states that constituted its membership and to “manage” Europe on technocratic, rational and well-ordered (statist) principles thus avoiding the jingoistic inefficiencies and barbarous tribalist passions to which nation states have shown themselves to be regularly prone. Monet and his buddies conceived of a supra state in which the horrors of the preceding century of national chauvinism would be consigned to the dustbin of history and set out a strategic frog-boiling blueprint for how this might be achieved in increments and subtly so as not to alarm the individual nations whose demos would - with a few exceptions - never have signed up - ie. voted - for the whole monty. Which for the largest part they were never invited to do.

So, it is not as if the EU mandarins were not perfectly capable of formulating and then executing a long term strategic plan - their actions prove that indisputably. They have nonetheless proven themselves to be blinkered in the extreme in their ability to identify similar abilities in those with whom they are forced to share the global stage. So absorbed have they been in the grand project of creating a regulatory behemoth, abrogating ever more budget, power and self-appointed dominance over the entire continent, and so firm in the believe in the infallibility and moral superiority of their statist, welfare expanding and climate and social ideological program, that they react to even the slightest intrusion of evolving reality as an affront. And why they continuously ignore or misunderstand the deeply serious strategic imperatives of the geopolitical actors with whom they must needs interact.

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy

The times they are a-changing, no doubt and the EU collectively and the member states individually are by and large acting like petulant children at the thought of a epochal party in which they could pretty much act out their fantasies of liberal democracy within a socialist framework with little to no care about defence and national security issues, is coming to an end. One of the best writers and thinkers on the subject of strategy - in all its applications - is whose book “Good Strategy. Bad Strategy.” was one of the first, if not the first book I ever read on the subject. His perspective and framework informed my own significantly and I was delighted to discover him writing here on Substack. In his first piece, from 2022 he writes:

In Only the Paranoid Survive, one of the best books on business strategy ever written, Intel CEO Andy Grove defined an inflection point as “a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end.”

Today, it feels like we are at such an inflection point. Inflation is rising to the highest level in 40 years, there is war in Europe, with Russia hinting at the use of nuclear weapons. China’s leadership has announced that it intends to supplant the US as the leading technological and military power. Many believe that it is planning an invasion of Taiwan this year or the next. The war in Ukraine has made energy security a new top issue for security, just as pressures to deal with climate change are increasing. The millennial workforce exhibits demands, behavior, and beliefs that are a marked contrast to those of most traditional employees.

Causing this mixture of issues and events are a number of major tensions. Each is composed of two countervailing forces that have been fairly balanced in the recent past. But today, some forces are strengthening and others weakening. Like a tug-of-war when one side weakens, the flag marking the center of the rope begins to move. These tensions are among inflation, taxes, and spending, among a more hostile world, energy security, climate change, and globalization, and among traditional workplace norms and the newer migration of ideological struggles into education, workplaces, news media, and government.

Rumelt argues insistently that strategy must be determined by circumstances and responses to them. In an essay last March entitled

The Rumelt Perspectives

Becoming a Strategist (Part 1)

Having written several books on strategy, I get a stream of email queries. One type asks, “How do I become a strategist?” These tend to come from people working in business or government who want to grapple with more significant issues than the trivia filling their workdays. Others are from business school students who discover that the economic theorie…

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a year ago · 193 likes · 7 comments · Richard Rumelt

from March 25 he sets out his definition: “I call my perspective challenge-based strategy. The central proposition is that a strategy is a set of policies and actions carefully designed to overcome a high-stakes challenge. In other words, strategy is problem-solving that defines a plan of action.”

As pointed out at the start of this essay, if you don’t recognise the real challenges (Russian, Chinese and US strategic imperatives and priorities) but instead focus on relative irrelevancies (such as Trump being rude or not as articulate as Oxford or Sorbonne educated mandarins, or attempting to be best in class in pointless subjects like climate change or critical theory), it will not be possible to evolve “carefully designed…policies and actions” to meet them head on.

The Grant Williams-Doomberg prompted a further realisation that in the current environment in which Europe has painted itself into a proverbial corner, there is no “European” option or fourth way between the three protagonists in their relevant Western, Eurasian and South Pacific spheres of influence that makes any sense in the context of the real challenges and relative strengths. Doomberg pointed out later on in the interview that

[Merz] said that Russia is part of Europe and that a strategic rebalance... It basically reads like the Trump strategic national security document that so shocked so many Europeans. One wonders whether Merz isn’t correctly reading the room and undergoing a bit of a shift politically to reposition himself with the understanding that that’s probably the only plausible way that he could survive as a politician in the current environment. Keep a close eye on whether the firewall against the AFD doesn’t begin to crack ever more so because there is a path where the current coalition in Germany collapses, but elections aren’t called. And that path involves a coalition on the right, which is of course the great fear of Brussels because that would be a major domino that will lead to reactionary populist, right-leaning parties, whatever you want to call them, all across Europe are gaining an ascendancy and effectively destroying the current political elite in Brussels.

That is the thermodynamically favored outcome in Germany. It is what the voters have expressly stated is their desire. And the longer and further the band is stretched, the more violently it snaps back, of course. And whether Merz can thread that needle and bring the AFD into the fold in a way that he can survive as it remains to be seen. But that is clearly, I think, in a world where the US is truly disconnecting from NATO, I think Merz sees what little Europe can do. And then beginning with his own political situation needs to find some stability.

The Week in Doom” podcast ~ Grant Williams (Episode 25 The World’s Gone Caracas! PUBLISHED: JANUARY 22, 2026

Given this background of fragile political stability, Europe is struggling to make sense of a world in which it is experiencing its relevance and political leverage dissipating like water in cupped hands. It is not surprising that European leaders or other non-lead dog Western hemisphere countries arguing for an independent strategic positioning. Both Mark Carney, the oleaginous globalist technocrat parachuted into Canada in the nick of time last year to “replace” the surely lunatic Trudeau who had stayed well past his sell-by date, and German Chancellor Frederich Merz, about whom it is better not to say anything, have made weighty political pronouncements on the need for these “middling powers” to coordinate their efforts. With the rhetorical bombast we have become used to from the Wizards of Oz from the middling kingdoms, comes the high certainty that whilst the objectives proposed may be sound it theory, they do not meet the minimum “Rumelt Criteria” for evolving good strategy in practice. Good strategy requires the strategist to root his or her problem-solving effort in an honest and comprehensive recognition of the conditions precedent, not those they would wish to see. This attitude is best illustrated by the Stockdale Paradox which holds that a survival strategy must be based on ruthless recognition of the nature and urgency of immediate threats to enable survival hour by hour or day by day, coupled with an unshakeable belief in future redemption rooted in deeply held values and faith in the vision, but without a date attached to it.

US or Them - Whose side are you on anyway?

Europe and Canada with their deep dependence on the US as a customer for their exports, a supplier of their existential energy requirements (less so in Canada’s case) and guarantor of their security in the face of their relative defencelessness against real aggression due to a confluence of factors most of them home grown, some determined by demographics and geography, are onto a non-starter if they belief that they can steer a course between three competing super powers without opening themselves up to complex dependencies in which they become increasingly susceptible to blackmail, coercion and manipulation. Europe has been to all intents and purposes a protectorate of the USA since the end of the last war and the “rules-based order” over the demise of which so many have spilled oceans of ink over the past year, was only ever possible as a long as an ultimate guarantor of that order was prepared to enforce it. This the USA was as long as it held all or most of the cards, found it in its interest to do so and its ability to project power was unchallenged. These aspects of geopolitical reality are no longer true in the way they were thirty or twenty years ago. These changed circumstances require acknowledgement and adaption, but above all they require commitment.

Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in The Prince

A prince is also respected when he is either a true friend or a downright enemy, that is to say, when, without any reservation, he declares himself in favour of one party against the other; which course will always be more advantageous than standing neutral; because if two of your powerful neighbours come to blows, they are of such a character that, if one of them conquers, you have either to fear him or not.

In either case it will always be more advantageous for you to declare yourself and to make war strenuously; because, in the first case, if you do not declare yourself, you will invariably fall a prey to the conqueror, to the pleasure and satisfaction of him who has been conquered, and you will have no reasons to offer, nor anything to protect or to shelter you. Because he who conquers does not want doubtful friends who will not aid him in the time of trial; and he who loses will not harbour you because you did not willingly, sword in hand, court his fate.

“The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli (Chapter XXI - “How A Prince Should Conduct Himself So As To Gain Renown”)

Taking this eminently sensible piece of advice to heart, it becomes blatantly obvious that, love it or hate it, Europe’s strategically most sensible option is to align itself fully and incontrovertibly with its long time hegemonic partner and protector, economically, politically, defence technically, financially and in any way that improves the odds of not finding itself crushed in the unstable gravitational forces created through the three body problem described in the eponymous book by Cixin Liu. To prevaricate, to overestimate ones own strengths and resources, to underestimate the earnestness of the situation and its potentially destructive outcomes is the opposite of strategic statesmanship. As ex UK PM Liz Truss recently noted in a Telegraph podcast “Let me be quite clear, the Chinese are not our friends.” But the US are. And it is not as if the European Continent does not have leverage of its own - this is not about vassalage but about commitment in the face of extant realities and relative strengths.

Bear in mind

Let me finish with a word or two on the third of the planets contributing to the Three Body Problem of inherent destabilisation. Germany has a very complicated relationship to its ursine neighbour in the distant east beyond the Ural mountains. Complicated is an understatement. Europeans and Germans in particular cannot comprehend Russia. They want Russia to be nice and not be a source of existential worry, which is why they like civilised Russians like that nice Mr. Gorbatchev and for a while that nice Mr. Mededev who wore well tailored suits and fitted in just fine in the cocktail bars and 5-star restaurants of Davos, but are scared out of their wits by sinister ex-KGB officers who like both parading around bare-chested with Kalashnikovs on horseback and having people suicided who get in their way. Recent history (by which I mean WW II) created a blood bond with Russia as it was they who sacrificed soldiers and citizenry in the tens of millions to defeat Hitler and his demonical regime, whilst the same leader who oversaw Russia’s war effort was also a monster himself, his death toll outstripping even that of the fascist national Socialists. A cognitive dissonance which is best answered by not dealing with it at all.

Much of recent (19th Century and 20th Century) geopolitical strategy by the Anglo American and French powers has been directed at preventing Germany cuddling up too closely to Russia for fear of becoming too powerful were that alliance to blossom. As long as the Americans were stationed in their hundreds of thousands in Western Germany and there existed a buffer of nations from Norway and Finland all the way down to Moldovia and Ukraine, none of which mean very much to the average West European, there was at least a sense of “out of sight out of mind” creating a fragile sense of security, especially, in the Cold War context if you are an ostrich .

In a recent outstanding Hidden Forces interview with Prof. Carlo Masala, of the Bundeswehr University in Munich, Demetri Kofinas explored the current trajectory of Russian interest and expansion of its own “near abroad” sphere of influence. The discussion was built around Prof. Masala’s recent book “If Russia Wins”. The book and the interview contain some deeply concerning truths about Russian intentions and thinking, concerning especially for Western Europeans unused to actually having to DO anything other than talk about geopolitical strategic imperatives. Questioned by Demetri on current Russian strategic thinking he answered:

Carlo Masala: in my field of expertise, which is more defence and security policy and military stuff, if you look at the war, there was only one clash in Russia with regard to this war. And this was not among people who said this war is stupid and doesn’t bring anything to us. These were among the people around Putin and the hardliners accusing Putin being too soft in the way he was waging the war against Ukraine.

Demetri Kofinas: 00:28:18 So actually the only opposition we became aware of was an even more nationalistic opposition than the current regime is. So therefore, my assumption is if there is a change of politicians in Russia, we might even get people who are more hardcore with regard to Russia’s goals and what the Russians wanted to achieve in foreign insecurity policy than the current leadership is.

Hidden Forces Podcast #460

That Putin is a relative dove surrounded by a nest of hawks and aggressive imperialists is a perspective I have not yet heard articulated by anyone who ought to know. I do not have space to describe Prof. Masala’s book here but both it and the interview are must reads/listens for anyone interested in understanding the context in which significant security policy choices are being presented, especially in Europe.

Concurrently I have noticed a slew of new books appearing in my (excellently stocked) local Bavarian bookshop, all focused on analysing and presenting some aspect of Germany’s relationship with Russia. This tells me that people are waking up to a need to have something other than the cartoon version of Russia in the context of Europe and its political challenges and policy responses. I have four open on my desk which I present for context only:

1. Ein Krieg Wie Kein Anderer (A War Like No Other) by Jochen Hellbeck telling the (awful) story of Operation Barbarossa

2. Moskau’s Westliche Rivalen (Moscow’s Rivals in the West) by Oliver Jens Schmitt, which looks at the (much overlooked) nations which form the immediate border with Russia on its Western flank (from the North Cap in Norway to the Black Sea in the South)

3. Das Versagen (The Failure) by Kaja Gloger and Georg Mascolo an investigative history of Germany’s disastrous failure in managing its relationship with Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union in 2001. and finally

4. If Russia Wins by Carlo Masala which I referenced above.

This eclectic selection of current titles are selling well apparently and feeding an unease that Brussels and the Chancelleries of the European Nations in the West are significantly underestimating the nature of the challenge facing them from the East, a lesson Lithuanians, Finns, Letts, Poles, Estonians, Norwegians, Moldovians and Rumanians need no extra cramming to understand.

Woefully under defended, entirely reliant on American hardware, software, satellite data gathering and communications technology, manpower and strategic focus, Europe needs to decide quickly if the risks of a go-it-alone “strategy” (deliberately set in inverted commas to underline the lack of coherence of such a program) or whether it would not be better advised to double down on bolstering the relationship with their - still engaged - protector and be, in Machiavelli’s phrase “a true friend”. Remember J.D. Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2025 just after President Trump took office:

"The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America"

J.D. Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2025

We know what we need to do.

“Brushing that surface is a sense of movement, of breathing impermanence. This is how Nieto looked in mid-thought, in mid-life, at this moment; there is no straining after the definitive. The man is here, supremely conjured in paint, but the picture does not give all of him because there is always more within him. He is allowed his privacy, his secrecy, his full mystery as a man, which is the respect Velazquez gives all of his stitters. Monarchs, chamberlains, watersellers, dwarves: they are all sovereign of themselves.”

~ Laura Cummings - The Vanishing Man

Portrait of Jose Nieto - Diego Velazquez ca. 1630

I originally wrote this piece for my one year anniversary of publishing on Substack (and third year of publishing Pitchfork Papers). I am republishing it here today - sans paywall - for a number of reasons. Firstly, I needed to read ’s wonderful description of the first post-Pinochet election all over again, especially the “We don’t need you - We can do better without you - We’d rather be free. “ mantra. It is often difficult to remember as we wade exhaustingly through the treacle of life in modern western societies and listen to the self-serving drivel dished up as policy in defence of “our democracy” that it really doesn’t have to be like this. Secondly, I wanted to (re)-introduce those readers who have never spent any time with him to Velasquez (and recommend Laura Cummings’ page turner “The Vanishing Man”), whose portraits and paintings capture and synthesize the essence of our individual humanity, our endless creative capacity, our singular complexity along with our sublime ability for technical mastery and elevate it. There are - mercifully - many more of you now than there were three years ago. Thirdly, I need to repeat loudly to myself and anyone else in earshot, that joy is the way out and up and that joy is achieved through a blend of individual purpose, mastery and competence of ‘some work of noble note’ and of community with others, with the world around us and with God. I hope it bears republishing.

The Easter weekend last week (April 8, 2023) allowed me the opportunity of building a story of perspective around a favourite painting (The Kitchenmaid at the Inn at Emmaus) by a favourite artist (Diego Velazquez). The groundbreaking temerity in depicting that key New Testament scene from the perspective of a kitchenmaid, broke radically with a tradition of keeping the great unwashed out of the main focus of religious art or even any art unless of course, it was to show them in their wretchedness and/or depravity (viz. Hieronymus Bosch’s representations of Hell). The Kitchenmaid was painted in around 1618 when Velazquez was a precocious 19-year-old and remained one of the very few religiously themed paintings he ever produced. However, the fact that he chose the perspective and the main character of his painting that he did and the gentle, respectful appreciation he establishes with the kitchenmaid and his capturing of her as a real person, was characteristic of all of his works.

“His portraits are not just the living, breathing likeness, but the seeing, feeling being in the very moment of life and thought. Nobody has ever surpassed his way of making pictures that seem to represent the experience - the immediacy - of seeing in themselves.”

~ Laura Cummings - The Vanishing Man

I have been revisiting Velazquez and immersing myself in the deep intimacy of his portraits and art this last week, picking up on a theme that suggested itself to me last week and took on an urgency the more I reflected on the man and his uncompromising dedication to his mission. Velazquez - perhaps more than any other artist - forces us to recognise the dignity of the individual and to see what he sees. By capturing the “living, breathing likeness” of his subjects high and, most especially low, he insists that we confront and acknowledge the indwelling complexity and singularity of each individual and catch ourselves in the act of superficiality and prejudice as he forces the intimacy of that recognition into our consciousness. It is simply not possible to stare into the eyes of a Velazquez subject and not be drawn into a connection, an awe in some cases, of the singular, tangible individual spirit facing us. Stripped of their accouterments - the crowns and feathers and artifacts of dignity - or even with them, the character of the individual subject transcends both costume and props and we are able to experience them in all their humanity - the good, the bad, and the ugly but always the complex.

It is dawning on me that this is exactly what we need to train in ourselves, every day and in every encounter and always. It is the weapon of resistance to the concept that we are a mass, to be herded like cattle or managed like inventory. Our ability to truly see the singularity of each human being - created in God’s image - and to act upon that truth is how we resist the tyranny of dehumanization. It is what I am calling the Velazquez Imperative.

In a Susbtack essay entitled NO! (^_^) in his series “Postcards from Barsoom” John Carter wrote recently

It doesn’t help that the WEF present their antiseptic nightmare of global AI surveillance serfdom as a fait accompli. It’s not just that they are showing you the future they would like to build – they present it as the future that will happen, the inevitable outcome of the relentless forces of history, technological and social progress carrying us all towards their technological Singularity as surely as a dropped rock falls to the ground.

Which is really quite excellent propaganda on their part. If their future is the only possible future, after all, there’s not much point in resisting it.

In the trade that’s known as assuming the sale.

[…]

But it won’t change anything, because their vision of the future is the only vision. They’re too strong, too rich, too powerful; they’ve hypnotized the population too thoroughly; they have too many ways of crushing any opposition, starving it of attention and resources, while lavishing funding on all those projects they’re using to build their prison. You can’t stop it. It’s inevitable.

Or so they’d like you to think.

And I think many of us tacitly accept this.

So we busy ourselves pointing out the insanity and corruption in excruciating detail. Did you hear the latest cretinous gibbering from today’s over-promoted regime lickspittle? Did you see the latest demented statement from a TikTok gender fiend? Did you hear about how yet another dissident got deplatformed, debanked, assaulted by the tolerant left? Have you heard about the most recent thing we’ve learned about what the vaxx does to your endothelial lining?

And oh my God what’s wrong with the normies, don’t they see all of this, what more will it take to wake them up?

The answer is much simpler than you expect.

The answer is joy.”

He prefaces the essay with the story of the opposition campaign in Chile in the 1990s who were driven by righteous indignation and a passionate desire to call out all the dreadful things that had occurred under Pinochet’s regime, until a marketing and advertising expert told them in no uncertain terms that whilst they may be justified in their indignation and mostly like correct in their assessment, that was not how they were going to win the referendum which Pinochet had permitted.

This, the protagonist explains to them, is a sure recipe for failure.

Of course, the people know all about the brutalities of the regime. They’re neither blind nor stupid. But focusing on these excesses will communicate nothing but fear, and from an emotional psychology standpoint this is not a winning strategy. Frightened people given the choice between the devil they know and the unknown will choose the familiar every time. Even those strongly predisposed against voting Yes will simply be demoralized by such messaging, as it will remind them that there could be painful personal consequences to casting a No vote. “True, Pinochet is a huevón, and he’s too scary for me to do anything about. This referendum is a sham in any case, voting in it won’t do anything but get me in trouble. Better to stay home.”

Instead, our hero says, the No campaign needs to market itself using joy. “Pinochet has had his time, and he’s done much good for the country. We’re safer and more prosperous than we’ve ever been! But we’re ready to move on now, our country has grown up, we have a bright and beautiful future ahead of us if we leave this authoritarian regime behind!” The point is to put viewers in a happy, positive frame of mind, and to get them to associate this emotional state with dancing through the streets on their way to cast a No vote, not as a doomed act of symbolic resistance but in the spirit of a carnival, with grins on their faces.

Carter finishes his piece with a description of how that ultimately successful No! campaign was conducted

Go back to that Chilean movie, No. The Pinochet regime’s Yes campaign was larded down with economic statistics (“See how far we’ve come under Pinochet’s wise leadership and firm hand!”) and grand projects for the future (“Our economic plan will increase GDP by 2.5% per annum!”). The No campaign didn’t bother with any of that. There were no specific policy proposals, no economic models, no dense political theory.

There was just a simple message:

No.

We don’t need you.

We can do better without you.

We’d rather be free.

And they put a cheerful rainbow behind it to drive home how happy this freedom was.

And that worked.

~ NO! (^_^) - Postcards from Barsoom (which also contains some of the best writing on Substack. I mean, an author who can shoehorn the words ‘recondite’, ‘haruspicy’ and ‘ludic’ not just into one paragraph, but (almost) into one sentence, without a soupçon of self-consciousness, has got to be worth reading).

We don’t need you - We can do better without you - We’d rather be free.

Notice the “we” - we individuals.

The Velazquez Imperative is a forcing function that commands us to look into each other’s eyes and recognise, validate, and acknowledge our singularity. If this is true -and I believe with every fibre of my being that it is - then the only system of social organisation is one that puts the individual at the epicentre of its focus. The US Constitution and the Bill of Rights do this unequivocally and other Constitutions adopted since try to, but most fail because their framers can’t quite commit to the full Monty, leaving plenty of wiggle room for collectivists and top-downers to establish eminent domain over the rights of the individual, in the interest of the “common good”. And that wiggle room has been expanded and stretched to suppress those natural rights and sovereignty of the individual in ways unimaginable as it always will be unless we say NO!

We don’t need you - We can do better without you - We’d rather be free.

The story we are being told about humankind’s inevitable self-destruction, the collapse of our planet, the constant - in Voegelin’s memorable phrase - immanentizing the eschaton - and most repulsively, the reduction of humanity to a seething mass of population which needs to be culled, managed and reduced in order to reserve the beautiful blue planet for, well, for whom exactly?, is just that - a story. Our entire existences - each and every one of them - are a latticework of narratives, stories we tell ourselves about what is true and what is false, what has to be and what cannot be, our decisions taken implicitly and explicitly based on where we see ourselves in whatever story we believe to be true.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” ~ The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

This sentence was the first line of code of the most powerful technological application in human history. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution which evolved in the decade following its publication along with the Bill of Rights which set out the practical applications emanating from those self-evident truths are both code and a story. And you either subscribe to them or you don’t. It’s not that difficult.

The Velázquez Imperative demands acknowledgment of the truth of our individuality and if it is true, then it follows that we must needs protect that individuality and reject any notion of collectivist subordination of the individual to any greater good in whose name so much evil has been forced and justified. If we are all singular and we all have intrinsic value and we are all made in the image of our Creator then our systems must recognise, honour, and uphold that truth.

Our systems begin with ourselves and the exhortation to love ourselves, forgive ourselves our trespasses, and be kind to ourselves. They extend to encompass our families and those for whom we have a duty of care and love in the long chain of inheritance of which we are links, then ripple out to our communities, our friends, our churches, and parishes if we still have them, the associations in which we find companionship and community of purpose, especially our businesses and places of work where we must nurture the eco-systems we create in pursuit of service and problem-solving, and then to the wider world of our county, state, and country and beyond, also cognisant of the fact that the dynamic interplay of millions of moving parts in a constant living, breathing state of self-organizing criticality - because that is how nature works - rests on the sovereign and singular individual as its critical smallest component. Honouring that, and protecting that truth is the path of joy that allows us to state with conviction to the latterday and future Pinochets:

We don’t need you - We can do better without you - We’d rather be free.

The Waterseller - Diego de Velazquez (1623)

“Perhaps Velazquez had some deep sense of his own dramatic journey from provincial still-life painter to Pictor Regis. One small but crucial fact reveals a profound attachment to the painting that brought him from Seville to Madrid, which was effectively the origin of everything that followed: the old man selling water in Seville.

The picture shows a working man with a lifetime’s experience, wizened and poor in his gaping garments but with his sorrowful dignity in tact. The boy (that same boy as in the “Old Woman Cooking Eggs in Seville, 1618) lowers his gaze alongside, taking the water with respect; without this man, he might have been thirsty, without water who can survive? Their two hands meet, holding this cheap but infinitely precious substance. Velazquez takes the most banal of transactions and gives it the significance of a parable.

The glass is an inordinately refined object conatining a floating fig, perhaps there to flavour the water, but still a tremendously difficult illusion to paint. The immense terracotta jug, irregular in shape and discoloured by misfiring, changes colour and texture as a trickle of water leaves its trace down the surface. Velázquezwas not twenty when he painted this scene and for all the many interpretations that have been put upon it - an allegory of age, prudence or Christian charity, a scene from a picaresque novel with the old man as a comedy beggar, a portrait of a Greek philosopher Diogenes, who was thought to have slept in a huge ceramic jug - it must at least be said to show a young artist selecting objects in order to display his ability to overcome the exceptional challenge of painting them. The glass is like the frying of eggs. This mastery of goes with the mysterious and sombre atmosphere of the picture: it dazzles in the same degree that it puzzles.

As for the idea that the waterseller - so stoic, so dignified, deeply respected by the painter as well as by the boy - was some low comic beggar, one wonders whether that commentator was looking at the same work of art.

When Fonseca died in 1627, Velázquez wrote an inventory of his art collection in which he gave the highest price to ‘The Waterseller’, and then he promptly bought it back. The chaplain’s widow benefited, no doubt, but so did Velázquez. This early painting mattered so much to him that he never let it go again; this is what we know now. He kept it with him until the end of his life.”

~ Laura Cummings - “The Vanishing Man”

It appears inordinately difficult to live our lives with full confidence that our inalienable rights will be respected and that we will be allowed to pursue happiness in whatever way we believe is in our best interests and within whatever definitions we assign to that objective. The difficulty lies on the one hand in the obvious transgressions against them to which we are witness every day and the seemingly never-ending encroachments on our private space and our ability to actually be autonomous and free, as we shrug our shoulders and attempt to make ourselves comfortable in the space left to us before the next incursion takes another slice of it away. And on the other in our apparent helplessness in the face of it all.

Until we find our Velázquez. And come face to face with the unavoidable truth of our singularity, dignity, and respect and the joy and energy that is released when we acknowledge it. For me, the contemplation of a Velázquez portrait brings me into that energy in a way no other artist can. It reaffirms my belief in our and my own agency. It kindles a joy bordering on awe of the grace inherent in our individual existence and brings the power of an individual life and its unique complexity into sharp focus. It makes me aware that we are so much more than we appear to be individually and that we as a mass is a false construct.

This is the Christian truth - we are made in God’s image and capable of great creation ourselves. This is the foundational ethic of the Framers and the underlying substance of the technology of the Constitution, free from the broken perspective of the State that more through the deliberate rejection of its precepts than through truthful observation of them has metastasized in spite of it. This is what allows us in our hearts to say :

We don’t need you - We can do better without you - We’d rather be free.

NB: Velasquez was not a prolific painter. Of those we know about, some were lost in a fire that raged on Christmas Eve in 1734 and destroyed the Palace of Alcazar. Not a few were just lost, vanishing into the mists of time. The largest collection of his paintings is housed in the Prado Museum in Madrid . It is well worth visiting the Spanish Capital just for the experience of viewing the collection (go early in the morning anytime between October and Easter but probably not afterwards). The Inn at Emmaus (one of two versions) is stored in the Museum of Art in Dublin, where it is however not on permanent display. Friends of the Museum can, with a day or two’s notice, ask for a private viewing of any painting in the archive, which is how I got to see it a few years back.

Occasionally a phrase pops onto your radar that lodges hard in that part of the brain in which information of neuralgic importance is stored. The phrase contains a powerful truth which germinates and subsequently brings everything else sharply into focus, after which nothing appears quite as it was beforehand.

Julian Garran of MacroStraegy UK delivered a qualifying zinger in his conversation with Grant Williams last October when he pointed out that prosperity and standards of living are the downstream consequences of previous investments into its capital infrastructure. Prosperity is a product of long term capital investments in the architecture of progress, be it roads, drainage systems, railways, telegraph lines or electrical grids and underground transport systems, hospitals and even prisons. Sounds obvious.

“Charlie Munger famously said, “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the behavior.” And I think that’s critical in a sense what this Wicksell spread stuff does is show you the size of incentives to allocate capital differently than the right way, the way that maximizes its value and maximizes the capital stock. And so the more that you see those incentives in place and the more you know that this behavior is happening, the more you realize that it begins to undermine the very fabric of society. And I think perhaps one of the biggest problems facing the global economy is that there’s an ignorance about what makes things work, at a very basic level, how does the world actually work?

And the main thing that distinguishes us from our ancestors who lived in caves and what have you, we’re no more intelligent than they were, the main thing that distinguishes us is that we’ve got this accumulated capital stock, everything that we see that’s human made around us from the buildings to the roads to the cars, the electrical grid, the sewage systems, and all of these types of things have built up over time using the surplus from work. And they provide this extraordinary foundation for the growth and for the standard of living that we all enjoy today. But if you don’t understand that, you might for instance, start to come up with some ideological idea [about why] that actually damages the capital stock. And one of those ideas could be, for instance, green policies, which while they’re well intentioned in most cases, end up making energy more expensive, which then makes it more difficult to build capital stock. And we’re starting to see the backlash to that now.

And then the other one is never wanting to have a tiny downturn, in which case you respond immediately to any threat of a take up in unemployment by chucking money at the system either through monetary policy or through fiscal. And a danger with that is that changes the pricing system by which business people will try and work out what the right thing to do, right way to allocate capital, and they’ll step away from looking at sustainable long-term returns and towards short-term speculation. And it’s the accumulation of that, those misallocations that put you in a fragile position. And it’s only by actually going back to the roots and working out how big this is, you realize something that you might be viscerally aware of, that this feels like a fragile economy that’s where the capital stock’s not growing or maybe shrinking and where people’s livelihoods may be going backwards rather than forwards. We can only really get at that by going to the root of why it’s happening, the incentive behind the behavior. And that’s basically policy, aggressive, easy monetary and fiscal policy is very damaging to the foundation of the economy, which is the foundation of socioeconomic wellbeing and of civilization itself.”

~ THE GRANT WILLIAMS PODCAST (transcript): Episode 109 Julien Garran PUBLISHED: OCTOBER 13, 2025 [emphasis mine]

More recently, Edelweiss Holdings plc Chairman Tony Deden wrote insightfully in a typically brilliant essay of “the hollowing out of democratic substance beneath the preservation of democratic form” stating “What is emerging is not simply illiberalism imposed from above, nor a relapse into overt authoritarianism. Rather, it is a gradual reorientation of democratic politics away from restraint and toward consumption—of capital, of institutional credibility, and of social trust.” [emphasis mine].

Capital therefore - the organising principles around which give rise to the -ism system - is (intelligently deployed) the foundation of prosperity. Full stop. Any system therefore that interferes with, constrains or otherwise disincentivises the formation and efficient deployment of capital must logically lead to the consequence of lower standards of general prosperity and social well-being. As Tony Deden acerbically points out, we are now in the phase of consumption of past investments be it the capital stock or institutions and their integrity or even the fabric of trust that holds societies together. These are all assets created from the behaviour through which aggregated surplus of earning over consumption become savings and then capital which is then deployed through the process of investment.

We know this to be true from personal experience. We work and save some surplus which requires us to forego immediate consumption. We then deploy those savings in creating assets which we believe will provide us with a higher standards of living in the future. It could be a washing machine or a house or an investment fund to provide income for retirement.

At an aggregate level, entrepreneurs are those who, using the Austrian term, invest in assets which form part of the structure of production, (ie are not consumptive goods in and of themselves, but provide the means by which eventually consumptive goods are produced). They access the aggregate savings markets through capital markets, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, but at heart entrepreneurial investment activity relies wholly on the availability of a pool of socialized savings to make those investments upon which future prosperity depends. This is not a difficult concept.

Let them eat cake

Everyone who has responsibility for an asset, whatever it is, knows three things. Firstly that to enable ownership they had to consciously accumulate and deploy savings, secondly that the asset requires maintenance if it is to remain useful and thirdly that it has an estimated useful life span. The toaster I bought as a student at Durham two score years ago is, to pick a random example, no longer with me (probably by a margin of two score years minus two) and when I was thinking about the path my life might take I was probably not imagining that the toaster might be accompanying me to the end of it. However I do know that I could probably have looked after it better and that had I done so, I might have deployed the £25 that its replacement cost by buying 20 or 30 shares of some toaster making enterprise (say Philips (PHIA.AS)) as an alternative, which turn would all other things being equal, make some meaningful contribution to supporting my consumption forty years later. Thomas Sowell is often quoted for his quip that “there are no such things as solutions, only trade-offs” which points to the fact that every decision to do something simultaneously implies a decision not to do a myriad other things. In this context it means that the decision to consume or invest determines outcomes that have far reaching consequences stretching out into the distant future. Capitalism is simply the system by which today’s surplus is converted (or not) into prosperity enabling assets in the future. It is the essence of jam today or jam tomorrow...

Returning to Sowell and the consequences of trade offs, it is patently true that most individuals and no societies can simultaneously have their cake today and eat it tomorrow no matter how ardently they may wish it. They can have their cake and eat somebody else’s tomorrow. They may even be able to avoid ever having their own cake to eat and live off other people’s cake for quite a long time, but the point will come ineluctably when there is no cake left at all. At the risk of flogging this metaphor to death, the path from cake to no cake is not linear and it is experienced in the latter part of the journey as a paucity of cake, with diminishing levels of cake quality and slice size, followed by a migration to bread which is called cake and then to just bread and from thence to crumbs. The fiction of plentiful supplies of cake in the face of the bitter experience of general cakelessness is usually the last thing to be given up. It feels very much as if we are the “cake for me but not for thee” phase of the cake cycle and that the prospect of a general absence of cake is edging ever closer.

The Ground Rules

The libertarian or liberalist creed (which traces its roots back to Locke and the early fathers of Individualism - or as I would argue alongside Gary North, 4,000 years prior to the Pentateuch) is based on four fundamental principles, as being

1. The Right to Self-Ownership

2. The Sanctity of Private Property

3. Free Exchange

4. Non-Aggression

From these principles are the Constitutions all of today’s Western Liberal democracies constructed, the most fundamental of which is the Constitution of these United States of America whose framers were clearest on the subordinate role of the State in the practical exercise of the basic rights. The European constitutions are more statist, the Anglo Saxon ones less so. This by way of setting the scene for the pre-conditions for prosperity and the securing of high future standards of living.

It stands to reason that if capital deployment in assets that support the flourishing of present and above all future social well-being is the key, then one of the foremost tasks of any rational social organisation would be to encourage the formation of such capital to that end and to incentivize and support the behaviours which lead to that outcome. By the same token, those who sincerely wish for continued high and increasing standards of living would encourage the maintenance of the assets and infrastructure bequeathed to them by previous generations of investors. They would then logically determine that one of their foremost tasks would be the upkeep and improvement of those inherited assets in the spirit of stewardship, if only to avoid the whole of society going the avoidable and tragic way of my student era toaster. Finally and critically they would do everything in their power to ensure that the value of surpluses accumulated by the unnatural act of extended time preference (for which we humans are definitely not naturally wired) would remain as stable as possible in order not to pervert the complex decision making processes through which the assets of the structure of production are brought into being.

The benign combination of a culture of stewardship, an encouragement of capital formation, the protection of property from of any form - direct or tacit - erosion or expropriation other than through weak execution or faulty judgement and a focus on maintaining and evolving the asset infrastructure on which present prosperity was built would appear to be the ground rules around which increasing standards of living are created. Prosperity follows investment.

It is not, as I have written, a difficult concept and it is frankly irrelevant what we call the process and the system which enables it. I am anything but dogmatic about whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice, as some wise capitalist said a few decades ago.

The Sewers are revolting

Given that all political parties and their representatives run on similarly sounding promises to improve the general well-being, it should be possible to evaluate both their policy platforms and performance by the simple process of scoring them on a few metrics linked to

1. The encouragement of capital formation (whether by individuals directly or in some aggregated form);

2. The protection of property rights, including the level to which property is encumbered or unencumbered by direct and indirect claims and restrictions on it;

3. The level of investment in maintaining and evolving existing infrastructure;

4. The encouragement of sound investments incorporating and exploiting advances in technology and their absolute level;

5. The promotion of behaviours that encourage time preference extension including by example through their own standards;

6. The protection of the integrity of important institutions, including but not limited to the law and legal system, the police, the defence capabilities of the realm, the media, parliament and (especially) - where applicable - the constitution;

7. Finally as an overarching metric the quality of stewardship as defined by the standard of care for and prudent evolution of the system they were elected to perpetuate.

Writing this, my face has contorted itself into a hybrid blend of cynical snort and a guffaw. We are, of course, everywhere far away from even moderate “could do better if he tried” outcomes in our present states and well advanced in the process “away from restraint and toward consumption—of capital, of institutional credibility, and of social trust” as Tony Deden so exquisitely framed it. We are in the accelerating consumption phase, no question.

Evidence of this accelerating consumptive malaise are everywhere. In the UK the trainwreck of decades of underinvestment and political inability to tackle even the basic job of maintenance is nowhere more evident than in the water treatment and sewage infrastructure. Writing in the Restorationist this week, Daniel Cohen points out:

Fifteen thousand overflow points, scattered across the country like relief valves on a pressure cooker that never stops boiling. The Victorian engineers who designed these systems intended them for storms of biblical proportion—once-in-a-generation deluges when every alternative had failed. Today they discharge in drizzle. They discharge when it is merely cloudy. They discharge because the alternative is sewage backing up through toilets and flooding into kitchens, and the choice between poisoning rivers and poisoning homes is apparently the best Britain can manage in the twenty-first century.

This is not an environmental crisis wearing infrastructure clothing. It is the opposite: an infrastructure collapse masquerading as weather events, regulatory failures, and the passive-voice inevitability of “pressure on the system.” But pressure implies force applied from outside. What we face is internal rot—the compounding mathematics of deferred decisions, raided budgets, and a regulatory apparatus designed to manage decline rather than prevent it.

The sewers are failing because nobody will pay to replace them. The flood defences are failing because maintenance is invisible until it stops happening. And the two failures are now locked in mutual amplification: overloaded sewers discharge into floods, which spread contamination; floods overwhelm drains, which dump into sewers, which overflow again. A feedback loop playing out in hundreds of communities across England, where the same houses flood on the same streets in the same months, and every time the response is surprise, sympathy, and a promise to “learn lessons”

He goes on to write

Actual failure, when it comes, is often catastrophic. A trunk sewer collapses and an entire neighbourhood loses service. A treatment works floods and discharges millions of litres untreated. A pumping station fails and sewage lakes form in residential streets. These are classified as incidents, investigated, sometimes fined. But they are not aberrations. They are the statistically predictable outcome of running nineteenth-century infrastructure under twenty-first-century loading without substantive renewal.

[…]

Water companies are not stupid. They employ engineers who know exactly what their networks need. They run models, they map failure points, they understand hydraulic capacity and biochemical loading. Then they pass this information to finance teams who calculate paying fines is cheaper than fixing infrastructure, and to communications teams who prepare statements about "unprecedented rainfall" and "lessons learned." This is not villainy. It is rational response to perverse incentives.

Nationalising Water When You Don’t Understand Drains - The Restorationist Daniel Cohen 11.01.2026

In Germany the last place most people think of as reluctant to invest to its own infrastructure, the picture is grim and getting grimmer:

Germany, for decades Europe’s economic powerhouse, also has a reputation for being a land of skillful engineers and efficiency. What has gone wrong?

Oliver Holtemöller, the head of macroeconomics at the Halle Institute for Economic Research, says the problems lie not in a lack of public financing, but elsewhere: “The burden of bureaucracy, highly complex planning procedures and the lack of skilled people to carry out the work.”

This, he said, was compounded by “politicians who want to be re-elected, who prioritise projects with a very short-term return”. Even before he was sworn in as chancellor last month, run-down infrastructure was high up on the list of Merz’s domestic concerns.

Kate Connolly ~“Rust in Peace - Why are Germany’s Bridges and Schools Falling Apart?” The Guardian 2025 (a fact to which this journalist felt impelled to add the comment “Problems caused by underinvestment are being seized on by the far right as evidence of ‘state failure’. Wouldn’t be The Guardian if they didn’t mention that.)

Pick an asset or critical element of our modern society - physical, institutional or metaphysical - and you will easily find articles and in depth essays documenting its decline in integrity and fitness for purpose usually with the same root causes as listed in Kate Connolly’s report - burdensome bureaucracy, overly complex planning, lack of skilled labour plus lack of budgets or perverse incentives. The compound effect of all this is - no surprise here - the experience and reality of gradually declining standards of living.

This is where we find ourselves. I would suggest that it is beside the point arguing about long or short term economic and social cycles and whether they exist or not, because the arithmetic reality is clear. Assets depreciate and depreciation is a cost: I can ignore the responsibility to reinvest my depreciation charge (irrespective of the tax treatment) for a while, but as all business owners and other fules kno , eventually the depletion of the asset base destroys the ability to continue in business.

The outcome of our current reality is not in doubt although we can debate the timing and the form of the eventual breaking point till the cows come home. Institutions and societies can limp on at declining levels of living standards for decades, probably even longer and history is replete with examples of entire countries doing just that. I cannot, however, bring myself to believe that after two millennia of cultural advance and the embedded knowledge of and capacity to effect extraordinary and exponential increases in the standard of living, the peoples of the Western Christian Empire will just shrug their collective shoulders and slouch off into a dismal future, without energetically demanding and participating in a long overdue restructuring and the whole scale dismissal of current management. Especially as we have the source code for what actually works.

I now need to clean my toaster.

“Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes.”

Exactly 500 years ago this year in 1526, William Tyndale published his translation of the New Testament from Greek into English. A decade later, on the 6th of October he was executed as a heretic in Vilvoorde, Duchy of Brabant in what is now Belgium, by being burned. He was spared from suffering through this appalling fate by being first strangled (garrotted) by his executioner, in acknowledgement of his standing as a scholar of international repute. Famously, depending on how much you know about the life and works of William Tyndale, he cried out “Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes.” before he was publicly strangled. For the nitpickers amongst you, there is some dispute as to whether it was indeed the 6th of October on which he was sent to meet his Maker, but John Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” has that down as his death day, so that is good enough for me.

The King of England, one Henry VIII, who, like Tyndale started life as a devout Catholic, did indeed have “his eyes opened” only ten months after Tyndale’s Church sanctioned murder by publishing in 1537 his own version of a Bible in English. Indeed his mistress Anne Boleyn , with whom he started an affair around 1526 was known to have delighted in Tyndale’s best selling publication of the New Testament, of which she had a copy. It is almost unthinkable that during the years of the late 1520s she did not read and discuss this text with her liege lord and paramour, soon to be husband, King Henry. This fact (of her having a copy) and surmise (that she discussed it with Henry) are made poignant by the background against which the work and its publication must be understood.

By 1525 England was the only country in Europe not to have a version of the Bible published in its native language. And the reason for this was simple: to translate even one word of the Bible into English was heresy, punishable by death. God’s word was available only in Latin. In Germany for instance, Martin Luther published his version of the New Testament translated directly from the Eramsus’ (original) Greek text in 1522 (not completing his translation of the Old Testament and publication of the Complete Bible until 1534), exactly the same time during which Tyndale was also teaching himself Hebrew and translating his English language version from the original. Luther and Tyndale’s versions were the first to translated directly from the original Greek / Hebrew rather than the vulgate Latin versions. Tyndale himself like Luther was inspired to tackle the task of translating the NT into English by the availability of Erasmus’ Greek (dual language with his own Latin) version in book form whilst he was studying at Oxford (1516) in his early 20s. He felt called to bring the message of Christ to the common man in his own language directly, the threat of heresy notwithstanding. His calling was stronger than the threat.

William Tyndale’s Life

“If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou dost.” ~ William Tyndale (1494 - 1536)

The story of Tyndale’s life and tribulations leading to his ultimate betrayal and execution is little known but excellently told by Prof. David Daniell in his authoritative and gripping “William Tyndale: A Biography” (1994 Yale University Press). The salient points are as follow: Tyndale, whose exact birth of date is unknown, but has been computed from records of his arrival at Hertford College Oxford as a 12 year old as being sometime in 1494, was an outstanding linguist who was fluent in seven languages including Latin and Greek. He was inspired, as noted above, by reading Erasmus’ own publication of the Greek New Testament in 1516 and driven - despite the penalties associated with the task - of rendering the books into common English. Or in his case uncommonly beautiful English language, of which more anon. He tried to elicit permission for his academic exercise from the Bishop of London but was thwarted by both him and the all-powerful Cardinal Wolsey, at that time Chancellor of England and Henry’s right hand man. He was however not without sympathisers and found refuge in a few aristocratic houses who gave him the space and time to pursue his work whilst acting as tutor to their offspring and providing him with materials and contacts to others keen to see him succeed.

It must be remembered that Tyndale was a child of his time, a time in which the dominant theme was Reformation of a Church whose own corruption and suffocating stranglehold on every aspect of civil life along with representatives who were universally loathed and disrespected as being venal, grasping and brutally moralising whilst living lives entirely at odds with the standards they enforced on the populations at large. William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davison describe the Church as follows, first economically

By the end of the Middle Ages, the monolithic Church as an institution had grown senile and counter-productive, a marked change from its positive economic contribution five centuries earlier…By the end of the fifteenth century, the Church had become a major drag upon productivity. The burdens it imposed upon the population were pushing living standards down.

and then - morally

“Little wonder that the common opinion of the late fifteenth century despised the higher and lower clergy, much as common opinion in highly politicised societies today despises the bureaucracy and politicians. As John Huizinga puts it ‘Hatred is the right word to use in this context, for hatred it was, latent, but general and persistent. The people never wearied of hearing the vices of the clergy arraigned.’ Part of the reason that people were commonly convinced that the Church was ‘grasping and extravagant’ is that it was true. ‘The worldliness of the higher ranks of the clergy and the deterioration of the lower grades were too obvious to miss. From the parish priest to the pope himself, the clergy appeared to be corrupt as only the personnel of a dominant institution can be.

Five hundred years ago, Alexander VI, made even Giulio Andreotti and Bill Clinton seem like exemplars of integrity. Alexander VI was famously known for his wild parties. As a cardinal in Sienna, he staged a famous orgy to which only ‘Siena’s most beautiful young women had been invited, but their husbands fathers and brothers’ had been excluded The Sienna orgy was famous but it later proved to be tame compared to those Alexander threw after becoming pope. Perhaps the most lurid of those was the so-called Ballet of the Chestnuts, which involved Rome’s ‘fifty most beautiful whores’ in a copulation contest with the Church Fathers and other important Romans’.”

The Sovereign Individual ~ William Rees-Mogg & James Dale Davison (1999) [Emphasis mine] - for more ‘lurid” details of the Ball of Chestnuts, you will just have to read the book (Chapter 4, p118) - this being a family publication.

And Death

Back to Tyndale.

Eventually England became too hot to hold him without endangering the lives and livelihoods of his patrons and sponsors, so he fled to Germany, home of Martin Luther and crucible of the Reformation, where he could find a thriving printing industry and printers willing to take on the job of preparing his English language New Testament for publication and distribution. Central Europe had at that time some 1,000 printers compared to only two in England at that time. He ended up in Cologne where he began the arduous process of setting and printing his folio edition many hundreds of copies of which ended up being bound and smuggled back to England in bales of wool. Tyndale insisted that his New Testament be published in a small hand-sized version so that it could nestle in a normal pocket and thus function as a vademecum, to be carried around always. This version will be the one a copy of which ended up in Anne Boleyn, later Queen Anne’s hands (and pocket).

Tyndale’s “subversive” text was quickly circulated and copies clamoured for and read out loud in families sympathetic to the message of reformation and fed up with the state of the Church as it was then experienced. It didn’t take long for the Church authorities to move against the volume and soon possessors of the heretical text were having their homes raided, books confiscated and finding themselves on trail. The Bishop of London organised a burning of any and all copies he could find, although I suspect Mistress Anne was spared from these indignities. The real task remained however to stop the heresy at the source by arresting and dragging Tyndale back to England.

This they almost succeeded in doing by sending a troupe of soldiers to Germany with the help of the Catholic authorities in Cologne to capture him and destroy the sets. Word reached Tyndale in the nick of time and he managed to escape with his manuscripts and books across the Rhine to the Low Countries where he ended up in Antwerpen, Duchy of Brabant. Here he settled in the English House, a collection of buildings in which the English merchants - Antwerpen being a major trading centre and port at that time - congregated, and which had much of the protective status of a modern embassy.

Wolsey and the English Church Lords had by no means given up the chase and after a few years prevailed upon one particularly nasty character, one Henry Philips, a vile destitute, from what had once been a well-off family, whose desperate need for money and weakness of character made him a maleable tool in the hands of certain parties in London. These unspecified parties from then Church’s upper echelons were happy to finance him for their mission and sent him to the Court of Brussels, a notoriously anti-reformation centre in order to gain their support in helping him trick Tyndale out of the safety of his enclave. Here he was to be arrested and captured by soldiers and brought to justice. Quoting from Prof. Daniell, who in turn quotes from Foxe’s account:

“So Master Tyndale took him forty shillings, which was easy to be had of him, if he had it: for in the wily subtleties of this world he was simple and inexpert.

Then said Philips, ‘Master Tyndale! you shall be my guest here this day.’ ‘No,’ said Master Tyndale, ‘I go forth this day to dinner, and you shall go with me, and be my guest, where you shall be welcome.’ So when it was dinner-time, Master Tyndale went forth with Philips, and at the going forth of Pointz’s house, was a long narrow entry, so that two could not go in a front. Master Tyndale would have put Philips before him, but Philips would in no wise, but put Master Tyndale before, for that he pretended to show great humanity.

So Master Tyndale, being a man of no great stature, went before, and Philips, a tall comely person, followed behind him: who had set officers on either side of the door upon two seats, who, being there, might see who came in the entry: and coming through the same entry, Philips pointed with his finger over Master Tyndale’s head down to him, that the officers who sat at the door might see that it was he whom they should take, as the officers that took Master Tyndale afterwards told Pointz, and said to Pointz, when they had laid him in prison, that they pitied to see his simplicity when they took him. Then they took him, and brought him to the emperor’s attorney, or procurer-general, where he dined. Then came the procurer-general to the house of Pointz, and sent away all that was there of Master Tyndale’s, as well his books as other things: and from thence Tyndale was had to the castle of Filford, eighteen English miles from Antwerp, and there he remained until he was put to death.”

Daniell, David. William Tyndale: A Biography (p. 364). Passage taken from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

Tyndale spent the 16 months between his arrest on the 21st May 1535 and his execution rotting (literally) away in his dungeon, deprived of light, warm clothing, books and only occasionally allowed access to pen and paper. Those who sought to help him were denied access to him, relentlessly pursued and in a few cases entirely ruined. He was desanctified - stripped of his clerical honour and position - and, ironically, although I am sure no irony was intended - strangled as if to symbolise the shutting down of a voice whose truth - even if it was merely a translation of God’s own voice - those in authority could not bear to hear. He died a martyr.

Tyndale’s Legacy

“William Tyndale gave us our English Bible. The sages who produced the Authorised Version (King James Version) in 1611…took over Tyndale’s work. Nine tenths of the best of the Authorised Version is Tyndale’s. He made a language for England” - Prof. David Daniell

C.S. Lewis, the famous author and scholar of medieval literature, noted the peculiar power of Tyndale’s “monosyllabic” style—his preference for simple, one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words (light, bread, give, love) over complex Latin ones.

“[Tyndale’s works] are the sources of the best modern English... The rhythm is always good, and the sentence structure... is excellent.” — C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century

Yesterday I found myself reading the Beatitudes and the subsequent Chapters from the Gospel of Matthew (5 - 7) and was powerfully struck by the poetry of language I have read hundreds of times before but never really fathomed the genius of the text nor until recently understood the price in agony and blood that was necessary to expend to produce it. My relationship to Tyndale is new. Yes, we “covered” him in passing at school many decades ago along with other luminaries from the early 16th C of Henry’s reign such as Cramner, Cromwell, Wolsey, More, not forgetting the bloodthirsty stories of Henry VIIIs novel and expedient approach to swapping out his wives in short order. In all honesty I have not thought about or even bumped into Tyndale in the last forty years and am mildly ashamed of the fact. I was prompted to reacquaint myself with him by a visit to St. John’s Cathedral in Denver last summer and a tour I joined after the Choral Eucharist on Sunday morning for want of anything better to do. On one of the stained glass windows on the north side of the Chancel, before the Choir, there are depicted several famous martyrs including Tyndale and Cramner (the unfortunate Archbishop who ultimately proclaimed Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon unlawful and presided over his subsequent marriage to Anne and paid for it with his life after “Bloody” Mary acceded to the throne following the death of Henry’s heir and her half-brother Edward VI).

I knew all about Cramner and his contribution to the Anglican tradition through his conceptual creation and composition of the Common Book of Prayer as the edition I have explicitly credits him with it. What I did not know is that much of the primary Biblical text referenced in the Common Book of Prayer is based wholly on Tyndale’s 1526 (and subsequently revised) translation. This is evidenced - for instance - by the Lord’s Prayer, which is the cornerstone prayer in Christian faith. The version we all know is word for word Tyndale’s translation which is - interestingly - different from the one printed in the original KJV Bible in which the word “debts” was substituted for “trespasses” by the editing council in 1611.

C.S. Lewis noted the magnificence of Tyndale’s language and his preference for Anglo Saxon words over Latin derived ones and it could be argued that it was Tyndale and not the author named Shakespeare who laid the foundation for the language we know today as English. Shakespeare referenced the Bible some 1,350 in his works of which more than half are from Tyndale translations (Tyndale never got around to the Psalms or Job or the big Prophets from Isaiah to Daniel) and all of which came from the KJV whose literary style was framed by Tyndale’s use of language and no doubt inspired and directed the council of sages working on the rest of the OT which Tyndale never got around to completing. To save you running for your Bible or looking it up elsewhere, here is a passage directly from Tyndale’s pen which reads differently once you know how much it cost him to write it. I know I will never be able to read the NT again without reflecting on the genius of the man who translated it and through his effort and tribulation brought our common language onto an entirely new plane of consciousness and perfection of expression.

Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? 28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: 29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? 31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? 32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. 33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. 34 Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Gospel of St. Matthew, 6, 27-34: The Bible. King James Bible.

Lowering the Cost of Knowledge and the Returns to Heresy

Quoting again from Rees-Mogg and Davidson’s The Sovereign Individual*, it is worth reflecting on the similarities between our modern age and the situation in which “the monolithic institution of the Church” found itself in in the initial years of the 16th Century:

The capacity to mass-produce books was incredibly subversive to medieval institutions, just as microtechnology will prove subversive to the modern nation-state. Printing rapidly undermined the Church’s monopoly on the word of God, even as it created a new market for heresy. Ideas inimical to the closed feudal society spread rapidly, as 10 million books were published by the final decade of the fifteenth century. Because the Church attempted to suppress the printing press, most of the new volumes were published in those areas of Europe where the writ of established authority was the weakest. This may prove to be a close analogy with attempts by the U.S. government today to suppress encryption technology. The Church found that censorship did not suppress the spread of subversive technology; it merely assured that it was put to its most subversive use.

Davidson, James Dale; Rees-Mogg, Lord William. The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (pp. 110-111). [Emphasis mine]

The new technology of the printing press threatened to - and indeed did - undermine the entire superstructure supporting the power of the established “monolithic” institution. It is obvious from the fact that Cardinal Wolsey was the leading executive in England and the King’s CEO that spiritual and temporal power were indistinguishable from each other. The Church protected the closed shop monopoly on knowledge by keeping the scared texts of the Scriptures in a language - Latin - only taught to fluency by those who went through the Church controlled education system. This way the Church was able to justify any and all of its practices no matter how egregious by referencing the Scriptures, which they knew full well no-one in the laity would be able to disprove.

Luther blew up this notion by pointing out at that none of the revenue generating wheezes that the Church had devised in the previous 150 years - such as indulgences and dispensations or even celibacy (from which priests could purchase a dispensation to avoid) - had any biblical foundation whatsoever, blowing an irreparable hole in their business model. The English establishment held out longer than the continentals, but not by much. No wonder they were so keen to protect their monopoly from public scrutiny and categorised any attempt to expose God’s Truth to general examination as heresy, punishable in the most draconian ways. The monolith was coming to the end of its tenure and over the next 100 years would see its power, and with that its revenue, relevance and stranglehold (no irony intended) on economic reform and progress severely curtailed. It took exactly 100 years from Luther’s nailing his 95 theses to door of Worms Cathedral to the Defenestration of Prague which kicked off the 30 Years War. At the end of which conflict, the warring factions and their peoples had suffered the loss of millions of lives to starvation, war and disease, paving the way for the nation state as we know it today to emerge in its nascent form in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.

Why this matters today

The monolith of the Church had reached the end of its usefulness after the 500 years which took it from the crucial central coordinating role of a society emerging from the pre-medieval “dark ages” to a top heavy suffocating bureaucracy in which, in Rees-Mogg’s description it “had become a major drag upon productivity. The burdens it imposed upon the population were pushing living standards down.” . The parallels to our modern State, which replaced it are obvious.

Peter Turchin, the father of cliodynamics or the study of changes in history, writes in his book End Times that all human societies from the most ancient to our modern ones and irrespective of the particular flavour of their political philosophies go through two fundament phases, one of integration followed by one of disintegration. These phases can be of different lengths but they have the same shape. They are, he asserts, characterised and determined by four different but interlinked variables, viz;

Our analysis points to four structural drivers of instability: popular immiseration leading to mass mobilization potential; elite overproduction resulting in intra-elite [sic] conflict; failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors. The most important driver is intra-elite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis.

Turchin, Peter. End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (p. 30).

I believe we can make a fair case for all of the above conditions to be said to have been met in sufficiency in our modern world and that the nation state, which was formed 400 years ago more or less and was engendered by radical technological changes in both weaponry and information has now reached the point at which its well-advanced disintegration is likely to accelerate. It is both loathed by an increasing majority of its citizenry, it has lost control of its finances and is chronically indebted such that it is mathematically impossible for any level of growth to counter the issue as its populations rapidly decrease and it has - through overregulation, absurd levels of taxation, obsession with invisible enemies such as pathogens and climate threats - become itself a major drag upon productivity, the very inverse of what it was conceived to enable.

Not unnaturally, a “monolithic institution” used to wielding unquestioning and complete power over its subjects (who in the integration phase considered themselves citizens) pretty soon discovers the value of heresy and the concomitant need to suppress the technologies and practices enabled by those technologies through draconian punishments. Today these technologies are those through digital technology support the complete disintermediation of “News” from an expensive government controlled production process and infrastructure to independent often highly specialised media outlets. Whilst the modern state no longer admonishes punishment by public execution of the body (although Julian Assange of Wikileaks and whistleblower Edward Snowdon, ex NSA currently hiding in exile in Russia might have a different perspective on that), it has found plenty of methods to deprive heretics who seek to expose egregious flaws in the institutional thinking and acting of their ability to effectively work in society: de-platforming, de-banking, reputational destruction, accusations and summary judgements for spuriously interpreted hate speech or “disinformation” crimes, leading to dungeoning being just a few examples of how modern immolation is administered. Examples of this are legion and increasing every day in every society. Europe leads the erstwhile free world in this, with Germany and now, shockingly the UK under the Starmer regime (see The Restorationists excellent article on the insidious influence of the Fabian Society in dismantling English Common Law rights) at the forefront of the modern heresy punishment movement.

The Dangerous Case of Comrade Günther

This whole essay was prompted by the extraordinary outburst in the context of a popular television talk show “Markus Lanz” aired on the German public broadcasting network ZDF. In it he argues for the state regulation of independent media outlets, specifically singling out the increasingly popular and wholly independent Nius channel, accusing them of making news stories up and spreading dangerous “opinions” that undermine the stability of “our democracy”. When asked point blank by the host whether he favoured censorship or even in extreme cases banning these media outlets he answered unflinchingly “yes”, later referring to journalists and independent media broadcasters as “opponents and enemies of democracy”. In other words heretics. Minister Präsident Günther is also in favour of aggressively taxing and possibly banning social media platform companies as well as banning anyone under 16 accessing social media at all. He seemed shocked that parliamentary colleagues apparently actually read Nius and other independent media content, going so far as to share ideas and perspectives on WhatsApp channels. His answer to the problem is to have only State sanctioned journalists who have been properly licensed tasked with the dissemination of opinions and facts. Possibly only in Latin, but I may be over-interpreting here.

In the past this superficially Conservative (CDU) - although Lord only knows what exactly he is attempting to conserve - leader of one of the smaller German Federal States of Schleswig-Holstein right at the top of the Republic has made a name for himself by taking the most authoritarian position possible in all of the recent public policy debates. In the Covid era he was one of the most radical supporters of enforced vaccination and for the imposition of draconian penalties on citizens who wanted to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right to personal bodily autonomy. His sadistic cruelty during that time was on a par with the swivel-eyed loon Michael Gunner, Australian Northern Territories Chief Minister whose spit filled, wild-eyed rants against the vaccine refusers made him famous across the globe.

Daniel Günther - Regional First Minister of the State of Schleßwig-Holstein

More recently he has taken hardline positions on the state’s need to be able to shut off the access to heating for private apartments and dwellings, as well as being an enthusiastic supporter of the Green Energie Renewal agenda and its deeply unpopular “Heating Modernisation Law” which would have effectively bankrupted many householders and apartment owners by imposing expensive installation of “green technology” heating systems or face fiscal sanctions and penalties. He started life as a popular PM taking his party to a commendable 40% + of his State’s parliament in local elections, although he has had to rule with support of the radical progressive Green party since coming to power which has no doubt had an effect on his political perspective and strategy.

I am trying hard not to be ad hominem with Mr. Günther, but there is something of the night about this aggressively authoritarian politician who seems to believe - deeply no doubt, as Inquisitors and Cardinals in a prior age would also have - that it is the State who should control who is allowed to say what and that the subjects citizens job is to bow to the diktats of those in authority. The ludicrousness of the idea that politics and political opinion should most certainly not be policed by the people elected to represent the sovereign does not seem to occur to him. That the inalienable right or necessity even of the citizenry to question or criticise their elected representatives should be curtailed on the grounds that criticism makes ruling difficult by confusing the population with “opinions” and “facts” contrary to the official narrative is the surest way to destroy any legitimacy or pretence of democracy and does not seem to occur to or on the assumption that he is possessed of above average intelligence to bother the conservative Mr. Günther.

The outrage has been quick in coming and there is a real threat of him not only being faced with legal challenges for behaviour and statements made explicitly as representative of the Schleßwig-Holstein government (to which he alluded specifically on the show in question) which are in direct conflict with the Constitution as well as for defamation charges through patently untrue statements made about Nius. We will see.

Much as I dislike writing about someone whose political and personal style and perspective I find abhorrent in the same essay as someone for whom I have nothing but admiration and gratitude for their courage and gift to us half a millennium after their passing, the pairing does illustrate that we are again at a point in our modern liberal democratic order (which is apparently now none of things) in which heretics are being persecuted, a sure sign that the monolithic system which commands our absolute obedience is fighting for its life and probably close to its ineluctable path to demise.

I apologise for the length of this piece. However it contains many of the ingredients from which future 2026 and probably 2027 essays are going to be assembled. I feel it only fair to give a heads up on this. The next year will see Pitchfork Papers attempting to understand the current situation in terms of repeat patterns and cycles within history and hopefully draw lessons from it. I sincerely believe that we are coming to the end of the current megapolitical cycle, the one in which the Nation State itself relinquishes its claim as the organising principle of human endeavour and flourishing. Technology and the suffocating results of bureaucratic managerial socialism (or whatever you want to call the mess we are currently experiencing) are ensuring to effect its demise. There are plenty of voices in the cacophony of ideas as to how and around what the next era will be organised, some uplifting and some depressing and we have no idea how or how long it will take to play out. What I do know is that by the example of men like William Tyndale we can choose to concentrate our energies on uplifting purposeful work whose focus is the sincere betterment of the lives of our fellow men, women and citizens trusting that through love (Tyndale’s original word which was edited into “charity” by the KJV scholars) humility and courage we can significantly alter the outcome.

In the early summer of 2009, I found myself sitting in my conference room with a gentleman who had just travelled a few hours from Wuerttemberg in the south-west of Germany to talk to me in Starnberg, Bavaria. It was around seven o’clock in the evening and warm sunlight was illuminating our conference room. My guest was finance director of a well-respected manufacturing business, one of those family-owned and run Mittelstand companies that represent(ed) the very best of German industry and which give (gave?) Germany its reputation as a respected economic powerhouse and producer of enviable trade surpluses. I knew the head of the family and President of the company and, as my guest told me, he had been instructed to come and talk to me with regard to a challenge he was facing, although he had not, secretively, told me the nature of the challenge when he made the appointment. I was flattered of course, but his demeanour suggested that he was unsure what good this meeting was going to do him and I suspect he would rather not have had the prospect of driving three hours back home on an evening much better suited to barbecuing. He was here under duress.

So there we were, cold mineral water on the sunlit table, looking for a way into the conversation. The company he represented was, he told me, 113 years old and had been founded by the current 70-year-old patriarch’s grandfather. The business produced a range of highly specialised metal products for use primarily in the textile industry and had at that time an approximately 60% share of the relevant world market. The company generated just shy of €500 million in revenue, was highly profitable and 100% owned by the founding family, now approaching its fourth and fifth generations.

Our conversation was taking place, remember, in the summer of 2009. The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 had caused a shockingly deep and potentially (apparently) disastrous recession, which had required and continued to require gigantic stimulus and supportive fiscal and monetary intervention by Governments to prevent a systemic collapse of the banking system. The mood was one of uncertainty not to say fear that we were all doomed.

It is of course difficult to imagine now, given that nothing like that could possibly ever happen again, but in those days the world felt scary and it seemed as though only Warren E. Buffett recognised the opportunity in the crisis and even published a letter in the NYT in October 2008 at the depth of the panic, explicitly telling the world what he was doing.

Warren and my guest, evidently.

It appeared that this CFO was facing a dilemma unprecedented in the company’s 113-year history. The recession had caused such turbulence in their market place that a respected competitor was struggling and they were considering doing something they had never done before, namely pursuing an acquisition. They had no idea how to go about doing this and felt that the mere idea was risqué and not something that solid companies like their family business should be engaging in. However, the opportunity was so obvious that they were having a moment of temptation and were following Oscar Wilde’s dictum of yielding to it quickly in case it dissipated. Hence the conversation with me.

The opportunity led to another challenge. Interest rates had plummeted post-crisis to historic lows and the CFO reckoned that from a financial perspective, it would make sense to borrow the money for the acquisition. The problem was they didn’t know how to do that either, as in all the company’s 113-year history they had never borrowed a cent - or Pfennig - from the bank.

“What? Never?” was I think all I could think of to say. “No, seriously” he retorted and handed me a slim document that contained his company’s current financial statements. I don’t surprise easily when it comes to reviewing financial statements and have learned to expect the good, the bad and the downright ugly almost anywhere, but this was…, well I had never seen anything quite like this before.

The liabilities side of the company’s balance sheet showed shareholder equity of well over 65%, no bank debt, generous reserves and the rest made up of trade payables. The asset side of the balance was even more surprising and showed a split between fixed assets (this was a manufacturing business remember) representing the plant and equipment of 35%, zero value for the property because it had been depreciated years ago and 65% in working capital of which about 20% was accounts receivable, 15% was cash and 30% was in stocks of finished and unfinished goods: in other words this was a warehouse bursting with their products with a cash balance and some plant and equipment attached to it..

I think the look of astonishment on my face relieved me of the need to actually ask the question of what that meant, so he told me that this was how the company had always been run and that it was an article of faith for the family to always keep a high level of stocks on hand, so as, he explained, always to be ready to serve customers immediately. He went on to explain that the company had grown steadily over the previous century but especially in the post-war years not only because the general level of trade had expanded - that rising tide lifted all boats in their industry equally - but specifically because coming out of recessions (of which there had been 7 severe ones in the past 70 years) the family had noticed that its conservative balance sheet policy had enabled them to snatch market share from competitors in the early phase of every single recovery.

The family, he told me, now knew two things: Firstly, companies survive recessions by freeing up working capital, producing just enough to get by and focusing on cash. The weaker the company the more depleted and exhausted it will be by the end of a recession. It will have laid people off, run down inventory, shuttered machines, done only the minimum necessary maintenance work, reduced marketing, cut sales bonuses and maxed out credit lines. And secondly when the (inevitable) return to normal levels of business began, those companies would not have the wherewithal to ramp up production, finance a growing level of raw materials and supply customers needs quickly enough. They also knew that banks could not be relied on to provide increased facilities until it was obvious that the recession was over, by which time the opportunity to grab market share from slower competitors would be over.

And it had worked: for over 70 years this marvellous company had grown its market share precisely at the time when the competition was weakest by the simple dint of having enough stock on hand to serve customers that in the good times they had been unable to prise away from their attachment to competitive suppliers. They knew their product was good, but they also knew their competitors were producing comparably good products. Their advantage, which allowed them near-monopoly status at least for the first phase of the post-recession recovery was being strong within a short window of opportunity, whilst the others were weak.

Genius.

The compound effect of that discipline was an unassailable, dominant market share which jumped by ca. 5%-points after every recession bolstered by a fortress balance sheet and total control of their financial commitments.

Our conversation went on for about 90 minutes and I remember how much we both enjoyed it. The company never did make that acquisition (too much trouble) and never did have to find out how to apply for a bank loan, but made a killing in that depressed market of 2009 and 2010.

As an illustration of what master investor Michael Weeks, Chief Investment Strategist at Edelweiss Holdings, refers to as resilience - one of his most admired attributes in a business, it is hard to improve on. Of it, in his Edelweiss Journal No. 20 “Searching for Resilience”, July 7, 2021 he writes

“Resilience is an unseen aspect of economic life. We cannot count it or touch it. It doesn’t appear on financial statements. Yet its presence gives us assurance and allows us to sleep well at night, while its absence drives men and women to the unemployment office, machinery to the scrap heap, and businesses into bankruptcy.”

“The only real test for hard times is to survive hard times. It follows that resilience is not the same as looking good or having predictable financial results.”

“Resilience is not a destination. Seeking resilience means abandoning a narrow definition of success like sales growth or annual returns and instead becoming prepared for any eventuality that can cause serious harm. It is gained by pursuing new capabilities and flexibility, and by avoiding landmines.”

Edelweiss Journals Nr. 20 July 2021 ~ Michael Weeks

That set of financials and the story of one family’s adherence to a set of management principles anchored in a commitment to resilience has stayed with me ever since as a benchmark. I remember that evening thinking that it reminded me of a similar story of a company from a decade earlier with a famously conservative Chairman and controlling shareholder which ended completely differently - tragically - when he passed the reigns on to his successor.

Arnold Weinstock and the Unmaking of GEC

Lord Arnold Weinstock was the creator of the UK company GEC plc (General Electric Company - no relation to the US version) and was best known as an industrialist for permanently keeping an oversized pile of cash on his balance sheet in order to be prepared for both the vicissitudes of the business cycle as well as to capitalise on opportunities. Personally his reputation rested on his passion for Mozart and for racehorses both of which he indulged singlemindedly.

Between taking over GEC in 1963 and his relinquishing control 33 years later in 1996, Arnold, later Lord Weinstock generated a 21% compound return on shareholder capital, as the following table demonstrates

Summary Table: The Weinstock Era (1963–1996)

Tortoise-like and with ruthless cost discipline, Lord Weinstock built a fortress balance sheet, deep, multi-decade and profitable partnerships with some of the world’s finest engineering and defence infrastructure concerns through sheer force of will, intellectual discipline and the willingness to defy the City’s chronically embedded short termism and preference for action over substance. His results, certainly on a shareholder performance metric measured up favourably with Berkshire Hathaway’s 25,5% CAGR market value performance over the same period, especially when considering the significantly lower margin and higher capital intensity businesses the focused industrialist manager assembled as compared to the freer master capital allocator into which Buffett evolved.

The City of London equally famously was relentless in criticising him for “wasting opportunity” for “not putting his capital to work” and for being “inefficient” in the deployment of his resources. Weinstock’s range of emotions in his Managing Director role was always somewhere on the spectrum between grumpy and cantankerous, which is probably the only persona to adopt when you are being continually harassed to do something that goes against your basic principles.

When he retired in 1996 his replacement was a City approved “hot shot”, George Simpson, who wasted no time in changing the name of the company to Marconi (always an early warning indicator of disaster to follow) and promptly trashing the company from a £35 billion valuation to zero by burning through Weinstock’s cash pile and adding a vast layer of debt to the company to finance a series of disastrous overpriced US telecommunications acquisitions at the height of the dot com/Internet bubble. You can read the story here.

If you can bear to look, here is the trajectory of GEC during the latter years of Weinstock’s reign and all of Simpson’s less than decade of “stewardship”

It is worth looking at George (also ennobled, this time by PM Tony Blair in 1998 “for services to British Industry”), Lord Simpson of Dundalk’s , Managing Director Statement in July 1997, announcing the results of his strategic review of the company. In it he writes

“ Since arriving at GEC, I have spent much of my time assessing the company’s competitive position and performance potential and have carried out a wide-ranging strategic review. [Note the “I” and the absence of “we” - just saying - Ed]

This process has confirmed that GEC is indeed a strong company, a valuable national asset with a solid platform for future development. GEC has many leadership positions in the industries in which it operates. Numbered amongst its employees are some of the world’s most creative engineers and technologists. The company has a very strong balance sheet - some would say too strong - and, despite the significant impact of the strengthening pound and a few troublesome contracts, has again in 1997/97 increased its pre-exceptional earning. GEC today is a large and diverse company whose coherence comes from a common management style based on a strong cost control culture and whose future is closely linked to its major venture partners.

Despite the strength of this “opening position”, I believe that GEC has reached a stage in its development when it needs to transform itself through a process of radical change.”

He goes on to write

“ The speed and direction of this programme will, of course depend on the value opportunities which arise and what is happening globally in the industries in which we participate. I expect that this acquisition programme will fully utilise the Company’s considerable cash resources.” [Emphasis mine]

~ George Simpson, Managing Director GEC plc July 1997

And he was as good as his word.

Simpson’s pursuit of growth saw him throw out or repulse all of Weinstock’s cadre of world class samurai managers whilst making a series of truly disastrous telecoms acquisitions - Reltec and Fore Systems in the US, for £4.1 billion. Both of these were (soon) marked to zero wiping out all the shareholders equity and forcing the company in to the hands of its creditors by 2004. In the process, Simpson, whose personal stake in the company was nothing all but destroyed the entirety of Lord Weinstock’s fortune of some 40 million shares - making him the largest individual shareholder in a company dominated by institutions - valued at several hundred million £-Sterling at the time of the handover.

Lord Weinstock held on to his shares until they were entirely worthless, despite voicing severe misgivings about the company’s new trajectory and the destruction of his management culture. He felt that as the founder and Chairman Emeritus, selling a large block of shares would signal a lack of confidence in the company. He reportedly believed that selling would "undermine confidence" in the business, even though he privately disagreed with the new management's strategy. This loyalty to the organisation he built and created was possibly the only act of emotional irrationality in a man who was otherwise famous for putting business logic and performance, especially personal performance, above everything else.

Associates reported that he died "of a broken heart" in July 2002, just as the final restructuring was wiping out the last remaining equity of the original shareholders. He lived just long enough to see the complete destruction of the empire he had spent 33 years building.

Of Hares & Tortoises

Far be it from me to invite comparisons between hares and tortoises, but it is well worth pondering on the differences between thinking in days (or quarters) and decades and how any attempt to shorten the time required to reap the rewards of compounding a sound strategy inevitably and significantly increase the risk of the strategy backfiring and ending you up somewhere else. Resilience is built over time and has survival not growth as its motivational ethic.

However, I don’t want to send you into the weekend weighed down by the tragic tale of hubris and catharsis that led to the death of GEC plc (although if you did want to read the whole story of Arnold Weinstock and GEC’s career at least up until the end of the Century, then Stephen Aris’ superb 1998 biography “Arnold Weinstock and the Making of GEC” is a cracking good read. George Simpson’s Statement was gratefully harvested from the Appendix of the book), so I offer up, James Thurber’s rendering of the Hare and the Tortoise for your enjoyment. For those of you who have always found the race between those two nonsense, don’t worry: you are in good company.

James Thurber, Fables for our Time, 1945

For those of my longest term subscribers (thank you for your service - you have no idea how much I appreciate it and you) you may have recognised this piece from back in the days when pteradactyls were still fluttering the skies. Well spotted - I wrote a shorter version of this essay under much the same title in March of 2021 and returned to it after a recent conversation in which I found myself mentioning Weinstock and Simpson in the context of the dangers of generational transitions. I went back to the original text and reread Stephen Aris’ book finding myself captivated by both Arnold Weinstock the man and manager and the awful catastrophe of his choice of successor. It still baffles me that of all the outstanding managers and divisional heads he had nurtured and trained in his way of being and doing, he should have chosen a rank outsider and succumbed to City and institutional pressure to pick a high flyer with no experience in the defence or electronics industries. That original piece also made no mention of the damage to Lord Weinstock’s personal fortune that the fatal combination of his character misjudgement and his loyalty to the business he created and led for 33 years engendered.

During a recent event organized by the inimitable Shannon Stanton on Nantucket this last October, I was invited to a conversation with Collective old timer Jason Buck, entrepreneur, investor and trader. Said interview was to be recorded and timed for late afternoon on the second full day of our retreat, subject - cabbages and kings, whatever. Shannon is not someone you say no to or discuss niceties when she is in full sergeant major mode. I agreed immediately without having the foggiest idea to I had just said yes. Put it down to jetlag or a compulsive “wing it” mentality.

The Collective brings together a broad spectrum of people - men only at this event although I don’t know whether that is deliberate or not - from, I was going to say all walks of life but that is patently not the case, the worlds of investment, finance, business and liminal areas between them (for instance John Fowler, the ex diplomat and founder of the always excellent geopolitical newsletter International Intrigue a subscription to which I cannot recommend highly enough). There are curated roundtable conversations moderated by Shannon along side fun outings and expeditions and endless excellent activities which feature a lot of food , the overall purpose of which is to enable conversations around current and timeless topics along with the opportunity to establish new friendships and nurture existing one. It is a splendid format and I am fortunate to have been invited to participate.

On the day of my planned interview two things happened. Firstly, I woke with a fever and nascent cold and secondly, likely occasioned by the illness, I forgot entirely that I had agreed to the conversation at all. I spent all day in bed sucking throat lozenges and taking zinc and vitamin c pills as well as drinking endless bottles of water and tea and sleeping intermittently. Those of you who travel regularly will know that there are few things more miserable than falling ill on whilst on the road, irrespective of how comfortable the setting (although I will be the first to admit that a fever cold in a lovely hotel in Nantucket is not quite comparable to the experience to dysentery in a hostel in Bangalore, but they are degrees of the same genus of misery). Between sleeping and feeling sorry for myself, I struggled through the day having cancelled my participation in the day’s events, sadly.

Some time in the afternoon I left my room and headed to our retreat centre, a separate building with a drawing room feel to it where we could replenish water and coffee supplies and sustenance in the form of an endless variety of snacks and pastries. I was on the hunt for water and ignored the gentlemen setting cameras and lighting equipment, only vaguely wondering what it was they were preparing for. Turns out, it was me. Jason appeared a minute later to ask if I was ready to go. Not wanting to appear unprepared or flummoxed, I said “sure” . This is the conversation that ensued.

Despite - or maybe because - I was suffering that afternoon this interview ended up being the conversation that best reflects and synthesizes my perspective on life and business. I thought you might like to watch to it if you find the time.

👉🏻 BTW Shannon has asked me to point out to you that this video along with a few others shot that week are actually behind a paywall, so this link is for your eyes only as my favorite subscriber. I - and she - would appreciate your appreciating that.

Substack evidently thinks it would be helpful to me (and by extension, them) if I were to plaster this post with exhortations to subscribe to Pitchfork Papers. So, in case you missed it at the top, here is another polite suggestion to do just that. I can’t think of a single good reason why you shouldn’t.

Five conversations

This story starts with a conversation in mid August with my friend Nadja Taranczewski, Founder of Conscious U and a colleague in the Leading Edge community founded by and finishes more or less on a Sunday afternoon outside Trinity Church on Broadway & Wall St. in downtown Manhattan three weeks later. Nadja is a leadership coach based in Berlin and her relationships span the globe. She thinks deeply about money and the psychological effects of our relationship with it. She uses money consciousness as a gateway to personal development and as a framework for revealing limiting beliefs. Her insights are always powerful and her experience deep. I love talking to her.

I like to think that after an entire adult life spent learning about, handling, deploying, reflecting on and building an holistic philosophy as well as winning and losing large quantities of the stuff, there are no new tricks that this old dog could learn and that I have my own perspective on money and the role it plays in life well locked down. I thought as I headed into my conversation with Nadja on a warm sun-drenched summer afternoon in August from my perch in Upper Bavaria that she and I were going to opine on the deeper strands of money psychology especially as it pertains to business and entrepreneurship, like two expert brain surgeons dispassionately discussing some arcane aspect of neurological procedure. That was the theory at least. But as I have found out in theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is. Nadja has a way of penetrating defences that leaves one — well, defenceless. I have some areas - self-evidently - in which there is unresolved pain and which I have been exceedingly astute in protecting from exposure, even to myself. I am, it appears, not nearly as locked down as I thought I was.

But, in stark contrast to younger versions of myself, I am much better at dealing with skeletal surprises from the unopened broom closets of my subconscious. Younger versions would slam the door shut, rush to put a cupboard in front of the door and avoid that part of the house entirely. The older version can breathe deeply, recognise work to be done, allow it and takes a lesson from Friedrich Wilhelm Gauß, the mathematician whose face and cultural inheritance forms the theme for the old 10 DM bank note (a copy of which sits on my desk in a plexiglass frame).

Gauss suffered from chronic claustrophobia and would, as a child, be terrified of being alone in dark bedroom. His remedy was to measure and calculate the dimensions of the room and all the objects in it, running calculations of cubic centimetres and trigonometrical distances through his prodigious brain until he had mapped out his surroundings entirely. I learned that from him - eventually and after a lot of practice - and found that running towards and not away from the source of my anxiety and measuring it was as good a way of deconstructing and dealing with it as I could find.

All of which is to say that on that afternoon in August about three months ago I was left feeling more vulnerable and less sure of myself than I had been in the morning and my conversation with Nadja opened the matrix as it were to a heightened sensitivity that, through some compounding force of the universe, evolved into a series of increasingly intense conversations with five women over five days, culminating in my spontaneously jumping on a plane to Rome the following Monday. The gist of the conversations, the essence if you will, was a deepening awareness of what it means to stop thinking and start feeling, a consciousness of how much my head was getting in the way of my heart (or gut - I am still trying to get the hang of my own somatic landscape) , where my instinctive intuitive understanding is located. I have been told all of my adult life that I needed to relax my fiercely aggressive frontal cortex in my interaction with life and to listen to my heart, but I never really knew what that meant or why attempting to understand things (with my head, I presume) was per se a bad thing. It is not that I am unfeeling or lack emotional intelligence, I believe (I almost wrote “I think” there but realised that sort of defeated the point of the sentence) I have been given a generous portion of both, it’s just that my natural process is to feed my experience of life through my intellect before validation. I need mental models to make sense of the world before I can allow it rather than a) listening to and then b) trusting fully in my visceral response. I suspect I am not alone in this.

These five conversations - all entirely unrelated to each other, with some planned and some serendipitous - however allowed and then fomented a new level of awareness of what that meant and - importantly to me - how to recognise when thinking processes were indeed being and in the past had been entirely unhelpful. In a word, I found the off switch. Which, to quote Robert Frost, has made all the difference. This piece is about the journey prompted by those conversations and about finding faith in the oddest of places.

Evolutionary Intelligence, Oestrogen and Tuscany

Conversation number three was with Emily Lane - another Leading Edge colleague - the founder of Evolutionary Intelligence Academy and a mystic, I guess would be the correct description of someone who has trained their psychic intelligence to the point where she is able intentionally to channel spiritual wisdom from the ether. William D. Wattles, writing in the early years of the 20th Century, refers to this spiritual intelligence as “Original Substance”. Well, Emily, an international Irish woman of indeterminate age who was a successful global corporate executive until a near life-ending experience some twenty years ago forced a radical change in both perspective and consciousness, teaches people how to connect to this original substance. She has a reputation that appears to be global given the people I have met from all parts of the planet who have worked with her and admire her greatly. Emily gave a presentation to our Leading Edge community on the Wednesday evening of this now watershed week for me in August. She was both fun and deeply impressive as she guided a group of some forty of us through that least intimate of all media - a Zoom call - for 90 minutes. A voice inside me told me that this was someone who could teach me more about how to develop that as yet fragile skill of genuinely listening to intelligence beyond the mind, so I signed up for a mastermind class she was offering to our group immediately and noticed on her website that she was about to host a week long retreat in southern Tuscany that following week.

In my “in for a penny, in for a pound” state, I booked that as well, confident that I could clear my schedule for the week despite having planned to leave for a long trip to the US immediately on my return. Emily vets her participants closely and so we scheduled a call for the following day. She warned me that I would be the only male in a group of eight other participants plus her and her co-host, but assured me that it would be beneficial to experience “male energy” in the room, so all good. I was in.

My final conversation was with my wife whose enthusiastic support for my adventure I was naturally keen to elicit. Those of you who have been married for a few decades will have a good idea of how that conversation went. “So, let me get this straight: you are heading off to a six day retreat in Tuscany with nine women none of whom you know, for an experience whose exact purpose you are at a loss to articulate, one week before you are due to leave for almost a month. And you’re leaving tomorrow. Oh, but they are going to be doing yoga which you have always told me you despise. Am I missing anything?”

Nonetheless, duly blessed but with the advice not to do a runner on day two (she knows me so well), off I set.

My purpose with this letter is definitely not to write a travel journal, so I will spare you the saga of landing in Rome on the day of a train strike and attempting to hire a car for my three hour drive to Castel del Piano, a proto-refugee experience in which my Gaussian measurement skills assisted in accurately calculating the probable length of my wait given that there were thirty people ahead of me each taking at least eight minutes to process their rental car and between two and three assistants at any one time (about an hour and ten minutes). Absent will also be any mention of the rescuing of two of my co-retreaters who had relied on there actually being trains to catch from Rome and our delightful journey in torrential rain up to our destination along with my sense that whatever else this trip had in store it was going to be a giggle. I will pass over all of those details.

The photo above is taken from Emily’s website as an inspirational underpinning to the retreat offer. It suggests medieval tranquility and manicured, slightly dilapidated but otherwise romantically situated (I have to stop myself sounding like an estate agent) sophistication with wide views of rolling, vine covered hills, parsed by iconic alleys of cedar trees with the only sound being provided by the chirping of the crickets in the long grass.

Actually Castel del Piano couldn’t be further from that bucolic Florentine idyll, although granted it is on a hill. It was pissing it down we arrived and didn’t really stop for days.

Southern Tuscany is much harder terrain, riven with deep valleys and gorges, thickly forested and providing few of those gently rolling fields ideal for the agriculture of wine, olives and fruits. The towns are visibly poorer and a quite a bit grottier than their cousins some 20 kilometres to the North in towns like Montalcino and Montepulciano, famous for all the right reasons. The whole region lies in the shadow of Monte Amiata a massive mountain with a peak of some 5,657 ft of elevation. I could write a whole piece - and probably will - just on this magnificent cathedral of a mountain with its ancient oak forests, beech and birch churches, steep banks, endless maze of trails and dense undergrowth, home to a large and vocal (if a grunt is vocal) wild boar population, to which I retreated on day four after eyeing it hungrily all week.

(See below for trail link and map)

Retreating Myself

The retreat itself was a uniquely immersive experience for me, having never participated in anything remotely comparable. There were eight of us, seven women and myself under the guidance of our sherpa Emily. They all knew each other and Emily, having been members of her coaching community often over years and were from either the UK or the US with one participant having travelled all the way from India. I would hazard an average age of 50. We came from all walks of life, coaching, non-profit, business, science and were as mixed a bunch as you could wish for. Chaucer would have been delighted. This group had however not previously met in person so there was much bonding and joy in that, reinforcing my otherness in the group.

We were being put up in a modest hotel in the centre of town with surprisingly decent rooms (extraordinarily, I found a fully functioning sauna in my bathroom) about 20 minutes drive from our retreat centre and our daily drive to and from the retreat centre at Villa Gaia allowed us to form an impression of the dense, contorted network of country roads that wind up and down tight valleys and inclines, with jungle-like vegetation spilling over them and the hill top villages scattered around the base of Monte Amiata. You could easily get lost in the maze and once or twice, we did just that.

It is hard to describe the experience of the retreat itself. Emily was an excellent guide, without question and she held the balance between earnest concentration and enjoyable intimacy during the working sessions in which sat on low seats that had evidently been genetically engineered by cross pollinating a beanbag with a small sofa, being neither the one nor the other, but somehow seeming to keep us in a yogi-like position without the effort of sitting for hours in a posture for which at least my atrophied western muscle infrastructure was not designed. Looked odd, but did the job. We have a dog a bit like that. These sessions stretched from 09:30 or so until past 17:00 with a break for a fully vegan (and undeniably delicious) lunch for an hour and were intense. The room we found ourselves in was a yoga shala, a circular yurt of a construction with glass panel doors as walls and a canvas tent dome as a roof. The construction was nested in a spinney giving us the impression of being fully immersed in nature. There was altar of sorts in the middle of our circle which played a role in the experience and added to its quasi religious framing, as did the incense which was burned from time to time. You get the picture.

I will admit that my instinct was to run a mile after the first day - my wife had me well figured with her parting words - but I was determined participate fully, no matter how uncomfortable, both physically (how do people sit for hours cross-legged?) and socially (I am not, how shall I put this?, naturally comfortable with sharing my inner life and perceptions in group environments or even individually with people I have only just met, especially when those thoughts and perspectives are fresh out of the oven und unreflected) I might have been. I did my best even though the meditation sessions turned into mini siestas for me and the large quantities of green tea I always consume created inconvenient breaks in the process. As the days passed I became more comfortable, integrated as best I could and found my place in this eclectic group of seekers of their own individual evolutionary purpose.

Our evenings were free and for me the most enjoyable part of the trip. A changing group would head out every evening to one or other of the local ristorante or osteria and laugh and converse and get to know each other. My co-retreaters were - to a woman - kind, thoughtful, intelligent and communicative, just wonderful people to be around and to share the experience. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, I truly did. Where I drew the line was yoga. I have a visceral loathing of PE, one of the selection of traumata embedded in my DNA from early years of incarceration at Prep school, but the prospect of performing stretching acts in a room full of members of the opposite sex all clad in tight apparel for which I don’t even possess the vocabulary was a bridge too far. It was day four of our five days and I needed a break and skipped it. I am sure everyone was better off for that decision.

We were done on Saturday night, exhausted and fulfilled, I not a little proud of myself for having stuck to my guns and with as surprisingly rich harvest of both insights I wasn’t expecting and new friendships which had the feel of being strongly enough rooted to survive the well intentioned promises to stay in touch once removed from the quickly dissipating cloud of endorphins which had engendered them.

I drove back to Florence airport at 5am on Sunday morning and would like to finish this section by stating that the City of the Medicis, the birthplace of the Renaissance and its aesthetic geniuses and home to Brunelleschi’s sublimely beautiful Duomo, has the most appalling awful, badly sign-posted and impractical airport in Christendom and don’t get me started on the car rental drop off, which I am sure they had to hire Soviet era planners to design, such is its incoherence, unfriendliness and idiocy of its UX. Just saying.

Two Weeks Later - A Synthesis

Some two weeks after the event I found myself sitting on a bench outside Trinity Church on Wall Street & Broadway which I had visited on Sunday morning to attend the Choral Eucharist, arriving early to experience the Church filling up for the most important service of the week. I stayed on to attend a (magnificent) “Foundations” lecture on the Purpose of Christianity which lasted well into the afternoon, and formulated the following (edited) notes written to Emily by way of review of my week with her and the reverberation of the experience into the real world (although whether either Nantucket Island or Downtown Manhattan qualify as “real world” experiences is certainly open to debate);

1.⁠ ⁠I left Tuscany with a heart substantially opened and a heightened sensitivity to being in the world. I noticed this in small interactions with others - strangers - immediately. I catch myself when I am moved to be judgemental and drop it and am much more accepting of what is and of the need to remove any unnecessary stress from my life. This helps especially when travelling - I have always been pretty good at this but the retreat softened my approach even more radically. I find that being more present allows me to be kinder, more attentive and less judgemental all of which increases the quality of my experience of life as it happens.

2.⁠ ⁠⁠I am also much more sensitive to both beauty and ugliness. I spent the day at Trinity Church, Downtown Manhattan and was moved to tears listening to the choir practice before the Choral Eucharist at 11:15. Really. I found myself literally overwhelmed by the beauty of the church, the music and the spirit of it and so saddened by the thought that as a society we were in danger of losing this treasure, this part of our Christian heritage...at the same time I have less tolerance for the ugly and hideousness of much of what passes for our civilisation and feel a need to protect myself from the latter and to immerse myself more in the former.

3.⁠ ⁠⁠I am listening to my heart more - which was what inspired me to join you in the first place. I am learning to recognise the heart language and somatic responses immediately and not needing to process them through my frontal cortex for validation. I don’t know where all that heightened sensitivity came from but it was there after the retreat and less there beforehand…ipso facto quod erat demonstrandum, as we say in Wicklow…

4.⁠ ⁠⁠I learned about frequency and how important it is to maintain and nurture it, through what we eat, drink and consume with our minds. I haven’t eaten pork (or eel) since and won’t, I suspect. Maybe someday I will even get around to tackling chocolate…I am currently looking for high frequency chocolate and am sure I will be successful. I am definitely revisiting the topic of my smartphone and technology when I get home. I am writing this on my iPhone but I don’t need to…or wouldn’t with a different infrastructure.

5.⁠ ⁠It deepened my Christian faith and commitment to my Church and what it stands for. We talked about this. I think the Christian faith gives many opportunities for incorporating the mystical, we are just not very good at integrating those practices into daily life. I will be (am) exploring this more explicitly over the coming months;

6.⁠ ⁠⁠It was a valuable experience being bathed in oestrogen in an all female group for a week. I am grateful for it and it drained me at the same time. There was a time, just past the halfway way mark when I felt like Jim Garner felt in Victor Victoria when he is fed up of pretending to be gay so that he can be with Julie Andrews who is also pretending to be a man so that she can sing in the all male review troupe. He heads off to a bar in the seedy part of town in his white tie and orders a glass of milk in order to provoke a fight. My version of that was to pull on my boots at 6am in the pitch dark and walk up Monte Amiata, which was a soul cleansing experience of a different order.

7.⁠ ⁠⁠My perspective on the purpose and direction of my work has changed but I can’t articulate in what way exactly. The change between Villa Gaia and Nantucket was too abrupt so I need some quiet walking time to figure out what it is exactly that I want more of and what I want much less of - I need to to recapture that change energy and let it show me what it wants me focus on.

The fifth point has stayed with me most powerfully and it was of this that I originally set out to write. My experience of retreats is limited. I know that there is a thriving business in retreats that combine meditation, spiritual practices, yoga along with all the equipment that goes with it. By all accounts it is a growing $220 billion market currently (check out this fascinating article “ Why is Spiritual Self help Speaking to the Neoliberal Subject?”) so the hunger for spiritual sustenance is real and enormous; of course it is. What I struggle with is the question of why my Christian faith in its various guises has been so weak in evolving to provide that home for those seeking such sustenance? Why do we feel the need to travel to faraway places to immerse ourselves in hybrid versions of faith based practice, shopping as it were in the eastern bazaars for enlightenment which is then interwoven with seasonings from Christian theology and its cast of characters (in my recent experience, Abraham, the spirit of the risen Christ, Mary Magdalene, St. Michael all put in cameo appearances although interestingly it was Mary Magdalene, the rejected fallen woman of the Apostolic version of the scripture who played the central role). It doesn’t feel like evolution, more like escapism.

I became strongly attuned during my week of retreat and meditation (or prayer in the language of my faith) to the underlying purpose of what we were doing, to the point and purpose of the exercise. My current synthesis suggests that there are two necessary sides to the coin of spiritual practice and that they both need to be integrated in order to deliver fulfilment. The one side is - and I use the word advisedly - selfish. It is directed towards the self. I go to a retreat, I practice meditation, I discover my evolutionary purpose, I seek enlightenment for me. Yes, I do this in a group and yes, I may have my online community, but it is disconnected from my quotidian existence, the one this briefly uplifted and cleansed soul must return to to be in the world of work and home and taxes and parking tickets and dental appointments.

The other side of the coin is that of community, preferably a faith community guided by a commitment to a certain framework of values and rituals which embed those values into a rhythm and cadence of daily and weekly practice. If the focus on self is the receiving then the embedding of that self in community is the essential balancing counterpart of giving. This focus on the self without the necessary infrastructure to allow for the delivery of the improved and recharged being to release the energy to others and to reaffirm the commitment to doing just that with a community of likeminded practitioners, is hollow and ultimately self-defeating. Receiving without giving or the ability to give in the same ordered and focused way in which the receiving was done misses the whole point and leads ultimately to frustration. I asked a few of my co-retreaters how much of the clarity that their experience of this and other retreats they were able to carry into their practical lives and the answer was generally, not much.

It is in this that the Christian faith has its most powerful opportunity or, if you like, demonstrates the most blatant evidence of its failure. It neglects the mystical for the dogmatic and appears not to want to evolve its own understanding of its mission or recognise the enormous power of its impressive physical infrastructure - its churches and cathedrals - to fulfil both parts of the souls requirement to elevate its consciousness and to bring that consciousness into the world. As St. James put it

“Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholders himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.” ~ (Gospel of St. James 1, 22-24)

and later in the same text

“What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him?” ~ (Gospel of St. James 2, 14)

My understanding is that the church is primarily the logistics and distribution centre of pastoral care, providing a place for the selfish receiving of spiritual uplifting through both the ritual of experience and the experience of the mystical and acting as the conduit for the giving part in which the community directs its collective energies, each as they can, some with treasure, some with time, some with particular talents, directed by the local shepherd and his helpers both spiritual and lay. It is a beautifully designed and fully intact infrastructure which forms the physical manifestation of what we need to thrive.

And that we need it is undeniable and expressed in monetary terms by the vast market that serves it - with spaces, with merchandise, with literature and with “pastoral” coaches and experts happy to provide a modern answer to the demand that is being woefully underserved (for reasons I have not yet grasped) by the ancient and established infrastructure originally designed for exactly that purpose.

And, perhaps not most importantly, but still worth mentioning, the church does not require yoga in its spiritual practice.

Monte Amiata Trail on AllTrails app

“Seems, madam? Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems.’ ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, nor customary suits of solemn black, nor windy suspiration of forced breath, no, nor the fruitful river in the eye, nor the dejected ’havior of the visage, together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, that can denote me truly: these indeed seem, for they are actions that a man might play; but I have that within which passeth show; these but the trappings and the suits of woe.”

Hamlet ~ Act I, Sc. 2 (William Shakespeare)

Roger Mitchell - entrepreneur, podcaster, a yoda-in-the making of the sporting world and probably, alongside Billy Connolly, one of the best products of Glasgow since the end of the industrial revolution - recently published an essay on his Albachiara.net website entitled “Meaning Amidst Chaos”, which now that I think about it, also means that Roger is a writer, although he takes great pains to deny it. It is a splendid piece, that reads like a collage artfully constructed from an eclectic collection of magazines. Rolling Stones, Outstanding Investors Digest (gee, I miss that), Glasgow Weekly (what do I know?) and whatever magazine football aficionados read come to mind.

I’ll get to the substance of the essay in a minute, but not before pointing out that several months ago Roger also penned an essay in a series of five reflections commissioned by Grant Williams and headed “Fin de Siècle” for his widely read monthly “Things That Make You Go Hmmm..” newsletter. (Disclaimer: I was one of the other four contributors). That essay “The Answer was here all the time”, On the back of both of those essays, Roger was invited to discuss his perspectives on Demetri Kofinas’ “Hidden Forces” podcast for his and Grant Williams’ “Hundred Year Pivot” co-production entitled “Boomer Blues”. In this hauntingly frank and in places wistfully melancholic conversation Roger lays out his framework for viewing the world in which we now find ourselves, saddened by the prospect that whilst the Boomer and Gen X generations, in Harold MacMillan’s famous phrase “never had it so good”, our children are finding the world a much more challenging and complex place to navigate than we did. In retrospect, at least.

Roger’s hymn - with a verse dedicated to each of the big themes of unaffordable housing, paucity of income and therefore inability to build savings, erosion of moral standards and normative behaviours, erosion of cognitive facilities and the decline of concentration, along with the replacement of logic and reasoning by feelings - is punctuated with a chorus of faith, a hallelujah if you will, showing that behind the dark, depressing clouds representing those oppressive themes the sunlight of a higher purpose breaks through the gaps, but is revealed to be ever present then, now and in the future.

Roger is a man of faith himself, a traditional Catholic whose life has been structured and informed by the rituals, rites and structure of that church. He tells us that the antidote to the creeping sense of purposelessness, exhaustion, anxiety and emptiness experienced by the Boomer Generation - at whose tail end he is - is an orientation to the eternal truths, the ever present sunlight and clarity afforded by the Christian Gospel and the belief in the example of Christ as the path to salvation. Those are my words not Roger’s but that is how I interpret them. He writes specifically:

”Either way, nihilism has run its course. It clearly leads to absolutely nowhere and this penny is suddenly dropping for a lot of clever people. Hardened atheists, artists, intellectuals, in a steady stream, now all seem to have ended up on a road near Damascus".

and

“The answer was indeed here all the time, and we do still need His love, after all we have done. People shouldn’t be afraid by any of this, maybe thinking back fearfully at all the blood historically spilt in the name of one God or another. Because you don’t even need to ‘believe’ if truth be told. Faith is a gift not given to everyone at the same time. If at all.”

ending with an exhortation

“so anyone feeling the Boomer Blues should read perhaps only four newsletter - none of which you will find behind a paywall: those of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”

I disagree with none of this in principle, but I am still left unsatisfied and I am unsure why precisely. I listened to Roger’s mellifluous Glaswegian brogue explaining his thought processes, mildly hypnotised by his lucidity, frankness and the weaving of the narrative of his life into the arc of history in which that life played out, an arc highly sympathetic to me as it neatly describes my own, although from a sociological categorisation I am officially an early Gen-X-er whilst he is a tail end Boomer. Put us both in a box and give us a good shake and you will find that the two are virtually indistinguishable. I nodded in agreement and noted that his interviewers Grant and Demetri were deeply sympathetic to the description of the malaise and welcoming of his “faith is the answer” antidote with what felt like relief. Thank you for saying it, they seemed to be intimating. There was further nodding of heads in the framing of the malaise within the context of the coming to an end of a saeculum or era, dated from the end of WW II and lasting some 90 years and neatly compartmentalised into four generational buckets, with the Boomers constituting the numerically largest and chronologically initial generation born in to that era. Followers of Grant and Demetri and regular readers of mine will recognise this framework as the Fourth Turning.

Nonetheless and head-nodding aside, there is something missing for me, something that I need to add to the conversation or framing in order for it to know what we need to do next, other than to renew our faith and sit down and study the writings of the Apostles.

The clue to what that might be was given by Roger at the end of his interview and whether consciously or not reintroduced as the core theme to his “Meaning Amidst Chaos” essay. Towards the end of his Hundred Year Pivot interview Roger states

“In a world since the War, certainly where the God has been money, undoubtedly money, when that game is up now, macro and micro level, macro level, the debt is there, and micro level , the social contract is gone. And one of the main candidates for that meaning has to be spiritual. It has to be.” (emphasis mine)

and then in his later essay he notes

“The nihilism of sport: To be clear, there is valid nuance in all of the above debates. A person of intelligence could argue them both ways. But is that the point? The Manchester City/EPL war could go in either direction, but the future of the sport shouldn’t be about who can afford the best lawyers. We should all know what is right.” Know what is our duty of care to the societal and community asset of our games.”

“Eigentum verpflichtet.” states Article §17.2 of the German post war Constitution making it, interestingly, the shortest sentence of any article in any constitution. It means “Property obliges” (which isn’t very good English, so maybe “Ownership creates obligation” would be preferable). Only it doesn’t anymore - property is just a means to an end and the end is always financial. Buildings can be flipped, companies saddled with fees and debt and then sold on repackaged as fast as possible to ensure highest possible IRR and so on. Property has become surgically separated from the responsibility that attends it and which used to be and fundamentally still is inseparable from it. Sports franchises are milked for maximum viewing rights and merchandising and tickets priced out of the reach of any but corporate sponsors. Ethics are outsourced to HR themselves the extended arms of governance enforcement laws: performance over substance, seeming over being.

The word that Roger, Grant and Demetri that all appeared to be avoiding articulating is the one that explains all the phenomenon so eloquently described, namely the political ideology of Socialism. This is a crucial missing element because without an understanding of the guiding economic and political ideology and its compound effect precisely through the post war period with whose outcome we are now attempting to grapple, Boomer navel gazing and mea culpas may make the gazer feel a bit better about themselves (a very boomeresque requirement) however, analytical therapy coupled with the search for redemption and meaning through a rediscovery of Christian faith is at best a panacea and at worst risks ignoring the proper place to direct our energy and focus as we seek to correct or redirect society onto a more wholesome and life sustaining path. As the Archangel Michael - cited by Roger - will surely testify if asked, you really have to know who you are fighting if you want to win the fight.

Socialism destroys societies because it tolerates no other Gods but the one of its own mission; it tolerates no other ethics other than its own - often deeply contradictory - moral hierarchy; it loathes the family because it recognises that the family presents the most intractable bulwark against the dependency culture it needs to create in order to establish control; it loathes markets because its policy program is both revealed as nonsensical by them and because it cannot stand the implicit contradiction of its „logic“ by economic reality; it destroys money because it creates too much of it to finance its promises and makes no difference between capital and income and destroys all incentives to capital formation; it is by design divisive because it needs to destroy the bourgeoisie (middle classes and aspirational working classes) by dividing it against each other (that is the whole and only purpose of the woke gender/racial/climate movement and is taken straight from the Marxist-Leninist playbook) and so on.

Every aspect of what we perceive as „change“ and the decline of our civilisation and its norms can be attributed to the compound effect of socialist ideology that has infested the Western Christian system for at least a century, but that found a new lease on life when it began to subsume itself into the managerial state that emerged in full strength in the post war reorganisational phase of our recent history. It is - as Christian Niemitz has described it - the failed idea that refuses to die. Its collusion with a blend of mercantilist and oligopolistic capitalism (which I once rechristened as Crapitalism) has extended its natural life by decades such that now the parasite has weakened the host to the point of exhaustion.

This and no other is the framework within which we who have lived through the economic peace dividend period and witnessed its gradual and accelerating decline must orient our emotional experience. Bemoaning it is all well and good, if it helps (hint: it doesn’t), as is discovering the beating heart of our Christian faith as the font of all succour, hope and purpose, but as Roger points out, that was there all the time, we were just too busy upgrading our BMWs and partying in Verbier to pay much attention. We need to buckle up and stand up if we are going to lend a hand in the course correction effort. If not for ourselves then for our children’s and grandchildren’s sake.

I have been reading the Harvard economist of the mid 20th Century Joseph Schumpeter’s excellent 1946 treatise “Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy” in which he contrasts these two forms of economic and social organisation and their interplay with political practice of democracy. He begins the book with a collection of essays on Karl Marx and the importance of Marx as both the foundational prophet of a new material religion and a sharp-eyed exhaustively researched economic scholar, writing

“Marxism is a religion. To the believer it presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved. We may specify still further: Marxist socialism also belongs to that subgroup which promises paradise on this side of the grave.”

“Marx the Prophet”, Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy ~ Joseph Schumpeter

He gives Marx full credit for recognising the inherent tendency of capitalism - as he defined it - to destroy itself primarily through its success in organising the necessary means of production and resources for economic satisfaction. He misses altogether - in his Theory of Immiseration - the regenerative capacity of the free market capitalist order or misses entirely the self-destructive inevitability of the collectivist alternative.

Marxism or Socialism or Democratic Socialism, whatever you want to call the ideology of envy, government control and interference in the name of redistribution has proven both remarkably resilient even as its core operational “truths” have been both intellectually dismantled and exposed as fallacious as well as demonstrably shown to have been abject failures in every single instance of their implementation. No matter! The promise of salvation coupled with the hypnotic language of good motives (well meaning) has never lost its ability to entrance the intelligentsia and to keep them locked onto the goal of perfecting humankind if only they could think it hard enough.

Auron MacIntryre the young and upcoming political essayist whose book “The Total State” is required reading for anyone interested in a brutal confrontation with the fact that our modern Liberal Democratic State is nothing other than the most successful implementation of the collectivist ideal through a usurpation of the free market economic model which feeds and enables it. He writes

Much of the twentieth century was framed as a battle between two competing political ideologies, liberal democracy versus communism, individual rights on one side and collectivism on the other. But de Jouvenel asserted that the two political systems had the same end goal: the total state. Those in charge naturally look for ways to increase their power, centralizing all duties and loyalties to themselves. This can be done by casting themselves as liberators, freeing the people from the yoke of obligation to their regional powers, or, in the case of competing social spheres, the duty of caring for one’s family or of attending church. A communist regime can also offer liberation from the capitalist class, the competing economic sphere portrayed as a parasite upon the freedom and wellbeing of the worker. Under both the liberal and communist archetypes, the functions that these competing institutions once served are transferred to state-managed bureaucracies.

and further

We are taught this is what holds the ruling class accountable: they must listen to and obey the will of the people or lose the power they so dearly covet. Yet this is not how the relationship really works. There’s a reason the incumbency rate for members of Congress reliably hovers around 90 percent while Congress’s popularity remains mired in the single digits. If the will of the people is the key to legitimating the power of the ruling class, then the ruling class must take an interest in controlling the will of the people. The good news for our elite is that mass media provides the perfect tool for doing this. As true mass media was born, good liberals like Walter Lippman were kind enough to write books explaining why it was the duty of elites to use this new tool to steer the will of the people in the right direction for the common good. The ruling class thus became deeply involved in controlling the information the public receives and the narrative that information shapes.

MacIntyre, Auron. The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (pp. 23-24).

Seen within the framework of a century and a half long battle between free market truly liberal socio-political order and the collectivist ideologies in their various guises in particular — the most successful and longest lived of those varieties — our own “liberal democratic” order has best managed to fulfil the Colbertian maxim of the highest level of feather plucking with the least amount of hissing. Roger’s eloquent and heartfelt description of the Boomer Blues in his essays and his conversation on the Hundred Year Pivot podcast, beautifully describe the problem and point to a door through which we might find respite and hope. Only when we realise the nature of the battle we have to fight can we genuinely direct our faith energy to the place where we have the highest probability of influencing the outcome.

As Peter Kaufman wrote of compounding “The most powerful force that could potentially be harnessed is dogged incremental constant progress over a very long time.” It is the key to personal success in a free market liberal order as Gautam Baid lays out in his book “The Joys of Compounding”.

Unfortunately that dogged incremental progress over a very long time does not differentiate the aims behind the will that enables the doggedness. The neo Marxian writer and philosopher, Italian Antonio Gramsci recognised this when he reframed the titanic struggle initiated by Marx and his disciples from open revolution to infiltration of public institutions in his thoughts contained in his “Prison Notebook”. His redefining of the nature of the battle and its long timeframe was condensed by revolutionary student leader Rudi Dutschke in1967 as “the long march through the institutions”. This process or idea took hold almost immediately after the student campus revolutions of 1968 when Universities decide in their infinite wisdom that the best way to placate the revolutionary leaders and activists was to give them academic posts as research fellows thus permanently embedding them and their ideological quests deeply in the academic institutions . From there into government departments - foremost those responsible for education and social policy - international quangos and NGOS and of course into ever more arcane faculties in academia itself designed to self perpetuate the long march to where we find ourselves today.

Roger and I end up in the same place - a sense that we are at the end of the empty age of the God of Money and its imminent replacement with another which we trust will be of more use in supporting human joy and flourishing. We hope that as this urgent, relentless, soul destroying age of productivity slavery with its final act determined by performance over substance, by transactions over relationships, by seeming instead of being yields to something kinder to our hearts and humanity that the transition will not be too long or painful or distressing, although I think we sense that it might be all of those things. Then we will at least have our prayers and a God to pray to.

In closing, I am reminded of the scene at the beginning of Robert Bolt’s play “A Man For All Seasons” in which Cardinal Wolsey is attempting to push Thomas More into supporting his plan to annul Henry VIIIs marriage to Catherine Aragon as she is unable to provide the King with an heir. More resists at which point Wolsey loses his temper:

More: “No, Your Grace, I’m not going to help you.”

Wolsey: (moves on, pressing) “If the King dies without issue, the succession will be in dispute. If that happens, we will have war… So far there’s been no hint of opposition. But suppose there is. Suppose after all these years there’s a new claim, a new war. All over this country, countless families that have lived at peace these fifty years, all at once they’re at war. Sons become soldiers. The land is bloodied. All for what? For one man’s conscience? For a principle? For what you call your principles? And then we will have your prayers to fall back on: I suspect you would like that, More.”

More: “Very much Your Grace,”

“A Man for All Seasons ~ Robert Bolt (Act 1 Sc. 2)

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.”

~ Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse (“High Windows” - 1971)

“My daughter, when I was in my 30s, went school at Stanford. I couldn't stand it. She was so far apart. And so I'd think of reasons to make trips out there, try to come up with a little business or something. I go out there with her. I get an old office downtown Palo Alto, Jean goes to class with her. I said, you know, I need to get some things going out here if I want to spend this kind of time. So I went over to Brentwood, about 20 or 30 miles from San Francisco, and I bought about 25 lots like I was going to build 25 houses, except I drilled four gas wells. And those four gas wells in 18 months paid me enough money for me to buy the Dallas Cowboys. Paying attention to my kids actually led to me getting involved into the passion of my life. And all along, what I was trying to do is hang out near my daughter.

Lot of things happened that you didn't have planned or don't have the strategy for. Now I'm not saying I've done anything right, but I made my mind up long time ago I was gonna work with my kids. They're involved in everything. They involved my leasing, oil and gas, real estate, and so when I got the Cowboys, I got it so that we could all work together. I thought I was doing it for them, but the one that got the most out of it was me.

I just know it's not gonna be this time, but you're gonna be sitting here sometime in the future, laying here sometime in the future, and this room is gonna be full of your business associates and the people you worked with all your life, and more than likely, your children and family are gonna be there because they're your children and your family, but you could have them there, because they're the people you spent your life with, you worked with, you fell down with, you got up with, not just Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's who you want to be with.

So when that time comes like this, it's a celebration of your life, and you're not wishing you got to spend a little more time seeing a few more suns come up. That's the trick. That's the trick because that's going to be your glory. I'm pretty proud of them Cowboys; I'm pretty proud of the stuff we've done in oil and gas. It pales in comparison to how proud I am to have lived my life working with my kids. You got a chance to do something about that. I hope you will.”

~ Jerry Jones (Owner of the Dallas Cowboys and legendary Texas entrepreneur and oilman) in a cameo appearance on “Landman” (S1E9 at 09:20) talking to Monty Miller (Jon Hamm) , the billionaire owner of M-TEX who is lying in a hospital bed after another heart attack. [See also David Senra’s outstanding Founders Podcast episode #379 ]

A little over two years ago I published a piece entitled

reproducing the list of twenty “rules of life” that guides Orthodox Jews in the ordering and execution of their daily lives and presented by Berel Solomon on his YouTube channel. Rule #18 is

# 18 Teach your children how to make a living and earn their keep. This is the primary duty of a father towards his children. If you do not, you are encouraging them to steal or be dependent on others.

This one piece of wisdom stuck with me more than any of the other nineteen and I have been chewing on its implications ever since. At the time our eldest was 23 years old and our youngest just 18. Our little brood was emerging from the sausage factory of modern education and beginning the wonderful and - from the parental perspective only - mildly terrifying task of making their way in the world. Gnawing in the background of my reflection was the question of whether I and my wife had done a good, fair or miserable job of preparing them for business of life, its hand raised urgently and demanding an answer. I had none that I could rely on.

Basic Training

My wife of 25 years and their mother is blessed with a ruthlessly practical streak and an intolerance bordering on pathological antipathy to procrastination and not attending to shit that could be done immediately, knowing in her infinite wisdom that jobs, tasks, phone calls, the small activities of daily life that can all be completed in less than five minutes have a tendency to metastasize exponentially into larger problems when not attended to in short order, indeed create lengthy tailbacks and traffic jams of Lake-District-on-a-bank-holiday-weekend proportions as all the downstream activities begin to get snarled up and put on interminable hold due to the non-attendance to shit that could and should be done NOW. I mention this because much as this was not a popular (mild understatement) regimen to pubescents of either sex (we have a brace of both), and at times led to Gaza levels of conflict and attestations of eternal hatred, it has prepared them more practically for a life in which getting shit done is well over half the battle in the quest for economic utility than my more cerebral support. David Allen, author of the famous and popular 1990s productivity guide points out that

”Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.”

Or more pointedly, not starting tasks that need attending to when they need attending to. Navy Seals like to say that under pressure a soldier does not rise to their potential but sinks to the level of their habitual training. So in matters of GTD (or in my parlance GSD), frugality and the ability to stand in the face of conflict, their training at their mother’s boot camp has prepared them excellently for whatever life might throw at them.

However, as Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon series, points out in his excellent autobiographical “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”, Nietzsche’s comment that “‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger’ sounds clever, but it’s a loser philosophy”. GTD is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success in life, or to reframe rule #18, to earn a living AND be happy doing it. Finding work to do that aligns with your talents and that is useful to others is, I believe the primary objective: getting things done quickly and efficiently is a handy basic training but it doesn’t answer the question of whether you are moving in the right direction or even doing the right thing in the first place.

The Journey of The Father is Embedded in the Son (or Daughter)

Our children grew up in an entrepreneurial household — I have been running my own business since before the first of them arrived mewling and puking on the planet — so they have imbued a perspective that is conditioned by that - ups and downs, both financial and emotional, and the roller coaster that accompanies the vicissitudes of a life spent as the offspring of a professional opportunist, poet manqué and generalist.

(with thanks to Gorka Orive on X )

As Monty Miller says early on in Landman of the oil industry “ Our business is one of constant crisis interrupted by brief periods of intense success.” The oil industry and every other industry I can think of. Also, whilst I am on the subject, that graphic depiction of the emotional journey of business is a fractal, ie: a shape characterized by self-similarity, meaning that it exhibits the same pattern at various scales, or in simpler language, it is not a single line that looks like that but a constantly repeating series of microscopic versions of that journey cobbled together into an arc of life which you hope will eventually end up in the top right hand corner of the frame coupled with the unspoken hope that when you get there you will not be too exhausted to care less.

If Philip Larkin - quoted at the onset of this piece - is correct (and he probably is although I strongly disagree with his conclusion. Obviously) then my journey which became their journey without them being asked whether they wanted to go on it or not, is going to condition how they view the business of earning a living, the role of money in their lives, whether they believe success is easy or difficult, whether they want a life that looks like the one they were witnesses to and nolens volens participants in or whether they want its opposite. I would be equally sympathetic to either conclusion.

Chapter 3 of Boyd Varty’s book “The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life” is entitled “The Tracks of the Father” and begins with the words

“The father washes onto the son. He lives inside you as an aspiration, a disappointment, or a fear. Afraid you will never be like him or afraid you will be; he is there in the bones of your emotions. In the voices in your head. In your expectations of yourself. In the shadows of your weakness or strength. No matter how good the relationship, there is a tension between father and son. The father is a track: a trail we choose to follow or a path we walk away from.”

That passage too resonates with me and I have read the whole chapter out loud to both my boys at least once. For them, as for the girls, I am probably as much part of the problem, the life riddle they all have to solve for themselves, as I can be part of the solution. Jerry Jones’ words hit a nerve and although they were part of a movie script, I know them to be heartfelt and true from the autobiographical material of his I have studied. It was included not just because it was fun having a real live oilman and Texan legend on the show because it is a sentiment both authentic, powerful and apposite - Taylor Sheridan’s genius on display. This stuff is messy.

Which Leads to Principles

If I think about the mental construct, the thinking framework that my wife and I have built and which, for better or worse, informs their perspective of the world, I can summarize it as follows

1. Do it now.

2. Everyone is an entrepreneur. Everyone - whether deliberately or not - chooses a business model for their participation in the economy of life. Everyone makes implicit and explicit choices about risks, trade-offs, income levels and so on. Many, probably most people are entirely unaware of their individual business model and the trade-offs they are making and are basing their decisions on “truths” they accept as fundamental and incontrovertible. Some of those “truths” turn out to be wrong or misleading.

3. Everyone has a balance sheet and a P&L that feeds it. Again, they may be unaware of it and may never think of themselves as having one, but as Chris Smithers sang in

   “It’s just like gravity I said,
   It’s not a product of my head
   It doesn’t speak but nonetheless
   commands attention”

   
   As with the business model, it much better by far to know it and then to make choices determining the outcome explicitly rather than having life do it to or for you. Like gravity.

4. Businesses (and individuals) are there to solve specific problems and to be useful. The more acute, urgent and significant the problem, the greater the utility of the business (or the individual). Making money is a by-product of utility and downstream of service, not the purpose. Profit is an indication of both having provided value and having organized the process of delivering it efficiently.

5. In a free market economy (actually any economy, although in some constrained forms there can be a dramatic distortion of incentives) there are three ways an actor gets paid: 1. in money 2. in reputation and 3. in knowledge gained by working on a specific problem and thereby deepening your first, second and third order understanding of context and connectivity. All three of these payment types are self- and mutually reinforcing and are as true for employees and they are for business owners and independents. All three are subject to the laws of compounding. Knowing this is mission critical.

6. Wealth is determined by health plus the amount of control you have over your time and privacy. Full stop.

7. Talent used in service of others leads to passion. Passion is not the prerequiste for success in 99% of all use cases. To quote Scott Adams again (who I would like to honour, because he is dying and doing it gracefully and with his characteristic good sense and humour):

   “Passion feels very democratic. It is the people’s talent, available to all. It’s also mostly bullshit. It’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion…..If you ask a billionaire the secret of his success, he might say it is passion, because that sounds like a sexy answer that is suitably humble. But after a few drinks I think he’d say his success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains, and appetite for risk.

   ~ Adams, Scott. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (p. 15).

   8. Systems systematically applied are what matter, but systems without objectives are not much use. James Clear is correct when he writes about systems being paramount, but he omits the part in which systems need to be designed with very significant objectives (goals) in mind to make sense. Systems are what get you there, but you need to figure out where “there” is first. As my grandmother used to say, “if you don’t know where you are going you will end up somewhere else”.

That’s enough principles - who do I think I am? Ray Dalio? But you get the gist - I bang on about this stuff endlessly, mostly to remind myself when I need to course correct, but also because I believe this way of thinking about earning a living and building a business to be true and helpful. I imagine some of it will have formed strong synaptic connections in the fertile brains of my offspring through the Law of Ad Nauseam, meaning I have a responsibility not to leave them alone with a half-baked synaptic system and to assist in the process of making sense of it and ensuring that my opinions are just that, my opinions sometimes weakly held no matter how strongly articulated, and not the whole truth.

The Point Being

I love listening to David Senra’s weekly Founders Podcast in which he presents a well-known or industry changing business (mostly but always dead) founder or occasionally another figure from history through their biographies or autobiography - it is a superb ongoing course in business and life wisdom told through the extraordinary lives of these impactful men and women. David regularly admonishes his listeners to put the wisdom they glean from learning about “history’s most famous entrepreneurs” into practice in their own lives and business, saying

“Learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior… I talk to a lot of people and they’re like, I love your podcast… but you’re not actually applying the lessons. Take what they did and what they said and see if that works in your business and then actually change it…it’s just a waste of time if it doesn’t result in tangible change”

~ David Senra, Founders Podcast

When I heard Jerry Jones’ perspective on working with his children, I immediately resolved to make a concerted effort to do the same with my children and to extend an offer to them, if they wanted, to join me and to be “the people you spent your life with, you worked with, you fell down with, you got up with, not just at Thanksgiving and Christmas.” That's who I want to be with. Nor can I think of a better way of discharging my duty under Rule #18 of ensuring that I actively support their ability to earn a living than by involving them in the process of how I earn mine and by sharing as much of my experience (I am hesitating to call it ‘wisdom', but at least I know where to look wisdom up) as they are willing to consume.

Since starting to make good on that promise, I have been astonished at how much fun that journey has turned out to be and how eagerly my offer has been entertained and accepted, at least in principle, by all of them. I am not suggesting that they, like James and John in Matthew’s Gospel 4, 21-22 drop everything immediately

And going on from thence, he saw other two brethren, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in a ship with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and he called them. 22 And they immediately left the ship and their father, and followed him.

The Bible. King James Bible: 400th Anniversary edition

(although I do often think about what Zebedee told his wife that evening when he went home after work and Mrs. Zebedee asked him “Hello love, where are the boys?”), but having started the process, I am finding new texture to the quality of our conversations as we explore their individual strengths, experiences, talents, ambitions and paradigms with much more rigor than we had previously. If at some stage they decide to migrate to work with me in a role that adds value to them and to our clients and partners whilst givimg them an excellent path to success then I would welcome that.

Equally, I am finding my own creative faculties being exercised as I think about what else we could be doing better to accommodate their talents and proclivities, which are in all cases markedly different from mine. The range of options and problem-solving opportunities could expand by a power of four if they all decide to evolve us into a genuine family business. This as much as anything else is a thrilling prospect to me.

I am enthusiastic at the prospect of teaching, where there is an interest to be taught, of sharing in the adventures of creation and value and of working for the improvement of our collective material and familial conditions whilst delivering on my responsibilities under Rule #18. I am reminded of the famous quip that Warren Buffett made at a Berkshire AGM in the early 1990s when asked what it was like being a billionaire. The Sage replied

Charlie and I enjoy the process more than the proceeds, but we have also learned to live with those.

Amen to that. I will keep you posted as the experiment unfolds.

That primary primary task now having been completed - “it’s in the post, sir. Should be with you any day” (translated from the original Bavarian) - the secondary primary task is now to unpack and reorder my books. This is taking much longer than expected because I keep distracting myself from the unpacking-sorting job at hand by coming across some tome or other, long lost from memory and browsing it or perhaps even sitting down on one of the many unpacked boxes in the old hay barn to study it more intensely. A bit like this only not as smart.

One great surprise was the number of boxes that had remained in storage in Ireland for a decade and to which I never managed to get around to attending. These included the large volume collections of the Encyclopedia Britannica as well as the German equivalent Brockhaus, as well as, to my delight, books that I had forgotten ever having owned at all. One such bears the irresistible title “Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? - The Encyclopedia of Modern Life” published 20 years ago in 2005 by a brace of writers named Steve Lowe and Alan MCarthur who may well have gone on to win Pullitzer prizes for subsequent works but I somehow doubt it. It must have been popular because (astonishingly) it was republished 5 times in the same year. I suspect in damp downstairs loos across the United Kingdom in houses great and small copies of this little book are mouldering away for the amusement of guests bored of staring at school, University and regimental photographs credentialing their host’s long passed youth. They must be somewhere.

Section C (it is an alphabetical collection) starts with the entry

“Cafés that charge excessive amounts for a mug of shit tea”

A pound? A fucking pound? I know what tea costs! I make it all the time!

and follows with

“Cafés that charge excessive amounts for a set breakfast but try to justify it by putting a bit of basil on the tomato” under which headline we are told

I know how much basil costs, too!And it’s not the £2 you’ve just slapped on the price of my breakfast. It’s much less than that — slightly over £1.99 less. Why don’t you just have done with it and move your family into my fucking house?

The whole book goes on more or less in that tone and style so this is definitely not a recommendation (although the entry a few pages later on “Charles, Prince of Wales” is worth the £9.99 entry price all by itself.) The £2 breakfast premium did prompt me to look up what a full breakfast (two eggs, sausage, black pudding, beans, tomato and toast) cost back in 2005. Answer: around £4 to £6 in London and between £3.50 and £4.50 outside. Today a similar London breakfast costs around £14 to £16, often more (outside of ludicrously overpriced hotel dining rooms). The computed rate of inflation which this range implies is from a low (£6 then to £14 today) 4.33% to a high of 7.18% with an average 5.65%. The official CPI figure for the average rate of inflation for that period is a tick over 2%.

Another way of looking at this is by asking how many breakfasts an ounce of Gold would have purchased in both periods (a technique that I first saw used to brilliant effect by Ronnie Stoefele’s Incrementum team in their annual Oktoberfest Index measuring the fluctuation of the number of Mass of Bier that 1oz of Gold would have bought over the past 75 years). In this case the average price of 1oz of Gold mid year 2005 was some $435 resulting in a breakfast to gold ratio of 87. Today (using a cable rate of $1.33 and a gold price of $3,270) that ratio is 154 implying that either Gold was seriously mispriced in 2005 (too cheap) or today (too expensive). I suspect the former, as a longer term view of the Gold price and another interesting ratio would seem to suggest.

The first chart below shows the performance of Gold (1 oz in US-$) and the Dow Jones Industrial Index (Dow) over the past 50 years. It is apparent that US stocks have performed well over this period - at least nominally - with the index rising from $802.65 (up 41% after the deep drawdown year of 1974) to today’s $40,570.85. A compound performance rate of 8.17%. Gold on the other hand rose from $160 in May 1975 to today’s price of $3,275 a compound average rate of 6.22%. Using Gold as an (incorruptible) deflator (which is probably its most useful function) we see the net compound real growth in the value of the underlying index at approx. 1.9% p.a.

The ratio of Gold to the Dow over time (last 50 years) is presented in the next chart and shows that we find ourselves - even after the dramatic surge in the $ price of Gold over the past 6 months and the drop in stock prices over the past month - in the top third of the relative valuation range from the DJII’s perspective. In 2005 the stock index was worth 24 units of Gold whilst today it is worth 12.5. At the low point (Gold peak valuation) in the last 50 years that ratio reached 1.41 or some 88% under the current level. The monetary expansion of the past two decades only started showing up as price inflation and concern for purchasing power erosion fairly late in the day leading to a relative disinterest in (and underpricing of) gold as an inflationary hedge in the period in which stocks were booming away from 2005 onward (pace the little interruption in 2008 and 2009).

Ah yes, I hear the clever ones in the front of the class calling out, the DJII is a price and not an performance index. It doesn’t include dividends, does it sir.? No, it doesn’t and for those of you who want to know what happens to two compound curves when you add back roughly 2.5% every year to one and nothing to the other, you get this (Gold and Silver indices are those squiggly little lines right at the bottom, represented in, well, gold and silver):

Of course you do. As any fule kno. But - clever clogs - the dividend reinvestment algorithm ignores taxes on the distributed dividends as well as the inconvenient fees and spreads on such re-investments which real human beings outside the econometric modelling departments have to cough up. And even if it didn’t, companies generally don’t distribute all of their earnings as dividends. Generally the payout ratio has been about 40% (probably less) across the spectrum which means that the nominal share price is being driven primarily by the reinvestment of retained earnings. It appears that the reinvestment rate - if it is being accurately reflected in the difference between the deflator (Gold - which does not have any earnings to compound and is merely the inverse of the US-$ degradation) and the nominal performance - is that paltry ca. 2% in real terms we deduced earlier on.

All of which is to say that inflation has been responsible for and can explain most of the “performance” of equities over the past decades and that by and large and across the board the real reinvestment rate experienced by shareholders in the aggregate has been less than impressive. I refer to Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory’s excellent series of essays over the last years deconstructing the great wealth transfer from shareholders to management via systematic balance sheet plundering and self-enrichment schemes with options at their heart. You can only spend those dollars once.

As we find ourselves daily battered with news stories from markets’, countries’ and corporations’ reactions to the Great Tariff HooHa and the world feels a lot as I imagine it did when President Richard Nixon pulled a fast one on the world’s currency markets by slamming the Gold window shut (read the excellent “Three Days at Camp David” by Jeffery E. Garten on the weekend deliberations of Nixon’s kitchen cabinet before announcing that fateful move) in 1971, the subject of the inflationary and/or depressionary effects on the US and global economies, on the US-Dollar’s role as the reserve and global settlement currency of the world are being debated aggressively, with the consensus forming that things will never be the same again and not in a good way. I do think however that we can point to a few aspects of the current GTH on which we can be reasonably certain.

1. The US is not going anywhere and remains the largest, deepest, most liquid and vibrant economy in the world. Give me a break with all those PPP adjusted GDP comparisons. The biggest dog in the pack is the US and will be for as long as anyone reading this (including my one year grandson) is around.

2. The US Dollar is not going anywhere either. The amount of private currency transactions settled daily on international currency exchanges in USD represents a big chunk of global GDP. Every single day. And where is all that ex-USD money going to go? The Euro that paragon of currency fortitude with its 20 different sovereign bond markets? Yen? Swissie? Renimbi (what?)?

3. Inflation has been under-calculated for decades now and Gold is just starting to catch up as sovereigns begin to lose their ability to control the bond markets. Thank goodness. Either gold is still seriously undervalued or (US) stocks are seriously overvalued or both - the Dow Gold ratio is only going one way and that is down towards its previous lows or at least the lower third band. Tariffs will only exacerbate one or both of those vectors.

4. The US is going to have to tackle the underlying cause of its pathological indebtedness by not running such enormous budget deficits and largely making do with the tax revenues it generates. One or another that is going to happen.

5. We are coming into the final minutes of play in this current cycle and the unwinding of the fiscal and monetary incontinence of the past decades will begin when the final whistle blows sometime in the next 18 months or so. There will be a few minutes of extra time granted by accommodating interest rate cuts or similar and we may see new highs in everything as the party picks up steam towards America’s 250 anniversary of independence on July 4th 2026 (to my many American friends - please don’t think of sending the Sussexes back as gift to the erstwhile motherland in case you are wondering what we might like to mark the occasion of your liberation).

The good news is that in all likelihood breakfasts in London and New York will probably not cost what they do now and we will not be paying the inflation adjusted equivalent of 2005 £2 for a basil leaf on our tomato.

The editorial beating heart (literally) of these Pitchfork Papers has this last week been uprooted and moved from the tranquil rural environment of the southern county of Wicklow, nestled between the heather-decked Wicklow mountains and the pristine beaches on the eastern fringe of Ireland to a Bavarian alp (or alplet to be more precise) some forty five minutes South East of Munich where it is now surrounded by cows instead of sheep and commands a fairly spectacular view of the mountains to the South. Leaving a much beloved Ireland and moving (back) to Germany (your correspondent spent some 27 years of his young and then not so young adult life in and around Munich and raised his family there) was prompted entirely by familial considerations - all four of our children have now reached the age of attainment and chosen to return to the country of their conception and childhood, having decided - not without some justification - that their prospects of advancement, mate-finding and quality of life were significantly higher in Munich and its environs than in rural Ireland, which as they all reminded me at times during the last year was entirely my choice and not theirs. Cue Fairy Nuff, one of my favourite Irish spirits. Four children have now evolved into four plus a grandson, so the idea of keeping their mother and now grandmother away from her expanding brood was not one that was ever going find a consensus in the Star Chamber of our marital Parliament, a decidedly non-democratic institution at the best of times. So here we are.

Those of you have read these Pitchfork Papers for a while will know that I am by conviction a late cycle Libertarian (ie an erstwhile free market, “leave me alone” conservative when that term used to mean something) Christian who has found himself on the wrong side of the cultural fence and well outside the Overton Window, somewhere closer to the Overton tradesmens' entrance round the back by the coal shed for the best part of the last fifteen years. Heading back to Germany from Ireland at this particular point in both countries respective trajectories has me feeling like a Tutsi deciding to head home to Rwanda in the summer of 1994 - not exactly brilliant timing.

Just so there is no misunderstanding - Ireland is far from a paragon of institutional governance. It is run by midwitted numpties with mind-numbingly parochial perspectives and fully in thrall to the EU’s globalist, woke, puerile climate worshipping infatuation, replete with a state controlled media (RTE) and a compliant press (one blessing of this move is that I now no longer have to breathe the same air as the ghastly Fintan O’Toole, Idiot in Chief of the Irish Times, who has the singular distinction of having singlehandedly redefined the boundaries of elitist smugness and condescension over the past decade) to rival any of the current European contenders for the covetted Pravda prize. Given the importance of incentives in all human activities, it is as well to understand that for most Irish politicians living as they do in a system free from Opposition, the primary goal is to be seen and noticed as a good European (or EU lackey) so that the option of a cushy sinecure in Brussels with jobs, pensions and expense accounts for the whole family remains viable when they have served their time as useful rubberstampers of EU directives in Leinster House.

Ireland’s singular advantage to those of us in the erstwhile small c conservative diaspora, is that the toxic radiation of this policy environment is largely confined to the Greater Dublin area where all the virtue signalling takes place, leaving rural Ireland to get on with life much as it always has, pace the disruption caused by the relocated migrants and refugees foisted on the country by said masters in Brussels. Ireland is too underpopulated and its law enforcement (civilian and military) too small (and nice) to ever effectively enforce an authoritarian diktat on its population. They couldn’t go all General Franco even they wanted to and anyway the Irish population has had more than enough practice over the past, say 1,000 years in dealing with authoritarian elites better organised, intelligent and principled than the current lot. It is still very much a country in which you can be left to your own devices and in which, as my wife pointed out a few weeks ago, citizens are given the benefit of the doubt as a matter of principle when interacting with the State and its officers.

Which brings me to Germany and my for-the-time-being new and erstwhile home.

Where to start?

In tandem with most countries of what can loosely be called the Western Christian Empire, Germany has been drifting slowly and then like Hemingsway’s bankrupt, quickly to the left (or should that be the Left, or even The Left?) of the political spectrum for decades. No need for me to go into more details here, read or any of the many intelligent, erudite and social critics here on or read outstanding book “The Total State” if you somehow missed the first eight seasons of this long-running and depressingly popular saga entitled “The Long March Through the Institutions” (screenplay by Rudi Duschke) and need to get up to speed. Each country has its own particular culturally determined flavouring of its descent into socialist authoritarianism but Germany with its natural proclivity to statism and its deeply engrained devotion to a highly bureaucratised way of social organisation, a genetic inheritance of its founding Prussian ethos, is particularly well-wired to transmit the prominent ideological programming du jour efficiently through its policy making apparatus and has adapted the current globalist, managerial catalogue with an ease that should surprise no-one.

British, French and German ruling elites each express their particular brand of hauteur and condescension differently but for most of the post war years German institutional elites were extremely competent - think of the Bundesbank titans of the 70s and 80s - and the entire apparatus of the State was focused on two priorities: supporting German export prowess on the one hand whilst simultaneously ensuring the maximum of social cohesion and the minimum of social disruption on the other. Germans do not do well with political volatility and thrive when the economic motor is humming along nicely with a strong currency, a significant trade surplus and political strife contained in a very narrow band of policy choices. I have always joked that when German politicians are faced with significant geopolitical disruptions which would require statesmanship and decisiveness on the international stage they double down on arcane discussions about the Pendlerpauschale (the tax deduction applicable to commuters to compensate for their longer travel to work. I know, riveting stuff) until the problem has gone away.

This system worked very well until the end of the second Schroeder Chancellorship when he, the ultimate business-first pragmatist despite (or perhaps because of) his left of centre political affiliation, ceded the mantle of power to Angela Merkel. Merkel, who I observed close up and at first hand on numerous occasions in the 2008 - 2012 period was as unprincipled as she was ruthless, seeing her primary job as the maintenance of power at any price. She was in a very real sense the most Machiavellian of modern politicians. This expressed itself clearly in her abandonment of a pro-nuclear policy in order to “overtake the Greens on the left” and her brutal culling of anyone - particularly any male - who through some permutation of telegenesis, intelligence, political network, policy competence or just charisma might have been a threat to her. When Ursula von der Leyen, that most self-serving and functionally incompetent of politicians, looked like upsetting Merkel’s plans for her own succession she promptly shoved her off to head the Brussels monster, leaving us to suffer the consequences. “Aprés moi le deluge” would be a fitting motto or epitaph for Frau Merkel and her political legacy. The vicious defenestration of Friedrich Merz, rhetorically brilliant, sharp witted, popular with the party’s conservative wing and an obvious rival for her position was one prominent case, whose legacy of trauma is now returning to haunt the party and the country.

Her worst mistake and the one with the most significant consequences today is the sense of euthanized complacency she instilled in the German public. Her banal repetitions of platitude after platitude lulled Germans - who it must be admitted were desperate for such lulling - into a sense of constitutionally guaranteed prosperity and outrage at the mere suggestion that the Panglossian state of German affairs might ever be subject to change. She propagated a sense of NIMBYism in the face of global challenges - be they technological, fiscal, demographic, military (what?) or anything else you might think of - that reinforced the nation’s belief in its own perfection, whilst instilling a profound sense of entitlement which pervades the German political atmosphere today, leaving the country horrified - literally - by the vehemence of change’s insistence banging on its door. Nowhere was this smugness better illustrated than by the following publication from 2020 - nothing screams ‘top’ or ‘hubris’ quite like a popular book with a title like this:

Small wonder then that the best selling title of the last quarter 2024 was Wolfgang Münchau’s eminently readable book “Kaput”. Who knows perhaps this a now marker for the bottom?

Berlin in Waiting: What the Merz-SPD Coalition Means for Germany’s Next Chapter

As you read this Merz’s CDU/CSU and SPD have put pen to paper, after a brisk 45-day sprint—a near-record in the annals of German coalition haggling — and produced a 148 page coalition agreement titled “Responsibility for Germany,” a name that sounds as sober and heavy as a Bundestag plenary session on a rainy Thursday. Finalized on April 9, this pact sets the policy tone for the next four years—if it survives the next few hurdles, which it appears it will. To many conservatives, coming hot on the heels of Merz’s coordinated last minute misappropriation of the old parliamentary majorities to ram through a constitutionally anchored €1 trillion defence and infrastructure spending program with the help of the Green Party, it represents no less than a fundamental betrayal of both election promises made and, more painfully, of fundamental conservative values. Merz it seems has taken a leaf or perhaps a whole chapter out of the merkelian playbook and run roughshod over the guardrails that previously defined what most adherents thought were the principles and tenets of the Christian Democratic political code. Apparently, it is all over bar the shouting.

The Last Box to Tick: SPD's Rank-and-File Weigh In

While party leaders have shaken hands and posed for the cameras, the agreement isn’t yet locked in. The SPD has handed the final word to its 358,000-strong membership. The internal vote runs through April 29. It’s not just symbolic—at least 20% turnout is required, and the majority must say yes. If they do - and it looks very much as if they will - Friedrich Merz is on track to be elected Chancellor by the Bundestag on May 6 or 7. If not? Well, we’re staring down the barrel of snap elections

At the moment, the SPD leadership is projecting confidence. The youth wings, ever the skeptical left flank, have raised their voices—particularly around migration and fiscal leeway—but the broader party seems resigned, if not entirely enthused. Although personally I find that “lack of enthusiasm” gob-smackingly arrogant given the not unimportant detail that the SPD lost the last election with a resounding crash, dragged down by scandal, incompetence and its clinging to the sceptre of power only by dint of its coalition with the idealogically deranged and economically destructive Green Party. For them to be even part of the next government is due only to the even greater political incompetence displayed by Merz’ CDU in categorically ruling out any negotiations with the AfD. (The AfD being the current “right wing extreme” but soon to be “national conservative” party to whom the cartel parties have conspired to apply the Voldemort "they who must not be named” treatment despite them currently showing the largest share of the popular vote - you can’t make this stuff up).

A Coalition of Calculation

This is a government-in-waiting with numbers on its side: together, the CDU/CSU and SPD command 52% of Bundestag seats. No need for kingmakers, no parliamentary highwire acts. On paper, it’s a stable majority.

When I started writing this almost two weeks ago, I had an inkling that the SPD might pull a fast one on FlipFlop Freddy at the last moment and ditch him and the CDU/CSU in favour of forming a Left-Green-Loony Left minority government and hoisting Merz by his own anti AFD petard. My thought was that having wrung unbelievable financial concessions from Merz who was bending over backwards to accomodate the Left factions and doubling down on his adamant refusal to even mentioning the AfD by name let alone, they could form a government knowing that the CDU/CSU would have to support any political initiatives they might wish to present to parliament as they would otherwise have to vote in opposition with AfD thus lending them (the hated AfD) the political legitimacy they are all so desparate to avoid.

Given that the German Bundestag is pretending the AfD don’t exist anyway and they the Lefties have got all they could ever ask for in terms of financial munificence, if you do the math excluding the AfD, then the SPD-Green-Loony left represent 269 seats of (officially 630) but without the AfD’s 152 seats (which don’t exist because they shouldn’t) of 478 making a 56% majority (just a tick less than the real majority CDU/CSU would have in a coalition with the AfD (57.1%). It is not going to happen obviously, as the SPD now have everything they could desire in a maximalist version of the tail wagging the dog, without running the risk of a rapprochement between the old conservatives and the new “national conservatives” to their right, but it was an interesting thought experiment. (Nb: watch the current fascinating rebranding of the AfD from “far right extremist” to “national conservatives” as the CDU/CSU prepares the ground for a possible coalition with the AfD when this unhappy Frankenstein of a government finds itself out of runway sometime in the next two years).

Fluke or Genius?

As it happens the railroading of a massive spending bill through the Bundestag, upending decades of German fiscal responsibility and reputation for boneheaded opposition to anything resembling debt financed infrastructure spending, could not have come at a better time. Under irresistable pressure from the Trump/Vance threat of withdrawing the security umbrella under which Europe has arranged itself since the end of WW II, Germany found itself faced with the unavoidable necessity of upping the ante in respect of its military spending, but constrained by its own (equally idiotic) constitutionally enshrined debt brake. Eh voila! with the aid of some breathtaking chutzpe and parliamentary shenanigans, Merz magically created the two thirds parliamentary majority required to change the constitution and the debt ceiling prohibition by handing the SPD and Green parties the very thing he and his party had brought them to fall over, through a successful legal challenge via the constitutional court. FlipFlop Freddy has demonstarted a level of rhetorical and principle acrobatic prowess hitherto unseen in a German postwar politician. You have to hand it to him.

Within a fortnight this new €1 trillion infrastructure spending bonanza was looking like just the thing the old continent needed when faced with an apparent Trumpian tariff chaos and all the depressionary effects that would have on an export dependent Germany and by implication the rest of the EU. Now suddenly out of nowhere Germany has €1 trillion of new money to boost domestic investment and consumption and Merz’s ambush is looking positively prescient and like a far-seeing political genius, navigating the stormy waters of geopolitical disruption and positioning Germany perfectly for its leadership role in the new post US hegemonic order.

Except I don’t believe it.

This post hoc rationalisation of an outcome that was only ever intended to pre-empt the blocking power of a new political adversary in the Bundestag at any price and buy off the SPD as his only possible coalitionary partner, does not stand up to much scrutiny. It reminds me of my attempts to throw a kitchen towel across the room and find it landing perfectly on the hook. Completely unrepeatable no matter how clever it might look to whoever is standing around witnessing it. In fact I would probably assign more strategic intent to my attempt than to Merz’s because at least I was performing the act with precisely that intended outcome no matter how unlikely I might have felt my probability of achieving it might have been.

It is saying something about the level of disruption and uncertainty unleashed on the world since Liberation Day on the 2nd April by the new Administration in the White House, that the poltical situation in Germany could appear settled and normal against the current background and perhaps, God moving in His mysterious ways, His wonders to perform, has created seeming order out of previous chaos just at the right time and perhaps Flip Flop Freddy, having expended so much personal and political capital to put himself within touching distance of his desparately covetted Chancellorship will recognise the gift that time and circumstance have handed him and become the leader that Germany and Europe needs. Stanger things have happened in this best of all possible worlds.

My apologies to my regular readers for testing your patience over the past two months of sparse publication and thank you for your continued interest and support. Normal service is now being resumed…

To save you looking up the seat distribution by party in the current 21st German Parliament.

Disruptive Technology

Early exposure to technological disruption - whether positive or negative - often shapes entrepreneurs' later approach to innovation and business management. A powerful example of this is Andrew Carnegie’s family experience in Edinburgh, Scotland in the first half of the 19th Century, where his father was one of many private hand-loom operators to whom the job of weaving cotton into cloth was outsourced, in a distributed raw materials processing model. From The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie and the Gospel of Wealth, we learn that "The change from hand-loom to steam-loom weaving was disastrous to our family. My father did not recognise the impending revolution, and was struggling under the old system. His looms sank greatly in value..."

Worse perhaps than the actual fact of technological disruption was Mr. Carnegie Snr.’s unwillingness to accept the reality of this profound technological advancement and the subsequent obsolescence of his capital and skill. This unwillingness to accept translated itself into depression and a sense of victimhood which prevented him from that most important of survival responses, adaptation. It did not take long for the Carnegie family to become destitute and only with the assistance of family and friends were they able to scratch together the wherewithal necessary to pay for the family’s passage to America, in the hope of finding work, income and a restoration of their fortune and dignity in the new country. The rest, as they say, is history, at least as far as Andrew is concerned - his father’s subsequent fate was not further commented on in his numerous biographies.

The early experience of the devastating effects of innovation profoundly shaped Carnegie's approach to technology. From victim to victor: while Carnegie's father was ruined by technology, Andrew became one of its greatest beneficiaries by embracing and investing in innovations at every stage of his career.

I have thought of this story often in the past year, whilst watching and reflecting on the changes being wrought within the marketing services industry as a new wave of technological innovation in the shape of AI cut and continues to cut broad swathes through a sector previously thought to be more or less immune to it. One of my best friends runs a highly successful boutique marketing services business in the US which has been around now for some three decades and we talk often about the profound changes taking place and the damage being done to participants in that market. He is unusual in that he has always maintained a deep “tech bench” in his business, rather than being exclusively staffed by creatives, writers and account managers with logistics skills. He is acutely sensitive to the emergence of new technological innovations and to the flow of technological adoption in the component parts of his industry and has been quick to evolve his firm’s offerings as paradigms shift. He was, for instance, early in recognising that the “website building” bonanza was becoming commoditised in the early teen years of the new millennium and responded by shuttering that offering entirely by 2015 and moving to higher value added digital marketing services. In the early ‘20s he recognised that the constant manipulation of the Google algorithm and the proliferation of content was destroying the efficacy of the previous SEO-based approach to marketing with its focus on clicks and reframed his firm’s offering away from that to a more targeted content and email nurturing focus in service of genuine business development for his primarily B2B clientele.

In late 2023 he saw the potential for both disruption and productivity being offered by the emergence of AI, notably Chat-GPT, Claude and other early providers and directed his tech team to begin building a specialised content writing tool for digital marketing. Within six months he was telling me that the quality of content production from the algorithm, given their ability to write highly specific prompts, was matching the creative output of his best writers and within nine months was able to create entire strategy briefs, extracted from deep subject matter and industry research. In combination with other AI based process tools, the technology can now identify innovative ideal customer typologies, simulate accurate target customer group responses, draft individualised campaign emails, extract the emails, pen Linked In posts, create and illustrate in-depth white papers, blog posts and other content and then execute the campaign, whilst constantly monitoring the feedback and results, as well as adjusting the campaign in a constant feedback loop to optimise the responses. All this can be designed and executed within an hour rather than the weeks and months a well-staffed agency would have needed to have expended in time and resources not even a year ago.

Google and Open AI’s new Deep Research tools, recently unveiled, are capable of doing this and more, if not for free then as good as, whilst producing both master and doctoral thesis level research papers which meet the highest standards of scholastic benchmarking. The ability of even a highly capable small firm to out-innovate the competition in the face of such rapid technological innovation and distribution is severely limited - it is becoming impossible profitably to outrun or outsmart this wave at its current velocity.

The results of all this innovation is breathtaking in its scope for productivity enhancement, i.e. increasing the output for a given quantity of labour or maintaining a specific level of output for a significantly reduced quantity of labour. In the case of AI derived marketing services (which are complex but not rocket science level complex) the reductions in time (the single most important factor in the provision of services to OEM customers) and labour, whilst potentially increasing quality and process efficiency are proving to be exponential. It is no exaggeration to say that the verb “decimation” (which literally means the removal of every tenth) is insufficient to describe the level of destruction of firms and jobs currently being experienced by this industry, many of whose participants do not even know what has hit them yet. I have not seen any reliable figures for what is likely to happen to the population of this industry, but given the current disintermediation and impossible-for-humans-to-match productivity increases it would not surprise me if at the end (which will come sooner than I dare predict) the small to medium sized marketing services firm in its current form will have gone the way of hand loom weavers.

My friend and a few others like him will be fine - if exhausted - as they, like Carnegie before them, understand the challenge posed by technological innovation and have the mental agility, technical competence and thought leadership capabilities to re-invent themselves. They are Schumpeterian heroes who can ride the wave of innovation and creative destruction, by letting go of previous paradigms and deeply understanding the constant underlying social need of their customers. Firms will always need to market to develop business and grow, just how they do it will be subject to change in paradigms of what is both possible and effective. It is as sure as eggs are eggs that the power of AI content and distribution, if applied to the (now) old paradigm of marketing, will break it and inflate the concept and quality of “content” to the point of zero utility. The new firms and leaders will be the ones who both recognise that and formulate a new paradigm, whatever that looks like.

Why this is Important

Obviously this is important stuff if you are in marketing services, but most people aren’t. What “most people” however are working in is in Services. It currently breaks down like this:

1. Services: 76.4%

2. Industry: 17.61%

3. Agriculture: 0.94%

Within the services sector, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) recognizes several major subcategories in official GDP statistics:

1. Professional and business services

2. Real estate, rental, and leasing

3. Educational services, health care, and social assistance

4. Finance and insurance

5. Wholesale trade

6. Retail trade

7. Information

8. Arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation, and food services

9. Transportation and warehousing

10. Utilities

As of Q1 2023, the top service industries by contribution to GDP were:

1. Professional and business services: $3.5 trillion (13% of GDP)

2. Real estate, rental, and leasing: $3.3 trillion (12% of GDP)

3. Educational services, health care, and social assistance: $2.3 trillion (9% of GDP)

4. Finance and insurance: $2.0 trillion (8% of GDP)

The service sector's share of the US economy has been growing over time, with private services-producing industries reaching an all-time high of 16,949.30 USD Billion in the third quarter of 20245. This trend is expected to continue, with projections indicating further growth in service-based industries, particularly in areas such as software publishing, data processing, and health care services. (Source Perplexity).

Further enquiry makes clear that pretty much every sector and sub-category of GDP is being and will continue to be disrupted, impacted and reshaped by the onset and adaption of this new technology and its promise of exorbitant increases in productivity.

Manufacturing has long been used to the relentless progress of innovation and indeed one (I) might argue that as the cost of labour (specifically through the increased tax burden placed on labour by the expanding welfare state) has been systematically made more and more expensive, the drive to increase productivity at the expense of the labour force has been a constant factor of manufacturing innovation at least since the end of the 19th Century. Manufacturing enterprises are, in other words, used to the constant replacement of low and mid-skilled manual labour by technology and at the same time the upgrading of labour from blue to white collar categories with associated higher levels of remuneration.

I would argue that the services industries have not, until today, had to face anything like the level of disruptive productivity pressure with which the manufacturing industries have had to contend and that they are singularly badly equipped to deal with the extent and the velocity of the change now barrelling down the pike. My experience in a ringside seat of the marketing services industry is leading me to the conclusion that the speed of replacement will make the fate of the hand-loomers or indeed the experience of the steel, shipbuilding, tooling, electronic components, durable goods, automotive and any other industries you can think of look like a stroll in the park. The last technological wave (see table below) - the so-called ICT (Semi Conductors, Software and Information technology - alongside bio technology) wave, created and expanded and indeed enabled the workforce in most services industries and where there was productivity enhancing software innovation (think the individual PC and - God forbid - the Windows platform) they created as much extra work as they saved time, so that productivity increases were driven by increased volume and less by increased efficiency of process.

from Herman Mark Schwartz’ “Will AI Generate a New Schumpeterian Growth Wave?”~ American Affairs Journal Q4/24

The current mental health and exhaustion crisis suffered primarily by service and knowledge workers is a testament to the fact that life has not been materially enhanced by those actually having to work with these technologies on the ground.

This time round, in the 6th Wave - it is a different kettle of fish entirely.

I suspect that the time lag between the adoption of the technology by the upstream clients of the service industry and the ability of the displaced workforce made redundant by that technology to retrain and reintegrate into the workforce will be longer and more painful than any other technological innovation wave than we have experienced in the 250 year post Enlightenment industrial age. Which brings me to my next and most important supposition.

Unacceptable inequalities will break the system

Left leaning economists and pretty much all social scientists (no need to add the epithet socialist to social scientists because, well, nomen est omen), particularly those who celebrated Thomas Piketty’s wholly indigestible tract on Capital, have forced our attention to the increasing levels of disparity between the ultra rich, the fabled 1% or the top 10% and the rest.

In the US the top 10% own almost 80% of the wealth and the bottom 90% 21%. I would bet that the next 10% own 90% of that 21% giving the bottom 80% as good as no share of the national wealth. These are indeed numbers to get any compassionate activist heart pounding in fierce indignation.

Only it is a straw man. The poor you will always have with you, somebody once said about 2,000 years ago in a distant corner of the Roman Empire. The above definition is based on a narrow concept of wealth and makes no mention of the overall level of national treasure or the benefits derived by those who live and work in a society with high levels of national productivity or GDP per capita.

The Wealth to Income chart shows a continuous upward trend since the 1990s and explains this as the result of the transfer of large amounts of assets to the “inheritor” generation.

What the study (for the Chinese Institute of Sociology and using data from the wonderfully named Wealth Inequality database - you just know what sort of people are going to be working there) fails to mention is the enormous inflation that precisely those assets that constitute their definition of wealth have undergone through the debasement of national money systems and distortional interest rate policies in place since roughly 1994 when China decided to impose its will unilaterally on the world’s financial system.

Whilst we can argue until the cows come home about what the acceptable level of disparity between the wealth/income of the wealthiest section of a society vis a vis the rest might be, we will hardly ever find a consensus. What we know for sure is that this statistic will be weaponised whenever politicians start reaping the fall out from their interventionist policies, monetary debasement, overspending and general misdirection of the economy, something that is unfolding before our eyes and explains the increased interest in ramping up the politics of envy.

However I surmise that there is much greater explosive potential in an altogether different state of inequality within civil society and which could become untenable in the evolving AI revolution. Namely the disparity between the public and private sector workforces. Public sector workforces in most advanced countries, whilst not having quite the same level of overall average compensation on an hourly wage comparative basis do have a range of significant advantages over their private sector counterparts. In the US there are roughly 174.5 million workers of which 9.8 million are self-employed, 23 million public sector (broadly defined but not including those NGOs and other entitities receiving more than 50% of their revenue from public funding sources) leaving roughly 141 million in the private sector. This translates as a public sector employment quota of approximately 13.1%.

This 13.1% of the workforce has a massively disproportionate impact on actual GDP as the statistics show. The public sector share of GDP in the US, as measured by government spending to GDP, has fluctuated over the past three decades. Here's an overview of its evolution:

1. Historical average: From 1900 until 2023, government spending to GDP in the United States averaged 25.68 percent.

2. Recent levels: In 2023, government spending was last recorded at 34.4 percent of GDP.

3. Peak during crisis: The ratio reached an all-time high of 47.01 percent of GDP in 2020, likely due to increased government spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

4. Current trend: As of 2024, government spending to GDP is expected to reach 37.50 percent by the end of the year.

5. Near-future projections: The ratio is projected to trend around 38.50 percent of GDP in 2025 and 39.00 percent of GDP in 2026

In addition to a disproportionate weight of government’s share of GDP relative to the number of people employed in the sector (which is definitely not the result of their higher productivity), the benefits that come with public sector employment are well known. Perplexity responded to my query on the main structural differences as follows

The main differences in employment experience between public and private sector employees can be summarized as follows:

Wages and Compensation

• Public sector employees generally earn higher median wages than private sector counterparts. In 2022, the median wage for public sector employees was €52,288, compared to €37,286 in the private sector2. [NB 40% higher]

• However, private sector salaries have more potential for growth, especially for high-level positions like directors and executives1.

• Private sector offers more flexibility in salary ranges and performance-based pay increases1.

Benefits and Pensions

• Public sector employees typically receive more generous pension contributions. 47% of public sector workers had employer pension contributions of at least 20%, compared to only 2% in the private sector1.

• Public sector jobs often offer better job security and stability15.

• Public sector employees generally have more annual leave days. For example, 30 days in the public sector compared to 22 days in some private sector jobs6.

Working Conditions

• Public sector jobs often provide more regular working hours and less overtime, leading to better work-life balance5.

• Private sector jobs may require longer hours, especially in senior or client-facing roles5.

• Public sector work environments are often less stressful due to fewer competitive pressures1.

Career Progression and Development

• Public sector careers typically have more structured and predictable career paths5.

• Private sector offers more opportunities for rapid advancement, especially in fast-growing fields5.

• Public sector provides more cross-departmental career mobility1.

Contract Types

• Public sector employment is generally more stable, with fewer risks of redundancy or business failure1.

• Private sector offers more variety in job roles and company types1.

Work Impact and Satisfaction

• Public sector jobs often involve implementing policies that directly serve the community, providing a strong sense of purpose5.

• Private sector jobs may offer satisfaction through problem-solving, innovation, and driving economic growth5.

Overall, while public sector jobs tend to offer better stability, work-life balance, and benefits, private sector positions generally provide higher potential earnings, more flexibility, and diverse career opportunities.

~Perplexity Query

The main bone of contention is - and in my estimation will certainly be in future - the almost complete absence of any pressure to increase productivity or service quality which is refered to obliquely in the section “Working Conditions” as “less stressful due to fewer competitive pressures”. I surmise that a massive dislocation in private sector employment due to the introduction of AI technology predominantly but not exclusively in the service sector entirely explained by the unavoidable need to increase productivity will lead to such a screaming disparity in the risk-reward profile of public and private sector jobs that it will become socially unacceptable to maintain the status quo.

It will become impossible to justify the maintenance of safe haven, low to no productivity employment of the large cohorts of form fillers and progress blockers using their almost 40% of GDP to stifle, hinder, complicate, burden, and frustrate the real value adding economic activity which finances the whole apparatus.

As AI destroys the employment prospects of literally millions of medium skill, medium productivity workers and self-employed by automating medium skill and medium complexity processes and tasks, it will become increasingly obvious that this technology could and indeed should be doing exactly the same to public sector with its low complexity, low skill work flows and processes, many of which are wholly unnecessary to the efficient functioning of a value creating economy and serve only to support a metastazing state and federal apparatus of redistribution and ideology management.

This, I believe is where the proverbial rubber will hit the road or, if you prefer the metaphor, where the faeces make contact with the ventilation system.

The Deconstruction of the Nation State

I will go out on a limb here, but preface my contention with a very short history detour.

The nation state as we understand it today was called into existence in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, signed and ratified by the main proponents of what became known as the Thirty Years War. This period from 1618 to 1648 was at that point the bloodiest and most destructive period of war, famine and destruction hitherto seen on European soil. It settled once and for all the question of religious freedom by granting the signatories the right to establish whatever faith regime they deemed appropriate for their territory. No longer was the see of Rome and the Holy Roman Emperor viz. the Pope going to be able to dictate the spiritual content and practice of a territory - they would from that moment onwards be at liberty to define their own practice - Protestant, Catholic or whatever - within their territory. This presupposed a clear definition of what that territory was and so boundaries - borders - emerged to demarcate the limits of those new territories. It’s not that they hadn’t existed before, but they had been vaguer and less important from a practical perspective. Now they really mattered.

And so began the great consolidation of territories and principalities which set in motion the demarcation of areas of political administration and centralised management of power that we today recognise as nation states. Louis XIV made the first attempt at establishing France as the primary imperial power in Western Europe, challenging the Habsburg empire in the East but it wasn’t until 1798 and the establishment of the first French Republic that the modern State with its sense of absolute power replaced monarchy as the modern expression of state organisation.

William Rees-Mogg in his seminal treatise on political organisation in the information age “The Sovereign Individual” ties together a number of strands of what I will call libertarian or anti-state arguments and weaves them into a coherent argument for the end of that period of State monopolies on power. He argues that the beginning of the end began with the Fall of the Berlin Wall exactly 200 years after the French Revolution and will inevitably lead to the deconstruction of the nation state and the embedded conviction that this form of social organisation is the ONLY viable one in “an increasingly complex world” (one of my least favourite clichés).

The underlying logic for the nation state was, as he and many others have explained, that there exist significant economies of scale and necessary minimum sizes in order to optimize the returns to violence, which lie at the heart of the business model. In a rapidly industrialising world (already visible in 1650 with the expanding use of gunpowder into the military technology arena), a large-scale standing army represented minimum table stakes for the acquisition of land and resources as well as for defence. A large army required three things above all else - a population large enough to draft and if necessary replenish men of fighting age and of good enough health, whose drafting would not impair the ability of the country to maintain its agricultural base. Secondly the population had to be large enough to be able to tax at non-ruinous rates in order to support both the army and thirdly the population needed to be of sufficient size and quality to be able to train and sustain the bureaucracy necessary to administer it and organise the tax collection. This model - unquestioningly dedicated to size and scale - successfully prosecuted for so long worked until it started not to. As we saw in the collapse of the Soviet Empire, eventually efficiency (the ratio of input to output) wins hands down over effectiveness (output), and never more clearly than when efficiency improving technologies (most if not all of them) emerge.

The End of the Nation State

My prediction is that we are now witnessing the slow death of the Nation State as the prime organising heuristic for mankind and that the coming crisis - framed so well by Neil Howe in his “Fourth Turning” - will see both the destruction of the superstructure of statist and its faux wealth fundament based on a corrupt and abused system of fiat money. The catalysts for this phase of creative destruction will be threefold:

Firstly the enormous pressure that AI will place on the entire public governance system massively to increase its productivity and efficiency, a pressure which this form of government has always resisted with great effort, but which in the face of typhoons of creative destruction in the private sector it will be unable to resist, undermining its very reason for being;

Secondly the damage to the tax and wealth base which the creative destruction will engender in the drawdown phase of this current cycle (and which I believe will begin in earnest in the early part of 2027) meeting an unsustainable burden of debt, will stop the model in its tracks and force it into rapid retreat. A retreat from which it will not recover because

Thirdly, the product of the ICT wave preceding the one now beginning is a level of interconnectedness, education and access to information on a scale never seen before. Put simply, too many people are too well-informed and too autonomous to continue to submit to the sort of tyrannical exercise of extractive power that has been the norm in both the obviously authoritarian (communist/fascist) modus operandi or the more subtle and therefore longer lived but no less extractive “Federal” democratic system over the past 200 years.

Government that can no longer provide the basic protection and sanctity of law that is its only reason for being in the minds of its customers and whose demonstrable inability to adapt the same technologies that markets and creative forces have impressed on the private markets, is out of runway.

If I had to guess, then this fourth turning we are currently in will be the one in which the oppressive inefficiency that an out-of-date and no longer technologically necessary form of human organisation imposes will begin to recede. I believe it will be replaced by human scale, much smaller autonomous units of social cooperation whether at state or local level and that we will see the rapid re-emergence of culturally homogenous principalities rendering the geo-political map of the second half of the 21st Century more reminiscent of the map of Europe in the 16th Century. As a mental model, think the City States of the Hanseatic League, but at a global level and not just confined to the Baltic and North Seas. This reimagining of the optimal form of self-organisation to promote human flourishing, free trade and genuine prosperity may seem utopian but it has existed in individual mini states since our species began organising itself into larger groups. The primary reason that we are told repeatedly that this is impossible is because the that information is being propagated by the very people who have the most to lose from its realisation.

If you haven’t seen it before, then take a few minutes to watch this animation of Europe’s changing borders and countries over the past 1,000 years and keep an eye on the date clock up in the left hand corner. And then tell me that the way it looks now is the only way it can ever look again….

Writing to his mistress, Sophie Volland, in August 1759, the great encylopedist, man of letters and serial womaniser Denis Diderot congratulated himself (and presumably his chére Sophie) on the longevity of their relationship by writing

“La magie de la constance! La plus difficile et la plus rare de nos vertus.”

[The wonder of constancy! The rarest and most difficult of our virtues]

I have always found this self-congratulatory exclamation of constancy hilarious. Presumably Mme. Diderot was not quite as enthusiastic about her husband’s achievement and would have had a slightly different perspective on the “vertu” bit, but whatever you might have to say about the specific circumstances of the quotation, Diderot was definitely onto something with his description of the difficulty and relative rarity of maintaining anything, especially a virtue, for an extended period of time.

Benjamin Graham, in his excellent, but seriously under-read book “Storage & Stability” wrote in the Foreward, in respect of fiat currencies that

“All these inventions have one feature in common to distinguish them from the standard money of an earlier time. Their value and their stability depend upon the wills of men, mortal men, more certainly consistent than the rest of us. The dollar, the pound, the mark, the franc could be given a higher or lower purchasing power by administrative fiat. The financial authorities who bear this responsibility mean honestly to hold the value of money to a fairly definite level, but muscles tire and nerves falter.”

~ Benjamin Graham, Storage & Stability, 1937 [emphasis mine]

Given that “muscles tire and nerves falter”, constancy, or doing something worthwhile but difficult for an extended period of time is, well ‘difficile’ and we are hard-wired to avoid pain today even when the promise of joy tomorrow, or several tomorrows hence, beckons. The ‘jam today or jam tomorrow’ conundrum, the ability willingly and deliberately to delay gratification (not a subject the keepers of mistresses are particularly qualified to hold forth on - cucullus non facit monachum, as it were), is one our species has struggled with since the dawn of time and probably well before that. I would conjecture that the entire discipline and psychology of economics, that odd collection of activities Ludwig von Mises referred to as praxeology or the study of human action, is at its core an examination of how we express preferences and manage our requirements across time and in the face of our urge to have now what theoretically we could have much more of down the road. Carpe diem or perhaps not.

All of which I mention by way of introduction to a fascinating conversation in which I was privileged to engage this week around the subject of long-term relationships in business in particular long-term relationships between investors and their general partners.

On the surface, it seems to present as a false dichotomy, one not even deserving of reflection. Of course you would want long-term relationships. What other rational objective could you have but to - at least before the fact - establish a relationship at all. My conversation partner - a gentleman in the fullest sense of the word, with decades of investing experience at the highest level of professional excellence - countered that it was by no means obvious that that objective was either the only one or the necessarily the most rational. He, in his practice, was constantly having to defend his conviction that relationships per se were better for business than what he referred to as a ‘transactional’ approach.

What do we mean when we say we seek a long-term relationship with our investors? 

We make the distinction between “transactional” and “relationship-based business activity.

In our minds “transactional” means exploiting our advantage and negotiating the best deal for ourselves every time. In this mode of operation, every deal is a fresh start and bears little or no relationship to past or future interactions. The deck is shuffled and dealt freshly every time. Transaction economics is adversarial and takes no account of the individuals on the other side of the negotiating table.

“Relationship-based” on the other hand is principally concerned with the individuals at the table and sees them not so much as adversaries but as partners, pursuing reasonably well-aligned and similar objectives. This paradigm actively precludes the pressing for maximum advantage. It is a fuzzier concept that is at its core “non-adversarial”. It conceives a single interaction not as a unique activity unrelated to the past or future, but as a link in a chain of interactions, each one building on the last and reinforcing the next.

Benjamin Franklin referred to the return on ethical behaviour in business as “enlightened altruism” and that the power of “doing well by doing good” was never underestimated by the wise businessman (see “Poor Richard’s Almanac”) whilst Warren Buffett in my oft-quoted Owner’s Manual refers to his principle as follows

I wrote about the deceptive nature of friendship in business a few months ago in a piece entitled “Forgive Us Our Trespasses”. In it, I described my own oft-repeated failure to recognize that a temporary alignment of business objectives along with perhaps a certain personal empathy is not enough the meet the criteria of a true friendship and that a business friend is possibly only a few rungs up on the dependability scale from a political friend. Once the mutual objective realigns, even if only slightly, the transactional nature of the arrangement reveals itself and raw self-interest takes over. And there is nothing inherently good or bad about this, it is just how the game is played.

So this is not about friendship per se, but about ensuring durability to the alignment of interest from which, no doubt about it, friendship may eventually result. The question is why bother and how to achieve that objective?

What are the Advantages to NOT regarding each Deal with a “transactional” Mindset?

Economically, the rationale behind building relationships is that they enable future transactions to be executed with significantly reduced friction and costs. Reduced friction expresses itself as

• Time saved: Investors can be approached and secured quickly without the need for intensive priming, explaining, and convincing to build understanding and most importantly trust;

• Reduced costs:  repeat business with an existing investor base dramatically reduces search, brokerage, transaction, and other costs, leading to better margins and/or the ability to offer better more competitive fee structures;

• Speed: Opportunities can be secured and capitalized on quickly if the organisation is confident in its ability to tap into existing relationships which may not even require anything more than a phone call and verbal commitment. 

• Referrals: Expansion of the available pool of capital happens geometrically when existing satisfied investors feel comfortable enough to recommend their friends and business partners to invest alongside them and at no (or minimal) cost to the General Partner.

It is a truism to state that business from existing customers is significantly more profitable and cost-effective than business from new ones. The NPV of the accumulated benefits to building and maintaining long-term relationships is enormous.

There is a further aspect to the deliberate nurturing of trusted relationships, namely that they are more energy efficient. Our brains consume in the region of 60% of the total energy requirement of the body. Thinking burns joules and they require replenishing. As a result of this basic fact, we have become adept at evolving strategies massively to reduce the necessity of burning precious fuel in order to make decisions. Often these come in the form of heuristics or little mental models that are triggered like macros in our minds and lead to actionable outcomes. All our prejudices are based on pre-packaged decisions about how a certain kind of people “are” and how we need to respond to them. Encountering a hooded person, likely a male on a street corner at night, we do not have the time or inclination to engage into an examination of their personality or specific history. We do not even have the time or inclination to ask whether they might be a boxer in training, or perhaps a monk with a modern sense of dress. We react instinctively, our body floods with adrenalin and we prepare for conflict and flight.

Inversely we have heuristics that allow us to build bridges of trust over which we can walk to transact. Those are usually some form of social proof - the recommendation of a friend for instance - or reciprocity or authority or any number of other “energy saving” devices that shorten our due diligence process. Building relationships through personal behaviour and experience creates the strongest bond of trust within the narrow field of relevance to the decision. Just because I trust you to look after a portion of my investment fund, doesn’t necessarily mean I would trust you to guide me on a climbing expedition. But once I trust you to run the fund, I don’t have to make that decision from scratch every time anew.

What Behaviours support the Development of Long-Term Relationships?

Whilst discussing the question of “how do we have to behave today in order to earn a long-term relationship of trust?” I remembered Pastor A.R. Bernard’s book “Four Things Women Want from Men” and was curious to see if his famous guide on how to build a lasting, supportive marriage - probably the most difficult of relationship structures - might yield insights valuable for framing the investor-principal or LP-GP relationship.

Turns out it does. Pastor Bernard highlights four key behaviours that are the prerequisites of a stable long-term relationship, namely

1. Maturity: “ Maturity is when you stop making excuses and start making changes”

2. Decisiveness: “Decisiveness is insight in action”

3. Consistency: “Consistency requires congruence between values and actions”

4. Strength: “genuine strength is a matter of integrity”

I found it useful to attempt to adapt these four pillars to the relationship between the General Partner and Limited Partners, based on the fact that the GP always has an asymmetrical knowledge advantage over the LP whose capital he controls. The outcome is indeed helpful and apropos in describing how we have to be to earn the right to be a steward of capital over time:

1. Maturity → realistic appraisal of risk and reward, caution, understanding of the cycle, realistic appraisal of timings, not overpromising, conservative underwriting and investment parameters, downside protection, holistic view of the interests of all stakeholders.
   
   The following table - which deserves its own letter and indeed got one here - describes mature or “healthy man” psychology.
   
   

   

   (from Making of Men ~ Dr. Arne Rubinstein)
   the essence of which is the concept of maturity embedded in a sense of community and responsibility for the whole (relationships) rather than just the individual (transactional).
   

2. Decisiveness → ability to execute, move fast on opportunities, full commitment to the strategy, formulate responses to crises and emergencies, cut losses, (re-)negotiate financing terms if necessary, say “no” with authority - both to projects and investors.

3. Consistency → adherence to the investment thesis across markets and cycles, clear congruence between words and actions, transparency in communication, and reliable responses to both positive and negative outcomes. Observable efforts to be true to articulated values, even (especially) when doing so brings personal discomfort or disadvantage, clearly articulated and congruent philosophy.

4. Strength → Balance sheet quality, fiscal prudence, patience, calm under pressure, ability to concentrate, self-control, ability to stand up to threats, humility, care for those in positions of weakness or dependency, willingness to lead, ability to keep things simple, experienceable discipline and emotionally safe culture of kindness in the workplace, reputation for excellence in the marketplace (with vendors, local government, partners).

These are behaviours embedded in positive values and expressed in guiding principles that influence and direct every single action every day.

At the end of our discussion, my friend paused, reflecting, and added “for all the rational arguments, I guess we behave that way because, well, it’s just the right thing to do and we feel a whole lot better when we do.”

And that is about the gist of it.

Yesterday marked a high watermark in the on-going hystericisation of public discourse in Europe as Elon Musk chatted inanely about German politics and space stations on Mars with Alice Weidel, the party chair and hopeful Chancellor candidate of the libertarian-conservative party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) while Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta, the company he controls and which owns the ubiquitous social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, will be dialling back the odious “fact-checking” departments, those ultra-political left wing thought police cells that had embedded themselves into almost every public content producing and mediating internet platform institution of note. As Eugyppius has noted in his regular acerbic commentary on the unfolding clownshow that is German public adminsitration, these two events, exacerbated by Mr. Musk’s previous wholly unacceptable interference in the sanctity of the hitherto unblemished German democratic political process, have sent the talking heads and establishment politicians along with their mandarins into what can only be described as a hissy fit of hitherto unexperienced dimensions. Please read Eugyppius’ posts from the last two weeks on this melodrama of establishment entitlement for a timeless lesson in hypocrisy and power abuse.

When not particularly intelligent but deeply entrenched and privileged functionaries who have grown accustomed to having things their own way suddenly find themselves under concerted pressure to accept responsibility for the appalling outcomes of their policies and mismanagement, you get to see who they really are and what they stand for. The EU - an institution I have loathed for its arrogance, lack of accountability, corruption, stifling of entrepreneurial energy, self-serving, economic ignorance and wastefulness since its inception - has fostered and facilitated the ascendency of a particular type of political functionary. Superficially well-schooled, bland, metropolitan, socialist but of the globalist managerial flavour, marinated in the virtues of the 17 UN Sustainability Charter SDGs, condescending to the peasantry and working classes (which includes everyone who doesn’t work, if that is right word, in government, administration or for the right NGOs) , ignorant of history, disdainful of national culture, and cloaked in the luxury beliefs that allow them to stand in their own virtuousness without having to suffer any of the consequences of them and lacking even a shred of what might be called worldly wisdom. This clever but profoundly ignorant class - who love being refered to as the elite - has been running the world according to its own tastes more or less untrammelled since the beginning of this century and nowhere with less trammells than in Brussells.

Used to making up its own rules without opposition, this autocratic and labyrinthine superstructure, running the second largest economic area on the planet is coming apart at the seams as we watch. Those seams are splitting under the combined pressure of the massive internal contradictions of its economic model - who thought that putting Germany and Greece into one currency with one interest rate policy was ever going to end well? - as well as its top down denial of the value citizens place on their own cultural integrity and its replacement with a cultural coding with all the heart-stirring power of an International Accounting Standards paper on the correct treatment of operating leases. (Here it is if you are having difficuties getting to sleep). One look at the previous beauty of the Deutschmark* or Franc bank notes compared to the current Euro notes tells you all you need to know about the care and dedication those responsible for issuing these notes felt towards their respective currencies):

By their fruits, ye shall know them…

The tenure of a miserably incompetent political caste is now coming to its inexorable and long overdue end and it hates it. With a shiny passion. It loathes those who painstakingly point out the manifest failure of its favourite policies - the Green Energy Transformation, the open border policy which sought to “redistribute” the world’s population more evenly in the name of multiculturalism and cheap labour, Safetyism, Woke ideology, rigid and backwards looking industrial policy, globalism and the undermining of national identity and of course inflationary fiscal policy financing the utopian fanatsies of a bureacracy on steroids.

The cows are now truly coming home to roost, as Belfast mayor Tommy Patton might have said (again). Growth has been scelrotic if not negative once real price increases across all factors of production are taken into account since the introduction of the Euro and only sheer bloody minded political willpower has kept the show on the road. Old Europe - and especially Germany - are way behind the rest of the world in terms of innovation and the build out of a digital infrastructure. Added to which are disastrous energy policies which are disproptionately affecting the industries on which Germany has become almost solely reliant and at the same hampering any attempt - if such there were - to catch up in the field of AI which itself - as any fule kno - requires egregious amounts of cheap energy to drive the processors. Not that Germany need worry about that of course: the time required to process planning application necessary to build an AI capable processing farm would ensure that such a venture would be DOA from the start.

The importation of millions of low to no skill migrants whose only interest in Europe is in milking the social security system for all it is worth is diluting national productivity at an alarming rate whilst concurrently strip mining the culture in places where that is at its most vulnerable. Tax burdens - direct and indirect - are accelerating and the cost of complying with the bureaucratic burden is virtually impossible for businesses already established and a huge disincentive to those thinking of investing in Europe.

(with thanks to The Econolog for the graph)

Again from Econolog’s recent post

If disruptive parties become part of more governments or even lead them, they will have their hands full with unwinding the most outrageous legacy policies, like the exit from conventional power generation (especially gas and nuclear), the phase-out of ICE cars from 2035, or unchecked immigration. While they are generally pro-business and pro-trade, they are very critical of the current political establishment consensus, and their vision for the EU is a much smaller role, not much more than a trade union.

The EU has maneuvered itself into a huge legitimacy problem. Its strategic, enormously costly recovery programs, from Barroso to Draghi, never addressed economic weaknesses and were nothing but energy transition programs in disguise – agenda instead of crisis response. The outcome has been an unmitigated disaster. As there is no democratic process in place to renew the EU, unlike the U.S., the only logical outcome will be that member countries develop a new nationalist perspective, ignoring central EU programs (the EU has no formal authority over member countries. EU legislation needs to be ratified in member countries’ parliaments), or even pursue an exit for which Great Britain has provided a template. Derivates of the term ‘Brexit’ swirl all around.

Considering the institutional forces, I don’t think there is much hope. As the old saying goes – today, the EU is standing on the brink of an abyss. Tomorrow, it will be one step ahead.

The EU has Failed ~ Econolog (Substack Jan 07. 25) [emphasis mine]

Germany is heading into an election a few weeks time, the outcome of which is highly uncertain. What is true is that the AfD - currently the second strongest party polling at around 21% - is being subjected to a barrage of opprobium from the established parties and their handmaidens in the mainstream media probably without precedent in the post war era. The ire and fury of the established political oligopoly in Germany is identical to that experienced by every single politically entrepreneurial party moving into the (significant) market space resulting from the constant drift leftwards by it.

The label “populist” which quickly morphs into “fascist” and in Germany the particularly inflammatory “far right” or “Nazi” epithet is literally all the uniparty have to throw at the newcomers now making hay as a consequence of their own inability to fasten themselves to what were previously defined as core conservative principles. Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Miloni, Nigel Farage, Alice Weidel, Viktor Orban and others whose policy programs represent a definite NO/NON/NEIN or NEM to the main planks of the globo-socialist platform prioritise national cultural interests way above those of non nationals whatever their migratory backgrounds. That quite reasonably resonates with those disadvantaged by the current regimes. The feather spitting and lawfare isn’t working very well and is predictably having exactly the opposite effect, increasing visibility, keeping the newcomers in the news and shining a spotlight on the incumbents own entitlement and inability to address the policy failures for which they are solely responsible. Having spent years deplatforming the AfD from mainstream political talk shows, it is rich irony indeed for the entire German establishment to be now crying foul when Alice Weidel finds herself invited to chat with Elon Musk, garnering an audience of over 300K on the X Space yesterday evening.

The lizards are working overtime to have Alice Weidel and her party banned or discredited before the election on the 23rd Feb. They will be unsuccessful no matter what rabbits they magic out of their lawfare hat. There is a strong sense that the real level of support for the AfD is much higher than the polls are currently showing due to the fact that years of “brown smearing” are making it difficult for middle of the road voters who are sensitive to surrounding opinions to admit to their sympathies and voting intentions. Recent calculations have put the AfD probable share of the vote at the ballot box much closer to 30%.

Whilst I have no idea whether Weidel will do in Germany what Herbert Kickl of the FPÖ in Austria managed to do in last September’s election and nudge out the establishment conservative party and its beyond useless Chancellor or whether if she does she will have to endure the same humiliation as Kickl did, when against all normal democratic practice the Bundespresident decided not to task him with forming a government, bypassing him instead for the establishment figureheads - who lost decisively - to see if they could form a coalition government. Only after they failed last week after 100 days of wasted time was Kickl asked to form the government that should have been his the day after the election. However the game is wide open and it is as sure as eggs are eggs that the shenanigans will not stop with the election results in February.

Sadly, the once lionine Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU is now reduced to a weak imitation of his former combatitive self and is driving legions of his former supporters into the arms of Alice Weidel and her party, so pissed off are they with the man who 15 years ago promised to simplify the German tax code and free the entrepreneurial spirits shackled by Merkel and her intransgience. Merz’ desperation to finally claim the Chancellorship that he believes he deserves is so obvious it is embarassing. He is evidently prepared to abandon all conservative principles in order to cut a deal with the Greens and their idiotic, authoritarian and economically illiterate leader Robert Habeck in order to claim his prize. But he won’t, claim it that is, at least not without suffering the same ignominious fate as his French counterpart Barnier. Of all the German politicians capable - both intellectually and by dint of his personality - of incorporating the AfD and their policy program into the CDU and neutralising the brown fringe of that party, Merz is the only one who could have done it and led a wholly recentralised conservative revival of the party of Adenauer, Erhard and Kohl back to the principled path which the cynical untethered Merkel crassly abandoned in her third term of office. I expect a French style contortion act as previous conservatives bend themselves out of shape trying to find minimum political common ground with the ragtag assemblage of leftist, Greens and Communists - anything to stop the populist cuckoos taking over the well-feathered establishment nest, hell bent on cutting the EU down to size and massively reducing its power, influence and policy dictating scope. Pathetic really.

And all this against a background of disruption, geo-political tension and fiscal over-extension not seen this side of 1945. Forecaster David Murrin in his latest Murrinations Forecast for 2025 (behind a paywall unfortunately) paints a dismal picture of what awaits the world in the next twelve months. Inflationary surge, off the charts bond yield increases, asset price collapse across the board, currency disruptions and war on a global scale pitting the Axis of Autocracy against the struggling US hegemon. Other independent thinkers and strategists, whilst less aggressively dismal, also tend towards the pessimistic for what has every appearance of a top of cycle period of inversion and draw down. A recent chart from Martin Barnes’ Debt Supercycle talk at Russell Napier’s Library of Mistakes lecture series was a favourite from last year’s harvest

His point being that the brutality of the maths of current spending and the compound effect of debt interest and deficits as far as the eye can see means that sometime between now and the point at the top right hand corner of the chart, the trajectory will be interupted and change forced through crisis. An “as you were” path is simply not going to happen.

My own belief is that the turbulence and volatility we are increasingly witnessing in all aspects of civil society - political, communal, geopolitical, financial - is indeed indicative of a deep structural crisis in its early stages. I believe that the Trump Presidency will be defined by two distinct phases, a first, lasting two years, in which animal spirits will be released and economic good times experienced across the board as those aspects of his policy platform which he can effect immediately will be delivered and a second phase - I am looking to Herbert Hoover as a role model - in which the economic realities of those policies and the accumulated pressure of fiscal deficits plus tariff-driven inflation and contraction will break the debt bubble once and for all. I concur with David Murrin’s overall thesis and his estimate of the cyclic peak but think he is mistaken in his timing. End of 2026 after the midterms in USA seems to me the most likely outcome, when the majority of now prominent doomsayers have been drowned out by the klaxons of market exuberance and their warnings forgotten. Europe will I suspect experience the US crack up boom of 25 -26 as at best stagnation but be fully immersed in the drawdown when it finally comes.

But for the moment the lizards are being driven out of office, no doubt to regroup and plot their return, so there’s that to celebrate. I am not sure it is going to make much difference.

A Happy and Prosperous New Year to you and thank you for your interest.

• See the wonderful book issued in 1995 by the Bundesbank to commemorate the new series of bank notes under the title “Von der Baumwolle zum Geldschein” (Verlag Fritz Knapp GmbH / ISBN 3-927951-82-X) for background on the composition of each note and the biographical details of the historical figures represented on them embedded into the design. The current Euro series lacks every aspect of those Bundesbankers love, intellectual enthusiasm and commitment to the cultural integrity of the new series of bank notes.

• I couldn’t fit this reference into the text but I suspect the German equivalent of the Hilary Clinton “basket of deplorables” moment from 2016 has to be the recent publication of a senior journalist’s contribution to political thought in book form
  

  

  Entitled “Too Stupid for Democracy” this staggeringly arrogant book by one Mark Schieritz, the political editor of the now unreadable weekly broadsheet publication “Die Zeit” (which many decades ago I used to enjoy reading) pulsates with the same disdain for the concerns and opinions of the non-establishment class that charaterises the Democratic and other erstwhile parties of the people. A better icon to represent the current cloistered thinking of an entirely disconnected class of privileged midwits it would hard to find. Please don’t read it - the title tells you all need to know.

( a free subscription to anyone who can name the two gentlemen in the silly hats without resorting to Google, Perplexity or asking Grandad. Answers in the comments.)

Commerce can operate in well-worn patterns or there can be various levels of discovery involved. The process of active discovery is entrepreneurship. This need not be commercial. It makes perfect sense to talk of political entrepreneurs.

So, if existing politicians and political Parties leave a “gap” in the political market—such as concerns amongst voters that are not being articulated—political entrepreneurs are likely to engage in market entry to target such gaps. Nigel Farage and Donald Trump—and national populism generally—are all examples of political entrepreneurship.² Such political entrepreneurship can extend to making differences between groups more salient than they previously were.^{3
~ Lorenzo Warby - ‘Capitalism’ and ‘capitalist’ are analytically dreadful terms (Substack)}

Lorenzo from Oz

‘Capitalism’ and ‘capitalist’ are analytically dreadful terms

A discussion of Kautilya’s (375-283BC) classic text the Arthashastra by a contemporary Indian economist, includes the following sentence…

Read more

2 years ago · 10 likes · 7 comments · Lorenzo Warby

What is a populist? Someone dangerous, apparently. A political agitator who appeals to the baser instincts of an (by implication) ignorant mass by promising them improvements to their lives which are unrealistic and therefore illusory. Someone who agitates against certain sections of society, placing the blame for current suffering on this or that sub-group and stigmatising them. A populist is socially divisive, unrealistic, emotional and economically irresponsible. Apparently.

In a commentary yesterday, the NZZ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) came to the defence of President Milei of Argentina, who has had more than his share of scorn and opprobrium poured on him by the the chattering and political classes since daring to run for office and even more ludicrously, by winning last year. His crime: being a populist and (worse still) a libertarian one at that. However

“The reforms are starting to take effect, though they demand significant sacrifices from the population. Argentina is enduring a severe recession. Poverty rates are rising, and the public sector—heavily bloated under Peronist rule—has already seen tens of thousands of jobs cut. As a result, unemployment is increasing, and consumer spending has plummeted. Nevertheless, there has been no mass uprising. The population largely supports the austerity measures, and the president’s popularity remains surprisingly high.

This popularity is often mistaken for populism. However, if a populist is a politician who panders to the people, makes unrealistic promises, and downplays problems, then Milei is the anti-populist. He promised voters nothing but “blood, sweat, and tears.” He stated bluntly: “No hay plata”—there is no money. After decades of economic mismanagement, there is nothing left to distribute. During his campaign, Milei prepared Argentina for tough times, yet he was elected with a clear 56% majority.

Another misconception is that Milei is a Latin American Donald Trump. While both share a flair for the dramatic and enjoy basking in each other’s light, they are worlds apart economically. Milei opposes almost everything Trump stands for: tariffs, protectionism, and industrial subsidies. Instead, he champions free trade, competition, and austerity. Unlike Trump, Milei doesn’t hide the fact that these measures are more challenging than state-provided welfare.”
- NZZ 5/12/24 “ Thema des Tages: Der argentinische Präsident ist ein Anti-Populist. Er mutet den Wählern harte Wahrheiten zu” (Translation and emphasis mine)

Currently we are being deluged by Populist leaders and their parties and are to understand that this, as any fule kno, is VERY DANGEROUS. Trump, Milei, Meloni, Orban, Le Pen, Farage, Holland’s Geert Wilders, Germany’s Alice Weidel and others too numerous to mention are all tarred with the same brush of populism and are subject to personal and incessant attacks from the traditional media and relentless defamation by State sponsored broadcasting institutions, our latter day Pravdas.

France’s government collapsed this week when Marine Le Pen’s Front Nationale block withdrew their support from Michel Barnier’s fragile government

Barnier is an old-school fiscal hawk and Le Pen is an old-school populist: so while Barnier was desperate to raise taxes and cut spending to get France’s yawning deficits back on a more sustainable track, Le Pen demanded that Barnier (for example) drop a proposed tax hike on electricity, and continue reimbursements for certain types of drugs.

Barnier kept playing ball, making $10.5B or so in concessions, until he drew the line at Le Pen’s last costly demand: keeping pensions in line with inflation. So she withdrew her party’s support, describing Barnier’s budget as “dangerous, unfair, and punitive”.

International Intrigue Daily Newsletter (05/12/24) - which I can’t recommend enough.

Brits will remember that M. Barnier was the odious functionary determined to penalise the UK for having the temerity to want to leave the EU - “old school fiscal hawk” is not an epithet that could reasonably be applied to any French politician let alone one who presided over his own fiefdom in the Kingdom of Brussels (European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services which roughly translated means in charge of competition suppression, oligarchy maintenance and protectionism), but that is for another paper. Marine Le Pen by contrast is an “old school populist” which I understand to mean someone who irresponsibly supports economically unviable programs and makes unkeepable promises. Which is something that traditional, non-populist, responsible and economically literate leaders and parties would never do:

In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro. Our sunny autumn is destroying our already-fragile government budget. Federal number-crunchers had originally allocated 10.6 billion Euros for feed-in tariffs in 2024, but already the government owes 15 billion and the year is not yet over. Scholz’s cabinet are thus trying to allocate an additional 8.8 billion Euro for the rest of the year. The parliament have yet to approve the additional funds, though, and also the damned sun will just not stop fucking shining, and so probably even this supplementary allocation won’t be enough. We’re bleeding money, all for a sun that doesn’t send any bills.

Eugyppius - Substack “How the German energy transition has committed taxpayers to paying billions of Euros for the sun to shine” (25.10.24)

President Trump is both an old school populist for supporting tariffs and a new school populist for daring to attack the bloated cost structure and bureaucracy under whose weight his country is currently staggering. Victor Orban (who may or may not be a Russian stooge - who knows anymore) is both an old school populist and an authoritarian and an apostate for daring to challenge the orthodox belief system that the Holy Roman Empire EU is sacrosanct and the only protection against war, pestilence and, well, populism. Nigel Farage is definitely an old school populist because he doesn’t like foreigners, a common trait amongst all populists. Actually what they really do is prefer their own people, national culture and taxpayers over others who don’t like them and don’t contribute. However that distinction gets lost in the urgent effort to conflate a political program of national interest with racism, fascism and all the other derogatory isms which misuse and inflation have rendered all but meaningless by those for whom national boundaries are - to misappropriate a phrase that Keynes used to describe Gold - a “barbarous relic” of more primitive times. The modern progressive concept of society requires a “globalist’ approach to managing the world’s populations and redistributing them more efficiently across the planet. The destruction of parochial mores and paradigms of national culture is, in this view, a feature not a bug.

A recent Substack by Scott Alexander Astral Codex Ten

Astral Codex Ten

Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House

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2 years ago · 297 likes · 592 comments · Scott Alexander

quoted from Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House on the reception of modernist architecture with its soulless and brutal utility by the people who actually had to live in it as follows:

“And how did the workers like worker housing? Oh, they complained, which was their nature at this stage of history. At Pessac the poor creatures were frantically turning Corbu’s cool cubes inside out trying to make them cozy and colorful. But it was understandable. As Corbu himself said, they had to be "re-educated" to comprehend the beauty of the Radiant City of the future. In matters of taste, the architects acted as the workers’ cultural benefactors. There was no use consulting them directly, since, as Gropius had pointed out, they were as yet "intellectually undeveloped". (emphasis mine)

There we have it - the gross conceit at the heart of every current government. We are too stupid, not intellectually evolved enough to appreciate the beauty , purpose, ultimate objective of all those brutal, ugly, degrading, inhuman, economically destructive and evil policies conceived by - largely but not exclusively -socialist intellectuals pursuing utopian ideals with little to no requirement of themselves having to suffer the consequences of their own idiocies.

Populism now means any coherent set of policies whose primary aim is to address real grievances of a large part of the national demos and which contradict the orthodoxy of the entrenched uniparty. Policies that specifically seek to address grievances the root causes of which can be directly traceable to policies espoused by said entrenched ruling elite are treated as heretical and apostatic. Policies that are not only urgently demanded but actually, dare we say it, popular. The current Top of the Pops of these policies are (with outstanding Substack authors addressing the issues as links embedded in them)

• Rampant Immigration and Cultural Degradation;

• Green Energy and the Decarbonisation fetish; ,

• Environmental Mismanagement and Confiscation;

• Gender Ideology and the promotion of sexual deviance in Education;

• Degradation of Education standards;

• Modern Monetary Theory and the Inflationary Debt Spiral; , ,

• Medical Coercion and Health Management;

• Globalisation and Centralisation of Decision making Authority away from the Demos; ,

• Warmongering whilst concurrently underinvesting in Defence (https://davidmurrin.co.uk)

• Anti Family, anti Small Business, anti Farming, anti Christian Orthodoxy (to many to mention, but here are a few of my favourites: Alan Pentz

If, as Lorenzo Warby points out in his recent post

existing politicians and political Parties leave a “gap” in the political market—such as concerns amongst voters that are not being articulated—political entrepreneurs are likely to engage in market entry to target such gaps.

then populism is simply the exploitation of unaddressed “gaps” in the market for policies and populists political entrepreneurs ready to take on the challenge of coordinating that unmet demand. Honestly, it appears almost impossible for the new class to make a bigger mess of it than the incumbents.

from “A bombshell new poll -why Reform is surging”.