Not the Monthly Post

The Nibelung’s Ring: The Valkyrie 1

Yes, I know we had a presidential election here in the US yesterday. The remarkable thing about it, after a campaign season so packed with improbabilities and absurdities, is that it was a normal election, with no more than the usual amount of vote fraud and a winner declared by sunrise. While everyone recovers from their hangovers, let’s continue with our discussion of The Nibelung’s Ring; those of my readers who are paying attention may notice that what we’re exploring may not be quite as unrelated to the current situation in the US, and elsewhere in the industrial world, as it might seem at first glance.

The situation before commodification set in…

The first installment of our tale, The Rhinegold, set out the problem the remaining three operas will explore.  In the mythic language Wagner borrowed from Ludwig Feuerbach, this is straightforward enough:  now that the gold from the bottom of the Rhine has been turned into a ring of power, is there any way that Alberich’s deed can be undone and the gold restored to the Rhine, or will the ring continue to pass from hand to hand, bringing doom to everyone it touches? Translate into the language of pre-Marxian socialism and the question becomes one that we’re still dealing with today.

Central Europe in Wagner’s time was still reeling from the initial impacts of the process by which human relationships stopped being the basic glue of society, and were replaced by a process of commodification that reduced all other values into those denominated in money.  The older world of peasant village economics, governed by customary exchanges and community values, still survived in fragmentary form here and there in isolated rural areas, along with the folktales the Brothers Grimm and their friends collected so enthusiastically; the educated public, or that fraction of it that read works on cultural history, could learn all about the comparable world of urban community life, with its craft guilds and self-governing city-states, that had been swept away by industrialism.

It was heady stuff, and it made a harsh contrast with the world of economic and political centralization spreading rapidly across Europe from its English seedbed in Wagner’s time. That was particularly true, of course, for intellectuals who didn’t have any exposure to the sometimes bitter downsides of peasant life, with its narrow horizons, its stifling conformism, and its utter vulnerability to the vagaries of a fickle climate.  To them, and of course to their many equivalents in later eras, rural village life came to be repainted in the hues of utopia. (Those of my readers who’ve followed the modern neoprimitivist movement will have seen the same sort of portrayals of hunter-gatherer societies, by the same sort of people, for the same reasons.)

…and the situation after it. It’s impossible to understand the movements we’re discussing unless you remember just how ghastly a change the industrial revolution was for many of the people affected by it.

The implications of this backward view through rose-colored glasses are rarely understood these days, not least because quite a few more recent socialists have been eager to cover up the less doctrinally correct dimensions of their own heritage.  One of the major strains in pre-Marxist socialism, in fact, was profoundly conservative, even reactionary, in its focus. That form of socialism didn’t, as Marx and his followers did, cram the hoped-for transformation from capitalism to socialism into a theoretical scheme of social progress that defined socialism as the inevitable wave of the future. Instead, it portrayed capitalism as a temporary aberration, an intrusion into the natural scheme of things, which had to be swept away so that human society could find its way back to its normal state.

It’s not inappropriate, in fact, to refer to this sort of thinking as Traditionalist socialism. If you want to see it in full flower, the best English-language source is the writings of William Morris, which were mentioned earlier in this sequence of posts.  In place of Morris’s fine socialist utopian novel News from Nowhere, though, you’ll want to read his even better epic fantasy novel The Well at the World’s End, which features exactly the sort of sturdy peasant culture that Wagner and other German socialists dreamed about in the exciting days before the 1848-1849 rebellions. It’s worth the time to read it, as it has a great deal more to offer than a glimpse at the older socialism; it includes a critique (veiled in mythic allegories almost precisely parallel to Wagner’s) of the entire social and political situation of Morris’s time.

Ralph and Ursula, the protagonists, at the Dry Tree. Yes, this was the 70s fantasy revival edition I first read.

The Marxist movement appears in his story as the Fellowship of the Dry Tree, and the Dry Tree itself is the terrible symbol of the universe of scientific materialism expressed most clearly, in Morris’s time, in the writings of Charles Darwin. That largely defined the core innovations that Marx brought to socialism: he linked the socialist movement to the mythology of progress and tried to claim the prestige of nineteenth-century materialist science for his theories.  It was a clever move. Marx backed the winning horse in the late nineteenth century reality wars, and a later generation of socialists inspired by his theories rode that horse to temporary dominion over half the planet.  It’s a very minor consequence of all this that Wagner’s allegory has become almost impossible for many people nowadays to grasp.

Make the effort to step outside of the cult of progress and look at the world in a different way, and what Wagner was trying to say becomes much easier to follow. During the years when he worked up the old legend of the Nibelung treasure into the plot of four operas, he was passionately convinced of the truth of the narrative I sketched out earlier:  the idea that capitalism and its commodification of the world represented a temporary aberration, a breach in the natural order of things, that would go away forever if only its grip could once be broken. Alberich’s terrible deed marked the beginning of that aberration, but the folly of the gods and giants in falling into the same trap marked the point at which its jaws closed hard on the world. How could society break out of the trap, though? That was the question that he sought to answer using the paired tools of mythology and music.

Wotan in the 1977 Seattle Opera cycle, the first I saw. “The sum of the intellect of the present” doesn’t cut an impressive figure.

I’ve mentioned before that one of the secrets behind the greatness of The Ring is that Wagner’s own ideas changed while he was writing and composing it. That’s important to watch here, but it’s also worth noting that Wagner started out with a clearer analysis than most of his (and our) contemporaries. Then as now, it’s standard for intellectuals to think of themselves as the forces for change that really matter, the ones whose ideas will set the pace for the future. That’s what Wotan thinks too.  “The sum of the intellect of the present,” as Wagner called him, is profoundly dissatisfied with the forced compromise that left the power of commodification securely in the hands of the aristocratic elite.  His goal in the second opera, The Valkyrie, is to go back on that compromise in some way indirect enough that he won’t be caught at it.

The problem, of course, is the same thing that undoes all his plans throughout the opera cycle: he’s ready, willing, and able to sacrifice anything and anybody for his goals except himself and his own interests. Self-aggrandizement is his overwhelming character flaw, and self-sacrifice—the one thing, as Wagner will argue, that can solve the problem posed by Alberich’s ring—is the one thing he can’t and won’t even conceive of doing. Wagner didn’t choose this detail of characterization at random. He recognized as clearly as anyone ever has that the craving for unearned power, and the collective egotism that drives it, are the besetting sins of the Western world’s intellectual class.

He was right, too.  From the days when Greek philosophers began to draw up the first sketch of the Western mind, the one thing you could count on was that whenever intellectuals made proposals about bettering society, most of them would argue that intellectuals like themselves should be first in line at the feed trough under the new arrangements. When Plato proposed in his Republic that philosophers ought to run the world, he was simply putting in the most blatant possible form the will to power that pervades Western intellectual life.

For the last two and a half millennia Pythagoras has been lionized for his genuine achievements. Unfortunately this has too often forestalled any recognition of the downside.

He was also following in the footsteps of the founder of the tradition of Western philosophy, Pythagoras, the guy who coined the word “philosopher” and who first proposed that what undergirded the material cosmos was not a substance but an abstract intellectual structure of laws and numbers, was also the first person we know of in the Western tradition to try to park intellectuals at the top of the political pyramid.  He succeeded for a while, too, by the simple expedient of getting all the leading political figures in the city-state of Crotona to become his students and embrace his ideas.

What happened in the slightly longer run makes a good object lesson to anyone who thinks the way Pythagoras did. Inevitably the ruling elite of Crotona applied the philosophy they’d been taught in ways that maximized their wealth and beggared everyone else, and insisted airily that since wisdom, justice, and truth were on their side, anyone who wanted to change things was simply an ignorant fool. The result was an uprising in which most of the students of Pythagoras were trapped inside the building where they met, and died when it was burnt to the ground. Pythagoras himself escaped, but died a short time later in the neighboring city of Metapontum, his dreams of a utopia of wisdom shattered.

You can see the same mistake the followers of Pythagoras made any time intellectuals set out to tell the rest of the world how they ought to live. Those of my readers who are familiar with the last few decades of self-proclaimed “deep thinking” can come up with plenty of examples.  Marx did the same thing in a slightly more veiled form, proposing a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that inevitably works out in practice to a dictatorship of a faction of intellectuals who rule in the name of the working class. By and large, the only Western intellectuals who refuse the temptation are those who don’t believe that it’s possible to design a better society from scratch, and of course they’re in the minority.

Wotan doesn’t belong to that minority. Au contraire, as the archetype of the Western intellectual, his goal as the orchestra begins playing the prelude to The Valkyrie is to get the Ring into his own grubby hands once again without violating any of the agreements that give him his power.  What’s more, he’s got a plan, and he’s been busy since the curtain came down on The Rhinegold getting all the pieces lined up.

The Valkyries in action. Did you ever notice that they’re basically just recruiters for Valhalla.com?

In mythic language—well, let’s start by noting that if his wife Fricka wanted a divorce she’d have an easy time convincing the judge of her view of the case.  The first thing Wotan did to further his plan was to go looking for Erda the Earth Mother, who popped up in the last scene of The Rhinegold to convince him to let go of the Ring. He found her and, well, they got very friendly.  Nine bouncing baby warrior maidens resulted. They grow up into the Valkyries.

(And yes, if you’re suddenly thinking about Tolkien again, there’s a reason for that. In a very real sense, The Lord of the Rings is an edgy parody of The Nibelung’s Ring. Sauron, like Wotan, has only one eye, he’s chasing after a magic ring he had once and lost, and his head is full of plans and strategies and gimmicks. Oh, and he has nine servants who ride out on errands from his magic castle. Of course they’re not beautiful warrior maidens, they’re hideous undead wraiths, but then that’s part of the parody; where Wotan is a morally complex figure, at once the protagonist and the villain of his story, Sauron is pure unfiltered evil, an infinitely black backdrop Tolkien uses to silhouette the moral complexities of his protagonists.)

The Valkyries, as I was saying, then become Wotan’s human resources department.  Yes, humans have now entered the story.  In The Rhinegold, as my readers will doubtless recall, mere human beings were nowhere on the stage:  it was all gods, giants, nature spirits and Nibelung dwarfs. Now there are humans. Norse mythology has plenty to say about how they happened, but none of that enters into our story. It’s one more reminder that the gods, giants, et al. in Wagner’s operas fill the role that Feuerbach assigned them, as allegorical figures reflecting classes and ideas in the human world. From this point on, though, the story is going to slip down bit by bit from the heights of Valhalla to the gritty realities of human life.

The Prologue in Heaven from Goethe’s Faust. Tolkien was among other things a subtle and witty parodist.

(Here again, Tolkien follows the same arc, though he does it in The Silmarillion rather than his more famous trilogy.  That volume begins quite literally with a prologue in Heaven—the parallel with Goethe’s Faust is doubtless deliberate—and descends from there; in Tolkien’s own words, “If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred”—Arda, of course, being the world in which you and I live. Tolkien’s own highly traditional Catholic Christianity, with its doctrine that the Fall affected the world as well as the human species, is of course involved here, but it’s worth noting that Wagner, who was anything but Christian, traced out the same trajectory in his opera cycle.)

Wotan himself is an eager participant in that descent, and the second and third phases of his plan show that at work. The second phase, once he has the Valkyries safely installed in Valhalla, is to send them to harvest the bravest of slain warriors from battlefields to form a palace guard.  He know that it’s possible that the giant Fafner might decide to use the power of the Ring against the gods, and he also knows that Alberich is scheming night and day to get the Ring back.  His guard of warriors is there to stop them, even though he knows that the power of the Ring is such that this may not save him.

Siegmund and Sieglinde.

It’s the third phase of the plan that sets the plot of The Valkyrie in motion. Not satisfied with his dalliance with Erda, he also descends to the earth, adopts the pseudonym Wolf, and takes up with a human woman, fathering two children, Siegmund and Sieglinde. Things don’t go well for them; Wolf and Siegmund come back from hunting one day to find their home burnt to ashes, Siegmund’s mother slain by raiders and his sister gone. The two men live as outlaws for a while, and then Wolf vanishes too.

Sieglinde, it turns out, has been taken captive and sold to a chieftain named Hunding, who takes her as his wife. (Her wishes, of course, are not involved in this transaction.)  Hunding’s hall has, oddly enough, a great ash tree growing right up through the middle of it. At the wedding feast, a mysterious stranger shows up and thrusts a magic sword through the trunk of the ash tree, saying that it belonged to anyone who could draw it out. You know the rest of that story, dear reader, in its Celtic variant, where it’s the Sword in the Stone rather than a sword in a tree; nobody could make it budge until the rightful heir of the sword comes along. That heir, of course, is Siegmund.

In other words, Wotan arranged all these events for his own purposes, including the murder of his human wife and the abduction and marital rape of his human daughter. As I noted in our last installment, for all his pretensions of divine glory, he’s basically a sleazeball, and his sleaziness stands out in stark relief in The Valkyrie.  His goal is to toughen a mortal hero to the necessary degree of strength and fierceness, give him a magic sword, and then send him to kill Fafner, the giant who owns the Ring, who has used his stolen powers to turn himself into a gigantic dragon and now dwells in a cave, guarding his treasure. Since Wotan himself won’t be the one who kills Fafner, he thinks he has plausible deniability, and he can then get the Ring back and make his power secure forever.  Given Wotan’s treatment of his mortal wife and daughter, what might happen to Siegmund if he doesn’t fork over the Ring promptly enough doesn’t bear considering.

The dog and the wolf from the Book of Lambspring, a 17th century alchemical text. The connection deserves more attention than it’s gotten.

Wagner got all the raw materials of his situation straight from Norse mythology.  There, like so much of Norse myth, they had a cosmological dimension; the hall that has a mighty ash tree growing up through the center of it is of course the universe itself.  The two rivals in the story also have deep roots. As the son of Wolf, Siegmund is a Wulfing, and the name Hunding literally means “son of the Dog;” the dog and the wolf, the tame and the wild, form one of the great cosmological pairings of the Northern tradition. (Weirdly, they also show up extensively in later alchemical literature, and the possibility of a connection between Norse myth and the lore of alchemy deserves much more exploration than it’s received so far.)

That said, Wagner didn’t have cosmology (or, for that matter, alchemy) in mind when he penned the libretto for The Valkyrie. Let’s put everything through his Feuerbachian filter and see what it becomes. Wotan, as we have seen, is the intelligentsia of nineteenth-century Europe, trying to find some way to evade the ghastly consequences of capitalist commodification while still clinging to the influence and wealth it got from the capitalist system. What are the children of the intellect? On the plane of gods and giants, they are ideals; that’s what the Valkyrie are. On the human plane, they are people motivated by those ideals. Among them are Siegmund, the archetypal rebel who is motivated by the ideal of freedom, and Hunding, who represents the establishment of his day and is motivated by the ideal of law.

And here are Hunding and Siegmund again, in a slightly different context. The crayfish? Probably Alberich.

We’ll discuss the other characters a little later on; they all have their own Feuerbachian meanings. All through the first half of the nineteenth century, the two ideals of liberty and law came into conflict over and over again, and—just as in Wagner’s libretto—the intelligentsia of the time fueled the conflict and did their best to keep it ablaze, without the least concern for the cost in human lives and suffering. The French philosophes who destabilized the French monarchy and aristocracy that paid their bills are only one example of the phenomenon, and of course it’s just as widespread now as it was then—witness the university professors who denounce in strident terms the very system that provides them with their salaries and benefits.

Then as now, these denunciations are phrased in terms of abstract principles, but it’s not exactly difficult to see through the filmy garments of justification to the seething, sweaty craving for unearned power beneath. Wagner’s diagnosis of what we may as well call “Wotan syndrome” remains as cogent today as it has ever been. As we’ll see, his prognosis of the course of the syndrome is just as exact. Wotan’s plan—in essence, to encourage rebellion against the existing order of society, in the hope of snatching power from the hands of the rebels once they seize it—is fatally flawed from the beginning.  In our next installment, we’ll see what the flaw is and how it plays out in practice.

181 Comments

  1. I’m really enjoying this series. Thank you for the recommendation to read “The Well at the World’s End.” I’ve added it to my list.

    “Wotan’s plan—in essence, to encourage rebellion against the existing order of society, in the hope of snatching power from the hands of the rebels once they seize it—is fatally flawed from the beginning.”

    Once again I catch a connection with my current reading: Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, “The Poisonwood Bible,” set during the 1960s Congo Crisis. The Eisenhower administraton planned to poison the rebel leader Lumumba with his toothpaste, but the plan was abandoned. (Perhaps the fatal flaw there was that the Congolese traditionally cleaned their teeth with wooden sticks, sans toothpaste.) In any case, Lumumba was eventually deposed and murdered. The problems of the crisis are unresolved, and the country remains subject to Western machinations.

    I’m looking forward to your next installment about the fatal flaw in Wotan’s plan.

  2. JMG, the phrase from this weeks essay, “Sweaty craving for unearned power beneath. Wagner’s diagnosis of what we may as well call “Wotan syndrome” “.
    This seems to perfectly sum up the Kamala Campaign along with the woke movement in general. It seems that Kamala is the dead end of the religion of progress. Though spouting platitudes like ” moving forward”, she was an empty vessel with no new ideas or even excuses to support the religion of progress. Al Gore is a perfect counterpoint. Like him or not, he rode the belief of progress in the future with some ideas ( both good and bad).
    All Kamal and her followers could say was,” anyone but her will make us go backward.”Almost as if they were admitting the gig was up.

  3. Here I thought Sauron was a fictionalized Lucifer, the fallen angel of light. Mordor where the shadows lie being the land without light as well as an industrialized waste.

    Some dates might help. Morris was born in 1834, so a generation later than Marx, b. 1819. The Well at the World’s End was published in 1896.

  4. JMG,

    I should probably read Faust directly, I’ve seen several adaptations to stage and film, but perhaps its time I made a pass at the original (or a translation, anyway).

    I like how ridiculously flimsy Wotan’s ‘plausible deniability’ is. It reminds me of nearly every action or statement undertaken by a senior leader of a government agency (and I work for federal agencies!). So often, they’re covering their hindquarters with the rhetorical equivalent of saran wrap. I have been repeatedly surprised at how well those thin and transparent lies work in allowing miscreants to dodge consequences. I suppose that’s one reason why I’m unlikely to ever get to that level!

    You’re leaving me hooked on the edge of my seat for the next installment!

    John B.

  5. Thanks John, I love the connections you make between the Ring mythology, social conditions, and esoteric knowledge. I look forward to the next installments

  6. Dear Mr Greer

    You said
    ” in its focus. That form of socialism didn’t, as Marx and his followers did, cram the hoped-for transformation from capitalism to socialism into a theoretical scheme of social progress that defined socialism as the inevitable wave of the future. Instead, it portrayed capitalism as a temporary aberration, an intrusion into the natural scheme of things, which had to be swept away so that human society could find its way back to its normal state.”

    In a way the traditional socialists are right. Capitalism is a temporary aberration that is slowly going away due to the decline of industrial civilisation.

    Jasmine

  7. Looking at the moon tarot card I immediately thought of that bright yellow disc being something like a golden ring …

  8. Every time you draw another parallel between Wagner’s Ring and Tolkien’s, I remember how much Tolkien claimed to loathe Wagner. But today I had an idea: Is it possible that part of Tolkien’s distaste for Wagner was because Wagner treated the gods as Feuerbachian images, and not as real Powers in their own right? Of course, doctrinally Tolkien was a Catholic and no polytheist; but I think his sympathies were clearly on the side of treating the Gods as Gods, and not as something so paltry as human ideals.

    “Though all the crannies of the world we filled
    with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
    Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
    and sowed the seed of dragons- ’twas our right
    (used or misused). That right has not decayed:
    we make still by the law in which we’re made.”

    Maybe you (or someone else in the commentariat) already made this point in an earlier installment, in which case I apologize for forgetting it.

  9. Goldenhawk, I’ve had Kingsolver’s book on my get-to list for a while. I’ll move it up a few notches.

    Clay, one of the things that fascinates me about the whole campaign the Democrats ran this time was that it had no substantive content at all. We were supposed to vote for Harris because she was “brat,” whatever that means; then because of “joy;” then because Donald Trump was Donald Trump; then because Donald Trump was Hitler; then because Donald Trump was Hitler, Attila the Hun, Ming the Merciless, Monster Zero, and Batboy all rolled into one — and then the ceiling fell in. There was a time when the Democrats knew they had to offer voters a vision of a better future, but they’ve lost that completely: it’s all “you have to vote for us or things will get worse,” as though the current miserable mess is the best we can possibly hope for. I suspect that did more to doom them than anything else.

    Mary, Mordor was those things also. Tolkien was anything but simpleminded; he wove a great many strands together into his fabric. As for Morris, yes; so?

    Sirustalcelion, it’s worth reading, even in translation. Goethe is brilliant. As for Wotan’s attempt at plausible deniability, good — that’s one of the crucial difficulties, of course.

    Kyle and Raymond, thank you! I try to keep it interesting.

    Jasmine, that’s quite true. It’s just that Marxian socialism is even more vulnerable to the same effect!

    KAN, given the symbolism of the card, that works quite well!

    Hosea, that’s an intriguing idea and may well be involved in Tolkien’s dislike of Wagner. All things considered, I’m not sure there was anything in Wagner that wouldn’t irritate a crusty old hyperconservative Catholic like Tolkien!

  10. Re. Wotan being “ready, willing, and able to sacrifice anything and anybody for his goals except himself and his own interests”: I find it striking how that’s such a specific inversion of the mythological Odin, who’s of course famous for sacrificing himself or parts of himself on several occasions. And also how his goal is to win power and knowledge for himself, but also for the wider community of humans and gods. Another interesting inversion with how he gives a wolf life here, while a wolf takes his life in the mythology.

    Re. alchemy and Norse myth: Also intriguing, as someone who’s admittedly more into the Norse than alchemical side of things, but willing to learn. My immediate thought is that the link might be Snorri Sturlason, since he clearly partook of Continental intellectual culture and trends in other ways, and so much of what we know of the myths is colored by the lens of that one individual. Maybe that’s too simplistic, though.

  11. Thank you for this most interesting essay, and thank you also for blithely disregarding current political events in this week’s essay (or almost)!

    I think Jasmine is quite correct, and in fact we (or rather, our descendants) will eventually return to a less commodified, if also much less comfortable society. I will now have to read The Well at the World’s End (once I have finished Little, Big) to see if Morris imagined a realistic level of comfort…

  12. JMG,
    Western civilization features all these different ideas for political and economic systems – Marxism, socialism, anarchism, capitalism, and the list goes on and on with various schemes and combinations of schemes into Faustian infinity. Is this development of various schemes only a characteristic of Faustian culture? All the different “experts” out there seem sure that they have discovered and developed the one true scheme that will bring peace, love, harmony, sweetness, and everyone’s “best life” to all of humanity forever and ever, amen. How does it compare with other cultural types such as those Spengler identified? Maybe they have schemes, just not the infinitude?
    Thank you for leading us on this fascinating Wagner tour. I never would have thunk it quite so entertaining and enlightening.
    Will1000

  13. Hi JMG and readership,
    the theme of “intelligentsia stirring the pot hoping to ride the unleashed chaos” is quite interesting.
    From my delvings into periferal spaces, I think that is one of the contributing factors to the rise of Donald Trump aswell. The likes of Peter Thiel and the John Birch Society, Turning Point Usa, Prager U propping up fringe intellectuals enlisted from the liminal spaces of the internet…these interest and advocacy groups being themselves propped up by Big Money interests (often tied to Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Car etc)
    Of them all, Musk is probably the one whose claims you can take at face value…after all he admitted that he thinks AI will take over the world and he just wants to be there to see it in his lifetime…and securing a presidency which will not limit social media (muh free speech!) from which algorithms learn, nor put any brakes on the AI and satellite arms races, seem only the next logical thing to do…accellerate even more…
    How do you think it will fare for them? Will they be able to control The Donald? Or will the young disinfranchised young men whose rage was carefully cultivated, be a time bomb which blows the chairs from under their buns?
    Lots of young lonely american men from the gun community have been training for years for a civil war…spending their hard earned surplus income (which they are not spending on rising families) on gear and guns and courses…
    Just the musings of an european spectator…

  14. JMG it helps me understand events in history if I can get dates and the sequence of events straight in my mind. For example, I realized that WOTW was published nearly a half century after the revolts of 1848, so at a time when Marxism was a recognized presence in European thinking. I shall keep my chronological researches to myself in future.

    Clay Dennis, oh, but I voted for Harris because I think she is a really nice lady whom I would feel comfy having a cup of tea with.

  15. As always, thanks for your insight Dear Archdruid.
    What came to mind in your various discussions of The Ring, specially the part where you spoke of the Fault’s deal of Pythagoras and his followers (an unknown detail I’ve found fascinating and horrifying in roughly the same measures) is this particular lines of the song Mis Tres Animales, by the Tucanes de Tijuana (disclaimer: these both are part of the Narcocorrido genre that is possible to share in polite company, but still… ).
    El dinero en abundancia,
    tambien es muy peligroso.
    Por eso yo me lo gasto,
    con mis amigos gustoso.
    “Abundance of money, is a very dangerous thing. That’s why I spend it all, joyfully with my friends”.
    I am thinking now that an abundance of knowledge, specially without the cultivation of wisdom, might be just as detrimental for one’s own safety. Furthermore, it is not something you can just spend. If anything sharing it with your friends may lead to an echo chamber where the group will encourage each other (and individually, try to outdo each other) into hoarding more of this exquisite brain fuel.
    What’s an intellectual to do, then? Go daoist and claim to be happier in the mud that in the Emperor’s court?

  16. Sirustalcelion (#4): “I like how ridiculously flimsy Wotan’s ‘plausible deniability’ is.” Just wait till you hear Fricka give him a royal reaming over it – she’s right, too, and he has to admit it.

  17. My first thoughts about capitalism were the same as Jasmine’s. But then it occurred to me that capitalism is actually quite natural: it’s an extreme r-selected socioeconomic system (hopefully the most extreme the planet, or at least our species, will ever see).

    Like any r-selected phenomenon, when the conditions are right for it, it will win. Trying to stop it during that period is a losing proposition. But also like any r-selected phenomenon, it will ultimately undermine the conditions that allow it to thrive, and that will be its doom.

    It’s already done that to itself once, about a century ago, and maybe once before that. In the wake of the Great Depression and the rising tides of socialism and fascism, the brutal, nakedly exploitative form of 19th-century industrial capitalism was replaced by a moderately less aggressive variant — neoliberalism — that seems to be slamming up against its own limits now. I suspect we have a few more, even shorter-lived variants to go through over the next century or two.

  18. Hi John Michael,

    Rural life is quite physically demanding, and unlike a pay cheque (check in US parlance) from working in an office, factory etc., you spend all that time and energy, and despite your best efforts, still go hungry from a lack of returns. I’m in the traditional lean time right now where the plants are growing strongly, there’s much to be done, but there’s not a lot of produce to consume. I probably know enough now not to starve, but that assumes I can keep on bringing in soil resources from elsewhere. No, the only people who’d think this state of affairs is an idyll, are those who’ve not had to put their backs to a shovel and dig the soil. Still, I don’t want those folks lives with the descent into abstractions, reality is terrible, but unreality is far worse..

    Wotan, that randy old goat of dubious moral character. What did he do with his power anyway? The results however, probably had a lot to do with recruiting posters over the past century or so… I’d not know previously that the Valkyrie were the equivalent of Tolkien’s dark rider ringwraiths.

    Presumably Siegmund has some semblance to Aragorn?

    The more the intelligentsia get behind such schemes, the more the people on the streets become wary, surly and unresponsive. What did they expect? The descent into unreality is far worse, and here we are today.

    Cheers

    Chris

  19. I just wanted to let readers know that it turns out The Well at the World’s End is in the public domain, and is available as a free ebook on Amazon and on sites such as Project Gutenberg. I’m a few pages in and having fun so far.

  20. Hi JMG,

    I’m intrigued by your interpretation of the Dry Tree in the Well at the World’s End as a symbol of socialism. It’s been a while since I read it, but the Dry Tree was such a strange symbol, and I found it so ambiguous in the books, that even after I have forgotten most of the other details of the story I have found myself wondering at intervals what it was all about. How did you work out the connection to socialism? It went completely over my head.

  21. I have to say, regarding that tarot card, that that snappy, chitininous crustacean reminds me if a certain entity egging-on the latter-day lunatic neo-cons vs. the jokey wokies .. each vying for dominance .. to their ultimate demise!

  22. I am really enjoying your analyses of the Ring. I suppose it has to be said that Wagner’s interpretation of how societal bonds used to be more morally social before capitalism, just seems ridiculous. Historians generally agree that most of civilized history has consisted of a predatory upper class (aristocrats) ripping off peasants, workers, and so on. A typical year for farmers saw people from the city come and take some large percent of their crops with no money or goods in return. In his book Plagues and Peoples, the historian McNeill employs the term “microphage” for “smaller eaters,” that is, small beings like bacteria that live off humans, and invents the term “Macrophage” or “big eater,’ for the upper classes throughout history, the big organisms that live off other humans. I find “macrophage” to be a really satisfactory term (also applicable, of course, to the capitalist predators who took over). It’s impressive how much power an unjustified sentimental view of pre-capitalist history acquired,. Of course, the ugliness of capitalist factories and behavior certainly helped.

  23. Now, substitute a squirrel and raccoon – both rabid … for those two canids, and well…??

  24. Kim, that’s an excellent point. Wagner being Wagner, he won’t have let mere fact stand in the way of his artistic vision! As for Snorri, that’s an interesting suggestion. There seems to have been some overlap in the 17th century between Rosicrucian occultists in the Scandinavian countries and interest in the old myths, so that’s not impossible.

    Aldarion, it’s a fine novel, but no, Morris donned the usual rose-colored glasses when looking at the Middle Ages.

    JP, thanks for this. The link works fine.

    Will1000, it really varies from great culture to great culture. China in its first intellectual golden age had quite a flurry of political and economic theories. Classical culture, by contrast, simply assumed as a matter of course that the polis was the natural political form of humanity and jerry-rigged various arrangements to manage nations of more than one polis. So it’s one of the variables. I’m glad you’re appreciating the journey!

    Monkeypilled, that’s one of the big questions. I’ll be discussing that in some detail once we finish this sequence of posts. The new year is going to see some lively explorations.

    Mary, I’m not asking you to keep chronology to yourself. It looked as though you were trying to make a point by citing the date, and I was curious about what the point was.

    CR, it’s not an abundance of knowledge that becomes muy peligroso, it’s the mistaken notion that filling your head with abstractions makes you better qualified to deal with the real world than other people. Those of us who are enticed by the intellectual life need to understand that it’s basically a hobby; like most hobbies — say, knitting — it has its productive side, and it’s possible to put it to good use in its own context, but Pythagoras and all his heirs were and are dead wrong when they convinced themselves that intellectual achievement is the same thing as practical wisdom. I would argue, in fact, that intellectuals of all people are very nearly uniquely unsuited for political office, and should content themselves with the indirect power they can have by putting interesting ideas into circulation.

    Slithy, that seems quite plausible. There have also been some briefer periods of protocapitalism, generally using big buildings full of slaves as their factories; the late Roman world was one of these periods. Here again, as you’ve indicated, it crashed and burned catastrophically as soon as conditions no longer supported it.

    Chris, nah, Siegfried is Wagner’s great hero; he’s Siegmund’s son, and he reforges the Sword that was Broken. Aragorn is the anti-Siegfried, to a hair. We’ll get to that!

    Jennifer, thanks for this!

    Samurai,_47, nah, the Dry Tree is the image of Darwinian materialism. It’s a brilliant image — a dead tree hung with weapons and surrounded by countless corpses, located in the terrible desert that has to be crossed before you can reach the Well at the World’s End. To explain how that works, I’d have to do a commentary on Morris’s novel — which is not a bad idea, all things considered. The Fellowship of the Dry Tree, in constant conflict with the Burg of the Four Friths, is Marxist socialism specifically; they have the emblem of the Dry Tree on their surcoats because Marxists embrace Darwinian materialism and the whole misbegotten universe of 19th century scientific determinism. Morris is saying, “No, go beyond that, beyond the Dry Tree.”

    Polecat, there’s that!

    Michael, no, I’m emphatically not saying that society used to be more “morally social” before the rise of capitalism, though a case can probably be made that Wagner was saying that. I’m saying that society was united by human relationships rather than by commodified abstractions. Human relationships are not necessarily morally good! The bond that unites an abusive spouse to the victim of abuse is utterly personal. Equally, the feudal bond that united lord and vassal, highly personal though it was, permitted a great deal of abuse. It’s essential, to understand any of this, to drop the habit of flattening out such issues into a one-dimensional moral spectrum in which the only two options are “good” and “doubleplusungood.” The problem with commodification is ultimately not a moral problem; we’ll get into that as this discussion proceeds.

    Polecat, I note with some fascination that just before Harris made her concession speech today, a squirrel ran across the platform. Peanut, thou art avenged!

  25. It seems to me that Goethe, Wagner and Tolkien are not necessarily copying each other, but that this story (which Shakespeare riffed off of too in many different ways) is constantly retelling and hitting on the underlying mythic structure of the entirety of western European religious and philosophical thought, that descends from Germanic and Celtic myth.

    There is a reason Spengler call it the Faustian culture.

  26. “Inevitably the ruling elite of Crotona applied the philosophy they’d been taught in ways that maximized their wealth and beggared everyone else”

    Can you recommend a source about this? – it sounds fascinating.

  27. Speaking of Germany, hot off the press.

    BERLIN, Nov 6 (Reuters) – Germany’s ruling coalition collapsed on Wednesday as Chancellor Olaf Scholz sacked his finance minister and paved the way for a snap election, triggering political chaos in Europe’s largest economy hours after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election.

  28. Fantastic introduction to the Valkyrie. In the old days when record companies packaged their operatic offerings in gorgeous box sets complete with libretti translated into four languages and page after page of learned plot summaries and commentary, you could have made a living writing for them.

    I recently stumbled onto a two part lecture by Deryck Cooke for BBC on a musical analysis of key elements in the Ring, complete with polite trashing of other commentaries and an absolutely riveting musical dissection of the famous passage in Act 2 of the Valkyrie when the scales fall from Wotan’s eyes and he sees the trap he has created for himself which you wrote about above..

    Bryan Magee called Cooke’s early death the greatest loss ever for Wagner studies — he had embarked on a multi-volume close analysis of the Ring, I Saw the World End, but he got only as far as the text of the four operas and the music of Rheingold. (Cooke is also well known for having taken the unfinished work of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony and shaping it into a performable version.)

    You and others may find these lectures (“Thinking about the Ring”) interesting (I certainly did) — about 45 minutes each.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCuXcfOYTt4
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BOgxiJ3HDc

  29. “…it portrayed capitalism as a temporary aberration, an intrusion into the natural scheme of things, which had to be swept away so that human society could find its way back to its normal state…”

    Isn’t that the lesson of peak oil? That industrial civilization—if not capitalism per se—is a temporary aberration in human history?

    And contrary to the claim of Traditionalist socialism or the modern climate change myth, there’s no need to fight it or sweep it away. It will recede on its own like the Hubbert’s pulse that it is.

  30. I can now see why the Wagner operas deserve a whole series of posts. Quite the feast of history, mythology, ideology and social studies! I really appreciate the occasional diversions into Tolkien’s treatment of the same archetype or figure; it is certainly worth exploring.

    I don’t know whether it is the exceptional lucidity of your writing this post or if I have been reading you for too long (maybe both?), but I anticipated several of your comparisons. When you were describing the Alberich’s foul deed and the predicament of how to rectify it I immediately thought about the fall from the Garden of Eden – and a couple of paragraphs later you mention it. Then, when you describe Siegmund and Wulfing as the dog and the wolf, I thought, “gee, that reminds me of the Moon card in the Rider-Waite tarot deck” – and, again, you draw the parallel. (I then proceeded to see whether the Marseilles deck also has the wolf and dog on The Moon card – and there it was! Looks like it’s been used in Tarot for quite some time)

    It is interesting to see that Pythagoras was the dude who started the whole ‘intellectuals should rule’ idea. I’ve had mixed feelings about Pythagoras: yes, he was good at math and stuff, but I always got the impression that he was really deep into abstractions – which is always a ‘red flag’ to me. “Philosopher kings”? Bah – humbug! Maybe Pythagoras and his ilk was the ‘inspiration’ for the airy-fairy inhabitants of the flying island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels? (I don’t know) Traditionally in most parts of the world those who rule are warriors (those who have more than just ‘skin in the game’; they often put their life on the line for their people) rather than ‘the smartest guy in the room’.

    You used the term “unearned power” several times in this post. Of course, examples of this situation in modern times are legion: in my own country (Canada) we have parliaments, chambers and municipal councils that are bursting at the seams with such people. I guess the question comes to mind, “how does one define ‘earned power’”? To my mind, earning power involves taking huge risks, performing heroic deeds and/or making major sacrifices for the sake of others rather than oneself, thereby earning the trust and affection of society. But if you could provide an explanation or description, it would be appreciated.

  31. This is the literature course I should have had in college. My hat off to you (tin foil and all) for providing us something with real value.

  32. Speaking of Peanut, is it just me or is the euthanizing of Peanut the squirrel shaping up to be the managerial elite’s Affair of the Necklace? The sort of screw-up that delegitimizes a regime is often something trivial, all things considered, and this seems to fit the bill: a small matter, objectively speaking, but an outrageous and unforced error all the same.

    I can easily see Trump tearing apart the bureaucracy with the slogan “Look what they did to Peanut!”

  33. Hello JMG,
    ” I note with some fascination that just before Harris made her concession speech today, a squirrel ran across the platform. Peanut, thou art avenged!” – not sure what you were talking about, didn’t see a squirrel before her speech, but I have my own squirrel story. Before the election, I was very preoccupied with my own life and found both candidates lacking many important qualities, so I didn’t vote. On the day of the election, I had a 4-hour surgery, came home, started reading the news, and came upon the squirrel story. I felt sad about the senseless death of an animal and terrified of the government that had the spare resources to stage a raid to apprehend a pet squirrel. This story gave me the emotional energy to schlep to the poll and cast my vote.

  34. “One of the major strains in pre-Marxist socialism, in fact, was profoundly conservative, even reactionary, in its focus.”
    Many of the movements hailed as proletarian were actually attempts to avoid being pushed down into the proletariat, for example by agriculturalists or artisans.

  35. A good description of the lives of early 19thC factory workers in England can be found in the novel, Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell.

    Blue sun, “modern climate change myth”? There is nothing mythical about it. It is real, it is here and the effects are getting worse year by year. Have you ever seen a forest fire? I have. Whole trees going up like torches. Now, several decades later, it is not just trees and hillsides. Entire towns are being burnt to the ground.

  36. PumpkinScone, maybe so, but so much of Tolkien looks to me like a deliberate inversion of Wagner that I think it was exactly that — among other things.

    Justin, it’s been a long time since I read up on the history of the Pythagorean movement in Magna Graecia and I no longer have my notes. Let me see if I can find anything.

    Siliconguy, I suspect there’s going to be a lot of that. I wonder how long Keir Starmer will survive in Britain.

    Tag, thanks for this! I have a copy of I Saw The World End — even though it’s incomplete, it’s utterly worth reading. He also did an audio discussion, which I have on CD — An Introduction to Der Ring des Nibelungen — which is equally worth your while.

    Blue Sun, that’s quite true. What’s more, there’s a sense in which that’s implied by the conclusion of the story ahead of us.

    Ron, thank you. I love the history of ideas, and since it’s not being practiced much in a form relevant to ordinary people these days, I figured I might as well cut loose and provide an example of what I think the field ought to be doing. As for earned power, that’s very simple. Power is earned when it’s freely granted by the people over whom it’s exercised. Think of a guru and his chelas — they give him considerable authority over their lives, because they recognize his attainment and want to emulate it. In the same way, a successful warlord gains earned power because his warriors know that he’s led them to victory before and will do it again. The people who crave unearned power want to control people without doing anything to encourage them to cooperate — they want to get loyalty but aren’t willing to give it, and they demand respect while doing nothing to earn it.

    Patricia O, thank you!

    Slithy, that’s occurred to me more than once.

    Inna, thanks for this! I wonder how many other people were motivated to go to the polls by Peanut’s fate. As for the squirrel on the stage, the Daily Fail was one of many sites that carried the video:

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-3307615/Video-Squirrel-runs-stage-Kamalas-concession-speech.html

    Polecat, thank you.

    Jessica, hmm! I need to learn more about that. Can you point me to some sources?

    Mary, thanks for this. My late wife was a great fan of Gaskell.

  37. Wotan’s plan – to encourage rebellion against the existing order of society, in the hope of snatching power from the hands of the rebels once they seize it – was basically my plan all throughout undergrad. What’s also funny is the triggering event that made me began to lose faith in that plan is something you also mention in this essay.

    I firmly believed that it was possible to design a better society from scratch. What irrevocably shook my faith in this belief is my part-time job in undergrad working at top class cognitive psychology lab. Without looking for it, we found explicit evidence for differences in reaction times between people of different races, which is significantly correlated with IQ and working memory, and is also something that is thought to be mostly due to genetics rather than something that is due to societal or environmental indicators. When I brought this up at our weekly lab meeting, that race was our single biggest confounder outside of piano playing or video game playing, I was told explicitly to ignore it.

    So what ends up happening is I ignore it, but start reading more on the IQ literature, and I would started telling my intellectual circles that I don’t think our plans to bring about a more equal, better society would be effective because a lot of the outcomes are influenced by genetics rather than by societal forces, and we need to acknowledge that. That view got me disinvited from all of my intellectual circles, even as I still clung to the progressive dream arguing that the proper response is to recognize that if innate differences in IQ exist, the best way to achieve equality in society is to compensate by taking from the more highly paid, higher skilled workforce and distributing that to the lower paid, lower skilled workforce. My logic was since that that which enables high skilled people to be high skilled (IQ) has a strong unearned (genetic) component, it’s unfair to reward people based on that and pretend that it’s due mostly to hard work or teachable behaviors.

    And, once that argument was firmly rejected by everyone in my intellectual circles (looking back at it, probably because I was threatening their rice bowls, their egos, and their politically correct sensibilities at the same time), I was left alone with the knowledge that a lot of people’s life outcomes are determined by genetic forces entirely outside the influence of society, and that fixing society isn’t going to fix that. Thus, if the goal is a utopia of equality, that seems impossible to design in a world where human beings aren’t blank slates upon which we can impose our will and vision.

    Then, visiting Cambodia a year after that made me realize that that goal is not only impractical, but evil.

    Adding to this, now, nearly 20 years later, I’m in a strange spot where I did the usual trade, principals for money trade with the idea that once I had enough money I could somehow better the world, and I’m finding that there is no way to “evade the ghastly consequences of capitalist commodification.” As soon as you reach for the ring, it has you, and there’s no real way to walk away from it without losing everything you obtained from it, and whatever goal you had for the betterment of the world or whatever, forget about it, because your goals are subsumed.

    I got a lot of this essay! Thanks for this.

  38. At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.

    If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.

    * * *

    This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.

    May baby Gigi, who may be suffering from side effects of medication prescribed during pregnancy, be healed, strengthened and blessed. May her big brother Francis also be blessed and remain in excellent health.

    May May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.

    May Ram, who is facing major challenges both legal and emotional with a divorce and child custody dispute, be blessed with the clarity of thought, positive energy, and the inner strength to continue to improve the situation.

    May FJay peacefully birth a healthy baby at home with her loved ones. May her postpartum period be restful and full of love and support. May her older child feel surrounded by her love as he adapts to life as a big brother and may her marriage be strengthened during this time.

    May Hal Freeman’s daughter Marina recover from walking pneumonia.

    May Leonardo Johann from Bremen in Germany, who was
    born prematurely two months early
    , come home safe and sound.

    May all living things who have suffered as a consequence of Hurricanes Helene and Milton be blessed, comforted, and healed.

    May Kevin, his sister Cynthia, and their elderly mother Dianne have a positive change in their fortunes which allows them to find affordable housing and a better life.

    May Tyler’s partner Monika and newborn baby Isabella both be blessed with good health.

    May The Dilettante Polymath’s eye heal and vision return quickly and permanantly, and may both his retinas stay attached.

    May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery to treat it.

    May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.

    May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.

    Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.

    * * *
    Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.

    If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.

  39. This is a really fascinating analysis of The Nibelung’s Ring – will have to save it for when I see it. I do have to disagree with the comments related to the 2024 Election aftermath. While Trump clearly had a bigger media megaphone, it seemed to me that Harris and the Ds put up, and have put up, policies that effectively distinguish them from the GOP, including on issues such as Housing, Education (and student loans), and Climate change. She, and they, may not be as effective at communication and media outreach, but that is not the same as saying there were no policies put forth.

  40. Hi JMG (and friends),

    I’ve been enjoying the posts on the Ring Cycle, but I do have one question. In this series, we’ve focused mostly on the libretto of the work (and to be fair, that is where is the meat of the story is). Is there any resources/texts dedicated to the music aspect of the Ring cycle, which a person whose a complete novice when it comes to the Western musical tradition could understand?

  41. I didn’t know about those socio-political references back when i was reading ” The well at the world’s end”. However, i remember that both The Dry Tree and The Lady of the Abundance had a lot of unexplained things around them, as if the reader was already expected to know a lot about them. Now i see why.

    Can you explain a bit more about what each of these two stand for in Morris political view?

  42. @Mary B #38
    Mary, I didn’t mean myth in the sense of a story that is completely untrue. The factual part is the change that’s already underway. The “mythical” part is that since we humans are observant enough to identify this change, ergo, we are omniscient enough to know how exactly it will play out, and omnipotent enough to stop or reverse it.

  43. Hello JMG and kommentariat…thank you John, for this interesting and wise relief; current affairs like Spain floods and Trump can wait…

  44. Really enjoying this series of posts.

    Not sure if you have access to X (aka Twitter) but this clip reminds me of the hypocrisy of those who want to undermine the system that supports them:
    https://x.com/kpac_15/status/1726340402809344277

    Possibly not many of the protestors themselves are Wotans – more the ignorant footsoldiers, perhaps? Just wondering if you had anyone in particular in mind, prominent in the public eye, who is currently “doing a Wotan”?

  45. Hello again, sorry just realised I hadn’t added any context to the clip I posted.

    It was filmed at a “Just Stop Oil” protest on London, where the protestors think the best way to “stop oil” is to block traffic, reducing London to gridlock, so that nobody (including ambulances) can get anywhere.

    And as their detractor points out, they haven’t really thought this through. “What are your clothes made out of?”

  46. “Those of us who are enticed by the intellectual life need to understand that it’s basically a hobby; like most hobbies — say, knitting — it has its productive side, and it’s possible to put it to good use in its own context, but Pythagoras and all his heirs were and are dead wrong when they convinced themselves that intellectual achievement is the same thing as practical wisdom. I would argue, in fact, that intellectuals of all people are very nearly uniquely unsuited for political office, and should content themselves with the indirect power they can have by putting interesting ideas into circulation.”

    Very interesting. I’m reading The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham this week -and loving it. The argument / conversation between Larry and Isabel when they break off their engagement, speaks to this tension between practical wisdom and intellectual wisdom.

    This line of thought has got me thinking about monasticism again. The monks of the past preserved some of our heritage and may do so again. It would be interesting to see some kind of monasticism ala the province of Castalia in our future. My point is, that I think some kind of monasticism will be one avenue for the intellectual (again) in the coming ages. To tie this back to Maugham, the character Larry has learned to live on much less than his immediate peers, much to their consternation, and instead has enriched himself by the life of the mind. Can’t wait to see where the rest of it goes…

    I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that in my OPW meditation this morning I mused on the influence of three books on my life: 777 by Crowley, The Glass Bead Game and Godel, Escher, Bach. The last I haven’t even read yet, but it is coming up soon. How they influenced me is that I was told by people that in the case of 777, I would never understand it. This was when I was looking at in a Waldenbooks (yes, quite awhile ago!) when I was in 6th or seventh grade. I determined that yes, I would understand it.

    Later, a girlfriend I had for a short while complained to me about no one ever understanding The Glass Bead Game or Godel, Escher, Bach. She didn’t claim to understand them herself, but she disparaged those who did. I’ve never been good at math, so have put off the last one, but I read Glass Bead Game immediately after this conversation with her, and it became important to me. This was around 2001 or 2002.

    Looking up Godel, Escher, Bach at work in the catalog I get shivers of synchronicity: 777 pages. Same on the wikipedia page. That is significant, not because of Crowley who I grew bored with some time ago, but about the whole idea of correspondences.

    That sense of proving others wrong, I feel a little less forcefully than I did when I was younger -the feeling that drove me to pursue things which others said were a waste of time, or would never bear fruition. But it is still there, tempered. The sense of will towards something, in the face of opposition… it’s been a wild ride so far. But I’ve needed quite a bit of help from people who have more practical wisdom than me for such things as fixing cars, handyman knowhow needed for owning a house (which I’ve gotten better at, but still no super talent or inclination for) , and just feeling capable with practical things. I don’t think I could have not been interested in books, music and such. The challenge has been to balance it with my practical responsibilities in the world and find healthy outlets for my inclination.

    Thank you again for these essays. It’s enriching my understanding of Tolkien as much as it is of opera, and giving me an appreciation for how the ideas from these works have influenced culture so forcefully by their circulation.

  47. Thank you, JGM. I do agree “not fit for command” may be a better way to contextualize the intellectual issue. Though I would argue that, while Wotan seams like a good match for the intelligentsia as a group, individual members act more like Siegmund. Please bear with me.
    Oh, Wotan did a number on this guy. Raised as an outlaw in the woods, the boy never learned the ways of his fellow men. If anything, his moral code (and I do think he has one) is in direct conflict with the established order and the social contract he is nonetheless expected to uphold. So, when he returns to the World after loosing his father, he finds troubles wherever he goes. Those are troubles of his own making but he is oblivious to that fact; he just calls it “misfortune”. His frustration turns into resentment, and he boiling in this own juice he has been until he becomes an outlaw in his own right: he responds to the call of a supposed damsel in distress and ends up a murderer, even causing the death of the woman he had set out to aid in the first place.
    From this, I compare to the rite of passage that many of us had to go through in this civilization, but which seams to be hitting Gen Z much harder than usual. We where raised to thrive in a world that never existed, and the first task to complete as a young adult is to pick up the debris of our crash with reality and build up a live for ourselves out of it. As a token sample of what I mean, I will ask the commentariat when was the last time you needed the Periodic Table for anything (I know some of you do, but there are hundreds of other useless facts you where forced to learn in your formative years; Chemistry just was my own pet peeve).
    I am thinking the time when the young heroes go Wotan is when it seems that some Giant is going to take away something that is Precious to them (more often than not, the possibility of manifesting some cherished idea). They could pick another, better, idea to give it a try. Instead, they decide they have had enough of this injustice and they’ll just cheat their way to success.

  48. “The result was an uprising in which most of the students of Pythagoras were trapped inside the building where they met, and died when it was burnt to the ground. Pythagoras himself escaped, but died a short time later in the neighboring city of Metapontum, his dreams of a utopia of wisdom shattered.”

    A hard lesson for philosopher-kings wannabes…in every time, including our time.

  49. Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but I find it wryly amusing that intellectuals as a class seem to be spectacularly bad at learning the obvious. Supporting a rebellion in order to try to grasp power from the rebels seems like a bad idea just from a common sense perspective (what happens if they actually win, and take away the positions and stability that most intellectuals depend on?), and it has blown up so many times: among many others, the Terror of the French Revolution, which saw many of the people who supported it for ideological reasons losing their heads in a very literal fashion….

  50. “Peanut, thou art avenged!”

    I saw the video. I suspect a political dirty trick — a good one, though!

  51. JMG,
    Would you say that Pythagoras’ introduction of abstract law and mathematics gave precedence to Elemental Air over the other Elements? It seems like a balance of Elements was always the best way to go, and you can see the desire for that balance in many systems. This imbalance in Air might be the reason why we romanticize Earth. If I remember correctly, Air and Earth are polar opposites.

    Oh no, and now we’re heading into a series of Great Conjunctions in Air for the next 200 years.

  52. You seem to be doing a very poor job of driving off your readers with this series! Question: who are the Valkyries in your/Wagner’s scheme? They’re the result of a union between Wotan (intellectuals) and Erda (Nature?) and have the job of recruiting warriors (from the proletariat?) for Wotan’s army. Brunnhilde in particular is a favorite of Wotan’s, but she turns against him and saves Sieglinde (and ultimately the universe, in Gotterdamerung, but we’re nowhere near there yet). What group/class do they represent?

  53. When I’ve read about “Traditionalist socialism”, I smiled. I can’t avoid to remember another strange ideology mix. I’d like to remind you that Salvador Dali classiffied himself as “a Monarchist and an Anarchist”. He was proud of it. However, I don’t know if Morris would be happy of being described as a Traditionalist Socialist. Well, I’d be according this strange political mix, maybe a Conservative Socialist. Maybe I’m kidding, maybe not…

  54. Dennis Michael Sawyers , Benedict of Nursia and Francis of Assisi were two men born into “good families”, i.e., what we nowadays call privilege, who did walk way, firmly turn their backs on, the gold ring.

    Mike Bressler, the policies put out were more tired neoliberalism. Tax credit when what is needed is actual price controls; no investment in mass transit to get people out of their cars and to work, combined with ritual kowtows to Isreal. I am increasingly convinced that the Dems. threw this one. They were going to lose anyway; the Biden admin was effectively over after he failed to support striking railroad workers, but it didn’t have to be this bad.

  55. @C.R. Patino – thanks for the comment on Siegfried’s upbringing and its ties to today’s kids. You can have a primitive code of honor that plays very poorly in a world of law-based civilization, and vice versa, and you see it sometimes in Irish legends such as Cuchulain’s. BTW, the lore – the Eddas, and the similar works from Germany and Scandinavia – makes it perfectly clear that Odin is a world-class A-1 ratfink, and that’s openly acknowledged. He’s the god of sorcery and dirty tricks a well as the unceasing quest for knowledge. Thor was the god most focused on in the days when Christianity v. the way of the old gods was an ongoing battle, and Thor’s hammer was the usual emblem. People said “I am a friend of Thor,” but very rarely, if ever (I can’t remember a single case) “a’ friend’ of Odin. Worshiper, yes.

    About today’s Gen-Z kids, something that I, as grandmother and great-aunt to mine, have given a lot of thought to. Looking at the calendar, they have never known a world that was not in crisis, any more than my contemporaries did. Whose parents gave them to think it was dangerous out there. Who, if a grandparent slipped them money for their deepest desires – freedom money – spent it mostly on things their parents approved of. But unlike the last one, the crisis we’re in has never come to a head – unlike the one their great-grandparents knew – but very, very like the the time after the Civil War. Those young people ended up settling the West, which was probably their salvation; that’s an option closed these days.

    Siegfried they’re not. But the obedient Valkyries?

    Anyway, that’s my $0.02. Except that, having had a chance to read today’s election results, we won’t be seeing Wotan running things for a while. It’ll be Thor’s hammer time.

  56. Dennis, it’s a very common delusion. Kudos to you for seeing through it.

    Quin, thank you for this as always.

    Mike, I think you misunderstood what I was saying. It’s not a matter of policies, it’s a matter of visions. Did Harris present a vision of the future as something other than a continuation of a miserably unsatisfying present? Did her policies offer any substantive reason to think that the next four years would be any different from the last four? I’d say “no” on both counts, and that’s what cost her the election.

    Hobbyist, if there is, I don’t know about them. Anyone else?

    Guillem, I think I explained the political meaning of the Dry Tree (scientific materialism) and the Fellowship of the Dry Tree (Marxist socialism, with its scientific-materialist veneer) clearly above. The Lady of Abundance is art — all the arts, taken together as an allegorical person. Remember that Ralph is Morris’s surrogate here; after his run-in with the world of capitalist business and commerce (the Burg of the Four Friths), he becomes a full-time artist (falls in love with the Lady of Abundance) before other events finally send him on his quest for the source of life and spirit (the Well).

    Chuaquin, you’re welcome.

    Sydaway, take your pick of the celebrities, media intellectuals, and pundits who claim to be against climate change, imperialism, et al. and yet profit from the system that includes these things and won’t do a thing to interfere with the gravy train. There are your Wotans.

    Justin, I’m quite sure that monasticism will have many a heyday in the centuries ahead. As for Godel, Escher, Bach, hmm — thanks for the reminder. I haven’t read it in forty years, and I wonder what I’ll think of it when I reread it.

    CR, good! Yes, exactly — remember that in Wagner’s mythos, human characters are classes or groups of human beings, while gods and giants are the abstract ideals that humans aspire to and represent. Siegmund as rebel without a clue is a very familiar type to most of us.

    Chuaquin, and one they seem almost uniquely unwilling to learn.

    Taylor, I know! You’d think they’d get a clue, right?

    Phutatorius, if it was a deliberate trick, kudos to the trickster!

    Jon, that’s one way to think of it, yes.

    Roldy, the Valkyries are abstract ideals. Brunnhilde is the one who’s clearly identified by Wagner’s mythos: she’s the ideal of liberty. We’ll see how that plays out in the operas to come.

    Chuaquin, I always thought that Dali’s comment was very sensible. He wants a king who reigns but does not rule — who serves as a screen onto which people project their need for a daddy figure, but who expresses that in purely ritual form. I don’t think it would work in practice, but it’s a charming idea.

  57. Maybe that crayfish is a lobster.

    “Consider the Lobster” is what Dr. Jordan Peterson (borrowing from late author David Foster Wallace) entitled his chapter on how the serotonergic system in human physiology has been conserved by nature since at least our last common ancestor with crustaceans, and so consequently we’re more constrained in our options around hierarchies, human potential, etc., than we’d like to believe. His background in Jungian analytical psychology, existentialism, and phenomenology also reflects something similar to what I’ve gleaned from your teachings, which is that, in spite of — and possibly because of — those constraints, we actually have more of a different kind of potential than we realize.

  58. A little tangential to the article, but a data point related to the election and some comments made about it above, feel free to delete this if it is too off-topic.

    NBC News of all outlets wrote an article where they anonymously interview several Democratic Party insiders immediately after the election. Much of what is said is deeply critical of current leadership, and indicates that many insiders knew exactly what was wrong with Harris’s campaign but, in short, they weren’t listened to:

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/shattered-democrats-grapple-kamala-harris-loss-rcna178967

    Personally I don’t find this surprising at all. Some especially interesting excerpts:

    “They said they see a party that drifted far from its onetime identity as the protectors of those left behind, to represent the party elites. They questioned the campaign’s decision to focus on reaching out to “soft” Republicans when they had their own issues with base voters.

    Some spoke of revamping the party’s outlook on immigration, calling for stricter enforcement on the border. They saw the rising support for Trump in metro areas as a backlash from early policies during President Joe Biden’s administration that enabled migrants to flood into blue states, where they were often housed and financially supported even as working-class residents struggled to receive services.”

    “Harris, they said, inherited a campaign where the fundamental negatives of a nation on the wrong track were baked in. Some blamed the influence of the Obama-era consultants and strategists who play an outsize role in messaging and who, according to one longtime Democrat close to the Biden team, were “stuck in 2009.””

    “Campaign aides and allies directed much of the angst at the campaign’s chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, whom they complained ran a shop with the hand of an autocrat. According to three senior campaign officials, they saw her as loyal to Biden, never allowing Harris to truly make the break from him that she needed to win.

    O’Malley Dillon, they said, siloed off information with just a tight circle of advisers, keeping other senior officials off email chains and updates. That sidelined many of the aides who knew Harris the longest — and the best, they said.”

    And finally,

    “The aide believed Democrats would still have lost if Biden was the candidate and that the party should have worked to ensure Biden didn’t run for re-election.

    “How the hell did we not deal with this problem? He’s 80 years old. He was supposed to be a one-termer. The man could barely speak and actually be coherent,” the person said. “It was too late, and we knew we had a Biden problem this time last year. The party knew it and people truly were not honest about how out of touch he was and how his age was really playing with America.”

    Ultimately, a Democratic lawmaker said, the party needs to reassess its leadership both in office and behind the scenes.”

    Of course, it’s yet to be seen whether any of this will translate to a real change in the party’s leadership. I guess we will have to wait and see.

  59. Hi JMG,

    I’m enjoying these essays on Wagner’s Nibelung’s Ring; is there any chance you could collate and publish them in book format? Would be a great read.

  60. Writing Hobbyist @43: I checked out Roger Scruton’s book “The Ring of Truth” a while ago. It had summaries of the operas and quite a bit of music theory. But for a complete musical novice? Not really. You’d want to pick up a familiarity with the piano keyboard and basic music theory to get much out of it. He gives hundreds of examples, but you’d need to be able to read music.

  61. Chaquin, JMG, re the Monarchy.

    I think you could make an argument that the British monarchy gets pretty close to that. They have a moat ritualistic ceremonial role and and there is a lot of projection of the hopes and fears put upon them

    MCB

  62. JMG,
    Indeed, you have explained what both the Felloship and the dry tree in itself stand for, but what i was wondering is that, if the Fraternity is Marxism Socialism and the Lady stands for Art, then why the Champions of the Dry tree are also in love with the Lady?

    Also, one of the things that struck me back then about the lady was how she seemed to stirre trouble wherever she went; Every powerful man around fell in love with her and was decided to obtain her no matter the cost… What side of Art is in display here?

    I Hope this does not veer too much from the theme, however.

    Thanks,

    Guillem.

  63. OK John, indeed Dali had a good idea when he mixed Anarchism/Communism and Monarchy…the problem with this great artist was that you never know when he was kidding and when he was speaking seriously.

  64. JMG and @Phutatorius #53,
    ““Peanut, thou art avenged!”
    I saw the video. I suspect a political dirty trick — a good one, though!”
    As the one who responded emotionally to this alleged “trick” (schlepped to the poll to cast my vote at the very last moment), I’d like to comment. I think it truly doesn’t matter whether it is a trick or not. Even if it is, this “trick” demonstrated the capability of the government on borrowed money (our government is in debt) to waste resources in order to apprehend a pet squirrel. In a more sane society, there would be no levers to push to produce this raid.
    So unless you allege that this is AI-generated non-reality… do you?

  65. The question of what kinds of acts involve self-sacrifice came up in the comment thread. I can offer a personal example.

    For the last 10 years of my husband Mike’s working life, he was represented by the local section of the Utility Workers Union of America in his job as a mechanic at the local water utility. In the mid 1990s, when the time for negotiating a new contract with the union came up, the utility refused to negotiate in good faith. Finally, in frustration, the union leadership recommended a strike, and the members voted overwhelmingly to go on strike.

    Keep in mind that everyone on strike worked for hourly wages, and the average wage was about the median income at the time. While they were on strike, they received no pay except for the $50 per week that the union had in its strike fund. It wasn’t nothing, but even in the mid 1990s it wasn’t much. It wasn’t enough to pay the mortgage or the car loan, it wasn’t enough to pay for all the ongoing typical expenses of a household – and it wasn’t as if the mortgage holder or loan holder or electric utility would accept being on strike as an excuse not to pay. Depending on how long the strike went on, everyone was making at least a small sacrifice, and possibly a large one. They were willing to do this on behalf of their fellow union members and the union cause.

    The strike lasted three weeks before the utility capitulated and made a contract offer with essentially everything the union wanted, an offer that they accepted to end the strike. Mike and I had less exposure to financial ruin than most, as we didn’t have a car loan, our mortgage was small, and we had savings. But the insurance premium on Mike’s motorcycle came due while he was on strike. He decided it was an expense he could give up for the cause. After the strike ended, he didn’t renew the insurance and eventually sold the motorcycle. He didn’t get another one for 27 years, until 2020.

    Contrast this to Biden’s betrayal of the railway workers when they were prepared to go on strike – and this from a president who claimed to be a friend of the unions. Neither he nor the PMC in general were prepared to sacrifice to support the railway workers, but we and other union families would have done so. This goes a long way to explain the election results.

  66. @JMG: “A king who reigns but does not rule……a screen on which people can project their need for a daddy figure….” what else has the British monarchy been for the past 100 years? Though another, powerful archetype has played out very prominently in their great queens: Elizabeth I, Victoria, Elizabeth II. I just now realized how tightly their images matched their era: The Virgin Queen at the Empire’s dawn; the matronly Victoria in their afternoon, and Everybody’s Grandmother at dusk.

  67. Monster, hmm! Well, crayfish and lobsters are very close relatives, so maybe so. I’m glad to hear that Peterson is aware of all this.

    Untitled, I wonder if any of this will sink in. It would be nice to see the Democrats start acting like Democrats again one of these days.

    Mark, I’m already planning on it, though it’s going to be interesting to see if I can find a publisher for it.

    MCB, it’s close, and the Japanese monarchy is closer. The difficulty is that neither one includes the anarchy side of the picture!

    Guillem, 19th century socialism was joined at the hip with the arts community all through the Western world — Morris was far from the only serious artist who was up to his eyeballs in political activism. As for why the Lady caused strife wherever she went, well, have you ever spent time hanging out with a bunch of artists?

    Chuaquin, I always assume that he’s doing both!

    Inna, not at all. I think Phutatorius and I were discussing the possibility that somebody arranged for a squirrel to scamper across Harris’s stage as an homage to Peanut.

    SLClaire, that’s a fine example: the sort of thing your husband and his fellow union members did is exactly what Wotan won’t do.

    Patricia M, granted. Here again, the monarchy side of the equation is one thing, the anarchy side something quite different!

  68. Hi John Michael,

    Siegfried hasn’t yet come into the story! 🙂 Being an apt student, I read ahead. Your comment intrigued me. Hmm. The anti-Aragorn Siegfried as a fictional character, it seems to me as if he’s a touch naive, and I have a hunch his taken to extreme nature is possibly his undoing, although candidly I did not read that far ahead. Purity of purpose and a lack of fear does in no way protect a character from harsh realities and perhaps Wagner was musing on his own life experiences there? In my reading of Tolkien’s other writings, the deep impression was wrought that Aragorn was noble because despite the opportunity to hang on to life well past his use by date (and indeed also by tempted by the ring), he chose to let go. Frodo faced the same fate and was only ever saved from failure by the greed of Gollum. There’s a deep lesson in there don’t you reckon?

    Cheers

    Chris

  69. > “Marx did the same thing in a slightly more veiled form, proposing a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that inevitably works out in practice to a dictatorship of a faction of intellectuals who rule in the name of the working class.”

    It’s interesting how that line of thinking evolved over time. Marx was in favor of worker’s councils at first, but became more and more elitist over time. Lenin made it explicit that a revolutionary elite (who coincidentally were usually intellectuals, not working class themselves) had to rule, and he demeaned the working class for their “trade-union consciousness.”

    In the book “Why Liberalism Failed” by Patrick Deneen he makes the argument that Marxism is anti-elitist in its rhetoric, but quickly becomes elitist because the average worker stubbornly refuses to have the same ideas and goals as the communist ideologues. He argues that the working class and rural people actually tend to be slightly conservative, in they don’t want constant revolution and change. They want stability. Curious about what you would make of that argument.

  70. Mr. Greer & Inna… whether that squirrel was an A.I. creation or an impromptu living ‘prop’, my response is still ‘!Outstanding!’ And, I will maintain that Orange de’ Julius IS the first Meme president to use such to his advantage … akin to former Pres. JFK … who was, for all tenths and purposes, the FIRST viable TV candidate! What a thing to behold!

  71. Thanks JMG. The Dry Tree is a haunting image. While some characters held it up as an ideal, this was problematic because it was fundamentally dead. My recollection is that it was poisonous, and may have even created the desert around it. Maybe that was just my own interpretation. The symbolism of scientific materialism certainly works, especially when you consider that one has to go through it and beyond it to reach the Well!

    Back to the Ring Cycle–I’m considering giving a graphic novel version to my son as a gift. There seem to be two good alternatives: 1) The Ring of Nibelung by P. Craig Russell (Dark Horse) and 2) Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Niebelung by Roy Thomas (DC Comics). I’d be curious to know if you or other readers here could recommend one over the other.

  72. It seems counter-intuitive that in the dog-wolf metaphor, the domesticated “dog” character is a warlord who takes kidnapped women from raids, and that the wild “wolf” is the peaceful one living on a homestead. Could you explain a bit more of this, and why he used those metaphors for those characters?

  73. I am really enjoying this series, JMG. Today I am thinking, a bit at a tangent, about my ancestors from Germany, contemporaries and namesakes of Wagners’ (yes, the W in my screen name stands for Wagner! no relation, as far as I know). According to some family history research that was done by a distant relative, my ancestors lived in the Dotzheim area for many generations. In 1855 they embarked for Tasmania (where I was born and still live), a whole family with quite a few children. My great-great-grandfather was a carpenter, as was his eldest son, and the passage was paid for by them being indentured to some rich person for 7 years. I forget the details. Reading your piece here gives me a more vivid idea of why they would have chosen to undertake such an adventure. Perhaps because they lamented the passing of that older Europe, as you say, “with its craft guilds and self-governing city-states, that had been swept away by industrialism”. Perhaps these Wagners, like Richard in his earlier years, were also of a rather Romantic bent, and that made them want to be closer to “nature”? Who knows – it was a time of expansion and big migrations out of Europe into the New World. Thanks for bringing it to life by fleshing out all these currents of thought from that time.

  74. I hope an off-topic comment about the election is okay. If not, JMG, I understand if you delete this – I’ll repost in the next open thread, or on Dreamwidth if you want election discussion to go there.

    I’ll start out by admitting I’m not a fan of the Orange Man, although I’m also very far from deranged by him and spend more time arguing with clueless liberals than with conservatives or populists. The biggest issue I have with our King in Orange is refusing to concede lost elections, given no more than the fairly minor fraud and errors that happen with any American election. This sort of thing reliably corrodes democratic systems wherever they exist in the real world. I did end up reluctantly voting for an empty pantsuit who spouts nothing but platitudes, and I would probably have reluctantly voted for her senile boss too if his handlers hadn’t managed to pull him from the race at the eleventh hours.

    Still, I got my second-most-preferred outcome on Tuesday night, which was this: Trump not just winning, and not even just winning the popular vote, but winning by making significant inroads among every significant demographic group. This election has turned out to be the least racially polarized in decades! Geographically there is a near-uniform swing, except that Trump actually swung many more voters in deep-blue states (e.g. NY and NJ) and in heavily Hispanic areas than he did in disproportionately white areas in swing states!

    My current favorite factoid about the outcome is that Trump’s 2024 performance is that he greatly over-performed the Republican average among both Jews and Muslims at the same time. He won a plurality in Dearborn, MI (69% D in 2020) and came within 4% of a plurality in Hamtramck, MI (85% D in 2020). I can’t find equivalent results for Jewish communities right now, but the NYC area results point to a similar outcome there.

    There’s no room anymore for Democrats to blame their woes on the Russians, Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, voter ID laws, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Hillary Clinton’s emails and James Comey’s response to them, occasional mild criticism from normally-placid media, or – above all – “racial resentment.” If my party wants to win in the future, it is going to have to be something other than the party of mainstream media, academics, celebrities, and HR departments.

  75. Chris, we’ll get into the contrasts between Aragorn and Siegfried later on; the fascinating thing, to me, is that Wagner made Siegfried at once a superlative hero and a total failure. It’s one of his many insightful touches.

    Enjoyer, Deneen is quite probably right. One of the profound weaknesses of intellectuals in the Western world is that they don’t seem to be able to realize that other people are, you know, people, with their own needs and passions and interests, rather than convenient little puppets who will do what they’re told. If you need any more evidence for this, watch the way that Democrats right now are melting down over the fact that very large numbers of black and Hispanic men voted for Trump. It never occurred to the Dems that if you go around insisting that all men are vicious privileged rapists, they might be just a little less likely to vote for you. (And don’t even mention the Native American vote; Trump took 2/3 of that.)

    Polecat, either way it was a fine moment.

    Samurai_47, I haven’t really looked at either one. Anyone else?

    Brian, the dog is domesticated, thus an emblem of law — Hunding’s theme — and the wolf is wild, thus an emblem of liberty — Siegmund’s theme. Law is not always just, and liberty is not always beneficial.

    Helen, it’s quite possible that Romanticism had something to do with it, but there’s also the point that moving from Europe to almost anywhere else meant a drastic increase in economic prospects and quality of life. All the colonies had labor shortages, so after a seven years’ indenture the new arrivals could count on an income many times higher than they were used to, a cost of living far lower, and a much less oppressive social setting. America got tens of millions of people the same way.

    Grebulocities, I’m certainly not dissatisfied; I commented earlier that I wanted whoever won to win decisively. With regard to the 2020 election, though, the election just concluded has raised questions about that to fever pitch. Here’s a chart of GOP vs. Democrat vote totals in the last four elections. Notice the anomaly:

    It seems rather hard to believe that around 20 million Democratic voters materialized out of thin air in 2020 and vanished this year. Vote fraud made easier than usual by mass mail-in voting under Covid restrictions seems rather more plausible as an explanation.

  76. A quote from the Financial Times, although most of the article is paywalled,

    “Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened.”

    And “According to Deutsche Bank, it’s also the first time since the late 1800s that the incumbent party in the White House has lost three consecutive presidential elections.”

    According to a graph 1880 to 1900 had four consecutive flip flops. That would have been following the crash of 1873 which left things unstable for a generation. Two of those non-contiguous terms were Grover Cleveland’s. The President after his second term was McKinley who was assassinated.

    The procession went Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley.

    Back in the present, The various Wotans are running out of tricks and the giants and dwarves are getting impatient.

  77. “Marxism is anti-elitist in its rhetoric, but quickly becomes elitist because the average worker stubbornly refuses to have the same ideas and goals as the communist ideologues. He argues that the working class and rural people actually tend to be slightly conservative, in they don’t want constant revolution and change. They want stability.”

    The workers of Marx’s time could see the system worked, they just wanted a piece of the action. That’s what Marx missed. It’s sort of like the Greens who sing the ecological praises of subsistence agriculture. Yeah, try it sometime. Revolutions tear up the crops and scare the livestock. Change faster than a year can’t be adapted to, once the crops are in you are stuck until next year.

    And it’s not just Marxists. A few years ago the idiot Bloomberg crashed and burned his campaign when he went on that farming is simple, you put a seed in the ground and a plant comes up.

  78. That’s interesting, JMG – I hadn’t been focusing on raw vote totals but rather percentage margins. I took a look at Dave Leip’s Election Atlas to find out more. It seems that turnout and Democratic vote totals are down disproportionately in solid Democratic states, while the turnout is holding steady in swing states with a substantial swing to Republicans. In fairly Republican states, Trump made absolute vote gains along with Democratic losses in TX and FL. Among solid Republican states, I’m actually seeing a pattern much like the solid Democratic states – Trump gets about as many raw votes in e.g. AL or AR while Biden/Harris lose votes 2020-2024.

    I guess I’ll reserve judgment until the final results drip in from the West, where mail voting is King (Covid or not) and final results take weeks. As a resident of downstate Illinois I’m far from averse to considering Democratic fraud as a possibility, but I was under the impression that Republican attempts to audit the 2020 vote in swing states came up mostly empty-handed. If large-scale fraud was involved in 2020, it would have taken a strange form where the Democrats primarily padded their numbers in safe states and only barely carried the swing states where the election was actually decided. I have no idea what to make of that.

  79. Dear JMG and commentariat!

    If this is off topic I will understand if it doesn’t appear. But I’m wondering about two things. When the collapse accelerates, the usual idea is that there will be some kind of future for people and other creatures generally, albeit a degraded, less abundant one.

    But what of the crumbling nuclear power stations? A society that can’t look after itself isn’t going to be dedicating its time to keeping the cores of hundreds of power plants cool, so meltdown and global radioactive contamination is inevitable, isn’t it? How does anybody/thing survive that? Is it possible that we could start to take this seriously and sort it out before it’s too late — is it possible to make these sites safe (even if humans could get together and agree on anything?)

    I would also like to ask about global dimming. It seems that particulates from pollution are keeping the earth cooler than it would be without them. Once industrial activities cease, the temperature will probably rise by 2 degrees, abruptly.

    Do I have this right? I hope not.

  80. @Siliconguy, @JMG

    Starmer? Theoretically he’s got a minimum of 4 and a half years, and a huge majority in parliament that’s not theoretical at all.

    What he doesn’t have is even a fraction of the popularity of his deeply unpopular predecessor. There’s been a series of unforced errors that have driven him into negative territory within days of getting into No 10.

    So the end is likely to be some external event that he doesn’t have the political capital to survive. For example he appointed our fabulously indiscreet foreign secretary who has a history of TDS with a large selection of hysterical tweets (google “David Lammy Trump twitter” for examples).

    He presided over a program to send activists from his own political party to the US to help persuade voters in swing states to vote Democrat. I’m not sure if that ever went ahead but it was certainly planned.

    I’m expecting a robust response from the White House early next year. Possibly sooner.

  81. JMG – this is off-topic, and feel free to delete… but some other election comments are “leaking” through… and maybe it is on-topic to the theme Ecosophy Enjoyer is riffing on – re the relationship between intellectuals and workers.

    Anyway, it was clear to see back in the days of Clinton and Blair, that both men were (almost in lock-step), disengaging their parties from any projects involving the interests of working class constituencies (who were still voting for them in large numbers).

    But this week, the absolute wide, open, blue waters that have opened up between the Democrat party and the interests of working people was best demonstrated, for me, by what my deep blue homestate of Massachusetts did. By a comprehensive two thirds majority, they said no, absolutely not, to a ballot measure intended to raise the minimum wage for waiters and bar staff and other “tipped” riff raff.

    Imagine that!

  82. In your discussion on Pythagoras and other intellectuals who want to lead societies, it’s hard to avoid seeing it as a metaphor for the recent election. The woke liberals have been saying that racism is an original sin of the United States, and that they should be given the power to rectify it. In other words, the philosophers should run society. The common people aren’t too cool with that idea, rise up and burn their school down.
    The problem is that the common people never actually run things. The elite, the people who have figured out how to amass money and power, run things. In Wagner’s terms, the giants; in this election’s terms, the corporations and capitalists. A battle between the intellectuals and the common people has only one winner — the wealthy. And now we’ve elected a wealthy person who has promised to tear down democracy. Why, one might even think that the common people were manipulated, by their passions, by the wealthy.

  83. JMG – I’m glad that you introduced the “4 popular votes” chart, since it’s been on my mind since I saw it. It was a topic for discussion last night on my regular Thursday night ham radio discussion on a local repeater, in fact. Apart from fraud, here are some other plausible ways to account for the drop in Democratic support, from Biden to Harris.
    First, the chart was created before the votes were completely counted. As of this writing, Harris has over 69 million votes, about 3 million more than on the chart. Votes are STILL being counted, even though the final result is decided.
    Second, Biden was elected during the pandemic, when everybody got mail-in ballots and may have had nothing better to do than fill one out. (I’m not dismissing the possibility that they filled out more than one!)
    Third, Trump now has over 73 million votes, many of which came out of the Biden tally.
    Fourth, there may have been many people who couldn’t bring themselves to vote in 2024 for either R or D (in part, due to their mutual support for Israel).
    A PBS-based “fact check” on the question starts off with the wholely unpersuasive assertion that “there was no significant fraud in 2020”, never minding that the kind of fraud that was alleged wouldn’t have been confirmed by the kind of investigation that didn’t find it.
    Now, the question in my mind is, regardless of how Biden got into office, how much long-term damage has his Residency done to the Democratic Party and the country? If they did cheat him into office, how does karma come around to punish us?

  84. I’ve thinking about Morris (and other old commies/anarchists) Socialism , and well, this ideology isn’t such contradictory as it seems, IMHO. Another thing is the idealisation of the medieval past.
    There’s a live tradition of “reactionary” and “luddite” branch in the not Marxist Left. Even I’ve remember that here in Spain a Traditionalist Socialist had his 10 glory minutes some years ago, between local extreme left. His name was Felix Rodrigo Mora. I read some of his books, often by anarchists prints, and I liked some of his ideas against the totalitarian left and the indistrial society. However, another of hos ideas looked like to me only ridiculous and false. An example: he wrote that in the Middle Age the Spanish kingdoms had democracy (sic) in the christian towns, against the Muslim Al Andalus, whose ideology was totalitarian…Well, I can’t describe feudal Castilla or Aragon looking like anarchist/communism.
    I could say that this man was our Ted Kaczynsky lite, because he at least was peaceful in his neoluddite ideology…

  85. from last night’s dinner table talk: a contemporary of mine, a playwright, was carrying on like Doomsday. Another I’d read as hard-core blue read her a lecture on how the Democrats had abandoned the working people, and got what was coming to them, a pity Bernie Sanders didn’t win the nomination. I mentioned the doom-crying and hair-tearing of the losers in the last 40 years of elections, and started singing “Pain, oh, pain, pain and agony! Deep dark depression, utter misery…..”, raising a table-wide laugh. And added that the people had spoken, end of story. And to the playwright, who is actually a very good friend, sang a bit of that old IWW song “We’re still here,” with the theme of presidents coming and going. “Eighty years have come and gone and we’re still here,” good for a thumbs-up in any old folks’ home. Exit, laughing.

    I won’t bother to argue with my daughters or their family, why waste my breath. But if they talk about moving elsewhere, I’m staying here. As my playwright tablemate pointed out, after a mention of a stranded neighbor whose relatives moved to Australia and New Zealand some time ago in fear of what the US was turning into, “We’re your family now.”

  86. Looking at that voter graph for 2020 indicates to me that the Republicans may have done a bit of voter fraud but were far out-frauded by the Democrats. So Trump was perhaps quite right to doubt the results of the 2020 election!
    Trump strikes me as a person who is guided more by holistic gut wisdom and responses and less by the intellectual bubble living in the top half of his head. Both of those zones have pluses and minuses and their wisdoms and stupidities. And the intellectual bubble isn’t as wise as commonly thought and the gut not as dumb as many think.

  87. @Brian Kaller, #75
    I think you are adding much of your 21st century notions to the labels “dog” and “wolf”. Maybe if you substituted for “guardian dog” and “street mongrel” it would make more sense.

    Hundling is by no means a pet; he’s a warrior in the dawn days of his culture. He is a service dog with one clear thing inside his skull: obey the master/the rules. Lawful neutral, from D&D rule-books, is the way you make sense of him. Sure, he purchased himself a wife; but the woman in question was already in disgrace by the slave raiders, so not better off elsewhere. Furthermore, it would have cost him the same money to keep her as a servant (and occasional sex-slave), but he gave her his name and a place in society. That has to count for something. And when he decided to kill Wolfling he announced so in the open and challenged him to a duel, not simply slit his throat in the middle of the night. And none of these redeeming qualities come out of the goodness of his heath; it is simply what the code demands of an honorable man.

    Wolfling, on the other hand, is basically a murderhobo. He acts all meek and docile at the beginning of the scene, but it is because he found himself disarmed and wounded after his latest killing spree, and exhausted to boot after his escape. He’s no Bond-villain, though; he shows kindness and warmth and politeness, so I pegged him as Chaotic neutral. He’d see himself as Chaotic good, for sure, but notice how the lightest display of animosity turns him like a switch! He will not forgive or forget an offense, and the minute the opportunity materializes itself in the form of the hilt of a certain sword, he’s already all-in. Within the minute he decides to repay kindnesses received by slaying the host and claiming the hostess for himself.

    And the worst thing is… they could have been friends. The natural progression of the scene was that someone is going to put the pieces together and realize this is the Wife’s Long Lost Brother, so we are Best Buddies, yes? Instead, the Wolf starts to brag about those loosers he offed yesterday, and the Dog goes: “wait… you mean… my COUSINS!!!!!!”

  88. I was pondering Trump and the squirrel. Ratatoskr is the squirrel who runs up and down the World Tree. Some of memes with Trump and Peanut the squirrel has the squirrel on his shoulder. Other memes have the squirrel with a MAGA hat. I wonder since Trump is half-German, that perhaps Ratatoskr had something to do with all of this. In my relations with Ratatoskr, He is a Being that does have power. (Or as the Marvel Character: Squirrel Girl says, “I eat nuts, and kick butts.”)

  89. One thought about Hundling and the marriage/rape of Siegelinde is how that has become the Feminist 4.0 view of all human relationships, so ingrained in the upper class women to the point where they are convinced that a man asking ‘can I buy you a drink?’ is tantamount to sexual assault. #metoo! “Rape-culture”, The Patriarchy oppressing women, &c. &c.

    I am also pondering (once again) perhaps the very names have some mythic significance like subtitles and big, flashy neon signs: Siegemund and Siegelinde and Siegfried.
    Sieg- victory
    Mund – mouth or spoken words
    Linde – Linden tree, and remember the leaf from the linden tree fell on Siegfried while he bathed in the dragon’s blood, leaving him vulnerable, right?
    Fried — ~ Freude ‘happy’?

    No, wait… don’t tell me… we’ll get to that…
    (Just random pre-breakfast thoughts from an unarmed mind… coffee… need coffee…)

    Bruce

  90. Speaking of Pythagoras, before I get to Godel, Escher, Bach, I am going to read this slim volume I just found at work, just came in:

    Music by the Numbers: from Pythagoras to Schoenberg by Eli Maor.

    (Music by the Numbers is the name of a chapter in the Radio Phonics Laboratory too, so this is flipping a, ahem, a number of my switches.)

    “Music is filled with mathematical elements, the works of Bach are often said to possess a math-like logic, and Igor Stravinsky said “musical form is close to mathematics,” while Arnold Schoenberg, Iannis Xenakis, and Karlheinz Stockhausen went further, writing music explicitly based on mathematical principles. Yet Eli Maor argues that music has influenced math at least as much as math has influenced music. Starting with Pythagoras, proceeding through the work of Schoenberg, and ending with contemporary string theory, Music by the Numbers tells a fascinating story of composers, scientists, inventors, and eccentrics who played a role in the age-old relationship between music, mathematics, and the sciences, especially physics and astronomy.

    Music by the Numbers explores key moments in this history, particularly how problems originating in music have inspired mathematicians for centuries. Perhaps the most famous of these problems is the vibrating string, which pitted some of the greatest mathematicians of the eighteenth century against each other in a debate that lasted more than fifty years and that eventually led to the development of post-calculus mathematics. Other highlights in the book include a comparison between meter in music and metric in geometry, complete with examples of rhythmic patterns from Bach to Stravinsky, and an exploration of a suggestive twentieth-century development: the nearly simultaneous emergence of Einstein’s theory of relativity and Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system.”

  91. Okay, one more Pythagorean book recommendation for the day. Cataloging the previous book led me to this title, which has some very interesting contents. So it’s also going onto the stack. I will be a busy with this material, as well as Godel, Escher, Bach for awhile … but it appears it will be supremely useful to me (and perhaps others here, esp. the geometry/music connection).

    Music and mathematics :from Pythagoras to fractals, edited by John Fauvel, Raymond Flood and Robin Wilson.

    Contents:
    Tuning and temperament : closing the spiral / Neil Bibby — Musical cosmology : Kepler and his readers / J.V. Field — Science of musical sound / Charles Taylor — Faggot’s fretful fiasco / Ian Stewart — Helmholtz : combinational tones and consonance / David Fowler — Geometry of music / Wilfrid Hodges — Ringing the changes : bells and mathematics / Dermot Roaf and Arthur White — Composing with numbers : sets, rows and magic squares / Jonathan Cross — Microtones and projective planes / Carlton Gamer and Robin Wilson — Composing with fractals / Robert Sherlaw Johnson.

    This has got me wondering how much number symbolism might be involved in the Ring. Stockhausen’s opera cycle Licht is filled with magic squares and other such hidden puzzles for the attentive listener/player/investigator. It can be fair to say the Ring was an inspiration on Stockhausen in that he wanted to create something of similar epic scope, and use of mythic characters (but here he might have been more like Tolkien, believing in the reality of these beings). I know lots of composers have hidden mathematical things or other puzzles in their scores. Did Wagner play this game?

  92. JMG,
    Thank you for this. I never would have imagined that I’d develop an interest in opera at my age. But given the trials of our times, decline and contraction, any light that can shine on what’s ahead is a beacon worthy investigating. Fuedalism doesn’t sound so bad in this context, although like anything, it can be abused to horrific ends. If anything, the opportunity for meaningful freedom appears to be greater than most industrial democracies since rulers must have skin in the game instead of buying their way in. Also thank you for the Beethoven recommendation. I definitely could see Iron Maiden or Ramstein playing some of this just because..why not?

    For those in the states, who worry about armed young men, we all dodged a couple bullets Tuesday night. It would have been obvious the fix was in if it went the the other way with apporopriate consequences to follow, both domestic and internationally. Let’s all pray that the situations in Ukraine and the middle east can get resolved without mushroom clouds. The king in orange may not be considered wise, but he does rely on eternal truths and takes a practical approach to problems.

  93. Ecosophy Enjoyer, Working class and rural people tend to be conservative for, I submit, two reasons:

    One is that we know quite well that what little we might have can easily be taken away, and

    we also know that the bloody consequences of other people’s revolutions will fall on us.

  94. Siliconguy, yes, I saw that and was pleased to see it. The fact that it appeared in FT suggests that it has finally begun to sink through the yard-thick skulls of our ruling elite that their frankly idiotic policies of the last few decades really are going to bite them in the nether regions. As for Marxism, exactly. What the working class wants is plenty of jobs at a good wage; give them that and they’re happy. Refuse to give them that and no matter what else you offer them, it won’t matter.

    Grebulocities, it’s the raw vote totals that are crucial here. That’s where the anomaly stands out. I’ll reserve judgment until a court of law rules on it…but Trump has said repeatedly that anyone who commits vote fraud will be doing time, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the post-Jan 20 Department of Justice were to carry out some massive investigations into the 2020 election. We’ll see what they turn up.

    Hobbyist, thanks for this.

    Larkrise, these are relevant questions for this blog but not for this week’s post. May I ask you to repost them once the Fourth Wednesday open post goes up on the 27th? I’ll be happy to answer them in detail then.

    Andy, several of my ingress charts have suggested that there’s an explosive financial scandal in his future. Yes, I heard about Lammy, and it’ll be interesting to see whether he quietly steps down, pleading personal issues, before January 20.

    Scotlyn, I noticed that. You’re right, it really does speak volumes about the Democratic Party these days.

    Tom, alternatively, one might even think that the common people have recognized that “democracy” in the mouths of the party that just lost was a dog whistle for “bureaucratic overreach,” and voted accordingly. Portraying the recent struggle as a battle between intellectuals and plutocrats is quite an oversimplification, not least because there are plutocrats and intellectuals on both sides. Nor is it a zero-sum game for the common people, who can choose which side to support based on which one offers them the best options, and are perfectly capable of judging a candidate based on his previous actions in office — rather than, say, the denunciations of his opponents. This notion that the people are always passive, never active, is very deeply ingrained in some circles — and it’s one of the core reasons the Democrats lost on Tuesday.

    Lathechuck, I’ll be interested to see the final score, and how that changes the lines. As it is, though, it’s quite an apparent anomaly. Since Trump seems to be committed to investigating and prosecuting vote fraud, it’s quite possible that all this will be settled in the proper way, in a court of law.

    Chuaquin, interesting — thanks for this.

    Patricia M, thank you for this! That’s good to hear.

    BeardTree, of course! Vote fraud is as American as apple pie and both parties engage enthusiastically in as much of it as they can get away with. I suspect the GOP turned out the ballot printers as fast as they could once they saw what was happening, but didn’t anticipate the epic flood of fake Democrat ballots. It’ll be interesting to see how things turn out now.

    Neptunesdolphins, hmm! I could see that.

    Renaissance, granted. I was amused to hear that a significant number of liberal women are swearing off sex as a result of Trump’s victory. So they’re going to protest a shift to the right in politics by taking up exactly the sort of sexual morality that the right wants them to embrace…

    Justin, thank you for all of these! As for number symbolism in Wagner, I have no idea. Anyone else?

    BobinOK, well, I just picked up an LP of Emerson Lake & Palmer playing Moussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” so Iron Maiden playing Beethoven doesn’t seem out of line! As for Tuesday, yes, and it was a close call. I note with some interest that the Houthis declared a ceasefire as soon as Trump’s election was announced, so there’s some hope there as well.

  95. Renaissance and JMG, I turned my back on sex, romances and dating when my husband died–in 1995. I have not for one minute regretted it. Course, I do happen to be, shall we say, not good looking, # 2 or maybe 3 on a good day. I said to myself, let the lookers deal with egos and hurt feelings.

    With all due respect, JMG, they might be embracing the kind of sexual morality the right says it wants to have happen. I will start believing them when I see traditionalists asking parental permission to marry.

  96. Hi JMG,

    I hope you are well.

    Until now, I didn’t write a thing, here, regarding the election. I had a lot to say, commenting largely on Taibbi’s sub-stack. I still have a bunch to say. It was a tumultuous few days. I stayed up all night on election night counting electoral votes. I can say “I was there” when the hour came about 11pm, that Trump’s numbers 1%, then 2% spilled over KomodoDragon Harris’ numbers, in the battleground states. Noticing the change in real-time was pretty nifty.

    Will next week’s Wednesday be the subject of the election?

    💨Northwind Grandma💨🤗🥳
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  97. Boo-hoo-blues…. David Kaiser! Who can’t spot a Grey Champion if one bit him in the butt, since they’re not his notion of buttoned-up dignified moral leadership. To his credit, he does realize that neither are our elite.

    http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/

    I’m not hearing too many boo-hoos from the women doing my speech therapy, physical therapy, toenails clipping (when you can’t do it for yourself any more…..) nor from the older folks here.

    Anyway, the quantum wave has decidedly collapsed, and you can’t take it back.

    Come to think of it, during the last internal crisis, we elected a country bumpkin with a low sense of humor and no couth at all, and guess what?

  98. @JMG re: “One of the profound weaknesses of intellectuals in the Western world is that they don’t seem to be able to realize that other people are, you know, people, with their own needs and passions and interests, rather than convenient little puppets who will do what they’re told. ”

    I was a at meeting of the Green Initiative Committee, which does a good job collecting the sort of things that can be recycled, or should go to hazmat disposal (batteries), or The Lions Club (discarded glasses etc.)The head of the committee also came up with and bought great numbers of those handy little detergent slips that replace the huge jugs of laundry detergent, and is handing them out. That’s good work.

    But when the actual work was done, she was going on and on and on about the way people did NOT bring their tote bags or reused paper bags or takeout dishes and was not putting things in the right barrels. To that end, she was handing out more and more flyers about what they should be doing. I agree with her that they should and its frustrating that they don’t , but she reacts to the fact that most of them don’t care, or will take the easiest path, in a classic example of trying to force people to be good and hitting the same buttons over and over and still not turning apes into angels. When I mentioned that in conversation, I used the example, familiar to Floridians, of the preacher who keeps pounding on the fact that he’s upset because his parishioners still sin. My ex-hillbilly war-veteran dad had no illusions about that! He could give you a good, pointed sermon on some of the horrible examples, but without the hair-tearing anger.

  99. Hi John Michael,

    My vote is probably more closely aligned with the crusty old hyper-conservative Tolkien. Aragorn as a fictional character was older, had years of experience and command to his name, and got the elves to reforge the sword that was broken. A dude can’t do everything. 😉 It was a smart move. Maybe I’ve misread the narrative, but there’s something a bit bumbling about Siegfried, I’m almost getting a sort of Sailor Steve Costigan vibe where he goes from one set of troubles to another and falls deeply head over heels for the first woman he meets. Dunno, I’d suggest there is a lack of impulse control going on there.

    I noticed a few folks discussing recent events. Had to laugh, there was some weird comment made by the old dude who’s clearly struggling upstairs if you know what I mean, and possibly should have been removed from office as an act of mercy. But the gist of the comment was that: “Defeat doesn’t mean that we’re defeated.” I’d have to suggest that clever word plays don’t necessarily get the job done, and there’s a bit of wider societal reaction to doubleunplusgood speak, especially when the consequences of getting it wrong are quite economically and socially dire. But then I guess people aren’t (or more correctly now, weren’t) allowed to speak about such things… Hmm.

    For your interest, I faced a group of rather disappointed and unhappy people the other day based on the election outcome. They were not very nice to me the cheeky scamps. The simplest reply is often the best in such situations: I’m not emotionally invested in the outcome. As I mentioned to you recently, it isn’t my circus, and they’d probably be frightened silly by a blunt assessment of the economic, social, resource and environmental realities.

    And oh yeah, Wotan seemed to enjoy plausible deniability, which is another way of pretending that a bloke is the good guy, when they ain’t. 🙂 You see that with the monster debt discussion, in that everyone seems to be pointing fingers, few, if any, are taking responsibility. Where ever have the adults gone?

    Cheers

    Chris

  100. On Tumblr not too long ago I read a disturbing observation. Someone who was tracking grocery prices over time observed that foods preferred by working class people were rising in price much faster than those preferred by the upper middle class. Organic chicken only went up in price by about 10% during the time period studied, while the cheap factory farmed chicken more than doubled. Similarly the cost of red bell peppers rose by about twenty cents a pound while the cost of green bell peppers rose by more than a dollar.

    This is exactly the opposite of what you’d expect if the price increases were motivated by market forces. After all, the higher a person’s income, the less likely that person is to be frugal when grocery shopping. Whole Foods customers are known for pretty much ignoring price.

    Therefore I am forced to conclude that this is a social engineering tactic, intended to drive a wedge between the classes.

  101. “So they’re going to protest a shift to the right in politics by taking up exactly the sort of sexual morality that the right wants them to embrace…”

    From what I’ve observed, the right isn’t anywhere near so anti-sex as it used to be. Much more concerned with falling marriage and birth rates. Even the Catholics, who have historically had lots of room for celibacy (and a fair amount of cultural biophobia and consequent sex-repulsion), are more concerned these days with what they call family formation, and of course Evangelical Protestantism, which is basically Christianity adapted for the frontier, has always been about that. I’ve seen “messaging” aimed at young women that was more focused on fecundity than on faith. “You could be a smart scientist or you could be a traditional mother and give birth to six smart scientists.”

    Where you find anti-sex sentiment these days is in the far reaches of radical feminism, quite a lot (though not all) of which seems to arise out of reaction against male-dominant cultural streams in both religious conservatism and the party animal lifestyle. I think it’s that last thing, the party animal lifestyle, that they’re protesting against.

  102. Hello Samurai_47 @#74
    My beau is a fan of P. Craig Russell and highly recommends his adaptation.
    Best
    Jill C Yogaandthetarot

  103. #84 I don’t know how Starmer & Co. are going to handle the outcome of the war in Ukraine, which seems likely to end in an outcome other than Ukrainian victory including restoration of the Ukrainian state’s control of its de jure borders. Most of the UK’s political class have quite a lot of political capital invested in it, so if it goes bad for them, I don’t know where that leaves them.

    #106 A similar absolute increase in cost price, for a cheaper product and a more expensive one, will be a smaller percentage increase for the more expensive one, so what you describe is possible without necessarily foul play.

  104. Mary, here’s hoping. I didn’t exactly ask permission of Sara’s parents before proposing, but very nearly the first thing we did after the proposal was accepted was take a Greyhound bus across the state so I could meet, and get the approval of, her parents. It was a sensible thing to do, and having both families on board with the marriage really helped early on.

    Northwind, it was quite something to watch. I went to bed around midnight, being fairly sleepy, with a good sense that Trump was going to win, and then got up around six and saw that he’d taken Pennsylvania and Georgia and had to stifle a whoop. No, next week will be a book club post as usual; the week after, I’m probably going to talk about the election.

    Patricia M, oh, granted. And yet he came closer than just about anyone else on the left to realizing that Trump’s victory was made inevitable by the unwilligness of corporate liberalism to pay the slightest attention to the bitter poverty and misery their pet policies inflicted on a majority of Americans. I grant him that much. As for your example, bingo — and it never occurs to them that yelling louder and louder isn’t going to do a thing. Unless the people themselves have some good reason to invest time and effort in a project — and they get to decide what a good reason is; their supposed betters don’t — they’re just going to shrug and ignore you, or if you really get annoying, go out of their way not to cooperate.

    Chris, I wish Siegfried was as smart as Costigan. Impulse control? He’s never heard of it. He’s the romantic ideal of the free human being, doing whatever his passions inspire him to do, which is why he’s a total personal and moral failure. Aragorn is the Un-Siegfried because he replaces that sort of mindless bumbling with the four classical virtues. As for “Defeat doesn’t mean that we’re defeated,” that’s just precious. Um, yes it does, precisely and in so many words.

    Joan, that’s a good point. There may be a simpler reason, though — the corporate staff who do the day by day work of setting prices may simply have decided to see to it that someone else pays the higher price, not them. As for sexual conservatism on the right, I’ve seen quite a bit of it recently among younger men, as part of their movement into traditional religion. The right is no more monolithic than the left, but it’s been interesting to see the young men who were into Pepe and the frog god Kek eight years ago turning increasingly to Jesus and the Bible today.

  105. From Chris, “For your interest, I faced a group of rather disappointed and unhappy people the other day based on the election outcome.”

    Why on earth would anyone in Australia care about our election? Unless you like watching train wrecks and building collapses. Morbid fascination is a thing.

    The good news about the election is that it pried a billion dollars out of the oligarch’s money bins. And of course $20 million just turned up missing from the DNC accounts.

    Quote from the Well at World’s End

    “for when the rich man is hurt his wail goeth heavens high, and none may say he
    heareth not.”

    I rather like that one.

    Somewhere Morris found a trove of archaic words to use.

  106. “Mike, I think you misunderstood what I was saying. It’s not a matter of policies, it’s a matter of visions. Did Harris present a vision of the future as something other than a continuation of a miserably unsatisfying present? Did her policies offer any substantive reason to think that the next four years would be any different from the last four? I’d say “no” on both counts, and that’s what cost her the election.”

    I’m going to make a defense of Harris here. I recently read a fascinating book, The Nightly News Nightmare, about how poorly the US mass media covered the presidential elections from 1988-2008. The mass media makes the campaigns look a lot worse, because they like attacks and will focus on the comparatively small number of personal attacks; they prefer to talk about the candidates and not the policies, which is the opposite of what the candidates want; and the book made a pretty compelling case that this broke American politics especially once the media decided to use sound bites under 20 seconds.

    I decided to look into Harris, and listen to one of her longer speeches, one that was clearly not meant to be broken into sound bites. She was trying to present a positive vision, and actually made the campaign about issues, and discuss why things were going to get better than they were now. She new things were not working and was trying to explain how she planned to deal with the problems facing the country.

    I still disagree with her on a lot of things, but she was trying to put forth a positive vision. The problem is the media just was not listening, and they were the ones trying to make the campaign entirely about the people running, instead of the issues both candidates were trying to talk about.

    Joan, JMG,

    A friend of mine who works in a grocery store told me a few years ago that it’s been a known secret for years that a lot of foods that the middle classes prefer to eat are quite often sold at a loss, because the people setting prices belong to those classes and they will intentionally mark down whatever they plan to buy as one of the many ways the managerial classes rip off the companies they work for.

    It would not surprise me in the least if they were now unwilling to raise their prices enough to cover inflation.

  107. Dear Archdruid,

    I have just finished Siegfried, and there is so much I have learnt by reading this seemingly simple opera cycle. Its not just how informed the work is, especially when you put it through the Fauerbachian filter. It is also how astoundingly influential the work has been over Western culture and fantasy, as a genre.

    For instance, the Song of Ice and Fire series, which was adapted into the wildly popular Game of Thrones, seems to have adopted its own choice of legacy from Wagner. Jaimie and Cersei Lannister, the two blonde twins born to the royal family of the Lannisters, secretly love one another. They have a dwarf brother named Tyrion, and also at their service is a brutish man named Gregor Clegane, who has the title of The Hound. Its like a kind of Coena Cypriani built around the Ring Cycle.

    Also, it does appear like most of fantasy as a genre started out as a way to write about politics. While Twilight and its cousins are mostly arousing romances pretending to be about fantasy, the best works of the genre – from Wagner and Tolkien to Lewis’s Narnia, through Asimov’s Foundation – are all about politics in one form or another. Wagner writes Romantic Socialist politics, Tolkien writes British Conservative politics, Lewis writes Christian Conservative politics, and Asimov writes the sort of atheistic liberal politics that we are all too familiar with these days. What is really funny is that even Harry Potter is about politics – the kind of liberal “social justice” politics that is quite strong now but was a budding flower at the time. Even Japanese fantasy series like Dragonball Z are thinly veiled commentaries on politics, with Freiza being a representation of the vicious alliance between real estate merchants and yakuza strongbosses in Japan at the time.

    I am really looking forward to your interpretation of Brunnhilde’s decisions in the later part of Das Walkure. By now I have learned to put on the Fauerbachian lens and glean some insight from the story on my own, but I do believe I have missed some of the really important bits. I can’t wait for the next chapter in this series.

  108. Siliconguy, Morris spent decades reading everything he could get from the Middle Ages, and he was fluent in multiple languages. He’s one of the few writers who could write medieval English and make it convincing. (E.R. Eddison is another.) Of all Morris’s discoveries, the one I like best is “ugsome” — that’s a synonym for “ugly,” just as “lonesome” is for “lonely.”

    JustMe, thanks for this.

    Taylor, fair enough, but I literally haven’t followed any US media for years. I get my news from overseas news sites. It’s interesting to me that none of these, even the cerebral ones, gave much space to Harris’s vision — while they gave quite a bit of room to Trump’s.

    Rajarshi, yep — modern fantasy takes most of its raw material from the earlier writers in the field, who drew on medieval legends, and it’s all about politics. The weird thing is how often novels by liberal writers push a conservative political agenda. So many fantasy novels frame the struggle as the good people trying to maintain an ancient order unchanged, and the bad people trying to change things, and all the while the bad people are grunting racist males and the good people are plucky young women of color who just happen to be the Special Person who alone can do whatever it is with the Magic McGuffin, etc.!

  109. John, about Dali’s “ideology” we shouldn’t take it very seriously. Indeed, he (like you’ve written in a previous comment) talked seriously and kidding at the same time. I agree.
    I’ve just remembered another famous “ideological” quote by Dali: “Picasso es comunista,; yo tampoco (“Picasso is a communist; I am not, either”). He obviously mocked to Picasso contradictory life style and his apparent leftist ideas. But Dali also was mocking himself…
    I’ve read some comments about Monarchies nowadays, but I think Dali doesn’t speak about none of them when he declares himself as Monarchist and Anarchist/communist.
    When Dali talks about himself as a Monarchist (if I remember well his ffreak interviews), he’s thinking in a “metaphisical” sense of Monarchy, by the way. I don’t know what meaning have his words in this point…Dali was maybe Francoist in Franco regime, monarchist with Juan Carlos I; maybe Dali was simply and ever Dalinist.
    I’d like to comment about the US election and the Trump victory, but I’m too tired of politics this week, but maybe I’ll comment something in two weeks. My mouth is sealed now.

  110. Dear JMG:

    It is interesting that Wotan’s plans involve no self-sacrifice, great complexity, and the need for plausible deniability (or everything he did is legal, but not moral). Wagner hit the elites of the time right on target (as well as ours). I think there is also a lack of self-reflection: is the right thing to do? What happens if it goes wrong? Is the game actually worth the risk? Some of it may well be: risk, what risk? Someone or something else will bail me out!

    Also, these plans involve using everything and everyone as tools, to be dropped as soon as they aren’t needed. It is funny when the tool takes charge (as for example, when the man with the funny mustache, who others thought could be used as their tool along with his movement, turned the tables on them).

    These days our elites are so stunningly inept, I think the time is coming when they really misjudge things!

    Cugel

  111. FWIW, I suspect that a good part of the differential rise in food prices is not nefarious, but is due to the massive subsidization of conventionally raised/grown foods (especially animal products) growing less effective. Those foods are kept artificially cheap in the US by various direct and indirect forms of subsidization, and are also more reliant on inputs; as energy and input costs rise, the prices of those foods also rise more sharply. Another factor is simply that people who are already purchasing cheap food have no other real options if it becomes less cheap (they can’t stop eating), whereas some percentage of even Whole Foods shoppers will switch to cheaper alternatives at a certain price point. Of course that’s not the whole story, but I think that’s probably most of it, and that self-serving finagling probably plays a pretty minor role. But I’m not dialed into grocery story politics; my experience is mostly as a producer for commodity sales and less so direct-to-consumer sales, which are different ballgames.

  112. Wer here
    Well If I have to be honest whoever ends up the president of the Us is of moderate importance to me.m People who make life miserable for millions of my countrymen are not leaving office that is for sure. But the amount of embarasing disasters associated with our “leadship” with trump is well documented here and elsewhere
    https://wpolityce.pl/polityka/712241-kompromitacja-tuska-niemal-wprost-nazywal-trumpa-agentem
    Now the current (wretch) prime minister is claiming with a straight face that all the mockery and attacks on trump he laid out in the last year and proclamations that “I will congratulate Kamala during her inauguration speech” and “we must support Ukraine at all costs” did not happen despite compilations of clips going into hour lenghts about him claiming thoose things being published on Polish social media daily.
    In the end the central theme is that the reality of our situation “Trump victory” “NATO humiliating defeat in Ukraine” (people are already talking here about the implications here on the street of it) “will the EU even survive?” had in greater context little meaning. The Twilight of the industrial age is here. decline never sleeps and whatever policies Trump will enact will not conjure up endless fossil fuels here in poland. Making some deal with “the bad man in east might help but thanks to recent policies that is no longer an option”. Some policies might stem the decline but not stop it.
    JMG I have an another question”who exactly in your opinion is Trump Gonna make America Great Again when the Us empire is in clear decline and Trump is vehemently against wars and sending US troops to other nations (he literally run on this platform to office). When he realises what is happening will he change course? What will be reaction of his electorate When he announces that us trops must be send to reinforce Israel etc?

  113. Quite from Stewart Dean on the Bujold list:

    “Determined, self-righteous ignorance is like a black hole
    Nothing you throw at it or say to it will make a difference”

  114. Taylor Burgess, about grocery prices. I just returned from the weekly Farmer’s Market. My purchases were $3. one head of cabbage, $1. two medium sized yellow onions, $5. doz eggs, $3. small basket of Macoun apples, and $3 one loaf of whole wheat bread from an Amish baker. Apples and eggs came from a certified organic operation, others claim they farm using natural methods. Cabbages and onions pretty much grow themselves in our soils. No carrots on offer, alas. Meats are expensive but I tend towards vegetarianism, with the occasional hamburger for a guilty pleasure. My take, one way to avoid the high prices is do not buy processed anything. Preserve your health by not ingesting the array of chemicals the processors use. For which, IMHO, there is no, as in none whatsoever, reason in most cases. Rich people taking in each other’s laundry is what the processed food industry is all about. Jane owns the dye factory, Joe imports chemical A, Bill produces additive B, and they all sit on each other’s Boards of Directors and each one gets a piece of the retail purchaser’s $. The primary reason I voted against Trump, besides that I think the VP is a nice lady I would like to have a cup of tea with, is that I am convinced his backers intend to force feed us all with their toxic chemical brews.

    Rising RE prices means fewer people having room for home gardens. Unfortunate, unintended consequence, I am sure.

  115. JMG 110

    > book club post

    Curious. What book?

    💨Northwind Grandma💨📖
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  116. The Democrat leadership strike me as being similar to the equivalent in Britain, that is people who are progressive in some ways, more educated (often far more so) and more enlightened on some issues than their countrymen, but at the same time completely unable to understand:

    a. that they have their own snobberies and prejudices ;

    b. that they are where they are as a result of social advantage just as much as ability ;

    c. that the economics they propound favour (and are seen as favouring) them, not everybody ;

    d. that there is a huge link between social division and prejudice, which their economics foster rather than ameliorate ;

    e. that if you weaken labour organsiation and socialist politics, it’s not liberalism which fills the gap ;

    f. that if progressive social ideas are linked to sod-you economics, and are seen as being propounded by a superior elite, then you are asking for what you get, which is an alliance between the resentful proletariat and the cynical wealthy.

    That they can’t grasp any of these points is precisely because of their monumental self-regard and sense of superiority.

  117. Hi John Michael,

    Mate, I’m still laughing about that one: I wish Siegfried was as smart as Costigan. Truly, that is painting one heck of a picture! Costigan did have dunno whether it was the common sense, or perhaps maybe even good luck, to enjoy life, and not wish to rise beyond his circumstances. Far out!

    I’m left scratching my head though, how could: He’s the romantic ideal of the free human being, doing whatever his passions inspire him to do, anyone in that state of mind possibly be free in any way shape or form? Being a slave to one’s passions is err, being a slave. Where ever does free will come into that story?

    One of the intriguing economic future circumstances is that a smaller government, will incidentally reduce bureaucratic over-reach. And it is a very adaptive response to decline, which will free up resources for more practical purposes. To my mind, it is a good thing. It is also worth noting that the massive amount spent on that lot produces a very poor return on investment for society.

    Cheers

    Chris

  118. Hi JMG,

    I am relatively sure you have seen this article on RT.com:

    https://www.rt.com/news/607372-conclusions-trump-us-president-term/

    It is a stupendous piece, summarizing succinctly much of what you have said for years, if not all🤙🏼.

    It is a travesty that the American mass-media has not had the guts to ‘fess up’ (“confess”) to the things said there — Americans would be better for it, to have listened back then or listening now.

    We have “70-odd days ’til Trump” is in the White House — 70DTT… countdown.

    💨Northwind Grandma💨🇺🇸🏚️
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  119. Chuaquin, I rather like the idea of a Dalinist Party in politics. It would certainly be an improvement over the current options.

    Cugel, good. Yes, and if you watch the intellectuals of his time and ours, you’ll find those same features on display. More as we proceed…

    Jennifer, thanks for this.

    Wer, that’s an excellent question to which I have no good answer. Trump’s unpredictable at the best of times, and exactly how he’ll handle the world-class mess Biden will be handing over to him is anyone’s guess.

    Patricia M, and that’s equally true on every corner of the political landscape!

    Northwind, er, the same book we’ve been doing for the last three and a half years, of course: The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Lévi.

    Robert C, that strikes me as a very good, cogent summary. I don’t suppose there’s any point in mailing it to your local Labourites and suggesting that they get a clue…

    Chris, exactly! That’s the epic blindness of the Romantic movement — the inability to realize that surrendering to your passions simply substitutes an internal tyrant for an external one.

    Northwind, thanks for this. I think Robert Clayton summed up very well in comment #123 the reasons why this sort of straightforward clarity is anathema to our chattering classes and the corporate media.

  120. Mary Bennet 121

    > My take, one way to avoid the high prices is do not buy processed anything. Preserve your health by not ingesting the array of chemicals the processors use.

    Yep. You got that right. I am transitioning my husband and me away from processed foods into home-made. Ain’t easy. I can’t do the changeover all at once, largely because I am also a new cook (yes, at 70-something). I started out not knowing how to boil water (not joshing); now I can boil an egg (joke). I end up hand-making supper twice a week, maybe thrice, with an emphasis on pasture-raised pork.

    Tonight, I fixed a sort-of flat casserole made of hamburger, cheese, eggs, spices, water, and pancake mix. The recipe called for milk, but I substituted water. I think I ought to have milk on-hand from now on (the casserole was rather ‘thin’). The whole meal came to, on the high side, $3 per person, whereas if the dish came processed, it would have been $7. In a restaurant, it would have been $30. Big savings. It didn’t kill me to spend an hour making the concoction and baking it.

    Throw something together halfway passable and see if [‘generic family’] notices. If the meal gets a “C,” it passes.

    Funniest thing is, my husband puts food at an “A” priority, but won’t do a thing about fixing it. Food bores him. He doesn’t care about food until 5:30pm when he walks in the door, and says, “Honey, I’m home. I’m hungry. What’s for supper?” Classic 1950s Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best. He can instantly turn into a grouchy old man, but put something passable into his tummy, and he melts. Classic guy. There is no changing him (been together 45 years, 42 married).

    I resist the role of cook partly because I started out a couple years ago knowing nothing, and it has been really hard. But we are eating healthier and it is a heck of a lot cheaper. I will never stop grumbling under my breath.

    I was of the borderline generation where after 7th grade (mid-1960s), the school system cancelled HomeEc courses (“Home Ek”; Home Economics) forever across the board. I didn’t know how deficient I would feel sixty years later. Women-of-the-household, if you now find an inexpensive offering of HomeEc evening cooking class near you, sign up for it pronto, dive in, because such a class(es) is worth its weight in gold. Heck, men too. Cooking, not baking. And middle-school and high-school girls, go for cooking classes — you will use the skills forever.

    Anyway, I thought of cooking when I saw your comment. Happy cooking‼️Way to go‼️Keep on truckin’‼️

    💨Northwind Grandma💨🥘
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  121. JMG 126

    > the same book we’ve been doing for the last three and a half years, of course: The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Lévi.

    Oh. Oops😬.

    💨Northwind Grandma💨😳🤓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  122. Northwind, I highly recommend: 1. a Betty Crocker, earlier the better, for baking especially, excellent for the step by step photos, and How to Cook Anything by Bittman, the big yellow one. If you can’t find Betty, Bittman’s How to Bake Anything is also a good place to start, but no photos

  123. Northwind Grandma, #127,

    Men too! As a husband and father, I did most of my family’s cooking, and I taught my sons to cook. When the older one went away to college he roomed with three other guys, and they had to figure out how to assign the housekeeping chores. My son offered to cook, and the others gratefully exempted him from anything else!

  124. When I try to access rt.com, the browser lies to me that the site doesn’t exist. Rt.com is blocked in the EU, so that we aren’t exposed to wrongthink.

    But of course we’re part of the “free West” and not emulating China.

    Any tips on how to show the censors the metaphorical finger? I’d like to decide for myself what to read.

  125. I like the Dalinist Party idea, too. I agree. When I see the current parties in my country and other places, I’d put my hopes in such as possible political party, not so absurd as it would like in a first look. Oh oh I’m not going to write more on politics by now…

  126. @ Grandma #127 – May I congratulate you at taking up cooking at the age of 70! Well done, you!

    It is, as you say, one of the most useful skills going, and one of the chief ways of ensuring that what you eat is actually food, and not a bunch of chemicals dressed up to look, taste and feel “almost, but not exactly, unlike” food… (The quote is from one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, where the character Arthur Dent encounters a machine that uses some inert chemical substrate to deliver whatever food or drink your heart desires. Arthur keeps trying to get it to make a cup of tea, but every time, it delivers something that is “almost, but not exactly, unlike tea…” Lol!

    Anyway, cooking was the one skill I made sure my boys had well under their belts before they left home, and both thanked me within their first year in college, since they were saving fortunes not having to choose from takeaways and/or ready meals, but already knew how to frugally assemble proper meals for themselves from basic ingredients.

    As for myself, I long ago figured out that my kitchen was not my prison (where I would perform my “prescribed role”) but my domain (where I am competently in charge, and respected for my skills).

    May your kitchen be blessed and your skills keep unfolding!

  127. @Northwind Grandma et. al. – I have always been pleased that my daughter taught her sons to cook, and encouraged other hands-on skills. Of course, they do prefer baking to cooking!

    Alas, some of us can neither cook nor make homemade bread etc, including me, any longer, any more than I can climb up the stairs to the fourth floor without great difficulty. I do buy organic wherever possible, and prefer raw green leaves to canned green veggies any day of the week . My walking stick, however, is bamboo, bought at an Albuquerque neighborhood Grower’s Market. However, the entire point is moot. I’m well aware of the fact that in any great crunch, the old and weak – and privileged – have the survival quotient of a snowball in the inferno, and actually accept that. Fussing all the way at the small manifestations, of course, as a first reaction. Doris Day put it well. “Que sera, sera.” Si, es verdad.

    I’m only praying my daughter and her family don’t head for Canada or wherever and leave me stranded, not on an ice floe, but on a warm green peninsula with flowers in November.

  128. @JMG
    I portrayed the recent election as pitting intellectuals against the common people because you’ve been writing about the Ring cycle, which is exactly about intellectuals pitted against common people and plutocrats. All abstractions are, of course, simplifications; we simplify in order to think, and we have to choose the right abstractions. I saw clear parallels between Wagner’s abstractions and the election. Permit me to speak further.
    It seems to me that the United States is a plutocracy, where the strongest economic group is the capitalists controlling the corporations. It’s also a democracy, which I understand as an arena where different groups compete for social goods, and where the groups agree to obey rules that distribute power broadly, so that no group can dominate, but it’s always a dynamic balance.
    The middle class are workers who’ve managed, through education, to become necessary to plutocrats and who thereby get a higher wage. The Democrats represent these knowledge workers. The working class doesn’t have many tools to defend itself, and is the class most vulnerable to the strength of plutocrats and the illth they serve all workers.
    Who should the working class ally with? It needs, most of all, good jobs. It can’t depend on government handouts because the government will always be stingy, so it depends on plutocrats for jobs. So the working class allies with them, and often echoes their concerns. “Bureaucratic overreach” seems to me a phrase a plutocrat would use, not what a worker would say.
    I think the working class isn’t now getting the jobs it needs from plutocrats. We are in a post-industrial world that needs less and less labor, as automation progresses, so the working class is less and less likely to get the jobs it needs. Its alliance with plutocrats makes less and less sense to me.

  129. I am surprised that the rather hot depiction of an incest was permitted on European stages in the 19th century. Even more so as it seems to me it was an addition to the story by Wagner himself. I can’t recall now if there is an incest somewhere in Nordic mythology, but I am rather sure there is no deliberate one. Wotan’s planning of it to purify the race of the Wölsungs seems to me an Egyptian touch.

  130. Serious question for JMG: A while back, you were talking about the astral feeling heavy, dark, muddled, and all-around bad. Has that changed any?

  131. @Chauquin, #115: “Picasso es comunista,; yo tampoco (“Picasso is a communist; I am not, either”)

    That reminds me of a story about the late lamented Peter Cook. At a party, he asked the young man he was chatting to what he was doing at the moment.
    “I’m writing a novel.”
    “Neither am I”, said Cook.

  132. “Any tips on how to show the censors the metaphorical finger? I’d like to decide for myself what to read.”
    Get a good VPN (e.g., Proton, which is free), and dial in from a server outside the EU.

  133. @Northwind Grandma, #127,
    I learned to cook shortly after I left university, in my 20’s. For me, this was (and remains) a basic survival skill.

    I, too, am very careful to make sure that what I eat is actual food.

    The latest thing I have learned to do is make my own pro-biotic yoghurt using half-and-half (there is a good organic brand of that where I live) and L. Reuteri as the pro-biotic. It makes a great, not-too-filling, breakfast food.

  134. JMG,
    Wotan certainly seems to be the spirit god of the Democrats, especially this latest ill-fated campaign. They seem desperate to gain and hold on to power using any manner of short-cuts and trickery. Instead of using the normal process to pick a candidate they choose a process that would not expose them to the will of the people and not risk upsetting the their senile centers of power. This ” shortcut candidate ” Kamala, seemed like the ” easy” path. But like Wotan they piled up a big debt to karma and the future to get their ” Castle in the Sky”.
    Like Wotan, trying to get power with a ” cheap trick” has and will hurt them badly. In the short term it will see them cast from power, and many of them prosecuted for crimes. In the long run it has destroyed their bench of future leaders. Imagine instead of bending a knee to Hillary and the democratic power brokers they could have run an honest campaign against Trump with Tulsi and RFK before they were exiled from the Democratic Party. Even if they had lost, they would have a better future than the bleak one they face today.

  135. @Aldarion #136 – yes, there was. Wagner didn’t invent it. For that matter,in another tale, Loki accuses Frey and Freya of getting it on, and their father Njord simply says, mildly, she has a perfect right to choose what lovers she takes. Not that the Norse really condoned it, I think, but gods and their descendants are in a slightly different category.

    @Robert Mathiesen #138 – My son-in-law’s mother’s family was Canadian, and she made sure her children and grandchildren all had dual citizenship.

  136. Northwind, I’m delighted to hear that you’re getting into cooking — it’s a useful skill to have at any age. One thing I discovered during my own learning curve in cooking is that most modern cookbooks, recipe columns, etc. are useless — they seem to be obsessed with making the simple process of making raw materials into tasty food as fussy, time-consuming, and expensive as possible. There are better ways. I don’t happen to remember if you use e-books, but if you do, Project Gutenberg has 127 old cookbooks free for the downloading —

    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/419

    — including some fine old Home Ec textbooks.

    Chuaquin, it says something about our current politics that over-the-top surrealism is less absurd than the policies being proposed in all seriousness by the people who think they’re the smartest folks in the room.

    Tom, I used the term “bureaucratic overreach” because it’s a convenient label. The working class people I know — and I know quite a few of them, btw — use longer and more profane labels, but the concept is the same. They’re convinced that one of the main factors that keeps them from having an adequate supply of jobs is the metastatic overregulation of our society, which (in many cases deliberately) chokes off small business creation, the most efficient source of jobs. The evidence suggests that they’re right. Fixating on plutocrats, btw, ignores the donkey in the room, the rise of corporate, government, and nonprofit bureaucracies as power centers in their own right distinct from individual plutocrats. It’s precisely because so much of the left is beholden to these bureaucratic power centers that they can’t address the concerns of working people.

    Aldarion, the incest theme is present in the original legends, and plays a significant role all through Northern European legend — the Finnish Kalevala includes a similar story in the relationship between Kullervo and his sister, and of course Tolkien borrowed the theme and used it efficiently in the story of Turin Turambar in the Silmarillion. Nineteenth-century writers who wanted to be shocking quite often either hinted at brother-sister incest or used it as an explicit theme; think of the way that Poe hinted at incest between Roderick and Madeline in The Fall of the House of Usher.

    Patricia M, I felt a significant change for the better about a week before the election.

    Clay, it’s grimly fascinating to watch so many of them double down and refuse to learn anything from the wholly preventable failures that cost them the election.

  137. Thank you JMG, another great breakdown!

    I had been wondering what the Valkyries symbolised.

    Is there any symbology in the fact that Siegmund and Sieglinde are brother and sister?

    By the way for those interested here are the meanings of the three “Sieg” names:

    Siegmund protection through victory
    Sigmund, also spelled Siegmund, is a Germanic given name with roots in proto-Germanic *segaz and *mundō, giving a rough translation of “protection through victory”

    Sieglinde is a distinct-sounding feminine name. The name comes from German culture and means ‘gentle victory.’ It has two Old Germanic elements that constitute its meaning, including sigu, which implies ‘victory,’ and lind, which implies ‘flexible’ and ‘tender.’

    The term linde in this name also means ‘linden tree’ or ‘protective shield of linden wood.’ So, the meaning of the name could also be summarized as the shield or the protection which defends our victory.

    Siegfried is a German-language male given name, composed from the Germanic elements sig “victory” and frithu “protection, peace”.

    Arthur Rackham is my favourite illustrator and his illustrations for the Ring Cycle are the just beautiful and VERY romantic, so therefore very appropriate!
    There is actually a specific Ring Cycle Tarot deck by Allegra Prinz, which uses his illustrations.
    I have it but haven’t studied it in detail.
    The quality of the print is not quite as good as The Arthur Rackham Tarot, by Lo Scarabeo.
    A description given by Schiffer publishing:
    This beautiful 78-card Tarot deck, adapted from the illustrations of Arthur Rackham, interprets Richard Wagners four-part opera, The Ring of the Nibelung, which traces the mythic tale of a golden ring of unlimited power plagued by a deadly curse, loose in the world of the Old Norse and Germanic gods.

    An End Time prophecy infuses the epic story with thought-provoking, contemporary resonance. The four elemental Tarot suits in this powerful divination tool are realized from four Ring Cycle races: Gods (Fire/Wands), demi-god Walsungs (Water/Cups), human Gibichungs (Air/Swords), and dwarf Nibelungs (Earth/Disks/Pentacles).

    The accompanying book explores divinatory meanings, lensed partly through the feminine and esoteric, and also delves into The Ring of the Nibelungs characters, plot, themes, and unique music, which would inspire J.R.R. Tolkiens Middle-earth novels decades later. This deck remains true to the spirit of Wagner, Rackham, and the Tarot, demonstrating useful contemporary insight into all three of these timeless arts.

    On the topic of ‘Evilly Evil” its really not possible I don’t think, even the nastiest are usually “nice” to someone or something. A totally evil person just can’t exist, they would be killed, or locked up or in fact by that measure, they would have to kill themselves as their evilness would have to extend to themselves as well.
    Anyway that’s my 2 cents worth, may $2 what with inflation!

    With regards to Herr Wagner himself, don’t you think, as an older gentleman, he has a magnificent countenance and bearing? The kind that would look at home on Mt Rushmore. He was also a sweet looking but serious boy and his young man picture has the look of someone that hasn’t yet being smacked by reality, in my opinion.

    To Silicone, the reason why Aussies care about the US election is because we are a vassal state of course! Plus the old adage, when the US sneezes the whole world catches a cold is still pretty much true. You’re a declining great power, but still a great power, nevertheless!

    To Wer, I always read your comments wioth grat interest, its kind of funny that your great leader has a very similar name to the Orange one!

    To Helen W, I am also a Helen W! Haha, in very, very dry South Oz. I mean dry. Don’t believe the forecasts when they say rain or showers for South Australia, they rarely eventuate, and if they do are generally very patchy and might total less than a mm! The quality of forecasting by the BOM has plummeted dramatically in the past 5 or 6 years. I think a lot of the older heads left or retired.

    To Chris, First Branch, finally finished (yes, took a while) I might read the second, then pause to read a Jack Vance, or maybe Andre Norton!

    JMG, apologies for my thousand and one questions, last AMA, I did get a bit over excited didn’t I?

    Finally, with the election over my sincerest wish is for Peace, genuine Peace!
    I hate the terrible suffering, death, destruction, madness and huuuuge waste of resources that war brings.

    Regards, Helen in Oz

  138. “a significant change for the better” JMG, I don’t know how Michael and his angels fit into your model of reality, but I feel they have busy kicking archon hind ends. Archons is a Greek word used in the New Testament for evil spiritual powers. I am watching Trump with interest as I am aware of various predictions – one even dating back to the mid 80’s that he would be used of the Spirit. to bring good to the USA. By the way there is nothing in the Bible that says the Spirit will only use pristine flawless humans as his vessel to get things done. That type is quite scarce, so deity has to make do with the available materials.

  139. JMG,
    In last weeks post I had described my desire for someone to be present in the ” Hillary Bunker” to chronicle the last days of the Biden/Kamala regime. As we know, that regime collapsed as anticipated. We will be waiting awhile before some insider can write the story. But I certainly hope we will eventually get to read an account of this epic downfall.

  140. @Aldarion (#136) & Patricia Mathews (#143):

    I grew up on Norse mythology, thanks to my Danish-American father and his family. (In fact, the Norse myths — not the Bible — were the first texts I ever encountered that told of Gods.) And I always understood that the Vanir, Freyr and Freyja, were brother and sister, and also husband and wife. And their parent, Njord, who is presented as male by the Norse, is the same as Nerthus, who is presented as female by Tacitus — so he/she/they was/were probably at once both the father and the mother of Freyr and Freyja. In contrast, the Æsir were more like humans in their sexual relations.

    Also, Patricia, good to hear about your offsprings’ dual citizenship. That puts them in an exceptionally favorable position.

  141. @Patrica Mathews and JMG: Thank you for the correction! I have read the Poetic Edda (in translation), but not the Prose Edda. Now that I have read a summary of the Völsunga saga, I see the incest occurs there already, though on a dead end of the meandering story and family tree. Wagner, for some reason, decided to put it on the main trunk.

  142. @HELEN #145 – hello to a fellow Helen W in Oz! My son is now living in Adelaide, one of these days I might visit him. Thank you for mentioning The Ring Cyle Tarot – I looked at it online, and reading the description of the suits gave me a much better understanding of the story – maybe others might also find it useful. From an online description: “The four elemental Tarot suits in this powerful divination tool are realized from four Ring Cycle races: Gods (Fire/Wands), demi-god Walsungs (Water/Cups), human Gibichungs (Air/Swords), and dwarf Nibelungs (Earth/Disks/Pentacles).”

  143. Capitalized Helen, we’ll be getting into the Siegmund/Sieglinde binary in our next installment. As for overexcitement, it’s been known to happen. 😉 Two or three questions are easy for me to answer — and keep in mind that another Magic Monday is going up in about three and a half hours!

    BeardTree, as a polytheist I make room for all sorts of spiritual beings in my view of reality, and I also note that descriptions of various powerful and beneficent warrior spirits in other traditions sound quite remarkably like the archangel in question. I’m quite familiar with archons, and am intrigued to hear you referencing them — that’s usually a Gnostic term, and the fact that Paul uses it has raised eyebrows in various circles. As for pristine flawless humans, my understanding is that in Protestant theology there has been only one of those since Eden, and in Catholic theology there have only been two — scarce is quite the understatement! It would be a feeble deity indeed, for that matter, who couldn’t put the foibles and follies of our species to good and benevolent use.

    Clay, here’s hoping! Since quite a few leading Democrats are flinging blame at each other right now, I suspect we’ll see competing memoirs relatively early next year.

    Aldarion, he did a lot of compression to make the story fit onto the opera stage!

  144. Thanks for these answers!

    And, yes, Nerthus and Njord were the parents of Frey and Freya, so clearly, the Vanir did marry as they did in Egypt. They were also the only gods in Asgard who married Giant maidens. (Though Skadhi and Njord were quickly divorced for geographic incompatibility.)

    @Helen in Oz – there actually people who are evilly evil; or, rather who have neither conscience nor a secular reasoned code of behavior that they go by. They were once called “sociopaths.” There’s a distinction between the ones who keep the lid on out of enlightened self-interest but are totally ruthless if the situation calls for it – “Order an execution like a farmwife killing a chicken for the pot,” as one of my favorite authors put it.” And others who just do as they please and act on impulse, and yes, they get locked up at a very high rate of speed. And repeatedly.

    @JMG – I’m so glad the astral has cleared up. I know my own feelings did do when the victory was announced. BTW, the latest word is that Arizona is now firmly in Trump’s camp., giving him a total of 312 electoral votes

  145. I think that’s the way to read, contra mundum, as contra archons and exousiai, the powers…on behalf of man because of the God man. On the side of Saint Michael…Steiner had much to say about that, maybe he read Daniel

  146. Athaia #131
    The RT article is by Glenn Deisen, and is available on his Substack here. Deisen is a Norwegian Professor with a fairly jaundiced view of the Globalist Project.

  147. JMG, I think we will see the memoirs sooner rather than later, for one simple reason, they will need the money. Reports say the Harris campaign fund is in debt to the tune of $20 million so most of the staffers won’t be getting a last paycheck. Their prospects in the Rapidly shrinking democrat lobbying apparatus are slim to none. I would guess that the main stream media will be jettisoning leftest talking heads. The Ukraine money laundering operation will be coming to a close by the end of the year.
    My guess is that anyone who worked on this disastrous campaign will only have a future working on small town dog catcher elections. Even jobs as waitstaff in DC will be drying up for democrats as bars and restaurants tend to change over when a new party gets in power. The current places with nonbinary waitstaff and Rue Paul’s drag race on the TV will be quickly changing over to BBQ joints with cage fighting on the screen and country girls from Texas waiting tables.
    Any of the Harris/Walz election staffers who are slow on the draw with tell-all books better let the blue hair grow out, get a pickup truck and learn how to weld pipe.

  148. I just want to say a big THANK YOU to all of the commentariat and especially to our esteemed host. I have been feeling so down since the election, happy Trump won and we don’t have to endure anymore witless cackling, but upset because almost my entire family are Dems and talk about Trump supporters as if they’re dirt, really stupid dirt, to boot. I didn’t vote for either Republican or Democrat, but I am just so tired of hearing Trump supporters maligned, and here all views are welcome and respected and it is truly a breath of fresh air!! With all the self righteousness flying around with the Dems they will surely lose more elections. They never seem to learn from their mistakes, I guess because they are the smartest people in the room and all, at least in their little pea brains, as my mother used to say. I don’t know why they can’t see that actually listening to people instead of insulting them is the way to go.
    Oh well, I’m just venting, and please delete this Mr. Greer if you want to. But I wanted to express my thoughts and thanks to all here.

  149. # Northwind
    If you ever consider getting some cookbooks to help exploration I can highly recommend two US examples. James Beard _American Cookery_ and the _Joy of Cooking_ which I believe is a committee effort. I’ve no idea what recent editions are like but second hand copies will be a fraction of the price of new ones. Mine are from the 80s.

    I’ve found that the trouble with cookbooks for me is that I find one or two recipes that my family likes and the others are pretty much ignored. So one consequence is that I have far too many. Nothing to do with my general weakness for books.

    In the last few decades I’ve found myself relying on YouTube for more of this kind of thing however. Mostly Chef John on the Foodwishes channel which is a good source of help and also terrible jokes.

    # Michael Martin

    Snap! This synchronicity business rarely gets old!

  150. Good series, JMG.

    When I was in my teens and twenties, I was a huge Wagner fan. (My brother and I also regarded Richard Strauss as a musical god in our teens!). Of all the characters in the Ring, I most identified with Wotan.

    By “identify” I do not mean that I wanted to emulate him! Rather, I “identified” with him in the sense that “the shoe fits!” Your last two posts help me understand why I have always felt that way.

    I have a baritone voice, and to this day, I can still (on a good day!) sing the Farewell and Magic Fire scene from Die Walküre, including Wotan’s final invocation: “Only the man who braves my spear point, shall pass through this sea of flame!” (14:33 in the clip below).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ojhx-cFsJw

    I look forward to your analysis of the Farewell and Magic Fire scene!

  151. JMG – Here’s a quote from today’s Washington Post op-ed page (Matt Bai), which perfectly encapsulates my perspective, and a lot of the recent discussion here:
    “The problem wasn’t merely the president’s age. It was his denial of reality — and his party’s. … Democrats denounced anyone who raised the fitness issue as ageist and accused us of abetting Trump. … When the Biden team faced pressure from voters over inflation and immigration, they answered it the same way they answered anxieties about his age. Never mind what you thought about the price of your groceries; inflation was falling and wages were rising! Never mind the images of desperate migrants streaming across a broken border; crossings were going down! If the Biden administration had a mantra, it would have been: ‘You’re not really seeing what you think you’re seeing.’
    Which never actually works. It only infuriates people.”

    If only Residential age, inflation, and immigration were the only issues about which we’ve been lied to for the last decade or two! When the truth of our energy predicament comes out, I expect more fury. When the high-flying financial assets collapse, I expect the kind of depression (big D and little d, which go together) like we haven’t seen in almost 100 years.

  152. JMG #144: I agree. Surrealist “politicians” could be hard rivals for current politicians, at least in the Western countries: however I’d like to remember you that there’s another alternative in addition to an hypothetical Surrealist Party: Dadaísm could be considered too. Here, the Dada Manifesto:
    https://391.org/manifestos/1918-dada-manifesto-tristan-tzara/
    Its nonsense sounds better than the current blah blah blah in the upper echelons…

  153. @Patricia Mathews (#152):

    My suspicion is that Nerthus and Njord are not only the mother and father of Freyr and Freyja, but that they are one single Divine Being that has the ability to beget its offspring on itself — thus, in human terms, both male and female at once. But the Lore is silent on these details, so it’s merely a speculation on my part.

  154. @Celadon #153
    “At that time Michael shall stand up” Daniel 12:1 Perhaps that was the deep shift I felt happening a while back in the unseen world that I spoke about in this discussion space.

  155. Clay Dennis @156: OMG, I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t thought of the impact on Dem staffers of the $20 million shortfall. Yikes for them!

    Various sources have listed the Dem payouts to ‘famous’ endorsees; the only payout I’m certain of, due to the multiplicity of sources, is the $1 million that was paid to Oprah Winfrey (a billionaire, for god’s sake!.) My “favorite” (!) rumored payout was $3 million to noted rapper and (former?) sex worker Cardi B, but there’s a whole host of other celebs whose paychecks are said to be in the many millions each. That’s got to be causing a considerable amount of upset/heartburn to staffers who were doing more working-class jobs (scheduling, makeup, PR flacking, and so on.)

    JMG, does the Ring Cycle have an equivalent group who are used and then not rewarded, and if so what is their reaction? Premonitions…

  156. @Mary Bennet #121,
    “Doz eggs $3” – WOW! I went to the weekly Farmer’s Market in Santa Clara County, CA yesterday. A dozen extra-large eggs — $13.
    @Northwind Grandma #127,
    Thank you for sharing your cooking journey, please keep us posted. Reading about someone in her 70-s developing a new skill is very inspiring. I will think of you when I develop a new skill. Though it’s definitely not gonna be cooking. I always knew how to cook. Nobody taught me. My mom was an excellent cook, but it mostly was, “Get out of the kitchen, I’m busy here” and heavy artillery fire of criticism if I attempted to cook. The first time I really entered the kitchen was when I moved out of the house. Once in the kitchen, I immediately knew what to do. The food was alive to me. I knew how to pick it and cook it. Every potato was different for me than another potato, every apple was unique. Some hunks of meat wanted to become a stew, and some were good for soups… and I always felt that for the food to be good I had to make it myself or someone had to make it with love and good intent. Anyway… cheering you on your way to mastery!

  157. “Jessica, hmm! I need to learn more about that. Can you point me to some sources?”

    JMG, I am sorry but I don’t remember my sources for this. It is a conclusion that I drew myself when I read a lot of labor history but that was decades ago.
    Of course, the workers of the Russian Revolution and the German Social Democratic Party of those days were already proletarianized. (Meaning that they had no land or special tools and had only their labor to sell.) It was earlier struggles that were about trying to avoid that status.
    The case that I still remember is the Homestead Strike of 1892. The version I read was that steel-making at that point still had a strong artisanal element. It was the most skilled of the steel workers who controlled the actual process of making steel, though the company controlled buying and selling and hiring and much of the work force was proletarian, not artisanal. But artisans still controlled inside the plant.
    The company wanted to introduce new technology that would eliminate the need for much of the artisanal knowledge and shift control of the details of production to the company and its engineers. After much violence, the strike was crushed and the company had its way. Productivity did not reach pre-strike levels for 10 years afterward, which is further evidence that the strike was about power and social structure, not about immediate profits.
    This shift was part and parcel of how much of the science in the early 1800s was done by artisans, but by the end of the 1800s, it was mostly done by university educated scientists and science and engineering became distinct fields. The first is what Deleuze and Gautarri call nomad science; the latter royal science.
    On the other hand, many of those who were reduced to complete dependence on wage labor were folks who had first been stripped of their previous ways of life, for example in the potato famine in Ireland or by Enclosures or perhaps a bit more gently, but the need to migrate to another country. (In the US, until after the Civil War, wage labor was usually a phase of life, not a form of life.)

  158. Hi John Michael,

    As someone who works in and with small business, your comment to Tom is spot on.

    If you think about it another way, simply in order to pay for the annual property taxes on this piece of land, I’d have to sell (excluding any costs) half a metric tonne of fruit. That’s 500kg, or 1,100 pounds of top notch high quality produce. Like, how does that story make any sense? And that’s simply one cost I face.

    There’s such vast mispricing in western civilisation that in order to balance out the pendulum between producer and consumer, I can only imagine that we’re in for a world of hurt. If a guide to the future of the entrepreneurial ruling class outcomes is needed, a person only but consider what happened to X when a certain well known mover and shaker took over. A lot of chaff was sorted from the grain. That’s the future, until in their turn, that class stuffs it up royally.

    Like you, my cost base is low, and my interests are with the future. Have you also observed those shifting winds?

    Cheers

    Chris

  159. Michael Martin #140, and Peter Khan of Potlucks #155, thank you for the tip and the link to the article. I’ll check out Proton, I didn’t know that free VPNs even exist – I thought they all cost money.

  160. John, I’m curious what your overseas news sources are. If you already answered this question somewhere above I apologize, but I didn’t see it. Thank you!

  161. Patricia M, all in all, a resounding victory. I imagine the Dems will be shrieking even louder now.

    Celadon, here’s hoping.

    Clay, well, CNN just announced that it’s going to lay off a lot of talking heads, and rumors are flying that MSNBC will be put up for sale because its viewership has dropped so far, so I think your prophecy is on track. I wonder if Trump will go ahead with his plan to relocate large sections of the federal bureaucracy out of DC, and eliminate other large sections; if he does, real estate prices in big chunks of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware are going to crash spectacularly.

    Heather, you’re welcome and thank you. One of the reasons I maintain these online spaces is that tolerably often I have feelings parallel to yours.

    Martin, it’s a lovely passage! I don’t have much of a singing voice, but I still sometimes belt out Donner’s number from The Rhinegold.

    Lathechuck, “reality is whatever we say it is” has been the mantra of the corporate-bureaucratic mainstream for too many years now. It’s astonishing that they lasted as long as they did. As for energy and the economy, well, yes. Shall I be euphemistic and say that there’s a lot of downside volatility ahead, and big opportunities for well-timed short selling?

    Chuaquin, there’s that. I’d like to see someone put Dali’s face next to Tristan Tzara’s in one of those socialist banners, in place of Marx and Lenin! (The text beneath should be some piece of giddiness in Russian; да здравствуют капиталистические враги народа comes to mind.)

    Bryan, as we’ll see, Brunnhilde gets used and discarded, and her reaction leads straight to Siegfried’s death and the destruction of, well, everything. Premonitions seem appropriate here; I wonder if any of those staffers have the goods on illegalities.

    Jessica, so noted. I’ll keep an eye open for that in my next plunge into historical research.

    Chris, exactly. Sara used to do bookkeeping for small businesses, and passed on many stories about the absurd tax and regulatory burdens they suffer in this country. Some of those are there to keep small businesses from competing with the big boys, some of them are there to justify the inflated salaries of the bureaucrats who administer them, and some are social engineering run amok, but all of them grind down on the productive economy. Yes, the phrase “wind is changing” comes to my mind, too.

    Erica H, I posted a discussion of this over on Dreamwidth quite a while ago:

    https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/96119.html

  162. @JMG Thank you for the opportunity to expand on my theories. I promise that this will be my last post.
    I think we are actually agreeing. I meant “plutocrats” to be all the centers of corporate power, whether individual people or not. Corporate power doesn’t want small business competitors, and squashes it when it can; regulation is one way. Because we live in a plutocracy, the government listens most to the large corporations, letting them put pressure on small business. (I ran a small business for a couple of decades, so I know their situation.)

  163. Regarding cooking … I mostly cook from scratch. Rarely do I eat out.. As an example: I take a number of various dried chilies, toast them in a hot pan until they show signs of blistering, then soak them in a covered bowl of boiling water until soft .. then whirl them with some of the soaking water + garlic & a jalapeño or two … along with some cumin, mexican oragano, some salt & pepper to taste .. and wallah! Chili Colorado sauce magnific!! None of the crap ingredients that BIG PSEUDO FOOD encourages one to use via industrial strength CON-venience in their glop! Yes, it’s drudgery … yes I have coughing fits due to the peppers smoking on the pan … yes, tis not something one can purchase off the self … but I will state that there is nothing comparable in Big Food World.. Me thinks that CON-venience … going forward will become a dirty word.

  164. And, as an aside to my above post: I make enough .. of whatever ‘entres’ .. to nosh on for an entire week! It simply is not that hard to make wholesome, delicious meals. But one has to commit the time to do so. Tonight, I’m making Mongolian Beef, as good or better than ANY restaurant in town .. for a quarter of the cost of eating out, again .. enough to get through for the entire week!

  165. @ JMG & Clay “CNN just announced that it’s going to lay off a lot of talking heads, and rumors are flying that MSNBC will be put up for sale because its viewership has dropped so far, so I think your prophecy is on track.

    I do wonder if that is a little too soon to be pulling the plug on staff.

    I think a lot of those at CNN/MSNBC etc were secretly hoping for a second Trump presidency simply because they could drum up drama over his unapproved antics and that is good for ratings. At best all that does is delay their inevitable decline by 4 years.

  166. “the morphing of Christianity back to its original intent” Celadon #153, darn it where’s a time machine to go back and see what it was! C..S. Lewis said something about attempts to use the varied writings we have to attempt to unveil the past. “The documents say what they say and cannot be added to; each new “historical Jesus” therefore has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another “ Perhaps proving that Paul was a full blown gnostic or not for or somewhere in between would be the same sort of suppression and exaggeration.
    I feel I have met and experienced the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit talked about in the New Testament. As regards Paul being a gnostic and Gnosticism itself I haven’t the detailed knowledge of the subject to talk intelligently about it but am content with my rather traditional Christian understanding and knowing of Deity so feel no need to dive in to grasp what some regard as a deeper or higher truth.

  167. JMG “Jessica, hmm! I need to learn more about that. Can you point me to some sources?”
    (Responding to: “Many of the movements hailed as proletarian were actually attempts to avoid being pushed down into the proletariat, for example by agriculturalists or artisans.”)

    If I may, E P Thompson’s book “The Making of the English Working Class” is a deep dive into this very topic. The first (of 5) part relates to the resistance of the independent and artisanal weavers to the restructuring of clothing manufacture around factories and machines. One point he makes is that the labour the textile factory owners specifically looked for was that of women and children (cheaper), and that this made serious inroads into family structure, as well as into the independence of the artisan weavers. He also points out that the artisan weavers were general a family enterprise, and both women and children would already have been contributing labour, even thought the “unit” was the household, and all outside negotiations would be carried out by the household head. Still the individual pittances of wages earned by the women and children often did not come up to what the househols would have originally earned, and the family itself was splintered.

    You might find a partail sketch of what you are looking for in that tome. Despite its author being of a different political “tribe”, and possibly containing some “throw book at the wall” moments, the research methodology and extensive use of primary sources is sound.

  168. Re my previous, perhaps I should have said the first “section” instead of part. There is one (very long) book. But it is written in different, more or less self-contained, sections.

  169. Ecosophy Enjoyer #72

    > Lenin made it explicit that a revolutionary elite (who coincidentally were usually intellectuals, not working class themselves) had to rule, and he demeaned the working class for their “trade-union consciousness.”

    Possibly the closest a Western nation has come to a dictatorship of the proletariat was Britain in the early 1970s. I was there. It was strike after strike after strike. The coal miners went on strike so the government declared a 3-day week to save electricity. The sugar and paper workers went on strike, so you couldn’t buy sugar or toilet paper unless you knew a friendly shopkeeper who kept some under the counter for you.

    There were sympathy strikes. The Jaguar workers went on strike. Management employed scab labour. So the Silverton radiator workers went on strike in sympathy because you can’t make Jaguars without radiators.

    There were demarcation disputes. In shipbuilding there’s a need to pass electric wires through bulkheads. Management said the electricians must drill their own holes in the bulkheads. The carpenters said, oh no, drilling holes is a carpenter’s job, the electricians have to call a carpenter and wait until he drills the hole. Strike until it’s sorted.

    Result: The fall of the Heath government and the return of Harold Wilson (a suspected communist). The end of Britain as a shipbuilding nation, in fact the end of Britain as the “workshop of the world”. And a quite astonishing degree of hatred between managerial and working classes.

    They like to blame Margaret Thatcher for the working man’s problems. But they brought it on themselves through sheer bloody-mindedness of the workers and union leaders at the time.

    As a practical matter, I don’t see how a dictatorship of the proletariat would work without some sort of governing authority to allocate resources and rule on disputes. If there are lots of small producers you can let market price sort it out, but once you get specialist industries that can affect downstream production e.g. computer chips, they can use scarcity power to get a better price or dictate production volumes. It could be done in a limited area with mutual agreements e.g. Mondragon, but not in a nation state as a whole unless the state of technology was so low that basically anyone could turn his or her hand to anything.

Courteous, concise comments relevant to the topic of the current post are welcome, whether or not they agree with the views expressed here, and I try to respond to each comment as time permits. Long screeds proclaiming the infallibility of some ideology or other, however, will be deleted; so will repeated attempts to hammer on a point already addressed; so will comments containing profanity, abusive language, flamebaiting and the like -- I filled up my supply of Troll Bingo cards years ago and have no interest in adding any more to my collection; and so will sales spam and offers of "guest posts" pitching products. I'm quite aware that the concept of polite discourse is hopelessly dowdy and out of date, but then some people would say the same thing about the traditions this blog is meant to discuss. Thank you for reading Ecosophia! -- JMG

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