Random musings – Graham Stull

Are we still talking about human overpopulation?

A decade is a long time in ecology
Those who know me in real life, and those who have read my first novel, will know that I have a longstanding interest in the question of human overpopulation, and what to do about it. With all that has been happening – Artificial Intelligence dominating humanity, genocide in West Asia, World War III, Travis and Taylor’s Wedding – the topic seems to have taken a backseat. It’s fair to ask, does human overpopulation still matter? After all, climate alarmism has cooled off to such an extent that it feels safe to refire up some good old-fashioned coal power plants.

First, let’s take a look at the latest numbers. When I first started writing about human overpopulation in the early 2010s, the best estimates had the number of humans at a rounding error over 8 billion. Now that number has jumped to closer to 8.3 billion – even despite the horrible pandemic that was supposed to have claimed oh-so-many lives. While it is true that – almost everywhere – fertility rates are declining ( and quite steeply in the West), we are still on track for 10.3 billion eating, shitting and farting homo sapiens by the year 2080. In short, if there was ever a reason to be concerned in 2010, that reason is still with us in 2026.

If in doubt, draw some graphs
But was overpopulation ever really a problem? Or was it just another “Current Thing” onto which postmodern postgrads like me could project their anomie-induced angst? As always, it helps to be dispassionate. Step back and consider this graph of human population over time:

This graph shows the population of humans based on the Population Reference Bureau’s historical benchmarks, from the dawn of humanity in 190,000 BC, up to 2080, the year the UN predicts population to peak. In a way, the graph is quite hard to read without resorting to tricks like logarithmic scale, because the population growth since the dawn of the industrial age has been so extreme that the blue line merely clings to the X-axis for most of human history, then shoots up vertically. In other words, the explosion of population is so great, you can’t even visualise it. The inset graph helps a little bit, showing just the most recent years of the homo sapien’s stellar rise – but of course that loses the longer-term perspective and tends to hide just how anomalistic the current era really is. Short story: what has happened to our species’ population in the past ‘blink of an eye’ is completely unprecedented and literally off the charts.

This planet’s resources were promised to us 3,000 years ago
‘So what?’, you might say. ‘We have the ability to make food, build machines; to house and clothe this many humans and more. And we have the right to, because we are special, because we are human.’ This is certainly the line being pushed by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. But is it true? Are we the breakout species that no longer needs to worry about ecological balance?

Consider a different metric. Let’s list the 150 largest land animals by average adult body weight, from the heaviest (African bush elephant – 5,500kg) down to the Antilopine kangaroo (40kg). Conveniently, humans clock in at exactly 100th place, with an average adult body weight of 62kg (I refuse to say how far over this average I am, beyond noting that I am going to the gym as soon as I complete this blogpost).

Now let’s multiply that average by the total estimated population of that species to give us a Total Species Mass (TSM). For example, there are 450,000 bush elephants, yielding a TSM of about 2.5 billion kg. In other words, the Earth needs to provide resources to sustain 2.5 billion kg of elephant flesh, fat and bone. For the antilopine kangaroo, with its smaller population of 100,000 and body weight of only 40kg, the species has a much smaller TSM of only 4 million kg.

But what about us? Well, our TSM is about 509 billion kg, or roughly 141 times the TSM of the next most resource-intensive animal (the wild boar). Once again, scale problems make this hard to chart, but here goes nothing:

_{(all data are from Wikipedia, using admittedly crude point estimates)}

The red line with the arrow needs to continue about another metre to the right of your computer screen, to give you a relative sense of human TSM. Once again, we are literally off the charts.

Oh reason not the need! Our basest beggars are in their poorest things superfluous
Of course, the TSM is only a very crude measure of resource-intensity: it fails to account for caloric efficiency or symbiosis effects. But these factors are likely to only make the contrast between us and other land animals more stark. For one thing, our nearest (but still distant) peers like the elephants, the deer, the kangaroos and the wild boar are all ecologically-conscious herbivores, whose calories require no resource-intensive ultraprocessing. Additionally, with the exception of the few species we have domesticated, we are the only ones who consume tooth brushes; synthetic textiles; video game consoles; artificially heated/cooled environments for our maximum comfort, etc, etc. Now add the fact that we even embalm our bodies after death to deprive the soil of the nutrients we have extracted from it, and the ‘human overpopulation’ begins to look much more like a ‘human infestation’.

So is overpopulation a big enough ecological problem, for us to divert our attention from pressing issues like a closed Strait of Hormuz, or an OpenAI? I’ll leave that for others to decide. In the meantime, go buy my book.

The Archive Cafe – a digital detox

Modern digital life is tiring and draining. There are a lot of cranky, socially isolated people staring into their screens or tuning into their airpod-casts.

But there’s also the Archive Cafe in Saint Gilles, Brussels. It’s an independent coffee shop located on Avenue Adolphe Demeur close to the town hall. The specialty coffee is crafted and the baked treats are top-notch, yet Archive is much, much more than a place to caffeinate and refuel.

It seems to possess an almost magical ability to create community and buck the negative trends that surround us. Maybe it’s the vinyl albums you can browse as you wait for your coffee to be made. Maybe it’s the barista, a chill, brown haired woman who seems to be on a first-name basis with everyone and exudes unambiguously positive energy as she DJs her way through the vinyls, chats with customers or just with herself, and serves up delicious brews. Maybe it’s the fact that you can still pay in cash. Maybe it’s simply the location, in one of the more trendy and relaxed neighbourhoods in Belgium’s capital.

Sure there are smartphones even here. But you also see people writing poems in notebooks, reading paperbacks and talking across tables to each other. Dogs are welcome. Babies are welcome. And I always feel welcome too.

It’s a small oasis in the modern dystopia that surrounds us: unpretentious, friendly and positive. A reminder that not everything is online. And not everything is shit.

Let me ruin every Western movie for you

What is the one thing you associate most with Westerns? Horses, right? Wrong! There are actually almost no horses in any Western movies you will ever watch. To prove the point, consider this picture of Clint Eastwood from the classic Rawhide, standing next to a ‘horse’:

Clinty Eastwood came to town, riding on a pony…

From this photo, we can see fairly clearly that the ‘withers’ of the equine in question (i.e. the ridge between the shoulder blades) reach up to just below Eastwood’s nipples. As any artist who has studied human anatomy can tell you, the distance from nipple to the top of the head is about 25% of total height.

Now we know Eastwood to be a tall man – the internet reliably informs me that he is in fact 193cm (6’4″) in height. Therefore we can estimate the distance from Eastwood’s crown to his nipple to be 48.25cm. Given the ‘horse’ and Eastwood are standing side by side, this yields a height from withers to hoof of 144.74cm.

But here’s the rub, fellow movie-watchers: Any equine below 147cm (14.2 hands) is not a horse, rather a ‘pony’! In fact, the animal pictured here is only a tad bigger than Coca, the pony my 8 year old daughter rides at our local stables.

Of course, my eyeball estimate could be a centimetre off, but even being generous, this animal barely crosses the threshold. To drive the point home, compare Clint with historical photos. Here we have one of the most famous horses in American history, Comanche, with his 185cm (6’1″) rider, Captain Myles Keogh. Note how Keogh’s eyes (eyes to crown: 0.5% of body) align with Comanche’s withers. Using our body proportions method, we can estimate the sole equine survivor of Little Bighorn stood 173cm (17 hands) tall – a good size horse, by any standards!

Now consider this: if even mighty Clint had such a diminutive mount, what of the other, mostly shorter, cowboys who grace the silver screen? Go back and watch the movies and you can answer the question for yourself.

In reality, if actual cowboys tried to ride off into the sunset on such little ponies, saddlebags, guns and all, the animals would not get them more than a few miles from Tombstone before collapsing with fatigue. So why do directors choose to pair these mighty tough guys with the sort of puny ride that daddy’s little princess canters around with at overpriced stables in the Connecticut suburbs?

A few reasons: First, because the pairing automatically makes the director’s cowboy look bigger than he really is – that’s almost always a good thing. More practically, unless you are supremely athletic and dressed appropriately, jumping up onto a real horse is quite hard to do. And having your grizzly desperado drag over the mounting block so he can scramble his way into the saddle would take away from the magic of the screen. Ponies are also smaller, thus cheaper to feed and stable. And if the actor loses his stirrups mid-scene, he is less likely to be hurt from the shorter fall.

Most importantly, Hollywood does this because they can get away with it. Few movie-goers spend much time with actual horses, so they have no point of reference in real life for how big a horse should be.

It’s yet another reason to get off the couch, away from the phone, climb into the saddle and ride into the saloon of real life.

Metaphors under modernity: how language is losing meaning over time

A few weeks ago, I dug up a bush from one place in my garden, trying to save as many of the roots as possible, then carried it over to another spot, where I would prefer it grew. I dug a hole, placed the bush into the hole, filled it around with soil and watered it copiously. This is the literal definition of the word ‘transplant’.

But it is not, by a longshot, how most people use the word, because in the modern world, very few of us spend our time moving plants from one place to another. Often we think of organ ‘transplants’. Or the idea of transplanting a family, ethnic group or business organisation from one physical or conceptual location to another. In fact, most people today, when they use the word ‘transplant’, probably don’t even think about the fact that they are using it in a figurative or metaphorical sense.

A bush in my garden that I ‘transplanted’.

Another example is the expression ‘to sow one’s wild oats’, referring to a young man who travelled without a fixed destination and engaged in sexual relations. A century or more ago, most would have understood the full nuance of the expression. Wild oats (avena fatua) are a grain that is similar to cultivated common oat (avena sativa), but blown by the wind, they spread their seed in an uncontrolled manner and yield no productive harvest. Thus, ‘sowing your wild oats’ was immediately understood to be a dangerous, reckless, and potentially ruinous pursuit. But today, this nuance is lost on the agriculturally ignorant urbanites who trot out the phrase.

The same is true for my transplanted bush. Right now, its main root is buried in the soil, but it is not well fixed and could easily be pulled out. I hope that it will slowly sprout new roots, binding with the new soil, before pushing up fresh branches and leaves. The scars of the brutal transplantation will never go away, but over time it will hopefully survive and flourish in its new location. All of these nuances, which apply equally to the figurative senses of the word, are sadly lost on the large percentage of the population who do not garden. The are not getting the full value from the metaphor – the sense of fragility; the need to first rebuild roots before further visible growth is possible.

And what’s true for bushes and oats is true for a whole host (or ‘hostile army’) of words. Most of the vocabulary we use today ossified (or ‘turned to bone’) at a time in history when certain technologies, like horseriding, were in full trot (or ‘moving along at a brisk, steady if somewhat jerky pace’). With modernity, our language is no longer well anchored (or ‘tethered to a weight at sea’) to, for example, the strong maritime past of our forebears; instead we have drifted (‘flowed’ or ‘moved with the stream’) from these visceral metaphors. In this way, the words have lost some of the richness of their subtext. And as our daily experiences become further and further removed from the physical (agrarian, industrial, nautical) world in which our language was cultivated (or ‘grown with care’), the metaphors will become ever more abstract and flavourless to us.

For sure, there are new technologies that level up (‘increase a character’s level, hit points and other powers in a video game’) the language, but I would swipe left (‘summarily dismiss on a dating app’) on the idea that they will trend (‘climb the rankings on a social media platform’) for very long. Mostly, these terms are an abstraction of an abstraction, they are niche (‘a small cavity in a wall’), and quickly fall out of currency.

What remains to those who would wish to marry (‘join in spiritual union’) metaphor and the life experience on which it is based? Well, you have only to don a pair of gardening gloves, volunteer to muck out the local horse stables or otherwise get your hands dirty.

I imagine not many readers will be chomping at the bit to do so.

On leaky woodsheds and subjective validation

I sometimes listen to Brett Weinstein on the Darkhorse Podcast, whence I hear an uncanny number of my own, older ideas echoing back at me – which is a little creepy, somewhat flattering but mostly not that edifying an experience. In general, I find Brett in that category of thinkers who – though quite smart and original – is slightly less smart and original than he thinks he is. If his brain were a little bigger, or his ego a little smaller, he would stand a better chance of making a meaningful contribution to the world of ideas. All in all, I think I listen more for the comforting and good-natured repartee he has with his sidekick wife Heather, than because I expect to learn something.

Occasionally, though, Brett hits upon something that really provokes thought. In a recent episode, he makes the point that there is a fundamental difference between academic and vocational education: for the former, test results are given by the teacher. It’s possible for the teacher to exercise discretion, induce grade inflation or act on biases. For the latter, the outcome of the education is too closely tied with a material, objective result. If you write a bullshit essay about the sociology of queer bubble tea drinkers, it’s possible a sufficiently biased teacher would give such an essay a high grade that does not reflect its true merit. If, on the other hand, you build a book case so badly that it falls apart upon contact with any reading material, there is nowhere to hide the fact that you have not been a good student. The physical world has a way of highlighting failures which, in the artificial world of academics, can be disguised behind a veil of ‘subjective validation’.

This idea of ‘subjective validation’ is actually an important point for making sense of the Western World in 2024. I have argued before that wokeness as a form of postmodernism is a real and meaningful concept for understanding current affairs – so many of society’s ills involve the replacement of the objective with the subjective. I have also argued that there is a pandemic of overeducation which leads to the ‘dumb but educated’ having less – not more – capacity to reason.

Weinstein’s point about education fits right in to this architecture. From kindergarten through to her second master’s degree, the entire life path of a middle class, professional American is defined by validation – not from the hard edges of bumping into physical failure – but from the soft, socially malleable constraints created by authority figures, peers or other social forces. Even in the physical sciences, the majority of ‘research’ involves models and theories that are two steps away from any practical application. This dulls us to the rigors of objective reality, in favour of subjectivism which may in itself be a defining factor in the success of postmodernist ideas like critical race theory or transgenderism.

All the A+’s in the world won’t make this woodshed less leaky

None of us is immune from this, of course. I recently attempted to erect a woodshed in my garden. To accomplish the task, I took with me a few tools, but a much larger stock of hubris from my relative success as an ‘attender of meetings’ and ‘sender of emails’. After all, I have many degrees and accolades, etc, etc. None of this mattered much to the final result of the woodshed, which currently stands as a risible and leaky testament to the fact that the physical world doesn’t give a damn how smart other people tell me I am.

In fact, you can generalise Weinstein’s point to encompass many phenomena in today’s society; a society in which an increasingly large number of people have learned what they know through subjective, rather than objective, validation. Take the entire culture of safety-ism. If your conception of the dangers of falling and hurting yourself comes from warnings issued by your overprotective mother, rather than the crunch of your seven-year-old bones as you plunge from the climbing frame, then your understanding of risk is one degree separated from the consequence itself. How well equipped will you be when, later in life, the government mandates you to Stay Safe from a virus that poses virtually no risk to your 24 year old body?

And what impact does subjective validation have on the media? If the very idea of what is ‘true and correct’ comes, not from a careful observation of nature, but from some authority figure telling you ‘you are right’, what hope can we hold out for the journalists whose job it is to sort through this very social noise in search of the important objective facts? Today on Substack, the excellent Eugyppius writes about how shockingly the media has reported on the thorny issue of President Joe Biden’s mental health. When the quality of reporting is validated not by any objective truth, but rather by the subjective validation of the collective authority (in this case of the elites themselves), this kind of mistake will be par for the course.

Of course, the world of subjective validation is itself ultimately subject to constraints of the objective kind. When entire generations have been told they are smart and clever by indulgent university systems, the fruits of this false validation will eventually result in economic stagnation, in military unpreparedness, and in a lack of meaningful innovation.

In other words, the woodsheds we’re building are getting very leaky.

A General Theory of Society

I’ve had in my head for some time a general theory of society, that I’ve been meaning to put down in writing. Here goes:

Society – any society – consists of three essential elements: a State, a Market and a Community. Let’s take each in turn.

The State is, in its essence, the monopoly on physical force. The weaker the State is in a given society, the more physical force is dispersed between different actors. The stronger the State, the more physical force is concentrated in the State itself. A hallmark of a strong State is, therefore, laws which prohibit any form of violence, up to and even including self-defense.

It follows from this definition of the State that everything it does in some way relates to its monopoly on violence. For example, the State spends money on infrastructure. But in order to do so, that money must come from taxes. These in turn are collected from taxpayers who, if they refuse to pay, will have the money taken from them. If they resist, the State will not hesitate to use physical force to compel them out of their possessions and into prison.

Next comes the Market. The Market is the free exchange of value between actors. It reposes on the assumption that exchange is mutually beneficial. In its purest form, the Market knows neither altruism nor compulsion. Each actor enters the Market to further his own self-interest, and finds that agreement with other actors is the best way of doing this.

The final pillar of society is Community. Community is all voluntary interactions of social actors that are neither transactional nor subject to compulsion under threat of physical force, So anything that is non-State or non-Market is by definition Community. Examples of Community are families, friendships, bowling clubs, religions and board game meetups.

A key feature of Community is that it has the power of banishment or exclusion, but no other power. Another key feature is that interactions within a Community tend to be highly altruistic. Community members ‘care’ about one another, and in fact are often willing to suspend their own self-interest in pursuit of Community-defined goals and in adherence to Community-defined values.

Now comes my core hypothesis about the ideal organisation of a society:

A society can be said to be well-organised when the Community, the Market and the State all have equal weight. This is because each of these three mechanisms represents an important check on the other two. The State provides order and peace, the Community provides values and morals, and the Market provides economic rationality and innovation.

A society that has a strong State, but a weak Market and a weak Community, will tend towards Communism. The lack of (Community) moral compass will allow the State’s leadership to abuse its monopoly on power, while the lack of (Market) pressure will lead to bad economic-decision making and undermining of democracy, because consumers and businesses exert a democratising influence.

A society with a strong Market, but a weak State and a weak Community, will tend towards Corporatism, a consolidation of economic power in the hands of wealthy oligarchy, who will lack morals (e.g. fly to space with Captain Kirk in a giant dick, while their workers have to pee in bottles). Likewise, enforcement of contracts will be impossible, because that requires either the compulsion of the State or the moral impetus of the Community. Ultimately, even basic transactions will be burdened with additional costs of self-enforcement, and entire markets will collapse under that cost.

It’s rather hard to find examples of a society characterised by strong Community, but weak State and a weak Market. However, tribal societies exactly fitted this description. And while they may be marked by a degree of stability, I would argue that this comes at a high price: investment is next to impossible, nothing is there to drive human progress and innovation.

In modern political discourse it is conventional to consider society along a ‘left-right’ axis, in which two of the three essential societal elements are considered as opposing poles of a spectrum. My hypothesis suggests that in fact there is no place along this spectrum that can deliver a healthy, well-functioning society, because the third element – Community – is not represented.

That is why it is best to illustrate politics not with a left-right spectrum, but with a Social Triangle

And in fact, much of the imbalance in modern society is related to a steady erosion of the influence of Community on our daily lives. Church attendance has plummeted, people have fewer meaningful friendships and participate in fewer activities. Families are smaller and more fragmented than ever before. Indeed, we have drifted down the Social Triangle, and are approacing the bottom axis that runs between State and Market.

That is why when the Left and the Right complain about the other side, they are both right and both wrong. A good example is around Hate Speech. New laws are being rushed upon us by well-meaning, but wrong-headed Leftists to outlaw saying ‘mean things’. These laws are incredibly stupid – at best they won’t work, and at worst they will. But the question is, why is this happening? Simply put, the power of the Community to check the behaviour of society’s members is increasingly absent. We now find ourselves trying to criminalise the sort of behaviour that used to cost you friendships, club memberships and a place at your cousin’s dinner table.

Markets are also malfunctioning in ways that Right-wingers find hard to explain away. It turns out that excessive greed and amorality are themselves a form of market failure, because any asymmetry between market participants creates an opportunity for sharp practice – information is imperfect, bargaining power is lopsided. Absent Community, the only way to check those immoral excesses is ever-more costly regulation. That in turn creates opportunities for regulatory capture and barriers to entry for new market participants. We find ourselves in a social market economy that is neither very social nor very market.

What is the solution? Clearly, it is to restore some sense of Community – common values, a common purpose, a clear set of religious dogma and a shared moral code. Adam Smith understood the importance of this intuitively, (even if Karl Marx was less perspicacious in this regard).

Now, this is all well and good, but do I have any more practical suggestions or is this just another ‘everything is awful’ blogpost? Here’s my three step plan:

Awareness. Stop pretending like our Community doesn’t matter. Restart a conversation about what our values are, what we can agree on, and how we can come together to pray and play – knowing that is every bit as important as who our State leaders are or how our economy is working.
Subsidiarity. An interesting result that comes out of the social triangle is the question of scale. It turns out the Market works ever better at scale, and the State too seems pretty able to work at scale. But Communities don’t seem to work very well at scale at all. Insofar as altruism is a key ingredient, it’s really not possible to have empathy with a million other people, much less 8 billion. In other words, today’s society is too big for real Community to exist. Not only is globalism a terrible idea, in fact, we need to break nations down into pieces that are well proportioned for Community to prosper. This suggests devolving more of the Market and the State to smaller scales – local government and buy local goods.
Stop uncontrolled immigration. Yes, there I said it. Immigration is very bad for Community, for the obvious reason that immigrants are least likely to share the common values that bind people together in voluntary ways. Immigration erodes Community and splinters society.
God. That’s right. The big guy. Flowing white beard. Turns out, not only is He almighty, but He’s also quite good for creating the conditions under which Communities can flourish. He sort of works as a rallying point and an anchor for common values and beliefs.
Get the hell offline. I don’t believe the internet is the cause of failing Community. After all, the excellent book Bowling Alone came out when the internet was still in diapers. But I also don’t think the internet can be part of the solution. If you want real Community, you should get off this damn computer, go outside and meet people. Join a choir. Or a rugby team. Or take a pottery class.

Eye-catching, provocative headline, tangental to subject

Opening premise that is sweeping and, if you ponder it for any length of time, probably questionable. Next, a flurry of facts the reader already knows to be true which seem to support the premise, omitting the ones that refute it or provide nuance. An appeal to the reader’s desire to feel ‘included’ in the group by mocking someone outside the group, who is too stupid to get the point here.

Construction of false dichotomy, with one pole being the conclusion you want the reader to reach, and the other being a ridiculous straw man argument. Elaboration on this straw man in great detail, in order to make it clear how ridiculous it is. Shoved-in call-back reference to the idiots you already mocked in paragraph one, who of course would also make the straw man argument. Now steel man any real argument against your premise, before smacking these down with more hyperbole and carefully curated facts.

A paragraph’s worth of accepted and true statements that have little to do with your main point, but with which the reader and any reasonable person would agree. Implication that the outsider idiot from above would probably also disagree with all of this.

Concluding quote from a famous and long-dead person that fits the general direction of argumentation, adding to it the heft of history and tradition.

Subliminal messaging – a novel conspiracy theory

A plandemic or a spamdemic?

I am still recovering from Covid. I think most of us are. By this, I certainly do not mean the effects of the SARS-2 virus on my body. That is not what ‘Covid’ is. Covid was and is a social construct. A state of mind that has variously been described by fellow critical thinkers as the result of mass psychosis, religious zealotry or the nefarious actions of a highly organised conspiracy.

Indeed, there is a lively debate in the community as to the extent to which many of the terrible outcomes were centrally planned, or were the result of an organic, systemic failure of our society to cope with a stress factor. Eugyppius, the German critical thinker whose substack is something of an authority on all matters covidian, flies the flag for system failure – pinning the blame squarely on the ineptitude of the technocratic managerial class that holds the real power in Western countries. Others point to damning evidence of the involvement of globalist elites, aligned to the World Economic Forum, in planning a so-called Great Reset.

Conspiracy theorists have more time on their hands than conspiracists

Personally, I have always aired closer to Eugyppius’ scepticism regarding the utility of tin foil hats. My own experience in proximity to ‘power’ has taught me that those who are thought to hold its reigns spend most of their time chasing after their own manic agendas. They barely have time to read the briefings that are shoved at them as they board airplanes – much less to craft the narratives that inform those briefings, in service of some conspiratorial purpose.

And yet, it cannot be denied that certain actors within the technocracy are motivated to play a key role in steering outcomes. Laura Dodsworth’s excellent ‘A State of Fear’ details how the UK government did exactly that, (though it stops short of providing a smoking gun motive for their actions – leaving open the possibility that the fear-inducing psy-ops perpetrated against the civilian populations were motivated by a misplaced yet well-intentioned belief in their necessity). Likewise, the Fauci emails and the Twitter Files clearly show deep and hidden linkages between the scientific
establishment, government and Big Tech, all acting in a way that shores up their respective power positions and bottom lines – the very essence of a conspiracy.

A novel conspiracy hypothesis

In this post, I would like to veer a little further away from Eugyppius’ position and down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theorising, with what I believe is a novel contribution to the saturated market of tin foil headwear. As the great Sherlock Holmes once remarked, we can sometimes learn more from a dog that does not bark in the night, than from listening to the ones who do. I say this because when I was a boy in the early 1980s, the talk was all about the use of subliminal messaging in advertising, spurred on by a 1970s book called Subliminal Seduction. Advertisers had discovered that they could splice in a single still frame into the middle of a video image – say, a nice refreshing bottle of Coke. The result would be that the conscious eye and mind did not perceive the embedded image or the ‘Drink Coke’ slogan. However, tests showed that when this was done, it had a very strong impact on the subconscious desires of those subjects exposed to the subliminal image. Those who had ‘seen’ the spliced-up video expressed a much greater preference for Coke.

The subliminal messaging was found to be so effective precisely because it did not register a conscious response. The subject’s usual mental defences against the effects of overt advertising did not kick in.

Naturally, there was no small degree of uproar. Advertisers rushed to assure a worried public that they would never engage in such underhand tactics, the FCC intervened in the public interest, and soon the story faded from the public eye. It was understood that whatever short term gains a product could achieve in this way would be more than undermined by the reputational damage of getting caught doing it. And because the same subliminal image would be diffused millions of times to TV sets across the country, it was sure that they would in fact get caught doing it.

Mind tricks in the digital age

That was then. Now imagine the same technology being used on tech platforms. Imagine the ability to splice in a single message into a gif or video clip on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or TikTok. Now imagine that the efficacy of that message was powered not just by generic 1980s Madison Ave advertising trickery, but by custom-generated user data and algorithms that allowed the messenger to craft ‘the perfect’ subliminal message for each and every user. For example, imagine the cute cat video you just watched had, cut into it, a 1:24 frame image of a Covid virus and the words ‘Stay home or you will die the way your mother died last August’, when in fact your mother had died last
August. What chances would you have of not being scared to death of Covid?

Big Brother isn’t watching you, you’re watching him

There is absolutely no doubt that this technology exists and that it could be deployed. Since the release of the Twitter Files, there is also little doubt that the government – or at least that part of it Glenn Greenwald refers to as the US Security State – has infiltrated Big Tech platforms to a sufficient degree to be able to undertake such an operation.

Of course, I will take my tin foil hat off long enough to admit that I have not a shred of evidence for any of this. But given how effective we knew it to be even without customisation, what are the chances that subliminal messaging is not being used in the Tech Age? And to return to Holmes’ dictum, if it is being used, why have we not heard more night-time barking from this particular dog?

The ‘pandemic’ of overeducation

‘You can never been overdressed or overeducated’

It is a widely held tenet of modern liberal thinking that there is a strictly positive relationship between the amount of education in a society, and the health of its politics and economy. When I say ‘widely held’, I mean to include my former self in that particular bubble of groupthink. I have a couple of masters degrees and a BA – achievements of which I have always been proud – and so perhaps it was out of pure ego that I always imagined that with more education, would come better public accountability for our representative democracies, greater labour productivity and a more effiicent use of public resources for the benefit of all. I must have thought: if more people were like me, how much better a world we would have!

Houston, we have a problem

Then along came SARS-2, wafting out of a wet market and certainly not the virology lab across the road (pay no attention to that bat lady behind the curtain!). In a flash of media madness, decades of established wisdom on public health was thrown out the window – on the efficacy of community masking to prevent respiratory virus transmission, on pandemic planning, and on the correct way to approve and make available novel pharmaceutical products. Basic facts that were immediately and publicly available were ignored and labelled misinformation or conspiracy-think – such as the fact that SARS-2 had an infection fatality rate of 0.3% (lower in age-adjusted terms), and was therefore not that deadly. Bizarre doctrines like Zero Covid emerged in the teeth of common sense and all available evidence. ‘Long Covid’ became an article of faith, a gospel reading in the Church of ‘The Science’.

Was it simply panic? Perhaps in the early weeks. But as the hysteria wore on and the masks literally muffled any dissenting voices, I noticed a strange pattern among the Covid Zealots I knew – they were, with few exceptions, those who had the most higher education. Whereas the received wisdom on the benefits of higher education suggested they should be most able to critically dissect what was happening and make sense of it, they in fact proved to be least able to do so.

Saving grandma and a nasty commute, both at the same time

Many critical thinkers I know attributed this to simple self-interest. The laptop class was, after all, able to comfortably telework throughout the lockdowns. Many even relished the reprieve from painful commutes into crowded office buildings. They were certainly not the waiters, shopkeepers or small business owners most immediately impacted by closures. To borrow a phrase – it’s hard to make a soy-infused Guardianista understand something, when continued enjoyment of they/their home office depends on them/they/they’re/their not understanding it.

But this doesn’t explain the more extreme manifestations of Covid Zealotry, such as the willingness to subject oneself and one’s own children to an experimental treatment with no obvious benefits and unknown risks. Data shows that higher education levels are correlated with higher ‘vaccine’ uptake. Likewise: mask wearing was nowhere as ubiquitous as in the ivy-clad enclaves of New England’s educational elites. There can be no doubt – the well-educated actually believed this worm-infested horse crap.

Some readers might shrug this off as an obvious conclusion. The fact that college-smarties lack common sense is nothing new to the working classes who fix their leaky roofs, service their cars and install their ergonomic workspaces.

I think I thought I saw you try…to think

But perhaps there is a deeper point to be made about the nature of cognition and how it has changed in the age of mass higher education. In general, when we learn something new, we go through an inductive process of reasoning. A leads to B leads to C … which leads to a result. For example, if I want to learn how to fix the clogged drain in my bathroom sink, I need to understand how the u-bend works, what seals are there to stop leaks. Where the water will flow when I open the plumbing, etc. then I can figure out what to do first. I create a mindmap of understanding.

Now imagine I attempt to ‘learn’ something that is complex beyond my ability to construct the relevant mindmap. Imagine, for example, that I simply cannot follow all the threads of thought that allow for a complete understanding of the quantitative theory of money. Of imagine I am unable to prove from first principles the power rule in differential calculus. What becomes of me?

In a world where these respective tenets of economics and mathematics are kept as the preserve of a true intellectual elite, the answer would be: I am told by my professor that I don’t grasp the thing, I am handed a failing note and I go back to unclogging u-bends under bathroom sinks.

The democatisation of education ensures we get the graduates we deserve

But in the age of mass higher education, this is very much not what happens. The greater the number of intellectually average people admitted into the halls of knowledge, the more fails a professor would have to hand out, and that isn’t good for business. And so instead, a short cut solution is provided. I might not ‘get’ monetary theory, but I can accept as dogma that M x V = P x T. I might not ‘get’ calculus, but I can accept as dogma that f'(x) = r*x^(r-1) and dumbly apply this rule to enough problems on my term exam to get a passing grade.

The problem isn’t just that I graduate with no real understanding of maths or economics. It’s that by trying to educate myself beyond the limits of my own cognitive capacity, my brain becomes trained to accept a dogmatic link between premise and conclusion. The only thing I have really learned from four (or nine!) years of this charade is that there exists this sacred black box in which intellectual ‘things’ happen, and that is not to be questioned. Forever after, because my status as an educated person depends on the sanctity of that black box, I become a militant defender of whatever it might output. In other words, I become a zealous believer in ‘The Science’. Follow it. Follow it right off a cliff.

I have also reduced my ability to create even those mindmaps that would otherwise be within my cognitive scope. University trains me not only to stupidly absorb the conclusions of others’ learning, but to deny myself the ability to engage in any of my own. I would be much better served by puzzling over how to put up fenceposts for free range chickens, at which I would succeed with my own two hands; rather than puzzling over, and ultimately failing, to understand fluid dynamics or molecular biology.

Then when a novel problem comes along, I am lost, for there is no equation for me to follow. Intellectually lost, I take to Twitter in a confused play for answers from the hashtags of authority I trust and identify with. How easy it becomes for they/them who wield these hashtags to guide me towards whatever dogma serves their/they’re interests. How stupidly will I cling to this dogma, with all the strength of my ‘education’. How heavily will I beat down dissent, with all the heft of my bourgeois status.

We need to stop educating people beyond their intellectual limits.

Trawling Netflix for hidden Covid truth

Escaping the vaccine immune escape

Over the weekend, the weight of current events got to me. It drove me to seek distraction. More accurately, I promised my wife I’d take a break from reading Covid news and from futile debates online with Covid zealots. And so I took to Netflix and sought out some pre-2020 viewing I was convinced would be as far away from Emergency Use Authorisations, monoclonal antibodies and vaccine passports as possible. This took the form of one movie and one series: a rewatch of the excellent film “The Big Short”, and a new-ish series about a magician doing street tricks on randomers, called “Magic for Humans”.

Though highly entertaining, both titles failed to provide an escape from the ‘Rona Blues. To my utter surprise, I’d picked two offerings that struck closer to the heart of the Covid debate than any Joe Rogan podcast or John Campbell Youtube Clip could.

Blame it on the algorithm.

Herd immunity versus herd mentality

Of course, both are set in a world that existed before the corona crisis was even a twinkle in Klaus Schwab’s eye. The Big Short was made in 2015, but it describes events leading up to the financial crash of 2008. More specifically, it details how the mortgage bond market was manipulated through the creation of financial instruments (called collateralised debt obligations) that encouraged ever riskier subprime lending. I’d seen it all before, but in the rearview mirror of media-induced virus hysteria, the underlying theme really comes into focus.

The film lays bare that the 2008 crisis was not only likely, but in fact inevitable. The fascinating part of the story is not how a handful of finance guys figured this out (and therefore made millions), it is how everyone else didn’t. After all, nothing they discovered was in any way hidden. The only thing these guys did differently was look. They literally walked into housing estates in Florida and talked to mortgage brokers, homeowners and real estate agents and quickly understood that the loans backing the bonds were garbage. Which meant the bonds were garbage, which meant the banks holding the bonds were garbage.

How did Alan Greenspan and his successor Ben Bernanke not see this coming? How did the shareholders of the banks, who lost their life savings, not see it? How did the legislators and the President not see it? For those of us who still believe in rationality, it is a humbling reminder that the wisdom of the masses is based on nothing more than the wool of the sheep standing next to you. Just because something is posted on a billboard, a government website, or comes blasting out of your neighbour’s mouth, doesn’t make it true.

The other lesson from The Big Short, even more worrying, is that when this kind of mass delusion takes root, it takes a hard and painful crash in order for everyone to snap out of their hypnosis. That was what I stewed on as the closing credits rolled.

It’s a kinda magic

So I shook my head and turned to the magician Justin Willman doing tricks on the mask-free streets of a 2018 Los Angeles. “Magic for Humans” sounded both magical and, well, …human. Surely the widening of children’s eyes as a blob of water defies gravity would succeed where global financial mismanagement had failed to distract my Covid-addled brain. And the first few of Willman’s tricks did not disappoint – artful slights of hand; fun gimmicks to please passer-bys. That is, until he got to the internet influencers.

This segment came in episode 2, and it made my blood run cold. Three young internet personalities were brought into a sort of ‘fun house’ and given a diverse box of props. After a short introduction by the magician, they were asked to go around the various rooms with their phones, separately, and take selfies with whatever props they thought would make the best Instagram post. Afterwards, Willman asked them to each separately select the single best picture and give it a hashtag. Without any consultation, all three had chosen the same spot in the house – a watermelon themed swing; the same prop – an ice tray; and the same hashtag – #TrayCool. Then Willman revealed the picture he had already pre-cooked of himself with exactly the same details, the one he knew they would do too.

Influencing the influencers is scary-easy – “Magic for Humans” Episode 2 (Netflix)

Plus ca change, plus on demeure aussi idiot qu’avant

The point was that his ‘short intro’ was so full of suggestive images that they had been steered into making what they thought were independent choices, but were in fact pre-programmed by the magician himself. Of course, when you see a trick like that play out, it is almost impossible not to draw the parallels to what has been happening over the past 21 months. If one TV magician can manipulate people so completely in the space of five minutes, just think what a team of ‘nudgers’ in a government department could do, with the resources of the State, the complicity of the mainstream media, and the cooperation of all the Big Tech platforms.

Could they do enough to get people to take an experimental vaccine they don’t need and could possibly harm them? Enough to get them to give it to their children? Enough to get them to surrender all their civil liberties and cower from life, triple-masked, in a bubble of fear? Enough to get them to agree to show a medical record to access their local pub or supermarket, forever, with no sunset clause? Enough to get them to hate… yes HATE … anyone who opposes the prevailing narrative – even close friends, even loved ones?

Maybe so. We’ll have to wait for the Netflix documentary to find out.